A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (6 page)

But there were still enough moviegoers to whom a night out at the
movies was worth the price; and to tempt these faithful, Jack Warner,
gambler that he was, staked nearly $28 million to make 26 features in 1952,
roughly two a month, in addition to the 88 shorts and 12o newsreels that
would carry the distinctive Warner Bros. shield insignia. Warner was proud
of that shield, and with good reason. The people he hired to make pictures,
and the pictures they made, had won eighty-five Academy Awards since
1927. Some of the best films ever made in Hollywood were actually made
in Burbank by Jack Warner and company. And that was still true on March
20, 1952, when the Academy Awards for 1951 were given out in a (not yet
televised) ceremony at the RKO Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Out of fourteen nominations for the company, five Oscars went to
pictures made or released by Warners.

The distinction between "made" and "released" is an important one, for
it points up a subtle change in the manner in which Warners, and indeed
many of the other studios, "made" its pictures. For thirty years, it had been
industry practice for a studio to buy a story, or have an original story written
by a staff writer, and then cast the picture from the studio's contract roster,
under a staff director, with support from the studio's technical departments. Everything would be financed by the studio, which retained ownership of the story and the film and all monies derived therefrom. But beginning in 1937, when William Randolph Hearst took his independent
Cosmopolitan Productions unit away from MGM and moved it twelve
miles north to Warners' Burbank studios, Jack found a new way to obtain
first-class product to carry the company's shield. And that was to finance
"outside" producers who had a "property," usually a story, and sometimes
a star to go along with it (in which case the "property" became a "package"), for which Warner Bros. would provide the financing, studio facilities, and the all-important distribution network. From Hearst's Cosmopolitan, the list of "outside" producers expanded to include Hal Wallis
Productions in 1941, Cagney Productions in 1943, and ultimately Charles
K. Feldman and his Group Productions, which made A Streetcar Named
Desire for release by Warners. Streetcar grossed almost $5 million and won
four of the five Oscars earned by Warner Bros. for 1951. So when, in early
August 1952, Transcona, in the persons of Luft and Alperson, came to see
Warner about Judy Garland in A Star Is Born, they found him not only
receptive but ready to make a deal.

"Eddie and I had a whole list written out," Luft recalls, "of what we
wanted, as opposed to what Warners was offering-we knew we wanted
this, and that we'd have to trade with that. One day I met with Jack by
myself. He had a scissors on his desk. I said, 'All right, Jack, you want that?
Then I want this-cut this out....' He'd cut out that paragraph, cut this
out, put this over there. We chopped up this whole piece of paper [till] it
looked like cut-up paper dolls. After [Eddie and I] concluded the trading
back and forth with Warner, we made a nine-picture deal, predicated on
A Star Is Born. Eddie brought a property called 'Snow Covered Wagons,'
which was about the Donner Party, and I owned the rights to the story
'Man 0' War' about the great racehorse. Those were the three properties
we went in with. We made this deal in late '52 and were hopefully going
to get going on one right away. We had a writer working on 'Man 0' War,'
which we hoped to start in early '53, then possibly get to A Star Is Born
in the middle of '53."

On June 8, two months prior to his initial meeting with Warner, Luft
had put Garland under a more personal kind of contract when he and the
singer were married. On July 19, they had thrown what the papers referred to as "a huge brawl" at their new home on Mapleton Drive in
Beverly Hills with a hundred and fifty guests in attendance, some of the
cream of Hollywood society. Betty Comden and her writing partner
Adolph Green were there, taking a break from working on MGM pro ducer Arthur Freed's new film, The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire.
Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz sang some of the new songs they had
written for the picture, including a rouser entitled "That's Entertainment." Everybody involved seemed very high-spirited and carefree, despite the fact that that same week MGM had announced that all contract personnel, executives and stars alike, would be taking salary cuts of
25 to 50 percent, thereby effecting an annual saving of $5 million for the
beleaguered studio. It was a harsh acknowledgment that an era of
munificence and extravagance had ended. Also in the trade papers that
week were two small, seemingly unrelated items. A New York outfit
called Cinerama, Inc., had leased the Broadway Theater from the Shu-
berts to exhibit what was referred to as "a new three-dimensional process," beginning in September. And in Hollywood, a promoter named Sid
Pink was taking the unusual step of screening "rushes" (daily footage) for
potential investors in a new independent movie called Bwana Devil, directed by Arch Oboler and photographed in something called "Natural
Vision 3 Dimension." These two items were buried in the back pages of
the trades; the headline news that week, after the MGM economy measures, was the story of the disastrous fire that had swept the Warners lot,
raging for almost three hours in the mid-afternoon and causing $5 million
in damages. While these events swirled and eddied around them, the
Lufts were celebrating not only their marriage but also the news of her
pregnancy, an impending recording contract with Capitol Records, and
what looked to be a very important picture deal with Warners.

