Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball
“Beautiful brown eyes, set in a marvelously vulpine, almost satanic, face - as beautiful as an erotic dream.” -Richard Burton on Sophia Loren (via mptv)

“Beautiful brown eyes, set in a marvelously vulpine, almost satanic, face - as beautiful as an erotic dream.”

-Richard Burton on Sophia Loren (via mptv)

“I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it’s rather an attractive image.” -Richard Burton 

“I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it’s rather an attractive image.”

-Richard Burton 

Sandy Dennis in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols) “Sandy is really one of the most genuine eccentrics I know of. She sat on the set of Virginia Woolf like a schoolmarm and suddenly produced the most gigantic belches, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth [Taylor] is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won.” -Richard Burton

Sandy Dennis in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols)

“Sandy is really one of the most genuine eccentrics I know of. She sat on the set of Virginia Woolf like a schoolmarm and suddenly produced the most gigantic belches, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth [Taylor] is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won.”

-Richard Burton

George Segal, Elizabeth Taylor, Sandy Dennis, and Robert Burton on the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols) (photo by Bob Willoughby) On the struggle to get Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a milestone in cinematic cussing, past the censors: “Disguising profanity with clean but suggestive phrases is really dirtier. It reminded me of an old Gary Cooper movie when somebody said, ‘He’s so poor he hasn’t got a pot to put flowers in.’ Everybody in the audience got what was intended: echoes of wild talk, it seems to me, are deliberately titillating. People do certain things in bed we all know they do, and people say things to each other that we have all heard. The whole point of the sexual revolution that’s happening today is to let those things take their place and then go back into proportion. We feel the language in Woolf is essential to the fabric; it reveals who the people are and how they lived.” -Mike Nichols, 1966

George Segal, Elizabeth Taylor, Sandy Dennis, and Robert Burton on the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols) (photo by Bob Willoughby)

On the struggle to get Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a milestone in cinematic cussing, past the censors:

“Disguising profanity with clean but suggestive phrases is really dirtier. It reminded me of an old Gary Cooper movie when somebody said, ‘He’s so poor he hasn’t got a pot to put flowers in.’ Everybody in the audience got what was intended: echoes of wild talk, it seems to me, are deliberately titillating. People do certain things in bed we all know they do, and people say things to each other that we have all heard.

The whole point of the sexual revolution that’s happening today is to let those things take their place and then go back into proportion. We feel the language in Woolf is essential to the fabric; it reveals who the people are and how they lived.”

-Mike Nichols, 1966

The last day of March, My darling Sleeping Child, I am oddly shy about you. I still regard you as an inviolate presence. You are as secret as the mysterious processes of the womb. I’m not being fancy…I have treated women, generally, very badly and used them as an exercise for my contempt - except in your case. I have fought like a fool to treat you in the same way and failed. One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realise to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have racked my shabby brains and can find no answer. But when people die, those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it. So I have decided that, for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall only be one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa. Ravaged love, And loving Rich -Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor (1973) (via) (photo via)

The last day of March,

My darling Sleeping Child, I am oddly shy about you. I still regard you as an inviolate presence. You are as secret as the mysterious processes of the womb. I’m not being fancy…I have treated women, generally, very badly and used them as an exercise for my contempt - except in your case.

I have fought like a fool to treat you in the same way and failed. One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realise to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself.

There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have racked my shabby brains and can find no answer.

But when people die, those who are taken away from us can never come back. Never, never, never, never, never (Lear about Cordelia). We are such doomed fools. Unfortunately, we know it. So I have decided that, for a second or two, the precious potential of you in the next room is the only thing in the world worth living for. After your death there shall only be one other and that will be mine. Or I possibly think, vice versa.

Ravaged love,

And loving Rich

-Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor (1973) (via) (photo via)