Love Em and Leave Em screens Thursday in NYC

Love Em and Leave Em (1926) screens Thursday in New York City. I wish I could be there. This short piece appeared in theNew York Times.

HOLLYWOOD ON THE HUDSON (Wednesday and Thursday)

Based on Richard Koszarski’s book “Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York From Griffith to Sarnoff,” this fascinating monthlong series at the Museum of Modern Art gets under way this week with a few rare screenings. Sidney Olcott’s 1923 film “The Green Goddess,” with George Arliss, and John Robertson’s 1920 “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” with John Barrymore, are showing on Wednesday, and Frank Tuttle’s “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em,” with Louise Brooks, and Robert Vignola’s 1921 “Enchantment,” with Marion Davies, on Thursday. Much more to come. (Through Oct. 19.) Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, (212) 708-9400, moma.org; $10.

The book the series is based on looks great. I plan to get a copy. So far, I have only had a chance to look through it briefly, but there are a number of references in it to Louise Brooks.

John Ashbery

There is a fine article in today's New York Times about the 81 year old poet John Ashbery and his first ever art exhibit. Ashbery is exhibiting collages from throughout his long and distinguished career at New York's Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Holland Carter's article, "The Poetry of Scissors and Glue," notes "That he was a childhood film freak helped form a Surrealist sensibility, though there were also more specific influences."

I mention Ashbery's interest in film because when I had the chance to meet the poet some half-dozen years ago, he told me of the time he met the silent film star Louise Brooks. At the time, as Holland Carter's article mentions, the poet was living in Paris where he was working as an art critic. Brooks was staying in a hotel where Ashbery was also in residence. And, because Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York and Brooks was then living in that upstate, New York city - the actress and the poet / journalist were introduced.

I can't rememeber how the subject of Louise Brooks came-up (though I suppose I am always talking about the actress), but it might of had to do with Ashbery's friends, the poets Frank O'Hara (wrongly identified in the NY Times article as John O'Hara) and Bill Berkson. Both had written poems "about" Louise Brooks, and both were fans of the actress' films. Ashbery, as it turned out, was also something of a fan.

p.s. Interestingly, Frank O'Hara's roommate in college was the illustrator / artist Edward Gorey, another admirer of Louise Brooks.

Lulu in Pittsburgh

Prix de Beaute (1930), featuring the one and only Louise Brooks, will be screened at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA on Friday, December 12th. For more info see www.warhol.org

More on Lee Israel

NPR ran a story on literary forger Lee Isreal, whose output of fake letters included some by Louise Brooks. The actress was mentioned in the text summation, as well as on the radio broadcast, which can be found here.

 

"I used what talent I had and what voice I had to duplicate the voice and the letters of some very famous people," she says.  It was also a bit like writing fiction, Israel says, which can sometimes be more fun than writing reality.

"You own the character. I finally owned Noel Coward and Edna Ferber and Louise Brooks and people like that," she says. "I had always adored large personalities, I had a good ear and I guess a talent to amuse. I could be funny, and that's how I did it."

Robert Giroux

Along with the passing of Anita Page, the film world recently lost another friend, Robert Giroux. He is best known as an editor and publisher who introduced and nurtured some of the major authors of the 20th century,  and, ultimately added his name to one of the nation’s most distinguished publishers, Farrar Strauss Giroux. He was also a lover of film, and to the film world, Giroux was known as the author of a significant book, A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor (Knopf, 1990). For more about Robert Giroux, check out this interesting, detail filled article in the New York Times.

Anita Page dies

Anita Page, one of the last living silent film stars and a contemporary of Louise Brooks, has died, according to an article syndicated by the Associated Press.

Her longtime friend and companion Randal Malone says Page died in her sleep of natural causes early Saturday morning at her home in Los Angeles. Anita Page, a beautiful blond MGM actress who appeared in the films of Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford and Buster Keaton during the transition from silent movies to talkies, has died. She was 98.

The New York-born Page began her film career as an extra in 1924. She had a major role—as the doomed bad girl—in "Our Dancing Daughters," a 1928 film that featured a wild Charleston by Crawford and propelled them both to stardom. It spawned two sequels, "Our Modern Maidens" and "Our Blushing Brides." Page and Crawford were in all three films.

Here is a link to another wire service story - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080907/ap_en_ce/obit_page_5

They didn't need dialogue. They had faces

An interesting, effusive article in yesterday's Guardian (UK) newspaper concerning the history of the cinematic gesture of the close-up on a woman's face mentions Louise Brooks.

Louise Brooks's black bobbed hair framing her pale kittenish face in GW Pabst's Pandora's Box (1928) and The Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) burns itself into the mind. It was Pabst who gave the 20-year-old Greta Garbo her first real chance to emote as a woman on the brink of prostitution in Joyless Street (1925), the role that led to her Hollywood career, prompting Roland Barthes to write in 1957: "Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced."

Marlene Dietrich's career only began to bloom with the coming of sound and her meeting with Josef Von Sternberg, who created her iconographic figure as the eternal femme fatale in various guises, conjured up by makeup, costumes and the subtle play of light and shadow on her face in close-up. Dietrich's face became an erogenous zone in Sternberg's pictures.