Hollywood History the Orton Way

I know a very nice man of my generation named Richard Orton. He lives not far from me in Santa Monica, and local history is his passion. He’s also a serious movie buff, the kind of guy who can tell you how many times the so-called Auntie Mame staircase has been repurposed for other Hollywood films. Since 2017 Dick has been emailing free newsletters that contain his research into what he calls “Ocean Park, Santa Monica, and Other Magic Places.” Now, as a service to a community he loves, he’s compiled his beautifully illustrated newsletters into a two-volume set that fans can purchase. Since the complete box-set is expensive, he has made copies available at a number of local libraries. This is highly fitting, because the project was partially financed through a 150^th anniversary micro-grant through the  City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs department.

 In reading through Dick’s volumes, I was struck by how much the history of our region owes to the rise of the motion picture industry. Within Santa Monica’s borders there still stand many structures that have a movie association. A small neighborhood movie house called the Aero Theater was built by aerospace icon Donald Douglas to entertain aircraft workers around the clock during the hectic days of World War II. An Ocean Avenue watering-hole called Chez Jay has been described by one wag as “where the stars go to slum.” It has hosted such celebrities as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, and most recently was used in a key flashback for George Clooney’s 2025 film, Jay Kelly. Unfortunately, the classroom building at Santa Monica High School that had a cameo in the James Dean classic, Rebel Without a Cause, was recently replaced by a more up-to-date structure.

 According to Dick Orton, the Jewish movie moguls of old (as well as those stars in unconventional living arrangements) were once not considered welcome in Beverly Hills. That’s why many built palatial homes on Santa Monica’s “gold coast,” close to the Pacific Ocean. Most are gone now, but Santa Monica still treasures the elaborate 1929 beach house once used for entertaining by actress Marion Davies and her beau, William Randolph Hearst. Given to the city by philanthropist Wallis Annenberg in 2005, it is now a treasured public playground on the sand.

 Old-timers will remember the Santa Monica Pier as the home of a post-Disneyland amusement park, Pacific Ocean Park. But even before that era, celebrities came to the pier for innocent merriment. One of Dick’s newsletters highlights a once-upon-a-time photo studio where celebs mixed with nobodies to have comic pictures taken. That particular newsletter is enlivened with  some of those photos: of Lucy and Desi, of the so-called Citizen Kane and Gilda (Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth), of Judy Garland and David Rose, of Alice Faye and Phil Harris.

 And then there are entries about the long-ago Santa Monica Canyon ranches where movies were once filmed. Like Hartville, founded in 1912, which boasted its own Indian settlement, and is considered the first modern movie studio. And the Clarence Brown ranch, which eventually ended up housing the standing set from TV’s M*A*S*H.

 Now that his book is done, has Dick Orton exhausted his subject? Not even close. I’m hoping he’ll look into the history of McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a Pico Boulevard performance venue that has launched the career of many a famous musical talent. It’s now owned by the son of screenwriter Robert Riskin and actress Fay Wray, and live albums recorded at McCabe’s are prized by collectors. So, Dick, what are you waiting for?   

 

Jessie Buckley and the Luck of the Irish

Well, it’s all over now but the shouting. The 98^th annual Academy Awards ceremony is in the books, and most viewers (me included) are rather happy about the outcome. Timothée Chalamet was gracious in defeat as Michael B. Jordan was hailed for his lead performance(s) in Sinners. (Trivia time: the only other actor who won the Oscar for playing twins was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.) Some of the actresses on display looked suitably gorgeous while others (I’m looking at YOU, Renate Reinsve) just seemed, well, a bit weird. Host Conan O’Brien was a hoot wearing Amy Madigan’s red fright wig from Weapons, being chased up the aisle of the Dolby Theatre by a pack of very excited kids. The glamorous and uninhibited Teyana Taylor seemed to have surgically attached herself to the leg of Paul Thomas Anderson as he strode to the stage to receive one of three long-overdue statuettes. There was real heartfelt emotion in the In Memorian segment, particularly in Billy Crystal’s tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner.

