Hollywood: The Oral History

by Jeanine Basinger

ALAN DWAN: The great thing about those silent comedians—Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, all of them—they made it look like they weren’t trying to be funny. The minute you’re trying to be funny—well, take for instance, a character like Chaplin. His scenes were sad little scenes. He was a pathetic little fellow. He never went around trying definitely to be a buffoon. His being one was an accident. And Keaton was always serious. Straight-faced. You see these comedians on TV today, and they are striving so hard and the only way they can ever make you laugh is to talk about their mother-in-law or their wife.

GEORGE FOLSEY: I worked with a director who had come from the Sennett company, and they were all kind of a little nutty over there, I guess. He never would say, all right, let’s get a close-up. If he wanted to have a great big close-up of somebody, he would stand there and he would say, “Choke her, choke her, choke her . . .” I finally figured out that that meant get a great big close-up, up by her throat. If he wanted a medium shot, like a half shot, he’d say, “Medium fried, medium fried . . .” It took me a while to get this jargon in my head. He would say when he wanted a long shot, “Feetie, feetie, feetie, feetie . . .” “Doorknobs” would mean shoot somebody about waist high, and it took a while to get used to that jargon, but he was a very amusing guy and he came out of that Sennett madhouse of comedy. They had their own language.

RAOUL WALSH: He discovered the close-up, you know. He perfected it. Never been seen before. Everything had been just set up. They nailed the camera down to the floor, and they came in like it was a stage play and played everything that way.

DW Griffith

HENRY HATHAWAY: To show you how loose the studio was when it came to production and job definitions in those days, I can cite one person: Lon Chaney. Lon Chaney used to come work (and I know ’cause I was a propman then) at six thirty or seven o’clock in the morning. If there was a stage where they had a cabaret with a couple of girls or something, he would choreograph the whole thing himself. He would show ’em the steps and put on a whole little number. He was under contract only as an actor, and he wasn’t paid as much as some of the others, but he would do everybody’s makeup. If somebody needed a beard, he would put it on him. He just loved it, loved to work. He was marvelous with drapes, and if they needed a plush home with fancy drapes, he’d get up on a ladder and go and fix the drapes. He used to come by every morning and say, “What can we do for you?” He had his hand in everything, especially makeup. He loved the choreography, too. It shows how our jobs were so loose that they intermingled, and it was easy to be recognized by somebody if you were willing to work to get a better job. He was getting paid less and wanted to move ahead, but he loved to work, too. He became a real star.

And when she’d arrive on the stage, we’d have a little orchestra who’d play a little theme song just for her. We all had orchestras.

“Mervyn, I didn’t ask how much it would cost, I asked if it would improve the picture.” And I said, “Yes, it would.” And he said, “Shoot it.” And that sums up Irving Thalberg.

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. Maybe it would have been fine. But just sitting there, normal-like, it was positively infuriating, it was so ludicrous, asinine, totally unrelated, and unless it was designed to be, to me it was like writing “Fuck” on the bathroom wall or something in the girls’ dormitory, or something like that. It was just stupid. It was unrelated and smart-assed and dumb.

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.

With [Spencer] Tracy, he was upset always, just staying on location, and he was threatening me always that he was going to go home and quit. So I had to figure out that what had to be done was to have some attractive-looking woman sitting there admiring him and telling him how great he was. So we employed a woman to do that. In fact, we sent to Boise, Idaho, and got her clothes and everything, a whole wardrobe. He didn’t know that. An attractive woman who was there, a vacationer or something, that was excited by watching him and all that. So that kept him out of threats, from saying he was going home and quit and all that sort of thing. So different people were different.

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

Katharine Hepburn. WILLIAM TUTTLE: She just had confidence in herself. As a makeup man, I can’t think of any player who is just going to walk in with no makeup in front of a director or producer, except for Katie Hepburn, who was always pretty natural anyway. The makeup artist is really the only person who sees them as they are. You know their innermost secrets, and they must have a certain trust in you that you’re not going to go out and say, “Well, you ought to get a load of them without makeup.” But if you were working with Katharine Hepburn, you could forget all of that because she could care less whether she looks perfect. A person who is like that, as self-assured as she is, doesn’t have much respect for someone they feel is not qualified to do their makeup. And they would very quickly tell them. Very outspoken about it. You had to build up respect with the female stars, but Hepburn just had confidence and assumed she was going to be all right no matter who or what.

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

GEORGE CUKOR: She didn’t quite find herself at first. She was a little too mannered. Her career could have gone one way or the other. She could have become a great glamour girl, but she’s too human for that. In fact, in Christopher Strong, her second picture, she wore very tight, glittering dresses and was about to become a glamour girl. But in spite of everything, her humanity asserted itself, and her humor. She is a human being, the humanity of her emerged.

