Olive Thomas collection

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

In the heyday of silent films, a winsome ingénue named Olive Thomas - affectionately dubbed Ollie by her friends and fans - possessed a seemingly charmed life. Born in the coal mining town of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, in 1894, her astonishing beauty and spirit carried her to New York City where she found fame and fortune. She became a favorite of illustrators, the Darling of the Condé Nast crowd, the mascot of the New York Yankees and a Ziegfeld Follies lovely. It wasn't long before she made the transition to star of the cinema.The Flapper is an exceedingly charming comedy about small-town girl Ginger King (Thomas), who attends and East Coast boarding school and dreams of romantic adventures. Ginger feels she has outgrown her young boyfriend and flirts with an older man. In her efforts to become sophisticated she unwittingly gets mixed up with a couple of crooks who entrust her with a batch of stolen jewels. Ginger returns home from school wearing the jewels and playing the jaded vamp. When the crooks come after her, she realizes she must overcome her childish dreams and save the day! Norma Shearer and her sister Athole make their first film appearances in The Flapper.Olive Thomas: Everybody's Sweetheart explores the life and death of one of the first onscreen flappers. By the time she appeared in The Flapper, she had completed more than seventeen films! But beneath the glitter of success, Olive had her share of tragedy and heartache. Her death, under mysterious circumstances in Paris, just a month before her 26th birthday shocked the world. It was the very first of the Hollywood scandals and was soon followed by the deaths of Virginia Rappe, William Desmond Taylor, and Wallace Reid. Narrated by Rosanna Arquette, this irresistible documentary features rare clips from Olive's films and interviews with director Allison Anders, Richard Ziegfeld and Daniel Selznick. THE OLIVE THOMAS COLLECTION reveals what a great loss Olive's death was to cinema, or as producer David O. Selznick said of this tragedy, she was a dancing sunbeam suddenly snuffed out like a candle.