A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (38 page)

Once the film had been shortened to Cukor's satisfaction, it was turned
over to the music and sound departments for the last of its vital components, the musical underscoring and the mixing of dialogue, music, and
sound effects. "A Star Is Born was such a beautiful picture to work on,"
recalls Ray Heindorf. "It was very dramatic and moody, and it was the kind
of film that if it wasn't a musical, probably would have had a background
score by Steiner or Korngold.... With songs that are written for a picture,
you can't sing them fifty times, but you can play them throughout. A hit
is not made by singing a song once, a hit is made by letting the people hear
it-throw it at them, just keep plugging that one song. So I themed `The
Man That Got Away' throughout." Actually, Heindorf used the song in
fifteen different variations throughout the film, starting with the main title, where he orchestrated the opening measures of the song for the full sixtypiece Warner Bros. orchestra; this was followed by a mini-overture of "It's
a New World" and "Lose That Long Face," returning to a brassy, syncopated version of "The Man That Got Away" as the credits ended. The
usual studio practice was to have a staff orchestrator do the arrangements,
but as Heindorf confessed: "I always wanted to do my own work. I enjoy
orchestrating, especially on the main title-that [is] the most important
part of a picture. A good main title will make an audience receptive to
what's coming, so we always spent a little more time on the beginning of
the picture."

Warner's dictum that he wanted music to "start where it says `Warner
Bros. Presents' and ... end where it says `The End' " was the guideline
Heindorf (and all the other Warners staff composers) used when "spotting"
music in a film. "The first thing you have to do," explained Heindorf, "is
to see the picture. You seldom saw it complete when you started to write
for it; there were always a lot of things missing. So you didn't just see it
once, you saw it many times. After a while the spotting of the music wasn't
that difficult, because ... when they didn't talk, we played."

Heindorf's sensitivity to the needs of a scene was subtly demonstrated
in his scoring for Maine waking in his bedroom in the middle of the night,
trying to remember, through his alcoholic haze, the name of the girl he's
promised to take to supper. As he is sprawled out in his bed with the
curtains blowing in the breeze, the orchestra quietly plays a muted string
arrangement of the "hey, you fool you" phrase from "Gotta Have Me Go
With You." As the camera dollies forward, Maine sits up suddenly and
unsteadily while the orchestra mimics his motion. As he tries to clear his
head and think, the brass jogs his memory by playing the first eight bars
of the song, which is then repeated in a minor key by the strings and
percussion as the scene segues into the Cocoanut Grove ballroom. The
music serves a dual purpose: by seemingly waking Maine with the ghostly
echo of the song, it eliminates the necessity for Hart's spoken aside ("Promised to take a girl to dinner ..."), then serves as a bridge into the next scene.

One of Heindorf's most expansive uses of "The Man That Got Away"
occurs after Maine calls Niles at four a.m. to tell him about Esther. As
Norman hangs up the phone, he absently hums the opening bars of the
song; then he stops and begins to think about Esther, and the cello picks
up the phrase; as Norman pours himself a drink, a clarinet plays an ascending figure; then the orchestra continues to develop the melody while he ponders the future of all this. A harp then plays the phrase "The night is
bitter. The stars have lost their glitter," which serves as a bridge into
Esther's darkened bedroom at the Oleander Arms, where she too is awake,
thinking. Her restlessness is made evident by the insistent clarinet repeating the previous phrase over a rising and falling string figure. As she gets
out of bed, the orchestra picks up the melody and expands it as she opens
her door and goes upstairs to talk to Danny McGuire, the music diminuen-
doing as she knocks on his door. It is a beautifully evocative use of the song,
tying the two principal characters together emotionally yet underlining
their separate anguish in a completely individual manner, just by altering
the chromatics and dynamics of the melody. Heindorf varied this approach
throughout the film, using four songs ("Gotta Have Me Go With You,"
"The Man That Got Away," "Here's What I'm Here For," and "It's a
New World") as principal themes, modifying their melodic structures to
fit the needs of the scene.

