JOHN WAYNE, MARLENE DIETRICH, OUR GANG AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THEM
Imagine John Wayne hosting a television show like Entertainment Tonight. In a way he did, when he was rebounding from the failure of his first starring film, Fox’s epic production The Big Trail in 1930. The make-believe television series was called The Voice of Hollywood and it was a series of theatrical short subjects produced by Louis Lewyn, who had co-created Screen Snapshots in the early 1920s. That series continued for decades, offering audiences a peek behind the scenes of movieland. The Voice of Hollywood was essentially the same idea with a twist: each ten-minute episode purported to be a television show being broadcast on station S-T-A-R from Hollywood. Some episodes even show engineers working in a futuristic TV control room. Lewyn spent his career repeatedly reshaping the same basic concept. Over…
