Louise Brooks
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DosViolines
far from home...
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Thanks for the pics guys 
Louise Brooks in "Love 'Em and Leave 'Em"
doctormacro.com
Louise Brooks in "Love 'Em and Leave 'Em"
doctormacro.com
Wanted to give Louise's brand-new solo thread a bump up so that everyone could see it 
I just figured it was about time she had her own thread so I pulled together all her posts from the 20's actress one.
Please show her some love & post away~
I just figured it was about time she had her own thread so I pulled together all her posts from the 20's actress one.
Please show her some love & post away~
A really good article about the filming of The American Venus with excerpts from magazine interviews with Louise 
As the Variety review indicated, the producers of "The American Venus" "tried to stress the undress angle." The Variety reviewer professed ennui: "It may give some of the old boys a kick, and then again it may not." Success at the box office demonstrated that it did. Part of the "kick" was the fantasy of being a judge. As Norman Rockwell's account demonstrates, there were as yet no protocols for judging. One of his colleagues, he recalled, "had a wonderful time measuring all the girls — bust, waist, hips, etc." In "The American Venus," the contestants stood on various pillars, dressed in low-cut, backless dresses, as the judges examined them from every angle. They also formed tableaux vivantes at which judges peered through a peephole. As with the revues, the male fantasy was having one's pick of a bevy of beautiful women. The complementary daydream, for the young women in the audience, was of being a contestant. They could imagine turning heads as they paraded past the judges. They could share the dreams of Hollywood and stardom.
Fay Lanphier did not become a movie star, although she did make several more films including one with Laurel and Hardy. On the other hand, "The American Venus" did launch Louise Brooks' career in Hollywood. She was not one of the real contestants used in the movie. She was a Ziegfeld girl. In a 1926 interview in Macfadden's Photoplay Ruth Waterbury noted:
She started her career at Denishawn, that school of dancing of Ruth St. Denis' and Ted Shawn's. She studied two months and then they signed her to dance on tour with them as one of their leading soloists.
"You must have been very talented to be starred by them so immediately," I said.
Another wise glance winged its way upward.
"They needed somebody in a hurry, somebody young and inexpensive," Louise explained. The possibilities of kidding Louise seem very remote.
"Miss St. Denis is very strict," she added. "She wouldn't let us smoke or eat candy or stay up late or anything. We did nothing but work or dance. Some of the girls got very artistic. I traveled all over the country and in Europe with them. I stayed two years."
"And after that the Scandals."
The corners of Louise's mouth curled slowly upward. "Yes," she said, in her quiet, lazy voice. "Immediately after. Fancy that." Faint lights of amusement revealed themselves in the depths of her eyes.
She is just nineteen.
Brooks had gone from George White's Scandals to Ziegfeld's Follies for two years.
Ruth Waterbury commented:
Describing Louise presents its difficulties. She is so very Manhattan. Very young. Exquisitely hard-boiled. Her black eyes and sleek black hair are as brilliant as Chinese lacquer. Her skin is white as camellia. Her legs are lyric. She has been one of the decorative daughters of the night life of New York for three seasons. . . .
She started in pictures with The American Venus. It was only a small part. After all the picture had the specially signed Fay Lanphier, the chosen Miss America, Esther Ralston and the entire Atlantic City beauty pageant for eye fillers with Ford Sterling, Edna Mae Oliver and Lawrence Gray to do a little acting. Nobody intended Louise to be particularly important and Louise didn't bother to mention to anyone that she was.
Then Paramount saw her rushes. They signed her for five years. That's how good she is. A good chorus girl learns lots of things, and Louise was an excellent chorus girl.
A subsequent interviewer, Malcolm H. Oettinger in Picture-Play for August 1926, adopted a similar tone:
From the rolling prairies [Wichita, Kansas], she came to the city, her fate paralleling that of many prairie flowers: the Follies got her. And so successful was she in brightening that gay symphony of the fleshpots, that the grateful Mr. Ziegfeld deployed her to grace his production of Louie - historically enough - the Fourteenth.
