Hollywood by Helicopter, 1958

“This movie is going to be pret­ty obvi­ous.” That’s not the best way to get the view­er’s atten­tion. And the rest of the script, read by Bob Crane, is not much bet­ter: “Hey Kit­ty, look … Kit­ty, you did­n’t look hard enough … See the thing that looks like a build­ing? That’s a build­ing!” Nor is the premise of the film very good: Kit­ty is a novice actress, and, before appear­ing in her first movie, she gets an aer­i­al tour of Hol­ly­wood and its land­marks.

But from a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, this 1950s footage of the Los Ange­les movie indus­try has its intrigu­ing moments. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to see how much space there still was around some of the stu­dios and movie the­aters. Just com­pare the image of Grau­man’s Chi­nese The­ater on Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard tak­en from the film with a Google Earth shot from today:

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

Name That Movie: 26 Films in One Animated Minute

Evan Seitz cre­at­ed this one-minute ani­ma­tion in which each let­ter of the alpha­bet rep­re­sents a famous movie. How many can you name? The answers have been shared on Buz­zfeed and The High Def­i­nite.

Don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Movies Online, which includes many great clas­sics, indies, doc­u­men­taries, noir films and more.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

“You Just Don’t Get It, Do You?” — A Montage of Cinema’s Worst Cliché

Jeff Smith, an inde­pen­dent film­mak­er from Indi­anapo­lis, must have spent quite a bit of time going through hun­dreds of movies to come up with his final mon­tage of 120 movies con­tain­ing the line “You just don’t get it, do you?”. If you want to invest some time as well, try to guess the movies first and then com­pare your results with the list of actu­al movies here.

If you enjoy guess­ing movies, you can take a look at Jef­f’s blog post “Name That Film,” in which he shows you tricky movie stills (don’t wor­ry, he also pro­vides the solu­tions).

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.