Sybil Bruncheon's "Dateline Hollywood!... MEOW!

DATELINE Hollywood!!...... The producers of the new James Bond film SPECTRE (2015) have just revealed that the great Angela Lansbury has made a cameo in it as "Poosy Galore"...still sexy, curvaceous...and..um... frisky!... Co-star Daniel Craig acknowledged at a press conference that Lansbury "Sure is a great kisser!...once you get past the whiskers!.....and the yowling..."

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A New Sybil's "WHO'Z DAT?"… WALTER HUSTON (April 5, 1883 – April 7, 1950)

Darlings! Mummy has made a decision! After reading dozens of posts and having hundreds of conversations with well-meaning folks who just don't know about the great CHARACTER actors who gave films the depth and genius that surrounded and supported the so-called "stars", I am going to post a regular, special entry called "SYBIL'S WHO'Z DAT?"....there'll be photos and a mini-bio, and the next time you see one of those familiar, fabulous faces that you just "can't quite place".......well, maybe these posts will help. Some of these actors worked more, had longer and broader careers, and ended up happier, more loved, and even wealthier than the "stars" that the public worships. (I think there may be a metaphor in that! What do you think???). And speaking of “character” actors, Mummy is going to introduce everyone to the concept of a “character LEAD”!! These actors may not have been lyrically handsome or beautiful, but they often played the leading roles in the most interesting and classic films out of Hollywood. Technically, Bette Davis was one!... almost from the very start of her career. And by her OWN choice! Spencer Tracy was another. Well, my next guest here is not only a classic example, but his range of both comedy and drama, heroes and villains, insure him a seat at the Olympus of character leads! And he started one of the great Hollywood dynasties as well! Walter Huston! (April 5, 1883 – April 7, 1950)

You’ve seen him everywhere, but he’s so chameleon that many folks don’t realize it’s actually HIM in some of the great classic pictures. Born in Toronto, Canada into a farming family and originally trained as an engineer, Huston turned to his other passion acting in 1902, appearing in Vaudeville and stage plays. In 1904, he married Rhea Gore (1882-1938) and gave up acting to work as a manager of electric power stations in Nevada and Missouri. By 1909, his marriage floundering, he began appearing in vaudeville with an older actress called Bayonne Whipple (1865 - 1937) (born Mina Rose). They were billed as "Whipple and Huston" and in 1915 they married. Vaudeville was their livelihood into the 1920s. In 1924 he starred in the premiere production of Eugene O’Neill’s DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS at the Provincetown Playhouse Theatre in Greenwich Village, which then moved to Broadway. To the end of his life, O'Neill (the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature) maintained that Huston’s performance was the greatest by any actor in any of his works. For the next few years, Huston appeared on Broadway and then moved to Hollywood as the “talkies” first began to appear. He immediately began starring opposite some of the great film actors of the early 30’s; Gary Cooper in THE VIRGINIAN (1929), Jean Harlow in BEAST OF THE CITY (1932), and Joan Crawford in RAIN (1932). His range ran from heroic icons like the title role in ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930) to corrupt judges in NIGHT COURT (1932).

Huston received the first of his four Academy Award nominations for the eponymous DODSWORTH (1936), the role he had originated on Broadway in 1934. Huston continued to return to the stage over the years, alternating work between New York and Hollywood. He scored on of his greatest stage successes in KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY (1944) as Peter Stuyvesant singing the immortal Kurt Weill/Maxwell Anderson classic “September Song”. Huston once said, “I was certainly a better actor after my years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural - never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.”. Huston received his second Best Actor nomination playing Mr. Scratch in the film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benet’s THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (1941) and his third Oscar nod (for Best Supporting Actor) playing the father of George M. Cohan’s (James Cagney) in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942) the following year. Just before playing Lucifer, he had made a brief cameo appearance as the dying sea captain (uncredited) who delivers THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) to the office of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart). That film represented the directorial debut of his son John Huston, who had established himself in Hollywood as a screenwriter in the 1930s. John Huston, as a practical joke, had his father enter the scene and die over 10 different takes.

Walter would go on to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for his role as the old miner in his writer-director son John' s THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), co-starring with Bogart. Accepting his Academy Award, the elder Huston said, "Many years ago.... Many, MANY years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, 'Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.' Well, by cracky, that's what he did!". Walter Huston died the following year in Beverly Hills from an aortic aneurysm, two days after his 67th birthday. The legacy he leaves is not only his own beautifully crafted work, but also the Huston dynasty; his brilliant actor/director son John, and grandchildren Angelica, Danny, and Tony.

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Sybil Bruncheon's HOLLYWOOD HULLA-BALLOO!... Coming soon!... a BETTY BOOP movie!!

