Saturday, February 18, 2017

Lillian Gish and the Movies, Library of Congress, October 20, 1969.

Actress/author Lillian Gish speaking on Lillian Gish and the Movies at the Coolidge Auditorium, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, October 20, 1969 [Photo courtesy Library of Congress.] 


Library of Congress Information Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 40, October 2, 1969
Events in the Offing

Lillian Gish will present a lecture entitled “Lillian Gish and the Movies,” illustrated with three reels of motion picture film, at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, October 20, in the Coolidge Auditorium, under the joint sponsorship of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund and the Motion Picture Section of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

Attendance at this program will be by invitation only.

A child actress, billed as Baby Lillian, Miss Gish made her stage debut at age six in Rising Sun, Ohio, with a professional touring company playing “In Convict Stripes.” For years after, she traveled and appeared on the stage in child parts; then at age 15, she began her film career under the direction of D. W. Griffith. Some of her early motion pictures include “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) in which she appeared as the heroine, Elsie Stoneman; “Broken Blossoms” (1919); “Way Down East” (1920); and “Orphans of the Storm” (1922), a film screened at the White House while Miss Gish was the guest of President Harding. Others of her early films include “The White Sister” (1923); “the Scarlet Letter” (1926); and “The Wind” (1928), an MGM production and one of the last of the outstanding silent films. In May 1930, at the Rivoli Theater, New York City, Miss Gish played her first talking role in the film “One Romantic Night.” In hat same year, she returned to the theater with her Broadway performance in Chekov’s play “Uncle Vanya,” directed by Jed Harris. Other of her plays in the years that followed include Guthrie McClintic’s production of “Hamlet” (1936) with John Gielgud; “Life with Father” (1941); and Robert Anderson’s “I Never Sang for My Father” (1967). Also in 1967, she appeared in “The Comedians,” an MGM motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor and, Richard Burton, and Alec Guinness, in 1968 with Helen Hayes in the ABC-TV production, “Arsenic and Old Lace;” and in the stage production “All the Way Home,” a drama by Ted Mosel, based on James Agee’s A Death in the Family, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1961.

Within the last few years, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass., and Rollins College, Winter Park, Fla., have awarded Miss Gish honorary degrees. This year, her autobiography Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, by Lillian Gish and Ann Pinchot, was published by Prentice-Hall, Inc. In addition, she has recently given performances of “Lillian Gish and the Movies” in Moscow, Paris, London, and the Edinburgh Festival.

Miss Gish’s narrated program, to be presented at the Library, October 20, traces the history of silent movies. It was created and produced by Nathan Kroll. [Miss Gish was being managed by the Kroll Agency at that time.] Ed. Note: No images accompanied this announcement.

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Miss Gish and the Movies by Gary Arnold, Washington Post October 21, 1969

Lillian Gish, perhaps the greatest actress ever to grace the American screen, brought her nostalgic one-woman show, “Lillian Gish and the Movies,” to the Library of Congress last evening. An invited audience in [the] Coolidge Auditorium responded enthusiastically to the performer and her material – a discursive illustrated lecture, combining film clips with ardent personal memories and humorous anecdotes.

Miss Gish looked trim and radiant in a long white evening gown, and although she had been supplied with a microphone, her voice seemed to ring through the hall in such a confident, professionally trained way that she didn’t need the amplification.

At one point Miss Gish described an argument with D. W. Griffith, the famed director, over the fade-out sequence of “Way Down East.” The heroine has just been dragged in from the snow after narrowly and quite literally escaping death; when Griffith insisted that she comb her hair and paint her lips for the final clinch, Miss Gish protested. “Do you think I should look like that after everything I’ve been through?”

Griffith, so much a realist in some things, proved to be an opportunist on this point. “Comb your hair! We want to make money in this picture, and that’s what the audience wants.”

Miss Gish later came to believe he was right, commercially speaking, but she apparently capitulated believing he was dead wrong. As far as a viewer can tell, her playing of the scene is quite straightforward –she slowly regains consciousness, sees the hero (Richard Barthelmess), and they embrace. But while we were watching this scene, Miss Gish said, “You can see how mad I am,” and suddenly those tightly closed lips did begin to suggest an emotion somewhat stronger than unconsciousness. Not that it matters, of course—this is just one piece of stylistic equipment of the repertoire of a consummate actress.

The excerpts began with a 1901 nickelodeon item in which motion itself is a novelty—the “action” consists of a smiling girl in a swirling dress. From there Miss Gish took us to Melies (“A Trip to the Moon”) and “Baron Munchausen’s Dream”) Edwin S. Porter (“Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest,” the little melodrama that introduced a young actor named David Wark Griffith to the screen) and the triumphant experiments of Griffith the director (“A Girl and Her Trust,” “The Musketeers of Pig Alley,” “The Birth of a Nation”).

