Thelma Todd

One way or another, the Hollywood police have been kept busy with murders on their ground. There are numerous theories about the killings of Thelma Todd, Jack Healy (Three Stooges), Elizabeth Short, alias The Black Dahlia, Bugsy Siegal and Johnny Stompano. The files of William Desmond Taylor, Raymond Navarro and Sal Mineo are also re-opened. Femmes fatales are often deadly for the man's wallet or reputation -- these ladies killed for real. From Calamity Jane, gang boss Ma Baker and New York madame Polly Adler to axe-murderess Winnie Ruth Judd and others, we look at the Black Widow Spider syndrome. Rare archival footage and many hitherto unseen interviews, film, video clip tapes, and photographs are included in this hour-long program.

HOLLYWOOD. Tinseltown. Land of the stars. A city where an actor can reach the greatest heights overnight - and descend just as rapidly. What goes up must come down, and Hollywood's failing stars leave a legacy of sadness, pain and disappointment in their wake. Here, in graphic detail, are the shocking stories behind the deaths of the silver screen's most beloved celebrities, as well as it's lesser known players. Packed with stunning newsreel footage, and previously unrevealed facts, DEATH IN HOLLYWOOD documents many a celebrity's morbid demise due to suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, disease, and even murder. From the outrageous to the tragic, DEATH IN HOLLYWOOD leaves no tombstone unturned in it's quest to dig up the truth about Hollywood's dearly departed.

Famous Hollywood Scandals and Tragedies

A compilation of early-day silent films that serves as a glimpse back to the formative days of the movie industry as a salute to Hollywood's Golden Year, so proclaimed by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce as 1953.

The edition of Screen Snapshots celebrates 25 years of production. It looks at the content of edition #1, then a tribute to movie people who have died in those 25 years. Finally there are tributes to the Screen Snapshots series by Cecil De Mille, Walt Disney, Louella Parsons and Rosalind Russell.

Stan and Ollie travel with a band of 18th-century Gypsies holding a nobleman's daughter.

Two wannabe bandits join the service of a dashing nobleman, who secretly masquerades as Fra Diavolo, a notorious outlaw.

A prostitute sees a friendly sailor as a way out of Havana's grimy underworld.

Lifelong friends and medical school graduates Mary Stevens and Don Andrews decide to set up office together. While Mary struggles to earn respect because of her gender, Don gets caught up in his ambitions for a bigger life.

Ollie is running for mayor when an old flame tries to blackmail him with a old photo.

Quincy Adams Wagstaff, the new president of Huxley U, hires bumblers Baravelli and Pinky to help his school win the big football game against rival Darwin U.

Four stowaways get mixed up with gangsters while running riot on an ocean liner.

A lovely dame with dangerous lies employs the services of a private detective, who is quickly caught up in the mystery and intrigue of a statuette known as the Maltese Falcon.

When Stephen, the husband of Gerald’s mistress, Claire, discovers a pair of tickets for their planned trip to Venice, Gerald must invent a wife to cover their tracks. He is then forced to hire a woman to play “his wife” when Stephen insists he and Claire accompany them to Venice.

Though he was protecting her when he accidentally killed a man, Mabel Kane (Thelma Todd) refuses to testify on behalf of her dance partner Jerry Davis (George Murphy), and he's sent to jail. In a riot, a hostile convict (Jack La Rue) forces Jerry to help him escape, so Jerry takes to the streets himself. Nightclub entertainer Anne Taylor (Nancy Carroll) meets him, and convinces her boss Louis (Arthur Hohl) to hire him as her partner.

Two homeless vagabonds hide out in a vacant mansion and pose as the residents when prospective lessees arrive and try to rent it.

A successful lawyer struggles to deal with his wife's unfaithfulness and his own hidden past.

Three smart film-flammers help a homeless little girl to love and happiness by making monkeys out of Hollywood's big movie moguls. A love story to make life worth living, bristling with roaring laughter and rhythmic with singable, lovable song hits. Made by the producers of "Sunny Side Up" — and surpassing it in everything.

Two yokels try to crash royal society by posing as the King's physicians.

A lovesick fool bumbles into espionage and finds a stolen plane.

A stock market broker plans to liven up his boring life by taking up piracy on the high seas.

Two young women, Zasu and Thelma, complain that all of their dates take them to Coney Island. The next day a car goes by and they are splashed with mud. The driver stops and offers to buy them some new clothes. They accept the offer and later agree to go on a date.

Instead of delivering some fancy dresses to a customer, the girls wear them to a party.

Zasu & Thelma go out with two idiots to a nightclub.

A songwriter has to come up with a full-length theatrical piece within a few days.

A high-spirited and short-tempered Texan woman storms her way through life until her luck runs out, forcing her to learn the error of her ways.

A thief on the run dumps some hot money in Thelma and Patsy's lap.

Albert Stuyvesant Spottiswood and his cousin Harriet Winthrop Spottiswood arrive separately at their long abandoned and very much run down family manor, each unaware that the other is going to be there, and since both have become penniless, they are forced to move into the dilapidated house. When Albert receives a letter from old acquaintances Lord and Lady Fetherstone advising the Spottiswoods of their impending visit to the manor, the cousins are at wit's end as to how to exercise non-existent skills required to make the old house acceptable for guest reception.

