Art director Erich Kettelhut & crew create the futuristic city set of Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang) (via)

 Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)

“This film marks the beginning of an intensive interplay between cinema and architecture. In its most grandiose moments the two fuse to become cinematic architecture, an independent art form.”

-Wolfgang Jacobsen, Metropolis: A Cinematic Laboratory for Modern Architecture   

Marian Marsh in Beauty & the Boss (1932, dir. Roy Del Ruth)

Hello, Monday.

Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961, dir. Blake Edwards) (via)

“The ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blonde and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanliness, a rough pink darkening the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty.”

-Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958)

“We are saddled with a culture that hasn’t advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer. “

-Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969

(via)

“I make people laugh, which is a great gift, but I live in fear.”

-Monica Vitti (via)

Peter Pan (1924, dir. Herbert Brenon)

“I’ll teach you to ride on the wind’s back, and away we go!”

Above, Herbert Brenon (center) directs Betty Bronson in 1924’s Peter Pan (a role traditionally played by women); below, still of Bronson from the finished film

On important distinctions:

[In her own defense, after being admonished for playing a prostitute in the film Blood Money]  “I played a masochistic nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac, not a prostitute.” 

-Frances Dee (via drmacro)

On dealing with difficult bosses:

“Lucille [Ball] gave Vivian [Vance] a hard time when they first met. I mean, a really hard time. One day I pulled Viv aside and I said, ‘What are you going to do about her?’ Vivian was very smart. She said, ‘Maury, if by any chance I Love Lucy actually becomes a hit & goes anywhere, I gonna learn to love that bitch.’”

-Maury Thompson (via Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball)

Vertigo, in spirals (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Faye Dunaway tries to kill director/Fugitive to the Stars Roman Polanski with her mind on the set of Chinatown (1974)

Polanski vs. Dunaway, Or: It’s All Fun & Games Until Someone Gets a Face Full of Urine

“The actors were used to the American warm bath school of directing, which is to say, a collaborative approach. That was not Polanski’s way. ‘Roman is Napoleon with actors, ‘They do what I tell them to do,” says [Paramount production head Robert] Evans. ‘He’d say, ‘In Poland, I could just go make my fucking movies.’ He was dictatorial & controlling. He gave Jack Nicholson so many line readings that Anthea Sylbert, the costume designer, half expected Nicholson to begin speaking with a Polish accent. But Nicholson & Polanski were good friends and Nicholson was more often than not amused by Polanski’s eccentricities. Dunaway, on the contrary, was decidedly not.

Dunaway was puzzled about her character’s motivation, and by all accounts, got little guidance from Polanski. He would shout, ‘Say the fucking words. Your salary is your motivation.’ Things came to a head two weeks into shooting. According to Polanski, ‘There was one hair that would stick out from her hairdo and catch the light and I was trying to get rid of it, trying to flatten it and it would not stay.’ Polanski walked around behind her and plucked the hair. Dunaway screamed, ‘That motherfucker plucked my hair!’ and stormed off the set. Polanski did the same.

Evans arranged a truce between the director and his leading lady, but it didn’t last long. ‘There was a scene where she gets in the car after seeing her daughter, and Jack is in the car waiting for her and scares the shit out of her,’ recalls John Alonzo, the DP. ‘She kept saying to Roman, ‘Roman, I have to pee. I have to pee.’ ‘No. No. You stay there. You stay there. We shoot, we shoot.’ And then he said, ‘Roll the window down. I got to talk to you. You’re turning too far right. Don’t look at Jack, look ahead.’ Then she threw a coffee-cup full of liquid in Roman’s face. He said, ‘You cunt, that’s piss!’ And she said, ‘Yes, you little putz,’ and rolled the window up. We were all speculating that maybe Jack peed in the cup for her. [Or maybe] she had a small bladder or something.”

-excerpted from Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Howard Hawks)