Seraphic Secret

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

Ginger Rogers

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“If I had my life to live all over again, I’d live it the same way. Maybe a few changes here or there, but nothing special. The truth is, honey, I’ve enjoyed my life. I’ve had a hell of a good time.”
— Ava Gardner (born Ava Lavinia Gardner 1922 – 1990)

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Flashback: When Hollywood Celebrated Christmas

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Mary Pickford helps Hollywood celebrate Christmas, 1920s.
Mary Pickford (born Gladys Louise Smith, Toronto, Canada, 1892 – 1979) helps Hollywood celebrate Christmas, 1920s.

There was a time when Hollywood openly and joyously celebrated Christmas. Now, among the Hollywood elite, the greeting I hear is “Happy Holidays.”

Look, we at Seraphic Secret are Orthodox Jews. This is not our holiday.

But we want our Christian friends to celebrate Christmas. The politically correct Happy Holidays shtick is another nail in the coffin of American culture; another instance where a minority of obnoxious liberals bully the larger culture into secular nothingness.

American Christianity is a unique force for good in world history. It is not the Christianity of Europe that is poisoned with genocidal Jew-hatred.

Hollywood used to celebrate Christmas using every tool in the cinematic playbook.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“It was after she said that she wanted to be in The Brothers Karamazov,” Wilder went on, “that she started going to the Actors’ Studio School of Dramatic Arts in New York. She didn’t do it for publicity. She’s sincerely trying to improve herself, and I think she should be admired for that. She could have sat here in Hollywood on her pretty little fanny and collected all of the money any ordinary actress would ever want, but she keeps trying.”
— Pete Martin’s interview with Billy Wilder for The Saturday Evening Post in 1956.
Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe on the set of Some Like it Hot, 1958

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“You get tough in this business, until you get big enough to hire people to get tough for you.”
—Natalie Wood, posing on her 1956 Ford Thunderbird

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Flashback: When Hollywood Celebrated Christmas

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Mary Pickford helps Hollywood celebrate Christmas, 1920s.
Mary Pickford helps Hollywood celebrate Christmas, 1920s.

There was a time when Hollywood openly and joyously celebrated Christmas. Now, among the Hollywood elite, the greeting I hear is “Happy Holidays.”

Look, we at Seraphic Secret are Orthodox Jews. This is not our holiday.

But we want our Christian friends to celebrate Christmas. The politically correct Happy Holidays shtick is another nail in the coffin of American culture; another instance where a minority of obnoxious liberals bully the larger culture into secular nothingness.

American Christianity is a unique force for good in world history. It is not the Christianity of Europe that is poisoned with genocidal Jew-hatred.

Hollywood used to celebrate Christmas using every tool in the cinematic playbook.

[Read more…] about Flashback: When Hollywood Celebrated Christmas