Barbara Payton & Franchot Tone: Love Brawl

Today We Live (1933) -- Well here's the answer to the trivia question, "What movie did Joan Crawford and Gary Cooper star in together?" Based on a short story by William Faulkner (who also worked on the screenplay), it's a soapy love triangle set in the English countryside during World War I. Joan plays a lonely young (British) woman who is torn between love of her brash tenant (Gary Cooper) and a valiant soldier (Robert Young). Franchot Tone plays Joan's brother -- two years later the couple were married in real life! -- Turner Classic Movies, Wednesday, 8:15 a.m. Source: www.theeagle.com

In the 1940s, Tone’s film roles varied widely. One moment he was involved in fluffy affairs with the much younger Deanna Durbin (in Nice Girl?, His Butler’s Sister, and Because of Him), the next he was up to his neck in some sort of dangerous business in, say, Billy Wilder’s Five Graves to Cairo, with Erich von Stroheim and Anne Baxter;

Robert Siodmak’s classic film noir Phantom Lady, with Ella Raines. Apparently, it was Joan Harrison, Universal’s first female producer and former screenwriter for Alfred Hitchcock, who brought Phantom Lady to Franchot’s attention. He admired her talent, trusted her instincts, and was eager to learn from her. Also, Franchot loved both working with newcomers (such as co-star Ella Raines) and trying new forms of cinematic expression. Phantom Lady would prove to be Robert Siodmak’s breakthrough film at Universal, and it set the early standard for film noir. But when it came down to it, Franchot was hungry to play a dark role and Jack Marlow fit the bill.

-Franchot Tone was Joan Crawford’s second husband (1935-1939). What was that marriage like? And what was it like for Tone to play opposite Crawford, then one of MGM’s top stars, in no less than seven films?

-Franchot and Joan’s marriage was her second (or third, depending on who you talk to) and his first, and it was a passionate one. They remained friends after their divorce and until Franchot’s death; I think that connection speaks for itself. A true love story even though the marriage didn’t work out.

Franchot loved women. Loved. His sexual appetite was an integral part of his identity. He was most happy when he was married because those relationships gave him stability — except for his short, tumultuous union with [minor leading lady] Barbara Payton [1951-1952]. He also loved family life; he had two sons with his second wife, actress Jean Wallace [1941-1948; Wallace later married Cornel Wilde]. But when he was single, he was never lacking in female companionship. [Tone’s fourth -- and last -- wife was actress Dolores Dorn, 1956-1959.]

-Franchot Tone’s film career came to a halt in the early 1950s. Why?
-That decade got off to a rocky start with his marriage to Barbara Payton, which took a huge toll on him both emotionally and physically. (After the fisticuffs with his romantic rival, boxer/actor Tom Neal). He felt betrayed and publicly humiliated by Payton’s infidelities. But he had to keep going, for his sons and for himself. Source: www.altfg.com

John O'Dowd: Franchot Tone first met Barbara at Ciro's nightclub in Hollywood in 1950, and was evidently blown away by her beauty. She, in turn, was most likely impressed with his millionaire status and with the fact that he was a very big movie star. Tone reportedly wooed her with daily gifts of champagne, flowers, and expensive jewelry, while Barbara reciprocated with home-cooked meals. The couple was soon engaged and was photographed often over the next year at various film premieres and nightclubs. When Tone left on a business trip to NYC in July 1951, Barbara attended a pool party in Hollywood and met Tom Neal.

An inveterate romantic, Barbara was immediately swept off her feet by Neal's rugged good looks and machismo, and quickly broke off her engagement to Tone. Several engagements followed--to both men--and she was all set to walk down the aisle with Neal in September 1951 when, on the eve of their wedding, she dumped him for an afternoon tryst with Tone at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Tom was living with Barbara at the time, and in the wee hours of September 14, he ambushed the couple upon their return to her home. Neal was an ex-amateur boxer and a weightlifter, and he hammered Franchot Tone into the ground. Tone was rushed to the hospital with severe head injuries, and for the next 18 hours he lingered near death in a comatose state. The brawl made worldwide headlines and brought a torrent of bad press raining down on the trio. Tom Neal had a comfortable upbringing in the Chicago suburb of Evanston and there were no police incidents in his youth. It appears that Barbara often toyed with Tom's emotions, as she was often inclined to do with the men in her life. "She drove the men in her life nuts" is how Tom's son put it to me. -John O'Dowd interviewed by writer Alan K. Rode in 'The Big Chat' Source: www.noirfilm.com

