Seraphic Secret

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

Bela Lugosi

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Richard Avedon
Buster Keaton, New York City, 1952
“The screen was just a white sheet. They had this flickering machine. That was the first time I saw this angel with a white face and these beautiful eyes. I knew this was something special. It was the first time I saw Keaton. He wore a flat pancake of a hat, and I just couldn’t believe the man’s grace.”
—Mel Brooks, on first seeing a Buster Keaton film when Brooks was a child.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“The mixed reviews and poor box office for Vertigo lessened my self-confidence. I always have this feeling that I’m supposed to do something, to mean something. My sense of that started to weaken, as if, ‘Oh, I thought this was a medium that I was supposed to touch people in and I’m not having an impact.’ As time went by, I thought, ‘This is not the right medium.’ It’s a wonderful medium and I enjoyed working in it but I started to think that this must have been a detour. This must not be my medium for doing something important and to touch people. I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful.” —Kim Novak, The MacGuffin interview, 2004
“The mixed reviews and poor box office for Vertigo lessened my self-confidence. I always have this feeling that I’m supposed to do something, to mean something. My sense of that started to weaken, as if, ‘Oh, I thought this was a medium that I was supposed to touch people in and I’m not having an impact.’ As time went by, I thought, ‘This is not the right medium.’ It’s a wonderful medium and I enjoyed working in it but I started to think that this must have been a detour. This must not be my medium for doing something important and to touch people.
I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful.”
-Kim Novak, The MacGuffin interview, 2004

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Sidney Fox: Lost in Hollywood

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Sidney Fox, 1907 — 1942.

In 1930, film mogul Carl Laemmle, Jr., attended Lost Sheep, a Broadway play that had garnered positive reviews. A young actress, Sidney Fox, b. Sidney Leiffer, received particularly good notices for her performance. The influential New York Times observed:

 “As Rhoda, little Sidney Fox [she stood only 4′ 10″ tall] won the hearts of the audience at once with her frail, girlish beauty and her pert spirit. Nothing could be more tenderly disarming than the freshness of her acting.”

Apparently Fox also won the heart of Carl Laemmle Jr. He brought her out to Hollywood, put her under contract to Universal Pictures and groomed her for stardom.

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