#Hollywood Center Studios

[oldshowbiz]

The soundstage where the Lone Ranger was made in the 1950s as seen September 9, 2023.

[thursdaymurderbub]

A definite difference between reality and Joan Bloandell's fictionalised autobiography Center Door Fancy, the reason for which is currently a mystery:

In the book, Joan is heading to Hollywood after becoming a hit in her first Broadway play. There, she will meet and star alongside James Cagney.

In a 1972 interview with James Bawden, Joan Blondell recounts her arrival in Hollywood as follows:

(from James Bawden and Ron Miller's 2016 Conversations with Classic Film Stars)

Joan Blondell and James Cagney indeed starred together in Sinner's Holiday (1930), but the film was based on a Broadway play Penny Arcade that they had just starred in together in 1929. The play only ran for 24 performances, but Al Jolson saw it and recommended it/them to Warner Brothers. The two were cast in the leads; this whole thing is likely linked to the studios searching for theatre actors who could read lines and act well for talkies, starting in 1927 but not really getting into full swing right away. Sinner's Holiday (1930) was successful and led to Blondell and Cagney being paired together in several other pictures.

Additionally, at least by release date Sinner's Holiday (1930) was Cagney's first film, but at the time of Sinner's Holiday's release, Joan already had three shorts and one full-length film acredited to her in theatres. The full-length film, The Office Wife (1930), includes Joan's name on the poster, below the titles and lead actors.

Maybe this is due to Darryl Zanuck's interest in Joan Blondell's promise, as recounted by Joan Blondell in the 1972 interview:

Joan Blondell explains all:

[disneyremnants]

Inside of the Backlot Express at Disney's Hollywood Studios is a large purple hang glider. This glider was originally used in the Epcot Center show Skylaidescope, which ran from 1985 until 1987. Multiple colored hang gliders were used in the show, such as this orange one!

[theodoradove]

something something the true glory days of the garden of allah and the chateau marmont were when they kind of sucked as residences

[marklikely]

watching the era of the tentpole blockbuster oversaturation studio franchise cinema landscape crumble before my eyes . :-)

[photosbydennisr]

Schoolboy Q performing at Puffcon LA October 2022 

Photographed by Dennis R.

[pappatarzansblogg]

Flashback: Orlando, Florida

Vi går alla igenom en del händelser som vi sedan kommer att minnas för resten av våra liv, och det kan ju vara både bra och dåliga saker. Jag har några resor och andra händelser som jag tänkte dela med mig av här på bloggen, och att jag gör detta under en den gemensamma rubriken “Flashback”. Min förhoppning är att jag ska kunna se tillbaka på det jag skriver för min egen skull när jag sitter som…

[elizabethminkel]

Since the WGA strikes began, the studios have been trying—and failing—to turn fans against the writers (and now the actors). I reported on a very strange SDCC this year, which was full of labor conversations and solidarity along the full spectrum of the fan/creator divide. As one member of SAG-AFTRA told me during an awareness-raising demonstration across from the convention center, “The people that I have met today have been all thumbs-up, V for victory, hugs. We love it, and we’re very pleasantly surprised.”

[ellianasdeadpointeshoes]

I've been asked to do a list of familiar names that are now going to ballet schools and studios

Crystal Huang (bb,rcfd)>>Abt jko

Sadie daniels (???) >> Ecc

Savannah manzel (larkin)>> ecc

Clara Riggs (dkcba)>>abt jko

Summer lily ( dkcba) > ecc

Shylee Sagle (rmbs)> San Francisco ballet school

Izzy howard( dkcba) >San Francisco ballet school

Kya Massimino (aocb)>> Hollywood ballet school

Isobel lehman(hbs)>> united ballet academy

Izzy keesee (ecc)>>> royal ballet school

Kennedy kahler(dbc)>>> Europe school of ballet?????

Annabel kohn (dkcba) > European school of ballet

Morgan ligon (ecc, abt jko)>>>???? Academie princesse grace????

Emma crawford( aba) - royal Danish ballet school

June freeman(dkcba)>>> San Francisco ballet school

Madison bevilacqua>>> San Francisco ballet school

Alisa xu(southland)>>> abt jko

Keagan pickett(mba)>> rock school for ballet education ( not the rock center in vegas)

Elsa newbower(n&d)>>> ellison

Keenan mentztos(bbc)>> royal ballet school

Ivana Radan (ellison)>>> dutch national.ballet school

Viktoria papalodouka(ellison)>>> abt jko

Daphne horvath (abcb)>>> abt jko

Everly nesda>>> rock school of dance

Kherrington turner>>>> European school of ballet.