 But I want to focus on one of the evening’s least suspenseful awards: that for Best Actress. Everyone seemed to agree from the get-go that Jessie Buckley was a lock for  playing Shakespeare’s grieving wife in Hamnet. I too loved her performance, but it made me more curious than ever about how her career evolved. I first spotted Buckley in a small 2018 film called Wild Rose. It focuses on a young Scottish single mother who loves American country music and dreams of traveling to Nashville. Buckley impressed me in that role, and I figured she was a talented young Scot with a bright career ahead of her. Wrong! Buckley is Irish, and apparently the first Irish actress ever to win a major acting Oscar. So her win was well-timed, just ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

 As to the question of how Buckley’s career got started, I’ve discovered something quite charming. Back in 2008, at the ripe old age of 18, she was a contestant on a BBC competition show called I’d Do Anything. The show’s title came from a perky song in the musical, Oliver! (based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist) which was a massive hit in London and New York before being transformed into an Oscar-winning film. The gimmick of the TV show was that various aspiring young singing actresses were competing to win the star role of Nancy in an upcoming West End revival of Oliver!, with votes from the public making all the difference. You can find the show’s finale on YouTube, with Buckley and another singer-actress, costumed identically, each singing Nancy’s big torch number, “As Long as He Needs Me.” 

Guess what! Buckley came in second, though guest panelist Andrew Lloyd Webber passionately campaigned on her behalf. For me, looking back on the competition after several decades, Buckley was a star in the making. I am not expert enough at singing to comment on the technical prowess of the two contestants, but there’s no question that Buckley was better at pouring into this song a deep well of emotions. Clearly, she understood the lyrics. 

 The Jessie Buckley of 2008 was not exactly the woman we saw on stage at the Dolby. At 18 she was very slim with a mop of curly hair and a fair amount of makeup, not the more austere look she seems to favor these days, as a wife, a new mother, and a recognized dramatic actress. She was adorable back then, but I wouldn’t have guessed what she’d go on to do. Now, though, the sky’s the limit. Brava! 

 

 

Murmurs from the Heart: Agnès Varda in California

I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry. On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful counterpoint.)

 Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical 1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse of a place, a time, and a people.

 Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing, seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing “everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish, and marred by graffiti.

 The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word “murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur, is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)

 In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.

 But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists, are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.   

 Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her celebration of these loud, bright murmurs. 

 

Harold and Bud: The Pre-Graduate

It’s hard for me to think of Bud Cort as old. When playing a title character in 1971’s Harold and Maude, he was in his early twenties, but (with his small frame,  big blue eyes, and early Beatles haircut) he looked to be maybe seventeen. And, of course, acted on screen like a spoiled teenager, one who hates his life and everyone in it. But now, more than fifty years later, Bud Cort is dead of pneumonia, at the not-so-young age of 77.

 When I was a recent college graduate, Harold and Maude was considered a major film for my generation. Not that the off-beat story of the pairing of youth and age was a commercial hit at the start, The film, written by UCLA film student Colin Higgins and directed by relative newbie Hal Ashby, was almost universally panned by critics and ignored by potential audiences. Gradually, though, it was discovered by young people in rebellion against their elders. Famously it became a cult hit, playing for three straight years in a Minneapolis art-house with a youthful clientele.   

 Why did Harold and Maude prove so attractive to young Americans? I realized, when watching it again after fifty-odd years, that this film has a great deal in common with the hit movie on which I wrote my last book, 1967’s The Graduate. In some ways they’re similar: a youthful leading man, a mistrust of parents; a restless rebellion against what seems like a bleak future. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two films couldn’t be more opposite. As my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson points out, recent Ivy League graduate Benjamin Braddock is a star student, a star athlete, and a Big Man on  Campus. Back home in Beverly Hills,  he’s his parents’ trophy son. Bursting with pride about his achievements, they give him expensive presents (a sportscar, a diving suit) and don’t intrude when he chooses to spend his summer lounging in the swimming pool (and in Mrs. Robinson’s bed).

 Harold, by contrast, has done nothing for his mother to brag about. (His father seems to be totally missing in action.) His very wealthy mom, played by a screen veteran with the wonderful name of Vivian Pickles, seems bent on ignoring him, so caught up is she with her salon appointments and social events. When she decides that an early marriage might cure what ails him, she insists on filling out the dating survey herself, in his name. Maybe that’s why Harold keeps coming up with increasingly gruesome ways of feigning suicide. He also attends many a stranger’s funeral . . . and that’s where he finds someone with similar tastes, almost-eighty-year-old Maude (the great Ruth Gordon).

 Despite her appreciation for a good funeral, Maude is hardly as gloomy as Harold. Instead she’s a true life force, someone who poses in the nude for artists and steals cars for fun. In her presence, Harold discovers joy, though his “Elaine” is a great deal older than Benjamin Braddock’s. All of which leads to an ending that seems surprising, but (given a few hints of Maude’s backstory) perhaps not entirely illogical. No, Harold and Maude don’t end up together on a bus, à la Ben and his beloved, but—for the young people who made this film and the young people who watched it—it still seems an ending filled with optimism and love. (And, of course, a rejection of anything to do with President Nixon and the U.S. military establishment, representing a world that the youth of my generation hardly wanted to celebrate.)

