Showing posts with label hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hollywood. Show all posts

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Hollywood friendship – Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks

While walking down the Hollywood Boulevard one day, Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977) saw a large poster in front of a movie theater that announced a new film comedy in which Douglas Fairbanks played.

There was a young man standing there, and Chaplin asked him:
     - Boy, have you seen this movie?
     - Of course! – the boy answered. 
     - Is it funny? – asked Chaplin.-   What a stupid question. I died laughing.  Fairbanks is the best.
     - Is he good like Chaplin? 
     - Much better than that wretched Chaplin, for whom I only feel pity.continued the young man. 
     - If so, let me introduce myself. I am Charlie Chaplin! – Chaplin angrily exclaimed. 
     - I am pleased to meet you. I am Douglas Fairbanks!

After this unusual acquaintance, Chaplin and Fairbanks became very good friends.
read more...

Friday, May 06, 2011

Hollywood experience – Dirk Bogarde

In 1960, famous British film and theater actor, Dirk Bogarde (1921-1999) went to Hollywood to film a movie called “Song Without End”. The movie was about the life of famous virtuoso pianist Franz Lizst.

After making that movie, Dirk Bogarde said that Americans are very uncultured and that he has no intention to ever come to Hollywood again.

Why?

Here is one line from the script that Liszt says in the movie, and which completely made mad Dirk Bogarde, who was known as perfect connoisseur of music and literature:

Hi, do you know my friend? This is George Sand. That’s your friend Chopin. This is Hubert. Common meet George Sand.
read more...

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Banana peel – Charlie Chaplin

Famous actor David Niven (1910-1983) wrote in his autobiography an anecdote when screenwriter Charles MacArthur (1895-1956) asked Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) for advice on how to design a gag in which a fat lady is walking down the street, slipping on a banana peel and falling down. Since such a stunt was performed thousands of times before, how to do it and make the audience laugh?

Should he first show the banana peel, then the lady approaching, and then the fall? Or, to show the fat lady first, and then the banana peel on which she slips?

Charlie Chaplin immediately replied:

"You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps OVER the banana peel and disappears down a manhole."
read more...

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Interrupted kiss – Alfred Hitchcock

At the time when Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was making  the movie "Notorious", and that was in 1946, the Motion Picture Production Code (in other words - censorship), popularly known as Hays Code (after Hollywood's chief censor of the time, Will H. Hays) prohibited scenes of a kiss longer than three seconds.

However, Hitchcock wanted for the kissing scene of the main characters in this film, actress Ingrid Bergman and actor Cary Grant, to go into the history as the most beautiful movie kiss, and also the longest movie kiss, so he decided to extend that kiss with any means possible.

Finally, cunning Hitchcock edited that kiss like this: Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are kissing for three seconds, then they are saying something to each other for a few seconds, then they are kissing again for three seconds, then they break away for just a second, then kissing again for three seconds, then they are whispering something to each other on the ear, and then again kissing for three seconds, and so on…

Their kiss lasted for two-and-a-half minutes, and it is perhaps the most intimate and erotic movie kiss ever.


read more...

Friday, April 08, 2011

Marilyn Monroe - Madness and her last days

In the book “Fragments”, which is based on diaries, letters and various writings of Marilyn Monroe, sex symbol of the 20th century, it is revealed that after a series of psychiatric sessions she ended up in mental hospital’s solitary confinement, and that doctor Greenson came there to examine – her breasts.


"Alone!!! I am alone-I am always alone no matter what." – with this begins the earliest of several diaries written by Marilyn Monroe, sexiest and most desirable women of the 20th century, according to "Playboy". Her diaries, sketches, poems, letters, various notes and rare photographs, dating from between 1951 and 1961, are published (in 2010) in a book called "Fragments". They are significant because, for the first time, Marilyn Monroe explains herself – she is presented outside of Hollywood splendor, myths and legends that were woven around her name in recent decades.

That book revealed her fears of sexual abuse, betrayal of her third husband, ghosts of inherited madness, traumas from psychotherapy to which she was forced, and an eerie testimony about the mental hospital in which she was involuntarily taken.

Of countless men who have passed through her life the most famous was John F. Kennedy, the most faithful was Joe DiMaggio… but the most trace in her life left her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, who managed to make her the happiest and most unhappiest woman in the world.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were probably in their happiest phase during the summer of 1957, which they spent in a rented house on Long Island. They spent their time there swimming and taking long walks on the beach. She looked splendidly on the photographs from that period. That was the time when she happily stepped into her husband’s world - She was joyful and witty at the dinner in the company of writers Carson McCullers and Isak Dinesen, she became friends with Truman Capote,  and met some of her literary heroes such as poet Carl Sandburg and writer Saul Bellow, with whom she had dinner while she waited for the premiere of “Some Like It Hot" in Chicago. The sexiest blonde knocked Bellow of his feet.

