Antebellum historian~ MARTIN TURNBULL has discovered something amazing....
THE TRUNK OF ALLA NAZIMOVA!~
Once upon a time… there was a great dramatic actress by the name of Alla Nazimova. She took Broadway by storm in the 1910s, earning a well-deserved reputation as being one of the great interpreters of Ibsen. Inevitably, Hollywood called, waving a huge contract at her–reputedly worth $13,000 a week–luring her westward. Madame Nazimova heeded the call, and at first she was very successful. But in time she saw the real money was to be made in producing movies, so she set up her own production company. However she found that producing a financially successful movie was harder than it looked. She made two high profile movies — Camille (1921) and Salome (1923) — but they both flopped so badly, Nazimova was all washed up in the movies and she returned to the stage.
Once upon another, much later time…I came across Alla Nazimova when I started doing research for my novels set around the Garden of Allah Hotel built around what was once Nazimova’s movie star mansion on Sunset Boulevard. Hardly any of her films are now available, and ironically, the only two viewable online are the two that sunk her financially, Camille and Salome.
It was Salome that particularly caught my eye. It’s years ahead of its time, especially in terms of production design, sets and costumes. It’s far-out stuff today, let alone to the audiences of the early 1920s, and it’s no great mystery why the expensive film flopped.
And what particularly caught my eye in Salome was the striking headdress she wore: a wig of short dreadlocks topped with beads made out of some sort of luminous material designed to reflect the light. Or perhaps glow in the dark.
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