Joseph Farnham in an undated photo, courtesy of Mary Mallory.
Title writers are the mostly forgotten men of the silent film era, the scribes who relayed important plot points and character arcs through witty or descriptive lines employed on cards throughout a silent film. These bon mots weren’t just witty throwaways, they were often the glue that held disparate skits or weak plots together and made them coherent to screen audiences. Their resuscitation work revived flat films, and invigorated well-made ones.
Large, friendly, talented Joseph White Farnham ranks as one of the top title writers of the 1920s, the only winner of the Academy Award for title writing issued by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Farnham possessed great experience and skill in all types of writing and film production, helping his beloved movie industry develop into a major economic powerhouse by the 1930s.
Mary Mallory’s “Hollywoodland: Tales Lost and Found” is available for the Kindle.
As anyone who has had the misfortune to deal with Windows 8 will tell you, it has a horrible user interface and is designed with utter contempt for the user. The entire attitude seems to be borrowed from Grayson, the School Bully in “Ripping Yarns”: “Click here, you disgusting idiot, to get your MICROSOFT mail!” “Click here, you pitiful little moron, to write a MICROSOFT document!” “Click here, you small, wretched twerp, to view a photo.” “Don’t talk to me about a START button, you minuscule, repulsive creature.” Think of it as Darth Clippy.
All of which is to explain that posting will be irregular in the coming days/weeks, as I grapple with the Windows 8 upgrade. I work a month ahead, so daily posts have been done to the middle of February, but getting the mystery photos up could be a challenge because they must be done daily.
ladailymirror.com 