A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (51 page)

Lize was working with a very creative animation cameraman named Ken
Rudolph, and there was almost nothing we could devise that he couldn't
figure out a way to accomplish. Of course, we had to give him the material
to work with; and on one crucial sequence, there was absolutely nothing.
Norman has returned from location and is making frantic efforts to locate Esther. He even goes to the Oleander Arms Motel (which name he could
not remember) and harangues the landlady, who has no idea where Esther
has moved. This was important because it showed Norman's concern for
Esther, his chagrin and frustration over his inability to locate her, and made
clear to the audience that he was not just on the make. It also served as
a bridge into the next scene, where he is lying on his sofa talking with Lola
Lavery when he hears Esther's voice-over for the Trinidad Coconut Oil
Shampoo commercial. All we had here was one stock footage shot of
Norman driving away from the curb at the Oleander Arms after berating
the landlady for naming her place something stupid like "Oleander Arms."
There were no shots of the landlady, no stills of the Oleander Arms, no shot
of the signboard that prompts his furious remark. We tried to find Kathryn
Card, the actress who played the landlady, in the hope that she might have
a still of the scene, but she had died several years before, with no known
survivors.

We were stymied. My one last hope was George Cukor. He had, I knew,
a complete set of stills from the film, and he had indicated through Gene
that we could use them if necessary. I hadn't wanted to bother him unless
we were unable to find or create what we needed; moreover, he was not
feeling well. But I put in a call to him anyway, and he told me to come
up to his home immediately and go through his files and take what we
needed.

George lived in a walled villa in the hills several blocks above Sunset
Boulevard near Beverly Hills. You entered through an electronically controlled door and were immediately transported into another world: the
grounds of a Mediterranean-style home, surrounded by trees, lush vegetation, and splashing fountains. Down a flight of stone steps was an Olympicsized pool, on the other side of which were terraced formal gardens. A
slightly longer flight of stairs led up to the door of the main house, where
George would usually be waiting to greet whomever he was expecting.
Today, however, one of his servants opened the door and ushered me
through the suede-lined living room hung with Miros and Braques to a door
on the far side of the hallway.

A knock on the door and a "Yes?" from inside and I was in a tiny, sunny
bedroom overlooking the garden and the pool. George was sitting in a chair
facing me; he had on a white shirt, a pair of suit trousers, and carpet
slippers. I had not seen him in some time and was appalled at how thin
and frail he looked. His voice and manner, however, were the same as ever, strong and purposeful. I explained what we were doing again and why we
needed his stills, but he impatiently cut me off: "Yes, yes, I understand
perfectly what you're doing. Let's go up to the attic and you can see what
I have."

As we made our way slowly through the house, he kept up a steady
stream of conversation, much as he always would, but it seemed to me
that he was studiously avoiding talking about A Star Is Born and what we
were doing to it. The air was permeated with the smells of something
tasty cooking-he was expecting guests for dinner-and as we neared the
kitchen he saw that the door was open and took the chef to task: the door
should be closed so that the smells of food didn't fill the rest of the
house.

He led the way slowly out the back door and up a short flight of stairs
to the attic, a large, bright, carpeted room filled with shelves, lined with
cabinets and tables, all neatly and efficiently ordered. He apologized for
having to leave me, but he had to get ready for his dinner guests.

As he slowly made his way out, I began searching through the volumes
of stills-a set for every film he'd ever worked on, beginning with All Quiet
on the Western Front in 1930. There were almost two hundred stills from
A Star Is Born, scenes and production shots, including one of Cukor
standing talking to Lucy Marlow that I recognized immediately as being
one of the images on the original advertising campaign for the film. It was
used in all the magazines and posters for the film: a tiny silhouetted image
of a man standing and gesturing to a girl in front of him, evidently imparting some words of wisdom. The impression it gave in the poster and the
ads was of Esther being tutored by Norman. I marveled at the use of this
shot, a stout George being redrawn into a trim movie-star figure and
standing in for James Mason in the advertising campaign. With all the stills
that he had in his collection, however, there was not one of the landlady.
There were some miscellaneous shots of Mason in sport clothes, taken as
candids in the downtown location, which might come in handy. I gathered
up what I needed, locked the attic, took the stills downstairs, signed a
receipt, and went to say goodbye to George. He was sitting in the chair in
his bedroom while his manservant helped him dress for dinner. After asking
me if I had found anything useful and being assured I had, he apologized
for not seeing me to the door.

