A&E Biography Of The Great Ida Lupino. Featuring Interviews with Roddy McDowall, Gena Rowlands & other Friends & Family. Narrated By Peter Graves.
Ida Lupino, promotional portrait for Woman in Hiding (1950)
Nineteen fifty was a phenomenal year for Lupino. With the release of Not Wanted, Never Fear,Outrage, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful, she became Hollywood's golden girl again, as she had been a decade before. As recognition of her new industry status, she was asked to present the Oscar for best director at the 22nd Academy Awards ceremony. Applause swept over her as she stepped to the podium. She announced Joseph Mankiewicz as the winner for A Letter to Three Wives. Said Mankiewicz: "Miss Lupino is the only woman in the Directors Guild, and the prettiest." The press hailed her extraordinary talent. Holiday magazine gave Ida a special award in recognition of her artistic courage: "To the woman in the motion picture industry who has done the most to improve standards and to honestly present American life, ideals and people to the rest of the world." -"Ida Lupino: A Biography" (1996) by William Donati
Ava DuVernay got sensational reviews for Selma but she did not make the list of nominees for Best Director. However, she did make Oscar history as the first African American woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture. David Oyelowo, who amazingly played Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and also got sensational reviews, did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In over 80 years of the Academy Awards, less than 10 women have been recognized in the category of Best Director.
Let's talk Hollywood history and another trailblazing woman: Ida Lupino. She directed films and TV shows after establishing herself as one of Hollywood's best actresses. Back in the late 1920s and the 1930s, there was one female director in Hollywood. She was Dorothy Arzner. She was the first woman to direct a performer to an Oscar nomination.
Actress Ruth Chatterton, known to many classic film fans as the actress who played the vain, exasperating wife in William Wyler's Dodsworth (1936) was a Best Actress nominee for 1930's Sarah and Son, directed by Ms. Arzner and co-starring Fredric March.
Then came actress Ida Lupino. She started making Hollywood movies in the 1930s. Although she slammed across some solid screen performances, she was never nominated for an Oscar. Although she was a pioneer for women in the field of television as a director, she never received a Lifetime Emmy. She opened the door for future actresses who also became directors. Women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster and Penny Marshall. Ida should've been given a Lifetime Emmy. She was an actress, scriptwriter, director and a producer. I still feel a film/TV scholarship award for women should be named in Ida Lupino honor. Source: bobbyriverstv.blogspot.com
Bradley Cooper believes the debate surrounding American Sniper is a good thing; Eddie Redmayne's Golden Globe was stopped during baggage check at the airport; and Patricia Arquette felt like a grown-up at Disneyland when she heard she was nominated for an Oscar.
These are just some of the insights and anecdotes shared by the Best Actress and Best Actor hopefuls before they entered the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon on Monday afternoon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon and nominees from all 24 categories caught up with each other at the luncheon Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com
"There is a realistic chance that American Sniper could ambush the Oscars," says Tom O'Neil of awards website GoldDerby.com. Because it broke into the race late, no one knows Sniper's strengths yet. But Saturday's Directors Guild Awards will be a great test for whether it can emerge victorious Oscar night, O'Neil says. If Eastwood wins best film, "then Sniper could emerge as the front-runner."
Dave Karger says it's conceivable that Cooper could "pull off an Adrien Brody". However, Golden Globe winners Michael Keaton (Birdman) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything), who also won a SAG award, are possibly a little too far ahead.
Actor Eddie Redmayne won a SAG Award, and if history is any judge, it makes him a strong contender for a best actor Oscar. O'Neil sees a chance for Cooper, however, because he has all the Oscar elements important to win: He portrays a real-life person, plus there's an impressive physical transformation involved. "He put on 40 pounds, facial hair and a Texas twang. He has a lot going for him."
Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock says the actor category is the best chance for a Sniper upset, mostly because of Cooper's two previous nominations for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. "I can't imagine it gets shut out," he says of the movie. "That'd be a pretty sweet reward." Source: www.usatoday.com
Bradley Cooper reading "Lolita" to Suki Waterhouse in a Parisian park, August 2013. Cooper is 17 years older than his girlfriend British model Suki.
60th Anniversary of Lolita (1955) - Nabokov finished Lolita on 6 December 1953, five years after starting it. The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret, by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. After these refusals and warnings, he finally resorted to publication in France. Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors". Eventually, at the very end of 1955, Graham Greene, in the (London) Sunday Times, called it one of the three best books of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the (London) Sunday Express, whose editor John Gordon called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." Today, Lolita is considered one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it came fourth in a list by the Modern Library of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century.(Wiki)
What makes Lolita “flame” is first of all a love affair with the real America. (“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity…. ”) It is an America where language and event make a seamless web of wonders, terrors, revelations, and portents. English, for Mr. Nabokov, is an instrument for the wildest and most mysteriously fitting shifts of tone, the most cheerfully extroverted, slang-relishing, literate verbal tomfoolery. Lolita’s chief actor, Humbert Humbert, a Swiss “salad of racial genes,” is afflicted with about equal degrees of wit, ennui, taste, and a hideously overt form of nympholepsy; the disease of Ruskin and Lewis Carroll given free and tender rein in a wilderness of American motels, suburbs, and progressive institutions. Lolita is a burlesque of Freudianism that Freud would have had to enjoy. I am inclined to think that the burlesque takes one more turn, at least, than we would expect of any previous example of the “confessional novel” or “roman noir” (Mr. Dupee’s terms). All Mr. Nabokov has to confess, I think, is imagination enough to project the charms of a Phedre or Cleopatra into the skin of an odious suburban bobby-soxer. Source: www.newrepublic.com
Bradley Cooper (You're the Reason) video featuring pictures and stills of Bradley Cooper, with his co-stars Heather Graham, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Sienna Miller, with girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, etc.
American Sniper has set its sights on another record: Within a matter of days, it will overtake Steven Spielberg's WWII classic Saving Private Ryan to become the top-grossing war-themed film of all time in North America, not accounting for inflation. Clint Eastwood's history-making movie jumped the $200 million mark on Sunday,
putting it ahead of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, another WWII title, which topped out at $198.5 million domestically in 2001. American Sniper is distinct from those two film in being set during a modern-day conflict.
Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, earned $216.7 million domestically. Taking inflation into account, that would equal roughly $312 million in today's terms. But a record is a record, and the history-making Sniper will cross $216 million sometime this week for Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow.
American Sniper is benefiting from a massive turnout in America's heartland, as well as from its six Oscar nominations, including best picture and best actor for Bradley Cooper's performance as the late Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who fought in the second Iraq war. In celebrating Sniper's $200 million milestone, Warners domestic distribution chief Dan Fellman said that Eastwood "created a gripping drama with a rare insight into the toll of war that has resonated with audiences in almost every demographic." Here's a rundown of how films addressing post-9/11 conflicts, or terrorism, have performed, according to Rentrak:
Lone Survivor
Release: 12/25/13
Rating: R
Gross: $125,088,651
Zero Dark Thirty
Release: 12/19/12
Rating: R
Gross: $95,720,716
Act of Valor
Release: 2/24/12
Rating: R
Gross: $70,012,847
Jarhead
Release: 11/4/05
Rating: R
Gross: $62,696,152
The Kingdom
Release: 9/28/07
Rating: R
Gross: $47,536,778
Green Zone
Release: 3/12/10
Rating: R
Gross: $35,497,337
On stage, Bradley Cooper plays Joseph Merrick, a disfigured man whose life story has been made into multiple theatre productions and a film. It is reported that the actor will next be heading to London for another run of The Elephant Man after it wraps on Broadway. While in New York Bradley has made a ritual of taking the subway to rehearsals and performances on a regular basis. But as he continues to enjoy public transport his career has taken off with not only an Oscar nod for his performance in American Sniper but also box office success. The total haul for American Sniper, which is up for six Academy Awards, stands at $200.4 million. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Bradley Cooper in Vanity Fair magazine, January 2015
A video featuring pictures of Bradley Cooper, his co-stars Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Sienna Miller, girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, etc., and scenes from "American Sniper".
