#Edit Rudolph Valentino!!!

[zoobus]

I regret never tagging things properly because I definitely have several old posts mocking how every single micro-generation act like they invented bishounen, and every single micro-gen+five years acts like the historically unforeseen event of people wanting to fuck beautiful young men will be what destroys us

[dontbestingybaby]

from Motion Picture Magazine, September 1923

Portrait of Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova by Hal Phyfe

[anabluetz]

AHS Hotel

Finn Wittrock as Tristan Duffy

Rudolph Valentino

[friendlessghoul]

Stage star Carter DeHaven seemingly transforms himself into a series of silent-era screen stars including Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Roscoe Arbuckle, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Jackie Coogan.

[marzipanandminutiae]

Not sure if you are on twitter too so I am not sure if you heard, but the Uglies movie will come to Netflix this year 13th September. God, I hope so much it is just as good as the books...

Interesting! I wonder how they're going to do some parts of it, like the fact that the characters all have to be within a specific, very narrow range of skin tones- at least, the Pretty ones who aren't allowed to be very light- or dark-skinned, but I'm willing to bet the Ugly characters shouldn't look totally one race or another either after so many years of genetic intermingling.

There's also going to be a lot of CGI involved in the Pretties, if they do it right. We're not just talking supermodel- one whole point is that it's a very specific template of beauty. I guess a few Natural Pretties who lived after photography but during the before-times are mentioned, so those could give us an idea, including Lillian Russell:

and Rudolph Valentino:

there's also a "Denzel" mentioned, but I have no idea who that's about. Denzel Washington hardly looks the part, IMO. maybe when he was younger, I guess?

(others, like Cleopatra and Nefertiti, seem to just be people who were famous for their beauty since nobody can really conclusively say what they looked like. it's also kind of ironic- nobody alive at that point saw Russell or Valentino in person, and they maybe don't realize- or care -that photo editing existed back then. so it's possible they weren't as Pretty as everyone thinks, IRL)

And to have the appropriate contrast after the operation, they're going to have to make the actors look very different. So I'm curious to see how that will go down.

I guess we'll see! Gods, it's so weird to be getting an adaptation of that after all this time- I remember first reading those books when I was like 11. Specials hadn't even come out yet.

[byneddiedingo]

Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy in Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Cast: Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond, Mary Duncan, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, C. Henry Gordon, Peg Entwistle, Harriet Hagman, Edward Pawley, Blanche Friderici, Wally Albright. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Samuel Ornitz, based on a novel by Tiffany Thayer. Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Film editing: Charles L. Kimball. Music: Max Steiner. 

Myrna Loy was born Myrna Williams in Helena, Montana, but you wouldn't know it from the way Hollywood often cast her at the start of her career in the '20s and '30s. Her role in Thirteen Women is probably the purest example of her work as the stereotypical sinister Eurasian. She plays Ursula Georgi, whom the cop played by Ricardo Cortez scorns as "Half-breed type. Half Hindu, half Javanese, I don't know." (Actually, Cortez himself knew something about crossing ethnic lines: He was born Jacob Krantz in New York, but Hollywood changed his name to capitalize on the vogue for Latin lovers like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and later claimed first that he was French and later that he was born in Vienna.) Ursula seeks revenge on the women who belonged to a sorority at a girls' college and blackballed her when she sought admission. She seeks out a phony seer known as Swami Yogadachi (C. Henry Gordon), whose horoscope readings the girls sought out, and hypnotizes him into sending them poison-pen readings that predict dire events. Two of the girls, the sisters June (Mary Duncan) and May Raskob (Harriet Hagman), have become trapeze artists, and June is so unnerved by the fake reading that she lets May fall to her death during a stunt and goes mad as a consequence. As others fall prey to Ursula's schemes, some of the survivors gather at the home of Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne), who thinks that their hysteria over the deaths is absurd. Laura is the single mother of a son, Bobby (Wally Albright), who is one of those cloyingly cute movie children -- he calls her "Mumsy." But even Laura's calm vanishes when Ursula makes Bobby her next target. In addition to being stupidly racist, the movie is sheer hokum, a cockamamie blend of revenge thriller and police procedural, and it was not much of a success at the box office, even after RKO cut 14 minutes from it after test screenings -- one of the reasons why we learn the fates of only 10 of the 13 women. One of the performances cut to only four minutes was that of Peg Entwistle, who played Hazel, the one who kills her husband and goes to prison. Entwistle was reportedly so despondent about her movie career that she climbed to the top of one of the letters on the Hollywood sign (reports vary on whether it was the H or the D) and jumped to her death. As for Loy, this was her last outing as a Eurasian vamp: The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) changed her screen image to that of the witty and soignée wife, most often of William Powell.    

