Vincent Canby (July 27, 1924 – October 15, 2000) was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.^[1]

Life and career[link]

Canby was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Katharine Anne (née Vincent) and Lloyd Canby.^[2] He attended a boarding school with the novelist William Styron, and the two became friends. He introduced Styron to the works of E.B. White and Ernest Hemingway, and the pair hitchhiked from their Christ Church, Virginia boarding school to Richmond, Virginia to buy Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.^[3] After war service in the Pacific he attended the Dartmouth College and then was employed as a film critic by Variety for six years.^[4]

Canby was an enthusiastic supporter of many filmmakers, notably Woody Allen, who credited Canby's rave review of Take The Money and Run as a crucial point in his career.^[5] He was also heavily critical of some otherwise acclaimed films, such as Rocky, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Jaws, Patton, Night of the Living Dead, Once Upon a Time in America, Chinatown, After Hours, Blazing Saddles, A Christmas Story, Witness, Mask, The Natural, Rain Man, The Exorcist, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,^[6] Deliverance, The Godfather Part II and Alien. In the early 1990s, Canby switched his attention from film to theatre; he was named the chief theatre critic in 1994.^[4]

The career of Vincent Canby is discussed in the film, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, by contemporary critics such as The Nation’s Stuart Klawans, who talks of Canby’s influence for a quarter century as America’s most prominent "make-or-break" critic, and A.O. Scott, who praises his New York Times predecessor for "always finding the right tone" in his reviews.

Canby never married but was, for many years, the companion of Penelope Gilliatt.^[7] He died from cancer in Manhattan, New York City on October 15, 2000.^[7] Almost three years later, upon the death of Bob Hope, the late Canby's byline appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Canby had written the bulk of Hope's obituary for the newspaper several years before.^[8]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Vincent Canby Reviews at The New York Times
• Vincent Canby at the Internet Movie Database

This disambiguation page is currently linked from a large number of articles. Please help direct these ambiguous links to articles dealing with the specific meaning intended. (March 2012)

Cyrano de Bergerac may refer to:

• Cyrano de Bergerac (writer), (1619–1655), French dramatist and duelist
• Cyrano de Bergerac (play), 1897 French verse drama by Edmond Rostand
• Cyrano de Bergerac (1950 film), a film version of Rostand's play starring Jose Ferrer
• Cyrano de Bergerac (1990 film), a 1990 French comedy drama film

See also[link]

• Cyrano de Bergerac (disambiguation)
• Bergerac (disambiguation)
• Cyrano (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Ken Russell
Russell in 2008
Born	Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell (1927-07-03)3 July 1927 Southampton, Hampshire, England
Died	27 November 2011(2011-11-27) (aged 84) London, England
Occupation	Director
Years active	1956–2011
Spouse	Shirley Ann Kingdon (1956–1978; divorced), 5 children Vivian Jolly (1983–1991; divorced), 2 children Hetty Baynes (1992–1999; divorced), 1 child Lisi Tribble (2001–2011; his death)

Henry Kenneth Alfred "Ken" Russell (3 July 1927 – 27 November 2011^[1][2]) was an English film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. He attracted criticism as being obsessed with sexuality and the church.^[3] His films often dealt with the lives of famous composers or were based on other works of art which he adapted loosely. Russell began directing for the BBC, where he made creative adaptations of composers' lives which were unusual for the time. He also directed many feature films independently and for studios.

He is best known for his Oscar-winning film Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), The Who's Tommy (1975), and the science fiction film Altered States (1980). Classical musicians and conductors held him in high regard for his story-driven biopics of various composers, most famously Elgar, Delius, Liszt, Mahler and Tchaikovsky.^[4]

British film critic Mark Kermode speaking in 2006, and attempting to sum up the director's achievement, called Russell, "somebody who proved that British cinema didn't have to be about kitchen-sink realism—it could be every bit as flamboyant as Fellini. Later in his life he turned to making experimental films such as Lion's Mouth and Revenge of the Elephant Man, and they are as edgy and 'out there' as ever".^[5]

Ken Russell died on 27 November 2011, at the age of 84, of natural causes.