Yes, folks and fans of the irrepressible Boop-Boop-Be-Doop Girl, a film devoted totally to Betty is in the works at the studios!... the problem is which studio will release theirs first!... and WHAT will it be about? Some of the proposals are listed below;

1) MGM is proposing a lavish blockbusting musical where Betty, a sweet, young, misunderstood girl from Poka-Ma-Hola, Iowa, is under attack by Shawnee Indians in her shabby but immaculate farmhouse when a tornado carries her off to a land of midgets, witches, and yodeling giraffes. Dancing vegetables and an overly friendly banana add mischief and merriment... followed by an uplifting message of redemption and family values as the music swells at the final fadeout. (Possible casting choices include Burt Lahr as Koko the Clown, and Linda Hunt as a "little person".)

2) Warner is finished with a script where Betty, caught behind enemy lines, smuggles Jewish, Bulgarian, and carny-show orphans out of a vaudeville academy to safety somewhere in the USA, possibly Poka-Ma-Hola, Nebraska. Disguising them all as merry midgets in her own touring musical review, she happens to run into her former great-love-that-got-away who is now the resentful-but-successful impresario of a dinner theatre in Bundt-kaka, Hungary. Their romance is swiftly rekindled, and he moves Heaven and Earth to get Betty and 316 orphans out of the country disguised as a giant millipede during a county fair 4H Club jamboree. Mischief, merriment, and machine gun fire ensue... followed by an uplifting message of redemption and family values as the music swells at the final fadeout. (Possible casting choices include the Mormon Tabernacle choir as the orphans.)

3) Universal Pictures is about to start filming a terrifying horror film where Betty Boop is transformed through exposure to atomic radiation, sound-waves from a distant planet, and defective Valentine's chocolates into a snarling, drooling, Medusa-creature!!... right in front of the Girl Scout troop she den-mothers for in a place called Poka-Ma-Hola, Indiana! Needless to say, the young girls are terrified, especially when she eats three or four of them, sashes and all. Crowds of torch-bearing villagers, mobs of pitchfork-waving farmers, and a smallish gang of circus-jugglers hurling spoiled vegetables manage to chase Betty to the haunted castle on the hill where a formerly insane mad-scientist has, through prayer and bathing in llama-milk, become a kindly old yoga-instructor. He cures Betty of her monstrousness, and the crowds of enraged citizens are won over to mercy and forgiveness... fortunately, the girls that Betty killed and ate were orphans and therefore not missed by any family members... the end is an uplifting message of redemption and family values as the music swells at the final fadeout. (Possible casting choices include John Carradine and all his sons as dancing skeletons.)

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Sybil Bruncheon's "Hollywood's Hysterical History"...

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)... starring an intimate cast (by 1930s Hollywood standards!) of Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Gloria Stuart, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, and the always fascinating Ernest ("Gods and Monsters!") Thesiger!...and directed by James Whale… (as flamboyant as ever!)

The title just about says it all, doesn't it? A weird and weirdly funny movie from the pre-code era, that sets a black & white horror mood rather brilliantly. Merrily macabre in so many ways, I often wonder how many takes some scenes took just because the cast broke out laughing especially with the extraordinary James Whale larking about behind the camera with Thesiger flouncing around in front of it! A Must-See, if you haven’t already!! Enjoy!!...

 …oh!... and did I ever tell you about the sequel? YES!! James asked me to star in it along with the reassembled Dark House cast! It was to be called QUEERISH CASTLE (1933 or so). James was getting more and more defiant of Hollywood’s closeted attitude about LGBTQ issues, so he decided to rub the big studios’ noses in it! No longer satisfied with only calling the lead character “Horace Femm”, the residents of Queerish Castle were to be Humpmey Bogart, Beulah Bondage, Finger Rogers, Poosile Ball, Orson Smells, Spencer Lacey, Lesbie Ann Warren, Julie Man-Drews, Clit Walker, Vulvian Vance, and Peener Youstinoff. The castle, though terrifying and full of dead bodies, trap doors, and secret passages, was also to be a fabulous dance hall/speak-easy with Vaudeville acts, including drag performance-knife throwers, transvestite-trapeze artists, contortionist-fortune tellers of indeterminate gender, and dog-and-cat ventriloquism! I was going to play “The Insatiable & Inscrewtable Vaj-eena”, a gypsy fortune teller who uses tea leaves and oblong vegetables to determine the unsuspecting guests’ futures… Misfortune and Merriment ensues!... or so we hoped. The Hays Committee shut us down for “Gross Indecency!... and oblong vegetables!” JEEEESH!!!!

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Sybil Bruncheon's "My Merry Memoirs!"... Fiddling Around in Films!

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933!!!...

Did I ever tell you about my tour through Hollywood's chorus lines when the Stock Market Crash and Depression had screwed up most careers... including mine? Well, I went from fabulous times in the silents and made the transition to the talkies with no problem... but BOOOM!! My investments evaporated, my debts exploded, and it was a choice between waitressing at the Automat or playing a neon violin with a hundred other girls in a darkened sound stage... dressed like a giant lampshade that kept getting caught in my battery pack! Look for me during the "Shadow Waltz" number... you can find m easily! I'm the one with the neon violin shorting out over and over, flickering on and off again as it zaps me in my patooties! By the end of the shoot, my hair looked like a haystack! It took me two days at Mr. Paulette's to put the marcelle back in it! JEEEEESH!!!

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Sybil Bruncheon's "I'm A Fan of Fabulous Films"...

