Moving Pictures (2 page)

Bitten by the newspaper bug, Ben was promoted to cub reporter on the
Mail.
One of his jobs, “the lowest on the paper,” he said, was to review the one-reel movies that were mushrooming in the nickelodeons of the Bowery and along 14
^th
Street. His reviews led to a job as associate editor of one of the earliest trade journals,
Film Reports,
where he was paid a then-comfortable salary of twenty-five dollars a week and a percentage of the ads he could bring in. This meant open sesame to all the film production then flourishing in New York.

Movies were called “flicks” in those days because they really flickered. The Edison Company that controlled the patent and hence the industry was convinced that a one-reel, ten-minute show was the ultimate for the medium. Still, the motion picture was such a novelty that tens of thousands of nickels flowed into the makeshift “movie houses” every
week. Young Schulberg, already signing himself “B. P. Schulberg” to make his byline belie his age, found himself on the ground floor of the infant industry.

The slender, pink-faced 22-year-old who stared down at the infant me looked neither old enough to be a father nor mature enough to be a veteran writer of the photoplay, as it was then called. But already he had cranked out hundreds of one-reel photoplays, at the rate of two a week, and as a sign of his veteran’s status, had been invited to write the preface to A. W. Thomas’s
How to Write a Photoplay.

Thomas’s byline on the title page is followed by five lines of identification:

President Photoplaywright Association of America, Editor Photoplay Magazine, Editor Photoplay Scenario, Author of Photoplay Helps and Hints and the Photoplay “Punch”; Member of the Photoplay Authors’ League, Screen and Ed-Au Club.

Perhaps this long-forgotten photoplaywright felt a need to write this advertisement for himself because, from 1905 onward, the screenwriter has always been low-man on the cinematic totem pole. The most ardent movie buff will remember the entire cast of a given picture, and tick off the names of the director and the producer. Ask him the name of the scribe who conceived the plot, the characters, the theme, and who wrote the words his favorites speak with such conviction, and a vague cloud floats across his eyes. Books on Hollywood and the history of motion pictures spawn like minnows in the spring, but the genesis and development of the photoplaywright (now simplified to
screenwriter)
remain virtually unrecorded. Even the writers themselves have not regarded their profession with sufficient seriousness to trace its history. Still, my boyish-faced papa was one of the originals, and so I came into the world hearing not the strains of “Rock-a-bye, Baby” or “Just a Song at Twilight,” but the clicking of typewriter keys.

The films that were being cranked out in the year of my birth held enough promise for Vachel Lindsay, the populist poet, to write a book titled
The Art of the Moving Pictures,
in which he trumpeted the movies as the most revolutionary civilizing force since the invention of the printing press. My father prized that book because he was as much in love with words as he was with the play without words that had become his passion and his livelihood. The catchy tom-tom rhythms of Vachel
Lindsay, sounding social warnings, contributed to the background music of my early years, along with the clicking of that old Underwood and the cranking of the now-obsolete boxlike movie camera.

For, by the time I appeared in 1914, my father was working for one of the first film tycoons, the diminutive, untiring immigrant fur worker, Adolph Zukor, whose Famous Players Company was still a fledgling. For writing scenarios and publicity, B.P. had now achieved the lordly salary of fifty dollars a week. And he was moonlighting: writing a series of four one-reel documentaries on Sylvia Pankhurst, the English suffragist leader, who had come to America to promote the cause, and who had been dragged off to jail from the meeting my mother had attended. It was through Adeline’s connections with the movement that B.P. had gotten the assignment, at fifty dollars per reel. So my birth had been financed in true collaboration: my father’s screenwriting skills married to my mother’s interest in the feminist pioneers. This was a first for all three of us: my first moments on earth, my father’s first documentary film, and my mother’s first efforts as a writer’s agent.

