The editors of STAGE MAGAZINE were dumbfounded when they considered that just ten years after audiences got an earful from the first sound movies, the most consistent characteristic to have been maintained throughout that decade was the box-office dominance of American movie stars, directors and writers. After naming the most prominent of 1930s U.S. movie stars the author declares with certainty that this could not have been an accident. Child movie star Shirley Temple (1928 - 2014) was by no means at her box-office peak when this article was penned (her most popular period would span the years 1936 through 1938), but the institution that she had become by 1935 had already built many second homes and an assorted number of mansions for more than a few well-placed studio executives and mogul types. When the news hit the palmy, sun-soaked boulevards of Hollywood that she had lost her first baby tooth, there was panic!
"That the end now shows unmistakable signs of beginning. That first baby tooth fell to the studio floor with a crash heard 'round the world....Yet, even as as the nabobs of Fox stood about applauding and cooing, the cold hand of fear must have gripped their kindly hearts."
Click here to read a 1939 profile of Shirley Temple. Hired to write dialogue for the king makers at Twentieth Century Fox, cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1890 - 1970) jotted down his impressions of 1930s Hollywood. "The chief mogul did all the ordering and I must say that he knew food. The lavish way in which he ordered bore out some of the glittering tales I had read about the grandeur of the movies. I think I ate six helpings of caviar and four tenderloin steaks. I wanted to make them believe I was no slouch myself." If you would like to read a Rube Goldberg interview from 1914, click here. Technologies change, power changes, tastes change, but if anything has remained a constant in the West coast film colony it has been the fickle romantic tastes of all the various performers, directors and producers who toil in the vineyards of Hollywood. An old salt once remarked that if a Hollywood marriage lasts longer than milk it can be judged a success; with this old saw in mind, a wise anthropologist sat down, put pen to paper and seriously attempted to understand mating habits of Hollywood, California.
The attached article from 1938 heralded a new day in the fashion industry where fashion magazines would no longer be relied upon to set the trends in clothing; henceforth, that roll would only be played by movie actresses in far-off Hollywood. It was Hollywood movie stars who introduced sunglasses to the world of fashion... A magazine article by Leonora Ross in which she recalled her high school days with one of Kansas City's most famous sons, actor William Powell (1892 – 1984). At the time this article appeared, Powell had some forty-two films to his credit (37 of them silent) with his best work yet to come. If you would like to read more articles from Photoplay Magazine, click here.
CLICK HERE to read about Powell's most famous film: The Thin Man...
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