A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (31 page)

Lucy Marlow's first day as a professional actress was memorable to her
for several reasons. "In the scene where I walk into the theater with
Charlie Bickford and Jack Carson, I had on this beautiful dress with a
huge flounce on it from mid-calf down, so that I couldn't see the white
tape mark on the floor, where I was supposed to stop. I kept missing my
mark. I did this about three times, and after the third time the extrasthe Shrine was full of extras, there must have been six hundred or so in
the background-began to titter a bit, which made me all the more nervous. So Mr. Cukor said, `Would you go have your makeup checked,
little one? We need to do some setup here.' So I went off to the makeup
area. I found out later from a wardrobe lady that Mr. Cukor announced
to the extras: `Miss Marlow is having a problem hitting the mark because
of her costume. We're going to remedy that; that's easy to do. What is
not easy to do is to handle the likes of you'- with some of his adjectives
thrown in-'making it uncomfortable not only for her but also for the
rest of us who are trying to do our best for the film. If I hear one more
titter from any one of you, I'm firing the whole lot.' That's what he said,
for a little starlet. I adored him."

Cukor evidently trusted Marlow enough to let her do what she wanted
as Lola Lavery. In the scene with Bickford in the box when Libby announces that Norman is drunk and shouldn't go on, Marlow relates, "Mr.
Cukor kept photographing ... and I'd ask him, `What do you want me
to do?' because he kept taking more footage. Finally, in between takes I
said, `Please, Mr. Cukor, is there anything else you want me to do?' He said,
`No, whatever you want to do.' I had figured out from the script that Lola
Lavery was probably not a very intelligent girl. She had probably been kept
or was being kept by Norman Maine; consequently, she wasn't at the
premiere for any other reason than to be seen. When somebody wants to
be seen and is that self-indulgent, they preen, so that's what I did."

Marlow recalls another singular experience later on in the shooting: "I
was talking to some of the gypsies, some of the dancers, and suddenly
everybody broke for lunch. Well, everybody could go to lunch except me,
because I couldn't sit down in that black dress I was wearing. I used to rest
on what they called a `slant board,' where you sort of leaned back and rested
your hips. So I ran back to my little portable dressing room, trying to find
the wardrobe lady or someone to unhook me so I could put on a smock and go in and sit down and have lunch. I couldn't find her, she had gone off
to lunch, so I was going around asking everybody I met to unhook my dress.
And everybody I asked said, 'We can't, we're not in that union.' I didn't
know what that meant, and they told me that if they unhooked me they
could get fired or the wardrobe lady could get fired.

"So I was going around almost in tears and I was almost by myself in
the Shrine, behind the curtains-I was standing there looking around when
I heard someone say, `What's the matter, kid-you lost?' and I turned
around and there was Judy Garland. Now, I had not met her-all I heard
was `In heaven's name, don't say anything to her until she says something
to you!' There was talk that she was drinking heavily, that she was on drugs,
and she was very, very difficult, so the best thing to do was to stay out of
her way. And then here I was, all alone with this monster I had heard about.
But I had adored her all my life and had used her as one of my standards
when I had to sing, so I stuttered, `Oh, Miss Garland, I can't get out of
this dress and the wardrobe lady has gone off to lunch and nobody can undo
it because-' And she said, 'Oh, knock it off, to hell with it, I'll undo the
dress! If you don't tell anybody, I won't ... Just don't tell anybody I'm
smoking!' She had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth while she was
unbuttoning my dress-she told me the fire hazard at the Shrine was
something else, nobody was allowed to smoke, so everybody was going
bananas, running out the side door to have a cigarette whenever they could.

"As she was undoing my dress, I was reaching out for some kind of
conversation, and I asked her if she was pleased with what she was doing
and she said, `Yeah, this is like old home week for me.' It was easy for her
to dance on this stage because the first time she had performed as a
professional, her mother had literally kicked her on stage as a Meglin
Kiddie-they were a troupe of little tap-dancing children. She said she'd
heard great things about what I was doing, that Cukor thought I was
terrific. She said, `Listen, honey, I've got my money in this thing. If George
says you're doing something to help the picture, I'm all for you-you're all
right in my book,' so she wished me good luck and went her way and I
found a smock and went mine. But that was something . . . it was an
emotional blanket that started me off with that lady."

