“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is available online for a pittance of twenty bucks. Here’s the opening title sequence.
The Hullabaloo bit is on screen for only a few seconds in the movie. For me, the complete sequence in the extended edition is by itself worth the purchase price.
I have never seen Drew Carey’s old sitcom, and I don’t watch The Price is Right, but I am really enjoying his Friday Night Freak-Out show on Sirius|XM. Carey recently played this song that caught my ear. It’s simple and direct, with a fantastically spaced-out guitar break.
I feel Carol Lynley’s passing merits further appreciation. “Bunny Lake is Missing” from 1965 — the same year that Lynley appeared in Playboy — provides some fascinating elements and crossovers that make it a cult delight. At 17 Lynley played a girl in trouble in “Blue Denim”. The word “abortion” isn’t spoken in that film, but it is in Bunny Lake, where she’s a single mother.
Keir Dullea plays Lynley’s brother. When I was speaking with him a few years ago, Dullea told me that Stanley Kubrick called his agent out of the blue, offering him the part of astronaut Dave Bowman in “2001: A Space Odyssey” — a role that Dullea didn’t even know about. Kubrick had spotted him in something, and that something was most likely Bunny Lake.
Laurence Olivier is shown chatting briefly with his old cohort Noel Coward in the film, to their presumed mutual amusement, but the most curious scene is with Olivier and Lynley at a pub. Swinging London bursts onto a TV screen with the appearance of the Zombies! You won’t see this video on YouTube, which implies to me that if I were to post the clip there it would be yanked. So I’ll put it here as a DogRat exclusive.
Edit: I’ve posted the video to YouTube in the hope it won’t be deleted.
Follow-up: I was right the first time! YouTube has deleted the video.
“Just Out of Reach” can be heard again later in the film, being played on a radio.
When I was starting as a DJ at a small commercial AM radio station, this naughty ditty by Meri Wilson was one of the records we played.
Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant catching a bit of that upbeat Les Paul sound.
Before Bill Gates became famous, to me the name Gates meant not only David Gates of the group Bread, but the manufacturer of the broadcasting equipment at the radio station where I worked. Here’s a short air check of another guy at the station, with a bit of a song from, appropriately, David Gates.
David Gates had a string of super hits with Bread, and before that his song “Saturday’s Child” was recorded by the Monkees (and studio musicians) for their debut album. The earliest song by David Gates that I know of came on a record I played to death as a kid. Hey, it was a start!
