Pencils and Pop Culture: The Golden Globes Connection

Pencils and Pop Culture: The Golden Globes Connection

Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony celebrated the best and brightest in the television and film during a star-studded gala hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. However, one of the night’s honorees was already a winner in our eyes long before the ceremony began.

Actress Michelle Williams was awarded Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for her incandescent turn as Marilyn Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” While Williams has been capturing audience’s hearts since her early days on “Dawson’s Creek,” we at Studio 602 were endeared to the actress when we read her profile in the October 2011 issue of US Vogue Magazine.

Early into the article, Williams happened to mention her penchant for, among other things, the original Eberhard-Faber Blackwing pencils. According to interviewer Adam Green:

“She gestures with small, slim, expressive hands as the conversation ranges from her affinity for dresses from the 1930s and long-discontinued Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencils (‘I love things that are old and beautiful and tell a story, even if it’s a sad one’) to the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, whose notoriously complex Ada is a favorite. ‘I think Nabokov once said that genius is finding the invisible link between things,” she tells me. “And that’s how I choose to see life. Everything’s connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it.’”

As Williams observes, everything is connected after all. Nabokov, whose works Williams admires, was also a devotee of the original Blackwing pencil. When adapting his notorious novella “Lolita” for the screen, Nabokov would meticulously transcribe his notes and new scenes onto lined index card, using a sharpened Blackwing pencil. Blackwings even make appearances in some of Nabokov’s works, most notably in “Look at the Harlequins!”

The Blackwing links Williams and Nabokov, and it links us to them as well. The Blackwing was revived in order to continue its legacy of artistic and creative excellence, which lives on in the pages of Nabokov’s novels and in the memories of enthusiasts like Williams. It’s something old, something beautiful, and it definitely tells a story, though we would like to think it’s one with a happy ending.

Congratulations to Michelle Williams, and should she ever need something for marking a script or penning a letter, we know just the thing for the job.