My favorite part of October is spending the month watching as many horror movies as possible. Here are ten of my favorite scary/Halloween movies. What is your favorite horror movie?
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
I know this may sounds crazy but…I kind of prefer Carrie’s closet from her single gal apartment. I suppose it’s because I’m more of a fan of Sex and the City the show rather than the movies. Plus, so many amazing fashion moments happened in that closet! The one she shares with Big still makes for good eye candy.
The world Hollywood movies projected in the mid-to late 1920s and throughout the 1930s was of lavish, glamorous rooms with sharply defined geometric designs. These movies were inhabited by the likes of Jean Harlow in clinging white satin or Ginger Rogers shedding the fanciful feathers of a ball gown as she danced across a vast black-marble floor and came down what seemed like hundreds of spiraling steps on Fred Astaire’s tuxedoed arm.
Movie star homes of that period often reflected the images on the screen. Magazines published photographs of the grandest of them, among which was the mansion of Hollywood’s top art director, Cedric Gibbons, and his exotic actress wife, Dolores Del Rio. Handsome enough to have been a movie star, Gibbons was head of the art department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. No other art director so greatly imposed his own taste upon the films he designed. We now call it Art Déco, but it was known then as Art Moderne.
One cannot talk about the Art Déco years of the silver screen without including the masterful works of Richard Day (The Dark Angel), William Cameron Menzies (The Thief of Bagdad), Merrill Pye, Anton Grot, Ben Carré, Charles D. Hall and Hans Dreier (who won three Academy Awards—one for 1950’s Sunset Boulevard—in a career that spanned three decades).
When glorious Technicolor gained popularity in the late 1930s, the silver screen came to an end. With the advent of color, Art Déco style slowly went out of fashion, to be revived only in period films or pastiches of the era.
There are many explanations of how Americans survived the Depression—the prevailing one being that they were sustained by their great fortitude and their belief in government. But there is credence to the theory that the innovative art directors of the period are at least in some way responsible. Re-viewing those movies on a classic-movie channel can, in fact, still carry one away to a beautiful world of shimmering silver and clouds of white.
source: Architectural Digest
In 1964 actress Sophia Loren graced the cover of at least 40 magazines internationally, was earning a reported one million dollars for The Fall of the Roman Empire and would soon be Oscar-nominated for her role as a 17-year-old prostitute in Marriage, Italian Style. Also that year, Loren posed for photographer Alfred Eisenstaed in the villa outside Rome she shared with her husband, producer Carlo Ponti. “I remember our dwelling with great fondness,” recalls her son Carlo Ponti, Jr., today the music director and conductor of Southern California’s San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra. “I think it was—and still is—the most beautiful house I have ever seen.”
“Audrey was shooting The Unforgiven (1960), with Burt Lancaster, directed by John Huston,” explained actor and director Mel Ferrer about a location shoot involving his wife, actress Audrey Hepburn, with whom he shared a house on Kimridge Road in Beverly Hills. “Audrey’s agent and I had gone to Mexico to see the production…we were barely back when I got the fateful phone call. Audrey had broken her back. Always ready for the most difficult assignments, she had not flinched when Huston—who had almost drowned Gregory Peck during the filming of Moby Dick (1956)—asked her to ride out of a shot on the back of a horse at the end of a scene. She rode out, bareback, and slipped off the horse halfway up a steep hill. Lamentably, she landed on a rock. I knew that Audrey had never had any experience as a rider. But John should have known it and checked before asking her to run the risk.”
After finding a bone specialist to treat Hepburn, Ferrer set about transporting the actress back to their Los Angeles home. “I got a hospital bed moved in, with all the concomitant equipment,” Ferrer recalled. “The Kimridge house looked like a hospital ward.”
“There’s always been just one way—what’s right for me,” said the indomitable Mae West. Like many performers, West was a mixture of show-off and recluse, a personality at once calculatingly public and insistently private. These two facets of the actress’s nature were reflected in her home and the life she led there—not in any balanced way but, like nesting boxes, one hidden within the other. Outside was the Mae West persona, sex-obsessed and self-loving, for which she found a domestic equivalent in the apartment she moved into in 1932, when she first arrived in Los Angeles, and where, in what may well be a record for residential longevity in Hollywood, she remained for the next 48 years.
Located on the sixth floor of the Ravenswood, an Art Déco building on Rossmore Avenue whose other tenants included Ava Gardner, Hedda Hopper and Judy Garland, West’s apartment was modest in size. It had just two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen, and common rooms that were by no means grand, but the decoration aspired to grandeur, and beyond. “Quality, quality—that’s all I heard [from my mother],” West told Life magazine in 1969. “Everything has proportion, nothing is jarring. Everything is symphony.” Fearful of the damaging effects of sunlight and fresh air on her beauty, she kept the blinds permanently drawn and the air conditioning perpetually humming.
