Sigmund Freud, John Huston, and Louise Brooks (& not-Ghoulardi)

Here's an odd one. . . . While doing some Louise Brooks research I came up with one of the strangest finds I have ever come across, linking Sigmund Freud, director John Huston, and the 1929 Louise Brooks' film, Diary of a Lost Girl.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences contains many documents, among them a batch of correspondence related to the John Huston Film, Freud (1962), starring Montgomery Clift in the title role. The correspondence comes from the Freud estate, and from those involved in the film's production. Among them was one Ernie Anderson, who sent a letter on November 24, 1961 explaining that Freud had no direct involvement with two earlier G.W. Pabst films, Secrets of a Soul (1926) and Diary of a Lost Girl.

Anderson was a long-time assistant to Huston (and not, apparently, the cult figure "Ghoulardi," the father of contemporary director Paul Thomas Anderson). But what is odd is why Huston would have been curious about Diary of a Lost Girl, which then was pretty obscure in the United States, having been seldom screened and even less written about in film histories.

Montgomery Clift and John Huston