Go Raq!

Anyone else looking forward to Hollywoodland? I am a sucker for Old Hollywood stuff. I hope it is good, I have been avoiding reviews, since I knew I was seeing it no matter what.

What I'd like is to see a movie dealing with the William Desmond Taylor murder in 1922. Early Hollywood, successful director murdered, studio coverup--it just screams Good Cinema!

I'm looking forward to it, Raq. I want to see Black Dahlia too, but it's not something to get me running to the theater at the moment.

Yeah, that's a great story. Also Paul Bern's suicide would make a terrific film.

Anyone else looking forward to Hollywoodland?

I am, in the sense that I think it'll be very interesting and I hope I make it out to the theater to see it but I'll probably have to Netflix it. I suck.

I put The Matrix on the other night while I was tidying up (does anyone else do that? Put movies on instead of music?), and I was struck by how outmoded the technology looks in the first shot of Neo. Beige CRT monitor (instead of a black flatscreen), stacks of CDs (instead of a mp3 player or earbuds going into the computer), minidiscs, the search engine on his machine.... I know not everyone has a flatscreen or mp3, but I remember how very now everything was when it was released. Which was the point - 1999 as Golden Age. But I couldn't help mentally substituting things in. Not much of a point, except to note cyberpunk's limitation in trying to portray cutting-edge and futuretech - it always gets outstripped.

does anyone else do that? Put movies on instead of music?

One of my favorite things to do when I get my full-on-must-clean-everything-now!-mode is to pop in my dvd of Branagh's Henry V, recite the opening monologue along with Derek Jacobi ("O for a muse of fire / that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention..."), and then start cleaning.

I was just looking up the Taylor murder info over at the Crime Library, and saw this wonderful summation of why it would make such a great movie:

The case has all of the elements of the unreal world of Hollywood. It has a famous director of silent films shot in the back. It has, among the suspects, a dope-possessed movie star, several sex-crazed female movie stars, a young up-and-coming screen goddess with an insatiable lust for the director, the starlet's monster of a stage mother, hitmen, drug pushers, and the victim's brother. If this were not enough, there's an embezzling chauffeur, a gay housekeeper, charges of gay and bisexual escapades, hysterical and dishonest movie executives, and a district attorney who seemed to want to produce a cover-up.

Place all of these characters in the context of 1920s movie scandals, prohibition, and the raffish characters that made up the movie industry at that time, and you have a story of passion, greed, and, most of all, a very mysterious murder.

You know, Scarlett Johansson would make a perfect Mary Miles Minter: [link]

Robin, I was interested in seeing Hollywoodland until I saw the trailer and it looked a lot like the Bettie Page movie. Just kind of small and an HBO production and maybe a little thin. Caroline Dhavernas is in it though, dressed fifties! (There's a nice portrait of her in costume in the current Kirsten Dunst issue of Interview.) Also Diane Lane looks scrumptious and I'd like to see Robin Tunney in fifties drag too. I guess I've talked myself into it.

Going through the Crime Library I was reading the Fatty Arbuckle case. He got his start with this act:

In 1904, the young Arbuckle sang for Sid Grauman at the Unique Theater in San Jose. He was what was called an “illustrated singer.” As described in David Yallop’s The Day the Laughter Stopped, an illustrated singer was one who sang “while gorgeously-colored slides with the lyrics were projected on a screen . . . thereby ‘illustrating’ the song.”

It's like vidding in the Vaudeville era. Definitely belongs in the Encyclopedia of Lost Pop Culture. Reminded me that Jerry Lewis' first act was comic lip-syncing.

The case has all of the elements of the unreal world of Hollywood.

They don't even mention that the director had changed his name and abandoned his family.