Hollywood: The Oral History

by Jeanine Basinger

René Clair treated you like you were a moron. You would arrive on the set, and René . . . with a stopwatch . . . would do the part for you. To the absolute detail, he portrayed what he wants you to do. He has the precise turn of the head just as he wants it. And he does it all with a stopwatch.

George Stevens had the only contract that ever has or ever will exist giving the director complete control over every aspect of his films. He was once asked which aspect he would give up if he had to give only one of the basic four away. The four aspects were: (1) selecting the material and working on it; (2) casting, sets, and costumes; (3) shooting it; (4) scoring, dubbing, and cutting. When asked which of those aspects he would give up, he said, “Directing the picture.”

HENRY HATHAWAY: I think the director of a film, from the day he starts working till the day he finishes the film, contributes about 10 percent to the film’s success.

HOWARD HAWKS: Gable, Barrymore, Harlow, not one of those actors had a damn thing to say about the choice of stories. They did what they were told to do by very smart people. And they remade any portion of the picture that was bad. And they worked the star system so that if you went to see Gable, you knew that you were going to see a certain type of picture. You knew what he stood for. You knew if you were going to see Crawford, what kind of story it would be. When the day came that the stars decided themselves what they were going to do—holy smoke, what a mess they made. You know, because nobody was watching them then. There have been some awfully good people who failed miserably because they chose bad things. They were better off when the studios chose, but many of them wanted more freedom, less glamour.

NUNNALLY JOHNSON: I thought that Marilyn was, I don’t know, the most obtuse woman. I just couldn’t get to her or feel that I had established any kind of communication with her at all.

My conviction is she bored the hell out of everybody. She just didn’t have the intelligence, but she was aware she didn’t have it. When she married Arthur Miller—now, this is pure speculation—my guess is that she just wasn’t interesting enough for Miller. Nobody finds it very difficult to talk before you get into the hay, but what do you say afterwards? Marilyn was like a child. She thought that a lay was the complete answer to everything. When Miller began to indicate that he was no longer devoted to her, she went out and had an affair. In each case, she thought that the solution was to make the man jealous, and that would win him back.

BILLY WILDER: My God, I think there are more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II, and there’s a great similarity.

She was very intelligent, she was tough minded, very appealing, but she had bad judgment about things. She adored and trusted the wrong people. She was very courageous when I directed her in Let’s Make Love.

She was very shrewd in certain ways. I once heard her talk in her ordinary voice, which was a very unattractive, unappealing voice. She invented this appealing baby voice.

Fred was very polite. Gene Kelly was just the opposite. He was quite brusque: “I don’t like that.” But Fred was a very quiet man. He didn’t talk much. At the meetings that we had on the pictures about scripts, he never said much.

SIDNEY FRANKLIN: Never got along with her at all. Well, I got along with every woman I ever worked with, and I could name quite a long list. All stars. But something about Garbo, I don’t know. I didn’t get along with her, and I don’t want to say why.

GEORGE CUKOR: You know, that “box-office poison” thing was nothing but a mean article in a fan magazine that labeled a few great stars that way: Hepburn, Crawford, Dietrich, all the legends. One article by a hack. Now it’s treated like government statistics.

ALLAN DWAN: Stanwyck was a very remarkable girl. Good worker. Terrific worker. And a great friend to the workingmen on the crew. She was a real mixer. She helped everybody. CHARLES LEMAIRE: She was probably the most professional of all the big stars, which is why her career lasted so long. RICHARD SCHICKEL: Barbara Stanwyck is always my choice of the older women stars. I think she’s a truly fabulous screen character.

LEO MCCAREY: Over at Paramount, I found myself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. The amazing thing about that movie was that I succeeded in not going crazy. They were completely mad. I enjoyed shooting several scenes in the picture, though. My experience in silent films influences me very much, and so usually I preferred Harpo. But it wasn’t the ideal movie for me. In fact it’s the only time in my career that I based the humor on dialogue, because with Groucho it was the only humor you could get. Four or five writers furnished him with gags and lines. Groucho thought he was the most creative, but to my mind, Harpo was. He was the most responsive and the funniest.

I learned one thing about comedy from him, which I think was very valuable. I remember it every time I’m writing comedy. Do you recall the famous line “Either he’s dead, or my watch has stopped” while Groucho was taking Harpo’s pulse? It was first a question: “Is he dead, or has my watch stopped?” Well, it was nothing. We were trying to analyze it, and Groucho said, “A question demands an answer. The audience is waiting for the answer. It’s the same as ‘Why does a chicken cross the road?’ That’s not the joke. The joke is ‘To get to the other side.’ They’re waiting for the answer. Let me make it a statement.” So he went out the next performance and said, “Either he’s dead, or my watch has stopped.” Then, boom, the whole roof went off.

