Original subtitles

Now onto Arena Embarks on a journey through the darker side of Hollywood's

history to reveal the tawdry face of Tinseltown.

Your guide is Kenneth Anger and his tour starts here.

Hollywood, three magic syllables invoking the wonder world of make believe.

To the faithful, it was more than a dream factory where one young hopeful out of a million

got a break.

It was Dreamland itself,

the home of the heavenly bodies,

the glamour galaxy of Hollywood.

Kenneth Anger,

their chronicler born among them,

who chose for his destiny not to record

Hollywood Heaven, but to lift the veil on Hollywood Babylon.

Kenneth Anger was raised in Beverly Hills and grew up in 1930s Hollywood.

He has written two books on the scandals that have littered Hollywood's history and raised

gossip to an art form.

He called them Hollywood Babylon, likening the legendary decadence of the ancient city

to the unrestrained excesses of Hollywood's golden years.

His own films have made him one of the most influential figures of underground cinema.

Both his books and films explore the same subjects,

glamour, illusion and human frailty.

For Anger, The Golden Age began with D.W. Griffith,

the outrageously extravagant director who dared to reconstruct the colossal court of

Belshazzar

for his 1916 epic, Intolerance.

Griffith riding high over illusion city, lording it over his vision of Babylon.

A mare's nest,

mountains of scaffolding, hanging gardens,

chariot race ramparts and sky high elephants.

Pasteboard Babylon, a make-believe mirage of Mesopotamia.

A gargantuan dream beside the dusty Tin Lizzie trail called Sunset

Boulevard.

Camera! Action!

Untouch your trip.

Untouch your trip.

Befits Babylon,

something of a reproach and something of a challenge

to the burgeoning movie town.

Something to surpass.

Something to live down.

The shadow of Babylon

had fallen over Hollywood.

I confess,

growing up in Tinseltown,

my childhood hobby was visiting cemeteries,

seeking the

resting places of my heroes,

those with the fabulous faces of Hollywood in the 20s who

had passed on.

Carmen Miranda, Mario Lanza, Cecil B. DeMille.

Well, we had...

Had a hot bird Tyrone Power

And Peter Lorre.

Um, and Mae Murray.

Mae Murray, one of the most beautiful and rich stars of the 20s, ended up derelict on a park bench.

Tom Mix.

Tom had a rainbow -colored fountain in his dining room and died in his hand -built sports car two weeks after receiving it.

We had Jean Harlow.

Jean Harlow's husband shot himself in 1932,

humiliated after trying to pleasure

the platinum star with a dildo.

We did have Marion Davies.

Mistress of both, Charlie Chaplin and William Randolph Hearst simultaneously.

We had Norma Talmadge.

Alcoholic.

Marilyn Monroe.

Suicide.

Jean Mansfield.

Decapitated.

The death of the screen's great lover, Rudolf Valentino on August 23, 1926,

released a flood of scandalous rumors.

The official cause of death was peritonitis,

but some attributed it to an arsenic revenge

by a well-known New York society woman,

others to a shot from an irate husband,

or that he was syphilitic.

What was known was that both of the women

he married were lesbians,

and that he married his second wife

without divorcing his first,

an oversight that led to his arrest for bigamy.

Valentino's demise at 31 left inconsolable

paramours of both sexes to judge by the tear-streaked testimonials.

Aside from the lady in black bearing flowers annually to the mausoleum on the anniversary

of his death,

the memory of Rudy was cherished by matinee idol Ramon Navarro, who kept

a black-lead Art Deco dildo embellished with Valentino's silver signature in a bedroom

shrine, a present from Rudy.

My life, my hope, is not in vain.

You know that soon you can return

with my old

love.

Silence of the night, that only wants to do nothing.

My life, my hope, is not in vain.

After Valentino died in August 1926,

the cult of Valentino has attracted several women,

some of whom I think are on the fringe of sanity,

who appear regularly at his tomb dressed

in black and who fuss with it and put flowers and things like that.

