A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (26 page)

Milton Krasner, still on loan from loth Century-Fox, photographed all
these retakes. He and Cukor had worked together previously on A Double
Life (1948) and The Model and the Marriage Broker (1 95 r ). "I thought
he was very good," recalled Cukor. "He worked a lot with [Vincente]
Minnelli.... I'm not so sure that I like his color work that much, though."
Krasner could not stay on the picture permanently; he was Fox's resident
expert on CinemaScope, and as such he was used to train cameramen at other studios in the vagaries of the process. The big problem now facing
A Star Is Born was finding another cameraman, and quickly. Recalls Sid
Luft: "I'd seen some stuff on television, in black and white-brilliant
stuff-and I noticed who this guy was: Sam Leavitt. I was telling Judy about
him and she said, 'You know, he was a camera operator for Harry Stradling.'
So I thought, 'Let's get a hold of this guy-if he was with Harry for ten
years or whatever the hell it was, he knows his stuff. He's the same thing
as Harry Stradling.' Judy said he shot all the musicals, so I said, 'Let's hire
him.' So I got him. His agent was Otto Preminger's brother, Ingo. It wasn't
an easy sell, either, with Jack Warner, especially after he saw what Milt
Krasner had done. And Jack had a thing about people who did television
work. But in the end I got him and he started right in." Leavitt joined the
A Star Is Born company on Friday, October 23, and was immediately at
work on retakes of the sanitorium sequence, then on retakes of the scenes
between Libby, the manservant, and the sleeping Maine.

The forty-nine-year-old Leavitt had been in the film business since the
early 1930s, starting out as a camera operator at the Biograph Studios in
New York. He moved to Hollywood in 1935 and had gone to work at
Paramount, then moved to MGM, working as a camera operator for Joseph
Ruttenberg and Harry Stradling. It was there that he had met Garland,
who liked him a great deal. After becoming a director of photography on
his own in 1951, he had specialized in off-beat, low-budget work for Republic and Columbia. His most famous work was The Thief (1952), a hardedged near-documentary starring Ray Milland, filmed on actual locations
in New York City and notable for the fact that though it was a sound film,
only one word of dialogue was spoken. Leavitt was a facile, proficient
technician; his work on low-budget films gave him an ability to light sets
in the shortest time possible, and he was a fast, no-nonsense cameraman.
He was unpretentious, loved his work, and was eager to please his director.
He had just finished work on the 3-D Southwest Passage, which had also
used Eastmancolor under the trade name Pathecolor, so he was familiar
with the process's strengths and weaknesses.

That all these factors made him an ideal choice for the troubled A Star
Is Born soon became evident on the first major scene he shot for the
picture, the retake of "The Man That Got Away" on Tuesday the 27th.
In contrast to the lengthy setup and lighting time on the earlier attempt,
Leavitt was given the camera setup at 9:oo a.m., started lighting the set at
9:1o, and was ready to shoot by 10:45. Leavitt later recalled: "Cukor had ideas about this number and his ideas were kind of scrumbly. He told me,
'I want to shoot this sequence with Judy singing in this barroom. I want
her to sing this number and walk around these musicians, about seven or
eight of them, and sing the number in between them, go around them and
then come back and go around the room.' This is where the intricate part
came in. He said, 'I want to see her, but I don't want to see the musicians.
I don't want to see their instruments, I don't want to see their faces, I don't
want to see anything about them. I just want to see her alone.' That was
the hard part, because when she went in between these people, she was lit
from one direction. When she looked over in another angle, she was lit
from there, but when she walked over a ways, she got in the way of a
musician, and every time she did that, the wrong light hit her, and I had
to take the light off her. I had a helluva time trying to cut one light off her
and put one light on them, and that was tough because here she is in a place
where she was definitely lit right, and then she'd move over here and she'd
get into this light here, that would hit her on this side, and the light didn't
make her look good. The toughest part was getting her out of all the lights
that she wasn't supposed to be in. I took a little time and I asked her where
she thought she was going to sing, and I mapped it all out in my mind, then
I had the stand-in walk around. After I lit it with the other girl, then I had
her go through it for me to see if I got it right. A couple of spots I had
guessed wrong with the lights, and Judy showed it to me-she knew her
lights, knew where her key light should be, and could tell if it wasn't hitting
her right, so then I'd move the light to make her look good. It was a tough
hombre to do, you know. I think in all my career, this was the toughest
lighting problem that I ever had. I should have had a week to piddle around
with it, but I couldn't because there was too much money involved. The
musicians-these guys didn't know what the hell I was doing; they didn't
give a damn about the lighting. All they were concerned about was going
through their musical score and playing right."

