This article was written by the silent film star herself for a fashionable American magazine concerning a few of the difficulties in the way of dress, make-up, manners and technique an actress might consider before portraying a child on stage or screen.
Mary Pickford Considers Her Rolls (Vanity Fair, 1920) Read More »
When this two page profile appeared in print Pickford was world famous, married to the handsomest actor in Hollywood, adored by all – she could do no wrong. Just fourteen years later, the respected New York playwright Clara Boothe Brokaw would ridicule her in the pages of Vanity Fair (August, 1932: p. 18) as a sad symbol representing a vulgar era.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, today few people know who she was – although she does get twice as many Google searches than Lillian Gish (but whose counting).
Amazon offers a PBS salute to the actress on a DVD that is strangely titled Mary Pickford
An Interview With Mary Pickford (Current Opinion, 1918) Read More »
Attached is a very funny article written by the great matinee idol Douglas Fairbanks (1883 – 1939) concerning the predictability of silent films:
Whether eastern or western, the villain is never without a big black cigar. On the screen a big black cigar represents villainy; on the stage it represents General Grant.
Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.
Douglas Fairbanks on Hollywood (Vanity Fair, 1918) Read More »
Yet another article from the dusty, moldy magazines of yore that illustrate how the silent film actor Douglas Fairbanks (1883 – 1939) would, time and again, bite that hand that fed him so generously: this is one more example in which Fairbanks points out the all-too predictable story lines of American silent movies.
Douglas Fairbanks on the Writers of Silent Movies… (Vanity Fair, 1918) Read More »
This article is a simply wonderful read for many reasons and the chief among them is that the journalist hated Los Angeles. The New York writer Karl K. Kitchen was dispatched to Beverly Hills to interview the recently divorced Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and he seemed to have had a nice enough time with the estranged couple, so much so that the Hollywood Royals invited him to dine at their house. The whole article is written in a very chatty way and there is one small, but distinct, slanderous aside referring to Jewish power in the nascent film industry.
Dinner with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (Literary Digest, 1922) Read More »
I haven’t a clue as to whether California lawyers had the Restraining Order as one of the tools in their arsenal back in 1916; but if they had, Mary Pickford might have chosen to deploy just such a legal measure in order to defend herself from this obsessed fan who wrote the following essay for the editors of MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE:
She is adorably feminine, from her curls to her toes. In Tess
Click here to read a 1923 comparison between Norma Talmadge and Mary Pickford.
Mary Pickford: An Appreciation (Motion Picture Magazine, 1916) Read More »
Restless with the manner in which the film colony operated, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks linked arms with two other leading Hollywood celebrities to create United Artists; a distribution company formed to release their own films. Attached is a printable history of United Artists spanning the years 1919 through 1939 which also outlines why the organization was so original:
[United Artists] introduced a new method into the industry. Heretofore producers and distributors had been the employers, paying salaries and sometimes a share of the profits to the stars. Under the United Artists system, the stars became their own employers. They had to do their own financing, but they received the producer profits that had formerly gone to their employers and each received his share of the profits of the distributing organization.
