(Reuters) – Quoting from “The King’s Speech,” the Oscar-winning movie about his great-grandfather, Prince William projected his royal voice to woo the Hollywood power crowd in a bid with wife Kate to promote young British talent.

He in black tie, she in a pleated lavender Alexander McQueen gown, the young newlyweds on Saturday night set a tone of classic elegance for the most high-profile event in their three-day visit to the United States.

Hollywood royalty — from actors Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman, and Barbra Streisand to studio mogul Harvey Weinstein — turned out for the couple of the moment at the $25,000 a table gala organized by British Academy for Film and Television (BAFTA), of which William is president.

“I would like to thank Colin Firth for my perfect opening line — I have a voice,” William joked with the crowd, quoting one of the most famous lines in the 2010 movie about King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth who overcame a stammer.

Alas, Oscar winner Firth was not there nor were many established British actors. William and BAFTA instead wanted to introduce 42 emerging British actors, producers, writers and videogame designers to the movers and shakers of the entertainment capital of the world.

“Please give them the opportunities that you have always extended to some of the brightest and best that Britain has to offer,” William told the gathering at the Belasco, a restored theater in downtown Los Angeles.

“When American and British creative talent gets together, magic happens. Let’s continue the winning formula.”

British actor Stephen Fry praised the idea to promote Brits in Hollywood while fascination with the royal couple was at its height following their April wedding.

“Royalty creates a glamour, prestige and luster that trumps anything Hollywood can produce,” Fry said.

Full article here.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

Throw us a bone – how about more than just one or two flicks a year not targeted to the demographic that thinks Lady Gaga is a boundary-pushing icon of limitless creative vision?  Maybe a couple that are not focused on shiny supernatural creatures who chat about their feelings and stare longingly into the eyes of dead-eyed starlets acting as the surrogate for the millions of lonely shut-ins who adore them?  Just a few films not aimed squarely at creepy man-children dwelling in their moms’ Kleenex-strewn basements wishing they too could winch their bloated tushes into tights and fight crime just like their cinematic heroes.

How about more than just a handful of movies for men and women who need more than five hands to count out their age, who breathe through their noses, who have lives?  I have some dough – well, at least until the President and his fellow travelers declare me rich too – and I’d like to take my hot wife out once in a while to see a movie.  I used to go a lot, a few times a month.  But it seemed that five years ago there were always at least a few movies that piqued my interest.  Perhaps it’s me – perhaps I’m too demanding, what with my stubborn insistence on interesting stories told in a coherent manner by competent actors.  Or perhaps it’s just that the recent crop of movies is exceptionally crappy.

Let’s address the curmudgeon question here and now – yes, I have occasionally turned my hose on those damn kids when they messed up my lawn, but hobbies aside, the fact is that Hollywood is both leaving money on the table and sacrificing what little artistic credibility it has left by ignoring the normal adult demographic.  It appears that Hollywood has simply thrown in the towel and decided to focus on feeding formulaic moron fodder to a waiting cohort of slack-jawed ninnies eager for the next story about a magical robot or a superhero with issues.

Let’s take a look at what’s in the theaters this Christmas to test this theory.  How about How Do You Know, with Reese Witherspoon.  It’s supposed to be a smart, mature romantic comedy.  Now take a look at the trailer:

—–

Oh my – yet another romantic comedy that appears to be neither romantic nor a comedy.  Tired, telegraphed jokes and Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd playing the same guys they play in every movie.  Plus Jack Nicholson in the same growly old guy mode he’s been in (except for the otherwise annoying The Departed) for the last couple decades.  Look, unless Jack is ripping the cover off a water department/incest conspiracy, I’m not interested.

The latest Harry Potter movie is still out.  But I’m a bit old for movies about teenage wizards, and I suspect a substantial number of the adult males watching it are going less to experience story than to see the now adult Emma Watson play with her wand.

The latest Narnia movie is out too, and I understand it’s C.S. Lewis and it has an important message and so on, but there’s a problem:  I’m not 12.  My kids will probably love it – when it comes out on DVD.

The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angela Jolie is out.  But it’s rated PG-13, which kind of eliminates the whole point of having Angela Jolie in it.

There’s a sequel to 1982’s Tron coming out as well.  Finally.  I guess the 28 years of non-stop clamoring for more adventures of some guys who go into an Atari game and do stuff have finally paid off.  I suppose I’d be more interested in Tron: Legacy if I hadn’t discovered girls in the meantime.

Soul-crushingly, we have De Niro cashing yet another paycheck in Little Fockers, the third or fourth sequel to a mildly amusing movie I’ve pretty much forgotten by now.  Watch the trailer and die a little inside:

—–

It’s like they invented a whole series of new clichés just for this movie.  And Ben Stiller’s recycled antics are annoying enough, but Barbra Streisand too?  I wouldn’t force Julian Assange to watch this nightmare…okay, maybe I would.  As for De Niro, just keep saying to yourself, “He’ll always be Neal, he’ll always be Neal.”

Jack Black will be waddling back on screen too as America’s favorite funny fattie.  This time, he’s in a wacky new version of Gulliver’s Travels.

—–

Can you spot the fresh, original joke?  Trick question – there isn’t one!  It’s just more Jack Black yelling, mugging, and running about, which might be hilarious to Miley Cyrus and her pals after a couple rippers off her achy-breaky bong, but for the rest of us, this thing looks like a celluloid kidney stone that you have to pay eleven bucks to pass.

