Hollywood: The Oral History

by Jeanine Basinger

The old star system kept the talent in front of the public, shaped a personality for them, created movie stories just for them, and kept their name and image out there in the movie magazines and newspapers.

NATALIE WOOD: And the fan mail departments, too, which no longer exist. In those days, the studios, the executives, used to take great note of the amount of fan mail that would come in from the public to figure out how popular someone really was. And now that’s been abandoned.

An actor’s value in pictures was measured strictly by the amount and character of his fan mail and the reports from exhibitors throughout the country. This was a response to personality rather than a recognition of talent. If some technical facility went with it, then so much the better. These were the Gables, the Garbos, the Cagneys, the Crawfords, and the Davises. The legends.

BRONISLAU KAPER: As I said, or MGM said, more stars than there were in the heavens. And closer, too, just up there on the screen in your neighborhood theater. For fifty cents.

The star shaped the vehicle. It had to be tailored around their talents and personalities. Betty Grable was Fox. Judy Garland was MGM. And behind them were art directors and cinematographers with specific styles, too. It all added up, but it had to be shaped around the star. The public went to see the star, really.

For an actor to try to break through or get roles they wanted, that took a hell of a lot of courage. In most cases it couldn’t be done. Even the most popular actors of that time didn’t really have the authority, didn’t have the persuasiveness.

JEAN LOUIS: Once they had made a star, they often tried to make a copy . . . for insurance. They always tried to revamp Rita Hayworth, but they never could do it. They could never find another one. They had some very pretty girl, Dolores Hart, and they tried to make her a Rita Hayworth, but she didn’t have . . . well . . . she was not Rita Hayworth.

Ginger Rogers once told me something so right about stardom. She said, “If somebody says to you, ‘Oh, I just saw your picture, you’re marvelous,’ don’t believe a word.” But, she said, if years later they say, “Eight years ago I saw you in. . . . ,” you can believe that.

KATHARINE HEPBURN: Ethel Merman is not going to play Florence Nightingale. Everybody has their limitations.

BETTE DAVIS: Well, you know, there’s a great misunderstanding that any time two women work together, there’s automatically going to be a terrific feud.

Actually, the men have bigger feuds than the women. It’s an old wives’ tale that women can’t get along, you know. It truthfully is. It’s just absurd.

LESLIE CARON: Joan Crawford is not a great actress. She is a great star.

The one to watch out for was Mae West. When she’d get mad, she would hum all of the time, like a rattlesnake before it strikes.

KATHARINE HEPBURN: I wanted to be a star. That was my object. What’s the matter with being a star?

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.

Groucho asked me once to play for him one of the first Irving Berlin songs. And he said to me, “You know, I sang this song for Irving Berlin. When I finished, Irving said to me, ‘Groucho, if you ever have a strong urge to do this song again, call me, and I will give you ten dollars not to do it.’”

So actually, of what was used in the picture, I think we shot thirty-one or thirty-two days. And the only high-priced actor in it was Gary Cooper. The girl . . . what was her name? . . . Grace Kelly . . . wasn’t high priced then. This was only the second picture she’d ever been in. She was not a name at all.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Gone with the Wind is considered by some people to be the high point of the studio system . . . 1939 is called the greatest year in Hollywood history because so many famous movies were made and released in that time frame. But GWTW, as they call it, is boring and dated and politically offensive in some ways.

There’s only one thing that a filmmaker needs to realize: you don’t photograph the money, you photograph the story. There’s a lot of “geniuses” around in our business today who think you photograph the money.

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.

So I took a suspension. And that was really something that people were frightened of in those days. A suspension was this: studios could suspend an employee’s contract for the period of time it took to make any film that you refused to do and add it to the end of the contract. It could be two and a half months, however long. Then you went past that period of time to the end of the contract.

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Hollywood was a big moneymaking industry, set in its ways. It was trying to keep its audience through new technology and trying to keep up with the times with movies like Blackboard Jungle and Island in the Sun and Intruder in the Dust and Caged and all kinds of things, but as liberal as it thought it was trying to be, it wasn’t keeping up with the changing times. And it was failing to look at what a White man’s business it had become.

SIDNEY POITIER: When I first walked on the 20th Century–Fox lot, the only other Black person there was the shoeshine boy.

PAUL MAZURSKY: You know, I was in Blackboard Jungle with Sidney in 1954. And the cast all stayed at the motel in Culver City, and Sidney had to stay at a hotel on Adams, because he couldn’t stay at our hotel. He’ll tell you it’s changed, but it’s still terrible. It’s changed a little bit, but it’s still terrible. It won’t change by magic. You know, it’s like digging a hole. You toss the dirt out. Just when you think you’ve tossed it all, more comes sliding back in. You’ve got to dig faster and faster.

