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Archive for January, 2012

The Last Insider of Silent Hollywood

posted by MIAN on January 16, 2012

Frederica Sagor Maas told all in her 1999 memoir.

Naked-starlet chases, stolen story ideas and scripts, sex as humdrum as cleaning your teeth.

Frederica Sagor Maas is dead at 111, but not before telling all about silent-era Hollywood.

The prolific screenwriter first trained to be a doctor, and then a journalist, and after quitting Hollywood in disgust said she would have preferred to be a washer woman.

The movies? Maas gave up on them, too, saying in 1999: “The product they’re making today is even worse than the product we made in the early days.”

The New York Times reports.

Categories: blog

The Art of the Trailer

posted by MIAN on January 16, 2012

The art of the trailer. NPR’s Brent Baughman reports on those ninety-nine seconds cut from four hours of unfinished movie with visible green screens and the director yelling cues from off-screen.

Categories: blog

Kim Jong-Il, Auteur

posted by MIAN on January 1, 2012

Apparently au fait with Leni Riefenstahl's work, North Korea's recently deceased dictator Kim Jong-Il staged this must-attend mass rally in Pyongyang in 2009 to celebrate his supremeness.

Korea’s just-departed hereditary communist Dear Leader and self-promoted demigod, Kim Jong-Il, was not only a diminutive but enormously vain playboy and bon vivant with a bouffant hairstyle and platform shoes, he was also a huge movie buff.

Fiction was among the supremo’s predilections. His apparatchiks trumpeted his fantastical origin myth – that his humble birth in a log cabin was marked by a double rainbow and bright star – and he engaged in various of the arts. During one two-year run, for example, he composed six operas. He designed a famous Pyongyang landmark. When he joined the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party, he assumed charge of his country’s arts-and-culture administration.

He knew how to live like a rap star: He drank like a fish, delighted in Hennessy VSOP cognac, kept himself well supplied with lobster and champagne, and surrounded himself with knock-out “companions.” And, man oh man, was he a golfer! …MORE >>

Categories: Main Featuresblog