 

 

After Hours in Nighttown

Circa 1988, when I came to work at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a strange new script crossed my desk. Called Daddy’s Boys, it was an outrageous dark comedy about a family of Depression-era bank robbers. If it read like something that had been cranked out in a hurry, this was because it had. It seems that Roger, looking at the rather effective period sets that had been built for Big Bad Mama II, became nostalgic for those early days when he’d shoot an outlandish movie (like Little Shop of Horrors) over a weekend, on sets left over from someone else’s project. My soon-to-be buddy, Daryl Haney, wrote the weird and wacky screenplay, while also playing the film’s hillbilly lead.. And its director, making his very first feature, was Joseph Minion.

 I doubt it was accidental that Roger knew Joe Minion’s work, because Joe had written the screenplay for one of Martin Scorsese’s most unique small films, 1985’s After Hours. Scorsese, of course, was one of Roger’s outstanding protégés, having made Boxcar Bertha for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1972. But after such major artistic and commercial successes as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese had hit the skids. His 1982 The King of Comedy was not well received, and a major studio had backed out of funding his passion project, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. At a creative impasse, Scorsese decided to take a chance on Minion’s eccentric little script, teaming with Griffin Dunne, who also played the hapless lead.

 After Hours is not the obvious Scorsese film: no gangsters, no major production values. It’s a simple but riveting story, set on the streets and in the seedy byways of Lower Manhattan, over the course of one very long evening. Dunne plays Paul, an uptown Manhattan office worker, now heading down to artsy, scruffy SoHo at the invitation of a quirky young blonde (Rosanna Arquette) who appreciates his taste in Henry Miller novels. He finds her in an artist’s loft, where her mostly undraped roommate (Linda Fiorentino) proves challenging company. I won’t go into too many details: suffice it to say that Paul is thwarted at every turn: his last $20 bill flies out the window of a cab; a new acquaintance abruptly commits suicide; he’s drenched by a sudden rainstorm; every woman he meets quickly turns against him, to the point where he’s racing through back alleys because someone suspects he’s the burglar who’s been preying on the neighborhood. All he wants is to go back home, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.  

 After Hours presents am increasingly phantasmagoric view of the world as the night plays out south of Houston Street. (One detail I’ll long remember: Paul fleeing through the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, chased by a Mister Softee ice-cream truck driven by none other than the late Catherine O’Hara. And then there are those strange moments involving hippie comics Cheech & Chong, as well as the papier-mâché bagel-and-lox paperweights that keep showing up when least expected.) Film scholars have some fascinating things to say about Scorsese’s borrowing of stylistic elements from surrealists like Hitchcock and Kafka, I’d add that there’s something here reminiscent of the “Circe” section of James Joyce’s greatest novel, the part that became an unlikely 1958 Broadway hit titled Ulysses in Nighttown.    

 Which hardly means this film is for intellectuals only. It should appeal to anyone who looks for a way out of a humdrum existence but finds the adventure ultimately too much to bear.  I’ve been there; have YOU?   

 

 

 

Los Angeles Plays Itself

I’ve long been convinced that Hollywood writers of romantic comedy secretly pine for their own early years in New York, when they had no money but a great capacity for love. Just look at When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and of course Annie Hall. On film, Manhattan often seems like a playground for lovers, who stroll through Central Park, nuzzle one another on subways, and find inspiration at the top of the Empire State Building. But if cinematic New York is for lovers, my L.A. hometown sometimes seems reserved for disasters: like earthquakes, fires, and terrorist attacks upon skyscrapers on Christmas Eve.

 The Los Angeles Times, obviously determined to show that there’s more to L.A. than Die Hard, recently published an Entertainment section devoted to the topic of “101 Best L.A. Movies.” Their sleuthing (and the follow-up section that features angry readers’ own suggestions) has served to remind me that L.A. is many sorts of places in one. It’s, of course, where movies are (or used to be) made: its agreeable weather and its amorphous nature have allowed it to pose as many other cities and countries. (Did you know that Martin Scorsese’s quintessentially New York-based Mean Streets was mostly shot in L.A.?) But a true movie fan knows that a Los Angeles location can imply many different aspects of life in the SoCal megalopolis. First place on the Times list went to Chinatown, showcasing crime, corruption, and a certain exotic flavor (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”) Near the top of the Times 101 there’s also the weird fantasy world of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, of course, the faded movie-star glamour of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The Times’ top five also include the ersatz flair of the Beverly Hills nouveau riche (Clueless) and the futuristic nightmare of Blade Runner.

