Title: "Sleepless" Derwent Inktense and Prismacolor water soluable pencils, Caran D'ache NeoColor II water soluable crayons and various brands of dry colored pencil on 18" x 24" Strathmore museum board. I had fun with this one!
Dolores Moran, probably best known for her role in "To Have and Have Not" with Bogey and Bacall, but also excellent in "The Man I Love" with Ida Lupino and "The Horn Blows at Midnight with Jack Benny. She had a really short career, making only about 15 or so film and TV appearances. Her autograph does not show up very often and when it does it is usually a bit pricey, but this one was a real bargain! A lovely woman with quite lovely handwriting to boot!
Patricia Neal, one of the finest actresses of the post war studio days and a damn good-looking woman too! It's a bit hard to see her sig on this photo because it's so dark but once again for the price I paid I am not complaining. It's a nice Bert Six photo too.
A great Bert Six photo of Virginia "hold the" Mayo, who forever secured her place in film history as James Cagney's treacherous girlfriend in "White Heat"
The great character actor Jack Carson, who shows up in so many excellent films and is always one of the reasons they are excellent! Who can forget him in "The Male Animal", "Mildred Pierce", "The Strawberry Blonde" and "Gentleman Jim" to name just a few.
Dennis Morgan, another stalwart Warner Bros character actor who then became one of their biggest box-office stars in the mid-forties. Not only was he in some of Warner Bros great A-pictures like "Captains of the Clouds", "The Hard Way" and "God is My C0-Pilot" but he also has the distinction of being the star of the one and only film Bogey ever played a zombie in, that being the classic B-film, "The Return of Dr X"!
And finally we get to the crowning piece in this batch of stills, the one and only Mr. Alan Hale! Probably best known for playing Little John in "The Adventures of Robin Hood" but Mr Alan Hale appeared in over 230 films from 1911 to 1950 with the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Olivia DeHavilland, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Garfield, Edward G Robinson and he appeared in 12 films with his buddy Errol Flynn! Yes sir, I am very happy to have Mr Alan Hale's autograph in my house now!
I'm fairly certain this pic was taken the first day I brought her home. She was about 9 weeks old then. She was such a tiny little thing I had NO idea she would get as big as she has!
She's so weird!!!!
She of the Chicken legs!!!
Pretty!
More chicken legs!
"Little Miss Pewfy-Pants"!
My Sleeping Beauty *sigh*
Clara truly had a million dollar smile! She shaved her real eyebrows off so she could "Draw 'em anywhere I wanna!". Although she did make a handful of fine pictures, most of Clara's films are not that good. She is always worth seeing though and it's just a damn shame that Paramount didnt take more of a vested interest in their biggest star and be more choosey about the material they put her in. Their opinion was if the public was willing to pay to see her in cheap second-rate material why bother with the expense of the first-rate stuff. The problem was after a while the public got sick of paying to see Clara Bow in bad films!
Paramount first dubbed her "The Brooklyn Bonfire" but that never really took off. Later she skyrocketed to fame as the "It" girl and one of the stars of the first best picture Oscar-Winner, William Wellman's 1927 WWI masterpiece, "Wings". She isnt in it very much but she is dazzlingly gorgeous and brings a huge amount of sex-appeal and youthful energy to the film when she's onscreen!
At the height of her fame Clara was making $5,000 a week at Paramount and was a bigger box office draw than either Lilian Gish or Greta Garbo. She was about 22 years old then and her filming schedule was relentless. When the talkies rolled into town Clara hated making them! She had incredibly bad "Mike Fright" and was self-conscious about her Brooklyn accent. So the geniuses at Paramount gave her about 2 weeks to get ready for her first talking film whereas Garbo, at MGM, was given over a year!
In her book "LuLu in Hollywood" Louise Brooks described Clara as having "The softest hair and skin you could imagine, it was just like a baby's!". One can only conjecture as to how Brooksie came about this information! Clara's red hair was amazing, it seemed to have a life of its own sometimes! Sadly the only color film she ever made "Red Hair" is a lost film. How lame that Paramount didnt even see fit to preserve the films of a person who made so much money for them. 
Clara could do "Bedroom Eyes" like nobody's business! She made her last film at Paramount in 1931 and then left Hollywood for a while, a frazzled, emotional mess, broke and washed-up at age 26! She was then offered a huge deal at Fox studios to make 2 films. Those were the last 2 films she ever appeared in and Clara permanently retired from Hollywood in 1933 at age 28!
Clara had a really unhappy childhood. Her mother was mentally unstable and her father was a boozing lowlife who at one point sexually abused her. She said when she needed to cry on camera all she had to do was think of back home. Bud Schulberg, son of Paramounts' B.P. Schulberg, recalled watching Clara when he was very young, filming a scene where she needed to cry. In the silent days they usually had a little orchestra on hand to play mood music for the actors and she always had them play "Rock-a-bye-baby" when she had to cry. Something in that song resonated deeply in her because he said anyone who saw her cry while that song played could never forget it. 
They had faces then! 
For the record I LOVE all the Star Wars flms! In spite of the flaws, and there are many, it is one hell of an achievement in film and it's all so ingrained in our culture now that it's hard to remember back to a time when there was no Star Wars! But Empire is my favorite. All the elements of the Star Wars universe came together perfectly on this one, a wonderful mix of drama, romance, adventure, action, humor and mind blowing special effects all masterfully directed by Irvin Kershner with a great screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett. 
Yoda!
"The Force is with you young Skywalker . . . but you're not a Jedi yet."
A rather menacing figure! Luke's confrontation with Vader is a living intensity! I've seen it dozens of times and I still get right on the edge of my seat! I love it!
For me, the lynchpin of all 3 of the first films is Mark Hamill. It's interesting to watch episodes 4-6 in one sitting and see how he grew as an actor and how the Luke character evolved. He's a damn funny guy in interviews too and who can foget his classic voice acting for The Joker and Solomon Grundy on the Batman and Justice League cartoons!
F - The Fountainhead" (1949)
"Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me in any words you wish." 
"If you want to be the kind of man that does things for people, then you must be the kind of man that gets things done, but you must LOVE the doing, NOT the people!"
"I've never seen so many men wasted so badly"
"200,000 Dollars is a lot of money . . . we're gonna have to earn it"
"Even a tramp like me, no matter what, I know there's a brother out there who'd never refuse me a bowl of soup"
"Blooooooonnnnnnnddddddiiiiieeeeeeeeee!!!!"
Ok, I am a HUGE John Garfield fan, so let's get that understood right away! I think he's the single most under-appreciated actor of his era and it's very hard for me to pick a fave film of his but this one is certainly in the top 3 or 4. A first-rate Warner Bros production from start to finish and Garfield and Joan Crawford are downright amazing!
Director Jean Negulesco is one of my fave post-war film makers. He made a whole slew of off-beat and interesting pictures at Warner's in the mid to late 40's including "Nobody Lives Forever" with Garfield and Geraldine Fitzgerald, "3 Strangers" with Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Geraldine Fitzgerald, "Deep Valley" with Ida Lupino and Dane Clark and "Johnny Belinda" with Oscar winner Jane Wyman, Lou Ayres and Charles Bickford, but this is my favorite of all his films. Probably the last time Joan Crawford really looked beautiful on screen, just before what i refer to as her "automoton" phase where she looked more like an android than a human being!
Original sheet music for the film. The score by Franz Waxman is almost like another character in the film! Isaac Stern did the amazing violin playing. If you havent seen this one yet, check it out, it's well-worth the time!
