A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (43 page)

-Scene omitted of Esther drying tears and singing "Lose That Long
Face" again.

The announcement by Warner to Luft and Garland that the picture was
going to be cut evidently ruptured their relationship irreparably. Luft
bitterly blames both Warner and Cukor for the cuts: "The only person who
can cut a picture is the director. George Cukor made those cuts. George
denies it, but ... he had to cut it to get his money. Think about it-Jack
Warner, a cigar-smoking idiot, sitting up there in that studio saying `Cut
the goddamn movie' because the Paramount theater chain says we're losing
a fortune! The only person who could cut is Cukor, or myself, or maybe
Moss Hart could cut it, but Jack Warner couldn't cut it. Moss thought it
was too long; I never did. We wanted an intermission-with that, it never
would have been too long. They said, `With an intermission we're gonna
lose more money,' and they were absolutely wrong. I wouldn't cut it; I
walked away. Judy and I, we wouldn't touch it. I tell you it was George who
cut it. He said, 'Remove "Lose That Long Face" '-it was done on the
telephone and in his presence-one meeting in the projection room with
Blangsted and the cuts were made.... [Judy and I] were heartbroken."
Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli, who was eight years old at the time,
recalls her mother coming home after hearing the news that cuts were
being made, throwing herself on the bed, and sobbing, "They just don't
care ... they just don't care."

No matter what Luft thinks, it would have been impossible for Cukor
to cut the film, as he had been out of the country since early September.
It is true, however, that he thought that "Born in a Trunk," the proposal
sequence on the sound stage, and "Lose That Long Face" could all be
removed without materially damaging the story. But what angered and hurt
Cukor was, as he later related, "the way they just hacked into it. It was very
painful.... Some terribly funny and touching scenes [were taken out] that were crucial. If they thought it was too long there were other ways of
shortening it besides chopping and hacking out vital bits. Had we been
allowed, Moss Hart and I could have sweated out twenty minutes which
would have been imperceptible to the audience. That's something which
I can't understand. Producers spend millions of dollars to do pictures and
then suddenly, right out of the blue, they say, 'Let's chop this out, then
that....' It's very painful, all this.... It's one of the great sorrows of my
career, the way the picture was cut by the studio. Judy Garland and I felt
like the English queen who had 'Calais' engraved on her heart. Bloody
Mary, wasn't it? Neither of us could ever bear to see the final version."

Just exactly why the picture was cut as it was is very simple when you
consider that both Harry and Jack Warner wanted the picture shortened
as quickly and as economically as possible. This meant no meticulous
recutting, no rerecording, no making of new prints. Instead, the picture was
to be trimmed by lifting out whole reels, or portions thereof. For studio
editorial purposes, the length of a 35mm reel is considered to be one
thousand feet, lasting ten minutes, give or take a few minutes, depending
on the amount of footage. For exhibition, two of these reels are combined
to form a two-thousand-foot projection reel. Each of these projection reels
is made up of an A section and a B section. To make the cuts in A Star
Is Born as indicated by the Richardson memo, Blangsted was obliged to
shorten both reels 3A and 3B and combined them to form a new reel known
as 3AB. Cuts were also made in reels 4A, 5A, 6B, 9A, and 9B. This was
done in utmost secrecy, as Jack Warner was still not entirely convinced that
the picture would work with the cuts. Blangsted worked from a finished
print, completing all deletions and changes within a week, and after this
new version was screened for Warner, he wrote to Kalmenson, "We have
eliminated 27 minutes ... [and I] am certain we have lost none of the values
... in fact we have gained a lot by sharpening the story line and eliminating
any `sore fanny' restlessness. We are sneaking this `shorter version' at the
Pantages tomorrow night [Sunday]."

