A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (47 page)

"The Man That Got Away," however, was another story. The screen at
the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theatre is one of the largest in the city,
and the audio system has been designed to extract and reproduce sound
with superb fidelity and power, no matter the age of the track. For this
excerpt, we were using the only existing four-channel magnetic stereo print
in existence. When the curtain opened and the full width of that early
CinemaScope image filled the huge expanse of screen, and Garland's voice,
backed by the dynamic three-dimensional orchestra, poured out of the
multiple speakers, the effect on the audience was electric. At the conclusion
of the song, the ovation was tremendous-it was almost as if no one there
had heard the piece before. And in a sense they hadn't, for most people
knew it only from old phonograph records, tiny television speakers, or the
muffled, faded prints that were sometimes shown in revival houses, where
the sound systems usually left much unheard.

The impact of the image and sound on the audience that evening was
exactly the same as it had been on me one hot Sunday afternoon in early 1955, when I first saw the film in my local theater, the Bal, in San Leandro,
California. San Leandro was very white, very working-class, very dull-a
forty-minute bus ride from San Francisco, and light years away from the
glamour and excitement of Hollywood and the movies. Except, of course,
at the neighborhood theaters, of which the Bal was one of the newest. Built
right after the war to serve the new housing developments that had sprung
up to provide homes for returning servicemen and their new families, the
Bal was a medium-sized, one-thousand-seat, "stadium"-type theater, meaning it had no balcony but, instead, a raised terrace area of seats in the rear
that served as the loge and the smoking section; it was also very useful for
necking. In the center of the ceiling was a large, ornate chandelier hung
with what was supposed to be crystal but was really just heavy plastic. On
this particular Sunday A Star Is Born was double-billed with the ironically
titled Itow to Be Very, Very Popular, which neither of them were, for even
on this scorching day there were fewer than fifty people in the air-conditioned auditorium. The Bal was equipped with a big new CinemaScope
screen and a decent stereophonic sound system, and I can remember vividly
being open-mouthed in awe at the sound of Garland singing "The Man
That Got Away." Later, at the conclusion of "Born in a Trunk," when she
belted out the final phrase, " ... in Pocatello, Idaho!," the sound was so
intense and thundering that even after the song had died away, the plastic
fragments in the chandelier were still swaying and tinkling, causing dust
to sift down from it onto the audience.

I was sixteen when I first saw A Star Is Born, and it was one of my primal
moviegoing experiences, the kind of epiphanic film that burrowed itself
into my subconscious and reverberated there. Movies were always important to me. I had grown from an indiscriminate kid enjoying Saturday
matinees with my friends into a teenager fascinated with movies as a
phenomenon, curious about their origins and history, their impact on
people, how they were made, and the excitement of how they were advertised and sold to the waiting public. My friend Gary Essert was the only
person I knew of my own age who shared this early fascination. We
maintained a bulletin board in the school library on which we mounted
elaborate displays of new films. To gather material for this we would take
bus trips across the Bay to San Francisco, haunting the various film exchange offices, occasionally conning our way into film inspection rooms,
where we would pick up miscellaneous frames, sometimes pilfering a still
or snatching a trailer. We considered ourselves fairly sophisticated: we read weekly Variety, and for further insight I subscribed to Showman's Trade
Review, an exhibitors' magazine that offered news of films in production,
technical articles, weekly grosses, theater exploitation ideas, ads, news of
premieres, and reviews of films, and generally gave what, to my teenage
mind, was a comprehensive inside view of the movie business.

Every Monday morning at school, we talked about the movies we'd seen
that weekend at the Bal, the Del Mar, the Granada, or the Lorenzo. Several
of my classmates had also seen A Star Is Born that weekend; none of them,
it seemed, had quite the same experience with the film as I did. One girl
admitted to having "cracked up" when Garland began singing to Mason
in the wedding-night sequence, while another fellow was impressed with
the symbolism of the bathrobe being washed out to sea in the scene of
Norman's suicide. Most of them felt that the picture was too long. Our
teacher Mr. Levine felt that there was too much emphasis on Garland, and
I tended to agree; I had been more intrigued by Norman Maine than by
Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester; there seemed to be something missing about
Norman, some aspect of his character that was not explained.

