What film quests have you gone on?

Chances are you're aware of those same steps having been used five years earlier in the most legendary and sought-after of L&H's mercifully few lost films, 1927's Hats Off (depicting them as washing machine salesmen). Comparing surviving stills from that earlier production with The Music Box reveals how significantly the hillside, largely vacant in 1927, had been built up in the brief time between the two. That's boomin' L.A. for ya. And one just never knows when or where a lost gem will be rediscovered in some unexpected place, so we live in hope.

I've seen The Music Box so many times that my eye often strays from the central action to scrutinize the surroundings; so many of their films - as well as those of others such as Buster Keaton - are wonderful, time-capsule documents of an ever-changing city, isolated pockets of which (like those steps) remain just as they were to be found if one looks hard enough. In shots looking north on Vendome St, passing traffic just beyond up on Sunset Blvd often catches my eye, and I think of those people going about their daily business, oblivious to some of film history's most enduring and well-known moments being committed to film in their direct vicinity, and I think as well of the meetings of two worlds in one time and place: the odd juxtaposition of iconic, manufactured farce captured in the same frame with those mundane details. And of how many of us would wish for a time machine just to be able to witness them for ourselves.