Mel Brooks, Vitaphone Shorts Added
Those attending the 15th annual TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood next month will have an opportunity to engage with Mel Brooks and Vitaphone, both born in 1926. One’s extinct, the other’s still going strong. While Brooks, 97, will be on hand for a closing-night screening of his 1987 comedy Spaceballs, six Vitaphone vaudeville shorts from the 1920s will be projected in 35mm, with sound played back from their original 16-inch discs on a turntable designed and engineered by Warner Bros.’ postproduction engineering department. Also announced Thursday: • Steven Spielberg will participate in a Q&A with Howard Suber — the UCLA faculty member at the center of the recent six-part TCM documentary The Power of Film — ahead of a director’s cut of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); • Nancy Meyers and Alexander Payne, respectively, will introduce world premiere restorations of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), both completed by Warner Bros. and The Film Foundation; • David Fincher will present a world premiere restoration Imax screening …
