Round Up the Usual Suspects

Hello Dear Friends:

It’s been some time since I last sent out a “Tales From Hollywood and Vine” blog. This doe not mean that I’ve ceased being your favorite “Hollywood Brat.” Far from it! In addition to spending an inordinate amount of time vetting COVID-19 research protocols and writing tons of political essays, I’ve also become part of a new film venture: EDIFY. There is a new online lecture service called “EDIFY,” sponsored by Florida Atlantic University . . . one of the places I do film classes. Months and months ago they asked if I would create a filmic version of one of my “Behind the Silver Screen” lectures . . . complete with yours truly and lots of clips and photographs. They came to me first as sort of a test case to see if it their idea could work. I said yes and then went to town on a lecture about the making of “Casablanca.” Well, after months of filming and editing, its up and running!

I am delighted to inform you first. You can find it online at edify.fau.edu Once you get to the site, you can go to “about,” and “subscribe” and then on to my lecture. Please note, this is a subscription site that contains dozens upon dozens of lectures in a whole host of disciplines. A subscription is a mere $10.00 a month, and you can cancel at any time you wish.

I hope you will get a chance to see my lecture. It was a pleasure to make and - in my humble opinion - turned out really well. If you have any questions or difficulties, you can always contact the creators of this website at edify@fau.edu or give the office a call at 561-297-3185.

Please let me know if you get a chance to see my lecture . . .

KFS

February 2, 1914

August 2, 2020

February 2, 1914

Sir Charles Spenser Chaplin in my library

The other day I officiated at the funeral of a dear friend. At the time of her passing she was 106, and had been, up until a few days before her death, about as healthy as anyone I knew. Selma shared a birthday with “Madame,” my mother Alice . . . except that Selma was precisely 10 years older than mom. Every February the 8th, she (Selma) would ask to be remembered to “that young lady” and send along her birthday wishes. Like Madame, Selma was a fine, fine artist; she worked largely in oils where Madame spent a lifetime as a gifted pointillist . . . pen and ink being her “weapon” of choice. Unlike Mom, Selma was never an actress, but like mom, was a gifted dancer.

In preparing for Selma’s service, I did quite a bit of research . . . most of it dealing with the year 1914. In the year of her birth, Woodrow Wilson was president, the only Roosevelt most Americans could identify was Theodore, and Babe Ruth had yet to hit his first home run. (For baseball aficionados, that year, the all-time record for home runs was one Roger Conner (1857-1931) who held the all-time record: 138 dingers. In February 1914, one could purchase a 3 bedroom home through the Sears catalog for $825.00; the vast majority of American veterans had served during the Civil War, a Ford Model T cost $440.00 (approximately $11,231 in current dollars) and the most popular movie star in the world (at least as of February 1st of that year) was a zaftig Jewish maiden named Theodosia Goodman, who who acted under the name “Theda Bara.” (Mom would parody Miss Bara about 45 years later in a sketch called “We Never Learned to Twalk (sic).”

“Making a Living” (February 2, 1914)

On February 2, 1914, a mere 6 days before Selma’s birth, the world be forever changed. For on that day, a 25-year old Cockney vaudevillian named Charles Spenser Chaplin was first seen on screen in a 1-reel short ironically entitled “Making a Living.” Appearing sans baggy pants, tight threadbare coat, derby hat and over-sized shoes (which wouldn’t come about until his next picture, “Kid Auto Races in Venice”). Film reviewers immediately understood that the first genius of the screen had arrived. The anonymous reviewer for Motion Picture World wrote about the unnamed actor in Making a Living: “The clever player who takes the role of the nervy and very nifty sharper (Chaplin) in this picture is a comedian of the first water, who acts like one of Natures’s own naturals. . . . “ 

One week later - on the very day Thelma was born - came Chaplin’s second picture: a half-real short entitled “Kid Auto Races at Venice.” In this picture, Chaplin somehow managed to throw together the costume that would almost immediately make him the best-known, most beloved character on planet earth.  In this split-reel film (the other half being an educational short called Olives and Their Oil), Charlie, a stranger from “Who Knows Where,” makes his  first appearance as “The Tramp.”  He laughs with the children at the auto race, mimics them, and flies into rages which soon pass. Already, reviewers sensed that this as yet unnamed actor was someone very, very special:  the reviewer for The Cinema wrote “Kid Auto Races struck us as about the funniest film we have ever seen.  When we subsequently saw Chaplin in more ambitious efforts, our opinion that the Keystone Company had made the capture of their career is strengthened.  Chaplin is a born screen comedian; he does things we have never seen done on the screen before.” 

“Kid Auto Races at Venice” (February 8, 1914)

By May 13, of that year, Chaplin had made an additional dozen pictures for Keystone.  On May 4, 1914, Keystone released the first film written, directed by - and starring - Charles Chaplin: “Caught in the Rain.” Within 3 months, “The Little Fellow” - as Chaplin would forever after refer to him - had learned just about everything he would ever need to know about the art/business of cinema.  He would never entrust any aspect of a Chaplin film to anyone else for the rest of his career.  By the time Caught in the Rain hit the theaters, his initial director at Keystone, Henry "Pathé", Lehrman had left Mack Sennett, understanding full well that Chaplin already knew far, far more about the art of cinema than the Ukraine-born Lerhman (1881-1946) could ever hope to know.  Within two more years, Chaplin (whom Sennett paid $150.00 per week in 1914), would be  making $10,000 per week (plus a $150,000.00 signing bonus) for a contract to write, direct and star in films for Mutual.  Within another year, he would be making more than $ 1 million a per as a founder and major stockholder of United Artists.  (n.b. In 1919, upon hearing that Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and the revered director D.W. Griffith had gone into business for themselves forming a company they called “United Artists"  in order to protect their work and control their careers, Richard Rowland, then head of Metro Studios, famously remarked that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum".  That’s where this witty bon mot came from.)

After making “The Kid” (Chaplin’s full-length picture for U.A., he would take more and more time between pictures, turning out such immortal classics as “The Gold Rush,” “The Circus,” “City Lights,” “Modern Times,” “The Great Dictator” and “Limelight,” among others.  Over the years, reviewers, while frequently castigating and finding fault with his politics (decidedly progressive) and personal life (he had a penchant for marrying younger women) never ceased to acknowledge his God-given brilliance as a filmmaker.  

On occasion, I would chat with Selma about Chaplin, whom she considered a consummate genius. She fully understood that to be an artistic genius did not necessitate being either a saint or a paragon of virtue.  Without question, Sir Charles Chaplin left an indelible legacy as a cinematic artist, world-class director, peerless composer, first-rate writer and clown.  I hope that the next generation will come to understand that Chaplin was and is to cinema  what the Beatles were, are and ever shall be to Rock ‘n Roll, and Dickens to literature: the best there ever has been.  And unlike just about any other person in the history of the so-called “Seven Arts” (Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Literature, Music, Performing and Film) Chaplin was the only whose brilliance was universally proclaimed on day one - February 2, 1914 - a mere 144 hours before my friend Selma’s birth.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone 

Budd Schulberg: Mostly Unknown But Still the Best of the Best

Except for dyed-in-the-wool movie buffs and multi-generational “Hollywood Brats,” the name “Schulberg” is largely forgotten or unknown. But one need not be either of the two - a dyed-in-the-wool movie buff or a Hollywood Brat - to be familiar with the films “On the Waterfront,” “The Harder They Fall,” or “A Face in the Crowd,” or the novels “The Disenchanted” or What Makes Sammy Run?  the latter likely the greatest Hollywood novel ever written.  Born in 1914, Seymour Wilson “Budd” Schulberg was the son of B. (Benjamin) P. (Percival) and Adeline (Adler) Schulbeg).  His father, who started out as a movie publicist (he was the fellow who tagged Mary Pickford “America’s Sweetheart”) rose to become one of the most powerful men in the business in the 1920’s as head of production at Paramount Studios. He also discovered Clara Bow, perhaps the most popular movie star in the history of motion pictures. Budd’s mother, Adeline (1895-1977), who divorced his father when he left her for starlet Sylvia Sidney (Sofia Koskow [1910-1999]) went on to form one of the largest and most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood.  Young Budd went to Dartmouth, where he was assigned the near-impossible task of tagging after writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, trying to keep the famous writer sober during the writing of a the film called Winter Carnival. Schulberg eventually turned that episode into one the best-selling novels of 1950, entitled The Disenchanted.

Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth, Budd Schulberg returned to Southern California, where he found employment as a “gofer” for director Cecil B. DeMille. In his time with the legendary showman, young Schulberg got a first-row knowledge of the industry into which he had been born. In 1941, the then 27-year old Budd Schulberg wrote and published a novel that is still in print nearly 80 years later: What Makes Sammy Run?” Recognized by many (myself included) as hands down, the greatest Hollywood novel ever put to paper (and to Broadway and television), What Makes Sammy Run? tells the story of Brooklyn-born Sammy Glick who, through a mixture of guile, dishonesty, naked ambition and unbridled chutzpah, works his way up from being a teen-aged copy boy for a cheap New York tabloid to the top-of-the-heap as a highly successful Hollywood producer. Along the way, he uses people like expendable sheets of Kleenex, plagiarizes the work of others and, despite making millions and remaking himself as anything but a Lower East Side Jew, can never find happiness, security or satisfaction.

Despite its huge readership and long, successful run – and numerous revivals - as a Broadway musical – What Makes Sammy Run has never been made into a movie.  Yes, there have been two television versions made long, long ago:

• First it was presented as a live television drama starring José Ferrer on April 10, 1949, on Philco Television Playhouse;

• On September 27 and October 4, 1959, on NBC Sunday Showcase, Larry Blyden starred as Sammy Glick in a two-part television broadcast on NBC-TV Also Blyden’s costars were John Forsythe, playing Sammy’s “Bosworth” Al Manheim, Barbara Rush as Kit Sargent, one of Sammy’s writers, and Dina Merrill as Laurette Harrington, the unobtainable Blue Blood Sammy desires as a bauble for his bracelet.

Even before What Makes Sammy Run hit the bookstores in 1941, most of the major players in the film industry had read its galley proofs . . . and had concluded that it would never be turned into a film. Why? Because these moguls - most of whom were Eastern-European Jews - thought the novel would be fatal fodder for all the well-bred anti-Semites who firmly believed that these moguls were all part of a conspiracy to undermine American morals and the greater good. In Goldwyn: The Man Behind the Myth, author Arthur Marx revealed that Sam Goldwyn offered Budd Schulberg a lot of money to not have it published because Goldwyn felt that the author was "doublecrossing the Jews" and perpetuating anti-Semitism by making Sammy Glick so venal. In 2001, DreamWorks paid more than $2.5 million to acquire the rights to the novel from Warner Brothers for a proposed movie version starring and/or directed by Ben Stiller. Nothing ever came of it. When asked several years ago if he thought What Makes Sammy Run? would ever be filmed, Steven Spielberg told an interviewer that in his opinion it never would be because it was “too anti-Hollywood.

There has long been a question about who Budd Schulberg used as his model for Sammy Glick.  Although no one knows for certain, and the author never said who he based Sammy on, many believe it was Brooklyn-born writer/producer Jerry Wald (1911-62), best known for producing “Mildred Pierce,” “Key Largo,” and “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” and writing “They Drive By Night,” “The Roaring Twenties” and “Brother Orchid.” According to his nephew (and my lifelong friend) Alan, whose father, screenwriter Malvin was Jerry’s younger brother, Sammy couldn’t have been based on Jerry . . . his uncle was simply too nice and, unlike the fictional Sammy, Uncle Jerry was widely respected. Sammy could never have won a Thalberg Award (given by the Academy’s Board of Governors to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production”), Jerry did . . . in 1948.

Like many Hollywood writers, directors and actors, Budd Schulberg was a leftist.  And, like many Hollywood leftists, he found himself having run afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  In order to keep from being blacklisted, Budd Schulberg, like others in the same dire straits, decided to “name names” before the committee.  What the committee was after was more an act of contrition than learning about heretofore unknown members of the so-called Communist Conspiracy.  Schulberg did go before the committee, but did not reveal a single name they were unaware of.  Another Hollywood lefty who did the same thing, director Elia Kazan, would find himself employable but reviled.  Somehow, Budd Schulberg escaped that additional punishment; both his reputation and employability would remain intact.  Ironically though, writer Schulberg and director Kazan would find themselves working together as writer and director on two of the very best films of the 1950’s: On the Waterfront (1955) for which both won Academy Awards, and 1957’s A Face in the Crowd, one of the very best political movies ever made in Hollywood.

A Face in the Crowd, is based on Schulberg’s short story Your Arkansas Traveler from his 1953 collection Some Faces in the Crowd. Starring Andy Griffith (in his first film), Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, Walter Mathau and Anthony Franciosa, tells the story of an Arkansas drifter named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes who becomes an overnight media sensation. As he becomes drunk with fame, fortune and power, industrial tycoons and political power-brokers start flocking his way, getting him to endorse their products, school their candidates in how to come across as “just plain folks”;' within the blink of an eye, he becomes a narcissistic, ego-maniac. As he is on the verge of creating out of whole cloth the next POTUS (played by Marshall Neilan, who in real life was a famous director of the silent era) “Lonesome’s” train to glory is derailed by the woman who created him in the first place: After his weekly television show (called “A Face in the Crowd”), the woman (played by Patricia Neal) keeps the sound going during the credits. Lonesome, who has finished the show with his now famous sign-off “The family that prayers together stays together',” is unaware that everything he says can be heard by his fans and acolytes coast to coast. They hear him deriding and contemptuously mocking both Senator Fuller, the man he is molding for President, and the so-called “Fighters for Fuller” a bunch of idiots. He brags says that they are all so stupid that they actually believe whatever he says about America, morality, and religion . . . all the while swigging a bottle of booze and laughing it up with the hillbillies who make up his backup band.

In the time it takes for Lonesome to get from the studio to his penthouse where he is about to throw a black tie banquet for Senator Fuller, an entire nation has come to understand that their idol is nothing more than a fraud. He arrives home only to discover that his advertisers had left him, his fans have abandoned him, and he is about to be unemployed. Even his manager (played by Anthony Franciosa in one of his earliest roles) has sold a new crooner to the advertisers to replace the Arkansas Traveler. The film ends with Lonesome screaming out “MARCIA! MARCIA! MARCIA!” at the cab carrying the woman who created him, now traveling off into the future . . .

Many say that Budd Schulberg “borrowed” the demise of Lonesome Rhodes - the mike that remained plugged in - from the legend of “Uncle Don” Carney, a popular children’s radio show host. Don Carney broadcast 5, sometimes 6 days a week on radio station WOR in New York City from 1928-1947. His kiddie show included segments called the "Healthy Child's Club" and the "Talent Quest,” and always ended with him telling his young fans “Good night little friends . . . good night.” It was a wholesome show, to say the least. According to legend, one night at the conclusion of a broadcast Carney thought he was off the air and exclaimed, "There! That ought to hold the little bastards"—but his microphone was still live, and his comment was broadcast to his radio audience. The legend goes on to state that public outrage caused Carney's termination from radio. For years, people truly believed that Schulberg mimicked this in order to bring down Lonesome. Turns out, the Uncle Don episode was an urban legend which persists to this very day. . .

In addition to arguably written the greatest Hollywood novel of all time, Budd Schulberg may well have also written the most politically prophetic screenplays of all time. And to a great degree, What Makes Sammy Run? and A Face in the Crowd share a great deal. They both have central characters who have public personae at odds with their private selves and highly acquisitive, ego-driven personalities that push them ever higher . . . regardless of who they step on. Both works are, at best, black satires on the medial; both present dire warnings about mass media and the power it has to shape a gullible public. Ironically, during the height of Glen Beck’s on-air career, radio and sports host Keith Olbermann started calling him “Glenn ‘Lonesome Rhodes’ Beck.” While it didn’t do that much harm to Beck’s on-air success (that would take place, but be largely of Beck’s own making), it did wonders for sales of A Face in the Crowd.

Budd Schulberg would continue writing books and screenplays until age 93, his last credit being for 2007’s Nuremberg: The 60th Anniversary Director’s Cut. Budd Schulberg died two years later of natural causes at age 95. During his long life he was married 4 times (most notably to actress Geraldine Brooks) and fathered 5 children.

Budd Schulberg may be gone, but he is definitely not forgotten. Simply stated, he was is and always shall be one of the most important writers of the past 80 years.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Baby Peggy: The Last Silent Star

Long before Shirley Temple, arguably Hollywood’s greatest and most talented child star; even before “The Jackies” - Cooper and Coogan, there was Peggy Jean Montgomery . . . known to the world as “Baby Peggy.” Born in San Diego, California on October 29, 1918, Baby Peggy’s father Jack worked as a cowboy before entering the movie business as a stunt man and stand-in for the great Tom Mix. At 19 months, Peggy was “discovered” while visiting her father at Century Studios, located in Hollywood at 6101 Sunset Blvd. A director named Fred Hibbard (neé Moishe Fishbach) cast her in a short (“Brownie’s Little Venus”) alongside “Brownie the Wonder Dog.” When it proved to be a success, she was signed to a long-term contract. From 1921 to 1924 Peggy appeared in nearly 150 comedy shorts for Century. These films, the vast majority of which are now lost, often parodied popular films of the day with Peggy satirizing popular stars of the day. In 1923, Peggy began to appear in dramatic features for Universal Studios. These films were “A” pictures, dubbed “Universal Jewels,” the studio’s designation for its top-flight productions. Baby Peggy became so popular that even before moving on to Universal, she was receiving more than 1.2 million fan letters a year. She had 5 full-time secretaries who did nothing but send autographed photos to her legions of fans.

In addition to her films - the most famous of which was 1924’s “Captain January” - remade a dozen years later starring Shirley Temple - she had a line of dolls, dresses, books, sheet music, stuffed animals and even milk. Universal sent her on national promotional tours. In 1924 she served as “mascot” for the Democratic National Convention and was photographed standing next to then-New York Gubernatorial candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before turning 5 she was earning more than $30,000 a week, 52 weeks a year.  Sadly, Baby Peggy’s parents - like those of Jackie Coogan, who had shot to international fame at age 6 starring opposite Charles Chaplin in the 1921 feature film The Kid - Peggy’s spent virtually every penny their daughter earned, putting virtually nothing away for the family’s breadwinner.  

Play Captain  January”

(When Jackie Coogan became old enough to control his own finances, he learned, to his horror, that his parents had, like Baby Peggy’s parents, spent almost every penny of the millions their children had earned during their time on the silver screen. Coogan learned, much to his astonished chagrin, that his parents had purchased mansions, jewels, employed a coterie of servants and invested in a Rolls Royce dealership, leaving their son with virtually nothing. Coogan fought back, hiring a lawyer and eventually having enacted into law The so-called “Coogan Law,” which forced parents of children who were actors to put aside a minimum of 15% of their gross earnings into sheltered accounts. Moreover, no child could be employed until the parent(s) had given certified proof of an account opened specifically for that purpose. That law is still on the books today . . .

In 1925, the 7 year old’s career came to a sudden and screeching halt when her father (who also served as her manager) cancelled her contract with Universal Pictures over a salary dispute.  As a result, Peggy was essentially blacklisted from the industry. Peggy was somewhat successful in vaudeville, which paid her but a fraction of what she had been earning in films.  After playing a couple of small uncredited parts in pictures made in the mid- to late-1930s, her performing career came to an end - much to her parent’s dismay and Peggy’s relief.  For like many child stars, it was not something she enjoyed . . . much less understood.  As Peggy explained to an interviewer many, many years later:

“I remember when I was 4, I was in bed at night and I was thinking how I was always aware that people who were my fans loved that little girl on the screen. But it wasn't me. That wasn't who I was. The real me was the little girl I went to bed with every night.  I remember reading something Jackie Coogan told a reporter about the days after his star had faded: ‘If I went into a restaurant and I was not surrounded by people asking for my autograph, I felt alone and unwanted.’  When I read (Coogan) saying that, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Anything that came as praise, he couldn't deal with it. He couldn't accept it. He was waiting for that child, Jackie, to come back. The real identity that he had, he suppressed.”

Fortunately for Baby Peggy, she chose that ‘second child’ - the identify of the real Peggy Jean Montgomery.  In another interview, Peggy (by then long known as “Diana Serra Cary”) said “Later, I made peace with her [Baby Peggy]. That's what every child actor should do. I'm so grateful I made that choice.

Cary would go on to become a well-respected freelance writer, the author of the memoir Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? a fascinating look at the Hollywood her father knew (The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History), a well-received biography (Jackie Coogan: The World’s Boy King: A Biography of Hollywood's Legendary Child Star) and a seminal work about the “Hollywood Child Star Era” (Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era.)  Unlike almost every child star whose career (and in many instances, their very lives) fell apart when they reached a certain age, Baby Peggy/Diana Serra Cary lived to be 101; she died less than a month ago in Gustine, California on February 24, 2020.  And, as a gift to herself, she celebrated her 99th birthday by publishing her first  - and only - novel, The Drowning of the Moon,  “a vast panoramic novel whose major characters are drawn from the aristocracy of 18th-century Mexico.”

For all the supposed glitz, glamour and fame that comes with being a successful actor, there is also a ton-and-a-half of heartache, insecurity and utter rejection.  If there is one thing I’ve learned growing up around actors, writers, musicians and the like, its that once the curtain goes down or the lights go  dim, you’re back to square one.  Talent, looks, intelligence and luck are certainly important.  The most telling ingredients, however, are sell-knowledge and the ability to accept rejection.  Baby Peggy certainly had these latter  qualities where so many, many other child  actors did not.  Perhaps that is why she succeeded so grandly at such an early age, had an enormously successful career which lasted only 5 or 6 years, and then went on to live an even more highly successful and gratifying life for an additional 95 years.  She is the last of the  silent  movie actors . . . she who at one time was one of the very best.

Copyright, ©2020 Kurt F. Stone

DeMille X 2: The Ten Commandments (1923 & 1956)

In Hollywood, remaking classic movies more than once has a long and venerable history.  Consider that such classics as “The Mark of Zorro,” “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “A Star is Born,” “Huckleberry Finn,” and “Stella Dallas” have all been made more than once – and using the same title.  Occasionally, a film will be remade under a different title, such as “The Shop around the Corner” (1940) morphing into a 1949 musical called “In the Good Old Summer Time. Then there is 1939’s “Love Affair,” starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne being remade under the same title by Warren Beatty in 1994, and also filmed as “An Affair to Remember” (starring Cary Grant and Debra Kerr) in 1957 and “Sleepless in Seattle,” (starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) in 1993.

It is indeed rare when a director will remake a movie he’s already shot. In 1933, the young Frank Capra turned a Damon Runyon short story called “Madam La Gimp” into the hit film “Lady for a Day” starring Warren William and May Robson. 28 years later, in what would turn out to be the last film he ever directed, Capra remade the film as “Pocketful of Miracles,” starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford.  Rarest of all is when a director will remake one of his pictures using the same title.  Such is the case with Cecil B. DeMille, who both directed and produced The Ten Commandments twice: in 1923 and then, 32 years later, in 1956 .Both were blockbusters; both were immensely profitable; both bore the unmistakable fingerprints of DeMille whose genius lay not so much in directing films as in being a master-level showman.

It was DeMille’s first big biblical feature, and it forever changed the direction of his career and his legacy as a director.

Prior to 1923, DeMille had become known for sex and society films with titles like Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). A particular DeMille trademark was scenes involving naked women in bathtubs. So when he held a contest in 1922 for fans to name the theme of his next film, it was a bit of a surprise when he chose the suggestion, “If you break the Ten Commandments—they will break you” as the guiding quote for his new epic. Many wondered if DeMille was the proper director to create a film about a scriptural story held sacred by both Jews and Christians.

In order to drive home the point of the continuing importance of the Decalogue, DeMille and his scenarist, Jeanie MacPherson created a two-part story in which the Israelite Exodus acts as a frame for a modern morality tale about two brothers, their pious mother, and their differing views on the relevance of the Commandments in the Roaring Twenties.

In a 90-minute feature, this meant DeMille had no time to spare, with about 45 minutes to tell the story of the Exodus and Moses’ receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. So the 1923 version is missing many classic scenes from the 1956 film, like the basket on the Nile, the burning bush, and Moses’ discovery of his Hebrew origins. (Not to mention the love triangle between Moses, Rameses, and the throne princess Nefretiri.) The story picks up at the plagues and jumps quickly to the Exodus and the parting of the Red Sea.

Theodore Roberts plays Moses, locking horns with Charles De Rouchfort as Pharaoh. At age 60, Roberts plays a considerably older prophet with a long Father Time beard, but still pulls off a dynamic performance. DeRochefort is beefy and formidable, but possesses none of the Oriental androgyny and cold arrogance of Yul Brynner. In this version Moses’ sister Miriam (Estelle Taylor) conspires with Dathan( Lawson Butt to build the golden calf—an unfair narrative invention which negates Miriam’s role as a woman-hero of the Old Testament. In the orgy scene, DeMille lets loose his lady-in-the-bathtub fantasies, filming Miriam writhing on the calf idol as the Israelites descend into graphic decadence.