Writers and books were not a coincidence in her life. "Esquire" once published a photo of her reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. There was also a photo of her reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine. Magazine “Life” once depicted Marilyn reading a book in front of a shelve with books. She had her personal library with 400 volumes that included works of history, philosophy, fiction...

In London, where they traveled in the fall of that same year to film her "The Prince and the Showgirl" movie with Laurence Olivier, Miller caused her greatest disappointment in life. 

Marilyn and her husband moved to a magnificent estate in Surrey, near London. Everything seemed perfect. She was producing a film in which played (and was directed by) one of the most respected actors of her generation and she lived in a large country house with the man she loved the most. As an artist she couldn’t have felt more fulfilled, until a coincidence buried her otherwise very fragile self-confidence and her trust in her husband.  She ran into a Miller’s diary in which he complained that he was disappointed with her and that sometimes he is ashamed having her in his company in front of friends. After reading those entries, Marilyn was destroyed.  One of her biggest fears came true - that she will disappoint the man she loves.

Formally speaking, Marilyn Monroe was not an orphan because her mother Gladys Monroe Baker eventually outlived her famous daughter. But since Gladys was a schizophrenic who spent years going in and out of psychiatric institutions, Marilyn was virtually abandoned and raised in a number of adoptive families, including the family of her mother’s close friend Grace Goddard.

Her first husband, James Dougherty, liked the idea of saving a shy and nice girl, who left high school to marry him. It is not surprising that their marriage fell apart - they divorced in September 1946. “My relationship with him was basically insecure from the first night I spent alone with him,” Marilyn wrote in her diary.

Her second marriage with baseball player Joe DiMaggio, who was one of the most famous names in sport‘s world, also failed. Their marriage lasted only nine months. DiMaggio was almost in his forties and he wanted, with all his heart, for his wife to leave Hollywood and become a housewife. Instead, he became "Mr. Monroe”, and that was too much for his jealousy and frustration. However, when she died, for twenty years DiMaggio sent flowers to her grave three times a week.

She began to visit psychotherapists at the urging of her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, to whom she went in the spring of 1955 because she wanted to become a serious actress. Strasberg was more than a teacher to her; he was almost a father she never met. By the wish of Marilyn Monroe, Strasberg became executor of her will, which was then heavy about 13 million of dollars. After Strasberg’s death, his widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, inherited that right. She even today earns about a million dollars thanks to Marilyn Monroe’s name.

Persuaded by Strasberg, and after breaking up her marriage with DiMaggio, Marilyn visited a psychiatrist five times a week. Dr. Margaret Hohenberg managed to pull out from Marilyn’s subconscious memories of a difficult childhood, including memories of sexual abuse and harassment of her aunt, Ida Martin, with whom she stayed a few times when she was between 11 and 13 years old.

Two years later, in 1957, Marilyn stopped seeing Dr. Hohenberg. Strasberg then recommended her another doctor, Marianne Kris, who later caused one of the greatest traumas in Marilyn’s life.  During sessions with her, Marilyn discovered that she was always “deeply terrified to really be someone's wife” because she knew “from life one cannot love another, ever, really”.

Three years later, after being totally rejected by Miller (he didn’t even came to her funeral), Marilyn Monroe became Yves Montand’s mistress. Her new doctor became Ralph Greenson – it is not known how much he managed to help her, but it is certain that he was obsessed with Marilyn. Greenson’s daily therapeutic sessions lasted about five hours, but nevertheless, in 1960, in a state of complete emotional disintegration, and upon the recommendation of Dr. Kris, Marilyn ended up in a psychiatric hospital in New York.

Practically, as soon as she entered, Marilyn started requesting to leave. But the more she was persistent about it, the employees of the hospital was more confident in her disease, and they eventually put her into a solitary confinement. Marilyn wrote a letter to Greenson in which she described what were they doing to her, but instead of getting her out of that hospital, he came to examine – her breasts. From hell that lasted for three days she was rescued by DiMaggio.


Marilyn became acquainted with Kennedy brothers in 1961, but she met some members of that family at least five years earlier. She wrote in her diary, that she fears that Peter Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, wants to hurt her - the feeling of violence I’ve had lately about being afraid of Peter he might harm me, poison me, etc.

In August 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead. It is assumed that she committed suicide by drinking a large quantity of sleeping pills.

