Word: sternbergs
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...daughter, Maria, in 1925. About a year later she got a second lead in a musical comedy, It's in the Air. She began to get starring roles in German pictures. Alternating them with stage work, she was a guest star in the Berliner Theatre when Josef von Sternberg saw her. After the show he went backstage-the squat, little man with a sharp face and Mephistophelean mustache. The strange career of Josef von Sternberg was just coming into its exotic bloom. Born Joe Stern in Vienna, Austria in 1894, he had risen from the cutting room, gambled...
...brought about the transformation of Mrs. Sieber. From an awkward, frail girl, visibly awed by the new world into which fate had thrust her, she became the purveyor of calculated glamour, icy and generous by turns, distant, temperamental, mysterious. Part of this was the result of coaching by von Sternberg, part of it the changes in her own ego wrought by the amazing publicity campaign organized for her by Paramount. Before Morocco, her next picture, was released Hollywood gazed astonished at a series of billboards in which Dietrich and her limbs were formally presented to the U. S. Writers, columnists...
Publicity alone can never make a star. Publicity plus personality-and the star is half made. Add to these assets one real hit and the trick is done. Morocco-succinctly described by Variety as a "boxoffice socko"-was the hit. Von Sternberg directed it. He followed with Dishonored and Shanghai Express. The new contract which he negotiated for himself and Dietrich specified that she was to be paid $125,000 per picture-a record at that time. Von Sternberg got a percentage of the gross. The contract was extraordinary for provisions giving von Sternberg and Dietrich complete choice of writers...
...change in Dietrich was astounding, that which took place in von Sternberg, though less evident, is no less interesting. The girl whom he had turned in record time into a world celebrity had paradoxically trebled his own fame. She was a perfect Trilby for his staccato, 14-hour-a-day Svengali. Impatient of routine, abrupt with strangers and remote with studio officials, Dietrich would tolerate the most brutal type of public correction from von Sternberg. It was common enough for her to go through a scene 15 or 16 times before he was satisfied with it. None of this seemed...
Their personal relationship, at one time apparently tender, changed to a purely professional and far more binding one. Dietrich went out with other men, but on important Hollywood occasions von Sternberg was still her escort. It was at his counsel that she let Mamoulian direct her in Song of Songs. The picture was not wholly a success. After this partial failure Dietrich returned to von Sternberg. They made The Scarlet Empress, based on the life of Catherine of Russia. It was a picture characterized by a peculiar violence of background and a remarkable tedium of pace. By making a much...