I was asked by some Italian reader of this website how I felt about Laura Betti and her passing away, since I hadn't mentioned it.

Well, I am saddened. I loved her work in movies. She worked with great film directors like Federico Fellini and Bernardo Bertolucci, she died in Rome July 31 of a heart attack. She was 70.



It was her work with Pier Paolo Pasolini that I dug and I used to have pictures of the two of them together tacked to my wall in my bedroom when I was a kid because I thought they were so glamorous together.

Rick James died too! The strangest part of that is they say of "natural causes."

Another Freaky thing is that two weeks ago I talked with a producer who said he was making a movie with comic Dave Chappelle portraying Rick James called "Memoirs of a Super Freak."

Weird!

Film archivists in Russia just found a rare German language version of a Laurel and Hardy movie.

Called "Spuk um Mitternacht" (Ghost at Midnight), and Stan and Oliver speak in German.

Sometimes I have to do voiceover work in Turkey and some other countries, and instead of them getting their own native speakers, they'll say it phonetically on my answering machine and I just copy it. I thing this is what Laurel and Hardy were doing here, but without the answering machine.

They called it Laurel and Hardy's first "German motion picture with sound" and it premiered in Berlin on May 5, 1931, and was a huge success.

Many famous actors made language films like this but most have been lost. Back in the day, it was like doing commercials in Japan like Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation."

I am going to Disneyland Tomorrow!!!

I haven't been there in probably ten years, so everyone I met there before has probably left by now.

Maybe the audioanimatronics are still there, but probably not.