Early life and career[link]

Russell was born in Southampton, England, on 3 July 1927,^[6] the elder of two sons^[7] of Ethel (née Smith) and Henry Russell, a shoeshop owner.^[8] His father was distant and took out his rage on his family, so Russell spent much of his time at the cinema with his mother, who was mentally ill.^[7] He cited Die Nibelungen and The Secret of the Loch as two early influences.^[9]

He was educated at private schools^[7] in Walthamstow and at Pangbourne College. He harboured a childhood ambition to be a ballet dancer but instead joined the Royal Air Force and the Merchant Navy as a teenager. On one occasion he was made to stand watch in the blazing sun for hours on end while crossing the Pacific. His lunatic captain feared an attack by Japanese midget submarines despite the war having ended. He moved into television work after short careers in dance and photography.^[10]

His series of documentary 'Teddy Girl' photographs were published in Picture Post magazine in 1955, and he continued to work as a freelance documentary photographer until 1959. After 1959, Russell's amateur films (his documentaries for the Free Cinema movement, and his 1958 short Amelia and the Angel)^[11] secured him a job at the BBC, where he worked regularly from 1959 to 1970 making arts documentaries for Monitor and Omnibus. Among his better-known works were: Elgar (1962), The Debussy Film (1965), Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), Song of Summer (about Frederick Delius and Eric Fenby) (1968) and Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a film about Richard Strauss. He once said that the best film he ever made was Song of Summer, and that he wouldn't edit a single shot.^[12] The Elgar film proved to be ground-breaking because it was the first time that an arts programme (Monitor) had shown one long film about an artistic figure instead of short items, and also it was the first time that re-enactments were used. Russell fought with the BBC over using actors to portray different ages of the same character, instead of the traditional photograph stills and documentary footage.^[13]

His television films became increasingly flamboyant and outrageous. Dance of the Seven Veils sought to portray Richard Strauss as a Nazi: one scene in particular showed a Jew being tortured while a group of SS men look on in delight, to the tune of Strauss's music. The Strauss family was so outraged they withdrew all music rights so that the film is effectively banned from being screened until Strauss's copyright expires in 2019.^[14]

Russell's first feature film was French Dressing (1963), a comedy loosely based on Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman; its critical and commercial failure sent Russell back to the BBC. His second big-screen effort was part of author Len Deighton's Harry Palmer spy cycle, Billion Dollar Brain (1967), starring Michael Caine.

In 1969, Russell directed what is considered his "signature film", Women In Love, a rollicking adaptation of D. H. Lawrence's novel of the same name about two artist sisters living in post-World War I Britain. The film starred Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, Jennie Linden and Alan Bates. The film is notable for its nude wrestling scene, which broke the convention at the time that a mainstream movie could not show male genitalia.^[15]

Women in Love connected with the sexual revolution and bohemian politics of the late 1960s. It was nominated for several Oscars and won one for Glenda Jackson for Best Actress in a Leading Role.^[16] Russell himself was nominated for an Oscar — that for Best Director (his only nomination)— as were his cinematographer and screenwriter.^[6]

The film was BAFTA-nominated for the costume designs of Russell's first wife, Shirley; they collaborated throughout the 1970s. The colour schemes of Luciana Arrighi's art direction (also BAFTA-nominated) and Billy William's cinematography, which Russell used for metaphorical effect, are also often referred to by film textbooks.

1970s[link]

He followed Women in Love with a string of innovative adult-themed films which were often as controversial as they were successful. The Music Lovers (1970), a biopic of Tchaikovsky, starred Richard Chamberlain as a flamboyant Tchaikovsky and Glenda Jackson as his wife. The score was conducted by André Previn.

The following year, Russell released The Devils, a film so controversial that its backers, the American company Warner Brothers, refused to release it uncut.^[17] Inspired by Aldous Huxley's book The Devils of Loudun and using material from John Whiting's play The Devils, it starred Oliver Reed as a priest who stands in the way of a corrupt church and state. Helped by publicity over the more sensational scenes, featuring sexuality among nuns, the film topped British box office receipts for eight weeks. In the United States, the film, which had already been cut for distribution in Britain, was further edited. It has never played in anything like its original state in America. British film critic Alexander Walker described the film as "monstrously indecent" in a television confrontation with Russell, leading the director to hit him with a rolled up copy of the Evening Standard, the newspaper for which Walker worked.^[18]

Russell followed The Devils with a reworking of the period musical The Boy Friend, for which he cast the model Twiggy, who won two Golden Globe Awards for her performance: one for Best Actress in a musical comedy, and one for the best newcomer. The film was heavily cut, shorn of two musical numbers for its American release, where it was not a big success. Russell himself provided most of the financing for Savage Messiah, a biopic of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He worked with David Puttnam on Mahler.

