“Mention art to a film magnate, and he will laugh in your face. ‘Listen, brother,’ he will say, after the guffaws have subsided, ‘the motion pictures are made for the square-heads out in Kalamazoo, not for the highbrows in Greenwich Village – and the square-heads want entertainment, not art.’ It is useless to argue that art may conceivably be entertainment; art, in Hollywood, is regarded as a dull, dry, esoteric and highly unprofitable property which is to be shunned religiously by all those who have the best interests of the exhibitor’s box office at heart. Charlie Chaplin is, and always has been, the living refutation of this absurd doctrine.”
– R.E. Sherwood, writing in Vanity Fair during the run-up to Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film, The Gold Rush.
In other, rather more modern Vanity Fair news, the New Mexico Nurse sends word that the Summer of Death has claimed Dominick Dunne. Dunne was one of what is surely a dying breed – not just a journalist who covered celebrities, but a celebrity journalist.
I shall miss Dominick Dunne. The number of places he went and people he mingled with – just in any particular month – was mind boggling. My sister had a standard quip when the new Vanity Fair would come out…"Wonder where he dined this time…probably seated between the Pope and Joan Collins."