Seraphic Secret

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

Gabriel Metsu

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Often a director, in a weepy scene, would ask me to visualize my mother dying so that I might cry easily. I couldn’t do it. The only way I could bring the tears was to think about something horrible happening to me.”
—Norma Shearer

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Another thing I had to cure myself of was the desire for adulation, and the approbation of my fellow man. It started when I was a small boy and played football at school. If I did well they cheered me. If I fumbled I was booed. It became very important to me to be liked. It’s the same in the theater, the applause and the laughter give you courage and the excitement to go on. I thought it was absolutely necessary in order to be happy. Now I know how it can change, just like that. They can be applauding you one moment, and booing you the next. The thing to know is that you have done a good job, then it doesn’t hurt to be criticized.”
—Cary Grant

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Days of Heaven, 1978
“At [director Terence] Malick’s insistence certain parts of the film were made at what he calls the ‘magic hour’, that is, the time between sunset and nightfall. From the point of view of luminosity, this period lasts about twenty minutes, so that calling it a ‘magic hour’ is an optimistic euphemism.
The light really was very beautiful, but we had little time to film scenes of long duration. All day we would work to get the actors and the camera ready; as soon as the sun had set we had to shoot quickly, not losing a moment. For these few minutes the light is truly magical, because no one knows where it is coming from. The sun is not to be seen, but the sky can be bright, and the blue of the atmosphere undergoes strange mutations.
Malick’s intuition and daring probably made these scenes the most interesting ones visually in the film. And it takes daring to convince the Hollywood old guard that the shooting day should last only twenty minutes. Even though we took advantage of this short space of time with a kind of frenzy, we often had to finish the scene the next day at the same time, because night would fall inexorably. Each day, like Joshua in the Bible, Malick wanted to stop the sun in its imperturbable course so as to go on shooting.”
-excerpted from A Man with a Camera, by Néstor Almendros
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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“To make a real war movie would be to occasionally fire at the audience from behind the screen during a battle scene. But word-of-mouth from casualties wouldn’t help the film to sell tickets. And again, such reaching for reality is against the law. Anyone seeing the movie will survive.”
—Sam Fuller reassures moviegoers they will not go home with injuries if they go see his latest war movie.

 

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I don’t know that I’ve any style at all. I just patterned myself on a combination of Jack Buchanan [musical comedy star of the 1920s], Noël Coward, and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point. It’s a relationship.” —Cary Grant
“I don’t know that I’ve any style at all. I just patterned myself on a combination of Jack Buchanan [musical comedy star of the 1920s], Noël Coward, and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point. It’s a relationship.”
—Cary Grant
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