Category: Uncategorized
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A Star is Born, Again and Again
Oh, autumn. I could howl from dread of winter’s approach. Evenings pull in as summer’s romantic dreams fade to sepia, then fall like brittle lace down to earth. Here in Manhattan it’s the season of tourists and torch songs, of ties worn but loosened in the lingering heat of the subway. Of stilettoed boots beating…
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Monroe: Some Kind of Mirror
In just over a decade, she worked with the greatest directors in Golden Age Hollywood: Huston, Wilder, Cukor, and Hawks. Moviegoers paid $200,000,000 to watch her project her trademark combination of atomic-age sexuality and childlike, vulnerable astuteness. She was born into an orphan’s chaos and lived the shadowy Los Angelean life of a Raymond Chandler…
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The Great and Powerful Roz
Just now, while flicking Jungle Red fingernails through the spammed questions I receive for this blog, I noticed the sort of query I usually relish (since it would lead us straight to Kenneth Anger territory– I am worryingly familiar with that dirty turf). The question was: “Could you tell me more about classic Hollywood’s grubby underbelly?” Why…
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To Hell with God Damned “L’Amour” (A Letter from Noel Coward)
By 1956, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich had been friends for over two decades. One day, Coward received a letter from his old pal in which she lay out her broken heart and told a tale of humiliation. What should she do? How could she go on? Immediately, the playwright sat down to write an…
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Another City, Another Life. . .
Since reading an Economist’s report on the competitiveness of global cities, I’ve been thinking about just what makes a city livable, and indeed how one thinks of cities at all. I have lived in many cities and, as a born romantic, never once asked myself the Economist’s practical question–how does this town compete in terms…
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Mutti Dearest. Daughter Dullest.
Hollywood Books (Part Ein): Marlene Dietrich by Maria Riva Ahh, Veteran’s Day not long ago. The leap of Spring is now long gone, along with the smoked salmon celebrations and the psyche-graveling guilt of Mother’s Day. Back in olden times, when dinosaurs played canasta and ice cubes could speak, AMC aired Mommy Dearest on repeat…
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Missing the Adrenaline Rush
(Originally in the Guardian Weekend Magazine, by Dana D. Burnell) I always knew there was something wrong with my heart. No other kid collapsed on the ground after playing, cradling their chest. It was only me, with a pain I instinctively ignored. At nine, I leapt from windows on to ice-hard lawns. At 12 I played…
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A&E Intervention Recap: Season 15, Ep. 13: Alicia (and Nexxus!)
A&E struck gold back in 2005 when they launched the Emmy-winning Intervention, a docu-style series following alcoholics, drug addicts and those struggling with other disorders from the depths of their addictions through a staged intervention and, if all goes well, off to treatment. Though briefly canceled in 2013, the show was revived just a year later…
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American Pain: Coming Soon! (to a multiplex near you)
(originally on AfterPartyMagazine) In a recent HuffPo essay, John Temple, the author of American Pain—a gripping, sordid history of a Florida Medical clinic that sparked the deadliest drug epidemic in history–explained what compelled him to write the book. First, a bit about the history: the clinic, simply called The American Pain Clinic, prescribed over 20 million…
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Can We Stop Prescribing Seniors Opiates?
From After Party Magazine BY DANA BURNELL+ ON OCTOBER 2, 2015 I live in a walk-up building three floors above an old lady with the name of a Neil Simon character: Mildred Plotkin. Mildred is 84 years old, approximately five feet tall, and batshit crazy. She regularly greets my upstairs neighbor with a heartfelt “Hello, Bitch,”…
Dana Dunbaugh Burnell 