Cukor kept the staging much the same as he had devised for the first
version, so there was very little change in the way of blocking. But Gene
Allen and Hoyningen-Huene, after seeing the first version, had redesigned
the look of the set. Recalls Allen: "The first time it all looked as if we had
painted a set to look like a bar. It needed to be softened up some way,
because it looked a little garish. So to give it a slightly impressionistic look,
I convinced Sam to let us put a scrim between the musicians and the back
bar. If you look very carefully at that scene you can see the scrim nailed down on the floor; of course nobody notices it, but it's there and it gives
a soft tone to the back, and we had some of the grips with bee-pots smoking
it up a bit, and it looked a lot better."

Shooting "The Man That Got Away" was an exhausting ordeal, and not
just for Leavitt and the crew. Earl Bellamy remembers: "We had the
playback machine there with the recording of the song; and, you know,
most singers just mouth to the playback. Not Judy. When she sang to a
playback, you couldn't hear anything. That playback was turned on to its
peak, but you could hear Judy above it. She was unbelievable when she sang
to a playback. She wanted me to start it full blast and then she started
singing and she topped it. You could stand anyplace and you could hear
that playback, but you could hear Judy just as clear as a bell, and she sang
right with it and everything was right on. It was just absolutely beautiful;
she put everything that she could possibly put of herself into a song, and
as a result, she's really down for the count for about ten minutes. When
we finished the number, she took me aside and said, `Earl, give me a break
before the next take,' and I said, `Fine,' and she went to her dressing room,
and we waited about fifteen minutes, and she came back fine and did the
whole thing again. Each time she was just as tremendous as she ever was.
She never varied when she sang, and she never missed." According to the
production log, because of technical problems, staging, lighting, or playback problems, Garland did twenty-seven takes of this number over the
next three days, both partial and complete, so that by the end of the third
day she was emotionally and physically exhausted. In watching the rushes,
it was found there were three good takes of the number, but everyone had
reservations about the scene itself. Recalls Bellamy: "Mr. Cukor had her
doing bits of business before she sang, and all of that action didn't really
fit the song. In my opinion, thinking back on it now, it destroyed the song,
it didn't have any meaning-it was just too busy." Gene Allen remembers
other problems: "We all had the same feeling: The color wasn't right. And
she didn't look good-her costume was wrinkled, it didn't fit right. Judy
would put on some weight, as some of us are apt to do, over a weekend and
be a few pounds heavier than she was when they first made the dress. So
that didn't look good. And even with the scrim and all, I still didn't like
the look of the bar. But even with all that, it was still an exciting number."

As the company finished shooting this sequence, Warners made official
what heretofore had been industry gossip. A lengthy press release from
Albert Warner's office in New York announced that Warner Bros. was taking up CinemaScope and that A Star Is Born would be the first Warners
film to use the Fox process. "This is being done," it was explained,

to clarify and standardize for exhibitors and the public a single process, thus
eliminating any possibility of confusion. We are happy to pool our technical
and engineering know-how with zoth Century-Fox in an even greater development of the CinemaScope system, which we feel is best suited for many
of the important productions we plan to bring to world audiences in the
future. We believe the industry can best be served by leading producers
collaborating and cooperating in technological advances for the best interests
of the business.

Significantly, no mention was made of the WarnerScope process; and even
more significantly, the announcement came from Albert Warner, not from
Jack as it would have under normal circumstances. The ever-vigilant Variety quoted industry rumor that the first shipment of lenses to Warner Bros.
from Zeiss was inferior because the optical company had been supplied
with the wrong specifications by the studio. In a separate editorial, the
journal made oblique references to the Warner-Zanuck standoff: "Warner
Bros. is to be commended for unbending from what is known in the trade
to have been a pretty firm and sensitive earlier emotional as well as technological conviction."

