Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Mitchell Stephens's "The Voice of America," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism by Mitchell Stephens.

The entry begins:
A compact, confident 27-year-old American walks onto the stage of the Royal Opera House in London in August of 1919. There is to be no opera. There will be no one else on stage. Lowell Thomas will be entertaining this audience merely with a collection of images he has shot and his voice.

He is played, let us say, by Alden Ehrenreich, who is currently 27 and also comely without being aggressively handsome; who has the right air of self-possession and, of most importance, a commanding voice.

“I would like to have you close your eyes for a moment,” Thomas intones, “and try and forget that you are here in this theater, and come with me on a magic carpet out to the land of history, mystery and romance.” Somewhere in front of him out in the darkened hall his cameraman – wearing an asbestos suit and holed up in a “big walk-in steel booth,” in case the film catches fire – is madly feeding and alternating projectors. We can see the desert; a blond, beardless man in Arab robes; some charging camels...[read on]
Visit Mitchell Stephens's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Voice of America.

--Marshal Zeringue