Behind The Screen: a thread for Hollywood history

Photoplay magazine: the birth of celebrity culture



http://www.theguardian.com/film/fil...ollywood-film-studios-stars-celebrity-culture

The king of all the fan magazines, though, was Photoplay, founded in the same year as Motion Picture. While Motion Picture initially had the edge over its rival, and the greater circulation in the early days, Photoplay reigned supreme in the 1920s and 1930s, with a canny mix of studio tie-ins and an “independent” editorial voice. While co-operation from the industry allowed Photoplay access to stars and sets, campaigning editorials claimed to speak for the fans. Like Motion Picture, it soon shifted its focus to the stars and their private lives. As the majority of film-goers were women, Photoplay addressed them directly with fashion and beauty hints, plus relationship advice. Beginning in 1920, the Photoplay Medal of Honor (a “solid gold” Tiffany medallion) was handed out every year to a film voted for by readers – one of the first major movie awards.

The “gossip” in Photoplay was discreet and mostly innocent: indeed, the magazine often did its best to dial down scandal. When Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks divorced their respective spouses and married each other in 1920, a double-page spread in Photoplay presented the couple’s story as “filmdom’s greatest real-life romance”. It was the perfect sop to any delicate readers who were upset by the thought of divorce and the whiff of infidelity. Photoplay made it OK to carry on liking Mary and Doug, and buying tickets to their films.

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Photoplay’s secret weapon was Adela Rogers St Johns, whose “sob sister” interviews with movie stars appeared to be so emotionally revealing as to create an entirely illusory sense of intimacy between reader and celebrity – although the “confessions” were mostly sanitised and scandal-free. Sexy sirens disclosed that all they wanted was a husband and family, screen lovers that they were just looking for the right girl.

One exception was the extended interview that Clara Bow gave to St Johns in 1928, which the “mother confessor of Hollywood” decided to run as a first-person narrative. The idea of Bow telling her painful life story in her own words was meant to evoke sympathy for the Brooklyn-born flapper. But instead, readers and Hollywood colleagues alike were horrified by the revelations in the piece entitled “My Life” . What really offended her peers was that while so many of them were trying to hide their pasts, Bow was prepared to put hers on display – and they didn’t like this trend for honesty.



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Today, although many of the names featured in Photoplay have become obscure, we can recognise the origins of our 24-hour celebrity culture in its pages. And for devotees of early Hollywood, much of the Photoplay archive, as well as that of its rivals, has been scanned and uploaded to a website called the Media History Project. Turning the pages click by click is a fascinating way to tour Hollywood in the silent era. And it’s more than an excuse to wallow in old-fashioned glamour. Even the myths that the studios and stars want to tell about themselves reveal hidden truths, about what women in another time wished for, and the dreams Hollywood sold them with each ticket.

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One of the magazines at the Media History Project has the greatest name of all time: Cap’n Joey’s Jazza-Ka-Jazza.

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It also has the legendary Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, memorably and anachronistically mentioned in The Music Man.

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Meet the 92-year-old New York woman who once starred with Bogart | New York Post »

Few neighbors realize that Sonia Darrin, who at 92 has lived in the same building on West End Avenue for more than half a century, once traded insults with Humphrey Bogart in one of Hollywood’s greatest noirs.

Seven decades ago, she unforgettably played Agnes, the elegant femme fatale who tangles with Bogart’s private eye Philip Marlowe in the 1946 classic “The Big Sleep.’’

In the course of her four scenes, Agnes — a grifter mixed up with a gang of blackmailers — watches one boyfriend shot to death and is later informed by phone by Marlowe that a guy who wanted to marry her has died rather than give her address to a hit man.

“I got a raw deal,’’ the pitiless Agnes tells Marlowe in their final meeting in a car — trading some crucial information for $200 from him so she can blow town.

“Your kind always does,’’ Marlowe replies.​

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For the 70th anniversary of the film’s release, I tracked her down through one of her sons, former child actor Mason Reese, who in the 1970s achieved the kind of stardom that once eluded his mother.

Darrin, who would only agree to a very rare interview on the phone, says she has turned down “many” invitations to appear at screenings of “The Big Sleep.’’ The feisty nonagenarian professes she’s baffled as to why she continues to get mail from fans of “The Big Sleep,’’ which will make its Blu-ray debut Tuesday from the Warner Archive Collection. And she’s aware of her burgeoning popularity on social media.
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Mason Reese c. 1973:

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I'm not going to post a recent pic of MR. Let's just say it ain't flattering.

