On movie moguls
See Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988).
“Never mind now”: Selznick, A Private View, p. 17.
On D. W. Griffith
See Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (1983); Karl Brown, Adventures with D. W. Griffith (1973); Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (2007); J. Hoberman, “First Movie in the White House,” London Review of Books, February 12, 2009.
“I have thought”: Schickel, D. W. Griffith, p. 33.
“It is another demonstration”: Ibid., p. 156.
“Never let me hear”: Ibid., p. 192.
“He stepped out”: New York Times, April 30, 1915.
“My father said”: Selznick, A Private View, p. 15.
“someone put the sun”: Robert Towne, Chinatown: A Screenplay (1983), Preface and Postscript, n.p.
“Did you know that guy?”: Lawrence Weschler, “The Light of L.A.,” in Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader (2004), p. 300.
“so radically different”: Robert Irwin quoted in ibid., p. 301.
“It is like writing history”: See Schickel, D. W. Griffith, ch. 10, pp. 272–309.
“It was David Wark Griffith”: Michael Powell, A Life in Movies (1986), p. 94.
On Charles Chaplin
See Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (1964); Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (1997).
“The stage manager came on”: Chaplin, My Autobiography, pp. 21–22.
On Buster Keaton
See Rudi Blesh, Keaton (1966); Tom Dardis, Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn’t Lie Down (1979).
On Douglas Fairbanks
See Alistair Cooke, Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character (1940); Richard Schickel, Douglas Fairbanks: The First Celebrity (1976).
On Louise Brooks
See Barry Paris, Louise Brooks (1989); Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood (1982); Kenneth Tynan, “Louise Brooks: The Girl in the Black Helmet,” The New Yorker, June 11, 1979.
“It was sexual hate”: Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood, p. 98.
“Better for Louise Brooks”: Variety, December 11, 1929.
The Era of Sunrise
On F. W. Murnau and Sunrise
See Lotte Eisner, Murnau (1973); Lucy Fischer, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1988).
“The screen has”: Murnau, “Films of the Future,” McCall’s, September 1928.
“There is a tremendous energy”: Murnau, New York Times, October 16, 1927.
“He had a German assistant director”: Janet Gaynor, quoted in program for Channel 4, a British TV channel, screening of Sunrise (1995).
“They say I have”: Murnau in Channel 4 program.
“Prolong it!”: Eyman, Empire of Dreams, p. 153.
“Working for Mr. DeMille”: Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson (1980), p. 110.
“the most important picture”: Robert Sherwood, Life and McCall’s, February 1928.
“Murnau’s city often seems”: Molly Haskell, “Sunrise,” Film Comment (Summer 1971).
“the open secret”: Thomas Elsaesser, “Secret Affinities: F. W. Murnau,” Sight & Sound (Winter 1988–89).
“People say that”: Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema,” Arts, June 1926.
On scandals
See David Yallop, The Day the Laughter Stopped: The True Story of Fatty Arbuckle (1976); Robert Giroux, A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of the Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor (1990); The Memoirs of Will Hays (1955).
“This is what comes”: Henry Lehrman, quoted in Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (1975), p. 30.
“Their boredom becomes”: Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939), p. 178.
On the Academy
See Anthony Holden, Behind the Oscar (1993); “The Envelope Please,” in Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (1990).
On Murnau
“I should like to make”: Quoted in Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (1973), p. 197.
The Cinema of Winter
“The years immediately following”: Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (1969), p. 9.
“A cold, somber atmosphere”: The published screenplay of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1972), p. 41.
“I am a camera”: Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), p. 1.
“that city where reality”: Siegfried Kracauer, introduction to the screenplay for Caligari, p. 5.
“At last I understand”: Screenplay for Caligari, p. 100.
“Look here, boys”: Erich Pommer, “Carl Mayer’s Debut,” in ibid., p. 28.
On Fritz Lang
See Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang (1976); Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (1997); Fritz Lang: His Life and Work—Photographs and Documents, ed. Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Cornelius Schnauber (2001).
“They build things big”: Quoted in McGilligan, Fritz Lang, p. 107.
“When the sun”: Screenplay for Metropolis (1973), p. 19.
“a wonderful, stupefying folly”: Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1967), p. 309.
“But on the other hand”: Luis Buñuel in An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel (2000), pp. 100–101.
“Lang could have stayed”: Gottfried Reinhardt, quoted in McGilligan, Fritz Lang, p. 180.
M
In additm ion to the books referred to on Lang in the last chapter, see Stephen D. Youngkin, The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre (2005).
“no violence”: Lang in interview with Peter Von Bagh, in Fritz Lang Interviews (2003), p. 151.
“We, too, should keep”: Screenplay for M (1968), p. 108.
“The evil little man”: Ibid., p. 15.
On Lang and Fury, see McGilligan, Fritz Lang, p. 223.
On the San Jose lynching, see Harry Farrell, Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town (1992).
“I want to escape”: Screenplay for M, p. 104.
