Tod Browning

Tod Browning (born Charles Albert Browning, Jr.; July 12, 1880 – October 6, 1962) was an American motion picture actor, director and screenwriter. Browning's career spanned the silent and talkie eras. Best known as the director of Dracula (1931), the cult classic Freaks (1932), and classic silent film collaborations with Lon Chaney, Browning directed many movies in a wide range of genres.

Early life

He was born Charles Albert Browning, Jr., in Louisville, Kentucky, the second son of Charles Albert and Lydia Browning, and the nephew of baseball star Pete Browning. As a young boy, he put on amateur plays in his backyard. He was fascinated by the circus and carnival life, and at the age of 16 he ran away from his well-to-do family to become a performer.

Changing his name to "Tod", he traveled extensively with sideshows, carnivals, and circuses. His jobs included working as a talker (barker, as the term is also known, is not correct) for the Wild Man of Borneo, performing a live burial act in which he was billed as "The Living Corpse", and performing as a clown with the Ringling Brothers Circus. He would draw on this experience as inspiration for some of his film work.

Freaks

Freaks is a 1932 American Pre-Code horror film in which the eponymous characters were played by people who worked as carnival sideshow performers and had real deformities. The original version was considered too shocking to be released and no longer exists. Directed and produced by Tod Browning, whose career never recovered from it, Freaks has been described as standing alone in a subgenre of one.

At 16, Browning had left his well-to-do family to join a traveling circus: he drew on his personal experiences for Freaks. Because of his success as the director of Dracula, he was given a considerable leeway for a major studio's first horror film: this and the fact he was working in Pre-Code Hollywood enabled a unique production. In the film, the physically deformed "freaks" are inherently trusting and honorable people, while the real monsters are two of the "normal" members of the circus who conspire to murder one of the performers to obtain his large inheritance.

Plot

Olga Baclanova

Olga Vladimirovna Baklanova (Russian: О́льга Влади́мировна Бакла́нова;pronounced Bahk LAH no Vah) 19 August 1893 – 6 September 1974) was a sultry Russian-born naturalized American actress of stage and screen, radio host and performer, operatic singer, and ballerina. She achieved prominence during the silent film era, after taking several years off her age and changing the spelling of her Russian surname from Baklanova. She was often billed under her last name only, as Baclanova, similarly to the surname-only nomenclature of her fellow countrywoman Nazimova.

An exotic blonde temptress, she was billed as the "Russian Tigress" and remains most noted by modern audiences for portraying the fictional Duchess Josiana in the Universal silent The Man Who Laughs and trapeze artist Cleopatra in Tod Browning's horror movie Freaks (1932), which features a cast of actual carnival sideshow freaks.

Early life and Moscow Arts Theatre

She was born on 19 August 1893. (other sources state, 1896, 1898 or 1900) in Moscow, Russia. Baclanova was the daughter of Vladimir Baklanoff and his wife Alexandra, herself an actress in early Russian films. Baclanova studied drama at the Cherniavsky Institute before being accepted into the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre with such contemporaries as Maria Ouspenskaya in 1912. Over the next decade she appeared in Russian films, and also performed extensively on stage, touring and performing in many countries of the world, in the 1930"s had a program called Olga Baclanova's Continental Review and she often appeared as a guest on radio programs singing songs in her native Russian, she had trained in operatic voice at the Moscow Arts Theatre. In 1925 she was given the award "Worthy Artist of the Republic" the highest soviet artist honour. Baklonava appeared in around 17 films in her native Russia, including th efirst Soviet agitprop. dil Bread, before heading t0 the United States

Al Boasberg

Al Boasberg (December 5, 1891– June 18, 1937) was an American comedy writer in vaudeville, radio, and film, as well as being a film director.

He is credited with helping to create stand-up comedy when he teamed with then-youthful vaudeville performer Jack Benny, helping develop Benny's familiar, reactive skinflint and thus helping make Benny a major star when he transitioned to radio in 1932. In fact, on the last day before his death, Boasberg wrote the lines that introduced the enduring Rochester character on Benny's radio show.

Similarly, Boasberg defined the enduring personalities of Bob Hope, Burns and Allen, Wheeler and Woolsey and Leon Errol. He was one of the early "script doctors", earning $1,000 a week to punch up radio scripts.

Boasberg also wrote for 47 films between 1926 and 1937—especially 1935's A Night at the Opera, which provided The Marx Brothers with a commercial comeback on the screen. Another Marxian, the comedy producer Sid Kuller, started out as a ghost-gag-writer for Boasberg.

The Doll Family

The Doll Family, also billed as The Dancing Dolls, were a quartet of four dwarf siblings from Germany who were popular performers in circuses and sideshows in the United States from the 1920s until their retirement in the mid-1950s. They also appeared briefly in films.

The Doll Family

Biography

The Dolls were 4 of 7 children born to Emma and Gustav Schneider in Stolpen, Germany (the other 3 were average-sized). Harry and Grace were the first of the quartet to perform in sideshows, as "Hansel and Gretel". In 1914, American entrepreneur Bert W. Earles saw them and brought them to the United States to tour with the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. The siblings lived in Pasadena, California with the Earles family. Earles also brought Daisy and Tiny to the United States (in 1922 and 1926 respectively), where they joined Harry and Grace in their act.