Daily Grind Of Still Water

In return for what they thought were “exclusives” (although these may just have been bland bit of gossip dreamed up by Strickling and his army of publicists), they would not to ask too many embarrassing questions.”The studios really did control the town,” says Coulter. “The chief of police of Culver City was also the chief of police of MGM. They exerted tremendous control over their players, over the town and the criminal justice system.”There is a long list of Hollywood “scandals” in which the reality and the reported version – the one sanctioned by the publicists – appear to be at odds. Imagine that the old Hollywood publicity machine was intact and Strickling was still in action today. That could have been provocation enough for him to act when Reeves left Toni for the much younger Leonore Lemmon. The film, directed by Allen Coulter (best known for his work on The Sopranos and Sex And The City) interweaves Reeves’s story with that of a hapless detective, played by Brody.Hollywoodland provokes some intriguing questions. Unfaithful himself, Eddie loved his wife and wanted her to be happy, even if it was with another man.

In June 1959, he was discovered dead in his bedroom with a gunshot wound to the head. The official line was that he had committed suicide, but a huge amount of evidence was suppressed. Many believe he was killed.The mystery of Reeves’ death is the starting point for Hollywoodland. In flashback, we’re shown how Reeves had started an affair with an older woman, Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), the wife of a studio bigshot called Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), who was notorious as Louis B Mayer’s enforcer. Affleck plays a real-life minor Hollywood star called George Reeves, who gained unlikely celebrity by playing Superman on television. “Here’s your next picture,” MGM’s “boy wonder” Irving Thalberg used to tell his actors as he handed them a script, without even deigning to ask their opinion.Hollywoodland, a new feature starring Adrien Brody and Ben Affleck, exposes Strickling and his fellows. He yearned to be taken seriously and had very mixed feelings at becoming a kiddy idol in a series sponsored by a breakfast-cereal manufacturer.

On the one hand, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford et al were the cynosures. They were immensely well-paid and lived what appeared to be ultra-glamorous lives On the other, they were treated as if they were children The studio regularly employed spies to keep tabs on them Those who fell from favour were treated brutally. They were employed on seven-year contracts and were obliged to appear in whatever film the studio chose for them. You could literally have somebody killed and it wouldn’t be in the papers,” the veteran screenwriter Budd Schulberg (whose father, BP Schulberg, ran Paramount in the early 1930s) commented.There was something utterly paradoxical about MGM’s attitude toward its stars. They learned to forge the stars’ signatures so that they could send signed photographs to fans.

They policed interviews (sadly, they still do), screened the stars’ phone calls and oversaw their social lives. If a male star was thought to have homosexual tendencies, they would quickly fix him up with some likely lady. If a starlet became pregnant out of wedlock, they would dispatch her on some “foreign tour”.”Escorts were provided, romances promoted or destroyed, elopements supervised and marriages arranged or rent asunder,” Marx writes in Mayer And Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints.All of this was relatively harmless. Far more alarming is the fact that the publicists were able to hush up wrongdoings, accidental or otherwise, of the contract players. Using a mix of bribery and intimidation, they managed to hide the true stories behind rapes, suicides, murders and drug busts “They (the studios) could cover up murder.