We’re proud to announce that Errol Flynn’s Ghost: Hollywood in Havana is the winner of a Gold Remi Award at the 2019 Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival, the oldest independent film festival in the world.
More screenings to come!
Continue Reading
The film festival tour continues! Next up: The 2019 Miami Film Festival, with a screening at yet another historic venue: The Tower Theater in Little Havana.
And if that weren’t enough, Latin culture website Remezcla has named Errol Flynn’s Ghost a must-see movie at this year’s festival.
Errol Flynn’s Ghost plays the Tower on Wednesday, April 6.
Continue Reading
Thanks to David Menzies for this great story in The Jersey Journal.
Continue Reading
Delighted to announce Errol Flynn’s Ghost: Hollywood in Havana will have its world premiere at this year’s Golden Door International Film Festival for any number of reasons, not least of which is the main venue: the Loew’s Jersey Theatre, one of the real architectural jewels of the golden era of movie palaces.
Errol Flynn’s Ghost will screen at the 2018 Golden Door International Film Festival in Jersey City on Sunday, September 23.
Continue Reading
As Errol Flynn’s Ghost: Hollywood in Havana nears completion, we thought we’d give you a sneak preview of some of the movie theatres featured in the film. From top to bottom, the interior of the famed Teatro América (modeled on Radio City Music Hall) in central Havana, the interior of the Sierra Maestra (formerly the Lutgardita) in Rancho Boyeros, and the neon-lit marquee of the Riviera, in Havana’s Vedado district.
All images copyright Hammer and Nail Productions 2018.
Continue ReadingFlynn biographer Thomas McNulty (Errol Flynn: The Life and Career) discusses the improbable meeting between Flynn and Fidel Castro in late 1958.The encounter between Flynn and Castro has inspired at least one novel (Boyd Anderson’s Errol, Fidel, and the Cuban Rebel Girls) and served as a backdrop for the narrative film The Last of Robin Hood (starring Kevin Kline as Flynn). We don’t need fictional license. The real story is unbelievable enough.
Continue ReadingA Cuban rebel fighter and confidante of Fidel Castro in the 1950s, today Max Lesnik is a radio commentator and the director of Alianza Martiana, an organization dedicated to the principle of Latin American sovereignty. Lesnik is also a lover of Classical Hollywood and a master storyteller. In this clip, he describes the regular presence of Hollywood movie stars in Havana in the 1940s and 1950. Lesnik, it turns out, had a personal brush with one of them: Errol Flynn. As Lesnik recalls, Flynn was in Havana with a camera crew (shooting footage for what would eventually become the semi-documentary Cuban Story) during the first weeks of 1959, around the time the rebels rode in. “There’s a shot of some rebels standing in front of a building, and I’m in that group,” Lesnik told us, adding, “I always wanted to thank Flynn for introducing me to the American public.”
Continue ReadingAs historian Megan Feeney explains, mid-20th century Havana may not only have had more movie theatre seats per capita than any major city in the hemisphere, it also had some of the most elaborate movie palaces anywhere. The greatest of them all might have been the Blanquita, which Feeney discusses in detail here. Opened by Senator Alfredo Hornedo in 1949 in the Havana suburb of Miramar, the Blanquita was billed as “the world’s largest and most modern theater,” seating nearly 7,000 patrons in air-conditioned comfort and equipped with the latest film projection technology. Little wonder that, following the revolution, the theatre was rechristened the Karl Marx. Megan Feeney holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and is the author of the forthcoming Hollywood in Havana: U.S. Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba Before 1959.
Continue Reading
In the 1940s and ’50s, Havana was a movie-mad city, reportedly boasting more movie theatres than even New York. These included countless neighborhood houses, as well as some of the most elaborate movie palaces anywhere, ranging in architectural style from the classical (the Payret; 1,800 seats) to Art Deco (the Fausto; 1,669 seats), to modernist (the Karl Marx, formerly the Blanquita: 7,000 seats). Overwhelmingly, they showed Hollywood films.
Errol Flynn’s Ghost will offer a rare glimpse of Havana’s historic movie theatres, and the fascination with American culture they once embodied.
Among our stops will be the Cine Yara (above). Originally part of the Radio Centro complex, the Yara opened in 1947 as one the earliest examples of midcentury modernist architecture on the island. The theatre was operated by Warner Bros. and known for showing films in the Cinerama widescreen format. It is still considered one of Havana’s principal movie venues.
Continue ReadingCopyright 2017. All rights reserved.
