Recording, watching and (sometimes) writing about old movies are a yooge part of my life.

Another day, another digestion nightmare. Ready for this? I had a lovely plate of artistic eggs yesterday morning for breakfast (thank you, Wolfgang) that took 12½ hours to finish traveling through my esophagus. I’m awfully tired of all these rotten infirmities! I almost starved to death — with a pressure in my chest like I’m having a fucking heart attack — until I could finally swallow again and take another bite of food. (Sam eventually baked some mozzarella sticks for a late dinner.)

Hallelujah, everybody. I’m swallowing again. I’ll live to eat another day.

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Hello. I know you’re not expecting movie reviews so close to the beginning of a Howdygram post, but SURPRISE! It’s very late Saturday night (after 11 p.m.), there’s nothing of any real consequence going on here right now, and I just finished watching MAKE ME A STAR (1932) on TCM starring Stuart Erwin and Joan Blondell. This is a tasty little classic — i.e., old but really fabulous — about a small-town rube named Merton Gill (Erwin) who graduates from a correspondence film acting school and dreams about a career in Hollywood westerns. (He even has a pocket-size “cheatsheet,” with pictures of mandatory facial expressions.) When Merton loses his job delivering groceries, the poor doofus finally packs up and “goes west,” where he nearly starves to death in the studio casting office waiting for his first break. That’s where Joan Blondell comes in. She plays Flips Montague, an actress in Mack Sennett-style comedies, who notices Merton sitting in the same chair week after week and finally rescues him with one day of work as an “extra” (that pays $7.50 cash) in a Buck Benson western.

If you’ve never seen Make Me a Star please keep an eye out for it on Turner Classic Movies. It’s one of my all-time favorites about Hollywood during the Depression era … with a terrific script and even better performances.

Another wonderful film, and basically the same story, is HEARTS OF THE WEST (1975) starring Jeff Bridges and Andy Griffith. In this one, also set during the Depression, Jeff Bridges plays Lewis Tater, a small-town rube who wants to be a “writer of western prose” (not an aspiring actor) and receives a diploma from a bogus correspondence school located in Nevada. After his older brothers won’t stop making fun of him, Lewis decides to escape his frustrating life at home to go west and “study on campus” … which is when he finds out the hard way that Titan College is just a P.O. box at a desolate railroad stop. As he tries to track down the local con men who bilked him out of his money, Lewis stumbles into trouble, gets mugged and robbed, and wanders out into the Nevada desert with underpants on his head (seriously!) where he eventually runs into an on-location movie crew filming a western in the middle of nowhere. The crew “adopts” Lewis as a mascot, lets him hang around as an extra, and then brings him back to Hollywood with the rest of the cast and crew. Eventually, as he works his way up for the next few weeks, Lewis finds himself starring in cowboy movies.

In Hearts of the West, Blythe Danner plays the Joan Blondell part, Andy Griffith is the actor/cowboy who originally finds Lewis wandering in the desert and becomes his buddy, and Alan Arkin co-stars as the director who gives Lewis his first break.

Sorry if this is all a little much for you, but recording, watching and (sometimes) writing about old movies are a yooge part of my simple life … which includes the following six-point roadmap to sanity:

1. I eat.
2. I sleep.
3. I write.
4. I watch old movies.
5. I design greeting cards.
6. Rinse and repeat.

Thank you for putting up with me.