Decentralizing JBF

Greetings, Joan Bennett Nation, and welcome to JoanBennettFan.com! I hope you’ll enjoy the gallery, which I’m adding to weekly, and stay tuned for all the Joan/Old Hollywood yet to come. Before jumping back into stories from Joan’s life and career in the blog, I wanted to explain a little bit of why I’ve chosen to move JoanBennettFan away from Instagram/Facebook.

Social media has been a fascinating thing to experience from beginning to… whatever stage we’re in now. At last update, I believe I’m what they call an “elder millennial,” born in the first few years of the classification. In quick succession, folks born in the early 80s have witnessed the rise and fall (and sometimes rise again) of so many forms of online communication, types of physical media, and corporate owners of our favorite things that it has become dizzying to try to keep track. I got my first computer in 1996- a beast of an Acer desktop with a phone jack for fax and modem hookup, that came with so many pre-installed learning programs, I didn’t need the internet. It sat in the kitchen/dining room, a central location in the house, and I was on Cloud 9 when I could sit and read encyclopedia entries for hours or read and re-read the synopses of films I only hoped I could one day see. My favorite program was a sort of pre-internet IMDb, created by Blockbuster. It had brief biographies of most of the major to semi-major actors of the silent era and golden age of film, along with synopses of what I believed, at the time, to be every film ever made.

I’ve always been a big fan of binders, and I used this opportunity to make one of my very first binders of stuff. I printed out the Blockbuster biographies of Kathryn Grayson, Eleanor Powell, Jane Powell, William Powell… damn, there were a lot of Powells… Myrna Loy, Ann Miller, Cyd Charisse, Lucille Ball, Irene Dunne, and so on, then I’d print out the films of theirs that I wanted to see, which would go behind the biographies. I had no idea that any of them could ever be off limits to me. The concept of the terrible fate of so many miles of film was foreign, and Youth Me™ was convinced that I simply needed to search all my local Hollywood Video and Blockbuster and Family Video stores for the movies.

Imagine my horror when it was impossible for a Midwestern 13-year-old to find and watch Kathryn Grayson’s entire filmography. I mean, she made nineteen films, how was it possible that I couldn’t find more than three of them to rent? There was a saving grace in this culturally blighted land, in the form of Suncoast Video. Of all the places from my past that I clearly remember, it’s the Suncoast at White Oaks Mall that I want to go back to, the most. They had a whole wall of “classic” films on VHS, and my grandma was happy to take me and my saved chore money to the mall while my mom worked, on Saturdays. She would sit at the nearby common area, and I would stare at that wall, carefully calculating what rabbit hole I wanted to go down, next. It was at that store that I purchased Rose Marie (1936), in 1998. I was curious to know what this film was that everybody seemed to lampoon.

Enter one Jeanette Anna MacDonald.

Also, entirely coincidentally, enter access to the internet.

There were a lot of Jeanette MacDonald fans already on the internet, prior to my arrival. They built websites and Yahoo Groups and chatted about Jeanette’s films- mostly about those made with Nelson Eddy. The fans were also split into two “camps,” those who believed the version of Jeanette MacDonald’s life that she truly lived with her husband, Gene Raymond, and those who believed one woman’s version, where Jeanette was the long-suffering lover of Nelson Eddy. While much research and support for the latter was claimed, it was never (and has never been) provided.

While the early internet was not exactly a place where one housed hundreds of high resolution photos of an actress on a single website, there was a free sharing of information about and photos of many classic film stars. There were an assortment of photos of Jeanette, and there were a lot of people who said they were collectors of Jeanette photos, but no one really seemed keen on sharing. Eventually, I found out that this was because both of these camps of fans were deliberately trying to hide things from the others. They wouldn’t let people know the real Jeanette because that meant they would lose control of whatever power her name brought them. From the True Life camp, they wouldn’t let people tell true stories or share photos that painted Jeanette in anything other than an angelic light. From the Long-Suffering Lover camp, they manipulated the meaning and purpose of set stills to make it seem like Nelson Eddy suffered from a truly horrifying case of priapism, or threw a watermark and © on the scan, as if the rights belonged to them.

From that point, it became my mission in life to spread the truth and to create access to things which have been hidden from the public and, in many cases, families of the stars I love for decades.

