It’s my guess that a majority of those involved with the NEA — even those few who are talented — are always eager to roll over for left-wing politicians.  Partly it’s because they are so hungry for attention and partly because they lack anything resembling a moral compass. 

Allow me to give you a few notable examples of the way that people who earn their living in the areas of art and entertainment can voluntarily blind themselves to those matters that have moral implications.  Just recently, we got to watch a swarm of Hollywood retards climbing all over themselves in a rush to defend Roman Polanski, a piece of Euro-trash who confessed to having sex with a 13-year-old child.  All sorts of big name, small brain, celebrities lined up to sign petitions on his behalf.  By attesting to his character, they merely confirmed that they lacked any themselves. 

Hollywood is the place where the members of the Motion Picture Academy were once so angry at producer Jack Warner for casting Audrey Hepburn, instead of Julie Andrews, in “My Fair Lady,” that they refused to even nominate Ms. Hepburn for her terrific performance as Eliza Doolittle.  However, proving, as usual, that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote even when politics aren’t involved, these lunkheads then gave the 1964 Oscar for Best Picture to “My Fair Lady,” which enabled the very same Jack Warner to stride onstage to thunderous applause. 

Then there was the matter of Cliff Robertson and David Begelman.  When Robertson, an Oscar-winning actor, discovered that Begelman, the head of Columbia Pictures, had forged his signature on a $10,000 check, he blew the whistle.  After a police investigation, it turned out that Begelman had been financing his gambling habit with a lot of other people’s money, including Judy Garland, whom he had blackmailed.  The upshot was that Robertson had his acting career short-circuited, whereas Begelman, who was only sentenced to community service, was then hired to run MGM. 

Shortly after the scandal occurred, I happened to be having lunch with my agent in a restaurant loaded with Hollywood types.  When Begelman entered, there was such a flurry of people competing for his attention, you could have mistaken them for a covey of Cardinals vying to smooch the Pope’s ring. 

It’s not just actors, directors and producers, who act like dopes.  Consider writer Norman Mailer.  Perhaps because he was the fellow who once tried to settle a domestic dispute by stabbing the second of his six wives, Jack Abbott, who was serving time for bank robbery and murder, decided he’d be the ideal pen pal.  Mailer became so enamored of Abbott’s writing, he not only used his considerable influence to get Abbott’s book, “In the Belly of the Beast,” published, but got this career criminal paroled.  In New York, quite naturally, Abbott became the toast of the literati crowd, but only for a little while because six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed 22-year-old Richard Adan to death. 

Saving the best for last brings us to Leni Riefenstahl.  In Berlin, in the 30s, as in Hollywood at any time, it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew, and Leni was a chum of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda.  Think of him as the head of Germany’s NEA.  It was Herr Goebbels who helped get her the opportunity to make “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” a couple of over-wrought “documentaries” dedicated to hyping the Third Reich. 

After the end of World War II and for the remaining half of her 101 years, American and European cineastes — the same twerps who do cartwheels over Michael Moore’s propaganda flicks — showered her with honors and acclaim.  This in spite of the fact that although she claimed she wasn’t a Nazi and would barely have recognized Hitler if she’d tripped over him, had said, “To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived.  He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.”  Sort of sounds like Chris Matthews going on about Obama or Oliver Stone mooning over Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro, doesn’t it? 

In 1993, Riefenstahl had the gall to deny that she deliberately attempted to create pro-Nazi propaganda.  For good measure, she claimed she was disgusted that “Triumph of the Will” was used in such a way.  It was reminiscent of Captain Renault’s shock upon discovering that gambling was taking place in the backroom at Rick’s, all the while pocketing his winnings. 

Having seen her most famous films, I can assure you that unless you cut the movies up into a million little slivers of celluloid and used them for toothpicks, there was no other conceivable use for them except as Nazi propaganda. 

Moreover, in 1934, Riefenstahl said that “Mein Kampf” had made a tremendous impression on her. “I became a confirmed National Socialist after reading the very first page.  I felt a man who could write such a book should undoubtedly lead Germany.  I felt very happy that such a man had come.” 

