The awards for the years before 1914 are very much a work in progress ...
1913 PICTURE winner:Fantômas (The Complete Series) (prod. Romeo Bosetti) nominees:Der Student von Prag (prod. Deutsche Bioscop GmbH); Sumerki zhenskoi dushi a.k.a. Twilight Of A Woman's Soul (prod. Aleksandr Khanzhonkov); Suspense (prod. Rex Motion Picture Company); Traffic In Souls (prod. Jack Cohn and Walter MacNamara)
ACTOR winner: Ford Sterling (The Keystone Comedies) nomiees: René Navarre (Fantômas); Paul Wegener (Der Student von Prag) ACTRESS winner: Hilda Borgström (Ingeborg Holm) nominees: Lillian Gish (The Mothering Heart); Mabel Normand (The Keystone Comedies)
DIRECTOR winner: Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley (Suspense) nominees: Yevgeni Bauer (Sumerki zhenskoi dushi a.k.a. Twilight Of A Woman's Soul); Louis Feuillade (Fantômas)
SCREENPLAY winner: Louis Feuillade, from the novels by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre (Fantômas) nominees: Victor Sjöström, from a play by Nils Krok (Ingeborg Holm); Walter MacNamara, from a story by George Loane Tucker (Traffic In Souls)
SPECIAL AWARDS Nikolai Kozlovsky (Sumerki zhenskoi dushi a.k.a. Twilight Of A Woman's Soul) (Cinematography)
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I spent the whole day with carpet installers, roofers and building contractors. Time for a nap.
But just because I'm tired is no reason for you to do without. How about watching an early Douglas Fairbanks comedy, Flirting with Fate, courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.
From my thumbnail review:
In a moment of despair, a struggling artist, Augy Holliday (Fairbanks), hires a notorious gunman to kill him. Almost as soon as the contract is set, though, Augy's ship comes in—his paintings sell, a long-lost relative leaves him a fortune and the girl of his dreams agrees to marry him. Luckily for him, this is a comedy. George Beranger provides memorable support as the would-be assassin.
"That's Typing" Tuesday, in which I share unpolished, unpublished writings from my vast store of unpolished, unpublished writings. On Tuesdays.
My post about Anita Loos yesterday inspired this additional thought: that during the silent era, Hollywood was a wide-open town as far as opportunities for women were concerned. Not just limited to the latest pretty face, women had a chance to direct, produce and especially write—hell, Mary Pickford owned her own studio and distribution company.
Indeed, I've read that more than half the screenwriters in Hollywood during the silent era were women—certainly the good ones were: in addition to Anita Loos, there was Frances Marion (who'd later win two Oscars), Jeanie Macpherson (who wrote all the good movies Cecil B. DeMille ever made) and June Mathis (who made Rudolph Valentino a star and later adapted Ben-Hur for the screen).
When the sound era forced studios to build thousands of new theaters and then the Great Depression soon after decimated the marketplace, Hollywood's moguls were forced to borrow millions of dollars to keep their studios afloat. Much like today, these money men were more interested in seeing a return on their investment than they were in art, experimentation or newfangled ideas (even the ones that worked). Powerful women made them nervous and women in the workplace, generally, smacked of unorthodox business practices, so women were out—no more Lois Weber's, no more Alice Guy's.
Because let's face it: nobody fears the future quite like a man with money.
And Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar (The Hurt Locker) notwithstanding, Hollywood's women have never really recovered, at least not in terms of the percentages working in high places. Something to think about the next time you congratulate yourself for being smarter than your grandparents.
Even if you don't know her name, chances are you know Anita Loos's work. Not only did she write the novel Gentleman Prefer Blondes and coin the phrase "Diamonds are a girl's best friend," she also shaped the careers of Douglas Fairbanks and Jean Harlow, wrote D.W. Griffith's epic masterpiece Intolerance, and in 1939 adapted The Women for the screen, the snarkiest chick flick ever produced.
Loos was born in 1888 to a pair of San Francisco newspaper publishers. "The family has always used the correct French pronunciation which is lohse. However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them."
She began acting on the stage with her sisters at the age of nine, but always preferred writing and she not only wrote some of the plays she performed in, but also wrote a New York gossip column despite living in San Diego at the time. Loos broke into the movies in 1912 with the screenplay for The New York Hat, a D.W. Griffith short starring Mary Pickford in her last film for the Biograph Company. That same year she wrote The Musketeers of Pig Alley, which is now credited as the first gangster movie.