 

Kathryn Trosper Popper Dead: Last Living 'Citizen Kane' Actress Was 100 »

Kathryn Trosper Popper, who was the last living castmember of Citizen Kane, died Sunday, her son, Joe Popper, told The Hollywood Reporter. She was 100.
Trosper, who played the inquiring photographer who asks, “What’s Rosebud?” in the 1941 film, died at her home in New York City.

In addition to acting, Trosper was director Orson Welles’ longtime personal assistant, working with him in the Mercury Theater division at RKO.

Trosper famously defended the filmmaker upon the release of Pauline Kael’s essay “Raising Kane,” in which Kael argued that screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was the actual writer for Citizen Kane, but Welles had affixed his name on the script.

“Then I’d like to know what was all that stuff I was always typing for Mr. Welles!” said Trosper in Welles’ defense. Kael never interviewed Trosper, who had worked on the film from its rough draft stages to its completion, and the essay was later discredited when Welles’ contributions to the screenplay were documented.
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Kathryn Trosper Popper on the set of 'Citizen Kane.'

 

Some great and rare pre-codes will be screened. James Whale fans take special notice.

Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928–1937 | MoMA »

Museum of Modern Art
May 13–June 15, 2016

Founded in 1912 by German immigrant Carl Laemmle, Universal Pictures remains among the powerhouses of the American entertainment industry. This series focuses on one segment of the studio’s rich history—the period from 1928 to 1936, when the studio’s head of production was the founder’s son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. Known condescendingly as “Junior” Laemmle and the butt of endless Hollywood jokes (“the son also rises”), the younger Laemmle was in fact a sophisticated, ambitious, risk-taking producer, who gambled the studio’s finances on a series of challenging projects—and eventually lost. When cost overruns on the 1936 Show Boat forced the studio into the hands of its creditors, the Laemmle era came to an end.


Brief as it was, that era yielded an extraordinary number of important films, including such celebrated classics as Dracula, Frankenstein, and All Quiet on the Western Front. This program, however, concentrates on lesser-known work, much of it with a distinctively European flavor provided by Universal’s many émigré directors, including James Whale (with 1933’s sublime The Kiss Before the Mirror), Paul Fejos (a major new restoration of the 1929 Broadway), and William Wyler (a Laemmle relative himself, represented by the Ibsenesque drama A House Divided and the comedy The Good Fairy). At a time when other studios seemed bent on standardizing their product for the new world of sound, Universal gave free rein to such distinctive stylists as John Stahl (represented by Only Yesterday, the first film adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman), the irrepressible Tay Garnett (Okay, America), and the ferociously creative Edward L. Cahn, here with three films including the recently rediscovered 1933 masterwork Laughter in Hell.


The series opens with the revival premiere of the 1930 musical King of Jazz, shown in its full-length version for the first time since the 1930s, with its two-color Technicolor returned to its full eye-popping glory by Universal’s new digital restoration unit.

 

The Obscure Accordionist Who Played Mood Music on Silent Film Sets »

In the era of silent films, Danny Borzage made his living as a mood musician. Before The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with synchronized dialogue sequences, revolutionized cinema, mood musicians were hired to play their instruments on film sets. As the camera rolled, these performers would create live soundtracks in order to evoke emotions from the actors. If a leading lady needed to shed a few tears, a musician like Borzage would play something sad to get the waterworks flowing.
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When Danny showed up for the audition, he impressed Ford with a song called “My Buddy.” And it probably didn’t hurt that Ford knew Danny’s brother, Frank. Thanks to his musical know-how and a little bit of nepotism, Danny landed the gig. It was the beginning of a beautiful work relationship that lasted over 40 years.

Even after the silent era gave way to sound, Danny remained an integral part of the Ford Stock Company (a group of actors who repeatedly appeared in the director’s films). While mood musicians had mostly vanished from Hollywood sets, Ford stuck with tradition and kept Danny around. Only now, with the advent of sound and the appearance of microphones, Danny worked most of his magic behind the scenes.