“Hop, you have no idea how rough it is,” the actress said, lighting a match off the bottom of her shoe like the slickest of New York bookies. “I know, Barbara. Believe me.” “Here I got one guy in love with me—Franchot—he reads Zigmund Freud to me while my head’s in his lap, and I got another guy, Tom, muscles like poured concrete, who’d just as soon gut Franchot as give up one night with his chin nestled in my thighs. Why make it either/or? Why not both?” Her lips curled into a smirk and he couldn’t help but laugh. She did, too, like a horse. On her it was inexplicably sexy. “I understand, Barbara. I really do. But you got a dozen columnists chasing this story.” She tapped her cigarette on one silky knee. “Fuck, Hop, what do I care? I’m having a ball. It’s not like I compete with Loretta Young for parts. I play hookers, molls, pinup girls.”

Hop hadn’t bothered with Tom Neal, a side of beef in tight pants. But he’d worked Franchot Tone a bit. Over the last week, he’d carried on several soulful late-night conversations with the longfaced, highbrow actor. “What do I care what they say?” Tone had confided. “Don’t you see? I love her. Love that darling girl.” And it was no surprise to Hop. Tone had long had a taste for beauties whose hems were still wet from the gutter. Even Joan Crawford, whom Tone married when she was Hollywood royalty, came with the richly thrilling backstory of a pre-fame gold-standard stag film, a seven-minute loop Hop himself had seen at more than one Hollywood party. It had been shown so many times at so many different gatherings that it had taken on the quality of a ho-hum home movie trotted out one too many Christmas mornings. -"The Song is You: A Novel" (2008) by Megan Abbott

For more details, please read my previous post: The Barbara Payton story

Connie Britton (American Ultra), Mad Men & 60's dystopian turn

Connie Britton is the latest to join the cast of Lionsgate’s 'American Ultra,' the action comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart that recently kicked off production. Eisenberg plays a seemingly hapless and unmotivated small-town stoner who is actually a highly trained, lethal sleeper agent in a government program. That program was created by Victoria Lasseter (Britton). Topher Grace, Tony Hale, John Leguizamo, Bill Pullman and Walton Goggins also star. Source: www.deadline.com

Access Hollywood: -Friday night lights... do you keep in touch with Kyle Chandler? -Connie Britton: I sure do. -Reporter: Good looking man, handsome man. -Connie Britton: We saw him recently. Went and visited. My son he's like: where is uncle Kyle? It's great. Source: www.accesshollywood.com

-You’ve been ranked as one of the best TV dads for Friday Night Lights, so how do your real life experiences as a dad affect your portrayal of your character [in Super 8]?

-Kyle Chandler: Well I mean the guy that I’m playing doesn’t have very good communication with his son and he’s mourning the loss of his wife and he’s rather distant so it’s not really similar but it is in the sense that I knew what I was missing playing the character. I’m very close with my kids and I’m a big hugger and a big talker and [I am] everything this guy is not. Source: www.viewauckland.co.nz

-I love Bob Dylan. I love all vintage -everything, really. I love fashion. And the fifties, I've always loved. But after working on 'Super 8' and seeing all the seventies clothes, now I'm really into Twiggy and 'The Virgin Suicides'. We were in West Virginia filming in this really small town [Weirton], which sort of felt like the seventies anyway. Then, being in all the clothes, you really felt like you were just there. I remember going to the wardrobe-fitting for the first time and seeing all the cool high-waisted jeans and halter-tops and that style is coming back anyway! -Elle Fanning about filming "Super 8" (2011)

It’s 1969, the culture is coming apart at the seams and a reckoning is on the horizon, a horizon that nobody sees, drenched as they are in narcissism and self-indulgence. What’s happening, simultaneously, is the demise of an old male order. Don Draper now back at work, but in a lowly position, pounding out ideas on a typewriter to please the boss, Peggy. Even the big boss who has replaced Don, the sharp-tongued, high-handed Lou, is revealed to be, in private, an absurd figure. The viewer who is even slightly aware of the thrust of recent U.S. history knows what the future holds – the optimism of the 1960s disintegrating, into the “Me Decade” of spiritual emptiness and moral decay, the decline of great cities, the traumatic attempt to disentangle from the mess of Vietnam. The end of entitlement for some, the evaporation of enlightenment for others.