Valentino, I'm here every single day to bring

flowers,

to bring praise,

and to bring my love.

If your sweetheart send a letter

of goodbye

It's no secret you feel better if you

cry

When waiting for the bluebird that sometime

come

So let your head down and

cry

Valentino

When I found Valentino's tomb,

it proved a disappointment.

It was nothing special,

just a space on the wall with two dinky flower vases like those in an

old -fashioned limousine,

with Rudy's name spelled out in bronze in the long version.

Still, I was drawn back again and

and again.

These visits were charmed.

There was never anyone else around.

I had Rudy all to myself.

For a long time, like grandmother, I didn't believe in death.

It was just a transition,

a special effect lap dissolve.

I firmly intended to approach my idols as they're equal.

After all,

I, too, had once acted in a Hollywood movie.

I was on the fringe of the movie industry,

and I appeared in one film as a child,

Midsummer Night's Dream.

You can still smell the soundstage,

because it was lit by very hot lights,

and everything reeked of shellac,

because it was sprayed over everything by Hal Moore,

so all the trees would glisten.

And it's a rather intoxicating smell,

and it was a wonderful thing for a four -year -old kid to

work in,

because for a four-year-old it was gigantic.

Did you go to see a lot of movies?

Oh, a lot, yes.

My grandmother was a movie buff,

and she'd take me once or twice a week when I was really quite small.

And then when I started to go on my own,

I never missed a Saturday matinee.

And she told me many a story,

which maybe weren't too suitable for children,

but at any rate, they were the equivalent

of grim fairy tales of the silent days.

And I began keeping a diary of all the things that happened

when I was growing up.

Thelma Todd's murder or suicide

that happened when I was a little boy.

Lupe Velez's suicide that happened when I was in Beverly Hills High School, living a

few blocks away.

These things made a tremendous impression on me and I cut out all

the press clippings about it. It was always looking forward to someday I would do something with

these. And years later they turned into the series of Hollywood Babylon books.

In 1921,

Fatty Arbuckle was the most popular and wholesome family entertainer in the movies.

When he signed a new $3 million contract with Paramount, he got straight into his custom-made

Pierce-Arrow and headed for the luxurious Hotel St.

Francis in San Francisco to celebrate.

Fatty booked three adjoining suites on the 12th floor, enough room for any developments.

Booze was still illegal in California, but Fatty phoned his bootleg connection, Tom Tom

the bellboy, and the party was on.

Seven years earlier, Fatty Arbuckle had been a hefty plumbers mate, discovered by Mack Sennett

when he went to unclog the comedy producers drain.

By the week of the party, he had six full-length features and 27 two-reeler showing.

He was a generous party giver, and a good-sized crowd of his movie colony cronies and assorted

hangers-on were soon having a good time.

Amongst them was an obscure starlet.

Virginia Rappe was a bit part actress at Mack Sennett Studios.

Fatty had had his roving eye on Virginia for some time and asked her to play the lead in

one of his films.

She seemed to be on her way.

Unfortunately,

when she did find instant renown,

it was because of what happened that day in

Suite 1221, and she was in no position to profit from her fame.

The party was in full swing when Fatty ended up in the bedroom with Virginia.

No one will ever know what really happened.

But next thing, Fatty emerged, saying the girl was sick and needed help.

A week later, Virginia died.

Please, one more question, please.

Murder.

Please, just one more question.

Hey, Maddie, guys in the Senate, I'm worried about you.

Oh my gosh.

I don't think I should talk to you news fellows anymore.

The stories that interest me are not just the sordid

little stories of Holly,

but somehow

they transcend into tragedy.

I mean, they've got to have an element of grandeur to them, something.

It's the contrast of the fame and glory

and then the all too human

tragedies that often

wipe them out.

As headlines screamed, the rumors flew of a hideously unnatural rape.