"Forty pictures I was in, and all I remember is 'What kind of bra will you be wearing today, honey?' That was always the area of big decision - from the neck to the navel." -Donna Reed
They gave Donna Reed the best supporting actress Oscar (Sinatra got supporting actor, too), and so they should have. But there she was in this scene, there was Donna Reed, gazing into the depths of life with shocking bleakness and talking about how one day she’d go home and get married and join the country club and do all the “proper” things for the “proper” people.
The scene jumped out of the picture—how did Lorene and the lovely, sweet Donna Reed get all that self-loathing and contempt on screen? Well, maybe she was more interesting than anyone guessed. I looked the picture up in the collected reviews of Manny Farber and, wouldn’t you know it, he said this in The Nation in 1953: “Miss Reed… is an interesting actress whenever Cameraman Burnett Guffey uses a hard light on her somewhat bitter features.”
In truth, the scene is better than Farber suggests, and it leaves Montgomery Clift’s Prewitt (the self-conscious emotional heart of the picture) somewhat at a loss. Because Reed’s face has seen a truth that exceeds the rest of From Here to Eternity. In addition, the film was boldly cast: Deborah Kerr (it was going to be Joan Crawford) is a surprise as the disillusioned wife, Karen; Burt Lancaster is subtle as Sergeant Warden; Clift is Clift; and then, there was Frank Sinatra, who knew this was his title shot and wasn’t going to let it get away. -David Thomson
Maggio (Frank Sinatra) busts in on Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) and Loreen (Donna Reed) as they try to get to know each other in this scene from FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.
World War II pinups appeared in many forms, from fighter and bomber nose art and bomber jacket art to calendars, postcards, matchbooks, and playing cards. The term pinup was coined during World War II, when soldiers would "pin up" these idealized pictures on their barracks and foxhole walls, and sailors did the same to lockers and bulkheads. There were photos of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, and hundreds of other calendar girls and Hollywood starlets whose only claim to fleeting fame was their image seared into a GI's brain from a ragged page of YANK or Esquire magazine. Servicemen soon began to create their own pinup art, decorating the noses of their planes and their bomber jackets with more primitive paintings of shapely babes. Source: www.skylighters.org
Servicemen would purchase such publications as Yank — the soldier’s magazine — which proudly displayed centerfolds of lovely young women in seductive poses, typically adorned in bathing suits, which the boys would “pin-up” on their barracks walls. However, prior to World War II and before the age of the photographic lens, soldiers and fighting men didn’t possess the luxury of hording an eight-byten image of their idol. Established stars such as Myrna Loy and Ida Lupino would hand out sandwiches at the Hollywood Canteen to soldiers on blackout assignments.
Penny Singleton, the pin-up girl of the Marine Corps — she was married to a Marine captain — established an alterations and repair community for the servicemen, which she called the “Sew and Sew Club.” The fair-haired actress, best known as the lead in the many Blondie pictures, enlisted a number of Hollywood personalities to assist her in this free-for-the-troops endeavor.
Such alluring cheesecake models as Marlene Dietrich, Jinx Falkenburg, Candy Jones, and Carole Landis entertained troops in foreign settings, and the troops were eternally grateful for their sacrifice. Little meant more to the American fighting man than to know that the ladies had them uppermost on their minds. To be greeted by a pin-up girl and given a fond farewell by her, before departure into war, was a gesture of profound magnitude. Linda Darnell, although a stunning pin-up girl whose beauty was out-of-this-world, enlisted in the Women’s Ambulance and Defense Corps of America and even took lessons on motor vehicle repair in her spare time.