But there is hope.  The Coen Brothers have a remake of True Grit coming soon.  Let’s leave aside the sacrilege of trying to compete with the Duke – it looks badass:

—-

A movie about adults, doing adult things, speaking in phrases that aren’t designed so that even the average public school drop-out can understand them – who would have thought it possible?  I’m getting disoriented – how can this be?

So, maybe I will visit the multiplex this Christmas season after all.  Right after I finish running off those damn kids.

In segment after segment Barbra talked about Barbra.  Barbra talked about Obama.  Barbra talked about Barbra.  Barbra talked about Clinton.  And Barbra talked about Barbra.

Larry King dutifully congratulated her on all of her observations.

Here’s one my favorite moments:  When Larry King asked her about the first two years of Barack Obama’s Presidency she laments that President Obama did not use his “executive powers” to unilaterally repeal DADT.  Then, pricelessly, without any sense of self awareness she goes on to praise President Bill Clinton as one of our greatest Presidents.  It would have been at this moment that an actual journalist would have pointed out to Ms. Streisand that President Clinton was the “great” President that instituted the DADT policy that she now wants President Obama to unconstitutionally and unilaterally revoke.  Instead, Mr. King appeared to sit back and admire the beautiful lighting that Ms. Streisand probably supervised prior to the tape rolling.

Earlier in the interview, Ms. Streisand reveals that she is glad that Hilary Clinton did not become the first female President because “they” would have blamed her gender for the economic trouble our country is in. Thanks to Mr. King, we don’t know who “they” are. But I suspect Ms. Streisand meant men, revealing her very low estimation of the reasoning skills of those of us inflicted with both an X and Y chromosome.

She came across as narcissistic, judgmental, sanctimonious, and dismissive of anyone who does not subscribe to her point of view. And, God help me, I loved her.

Maybe it’s because I’m a “theatre-guy.”  Maybe it’s because I spent so many years on Broadway. But no matter how many times Barbra Streisand lets me know that I, as a conservative, represent what’s wrong with this country, I still can’t help having the secret desire to see her return to Broadway as the ultimate Mama Rose in a blockbuster revival of Gypsy. I suspect that some time during my first year working on Broadway I was drugged and dragged into a dark room and implanted with a device that alters the part of my brain that would see Barbra Streisand for what she is:  an egotistical blowhard who has consistently snubbed Broadway – the place that made her a star – for lo these many decades.

Barbra Streisand is included in what is known as the Broadway diva Mt. Rushmore.  She, Ethel Merman, and Mary Martin inhabit 3/4 of that sacred monument. The 4th face is bit of a revolving door which changes depending upon the times. Over the past few decades Liza Minnelli, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, and recently Kristin Chenowith have all occupied the “Ringo” chair. I can make a strong case for all of these women as icons of the American stage except, curiously, Barbra Streisand.

When Hollywood called four decades ago Ms. Streisand took her last curtain call and never looked back.  Many Broadway stars before her and since have found fame and fortune on the silver screen and yet still come back to Broadway even if for a limited engagement to pay respect to the industry that made them a star. Not to mention the economic benefit it provides the stagehands, the ushers, the restaurant and hotel workers in the theater district. But not Babs.

Even when she famously returned to live performances in her multi-million dollar string of “final” concerts (How many have there been now, 20?) she refused to play the 2,000 seat theatrical cathedrals in New York opting instead for arenas built for boxing matches.

And yet, knowing the disdain she’s shown for my industry, my colleagues and I still look upon her with reverence, respect and admiration. I kid you not, as bitchy as Broadway is, there are a handful of people you’re just not allowed to criticize and Streisand is one of them.

So here I sit, my good conservative brain telling me all the reasons why I should hate Barbra Streisand, after all, she seems to hate me, my friends, and my industry. And yet, I can’t stop hoping that one day she’ll see the light and let me produce her return to Broadway complete with an opening night gala fundraiser for the Tea Party Patriots.

I know.   I need an intervention.

The goal of Streisand’s piece is to try to stall the momentum of the pending Republican takeover in November. Therefore it is overrun with excuses for why Obama has yet to bring us all some hope and change, and the main reason given is because those rascally ole Republicans “have been committed to blocking progress at all costs in order to insure the failure of this President.”

Does Streisand not understand that the Democrats have a commanding majority in the House and a near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate? In other words, Obama doesn’t need Republican support to pass his agenda; he just needs all the Democrats to support him. The problem, which has apparently eluded Streisand, is that Democrats have realized that if they vote for Obama’s style of hope they’ll have to change jobs in November: no wonder everything is at a standstill.

What’s happened here is that Streisand has finally realized that voters across the country have awakened and are holding political careers hostage, thus the title of her op-ed: “Stop. Think. Breathe.” She is trying to assuage public anger by promising that Obama can be “successful is if he has a Congress that dreams with him and an American electorate that gives him the chance!” But what she fails to realize is that there are people participating in the Tea Parties who not only gave Obama a chance, they actually voted for him and have since seen the error of their ways.

If I could say anything to Streisand, it would be: “Don’t get your hopes up Babs, no one is listening to you.”

If I could say anything to Streisand’s family and her former fans, it would be: “Don’t feel like you have to don the brown paper bags just yet, the public long ago ascertained that Babs is ‘out there.’”