From 2002-2012, I ran KathrynGraysonFan.com. It was my attempt to “give back” to her, for having spent her life entertaining others. Her music brought me so much peace, during my teen years, when I was this awkward poor kid who didn’t play sports getting bussed to a nearby sundown town’s affluent, sports-heavy high school. It meant a lot to me to say thank you to her in the only way I knew how- telling her story and showcasing her work and sharing all those damn publicity photos she had to sit through. I loved doing it. I loved hearing from fans all over the world who loved her as much as I do, and I was honored beyond words when one of the ladies who worked with/for Kathryn told me that I was the only person who ever got her biography right. There was one gentleman who had been fighting to be her official webmaster for years, but his biography was plagued with errors he had no intention of fixing. (It was actually reprinted from a 1950 fan magazine.) Another website with a whole Kathryn section- again, more errors, and unsourced. 

Kathryn Grayson was a stickler for accuracy, and I passed the test I didn’t know I’d been taking, simply by doing what I thought everyone would do, in my situation. Research. Analyze. Write. Share. I’ve had numerous people- including famous people- ask me how I got close to Kathryn Grayson. I don’t know, I didn’t try. She asked me in.

It took me longer than most to enter the fandom arena, on “new” social media. Eventually, I was taken by the ease of connecting with other fans. I reconnected with some people who had “been around since LiveJournal” and met new people of all ages, from all walks of life, with the same passion I had for old movies and stars. There was a sort of twilight phase where it seemed like people were gathering to share love and ideas, and when the internet sped up, actual films. I know I’m saying the quiet part of old movie fandom out loud, but we’re all pirates. Movies that studios have not been interested in for decades are rotting on shelves because, I don’t know, the CEO might miss a payment on his yacht, if they gave us access. So we’re all committing this necessary evil, which began with people sharing physical reels of film they’d rescued from dumpsters. (We’ll save that long-form rant for later.) At last, I’m able to see many of the films that were off limits for so long because the people who could do something about it don’t want to. I’m seeing them because of a bunch of dumpster divers in the 70s, some of whom were subject to FBI raids at the direction of the very corporations who threw the films away.

These are all the wonderful aspects of social media that I will truly miss, moving JBF away from direct posts to Instagram and Facebook.

I could spend another 1300 words just describing the ridiculousness I’ve witnessed in comments and replies on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The thing is, as much as I love all the ways in which social media has broadened access and knowledge, it has also worked to eliminate it in so many others. The push to make everything fit into small, easily consumable packages is stifling our understanding of each other and of the past. It’s easy to dismiss people as awful when no effort is made to understand what made them do the things they do or did. It’s also easy to dismiss people as awful when those in power present themselves as experts and choose to lie. I’ll spare you my more detailed reasons for leaving and focus on those pertaining mostly to movies: Kenneth Anger and TCM.

I don’t know how many other people suffer with this curse, but I can physically feel the emotional pain of those around me and, often, that of those describing traumatic events in their lives, on paper. Have you ever gotten that weird feeling in the pit of your stomach when a friend does something to embarrass themselves? It’s like that feeling, magnified by 12, then add a dash of devastating sadness and the occasional heart race. It’s empathy on the worst steroids imaginable, bought from some South Florida George Brothers operation. 

Kenneth Anger wrote Hollywood Babylon, common fact. He spread falsehoods about every name he printed and demonized every woman from Virginia Rappe to Lana Turner. He called Judy Garland “MGM’s Amphetamine Annie.” Almost wildly, the shooting of Jennings Lang is described… fairly accurately? The point being- for the most part, the man hurt people. He published a book of stories he knew to be lies, with gruesome photographs of death and disfigurement, and his words seem almost giddy. He’s pleased with every catty joke and snide remark he makes about real people in their darkest and/or last moment. It enrages me, and not just for me, but for the people he hurt. Imagine being Jayne Mansfield’s descendants, knowing some ghoul put a centerfold of her death in his book for shock value. Kenneth Anger was an abuser of both the living and the dead, and when he finally died, I thought I’d at least see a few mentions of what a terrible human he was from people in power. I did see mentions- from “regular” men and women who were his victims. UCLA, Criterion, and so many more big names in preservation eulogized him and the experimental films he made beautifully. The man might as well have invented cinema, in their obituaries, and not a single mention of the men and women whose legacies he aimed to ruin. I couldn’t understand it- what have I been doing my whole life, trying to set records straight, if the people who SHOULD care about that, don’t? Fans the world over are researching and sharing information to this day, in an attempt to fight Anger’s lies, and I don’t see UCLA and Criterion thanking them for fixing their great visionary’s colossal fuck-up. All of their work simply cannot be a waste, I won’t accept that as a reality. While I’m not advocating for the elimination of Anger’s name from history, I don’t think it’s outlandish to expect one of two things: acknowledgment of Anger’s misdeeds or equal acknowledgment and praise of the specific fans who are working to right his wrongs. There is a huge problem in the Old Hollywood community of both fans and organizations ignoring the contributions of “regular people” in favor of trusting famous people and their corporate overlords implicitly.

