Carla Valderrama knows how to make something look good.
“They wanted me to do a lot of stories.
Initially, they said, ‘Oh, how about 50?’
Credit: Zack Munson; TMC
and I said, ‘How about you jump off a bridge!
I’m not doing 50.
I’ll do 30,'” she quips.
Virgil Apger/Margaret Chute/Getty Images
I wanted to have a through-line."
The solution to that problem came in her own collection.
Valderrama is an avid collector of classic movies and fan magazines from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Courtesy Everette Collection
“My husband was like, ‘Why don’t you just do that?’
And he pointed at the movie magazine.
I was like, ‘Oh my god, you’re such a f—ing genius.'”
Thus was born the concept of designing and structuring her book like a movie magazine of old.
“It helped build the industry and create the stars.
It was such an integral part of the industry at the time.”
“The thing about the movie magazines, it wasn’t just about pretty design,” she says.
“It has to have a purpose.
It has to push the narrative.”
Many of the stories came to Valderrama through a sort of kismet.
“I was expecting to get a lot of background information,” she explains.
“And like five minutes into the conversation, she dropped this A-bomb on my lap.”
When she suddenly quit the business, fans spent years wondering why.
So, she didn’t.
“I was like, ‘Give me all those files.'”
Ultimately, she followed where her heart and her research led.
There were still some stories that got away, like that of trailblazing African American actress Fredi Washington. "
I didn’t get to do it because I ran out of time and money," she explains.
I want it to be archival research.
Valderrama spoke to Garfield’s daughter, as well as his contemporaries like Norman Lloyd.
“He looked at me and he said, ‘Do you know how many lives were destroyed?
Do you know how many people jumped out of windows?
Went to Mexico or Europe or wherever?'”
“It was like you just ripped the band-aid off of him.
104 years old, and he was ready to cry.”
The author hopes that readers will take the time to discover Garfield’s work in-depth after learning his story.
“He was the O.G.
before Marlon Brando, before Montgomery Clift, before James Dean,” she opines.
“He was the first method actor superstar; he was the one that changed everything.
“I wanted to really focus on the humanistic story,” she says.
“I don’t have production dates.
I don’t want to get bogged down in that.
I wanted to make it interesting for someone like Leonard Maltin, who gave me a blurb.
That ultimately was the goal of the fan magazines too to make movies accessible to the public.”
This Was Hollywoodis now available.
