One of the most prolific partnerships to emerge in the silent film era was the one between movie star Mary Pickford and screenwriter Frances Marion. Director Clarence Brown once referred to their working relationship as “spontaneous combustion,” an apt description of the women’s uncanny ability to play off one another in developing new material. For…
During my senior year of college at Mississippi University for Women, I took an independent study course under the supervision of my mentor, Dr. Bridget Smith Pieschel. The subject was Women’s Autobiography, and my job was to transcribe and notate the diary of a former student of the school, Martha Smith (Dr. Pieschel’s aunt–one of…
by Jimmie Meese Moomaw I have absolutely no recollection of the first movie I ever saw. To my knowledge, Mama and Daddy never went to the movies–never, not once. All the movie memories I have are of me going alone or with or to meet friends at the theater. The very earliest memories are of the double-feature cowboy movies…
by Heather Dunn Schmitt My earliest memory of going to the movies is a foggy one, but it’s there. I was five years old, I think, and my dad piled all of us–my older sister, my younger brother, and me–into his 1966 Ford Mustang. We drove for what seemed to my young mind to be…
by Lara Fowler I can trace my love for classic film back to one person. Inhabiting a small house in a quiet neighborhood just north of the Santa Clara Valley, my grandparents, Julian and Frances Polon, were both Los Angeles transplants. My grandmother, born Canadian, had moved to Los Angeles for nursing school and stayed…
by Terry Coffey One film that really stands out in my memory is Darby O’Gill and the Little People, a 1959 Disney movie. I was seven years old and did not go to the movies much–I lived in Olive Branch, Mississippi, and you had to go all the way to Memphis to the movies, and we just…
by Donette Lee While I cannot describe my first trip to the movies, I do remember that, when I was in preschool, Mother or Daddy would ask the other: “Do you want to go to the S-H-O-W?” But soon I began to answer, “I want to go, too!” and they had to quit spelling the…
by Carolyn Camper Mann I can’t remember the first movie I went to in the small town where I grew up. However, I do remember a movie that was very special. We lived in Omaha, Nebraska in the early 1960s. My husband, Harry, was on an Air Force “Bootstrap” assignment to complete a Bachelor’s degree in…
