Moving Pictures (20 page)

The picture was “sneaked” in a small town near Los Angeles—the institution of sneak previews having just begun—and to the pain of my father, the director, Lon Chaney, and the other filmmakers, it was booed. Not in the beginning, because the provincial audience clearly expected Yen Sin to belie his apparent gentleness and become an
insidious Fu Manchu. But as the film went on and the good Caucasians were exposed as sinners or hypocrites and the yellow laundryman recognized as the avatar of virtue, there was audible protest from the paying customers. Half the house walked out in disgust even before it was over. Father’s noble experiment seemed to be a disaster. I was proud of his response: If
Shadows
was rebuffed by the major chains, he said, he would have his distribution partner Al Lichtman try to sell it to small independent houses. When even they refused to advance money on it, B.P. told them to play it for nothing—give it a try, with Preferred Pictures gambling on a percentage of the profits, if any.

Then came good news. The National Board of Review, a welcome lever for elevating the quality of motion pictures, singled out
Shadows
for special commendation, praising its courage as a forceful lesson in religious and racial tolerance. Robert E. Sherwood lent his prestige by including it in a new annual anthology,
The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-23,
a hopeful sign that intellectuals and highbrow critics were no longer scorning the movies as pabulum for the masses. A movie could be a work of art, even carry a message, and still being entertainment to large audiences.

The year 1923 marked a long step forward in the progress of the motion picture. Sherwood described his recent conversion to the art of films: “If we can succeed in luring a larger number of intelligent people into the film theaters, we shall automatically receive more intelligent pictures.” And so his companion volume to Burns Mantle’s celebrated
Best Plays,
while never ignoring the sure things like Valentino’s
Blood and Sand
and Fairbanks’s
Robin Hood,
helped to open the doors to small, brave tries like
Shadows.

Later that year Sherwood had kind words for another Schulberg film,
The Hero,
“that well might have proved highly unpopular with the dear old general public.” Adapted by Eve Unsell from a controversial play by Gilbert Emery, it starred Gaston Glass as a war hero who in civilian life turns out to be an utterly worthless human being. Heroes were still heroes to the patriotic audiences of the early Twenties. Although the Hemingways and the Dos Passoses were beginning to question whether the War To Make The World Safe For Democracy had been cynically sold out by the international powerbrokers at Versailles, when B.P. dared to make
The Hero,
nationwide audiences still insisted that their bemedaled warriors be true blue. To evoke the sort of stir created by
The
Hero,
we would have to imagine John Wayne playing a Green Beret officer as an empty-hearted scoundrel. I was nine years old when
The Hero
was released, just barely of an age to nibble around the edges of cinematic unorthodoxy. I remember my father fighting for this film as he had fought for
Shadows.
His bread-and-butter pictures, frankly, I have to leaf through the old scrapbooks to remember. But the brave little pictures live on in my head.

Another was
Capital Punishment,
with a now totally forgotten Schulberg star, Donald Keith. A murder is committed. Donald is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair. The Governor, finally convinced that Donald is innocent, phones the warden to unstrap him from the chair. But the call is made a few seconds too late. In vain did the exhibitors, fearing for their dear old general public, plead for a last-minute reprieve, a happy ending. But young B.P. refused to bend. “If you’re going to make a movie attacking capital punishment,” he said, “then goddamn it,
attack it
!” Sometimes when he was aroused like that he even forgot to stammer.

B.P. never lost the touch for press agentry he had developed in his early Porter and Zukor days. Every Preferred Picture had a hardcover campaign book. No key was left untouched in B.P.’s efforts to woo the public to his Preferred Pictures. Long before “street theater” came into our language, B.P. was spelling out “street stunts” that could be set up to draw a crowd and excite them to see his picture. For instance, a woman carrying a baby accosts a man, ostensibly her estranged husband, on a public street, and begins to berate him as a cad who has deserted her. “The two actors should be Vaudeville people if possible. Impress upon them the necessity of putting
pep
in their argument as soon as the crowd collects,” my father’s instructions read. “They are to settle their differences and move on to the next corner to repeat the spontaneous performance. Whenever the street wife has a chance, she is to tell the crowd who pause to enjoy these matrimonial fireworks that she has just seen
The Girl Who Came Back
—and it was the movie that convinced her to give hubby another chance!”

