Former porn star Sasha Grey says she will not withdraw from an elementary school reading program despite outcry from angry parents, according to a report from TMZ.

Earlier Friday, news broke that a Los Angeles area elementary school is facing some major criticism from parents after the district invited Grey to read to a group of first graders as part of the Read Across America program.

“I committed to this program with the understanding that people would have their own opinions about what I have done, who I am and what I represent,” she said in a statement.

“I am an actor. I am an artist. I am a daughter. I am a sister. I am a partner. I have a past that some people may not agree with, but it does not define who I am.

“I believe in the future of our children, and I will remain an active supporter and participant in education-focused initiatives.”

TMZ obtained photos of Grey reading to the children at Emerson Elementary School in Compton on November 2 as part of Read Across America.

Full story here.

Its name is “Girlfriend,” and before I get caught up in rapturously praising the film, I want to let our Los Angeles readers know that they have one shot to see the film in a theater and help give it a broader life. It screens at 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Downtown Independent Theater, the same free-thinking venue that earlier this year earned my praises for having the guts to screen the amazing anti-North Korean documentary “The Red Chapel” for a week.

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In its own ways, “Girlfriend” is even more of a must-see, and I urge anyone who appreciates great acting and writing in the vein of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor’s darkly meaningful tales to go. It’s a thoughtful, quiet film that builds slowly but surely to a compelling series of events that should leave viewers happy that their intelligence was respected like so few films bother to do, as well as a uniquely satisfying conclusion that will leave you seeing the world in a different way.

While it tells its own very personal, compelling and unpredictable tale, it bears a resemblance to another great film that came out of nowhere back in 1996: Billy Bob Thornton’s masterpiece, “Sling Blade.” Like that film, “Girlfriend” centers on a mentally challenged man named Evan in a small rural town who suddenly has big decisions to make with even bigger consequences hanging in the balance.

But while Thornton was a relatively unknown character actor who drew critics and audiences in with a stunning performance pretending to be mentally challenged, “Girlfriend” stars a man named Evan Sneider, who actually lives with the condition of Downs Syndrome. His performance here is a stunner, because he not only holds his own against an excellent cast, but alternates perfectly between moments of subtle sadness and explosive emotion in a way that would make most so-called normal actors jealous.

The plot is deceptively simple at first. Evan lives with his single mother, who works as a dishwasher in a middle-of-nowhere dive and watches over Evan as he takes food out to the customers. Evan went to high school with the area’s “normal” kids years ago, and has started to realize that his life is in danger of being stuck in a perpetual rut because of his mental condition.

He keeps a list of friends he calls daily to check on their own humdrum lives, hoping to hear about their happiness at least. But his heart is set on what he believed was the most beautiful girl in his high school, a woman named Candy who now is a single mother who parties too hard and is caught between a fling with a married man and the abusive and jealous ex-boyfriend named Russ who fathered her child.

When Evan’s mother suddenly dies, he’s left utterly alone in the world and suddenly notices that the relationships of the townspeople around him are just as sordid as the ones he watched on TV soap operas with his mom. The movie mostly hints at these mixed-up lives, rather than graphically dwelling on them. But when Evan learns that Candy is about to be evicted from her home because of Russ’ refusal to pay her rent as promised, he secretly leaves the money she needs, taking it out of a large stash that his guilty brother has left for him to buy food and care for himself.

That decision to give Candy money is Evan’s desperate attempt to be her “man” and attempt to win her over as his girlfriend. Yet that seemingly pure-hearted decision is more complicated than it at first appears, and winds up setting off a whole chain of consequences between Evan, Candy and Russ that no one will see coming.

Aside from being a perfect gem of a film that deserves to be seen and admired by a large audience, “Girlfriend” is important in another major way.  In an age where those with Downs Syndrome are being overlooked more and more, this film shows through Sneider’s performance that they are indeed capable of great things when given a chance.

Of course, most people with Downs don’t wind up starring in a movie and like any group of “normal” people, most probably don’t even care to try. However, films like “Girlfriend” and “Sling Blade” and their Emmy-winning TV predecessor “Life Goes On” show that they are more complex and human than we often realize, that they shouldn’t be shoved to the side and forgotten, and that they are often capable of even more profound displays of love than the rest of us.

