A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (15 page)

By March 18, enough footage from The Robe and How to Marry a
Millionaire was available for Zanuck and Skouras to hold the first public
demonstration of CinemaScope for exhibitors at the old Fox studio on
Western Avenue in Hollywood. The screenings were a huge success, with
theater owners from all over the country clamoring for the necessary
equipment and the exclusive rights to premiere The Robe in their cities.
And not only exhibitors: two days after the demonstrations, Fox announced that MGM, Columbia, Universal-International, and Walt Disney had joined "the CinemaScope revolution." The lone holdouts were
Warner Bros., because of Jack Warner's intractability, and Paramount,
which startled Zanuck and everyone else by both denouncing CinemaScope as impractical and, surprisingly, contesting Fox's claim to exclusive
rights to the process by dusting off its own anamorphic lens. Paramount
had made a similar deal with Professor Chretien in 1932 but had never
used the lens.

At the heart of the matter, however, was Paramount's fear that if
CinemaScope did catch on with the public and exhibitors, the same situation that had happened with the introduction of sound would reoccur:
the studios would be stuck with a backlog of outdated, unmarketable
product. As of March 18, when Fox held its public demonstrations of
CinemaScope, the major studios had a total of $350,000,000 tied up in
unreleased two-dimensional films, which would take up to two years to
play off successfully in the nation's theaters. Many veteran industry ex ecutives shared Jack Warner's privately expressed sentiment that 3-D was
a good short-term gimmick, a quick fix that would hype box-office receipts but never gain lasting public favor. CinemaScope, however, was
being introduced and marketed by a major studio with a long-term investment and a single-minded approach to making certain that the process's
dramatic and technical standards were on a level consistent with audience
expectations and comfort (i.e., no glasses). Cinerama's panoramic screen
mystique seemed to be exciting audiences and press alike, whereas 3-D
was meeting with critical and audience resentment: by March, Bwana
Devil and a series of old American and British short subjects were all that
the public had seen of 3-D, and while the sensation was novel, so was the
eye strain and the inconvenience of the cardboard viewers necessary for
obtaining the primitive depth effect. Warners was rushing House of Wax
to completion to meet the April io New York premiere deadline; and
Columbia had hastily added 3-D to a little B picture called, aptly enough,
Man in the Dark, with which it hoped to make a lie of Warners' claim
that House of Wax would be the first feature-length 3-D film from a
major studio.

But even as he raced with Columbia's Harry Cohn to be first in the
stereoscopic sweepstakes, Jack Warner, worried about the backlog of unreleased pictures, was hedging his bets. Still smarting from being aced out
of the Chretien process, he tried to come up with a viable alternative to
both Cinerama and CinemaScope-preferably something that could be
used on the studio's unreleased films. Early in January rumors began to be
heard of a new projection system that Warners had developed, and suddenly the same rumor began to circulate about Paramount and UniversalInternational. On January 26 a secret demonstration at the Warner Wiltern Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles revealed to a select
few what Jack, in a fit of pique and semiplagiarism, would soon dub
"WarnerScope." What it was was nothing more than the studio's 1946
musical blockbuster Night and Day projected through a rectangular mask
and a wide-angle lens on the projector, resulting in a picture almost twice
as wide as normal, giving a good imitation of "the panoramic screen"
that so many had heard about but so few had actually seen. It turned out
that both Paramount and Universal had already come up with the same
concept, although neither had gone to the extremes of width that Warners had. To get the necessary proportion, Warners' process cropped the
original image almost in half horizontally, masking the top and bottom of the picture so that when it was projected through the necessary lens, it
had a long, narrow look. Paramount opted for a proportion slightly less
wide, roughly one and a half times wider than normal, while Universal
decided that it could stretch its picture out to one and three-quarters
times wider than normal size, enhancing the width by projecting the
picture onto a curved screen reminiscent of Cinerama and throwing in a
multi-channel sound system as an added tonic. When Warner heard
about this latter gimmick, he grabbed it gleefully, christened his version
"WarnerPhonic sound," and ordered that House of Wax should be advertised as the first "all 3-D picture: 3-D Action, 3-D Sound, and 3-D
Color"-the latter being, of course, WarnerColor (what else?).

