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.

Norma Shearer

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“If there’s anything I hate it’s a goddamned phony, and Hollywood’s filled with them, pretending to be what they are not and some of them never were.”
—Barbara Stanwyck

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“It wasn’t the way I looked at a man, it was the thought behind it.”
—Gloria Grahame

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“It is impossible to get anything made or accomplished without stepping on some toes; enemies are inevitable when one is a doer.” —Norma Schearer
“It is impossible to get anything made or accomplished without stepping on some toes; enemies are inevitable when one is a doer.”
—Norma Schearer

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Hollywood Hair: Leda Styled By Leonardo da Vinci

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Four studies of Leda by Leonardo Da Vinci. In Greek mythology, the God Zeus transforms himself into a swan and travels to Earth to seduce a lady called Leda. She gives birth to two eggs that hatch to be Polydeuces and Helen.
Four studies of Leda by Leonardo da Vinci. In Greek mythology, the God Zeus transforms himself into a swan and travels to Earth to seduce a a beautiful lady named Leda. She gives birth to Polydeuces and Helen, AKA Helen of Troy. The date of this chalk and ink work is 1506, and executed while Da Vinci lived in Milan. The dimensions are 17.7 x 14.7 cm.  The completed “Leda and the Swan”painting is lost.

Years ago, on Shabbos evenings, when our children were little, I would frequently grab an art book, sit in my chair, and one of the kids would climb into my lap. We’d turn the pages, look at the pictures, and make up stories about the figures in the paintings.

Ariel, Z’TL, was intrigued by the Dutch painters of the Seventeenth Century: Jan Steen, Peter de Hooch, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. Offspring #2 and #3, girls, inclined to the High Italian Renaissance: Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo.

One memorable night, I opened a book devoted to the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci.

Offspring #2 was about 5 years old at the time, and after leafing through a few pages, she grew bored. She wanted lush colors, luminous light, and dramatic figures in mysterious landscapes. Leonardo’s drawings were too stark, too black and white. And Leonardo’s anatomy drawings… totally gross.

Then I turned to Leonardo’s four sketches for the head of Leda.

Offspring #2 nearly fell off my lap.

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Movie Posters: Hollywood’s Golden Age

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Fantastic poster for a 1931 film that hints at menace in the form of a mysterious yellow ticket. What the poster doesn't tell you is the ticket was a pass issued to Jewish women allowing them to travel out of the Pale of Settlement where the Jews were confined by order of the Jew-hating Tzar. But only prostitutes were eligible. An obscure film starring Laurence Olivier, Lionel Barrymore and Elissa Landry.

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, when movie posters were the dominant element by which audiences were lured to the movies.

Here are just a few samples of ordinary posters cranked out by the Hollywood studios; all are characterized by bold graphics and unusual fonts. These are posters that artfully promise action, mystery and romance.

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