The outdoor scenes in “Egypt” were filmed on a massive set built on the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes(18)about 80 miles north of Santa Barbara County. For the weeks of filming on the California coast, DeMille constructed a tent encampment of 3500 actors, technicians, and extras, divided into 14 companies of men and 7 companies of women, and governed by strict rules against alcohol, gambling, fraternizing, and coarse language. Among the extras were 225 Orthodox Jews, hired to “look like their ancestors.”  DeMille, who himself was the son of a Jewish mother – the British Mathilda Samuel – thought the Orthodox Jews would make “the most authentic Israelites.”  Hollywood legend has it that on their first day on set, the extras were forced to fast because the commissary served ham for dinner.

DeMille’s exterior set for the Pharaoh’s city was 750 feet wide by 109 feet high, and included an avenue of 21 plaster sphinxes. He ordered 250 chariots for the chase scene to the “Red Sea,” along with the horses to pull them, and stables to include 5,000 donkeys, sheep, goats, and camels.

DeMille’s enormous ancient Egypt sets has become a Hollywood legend.  The construction of four 35-foot-tall statues of the Pharoah Ramses, 21 five-ton sphinxes, and city walls over 120 feet high was all constructed on the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. When filming ended DeMille simply had this entire Egyptian city set bulldozed and buried. In DeMille’s autobiography he stated:

“If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America.” – “The Autobiography of Cecil B.

The cost of shooting the film quickly spiraled out of control, nearly causing Paramount to pull funding from the film. One desperate missive from producer Adolph Zukor in Los Angeles was sent to “Camp DeMille” by telegraph:

“C.B.—You have lost your mind. Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once.—A.Z.”

The Ten Commandments was the first studio film to use Technicolor. In order to get in on DeMille’s epic, Technicolor(23) offered to shoot sections of the Exodus scene alongside the regular black and white cameras for free. If DeMille didn’t like the footage, he didn’t have to use it. The Technicolor footage was edited into the mostly black and white film, along with traditional toned tinting and the Handschliegl process of hand-coloring elements of a scene frame-by-frame.

The special effects of the fiery pillar and the parting of the Red Sea are enjoyable for their low-tech innovation. The “pillar” of fire was more of a curtain – actual flames superimposed on the screen through double exposure. The parting of the Red Sea was accomplished by use of molded gelatin set on top of a metal table, melted by gas jets. Running the film in reverse in fast motion achieved the sense of the waters parting and standing at jiggling attention. Certain low-budget effects and anachronisms, like the Children of Israel holding staffs with Stars of David (King David didn’t come along until centuries later) and toy horses and chariots sinking in a shallow tub of water after being “drowned” in the Red Sea, only add to the charm of the feature.

Make no mistake, however, this spectacular telling of a biblical narrative was like nothing anyone had ever seen at the time. According to reports of the New York premiere in the Times, the audience applauded at the parting of the Jell-O sea. The Hollywood opening, held, fittingly, in Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, complete with a Vaudeville-style live prologue, “A Night in Pharaoh’s Palace” must have only added to the spectacle.

With false modesty, DeMille dismissed the film’s unheard-of cost of 1.5 million as the “cheapest picture that was ever made.” As he said in a December 23, 1923 article in the New York Times:

“This spectacle will show people that we have an obligation to the public and that motion pictures can be more than mere stories […] The reason for the spectacle in ‘The Ten Commandments’ is to bring force to the picture […] The idea of the spectacle as it is presented is worth a million.”

Then there is the second part of the movie: the modern tale.  This part shows the usefulness of the Ten Commandments in modern life, based off a story of two brothers fighting for the love of one woman.

 John MacTavish (Richard Dix), Dan MacTavish (Rod La Roque) and a waif of the streets Leatrice Joy whom the MacTavishes have taken in.  Dix, a carpenter, is much under the influence of his Bible-reading mother, (played by Edythe Chapman), but La Roque, who worships the golden calf of quick millions, decides to leave the religious atmosphere of her house, taking Miss Joy with him as his wife. Sally Lung, played by Nita Naldi and described as a “Eurasian adventuress,” wheedles costly baubles from Dan MacTavish, who has grown rich and neglectful of his wife, Miss Joy.  Only the audience knows that Miss Naldi has escaped from the leper colony at Molokai.

 John MacTavish tells his brother Dan that the sustaining fibers he intends to use in constructing a new cathedral are shoddy, but the latter scoffs. When Mother MacTavish visits the new cathedral, it collapses upon her and kills her.

Meanwhile, Dan, who has contracted leprosy from Miss Lung, shoots her and flees.  Temporarily hidden from the police in his wife’s bed, Dan is later killed in a speedboat accident as he races for the Mexican border.  The repentant Miss Joy is lectured by John MacTavish on the folly of breaking the Commandments and worshiping the Golden Calf.  She learns her lesson and the film ends with the two embracing atop a building he is constructing.  Fade Out . . .

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The 1956 version, of course, consisted of only one story.  In many ways, DeMille used this movie to spread an anti-Communist message. In an extraordinary gesture left out of the television version, when the curtains parted, DeMille himself appeared on the screen. "The theme of this picture is whether men ought to be ruled by God's law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls under God? The same battle continues throughout the world today." In the midst of the Cold War, DeMille's message was clear: Moses represented the United States; the pharaoh represented the Soviet Union. To drive home his point, DeMille cast mostly Americans as the Israelites and mostly Europeans as the Egyptians.

Politics even entered the matter of the Ten Plagues. DeMille depicted three: turning the water into blood, hail, and the killing of the first-born sons. For the blood, he used a garden hose with dyed water. For the hail, mothballs were considered too fragile, so he used popcorn. The tenth plague was often portrayed as an angel with a bloody knife, but DeMille thought the image wasn't scary enough. He chose a green fog that swooped down out of the sky. In the age of duck-and-cover drills, the fog was meant to evoke a nuclear cloud.

As part of his plan to spread biblical values, DeMille persuaded Paramount to pay for granite monoliths of the Ten Commandments to be placed in public squares across the country. Over 4,000 were made. One of these monuments, in Austin, Texas, became the basis for the Supreme Court decision in 2005 that allowed the Ten Commandments on public property if they had a secular purpose. A publicity stunt for The Ten Commandments became the basis of landmark U.S. law.

De Mille put together a first-class cast

Charlton Heston, who had previously worked for DeMille in The Greatest Show on Earth, won the part of Moses after he impressed DeMille (at an audition) with his knowledge of ancient Egypt. Interestingly enough, though Moses most likely lived sometime in the early New Kingdom, it was Old Kingdom Egyptian facts Heston used at his audition that won him his legendary role. Heston's newborn son, Fraser (born February 12, 1955), appeared as the infant Moses and was three months old during filming.

The part of Nefretiri, the Egyptian throne princess, was considered "the most sought after role of the year" in 1954. Ann Blyth, Vanessa Brown, Joan Evans, Rhonda Fleming, Colleen Gray, Jane Griffiths, Audrey Hepburn, Jean Marie, Vivien Leigh, Jane Russell, and Joan Taylor were considered for the part. DeMille liked Audrey Hepburn but dismissed her because of her figure, which was considered too slim for the character's Egyptian gowns. Anne Baxter (who was considered for the part of Moses' wife) was cast in the role.

Judith Ames, Anne Bancroft, Anne Baxter, Shirley Booth, Diane Brewster, Peggie Castle, June Clayworth, Linda Darnell, Laura Elliot, Rhonda Fleming, Rita Gam, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Green, Barbara Hale, Allison Hayes, Frances Lansing, Patricia Neal, Marie Palmer, Jean Peters, Ruth Roman, Barbara Rush, and Elizabeth Sellers were considered for the part of Sephora.[17] Grace Kelly, DeMille's first choice, was unavailable.[17] DeMille was "very much impressed" with Yvonne De Carlo's(39) performance as a "saintly type of woman" in MGM's Sombrero.[18][19] He "sensed in her a depth, an emotional power, a womanly strength which the part of Sephora needed and which she gave it."[20] Sephora is the Douay–Rheims version of the name of Zipporah.

Merle Oberon and Claudette Colbert were considered for the role of Bithiah before DeMille chose Jayne Meadows (who declined) and finally cast Nina Foch (40), on the suggestion of Henry Wilcoxon, who had worked with her in Scaramouche.

For the role of Memnet(41),Flora Robson was considered and Bette Davis was interviewed (DeMille's casting journal also notes Marjorie Rambeau and Marie Windsor)[23] but DeMille chose Judith Anderson after screening Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca.)

DeMille was reluctant to cast anyone who had appeared in 20th Century Fox' The Egyptian,[24] a rival production at the time. Several exceptions to this are the casting of John Carradine and Mimi Gibson (in credited supporting roles) and Michael Ansara and Peter Coe (in uncredited minor roles), who appeared in both films.

For other major roles, DeMille cast Yul Brynner as Rameses, Debra Paget as Lilia, Sir Cedrick Hardwicke as Sethi, John Derek as Joshua, Edward G. Robinson as Dathan, Douglas Dumbrille as Jannes, Vincent Price as Baka, and Martha Scott as Yochabel.

There were, for the time, some spectacular special effects. The illusion of the Red Sea parting was achieved by large "dump tanks" that were flooded, then the film was shown in reverse. The two frothing walls of water were created by water dumped constantly into "catch basin areas" then the foaming, churning water was visually manipulated and used sideways for the walls of water. A gelatin substance was added to the water in the tanks to give it more of a sea water consistency. Although the dump tanks have long since been removed, the catch basin section of this tank still exists today on the Paramount lot, directly in front of the exterior sky backdrop, in the central portion of the studio. It can still be flooded for water scenes, but when not being used in a production, it is an extension of a parking lot.

As with the 1923 film, the sets(52) for this production were also immense(53).Remember, even the most intimate scene in a movie has anywhere between 35 and 50 people standing behind the camera and around the set.  It is anything but intimate.The chief of the special effects department,William Sapp was not involved with creating the burning bush; instead it was handled by one of his assistants. Sapp was critical of the result, pointing out that it was not a "burning" bush at all, but a glowing one. He claimed had he crafted the bush it would have burned on-camera. For the rest of his career in Hollywood, Sapp was bitter about that effect.

The Infant Moses was played by Charlton Heston’s 3-month old son Fraser Clarke Heston.  Now 65 years old, this is the only film in which Fraser appeared on screen.  He has gone on to have a fairly successful career as a producer/director, and has been married to the same woman for 40 years . . . rare by Hollywood standards.

A few factoids:

1, 644 publications referred to by Henry Noerdlinger in research for the script. These sources included: the Midrash Rabbah, an ancient compilation of rabbinic commentaries; the Qur'an; Philo's "Life of Moses;" and the writings of Josephus and Eusebius.

Five years in the making: 1951-1956

161 days of production: 44 days in Egypt.

One year in post-production, editing special effects; editors worked 16-hour days, seven days a week.

5,000 camels, 5,000 water buffalo, about 4,000 oxen, 2,000 geese and 2,000 ducks were used during the Egypt shoot.

8,000 to 14,000 extras were used in the movie.

The Exodus from Egypt was shot in three 10-minute takes, each using one reel of negative film; it took two hours to reassemble all the extras back to the starting point after each take.

200,000 gallons of water a day used on location in Egypt; wells were drilled on the site.

12 of Paramount's 18 sound stages were used.

A giant 200,000-cubic-foot pool was built in the middle of the Paramount parking lot, with 12 smaller tanks on either side. They sequentially released a total of 360,000 gallons of water to create the parting of the Red Sea sequence.

25,000 feet of film was shot using four specially made VistaVision cameras.

DeMille was 73 years old when they shot on location in Egypt. He lost 21 pounds during that shoot. He was 75 when the movie finally premiered. He suffered two heart attacks during the making of "The Ten Commandments."

$13.2 million to make. Initial box offices receipts were $64 million.

The movie was previewed in only one location, Salt Lake City, in August 1956.

The Ten Commandments received 7 Oscar nominations: for best picture, best color cinematography, best art/set direction in color, costume design, editing and sound.  Despite all the nominations, it received but a single Oscar: for best special effects.  (The Best Picture Oscar went to Michael Todd’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”)

DeMille was 73 years old when undertook the enormous responsibility of both directing and producing the Ten Commandments.  He would continue working on the picture for more than 2 years, He suffered two heart attack during filming, and yet was only away from the set for 3 days.  It would turn out to be the last picture he directed.  He died two years later, on January 21, 1959, having created what at the time was the second most successful motion picture in history.

"West Side Story" - Shakespeare Meets Bernstein and Robbins . . . and Spielberg Too

Without a doubt, the 1961 production of West Side Story is one of the all-time great movie musicals.  Winner of an incredible 10 Academy Awards, it represents one of the most unique artistic amalgamations in the history of both Broadway and Hollywood.  Based in part on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it blends the musical genius of Leonard Bernstein, and choreographic brilliance of Jerome Robbins all under the watchful eye of Robert Wise, who directed a first-class script by Ernest Lehman and lyrics by one of the century’s truly great talents, the then 30-year old Stephen Sondheim.

Of course, even before it was an award-winning film, West Side Story was a tremendously successful Broadway musical.  On Broadway, the original cast included Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence as Tony and Maria, Chita Rivera and Ken LeRoy as Anita and Bernardo, and William Bramley and Arch Johnson as, respectively, Shrank and Office Krupke.  The Broadway production received 6 Tony Award nominations, winning two: Oliver Smith for Scenic Design and Jerome Robbins for Choreography.

When it came to casting the film version of West Side Story, few if any of the original Broadway folk were hired; there is a huge difference between performing on stage and in front of a camera. 

Many theater-goers who'd loved that 1957 Broadway musical were miffed that Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence weren't even considered to reprise the roles of Tony and Maria in the movie. But the producers wanted a cast that looked young enough to be teenagers, and the Broadway leads were both about 30. Nonetheless, while they ended up casting two 23-year-olds in the leads, most of the gangbangers and gals they hired were indeed close to 30.

   From the perspective of nearly 60 years, it is hard to believe that Elvis Presley was approached to play Tony.  However, Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s agent and alter-ego turned the studio down, favoring the anodyne musicals his client was already making over one that would have had him wielding a switchblade. (Though he'd already played a street kid driven to violence in such movies as 'Jailhouse Rock' and 'King Creole.'15) If Elvis had done the movie, he'd have ended up playing opposite Natalie Wood, with whom he’d engaged in a torrid affair in the mid-1950s.

Others who almost (16) played Tony: Marlon Brando & Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins & Russ Tamblyn, Burt Reynolds & Troy Donahue, Bobby Darin & Richard Chamberlain, Dennis Hopper and Gary Lockwood. Hunter (age 30), Reynolds (26) and Chamberlain (26) were all considered too old. The versatile Darin was too busy. Brando wanted to do it but figured that, at 34, he was way too old. Tamblyn, of course, ended up with the role of Jets leader Riff. Warren Beatty was co-director Robert Wise's first choice, and he even tested with his then lover/'Splendor in the Grass' co-star Wood. Ultimately, the filmmakers went with the little-known 23-year old Richard Beymer.

Then there was the question of who was going to play Maria. Among the actresses considered for the part were Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Luna, Jill St. John and Valery Harper, Diane Baker, Elizabeth Ashley and Suzanne Pleshette. Hepburn dropped out when she became pregnant.

Natalie Wood really wanted to do 'West Side Story,' but she knew if she turned down Warner Bros. forthcoming melodrama Parrish, set to star Claudette Colbert, Troy Donahue and Karl Malden, studio chief Jack Warner would never loan her to the rival United Artists. So she faked a bout of tonsillitis. That trick got her out of 'Parrish,' but it backfired when she contracted a serious case of pneumonia and almost had to drop out of 'West Side Story' as well. (Her part in Parrish went to Connie Stevens. Fortunately, Wood recovered in time to make West Side Story. (Pneumonia also struck cast member Eliot Feld, who played Baby John, during the New York shoot.) Feld was one of several veterans of the Broadway production who landed roles in the film.

Stefanie Powers, then going by the stage name Taffy Paul, was hired as a chorus dancer but had to drop out because she was underage and would have required an on-set tutor and a shorter work schedule. Years later, of course, she would co-star with Wood's husband, Robert Wagner, on TV's 'Hart to Hart.'

“Cool”

The scope of the project was so large that the studio decided to split the workload between two directors. Jerome Robbins, who directed and choreographed the Broadway show was hired despite never having directed a film before. Veteran movie director Robert Wise was hired despite never having made a musical. It was decided that Wise would handle the drama scenes and Robbins the musical numbers. But Robbins' perfectionism began to drag the movie down. His exacting demands and endless rehearsals took a toll on the dancers. ("They didn't dance out of joy, they danced out of fear," said music supervisor Saul Chaplin.") Soon the movie was behind schedule and $300,000 over budget. Wise defended Robbins, but he was soon asked to finish the movie by himself. Robbins' choreography remained, but the only completed numbers he shot that remain in the film were the prologue, 'America,' 'Cool,' and 'Something's Coming.'

Robbins worked Wood 16 hours a day, until she begged to be fired from the film. She also wanted Beymer fired, complaining about his lack of singing and dancing chops (even though her song-and-dance skills were - when all was said  and done -  just as limited). Eventually, she figured out how to get along with both Robbins and Beymer, while the directors figured out how to shoot around her dance limitations.

As for the stars' vocal limitations, most fans know that Wood's singing voice was dubbed by Marni Nixon (who would do the same for Audrey Hepburn three years later in 'My Fair Lady'). Wood herself didn't know, however. She had assumed her own singing voice would be used, at least for the lower-register parts, and didn't learn she'd be dubbed until the shoot was over. Beymer was dubbed by Jimmy Bryant.

There was other vocal doubling going on as well. Tucker Smith (“Ice”) also sang Tamblyn's part in 'The Jet Song,' though Tamblyn's own voice is heard during 'Gee, Officer Krupke' and 'Quintet.'The stage lyrics for the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" are "My father is a bastard, my ma's an s.o.b. My grandpa's always plastered..." The lyrics had to be changed for the movie to: "My daddy beats my mommy, my mommy clobbers me, my grandpa is a commie..." Also, the stage lyric was, "Dear kindly social worker, they say go earn a buck, like be a soda jerker, which means like be a schmuck." For the film, the lines were changed to "Dear kindly social worker, they say go get a job, like be a soda jerker, which means I'd be a slob." Remember. the movie was produced in the last days of the movie code when absolute Puritanism still held sway over the industry.

 George Chakiris was the only one of the main characters to not be dubbed. This was because he had no hard solo songs to sing.

 As Anita (Bernardo's sister and Maria's confidante), Rita Moreno sang on 'America,' but Betty Wand  was hired to dub her lower notes on 'A Boy Like That.' On the day the vocals for 'Quintet' were recorded, however, both Moreno and Ward were sick, so Marni Nixon stepped in, singing for both Anita and Maria. So on film, the song was really a quartet. For her work dubbing Moreno's vocals, Ward went uncredited on the album. She sued the film's producers and the CBS record label for $60,000 in damages. The suit was settled out of court.  Marnie Nixon was also denied royalties as well. She finally got some when Bernstein agreed to give her a portion of his percentage.
 

'West Side Story' was the No. 2 box office hit of 1961, behind only Disney's '101 Dalmatians.' The film, which cost $6 million to make, has earned back $43 million at the box office over the course of multiple releases through the years.

In 1962, the film won 10 Oscars, a record for a musical that stands to this day. Among the honors: Best Picture (a prize that went to Wise, as a producer), Best Director (shared by Robbins and Wise, who insisted that his fired collaborator remain credited as co-director), Best Supporting Actor (Chakiris) and Best Supporting Actress (Moreno). The only Oscar it was nominated for that it didn't win was Best Adapted Screenplay (Ernest Lehman). Wise and Robbins were the first pair ever to share a directing award (and the last, until Joel and Ethan Coen won for 2007's 'No Country for Old Men.') Robbins is the only director ever to win an Oscar for his sole feature directing credit; he never directed another film. Wise, however, went on to repeat his feat four years later, winning Best Picture and Best Director for 'The Sound of Music.'

Rita Moreno, the only actual Puerto Rican among the principal cast, became only the second Hispanic performer (after fellow Puerto Rican José Ferrer a decade earlier) to win an Oscar. But it didn't help her career the way she expected. "Ha, ha. I showed them. I didn't make another movie for seven years after winning the Oscar," she recalled in a 2008 interview. "Before 'West Side Story,' I was always offered the stereotypical Latina roles. The Conchitas and Lolitas in westerns. I was always barefoot. It was humiliating, embarrassing stuff. But I did it because there was nothing else. After 'West Side Story,' it was pretty much the same thing. A lot of gang stories." Today, Moreno is one of only 12 people who've won the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) grand slam of competitive entertainment awards and is the one who did it in the shortest span of time (16 years).  The others are Richard Rogers, Helen Hayes, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Jonathan Tunick, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopie Goldberg, Scott Rudin and Robert Lopez.  In addition, Moreno has received the SAG Lifetime Achievement Award.

These days, Russ Tamblyn is better known as the father of Amber Tamblyn, of the 'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' movies and TV's 'Joan of Arcadia' and 'House.' Richard Beymer, who most recently played Benjamin Horn in 6 episodes of Twin Peaks (2017), is going on 82 and lives in semi-retirement in his native state, Iowa.  George Chakiris, now 85 years old, made his last movie (Last of the Summer Wine) in 1996 and has been a jewelry designer for over 25 years.  Rumor has it that a movie he appears in (Not to Forget) is in post-production and will make its bow in early 2020. 

Throughout the movie, Natalie Wood wears a bracelet on her left wrist, not for any aesthetic reason, but because she had injured her wrist in the scene of 1949’s The Green Promise when she fell on the bridge that collapsed during the severe rainstorm, causing an unsightly bone protrusion on her wrist. She wore the bracelet to hide the injury. It became her trademark in all of her movies.

Contrary to popular belief, the prologue of West Side Story was not filmed where Lincoln Center is currently located (which is between 62nd and 66th streets). Rather, it was filmed in what is now an area called Lincoln Center Towers - a group of large residential towers - which is north and west of Lincoln Center, stretching between 66th and 69th Streets (filmed on west 68th street to be more specific). The street itself, west 68th between west end avenue and Amsterdam Avenue, no longer exists). This area was condemned and the buildings were in the process of being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center Towers. The demolition of these buildings was delayed so that the filming of these sequences could be completed.

The original stage version of Maria's song "I Feel Pretty" included the lyrics "I feel pretty and witty and bright / And I pity / Any girl who isn't me tonight." In the film this night scene was changed to the daytime, and presumably for this reason, the rhyming words "bright" and "tonight" were changed to "gay" and "today."

Richard Beymer later confessed in an interview that he wasn't happy with how his performance came out, saying that he wanted to play Tony as rougher and tougher, more like an actual street kid who used to run around with a gang starting fights for fun, but Robert Wise made him play Tony as the nicest guy around, which Beymer felt didn't mesh with the character's back story. He also said he had trouble saying some of his lines with a straight face, namely the more romantic lines. He even reportedly walked out on the London premier of the film - even though it ended up being his most famous role.

The stage version was originally planned as a story about a Catholic boy falling in love with a Jewish girl. The working title was "East Side Story.” After a boom of Puerto Rican immigration to New York in the late 1940’s and 50’s, the story was changed, and the show opened on Broadway in 1957 as "West Side Story.” The working title of 'East Side Story' was later used as the title to Mexican-American rapper Kid Frost's second album released in 1992 - with the placement of the 'East Side Story' title reminiscent of the West Side Story movie posters.

In 2010, Stephen Sondheim (who wrote the lyrics) told "Fresh Air" interviewer Terry Gross that while he was writing the stage musical, he originally wanted the show to be the first one in Broadway history to use the words "fuck" and "shit" in its song lyrics. He wanted the end of the song "Gee, Officer Krupke" to be "Gee, Officer Krupke/Fuck you!" (instead of what it became, which is "Gee, Officer Krupke/Krup you!"), and he wanted the lyrics in "The Jets Song" to be "When you're a Jet/If the shit hits the fan" instead of "When you're a Jet/If the spit hits the fan". However, the show's writers were informed that if the Original Cast Album contained those profanities, it would have been illegal to ship the record across state lines. So Sondheim made the substitutions for those words that appear in both the stage show and the movie.

During the Prologue, the Jets take a basketball from two kids and play with it. Before they walk away, Riff throws it back to one of the kids. That kid is Christopher Culkin, father of the Culkin brothers who were in movies of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

With its win of 10 Academy Awards, this became the biggest Oscar-winning musical of all time, beating the record Gigi (1958) set three years before with its nine Oscars.

"Cool" was such a demanding number for the performers, that the actors ritually burned their kneepads upon wrapping the scene.

