Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
Nov. 13th, 2018 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve had the documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story on my list for a while now, and last night I finally watched it and it was just as good as I’d hoped. A fascinating documentary about a fascinating woman, living in far more interesting times than anyone ought to have to suffer through.
She was born in Austria in 1914, starred in the shocking film Ecstacy in 1933 (an extended sequence features Lamarr - not yet named Hedy Lamarr, but still going by her birth name of Hedwig Kiesler - running naked through the woods), escaped a domineering husband and also the rising threat of Nazi Germany in 1937 (for Lamarr, although in her later years she never spoke of it, was Jewish), and then walked out of a meeting with Louis B. Mayer in London when he offered her a paltry-for-a-movie-star salary of $125 a week.
“That’s not good enough,” Hedwig Kiesler said, and sailed out of the meeting. Then she arranged to cross the Atlantic to America in the same ocean liner Mayer was taking; and when he saw her come into the dining room that first night, turning every head in the room as she entered in her decollete evening gown, he knew he had to hire her. She got $500 a week.
Then she spent the next couple of decades fighting with the studios, so even with the higher salary that was a rather Faustian bargain. In the fifties she produced a few films of her own (though she never directed), including a vast epic called Loves of Three Queens, wherein Lamarr starred as Helen, Guinevere, and Napoleon’s Josephine. But she couldn’t get distribution, lost all her money, and fell into a sharp decline.
(I’ve noticed that distribution is one of the great bottlenecks that women’s films often run into: many women founded production companies in the silent era only for their efforts to fall into nothing when no one would distribute the finished film. Lamarr worked in a later era, but ran into the same problem.)
Oh, and in between all of this, she came up with the idea for frequency-hopping, which would have allowed Allied ships to communicate securely to guide their torpedoes: the Germans wouldn’t be able to block the frequency because the transmission would hop between frequencies. At the time the army shunted the idea aside, but now it’s the basis for secure military transmissions, WiFi, Bluetooth, cell phone communication…
So basically we have Hedy Lamarr to thank for the modern world.
She was born in Austria in 1914, starred in the shocking film Ecstacy in 1933 (an extended sequence features Lamarr - not yet named Hedy Lamarr, but still going by her birth name of Hedwig Kiesler - running naked through the woods), escaped a domineering husband and also the rising threat of Nazi Germany in 1937 (for Lamarr, although in her later years she never spoke of it, was Jewish), and then walked out of a meeting with Louis B. Mayer in London when he offered her a paltry-for-a-movie-star salary of $125 a week.
“That’s not good enough,” Hedwig Kiesler said, and sailed out of the meeting. Then she arranged to cross the Atlantic to America in the same ocean liner Mayer was taking; and when he saw her come into the dining room that first night, turning every head in the room as she entered in her decollete evening gown, he knew he had to hire her. She got $500 a week.
Then she spent the next couple of decades fighting with the studios, so even with the higher salary that was a rather Faustian bargain. In the fifties she produced a few films of her own (though she never directed), including a vast epic called Loves of Three Queens, wherein Lamarr starred as Helen, Guinevere, and Napoleon’s Josephine. But she couldn’t get distribution, lost all her money, and fell into a sharp decline.
(I’ve noticed that distribution is one of the great bottlenecks that women’s films often run into: many women founded production companies in the silent era only for their efforts to fall into nothing when no one would distribute the finished film. Lamarr worked in a later era, but ran into the same problem.)
Oh, and in between all of this, she came up with the idea for frequency-hopping, which would have allowed Allied ships to communicate securely to guide their torpedoes: the Germans wouldn’t be able to block the frequency because the transmission would hop between frequencies. At the time the army shunted the idea aside, but now it’s the basis for secure military transmissions, WiFi, Bluetooth, cell phone communication…
So basically we have Hedy Lamarr to thank for the modern world.
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Date: 2018-11-14 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-14 01:32 pm (UTC)