WEIRDLAND

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Kristen Stewart ("On The Road" at TIFF), Kirsten Dunst & Marion Davies

Scan of Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund for the film "On The Road" (2012)


Kristen Stewart - On The Road Trailer #2; Before IFC Films launches a domestic trailer, after picking up Walter Salles‘ adaptation of Jack Kerouac‘s classic novel On The Road at Cannes, an international look has been released for the drama. The film stars Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart, along with the supporting cast of Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Alice Braga, Elizabeth Moss.

Kristen Stewart plays Marylou in "On The Road" (2012)

Kristen Stewart has yet to make a public appearance since news broke in late July that she cheated on boyfriend Robert Pattinson with director Rupert Sanders, but that could be changing soon! Kristen will be traveling to the Toronto International Film Festival in September to promote her latest film, On The Road. TIFF recently announced that there would be a special presentation screening of the film during the festival, with the date of the screening to be announced on August 21. A source confirms with HollywoodLife.com, “Kristen will be there.” The festival will run from Sept. 6 through 16. Source: hollywoodlife.com

Kirsten Dunst kissing Sam Riley in "On The Road" (2012) directed by Walter Salles

Kirsten Dunst plays actress Marion Davies in "The Cat's Meow" (2001) directed by Peter Bogdanovich: a semi-true story of the Hollywood murder that occurred at a star-studded gathering aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924.

Kirsten Dunst is completely satisfying. Dunst has the maturity to play the 27-year-old Davies, and she resembles her, too. She has the right coloring, and she has a similarly sneaky-looking mouth. Most important, she captures the actress' warmth. Davies is one of those rare Hollywood figures whom absolutely everyone liked. Scour books and magazines looking for a bad word about her and you'll come up empty-handed.

Dunst helps audiences understand why. Source: www.sfgate.com

Portrait of Marion Davies in 1936. Marion was “blonde, vivacious, full of generous laughter and warmth —and like Carole Lombard— one of the most beautiful women to ever grace an elegant party or a movie set.”

Dick Powell and Marion Davies in "Hearts Divided" (1936) directed by Frank Borzage

Best known as newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s girlfriend, Marion Davies was "the love of his life,” in spite of the fact that he never divorced his wife, Millicent, to marry her. Instead, Hearst and Davies lived together at San Simeon, Hearst’s legendary California estate and at her 100 room beach front Santa Monica mansion, which Hearst built for Miss Davies in 1926. It was officially christened as “Ocean House,” a Georgian style structure, which boasted 37 fireplaces.

“THE CAT’S MEOW” reveals an angry and jealously outraged Hearst caught up in a “mistaken identity murder.” Allegedly, Hearst shot and killed Hollywood producer, ‘THOMAS HARPER INCE,’ thinking he was getting his revenge on screen legend ‘CHARLIE CHAPLIN,’ whom he believed to be Marion’s secret lover. According to the late ORSON WELLES, the murder took place on Hearst’s yacht, ‘THE ONEIDA’. Super star comedian and director, Charlie Chaplin was also invited on board, as he had been a friend to both Hearst and Marion ever since his first great successes five years before. However, as time passed, it became obvious to Hearst that Chaplin’s interest in Marion was more than just platonic friendship.

Soon Marion would be the bait, “The Oneida,” the trap and Hearst “the vengeful spurned lover.” But, it all fell apart. Hearst mistook Ince for Chaplin and shot him in the back of the head. Hearst columnist, LOUELLA PARSONS, was also on board “The Oneida” that night and witnessed the murder. To buy her silence, Hearst is believed to have granted her a lifetime contract with ‘Hearst Newspapers’. The official story on Ince’s death is that he died from “bleeding ulcers.” The cause of death was never investigated by the police.

Marion Davies was still denying that Thomas Ince was murdered when years later she and her husband, HORACE BROWN, retreated to their Gloucester County, Virginia estate from the “wilds of Beverly Hills.” Marion was 54 when Hearst died and the two had been together 34 years. Hearst, the owner of “The New York American” and “The San Francisco Examiner” and sixty other publications, including “Cosmopolitan” magazine, was one of the most “powerful forces in American journalism.”

