I detest flying anywhere. Left to my own devices, I’d never leave my keyboard.

I saw the Kino print of ‘The Man From Beyond,’ but apparently a superior new print has been produced by Restored Serials. Maybe a few snippets of missing footage will close up some of the...

I’m still learning my craft, and I’ve been writing since I was nine.

If you want to see what stage comedians did to get laffs a century ago, watch the 1910 ‘Wizard of Oz.’ I hope you have a high tolerance for pratfalls.

In 1921, Harry Houdini started his own film company called – wait for it – the Houdini Picture Corporation.

In 1916, Universal Studios released the first filmed adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’ Georges Melies made a film by that name in 1907, but, unlike his earlier adaptations of Verne,...

I want you to tell all these people that I wanted more time to spend with them. Tell them I meant to, tell them I wanted to hear what they said and tell them what...

Romantic Orientalism was fascinated by the color and excitement of a powerful culture, and nearly always approached its subject with love.

Let’s say you need a perfectly obedient servant who never gets tired, never needs to be paid, and is virtually indestructible. If you’re in a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away, you’ll...

Boy, you’re good at figuring things out. Isn’t he? Except that if anybody’s the devil in this room it’s _you_, buster.” An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. “I’ve seen you before. I know you,...

The 1910 Edison film of ‘Frankenstein’ was itself a dead thing revived by technology.

People who like to fume about the manner in which Disney changed beloved classics are often ignorant of history, not to mention the realities of show business.

I don’t think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It’s instructive to imagine...

1925’s ‘The Lost World’ is… really, everything a dinosaur movie should be. Like a dinosaur, this classic was once extinct too, existing as mere fragmentary footage and stills, but cinemaphile fossil-hunters have painstakingly excavated bits...

We who grew up with ‘drop and cover’ drills know all too well what wonders science can bring us, and we like to see the guy in the white lab coat suffer a little. Or...

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It’s king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.

A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful...

What has ‘The Patchwork Girl of Oz’ got in its favor? Quite a lot, from our point of view in 2009. If you want to see how Oz’s creator envisioned his own work, here it...

If you ordered up a whore here, you’d probably get a theater major doing Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson. I wonder what would happen if I ordered up a Hershey bar?” His eyes lit up...

According to Jewish legend, only the very wisest and very holiest rabbis had the power to make golems, animated servants of clay. Strictly speaking, the golem is not in the same class with Frankenstein’s monster,...

Written and directed by French showman Georges Melies, ‘Le Voyage’ features one of the most indelible images in cinema history: the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain...

In 1913, the noted German actor and director Paul Wegener was making a film in Prague when he heard the legend of Rabbi Loew, who created a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague...

Back when the concept of organ transplants qualified as science fiction, novelist Maurice Renard wrote a thriller called ‘Les Mains d’Orlac.’ Call it a bastard offspring of ‘Frankenstein;’ its plot revolved around the old theme...

So vast is the shadow cast by the MGM production of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ so indelible are its characterizations, so perfect its music, and so assured is its cinematic immortality, that most people think...

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I’m here in person to tell you it ain’t so. If your stuff...

For those of you who thought F. W. Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ was his greatest film, I have news for you: his ‘Faust’ blows it out of the water.

For all its flaws, ‘The Hands of Orlac’ really is a seminal film, and if you’re partial to that particular B-movie subgenre of Demon Body Parts, you really ought to see it.