Word: lulu
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...come to Hollywood with dreams of stardom that never materialize. But if that were all there was to say about Louise Brooks, we would not be celebrating her centenary today. The Victoria Theatre in San Francisco would not be holding "Happy Birthday, Louise" party to accompany a performance of Lulu, a play based on her signature film Pandora's Box. The Criterion Collection would not be issuing a double-disc edition of the Pandora's Box DVD. And Rizzoli would not have published Louise Brooks; Lulu Forever, a handsome volume with more than 100 large photos and a warm consideration...
...Henri Langlois of Paris' Cinematheque Francaise spearheaded the revival of her reputation by proclaiming, "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!" The cue for his effusion was George Wilhelm Pabst's 1929 German melodrama Pandora's Box, in which Brooks plays Lulu, an innocent beguiler who radiates sexuality so unself-consciously toxic that it drives men mad - beyond lust, to disgrace and murder...
...wait a generation to find its audience. But when recognition for the film, and even more so for Brooks, did come, it didn't stop. The Anna Karina character in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie was based on her, as was Melanie Griffith's Lulu in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild. An adoring 1979 New Yorker profile by Kenneth Tynan (calling Brooks "the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid") cemented her celebrity, and suddenly the Rochester, N.Y., recluse was up in the silent-movie Pantheon with Garbo and Lillian Gish...
...where she busied herself in research on silent films. It was there she found a second career, writing memoir-essays on her early days. These trenchant pieces, on Chaplin and W. C. Fields, Gish and Garbo, and of course Pabst and Pandora's Box, were collected in the volume Lulu in Hollywood, and proved Brooks a stranger creature than the moguls could imagine: a beauty with a brain. The flapper could write...
...CURSE OF LULU...