A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (5 page)

Lacking that kind of patience, a weary tourist, you decide to have
something to eat before going back to your motel. Clutching your copy of
Life, you walk a half-block down Vine Street to the World Famous Hollywood Brown Derby, where, surrounded by caricatures of more of Hollywood's famous, you order a Cobb salad and contemplate excitedly what
you've just seen. Opening your copy of Life, you read the article on Garland and the movie, devouring the behind-the-scenes gossip. You're surprised at
the accounts of her temper tantrums and at the time, money, and effort
that it took to make the picture. Reading all this over your dessert, you
might even wonder idly just how a movie like A Star Is Born came to be
made in the first place.

oday there is only one person who remembers how this version
of A Star Is Born got started, and it isn't Jack Warner. He, as they say, is
no longer with us; but even as far back as 1955, he couldn't, under oath
(in a deposition taken in a suit against Warners by David 0. Selznick over
his rights to the 1937 version of A Star Is Born), recall how the picture had
come about:

Q: Mr. Warner, can you tell us ... the first time you ever discussed [this
movie]?

A: Oh, it has been too long ago to remember.... I don't know.

At the same hearing, his older brother Harry (the president of the company), couldn't remember either:

Q: When did you first hear that Warner Bros.... was to produce ... A
Star Is Born?

A: After it was started ... I only knew about it when the cost came to my
attention.

No, the one person who remembers exactly how the film came about is its
producer, Michael Sidney Luft: "We were rehearsing for Judy's Palace
Theater opening [in 1951]. We had twelve dancing boys and were in a
dance studio on La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard in L.A. and I picked
up the paper one day and I read that Ed Alperson had the remake rights
to A Star Is Born ... and I just parked that in my head."

The Judy he refers to was Judy Garland, legendary ex-MGM musical
star who had been fired by that studio two years earlier after almost two
decades of stardom, because of her "unreliability." She and Luft had met shortly thereafter in New York City, around the time her last MGM film,
Summer Stock, had been released. By then she had survived a suicide
attempt, a subsequent nervous breakdown, and a divorce from her second
husband, director Vincente Minnelli. Luft's colorful career had included
stints as a test pilot, an entrepreneur, and a B-picture producer. He was a
divorced (from actress Lynn Bari) man-about-town who loved horse-racing.
Garland, at that point in her life, was a proven winner who'd been put out
to pasture prematurely. So Luft picked up where MGM had left off and,
under the sponsorship of Abe Lastfogel of the William Morris Agency,
shepherded her though a series of concerts in England, beginning at the
London Palladium. The success of these led to an offer for her to bring
vaudeville back to New York by opening her show at the legendary RKO
Palace Theatre on Broadway, which had abandoned live performances
almost twenty years earlier. It was in preparation for this that rehearsals
were being held in the dance studio with the twelve dancing boys. Luft
remembers: "We were sort of noodling the show together over a two-week
period, and after rehearsal one night I said, 'Judy, I've got a great idea,
perfect for you' . . . and I told her about A Star Is Born and she smiled
and I said, 'What's the big smile?' And she said, 'I've done it on the Lux
Radio Theatre, and after I did it I went to L.B. [Mayer] and told him I
wanted to do it and he thought it was a good idea, so he called Nick
Schenck [the head of MGM in New York] ... but Schenck said no, we
won't take a sad and tragic story like that and do it as a musical for our
precious Judy'-that's what she told me. We both decided it was a good
idea ... [but] there was nothing I could do about it then because I was
concentrating on getting this whole troupe to New York and opening at
the Palace."

Garland opened her show on Broadway on October i6, 195I, to tremendous critical and public acclaim. Her career seemed to be back in high gear.
"After we opened," Luft recalls, "maybe a week or two after, I called Abe
Lastfogel and told him what my notion was about A Star Is Born and for
him to see if he could possibly call Alperson and see if the property was
for sale. Two, three days later, I get a call back from him; he says that
Alperson is not interested in selling the property at any price, nor is he
interested in Judy Garland doing it ... he has other ideas, and that was
it."