For example, we all remember that the last time Streisand took a big shot at affecting public opinion was when she told commoners: “Turn up your [air conditioning] thermostat to 78 degrees when you’re home, and 85 degrees when you’re out.” Then the commoners read the newspaper and realized that Streisand keeps her apartment in New York City at 42 degrees whether she’s there or not (in order to protect her furs). She also told commoners how to conserve water, and then it was revealed that her annual water bill, for watering her lawn, was $22,000.

That’s almost as bad as Al Gore’s annual electricity bill of nearly $30,000, and clearly as hypocritical.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – When President Obama took to the stage at a Beverly Hilton ballroom on May 27, 2009, to raise money for the Democratic National Committee, it was a victory lap of sorts for the 250 studio executives, directors and stars who had paid $15,200 apiece to dine on kabachi ravioli as they listened to their newly elected leader.

“If it weren’t for you, we would not be in the White House,” the president told DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, going on to recognize the deep pockets of other showbiz contributors who had put millions into his campaign coffers.

Tonight, a little more than a year later, Obama arrives in Hollywood again to meet and greet industry heavy hitters. This time, the feelings of many in the crowd are more complicated. Obama has faced criticism from the left about unfulfilled campaign promises ranging from the closure of Gitmo to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

This evening’s fundraiser featuring Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi takes place at the Hancock Park home of “ER” and “The West Wing” executive producer John Wells and benefits the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The usual gang of Hollywood A-listers will be in attendance: the host committee includes J.J. Abrams and wife Katie McGrath, Alan and Cindy Horn, Barbra Streisand, the Katzenbergs, and Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg.

With rising “wrong track” poll numbers and mounting criticism by donors and supporters over the administration’s Afghanistan policy, compromises in the health-care bill and lackluster Wall Street reform, it’s painfully obvious that many Hollywood natives are getting restless.

Obama has not cozied up to the industry and, indeed, has told insiders he feels uncomfortable schmoozing with show business bigwigs — a big departure from Bill Clinton.

Read the whole story here.

And this isn’t an ideological thing. As morally and politically illiterate as many of my writer foes on the left are, at least they’re not boring.

—– 

Where was I? Oh, yes, the wagon circling. Other than nudging Obama to be even more socialist when it comes to the kind of regulation and oversight necessary to kill middle-class jobs and tax us all into poverty ensure this tragedy never happens again, not a single one criticizes the President for his mishandling of the spill. But guess who does rank a Babs mention?

Redford’s video above is a pretty fascinating piece of propaganda. Take special note of how he at first laments the  job losses caused by the spill but then closes by calling for even more job losses through an end to offshore drilling. It should go without saying that the Obama administration’s voting present throughout the 50-plus days of this disaster never comes up.

If you can manage to stay awake through all this learned smartfulness, here are some of the highlights:

Barbra Streisand:

The BP spill also brought to light the corruption and ineptitude in the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service office. President Obama inherited most of this staff since many of the employees were placed into these regulatory roles during the eight years that Bush was President. Many of the regulators were already friends with industry officials and some had worked in the oil and gas business before their stint in government. These regulators apparently let the oil and gas companies fill out their own inspection forms in pencil and then traced over their writing in ink. In return for their leniency, regulators accepted invitations to hunting trips and tickets to college football games courtesy of the oil and gas companies. Basically, Bush put the foxes in charge of guarding the hen house! In addition, the Minerals Management Service frequently granted waivers to BP and other oil companies releasing them from providing regulators detailed environmental impact and safety contingency statements regarding the areas they planned to drill for oil. These waivers allowed oil companies to take short cuts, which ultimately lead to the kind of disaster we are now experiencing in the Gulf.

Robert Redford:

Recently, President Obama announced several measures that will reign in Big Oil’s influence. He strengthened regulations governing offshore operations and called on the Justice Department to examine BP’s role in this fiasco. He also imposed a moratorium on new offshore drilling while a commission investigates the spill. And although I welcome the president’s initial steps, some of these measures need to be stronger.

Ultimately, the only way to break the industry’s hold on political decision making is for America to shift to more fuel efficient cars, more public transit and other technologies.

These are the solutions that will break America’s addiction to oil and put more money in consumers’ pockets. Right now, there is a clean energy and climate bill before Congress that could help unleash these solutions. The time for passage of this bill is NOW, not later.

Ted Danson:

This week Obama announced a moratorium on new permits to drill new deepwater wells, and he suspended the planned exploration in Alaska, canceled a planned August lease sale in the western Gulf of Mexico and canceled a proposed lease sale off the coast of Virginia.

This is a huge step forward, but a six-month moratorium is not enough. We need a complete moratorium on offshore drilling, like the one that protected most of the U.S. coastline for 25 years.

Compare this to the left’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. Calling for an end to off-shore drilling is like saying don’t rebuild the levees because they’ll just burst again; or don’t re-populate New Orleans because it will just flood again. Does anyone want to argue the flooding in New Orleans didn’t devastate that environment?

And laying all the blame for the oil spill on BP (and Bush!) and none of it on the Obama Administration’s incompetence is like blaming Katrina only on the builders and inspectors of those levees. 

But don’t completely laugh off these A-listers. Writing them off as fuzz-headed, liberal celebs is a mistake. Each is very wealthy, very powerful and politically connected. And each is lobbying hard both in print and behind the scenes to devastate an already devastated community with further job losses — and as they sit in their over-sized mansions – to undermine our standard of living with higher taxes and energy costs (which affect everything).

Babs, Bob and Ted  might compose their big thinks with a laughable sense self-seriousness, but the power and influence they wield to further their totalitarian agenda is not to be under-estimated.

