Alfred Hitchcock began his storied career as a title card artist for silent films in the U.K. in 1919.  Now, the British Film Institute is raising money to preserve some of the great director's earliest films.

The campaign, "Rescue the Hitchcock 9," aims to preserve and restore these films:
The Pleasure Garden (1925)
The Lodger (1926)
The Ring (1927)
Downhill (1927)
Easy Virtue (1927)
The Farmers Wife (1927)
Champagne (1928)
The Manxman (1929)
Blackmail (1929)

The only one I've seen is The Lodger, which is still a pretty gripping thriller, and shows how Hitchcock began earning his stripes as the "Master of Suspense" from his first days in the movie business.

Still from 'The Pleasure Garden,' courtesy BFI

Turner Classic Movies will be back in August with its annual "Summer Under the Stars" feature, and once again, they're launching cool website graphics and a fun collectible to go along. This year, it's hip "trading cards" by graphic artist Michael Schwab. They're all cool silhouettes, like the Paul Newman card shown here.

And of course there's the movies, with a different star featured every night in August, including Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall and Bob Hope. With the heat wave this summer, August sounds like a good time to curl up with the air cranked and some great classic movies on the tube.

Too bad this never made the airwaves, but somebody has found it and put it on YouTube, of course.

Who knew Orson Welles made a pilot for a talk show?  The camera angles and the titles are pretty trippy, as one might expect from a 1979 pilot, and the audience reaction shots are beautifully dated.

I don't know why it didn't make it to the air, especially with the boffo lineup - the Muppets, Burt Reynolds, Angie Dickinson and magic tricks. I would have watched.

Welles circa 1935, the Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I generally don't tout sales in this space, but if you're looking to beef up your collection of art house titles from Criterion, there's a 50-percent-off sale on Barnes and Noble.

Nobody's better at pristine editions of quality classic movies than Criterion.  So if somehow you've never managed to add Truffaut's 8 1/2 or The Red Shoes or Seven Samurai to to your collection, now might be the time.  (Although as much as I love Akira Kurosawa, I can't quite bring myself to snap up the collection of 25 of his films.  Even half-off, it's still 200 bucks. )