Hooray for Hollywood? Volume 3

Back by popular demand (not!), we revisit this tome which is filled with quotes from famous performers and craftsmen who spent time in Tinseltown. Things have reached a frenzied pace here in The Underworld and posts of this sort allow me to put something apropos out there while I attempt to regroup. We'll be back asap with more classic show biz fun and frolic!

"I felt that Hollywood was wonderful, and I couldn't in any way complain because I had a wonderful time, and people seemed to like me, and I hope we made some good pictures. But I just wanted to do something more realistic, and when I saw Open City (1945) I realized somewhere in the world they did a different kind of picture, and I left." - Ingrid Bergman, 1980. (Bergman's fateful decision to make Stromboli, 1950, in Italy with Roberto Rossellini led to their affair, marriage, three children and nearly global ostracism for several years!)

"Hollywood was an experience I wouldn't have missed. In those days, just after the war, "Glamour" was the magic word. Everything had to be geared to what the producers thought the public imagined was the perfect romantic male, or ideal woman of perfection. If one of your eyebrows didn't match the other it had to be made identical. If your mouth was crooked, that had to be made straight. If you had no bust, they gave you one. Rotten teeth-they whipped them out." - Ann Todd, 1980. (Todd wed famed director David Lean not long after Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, 1947, and appeared in three of his less-famous movies.)

"Hollywood is very much like a streetcar. Once a new star us made and comes aboard, an old one is edged out of the rear exit. There's room for only so many and no more." - Cary Grant, 1983. (Mr. Grant was one of those rare older stars who remained in demand long after he exited the biz in 1966, but he resisted all offers, preferring that filmgoers remembered him the way he was in his prime.)

"What do I dislike most? Hollywood! For years I bummed around trying to get a job. It was the same old story. My voice was too soft; my teeth needed capping; I squinted too much. I was too tall. And I know that if I walked into a casting office right now and no one knew I was Clint Eastwood, I would get the same old treatment. Everything they said was wrong is still here." - Clint Eastwood, 1983. (Eastwood, who emerged as an important director along with his acting career, soared to real fame when he made a trio of Italian westerns which became international smashes.)

"I still find things to get angry about. Sometimes, I think I'm back in 1940s Hollywood and the studio system still prevails. And so as soon as I finish working, I take off. Let them try and find me." - Debra Winger, 1983. (Following a period of hits like Urban Cowboy, 1980, An Officer and a Gentleman, 1982, and Terms of Endearment, 1983, among others, Winger really did take off, meaning she left acting from about 1995 to 2001. And she kept a low profile, too, for much of the time. A documentary was even released in 2002 called Searching for Debra Winger, regarding the pressures actresses face in an esoteric business. Winger was pretty active again on TV from 2017 to 2021.) 

"In Hollywood, actors learn to act from watching television. In New York, people learn to act by walking down the street." - Sidney Lumet, 1980s. (Having been Oscar-nominated for directing 12 Angry Men, 1957, Dog Day Afternoon, 1975, Network, 1976, and The Verdict, 1982, as well as for co-writing Prince of the City, 1981, Lumet received an honorary statuette in 2005 for his body of work.)

"I made many films with Joan Crawford... One day, Clarence Brown, the director, asked me to do a test of Crawford. I did and they liked it, so I began our association by photographing her in Chained (1934) - which costarred Clark Gable, who was a fantastic human being with this great animal quality that exploded off the screen. The key to how to photograph Joan came while they were rehearsing a boat scene with her for Chained. Inadvertently, a light high up in the rafters came down and had lit her face. She looked gorgeous. I said that's how we're going to shoot her. When she saw the film she fell down - she hadn't looked that good in years. We used that philosophy of lighting from then on in all our films together throughout the 1930s." - cinematographer George J. Folsey, 1984 (Mr. Folsey was an amazing artist, nominated 13 times for the Oscar, but never winning.)

"Hollywood is the loneliest place I have ever lived in. Never in my life have I been so lonely nor stayed home so much. When I first came, I did not think I could stand it-I would not have stood it if I had not had my work." - Marlene Dietrich, 1930s. (Los Angeles was likely quite a contrast from the very compact and crowded Berlin, though I suspect she eventually found ways to pass the time - in the company of others!)

"Into the community that lives and thinks film pictures I arrived, prepared to work very hard to succeed. I liked Hollywood. I like breathing space. I like green things growing around me. There isn't the feeling here of millions of people huddled together." - Ronald Coleman, 1935. (In contrast to Ms. Dietrich, Coleman seemed to relish the contrast from a bustling city atmosphere to the more laid back surroundings of California.)

"In Hollywood, everyone's home seems to be a sort of personal wish-fulfillment. The buildings are made in the Spanish manner, the New England or English farmhouse style, the Tudor colonial or in what Charles (Laughton) and I call Late Marzipan. Naturally, there are lovely houses, but on the whole the designs are not in harmony with each other. Only a few people seem to have taken a peep at the blue sky and decided how life should be lived underneath it. One feels it is all rather like a film set, or perhaps made of icing sugar." - Elsa Lanchester, 1938. (Apart from her famous role in The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935, Lanchester is likely familiar for a series of dotty middle-aged ladies, but in her youth she was an unconventional dancer and even a nude figure model.)

"Hollywood has everything that God has to offer. Beautiful surroundings and a beautiful climate. In Hollywood there are are no daily obstacles such as people everywhere else in the world have - the obstacles of bad weather, difficult transportation to work, sharp changes of season. Hollywood also permits you to live too comfortably. With the result that in Hollywood one vegetates." - George Sanders, 1947. (The urbane Sanders seemed to possess a low threshold for boredom. Having mastered the occupation of acting and married four times - two of them Gabor sisters! - he fulfilled a vow he'd made many years prior and committed suicide via pills at age 65.)

"There are too many pastel people - pastel characters - in Hollywood. They don't know how to portray a character because they don't know people. Some of them are just busy little people studying their lines. If they learned more about life, about people, about psychology, about acting and timing, their characterizations would be more believable. Pastel people can ruin a picture." - Robert Mitchum, 1947. (More often, Mitchum preferred to downplay any particular skillfulness or method in his acting, though he was pretty great at it.)

"Hollywood is the only community in the world where the entire population is suffering from rumortism." - Bert Lahr, quoted in a 1969 book by his son. (Mr. Lahr, legendary for his portrayal of the Lion in The Wizard of Oz, 1939, was a popular fixture on Broadway and worked on quite a few movies as well. He died during his last film, The Night They Raided Minsky's, 1968, but with the aid of some editing, a body double and a vocal dub, the greater part of his performance was able to be salvaged.)

"I can't play the games that go on in Hollywood. Who cares if my pearls are only seven millimeters when everyone else is flashing eleven millimeters? Who cares about dating the most men, or getting the best table in the restuarants? I don't fit in at all." - Janet Blair, 1972. (This quote was made to TV Guide while she was filming the short-lived TV series The Smith Family, as Henry Fonda's wife. She'd risen to fame in the 1940s with movies such as My Sister Eileen, 1942, and Tonight and Every Night, 1945. She retired after a 1991 appearance on Murder, She Wrote, passing away in 2007 at age 85 of pneumonia.)

"Hollywood: it only ran on one track, and that track was the motion picture. Any and everyone was obsessed with movies. All you ever heard wherever you went were words such as grosses, below-the-line, above-the-line, percentages, negative costs, reruns, spin-offs and scarcely a word to indicate anything at all was happening in the real world other than the making of movies." - Sophia Loren, 1979. (This was the year her autobiography was published and she made the rounds to promote it. Now 88, she still performs occasionally.)