But I think I speak for all of Hollywood when I say, thank gawd we elected the Community Organizer instead of that hick from Alaska who has actual experience in dealing with oil companies and spills.

According to the poll, 65 percent of Americans say they won’t make major lifestyle changes to help the environment.

These findings, of course, will be filed under “idiot America” by our greenies stateside, and those abroad.

Yep – It’s just another example of how selfish and short-sighted we dumbass Yanks really are. Screw the earth. All we care about is our monstrous SUV’s, our Play Stations, and of course, our vintage collection of shrunken spotted owl heads.

I have 58.

So when not frenching Hugo Chavez, Sean Penn will shake his head ruefully. Al Gore will sob quietly in his air conditioned silo made of coffee table books. Tim Robbins will try to suffocate himself in a biodegradable, but reusable shopping bag.

Hooray, I say – because these freaks are wrong. The reason why Americans are less likely to make said changes isn’t because they don’t care about the earth – it’s that they just don’t care for the propagandists who browbeated them into caring about the earth.

So whose fault is that? Well, it’s Gore’s, and every single man-made global warming apostle out there. By abandoning reasoned debate found in just about every major scientific arena, and instead embracing media friendly, self righteous hysteria – they became a noxious mixture of Chicken Little and Mrs. Kravitz.

You know, from Bewitched.

And of course, they got cocky and fudged their data.

Fact is, most Americans do care about the earth, but they can smell BS a mile away.

And yeah, I’m referring to Barbra Streisand.

And if you disagree with me, you’re probably a racist homophobe who pours milk on starving kittens in hopes of enticing them to cannabalism.

Our guests tonight: 

Stephen Kruiser!

Ron Geraci!

Barret Swatek!

and….John Lydon! (or Rotten, depending on the band!)

“Comrade Karen?”

My wife gazes at me, and she’s like, “Huh?”

“Since I’m watching all these Russian themed movies I feel the need to get in character.”

“Robert…”

“Comrade Robert, if you please.”

My poor wife heaves a weary sigh.

“Comrade Robert, how long will this lunacy continue?”

“Counter-revolutionary! Saboteur! Trotskyite!”

Comrade Karen sternly points to the stairs, and I make my way to a Zhivago-like exile in the living room for the next few hours.

Oh, the sacrifices I make for my comrades at Big Hollywood.

Kim Darby and Bruce Davison in The Strawberry Statement.

She’s a humorless scold.

He’s a laid back golden boy.

Naturally, they fall in love.

We continue our look at Shadows of Russia, the TCM series that explores how American movies viewed Tsarist and Soviet Russia.

This time, we’re on the American campus.

First up, The Strawberry Statement (1970), I never saw this movie and was kind of anxious to see the very young Bruce Davison and Kim Darby as college students caught up in the student riots of the late 60’s.

Davison is an easygoing jock, completely apolitical. Darby is ardently dedicated to “the movement” and opposition to the Vietnam War.

Davison gets involved in the protests in order to hit on Darby. There are lots of shots of Darby and Davison walking around looking confused and soulful. As was the fashion among filmmakers during that period, there are lots of zooms, and the camera endlessly circles our young protagonists—I actually got nauseous—as they agonize over the clash of love and politics.

This is a wretched movie, akin to one of those dopey student films shot with a Bolex. The script is amateur, with no discernible structure. The director—and I’m using that term loosely—could not direct traffic in the Sahara desert.

Darby is supposed to be a student radical, but she has no fire. She looks drugged, lost in a role that is not there. Davison fares somewhat better. He manages to find his character, a romantic opportunist who is, at last, so outraged by, ahem, police brutality, that he actually gets angry and in slow motion, natch, leaps into action.

Not a Russian in sight. And though the students are a bunch of spoiled suburban middle class leftists, there is no direct talk of Communism.

Confused by the inclusion of this film in the series I shot off an e-mail seeking clarification from Self-Styled Siren, who, with The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick programmed this fascinating series.

Replied Self-Styled Siren:

The Strawberry Statement — I haven’t watched it yet and I have no idea. It wasn’t on my and Lou’s shortlist and you may quote me on that. They just programmed it as an overnight thing.

Done and done.

Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in The Way We Were.

She’s a humorless scold.

He’s a laid back golden boy.

Naturally, they fall in love.

This time it’s Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were (1973). And I’ve got to admit, this film is much better than I remembered.

Initially set in the late 1930’s on a gorgeous college campus, all autumn leaves and red bricks buildings, Babs is a committed Socialist/Communist/Idealist, working her way through college as a soda shop waitress. Redford is an apolitical athlete—code for Republican—who discovers that Babs is the only girl on campus who appreciates his more poetic side—he’s a writer who eventually goes to Hollywood.

Though politics is central to The Way We Were, the film manages to keep the love story front and center.

Years ago I read the shooting script and there was a lot more politics, with an emphasis on the Hollywood blacklist. Previews in Pasadena were not good. Audiences intensely disliked—duh—all the political posturing and so it was left on the cutting room floor.

Talented screenwriters understand that the best characters are defined by their faults. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents serves up barrels of faults for both characters. Streisand is a relentless political animal, and though the filmmakers admire her idealism, they recognize that her radical pose masks deep insecurities and an abiding narcissism.

As Redford angrily observes: “Not everything that happens happens just  to you.”

