A Photoplay Magazine interview featuring British actor Ronald Colman (1891 – 1958) in which the journalist attempted to dispel all preconceived notions that the actor was some sort of "male Garbo" and was, in fact, a regular guy.
When the deep-pocketed film director Howard Hughes (1905 – 1976) decided to tint a few sequences from his film HELL'S ANGELS (1930) he purchased the company that he believed capable of filling such an order: Multicolor in Hollywood, California (as it turned out, the work was actually done by Technicolor). Hughes was such a curiosity to the press and they followed his every whim; in this article, critic Donald Beaton refers to Hughes as a pioneer and salutes him for experimenting with color. An interview with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: "They are the comedy sensations of the season. And all because they have learned, by a lucky stroke, that the public likes to see itself caricatured on the screen; that the public can laugh at the maunderings of a fat man who shakes a warning pudgy forefinger at a sensitive simpleton who is prone to weep" A swell article that truly catches the spirit of the time. You will read about the war-torn Hollywood that existed between the years 1941-1945 and the movie shortage, the hair-pin rationing, the rise of the independent producers and the ascent of Van Johnson and Lauren Becall: "Lauren, a Warner Brothers property, is a blonde-haired chick with a tall, hippy figure, a voice that sounds like a sexy foghorn and a pair of so-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it eyes" Mention is also made of the hiring of demobilized U.S. combat veterans to serve as technical assistants for war movies in such films as "Objective Burma".
An article from TRICOLOR MAGAZINE explains how the French film industry fared under the German occupation. There is no doubt that the Hollywood matinee idol Errol Flynn (1909 - 1959) was the Charlie Sheen of his day, and thanks to the unrelenting press control that the Hollywood studios exercised over the fan magazines of that day, we probably only know about a quarter of his assorted debaucheries. He was a masher and a lush, and the one law suit that the studio executives couldn't kill was
"the great case against him for statutory rape which, had it stuck, would have given him jail for fifty years. For weeks in 1942 it replaced the war news in the headlines."
In 1938, Flynn wrote an article in which he weakly defended the unique moral codes of Hollywood actors; you can read it here.
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