Seraphic Secret

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

Peter Bogdanovich

Books on my Night Table

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In the year 1000 there was the fervent belief that the oceans would rise, the crops would fail, and that the world was going to end in fire and ice and fury. In short Democrats would have felt right at home in Medieval Millennium Europe. Modern critics dubbed Roth, Bellow and Malamud as important Jewish writers. Chaim Grade was a real Jewish writer whose subject matter was the vanished world of the European Jew in the years before World War II. A great and sadly neglected writer. Before Peter Bogdanovich directed the best movies of the 70s, Targets, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc?, and Paper Moon he wrote some of the best, most well observed essays about movies and movie people.

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Most of the good things in pictures happen by accident.”
—John Ford
Photo by Richard Avedon, Bel Air, California, 1972

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“A movie should be like a dream. It washes over you; you don’t know what’s affecting you; you can’t do anything about it; you’re taken away.”
—Peter Bogdanovich

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Listening to the Movies

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For a few years I kept track of the movies I went to by keeping my stubs and mounting them. Over the years, most of my collection was lost. I recently discovered this blast from the past. The only card left of dozens.

When I was a youngster growing up in Brooklyn during the 50s and 60s there were two ways to watch movies: go to my local movie theater and see the latest studio release, or catch an old movie on late night television. Thus, your choices were pretty limited. As I grew older, I would schlep into Manhattan and watch movies at arty revival houses. In this way I educated myself about motion pictures. I screened a fair number of movies by the time I entered college but I realize now I was pretty ignorant.  Basically, access to movies was severely limited.

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Cary Grant: The Truth About The Academy Awards

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Cary Grant receiving an Academy Honorary Award in 1970.

“Years ago, when Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon were getting divorced, a perhaps apocryphal story appeared in the scandal sheets: As an example of Grant’s supposed irrationality, Cannon cited to the judge Cary’s yearly habit of sitting in front of his television and sardonically abusing all the participants. This item, true or not, must have amused nearly everyone in Hollywood, since nearly everyone in Hollywood does pretty much the same thing.

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