The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (320 page)

This is a sad story: once vigorous, Parrish never passed the point of wondering where his next film would come from. As the movie world grew more unreliable as an employer, so his projects became intractable. His reflective, anecdotal books became more worthwhile than his films.

Parrish was a teenage actor:
Four Sons
(28, John Ford);
Mother Machree
(28, Ford);
The Iron Mask
(29, Allan Dwan);
Men Without Women
(30, Ford);
The Right to Love
(30, Richard Wallace);
Up the River
(30, Ford);
All Quiet on the Western Front
(30, Lewis Milestone);
City Lights
(31, Charles Chaplin); and
The Informer
(35, Ford). He was with Ford as assistant editor in the late thirties and assistant director on
Gunga Din
(39, George Stevens). He was Ford’s editor during the war on
The Battle of Midway
and
December 7th
, and after the war on
Body and Soul
(47, Robert Rossen);
A Double Life
(48, George Cukor);
No Minor Vices
(48, Milestone);
Caught
(49, Max Ophuls);
All the King’s Men
(49, Rossen); and
Of Men and Music
(50, Irving Reis). He also directed some of
The Lusty Men
(52) during Nicholas Ray’s absence through illness.

His first thrillers benefited from being economical and direct:
Cry Danger
is especially exciting. Parrish appeared to expand with better material and actors.
My Pal Gus
is an engaging comedy,
The Purple Plain
a startlingly vivid account of Gregory Peck in extremis,
Lucy Gallant
a domestic Western with character,
Fire Down Below
amusing nonsense, and
The Wonderful Country
a Western of real distinction.
In the French Style
was unconvincing, but
Up from the Beach
was a good war picture.

After that, however, Parrish produced either the pretentious—
Duffy
(the remains of a Donald Cammell script)—or the messy—
The Bobo
and
Doppelganger
. But after ten years’ absence, he reappeared as codirector of an American documentary, a labor of love, but a slow, uninvolving film.

Louella Parsons
(Oettinger) (1881–1972), b. Freeport, Illinois; and
Hedda Hopper
(Elda Furry) (1885–1966), b. Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania
People once regarded Hedda and Louella as a great rivalry—like Robinson and La Motta for five or six years, vital to the circulation war among Los Angeles newspapers. Yet, truly, in hindsight, they work best the way we refer to them: as a team, as two old, overdressed biddies (a bit like dahlias battered by rain) who needed each other. In fact, Hedda studied Louella and then set up the contest with her. But if you were to tell their story today, you would need a complicit Louella mistress-minding the whole furor.

Louella led the way (she was the older of two women who practiced lying with their own ages), but she was the less smart of the two—as if that had much to do with it, or as if their writings are recommended for wit or insight. But Louella attended high school in Dixon, Illinois (something a native of the town, Ronald Reagan, later cultivated), and she was a teenage reporter on the local paper before marrying John Parsons (in 1905) and having a daughter, Harriet, who would become her assistant and substitute.

There was a quick divorce, and it was as a single mother that Mrs. Parsons tried screenwriting at Chicago’s Essanay Studios and then joined the
Chicago Record-Herald
. She had one bright idea: as celebrities training across the country made the two-hour stopover in Chicago, she would interview them. In 1918, she joined the
New York Morning Telegraph
, married again (to Jack McCaffrey), and had a passionate affair with labor leader Peter Brady.

What changed everything was her joining William Randolph Hearst’s
New York American
in 1923, for $250 a week, to be its entertainment writer. Legend, and Peter Bogdanovich’s entertaining film
The Cat’s Meow
(in which Jennifer Tilly does a good job as Louella), offer the story that Louella was on the Hearst yacht when Thomas Ince died (in 1924), that she had the inside dope on the scandal, and that’s how she secured her position with the Hearst papers.

It may have helped. But Louella’s contract was earlier, and Louella had paid her dues by sucking up to Marion Davies. It is true that in 1925 Louella fell sick with TB and that Hearst paid for her recuperation. A year later, he insisted that she come out to Los Angeles (in other words, she was actually still posted in New York in 1924). And so began her empire: seven columns a week for the
L.A. Herald
Examiner
, plus a radio show, with a syndication deal that went to over 370 papers at its peak.

