Alternative Film Guide

Dave Graham reports in Reuters that later this year what appears to be the first biography of silent-film actor Max Schreck, in my view the most effective movie vampire of them all, will be published in Germany.
Schreck starred in F.W. Murnau’s excellent 1922 horror drama Nosferatu, presumably the first feature film based on Bram Stoker’s [...]

In the Los Angeles Times, Matthew DeBord offers what amounts to a promotional puff piece on Julie Andrews ("that bold Andrews sexiness, maternal and theatrical at the same time") and her autobiographical tome Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. (According to DeBord, this Sunday it’ll land on the No. 1 spot among hardcovers tracked [...]

Emma Brockes reviews Julie Andrews‘ Home: A Memoir of My Early Years in the International Herald Tribune:
"Julie Andrews’s memoir is full of crisp locutions like ‘poor unfortunate’ and ‘banished to the scullery’ and ‘trivet,’ a characteristically precise term that the dictionary defines as ‘an iron tripod placed over a fire for a cooking pot or [...]

Academy Film Scholar Thomas Doherty will discuss his newly released book Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & The Production Code Administration (mentioned on this blog in the post "Joseph I. Breen: Anti-Semite?") on Monday, March 17, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Admission is [...]

As it says on the cover, Allan R. Ellenberger’s Celebrities in the 1930 Census (McFarland, 2008, US$49.95) is a compilation of household data — as collected by 1930 census takers — of more than 2,000 "U.S. actors, musicians, scientists, athletes, writers, politicians and other public figures." (The woman in the photo is aviatrix Amelia Earhart.)
The [...]

It’s Oscar time. What better way to celebrate the 80th Academy Awards than by having a q&a about the best actress Oscar winner …
… of 1931?
(Or rather, for the period 1930-31, as the Oscars in those days covered films released in the Los Angeles area from August 1 to July 31.)
And who was the best [...]

Below are excerpts from Kathleen Turner’s upcoming autobiography Send Yourself Roses, as reported in several online venues.
On William Hurt, her co-star in Lawrence Kasdan’s atmospheric 1981 neo-noir (in color) Body Heat:
"In those days, he was pretty wild. He drank a great deal and took a lot of recreational drugs — he loved those magic [...]

Joan Blondell, 1938. Photo by A. L. Schafer.

Joan Blondell. Those who have heard the name will most likely picture either a blowsy, older woman playing the worldwise but warm-hearted saloon owner in the late 1960s TV series Here Come the Brides, or a lively, fast-talking, no-nonsense, and (unconventionally) sexy gold digger in numerous Pre-Code Warner [...]

Veteran author Anthony Slide has another book out, Incorrect Entertainment or Trash from the Past: A history of political incorrectness and bad taste in 20th century American popular culture (BearManor, 2007, paperback, US$19.95).
Lengthy title for a highly controversial subject matter. Chapters range from "This Race Business" and "Sex" to "Bodily Functions and Dysfunctions" and "Hollywood’s [...]

The Hollywood Book of Extravagance. How do you write something with that sort of title without falling into the trap of sensationalism or cheap journalism? And could you say something about the formatting of your text — the mini-bios divided into specific chapters — and what you wanted to accomplish with it?
To my mind [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ new book, Now Playing: Hand-Painted Poster Art from the 1910s through the 1950s, showcases more than 150 rarely seen original movie poster paintings, thus offering a glimpse into a largely forgotten form of film-related art.
"This book documents the unrecorded and uncelebrated work of movie poster artists whose [...]

Some have called her the greatest movie star ever, but even if that’s a sort of exaggeration — how does one measure stardom-ness? — Joan Crawford most likely is the film performer who worked most assiduously and for the longest time on creating and maintaining the image of the movie star par excellence.
In fact, it’s [...]

Film researcher Joan Myers has been working on a book project that will present the Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle manslaughter trial in a different light.
What trial? Fatty who?
What trial? Well, only the biggest Hollywood scandal of the 1920s — along with the unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor. (See Time magazine’s top 25 crimes of [...]