Veronica Lake acquired over fifty sets of wings from cadets on one junket, as admiring gents surely wanted to pin their brass wings on the stunning Miss Lake’s dress. The wearing of military paraphernalia by pin-up girls became a common practice, for the gals showed the men in the armed forces that their simple little admiring gifts did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. -"The Pin-Up Girls of World War II" (2013) by Brett Kiser
US and British military culture in World War II promoted this preoccupation with sex. Over 5 million copies of Life magazine’s 1941 photo of Rita Hayworth (captioned the “Goddess of Love”) were sent out to US soldiers. Such “pin-ups” were ubiquitous among US forces. They were published not only in men’s magazines but in service publications like Stars and Stripes (or for Britain, Reveille).
The appeal of the “undisputed leader,” Betty Grable, “was less erotic than as a wholesome symbol of American womanhood,” based on a “carefully groomed exploitation of her good-natured hominess by 20th Century-Fox.” Hayworth, however, the “runner-up” to Grable, “exuded the sultry sex appeal of a mature woman” whose “appeal was more erotic than wholesome.”
Jane Russell’s “flamboyant sex appeal made her pin-ups wildly popular with GIs overseas.” Her large breasts were shamelessly exploited by movie producers as “the two great reasons for [her] rise to stardom.” Moralists at home opposed the pin-up craze. In 1944, the Postmaster General banned Esquire with its Vargas Girl fantasies, and Congressional hearings ensued. However, officers decided that pin-ups contributed to soldiers’ morale. In Britain, meanwhile, the cartoon heroine “Jane” boosted morale during the Blitz and thereafter by taking her clothes off during periods of bad news. “It was said that the first armored vehicle ashore on D-Day carried a large representation of naked Jane.” The comic-strip Jane “finally lost the last vestiges of her modesty during the Normandy campaign” in 1944, and soldiers said, “Jane gives her all.”
Behind the lines, by contrast, sex flourished in World War II. By one calculation, the average US soldier who served in Europe from D-Day through the end of the war had sex with 25 women. The peak was reached after the surrender of Germany in 1945. Condoms had to be rationed at four per man per month and medical officers considered this “entirely inadequate.” Over 80 percent of those who had been away over two years admitted to having regular sexual intercourse. In US-occupied Italy, three-quarters of US soldiers had intercourse with Italian women, on average once or twice a month.
War stories that focus on the front rarely discuss sex. For example, historian Stephen Ambrose gives detail-oriented accounts of battles, but only a vague mention that Paris after liberation in 1944 “over the next few days had one of the great parties of the war.” Ambrose mentions that German soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge were motivated by being told that hospitals in Belgium contained “many American nurses.” When the huge bureaucracy of the US Army’s Services of Supply moved to Paris, “a black market on a grand scale sprang up… The supply troops… got the girls, because they had the money, thanks to the black market.” Ambrose can take for granted that “girls” were a commodity in wartime cities. Aside from these occasional references, however, Ambrose bypasses sex, presumably because it does not matter at the front.
By some reports, “war aphrodisia” – common among soldiers in many wars – extended into many segments of society during “total war.” The million and a half US soldiers who filled England before D-Day in 1944 had a well-deserved reputation as “wolves in wolves’ clothing.” They were, in one British phrase of the time, “oversexed, overpaid, and over here.” England’s men were absent in large numbers, and its women had survived blackout and Blitz. The US soldiers’ presence contributed to a shake-up of British sexual mores, already under strain from the war. Back in the United States, “Victory Girls” gave free sex to soldiers as their “patriotic duty.”