It was the early thirties before Hedda Hopper came into Louella’s life. In 1913, Hedda had married DeWolf Hopper: she was a Broadway dancer, he was a matinee idol. Together, in 1915, they went to Hollywood: he joined Triangle and she began a career as an actress that easily outlasted the marriage (over in 1922). For a few years, she was a lead, but then she happily accepted supporting roles and went on doggedly until the late thirties. If I skip titles, it’s because she wouldn’t be in this book as an actress.

But she was no fool, and she had sense enough to know that in Hollywood then information had a currency. She became one of Louella’s sources, and she was able to observe and learn from the older woman’s routine. In 1936, she started a radio talk show, and in 1938 she promoted herself into a job at the
L.A. Times
that rapidly made her Louella’s match, or rival.

What did the two of them do? Essentially, they played ball with the studios. They recognized that they could become important and wealthy parts of the promotional machine, running star interviews, profiles, and “secrets” from their private lives. The legend goes that they often angered stars with their indiscretion, yet I think it’s closer to the truth that (as journalists) they were remarkable for the stories they buried, for ugly truths they were prepared to ignore. For, more or less, their power coincided with the contract system, a part of which was the “morals clause”—a blanket warning that any unruly or improper behavior could end a career.

What they and people like MGM head of publicity Howard Strickling knew is another matter—that is the lost history of Hollywood. But Louella and Hedda were writers who left a legacy in which little printed in the L.A. press and the fan magazines in those days can be trusted. They were partners with the publicity machine in spreading a picture that suited the studios. They hardly ever dealt with real business, or money, and they never offended the real powers. If they picked on a star, it was a sign that that star’s number was up. In other words, they helped erect the barrier that has always protected Hollywood from our scrutiny.

Gossip press today is far rougher. (These were both ladies raised in the Victorian age.) But there is no contract system, and so every star needs to hire an agency—like PMK—to run publicity or protection. That manipulation of truth or impression—we call it “spin”—is a true American art, much neglected, and it is arguable that it began in show business before it set in in politics.

But these days the public has acquired a greater taste for trashiness or even criminal behavior in stars. Hedda and Louella took it for granted that the movies were good for business and for America, and they stirred the pot.

Hedda is semifamous for her appearance, looking for dirt, at the end of
Sunset Boulevard
(50, Billy Wilder) and even made a final appearance in
The Oscar
(66, Russell Rouse). She had a son, William Hopper (he played Paul Drake on
Perry Mason
and Natalie Wood’s father in
Rebel Without a Cause
), who was said to be his mother’s spy. She died without having to see
Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider
, or worse intrusions on wholesome entertainment. Louella faltered in 1962 when the
Herald Examiner
folded. She spent her last years, silent, in a Santa Monica rest home, paid for by Hearst money.

No one reads them now. No one, much, would go to their files for reliable material. Louella, famously, led the charge against
Citizen Kane
, and that has only been the most admired film for fifty years. As to wounds, I suspect that Pauline Kael did more hurt to Hollywood feelings, and she never used a hatpin—she didn’t even wear hats.

Pier Paolo Pasolini
(1922–75), b. Bologna, Italy
1961:
Accattone
. 1962:
Mamma Roma;
“La Ricotta,” episode from
RoGoPaG
. 1963:
La Rabbia
(part 1; film never released because of difficulties over part 2, directed by Giovanni Guareschi);
Sopraluoghi in Palestina per “Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo”
(d). 1964:
Comizi d’Amore; Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to St. Matthew
. 1966:
Uccellacci e Uccellini/The Hawks and the Sparrows;
“La Terra Vista dalla Luna,” episode from
Le Streghe;
“Che Cosa Sona le Nuvole?” episode from
Capriccio all’Italiana
. 1967:
Edipo Re/Oedipus Rex;
“La Fiore di Campo,” episode from
Amore e Rabbia
. 1968:
Teorema/Theorem
. 1969:
Il Porcile/Pigsty
. 1969:
Medea
. 1971:
Il Decamerone/The Decameron; I Muri di Sana
. 1972:
I Racconti di Canterbury/The Canterbury Tales
. 1974:
The Arabian Nights
. 1975:
Salo o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma/ Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom
.