In 1975, Russell's star-studded film version of The Who's rock opera Tommy starring Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed, Elton John, Tina Turner, Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson, spent a record fourteen weeks at the No.1 spot and played to full houses for over a year. Two months before Tommy was released (in March 1975), Russell started work on Lisztomania (1975), another vehicle for Roger Daltrey, and for the film scoring of progressive rocker Rick Wakeman.

In the film, the good music of Franz Liszt is stolen by Richard Wagner who, in his operas, puts forward the theme of the Superman.Tommy and Lisztomania were important in the rise of improved motion picture sound in the 1970s, as they were among the first films to be released with Dolby-encoded soundtracks. Lisztomania, tagged as "the film that out-Tommys 'Tommy'", topped the British box-office for two weeks in November 1975, when Tommy was still in the list of the week's top five box-office hits. Russell's next film, the 1977 biopic Valentino, also topped the British box-office for two weeks, but was not a hit in America.

1980s[link]

Russell's 1980 effort Altered States was a departure in both genre and tone, in that it is Russell's only foray into science fiction. Working from Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay (based upon his novel), Russell used his penchant for elaborate visual effects to translate Chayefsky's hallucinatory story to the cinema, and took the opportunity to add his trademark religious and sexual imagery. The film had an innovative Oscar-nominated score by John Corigliano. The film enjoyed moderate financial success, and scored with critics who had otherwise dismissed Russell's work. Roger Ebert, who had given The Devils "zero stars", and had panned Russell's composer portraits, gave it his highest rating for Russell's work (three-and-a-half stars), praising it as "one hell of a movie!"

Russell's behaviour on set, including a row with Chayefsky himself, caused him to become a virtual pariah in Hollywood. Beyond this, Russell's last American film, Crimes of Passion (1984), with Anthony Perkins and Kathleen Turner, had moderate critical success but did not perform at the box office and Russell subsequently returned to Europe.

After taking a break from film to direct opera, Russell found financing with various independent companies. During this period he directed Gothic (1986) with Gabriel Byrne, about the night Mary Shelley told the tale of Frankenstein, and The Lair of the White Worm (1988) with Amanda Donohoe and Hugh Grant, based on a novella by Bram Stoker. 1988 saw the release of Salome's Last Dance, a loosely adapted esoteric tribute to Oscar Wilde's controversial play Salome, which was banned on the 19th century London stage. The cult movie defines Russell's adult themed romance with the Theater of The Poor and was also notable for the screen presence of Imogen Millais-Scott as Salome.

Russell finished the 1980s with The Rainbow, another D. H. Lawrence adaptation, which also happens to be the prequel to Women in Love. Glenda Jackson played the mother of her character in the previous film.

In the late-1980s, Russell directed the music video for "It's All Coming Back to Me Now", a song written and produced by Jim Steinman for his Pandora's Box project. The production featured a range of erotic imagery, including studded bras and spiked codpieces.^[19][20]

1990s[link]

In the 1990 film The Russia House, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer, Russell made one of his first significant acting appearances, portraying Walter, an ambiguously gay British intelligence officer who discomfits his more strait-laced CIA counterparts. Russell henceforth occasionally acted.

The 1991 film Prisoner of Honor allowed Russell a further opportunity to explore his abiding interest in anti-Semitism through a factually-based account of the Dreyfus Affair in France. The movie featured Richard Dreyfuss in the central role of Colonel Georges Picquart, the French army investigator who exposed the army establishment's framing of the Jewish officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

In 1991, Russell directed his final film of any note, Whore. It was highly controversial and branded with an NC-17 rating for its sexual content. The MPAA and the theatre chains also refused to release posters or advertise a film called Whore, so for this purpose the film was re-titled "If You Can't Say It, Just See It". Russell protested his film being given such a rating when Pretty Woman got an R, on the grounds that his film showed the real hardships of being a prostitute, and the other glorified it.

By the early 1990s, Russell had become a celebrity: his notoriety and persona had attracted more attention than any of his recent work. He became largely reliant on his own finances to continue making films. Much of his work since 1990 has been commissioned for television (e.g. his 1993 TV film The Mystery of Dr. Martinu), and he contributed regularly to The South Bank Show. Prisoner of Honor (1991) was Russell's final work with Oliver Reed; his final film with Glenda Jackson before she gave up acting for politics while The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (1992) was his last composer biopic.