The ill-defined “‘victory girl’ was usually assumed to be a woman who pursued sexual relations with servicemen out of a misplaced patriotism or a desire for excitement. She could also, without actually engaging in sexual relations, was testing the perimeters of social freedom in wartime America. According to FBI statistics, the number of women charged with morals violations doubled in the war years. A “surprising number were young married women.” Detroit banned unescorted women from bars after 8 pm. In Germany too, as social control disintegrated at the end of World War II, civilian gender limits expanded. In the Rhineland in 1945, advancing Allied forces found “Edelweiss gangs” of young men in pink shirts and bobby-sox, who “roamed the rubble hurling insults and stones at the Hitler Youth – when they were not trading sexual favors with willing girls.” Source: www.warandgender.com
The Seventh Veil (1945) - British Classic Noir - Full Movie, starring James Mason, Ann Todd, Herbert Lom...The movie begins with Francesca (Ann Todd) in the hospital—mental hospital it’s soon revealed. Recovering from her unsuccessful suicide attempt, she tells her life’s story to psychiatrist Dr. Larsen (Herbert Lom). This is one of those rare films where the psychiatrist doesn’t fall in love with his patient.
She relates going to live with her crippled, pianist guardian, Nicholas, who imperiously turns her piano talents into concert pianist proportions. And she dutifully becomes famous, as a love of music drives her as much as it drives her cousin. Francesca’s first love is an “American” band leader (British actor Hugh McDermott, sans an American accent), but when she informs Nicholas she plans to marry, he decrees otherwise, as he is her guardian until she’s twenty-one. Nicholas commissions him to paint her portrait, which eventually hangs on Nicholas’ wall, á la Gene Tierney’s portrait in Laura, Joanne Woodward’s in Sleuth, Jennifer Jones’ in Portrait of Jennie. Source: classicfilmfreak.com
The Passionate Friends (1948) - David Lean David Lean's film adaptation of the H. G. Wells story, starring Ann Todd, Trevor Howard and Claude Rains.
Ann Todd plays Sylvia Leeds Kent in "Sylvia" from "Alfred Hitchcock presents" (19 Jan. 1958)
Sylvia is a young woman who we think is contemplating suicide. Her ex-husband, Peter, married her for money. When he forged a check, her father agreed not to prosecute if he divorced her. Now Sylvia is again in touch with Peter, and wants him back. Peter calls her father and tells him that he will stay out of her life for a price. Sylvia's father tells her about his blackmail scheme, and she tells him that she bought a gun to use on Peter if they did not get back together. She goes to her room alone and is followed by her father, who is worried about her and tries to retrieve the gun.
The original "Rear Window" ("It Had to Be Murder", written by Cornell Woolrich in 1942) had no love story and no additional neighbors for L.B. Jeffries to spy on, and those elements were created by Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes in the 1954 film version. Woolrich enrolled at New York's Columbia University in 1921 where he spent a re1atively undistinguished year, until he was taken ill and was laid up for some weeks. It was during this illness, a Rear-Window-like confinement involving a gangrenous foot, according to one version of the story, that Woolrich started writing, producing his first novel, the Fitzgerald-esque Cover Charge, which was published in 1926. The following year a second 'jazz-age' novel, Children of the Ritz, won a college magazine's literary prize which led to Woolrich landing a job as a Hollywood screenwriter.
Woolrich moved to Hollywood in 1928, to work under contract to First National Pictures, apparently on the script of Children of the Ritz. Whatever Woolrich did during his stint in Hollywood, he received no screen credits under his own name. Although Woolrich had published six 'jazz-age' novels-party-antics and romances of the beautiful young things on the fringes of American society-between 1926 and 1932, he was unable to establish himself as a 'serious' writer. Perhaps because the 'jazz-age' novel was dead in the water by the nineteen thirties when the depression had begun to take hold, Woolrich was unable to find a publisher for his seventh novel, I Love You, Paris, so he literally threw away the typescript--and re-invented himself as a pulp writer. -“Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich” (1999) by Eddie Duggan
Woolrich's biographer Francis M. Nevins describes "Phantom Lady" (1944) as a breakthrough for both Woolrich and Siodmak. It put Woolrich on the map as a source of dark, suspenseful screen stories, and allowed Siodmak to go on to make such noir classics as The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949). In his performance as Henderson’s friend Marlowe, Franchot Tone seems hell-bent on one-upping Cook’s manic skin-pounder. Thomas Gomez is more restrained, giving a characteristically solid performance as the good-hearted cop who gets the great lines “I’ll get the murderer sooner or later. It’s always easier when they’re insane.”