After all these early scenes had been filmed, Cukor and the company spent
the next two days filming the ending scenes, which brought the story full circle. Esther, now Vicki Lester, the biggest star in the movies, attends a
benefit show at the Shrine Auditorium shortly after Norman's suicide,
where she goes onstage and introduces herself as Mrs. Norman Maine. The
scene was photographed with two cameras: one in the first row of the first
balcony, which gave a good close shot of Vicki on the stage, and one in
the last row of the second balcony, which offered a stunning shot of the
eye-filling Shrine proscenium arch and drop curtain. Cukor had wanted to
move from a close shot of Garland to the extreme long shot from the second
balcony in one continuous pull-back, but there was no way of accomplishing
this in one unbroken shot. So Leavitt, using a zoom lens on the camera,
pulled back as far as he could from the first balcony; and the camera in the
second balcony, also equipped with a zoom lens, picked up from there. It
was decided that the two separate shots would be combined in a dissolve
by the laboratory, which meant that the pull-back speeds would have to be
carefully synchronized, so the movement would cut together smoothly.

Again with this ending scene, Hoyningen-Huene had a very specific idea
about the color mood: "In contrast with the bright opening sequence, the
final sequence is dominated by a deep sky-blue mood, not gay. Miss Garland, now riding the crest of film success, is dressed in gold. But her
appearance has Pagliacci overtones and the crowd knows it. The sky-blue
color contributes a serene quality."

Immediately after finishing this last scene, Cukor had Allen revamp a
section of one of the Shrine's balconies and used it as the movie theater
where Norman and Esther watch the sneak preview of her first starring
film. The final two days at the Shrine involved close-in work of the arriving
stars and celebrities being interviewed in the lobby by a typical Hollywood
interviewer. For this, Cukor cast the real thing: a local announcer named
George Fischer, a long-time emcee at premieres. As his female counterpart,
Joan Shawlee, a little-known young character actress, gave a hilarious impersonation of a gushing radio columnist describing "lovely Lola Lavery"
from her wardrobe ("She's wearing a black sheath and a blue fox-isn't it
marvelous? And the diamonds in the hair!!") to her character ("We've just
had the pleasure of talking with Lola Lavery.... Have you ever seen anyone
so sweet, so unspoiled and down to earth? She's a darling girl"). All of this
was filmed with very little difficulty and very little excess footage, and work
at the Shrine finished on budget and on schedule on January 8.

Back at the studio, work progressed quickly and smoothly on scenes involving the housewarming party of Norman and Esther, which *had been postponed because of Garland's dissatisfaction with her costume; this was
completed in two days. Then the "New York street" on the Warners back
lot was dressed up with neon signs, puddles of water, and 1 12 extras to
create a believable facsimile of a busy street in a small Southern California
town, where Norman and Esther arrive for the preview of her first starring
film. Following these relatively simple scenes, Cukor shot the sequences of
Norman being bailed out of the drunk tank by Vicki and Oliver Niles on
Christmas Eve. These exterior shots were done on location at the Lincoln
Heights jail in downtown Los Angeles; the interiors would be done later
at the studio.

