Age & (Best) Actressing

Guess what's the most common age to win Best Actress? 29. Guess who's 29 right now? I'll give you one guess.

If Natalie Portman wins Best Actress in February she'll join the ranks of seven previous movie star beauties who won on the cusp of 30 including the immortal Elizabeth Taylor (who won for BUtterfield 8 at 29, pictured above with Portman's Black Swan turn).

Guess which decade of life has the least amount of best actress winners.

Age ain't nuthin but a number. Except when it comes to the Best Actress category.

Read my latest Oscar article at Tribeca Film

Plentiful Oscar trivia and a case for Academy ageism await you. 

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A Link of Their Own

Have your eyes yet feasted on this actual handwritten letter (thx Boy Culture) that Madonna wrote to photographer Steven Meisel? So much pop cultural memory jogging is happening: Herb Ritts, the "Sex" book in idea form, The House of Extravaganza, and --eep! -- everyone's favorite female baseball picture A League of Their Own ("Geena Davis is a barbie doll"... "I hate actresses..." HA!).

That's better than any time machine in taking me right back to 1992. This is why no one should ever throw anything handwritten away ever.

The Big Picture $40 million is the new ceiling for Hollywood drama budgets. It's about time they figured that out. You can make a great one for that amount so why not improve your profitability potential?
All Things Fangirl on Batman 3 speculation (it's actually Batman 8 if you ask me, though I know everyone likes to pretend the first 5 Bruce Wayne pics didn't happen) Which female villain should appear. I say none because of Nolan's girl problem. I was just innocently reading along and then my fur went up and I started hissing. You'll know why.

i09 interviews Eliza Dushku about the departed Dollhouse now that it's all on DVD. Will she work with Joss Whedon again?
Star East Asia Reign of Assassins character posters. I am so ready to see Michelle Yeoh again. Bring this movie to me.
Empire Black Swan graphic design
/Film Green Hornet poster
I Need My Fix Adam Sandler in drag? My eyes!
Topless Robot They're converting the whole Harry Potter series into 3D. I would someday like 2 pennies to rub together myself but sometimes the insatiable miserable greed in this world is really unsettling.

<--- Meanwhile, in my weekly column for Towleroad I've issued a cinema-altering challenge to James Cameron involving Elizabeth Taylor, bitched about the MPAA and their fear of peen, and shared a performance moment from the dueling trans stars of Portugal's Oscar submission. Why is it that no matter where you go in the world, the drag playlists remain exactly the same?

Curio: Yul Brynner's Photographic Journey

Alexa here. Yul Brynner has always been a favorite of mine, maybe because The King and I was the first musical I ever saw. Or maybe because my old Ukrainian great-grandmother swore he was the spitting image of her brother. Or maybe it was just his mellifluous voice and shiny dome. But it wasn't until I spotted the recent press on an exhibit of his photographs in New York that I was aware he was such an avid photographer.

In honor of the 25th anniversary of his death, a new, four-volume book celebrates his life in pictures. Edited by his daughter Victoria, Yul: A Photographic Journey includes four volumes: "Lifestyle", "Life On Set", "1956" (the pivotal year when he starred in The King and I, The Ten Commandments and Anastasia) and "Man of Style" (containing portraits of Brynner by famous photographers). I was most taken with his portraits of other actors. Here's a sampling. You can order a copy of the set here.

I really wish more actors would take up photography! Jeff Bridges is another example of an actor who kills time between takes with his camera. But maybe today's paparazzi culture has lessened the desire to document life on set.

MM@M: Old Fashioned Sixties Sweethearts

Mad Men at the Movies. Now practically concurrent with episode airings!

Mad Men 4.2 "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"
In this episode SCDP scrambles to make their low budget Christmas party festive for their biggest client Lee Garner Jr.. Don Draper gets drunks and beds his secretary. Awkward! Meanwhile, Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray) returns with a valuable client in hand. He and his former protege Peggy argue about the Ponds soap campaign. Freddy wants to enlist a celebrity as the spokesperson.

Freddy: Tallulah Bankhead? She's glamorous. She seems more uncompromising than a movie star. She's on Broadway.
Peggy: She never got off Broadway because she's not beautiful enough.
Freddy: Shame on you. C'mon.

