Seraphic Secret

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

Ace in the Hole

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“We had been asked to stay in Los Angeles by Mr. and Mrs. Jack Warner… the Warners threw us a star-scattered party. It was a bit of an orgy, none the worse for that and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. I started in a fine pink brocade Molyneux dress, but Mr. David Selznick told me that my breasts were too flattened and that people were complaining about them, and could I change? So I went back to the old Central European’s peasant dress and took a new lease of deep-bosomed life.”
—From Lady Diana Cooper’s Autobiography
Photo by Emil Otto (‘E.O.’) Hoppe, 1916

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Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1950s: Ace in the Hole, The Bad and the Beautiful, Singin’ in the Rain

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We continue our survey of the twenty greatest movies of the 1950s.

For a complete listing of the greatest movies of the 20, 30s and 40s, click here.

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, 1951.
Kirk Douglas, Ace in the Hole, 1951.

4. Ace in the Hole, 1951

A hand-embroidered motto, “Tell the Truth” sits as a dusty epitaph on the newsroom wall of an inconsequential Albuquerque newspaper where Kirk Douglas, a cynical New York reporter, hustles a job.

Sent out to cover a local rattle snake hunt, Douglas stumbles on a man trapped inside a cave, and turns it into a “human interest” story that explodes on the national scene and becomes — entertainment.

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The Wisdom of Hollywood Screenwriters

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Ben Hecht, screenwriter and novelist, the Shakespeare of Hollywood.

From where do we draw wisdom?

First and foremost, Seraphic Secret relies on the Torah—written and oral—on the lessons of 3,000 years of Jewish history, and on the common sense advice of my wife Karen.

And then there are the movies, a moral landscape of immeasurable power where searing images and razor-sharp dialogue deliver lessons in human character that, for better or for worse, shape modern man’s consciousness.

I know it seems ludicrous, if not downright blasphemous, noting Torah and movies as primary influences, but the mind of yours truly, a screenwriter and movie-lover, is a stage of raging intellectual conflicts.

Here are five slices of dialogue by some of of Hollywood’s finest screenwriters that brilliantly and economically unmask a raw and vulnerable humanity.

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