The song "One Hand, One Heart" was written for the earlier musical "Candide," but later discarded by Leonard Bernstein and revived for "West Side Story."

Robert Wise wanted the film to have a single rising line of tension, with no light moments after the rumble. Therefore, "I Feel Pretty" was moved earlier, and the positions of "Cool" and "Gee, Officer Krupke" were reversed. Those who feel that the sassy, lighthearted tone of "Gee, Officer Krupke" is out of place following the deaths that end the first act prefer the film's ordering of the numbers. The placement of "I Feel Pretty" and "Gee, Officer Krumpke" after the Rumble in the stage version was meant to help cheer people up after the deaths of Bernardo and Riff, as audiences were not used to death occurring in Broadway musicals. This issue is still heatedly debated among the film's fans.

In December of next year, a West Side Story remake will hit the silver screen.  Directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Tony Kushner, this new version stars Ansel Egort as Tony, Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, David Alvarez as Bernardo (a far, far less important role than in the original version) and Mike Faist as Riff and Brian d’Arcy James as Officer Krupke (played by Simon Oakland [Isidor Simon Weiss] in the original). And, as a capstone to a long, long career, Rita Moreno will play “Valentina,” a cameo created specifically for the purpose of luring her into the remake.

Now in post-production, this will be Spielberg’s first musical.

Glimpses Behind the Silver Screen: "Some Like It Hot"

   In the spring of 1958, Billy Wilder (Samuel Wilder, aka “The Viennese Pixie”) ran into Jack Lemmon at Dominick’s, a restaurant at
8715 Beverly Blvd, West Hollywood which,  by the way, was the place where lots of people went for “Sunday night suppers. “I have an idea for a picture I would like you to play in,” Wilder said to Lemmon. “Sit down,” said Lemmon.  “I haven’t got time now,” Wilder responded, “but I will tell you what it is about.  It’s about two men on the lam from gangsters, running for their lives, and they dress up in girls’ clothes and join an all-girl orchestra.”

“If anybody else had said that,” Lemmon said after the picture was released to tepid reviews but great, great box office, “I would have run like a jackrabbit.  Go in drag?  Since it was Billy Wilder, I said, ‘Fine, I’ll do it if I’m free to do it, and if I’m not free, I’ll get free.”

Wilder and his writing partner, Iz Diamond (Itek Domnici), had been meeting every day in Billy’s office on the Sam Goldwyn lot since at least the beginning of the year, trying to work out the plot of the farce they wanted to make for their producers, the Mirisch brothers.  It would be based on a 1951 German film, Fanfaren der Liebe (“Fanfares of Love”), a film that neither Wilder nor Diamond liked all that much.  What they didn’t like was the film’s execution. What attracted them, however, was the film’s basic premise: two hungry musicians resort to a series of disguises in order to find work: first they dress as gypsies and join a gypsy band; then they put on blackface for a jazz ensemble; finally, they don dresses, wigs, and makeup and join an all-female orchestra.  As Izzy Diamond later recalled, Fanfaren der Liebe was “heavy-handed and Germanic.  There was a lot of shaving of chests and trying on of wigs.  When one of the musicians is seen sneaking into his room in men’s clothes, the other girls beat up his roommate because ‘she’ has disgraced the honor of the band.”

After ditching two or three incidents from Fanferen der Liebe, Wilder and Diamond had to decide what kind of tone their comedy would take. It wouldn’t be some sort of Teutonic “men in drag,” but rather a lighthearted farce with sexual tension and a lot of dirty jokes – in short, sublime but filthy.  They were concerned about motivation in Fanfaren der Liebe: the two musicians were spurred by hunger, but Wilder and Diamond realized that if poverty were their own characters’ sole incentive, they could just take off the dresses once they had enough to eat and move on in men’s clothes to another gig.  Diamond and Wilder understood precisely what it would take to force American men even to play at being a woman in the 1950s: the threat of death. Diamond killed the second bird with the same stone by suggesting that they make the comedy a period piece; his theory being that “when everybody’s dress looks eccentric, somebody in drag looks no more peculiar than anyone else.” Thus Americans of the repressed 1950s were disguised in Roaring Twenties, Jazz Age clothing.

“The next morning,” Diamond recalled, “Billy came into the office and said, ‘I was driving home last night thinking about what you said, and I think I have the solution: 1929, Chicago, the St Valentine’s Day massacre.’ That was the breakthrough, and suddenly we had a wealth of material to work with – speakeasies, bootleggers, Florida millionaires.  We started writing.”

Some Like it Hot’s casting is the Rashomon of drag comedy.  Everybody has a slightly different tale to tell about who’d be wearing skirts for Billy Wilder.  According to Tony Curtis, United Artists (which distributed the film for the Mirsch Company) originally pushed the idea of casting Bob Hope and Danny Kaye as the two musicians, with Mitzi Gaynor (Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber, who at age 89, is still performing) in the role of Sugar Kane.  Wilder is said to have rejected all three suggestions, choosing instead to sign Curtis (Bernie Schwartz) right off the bat, believing that the dazzlingly handsome actor could play either male role.  Wilder first knew Curtis when he was starring in Houdini for Paramount in 1953.

Tony Curtis was fine as far as UA and Walter Mirisch were concerned, but they still felt strongly that there had to be at least one very big star in this film. Their suggestion: Frank Sinatra.  As I.A.L. (which stands for “International Algebra League”) Diamond recalled, Billy Wilder made a lunch date with Sinatra, but Sinatra didn’t bother to show up, and that was the end of the matter. According to Diamond, too, there was no need for a big star on the order of Sinatra once Marilyn Monroe signed on and filled the bill herself.

Sinatra was more central at the time. And Monroe’s appearance didn’t obviate the need for “Ol’ Blue Eyes” – at least not in the beadier eyes of either Walter Mirisch or United Artists.  In late March, UA’s Arthur Krim was told that the film (still referred to as Fanfares of Love) would start shooting in July and would probably star Sinatra, Curtis, and Monroe. The Mirisches were budgeting Sinatra and Monroe at $200,000 each, plus a quarter of the film’s profits.  (Monroe ultimately got 10% of the gross, which turned out to be slightly over $4 million.) Curtis would get $100,000 against 5% of the gross - over $2 million.  As for Billy Wilder, he’d be getting $300,000 plus 17.5% of the gross, above two times the cost of the negative.  If the film grossed $1 million after the break-even point, Billy’s take went up to 20%. It was a very sweet deal, to say the least.

 Another young actor was also approached, and he remembered Sinatra’s importance as well.  According to Anthony  Perkins, “Billy Wilder stopped by my dressing room [in New York where Perkins was appearing in Look Homeward, Angel] and asked if I’d star in a movie with Frank Sinatra.  I told Billy I’d committed myself to Mel Ferrer for Green Mansions, and couldn’t go back on my word.”  Sinatra was apparently going to play Joe, while Perkins would have been given the Jerry role.  Tony Curtis had similar memories: “It’s you, Marilyn, Sinatra, and Edward G. Robinson and George Raft as the gangsters,” Curtis remembers Wilder telling him.

Wilder and Sinatra were buddies, though the friendship was strained.  For instance, Sinatra supposedly screamed at Wilder over Love in the Afternoon.“He was quite adamant about it,” Wilder remembered – “so vehement that he made my wife cry.  He said he didn’t like the picture because he thought it was immoral for an elderly man to make love in the afternoon to a young girl.” This must have struck Wilder as peculiar, given Sinatra’s own notorious womanizing. Indeed, in 1966, the then 51-year old Sinatra would marry twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow. Wilder also reported, years after Sinatra stood him up for lunch, that he never cast Sinatra precisely because of the performer’s unreliability: “I’m afraid he would run after the first take – ‘Bye-bye kid, that’s it.  I’m going. I’ve got to see a chick!’  That would drive me crazy.”

Still, Wilder loved the way Sinatra looked and acted on-screen.  In any event, Jack Lemmon landed what started out as the Tony Curtis role, and Curtis took over Sinatra’s.  As for Monroe, Diamond remembered that while he and Billy were still writing their first draft, Billy got a letter from Monroe telling him how fondly she recalled their work together on The Seven Year Itch, (1955) and hoping they’d be able to work together again. This was amusing, given the tsouris he’d endured with her. But as trying as that film had been for Wilder, he’d always loved her performance.  Besides, as Wilder himself put it in 1959, Sugar was “the weakest part, so the trick was to give it the strongest casting.” When Wilder read her a few passages of the script, she agreed to appear in Some Like it Hot. She liked Wilder well enough, and she liked Curtis, too, having been friendly with him when they were both aspiring actors.  Curtis even claimed to have had an affair with her in the early 1950s.

Wilder and Monroe

The relaxed bonhomie between the stars and director dissipated all too quickly. At a 7:00 p.m. dinner party Harold Mirisch threw to welcome Marilyn Monroe back to Hollywood after an absence of two years, Monroe didn’t show up until nearly 11:30. Then her husband, playwright Arthur Miller, put his arms around both Wilder’s and Diamond’s shoulders and patronizingly began to lecture the two literate screenwriters on the essential differences between comedy and tragedy. They rolled their eyes in irritation. Monroe, watching the interaction, became tense.

Jack Lemmon, who claims to have literally fallen off a couch laughing when he first read the script, didn’t yet realize that he’d been cast in the role of a lifetime by a director who would become one of his closest friends and most devoted employers. Wilder knew what Lemmon didn’t: “Within three to four weeks after the start of production,” Wilder reported, “Diamond and I had decided that this was not to be a one shot thing with Jack. We wanted to work with him again.”  Lemmon himself didn’t quite see it.  As he later noted, his girlfriend, Felicia Farr (whom he’d just begun dating and would be married to for nearly 40 years), “kept asking me what I thought of Wilder and I told her, ‘I guess he’s okay’ she’s never let me forget that one.” Wilder described his friend with genuine affection – which is to say with a put-down: “Lemmon had to be an actor.  I doubt he could have done anything else, except play piano in a whorehouse.”

Tony Curtis

Wilder understood quickly, and Lemmon eventually, that the two men could forge a rare kind of bond between director and actor.  Tony Curtis, meanwhile, was able to lend glamour to the character Wilder and Diamond wrote for him, but his persona was essentially foreign to Billy.  He was a pretty boy. Curtis was known for wearing exceptionally tight clothes, some of which he designed himself, all the better to show off his pinup, classic 1950s “veal cake” physique.  As Wilder once said, “Tony’s pants look as though someone dipped him in India ink up to his waist.” One day on the set of Some Like It Hot, Curtis raised a fuss over whether or not his name would or would not appear in the large-size type his contract specified.  He approached Wilder and launched into a lengthy remonstration.  Wilder listened patiently and then slid the knife in: “The trouble with you, Tony, is that you’re only interested in little pants and big billing.”

 With his pants off and his flapper skirts and wig on, Curtis was ill at ease when filming began he walked onto the set markedly discomposed.  Lemmon, however, clomped on to the set waving happily to the crew and introducing himself with “Hi, I’m Daphne!”  “You create a shell and you crawl into it,” is the way he later described it.

 The shells he and Curtis created in Some Like It Hot were designed in part by one of the twentieth-century’s preeminent drag artists, Barbette, whom Billy fondly remembered from his own days in Berlin and Paris, and was lured out of semi-retirement (at Wilder’s behest) to teach Lemmon and Curtis how to effectively transform themselves - not into women, but into drag queens. Wilder flew Barbette in from Texas to train Lemmon and Curtis in the art of female impersonation.  It wasn’t just a matter of seeing to it that their chests were properly shaved, their eyebrows plucked to the correct degree, their hips padded just so.  Barbette’s lessons were those of a performance artist, not a costumer.  She taught them, tried to teach them, how to walk: about how you cross your legs in front of each other slightly, which forces your hips to swing out, subtly but noticeably, with each step.  Tony Curtis was a perfect student as far as Barbette was concerned.  Under her tutelage, Curtis’s Josephine was a model of classic, discreet femininity.  Lemmon, however, couldn’t be taught.  Daphne was a disaster. Lemmon wouldn’t follow Barbette’s rules. 

Throughout the first half of 1958, Wilder and Diamond wrote together on their usual schedule – from 9:00 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening, Wilder having been up for three hours already at the start of his weekday.  When filming began in early September, they continued the same schedule and added evening rewrite sessions as well from 8:30 to 11:00 P.M.  More than any other film to date, this was a Wilder movie that demanded to be written concurrently with its filming.  Drag comedy was dicey, he knew, so he and Diamond saw what worked and what didn’t and developed the screenplay organically on that basis.  David O. Selznick told Billy it was impossible from the start: “You want machine guns and dead bodies and gags in the same picture? Forget about it, Billy.  You’ll never make it work.”  But by growing it slowly and essentially by constructing each piece on its own, he did precisely that.

Along with the sexual drive of this comedy, a certain Judaism emerges in this, the second script Wilder wrote with Diamond; the writers are having fun being themselves.  Listen to the booking agent Sig Poliakoff (played by Billy Grey, born Bill Giventer) on the phone trying to round up some “girl musicians”: “Gladys! Are ya there?  Gladys!” (He hangs up.) Meshuggeneh!  Played a hundred and twelve hours in a marathon dance, how she’s in bed with a nervous collapse!”  When Poliakoff tells Joe and Jerry about a gig, he inflects his declarative statement with the eastern European lilt of a question: “At the University of Illinois they’re having (you should pardon the expression) a St. Valentine’s dance?”  even Geraldine’s line “We spent three years at the Sheboygan Conservatory of Music” sounds like a Catskills routine (or a Columbia Varsity Show written by a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.)

   The final preliminary budget called for a total cost of $2,373,490.  When filming began, Monroe was up to $300,000; Curtis and Lemmon each got $100,000.  Diamond got $60,000, and Wilder $200,000.  Filming began in September 1958 at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood – off the corner of Formosa and Melrose, where the Mirisches rented space, and on location at the Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego. United Artists’ Arthur Krim gave the go-ahead but was nonetheless a little worried. This was going to be an expensive picture, and he wanted to protect his company against the big loss he thought Some Like It Hot might incur simply because of its high salaries.  Early on, there was also the problem of the film’s title.  If they wanted to call it Some Like It Hot, they’d need to get a waiver from MCA – the Music Corporation of America – which owned the rights to a 1939 Paramount film of the same title starring Bob Hope.  This turned out to be fairly easy: Wilder was represented by Lou Wasserman, who happened to own MCA.

The script called for a Miami resort Hotel, the Seminole-Ritz, but by the late 1950s, very little was left of the Roaring Twenties Florida, the magnificent old resorts having been pulled down to make room for the rococo gloss of postwar beach development.  Instead, they decided to shoot at the Hotel Del Coronado.  It was perfect: a grand 1887 hotel with turrets, a big veranda, and a wide white beachfront.

(On a personal note: It so happens that the four Stones - Mom, Dad, my “slightly older sister” Erica and yours truly - were in residence at the Hotel Del Coronado during filming. At that time, it was a purely wooden hotel and had a double-Olympic-size swimming pool filled with saltwater. As I recall, it also had a pinball machine or two in the basement.

As fairly typical “Hollywood Brats,” neither Erica nor myself were all that overwhelmed by the stars who were - at least for the nonce - our neighbors. I do recall walking up to actor Joe E. Brown [who played millionaire playboy Osgood Fielding III] and saying to him “I know who you are . . . you’re the man with the big mouth!” He smiled. but, much to my regret did not open his mouth. I became far more impressed with him after my father informed me that Mr. Brown, in addition to being a longtime actor who specialized in comedic baseball films back in the early to mid-thirties, was also general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. To my 10-year old way of looking at the world, THAT made him royalty! I followed him around like a puppy dog, wondering if perhaps he had an autograph of Roberto Clemente or Bill Mazeroski in his pocket. I never found the nerve to ask . . .)

At the Goldwyn studio, filming continued in fits and starts.  Wilder and Diamond were piecing the film together as they went along.  Monroe was characteristically late to arrive in the morning, and when she did show up, she had a tendency to mess up even the simplest of lines. Then a minor catastrophe occurred.  In the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre scene, in which Spats Columbo (George Raft) rubs out the diminutive Toothpick Charlie (George E. Stone - born Gershon Lichtenstein) and his gang before Joe’s and  Jerry’s horrified eyes, Wilder insisted that Raft perform a final indignity upon the bullet-riddled corpse of Toothpick Charlie – namely to kick the toothpick out of Charlie’s mouth.  Raft couldn’t bring himself to kick him so close to his jaw.  Two takes, three takes, five, ten. .  .Wilder was getting frustrated.  It was bad enough that Monroe was constantly requiring multiple takes to speak the simplest of lines.  Now George Raft was using up film stock as well, and Wilder couldn’t take it any longer. Finally, after all his pleading and cajoling failed, Wilder marched over and demonstrated it himself, missed, and kicked Stone right in the head.  The actor had to be rushed to the nearest hospital. 

 Marilyn Monroe was, of course, a bigger problem than any character actor’s broken jaw could possibly have been.  She cost more.  Things didn’t start off badly.  “I want the world to know that Marilyn’s not only on time, she is three hours early,” Wilder told the press when Some Like It Hot went into production in August.  By September, some tension surfaced when Monroe declared that Wilder wanted her to lose weight – eight pounds, to be exact. She refused. “Don’t you want your audience to be able to distinguish me from Tony and Jack?” she claimed to have asked Wilder.  “Besides,” she supposedly said, “my husband likes me plump.”

There are many tales about the number of takes it took for Monroe to get a scene – sometimes consisting of no more than three words – to get it right.

Iz Diamond recalled, “One morning a couple of hundred extras waited on the set while reports kept filtering in on Marilyn’s progress – she was in makeup; now she was in hairdressing; finally, at eleven o’clock, she walked on the stage carrying a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man under her arm.  Without a word of greeting or apology, she crossed to her dressing room and locked herself in.  Billy waited another fifteen minutes, then sent the assistant director to fetch her.  The A.D. knocked on her door and called, ‘We’re ready for you, Miss Monroe.’  From inside came the answer: ‘Drop dead.’”

After each scene, Monroe would call out to her secretary, ‘May! Coffee.’  And May Reis would bring her a thermos bottle.”  It contained not coffee, but vermouth.”

  Every day, Monroe’s acting coach, Paula Strasberg, would seat herself in a place where Monroe could easily see her.  Strasberg earned $1,500 a week to flutter around her neurotic boss, whispering suggestions in her ear and holding a big black umbrella over her head, always urging Monroe to “relax, relax!” 

In the early days of doping out the script, Wilder decided he wanted to have lots of old-time actors who had either played famous gangsters costarred in classic gangster films: Pat O’Brien and James Cagney, Paul Muni and George Raft, as well as Edward G. Robinson. Cagney wasn’t available, although he would star in a Wilder film – (One, Two Three) - in 1961.  Muni, who had just finished filming The Last Angry Man decided to retire.  O’Brien and Raft signed on, and Robinson took home a copy of the script. Wilder wanted him to play “Little Bonaparte. ”It looked like he was set. Then he pulled the rug out from Wilder; he sent Wilder a note saying that under no circumstances would he do the picture. Little Bonaparte would be played instead by Nehemiah Persoff.

Although Robinson didn’t say why, everyone knew what the problem was. It went back seventeen years: a 1941 Warner Bros. picture they’d made together called Manpower, directed by Raoul Walsh.  Turns out that while Raft and Robinson were making Manpower, they both got an itch for the film’s leading lady, Marlene Dietrich.  Raft and Robinson became rivals. There was tension on the set. One day it blew up, and they came to blows. Unfortunately, it was the same day that the publicist had a Life magazine photographer there.  He caught the fistfight.  Life ran the picture.  There wasn’t a thing that Warners could do about it. Robinson vowed he’d never work with Raft again.

In 1958, Wilder either didn’t know about Robinson’s attitude toward Raft or thought he’d get over it. In order to curry favor, Wilder had even hired Edward G. Robinson, Jr. for the tiny part of gangster Johnny Paradise.  When Robinson sr. pulled out, Wilder was furious – and stuck with Robinson, Jr.

Made for $2.9 million, Some Like it Hot earned an amazing $40 million in its first run. Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, it came away with but one: Best Costume Design - Black and White. Today, it is considered to be one of the greatest comedies of all time. In a poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2017, Some Like It Hot was selected as the best comedy of all time in a poll of 253 film critics from 52 countries.

So who remembers Fanfaren der Liebe?

Behind the Silver Screen: The Making of Chaplin's "The Great Dictator"

Quite apart from any particular merits of the film, The Great Dictator remains an unparalleled phenomenon, an epic incident in the history of mankind.  The greatest clown and best-loved personality of his age directly challenged the man who had instigated more evil and human misery than any other in modern – if not all of human – history.

 There was, to begin with, something uncanny in the resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler, representing opposite poles of humanity. And of course the fact that they had been born but 5 days apart in April, 1889. On April 21, 1939, a year and a half before the release of The Great Dictator, an unsigned article in the Spectator noted:

 Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago, this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other . . . Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society; the date of their birth and the identical little moustache (grotesque intentionally in Mr. Chaplin) they well might have been fixed by nature to betray the common origin of their genius.  For genius each of them undeniably possesses.  Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the ‘little man’ in modern society.  Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.  In Chaplin the little man is a clown, timid, incompetent, infinitely resourceful yet bewildered by a world that has no place for him.  The apple he bites has a worm in it; his trousers, remnants of gentility, trip him up; his cane pretends to a dignity his position is far from justifying; when he pulls a lever it is the wrong one and disaster follows.  He is a heroic figure, but heroic only in the patience and resource with which he receives the blows that fall upon his bowler.  In his actions and loves he emulates the angels.  But in Herr Hitler the angel has become a devil.  The soleless boots have become; the shapeless trousers, riding breeches, the cane, a riding crop; the bowler, a forage Reitstieffeln cap.  The Tramp has become a storm trooper; only the moustache is the same.

 There were even those who believed that Hitler had at first adopted the moustache in a deliberate attempt to suggest a resemblance to the man who had attracted so much love and loyalty in the world.

The famous Jewish short story writer Konrad Bercovici a close friend of Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, brought a plagiarism suit against Chaplin, claiming that he had first proposed that Chaplin should play Hitler in the mid-1930s.  The case was settled, with Chaplin paying Konrad Bercovici $95,000 in 1947. In his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that he had been the sole writer of the movie's script. He came to a settlement, though, because of his "unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next."

Bercovici was represented in his plagiarism suit by attorney Louis Nizer . In his book, "My Life in Court," Nizer goes into detail about Bercovici v. Chaplin: "The claim was that Chaplin had approached Bercovici to produce one of his gypsy stories as a motion picture and in the course of those friendly negotiations Bercovici gave him an outline of "The Great Dictator" story about a barber who looks like Hitler and is confused with him. Chaplin denied ever having negotiated for the gypsy story and also denied the rest of the claim...One day, upon my continuous inquiry, Bercovici suddenly had a flash of memory. He recalled that he had met Chaplin in a theater in Hollywood and that Chaplin had pointed out a Russian baritone in the audience whom he thought might play the leading role in the gypsy story. Bercovici believed that they spoke to the singer that evening and that he might possibly be a witness." Nizer tracked down Kushnevitz, the Russian baritone at issue: "He [Kushnevitz] recalled the incident vividly, for this, as he put it, was one of the great moments in his life - the possibility that he would star in a Chaplin picture. Chaplin had called him down the aisle of the theater and had given him his private telephone number. He pulled out a little black book from his back pocket and he still had the number written in it. He was a perfect witness in view of Chaplin's denial of any interest in Bercovici's gypsy story."

 A good many newspaper cartoonists, notably David Low, might equally have claimed the idea as their own; after all, it was inevitable.  Much later Chaplin admitted, ‘Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. Hitler, true, turned out to be no laughing matter; but there was nothing light-hearted in Chaplin’s deeper intentions in making the film.  He suffered very real and acute pain and revulsion at the horrors and omens of world politics in the 1930s.  In a 1931 diatribe against the myth of patriotism, he foresaw with dread another war. A Far East tour he undertook in the mid-1930s had made him more alert than most to the perils of the so-called “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” of July 1937 and the escalation of the Sino-Japanese conflict.  Also known as the “Lugou Bridge Incident,” or the “July 7 Incident,” it was a battle between the Republic of China’s National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army, often used as the marker for the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which occurred between 1937 and 1945.

Chaplin was no less disturbed by events in Spain.  In April 1938 the French film magazine Cinémonde published a translation of a remarkable short story by Chaplin himself, entitled “Rhythme.” It describes the execution of a Spanish loyalist, a popular humorous writer.  The officer in charge of the firing squad was formerly a friend of the condemned man; ‘their divergent views were then friendly, but they had finally provoked the unhappiness and disruption of the whole of Spain.’ Both the officer and the six men of the firing squad privately hope that a reprieve may still come.  Finally, though, the officer must give the rhythmic orders: ‘Attention! . . . Shoulder arms! . . . Present arms! . . . Fire!’ the officer gives the first three orders.  Hurried footsteps are heard: all realize that it is the reprieve.  The officer calls out ‘Stop!’ to his firing squad, but,

   Six men each held a gun.  Six men had been trained through rhythm.  Six men, hearing the shout ‘Stop!’ fired.