In May 1995, he was honoured with a retrospective of his work presented in Hollywood by the American Cinematheque.^[21][22] Titled Shock Value, it included some of Russell's most successful and controversial films and also several of his early BBC productions. Russell attended the festival and engaged in lengthy post-screening discussions of each film with audiences and moderator Martin Lewis, who had instigated and curated the retrospective.^[23][24]

2000s[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Russell had a cameo in the 2006 film adaptation of Brian Aldiss's novel Brothers of the Head by the directors of Lost in La Mancha. He also had a cameo in the 2006 Colour Me Kubrick. He directed a segment for the horror anthology Trapped Ashes (2007) which also includes segments directed by Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman, and Joe Dante. Prior to his death in 2011 he was reputed to be in pre-production for two films: The Pearl of the Orient and Kings X.

Efforts such as The Lion's Mouth (2000) and The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002) have suffered from low production values (for example, being shot in video on Russell's estate often featuring Russell himself) and limited distribution.

From 2004, Russell was visiting professor at the University of Wales, Newport Film School. One of his many tasks was to advise students on the making of their graduate films. He also presented the Finest Film Awards (for graduate filmmakers of Newport) in June 2005.

Russell was appointed visiting fellow at the University of Southampton in April 2007, where he acted in a similar capacity to his role at the Newport Film School, until March 2008. His arrival was celebrated with a screening of the rare director's cut of The Devils hosted by Mark Kermode.

He began production of his first full length film in almost 5 years, Moll Flanders, an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's novel, starring Lucinda Rhodes-Flaherty and Barry Humphries, but a finished film failed to materialise. Also in 2007 Russell produced A Kitten For Hitler, a short film hosted by the Comedybox.tv website. Russell commented that "Ten years ago, while working on The South Bank Show, Melvyn Bragg and I had a heated discussion on the pros and cons of film censorship. Broadly speaking, Melvyn was against it, while I, much to his surprise, was absolutely for it. He then dared me to write a script that I thought should be banned. I accepted the challenge and a month or so later sent him a short subject entitled A Kitten for Hitler. "Ken," he said, "if ever you make this film and it is shown, you will be lynched."^[25] Russell joined Celebrity Big Brother in January 2007, at the start of the series, but left voluntarily within a week after an altercation with Jade Goody.^[26]

In 2008, he made his New York directorial debut with the Off Broadway production of Mindgame at the SoHo Playhouse produced by Darren Lee Cole, a thriller by Anthony Horowitz and starring Keith Carradine, Lee Godart and Kathleen McNenny. "After reading Mindgame, I was convinced that I had to direct this play in New York ... Anthony Horowitz has written a fascinating thriller with a new surprise every five minutes", said Russell.^{[citation needed]}

In March 2008, he was invited by the University of Wales to mark the start of the construction phase of a new £35m Newport City University Campus. "I think the City Centre Campus is a brilliant idea!", Russell was quoted as saying.^{[citation needed]}

Ken Russell and his wife Lisi Tribble were invited by New York film writer Shade Rupe on a six-week journey across North America, beginning with a Lifetime Achievement Award given by Mitch Davis at the Fantasia film festival on 20 July 2010, followed by a screening of Russell's most notorious film, The Devils. The next day, a near complete 35mm print retrospective of Russell's work at the Cinémathèque Québécoise including Billion Dollar Brain, Women in Love, The Music Lovers, Crimes of Passion, The Rainbow, Whore, and many more found projection along with an exhibition of several of Russell's photographs from the 1950s. The next stop was Russellmania! at Lincoln Center, a nine-film overview of Russell's work from Women in Love through Valentino, with Russell present at each evening screening for a nearly sold-out weeklong festival. 30 July 2010, opening night, Russell was joined by Vanessa Redgrave for a 40th anniversary screening of The Devils and the next evening saw The Music Lovers and Women in Love projected with Ken in attendance. Tommy Tune joined Russell the next evening for The Boy Friend and followed the screening with a live stage dance number from the film. The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles next hosted Mr. Russell at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica with screenings of The Devils and Altered States with Charles Haid and Stuart Baird in attendance, and Tommy and Lisztomania at the Egyptian the following evening. Director Mick Garris extended an invitation and Russell, Tribble, and Rupe joined the Masters of Horror for one of their rarified dinners. The tour wrapped up in Toronto at the Rue Morgue Festival of Fear and a packed screening of The Devils at the Bloor Cinema hosted by Richard Crouse.