Strangely enough, when House of Wax finally opened in New York, it
had all the above-named Warner gimmicks except WarnerScope, which
Jack evidently decided to save for a rainier day. House of Wax proved to
be the sensation he had hoped for: on an investment of a little over $i
million, the picture grossed the staggering figure of $5.5 million, more than
any other Warners release since 1947's Life with Father. It seemed that
3-D, if not the panacea for all the industry's ills, was certainly a potent shot
in the arm; even Columbia's little 3-D potboiler Man in The Dark (which
beat House of Wax into New York by one day) grossed a respectable $2.5
million.

But Paramount became the first to introduce the wide screen to most
moviegoers, when George Stevens's Shane opened at the Radio City Music
Hall on April 24, on a screen measuring 3o by 50, as opposed to the normal
size of 25 by 34. The picture took in a hefty $9 million in its first year, which
it probably would have done without the added width; but the lesson, such
as it was, seemed to be that the public would flock in even greater numbers
to see pictures that were, to paraphrase an advertising slogan of the time,
"bigger and better than ever."

It was around this time that George Cukor returned from his European vacation to find a Hollywood considerably different from the one he
had left in January. Hardly anybody was working. Many of the studios
were at a standstill-RKO, Warners, and Universal had been closed
down for weeks, while at Columbia only one film was in production; at
MGM, two. But Cukor sensed a feeling of optimism and excitement in
the town, and after surveying the disarray and confusion he remarked to
the press that it seemed to him to be "the end of an era in Hollywood;
but I think it's healthy. There is a great turnover just like the period when talkies were introduced. It's stimulating . . . it gives you a chance
to keep yourself fresh . . . it takes you out of a groove and gives you the
chance to work with new ideas and new people." Having said that, he
reported to the Warner Bros. studio to begin the preproduction work on
his thirty-seventh film, his first in color and his first musical.

'ne of the first problems confronting Cukor was what to do
about the Cary Grant situation. Luft was continuing to assure everyone
involved that Grant would do the part, and in fact the actor did do a
reading of the entire script with Cukor. As Cukor told author/critic Robert Osborne, "Everybody wanted Cary to play Norman Maine in A Star
Is Born with Judy, and he came here [to my home] one day to read the
script aloud for me, and with me. He was absolutely magnificent, dramatic and vulnerable beyond anything I'd ever seen him do." It was
under Cukor's direction in Sylvia Scarlett in 1935 that Grant had first
stretched his talents beyond mere personality and delved into a character,
feeling, according to Cukor, "that he had substantial talents as an actor.
The part gave him confidence in his abilities, and I think was the real
start of his career as an actor." Cukor thereafter directed Grant in holiday and The Philadelphia Story, two films that established the actor as a
major romantic leading man and box-office attraction. Now, thirteen
years after their last work together, Cukor was astonished at Grant's
depth and range in reading the part of Norman. "But when he finished,"
continued Cukor, "I was filled with a great, great sadness. Because I knew
Cary would never do the role. He would never expose himself like that in
public."

Cukor evidently kept his suspicions to himself, for according to Sid Luft:
"George Chasin [Grant's agent] warned me that I'd never get Cary unless
we made the deal he wanted. But Jack Warner was stubborn about it. Cary
wanted to do it, but Jack would not give him to percent of the gross. Then
one night a few months before we were scheduled to start, Betsy [Grant]
came down to our house at midnight in her tennis outfit and said that Cary
was just heartbroken, but he just couldn't do the movie. After all that
romancing and racetrack and dinners he just couldn't do it-he couldn't get on the phone either, so Betsy had to come down. She was crying, Judy
was crying....