Alperson's professed disinterest in Garland didn't deter Luft at all. "A
couple of days later," Luft relates, "I called Johnny Beck, an agent at the William Morris office. I said, 'John, do me a favor. See if you can set up
a meeting with Eddie Alperson-I'm flying in and I want to talk to him.'
He called me back in a couple of days, says, 'Eddie Alperson is coming in
on such-and-such a day.' I said, 'I'll be there.' While we're in the meeting,
it dawned on me what was bothering Alperson: he didn't want anything
to do with the Morris office. [After the meeting] I walked out with him
and I said, 'Eddie, I'm going back to New York; Judy's not feeling well.
Are you coming with me?' He said, 'I'll go home and pack.'"

Edward L. Alperson was a thirty-two-year veteran of the movie business,
an independent B-picture producer who by 1951 was releasing his lowbudget product through zoth Century-Fox. Before that he had been president of Grand National Pictures, a 1930s purveyor of B pictures; chairman
of the board of Cinecolor, a cheap two-color process; and president of the
bizarrely named Pawnee Bill Productions and of Film Classics, a firm
specializing in reissuing older films. It was his connection with Film Classics that had led him to buy the rights to the original 1937 A Star Is Born
when Selznick International, the company that had produced it, disposed
of its assets upon going out of business in the early 1940s.

Alperson and Luft flew to New York in mid-November 1951; and over
the next few weeks, as he saw the effect Garland was having on audiences
and the extent of the publicity she was generating, Alperson's intractability
regarding casting her in A Star Is Born softened to the extent that he, Luft,
and Garland formed a corporation called Transcona, after a town in
Manitoba where Luft used to fly. Transcona was designed as a holding
corporation, its assets being the rights to A Star Is Born: Alperson held 20
percent of the corporation; Garland as star and Luft as producer held 75
percent; and the remaining 5 percent went to Luft's millionaire friend and
racing partner, Ted Law.

All was seemingly neat and orderly-but there was one tiny flaw that no
one involved noticed: Alperson didn't own all the rights to A Star Is Born.
He had the story and remake rights, true; but exhibition rights to the
original film in some thirteen foreign countries had been reaquired by the
picture's original producer, David 0. Selznick, who fully intended to exploit them, which meant that anyone who made a new version of the story
could not show it worldwide without violating Selznick's copyright. It was,
at the moment, a minor legal snag which neither Luft nor Alperson noticed; their main concern was in shopping the property and Garland
around.

Garland, recovered from her much-publicized suicide attempt, had filled
the Palace Theatre twice daily for almost four months; she had been
covered, profiled, photographed, and recorded so often that for a while in
the winter and spring of 1951-52, it seemed as if Judy Garland was everywhere, except television. Her "comeback" was almost complete; all it
lacked was a movie. But even with all the press attention, the men in charge
of the studios were still leery of her. Singing a few songs on stage was one
thing; building a big musical picture around someone with a proven record
of "unreliability" was quite another, expensive matter. This was the prevailing attitude that Luft and Alperson faced-until April 21, 1952. That was
the night when Garland brought her show to the Philharmonic Auditorium
in downtown Los Angeles and was "welcomed home" with an extravagant
celebrity turnout and a spectacular party afterwards at Romanoff's restaurant. The warmth generated by all this melted the solid wall of resistance
that Transcona had encountered, and cautious feelers were extended to
Luft about Garland doing a picture.

But Luft knew what he wanted: Warner Bros. "They'd just divorced
themselves from their theaters and they had all this money in the bank to
finance independent production. [Under the terms of the U.S. government
antitrust settlement against the major studios, Warner Bros. sold its three
hundred theaters to the Stanley Company for $6,ooo,ooo in December
1952] And just before we had opened at the Palace in New York, I saw
Jack Warner at a party. I watched him pull up a chair and sit next to Judy
and talk with her at length. I knew that Warner was interested in Judy.
Eddie [Alperson] set up the meetings ..."

