arts•meme » hollywood history

Remnants of “The Players” found in anthropological dig of Los Angeles nightclub property

debra — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:28 +0000

Our story concerns the film director Preston Sturges, whose great legacy is his canon of laugh-out-loud, politically tinged screwball comedies: “Sullivan’s Travels,” “The Palm Beach Story,” “The Lady Eve,” among them.

The former private home where Sturges’ bar/restaurant, The Players, once operated still stands at 8225 Sunset Boulevard. In the 1940s it formed a Triangle of Amazingness with neighbors Chateau Marmont (next door) and the Garden of Allah complex (caddy-corner).

With its innocent-looking checkerboard balcony beckoning both trouble and fun, this building just screams vintage Los Angeles.

[Click photo for detail.]

Reprinted from The Hollywood Reporter (04.06.12)

Harry Morton— son of Hard Rock founder Peter Morton — soon will open the second L.A. outpost of his Mexican restaurant chain Pink Taco at 8225 Sunset Blvd. During the renovation of the property, which has been Miyagi’s, the Roxbury and Imperial Gardens, Morton, 30, peeled back enough layers to discover traces of the site’s original hotspot: Preston Sturges’ Players Club.

Run from 1940 to 1953, the multilevel supper club, frequented by Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles and Howard Hughes, was a nexus of the Hollywood scene. Morton dug out the entrance to the Players’ legendary VIP tryst tunnel — which connected to the adjacent Chateau Marmont and has long since been sealed by the city — as well as a revolving circular band stage buried beneath the dance floor that he hopes to restore in a later phase of the project.

“When I first got into this place, it had years of shit piled on top,” says Morton. “But when I stripped it all down, incredible things came to light.

The new club going in? “The Pink Taco.” Ya’d think that a legendary watering hole frequented by Humphrey Bogart might inspire different treatment. Chasen’s, the Brown Derby, the Cocoanut Grove, Ciro’s — all gone. Musso’s on Hollywood Boulevard, imperturbable or so it seems, still operates.

Writer Martin Turnbull tells the story of The Players on his website.

Sturges died at The Algonquin Hotel. That’s classy.

Rarely viewed version of “The Great Gatsby” starring Alan Ladd opens film noir festival

debra — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 08:43:01 +0000

An unusual choice for the opening act of the Noir City film festival — The Great Gatsby (1949, Paramount) in a new 35 mm print. The festival, now on at the Egyptian Theatre, is co-produced by the Film Noir Foundation and the American Cinematheque.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great masterwork from 1925 is far from pulp fiction. But it taps themes of the American underbelly — the tug between money, social power, and love. Perfect fodder for dark cinematic treatment.

Director Elliott Nugent’s Gatsby, shot in b/w, has undeniable noir characteristics. It charts Gatsby’s downward trajectory — a key noir theme. Naturally, it’s a woman who brings our hero down. But the well-born Daisy Buchanan (Betty Field) is a good girl, not a femme fatale. When at the end of the film she sacrifices Gatsby, contributing to his death, her gangsta stripes surface. Another of the novel’s elements that meld well with film noir is the pulpy portrayal of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s tootsie girlfriend. She’s played by Shelly Winters — born to play this role. Her aggrieved husband (Howard da Silva), seeking justice, shoots Ladd in the back in a swimming pool murder scene worthy of “Sunset Boulevard.”

Film noir experts Eddie Muller and Alan Rode, festival organizers, spoke prior to the screening. Said Rode: “Ten months ago, no one knew there was an Alan Ladd version of Gatsby. Some good people at Universal Pictures struck a new print in 35 mm, saying ‘Damn the rights!’”

Added Muller, “Alan Ladd is the perfect Jay Gatsby. This is a revelatory performance. Alan Ladd was instrumental in getting Gatsby made.”

In 1949, when the film was released, the great American novelist was not yet dead ten years (he perished in West Hollywood in 1941). Censorship issues hampered the film’s development process — not sex per se, but there was a general aversion to the novel’s morally loose jazz-age values. This seems ludicrous today. So many people working in Hollywood in 1949 must have known Scott. So it’s interesting and sad (so much related to Fitzgerald is sad) that the film had such a tough time getting made.

Calling Ladd “somewhat of a forgotten actor,” Muller noted that, “Every fourth movie at Paramount in the 1940s starred Alan Ladd. He was a huge star.

“There are not many blonde actors from this era.”

