A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (25 page)

The rest of the day was spent filming the scenes with Matt Libby and
Maine's manservant discussing the sleeping Maine (Manservant: "He'll
smile in his sleep in a minute ... like a child." Libby: "Like a child with
a blowtorch. Mr. Maine's charm escapes me. It always has"). There were
several plot points that this scene had to establish, including the fact that
Norman had to be up and on his way to a mid-sea location by 6:oo a.m.
and that he might be gone for several weeks. Libby instructs the manservant to "hide [Maine's] car keys ... I've had enough of Mr. Maine for one
night." The servant does this by dropping the keys into the glass containing
his false teeth. When Maine awakes and decides to track down Esther, he
finds the keys and takes the manservant's teeth with him, muttering, "I'll
teach you to play fair, Graves."

The scenes were photographed in various parts of the darkened Maine
mansion, a lavish movie-star home, tastefully and expensively decorated
with a mixture of traditional and contemporary furnishings. The lighting
and the camera movement were constantly fussed over and changed by
Cukor, working with Hoyningen-Huene and Gene Allen. Earl Bellamy
relates that "on any picture, but especially this one, lighting is your biggest
time consumer, because it involves a great deal-your background, your
foreground, and your principals. Mr. Cukor was a stickler for lighting
effects. He had definite ideas and he would talk it over and explain what
he wanted. He would lay out a shot the way he wanted it to move; then
he would turn it over to the cameraman and let him do all the lighting. But if he had something special [in mind], he would keep after them until
he got exactly what he wanted."

Warners-indeed, the entire industry-was on a six-day work week; and
after taking Sunday off, Cukor and crew on Monday moved onto the
sanitorium set for the scene where Maine is visited by Oliver Niles. This
was the scene that had been written into the 1937 script after Cukor had
related to Selznick and Wellman the details of his trip to see John Barrymore, who was trying to dry himself out. Recalls Cukor: "Years ago, when
I was going to direct Camille, I went to see Jack Barrymore about playing
de Varville, the part Henry Daniell finally played. Jack had put himself into
some kind of home in Culver City to stop drinking.... It was an old frame
house that called itself a rest home. I went into some dreary, depressing
room. Back of it was the dining room, and I noticed something that always
strikes me as very shabby and sad-they hadn't taken away the tablecloths,
and you knew they never changed them. Then Jack came in, with a sort
of aide called Kelly. He took us into a gloomy sitting room and said, `Can
we sit here, Kelly? Nobody's going to come through and disturb us by
pretending he's Napoleon?' " Seventeen years after the fact, Cukor found
himself restaging this episode from his past.

Cukor's version is similar in outline to Wellman's; Hart lifted the dialogue
intact from the original (including one pithy line from Dorothy Parker for
Maine, "We dine at five-thirty. Makes the nights longer"). But the similarities are only surface. Wellman's version had a bluff, bonhomie bravado to it.
It was external and superficial, with Adolphe Menjou, as Niles, playing
smoothly and jovially while Fredric March as Maine was charming and
unconcerned, with just a hint of hurt pride at the thought of being offered a
subsidiary role in a big picture. Cukor enriched his version by concentrating
on the gloomy, depressing aspects of the place, the melancholy quiet, and
the awkward tension between Maine and Niles. Charles Bickford, whom
Cukor referred to privately as "Old Ironpants," needed a great deal of work
to loosen up and evince the kind of careful, caring warmth that Cukor felt
was essential to the scene: the relationship between the two men is deeper,
richer, and more poignant than in the earlier version. And Cukor added a
short coda: with both men jockeying to sidestep the emotion of the moment,
Maine sees Niles out, but just before the door shuts, he reaches out and
grasps Niles's arm, saying quietly, "Thanks for dropping by, Oliver." When
Niles is gone, Maine reverts to his old self, putting his arm around his
"nurse" and saying, "Alone at last, Cuddles."