   The story at once embodies those fears of seeing men turned into machines which Chaplin had expressed in Modern Times (8), and looks forward to some grim, ironic gags in The Great Dictator.

 There is more evidence of Chaplin’s feelings about Spain in a poem which he scribbled in a folio notebook among some memos on the development of Regency, presumably in the winter of 1936-37.  The poem was quite clearly never meant for publication, or even for other eyes.  It was a private attempt to express his sentiments.

To a dead Loyalist soldier

On the battlefields of Spain

Prone, mangled form,

Your silence speaks your deathless cause,

Of freedom’s dauntless march.

Though treachery befell you on this day

And built its barricades of fear and hate

Triumphant death has cleared the way

Beyond the scrambling of human life

Beyond the pale of imprisoning spears

To let you pass.

There was, he said euphemistically, ‘a good deal of bad behavior in the world’. Feeling as deeply as he did, he felt impelled to do whatever he could to correct it, or at least to focus attention upon it. His only weapon, as he knew, was comedy.  Of course, he had attacked war with comedy in 1918, with his scathing satire Shoulder Arms (that’s Charlie and brother Syd on his right below), in which he had also played a soldier who is mistaken for leader of the Huns . . . except that in this case it was all a dream.

   In the latter part of the 1930s Chaplin was very friendly with the director King Vidor and his family, and it was through the Vidors, sometime in 1938, that he met Tim Durant.  Like Harry Crocker who, for many years, was Chaplin’s personal assistant, Durant was a tall, good-looking patrician, university-educated young man: Chaplin seemed to have a penchant for this type among his friends and assistants.  Durant had the added merits of being sympathetic, amusing, discreet, and very good at tennis.  Through Durant he was introduced into the society of Pebble Beach and Carmel, one hundred miles south of San Francisco.  Chaplin called Pebble Beach ‘the abode of lost souls.’  He was fascinated, charmed and attracted by the collection of California millionaires who still made their homes there, and no less by the abandoned mansions that now lay in decay.  The more Bohemian colony at nearby Carmel, a section of coast much favored by artists and writers, had a different but potent attraction.  He was especially pleased by his meetings there with the famous California poet Robinson Jeffers, who coined the term “inhumanism,” the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things."

 Tim Durant remembered that at first Chaplin was reluctant to become involved with the Pebble Beach set:

I knew a girl who was married to one of the Crockers in San Francisco, and she heard I was there and called me up and asked me to come over for dinner and bring Charlie.  But Charlie said to me, ‘Listen, Tim, I don’t want to get into this group at all . . .’  I said, ‘Look, Charlie, will you do this just as a personal favour – I don’t ask you to do anything.  Will you just go over and have dinner with them, and we can say honestly that we have to get back and do some work, and you can leave immediately.’

 He said, ‘All right, Tim; but get me out of there, remember; don’t let me spend the evening there.’

 So we went over there.  We walked in and everybody congregated around him, you know, and he was a hero.  He had an audience, and he couldn’t leave – wanted to stay until three o’clock in the morning.  After that he wanted to go out every night, because they accepted him and he entertained them, and we went out all the time.  He wrote many stories – I took notes of stories about the characters there.  He had an idea of making a story about the people there.’

 One of his hosts was D. L. James, who lived in a Spanish-style mansion perched on the cliff-edge in Carmel, one of northern California’s architectural monuments.  (James’ parents actually had him baptized ‘D.L.’ with the idea that he could choose names to suit the initials when he grew up.  In fact, he remained simply ‘D.L.’ though occasionally he intimated that he might consider ‘Dan’ as a first name.) At the James house Chaplin met D.L.’s son Dan, who was then twenty-six, an aspiring writer and ardent Marxist, who was at the time rather unsettled; “My writing was getting nowhere; I was separating from my wife; and I was just then thinking of going to New York.’  They met on several occasions and Dan would hold forth on films and about the war against Fascism.  Chaplin in turn outlined his ideas for a Hitler film.

   When Chaplin returned from Pebble Beach to  Hollywood at the end of the summer, Dan James took a chance and wrote to him saying that he was enthusiastic about the idea of the Hitler film, and would be very happy to be able to work on it in any capacity.  ‘I went on packing my bags for the East, though.’  Somewhat to his surprise a telephone call came from the Chaplin studio a few days later, and he was invited to call and see Alf Reeves, Chaplin’s longtime studio manager.  Reeves warned him that Chaplin was very ‘changeable,’ but that he liked him and was prepared to employ him at a salary of $80 a week, and to put him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel until he could find somewhere to live.  ‘My first evening he took me to  Ciro’s Trocadero Oyster bar; then we dined and he told me the outline of the story.  The next day I went up and started to make notes . . . I think Charlie took me on because of my height, because my family had a castle out here, and because he knew pretty quickly I was a declared Communist, so that my background and political preoccupations would keep me from selling him out for money.’

 For three months James reported daily to Chaplin’s Beverly Hills mansion – known as “Breakaway House” – where he would make notes as Chaplin discussed ideas for the plot and gags.  From time to time James would go to the studio to dictate the notes to Kathleen Prior: the first of these dictation sessions seems to have taken place on October 26, 1938.  During these three months James was able to assess Chaplin’s own political thinking:

 He did not read deeply, but he felt deeply everything that happened.  The end of Modern Times, for instance, reflected perfectly the optimism of the New Deal period; already by 1934 and 1935 he had a sense of that.  He had probably never read Marx, but his conception of the millionaire in City Lights is an exact image for Marx’s conception of the business cycle.  Marx wrote of the madness of the business cycle once it began to roll, the veering from one extreme to another.  Chaplin presents a magnificent metaphor.  Whether he was aware of the social meaning of this I do not know, but he got it.

He had a sixth sense about a lot of things.  In 1927 and 1928, for instance, he began to feel that the stock market was going mad, and he took everything he had and put it into Canadian gold.

Charlie called himself an anarchist.  He was always fascinated with people of the left.  One of the people he wanted to meet was Harry Bridges of the Longshoremen’s Union.  I fixed up a meeting, and they took to each other immediately. 

 Whatever his exact politics, Charlie had a position of revolt against wealth and stuffiness. He had a real feeling for the underdog.  He was certainly a libertarian.  He saw Stalin as a dangerous dictator very early, and I had great difficulty getting him to leave Stalin out of the last speech in The Great Dictator.  He was horrified by the Soviet-German Pact.

 When it came to Hitler it is easy to say, with hindsight, that Chaplin made too light of him.  You have to remember that the film was conceived before Munich, and that Chaplin had undoubtedly had it in his head a couple of years before that.  And the thought then was that this monster was not so awe-inspiring as he appeared.  He was a big phony, and had to be shown up as such.  Of course, by the time the film appeared, France had fallen and we knew much more, so that a lot of the comedy had lost its point.

   The Great Dictator marked an inevitable revolution in Chaplin’s working methods.  This was to be his first dialogue film, and for the first time he was to begin a picture with a complete script.  The old method had been to work out each sequence in turn, alternating periods of story preparation with shooting – changing, selecting and discarding ideas as the work proceeded.  Now these processes had to be transferred to the preparatory period, the work of a definitive script.

   The original and basic premise was the physical resemblance of the Dictator and the little Jew. All the early treatments of the story begin with the return of Jewish soldiers, many maimed, from the war to the ghetto. They are all welcomed back by wives and families, except ‘the little Jew.’  He ‘is alone walking down the ghetto street.  In his hunger for companionship he embraces a lamppost.’

   One early idea was for a flophouse sequence which can be used for the setting of our inflation material. (This may have been suggested by D.W. Griffith’s Isn’t Life Wonderful) The little Jew will return to pay a bill.  The sign will read, ‘Beds, $1,000,000 a night – baths $500,000 extra.’  Someone will send out for a package of cigarettes: ‘You’ll have to carry the money yourself,’ or perhaps the little Jew goes out balancing a huge basket of currency on his head. $10,000,000 for cigars.  The tobacco dealer insists that the money be counted.  It is all in $1.00 bills. 

Never willing to waste a good comedy idea, Chaplin planned to use a flea circus routine . . . something he had been toying with for more than a quarter century. It stayed in through several successive treatments, but was finally abandoned.  Having been frustrated in his efforts to introduce the business into his 1928 picture The Circus, and The Great Dictator, Chaplin would eventually manage to squeeze it into Limelight in 1952.

Chaplin early conceived the idea of two rival dictators competing to upstage one another.  He was to abandon an idea for the Great Dictator’s wife, a role intended for the famous Jewish comedian Fanny Brice.  A scene was sketched out, with a lot of revision in Dan James’ handwriting, indicating the kind of relationship Chaplin had in mind, and suggests that it might have encountered serious problems with the Breen Office and other censorship groups:

SCENE: Mrs. Hinkle alone – boredom and sex starvation with Freudian fruit symbols.  Enter Hinkle from speech.  She’s mad at him – orders him about.  He’s preoccupied about matters of State.

 Mrs:   I’m a woman.  I need affection, and all you think about is the State! THE STATE! What kind of state do you think I’m in?

Hinkle:     You’ve made me come to myself. I’m not getting any younger. Sometimes I wonder . . .

Mrs:     Life is so short and these moments are so rare . . . Remember, Hinkle, I did everything for you.  I even had an operation . . . on my nose.  If you don’t pay more attention to me I’ll tell the whole world I’m Jewish!

Hinkle:       Shhh!

Fanny:        And I’m not so sure you aren’t Jewish too.  We’re having gefilte fish for dinner.

Hinkle:       Quiet! Quiet!

Fanny:        Last night I dreamt about blimps . . .

Hinkle:       Blimps?

Fanny:       Yes, I dreamt we captured Paris in a big blimp and we went right through the Arc de Triomphe. And then I dreamed about a city full of Washington monuments.

                    (She presses grapes in his mouth, plays with a banana.

  By December 13, 1938, Chaplin had decided on much of the story, including the idea of the ending. Charlie and the father of the Girl from the ghetto with whom he has fallen in love are put in a concentration camp.  They escape, and on the road run into Hinkle’s troops, preparing to invade the neighboring country of Ostrich (which would, in the final cut, become Osterlich, the real last name [although spelled differently] of Fred Astaire). The general in command mistakes Charlie for Hinkle.  Hinkle himself, out shooting ducks while trying to make up his mind about the invasion, is meanwhile mistaken for Charlie and thrown into prison.

Charlie and the Girl’s father are carried along on the invasion of Ostrich and finally find themselves in the palace square of Vanilla, the capital.

Hinkle’s soldiers are drawn up before the platform from which the conqueror is about to speak.  Charlie walks out on it.  He can’t say a word.  The Girl’s father is at his shoulder. ‘You’ve got to talk now! It’s our only chance! For G-d’s sake, say something.’ Herring (Hinkle’s P.M.) first addresses the crown – and through microphones the whole world, which is listening in, he calls for an end to democracies. He introduces Hinkle, the new conqueror, who must be obeyed or else. In the crowd we show dozens of Ostrich patriots ready to kill Hinkle.  Charlie steps forward. He begins – slowly – scared to death.  But his words give him power. As he goes on, the clown turns into the prophet. [The following video capture - long known as the “Look Up Hannah speech” - is, in my humble opinion, great bit of writing and acting in the history of motion pictures.)

By the middle of January 1939 Chaplin clearly felt confident with his story, though it was to undergo much subsequent revision.  Dan James was set to adapt it into a dramatic composition in five acts and an epilogue, in order to register it for copyright.  Copyright was also sought in the title The Dictator, but it was discovered that Paramount Pictures and the estate of Richard Harding Davies already owned the title and were unwilling to relinquish it. In June, therefore, the title The Great Dictator was registered, but Chaplin was not entirely convinced that it was right; having already registered Ptomania, he subsequently registered as alternatives The Two Dictators, Dictamania and Dictator of Ptomania.

The Chaplin Studio c. 1917

 After January 16, Dan James no longer went to the Beverly Hills house, since Chaplin now worked at the studio, where he could supervise preparations for shooting. The stage was being soundproofed; there were contracts to be negotiated with outside organizations like RCA who were to be responsible for the sound; and work was already in hand on miniatures for special effects.  Now the daily script conferences took place in Chaplin’s bungalow on the lot.  On January 21, Charlie’s brother Sidney returned to work at the studio for the first time in almost 20 years; with conditions in Europe as they were, he and his new French wife, Gypsy, had decided that they were likely to be safer in America. The daily script conferences were now augmented, as Sydney and Henry Bergman (who had been with Charlie ever since the beginning of his film career at the Sennett Studios) joined Chaplin and Dan James.

By the late summer of 1939 when the script was finished and Chaplin was ready to start shooting, he was able to reassure Sydney: “This time, Syd, I have the script totally visualized.  I know where every close-up comes.”  Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.  It rarely ever does . . . especially with a filmmaker like Chaplin.

During the weeks of preparation, Chaplin ran films for his staff in the studio projection room, among them Shoulder Arms and the mysterious The Professor - a likely unfinished and definitely unreleased Chaplin film from c. 1919). He also screened all the newsreels of Hitler on which he could lay hands.  He later returned often to a particular sequence showing Hitler at the signing of the French surrender. As Hitler left the railway carriage, he seemed to do a little dance.  Chaplin would watch the scene with fascination, exclaiming, “Oh, you bastard, you son-of-a-bitch swine.  I know what’s in your mind.”  According to Tim Durant, “He said, ‘this guy is one of the greatest actors I’ve ever seen’ . . . Charlie admired his acting.  He really did.” Dan James commented nearly a half-century later, “Of course he had in himself some of the qualities that Hitler had.  He dominated his world.  He created his world.  And Chaplin’s world was not a democracy either.  Charlie was the dictator of all those things.”

The script, which was completed by September 1, 1939, remains one of the most elaborate ever made for a Hollywood film.  It runs to the extraordinary length of almost 300 pages (the average feature film script varies from 100 to 150 pages).  It was divided into twenty-five sections, each designated by a letter of the alphabet and separately paginated; through shooting every take was identified by the letter and number of the relevant script page.  Despite the doubt Dan James cast on Chaplin’s assertion that everything was visualized, the system seems, to judge from the shooting records, to have served pretty well in the 168 days of a very complicated production.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 1939 Chaplin was collecting his crew around him. Henry Bergman was nominated “co-ordinator.” Dan James was joined by two more assistant directors. One was Chaplin’s half-brother Wheeler Dryden, who arrived at the La Brea Blvd. studio in March, overjoyed to be given a job on Chaplin’s permanent studio staff.  Wheeler had continued to pick up a living as an actor and in 1923 had had a play, Suspicion, produced at the Egan Theatre in Los Angeles.  He was to remain at the studio until Chaplin’s departure from the United States in 1952.  A slight man, Wheeler retained the air and diction of an old-style stage actor.  Though he adored Charlie, Wheeler could sometimes madden him as well as the rest of the studio staff with his finicky attention to detail.

The amusing and devil-may-care Robert Meltzer, another assistant director, like James an avowed Communist, was in striking contrast to the solemn and nervy Wheeler.  He had also been recruited in Pebble Beach.  During the summer there the gossip writers had linked Chaplain’s name with several women, notably the sugar heiress Geraldine Spreckels and a striking young red-headed actress named Dorothy Comingore, whom Chaplin saw on stage in Carmel. Comingore was then living with Bob Meltzer, and when Chaplin convinced her that she should try her luck in Los Angles, Meltzer came too.  In the end it was Meltzer who worked for Chaplin and not Miss Comingore, who joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and made her most striking impact as Susan Alexander – the role transparently based on Marion Davies – in Citizen Kane.  After The Great Dictator Meltzer himself was to work briefly with Welles. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1941 he volunteered for service with the paratroops and died in the Battle of Normandy at age 31.

Chaplin’s staff was astonished when Chaplin engaged Karl Struss as director of photography.  After 23 years as Chaplin’s senior cameraman this was a cruel blow to Rollie Totheroh, who could never afterwards completely forgive his beloved boss.  Chaplin had grown dissatisfied with Rollie’s camerawork for reasons which were never quite clear.

Part of the problem for a director making only one film every four or five years was that in the interval conditions in Hollywood had changed.  Each time Chaplin made a film he found himself bedeviled by new technical people whom he neither understood nor needed.  He had a running feud with the script girl – a personage hitherto unknown on a Chaplin film.

   The role of Hannah was all along intended for Paulette Goddard, who reported for work at the studio on July 29.  She and Chaplin had spent a good deal of the previous year apart.  While he went to Pebble Beach in the early half of 1938, she flew to Florida, and during most of the rest of the year she was at work in Hollywood, while he stayed away from the studio. Already in March, while hardly finished with marriage rumours, the newspapers talked of impending divorce.  Paulette’s contract with the studio expired on March 31, 1938, and she had sought an earlier release to sign with the Myron Selznick agency.  She was hired for The Great Dictator at $2,500 a week; Chaplin was furious when she brought her agent (probably Selznick himself) to demand bigger billing.

She and Chaplin continued to live together in the Summit Drive mansion throughout the production of the film.  As Chaplin nicely expressed it, ‘Although we were somewhat estranged we were friends and still married.’ To the Chaplin sons, now mischievous early teenagers, and to casual acquaintances, their relationship seemed much as before. At the studio, the staff were however aware of the change.  You either belonged to the Paulette faction or to the Charlie faction.  You couldn’t be both.  Chaplin would work very hard with her; sometimes he would make twenty-five or thirty takes.  He would stand in her place on the set and try and give her the tone and the gestures.  It was a method he had been able to use in silent films; it could not work so well, of course, in a talking picture.

The final stenciled copies of the script were completed on Sunday September 3, 1939 – the day that Britain declared war on Germany.  Three days later Chaplin began to rehearse and on September 9 shooting began on the first ghetto sequence.  Filming was to continue with hardly a day’s break apart from (most weeks) Sundays until the end of March 1940.  By that time Chaplin would have shot most of the 477,440 feet of film which were eventually to be exposed. The length of the finished picture was 11,625 feet.

 It is interesting, but perhaps not too surprising, to discover that Chaplin kept the shooting of his two roles quite distinct.  First, until the end of October, he worked on the scenes of the ghetto, in the character of the barber. With the bulk of those completed, November was spent on the more complicated action and location scenes, like the war scenes, particularly those involving Reginald Gardiner and the crashed plane.  Chaplin had devised some very funny business with the airplane.  Taking over the controls, Chaplin manages to turn it upside down without either himself or his companion (Gardiner) being aware of it. They only notice with some concern that the sun is shining up from below them, that a watch released from a pocket leaps (apparently) into the air and sways there on its taut chain, and that they are passed by flocks of upside-down seagulls.  Reginald Gardiner suffered much more than Chaplin from the experience of being strapped upside down, and only managed his lines and air of insouciance with great difficulty.

There were interludes and distractions in the work at the studio that November.  Not all were welcome: a plagiarism suit brought by writer Michael Kustoff on account of Modern Times came to trial in federal court and kept both Chaplin and studio manager Alf Reeves busy. Chaplin himself was in court on November 18 when the case was decided in his favor.

On November 15, 1939 Douglas Fairbanks and his new wife, Sylvia, the former lady Ashley, visited the location in Laurel Canyon where Chaplin was filming.  Chaplin thought he looked older and stouter, though he was still as full of enthusiasm. He had always been Chaplin’s favorite audience, and as so many times before, Chaplin showed Fairbanks his sets and expounded his plans.  Although he was filming in the Barber’s concentration camp costume, Chaplin put on his Hynkel uniform to show his visitors, and wearing it, was photographed with them.  They all lunched together.

Chaplin & Fairbanks: the final photo

It was the last time he saw the man whom he later said had been his only close friend.  At four o’clock in the morning of December 12, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. telephoned Chaplin to tell him that his father had died just over three hours earlier, in his sleep.  There was no shooting at the Chaplin studio on the day of his funeral, December 15.  “It was a terrible shock,” Chaplin later wrote, “for he belonged so much to life . . . I have missed his delightful friendship.”

   As December came, Chaplin began his Hynkel scenes.  The supreme actor, Chaplin always became totally subsumed into the role he was playing, as colleagues throughout his career have testified. When, for the first time, he adopted the uniform and role of an autocratic and villainous character, even he was momentarily disconcerted by the effect.  Reginald Gardiner remembered that when Chaplin first appeared on the set ready to shoot in his Hynkel uniform, he was noticeably more cool and abrupt than when he had been playing the Jewish barber.  Gardiner recalled further that when he was driving with Chaplin – already in uniform – to a new location, Chaplin suddenly became uncharacteristically abusive towards the driver of a car that was obstructing them.  He quickly recovered himself, and recalled with laughter an earlier discussion about the false sense of superiority a uniform can produce.  ‘Just because I’m dressed up in this darned thing I go and do a thing like that.’

 Although work on The Great Dictator proceeded on a much tighter schedule and pre-set plan than any previous Chaplin film, there was no fixed daily routine in the studio. Much, of course, depended upon Chaplin’s own somewhat unpredictable time of arrival, although for the first time he appears to have delegated considerable responsibility for preparation and in some cases shooting to his assistants.

 Just before Christmas, Chaplin shot the scene which remains the most haunting and the most inspired of the film: Hynkel’s ballet with the terrestrial globe.  The first hint of a symbolic scene of this sort is a random story note dating from February 15, 1939:

SCENE WITH MAP: Cutting it up to suit himself, cutting off bits of countries with a pair of scissors.

The dance with the globe was to go far beyond this elementary notion.  While the gibberish speech appears so precise and planned that it is surprising to discover that it was improvised, the dance with the globe seems to soar so freely in its inspiration that it is hard to imagine that it could be written down.  Yet it was.  In the complete version of the script, the description of Chaplin pas seul occupies four pages, opening,

 HYNKEL GOES TO THE GLOBE – and caresses it – trance-like.  Soft strains of Peer Gynt (in the outcome the Prelude to Lohengrin proved more appropriate) waft into the room.  Hynkel picks up the globe, bumps it into the air with his left wrist.  It floats like a balloon and drops back into his hands. He bumps it with his right wrist and catches it. He dominates the world – kicks it viciously away.  Sees himself in the mirror – plays God! Beckons, the world float into his hand.  Then he bumps it high in the air with his right wrist.  He leaps up (on wire), catches the globe and brings it down. 

The particular attention that Chaplin was to give to the balloon dance indicates that he was well aware that it would remain one of his great virtuoso scenes.  He spent three days on the main shooting in the days just before Christmas, and then made some retakes in early January. The first three days in February seem to have been entirely taken up with running and rerunning the material, and on February 6 and again of the 15th Chaplin did further retakes.

Carter De Haven, who plays the Bacterian Ambassador in the film, was later to attempt to get into the plagiarism game by claiming the ballet with the globe was his idea.  Any doubt, however, was finally put to rest when Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, preparing their Unknown Chaplin film series, unearthed some forgotten home movies (39) of a party at Pickfair in the early 1920s. Chaplin, in classical Grecian costume and crowned with a laurel wreath, performs a dance with a balloon which is the unmistakable prototype for The Great Dictator. No doubt Chaplin was remembering his party trick of nearly twenty years ago when he noted in the script description of the globe ballet, ‘Then he slides to the table top to perform a series of Greek postures’ and ‘Gracefully he leans back over the desk and gets very Greek about the whole thing.’

In January 1940 Jack Oakie joined the cast to play Benzino Napaloni, the Dictator of Bacteria. When Chaplin first proposed the role to him, Oakie questioned the suitability of casting an Irish-Scottish American in a caricature of Mussolini.  What, asked Chaplin, would be funny about an Italian playing Mussolini? Chaplin did perceive a problem however when he discovered that Oakie was at the time dieting to lose weight. According to Charles Chaplin Jr., his father brought his own cook, George, to the studio and had him tempt Oakie with the richest and most fattening dishes he could devise.  When he found his strategy was succeeding, and that Oakie was increasingly growing to resemble Mussolini in stature, he cheerfully nicknamed him ‘Muscles.’

Charles Junior considered that ‘one of the pleasantest things about the new film was the affable relationship between Dad and Jack Oakie.  Jack had a tough hide and was able to take Dad’s drive in stride.  Dad, on his part, has always had great admiration for Jack.’  Others on the set observed that working in his scenes with Oakie brought out a certain competitive spirit in Chaplin  It was not jealousy: rationally, Chaplin knew that his supremacy was unassailable.  Rather it was Chaplin’s legacy from his early training with Karno and Keystone: the essential and driving motive for a comedian must always be to outdo the rest.  Chaplin’s own script for The Great Dictator often gave the better comedy business to Oakie.  Chaplain’s professional instinct still drove him to top it with his own comedy. He would sense the reaction of the unit, and he played the comic game with the same intensity as he played tennis.  As with tennis, he did not like to lose: finishing a scene in which he felt that Oakie had scored the biggest laughs from the bystanders, he could hardly conceal his irritation. Charles Junior, a very reliable witness, despite his youth at the time, recalled one day when Oakie had tried every trick he knew to do the impossible and steal a scene from Chaplin.  In the middle of the scene, Chaplin grinned and offered advice: “If you really want to steal a scene from me, you son-of-a-bitch, just look straight into the camera.  That’ll do it every time.”

