All About “All About Eve” (23 page)

Dede Allen, considered one of the most creative American film editors, believes one reason the field has always been open to women is because “they are good at little details, like sewing.” Margaret Booth, still another legendary editor, had a passion for detail; she recalled that before there were “edge numbers” on a film frame—those tiny numbers that identify a particular shot—she would sit for hours trying to determine whether Lillian Gish had her eyelids closed or open.

In Barbara McLean’s unair-conditioned workroom, in June 1950, hung strips of celluloid, and on every flat surface were stacks of film cans. There was an inspection table where she and directors and producers could eyeball the goods, but the most important object was the Moviola, an editing device with a small viewing screen that showed film running at sound or slower speed. The Moviola could be stopped or started on individual frames, enabling an editor to examine scenes closely and to mark them for sound synchronization or optical effects.

Superficially, at least, the process of editing a film seems to run parallel with editing a book for publication. The manuscript arrives in what the author considers its final form. One or more editors at the publishing house then take over, making few changes if the manuscript is “clean” but sometimes totally reshaping one that’s unwieldy. The author then approves or disapproves the changes and, necessary compromises having been reached by all concerned, the book is sent to the printer.

But such is not the case in editing a film. The main difference is that movies have usually been routinely edited as they are shot. There is no real equivalent in publishing, since writers don’t ship off their work at the end of the day for assemblage. Film directors do.

This editing practice, not widely known outside the film industry, often surprises even those who are well versed in other aspects of the movies. For example Tom Stempel, a film historian who interviewed Barbara McLean in 1970, asked her: “Was this standard policy to cut the picture as it went along? I’d always had the impression that the films were cut after the shooting had stopped.” McLean answered: “Oh no, you cut as you go along. Every studio does that. You’d be in a hell of a mess otherwise. What if you needed some stuff and the sets had already been torn down? By the time you got through with the whole picture, it was pretty nearly set. All you had to do was just add the whole bit up together.”

Bitter quarrels often erupted over the final cut of a film. Would the release version please the director, or the producer? Rarely did they share the same vision.

All About Eve
is the exception that proves the rule, for it seems to have pleased Mankiewicz, Zanuck, McLean, and all other interested parties. No one connected with it is on record as having complained about the film’s ultimate arrangement. It’s impossible to pin down the minutiae of editing
All About Eve
—who selected which shots, who suggested that others be dropped, and the like. Such records either were not kept or they have disappeared. But we do have clues.

The best indication of the film’s integrity is that the story we see on-screen remains basically as Mankiewicz conceived it from treatment through shooting script. Second, in the words of Tom Mankiewicz, “Dad was riding high at the time. He was bouncing off
A Letter to Three Wives
and the two Oscars he won for that picture, so he was at the height of his power and control—the height of his artistic testosterone, if you will. Meaning he was able to win fights against Zanuck because he was the fair-haired boy of the studio.” Third, although no director had final cut in the studio era, Mankiewicz, like most important directors, “was in the editing room all the time,” according to his son. Yet his presence there didn’t jar Barbara McLean. Later she said, “We were very good friends,” and Tom Mankiewicz states that his father always spoke “very affectionately” of her. After they finished the picture, the director gave McLean a key chain with a gaggle of tiny Oscars attached to represent her own Academy Award and those of the other Oscar winners on the picture.

Goofs and Non Sequiturs

• Mankiewicz, Zanuck, and the editor, Barbara McLean, overlooked several minor blunders in the final cut. The first concerns a letter to Margo that comes out of nowhere and means nothing. In her dressing room, as Margo and Bill prepare to leave for the airport, he says, “Throw that dreary letter away, it bores me.” She does so and that’s that. It’s possible that Mankiewicz had in mind a deceitful letter written by Eve Harrington in Mary Orr’s story. In the movie, however, no such thing occurs.
    A more whimsical explanation is that this letter is an oblique reference to
A Letter to Three Wives
. Or, if Mankiewicz were able to read the future, a foreshadowing of Bette’s notorious “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    Curiously, the same thing happens in
Hamlet
. In Act IV, scene VI, a messenger enters, giving Claudius a letter from Hamlet. “And this to the queen,” says the messenger. But, as Hardin Craig notes in his edition of
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
, “One hears no more of the letter to the queen.”

