Seraphic Secret

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

Harry Callahan

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I loathe acting. I loathe what it does to my life. It cancels it out; you cannot live while you are working. You are a person completely surrounded by unbreachable walls.”
—Margaret Sullavan, via Haywire, one of the finest, if most depressing Hollywood memoirs I have ever read

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“When I am spotted somewhere, it means that my characterizations haven’t covered up Eleanor Parker the person. I prefer it the other way around.”
—Eleanor Parker

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I have bursts of being a lady, but it doesn’t last long.”
—Shelley Winters

 

I would be remiss if I did not link to a splendid Christmas or Chanukah gift. You have my personal guarantee that this item is awesome. 

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby (1968, dir. Roman Polanski)

“I appeared in every single scene of the film [Rosemary’s Baby], except when, during [the impregnated with Satan’s spawn sequence] a body double was used in my place. But I didn’t entirely miss out on the scene—one day I found myself—me from convent school, who prayed with outstretched arms in the predawn light – tied to the four corners of a bed, ringed by elderly, chanting witches, while a perfect stranger with bad skin and vertical pupils was grinding away on top of me. I didn’t dare think. After finishing that scene the actor climbed off me and said politely, in all seriousness, ‘Miss Farrow, I just want to say, it’s a real pleasure to have worked with you.’“
—excerpted from Mia Farrow’s What Falls Away

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Terri Garr, Gene Wilder, ? & Mel Brooks in Young Frankenstein (1974). “I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could be another Frankenstein. I said not another – we’ve had the son of, the cousin of, the brother-in-law, we don’t need another Frankenstein. His idea was very simple: What if the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein wanted nothing to do with the family whatsoever. He was ashamed of those wackos. I said, “That’s funny.” —Mel Brooks
Terri Garr, Gene Wilder b. Jerome Silberman (1933 – 2016), Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle and Mel Brooks on the set of Young Frankenstein (1974).
“I was in the middle of shooting the last few weeks of Blazing Saddles somewhere in the Antelope Valley, and Gene Wilder and I were having a cup of coffee and he said, I have this idea that there could be another Frankenstein. I said not another – we’ve had the son of, the cousin of, the brother-in-law, we don’t need another Frankenstein. His idea was very simple: What if the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein wanted nothing to do with the family whatsoever. He was ashamed of those wackos. I said, “That’s funny.”
—Mel Brooks

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