Behind the scenes of Hollywood's double standards
The ethical back room of Hollywood has always caught my attention.
I have grown up with the glamor of the great productions filmed in the mecca of American cinema during unforgettable decades of the last century, in a country like Spain where they never talked about what was really cooking behind the scenes of America, even if they were open secrets.
I bring up this reflection a few days after the premiere in Spain of a paradigmatic film, American stars do not die in Liverpool, because it represents very well the double standard of Hollywood and its fatal attraction to death.
What happens is that a great American actress, protagonist of the film, Gloria Grahame, the Oscar winner for "Captives of Evil", sends a contradictory message in the film, putting Hollywood in its place at the end of her life, because his true love was finally not there.
Recently in Madrid, the protagonist of this true story, Peter Turner, who in 1978 “was a 26-year-old actor from Liverpool trying to make a living in London with very little success. One day a 54-year-old veteran American actress, who had been disowned by Hollywood, arrived at the boarding house where he lived, and had moved on to the theater.
"I remember the first time I saw her. I occupied one of her upper rooms and she the main apartment downstairs », recalls Turner in Madrid. "One second I visualize it."
For a moment. “She was not what I expected her to be. They had told me about a Hollywood star, and I remember that she opened the door as if hiding, looking as if she had arrived five minutes earlier ».
She needed 4 pounds 75 pence; he lent them. "I never found out what for, but she paid me back in a check that I still have." A couple of days later they started dancing together at the Saturday Night Fever house, and weeks later they became lovers.
I have been experiencing something special for weeks in relation to the cinema, because almost everything I see is not a pure coincidence with the harsh reality.
Will I have Turner syndrome, that is, what is told in some movies is what really happens to me? It is likely, because what happens to us is that we do not know what is happening to us and the cinema is in charge of reminding us by shooting it live and direct.
That is the magic of him, almost in a perennial deja vu. It doesn't matter, live love, live life and live death, that legendary film shot by Bertrand Tavernier, starring Romy Schneider and that still moves me when I remember it.
Really, that's the magic of commitment cinema, not just any cinema. I admire the American actresses and actors who stood up to the mafia world of Hollywood for decades and continue to stand up to us today, when the Weinstein producer scandal recently broke.
That is why I wish to extol the discreet charm of this excellent actress, Gloria Grahame, who, beginning her internal and external exile in Liverpool and with only a humble request of 4 pounds and 75 pence to an unknown boy who was staying in her pension, 28 years younger than her, really wrote the most beautiful pages of her life and that of the person with whom she shared the last moments of a journey towards an important part of her secret soul.
Although no one told her the reason why she did not want to die in Liverpool, where she found her reason for existing and, paradoxically, asked to return to Hollywood that she had denied him so much in her eventful life. With this final decision, I think she won the Oscar for the most worthy actress in Hollywood.
And the end comes, that famous The End of the movies of my childhood. I know that Peter Turner shot a documentary many years ago, I Used to Be in Pictures, which I am very interested in seeing and which I am desperately looking for.
Because I think he has found many surprising reasons for the behavior of Hollywood actors and actresses, in his back room, with a common identifier: they all starred in silent movies and now shared the last days of their lives in an Academy Asylum of cinema in Hollywood. They were what you saw.
They didn't speak in those movies, but they taught us to feel their passion for what they did with absolute dignity. In their nineties, they told Turner, in hushed tones, how the Hollywood backroom worked and, perhaps, what the real soul of Gloria Grahame was like. Marvelous.
