A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (33 page)

The result of this memo and a series of conferences with his attorneys
and other advisors was a four-page, single-spaced letter to Jack Warner,
largely written by Selznick himself:

Dear Jack:

We have known each other for so many years and so well that I feel
obliged to call to your personal attention the facts on A Star Is Born before
it is too late.

I hope you will forgive me if I point out that you are pouring millions into
a remake of my picture without having bothered to clear the foreign rights.
I . . . call your attention to the fact that I was the creator of this subject. I was not only its producer, the very idea was my own, and so much of its
writing did I do that when Bill Wellman received a writing "Oscar" for it,
he frankly stated in his remarks of acceptance that it should have been given
tome....

Now I am not seeking anything philanthropic from you, Jack. On the
contrary, I feel that it is I who am doing you the favor in putting you on
notice before it is too late. Also, I feel bad about Judy, who I.understand owns
a substantial piece of your film.... I do not want to be responsible for causing
you tremendous headaches, or to be improperly charged by you with never
having brought the matter to your personal attention....

It may be, Jack, that your lawyers will tell you that you are absolutely in
the clear, and that you have nothing to worry about.... Perhaps this is what
they have already told you.... I, of course, intend to follow the guidance
of my own lawyers. . . .

In the absence of any immediate constructive approach by your company
to this problem, you may expect legal actions to be taken by us in every single
territory of the world where we own the film. If I don't receive a prompt reply
to this letter, I shall regrettably be forced to assume that there is no change
in your attitude, and to act accordingly.

With kindest regards,
David

Jack Warner's reply to this broadside was brief and to the point:

Dear David:

This is to acknowledge receipt of your rather voluminous letter ... regarding A Star Is Bom. Please know that I appreciate the spirit in which you
have sent this letter to me. However, inasmuch as the contents of your
letter raise many points with which I am sure our Legal Department is
familiar, I naturally will have to be apprised of the department's views
before any reply can be made. As soon as I have all of the facts before me,
either I or one of our executives here at the studio or at our New York
office will get in touch with you or your New York office. Of course, David,
my failure in this letter to treat in detail upon any of the points raised in
your letter is in no way to be construed that any of them are recognized or
conceded by me.

Kindest personal regards,
Sincerely,
Jack

Selznick's bringing this matter to Warner's attention must have caused
quite a stir at the studio, since this was the first time that Jack Warner
realized that he was doing exactly what Selznick had described: "pouring
millions into a remake without having bothered to clear the foreign rights."
While Sclznick's attorneys had indeed notified Warner's attorneys of this,
legal matters were seldom brought to Jack's attention unless they involved
contractual negotiations. In this case, Selznick's claims were just thatclaims. Now that Warner was aware of it, it must have infuriated him,
especially in conjunction with another matter regarding A Star Is Born that
had been brought to Warner's attention, which prompted this memo to
Alperson:

Dear Eddie:

People have advised me that they have seen A Star Is Born on television
within the last three months. You told me this picture had been removed
for an indefinite time and that it only had appeared on television a few times.
Have you a print of this picture running on television? If so, I am very, very
much disappointed. Would appreciate your writing or phoning me about this
immediately.

Regards,
Jack

Another factor irritating Warner was the fact that both Alperson and
Luft were convinced that they were in possession of all rights, including
foreign, and that they had signed a contract stating so. To discover now
that this invaluable component was, in fact, not part of the deal meant that
the project could turn into a major problem for Warner. On the one hand,
what he was seeing in the rushes made him confident that he had the
makings of a great picture. On the other hand, the cost projections, the
number of days the film was behind schedule, Luft's inexperience, and
Garland's erratic absences probably made him regret, at this point, that
he'd ever heard of A Star Is Born, Ed Alperson, Sid Luft, or Judy Garland.

