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Ramon Novarro: Q&A with Author Allan Ellenberger

I first contacted author Allan Ellenberger shortly before the publication of his book on Old Hollywood star Ramon Novarro, as at the time I was working on my own Novarro bio. Instead of treating me like a pesky rival, Allan generously shared the information he’d amassed throughout about a decade of research — and for that I was very thankful.
We’ve since become good friends (but Allan, you need to buy me pizza more often), so I’m glad to report that his Ramon Novarro (McFarland, 1999) is now available in paperback at online bookstores. In his carefully researched book (I’ve read it about four or five times), Allan discusses Ramon Novarro’s life and career from his early beginnings in [...]

Karl Dane Biographer Interview

Allan Ellenberger interviews biographer Laura Petersen Balogh, whose book on silent-film comedian Karl Dane has just been published by McFarland.
Here’s a brief snippet:
Why Karl Dane? What is it about him and his story that moved you to write a biography?
I had always known who Karl Dane was, being a silent film buff my whole life, but he never really made that much of an impression on me. I had read different Hollywood scandal books which said his voice was not suited to the talkies, but pretty much thought that was the end of the story. It wasn’t until December 2005, when my husband Dan and I were watching the 1933 early sound serial The Whispering [...]

LLoyd Hamilton: Poor Boy Comedian of Silent Cinema

In the San Francisco Examiner, Thomas Gladysz talks about the recently released biography of silent-film comedian Lloyd Hamilton:
"Chances are, if you’re a fan of early film or early comedic actors, you’re only dimly aware of Lloyd Hamilton. Though he was never as popular as his silent film contemporaries Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Charley Chase, he was admired and even praised by those same greats. Some have called Hamilton a ‘comedian’s comedian.’ And pretty much everyone who has seen his films agrees he was an original talent.
"The reputation of Lloyd Hamilton – a once popular baby-faced comic with a trademark checkered cap – has not fared well since his death at the age [...]

Phill Hall on THE HISTORY OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA III

Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Phil Hall Interview: Part I
Phil Hall Interview: Part II
What have been the top foreign influences on American independent filmmaking?
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the European avant-garde films of the 1920s were a huge influence on U.S. underground filmmakers. The Italian neo-realism in the post-World War II era had a strong impact, primarily because it enabled filmmakers to adopt an obvious low-budget approach — with the caveat that the film was appropriately gritty enough to warrant the glamour-free style.
The 1962 Italian feature Mondo Cane helped to inaugurate the shockumentary filmmaking school that is still with us. More recently, the Dogme school of filmmaking had a flurry of [...]

Phil Hall Interview II

Mary Pickford, one of the first major independent producers, and screenwriter Frances Marion

Phil Hall Interview: Part I
The History of Independent Cinema. I’m assuming that refers to US-made films. Even so, that’s a lot of ground to cover. What sort of parameters did you have to use in order to condense that very long and very diverse history into one volume?
Clearly, I could not accommodate every independent film into the book. I decided to focus primarily on films and creative artists that made a significant contribution to the commercial and/or artistic development of film production and distribution. That helped to eliminate many obscure films and filmmakers from coverage.
There are two genres that were not pursued in depth. I opted not [...]

THE HISTORY OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA: Q&A with Phil Hall

"Independent film is a vast and varied territory, and Phil Hall’s remarkable book explores every inch of it with wit, intelligence, a sympathetic spirit, and a wide-open mind. Fresh discoveries and surprising revelations abound on every topic from Edison to Aronofsky, Anger to Warhol, the silent era to the Internet age. It’s hard to imagine a study more keenly in tune with one of cinema’s liveliest, most multifaceted fields.” — David Sterritt, Ph.D, chairman, National Society of Film Critics
The "remarkable book" in question is called The History of Independent Cinema, which, as the title implies, covers the century-long development of American filmmaking outside the big-studio lots. Published by BearManor Media, The History [...]

LEADING COUPLES: Q&A with Author Frank Miller

In Leading Couples: The Most Unforgettable Screen Romances of the Studio Era (Chronicle Books, 2008), author Frank Miller, whose previous books include Leading Ladies, Leading Men, and Censored Hollywood, presents nearly forty highly successful movie pairings from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Among those featured in Leading Couples are dancing lovebirds Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, singing lovebirds Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, singing & dancing lovebirds Betty Grable and Dan Dailey, sparring lovebirds Doris Day and Rock Hudson, and costumed lovebirds Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn (above, in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex).
Also, odd lovebirds Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery, sentimental lovebirds Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor, cool lovebirds Alan Ladd and Veronica [...]

Irving Thalberg: Q&A with Mark Vieira

"The Wedding of the Painted Doll" number from the musical The Broadway Melody (1929), the first talkie to win a best picture Academy Award; Louis B. Mayer, director Reginald Barker, Irving Thalberg on the set of The Dixie Handicap (1925); Norma Shearer and Chester Morris in the popular pre-Code melodrama The Divorcee (1930).
 
