Tag: 1930s

“Finding Marlowe”

Louise Ransil talks with the Los Angeles Times about private investigator Samuel B. Marlow. “Marlowe, she said, was the city’s first licensed black private detective. He shadowed lives, took care of secrets, knew his way around Tinseltown. Ransil dropped the names of some Hollywood heavies — Clark Gable, […]

RIP, Bob Orrison

Stunt performer and coordinator Bob Orrison has died. Orrison performed stunts in many, many movies and tv shows including: Speed (1994), Universal Soldier (1992), Die Hard 2 (1990), Hooper (1978), The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard, Blues Brothers (1980), Smokey & The Bandit (1977), Three The Hard Way […]

Engulfed by the Shadow of Dracula

“Beware that his shadow does not engulf you like a daemonic nightmare.” Of Vampyres, Terrible Phantoms and the Seven Deadly Sins (Nosferatu, 1922) “No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.” […]

Photography’s Antichrist

At The Guardian, Chris Campion writes about American photographer William Mortensen, who specialized in the eerie, the grotesque, the fantastic and the macabre. “In his own writings, Mortensen invoked Hogarth, Beardsley, Daumier and Goya as his forebears. But he also had much in common – in technique, style […]

RIP, Geoffrey Holder

Actor, dancer, choreographer, director, designer and artist Geoffrey Holder has died. Besides his iconic role as Baron Samedi in Live And Let Die (1973), he directed and designed the costumes for the 1975 stage production of The Wiz, performed as the Metropolitan Opera Ballet’s principal dancer in 1955-6, […]