Seraphic Secret

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

Screenwriting

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I made my own image because I refused to change my name or my hair. They wanted to change me completely when I first came over because that was the standard thing to do. They took stars from Hungary, Germany, France, and tried to change them – to make them more beautiful to American eyes, I suppose. But then they became just like all the other American stars that were there. Lots of publicity stills in bathing suits and hats and all that.”
—Ingrid Bergman

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I was, I am afraid, wildly infatuated with love. At the age of sixteen – when I looked about twenty four – I was playing Robert Taylor’s wife. I’d finish a passionate love scene with him and then the tutor would drag me away to study mathematics. I mean it really kind of made your eyes go crossed.”
—Elizabeth Taylor

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Books On My Night Table

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Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is one of the greatest Torah scholars the Jewish world has produced in modern times. His new translation and commentary on the Talmud is already in use all over the world. This slim volume presents profiles of thirteen Talmudic sages that serves to humanize these great men and place them in historical context.

Preston Sturges was one of the greatest writer/directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. His scripts are beautifully structured and if you want a master class in comedy dialogue, read his screenplay for The Lady Eve (1941) where con woman Barbara Stanwyck observes about Henry Fonda: “I need him like the ax needs the turkey.”

Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is one of the greatest artists who ever lived. His life is also something of a mystery. Author Daniel Arasse suggests that Vermeer was a revolutionary painter who was attempting to conceptualize a new pictorial space within the classical tradition of art. A fascinating analysis of my favorite artist.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I was not a born actress. No one knows it better than I. If I had any latent talent, I have had to work hard, listen carefully, do things over and over and then over again in order to bring it out.”
—Jean Harlow

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I was lazy. I would have been a hell of a lot better actress had I taken it more seriously. I never had the proper respect for acting. Quite often, I learned my lines on the way to the studio.”
—Ava Gardner

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