On September 8, 1952, Jack Warner made it official: Warner Bros.
would finance and distribute three films from Transcona, the first to be a
musical remake of A Star Is Born with Judy Garland.

Transcona's nine-picture deal was altered slightly so that the six pictures
to follow the initial three were to be taken as options on the part of Warners
every six months, with Garland having the lead in two after A Star Is Born.
Once agreement had been reached among Luft, Alperson, and Warner, the
actual working-out of the contract was turned over to the Warners legal
department, which promptly began negotiating with Transcona's attorneys. While the lawyers met, Luft recalls, "we were kicking around names
[of people to work on] the picture. We knew we wanted Harold Arlen to
write the music because of his association with Judy on "Over the Rainbow," and we kicked around [the names of] guys to write the screenplay.
Judy loved Moss Hart, she knew him personally, so we went to Jack and said we wanted Moss for the script if we could get him. Jack went along
with us, thought we couldn't do any better."

Moss Hart and Harold Arlen had one thing in common-they were both
represented by Irving Paul Lazar. Pint-sized, dynamic, and shrewd, Lazar
was one of the fastest-rising literary agents in Hollywood. He had not yet
been nicknamed "Swifty" by an admiring Humphrey Bogart-that would
come in 1955, when in the course of one afternoon he made six separate
picture deals for Bogart-but in 1952 he already was known for the speed,
dexterity, and imagination that characterized his business deals. He maintained an enviable circle of friends which included the Bogarts, Luft and
Garland, Billy Wilder, Frank Sinatra, and George Cukor. A prominent
bachelor-about-town, Lazar was in noticeable attendance at just about
every major social function, public or private, held in Hollywood or New
York, several of which he hosted himself. He was at the July 19 party that
Garland and Luft gave, and undoubtedly at that time he had conversations
about Moss Hart.

Lazar had met Hart when the two were in the service in World War
II. Lazar, a former MCA agent, was a second lieutenant, and Hart was
already a famous, well-established playwright. Lazar persuaded Hart and
General "Hap" Arnold that the Air Force needed a fund raiser; the result
was Winged Victory, which netted $5 million for the Air Corps relief fund
and marked the beginning of a long and close friendship between Hart and
Lazar. "Moss anointed me," said Lazar. "He said, 'You are a literary agent
now.' " Lazar not only took Hart at his word but took him on as his first
client, obtaining an unprecedented $150,000 for Hart's screenplay for
Laura Z. Hobson's novel Gentleman's Agreement in 1947.

Five years later, in October 1952, Lazar broached the subject of A Star
Is Born to Hart, who was in Philadelphia with out-of-town tryouts for his
play The Climate of Eden, which he had adapted from a novel and was
directing. According to an Ed Sullivan column of the time, Hart

was dining in the Ritz Hotel when his West Coast agent Irving Lazar arrived
from the airport. Hart said, "I've read that Warners is planning to re-make
A Star Is Born with Judy Garland. Is that on the level?" Lazar told him that
the oft-discussed idea was a reality. "I'd very much like to write it for Judy,"
said Hart. "I've known her a long time and I'd enjoy it." Lazar asked the
waiter to connect a phone at the table and put through a call to Sid Luft
in Hollywood. "Sid wants me to fly right back and sign the deal," Lazar said. "But you haven't even had dinner," objected Hart. "When it comes,"
grinned Lazar, "you eat it for me. I'm rushing to the airport."

