A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (19 page)

Warner's seemingly arbitrary setting of the starting date for September i
was actually a shrewd move on his part to galvanize everyone into action.
He knew just how much preproduction work had been done, and it was not
progressing at the pace he liked. Cukor was still fussing with the script; sets
and costumes were being argued over; the songs had not yet been orchestrated; there was considerable confusion over who would be the cameraman
and who would do the choreography. Much of this Warner must have
attributed to Luft's inexperience as a producer, so he decided to take
matters in his own hands and give everybody a push. In a memo to Luft
dated August 9, Warner made his feelings in the matter clear:

Dear Sid:

After our talk yesterday, I am pretty sure all of us understand each other.
Now that we have set a definite starting date of the first, everyone should
really start things rolling. Above all it is imperative we get tests underway
to get the feel of WarnerScope. With the starting date decided on, we
should move everything in our power to that point. Otherwise we will find
things going along with indecision, which is always costly and non-productive. It is up to you, Sid, to see that we do not waste money or go overboard.
Also, that everything we do spend is photographed. I have great confidence in you and all connected with the picture, and I know that confidence will
pay off.

With the picture due to start in less than six weeks, the production meetings became more intense as everyone involved tried to come to grips with
the myriad problems that needed solving and the decisions that needed to
be made. Hoyningen-Huene, who had finally been located in Mexico,
agreed to work on the picture at $500 weekly; he arrived in mid-August,
staying at Cukor's home while he began working with the art-direction
staff. Lemuel Ayers had become ill and left the picture in early August; he
was replaced by Malcolm Burt, who, as Gene Allen recalls, "had been the
draftsman working for Lem; he became the art director and I was made
assistant art director. Mal would do all the basics; he'd hear the ideas
everyone had-Mr. Cukor, Sid Luft, Judy-about the kind of settings,
interiors and exteriors, and see that it was done ... a very, very professional
gentleman.

"Now, when Hoyningen-Huene came on the scene, this was the first
movie he'd ever worked on-he'd made some documentaries, I think, but
this was the first time he had done anything with a big production. He had
very good taste, a background of art second to none-we neither of us had
any real jobs, we interchanged and just talked and thought of things. He
was terribly creative and helpful, and so we formed a sort of partnership.
We were known as Cukor's art boys-he had a great extensive collection
of art books, so he would bring in these fine art books and show the
cameraman what we had in mind for color or lighting or something and
they loved it."

The cameraman who was finally picked was British-born Harry Stradling, in films since 1937, who had previously photographed Garland in The
Pirate, a lush Technicolor fantasy directed by her then husband Vincente
Minnelli, and in Easter Parade. His work was characterized by a rich
chiaroscuro look, which molded and shaped the mood of a scene. He last
had worked at Warners on A Streetcar Named Desire, then went to Goldwyn to do Hans Christian Andersen, then joined the staff of A Star Is Born
in early July.

Assistant director Earl Bellamy, who began his duties on the film at
about the same time, remembers exactly when he first heard of A Star Is
Born: "I was working with Mr. Cukor on It Should Happen to You in New
York. I was organizing a shot in Columbus Circle at rush hour, which was very complicated and nerve-wracking, and I was having a bit of trouble with
the police because they thought I'd lost my mind trying to get this shot
the way he wanted it, which was in one continuous take as the car drove
around. It was a bad moment with all this going on, and Mr. Cukor just
barged right into my meeting with the police in the middle of Columbus
Circle and said, 'Would you like to do A Star Is Born with me over at
Warners?' And I said, 'Yes, yes of course, you arrange it.' And we finished
the film and some time passed and he came to me and said, 'It's all set,
you're going with me over to Warner Brothers,' and I had completely
forgotten the incident." Bellamy, a Los Angeles native, had been in the
business since he was eighteen. He recalls his days as an office boy in the
production office: "I'd get in at four in the morning, check the weather,
call the assistant production manager, and we would decide whether or not
to send the companies out on location, gamble on it, or keep them in. If
we kept them in, I would have to call every member of the crew by phone
and say 'Forget the outside call, we're going to work on stage 8 today.' Then
I'd call the assistant director and he'd have to call the cast and tell them.
Later on I became a second assistant director. He's the one the assistant
director turns to and says 'Will you go get Rita Hayworth?' At Columbia
they had one production manager and an assistant production manager;
and whatever show you were assigned to as first or second assistant, whatever you were required to do, you did it. You did everything. Oftentimes
I would go ahead of the company on location, set up all the approximate
locations that we might need, get permission to shoot in certain areas if that
was needed, and then follow through with setting the rooms for all the crew
and making arrangements for all the lunches and the lodgings; and then
the company would come out, the director, the assistant, and they'd finalize
the locations. After I'd worked for some time I made a five-year plan for
myself-I said, 'In five years I want to be a first assistant.' I was lucky, I
made it in four. When I became a first, I said, 'In five years I want to be
a director.'

