LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT ai

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Been playing around with Perplexity.ai and, on a whim, asked it about LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT. Delivered the standard answers - lost, never found, frames etc etc - but it did include something I didn’t know: that there’s a full script out there (which I should've known, given the photo recreation of the film from 2002 but hey). Anyhow, got me to thinking: given that there’s a script and plenty of stills and fragments (and the 2002 reconstruction) extant, could AI be used to recreate the complete film as it was when it premiered? A search for the 2002 recreation yielded this bit of brilliance, from someone who made an amazing (though obviously not perfect) go at recreating a few minutes of the film with AI. Excited by the potential here and what it could mean for lost films as a whole.

unsold DICK TRACY Pilot (Dozier, 1967)

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Directed by Larry Peerce from a script by Hal Finberg inspired by the work of Chester Gould; starring Ray McDonnell, Jan Shutan, Ken Mayer, Jay Blood, Allen Jaffe, and Victor Buono. Unreleased; watched 2023w15 via YouTube.

Save for what I can describe only as the "drunken baritone" vocals to an otherwise Dozier-typical and snappy theme song (a la BATMAN and THE GREEN HORNET) and the standard bloodbath of the mid-late 1960s television, I can't figure why this little imperfect gem didn't get picked up to series.

An all-too-brief 28 minute, pitch-perfect blend of the Dozier-BATMAN camp with the Dozier-GREEN HORNET seriousness (that unfairly killed the show) featuring a great cast – especially Ray MacDonnell as Tracy (he'd go on to have a 40-year run on ALL MY CHILDREN) – that wasn't afraid to dive into the deep end of the fantastic when it came to villainy (Buono's Wellesian Mr. Memory is a great start – Lon Chaney Jr. was to be cast as Pruneface had this been picked up to series; makeup test photos were taken (cart before horse, example one), below) in a story that felt ripped from a Gould comic – dug the Bat-Pole inspired entrance to Tracy's home crime lab, Tracy’s Swedish microscope magnifying eyedrops, and the use of the two-way wrist TV.

Making up LCjr as Pruneface – this would have been amazing! | via

Happy to add that one of the treasures in my DT collection is this 1967 bagetelle game featuring the incarnations from this unaired, unsold pilot (cart-horse, two):

Really wish this had been picked up. Had the potential to be something special.