Again, writer-director Justin Lerner takes his time to tell its story, but when it all unfolds, this film is magic. Relative unknown Shannon Woodward is also excellent as Candy, while Jackson Rathbone – one of the “Twilight” crew of young actors – shows that he’s got a lot more going on than might be expected of a heartthrob through the fact he’s not only great as Russ but he helped produce the film and with his band 100 Monkeys provides the subtly unsettling yet beautiful score.

If you’re in LA and want to see a great film, head downtown Wednesday night. “Girlfriend” just finished a two-week, largely sold-out run in New York City’s Film Forum theater and if it goes well Wednesday, it’ll land at least a full week and from there hopefully get a bigger shot at viewers nationwide.

What did California law enforcement expect when they enlisted celebrities to help warn the public of the impending closure of a major freeway?

Probably not this.

Kim Kardashian, one of several celebrities with Twitter followings in the millions, was asked by the L.A.P.D to warn her followers of the impending highway closure.

Kardashian complied, tweeting on Friday: “Remember this weekend the 405 Fwy is gonna be closed between the San Fernando Valley and the West Side!!”

Just one problem. The closure is in two weeks.

So the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star tried to correct her mistake, tweeting: “Remember next weekend the 405 Fwy is gonna be closed between the San Fernando Valley and the West Side!!”

Wrong again.

Kardashian erased both initial Twitter messages and finally got it right: “Stay away from the 405 Fwy the weekend of July 16 & 17, it will be closed btwn the 10 Fwy and 101 Fwy North & South!”

Oh. My. Gawd.

My data isn’t fresh on this, but there was a time not long ago where the stretch of 405 freeway between the 10 and 101 was the single most trafficked road in the United States.  Shutting that down for a couple of days is like blocking off L.A.’s pulmonary artery; it just can’t function without it.  So, if the city is going to try to temporarily block it off, they can’t afford any mistakes.

One of the main theses of Big Hollywood is that more often than not, pop culture trumps politics; in other words, Hollywood has as much, if not more influence over the way we live our lives than those who are literally in power.  One of the best illustrations of this is twitter, where most of our country’s greatest thinkers are followed by a few thousand people while reality television stars and pop singers are followed by millions.  Kardashian, for example, who was catapulted to fame when a bootleg sex tape she made with rapper Ray-J was leaked to the public, is followed by over eight million people. By virtue of that fact, the LA City government entrusted her to disseminate vital information to help keep one of the country’s largest municipalities moving at it’s already lumbering pace.  Naturally, she wasn’t up to the task.

But I don’t blame Kim Kardashian; she makes a living having her butt x-rayed. I blame all of us who have been suckered into the cult of celebrity and vote for the people who run this city so horribly.  The taxes are too high, our schools are unusable, and even the public restroom toilet seats have gang inscriptions carved into them.  And don’t try and drive anywhere in L.A., either, because if you don’t pop a tire on one of the countless potholes, I can only conceptualize an L.A. traffic jam as the preview for Hell.  The city is run by a goof-ball Mayor who changed his name from Tony Villar to Antonio Villaraigosa (no doubt to pander to the Latin community) and failed the Bar Exam all four times he took it.  When he’s not on top of a Telemundo reporter (no wonder he’s happy to turn the key of the city over to an amateur porn star) he’s court-side at a Laker game or violating a local variance.  This is the guy we democratically elected to be in charge, so we deserve whatever we get from him.

We now have a city that has been left to the most incompetent people in the country (reality television stars) by the second most incompetent people in the country (left-wing politicians).

Needless to say, it’s a bit of hyperbole to blame this twitter mishap on our failure of a Mayor; he may not have had much to do with any of this.  But someone was elected to run this city–it ain’t one of the Kardashians–and the buck stops with him.

I love Los Angeles for a number of reasons, but the combination of Hollywood nonsense and a left-wing government can be a heavy burden to bear.  If you want to understand why our John Nolte left L.A., look no further than Kim Kardashian’s twitter feed.

“Kate, California is going down! Pack up the kids now!

It’s not just California. It’s the whole goddamned world that gone to shit.” (John Cusack, 2012)

It’s surprising to me how often it seems like Sacramento wrote the plot of its own disaster movie and is now acting the part it has written for itself of panicking, incompetent government.

