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

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“The first day of making a film I feel, ‘Why did I ever get mixed up in this profession? I have no talent. This time, they’ll find out.’”
— Olivia de Havilland

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761 – 1845)
The Dead Mouse, 1790s
Oil on canvas: 40 x 31.2 cm

 

Louis Faurer
Pennsylvania Station, New York, 1946

 

The Art Nouveau style Gran Hotel Ciudad de Mexico in Mexico City was designed by Jacques Gruber in 1899.

 

Myrna Loy, 1940s.

 

Manny Farber
Domestic Movies, 1985

 

“I think we’re all a bit crazy. Picture people, I mean. Too much of a strain on the nervous system, too much parading of emotions. It’s bad. We get so that everything that happens to us away from the studio is dramatized — we exaggerate our personal emotions.”
—Thelma Todd

 

Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599 – 1641)
Marchesa Giovanna Cattaneo, 1622-1627
oil on canvas (lined)
40 3/8 in. x 34 in. (102.55 cm x 86.36 cm)

 

A woman taking a selfie in 1900. She is using a Kodak Box Brownie camera for which she paid $1.00. The cardboard camera took two inch photos on 117mm roll film and sold in the millions. The Box Brownie was cheap to manufacture, easy to use, and it revolutionized the art of photography, giving birth to the concept of the snapshot.

 

Rick McGinnis
Poppy, June 2020

 

Pierre Boulat
François Truffaut and his collection of films.
Paris, 1981

 

1956 Nash Ambassador

 

“The best research for playing a drunk is being a British actor for 20 years.”
—Michael Caine

 

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (French, 1796–1875)
Portrait of Mariette Gambay
Date: between 1869 and 1870
oil on canvas
Height: 80 cm (31.4 in); Width: 62.5 cm (24.6 in)
Collection
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

 

Lili Liana as the possessed Lea during the exorcism. Screenshot is from Michał Waszyński’s filmed Version of S. Ansky’s “Der Dybbuk,” Warsaw, 1937

 

Roger W. Smith is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest watchmakers. “At a time when it feels like mainstream brands are running out of ideas to reel in new buyers, clients have to wait close to three years to get their hands on a Roger W. Smith wristwatch, which may cost them in excess of $150,000. These timepieces produced by Smith and his team follow “The Daniels Method” – every component is made from raw materials in the Isle of Man studio without the use of repetitive or automatic tools. ” More here.

 

Charlotte Birdie wishes all our friends and relatives the best Shabbat ever.

 

Ed Ruscha, The End, 2003

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Comments

  1. That hotel is stunningly beautiful! I think those are true words of Thelma. Always thought the Nash – in various models of the 50s – all looked a bit weird. But the rear legroom….! Clever woman and the selfie! The marketing brilliance of Kodak – which worked for 100 years, was to almost give away the cameras and make the money on the film. Now look at them. They were a blue chip stock for almost 100 years.

    Irony? They invented the digital camera but didn’t wish to market it as to impinge on their film sales. They had a lock on the US market for decades.

    • Maybe Kodak could make a comeback as a pharmaceutical maker. I seem to recall some chemistry history. Upstate New York has a big skilled worker population, unless they have already left.

  2. My father had a 1956 Nash that was all black. It was not the Ambassador but the next lower model. The starter switch was under the accelerator.

  4. A lot of wonderful pictures today.

    The Gran Hotel Ciudad is jaw-droppingly beautiful. I love Art Nouveau and I could sit in that lobby all day. More’s the pity that it’s in Mexico; I suppose this reflects badly on me, but I have no desire to travel there at all.

    I don’t know what to think about the Boilly painting, since it seems out of place for its time. Anything like that done in the 1790s makes me wonder what was going through the artist’s mind at the time. Was this his way of distracting himself from the horrors of the Revolution and Napoleon’s takeover?

    I wish I had a collection like Truffaut. I do, if you count DVDs, but I’d prefer film.

    Caine makes a great observation, and it reminds me of Robert Sellers’ book “Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed.” A fun read, if you haven’t seen it.

    Thelma Todd was born in Lawrence, MA, not too far from where I live, and every year on her birthday the local fan club holds a festival of her movies.

  5. Olivia wasn’t afraid to show us her “other side”.

    The Grand Hotel of Mexico City and Myrna Loy — 2 classic beauties!at

    Domestic Movies is one of those paintings that you can look at a hundred times and see something different every time. To me, that makes it an excellent piece of art.

    Thelma Todd, known as “the Ice Cream Blonde”, died at age 29 and had 120 films/shorts to her credit. There was “great mystery” around her death (isn’t there always when a pretty, young actress dies) which ultimately was ruled accidental.

    The woman in the “1900 Selfie”… I see photos like this and want to know who she was, why she took the photo, what happened to her, etc.

    In regard to the photo of François Truffaut (and I think this could actually be a photo of Robert with his secret stash of films). I remember seeing Fahrenheit 459 and thinking that it could be our future. He was known as a serial womanizer and he certainly had a Who’s Who of attractive young leading ladies. It is all “so French”.

    As to the watch, it is a nice time piece, but you are entirely paying for the name/prestige. I much prefer the design of the Series 4 to (this) Series 3, but I find I find the $150K price tag (let alone the 3 year wait time) ridiculous. I would take your Hamilton (with the dual time display) any day over this Smith.

    Charlotte is adorable. I love the look on her face and how she holds her hands. May I ask who is holding her?

    Have a wonderful weekend!

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