Goofing around Gary Cooper dons a wig, can’t identify the gentleman on the left (a director?), on the right is Basil Rathbone. Happy Sunday! Hm. Let’s make this free association Sunday. This picture reminds me of my mother, and the wigs (they were called falls then – don’t know why)…
Category: Short Stories
I am about to take a few months break from Beguiling (although I may pop in now and again) as I feel the urge to follow the Golden Thread of Inspiration—stop laughing—and return to writing, obviously this means I wouldn’t be able to take the time with the weblog as…
Barbara Stanwyck on the set of The Lady Gambles: A couple of years ago I bumped into a cinematographer friend in Vegas. He asked me if I’d ever gambled before and I said “no” and he said “perfect” and led me over to the craps table and handed me a…
A screenwriter wrote this passage about her friend’s divorce at the age of 99. She was intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of Hollywood and waited until “all the bastards were dead” before she wrote her tell-all autobiography. She herself outlived them all, Frederica Sagor Maas, Scriptwriter From the…
A tour de force of production design by Hans Dreier. Pictured here is an unidentified artisan with a grouping of heavily featured set pieces – the ominous sculptures of “The Scarlet Empress”. The writer, director, producer, Josef von Sternberg had this to say about filmmaking: Shadow is mystery and light…
In what ways do the books you read figure into the music you write? Songwriting is of course a very different art to that of the novelist — condensing sometimes large ideas into rhyming couplets seems to be the opposite process. But it is interesting to me how often a…
If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be? One would be difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her…
You know—a book—as indicated by that little photo of palm trees and pink clouds to the left? The one that says, “Buy on Amazon”… What, pray tell, does this have to do with Theda Bara? Oh, you know my tricks by now, post fascinating pictures of movie stars from times…