During shooting, the accordionist would escort actors away from the set and play specific songs to manipulate their emotions. While filming Cheyenne Autumn, Danny helped actress Dolores del Rio cry by performing a love song from one of her old films. In The Searchers, he played the movie’s theme to help Vera Miles prepare for a big romantic moment. John Wayne also remembered hearing Danny on the set of films like The Long Voyage Home and admitted that when Danny was playing the accordion, it gave the director a major advantage. As the Duke put it, “It’s easy to talk an actor into a scene that way.”
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In addition to appearing in films like The Horse Soldiers and Two Rode Together, Danny directly contributed to some of the most memorable moments in the John Ford canon. His heartbreaking accordion rendition of “Red River Valley” caps off Ma Joad’s final monologue in The Grapes of Wrath. As a group of pioneers pray over a massacred family in The Searchers, Danny accompanies the mourners with “Shall We Gather at the River?” He shows up again at the end of the film, performing an energetic version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” at an Old West wedding. And you can hear that bittersweet accordion in films like My Darling Clementine, 3 Godfathers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
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Years after Danny passed away in 1975, actor Harry Carey Jr. honored his old friend with a few kind words. “I feel reverent when I say his name,” the actor said, “because he’s the most underscored, underappreciated human on the John Ford Stock Company.”​

 

Looking back on playing Tommy in ‘Wonderful Life’ »

At 75, Jimmy Hawkins is just a little older than “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), the film he is most closely associated with and the one for which he had his first credited screen role, as George (James Stewart) and Mary Bailey’s (Donna Reed) young son Tommy. Though his acting career continued — including a recurring stint as Shelley Fabares’ boyfriend on “The Donna Reed Show” — and he eventually became a producer, it is to “It’s a Wonderful Life” that he keeps returning, writing numerous books on the subject.

Now, with Paramount releasing “It’s a Wonderful Life” in a new, two-disc Platinum Anniversary edition, in both DVD and Blu-ray, Hawkins is once more sharing his memories of the holiday classic.

Q: You were so little when you made “It’s a Wonderful Life.” What do you remember most about it?

A: I was 4½ — that “half” was a big deal to me — and I remember vividly Mom waking me up and it was still dark outside. We would take the bus and streetcar to get out to Culver City. We’d finally get to RKO Studios in Culver City and walk on Stage 14 over there. Here would be the Bailey house, the interior, and the Christmas tree was up. Here it is 90 degrees outside and freezing inside, because there was real snow outside of that house.

I learned something much later from Donna Reed … She said, “We used to call you Rip Van Winkle. You were so cute. You could sleep anyplace, anytime, no matter the commotion going on around you. Then all of a sudden, they’d wake you up and you’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and do whatever they asked.”

I have vivid memories of Frank Capra rehearsing the scene where we come out of the living room and go into the kitchen and I keep saying, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” and then the final line is, “I burped!” That line was written the night before. Capra would be great at — they call it tap-dancing. He would see something and change it right on the spot.

The pool scene — they were over at Beverly Hills High School scouting the location (for the dance scene), and the assistant director, Art Black, said, “You know, underneath this basketball court is a swimming pool.” Capra said, “Open up. Show me.” Then he wrote all the stuff in the script about the swimming pool. He always was thinking.

He was thinking the night before when he wrote that “Excuse me” line. He wanted a lot of commotion to be going on in that scene while George is only thinking of losing $8,000 and his life is over. … It was the most difficult scene in the movie to direct, Capra told me. There were so many elements going on.

Q: What do you remember about Jimmy Stewart?

A: A vivid scene I remember is putting tinsel on Jimmy Stewart’s head and then, all of the sudden, he pulls me in to him. … He was very professional. He didn’t talk down to us. He would treat us as if he was with a professional actor. He was like, “Hey, they were hired to do a job and they’re doing it.”

Years later, I had the opportunity of doing something with him or being at a party with him and he was very cordial. He wanted to talk about the colorization (of the film). … He wasn’t a big fan of it. He thought it looked like Walt Disney threw up on (the picture).

Q: “It’s a Wonderful Life” is 70 years old. Why do you think it has endured the way that it has?

A: It’s the message. Each man’s life touches so many others; if they weren’t around, it would leave an awful hole. That’s so true. They realize that they are important when they see that film, just like George Bailey. He didn’t think he was doing anything so great. He was running Bailey Building & Loan, giving people loans so they could get a house. Why should they wait until they’re old to have a house? He was encouraging people. He helped people. … That’s what the audience sees. “Maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I have made a difference.”​

 

How Jimmy Stewart Became George Bailey »

The first time that Jimmy Stewart appears on screen as George Bailey, the image freezes in close-up as two angelic figures discuss the character in voice-over. One says to the other, “I want you to take a good look at that face.” It’s something that all of us should do as we watch the film.