"The first time I worked with Mr. Cukor was on Born Yesterday. When
you worked for him you really had your work cut out for you, because he
relied very, very heavily on an assistant director. I would get everything
organized for him, make sure that everything he might want was all laid
out and ready, and he'd come on the stage in the morning and it was work,
work, work. He was a very hard-working man himself and he expected the
same from everybody, his cast and his crew-he expected them to be on their toes and to come in prepared. A very interesting thing with him-you
could always go up and offer him a suggestion, which I did many times.
You would suggest something about a scene, he would stop and rehearse
it your way and either he accepted it and liked it or he would turn to you
and tell you why he wasn't going to use it or why it didn't work. A good
example of that was in It Should Happen to You. There's a great bit when
Peter Lawford is nuzzling Judy Holliday, and she's trying to fend him off,
but she takes off her earring so he can nibble her ear-that was an idea that
came from the property man, Blackie, and Mr. Cukor thought it was great,
so it's in the film. But that's the way he was, very receptive to people's
contributions toward making a good film.

"After Born Yesterday, every time he would come to Columbia for a film
he would ask that I be with him, which was very flattering. And then when
we went to Warners to do A Star Is Born, I was still working for Columbia.
They mailed me my check every week, which was kind of unique at the
time, to be working at one studio but paid by another-at least for an
assistant director it was."

Ray Heindorf, the musical director on the picture, had been one of Warners' major assets since 1932. In fact, his career had recently come almost
full circle: one of his first jobs in Hollywood had been arranging the songs
for the Eddie Cantor musical Whoopee in 1930; twenty-three years later
he arranged the songs, wrote the background score, and conducted the
orchestra for The Eddie Cantor Story, one of Warners' bigger (if not better)
pictures of 1953. That year was also memorable for Heindorf because his
hometown of Mechanicville, New York, had just celebrated his birthday,
August 25, by declaring it Ray Heindorf Day. "Actually, it was three days,"
he recalled. "It was a very strange thing. They invited me back and they
had this three-day celebration-it was quite a surprise. I mean, I used to
play for silent pictures there when I was a kid; and I went back, and there
was my old theater, the State-they were playing She's Back on Broadway,
and my name was up on the marquee bigger than Virginia Mayo's!

"I'd begun playing piano there about 1922, when I was fourteen. We
had a four-piece orchestra: piano, violin, trumpet, and drums. I wasn't
interested in school; I was only interested in music. In those days we used
to get orchestrations for some of the bigger pictures, for eighteen-piece
orchestras, and I'd take the parts home and study them and see what the trombone played and what the horns played and what the instruments we
never even saw played, and I'd break these orchestrations down for our four
men. My father was very enthusiastic about this, and I'll never forget-in
1924 he took me to Saratoga Springs to hear Paul Whiteman's jazz band
play Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. It had just been played in Carnegie Hall
and really was something to hear.

