A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (49 page)

Fred, who had his hands full with all the television and theatrical production work that was going on at the studio, seemed a little bemused by the
whole project; when I told him that I was looking forward to spending my
summer vacation prowling through the studio vaults, he just smiled, shook
his head, and said, "Well, Ron, whatever turns you on."

Our first stop at the studio was the sound department's storage area
under what was known as the old Technicolor building, to make certain
that Dave Strohmeier had been correct about the complete track being
there. A huge subterranean basement, it stretches under the studio for
nearly an acre; here, lit by bare bulbs and in some areas thick with the fine
dust of the years, are thousands of cans of soundtrack film and magnetic
tape. Fred and I went through the narrow aisles and finally located cans
of film marked "A Star Is Born, Long Version YD-YF Mag Track," which,
translated, meant that this was a monaural dialogue, music, and sound
effects track on magnetic film. (The original stereophonic master tracks had
all been erased in the mid-196os. This was done on orders from Jack Warner himself, who reasoned that old films with stereo tracks were never
in demand in television or for theatrical reissue. All those expensive reels
of magnetic tape were erased and reused. The sonic splendors of those early
Warners stereo tracks were obliterated, and only the single-channel mixes
were saved.) There were twenty-three separate cans, and the only way to
find out whether this was what we were looking for was to play back one
of the reels to see if it had the missing material on it. Reel 3A was pulled.
If all was well, it should have Esther saying goodbye to the band-and by
God, it did! Things were off to an auspicious start. Finding the soundtrack
was half the battle; now all we had to do was find the picture to match it.
To try to do this, Fred turned me over to Don Adler, who had been working
in the production film department for close to thirty years, cataloguing
every single piece of photographic film from camera to release print, from
sound stage to laboratory. He was a large, quiet man, who whisked around
the studio in an electrically motorized cart, appearing and disappearing
with equal parts of speed and silence. I asked him what would have happened to the cans shipped back to the studio from Technicolor with the
cut negative in them. "In those days, we'd keep it for six months, then junk
it." What about the cut sections from the various exchanges around the
country? "Same thing. If it was sent back to us, we'd hold on to it for a
while, then junk it." Was it possible that some of it might not have been
junked? "Possible, but not likely."

Our first step was to go to the negative storage vault to make sure that
the Eastmancolor printing negative was trimmed as the records indicated.
If it had been, reels 3A and 3B should have been in one can marked 3AB.
And so it was. This was the only 35mm printing material on the picture;
and since it was trimmed, it seemed that the material had indeed been
junked. According to Don's inventory, however, there were some miscellaneous cans of A Star Is Born material in one of his storage areas. Back to
the old Technicolor building and into another locked and dank area of the
basement. More rows and rows of rusty cans of film, stacked darkly on metal
shelves, by decade: April in Pans; Stop, You're Killing Me; Storm Warning;
Young at Heart ... and, finally, A Star Is Born. I looked at those rusty cans
in the light of Don's flashlight and realized that I had been thinking of the
film in terms of images on a screen and sounds, all of which made it live
for me; but to most of the people here in the studio, this must be what the
film was: rusty cans with frayed adhesive labels, dead and buried.

There were about twenty cans for A Star Is Born, none of which bore the appropriate Technicolor numbers to indicate that they might be what
we were looking for. Mostly, they were trailer negatives, foreign-language
titles, and background negatives. But there were also nine cans marked
"YCM Printing Masters," which meant that each primary color record had
been converted into a black-and-white positive image, which could thereupon be recopied on color film to form a duplicate color negative. In those
days it was standard practice to make these separation masters, so that as
many duplicate color negatives as needed could be struck for printing
purposes. This was a promising lead. Unfortunately, the entire picture had
not been done; evidently, work was halted when it became obvious that the
picture was going to be cut further. None of the reel numbers on the cans
matched up with the reels that had been trimmed. Still, here was my
chance to prove or disprove my theory about the possibility of mismarked
cans.

