Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood’s Golden Age, many of the top directors in the U.S. were Germans. Most of them moved to Hollywood when Hitler came to power; however, some important German directors in Hollywood arrived long before the Nazi era. Erich von Stroheim was a big movie star in the U.S. during World War 1. He was the first German actor in Hollywood to figure out that the way to get jobs directing big-budget movies was to act the role of a stereotypical German theatrical director. He knew that Americans had a very clear idea what German directors were like. Americans thought that German directors were arrogant monocled tyrants, terrorizing the people who worked under them, but that they were also artistic geniuses. Von Stroheim knew how to play to that stereotype. He starred in many big-budget movies in World War 1 and World War 2, always playing a nasty, arrogant, monocled German military officer. American audiences lapped it up! Von Stroheim was billed as ‘the man you love to hate.’ Von Stroheim began wearing a monocle soon after arriving in Hollywood, but he didn’t actually need glasses to see. The lens in von Stroheim’s monocle was just window glass. He wore the monocle as part of his theatrical personae. Twenty years after von Stroheim arrived in Hollywood, Hitler came to power, and a slew of top German directors moved to Hollywood, most of them Jewish, and all of them looking for work. Two of the best of these Jewish German directors were Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang. Both of them knew Erich von Stroheim. Soon after arriving in Hollywood, both Preminger and Lang started wearing monocles. Neither of them wore monocles when they lived in Germany. They also began sneering when being photographed. Like von Stroheim, they quickly got jobs directing important movies. My favorite movie directed by Otto Preminger was ‘Laura.’ It has often been called the best cinema noir movie ever made. Preminger won the Academy Award in 1944 as Best Director for that film. He also acted in a number of movies. In ‘Stalag 17’, Preminger played the arrogant, sadistic commandant of a German POW camp. In that movie, Preminger plays with his monocle while tormenting American POWs. So, if you know someone with a German accent who wants to become a big-name Hollywood director, my advice is – start sneering and get a monocle!
Micro apartments and condominiums in San Francisco keep getting smaller, and so do their kitchens. Below are photos taken from San Francisco Craigslist rental ads. These are examples of what is politely known in the City as ‘efficiency kitchens.’ Each kitchen measures less than 5 square feet. In that tiny space, they somehow squeeze in a stainless steel sink, a stove, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, and some shelves or a storage cabinet. Just because these kitchens are tiny, doesn’t necessarily mean these apartments are cheap. They are in San Francisco, where the average 1 bedroom apartment now rents for $3,600 a month. Whenever I see ads for newly-built micro apartments and condominiums in San Francisco, I think: ‘Well they can’t get any smaller than that’, but they always do. I wonder how they will make kitchens smaller than this.