[imagining commercial] A little backstage at the makeup mirror with Ponds. Opening night 'The choice of professionals.' It's good, right?
Peggy: All of their research says they're trying to get young women.
Freddy: Young women look up to older women.
Peggy: For beauty tips. Are you joking?

Joking indeed. Here's Tallulah Bankhead in 1930 and again in the 1960s (she died in 1968). She was one of the hardest living, wittiest and most quotable of stars. Glamorous? Yes. A good spokeswoman for clean beauty regimens? Um... No

Later in the episode...

Freddy: On the short list I got Tallulah, Jessica Tandy, Barbara Stanwyck, and Doris Day -- different types.
Peggy: I don't even understand your list. What's wrong with Elizabeth Taylor?
Freddy: Isn't about making old ladies look good?
Peggy: Nothing makes old ladies look good.
Freddy: The Ponds does.

Freddy's wish-list suggests that he goes to the theater a lot (Tandy & Tallulah both being stage rather than movie stars). An argument erupts between them about what young girls want and whether they'll get married or not and such. Peggy, who has just been called "old fashioned" by her boyfriend in a previous scene, deflects the insult Freddy's way.

Peggy: You know, Freddy, I've brought up your name a hundred times to come in and freelance for me. But everyone is right about you. You and your grand dames and your poor old typewriter and your desperate spinsters. You're so old fashioned, you know that?

Hey, if loving grande dames makes you old fashioned, I've been old fashioned since I was five years old! I've always loved theatrical women of a certain age.

In 1964 when this episode takes place, Liz Taylor was a mammoth star and at 32 still the screen's preeminent beauty (Peggy's suggestion makes sense) but it was actually Doris Day, ten years Liz's senior, who was the box office queen. Day was the top earner, male or female, from 1962 through 1964 according to the Motion Picture Almanac, so it's interesting that Day would be grouped in with Freddy's "old fashioned" taste. But I guess the romantic comedy queens, who always seem to be the top earning females no matter the decade, do appeal to the most conventional and traditional of moviegoers... and therefore all age ranges. (It's interesting that Mad Men is suddenly using Peggy and Freddy, two allies, to dramatize the widening generational gap of the tumultous 1960s.)


Liz and Doris are the constants but the sweetheart crown shifts from Debbie Reynolds to Sandra Dee and then, in the mid to late 60s, a real shakeup begins with the musical stars exerting their power be it Ann-Margret, Shirley Maclaine or the tsunami sized arrivals of both Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand (just a few short years away). Natalie Wood is a constant during the early 60s (the peak of her popularity) but one assumes she just missed these lists since the bulk of each top ten is made up of male stars.

Since we're now writing about the episodes shortly after they air, I thought I'd add three new elements to each write up.

Best Line
Peggy to her horny boyfriend: "You're never going to get me to do anything Swedish people do."

Best Intangible Something
I absolutely love that everyone is going to have to blow Lee Garner Jr. (metaphorically speaking) to keep his business. Consider it Sal's phantom revenge. (For those just joining the series, Sal --who used to be the defacto star of "Mad Men at the Movies" -- lost his job basically because he refused Lee Garner's sexual advances behind the scenes.)

Best Single Moment
Joanie leads a conga line.


This moment was a major hit with fans everywhere if Twitter is any indication. It prompted several amusing online responses including a conga from GIF PARTY and a campaign for an entire episode composed solely of Joanie leading a conga line. Hell, I'd watch!

Other references: (Music) The Beatles | (Myths/Characters) Potemkinville, Rasputin, Santa, Three Wise Men, Hitler, The Tin Man | (Literature) Article "The Swedish Way of Love"... this episode takes place in December 1964 so we're still a couple of years away from the famous I Am Curious (Yellow) film but the "Sexual Revolution" is approaching in America and Sweden was an early influential leader in this regard.

Send in the (Green) Clowns

I'm off to a slow start this morning. Sometimes it can't be helped. Enjoy this first photo of Ryan Reynolds as Green Lantern while I hook up my coffee IV, finish Oscar page revisions, and write about Inception... all while humming Sondheim's brilliant A Little Night Music score. What a mashup that will be.