Childhood – Her guardian wanted to rape her when she was just six years old

In her diaries, Marilyn also wrote about her first marriage with an intelligent and attractive James Dougherty. She married Dougherty on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and he was five years older. Marilyn described her loneliness and insecurity in that sudden marriage, which was less love and more of a way for Marilyn – then Norma Jeane Baker – to seize the opportunity to escape from the life of an orphan, while her guardians, Grace and Ervin Goddard, were in California. Especially because Ervin tried to rape Marilyn when she was just six years old.


read more...

Friday, March 04, 2011

Arnold Schwarzenegger - Conan the Destroyer of California

After two terms as the Governor of California, Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger probably finished his political career. While he will be remembered in California for the debts that he left, the rest of the world will probably link Schwarzenegger’s political career with his proposal to ban the use of words "Mom", "Daddy", "husband" and "wife" in California public schools, because these words "offend feelings of children from gay marriages".

He became the Governor of California in 2003, and thus, he became the second actor, after Ronald Reagan, who got hold of high political positions. That he will run for Governor, on the Republican side, he revealed in a Comedy show. To be even able to participate in general elections he first needed to obtain permission from his wife, because his wife, Maria Shriver, is niece of Edward Kennedy, one of the members of the Kennedy clan, who belong to the Democrats.

With a little help of media and 25 million dollars that he invested in his two election campaigns, but mostly thanks to his acting career, Schwarzenegger won a landslide victory in both elections, in 2003 and 2006. His victories were not endangered even with charges that he used drugs, speculation that his father Gustav committed war crimes in World War II, or insinuation that he had sexually harassed 13 women.

Back in the early nineties, George H.W. Bush cast an eye on him and appointed him as the president of a smaller committee, calling him "Conan the Republican". 

Because of the skepticism about the strength of the U.S. economy, he called the Democrats "economic girlie men. During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he said that he will make him "do squats" to "do something about those skinny legs”, and later that he will make him "do some biceps curls to beef up those scrawny little arms ".

If he could only do something about putting some meat on his ideas”, Schwarzenegger said.

None of that what he said didn’t bothered him to recently publicly recommend himself to Obama - Schwarz said that he would like to get a job in the Obama administration, something regarding ecology. True, Americans admit that he achieved maximum on that field during the seven years he served as the Governor of California. Everything else was a complete fiasco.

During his term, the budget deficit has tripled, reaching 28 billion dollars. Unemployment rate is 13%. This is followed with speculations about a possible economic fiasco of California. At one point, California had no money for payment of regular monthly infrastructural obligations.

Schwarzenegger explained that the state wouldn’t have borrowed that much money if he knew that the global economic crisis will occur. He also said that his political opponents sabotaged his efforts to bring the house in order and improve the state of California's economy. It remains unknown what happened to his ambitious pre-election plan to make each of 36 and a half million residents of California eligible for health insurance, rather than one in five as it was.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had no idea what it was like to govern. Sacramento isn't Hollywood. I also believe that he gave too big promises because probably he did not realize that he will not be able to fulfill them, which somewhat resembles Obama’s failure in fulfilling great promises. Residents of California expected too much. We did not giggle the way the rest of the world did at the Governator assuming office”, said Dr Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior fellow at the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California.

It turned out that Schwarzenegger was far from behaving as a terminator when it comes to economic problems, which is why California citizens completely lost confidence in him.

Schwarzenegger’s new political engagement doesn’t seem too likely: he often worked and operated in contrary to California's Congress, and Republicans went against him when he invited them to cooperate with Obama in order to jointly find a solution for economic recovery and deficit control. The Republicans were not happy and with his proposition of budget deficit of California which he agreed with Washington's administration. The support of his family is also unlikely: although she never prevented her husband to be involved in politics, Maria Shriver was never thrilled with his new job.

But, Schwarzenegger doesn’t have to worry about his future, even if he gives up from the announced intention to write biographical books. In his 30’s he was already a millionaire, and that was before he achieved great success with his movies. He earned his first millions with postal sale of bodybuilding equipment and real estate investments. With Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Demi Moore he invested money in the restaurant chain Planet Hollywood. And despite all costs that he had as a politician, Schwarzenegger’s wealth is now estimated at 800 to 900 million dollars. This amount includes income from bodybuilding, real estate, earnings in the financial market and, of course, earnings from his films.

Nevertheless, the films were the ones that had influence on the magazine TIME and their decision to place him among the 100 people who shaped the world in 2004 and 2007.

