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FRITZ LANG: I ran away from home when I was eighteen or nineteen. Anybody who wants to be somebody should run away from home.
FRANK CAPRA: I fulfilled my dream and graduated from Caltech as a chemical engineer, but when I came back to California after World War I, I couldn’t get a job in my field. I just couldn’t get a job anyplace, but I needed to work, so I got a job in show business as a gagman.
It was a Spanish picture. The studio was in Fort Lee [New Jersey], and we built a big Spanish set there—a big Spanish street. The day we started the thing, a blizzard hit New York, and it really was a blizzard. Well, Bill Fox [William Fox, studio executive] was a nice old fellow, and he said to me, “Raoul, what can we do?” I said, “Well, Mr. Fox, I think that if we put a few domes on that set, we can change it to a Russian picture.” He called all the people and he said, “Get the Spanish costumes the hell out of here and bring the Russian costumes in.”
FRANK CAPRA: The training ground was there, you see, at Mack Sennett’s studio. You know, comedy is difficult. It’s the most difficult of all the genres in film or in any other medium—stage, books, or anything else. The silent era trained people in the real comedy school: visual comedy, which is quite a bit different from verbal comedy or oral comedy. In other words, people and things had to look funny to be funny.
PETER BOGDANOVICH: Someone once complained to Chaplin that his camera angles weren’t interesting. He said, “They don’t have to be. I’m interesting.”
actors and stars did have a great problem back in those early days with Klieg lights. We had this Klieg light eye problem. We used so much exposure and light, and some actors apparently became affected by it. Believe me, it can be extremely painful. People at that time thought it came from carbon dust floating in the air. Actually, it was from ultraviolet light, and there is now a law that you must not have these lights on without a glass over them. Just a plain piece of glass would have taken care of the problem, because it cuts out the ultraviolet. Now it’s a state law, or a law everywhere,
Doug Fairbanks, Sr., did most of his own stunts, but for the really dangerous ones, he had this troupe of Italian-German acrobats, and one of them was a very handsome boy. There were six brothers, I think. Most of them got killed doing stunts.
Charlie Chaplin said, “Just when we were getting it right, it was over.”
As a matter of fact, sound probably saved the industry. The business had come to a crisis where the entertainment dollar was being attracted by so many competitors. The motion picture business needed a shot in the arm, and the shot in the arm came with sound.
Little May McAvoy, who was the leading lady opposite Jolson, had red hair. Red is not sensitive to orthochromatic stock, so a girl with red hair looked like a deep brunette when she was photographed on ortho. So when it got to the scenes that were photographed under incandescent light on the panchro, which was sensitive to red, she’d walk out of a silent scene into one that was going to have dialogue and suddenly she’d become a blonde. She’d be a brunette on this side of the door and a blonde on the other side of the door. Yeah, we were solving problems and creating new ones.
If he didn’t have a good take, we’d have to start over again because we couldn’t edit sound in those days. If you had a nine-minute scene of dialogue, you shot for nine minutes continuously. That’s why we started using multiple cameras. They hadn’t yet learned how to dub sound.
Then they gave me the double whammy: “How long will it take you to convert the last three reels of your movie—or two reels of it—into sound?” The Spieler was going along beautifully as a silent picture, and all of a sudden, whammo! Right in the middle of shooting, it became a sound movie.
HAROLD LLOYD: I had just completed a picture called Welcome Danger. I had finished it silent, and we previewed it, and on the bill was a little one-reel sound comedy, and they howled at this comedy. They had the punkest gags in it, but they were laughing at the pouring of water, the frying of eggs—it didn’t matter—the clinking of ice in a glass. We said, “My God, we worked our hearts out to get laughs with our thought-out gags, and look here, just because they’ve got some sound to it, they’re roaring at these things.”
KING VIDOR: When sound first came in, that’s when popcorn and all the drinks started and necking in the theater started, because you could turn away and do all sort of things and you could still hear. You wouldn’t miss anything, you know. The sound would take care of it. In silent pictures, you had to pay attention the whole time. You had to sit there and try to figure it out.
HENRY HATHAWAY: I loved it! We had about used up everything there was to do in silent pictures, and it gave a new dimension to movies. Change always happened. Later color would come in and add another dimension. Then there would be the new size of the screens and Cinerama would be added. Sound was just an added dimension. The latest dimension is smut—pornography.
