HEDDA & LOUELLA Movie-struck columnist Louella Parsons used extortion and blackmail to rule Hollywood’s gossip mill with an iron glove for decades. It would be accurate to say that it was more the stories she did not print that gave her a vice-like grip on the studios and their […]
(L) Hedda Hopper & Louella Parsons Beginning in 1912 with Photoplay, there have always been movie magazines, most of which relied almost entirely on being fed carefully orchestrated morsels of ‘facts’ about their stars by the studios’ publicity departments. The public was so hungry for ‘behind the scenes’ information […]
CLINT EASTWOOD: [On surviving a plane crash in the early fifties] ‘They had one plane, a Douglas AD, sort of a torpedo bomber of World War Two vintage, and I thought I’d hitch on that. Everything went wrong. Radios went out. Oxygen ran out. And finally […]
Henry Fonda & his wife Margaret Sullavan Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat (1944) Tallulah Bankhead was dismissive about her only sexual encounter with legendary screen star Henry Fonda. ‘Oh, please, dah-ling, don’t mention Hank to me’, she laughed. ‘I went to bed with him only one time. He failed to […]
L to R – James Darren, Greg Peck, David Niven & Anthony Quinn in The Guns of Navarone (1961) The problem with the WW2 action flick The Guns of Navarone (1961) should be immediately apparent to just about everyone. Of the six commandos sent to disable the mighty guns of the […]
Marlon Brando & Karl Malden in One-Eyed Jacks (1961) One-Eyed Jacks (1961) was to have been directed by Stanley Kubrick at a budgeted cost of $1.8 million, but then Kubrick left and the picture’s star, Marlon Brando, took over as director. Day one, ominously, saw him throw away the script […]
Over the past century or more that Hollywood has existed there has been no shortage of abortions performed on many of its aspiring young actresses. Unwanted offspring are not unique to the movie business, but they do tend to interfere with ambitions, not to mention reputations, more often in […]
When the studio system was at its peak in the thirties and forties, a ‘Gossip Columnist’ could wreck a career with just a couple of acid-laced lines. They did not even need to be true. Louella Parsons, the Hollywood mouthpiece for the Hearst empire of newspapers, became a most […]
Thomas Ince was a director of silent movies, in particular westerns. In fact, he was known as ‘the father of the western’, a man who produced and directed over 100 features up until his mysterious death in 1924, just three days after his 42nd birthday. The mystery revolves around […]
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