Tag Archives: Gun Crazy

By Robert J. Avrech | September 6, 2012

Ten Greatest Movies Ever Made

Tweet Every ten years, Sight & Sound magazine, a British publication devoted to the — cue cultured BBC accent — Art of Cinema, surveys some 1,000 critics, directors and know-it-all yentas, most of whom I’ve never heard, asking them to list the ten greatest movies in the known universe. Here’s the survey. For the past […]

Posted in Great Movies, Ten Greatest Movies | Also tagged Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, His Girl Friday, Rear Window, Seven Samurai, Show People, Sight & Sound, The Awful Truth, The Freshman, The Lady Eve, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vertigo | 55 Responses

By Robert J. Avrech | May 17, 2012

Movie Posters: Hollywood’s Golden Age

Tweet Have you looked at a movie poster recently and said to yourself: I really have to see that film. Doubtful. In the digital era movie posters are barely there, a minor and frequently mediocre—tedious star shots dominate—element in the white-noise media that is dominated by an ever-shifting social media. There was a time, however, […]

Posted in Hollywood, Movie Posters | Also tagged Ann Blyth, Elissa Landry, He Who Gets Slapped, Joan Crawford, John Dall, John Ford, John Gilbert, John Wayne, Laurence Olivier, Lillian Gish, Lon Chaney, Lorna Doone, Madge Bellamy, Mildren Pierce, Norma Shearer, Peggy Cummins, Ronald Colman, Stagecoach, The White Sister, The Yellow Ticket, Zachary Scott | 13 Responses

By Robert J. Avrech | January 26, 2012

The Wisdom of Hollywood Screenwriters

Tweet 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 […]

Posted in Hollywood, Screenwriting, Wisdom of Hollywood Screenwriters | Also tagged Ace in the Hole, Beast of the City, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, China Seas, Clark Gable, Dalton Trumbo, Gone With the Wind, James Kevin McGuiness, Jan Sterling, Jean Harlow, Jo Swerling, John Lee Mahin, John Van Druten, Jules Furthman, Kirk Douglas, Lesser Samuels, MacKinlay Kantor, Oliver H.P. Garrett, Sidney Howard, Victor Desny, Vivien Leigh, W.R. Burnett, Walter Newman | 7 Responses

By Robert J. Avrech | December 15, 2011

The Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1940′s: ’46-’49

Tweet We continue our series of the Twenty Greatest Movies of each decade. Here are our our picks for the last five great movies of the 1940′s. 16. Notorious, 1946. No American actor has tampered with his own charming image more successfully than Cary Grant. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939) he is the tough […]

Posted in Great Movies, Greatest Movies of the 1940s, Hollywood | Also tagged Alfred Hitchcock, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, Charles Dickens, David Lean, Great Expectations, Howard Hawks, Ingrid Bergman, Jean Simmons, Joanne Dru, John Dahl, John Wayne, Joseph H. Lewis, Montgomery Clift, Notorious, Peggy Cummins, Red River, The Killers | 13 Responses

By Robert J. Avrech | November 1, 2011

This Land of Film Noir

Tweet Every morning I rise at about five AM, don my sweats, hook up my iPhone’s music function and take a brisk three-mile walk. The streets of Los Angeles at this time of the morning are wet, slick from all the lawn sprinklers that explode with a fearsome hiss in the middle of the night. […]

Posted in Hollywood, Movies | Also tagged Cornel Wilde, Double Indemnity, Film Noir, Jean Wallace, John Alton, John Dahl, Los Angeles, Peggy Cummins, The Big Combo, The Killing | 30 Responses

By Robert J. Avrech | June 26, 2007

Stalked

Tweet “Thing is, he’s going to kill me.” “Have you gone to the police?” “Yes, of course I have.” “And what happened?” She shakes her head from side to side, wraps her arms protectively around her chest. “I got a restraining order against Ned, that’s my ex. But you know what good that is, don’t […]

Posted in Gun Control, Weapons | Also tagged 10 Day Waiting Period, Buying Guns, Gloria Grahame, Lana Turner, Peggy Cummins, Self-Defense, Tuesday Weld, Woman Stalked by Ex | 62 Responses

How I Married Karen

The new book
by Robert J. Avrech

Available in All Major Book Stores

Adobe Digital Edition's version is available through the Lulu store!
About Me
Robert J. Avrech
Los Angeles, California
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I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
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Annual Ariel Avrech
Memorial Lectures
Young Israel of Century City

Tenth: June 9, 2013
David Horowitz: "The War Against Judaism on the University Campus." Blog Post | Audio (mp3 16MB)

Ninth: June 3, 2012
Joel B. Pollak: "The Mainstream Media's Betrayal of Israel." Blog Post | Audio (mp3 15MB)

Eighth: June 5, 2011
Yossi Klein Halevi: "What is Expected of a Survivor People: Lessons My Father Taught Me." Blog Post | Audio (mp3 18MB)

Seventh: June 13, 2010
Dennis Prager: "Happiness is a Mitzvah, Not an Emotion." Blog Post | Audio (mp3 80MB)

Sixth: June 21, 2009
Rabbi Steven Pruzansky: "Conformity in Jewish Life: Vice, Virtue or Affectation?" Blog Post | Audio (mp3 64MB)

Fifth: June 15, 2008
Rabbi Dr. Gil S. Perl: "What Was the Rosh Yeshiva Reading: Intellectual Openness in 19th Century Lithuania." Blog Post | Audio (mp3 70MB)
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