Finding Marlowe: Did this man inspire two of noir's iconic fictional detectives? It was hot and I was late for lunch. I was feeling mean, like I’d been left out in the sun too long. IPhone: Annotable is one of the best image annotation tools around, especially after Evernote abandoned Skitch a couple of years ago. Now, it’s been updated with a.We were meeting at a joint on La Brea, the kind of place where the booths have curtains you can pull shut if you need a little privacy. I slid across cool leather and got my first good look at Louise Ransil, a wisp of a redhead with high cheekbones and appraising eyes. She sat with her hands folded on the worn table, a stack of old paperbacks next to her. Ransil had a script she’d been peddling to the studios. I’d started reading it — a detective caper set in 1. Los Angeles — and wanted to find out about the claim on the title page.“BASED ON A TRUE STORY: From case files of P. ![]() ![]() I. Marlowe.”The screenwriter. Louise Ransil, a former Hollywood executive, says she spent “hundreds of hours going through Marlowe’s files, then intensive hours interviewing family members” before writing her film script, “Marlowe.” Watch a behind- the- scenes video with Daniel Miller and Louise Ransil »Ransil didn’t waste any time. Marlowe, she said, was the city’s first licensed black private detective. He shadowed lives, took care of secrets, knew his way around Tinseltown. Ransil dropped the names of some Hollywood heavies — Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Howard Hughes. But it got better. ![]() ![]() Ang Lee's "Life of Pi" is a miraculous achievement of storytelling and a landmark of visual mastery. Inspired by a worldwide best-seller that many readers must have. IMDb editors highlight the stories, faces, and trending stars that had us buzzing this week. Check out our picks from the week. Life of Pi is an undeniably good film that is certainly not as good as its visuals. Those special effects when Pi is in the middle of the ocean are absolutely. One of the biggest limitations of Google Home, Google’s voice-controlled speakerbot, was that it couldn’t tell anyone apart so all your requests were centered on. Marlowe knew hard- boiled writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, she said. The private eye had written them after reading their early stories in the pulp magazine Black Mask to say their fictional gumshoes were doing it all wrong. They began writing regularly, or so her story went. The authors relied on Marlowe for writing advice, and in the case of Chandler, some real- life detective work. So his name was Samuel Marlowe . At the very least, it was a hell of a coincidence. But the letters that would prove it all had gone missing — if they even existed. Marlowe’s relatives were searching for them. There was talk of a secret compartment in a home in West Adams. Or maybe they were hidden at a shuttered thrift shop in South Los Angeles. Ransil flashed a wry smile. Was I interested? Lost letters worth thousands. A family trying to uncover the truth about a man all mixed up in the glamour and the seediness of L. A. And a Hollywood screenwriter who stood to gain a lot from any story I might write. This was L. A. Chandler and Hammett created two characters that shaped the archetype of the noir detective as a world- weary white man, and she was saying they might have been named after a black private eye. I started checking out Ransil’s story, looking up the paid obituaries in The Times and the Los Angeles Sentinel from when Marlowe died in 1. Marlowe was born Aug. Montego Bay, Jamaica. According to The Times obituary, he served in Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, a World War I fighting brigade that guarded the Suez Canal. After the war, Marlowe immigrated to the U. S., settling in Los Angeles, where he soon became a private detective. Both obituaries made the same bold — and almost certainly untrue — claim: “In L. A., he was the first licensed P. I. And to Ransil. She said that after reading the obituaries, she reached out to the gumshoe’s son, Samuel Marlowe Jr., who gave her access to his father’s archives. Over the course of several months in 1. Ransil said, she examined the PI’s papers at the younger Marlowe’s home — rifling through old case files, invoices and correspondence — and took notes in Stenoscript shorthand. She showed me dozens of pages of them. Ransil said she didn’t photocopy anything because it would have amounted to hours of work and she figured there’d be plenty of time to examine it all. She eventually set aside the project, distracted by her day jobs. By the time she picked it up again in 2. Marlowe Jr. She’s adamant that her motives are pure. At least Ransil wasn’t the only person who claimed to have seen the letters. Willie Rawls, 7. 