CineSavant Column
Hello!
We can depend on correspondent Michael McQuarrie to send along links of crucial interest:
It seems the Internet Archive has a pretty extensive selection of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines up, and rather well-scanned.
My teenaged collection began with Issue 28 — Bela Lugosi as a manimal, above — but it had to disappear when I went to college in 1970, along with 99% of my childhood possessions. Only a few times since have I sampled old copies of the magazine. Forrest J. Ackerman was no oracle of our times, but he did have fun with terrible puns. I’m advised to jump into early issues and start seeking out ‘reader write-in’ articles, where various fans, friends, superfans and the occasional future celebrity can be found.
The covers are certainly fantastic — for some reason I saved the incredible scarlet cover with Bernard Jukes, when everything else had to go. I recall digging into early issues I never saw, only to be confronted with material I had already read in paperback reprints. Yep, Forry and his publisher didn’t print anything just once, if 4 times would be tolerated.
Anyway, I’m going to refrain from dawdling too long in this archive … it doesn’t seem to be complete, or is it?
We once again shamelessly ‘adopt’ a link circulated by Joe Dante. This time out the prize is an hourlong TV docu about the legendary silent actress Louise Brooks, from the 1980s BBC arts series Arena.
The show takes excerpts from Brooks’ intense one-on-one 1975 ‘bathrobe’ interview piece with director Richard Leacock called A Conversation with Louise Brooks, that was later also folded into the documentary Lulu in Berlin. Also part of the mix is interview footage shot by Kevin Brownlow, for his solid-gold docu miniseries about silent movies, Hollywood.
Add to that numerous clips from Louise Brooks films and interview material with various spokespeople like critic Kenneth Tynan — he really seems to have been enthralled by the Brooks mystique. The actress was completely frank about sex. This particular docu begins with the oft-quoted bit from the Leacock interview, in which Ms. Brooks says that ‘Hollywood was invented by money men as a way of owning beautiful women.’
The documentary may change your mind about the sex appeal of silent movies:
This caught our attention as well. Long-time correspondent Malcom Alcala found these online photos online somewhere — they’re reportedly from an un-aired, possibly un-filmed Dick Tracy TV show sometime about 1967.
Friend Craig Reardon helped with some fantastic effects makeup jobs for the celebrated Warren Beatty film, but I didn’t know that an earlier production attempted to replicate the cartoonish appearance of Chester Gould’s menagerie of underworld villains.
All I can say is that the makeup man is identified as John Chambers … it’s reportedly Lon Chaney Jr. made up as “Pruneface,” and actor Leon Janney in full makeup as “Flattop.” The Flattop still looks like it’s been touched up a little, maybe. Or maybe a lot. But it certainly matches the comic book look of Pruneface.
Is it just me, or does Pruneface look like a parody of Ronald Reagan?
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s471tracy.html