We stumbled across these bright, and interesting charts calling forth from a box of equity case files. As with most things archival, looking into the history of these records, opened a fabulous rabbit hole that we were happy to travel down!
Graphology! That is the name of the game. Graphology is the self-proclaimed science which analyzes handwriting for personality traits. These particular charts were part of two court cases in which A. Dolph Dean, Graphologist was asserting his 1932 copyright for his chart, “Character is Written into Handwriting and With this Chart You Can Read It.”
A. Dolph Dean, C. Ellsworth Bower, and Professor John W. Burke of the Personality Analysis Guild were not the only promoters of the value of graphology (at the rates of 10-50 cents per review - $1.50-$8.00 in today’s money). California newspapers were in the game as well:
The Los Angeles Times’ Muriel Stafford, provided graphological assistance with love matches, and to determine levels of culture and taste, in addition to analyzing the handwriting of everyone from George Washington (declared to be a stubborn humorist) to Bing Crosby (declared to be magnetic and easy-going). At one point, she proclaimed Los Angeles a warm-hearted, affectionate, generous city based on the handwriting of the Angelinos who wrote to her.
Los Angeles Times advertisement for the L.A. Festival of Books: http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/ featuring USC drum major Kyle Wilson outfitted in Sword & the Stone chest armour and helmet.
Ths is a reader’s response to last week’s LA Times profile on Matthew GoodE by Mary McNamara.
Below is the concluding paragraph of her op piece. Highest compliment on Matthew’s performance. Full article under the cut.
Also Deedee Messana of Sherman Oaks wrote
Photo: Miller Mobley/Paramount+
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Mary McNamara’s outstanding analysis notwithstanding, I’m not sure that Robert Evans would not have approved of Matthew Goode playing him in “The Offer.”
Although this flyover-nobody did not know Mr. Evans personally, I was lucky enough to have a small correspondence with him on Twitter between 2013 and 2017.
I nearly had a stroke (which would have smashed the oversized Evans-like sunglasses I also like) when he followed me and then felt another coming on when he responded several times to my thanks for the follow.
Over the years, I was just a bit less shocked when he would thoughtfully respond to my tweets, which were about decidedly non-Hollywood subjects. I even got a bit accustomed to the occasional direct message and greeting.
Yes, he was an older man by the time I made his online acquaintance. But he seemed to be an older man who perhaps was never as wholly outrageous as his publicly wild lifestyle might have suggested.
The Kid definitely remains in the picture, portrayed by an actor who might capture more of the Evans behind the sunglasses and the headlines. He just might have liked that very much.
Mary Stanik Tucson
Playing the kid
Thank you for Mary McNamara’s breathtaking portrait of Matthew Goode as Hollywood icon Robert Evans [“Matthew Goode Amps It Up,” May 8]. The photographer [Dania Maxwell] perfectly captured the drama, class and glamour of a bygone era and personified the depth brought to the role by this amazing actor.
HOW RAD is Korean film director BONG JOON HO!?!? He was already considered one of the greatest of all time in his native Korea, but after last Sunday’s historic Oscar wins forParasite, he’s now an international superstar. What I have loved about all of this is how lovably human and honest he is the whole way through, which has only earned him more fame, which makes him feel “super awkward.”
“It’s been a while… since I’ve posted, since I made a celeb portrait!
Happy these portraits with @twhiddleston are finally published!
Such a great actor, such a cool dude and great collaborator. He appreciated the effort and was into the idea of making something unique and not viewable on the spot, with my 8x10 film camera! It really is a site, when you come around the corner for a “quick portrait” and see this giant camera on a huge tripod and immediately recognize it as “old timey!”
While we were really working on portraits to go along w a feature about his current dramatic work in “The Essex Serpent,” on @appletvplus (I dig it!), I had to squeeze in a #Loki idea, adding a green gel for a couple frames!
I went two mins over the agreed upon 15 mins, but #TomHiddleston was a willing collaborator when he saw how much gear I set up by myself, including an 8x10 film camera!
I also got in a green #Loki pic for the Marvel crowd!
A mischievous god, a reverend and a newly engaged man: Tom Hiddleston has been busy
by Bob Strauss. Photos: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times
It hardly needs saying, but Tom Hiddleston is a much nicer guy than Loki, the supervillain he’s played in six Marvel movies and an acclaimed Disney+ series, which just started shooting its second season in England.