Aliya yen( p21)>>>>

Sofia rutova(mba)>** vaganova training progam.

Anjali dyen (rmbs)>>> elite classical coaching.

Tova tustin (mba)>>> thr rock school for dance education

Bianca vezzali (bisd)>>> academie princess grace.

[oldshowbiz]

Hollywood General Studios aka Hollywood Center Studios has gone by many names. 

Built during the Silent Film era and first utilized by Harold Lloyd, this incredible, independent lot has thrived for over one hundred consecutive years. 

Every major comedy star you can name from the 1920s to the 2020s has done something here. 

[thursdaymurderbub]

Excerpt from Joan Blondell's fictionalised autobiography Center Door Fancy. Jim is Dick Powell, Joan's second husband and star in and of himself. I think Teresa Hernandez must be Marion Davies and He Who Must Not be Named, "the world-famous publisher," is William Randolf Hearst. Joan's thoughts in this part of the book occur just after she is divorced from her first husband and before she is married to Dick Powell, so the year must be 1936. Dick Powell and Marion Davies made 'Page Miss Glory' together in 1935 and 'Hearts Divided' in 1936. Coincidence?

I think it's interesting to see the power dynamics at play with obviously Hearst at the top--Joan capitalizes his pronounced like a revered god and doesn't even dare/bother to provide a pseudonym for him--but also how Marion Davies benefited in her personal life (or not) by either overtly evoking Hearst's name/power or just because everyone knew he would support her. I've read elsewhere that Marion Davies had many affairs during her relationship with Hearst and that he didn't actually mind very much as long as it wasn't public knowledge. Also, I can't find anything about Dick Powell and Marion Davies having an off-screen romance anywhere, so a nice 90-year old piece of hot goss from Ms Blondell <3

[theprice-if]

DEMO (TBA)

★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★★

Roaring stadiums, filled to the max with screaming fans, as you stand with a microphone in hand. Your heart pounds against your chest as you get ready to perform. Shouts of adoration filter past your ear as the lights finally turn on; the show truly begins. With you in the center of it all.

Except… that isn’t you. You’re to the side, watching it all, with a clipboard pressed to your chest. Making sure that nothing was out of place.

You’re just an assistant, an assistant to the biggest star gracing the stage in the past decade, but still just an assistant.

That is until you woke up alone in a room that was way above your pay grade; with a shiny ring on your finger. Your new spouse? The very star that you have been working for, for the last two years. The same star that many believed would never settle down— until you came along.

These rapid-fire events thrust you into the spotlight. Rocketing you towards the twinkling lights of stardom as you desperately try to figure out how to come to terms with everything.

The media and tabloids are just the tip of the iceberg. The very star you’re married to offers you the deal of a lifetime.

Stay married to them for a year and get a record deal; the biggest reason you moved to L.A.... All of your dreams will come true after twelve months.

If only you had known what the price of stardom truly brought.

The Price is rated 18+ for explicit language, sexual themes, alcohol/drug use, questionable behavior, and more!

★ Features ★

Customizable MC: name, gender, appearance, facets of your personality, hobbies, and more!

Get into the studio and start preparing for what will come when the year is up. Find the voice that you have always wanted to showcase in the industry!

Create your own music! Cultivate your debut album and show the world what it's been missing!

Interact with your fans and the music industry as a whole through social media! Will you become an upcoming star that the media loves or a black sheep that'll keep them returning for more?

Engage in romance with a variety of characters. Will the fake one become real with your pretend spouse? Or perhaps you'll find passion building with the less complicated-- and fun-loving-- photographer?

Discover what truly happened the night of your marriage. Or, if you choose to do so, leave it as the hazy fog in the recesses of your mind.

And much more as the story continues forward!

Are you willing to pay the price for your dream? Will that dream change over time?

★ The ROs ★

Adrian/Ariana Ocean ★ He/Him or She/Her ★ 28 ★

Your boss, and also your spouse, the most sought-after star in the entertainment industry. With a reputation as spotty as one would expect with someone at the top. However, with the news of your marriage, people seem to be seeing them in a new light; something that they’ve been wanting for a very long time. Let’s hope it’ll last.

Blake Turner ★ He/Him or She/Her ★ 28 ★

A Hollywood starlet that’s coming off their recent Oscar win; who also happens to be your ex from college. An ex that dumped you when they dropped out of college to become a star. A story that you never truly got to hear the entirety of. And suddenly, just like that, they’re back in your life with the same smirk from before. The one that made you fall in love with them, to begin with.