My delivery, my baby clothes, and all the luxuries that would be lavished on my infancy were supplied by the latest and liveliest of the arts. My first carriage was presented to me by the Adolph Zukors, and from their farm outside the city they sent fresh milk and eggs to help little Buddy, as I was called, grow strong. The Zukors’ son-in-law, Al Kaufman, an executive in the young company and a crony of B.P.’s, presented me with a sailor suit. Mary Pickford, at twenty-one the most famous of the Famous Players, sent Buddy a woolly blanket. B.P. had just written one of her current movies (and long one of her favorites),
Tess of the Storm Country,
and had coined the phrase that practically became part of her name, “America’s Sweetheart.” The business that people had scoffed at as an overnight fad when my father first drifted into it was going through its first great transition. Mary Pickford (née Gladys Smith), who had earned five dollars a day as an anonymous extra in 1909, was earning an astronomical four thousand dollars a week in 1914. The American public, tired of stale vaudeville jokes and third-rate touring companies, had discovered its favorite form of entertainment. Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Theda Bara, the Keystone Kops and the Bathing Beauties were the angels flying round my crib. But Hollywood was still a primitive barn in open western country where a failed theater director named Cecil B. DeMille was making his first movie,
The Squaw Man,
for an odd couple of film pioneers, Jesse Lasky,
a congenial trumpet-player-vaudevillian, and his single-minded, irascible, ex-glove salesman brother-in-law, Sam Goldfish.

Back in Harlem, I was overdressed and pampered by a young mother so ambitious for my intellectual progress that while she was carrying me she had spent as much time as she could in libraries, taking poetry courses at Columbia and reading Tennyson, Milton, and Shelley, determined that I should become, at the very least, Stephen Crane and John Galsworthy combined.

Maybe it was the lack of a family tree. We sprang like Minervas from the ghetto brow, barely knowing our grandparents, our great-grandparents lost in the great Russian miasma. Like African slaves in America, our births, marriages, and deaths in Czarist Russia had gone unrecorded. Who were my great-grandfathers, my great-grandmothers? Did they earn a living, did they love each other, were they killed in pogroms? No one has ever been able to tell me. I read Nabokov and I marvel at the rich tapestry: What a parade of predecessors! There is Grandfather the Minister of Justice. There is Grandmother the Baroness. There is the great-great-grandfather the General, in command of “The Nabokov Regiment.”
“Eppis,”
my mother would have said.

Over the centuries Nabokov ranges, like an elegant but greedy unicorn, until the history of the Nabokovs becomes the history of Mother Russia herself, complete with loyal Ministers of State who are intimates of the Czar and rebellious Decembrists on their way to the scaffold. What a proliferation of Nabokovs, all the way back—Nabokov points out modestly—to a Russianized Tatar Prince Nabok Murza, in 1380. Six hundred years of Nabokovism! I want to cry out, “Vladimir, we came from your country, too, but while you were living on great estates and making history, we were huddled in our little synagogues, and in our village huts, hiding from history. Even the serfs looked down on us. We held no titles, never raced in luxurious sleighs through the forests of our dachas, we had no French, English, and German tutors, our ancestors did not distinguish themselves in celebrated duels and affairs of state. We were just poor Russian or Latvian Jews who lived out our unrecorded existences.”

Oh, but wait, we did have one claim to fame. My mother never tired of boasting about him when we were young: Pinsker, her mother’s brother, our “diamond-cutter to the Czar,” who had special permission to live—beyond the Pale—in that vast expanse of European Russia forbidden to ordinary Jews. I had visions of this legendary ancestor in
his fur-lined jacket and handsome fur cap, enshrined in his diamond-cutting workshop in a corner of the Winter Palace, cutting exquisite, gleaming spheres for the pleasure of the Czarina. The Pinskers carried this high calling to the New World. While the Jaffes were sweltering in cramped railroad flats on the Lower East Side, the Pinskers were operating jewelry shops in Middletown, Connecticut, where their sons attended Wesleyan University, and where Adeline would be invited to escape the heat, the noise, and the smell of the ghetto summers. Middletown opened a window to what life could be like in America.

I
F WE HAD NO
family tree, yet ours was another kind of family, stretching horizontally, composed of motion-picture pioneers with whom my father the writer soon found himself involved. Before he was twenty, he had gone to work for the now-forgotten pioneer, Edwin S. Porter, truly the father of the American motion picture. It has become the convention to accord that role to D. W. Griffith, and to think of Griffith, DeMille, and Chaplin, along with the novice entrepreneurs Zukor, Lasky, Laemmle, and Goldwyn, as the creators of the first American films. But way back in 1903, years before these other pioneers had shot or presented their first reel, Porter had made the seminal narrative film,
The Life of an American Fireman.
This jumpy eight-minute flick, primitive and childish as it may look today, was a first step in the long march of the American film. In the period into which I was born, B.P. was working with Porter, fascinated with his technical inventions and his creative discoveries. Having heard these stories of Porter’s achievements firsthand, I accept them as part of my birthright. He is my Grand Duke.

