Category: Videos
Read the transcript here.
Jane Jones singing in “Port of Missing Girls”
This blurry still is from the video of the B movie “Port of Lost Girls,” from 1938 — see the video below the fold. The film offers a rare view of Jane Jones, proprietor of Jane Jones’ Little Club at 8740 Sunset Blvd., one of two lesbian-centric nightclubs on the Sunset Strip — the other was Cafe Internationale, at 8711 Sunset Blvd., owned by Elmer and Tess Wheeler — mentioned in Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics and Lipstick Lesbians, by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons.
Faderman and Timmons describe the womens’ nightclubs on the as “in the tradition of the upscale nightclub, and they promoted an exotic glamour, much like the lesbian bars of Weimar Berlin.” Jones, they said, “was a big woman with a basso profundo voice who’d been a signer in movie musicals.”
(Read more about Jane Jones’ Little Club here and the closing of Tess Wheeler’s Cafe Internationale by the Navy during World War II here.)
Here’s the movie:
This trailer is the only surviving footage from the 1926 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The film itself is lost. It’s of particular interest because Fitzgerald lived on the Sunset Strip for several years, at the Garden of Allah Hotel for a while and later, in the months before his death, in an apartment nearby. The film was directed by Herb Brenon, who also directed “War Brides,” the first film starring Alla Nazimova, who later founded the Garden of Allah. And it features an early performance by William Powell, who was later a regular at the pool of the Garden of Allah, along with his wife, Carol Lombard.
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