Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Hollywood
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' unique chemistry made them one of the most iconic duos of Hollywood's Golden Age.
The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman.
How does one choose a list of great historical films? Is the emphasis on great or historical? And how far should one be willing to compromise with either?
From "The General" to "Gettysburg," spanning 66 years, these movies have done the best to capture America's worst war.
It was all over by 9:30 a.m. Colonel Rall mortally wounded, the last of his Hessian troops, driven out of the town by the Continentals and surrounded in a desolate winter orchard, dropping their muskets to the ground.
The cemetery where many of the greatest early movie stars are buried is returning to life.
Bela Lugosi began by playing Laertes and Romeo, only to become forever trapped in very different roles.
All across America, there are restaurants that serve up the spirit and conviviality of eras long past.
Mr. Henry Erkins had a flash of inspiration in 1908. He could see every detail of it in his mind.
A BOLD NEW KIND OF COLLEGE COURSE BRINGS the student directly to the past, non-stop, overnight, in squalor and glory, for weeks on end.
A few years ago, I served as one of the historical advisers for the movie Glory, which told the story of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry and its brave and calamitous attack on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.
For a century and a half, Germans have been deeply ambivalent about the United States, and their contradictory feelings say much about their future in Europe and the world.
In 1989, the Berlin wall came down. A year later the unimaginable had become a reality: Germany, divided in 1945, was reunified, and it was beginning to raise a major voice not only in Europe but also in world politics.
Desperate improvisations in the face of imminent disaster saw us through the early years of the fight. They also gave us the war’s greatest movie.
America’s favorite World War II movie has led a charmed life. While it was being filmed, each looming disaster turned out to be a cleverly disguised blessing, and after its completion everything that could go right did go right.
In 1932, the Communist International paid to send a cast of American blacks to Moscow to make a movie about American racial injustice. The scheme backfired.
In 1932, while Scarface, Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
"Gosh, it would be fun to play a president of the United States," said Lieutenant Reagan.
In April of 1942, I enlisted in Psychological Research Unit 3 at the Santa Ana Army Air Base.
President Wilson said that “The Birth of a Nation” was “like writing history with Lightning.” Movies have taught everybody else history, too.
When the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty failed to enchant local audiences, a distributor begged MGM to make “no more pictures where they write with feathers.”
It was a great life being a contract writer for a major studio during the high noon of the American movie industry—but it could also be a nightmare. A survivor recalls the pleasures and ardors of working at 20th Century-Fox forty years ago.
“COME ON OUT, DAD. SWANIE.” These homely words unlocked the gates of paradise, opened the road to fortune and easy living. They were from my West Coast agent, H. N.
With the Depression pushing the studio toward bankruptcy, Warner Brothers had to resort to crime—and crime paid so well that the company was able to recruit the toughest guys that ever shot up a sound stage.
JACK WARNER RAN HIS organization the same way Al Capone ran his: ruthlessly. The problem was that, unlike Capone, he couldn’t simply wipe out the competition.
It was a suburb of orange blossoms and gardens, of gracious homes and quiet, dignified lives—until a regrettable class of people moved in.
THE IDEA OF HOLLYWOOD as a boomtown would not have surprised those who lived there as this century began, for they worked hard toward that very ideal.
The Dean of American Movie Men at Seventy-Five
Ragtime and Reds
Hollywood ordinarily leaves American history well alone. But two of the winter’s big movies turn out to be meditations on early twentieth-century America. Ragtime , drawn from E. L.
The curious career of the Hays Office
The comparisons were inevitable. Just a year earlier, in 1921, organized baseball had tried to counter the effects of the Black Sox scandal by appointing the august Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to the newly created position of commissioner.
The Plains Acrossi The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60
by John D. Unruh, Jr. University of Illinois Press Illustrations, tables, maps 565 pages, $20.00
Tallulah Bankhead called it “the most gruesomely named hotel in the western hemisphere.” Others, perhaps thinking of its curious architecture or the monumental hangovers that accompanied its boozy high life, called it simply the most gruesome hotel.
The last of the major silent films, made shortly before sound engulfed the movie industry in 1928, may not have been golden, but they glittered brightly.
Superstar of the Silents
In early Hollywood there lived a King. He was married to a Queen. Her name was Mary, and she was a Golden Girl. He was dashing and marvellously graceful and young—above all young. Youth was very American, and besides, it was essential to the King
In his old age, William Randolph Hearst did a stately pleasure dome decree, and yet the secret river, youth, escaped him
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