Garland was not needed for these scenes; instead, she had been working
with Richard Barstow and the dancers, rehearsing the number to be performed at the Shrine Auditorium. In between, she had costume fittings and
publicity photos while simultaneously trying to rest up for what gave every
indication of being a difficult sequence: the scene in the after-hours club
where Maine hears Esther sing "The Man That Got Away." This would
be the first time Garland and Mason played together. It was a long, crucial
scene; not only did it have to convince Maine (and the audience) of
Esther's enormous talent, it had to set up the wary relationship between
them, half bantering, half serious, and it was the first time that the real
character of both was revealed. Additionally, it had to set the tone and the
direction for the rest of the story, for it is here that Maine first convinces
Esther that she is something unique, that she possesses "that little something extra" which is star quality. He gives her the beginnings of belief in
herself and a sense of her worth and convinces her to try for "the big
dream." It was a long, seven-page sequence in the script, and it had
bothered Sid Luft greatly that all the dialogue between the two took place
at a table in the club. He had asked Cukor to have Hart rewrite it, but
Cukor was evidently satisfied with it: it lent itself to a favorite technique
of his, a long single take in which actors perform an entire scene without
stopping. Hart's description of this scene and its mood was most explicit:

INTERIOR OF THE DOWNBEAT CLUB. The word club is a misnomer. "Dive" would be more apt. It is a typical musician's hangout-a place
where the boys feel truly at home-where they can play as they wish to their
heart's content-not set orchestrations for smooth dancing-but improvising, "taking off"-the kind of place where a new sort of music is born or
a Benny Goodman or a Bix Beiderbecke emerges, full blown. There are not
too many patrons at this hour, but a number of the Glenn Williams aggregation are scattered among the tables, and on the little bandstand a foursome
of the Williams Orchestra has taken over. Dan McGuire is at the piano, the
drummer behind him, and on each side of him are the clarinetist and the
trumpet. In front of them stands Esther. Her eyes half-closed, she begins to
sing a low blues-first straight, then as she reaches the second chorus, a wild
improvisation begins-throbbing and bizarre.

Norman Maine has entered as the number began. For a moment, he
stands in the doorway, listening. Then he slides into a chair at the nearest
table, his eyes never leaving Esther's face, a slow look of amazement and
pleasure spreading over his own. As the number finishes, the effect on him is electric-he starts to applaud-then drops his hands in his lap and keeps
staring at the bandstand.

According to Cukor: "What dictates your approach very often isn't you,
but it's the situation-it's the text. It's what the play tells you. I envy
directors who have everything written on a piece of paper and then just go
on the set and do it. [I like to] do things simply. You just ride it . . . you
do it naturally, I suppose." An approach like Cukor's takes much thought
and preparation, and this scene had been on his mind for some time. He
wanted simplicity, but he also wanted to experiment visually. "When you
look at something," he later related, "you're used to seeing the whole of
a thing-then suddenly you see a section, arbitrarily, not composed. Just
a section of something cut off. In the David painting 'Sacre de Napoleon,'
when the detail is reproduced in an art book, you see a head to one side,
bits of other heads cut off here and there. And I thought, 'Why not do that
in a movie?' So I decided that we could do that when she sang 'The Man
That Got Away.' I wanted the camera to follow her, always in front
... sometimes she would go to the side and almost disappear out of the
frame ... all in one long take, for the whole musical number. It isn't easy
for an actor or an actress to carry a long take-you have to be strong. I
wanted to do it with Judy because I knew she could sustain it." Long takes
are much more complex than they sound, in that they have to be carefully
worked out as to staging, camera movement, and especially lighting. The
mood of this scene was particularly important, for Cukor wanted to convey
Hart's description of a "dive" in an impressionistic fashion. Cukor, Hoyningen-Huene, Allen, and Hoch began working out the setup for this sequence
after lunch on Tuesday the loth. They worked for most of the afternoon,
with Cukor becoming more and more irritated at Hoch's intransigence.
The cameraman was adamant that the look Cukor wanted could not be
achieved successfully; the low light levels, the impressionistic feeling of the
musical instruments, Garland moving in and out of pools of light with the
camera following. At the end of the day, they had not reached an agreement on anything and were still nowhere near ready to shoot the scene the
next day. Cukor had very little patience with cameramen who, as he put
it, "are great stars in their own right. Who refuse to listen, refuse to be
influenced.... It's best to have someone with an open mind ... I must
have a cameraman who will listen." Cukor evidently relayed his displeasure
with Hoch to Warner and Luft, for the latter relates: "I had hired Winnie Hoch. He was a helluva nice guy and a goddamn good cameraman for
outdoor stuff, but indoors his stuff was crappy. Lighting was bad-it just
missed-and he did not understand what the hell we wanted to do with
`The Man That Got Away.' So I had to fire him."

