Articles from Script Magazine
To mark the 67th birthday of the silent film director D.W. Griffith, the editors of a once illustrious Hollywood literary magazine pasted his famous profile on their magazine cover and devoted four columns to his achievements.
A Salute to D.W. Griffith (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1945) Read More »
Attached is a 1948 article by the Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton (1892 – 1962) concerning the widespread understanding among nuclear physicists to wrestle control of atomic energy away from the military and firmly in the hands of civil authorities, where it’s benefits can be put to general use and harnessed as positive force in the lives of all mankind.
Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1927, the SCRIPT MAGAZINE editors believed that Arthur Compton, more than anyone else, deserved the title Daddy of the Atomic bomb. When the U.S. Government decided to proceed with the research and development of this weapon, Compton was assigned the double task of attempting a nuclear chain reaction and of designing the bomb itself.
Compton is remembered as the senior physicist at the Manhattan Project who hired Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years.
Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
The Atomic Crusade (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1948) Read More »
A printable music review by Lawrence Morton (1904 – 1987), long time advocate of modern music and habitual contributor to MUSICAL QUARTERLY and MODERN MUSIC. One of Morton’s greatest interests was the music of Stravinsky, and it is Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements that was discussed in this 1947 review:
The symphony opens in full orchestra with a mighty affirmation of confidence and resolution. Then the horns state the main problem with which the composer would confront us: other instruments reiterate it, as if to show it to us from new angles and with new perspectives…
This particular performance was conducted in Los Angeles by Otto Klemperer (1885 – 1973), who was singled out for high praise in this article.
Otto Klemperer Conducts Stravinsky (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1947) Read More »
This 1940s Hollywood journalist refrained from using the pejorative white cracker while condemning silent film director D.W. Griffith for his racial views -and yet at the same time did something rather bold in that he put in print his views that the man has been erroneously credited as the creator of various assorted film innovations that were pioneered by other filmmakers.
Back-Handed Compliments for D.W. Griffith (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1948) Read More »
During the course of the Second World War, Western fiction writer Louis L’Amour (1908 – 1988) served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in a transport unit. He penned this nifty article about 1946 Paris while waiting to return home:
It is cold in Paris now. There are chill winds blowing down those wide streets. The fuel shortage is serious, and will probably continue to be so as transportation is not yet what it should be.
Vivid with historical background, the city somehow remains modern. It has kept step with the world without losing its beauty or its patina…Easy enough when riding along the Rue St. Antoine to forget that where the jeeps and command cars roll now, there were once Roman chariots. No corner of Paris is without its memories.
Louis L’Amour on Post-War Paris (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946) Read More »
Joseph Cummings Chase (1878 – 1965) was an American painter who’s name is not likely to be associated with World War I artists but, like Sir William Orpen, he had a comfortable place within fashionable circles and he, too, was commissioned to paint portraits of the anointed within his nations military establishment. This article appeared in 1942 and primarily concerns the W.W. I portrait that Chase painted of Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur during the closing days of the war:
Joseph Cummings Chase is without doubt one of the world’s greatest portrait painters, and as luck would have it, he was in Paris when World War I began, at which time the Government commissioned him to paint the Distinguished Service Cross men, both enlisted men and officers, wherever he could catch up with them; some in dugouts, some in trenches, and some behind the lines.
Click here to see a few trench war images by German Expressionist Otto Dix.
Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.
Joseph Cummings Chase: Soldiers All (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1942) Read More »
