Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part II
Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays continue!
The cleanest copy I’ve ever seen of Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants [1996] was uploaded to the Internet Archive as an RF rip sourced from an internal HBO tape. Over on blusky, Chris Person describes some details, and then goes into more detail over at The Aftermath: The Person Saving The Media You Love Is You. Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants is one of those weirdly lost pieces of media; I saw this on cable back in, I guess, college, and then it’s vanished except for terrible VHS rips on youtube.
Which also provides an excellent excuse to link to Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets | The New Yorker.
All that said, my all-time favorite Ricky Jay trick is the thing he does in the first five minutes of: Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters and Ricky Jay - YouTube. (Which is another semi-lost Ricky Jay documentary.)
The folks behind the “George Lucas Talk Show” got a group of commedians together to do a live read of the script of Episode I: THE NABOO MOVIE - A 25th Anniversary All Star Live Reading of Star Wars Ep 1: The Phantom Menace - YouTube. Tony Hale (Buster Bluth) as Qui-Gon! Tawny Newsome (Mariner from Lower Decks) and Haley Joel Osment (yes, from Sixth Sense) as Padme and Anakin! Episode I is a deeply weird movie, but if nothing else this reveals that the script wasn’t the biggest problem. There actually was a way to say those lines and make it work.
There’s this elevated, enclosed passageway in Venice called the Vasari Corridor, which I am embarrassed to admit I only found out about via this CNN travel article I clicked on as a form of fully-inflamed procrastination: The Vasari Corridor is a secret passageway through central Florence — now it’s open to the public. Fascinating!
State of Play: Wolfgang Baur crunches some numbers - Kobold Press: Baur outlines the state of the business over at Kobold Press; wild to be how large a percentage kickstarter revenue is. I think these kinds of small-to-medium businesses are where kickstarter really shines.
Fully playable Star Wars: Battlefront 3 Wii build leaks online: it was always rumored that it was close to done, but wow!
Willem Dafoe on His Acting Career, ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Nosferatu’: yes.
Mary Tyler Moore accidentally nailed a perfect trick shot in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1962): If you’ve never seen it, you have to watch this; this real amazing parts are the looks of shock that play across the faces of both Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke who can’t believe they saw what they saw, but then get it together to finish the scene. Stone cold pros, the both of them.
Patricia Lockwood · Diary: Encounters with Aliens: Patricia Lockwood is watching The X-Files! “So then the show becomes about something else, something deep and dark as water, it is carried rapidly past all other unsolved mysteries to ask: what if a woman were irreplaceable?”
Satellite Photos of Middle Earth: nicely done.
Interview: Demolition Man Writer Daniel Waters: A couple of amazing tidbits in here, including an incredible semi-pitch for the sequel.