John Nolte, editor of Big Hollywood, has joined that great mass of reverse Joads (of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), in search of a better life anywhere but California. I imagine him, with his affects, trucking across the Mojave Desert in search of the better life that eluded him in California.

“The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley in Search of America. Now the desert, notwithstanding the government-induced drought in the Central Valley, is more metaphorical and all around us. There are no jobs but government jobs or the jobs the government has yet to destroy.

“You know what’s remarkable? Is how much England looks in no way like Southern California,” Austin Powers once said. But he was wrong. We are England, circa 1970. We’re still looking for our Thatcher. We hope if New Jersey can get Christie, maybe this state can come back, even if our last Republican governor merely played the part of a conservative. Indeed, the fattest governor in America could have taught the body builder a thing or two about trimming the fat.

Call me silly or foolhardy, but I’m not yet ready to leave the party. To be sure, the state’s fiscal matters are a mess and now it’s at war with Amazon.com in its vain hope to tax the Internet, its political class wants to kill off both its tax base and the middle class. If they could figure out a way to tax the weather, they would. (Oh wait, that’s what the global warming law – AB 32 – is all about!)

You see, I’m a refugee from Massachusetts, so I’m used to getting taxed and taxed hard. In California, at least I have the weather, the beaches, and the babes. The Beach Boys¸ let me tell you, really were right.

So about four years ago I showed up with no job, $40 dollars in debt, without having ever visited L.A., let alone my college (which I picked after spending the afternoon trying to find the college the furthest away from the Ivy League cliques). In Southern California, all you need is money, good looks, or grit. People spend less time asking you where you went to school and more time asking you where you want to go and how they can help. With its shallowness, it’s oddly more meritocratic than the supposedly deep political class that runs the country. With its love of beauty and the good life, it is fairer than the petty, soulless liberal prep school I went to.

Though I had no way to pay my bills, I was determined to make a go of it. Besides, I figured that if things didn’t work out, there were worse places to be homeless. Despite scholarships I still was so broke that I did odd jobs on Craigslist – the least pleasant of which was pulling a dad cat from underneath a house – and worked three different jobs, sometimes competing with illegal immigrants for the cash jobs I wanted. I still couldn’t afford the plane ticket back to Boston and saw my parents only a handful of times.  Times, as they say, were hard.

But in the evenings, I saved up enough money to take myself and my then-girlfriend, now-fiancée (remember what I said about California girls – she’s a sensible Berkeley grad) to the movies. And there we escaped together.

I had always thought she and I would leave the state altogether, but a recent movie finally convinced me to stay, Battle: Los Angeles.  Its critics to the contrary, the film delivered exactly what it promised: a battle in Los Angeles. Having spent way too many misspent hours on the freeways, the prospect that those freeways were to be destroyed was reason enough to make the trek to the theatre.

The plot was simple enough: genocidal aliens roamed about murdering people indiscriminately and then the Marines showed up to fight them off. In a situation room, the Sgt. Major put the situation darkly and grimly: “This is a textbook military invasion. We are the last offensive force on the west coast. We cannot lose Los Angeles.”

Something stirred in me hearing those words. Yes, we cannot lose Los Angeles. We cannot lose California.  We’ve got to get back to the fight.

No matter where we run, the Left will eventually come for us. Even liberals flee failure, though of course, they import it with them. Just ask Republicans in Colorado or New Hampshire, which are now swing states. Though many of us might move to the Texas – the land of the Alamo – California must be our battleground. It must be our Alamo.  After a brief stint in New York City at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, I’m going to come back to fight.

And yes, it’s true that California, once among the world’s greatest economies, would be under I.M.F. receivership were it independent, its worth it to get its financial house in order.

We need not be fatalistic about it, for as Shakespeare once said, the entire world’s a stage, we are merely actors, waiting for our entrances and exits.

Well, now is our cue.

