Articles from 1930
Written twelve years after the end of the First World War, this Collier’s Magazine article recalls a number of incidences that serve to illustrate how the ruling class in Washington bungled and mismanaged the war.
Click here to read a short film review of one of Hollywood’s first W.W. I movies: Wings, directed by William Wellman.
Having suffered the scourge of the noble experiment for over ten years, Dudley Cammet Lunt, an attorney, penned this essay about how the states could be done with that Federal edict:
In discussing Article V in The Federalist Papers [Alexander Hamilton] said: ‘We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.’
A segment from a slightly longer 1930 profile covering the high-life and Hollywood career of La Belle Swanson. Written by actor and theater producer Harry Lang (1894 – 1953), the article concentrates on her triumphs during her lean years, her assorted marriages and her healthy fashion obsessions.
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
Upon viewing one of the earliest sound movies this film reviewer did not find it odd in the least as to why the audiences laughed uproariously while listening to perfectly ordinary dialog during the viewing of one of Hollywood’s newest offering War Nurse (directed by Edgar Selwyn):
It was not so much [that they chortled] at these isolated bits of dialogue that the audience laughed, as it was a resort to laughter caused by the absurdity ceaseless chatter that prevails throughout the entire production.
From Amazon: Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay
Published in a 1930 fan magazine, this article tells the story of the earliest days of cosmetic surgery in Hollywood:
Telling the actual names of all the stars who have been to the plastic surgeon is an impossible task. They won’t admit it, except in a few isolated instances…It is only lately that a few of them are beginning, not only to to admit that they’ve had their faces bettered, but to even go so far as to publicly announce it.
Click here to read more articles from PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE.
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
Published in a 1930 fan magazine, this article tells the story of the earliest days of cosmetic surgery in Hollywood:
Telling the actual names of all the stars who have been to the plastic surgeon is an impossible task. They won’t admit it, except in a few isolated instances…It is only lately that a few of them are beginning, not only to to admit that they’ve had their faces bettered, but to even go so far as to publicly announce it.
Click here to read more articles from PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE.
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
PHOTOPLAY’s Frances Kish spent some time with the animators at Terry-Toon studios and filed this report detailing all the efforts that go into the production of just one Terry-Toon film:
The major animator begins begins the work. The thin white paper he uses for his drawings has holes punched at the top, like pages for a loose-leaf note book…The figures are about three inches high…
Although Euro Disney would not be opening until 1990, this article by Hollywood costume designer Howard Greer implied that it would have done quite well had they opened eighty-six years earlier:
You know everyone in Hollywood? they asked. I blushed modestly and admitted that I did.
Don’t you want to know about the stars? I went on.Shall I tell you about Garbo?
‘A smile passed across their faces.’
‘Garbo? Yes, we like her. But the star we ‘d love to know everything about is – Mickey Mouse!’
Published in a 1930 Hollywood fan magazine, this is the story of the earliest plastic surgeons and the rise of cosmetic surgery in Hollywood:
Telling the actual names of all the stars who have been to the plastic surgeons is an impossible task. They won’t admit it, except in a few isolated instances…It is only lately that a few of them are beginning, not only to to admit that they’ve had their faces bettered, but to even go so far as to publicly announce it.
Attached is a three page article about Charlie Chaplin that first appeared in 1930 and contains far more information about the man than you might possibly care to know:
He is a splendid boxer and a keen boxing fan…He plays bridge well…He loves traveling and dislikes flying…He likes to be alone…He likes to talk…He swears now and then…He did not go to school…
Here is a profile of the actor Lew Ayres (1908 – 1996) that was published, quite coincidentally, shortly before the release of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (Universal):
Naturally a great deal depends on the outcome of this picture. Lew is not the type that will go on for years as a moderate success. He will either be a tremendous hit or or a failure.
Click here to read about Lew Ayres and his status as a conscientious objector during the second World War.
Hired to write dialogue for the king makers at Twentieth Century Fox, cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1890 – 1970) jotted down his impressions of 1930s Hollywood.
The chief mogul did all the ordering and I must say that he knew food. The lavish way in which he ordered bore out some of the glittering tales I had read about the grandeur of the movies. I think I ate six helpings of caviar and four tenderloin steaks. I wanted to make them believe I was no slouch myself.
If you would like to read a Rube Goldberg interview from 1914, click here.
When the deep-pocketed film director Howard Hughes (1905 – 1976) decided to tint a few sequences from his film HELL’S ANGELS (1930) he purchased the company that he believed capable of filling such an order: Multicolor in Hollywood, California (as it turned out, the work was actually done by Technicolor). Hughes was such a curiosity to the press and they followed his every whim; in this article, critic Donald Beaton refers to Hughes as a pioneer and salutes him for experimenting with color.
In one of his weekly columns for the year 1930, Sol Metzger (1880 – 1932) praised the well-coordinated teamwork of the Dartmouth boys for a surprising play they deployed in their contest against Harvard a year earlier (Crimson ate it 34 to 7).
The play is diagrammed and can easily be printed.
The attached article tells the story of American Legion Post 43, which is housed at 2035 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood, California. Designed by the Weston brothers in 1930 (both men were members) the building represents not only the home of the a Legion post but also [serves as] a memorial to the fighting divisions of the American Army and every American who took part in the World War.
An article written by one of the grand old men of football and one of the game’s most legendary coaches: Knute Rockne (1888 – 1931). Before there was the NFL, there was only college football and it was football pioneers like Rockne who brought out the excitement of the game, generating such enthusiasm for the sport and creating a fan-base that grew steadily throughout the century. Just as Redskin Coach Joe Gibbs had The Hogs in the Eighties, Knute Rockne was famous for a group of players in the Twenties called the Four Horsemen (Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Elmer Layden, and Jim Crowley), and that is who the coach wrote about on the attached pages:
Individually, at first, they were just four compact youths, no better than football’s average…Within a season they became famous – the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame…They amazed even their own coach
In 1930 a seasoned diplomat and respected attorney by the name of James Watson Gerard (1867 – 1951) created quite a dust-up in Depression-era Washington when he took it upon himself to release his list of those Americans who he believed to have the most power on Capitol Hill. The reason his compilation turned as many heads as it did was because there wasn’t the name of a single elected official to be found on the list – not even President Hoover was mentioned (although his treasury secretary was, the millionaire industrialist Andrew Mellon).
Click here if you wish to read more on this subject and see Gerard’s list of the most powerful men in Cold War Washington.
Assorted quotes addressing some aspects of the 1930 Hollywood and the entertainment industry seated there. Some are prophets who rant-on about the impending failure of talking pictures, others go on about the obscene sums of money generated in the film colony; a few of the wits are well-known to us, like Thomas Edison, George M. Cohan and Walter Winchell but most are unknown – one anonymous sage, remarking about the invention of sound movies, prophesied:
In ten years, most of the good music of the world will be written for sound motion pictures.