She was so impressed with the book that she wrote the author a fan letter.  The letter led to a meeting.  The meeting led to her directing “Victory of Faith,” a movie about the fifth Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.  So much for her claim that she really only knew Hitler from his photos. 

In fact, for someone who spent so many years churning out propaganda films, she was rather inept when it came to lying.  For instance, on one occasion she claimed that she was totally unaware that concentration camps even existed, while another time she swore that she only worked for the Nazis because Goebbels had threatened to send her to a concentration camp if she didn’t cooperate. 

Frankly, what confounds me is why she wasted even a single second lying about her past.  I mean, even if she had been good at it, why bother?  After all, sensible and moral people never believed her self-serving malarkey; and, as for the celebrity crowd, they simply didn’t care.  They never do.

Hedy Lamarr’s perfectly arched eyebrows emphasize her symmetrical features. Considered the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, Lamarr was also incredibly bright, co-inventing, in 1941, a “frequency-hopping device that now serves as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology.” That quote is grabbed from Wikipedia. I have absolutely no idea what it means, but darn, I’m impressed. Anyhoo. Married six times, Lamarr gained and lost several fortunes. After her career was over she was arrested on shoplifting charges.

Screening movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, I’ve noticed an interesting trend—in eyebrows.

During the early days of silent films, female stars appeared pretty normal. Which is to say, eyebrows were lightly plucked, but retained a recognizably human configuration.

But the Flapper Age of the 1920’s, a time of huge social upheaval in America, ushered in severely plucked eyebrows, styles that were eventually refined into Baroque loops and harsh anorexic gashes.

A close friend, a brilliant cultural observer, wrote to me with this fascinating bit of cultural information:

Flappers were the first group of women outside of prostitutes to shave their legs and armpits. They changed the world, depilation-wise.

Narrow eyebrows seem to have come into fashion as Hollywood, and society in general, turned away from the Nineteenth Century ideal of the woman with the hourglass figure to the starved creature of the modern age.

Plucked eyebrows reached their apotheosis in the 30’s as whip-thin Art Deco was all the rage. Eyebrows in Hollywood evolved into extra fine lines that seemed drawn by Dexedrine fueled designers.

Studio stylists regularly shaved the eyebrows of the vulnerable young actresses being groomed for stardom, but after a few shavings the eyebrows of the chosen Pygmalions failed to grow back. Thus, several generations of Hollywood stars lacked eyebrows and their faces became blank canvasses for the powerful studio stylists.

The clash between the reality of her true self with the manufactured Hollywood image was deeply alienating for many young women, most of them uneducated teenagers from hard scrabble childhoods. No wonder Lana Turner wryly commented on her seven disastrous marriages: “The problem is that men marry Lana Turner—and wake up next to me.”

Let’s go to the visuals:

Jean Harlow had narrow, deep-set eyes—difficult to photograph—and so along with false eyelashes like shelves, studio stylists inscribed eyebrows, like soaring roman arches, to create the illusion of rounder, wider eyes. Harlow suffered to maintain her bombshell image. So toxic was the dye used for her platinum blond hair that it finally started falling out in clumps—like a chemotherapy patient—and she was forced to wear wigs for extended periods.

Carole Lombard had a lovely forehead, cheekbones like blades, and her eyebrows—low slashes—were etched in order to draw attention to those patrician features. In January, 1942, on a national tour selling U.S. War bonds, Lombard, one of the most beloved figures in Hollywood, was killed in a plane crash, making her one of America’s first casualties of World War II.

Clara Bow’s drooping eyebrows seem to echo her emotional instability—she was probably bi-polar. Her mother, an occasional prostitute, twice tried to murder Bow when she was just a child. Her father repeatedly raped young Clara after Bow’s mother was confined to a mental institution. Clara Bow was one of Hollywood’s greatest natural actresses, but her important body of work is barely recognized and a “nothing”—so said the great George Cukor—like Louise Brooks is built into a cultural and movie icon. We have the French—what a shocker—to thank for initiating this bit of historical lunacy.