[gentlyepigrams]

Vilma Banky by Truus, Bob & Jan too! Via Flickr: French postcard ny Editions Cinémagazine, no. 428. Photo: Vilma Banky in The Winning of Barbara Worth (Henry King, 1926), also with Ronald Colman and a young Gary Cooper, who debuted in this film. Hungarian-born silent film star Vilma Bánky (1898-1991) filmed in Budapest, France, Austria, and Germany, before Sam Goldwyn took her to Hollywood. There she starred opposite great silent stars like Rudolph Valentino and Ronald Colman. She became Goldwyn's biggest money maker till sound finished her career. For more postcards, a bio and clips check out our blog European Film Star Postcards or follow us at Tumblr.

[lizardsfromspace]

Just learned that there's another World War I propaganda film starring a drag queen, this time the more popular one Julian Eltinge, and its history is. Weird.

It was filmed in 1918 as Over the Rhine and not released bc, well, it was a World War I propaganda film and it was 1919. So they recut it to remove the WWI elements and released it in 1920 as The Adventuress. Then they recut it again in 1922 as The Isle of Love, because the supporting cast included Rudolph Valentino and they wanted to cash in on his newfound stardom, and also it included Virgina Rappe and they wanted to cash in on the infamy of the scandal around her death*.

Unfortunately the original and the second cut are lost but the cash-in thirty minute edit is on the Internet Archive, at least? But what a bizarre trajectory for a movie to take. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation of Great War propaganda

*btw Roscoe Arbuckle was one hundred perfect objectively innocent, to the extent that the jurors in his final trial took only six minutes to acquit him, five of which were spent writing an apology to him, and it's gross that he's still sometimes dredged up as an example of Hollywood's Dark Side or abuse in Hollywood based on one hundred year old tabloid articles going "haha what if he's so heavy, he crushed her to death, haha"

I watched this silent movie called Yankee Doodle in Berlin that's notable for being a early crossdressing comedy starring Bothwell Browne, one of the first big "female impersonators" - in modern lingo, that means he was one of the 1910s' most popular drag queens (at one point he had a double act with a "male impersonator" named Kathleen Clifford), and drag queens were popular enough to play Broadway theaters in the 1910s, I say authoritatively as if I didn't learn that today. It's a World War I movie where he's a pilot on a secret mission who dresses as a woman and the Kaiser's men get the hots for "her" etc

But it has tremendously weird energy since it's a incredibly gung-ho WWI propaganda film...released the year after the war ended. It has a copyright date of 1918 so I guess it was made in the last days of the war and shelved for a while but the entire film is like, "look at the DASTARDLY HUN! Smash the Kaiser today!!!" when the Kaiser was smashed eight months ago, we don't need to smash the Kaiser anymore. This comedy pauses for obligatory war crime scenes so we know to hate the Kaiser but the Kaiser was very much un-Kaiser-ed by the time this came out

(Germans in World War I propaganda films are always comically evil, always throwing babies out of windows and crucifying Canadians and the like)