KARL STRUSS: If we had technical problems, it was always up to the camera department to give in to the sound department, which I resented very much. Sound became the important thing. Photography meant nothing. It was a stupid arrangement from the start.
ALLAN DWAN: I remember one time when somebody was struggling to get the sound of water dripping. Dripping water. They tried everything. They tried pebbles, buckshot, everything in the world, until somebody came along and said, “Why don’t you try water?” And it worked perfect.
ALLAN DWAN: Technically, sound was wrong when it began. It was wrong for a long, long time. By that I mean in pitch. If your voice was high, it made it higher, no doubt due to the speed . . . very much like the tone if you speed it up. The voice becomes shrill. Actors like John Gilbert just didn’t have the kind of a voice that went with his personality, and Doug Fairbanks didn’t, either. Doug was manly looking, but he had a high voice. So the sound didn’t fit them. Today it could be corrected, or they could have some vocal lessons. But up until that time, they hadn’t had to talk, so no one had
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Looking back on the whole thing, I would say the business used those “iceboxes” and those immobile booths for about a year . . . maybe a year and a half . . . then we all moved forward.
ALLAN DWAN: Sound brought on the building of the bigger studio lots. The original studios, which were started up about 1911 or 1912, were smaller, more like offices with some facilities attached.
JOHN CROMWELL: You can see how sound brought in the formation of a dominant business system. It pulled people together into bigger buildings, onto lots, into a working hierarchy, and it created a structure to assess product, budget product, and make product.
MERIAN C. COOPER: Irving Thalberg never put his name on a picture. Best producer that ever lived. He did a lot of great pictures. Hell, he was head of Universal Studio when he was only twenty-two years old, for Chrissake. The production head of it. He died at thirty-five or something, and in the last two or three years he was so sick he couldn’t work.
TAY GARNETT: Thalberg was very sure of himself and rightfully so. He was probably as near to being a genius as anyone we’ve ever had in the picture business.
I think the “genius” tag applies to Thalberg. He was the first man to conceive reshoots or adding new scenes as a practical method for putting a high polish on a picture. Thalberg didn’t do little things or retakes just to make a show releasable. His pictures were all right, but he knew these little things would make them much finer pictures.
ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS: Well, Thalberg had people advising him, too. [Screenwriter] Frances Marion was Thalberg’s other self. Every picture that Thalberg did, Frances was involved in or wrote. She was the great scenario writer, and she sat with him on every picture. And she was the greatest scriptwriter the business has ever seen.
Voldemar Vetluguin,
IRVING RAPPER: Jack Warner was not to be coped with. He was tyrannical, unreasonable, and didactic. At home, he was a prince and an angel, the greatest, kindest host in the world. And he had a most charming, wonderful wife, whom I adore and who helped cope, but really, he was not to be coped with.
doubt it. Jack Warner had trouble with all of them: Flynn, Cagney, Bogie, de Havilland, Davis. He drove actors crazy.
ADELA ROGERS ST. JOHNS: Look at what they went through out there at Warner Bros. with all those unhappy stars. They gave out so many suspensions that their people weren’t working half the time. Bette Davis wouldn’t work for that son of a bitch Jack Warner, and she ran off the lot to England. Of course, they forced her back, and when she comes back, Cagney runs off the lot. I mean, you know, those things didn’t happen at Metro. Maybe at Fox or Paramount, I don’t know. But not Metro.
At Columbia, if the director went beyond four takes on any given shot for any reason whatsoever, the assistant director was supposed to call the production office.
you only mentioned Parnell as a loser. It was just like a word in the dictionary, identical with “failure,” and it opened the way wide for English actors because they said Gable was not an Irishman and therefore people couldn’t believe in him and the whole thing collapsed. Gable never made another picture in which he didn’t play an out-and-out American.
CHARLTON HESTON: I think producers can do their job in three general ways. There is the producer who is a logistician, who deals with the logistics of film, and whose expertise has to do with schedules and the mechanics of making a picture. And this, never doubt it, is vital. Then there are producers who are promoters. Arthur Jacobs was one of those. So was Sam Bronston. There are many such. Sam Spiegel is such a producer, really. Then there are producers whose primary instincts are for some of the creative aspects of filmmaking. Perhaps script, perhaps cutting. I would say Hal Wallis was an
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Never mind the quality of the picture. “Let’s not open a new can of beans.” There were many producers who were not too secure, so they would rather do a bad picture than not do a picture at all. It was very sad. But that was the studio system at MGM.
