Hi, everybody!  I must apologize for my absence (and I want to thank everyone for their concern, and especially thank the very kind AnntiChrist M. Coulter for the book by Caitlin Flanagan on “Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife”) — but I did return bearing lovely excuses. First, I was sick, followed by scattered showers of fatigue, lassitude, and ennui. Also, I’ve been spending all my spare time (and money) at the vets.  In a kind of post Valentine’s Day tribute to love, we did mass spayings and neuterings.  Plus, two of the cats have been very sick.  Little Oliver had a fever of 106 — it was thought he had FIP, which is fatal, but expensive blood tests revealed that the vet really doesn’t know what he had.  But he’s okay now.  Also, the new cat Sylvie (the one who was going to get the lovely goddess name, until I decided that she didn’t deserve it) had post-spaying complications, and was quite ill for a few days. 

Plus, I got a new dog.  It’s a long story, but I’ll probably bore you with it anyway in a day or two — but the short version is that he’s a black and tan Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, he’s 9 months old, he was put up for adoption when he got sick, but he’s okay now, and his name is Henry.  Anyway, he turned out to be the sweetest, cuddliest, naughtiest dog ever. He destroys more before noon than you destroy all day. 

Throw in several winter storms that necessitated shoveling vast quantities of snow (which tires me out, makes my back hurt, and causes me to get cold!), some family stuff, my challenging role of arbitrator in the ongoing Jet Jaguar-Sylvie wars, and my general debilitated state, and I couldn’t even find the energy to turn on the computer most days. 

But, as penance, I did watch Fox News.  Later I will share with you some of the things I learned (not much about the horrid conditions at Walter Reed, but lots about Anna Nicole Smith).  Well, here’s one factoid for today: “faggot” is not offensive to gays, because it’s just a bit of school yard argot meaning ”sissy.”  This comes from no less an authority than Ann Coulter, who revealed this pertiment info while guesting (she got two segments) on “Hannity & Colmes.”  If you don’t believe me, here’s a snippet from the transcript:

COLMES: But you used a word that’s very offensive to gays. Would you use a word offensive to another group of people and say, oh, it was only a joke? Where do you draw the line? 

COULTER: It isn’t offensive to gays. It has nothing to do with gays. It’s a schoolyard taunt, meaning wuss.

Good to know — and I hope that, in particular, all you gays learned something from the William Safire of her generation, and you now realize that you aren’t offended at all. 

Ann said a lot of other stuff, almost all of it equally stupid and annoying, but let’s move on for now, since I also learned  that this weekend’s “Hannity’s America (which is apparently not a country for that you’d want to visit OR live in — I think it must be a level of hell so horrific that Dante couldn’t bear to write about it), Sean will reveal ten statements made by liberals that are WAY WORSE than what Ann Coulter said, but that the liberal media hushed up, since they so shamefully refuse to report everything that national figures like Ward Churchill say.

I also learned from Bill O’Reilly that Bill Mahr is just as bad as Ann, because he said something unkind about Dick Cheney while he was speaking at a national liberal conference, or on a comedy show, or something.  Also, Bill informed us that John Edwards has no moral highground from which to denounce Ann, since Edwards hired those horrid anti-Christian bloggers (you know, the ones that Bill singlehandedly saved us all from). 

Bill also taught me that Mr. Libby can appeal his sentence, because young Scooter was only convicted of lying during the course of an investigation about a crime that never even occurred, and that’s unconstitutional or something.  

But, in closing, let me share with you what possible presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich had to say about Scooter’s “crime”:

Perjury is at the very heart of our legal system. And is very often punished very intently by the courts. [...]  The standard is in a court of law, should somebody who’s popular get away with committing a felony?

And if this week it’s perjury, and next week it’s theft, and the week after that it’s having somebody beaten up, then what morning do we end up as a corrupt country like Nigeria where the corruption is so deep that it eats at the very fabric of our society?

So, if Scooter gets a presidential pardon, we will all go out and lie and steal and beat up people, and then our national economy will be based on email scams.  A strong warning from Mr. Gingrich which the President would do well to heed.