Writings[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Besides books on film-making and the British film industry, Russell also wrote A British Picture: An Autobiography (1989; published in the US as Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell, 1991). He also published six novels, including four on the sex lives of composers – Beethoven Confidential, Brahms Gets Laid, Elgar: The Erotic Variations, and Delius: A Moment with Venus. Mike and Gaby's Space Gospel is a science-fiction rewriting of Genesis. His last novel, also science-fiction and published in 2006, is called Violation. It is a very violent future-shock tale of an England where football has become the national religion. At the time of his death, he had a column for The Times in the Film section of times 2.

Photography[link]

At several stages of his career Ken Russell struggled to break into the film industry. Before 'making it', Russell enjoyed a brief fling with photography. An exhibition displaying some of Russell's work was on display during the summer of 2007 in central London's Proud Galleries in The Strand, London. The exhibition, entitled Ken Russell's Lost London Rediscovered: 1951–1957, included photos taken in and around London, with many of the pictures being taken in the Portobello Road area of London. An exhibition Ken Russell: Filmmaker, Photographer ran at several galleries in 2010.

Personal life[link]

Russell converted to Roman Catholicism during the 1950s.^[27] He was married four times; the first three ended in divorce, the last in his death. He was married to Shirley Kingdon from 1958-1978; the couple had four sons and a daughter. He married Vivian Jolly in 1984; the couple had a son and daughter. He was married to Hetty Baynes from 1992-1997;^[28] the couple had a son. He married Elize Tribble in 2001.^[7]

Related books and articles[link]

• Baxter, John (1973). An Appalling Talent: Ken Russell. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-1075-8. 
• Gomez, Joseph A. (1976). Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator. Muller. ISBN 0-584-10203-8. 
• Phillips, Gene D. (1979). Ken Russell. Twayne. ISBN 978-0-8057-9266-9. 
• Lanza, Joseph (2008). Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films. Aurum Press. ISBN 978-1-84513-373-3. 
• Flanagan, Kevin M., ed. (2009). Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's Last Mannerist. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-6954-3. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• Ken Russell at the Internet Movie Database
• Ken Russell at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Savage Messiah – a Ken Russell site by Iain Fisher
• Ken Russell's film on Delius, Song of Summer
• Ken Russell on Television – a comprehensive study of Russell's small-screen work, from the British Film Institute's Screenonline site. Video clips are restricted to UK schools and libraries for copyright reasons, but the text can be accessed by everyone.
• Celebrity Big Brother Updates: Ken Russell
• Ken Russell Discussion Group : The Lair of Ken Russell
• BBC Interview with Ken Russell and Tony Lane on Invasion of the Not Quite Dead (2008)
• Ken Russell interview on BBC Film Network Sept 2008
• BBC piece on places that have inspired Russell's film-making
• Long Q&A with Ken Russell on his early career in ballet and photography (19 June 2010)

Les Blank at 43rd KVIFF in 2008

Les Blank (born 27 November 1935, Tampa, Florida, United States) is an American documentary filmmaker best known for his portraits of American traditional musicians.

Blank attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received a B.A. in English literature and an M.F.A. in theater. He had also studied communications at the University of Southern California.^[1][2] Following his university education he founded his own production company, Flower Films, and most of his films since that time have been independently produced, often with the assistance of grants from cultural agencies, both governmental and non-governmental.

Most of his films focus on American traditional music forms including (among others) blues, Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, Tex-Mex, polka, tamburitza, and Hawaiian musics. Many of these films represent the only filmed documents of musicians who are now deceased.

Blank's films focusing on musical subjects often spend much of their running time focusing not on the music itself but on the music's cultural context, portraying the surroundings from which these American roots musics come.

Other notable films on non-musical subjects include a film about garlic and another about gap-toothed women, as well as two films about German film director Werner Herzog: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) and Burden of Dreams (1982), the latter about the filming of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. The Maestro; King of The Cowboy Artists (1995) and Sworn To The Drum (1995) were Blank's last two films using 16mm film. He now works in digital. His most recent film, All In This Tea, which was co-directed by Gina Leibrecht, is a profile of the western Marin County-based tea importer and adventurer David Lee Hoffman. In 2007 Blank was awarded the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal in the Arts.

Les's son, Harrod Blank, has also become a documentary filmmaker.

Blank lives in Berkeley, California. His company, Flower Films, is based in El Cerrito, Contra Costa County, California.

