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I planned to be a lawyer. I even practiced. I started out very young, and they mistook me for the office boy. I was a very poor lawyer. A discouraging factor in my legal career is that I lost every case. One day a client was chasing me down the street. I saw a friend of mine who called out, “What are you doing, Leo?” And I said, still running, “Practicing law.”
So I did a comedy story called Fig Leaves, and it got its cost back in one theater alone. And I always remembered what he said to me . . . make a picture people want to look at.
Film history has shown us that in the silent era, women wrote, directed, produced, acted, starred, did stunts, whatever. But slowly, women disappeared out of the top ranks, both in front of the camera and behind it.
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.
Allan Dwan told me that when Griffith first started using the close-up, the exhibitors complained that there were these heads on the screen with no bodies.
When he started taking close-ups, up in the office they said, “We pay for the whole actor.” When Mr. Griffith entered films, he gave it the form and grammar it has today.
You couldn’t “act.” You had to “be.” If he caught you acting, he knew the illusion was gone. So you had to be whatever you were supposed to be.
In the early days of the picture industry—that is, before the formation of the Directors Guild—whenever they filmed mob scenes, “herders” were employed to help out the few assistant directors assigned to the show. Although termed “herders,” they were actually extra assistant directors for crowd control.
He was a very religious man on Sunday . . . whenever he wasn’t on his boat with his mistress.
If Valentino grew a beard, every man in America would grow a beard.
In those days, you didn’t have doubles. Any star did what they were told. They were obedient in those days. It wasn’t like today, where the star tells the director what to do. But when I think of what we did with some of those people! We were all young and foolish, and we didn’t think.
Things could get real and really terrifying because we would have an actor running through the streets being pursued by somebody, and any minute, you know, those people in that area would take a swat at you, thinking you really were a crook. They didn’t know we were making a picture, see, because we had our cameras hidden in trucks. They saw a guy running and people chasing him—it’s a wonder somebody didn’t take a potshot at him. But we were lucky, and they didn’t.
We fixed up all our stunts to keep from hurting the horses as much as we could, but the rider was on his own.
. the first all-talking movie was Warner Bros.’ Lights of New York. The Jazz Singer was one of the early part-talkie experiments that Warners did. It was the most successful one . . . and certainly the one with the off-screen drama.
Well, the talking picture stimulated the box office. It was one of the new gimmicks that brought people back.
The motion picture business needed a shot in the arm, and the shot in the arm came with sound. It was a whole new field. It was a time when they could hear Garbo talk.
It hardly mattered what your voice was really like. No one knew just what this recording business was going to do. It may distort it or require certain tones in your voice that you might not have. No one knew enough about the vocal equipment to know that any shortcoming could be eliminated or corrected.
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.
Our first talkies were très talky.
When talkies came in, the movies imported everybody from the theater who knew anything at all about how to speak.
What attracts me to films is not the dialogue, it’s the imagery, the magic of the camera, and the dialogue should be subservient to that.”
HATHAWAY: It was by sheer perseverance that directors finally got it together during the transition to sound.
Nepotism reigned supreme at Universal, like it never reigned at any other lot.
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.
Jack Warner had trouble with all of them: Flynn, Cagney, Bogie, de Havilland, Davis. He drove actors crazy.
In the old days, the studio heads were people who delivered enormous practical experiences from their lives as showmen.
Warners watched the credits . . . and the pennies.
In the 1930s, with Frankenstein and Dracula and that type of story, Universal gave birth to its forte in motion pictures, the horror film.
The first time I met Howard Hughes was on a picture I did retakes for, a Billie Dove picture for Frank Lloyd in the early thirties. That was the first time I ever met this strange individual.
What are you talking about? You don’t meet Howard Hughes. You meet his money.
KATHARINE HEPBURN: Oh, hell. We read fairy tales for years, didn’t we? Are they throwing all that out? Do you think that A Clockwork Orange has a lot more to do with reality? I don’t. . . . You’ve got to dream up your own life. You’ve got to dream up everything.
Nobody gives Hollywood any credit for business sense. Every studio looked for ways to save, to make profit off something lying around. And, of course, studios would make deals with one another to loan or exchange stars. The poor stars were just traded back and forth, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
Some of us were just brought out to Hollywood and allowed to vegetate. For instance, there’s the famous story about William Faulkner. He was brought out and sat around, and he said one day, “Do you mind if I work at home?” They said, “No.” So he went back to Oxford, Mississippi, and he was there for six months before anyone figured it out. His agent kept sending him checks the whole time.
CHARLTON HESTON: A screenwriter has to recognize that film is a collaborative undertaking. You can’t write a film script totally in the typewriter. This is a highly controversial point, and the next time you have a writer in front of you, quote me and hear how mad it makes him.
Film is a funny thing. You can take a series of five scenes, and there are perhaps twenty-five ways you can put them together. But there’s probably only one way that makes any sense, and you’ve got to find that one way.
In contrast to the backgrounder dress, you would design the deliberate eye-catcher dress. The eye-catcher is for where the woman comes in the room and the dress is supposed to be noticed for itself, for reasons of story and character.
EDITH HEAD: Years ago, we transmitted the mood of the actress to the audience by the way we dressed them. We were so much a part of the storytelling image.
I always liked Ginger. She had a marvelous figure. I had no trouble with her except she was always adding a little bit to her outfits, bows on her shoes and something on her hair and something you’d never expect until the last minute. One of the other designers said about Ginger, “If she couldn’t wear it on her Christmas tree, she wore it on her dress.”
EDITH HEAD: Some directors are suspicious of designers, did you know that? Why? Because they always feel a designer is trying to sell a dress.
Music is only important and necessary in a movie if it makes some kind of a statement, takes some kind of position, means something.
Through the thirties and forties there was a transition whereby you had a film with sound, dialogue, special effects, and everything else, but the filmmakers weren’t quite sure about the role of music.
I think what music can do in a film is to create any emotional ambience. This is its greatest use and its most valid use.
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.
William Cameron Menzies was the greatest designer that ever lived, the father of the words production design.
The role of the art director is to fight when necessary, which is what all departments do.
The fan magazines were the greatest star builders that ever existed for the motion pictures. And then the newspapers in the old days.
VINCENTE MINNELLI: I made that character Jack Buchanan played in The Band Wagon and based him a little bit on me. I’m a very confusing person.
SHIRLEY MACLAINE: He said to me, “Murder can be fun.”
She's talking about Hitchcock btw
Hollywood was always about stars. Stories, what we refer to as genres today, were important . . . but movie stars defined Hollywood for the public.