The crucial year in Schwarzenegger’s Hollywood career was 1982, when he appeared in "Conan the Barbarian". Until the appearance of "Conan", Schwarzenegger made eight films. He won his first role (lead role) in 1970, in the comedy "Hercules in New York". He even today speaks English with a strong German accent, but at a time of making “Hercules”, he was saying it so badly that the producers were worried about whether the public will understand him at all. The fear was unjustified - the movie itself was terrible, but because of the accent, Arnold is even today called Ahnold.

"Conan the Barbarian", and two years later "Conan the Destroyer", were his first major commercial successes, in which his physical appearance was fully exploited. Neither before nor after these films, no one was counting on a some great acting performance from him. He became mega-star with action movies "Terminator" (1984, 1991, 2003), "Predator" (1987), "Red Sonja", "Commando", "Red Heat", "Total Recall", "Eraser ", "Collateral Damage" and many others.

Besides action movies, among total of 38 movies that he made, he made and a few comedies, like, for example, “Kindergarten Cop".
read more...

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Hollywood with no imagination!

I you look at the remaining potential Hollywood blockbusters in 2010 it is clear that Hollywood is out of new ideas. Big Hollywood hits in the other half of this year will be, as expected, on-screen adaptations of books and comics, sequels of old hits and remakes.



The Hollywood screenwriters, for which is said that they are currently without imagination (or, what is most likely, the best of them have escaped to TV stations like HBO) have, nevertheless, prepared a few realizations which will be interesting to good-action fans. Here are the most interesting movies in the other half of 2010.

  • Predators – July, 9

Hit recycling from the 80s doesn’t guaranty producers some sensational success on the box-office but it is securing them with enough profit to pay of investments in filming. 20th Century Fox Studio has released yesterday Nimrod Antal’s Predators. This is the latest reincarnation of cult franchise about vicious space hunters that are hunting down humans. The cast of this movie is rather unusual. Adrien Brody, a usual aristocrat who was brilliant in the roles as artists, has found himself as a leader of soldiers-mercenaries, which land on a distant planet and discover that their only function is to become a prey for alien hunters. What comes next is fight to the death in which the spectators will more likely be on alien’s side because this group of people is the scum of our world: hired killers, yakuza, and members of death squad.

  • Machete – September, 3

Machete was announced in a rather fanny way in the frame of double feature realization Grindhouse, which was signed by Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror). Now, few years later, Machete is arriving to cinema as independent realization directed by Robert Rodriguez. This movie is about adventures of Machete Cortez (Danny Trejo), a character that appeared in earlier Rodriguez movies, Spy Kids. Machete is a true child of love of Hollywood big-names who have decided to appear in this movie for symbolical fees: Robert De Niro, Don Johnson, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba…

  • Resident Evil 4: Afterlife – September, 10

It’s time for another sequel of the story about Alice (Milla Jovovich) who must fight for her life in a world destroyed by a deadly virus infection. The movie is signed by Paul W. S. Anderson and the rest of the cast is made of Ali Larter, Wenthwort Miller, Sienna Guillory, and others. Milla is fighting again against the evil corporation Umbrella and this time she has a few of her old friends by her side. The plot is placed in Los Angeles which is crawling with monsters.


  • Red – October, 15

In a time when all visual challenges can be solved using state of the art graphical software, adaptations of comic books and graphical novellas have become a common thing in Hollywood. The latest potential hit coming from that genre will be released on October, 15. The movie Red, directed by Robert Schwentke, was created according to the idea from a graphical novella by a famous author Warren Ellis. The cast is a true dream team: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren. The three of them play ex-CIA agents. While fighting against their former employee, these three agents are uncovering the greatest conspiracy in the history of US government.

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – November, 19

Director David Yates, who already signed two parts of Harry Potter serial, has been given the honor to be the author of the last part of a saga about a boy wizard.  This movie will be split on two equal-length parts. Besides Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter and Rade Sherbedzija will also appear. The last chapter of this great movie serial, which began in 2001, tells about Harry, Ron and Hermione who leave Hogwarts School of Magic to go and destroy the very source of evil Voldemort’s power and immortality.


  • Tron: Legacy – December, 17

Video game and digital technology fanatics are already preparing themselves for the premiere of the movie Tron: Legacy by Joseph Kosinski. This is a remake of a legendary movie from 1982 which was one of the firsts who used computer graphics. Jeff Bridges, who played in the original, will appear and in the sequel. The producers of this movie are announcing that it will be a high-tech 3D adventure in a digital world and like something nowhere to be seen. The movie is mostly placed in the virtual world full of beauty and amazing dangers.



Are you eager to seen any of this movies? You are welcome to comment :)
read more...
Related Posts with Thumbnails