Then, just as I was leaving, he spoke up. "I think it's remarkable what
you're doing. I keep getting reports on how it's progressing. I appreciate all the effort and the work and I'm very grateful to you. Keep at it and good
luck."

Buoyed by these words of encouragement, I went back to the Academy
determined to find a solution to the problem of the landlady sequence. The
stills I had found of Mason in George's files at least gave us something to
work with, since there were several full-figure poses of Mason standing in
various attitudes which could be used over the track as he expressed his
irritation and outrage at the name "Oleander Arms." But we still needed
some visual representation of the sign on the motel.

The only time the motel is seen previously is at night, when Esther is
driven home by Norman after their first meeting. As they pull up to the
building, they stop in front of the sign. I remembered that in my searching
through the stock footage vaults, I had found a roll of film marked "Oleander Arms-Night" which had been used for background process plates. I
went back to the vault and pulled out the negative, hoping that there might
be a "flash frame"-an overexposed frame that occurs sometimes at the
very end of a reel when the electronic shutter disengages. My hunch paid
off, for just before the end there were three frames with the sign "Oleander
Arms" as bright as daylight. We took those frames, blew them up into
eight-by-ten stills, composited the figure of James Mason onto them in such
a way that he seemed to be looking at the sign, and Lize worked out the
timing so that the line "Oleander Arms! Well, no wonder I couldn't
remember it!" seemed to be prompted by his looking at the sign. Then we
could cut to his driving away and put the rest of the line over that.

That was fine for the end, but we still needed the beginning of the
scene-the dialogue with the landlady. The location for the Oleander Arms
was an apartment complex that in 1982 was still standing at the corner of
Fountain and Crescent Heights in Hollywood, a mile or so away from the
Academy. I passed it almost every day-it was easily recognizable because
of the distinct railings that were all over the building. Looking at the scene
where Norman drives away from the building, I noticed that he wears a
tweed jacket much like one I owned. In mulling over what we could do to
save the beginning of the scene, it suddenly occurred to me that we were
manufacturing stills from bits and pieces of other stills-why not just
photograph what we needed? The building had changed barely at all in the
intervening years. And no one knew what the actress playing the landlady
looked like; we could find someone, make her up to look the part, give her
the lines to say, put her in front of a recognizable part of the building, and photograph a set of stills that would serve our purposes. As for getting
Mason into the scene, it wasn't necessary to show his face, just his back
or his arm gesturing to the landlady. My jacket matched his pretty closelyI could stand in for Norman Maine! Doug thought I was a little crazy, but
after I explained my plan in detail and sketched out how it would work,
he fell in with the idea. An actress friend of his, Gloria Lewin, agreed to
do the job, and the photography was done by Bob Kensinger.

It worked beautifully, except for one minor flaw: Doug had not had a
chance to listen to the track of the landlady's voice, which-cultured,
querulous, older-just did not match up to Gloria's appearance. But the
sequence did convey all the points that needed to be made. And I must
confess to a certain satisfaction in knowing that I'm in the movie-even
if it is just my arm, and only for a fleeting moment at that!

All of the photographs we were working with, whether originals, reconstructions, or newly photographed, had to be retouched to eliminate spots,
dirt, scratches, and unwanted details before they could be given to Ken
Rudolph for photography on the animation camera. Fortunately, Lize had
brought with her into the project Kevin Kutchaver, whose ability to doctor
and enhance these photos was truly unique. Many of these were tiny images
on proof sheets. Kevin had to go through six separate steps for each normal
photo: rephotographing, special processing, enlarging, retouching, rephotographing again, and then once again through the "squeeze" lens. Composite photos, where we were adding images, were even more complex and
time-consuming.