Don and I carried the nine cans into a small office that had a set of
rewinds, and I opened the containers one by one. The film was still in the
black waxed bags in which it had originally been wrapped: apparently, these
cans hadn't been opened in close to thirty years. I wound through the film,
squinting at the 35mm images, looking for something that was familiar to
me from the stills of the missing sequences. Can 7A had the first love scene
between Norman and Esther, immediately after her preview triumph. It
took place on the terrace of an exclusive Hollywood nightclub, and in the
cut version it was supposed to dissolve into a scene in Oliver Niles's office,
when they announce to him that they're going to be married. But it didn't.
Instead, I found I was staring at the scene on the recording stage with
Esther singing "Here's What I'm Here For," followed by the proposal and
live microphone pickup.

I must have let out some sort of loud yelp, because Don came running
back into the office to see if anything had happened to me. I was literally
jumping up and down with excitement: the entire scene was there on all
three reels of black-and-white images (one for each primary color), including the fade and dissolve at the beginning and end. All that had to be done
was to copy it, print it, match it up with the track, and drop it back in where
it had been originally. If this one sequence was there, could the others be
far off?

After Don had helped me carry in the twenty other cans of film, he
left me alone, reeling through negative can after negative can, hoping
that lightning would strike twice. Alas, it didn't. For the next four days I examined every single rack and every single label on every single can of
film in that basement storage area, looking for anything that might conceivably contain something to do with A Star Is Born. But there was
nothing else.

"Where next?" I asked Don.

"Try the stock footage library. I think they have a lot of leftover material
from the film."

Every studio has one of these libraries. After a picture is put together,
an editor goes through all the unused film and picks out material that might
be useful at some future time in another film: crowd scenes, exterior shots,
buses, cars, houses, nonspecific bits that can be integrated into another film
to save money.

The Warners stock footage library was under the iron rule of Evelyn
Lane, a large, imposing woman who stands for no nonsense from anyone.
Her long days are spent in a cramped bungalow office, stacked with miscellaneous cans of film, file cabinets, rewinds, and editing tables; she answers
telephones, fields requests, demands, and complaints, and deals with interlopers like myself while trying to get on with the business at hand: locating
footage needed for theatrical and television productions and keeping track
of the thousands of cans and millions of feet of film that flow in and out
of her tiny office.

"A Star Is Born? Down there in the bottom drawer," she pointed, while
cradling a telephone on her shoulder and typing up a requisition at the same
time. She hung up and swung around in her chair to explain that all of the
Warners features are listed by title, with individual index cards for each
piece of stock footage from that particular film. She pulled out the bottom
drawer, and there, neatly typed on five-by-seven file cards, were descriptions
of all the unused negative footage from the film with a sample frame on
each card. It was all broken down into categories-Theaters, Premieres,
Apartment Houses, Los Angeles Exteriors, Automobile Traffic, Drive-ins,
Life Rafts, Studio Production, Interior Sound Stages-with one-line descriptions of what is on the film.

I pulled out the card marked "Bus" and read: "Day. Bus with lettering
GLENN WILLIAMS ORCHESTRA On side pulls away from motel." I began to
get excited again-this was Esther's goodbye to the band. I pulled out the
card marked "Drive-in": "Dusk. Robert's Drive-in Restaurant on Sunset
Blvd. Watch for Judy Garland"; then "Hotel": "Day. Old three-story
house turned into Hotel Lancaster. Watch out for James Mason as he runs up and enters hotel." Card after card listed bits and pieces of missing
sequences. There were close to two hundred entries on A Star Is Born, some
of which had been printed up for various uses.

Evelyn took me over to the vault where this printed material was stored,
and I began going through the cans, finding dozens of takes and angles on
these scenes, mostly long and medium shots, carefully edited so that the
principals were not visible. This was particularly frustrating in the scenes
around the fictional Hotel Lancaster, which was the location of Norman
and Esther's reunion on the roof. There would be an establishing shot, and
just as Judy Garland or James Mason would appear, the film would end.
Hoping there might be more of this on the negative material itself, I asked
Evelyn to take me over to the storage vault: long, narrow bunkers filled with
rank upon rank of film cans-' 50 of them from A Star Is Born. Each can
had several tightly wound rolls of negative material with a paper label
describing the contents.