After watching Leon Errol's collapsible ankles throughout two hundred performances of that comedy, Louise spent an afternoon discovering Long Island's Astoria. She had heard about the fortunes to be earned, or at least obtained, in pictures. Mr. Cohill, of Paramount's casting office, found Louise worth filing for future reference. And before she knew it, she was being hired to lend a bit of sex appeal to The American Venus - the picture that featured Atlantic City, Venus, and five hundred other girls.
Although her part in the proceedings was limited to what is technically known as a bit, Louise made it stand up and speak, surrounded though it was by distracting one-piece bathing suits. New York critics acclaimed her, singled her out for special praise, showered paragraphic commendation upon her. She was signed, then, on what studios always call a "long-term contract."
Brooks, as both interviews demonstrate, possessed a degree of worldly wisdom rarely admitted to by either actresses or beauty contestants. Note how Oettinger ended his story. After detailing her work in revues in London and Paris, her seasons with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, her success as a chorus girl, and her initial success in the movies, he wrote:
Here is inspiration for young America, for high-school belles, misses' sizes. And here, perhaps, was a chance to get a message from Louise.
"What, Miss Brooks, are the chances for a young girl, fairly pretty, fairly intelligent, to come to the city, and make good ?"
A breathless silence preceded her reply.
"The chances," said Louise, "are what she takes."
The Photoplay interview ended in similar fashion:
"Isn't the family thrilled by your sudden success ?" I asked.
She looked at me carefully. . . . "They don't know about it," she drawled. She waited and then smiled.
"My mother and father separated when I was a kid," she explained. "My father thinks I'm terrible."
Her black eyes were languid.
"In our family," she said, "it was everybody shift for himself." She smiled once more and waved her little white hand to indicate her apartment. It is a Park Avenue apartment, and in Manhattan there is nothing more utterly utter than a Park Avenue apartment.
"Well," said Louise, "I have."
Brooks would prove over the course of her career that she was the consummate "honest crook." She was, as Ruth Waterbury put it, "exquisitely hard-boiled." As such, she risked puncturing the male version of the revue fantasy. Edmund Wilson pointed out there had to be a pretense of "dewy-eyed" innocence. Louise refused to pretend. She had taken her chances. So did tens of thousands of others who became chorus girls during the heyday of the revues. So did more thousands who went to Hollywood seeking to break into the movies. Numerous as they were, they were still the exceptions. The great majority of young women did not even enter a bathing beauty contest. But lots of them did go to beaches where their costumes raised the identical moral issues posed by the "undressed angle" in the movies and on the stage.
assumption.edu
As the Variety review indicated, the producers of "The American Venus" "tried to stress the undress angle." The Variety reviewer professed ennui: "It may give some of the old boys a kick, and then again it may not." Success at the box office demonstrated that it did. Part of the "kick" was the fantasy of being a judge. As Norman Rockwell's account demonstrates, there were as yet no protocols for judging. One of his colleagues, he recalled, "had a wonderful time measuring all the girls — bust, waist, hips, etc." In "The American Venus," the contestants stood on various pillars, dressed in low-cut, backless dresses, as the judges examined them from every angle. They also formed tableaux vivantes at which judges peered through a peephole. As with the revues, the male fantasy was having one's pick of a bevy of beautiful women. The complementary daydream, for the young women in the audience, was of being a contestant. They could imagine turning heads as they paraded past the judges. They could share the dreams of Hollywood and stardom.
Fay Lanphier did not become a movie star, although she did make several more films including one with Laurel and Hardy. On the other hand, "The American Venus" did launch Louise Brooks' career in Hollywood. She was not one of the real contestants used in the movie. She was a Ziegfeld girl. In a 1926 interview in Macfadden's Photoplay Ruth Waterbury noted:
She started her career at Denishawn, that school of dancing of Ruth St. Denis' and Ted Shawn's. She studied two months and then they signed her to dance on tour with them as one of their leading soloists.
"You must have been very talented to be starred by them so immediately," I said.
Another wise glance winged its way upward.
"They needed somebody in a hurry, somebody young and inexpensive," Louise explained. The possibilities of kidding Louise seem very remote.