Stewart is supposed to be playing a young man in his early 20s, but the once-boyish 38-year-old had just returned the year before from fighting in Europe, and only makeup and careful lighting could give him a semblance of youth. More seriously, as we know from the testimony of those who worked with him in the military and in Hollywood in those years, Stewart was suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

After two years of subsisting largely on ice cream and peanut butter, he had only just begun to eat real food and keep it down. He had the shakes and at times flew into rages, and his sleep was interrupted by images of bombers burning in the sky and men tumbling to earth.​

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“It’s a Wonderful Life” was Stewart’s first picture after almost five years away, including 20 months on the front lines. As a squadron commander of B-24 heavy bombers, he flew his first combat mission to Germany on Dec. 13, 1943. He commanded 12 missions in his first two months and was almost shot down twice. The experience unnerved him enough that he spent time at the “flak farm,” where fliers went to decompress after seeing too much combat.

It wasn’t fear of losing his own life that had gotten to Stewart. It was his deeply ingrained perfectionism, which made him fear making the wrong split-second decision in German airspace while leading dozens of planes and hundreds of men in combat.​

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Filming “It’s a Wonderful Life” found him back in Hollywood after surviving too many crash landings and close calls. In sunny Southern California, the land of make-believe, this suddenly middle-aged man faced other problems. A new crop of youthful leading men had emerged in his absence. He also faced a crisis of conscience, wondering if acting was a worthwhile profession after the gravity of his daily life in the military.​

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It was the veteran actor Lionel Barrymore—the movie’s villain, Old Man Potter—who helped Stewart to claw his way back. When Stewart wondered aloud during production if acting was worth his time, Barrymore looked him in the eye and asked: Isn’t entertaining people better than dropping bombs on them?

Stewart seems to have gotten the message. He was able to convey great joy and passion in the movie’s closing scenes, shouting “Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!” as he runs through the streets and saying with a wink to his guardian angel, as he turns heavenward, “Atta boy, Clarence.”

Jimmy Stewart returned to Hollywood unsure if he would be able to continue his career as an actor. “It’s a Wonderful Life” showed that he could. It arrives every December like a holiday card from a dear friend, a man who came home from war and found the beauty in peace.​

 

David Geffen, Samuel Goldwyn and the Search for the "Holy Grail" of Missing Movies

What started as a request from Geffen to screen the Goldwyn production 'Porgy and Bess' ended up as a hunt to find an existing print of the musical that even the Academy has been blocked from screening for its staff.

It was 2008 when David Geffen started pressing producer John Goldwyn to arrange a screening of Porgy and Bess. The 1959 musical, based on the George Gershwin opera, was produced by Goldwyn's grandfather, legendary Hollywood pioneer Samuel Goldwyn. Geffen implied that the mogul's grandson had vowed to set up a showing of the film, but if so it had slipped Goldwyn's mind. In any case, though his family still controlled the rights, Goldwyn did not have a print and did not know how to get one.

Prints of Porgy are beyond rare. "It probably is the most elusive film that not only got a studio release but a prestige studio release," says Todd Hitchcock, director of programming at the AFI Silver Theatre near Washington, D.C. Foster Hirsch, author of a biography of the picture's director, Otto Preminger, calls it "the holy grail of unavailable films." Many archivists and some of the rights holders don't know if a complete, quality print even exists.

With an astounding cast, including Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey and even a young Maya Angelou in an uncredited appearance, Porgy was broadcast nationally on television only once, when ABC aired it March 5, 1967. There are dubious bootleg copies online, but it is not possible to buy or rent a legitimate full-length quality version in any format. And even if a pristine print were discovered today, significant obstacles prevent it from being shown in theaters.
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A closed thread:
The Lost City of Cecil B DeMille: film about unearthing a 1923 movie set took 30 years to make

A new article:
The strange tale of the lost California sphinx

After nearly a century, the shifting red dunes of California’s Central Coast are giving up their final secrets. For 10 days in November, archaeologists used shovels, horsehair brushes, and gallons of quick-hardening foam to unearth and remove a nearly complete Egyptian sphinx from the sands of Guadalupe, CA.

Rather than the North African limestone that gives the Great Sphinx of Giza its form, however, the Cali sphinx is constructed of plaster.