Crying out in anguished pretension

To say we’ve enjoyed our time in Los Angeles would be an understatement. Adventure we sought and adventure we received. Though I eventually failed out, I loved the few years I (barely) scraped out a living in the independent film world and that it led to eventually being a part of Andrew Breitbart’s BIG empire feels something like providence. There is very little, however, my wife and I will miss about the city itself. We learned pretty quickly that all the cliches are true about the crime, traffic, smog, tremors, and artificiality of it all. Simply put, this city is a dump with a 10% sales tax where light bulbs are contraband the seasons change from hot to scalding and throwing your garbage in the wrong bin ranks as something close to a capital crime. No offense, but I see Los Angeles as nothing more than a big, fascist, one-story ghetto and those of you who love it are welcome to it.  

One cliche that is a total lie, though, is the unbelievably phony narrative created by the Leftist media and Hollywood about the people who live here. Throughout my misspent life, I’ve lived in Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, and now California — and I have never met nicer people than the people of Los Angeles. That’s not hyperbole or rose-colored glasses or sentiment. It’s a fact. Over the years, I’ve been all over this city and have met and worked with folks from every possible background and income group; from movie stars, producers, journalists and politicians to cops, public school teachers, and factory workers. The people who live and work and make this city run are almost without exception uncommonly decent and kind.

Which brings me to the Paul Haggis film “Crash.”

What city does that man live in? Or does he just look down on the “little people” hustling out a living in the valley and seize every opportunity available to lord his progressive superiority over us? Because the Oscar-winning moral obscenity known as “Crash” would have you believe that the marvelous American melting pot known as Los Angeles is filled with racists and racial strife and racial tension and race, race race, race race. Well, that’s a damned lie. My hand to God, in eight years I have personally never seen, been involved in, or known anyone involved in any kind of racial incident.

Monterey Park, California

Sure, we’ve been through droughts, fires, mud slides, and three murders on our block. Yes, my wife’s been robbed at gunpoint, we’ve been awaken by our house shaking like pre-Army Elvis, and have sweltered with no air conditioning due to hours-long power outages in 105 degree heat. But never once have we felt a moment of stress or tension with anyone over race.

Not ever.

Furthermore, I don’t live in the Hollywood Hills or Santa Monica or Beverly Hills. I live on the border of (the unfairly maligned by Hollywood) East Los Angeles in a city called Monterey Park … where I’m the minority. My neighborhood is 80% Asian and Hispanic, and I have never once been made to feel like any kind of outsider. Not to sound corny, but we’re all Americans here. This is a neighborhood where the excitement and celebration surrounding the Chinese New Year is only topped by the 4th of July.  

Boone, North Carolina

“Crash” came out in 2005 and I didn’t much care for it then. It was smug and pretentious and proud of itself. But it took a while for me to realize just what a defamatory attack it was on the people of this city. I remember the moment it struck me. I was sitting in church one Sunday just a year or so ago, when I looked over and saw a white guy sitting in the pew next to me. At first I was surprised and then I was surprised I was surprised and then I figured out why. You simply don’t see many white guys in my church. In fact, sometimes I’m the only one. And that’s when it struck me that I was part of a small racial minority in my community. But because race had never been any kind of an issue with my neighbors, I had never once given the difference in skin color or ethnicity or whatever any kind of thought.

I don’t know what life is like in the upper echelons of the Hollywood Paul Haggis and his ilk reside in, but down here in the San Gabriel Valley we Americans live together just fine.  

E pluribus unum.

So goodbye, Los Angeles. And please don’t take those Julie and John-shaped roadrunner clouds you’ll see tonight personally. Hate the city, already miss the people, and Paul Haggis can go to Hell.

On his Wednesday show, Adam Carolla interviewed Andrew Breitbart to discuss Andrew’s new book, Righteous Indignation. Let me assure you, you’ll LOVE this duo. Andrew’s been a guest on Carolla’s show before, but this was hands down the most entertaining so far.

Check out some of the comments from Carolla’s regular listeners – not surprisingly, some aren’t exactly Breitbart fans (which makes it that much more enjoyable for me, at least).

Carolla tackled topics with Andrew on just about everything – from Righteous Indignation to Communism, the Left’s Racist meme, the racket of building permits and greenwashing, and unions, just to name a few. And a whole lotta LA, which, as Andrew illustrates for us, ain’t what is used to be. The two were on such a rant roll over our waning freedoms, Carolla, who has described himself as having libertarian leanings, almost sounded like another grassroots activist. Who knows? Sounds like he may just have a bit of Presidential appeal. Andrew certainly thought so!