It ends with the Kaiser being chased by a bomb labeled USA because this film presents winning World War I as an entirely American endeavor. Actually this film presents World War I as being won entirely by a drag queen which, cool that that was the premise of a popular film in 1919 when a trans war film would get a theater threats today but it's incredibly weird to see a phase between smash-the-Hun propaganda and Lost Generation disillusionment where you could present World War I as a wacky, slapstick lark of a war

[thesoundofsilents]

Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino in “Camille”, 1921

[music-is-my-main-drug]

☠️Tristan Duffy☠️

[dontbestingybaby]

from Motion Picture Magazine, February 1924

original caption:

No—Guess Again! Recently there was a mammoth Actors' Fund Benefit held in Los Angeles in which all the movie stars appeared. And the Argentine tango in which Shirley Mason and Viola Dana impersonated Natacha and Rodolph Valentino is even now the talk of Hollywood

[anabluetz]

AHS Hotel

Finn Wittrock as Rudolph Valentino

[byneddiedingo]

Vilma Banky and Rudolph Valentino in The Eagle (Clarence Brown, 1925)

Cast: Rudolph Valentino, Vilma Banky, Louise Dresser, Albert Conti, James A. Marcus, George Nichols, Carrie Clark Ward. Screenplay: Hanns Kräly, based on a novel by Alexander Pushkin; titles: George Marion Jr. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Hal C. Kern. 

It's easy to overlook the absurdities of the story of The Eagle because the filmmakers embrace them, and everyone seems to be having so much fun. Rudolph Valentino is Vladimir Dubrovsky, a dashing (what else?) lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Guard, who catches the eye of Catherine the Great (Louise Dresser) when he rescues a pretty young woman (Vilma Banky) and her aunt (Carrie Clark Ward) from a carriage pulled by a runaway horse. Catherine wants him for herself, of course, but Vladimir is shocked by her advances and flees. Meanwhile, he learns that his father has been victimized by a wicked aristocrat, Kyrilla Troekouroff(James A. Marcus), who has confiscated his lands. When his father dies, Vladimir vows vengeance against Kyrilla, and assumes the identity of the Black Eagle, a Zorro-like figure who wears a mask and rights the wrongs of Kyrilla against the peasantry. (In fact, the Black Eagle wasn't in the Pushkin story on which the movie is based; he was inspired by the success of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro directed by Fred Niblo.) And wouldn't you know it, Kyrilla's daughter, Mascha, turns out to be the pretty young woman he rescued in the runaway carriage. Disguising himself as a French teacher, he works his way into Kyrilla's household and woos Mascha. Meanwhile, the empress has put a price on Vladimir's head for desertion, so when he manages to win Masca and defeat her father, he still faces a firing squad. This is probably Valentino's most light-hearted performance, and he gets fine support from Banky and especially Dresser as the randy czarina.  

[theritahaywortharchive]

Rita Hayworth displays The Rudolph Valentino Prize statuette she was awarded for her role in “Career Excellence” along with Glenn Ford, 1978

[missnedge]

Miss and Edge's fandom list

Below is lists for Miss and Edge of series/chracters you can request fics, or headcanons for.

Miss

The Witcher (2019-2022-): Unfortunately I only know the show as of right now, hopeful to read or play a game in the near future. Character X Reader/OC or Character/Reader(oc)/Character. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons

Geralt of Rivia

Yennefer

Dandelion

Stranger Things (2016-2022-): Will only write the following character for smut, all of these can be Character(s) X Reader/OC or the Ship. All other characters for other formats. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons.

Steve Harrington 

Billy Hargrove 

Eddie Munson 

Robin Buckley 

Steddie, Steddie X Reader

Harringrove, Harringrove X Reader

Mungrove, Mungrove X Reader

Ronance

Arcane (2021-): Character X Reader/OC, will consider certain ships. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons.

Vi

Jinx

Caitlyn Kiramman

Viktor

Silco

Vander

A Court of Thorns and Roses+ : Character X Reader/OC, I will take considerations for other characters but it might be biased. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons.