 But not every film on the Times list showcases the rich and famous. I was pleased to see the inclusion of Tangerine, Jackie Brown, and particularly Boyz N The Hood, all of which pay attention to the down-and-out, as well as to the pervasive racial tension affecting L.A.’s misfits. There’s also suburbia (Valley Girl, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the ethnic pockets where English is not really the lingua franca (Real Women Have Curves, Mi Vida Loca). L.A. as a place of aspirations is showcased beautifully in everything from The Karate Kid to Bowwfinger, while LA. as the land of dashed dreams shows up in movies as different as Barton Fink and Slums of Beverly Hills. And the list also covers films that dive deeply into local occupations we Angelenos would rather ignore, like the San Fernando Valley pornography biz in Boogie Nights.

 When I first beheld the Times list, I anxiously scanned it to make sure it included The Graduate. (It’s #37, capturing the soignée lives of the swimming-pool set.) But some Times readers expressed dismay at the non-appearance of such films as the Oscar-winning Crash (a slightly overwrought movie definitely attuned to L.A.’s  car culture)), the screen adaptation of Nathanael West’s classic Day of the Locust (for me it misses its mark) and the hilarious Get Shorty. My own biggest complaint is the absence on the main list of 2009’s poignant romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer.

This film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, is a 2009 charmer in which an young  couple fall in and out of love while living and working in Downtown L.A. Local landmarks (the Bradbury Building!) and hidden corners are given their due. Hey, this is a “New York is for Lovers” movie set in my own hometown! 

 

 

 

 

Confronting “The Beast in Me”

Since around the time that my Roger Corman biography came out, I’ve been part of a lively group called Biographers International Organization. This group, officially founded in 2010 by the indefatigable James McGrath Morris and some of his biographer peers, is devoted to the art and craft of biography. BIO’s advisory council has included a who’s who of famous biographers (including Pulitzer Prize winners like Debby Applegate, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff), but anyone who finds biography of interest is welcome to join for a nominal fee. Perks include an annual conference, an informative monthly newsletter, and Zoom gatherings galore. And, of course, a Facebook group in which biographers from around the globe trade info, cheer one another on, and generally stay in touch.   

 I bring this up here because of a hot recent topic on the BIO Facebook page: the limited Netflix series called The Beast in Me. The dauntless biographer Carl Rollyson (who’s credited with almost as many books as Heinz has varieties) was, I believe, the first to encourage his fellow members to check out the eight-part series. It’s a cracking good thriller, featuring two of filmdom’s finest, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a best-selling author grieving the loss of her young son in an accident involving a drunk driver. Rhys (a Welsh actor who speaks flawless American English in this series) plays Nile Jarvis, a wealthy entrepreneur notorious in the press because of the mysterious disappearance of his wife.

 One reason Rollyson and other serious biographers are keen on The Beast in Me is because Aggie’s fame comes from her publication of a non-fiction book about her late father. When the series opens, she’s struggling to move ahead on a joint biography of two recent Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who were both courtroom adversaries and personal friends. A fertile topic for a book, perhaps, but maybe not one that Aggie’s equipped to handle. So when her new neighbor, the cheerfully sinister Nile Jarvis, proposes himself as her new biographical subject, she pays attention. Next thing you know, they’re having long tête-à-têtes in which, while proclaiming himself innocent of serious crimes, Nile Continues to find ways to get under Aggie’s skin.

 The series is riveting, though maybe its wrap-up is not quite as effective as it might be. It’s exciting to see Danes (who surpasses even Keri Russell of The Diplomat in looking worried and disheveled) struggling to know how to handle the disarmingly chummy new next-door pal she’s pledged to present to the world on the page. As Carl Rollyson has pointed out to his fellow authors, biography can also be seen as autobiography. The way a biographer approaches his or her subject is very much a secret glimpse into that biographer’s own psyche. Aggie, for instance, must ultimately admit to seeing in herself something resembling Nile’s cold-blooded approach to the world.

 I agree completely. I’d even say that my three books reveal to the reader three very different aspects of my own path through life. Writing about my longtime boss, filmmaker Roger Corman, I was something of a cynic: sassy and even snarky. My Ron Howard bio brought out the optimist in me. Suddenly I was hopeful about the human capacity for goodness. My 2017 study of The Graduate, officially titled Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, saw me as a member of a youthful generation  hugely influenced by this smart little comedy, but also—fifty years later—as someone who had learned a great deal about life as the decades wore on.