A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (45 page)

Jack Warner, too, remained proud of A Star Is Born over the years.
Despite the headaches, the heartaches, and the final fiscal disappointment,
all who knew him or worked with him recall him listing it as one of the best
pictures ever to carry the Warner shield. He stayed head of production at the
studio until 1966 and outlived his feared older brother Harry, who died in
1958, and brother Albert, who followed ten years later. Jack, finally tiring of
the role of mogul and seeing the rules of the game of moviemaking change in
ways that he could not adapt to, sold his shares in the company to Seven Arts
Productions for $32 million; at seventy-five, he officially retired. He made
two unfortunate forays into independent moviemaking: Dirty Little Billy
and the film of the hit Broadway musical 1776, both released in 1972 to
profound public indifference. Warner died in 1978, at the age of eighty-six.
Literally the last tycoon, he presided over the making of more good movies
for a longer period of time than anyone else in Hollywood, and those films are
his legacy.

Moss Hart died of a heart attack in 1961, a year after the opening of
the Arthurian musical Camelot, which he directed. Jack Warner later
personally produced film versions of both this and Hart's 1956 My Fair
Lady. In 1963, the studio released an unsuccessful adaptation of Hart's
posthumously published autobiography, Act One.

As for David 0. Selznick's lawsuit against Warners, it was settled in late
1955 when Selznick turned over his foreign distribution rights to the
original production of A Star Is Born; for an additional payment of $25,000,
he was given the remake rights to A Farewell to Arms. He produced the
film under his Selznick Studio banner in Italy in 1956-57 at a cost of $5
million. Starring Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson, it was filmed in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor and released by loth Century-Fox in 1957; it was
a failure, both critically and financially, and Selznick never made another
movie. He died in 1965 of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three.

James Mason went on to a string of artistic successes that ended only
with his death in 1984 at age seventy-five. He, too, had subsequent experi ences with A Star Is Born: "It continues to be shown all over the world
both in theatres and on television screens," he wrote in his 1981 autobiography. "If there is no pressing appointment to stop me, I will always watch
it when it shows up on my nearest television set. When I was taking a walk
with [my daughter] Portland on the side of our local mountain in Switzerland, we stopped in at a cafe for a cup of tea when the voice of Judy singing
made us turn towards a corner of the room where a small black-and-white
set was lodged. When she stopped singing another voice took over her share
of the dialogue. Both she and I had French-speaking voices attached to us
and Portland and I sat through it spellbound to the end. I have seen it again
a couple of times since ... and the last time we saw the French version
I noted that it ran for not more than an hour and forty minutes. The
uprooted sections were mostly musical.... In most of our lives this film
meant a great deal. The Hollywood Establishment saw little virtue in it.
... It was by no means a commercial success at the time. But now it has
been revived so often that I think we may call it a retarded success. When
the film first came out, the people of Hollywood knew Judy as a person who
had `trouble' written all over her. But now ... people all over the world
... rate her among the two or three great popular singers of our century,
an irreplaceable treasure."

Judy Garland was found dead in a London hotel room on June 21, 1969,
apparently of an "accidental overdose of sleeping pills." Her body was
brought back to New York, where it lay in state at Campbell's Funeral
Parlor as thousands of fans gathered outside to pay their last respects. James
Mason delivered the eulogy, which ended: "The little girl whom I knew
... when she was good, she was not only very, very good, she was the most
sympathetic, the funniest, the sharpest, and the most stimulating woman
I ever knew."

At the time of her death, Warner Bros., which now owned A Star Is Born
outright, announced that the picture, in its full-length version, would open a
limited engagement at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York. The theater
was jammed for the first showing, but it soon became apparent that this was
the short version, and the studio was forced to admit that it had no idea
where, or even what, a "long version" was. Thereafter, A Star Is Born was
relegated to the film cemetery of late-night television and seedy "grind"
houses. An expensive footnote in movie history, it was evidently a picture
that the Hollywood film industry had no further use for nor interest in.
Or so it seemed until the night of July 19, 1983.

~/n July 19, 1983, twenty-nine years after its first Hollywood
premiere, A Star Is Born was given another searchlighted and celebritystudded unveiling. This one took place at the new Beverly Hills headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: there were some
limousines, a red carpet, photographers, and television news cameras-no
premiere would ever be complete without them-but this event was much
less hysterical and spectacular than the original opening. Once again
George Cukor was not in attendance; nor, for obvious reasons, were Jack
Warner and Judy Garland. But her daughters, Liza Minnelli and Lorna
Luft, were there, as was her son, Joey Luft; so was Sid Luft. James Mason
made it to this premiere-along with Gene Allen, Sam Leavitt, Lucy
Marlow, Earl Bellamy, Russ Llewellyn, and eleven hundred of Hollywood's
elite, old and new, including Gregory Peck and Lillian Gish. All of them
crowded into the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theatre to take part in a
unique filmland event: the hometown premiere of a "reconstruction" of the
original version of the film, funded in part by the Academy Foundation and
by Warner Bros., the same studio that had produced, then diminished, the
masterpiece a quarter of a century before.
.,,, 1 1 1 1. 1 1

