Super Scopitone Swings at ’60s Nightclub

My friend DeSoto Brown in Honolulu found an amazing Scopitone and wrote, “This video appears to encompass many of the nightlife themes you espouse in your blog, in one appealing package.”

Ethel Ennis sings “I’ve Got That Feeling”  Enjoy!


About Peter Moruzzi

Author and historian Peter Moruzzi is passionate about the middle decades of the 20th century: its nightlife, classic dining, and architecture. Born in Concord, Massachusetts and raised in Hawaii, Moruzzi graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and later attended the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. In 1999, he founded the Palm Springs Modern Committee (PS ModCom) an architectural preservation group. He is the author of "Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground," "Palm Springs Holiday: A Vintage Tour From Palm Springs to the Salton Sea," "Classic Dining:Discovering America's Finest Mid-Century Restaurants," "Palm Springs Paradise: Vintage Photographs from America's Desert Playground," and "Greetings from Los Angeles." His latest pictorial history, "Greetings from Las Vegas" will be available in September, 2019.
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4 Responses to Super Scopitone Swings at ’60s Nightclub

  1. Bill Chance says:

    I’m a recently discovered fan of the Scopitone films ( http://billchance.org/2011/10/08/scopitone/ ) – love the one you linked to! It’s nice to see one with quality, not simply cheese.

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  2. DeSoto says:

    I can only hope that…

    This visual smorgasborg will inspire the cinematographers of today – Sven Kirsten, for one example.

    And, in an ideal world, the nightclubs of today would mimic this parade of talent, costuming, lighting, and decor.

    Especially since there are no longer any Scopitone machines to tempt us into “stopping for a minute, being entertained for hours” (as one of the newspaper ads on the Scopitone site tells us.)

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  3. Sven Kirsten says:

    Arrrgh, now you’ve done, got me hooked on the Scopitone channel again! I really wanna know WHO their crazy out-of-sync choreographer was! Love the visual crescendo of the rotating prism effect. Curiously, this apt portrayal of American nightlife was committed to film by ze French (I believe) – not unlike the best depiction of Tiki night-clubbing being filmed by Russians in Havana in I AM CUBA, n’est pas?

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  4. I’ve added a link in the first paragraph to Scopitone for those of you who are unfamiliar with the technology.

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