Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Robert J. Avrech

Lillian Gish Purged by Bowling Green State University

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Lillian Gish, among cinema’s early pioneers and one of our greatest actresses.

Lillian Gish was one of the most important actors in movie history.

She was there at the beginning of moving pictures working with D.W. Griffith, inventing the grammar of film, perfecting the new style of acting for the motion picture camera. She was Hollywood’s first great actress. Her film career lasted for 75 years from 1912 to her last film The Whales of August on 1987. She passed away in 1993 at the age of 99.

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How to Become a Dangerous Person

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How do you become “dangerous”? Writer and Portland-based podcaster Nancy Rommelmann would have thought she was the last person to answer that question — until she publicly dared to raise some questions about the #MeToo movement. Then her life suddenly changed and she became public enemy number one. She tells her astonishing story — what happened and why — in this compelling video.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“A movie should be like a dream. It washes over you; you don’t know what’s affecting you; you can’t do anything about it; you’re taken away.”
—Peter Bogdanovich

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I didn’t want to be just another blond in the movie world, brought out to be slapped into a bathing suit, perched in a cherry tree to be photographed and then sent back to New York.”
— Jan Sterling (1921-2004). Sterling’s best role was as the hard boiled Lorraine in Billy Wildrer’s Ace in the Hole, 1951, in which she delivers one of the greatest lines of dialogue ever written for motion pictures: “I don’t go the church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” In contrast to her movie image as a street-wise femme fatale, Sterling was a refined and educated woman who came from a wealthy Manhattan family. She attended posh private schools, and traveled widely in South America, London and Paris.

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July 4th Flashback: When Hollywood Loved America

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Betty Grable wishes America a happy and meaningful July 4th. G-d Bless America.

A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, in a place called Hollywood, the movie studios and the actors who flourished in those dream factories, celebrated their love of America and enthusiastically indulged in unabashed displays of patriotism.

L.B. Mayer (b. Lazar Meir) the powerful head of MGM, was a pioneer of the motion-picture industry, and the man who invented the star system. Mayer adopted July 4th as his birthday. Scores of Hollywood historians get all snarky about Mayer’s birthday, claiming that he conveniently changed his birthday in order to cash in on a public identification with America.

What these historians fail to recognize is that Mayer probably did not know the date of his birth.

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