A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (17 page)

We cut to another shot where we see the director, who is obviously annoyed. "We saw her face!" (to Esther) "We saw your face! Keep back! Keep
back!" Esther is very embarrassed. The director says, "Let's do it again. Now
mind you, be careful-I don't want to see your face!"

The next scene should be shot from the inside of the "mock-up" coach. The
prop camera still remains on the outside, photographing the scene. We hear
the director say, "All right-camera!" This time Esther becomes a contortionist. She stretches her arm way out, does the waving business, but keeps her
head and body safely averted.

I hope my description ... [is] neither too garbled nor too long-winded and
that you can make some sense out of [it]. Also, I trust that you're not sore
at me for this continued harassing, but "ARS GRATIA ARTIS"-no, that's
the wrong slogan. I have none to substitute for it, however, because I've not
yet learned the Warner Bros. motto ... but I will! If you're a good boy and
do this homework well, I'll dream up some more things for you to do.

My love to you and Kitty.

Always,
Gregory Ratoff (your director)

Hart replied:

Your fascinating letter to hand-and I see no reason why all this shouldn't
blossom into a kind of Shaw-Terry correspondence.... I'm delighted with
[the scene] as outlined in your letter-[it's] excellent and infinitely better
visually than what we had originally-I'm enclosing the letter back to you
in case you didn't keep a copy-I see no point in just transcribing your
deathless prose and sending it back to you-it's fine as it is-just insert it-as the girl said to the sailor. I don't know why people say you're not as good as Lucky Humberstone.*
I think you're wonderful!

Cukor's suggestions and revisions added considerable comedy and accurate behind-the-scenes views of movie-making-and they also added another four minutes to the overall running time of the picture. So even at this early stage, the length of A Star Is Born was a problem that no one seemed to be aware of. Sid Luft remarked: "Suddenly everybody was getting excited about this picture . . . Moss Hart, George Cukor, Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen. The place was getting steamed up about this. The word was out that this was going to be a blockbuster."

The word was out, as Luft stated, and one person who got it was the producer and uncredited co-writer of the 1937 original, David 0. Selznick. Inactive as a producer since 1948, he had turned instead to the international marketing of his extensive backlog of films. A Star Is Born was his baby, even if it had been adopted by others; his pride in it and the knowledge that it was still unreleased in several European and Asian markets led him to make a concerted effort to reacquire some rights to the film, even if these were only releasing rights in certain overseas territories. He did this by buying up the subdistribution rights that Alperson and his associates had sold to small independent franchises in the late 1940s, so that by the time the remake was announced in 1952, Selznick was in possession of rights for some thirteen countries, including Germany and Japan. As he pointed out in a letter to his attorneys:

This is a unique situation . . . in which apparently Warners are perfectly willing to have the competition of another version of the market abroad, or it may be that they don't even know about it. Certainly it may come as a rude shock to them that there is nothing they can do to interfere with the distribution of our version; [regardless of] whether there is anything we can do to interfere with the distribution of theirs.... I think it behooves us to get on the market before them, certainly at least in those countries where the picture has never been released before.

In order to do this, however, he needed to make color prints of the film,
and this he could not do without the negative, which was in Alperson's
possession. It was standard industry practice for the original distributor to
supply all legal subdistributors with prints to fulfill their contractual obligations; but in this case Alperson, embarrassed by the oversight of selling the
remake rights to Luft and Warners without owning all foreign distribution
rights, flatly refused to cooperate with Selznick. This led Selznick to fume
in a memo to his attorneys:

Have seldom been so outraged as by Alperson's attitude ... imperative he
immediately be served with ... notice [that] he will be held strictly accountable for all damages growing out of any delays in fulfilling our privileges.
... Would not be at all surprised to learn that Warners does not know of
our rights.... It [is] imperative that Warners know of the situation.... Also
I think I ought to immediately send a letter to Judy Garland, a good friend
of mine, and her husband, concerning this matter, so that they understand
the situation, and perhaps will put some pressure on Alperson and Warners.
If and when all else fails, then let's see what legal steps we might take, if not
against Warners, then against Alperson, to force them to give us the negative. Certainly, the whole thing can be approached legally ... or as a matter
of fairness, or probably a combination of the two-with the Warner lawyers,
but on a friendly basis.

