2012 February | Cladrite Radio

Ghost of Grandma’s Boy

A “ghost sign” for a 1922 Harold Lloyd movie is uncovered in Vancouver (sadly, it’s not long for this world).

Here’s the full story.

29 Feb 12 | Tags: 1922, classic movies, ghost signs, Grandma's Boy, Harold Lloyd
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Times Square Tintypes: Helen Westley

In this chapter from his 1932 book, Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles American character actress, Helen Westley.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT

THERE‘s always a woman in the case. And the Theatre Guild has HELEN WESTLEY.

Her full name is Henrietta Remsen Meserole Westley. She comes from a clan of prim old Huguenots. Two streets in Brooklyn, Remsen and Meserole, are named after her ancestors.

Is downhearted because men look upon her in a motherly fashion.

For years her stage was the back room of Greenwich Village cafés and bookstores. She wandered in, strutted her stuff and wandered out—a will-o’-the-wisp. One evening a group of intellectuals planned to start a theater. This little elf entered and this time she didn’t leave. Today she’s a trade-mark.

Her passion is reading subtitles aloud. Talking pictures annoy her.

She believes in God and is a member of the Dutch Reformed Church.

Claims she is a good luck piece of the Guild. Must have a hand in everything they do. She played in both Strange Interlude and Faust the same evening. Merely left one play about the third act, hurried down the street with makeup on and went on in the other.

Her purse is large enough to pass as baggage at any hotel. It always contains a mess of bills, cosmetics, letters, keys, bric-a-brac and ashes.

Flowers, she thinks, are horrid. Her summer home, a shack at Croton, is surrounded by weeds.

Haunts second-hand stores. She detests breaking in new garments. Her shoes are one size too large. At present she is wearing a cane.

Likes to use big words in conversation. The listener generally doesn’t know what they mean.

She never gets peeved. Is always quaint.

Adores babies and makes special visits just to pinch their cheeks. She has a gentle pinch.

Went to Paris once. Drank milk of magnesia all the way over so she wouldn’t get seasick. Stayed eleven days and never went outside of Montmartre.

Envies Heywood Brown for his ability to dress better.

The only restaurant she ever liked was in Chicago. Raved about it for five months. Then arranged a supper party there. Paying the railroad fare of four guests. Arriving, she learned the restaurant had been closed by the Health Department.

Studies Yoga philosophy.

Belongs to over twenty freak societies. With the hope that some day one of them might amount to something.

Calls upon her friends without notice. And whenever the desire seizes her. Regardless of the time. Thinks nothing of returning a book at three in the morning.

She buys costumes from old Theatre Guild plays and uses them for street clothes.

Her most precious possession is a jade necklace. Whenever she gets another piece she adds it up to the necklace. It now hangs about her knees.

Before her daughter, Ethel Westley, was born she attended the Metropolitan Opera House and visited the art museums weekly so the child would be artistic.

She claims she was the first modern woman.

Traffic doesn’t bother her. When wishing to cross a congested avenue in a hurry she merely lets out a terrific shriek. People as well as autos stop.

She feels she should know more policemen.

Goes for long walks with a bottle of milk under her arm and feeds stray cats. While on these journeys she also buys liver for dogs. The delicatessen store near the Guild Theatre has a standing order to feed all stray cats and charge it to her milk fund.

Thinks the North was right in the civil war.

When her daughter was to be married the entire Theatre Guild acting asked her what Ethel would like for a wedding gift. She replied: “Ethel is very fond of coffee pots.” Ethel received thirty-eight coffee pots.

She groans when she walks up a flight of stairs.

She washes herself with oil.

27 Feb 12 | Tags: Chicago, Helen Westley, Heywood Broun, NYC, Paris, Theatre Guild
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You screened it for her, you can screen it for me…

Like most movie buffs, we occasionally are asked to name our favorite movie.

At first thought, it seems a difficult question. After all, there aren’t many genres of movies we don’t enjoy, and we happily watch pictures more than a century old and the latest releases. We have a list of favorite directors as long as our arm and a list of favorite actors and actresses as long as our leg.

But in the end, it’s really not that tough a call. For our money, Casablanca is the perfect movie—or the closest we’ve ever seen to it. Amazing performances from the whole cast, from Bogart and Bergman down to the tiniest bit roles. A witty, suspenseful, and moving script that deftly combines romance, drama, and humor and features some of the most celebrated dialogue and memorable scenes ever committed to celluloid.

We’ve seen Casablanca a dozen times or more, most of those on a big screen, surrounded by a collection of appreciative fellow movie buffs. It’s one of the benefits of living in a city like New York; we get to see an amazing range of movies from across a century-plus of cinema in theatres.