Chaplin undoubtedly found these duels of comedy nostalgic and stimulating.  He was less happy with some of his actors from the legitimate theatre.  In particular he found it very hard to work against Henry Daniell’s measured timing. “He developed a hatred for Daniell,” recalled Dan James. “He really thought Daniell was trying to sabotage him.  The trouble was that he had a respect for Daniell because he was a real stage actor, and couldn’t bring himself to explain what was wrong.  Poor Daniell knew that Chaplin was not pleased with him, but he never understood why.  On the other hand he was crazy about Reggie Gardiner, though once he had got him, he never really gave Reggie any funny stuff.

By the middle of February practically all the studio scenes had been shot. Chaplin moved out onto location to shoot the First World War scenes for the opening of the film and the scene of Hynkel being arrested while out duck shooting, filmed at Malibu Lake. The war scenes involved a series of gags with Chaplin and the enormous Big Bertha gun, and for one day’s shooting the Chaplin children were taken to watch.  Fourteen-year-old Sydney was so overcome with mirth at his father’s antics following the explosion of the gun that he laughed out loud.  When he discovered who had wrecked the sound take, Chaplin flew at him in fury, saying ‘Do you know your laugh just cost me fifteen thousand dollars?’

‘In a twinkling, from being the funniest man alive, Dad had become the most furious.’ The two boys feared some awful retribution; but then Chaplin began to laugh, and proudly called out to the crew, ‘Even my own son thinks I’m funny.’ To Sydney he added, ‘Well, it was fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of laugh, but if you appreciated it that much, it’s all right . . . Just don’t let it happen again, son.”

One series of scenes shot during this period was destined never to be seen.  Chaplin’s first idea for the final scene of the speech, in which (in the words of the early treatment) ‘the clown turns into a prophet’ was extremely ambitious.  He intended the speech to be laid over scenes supposed to take place in Spain, China, a German street and a Jewish ghetto in Germany.  As Chaplin’s speech came into heir consciousness, a Spanish firing squad would throw down their arms; a Japanese bomber pilot would be overcome by wonder, and instead of bombs, toys on parachutes would rain down on the Chinese children below; a parade of goose-stepping German soldiers would break into waltz-time; and a Nazi storm-trooper would risk his life to save a little Jewish girl from an oncoming car. A couple of days were actually spent shooting material for the sequence, but it was discarded.

 By the end of March 1940, the main shooting was all finished, the laborers were already beginning to clear the studio, and Chaplin had a rough-cut of the film ready to show to a few friends such as Constance Collier in early April. The climactic scene, the final speech made by the little barber who has been mistaken for the Great Dictator, remained to be shot.  Moreover Chaplin was to polish and tinker with the film more than with any other that he had ever made. During the next six months he would suddenly decide to put up a set again; and he was still doing retakes of the ghetto scenes in late September, after he had already previewed the film.  Redubbing of the sound went on practically until the premiere on October 15, 1940.

From April to June Chaplin labored over the text of his big speech, between working on the editing of the film.  His two young Marxist assistants were of no help to him.  The Utopian idealism and unashamed emotionalism of the speech evidently offended their Communist orthodoxy.  Others were anxious about the speech on more pragmatic grounds. When told by his film salesmen that the speech might lose him a million dollars in sales, Chaplin reportedly said, “I don’t care if it loses me $5 million . . . it’s my money, and it’s worth it.

That final speech, which the political right felt smacked of Communism and the left suspected of sentimentality, seemed not to embarrass the larger audience.  It was widely quoted and reprinted.  Chaplin’s old friend Rob Wagner devoted a page to it in the November 16 issue of his magazine Rob Wagner’s Script; Archie Mayo, mainly remembered as the director of The Petrified Forest, used it as his Christmas card for 1940, comparing it to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; and in England, the Communist Party put it out as a special pamphlet.

The Great Dictator was nominated for 5 Oscars, including best actor, best supporting actor, best screenplay and best original music for Meredith Wilson. Although it did win the New York Film Critics Award for Picture of the Year, Chaplin refused to accept it.  It wound up being his most profitable picture, earning him slightly more than $5 million.  It is also one of the first films named to the National Film Registry.  

Throughout his career, people assumed that Chaplin was Jewish. After all, he was probably a Communist (so they believed) and weren’t a majority of Hollywood Reds Jewish? Throughout most of his life, Chaplin did not address the issue. Towards the end, however, a writer posed the question for perhaps the thousandth time. Chaplin’s response?

“I’ve never had that honor.”

Enjoy the film . . .

Behind the Screen: "The Sting"

Back in 1969, Paul Newman and Robert Redford teamed together in the much-beloved Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  It was a huge hit; Butch and Sundance made an ideal team, and of course, Redford latched on to the whole “Sundance” thing; for more than 40 years, the “Sundance Film Festival” has been nearly as prestigious as Cannes.  And today, there is also the “Sundance Institute” as well as the The Sundance Channel and the Sundance Catalog, which features clothing, furniture and housewares.

Despite the incredible chemistry between Newman and Redford, they only made one more movie together: The Sting. It turned out to be a much bigger hit than Butch Cassidy: it won an incredible 7 Academy Awards including the Oscar for Best Picture of 1973. For fans of old-timey con men and even older-timey music, clothing and automobiles, nothing beats The Sting.  It has a look, a sound and a plot-line which has rarely been used to such great affect in all Hollywood history.  And yet, as with most truly great Hollywood films, its success owes nearly as much to what did not happen as to what did. . .

 Screenwriter David Ward (also known for Sleepless in Seattle, King Ralph and Major League ) got the idea for The Sting when he was working on his first screenplay, Steelyard Blues (1973), which includes a pickpocketing scene. Researching this, Ward found himself reading everything he could find about con artists. Ward had originally shown the screenplay which would become Steelyard Blues to producer/actor/director Tony Bill and now gave him an outline of his new story. Bill liked it immediately and brought in partners Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips; the three then produced both films.

  At the time the trio first optioned Ward’s screenplay—before it was finished, based only on his telling them the story—the deal had been for him to also direct.. That was nixed when Redford, sniffing around the project, said he wouldn’t do such a complicated movie with a first-timer at the helm, no offense. Once Ward saw the caliber of talent his screenplay was attracting, he came to agree with the producers that it deserved a more experienced director. Ward did eventually direct a few of his own screenplays, including Major League, King Ralph, and The Program.

George Roy Hill, who had already directed Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy, saw the screenplay by accident and asked for the director's job.  The screenplay that Hill read was quite a bit different from Ward’s earliest versions. Originally, Paul Newman’s character (Henry Gondorff) was only in about half of Ward’s original screenplay, and was intended to be an older, paunchier fellow—a sort of gruff mentor to Johnny Hooker (who was written as an eager, raw-boned 19-year-old). At this stage of development, the producers were thinking of someone like Peter Boyle to play the role, but Newman loved the screenplay and wanted to play Gondorff no matter what. So Ward slimmed down the character and beefed up the role to fit Newman. (It turned out that Peter Boyle would appear in no less than 6 films in 1973, including major parts in Steelyard Blues and The Friends of Eddie Coyle.)

Despite the fact, as just noted, that the original Johnny Hooker was supposed to be a callow 19-year old, Ward later claimed he wrote the script with the then 37-year old Redford in mind. Redford initially turned down the part; there was simply no way he could pay a 19-year old. At this point, Ward approached Jack Nicholson who was a year younger than Redford; he turned them down as well.  When George Roy Hill – who, as previously mentioned, had directed Butch Cassidy - signed on for The Sting, Redford changed his mind and got on board.  He and Newman would be reunited for a second film to be directed by George Roy Hill.  Great!  But there were still qualms . . .

 Separately, Robert Redford and Paul Newman were two of the biggest movie stars in the world in the early 1970s. As a duo, they were perhaps even more popular because Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was still fresh in people’s memories. But while a Butch and Sundance reunion sounded tempting (and lucrative), the studio had a concern: In the movie, the two con men’s partnership hinges on the possibility that one (or both) will try to double-cross the other. With Redford and Newman so famously chummy, the producers were concerned that audiences wouldn’t believe such a betrayal was possible, and the film would thus lose some of its suspense. Hill convinced them he could make it work. 

Even after changing his mind, Redford didn't expect the movie to be a hit. In matter of fact, he wouldn’t even see the film until 2004.

The part of merciless gangster Doyle Lonnegan was originally supposed to be played by Richard Boone, who had starred in TV’s Have Gun - Will Travel (1957-1963) and a handful of movies, including several Westerns. Boone signed on for The Sting but dropped out without explanation, refusing to even return producers’ and agents’ phone calls. After actor Sterling Hayden turned down the role because he didn’t want to shave off his beard, the role was offered to British actor Robert Shaw.  Shaw hurt his ankle playing racquetball two days before shooting began; director Hill decided to work with it and had Shaw turn his injury into a character trait.

George Roy Hill is an interesting anomaly in Hollywood history.  Butch Cassidy made $102 million in 1969, or about $715 millio at today’s ticket prices. When Hill reunited Newman and Redford for The Sting, the result took in $156 million ($901 million adjusted for inflation). The Sting was the fourth highest-grossing film in history at the time, behind The Exorcist (which was released the same week), Gone with the Wind, and The Sound of Music, and ahead of The Godfather. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was number eight, making Hill the only director to have two movies in the top 10. Hill was reclusive compared to most Hollywood directors, disliking publicity tours and talk show interviews. As a result, despite his incredible success (he also made Slap Shot and The World According to Garp), he never quite became a household name.

Viewed retrospectively, The Sting, like all truly great films, stars the only actors in the world who could have played the parts they played.  That is in retrospect.  As we have learned, casting a film is never as smooth or seamless as the finished product would suggest.

   George Roy Hill and the production team were able to assemble first-rate cast of players, including:

·       Harold Gould as “Kid Twist”

·       Ray Walston as “J.J. Singleton”

·       Eileen Brennan as “Billie,”

·       Dana Elcar as “FBI Agent Polk”

·       Charles Durning as Lt. Snyder

·       Charles Dierkop as “Floyd,” the bodyguard

·       Robert Earl Jones as “Luther Coleman,”

·       Dimitra Arliss as “Loretta”

·       Jack Kehoe as “The Erie Kid,” and

·       James Sloyan as “Mottola”

Production began in January of 1973. The filming was split between location shooting in Chicago, where the story was set, and on the back lot  of Universal Studio in Hollywood (actually “Universal City”) California.  Production got off to a rocky start. Screenwriter Ward said the only time he felt any doubt about the film’s potential was when shooting began. He said director George Roy Hill “didn’t like what he did the first week of shooting, and thought it could be better, so he reshot it.” (It was the first sequence in the movie, the one where Hooker and Luther Coleman fleece a mobster in the alley.) Things went smoothly after that, and people praised Hill for running an efficient, happy, and well-organized set.

Hill wanted The Sting to be a stylish film that accurately reflecting not only the feel of 1930s Chicago but also  that of old Hollywood films from that era. Hill, along with Art Director Henry Bumstead and Cinematographer Robert Surtees, devised a color scheme of muted browns and maroons for the film and a lighting design that combined old-fashioned 1930’s-style lighting with some modern tricks of the trade to get the visual look he wanted. Edith Head designed a wardrobe of snappy period costumes for the cast, and artist Jaroslav Gebr created inter-title cards to be used between each section of the film that were reminiscent of the golden glow of old Saturday Evening Post illustrations - a popular publication in the 1930’s.

Hill tried to find locations in Chicago and Los Angeles that had not been touched by modern times to use for many of the scenes. In Los Angeles, locations such as The Green Hotel, the Santa Monica Carousel and The Biltmore Hotel were all used. Chicago's Union Station was also used along with LaSalle Street Station. Producer Tony Bill also contributed to the film's authentic look by helping to round up a number of period automobiles  in the Southern California area.

As he researched old Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s for inspiration, Hill noticed that most of them didn't use a lot of extras in the scenes. "For instance," said Hill as quoted in Andrew Horton's 1984 book The Films of George Roy Hill, "... no extras would be used in street scenes in those films: Jimmy Cagney would be shot down and die in an empty street. So I deliberately avoided using extras."

To complete the effect, Hill made choices for The Sting that would utilize certain stylistic techniques of the 1930’s. For instance, he decided to use an old-fashioned Universal logo from the period at the beginning of the film, immediately evoking a nostalgic tone for The Sting. Hill also employed devices such as editing wipes - a type of film transition where one shot replaces another by travelling from one side of the frame to another.

As he researched old Hollywood gangster films of the 1930s for inspiration, George Roy Hill noticed that most of them didn't use a lot of extras in the scenes. "For instance," said Hill as quoted in Andrew Horton's 1984 book The Films of George Roy Hill, "...no extras would be used in street scenes in those films: Jimmy Cagney would be shot down and die in an empty street. So I deliberately avoided using extras."

Having to shoot location scenes with Paul Newman and Robert Redford - Hollywood's reigning movie stars and sex symbols of the day - proved challenging at times. Crowds would inevitably gather and reactions would be akin to the arrival of The Beatles in 1964. "I used to go see Sinatra at the Paramount in New York when I was a kid," said one observer as the cast and crew shot a scene at Chicago's Union Station, "and, my God, I never saw anything like that. I bet the temperature in here went up 22 degrees when Newman walked in." Added another onlooker at the time, "I never saw anything like it, either. Myself, I think we ought to rope off that center aisle and never let anybody use it again."

The pandemonium seemed to reach a particularly feverish pitch for Paul Newman, often to the amusement of co-star Robert Shaw. "... I did notice that it was Newman everywhere we passed through," said Shaw in a 1973 Rolling Stone interview. "I mean, I picked up about two fans on the way, and those two ladies guided me back to the station, and with great joy they introduced me to people along the way...and none of these absolute layers of girls knew who the hell I was. But they all recognized Newman, to be sure. I mean, everybody would come up and kind of swoon over him, but they didn't in Redford's case, not at all."

Newman made a point along with Robert Redford to never take such attention too seriously and instead focused on the work at hand. To keep each other grounded, Redford and Newman took turns playing practical jokes on each other. There was a good camaraderie between them, which inevitably registered on screen. "What puts Newman and Redford over so well together is as much chemistry as acting," said George Roy Hill according to the 1996 book Paul Newman by Lawrence Quirk. "When they're in the same frame something exciting happens even when they're not talking or even moving."

The movie was filmed on the backlot of Universal studios and the diner in which Hooker meets Lonnegan is the same diner  interior used in Back to the Future (1985) in which Marty McFly first meets his father and calls Doc Brown. Movie magic made it possible for 1930’s Chicago, shot in 1970’s Hollywood, to appear as real as can be.

John Scarne, a one-time magician known as an authority on card games and tricks, was used as a technical consultant and poker game hand double on The Sting.  It simply would have taken far too long to teach Paul Newman how to perform the card magic.

Without a doubt one of the most memorable aspects of The Sting is the ragtime music.  The story is set in 1936, by which time the Scott Joplin piano tunes that serve as its soundtrack—all written between 1902 and 1908—were no longer popular. But there was revived interest in Joplin’s work in the early ’70s, including a new recording of his catalog by pianist Joshua Rifkin that became a million-seller (quite rare for an album of “classical” music). A high-profile analysis of Joplin’s work in The New York Times soon followed, and in 1976 the composer was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his “contributions to American music.” Meanwhile, in the midst of this Joplin-mania, George Roy Hill heard his son playing a Joplin rag on the piano (or, according to other sources, heard Rifkin’s Joplin album) and thought the happy-go-lucky attitude of ragtime would set the perfect tone for The Sting. 

When Hill first approached composer Marvin Hamlisch to adapt Scott Joplin's music for the score of The Sting, Hamlisch was reluctant. He was a composer of original music, after all, and not in the habit of adapting other musicians' work. "I agreed to see a first cut in the screening room," said Hamlisch in his 1992 autobiography The Way I Was. "I quickly realized that this was one of the best pictures I had seen in years...David Ward had written a witty, stylish script, George Roy Hill had directed it faultlessly, and Newman and Redford were the best screen couple in years...One of the things that drew me to The Sting was that George had been shrewd enough to leave little oases without dialogue for the music. He built montages and sequences into the picture for this purpose. Whenever I see patches in a film that are talkless, I'm in heaven." Hamlisch agreed to take on the job.

   Although Hamlisch wasn't a Scott Joplin aficionado, he quickly found several pieces of his that he liked and set about adapting them to suit the film. It took him a mere five days. "Writing an original theme for a film takes time, but that was not the job here," said Hamlisch. "Instead, I chose from preexisting material, and that was much easier. I quickly figured out what went where, adapted the music, timed it, cut it up, and the rest was history." He told his agent he was done, and the agent replied, "Whatever you do, don't tell them you've finished in five days. Call them in three weeks and tell them it's coming along nicely." That is exactly what Hamlisch did.

Hamlisch had nothing but praise for director Hill. "George Roy Hill was what every director should be for a composer. If I told him I had a problem and needed a little more time in a scene to accommodate the music - or a little less - he would try to make the adjustment. He also would ask my opinion about certain scenes in the movie and how they played. That's a rare collaborator."

In addition to winning an Academy Award for his adaptation of the musical score of The Sting, Marvin Hamlisch also won two additional Oscars the same night for his work on The Way We Were.

 The Sting won 6 additional Oscars, including best picture.

 Producer Michael Phillips, later told an interviewer, “Believe it or not, I rehearsed my Oscar speech before we rolled our first shot. It was naive, even though it worked out that I won.” Of course, none of what he had rehearsed made it into his Oscar acceptance speech: “When I got up there, I just babbled.” The screenplay that had given him such confidence won an Oscar, too. 

 Elizabeth Taylor presented the Award for Best Picture. It was the first Universal Pictures film to win the award since 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front In her brief acceptance speech, the then 30-year old Julia Phillips – the first woman to ever win a best picture Oscar - said: "You can imagine what a trip this is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck - I get to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor at the same time."

 Edith Head won her record 8th (and final) Academy Award for best costume design.

Ever since the first foot of film was exposed for what originally were referred to as “chasers,” people have sued producers, writers and directors for plagiarism.  True to form, The Sting prompted at least four separate lawsuits. David W. Maurer sued for plagiarism, claiming the screenplay was based too heavily on his 1940 book The Big Con, about real-life tricksters Fred and Charley Gondorff (note the Newman character’s last name). Universal quickly settled out of court for $300,000, irking screenwriter David S. Ward, who had used many nonfiction books as research material and hadn’t really plagiarized any of them. (It didn’t help that Universal had quoted excerpts from Maurer’s book—properly attributed, of course—in the souvenir booklet they produced as part of the film’s publicity materials.) 

Another lawsuit followed when a company called Followay Productions claimed that since they’d bought exclusive adaptation rights to The Big Con back in 1952, any movie ripped off of that book was ripped off from them, too. (The case was thrown out because Followay failed to get the author to join it.) Paul Newman sued for a refund on California state income taxes that he paid on the money he earned on The Sting, saying he should have been charged the out-of-state rate, not the resident’s rate. (He won.) And Newman and director Hill later sued Universal for lost revenue from VHS sales on The Sting and Slap Shot. How fitting that a movie about money should have inspired so much real-life bickering about it. 

A decade after The Sting, screenwriter David Ward wrote The Sting II for Redford and Newman again, and says George Roy Hill wanted to come back as director. Redford was willing to consider the project, but Newman wanted to leave well enough alone. Universal made the sequel anyway, with Mac Davis and Jackie Gleason in the Redford and Newman roles, respectively (more or less: the characters’ names were altered, and some story details were retroactively changed). Ward wanted to take his name off as writer (or says he did), to no avail. The Sting II was released in 1983, made $6 million, and was never heard from again. 

   As with many great films, The Sting contained lots of memorable lines:

·       "Luther said I could learn from you. I already know how to drink." -  Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) to Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman)

·       "Glad to meet you, kid. You're a real horse's ass." - Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) to Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford)

·       "Not only are you a cheat. You're a gutless cheat as well." - Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) to Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman)’

·       "Sit down and shut up, will you? Try not to live up to all my expectations." -  Phony FBI Agent Polk (Dana Elcar) to Snyder (Charles Durning)

·       "Sorry I'm late. I was taking a crap." -  Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), pretending to be drunk as he arrives at a poker game.

·       "I don't even know you.’  "You know me. I'm the same as you. It's two in the morning and I don't know nobody." -- Loretta (Dimitra Arliss) and Johnny (Robert Redford)

•  "Doyle, I KNOW I gave him four THREES. He had to make a SWITCH. We can't let him get away with that."
  "What was I supposed to do -- call him for cheating better than me, in front of the others?"  Floyd (Charles Dierkop) to Doyle (Robert Shaw)
  
  "Who told you this guy was in here?"
  "Nobody. I just know what kind of woman he likes. Going to check all the joy houses till I find him."
  "Oh, well maybe I could help you, if you tell me his name."
  "I doubt it. Which way are the rooms?"
  "Right through there. But I wouldn't go in there if I were you."
  Billie (Eileen Brennan) to Lt. William Snyder (Charles Durning)

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

The Making of "Sunset Blvd."

“Alright Mr. DeMille: I’m ready for my close-up!

On December 21, 1948, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder turned in the first sixty-one pages of their new screenplay to their bosses as Paramount. The screenplay began with a curt notation: This is the first act of Sunset Blvd Due to the peculiar nature of the project, we ask all our co-workers to regard it as top secret. What was peculiar about the film was its central female character, a batty silent screen star who’d passed her prime. Its narrative structure was also strange. Sunset Blvd. began in a morgue. Its leading man, the film’s narrator, was a cadaver:

An attendant wheels the dead Gillis into the huge, bare, windowless room. Along the walls are twenty or so sheet-covered corpses lying in orderly rows of wheeled slabs with large numbers painted on the walls above each slab. The attendant pushes Gillis into a vacant space. Beyond him, the feet of other corpses stretch from under their sheets: men’s feet, women’s feet, children’s, two or three Negroes - with a linen tag dangling from each left big toe. The attendant exits, switching off the light. For a moment the room is semi-dark, and then as the music takes on a more astral phase, a curious glow emanates from the sheeted corpses.

A MAN’S VOICE: Don’t be scared. There’s a lot of us here. It’s all right.

GILLIS: I’m not scared.

His head doesn’t move, but his eyes slowly wanted to the slab next to him. There, under a partially transparent sheet, lies a fat man aged 60 or so. His eyes are open, too, and directed at Gillis.

FAT MAN: How did you happen to die?

GILLIS: What difference does it make? It’ll be a good joke, lying here like a jigsaw puzzle all scrambled up, with the cops and the Hollywood columnists trying to fit in the wrong pieces.

FAT MAN: Hollywood? You in the movies?

GILLIS: Yeah. Came out in forty-five, to catch me a swimming pool. And by gosh, in the end I got myself one. Only there turned out to be blood in it.

FAT MAN: Were you an actor?

GILLIS: No, a writer. Never had my name on anything big, though. Just a couple of B pictures. One sinker, and the other one - well, that wasn’t so hot either. I was having a tough time making a living.

FAT MAN: It’s your dying I was asking about.

(Gillis chuckles)

GILLIS: Well, I drove down Sunset Boulevard one afternoon. That was my mistake. Maybe I’d better start off with the morning of that day. I’d been out of work for six months. I had a couple of stories out that wouldn’t sell, and an apartment right above Hollywood and Vine that wasn’t paid for . . .

Brackett and Wilder listed their cast of characters along with “the actors we hope to get” to play the roles. For Dan Gillis, they wanted a bright young star - Montgomery Clift. Gloria Swanson, herself a silent star who hadn’t made any movies in a while, would be the demented Norma Desmond. Erich Von Stroheim would appear as her butler Max. The character of Betty, a Paramount script reader, would be played by “a new face,” and Brackett and Wilder hoped that the r ole of Kaufman, a Paramount producer, would be taken by Joseph Calleia. There would also be a number of smaller roles - “movie people, cops, and corpses.”

Magnificently handsome and charismatic, Montgomery Clift had appeared in only two films - Howard Hawks’ Red River and Fred Zinnemann’s The Search when Wilder approached him for the lead in Sunset Boulevard. His third picture, Paramount’s The Heiress (costarring Olivia de Havilland) hadn’t finished filming yet, but the buzz surrounding him was extraordinary. He was a studied, upper-crust 28 year old who assiduously played the r ole of a relaxed bohemian in his public life. The combination was dazzling. Wilder gave him the first section of the screenplay, Clift loved what he read, and agreed to play the role. Paramount’s contract with Clift for The Heiress included options on future films, so all Paramount had to do was exercise the first of these options for Sunset Boulevard and Monty was ready to go. He’d get $5,000 per week for a guaranteed twelve weeks on the film. Clift agreed to report to work in early April, about six weeks after he officially signed on. In the meantime, Billy and Charlie wanted him to stay in Hollywood for story conferences as did Clift’s protective agent, Herman Citron. But Clift, having finished work on The Heiress, was in the mood for a nice vacation, so he flew to Switzerland and went skiing.