ORSON WELLES parodied, emulated and infuriated Hearst in his classic 1941 motion picture, CITIZEN KANE, and Hearst did everything in his power to destroy Welles’s career and reputation—by not running advertisements for the film in the Hearst newspapers across America and the rest of the world. Hearst did “not care what Welles thought of him,” but his bitterness derived mostly from Welle’s portrayal of Marion as the “drunken-untalented” Susan Alexander, Kane’s wife, in the film. In reality, Susan Alexander, the fictional character of the picture—had nothing in common with the “extremely gifted and talented Marion Douras Davies.”

Marion Davies was “one of the most charismatic screen personalities of her generation”. Something about Marion’s “comings and goings” appeared in “glowing headlines” almost weekly—sometimes daily—in Hearst newspapers from Maine to California—a fact not lost on Orson Welles and co-writer Herman Mankiewicz, when it came time for them to write the screenplay for “Citizen Kane,” originally entitled, “American.” Marion married ‘Gloucester’s favorite native son’—Horace Brown—in Las Vegas in 1951. He was, like Hearst, instantly smitten with her. Physically, at least, Horace could have passed for Hearst, himself. He looked like Hearst when in his fifties. Friends often did a “double-take” when they saw Horace for the first time; he so strongly resembled William Randolph Hearst.

Marion captivated Horace, just as she had captivated W.R. Hearst thirty-five years earlier when Hearst first saw Marion at “The Ziegfield Follies” in New York in 1917. Hearst, like Horace Brown, fell instantly in love. Marion told Horace that when she met Hearst, “W.R. always bought two seats to see her show. One for himself. And, one for his hat.” Like Hearst before him, Horace was “obsessed with Marion.” Horace adored her. Source: www.spywise.net

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Jake Gyllenhaal - End Of Watch Trailer #2



Academy Award® nominee Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star in the action thriller End of Watch as young Los Angeles police officers Taylor and Zavala as they patrol the city's meanest streets of south central Los Angeles. The film creates a riveting portrait of the city's most dangerous corners, the cops who risk their lives there every day, and the price they and their families are forced to pay. In theaters September 21.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Dick Powell, remembered by Christopher Knopf (Zane Grey Theatre)

Actor Dick Powell - Zane Grey Theatre Press Photo

Dick Powell came in with that characteristic smile and jaunty walk, asking how things were going, just wanting to say hello. Then his arms were around Aaron’s and my shoulders. We were his boys, and anything we said we could do we could do. Ten minutes later when Powell returned to the set, Kaiser and Four Star were partners, the show on the air. The work at Four Star was constant. Not only Trackdown, but soon most of the other shows coming through in the late 1950’s. Zane Grey Theater was my favorite. For good reason.

As an anthology and with Dick Powell’s magnetism, stars were drawn to the show most other studios couldn’t attract. I’d written a script for it, Interrogation, developed specifically for Powell himself. It was a psychological drama, set in the Mexican-American war, the breaking of a heroic figure without either threat or use of torture. I was on to my favorite theme again, courage vs cowardice. I was obsessed with the theme, clearly still trying to work out things for myself. Dick refused the part and said we’d never get a star to play it.

We got Academy Award nominee Robert Ryan. “I know what you’re asking of me,” Ryan told me. “I’ll give it to you.” Powell could have buried the show out of pique. He didn’t. He took full page ads in the trades recommending it for award consideration. It won the Writers Guild Award that year for Best Written Half Hour Anthology Drama. Throughout Powell’s career he’d had unparalleled success.

He was television’s top male star, president of its leading, most productive independent production company, and a millionaire several times over. What he felt he had never had, what he wanted desperately, more than even producing or directing movies, was personal critical acclaim, not for the work of others, but for himself. This show could, and would, get it for him. Returning full time to the lot, he moved virtually all else aside to see that it did so. He was its executive producer, its soul, and nothing happened on it he didn’t know about. “If my aunt in Little Rock doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t go on my show,” he’d say. Except he couldn’t make it stick, and that is what made the two years on The Dick Powell Show among the most rewarding I experienced.