GEORGE FOLSEY: I had to make a test cold of Katharine Hepburn when she replaced Claudette Colbert in State of the Union. A very charming, delightful person. Just wonderful. During the time I’m making the test, she said, “Now make me fat. Make me fat!” She didn’t want to be gaunt and thin, she wanted to be nice and round and fat. And I said, “Miss Hepburn, I’ve been trying to make myself fat for years.” She said, “Don’t give a damn about you, just make me fat!” Talked like a rubber band at you. What a charming, delightful, wonderful person she is. And, of course, she was an excellent person to photograph as long as you, as she says, “Don’t show my chicken neck.”

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.’”

Dumont was a dear woman. She could take it. She had innate dignity. Whatever those crazy Marx Brothers did to kid her around, she’d always say, “Oh, you funny boys, don’t do that.” She didn’t have a hair on her head. She was absolutely bald. She wore a wig which Harpo used to steal. When we were on tour, she’d have to get off the train with a little turban that said PULLMAN on it! She was great, she was really the fourth Marx brother. Her dignity, they’d play against that dignity, she never tried to get laughs on her own. She was absolutely superb. Years later, after her time with the Marx Brothers, when I was directing my first picture, Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, there was a scene in which Betty Grable has a dream. She goes to meet Mrs. Richbitch (I forget what the name really was). She walks up a tremendous flight of stairs, wearing a beautiful mink coat, and at the top is the grande dame. All the character had to say was, “Good evening, my dear, so good of you to come.” When I started to think about casting it, I said, “Maggie Dumont.” I knew she was still alive, because every afternoon she would have tea at the Knickerbocker Hotel. So I called her, and I said, “Maggie, I’m doing a film. There’s a small part, not very much, but if you’d like to do a favor for me—” “Oh, my dear boy, of course, of course. But send me a script, I want to see if I’m right for the part.” So I sent her the script. Now, literally, all she said was “So good of you to come, my dear.” So she...

MARDIK MARTIN: You can do a scene that says one thing on paper, and if I give it to each one of you, that same scene, each one of you is probably going to do it differently. Am I right?

ROGER CORMAN: I feel that any script can be made for any budget. You can make Doctor Zhivago in six days for $50,000, but it’s going to look different than David Lean’s version.

MEL BROOKS: After Mike Nichols had done The Graduate, I said, “If Mike Nichols could have gone to Joe Levine and said, “I want to do The Green Awning.” “The what?” “The Green Awning.” “What is it?” “It’s a movie about a green awning.” “Does any famous star walk under the green awning?” “No, all unknowns.” “Are there any naked women near the green awning?” “No, no naked women.” “Are people talking and eating sandwiches and scrambled eggs in outdoor tables under the green awning?” “No, it’s just a green awning. Panavision. Just a green awning. It doesn’t move.” “How long would it be?” “Two hours. Two hours, nothing but a green awning on-screen. No talking, no dialogue, nothing.” “All right, what the hell, we’ll do it.”

RICHARD SYLBERT: You say to yourself, “Okay, Chinatown is about a drought, so all the colors in this picture are going to be related to the idea of a drought. And the only time you’re going to see green is when somebody has water for the grass.” It’s about a drought in 1937 in southern California. All the buildings in this picture will be Spanish except one. And they’ll all be white. The reason they’re white is that the heat bounces off them. And not only will they all be white, they’ll be above the eye level of the private eye. Above eye level means, for the private eye, that he has to walk uphill. It is always harder emotionally to walk uphill. You then decide what the colors are going to be and why they’re going to be that way and what the range should be, let’s say, from burnt grass, which is a terrific color, to white, which you know you’re already going to deal with, to umber. Umber is interesting, because it’s the color of a shadow. And in a movie like this, the more shadowy the better. You use the layers, the planes, use everything you can. All these things are available to you to structure a movie. Even opaque glass. You know what’s interesting about opaque glass in a mystery? You can’t quite see who’s behind it, and it looks like frozen water. And in a picture where they’re talking about water, it’s an interesting object to get involved with. And you just keep doing that wherever you can.

Taxi Driver

TOM POLLOCK: Movies are made for all the wrong reasons. They cost way too much money. And when I say all the wrong reasons, I’ve been there and I’ve been part of it. So this is part of my own personal twelve-step program: “My name is Tom Pollock, and I have filmed a concept rather than a movie.”

DON SIMPSON: Flashdance was booked in the theaters prior to us even finishing the screenplay. JERRY BRUCKHEIMER: All we had was a title, which was Flashdance, and we didn’t know what flash dancing was. If you see the picture, you still don’t know what it is. We finally decided we never would know, so screw it.

GEORGE CLOONEY: I did audition for Reservoir Dogs. I would have done a better job if I’d known Quentin was going to be such a talented director.

PETER GUBER: There are no rules in this business, but you break them at your peril.

CURTIS HARRINGTON: There are three cardinal rules of filmmaking, according to Curtis Harrington. I want you all to remember these. One is: Never make a film with animals. Number two is: Never make a film with children. And number three is: Never make a film with Shelley Winters.

this book is a long and open conversation among (and about) almost everyone who worked in Hollywood.