Liam/Leah Shaw ★ He/Him or She/Her ★ 29 ★

Your newly assigned bodyguard, you still have to get used to that, who is supposed to protect you whenever your spouse can’t be with you. You just weren’t expecting them to start affecting you the way that they have. Their warm smile is like a beacon in this unfamiliar world.

Isaac/Isabel Carnell ★ He/Him or She/Her ★ 27 ★

The photographer who is tasked with taking lovely shots of the newly wed couple. One of the only people, besides management, that actually knows what the hell is actually going on. Their general cheerfulness does wonders to lighten your spirits. Not to mention the pictures they take are absolutely divine.

Carson/Cara Madden ★ He/Him or She/Her ★ 33 ★

The lawyer that is making sure everything goes smoothly; while also trying to not get gray hairs throughout. An aloof individual that only cracks a smile around a select few people. However, they’re good at their job and that’s what should matter most to you. Even though you sort of wish they’d smile at you. At least just once.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Regardless of what companies and investors may say, artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent in the way most humans would understand it. To generate words and images, AI tools are trained on large databases of training data that is often scraped off the open web in unimaginably large quantities, no matter who owns it or what biases come along with it. When a user then prompts ChatGPT or DALL-E to spit out some text or visuals, the tools aren’t thinking about the best way to represent those prompts because they don’t have that ability. They’re comparing the terms they’re presented with the patterns they formed from all the data that was ingested to train their models, then trying to assemble elements from that data to reflect what the user is looking for. In short, you can think of it like a more advanced form of autocorrect on your phone’s keyboard, predicting what you might want to say next based on what you’ve already written and typed out in the past. If it’s not clear, that means these systems don’t create; they plagiarize. Unlike a human artist, they can’t develop a new artistic style or literary genre. They can only take what already exists and put elements of it together in a way that responds to the prompts they’re given. There’s good reason to be concerned about what that will mean for the art we consume, and the richness of the human experience.

[...]

AI tools will not eliminate human artists, regardless of what corporate executives might hope. But it will allow companies to churn out passable slop to serve up to audiences at a lower cost. In that way, it allows a further deskilling of art and devaluing of artists because instead of needing a human at the center of the creative process, companies can try to get computers to churn out something good enough, then bring in a human with no creative control and a lower fee to fix it up. As actor Keanu Reeves put it to Wired earlier this year, “there’s a corporatocracy behind [AI] that’s looking to control those things. … The people who are paying you for your art would rather not pay you. They’re actively seeking a way around you, because artists are tricky.” To some degree, this is already happening. Actors and writers in Hollywood are on strike together for the first time in decades. That’s happening not just because of AI, but how the movie studios and steaming companies took advantage of the shift to digital technologies to completely remake the business model so workers would be paid less and have less creative input. Companies have already been using AI tools to assess scripts, and that’s one example of how further consolidation paired with new technologies are leading companies to prioritize “content” over art. The actors and writers worry that if they don’t fight now, those trends will continue — and that won’t just be bad for them, but for the rest of us too.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

Man, I like Daily Wire in concept but Matt Walsh needs to shut the fuck up about video games. The same guy who tried to resurrect the tired old "violent video games are harmful!" crap is now acting like he's the first person to notice that video games are pushing woke nonsense (even though there are about a hundred channels and outlets that have been talking about this for years) but his solution is to, of course, for the right to stop playing video games.

No. Just, no.

This is the same "bury our head in the sand and pretend pop culture doesn't exist" mindset that got us into this situation in the first place. You can't win a war (and there is a culture war going on, no matter how many people on both sides want to pretend otherwise) by retreating from every battlefield. You win by raising awareness of a problem and then offering a real solution.

And it's especially stupid seeing this cultural retreat mindset from someone working for DW because DW actually knows exactly how to fight this battle. They created their own media company to fight against woke Hollywood. Are all their movies and shows good? No, not at all. But they still did the right thing. They put their money where their mouth is, and created an alternative.

A much better example is Angel Studios, which is probably the only Christian movie studio I've ever seen that puts out top quality content with great acting, writing, and production values. They're raking in money and getting their content onto mainstream streaming services as well as theaters. In other words, they're taking their message to the people who need it the most. The ones who aren't already in the echo chamber. Unlike Daily Wire, which only offers its content on its own website through a subscription service to its own audience, and never advertises anywhere.