Selznick's reluctance to take on Warners in this matter was due to his
desire to once again produce a picture. The property he wanted to make
was owned by Warners: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. On the
one hand, he needed the prints of A Star Is Born from Alperson and
Warners; but he could not risk rushing into a lawsuit without jeopardizing
the possibility of getting the remake rights to the Hemingway novel.

While Selznick grappled with this dilemma, George Cukor was immersed
in the thousands of daily details that go into the preproduction phase of
a picture. Despite its small cast and straightforward plot line, A Star Is Born
was a musical, and musicals by their very nature are more complex than
straight dramatic films. This would also be Cukor's first official color film,
although back in 1939 he had directed two weeks of Selznick's Gone With
the Wind in Technicolor, before disagreements with the strong-minded producer had caused him to be replaced by Victor Fleming. Cukor had
switched over to MGM's The Women, which included a Technicolor
fashion show. Cukor had not directed this sequence and had thought its
costumes and color design were particularly garish. Cukor was a cultured,
civilized man, of whom Irving Lazar later said, "George proved that you
could be in the movie business and not necessarily be a hoodlum." Cukor's
home in the hills above Sunset Boulevard was elegantly designed not only
for gracious living but also to be a showcase for his extensive collection of
paintings and sculptures. His ideas of color and design were shaped by his
love of art, and A Star Is Born would be his first opportunity to infuse one
of his films with the same sense of understated elegance that was so
characteristic of his own private surroundings. In his book On Cukor,
Gavin Lambert quotes him as saying that "anyone who looks at something
special in a very original way, makes you see it that way forever." To Cukor,
Hollywood and its inhabitants were something special. From the time of
his arrival in Hollywood in 1929, he had "just taken to it immediately.
... I quickly fell in love with ... Hollywood ... the place and the people."
It was an affection he shared with David Selznick, although not to the
degree of Selznick's wide-eyed idealism: "David didn't like cheap jibes
about Hollywood or its people, he had a romantic idea that the whole world
loved Hollywood ... so when we made What Price Hollywood? he didn't
want to make anything bitchy or sour ... he wouldn't let it become cynical.
It was exuberant and a little larger than life." Cukor's down-to-earth attitude about Hollywood complemented Selznick's more romantic view of the
subject. Cukor viewed the place and its people with neither a jaundiced nor
a cynical eye but rather with a realistic, nonillusory view, which in the case
of What Price Hollywood? was tempered with his own irreverent humor
toward the subject. Interestingly, Selznick had wanted Cukor to direct the
original A Star Is Born; but Cukor had not wanted to do another Hollywood
story, so close in time and spirit to the 1932 film, so Wellman took on the
project. In the intervening sixteen years, however, Cukor had watched from
the inside the changes in the town and in the industry; he had seen the
rise and fall of careers, the deaths of friends through old age, neglect, and
suicide-all of which tempered his irreverence into a bemused, appreciative
tolerance and understanding of the foibles and failings of the residents of
the movie colony. His attitude toward all of them was that Hollywood, far
from being the crazy, corrosive kind of place so dear to novelists and other
detractors, was made up of a forthright mixture of the good and the bad, the strong and the weak, the talented and the not-so-talented, motivated
by ambition, envy, greed, and the love of movies and movie-making. And
all of this Cukor wanted to reflect in A Star Is Born-directly, through
Hart's screenplay and the actors, and indirectly, through the interplay
of mood, design, color, and the sprawling, diverse Southern California
landscape.

A motion picture depends for its effectiveness on the interaction of numerous components: script, performance, setting, lighting, design, photography, music, color. All of these diverse elements are orchestrated and given
emphasis and meaning by the director. And in the studio system, a director
was only as good as his collaborators-a fact of film life that Cukor had
learned early on. He realized the value of having fresh outlooks and new
talent surrounding him; as he had put it in his press conference in March:
"The chance to work with new ideas and new people ... is stimulating.
... It gives you a chance to keep yourself fresh."

For A Star Is Born, Luft, probably at Garland's urging, had turned to
the Broadway theater for some of the "new" talent that Cukor found so
refreshing to work with. For the settings and costumes for the film, Luft
had brought in the distinguished (and expensive) Lemuel Ayers, whose
reputation had been made with his designs for Oklahoma! in 1943. Subsequent to that he designed the settings or the costumes (in some cases both)
for Song of Norway, Bloomer Girl, and St. Louis Woman and was coproducer as well as designer for Kiss Me Kate and Out of This World, all
colorful, stylish, and trend-setting musicals.

