Forgotten Hollywood

“When I went to work in a studio, I took my pride and made a nice little ball of it and threw it right out the window,” said director Dorothy Arzner in a 1933 article in Silver Screen magazine entitled “Get Me Dorothy Arzner”. Whatever tribulations she went through to build a career in Hollywood that started in silent films, in an industry dominated by men, Arzner, almost forgotten now, has more major studio directorial credits than any other woman to this day.

The silent film era, which lasted from the 1890s to the 1920s, was run by white men. Any Black performers seen in the films were portrayed through the white perspective and confirmed stereotypes that abounded at the time.

Florenz Ziegfeld turned her down for a role in his Follies because he said she was too short, had fat legs, crooked teeth, and a wandering eye. She wasn’t the most good-looking or talented hopeful to want a career in the movies.

On August 15, 1926, thousands of fans mobbed the Polyclinic hospital in New York City where Rudolph Valentino had just died after a bout of acute appendicitis, perforated ulcers and peritonitis. In the week before his passing, letters, telegrams, calls and gifts flooded into the hospital as he battled for his life.

In 1969, Lillian Gish published a book entitled “Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me,” dedicated to the three people who had the most influence on her life: “To my mother who gave me love.

In 1918, there was a sensational court case in Hollywood in which a man, Guadaloup Martinez, was on trial for flinging his wife Rosa out of a window to her death. Actress Theda Bara was subpoenaed by the defense to give expert testimony that Mrs.

In the first decade of silent movies starting in 1910, the players were anonymous with no names in the film credits. But once “the Biograph girl,” Florence Lawrence, was advertised as the first movie star in 1909, studios were careful to control the images of their actors.

In Marion Davies’ posthumous memoir, “The Times We Had,” published in 1985 based on her audio recordings, she says, “I couldn’t act, but the idea of silent pictures appealed to me because I couldn’t talk either. Silent pictures were right up my alley, and that’s how I got all the bad notices.

Such was her fame that on March 31, 1920, the Los Angeles Times devoted a banner headline across the top of its front page to the nuptials of ‘America’s sweetheart’ Mary Pickford to her paramour Douglas Fairbanks. “Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks are Secretly Married Here,” it proclaimed.

In the olden days, actors were expected to be all-around performers. Singing and dancing were requirements that even those we think of as heavy dramatic actors were forced to learn.