Pasolini was never merely a movie director. He was a Marxist, a poet, and a novelist, an intellectual prophet, and committed to the homosexual life. He was a figure in the Italian cultural landscape, and it may be that his violent death (murdered by a teenage hustler) is best understood in terms of the many controversies he had stirred up. For, finally, he was a dramatic corpse, as if that was the ultimate way of declaring his truth. In his films, too, there are many creative forces at war with his flux of gravity and emotionalism. Though not a believer, he was preoccupied with belief; he recognized the need to address contemporary issues; yet he also loved the epic, scholarly and homoerotic recreation of earlier literary worlds—he was thrilled by decor, light, and the great beauty of battered faces and heroic bodies. He was very articulate, very determined—yet he frequently went off in opposed directions.

Like Buñuel, Pasolini despised the establishment’s imaginative life for being decadent and threadbare compared with that of the vigorous outsider—whether the legendary man who figures in
Theorem
, the slum kid in
Accattone
, or even the artisan Christ of the Matthew Gospel.

He persistently offended Italian authority—Church and State—and the absurd suspended sentence after
La Ricotta
was only the most notorious brush he had (and courted). Just as his films often pointed accusingly at his own society, so he retained a creative interest in other arts. Originally a poet, essayist, and novelist, his writing was a vital part of his work. Indeed, his paper, “Il Cinema di Poesia,” read at the 1965 Pesaro Festival, is one of the most worthwhile contributions to cinema theory. An esoterically argued and barbarously worded essay, it marked a deepening poetic content in Pasolini’s own films.

Despite admiration for Pasolini as theorist, I cannot like his films too much. He often inflicted a portentous mystery on his images, and was not the most graceful of visual realizers. His strident compositions were clumsy and monotonous, and his appetite for faces often overrode the ability to edit shots together fluently. The style was top-heavy, just as the meanings of his films were too literary, too immediate, and too inconsistent. Very close in mood to Buñuel,
Pigsty
and
Theorem
—his best films—have a showy and gratuitous cruelty and an unresolved desire to brandish fantasy within the everyday.

The Decameron
was an odd departure, hardly sustained by the simplistic pretext that the Middle Ages were like our own, or by the interest of Pasolini himself playing Giotto in search of good faces to adorn the stories. But to extend that choice to
The Canterbury Tales
was eccentric, and it meant the elimination of Chaucer’s May mood for the bawdy anecdote.
The Arabian Nights
was the dullest of the sequence, and
Salo
was gratuitously disgusting—as if something had shaped or clarified in its director’s mind. Intellect and artiness were gone, and a kind of gay pornography was revealed.

Before he began directing, Pasolini had written several novels dealing with lowlife in Rome and had moved on from Friulian dialect poetry to be an important Italian poet. During the 1950s, he worked as a writer on many films, including
La Donna del Fiume
(54, Mario Soldati);
Nights of Cabiria
(56, Federico Fellini); as a dialogue man on Selznick’s
A Farewell to Arms
(57, Charles Vidor);
Marisa la Civetta
(57, Mauro Bolognini);
Giovani Mariti
(58, Bolognini);
La Notte Brava
(59, Bolognini);
Morte di un Amico
(60, Franco Rossi);
I Bell’Antonio
(60, Bolognini);
La Lunga Notte del ’43
(60, Florestano Vancini);
La Ragazza in Vetrina
(61, Luciano Emmer); and
La Commare Secca
(62, Bernardo Bertolucci).

Ivan Passer
, b. Prague, 1933
1964:
A Boring Afternoon
(s). 1965:
Intimate Lighting
. 1971:
Born to Win
. 1974:
Law and Disorder
. 1977:
Silver Bears
. 1981:
Cutter and Bone / Cutter’s Way
. 1985:
Creator
. 1988:
Haunted Summer
. 1990:
Fourth Story
(TV). 1992:
Stalin
(TV). 1994:
While Justice Sleeps
. 1995:
Kidnapped
(TV). 2000:
Picnic
(TV). 2005:
Nomad
.