Maybe not, but it’s been on cable a lot recently.
I think whoever posted that was pulling your leg. I can find no evidence of any short subject titled The Radio-Pizza Show, or any similar title starting with “Radio”. Not in the U.S. Copyright Catalog 1912-1939, or 1940-1949. Not in the Variety movie reviews (yes, they reviewed short subjects, too). Not in the Internet Movie Database. The tip-off might be the idea of casting Jon Hall and Marjorie Main as a vaudeville team — she was twenty-five years older than he.
What’s more, when I do a search here, I find that there’s no poster ever named “lalbert” and no thread other than this one that contains all the words “radio”, pizza", “show”, “Main”, and “Hall”, although that may be just because it’s not possible to search certain time periods.
Here? Krokodil said it was posted to the alt.fan.cecil-adams Usenet newsgroup.
Sorry, I missed that when I read the post.
And even if it were here, the search engine misses a lot, too.
I found one other reference to The Radio-Pizza Show on alt.fan.cecil-adams, posted by the same lalbert person. He’d mentioned a prior mention by somebody else in rec.arts.movies, but I couldn’t find anything archived on Google.
Am I being whooshed? It wouldn’t be the first time. I don’t see any ironic kick that would make such a whoosh worthwhile on lalbert’s part, though. And Jon/John Hall is a common enough name that maybe it was a different one from the one you cite. For every movie you’ve ever heard of, three are dozens more that you–and the IMDB–haven’t. More old movies slipped through the cracks than not. And Marjorie Main wasn’t the type of actress that film scholars are moved to write definitive biographies about.
As one of the most prolific contributors to the IMDb, I can say that the IMDb has its strong points and its weak points, but this would not be one of them. That all record of a short subject made by a Hollywood studio in the late 1930s would have disappeared is impossible, especially one in which several stars make cameo appearances. The nitrate materials may have disappeared, but there would still be studio records, Screen Actors Guild records, distributor records, copyright records, and industry reviews.
The IMDb is better than you are give it credit. It is virtually complete for the first ten years of American commercial motion picture production, 1893-1903 (5,900 titles). And it is also virtually complete for the first eight years of American feature production, 1912-1920 (8,300 titles). And that is so even with only about ten percent of those movies physically existing today in complete form.
As for the “John” Hall theory: The part you describe would be a principal role, and after May 1937 all principal roles, whether in features or in shorts, had to be cast from Screen Actors Guild members. There was no SAG member named John Hall, and Leo Gorcey did not start working in Hollywood until May 1937, having been brought there from the Broadway cast of Dead End to do the movie version.
Michelle Vogel, Marjorie Main: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s “Ma Kettle” (McFarland & Company, 2006).
Wow, I stand corrected!
Your resources outstrip mine, Walloon, so let me ask you the question I posed to the alt.fan.cecil-adams NG: What is the earliest depiction of pizza in an American film that you can find?
The Crime of Dr. Forbes (1936), starring Gloria Stuart (of Titanic fame), Robert Kent in the title role, and Hollywood’s favorite stock Italian Henry Armetta as Luigi. Produced and released by Twentieth Century-Fox. The first third of the plot summary in The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures:
The script was written in 1935, and filmed in April-May 1936.
Why would Greed be infamous? I know that there is only a quite shortened print available, but it is an excellent movie. The sad part is that so much of it was lost. I love Zasu Pitts.
I was wondering the same. Some of the movies listed don’t seem “so infamous, that it will never be shown again”, they are just lost for some other reason
My thinking is that it could be considered infamous because so much of it was destroyed, and in the manner that is was. Kinda like Pearl Harbor.
…seems to be shown every once in a while. It is a pretty bad movie…you almost laugh at the stupid lines that John Wayne mouths. Hughes kept it under wraps for years, because the critics panned it. I could swear that AMC was running last year.
Unfortunately that movie is still around.