Tag: Hollywood History

As the controversy over Jimmy Kimmel’s temporary time-out from talk show hosting played out last September, Jane Fonda announced that she was reviving the Committee for the First Amendment to help preserve freedom of expression in the Age of Trump. The first iteration of the committee was a star-studded political action group formed to protest…

In Henry King’s Jesse James (1939), Jesse and Frank, that is Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, which is to say their stunt doubles, ride their horses over a cliff and tumble 70 feet into the Lake of the Ozarks. One of the horses was killed, the other injured. The American Humane Society condemned the “most barbarous…

“They want crap,” Carolco executive Peter Hoffman once told the Los Angeles Times, “Every time people tell you they don’t, it’s bull. They want crap.” Hoffman was reflecting on the lackluster audience response to the Oscar-nominated Music Box (1989), while sci-fi action blockbusters such as Total Recall (1990) were filling coffers like mad. Long before independent production houses like Skydance,…

A favorite parlor game for film buffs is to pick Hollywood’s greatest year and then argue. The obvious answer — 1939, the certified Golden Year — always gets the most votes, but a few eccentrics make the case for a dark horse. 1928 was Peter Bogdanovich’s choice, the year that saw the apotheosis of silent film…

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon is the latest turn in a long motion picture tradition of pilfering FBI case files for screen scenarios. Originally, Hollywood coveted the validation of the bureau (“based on actual FBI case histories!”) and the personal imprimatur of its lord high ruler, J. Edgar Hoover…

Revisiting a Hollywood Crew’s Archival Effort to Use Film to Convict Nazis at Nuremberg On November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg, Germany, once prime real estate for torchlit Nazi pageantry, currently reduced to ruins by Allied bombing, the International Military Tribunal, an unprecedented experiment in transnational jurisprudence, convened in the city’s Palace of Justice, one of…

How ‘Babylon’ Chases Hollywood’s Decadent Past When Blanche Sweet sang “there’s a tear for every smile in Hollywood” in Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), she wasn’t wrong. Movie people have long been warning starry eyed wannabes to tread carefully if there were coming to Tinseltown full of hopes and dreams. In The Truth About the…

Unearthing a Forgotten Episode of Hollywood’s Blacklist Era, 75 Years Later Seventy-five years ago, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC for purposes of pronunciation) launched the first of its series of postwar investigations into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood. The show trial was staged from October 20 to 30, 1947, and you can probably…