The studio's capitulation was a triumph for Zanuck and Fox but a galling
defeat for Jack Warner personally. Being a seasoned gambler, however, he
shrugged it off with seeming good grace-not an easy thing to do, as he
had lost nearly $400,000 of the firm's money in his battle to combat Zanuck
and establish WarnerScope. In a privately negotiated face-and-moneysaving gesture, Fox agreed to take over Warners' contract with Zeiss, which
had been primarily for the manufacture of projection lenses. This worked
to Fox's advantage, as Bausch and Lomb were having difficulties turning
out enough lenses to supply all the theaters that wanted the anamorphic
device. Enabling Warners to keep its promise to exhibitors that they could
rent the new lenses instead of being forced to buy them, Fox gave Warners'
distribution arm three hundred lenses. Additionally, Fox agreed to sell
CinemaScope equipment to all the Warner-affiliated theaters at the same
reduced price it was offering its own former subsidiary theaters.

This was a major victory for zoth Century-Fox in its effort to sell the
new technology to the industry and to the moviegoing public. It now had every studio except Paramount, and virtually every major theater chain in
the country (and abroad), producing and exhibiting films in CinemaScope.
Almost literally overnight, Spyros Skouras and his band of unlikely revolutionaries had succeeded in sweeping away almost all opposition to the new
process. By the end of 1953, CinemaScope was firmly established as a viable
economic and aesthetic force; the new shape and sound would dominate
Hollywood film production for the next two decades.

low that CinemaScope was officially the order of the day, Cukor
and his collaborators were faced with the problem of filling the vast expanse
of screen. "It is the most unfortunate shape," remarked Cukor, "like a
mailbox ... the problem is, you can't get any height in the thing." Milton
Krasner and another Fox anamorphic expert named Rosenberg had given
Cukor and Leavitt a set of rules that had to be adhered to when working
in the new process: "We couldn't move the camera up or down, because
of distortion, and we couldn't move back and away from the camera,"
recalls Cukor. "Everything had to be played on a level plane-if someone
were too much upstage, they would be out of focus. And you weren't
supposed to come in really close on faces. It was rather like what happened
when sound came in-you were supposed to forget everything you'd
learned. Well, we shot like that for just one day-and then, with Gene
Allen and George Huene, we said, 'To hell with it.' We just paid no
attention to that unfortunate mailbox shape, we ignored all the rules."
- .11 1 .l . 1 f 1 '. .l -.-1

Gene Allen remembers this period of change very distinctly: "We had
to learn on the job. Fox had given us a whole list of rules, like lining up
your actors in a straight row, because of perspective problems, focus problems, and all. Well, Cukor said, 'I don't know how the hell to direct people
in a row. Nobody stands in rows.' And as he said, you couldn't get height.
So we were constantly on our toes about designing. We found that we
would have to jack up tables and chairs to get a plane representing the floor
plane, because in CinemaScope you just didn't get floors or ceilings in.
Then we had to find ways to bring ceilings down into the picture, so that
you got some feeling of where walls were in relationship to the actors. So
all of these things were going on at the same time: how do you stage a scene
that was shot in the old three-by-four proportion, and now suddenly you
have to redo it and you have a few feet on each side left over? Well, you had to redesign, you had to move people apart, you had to fill the screen
very carefully. We were trying to watch the schedule; we had the problem
of shooting and reshooting-I don't know of any other film that suddenly
had all these problems dumped on it. Cukor never spoke much about it,
but he had to be terribly nervous about putting his reputation on the line.
George Huene and I began working with him on every shot, every angle;
we were always right there. And we were all learning. For every setup, I
looked through the finder with the permission of the cameraman and the
operator-I found a way to work with them instead of against them. You
had to be a diplomat, because you're dealing with great temperaments; but
I had a lot of enthusiasm, and they liked the idea of the team, the concept
that we were only doing something to make it all better. And when they
found out that we didn't do things to make them look bad, and that they'd
get credit for any great ideas we might have had-well, then it turned out
all right."