A profile of the Hollywood actress Donna Reed (born Donna Belle Mullenger: 1921 – 1986), who will foreve be remembered for her portrayal of the character Mary Bailey in the Frank Capra film, It’s a Wonderful Life(RKO, 1947).
This interview was published as one more publicity element that was created to promote her television program, The Donna Reed Show
A tongue-in-cheek magazine article from 1938 about The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and their annual gala devoted to over-confidence, The Oscars. Written eleven years after the very first Academy Award ceremony, and published in a magazine that catered to New York theater lovers, the article was penned by an unidentified correspondent who was not very impressed by the whole affair but managed to present a thorough history of the award nonetheless.
Director Frank Capra was awarded his third trophy at the 1938 Oscars…
Attached is short report listing some of the highlights of the 11th Academy Awards ceremony that was held on February 23, 1939 in downtown Los Angeles:
• Director Frank Capra received his third Best Director statue for You Can’t Take It with You
.
• Walt Disney was awarded an Oscar for the best animated short film, Ferdinand The Bull – in addition to a special award for his innovative work on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
• The Best Screenplay Oscar went to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw for his efforts on Pygmalion.
An amusing, if blasphemous, article about the 1938 Oscars can be read here…
Among all the many lovelies who resided in the Hollywood of 1940, the wide-awake editors of PIC MAGAZINE singled-out Lucille Ball (1911 – 1989) as the one to watch:
Barring accidents, Lucille Ball tomorrow will occupy the spot now disputed by Carol Lombard, Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers – as First Lady of Hollywood. Lucille deserves to get it and she has what it takes to get there. The red-headed ex-chorus girl has talent, ability looks, personality and willingness to take every punishment on her way up.
Here is an interesting review of Charlie Chaplin, a 1951 biography:
The acting of Charlie Chaplin has enriched our lives; it has become part of our experience. Regardless of how his casual and unserious politics are interpreted, irrespective of what attitude is taken toward newspaper stories of his private life, his films have demonstrably healthy influence on audiences. All one needs to do to prove this is to sit in a theater and listen to the genuine laughter which Chaplin evokes.
The advent of talking pictures has enormously increased the number of those who vision a fairyland of fame and fortune if they can only reach Hollywood… Rumor had it that voice was important for the new Talkies, and every female whose misguided family had ‘cultivated’ Mamie’s vocal resources, usually without the faintest reasonable excuse, realized where her destiny lay. The rush was on… Several organizations in Hollywood find it possible to send girls back home before the tragedy point is reached… Periodically the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce broadcasts warnings.
ONE MILE EAST of Sunset Plaza was a Hollywood hangout called Schwab’s Drugtore – read about it here…– from Amazon:Read
The attached magazine article first appeared in the long-forgotten Hollywood trade rag Film Daily and concerns the 1930s newsreel production company The March of Time:
Since the beginning of the motion picture, the newsreel has been recognized as a vital medium of public information. Movie goers demand it. But, by the very nature of its technique and the swiftness with which it brings today’s events to the screen, the newsreel can give little more than headline news. And so it has created among movie-goers a desire to see more.
It was this desire ‘to see more’ that led the founders of ‘The March of Time’ to launch their new kind of pictorial journalism…The first issue appeared in some 400 theaters throughout the United States on February 1, 1935.
The journalist who wrote this 1938 piece saw much good in theater newsreels, believing that the newsreel encourages a keener sense of the present and imprisons it for history. He doesn’t refer to any of the prominent newsreel production houses of the day, such as Fox Movietone, Hearst Metrotone, Warner-Pathe or News of the Day but rather prefers instead to wax poetic about the general good that newsreels perform and the services rendered. This newsreel advocate presented the reader with a long, amusing list of kings, dictators and presidents and what they thought of having their images recorded.
Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.
A writer warns that since the advent of sound in movies, the journalists involved in the production of newsreels had grown absolutely giddy over the possibilities of the new technology being used to bend the truth any way they wanted, and frequently did.
In this early Sixties article, celebrity epistolarianne Cyndi Adams recalled her first two encounters with the man who would be Felix Unger:
‘I am definitely neurotic and psychotic,’ cheerily announced Tony Randall (1920 – 2004) the first time we met – ‘he’s an actor-comedian of remarkable skills…he unconsciously reflects, in the way he plays his rolls, so much of the neurotic age we live in…’.
The New York Times would pursue this point to a further degree in their 2004 obituary of the actor:
That’s the force Tony Randall embodied: he represented, in his neurotic grandeur, our national will to unhappiness. Or if not our will, at least our right, which in the 50’s we were only beginning to realize we could exercise.
In spite of the incredible films that Hollywood churned out in 1939 – Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it seemed that there were some folks in 1940 who just wouldn’t be satisfied. This completely irked the citizens of Hollywood. And so the editor of Variety dispatched pollsters hither and yon to ask why they
thought the movies stunk.
A 1945 Collier’s Magazine article about Yvonne De Carlo (a.k.a. Lilly Munster: 1922 – 2007) that appeared shortly after her first big break in Hollywood, Salome, Where She Danced. At the time of this interview the actress had well-over fifteen minor films on her resume but the journalist chose to claim that Salome was her first, just for the unbelievable glamor of it all; he also chose to shave three years off her age.
Yvonne De Carlo was born twenty years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia…She was a featured dancer at Earl Caroll’s and earned the undying respect of the producer by tipping the scales at a svelte 115 pounds, standing on the runway at a mere 5 feet four inches, and by displaying an 11 -/2 -inch neck, a 36 bust, a 24 waist, 32 hips a 7 1/2 -inch ankle, and 15 2/3 -inch wrist.
Nine years after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Hollywood reporter James Henaghan remembered his friendship with the star and their warm, unguarded moments together:
I guess I had known it all the time. I knew that I belonged to the public and to the world. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming, and the only home I ever had dreamed about.
A short review of the silent classic film, Intolerance
For many years to come it is sure to be the last word in pictorial achievement. Not only is it deeply enthralling as entertainment, but it also carries a message of such power that pages of editorials have been written around its theme and its treatment.
An appreciation of Birth of a Nation written 20 years after its opening.
A magazine profile of RKO Studio Dance Director Hermes Pan (1909 – 1990); his work with Fred Astaire (1899 – 1987) and Ginger Rogers (1911 – 1995) and the lasting impression that African-American dance had made upon him. It is fascinating to learn what was involved in the making of an Astaire/Rogers musical and to further learn that even Bill Bojangles Robinson (1878 – 1949) was a fan of the dance team.
Astaire liked the youngster’s blunt answers. He realized the need of a critic who would talk back to a star.
A magazine profile of RKO Studio Dance Director Hermes Pan (1909 – 1990); his work with Fred Astaire (1899 – 1987) and Ginger Rogers (1911 – 1995) and the lasting impression that African-American dance had made upon him. It is fascinating to learn what was involved in the making of an Astaire/Rogers musical and to further learn that even Bill Bojangles Robinson (1878 – 1949) was a fan of the dance team.
Astaire liked the youngster’s blunt answers. He realized the need of a critic who would talk back to a star.