I love thrillers!... suspense films that make you completely forget you're sitting in a movie theatre with hundreds of strangers or tucked into a blanket shivering away on your sofa in the dark! And there are so many different variations on the thriller genre; science fiction, horror, serial killers, slasher films, who-dunnits... oh, the list goes on and on! Here are a few of my favorites, and I would have added another ten or twenty, but a photo collage is only so big!…

If you’re having trouble with the titles of these great suspense films, the answers are directly below!

[Top row: PSYCHO (1960), THE USUAL SUSPECTS (1995), REAR WINDOW (1954). Middle row: CHINATOWN (1974), L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997), SEVEN (1995), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). Bottom row: KLUTE (1971), JAWS (1975), THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)]

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Sybil Bruncheon's "WHO'Z DAT?"... Aquarius Goes Hollywood!... The ACTORS!

[Clockwise from upper left: Edgar Bergen (with Charlie McCarthy); Jimmy Durante; S.Z. Sakall; Clark Gable; Edward Arnold; Ronald Colman, Ronald Reagan, John Carradine]

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “Hollywood’s OTHER Side”… alternative plots for classic films!

Yes, this movie still does look like it’s from the gentle drama OUR VINES HAVE TENDER GRAPES (1945) starring Edward G. Robinson, Agnes Moorehead, Margaret O’Brien, and a host of lovable character actors and actresses from the MGM studio stable… It’s a bucolic, charming, and heartwarming tale told from a little girl’s point of view about a Wisconsin farm and Norwegian immigrants… sort of like I REMEMBER MAMA but with cows instead of San Francisco fog…

But did you know that the original story, still set in the 1940s and Wisconsin, was very, very different from what MGM finally settled on? The title was originally OUR VINES HAVE POISON TENDRILS, and it concerned the dangerous secret world of 3rd grade, Nazi sympathizers, barnyard sabotage, and the use of farm animals as German spies and saboteurs infiltrating the heartland, specifically in the dairy industry. Consequently, little Nell Gustafson (Margaret O’Brien in a chilling and very convincing performance) heads a herd of formerly gentle cows and sheep and turns them into brainwashed fascist-terrorists and assassins. Dressed as Little Bo Peep for a school play titled “Our Fairy-Tale Friends”, she turns Flossie, her favorite lamb, into a flame-throwing storm-trooper who incinerates a brownie and cookie stand at the 4H Jamboree. Pies, cakes, and strudels are horribly destroyed while children dressed as a corn cob, an asparagus, a ham, and other objects of American farm abundance run shrieking in terror! O’Brien’s little Nell points and laughs from the gun-turret of her panzer-tank constructed from Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and an old Soap Box Derby chassis.

Later, her parents, played by Robinson and Moorhead, are devastated as Nell pledges allegiance to the New World Order during a spelling bee where the competition words include “schnitzel”, “sauerkraut”,  “dachshund”, and “gesundheit”. Needless to say, only her recruited Nazi-pals can spell the words correctly. Her former “best girlfriend” little Becky-Marie Granger is unable in the third round to correctly spell “doppelgänger”, and is dragged to the swing set and summarily shot… without a blindfold…

The film ends with Nell in charge of the local Girl Scouts chapter and being addressed as Fräulein Hiawatha during the annual Our Indian Heritage Festival… needless to say, there are no Native Americans in sight. “The End” projected on the final screen is followed by a giant question mark.

The test audiences were horrified by the implications; sales of American cheese plummeted, and several Good Humor ice cream trucks were attacked and set on fire in suburban neighborhoods. The MGM board immediately reshot and re-edited the entire film… another case of  “Hollywood’s OTHER Side”…

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Sybil Bruncheon's "My Merry Memoirs!"... the 1950s...

THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957)... on a personal note, I was cast in the sequel made in 1958 with Kenneth Tobey, Beverly Garland, Gloria Talbot, Faith Domergue, John Hoyt, and Narda Onyx... it was called THE DEADLY WO-MANTIS (1958)... I got to play the title character!... well, until the Marines dropped an A-Bomb on me while I was eating Toledo... JEEESH!

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Sybil Bruncheon’s “Hollywood’s Hysterical Histories!”…

Seen here is a rare photo of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe, secretly visiting the set of GODZILLA (1954) on the first day of shooting. She had been in private negotiations with the director Ishirō Honda about starring in the film, but he carefully explained to her through translators that the only American in it would be a male reporter to be played by Raymond Burr. Apparently, Monroe laughed merrily and said “NO, Silly!!” She wanted to play the title character… GODZILLA! She revealed she had been coached for months by her mentor Lee Strasberg and had stayed overnight at the Cuddly Critters Petting Zoo … in their iguana cage! The staff, again patiently, granted that although she was quite convincing at stepping on toy skyscrapers in slow motion and roar-honking loudly on cue, she was still too attractive to play a dinosaur… even if she DID stop using moisturizer. She was devastated and returned to America heartbroken. She immediately married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. Who she claimed “looks a lot like Godzilla, especially when he just gets out of the shower!”…

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