The documentary, “Bombshell,” tells the amazing life story of movie star and wartime inventor Hedy Lamarr; YouTube will compete with Spotify and Apple Music through its new streaming platform; the schlocky horror comedy, "Killer Klowns from Outer Space," turns 30.
'Bombshell' Hedy Lamarr's brilliance was discounted for decades
In the category of incredible, impossible-to-make-up stories, the real life story of Hedy Lamarr may take the cake.
She was one of the most glamorous film stars of the 1930s and '40s, and at the height of her fame was dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world.” What remained hidden for decades was that Lamarr led a sort of double life— or really, multiple lives.
Born Hedy Kiesler in 1914 in what was then Austria-Hungary, she first fled an unhappy, early marriage and then Nazi-occupied Europe. Once in the U.S., she shed her Jewish name and identity and distanced herself from a scandalous start in the movie business to become a major film star.
But that still doesn't really tell the half of it. What wasn't known back then, and still isn't fully appreciated today, is that Lamarr was also a talented, self-taught inventor. One of her inventions, a remote-controlled torpedo that used frequency hopping, was a precursor to Bluetooth and WiFi technology we use today.
The new documentary, “Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story,” written and directed by Alexandra Dean, fills in a lot of the remaining blanks in Lamarr's story. An audio recording of Lamarr herself, which Dean discovered during the making of the film, forms the backbone of the documentary.
Alexandra Dean spoke with The Frame guest host John Rabe about "Bombshell."
Interview highlights:
On Lamarr's natural inclination toward inventing:
The thing about Hedy is that she started out as an inventor — that’s her natural self. She did it with her father as a kind of playful activity. In their off hours they would take apart gadgets. They loved radios, they took apart radios. She also took apart her music box and put it back together. That was just how her brain was wired.
On the audio interview with Lamarr that Dean discovered while making the film:
At first, you’re lulled into this interesting introduction she gives you which is, "This is going to be the opposite of what you think about me." And then she unfolds it on these tapes in this way that is just so fascinating. You go into world after world that she lived in, and it’s almost like "Forrest Gump." She’s interacting with these major moments of history. She gets into scrape after scrape and escapes them, and then she does these things that you can’t even imagine a Hollywood actress trying to do in the 1930s. And then she’s ignored for it. She takes you through all of that, and I think that without her voice you just wouldn’t believe it.
On Lamarr's frequency hopping invention:
It was really this idea that if you’re going to try and remote-control a torpedo, the big problem is that the enemy can hear your radio signal and jam it. They can stop the signal from traveling between the ship and the torpedo that it’s trying to control. So what Hedy wanted to do was create a signal that couldn’t be hacked and that couldn’t be jammed. Her idea was: Why not just hop around on frequencies so that nobody knew where the signal was going to go next? If they jammed the signal, it would only be for a split second. It was the basis for frequency hopping as we use it today, which is one of the ways that we communicate over WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and some cell phones. So it really went into many many things through the military. And that's because the military did dig [Lamarr's patent] out, give it to some contractors, one of those contractors wrote a tribute to Hedy, so we actually know that he used her patent and put it in all these important military inventions, which in turn influenced other inventions. [JOHN RABE: But they never paid her?] No, not a cent.
On Lamarr as a movie-making pioneer:
What’s so interesting about Hedy is that she gets punched and knocked down like she does with the invention, and then she gets back up, dusts herself off, and says, I’m going to make my mark on the world in a different way. There were people that had come before her, but in ‘46, when she started producing her own films, there was no actor out there producing their own films with the exception of Bette Davis, a friend of hers. In 1946, Hedy and Bette went out there and said, If the studio system is not going to work for us, we’re going to create our own films. And that was in a way just as revolutionary as saying, I can affect the outcome of World War II with my inventions.
On the film’s resonance with the current sexual harassment reckoning in Hollywood:
The world has shifted around this film and it is being received differently than I thought it would be. But it’s exhilarating because the world feels more ready for the conversation that the film kicks up, which is, Why couldn’t a woman this talented make her mark on the world the way she wanted to? Why didn’t we receive her with open arms and find out what else she could’ve invented? Who else have we ignored and erased because we were not able to accept that somebody that looked like that, or was a movie star, could also be a brilliant inventor? And that’s really all part of this #MeToo moment, I think, because what we’re saying is, women are silenced in different ways, and if we don’t explore it, what kind of talent do we lose?
"Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story" airs on May 18 on most PBS stations.
The origin story of the 1988 cult classic, 'Killer Klowns from Outer Space'
It was the late 1980s. Three brothers – Edward, Stephen and Charles Chiodo – were working as special effects animators in L.A. when they decided to make their own low-budget film.
The result was their first feature, "Killer Klowns from Outer Space," released in 1988. It’s a schlocky, sci-fi horror comedy about a gang of murderous clown-like aliens who take over a small town. The Klowns terrorize its inhabitants, trapping them in cotton candy cocoons and smothering them with pies.
It didn’t have much box office success, but in the 30 years since, it has become a cult classic.
To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the Chiodo brothers, along with composer John Massari, are hosting a screening at the Montalban Theater in Hollywood on May 19, complete with a live orchestra and circus performers.
The Frame's Michelle Lanz caught up with them recently to find out the Killer Klown's origin story.
Interview Highlights:
John Massari on why he wanted to be involved in the film:
My involvement in the movie itself is defined by one word, and that's love. Isn't that funny? With "Killer Klowns From Outer Space," love is a thing! The movie is born from imagination and creativity and originality. That's what drew me to it. At the time Tim Burton had just – and by the way the Chiodo brothers have worked for Tim Burton often –he had done "Beetlejuice." I thought, OK, this is the new wave of horror! Comedy, bizarre, creative. I have to do this.
On the birth of the idea:
Stephen Chiodo: I was trying to think of the most frightening image I could imagine. And for me it was traveling down a lonely mountain road and behind me a car would appear. And as it's passing me, it would be a clown staring at me. And that's as silly as the inception of "Killer Klowns" was.
Edward Chiodo: Once you come up with that "Killer Klowns from Outer Space," it kind of writes itself from there. You start thinking about all the circus motifs and opportunities to kill people in humorous, deadly ways.
SC: It really was just a fun process to brainstorm between horror kills and circus motif.
On visualizing the Killer Klowns:
EC: The task was to make something that didn't look like a man in costume or a man in makeup. It had to be a monster from outer space. Something not human, something alien.
SC: This is an alien race that just happens to look like clowns. They weren't supposed to be aliens that would dress up like clowns, they were sort of like a species of slugs from another planet. And their ornamentation just makes them look like clowns. The main thing was that we wanted to avoid anything that a regular clown maniac would do. Our inspiration came from Wes Craven and "Nightmare on Elm Street." And even though it was pretty violent and stuff, what we liked was the aspect of dream kills, where it could be anything in your imagination in the dream world that could kill you. That's what we modeled our killer klown kills after.
On setting the precedent for scary clowns:
EC: It's funny that the image of clowns prior to our movie was pretty normal. Stephen King's "It" [with] Pennywise had come out before the movie, but the miniseries came out after our movie. We were really the first movie to give clowns literal teeth. Our movie didn't really do well and wasn't well-received at the time, but in the last 30 years it's built up this incredible following. It's really become a cult classic.