In that context Mad Men now seems to take a dystopian turn. As it must. What seemed heavenly in the series’ first seasons – anchored in viewer nostalgia for the fashion, the social mores, the predigital requiescence of working and personal life – now turns, inexorably toward a vision of a hellish place. Darkness looms and if you look below the surface of Mad Men now it should make you shiver. Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

Project MKUltra is the code name of a U.S. government human research operation organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, etc. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. LSD was eventually dismissed by MKUltra's researchers as too unpredictable in its results. Alarmists and proselytizers alike collaborated in the belief that American youth en masse were abandoning the stable routes of American society and striking out onto unprecedented trails. Even as the editors deplored the current excesses (although it was a Life article that stimulated a psychologist named Timothy Leary to try his first psychedelic mushrooms), they were usually less than scrupulous in reminding their audience that most of the young were dropping acid and fleeing to the Haight-Ashbury.

There was enormous anxiety about whether the prevailing culture could hold the young; and on the liberal side, anxiety about whether it deserved to. Governor George Wallace and Dr. Timothy Leary agreed that what was at stake was nothing less than Western Civilization, the only question being whether its demise was auspicious. Thrown out of Harvard in 1963 for tampering with unwary undergraduates, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert took their drug experiments to a millionaire heir's mansion in upstate New York, a quasi-religious ashram for what Leary called the International Federation for Internal Freedom, where psilocybin was superseded by the even more mind-blowing chemical LSD.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Kesey, who had been turned on to LSD by a Veterans Administration hospital experiment in I960, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with its romance of crazy-like-a-fox heroes up against the Combine (a.k.a. System), and founded a countercombine of Merry Pranksters. How to summon up the enormous innocence of the Pranksters? In their reckless abandon, their sheer ingenuity and bravado, they were strangely of a piece with the nodules of the civil rights movement and the New Left. For Kesey, like Leary, was a proselytizer at a moment when millions were seeking a way to live beyond limits; he had a "vision of turning on the world." Expert chemists like the Bay Area's Owsley, who set up underground laboratories and fabricated potent and pure LSD tablets (still legal), were not in it just for the money; they kept their prices down, gave out plenty of free samples, and fancied themselves "architects of social change", toward which end Owsley helped, for example, to finance the Grateful Dead." -"The Sixties: Years Of Hope, Days Of Rage" (1993) by Todd Gitlin

Pre-Code's Sex Slant, Carole Landis ('sex-loaded'), Homefront's Lemo Stars

‘I like restraint,” Mae West once said, “if it doesn’t go too far.” It went a long way during the so-called Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system, from 1934 to 1968. During those years, there were exact limits on what could be shown on screen, as specified in the Hollywood Production Code. The period came to an end in 1968 when something like the present ratings system came into effect, partly in response to a new generation of films full of nudity, obscenity and bloodshed that scarified the bourgeois, films such as 1966’s Blow Up and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It had begun four years after the formal end of silent cinema in 1930.

So what happened between 1930 and 1934? A rich, 21-film season at BFI Southbank in London next month provides an answer, mapping the turbulent, fascinating period of studio history known as ‘Pre-Code Hollywood’. Familiar stars appear in these often dazzling early talkies – James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Bette Davis and Clark Gable among them – but the films aren’t standard Hollywood fare. As James Bell says in the season programme, it was ‘a naughtier, rougher-edged and more shocking cinema than anything audiences would see again until the 1960s’. It treated with arresting frankness, and often visual inventiveness, subjects as delicate – or as crude – as lust, violence, drugs, alcohol, adultery, bestiality, rape and homosexuality. Gangsters shot or lied their way to the top in a desperate Depression-era world; but women could be just as hard-bitten.