HOLLYWOOD DREAMS MADE REAL: IRVING THALBERG AND THE RISE OF M-G-M — Q&A with Mark Vieira (Introduction)
 
First of all, why did you decide to write a book on Irving Thalberg?
Ben-Hur, Flesh and the Devil, Tarzan the Ape Man, Grand Hotel, Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, The Good Earth — most filmgoers today have heard of these Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [...]

HOLLYWOOD DREAMS MADE REAL: IRVING THALBERG AND THE RISE OF M-G-M – Q&A with Mark Vieira

Author and photographer Mark A. Vieira (right), who’s been a friend for a number of years, has recently written no less than two books on Irving G. Thalberg, the young MGM mogul whose high-quality productions earned him both a reputation as Hollywood’s "Boy Wonder" and a special place in Oscar history as the name attached to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Memorial Award given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Thalberg even inspired a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, the unfinished The Last Tycoon.
Now, Mark’s two books may cover the same ground in terms of subject matter, but they’re radically different in terms of approach to same:
Hollywood [...]

Douglas Fairbanks: The First King of Hollywood

Douglas Fairbanks in Wild and Woolly (top) and Don Q. Son of Zorro (bottom). Below right, Fairbanks can be seen in The Matrimaniac.

The exhibition "Douglas Fairbanks: The First King of Hollywood" will premiere on Saturday, January 24, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Fourth Floor Gallery in Beverly Hills. Admission is free.
As per the Academy’s press release, the exhibition will focus on superstar Douglas Fairbanks’ "multifaceted life as a movie star, studio [co-]founder [that's United Artists], philanthropist and civic leader through film clips, movie posters, props, costumes, original documents and stunning photographic imagery. The exhibition spans from his earliest days in silent films through his transition into talkies, delves into [...]

LEADING COUPLES: THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE SCREEN ROMANCES OF THE STUDIO ERA

With text by Frank Miller, whose previous books include Leading Ladies and Leading Men, introduction by Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne, and loads of photographs covering about half a century of Hollywood history, Leading Couples: The Most Unforgettable Screen Romances of the Studio Era (Chronicle Books, 2008) takes a brief look at nearly forty successful movie pairings from the studio era (and a little later).
Among those featured are both the obvious — say, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn — and several more esoteric couplings (at least as far as modern film lovers are concerned), e.g., [...]

Anthony Slide on HOLLYWOOD’S BLACKLISTS: A POLITICAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY

Anthony Slide on Reynold Humphries‘ Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History:
"The entire history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) is well recorded. The author explains the origins of the Blacklist, dating the story from Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and the rise of what he describes as the Liberal-Communist Alliance. The Alliance quickly ended with the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, but the damage had been done to the liberal elements in Hollywood. They had, and continued to develop, a history. It is all here: Upton Sinclair’s running for the governorship of California in 1934, the rise of the Guilds and unions and their struggles for recognition, and, of course, Hollywood’s [...]

Dirk Bogarde’s Letters Revisited

In The Guardian, Simon Callow reviews Ever Dirk: The Bogarde Letters, a collection of letters written by Dirk Bogarde and edited by John Coldstream, former books editor at the Daily Telegraph:
"The collection of letters (a mere eighth of his surviving epistolary output, and who knows how much was lost and destroyed?) reproduces all these effects. It is charming, enraging, funny, touching, baffling, but is also unexpectedly substantial, a sort of apologia pro sua vita — though, old trouper that he was, he firmly embraces the pro’s mantra: never apologise, never explain. The tone is startlingly different from the demure and polished tone of the published books. This is partly a matter of orthography, partly of typing. [...] Oddly enough, [...]

Ray Bradbury Interviewed by Steve Wasserman

At Truthdig, Steve Wasserman laments the apparent just-around-the-corner demise of both literary criticism and literature itself during a q&a with Ray Bradbury.
In addition to his many novels and short stories, Bradbury wrote a handful of screenplays, including a 1956 adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which John Huston directed in 1956, with Gregory Peck (!) as Captain Ahab. The film version turned out to be a daring but ultimately unsatisfying effort. (According to Bradbury, Huston asked him to write the screenplay "because I love dinosaurs.")
Bradbury also wrote the story for the 1953 sci-fi flick It Came from Outer Space, while a number of films and television productions were based on his novels and short stories, including The Beast from [...]

Ken Russell on PHALLIC FRENZY

In The [London] Times Ken Russell, 80, discusses Joseph Lanza’s "critical biography" Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films. The article is called "Can it really be me who lived that life?"
"I must say, Lanza has done his homework. He knows more about my life than I do. It’s a little unsettling to read such intimate details about yourself by someone you’ve never met.
"Phallic Frenzy reads like an overblown, outrageous biographical film script by Ken Russell, full of myth masquerading as fact. And as usual the finished product is bright, irreverent, camp and cacophonous. Lanza has managed to disguise his masterful research as a near-neo-novel with gothic and surreal overtones. I have to applaud the man, having done the [...]

