Kate Hepburn had sexual assignations with more than 150 women. Spencer Tracy swung both ways. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott – an item. Charles Laughton and Tyrone Power were into “water sports.” Anthony Perkins and Tab Hunter were lovers. Harold Lloyd spent money on hookers – lots of hookers – but he would never touch them. He photographed them with a special 3-D camera.

Such are a few of thejuicy revelations to be found in Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, $25), a titillating tell-all from Scotty Bowers, a gadabout go-between in the closeted and scandal-wary world of moviedom. From just after World War II, when he returned from his stint as a Marine in the Pacific and started pumping gas (and got propositioned by actor Walter Pidgeon), up through the decades until the advent of AIDS, Bowers was -- or claims to be – a facilitator of sexual favors, matching movie stars who were secretly gay with their gender of preference, and fixing hetero and bisexual celebs with all manner of obliging company.

Bowers’ book, written with Lionel Friedberg (a documentary producer who is working on a film with, and about, Bowers), rehashes a lot of familiar Hollywood Babylon-style gossip and dirt. But Full Service is also chockfull of detailed descriptions of dalliances between leading men and other men, leading ladies and ladies of the night, of orgies, hedonistic hijinks and angry spouses. (Lucille Ball had it in for Bowers because he hooked husband Desi Arnaz with countless, compliant women – or so Bowers says.)

Written in a chatty, affable style, and loaded with the sort of specifics that suggest 1) this stuff could well have happened or 2) Bowers is possessed of an extremely vivid imagination, Full Service is never less than entertaining. But beyond that, truth or fabrication, the book paints a picture of a different kind of Hollywood, where the press only went so far in reporting scandals, where great efforts were taken to conceal  an actor or actress’ true proclivities, where there was no TMZ and no celebrity porn videos and where there was a lot more to lose if the real story ever got out.  

If you’ve ever stumbled across those weird icons and paranoia-tinged messages planted in the asphalt on street corners in Phladelphia (and Baltimore and Boston and New York, and other places around the globe) and wondered what was up, and who’s behind ‘em,  wonder no more. Jon Foy’s engagingly eerie documentary detective project, Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, follows local sleuths Justin Duerr, Steve Weinik and Colin Smith as they piece together the puzzle of the street texts and their odd connection to the famous philosophical historian Arnold Toynbee, to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, to former Inquirer columnist Clark Deleon, to playwright David Mamet, to the Philip K. Dick-ish sounding Minority Association, to South Philly’s “bird man” and to the planet Jupiter.

The Philadelphia Film Society is sponsoring the event, which includes a screening of the film, a Q & A with Foy – who not only directed, but co-wrote, co-produced, edited and composed the remarkably effective, noir-ish score – plus drinks and food and Troc-y atmospherics. Foy won the best documentary director prize at last year’s Sundance Film festival for his efforts. The film's illustrations, by Matt Rota, are also incredibly cool. For more info on the film, the DVD, and the Monday night showcase, click here.   

It was Wim Wenders’ eureka moment: sitting in a theater in 2007, he slipped on a pair of black plastic 3-D specs and settled back to watch his buddy Bono in the giant screen concert film, U2 3D. And suddenly, everything became clear – he knew how to make his long-discussed documentary about internationally renowned choreographer Pina Bausch.

 “I had been debating with Pina for 20 years about this film, and stalling for time, and hesitating,” explains Wenders . ”I just didn’t know how to do it. I had huge reservations about filming dance, not because of the beauty of dance -- but because I felt my craft was inadequate. The tools couldn’t really do justice to the life experience.... And so, for twenty years, Pina and I had this running gag going. Each time we’d meet she’d ask, `Well, do you know now?’

“`Give me more time, Pina, I still don’t know.’”

And then Wenders found his solution, “in an area where I had not looked before, and that was technology. It was at the very beginning of the digital 3-D wave…. I put on these glasses innocently and thought I was going to have fun, I love the music, and instead I sat there mesmerized and couldn’t wait for it to end, because from the first shot it was clear this was the answer to our question -- Pina and I. And I just wanted to call her. So while the credits were running I dashed out and gave her a call, and the only thing I had to say was, `I think I know now how to do it.’

 “It was so obvious: what we were missing was the very element of dance – space!”

Pina was nominated for a best documentary feature Academy Award this Tuesday. It’s playing now – in 3-D, of course – at United Artists RiverView, United Artists King of Prussia, AMC Neshaminy and Rave Motion Pictures at the Ritz Center/NJ.

A Separation, Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s fifth film, has, like his previous work, been received well as it toured film festivals and arthouses around the world. But this intimate drama about a Tehran couple’s legal and familial strife has tapped into something deeper, as the kudos and acclaim and even the box office (for a subtitled film) have demonstrated. Winner of the best foreign language film prize at the Golden Globes (and from the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review, so on and so on),  A Separation landed two Academy Award nominations this week: for best foreign language film, and best original screenplay.

Reached in Los Angeles on the Friday before he nabbed his Golden Globe, and speaking through a translator (and correcting the translator when he didn’t get the Farsi-to-English exchanges exactly right!), Farhadi says that he hasd’t been prepared for this kind of response.