A film like Jack Conway’s Red-Headed Woman (1932), starring the usually blonde Jean Harlow as Red, a promiscuous predator sleeping her way up the financial food chain to millionaires, is based on the premise that men can’t resist her body. The hero’s estranged wife accuses Red right out: “You caught him with sex!” This isn’t the kind of line we would hear film characters deliver much post-1934. Red later crows, ‘I’m the happiest girl in the world. I’m in love and I’m going to get married!’ She’s in love with a handsome chauffeur – and is marrying his aged millionaire boss. Yet, to suggest that this was a film revelling in a world before censorship would be wrong. In March 1930 the studios had already pledged to observe a new, elaborate Production Code associated with Will Hays, President of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

Not all the ‘sex slant’ was so serious. The German director Ernst Lubitsch constantly flirted with the transgressive – in for instance the still-unsettling ménage à trois of Design for Living (1933). Musicals could also raise an erotic frisson – like the delightful girls-on-the-make entertainment Gold Diggers of 1933 by Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley, with songs such as ‘Pettin’ in the Park’ (‘Come on, maybe this is wrong, / But, gee, what of it? / We just love it.’) After all, the subtleties of coded suggestion in Hollywood’s Golden Age have enriched the cinematic heritage just as much as the startling achievements of this heady era. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Carole Landis - Ping Girl at Roach Studios (1939–1940): With dubious logic, Roach created the slogan, “The Ping Girl: She Makes You Purr.” But for those in the know, ping had a less respectable meaning. Although the word does not appear in standard slang dictionaries, an Internet dictionary defines it as an exclamation accompanying an erection, as in, “I saw her, and ping.” One can well understand why Carole, presumably aware of this usage, would have found the title unacceptable. At the same time, the fact that Roach was able to use the term in publicity suggests that its slang meaning was not widely known among the general public, who were expected to be duped by the motor-oil red herring.

The awkwardness of the episode, which would be writ large in the uneasiness of Carole’s entire film career, is one more demonstration that the kind of overt sexual appeal that had flourished in the days
of first Clara Bow and then Jean Harlow (who never needed a slogan to project it) was no longer possible. The 1930s image of the desirable woman had been divided between the ethereal sexuality incarnated by Greta Garbo and a pointedly sluttish style typified by Harlow and raised to the level of caricature by Mae West (who, we should not forget, turned forty in 1933). In contrast, 1950s sexuality, reflecting the budding postwar youth culture, would cater less to adult desires than to adolescent wet dreams. The sexuality of the 1940s was more restrained, less explicit.

Especially after the war, actresses such as Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth evolved a sexiness that was suggestive rather than direct. In Gilda (1946), under the direction of Charles Vidor, Hayworth inaugurated a new art of playing seductively to the camera—the implicit eye of the spectator—that in the following decade Marilyn Monroe would perfect and Jayne Mansfield parody.

Despite Carole’s penchant for low-cut gowns, modesty was an important trait of her character; she loved to tell jokes, but according to at least one credible witness, these were never off-color, nor was she known to use foul language—in contrast to her notoriously salty-tongued namesake, Carole Lombard.

I Wake Up Screaming, Carole’s second turn as Betty Grable’s sister, was not a film Carole claimed to have particularly enjoyed making, yet it is the most biographically significant motion picture of her career. Vicki, Carole’s character in I Wake Up Screaming, was almost certainly the inspiration for Jerome Charyn’s obsessively counterfactual portrait of Carole in Movieland (1989): “almost pathological coldness... frozen beauty... coolness that was outside any art.”

Although the Landis:Grable::beautiful:pretty paradigm had been marked in Moon over Miami, it was incidental to the substance of Carole’s role, merely a way of justifying and mitigating her presence on screen. I Wake Up Screaming does something different, and rather daring: it foregrounds Carole’s beauty not simply as an empirical reality of the fictional world but as a transcendental difference reflected in the formal structure of the narrative. Carole was uniformly praised for her performance, as “properly hard and brittle.”

