Meet Ernest Belcher’s prize pupil, Pola Negri 2
News of the digital restoration of The Spanish Dancer (1923) by Milestone Film & Video and the Eye Film Museum caught our fancy for several reasons. The silent movie is promoted as a “great romance epic,” and gosh, you can never get enough of that, right? In its making, director Herbert Brenon employed a “cast ...
More than a ‘mogul’: 20th C-Fox’s Darryl Zanuck in new Eyman book and on TCM 3
Oct
4
2021
New Eyman book for Running Press The respected and feared Darryl F. Zanuck ran his studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, like a Swiss watch and devised entertainment for the masses, including bright musicals starring Fox blondes Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, even Shirley Temple. He commandeered technologically innovative epics (The Robe, the movies’ first CinemaScope production), ...
Santa, please put Cary Grant under the tree!
Dec
21
2020
He was just so gorgeous right? And so very, very Cary Grant. That elocution, that accent: Cockney base, polished overlay. His comic timing, his dramatic line-readings. His credibility. His love-making, both on-screen and off. His pratfalls! His haberdashery. Everything under control; everything perfect. But then you would hear things to the contrary. That he was ...
Social distancing — from John Wayne
When film historian Scott Eyman published his comprehensive biography, John Wayne: The Life & Legend, in 2014, John Wayne, who died in 1979, was long since a controversial figure — and a polarizing one. But surely never in Eyman’s imagination could he predict that six years hence, the Democratic Party of Orange County, California, would ...
‘Exuberant’ Peter Fonda, remembered by film historian Scott Eyman
Aug
19
2019
peter fonda, scott eyman, tcm fest 2015 Ed. note: A personal reminiscence of the recently departed actor by the biographer of his father, Henry Fonda. Scott Eyman contributes this anecdote to the blog: I was drinking a Coke in the Green Room when Peter Fonda walked in with a drink – a martini with an ...
Tarantino’s dream: the Pussycat meets the Bookshop 2
Women around the world are beside themselves with joy to see movie director Quentin Tarantino bring back the sleaze old days of the late sixties, when XXX-rated porn movies spooled at the bygone Pussycat Theatre. Admittedly, even I miss rolling by this colorful (ahem, it was the color purple) ediface of screaming architecture on the ...
Respected film biographers converse @ TCM Fest
A Friday panel discussion—one of many such interesting events at “Club TCM,” a special gathering place for attendees of TCM Classic Film Festival—tapped the minds, memories and methodologies of three prominent film biographers: Donald Bogle, Scott Eyman, William J. Mann, with smart moderation by TCM’s Alicia Malone. Invited by Ms. Malone to consider their careers ...
Hank & Jim & Scott bring new book to Los Angeles
Oct
29
2017
In his new book,“Hank and Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart,” New York Times bestselling author Scott Eyman tells the story of the remarkable friendship of two Hollywood legends who, though different in many ways, maintained a close friendship that endured. Henry Fonda and James Stewart were two of Hollywood’s biggest ...
Memo to L.B. from W.R. re: ‘hoodoo’ president
Excerpted from “Lion of Hollywood,” by the award-winning film historian Scott Eyman, whose new book, “Hank and Jim” concerning the lifelong friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart will be out in November 2017. In his 2005 biography of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, Eyman captures a fascinating exchange between two prominent right-wingers of ...
Author Scott Eyman to discuss “John Wayne – The Life and Legend” Apr 14
Just because TCM Classic Film Festival will be ramping down on Hollywood Boulevard next Monday does not mean that fantastic film events will disappear! Indeed, April 14 offers a stellar and intimate conversation with one of the nation’s leading scholars and writers of Hollywood history, discussing his latest oeuvre, his biography of John Wayne. That ...