In addition to these four songs written for the picture, he interpolated
fourteen other, outside melodies throughout the film. The overture to the
Shrine benefit is a rousing version of J. Fred Cootes's "Why?" from the
I929 Broadway show Sons o' Guns. For a jam session in the Downbeat
Club that interrupts Norman and Esther's conversation, Heindorf used the
Jack Yellen-Lew Pollack "Cheatin' on Me." "I brought in some jazzmen
for this," recalled Heindorf, "in addition to the regular orchestra, because
I wanted it to sound like improvisation. We had Buddy Cole on the piano,
Nick Fatool on the drums, Babe Russin on tenor, and Hoyt Bohannon on
trombone, and they made it sound improvised, even though it was written
[in an arrangement by Skip Martin]." Ironic counterpoint was added by
using the Johnny Green standard "Easy Come, Easy Go" as Norman points
out the lights of Hollywood to Esther after her preview triumph, telling her,
"It's all yours, Esther.... " Later, after Norman's humiliation at the
Academy Awards, Esther helps him off the stage while the couples begin
dancing to "Here's What I'm Here For," a bit of poignant and subtle
understatement. For the final sequence, Esther's return to the Shrine
Auditorium, Heindorf scored her entrance into the backstage area with a
mournful guitar solo by Laurindo Almeida called "Amor Flamingo," as
Esther sees the heart drawn in lipstick by Norman on the night of their
first meeting. "At the end of the picture," recalls Heindorf, "after she said
'This is Mrs. Norman Maine,' she started singing 'It's a New World.' We
went to preview that way, but it didn't work. It was anticlimactic, so we took Judy's vocal out and put in a choral version, which worked much better
for an ending."

It took Heindorf and the Warner orchestra two weeks to record the score
using the studio's new four-channel stereo sound recording system. "That
was a fabulous recording," he recalls. "Years before, I'd seen the Disney
picture Fantasia at the Carthay Circle Theatre [in Los Angeles]. I don't
think that anybody has done anything better than what Stokowski did with
the Philadelphia Orchestra in that. I went back to see it seven times, that's
how impressed I was with it. The sound was just magnificent. When we
did A Star Is Born, it was the first chance I had to work with stereo, and
it was a completely different departure. We had a sixty-piece orchestra, and
we covered the whole thing with three microphones; we had four channels,
because we used what I call a 'long shot' mike, which was a microphone
at the far end of the stage to pick up natural distance sound. When we
listened to the first playbacks on the score, it was on magnetic tape, and
the sound that came out of those big new speakers of ours-it really was
something. Everybody was impressed with it. Even I was impressed with
the way we sounded. It was a real thrill to hear your orchestra and your
arrangements sound that good."

When the background scoring was completed, the picture was given
over to the sound department for the final mixing of all the nonvisual
elements: dialogue, music, and sound effects. Under normal conditions, this
was one of the most time-consuming and delicate of processes. Each individual track had to be recorded in synchronization with the others. Balances
had to be set so that the dialogue would not be drowned out by the music.
Sound effects were immensely complicated to dub in; it was possible to have
as many as six different sound-effects tracks running simultaneously in a
scene: traffic sounds, wind, rain, dogs barking, footsteps, gunshots-the
possibilities were limited only by the number of dubbing machines available, each of which would carry a separate track. That, of course, was with
the old single-channel, monaural, optical soundtrack. With the advent of
four-track magnetic stereo sound, a whole new method of putting sound
on film was introduced, and with it came new techniques and methods.
With stereo, if a character was talking on the left side of the screen, the
sound had to come from there; if the scene cut to another angle, the sound
(dialogue and effects) also had to switch positions. In the early days of stereo
dubbing, sound engineers were driven to near distraction trying to work
with multiple tracks, keep them all synchronized, and place the source of the sound accurately. Once this was completed, a final mix was done in
which the three-channel orchestral background score was added to the
previously mixed dialogue and effects tracks. It was a complex and exacting
job; endless hours could be spent on one ten-minute reel.

While these final, all-important details were being meticulously attended
to, Luft and Garland set forth for Europe with Jack Warner and friends
on an extended three-week vacation. They were all scheduled to return to
Los Angeles around Labor Day. Meanwhile, in the New York offices of
Warner Bros., considerable time and discussion was being given to A Star
Is Born. Based on the work that was being done on the film and the amount
of time it would take Technicolor to make release prints, it was decided
that the picture would be given its world premiere in Hollywood at the
Pantages Theatre on September 29. The New York opening would take
place on October 11. Due to the phenomenal interest in the film, fueled
by newspaper and magazine articles, it was decided to put the picture into
two Times Square theaters simultaneously, the three-thousand-seat Paramount and the smaller twelve-hundred-seat Victoria. All these initial "first
run" engagements would be on a continuous-showing basis, with no intermission-and at advanced prices.