On the final pre-shooting script of I Wake Up Screaming in the Fox archives at the University of Southern California, one of Darryl Zanuck’s thick-penciled notes describes the still uncast character of Vicki Lynn as “sex-loaded.” Whatever the truth about Zanuck’s 4 p.m. trysts, it could not have escaped him that no one on the Fox lot fit that description better than Carole. But a woman whose sex appeal is so excessive that she must be expelled from the film before it begins is not compatible with very many movie plots. In Carole’s Fox career, I Wake Up Screaming was in the nature of an exorcism. In the script conferences, various names had been suggested for both roles: Rita Hayworth or Gene Tierney as Jill, Lucille Ball as Vicki. Zanuck’s choice of Carole for this “sex-loaded” role had been an afterthought. -"Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl" (2008) by Eric Gans

Ginger Szabo (Tammy Lauren) has just told Jeff (Kyle Chandler) that they would like her to sing a love song on the next "Lemo Tomato Juice Hour". -Jeff: At this rate, you'll be bigger than Betty Grable! -Ginger: You think so?

Review: ‘Homefront the Traveling Lemo All-Stars’: It is the fall of 1946. The nation is just getting used to the idea that nylon stockings are plentiful and has rediscovered that there is actually an organization called the Republican party. Meanwhile, in a farcical turn away from their usually serious and oftentimes traumatic post-war adjustments, the denizens of “Homefront” Ohio are enduring the joys and sorrows of America’s rush to embrace the free enterprise system.

The laughs are few in this hit-and-miss episode centered around Cleveland Indians baseballer Jeff Metcalf’s (Kyle Chandler) ill-fated journey as a member of “The Traveling Lemo All-Stars,” but the series still deserves high marks for its well-defined characterizations and rich attention to detail. All Metcalf wants to do is earn enough postseason money to keep the payments going on his car until spring training; but his reluctant participation as a member of the Lemo Tomato Juice all-star baseball team turns into the barnstorming-tour-from-hell. Kyle Chandler and Tammy Lauren are totally likeable as the on-again-off-again lovers... Source: variety.com


Ginger Szabo and Jeff Metcalf talk about their plans for a honeymoon. (from "Can't Say No" -'Homefront' episode). Jeff tries to cheer Ginger up after the screen test (from "Szabo's Travels"). Ginger is sitting at the bar looking very glum; Eddie (comes up behind Ginger): -For whatever it's worth, you reminded me of Carole Lombard. -Ginger (excited): Really?

Carole Landis was born on New Year's Day in 1919 in Fairchild, Wisconsin, as Frances Lillian Mary Ridste. Some time after her arrival in San Francisco, Frances tells us she chose her stage name. Carole was her “favorite name,” clearly borrowed from Carole Lombard, the first Hollywood star to spell her name that way, although Carole herself “never gave this story credence.”

Frances was surely aware that, like herself, her chosen namesake, née Jane Alice Peters, was born in the Midwest (in Fort Wayne, Indiana), the child of a broken home, had come to California as a girl, and had dropped out of high school to pursue an entertainment career; above all, Frances, whose best acting would be in comedy, must have admired Lombard’s mastery of the screwball genre. Carole explained the choice of “Landis” as one of two hundred names she found in the San Francisco telephone directory; some writers claim that she made her selection on seeing the name of baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in a newspaper. -"Carole Landis: A Most Beautiful Girl" (2008) by Eric Gans

Mad Men's Monolith, The Melody of Heartache (Kyle Chandler/Homefront), Sex & Character

Eternal Male/Female Difference Revealed: The recent telephone conversation between Megan and Don, when he finally tells her that he has been given a leave from the firm he helped build from ashes highlights a universal male/female communication challenge that life partners who are intimate and committed face, understand, and work through. Megan cannot understand why Don did not love and trust her enough to tell her the truth. Don could not tell Megan the truth because he felt if he did she would no longer see him as potent and strong and would stop loving and desiring him.

