Category: Life with Pratts

Click picture to watch video.

Roger Pratt is a top cinematographer.  He’s worked with Terry Gilliam quite a few times, and he’s filmed some very big movies, including Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  But long before Roger there was another Pratt working behind the movie camera.

Let’s go way back to 1922, when Gilbert Pratt was directing Stan Laurel in the 3-reel (approx. 30-minute) silent movie Mud and Sand, a parody of the recent Rudolph Valentino hit, Blood and Sand.  Laurel was working solo in those days.

Don’t expect this video to look as good as my previous post with Laurel and Hardy.  The audio has some very good Dixieland music, but I think it was just a CD that somebody played in the background as a soundtrack.

Was there ever a super-hero named Pratt, you ask?  Why yes, as a matter of fact, there was.

Al Pratt was the original Atom.  Introduced by DC Comics in 1940, during the Golden Age of comic books, Pratt was very short, about 5 feet tall, and he had the strength of a, uh, normal man.  But he was tough.  Real tough!  And he learned how to be a — a — really good boxer.  *Sigh.*  OK, so he wasn’t Superman.  But neither was Batman.  So there!

Here’s a very nice portrait of my late mother, Joanne Waffle Pratt. I believe this was taken after she had her first baby, my sister the doctor. I don’t know when studio photography done in this style fell out of fashion, but stylish and fashionable it was!

My late mother’s maiden name was, no fooling, Waffle. She graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York the semester before Grace Kelly started there.

With the presence of Eastern Equine Encephalitis and West Nile Virus here in Massachusetts, we’re hoping to get some tenants in our new bat house next spring. It has a Batman emblem on it, so I couldn’t resist. The bats will eat the mosquitoes, and that’s good, but what about rabid bats?

The movie It’s a Wonderful Life was based on a short story called The Greatest Gift, which starts with these sentences:

The little town straggling up the hill was bright with colored Christmas lights. But George Pratt did not see them.

This is the George Pratt I know. My dad. Mom is gone.