“By the way, are you aware that the Republican Party has nobody running for the presidency right now, and if you had put that out there by mistake and people heard that, and that was your spiel, you would have gone up to Donald Trump level, you would have gone up to 17%?”

Oh yeah – Carolla’s also not a big fan of Maxine Waters. Not. At. All. Which reminds me, this audio is NSFW.

If you’re familiar with the political concept of The Overton Window (no, not the Glenn Beck thriller), you’ll also enjoy the duo’s discussion about how smokers have unwittingly allowed themselves over time to be regulated almost out of existence. Carolla makes creative use of both the war on smokers and the NRA to make that analogy, in a rather unforgettable way. Listen as he sets up what has happened over the years and how we’ve gotten where we are today.

It’s funny that you used the smoking thing. I think about that all the time and I always use it as an example of the difference between the guys who wanted to smoke and the NRA… I secretly suspect this is what the NRA does, not a fan, but this is what they do, this is part of their strategy…see…

So, somebody came into the restaurant and said ‘Hey smokers, you know what, we’re gonna need to move you on over here and just create a little smoking section on this side of the restaurant, so would you just pick it up and move it over here please?’ And everyone went ‘oh yeah, OK,’ and they went and sat in the smoking section. And then at a certain point, somebody came up and said ‘Hey, uh, smokers listen, uh, gonna need you to clear out of the dining area but if you wanna smoke at the bar that’d be fine‘, and they just sort of got up and went ‘yeak, OK, alright’ and then went and sat at the bar. And then the same guy came back again and said, ‘bad news, gonna need to move you out front, outside, can’t have any smoking in the bar or the restaurant, just go out front’ so they went ‘yeah, OK,’ so they stood out on the sidewalk in front of the valet and smoked a cigarette. And then the guy came out and said ‘gonna need you to move down the street 80 paces to smoke a cigarette’ and you see, they just kept getting up and moving.

What the NRA does is they say, ‘f*** you, we’re not moving, let’s argue about it,’ and they’re staying where they are. Meaning, they said, ‘hey man, we need those hollow tip bullets’ and went ‘I don’t think so,’ and now they just argue about it. Now, I don’t think they’re really arguing about that. They just don’t wanna keep sliding out down the sidewalk with the smokers.

And this is the way we are, especially in CA. Which is, we go, ‘hey do this,’ and then someone goes ‘alright.’ Or, we’ll go ‘hey put a tax on cigarettes for a dollar,’ and then next time they go ‘hey make it another buck’ and then they go, ‘eh make it 5 bucks!’ And then Rob Reiner goes, ‘it should be 10 bucks!’ And then all the people that don’t smoke and are full of f***ing righteous indignation, they go ‘oh yeah!’ And then someone says ‘give it to the kids’ and then, next thing you know, we’re where we’re at.

All in all, Carolla seemed quite inspired by Andrew’s plight (and that of Righteous Indignation). Political correctness has run amok, regulations are overbearing, and our freedoms are dissipating before our eyes. How much longer are people going to just sit back and take it all? While there are so many memorable…and colorful quotes in this interview, perhaps this one from Carolla bluntly states the sentiment best:

“What we all need to do in life is just start standing up and telling people to f*** off.”

I suspect many of the Bigs readers might agree. Hell, I certainly do.

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It’s a rarity to be able to work on a film that portrays soldiers in a good light, especially one in which the hero is a female Captain in the Army. The gem of a film is “Flag of My Father”; a story about how Army Nurse, Captain Judith Rainier, deals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the collateral damage it has on her family. Judith and her veteran father, played by William Devane, share a special bond as they confide in each other over their military experiences. This creates an even greater wedge between her and her half-brothers, the most viscous one being played by John Schneider (which he plays disconcertingly well). “Flag of My Father” addresses PTSD, and is a movie about faith, forgiveness, healing, and family. It is truly patriotic and one of a kind with a great soundtrack, including music from Michael W. Smith and Sarah McLaughlin.

“Flag of My Father” premiere’s at the GI FILM FESTIVAL in DC May 13th, where it is in competition to win Best Feature. After the festival, it may get a small release and will be available on DVD. 