Swanson and the Marquis de la Falaise

Clift was a fine match for Gloria Swanson. Hollywood’s hottest young man would play beautifully opposite the Jazz Age’s flashiest, most glamorous woman. Swanson had been a genuine sensation in the 1920s. “You must remember,” said Wilder, “that this was a star who at one time was carried in a sedan from her dressed room to the soundstage. When she married the Marquis de la Falaise and came by boat from Europe to New York and by train from there to Hollywood, people were strewing rose petals on the railroad tracks in her direction. She’d been one of the all-time stars, but when she returned to the screen in “Sunset,” she worked like a dog.” In the film, Wilder gives Norma’s butler a punch line that plays on Swanson’s own erotic allure: She was the greatest of them all. You wouldn’t know; you’re too young. In one week she received seventeen thousand fan letters. Men bribed her hairdresser for a lock of her hair. There was a maharajah who came all the way from India to beg one of her silk stockings. Later he strangled himself with it . . .”

When he described Swanson’s dedicated to her performance, Wilder makes an important point: she was not the crazy diva she played on-screen, but a tough and hard-working actress. But then nobody had ever called Gloria Swanson either lazy or dizzy. Swanson’s movie career appeared to be over, but she had never stopped working. Ironically, one of her last movies had been 1934’s Music in the Air, a Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein musical adapted for the screen by the then-unknown Billy Wilder, who at the time knew so little English that he wrote the screenplay in German and then had it translated.

By the late 1940’s, Swanson was acting in summer stock productions, doing radio shows, and trying to keep her company, Multiprises, from going bankrupt. Still, Swanson continued to consider herself one of the greatest film stars in the world; she’d earned the title in the 1920s, and in the late 1940’s saw no need to give it up. As one contemporary account explained, Gloria was “keeping up appearances by spending $7,000 a year on clothes, which, in her special instance, she regarded as more of a professional expense than an extravagance.”

In June 1948, Swanson began earning $350.00 a week on WPIX radio in New York City. (In the latter 1920s, she was earning $20,000 a week, 52 weeks a year.) When Paramount called her in September to see if she was interested in returning to motion pictures, Swanson naturally assumed it was a bit part and said that she might be able to leave her radio show for two weeks. No, the studio told her, it was for the lead in the picture, and she’d get somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 for a ten- to twelve-week shoot. Swanson said she could be in Hollywood by the first of the year (though Sunset Boulevard didn’t start to roll until April.) She promptly divorced her fifth husband, to whom she had been married less than twelve months, and - according to Swanson, anyway - flew to Hollywood and arrived on the set having no idea of the plot of the picture or the role she was to play.

On the day Swanson return to Paramount Pictures, the studio she had indeed helped build, she found a huge likeness of herself on a billboard near the gate. Paramount’s publicity department was working on a self-promotional campaign to tie the studio in, decidedly obscurely, with the centennial celebration of the 1849 gold rush. The billboard featured a huge comet blazing through the sky leaving pictures of past and present Paramount stars behind it. The size of the picture and its position relative to the comet’s tail was determined by the star’s perceived importance to the studio. At the head of the tail was Gloria Swanson. According to her, the chief casting director explained why: “Baby, am I glad to see you. You took me off a helluva spot! If Id put Crosby’s picture on the front end of the comet, Hope would have blown his top, and Crosby would have had a fit if Hope was up there. Stanwyck or Hutton would’ve scratched my eyes out if one got top billing over the other. You turned out to be a real lifesaver.” “That’s when I knew I was home,” Swanson told the press. “Right back in the jungle up to my ears in a rat race.” A more likely rationale is that the studio had already begun its publicity campaign for Sunset Boulevard. They also wanted Swanson to feel the way Norma Desmond feels when she returns to Paramount in the film, except of course, that Normal Desmond is delusional.

Pola Negri

Brackett reported that he and Billy had never considered anybody else for the part. To the extent that the extended comedy routine that served as Billy’s memory can be trusted, however, Brackett and Wilder originally wanted another old-time star. “For a long time I wanted to do a comedy about Hollywood,” Wilder claimed. “God forgive me, I wanted to have Mae West and Marlon Brando.” He also said they tried Pola Negri: “We called her on the phone, and there was too much Polish accent.” Then they went to Pickfair, Mary Pickford’s immense estate high in the hills. “Brackett began to tell her the story, because he was the more serious one. I stopped him. ‘No, don’t do it,’ I waved him off. She was going to be insulted if we told her she was to play a woman who begins a love affair with a man half her age. I said to her, ‘We’re sorry, but it’s no use. The story gets very vulgar.’”

Frustrated at his lack of success in casting this most particular, most peculiar role, Wilder turned to his colleague and friend, director George Cukor for help. They were sitting in Cukor’s expansive garden drinking tea when Cukor mentioned Swanson. Wilder probably hadn’t thought very much about her since Music in the Air. He’d predicted in the pages of Der Querscnitt (a German literary magazine) that Queen Kelly, the film Swanson made for Erich von Stroheim, would be a huge hit. Little did he know at the time that Swanson, on the other side of the world, was becoming increasingly horrified at such Stoheimian touches as her costar, Tully Marshall, drooling brown tobacco juice on her delicate hand while slipping a wedding ring on her finger. Queen Kelly died before completion; Swanson’s producer/lover, Joseph P. Kennedy (who was, without her knowledge, using Swanson’s money to finance the film) pulled the plug, and Swanson’s fame began a protracted collapse as well.

One of these reasons served doubly as the solution to another problem - the casting of Max, the servile butler who used to be a famous film director. Erich von Stroheim came naturally to mind. von Stroheim did not become a butler; he became an actor and, at times at least, a very good one. Before playing Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo, von Stroheim played the gentleman soldier von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir’s La Grand Illusion. von Stroheim was living in France at the time. Wilder approached him through Paul Kohner, von Stroheim’s agent. von Stroheim responded in a letter to Kohner: “I don’t have to tell you that I would not mind at all working against with ‘witty-Billy.” His last endeavor with me had a tremendous success here in France, or was it my extraordinary popularity here that made his picture go over so big? Ask him.”

Montgomery Clift abruptly decided he didn’t want to do the picture after all. He’d just gotten through with The Heiress and didn’t want to play any more love scenes with yet another older woman. What Clift specifically said was that he didn’t think he could be convincing.

Sunset Blvd. was getting ready to roll, and Clift’s sudden departure caused a crisis. Wilder and Brackett (who was also producing) had to debate the merits of various available Paramount stars, someone who could step into a difficult, high-profile part quickly. The most promising was William Holden, who had been kicking around the studio for years. Holden had been great in Golden Boy, but that film was already ten years old. On the other hand, the fact that he’d never really delivered on his Gold Boy promise actually worked to his advantage, for Sunset Blvd. even though he been in pictures of over a decade, audiences still didn’t know William Holden. Paramount paid Brackett handsomely for producing Sunset Blvd - about $130,000 - but only for producing it; Wilder earned all the money for writing the film.

Since this was a film about an industry they knew and loved, they wanted to suffuse it with familiar people and spaces. In this spirit, Brackett and Wilder hired the nudgy Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skulsky to appear in a sequence set at Schwab’s Drugstore in the heart of downtown Hollywood. Enticing Skilsky to lay himself wasn’t difficult; as Brackett told him, “It won’t be Schwab’s without Skolsksy.”

Hedda and Louella

Sunset Blvd’s script also contained lots of references to real people, each of whom had to agree to the use of their names. The writers wanted Norma to recognize one of the juicers (industry slang for an electrician) and greet him like a long-lost friend. “Hog-Eye!” Norma cries looking up to where the lights are. In fact, “Hog-Eye” was real - it was the nickname of a former Paramount electricians named John Hetman, who didn’t mind the reference. Billy and Charlie also tried to get two criers for the film’s operatic final scenes, not just one - Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons - each on the phone, one upstairs, one down, neither of them giving up the phone and saying ‘Get off the line, you bitch! I was here first!’ “Hedda I got easily, but Louella knew quite well she would lose that duel because Hedda was a former actress and she would wipe the floor with her.”

(Fun Fact: the magnificent limousine Norma’s butler Max (Erich von Stroheim) drove on to the Paramount lot was a 1929 Isotta-Fraschini 8A which Norma tells Gillis “cost me $28,000.” Turns out von Stroheim did not know how to drive, so the car scenes had to be filmed with the Isotta-Fraschini being towed or by using process shots. Perhaps that’s the reason for William Holden's acute embarrassment in those scenes; it was more than just acting--imagine being towed up and down Sunset Boulevard in that car with Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim in costume!)

The Alto-Nido Apartments at 1851 North Ivar at the top of the hill at Franklin would work well for the drab barracks of an unemployed screenwriter. For Norma Desmond’s mansion, they had to look farther afield than the 10,000 block of Sunset Blvd.,, on which the fictitious house is situated in the script. They found it, about six miles away, at the northwest corner of Wilshire and Irving Blvds. The immense heap of a house, built in 1924 for the then-astronomical sum of $225,000 ($3.7 million in current dollars), at that time belonged to one of J. Paul Getty’s ex-wives, who hadn’t lived there for several years. There was no pool, so Paramount built one. (The ex-Mrs. Getty was said to be thrilled to get a free swimming pool, but the pool the studio built had next to no plumbing and was never used for swimming once filming was completed.)

Costuming Gloria Swanson for the role of Norma Desmond presented designer Edith Head (Edith Posener) with a tricky set of problems. Norma had to remain blissfully unaware that she was a throwback. Thus her clothes had to be both in style and out-of-date all at once. Head’s ingenious solution was to combine Jazz Age materials with so-called New-Look styling.

Billy Haines & Jimmy Shields

The script was still incomplete when the production of Sunset Blvd. officially opened on April 18. First came sequences at the Desmond mansion. On may 3, the scene in which Norma invites a few old friends to her house to play a rubber or two of bridge was filmed. Holden’s character nicknames them “the waxworks,” and they look and act accordingly. In one of the film’s crueler touches, the “waxworks” are played by three old, washed-up movie stars: H.B. Warner, Anna Q. Nillson, and the perhaps the greatest silent comedian of them all, Buster Keaton. Keaton was actually one of Hollywood’s best bridge players. He was also a severe alcoholic whose once-handsome face had turned puffy and sagging. Brackett and Wilder had approached another former star, William Haines, but Haines turned them down; he was content with his second career as one of Hollywood’s most successful interior designers. (Billy Haines was an immense silent star in the later 1920s. Louis B. Mayer signed him to a million dollar contract . . . with a single stipulation: that he get rid of his “husband,” Jimmy Shields. By then, the two had been together for about a decade. Billy said no, and was quickly fired. Thanks to the assistance of John Crawford, who asked Billy and Jimmy to do all the interior design on her new mansion, the two became well known. The peak of their career was when Ambassador Walter Annenberg has them to do over the Court of Saint James in England. Billy died at age 73; within two months, Jimmy committed suicide. In his note, he stated, simply, that he could not live without the love of his life. The two were together for more than a half century, and were generally known as “Hollywood’s happiest couple.”)

The 3 silent stars who did agree to caricature themselves in Sunset Blvd. worked for precisely one day. Nillson was called at 7:00 AM; the others at 9:00 AM. they performed diligently like the professionals they had once been, needing two or three takes per setup. By 5:25,Wilder was done with them and they were has-beens once again.

It was von Stroheim’s idea to have Max write all of Norma’s fan letters. After filming DeMille’s scenes, Wild is said to have patted C.B. on the band said “Very good, my boy. Leave your name with my secretary. I may have a small part for you in my next picture.”

Sunset Blvd. wrapped in late in late July. August, September, and October were taken up by editing. By October, Sidney Skolsky was on the cutting room floor. Viewing the film with several preview audiences, Wilder concluded that other scenes weren’t quite right either, and the production was forced to reopen yet again on October 20 for location shooting. Brackett and Wilder had decided to preview the film somewhere other than Los Angeles. It was a matter of self-protection. “““We didn’t want Hollywood people to see the picture because it was about Hollywood,” Wilder explained. So they took it to Evanston, Illinois. It didn’t turn out too well. They tried another preview - this time in Poughkeepsie. The Great Neck, Long Island preview began badly as well. Wilder began to see what it was that the audience particularly didn’t like; the film’s opening, which takes place in a morgue.

Wilder was forced to agree. He cut the whole morgue scene out of the picture and filmed a new traveling camera shot of the Sunset Blvd. pavement (and a tilt up to the police cars) and a shot of the cops arriving at the Sunset driveway. Finally, he added a new voice-over narration by Joe Gillis. Then we see Joe, in the pool, obviously drowned.

Louis B. Mayer, who saw the film before its premiere, stormed out of the screening room in a rage. The other movie people may have loved watching Hollywood shoot itself in the back on-screen, but MGM’s in-house emperor apparently took it personally. Storming out of the theater, Mayer is said to have shrieked at Wilder, “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”
When Mayer attacked the creators of Sunset Blvd., he did appear to be taking his ire out on the immigrant, not the native-born Republican. Charlie Brackett, still president of the Academy, appears to have escaped the incident unscathed.(Unlike the Jewish Billy Wilder, who  had immigrated to America from Austria-Hungary-via Paris in 1934 at age 28, Charlie Brackett’s ultra blue-blood family had arrived in America in 1629.  Charlie had degrees from both Williams and Harvard.)

The studio sent Swanson on a national promotional tour. Paramount paid her $1,000 per week. When the Oscar nominations were announced in February 1951, Sunset Blvd. was named in eleven separate categories, including Best Picture, and Best Director. Erich von Stroheim was nominated as Best Supporting Actor and responded angrily. The reason? He told the press that he was simply“too big for that category,” and even threatened a lawsuit.

For Wilder and Brackett, the problem was much more clearly defined. Its name was All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz’s highly polished back-stage drama, starring Bette Davis. When the Best Picture award was announced, it was Mankiewicz, not Wilder who got up to accept the Oscar trophy.

And yet, Sunset Blvd. is still considered one of the best - if not the best - films Hollywood ever made about itself . . . and all the “lovely people in the dark.”

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Louis Wolheim: The Ugliest Character Actor in Hollywood History

In one of her earliest short stories - The Man Who Came Home - Edna Ferber described a character named Birdie as having “. . . a face that looked like a huge mistake.” She could easily have been referring to actor the great Louis Wolheim, who was, hands down, the ugliest character actor in Hollywood history. Universally respected as an actor’s actor, and widely known as an erudite “doll of a man” Wolheim was invariably cast as a brute because of his “huge mistake of a face.” Born into an Orthodox family in Russia in 1880, Wolheim, arrived in New York in 1888 with his parents Elias & Lena Wolheim, where they would eventually be blessed with nine more children.

A brilliant student who spoke fluent French, German, Spanish and Yiddish (his mother- tongue), Louis enrolled at the City College of New York; after 2 years, he transferred to Cornell University, where he earned a degree in engineering – and played varsity football. That’s how he originally injured his nose. However, according to a contemporary issue of Photoplay magazine, Louis had his nose restored to its original glory surgically, and celebrated the occasion with a party at an Ithaca bar. After a bit of drinking, he and one of his guests got into a fight, during which he broke his nose a second time. (Wolheim told the fan magazine that he won the fight.)

Following graduation, Wolheim remained in Ithaca where he became a highly popular and successful math tutor. One of his pupils was future movie star Alolphe Menjou, who later described Wolheim as having “a mind like a calculating machine and a face that looked as though it had been run over by a truck." (Ironically, it was the handsome, debonair Menjou who, in 1931, replaced Wolheim in his starring role in the original version of “The Front Page,” when Wolheim unexpectedly died.) Wolheim spent a couple of years in Mexcio working as a mining engineer and then returned to Ithaca, where he sold cigars at a local hotel. One day in mid-1914, Wolheim was spotted by actor Lionel Barrymore, who was in town shooting a two-reel picture for D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Studio. (n.b.: in 1914, Barrymore starred or appeared in 14 silent films). Barrymore, according to the legend, advised Louis that “with that face, you could make a fortune in the theater.” Shortly thereafter, Wolheim began his acting career, first as an uncredited extra in dozens of shorts and serials.

With the help of Lionel and his younger brother John, Wolheim eventually transferred his face and untrained theatrical talent on the stage, where from 1919 to 1925, he appeared in 10 Broadway plays. Keeping a finger in film, he also landed a reasonably meaty role in John’s 1922 film Sherlock Holmes, costarring Roland Young, William Powell, Hedda Hopper and, as Professor Moriarty, Gustav von Seyffertitz. (A trivial note: Von Seyffertitz, who by the outbreak of WWI was already a star of note in Hollywood, took the advice of his producer, Jesse Lasky, who thought it wise to change his name to something far, far less Teutonic. In 1915 and beyond, Americans were anti everything “Hunnish.” Thus, “sauerkraut” became “liberty cabbage,” the teaching of German in public school legally banned, and Gustav von Seyffertitz was renamed “C. Butler Clonblough.” He wouldn’t go back to using his birth name until 1919.)

Shortly after completing his brief role in Sherlock Holmes, Wolheim met playwright Eugene O'Neill by chance at a Barrymore thrown party to celebrate the opening of The Claw which starred Lionel and opened in October 1921. (The Claw was written by the French playwright Henri Bernstein, and was translated into English by none other than Louis Wolheim). O’Neil was immediately taken with Wolheim, and cast him as the lead in his newest play, an expressionist one act, eight scene piece called The Hairy Ape. The play, which confused most theatre-goers, was most notable for the newcomer playing the lead role of “Yank,” a barrel-chested trouble-maker who works on board a trans-Atlantic ship. It had a successful run on Broadway in 1921-1922;  O’Neil and Wolheim would would remain lifelong friends. Wolheim, with his “face that was a mistake” soon became familiar to Broadway audiences; in 1925, he costarred as Captain Flagg to William Boyd’s Sgt. Quirt in the fabulously successful What Price Glory? From there, it was a quick leap to Hollywood where the roles were bigger, the work quite steady and the paychecks far larger.

In 1927, Wolheim costarred in Two Arabian Knights, alongside his What Price Glory? costar William Boyd (the future “Hopalong Cassidy), and Mary Astor. The film, which won the first - and only - Academy Award for “Best Direction of a Comedy Picture” (Lewis Milestone, nee Lev Milstein) was produced by the then 22-year old Howard Hughes. (Trivia Break: Two Arabian Knights is the only film in Academy history to win a Best Director Prize [it wasn’t yet called an “Oscar”] without being nominated in any other category. Milestone would go on to win a second best director’s awards [1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front] - costarring Louis Wolheim - and be nominated for a third - 1931’s The Front Page - which, as mentioned above, originally starred Wolheim who, following his unexpected death, was replaced by his old Cornell student, Alophe Menjou.)

 From 1914-1931, Louis Wolheim appeared played in 49 silent and 8 talking motion pictures. Throughout his relatively short career, he made films for everyone from Wharton, Rolfe Photoplays to Biograph, Goldwyn, RKO, D.W. Griffith Productions and Universal. Wolheim’s best-known, most beloved performance was that of the German sergeant Kaczkinsky (Kat) in Universal’s all-time great anti-war film “All Quiet on the Western Front,” in which he costarred with the then 22-year old Lew Ayres. The film had a lasting effect on both Ayres and Wolheim: it turned the young Ayres into a lifelong pacifist, which all but ruined his career when he declared himself a conscientious objector in WWII - theatres refused to screen his films. For Wolheim, it put a dramatic bee in his bonnet. Seeking to expand his cinematic range by improving his looks, he began making arrangements for having his nose fixed by a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. However, his studio at the time, United Artists, went to court for a restraining order to stop him.

Typecast throughout his career as a gangster, bully or prisoner, off-screen Wolheim was known for his modesty and for always being ready to help friends in need. After his death, Photoplay Editor James R. Quirk wrote, “His hard-boiled face was a mask; he was a child who never quite knew what it was all about. I think he felt he would live to help a great world-change for the better. He had a passion to make the world better. He believed no one should get more from life than than he gave to it.”

Louis Wolheim died from stomach cancer on February 18, 1931, just six weeks shy of his 51st birthday. He is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, right next to the unmarked grave of Frank Zappa.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

What's In a Name?

Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke

In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system (c. 1915-1957), each studio was a self-contained universe. Within its walls one could find carpentry shops and costumers; hairdressers, wigmakers and dance studios, commissaries, set building shops, sound stages and recording facilities, furniture and antique warehouses, writers, producers and directors wings One could build - and then tear down - complete mock-ups of Manhattan and London, Paris and a North African Casbah, Kansas, Casablanca and Constantinople. Most studios owned their own ranches out in the San Fernando Valley where Westerns and wars, rural dramas and jungle pictures could be shot. For actors under contract, the studio was a stern family at which you would be taught how to dress, ride a horse, sing, dance, and speak with a French, British or Mexican accent. The studio would also teach you the rudiments of fencing, create your (mostly false) biography, and keep you out of trouble. Each studio had its own police department that - along with your personal press agent - would work with the municipal cops and local papers to keep your name off the front page if you got into trouble.

The studios even renamed you if the name you were born with were either too ethnic or too long to fit on a marquee. I have written elsewhere about my family getting “legally Stoned” back when Erica and I were 7 or 8.

For those of us who grew up in that world, we were well aware of what people’s real names were. We also knew many of them without their wigs and toupees, false teeth makeup . . . just plain people who happened to photograph well.

Let’s see how many you can figure out. First, a list of real names; then a second list of their Hollywood names. Have a blast! (BTW: this list is by no means exhaustive, so don’t write in and ask “Why didn’t you include . . .?)

First, some actors:

1. Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke

2. Bernice Frankel

3. Naftaly Birnbaum

4. Spangler Arlington Brugh

5. Bernard Zanville

6. Lucille Fay Lesueur

7. Leo Jacob

8. Howard Silverblatt

9. Leonard Franklin Slye & Frances Octavia Smith

10. Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman

11. Jacob Lincoln Freund

12. Jacob Julius Garfinkle

13. Lyova Haskell Rosenthal

14. Frederic Austerlitz Jr. & Virginia Katherine McMath

15. Zvi Mosheh Skikne

16. Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler

17. Jerome Lester Horwitz

18. Samuel Horwitz

19. Madeline Gail Wolfson

20. David Daniel Kaminksy

21. László Lowenstein

22. Natalie Hershslag

23. Paul Sternberg

24. Arthur Leonard Rosenberg

25. Winona Laura Horowitz

26. Emanuel Goldenberg

27. Sophia Kosow

28. Simone Henriette Charlotte Kaminker

29. Jill Arlyn Oppenheim

30. Gerschon Lichtenstein

31. Harold Hochstein

32. Shirley Schrift

33. Isaiah Edwin Leopold

34. Dino Crocetti & Joseph Levitch

35. Ruby Stevens

36. Liliy Chauchoin

37. Harlean Carpantier

    Next, some directors:

38. Reuben Sax

39. Leib Milstein

40. Michael Igor Peschkowsky

41. Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz

42. Wilhelm Weiller

43. Allen Konigsberg

    Lastly, some producers and screenwriters:

44. Abraham Goodman

45. Clifford Gorodetsky

46. Dorothy Rothschild

47. Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum

48. Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff

49. Salomea Steuermann

50. Nathan Weinstein

51. Robert Shapera

52. Eliezer “Laiser” Zeleznik

53. Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen

54. Harold Brent Walinsky

55. Walter Feuchtwanger

56. Shmuel Gelbfisch

    OK: Let’s see how you did . .

    1. Mary Astor

    2. Bea Arthur

    3. George Burns

    4. Robert Taylor

    5. Dane Clark

    6. Joan Crawford

    7. Lee J. Cobb

    8. Howard Da Silva

    9. Roy Rogers & Dale Evans

    10. Douglas Fairbanks

    11. John Forsythe

    12. John Garfield

    13. Lee Grant

    14. Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

    15. Laurence Harvey

    16. Hedy Lamarr

    17. “Curly Joe”Howard

    18. Shemp Howard

    19. Madeline Kahn

    20. Danny Kaye

    21. Peter Lorre

    22. Natalie Portman

    23. Paul Stewart

    24. Tony Randall

    25. Winona Rider

    26. Edward G. Robinson

    27. Sylvia Sidney

    28. Simone Signoret

    29. Jill St. John

    30. George E. Stone

    31. Harold Stone

    32. Shelly Winters

    33. Ed Wynn

    34. Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis

    35. Barbara Stanwyck

    36. Claudette Colbert

    37. Jean Harlow

    38. Richard Brooks

    39. Lewis Milestone

    40. Mike Nichols

    41. Jerome Robbins

    42. William Wyler

    43. Woody Allen

    44. Abby Mann

    45. Clifford Odets

    46. Dorothy Parker

    47. Ayn Rand

    48. Irwin Shaw

    49. Salka Viertel

    50. Nathaniel West

    51. Robert Evans

    52. Lewis Selznick

    53. Michael Todd

    54. Hal Wallace

    55. Walter Wanger

    56. Samuel Goldwyn

One of these days, we’ll produce another list. Until then, meet you on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Do be sure to stop in at Musso & Frank Grill (now celebrating its 100th birthday) for lunch. Yum . . .