4, a Marlowe family friend, said she examined them around 2. And one of Marlowe’s great- grandsons, Antoine Durousseau, said he saw them too.“A lot of them were handwritten — letters between Marlowe and the authors,” he said. He was picking through battered steamer trunks and moldy cardboard boxes. John Cummings was searching for the lost letters — or anything else that could prove the man he knew as a boy was a trusted advisor to two literary lions.“He had a gold- capped tooth right here,” Cummings said of his great- grandfather, pointing at one of his own front teeth, “and was addicted to cigars, horses and women.”As the sun beat down on a dilapidated South L. A. He wasn’t satisfied with the objects he’d unearthed at the property, once a thrift shop operated by his late father, who had retrieved some of Marlowe’s personal effects when the private eye died. For Cummings, it’s personal. He wants to prove what a 1. Sentinel asserted: When Marlowe became a PI in 1. California.”“I am more interested in Sr.’s legacy, and the legacy of African American men who have blazed a trail and gone unrecognized,” said Cummings, speaking in a cigar- ravaged rasp. The California Department of Consumer Affairs, which issues private detective licenses, has no record of Marlowe, but an agency spokesman said that older files are often incomplete or missing. USC history department researcher Angelica Stoddard, whose work centers on L. A.’s first licensed black private eyes, says Marlowe is the earliest one she’s heard of. Cummings ducked into a rusty white Ford Econoline van parked out back and emerged with a heavy cardboard box. He set it on the ground and plunged his hand in, pulling out a pistol, bullets, stale cigars. There was an address book with an entry for Universal Studios’ payroll department and a placard that read, “This property is protected by the Samuel B. Marlowe Detective Agency.”I started re- reading Chandler’s and Hammett’s novels, gulping down their stories of crooks and femmes fatales, dizzy with all that hard language coursing through my head. Hammett’s debut novel, “Red Harvest,” was published in 1. Marlowe wrote the author to complain about his writing, Ransil said. The following year, Hammett released “The Maltese Falcon,” with its iconic, white private detective, Sam Spade. Marlowe claimed that Spade’s first name was an homage to him, and that the character’s surname was Hammett’s “winking inside joke,” because “spade” was a derogatory term for a black person, Marlowe Jr. Afterward, they visit an African American speak- easy called Mack’s. Once she leaves, the barman tells Bye: “I like you, boy, but you got to remember it don’t make no difference how light your skin is or how many colleges you went to, you’re still a n—.”Ransil said that Marlowe’s cache of letters from Hammett included a carbon copy of a draft of “Nightshade” with an index card clipped to it suggesting the story was inspired by the private eye: “I came across this and thought you might like to have it. You’ll see I changed a few of the details, but I think it still works.”Marlowe, family members say, provided security for illegal speak- easies during the Prohibition era, when Hollywood types liked to frequent the Dunbar Hotel and other nightspots on South L. A.’s Central Avenue — long the center of African American life in Los Angeles. Great- grandson Durousseau said that he’d been told by older relatives that film studios also paid the gumshoe to “pick up actors and actresses who were in the wrong part of town at speak- easies and juke joints.”The work on Central Avenue, and a walk- on part in the 1. King Kong,” introduced Marlowe to a slew of movie industry players. Among those who relied on Marlowe were Howard Hughes and Charlie Chaplin — both of whom used him to keep tabs on women they were seeing, Ransil said. In 1. 93. 6, Paramount Pictures hired Marlowe to investigate an attempt to blackmail actress Marlene Dietrich, Ransil’s notes show. Marlowe went to a train station to stake out the delivery of $8,0. He turned out to be the son of Dietrich’s makeup artist.