INHERIT THE WIND dir. Stanley Kramer
Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight (1933)
He lives up on Mulholland Drive, the winding crest at the top of the Hollywood Hills, where you get the glittering views that accompany success in this city. But of all the views that Joaquin Phoenix could enjoy – out west, say, to the Pacific, or south to Hollywood, the twinkling rug that rolls down across Sunset and beyond – he chooses to look north, across the San Fernando Valley, standing out in his backyard, smoking American Spirits, and tracing the grid sprawl way out to the paper cut mountains that serrate the horizon in the far distance.
“That’s where we lived when I was a kid,” he says. “I’m talking about the fucking foothills. The deepest valley that you can get. We’d get into a station wagon that would break down at least twice a fucking week, and we’d drive, all five of the kids, to the different studios for auditions – Warner Brothers, Fox, Paramount, all of them.”
Esquire Magazine