Interwoven with Griffith’s work were examples of the other major innovators and personalities of the period-Mack Sennett, [Charlie] Chaplin, [Buster] Keaton, [Douglas] Fairbanks, [Rudolph] Valentino (a very amusing clip from “Blood and sand” in which Valentino, looking surprisingly like Elvis Presley, succumbs with some effort to the allure of Nita Naldi). The program closed with excerpts from later Gish-Griffith collaborations (the rescue scenes from “Orphans of the Storm,” and “Way Down East,” as well as Miss Gish’s startling “mad” scene in the latter, when she learns of the death of her child)  and three films from her MGM period—“La Boheme” with John Gilbert, “The White Sister” with Ronald Colman, and “The Wind,” with Lars Hanson.    

The lecture was presented here under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund and the Motion Picture Department of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. Miss Gish plans a national tour.  

Miss Gish was introduced by Librarian of Congress Quincy Mumford. A champagne reception in the Great Hall followed the lecture.

© Washington Post

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LC Information Bulletin, Vol 28, No. 44, October 30, 1969

Lillian Gish presented “Lillian Gish and the Movies” to an invited audience in the Coolidge Auditorium on Monday, October 20. The program sponsored by the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund, was designed by Miss Gish and her producer, Nathan Kroll, to show her career and the history of the silent films. Miss Gish became an international star when she was very young and this art form was in its infancy, but some of the films shown antedated even her debut. Many of the film makers whose work she chose are also represented in the Library of Congress Film Archive.
The film program revealed the development of camera, acting, and editing, techniques in this medium, envisioned by David Wark Griffith as a universal art form, capable of transcending all boundaries. Miss Gish’s commentary was in large part a tribute to Griffith, about whom she wrote in her book, Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, and she asked her audience, “Shouldn’t this man have a postage stamp?”

It also included, however, her reminiscences of Mary Pickford, Ronald Colman, John Gilbert, Rudolph Valentino, and other stars of the silent era, as well as glimpses of studio and on location conditions in early days, and an explanation of her own interpretation of her roles.

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“A Trip to the Moon” can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5x_M_vcNVY

“Baron Munchausen’s Dream” is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hN83ykX644

Edwin S. Porter’s “Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehFrT2cE5JI

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Jim Patterson enjoyed a long friendship with actress Lillian Gish. He is a Life Member of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Fremont, California, a long-time member of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and a long serving Board member of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Theater, Bowling Green State University. He has published more than 200 articles on the Silent era and his work has appeared in Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Classic Images, Auburn Magazine, San Francisco Examiner, (Raliegh, North Carolina) News and ObserverFremont Bulletin, and many others. For speaking availability, contact JEPWriter@gmail.com


February 18 in Film History

1929 First Academy Awards Presented
Best Film: Wings Best Actress Janet Gaynor Best Actor Emil Jannings
All Results https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1929

Deaths: 

·         1963 Monte Blue, American silent film actor (Apache), dies of heart attack at 73
·         Monte Blue worked as a stuntman for Griffith and an extra in The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was his first film. Griffith took him in and made him an assistant on his classic epic Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916), where he earned another small part. Gradually moving to support roles for both Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, Blue earned his breakthrough role as "Danton" in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921) with sisters Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish. He rose to stardom as a rugged romantic lead opposite Hollywood's top silent stars, among them Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow and Norma Shearer. He made a relatively easy transition into talkies as he had a fine, cultivated voice, but, at the same time, lost most of his investments when the stock market crashed in 1929. By the 1930s the aging star had moved back into small, often unbilled parts, continuously employed, however, by his old friend DeMille and Warner Bros. At the end of his life he was working as an advance man for the Hamid-Morton Circus in Milwaukee. He died of a coronary attack complicated by influenza in 1963.
·         - IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
·          
·         1976 Joseph Henabery, actor/director (Cobra), dies at 88
Joseph E. Henabery, veteran motion picture director and silent‐film actor, who played the role of Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith's “The Birth of a Nation.” died Wednesday at the Motion Picture Country House in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 88 years old and lived in Tarzana, Calif.

During his 43‐year film career, Mr. Henabery directed such stars as Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Roscoe (Fattyl Arbuckle and Jack Holt. He learned his craft under the tutelage of Mr. Griffith and was his assistant during the making of the epic “Intolarance.”
Born in Omaha, Mr. Henabery grew up in Los Angeles. after a career in railroading, he entered the burgeoning movie industry in 1913 and within two years became a director of feature‐length films.

After first playing bit parts for Universal Studios, he went to work for Mr. Griffith at the Reliance Majestic Company in East Hollywood.

Later with Mr. Griffith and the Fine Arts Company, he did the research for “Intolerance” and played one of the three Pharisees in the Babylonian sequence and the role of Admiral Coligny in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew sequence. He also served as Mr. Griffith's production assistant and directed the two Babylonian orgy scenes that appeared in the film after its premiere showing.

Mr. Griffith then gave Mr. Henabery his first directing assignment in "The Children of the Fend.” which starred Dorothy Gish. Mr. Henabery next joined Famous Players‐Lasky and directed Douglas Fairbanks in several pictures.

After a short stint in the Coast Artillery in World War I. Mr. Henahery in 1919 made his, last picture with Mr. Fairbanks, “His Majesty the American,” for the new United Artists Corporation.

Later he directed for First National Pictures and Ince Studios, and then returned to Famous Players‐Lasky. There he made pictures with Arbuckle, Mary Miles Minter and Jack Holt.

