film | Amusing the Zillion

Archive for the ‘film’ Category

Sunday Matinee: Under the Roller Coaster (2005)

Posted in film, video, tagged Coney Island, documentary, film, Fred Moran, Freddy Moran, house under the roller coaster, Lila Place, Mae Timpano, Thunderbolt, Under the Roller Coaster on February 23, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The house under the roller coaster in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” was the real life home for 40 years of Mae Timpano, who shares vivid memories of good times and sad in this 2005 documentary by Lila Place. “If the wind was blowing towards the house, I heard everything going on in Coney Island,” says Timpano in the film. For most of those years under the Thunderbolt, her companion was Freddy Moran, who owned and operated the famed coaster built by his father over the Kensington Hotel in 1925. She recalls the two of them going for swims to the end of Steeplechase Pier at 2AM after she got off work as a waitress.

“Mae’s story is a window onto a lost world and makes us think about the importance of place in a new way,” says the film-maker. In addition to Timpano’s candid reminiscences, the 16-minute documentary includes interviews with family, friends and historians as well as old news clips. Moran tells a TV reporter asking about changes in Coney Island: “Roller coasters are a very, very stable element of the amusement business and I don’t see any way they’re going to be replaced by anything else and give the same feeling.” But after Moran died in 1982, the coaster closed and would never reopen.

Timpano was a spirited survivor who lived alone in the house for several more years. “I got used to the quietness,” she says, just as she had gotten used to the clatter of the roller coaster passing overhead and finding wigs and dentures lost by riders in her backyard. Horace Bullard, who bought the Thunderbolt and other properties with the dream of rebuilding Steeplechase Park, once said of Timpano: “She’s Miss Coney Island. When you get close to her, you get sort of the feeling of what Coney Island used to be like.”

Timpano, who died five years ago, outlived the coaster and her former home, which were controversially and illegally demolished in 2000 on the orders of Mayor Giuliani.

“Under the Roller Coaster” won a number of awards including Best Made in Coney Island Film at the Coney Island Film Festival (2005) and Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary Short at Slamdance (2006).

Annie Oakley & Buffalo Bill ‘Star’ in Wild West Show Auction

Posted in Auction, film, Photography, tagged Annie Oakley, Barbara Stanwyck, Buffalo Bill, cabinet card, movie poster, Photo Album, Wild West, Wild West Show, William F. Cody on January 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »

La Gloire de Cirque, French movie poster for ‘Annie Oakley,” 1935. High Noon Western Americana

This striking Belgian movie poster titled La Gloire du Cirque for the 1935 RKO film Annie Oakley is currently up for auction at High Noon Western Americana. Barbara Stanwyck starred as the sharpshooting “Queen of the Roaring Eighties” who joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1885. The January 25th sale is in Mesa, Arizona, with online bidding available via Live Auctioneers.

While the Hollywood movie was a fictionalized account of Annie Oakley’s career, authentic photos and memorabilia documenting Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show will be on the auction block at the January 31st sale of the Garlow Collection of William F. Cody Family Photographs and related ephemera. Most of the items in the sale at Cowan’s Auctions are descended directly in the family of Patricia Garlow, the great-granddaughter of William “Buffalo Bill” Cody.

Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill in Irma Cody’s Wild West Show Album , Cowan’s Auctions, January 31, 2014

Cody was the first president of the Showmen’s League of America and one of the first international entertainers. His daughter Irma Cody’s Wild West Show Photo Album is among the rarest items in the auction and has a pre-sale estimate of $4,000-$6,000. The album features photos of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley as well as trick ropers, cavalrymen, musicians, show managers and sideshow performers congregating among their tents.

Sideshow Performers in Irma Cody’s Wild West Show Album , Cowan’s Auctions, January 31, 2014

This cabinet photograph of Annie Oakley wearing a chest full of shooting medals was taken by Stacy of Brooklyn in 1894. In May, the Wild West built a huge grandstand on Third Avenue between 36th and 37th Streets at Ambrose Park, where the show “delighted twenty thousand,” according to the The New York World.

Annie Oakley Cabinet Photograph by Stacy , Brooklyn, NY. Cowan’s Auctions, January 31, 2014

Buffalo Bill’s great Wild West Show opened at Ambrose Park, South Brooklyn, yesterday afternoon, in a blaze of glory and amid a shower of ringing coin thrown by the 20,000 people who occupied seats in the grand stands.

Col. Cody had unquestionably in this exhibition surpassed all his former efforts in the show line, and to miss seeing his Congress of Rough Riders of the World, in their most wonderful and daring feats of horsemanship, which, by the way, are perfectly natural, and contain no circus play, is to miss one of the finest educational exhibitions ever given…

The entertainment consisted further of rifle shooting by the celebrated woman rifle shot, Miss Annie Oakley; horse races between a cowboy, Cossack, Mexican, Arab and Indian on the horses of their native lands; an exhibition of the famous old pony express, an immigrant train attacked by Indians on the plains, exhibitions of horsemanship by Riffian Arabs, cowboys, Mexicans, and others; hurdle races, races between Indian boys on ponyback, the battle of the Little Big Horn, illustrating Custer’s last stand; the attack on the Deadwood coach and settlers’ cabins by Indians; buffalo hunts, a military musical drill, the cavalrymen of all nations, and Col. Cody’s wonderful exhibitions of sharp-shooting at glass balls with a rifle while riding at full speed.

The New York World, May 13, 1894

Video of the Day: Mickey Mouse in The Karnival Kid

Posted in Events, film, video, tagged animated short, birthday, cartoon, Disney Channel, Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, The Karnival Kid, Walt Disney on November 18, 2013| 2 Comments »

1928-29 Mickey Mouse movie poster. Photo via TheHistoryBlog.com

Happy 85th birthday, Mickey Mouse! On November 18, 1928, the world’s most famous mouse made his debut in Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie at New York City’s Colony Theatre. Tonight, Film Forum is celebrating the occasion with a special “Disney Mouse Party” at 7pm. The program of rare 35mm prints from the Disney archive includes early b&w comedy classics (1928-1933) such as Puppy Love, Blue Rhythm, The Gorilla Mystery, and Building a Building, plus a bonus sing-a-long; Technicolor breakthroughs from 1936-1941 like Thru the Mirror, Mickey’s Trailer, Mickey’s Rival, and Nifty Nineties; plus what’s being billed (in all caps) as “AN ASTOUNDING SNEAK PREVIEW.” Could it be Potatoland, which is set to premiere today?

The Disney Channel will debut the new seven-minute cartoon titled Potatoland as part of a day of programming honoring Mickey Mouse’s birthday. The comedic film takes Mickey, Donald and Goofy on a road trip to Idaho to fulfill Goofy’s dream of visiting Potatoland theme park.

Being a carny kid, our favorite Mickey Mouse cartoon is The Karnival Kid from 1929 in which Mickey is a hot dog vendor at a carnival and Minnie is a shimmy dancer. It’s famous for being the first film in which Mickey talks but his voice is actually that of Walt Disney. Mickey yells “Hot Dogs! Hot Dogs!” Watch what happens when Minnie bites into a very animated frank…