Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films (official site w/Flash) Filmmaker Arthur Dong covers the good (YT), the bad and the players (link to Flash video clips) in his latest award-winning documentary. Related MeFi post.
posted on May 4, 2008 - View this thread

120 year ago today, on February 1, 1887, Harvey Wilcox, originally a prohibitionist from Kansas, filed a grid map of Hollywood with the Los Angeles County recorder's office, carved from a nondescript plot of land he owned in Southern California. The rest, as they say, is history. Hooray For Hollywood!
posted on Feb 1, 2007 - View this thread

"Calling it a museum is really a misnomer". The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum opens today in Springfield, Ill., with a silicone Lincoln posing in the rotunda and Tim Russert introducing mock TV attack ads from the campaign of 1860. In the Union Theater, an abolitionist roars "Lincoln was no friend of the black man" as hologram cannons boom to signal the start of the Civil War. Strobe lights flash; the plush seats jerk and rumble like a ride at Universal Studios. When Atlanta burns, the air feels hot. This is history, Hollywood style: A $90-million look at Honest Abe's life and times — with special effects created by the "Jurassic Park" and "Terminator 3" team of Stan Winston Studios (link with sound).
posted on Apr 16, 2005 - View this thread

Call her Madame. Among the old-timers, the story went like this: a woman known to everyone as Madame came to California from Kentucky with her children and her husband. But once they were in the Gold Rush State, her husband left her. Desperate to find work, she introduced herself to a movie director named D. W. Griffith. He not only cast her in his movie, but the two became friends for life. And with this woman, called Madame Sul-Te-Wan, what we now call Black Hollywood began -- as a new book by historian Donald Bogle explains. (more inside)
posted on Feb 7, 2005 - View this thread

The lost Egyptian city of DeMille In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille built an Egyptian city in the dunes of the Guadalupe Desert north of Los Angeles as the set for "The Ten Commandments," the first true Hollywood epic. Cost over-runs on the filming left too little money for a complete dismantling of the set, so DeMille had it buried instead. In recent years the set has been partially uncovered by Pacific winds, revealing the remains of three-story-tall plaster sphinxes and other artifacts, and leading to a campaign to excavate and preserve this important piece of film history.
posted on Sep 16, 2002 - View this thread

Lincoln a dysfunctional, racist, manic-depressive? This is the latest proposed Hollywood revision of history. So what's been the most egregious example of movie distorting or ignoring historical fact? JFK? Amistad? Gladiator?
posted on Mar 19, 2001 - View this thread