Filmography[link]

• 1960 - Running Around Like A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off
• 1960–1985 - Six Short Films of Les Blank
• 1961, 1962 - Strike! & And Freedom Came!?
• 1965 - Dizzy Gillespie
• 1967 - Christopher Tree
• 1968 - God Respects Us When We Work, But Loves Us When We Dance
• 1969 - The Arch
• 1969 - The Sun's Gonna Shine
• 1969 or 1970 - The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins
• 1970 - Chicken Real
• 1971 - Spend It All
• 1971 - A Well Spent Life
• 1973 - Dry Wood
• 1973 - Hot Pepper
• 1974 - A Poem Is A Naked Person
• 1976 - Chulas Fronteras
• 1978 - Always for Pleasure
• 1979 - Del Mero Corazon
• 1979 or 1980 - Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
• 1980 - Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers
• 1982 - Burden of Dreams
• 1983 - Sprout Wings and Fly
• 1984 - In Heaven There Is No Beer?
• 1985 - Cigarette Blues
• 1985 - Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabella
• 1986 - Huey Lewis And The News: Be-Fore!
• 1987 - Gap-Toothed Women
• 1987 - Ziveli! Medicine for the Heart
• 1988 - A Blank Buffet
• 1988 - Ry Cooder And The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces
• 1989 - The Best of Blank
• 1989 - J'ai Été Au Bal / I Went to the Dance
• 1990 - Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking
• 1991 - Innocents Abroad
• 1991 - Julie: Old Time Tales of the Blue Ridge
• 1991 - Marc & Ann
• 1991 - Puamana
• 1994 - The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists
• 1994 - My Old Fiddle: A Visit with Tommy Jarrell in the Blue Ridge
• 1994 - Roots of Rhythm
• 2007 - All In This Tea (co-directed with Gina Leibrecht)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Flower Films/Les Blank official site
• Les Blank at IMDB
• "Food Filmmaker Les Blank Puts The Scent In Cinema" by Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, 9 March 2005
• http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080507/SC2470202/80507009/-1/SC247 Courtney Fathom Sell interviews Les Blank
• Tames, David. "A Conversation with Les Blank". The Independent. http://www.independent-magazine.org/node/465/. Retrieved 2007-10-05.  (interview with Les Blank)

Louise Brooks
Louise Brooks circa 1926
Born	Mary Louise Brooks (1906-11-14)November 14, 1906 Cherryvale, Kansas, U.S.
Died	August 8, 1985(1985-08-08) (aged 78) Rochester, New York, U.S.
Other names	Lulu
Occupation	Actress, model, dancer
Years active	1925–1938
Spouse	A. Edward Sutherland (m. 1926–1928) «start: (1926)–end+1: (1929)»"Marriage: A. Edward Sutherland to Louise Brooks" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Louise_Brooks) Deering Davis (m. 1933–1938) «start: (1933)–end+1: (1939)»"Marriage: Deering Davis to Louise Brooks" Location: (linkback:http://en-wiki.pop.wn.com/index.php/Louise_Brooks)

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985), generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, noted for popularizing the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known as the lead in three feature films made in Europe, including two G. W. Pabst films: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beauté (Miss Europe) (1930). She starred in 17 silent films and, late in life, authored a memoir, Lulu in Hollywood.

Early life[link]

Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Louise Brooks was the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his children, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who determined that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves".^[1]:11

Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music. None of this protected her nine-year old daughter Louise from sexual abuse at the hands of a neighborhood predator. This event had a major influence on Brooks' life and career, causing her to say in later years that she was incapable of real love, and that this man "must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure....For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough – there had to be an element of domination".^[2] (When Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her mother suggested that it must have been Louise's fault for "leading him on".^[1]:548)

Brooks in high school, 1922.

Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn modern dance company in Los Angeles (whose members included founders Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham) in 1922. In her second season with the company, Brooks had advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. A long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over one day, however, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in 1924, telling her in front of the other members that "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver".^[1]:53 The words left a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The Silver Salver" was the title she gave to the tenth and final chapter.^[1]:429

Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett (sister of Constance and Joan), Brooks almost immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, followed by an appearance as a featured dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. As a result of her work in the Follies, she came to the attention of Paramount Pictures producer Walter Wanger, who signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925.^[1]:100 (She was also noticed by visiting movie star Charlie Chaplin, who was in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush. The two had an affair that summer.^[1]:109)

American film career[link]

Brooks and Gregory Kelly in The Show Off (1926)

Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years^{[citation needed]} , starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others.

She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent "buddy film", A Girl in Every Port in 1928.^[3]

In an early sound film drama, Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks played an abused country girl on the run with Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery playing hoboes she meets while riding the rails. Much of this film was shot on location, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies.