Ladd indeed gives off a fine air of elegance, desire, Fitzgeraldean romanticism, and criminality as the bootlegger Gatsby.

Fun to see this in anticipation of Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” starring Leonardo diCaprio to be released at year end. I find diCaprio such uninspired casting for this role. Ugh, I last saw him flopping around like a beached whale as J. Edgar Hoover. Jay Gatsby is such a beautiful role for a man, although Fitzgerald sketches him so minimally in the book. I’d like to see him as hounded, edgy, and messed up, like Robert Downey Jr. can be. Downey’s too old now, as is Christian Bale who could be a great Gatsby. Clooney could also be good, but he too is too old. Redford wasn’t right either. I did enjoy Alan Ladd’s portrayal, but he played against an ill-cast Daisy. Why can’t Hollywood get Fitzgerald right? It’s like a curse.

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Stars light up Hollywood Boulevard, once more, at TCM Fest [slideshow]

mark — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:45:38 +0000

Paramount producer Robert Evans discusses "Black Sunday"

Angie Dickinson, Ben Mankiewicz

Angie Dickinson

Robert Osborne & Debbie Reynolds discuss "How the West Was Won"

Robert Osborne & Tony Roberts discuss Annie Hall

Robert Osborne, Tony Roberts

Robert Wagner, Robert Osborne

Kim Novak, hand/footprint ceremony @ Chinese Theatre

Kim Novak's hand and footprints at the Chinese Theatre

Kim Novak, Robert Osborne, Robert Wagner

The Egyptian Theatre, Los Angeles treasure

Baby Peggy Montgomery

Thelma Schoonmaker, film editor

Robert Osborne, Michael Murphy

Robert Osborne, Debbie Reynolds

Marge Champion, Leonard Maltin

Carla Laemmle, Leonard Maltin

Ben Mankiewicz, director Norman Jewison

Robert Osborne, Kim Novak, Debbie Reynolds

TCM Fest: Good god! Peggy Cummins heats up “Gun Crazy”

debra — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:04:02 +0000

It was wild watching “Gun Crazy” (1950) projected on the humongous screen of the Egyptian Theatre as I did yesterday afternoon at TCM Fest.

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s pulpy film-noir concerns a couple of newly weds; played by John Dall and Peggy Cummins, they’re just doin’ what newly weds do. They’re livin’, lovin’, and workin’ … and they’re shootin’. It’s a match made in hell — just a couple of good old-fashioned American gun nuts. Teaming up, they detach with ease from the conventional path. Soon they’re on the lam. They rob banks and payroll departments; in the process, they pop a few unlucky losers who get in their way (he regrets this, she can justify it). Then they screech their way across rural America in stolen getaway cars.

(Sound familiar? Yes, a clear precursor to Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.”)

I watched “Gun Crazy” from the relative safe haven of the Egyptian Theatre balcony; descending the staircase after the film, I felt queasy, messed up … freaked out.

“Gun Crazy”‘s violent tour swings through the nation’s middle swathe and ends up ~ where else ~ on the Santa Monica pier. Then comes a desperate foot chase in the wilds of northern California. Argh, it’s a hard-boiled finish. California basically does them in.

Ramping up the film”s heat is a hugely visceral and instinctual performance by the then-18-year old Peggy Cummins, a British actress first brought to Hollywood by Daryl Zanuck in 1945. Cummins was in person at TCM Fest yesterday. That alone is a miracle.

Film noir expert and curator of TCM’s film noir department, Eddie Muller, interviewed the actress. Calling “Gun Crazy” “hugely influential,” Muller noted that neither Godard’s “Breathless” nor Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” would have existed without it. Muller (who knows his stuff) called Cummins’s performance in the film “the signature female performance in a film noir,” then, going further, “the most ferocious female performance in American cinema.”

High praise. Explained Cummins:

“I came to America, it was 1945. I left in 1950, and haven’t been back since. It’s lovely to be here.

“It was all such a long time ago. Darryl Zanuck gave me a contract with Fox. I came to play in “Forever Amber.” But I didn’t. They didn’t think I was sexy enough.

“I have made films with Ronald Coleman, Edward G. Robinson, Victor Mature, Vincent Price, and yet this, “Gun Crazy” is the one that stood out.

“Fox made a big splash for me when I came over. I weighed 98 pounds and had an 18″ waist.