RANALD MACDOUGALL: A gulf exists between actors in the old generation and this one. I could go on for days and tell you the depths of the pettiness of some of the so-called stars of today. They are killers, you know. They kill people. Ulcers. And they have very little talent. . . . All the people from old Hollywood were professionals. They were professionals.

I. A. L. DIAMOND: Everybody can quote half a dozen good lines from Casablanca, from Ninotchka, from The Maltese Falcon and any number of other pictures. Now, the two big laughs in Shampoo, as far as seeing it in the theater, were “I want to suck his cock” and “Do you want to fuck?”

KATHARINE HEPBURN: Sex, pornography, and obscenity have always sold better than anything else. Now you make it respectable and you make it sort of an art form. . . . [Sam Peckinpah] knew better than to make Straw Dogs. This is the rottenest piece of work that I ever saw . . . it’s laughable and cheap. It is brutality . . . I think it’s phony. I think A Clockwork Orange is phony. I think that Sunday Bloody Sunday is phony. I think they are just pathetic. I just go and laugh and throw up.

Selznick really wanted Paulette to do it. But then there was a long letter signed by the Daughters of the Confederacy saying that it was well known that Paulette Goddard was living in sin with Charles Chaplin and no girl of the South, no daughter of the Confederacy, would do such a thing as that and they would boycott the film if Paulette Goddard did it.

PANDRO BERMAN: These corporation men are not the old storytelling studio heads of the past. They loved making pictures, and that’s why a lot of people think those old films were better than the films we’re getting now. On the other hand, there’s the school of thought that thinks these films were all sentimental hogwash or hack jobs and that the motion picture of today is the really good motion picture, the ones today being based on the work of one writer, one director, or a combination of a director-writer. And there’s no question that there’s something to be said for both sides.

By the midsixties, the old system was, for all practical purposes, gone with the wind. The problems included censorship, the formation of unions, the government forcing the studios to sell their theater chains and stop their practices of block booking .

the House Un-American Activities Committee, the defections of stars after the de Havilland decision that disallowed suspensions of contracts, the threats of competition from both television and new material from international markets . . .

BILLY WILDER: There are times when I wish we still had it because the fun has gone out of it, the game that you played with them. We had to be clever. In order to say, “You son of a bitch,” you had to say, “If you had a mother, she’d bark.”

JOHN CROMWELL: The Depression ultimately did bring about an important change in Hollywood, however: the formation of the guilds [unionization].

RIDGEWAY CALLOW: Yes, it came immediately. Conditions were better right away. The exploitation ended, and I have to thank the actors for a great deal of that. The Screen Actors Guild stipulated that the members wouldn’t work Saturdays anymore, and if they did work Saturday, they got double time, which is quite a bit of money. If the studios had been reasonably fair, maybe there wouldn’t have been any unions, but unionization cost the studios in profitability.

JOHN CROMWELL: The formation of the Directors Guild was not a simple matter. It brought out the deep-seated convictions of a few who felt that it was undignified. They felt that creative people like directors had no place in organizations for protection. Led by Cecil B. DeMille, the diehards tried in vain to stop the movement.

SIDNEY SHELDON: During World War II, almost no picture lost money. People would go to see anything because they were so desperate for entertainment. There was a great curtailment of necessities. You couldn’t get much gas. There was rationing. You couldn’t drive. You really couldn’t get entertained very easily, so all movies made money.

WALTER REISCH: We couldn’t shoot any outside locations. It all had to be inside the studio. You couldn’t even shoot outside [on the lot], because there was a curfew on lights in California then. No spotlights were permitted on the back lot.

SIDNEY SHELDON: Remember. A lot of factors contributed to the decline of the motion picture business. But there were serious legal issues that went against the studios and affected their profit margins: the de Havilland decision and the antitrust decrees that forced the studios to sell their movie chains and stop their practice of block booking. During the 1930s and through World War II, almost every studio had its own chain of theaters. Before a camera turned, those pictures were automatically booked into the whole chain. There was no television then, so that wasn’t a competitive factor. Then the distributors got unhappy and said that the studios were forcing them to buy everything. If they wanted one good picture with Clark Gable, they had to take four bad ones from the studios. It was called block booking. They had to buy a package of five. If they didn’t want to take the five, they couldn’t get the Gable picture. Finally they filed an antitrust suit and won. Then television came in.

SAM ARKOFF: At the beginning of the fifties, the television era really started in earnest. The older people, the middle-aged and older people, were moving out to the suburbs. They were sitting in before their television set all night instead of going to the movies.

JEANINE BASINGER: Hollywood was hit hard by the case known as the Paramount Consent Decrees. It’s probably the main factor that brought about the end of the old studio system, not television as most people tend to believe.

It was an antitrust case brought against Paramount. Paramount

Well, it was simple enough . . . the major film studios owned the theaters that they showed their movies in . . . and since they also made the pictures . . . and had all the creative personnel under contract . . . and owned the film processing labs and distributed into their own theaters, they were in monopolistic violation, in illegal trade practice.

