About Tony
Tony Maietta arrived in Los Angeles in the 1990s as a fresh faced twenty-something, eager to discover the “classic’ Hollywood that he fell in love with as a child. Alas, he was disappointed. He soon realized the only way he could travel back to that magical place was to become a film historian, so he set out to live in the past. He is the on-camera host for a number of original productions celebrating classic film and television, including CBS Home Video’s award-winning presentations of Lucille Ball’s renowned television series, The Lucy Show, (in which he interviews key players from the series such as Jimmy Garrett, Carole Cooke and Lucie Arnaz) and Here’s Hollywood, an original program produced by here! media in which he discusses classic Hollywood films in the context of gay and lesbian cinema history. In addition to participating in lectures, hosting film events (2005’s Greta Garbo Film Festival in Hollywood, 2009’s Douglas Fairbanks Film Festival at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City), and writing program notes (most notably, for the prestigious Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Silent Film Gala, chaired by Dustin Hoffman), he has written and recorded six DVD commentaries for Warner Home Video. For Turner Classic Movies, he has been an advisor and participated in on-camera interviews for numerous film documentaries including the presentations Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood (2007), Public Enemies: The Golden Age of the Gangster Film (2008), and Moguls & Movie Stars (2010), the acclaimed six-part Emmy-nominated documentary. Rediscovering John Gilbert, an original documentary which he co-wrote and produced, had its TCM premiere in January of 2010. In addition, he appeared alongside Mel Brooks, Cloris Leachman(et al.) in the documentary Hitchcock and Mel: Spoofing the Master of Suspense (2009), as well as in Murnau, Borzage, and Fox (Twentieth Century Fox, 2008), and the original KTLA production Two Modern Guys in Classic Hollywood (2008) which he also co-developed. His latest project is The Marble Faun of Grey Gardens , a book that he co-wrote with Jerry Torre, the infamous "Marble Faun" from the celebrated 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens.