What are you reading?

[Birdy]

how can they do one for the money without doing two with it? is ranger even in one?

[jdb1]

I don't know Grey's Anatomy -- never saw it. I do recall that Heigl's name was being shrieked on every Hollywood "news" show for a while last year. She looked very ordinary to me, but I did not hear her speak in any interviews. I hope she's up to the task.

You know, Birdy, I can't remember now if Ranger appears in the first book. I hope so. I'm more concerned with who is going to play Stephanie's family and co-workers -- they're the real gems of the series. I can see Betty White or Chloris Leachman, or even Lily Tomlin as Grandma.

[charliechaplinfan]

I finished reading Showman David O Selznick by David Thomson. I found the book really well written but the subject infuriating yet sympathetic. David Selznick did have a touch of genius about him, he achieved a lot very young and could have rivalled Thalberg, if he'd have chosen to. Instead he married the boss's daughter Irene Mayer and refused any advantage that that position might have brought him. It seems a very genuine love story, they seem to compliment each other enormously. I admire the refusal of the Fox shares that LB Mayer wanted to give him, I admire the desire to be independent rather than be set up as a second Thalberg. I love some of his movies and applaud the man who made the great Gone With The Wind. He was a terrific spotter of talent, in the forties he made most of hgis money loaning out the talent on his books, Joan Fontaine, Ingrid Bergman and Jennifer Jones. He was a control freak who spiralled out of control, around the time of GWTW he started taking Benzadrine a stimulant that can make the taker arrogant, this seems to have been the case. He wrote those copious memos, harranging everyone who ever worked for him, very few could cope with them. He gambled wildly. He chased women around his office. He had an affair with Joan Fontaine but both of them knew it was just fun but when he did the same with Jennifer Jones it was an entirely different affair, she was insecure and needed David, he was torn wanting his cake and eating it too. He didn't want to divorce Irene but she wanted him to make a decision and he could see how vulnerable Jennifer was and couldn't be cruel to her, so he vacillitated and Irene divorced him. This isn't to say he didn't love Jennifer, I think he did but she was more of a creation, a delicate project who needed the help of a regular analyst in Switzerland. Jennifer is supposed to have made her best films away from David's control. David's relationship with Irene didn't stop at the divorce, the jointly owned the Selznick companies until 1951 which meant that Irene owned half of Jennifer's contract. Irene continued to be a support to David for the rest of his life. irene had given David 2 sons, Jennifer gave him one daughter, Mary Jennifer, he spoiled her rotten. He died when she was 10, a few years later Mary Jennifer threw herself out of a window on the 22nd floor . That' just so sad.

[klondike]

Not that I can claim to have researched any superior background information thereof, nor logged any first-hand readership of any of these particular chronicles, but I must ask:
Do any of the DOS/Jennifer Jones biographers ever contribute any ink about what the David & JJ affair did to Robert Walker?
Personally, I think it's incredible that poor little cross-medicated, cuckolded Bobby didn't go absolutely psycho-ballistic & murder everyone on the set of Since You Went Away.
But heck, Hollywood's seldom known as the Town of Just Desserts, now is it?

[charliechaplinfan]

I watched Since You Went Away yesterday, the fact that Robert Walker was cast to play love scenes opposite his estranged wife is slightly ghoulish to me. DOS was in the throws of his affair with Jennifer and had driven a wedge between the couple. It's seems very cruel to cast them together, even if he did have them both under contract.

Jennifer is somewhat in the shade in the DOS book, she declined to have anything to do with it. Irene and her two sons spoke to the author along with countless friends and colleagues. It touches on Robert Walker even less. He died a few years after he's seperated from Jennifer, he must have felt like Hollywood's biggest cuckold. I've seen him in a handful of films, he was a good actor. The book doesn't shed light on whether Jennifer and DOS contributed to alcoholism or demise, it doesn't say if RW had alcoholic tendencies before DOS. Jennifer's boys are hardly mentioned either, I haven't a clue as to who brought them up, DOS does seem to have felt some responsibility for them once RW had died. The affair and marriage to Jennifer has a bad smell about it.

[ChiO]

I have just started Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (Robert Polito, ed., 2009). And complete it is, replacing my worn copy of Negative Space. How can one not love a writer with the pizazz to open a review with:

"Stalag 17" is a crude, cliche-ridden glimpse of a Nazi prison camp that I hated to see end.

[charliechaplinfan]

I've started reading Dangerous Men by Mick Lasalle, I loved his book Complicated Women. I feel a precode period coming on

[pvitari]

I just started reading Gregory Mank's "Hollywood's Hellfire Club: The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and the Bundy Drive Boys." It's a tragic/hilarious account of the drunken goings-on of a group of actors (which also included John Carradine and Roland Young) and other Hollywood artistic types who collected around the Bundy Drive residence of painter John Decker (who is himself a very odd character). One Bundy Drive "boy" was the now-forgotten but then famous (or infamous) poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann (Japanese mother, German father), whose one screen role was as the court magician in Douglas Fairbanks' The Thief of Bagdad.

I recently read a book of interviews with Charlie Chaplin in which he mentioned a novel of Hartmann's. He was an influential literary figure back in the early decades of the 20th century.

[moira finnie]

One Bundy Drive "boy" was the now-forgotten but then famous (or infamous) poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann (Japanese mother, German father), whose one screen role was as the court magician in Douglas Fairbanks' The Thief of Bagdad. I recently read a book of interviews with Charlie Chaplin in which he mentioned a novel of Hartmann's. He was an influential literary figure back in the early decades of the 20th century.

Hi pvitari,
I'm glad to see you posting. I have been fascinated by Hartmann too, especially since he seems to have had a longtime influence on John Barrymore, which I first read about in Gene Fowler's book about his late friend and his cohorts, called Good Night, Sweet Prince, (which I think was an inspiration for Mank's recent book, even though Mank's research unearthed more documented info than Fowler's). In addition to Sadakichi Hartmann, I was always intrigued by artist John Decker as well. I realize that Fowler and Mank's books document the dissipation of some very talented individuals--but they certainly had style, (though I'd hate to have to clean up after them).

There's tons of material about Sadakichi Hartmann's life and work here too.

I would love to read more about John Decker, another character among those who befriended Barrymore. Decker has had at least one bio of his own, called Bohemian Rogue: The Life of Hollywood Artist John Decker by Stephen Jordan which I have yet to find in a library. A video found here features a montage of Decker's drawings and paintings, though unfortunately, the sound has been disabled. It also features glimpses of Barrymore's rather vividly morbid artwork. He did have talent in more fields than acting. Too bad it rarely brought him peace!

Moira

[charliechaplinfan]

I got Good Night Sweet Prince for Xmas, I think I shall have to start reading it soon. No doubt I'll then I'll get interested in your book pvitari. I love the tales about Errol Flynn, WC Fields and John Barrymore but like Moira, I'd hate to have to clean up after them. The one story I've read that connects Barrymore and Flynn together is in one of David Niven's books, it's the one about John Barrymore's corpse being left in Flynn's living room, that's a Hollywood tale that is just too tall to be true.

I'm half way through Dangerous Men , it's good but not quite as good as Complicated Women. It does have a section on Frederic March, one of the most delightful actors of the precode era. I knew virtually nothing about him, the book highlights three of his performances Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Smilin' Through and Merrily We Go To Hell. I've seen all three of these movies and can vouch for his perfromances in all. Why is he not held in the same esteem as Spencer Tracy, who I see as his closest screen rival?

[jdb1]

I got my copy of The Snake Pit, by Mary Jane Ward, yesterday, and I'm halfway through it. It is really, really good.

Without any fancy literary conceits, Ward takes us into the mind of a woman who is floating in and out of reality. It's very well done. I was afraid it would be too "artsy," but that is not the case at all. It's quite straightforward, but very skillful in giving us clues to Virginia's mindset, her past, and her past as only she saw it.

One thing different from the movie: Virginia may not have been a very likeable person. She remembers her mother telling her that she (the mother) overheard another parent refer to Virginia as "the meanest kid in school." And in another flashback, Virginia remembers overhearing two women at her country club talking about her and saying how cold and arrogant she was. Several other memories deal with how people seem to side with her husband, and against her, in some situations, calling her flightly and unfocused, and implying that she is a selfish person. It's clear that Virginia didn't seem able to "find" herself before her breakdown.

Something else interesting: I got this book through an Amazon reseller. Inside the back cover, there is a Book of the Month Club insert about the book, which says that a number of subscribers asked that these little descriptive booklets be printed in this manner so that they could be pasted into the book's flyleaf.

In addition, there is a Book of the Month Club return packing slip inside the pages of the book, in the name of a Miss Trussell (Pittsburgh 6, Pa.) The form is obviously individually typed (on a typewriter). Miss Trussell got a dual selection order in the month of April (no year, but probably the year of the book's publication, 1946) -- The Snake Pit, and Man-Eaters of Kumaon. The combined price was $3.11. Wow.

[charliechaplinfan]

I finished Dangerous Men, it wasn't as good as Complicated Women, I think that's because I knew more about the men of the era. The women and women's filmsI find the most fascinating.

I've started reading Jeffrey Meyers book on Gary Cooper. Haven't been able to get into it properly yet, I've not had enough time to devote to it. I was intrigued to discover that Cooper had been educated in England. I'd never have known. Cooper himself is someone I like in his early career, up to Ball Of Fire than I struggle to get into him. I like Love In The Afternoon and The Fountainnhead perhaps this book will help me.

[Ann Harding]

I've started reading Jeffrey Meyers book on Gary Cooper. Haven't been able to get into it properly yet, I've not had enough time to devote to it. I was intrigued to discover that Cooper had been educated in England. I'd never have known. Cooper himself is someone I like in his early career, up to Ball Of Fire than I struggle to get into him. I like Love In The Afternoon and The Fountainnhead perhaps this book will help me.

I bought the Meyers book when it came out. I found it deeply disappointing. Meyers' appreciation of films is fairly mediocre IMHO. As for his description of Cooper's life, I found his moralizing rather annoying. I am really not interested in a biographer's moral opinion about his subject. I want to read a honest factual description of a person's life. That said, the previous books on Cooper are even worse....gossipy and worthless.

[charliechaplinfan]

I've not got very far, I wonder if that's the reason why? I'll probably perservere though.

[jdb1]

I got to finish The Snake Pit yesterday, and I wanted to tell you how the film differs from the book.


The main difference is, as one can imagine when Hollywood gets hold of a property, that the story is essentially completely different from the story of the book. All of the circumstances of Virginia's breakdown, as limned in the movie, do not exist in the book. There is some mention of her boyfriend Gordon, but he is not described in any way, and he didn't die in a car crash, but of an illness. Virginia does lock herself in the bathroom, as she does in the movie, but mainly because she wants some privacy -- the bathrooms in the wards have no doors to the stalls. It's only after she's in there that she decides she'd rather stay there on her own than return to the ward, and she is punished for her actions, which the nursing staff considers unseemly, by being sent to hydrotherapy. As if often the case, behavior that is perfectly logical to Virginia in her disturbed state is seen as aberrant, even if Virginia didn't mean it that way.

There is no sensationalism of any kind in the book. I don't think sensationalism was the author's intention. Rather, she sought to describe what it feels like for a mentally fragile person to experience the typical medical treatment of the times (1940s). Virginia' short-term memory hardly functions, and she remembers very little of her contact with Dr. Kick. She is not aware that she has psychoanalysis with him -- she is told so by the nurses and other patients. Her main memories of him are that he is present in the room when she undergoes electroshock treatment. Throughout the book, Virginia is confused, frightened and exceedingly passive. I think the point of the book is that those who lose control of their sanity are ill-served by being placed in an environment where they lose control of the rythms of their lives as well. Virginia "comes to" from time to time in different places, talking to people she doesn't not recognize, and has to rely on what others tell her to do in order to function.

There is also a question as to whether she is really "cured" when she is released from the hospital. She doesn't really think she is, but since the doctors, and her husband tell her she is ready to leave, she merely accepts it. And the day of her release is nothing special. She is as confused and docile as ever when she leaves, and there is a hint of a suggestion that she will be coming back at some point.

The book is very skillfully done, and was very interesting to read.