Arbuckle, enraged at his drunken impotence, had ravaged Virginia with a Coke bottle or

champagne bottle, then repeated the act with a jagged piece of ice. Or wasn't it common

knowledge that Arbuckle was exceptionally well endowed?

How could Hearst print this? I mean, this isn't news. This is totally unfounded gossip.

I thought he liked me.

Or was it just a question of 266 pounds too much of fatty,

flattening poor Virginia in

a flying leap?

What was certain was a leap in circulation.

The tabloids had a field day,

printing insinuation about Arbuckle's bottle party.

When Fatty was charged with Virginia Rappe's rape and murder, all the world knew the young actress's name.

The state of California blamed her death on external pressure applied by Arbuckle during sexual dalliance,

a forlorn fame for Virginia,

a heavy rap for Fatty. Murder won. He could go to the gallows.

Fatty suffered through three trials and was found innocent each time, but the public found him guilty.

Arbuckle's films were withdrawn.

His three million dollar contract was canceled and his unreleased films were junked, causing

the studio a cool million dollar write -off.

Fatty the funny man, never convicted of any crime,

was finished.

The Prince of Wales had been harpooned.

He died broke, drunk and broken at the age of 46.

Hollywood now meant more than dreamland.

It was forever linked with scandal in the minds of millions.

Down the island of the Woodbury bride,

she uses Woodbury soap because it's gentle and

mild.

Juergens lotion and Woodbury soap present the Louella Parsons show.

It's the lotion that's preferred by the women

everywhere.

That girl who sent poison pen letters from Jamaica about Errol Flynn is in for

serious trouble.

Errol has talked by transatlantic telephone to his lawyer in Hollywood, telling him to take

immediate action.

The Bahamas Post Office Department is working in conjunction to track down the

anonymous letter writer, and I hope they get her.

And here is last minute news.

Spicy Hollywood headlines have always been good for business.

And the queens of gossip were the original go-getting Paganini of Piffle, Louella-I-Saw-What

You-Did-Parsons,

and her arch -rival Hedda Hopper, regularly spilling the steaming beans on who was

Hollywood in and Hollywood out.

may have forgotten the name of Lou Tellegen, but as Harry Carrey's suicide,

in his apartment last week...

The public's craving for a non-stop movie star titillation fix

was mainlined and bylined day by day by these two syndicated mutant

sob sisters.

...immediate the voice action against...

The girls got so excited...

For Hedda and Louella, there was no better place than Hollywood, reborn Babylon.

And their decent, outraged voices confirmed that behind every closed door and window,

Glittering soulless women wandered from Wicked to Wanton Orgy on the tuxedoed

arms of vainglorious males

through a moneyed, perfumed world of drink,

dope, and much, much worse.

We could possibly blame him this time.

Virginia Hill, former girlfriend of Bugsy Siegel.

Found last night by Hollywood police dressed in women's underwear, hanging from a shower rail.

Cut off by Hollywood wire, Merle Oberon to say she's off to

Mexico to divorce.

She did not move when she was in sudden death last night until after she finished her show.

It was early morning before she flew into Los Angeles.

And how about Lionel Atwill's 1940 Christmas party?

He fancies an orgy after dinner.

They even have a blind pianist play the blue Danube.

As he strikes up, that's the start signal.

And off come the tuxedos and Adrian evening gowns,

sulka shorts and Antoinette lingerie.

Just to stay decent, they keep their jewelry on.

and then they watched some of Lionel's special films.

Not many Academy Awards on view.

The original casting couch was a piece of furniture in the office

of Mack Sennett.

and it's where he interviewed

the various Mack Sennett bathing beauties,

and they did put out.

And the other most famous casting couch that was actually a separate

bedroom

behind the office of Daryl Zanuck

at Fox,

and he wasn't to be disturbed any afternoon,

Monday to Friday, from four to five.

That was the bedroom hour.

It was what you call phallic power of the producer.

Have you ever refused to do a publicity stunt?

