If you live in the Los Angeles area, or will be there over Labor Day weekend, you’ll love Cinecon. Described as a “7th heaven for cinephiles,” Cinecon returns for a 59th year August 31 to September 4 with a playbill of rare goodies you can’t even see on TCM. Among those programming the festival is
Attention anyone who remembers or is simply curious about the early days of television: don’t miss this sneak peek at “Kinecon at Cinecon.” The annual screening of rare kinescopes from the 1940’s and ’50s — the days before videotape — is part of Cinecon, the classic film festival held over the Labour Day weekend in
Gather round, fans of rare, early, one-of-a-kind TV gems, You won’t want to miss this: Labour Day weekend marks the return of another LA-based Cinecon movie festival. For the second September in a row, the coronavirus has moved the festival on-line only. That’s good news to many of us who live far from LA as
Frequent visitors to this site will know that I collect TV shows on 16mm film. Older readers will remember this format from high school, when pizza-sized reels of film were threaded on a projector, the lights would go out and everybody took a quick nap. I stayed awake, and never lost my fascination with the
It is fitting that Cinecon’s annual salute to TV’s “lost” past should be projected on the big screen in Hollywood’s fabled Egyptian Theatre. These kinescopes — generally the only record of a live, early TV broadcast — are about as rare as treasures found in pyramids past. A favourite gathering for classic film buffs, Cinecon
Happy to be back in The Toronto Star today, this time for a feature on two of my most treasured comedy film idols, Laurel & Hardy. The occasion is the release of the new feature “Stan & Ollie,” premiering Friday in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The movie spreads to cinemas in other Canadian cities a
Those of you who read this site regularly (you both know who you are) are undoubtedly aware that my favourite TV channel is TCM — Turner Classic Movies. No other channel caters to its fan base with such style and provides such well archived content. Ben Mankiewicz has proved that classic film, as his intro proclaims,
Did you know Sammy Davis Jr. could not land a special on a U.S. network TV schedule in the late ’50s — so he made one in Canada instead? That’s just one of the things I learned Monday from my pal Stan Taffel, 16mm film collector extraordinaire. Taffel is the president of Cinecon, an annual Los