Basically Powell was a simple man, politically conservative, steeped in traditional values. And there he sat, facing impassioned, young, mostly Jewish writers, wanting to deal with confounding themes. I’ve heard that Powell never met a man he couldn’t forgive. The Dick Powell Show was into its second year, and working on it now with Stan Kallis reenergized me. The show got ratings and envy. And then we got wind of something that made none of it worthwhile. We heard Dick was sick. There were a lot of rumors as to what it was, but the one word, cancer, kept coming up. If Powell was sick, you couldn’t prove it by him.

Dick Powell and June Allyson on the cover of Hollywood Studio Magazine (November 1982)

He’d reunited with his estranged wife, June Allyson, had sailed off with her on his yacht during the summer, and now was returned. He looked great, and acted it, and fought you tooth and nail in those meetings, testing your will, yielding to it as usual if he felt your own sincere devotion to your project. He was dying. He knew it and we didn’t and he never told us nor gave us the slightest indication of it, nor a single moment’s sense that he was hiding that hideous truth, that within several months he’d be gone. And then he was. January 2, 1963.

Singer, actor, producer, director, sailor, pilot, born in Mountain View, Arkansas, he was fifty-eight years old. The pall that set over Four Star was palpable. And over me a near disaster. As for Four Star, at the time of Dick Powell’s death it had a dozen shows on the air, give or take one. Two years later it had two. A year after that just one, The Big Valley, which played on ABC for four seasons. -"Will the Real Me Please Stand Up" (2010) by Christopher Knopf

Jake Gyllenhaal and Gwyneth Paltrow - "End of Watch" Screening at Hamptons

Jake Gyllenhaal with Gwyneth Paltrow attending "End of Watch" Screening at Hamptons (East Hampton, NY), on August 19, 2012

Monday, August 20, 2012

Dick Powell ("The Words Are In My Heart")


Dick Powell video - a musical video featuring pictures of Dick Powell and his co-stars: Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley ("Murder, My Sweet"), Linda Darnell ("It happened tomorrow"), Lucille Ball ("Meet the People"), Lizabeth Scott ("Pitfall"), Evelyn Keyes, Nina Foch ("Mrs. Mike", "Johnny O'Clock"), Gloria Grahame ("The Bad & The Beautiful"), Rhonda Fleming ("Cry Danger"), Madeleine Carroll ("On The Avenue"), Ellen Drew ("Christmas in July", "Johnny O'Clock"), Debbie Reynolds ("Susan Slept Here"), Priscilla Lane, Lola Lane ("Cowboy from Brooklyn", "Varsity Saw"), Micheline Cheirel, Nina Vale ("Cornered"), Signe Hasso ("To the Ends of the Earth"), Peggy Dow "("You Never Can Tell"), Ginger Rogers ("Twenty Million Sweethearts"), Marion Davies ("Hearts Divided"), Olivia de Havilland ("Hard to Get"), Jane Greer ("Station West"), Mary Martin ("Happy Go Lucky", "Star Spangled Rhythm"), Ann Sheridan, Gale Page ("Naughty but Nice"), Ruby Keeler ("Flirtation Walk", "Dames", "Colleen"), Ann Dvorak ("Thanks A Million"), Glenda Farrell ("Golddiggers of 1937"), Patricia Ellis ("The King's Vacation"), Dorothy Lamour ("Riding High"), and his wives Joan Blondell and June Allyson.

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler in "Footlight Parade" (1933) directed by Lloyd Bacon

Songs performed by Dick Powell: "I Can Dream, Can't I?", "Lonely Lane", "Ah The Moon Is Here", "The Words Are In My Heart", "Down Sunshine Lane" and "Beauty Must Be Loved".

Johnny O'Clock (1947) directed by Robert Rossen (Full Movie)

In her book "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood", co-star Evelyn Keyes wrote about her experiences on the film: "...Rossen was rewriting as we went along, handing out new pages seconds before we did almost every scene." Regarding a scene she had with supporting actor Lee J. Cobb, Keyes said that "although he was quite helpful and worked hard with me on it, he then tried to steal it from me by chewing on a cigar and noisily spitting out pieces of it over my lines." Source: www.tcm.com


