It was my great honor to have Sidney Lumet as the director of my screenplay, A Stranger Among Us, 1992, starring Melanie Griffith, Eric Thal, and Mia Sara.

Working with Sidney was a master class in making movies. I learned more from Sidney than anyone else in my entire Hollywood career. He relished collaboration. But, like a no-nonsense general, always maintained a firm grip on the material, insisting that the greatest sin was dramatic falsehood. No matter how outlandish the scene or the core material, it is the movie maker’s job to infuse the narrative with a spine of truth.

Director Sidney Lumet, 1924 – 2011

Audiences, Sidney told me over and over again, can sense when Hollywood tries to put one over on them with polished nonsense.

In 1991, when “Stranger” received the green light to go into production, my producer Howard Rosenman, without whom the film would never have been made, asked me who I wanted as director.

Without hesitation, I replied,” Sidney Lumet.”

“I’ll send him the script with an offer,” said Howard.

Sidney Lumet was one of the great Hollywood directors, and though he got his start in live television in the late 50’s, I always thought of Sidney’s work as a direct descendant of the Hollywood’s Golden Age. Like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Clarence Brown, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wellman, Billy Wilder, George Cukor, Victor Fleming and so many others, Sidney strived to hide technique in order to achieve an invisible style in which the story and performance was supreme. Like movie masters of previous generations, Sidney labored to make sure that the audience understood the geography within the frame, and from one scene to the next. Frenzied editing was, for Sidney, a sure sign that the director, literally, could not direct.

(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…)