Forgotten Hollywood

In 1930, when 90% of the population was going to the movies every week, William Haines was the biggest box office star in Hollywood. By 1927, he was only one of seven MGM stars to have his name above the title in his movies.

On January 15, 1947, the mutilated body of a young woman was found in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles in an empty lot, severed at the waist. According to the Los Angeles Times, “She was face up, a few inches from the sidewalk, just north of the middle of the block.

On the morning of Monday, December 16, 1935, the body of a young woman was found doubled over on the front seat of her chocolate brown 1934 Lincoln Phaeton convertible parked in a garage in Pacific Palisades. Wearing diamond jewelry and dressed in a mauve and silver evening gown and a mink coat, she had seemingly died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Just before Titanic was released in 1997, director James Cameron gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly. “Filmmaking is war,” he said.

Despite a traumatic past that she could never recover from, Ethel Waters had a groundbreaking trajectory in show business. She had a thriving recording career and a string of nightclub hits.

It’s been called ‘Kevin’s Gate’, referring to the disastrous Heaven’s Gate that sank United Artists. It’s also been called ‘Fishtar’ with reference to the famous flop Ishtar.

In a radio interview, Willem Dafoe talked about being fired from his very first film. He was a ‘glorified extra’ on the set of the epic Heaven’s Gate in Montana and recalled, “One day we're sitting in a lighting setup, eight hours, full makeup, full costume, and we’re not even going to shoot.

There are many reasons why some movies have had difficult productions – lack of preparedness, budget overruns, incompetent directors, script problems, clashing of egos, and plain bad luck. Sometimes, successful films can still come out of the chaos - films like The Bourne Identity, World War Z, and, most famously, Apocalypse Now and Titanic.

It was 1979 and the once-wunderkind of Paramount Pictures, Robert Evans, was trying to recapture his former glory days by moving into independent producing. He had bought the rights to a 1977 book by Jim Haskins called “The Cotton Club: A Pictorial and Social History of the Most Famous Symbol of the Jazz Era” for $350,000 from a guy called Charles Child who was a Union Carbide executive.

He was a 57-year-old Black man, she was six years old and white. Together, they danced into history as the first interracial tap-dancing couple in 1935’s The Little Colonel.