Seraphic Secret

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

Screenwriting

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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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Yul Brynner, 1949
“I am just a nice, clean-cut Mongolian boy.”
In fact, Yul Brenner (b. Yuliy Borisovich Briner, 1920 – 1985) was born in the city of Vladivostok in the Far Eastern Republic, a puppet state controlled by Soviet Russia before being merged into the wider USSR two years later. He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born “Taidje Khan” of part-Mongol parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality of Swiss-German, Russian, and partial Buryat ancestry. Wikipedia

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Unlike writers or painters, we don’t sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, ‘How do I start? Where do I start?’ We’re given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there’s a group of people all ready to make a film and it’s a marvelous life.“
—Albert Finney R.I.P. 1936-2019

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