"Cukor had told us that he wanted rain when we did the scene of
Maine's funeral," Russ Llewellyn relates. "So we waited and waited and
finally we got lucky. We got a bad forecast and we rushed right through
and made it. It was a hell of a day's work. We had four hundred extras and
we ruined the lawn at the church." The scene was staged at the Church
of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, irreverently known locally as "Our
Lady of the Cadillacs." It was a difficult sequence to shoot, since the church
hierarchy would not allow lights in the church itself, making it almost
impossible to photograph Garland, Bickford, and Noonan as they came out
of the darkness of the church vestibule. Compounding the problem was the
fact that Garland was wearing a heavy veil and both Noonan and Bickford
were in dark suits; Leavitt could not get enough exposure to separate the
characters from the darkness of the church. The solution that he worked
out was to use a side door of the church for their exit, as it was backdropped
with a stained glass window in the wall behind the door, which gave enough
backlight so that the three figures could be seen. The edict against floodlights in the church was circumvented by having photographers' flashbulbs
go off as soon as the doors were opened, which lit the faces and figures of
the principals in a dramatic, staccato fashion. Interspersed with this was the
frenzy of the fans, hysterically pushing and shoving in their efforts to see
Vicki; all this gave the scene a raw, cold semidocumentary look that added
greatly to the dramatic impact of Vicki's screaming, wailing collapse as her
veil is ripped off by her adoring fans with their ghoulish demand to "give
us just one good look!"

Next, Cukor returned to the scenes in the Malibu beach house where
Esther, after getting Norman out of jail, tells Niles that she is giving up
her career to care for her husband, who overhears all this and, devastated,
decides to commit suicide. These were crucial scenes in the story, melodramatic and almost unbelievable. Hart had lifted them almost intact from
the original, with virtually no rewriting, relying instead on their highly
charged dramatic intensity and Cukor's subtlety to make them come alive.

To do this, Cukor depended more than usually on mood. The setting
was supposedly an exterior, a modern glass-walled house with a terrace
overlooking the ocean. The time was a late winter afternoon, which deepened into twilight as the scene progressed, giving the scene the necessary
feeling of coldness and melancholy. For Sam Leavitt, the sequence was
another in the long series of problems that had to be solved in a practical,
realistic manner. "Cukor wanted it to be late afternoon," he recalled. "The
sun goes down, down ... the shadows get blacker and longer. You have
to think what to do: how's it going to look? So I had to put some color lights
over the lights, the kind that would make it look like late afternoon. You
have to make it look beautiful as well-make Judy look good, and Mason,
and when they're both together, you have to make them both look good.
You can't make them look flat; you have to get a molded look, with lights
and shadows that are dramatic and add something to the scene." Leavitt's
lighting and photography problems were complicated by a subtle bit of
symbolism that Cukor had used throughout the film to try to hint at
Maine's fate. In an early scene in Maine's bedroom, he had shown a
close-up of the actor's tuxedo shirt on the floor, its arms outstretched as if
it were floating in the dark. In the scenes of Maine on location, the first
shot of the actor was of him unconscious, floating on his back in the water
before being pulled to safety; and in the shots of him alone in the beach
house, putting golf balls, he is backdropped by waves breaking on the shore
as seen through the windows of the living room. For this presuicide sequence, Cukor wanted to have Maine behind the sliding glass doors, surrounded by the reflection of the breaking surf and the ocean. It seemed
impossible to do this in the manner Cukor wanted without going on
location, but Leavitt and the special effects crew came up with an ingenious
solution to the problem, which Cukor explained: "All we had was the
interior set and a little exterior set of the terrace right outside the house,
so we had to suggest the location by a process shot of the reflection of the
ocean." This involved erecting a large "process screen" opposite the beach house set, then projecting onto it from behind footage of the ocean and
the surf, whose reflection would be picked up by the glass doors and
windows. Thus, when Mason stood inside the sliding glass doors of the set,
the reflection of the water seemed to surround him and wash over him. And
Cukor attempted to give the scene a further air of reality: "I don't like
doing exteriors on an interior set, but if you can get a sense of movement
in the air, you can keep the scene alive. Judy Garland wore a very light
chiffon scarf, and the air moved it. It was tricky, because if we'd had a
regular fan, it would have made so much noise, we would have had to
postsync the dialogue. So we had wind tunnels, where the fan is placed
outside the stage and the air is brought in through a big canvas tunnel that
kills the sound of the fan. So you got the illusion of being at the ocean, and
we were able to keep the exterior alive."