Jack Warner, born in London, Ontario, in 1882, was the youngest and
most flamboyant of the four brothers who, in 1923, had founded the
company that bore their name. A self-described "lighthearted man," he
had been a legendary Hollywood mogul since 1926, when he and his
brothers had given the world Vitaphone and the first commercially successful talking pictures, thereby transforming their tiny company into one of
the major production forces in Hollywood. Jack's older brother Harry was
president of the company; his brother Albert was treasurer; and Jack was
vice-president in charge of production at the firm's Burbank, California,
studio. (Sam Warner had died in 1926.) A frustrated performer, he had
started out in show business as a boy soprano under the stage name Leon
Zuardo, singing in nickelodeons to clear the house between shows. Like
many other of the film pioneers, Warner didn't have much of a formal education; he was what is now called "street smart"-shrewd, manipulative, with a collection of the worst jokes in the world, which he would tell
anywhere and everywhere, usually making everyone cringe. He was a highstakes gambler at any casino from Monte Carlo to Reno, and he ruled his
suzerainty in Burbank just as loudly and as expansively as he gambled. He
was a practical, thrifty (some would say cheap) man who went around the
studio turning out lights to save on electric bills. (His brother Harry, with
whom he maintained a strained relationship, was equally thrifty: he would
walk around the studio streets picking up nails for reuse-an idiosyncrasy
carried over from his early training as a cobbler.) Jack insisted on a full day's
work for his money and on absolute loyalty to the company. One classic
story that illustrated his attitude is the "happy gateman" episode. On one
of his frequent forays around the studio to see that everyone was at work
and no time being wasted, he heard a new gateman singing operatic arias
in a quite respectable voice. Talking to the man, he learned that he was
a serious student of voice, practicing daily. "Which would you rather be,"
Warner inquired, "a singer or our gateman?" "Oh, a singer, of course," the
man assured Warner, thinking this was his big break. "You're fired,"
replied Warner and walked away.

As vice-president in charge of production, he was responsible for, in his
own words, "engaging the people who produce the pictures: the writers,
directors, actors, the technical branches of our studios. This is all done
through department heads. Also, the buying of the stories, assigning writers, directors, producers ... in many cases I [decide] the principal players,
the stars, and occasionally the supporting players, the shooting of the
pictures and things like that ... as far as deciding what pictures should be
produced.... I talk it over in general with producers and other executives.
... On some pictures I have final say ... [but] sometimes my final say is
voted down . . . I think I should add that. I don't want [to give] the
impression I do everything because I don't." One of his ex-executives, Hal
Wallis, who started his producing career with Warner, characterized him
as "a dynamo. Nervous, restless, he couldn't sit still a minute. He was like
a jumping bean, endlessly interested in everything that was going on.
... Jack was a great administrator ... and a very skillful man in his dealings
with the stars ... he understood them, knew how to feed their egos. [He]
was a showman who played his instincts. I never saw him read a script, let
alone a book. Just from glancing at a title or riffling through a few pages,
he could sense whether [something] would interest millions of people all over the world. He was usually right." Playing by his instincts had kept
Warner Bros. from losing money since 1933. In the fiscal year 1951-52 the
company had a profit of $9.4 million-down from the postwar high of $22
million in 1947, but that was the year that 9o million Americans went to
the movies twice a week. In 1951, 54 million went once a week; the rest
of the time they stayed home and watched their new television sets. In
1946, there had only been 8,ooo sets in the United States; by late 1952,
that number had multiplied astoundingly to 15.5 million! Life magazine,
in an extensive article on the movie industry in its August 13, 1951, issue,
related a young married moviegoer's explanation of how the moviegoing
decline came about: "There was a picture my wife and I wanted to see
... we began to add up [how much it would cost us]. Two tickets at 6o¢
each-that's not so bad. But then there was the babysitter. Three hours
at 500 an hour plus car fare is $1.70. Parking the car-that would be
another 50¢. Figuring gas and oil would be another 5o¢. Add a Coke or
something afterward, say another 25g. That's over $4.00. So we stayed
home."