The first cans I opened corresponded with the inventory cards; there was
Norman Maine on location, bobbing up and down in a life raft; there was his
limousine pulling away from his home in the early morning hours, as he
sleeps off his hangover in the backseat; there was Judy Garland inadvertently
left in as a carhop at the drive-in, serving a customer and reeling off a list of
hamburgers to a man in a convertible. The contents of can number go,
however, were not all listed on Evelyn's inventory. The paper label read very
plainly, "Judy Garland sings `Lose That Long Face.' " Examining other
cans, I discovered that Folmar Blangsted, the original editor, had saved every
single alternate take for all the musical numbers in the film, including the
puppet commercial! I didn't want to get my hopes up, but there seemed a
good chance that all of the missing dramatic footage might be there, too, in
alternate takes. For the next week, I went through the 150 cans, examining
every roll; but in spite of the musical numbers being there, and the miscellaneous shots from the exterior sequences, the all-important close-ups and
medium shots of the two leads playing out the missing dramatic scenes were
nowhere to be found. It was doubly frustrating because so much was there.

For the next month I scoured every vault in the place, trying Evelyn's
patience with my repeated requests of "Are you sure there's no place else
to look?" She gave me a set of keys to the double-decker storage vaults
behind the old Technicolor building, under which I had found the sound
stage proposal sequence. There were forty-eight of these vaults, narrow
concrete rooms with row after row of film cans carefully held in metal slots. Most were neatly ordered, but some were in disarray, and in this disarray
I discovered some rarities. Here were a negative and print for the 1932
version of The Animal Kingdom, which Warners had purchased from
RKO in the mid-i94os for remake purposes. The Animal Kingdom was
considered a "lost" film, since no copies were known to exist; so this was
a major find. So was a pristine 35mm print of RKO's 1934 Of Human
Bondage starring Bette Davis and Leslie Howard, later remade by Warners.
In the same vault were the original black-and-white camera separation
negatives for the 1937 Technicolor A Star Is Born; this, too, was an
important discovery. If I had not been so anxious to find the missing
sequences from the remake, I would have been extremely excited.

I kept on searching. I was even allowed in the sanctum sanctorum, Jack
Warner's own personal vault, which was chock full of all sorts of miscellaneous footage, including costume and photographic tests for A Star Is Born,
but no missing footage. How absolutely crazy, I thought to myself, that he
would hold on to that but not to the deletions! Having exhausted every
possibility in these stock vaults, my last hopes were the storage areas for the
library prints themselves, the copies that are kept for use by the studio.
Some of these are stored in individual i,ooo-foot cans; some are kept in
"shipper" cans, which are 2,ooo-feet reels in metal containers, ready to be
sent to studio projection rooms, schools, museums, or other studios for
single viewings. Several of these vaults were no longer used for storing film
but had been given over to housing departmental records of one sort or
another: stacks upon stacks of cardboard boxes, which at this point, to my
fevered mind, might well contain film.

Over a period of days, I worked my way through all these storage vaults,
finding nothing, until finally only one more vault remained. By this time
I was pretty much resigned that there was nothing more to be discovered,
and I was just going through the motions. Vault 120 looked no different
than all the others before it, except that in the very back were two tall
cardboard boxes of the type that film cans are shipped in. I climbed over
crates, working my way toward the back, looking at the labels on everything, opening what wasn't labeled, still finding nothing, until I reached
the air duct grating in the very rear. There were the two cardboard boxes,
about three feet high, sealed, with no labels other than the Technicolor
emblem. I opened the first one and looked at the cans: The Bounty Hunter,
a Randolph Scott western from 1954. I had a bit of trouble with the next
box; it was sealed tightly with masking tape, and my efforts to peel it off weren't entirely successful. From the look of it, it had never been opened.
But I finally managed to peel off the tape and break open the sealed top:
there was a silver can inside with the distinctive Technicolor blue label, and
on the label were the words "A Star Is Born RI2A." A yellow shipping
receipt bore the date October 14, 1954. I opened the top can, and inside
were the distinctive black waxed bags in which film was shipped, still
sealed-they had never been opened. I began pulling those cans out furiously, looking for the two reels, 3A and 3B, which would tell me if this was
a complete, uncut, original print. By the time I got down to the bottom
of the box, I was shaking so much that I dropped my flashlight and couldn't
read the numbers on the top; there was 4B, then 4A, and the next can was
it-I looked and read "Reel 3AB." It was the cut version!