I mean, is there a kind of publicity you try

and avoid? I've never done a publicity stunt in my entire

life and I never will.

If the time ever comes when I will do a publicity stunt,

then I'll be 150 years old.

Glamour is something that you get trapped

The Chinese fled from the cameras back

in the 19th century.

I think they were on to something, but I think we have to deal with it.

I think we have to have enough soul that we don't mind having a little bit stolen.

And I think what we see on the screen that's fascinating is when we do see

some soul up there.

For instance, I think the mystery of Garbo is that you were seeing a bit of Garbo's soul up there.

But you did go as far as describing the film medium as evil.

It's an evil I'm perfectly prepared to deal with because I recognize that it has

that

glamour in the old sense.

But I love it.

And so I feel safer working with it since I recognize that.

My family had a 16 millimeter Cine Kodak and

so I began making my own little films with

the family Cine Kodak.

But I modeled myself after Hollywood

professionalism.

In other words I wanted good lighting and I wanted to make the camera

do things like I'd seen in professional

films, even though what I was doing was quite different.

It's a adolescent dream of terror.

It's a bit of an initiation rite.

I mean,

it has a dreamer awaking and going out in the night

and meeting up with a bunch

of sailors, about 15 of them, which looks like a huge

crowd in the film.

How do you feel about it being seen as a gay statement? Is that something you object to?

It was made in 1947, and at that time there were very few

statements of any kind being

made along those lines.

And I don't disavow it.

In other words, if they want to see it

that way, it's fine with me.

Vision or dreams?

They're daydreams.

Sometimes a nightmare.

In other words, you have your choice. But they're like a reverie. And I don't use dialogue.

In other words, it isn't a conventional narrative, but it does tell a story.

You need the shadow and the contrast of good and evil.

And I find the vast allegories of good and evil reflected in a very vivid

way in show business.

So in a sense that kind of allegory run

through Hollywood Babylon.

Have you taken a bottle of ?

How many did you take?

Three.

Uh-huh.

Oh, who found you?

Now what really happened on the night of April 4th?

Whether Cheryl Crane, the 14 year old daughter of movie star Lana Turner, had killed her mother's gangland lover, Johnny Stompanato.

I swear it was so fast.

I, I was truly frustrated and in despair.

Even a last-minute interruption in the best of Hollywood tradition took place by a man who burst in yelling,

It's a pack of lies, I want to testify, then rushed out.

21 year old Lionel Williams of Los Angeles was serving time in Michigan when he was charged

with the actor's murder.

Many were stabbed to death with a hunting knife on February 12th, 1976.

He was heard crying for help outside the garage of his fashionable apartment.

It has to have an element of the bizarre truly to interest me.

Like in the death of Marie Prevost,

she was a Mack Sennett bathing beauty

who then became a star in the 30s and fell on hard times.

But the fact that she died and was shut up for two weeks

in her little apartment with her dog,

and the dog survived by chewing on her legs and eating them,

makes it fascinating for me.

It makes it a Hollywood Babylon story.

I'm such a trip

Every scandal sent shivers to the

expensively clad charm circle

but the revels went on

unabated

The new gods were determined to live their own legends to the hilt, whooping it up in

an atmosphere of staggering luxury in dream castles like Valentino's Falcon Lair.

The excesses of these stars developed a cynicism and a defiance characteristic of jazz-age youth.

Bitterness and darkness often lay just beyond, but their attitudes seemed to be so what.

They soaked boudoirs in Shalimar

and a $3,000 ball gown lasted the life of a party.

Any star could buy the key to a dream paradise.

As if dressing up under the Klieg lights all week long wasn't enough, a favorite divertissement was the

costume party.

Here is Gloria Swanson as Helen Hayes in The White Sister.

Gloria Swanson spent a quarter of a million dollars a year on her dresses

alone.

Oh, the parties we used to have.

In those days, the public wanted us to live like kings and queens.

So we did. And why not?

We were in love with life.

We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed.

