Seraphic Secret

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

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

by 6 Comments

“Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes.”
—John Ford

 

Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘‘Austin,’’ the artist’s final work and only building, which opens this month at the University of Texas’s Blanton Museum of Art. Credit: Victoria Sambunaris

 

Photo by Ricardo Nuno Silva, 2012

 

637 armchair designed by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1935. Dimensions: H 70 x 64 x 85 cm.

 

Dorian Leigh wearing a sheer accordion-pleated dress by Jane Derby in a 1950 photo by Gjon Mili

 

Jan de Baen
Dutch painter (b. 1633, Haarlem, d. 1702, Den Haag)
Self-Portrait with His Wife, Maria de Kinderen
1674
Oil on canvas, 101 x 93 cm
Museum Bredius, The Hague

 

“At about 12 noon this same day I did something beyond outrage. I bought Elizabeth the jet plane we flew in yesterday. It costs, brand new, $960,00.00. She was not displeased.”
—The Richard Burton Diaries, September 30, 1967

 

Ellsworth Kelly, “Austin,” 2015 (Interior, facing south). © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

 

Susan Abraham in a John Cavanagh lace evening dress, Spring 1957, photo by John French

 

Gerard van Honthorst (1592–1656)
“Margareta Maria de Roodere and Her Parents”
1652
oil on canvas
Height: 140 cm (55.1 in). Width: 170 cm (66.9 in).
Centraal Museum in Utrecht

 

David Peat
Kids walking through the streets of Glasgow, 1945

 

1931 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750

 

“When I walked through the gate, Universal quit building actors. All of a sudden I was doing leading roles. I knew I was a tyro [novice] but they told me to shut up and act. Some of those early roles were unactable. Even Laurence Olivier couldn’t have done anything with them. The dialog ran to cardboard passages such as ‘I love you. You can rely on me darling. I’ll wait.’ It was all I could do to keep from adding, ‘with egg on my face’ … There was no studio system to let me work my way up through small roles. When I got up on my hind legs, no one would believe it.”
—RIP John Gavin (b. John Anthony Golenor, 1931-2018)
John Gavin in Psycho, 1960
Ellsworth Kelly, “Austin,” 2015 (West façade). © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin

 

Eugene Robert Richee, Carol Lombard, 1930s

 

Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572)
“Lucrezia di Cosimo”
Between 1555 and 1565
oil on tin
Height: 15 cm (5.9 in). Width: 12 cm (4.7 in).
Uffizi Gallery

 

Myrna Loy getting her nails done on the set of After the Thin Man, 1936

 

WWI, USA, Jewish Welfare Board, United War Work Campaign, English-Yiddish, 1918.
Poster by Josef Foshko. Yiddish text reads: “He provides them with everything.” More than 250,000 Jews served in the American armed forces in WWI. Approx. 3,500 were killed and more than 12,000 wounded. (William A. Rosenthall Judaica Collection).

 

Miriam Hopkins to Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise, 1932
Screenplay by Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones (adaptation)
Based on “The Honest Finder,” 1931 play by Laszlo Aladar

 

Maayan, Lielle, and Liv wish all our friends and relatives a peaceful Shabbat.

 

 

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. looking at your grandchildren smiling….I had to smile. You see them and have to believe that there is hope for the world.

    Would you say that Liz was a high-maintenance woman?

  3. Well done, Robert. I have always been fascinated by John Ford’s personality. I’ve read that he was a man with definite idiosyncrasies when he directed, but a man with a keen eye for “the picture” that the audience wanted.

    I also appreciate the Myrna Loy photo — one I don’t recall seeing before!

Leave a Reply