But there are plenty of burgs where a movie classic like Casablanca can be seen only on television, on a DVD or when Turner Classic Movies airs it. So I got excited—not for myself, but for the millions of Americans living somewhere other than NYC or Los Angeles or Chicago or San Francisco or half dozen other cities that have outlets for viewing classic movies in theatres—when I learned that on Wednesday, March 21, TCM is commemorating the movie’s 70th anniversary with a one-time digital screening of this classic in more than 335 theatres across the country. There will be an introductory short starring TCM host Robert Osborne, who will “take audiences behind the scenes of this epic love story.”

Every theatre is showing the movie at 7 p.m., so in each time zone, thousands of moviegoers will be watching it simultaneously. We love that.

There’s a good chance there’s a participating theatre near you. If you’ve never seen this wonderful movie on a big screen with an audience of fellow movie fans, you owe it to yourself to attend. Tickets went on sale today.

24 Feb 12 | Tags: Casablanca, Claude Rains, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Michael Curtiz, Paul Heinreid, Peter Lorre, Robert Osborne, Sidney Greenstreet, TCM, Turner Classic Movies
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That’s one beautiful five-and-dime

May 1940, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi-res view

Hoo-boy, do we love this photograph, which is from a 35mm nitrate negative taken by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration.

The bird’s-eye POV, the pristine quality of the building housing the Woolworth’s store, the amazing automobiles. It’s so perfect, it almost seems artificial—like an artist’s handiwork in miniature.

22 Feb 12 | Tags: Farm Security Administration, Indianapolis, John Vachon, Woolworth's
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Times Square Tintypes: Owen Davis

In this chapter from his 1932 book, Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles perhaps the most prolific of American playwrights, Owen Davis.

CURSE YOU—JACK DALTON!

SOME people write one play and then are never heard from again. But this fellow’s inexhaustible. OWEN DAVIS.

He is a tiptop cook.

There never will be an exact count of how many plays he wrote. He wrote at least three hundred. Between the ages of twenty-seven and forty he remembers nothing but writing plays. Somehow, between scripts, he managed to get married. Also to raise a family. Didn’t notice either until he was forty. Then took up golf.

He knows much more about a lot of theatrical managers than they care to have him know.

Had a unique contract with A. H. Woods. It stated that for a period of five years he could write plays for Woods only. Also stated that during that period Woods couldn’t produce any plays but his. During those years he wrote fifty-eight melodramas, or a play a month for five years.

He’d go to Europe tomorrow if they’d build a railroad across the Atlantic Ocean.

He doesn’t drink. He’d like to.

Is a Harvard graduate. Played football on the Crimson eleven. Also held that college’s record for the hundred-yard dash until four years ago.

In those days of the thrilling melodramas Woods would select a title and order terrifying lithographs of maidens in peril. Then Davis would write a play to fit both the title and the picture.

Perhaps you recall some of them. They include such titles as Through the Breakers, Deadwood Dick’s Last Shot, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery, Confessions of a Wife, The Gambler from the West, Tony the Bootblack, The Great Express Robbery, Queen of the Opium Ring, Convict 999, Broadway After Dark, The Policeman and the Millionaire’s Wife, The Creole Slave’s Revenge, A Chorus Girl’s Luck in New York, and Edna, the Pretty Typewriter.

He doesn’t remember writing Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl, although he is credited with it.

His play Icebound won the 1923 Pulitzer prize. The Detour he considers his greatest play.

Always smokes cigars. At rehearsals he makes a little cup from a newspaper to flick his ashes in. He is well house broken.

Clarence Darrow is his idea of the greatest American.

Prefers the theatre to the movies, ices to ice cream, a four-in-hand to a bow tie, a cold bath to a hot one, poker to bridge and a wicked woman to a simple one.

The first theatrical flashlight ever made was of his play The Road to Paradise. It is now pasted on the wall of his workroom. Among those in it are Mrs. Davis, then the “You Ain’t Done Right by Our Nell” girl. And George Jessel‘s stepmother, then very interested in keeping the villain from foreclosing on the old homestead.

Wrote his first play, The Rival Detectives, at the age of eight. All the characters in it were murdered.

His ambition is to have a perfect script after the first writing. Thought he had it with The Nervous Wreck. Then had to rewrite it seven times.

Once was turning out so many plays that he had to write under seven different names. Two of the nom de plumes, Robert Wayne and John Oliver, became well known. In fact, a Pittsburgh dramatic critic wrote a piece about John Oliver stating that “at last a man had come along to drive Owen Davis out of business.”

Eugene O’Neill is his favorite playwright.

When writing he moods himself to the play. While working on Chinatown Charlie he lived on chop suey.

20 Feb 12 | Tags: A. H. Woods, Broadway, Charles Frohman, Charles Klein, Clarence Darrow, Deadwood Dick, Eugene O'Neill, Frank Sullivan, George Jessel, Harvard University, NYC, Owen Davis
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Give a boy a June night,
Give a girl a song.
They'll be dancing in the moonlight
All night long.

---Dancing in the Moonlight, Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson, 1933