“I had no expectation that audiences, especially outside of Iran, would receive this movie this well,” he explains. “I imagined that the level of reception and positive reviews would be similar to my previous films…. Those movies, my previous movies, were very successful in the festival arena, but this one is unique – it seems to be very popular with the people, too. “

And does he have a theory as to why?

“There are several elements, I think," he says. "The movie has a story, it has drama. It has a realistic language. It’s probably the mixture of realism and drama that is attractive to audiences.”

No Adventures of Tintin in the animated feature field? Does this mean “performance capture” doesn’t really count as cartooning?… But John Williams, Steven Spielberg’s go-to music maestro, received a best original score nod for Tintin, and another for his work on Spielberg’s best picture nominee, War Horse!… Only two original songs contenders? One, the impossibly catchy “Man or Muppet,” comes from Flight of the Conchords’ genius musical parodist, Bret McKenzie. The other? “Real in Rio,” a Sergio Mendes ditty from the animated macaw movie, Rio.… Irony award goes to Michel Hazanavicius, nabbing an original screenplay nomination for his SILENT movie, The Artist. (OK, there are intertitle cards.)...  J. Edgar totally snubbed -- not even best makeup, probably because the aging effects on Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady were superior in every way to the crinkly gobs applied to Leonardo DiCaprio’s mug……. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris lands four Oscar noms, including best picture and director. His biggest film ever, released last summer, and it’s still going strong!…. Kristen Wiig gets Oscar cred for co-writing Bridesmaids, the femme buddy/bodily-function matrimonial farce. To quote Maya Rudolph’s character: “Why can’t you be happy for me and then go home and talk about me behind my back like a normal person?”

Trivia note: the last silent film to be nominated for best picture? The Patriot, Ernst Lubitsch, 1928.

There’s a local connection in the documentary feature race: Hell and Back Again, about a wounded U.S. Marine’s tough transition from Afghan combat to stateside rehab, was edited by Fiona Otway, who’s in the graduate program at Temple University’s film school. It’s the third Oscar-nominated doc that Otway has edited: Iraq in Fragments was a documentary feature contender in 2007, “Sari’s Mother” was a 2008 documentary short subject nominee.

“Happy news,” says Otway, reached an hour or so after the Oscar announcements.“ The 33-year-old editor worked “a little bit” on Hell and Back Again here in Philly, but mostly she put the film together  in Seattle, where she was living before she received her fellowship to attend Temple.

Otway, currently finishing up work on a doc about international adoptions, calls this year's five non-fiction feature nominees “a really good batch.”  They are: If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Pina and Undefeated. “Undefeated was made by a friend of mine, TJ Martin, so I'm excited for him, too,” she says.

Click here to check out Hell and Back Again’s website.  

A beautiful documentary about the late, great folk singer Phil Ochs -- Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune – has its television premiere this coming week on PBS’ American Masters. Locally, WHYY will broadcast Kenneth Bowser’s compelling biography on Monday, Jan. 23, at 10 p.m.  Interviewees include Joan Baez, Sean Penn, Pete Seeger, Tom Hayden, Michael Ochs (Phil’s brother and, for a time, his manager) and the late Christopher Hitchens, who speaks with characteristic passion and eloquence about the ‘60s protest singer and folk icon. Ochs, once considered an equal to Bob Dylan, took his life when he was 35 – despondent over the downturn in his career.

If you didn’t see There But for Fortune when it screened at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute last year, now’s your chance. Check out the doc’s official site here.  

Scene- stealing Jack Russells Cosmo and Uggie, co-stars, respectively, of the Golden Globe-winning Beginners (Christopher Plummer for best supporting actor) and the Golden Globe-winning The Artist (best film – comedy or musical, best actor (Jean Dujardin) and best score), showed up for a Hollywood Reporter photo shoot earlier this week. Both dogs are more than just cute canines in their films – they emote mightily, they interact with their human counterparts, and they do their own stunts.

In the new bestseller Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, author Susan Orlean recounts how the very first acting Oscar, in 1929, almost went to the German shepherd superstar of Silent Cinema. But at the last minute, the Academy board made a rule that only humans could be eligible for the acting prizes. Maybe it’s time to rethink the policy. Cosmo and Uggie are essential characters in the respective stories, and it’s impossible to imagine either Beginners or The Artist without ’em.

Here’s a video of the Hollywood Reporter photo shoot:

In interviews – including one forthcoming with yours truly – Glenn Close has been telling people how she’s struggled to bring the character of Albert Nobbs to the big screen for, well, forever. Playing a woman forced to disguise herself as a man in order to survive in 19^th century Ireland, Close has rightly received accolades for her performance, not to mention a Golden Globe best actress nomination. And don’t be surprised if an Oscar nod follows when the Academy announces its nominees on Jan. 24.

Well, here’s a photo of Close in the original Manhattan Theatre Club Downstage production of The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, written and directed by Simone Benmussa, adapting a short story by George Moore. Albert Nobbs the film, directed by Rodrigo Garcia from a screenplay by Close and John Banville, opens in the Philly area on Jan. 27.