Johnny O'Clock, directed by Robert Rossen in 1947

JOHNNY O’CLOCK: This erotically offbeat noir gave Dick Powell his most vividly hard-boiled role since his re-invention as tough guy Philip Marlowe three years earlier in Dmytryk’s “Murder My Sweet.” As the darkly suave proprietor of an illegal gambling den, Johnny walks a deadly tightrope between doom and redemption. A nearly forgotten gem of sizzling noir brilliance, beautifully photographed by the legendary Burnett Guffey. Also in the top-notch cast: Evelyn Keyes, Lee J. Cobb, Thomas Gomez and Ellen Drew. Written and Directed by Robert Rossen. Source: roxie.com

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Dick Powell and Dorothy Malone in Four Star Playhouse episode

Dorothy Malone


Four Star Playhouse 1952: Dick Powell and Dorothy Malone


Dick Powell as Willie Dante in The Stacked Deck (1956) part 1

The Stacked Deck - An ex-con forces Dante to take part in a blackmail scheme. This episode includes some double entendre dialogue and even a funny dig at Powell's actress-wife June Allyson!


Dick Powell as Willie Dante in The Stacked Deck (1956) part 2

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Ginger Rogers on June Allyson: "She's the girl every man wants to marry and the girl every woman wants as a friend"

Ginger Rogers as Ann Lowell in "42nd Street" directed by Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley for the musical numbers. 42ND STREET (1933). The definitive backstage musical, complete with the dazzling newcomer who goes on for the injured star. Director: Lloyd Bacon. Cast: Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, George Brent, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee, Una Merkel, Allen Jenkins, Ned Sparks, Edward J. Nugent, Robert McWade, George E. Stone, Louis Beavers, Patricia Ellis. Black and white, 89 minutes. Source: www.altfg.com Ginger Rogers scored her first leading role in a major film in the breezy 1934 musical Twenty Million Sweethearts. The slender tale of two radio singers, Buddy Clayton (Dick Powell) and Peggy Cornell (Rogers), whose romance sends their managers, particularly Buddy's fast-talking agent (Pat O'Brien), into a tailspin, provided Powell with more musical numbers, but Rogers proved that she didn't need to rely on her trademark wisecracking to hold the audience's attention.  
Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers sing "I'll String Along With You" in the movie "Twenty Million Sweethearts" (1934) directed by Ray Enright. In the beginning of the song Dick Powell's character suffers from a case of the nerves. The loan-out (to Warner Bros. for Twenty Million Sweethearts) was hardly a problem for Rogers. After all, her supporting performances in Warner's 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, had helped bring her to the attention of RKO management.

  In addition, the film provided a reunion with Powell, whose talent and good looks had impressed her when he played banjo as part of the orchestra for a singing engagement she had in Indianapolis. [One columnist wrote, "Dick wants all of Ginger's time. And gets it... so that looks serious on Dick's part. As for how serious it is on Ginger's part - she's been obeying her new boyfriend implicitly."]

  At the time, she had thought his good looks and youthful charm were a natural for the movies and was happy to find her prediction come true when Powell quickly hit the big time as the star of several lavish Busby Berkeley musicals at Warners. Source: www.tcm.com

Ginger Rogers once said of June Allyson (Dick Powell's third wife): "She's the girl every man wants to marry and the girl every woman wants as a friend."

  Dick Powell reinvented himself from the crooning hoofer of '42nd Street' and 'Footlight Parade' to private eye Philip Marlowe in 'Murder My Sweet' in 1944.

  "Philip Marlowe, though, is particularly impossible to replicate. Parker’s efforts were laughable, but even the movies have not had much better luck. Bogart was OK in The Big Sleep, but he completely misses Marlowe’s really rather weird “Cotton Mather in a trenchcoat” moral outrage. Chandler himself thought Dick Powell at least looked the most like Marlowe." Source: www.thedailybeast.com

Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott and Raymond Burr in "Pitfall" (1948) directed by André De Toth Powell recreates his screen persona again in 'Pitfall' playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. Miss Scott, who remains hale and hearty, burnished her noir chops as a loan out from Hal Wallis who had her under contact. It is one of her favorite pictures and arguably the best performance of her career. Lizabeth Scott's recollections about 'Pitfall': "The whole experience of making Pitfall was delicious! Dick Powell was gracious and kind. His attitude inspired me. He was a pleasure to work with. Andre de Toth was exceptional. We were a compatible group." Source: alankrode.com

The 1950's proved to be a golden era in the Powell marriage. June slowly became comfortable with Hollywood society and even gained the most coveted of Hollywood invitations — dinner with Mary Pickford at her fabled estate, Pickfair. Among the Powells’ most frequent guests were James and Gloria Stewart, George Murphy and his wife, Ronald Reagan, and Jane Wyman. While June taught herself to be a mother, hostess, and Mrs. Dick Powell, she became America’s favorite wife. Journalist Bob Thomas wrote in 1954: “June Allyson is the doll who has inherited Myrna Loy’s apron as the ideal spouse of the movies.”