“I had no desire to be a film actress, to always play somebody else, to be beautiful with somebody constantly straightening out your every eyelash,” said Marlene Dietrich in 1964. “It was always a big bother to me.” The actress arrived in Hollywood from her native Germany in 1930 with her mentor, director Josef von Sternberg and ended up renting a number of residences. She never truly settled in Hollywood, though her Beverly Hills residence in the mid-1930s reflected her preference for high-contrast black-and-white furniture in a home that featured a tuxedo sofa, a mural of a leopard and a zebra, a zebra-print throw, 19th-century Chinese wallcoverings and an ankle-deep carpet of fur. “I would like to have lived in Hollywood at another time,” Dietrich once remarked. “The anecdotes about the days of the silent films made my mouth water.”
“It was a magical place for a small kid,” comments Aissa Wayne about the lush acreage in San Fernando Valley that she shared with her siblings, her mother and her father, actor John Wayne. “My dad had a huge soft spot for animals, children and the needy and he was extremely generous. For birthday parties my parents would arrange for a cotton candy machine, ponies, carnival rides and even a baby elephant one year. Dad loved to watch the kids get a kick out of it all; it pleased him to see happy children. He was the first one awake on Christmas morning because he took such pleasure in seeing children open their gifts. I remember he would pace the hallways at 4:00 A.M., and I thought it was Santa—but it was my dad waiting for daylight so we could open our presents… Funny, isn’t it? For a tough cowboy, he was the biggest mush-ball you ever came across.”
Read more at Architectural Digest
“My home?” asked Marilyn Monroe. “It will be a place for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble. As for me, I just want to be an artist and an actress with integrity.” Throughout her life, Monroe occupied a series of residences, owned no jewelry and counted books, records and a picture of legendary actress Eleonora Duse among her most cherished possessions. Even after attention-getting roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve (both 1950), she still kept a modest, one-room apartment at the Beverly Carlton Hotel in Beverly Hills. “I’m not interested in money,” she once said. “I just want to be wonderful.”
Hollywood romances are known to be fleeting, but it’s true that every rule has an exception. After 50 years of marriage, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward exemplify togetherness, with Newman once famously declaring, “Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?” After their 1958 wedding, the couple purchased a house in Hollywood, where the backyard swing set and shaded lawn created an idyllic playground for daughters Elinor, Melissa and Claire. Woodward, a best actress Oscar winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), was, in 1960, the first actor to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Newman received an honorary Oscar in 1985 and won an Academy Award for best actor in The Color of Money (1986).
“I don’t know whether it was the weather, the people or the music,” actress Ava Gardner wrote about her feelings for Spain, “but I’d fallen head over heels in love with the place from the first moment I’d arrived.” She would go on to develop an interest in bullfighting — as well as in bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. In December 1955, following a separation from third husband Frank Sinatra, Gardner moved to Spain and found a ranch-style brick house set on two acres outside Madrid; later, she settled into an apartment in the city. “The only necessities I couldn’t seem to get — Hershey bars, Kleenex and Jack Daniel’s whiskey,” she wrote, “were replenished by visiting friends.”
Carole Lombard wasn’t born a screwball heroine; she and the genre evolved together. The actress liked to say that her feature movie career (which followed an important apprenticeship in a dozen Mack Sennett two-reel shorts) began with “17 flops in a row.” Before he directed her in Twentieth Century (1934), her breakthrough movie, Howard Hawks called her the worst actress in the world. But he is also said to have told her costar John Barrymore that she would be a sensation — if only they could keep her from acting. What the notable director and actor did was encourage Lombard to be herself, and this turned out to be the key to liberating an antic original from the restraining shell of a gifted, if not particularly inspired, contract player.
Doris Day, one of the best-loved and highest-paid female stars of the 1950s and ‘60s, purchased a house in Los Angeles’s Toluca Lake area from comedienne Martha Raye in 1951. Interested in design, Day visited an upholsterer immediately after her wedding to Martin Melcher. “I remember Marty standing there…muttering, ‘I don’t believe this is happening on my wedding day.’ [The day] we returned from our wedding trip to the neat house in Toluca Lake, [my son] Terry excitedly running to the car, Alma in the kitchen preparing a welcome-home dinner,…was the answer to what I had prayed for,” the actress told A. E. Hotchner, who wrote her 1975 memoir, Doris Day: Her Own Story. “From the time I was a little girl, my only true ambition in life was to get married and tend house and have a family.”
Read more at Architectural Digest
“I’ve been through it all, baby, I’m mother courage.”-Elizabeth Taylor
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