Greta Garbo surrounded by reporters as she arrives in New York (1938, photo via Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Rules for meeting Greta Garbo #2 - Wear nice shoes; try not to be stupid:

“In Rome, Audrey Hepburn, informed that Marcello Mastroianni was unexpectedly coming to dinner, exclaimed, ‘Oh no! I’ve dreamed of this for years!’

In New York, a similar dream stirred another star - Greta Garbo.

‘They said she was nervous and I had to pretend it was an accidental encounter,’recalls the actor. ‘So we go to the East Side, above some antique store, and there are two women sitting with Garbo. I say, ‘Oh, Signora Garbo, what a surprise!’ She smiles and I smile.

‘Then she says, ‘What beautiful Italian shoes you have.’ They were English, but I only want to make her happy. So I say, ‘Yes, Signora, Italian.’ Then one of the ladies mentions an old Garbo film, and says: ‘How beautiful you were.’ With that, Garbo gets up and leaves. We go next to a party at the Actors Studio and someone’s shouting: ‘Mastroianni! Greta Garbo wants you on the phone! The whole place stops like a stuck film track. Garbo says: ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Mastroianni. I admire you very much, but I cannot stand stupid women’ - and hangs up.”

-Still Mastroianni, New York Times, September 20th, 1987

Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (via)

 “How I Love Lucy was born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we’d profit from them.”

-Lucille Ball, 1952 (here with Desi Arnaz in 1956)

“I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here.

…As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. Look at the depiction of Jesus in our iconography, unchanged since the vanilla ice-cream kitsch of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. These images alone are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund.

We need images in accordance with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. It can sometimes be a struggle to find unprocessed and fresh images.”

-Werner Herzog, quoted in Herzog on Herzog (photo by Beat Presser, c. 1981)

Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) kidnaps Maria (Brigitte Helm) in Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)

(via)

Brigitte Helm in publicity still for L’Argent/Money (1928, dir. Marcel L’Herbier)

Interviewer: Her performance of the blind girl in Jeanne Ney is one of her most striking. I don’t feel Brigitte Helm is acting. I feel she is in a trance. That she has the power to throw herself into a trance and to move and speak and live a life quite outside her own experience.

G.W. Pabst: “Ah, you see. You have it. Do you know the scene when she walks with Jeanne Ney in the streets of Paris, she was almost killed. The actor driving the taxi was not a driver really, but had had to learn. He was not very sure of his steering. Brigitte Helm walked right in front of him. I had to run before the camera to save her. Do you know why? She was blind. She simply did not see it.”

via Close Up magazine (March 1929)

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise) (via)

“Number one, it was (for once) an alien from outer space who was not an evil alien. Also, it was a science fiction film set on Earth here, and I thought that was marvelous. I liked the setting, the fact that it was in Washington, the heart of our country. I thought that made it very real, very believable, very mundane. I tried to heighten that with my casting, too. I wanted to make it just as credible and believable as it could possibly be, and I think that is one of its strengths.”

-Robert Wise, quoted in Tom Weaver’s It Came from Weaver Five

Lolita (1962, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom in a sex nymphette role to stay on a level path. Lolita exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo. From the time I was about 16, I’d go totally wacko, totally crazy, for about three months at a time, then go into such deep depressions that I wouldn’t even leave the house to go to the grocery store.

I hate the spotlight, I hate people looking at me, I don’t like strangers asking me questions. I like to be left alone. I enjoy my security, my safeness with a private life. I was once on a television show, a talk show. My brother had just died two days before that. The interviewer opens his show by saying - and now I was 16 years old - he said, ‘Did your brother kill himself because you played Lolita?’ I didn’t say a thing. I got up and I walked off. I couldn’t even dignify that. I had no words. That’s typical of the reason that I can’t be a movie star. I never could.

Am I going to be Lolita when I’m 50? Much as I appreciated Lolita in her day, I’d like to leave her now.”

-Sue Lyon, after her early retirement from films (photo via Chicago Sun-Times, 1962)

On the aloof persona she cultivated:

“I disconnected to shield myself from people who would sway to my songs in the club and call me ‘nigger’ in the street. They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman. The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach and therefore can’t hurt.

I am too proud to let them think they can have any personal contact with me. They get the singer, but they are not going to get the woman.”

-Lena Horne (photo by Yale Joel/Time Life Pictures, 1947)

The truth behind solar eclipses via The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon (1907, dir. Georges Méliès)

Jane Fonda, 1957 (photo by Mark Shaw)

Interview as 1960s time capsule (also, why one should always think twice before accepting a gift from Dennis Hopper):

“Two hours before midnight on New Year’s Eve, Jane Fonda was coiled like Cleopatra’s asp on the living room sofa of her father’s lush townhouse. That afternoon she learned she had won the NY Film Critics Award for best actress of 1969 for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Optimism was high. So was Jane. “You don’t mind if I turn on, do you?” she asked impishly. Then her long fingernails carefully rolled the tobacco out of a Winston cigarette and replaced the ordinary old stuff that only causes cancer with fine gray pot she had just brought back from India? Morocco? She couldn’t remember; all she knew was it wasn’t that tacky stuff they mix with hay in Tijuana, this was the real thing.

Then she lay back on the sofa, inhaled a lung full of dreams. “I’m very optimistic about the world tonight. I wonder if, at 10pm on New Year’s Eve in 1959, people looked back on the 50’s and thought their decade was as productive as ours has been. I don’t think so. It was the end of a time when people had been fed sleeping pills by Eisenhower. Things are more exciting now. We’ve stepped on the moon! People are more alive in every walk of life. Take a simple thing like turning on – doctors, lawyers, politicians – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t turn on.”

There was a noise on the stairs. It was her father Henry Fonda, looking straight and spruce enough to be the conductor of the Yale Glee Club and his pretty wife Shirlee, the fifth Mrs. Fonda.

Jane leaped up and waved her arms frantically to blow the pot smoke out of the room. “This reminds me of the times I used to clean this place on my hands & knees after my parties before my father came home. If only he knew how many bodies have passed out on this floor.”

The Fondas toasted the New Year with champagne & Jane decided to call Peter [Fonda] in New York. They all sang “Happy Decade” to Peter and after they hung up, Jane rolled her eyes. “Boy, was he stoned!”

Henry Fonda saw it all clear and made a mental association. “Have you seen Dennis Hopper lately?”

“I was at his ex-wife’s house just before Christmas,” said Jane, “and you know what he gave his daughter? A Polaroid camera box filled with hair. He had cut his hair off and wanted his child to have it as a Christmas gift! It wasn’t even clean – just dirty, matted hair. So I don’t know what kind of scene he’s into now.”

The subject turned to 1970. Biafra. Slum housing. Strikes. Corruption in Congress. “We’ll always be pouring money into military wars,” said Jane glumly. “I’m not happy about the political situation either.”

“Where are we all headed?” asked Mrs. Fonda. “The Far, Far Right,” answered her husband. Jane looked dour. “Come to think about it,” she said, a few minutes into the beginning of her brand new decade, “I take back what I said earlier about the world getting better. The only thing I’m optimistic about is me.”

-excerpted from Rex Reed’s New York Times Fonda profile, December 1969