"Miss St. Denis is very strict," she added. "She wouldn't let us smoke or eat candy or stay up late or anything. We did nothing but work or dance. Some of the girls got very artistic. I traveled all over the country and in Europe with them. I stayed two years."
"And after that the Scandals."
The corners of Louise's mouth curled slowly upward. "Yes," she said, in her quiet, lazy voice. "Immediately after. Fancy that." Faint lights of amusement revealed themselves in the depths of her eyes.
She is just nineteen.
Brooks had gone from George White's Scandals to Ziegfeld's Follies for two years.
Ruth Waterbury commented:
Describing Louise presents its difficulties. She is so very Manhattan. Very young. Exquisitely hard-boiled. Her black eyes and sleek black hair are as brilliant as Chinese lacquer. Her skin is white as camellia. Her legs are lyric. She has been one of the decorative daughters of the night life of New York for three seasons. . . .
She started in pictures with The American Venus. It was only a small part. After all the picture had the specially signed Fay Lanphier, the chosen Miss America, Esther Ralston and the entire Atlantic City beauty pageant for eye fillers with Ford Sterling, Edna Mae Oliver and Lawrence Gray to do a little acting. Nobody intended Louise to be particularly important and Louise didn't bother to mention to anyone that she was.
Then Paramount saw her rushes. They signed her for five years. That's how good she is. A good chorus girl learns lots of things, and Louise was an excellent chorus girl.
A subsequent interviewer, Malcolm H. Oettinger in Picture-Play for August 1926, adopted a similar tone:
From the rolling prairies [Wichita, Kansas], she came to the city, her fate paralleling that of many prairie flowers: the Follies got her. And so successful was she in brightening that gay symphony of the fleshpots, that the grateful Mr. Ziegfeld deployed her to grace his production of Louie - historically enough - the Fourteenth.
After watching Leon Errol's collapsible ankles throughout two hundred performances of that comedy, Louise spent an afternoon discovering Long Island's Astoria. She had heard about the fortunes to be earned, or at least obtained, in pictures. Mr. Cohill, of Paramount's casting office, found Louise worth filing for future reference. And before she knew it, she was being hired to lend a bit of sex appeal to The American Venus - the picture that featured Atlantic City, Venus, and five hundred other girls.
Although her part in the proceedings was limited to what is technically known as a bit, Louise made it stand up and speak, surrounded though it was by distracting one-piece bathing suits. New York critics acclaimed her, singled her out for special praise, showered paragraphic commendation upon her. She was signed, then, on what studios always call a "long-term contract."
Brooks, as both interviews demonstrate, possessed a degree of worldly wisdom rarely admitted to by either actresses or beauty contestants. Note how Oettinger ended his story. After detailing her work in revues in London and Paris, her seasons with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, her success as a chorus girl, and her initial success in the movies, he wrote:
Here is inspiration for young America, for high-school belles, misses' sizes. And here, perhaps, was a chance to get a message from Louise.
"What, Miss Brooks, are the chances for a young girl, fairly pretty, fairly intelligent, to come to the city, and make good ?"
A breathless silence preceded her reply.
"The chances," said Louise, "are what she takes."
The Photoplay interview ended in similar fashion:
"Isn't the family thrilled by your sudden success ?" I asked.
She looked at me carefully. . . . "They don't know about it," she drawled. She waited and then smiled.
"My mother and father separated when I was a kid," she explained. "My father thinks I'm terrible."
Her black eyes were languid.
"In our family," she said, "it was everybody shift for himself." She smiled once more and waved her little white hand to indicate her apartment. It is a Park Avenue apartment, and in Manhattan there is nothing more utterly utter than a Park Avenue apartment.
"Well," said Louise, "I have."
