A8 News
May 27, 2009
The Chronicle
Alum donates footage of 1940 graduation
Tea Time
By Michelle Nosratian
Lauren seo/ Chronicle
Yumi Mishimura (left) and Asako Kudo, who both went to tea school in Japan, japan visited the third period Japanese class on Friday May 22. They taught about a traditional Japanese tea ceremony.
E. Randol Schoenberg ’84 has donated some color film footage of the 1940 Westlake graduation to the school archives. The film is the oldest color film in the archives, according to school archivist Allan Sasaki. The short video features the procession of soon-to-be-graduates on the lower lawn of the school. The girls are wearing identical white dresses and receiving their diplomas from then-principal and school founder Frederica de Laguna. The footage has no audio to accompany it. Schoenberg is a Los Angeles-based attorney known for recovering five Gustav Klimt paintings that were seized during the Holocaust and returning them to their rightful owner in a Supreme Court case against the government of Austria in 2004. Schoenberg, the grandson of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, sent a DVD of the footage to Sasaki. A lowquality version of some of the footage is also available on YouTube. “I took a tour of the new middle school campus...and ran into Mr. Sasaki, whom I remembered from the olden days, and he showed me his new archive,” Schoenberg said. “I told him about this film I had and sent it to him.” One of the girls in the video is Tamara Hovey Gold ’40. Gold’s brother Serge studied with Schoenberg’s famous grandfather after the composer fled the Nazis and arrived in Los Angeles in 1934. The composer taught at UCLA and has a concert hall named after him at the university. “My brother was 18 at the time and he took the film,” Gold said. “He was just doing what brothers do.” Gold was 16 at the time of the graduation and went on to study at Bryn Mawr College. “The girls with the flowers were the juniors; I guess it was the tradition of the time,” she said. Schoenberg found the video as part of a larger roll of film in the Sonya Levien
Collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino that included footage of his grandfather, he said. Sonya Levien was Tamara and Serge’s mother and a famous screenwriter; her major credits include “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1939) and “Interrupted Melody” (1955). “Color film was brand new at that time and Sonya Levien worked for the studios and brought home left-over film that her kids used to take home movies,” Schoenberg said. “This is around the time of the ‘Wizard of Oz,’ the first full length color movie. Color film for home use just did not exist at that time, so these films are extremely rare.” Tamara and Serge Hovey were just teenagers when they used raw stock film to record famous personalities such as Arnold Schoenberg, novelist Thomas Mann, writer Aldous Huxley, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, all living in Los Angeles. “I’ve known about the Schoenberg part of the film for a long time because a copy was made for the Schoenberg archives, but I wanted to see if I could get a better copy to make still photos for a book I put together of my grandfather’s correspondence with Thomas Mann,” Schoenberg said. “My parents knew Tamara, so I called her and found out the original film was in the Huntington Library in San Marino. I was then able to arrange for the film to go to a professional lab for digital scanning.” Schoenberg is working on publishing an English-language version of a book that he has published in Italian, French and German that details the correspondence between his grandfather and Mann, the author of “Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend” that the German novelist wrote in the mid 1940s while he was in California. A character in Mann’s book is loosely based on Schoenberg’s grandfather, which irritated the composer and caused a rift between the two men, Schoenberg said. “The pictures in [Schoenberg’s] book are taken from the films [my brother and I] took when we were young,” Gold said.
Concert raises money for LA homeless families By Ashley Halkett Nineteen upper school students sang in a concert in Rugby Theater on May 22 for Imagine LA, a non-profit organization that helps homeless children. The event was hosted by Mike Lee ’09 and Keith Black ’09. The concert featured nine songs, mostly duets, and a special guest performance by Te’Rhon O’Neal ’09 and Corey Vann ’09. Proceeds from the concert totaled over $2,000. Before the performances, Imagine LA spokesperson Jill Bauman told the audience about the importance of helping homeless families,
~All ages ~All subjects: i.e. calc & stats ~Available: evenings & weekends
particularly children, escape the cycle of poverty. Black introduced the first act by singing the first couple lines of a T-Pain song, dedicated to “a special lady; you know who you are.” Inspired by the dedication of those involved last year, Lee decided he wanted to work with the association after seeing the first concert, held by Tymon Tai ’08 at St. Michael’s in 2008. “Imagine LA is one of the few organizations with a clear, distinct vision in helping to stop [homelessness],” Lee said. “I knew with proper funding, this charity would be able to take even bigger strides with our help,” he said.
Contact: LAmathGuy@yahoo.com Cell: (310) 383-9072
Between getting approval from the administration and recruiting both volunteers and performers, the concert took about three months to set up. Lee said he was nervous about a low turnout, but that his fears were assuaged and everything went better than expected. “My favorite part was definitely being able to incorporate a passion of mine, music, with something that really helps out the community,” Lee said. “I’ve been trying to pursue a showcase for some time now, and finally being able to see a performance like that come true is something I will never forget,” he said.
Courtesy of Jason Mow
Imagine that: Jilli Marine ’10, Megan Fleming ’10, Nora Rothman ’09 and Maddy Sprung-Keyser ’09 (from left) sing to benefit Imagine LA, a charity that helps homeless families, on May 22.
Valid on Driver Ed (classroom or online)/Training package. Coupon must be presented at sign-up to receive discount. 1093 Broxton Ave #218, Los Angeles, CA 90024 One Coupon per student. Expires 9/2010 Call 310-824-4444 or email us at www.westwooddriving.com or start your Driver Education online now at www.310driversed.com!