By this time in her life, she was mixing with the rich and famous, and was a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at San Simeon, being close friends with Davies' niece, Pepi Lederer. Her distinctive bob haircut, which became eponymous, and is still recognised to this day, helped start a trend; many women styled their hair in imitation of her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.^[4] Soon after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Brooks, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian Expressionist director.

Paramount attempted to use the coming of sound films to pressure the actress, but she called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Actress Margaret Livingston was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film,^[5] and the studio claimed that Brooks' voice was unsuitable for sound pictures.

In Europe[link]

Once in Germany, she starred in the 1929 film Pandora's Box, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst in his New Objectivity period. The film is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora) and Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu. This film is notorious for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first screen portrayals of a lesbian.^[6] Brooks then starred in the controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme and also directed by Pabst, and Prix de Beauté (1930) by Italian author Augusto Genina, the latter being filmed in France, and having a famous surprise ending. All these films were heavily censored^[where?], as they were very "adult" and considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality, as well as their social satire.

Life after film[link]

Publicity photo, c 1930

When she returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films: God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931). Her performances in these films, however, were largely ignored, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting".

Despite this, William Wellman, her director on Beggars of Life, offered her the feminine lead in his new picture, The Public Enemy starring James Cagney. However, Brooks turned down the role in order to visit her then-lover George Preston Marshall in New York City,^[7] and the part instead went to Jean Harlow, who began her own rise to stardom largely as a result. Brooks later explained herself to Wellman by saying that she hated making pictures because she simply "hated Hollywood", and according to film historian James Card, who came to know Brooks intimately later in her life, "she just wasn't interested....She was more interested in Marshall".^[8] In the opinion of Brooks's biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".^[8]

For the rest of her movie career, she was reduced to playing bit parts and roles in B pictures and short films. One of her directors at this time was a fellow Hollywood outcast, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, working under the pseudonym "William Goodrich". Brooks starred in Arbuckle's Educational Pictures comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931).

Brooks retired from the screen after completing one last film, the John Wayne western Overland Stage Raiders (1938) in which she played the romantic lead with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her "Lulu" days. She then briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out to be another kind of hell," she said. "The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."^[2] After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned East and, after brief stints as a radio actor and a gossip columnist,^[9][10] worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York City for a few years, then eked out a living as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients.^[11]

"I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl...and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills."^[12]

Brooks had also been a heavy drinker since age 14,^[13] but she remained relatively sober to begin writing about film, which became her second career. During this period she began her first major writing project, an autobiographical novel called Naked on My Goat, a title taken from Goethe's Faust. After working on the novel for a number of years, she destroyed the manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator.^[14]

She was a notorious spendthrift for most of her life, even filing for bankruptcy in 1932,^[15] but was kind and generous to her friends, almost to a fault. Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Brooks". Her many lovers from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. According to Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu, Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the rest of her life, and according to the documentary this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point. She also had an on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall throughout the 1920s and 1930s (which she described as "abusive"). He was the biggest reason she was able to secure a contract with Pabst. Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him and after finding that she had had many affairs while they were together, married film actress Corinne Griffith instead.

Rediscovery[link]

French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon (Henri Langlois: "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"),^[16] much to her amusement. It would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood, was published in 1982. She was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, "The Girl With The Black Helmet", the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob, worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over.

She rarely gave interviews, but had special relationships with John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow, the film historians, and they were able to capture on paper some of her personality. In the 1970s she was interviewed extensively, on film, for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and in the Hollywood series (1980) directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a year before her death, but filmed a decade earlier. Author Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks' apartment for an interview in 1982, and later wrote about the at times awkward and tense conversation in his brief book "My Afternoon With Louise Brooks."

As is the case with many of her contemporaries, a number of Brooks' films, according to the documentary Looking for Lulu, are considered to be lost. Her key films survive, however, particularly Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl which have been released to DVD in North America by the Criterion Collection and Kino Video, respectively. As of 2007, Prix de Beaute and The Show Off have also seen limited North American DVD release, as well. Her short film (and one of her only talkies), Windy Riley Goes Hollywood was included on the DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Her final film, Overland Stage Raiders, was released to VHS but has yet to receive a North American DVD release.

Legacy[link]

Brooks had always been very self-directed, even difficult, and was notorious for her salty language, which she didn't hesitate to use whenever she felt like it. In addition, she had made a vow to herself never to smile on stage unless she felt compelled to, and although the majority of her publicity photos show her with a neutral expression, she had a dazzling smile. By her own admission, she was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to experiment, even posing fully nude for art photography,^[17] and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation.

