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Movie History Film Clips
Angela Lansbury Arrives in Hollywood (Rob Wagner's Script, 1945)
Those sly dogs at SCRIPT MAGAZINE! They printed the smiling mug of the twenty-five year-old Angela Lansbury (b. 1925) on the cover of their rag, briefly praising her for being the youngest performer to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award (she soon won the 1944 Best Supporting Actress statue for "Gaslight"), and ran a "profile" of the lass on a page eight article that was misleadingly titled "Our Cover Girl", only to devote 85% of the columns to her illustrious pedigree!
Abusive journalists not only make our blood boil, but they also make us write run-on sentences.
The article says nothing about the fact that her love of acting was so great that she braved the U-Boat infested waters of the Atlantic Ocean in 1942 in order to get to Hollywood. However, you will learn about her salad years as a shop girl at the Bullocks Wilshire department store.
| Martha Vickers (Pic Magazine, 1945)
Perhaps one of the first magazine articles about the beautiful actress Martha Vickers (1925 – 1971) who is best remembered by fans for her performance as the fabulously slutty "Carmen Sternwood" in the 1946 film The Big Sleep.
This article tells the tale of her early days in 1940s Los Angeles and her work as a photographer's model, which turned a few of the crowned heads of Hollywood:
"A color photograph of her was seen by David Selznick, who forthwith signed her. Selznick gave her drama and diction classes for a year without casting her in a picture, and when option time came up, her contract was dropped. That, naturally, was a great disappointment..."
••Watch A Martha Vickers Slide Show ••
| Where the Stars Dwell: Beverly Hills, California (Coronet Magazine, 1953)
Times have changed: when this article about Beverly Hills first went to press, that famed little hamlet could support as many as ten bookshops. It is now barely able to support one:"Beverly Hills became famous in 1926 when, in one of the smartest publicity stunts of the century, the movie star Will Rogers was elected honorary mayor. Installed in drizzling rain, Rogers declared that all the budding town needed for progress was a little scandal and a few murders... Today, it has an international reputation for exclusive smartness; its citizens are largely concerned with the production of motion pictures; possibly 200 film notables live in the town, and most of the movie stars who built within its confines came there because they were attracted by the notion of large estates within easy distance of the sea and the beaches."
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| Veronica Lake (Click Magazine, 1944)
This is a profile Veronica Lake (1922 – 1973) who was characterized in this article as "an artist at making enemies.":
"One of the most acute problems in Hollywood is Veronica Lake. Where, and at what precise moment her time-bomb mind will will explode with some deviation from what studio bosses consider normal is an ever-present question. Hence, the grapevine of the movie industry always hums with rumors that unless Miss Lake 'behaves', she will no longer be tolerated, but cast into oblivion."
Her response:
"Women are always trouble to unimaginative men..."
| William Holden (Coronet Magazine, 1956)
The attached profile of actor William Holden (1918 – 1981) appeared in print when his stock was about to peak.
By the summer of 1956, Holden was already a double nominee for a BAFTA ("Picnic"), an Oscar ("Sunset Boulevard") and was the grateful recipient of an Academy Award for Best Actor one year earlier ("Stalag 17"). In 1957 his performance in the "Bridge on the River Kwai" would bring even more pats on the back (although the Best Actor statue would go to Alec Guinness). This five page interview tells the story of Holden's initial discovery in Hollywood, his devotion to both the Screen Actor's Guild and Paramount Pictures. His Hollywood peers held him in especially high-regard: "In a poll of Hollywood reporters recently he was designated 'the best adjusted and happiest actor around'".
| My Brother Groucho (Coronet Magazine, 1951)
In this six page essay Harpo Marx tells the tale of Groucho (1890 – 1977) as only an older brother could see it. From the Marx family's earliest days in the slums of New York and Groucho's first entertainment job (he was 13), Harpo (1888 – 1964) briefly recounts his brother's wins and losses leading up to the team's first popular show on Broadway ("I'll Say She Is", 1923) and the man's travails on his T.V. game show, "You Bet Your Life".
"Groucho's infatuation with the language has been the backbone of his entire life and has, undoubtedly, played the largest single part in shaping him into one of the greatest wits of our time. Groucho doesn't regard words the way the rest of us do. He looks at a word in the usual fashion. Then he looks at it upside down, backwards, from the middle out to the ends, and from the ends back to the middle...Groucho doesn't look for double meanings. He looks for quadruple meanings. And usually finds them."
Click here to read about the manner in which the Marx Brothers would test their jokes.
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