And there was no reason to believe it would ever stop.

I went out to Coney Island one Saturday

and saw these fellows, bikers,

on these elaborate show bikes.

And I admired their machines

and asked them if I could photograph them.

And they said, yes, sure.

And that was how Scropio Rising got made.

How'd you come to choose the music for your films?

Well, I use them in an ironic context, things like Blue Velvet,

while I show a biker getting dressed in jeans

and putting on his black leather jacket.

So it has an ironic comment on his narcissism,which it is.

When I was cutting the film,

a film was delivered to my house by mistake,

and it was left on

my doorstep, literally.

And it was a Sunday school film called The Last Journey to Jerusalem.

Well,

I called it sort of a gift from the gods that it had

dropped down.

I ran it, and

I said, well, I'm just going to work it right into my film.

And so the whole sort of parallel cutting

of Jesus traveling into Jerusalem

was intercut with the bikers.

I took it as an act of magic

that it was delivered to me at that time.

Well, I was making films the way someone else would write a poem.

And these were personal artistic statements.

And so,

unless I found a,

uh, some kind of, uh, patron,

I could hardly expect, you know, for studios to back this kind of film.

And I never did.

There's no sense in which the books are revenge on Hollywood.

No, I don't consider them that at all.

And as a matter of fact, I love Hollywood.

In other words, I don't know, it's provided me with a lifetime

entertainment

and wonderful little insights into the human condition.

It had many things wrong with it, I mean, you know, abusive power

and so forth,

but yet many things were right with it.

and Hollywood made some wonderful films along the way.

That was the idea of the old picture palaces,

to create a dignified and rather awe-inspiring atmosphere

where the pictures were to be shown.

The Tower was designed as a talkie theater.

It opened in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, its very first picture.

And it lasted until 1989 and now it's a clothes mart.

So it's fallen on harder times.

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

Yes.

I want to die, oh please!

Please don't make me cry, tell them!

I'm just a chronicler of their foibles,

follies and excesses.

Many of them came to rather sticky ends,

like some of them chose suicide and often rather

dramatic self -destruction, like this would be my last headline or my

last grabbing of

world's attention.

That's why we're going on this trip, to get away from business.

This is my two-time honeymoon.

The first time we went on a honeymoon, we didn't go.

But this time, the only business is going to be, is going to be nobody's business.

Well, then, may we have a picture of you alone?

Oh, certainly.

I'll check on the cabins.

All right.

Right over here, if you don't mind.

I know what you want.

Is this it?

Beautiful.

Oh, thank you.

Lupe Velez had been part of the Hollywood scene since the late 20s, when the go-getting

teenager had come up from Mexico City to conquer the movies.

She made a film with Cecil B. DeMille,

seduced Gary Cooper and Tarzan himself,

Johnny Weissmüller.

She soon earned the name Mexican Spitfire and was living in splendor in Beverly Hills.

She was dead at 34.

This was discovered in my neighborhood in Beverly Hills.

And the maid let me in the kitchen door.

And I was able to peek in the bedroom that was full of all these flowers

and actually see dead Lupe among the flowers.

I am very sorry all this has happened, Dennis.

But this last time is the camel that broke the straw.

Maybe you're happy because I'm leaving.

That's right.

You mean to say you don't want me to stay?

Of course not.

The sooner you get out of my cabin, the better.

Goodbye.

Lupe's career skidded from A to B pictures, in which she served chili-con-Lupe parodies

of her own spicy persona.

The mortgage was overdue on her outmoded Zorro-era pile, Lupe was completely zonked by debt,

and she realized she was pregnant.

Harold Ramond, bit -part player and father of her unborn child,

had taken the news with his get -lost look, his so -what shrug.

Suicide was the way out for Lupe,

an old -fashioned star,

brainwashed and brain -damaged by her own beauty and glamour,

for whom the loss of the public, of fan mail, of image, was the loss of self.