Not all the photo uses were so complicated. Just before the "Born in a
Trunk" sequence, there was a scene deleted showing Maine driving Esther
to the sneak preview of her first film: she is nervous; he is trying to reassure
her; she makes him stop the car and is sick to her stomach all over an oil
derrick. This is a sequence that many people remembered in the original
version, partly from the beauty of the California sunset that backdropped
it and partly because it showed a tender side of Norman. It would have been
easy to leave it out, as it did nothing to advance the plot, but it was one
of those unique Cukor uses of location to set a mood and to enhance the
development of characters and relationships. I had found the alternate
takes for the driving and oil derrick scenes, all long and medium shots.
What was needed were close shots of Mason and Garland in the car for the dialogue sections; again, no stills had been photographed for this. But
in the first part of the film Norman drives Esther home at night in his
convertible: there was enough variety of facial expressions in this earlier
sequence so that if we picked out some frames, blew them up, and intercut
them with the driving scenes and oil derrick shots, we could maintain the
continuity, the charm, and the pictorial effectiveness of the segment. However, to maintain audience interest throughout the stills, we were forced
once again to edit the soundtrack, eliminating much of the steady stream
of conversation with which Norman tries to calm Esther.

This was something we had to do several times throughout the stills
sequences; and it accounts for the difference in running time between the
original release version of 181 minutes and our reconstruction, which runs
176 minutes. In one instance we had to leave out a portion of a crucial
scene. When Norman finally tracks Esther down in a seedy rooming house,
they have an awkward reunion on the roof of the building, where she is
drying her hair. In the Hart-Cukor original, the two are set upon by the
landlady and the neighbors, all demanding autographs and photographs
and generally being extremely boorish. When Norman gets angry, they
turn on him in a nasty fashion, and it takes all of Esther's tact to quiet
everyone down and smooth things over. Unfortunately, we only had two
stills of this sequence, and no matter what we did and how we edited the
track and juggled the stills, we could not make it work. When we showed
the scene to Fay and Gene, they didn't like it, feeling it stopped the flow
of the reunion scene. I wasn't happy with it either, but I felt it should stay
in, choppy and awkward though it was. Fay's and Gene's logic prevailed
and I realized that the scene did work against the sequence; so we lost that
one bit.

This first eleven-minute photo-and-film section took almost five weeks
to complete. We had looked at bits and pieces of the material on the
editing table as we worked, but we had never shown it to anyone in
continuity and on a big screen. On the day of our first full-scale screening
for Fay, Gene, and other Academy executives, we were all extremely nervous. Craig had spliced the footage into the appropriate places on our reels
of re-edited film and gave the picture and separate soundtrack to the
projectionist. The lights went down, the picture faded in, and the camera
traveled across a still of the Glenn Williams Orchestra bus, coming to rest
on Judy Garland as, on the track, the voices of the men in the band said
their farewells. The sound and the image matched up beautifully; when we cut to an actual shot of the bus pulling away in full color, the effect was
striking. The rest of the technique worked equally well. I was greatly
relieved, and everyone else seemed generally pleased.

We set to work in earnest, trying to complete the segment in time to
show Bob Daly before he went off to Europe. We estimated that it would
be done in two more weeks, so Fay made an appointment with Daly to
come to the Academy on Tuesday, January 25, to see the results.

Gene called George Cukor to tell him that we were almost ready to show
what we had, and George agreed to come down and take a look with Daly.
We decided that to make the best possible presentation, we would run the
picture up to the point where the cuts had been made, then switch over
to our reconstructed material. This would not only demonstrate how the
technique worked in terms of story continuity but also show off the film
itself, along with the superb stereo track. (I defy anyone to sit through the
first two reels of A Star Is Born without immediately getting caught up in
the excitement, the glamour, and the sheer artistry of the film.)