Copyright©2019 K.F. Stone (née Kurt Franklin Schimberg)

A Horse Is a Horse (Of Course Of Course)

Tom Mix and Tony

I gotta admit that movie Westerns are still one of my guilty pleasures. As a kid I was fan of both Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger, delivered newspapers to both Milburn Stone (old “Doc Adams” of Gunsmoke fame) and perennial bad guy Jack Elam, was mesmerized by our down-the-street neighbor John Anderson (who played Abraham Lincoln on at least three occasions), and was family friends with Bill Williams (Kit Carson), his wife Barbara Hale (Della Street) and son William Katt (The Greatest American Hero). As kids, we spent quite a bit of time hanging out at “Corriganville,” a wonderful Western town in nearby Simi Valley where dozens upon dozens of Cowboy movies were filmed in the 40s and 50s, and the Iverson Movie Ranch (situated in the Santa Susana Pass just above Chatsworth, where everyone from Buster Keaton and Hopalong Cassidy to Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger and John Wayne shot movies. (Particularly well-known is a section of the Iverson Ranch known as the “Garden of the Gods"“; even though you’ve likely never heard of it, you’ve seen it a million times . . . everyone shot Westerns there.

Ever since the first cowboy star, “Broncho Billy” Anderson (Max Aronson) rode onto the silver screen in 1903, their horses played an integral role; they became teams to such an extent that saying “Tom Mix” without adding . . . and Tony” was as unthinkable as uttering the name “Romeo” and forgetting to add “. . . and Juliette.”) Of all the horses of my childhood, none could hold a candle to Roy Rogers’ magnificent Palomino, “Trigger.” Hollywood Brats of the post-War era will well remember “Uncle Ben’s Kiddie Park,” way out Van Nuys Blvd. in the Panorama City section of the San Fernando Valley. “Uncle Ben” had a pretty good collection of tame equines of all colors and sizes. Everyone’s favorite was, of course, a magnificent Palomino who could easily have passed for “Trigger’s” twin. We were so young and naive that we didn’t even know if this “Trigger” was a girl or a boy; we never thought to check under or behind its tail. We would wait in line for up to two hours just for the chance to spend ten or fifteen minutes riding this wondrous creature . . . wearing our Roy Rogers hat and spurs and imagining Dale Evans and “Buttermilk” riding alongside. Ah, those were the days.  We were so young, so innocent and naive; we had no idea that kids around the world didn’t live in such proximity to our heroes.

As already mentioned, the horses these cinematic cowboys rode became stars in their own right.  Despite the fact that at first, the Arkansas-born Broncho Billy didn’t know whether to mount a horse from the right or left, (it’s the left), “Ranger” became his costar in more than 350 one- and two-reel films.  As time progressed, the horses became more and more famous:  For more than twenty-five years,  the most famous horses in Hollywood were Tom Mix’s “Tony” (pictured above), William S. Hart’s “Fritz,” (shown below on left) Hoot Gibson’s variously named “Goldie,” “Midnight,” “Starlight,” “Mutt,” and “Pal” (not to mention “Silver”); Ken Maynard’s “Tarzan,” Richard Dix’s “Dice,” Hopalong Cassidy’s “Topper,” Gene Autry’s “Champion” and Audie Murphy’s “Rebel”. Without question “Silver” was the most popular of all equine names. For in addition to the Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore’s horse), Sunset Carson, Whip Wilson, and the aforementioned Hoot Gibson all had horses bearing the same name. 

In some cases, the actors actually owned the horses they rode on screen.  Most notable were Roy Rogers and Trigger, Dale Evans and “Buttermilk.” and John Wayne and “Dollar.”  But John Wayne did not have the financial wherewithal to purchase or care for a horse until later on in his career.  And here hangs a tale . . .

John Wayne (Marion Michael Morrison) and his football team buddy Ward Bond  played for the University of Southern California in the late 1920s.  They were spotted by director John Ford who liked them, and hired the two to move furniture from one scene to another.  Eventually, Ford started using the pair as extras in crowd scenes.  After appearing in 20 unaccredited  bits at various studios between 1926 and 1930, Morrison (by now renamed “John Wayne”) was hired for the lead in Howard Hawks’  1930 film ”The Big  Trail,” which was an absolute bomb.  Ford, who was furious with Wayne, let his protege  suffer through more than 60 third—rate roles for minor-league producers until,  to  Ford’s way of thinking, Wayne was ready for stardom.  That would not come until 1939, when Ford  cast   Wayne as “The Ringo Kid,” in Stagecoach, which would make  eventually make Wayne a star.  During his cinematic apprenticeship, Wayne appeared in dozens of westerns, some even  “starring” him as a character  called “Singing Sandy.”  At the time of his cinematic apprenticeship,  he rode a horse called “Duke.”  Eventually, when he became a star, his nickname would also be “Duke.”  Within the Hollywood  community, this nickname was a bit of a insult.  In referring to him as “Duke” Wayne, it was a way of  proclaiming that he was  no more an actor than his horse.  To this day, it is likely that few understand its genesis.

It helps to be a “Hollywood  Brat.”

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Hollywood Hates Hollywood

Ben Hecht

Shortly after arriving out west, the witty, brilliantly prolific screenwriter Ben Hecht (The Front Page, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred) began referring to Hollywood as “The land of mink-lined swimming pools and plastic palm tree,” and defining “starlet” as the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel. Not to be outdone, the equally witty Dorothy Parker (A Star is Born, Saboteur, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman) noted that the only ‘ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.   The two were by no means alone in their lowly, utterly sarcastic assessment of the world’s film capitol.  William Faulkner called Hollywood A place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.  And then there was Fred Allen, who claimed You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

When it comes to having a jaundiced view of the movie industry, nothing and no one is more jaded – or funnier – than Hollywood itself.  And when Hollywood makes films about Hollywood . . . watch out! 

What follows are a handful of Golden Age films which, in my humble opinion, are among the greatest (though not necessarily best-known) exemplars of classic Hollywood’s disdain for the very industry which, in the words of Marilyn Monroe will pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and a nickle fore your soul . . .

On September 24, 1930, a new play, the first collaboration of two young writers named George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, which was co-owned by Sam Harris and Irving Berlin. It was called Once in a Lifetime, and went on to have a run of 406 performances, which in the early 1930’s was tremendous. This was a farce based on what took place in Hollywood just after the introduction of sound. For many great stars, sound meant the end of their Hollywood careers. Many did not speak English; many had voices and/or accents which simply didn’t go with their onscreen images. Hollywood’s response was to import as many Broadway actors - masters of proper diction - as possible along with a strange crowd who called themselves “elocutionists.” It was their job to teach the formerly silent how to speak. The play was an absolute hoot. And because it savagely prodded both Hollywood moguls - many of whom could barely speak English themselves - and director, it was widely assumed that no studio would ever dare turn it into a motion picture.

They were wrong. Universal’s diminutive “Uncle”Carl Laemlle not only bought the rights from Kaufman and Hart; he turned it into a howl of a movie which began with a self-serving crawler which proclaimed:

When I bought the moving picture rights to “Once in a Lifetime,” the stage play which so mercilessly and hilariously poked fun at Hollywood and its motion picture people, the critics said I would not dare make use of its best material on the screen.  It was too funny, they said, and it would make the world laugh at us!  I pity the man who cannot enjoy a laugh at his own expense. So I decided that if I could make the world in times like these, it would be a great thing to do.  I now leave it to you to judge whether I have spared the movies in translating the great stage success to the screen.  Carl Laemmle, President Universal Pictures.

Laemmle’s picture, which starred Jack Oakie, Sidney Fox, Aileen McMahon and Gregory Ratoff as the Goldwynesque producer Herman Glogauer, (What did they have to go and make pictures talk for? Things were going along fine. You couldn't stop making money - even if you turned out a good picture you made money!), the film brought in a fortune at the box office. Almost unknown today, it is worth a look. Its satiric look at a Hollywood in transition from silence to caterwauling is more than worth the price of admission. (You can watch the movie on YouTube below)

One of the most oft-filmed yarns about Hollywood is once again up for an Academy Award: A Star is Born, this time starring Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper and Sam Elliott. And while most film buffs consider the 1937 version starring Janet Gaynor, Frederic March, Adolphe Menjou and Andy Devine to be the original (followed by the 1954 reprise and 1976 musical starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, what they likely do not know is the true original was 1932’s What Price Hollywood? produced by 30-year old David O. Selznick, directed by the 33-year old George Cukor and starring Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman. The Oscar nominated screenplay by Jane Murfin and Adela Rogers St. Johns (it lost to Frances Marion’s The Champ), tells the story of waitress Mary Evans (Bennett) who is discovered by - and turned into a top-flight star - by the dipsomaniacal director Max Carey (Sherman), only to see her career soar as his hits rock bottom.

Originally meant to star “The It Girl,” Clara Bow, by 1932, she was going through too many psychological traumas to handle the role, thus it went to Constance Bennett. Originally based on the relationship between twenties’ megastar Colleen Moore and her then husband, director John McCormick, the film did not make back its investment. Nonetheless, it did manage to portray Hollywood’s seedy underbelly in a way almost never before seen or screened. The only real difference between this film and the various A Star is Born repeats is that here, the young, up-and-coming star does never marries the drunk, who, rather than being a star losing his career to alcohol, is rather her director. Regardless, it portrays Hollywood cupidity - success at any price - as hauntingly as any film ever made.

In 1936, Paramount producer Adolph Zukor and director Robert Florey came out with Hollywood Boulevard, which dealt with the extraordinarily destructive power of Hollywood gossip magazines.  Starring John Halliday, Marsha Hunt (our longtime neighbor who is still alive and now going on 102 years old), Robert Cummings and more than a dozen down-on-their-luck former silent screen stars, Hollywood Boulevard is an expose of scandal-and-gossip magazines of the era, in which has-been actor John Blakeford (John Halliday) agrees to write his memoirs for a magazine-publisher. One review of the film was entitled The Dirt Brigade,  which just about says it all.  Hollywood Boulevard, which also contains a murder mystery sub-plot, is mostly an attack on the cruelties of Hollywood in the manner in which the town turns its back on former stars.  Many of the film’s supernumerary and bit actors (e.g. Frances X. Bushman, Charles Ray, Maurice Costello, Betty Compson, Mae Marsh, William Farnum) were, at one time, among the most popular and highest paid “superstars” of the silent era . . . many earning in excess of $10,000 a week (at a time when a decent annual income was $1,250.00).  For this film, few of them were listed in the credits, and were paid no more than $5.00.  That’s Hollywood; that’s Hollywood Boulevard.

Then there is the best, most spot-on Hollywood novel ever written: Bud Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? The novel, first published in 1941, tells the rags-to-riches story of Sammy Glick, the conquistador of the gutter, who steps on and over any- and everyone in his path in order to make it to the pinnacle of Hollywood success. Inspired partly on the life of his father, early Hollywood mogul B.P. Schulberg (1892-1957) and partly on the thousand octane writer/producer Jerry Wald (1911-1962) this ultimate Hollywood novel follows Sammy from the Brooklyn to Beverly Hills. Sammy is an amoral narcissist who is quick to pilfer and plagiarize the work of others, adapt novels he’s never read, and rip the heart and guts out of anyone who gets in his way. Most every character in the novel - writers Al Manheim and Julian Blumberg, producer Sidney Fineman, Sammy’s brother Israel - are Jewish.  Nonetheless, at the time the novel was in its final stage of rewrites, so the story goes, producer Samuel Goldwyn offered Schulberg a lot of money to not have it published because Goldwyn felt that the author was "doublecrossing the Jews" and perpetuating anti-Antisemitism by making Sammy Glick so venal.   

Despite the fact that What Makes Sammy Run? is a seminal Hollywood novel which was turned into a smash Broadway musical (starring Steve Lawrence as Sammy, Robert Alda as Al Manheim and Sally Ann Howes as Al’s girlfriend Kit, it has yet to be made into a theatrical film.  There have been two television presentations: in 1949, there was a live version (the Philco Television Theatre) starring Jose Ferrer, and a two-part 1959 television treatment starring Larry Blyden, John Forsythe Barbara Rush and Dina Merrill.  

According to a 2001 article in Variety, DreamWorks paid US$2.6 million to acquire the rights to the novel from Warner Brothers for a proposed movie version starring and/or directed by Ben Stiller, although production was never begun. Budd Schulberg, who died in 2009 at age 95, told The Jewish Daily Forward in 2006 that he doubted a film would ever be made, saying "I still think there's a sense that it's too anti-industry." In a 2009 newspaper interview, Schulberg quoted Steven Spielberg as saying that the book was "anti-Hollywood and should never be filmed."  

The quintessence of Hollywood’s historic hate for itself can be summed up in two marvelous quotes, plus a final thought from Sammy Glick:

From Walter Winchell: Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation.

From Johnny Carson: In Hollywood, if you don’t have a shrink, people think you’re crazy.

Sammy Glick: Going through life with a conscience is like driving your car with the brakes on.

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Cinematic Chemistry: That Certain Something . . . Part 1

Ever since the days when most of films were shot in New York, the vast majority of Westerns in Ft. Lee New Jersey and “movies” was the term used for the people on the screen or sheet (for after all, they moved) producers have been on the lookout for cinematic couples who possessed that indescribable something called chemistry. It has never mattered whether the chemistry was comedic or romantic, musical or slapstick; urban or western. All producers knew is that couples possessed of cinematic chemistry frequently caused cash registers to overflow.

John Bunny & Flora Finch

Without question, the movies’ first “chemical success” was a pair of physically mismatched actors (like Laurel and Hardy and briefly, Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton) who thoroughly hated one another - both on screen and in real life. They were the short, morbidly obese John Bunny (1863-1915) and the tall cadaverous Flora Finch (1867-1940). Between 1909 and 1915. the two appeared in an incredible 160 one- and two-reel films together. Their films were all made by the long-forgotten Vitagraph Company. And because these flicks were silent, their popularity was literally global. Costarring in films with titles like The New Stenographer (1910), The Subsiding of Mrs. Nag (1911) and A Cure for Pokeritis (1912), these fan favorites quickly became known as Bunnyfinches. He was jolly and enjoyed a good time; she was prudish and taciturn. The secret of their success was likely that the hatred they had for one another in “real” life carried over into “reel” life as well. By 1912, they were the most popular and highest-paid players in the world. When Bunny succumbed to Bright’s Disease at age 52, he was mourned by tens of millions of fans the world over. Ironically, Flora Finch, did not mourn his passing, didn’t even show up at his funeral . . .

Harold Lockwood & May Allison

During “The Great War” (WWI), the most popular romantic pairing, without question, was Harold Lockwood and May Allison. The chemistry between these two had much of the world believing they had to be married in real life - which definitely was not the case; Harold was married to Alma Jones, and May did not marry until several years after Harold had died. And when she did marry, it was to James Quirk, the editor and publisher of one of the earliest film fan magazines, Photoplay. Between 1916 and 1918, when Lockwood died of the Spanish Flu, the two made 22 feature-length films together, the most famous being David Harum Never mind that the plots of their films were all but indistinguishable; the public saw them as the ideal of romantic love. He was a boy scout - loyal and true - while she was as pure as the driven snow. After Lockwood’s death (he died at age 31), Allison’s career was all but over. Although she lived until 1989 (dying at age 99), she had not been on screen for more than 60 years. At yet, to serious movie buffs until this very day, the names Lockwood and Allison are fondly remembered for having possessed that “certain something.”

From time to time, studios attempted to make ‘teams” out of actors who turned out to have less than a gram of chemistry. Mack Sennett tried to pair a novice Charlie Chaplin with first, veteran Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and then top-flight comedienne Mabel Normand (whom film historians would eventually tab ‘the female Chaplin’). And when he moved on from Sennett’s “Keystone Comedies” to Bronco Billy’s “Essanay Pictures,” the company attempted to team him with the cross-eyed Ben Turpin in two two reelers made two weeks apart in February 1915: His New Job and A Night Out. None caught on; from virtually the first moment he stood before a camera, Chaplin had an instinctive knowledge of what he could accomplish on his own. His best chemistry came when he called all the shots . . .

Charles Farrell & Janet Gaynor

The reigning “chemical” stars of the late 1920s and early 1930s were sweet, wholesome yet gritty Janet Gaynor (who won the first Academy Award for Best Actress) and big, brawny Charles Farrell. After taking the world by storm in their first film, 1927’s Seventh Heaven, the pair made another 11 romantic films together over the next 7 years - the last being Change of Heart (1934). Today, Janet Gaynor is best known for playing Esther Victoria Blodgett (aka “Vicki Lester”) in the second of 5 versions of A Star is Born (most film historians hold that the 1932 RKO-Pathé production of What Price Hollywood? starring Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman was actually the first.) Today, Charlie Farrell is best-known - if remembered at all - for the mid 1950’s television show My Little Margie, in which he played Vern Albright, the father of Margie, played by Gale Storm. Gaynor and Farrell’s chemistry was that of young, first-time love . . . which people of any age can and do easily identify with. That they could maintain this chemistry into their early ‘30s was remarkable. Also, their films kept Fox from going bankrupt . . .

As the major studios got larger and more powerful, they had the ability to stockpile tens of dozens of actors and actresses and spend the time and money required to create cinematic identities and occasionally, teams abounding in chemistry. Among the most successful such pairings were William Powell and Myrna Loy who, between 1934 and 1947, costarred in 14 films - including 6 in the fabled “Thin Man” series. Prior to getting together (1934’s Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable), Hollywood had typecast Powell as either a bad guy or a suave swindler and Loy, unbelievably, as an Asian exotic. Immediately after costarring in the Gable film, MGM put the two together in The Thin Man. Their scenes together fairly sparkled; between the mystery, the Manhattans and the endless banter, they lit up the screen.

Rogers & Astaire

Then there was RKO’s pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers - first as featured players in a minor 1933 Delores Del Rio - Gene Raymond fluffball called Flying Down to Rio. This totally forgettable film was saved when Fred and Ginger spent a little over 2 minutes dancing the Carioca . . . and thus was a new type of cinematic chemistry born. Ironically, Astaire wasn’t all that interested in dancing with Rogers again. As he wrote his agent, "I don't mind making another picture with her, but as for this team idea, it's out! I've just managed to live down one partnership (his sister Adele) and I don't want to be bothered with any more." But Fred was under long term contract to RKO, which meant he had to do what they told him. The next year these two received top billing in The Gay Divorcee, which would turn out to be the 2nd of their eventual 10 pictures together. And their chemistry? It was best explained by Katherine Hepburn (who knew a thing or two about onscreen chemistry . . . just ask Spencer Tracy) when she said “Fred gave Ginger class, while Ginger gave Fred sex . . .”

The Marx Brothers

Comedy teams have long been a fertile source of cinematic chemistry. Think Laurel and Hardy (107 films together) Abbott and Costello (36 films), Martin and Lewis (17 films), The Marx Brothers (17 films) The Three Stooges (nearly 200 shorts) and of course Bob Hope and Bing Crosby (and let’s not forget Dorothy Lamour) who made 7 “Road to . . .” pictures. What made most of these teams work so well was either the attraction of physical opposites (Laurel and Hardy), Abbott and Costello), bipolar personalities (the suave Dean Martin and frenetic Jerry Lewis) and the complex relations between members of the same family (the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges).

From the perspective of younger generations of film fans, it would seem that what cinematic chemistry is in short supply. In part 2 of this essay (which will be posted when it’s finished) we’ll explore whether this is true - and if so, why so . . .

Copyright©2019 Kurt F. Stone

Hedy Lamarr: Brains, Beauty and a Whole Lot More

Of all the scores of stars who graced the silver screen during Hollywood’s “Golden Era,” it is likely that the most beautiful and alluring of all was Hedy Lamarr . . . who was named for the silent star Barbara Lamar, who, in her day was known “the girl who is too beautiful” But unlike Barbara La Mar who died in 1926 from tuberculosis and nephritis at age 31, this Lamarr lived to the ripe old age of 86, and was far, far more than just another pretty face. Indeed as early as 1931, her first director, the great Max Reinhardt (Max Goldmann) referred to her as “the most beautiful women in the world” And for my money, he was absolutely correct.  Far from being a world-class actor, Hedy was nonetheless one of the smartest and accomplished stars of all time . . . away from the screen.

Ricardo Cortez: The First Sam Spade

“Ricardo Cortez” as the first Sam Spade

There likely isn’t a film buff on the planet who doesn’t know - and love - the 1941 classic detective drama The Maltese Falcon starring, among others, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. It is the living, breathing definition of a film classic. It is also one of the very first movies both written and directed by the same person - in this case, the then 35-year old Huston who made a deal with studio owner Jack Warner that he would only charge his boss a measly ten bucks for the screenplay if only he were permitted to also direct as well. What a lot of film buffs do not know is that Jack Warner actually produced two other films based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel prior to the Huston classic:

• 1931’s The Maltese Falcon, starring Ricardo Cortez as detective Sam Spade and Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly,

• The 1936 tongue-in-check send up entitled Satan Met a Lady, starring Warren William as Sam Spade (here called “Ted Shane”) and Bette Davis as Ruth, here called “Valerie Purvis.” Unlike the 1931 version, which was a box-office hit, Satan Met a Lady was so bad that Bette Davis spent a lifetime trying to get it expunged from her official filmography!

For decades, film historians believed that original version of The Maltese Falcon starring Cortez, Daniels, (as well as Una Merkel, Thelma Todd *(about whom we’;ll devote a blog piece in the near future and Dudley Diggs) was either destroyed or missing. Actually, it was neither; Warner Brothers buried the 1931 version on a back shelf for fear that moviegoers would mistake it for the 1941 Bogart/Astor/Greenstreet classic. What a pity! For although not quite as true-to-form as the Bogart/Astor version, Ricardo Cortez does make a compelling - though less nuanced version - of the iconic, hard-boiled Sam Spade. Unlike Bogie’s Spade, Cortez’s wears a perpetual smile and is far more sexually aggressive. Then too, Cortez was not nearly as good an actor as the stage-trained Bogart. Unlike Bogart, Cortez was first, last and always a movie star . . . not an actor. And believe me, there is a world of difference between the two.

Nonetheless, unlike Humphrey Bogart, Ricardo Cortez is little remembered. In his day, Cortez was a first-rate “Latin Lover” and great fan favorite. He was the only actor to ever receive top billing over Greta Garbo (1926’s Torrent, her first American film); during his heyday in the late silent and early sound era, he played opposite a majority of the greatest actresses of the silver screen (Mary Astor, Loretta Young, Bette Davis, Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell, to name but a few) with many of the most acclaimed directors and filmmakers in cinematic history. And yet, precious little is known about him.

Why?

Cortez and Garbo in Torrent (1926)

For two reasons: first, in the words of his biographer Dan Van Neste, “Cortez was an excessively private person.  He didn’t leave diaries, didn’t trust the press, granted very few interviews, and when he did, they were rarely substantive. Second, there never was a “Ricardo Cortez”; he, his life, background and family history were all the product of a slick Paramount (Famous Players-Lasky) publicity campaign. When, in the early 1920s, Paramount inexplicably lost the screen’s greatest “Latin Lover” Rudolf Valentino (Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla) to Metro (soon to become Metro-Goldwyn and eventually Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), Paramount realized they needed a new, flashier, more sexually charged Latin. And so, they went to work and turned a Jewish kid from New York’s Lower East Side (Hester Street to be precise) born Jacob Krantz, the son of Morris and Sarah (Lefkowitz) Krantz, immigrants from Galacia, into Ricardo Cortez, whose original tagline was “The Man with the Bedroom Eyes.”

From the very beginning of his film career in 1917, when he started doing extra work in films shot in Ft. Lee, New Jersey at $2.00 a day, Krantz (who would legally change his name to “Ricardo Cortez” after becoming a major star and making in excess of $3,000.00 a week) was typecast as a either a Latin lover or exotic villain. Because of his dark olive complexion and heavy-lidded dark eyes, the deception was an easy one to pull off. Back in the 20’s and 30s, moviegoers were far more willing to believe what the fan magazines (fed largely by the various studios’ p.r. teams) told them about their favorite stars. Morever because movies were silent, there was no problem with the fact that stars like Ricardo Cortez didn’t sound anything like cultured, aristocratic Spaniards . . . or Mexicans or Italians; rather he spoke English like a Jewish kid from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Interestingly, where many silent stars decided to retire with the coming of sound rather than have their loyal fans discover that they weren’t who they were supposed to be, “Ric” Cortez, decided to keep on chugging along . . . and if for other reason than he loved the money they paid him.