It’s is also nowhere near as ancient as its Egyptian cousin. The Guadalupe sphinx is likely the last remnant of a colossal movie set constructed here in 1923 by the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, for his black-and-white silent movie The Ten Commandments. At the time, it was one of the largest movie sets ever built, consisting of a pharaoh’s gate some 12 stories tall and 720 ft long, with 21 sphinxes arrayed down a perpendicular corridor, where hundreds of actors and extras reenacted scenes of Biblical bondage.

A team of six archaeologists and restoration experts worked from dawn till dusk, exercising extreme care not to step on any of the federally protected rare plants that grow here. Because of those plants, and the western snowy plover, a small, ecologically threatened bird which also lives here, the dunes have been protected since the 1970s. That’s one reason it took so long for the excavation to occur. It’s also an important area to local indigenous groups. A monitor representing the Northern Chumash watched over the dig, should any tribal artifacts be uncovered. When I visited in November, a sense of extreme urgency had set in. The three-day forecast called for rain, which would likely destroy the sphinx forever.

“Anything that we can recover from the site, now is the time to do it,” said Colleen Hamilton, the lead archaeologist on the project.​

 

That's an amazing story!

 

Comedy and Tragedy

by Mark Steyn
Mark at the Movies
December 2, 2017

This week's movie date takes us back to the dawn of Hollywood, and a December night one hundred years ago - 1917 - at about four in the morning, when an automobile doing 60 miles per hour down Wilshire Boulevard crosses over to the wrong side of the road and hits an oncoming car near the intersection with Vermont Avenue.

Everyone survived with minor injuries, except the driver of the speeding vehicle who was killed instantly. Because of his huge size, it took five hours to get him out of the wreckage. And, when they identified him, a stellar screen career was over almost as soon as it began. The deceased was a 37-year-old man called Eric Campbell, and at the time he was one of the best-known faces on the planet - if only because in those days, sans television and the Internet, even well-known faces were only locally known. But Campbell appeared in the most popular movies of the day, and, because they were silent, they were popular not just in America and England and Australia but in France and Argentina and China. And Campbell's face remained recognizable for decades afterwards, as every film of an eleven-film career proved to have a far longer life than he did.

Who is Eric Campbell? Well, he's the heavy guy towering over Charlie Chaplin in all but one of the twelve films Chaplin made for the Mutual Film Corporation in 1916 and 1917.​

His body was cremated and his ashes sent to Rosedale Cemetery, where they sat in storage for six months waiting for someone to pay for their interment. When no one did, the cemetery sent them back to the undertakers, the Handley Mortuary, where they sat around for another twenty years. When Handley's closed up shop in 1938, the ashes were shipped over to Rosedale again, where they were put in a closet until 1952, when an employee took pity on them and had them buried somewhere in the cemetery. Unfortunately, he neglected to record where. So somewhere or other amid the starry tombstones of Hattie McDaniel, Anna May Wong and Fernando Lamas lie the ashes of Eric Campbell, in the Rosedale equivalent of a pauper's grave.​

 

Another story - video at link:

Sphinx from 90-year-old movie set unearthed in California

 

Former Child Star Baby Peggy Self-Publishes Her First Novel at 99

The silent-film era actress marked her recent birthday with the publication of an "epic tale" set in "the fascinating Mexican-American colonial Empire of New Spain" that centers on a woman facing the horrors of civil war. Diana Serra Cary — born on Oct. 29, 1918, and best known by her stage name Baby Peggy — was one of the most well-to-do child stars of the silent film era thanks to a seven-figure contract signed at age 4.

Cary recently marked her 99th birthday by self-publishing her first novel, The Drowning of the Moon, a tome that follows her memoir and a biography of fellow child star Jackie Coogan. Cary says the "epic tale," set in "the fascinating Mexican-American colonial Empire of New Spain," is about a woman named Sirena facing the horrors of civil war.

Cary, who says she writes in four- to five-hour spurts, is enjoying her age but has no plans of a full-on retirement. "[Life] is still productive, filled with today's crazy politics and wonderful scientific discoveries about nutritious food and good health. I'm thriving on the good life of the latter!"​

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-4312911

The Race Is on to Save Disney's Classic (But Fading) Cartoons


A print of Snow White shows signs of deterioration

Original drawings from Disney cartoons like Alice in Wonderland and Snow White could soon be lost to fading and decay.

The individual hand-painted sheets that were used to make the films have become distorted and cracked over time.

The Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) is working with Disney to try to save the beloved pictures that led to some of the world's most iconic animations.

