Wednesday, September 10, 2008

More on Lee Israel

NPR ran a story on literary forger Lee Isreal, whose output of fake letters included some by Louise Brooks. The actress was mentioned in the text summation, as well as on the radio broadcast, which can be found here.
 
"I used what talent I had and what voice I had to duplicate the voice and the letters of some very famous people," she says.  It was also a bit like writing fiction, Israel says, which can sometimes be more fun than writing reality.

"You own the character. I finally owned Noel Coward and Edna Ferber and Louise Brooks and people like that," she says. "I had always adored large personalities, I had a good ear and I guess a talent to amuse. I could be funny, and that's how I did it."

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Robert Giroux

Along with the passing of Anita Page, the film world recently lost another friend, Robert Giroux. He is best known as an editor and publisher who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century,  and, ultimately added his name to one of the nation’s most distinguished publishers, Farrar Strauss Giroux. He was also a lover of film, and to the film world, Giroux was known as the author of a significant book, A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor (Knopf, 1990). For more about Robert Giroux, check out this interesting, detail filled article in the New York Times.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Anita Page dies

Anita Page, one of the last living silent film stars and a contemporary of Louise Brooks, has died, according to an article syndicated by the Associated Press.

Her longtime friend and companion Randal Malone says Page died in her sleep of natural causes early Saturday morning at her home in Los Angeles. Anita Page, a beautiful blond MGM actress who appeared in the films of Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford and Buster Keaton during the transition from silent movies to talkies, has died. She was 98.
The New York-born Page began her film career as an extra in 1924. She had a major role—as the doomed bad girl—in "Our Dancing Daughters," a 1928 film that featured a wild Charleston by Crawford and propelled them both to stardom. It spawned two sequels, "Our Modern Maidens" and "Our Blushing Brides." Page and Crawford were in all three films.

Here is a link to another wire service story - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080907/ap_en_ce/obit_page_5

They didn't need dialogue. They had faces

An interesting, effusive article in yesterday's Guardian (UK) newspaper concerning the history of the cinematic gesture of the close-up on a woman's face mentions Louise Brooks.

Louise Brooks's black bobbed hair framing her pale kittenish face in GW Pabst's Pandora's Box (1928) and The Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) burns itself into the mind. It was Pabst who gave the 20-year-old Greta Garbo her first real chance to emote as a woman on the brink of prostitution in Joyless Street (1925), the role that led to her Hollywood career, prompting Roland Barthes to write in 1957: "Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced."

Marlene Dietrich's career only began to bloom with the coming of sound and her meeting with Josef Von Sternberg, who created her iconographic figure as the eternal femme fatale in various guises, conjured up by makeup, costumes and the subtle play of light and shadow on her face in close-up. Dietrich's face became an erogenous zone in Sternberg's pictures.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Lily Koppell, "The Red Leather Diary"

I am looking forward to Lily Koppel's author event on Wednesday, September 10th at The Booksmith in San Francisco. Lily will be discussing her new book, The Red Leather Diary. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the 1920's / 1930s.

New York Times journalist Lily Koppel found the inspiration for her book after discovering an old diary in a Manhattan dumpster. The diary recorded the thoughts and feelings of an intelligent, ambitious and creative teenager on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the early 1930s. In the diary, the young author recorded everything from her first kiss (with a boy) to her crush on actress Eva Le Galliene (whom she had met - and which led her to question her sexuality) to her passion for writing and art. There are also numerous observations on daily life in 1930's NYC. Ultimately, the diary acts as a window into a fascinating and privileged world, one that Lily Koppel successfully recreates by telling a story in a novelistic way using no more than snippets of text from the teenager's diary.

Remarkably - and this is a big part of the story - Lily Koppel was able to reunite the long lost diary with it's then 90-year-old author after locating its her in Florida. I am reading The Red Leather Diary now - and enjoying it a great deal. Check out this event if you can.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Filmmaking in New York, exhibit

EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Museum of Modern ArtNew York
17 September – 19 October 2008

Hollywood on the Hudson traces the roots of the modern American film industry to New York City between the two world wars, when an industry built on centralized authority began to listen, for the first time, to a range of independent voices, each with their own ideas about what the movies could say and do.