“I went to Zanuck’s party [at his home.] All these people were there, Lubitsch, Tyrone Power, Joan Crawford. I said ‘Hello,’ as though I knew them. It was awesome. They were stars; I was an actress.”

“The tendency, if you were a bit short, blonde and rather pretty, was for a conventional role, but this was quite a meaty part. An actor wants to play against type.”

Cummins recalled the iconic bank robbery sequence, the footage for which filmed by a crew, cinema-verité style, in the back seat of the getaway car, all in one take, with improvised dialogue. “They [director Lewis, the d.p., and sound man] designed a car, I was driving the car. Behind me was the camera, the crew, the sound, they were breathing down my neck. They told me, You’ve got to park the car, John Dall gets out and make up your own dialogue. A policeman walked up. I get out of the car, saying, hello, I’m just waiting for somebody. That’s a nice gun you’ve got, he says to me, and then all hell breaks loose. John Dall gets out of the bank and he jumps in the car. It was all in a single take, about four minutes long. It was quite something.”

_{Peggy Cummins discussing Gun Crazy on Saturday at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, California. 4/14/12 Photographer: Jason Merritt}

TCM Fest: “Frankenstein’s gonna bite me and kill me,” said five-year-old Mel Brooks

debra — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 08:02:58 +0000

In conversation with Turner Classic Movies creative exec, Tom Brown, prior to the TCM Fest screening of his great comedy classic, Young Frankenstein (1974), director Mel Brooks dug deep into his memory bank.

Asked by Brown what spurred his ribald take-off of the James Whale horror flick, Brooks recalled:

“In 1931, I was five years old, I was already born. I was deep into poverty.

“They were playing Frankenstein at the Commodore Theater in Williamsburg [Brooklyn]. My mother took me.

“Now, we called the monster “Frankenstein.” You know, the big guy who scared the shit out of us?

“He [not the scientist] was Frankenstein.

“That night, I told my mother to close the window. She said to me, ‘We’re on the fifth floor of a tenement. It’s hot. And air conditioning hasn’t been invented yet.’

“I said to her, ‘Frankenstein is gonna come and bite me and kill me.’

“My mother said, ‘In order for Frankenstein to come up the fire escape, he has to take a train from Transylvania to the port and then he has to take a boat across the ocean and then he has to take the BMT to Brooklyn and then he’ll get the people on the first floor before he would climb five stories up our fire escape.’

“So I let her open the window.”

Brooks went on to recount how his good pal, Gene Wilder, had the initial idea for the flick, and how together they developed it, and how Alan Ladd Jr. at Twentieth Century Fox backed the film’s two million dollar budget.

“Young Frankenstein” rocked the walls of the Egyptian tonight. Of all the bit players in the film — and they are all so hilarious — Marty Feldman (“Damn your eyes!”" Too late!”) gets my vote as the funniest.

_{Tom Brown discusses Young Frankenstein with Mel Brooks on Friday at the 2012 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood, California. 4/13/12 Photographer: Edward M. Pio Roda}

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Mel Brooks & Carl Reiner: Still Kings of Comedy

“Travis Banton inspired my dressing Cher,” says Bob Mackie at TCM Fest

debra — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:27:18 +0000

In a curtain talk with costume historian Deborah Nadoolman-Landis prior to a TCM Fest opening-night screening of Cleopatra, Bob Mackie described an early influence. It was designer Travis Banton’s amazing costumes for Claudette Colbert in Cecil B. DeMille’s at-turns-camp, at-turns-sumptuous Roman romp.

“I was thirteen, I lived in Inglewood, there were three movie theaters there. An old revival house was showing Cleopatra. Claudette was playing this woman [whose dress] had a strap this way, a strap that way. I saw things I never saw in my life.

“In the fifties, you thought all women’s breasts go outward to a point. Here, you see jiggle.

“Nothing hangs over the edge. the body is smooth and lovely.

“But Cleopatra’s handmaidens look period. They were from the Burlesque downtown.”

Nadoolman-Landis noted that although the film is shot in black and white, the costumes in Cleopatra were created in color. She said, “We have one dress that we’re putting in an upcoming display of Hollywood costume in London. It’s from the scene where Colbert is having her make-up done. It’s a heavy satin dress; it looks white, but it’s mint green.”

Mackie said that color was necessary for the actresses psychologically, even though it did not read in the final film.

“I worked in black-and-white television starting in 1963 with the Judy Garland show.”

