Leonard Maltin

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Dynamic Duos At The AFI Awards

By Leonard Maltin
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January 16, 2010 1:35 AM
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The best part of being asked to serve on the jury for the AFI Awards is that I get to attend an elegant luncheon for the honorees. Once the doors of the Four Seasons Hotel banquet room close, there are no television cameras inside, no publicists, no press. It’s meant to be a celebration of outstanding work in film and television during the past year, and that’s just what it is. Part of the fun is the schmoozing—getting to meet people whose work I’ve admired—and a personal pastime of mine is...matching up interesting pairs of filmmakers for snapshots. Here are some of the results from today’s lunch.

By Leonard Maltin
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January 14, 2010 11:54 AM
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3 Comments

The official marker for
Errol Flynn Reserve in Hobart, Tasmania.

During my recent cruise around New Zealand and Australia, I learned a great deal about our various ports of call, but I had one lone piece of knowledge about Hobart, Tasmania before we arrived: it was the birthplace of Errol Flynn. Our tour guide during our day in port, Heather Henri, was very savvy, and told us that Hobart had never exploited, or commemorated, its native son until just recently. In fact, she said, a colleague of hers had launched an Errol Flynn Tour at one point, traveling to the many places he lived with his parents around the town…

By Leonard Maltin
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January 12, 2010 2:30 AM
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2 Comments

A preview of the incredibly opulent Civic Theater in Auckland, New Zealand. More photos and videos to come! Please forgive my delay in grabbing hold of 2010. I've been on a long, and long-overdue, vacation to New Zealand and Australia, and I'll be sharing some of my movie-related experiences and pictures with you in the weeks to come. (Here's a teaser: a detail from an incredible movie palace I visited in Auckland.) I'm also learning to become a blogger, which is very different from maintaining a quiet website, which I've done for the last decade. Sometimes weeks would go by without an update, because I was...

By Leonard Maltin
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January 12, 2010 1:27 AM
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2 Comments

At the outset of a "life celebration" for the late Roy E. Disney on what would have been his 80th birthday on Sunday, Disney chief Robert Iger surprised and delighted a packed house at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood by announcing that the studio's animation building in Burbank--the one with the whimsical Mickey Mouse Sorcerer's hat--will now bear Roy's name. A long, loud cheer went up from the crowd as an artist's rendering of the new building facade was beamed onto the theater screen. What a perfect tribute to the man who rescued Disney animation from possible extinction in the 1980s and oversaw its renaissance. John Lasseter also pointed out that it was Roy who was responsible for...

By Leonard Maltin
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January 2, 2010 1:07 AM
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4 Comments

Autographed Photo of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

I receive a lot of auction catalogs; in fact, the amount of movie memorabilia being sold at auction these days is positively overwhelming. But I always look forward to the Autograph Catalog from Profiles in History, because the handsomely printed booklet is a collectible in its own right. You learn which pictures famous stars and filmmakers chose to represent themselves to fans and admirers.

By Leonard Maltin
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January 1, 2010 9:36 AM
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1 Comment

Now that my eyes have uncrossed, I can tell you about the incredible experience of attending The World 3-D Film Expo this past month at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.

I knew it would be fun to see a lot of vintage 1950s films in genuine, double-system 3-D—the best method of all, which uses polarized filters and requires two projectors in “interlock” synchronization.

But I didn’t know that the festival would turn into a happening. My friend Michael Schlesinger, who helped to host the festival and provided many prints through Sony Pictures Repertory Division, likened it to Woodstock, and that’s exactly what it was: Woodstock for movie geeks.

Those geeks included a hardy handful of contemporary filmmakers who are also world-class film buffs, including Joe Dante, John Landis, Curtis Hanson, Guillermo Del Toro, and Quentin Tarantino, who confessed to me on opening night that he was playing hooky from finishing the sound mix on his new movie Kill Bill. He so harangued his editor, Sally Menke, that she finally agreed to let him go to see Andre De Toth’s The Stranger Wore a Gun if he’d take her along, too.

I was lucky enough to have seen some of the more popular titles during the last big 3-D revival, during the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York City. Both the 8th Street Playhouse and the venerable Thalia showed double-system prints of—

By Leonard Maltin
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January 1, 2010 9:27 AM
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0 Comments

Remember when it was fun to go to the movies? That feeling of enthusiasm, bordering on sheer abandon, that’s largely disappeared from the moviegoing experience was recaptured at World 3-D Film Expo II at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood this month.