I attributed this to the fact that I had seen the picture in its shortened
form. I knew there was a longer version; reading the trades had kept me
abreast of the controversy over its length, and a fan magazine called Screen
Stories had published a story version of the script that contained many
scenes that were not in the film I saw-and the soundtrack album contained two songs that weren't in the picture. But even if I hadn't known
about this, the picture itself was full of maddening inconsistencies, and
oblique references that indicated to even the most obtuse viewer that
something was missing. A line delivered by Maine's manservant, "He'll sure
be surprised when he finds himself on location in the morning," was
meaningless, as Maine never went on location. Maine's remark to Esther
"Think about a man in a car eating a nutburger" was incomprehensible;
the disappearance of Lola Lavery after her initial scenes also seemed
strange, as did Esther's abrupt rise to stardom.

Almost immediately after my first viewing of the film, I tried to track
down the full-length version. My reasons are best summed up by a speech
written by Moss Hart for Norman Maine: "There are certain pleasures you
get-little jabs of pleasure-when a swordfish takes the hook ... or watching a great dancer-you don't have to know anything about ballet. That
little bell rings inside-that little jolt of pleasure. That's what happened to
me just now." He was describing to Esther the thrill of recognizing great ness; and so it was with me and A Star Is Born. I wanted more of those
"little jabs of pleasure," the nuances of characterization, the hundreds of
directorial details with which Cukor had so delicately imbued the film. I
wanted more of the art direction, so carefully and tastefully understated,
the subtle richness of the photography, which filled the screen with compositions such as I'd never seen in a film before. I wanted to see and hear the
two cut musical numbers. I wanted more of the delicacy and charm of
James Mason and the warmth and vulnerability of Judy Garland; more of
Hart's and Cukor's observations of the Hollywood social scene, the studio
atmosphere, the ambience of Los Angeles and its environs; more of the
elegance and wry sense of humor that permeated the film-all of which,
taken together, made A Star Is Born a visual, aural, and emotional feast.

I contacted the Warner Bros. office in San Francisco, asking where the
full-length version could be seen. They had one print, but it wasn't booked
for any theaters in the near future. I kept calling, kept going to theaters
playing the film in the Bay Area in the hope that it would turn up. But
it never did, and finally the man at the Warners office told me the print
had been sent back to the studio. So I wrote to the studio asking that they
put the full-length version back into the theaters. My letter was never
answered, and after a while the hope of ever seeing all of Cukor's masterpiece faded.

... Until years later. After living in New York during the Ig6os, I moved
to Los Angeles and went to work at the American Film Institute in Beverly
Hills as a projectionist. Around this time, in early 1970, author/critic Gavin
Lambert was preparing a book on the films of George Cukor, and he and
Cukor were looking at all of the director's work. I was running the films
for them. I was completely in awe of Cukor-he was as witty, unsentimental, and forthright as his films, and I hesitated to approach him. But finally,
several days before we were scheduled to screen A Star Is Born, I introduced
myself, told him how much I enjoyed his films, and what a good time I was
having running them all for him. He received all this graciously, though he
seemed somewhat taken aback by my unquestioning enthusiasm ("You
liked them all? Well, that's certainly more than I can say"). I told him of
my admiration for A Star Is Born and then asked if we could show his print,
as I'd always wanted to see the film complete. "I don't have a copy," he
said. "I don't have any of my films. All I have are scripts and stills." I was
shocked. In my naivete, I had assumed that all directors had copies of their
work, an assumption that was proved unfounded in most cases. So I im plored the AFI's film librarian to try to get the 181-minute version from
the studio. Back came the word: all they had was a stereo print that ran
154 minutes. The day of the screening, Lambert showed up alone.
"Where's Mr. Cukor?" I asked. "He's not coming." How strange, I
thought, not to want to see one of your best films.

