Calling Hedy Lamarr

Calling Hedy Lamarr

AT/DE/UK 2004, 72 min, HDCAM/35mm
Mischief Films, Hanfgarn & Ufer, Lone Star Productions

Who was she really? Viennese girl. Hollywood goddess. Inventor. A success story. A failure. Rich. Poor. Forgotten. Rediscovered. The studio wanted her to be beautiful and nothing else. Her son wanted a loving mother. Her six husbands, a wife. And herself? A film that examines the traces left behind by the most beautiful inventor in the world, told as a mixture of modern myths, fabricated legends, and true stories.

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Synopsis

The Most Beautiful Woman In Films! - MGM

A Face, a Tag Line, an Invention.

Two facets that don’t seem to belong to the same woman. A Hollywood star as an ingenious inventor piques our curiosity. The director Georg Misch is interested in how truth and myth intertwine. He listens to stories about her told by people who knew her. He dissects the history of the woman with the exotic eroticism who not only made surprising and daring decisions in her private life, but who caused a sensation with an intrepid film project right from the start. What is left? – her first film Ecstasy with its scandalous nude scenes, movies that nobody has seen or heard of, a sixty-year-old son who is still struggling with his relationship to his mother, an invention whose patent ran out too soon, so that what has become a cornerstone for wireless communications, which are in constant use in our everyday lives, brought its inventor late fame but never earned her any money.

At the end of the day what lingers is the echo of her fascinating beauty.

The way the film handles the archive material from various sources reflects the inner conflicts of a Hollywood diva whose other talent as a mathematical genius and inventor was not allowed to unfold so as not to endanger her aura as a successful goddess of the silver screen. As we peel away the convolution of myths that grew up about her while she was still alive what gradually emerges is the portrait of a modern woman beyond the Hollywood star.

In the last decades of her life the telephone became her only means of communication with the outside world, even with her children and close friends. She often talked up to six or seven hours a day on the phone, but she hardly spent any time with anyone in person in her final years.

For this reason, though also of course because of the significance of her invention to modern communications, the telephone has been chosen as the “structuring motif” of the movie. The interviews in the movie have been staged as telephone calls and lead the viewer through time like a nostalgic conference with the film’s protagonists.

CALLING HEDY LAMARR isn’t, however, a portrait; it is above all a film about the Hollywood diva from the perspective of her son Anthony Loder, a fairly successful telephone dealer in Los Angeles who wants desperately to be the Hollywood producer of a feature film about the life of his mother. Through his research he encounters contradictory statements and fantastic theories. There is often only a fine line between truth and lie.

Hedy Lamarr – The Strange Woman

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, who later under the name of Hedy Lamarr was to have the kind of Hollywood career everyone dreams of, was a student of Max Reinhardt, the wife of a munitions manufacturer, and the cause of a European scandal in her “first life.”

Ecstasy – A scandal and at the same time the temporary end of her film career

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Her film appearance in 1933 in a nude role in the Austrian-Czech film Ecstasy by Gustav Machatý was a tremendous scandal in cinema history.

But the actress disappears from public life at the age of 19 when she marries the Austrian munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl, who tries in vain to buy all existing prints of the scandalous film. He hides his young wife away for safekeeping. Lamarr endures four years of married life in a golden cage before she leaves her husband and emigrates to the United States in 1937.

On the ship to America – A contract with MGM

Louis B. Mayer gives her a contract but insists that she changes her name first. MGM markets her as the most beautiful woman in the world. It isn’t long before the rising star Hedy Lamarr finds a place in the MGM firmament. In her promising Hollywood debut “Algiers” she stars with Charles Boyer as ’Pepe Le Moko.’ Her ’exotic’ sex appeal makes headlines. In the following productions the studio tries to turn her into a really big star with roles alongside Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, James Stewart, and William Powell. Hedy Lamarr is considered the brunette answer to the super famous “Hollywood bombshells”. Among her most popular films are Boom Town (Jack Conway, 1949) and Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949); the critics are less than enthusiastic, her break into big time stardom never comes. Hedy Lamarr goes down in history as the most beautiful woman in the world, her movies leave no mark. From a film history point of view the movies she made outside of Hollywood remain the most interesting – Ecstasy by Gustav Machatý, The Strange Woman by Edgar Ulmer and Experiment Perilous by Jacques Tourneur. The Strange Woman seems to be the programmatic precursor of the biography of Hedwig Eva Kiesler.