MICHAEL OVITZ: It was feast or famine at Fox. Cleopatra is a disaster but The Sound of Music—another massively expensive production—is an enormous, enormous hit.

JOSEPH E. LEVINE: In 1966, we made five family pictures. Even my own family didn’t go and see them!

GEORGE LUCAS: What I really wanted to do was go down to the ArtCenter in Los Angeles and become an illustrator. But my father said, “Well, you could do that, but you’re going to pay for it yourself”—and it was a very expensive school. He knew I wasn’t going to go out and work my way through school. Basically, I’m a lazy person.

PETER GUBER: The actors playing teenagers were fifty-three years old. I was young and sitting around the table at Columbia Pictures. There were forty White men. The average age was sixty-five years old. I was twenty-five.

MEL BROOKS: I think the word should be author, I’m not sure, but if the French want to say auteur, let’s not quarrel with them. They’re okay.

JANE FONDA: It never occurred to me to ask a director to be consulted on style or content. I remember halfway through my career, I’d been an actress for twelve years, and I made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It was the first time that a director other than my husband had asked me what I thought and discussed the script with me, the story, changes that needed to be made. I couldn’t believe it. It was Sydney Pollack.

BARBRA STREISAND: For too long, I had given in, even though I knew intuitively that I shouldn’t. I had heard people say that Barbra Streisand is difficult to work with because she always wanted to control things. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve never really had control, and that’s the reason I formed my own company, was to begin having control.

ARTHUR PENN: When we finished Bonnie and Clyde, the film was characterized rather elegantly by one of the leading Warner executives as “a piece of shit.” It went downhill from there.

NED TANEN: You’re always dealing with the mood of the public at the moment you put that picture out. Does anyone really think that in 1978 Easy Rider would be a hit movie? I don’t presume to know what a general feeling in America is. I don’t presume to know what a general feeling in my office is.

BUCK HENRY: I had no feeling. I never have a feeling. I have a slight feeling of doom every time.

DENNIS HOPPER: Anyway, so Easy Rider.

A. D. MURPHY: Film companies, distributors, and exhibitors woke up to the fact that people don’t go to films, they go to see a specific film. It’s an impulse purchase. There have been many studies. People make up their mind to see a film about six hours before, and they go that day. It’s literally an impulse purchase.

That’s another interesting note, and I must make note of it. In those days, the late sixties, there was a lot of innocence surrounding dope. Not like it has developed into. And as a result of that, there was a lot of dope in our editing room. SAM FULLER: These kids liked to smoke.

lol

JULIA PHILLIPS: Universal is like the Pentagon.

MIKE NICHOLS: There are many funny stories about making The Day of the Dolphin. And I won’t tell any of them.

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.

JOYCE SELZNICK: It’s not easy to put movies together. But it’s harder to sell them once they’re made.

JULIA PHILLIPS: What I think is a miracle is that we’ve gotten movies made at all.

GEORGE LUCAS: This is not a good thing to do if you actually want to earn a living. DAVID PUTTNAM: Real estate’s a much better business if you’re really interested in money.

STEVEN SPIELBERG: George was so anxious that Star Wars would be the biggest flop in his personal history that he went to Hawaii to get away. I met him in Hawaii the day the film opened.

GEORGE LUCAS: We were building sandcastles, and he was musing about how what he really wanted to do was a James Bond film. He’d gone to the producers and asked them if he could do it and said he would only do it if he could bring Sean Connery back. They didn’t want to do that, so Steve backed off. I turned to him and said, “I have the perfect film for you. It’s basically James Bond.” I told him the story of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

FRANK DARABONT: Moses did not come down from the mountain with a tablet that says “Write a three-act structure, or you’ll go to Hell.”

HOWARD W. KOCH: You’re not going to take Barbra Streisand out of a picture, so you spend most of your life being a diplomat. Or she calls you at night and you talk to her all night on the phone. She says, “Shouldn’t we do this? Don’t you like my hair this way?” And you keep cajoling and working, and you have seventy-five days of madness, and your wife says, “Listen, it’s either Barbra Streisand or me.”

BARBRA STREISAND: Well, I mean, there’s Robert Redford climbing on top of you, you know? You don’t have to act, you know?

TOM POLLOCK: You have to overcome the studios’ natural reluctance to trust you with a million dollars.

STEVEN SPIELBERG: It doesn’t take much gall. It takes desire to really do it. To really be a moviemaker or a writer or whatever you want to be, it just takes a blind faith that overcomes all fear.