“I want a river,” murmured D. W. Griffith, his eyes unfocused and gazing into space. “A misty river. A river of dreams. The Thames as Whistler — or perhaps Turner — might have painted it. Only it must be a real river. Do you understand? A real river. Flowing, endlessly flowing. Carrying destiny — the never-ending destiny of life — on its tide. I must see that flow, that silent flow of time and fortune, with all the mystery of unknowable future there. To be seen — and yet not to be seen. . . .”

For cinematographic “boy Friday” Karl Brown (1896–1990), this latest impossible request was all in a day’s work. Ever since begging his way into a job with Griffith as a camera assistant, he had often been sent on strange excursions to capture some particular shot haunting the director’s imagination. “One man who was the master designer, Griffith, drew all the plans,” Brown wrote as an old man in his book Adventures With D. W. Griffith. “The rest of us, from the highest to the lowest, gave whatever was in us to the realization of the master plan. I was the lowest, a beast of burden by day and a chore boy by night. The work was cruelly hard, the hours exhaustingly long.”

This latest task, Brown soon discovered, was for a new film called Broken Blossoms, a title “so sickly sweet that the working crew, a godless bunch by definition, never called it anything but Busted Posies.” The film was supposed to take place in the infamous Limehouse district in London, a poverty-wracked den of thieves, swindlers, brutes, hookers, and opium addicts bordering the Thames. Griffith had pulled strings to get young Mr. Brown called back to Hollywood (from a World War I stint in the Army) just so he could create and capture one master image of the Limehouse riverfront on celluloid. (more…)

Lupe Velez, The Mexican Spitfire.

The lives of Hollywood stars are frequently tragic and messy tales of absent fathers, cruelly ambitious mothers, and madly dysfunctional families.

Mexican-American actress, Lupe Velez (July 18, 1908 – December 13, 1944) “The Mexican Spitfire” was a beautiful, passionate, emotionally unstable woman best known for a series of 1930’s B movies in which she plays a delightfully scatter-brained character who speaks broken English mixed with streams of rapid fire Spanish.

Her first feature-length film was in the Douglas Fairbanks blockbuster, The Gaucho (1927), where she plays a high spirited Spanish dancing girl. Velez performed in a further eighteen films before settling into comedy—she had a Carol Lombard vibe, a  flair for screwball situations, but her accent limited her appeal—most notably in the seven “Mexican Spitfire” series of films (1939-1943). (more…)