The intervening years, however, had wrought many changes, not only
in Hollywood the town but also in the film industry. The old moguls of
legend were all gone; the studios over which they had ruled so colorfully
and successfully for so many years were now largely small plums in large
corporate pies. Some had simply ceased to exist; nothing was left of RKO
except its backlog of 744 films and an art deco address plate at 780
Gower Street. The company had been bought by the TV production firm
Desilu, which was later absorbed by Paramount Pictures, which in turn
had been acquired by Gulf and Western Industries. Columbia Pictures
was a subsidiary of Coca-Cola and had given up its production facility on Gower Street in Hollywood to move out to Burbank, where it shared
space at the Burbank Studios with Warner Bros., which had evolved first
into Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, then into Warner Communications, a
unit of Kinney Services, operator of parking lots and mortuaries. United
Artists was now merely an appendage of the once mighty MGM; both
were reduced to being just chips in the high-stakes money games of their
owner, Kirk Kerkorian, who preferred building hotels and gambling casinos to making movies. Real-estate mania had begun in Hollywood in the
late 1950s when loth Century-Fox sold its studio at Western and Sunset
to a developer who demolished it and built a shopping center. Fox's Beverly Hills studio still stood, but the extensive back-lot acreage had been
sold off in the early 196os and the facility was now backdropped by the
spectacular skyscrapers of Century City. The Pico Boulevard frontage of
the studio had been converted into an amazingly detailed replica of 189os
New York City, complete with miniature elevated railway-an elaborate
reminder of the disastrous 1970 film version of the Broadway hit Hello,
Dolly! In 1962, Darryl Zanuck had ousted Spyros Skouras and taken over
the presidency; he, in turn, was deposed in 1971 after the failures of
Hello, Dolly!, Dr. Doolittle, Star!, and Tora! Tora! Tora! had squandered
the $82 million profit of the 1965 blockbuster The Sound of Music. Universal Pictures was now owned by MCA, the former talent agency.
When in the early 1950s the government forced the production companies to sell off their theaters, it freed the studios from the burden of
churning out picture after picture to keep those theaters supplied with
product. Consequently, there was no need to keep expensive stars and
other creative talent under contract. As performers and directors formed
their own companies, their managers and agents became the dominating
force in the business. Adept at making deals, they were not quite so
skilled at making pictures; costs rose as quality fell. The cost of an average
film was $1.5 million in 1960; by 1983 it had risen to $11.8 million,
largely because of the wage demands of the unions. And fewer pictures
were being made. In 1957, 533 features were released by the major distribution companies; by 1983, the figure had dropped to 280. In 1960, 40
million moviegoers paid an average of seventy-five cents weekly to get
into a first-run theater; by 1983, audiences had dwindled to 22 million a
week, but admission prices had quadrupled to an average of three dollars.

With fewer and more expensive films, the game of moviemaking was
played for higher stakes; but when a film caught the public fancy, the winnings could be tremendous. In 1977, Star Wars grossed an astounding
$193 million; in 1982, E. T. topped even that by taking in $209 million.
But for each spectacular success, there were equally sensational failures, the
most celebrated of which, 198o's Heaven's Gate, cost United Artists $44
million and grossed $1.5. This resulted in the parent firm, TransAmerica,
selling the company to MGM, which had its own series of unbelievable
disasters, such as the 1982 Luciano Pavarotti vehicle Yes, Giorgio, which
cost $18 million and took in less than $1 million.

As the old studio owners retired or died, their places were filled by a
succession of agents, lawyers, and accountants, few of whom had the
training, the knack, or-most importantly-the love for making movies.
Audiences were now smaller and much more selective in their choices of
entertainment; few of the new production executives, with their degrees in
business or finance, had any sense of what these audiences wanted and
instead relied on marketing surveys and previous successes in place of
imagination or instinct in making their production decisions.

Television had broken the hold the movies had on family entertainment
habits. The mass audience had largely defected to the smaller and less
expensive pleasures of commercial television, and it was the production of
filmed television programs that now accounted for the bulk of the output
of the Hollywood film industry.

While television was responsible for the decline in theatrical attendance,
paradoxically, it also created a new market and a new interest and respect
for movies, especially films from the so-called "golden age" of the 1930s
and 1940s. An anonymous writer for Time magazine in April 1954 has been
proved amazingly prophetic with the statement that "Hollywood could
stop work tomorrow and still keep the wolf out of the patio with its past
potential." He was writing about theatrical reissues of older films, but his
prediction has come true in ways he could not have foreseen. For with the
release of the studio backlogs to television in the mid-195os, a whole new
generation was given a crash course in the art and pleasures of Hollywood's
past accomplishments. Millions of children grew up on a steady diet of
some of the finest films ever made (and some of the worst!). This penetration of the subconscious by the constant telecasting of old films created a
new breed of film enthusiasts. These new fans, born in the ig4os and 1950s,
were literally reared on, and fell in love with, the film medium and its
achievements, fragmented and disjointed as these seemed to be when seen
between endless commercials on a tiny black-and-white screen. But the films, with their storytelling power, their superb craftsmanship, and their
talented, charming, and glamorous performers, transcended these limitations and gave young viewers a new cultural awareness of and curiosity
about the history and techniques of film that their parents seldom, if ever,
possessed.