1 Goldstar Member Review

Goldstar Member

Very poorly organized. The live-pre show was way too long and not very good. The reception was a mess, the finger food required plates or extra large mouths, there were no plates and scarcely any napkins!!!! The reception area was kind of yukky, sort of like someone's basement....

I felt ripped of at the half-price. I spoke with some people who paid the full price and they were very, very disappointed and not happy.

By the way I did tell them about Goldstar....

I am giving the bronze star only because there was no other option given. This kind of evening is exactly "my thing" I love silent movies, I love live entertainment, I love receptions but this was extremely disappointing.

I can't belive that this was organized by Producers' Guild. Whoever organized this should have their membership suspended asap.

Written on Oct 17 2005

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More Information About A Night at the Orpheum - Vaudeville Entertainment Plus Harold Lloyd's The Freshman

Description

Tickets are for a reception beginning at 6:30pm, followed by an evening of vaudeville, and the screening of Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman" with live organ accompaniment.

Proceeds from the evening will support the efforts of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Broadway Initiative to revitalize the magnificent historic movie palaces along Broadway.

The Freshman (1925)

Directors: Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor
Producer: Harold Lloyd
Screenplay: John Grey, Sam Taylor, Tim Whelan, Ted Wilde (Harold Lloyd, uncredited)

As brilliant as he was, it seems that Harold Lloyd will forever be defined as the "third comic genius" of the silent era, right behind Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton...or behind Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, depending on your personal preferences. Still, casual film viewers are more likely to simply remember that Lloyd's wide-eyed, everyman character wore horn-rimmed glasses. Even though he had already enjoyed considerable success playing a Chaplin knock-off known as Lonesome Luke, Lloyd couldn't have imagined what donning those frames would do for his movie career. His popularity grew so vast in the 1920s, he's even been credited with changing America's attitude toward corrective lenses, never mind that the frames he wore didn't contain any glass.

The biggest moneymaker of Lloyd's career was easily The Freshman (1925), a college football comedy that wraps up with some improbable heroics at a big game. In fact, The Freshman was one of the major financial successes of the silent era, and it still drew audiences years later when it became a popular feature at college campuses across the country.

In The Freshman, Lloyd plays Harold Lamb, a bespectacled go-getter who heads off to college thinking his experiences will be just like the ones he saw in a college-based movie. He even learns a little jig that he saw in the picture, imagining that it will make him one of the more popular guys on campus. Unfortunately, reality intrudes, and Harold finds himself being laughed at by the other students. He decides to re-invent himself yet again, by trying out for the football team. But he evolves into more of a tackling dummy than a real player. Luckily, he gets a chance to set things straight, and even win the affection of the girl he loves (Jobyna Ralston), by starring in a climactic game that was partially filmed during a real contest at Pasadena's Rose Bowl!

Now, about those glasses: A 1995 article in the Journal of the American Optometric Association by Byron Y. Newman, O.D. is actually titled, "Harold Lloyd, the Man Who Popularized Eyeglasses in America." How's that for getting to the point? Newman wrote: "For optometrists in the 1920s, (Lloyd) was the man who popularized the use of glasses, especially horn-rimmed glasses, to a population who resisted the use of spectacles. Suddenly, there he was on the silent screen, demonstrating for all to see that the wearing of eyeglasses added to one's personality." Lloyd broke the mold for screen comedians when, in 1917, he devised "the glasses character," as he liked to call the protagonist of The Freshman and so many other films. Before Lloyd, popular comics wore overtly theatrical costumes and some form of outlandish makeup when working in films. But, outside of the glasses, Lloyd looked like any other Joe on the street. He was especially pleased that this allowed him to change the attitudes of his signature character from film to film, a stunt that even Keaton and Chaplin had trouble managing. By standing out less as a physical presence, Lloyd was capable of inhabiting a somewhat broader range of roles than his illustrious peers.

Lloyd chose the horn-rims because they had become a bit of a fad among the young. He felt that the suggestion of vibrancy and youth suited the kind of character he was imagining. After shopping around for a while, he eventually found the perfect pair of rims at an optical shop on Spring Street in Los Angeles. The first set, which cost him 75 cents, managed to last for a year and a half. After vainly trying to patch them up himself for several months, Lloyd wound up sending them to Optical Products Corporation, which sent back his un-used check and a box containing 20 pairs of frames. They couldn't imagine taking money from the man who had given them such an unexpected economic boost.