A radio columnist is threatened by gangsters and later murdered during a broadcast. A detective sets out to find the killers.

Juror Zasu accidentally swallows a piece of evidence which just happens to be a time bomb.

Jack Oakie and Jack Haley are songwriters are enroute from New York to Hollywood to make their fame and fortune; Ginger Rogers, a lunchwagon proprieter, joins them.

A reporter sets out to prove that his girlfriend was framed and sent to prison.

Hips, Hips, Hooray! is a 1934 slapstick comedy film starring Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Ruth Etting, Thelma Todd, and Dorothy Lee.

During WW1, the girls become spies when they spend the evening with two German officers.

Charley agrees to go on a blind date to help out his roommate. But because his last such date turned out badly, he goes all out trying to make himself look bad. He refuses to shave, wears his friend's old suit and even eats garlic. Unfortunately for him, however, his date turns out to be the lovely Thelma Todd.

After running their car off the road, a society matron insists that the girls spend the evening at her mansion.

Lora Moore, the club champion, loses a golf match to a woman from another golf club. Then Jerry Downs, a handsome golf pro, and his goofy friend, Jack Martin, show up. Lora takes him on as her golf teacher to work on her putt. She falls for him, but so do several other women. Meanwhile Angie Howard, Lora's friend, chases after Jack. A lot of silliness ensues.

A plucky stewardess risks her life marrying a daredevil pilot.

The girls moonlight as taxi dancers in order to earn some extra money.

Thelma volunteers Patsy as a subject for her friend who is in dental school and needs somebody to practice on.

Thelma, who came to Hollywood from Joplin to be a star, is ready to go home. She and her pal Patsy are packing up and packing it in. Then, through Patsy's deviousness, Thelma gets a call to come to the studio immediately to audition for a costume drama.

The girls and their pet monkey create havoc on board a train carrying a traveling Broadway troupe.

A professor gets mixed up with chorus girls in a Broadway musical.

Patsy is coerced into faking a broken leg in order to win an insurance settlement after an automobile accident.

Zasu falls for a wrestler, drags Thelma to his next fight.

A rich American businessman in London makes believe he's lost all his money so that his daughter will marry a composer.

In the South Seas, a half-caste island girl refuses to follow tradition and marry a fellow islander, instead falling in love with a white man and heir to an American fortune.

Laurel and Hardy try to entertain a female neighbor, unbeknown to Hardy’s wife.

Before a planned African expedition, Jim's fiancée Eve worries her father's guest plans to steal one of her father's rubies. The couple are kidnapped and held prisoner at a mysterious, creepy house, where strange things are afoot.

In French Indochina, a magistrate is assigned to investigate the murder of his boss. Unknown to him, the boss had a policy of requiring the wives of his subordinates to sleep with him if they wanted their husbands to get promoted. What he also didn't know was that his wife was in the boss' office when he was killed. Complications ensue.

Playboy Teddy Ward wants to marry Jeannie King, an artist, but his father wants him to marry Loris Lane, but tells Teddy he can marry whom he pleases if he will make the Mountain Inn a profitable operation. Teddy agrees, and with the support of his friends arranges an ice-boat race with a $10,000 prize to the winner. A problem arises when his father refuses to pay such an amount. Teddy thinks one of his friends will win the race and refuse the prize, but champion racer "Duke" Slade shows up and Teddy knows he will take the money. Some movie stars show up and, while using their own names, are definitely not playing "Self" in this fictional film.

Charley intervenes in a fight between Eddie and Thelma inside her small car. Cop Kennedy misinterprets things, and Charley hides in the theatre Thelma is rehearsing in. Charley replaces Eddie as Thelma's partner in an artistic dance act, and makes a fiasco of it.

Real-life outlaw Joaquin Murietta, who (according to this film, anyway) is a latter-day Robin Hood, dedicated to driving land-grabbers and corrupt politicians out of Spanish California.

Diamond thieves have infiltrated the staff of O'Day Jewelry. The Los Angeles Police Dept. employs their newest weapon, an airplane, to help smash the diamond theft ring.

Two firemen must put up with a variety of travails in their job, especially their chief's spoiled and bratty daughter, who keeps turning in false alarms whenever she needs some heavy lifting done so that she can get the responding firemen to do it.

In this suspenseful silent crime drama, a hijacker proves his loyalty to his mother by killing his biological father, a blackmailing gangster who has been threatening to destroy the mother's happy marriage to the governor.

A once notorious gunfighter takes a respectable job on a ranch. "Nevada" is charged with protecting the ranch owner's pretty daughter, arousing the enmity of ranch foreman Clan Dillon, who is in love with the girl. The villainous foreman leaks a rumor of his rival's dark past to the sheriff, and the former outlaw is soon on the run again.

A English aristocrat causes a scandal when she divorces her husband and runs off with a young American.

A present-day stereotypically-Irish American politician is vaulted into ancient Greece after receiving a bump on the head. This film is lost.

Princess Delatorre, the recent widow of an Italian royal, pays a visit to her old hometown in America and is quickly mistaken for a local seamstress of dubious reputation.