This leads me to TCM (and Jeanette MacDonald and Joan Bennett). There is a great big ol’ stink right now because the CEO of WB Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies in the US and is removing it from the UK. First, the UK version has never been a true old movie channel, so I’m not even considering that a loss. People in the UK don’t even like TCM UK and wish theirs was like the US version. It’s like they lost an extra Starz movie channel that plays the same six movies on rotation each week. They might luck out and get an old movie here and there, but it’s not often. Second, let’s do talk about the leadership gutted from TCM. They have implemented some good things in their time at the network, but most of the great original productions that people are reminiscing about happened before the time of anyone who was fired. At some point in the early 2000s, with AMC safely neutralized as a threat, TCM became more focused on sensation and optics and profits than preservation and access and facts. There are two specific incidents which I consider unforgivable, but could at least be retracted, for which TCM has never accepted ownership. The first was when they made Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy collective stars of the month. In the Now Playing magazine, in an article attributed to Robert Osborne, it says that Sharon Rich- that person I mentioned above who never has provided any evidence- had compelling evidence to suggest that Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy were lovers.

That man knew better.

You will not tell me he did not know better than that. So either everyone’s hero Robert Osborne is just writing whatever for pay, or he’s not writing it at all and this is all an act put on by a corporation that gives zero shits about the legacies of dead people when MONEY.

Either option is tragic, not just for legacies but for the sanity of those of us trying to make what both of the Jeanette MacDonald fan clubs did to her right. They have never issued a retraction, despite numerous people attempting to present them with actual evidence. Maggie McCormick outright proved them all wrong with her books, but neither TCM nor Sharon Rich has apologized to Jeanette’s or Nelson’s families and fans.

While that happened quite a long time ago, the interim has not seen any growth in appreciation of how hard it is for researchers to overcome a falsehood spoken by someone purported to be “in the know.” It’s a blow to my psyche and another tiny cut to my already minimal self-worth when someone tells me, “I’ll trust the experts,” and the expert is a TCM host. It happened recently, when Eddie Muller suggested that Joan may have been sexually involved with Fritz Lang. I’m not going in to all the reasons why that’s extremely low probability, but three different people gave me some iteration of “I trust Eddie Muller more than you because he’s on TCM” when I attempted to correct the statement, on Twitter. And the salacious way in which it was presented… I’m physically shuddering. I mean 99.9% she didn’t, but if Joan Bennett wanted to jump some old blind German dude’s bones, good for her. Her husband wasn’t exactly faithful, either, so good for her. Good for that theoretical version of Joan Bennett. But, as far as I know, no one at TCM has issued a retraction either for (probably) lying about or (very less likely, please do not take this as affirmation) slut shaming Joan Bennett.

I simply can’t keep watching everyone rush to the rescue of an organization that gets to hurt people with impunity. And for as much as they tout access, it’s only been further and further lost through years of pissing matches between cable company moguls. Their film festival costs more than what minimum wage workers earn in a month. This is not a company that is for film history and access- it is a corporation, and like any corporation, it wants more money. Instead of rallying around this limping corporate behemoth, it’s time people start demanding better. Why are we forced to pay so much for access to things whose creators are, for the most part, too dead to profit? At any given hour of the day, we can look up and view historical paintings and sculptures from the 20th century for free. Why not film? The frustration I have is so great, and yet… there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I’m powerless, strangers think I’m some random idiot because I’m not on TV, and I’m tired of feeling that way. The doom scrolling had to stop.

I could go much more in depth, but I’m sure everyone is at that point of the post where they’re like “shut up and give me the recipe already, you monster.” I simply want everyone to know that the friends I’ve made and the stories you’ve all shared mean the world to me, but the social media vibe of content over context and quantity over quality isn’t for me, anymore. The popularity contest isn’t for me, either- I’m a really prickly person, not always the most likable, and physically incapable of glad-handing for self-gain. If you’re here and read this far, I’m sure you already know how much I freakin’ love and appreciate you and all the ways you’ve supported all of my many eras. I have a lot of Joan Related Things™ to say, and our good Lorde knows a whole lot to share. I just have to go back to my basics: Research. Analyze. Write. Share.

xoK