Author Patrick Agan (Clint Eastwood: The Man Behind the Myth) has been working on a biography of MGM star Hedy Lamarr, at one point considered one of the most beautiful women this side of Orion.
The Austrian-born "exotic" import was brought to the studio in the late 1930s, and would remain at MGM well into the [...]

James Robert Parish, author of countless film books (The RKO Gals, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops), answers a few questions on the subject of his upcoming biography, It’s Good to Be the King: The Seriously Funny Life of Mel Brooks (Wiley, 2007).
Many comedians are supposed to be major bores when they’re not "on." [...]

Courtesy © Allan Ellenberger Collection
Though relatively forgotten and, when remembered, usually dismissed as a second-rate talent (quite possibly by those who have never seen her on film), Miriam Hopkins was actually a highly capable performer who worked with some of the most renowned directors in Hollywood history — Rouben Mamoulian, Ernst Lubitsch, and William Wyler, [...]

"First Writers Guild president. Playwright. Screenwriter. Oscar nominee. Organizer. Teacher. ‘Premature antiracist.’ Blacklistee. ‘Dean of the Hollywood Ten.’ Jailbird. ‘Tinseltown’s cultural commissar.’ Film theorist. ‘Grand Pooh-Bah of the Communist movement.’ Author. ‘Gauleiter of the Hollywood Communist Party.’
"Who was this ‘man of outstanding courage and integrity,’ as Charlie Chaplin stated, standing ‘resolute against those . . [...]

Via The Guardian:
The film version of Patrick Süskind’s best-selling novel Das Parfum - Die Geschichte eines Mörders / Perfume, the tale of a twisted 18th-century Frenchman with no body odor but ironically gifted with a freakish olfactory sense, had its world premiere last night, Sept. 7, in Munich.
Directed by Tom Tykwer, Perfume’s English-speaking cast [...]

“This region is stuffed with hard-boiled savage climbers, the lowest grade of political grafters, quacks not calculable as to number or variety … loafers, prostitutes, murderers and perverts. In the bland sunshine here they multiply like germs in the canal zone.” That’s author Theodore Dreiser referring not to Washington, D.C., or any other world capital, [...]

In The Guardian, Chris Petit reviews James Mottram’s book The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood:
"James Mottram quotes Robert Evans, producer of Chinatown and The Godfather, saying that movies are no longer made for their ideas and their sole concern is with their marketable elements. One result of this is an obsession [...]

James Robert Parish, author of dozens of books in the last 30-odd years, answers five questions about his latest work, Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops. The title says it all. Among the films included in Fiasco are the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton version of Cleopatra, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club, and - inevitably [...]

I’ve been reading James Reid Paris’s The Great French Films. Published in 1983, Reid’s pictorial history book discusses approximately fifty French films, from Abel Gance’s 1927 epic Napoléon to Alain Resnais’s highly cerebral 1980 drama Mon oncle d’Amérique. The text is informative and concise - Reid provides each film’s background, synopsis, and commentary - though [...]

Brief Obit: Science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, 84, whose novel Solaris was made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972, died today of heart failure at a hospital in Krakow. According to the Associated Press obit, Lem was one of the most popular science-fiction writers working in a language other than English. His books have [...]

Long before Brokeback Mountain, there was Song of the Loon. Directed by Andrew Herbert, and with a cast of unknowns (including John Iverson, Morgan Royce, Lancer Ward, Jon Evans, and Brad Fredericks), this no-budget 1970 film also revolves around a male homosexual romance set in the American West. According to an IMDb poster, Richard Armory [...]

Via Susan King’s article "He wrote movies, and he loved movies" in the Los Angeles Times: Author-screenwriter Gavin Lambert, who died last July at age 80, is being honored by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the series "A Tribute to Gavin Lambert," which kicks off on Friday at the Leo S. Bing [...]