BTW, loved the Broadway show last night. Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch are theater legends for a reason. Peters was exceptionally moving during "Send in the Clowns" -- I've never heard a Broadway audience go that quiet, basking in every nuance of that spectacular inimitable voice of hers -- and very funny hamming up the comedic portions of the show. There's this line in the second act about watching the summer sky smile, where Elaine Stritch says "That smile was particularly broad tonight." That line reading just killed. It felt like an affectionate elbow to the cast surrounding her that evening. Stritch was so funny that the young actress playing her granddaughter regularly had to wait a few extra beats to be heard above the laughter. Since this 1973 Stephen Sondheim musical is based on Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and the film version of the musical in 1977 starring Elizabeth Taylor isn't definitive by any measure, I wonder why it doesn't get a second cinematic go? It couldn't be that expensive to mount since it basically only involves a few locations: mostly people's bedrooms and the grounds of a country estate.

"Desiree" via Eva Dahlbeck (55), La Liz (77), CZJ (09) and Bernadette (10)

All you need is a great actress of a certain age with a killer voice and a good comedic supporting cast. Plus beautiful costumes and careful outdoor cinematography. You're good to go. Do justice to the show's humor and the actress-playing-an-actress theatrical pathos and you've got Oscar nominations for Actress, Supporting Actress and a few tech categories at least.

[Trivia Tangent: Because we've been talking about the EGOT and the triple crown lately due to the upcoming Emmy awards, here's how that shakes out. As you know Catherine Zeta-Jones just won the Tony for this role so she only has to win an Emmy to get a triple crown. Bernadette, replacing her, has multiple Grammys -- or does she? -- and Tonys. She's been nominated for Emmys but hasn't won and the Oscar (let alone a nomination) eluded her even at the heighth of her fame in the late 70s / early 80s when she was in the mix at the Golden Globes winning for Pennies From Heaven and nominated for Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. Elaine has a Tony and multiple Emmys. No Grammy or Oscar.]

Switching gears*, to say the least...

I'm still sad there's going to be a Green Lantern movie instead of a Green Lantern Corps cable series. That could have been the next great complex and fascinating sci-fi television series to follow Battlestar Galactica with the right team. Instead I fear it will be a generic superhero movie franchise. It certainly looks generic. We need another great sci-fi series on television way more than we need another superhero movie.

If you had a power ring, what kind of things would you make it do? I mean, besides conjuring up free Broadway tickets.

*I apologize for the schizophrenia of this post. Everyone knows that superheroes and musicals don't go together.
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James Dean, Posterized

Since he only starred in three features, I thought that James Dean would be the easiest "Posterized" episode, a fill in on a Friday when I was short on time. But because I can never leave well enough alone, I had to make this one complicated, too. Here's three sets of posters for his three classics East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956).

What a batting average, eh?

I think these are original release posters (?) Might be wrong. Tough to find dates to coincide with poster designs. But note that the book was actually the initial selling point of East of Eden and that Dean was only top billed once (for Rebel).

Reissues and such. Note how Dean takes over.

And a few foreign versions for fun. I find it quite interesting that Sal Mineo gets to pull focus on the Italian poster (photo src) but then he does have the gun and what is that they say about movies? All you need is a girl and a gun. Speaking of the girl, Natalie Wood rarely gets much focus in Rebel Without a Cause merchandising which is strange since she's such a classic screen icon herself.

But I bet if you lined up all the posters ever made for these three pictures including original release, subsequent reissues, television airings, repertory house / specialty showings and vhs/dvd/blu-ray covers, you'd find the most conflict in the Giant posters. What do you do when you have three mammoth stars in one movie? Giant's credit hierarchy has always been.

• Elizabeth Taylor
• Rock Hudson
• James Dean

...but they don't always get equal billings on the posters. Sometimes Rock & La Liz are the focus (as they were in the 40th anniversary release) sometimes Liz & James are the focus like you see in the 70s rerelease version of the poster from Japan above. And though it's another discussion entirely you know that if the film were released in our current era James Dean would've been nominated (and won) posthumously for supporting actor instead of lead, since they're so scared of 'same sex but both leads' campaigns these days.

Another entirely different discussion: Is it just my imagination or is La Liz the actress of beauty sharing? Which is to say that she always made her co-stars look yet more handsome than they already were. It's as if her glorious beauty was too much for just one face so some of it drifted over to the actors, too.

Have you seen all three films? If the answer is no, you'd best explain yourself. They're all quite terrific in their own ways.

