Julie on set in gold head-to-toe makeup applied by makeup man Antole Robbins, Flynn observing at rear c. 1952
Beyond his many physical gifts that made him the most derring-do of screen actors to famously do his own stuntwork, the long-legged Aussie-born movie star, Erroll Flynn (1909-1959) could also dance. Who knew? It was a gem of a factoid shared in an interview with dancer/Cat Woman, Julie Newmar. She is someone who would know, she worked with Flynn on a project in Cuba, we are not yet certain its title.
“I want to tell you something else,” Julie told me. “Something he’s never been given credit for. This person is a non dancer. But he was a natural. He was born on the island of Australia, and that was Errol Flynn. If you can find him doing a song and dance number; I have never seen such a natural dancer, singer. He is known only as an actor, his timing was out of this world, his instincts were better than dancer-dancers.”
By day, it wasn’t an ‘urban underbelly.’ It was Anytown USA, a hustle-bustle neighborhood of oversized Victorian homes with porticoes and porch swings; corner grocery stores, playgrounds and bus stops. It was the terminus of the charming funicular, Angel’s Flight, that shuttled workers to and from their downtown Los Angeles jobs. By day, the flattish hilltop community was flooded by California sun. After sunset, it was a town transformed. That’s when the bars, the broads, and the bad-boys, the losers and the lost ones, skulked the streets creating a mythic identity of L.A. Noir forever linked to old Bunker Hill.
Marsak tells the story of the district’s inception in the mid-19th century to its present day. Once home to the wealthy living in Los Angeles’s ‘first suburb,’ then the epicenter of the city’s shifting demographics, Bunker Hill survived its attempted erasure and reemerged as a hub of arts, politics, business, and tourism. It went from bad boys to ballet boys.
photo courtesy nathan marsak
We asked a friend of artsmeme, Chris Nichols, an author, cultural historian and bright light behind the “Ask Chris,” column of Los Angeles Magazine, to give us his reaction to the book.
I liked the book a lot. Nathan Marsak is brilliant and funny. He manages to weave several interconnected stories about politics, urbanism, art, film noir, redevelopment, as well as a straight history of how this neighborhood came to be — and how it came to be destroyed. The destruction of Bunker Hill is a great Los Angeles myth which everyone approaches with some intrinsic bias (like the history of Dodger Stadium) and Marsak does a good job of being impartial. He’s passionate, but not placing blame on any one person or side. He obviously spent years on research and you can tell. He talks as though he were there — and that’s my favorite kind of historian.
Chris Nichols, on ‘Bunker Hill Los Angeles: Essence of Sunshine and Noir‘
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The longstanding professional relationships of the Alan Broadbent Trio might indicate that the recording at hand is the result of a comfy, well-worn process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each selection of their new album, Trio in Motion (Savant) is a journey, and the performances are travelogues that sometimes surprise the musicians as much ...