The Cortez/Daniels Falcon was made by Warner Brother Broptherss in 1931 - several years before the Movie Production Cod, which mandated a stiff jolt of morality - into the industry. As such, the Cortez Falcon had Spade obviously sleeping with Miss Wonderly. In one scene, Miss Wondely (payed by Bebe Daniels) Additionally, takes a bath in the nude and Spade forces her to get out of all her clothes in order to determine if she has taken a thousand dollar bill.” There are numerous references to the homosexual relationship between Gutman (the “Fat Man”) and Wilmer (here referred to as his “boyfriend,” and in the 1941 version as a “gunsel,” which is an inside term for gay lover); moreover, in the Cortez/Daniels version, Miss WonderlyIn 1931, this as all OK. By 1936’s Satan Met a Lady, such scenes or suggestions were absolutely verboten. By comparison, the 1941 Bogart incarnation of Sam Spade was a growling Boy Scout.

As a Hollywood Brat, I can attest to the fact that the “six degrees of separation” are always at work. Consider the following:

• Brown Holmes, the screenwriter for Cortez’ Maltese Falcon, served in the same capacity for the 1941 Bogart version.

• Both the 1931 and 1941 version had the same cinematographer, Robert Edeson.

• Warren William, who plays the Sam Spade character (Ted Shane) in 1936’s Satan Met a Lady, also played Perry Mason in a series of films beginning in 1934, but was replaced in 1936 by none other than . . . you guessed it, Ricardo Cortez.

• Speaking of Perry Mason, Bette Davis (who costarred in Satan Met a Lady, filled in for Raymond Burr when he had to have surgery in Perry Mason: The Case of Constant Doyle (1963).

Getting back to The Maltese Falcon, Ricardo was signed to play Sam Spade mainly because Jack Warner’s first choice, the legendary actor - and world-class drunk - John Barrymore, was unavailable, having been already signed to star in another Warner’s film, Svengali (based on George Du Maurier’s Trilby. To a great degree, The Maltese Falcon revived Cortez’s cinematic career. and caused his loyal fans to forgive and forget that he in no way sounded the way they assumed a Latin Lover might. Over the next decade, Ricardo made several dozen motion pictures, including 1932’s Symphony For Six Million, one of classic Hollywood’s most Jewishly significant films. Based on a Fanny Hurst short story, Symphony stars Ricardo Cortez as Dr. Felix “Felixer” Klauber, a brilliant young doctor who grows away from his Jewish family and community when his older brother convinces him to make his fortune as a Park Avenue doctor.  When tragedy strikes, he sees where his obligations lie, but will it be too late? This particular film hit home with Ricardo Cortez, who had long felt that he, Jacob Krantz, had abandoned not only his family, but his cultural and religious heritage heritage in exchange for the extraordinary riches which only Hollywood could afford a junior high school dropout. Interestingly, Symphony for Six Million costarred Jewish actors Anna Appel and Gregory Ratoff, who, prior to their Hollywood years had starred with, respectively, Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre, and Chekhov’’s Moscow Art Theatre..

Cortez, realizing that he was losing his hold on the public, decided to start directing pictures. Between 1930 and 1940, he directed 7 films for Warner Brothers, all of them "program pictures made on a shoestring for the express purpose of filling the bottom half of the mandatory double bill ..." Between 1940 and 1958, he appeared in a mere 15 films and 1 television show (Bonanza). Forsaking Beverly Hills and returning to New York City, Cortez went back into the world of Wall Street, where he had begun his working life as a runner in the nineteen-teens. He succeeded admirably as a broker and continued selling stocks and bond - and doing an occasional commercial, until his death in 1977 at age 76/ The thrice married Cortez died childless. Over the course of a 43-year career, Ricardo Cortez made his way into 103 films, for which he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If you’re ever out in Hollywood, you can find it at 1500 Vine Street.

For those of you who live in South Florida, I will be showing the 1931 Maltese Falcon at Florida International University on Wednesday, October 3rd at 3:00. If you;’re interested in attending class, please contact me through this website and we’ll see what we can do.

Copyright©2018 Kurt F. Stone

I

Goldwyn's 'Last Sten'

                Theda Bara (Theodosia Goodman)

Over many decades, Hollywood moguls have, from time to time, attempted to create stars from scratch. That is to say, taking a nobody, changing their name, creating a back-story and building them up so that they are already "legendary" even before the first foot of film has been exposed. Sometimes it works; sometimes it fails.  The first such manufactured star was Theda Bara, a dark-eyed rather zaftig young Jewish lady from the Avondale section of Cincinnati whose real name was Theodosia Goodman.  Early film mogul William Fox (Vilmos Fried - 1879-1952), a furrier from Tolscva, Hungary turned owner of the unheralded Fox Film Corporation in New York, found himself in desperate financial straits in 1914.  What to do? 

Fox and his publicity staff started looking around for an actress who could take direction, then go to work creating an identity and unique look, an unforgettable name and a biography (the crazier the better) to sell to a gullible public that would be thirsting to see her on the silver screen.  And so, assembling members of the press in a smoky, dimly lit hotel room in Chicago, the then 30-year old Miss Goodman (who though a natural blond now sported jet black curls) was introduced to the world as Theda Bara (an anagram for "Arab Death"), who, the assembled journalists were told, was born in the shadow of the Sphinx, the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French actress. (During the 6-month long publicity campaign, Miss Bara, the ultimate vamp, was also billed as the Egyptian-born daughter of a French actress and an Italian sculptor.)  She finally hit the screen in a film based on a ridiculous stage 1909 Porter Emerson Browne play called A Fool There Was, and by the next year, was almost as popular as Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin.  Her weekly salary quickly skyrocketed from $50.00 to $4,000.00. Her vogue, which lasted barely 4 years, had her playing a succession of vamps, seductresses and wicked women in such films as Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Camille, Salomé and Madame Du Berry.  Miss Bara, who would be a doyen of Beverly Hills society for more than 30 years (dying there in 1955), not only saved Mr. Fox; she insured that his name and an offshoot of the company he created would still be in the headlines more than a hundred years later (think "Fox News").  Needless to say, this first "creating a star out of whole cloth" was a rousing success.

                            Jane Russell - Cleavage and All

In early 1940, RKO boss Howard Hughes - the Donald Trump of his era - decided that he too wanted to create a star.  And so, after looking around for a while, his search netted him a 19-year old graduate of Van Nuys High School (the same high school that Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford and Dodger pitching great Don Drysdale attended) named Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell (1921-2001) He quickly signed her to a standard 7 year contract. Jane Russell had a couple of things going for her: she had actually studied drama and acting at Max Reinhardt's Acting Workshop, had been coached by Maria Ouspenskaya,  had a decent singing voice, and measured a colossal  38D-24-36.  After a year of publicizing his upcoming star (during which time she did not appear on screen), Miss Russell  got top billing in a film called The Outlaw, costarring the equally unknown Jack Buetel and featuring Oscar-winning actors Walter Huston and Thomas Mitchell.  Due to problems with the censorship board, the film (which was made in 1941) did not go into general release until 1946.  But Hughes continued publicizing Miss Russell. Thousands upon thousands of photos of the voluptuous star-in-the-making ran in magazines throughout the country.  By the time the film went into general circulation, she had the best known cleavage on the planet.  Hollywood writer and Algonquin Roundtable wit Dorothy Parker referred to Hughes' campaign as "The sale of two titties."  Critics hated the film; the public couldn't get enough of Jane Russell and her amazing cleavage.

Miss Russell would go on to star in more than 30 films, including The Paleface (1946), His Kind of Woman (1951), Gentlemen Prefer Blonds (1953), and The Tall Men (1955).  Despite her seductively loose, lusty-busty image, Miss Russell was, in her own words, ". . . a mean-spirited, narrow-minded, right-wing, conservative Christian. I start out with that, and if you don't like it, you can lump it." By any stretch of the imagination, Howard Hughes' - like William Fox's experiment in star creation - was a great success. 

Sorry to report, such was not the case for one of the greatest of all movie moguls: Samuel Goldwyn. When he tried to create a star, he fell on his face, landing with a thud which resonates to this very day.  Her name?  Anna Sten . . .

                       Anna Sten in a Typical Garbo Pose

Born in Kiev (then Russia, now the Ukraine) in 1908, Annel Stenskaya Sudakevich  got her start in acting with the Moscow Art Theater. After playing small roles in a couple of Soviet films, she moved on to Germany, where scored rave reviews playing Grushenka in the 1931 masterpiece Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff ("The Murderer Dimitri Karamasoff") based on Dostoevsky's classic novel "The Brothers Karamazov."  One night, Goldwyn saw this film, and even before its conclusion gave orders to one of his assistants to contact Sten's people and sign her to a 7 year Hollywood contract.  He had dreams of making her his Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich - so much so that he arranged to have her photographed with some of the same poses Garbo used.  (See pictures to above of Anna Sten, and below of Greta Garbo, using the same pose)

When Sten arrived in the United States, so the story goes, she had put on considerable weight and, to Goldwyn's amazement, found her English to be impenetrable . . . which, considering the state of his English must have been truly depressing.  And so, Goldwyn put his staff to work slimming her down, working on her English and looking for the ideal picture in which she could make her American debut.  Of course, all the while, her picture and stories about her were running in fan magazines across the country.  Finally, Goldwyn decided on starring her in Nana, based on the classic novel by French author Emile Zola.  Unfortunately, a faithful treatment of this notorious literary whore and the men she ruins was impossible in an industry newly saddled with the restrictions of Will Hays and his Production Code.  Despite all her English lessons, Sten wound up learning her dialogue by rote; there was none of the vital thespic spontaneity that had so captivated Goldwyn or his staff.  Predictably, the film bombed . . .

                                           Greta Garbo: The Original Pose

Undeterred and possessing an ego approximately the size of California, Goldwyn persisted. Sten's next two films - We Live Again  (1934) costarring Frederic March and The Wedding Night (1935) which costarred Gary Cooper and won King Vidor a best director Oscar - were better, but the public wasn't buying. As Goldwyn biographer Scott Berg noted, "When the public failed to embrace her a third time, Goldwyn decided he could not afford to give her another chance." When it became known around Hollywood that Goldwyn, at Sten's request, cancelled the final year-and-a-half of her contract (which paid her $2,500.00 per week), The Wedding Night started being referred to as "Goldwyn's last Sten." The debacle wound up costing Goldwyn in excess of $2 million. 

Anna Sten would go on to make a handful of increasingly cheaper movies for increasingly minor studios.  She even guest starred in a handful of television shows.  She and her husband, the Russian-born producer Eugene Frenke (who were married for 52 years) moved to Manhatten, where he died in 1984 and Miss Sten about 10 years later, shortly before her 85th birthday.  Today, three things remain of the Sten legacy: Her nickname, "Goldwyn's Folly," the expression "Goldwyn's Last Sten," and a line written by Cole Porter for his 1934 show Anything Goes:

When Samuel Goldwyn can with great conviction
Can instruct Anna Sten in diction
Then Anna knows,
Anything goes.

Copyright©2018 Kurt F. Stone

The Most Iconic Sign on the Planet

                                   The Most Iconic Sign on the Planet

There likely isn't a soul on the planet cannot identify the gigantic HOLLYWOOD sign sitting atop a minuscule mountain few people know the name of.  For a couple of generations, that sign has best symbolized the flash and allure, the glitter and glamour of both a small town and a ginormous industry. Its history is fairly well known to those of us who are "Hollywood Brats." To those outside the brat brigade, that story might seem as improbable as any film the MGM or the Warner Brothers ever produced.  And, in matter of fact, that sign - whose history goes back 95 years, originally had next to nothing to do with the then nascent movie industry.  

Way back in 1923, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and a couple of developers named Woodruff and Schults  came up with he idea of erecting a larger-than-life advertisement for a new upscale housing development they were planning to build in the hills above Hollywood. Their development would be called "Hollywoodland." Their original intent was to erect a 43-foot high sign built of telephone poles, thin metal, wood, wire, and pipes and lit with 4,000 20-watt bulbs spaced 8 inches apart.  Chandler and his investors thought the sign would stand for no longer than 18 months. - at which time, they assumed,  construction would be complete and a score of well-heeled movie stars and executives would have begun moving into their new residential palaces. The sign wound up costing $21,000.00 (about $290,000.00 in today's dollars). Of course, in order to put up the sign they first had to build a pathway to the top of what would officially be named "Mt. Lee."  Chandler et al never got further than building a primitive road.  In 1926, the land with the enormous sign - which was already showing a bit of wear and tear - came into the hands of Mack Sennett, the enormously successful movie producer and owner of the Keystone studios. 

                        Beaachwood Canyon in the mid-1920's. 

c

         Peg's Suicide Makes Page 1 of the New York Times

The actual "Hollywoodland" sign made its way back into the news in a big way on September 16, 1932, when a distraught 23-year old Welsh-born stage actress named Peg Entwistle committed suicide by climbing up to the top of the "H" and then leaping to her death.  Entwistle, who had appeared on Broadway in the late 1920's was known both for her talent and her good flapper-esque looks.  Film immortal Bette Davis often proclaimed that Peg was the reason she decided to be an actress after witnessing one of her stage performances. “I had to be an actress, exactly like Peg Entwistle,” explained Davis. Peg was often cast in comedies as an attractive, good hearted  ingénue, but her desire was to play more challenging roles.  Arriving in Hollywood in early 1931, Entwistle made the rounds of studios with little success.  It is a tale that thousands of wannnabe film stars can tell.  Indeed, there is an old Hollywood saying that "The first requirement for becoming a star isn't talent, good looks or great luck; it's the ability to withstand repeated rejection." Apparently, Peg lacked that ability.  Just about the time Peg had hit rock bottom, she scored a feature part in an RKO picture called Thirteen Women, starring Irene Dunne, Ricardo Cortez (Jacob Stein) Myrna Loy, Florence Eldridge (the wife of actor Frederic March) and Jill Esmond (who had recently married Laurence Olivier). Peg was dismayed to learn that her 12 of her 16 minutes of screen time had been left on the cutting-room floor.  And so, she committed suicide by jumping from atop the sign.  Hikers found her body at the base of the sign along with a note which read "I am afraid, I am a coward. I am sorry for everything. If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain. P.E.” Thirteen Women opened the day after her body was discovered.  Today, 86 years later, all Peg is remembered for is her death, not her talent.

One direct result of Peg's suicide was that the ladder which long stood on the sign's backside (permitting workers to ascend in order to effect repairs) was taken away.  But for years thereafter, picnickers would go to the base of the sign, spread out their blankets and dine . . . while waiting to see if perhaps the ghost of Peg Entwistle would be joining them for a nosh.

Maintenance of the iconic sign fell by the wayside during the Great Depression, and by the mid-1940s, the sign was looking pretty sad. The “H” fell down—legend has it the sign's caretaker drunkenly plowed into it with his car—and the other letters were deteriorating. Though the L.A. Recreation and Parks Commission wanted it completely torn down, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce had different ideas. They offered to remove the “LAND,” then restore the remaining nine letters to promote the town.  This they did in 1949 . . . the year of my birth.  In the mid 1970s I lived within hiking distance of the sign on Argyle, several blocks above Hollywood Blvd.  By that time the Hollywood sign was looking every inch of its 50-plus years. An “O” had toppled down the hill, an “L” had been set on fire, and the other letters were falling apart. Hugh Hefner came to the rescue, holding a benefit gala where celebrities were able to “purchase” the new letters. Hefner himself bought the “Y,” Alice Cooper bought an “O” in honor of Groucho Marx, and Andy Williams sponsored the “W.” Other donors included Gene Autry, Warner Bros. Records, and Les Kelley of Kelley Blue Book. 

In the 1940s, Howard Hughes bought 138 acres of land surrounding the sign, intending to build a compound for himself and then-girlfriend Ginger Rogers. Plans fell through after Rogers broke up with him, and the Hughes estate did nothing with the property for decades. When they finally sold it for $1.7 million in 2002, developers announced a plan to divide the estate into five luxury home sites. The Trust for Public Land raised money to purchase it from the developers for $12.5 million in 2010. The sign’s previous rescuer, Hugh Hefner, chipped in $900,000.  The sign's letters have been altered a couple of times over the years:

• In 1976, it was changed to “Hollyweed” to celebrate changes to marijuana laws. 
• It read "Holywood" when the Pope visited in 1987.
• It was briefly Ollywood during the Oliver North Iran-Contra hearings. 
• It’s been used to root for football teams, including “Go Navy” in 1983 and “GO UCLA” for the 1993 UCLA-USC game. 
• It even helped market a movie when animated character Holli Would was perched on top of the "D" to promote the film Cool World (1992). 

5 years ago, Sherwin-Williams freshened up each letter by removing all of the previous paint, then applying 105 gallons of primer and 255 gallons of exterior acrylic latex paint in the color “High Reflective White.”  

Throughout its 90-year history, the Hollywood(land) sign has been a symbol not only of a town which makes magic come true; it has served as an iconic totem for dreams and nightmares, music and mystery, dreams and delights.

May Harry Chandler's 18-month wonder stand watch over the movie capital for another 90 years . . .

Copyright©2018 Kurt F. Stone

Buster Keaton and the Sound of Silents

    Keaton & Arbuckle in "The Butcher Boy" 

Legend has it that when Joseph Francis Keaton IV was about 18 months old, he tumbled down a flight of stairs at home his parents were renting. Upon landing at the bottom of the stairs, magician Harry Houdini - a friend of the tykes parents - scooped up the tyke in his arms and said "That was a real buster!"  Thus was born a nickname which within less than two decades would be known all over the world.  Fast forward to 1917.  Walking down a street in Manhattan, the now 22-year old Buster Keaton - already a veteran star of vaudeville - ran into an old acquaintance, the 30-year old former vaudevillian and current slapstick comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.  At the time of their chance meeting, Arbuckle was as popular a star as Charlie Chaplin - with whom he had costarred in several films for Mack Sennett's Keystone Comedies.  Arbuckle, so the story goes, urged Keaton to come and check out his newly-created film company, "The Comique Film Corporation," and perhaps become a movie actor.  ("Comique" was owned by Joseph Schenck - pronounced Skenk - who would, within a half-dozen years,  become both Keaton's producer and  brother-in-law.)

The next day, so the story goes, Keaton went over to the Comique studio, which was located in a warehouse at 318-320 East 48th Street in a tough section of Manhattan. After walking around Arbuckle's 3rd floor space (the 1st floor being occupied by Schenk's wife, actress Norma Talmadge) Fatty asked Buster what else he'd like to see.  Quick as a flash, Keaton answered "THE CAMERA!"  Over the next 24 hours, Keaton, a born mechanic,  literally took a camera apart and put it back together not once but twice . . . in order to figure out how it worked and what it could do and could not do.  By the beginning of the third day, Keaton was ready to costar with Arbuckle in The Butcher Boy (photo above).  And thus, a star was born.

Keaton would go on to become a complete filmmaker. Like Chaplin, he was both a director and a first-rate editor.  He was also an ingenious cinematic engineer, whose films contained construction pieces which were actual costars.  The scene below, from Keaton's 1928 feature film Steamboat Bill, Jr., is arguably the most dangerous stunt ever put on film; that building facade falling on Buster actually weighed more than 2 tons. The entire company - save the cinematographer,  who had to stick around to hand crank the camera - hit in a trailer just off the set's sight-line.  They were afraid to watch, fearful that their boss was about to be crushed.

                                                   Buster Keaton's Italian Villa c. 1927

By 1925, Keaton was one of the world's best-paid and most popular film stars.  In 1926 Keaton purchased a 3 1/2 acre lot just behind the Beverly Hills Hotel and built a lavish - and I do mean lavish - 10,000 square foot home known forever more as "The Italian Villa."  (It's original address was 1004 Hartford Way; today it's called Pamela Drive.) Among his closest neighbors were Charlie Chaplin, John Gilbert, Rudolph Valentino and Harold Lloyd.  The Keatons - Buster and his wife Natalie (Talmadge) were known for their Sunday bashes, in which food was plentiful and liquor flowed like Niagara.  Alas, Buster's Edenic existence wouldn't last for long.  Following what was arguably his greatest picture, The General, Keaton made what he later called "the greatest mistake of my life": he permitted his brother-in-law (and producer) Joseph Schenck to sell his contract to MGM. Suddenly, Keaton was an employee without his own studio and shorn of the right to use his own crew.  Then, Natalie filed for divorce, took their two boys and changed their names from Keaton to Talmadge.  Then, MGM started pairing him up with Jimmy Durante; an obvious attempt to elevate the old Schnozzola at Buster's expense.  As a result of all this Buster started drinking heavily; by 1932 was virtually unemployable and had to file for bankruptcy.  Natalie sold the Villa to cover her debts.  At one point it was the home of Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant and his wife, heiress Barbara Hutton. Actor James Mason and his wife Pamela (for whom the street was renamed) purchased the Villa for $84,000.00 in 1952.  (BTW, it's back on the market now and will only set the purchaser back $16.2 million . . . )

The 30's were pretty much a inebriated blur to Buster.  By the end of the decade he was back making one- and two-reelers for lesser studios and working as a 'comedy doctor' for the bigger ones.  Then he married his third wife, Eleanor Norris, an MGM dancer who was nearly a quarter century younger than "The Old Stone Face."  Things began looking up, for in addition to being his loving wife, Eleanor turned out to be Buster's biggest fan, his nurse and closest adviser.

And then there was actor James Mason . . . who we will get to in another couple of paragraphs.

The percentage of silent and early talking motion pictures which were destroyed, burnt or simply disappeared is appalling.  Virtually none of vamp Theda Bara's 44 feature films are known to exist as are the overwhelming majority of films produced/directed by D.W. Griffith. Researchers at the Library of Congress suggest that more than 75% of all films made between 1910 and 1930 no longer exist. In part this is because most - if not all - of the early movie moguls considered films to be commerce, not art.  Once they got past their first - and only - run studio heads burnt films, figuring that a) no one would want to view them a second time and b) film contained silver which could be extracted and then sold.  Then too, those films which were saved in metal cans were improperly stored and disintegrated.  A handful of stars - notably Charlie Chaplin and his best friend Douglas Fairbanks - considered their work to be art, and paid scientists a small fortune to come up with what would become known as 'Safety Film' celluloid which would not disintegrate if stored under optimal conditions.  As a result, virtually their entire oeuvre is, to this day, available.  

Where Chaplin and Fairbanks were both deliberate and driven to preserve their films, Buster just lucked into the immortality of his cinematic canon.  Like his stone-faced persona, Buster had a ministering angel looking out for him, ready to provide a miracle.  That miracle was performed by the British actor James Mason (1909-1984) and an American-born film collector named Raymond Rohauer (1924-1987).  As mentioned above,  Mason and wife Pamela purchased Keaton's Italian Villa in 1952. By then the Villa had been renovated, re-landscaped and subdivided to make way for three more mansions.  When the Masons first purchased the estate in 1952, they weren't aware that Buster had built a small workshop on the property where he spent a lot of his downtime tinkering around with various mechanical projects.  One day, Mason was out in the workshop and realized that the structure contained a false wall.  When a worker he had hired broke through that wall, they discovered a rather large safe.  Inside that safe they discovered . . . can after can after can containing canister after canister after canister of nitrate films . . . all made by Buster Keaton! 

What happened next is the stuff of legend.  

The way I heard it, not knowing precisely what to do with this cinematic cache, Mason drove over to the Silent Movie Theatre located at 611 Fairfax Avenue and offered the lot to the theater's founder John Hampton.  (Hampton and his wife Dorothy opened his silent theatre in 1942 - a time when silent movies had ceased to exist.  With the exception of a brief closure in 2017, the Silent Movie Theatre is still running nothing but silent pictures.  Hampton soon got hold of Ray Rohauer, who had befriended Buster at that very theater when he was a 20-year old film enthusiast.  Rohauer proceeded to raise sufficient funds to repair and restore Buster's films, and then begin showing them around the country.  He also decided to restore Keaton's legal rights to these films and provide him with the lion's share of all ticket sales.  Soon, Buster was on the way back up.  The next year, Buster was paid $50,000 for rights to his life story, which were turned into a (not very good) film starring Donald O'Conner, Ann Blyth and Rhonda Flemming.  This fee permitted Buster and Eleanor to purchase a ranch out in Woodland Hills (in the San Fernando Valley) at 22612 Sylvan Street  where Buster and Eleanor spent the rest of his life living among his St. Bernards,  his chickens and the miniature railroad which encircled his property.  By the time of his death on February 1, 1966, he had been back on top for more than a decade thanks mostly to Eleanor, but also to his gritty determination, his innate talent and an outright miracle coauthored by James Mason and Raymond Rohauer.

So what is the sound of silents? 

Applause, of course . . . 

Copyright©2018 Kurt F. Stone