These issues are why so many big-name directors ultimately became their own producers: Frank Capra, John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, and so on. They became producer-directors.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: How much work do I leave for an editor? None. This is the point. It seems to me an extraordinary thing—I hope there are no cutters present—that you have, say, $6 million of film, and it might get into the hands of a very indifferent editor. That’s a problem.
CHARLES LEMAIRE: Department heads got credit on a film for the costumes whether they designed them or not. This led to some hard feelings and rivalries. I took the title “director of wardrobe.” On the screen you saw “Director of Wardrobe Charles LeMaire.” Not costume designer or whatever. Then you saw “Costumes Designed By Bonnie Cashin,” which meant that Bonnie did the clothes for the principal people, sometimes also for some of the people in secondary roles. Oftentimes, due to money or time constraints, she might have to take something out of stock and redo it, but she designed the movie’s
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ELMER BERNSTEIN: Sometimes I will get up and boo at the end of the performance. I do things like that. There’s one score I really hate. I hated it so much. In the case of 2001 I had to walk out of the theater for a few minutes at one point because I got so infuriated by the ridiculousness of it. Now, maybe that’s what Kubrick wanted. I once discussed it with Kubrick, and I still don’t know what he had in mind. But the use of the “Blue Danube Waltz” made me very sorry that I wasn’t stoned when I was in the picture.
MERVYN LEROY: Not with the top boys. Capra didn’t have to fight. George Stevens didn’t have to fight. Willy Wyler didn’t have to fight. I don’t think any of the top boys had to fight. Negotiate, yes. Argue, probably. But not fight. You didn’t have to fight to make a good picture, you know. Everyone wanted the same thing.
EDWARD DMYTRYK: If we had all known that they were going to be still running these pictures forty or fifty years later . . . and asking us to get up and talk to people about them . . . we probably would have shot them differently. As a matter of fact, we just made pictures. We thought the movie would go out and be run for a few weeks or a few months in the theater and then would be completely forgotten.
My kind of director—those are the guys like my friend Ford and George Stevens and Willy Wyler and others—is someone who took over the role of producer as fast as possible. You had to prove yourself, but your goal was total control of your movie. And success freed you.
The thing is, Capra knew technically what he wanted. He didn’t seem to pay an awful lot of attention to the camera, or at least as much as he did to the scene, which I think is right. I think the scene’s more important than the camera position.
LEO MCCAREY: I thought Frank Capra was the cleverest director in the business. He was my hero. I literally mean it. I ran everything he made, right from the beginning, before he had made a name for himself.
JOHN HUSTON: Hitchcock, a wonderful director, is always on the lookout for material that fits what he likes to talk about and tell, and he never steps out of that circle. I am not that way. When I make a film, it’s only been because I was completely interested and fascinated by the material itself.
There was a good joke said by an Austrian writer, Anton Kuh, about a director: “He has a tremendous talent for genius.” That was Lubitsch.
JACK BENNY: Lubitsch could direct anybody. He was probably—no, don’t let me say probably, let me say definitely—the greatest comedy director that ever lived.
John Ford was a great director of actors and not too involved with anything else. He would very seldom deviate from a given course, and he was murder on actors, especially women. He hated women in his pictures, and he hated a suggestion from anybody.
FRED ZINNEMANN: I think Hitchcock is the great master—I don’t know anybody else who can touch him—and I admire it, but that doesn’t mean that one should try to imitate it.
but personally I never look through the camera. What for? To find out whether the camera is lying? I only consider the screen up there, and the whole film, to me, should be on paper from beginning to end—shot by shot, cut by cut—and each cut should mean something. . . . What is cinema? The assembly of pieces of film to create an idea . . . it’s the only new art of the twentieth century, but it is essentially a visual art.
To be honest, I am not interested in content at all. I don’t give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material to create an emotion in the audience. I find too many people are interested in content. Who cares? I don’t care myself. But a lot of films, of course, live on content. I think one of the greatest problems we have in our business is the lack of people who can visualize.
STANLEY KRAMER: Why do I keep directing? Because I’m arrogant and I’ve got an ego and I enjoy it.