Redford and his friends simply want to enjoy their martini lunches, thereby maintaining the baronial privileges of WASP society. As in Ninotchka and Comrade X, the apolitical male is a down to earth sidekick to the whacky but lovable female radical. Redford, like Clark Gable and Melvyn Douglas, takes it upon himself to teach the Commie hottie to be more, um, female.

Early in The Way We Were, Redford orders Streisand to lift her foot. She complies and Redford ties her shoelace. Thus she’s characterized as an artfully shlumpy Jewish girl—hey, this is Babs—and Redford, glowing in Gatsby white, not only teaches her to be a better woman, but in a sly sexual and religious reversal, he’s the shicksah goddess. There’s a touching gesture repeated throughout the movie where Streisand tentatively reaches out and brushes Redford’s golden hair off his forehead. It’s a lovely and telling act that encapsulates all the tenderness and tension in their doomed love story.

Surprised at my affection for this film, I said to Comrade Karen, “You know, in spite of all the politics, I really like the film.”

Replied Karen: “I don’t remember any politics. I just remember the love story and crying like a baby in the end.”

Drum roll, please!

Comrades, the movie that inspired the Shadow of Russia series:

Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the memoir of the same name by Joseph P. Davies, is, well, jaw dropping. Not because it’s so bad, which it is. But because it’s a piece of slick Stalinist propaganda produced by Warner Brothers.

How did this wretched film come into existence?

With the Soviet Union abandoning the Soviet-Nazi pact, and joining America and the allies against Germany and Japan, Roosevelt understood that the American people needed to be, um, reeducated in their attitude towards the Soviet menace. Thus, Roosevelt asked Hollywood to cooperate and produce films that cleared up all the alleged misunderstandings about totalitarian Soviet Communism and mass murdering Josef Stalin.

Or that’s the standard story. In Red Star Over Hollywood, Ronald and Allis Radosh report that:

In a newspaper interview, Davies said that it was he who had approached Harry Warner about the book, after other film companies had shown interest. If it was to be a movie, he told Warner, “I want you to make it.” Warner agreed, and Davies was paid $25,000.

Whatever the truth of the film’s genesis, using Davies 1941 memoir, Hollywood went to work.

A credulous dupe, Davies, Roosevelt’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, was, like New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, a reliable apologist for Communism and Stalin’s murderous policies. Davies was, as Lenin famously labeled Western liberals, “a useful idiot.”

Most shocking in Davies memoir is the treatment of the Moscow show trials that took place between 1936 and 1938. In a major purge, Stalin accused the old Bolshevik leaders of plotting with Nazi Germany to overthrow the Soviet regime. The defendants were primarily old buddies of Lenin who had been celebrated as the first heroes of the Soviet Revolution. They were now accused of working with Trotsky to sabotage industry, assassinate Stalin, and bring down the Soviet regime.

The charges were absurd and most of the defendants were executed. Their confessions are lovingly rendered in a courtroom scene that paints the Soviets as scrupulous jurists. In fact, the hapless defendants were drugged, horribly tortured and told that their families would be murdered unless they confessed.

The film faithfully presents Davies view that the trials proved “a record of Fifth columnist and subversive activities in Russia under a conspiracy [involving] the German, Japanese governments that [was] amazing.”

Davies was intimately connected with the production and at every stage carefully vetted the script and demanded rewrites so that the finished product accurately reflected his pro-Soviet point of view.  In fact, it was Davies idea to include the hagiographic prologue in which he pompously introduces the film.

Howard Koch, a member of the Communist party in the 1930’s, wrote the script. He hired Jay Leyda, former student of Soviet propagandist Sergei Eisentein and an ardent Stalinist, as his technical adviser. Thus with the triumvirate of Davies, Koch and Leyda in place, the film’s slavish adherence to Comintern discipline was assured. It was left to Michael Curtiz, a ruthlessly efficient and amoral director, to make sure that Mission to Moscow had all the gloss of any normal Hollywood production.

The film looks great with a constantly prowling camera shooting through glass reflections. Ann Harding, as Davie’s patient wife, wears fab-u-lous hats, and, natch, scrumptious furs.  At an embassy dance a dashing and spiffily costumed Russian officer whirls Davies daughter, Eleanor Parker—yup, Davies pimps out his movie daughter—around the dance floor, assuring the unreasonably anti-Communist young woman that the great Soviet social experiment is just, um, misunderstood. And hey, try reading Marx’s Das Kapital because it’s a total page turner.

At this point in the movie, I hit the pause button and got all interactive: I screamed.

Not surprisingly, the script enforces the outrageous Stalinist line for the infamous Soviet invasion of Finland. Walter Huston, playing Davies as insufferably heroic and saintly, cries out to an American critic: “Russia knew she was going to be attacked by Hitler so the Soviet leaders asked Finland’s permission to occupy strategic positions to defend herself against German aggression. She offered to give Finland twice as much territory in exchange, but Hitler’s friend Mannerheim refused and the Red Army moved in.”

Exactly the Soviet justification for the invasion of Finland.

Critical reception to Mission to Moscow—it was a major release with klieg lights and a red carpet—was split along political lines more than aesthetics. The powerful and clueless Bosley Crowther of the New York Times gave it a thumbs up writing that the movie showed: “… a boldness unique in film ventures” since it “comes out sharply and frankly for an understanding of Russia’s point of view.”