Phantom Lady is prime Woolrich. Between 1942 and 1950, 15 Hollywood movies were made from Woolrich’s work. In 1946, his best year for sales, Woolrich earned around $60,000. But as time went on too many of his properties were sold for too little. Woolrich bitterly recalled that Alfred Hitchock paid $600 for the movie rights to Rear Window. Woolrich’s agent H. N. Swanson sold that story and seven others for $5,000. Woolrich’s first two novels showed the influence of his hero F. Scott Fitzgerald. His second book, Children of the Ritz (1927), won a $10,000 prize from College Humour magazine. -Ben Terrall (Noir City, Winter 2015)
In West of Sunset, novelist Stewart O' Nan imagines F. Scott Fitzgerald's final years, which he spent in Hollywood. The book opens in 1937 in North Carolina, where Fitzgerald is "just eking out a living" writing short stories, O'Nan tells NPR's Scott Simon. He is deeply in debt to his agent Harold Ober, O'Nan explains, "but he sees a chance to get out of debt by going to Hollywood and he seizes it." "Having nothing to add, with a view of the whole room, Scott lost himself in stargazing. Right beside Ronald Colman, Spencer Tracy was tucking into a tripledecker club; next to him, her famous lips pursed, Katharine Hepburn blew on a spoonful of tomato soup. Mayer and Cukor were showily spinning an hourglass-shaped cage of dice to see who’d pay. It was much like Cottage, his dining club at Princeton: while the place was open to all, the best tables were tacitly reserved for the chosen. The rest of them were extras." -"West of Sunset" (2014) by Stewart O'Nan
Ann Todd and Trevord Howard in "The Passionate Friends" (1948) directed by David Lean
Wells, H. G. (1866–1946) English novelist now best known for his science-fiction romances, including The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The Passionate Friends: A Novel (1913). Fitzgerald reviewed God, the Invisible King (1917) for the the Nassau Literary Magazine and in 1917 called The New Machiavelli (1911) “the greatest English novel of the century” (to Edmund Wilson, 1917). Wells influenced This Side of Paradise - his novel The Research Magnificent (1915) was one of the “quest novels” that influenced Amory Blaine, and Rosalind Connage is partly based on Beatrice Normandy from Tono-Bungay (1909).
When Edmund Wilson read the typescript of This Side of Paradise in November 1919, he described it as “an exquisite burlesque of Compton Mackenzie with a pastiche of Wells thrown in at the end”. However, Fitzgerald renounced Wells’s influence: “Such a profound and gifted man as John Dos Passos should never enlist in Wells’ faithful but aenemic platoon along with Walpole, Floyd Dell and Mencken’s late victim, Ernest Poole. The only successful Wellsian is Wells. Let us slay Wells, James Joyce and Anatole France that the creation of literature may continue”. Wells’s Outline of History (1920) was the foundation of Fitzgerald’s “College of One” plan for educating Sheilah Graham. In F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique, James E. Miller, Jr., sees the change from This Side of Paradise to The Great Gatsby as a very conscious change in Fitzgerald’s movement away from H. G. Wells’s technique of “saturation” toward Henry James’s technique of “selection”. Fitzgerald renounced Wells’s influence in his review of John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921), and his thinking through to “selection” as an essential aspect of the writer’s craft accounts for his strong criticism of Thomas Wolfe’s work.-"H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life" (1985) by Anthony West