Brooks would prove over the course of her career that she was the consummate "honest crook." She was, as Ruth Waterbury put it, "exquisitely hard-boiled." As such, she risked puncturing the male version of the revue fantasy. Edmund Wilson pointed out there had to be a pretense of "dewy-eyed" innocence. Louise refused to pretend. She had taken her chances. So did tens of thousands of others who became chorus girls during the heyday of the revues. So did more thousands who went to Hollywood seeking to break into the movies. Numerous as they were, they were still the exceptions. The great majority of young women did not even enter a bathing beauty contest. But lots of them did go to beaches where their costumes raised the identical moral issues posed by the "undressed angle" in the movies and on the stage.
assumption.edu
DosViolines
far from home...
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Thanks for the thread Orchide 
Here are two HQ's of Louise, including her most iconic picture:
doctormacro.com (Click to enlarge)
Here are two HQ's of Louise, including her most iconic picture:
doctormacro.com (Click to enlarge)
Ziegfeld Girl
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Louise Brooks is this month's beauty icon on style.com!
Louise Brooks, 1927. The actress, originally from Cherryvale, Kansas, became an accomplished film critic later in life.
"I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act," said Louise Brooks. With Graham, she was a member of the Denishawn Dance Company. A stint as a Ziegfeld girl followed. This is a publicity still from Now We're in the Air (1927).
The actress works la garçonne look, circa 1927. Brooks was no slouch, as evidenced in this exchange with Photoplay journalist Malcolm H. Oettinger: "'What, Miss Brooks, are the chances for a young girl, fairly pretty, fairly intelligent, to come to the city, and make good?' A breathless silence preceded her reply. 'The chances,' said Louise, 'are what she takes.'"
American Venus: The iconic image of the actress, emerging out of the darkness, luminous as a pearl, circa 1928.
Flappers like Louise Brooks lived on the fringe of respectability. The actress is photographed in a sailor-style ensemble, circa 1928.
Brooks, boyish as Nancy in Beggars of Life (1928).
Louise Brooks as Lulu, her most famous character, in Pandora’s Box (1929), directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Film historian Lotte Eisner has commented that “Brooks succeeded in stimulating Pabst's otherwise unequal talent to the extreme."
Louise Brooks, 1927. The actress, originally from Cherryvale, Kansas, became an accomplished film critic later in life.
"I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act," said Louise Brooks. With Graham, she was a member of the Denishawn Dance Company. A stint as a Ziegfeld girl followed. This is a publicity still from Now We're in the Air (1927).
The actress works la garçonne look, circa 1927. Brooks was no slouch, as evidenced in this exchange with Photoplay journalist Malcolm H. Oettinger: "'What, Miss Brooks, are the chances for a young girl, fairly pretty, fairly intelligent, to come to the city, and make good?' A breathless silence preceded her reply. 'The chances,' said Louise, 'are what she takes.'"
American Venus: The iconic image of the actress, emerging out of the darkness, luminous as a pearl, circa 1928.
Flappers like Louise Brooks lived on the fringe of respectability. The actress is photographed in a sailor-style ensemble, circa 1928.
Brooks, boyish as Nancy in Beggars of Life (1928).
Louise Brooks as Lulu, her most famous character, in Pandora’s Box (1929), directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst. Film historian Lotte Eisner has commented that “Brooks succeeded in stimulating Pabst's otherwise unequal talent to the extreme."
Ziegfeld Girl
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^^ All information and pictures came from style.com 
Its funny b/c the writer from style.com wrote to me on my blog and asked where I had gotten certain photos of Louise from- I guess he was researching for this above piece and somehow came to my blog which has Louise on it
Thanks for posting Ziegfeld!
Thanks for posting Ziegfeld!
Ziegfeld Girl
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That's so funny. I've always wondered how style.com found pictures of women from the 1920s, 1930s etc. I didn't know they did it by asking fans on the internet!Orchide said:Its funny b/c the writer from style.com wrote to me on my blog and asked where I had gotten certain photos of Louise from- I guess he was researching for this above piece and somehow came to my blog which has Louise on it
Ziegfeld Girl
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I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make your blog sound like that sort of blog. I've actually looked at your blog a couple of times and the information you present is very informative and does appear to be very well researched.Orchide said:I'd like to think my blog is not of that ilk- i.e. a fan blog
I try to really do my research and present it as information whether it be on Louise or someone else
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