Taking Stock of Who We Really Are Involves Pain: Why isn't Don going elsewhere? Why is he accepting horrific, disrespectful treatment? Sterling and Cooper was a launching pad for him, and his life's blood went into Sterling and Cooper and Draper. He has been able to do brilliant work because of innate ability to combine art and manipulation, as well as the love of the woman who had been the wife of the man whose identity he had stolen --- the first love he has ever known from anyone. Perhaps Don will be able to build on this, and work toward becoming a true person. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

"A man’s attempt to find himself in a woman, rather than simply seeing Woman in a woman, necessarily presupposes a neglect of her empirical person, which regards Woman as a completely dependent possession and does not consider her inner life at all. This is where the parallel between the cruelty of eroticism and the cruelty of sexuality becomes complete. Love is Murder." -Sex & Character (1906) by Otto Weininger



As Mad Men is (slowly) wrapping up, it’s looking more and more at whatever the future is going to bring, and much like that huge IBM computer, the future is a looming, loud presence that will, inevitably, displace them entirely. The monolith is a memento mori. Really, that’s what “The Monolith” is about underneath it all. The characters are pushing toward the things that will let them move past the failed versions of themselves, past all of the wrong versions of events, toward something right. Deep down, I think that Matt Weiner and his writers don’t want to punish these characters or even have them see a real comeuppance. That comeuppance came last season, for the most part, and now, they’re heading into a new era, one that may bring new consciousness or a dream of men who’d dare walk on the moon. Source: www.avclub.com

But it is 1969, the year that is often cited as the one when the cultural landscape dramatically shifted in America, and Roth’s novel was a big part of that. The thing about Portnoy’s Complaint is that, unlike some books we’ve seen Don reading, like Dante’s Inferno, there isn’t an obvious meaning to Don’s choice of reading, unless you want to get into the mommy/sex issues that both Don and Roth’s most famous character have.

It’s difficult to find an allegory in Don opening up Portnoy’s, but a book about a descent into hell, that’s something we can understand: women, to Portnoy, are the root of all pleasure and all pain.
Source: flavorwire.com


Jeff and Ginger ending their romance - "Man, This Joint is Jumping", "Szabo's Travels", and "Appleknocker To Wed Tomatohawker" inspired this very short 'Homefront' story by Tracey Diane Miller, "The Melody of Heartache" (2005): "Jeff Metcalf wasn't always the most sensitive guy in the world but his Achilles heel was his intense and unquestioned love for Ginger. Sometimes the depths of that love scared him. Sometimes he felt as if something were tugging at his gut. And so began the melody of heartache, swelling into a full blown overture of pain. It was a melody that had been introduced by that first note that echoed within the young couple during a fateful day in Hollywood park months ago. Jeff had become a casualty in the war of the broken-hearted."

Kyle Chandler: -"I look at those celebrity magazines and I'm jealous. There are pictures of late-night partying at nightclubs and I wonder who's taking care of the kids. I'm boring compared to those people. And my beautiful wife, Kathryn, and I will be coming to Los Angeles, seeing friends we haven't seen in a while and be two adults in the city of Hollywood, living it up while the kids are at home kicking back."

"Of course, my wife has to be there. The person you say goodnight to last is the one you want to say thank you to last." But the fact is, Chandler admits, "I wouldn't trade anything for what I've got right now. I appreciate everything in my life. Every time I turn on TV and see how difficult things are for some people, I'm just grateful for what I've got. I wouldn't trade my life for anyone's." Source: www.creators.com

"Schopenhauer (author of “Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes”) had very little appreciation of a higher kind of eroticism, and only really appreciated sexuality. Schopenhauer’s face showed little kindness and a great deal of cruelty (from which he himself must have suffered most terribly: one does not devise an ethic of compassion if one is very compassionate. The most compassionate individuals are those who most resent their own compassion: Kant and Nietzsche). But it may already be indicated at this point that only those who have a strong tendency toward compassion are capable of a fervent eroticism. Those who “couldn’t care less” are incapable of love and they have no appreciation of a supra-sexual relationship. True love, like true compassion, is modest. Rather, beauty itself is a projection, or emanation, of the desire to love. Therefore, the beauty of Woman is not something different from love, not an object to which love is directed. The beauty of Woman is the love of Man. Love and beauty are not two different facts, but one and the same. Just as ugliness derives from hate, beauty derives from love. Beauty is something untouchable, inviolable, which cannot be mixed with other things. Love is modest because, by loving, I place myself below others. Love makes the individual most forgetful of his pride. Therefore compassion is related to love, which is why only those who know compassion know love. In compassion I am the giver, in love I am the beggar. Love is the most modest of all requests, because it begs for the most, the highest." -"Sex & Character" (1906) by Otto Weininger

Kyle Chandler and Jon Hamm: Baseball Heroes

-What's your favorite sport? / -Kyle Chandler: Baseball, baseball, baseball. (TVGen-Yahoo! Chat Session, 1999). In "Homefront" (ABC) Kyle Chandler would play Jeff Metcalf, a professional baseball player with the Cleveland Indians. The scripts for "Homefront" were written (even more than "Mad Men") in the slang and vintage turn-of-phrases of the 1940's era.

