Topic
The studio system controlled the story as tightly as it controlled the stars. These pieces work from what survived it: decrees, award records, studio announcements and photographs whose licence we checked file by file.
15 stories published.
Their love story began on the set of Cleopatra and produced two marriages, two divorces, eleven films and a correspondence that outlived them both. Here is the documented sequence — and what happened after the second divorce.
8 min read
They met on a film set in 1989 and married on Christmas Eve 1990. In February 2001 a publicist announced the separation in a few lines, and neither has ever given a detailed public reason. Here is what the record does say.
5 min read
In January 2005 they announced their separation in a statement they wrote together. Twenty years on, the parts of that story that are documented and the parts that were invented are still routinely confused.
5 min read
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz built the most successful comedy in television history, owned the studio that made it, and ended their marriage the day after they finished shooting.
5 min read
Lauren Bacall had never made a film when she was cast opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1944. What followed is one of the few Old Hollywood romances that the record does not complicate.
6 min read
Carole Lombard raised over two million dollars in a single evening in Indianapolis, boarded a plane home, and was killed with her mother and twenty other people on a Nevada mountainside.
6 min read
Mike Todd died in a plane crash in March 1958. By September, his widow Elizabeth Taylor was involved with his best friend, Eddie Fisher, who was married to Debbie Reynolds. The public chose a side immediately.
5 min read
An actor hospitalised by his own make-up, an actress set alight by a special effect, and a sixteen-year-old lead who was already on studio-supplied medication. The documented aftermath of the most-watched film ever made.
6 min read
Madonna and Sean Penn married in August 1985 in front of a press corps in helicopters. The divorce file, the withdrawn 1987 petition and a sworn 2015 declaration are the only parts of this marriage that are documented.
4 min read
He left a marriage of twelve years, was dropped by his record label and his agency, and won an Academy Award while the marriage was already over. The documented sequence of the most destructive love affair in mid-century Hollywood.
5 min read
Two ceremonies in two days, an estimated thirty million television viewers, and a studio contract that ended with the vows. What the record shows about the wedding that invented the modern celebrity royal.
4 min read
The wedding at San Francisco City Hall took minutes. The marriage lasted nine months. What DiMaggio did afterwards is the part almost nobody gets right.
3 min read
In 1950 a sitting United States senator stood up and called a film star a threat to the nation. Twenty-two years later, another senator apologised for it in the same chamber.
3 min read
Told to think up a comedy make-up, Chaplin walked into the Keystone wardrobe, borrowed trousers from one actor and shoes from another, and came out as a character he would play for twenty-six years.
3 min read
Georges Méliès burned his own negatives and ended up selling toys in a Paris railway station. A hand-coloured print of A Trip to the Moon turned up in Barcelona in 1993 — fused into a single lump.
3 min read
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