And despite the Norse God of Mischief’s ubiquity, the Cambridge and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-educated actor does have other interests. His stage résumé is as impressive as the array of auteurs he’s made movies with: Joanna Hogg, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Terence Davies, Jim Jarmusch, Guillermo del Toro, Ben Wheatley. There’s also prestige TV such as “The Night Manager” and now “The Essex Serpent,” which launched in May on Apple TV+.
Still, “‘Loki,’ ‘Essex Serpent,’ they have occupied the last two years of my life,” Hiddleston notes on a warm afternoon in an L.A. hotel garden.
Of course, there was more to the last several years than “Essex” and the first season of “Loki.” Hiddleston found time in March to propose to Zawe Ashton, his co-star in a 2019 West End revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal.”
“I’m very happy” is all he wants to say about that, perhaps gun-shy regarding personal matters since a super-scrutinized 2016 romance with Taylor Swift. But just get him started on the latest shows ….
“I love playing Loki, have loved playing him every time,” the actor says about Thor’s shape-and-loyalty-shifting brother. “In every story, there’s been a different iteration, a different director, a different spin on the ball, if you like.”
The “Loki” series takes place in a divergent timeline before/after he was killed in the last two “Avengers” movies. This trickster version is detained by a kind of cosmic bureaucracy, the Time Variance Authority, and stripped of his powers if not his arrogance.
“If you take away everything that the character knows and understands, what remains?” Hiddleston submits. “Something will be revealed to us and to Loki about who he is. This idea of him undergoing an almost psychoanalytical interrogation with the TVA’s Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, and being confronted with repetitive patterns of destructive behavior, which only resulted in his loss and loneliness, I found to be extremely exciting.”
Another first, for Marvel and Loki: He came out as bisexual to the series’ other key frenemy, Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie, a female variant of himself.
“In my research into the character and the ancient stories, Loki’s identity has always been fluid in his gender and sexuality,” Hiddleston notes. “It was a privilege to touch on it this time. I’m aware it’s a small step and there’s further to go, but I hope that people felt represented by it.”
Contemporary concerns are also represented in Sarah Perry’s bestselling historical novel “The Essex Serpent.” It’s set in a scientifically advancing 1893, while superstitions still haunt the Blackwater Estuary on England’s eastern coast. People go missing, a big underwater thing is bumping into fishermen’s boats, and some believe a folklore dragon has returned.
Claire Danes plays Cora Seaborne, recently widowed from an abusive marriage and an amateur paleontologist, who comes up from London to investigate. An attraction grows between her and the local, married vicar, Hiddleston’s Will Ransome. All six episodes were directed by another of the actor’s admired auteurs, Clio Barnard (“The Arbor,” “Dark River”).
“I loved this combination of her and the story,” Hiddleston says. “It deals with some very resonant themes: uncertainty, fear and how fear of what we don’t understand can sometimes collectively distort reality. There’s an ideological debate between science and religion that’s staged in the dynamic between Cora and my character, the very progressive but nevertheless faithful reverend of the community.
“In my research into the character and the ancient stories, Loki’s identity has always been fluid in his gender and sexuality,” Hiddleston notes. “It was a privilege to touch on it this time. I’m aware it’s a small step and there’s further to go, but I hope that people felt represented by it.”
“It felt like with the pandemic, we all had to manage so much uncertainty,” he continues. “It’s about that, but of course there’s a very psychological metaphor about the serpent, things that lie beneath the surface.”
Hiddleston tried to be a gracious host to his American co-star when they filmed in the Essex salt marshes 13 months ago but fears he might have gone too far.
“It’s windy and it’s muddy and it’s wet,” he says of the shoot. “Claire was incredibly game about all of that. I became a kind of cliché Englishman, endlessly promising that the weather would improve. Every day I’d be like, ‘It’s going to get better, Claire! Just you wait, the spring in England is lovely!’”
Cliché, or in actuality a particularly nice chap?
“I was very lucky when I was younger,” Hiddleston reckons, regarding his reputation. “I worked with some great actors, and I could see that they were very committed to the work and very kind, inspiring in that way. I was junior to Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor; these are the best of guys doing it.
“I try to put my best foot forward,” he concludes, then adds with a sheepish grin, “It’s hard to address that.”