Noodleman-Landis described Paramount’s gifted chief designer who was reknowned for dressing Mae West, Carole Lombard, Miriam Hopkins, and Marlene Dietrich: “His genius was apparent. People haven’t heard about him. If anyone wants to do a biography of him, now’s the time.”

Said Mackie, “When I first started designing for Cher, she didn’t want to look like anyone else. She wasn’t Sandra Dee. She was lean and long. She was a vamp.

“Recently, I went back and looked at Travis Banton’s fabulous Roman gowns for Cleopatra. And I thought, ‘I really knocked that movie off!’”

Travis Banton is a popular subject at arts·meme. Read more:

Travis Banton turned tootsies into stars
All hail Paramount costumer Travis Banton
Travis Banton undresses Miriam Hopkins
C.B.’s captivating “Cleopatra”
Gaultier knocks off Bob Mackie’s thong for Cher

spring holiday weekend at arts·meme

debra — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:13:04 +0000

Cecil B. DeMille lived right down the road from arts·meme global headquarters. His crossing-of-the-Red-Sea special effect in “The Ten Commandments” (1956) may have been inspired by crossing Los Feliz Boulevard. Just as tough.

We wish you and yours a Happy Passover and Happy Easter!

_{thank you jonathan rosenbaum for the photo}

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Noir City: Hollywood, 14th annual festival of film noir opens soon @ Egyptian Theatre

debra — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:23:03 +0000

Fourteen years ago, the American Cinematheque launched its inaugural festival of film noir. Back in 1999 it was called “Side Streets and Back Alleys: A Festival of Film Noir,” and it featured dozens of forgotten films, retrieved from critical exile, that have since been recognized as unjustly neglected genre gems, with many returned to circulation via DVD.

This year the the festival returns to the Egyptian Theatre, where it all began, with a super lineup of films ranging from pre-Code proto-noir (OKAY, AMERICA and AFRAID TO TALK) to perennial festival favorites (T-MEN, THE WINDOW, CAGED) to rediscovered rarities (NAKED ALIBI, SHIELD FOR MURDER, JOHNNY ALLEGRO, MANHANDLED, THREE STRANGERS, Alan Ladd’s 1949 THE GREAT GATSBY).

I’m all for F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I’ll go to the opening night Alan Ladd double-bill,

THE GREAT GATSBY (1949)

Universal, 91 min, USA, Dir: Elliott Nugent

Resurrected at last is this Golden Age version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, unseen for decades. Thanks to our friends at Universal Pictures, Alan Ladd’s noir-tinged take on the timeless tale of shady success and lost love can be seen again, in a brand-new print made exclusively for Noir City! Screenplay by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum, based on the novel and a play by Owen Davis. Directed by Elliott Nugent. An intriguing take on an American classic. NOT ON DVD
THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)
Universal, 81 min, USA, Dir: Frank Tuttle

Alan Ladd skyrocketed to stardom playing vengeful assassin Philip Raven in this stylish adaptation of Graham Greene’s classic novel of espionage, transposed to the California coast. Veronica Lake sizzles in her first of seven onscreen pairings with Ladd, and noir favorites Laird Cregar and Marc Lawrence lend memorable support. Directed by Frank Tuttle, from a screenplay by W.R. Burnett (THE ASPHALT JUNGLE) and Albert Maltz (NAKED CITY)

_{Thank you, American Cinematheque, for text.}
_{Photo, Alan Ladd in “Gatsby”}

Noir City: Hollywood | Egyptian Theatre | opens Friday April 20 | full sked here

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Doris Day shares career memories on TCM

debra — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 06:18:27 +0000

TCM does such a wonderful job … no one does it better.

The best bits come when Day recounts memories of working with James Cagney, Ginger Rogers, and Jack Lemmon.

[Apologies if you get a horrifying anti-smoking commercial first. We'll try to strip out soon.]

Julie Andrews granted “Gypsy” award by Professional Dancers Society

debra — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:11:53 +0000

An amazing line up of talent on view at the Professional Dancers Society 25th anniversary gala luncheon honoring Julie Andrews on March 18, 2012. Previous PDS honorees Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, Marge Champion, Mitzi Gaynor, Carol Burnett, Joni Berry (Chairman of PDS), Rita Moreno and Florence Henderson, join Julie Andrews on stage as she receives the Gypsy Award!

Click on the photo to view some major female talent in that front row.

_{photo by Nathan Sternfeld/Professional Dancers Society, courtesy of MissMitziGaynor.com}