The Errol Flynn Blog

I am pleased to announce our New Author Sean Warren to The Errol Flynn Blog! Sean, we look forward to your posts and comments…

— David DeWitt

..interviewing RORY FLYNN the daughter of the legendary actor Errol
Flynn. Listen to some wonderful stories from Rory about her Parents
and living up at Mulholland…

www.latalkradio.com…

— David DeWitt

 
My mother spent 60 years in love with Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler, but never cared for the Olivia de Havilland rendition of Melanie Hamilton Wilkes. In fact, Mom called Melanie a “simp.” So this anti-Melanie bias in a home that otherwise revered the motion picture Gone With the Wind was my only exposure to Olivia de Havilland for years. Then as a freshman in college I saw The Adventures of Robin Hood for the first time, and zing went my heartstrings. I had seen widow’s peaked Melanie often enough, but the girl in the Maid Marian frocks was a different creature entirely, and in that scene where she literally lets her hair down—zowie!
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I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mom, but you just didn’t get Olivia de Havilland, because I’ll agree that in the early going earnest Melanie can come off as somewhere between bland and syrupy, but as GWTW unspools, her character is revealed to be one of utter strength and an ability to overlook human failings to see the truth in people and situations. Thanks in part to three great directors and to her own abilities, Olivia brought all that to her characterization in what was for a long time the most famous picture in Hollywood history.
 
I guess I’ve been writing a book about Olivia de Havilland in my head since that first time I looked up at her beautiful 30-foot-high face in the theater, with that flawless skin and those liquid brown eyes. It was a mad crush and it has never abated. We have corresponded on and off and I very much wanted her to participate in the creation of the manuscript that became the soon-to-be-released Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood, but I never got her on board. She has always been old-school polite with me, and interested, and as earnest as Melanie, but there was an aspect where she knew she was tantalizing me with hints of a collaboration. I felt like she was trying to be enticing and even coy, but I’m a guy with a years-long crush, so there’s something grand in such enticement.  I sent her a copy of Errol Flynn Slept Here to demonstrate that I’m not kidding around here; I am writing a book about Errol and Olivia. I sent her a detailed list of questions about Errol and their work together and their relationship offscreen. Questions about his scene stealing and insecurity and their date at the coronation ball and did he ever take her to Mulholland Farm?
 
When I realized after more than a year and a half that she wasn’t going to help me, as I recount in Errol & Olivia, it hit me hard, and like a jilted suitor, I let the disappointment color my writing to such an extent that when I showed the manuscript to colleagues, one of them wanted to know why I had written such a harsh book about Miss de Havilland. “After all,” said my colleague, “if at her age she doesn’t want to tell her story, that’s her right.” It was a simple fact that had eluded me, and I stepped back and realized that there was a chip on my shoulder, and I didn’t even know it. I believed I was telling a story that pulled no punches about either her or Errol (because I try to be a serious journalist, etc.), but when I went back and re-read it, I could see that I had gone astray.
 
So I fixed the problem. I think that, except for a few key passages, I wrote a book that Olivia can’t argue with, because the scholarship is rigorous and much of what’s there comes out of her own mouth. I’ve drawn a conclusion or two that I’m afraid she’s not going to like, but I admire her deeply. I admire her superficially for being the dish who won my heart as a freshman in college. I admire her deeply for being the fighter, and loner, and winner, and uncompromising survivor whom I discovered through the course of my research. This woman made a big stink for better roles in a studio run completely by men. This woman took major chances with her career and could have been banished from the picture business. This woman beat that great bully Jack Warner in court. This woman won two Best Actress Academy Awards in four years. This woman survived some very hard personal times and just celebrated her 94^th birthday.
 
Yes, Mom had it wrong, but I think I ended up getting it right, and the crush endures. 

— Robert Matzen

Please be advised that a new book “Hollywood Babylon – It's Back” by Darwin Porter and Danforth Price has extensive new and original material on Errol Flynn.   This book has over 20 references to Errol Flynn including a chapter on the short, happy life of Sean Flynn and his tragic fate in Cambodia.

This book and even another by this pair of authors follows in the footsteps of Kenneth Anger who wrote those two landmark “Hollywood Babylon” books in the 1970's.

Some of this material on Flynn is true and some of it is probably false or greatly exagerated but I don't know where exactly.  The book is currently available from Amazon.com…, where you can browse the Flynn passages.

Dark side or not this book does appear to be a fun read.

And by the way whatever happened to those remains discovered in Cambodia that were thought to be what's left of Sean Flynn?  Have they finished DNA testing?  

I suspect those remains where not in the end Sean Flynn.

Best wishes

Ralph Schiller

— Ralph Schiller

Mulholland Drive Boys and Fellow Flynn fans:

  Today Sunday they are showing a one time screening at the Billy Widler Theater at UCLA.   This is a late notice but you will see on the big screen TOO MUCH TOO SOON 

www.tft.ucla.edu…

Screening – Rarities from the Warner Archive Collection – “Too Much Too Soon”| Errol Flynn as John Barrymore, Dorothy Malone as daughter Diana 7:00 PM at The Billy Wilder Theater (10899 Wilshire Boulevard (intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards) Los Angeles, CA 90024 310.206.8013 )

The new Warner Box set of Errol's WWII films have hit the market.  This makes the 4th boxed sets of Flynn films that Warner's released.  We must buy the set so they will make another set of his comedies.

I hope to see some of you there that live in LA.

The tickets are 10.00 its a double feature and you can't buy them online.  So I don't know if it is sold out.

Jack Marino

— David DeWitt

Dale Westin of The Errol Flynn Marina in JA announces the Errol Flynn Benefit Ball for 2010!Pat Wymore Flynn of Portland is patron of the event which provides significant funds to a worthy Portland Parish charity…

                                                      
                                                       Pat Wymore Flynn

— David DeWitt

The August 2010 issue of Dale Westin's Docklines the official Newsletter of The Errol Flynn Marinia in JA is available now!

— David DeWitt

…the August Rockitt Magazine is online! www.therockittmagazine.com….au  Don't miss it!

— David DeWitt