Louise Brooks as an unattainable film image served as an inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image. In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies". (Elements of The Invention of Morel, minus the science fiction elements, served as a basis for Alain Resnais's 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad.)

Brooks also had an influence in the graphics world – she had the distinction of inspiring two separate comics: the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H. Striebel that started in the late 1920s and ran until 1966, which grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, "Show Girl", that writer J.P. McEvoy had loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway; and the erotic comic books of Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comics artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.

In her 2011 novel of supernatural horror, Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow uses Brooks as an actual character in the leading character's visions, and Brooks appears as a character in The Chaperone by Laura Morairty, to be released in June 2012.

In an interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, Liza Minnelli related her preparation for portraying Sally Bowles in the film Cabaret: "I went to my father, and asked him, what can you tell me about thirties glamour? Should I be emulating Marlene Dietrich or something? And he said no, I should study everything I can about Louise Brooks."

In 1991 the British new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released a single named "Pandora's Box" as a tribute to Brooks. The video for the single used extensive footage of Brooks from the movie and included a text intro which explained who Brooks was. And, for the 1988 Siouxsie and The Banshees album (Peepshow) and tour, singer Siouxsie Sioux sported a hairdo and costumes in Brooks's style.

An exhibit titled "Louise Brooks and the 'New Woman' in Weimar Cinema" ran at the International Center of Photography in New York City in 2007, focusing on Brooks' iconic screen persona and celebrating the hundredth anniversary of her birth.^[18]

Personal life[link]

In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with Fields, but by 1927 had fallen "terribly in love"^[19] with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life".^[1]:199 She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928.^{[1]:215, 246}

In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her.^[1]:364 According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more.^[1]:364 The couple officially divorced in 1938.

Brooks enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night affair with Greta Garbo.^[20][21] She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover".^[22][23] Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual:

I had a lot of fun writing 'Marion Davies' Niece' [an article about Pepi Lederer], leaving the lesbian theme in question marks. All my life it has been fun for me. When I am dead, I believe that film writers will fasten on the story that I am a lesbian... I have done lots to make it believable [...] All my women friends have been lesbians. But that is one point upon which I agree positively with [Christopher] Isherwood: There is no such thing as bisexuality. Ordinary people, although they may accommodate themselves for reason of whoring or marriage, are one-sexed. Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with girls – they did nothing for me.^{[24]:394–395}

Death[link]

On August 8, 1985, Brooks was found dead^[25] of a heart attack after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. She was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

Filmography[link]

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Böhme, Margarete. The Diary of a Lost Girl (Louise Brooks edition), PandorasBox Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-557-50848-8.
• Brooks, Louise. Fundamentals of Good Ballroom Dancing, United States: self published, 1940
• Brooks, Louise. Lulu in Hollywood, New York: Knopf, 1982
• Brooks, Louise. Lulu in Hollywood: Expanded Edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000
• Cowie, Peter. Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, New York: Rizzoli, 2006
• Graves, Tom. My Afternoon With Louise Brooks, Memphis: Rhythm Oil Books, 2011.
• Jaccard, Rolland (editor). Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star, New York: New York Zoetrope, 1986
• Krenn, Gunter and Moser, Karin (eds.). Louise Brooks: Rebellin, Ikone, Legende, Austria: Film Archiv Austria, 2006
• Mollica, Vincenzo. Louise Brooks: Una Fiaba Notturna, Italy: Editori del Grifo, 1984
• Oderman, Stuart. Talking to the Piano Player 2. BearManor Media, 2009. ISBN 1-59393-320-7
• Pabst, G.W. Pandora's Box (Lulu), New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971 (1928 script by Pabst)
• Paris, Barry. Louise Brooks, New York: Knopf, 1989. ISBN 0-394-55923-1.
• Wahl, Jan. Dear Stinkpot: Letters From Louise Brooks. BearManor Media, 2010. ISBN 978-1-59393-474-3

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Louise Brooks

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Louise Brooks

Biography portal

• Louise Brooks at the Internet Movie Database
• Louise Brooks at AllRovi
• Louise Brooks at the TCM Movie Database
• Louise Brooks at the Internet Broadway Database
• Louise Brooks at Find a Grave
• Works by or about Louise Brooks in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Louise Brooks bibliographies
• Louise Brooks interview, circa 1960s
• A Louise Brooks interview clip from Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture
• The Louise Brooks portrait doll by Lenci, 1930