This past year has been a heck of a year, to say the least. Admittedly, it has been a year of both highs and lows (I won't talk about the latter, for now), as well as accomplishment and even a few disappointments.
The Louise Brooks Society marked a significant milestone in 2025. The LBS was launched in 1995, and this past year the website celebrated its 30th anniversary. To describe the Louise Brooks Society as "pioneering" is not a stretch, as few websites on any subject can claim to have been around as long. The Louise Brooks Society is a labor of love, and I hope to keep going as long as I can.
The mission of the Louise Brooks Society is to honor the actress by stimulating interest in her life, films and legacy. To that end, the LBS has been involved in a couple of long-term projects which were first announced in late 2025, and which will see release within just a few weeks!
The most exciting of these long-term projects in the forthcoming Blu-ray, Focus on Louise Brooks, due out from Flicker Alley. I first pitched the idea of just such a disc 10 years ago, and thanks to the efforts of the person who made it happen, film preservationist Robert Byrne -- that disc is finally seeing release. Byrne was the person to whom I first pitched my idea of "The Lost Louise Brooks" -- which was to gather all of Brooks' unreleased / surviving / fragmentary / once "considered lost" films. There is more than you might think. I first had the idea around the time the surviving material from Now We're in the Air (1927) was found in Prague and later preserved by Byrne. I had a hand in its preservation (and am acknowledged in the credits).
Focus on Louise Brooks also includes another film with whose preservation I also provided assistance (and am also acknowledged in the credits). That film is The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), which marked Brooks' screen debut. It is a terrific film from director Herbert Brenon, who directed Peter Pan (1924) the year before and Beau Geste (1926) the year after. The latter has been receiving a good deal of attention lately as it has also been restored and released on Blu-ray. Focus on Louise Brooks also includes surviving material from The American Venus (1926) -- which was Brooks' first credited screen role, and Just Another Blonde (1926), an enjoyable Jazz Age romance shot, in part, on location at Luna Park on Coney Island. Fans of the actress will adore the surviving footage of the actress. I do.
For Focus on Louise Brooks, I wrote the booklet essay, and provided audio commentaries for three of the disc's four films. I also provided images for the bonus material, and even helped with copy editing some of the bonus and promotional materials. I am pleased with the way this disc turned out, and hope Brooks' fans will be as well. If you want to see more Brooks material released in the future, then please help support this project and purchase a copy of Focus on Louise Brooks. It comes in two different editions. The regular edition is pictured below on the left, while the limited edition is pictured on the right.
The limited edition features a spot gloss slipcover only available at the Flicker Alley website and select indie retailers. No major retailers will be stocking this item. For more on this disc, including a breakdown of the various must-have bonus materials (which includes the little seen trailer for Just Another Blonde, which itself includes footage not seen in the surviving fragment), check out the Flicker Alley website. Focus on Louise Brooks is scheduled for release on January 13. The regular edition will also be available on amazon.com at a later date.
Another project which the Louise Brooks Society has been involved is the forthcoming re-release of Lulu in Hollywood, Brooks' 1982 volume of autobiographical essays. The book is being re-released in print with a new cover (shown below) on February 3, AND it is being released for the first time ever as an e-book. I have been working behind-the scenes with Penguin Random House and the University of Minnesota Press for at least a year to make this happen -- especially in regards to the e-book release -- and now, at last, it is! The new edition(s) of Lulu in Hollywood will be available on amazon.com
I had hoped to get the book's publisher interested in an expanded edition, which would include Brooks' uncollected writings on film, but I couldn't get that to happen. That was disappointing. So, that side-project will have to wait until later, perhaps when and if I am able to entice a publisher into issuing an annotated Lulu in Hollywood, perhaps in time for the book's 50th anniversary in 2032. I have already started gathering materials scattered in archives far and wide in order to make that happen.
Speaking of anniversaries, did you know that the Louise Brooks Society has been blogging since 2002. And next year, this blog will mark its 25th anniversary! This year, I posted more than 120 times.... which brings the overall total for the LBS blog to more than 3840 posts, many of them substantive. Earlier this year, back on March 23rd to be exact, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in New York mentioned the LBS blog in an article on Louise Brooks, “'Never has a more beautiful, intelligent, quirky, sexy, uniquely commanding character graced the screen,' Anthony Bourdain said in a column by Thomas Gladysz, the founder and longtime champion of the Louise Brooks Society.” Its nice to be noticed.
The Louise Brooks Society website, its blog, and its group of pages focused on Pandora's Box also got noticed by a terrific site which everyone should check out, WeirmarCinema.org. In fact, there are multiple references and citations to the Louise Brooks Society on its Die Büchse der Pandora film dossier. If you haven't already checked it out, do so ... and don't be scared of this superb site's academic leaning.
On a related note, I am more than 4,100 words into a long article tentatively titled "How Louise Brooks came to play Lulu". It is a topic I have been looking into for some time, years actually. I won't say much about it until it is done and published (certainly in 2026), but I will say it dismantles the notion that it was A Girl in Every Port that inspired G.W. Pabst to give the role of Lulu to Brooks.
BTW: it was little more than a year ago that I launched the Louise Brooks Society SubStack, which can be found at https://substack.com/@louisebrookssociety I have spent this past year developing it. There, you will find a bunch of free and subscriber only long-form posts... everything from Louise Brooks trivia to groundbreaking pieces on "Louise Brooks and Early Radio" to "Louise Brooks in Japan". Please check it out, and please subscribe. My resolution for 2026 is to post at least once a month. Fingers crossed.
I have given over a lot of time in 2025 to reworking and expanding the Louise Brooks Society website. I have added dozens of new pages to the films section, as well as to the archive and homage sections. As of now, the site stands at nearly 300 pages.
To the pages on the 24 films in Brooks' filmography, I have added links to press books, thematic cue sheets and available issues of Mensajero Paramount, censorship information and censorship documents, adjunct pages on film source material, coming attraction slides, location shooting, and physical media, etc.... And to the archive section, I have added dozens of pages on all manner of material, from vintage magazine covers from all around the world to vintage postcards from all around the world to photoplay editions and product advertisements and ephemera, such as match boxes and calendar blotters. There are pages on related 78 rpm records and another on piano rolls which feature a video of one of the rolls being played. (Thank the heavens for YouTube and the Internet Archive.)
Please do take a moment or two to explore my 30 year labor-of-love, the Louise Brooks Society.
THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society (www.pandorasbox.com). Original content copyright © 2026. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
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