MM@M: Liz Taylor and BUtterfield 8

Mad Men at the Movies. Season 3 is hopefully in your DVD player and Season 4 debuts on Sunday July 25th, so we have a lot of catching up to do. We return to that movie-loving 1960s based series. If you're just joining us, the idea and personal motivation behind this series are explained here and you can also visit the season 1 recap in case you'd like to refresh your memory. Even if you've never seen the show, enjoy the movie history!

Now... back to Season 2 of Mad Men which kicks off on Valentine's Day, 1962.


2.01 "For Those Who Think Young"
In the first half of the episode, Don and Betty Draper (Jon Hamm & January Jones) are at the Savoy for the holiday when they run into an old roommate of Betty's, Juanita (Jennifer Siebel Newsom) out with a much older man. They exchange small talk and Betty asks for Juanita's phone number. Awkwardness ensues. Don has to inform his wife, inscrutably naive about sexuality as ever, that her old friend is "a party girl".

Betty, who loves to gossip, embellishes this encounter for her best friend Francine (the wonderful Anne Dudek) the next day.

Betty: ...she was in the lounge of the Savoy. She didn't look cheap except for this two carat stone. But she wasn't with a date. She was with... a companion.
Francine: I don't understand.
Betty: Don agreed with me. He was an old man. She's a call girl.
Francine: Really?! BUtterfield 8. I wonder what that's like?

True to form the Mad Men writers don't explain the time capsule reference but for movie buffs and Elizabeth Taylor devotees this particular movie note is well detailed.


BUtterfield 8 as a movie title refers to the phone number of call girl Gloria (La Liz). It's fitting then, that this subplot begins with an inappropriate phone number request. The sexually scandalous hit film opened in November 1960. Famously La Liz wears only a fur coat in one scene and what is Betty Draper's valentine's gift from husband Don but a fur coat. During their girl time gossip session, Francine teases that if prostitution means fur coats from Don than sign her up!

BUtterfield 8 may have been pop culture shorthand for "prostitute" in the 1960s but if people recognize the title today it's usually only as an Oscar footnote. Though the film isn't anything like a "respected" classic, its enduring infamy is as a major chapter in the career of one of the all time great stars. By the time BUtterfield 8 premiered, Liz Taylor was already more scandalous than her character Gloria "the slut of all time!" would ever be and in 1962 when this episode takes place she was still the subject of endless headlines. In our 2010 tabloid culture this is the norm but none of our modern stars can match Liz Taylor for sheer sustained bang for tabloid buck.

Consider just five years in her life and try to imagine how mammoth she'd be today given the 24 hour news cycle. I bet she'd dwarf any other star including Angelina Jolie (who is occasionally compared to her)

• 1957 Liz marries producer Mike Todd and turns 25 years old. She's already been famous for more than a decade and this is her third husband. The newlyweds attend the Oscars where he wins Best Picture for Around the World in Eighty Days (pictured left). In the summer she gives birth to a baby girl, her third child.
  
• 1958 She receives her first Oscar nomination for Raintree County. Four days before the ceremony, Todd is killed in a plane crash. Later that year she begins an affair with Eddie Fisher (also a huge star at the time), Todd's friend and the husband of her friend and fellow movie star Debbie Reynolds. As if that weren't enough drama for one year, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof hits movie theaters.
  
• 1959 She marries Eddie Fisher.
  
• 1960 Liz becomes the highest paid actress in Hollywood history signing on to Cleopatra for a cool million (the salary will balloon). BUtterfield 8, in which she co-stars with Eddie Fisher, is released but production on Cleopatra shuts down when she becomes ill.
• 1961 She receives her fourth consecutive Oscar nomination for BUtterfield 8 and during the Oscar voting period she has life threatening health complications. She is even pronounced dead at one point. She wins Best Actress while still in the hospital prompting Shirley Maclaine's famous quip "I lost the Oscar to a tracheotomy". Filming on Cleopatra resumes.
  

As you can imagine, the scandals and high-drama lifestyle didn't stop there.

Enter Richard Burton....


There never was a star like La Liz and there never will be again.

Suggested related post
78 Appropriate Ways to Celebrate Liz Taylor

Other cultural references in this Mad Men episode
Cinema: Pinocchio, Gone With the Wind | Books: Meditations in an Emergency | Celebrities: Jackie Kennedy | Special thanks, as always, to Mad Men fansite "Basket of Kisses" for goading this series into being.