Click here for premiere info.

This film is timely in light of all that is happening in the world today. It’s important for the independent conservative filmmaker to step forward now and make quality movies. We have a chance to make a difference.  So thanks R2 Productions for stepping out and making it happen.

More here.

The Los Angeles Times:

Authorities said they were taking steps to avoid a repeat of past gridlock when President Obama arrives in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon.

Meanwhile, L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl urged Westside residents to plan activities at home during the period the president will be moving around or face “putting yourself into potential gridlock.”

Obama will arrive at Los Angeles International Airport at 2:45 p.m. He will spend some time at a fundraiser at the Sony Pictures lot in Culver City. He is scheduled to dine at the Tavern restaurant in Brentwood. It’s unclear where he will spend the night, but the president is scheduled to depart from LAX about 9 a.m. Friday, at the heart of the morning commute.

Obama’s visit to L.A. last summer closed numerous streets from downtown L.A. through the Westside, turning 45-minute commutes into three-hour ordeals. In his next visit in the fall he used a helicopter for some stops, and the traffic situation improved.

“Every effort is being made to minimize the impact to the residential communities and businesses affected by the president’s visit,” the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement. “Although it is not always possible to provide advanced information regarding the specific routes of travel involving the president, we are committed to utilizing traffic control measures that minimize the impact upon commuters while still maintaining the safety of the President as well as the communities involved.”

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Imagine an era of movie action heroes who actually look as though they could kick your butt. There was such a time, not so long ago, when masculine men strode the Earth and walked directly into trouble firing very big guns at very bad guys without being all conflicted about it afterwards.

A Purple Heart recipient for his service in WWII as an aerial gunner, Charles Bronson was the unlikeliest of movie stars. Born in 1921, his early success as a supporting player in legendary films such as “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape” didn’t occur until he was into his 40s and genuine super-stardom finally hit when he was in his 50s, starting with Michael Winner’s “Death Wish” in 1974.

Most critics dismissed Bronson’s acting as wooden and most of his films “reactionary” and “ultra-violent,” but he remained a bankable star in low-budget genre films until he was well past the age of 70. And when he did star in the kind of films critics approve of, such as Sean Penn’s “The Indian Runner” in 1991, they would suddenly find him praise-worthy.

Charles Bronson was a star over four decades because he was absolutely believable in the roles he chose, had as much screen presence and charisma as Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, led a quiet personal life that never shattered his image, gave his fans what they were looking for, and while he wasn’t always a fan of his own films he never let a sense that he was above the material bleed into his performance.

If you’re looking for a Charles Bronson Netflix starter kit, let me suggest:

Once Upon a Time In the West, Chato’s Land, The Mechanic, The Stone Killer, Death Wish 1 & 2, Breakout, Death Hunt, The Evil That Men Do,  and Murphy’s Law.

The best of that bunch is 1982’s “Death Wish 2.” At 60 years-old, Bronson was at the very peak of his menacing masculinity, Jimmy Page’s scoring is beyond inspired, and you’re never going to see a more satisfyingly straight-forward revenge film like this again. As an added bonus, director Michael Winner’s iconic shots of a determined and deadly Bronson dressed head-to-toe all in black against the time capsule of early eighties L.A., are some of my favorites in all of film. 

—–

God won’ t make another Charles Bronson, which is why He gave us DVD.

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.

Despite a reputation for action, spectacle and (in the case of one singularly notorious film) controversy, at heart and above all David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) was a poet. In later years, the people who worked with him on his best known movies — The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920) — all remembered how much he admired Edgar Allan Poe and a variety of other versifiers. With stories that inspired his poetic nature, it wasn’t enough to just shoot action — the images had to possess a certain aura and emotional resonance that hammered home the themes of his tales.

For Broken Blossoms, this meant doing more than walking down to the nearest culvert, getting a quick shot of the Los Angeles River, and calling it the Thames on film. He needed an idealized waterfront tableau, one full of shadows and fog and billowing clouds, a place full of secret thoughts and fantasies. A place where a pair of sad, lonely people — each bereft of happiness and starved for some hint of beauty in life — could find each other and fall in love like two fragile flickers of light amidst a sea of darkness. A place of poetry and dreams.