The Hollywood studio system was geared toward creating a standardized product and sought to appeal to all ages and classes, whereas New York cinema was technically innovative and culturally specific, and played to niche audiences, from art houses to ethnic enclaves. But the collapse of Hollywood's economic and industrial model in the post–World War I era forced American filmmakers to rethink the way they made films and sold them to audiences.

Finding they could no longer depend on a system that required long-term contracts and studio backlots with elaborate standing sets, they began to adopt the methods being used by writers, directors, and actors in New York.

This exhibition surveys filmmaking in New York during the hegemony of Hollywood, from D. W. Griffith's return from the West Coast in 1919 to the World's Fair of 1939. Screenings include pioneering sound films shot at the Paramount Studios in Astoria, Queens, and starring Broadway luminaries; films featuring such stars as Louise Brooks, Marion Davies, the Marx Brothers, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino; and noteworthy African American and Yiddish films.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Louise Brooks in Los Angeles exhibit

The Vanity Fair exhibit, which drew large crowds and much acclaim while on exhibit in London, is coming to Los Angeles. Opening October 26 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),  "Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008" brings together 150 of the famed magazine's iconic portraits. This is the first major exhibit to bring together the magazine's historic archive of rare vintage prints with contemporary photographs as well. The exhibition will complete its tour at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia,  where it will run June 12 – August 30, 2009.

Of special note to Louise Brooks devotees and fans of the 1920's is the inclusion of portraits of a handful of celebrities from the 1920's. "Among the exceptional people portrayed in the exhibit are Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Jesse Owens, James Joyce, Katharine Hepburn, and Fred and Adele Astaire. The introduction of modernism into photography was particularly evident in the progressive work of [Edward] Steichen (1879–1973), who held the title of Vanity Fair 's chief photographer for 13 years. Steichen was America's leading photographer of style, taste and celebrity, and many of his iconic photographs are in "Vanity Fair Portraits," including those of Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks, Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson. The exhibition also showcases definitive portraits of the Jazz Age, including now-classic studies of Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Noel Coward."

Monday, August 4, 2008

Love Em and Leave Em screens in L. A

The Silent Society of Hollywood Heritage, in association with the National Parks Service, is hosting a screening of Love 'em and Leave 'em (1926) at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura (near Los Angeles) this Sunday evening, August 17th at 7:30 pm. The screening is part of the groups  “Silents Under the Stars” series. This feature will be preceded by a surprise short subject, and will feature live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla.

Sunday, August 17, 2008 - 7:30 pm

Love ‘Em And Leave ‘Em (1926) starring Evelyn Brent, Louise Brooks and Lawrence Gray. Directed by Frank Tuttle. Mame Walsh (Evelyn Brent) returns from vacation to find her younger sister, Janie (Louise Brooks) has stolen the affections of her boyfriend and decides to make him jealous by adopting Janie’s “love ‘em and leave ‘em” philosophy.

Tickets are $6.00 for adults, $5.00 for members of Hollywood Heritage. Children under twelve are $3.00, under three free.

Films begin at dusk. Picnic dinners are encouraged. Please bring a flashlight as the parking area is dark.

For further information call Hollywood Heritage at (323) 874-4005, or visit  http://www.hollywoodheritage.org/

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Louise Brooks and forged letters

There have been a lot of articles popping up regarding Lee Israel's new book, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger. One of the best articles / reviews I read was by Thomas Mallon. It appeared in the New York Times on August 3rd. I recommend reading it. And what's more, two of the illustrations accompanying the article relate to Louise Brooks.

As some readers of this blog may know, Lee Israel is a noted journalist and biographer. [I own a copy of her Tallulah Bankhead biography.] When she fell on hard times some years back, she turned to stealing the letters of famous individuals from archives and libraries, whcih she sold, as well as forging letters from other subjects of interest (which she also sold). Apparently, Israel was very good at what she did. A couple of her Noel Coward letters were even included in a recently published collection of the British authro's correspondence.

Among the letters Israel forged and sold where some from Louise Brooks. I haven't read this new book yet, but from all the coverage its getting, I gather that Israel's forgeries of Brooks' letters play a significant part in her story. The name of the actress also appears, obliquely, on the cover of the book.



[This bit of literary intrigue reminds me that I had once heard that shortly after Louise Brooks' death, a number of fake signatures ascribed to the actress came on the market. Signed books, signed pictures, etc.... I wonder what ever became of them. Buyer beware.]
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