Lea, classic hollywood enthusiast, cinephile. Norma Shearer and Myrna Loy are my queens.
Such an unholy mess of a girl
Happy Mother’s Day!
“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
William Makepeace Thackeray
“There ought to be a law against any man who doesn’t want to marry Myrna Loy.”
James Stewart
While shooting exteriors in San Francisco, Myrna, Bill Powell and his unofficial fiancée Jean Harlow were to stay at the St. Francis Hotel:
“At the St. Francis in San Francisco, they had reserved a Flyshaker Suite for Bill and me. The management assumed we were married. Already they considered us a couple after only five pictures together! Well, of course it was hysterical. Here was Jean, but we couldn´t be obvious about the situation with the press on our heels. To complicate the matters further, conventioneers had taken every other room except a little hall bedroom downstairs somewhere. I didn´t know what to do, but Jean was marvellous. “There is nothing for you to do,” she said. “We’ll just have to put Bill downstairs.” I never saw this room, so I don’t know how bad it was, but Bill complained bitterly, let me tell you, angling to get upstairs.”
Myrna Loy
Happy Birthday Tyrone!
↳ (May 5, 1914 – November 15, 1958)
“Tyrone Power, as a star, was right up there with Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. And being in his physical presence was almost overwhelming. He was so beautiful, so charming, so gentle, so sensitive, and so kind — to everybody. Sometimes Tyrone would drive over from 20th Century-Fox where he worked to have lunch with Linda. We were all thrilled just to see him — he was so sensational looking.”
Debbie Reynolds
Paul Newman was so supportive when Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, producer Mike Todd, died in a plane crash during production that it actually motivated her to return to work sooner. She would later say, “Paul Newmanis one of the sweetest men I know. He was so unbelievably supportive with his kind words and just being there for me. He helped me through an enormously difficult time in my life, and I will always be grateful.”
“Arlene Croce, author of a definitive volume on Astaire and Rogers, says of “I’ll Be Hard to Handle”: “This is the big event of the film, the number in which ‘Fred and Ginger’ became fixed screen deities.” It certainly gets your attention. They start with a rhythmic shuffle, then after eight bars he gently takes her by the waist and together they spin around and around, settling at last into one of the most brilliant and inventive tap duets ever filmed. Halfway through the number, they separate and have a tap “conversation”, each taking a phrase, then each responding with a salvo of taps. The band strikes up a bugle call, and Rogers snaps to military attention, only to be distracted by Astaire’s invitation to resume their buoyant pas de deux. They continue the breathtaking duet as the music rises to a new wave of excitement; then, just as our hearts are ready to burst with exhilaration, they whirl one last time and collapse into two chairs.” [x]
“It was just, everything about it was different. It was before all the shows that followed us, that copied us. It was the first one.”
Gillian Anderson
Rarely has the disparity in their heights and sizes been more evident than in the execution of this scene. DD is tall but does not look in the least bulky until he leans over and literally wraps himself around the diminutive GA in this scene. Towering over her, he practically absorbs her—-even in her stacked-heel boots—- as his arms enfold her to show her how to hold and swing the bat. She was fairly invisible except for her legs when I viewed one of the takes from directly behind them. Another point of fact is that they are as spooned as two individuals of such disparate heights can be and maintain plausible denial that they are congenitally conjoined (!) […]
Whether for our amusement or his own or, more likely, ensuring choice cuts for the crew’s private blooper tape, I cannot say, but, at *least* once, immediately after the “ROLLING” shout, David took advantage of having Gillian trapped “within” him, as it were, and —-sorry, folks, no other way to describe it—- busted a positively lewd move on her —-wriggling and well…, uh…thrusting “himself” into her. Several of us who spotted it (primarily the two of us with bionic-binocs that zoomed the couple into our eyelashes—- and we were all pretty close to begin with) gaped at each other and gasped in astonishment —- “… did you see what he did???”—- . As for Anderson, the way her giggling carries, there was no inferring that she was in any way offended. She never once insisted that filming stop and it didn’t until “CUT” was shouted by Director Duchovny when he decided it was time to get down to business.
“I think it was the only episode Entertainment Weekly ever gave an F rating to.”
Glen Morgan on “Home” (4x03)
Happy Birthday Steve!
↳ (March 24, 1930 – November 7, 1980)
When I believe in something, I fight like hell for it.
Times are hard. Now, if you fool around on the hill up here, then you don’t get nothing, l don’t get nothing, he don’t get nothing. So how ‘bout it, honey? Just for a little while. Let old Trixie sit up front with her big tits.
When filming the picnic scene Madeline Kahn initially refused to say the word “tits” in her line “Let Miss Trixie sit up front with her big tits”, objecting the vulgarity of the word. Director Peter Bogdanovich had to convince her to say it. She eventually said it in one take and that is the scene you can see in the film. Madeline’s reaction of embarrassment after saying the line is genuine.
Another candid moment can be found shortly afterwards. When she slips in the film while walking down the hill with Tatum O’Neil following her, she really did almost slip. The line she said was ad-libbed because of it.
“I blocked it out until the last moment where all of a sudden it hit me, that this person that I was standing in front of as I know him and have known him for such a long time, that this aspect of our relationship was coming to a close. We embraced and I just burst into tears. We held our embrace for a really long time and I think it was just flooding over us, the importance of this agreement that we’ve had to be in each other’s lives in a very powerful way.”
Gillian Anderson
“I think it was written that Scully gives Mulder a kiss on the forehead. Kim Manners was there [directing], and I was so confused at that point that I didn’t trust my feelings about it because I had so many personal feelings. It was eight years of my life. I didn’t know what would be an appropriate ending. I didn’t know. And when Kim and I read it as we were about to shoot it, he said, ‘We’ve done that 100 times, the whole hand holding and the kiss on the forehead. Let’s do a real kiss.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that feels right.’”
David Duchovny
“The last shot in the picture was Gillian handing David the baby in her bedroom. David leaned over and gave her a kiss, and the camera then pulled back out of the doorway and just kept going down the hall. We got the shot, and we cut it and printed it; the nurse came and took the baby away. And David put his arms around Gillian, and she put her arms around him, and they stood there for about ten minutes, and never said a word to each other. The tears were just rolling down their faces, and the whole crew stood there and watched this in silence. It was truly one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”
Kim Manners, director
Before “From Here To Eternity” (1953) a love scene had never been made like this. Now this particular scene is one of the most famous love scenes in movie history and Deborah Kerr herself thought it to be one of “the most erotic” love scenes. However, shooting this particular scene was far from being romantic:
“It had to have rocks in the distance, so the water could strike the boulders and shoot upward — all very symbolic. The scene turned out to be deeply affecting on film, but, God, it was no fun to shoot. We had to time it for the waves, so that at just the right moment a big one would come up and wash over us. Most of the waves came up only to our feet, but we needed one that would come up all the way. We were like surfers, waiting for the perfect waves. Between each take, we had to do a total clean-up. When it was all over, we had four tons of grit in our mouths—and other places.” (Deborah Kerr)
Deborah Kerr gives a nod to Irene Dune in An Affair to Remember by reciting a similar line previously done in the film The Awful truth as Irene was in the original version of the film Love Affair.