"So a couple of days later we all have a meeting-Jack, George, Moss,
Eddie, Judy, and myself. I brought up the name Bogart. He was our
neighbor, a close friend of ours, and he and I had talked about him doing
it, but Jack just brushed him off quickly. His thinking was that the contrast
facially between this young pretty girl and this older, withered-up man was
just too much. In the original movie Freddie March was a very handsome
fellow, he didn't look like any drunk, and she was very young and innocent
looking, so Jack was probably right.

"So then I brought up Frank Sinatra. I'd had a meeting with Frank, long
before he did From Here to Eternity. He was a great friend of ours, an old
and close friend of Judy's. He wanted to do it. I thought he and Judy would
be great together. Judy wanted him too, so I brought up his name at the
meeting. But at the time he was considered poison; his records weren't
selling. As a matter of fact, I went down to see him when he was at the
Cocoanut Grove-must have been about thirty people in the crowd, that's
all. And he was having problems with [his wife] Ava [Gardner]; she was
running around with a bullfighter and making a movie in Africa. So Frank
was going over to Africa to settle up with her; when he came back he
wanted to do A Star Is Born. But the name Sinatra was taboo. Moss
listened, but George wasn't too thrilled, and Jack didn't like it at allnobody liked it except Judy and myself. So it seemed we were stuck, and
we were all going to think about it. I got on the phone next day with [agent]
Charlie Feldman and he brought up the name James Mason."

In 1953, James Neville Mason was forty-four years old and, at this stage
of his career, in his own words, "a madly competitive actor. I was competitive because I was not getting anywhere very fast." An uncharacteristic
statement, for Mason was also, in George Cukor's view, "rather reserved
by nature ... a mysterious creature with the greatest discretion. He is a
complete actor." Ambition is one of the necessary components for the
"complete actor," and Mason had the kind of ambition that had taken him
from his early upbringing as the third son of a successful Yorkshire business
family through an education at Marlborough and Cambridge, where he
studied architecture in the midst of which he stage-managed a production
of Purcell's The Fairy Queen and simultaneously played the part of Oberon.
The taste of performing whetted his appetite for more, and he was soon
immersed in productions of the Marlowe Society, devoting himself to plays of the Elizabethan era and drifting further and further from architecture.
But it was Tyrone Guthrie and his company of actors at the Festival
Theatre in Cambridge who opened Mason's eyes and mind to the infinite
possibilities of the theater.

After graduation and a move to London, he discovered that the Depression had destroyed any possibility of architectural pursuits. In 1931 he
began his professional theatrical career by playing the part of a thinly
disguised Prince Yousoupoff in an even more thinly disguised version of the
Rasputin saga called The Rascal, which toured the provinces; at one performance Mason, who was supposed to shoot the mad monk, discovered
to his dismay that his prop gun had no bullets and administered the
requisite coup de grace by aiming his pistol and yelling "bang bang." An
inauspicious beginning for a "madly competitive" actor, but hard work,
perseverance, and luck worked in his favor. Luck came in the person of
Guthrie, who saw Mason in his West End debut as one of John Brown's
sons in a play called Gallows Glorious, a dramatization of the raid on
Harpers Ferry. Guthrie, impressed with Mason's intensity, offered the
young actor a spot in a new troupe he was assembling for the Old Vic. The
company included Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, Ursula Jeans, Roger
Livesey, and Marius Goring, all of whom soon went on to greater fame in
theater and film.

Mason's own beginning in film was shaky: the lead in a 1935 "quota
quickie," Late Extra. Eight years later, he finally reached stardom in Britain
playing a sexy nineteenth-century villain in The Man in Grey, one of those
Regency melodramas so dear to the hearts of the war-weary British masses.
A succession of such roles followed, capped by his classic "Gainsborough
Gothics," Fanny by Gaslight and The Wicked Lady. But it was his bravura
performance in 1945's The Seventh Veil that turned him into an international sex symbol, as the crippled, possessive guardian of concert pianist
Ann Todd. As a saturnine Svengali figure, he was called upon to thwack
her fingers with his cane as she rehearses the "Moonlight" Sonata, thereby
ensuring her undying love-after a certain amount of plot development, of
course.