In this classic essay about a classic American art form, legendary screenwriter Daniel Fuchs reflects on his lifetime learning the trade.
old hollywood
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Cecil B. DeMille Went Way Over Budget
David Ferry, writing in Outside about the extravagant faux-Egyptian set built for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film “The Ten Commandments.”
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Twisting History to Tell Universal Truths
Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr […]
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The Democratic Fame of Silent Movie Stars
The period known as “Classic Hollywood” began in the late ‘20s/early ‘30s, with the gradual consolidation of the studios, and ends at a nebulous point in the 1950s. In the earliest days of the so-called “movie colony,” you could get a job in the moving pictures if you a) had a great face (Clara Bow); […]
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François Truffaut on an Aging Joan Crawford
As she neared fifty, determined to keep going, she became almost grotesque, answering her own needs and the wiles of directors eager to exploit her. In Nicholas Ray’s odd, beautiful, impassioned Western “Johnny Guitar” (1954), she’s Vienna, a tough businesswoman who runs a saloon and constantly faces down groups of armed men. Vienna is both an […]