Jan L. Willis

Remove the influencers from the red carpet and replace them with her. She knew how to interview a star.

"When I made Kane, I didn’t know enough about movies, and I was constantly encouraged by Toland, who said ‘Carry everything in one shot – don’t do anything else.’ In other words, play scenes through without cutting" Orson Welles ~ Citizen Kane's 85th anniversary

Was once working on a job where I had a wonderful ex-East End gangster driver called Paul. He told me that he & all his gangster associates thought that Ben Kingsley’s performance as Don was the best portrayal of a psychopathic criminal they’d ever seen. Sexy Beast. ‘2000

There is something very reassuring about an old fashioned and well stocked independent bookshop. Topping & Company Booksellers (St Andrews, Fife) is a perfect example of this. Absolutely wonderful bookshop. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Fifty years later, Randy Newman's 'Louisiana 1927' remains a subtle miracle. Three minutes of wry alchemy which manages to recount a tragedy lost to history and a people forgotten by time, without resorting to cheap sentiment or class-based condescension. A perfect American song.

Jonny Quest was unique in many ways, and it's truly one of a kind in Saturday morning TV. It was twice the budget of The Flintstones, and every other cartoon, full orchestra, characters died violently, the art was more nuanced. Sponsors hated it, and it lost money.

There is only one right answer and that is Nick and Nora Charles being the blueprint ♥️

Eddie Muller @EddieMuller and Sterling Hayden biographer Philippe Garnier at Larry Edmunds @LarryEdmunds1 #TCMFF

70% more bookstores today than there were in 2020. Huge win for society. Let's keep it going.

Inspired by @classicfilmgeek we just visited the apartment building location from IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). Very cool to see it! #TCMFF

Lovely. Thank you for sharing this moment of joy.

Ian McKellen reads a passage from DH Lawrence's novel 'The Rainbow,' taken from a 1984 documentary about the writer/POET. I could listen to this endlessly. The prose is perfect, very poetic without attempting to be so. Within it, I catch echoes of Hopkins.

I just realized Randy Newman isn’t on that greatest living songwriters list, seems like a great concept for a funny-sad Randy Newman song.

Happy 100th birthday Harper Lee! Alabama storyteller Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama. Like so many, I learned early from To Kill a Mockingbird that real courage means doing what's right, even when it's hard.  I often quote this line from Atticus Finch, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." What a better world we would live in if we all sought to understand people who are different from us like Atticus did. Atticus Finch showed us what integrity looks like, a lesson I've carried with me my whole life.  On this Harper Lee Centennial Day, I'm so grateful for her voice and her legacy.

Max Ophüls on the failure of "Letter From An Unknown Woman" (1948) at the box office & the second life it got: "It was a very happy production: I had further proof of that only recently. A fortnight ago, Bill Dozier (The Executive Producer), who hadn’t been to Europe for ages, came to Paris and telephoned me here. Like all Americans in transit, he was in bed, a victim of the good food and he hadn’t set foot outside his hotel. He told me that the film was having a second career on television. On its release in America, its career had been fairly insignificant: I trembled lest the producers—who had become real friends—would never get their money back. But receipts in Europe were very good and now, it’s one of the most popular films on American television. It’s a very interesting phenomenon: certain rather intimate films fail when shown in the cinema, but do very well on television." (Max Ophüls with Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1957) P.S: On this day, 78 years ago, "Letter from an Unknown Woman" (1948) premiered in New York City, USA.

Richard Burton reciting this piece from Hamlet ("I have of late but wherefore I know not...") is definitely worth your attention.

Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish photographed by Diane Arbus in Central Park in 1964, 43 years after the 2 sisters worked together on D W Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, and 9 years after Lillian battled Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter.

I’ve followed this account for a couple of years, and it consistently adds beautiful wonders of the world to my timeline.

What I miss most about old movies is extras. People on the streets, in the background, all around. So many films now feel like the characters exist in an almost empty world. Like this scene in Body Heat— I couldn’t think of the last film I saw that felt so casually alive.

One of the truly great Noirs.