These decisions regarding the picture's handling were all being made by
one man: Benjamin Kalmenson, president of Warner Bros. Distribution
Corporation and a vice-president (along with Jack and Albert Warner and
five others) of the parent Warner Bros. Pictures Corporation. The fiftyfive-year-old Kalmenson, who had worked for ten years in the steel factories
of Pittsburgh before switching over to the film business in 1927, had joined
Warner Bros. in 1934 as the chief booker for the theater chain. His rise
through the ranks eventually brought him to the top of the sales department, from which he subsequently moved to president of the distribution
arm. Kalmenson's background and training did not imbue him with much
patience for "art" or "greatness" in films. To him they were merchandise,
to be sold to theaters at the highest price that could be extracted. The more
stars and production values, the better the merchandise and the easier it
was to sell. In his estimation, A Star Is Born had all those, plus the
additional advantage of massive amounts of publicity due to the fascination
that Garland held for the press. But he felt that the picture had one great
drawback: its length. At three hours and two minutes, it was twice as long
as the average film. A large first-run theater conceivably could show a hit film seven or eight times a day, filling the house for each screening-what is known in the trade as "turnover." The more people who paid to see a film, of course, the bigger the gross. Since the bulk of a picture's earnings came from its first run in large cities, it was imperative that as many patrons as possible have access to the picture. With A Star Is Born this would be especially important, since the final production cost had reached the astronomical figure of $5,019,770, making it the second most expensive film ever produced in Hollywood. (Selznick's 1946 production Duel in the Sun had cost $5,225,ooo.) For A Star Is Born just to return its negative cost to Warner Bros., it would have to take in $1o million. This was due to the cost of making prints, advertising, studio overhead, distribution costs, interest on money to finance the film, and the fact that out of every dollar taken in at the box office, seventy cents went to the distributor and thirty cents was kept by the theater. In the days before the government had made the companies give up their lucrative theater chains, this last factor was not a major problem, since all the money eventually ended up in the same corporate pot. But the 1948 "divorce decree" had turned distribution and marketing into two very different (and expensive) ball games. With A Star Is Born Kalmenson and his staff had a five-million-dollar piece of merchandise on their hands which would have to be sold in a manner that would bring in twice that amount. In the entire history of the American film business, only eight films had managed to gross $1o million.*

The marketing problems posed by A Star Is Born could be solved in several ways:

i. A road-show presentation, with reserved seats and two or three showings a day at high prices. This would give the film a prestige handling and make it special in the eyes of the moviegoing public. Later it could be exhibited in one or two first-run theaters with continuous showings at regular prices. The "playoff time" (the time a picture is in first- and second-run release) would be longer, but so would the amount of time needed for the film to recoup its cost.

2. A regular, continuous-performance presentation in a large first-run house
at advanced prices.

3. Showings at several theaters in every major city, also at advanced prices,
so as to reach the widest possible audience in the shortest time.

All of these approaches had been used in the past to market expensive films,
and all had paid off handsomely. For a while Kalmenson toyed with the idea
of road-showing the film with reserved seats and an intermission, much in
the nature of legitimate theater, but the slow return on the investment had
pretty well scuttled that approach. Multiple openings within a city was an
attractive idea, but there were not yet enough theaters equipped for CinemaScope and stereophonic sound, and even if there were, no chain would want
to tie up its theaters for a long run with one film. So it was decided that A
Star Is Born would be shown in one major first-run theater per city (except
New York, with two) on a continuous-performance basis, with no intermission and at advanced prices, which in most cases would be two dollars top,
fifty cents higher than normal. To overcome the difficulty of getting the
necessary turnover, it was decided that each theater would screen the film
five times daily, beginning at eight a.m.(!), with a short subject and a
newsreel bringing the length of each show to three hours and thirty minutes.
This was fine in theory but unfortunate in practice: with that schedule, the
film would screen in the evening at six-thirty (too early) and at ten (too late).
This evidently did not occur to the sales people, who felt that it was necessary
to squeeze in many showings, regardless of the starting time.