State Film—Film State
See Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1960); Kuleshov on Film, ed. Ron Levaco (1975); The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (1994); Ronald Bergan, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict (1999).
“A new revolutionary state”: Stanley Kauffmann, “Potemkin,” in Great Film Directors, ed. Leo Braudy and Morris Dickstein (1978), p. 235.
“for us film is”: Lenin to Anatoly Lunacharsky, quoted in Sovietskoye Kino, no 1–2, 1921, p. 10.
“At regular intervals”: Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1949), p. 37.
“A small boy”: Screenplay for Battleship Potemkin (1968), p. 74.
“In utter confusion”: Sergei Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, An Autobiography (1983), p. 85.
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Bolshevik in the West
See Eisenstein, Immoral Memories; Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman, Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of Que Viva Mexico! (1970); Anthony Arthur, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair (2006).
“The projection of the dialectic system”: Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form, 1949, pp. 45–46.
“‘A lot depends on’”: Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, p. 147.
“more dreadful than”: Ibid., p. 148.
“What interested me”: Ibid., p. 156.
“Once more rings out”: Sergei Eisenstein, “A Sequence from An American Tragedy,” in The Film Sense (1947), p. 240.
“When I was a boy”: Lewis J. Selznick, quoted in Budd Schulberg, Moving Pictures: Memoirs of a Hollywood Prince (1981), p. 64.
“positively torturing”: David O. Selznick to B. P. Schulberg, October 8, 1930, Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (1972), p. 27.
“On pictures”: Eisenstein, Immora
l Memories, p. 149.
“In retrospect”: Schulberg, Moving Pictures, pp. 369–70.
“a picture according to his own”: Geduld and Gottesman, Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, p. 22.
“The grotesque laughing”: “First Outline of Que Viva Mexico!,” The Film Sense, p. 254.
“Eisenstein loose”: Geduld and Gottesman, Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair, p. 212.
“will not moralize”: Eisenstein, Immoral Memories, pp. 1–2.
“life had passed”: Ibid., p. 3.
On Leni Riefenstahl
See Rainer Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius (2002); Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (2007).
“In the end”: Bach, Leni, p. 122.
On Melchior Lengyel and Ninotchka
See Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (1977); Ed Sikov, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (1998); Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (1993).
“Russian girl saturated with”: Quoted in Zolotow, Billy Wilder, p. 79.
“This movie is”: Ibid., p. 75.
1930s Hollywood
See Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (1988); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985); Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies (1988).
On viewing figures, see Joel W. Finler, The Hollywood Story (2003), pp. 364–67
On Thalberg
See the books on Louis B. Mayer, and Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince (2009); Roland Flamini, Thalberg: The Last Tycoon and the World of M-G-M (1994); Gavin Lambert, Norma Shearer: A Biography (1990).
“people run out”: Harry Rapf, in Samuel Marx, Mayer and Thalberg: Make-Believe Saints (1975), p. 189.
On Marie Dressler, see Higham, Merchant of Dreams, p. 204.
“Like my dear old friend”: See Wallace Beery biography on IMDb.com.
On King Vidor
See King Vidor, A Tree Is a Tree: An Autobiography (1953); King Vidor on Film Making (1972); Directors Guild of America (DGA) Oral History, interviewed by Nancy Dowd and David Shepard, King Vidor (1988); Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (1988).
“All the wooden structures”: DGA Oral History, p. 2.
“One day I had a talk”: Vidor, A Tree, p. 111.
“Well, I suppose”: Ibid., p. 145.
“Just because I stop you”: Ibid., p. 150.
On Vidor and the Directors Guild, see David Thomson, “The Man Who Would Be King,” DGA Quarterly (winter 2011).
“I was glad to get out”: DGA Oral History, p. 281.
On Josef von Sternberg
See Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965); Steven Bach, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992); O. O. Green (Raymond Durgnat), “Six Films of Josef von Sternberg,” Movie 13 (Summer 1965).
“I saw Fräulein Dietrich”: von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, p. 231.
“Turn your shoulders”: Ibid., p. 253.
On Frank Capra
See Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title (1971); Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992); Bob Thomas, King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn (1967); Dan Callahan, Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman (2012); Raymond Carney, American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra (1986).
“You know”: McBride, Frank Capra, p. 307.
“I feel as happy as”: Mason Wiley and Damien Bona, Inside Oscar (1996), p. 57.
“I was just an innocent”: McBride, Frank Capra, p. 326.
On John Ford
See Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford: A Life (2001); Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (2001); Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (1986).
On Gary Cooper
See Larry Swindell, The Last Hero: A Biography of Gary Cooper (1980); Patricia Neal, As I Am (1988); Jeffrey Meyers, Gary Cooper, American Hero (1998).
On Fred Astaire
See John E. Mueller, Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films (1985).
France
“The cinema doesn’t suit”: Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films (1974), p. 45. On Méliès, see John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The Films of Georges Méliès (1979).
“Fantômas was a genius”: Suzy Gablik, Magritte (1970), p. 48.