"It was just about this same time that I began to study arranging. I was
impressed with one man whose name was on all the important stock
arrangements that they sent to the bands. His name was Arthur Lang, so
I wrote to him in 1927, asking if he could teach me how to arrange, and
he wrote back and said to look him up if I was ever in New York, so right
away I went to New York. He had an office on Forty-fourth Street, and
we talked and I got a job with him-I was sort of his utility man. I would
copy his scores and proofread the printed copies and correct any mistakes.
There wasn't any better way of learning to orchestrate than that."

Heindorf worked with Lang on several Broadway shows and in early
1929 accompanied him to Hollywood to oversee the music for MGM's The
Hollywood Revue of 1929, one of the world's first "All Talking-All Singing-All Dancing" musicals. Heindorf went on to assist Alfred Newman
on Eddie Cantor musicals; and by 1932 he found himself at Warner Bros.,
which prided itself not only on its introduction of sound but also on its use
of music throughout a film. "Jack Warner was a great music lover," relates
Heindorf, "and I remember he said to me once, 'Ray, you know how we
use music here? I want it to start where it says "Warner Brothers Presents"
and I want it to end where it says "The End." ' "

In his pre-A Star Is Born years at Warners, Heindorf had worked on
practically every feature film involving music. His love and genius for music
and superb musicianship had made him one of the most respected and able
music directors in the business and had earned him a total of fourteen
Academy Award nominations. He'd won twice: for arranging and conducting the George M. Cohan songs in Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942, and
again the next year for doing the same thing with the film version of Irving
Berlin's wartime relief show, This Is the Army. His arrangements were
brisk, robust, and exciting, with a syncopation and driving excitement that
gave life and vigor to even the most lackluster songs. His work on quieter
ballads and blues was characterized by a delicate, transparent sheen that
subtly underlined the emotion and poignancy of both melody and lyric.

When Leo Forbstein-long in charge of music at Warners-died in 1948, Heindorf was elevated to the head position, which made him responsible for hiring musicians and assigning composers and orchestrators. He
was efficient, businesslike, and outspoken in his determination that the
Warners music department maintain its reputation as the best in the
business-a position that was challenged frequently by his peers Alfred
Newman at 2oth Century-Fox and Johnny Green at MGM.

On August 13, A Star Is Born officially went into the works as production
# 386. On that day, in the "train shed" on the back lot, the dancers began
rehearsing under the direction of Richard Barstow, who had won out over
Michael Kidd to do the choreography for the film. Barstow was a specialist
in big production numbers: he staged the musical interludes for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, did the dance direction for the
Broadway hit New Faces Of 1952, and pioneered and developed the concept of the "industrial show," whereby a manufacturer would launch his
product with a "by invitation only" extravaganza, most notably General
Motors with its Motorama.

While Barstow and his sister Edith were working with a rehearsal pianist
and a troupe of twenty dancers, Garland, still dieting, reported to the studio
on August 21 to begin recording the songs on stage 9, the Warner Bros.
recording stage, under Heindorf's direction and Cukor's watchful eye. The
songs were being recorded with an expensive new state-of-the-art threechannel magnetic stereophonic system which Warners had first used in
House of Wax, giving the sound a quality of astonishing richness, presence,
and depth. Recalls Earl Bellamy: "The first song Judy worked on was
'Here's What I'm Here For.' In the film, she sings it on a recording stage,
and then she leaves the microphone and plays the proposal scene with
Norman, which unbeknownst to them is picked up by a live microphone
and recorded. Now, Judy was very demanding, and she did the song several
times, and each time she'd look at Mr. Cukor and he would tell her what
he thought, and then they'd listen to the playback, and either she was right
on as far as she was concerned or she wasn't and you did it again. Mr. Cukor
would let her have her head in this, because he knew she knew best."
Recalls Heindorf: "Working with Garland was just magnificent. It was the
first time she'd sung in some time, and she was fresh. She knew those songs
backward and didn't have to use any music, ever." However, the sessions
were marred by a series of testy discussions with her vocal coach, Hugh
Martin (who had written the lyrics for one of Garland's best MGM pic tures, Meet Me in St. Louis, to music by Ralph Blaine), over the best way
to interpret the song.