They have been analysing the sheets, known as cels, to find out their composition and how to restore them.

British scientist Tom Learner, of the GCI, has been quoted as saying that Walt Disney himself was an "unusual man" because of the way he kept a collection of his work.

"They were archived pretty well," he told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on Friday.

"Many other studios used them for the movie then they were tossed out, so it is an amazing resource."

Dr Learner said the Disney archive goes from the mid-1930s and up to the 1980s, which was when digital took over.

Technically speaking, the sheets with the cartoons have started to deform, which "causes the paint to pop off the sheets and crack," according to Dr Learner.

"It's very sensitive to humidity, so when the humidity drops to a dry condition the paint becomes very rippled," he added.

There could be a Disney-style happy ending though, as the GCI team have found keeping the sheets in a humid environment helps the paint re-attach to the sheets and restore the images.

"This means the paint is safe," said Dr Learner. "It will not crack off and it can be digitally photographed - so we're thrilled with that."

So, with any luck, Snow White will remain the fairest of them all.​

 

Up until about 10 years ago, nobody gave a damn about the plants, the snowy plover (the most hated bird on the South Coast, especially by surfers) or Chumash artifacts. You could just go out to the dunes and goof around. I have a shoebox full of of plaster bits from the DeMille set I picked up. It just laid around everywhere.,, Then they shut down the dune because of those dumb little white birds. It funny they now treat these like holy relics, when CB DeMille was happy to just junk the set and leave the crap laying on the dunes and for years nobody gave a damn. Are they holy relics or just Hollywood trash?

 

An interesting article about the Wm Pine-Wm Thomas producer team, aka "The Dollar Bills":

Pine-Thomas Productions - Wikipedia

 

Lights! Camera! Action! How the Lumière brothers invented the movies

National Geographic

In 1870, as France reeled from invasion in the Franco-Prussian war, Antoine Lumiere moved his family from the hazardous eastern border of the country to the city of Lyon. A portrait painter and award-winning photographer, he opened a small business in photographic plates in his new home.

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In 1894 Antoine attended a Paris exhibition of Thomas Edison and William Dickson’s Kinetoscope, a film-viewing device often referred to as the first movie projector. However, the Kinetoscope could show a motion picture to only one person at a time. The individual viewer had to watch through a peephole; Antoine wondered if it were possible to develop a device that could project film onto a screen for an audience. When he returned home from Paris, Antoine encouraged his sons to begin working on a new invention.

One year later, the brothers had succeeded, and the Lumière Cinématographe was patented. With its perforated, 35mm-wide film that passed through a shutter at 16 frames per second, the hand-cranked Cinématographe established modern standard film specifications. Similar to the mechanics of a sewing machine, the Cinématographe threads the film intermittently and more slowly than the Kinetoscope’s 46 frames per second, creating a quieter machine and one that made the images appear to move more fluidly on screen. In addition to expanding Edison’s one-person peephole view to an audience, the Cinématographe was also lighter and portable. The bulk of the Kinetoscope meant that films could only be shot in a studio, but the Lumières’ invention offered operators the freedom and spontaneity to record candid foot age beyond a studio’s walls.​

 

The Great Hollywood Screenwriter Who Hated Hollywood

Ben Hecht, the greatest of American screenwriters, produced, near the end of his career, a garrulous autobiography, “A Child of the Century,” in which he tells us the following: In 1910, at the age of sixteen, he left the University of Wisconsin after attending for three days and took a train to Chicago. He had fifty dollars in his pocket. Having slept on a bench in the Chicago railroad station, he tried to go see a show at the Majestic Vaudeville Theatre, only to be accosted by a distant relative, Manny Moyses, a liquor salesman “with a large red nose.” Moyses pried him loose from the ticket line and brought him to meet a client who also had a red nose, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Journal, one John C. Eastman. The publisher was throwing a party that night and needed something he could show off. He told the young man that he would hire him if he wrote a profane poem—a poem about a bull that swallows a bumblebee. (Don’t ask.) Hecht wrote the poem while Eastman was out to lunch, and got the job. For some months, he wrote nothing for the Journal, but made himself useful by invading the homes of people suffering one tragedy or another and stealing a picture of the victim, usually a woman, which would then appear in the paper. At the age of seventeen, he became a full-time reporter, and attained what he called a “bug-in-a-rug citizenship” of Chicago. In his book, Hecht recalls the local-journalism obsessions in the nineteen-tens and twenties—spectacular crimes and municipal frauds, a general atmosphere of license, exploitation, and swindle. “The Stockyards’ owners imported Billy Sunday to divert their underpaid hunkies from going on strike by shouting them dizzy with God,” he tells us.