“This is a film”: Nelly Kaplan, “Napoléon,” in British Film Institute Film Classics, vol. 1 (originally published separately in 1994), p. 51.
“Gance does not”: François Truffaut, The Films in My Life (1978) p. 33.
“simply one of the funniest”: Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, p. 287.
“The clearest”: Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies (1976), p. 245.
“We willingly admit”: René Clair, Four Screenplays (1970), p. 221.
“Beware of the dog”: Jean Vigo, Vers un Cinéma Social (1930), quoted in screenplays for L’ge d’Or and Un Chien Andalou (1968), p. 81.
On Luis Buñuel
See John Baxter, Luis Buñuel (1994); Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, My Last Sigh (1984); Raymond Durgnat, Luis Buñuel (1990).
“Once Upon a Time”: Original shooting script for Un Chien Andalou in screenplays for L’ge d’Or and Un Chien Andalou (1968), p. 93.
On Jean Vigo
See P. E. Salles Gomes, Jean Vigo (1972); Marina Warner, L’ Atalante (1993).
Renoir
See Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father (1962); Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films (1974); Jean Renoir, Letters, ed. Lorraine LoBianco and David Thompson (1994); Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924–1939 (1980).
“She was sixteen”: Renoir, Renoir, My Father, pp. 398–99.
“We went…nearly”: Renoir, My Life and My Films, p. 49.
“This betrayal marked”: Ibid., p. 108.
On Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, see Richard Boston, Boudu Sauvé des Eaux (1994).
On Partie de Campagne, see screenplay, L’ Avant Scène du Cinéma 21 (1962).
“a film of pure sensation”: Truffaut, The Films in My Life, p. 38.
“trapped, almost wounded”: Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, p. 342.
On la caméra stylo, see Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo” (1948), in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (1968), pp. 17–23.
“cowardly pacifism”: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, A Twentieth-Century Job (1991), pp. 305–9.
“We had an argument”: Renoir, My Life and My Films, p. 166.
“‘Gentlemen, tomorrow we shall’”: Screenplay for The Rules of the Game (1970), p. 168.
“an exact description”: Interview between Renoir and Marcel Dalio in ibid., p. 6.
“I was deeply disturbed”: Ibid., p. 9.
American
See Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (1995), and Orson Welles: Hello Americans (2006); Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum (1992); John Houseman, Run-Through (1972): Robert L. Carringer, The Making of “Citizen Kane” (1985); Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane,” in The Citizen Kane Book (1971), which also includes the shooting script and the cutting continuity; Peter Conrad, Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life (2003).
“Mankiewicz’s contribution?”: Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, p. 52.
On the “Rosebud” rumor, see Gore Vidal, “Remembering Orson Welles,” United States, Essays 1952–1992 (1993), p. 1197 (originally published in the New York Review of Books, June 1, 1989).
“was a hero”: Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, p. 87.
“a great motion picture”: The Hollywood Reporter, March 12, 1941.
“a film possessing”: Variety, April 15, 1941.
“It comes close”: Bosley Crowther, New York Times, May 2, 1941.
“the majority of”: Archer Winsten, New York Post, May 2, 1941.
“It’
s as if you never”: Cecilia Ager, PM, May 1941.
“fatuously overrated as”: James Agee, The Nation, December 26, 1942.
“an exciting, but hammy”: Manny Farber, “The Gimp,” Commentary (June 1952), and in Farber on Film: The Complete Writings of Manny Farber, ed. Robert Polito (2009), p. 394.
“But by now the lesson,” Farber, Farber on Film, p. 397
a shallow masterpiece: See Kael, “Raising Kane,” p. 4.
Ambersons
“overdirected his masterpieces”: Gilbert Adair, Flickers (1995), p. 95.
On Ambersons at 132 minutes: See Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Appendix: The Original Ambersons,” in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, pp. 454–90.
“a labyrinth with”: Jorge Luis Borges, “An Overwhelming Film,” Sur, 1941, and in Borges In/And/On Film, ed. Edgardo Cozarinsky (1988), p. 77.
Howard Hawks: The “Slim” Years
See Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (1997); Slim Keith, with Annette Tapert, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life (1990); Robin Wood, Howard Hawks (1968).
“seriously dumb” and “truly intelligent”: Keith, with Tapert, Slim, p. 57.
“was ill a great part”: Ibid., p. 60.
“But what do you do”: Lauren Bacall, By Myself (1979), p. 120.
“If anything”: Keith, with Tapert, Slim, p. 87.
“I don’t know which”: Ibid., p. 90.
“Hawks’s behavior”: McCarthy, Howard Hawks, pp. 543–44.
Films Were Started
See Charles Drazin, The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (1998); Charles Barr, Ealing Studios: A Movie Book (1993); Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (1970).
On Graham Greene
See Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader, ed. David Parkinson (1993); Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (1971), and Graham Greene, The Pleasure Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935–40, ed. John Russell Taylor (1980).
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