Clara Bow wasn’t the only one who found Hollywood depressing. On a chilly, unusually clouded over, February afternoon in 2009 when I was 48, after the fourth week of shooting on the revived franchise, I received a call. It was Antoine. He told me he couldn’t make it to set…
Tag: Depression
I couldn’t get a focused enough picture of the light bulb, but the filament is still there, which means this baby still burns… Cool, yes? In the 1920s, when this light bulb would have been in use, there was no such thing as autopilot. But I, personally, have put the…
Depression isn’t sadness, it’s a feeling that overcomes you and pushes everything else aside. It gobbles up your thoughts and makes you physically ill, fatigued, insomnia prone. In some it can cause agitation, hyperactivity, risk-taking, because the one prevailing thought when the fatigue won’t break, or the adrenaline plateaus, is…
…He took on different characters with different accents, roamed to all kinds of locations, both physical and metaphysical, made lightning-fast comic connections in time and space that were at once hysterically funny and like nothing I had ever experienced before. It was no surprise people in the know were buzzing…
One of the things I found most intriguing about this insightful and touching portrait of a golden girl’s fatal plunge into depression, was Hope Anderson’s account of filming the reenactment of Peg Entwistle’s last walk from from her home on Beachwood Canyon, up to the Hollywood sign. From finding a…
Peg has been depicted as a naïf, a lightweight and a wannabe, but nothing could be farther from the truth. No less a star than Bette Davis vividly recalled seeing her act in “The Wild Duck” in Boston in 1926. Davis said, “Before that performance, I wanted to be an…
Peg Entwistle and the Hollywood Sign by Hope Anderson Introduction My interest in the actress Peg Entwistle, who in 1932 committed suicide from the Hollywood Sign (which then read Hollywoodland), began in 2006, when I began researching the neighborhood’s history for my documentary, Under the Hollywood Sign. Though seventy-four…