Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy and had never warmed to his idea of a Jack London story). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had  overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty. His legacy is eternal.