She planned her last night as punctiliously as an early-de-mil allegorical flashback.

After a last supper of chili con carne,

brandy and cigarillos,

she got ready for a big scene.

The bedroom was Our Lady of Guadalupe's chapel on a day of days.

Flowers, candles everywhere, everything aglow.

Second all sleeping pills had always proved a popular Hollywood exit.

And Lupe downed seventy-five of the little beauties, stretched out on the satin bed,

crossed her hands on her breast, closed her eyes, and thought of the next day's headlines.

And indeed, in the next day's L.A. Times, Louella had the story.

She described the still life at Casa Felicias.

Lupe was never lovelier as she lay there, as if slumbering.

A faint smile, like secret dreams.

Looking like a child taking nappy.

Like a good little girl.

The actual scene had been something else.

When Juanita, the chambermaid, had opened the bedroom door at nine the morning after

the suicide, no Lupe was in sight.

The bed was empty.

The aroma of scented candles, the fragrance of two roses almost, but not

quite masking the stench recalling Skid Row derelicts. Juanita traced the trail from the

bed over to the bathroom. There she found her mistress, Senorita Vélez.

The huge dose of secanol had not been fatal in the expected fashion.

It had mixed wretchously

with the Spitfire's maxi -spice last supper.

Violently sick,

an ultimate fastidiousness

drove her to Stager towards the sanitary sanctum of the Saldaban,

where she slipped on the tiles and plunged head first

into her Egyptian chartreuse onyx hush-flush model deluxe.

Well, I'm gonna get a policeman and throw you out!

You must be inside a bunker!

Wait! Look here! Don't you cause another scene!

There's gotta be a scene, all right!

You're gonna listen to me, right?

Oh, my! I'll get you livin'!

Let go of me! I'll knock you out!

This is Sunset Boulevard, the fabled highway of the stars.

Don't look now, but isn't that Jane Mansfield?

Could be, she lives on this street.

That is Jane Mansfield. She had her hair dyed for a picture.

Tom Mix told me that day that he came to Hollywood in 1910, determined to make a million dollars.

Well, he made it.

He was killed in this car two weeks after this picture was taken.

How fast will your car go?

Oh,

an honest mile an hour.

Clocked at about 106 - 107.

Oh, wait a minute, Jimmy. One more question.

Do you have any special advice for the young people who drive?

Take it easy driving, the life you might say might be mine.

the Griffith Park Observatory was used as a background by

Nick Ray for

the film Rebel Without a Cause,

one of the very few films that James Dean made in his very short career.

It's amazing that he's made such an impact when he's really made only three features.

After Dean died, his tombstone at Fairmount, Indiana bore only his name in the stark dates

1931 -1955.

A brief epitaph might have read, pretty much of a tramp.

The promiscuous dope smoker had trouble remembering his lines,

fluffed his dialogue and fumed on the set.

He was basically gay and had taken to hanging out at the club,

an East Hollywood leather bar, specializing in the magic world of S &M sex.

Dean was into beating, boots, belts and bondage.

When stone he would bear his chest and beg his masters to stub their cigarette butts out on him.

They responded by tagging him the human ashtray.

After his fatal car crash,

the coroner made note of the constellation of burns across his torso.

But if Richard Gere, Matt Dillon, or any of the other boring Dean clones were to suffer his fate,

would cults arise,

fans commit suicide,

love notes turn up 30 years after his death?

Doubtful. Jimmy may have had crabs, but he had durable charisma.

Dean died at 24, Valentino died at 31,

and others had their careers over,

and in a sense never recovered from the fact

that they were once at the top,

even though they may have lived on for years,

because Raymond Navarro died at 69,

but he never got over the fact

that he was once a top matinee idol,

and so his later years were quite sad.

I have very few friends and I'm glad of it too because you

never have many friends.

You just can't.

You just can't.

Ramon Navarro's ghastly death by beating in 1968 brought to mind the bizarre crimes

of Hollywood's past.

