Seraphic Secret

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

Screenwriting

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I never take any notice of reviews — unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now.”
—Robert Mitchum

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Too much glamour, too much sin, repeated often, become monotonously dull. I’m speaking now about the screen, of course.”
—Kay Francis

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I’m a lot more sartorial than thespian. They come to see me and go out humming the costumes.”
—Constance Bennett (b. Constance Campbell Bennett, 1904 – 1965)

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Raymond Chandler: Advice for Hollywood Screenwriters

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Raymond Chandler, novelist and co-screenwriter on Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia, Strangers on a Train, etc.
Raymond Chandler, novelist, and co-screenwriter on Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia, Strangers on a Train, and numerous other credits.

Like every writer or almost every writer, who goes to Hollywood, I was convinced in the beginning that there must be some discoverable method of working in pictures which would not be completely stultifying to whatever creative talent one might happen to possess. But like others before me I discovered that this was a dream.

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Clark Gable: A Child… A Bull… No Filth

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Clark Gable

John Lee Mahin (1902-1984) was one of the greatest screenwriters. His credits include some of Hollywood’s most enduring classics: Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), Bombshell (1933), China Seas (1935), Wife Versus Secretary (1936), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) with uncredited contributions to, among others, A Star is Born (1937),  Test Pilot (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Mahin was director Victor Fleming’s most trusted screenwriter and in one way or another Mahin contributed to nearly every Fleming film.

Mahin understood star power. He instinctively knew that Harlow’s hyper sexuality was best exploited through humor and naughty wisecracks. Thus Red Dust and Bombshell were Harlow’s very best pictures.

Mahin also understood raw male power. And during Hollywood’s golden age, no male star approached Clark Gable’s dominance. Women wanted Gable and men wanted to be Gable.

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