  She was so convincing as Jimmy Stewart’s wife in “The Stratton Story”, “Strategic Air Command”, and “The Glenn Miller Story” that many reporters jokingly claimed she had two husbands — Dick and Stewart. June said good-naturedly that she saw more of Stewart than of Dick. She may have said this with a smile on her face, but the truth was that her marriage with Dick was moving downhill.

  John Wayne, director Dick Powell and editor Stuart Gilmore during the filming of "The Conqueror" (1956) Powell spent nearly every spare minute at RKO where he worked as a director for Howard Hughes. In addition, he helped found Four Star Television and was active in producing and performing for the small screen. June sadly said that “Richard was so tied up with business that the children kept asking ‘Where is Daddy’?”

June once admitted to Henry Scott: “I never did feel quite right about the roles I was called upon to portray —the gentle, kind, loving, doting wife who will stand by her man through anything!” In 1961, June reluctantly filed for divorce. It was a step she took with no pleasure; she spoke no harsh words against Dick throughout the hearings. In the 1950s, Powell was one of the founders of Four Star Television, with Charles Boyer, Ida Lupino and David Niven. Ida Lupino decided to make her television debut in the highly acclaimed Four Star Playhouse (1951). Dick Powell and Charles Boyer had been the original duo, with Joel McCrea nearly the third star. But McCrea lost interest, and David Niven took his place. During her separation from Howard Duff in 1960, Ida received a telephone call trom Dick Powell. Once a boyish crooner in the thirties, Powell had matured into a shrewd businessman, still handsome and quite wealthy. He and his wife, June Allyson, lived close to the Duffs in Mandeville Canyon. Allyson had begun an odd romance with Alan Ladd. Powell telephoned Ida one evening, despondent over the collapse of his marriage. He suggested that they meet, but Ida hesitated. A few years later, both were again in marital difficulties. 

In fact, June Allyson had gone to court to divorce Powell. He again telephoned Lupino and asked her to come to his Four Star office, ostensibly to discuss Ida's outline for a television series called A Matter of Minutes. But the conversation soon turned personal. He asked how she and Duff were getting along. Ida said they were separated. He said he and June were fighting like mountain lions. "We're a fine pair, aren't we?" Ida asked. "Yes, I think we'd make a damn fine pair," Powell replied. But it took virtually no time at all before June and Dick were seeing each other again.
  In 1962, they remarried. Dick also told the press: “June isn’t happy when she’s acting and neither am I.” In a cruel twist of fate, Dick and June’s newfound happiness was cut short after less than a year. Dick was diagnosed with cancer, which he had developed as a result of exposure to radiation left over from atomic testing done in the area he had filmed “The Conqueror.” For the next ten years, June fell into the depths of depression and alcoholism. She rarely left the house, and when she did, she donned wigs to conceal her identity. She confessed in her memoir: “I drank, and that along with a string of nervous breakdowns and my bad rebound marriage, almost finished me off… I wanted to die and I was too much of a coward to commit suicide. ”
  June Allyson’s dependence on a man for her happiness and her screen image as the perfect wife may not be politically correct today. However, in post-war America, she embodied the ideal woman and became a successor to Mary Pickford as America’s sweetheart. Privately, she survived a nearly debilitating childhood injury and recovered from depression and alcoholism. Publicly, she endeared herself to audiences more so than her glamorous contemporaries such as Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner by becoming a symbol of American values.

  Her underlying vulnerability and self-consciousness makes introverts identify with her while her outspokenness and confidence appeal to extraverts. June summed herself up best when she said: “In truth, I was an introvert in training to be an extravert.” Source: fan.tcm.com