Word: stroheims
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lyric Opera of Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime...
...tryst at New York City's Pierre Hotel. Julian Kay (Richard Gere in American Gigolo) was born in an asylum, son of the mad Norma Desmond and Screenwriter Joe Gillis, whom she shot in the last reel of Sunset Boulevard. Julian is raised by Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), Norma's former husband and butler. After two dismal marriages, Judy Rogers (Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause) joins a Haight-Ashbury commune...
...deprive them of their paper-thin texture. In an attempt at the That's Entertainment of bad films, five comic actors-Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, and Cheech and Chong-introduce segments about gorillas, musicals, reefers, mixed-up teens and the mesmerizing oeuvre of the Poverty Row Stroheim, Edward D. Wood...
...creative block. Guido Contini (Raul Julia) is a world-renowned movie mogul whose last three movies have been flops. He now has a contract for a new film and a producer, Liliane La Fleur (Liliane Monte-vecchi), who in her barbed tyrannical needling could pass muster as Erich von Stroheim in drag...
There is also new information about the era's most famous flameouts (D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim) and the best-documented veterans (Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, Lillian Gish). Even the trivia somehow does not seem trivial. It is touching to hear Frank Capra recall Mack Sennett's sad mansion full of unread books and overdressed servants. Director Henry Hathaway, who remained active past True Grit (1969), wittily brings back the days when his job was to follow DeMille around with a chair on location. A writer remembers the shock of seeing her credits on a silent...