For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III

What is this?

I am proud to take part in this year's For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon. What that means is they=we=you are gonna be raising funds for the National Film Preservation Foundation's (NFPF) project, The White Shadow this week.

The White Shadow is a 1923 film "officially" directed by Graham Cutts but was the first film to be written and assistant-directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Long considered lost, the first three reels were discovered in a collection of unidentified American nitrate prints that had been safeguarded at a New Zealand archive since 1989. You can read more about the discovery of the film here.

From Ferdy on Film: "The good people at NFPF are committed to making many of the films they have rescued available for cost-free viewing by streaming them on their website. But online hosting ain’t cheap. NFPF estimates that it will cost $15,000 to stream The White Shadow for four months and record the score. It is the mission of this year’s For the Love of Film Blogathon to raise that money so that anyone with access to a computer can watch this amazing early film that offered Hitchcock a chance to learn his craft, with a score that does it justice."

The goal, as mentioned, is to raise $15,000 to stream this three-reel fragment online, free to all... and to record the score by composer Michael Mortilla.

Just click the image above and you can donate. Thanks!

Now.... As part of the Blogathon, all the participants (over 100 film blogs!) are offering posts on Sir Alfred. So, if you CLICK HERE, you'll be offered a choice of not one, but THREE! Hitchcock posts I've done (The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest & The Birds), each with a tantalizing recipe to cook which will enhance your viewing pleasure. (Actually, you can read all three - it's more of a buffet than a single prix fixe thang.)

As Sir Alfred once said: “I'm not a heavy eater. I'm just heavy, and I eat.”

For other bloggers involved in the Blogathon this week - for those added Monday & Tuesday visit HERE, for those added today & tomorrow - click here.

As always, cook, watch, eat & enjoy!

TV Bites: The Lady Vanishes

THE SNACK:
Alma Hitchcock's Crêpes Elizabeth


A shorter version of this post appears on the Criterion Collection website.

Finally, finally, finally! This is finally part two what was to be my Hitchcock double bill.

If you read the previous post on Hitchcock's The Birds, you'll know I recently got a book with some of Sir Alfred's wife Alma's recipes. And since I had all these other books on Hitchcock already out of the public library, I figured why not kill two birds as The Lady Vanishes is just being released by Criterion on Blu-Ray.

The Class: Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds

THE MEAL:
Alfred Hitchcock's Quiche Lorraine
Classic California Caesar Salad
Quick French Bread
Coq au Vin
North Beach Style Zabaione with fresh Berries



Happy Halloween!

Let start right off with an apology... I'm a little upset because since I planned this class, and wrote up and tried all the recipes, I've discovered that Hitchcock's daughter, Pat, wrote a biography of her mother, Alma, and in it included a bunch of recipes! Including one for a roast chicken! ACK!! Well, it's too late, baby. But the good news is that there are a lot of other Hitchcock films to write about, right?

TV Bites: North by Northwest

THE SNACK:
Bourbon Cured Steelhead Trout



Well, currently I'm stuck in bed with an upper respiratory infection which means it hurts to talk and I've been on a liquid diet for the last 48 hours. And I'm contagious. But the show must go on and I'm hard at work trying to knock out the special Christmas and New Year's editions of this blog. So, in the meantime.....

I hope you will believe me when I say that I have no grand master list of films I'm choosing, but rather selecting them as the urge strikes. So it's as much of a surprise to me that in the few films I've chosen so far, this is now the third film that was made in 1959 (along with Some Like it Hot and Rio Bravo). Why this year has such a pull on me for this "adventure," I'm not sure. But here we are, number three.