Actress Mary Pickford — who along with her husband Douglas Fairbanks and the comedian Charlie Chaplin were partners with Griffith in a new production company, United Artists — was the one who introduced the director to a bestselling volume of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916), authored by a young Englishman named Thomas Burke.

The book, coming as it did in the years before literature grew stark and hardboiled in the hands of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett, was a soul-stirring reverie of romance, sordidness, and exoticism rivaling the appeal of modern novels such as Memoirs of a Geisha (1997). “Thomas Burke’s stories of Limehouse were enjoying a great vogue,” Karl Brown remembered many decades later. “I’d read all of them. So had everyone else. You might as well confess at once that you were utterly behind the times if you were not intimately acquainted with Burke’s stories of Limehouse. The whole English-reading world knew every dark and dangerous alley of Limehouse as well as they knew the way to the corner grocery.”

Griffith became particularly entranced with the first story in the volume, “The Chink and the Child” (a title as offensive then as today — Burke’s use of the pejorative here is cynical, designed to elicit sympathy from the reader and putting us firmly on his Chinese protagonist’s side). This story (and hence the bestselling book as a whole) sets the mood as follows:

IT is a tale of love and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little. . . you know. . . the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps. . . .

But listen.

These lilting, lyrical, rhythmic words, and the ones that followed, made a deep impression upon the famous director. “It was originally intended to be just a regular picture, so far as presentation was concerned,” he said in an interview soon after the film’s release. But what was supposed to be a straightforward programmer grew much more visually ambitious. “Something impelled me — the story, in the first place. I believed in it.” These were years in which Griffith felt a great responsibility to grow the medium of film beyond its Nickelodeon roots and into a more rarefied sphere. His last few films had been indifferently received, and he was determined to do justice to this popular, achingly soulful work of literature. With Broken Blossoms, he endeavored to craft a “photodrama” unlike any seen before.

Karl Brown eventually created the Limehouse riverfront shots by building them in miniature. A trough was filled with water to make the Thames, wooden storefronts covered one side of the foreground, fake ships lazily drifted through the frame, a large painted background gave the sky billowing night clouds, some smoke provided the requisite night fog, and flash powder sprinkled on the water created the effect of sparkling moonlight on gentle ripples. After the whole diorama was lit with strategically placed lights, the effect was convincing. Brown took his film to Griffith’s on-site developing department, where they lovingly developed and tinted the film multiple times until it was just the right shade and color to evoke a riverfront at night.

When Brown projected his finished shot for Griffith, the director watched with rapt attention, then asked to see the whole thing again, overwhelmed. “It’s a painting!” he gasped in awe. “A painting. . . that moves!”

With that, Karl Brown went back to his Army outfit, and Griffith went on to shoot his film in a matter of a few weeks. For the first time in his career, he stayed entirely in the studio on meticulously designed sets, where he had total control over light and mise-en-scène as he strove to get every shot to measure up to that first great painterly effect.

Brown was away in the Army during the shooting of Broken Blossoms, but he returned home in time for the movie’s grand Los Angeles premiere on September 16, 1919. The movie had already appeared in New York earlier that spring, receiving rave reviews, and he was curious to finally see with his own eyes what magic Griffith had conjured to earn them.

He arrived at Clune’s Auditorium, a massive silent theater seating thousands, to find that all of the movers and shakers in Hollywood had turned out for the spectacle (an architectural marvel and a Los Angeles landmark, Clune’s would later become the longtime home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic). The program booklet carried a cryptic legal note: “Copyrights and patents pending on all lightings and effects used in this production.” It also contained an alluring epigraph heralding the evening’s entertainment, from Poe: “The end of all art is to be beautiful — there is no moral in art.”

Everyone in the crowd was no doubt sharing the same thought: what on earth had Griffith come up with this time?

They soon found out. A Russian balalaika orchestra — of all things! — came through the door of the orchestra pit and took their places. Incense began floating up lazily from the stage in tenuous, fragrant strands. Then, Karl Brown writes,

The houselights dimmed, but not entirely so. Instead of darkness, the entire auditorium was suffused with a strange, unearthly blue that seemed to come from everywhere — from the chandelier, from spots ranged along the balconies, from the footlights. There was something eerily supernatural about it.

