Ten years before the home video explosion of the 1980s and decades before TCM and YouTube brought the full measure of film history into our homes, MGM studios mined their rich archive to create…
Category: Film
Blog posts
Quote of the Day: David Niven from His Autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon
“There was an excitement and generosity of spirit in Hollywood—a minimum of jealousy and pettiness, everyone felt they were still pioneering in a wonderful entertainment medium. The premieres of the big pictures were black…
Movie Quote of the Day: Scarlett Johansson on Cinematic Expectations
“We can very easily disappear into these (cinematic) worlds, these fantasy worlds, living vicariously through them. They set the bar for the expectations in our personal lives. She feels like the movies and stories…
Orson Welles’ 12 Best Movies of All Time (and Their Directors)
1. City Lights, 1931, (Charles Chaplin) 2. Greed, 1924, (Erich Von Stroheim) 3. Intolerance, 1916, (D.W. Griffith) 4. Nanook of the North, 1922, (Robert Flaherty) 5. Shoeshine, 1946, (Vittorio De Sica) 6. The Battleship…
Karen Black: “My Top 10 Favorite Moments in All of The Sci-Fi/Science-Fantasy/Horror Films I Have Seen”
While Stargayzing was on hiatus we lost the great Karen Black. A major star in the 1970s who enjoyed leading roles in important films that came to define the New Hollywood (Five Easy Pieces,…
Stargayzing Returns: “I Turn My Back For a Minute and All Hell Breaks Loose,” Says Munk
I’m back after a short hiatus and even though I was quite busy, I must tell you how much I missed writing Stargayzing. There were so many times I had the impulse to comment…
Eating With the Stars Gets Meta With Recipes for Sally Field’s Peanut Butter-Honey Granola and Mary Todd Lincoln’s Vanilla Almond Cake
Recently I encountered a dilemma when I unearthed a recipe for Mary Todd Lincoln’s Vanilla Almond Cake. Though I loved the idea of propagating it and, even saying, “Mary Todd Lincoln’s Vanilla Almond Cake”…
Movie Quote of the Day: Auntie Mame, 1958
Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!…
A Letter of Encouragement From OBE Glenda Jackson, Plus a Recipe for Her Nutty Date Loaf in Eating With the Stars
Though she essentially retired from acting in the early 1990s to focus on her second career as a politician, Glenda Jackson is fondly remembered today as a leading lady of great skill and charm,…
Stargayzing Screening Room: What We’ve Been Watching Lately, Volume 1
1. The Fuller Brush Girl (1950) Lloyd Bacon’s slight but amiable comedy is most notable for the opportunity to see the great Lucille Ball in one of her last film roles before she commenced…
Gloria Swanson Standing in the Rubble
I learned a few interesting things in that nanosecond it took me to research the origin of my true or untrue memory of this photograph. The 5,920 seat Roxy theater was erected in 1927 and was razed in 1960. In its day it was the most exquisite and largest of all the movie palaces. Interestingly, the choice of Gloria Swanson wasn’t random—the Roxy’s opening film was a silent Swanson feature called The Love of Sunya, which told the story of a young woman who was given the power to see into her future.
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