On television’s “Mad Men,” Jon Hamm plays Don Draper -- the clever and creative advertising man who can sell just about anything. But in his new movie role as a down-on-his-luck sports agent, he’s making his wildest pitch yet: a contest to find major league-caliber pitching stars in a country where almost no one has ever seen a baseball.

Only this time, the character Hamm plays is real -- and is now the subject of an upcoming Disney film, “Million Dollar Arm,” in theaters nationwide May 16. The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC News. “Anyone can make this stuff up, but when it happens to real people, in real life, I think the emotional impact is even more so,” Hamm told "Nightline" during filming in Atlanta last summer. “It’s just a very interesting story for me, especially as someone who gets to play maybe not the most wholesome person on the planet, six months out of the year,” Hamm said. Source: abcnews.go.com

He's suave, sophisticated, and undeniably sexy. But Jon Hamm says he just can't understand why anyone would find his Mad Men alter ego Don Draper attractive. Talking to Glamour magazine, the actor explains: 'He’s a terrible guy. It’s not his fault he’s damaged, but he’s a terrible guy.'

(seen in the show with co-star Jessica Pare). Despite being lusted after by his fans, Jon, 43, doesn't understand the seemingly universal appeal of the flawed advertising exec. 'With men, it’s like, "That’s the guy you want to be?" Go buy a nice suit and comb your hair, but don’t do the other parts of the character [the cheating, the lying]. 'And I find it crazy when women like Don. There are better dudes.'

But it seems modest Jon may be discounting a hefty part of his character's appeal - his own good looks. Jon revealed his childhood dreams were quite different. 'I wanted to be a professional baseball player when I was a little kid. I still play in a league out here [in L.A.]—a bunch of old dudes who get together on Sundays. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

​Weiner tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he's still conflicted about Don and his secretive, promiscuous ways. "I don't really have a lot of judgment for Don," he says. "He makes me nervous. I feel bad for him. I want him to be able to get out of things. I know that he has a lot of love in his heart. I just don't know if it's possible to stand up and rectify everything by telling the truth." Jon had a depth and maybe carries — even if it's fictional — a sense of a wound, a sense of a conscience, a sense of conflict. You're seeing it on the show all the time. He brought that to it. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I think, "Oh my God, what if I didn't cast him?" You know? Well, I wouldn't have a show. Source: www.npr.org

Talking about the ending of "Friday Night Light": "Bittersweet. Saying goodbye to the Taylor house hurt a lot. Our final scene there we shot on a hot, muggy night, and everyone was exhausted. And I was thinking, “I want to get home.” But as we got into the van to leave, I looked back at the Taylor house, and it brought up a lot of memories. It stung. I grabbed my phone, stuck it out the window and took a picture of the house. I’m going to put it in a tiny little frame and keep it my home. That will be “Friday Night Lights” for me, whenever I look at it." -Kyle Chandler (Coach Eric Taylor in FNL)

"It's probably a personality flaw in a business like mine, but I prefer to avoid fuss and flash," says Chandler, enviably handsome. In the dim light of the oak room, with yellowing photos of Seabiscuit and the 1951 Rams behind him, it's easy to imagine a time when guys like Chandler pursued acting simply as an excuse to ride horses and chase pretty girls. He's gracious enough, but you get the sense he would rather be having a root canal than blathering on about himself." Source: www.menshealth.com

Hear us out: he may not be the first actor that comes to mind, but Kyle Chandler could play the weathered older version of The King - Elvis Presley. It’s definitely out of the mold of government officials and coaches (Coach!) we’ve seen him play in the past, but maybe a fat suit and a new role is just what Chandler needs. Not to mention we’d take every word he says very seriously, because, well, clear eyes, full hearts, you know the rest. Source: www.mtv.com