Currie, Louise

Adventures of Captain Marvel

Walt Disney Treasures - Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studio

As Walt Disney's fame grew during the 1930s, people wanted to know more about his studio and how the "Silly Symphonies" and Mickey Mouse shorts were created. Although Disney seldom allowed visitors, he periodically offered viewers peeks inside into the studio through the films in this collection. In 1937, Disney made A Trip Through the Walt Disney Studios for his distributor, RKO, to help the marketing campaign for Snow White. This in-house documentary was later reworked and released as a trailer for the studio's first feature as How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made. In 1941, humorist Robert Benchley toured the studio and chatted with the artists in The Reluctant Dragon. But the film was released during a bitterly fought strike that belied its cheerful depiction of the studio.

During the '50s, Walt used his studio as a backdrop for several episodes of the Disneyland TV series. "The Story of the Animated Drawing" traces the history of the medium, including re-creations of Emil Reynaud's Théâtre Optique (1892-1900) and Winsor McCay's vaudeville routine with his landmark film Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). "Tricks of Our Trade," which focuses on the creation of Sleeping Beauty, shows staged footage of four of the celebrated "Nine Old Men"--Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston--sketching. In the DVD bonus material, host Leonard Maltin traces the development of the studio facilities from a Los Angeles garage to its present location in Burbank. Maltin also chats with Disney legend Joe Grant, who cowrote the "Baby Weems" sequence in Reluctant Dragon. Recorded at the time of Grant's 94th birthday, the artist displays the sly wit that continues to inspire animators. (Unrated: Suitable for all ages: cartoon violence) --Charles Solomon

This volume goes inside the walls of the world's most famous magic factory for an inside tour, via several "behind-the-scenes" films and television shows.

Lugosi: Hollywood's Dracula

Bela Lugosi and Dracula are inseparable images from the heyday of Hollywood. More than any other actor in film history, Lugosi is the master of the macabre, the king of the vampires, and the cult hero of horror movies. And yet he was also a man who fought in wars and revolutions, who married five times, and who mastered stagecraft and film arts in Hungary, Germany, and the United States. He remained an enigma in Hollywood even as his career dwindled into the weird worlds of drug abuse and filmmaker Ed Wood. Lugosi's fusion with the famed vampire became more permanent than ever when he was buried in his Dracula cape in 1956. LUGOSI: HOLLYWOOD'S DRACULA unravels the truth behind the legendary star by interweaving rare film footage from 1918-1956, home movies, and previously-unseen photographs with narration by Lugosi costar Robert Clarke and Lugosi fan Rue McClanahan. Numerous on-camera interviews span family members like his son and widow, Academy Award-winning director Robert Wise, legendary film producer Howard W. Koch, and a host of Lugosi's costars and personal friends.

The film has won awards and accolades at film festivals and theatrical screenings across the globe. Film historian Michael H. Price, author of FORGOTTEN HORRORS, has proclaimed that "Gary Rhodes's LUGOSI: HOLLYWOOD'S DRACULA is the first life-story to give Lugosi his generous due, to treat Lugosi as something greater than a martyr, and to mingle an academic thoroughness with an unabashed enthusiasm towards its troubled and majestic subject."

The Ape Man

The Citizen Kane (Gold Edition Box Set)

Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast that almost seems to be rising up from a viewer's subconsciousness. As Kane, Welles even ushers in the influence of Bertolt Brecht on film acting. This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and in many ways is still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century. --Tom Keogh