Though on the left of the political spectrum, James Agee was far more perceptive: “Through rumor and internal inference the Stalinists here stole or were handed such a march that the film is almost describable as the first Soviet production to come from a major Hollywood studio.” Summing up, Agee lamented that the film’s essential thesis is, “there is no difference between the Soviet Union and the good old U.S.A.”

Meyer Schapiro, the distinguished art critic and historian, said it best: “One must turn to Nazi propaganda films for similar technique and indifference to truth.”

Farley Granger as a noble Russian peasant in The North Star.

From the delusions of Mission to Moscow we move to The North Star (1943), another lyrical ode to Communism, this time penned by Lillian Hellman. She joined the Communist Party in 1938, and resigned in 1940, but she continued to defend the Soviet Union for years. Called as a witness by the HUAC in 1952, Hellman took the fifth in order to avoid going to prison.

In many ways, The North Star is an even more shocking piece of Soviet propaganda than Mission to Moscow. The film tells the story of a happy go lucky peasant cooperative in the Ukraine. So delirious with joy are our farmers—Walter Huston all noble and saintly again, that they break into song and dance, music by Aaron Copeland, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, in the sun drenched fields.

The Nazis invade. Which is great because Erich von Stroheim finally shows up as a sadistic Nazi physician and actually brings some fire to this listless production directed by Lewis Milestone.  Young villagers fight and die as heroic partisans.

This is, to say the least, a complete Orwellian rewriting of history.

The Ukranians furiously resisted collectivization. Hundreds of thousands of farmers smashed their tools and killed their own animals rather than hand them over to the Soviets. Mass starvation followed and Stalin withheld all aid. Four million Ukranians died of hunger and disease. When the Nazis invaded, the Ukranians did not rise up as partisans. In fact, most welcomed the Nazi army as liberators. And let us not forget that the Ukranians were rabid Jew-haters, aiding the Nazis at every step. Indeed, the Ukranians were active and enthusiastic genociders notorious for being even more brutal than the SS. The 1941 Babi Yar massacre of 34,000 civilians, mostly Jews, could not have taken place without the willing collaboration of the Ukranians.

The North Star was nominated for six Academy Awards.

Go figure.

After screening these two pieces of Communist propaganda, I really needed a break so I turned to the next titles in the TCM series, under the heading Diplomatic Immunity.

Okay, this photo of Liz Taylor is not from Conspirator, it’s actually from Suddenly Last Summer, but we need some visual relief, right?

Conspirator (1949) with Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor is an anti-Communist film. And you know what, it’s pretty darned effective. The story is simple, Elizabeth Taylor—she was only 17-years old when she made this film—falls in love with the dashing military officer Robert Taylor—he was 38 and really uncomfortable in their love scenes. Taylor and Taylor marry and she discovers that he’s a Soviet spy.

Says Liz: “You’re a traitor and a spy.”

Robert Taylor gets all dialectical and responds: “Those are just unpleasant words. I’m a loyal supporter of the greatest social experiment in the world. It will take a while for you to change your political attitude.”

Liz shoots back: “I haven’t got a political attitude, all I know is it’s wrong and I hate it.”

Okay, that’s kind of refreshing. Right and wrong. Good and evil. But have you noticed that not one of our movies gives voice to a coherent defense of capitalism and democracy? Nevertheless, Conspirator builds to a restrained but powerful resolution.

Bibi Andersson in The Kremlin Letter.

Finally, we come to The Kremlin Letter, (1970). I scribbled a few notes and here they are.

Exposition. More exposition. Whoopeee, lesbians! Exposition. Oh my gosh, George Sanders is in DRAG!!! More exposition. Okaaaay, hot Ruskie prostitutes. Richard Boone is really fat. Have bottle will travel. Orson Welles phones it in. Ditto Max von Sydow. Barbara Parkins is sex starved! She gets it on with… Patrick O’Neal!?!? Bibi Andersson is sex starved. Oh no, she’s also hooking up with O’Neal.  Am I missing something? I have no idea what’s going on. John Huston must have been hammered. Whoa! George Sanders just jumped out a window. He actually did commit suicide three years later.  Depressed. Eyeballs bleeding. Help, I’m melting!!!!

George Sanders in drag in his last role.

As you can glean from my notes, The Kremlin Letter is incoherent. The cold war is reduced to a sleazy sexual tableaux. According to the cynical minds who developed and produced this film, the conflict between Western democracy and Communist totalitarianism is meaningless. Both sides are evil. Both sides murder indiscriminately. This film is an excellent model for post-modern moral equivalence.

I’m beginning to think that Hollywood cannot be trusted to deal honestly and effectively with the evils of Communism—unless the story is framed as a romantic comedy. So far Ninotchka and Comrade X are not only the best films in the series, but far and away the most insightful.

I climb the stairs, back to the master bedroom.

“Karen, I’m done for the night. Whatcha doing?”

“Watching Comrade Obama speak to the proletariat.”

I turn on my heel, and head back to my gulag in the living room.

Time to indulge in some escapist entertainment, Project Runway: a celebration of the free market, fashion, diva designers and my very favorite comrades, extremely thin, extremely neurotic models.

© Robert J. Avrech

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she.

Born in 1888, Marion Benson Owens grew up in San Francisco as the middle child of a no-nonsense ad executive, but soon developed into a rebellious little Bohemian with a variety of artistic pretensions. She was above all precocious and full of imagination. Whenever her aunt would invite other ladies over for séances (a favorite pastime in those days), young Marion would play the part of a possessed girl channeling spirits, inventing all manner of accents, characters, and stories with which to delight her audience. Her uncle, an old seaman, often took her along to visit his buddies in seedy bars and taverns. Watching the gruff men smoking, drinking, and cursing in their salty element, she gained early first-hand experience in the sort of masculine banter and swagger that decades later would grant The Champ so much verisimilitude.