Another successful example outside of movies is Eric July's Rippaverse. He's been killing it with his comics, with every single one of his campaigns raking in over a million dollars, every cent of which is reinvested back into his business, helping it grow, creating more content, and expanding his already impressive roster of writers and artists. Mainstream writers and artists, by the way. Like Chuck Dixon, the guy who co-created Bane and wrote the seminal Tim Drake Robin comics, among many other credits, and Mike Baron, who wrote some of the best early Punisher comics. Eric had a following before he started the Rippaverse. He runs a successful YouTube channel and he's a regular contributor to The Blaze. He could have walled himself off with his fanbase, wrote comics about ancaps saving the world from the evils of government, and made some money while pandering to the people who already agreed with him. Instead, he went big. He invested his own money, runs his own distribution center, owns his own business with zero outside investors, hires the best talent he can, and offers a product that focuses on story and characters over messaging. His work isn't even "anti-woke". It's just not woke.

And that's what we need in video games. We need alternatives. We need to roll up our sleeves and wade into the deep waters and actually contribute our ideas and our talents. Offer an alternative. Hire people who know what they're doing, who care about quality content first and social engineering never. There is a huge untapped audience who would pay hand over fist for good video games free from microtransactions and woke nonsense.

But retreating is not an option. It's not brave or moral to hide in our echo chambers and scoff at anything fun. Entertainment is necessary. And maybe more importantly, it's not going anywhere. We will never live in a world where people go to work and spend time with their families at home and do nothing else. We need to engage with the world as it is. Not wait around for whatever our idea of a perfect world is to magically form so we can finally interact with it. You can't change society if you keep pretending large swaths of it don't exist.

[devilzukin7-johnny-cage]

Everything will be okay...💜

Johnny Cage was always cheerful, arrogant, self-centered and a joker, but part of that was a mask to hide his worries and weaknesses, he is not someone who is vulnerable in front of anyone and we see him with a smile all the time. But a famous actor like him must face criticism all the time, the pressure of having to do everything well and not make any mistakes since he is in the public eye, studying hundreds of scripts and perfecting his performances so as not to let his career fall, among others things.

Before he was completely alone, he did have dates or invite women to his dressing room, but all that was superficial, a temporary distraction, but even in those moments hid his true emotions behind a façade of arrogance and flirtation. He kept everything to himself until he ended up drowning his sorrows in alcohol or other things that the Hollywood world itself offered him.

Everything changed that day when he went to a town far from the city to distract himself and practice his fighting skills, in addition to taking a break. The monks helped him realign himself on the right path while the pure air purified him. There he met some other townspeople who showed him something different from what he used to see on the streets of California, and among those townspeople, thanks to his temporary mentor Bo' Rai Cho, he met his daughter, Araceli, who made him curious from day one, being the daughter of someone so important to the people of the town and also a fan of his movies.

Johnny began to approach her and talk often with her, forging in those days a genuine connection and friendship that he had rarely had, although he was a little disconcerted every time he tried to advance with her and she didn't understand his advances. Her naivety was a little worrying for a fighter bartender, he thought.

Before leaving town to resume his normal life, he decided to take the risk of taking her as his assistant. At first he doubted his decision a little because she was not only inexperienced but also clumsy and sometimes still smelled of onions and fields, but after a few weeks of scolding and frustration, everything improved more than he expected.

With this, he little by little began to loosen up a little more, since he had already gotten used to being more direct since if not, she would not fully understand his words. He could be himself without feeling that he would be seen as weak man because for her it was normal to show emotions openly and be honest, everything was different in the town where she came from and she reflected it in her way of being, infecting a little of these customs to the actor.

Even though Araceli sometimes seemed to not understand anything about her surroundings or even know where she was standing, she immediately noticed when Johnny felt frustrated, sad, angry, there was no way to hide it from her, she already knew him very well and it was difficult not to notice (especially when he was quieter than normal and scolded her for silly things). Those months working together served as a healing for both of them, as she had her own internal problems that he would soon learn about through her own words.

While Araceli learned about the world out there away from her town and matured little by little, Cage now had loyal support and someone to whom he could show his vulnerable side knowing that she would see him the same way no matter what he said. Even though the actor was constantly keeping her busy with work and asking her for favors all the time, she had become his emotional support and the feeling was mutual. He no longer had to hide from his own feelings.

Characters:

Johnny Cage (Mortal Kombat)

Araceli Cage (my OC)

Mortal Kombat (c) Netherrealm Studios / WB / Midway before