silent films Articles

Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s, died January 5 at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, in the San Diego metropolitan area. She was 111. The daughter of Russian immigrants (one Jewish, one Christian), she was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on July 6, 1900, in New York City. According to her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early [...]

Author Susan Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief became — more or less — director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's all but unwatchable Adaptation (Meryl Streep played Orlean), has another book out, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, published last September. Today, Deadline's Mike Fleming wrote a piece in which he explains that Orlean "discovered that the true Best Actor winner in [...]

Several shorts directed by film pioneer Georges Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley in Martin Scorsese's well-received Hugo, will be featured throughout January 2012 at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's Edison Theater in Fremont, Calif. The Méliès screenings will be held at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 7, 21, and 28. On Jan. 7, the Edison Theater will show Méliès' 1910 short The Doctor's Secret prior [...]

Gloria Grahame, The Big Heat FORREST GUMP, BAMBI, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: National Film Registry 2011 Movies Besides the aforementioned Hester Street and Norma Rae, women are also at the forefront of Julia Reichert and Jim Klein's Growing Up Female (1971); Chick Strand’s Fake Fruit Factory (1986), a documentary about Mexican women who create ornamental papier-mâché fruits and vegetables; and the recently deceased George [...]