“Dietrich refused to have the makeup woman and son arrested because she and the makeup woman had been lovers,” Ransil’s notes show. The detective also started doing a little work for Chandler after the author wrote the PI asking if he could retrieve some police files, Ransil said. Marlowe’s billing files, she said, show that he was also Chandler’s guide on research expeditions to the “tough parts of town.”Marlowe gave Chandler a bit of advice on how to think like a PI: “Believe no one, even the person hiring you — especially the person hiring you,” according to Ransil’s notes. In 1. 93. 9, Chandler released “The Big Sleep,” his first Philip Marlowe novel. It turned the writer into a literary star. Chandler followed up “The Big Sleep” a year later with “Farewell, My Lovely,” considered by some to be his greatest work. Ransil believes that the South L. A. He watches the felon Moose Malloy throw a black man out of a bar called Florian’s. Later, Malloy and Marlowe come across an African American bouncer at Florian’s who says, “No white folks, brother. Jes’ fo’ the colored people. I’se sorry.”“Where did he get that? Why Central Avenue?” asked Judith Freeman, author of the biography “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved.”The research institutions that house the two writers’ papers said none mention Marlowe. And scholars have plenty of other ideas about where the characters’ names might have come from. Freeman said the connection would be plausible — “if one could find even the smallest direct link.”I thundered down the 1. Compton, my coupe shuddering over the highway’s tar- smeared seams. I was hoping for an audience with Marlowe’s oldest living relative — his nephew. Samuel Joseph Marlowe lives in a pink, wood- sided house with a security gate at the front door. It was a Sunday, and down the block a church was flooded with parishioners who spilled out onto a porch. Visual Effects: Going Behind The Magic - LIFE AFTER PI (Official VFX Documentary)Change starts now. Stay connected. www. Thanks for watching. I do not take any credit for creating this content, I am reposting this so it will reach as many people as it possibly can, this is very important and it needs to be viewed by anyone in the Visual Effects industry or anyone looking to get into it. LIFE AFTER PI is a short documentary about Rhythm & Hues Studios, the L. A. The film explores rapidly changing forces impacting the global VFX community and the Film Industry as a whole. DIRECTED/EDITED BY: Scott Leberecht PRODUCED BY: Christina Lee Storm GRIP/LIGHTING/SOUND: Brian Sorbo CAMERA OPERATORS: Nick Thiesen, David Andrade, Nick Donel ASSISTANT EDITOR: Missy Wiechers MUSIC BY: Kays Alatrakchi ADDITIONAL FOOTAGE: Jud Pratt ILLUSTRATOR: Jesse Mesa Toves PUBLICIST: Scot Byrd WEBSITE DESIGN BY: Chris Dalton SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR: Matthew Lengyel SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANT: Yolanda Rodriguez LEGAL SERVICES BY: Lincoln Bandlow, Lathrop & Gage, LLP AND Law Offices of Clifford Lo. The Filmmakers Wish to Thank Those Who Participated in the Filming of this Documentary: John Hughes, Keith Goldfarb, Lulu Simon, Jack Fulmer, Lois Anderson, Amanda Dague, Walt Jones, Scott Squires, Scott Ross, Saraswathi Vani Balgam, Lee Berger, Prashant Buyyala, Michael Conelly, Dave Rand, Matt Shumway, VFX Guy vs. Producer, Markus Kurtz, Bill Westenhofer, Mike Egan, and All R& Hers. Special Thanks To: Mike Meaker, Steve Storm, Scot Byrd, Kia Kiso, Jason Perr, Rick Young - - moviemachine. PGA Rough Cuts West, Act One, Winnie Wong - - Momentous Insurance. The views and opinions expressed in this film are solely those of the filmmakers and do not represent and no way are affiliated with, sponsored, approved, or reflect the views of Rhythm & Hues, 3. X1. 18 Holdings, Inc., Prana Animation Studios, or any of their respective affiliates or licensees. DISCLAMER I do not own or profit from any audio- visual content in this title, this is purely an effort to campaign the views expressed in this video.~Red. Inc. Digital Studios. Facebook: www. facebook. Twitter: www. twitter. Deviant. Art: http: //onejobproductions. Google Plus: https: //plus. Life of Pi Reviews - Metacritic. Continue with Facebook.
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