There were heaps — accumulated reminders of a life — all around. Everything that served as an archival asset, or a teaching aid for future filmmakers, I boxed and hauled over to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Clothes, I donated. Books, I culled down to the essentials…
Tag: Hollywood behind the scenes
All through life, instinctively or intellectually, we adapt to survive. Even insects have some boss strategies, for example, the formation of a chitinous exoskeleton, which is the somewhat see-through shell that encapsulates and protects a shrimp or a spider. I have a theory about directors who succeed in the movie…
Lethal stress can come at you no matter whether you’re onscreen or off. Actors in Hollywood have committed suicide by swallowing ant paste, Nembutal, or barbiturates. George Sanders (check out his performance in All About Eve) swallowed five bottles of pills in Barcelona and left two suicides notes. One in…
Gifted with a glib tongue he moved quickly from never-featured actor, to production assistant, to assistant director, and rapidly ascended the dating scale (as he saw it) from the cute craft service gal who brought cucumber sushi snacks to camera at four in the afternoon, to the daughter of a…
In the words of Dorothy Gale, there’s no place like home. The light here is what made filmmakers move to California. It shines here most of the time, and there are certain places, certain times of year that take your breath away with sheer wonder. It’s a crying shame that…
And thus, Anne Brown and her roommate, Tatiana Schneider were dispatched to a TV star’s mountain top domicile. They felt charged with responsibility and a certain kind of contempt for their elders’ unmanageable peccadilloes, “God, how gross,” was a phrase they bandied about between them. The star’s property…
At the onset of our thirties we, the former nannies, while ascending the career ladder, found our personal lives lagging. Polly found her male peers juvenile – emotionally immature and adolescent in their delight at attaining useless things. Darla made a three year, nine million dollar TV development deal and…
Some people apply battle strategy to film making. Many directors are able to extemporize on Sun Tzu’s thirteen principals of war. I wasn’t very familiar with eastern philosophy, even though Cooper Daniels had sent me to the Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose for a stack of treatises in vogue with…