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Louise Brooks was born Mary Louise Brooks in 1906, and she was always unconventional. She was the daughter of a Kansas lawyer, but she left at the age of 16 to go to New York and join Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn with their Denishawn dancers. Two years later she had a falling out with Shawn and was fired. She then worked in the George White's Scandals, the Ziegfeld Follies (where she was a semi-nude dancer, and was noticed, and signed to a Hollywood contract by Paramount Pictures, where she had several minor movies as a sexy flapper girl in comedies). She finally got her big break in a starring role in Beggars Of Life, and predictably she left Hollywood to go to Europe. But she had had the title role in The Canary Murder Case in 1929, which had been filmed as a silent, and Paramount asked her to return to dub the movie, and she refused, which effectively blacklisted her in Hollywood. She made two incredible movies with legendary German director G.W. Pabst, Pandora's Box, and Diary Of A Lost Girl and I highly recommend both. She made Prix de Beaute in France, and in the early 1930s she returned to Hollywood (minus her trademark flapper hairdo) where she could only get minor roles, and she returned to Kansas, and later New York. She lived an alcoholic life in obscurity (supported by former admirers including William S. Paley, founder of CBS). In the 1950s and 1960s she was "rediscovered" by film critics, and she wrote many articles and books about her life, which I also highly recommend. She is likely best remembered for her distinctive hair style! She passed away in 1985 at the age of 78.

Important Added Info: Note that this is a "studio-issued" negative. What is it? It was produced by the studio but is not the camera original. It is very high quality and was created in quantity by the studios and sent to media outlets or other places that had need of the very highest quality image for reproduction purposes (in newspapers, magazines, or elsewhere). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to an image of the negative image). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). The negative is in a plastic sleeve (but we removed it and scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is). It will be sent to the winner of the auction in its sleeve.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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Bruce Hershenson,
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