Why do we love to hate von Stroheim?
btw, Veidt was up for the title role that went to Bela Lugosi in DRACULA. God, I’d love to see that!
I’ve read lots of great anecdotes about von Stroheim from that movie, two of my favorite being:
1- he couldn’t drive and the producers didn’t know it until the scene when he drives Norma to Paramount; the Isotta Fraschini was being pulled with a cable by a delivery truck in those scenes.
2- he drove the director and staff nuts with “helpful” suggestions on how to do their job- among other things, he wanted to include a scene in which Max launders Norma’s underwear. (He generally reminded them of why he was physically locked up when his movies were being edited.)
Speaking of underwear, is von Stroheim the one who spent thousands of dollars to make sure the underwear on the military extras in a war movie was accurate to the period (even though all the soldiers remained fully clothed in the movie)? It sounds like something he’d have done. (I know that for GREED he had some copies of the film painted with real gold in scenes where gold coins are being counted.)
Maybe the expert meant to say “the World Trade Center was the General Weygand of buildings” but it came out sounding like he said Conrad Veidt because of his accent.
During WWI he specialized in playing Evil Hun characters in films, and his studio promoted him as “The Man You Love to Hate.” When he became a director, it stuck because he was such a tyrant on the set. There have been at least two documentaries and one bio of him titled “The Man You Love to Hate;” none thus far called “The World Trade Center of Directors.”
Roger on the Von Stroheim underwear tale.
Dammit, no one’s answered my question yet!
The Chrysler Building? “We didn’t need glass facades, we had gargoyles . . . There are no more facades like that . . . Maybe one . . . The Empire State Building . . .”
Norma: The Washed-Up Has-Been You Love to Quote?
Eve, I figure you know this stuff better’n anyone. The Austrian army underwear tale has been circulating 'bout 'ol Erich for decades. The version I heard attached itself like a barnacle to “Merry Go Round”, wherein that paragon of accuracy, Irving Thalberg, cited it as an example of von Stroheim’s extravagance. This strikes me, however, as about as likely as the whole Aileen Pringle story (that during a romantic swept-into-his-arms scene in a silent film, she allegedly mouthed to her virile co-star “Drop me, you son-of-a-bitch, and I’ll break your neck”). After all, Thalberg did fire von Stroheim, and he did replace him with Rupert Julian, and everyone did say the resulting film sucked dirty green rocks. So, Eve the expert on early Hollywood, how much of this ought we to believe?
(Just to muddy the waters, if I were a documentary filmmaker and somebody had come up with a goofed-up identification of a long-ago film star, I’d leave it in the finished film: you have to be careful about feeding lines to your talking heads, the comment made the point, and the poor sap who said it will probably never be allowed to live it down.)
Beautiful.
The Chrysler Building is Norma Desmond.
ESB: You used to be big.
CB: It was the City that got small.
I, too, suspect it’s a red herring. I read an excellent biography of von Stroheim a couple of years ago and I’m sure it goes into the matter, though I can’t remember offhand.
I’d heard the soldiers’ underwear story in connection with one of my alltime favorite films, The Scarlet Empress.
“It took more than one man to change my name to Cathewine the Gweat.”
Really though the Woolworth building would be the Norma Desmond. Biggest in 1912. Now under appreciated.
Suspiciously, I’ve heard similar stories told about Michael Cimino. Supposedly during the making of Heaven’s Gate he not only insisted that all of the actors in crowd scenes wear authentic style clothes including underwear, but he also bought actual vintage clothing for his main performers rather than have reproductions made. Cimino also supposedly insisted on having rooms inside buildings on his town set completely furnished, including the contents of drawers, even if no scenes were filmed inside.
Well I could see the corset thing. Women look and stand and walk differently when they are wearing corsets.
I’ve always maintained that Willis Hawley has been unfairly blamed for something that was really Senator Reed Smoot’s fault.
Is this true? I would think that, gold not being know for its transparency, the result would look like big black splotches when projected onto a screen.
Well, the version of “Greed” I’ve seen with a large number of added photos had a large number of gold-painted items.
Sure, you could paint them gold-colored. I just don’t think you could use real gold to get that effect. Could be wrong, though: I’m hardly an expert.