The balalaikas began to whimper a strange, haunting, shimmering melody. . . The big curtain whispered upward, revealing the screen, which was not all white but bathed in that strange, all-suffusing blue coming from spots arranged around the inside of the proscenium arch.

Then the picture came on in a slow fade that revealed the scene I had been released from the army to make — but with what a difference. I had seen it in a black-painted little projection room on a white screen with black edges and a silence broken only by the whirring of the projection machine.

This was a vision of gold swimming in a misty blue, a vision that seemed to reach on and on, far and away, as far as the mind could reach. The shimmering music echoed the shimmering of the water. The slow movement of the river was the endless motion of time itself. You could head a gasp from the audience at the impact of pure beauty.

My mother, seated next to me, reached over and gripped my arm strongly.

As the movie played out for that audience of jaded Hollywood veterans, they were as taken with its stunning visuals as the New York critics had been. All the reviews raved about its color and beauty. “The screen was always bathed with a curious, vibrant mauve,” marveled the New York Sun, “while the inner core of the picture itself shimmered with salmon pink.” The New York Times promised its readers that, “Many of the pictures surpass anything hitherto seen on the screen in beauty and dramatic force.” The Morning Telegraph went even further, gushing that “No word of ours can do justice to the photographic effects, which are like beautiful paintings, put on with an impressionistic touch. . . Such art, so real one can think only of the classics, and of the masterly paintings remembered through the ages; so exquisite, so fragile, so beautifully and fragrantly poetic is Broken Blossoms.”

Karl Brown, Lillian Gish, and the rest of Griffith’s crew finished watching the movie with thousands of Hollywood counterparts, and all realized they had just seen something far beyond anything they ever imagined could exist on celluloid. Brown tells us that

The picture closed as it had begun, with that blue vision of the mysterious river of time, forever flowing yet forever the same, with the shimmering of the balalaikas dying away to silence.

The reaction of that crowded house was the ultimate in applause — a stunned silence of the deeply moved. This lasted a moment, and then came a spontaneous roar of sound, people on their feet shattering the air, hands smiting hands, voices crying, “Bravo! Bravo!” and the walls loud with the echoed uproar.

This went on and on, until finally Griffith appeared, a small, frail figure all in black and seeming to be very tiny at the edge of that big proscenium. He said nothing. . . He let the waves sweep over him a moment and then he was gone; the houselights came on and the audience began to leave, full of overflowing talk about the miracle they had witnessed.

In London, critics gave Griffith’s depiction of the Limehouse district their highest accolades. “The reviews were all but unbelievably exultant,” Brown writes. “They could find no words of praise fine enough to compliment Griffith on his meticulously accurate reproduction of Limehouse down to its tiniest detail. This was something no American should be capable of doing, because one must live in such a place for a lifetime to capture its inner spirit and not merely its outward appearance. And yet he had done it.” Some even claimed to have hunted down the exact spot where Griffith must have filmed that lush and ghostly master shot of the riverfront. That it was a miniature invented by a twenty-two-year old kid in a Hollywood studio eluded them.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, how Lillian Gish generated the performance of a lifetime for Broken Blossoms.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke. Both volumes of short stories are available online, and still well worth perusing.

Adventures With D. W. Griffith by Karl Brown. An intimate behind-the-scenes look at Griffith and his production company during their Hollywood years, when all of his greatest films were made, including Broken Blossoms. Written by Brown in old age, some fifty years after his time with the master director.

Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film. Brown is also featured in several episodes of Kevin Brownlow’s epic thirteen-episode documentary on the silent era. Every fan of cinema should see this series at least once in their life, but unfortunately the set is only available on VHS at the moment, and is ridiculously overpriced (I scored my set through alternate, shadowy channels worthy of Limehouse itself). You can currently find several episodes on YouTube. Narrated by James Mason.

Clune’s Auditorium. Some history and pictures of the storied silent film auditorium in Los Angeles where Broken Blossoms had its west-coast premiere. After 1920 it became the Philharmonic Auditorium, and also was used as a Baptist super-church until its demolition in 1985 (to make way for a promised new complex of ritzy modern buildings that never materialized — the area is now an empty lot).