Looking for ways to express her imaginative longings, Marion began to draw and to write poetry, things that failed to impress her down-to-earth businessman father and socialite mother. Their divorce when she was a teen imbued her soul with another of the painful elements that would later figure so prominently in The Champ. Among her parents’ friends was the great Jack London, the first millionaire author in history. Although it is unknown whether she read any of his seminal tales about boxing (The Game, “A Piece of Steak”) it is known that he heartily encouraged her writing endeavors, spurring her to submit what would become her first fledgling short story and poetry sales.

Marion’s early marriage to a magazine illustrator failed, as did a second to a steel magnate. By 1915 a series of transient jobs (including time spent in Europe as a WWI combat correspondent!) had ended with her in Los Angeles, nibbling around the edges of the molten Hollywood film industry. Meeting the famous actress Mary Pickford was a turning point, as they quickly began a warm friendship that would last over fifty years. Soon she was acting in bit roles for silent movies under the stage name “Frances Marion” (one of her distant relatives was Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” of the Revolutionary War). The name would stick, and the former Marion Owens would be Frances Marion for the rest of her life.

Ultimately, acting wasn’t her forte. Her first chance to write for a movie came about due to a funny circumstance. The movies of 1915 were silent, yes — but amazingly, studios were getting complaints from lip readers who claimed that the words mouthed on-screen by the actors didn’t at all match the displayed dialogue cards. (Because there was no sound, actors could say anything — including plenty of things no lip-reading Christian ought to “hear”!) Directors began requesting scene-appropriate mock dialogue for the actors to use. The newly christened Frances Marion obliged, and began what would become a lifelong career and passion.

Within a few years Marion the writer was a hot property, penning a continuous stream of “scenarios” and making an obscene amount of money doing it. She became the personal screenwriter for her friend Mary Pickford, as well as the ghost-writer for Pickford’s newspaper column. In 1917 alone Marion cleared $50,000 for her scriptwriting chores. She wrote lightning-fast, sometimes cranking out a feature-length script in as little as three weeks. No one knows exactly how many movies she wrote during the teens and twenties. The Internet Movie Database has records for 150, but copyright filings at the Library of Congress reveal that to be a low-ball figure. The estimated totals published in various sources are all over the map, ranging as high as 325.

What isn’t in dispute is that Frances Marion remains the most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history. During her tenure she was also the best-paid writer, man or woman. “She had more muscle than most women in Hollywood,” observed actress Gloria Swanson, “because she was a gold mine of ideas — ideas that could become stories that could become scripts that could become films that could save careers, lives, and corporations.” In 1926, Variety reported that Marion was to be given a staggering $100,000 to write exclusively for Sam Goldwyn. Still later, as M-G-M’s prize scenarist, she would be paid upwards of $30,000 per week. “I’ve been so glad to get the money,” she said, “that I never worried much about the credit.”

In 1919 Marion married for the third time, to an ex-Army Chaplin named Fred Thomson, who had been a military adviser on one of Mary Pickford’s pictures. Unlike her previous marriages, this one worked out exceedingly well — after a decade of trying, she had finally found true love. A few years later, when Marion called on her husband to fill in for a missing actor on one of the pictures she was directing (yes, she even directed a few films), he promptly became an overnight sensation. Thomson ended up starring in dozens of films, most of them written by his wife, and soon her husband was one of the most popular Western stars in America. The happy couple adopted one son, had another naturally, and built a sprawling twenty-four acre estate in Beverly Hills. Life was wonderful.

Then, in late 1928, tragedy struck in the form of a rusty nail on the floor of a horse stable. Thomson stepped on it, developed tetanus, and quickly sickened while his doctors flailed around trying to diagnose his illness. His death on Christmas Day (so emotionally similar to the one she was soon to write for The Champ) sent her into a tailspin. Forty years old and with two babies to raise, she was hospitalized several times for exhaustion and grief. A fourth marriage to director George W. Hill ended in divorce (soon after, Hill committed suicide), and with that Marion swore off marriage forever, dedicating herself to the raising of her sons while alleviating her loneliness with occasional flings and affairs.

It was in the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death that she wrote the movies for which she is best remembered. Sound had arrived, and dialogue suddenly had grown substantially in importance. Whereas before a screenwriter need only write small bits for subtitle cards, now they were required to invent whole monologues and long debates bristling with dramatic energy. A new set of rules regarding pace, length, and nuance were required. Techniques that worked wonderfully in the silent era now fell flat. Unlike many, Marion’s well-rounded and emotion-laden characters transferred well to talkies. With the support and encouragement of the brilliant young producer Irving Thalberg, she penned hit after hit for M-G-M, and in 1930 became the first woman to win an Academy Award for a non-actress category when she took home the statue for The Big House, a gritty prison film.

But it was in Mexico, on a research trip for an upcoming western, that she had the “Eureka!” moment that would result in a film even more memorable and close to her heart. She watched in fascination as a man got tossed out of a saloon along with his young son. The boy was angrily defending his drunken dad, calling him “the Champ!” This scene of familial loyalty and moxie from a little boy touched her, and when she got back she asked Thalberg if she could write a different story than the western they had been planning. As Thalberg was vacationing in Europe, he assigned Marion to Harry Rapf, one of M-G-M’s top producers. It was an inspired choice, for Rapf gave Marion additional ideas that ultimately nudged the story far closer to the one we now know and love.

