SFBG reviews Lulu

From the San Francisco Bay Guardian (the alternative weekly here)

Lulu Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St; 863-7576, www.victoriatheatre.org. $20. Extended run: Thurs-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Through Oct 29.

Oh, to have the perfect Louise Brooks bob and the desire of all who lay eyes on you. Being irresistibly sexy is not all it’s cracked up to be, as demonstrated in the Chicago-based Silent Theatre’s adaptation of German playwright Frank Wedekind’s story cycle revolving around the self-serving femme fatale Lulu (Kyla Louise Webb). Everyone wants the vixenly cabaret performer, from her sugar daddy agent (Alzan Pelesic) to her legal guardian, the supposedly upstanding Dr. Sch�n (Nicholas DuFloth), to the doctor’s feckless son (Matthew Massaro) and the Egon Schiele-esque countess and costume designer (Lauren Ashley Fisher) for the upcoming big show. And though Lulu seems adept at handling her cadre of suitors, the stage can get pretty crowded, with one lover coming in the door, another sneaking around the sofa, and yet another pretending to be a statue in the corner. The story is told without dialogue, save for the projected intertitles, and the players move in black and white makeup and costumes like actors in the sped-up, jerky films of the 1920s to the dazzling and manic piano accompaniment of Isaiah Robinson. Director Tonika Todorova’s translation of the silent film to the stage can be elegantly seductive, as when Lulu tangos with her new dance partner, the volatile Rodrigo (Curtis M. Jackson), but also a bit messy, as when a particularly juicy make-out session between Lulu and the countess leaves their black lipstick smeared for the rest of the scene. Ah, but nothing in life is ever too tidy — especially in Lulu’s. (Giattina)

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=1743&l=1

Lulu in Cyberspace

Just posted a links page = "Lulu in Cyberspace" at silentfilmbuff.googlepages.com/

Buck's column - Cherryvale's movie star

The Coffeyville Journal ran an article about Louise Brooks in today's paper. "Buck's column - Cherryvale's movie star" discusses the actress from the next town over. Buck Walton's piece starts:

It must be admitted that I’ve only seen one film of Cherryvale’s Louise Brooks, and it was “Overland Stage Raiders” (1938, John Wayne), which was her last. Judging from this B-western, you’d never guess that she had been a sensation in the 1920s and has a cult following.

The article can be found in its entirety at www.cjournal.com/columns/local_story_267010823.html/

Continueing . . .

I have continued placing inter-library loan requests and have continued visiting the library. . . . Over the last few weeks I have gathered Denishawn material from the Wasau Daily Record-Herald (from Wasau, Wisconsin) and most interestingly, the Yale Daily News (from Yale University). The students at Yale gave Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Louise Brooks and the other members of the Denishawn Dance Company considerable coverage, including a front page article and front page review. Just a few days later, Rudolph Valentino, who was also on a dance tour of his own, visited New Haven. (Valentino was on strike against Paramount, and was touring the country with his wife, Natasha Rambova.) This would not be the first time Brooks and the Denishawn Dance Company would nearly cross paths with the silent film star.

I also gathered film material from a handful of newspapers including the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News (from Poughkeepsie, New York), Lancaster Daily Intelligencer, (from Lancaster, Pa.), Knoxville Journal (from Knoxville, Tennessee), Indianapolis Times , San Antonio Express, and Denver Post. I found some nice advertisements, and a few original reviews.

Also, of late, I have also been borrowing books. I managed to get ahold of a few vintage editions of Margarete Bohme's Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, the 1907 novel which was the basis for the 1929 film Diary of a Lost Girl. It was interesting to examine different editions. I also got ahold of Un homme en habit, the 1922 French play which was the basis of the 1927 film, Evening Clothes.

Here is a scan of the remarkable cover of the first edition of Bohme's book.

Rolled Stockings, a rolled stock

A Rolled Stockings (1927) lobby card is for sale on eBay. The card depicts Louise Brooks in a scene with James Hall and Richard Arlen (his pant leg pulled up, and his sock rolled down). Little known is the fact that a good deal of the film was shot around the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.  Anybody got an extra $1,125 ! 

Pola Negri

There is a Pola Negri retrospective taking place in New York City, and a Polish radio station did a story on the Polish-born actress. Follow this link to read the article or to listen to the even longer (approximately 5 minute) program.    http://www.polskieradio.pl/polonia/article.asp?tId=42221&j=2

A Centenary Tribute to Louise Brooks

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents A Centenary Tribute to Louise Brooks, October 12 - 21. Click here for more info.

October 12 - October 21 
A Centenary Tribute to Louise Brooks Louise Brooks was born one-hundred years ago this November 14 in Cherryvale, Kansas. Though she lived a mere six of her seventy-nine years in the glare of celebrity, she has become a cinematic icon without equal. A trained dancer who toured with Martha Graham, Brooks happily ascended to showgirl heaven in the Ziegfeld Follies, where she honed her real talents: attending parties and dazzling men. Brooks started a fashion craze with her geometric black haircut and soon appeared in magazines as an emblem of the Roaring Twenties. When the movies came knocking, she started packing, and after a brief affair with Charlie Chaplin in the summer of 1925, Brooks surfaced in Hollywood with a Paramount Pictures contract. She later married director Edward Sutherland, blazed a trail through the celebrity colony, and attracted plenty of photographers along the way. Unfortunately, her career was going nowhere until a third-act role as a gold-digging circus performer in Howard Hawks’s A Girl in Every Port caught the eye of the renowned German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Under pressure to cast the part of Lulu, the amoral temptress at the heart of Pandora’s Box, Pabst miraculously saw in Brooks an actress who, in the poetic words of critic Lotte Eisner, “Needed no directing, but could move across the screen causing the work of art to be born by her mere presence.” Brooks flew immediately to Berlin and embarked on a creative collaboration that produced three major films (of which one is considered a masterpiece) and ensured her fame for generations to come.

The story of Louise Brooks’s disappearance, rediscovery, and rehabilitation is a fascinating biography. By 1930, the icon had been etched on celluloid and the legend seeded. One of the curious aspects of Louise Brooks is how her admirers have tried to express her mysterious effects on the viewer. In 1955 Henri Langlois, director of the Cinematheque française, proclaimed to the audience, “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!” Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, is the most succinct in her reference to Brooks as the most beautiful of all “black-haired blondes.” However, nothing equals theater critic Kenneth Tynan’s verbal paroxysm, with phrases like “shameless urchin tomboy” and “prairie princess,” before he retreats to the relatively sage “a creature of impulse, a creator of impulses, a temptress with no pretensions.” Perhaps Brooks put it best herself when she dryly wrote, “I guess Lulu’s life is about as close to my own as anyone’s can be.”

The films in this tribute are silent with live musical accompaniment.

Thursday, October 12, 7:30 PM
Pandora's Box
Friday, October 13, 7:30 PM
Pandora's Box
Saturday, October 14, 7:30 PM
Pandora's Box
Friday, October 20, 7:30 PM
A Girl in Every Port
andDiary of a Lost Girl
Saturday, October 21, 7:30 PM
Prix de Beauté (the restored silent version, with spoken translation of the French intertitles)

Along with the four film series being presented by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York this looks like the most ambitious series of screening happening in the United States.