This was not the only change in store for the A Star Is Born company.
Late the previous week, Jack Warner had a lengthy telephone conversation
with his two brothers in New York. The upshot of that call was that over
the weekend he had been paid a visit by Al Lichtman of aoth Century-Fox,
who had flown from New York specifically to convince Warner to give up
his insistence on WarnerScope and to join the CinemaScope converts.
Lichtman's arguments, as well as his brothers' insistence, evidently were
more than Warner could resist, for on the Monday following the meeting
he called Luft, who recalls: "Jack used to get to the studio about eleventhirty, but this one morning we went over to Fox about ten a.m. because
Jack had not seen anything in CinemaScope-nothing. So we went over
and ran three pieces of three pictures that were being shot there, stuff with
Tyrone Power and Victor Mature, and when he looked at it he agreed that
it was great-much better than anything we'd been able to get with
WarnerScope. So he made the deal with Fox. We had been shooting for
about ten days and now we were gonna have to do the whole thing over
from the start, so this changeover cost us a lot of goddamn money."

The switch to CinemaScope was not made instantaneously. It fell to
Luft to break the news to Cukor, who remained unconvinced about the
wisdom of the change. It was decided to film the next day's sequence, "The
Man That Got Away," both in wide-screen Technicolor and in CinemaScope and WarnerColor and then make a firm decision after comparing
the two. Hoch would continue to direct the Technicolor photography,
while the CinemaScope camera was handled by Milton Krasner, on loan
from Fox, one of the few men in the industry who had practical experience
with the new medium. One of the arguments that Lichtman had used to
convince Warner of the advantages of the new process was its economy:
scenes would not have to be shot in multiple setups for editing purposes
but could be photographed in one master shot, with the staging taking care
of medium shots, close shots, and dolly shots. The theory, as propounded
by Lichtman, was that CinemaScope was more like the stage-the action
must be arranged so that the audience's attention is focused on the center
of attraction. The proof of this would be in the filming of "The Man That
Got Away."

Cukor and his crew were on the set by 9:oo working with Bellamy and
Krasner. Cukor had worked out the action of the scene, which had Esther
serving coffee to the musicians, sitting down, throwing a mute to the
trumpeter, then standing up and singing as she moved among the men and
their instruments. Because of the newness of the technique, and because
Krasner had to be briefed on the lighting and photography Cukor wanted,
the first shot was not taken until 2:30. After that, the lighting and the
blocking had to be reset for Hoch and the narrower scope of the Technicolor camera. By 5:oo, everything was set up and ready to go, but the first
two Technicolor takes were spoiled by a malfunctioning camera, the second
by Garland stumbling into a table; the third take was fine and was printed.

At 8:oo the next morning, everyone concerned except the cast and Hoch
gathered in the screening room to look at the two versions. Even with the
aesthetic imperfections of WarnerColor, the quality of the image and the
staging in CinemaScope had an undeniable impact. After some discussion
with Luft and Cukor, Warner made the decision: A Star Is Born would be
started over, this time in CinemaScope. As Luft mentioned, this changeover was expensive; nearly $300,ooo had been expended on the film so far,
and all the footage was unusable. One thing everyone agreed on was that
"The Man That Got Away" would have to be redone. The lighting was
bad, the staging awkward, and it looked like the rehearsal that it was.

When the question of CinemaScope had been resolved, Cukor and his
crew immediately began refilming, starting first with the scene between
Mason and Charles Bickford in Maine's dressing room, where the actor
tries to convince Niles to give Esther a chance in an upcoming film, and
following with the scene of Niles being awakened in the middle of the night
by a phone call from Maine, drunkenly raving about Esther, whom he has
just heard sing. Neither scene needed any special adaptation for CinemaScope-the sets were still standing, the lighting had all been worked out
beforehand, and there were very few problems caused by the switch to the
new technique.