Rapf’s friend, director Chuck Reisner, had told him some tales about the misadventures of his son Dinky with a horse at a Tijuana racetrack. Marion incorporated these into her plot, and added heaping portions of emotional resonance drawn from her own life — divorce, untimely death, the hole left by the absence of a parent. Her flair for melodrama was exquisitely developed by this point, honed to a razor’s edge by fifteen years of writing hundreds of silent films. The resulting screenplay featured a mix of powerful elements appealing to both males and females. Alcoholism especially was given a harrowing treatment (and this during Prohibition, which had not yet been repealed).

Many critics find weepy melodrama loathsome, but Marion prized the ability of movies to elicit strong emotions. Years later, in a book on screenwriting, she would say:

A character exists only in his emotions and sensations. Without the expression of feeling, he no more represents a living person than does a fleshless skeleton. If he does not realistically express some credible emotion himself, he will not be likely to arouse feeling in those who watch him. His own characteristics and the plot arrangement should set him in situations that plausibly arouse his own fear, hope, passion, desire, anger, love, jealousy or other emotion, and his own feeling should be expressed so realistically as to arouse emotion in the beholder.

After she finished the story proper, screenwriters Leonard Praskins and Wanda Tuchock were brought in to add dialogue and flesh out the scenes. According to Marion, surgically adding layers of witty banter and comedy to an outwardly dramatic movie is a tough business:

If anyone [believes] that we sit around holding our sides with laughter as one hilarious gag after another is suggested, they are gravely mistaken. We sit in a room and build our comedy scenes with concentration. It was grim work, and even when we thought we had hit upon what comedians call a “belly laugh,” nobody so much as cracked a smile.

The resulting script was strange, the first of what would eventually be seen as a new genre, the “male weepie.” It’s a delicate balance: take the masculinity from such a script, and it’s just another Little Women type estrogen-fest. But take away Marion’s feminine melodrama, and it’s just another fight picture with shallow, cardboard heroes. As things turned out, audiences suffering through the Depression heartily embraced Marion’s heartfelt tale, and the script for the movie won the veteran screenwriter her second Academy Award.

Marion would continue writing for M-G-M until 1946. By then, in her late fifties, she was thoroughly disenchanted with the business. Most of her silent-era friends were dead or retired, and it was near impossible to get anything personal made anymore. Whereas The Champ had been pitched and developed at light-speed, now everything was homogenized by a legion of script doctors and production-code enforcers, assembly-line style. Writing in that environment was, in her words, “like writing on sand with the wind blowing.” The personal, heartfelt projects of yesteryear had given way to

the era of messages, of art; the intellectuals have taken over and the films aren’t simple and direct any longer. . . The poor people who write for the films! Film writers are like Penelope — knitting their stories all day just to have somebody else unravel their work by night.

Thus, with her children almost fully grown, she abandoned Hollywood and moved East to write novels and plays. Her last brush with Tinseltown was to adopt her Champ screenplay into a new vehicle for Red Skelton, changing the prizefighter of the original into a comedian and naming it The Clown (1953). Shorn of its hard-boiled masculinity, it bombed.

Frances Marion never worked in Hollywood again, and died in 1973 at the age of 84. In 1987, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was attempting to create a display featuring real Oscars from every year of the awards’ existence, they were having a problem finding one for 1930. Marion’s son Richard came through by donating the statue she had received for writing The Big House. When asked about how his mother had displayed her Oscars during her life, he replied that she generally used them as doorstops.

One of Richard Thomson’s earliest memories of his mom was walking into her bedroom early in the morning to find that she already had been up for several hours writing. “Her hair was down,” he recalls, “but she was sitting up with papers all over her bed.” The most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history — lonely, tinged by tragedy, yet still possessing a little girl’s imagination and heart — gutting out the stories that made a generation of Americans laugh and weep.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the underrated actors who brought Frances Marion’s ardent effusions to Oscar-worthy life.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The go-to gal for information about Frances Marion is Cari Beauchamp, who over the last decade has single-handedly spurred a renaissance and reevaluation of the forgotten screenwriter. Her 1997 book Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood is the source from which most modern articles, including this one, glean substantive information about the author of The Champ. There’s also a Turner Classic Movies documentary film of the same name narrated by Uma Thurman and Kathy Bates. Beauchamp, a former press secretary for ex-California Governor Jerry Brown, is to be commended for shedding light on a much-neglected area of Hollywood history.

Another documentary on the early history of women in Hollywood is Reel Models: The First Women of Film. It might be asking a bit much for Big Hollywood readers to watch this given the narrators (Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Hilary Swank, and Minnie Driver, plus Barbra Streisand introduces it). But if you can get past them, check it out for the content.

Frances Marion wrote a fair number of books in addition to her screenwriting output, two of which Big Hollywood readers may particularly wish to hunt down. How To Write and Sell Film Stories was published way back in 1937, and serves as a sort of Syd Field primer on writing for the big screen. Off with Their Heads! is her autobiography, and contains many stories about early Hollywood.

Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” is one of the most affecting short stories you’ll ever read, penned by one of our very best authors. A harrowing boxing tale, it’ll put you in the proper mindset to fully appreciate what Frances Marion did with The Champ.