While Selznick and the Warner Bros. attorneys played tug-of-war with the
1937 negative, Cukor was moving the production forward as quickly as
possible. In addition to the three musical numbers that had yet to be filmed,
there were also the retakes of work already done and a considerable number of dramatic scenes that hadn't been filmed at all. One of the most crucial
of these took place in Vicki's dressing room at the Niles studio. In the
original, this had served as little more than a bridge to the scene between
Niles and Maine in the sanitorium; it had been brief and made the plot
points that Niles was noble and caring, that Norman was trying to stop
drinking, and that Vicki was distraught. Unfortunately, as written and
staged by Wellman, it dealt with the drama of her concern and anguish
not at all. Hart's rewrite of this scene seized upon the possibilities inherent
in the pressure on Vicki. She is first seen filming a very upbeat, cheerful
musical number; during a break, she is visited in her dressing room by Niles.
When he asks Vicki about Norman, he is met with silence; then she breaks
down:

He's trying awfully hard to stop drinking ... he really wants to ... but what
is it? Why does he try to destroy himself? ... I've got to find the answer
... I can't live this way! You don't know what it's like to see someone you
love crumbling away before your eyes, day by day, bit by bit ... and to stand
there helpless. Love isn't enough ... I thought I was the answer for Norman
... but love isn't enough. And now I'm afraid of what I feel in myself
... because ... I hate his promises to stop-and the watching and the waiting
to see it begin again. I hate to go home to him at night-and listen to his
lies.... But my heart goes out to him, because he does try ... but I hate
him for failing! ... and I hate me because I've failed too. I don't know what's
going to happen to us, Oliver! No matter how much you love someone-how
do you live out the days? How?

The intensity of the emotion, the honesty of the character in admitting to
hatred, fear, and despair, and the picture that the dialogue painted of the
disintegration of a person and a relationship marked a major advance in the
treatment of character and subject in the ultimate Hollywood escapist
fantasy: the musical. Hart added a coda in which Vicki, after Oliver promises to put Norman back to work, goes back out to the sound stage and
finishes her song. His construction of the scene-bracketing it with the
song-gave an added poignancy and depth to Vicki's breakdown.

The musical number, called "Lose That Long Face," was still being
worked out by Barstow, but it had been decided that Vicki would be
costumed as a waif, selling newspapers. There had been some talk of having
her do the number in blackface, but a makeup test convinced everyone it would be unwise. For her costume in this scene, Cukor had brought in some
Jacob Riis photos of turn-of-the-century tenement children, and the wardrobe department had outfitted Garland as a ragamuffin, complete with
straw hat and freckles.

Cukor had decided to film the Niles/Vicki scene in one uninterrupted
take. The CinemaScope camera was set up so that Garland and Bickford
were at opposite ends of the wide screen; the lights surrounding the dressing room mirror and the reflection of the overhead lights in the mirror gave
the scene a harsh, clinical quality, which emphasized the intensity of
Vicki's feelings, her anger and her sorrow.

As Del Armstrong recalls, "Cukor knew how to get the most out of
actresses. Because of his particular lifestyle, he knew how to hurt a
woman, and he used it several times to get them into a mood for a crying
scene. Usually it's in the quietude of their little rehearsals-he says I
want the set now' and everybody goes away, and what he says to her and
she says to him, usually nobody can hear it. Different directors have different ways of getting an emotion going, because maybe she comes in in
the morning bright and gay and full of laughter, then all of a sudden she
has to drop for a scene, and he has to abuse her a little bit, in order to
bring her down.

"[In this scene] I had great admiration for Judy, being able to get up
to those highs. I don't know how she managed to do it within herself,
especially with Cukor. He was notorious for dozens of takes-well, any
emotion will drain doing it that many times. So towards the end of the
last takes, I'd have to come in and furnish the tears for her, and maybe
help her get up to the point where she was in the last take. She always
surprised me in her ability to do this-I would come out of her dressing
room with her and maybe we were joking about something and she'd go
right into a scene and then snap, she'd change like that, which usually
surprised me a bit. But she had that talent, even though she needed
constant reassurance.... She was never confident in her own ability as
a dramatic actress.