How many of these details are true? It’s impossible to say, but truth, in this case, may not be the point. As Norman Mailer noted in 1973, Hecht was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.” Hecht’s gift for confabulated anecdote suggests one reason that he became so successful as a Hollywood entertainer. What Hecht got out of his ruffian journalistic years shaped his temperament, and that temperament in turn shaped American movies in the thirties. The raffishness, the abruptness, the fusillade of insults and wisecracks; the fascination with violence and the illicit; the division of the world into the knowing (typically urban and male) and the saps (often rural)—such qualities made the comedies and the melodramas of the Depression a hardheaded new American art, an art that moved faster and ran shallower than life.

Hecht’s film résumé is difficult to sort out, in part because he was indifferent to getting screen credit, though not to getting paid. He worked on “Underworld,” “The Front Page” (which yielded the sensationally effective remake “His Girl Friday”), “Scarface,” “Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Nothing Sacred,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Gunga Din,” “Notorious,” various minor but potent noir movies, and many other things. Some of these were original screenplays, some were adaptations, some were collaborations (with his pals Charles MacArthur or Charles Lederer); a few times he simply provided an indelible story and moved on. Hecht also pulled together and revivified a stalled “Gone with the Wind” and worked as a last-minute fixer on “Stagecoach,” “The Shop Around the Corner,” “Foreign Correspondent,” and “Gilda.” An enormously talented man—“He invented eighty per cent of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968—he was also frivolous, ornery, and contradictory. The best screenwriter in Hollywood was contemptuous of movies as an art form (“an outhouse on the Parnassus,” Hecht declared), and had little trust in the wisdom of studio bosses and producers (“nitwits on a par with the lower run of politicians I had known”).​

Ben Hecht interviews Jack Kerouac (1958)

 

Interview With Steve Massa, Author of “Rediscovering Roscoe”

Silent-ology is pleased to present this exclusive interview with the prolific silent comedy historian Steve Massa, author of the new Rediscovering Roscoe: The Films of “Fatty” Arbuckle. We talk about why a book on Roscoe’s films was overdue, about his considerable directorial skills, about his wonderful friendship with Buster and Al St. John, and just how many hours he would put into filming a single difficult gag…and more!​

 

Closed Movie Theaters and Infected Stars: How the 1918 Flu Halted Hollywood

A massive influenza outbreak 102 years before the current pandemic shut down production and felled actors: "Pessimists croaked that this was the beginning of the end."

It should have been a joyous time in Hollywood. The horrific First World War was about to come to an end — in November 1918 — and the nascent silent film industry was booming, distributing pictures to more than 20,000 theaters across America. According to the Weekly Service, by 1918 some said the film industry was soon to be the fifth biggest in the country, behind agriculture, coal, steel and transportation, with an estimated capital invested of $250 million. But this rapid progress was threatened by the outbreak of an influenza pandemic, one that would claim millions of lives worldwide.

Much like Hollywood today amid the COVID-19 crisis, studios and theaters were forced to come to terms with a viral threat to the livelihood of the business and the lives of its employees. "Filmland is full of gloom and germs," Moving Picture World reported in November 1918. “Everyone you meet has a different cure for the flu…and in spite of this, everyone you meet has either just gotten over an attack of the flu or is just getting down with it.”

For months, L.A.-based studios and theater chains believed that the so-called Spanish influenza was an East Coast problem. “The situation regarding influenza is nothing like as serious here as it is in the East,” one film representative told the Los Angeles Times. “Should the local health officials ask the picture houses to close, I am sure the managers would do anything the officials desire.”​

In a train-station scene from the 1919 Mary Pickford silent film Daddy-Long-Legs, a woman sneezes and everyone scatters, including people wearing masks.

 

This web site is on film and films and their releases and history. It's an essential site
for anyone looking through this thread. I've been visiting it for years, but a word of warning:
you'll spend days going through it. Also, if any picture, poster, or lobby card is clicked on, you'll
get a full screen version of them.
Greenbriar Picture Shows

 

Couldn't agree with you more. As a matter of fact,

Spoiler

I steal pics from there occasionally

 

i.e., what's eating Gilbert