In the days of Thomas Edison’s domination of the infant film industry at the turn of the century, Edwin S. Porter served as one of his mechanics and cameramen. An irony of Edison’s life is that, though he is credited with inventing the motion picture, his true love was the phonograph. He
was
interested in the coordination of sound and picture, but his young English assistant and co-inventor, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, was far more enthusiastic than Edison about the possibility of projecting
motion pictures on a large screen. Edison favored the peep-box in the penny arcade, and even after the motion-picture screen emerged from its historic but unprepossessing Room Five in East Orange, New Jersey, he had no faith in the commercial future of the movies. Still, the nickelodeons were catching on, and so Edison reluctantly gave the audience what it seemed to want, twenty or thirty feet of moving pictures depicting
New York in a Blizzard,
or scenes of our sailors landing in Cuba, grandiosely titled
Our Flag Is Here to Stay.
Or, for the wicked, some enticing flashes of
Fatima’s Coochee-Coochee Dance.

Basically a mechanic-inventor rather than an artist-director, Ed Porter happened to see one of the supernatural films that the French magician Georges Méliès had made in Paris. These Méliès films were the very first not to rely on actual photographed events but on staged theatrical scenes that told a story. With his mechanical mind—so my father would tell me when I was young—Porter examined these innovative movies frame by frame. Méliès was able to transfer his sleight of hand to the screen, able to change a pumpkin into a royal coach. He anticipated Walt Disney by 35 years, and his
A Trip to the Moon,
caricaturing the scientific daydreams of the 1900s, foreshadowed the optic miracles that the motion-picture camera was about to achieve. Méliès’ movies, Porter told my father, were “the fastest moving pictures” he had ever seen. After a few tentative imitations of Méliès’ magic films, he was ready to make his landmark “story picture.” The pragmatic tinkerer would choose a subject eminently down to earth: a fire. A mother and child trapped in a flaming house. Horse-drawn fire engines racing to the rescue. Precious lives saved in the nick of time!

Because Porter knew that Edison’s mind was closed to the artistic possibilities of his mechanical invention, he conspired to shoot his innovative story-film in secret. Without Edison’s knowledge (according to my father), Porter worked out his pioneer scenario. First, a shot of the house catching fire. Then a historic close shot (antedating Griffith’s more sophisticated use of this device) of the frantic mother gesticulating at the window. Cut back to the firehouse. The mustachioed firemen are lounging around until galvanized into action by the sound of the alarm. Then came the first American use of intercutting, the technique that was to become the spine of cinematic storytelling. Back again to the fire, the flames licking higher. Then cut to the fire wagon, drawn by powerful horses galloping down the street. Finally, a breathtaking climax, the
last-minute rescue of the mother and child, with the house collapsing in flames behind them as they are carried to safety.

There it was, an American
first
, a creation that was to have as great an impact on the country as the invention of the telephone, the telegraph, and the electric light. The theater, the opera, the dance, and the concert had been the luxuries of the wealthy and the middle class. Porter’s
The Life of an American Fireman
opened the door to the art form of the poor, the art form soon to be enjoyed by millions of people all over the world.

But that door was not opened without a struggle from The Wizard, as Edison was known for his inventions of the incandescent light and the phonograph. A full generation before the advent of sound, he had worked to synchronize dialogue and music with moving pictures. But Porter knew the old man’s mentality, and he was in a cold sweat when he ushered Edison into the small projection room at the New Jersey laboratory. If you brought a mechanical development to Edison he would always take time to examine it. But he seemed strangely impatient with this latest brainchild. Edison fidgeted through the first four or five minutes of this historic film and then turned on his employee: “Porter, you must be crazy. I keep telling you people will never sit still for a whole reel. Eight minutes on a single story! It won’t sell. People want variety. At least four or five subjects on every reel.”