Louise Brooks, the toast of Paris 1929

Louise Brooks was the toast of Paris while she was in France making Prix de Beauté. The film was in production between August 29 through September 27, 1929. (The film was released August 20, 1930.)

Brooks appeared on the covers of magazines, was the subject of numerous articles, and had her picture taken by one of the leading photography studios in the city, the Studio Lorelle. The image below shows Brooks' portrait on display in a Parisian shop window.

Re: Silent version of Prix de Beauté screening in San Francisco

As was mention here earlier, on Thursday, July 18th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen a new restoration of the RARE silent version of Prix de Beauté (1930), with musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne. The screening opens this year's annual festival, the largest such festival in North America. It is an opportunity to see the least seen version of any one of Louise Brooks' films. Below is a rare image from the film. And here is what the Festival website has to say: 

Silent version of Prix de Beauté to screen in San Francisco

On Thursday, July 18th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen a new restoration of the silent version of Prix de Beauté (1930), with musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne. The screening opens this year's annual festival, and is a very rare opportunity to see the least seen version of one of Louise Brooks' finest films. Here is what the Festival website has to say:

France, 1930 • Director Augusto Genina
Cast Louise Brooks, Georges Charlia, H. Bandini, A. Nicolle, M. Ziboulsky, Yves Glad, Alex Bernard

Prix de Beauté marks Louise Brooks’s last starring role in a feature. Less known than her work with G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl), Prix de Beauté was marred by its foray into early sound (Brooks’s voice was dubbed). Our presentation is the superior silent version recently restored by the Cineteca di Bologna. Brooks is stunning as Lucienne, the “everygirl” typist who enters a beauty contest and is introduced to a shiny world of fame and modernity. But Prix’s script, a collaboration between René Clair and G.W. Pabst, doesn’t leave Lucienne in a fairy tale bubble but leads to a powerful, moving denouement. Cinematographers Rudolph Maté and Louis Née make beautiful use of Brooks’s glorious face. Approximately 108 minutes.

General $20 / Member $18

Buy Tickets and Passes Here!

Berlin Exhibit :: Diversity Destroyed

If you have an interest in Wiemar Germany, then don't fail to check out Diversity Destroyed: Berlin 1933 - 1938 - 1945. It looks at what happened in Germany and to German culture in the years after the Nazi's came to power. 

According to its website, "Today, Berlin enjoys a global reputation as a modern, tolerant and culturally diverse metropolis. The 2013 Theme Year 'Diversity Destroyed' will endeavor to communicate the importance and sensitive nature of these democratic values and achievements. The forthcoming Theme Year will highlight the social and cultural diversity that was destroyed in Berlin under the National Socialist regime in the years following 1933."

Wikipedia has a rather extensive page on the history of the Wiemar Republic, the German state which existed between 1918 and 1933. Louise Brooks worked in Germany at the time, during the years 1928 - 1929.

Diary of a Lost Girl screens twice TODAY in Brooklyn

I just found out about this screening of the Louise Brooks film Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) at Spectacle in Brooklyn, New York. I wish I could be there. Sounds like it will be an interesting viewing and listening experience. More info here.

According to the Spectacle website: "On May 23rd, Ana Lola Roman will provide live electronics, synths, beats, live vocal atmospheres, and drum pads to provide a futuristic, timeless, modular, and modern soundtrack/score to G. W. Pabst’s first Louis Brooks’ film. Roman’s haunting, lush, and minimal flourishes will provide a sound-scape that teeters on suspense, sexuality, raw-eroticism, and danger. This will be a chance to see silent film’s penultimate Muse; the vivid innocence, playfulness, and primal, yet refined beauty of Louise Brooks through Roman’s modern, raw, animistic, refined lens.

Louise Brooks, the silent film star who very well could have been the first to engage in the earliest version of ‘method’ acting, stars in Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl. Brooks plays the main character of Thymian, who is forced to face lurid tragedies and brief encounters with scandal and lust.

The premise of the story is disturbingly modern. Diary of a Lost Girl plays on fears we could face at anytime. We see Thymian take on a variety of misfortunes all while forced into a class-system she was not born into and which is clearly beneath her. Modern viewers will first notice that this film, released in 1929, is the first of its kind to deal with problems of exploitation, prostitution, and abandonment. Even before Lolita, or before Taxi Driver, this silent film eerily depicts a new genre of film to come."