This new version was shown, unannounced, at the six o'clock evening
screening. Columnist Joe Schoenfeld of Variety, who had been alerted,
showed up to see what was happening with the film and recounted later
in Variety:

Warners' tested its cut version of A Star Is Born at the Pantages the other
night. Jack Warner, Steve Trilling [his assistant] and other execs were in the lobby talking it over afterwards. Out of the auditorium came an angry youth
of around 1q. Seeing J.W., who looks like an exec, the young man came over
and asked, "Are you the manager?" J.W. answered, "Yes." The youth then
demanded his money back. "This picture has been cut," he charged, "and
I didn't get my money's worth." "What makes you think the picture's been
cut?" asked Warner. "Because I've seen it before" answered the kid and
again demanded his money. Warner, knowing that the uncut version was
going on again for the next and last showing, then asked the kid to describe
exactly what scenes had been omitted. The kid reeled them off as though
he had lived most of his life in a cutting room. After he had described the
trimming in detail, Warner looked him straight in the eye and said, "You
must have been dreaming! But I'll tell you what I'll do. You go back in there
and see the next showing, and when it's over, if you tell me again that the
picture has been cut, I'll give you your money back." 31/2 hours later, the
house manager, on instructions from Warner, was waiting for the 19-year-old
as he came out of the theatre. His eyes looked as though they had been
looking at film for 1o hours. The manager told the kid he was the assistant
manager, and asked whether he still thought the film had been cut. The kid
never answered. Just shook his head, dazed and completely perplexed.

The trimming that had so outraged this young man was damaging to the
film, as it eliminated scenes that added considerably to the understanding
of the motivations and development of the two central characters. The
deletion of this expository material diminishes the growing emotional involvement of Norman and Esther and mutes the final tragedy of the story.
The two songs removed from the second half had been designed to complement and enhance the dramatic structure of the story; cutting them not
only lessened the impact of certain scenes but also seriously damaged Moss
Hart's carefully structured continuity, which, in the original, maintained a
careful balance between the musical and the dramatic. Warner, however,
was evidently at the point where he was sick of the whole project and just
wanted to put it behind him.

After seeing how the picture went over with an audience (who, after all,
did not know what was missing unless they'd seen it before), Warner was
considerably heartened and gave orders that the short version should be
supplied for all future engagements; the picture would continue to play in
the full-length version where it had already opened. The fact that the film
had been shortened was made public by Warners in a news release dated
October 27, with the announcement that the new version would be for subsequent runs only, and primarily for second-run and neighborhood
houses, which remained resistant to films over two hours in length. But
according to one irate patron in a letter to the editor of Variety:

The Victoria, here in New York, is now showing the abbreviated version
... without ... however ... a price cut ... still at a fancy $2.00 top.
... This action is highly objectionable ... nor can it be excused on artistic
grounds. I would defy any of the critics who complained of the ... length
to suggest that any improvement has been made in the film's quality by the
trimming. On the contrary, the film suffers noticeably by the fadeouts where
it is obvious a musical number has been dropped, to say nothing of dialogue
which is now meaningless because it refers to earlier scenes which have been
indiscriminately scissored. It seems to this writer that the New York showcase for such a long-awaited attraction has acted most unwisely in the matter
and with contemptuous disregard of the public interest.

As the news of the editing done on the picture spread, the studio was
suddenly flooded with dozens of letters from moviegoers protesting the
action. An angry patron from the Bronx took Warner to task, saying:

I saw A Star Is Born twice ... [it is] a finely wrought, lovingly created moving
piece of entertainment.... The length was inconsequential to the enjoyment
of the film. Now I read that there is a different A Star Is Born being shown,
a picture which has lost forty [sic] minutes of priceless footage.... Frankly,
Mr. Warner, a long time has passed since a really good picture has come from
the Warner lot, and when one finally did come along it was only to be slashed
to conform to the mold. A very sad thing has occurred [over] which 1, as an
ordinary moviegoer, have no control, and I wish to know what prompted you
and your associates to do this terrible thing....

