Booze News: W.C. Fields Exhibit & Vol.2 DVD Set
>> Saturday, December 30, 2006
On January 19th, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will open an exhibition in their 4th Floor Gallery dedicated to the patron saint of booze movies, W.C. Fields. “The Amazing Peregrinations & Pettifoggery of One William Claude Dukenfield, late of Philadelphia, Pa., familiarly known to Crowned Heads and Hoi Polloi alike as W.C. Fields” will feature posters, photographs, publicity materials, letters, scripts, personal documents, artifacts, film clips, and sound recordings donated by family and friends of the Great Man. If you live in the Los Angeles area, don't miss this unique opportunity.
Here's a link to the official press release:
http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2006/06.12.11.html
In other Fields news, the cover for the upcoming W.C. Fields Comedy Collection Vol 2 has been finalized. The set is due for release on March 20th, and it will no doubt be the most important rotgut-related DVD release of the upcoming year. The box will include five of the Great Man's greatest comedies, three of which (*) have never been released on video in any format:
YOU'RE TELLING ME (1934 Paramount)
THE OLD FASHIONED WAY (1934 Paramount) *
MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE (1935 Paramount) *
POPPY (1936 Paramount) *
NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941 Universal)
Look for reviews of those films in March. In the meantime, I'll cover many other gems of soused cinema, including the films in Vol. 1.
W.C. Fields Comedy Collection (The Bank Dick / My Little Chickadee / You Can't Cheat an Honest Man / It's a Gift / International House)
W.C. Fields Comedy Collection, Vol. 2 (The Man on the Flying Trapeze / Never Give A Sucker An Even Break / You're Telling Me! / The Old Fashioned Way / Poppy)
3 comments:
The grandchildren of W.C. Fields have done a wonderful thing in sharing the personal memorabilia of W.C. Fields with the world at an exhibit opening on January 19, 2007. This is a must see for fans of the Great Man:
"Celebrating the donation by the Fields family of the renowned humorist’s personal papers to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, the exhibition presents a historical, biographical and geographical survey of W.C. Fields’s remarkable career by drawing from a trove of personal memorabilia – including items never before seen outside the Fields family."
See you there on January 19th:
Ted Wioncek, President
W.C. Fields Fan Club
P.O. Box 506
Stratford, NJ 08084-0506 USA
WCFieldsFanClub@comcast.net
www.webtrec.com/wcfields
Ted also deserves a great deal of credit for keeping the memory of the Great Man alive and for organizing campaigns to encourage Universal to release William Claude Dukefield's work on video.
Thanks Ted,
garv
P.S. -- I feel honored that the President of the W.C. Fields Fan Club was the first person I did not know personally to post a comment at Booze Movies.
And I think he created a blogger profile just to post comments here.
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