I
WASN’T BORN IN
a trunk like Judy Garland, but a silent studio was my first home. I remember it more clearly than the bungalow where we first lived on Gramercy Place, or the Wilton Place public school around the corner, where I was an ignominious figure.

I gained importance as “B.P.’s little boy” on the Mayer-Schulberg lot. So B.P.’s struggles and triumphs and street stunts were vital to me. Since he was hardly a devoted father, being preoccupied with his pictures and his extracurricular activities, the studio became my composite father. With the exception of the prize fights B.P. and I attended religiously every Friday night, the paternal ties to which I clung were the studio, its product, and my father’s flair for salesmanship.

B.P.’s story conferences and projection-room “rushes” were my nursery; I went to kindergarten on his inventive promotions. A page headed
SOME SNAPPY STUFF THAT’S DIFFERENT
includes the following:

Aeroplane cuts loose a girl dummy when over town. Parachute opens—dummy drops (so light, no danger). Sign on sweater—“The Girl Who Came Back.” Interest in this can be worked to fever heat by inducing newspaper to print notice of girl abducted in aeroplane a thousand miles from your town, thought to be coming your way. Plant this story in outside paper first—then show to your local paper.

When the winter rainy season hit southern California, B.P. capitalized
on it with the grand announcement that the extravagant outdoor garden party in
The Girl Who Came Back
would have to be reconstructed on an indoor stage, “bushes, trees, pool and all, with the oval pool in the center floating a flower-decked boat, and in whose depths splash Oriental maidens.” This decision made it possible to bring into play the Schulberg Studio’s new lighting paraphernalia—used for the first time on an “exterior” scene. Against that ubiquitous pool, the star Miriam Cooper, who had started the picture as an innocent country girl, had now become a bare-shouldered, sequin-gowned woman of the world swept into the arms of the bespangled and beturbaned Kenneth Harlan, a most unlikely “sheik.” Hollywood had a terrible case of the Valentino vapors, and even the most Anglo-Saxon profiles in town were being pressed into service as irresistible Arabs. Indeed, “sheik” went into the language as the generic term for the playboys of the John Held, Jr., generation.

The Mayer-Schulberg Studio was not only my nursery and kindergarten. It also offered an advanced course in psychodrama, neurasthenia, and pathological insecurity. A vivid case history is that of the director Marcel DeSano, a name you will not find in any of the film histories but which lives on in our family folklore. Where DeSano came from I don’t remember. He was simply one of a number of young European geniuses who materialized in early Hollywood. In silent pictures, remember, mastery of the English language was no prerequisite. In that sense motion pictures were more international than they are today. In Marcel DeSano’s case, he had been around Hollywood for a year or so. He had worked for Irving Thalberg when Irving was the 20-year-old
wunderkind
of Universal. Now L.B. had brought Irving to the Mayer-Schulberg Studio as his assistant, undoubtedly the single best move Louie ever made, and the young Irving in turn had told B.P. about his problems with Marcel DeSano. DeSano talked like a genius. He had fascinating ideas. He claimed to have made brilliant short films in Europe. But Irving had never been able to sell him to the warring factions at Universal. And, Irving admitted, young Marcel was erratic. Stimulating, seemingly bursting with talent, but terribly neurotic. Irving himself wasn’t yet sure enough of his position with L.B. to take on DeSano. But he thought B.P. might be interested.

Exactly the kind of challenge my father welcomed! He met with Marcel, both at the studio and at our house for dinner, and was captivated. The young director was one of a long line of European
charmers who would troop through our living rooms for years to come, some of them phonies, some of them the genuine article. I see them all in a single composite, those adventurers with febrile minds and finely chiseled faces of the proper artistic intensity, kissing the hand of my mother, engaging me in flatteringly mature conversation, discussing the works of the European masters with B.P. Artists, mediocrities, poseurs—all of them
HOLD-FRAME
in the portrait of Marcel DeSano. Of medium height, he was delicately made, attractive in a dark, mysterious way, dapper in his dress—
dandy
is the word—a Balkan adventurer turned Parisian boulevardier. He was Jewish, but of a completely different breed from the East European and the ghetto Jews who had taken over the motion-picture business from the Edisons and the Porters. Cultivated, educated, debonair, sophisticated, he could talk brilliantly about the art of the cinema. He had seen every picture and had made a study of the techniques of the ranking directors, the incomparable Griffith, Flaherty the documentary artist, Fred Niblo, Frank Lloyd, King Vidor, Rex Ingram, James Cruze, William Desmond Taylor… All he needed to join that select group, DeSano insisted, was a chance to make a picture of his own.