Over the next three years, she wrote more than fifty screenplays—including the titles to Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance—but made her biggest splash in 1916 when she wrote a series of screenplays for Douglas Fairbanks who was attempting to make the jump from Broadway to the movies. It was Loos who first saw the real-life Fairbanks as a born swashbuckler—fun, athletic and heroic—and screenplays such as American Aristocracy, The Matrimaniac and Wild and Woolly helped establish Fairbanks in the minds of the movie-going public as one of the silent era's greatest stars.
Through this series of scripts, Loos (along with Mary Pickford's favorite writer, Frances Marion) turned movie intertitles—the dialogue and descriptions that pop up during silent movies—into an art form, transforming them from dull chapter titles into witty bon mots worth reading in their own right. When Fairbanks joined the Famous Players-Lasky film company, he brought Loos with him, paying her a salary of $500 a week.
It was on a trip west with Fairbanks and his entourage that Loos noticed the men on the train falling all over themselves to impress Fairbanks's latest costar, an empty-headed actress who was nevertheless blonde, a situation Loos (herself a brunette) deemed "palpably unfair." The novel inspired by the trip, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was a sensation, as were her stage and (1928) movie adaptations of it.
After a brief marriage in 1915, she married frequent writing partner John Emerson in 1919 and remained married to him until his death in 1956. Despite its longevity, the marriage was not a happy one. Not only was Emerson a chronic philanderer but even more dismaying to Loos, his dull exterior concealed an even duller mind. "I had set my sights on a man of brains, to whom I could look up, but what a terrible let down it would be to find out that I was smarter than he was."
It was Emerson who convinced Loos to largely abandon Hollywood for New York. There, Loos wrote such plays as The Whole Town's Talking, the aforementioned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and an adaptation of Colette's novel Gigi.
Despite living in New York, Loos continued to pen screenplays on occasion, including a brilliant adaptation of Clare Boothe Luce's hit Broadway comedy, The Women, in 1939. The most important of her sound era screenplays, however, may well have been 1932's Red-Headed Woman, which starred Jean Harlow.
Largely wasted up to that time in glamorous roles that required little acting skill, Harlow was a star without a screen persona, a situation producer Irving Thalberg was determined to remedy. Buying up Harlow's contract from Howard Hughes, Thalberg cast her in the screen adaptation of Red-Headed Woman, Katharine Brush's racy novel about a woman who sleeps her way into high society. F. Scott Fitzgerald took the first crack at the screenplay, but couldn't solve the puzzle of how to make the audience like a character he himself didn't approve of.
It was instead Loos who drafted the final screenplay.
Although Harlow's Lillian Andrews is a manipulative gold digger—she seduces her married boss and breaks up his marriage—there was a sincerity to Lil's transparent scheming, and with Harlow serving up the brassier bits with humor and wounded pride, audiences found themselves rooting for her. The result was one of the biggest hits of 1932.
Harlow played variations of this character throughout the remainder of her tragically brief career.
In all Loos wrote five screenplays for Harlow including her last, Saratoga. She also wrote such screenplays as San Francisco, Susan and God and I Married an Angel.
Loos never retired and published her last book, a biograph of Norma and Constance Talmadge, in 1978. She died in 1981 at the age of 93.
Well, actually, if we're going to get technical, she's in a cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles, but I think you know what I mean.
One day I'm going to write one of those three thousand word essays about her, probably in connection with Out of the Past, my pick for the best movie of 1947, but possibly about her performance in The Big Steal, which is the one I put on when I want pure escapist fun. Both films are available on DVD. I suggest you grab them both.
It's Katie-Bar-The-Door's birthday. She's not only taking the day off, she's taking the rest of the week (plus Labor Day), so in all likelihood, no blogging until Tuesday. (Not that I've done much blogging in the past couple of weeks; lots of good reasons, but I won't bore you with the details.)
You know, I often talk about Katie-Bar-The-Door, for whom the all-important Katie Awards are named, but I don't know that I've ever described her. At her office, people sometimes see her as a combination of Ellen Ripley and the Terminator, only better dressed. Maybe like Kyra Sedgwick on The Closer.
Scary.
But when the big cheeses need someone to bring order out of chaos, or when her co-workers need someone to speak truth to power, Katie's the one they call on.
"Release the Kraken!" is how Katie cheerfully puts it.
"She very politely pretends to work for me," the owner of the company says, "but we both know who the boss really is."
