Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Hobnobbing in Hollywood

I love finding new shots of Houdini hobnobbing with Hollywood royalty. Here's a photo of him with director Cecil B. DeMille and star Wallace Reid. This would have been taken at the time of his arrival in Hollywood to start work on The Grim Game in 1919.

Picturegoer, Sept. 25, 1920

Here's another DeMille morsel. The photo below is from the documentary The Lost City of Cecil B. Demille and shows the director with the submarine model that appears in Houdini's Terror Island. This raises the question of which came first. The model or the movie?


Below are some more Houdini-DeMille-Reid connections.
 
Related:

8 comments:

  1. Cool. But odd thing is it doesn't really even look alot like him. But it looks like they did the OLD school "cut and paste", where they actually DID cut a picture out and paste it elsewhere with paste in those days waaaayyyy before photo shop. So maybe that's why his nose is totally flatšŸ¤£ -Whitt Smith

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    1. Ha! You're right. It looks like the magazine cut out the background and maybe a little too close to Harry.

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  2. There's another post on WAH of HH sitting at a long table having lunch with DeMille, Gloria Swanson, and other Hollywood people.

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    1. Yes! The Hollywood power lunch.

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    2. The young rising star Nora Desmond having lunch with DeMille. I am big! It's the pictures that got small! I bet Harry would have had a cameo in Sunset Boulevard had he lived. Diving manacled into Nora's pool.

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    3. Houdini and Gloria Swanson were friendly.

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    4. Yes they were friends! Do you know the books that each published a photo of HH and Swanson together? The JC Cannell "Secrets of Houdini" book and the Henning/Reynolds book. And I got it wrong: It's Norma Desmond. "I'm ready for my close up Mr. DeMille."

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