Marlene Dietrich, monstrously self-absorbed, positioned a full length mirror beside the camera to keep an eye on her reflection. Dietrich understood her own image, and worked hard at refining the mystery and glamor that characterized her fame. Dietrich wielded her beauty like a sexual totalitarian, seducing scores of men and women with frightening self-assurance. When John Wayne rebuffed her advances she flew into a rage calling Wayne a “stupid American cowboy.”

Marion Davies started out as a teenage Ziegfeld Girl. Posing in the elaborate costumes, Davies looked fresh and lovely, and the severe stutter that plagued her, was rendered unimportant. In Hollywood, her all-American looks gave way to various make-up extremes. Here, Davie’s eyebrows seem to be crawling down her cheek bones. One of the kindest, most generous women in Hollywood, Orson Welles admitted that in his cruel portrayal of supremely untalented Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane, 1941, he did Davies, a hugely gifted comedienne, “a dirty.”

Garbo’s eyes were probably her best feature and her eyebrows draw attention to her hypnotic gaze. Garbo was most effective in close-up, that’s what her fans best remember and fetishize. In medium and long shot, Garbo is often noticeably uncomfortable—she had a tendency to slouch—and her attempts to control her klutziness results in some awkward moments. Take a look at her performance in Grand Hotel, 1932. She plays a ballerina, but she’s a dancer with two left feet.

Bette Davis hated Hollywood’s emphasis on beauty, but even she submitted to extreme plucking. Later in her career at Warner Bros., when she had clout, and didn’t hesitate to use it, Davis let her eyebrows grow in and she reconstituted her own image with an iron fist. Eventually, Davis refused to pose for the studio glamor portraits.

Known in her later career for thick as mink eyebrows, Joan Crawford actually started out with the harshly plucked Flapper look. Watching Crawford in close-up can be an eerie experience: those saucer eyes never blink and her unyielding stare burns a hole through the silver screen.

Anna May Wong was Hollywood’s first and greatest Chinese star—though she was born and raised in Los Angeles. The studios carefully constructed her image as an Oriental femme fatale using the full Hollywood arsenal of hair styles, wardrobe, props and barely there eyebrows. Catch her in the pre-code Shanghai Express, 1932, in which she plays a slinky courtesan. Anna May Wong blows Marlene Dietrich off the screen by remaining Buddha-still in contrast to Dietrich’s Rococo poses. A natural leading lady, beautiful and talented, Anna May’s movie career was severely hampered by the Motion Picture Code where portrayals of miscegenation were forbidden.

Alice Faye is barely remembered today, but, for a few years, she was a huge singing star for Twentieth Century Fox. Not conventionally beautiful, rather the cute girl next door, the studio imposed on Faye a glamorous image that just didn’t fit. When her film career sputtered, Faye moved into radio starring in a successful show with her husband, band leader Phil Harris.

Joan Marsh was the daughter of the great, pioneering Hollywood cinematographer Charles Rosher and as such, she knew something about the primacy of image. This offspring of Hollywood gained positive attention as a child actress in Mary Pickford’s delightful Daddy Long Legs, 1919. There’s something silkily feline about Marsh in this iconic George Hurrell portrait. Her darting eyebrows draw attention to her flowing river of hair. Marsh never gained leading lady status, she was primarily a feature and day player—her continuous battles with weight are just heartbreaking. Marsh retired from the screen in 1944. In later years, she managed a stationary shop on Ojai, California.

Now, let’s skip forward to 1956, eyebrows are back, bigger and badder than ever:

It looks like two caterpillars have taken up residence over Audrey Hepburn’s eyes. Hepburn was lovely, a charming actress who projected intelligence and vulnerability. She was a class act, but never a star who caused men to walk distractedly into walls. Her carefully constructed image—boyish hair, boyish figure, and he-man eyebrows—short circuited the traditional Hollywood look.

And finally, the greatest eyebrows in Hollywood history.

