No blogging yesterday. I was watching movies, nineteen of them to be exact, although to be fair, sixteen of them were made between 1888 and 1905 and consisted mostly of a single shot of passing traffic in places like Leeds Bridge and Jamaica Street, Glasgow. The briefest of these movies was two seconds—Roundhay Garden Scene. Filmed in 1888 by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, it's the earliest surviving film, shot on a strip of paper shown at 10 frames per second.You want to see it?
You want to see it again?
Just 27 years later, the same amount of time that has passed since Motorola introduced the first mobile phone, D.W. Griffith would be making three-hour epics for millions of paying customers.
But more about that in November.
Poll results are in. Last week I asked you to choose your favorite Carole Lombard performance from between four movies. The winner, no surprise, was My Man Godfrey, one of the great screwball comedies of the 1930s.
Is it my favorite? Well, that's the question. Because while I can guarantee you Carole Lombard will win a Katie-Bar-The-Door award as the best actress of some given year, I'm not promising it will be for My Man Godfrey. But it could be—you don't know. Stay tuned to see how this plays out.
The final tallies: My Man Godfrey 18; To Be Or Not To Be 7; Twentieth Century 4; and Nothing Sacred 0.