Apocryphal though the story may be, it certainly enhanced Lazar's
reputation as a whiz at deal making-as did the actual deal he made with
Luft for Hart's services: $100,000 and a house in Palm Springs in which
to work. It was a felicitous arrangement and worth every penny, for Hart
was one of the pre-eminent figures of the Broadway theater. Since his first
success in 1930 as the co-author, with George S. Kaufman, of the Hollywood satire Once in a Lifetime, Hart's name, as author or co-author, had
been on some of the most famous plays in the American theater, including
You Can't Take It With You, for which he shared a Pulitzer Prize with
Kaufman in 1937. He wrote some of the best dialogue Broadway ever
heard, and his direction of plays and musicals was equally skilled. In collaboration with Kaufman, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart in the 1937
Franklin D. Roosevelt spoof Id Rather Be Right and then with Kurt Weill
in Lady in the Dark in 1941, Hart managed to change the style and
direction of the Broadway musical theater. He had created one of the first
truly integrated original musicals, in which song and dance arose from
character and story instead of being dragged in as divertissements. (Oklahoma.,, which many point to as having pioneered this approach, was an
adaptation of the play Green Grow the Lilacs.) Hart's choice of subject
matter for Lady in the Dark-psychoanalysis-had been derived from his
own experiences and had brought drama and a new maturity to the rather
innocent and carefree musical theater libretto. As a screenwriter, Hart had
earned an Academy Award nomination in 1948 for Gentleman's Agreement, his adaptation of Laura Z. Hobson's novel about anti-Semitism in
America; and just as Lazar was making the deal for Hart to work on A Star
Is Born, Samuel Goldwyn's new film, Hans Christian Andersen, for which
Hart had written the screenplay, was opening around the country to excellent reviews and even better business. One of Hart's recurring superstitions
held that "every success is a combination of luck and a modicum of skill,
and that with each new play the luck is bound to run out." So it was with
his The Climate of Eden, which opened on Broadway on November 6,
1952, and closed after twenty performances, after which a philosophical
Hart remarked: "Only two things matter in a man's life: Love and Work.
It is possible to live without one, but not without the other. My secret
dream is to get together enough money to some day give up work." With that, he and his actress/wife, Kitty Carlisle, and their two children left for
Palm Springs, where Hart promised to "do magic" with the script of A Star
Is Born.

Meanwhile, on November 21, in Los Angeles, Judy Garland gave birth to
her second child, whom she and Luft named Lorna. Four days later,
according to Gerold Frank's biography Judy, the singer once again tried to
commit suicide by slashing her throat; it was only through the timely
intervention of Luft that she hadn't bled to death. This fit of self-destruction evidently had been brought on by a combination of postpartum depression and Garland's long-standing and continuing dependence on barbiturates and amphetamines. Her addiction had begun innocently enough in
the early i94os, when an MGM doctor had prescribed use of the new drug
Dexedrine to help her get through her rigorous daily filming schedule. Over
the years, she had made valiant but unsuccessful efforts to stop using these
pills. It was a truly vicious cycle: sleeping pills at night, then during the day
another stimulant to neutralize the sleeping pills. Luft realized that she was
happiest and felt most vital when she was working, but he also realized that
if word of her latest escapade leaked out, the deal with Warners would
probably be called off. To quiet any rumors of problems, he and Garland
decided to give a small dinner party in early December. Garland's recuperative powers were evidently tremendous, for not only was she a charming
hostess but she also sang at length after dinner, the scars on her neck
concealed by a high-collared dress. Luft marveled at her seeming indestructibility and almost immediately continued with preparations for A Star
Is Born, as if nothing out of the ordinary were besetting his wife and the
star of his film.

Preoccupied with their problems, the Lufts paid scant attention to the
two events that were causing the rest of the film industry to sit up and take
notice. On September 30, the motion picture This Is Cinerama opened at
the Broadway Theatre in New York and quite literally created a sensation.
It was something distinctly new, using three separate cameras and projectors to throw a gigantic picture on a huge, deeply curved screen which
almost engulfed the audience. Coupled with this was a six-channel stereophonic sound system, utilizing, for the first time in film exhibition, magnetic tape and offering sound of astounding richness, realism, and directionality from numerous speakers placed around the theater. The process was a refinement of a World War II gunnery training device invented by Fred
Waller, an ex-Paramount cameraman-director; the technique had caught
the eye of pioneer broadcaster and newsman Lowell Thomas, who had
interested Broadway producer Michael Todd and filmmaker Merian C.
Cooper. What evolved was a travelogue of sorts, which showed the potential of the technique while literally taking audiences for a ride all over the
world. That particular opening-night audience was filled with the social,
political, and theatrical elite, all friends and/or acquaintances of the three
impresarios; the word of mouth they generated and the resulting press
attention made Cinerama an overnight sensation, with front-page stories
in the major newspapers and block-long lines at the box office. Anything
on film that generated that kind of money and publicity was bound to
arouse the interest of the heads of the film companies; but after a careful
review of the process, most of the studio executives decided that Cinerama
was too complex to be practical. And there seemed to be no way to achieve
the same effect in any simpler manner. Still, Cinerama did create a new
excitement about moviegoing, even if it was an excitement that couldn't
be exploited immediately.