That's a Link Breaker, Ladies

Letters of Note "I feel every cut" an intimate glimpse back at Terry Gilliam's Brazil madness
Self Styled Siren a happy ending for For the Love of Film Blogathon III. The money raised towards film preservation (a digitial copy of a super early piece of the Hitchcock puzzle) will result in free streaming of the surviving reels this November. Well done, all!
24 Frames Broadway star Kelli O'Hara will star in not one but two new fillm drama to stage musical adaptations: Far From Heaven (previously discussed) and... The Bridges of Madison County?
The Daily Notebook 1948 was a good year for mermaids: Glynis Johns & Ann Blyth

Rope of Silicon new character photos from Anna Karenina including Keira Knightley, veiled
Pajiba says goodbye to sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury (RIP)
Antagony & Ecstacy "in space no one can hear you yawn"... on Alien Ressurection. Or is it Alien: Ressurection? 
Slate "Woman: The Other Alien in Alien" Tom Shone investigates Academia and the Alien franchise... with a Ripley focus of course
Ultra Culture "fixes" the teaser poster for Robert Zemeckis' Flight starring Denzel Washington 

Broadway Blog my friend Tom makes his educated Tony prediction guesses. Are you watching Sunday night? 
The New Yorker's this new true story article "The Yankee Comandante" about an American helping Cuban rebels overthrow their president in 1959 is already on its way to being a movie. George Clooney will direct.  
Vulture the scariest thing ever seen on television via Twin Peaks. I wholeheartedly agree. I remember actually attempting to move backwards. (Maybe I also whimpered / screamed. Shut up. You had to be there in 1991)  

Finally...
I giggled this morning when reading Stranger Than Most's "Jenna tells it like it is" a reminder of one of 30 Rock's most hilarious scenes. I'm linking because tonight I'll be at Town Hall enjoying Jane Krakowski in concert, a birthday gift from my besties. Yay. I loved Jane truly madly and deeply even before 30 Rock finally convinced everyone else that she was a comedy genius. Every drink I consume tonight will be (re)named in her honor: Jenna'sSide, The Krakowski, 'That'sADealBreakerLadies', Sexual Walkabout, CallFromTheVatican, and MuffinTop. Erm... not that I'm going to drink six drinks. No Lost Weekends for me!

Tell me how much you love Jane Krakowski and how much she deserves the Emmy for this season of 30 Rock after the jump. Don't be anything less than effusive, bitches.

Complete the Sentence

I've seen ______ movies thus far this year and the best _____ so far is totally _____.

Twins: Hunter & Who?

celebrating twins daily during Gemini at 2:22 PM

Do you know who Hunter's über famous twin is? The answer is after the jump but you know and love her... or at least you know her. Maybe you love her again after a few oddly uncompelling years.

Click to read more ...

Frank Langella, Name Dropper

On my way out west to see family, I found great escapist distraction in Frank Langella's memoir "Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them" When the book was first released earlier this year, I thought it sounded so distasteful so I didn't pick it up. As it turns out Billy Held an Oscar wouldn't let me go without reading it and sent me a copy as an early birthday gift. Thanks, Billy!

Frank Langella in his first flushes of fame. The book is about dead celebrities he met.

I hadn't realized that Langella was only talking about dead celebrities -- sorry, no shacked-up-with-Whoopi Goldberg or Frost/Nixon chapters! -- and I can't decide if that makes the sometimes unflattering anecdotes more wonderful or more distasteful. Probably both. Initial reservations aside the book is well written and a real page turner. Langella even predicts and silences most "they can't defend themselves!" criticisms with a clearly stated prologue, including this bit:

Separate and diverse individuals as they may be, my subjects have in comon the inevitable outcome awaiting us all: to live only in memories. In this case, mine.

I admit that they are most likely prejudiced, somewhat revisionst, and a tad exaggerated here and there. But were I offered an exact replay of events as they unfolded, I would reject it. I prefer my memories.

I am forcing myself to read the book very slowly so as not to exhaust all the juicy anecdotes quickly.  I still have a lot to read but my favorite story thus far is remarkably not about a movie star at all but about the movie starriest of American presidents John F Kennedy, who Langella met when he was all of 15 at a rich friend's parent's brunch. Langella, who is now 74 has a wealth of material to draw from given that his showbiz career started as a teenager and he's achieved success on the stage, in film and on television. 

Nothing shocks Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester!

I thought I'd share an example after the jump -- a little Elsa Lanchester bit...

Click to read more ...

On Jean Harlow, "Beauty", Screen Presence & Short Lives

75 years ago today Jean Harlow died. The Platinum Blonde superstar, arguably the ur blonde bombshell that Marilyn Monroe gets the bulk of the credit for being, was only 26 years old. She'd been a sensation since the age of 19 when Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) premiered. I loved the Scorsese-directed Hughes bio The Aviator (2004) when it premiered because of its handsome snapshot of Old Hollywood Glamour but I never quite understood what Gwen Stefani was doing playing Harlow. I couldn't see the resemblance beyond hair color and anyone can have that; Platinum Blonde does not normally occur through natural means!

When I was a baby cinephile and more familiar with Old Hollywood giants from their still photos than their actual work, Jean Harlow's huge fame and legendary sex appeal confused me. I thought she looked... odd and weirdly masculine (maybe it was the nose and chin? or maybe just my youth). Definitely not "beautiful". But I learned quickly that traditional beauty, both the male and female variety, is often flat onscreen. Screen presence always trumps beauty. Even the most famously beautiful movie stars are famously beautiful because their screen presence augmented their beauty, permanently burning it into the collective consciousness.

Leo & Gwen as Hughes & Harlow in THE AVIATOR (2004)

That's a lesson that unfortunately many casting directors and studio executives have never learned. This is especially true on television where entire shows are populated with "beauties" but you can instantly forget what everyone looks like by the time the credits are rolling in the sidebar as commercials for the next whatever play. It's especially true on networks like the CW and for whatever reason it always reminds me of those legendary stories about the casting of X-Files. Many executives didn't want Gillian Anderson because she wasn't "hot" enough but an interchangeable pretty blonde that would be easy to imagine doing photoshoots for men's interest mags, would never have seized the public imagination like Gillian did as Agent Scully. But I digress!

Seeing the pre-code movie Red Dust (1932) cured me of all Harlow doubts, since her carnality still reads as so immediate, unwithered by the passage of time.

Doesn't it feel sometimes as if being a Movie Star was more of an Occupational Health Hazard in earlier cinematic decades. So many film stars died young: James Dean (24), Jean Harlow (26), Rudolph Valentino (31), Carole Lombard (33),  Marilyn Monroe (36), John Gilbert (38), Natalie Wood (43), Monty Clift (45), Stephen Boyd (45), Judy Garland (47), etcetera. Or is it merely that those who die young stick in the memory, filed under What Could Have Been.