Thanks to Lauren (The Ginger List/Grayscale) I now know the whereabouts of Night in a Dormitory!
I myself have located through nefarious means DVDr copies of Follow the Leader (1930), and Sitting Pretty (1933)!!
Still questing for Hat Check Girl, I'm really hopin its a good movie, or at least rich in Ginger! Imagine if after all the frustration and heartache, it turned out to be a dud!
I was working in my rose garden today, and remembered reading in Ginger :My Story, about Ginger having a rose named after her, thought I'd locate a picture! Pretty isnt it, pink of course :P !!Beth xx
Haha, looks like Hat Check Girl has a lot to live up to for everyone. :)
ReplyDelete..It's out there somewhere... there are too many reviews on it, including a pretty lengthy one from TCM - sometimes I wonder if just an e-mail directly to the studio (Fox in this case) would do anything... Fox also did 'Broadway Bad', which she bookended with '42nd Street' and 'Gold Diggers of 1933' - I have not seen that one, either.
ReplyDeleteBeth, you and some of the others on here are WAY ahead of me - I think my Ginger movie count is at 45 or so, tops...generally I have all available 'mass market' DVD's, TCM showings, and just now delving into the 'on-line' avenues... I will say that back in the spring, TCM showed SEVEN, count them, SEVEN - Ginger movies in a row, NONE of which are currently available on DVD - started showing at 7:30 AM, until 6 PM - I took an off day to record them all! I guess that was when I realized I had become a full-fledged follower of 'Gingerology'... told my wife I was taking off to help clean up the house, but she didn't buy that for a minute... but I DID move a few boxes around in-between features...:-)
Just contacted someone who might be able to help track this one down. He's friends with a man who stores and preps footage for TCM, and the guy I spoke with said he's been looking for Hat Check Girl as well, and the TCM guy (haha, bear with me) said he'd look through the archives. I'm keeping my fingers crossed-- hopefully soon it'll be found.
ReplyDeleteWow!! I really really wish I had TCM! And Juliette, I hope so much that your friend of a friend comes through! It'd be a momentous event if it were discovered! As for Broadway Bad, thats available a few places online, as a torrent or DVDr though I havent got around to watching it yet (as I heard its not great) xx
ReplyDelete...You know, I was wondering, where IS TCM headquarters? If in Atlanta, like most of Turner's stuff, I am within 3 hours of it... in fact, I was in ATL one day a while back, and drove by a decent-sized building, and I swear I thought it had the TCM logo on it, like a headquarters... not that I could really do anything...like they would just say, "Sure! come on in and help yourself to all of the archives! Just be sure to bring them back when you are done with them!" :-/
ReplyDeleteBut, if Juliette has a connection, that ROCKS! If anything, maybe they will show some of them, which hopefully will translate to a YT or torrent deal...honestly, I need to figure out the torrent deal...
Oh, and just to see if I can break the record for comment post length, thanks for the info on Broadway Bad... I wondered if it was any good...oh well - if Ginger is in it, it is worth the time...right?
Here's hoping "Hat Check Girl" finally checks in!
I think it is in Atlanta, yeah. You should break in one day. ;)
ReplyDeleteWell, next time I am over there, I really may go in wherever they let the 'public' in, and just see if there is even just a tour available, etc... probably not - the building did not look new - in fact, it may have been the place where Turner started his 'Superstation' back in the '70's, to get him off the ground... but would be cool to find out all I can about it.
ReplyDeleteTurner is a pretty squirrelly fellow (strangely, it seems a lot of Billionares are), but if he ever did anything right, he 'saved' a lot of the old movies and got them restored. Honestly, a lot of them we have now may would probably just not be available if TCM wasn't around...(for example, TCM unearthed 'Rafter Romance' only recently, and it was supposedly 'lost forever'... let's hope they keep digging!) He tinkered with 'colorization' of the old black-and-white pix, but it was not that great...really was washed out and ultimately made actors look sinda sickly... but can't fault him for trying it.
Of course, I think we are all pretty much 'B/W purists' here, but if there was a 'good and true' color option for some movies, it would be interesting... for example, Carefree was a candidate for color when it was made, but it just was cost prohibitive back then (think I heard color was 8 times the cost of B/W originally), unless you were doing a 'blockbuster' - like Oz, GWTW, etc... (of course any Ginger/Fred pix falls in that category!) But, RKO just didn't do it for whatever reason... I always thought the 'dream sequence' - 'I Used to be Color Blind' - would have been cool in color, for obvious reasons, then make the rest of it in B/W (like the first part of OZ) - and, that would have saved RKO from a 'full-length' color pic... oh well.
overall, tho, Turner really is an important 'cog' in the Finding Ginger saga...props to him for that.
There's a quote that I really love from "Ginger: My Story," and I think that we Ginger fans will have to agree with her. Ginger said,while talking about the changing color vs. B&W plans for Carefree, "Carefree was made that way, and that's the way it should remain. I don't think that Carefree or any black-and-white film should suffer from today's colorizing process." I agree with all my heart!
ReplyDeleteAs for Ginger's rose, I absolutely love it! Is anyone else reminded of her dress from Swing Time? You know the one I mean... the gorgeous one that she wore for "Waltz in Swing Time." The rose petals remind me of the sleeves and the skirt. I think it's rather fitting that Ginger's rose should be pink and similar to a dress that she loved, which she wore in a movie that she loved. Wonderful!
- DancingWannabe
What a great quote! :)
ReplyDelete...Totally agree that colorization is really not a good thing... even if the process is 'perfected', the general 'setup' of most of the B/W movies made back then were designed to work best in B/W - for example, most backgrounds were light and/or white, whth bright metallic accent - ultimately worked well to 'frame' characters crisply (is that a word Beth?) - anyway, not an expert on technical aspects by any means, but I just know that B/W has really become very comfortable to me for film viewing, especially for Ginger.
ReplyDeleteAgain, can't fault folks for tinkering with things, as that is how great things are invented - but in this case, 'colorization' was obviously a failed experiment.