Sex on wheels: cars of the stars

FATTY ARBUCKLE AND HIS 1919 PIERCE ARROW

ERICH VON STROHEIM AND HIS CADILLAC

HAROLD LLOYD AND WIFE MILDRED DAVIS WITH THEIR BUICK

LINCOLN THEODORE MONROE ANDREW PERRY, AKA STEPIN FETCHIT, WITH HIS CADILLAC PHAETON

JOAN CRAWFORD WITH HER 1929 FORD TOWN CAR

BABE RUTH RECEIVING A 1926 AUBURN ROADSTER AS A GIFT

LILLIAN HARVEY AND HER MERCEDES

JOHNNY WEISSMULLER WITH HIS 1932 CHEVROLET

CLARK GABLE WITH HIS 1932 PACKARD

LAUREL AND HARDY IN THEIR BUICK 1930 SERIES 30 MODEL 30-45 PHAETON

JOAN CRAWFORD (AGAIN) AND HER 1930 (OR 1931) CADILLAC FLEETWOOD

CARL BRISSON BEHIND THE WHEEL OF HIS 1934 ISOTTA FRASCHINI

AL JOLSON WITH HIS MERCEDES

JEAN HARLOW WITH HER CADILLAC

WILLIAM POWELL ADMIRES GARY COOPER'S DUESENBERG

BUCK JONES WITH HIS 1933 PACKARD SPECIAL

ERROL FLYNN DRIVING HIS PACKARD

.... AND AUBURN ROADSTER

TYRONE POWER WITH HIS DUESENBERG

.... AND POST-WAR JAGUAR

ROBERT MONTGOMERY WITH HIS CADILLAC SPORT PHAETON

JOAN CRAWFORD (YES, AGAIN) IN HER 1933 FORD ROADSTER

JAMES "JIMMY" STEWART WITH HIS PLYMOUTH

GINGER ROGERS AND HER 1937 DODGE

NORWEGIAN OLYMPIC FIGURE-SKATING CHAMPION, AND HOLLYWOOD STAR SONJA HENIE, POSING WITH HER 1936 CORD 810

CECIL B. DE MILLE WITH HIS 1937 CORD

RITA HAYWORTH WITH HER 1941 LINCOLN CONTINENTAL

BING CROSBY GIVING RIDES AROUND THE STUDIO LOT IN HIS 1939 OLDS COUPE CONVERTIBLE

CARY GRANT PARKED ON THE FENDER OF HIS 1941 BUICK CENTURY

JOHN WAYNE AND MAUREEN O'HARA IN A 1914 STUTZ BEARCAT

(Sent to me by Matt Paust, along with another display of rip-roaring Old West photos which I might reproduce here. These are, as far as I am able to make out, in the public domain, unless passing them around five thousand times means you gotta get permission. I won't say anything about them because they speak for themselves. I have a major jones for old cars AND a major jones for old Hollywood, so this is pure bliss to me.)

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Alarming moose taxidermy

Caitlin's grad: ready to fly!

Caitlin graduates from Grade 7. . . with proud Mom and Dad.

With proud Grandma and Grandpa.

Proud Caitlin!

Grandma made Caitlin's grad gift, the photo frame, out of old CDs. No glue gun, so I broke my budget on that clear packing tape, you know the kind that keeps sticking back on the roll/ripping? Oh well, it turned out pretty good.

Lovely Caitlin.

Run, run, RUN!

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The First Movie

Phenakistoscope

One of Muybridge's early gizmos to try to make his still pictures/motion study sequences "move". I'm not sure how he did this, perhaps he painted the images on, but that would mean painting a lot of nude women onto glass plates. Then, I assume, it would spin around and you'd look at it. There is no more than a second or two of animation here, but then, the "first movie ever made" ain't exactly Gone with the Wind either:

I can't post the Director's Cut here because I can't get it to come up. So that means another post. Sigh. Some day these will end, I promise!

Splash!

 

Muybridge cat

Camel Run

This is about Take Five of this Muybridge project. It's not often I get TWENTY images to work with, but then again, it's not often I get twenty images to work with (meaning it seems to take forever to get them into a form I can use for a decent gif). There were several time-consuming outtakes that didn't make the cut, though the first one did have a certain raw energy that appealed to me.

This one has a little more polish to it in that I got rid of a lot of crap in the margins, and most of the camel is still visible in the frame. It seems to me the Muybridge photos vary in size, or they seem to, making cropping them out of the big sheet of images much harder. 

These are stills taken in sequence, and were in fact never meant to be strung together into a "motion picture" because such a thing didn't exist yet (though there were praxoscopes and things like that, things that spun around and fooled you into thinking there was motion. To me it sounds like some sort of device a proctologist would use, but never mind). One was supposed to examine a photo, then examine the next one, then examine the next one, etc., etc., to get a sense of what exactly happened when a body was in motion. Thus, those sheets with all the images printed on them (see below), strange-looking things with a grid in the background and heavy black margins that I try to crop out, though a Muybridge purist would probably leave them in. These look primitive, but they were a miracle back then.  Don't forget: this was a time when people thought a trotting horse always kept one hoof on the ground, and a galloping horses went from back legs to front legs in leaps, in the manner of those old heroic paintings.

As a kid I was enamoured of flip-books which we made by hand. I wasn't as good at them as my brother. I never lost the fascination. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to find useful sequences of photos like this camel one (imperfect as it is, with the camel framed a little differently in each photo, the graph in the background fluctuating wildly, and even the ground bopping up and down as if there's an earthquake going on).

So I end up going back to Muybridge. 

Still, the eye is fooled. Even with the jerkiness and wildly varying backgrounds (and it feels to me as if there's a frame missing somewhere), there is a sense of motion. Of an actual animal running. I like the way one of its humps flops up and down, and the way the two humps go in opposite directions like one of those tassel-dancers. It looks camelish to me, and moves as camelishly as anything did before the movie camera was even invented.

POST-BLOG FEVERISH MAUNDERINGS. I was wrong about the praxiscope. It doesn't exist, never did. There were, however, many many proto-motion picture/pre-film devices that experimented with the illusion of movement through the rapid spinning around/flipping/projecting of stills. Below is a lovely pink link to a site that gives you all sorts of beautiful information. It's an older, non-slick site that's set up beautifully, logically, with no "things" popping or bulging or moving around. You can actually SEE it, in the tradition of seeing pre-film technology and stuff.

I like the exotic-sounding names of these devices: zoetrope, praxinoscope, kinetoscope, cinematographe, mutoscope, vitascope. . . and no doubt many other scopes that never became well-known. And if you think I'm going to tell you about them. . . just click on the pink link, it'll tell you everything you need to know.

Pre-film devices

Muybridge dancer