In 1924, Mr. Henahery made one of the earliest all‐star pictures, “The Stranger,” adapted from John Galsworthy's “The First and Last,” starring Betty Compson, Richard Dix and Lewis Stone, among others. He then directed Rudolph Valentino's last film for Famous Players, “A Sainted Devil,” released in 1924, and “Tongues of Flame,” with Thomas Meighan.

After a long illness, Mr. Henabery resumed his career in 1926 and as a freelance made more than 15 major pictures for various studios. Among the stars he directed were Joseph Schildkraut, Glenn Hunter, Constance Bennett, Noah Beery, Ben Lyon, Mary Astor, Lloyd Hughes and Lionel Barrymore.

In the early 1930's Mr. Henabery moved East and joined Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn. directing Judy Canova and Jack Haley Sr., the Easy Aces comedy shorts and the S. S. Van Dine murder mysteries.

Before, during and after World War II, he worked for the Army Signal Corps, making training films and documentaries, including “Shades of Gray,” about emotional problems of battle‐fatigue. He retired in 1957.

Surviving are his wife, Lilian; a son, Robert of New York; a daughter, Mary Figueroa of Tarzana; three grandchildren, and four great‐grandchildren.

© New York Times
·         1977 Ralph Graves, actor (Extra Girl), dies at 77
Ralph Graves was born on January 23, 1900 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA as Ralph Horsburgh. He was an actor and writer, known for The Extra Girl (1923), Ladies of Leisure (1930) and Speed Limited (1935). He was married to Betty Flournoy, Marjorie Seaman and Virginia Goodwin. He died on February 18, 1977 in Santa Barbara, California, USA.

Silent screen comedian at Essanay and, later, Sennett studios. Starred in his own series of 22 two-reel comedies made between 1924 and 1926.
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Jim Patterson enjoyed a long friendship with actress Lillian Gish. He is a Life Member of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, Fremont, California, a long-time member of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and a long serving Board member of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Theater, Bowling Green State University. He has published more than 200 articles on the Silent era and his work has appeared in Christian Science MonitorSan Francisco ChronicleClassic ImagesAuburn MagazineSan Francisco Examiner, (Raleigh, North Carolina) News and ObserverFremont Bulletin, and many others. For speaking availability, contact JEPWriter@gmail.com

Monday, February 6, 2017

Launch of United Artists A Film History Moment by Jim Patterson

Lillian Gish Knew Silent Film Era was No Place for Sissies!
(c) Pioneer Press Service
Film History Moment by Jim Patterson 
On February 5, 1919, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith launched United Artists.
Griffith’s first UA film was 1920’s “Way Down East” with Lillian Gish. It was the film that established the legendary dedication of Miss Gish, who risked her life on an ice floe, to director and film. “Way Down East” is not on the National Film Registry, a U.S. film preservation program managed through the Library of Congress.  To nominate “Way Down East” to the National Film Registry via an online form see https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/nominate/. If you would prefer send a letter of nomination to National Film Registry Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation 19053 Mt. Pony Road Culpeper, VA 22701. There is no fee to nominate a film. 
United Artists co-founder Charlie Chaplin, who directed, produced, scored and starred in most of his own films, re-shot one scene in 1931’s "City Lights," featuring his famous "Little Tramp" character, 342 times.
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Jim Patterson is a silent film historian whose work has appeared in Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Classic Images, San Francisco Examiner, Financial Times, Auburn Magazine and others. He is available to speak at silent film festivals and travels from Washington DC. He served on the Board of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Theater at Bowling Green State University for more than 10 years.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Lillian Gish in Time/Life's The Roaring '20s


                                                     Time/Life's The Roaring '20s (Clara Bow, upper left, and Babe Ruth,                                                       upper right.)

                                                                   Lillian Gish



Lillian Gish
Gish’s deal with MGM was so lucrative that she asked for a cut to pay supporting actors more

Widely considered the finest actress of the silent era, Lillian Gish did more than any other performer to define the techniques that worked on film. Her trademark wistful gestures and contemplative looks offered viewers a portal into her characters’ souls. Fragile and vulnerable, Gish presented the perfect persona for the delicate damsels in distress she often played.
Like so many of the stars of the 1920s, Gish entered show business as a child. When she was 19, her lifelong friend and New York City neighbor Mary Pickford introduced her to director D. W. Griffith. Soon she was appearing in various Griffith productions, including feature-length films like the controversial Birth of a Nation in 1915.  

Gish left Griffith in 1925 for a deal with MGM that was so lucrative that she negotiated her contract down so her supporting actors and crew could get paid more. Gish shifted her focus to the theater in the 1930s and ‘40s, then returned to movies and the new medium of television in the 1950s. Her final film was the 1987 drama Whales of August, about two elderly and incompatible sisters played by Gish and another screen legend, Bette Davis.

Text from Time/Life's special on The Roaring '20s
Released January 2017.

Jim Patterson note: Lillian Gish’s last film with D. W. Griffith was Orphans of the Storm in 1922. She went abroad to film White Sister 1923 and Romola 1924 and Griffith had no role in either film. Her MGM career began in 1925.

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