No, wait, Newt wasn’t talking about Scooter, he was explaining to James Dobson why Newt thought it was permissible (nay REQUIRED) to go after Bill Clinton for fooling around with Monica while he himself was having an affair with a young aide. 
And anyway, God has forgiven Newt for his cheating, hypocrisy, and general loathesomeness, and it’s fine with God if you make Newt the leader of the free world.  Anyway, just something to think about when you’re in the voting booth.

So, more later.  Unless it snows some more, or I have to try to glue together another library book or something.
 

Uncategorized | 34 Comments »

I’m probably not qualified to blog against sexism, as witnessed by the fact that I only just noticed that it’s Blog Against Sexism Day.  But I think I can get a post in just under the wire, by virtue of the fact that I live on the west coast, and it’s not even 10:00 PM here yet, and because I’m a man, and everybody knows we’re natural procrastinators and are used to cutting us some slack.

Anyway, by a strange coincidence, I was corresponding today with Dan Domike, proprietor of Jackson Street Books, who has been kind enough to stock copies of Better Living Through Bad Movies, and he casually mentioned his own familial connection to the dream factory:

I grew up in LA, mostly in the Valley before it was the Valley (moved there in 1959) and had lots of ranches and fruit groves. Didn’t get to Hollywood alot, unless to see a movie or visit my older cousin (technically my first cousin thrice removed) who did female leads before talkies and ended up doing screenplays for Republic. She lived in a residential hotel on Highland. Great gal.

Even more strangely, I was talking to Mary last night about just how few women screenwriters I bump into in the course of daily business.  And how it only recently dawned on me what a peculiar state of affairs this is, given that the dramatis personae of your typical pitch meeting (at least, in my limited experience) invariably comprises one or two male writers peddling their wares to a phalanx of female development executives.  And yet, in the early years of the motion picture business, when roles were far more fluid, women screenwriters and even directors were surprisingly common:

Before the film industry became a big business, women were involved in nearly every aspect of production. Writer Lizzie Francke has quoted screenwriter Beulah Marie Dix (1898-1973) on this point: “It was all very informal, in those early days. There were no unions. Anybody on the set did anything he or she was called upon to do. I’ve walked on as an extra, I’ve tended lights (I’ve never shifted scenery) and anybody not doing anything else wrote down the director’s notes on the script . . . I also spent a good deal of time in the cutting room.” As Francke remarked, “In such a relatively egalitarian atmosphere women seemed destined to become equal partners with men in this new industry.” The Library holds films created by many of these pioneering filmmakers, including works by Gene Gauntier (1891-1966), Helen Gardner (1885-1968), Mabel Normand (1894-1930), Cleo Madison (1883-1964), Grace Cunard (1893-1967), Julia Crawford Ivers (d. 1930), Ruth Ann Baldwin, and Dorothy Davenport Reid (1895-1977).

The first person believed to have directed a narrative film is Alice Guy (later known as Guy-Blaché, 1873-1968). In 1896, Guy was secretary to Léon Gaumont, whose French photography company was expanding to include the sale of a motion picture camera. Guy asked permission to make a story film to demonstrate the new device. Gaumont agreed, but only if the project did not interfere with her secretarial duties. Within a year, Guy was head of Gaumont film production; and by the time of her emigration to the United States in 1907, she had produced (often directing) about 400 short films.

In America, she formed her own film studio, Solax (1910-14), where, as president and chief director, she supervised the production of more than 300 movies. In 1913, Guy concentrated on making longer films, eventually directing 22 feature films. 

Before embarking on a film career, Lois Weber (1882?-1939) had already toured as a child prodigy concert pianist, worked as a missionary in Pittsburgh, and appeared on the stage. In 1908, she joined the Gaumont studio in New York City, where she wrote, directed, and acted in motion pictures. Weber eventually moved to Hollywood, where she became Universal Studio’s highest-paid director in 1916. In 1917, she formed her own production company and continued to make films that reflected her moral stand on important social issues. She had addressed birth control and abortion in Where Are My Children? (1916), capital punishment in The People vs. Joe Doe (1916), and drug addiction in Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916).