Here was a man dying as he had lived, extravagantly, choked in his own blood.

The lead art deco dildo which Valentino had given him 45 years earlier

thrust down his throat by two small-time hustlers

looking for his petty cash.

Star systems survived scandal after scandal. MGM launched the motto

more stars than there are in heaven.

Although the stars themselves wondered

how long they could stay in orbit.

As Mae Murray said from the perspective of 20 years,

we were like dragonflies.

We seemed to be suspended effortlessly in the air,

but in reality,

our wings were beating very, very fast.

There's a new star in heaven

tonight That may

never fade from our

sight

There's a new star at home in that

far starry dome Shining bright on its

loved ones tonight

There's a voice singing sweet fine

delight With a smile

that has made the world bright

Valentino, goodbye

But we're up in the

sky

There's a new star

in heaven

tonight

Doris Day!

Do you love Jane Darwell?

Where?

Liberace!

We love her!

We have to toe tap

on Liberace!

She knew what old Hollywood was all about,

didn't she?

Sidney Sheldon?

Delicious!

We're getting hotter!

And Baxter?

I just get hornier and hornier as we go closer, don't

I think Marilyn and everybody would have shaken their grave to learn how filthy and

dirty this crisis turned out.

Such a terrorist trap.

Did James Dean love to get beat to filth?

James Dean is the human ashtray.

They just take big cigars and put them out on him?

He'd mash your cigarettes out of him and wring his neck.

That makes me sick.

That thing looks horrible.

And whoever did her wigs was the most horrible thing that was ever let out loose with a hair brush.

Can you believe it?

I couldn't believe those big old wigs.

She used to wear them on Dynasty with a full wig line.

She'd hot glue those wigs on and it was horrible.

Does she need to talk to Chazay?

She sure does.

I always wanted to ask you, do you just hate your life?

She loves her life.

Honey, I don't think she loved her life at all.

That's why she hopped in the grave over to John F. Kennedy.

She was murdered down.

You think she was murdered?

Yes.

I refuse it.

I think she murdered herself.

Greta Garbo and Monroe,

Dietrich and DiMaggio,

Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean,

on the cover of

a magazine.

They had style, they had grace. Rita Hayworth gave good face.

Lawrence Catherine, Lana Turner, Betty Davis, we love you.

Ladies with an attitude, fellas that were in the mood.

Don't just stand there, let's get to it. Strike a pose, there's nothing to it, vogue.

In the glare of studio lights, these 850 of Hollywood's most lavishly

dressed extras are trying to crash the preferred list.

But the sad truth is that Hollywood is swamped by hundreds of feminine applicants for

every job.

So these judges have a wide choice.

The cream of the crop is theirs for fifteen dollars a day, if and when they work.

Remember, only a few extras ever earn as much as forty-five dollars a month.

Hello, this one should make good in comedy, don't you think?

You done forgot your ?

Meet the winners.

They hail from every town and city from coast to coast.

Many are from foreign lands, but all with one dream, stardom.

Few make the grade.

That big break seldom comes.

They have looks, perhaps talent, and clothes.

But take it from us.

Girls who go Hollywood sometimes go hungry.

Peg Entwistle started a trend with her fall from grace.

Peg was in a couple of Broadway plays, but thought she'd try Hollywood when the crash came in the 30s.

She lived with an uncle on Beechwood Drive and was in one film, Thirteen Women

in which the young blonde is haunted by the fear of committing suicide.

That's silly.

A man I've never seen.

He has the nerve to tell me that I'm going to kill myself.

Oh, are you going to bed?

Yes, it's so late. We'll be in Los Angeles in the morning.

I'll see you at breakfast.

Fine.

If I were you, I would...

Go to bed?

Don't worry.

No stars are going to twinkle twinkle me in the committing suicide.

When the parts dried up, Peg became more depressed.

Hollywood's a lonely place for those who haven't made it.

The handshakes are reserved for those who have.