Two years later, I had left the AFI to join film historian David Shepard
in putting together a permanent film program for the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, and we both agreed that George Cukor should be the
subject of our first retrospective. By this time, I had met Cukor several
times and worked with him on a professional basis in putting together a
three-and-a-half-hour compilation called "The Movies" for the fiftieth
anniversary of the Motion Picture and Television Fund. (An interesting
sidelight: the producer of this marathon undertaking was none other than
my old friend Gary Essert, with whom I had maintained that library
bulletin board so long before.) Sharp, practical, and feisty, Cukor brooked
no nonsense from anyone, nor had he patience with pretentiousness and
airs. He could be, and was, brutally direct with his dissatisfactions, and
downright earthy in his succinct observations about people and situations.
I delighted in the stories he told of his famous (and not-so-famous) friends,
in his wit, his taste, his rare outbursts of temper, and his unfailing good
humor; even under the most trying of circumstances he was almost always
gracious and considerate, if sometimes a bit testy.

Wanting to please him, I came up with an idea for our screening of A
Star Is Born at the County Museum as part of our Cukor retrospective.
Since so many people knew that cuts had been made in the film but no
one seemed exactly certain of what was missing, I would put together a
brochure, using stills and script extracts to show exactly what had been
deleted. Over the years I had managed to find stills of all the missing
sequences; the studio supplied a copy of the script, and the end result was
given out at the screening of the film and quickly became a collector's item.

I was very proud of this brochure, but when I gave Cukor the first copy
off the press, he looked at it cursorily, murmuring almost to himself, "They
don't deserve a good picture," and then, beyond a brief "It's very nice,"
never said another word about what I had hoped would give him some kind
of pleasure. Evidently and unfortunately, it only served to remind him of
one of the major disappointments of his career.

One thing the brochure did do was to generate a renewed interest at
Warner Bros. in finding the missing footage. Rudi Fehr, who was then vice-president in charge of postproduction at the studio, called to tell me
that he had his people go through their records and their storage vaults and
that they had turned up nothing. Evidently the cut sections had been kept
for several months and then destroyed, in what was then the accepted
practice at every major studio. Fortunately, this had all changed with the
advent of the television movie market, and now everything that might
possibly be of use for alternate versions of a film was saved. But A Star Is
Born had been too early a case.

In the interim, another version of A Star Is Born had been produced,
this one starring Barbra Streisand. While dramatically incoherent, it had
been a great box-office success, due primarily to Streisand's star power. If
contemporary moviegoers could enjoy this lackluster remake, I thought
they would really appreciate the Garland-Cukor version-if only it could
be restored to its full CinemaScopic and stereophonic glory. If this could
be done, I was convinced, it would once again prove to be an overwhelming
theatrical experience for everyone who loved good movies and good moviemaking.

Then one day, from out of nowhere, a call came in to my office from
an apprentice film editor at Warner Bros. named Dave Strohmeier, who
had been at the screening of A Star Is Born at the County Museum. The
brochure with the missing sequences had kindled his interest in the film,
so he began a little research of his own. It had evidently paid off, for he
excitedly told me that in the sound department storage vaults, he had come
across the complete three-hour soundtrack to the picture: dialogue, music,
and sound effects, mixed and ready to be put to picture. He had not,
however, been able to turn up any footage, try though he might.

The discovery of the complete soundtrack gave me the idea of screening
the film at the museum using this soundtrack, illustrating what was going
on by showing stills of the missing sections-a sort of aural version of the
brochure. This would necessitate all kinds of expense for special sound
reproducers to play the magnetic soundtracks, copying stills, and running
everything in synchronization; and unfortunately, our budget at the museum wasn't up to it.