That Certain Thing (Capra, 1928)

Kids these days will never understand watching Letty Lynton in 280p.

Whoever AI upscaled the Three Wise Girls poster for TMDB is going to hell.

James Hong talking about Lauren Bacall getting William Wellman to calm down after getting hit by a spitball during Blood Alley (1955)

Crazy but true: Preston Sturges was born Edmund Preston Biden, and was likely a distant relative of Joe Biden; his second wife—whom he eloped with over her parents’ objections—was the daughter of Marjorie Merriweather Post, who built & originally owned Mar-a-Lago in the 1920s with her husband.

Warner Baxter’s birthday, so here is a photo from my collection of William A. Wellman, Claire Windsor, Baxter, and Dorothy Burgess on the set of Robin Hood of El Dorado (1936)

Joel McCrea, Dorothy Jordan, and Robert Armstrong in a publicity photo for The Lost Squadron (1932)

We've found a rare #FelixTheCat cartoon in our archive, and have just uploaded it to YouTube. First time on the internet! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IoD...

Saturday, March 28th, 7:30pm Greg Pane, Piano Accompaniment LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN (1925, Lubitsch) A society woman believes her husband is having an affair, a misconception which may have dire personal consequences for all involved. Tickets: checkout.square.site/merchant/MLB...

Cinematographer Ray June #BOTD inspects the day’s rushes with Jean Harlow on the set of Wife vs. Secretary (1936)

Gloria Swanson #BOTD by Edwin Bower Hesser, 1924

March 27, 1926: Young women of California's Santa Clara Valley help open the Saratoga Blossom Festival.

Thinking about William Wellman calling Robert Taylor ‘the only man I ever knew who could drink scotch and sodas and eat chocolates at the same time’.

Historical hearsay dictates that Jean Harlow was meant to be the original Maisie, a role that fell to Ann Sothern's feet in 1939. I wrote about why it's not that cut and dried on Vitaphone Zone. vitaphonezone.substack.com/p/was-maisie...

Happy William A. Wellman Wednesday (in a classic sparring pose on the set of Nothing Sacred, with Fredric March and Carole Lombard)

Posted this on X and forgot to do so here re: the passing of the great Valerie Perrine. Apart from her character’s name, I really adore Mick LaSalle’s establishment of the Harlow to Perrine pipeline in his essential Complicated Women:

Jean Harlow as Cassie shows how she deals with potential pick-ups in the introduction to William Beaudine’s Three Wise Girls (1932), one half of her two-picture Columbia deal signed in ‘31. Gorgeous night scene cinematography courtesy of Ted Tetzlaff.

I’ve got a long one for you today! I had so much fun talking with author, critic and film historian @pamhutch.bsky.social about QUEEN KELLY, Louise Brooks, C. A. Lejeune, HÄXAN, and so much more! Read: oldfilmsflicker.substack.com/p/silent-fil...

Sharing again for the Sunday morning weekend crowd:

My favorite photo of the great Françoise Dorléac #BOTD, dressed as Jean Harlow for a costume party circa 1965

I dug into the story of 1930s 'nationally famous billboard beauty' Mona Gray, who readily wrestled publicity demons in court on account of a fake story about false eyelashes. vitaphonezone.substack.com/p/a-study-in...

I like that nobody noticed I accidentally wrote Crabapple instead of Crabtree. I did and it’s hilarious.

One of the earliest career photos I’ve seen of Jean Harlow: sharing a scarf with fellow starlet, the rhyming Alona Marlowe, at seventeen sometime in 1928 (this was published in October). I like that their names match but their hair doesn’t.

Wrote a bit about one of my husband's distant historical cousins, composer Ruth Tweed Aubury, due to the wildly moving nature of her story. Her fingers only grazed a bit of the musical success that would jump right out of her hands: open.substack.com/pub/vitaphon...

Cleaned up a mistake I found in this favorite biographical sketch of silent almost-starlet Justine Valse I wrote in 2024, so naturally I am sharing it again (free to read)!: open.substack.com/pub/vitaphon...