In mid-June, Ayers joined the production meetings at Warners, where the
picture initially began to take shape. Here, each department head, in
consultations and discussions with the producer and the director, began to
get a sense of how the story should be treated. Ideas were tossed out,
approaches tested and accepted or rejected; costs were estimated, compromises made, and ways devised to save money while still getting the necessary images onto the screen. An example is Hart's opening line: "The
piercing beams of huge arc lights sweep the night sky above Hollywood."
This would be almost impossible to do realistically, so it was decided that
a second-unit camera crew would photograph various panoramic vistas of Hollywood at night, and that the searchlight beams would be added by the
special effects department. Hart's description of the Night of the Stars
benefit, which opens the story, takes only one paragraph in the screenplay:
"The lights are being manipulated for a special event ... Hollywood's Own
is on display at its most splendid. Those stars not appearing in the show
are in the audience-the men in white tie, the women beautifully gowned
and jeweled-all watching the act in progress on the stage with that fine
air of benevolence reserved by hard-shelled audiences for benefits in a
worthy cause. The camera sweeps quickly across the auditorium; then to
the row of dancing girls on the stage . . ." But in visualizing this, Cukor
expanded and refined the idea so that the opening sequence became an
evocation of the glamour, the hysteria, and the fatuousness that was, to his
knowing eye, so much a part of these ritual events.

In addition to the audience in the theater, Cukor wanted to sketch in
the pushing, shouting, shoving, screaming crowds of fans for whom the
ritual is performed; and in so doing, he-perhaps inadvertently-added an
important element missing from Hart's screenplay: a villain. In Cukor's
A Star Is Born, the public is the real heavy of the tale: fawning and
hysterical one moment, angry and destructive the next; demanding, fickle,
righteous, and vicious in its treatment and mistreatment of its favorites.
"Fan" is short for "fanatic"; and to Cukor, that's exactly what the mass
public was, at least as he had seen it behave at just about every major social
function in the town for the past twenty years, be it a party, a premiere,
or a funeral. This idea was touched on briefly and memorably in one scene
in the 1937 original, where Vicki's fans snatch off her mourning veil at
Maine's funeral. Hart's treatment had indicated this kind of behavior on
the part of the movie public, but it was Cukor who decided to visualize it,
to depict it in all its mindless, infantile, drooling tawdriness. To do this in
the opening sequence of the film would add greatly to the physical necessities of the production-an exterior of a theater, several hundred extras,
dozens of cars and limousines, all the other paraphernalia of the typical
premiere night-and add at least another $ioo,ooo to the budget; but
everyone involved evidently agreed that this would add excitement, spectacle, and glamour to the opening of the story.

It was at these production meetings that Cukor realized that Ayers, with
all his talent and experience in the theater, had no understanding of how
to design for film, at least not in the way Cukor wanted the film to look.
He wanted every camera setup to be carefully drawn beforehand for compo sition, lighting, color, and costuming, including angles and cuts. When he
tried to explain this, it was obvious that Ayers was stumped. "He was a New
York stage designer and ... didn't know anything about the movie business," Cukor later recalled. "I suggested he find someone in the art department who would understand what I was talking about and bring him to the
meetings." Ayers did exactly that, locating a thirty-four-year-old sketch
artist named Gene Allen who had just rejoined the Warners art department. A native of Los Angeles, Allen had grown up surrounded by the
movies. He recalls: "After I finished school I went to work at Warners
... as a blueprint boy in the art department.... Warners had a great art
department, as good as if not better than MGM's. We had men like Anton
Grot and Carl Weyl, John Hughes, and Jack Okey. I really learned how
to draw, watching the sketch artists at Warner Brothers; then I went to
night school at Chouinard Art Institute and studied art. At Warners in
those days they had maybe twelve sketch artists working in the art department, because each art director had one of his own people that he liked
to have do his sketches. A sketch artist would take the plans for the sets
and turn them into three-dimensional drawings so the producer and the
director would have an idea of what they would look like. They were called
`set sketches' ... and then you worked on continuity, in which, to a certain
degree, you illustrated the script-at least, the art director's interpretation
of what the script should look like, so that he could talk to the director,
showing the various angles, pre-editing, that sort of thing....