Jeff Joseph, Dan Symmes, Bob Furmanek and a hearty staff of film fanatics, organizers, projectionists, collectors, and volunteers turned the ten-day event into a “happening” of major proportions. As with Expo I three years ago there weren’t a lot of young people in the audience; they’ve grown up in the era of multiplexes and IMAX, and the notion of gathering to watch a bunch of often-tacky 1950s movies holds no allure. It’s their loss.

Opening night provided a perfect example. There wouldn’t be much reason to revive Those Redheads from Seattle, a 1953 Pine-Thomas production released by Paramount. It’s a pleasant-enough musical, but watching a double-system print projected by two interlocked projectors in Polarized 3-D—on a highly reflective silver screen, erected just for the festival—made it An Event. Who could have guessed that this modest film, produced by the B-moviemeisters popularly known as “the two dollar Bills,” would have such inventive use of 3-D?

An establishing shot of a steamship at night has a taut—

By Leonard Maltin
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December 31, 2009 3:02 AM
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7 Comments

At year’s end it’s traditional to look back and make Ten Best Lists. The problem is that in the flurry of award season—and its attendant hype—one tends to forget how many mediocre films have come and gone, or how many months there seemed to be nothing worth going out to see. I wish I could forget suffering through Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for two and a half miserable hours, but that’s another story.

This was not an outstanding year for moviegoing. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t some excellent work,

but most of the year-end lists I see are filled with good films, not great ones. The only titles I would refer to as great this year are Up in the Air, Up, and three imports, the remarkable District 9, the Chilean film The Maid and Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces (which, I’m sorry to see, is getting very little attention despite a sensational performance by Penélope Cruz. I fear that its distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, has succumbed to awards fever and is paying more attention to other entries.) I also liked Olivier Assayas’ quietly profound Summer Hours, and the outrageous political saga from Italy, Il Divo.

By Leonard Maltin
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December 28, 2009 8:38 AM
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6 Comments

Gloria Stuart, still glowing at age 99, poses with her good friend and Titanic costar Suzy Amis It’s hard to believe twelve years have come and gone since Titanic sailed into movie theaters. At the time of its release, most moviegoers were unfamiliar with Gloria Stuart, who played “Old Rose” in the story’s modern-day scenes, but movie film buffs knew it was the same actress who’d been a leading lady in such 1930s pictures as The Invisible Man, The Old Dark House, John Ford’s Airmail and The Prisoner of Shark Island, and two Shirley Temple vehicles, Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Gloria earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Titanic and subsequently published an autobiography, I Just Kept Hoping. Readers who were unfamiliar with her story learned that acting was only a small part of her long and productive life; she has an artistic soul and has been a successful painter and creator of limited-edition books for many years.

By Leonard Maltin
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December 18, 2009 3:19 AM
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5 Comments

I snapped this photo of Roy when we attended the Philadelphia International Film Festival in March, 2007. The only reason he isn't wearing a Hawaiian shirt is that it was wintry that week! The last time I saw Roy E. Disney was in May, when he attended a memorial for Wayne Allwine, the voice of Mickey Mouse. People in the extended Disney family were delighted to see him, but somewhat taken aback at his gaunt appearance. Still, for a man who had battled cancer as vigorously—and optimistically—as he had, he seemed to be in pretty good shape, and he spoke with great spirit and humor that night. Best of all, he was wearing one of his trademark aloha shirts. Now he’s gone, and the news is difficult to digest. Just two weeks ago he was making plans to attend the Palm Springs Film Festival. Death was not on his agenda. Roy Edward Disney would have been 80 on January 10, but he didn’t think or act like an old man. He only curtailed his celebrated participation in sailboat racing during the past decade. What impressed me most about Roy was that he carried himself so lightly. Here was the son of Roy O. Disney, Walt’s older brother and lifelong partner. He grew up riding his bicycle around the Burbank studio. His first job was...

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Dynamic Duos At The AFI Awards

A Swashbuckler Lived Here...

NEW YEAR, NEW ADVENTURES

Roy E. Disney's Name Where It Belongs

Inscribed in Hollywood History

3 Times The Fun (2003)

Three Times The Fun (2006)

Great And Not-So-Great Movies...

A Titanic Reunion

Remembering Roy Disney

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