Happy William A. Wellman Wednesday (on the set of Stingaree, 1934)

Jean Harlow makes up in a wicker armchair, a material we certainly don’t see as much of anymore, at her vanity in a general MGM publicity photo taken for The Beast of the City (1932).

Harlow’s Lola skips out on a date at the Cocoanut Grove with Lee Tracy’s Space Hanlon in this scene from early in Bombshell (1933); Tracy makes a pretty good in-joke in this highly biographical film about using ‘klieg eyes’ to skip out on the other guy.

Listen to me talk with the ultra-knowledgeable Brandon Davis about the magic of one my favorite pre-Codes, not to mention my favorite duo of the era. ⬇️ (Do it for Joan Blondell)…

Fantastic cartoon illustration of Jean Harlow and Robert Taylor as they appear in their 1937 film, Personal Property, by legendary Romanian caricaturist and paper artist Jacques Kapralik:

I had a great time chatting about Havana Widows with @vitaphonezone.bsky.social linktr.ee/FrontRowClas...

Listen to me talk with the ultra-knowledgeable Brandon Davis about the magic of one my favorite pre-Codes, not to mention my favorite duo of the era. ⬇️ (Do it for Joan Blondell)…

Jean Harlow at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco on December 27, 1932, for a post-Christmas shopping sojourn, according to the local Examiner. This wonderful, uncommon candid is courtesy of the Fang family photographic archive in the digital collections of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Jean Harlow at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco on December 27, 1932, for a post-Christmas shopping sojourn, according to the local Examiner. This wonderful, uncommon candid is courtesy of the Fang family photographic archive in the digital collections of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Thanks to the Louise Brooks Society, "Lulu in Hollywood" has been reissued in a new print edition AND the book's first ever e-book edition is now available. amzn.to/4bkZ4Qi

Ida Lupino, 1941 — “Away From it All.” Photo by Schuyler Crail

Harlow in a luxurious fur coat-and-hat combo shot by George Hurrell circa 1935, in all likelihood at his studio on Sunset Boulevard (which he famously left MGM to freelance in after a tizzy with Howard Strickling over his services for other studio’s stars).

Jean Harlow wears an all-white gown of ‘heavy matlasse crepe’ ninety-two years ago today (March 10, 1934) in publicity portraits by Clarence Sinclair Bull for her only film of the year, The Girl From Missouri:

An attempt was made in Side Streets (1934) to make Aline MacMahon’s spinster look dowdy in glasses which just had the opposite effect on me with the amount of screenshots I took

Fairly rare 1936 Ted Allan publicity shot of Jean Harlow in Dolly Tree for Libeled Lady (1936)

Jean Harlow refers to her screen persona as a ‘one-woman corporation’ that her offscreen self oversees (Motion Picture magazine, March 1937):

It’s crazy that one of the only known pictures of Jean Harlow with Constance Bennett and Maureen O’Sullivan (and I think the only one with both Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald) is ruined by her face stuck in the spine of the magazine it’s in

THREAD: I got laid off from NYMag/Vulture after 14 years. The family lost 75% of income + medical. Now mzs.press bookstore, once a side project. is do-or-die for Judith & I. I feel weird telling you this because others are doing much worse. But if you could like or share this, we'd be so grateful!

You in another decade.

The Good Bad Man (1916). #SilentFilm

Heroes for Sale. William Wellman. 1933.

Sign, San Juan Hidalgo, Texas Russell Lee, 1939

Cleaned up a mistake I found in this favorite biographical sketch of silent almost-starlet Justine Valse I wrote in 2024, so naturally I am sharing it again (free to read)!: open.substack.com/pub/vitaphon...

Louis B. Mayer getting raked over the coals in a ‘35 Hollywood gossip magazine for saying ‘too many bums are coming to California’, or, time passes but never really changes:

Wrote a bit about one of my husband's distant historical cousins, composer Ruth Tweed Aubury, due to the wildly moving nature of her story. Her fingers only grazed a bit of the musical success that would jump right out of her hands: open.substack.com/pub/vitaphon...