The nine tawdry letters on the hill above her house started to haunt her.

And one night she found the way up in her own fashion.

Not an easy task in high heel shoes and evening dress.

It was a shame that in her one film,

Peg had watched someone plunge to her death.

These ideas stick.

She left her clothes and purse on the ground and climbed the 50-foot H.

No one will ever know how long she gazed down at Hollywood that night, or her bitter thoughts.

She could see several of the studios from her privileged position.

Then she leapt to her death.

She didn't know that at that moment in the post was an offer of a job.

The juicy role of a girl who commits suicide at the end of the third act.

I was frightened of him when I first met him.

He used to leave books around and give me

things to read and he really wanted me to get into it, you know, his Crowley obsession.

And I didn't want to do it and I didn't.

And I was scared of Kenneth.

Later I got to

I really loved him and I became fond of him.

I've studied magic and magic is not illusionist magic like pulling

rabbits out of hats.

I mean, that's an art that I respect,

but this is supposedly the real thing.

And I've seen it work enough times.

I know it's there.

It's like a background.

It's like a wavelength, a little bit like radio waves.

It was very difficult to work on that film for everyone who was involved because

he never told anyone anything.

And one of the worst things was the scene in the cemetery.

It was really quite weird and it was a sunrise and I

was sort of crawling around in my hands and knees among all these

This cemetery life, you know with Max Factor blood everywhere

But he was very sweet and

He would tell me what he wanted me to do and

I'm well, I'm course. I'm not a real actress so I didn't have the

skills to say what is the meaning of this thing, you know, I didn't know how to do that.

I played Lilith.

Very bad.

Lilith was the first wife of Adam,

the non -human wife, the demonic wife of Adam.

We're dealing with Aleister Crowley's idea of a ritual which is called the

dramatic ritual where you impersonate a God and then become that

God so you meditate on a god,

say, like the god of love, and then you become love.

Or maybe you meditate on the god of war, Mars, and become Mars.

And the idea is to control it, to feel the god force come through you and to manifest.

My vision of Hollywood was very colored by Kenneth's book, you know.

I found it absolutely fascinating.

And it brought it all to life for me somehow.

And I understood more about glamour and illusion.

and it's something to do with going as far away from truth as you can possibly get.

But that's Hollywood, I suppose.

That's our image, my image of what it's all about.

I walk along the street of

sorrow,

the boulevard of broken dreams,

Where Jigolo and Jigolette Can take a

kiss without regret

Till they forget their broken dream

You'll laugh tonight and

cry tomorrow

When you behold your shattered scheme

The gigolo and gigolette

Wake up to find their eyes are wet

With tears that tell of broken dreams

Certainly Hollywood still has scandals

I mean they range from everything from John Belushi's

overdose in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont Hotel to David Begelman, a top

producer forging checks, even though he

was a rich man. No one has yet figured

out why he did it. But somehow they don't

quite measure up to the old scandals of,

which was in a more innocent age. It was

more shocking because these were more

idealized people.

The joy that you find here you

borrow You cannot keep it long, it seems

But gigolo and gigolette still sing a song

and dance along

The Boulevard

of Broken

Dreams

By the 60s, old Hollywood had died.

The battlements of those feudal kingdoms,the studios,

fell one by one to the enemy.

television.

On the empty stages at Columbia they host game shows these days.

The mansions of the stars have crumbled, the swimming pools are empty, the tennis

courts overgrown. Sarah Bernhardt believed the movies promised immortality,

but in truth they disappoint like any mere mortal. They grow old and wrinkled,

get folded, spindled, and mutilated.

Their blooming colors fade like the people do,

And like lovers, many explode into flames and disappear without a trace.

And yet sometimes in Hollywood,

after fierce rains and winds have swept the skies clean,

the Egyptian blue appears over the palm trees like a vision, the hulking obsolete sound

stages like secretive tombs ever present.

And we can't imagine what drew the ambitious and reckless men here an age ago.