And it was not just fans who were irate. A letter from a theater manager
in Maine complains: "What they have done to this film is inexcusable. The
studio should certainly back down to the extent of making both versions
available to [exhibitors] and let us select which version we will show. We
played the picture last week and received many letters and calls from
customers stating that they would not pay advance prices to see a picture
with more than thirty minutes cut out of it. Consequently we lost money
on the picture." Controversy spread as far as the pages of The New York
Times, where critic Bosley Crowther, who had high praise for the original version, declared himself to be "in a grave dilemma" in considering A Star
Is Born for his ten best list of 1954• He deplored the trimming of the film
and called for reviewers to "show disfavor for such post-release tampering."

The picture did extremely good business everywhere for its first month
of release; then, about the middle of November, as other, newer films were
released for the holiday season, attendance at A Star Is Born began to fall
off sharply. Everyone in the sales and distribution departments of Warners
had expected the picture to maintain its first run for at least two months
before business slackened, so there was immediate surprise and concern, for
the film had not yet recouped the bulk of its negative cost, let alone shown
signs of moving into the profit area. By late December, it was obvious that
the film was not going to be the financial bonanza that Warner and his
people thought it would. Irv Kupcinet, in his column in the Chicago
Sun-Times, remarked that "Hollywood has been quick to label Judy Garland's [film] a box office flop. 'Taint quite so. Some 300,000 persons have
laid it on the line to see the movie at the Chicago Theatre, which means
that the picture will show a tidy but not huge profit locally. The same is
true all around the country. What is true is that Star, after one of the
biggest buildups in Hollywood history, hasn't been the tremendous hit
expected."

The picture was generally released in the shorter version in mid-January
1955. The existing full-length prints were shortened at the various Warner
Bros. film offices around the country, as per detailed instructions from the
studio's editorial department in Burbank. The cut material was shipped
back to the studio, and the long version, for all practical purposes, ceased
to exist. Even the studio print was cut to conform to this new length. Over
the next months this version of A Star Is Born did fair business; as it
wended its way down the theatrical release ladder, the sales department
added another $2 million to the picture's gross, bringing its total to just over
$4.3 million for the first six months of its release.

In February, however, the announcement of the nominations for the
1954 Academy Awards gave A Star Is Born a temporary new lease on
box-office life. Both Garland and Mason were nominated for their performances, and the film also was cited for art direction, song ("The Man That
Got Away"), scoring, and costume design. The picture stood to gain a great
deal of income depending on how many awards it received and in what
categories. If Garland and Mason both won, that could add another $2
million or more to the gross. Garland alone would probably be worth a little over a million. Awards in the subsidiary categories could bring in an additional quarter- to half-million dollars. So the nominations and the awards
were a valuable marketing tool. Indications were all in favor of Garland
winning. The competition was strong (Dorothy Dandridge for Carmen
Jones, Audrey Hepburn for Sabrina, Grace Kelly for The Country Girl, and
Jane Wyman for Magnificent Obsession), but she was the sentimental
favorite. When Look gave her its award for best female performance of the
year, it seemed a harbinger of things to come.

Cukor, however, was nowhere in sight on the Academy's list of nominees. In fact, all of Cukor's extensive efforts on this film were obscured by
the flood of publicity on Garland: his direction was praised, but not extensively; most remarks concerned the performances he had gotten from the
two leads. At the time of the premiere, he was off in India scouting
locations, and there had been almost no acknowledgment of him at all.
Gene Allen, who was with him at the time, recalls, "He got a wire from
his aunt-I think her name was Maude-and she said, `George, don't work
hard. Don't kill yourself for these people. Do you [know] that nobody
except Lucille Ball mentioned your name at the premiere?' He laughedhe thought that was wonderful."

A Star Is Born had played the bulk of its bookings by the time the
nominations were announced, so it needed all the help it could get. Musicals were seldom deemed worthy of awards except in music, design, costumes, photography, and other technical areas. Performances, direction,
and script were seldom given serious consideration, though An American
in Paris had won in 1951.