At home, though, I see a different side of Katie-Bar-The-Door, and in terms of movie references you might know, this is how I would describe her:
The red hair and fiery temperament of Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man the loyalty and compatibility of Katharine Hepburn in Holiday the humor and easy companionship of Myrna Loy in The Thin Man series (we even have a dog!)
the wit and resourcefulness of Diana Rigg in The Avengers and the smarts of Irene Dunne in, well, everything.
In short, she's the ultimate Hawksian woman.
Which makes me a very lucky man indeed. Happy birthday, Katie-Bar-The-Door!
"That's Typing" Tuesday, in which I share unpolished, unpublished writings from my vast store of unpolished, unpublished writings. On Tuesdays.
I don't know how you first became acquainted with Buster Keaton, arguably the greatest film comedian of all time, but my introduction came from the unlikeliest of sources, a book about the Beatles. In The Beatles in Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night: A Complete Pictorial Record of the Movie, editor J. Philip di Franco interviewed director Richard Lester and asked him the following question:
"How and why do you cut, cross cut, jump cut or shoot a particular scene this way or that. What theory do you use to make films?"
To which Lester responded, quite candidly:
"Well, I think all those things are valid, but you lose the kind of cutting that normally exists. The focus puller has lost focus because he has gone the wrong way with the handle, or the opening and the end of the shot are excellent, and the middle is blurred so you lose it, and you have to piece it where you couldn't see who is in it.
"That is the first kind of editing for me. If you want to go into it, I will show you shot by shot, list by list, of where you are saving a catastrophe by editing. For example, in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Buster Keaton was picked for a role in which he does what he usually does, which is be physical. He arrived dying, in the last stages of an incurable disease and we find that he can walk, but certainly not run. Therefore we have to find a double for Buster Keaton. When you have a shot where he is supposed to be coming along, he does a bit of action, bumps into a tree and falls down, you end up using eight cuts because Buster can't run that distance. So you have to have a shot to establish that it is Buster, then the long shot for the double, then another shot to remind everybody that is Buster, then another long shot, etc. ..., a close-up for him when he says his lines. All that is totally wrong in terms of one's principles, one's hopes, one's feelings toward the scene, but that is what you do. That is number two. I am afraid that I must stick everything that you said down at the end at number three."
Now when I first read that, when I was, I'm guessing, seventeen, I didn't know Buster Keaton from Diane Keaton (or for that matter, Buster Olney, the ESPN sports analyst who was to become a buddy of mine in college—Katherine says "hey," Buster), and it was a long time before I finally saw a Buster Keaton movie, but that story always stuck with me.
Strange knowing the unbearably sad ending of the story before I ever knew its beginning, but there you have it.
Anyway, for reasons I don't understand, I found myself regaling Katie-Bar-The-Door with that yarn this morning, and then I realized that thanks to the efforts of my little brother, who rescued the Beatles book from the trash pile at my mother's house during one move or another, I could share it with you, verbatim.
Now you have a glimpse into what it must be like to be married to a film buff with a pack rat's memory and a penchant for obscure anecdotes. Lucky you.
While we here on the East coast batten down the hatches, why don't the rest of you watch Buster Keaton in his classic comedy about the weather, Steamboat Bill, Jr., courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.
I promise to get back to the serious business of blogging next week ...
[Click here to read more about Buster Keaton's performance in Steamboat Bill, Jr.]
"That's Typing" Tuesday, in which I share unpolished, unpublished writings from my vast store of unpolished, unpublished writings. Usually, although not always, on Tuesdays.
When I was a kid, sportswriters used to say that a football team that had three quarterbacks was a football team that didn't have a quarterback. And I have to say, a movie available in five different version is a movie begging for a sixth.
Nevertheless. Raymond Chandler wrote in his introduction to a collection of short stories, Trouble Is My Business: "There are things in my stories which I might like to change or leave out altogether. To do this may look simple, but if you try, you find you cannot do it at all. You will only destroy what is good without having any noticeable effect on what is bad. You cannot recapture the mood, the state of innocence, much less the animal gusto you had when you had very little else."
While a director (or any other artist) might have a right to revisit the work of his youth, at some point the effort becomes counterproductive, not only diminishing the quality of the original work, but also robbing him or her of the energy to create something new. I mean, I can't help wondering what movies Francis Ford Coppola and Ridley Scott could have made and never will while they re-worked Apocalypse Now and Blade Runner.
To quote Woody Allen paraphrasing Balzac, "There goes another novel."
Postscript: By the way, I used to wonder the same thing about George Lucas as he fiddled with the original Star Wars trilogy, speculating idly what movies he could have been making had he not been revisiting old ones. Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be The Phantom Menace ...
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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