If You Start Reading Books Again. You Will Feel At Least A Little Better. I Promise

They should invent a brain that lets you sleep

Photoplay Magazine, August 1928.

Maturity is when you stop trying to convince other people to treat you right. You just observe their choices, understand their character, and decide what you’re going to allow in your life.

Pre-Code Hollywood refers to the era in the American film industry between the introduction of sound in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (usually labeled, albeit inaccurately after 1934, as the “Hays Code”) censorship guidelines. Although the Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934. Before that date, movie content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers. As a result, films in the late 1920s and early 1930s included sexual innuendo, miscegenation, profanity, illegal drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence and homosexuality.

James Dean and Geraldine Page photographed by Dennis Stock, NYC, 1955

I hate when people say ohhhh your pets only love you because you feed them. as if that wasn't the first form of love any of us felt. get real.

the first film I saw Norma Shearer in was The Women and I think that negatively coloured my perception of her for years (decades?) because I thought she was the worst one in that (Paulette Goddard, Rosalind Russel, and Joan Crawford outshine her completely and when I saw the film as a teen I found her matronly and submissive). Watching her pre-code films now is wild, she's so sexy and cool! This is a problem I've had with a lot of actresses who took up more "good woman" roles in the late 30s and 40s (eg Claudette Colbert or Myrna Loy) because when I first got into classic films as a teen, I could not relate to those women or their characters and found them old and stodgy. Similarly I always thought actors like Gary Cooper or Cary Grant in the 1940s were so ancient and couldn't believe any woman would be attracted to a man that old

It is what it is *throws up*

Garbo got a kick out of sporting turtlenecks at a time when only jockeys and prizefighters wore them, and she was the first film star, followed by Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich, to liberate women from skirts. Knowing observers slipped innuendo into their reports of Garbo and Dietrich’s preference for masculine styles. Vanity Fair pictured the Swede and the German, in 1932, under the headline “Both Members of the Same Club,” implying more than their mutual fondness for men’s suits and slouch hats.

Women who spurned skirts were not only violating taboos at the time, but breaking laws; in Paris in the twenties, a permis de travestissement was required of any female wearing a man’s suit. Mores were not much more relaxed on Hollywood Boulevard. “Garbo in Pants!” shouted a wire-photo caption.

“Innocent by standers gasped in amazement to see Mercedes de Acosta and Garbo in pants pretty much managed to go Where she pleased (and, perversely, she didn’t seem to mind the extra attention her fashion preferences brought her).

One night in 1928 Bill Frye slipped her into Chasen’s by rolling her trousers up beneath her overcoat, which she wore to the table. “We had already booked the reservation,” says Frye, “and when I saw what she was wearing I called the restaurant and told them I was bringing Miss Garbo to dinner and could she please come in slacks. They said no, she could not. I asked, ‘What if you put us to the right, just as we come in the door?’ They still said no, so we played our little trick.”

Greta Garbo striding swiftly along… dressed in men’s clothes.” A few days later, MGM sent out a story under Garbo’s name, in which she apologized for inflicting her “trousered attitude” on hostesses, escorts, and maitres d’.

Greta Garbo in The Single Standard (1929)