Walter Mirisch Book Signing at the Egyptian Theater

At 6:30 pm on Thursday, June 19, producer Walter Mirisch, 86, will sign copies of his new book of memoirs, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The book signing will be followed by a screening of two Oscar-winning Mirisch productions: Billy Wilder’s mordant 1960 comedy The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and (gasp!) an excellent Fred MacMurray, and Norman Jewison’s well-intentioned but weak 1967 cop melodrama-cum-social commentary In the Heat of the Night, starring Sidney Poitier and best actor Oscar winner Rod Steiger.
Mirisch will introduce the double feature.
By the way, among Mirisch’s other productions or co-productions are Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949, he began modestly), Flight to [...]

Max Schreck Biography

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 Dracula. (In this unauthorized adaptation, the Count is called Orlock.)
Author Stefan Eickhoff has tried to bring to light the actor’s career in Max Schreck — Gespenstertheater ("Ghost Theatre"), though the man himself — no real vampire he — apparently will remain a mystery. Precious little was written about him while he was alive or after he was dead.
As per Graham’s piece, the few reminiscences about [...]

Julie Andrews: Sexy, Maternal, Theatrical

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 by the New York Times.)
The article, does, however, offer a couple of good quotes, the second of which is sexy, maternal, theatrical, and addictive at the same time:
"The success of the book has been dreamlike. But I’ve had a fairly acute shyness and reserve all my life, and now I’ve said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to talk about it!’"
…
"’To describe now what [...]

Julie Andrews’ HOME: A MEMOIR OF MY EARLY YEARS

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 kettle to stand on.’ It opens with a soppy poem she wrote about England, but what follows is a decisively unsoppy account of a typically dismal English childhood, complete with cramped lodgings and brutish relatives, which Andrews tells briskly and without self-pity."
…
"There are occasional flashes of the piety that some later found so annoying. … And when she gets going on how marvelous the royal [...]

Thomas Doherty to Discuss HOLLYWOOD’S CENSOR: JOSEPH I. BREEN & THE PRODUCTION CODE ADMINISTRATION

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 free. (More details below.)
As per the Academy’s press release, "Hollywood’s Censor tells the little-known story of Joseph I. Breen, one of the most powerful men in motion picture industry history. Breen reigned over the Production Code Administration, the Hollywood office tasked with censoring the American screen, from 1934 to 1954. He dictated ‘final cut’ over thousands of movies — more than any other individual in [...]

CELEBRITIES IN THE 1930 CENSUS II

CELEBRITIES IN THE 1930 CENSUS Q&A: Part I
What does the 1930 census tell us about those people?
Specifically, it’s a snapshot of each celebrity’s life on one specific day — April 1, 1930.
As I put this book together, I had to decide which information I would include from the census. I realized that listing the answers to all 32 questions would not be possible, so I chose twelve of the most appealing and relevant. Of course, I knew that the subjects’ location would attract the most curiosity.
The value of the person’s home or the rent he paid was another point of interest. This was the only census in which every person was asked if he or she owned [...]

CELEBRITIES IN THE 1930 CENSUS: Q&A with Author Allan R. Ellenberger

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 book, of course, doesn’t offer any saucy insights into the lives of those people. Instead, it’s a straightforward amalgam of un-dramatic — but important — information for researchers. (Though non-researchers may find the myriad listings addictive as well.)
For instance, when I wrote the Ramon Novarro (above right) biography Beyond Paradise, I didn’t have access to the 1930 census, which became part of the public record [...]

Marie Dressler: Q&A with Biographer Matthew Kennedy

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 actress winner that year?
Well, none other than — according to US film exhibitors’ polls — the biggest box-office attraction in the United States of the early 1930s.
That’s Joan Crawford, right?
Wrong.
Norma Shearer? Greta Garbo? Barbara Stanwyck? Jean Harlow?
Nope.
Betty Grable!
Go get yourself a film history book. Grable was the biggest female box-office attraction of the 1940s.
Who then?
Marie Dressler.
Who??
Marie Dressler — an actress without Betty [...]

Kathleen Turner’s Autobiography SEND YOURSELF ROSES

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 (right):
"In those days, he was pretty wild. He drank a great deal and took a lot of recreational drugs — he loved those magic mushrooms. He loved women, too; I don’t know how many he went through during filming. Bill always wanted to stay in character . . . [He] thought I wasn’t taking my acting seriously enough."
***
Regarding Nicolas Cage on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1986 hit Peggy Sue Got Married, for which Turner received a best actress Oscar nomination:
"Everything Francis wanted him to do, [...]

Joan Blondell: Q&A with Biographer Matthew Kennedy

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 Bros. comedies and musicals of the early 1930s.
Matthew Kennedy’s Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) seeks to rectify that cultural memory lapse. Not that Blondell doesn’t deserve to be remembered for Here Come the Brides or Gold Diggers of 1933. It’s just that her other work — from her immensely touching performance as a sexually liberated woman in A Tree [...]

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