Poster by Domokos (Tit’nul) from Future Blondes

CNN on how Louise Brooks inspired Gatsby actress

CNN has an interesting article about how flapper era women inspired the actresses in the recently released Baz Luhrmann film, The Great Gatsby. The new source asked actresses Carey Mulligan, Isla Fisher and Elizabeth Debicki who gave them inspiration for their characters. The actresses mentioned F. Scott Fitzgerald's own love interests Ginevra King and Zelda Sayre, along with actresses Clara Bow and Louise Brooks. The piece notes:

Louise Brooks was another great actress of the silent movie era, best known for her films "Pandora's Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl", both filmed in Germany in 1929.

Among the first to sport a bobbed haircut, it was Brooks who inspired the Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki, playing "The Great Gatsby" character Jordan Baker in the film.

"She is just fierce, wonderful, intelligent, and I read a lot about her," said Debicki. "She really typified that woman who appeared in the 1920s, completely independent and, like Gatsby, she built herself up, created the image she wanted.

"I had photos of her in my kitchen, everywhere. When I woke up in the morning I would look at Louise Brooks."

For more on Louise Brooks and F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, scroll down to check out earlier blog posts.

Cool pic of the day: Louise Brooks looking stylish and deco

Cool pic of the day: Louise Brooks looking stylish and deco

Lulu in Hollywood available through Open Library

Lulu in Hollywood is now available as an e-text through Open Library, an online lending library with zillions of books which can be checked out or read online. Lulu in Hollywood is Louise Brooks bestselling  collection of autobiographical essays. It was first published by Knopf in 1982.

The eBook pdf of the text may be found at http://openlibrary.org/works/OL4772459W/Lulu_in_Hollywood This version includes William Shawn's original introduction, which was replaced by Kenneth Tynan's famous New Yorker essay, "The Girl in the Black Helmet," in the most recent reprint from the University of Minnesota. (Shawn was the editor at the New Yorker when some of the pieces included in Lulu in Hollywood were first published.)

Also available at Open Library is Three Films of W.C. Fields (Faber & Faber, 1990), which includes an introduction by Brooks, "The Other Face of W. C. Fields." (That essay is included in Lulu in Hollywood.) The eBook pdf of the text may be found at http://openlibrary.org/works/OL4772458W/Three_Films_of_W.C._Fields

There are many other swell books on early film available through Open Library. be sure and check it out.

Louise Brooks and F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is all the rage. So now might be a good time to look at Louise Brooks' connections with the famous Jazz Age novelist. Brooks, it could be said, shouldn't be on the cover of the three books by Fitzgerald pictured above. But she is. 

Tender is the Night (Penguin, 1999) 

Bernice Bobs Her Hair (Penguin, 1990) 

 Flappers and Philosophers (Penguin 2010)

That's because Fitzgerald was actually smitten with another actress of the silent era, Lois Moran, who served as the basis for a character or two in Fitzgerald's celebrated fiction. It is widely believed that Moran and Fitzgerald had a brief affair during the 1920s, despite their difference in years. (For more on the actress, see Richard Buller's outstanding biography A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran, from 2005.)

Brooks and Fitzgerald did meet at twice, at a couple of parties, but apparently didn't leave much of an impression on each other. Instead, it was the similarly bobbed actress Colleen Moore about which Fitzgerald famously said, "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble." (For more on this actress, see Jeff Codori's fine biography Colleen Moore: A Biography of the Silent Film Star, from 2010.)

Nevertheless, Brooks image has become closely identified with the Jazz Age and its most famous writer. At least three other recent editions of Fitzgerald’s work (including new eBook and print-on-demand editions) depict Louise Brooks on their covers. Why? Because Brooks' image is iconic.

For more on Louise Brooks and F. Scott Fitzgerald, see the May 9th LBS blog, "Louise Brooks and the original Great Gatsby."

Brooks did play a Flapper on the screen on at least a couple of occasions, in Just Another Blonde (1926) and Love Em and Leave Em (1926). Only the latter film survives in tact. Brooks' characters in these two films was never so glamorous as Fitzgerald's flappers, but they did diepict the wild and carefree spirit of the times in plainer garb.