Julie Newmar gained fame as Catwoman, “the purrfect villainess,” from the Batman TV series, her episodes running from 1966-67. Newmar’s mother, Helen Jesmer, was one of Ziegfeld’s most stunning girls. Newmar wrote the introduction to the ravishing volume, Jazz Age Beauties, in which Jesmer appears along with dozens of other Ziegfeld girls. Next time you watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1954, feast your eyes on the unbelievably leggy and wasp waisted Newmar as Dorcus, one of the abducted brides.

For more great visuals of notable Hollywood eyebrows, head on over to Starlet Showcase.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

Mary Pickford's rich and lustrous hair was the paradigm of female beauty in early Hollywood.

I’ve been looking at portraits of Hollywood stars from the 50’s, a time when the studio system was finally collapsing, and I noticed a few things.

The quality of studio portrait photography was dismal.

The images are, for the most part, bland, with little creative inspiration. Everyone seems bored—the photographers and the stars. Hollywood once employed geniuses like George Hurrell and C.S. Bull, whose iconic photography helped mold the G-d-like images of Hollywood’s golden age.

But as the studios were shrinking in power, they drastically cut back on their still departments. And because actors were no longer under long-term contract to the studios, the technocrat executives who replaced the original passionate moguls had no stake or ability to carefully shape and control the images of their most promising thespians.

Jean Harlow by George Hurrell

Clark Gable by C.S. Bull

Since then, Hollywood stars have been shrinking at an incredible speed, eventually collapsing into what we have now: not movie stars, but tabloid celebrities who fight for media space with reality TV personalities, serial murderers and scandal choked, drug addled rock stars.

I also noticed hair.

Something was happening to the hairstyles of Hollywood stars in the 50’s. There was, in the cultural air, a reversal in the natural order of masculine and feminine. In the past, great Hollywood female stars were often defined by luxurious and cascading curls. But in the 50’s a startling number of Hollywood women submitted to a radical and often sexless ‘do.

The resulting images come uncomfortably close to evoking memories of post WWII photos of European women who were publicly humiliated, punished as German collaborators—their proud locks severely shorn, harshly clipped and plastered down into tight, impenetrable helmets.

But the men, like vain peacocks, display incredibly complex hair architecture—frequently built in layers like towering wedding cakes. The sensuality just drips from their rococo, thickly gelled cuts.

What was happening? Did the apocalyptic nature and mass slaughter of the Second World War turn fashion conscious Hollywood women into hard-to-define gamines? If so, a new generation of Hollywood men, with pillowy lips and come-hither eyes, stepped into the breach morphing into sexually charged male objects, yet seductively hinting at the inner female.

Here are a few samples:

Robert Wagner, ‘52

Shirley MacLaine, ‘55

James Dean, ‘55

Jean Seaberg, ‘57

Burt Lancaster, ‘57

Leslie Caron, ‘55

Tony Curtis, ‘52

Audrey Hepburn, ‘56

Elvis Presley, ‘56

Lilli Palmer, ‘56

Charlton Heston, ‘50

Claire Bloom, ‘52

And of course, there is an exception to every rule:

Yul Brenner, ‘57

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

In an age where Dreamworks’ feeds us a steady diet of kung-fu pandas and boogie-in-your-butt lemurs voiced by the guy that gave us Borat, three-to-thirteen year olds have a place to fill up on some traditional values – Disney/Pixar.  

My wife and I took our 6-year old boy to see Up on Saturday to a packed movie theater in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  All we heard in the theater was laughing, deep emotion and applause. And why not?  Up is film that, had it been produced with live actors decades ago, may have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.  It is classic American storytelling – true love, big dreams, self-reliance and fierce determination. It doesn’t need gimmicks, politically correct characters or audience focus-group testing to determine its destination.  It relies on Russell, who misses his Dad, and Carl Fredricksen, a lost old curmudgeon grieving over the death of his wife – they get us where we’re going.  You know them – they’re the sort of folks we see and meet most everyday.  