"I remember we worked on that scene all day; we finished at nine o'clock
at night or something. Now, my relationship with her was always kind of
separate and apart from the movie; it was ... on a little more personal basis.
And on this day, she was so wrought up after the day's work, so I took her
home because she was near hysterical ... and we had to stop right outside
of Hollywood High School and give her a chance to throw up. It was just emotions-it wasn't from drinking-it was just an upheaval, a nervous
disorder, like ulcers or something. I don't think she came to work the next
day, either."

Regarding Garland's absences, Cukor remarked that "she works intensely and can only sustain the pace for short periods, but it's well worth
it, for she is a revelation in her emotional scenes. She manages to get the
same thrilling quality in them that she does when she's singing a song-at
her best. She makes them heartrending, real and electrifying."

Garland recovered and was back at work after her day's absence to film
the interior scenes of Esther and Niles bailing Norman out of the night
court. Bellamy remembers an amusing quirk of Cukor's: "When he'd come
in in the morning I would always pull out of the script the scenes that we
were going to do, just those pages, and he always worked with them. And
then at lunch time I would have to give him a new set of pages, because
by then the ones that I had given him in the morning were such a mess-all
crumpled up so that he couldn't read them. And then by evening when we
finished, the new pages were just as crumpled, because he would hold them
real tight in his hands or stick them in his pockets, or sometimes chew on
them. But that was his way of working."

By the end of January the production was twenty-nine days behind
schedule, and other commitments began looming for the actors and for
Cukor. Walt Disney had signed Mason to star as Captain Nemo in his
live-action feature of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and
the actor was due to start work in April. MGM wanted Cukor for preproduction work on his next film for them, an adaptation of John Masters's
bestselling novel Bhowani /unction, to be filmed on location in India in
the fall. And Columbia wanted Earl Bellamy back. "In January," he recalled, "I'd been with the picture from June or July, loaned out, and
Columbia said, 'That's it, Earl, you have to come back.' " Just before he
left, he experienced his one and only case of Garland temperament.
"One morning, she came into makeup and I went up the stairs into the
makeup room where she was and walked in and said, 'Morning, Judy,
how are you?' And she lit into me like ... it blew me right out of the
water. All I said was 'Good morning,' and she had some problem and she
ripped into me and it made me mad, so I went out of the makeup room
and I slammed that door-it's a wonder it still stayed on the hinges.
Later on I went and called her and said, 'Judy, we're ready for you,' and
she came on the set, she walked to the center of the set and she said, 'Hold it, everybody-hold it, quiet.' She said, 'I did something today to
a fellow I like very much and I want to apologize to him,' and she turned
and said, 'I'm very sorry about this morning, Earl.' That was it. And to
this day, I don't know what her problem was. I don't care-I thought it
was very wonderful of her to do such a thing."

Bellamy gone, the burden of the production now fell on
Russ Llewellyn's shoulders, and the first major problem he had to deal
with was Cukor's growing irritation at what he considered Sid Luft's unwarranted interference in matters Cukor felt were best left to himself and
Hart. The company was shooting a scene in Laguna, showing Norman
and Esther surveying the property for their beach house and having an
impromptu picnic with Esther singing "It's a New World" as the two
have a tender love interlude. "We're going down to Laguna in the car,"
relates Llewellyn. "We'd sent Judy down the night before so she could be
with the makeup and wardrobe crews first thing in the morning-we had
to finish in one day. Cukor pulls out these papers and looks at them. He
says, 'Mr. Luft sent these to me last night . . . ,' then in the car he blows
his cork-he's mad and he tells the driver, `I want to stop at a telephone
booth.' So he gets out of the car and calls Moss Hart in New York-you
know, you couldn't change a sequence of any kind without Hart's okay.
And he came back to the car and he says, `You know what Hart said to
me? He said, "You mean to tell me you're on Pacific Coast Highway at
seven o'clock in the morning, calling me from a pay phone?" ' He said,
`Yeah' and Hart died laughing. So we went down and finished the scene
and I thought that was the end of that."