Cassian

Nesta 

Lucien

Feyre X Rhysand X Reader

Azriel X Rhysand’s Sister

Game of Thrones: Character X Reader/OC only, will not contribute to cannon incest. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons.

Daenerys Targaryen

Jon Snow

Robb Stark

Daario Naharis

Yara Greyjoy

Jaime Lannister

Rhaenyra Targaryen

Daemon Targaryen

Aemond Targaryen

BBC Merlin (2008): Character X Reader/OC. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons.

Merlin

Arthur Pendragon

Gawain

Morgause

Guinevere

Morgana

X-men: Character X Reader/ OC. Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons

First Class/Days of Future Past/Apocalypse:

Erik Lensherr/ Magneto

Raven/ Mystic 

Charles Xavier/ Professor X

Havok

Jean Grey

American Horror Story: Character X Reader/OC, Fluff/Angst/Smut/Headcanons.

Kit Walker

Lana Winters

Elizabeth Johnson

Rudolph Valentino

Natacha Rambova

Donovan

AU’s: Ghostface, Zombie, Apocalypse, Vampire, Camp

Miss will not: Write for or about children or Age Play characters that are not adults. Write or contribute to incest in fandom or canon. 

My promise as a writer I will continually edit my fiction to ensure all possible triggers and/or warnings are at the top of each post. I do believe that all characters I will write about or for, have an opportunity for growth or redemption. Otherwise I would not be comfortable writing about them. I think this is an amazing way for us as fans to be creative and as imaginative as possible. Therefore I will also aside from requests have OC, series and other blurbs or headcanons I’d like to post or accomplish. I can’t wait to read and hear feedback in a safe, habitable way in the near future. 

Masterlist

Edge

Transformers (clarify which version, like bayverse, prime, ect..)

Will only do character/reader (Cybertronian, human, or cyborg reader)

My Hero Academia 

Will do Character/reader, and open to certain ships

Undertale

Will do Character/reader, including AUs (Monster or human reader) (I will not do insest with any of the skelebros)

SCP/Cryptids

Only open to /readers

Creepypastas

Only open to /readers, unless its Character/reader/Character

Attack on Titan

Will do Character/reader, only open to certain ships

Detroit become human

Only open to Conor/reader (reader can be human, android, or a mix)

Stardew valley/Harvest moon

Will do Character/reader, only open to certain ships

Blue Exorcist

Will do Character/reader, only open to Rin/Ryuji/reader as a ship

Supernatural

Will do Character/reader, only open to certain ships

Noragami

Will do Character/reader, only open to certain ships

Soul Eater

Will do Character/reader, open to a few ships.

Star Trek (any series)

Will do Character/reader, only open to certain ships

Youtubers-MCYT (Only their personas, for example, any of Markiplier's alter egos. I will also not do DSMP)

Will do Character/reader, only open to certain ships

Edge’s rules

I will not write incest or NSFW senerioes about minors or minor/adult relationships. Depending on the scenario I might be open to aged up characters like in AUs, for example in MHA I've read plenty of Pro-hero AUs that eventually contain smut, I don't mind stuff like that.

I am very open to writing many different scenarios, AUs, Characters, ships, fluff/angst/smut, poly, threesome and beyond, you name it and I'll probably be down to write.

Both

Marvel

Harry Potter

Fullmetal Alchemist (any version)

Umbrella Academy

The Boys

The Walking Dead (show and telltale game)

^^^ These fandoms both of us will write for

We have the right to deny any request if we do not feel comfortable or if we do not think that we are capable of completing the request to our greatest ability.

[bookloversofbath]

Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (Emily Wortis Leider)

Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (Emily Wortis Leider)

Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (Emily Wortis Leider) soon to be presented for sale on the fantastic BookLovers of Bath web site!

Published: London: Faber & Faber, 2003, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Contains: Black & white photographs; List of sources; Filmography; Appendices [25];

From the cover: Emily W. Leider takes an in-depth look at the silver-screen legend who forever…