It’s crystal clear — the golden age of animation has returned to the American cinema since Pixar made Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and Up.  Pixar virtually invented CGI animation, but masters such as John Lasseter, Brad Bird and others have remembered that dazzling audiences with the computer doesn’t really matter if you can’t remember to have healthy dose of humanity.  Case-in-point: the exchange between 8-year-old Russell to old man Fredricksen – when walking though the jungles of South America, Russell recounts a simple day with his estranged Dad as they counted cars on the curb of a local ice cream shop. “That might sound boring,” Russell says with a flushed face, “but it’s what I remember most.”  

“Wonder and interest doesn’t have to come out of pizazz and spectacle and huge ideas. … I always knew that the power came from the small, and not from the big,” Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Newsweek earlier this year. Oh, there may not be any sure-fire Happy Meal spin-offs, or top-40 hip-hop smash hits in Up, but that’s never what has made lasting, and ultimately successful, cinema. 

With all this good feeling, there has to be a catch, right?  Sure!  More and more, Pixar is coming under scrutiny from feminist critics who would rather see female lead characters featured in their films. Seemingly, themes on the the do-not-call-attention-to-list are a father’s undying quest for the well being of a son (Nemo), the willpower and love of an elderly man (Up) or the robot love of Wall-E (apparently, even though the female robot was clearly superior – the film was named after the male robot, and thus, inviting to criticism).  

But, hey – it’s summer.  Can’t we all just get along? If you want to remember how glorious it is to find true love, to dream the dreams of a child and then find out how life ends up after all that falls apart, Up is your movie…

Creepy, right? I have not seen Haunting and will probably wait for DVD or pay cable, but that is a weird, startling, attention-grabbing image. As a movie junkie, I love good movie art. The best movie posters are evocative. They capture what a movie is all about without giving away the mystery. There are certain movie posters that instantly put me back in that theatre experiencing the film for the very first time. The best movie posters are not just promotional tools. They stand as a work of art on their own. These are my favorites, buit it is by no means a definitive list. Feel free to add your favorites (and subtract any of mine).

#1 – JAWS
I saw this all-time classic as a 9-year-old on opening day, and saw it a second time at the Saturday matinee. To this day, I am afraid to swim in the ocean. That shark is always there in my imagination. The poster is literal, but haunting.

#2 – CHINATOWN
This is truly a work of art. The smoke shrouding the ultimate mystery of Evelyn Mulwray, and the stylized version of Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson), the hard-boiled detective who unravels it all.

#3 – THE DARK KNIGHT
Impossible to separate Heath Ledger’s death from his remarkable interpretation of The Joker. This is an amazing image. In 30 years, I will look at this poster and immediately feel the impact of Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.

#4 – BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S
You can almost hear Audrey Hepburn warbling “Moon River” at the sight of this iconic poster. Every woman wanted to be her and every man wanted to be with her.

#5 – SECRETARY
The 2002 cult classic about a sadomasochistic relationship between a demanding lawyer (James Spader) and a submissive secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The movie is an under-appreciated gem. The poster may be even better.

#6 – UNFORGIVEN
This is my favorite poster made for Clint Eastwood’s masterful revisionist Western. Simple. Classic. Tells you everything you need to know about Clint’s Bill Munny character.

#7 – AMERICAN BEAUTY
A beautiful image that suggests the perversity that lies just beneath the surface of the suburban neighborhood created by screenwriter Alan Ball and director Sam Mendes.

#8 – SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
“You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won’t you?” You can almost hear Dr. Hannibal Lecter say it. The Death’s-head moth “lodged” in Clarice Starling’s throat. Brilliant image.

#9 – VERTIGO
An ode to acrophobia as Detective Scottie Ferguson (as played by Jimmy Stewart) battles his fear of heights while becoming obsessed with Madeleine Elster (the stunning Kim Novak). This kaleidoscopic design immediately brings the strains of Bernard Hermann’s amazing score into my head.

#10 – PULP FICTION
Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in all her swagger. Yes, she does wind up with a sharpie circle on her chest and a shot of adrenaline, but the whole gritty movie is captured with this image.

HONORABLE MENTION
- in no particular order -
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
SWEENEY TODD
MEAN STREETS
AMADEUS
GONE WITH THE WIND
METROPOLIS
KING KONG (1939 Fay Wray version)
CLOVERFIELD
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter@LAMase.