B.P. was intrigued. He loved to take chances on unknowns. It was like putting all his chips on a single number in a game of roulette. But there was Ad: “Ben, I’d be careful…” “Ben, are you sure you know enough about him?…” “Ben, you mustn’t let him flatter you into making a hasty decision you’ll regret later…” And of course the more Ad reminded him of his flair for the impulsive, the more determined he was to take that plunge. Instead of entrusting his next picture,
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Work,
to one of his dependable three, Gasnier, Forman, or Schertzinger, he defied Ad and his own studio associates and gave the assignment to Marcel DeSano.

In those days it was already
de rigueur
to shoot an establishing or master scene from the top to the end, and then move in for the medium close shots, the two shots (shots with two people), the close-ups. That way the film editor could assemble the scene according to what he thought was the proper rhythm—the full shot to establish the scene, the closer shots for reactions, and back to the original longer shot for the performers to make their exits. But Marcel was only half a dozen feet into his long shot when he called “Cut!” The cast and crew were astonished. In that scene the heroine was asked to slap the face of the villain. As she raised her hand, again Marcel called “Cut!” Then he shot a closer
shot of the impact of the hand against the face. What DeSano was doing was cutting the picture in his head, shooting only what he had decided was necessary to the finished film. Normally it took a hundred thousand feet of raw stock edited down to get a ten-thousand-foot motion picture. Marcel was leaving himself no protection. A dangerous gamble. Willie Wyler, one of the most distinguished directors of the last forty years, shot his scenes all the way through from every possible angle. Not our Marcel DeSano.

At first the actors, the chief technicians, and my father as well were concerned with the breakneck speed with which DeSano was rushing through the picture. He had been given a three-week or eighteen-day schedule, for in those hardy years Saturday was still a working day. DeSano brought in the picture six days and $20,000 under schedule. In twelve days he had finished
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Work,
and it was instantly assembled, with practically no excess footage in the film bin. The cutter couldn’t believe what he was seeing and neither could my father. What was even more extraordinary, when they ran the first cut in the small projection room, it had all come together exactly as DeSano had conceived it in his mind. Everyone agreed it was one of the best pictures Preferred had ever made!

So did the sneak-preview audience. So did the general public. And so did the critics. A new European genius was welcomed to the inner circle. Hollywood was amazed. B.P.’s discovery was the talk at all the smart places where the movie crowd assembled: Montmartre and Henry’s and the Coconut Grove. Thalberg wanted to borrow DeSano from B.P. for his next production. B.P. was taking bows and reminding Ad that an up-and-coming producer had to take chances and play his hunches. Discovering talent was the keystone of this burgeoning business/art. He was making a star of little Ethel Shannon, he had just signed that gum-chewing beauty contest winner from Brooklyn, Clara Bow, and now he had the overnight wonder boy, Marcel DeSano.

B.P. told Thalberg that DeSano was too precious to loan out. As soon as he had a well-deserved rest and went to New York for press interviews, he would start the sequel to
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Work,
already being written by a team of lady writers. Meanwhile, B.P. dined Marcel at Victor Hugo’s, took him with me to the celebrated Friday-night fights, and virtually brought him into the family. Marcel traveled with us on those hectic weekends to Catalina Island, Santa Barbara, and to the
wonderfully Victorian Hotel Del Coronado near San Diego. How vividly I remember him, the natty, intense, and now famous Marcel DeSano in his smartly tailored dark suits, with expensive ties tucked into elegant vests. Marcel DeSano talking of his innovative theories of film editing. Talking of the Balzac novel he would like to do next. Talking to me on the balcony about how one day we would work together. Move over, Von Stroheim and Murnau. We have Marcel DeSano!