The Court decided against the studios, and they had to divest themselves of their theaters and stop block booking. It was the end of the original Hollywood studio business system, although, of course, Hollywood did not collapse overnight. It continued in production, and most people didn’t know the difference.

JEANINE BASINGER: The first generation of studio heads was disappearing. Louis B. Mayer died in 1957 and Harry Cohn a year later. Paramount’s Adolph Zukor was already eighty-seven years old in 1960 and Darryl F. Zanuck left Fox in 1956 to become an independent producer in France.

GORDON STULBERG: I got to know foreign distribution operations quite well, and it was quite clear that if you had Steve McQueen, for example, or Clint Eastwood or Barbra Streisand, that the guarantees that were payable in Australia and Japan and South Africa and Italy and Germany—just the guarantees that you’d get whether the picture performed or not—would be three or four times the salary you paid the actor for the whole picture.

ARNOLD KOPELSON: And you take those contracts, with a completion guarantee that’s issued by an insurance company, and you take it to a bank, and you borrow the total cost of making the movie. And generally, your contracts are for more than the budget of the movie, more than the anticipated negative cost plus interest. And generally you can come in with a profit before you start your first day of photography.

GEORGE LUCAS: I was a huge fan of Godard because I was an editor and experimental filmmaker and he was pushing the boundaries. When it came to how to tell a story, Fellini was everything to me, as was Kurosawa. With Kurosawa especially, an American audience was being made to explore a radically new but fascinating foreign culture. What did any of us know about the history of medieval Japan? We were really being dumped into an alien environment. I loved being thrown into the middle of something with no explanation. I assume it’s the same for someone who grew up in a village in China. They would look at a western and say, “What is going on here? What is this place?”

PETER BOGDANOVICH: I think something that has hurt American cinema is that younger filmmakers have gone after Antonioni and Fellini. Such pretension!

GORE VIDAL: The laughter that went through this town when the French—who are always wrong—remember that! Whenever the French have a theory, you must begin by saying “It’s incorrect.” It’s a nation devoted to the false hypothesis. On that they build marvelously logical structures, but the hypothesis is always wrong. They suddenly decided that all these hacks that we’d been laughing at for years were great creators.

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN: I did the last Alfred Hitchcock Hour ever made. My contact with Hitchcock consisted of him coming on the set on my first day of shooting to film his introduction. I was really terrified, because he was this great director. He came up to me and stared. He said, “Mr. Friedkin, you’re not wearing a tie. Usually our directors wear ties.” I thought he was putting me on, but he was absolutely straight. That’s all he ever said to me.

BILLY WILDER: The critics have become important because today’s business doesn’t know what it’s doing. They need somebody to tell them.

PETER FALK: I dislike very, very much when I walk onto a set and I know that the director has an idea ahead of time, where he wants that camera to go and where he wants the scene to go.

SAM WASSON: In the old days, most everything was done in-house. It was easier to apply cost control and budget realistically.

HAL ASHBY: I was so loaded on Harold and Maude, I could hardly walk. You want to talk about profundity? I was lucky I didn’t fall in the bay.

SAM WASSON: But The Godfather was a startling example of smart distribution, blockbuster distribution, an essential element in the burgeoning equation of how to assemble, manufacture, and sell not just a movie, but a giant hit.

JOHN PTAK: The studios used to totally finance their own pictures, but in the last fifteen years, studios have become more involved in cofinancing, negative pickup deals, and outright purchases. Cofinancing is where a studio puts up, say, a million dollars, and a private financier puts up another million. To make the case easier, when someone like Dino De Laurentiis puts up a million dollars and Paramount puts up a million dollars, Paramount might get US and Canada, Australia and Great Britain, your principal English-speaking countries. For De Laurentiis’s million, he would get the rest of the world to do with whatever he pleases. Studios more recently have entered into cofinancing situations with each other.

DAVID BROWN: Jaws is an example of studio trust. It goes beyond trust. And it is an example of what producers can do with their much-battered credibility. Because there were times, I’m sure, when they thought we were insane, and there were times when we thought we were, too.

FIELDS: My favorite story about the cutting of Jaws is that each time I wanted to cut, I didn’t, so that it would have an anticipatory feeling. And it worked.

It has become an increasingly difficult area of the business, and it may be the most difficult area of the business. Since people who go to movies generally are not people who read newspapers, there is an enormous amount of wasted money in newspaper advertising. Television advertising for movies is so extraordinarily expensive that you can spend three or four million dollars on television advertising, cash, so fast that you will not know what even happened to the money. And it’s obviously only good for a certain kind of movie, which is the Towering Inferno kind of movie, where you can show something in a fifteen-second spot that will at least get somebody’s attention.