In recent years, some of these forgotten female artists have begun to emerge from obscurity.  A documentary entitled Without Lying Down, adapted from the biography by Cari Beauchamp recounts the life and career of Frances Marion, who was the go-to scribe for Mary Pickford, another woman who towered over the formative years of the film industry:

From 1915 to 1939, Frances Marion was one of the most powerful talents in the movie industry, writing more than 200 movies as the world’s highest paid screenwriter, man or woman, and becoming the first screenwriter to win two Oscars. Moguls competed for her stories, and stars like Pickford, Garbo, and Gable brought her characters to life in classics like “The Champ,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “Anna Christie,” “Camille,” and more.

June Mathis, like Dan’s cousin, began her career as an actress, before becoming one of the most influential women in Hollywood.  Famous in the 1920s as the only female executive at MGM, she’s best remembered today as the woman who discovered Rudolph Valentino, and wrote the picture, Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, that made him a star.

I asked Dan for a little more information about the family scribe, and he wrote back:

Her name was Betty Burbridge, or Elizabeth Burbridge. She was my grandmother’s first cousin, and about the same age. She was more like a granny to us than a cousin. She never married. She is listed for both screen
appearances and screenplays at IMDB. She did a number of the Three Meesketeer films. She always told me that the films were not particularyl good, but, hey, it was the Depression and it was a living.

According to the IMDB, which is far from flawless or exhaustive, Cousin Betty’s acting career stretched from Slim Turns the Tables in 1913 (one of at least 9 Slim Films) to Charity? in 1916 (although there’s evidence she may have appeared on Broadway in 1919, co-starring in a comedy called Five O’Clock that ran for 41 performances at the Fulton — later the Helen Hayes Theatre).  It appears that Betty embarked on her career as a scenarist the following year, since her first recorded writing gig is a story credit on the 1917 picture, The Brand of Hate.

One of the most remarkable things about Betty is that she specialized almost exclusively in that most masculine of genres, the western.  As Dan mentioned, she scripted a number of the Three Mesquiteers pictures in the late 30s that starred John Wayne, Ray “Crash” Corrigan, and Raymond Hatton, as well as several entries in the Cisco Kid series.  And she wrote a staggering number of of Gene Autry’s films, beginning with Melody Trail in 1935, and continuing right through to her final credit, a 1952 episode of the Gene Autry television program.

Like most writers who toiled on the studio lots, from the opulence of MGM to the Poverty Row squalor of Republic Pictures, Elizabeth Burbridge was an invisible part of the machine, and we don’t have any glamour shots, press releases, or scandalous gossip column clippings to help to reconstruct her life.  But judging by her resume (which includes only those films for which she received screen credit — there’s really no telling how many scripts she may have worked on for a week here or a few days there) she was a creative force behind over a hundred motion pictures, stretching from the days of silent two-reelers cranked out in Nickleodeons to the dawn of television.  And there’s a good chance that at some point, most of us have unknowingly experienced her work, if only a few minutes of Springtime in the Rockies (original screenplay by Betty Burbridge) drowsily viewed at three in the morning on TCM.

Not exactly an Ozymandias-sized footprint, but enough to say, Look on my works, ye mighty/And crack a smile.

When I told Dan I wanted to write something about his cousin, he sent me a few more remembrances:

Funny thing about Cousin Betty was that we called her Tommie, her family name. The story is that her father wanted a boy, she disappointed in being a girl, but was called by family members all her life, Tommie. Betty was her professional name.

My grandmother, years ago, was vacationing in Mexico, (this would have been in the late sixties) when she saw John Wayne at a restaurant, having dinner with his wife. My grannie introuduced herself to the Duke, saying “You wouldn’t remember me, we met at a party years ago, but you would remember my cousin, Betty Burbridge”. And of course he did remember and was very gracious to my grandmother and asked her to say hello to my cousin. He may have been an old fascist, but I will think well of him because of his courtesy.

Movies | 6 Comments »