Strange – misunderstood by many

She tries to make her sphere of activity go beyond the inflexible “star mold.” As a Jew who converted to Catholicism she is both sensitive to and aware of the political developments taking place in Europe. From her years of being married to the munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl she has heard a lot about information systems and is quite aware of the problem of the vulnerability of radio communications. When she by chance meets the avant-garde composer George Antheil, the so-called “enfant terrible of music,” at a party in Hollywood in 1940, she not only finds someone who shares her weariness of the world of superficial beauty, but for the first time someone who understands her idea of frequency hopping. Lying on the living room rug Lamarr and Antheil use a box of matches and its contents to fashion a device for the radio control of torpedoes that wouldn’t be susceptible to interception or jamming. They invent a torpedo guidance system using 88 frequencies – analogous to the 88 keys of the piano and patent their invention.

A life of beauty, a hideous end

In 1958 her Hollywood career is over, she has plastic surgery done numerous times in the years to follow. She wants to stay the most beautiful woman in the world, her “look” is copied by many actresses and serves as a source of inspiration for a number of fictional characters (Catwoman, Disney’s Snow White, the replicant in Blade Runner).

She is arrested repeatedly for shoplifting. She sues people and companies alike, including Mel Brooks for using her name in Blazing Saddles (1974) and the software company Corel Corporation for using her photo for the cover of one of its products.

She avoids public appearances, only maintains contact with a few confidants via the telephone. She was married six times, had three children (two of her own – a son and a daughter, and an adopted son with John Loder). In 2000 she dies at the age of 85, lonely and forgotten.

The Invention

They wanted her face not her brains.

1940: Janet Gaynor throws a dinner party

Hollywood beauty Hedy Lamarr makes small talk with the enfant terrible of film music composition George Antheil. The next day they get together again. She has finally found someone she can discuss her idea of frequency hopping with. What follows is not a love affair but an intense exchange about radio controlled torpedoes. One can assume that the subject came up over a political discussion about Nazi Germany. Hedy Lamarr came from a Jewish family and was exposed, no doubt, to quite a bit of information about weapons and defense from the time she was married to the munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. Her idea focused above all on the radio guidance of torpedoes and ultimately on preventing the enemy from understanding the radio signals. Her idea was in fact quite simple, like all great ideas – if it was possible to intercept a frequency, why not use the switching of frequencies in rapid succession to encode transmission – so-called frequency hopping?

Antheil had been fooling around at the grand piano; Lamarr was leaning against the instrument singing along while Antheil kept switching keys, and this was when the inspiration for the implementation of the idea struck her – why not use player piano rolls to control the radio tuners.

My God, I can see them saying, “We shall put a player piano in a torpedo.” (George Antheil)

Lamarr and Antheil, as they will tell the story later, stretch out on the living room rug and put their ideas onto paper. Piano rolls for the code input and the same for deciphering the code. Radio signals that switch their frequency quickly could only be deciphered by their recipient in this way. An invention which has become the cornerstone for secure wireless information transmission.

Lamarr and Antheil had wanted to support their country during the war; they worked out their idea and submitted it to the patent office. They received a patent in 1942. Hedy Lamarr, under her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey, was awarded patent #2,292,387, along with co-inventor George Antheil, for a “Secret Communication System.” This seminal invention was the first instance of spread-spectrum communications based on frequency-hopping techniques. [August 11, 1942]

The Navy declared the patent unfeasible and piano rolls cumbersome.

Hedy Lamarr wants to work with the National Inventors Council on a regular basis. She is advised not to forfeit her brilliant film career and is convinced instead to sell kisses for war bonds. With a price of $50,000 for a single kiss she has soon sold millions of dollars worth of bonds.

Spread Spectrum Utilizations – Where the Lamarr and Antheil invention is being used:

GPS

GDMA

Blue Tooth

Wireless Internet

Cordless phones

Milstar Defense Satellite

They never earn a penny on the patent. After it expired (17 years later) the US government reevaluated the idea and developed it further.

Beach Buzz: “Calling Hedy Lamarr” is one of “Five fest films worth digging into”.

The Hollywood Reporte

Presskit

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Calling_Hedy_Lamarr_Presskit_en.pdf

Image 3000 x 1971