• A possible mistake occurs when we see Margo taking curtain calls after a performance of
Aged in Wood
. The curtain rises, and she looks completely surprised. “Who, me?” is the expression on her face. Is it a directorial error, as Charles Affron suggests in his book
Star Acting
, or is Margo feigning star humility?

• During Margo’s fierce quarrel with Lloyd, she snarls this line: “I’m lied to, attacked behind my back, accused of reading your silly dialogue as if it were the Holy Gospel.” In the heat of that scene, her line seems to make sense. But what Mankiewicz wrote was: “… accused of reading your silly dialogue inaccurately as if it were the Holy Gospel.” And that’s what Bette should have said. With the word “inaccurately” omitted, the line is absurd.

• When Barbara Bates, as Phoebe, flatters Eve with a mention of “the Eve Harrington Clubs they have in most of the girls’ high schools” it sounds false. That’s because it is. Fan clubs were for movie stars, and although Eve has already packed for Hollywood, she hasn’t yet made a film. The Eve Harrington Clubs are as phony as the John Doe Clubs in Frank Capra’s
Meet John Doe
(1941). (Was Mankiewicz perhaps poking fun at that off-center movie?)

• There’s also a goof in the final credits. The name of Gary Merrill’s character, Bill Sampson, is misspelled as “Bill
Simpson
.”

Years later, after his retirement, Mankiewicz spoke to an interviewer about editing a film: “I get the best editor I can find and explain what I have in mind—what I want the scene to express. Then I leave the editor alone to do his work. I can profit from the editor’s previous experience because he can give me ideas I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. And I don’t take a hands-on approach. Of course I know what a Steenbeck editing table is, and a Moviola, but I’d be totally incapable of using them myself.”

To illustrate his relative indifference to the technical aspects of filmmaking, Mankiewicz talked about the time he—like Bill Sampson in
Eve
—looked through the wrong end of the camera finder. It happened while making
Dragonwyck
(1946), Mankiewicz’s first film as a director. After the gaffe, Arthur Miller, the cinematographer, told the novice director, “Just leave it all to me.” Mankiewicz did. From then on, he said, “Arthur handled the camera and I handled the actors. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the only way to do it.”

Mankiewicz took the same attitude toward a good editor like McLean. She, in consultation with Mankiewicz and Zanuck, “built”
All About Eve
from the ground up, using what Mankiewicz delivered. McLean paid attention chiefly to technical points of expertise and to rhythm and timing in the film. Mankiewicz, with his long takes, his even, cantering pace, and sparing use of fancy work, was an orderly filmmaker. With certain other directors, however, McLean found herself trying to figure out the beginning, middle, and end of a picture.

As her job neared completion, McLean knew that Zanuck was pleased. So pleased, in fact, that he decided not to preview
All About Eve
. At that time, previews often indicated uneasiness about a movie, or some part of it, such as the running time or the ending. In this case Zanuck was confident they had what it took.

McLean liked the picture, too, and that was important. Studio executives knew that when Zanuck prefaced a statement with, “Bobbie says…” he was not expressing an opinion but announcing a decision. If “Bobbie” hadn’t liked it, she would have let him know. Whenever McLean and Zanuck disagreed, she stuck to her guns. “I don’t care,” she would tell the boss. “If you’re not going to listen, then don’t ask me. If you’re going to ask me, then pay attention to what I say.” Such uppity talk might have gotten her kicked out of other studios, but Zanuck knew her value. Besides, they had worked together so long that a certain gruff frankness had become their shorthand.

The unpolished version that McLean patched together during the filming of
All About Eve
was the assembly—that is, the initial joining together of shots in proper continuity. This involves a selection of takes, the elimination of unwanted footage, the trimming of scenes to a more or less desirable length, and the marking of transitions. A film’s assembly is the stage just prior to the rough cut.

Soon after the final day of shooting, McLean and Mankiewicz completed the rough cut—i.e., the editing stage immediately before fine cut. A rough cut might be compared to the second or third draft in writing, which is often publishable even though it lacks the author’s final burnish.

On Saturday, June 24, Mankiewicz delivered his rough cut to Zanuck. Zanuck, with McLean beside him, screened this cut two days later. We can extrapolate details of the ambience at their first viewing of the rough cut if we study a photograph of Zanuck and McLean taken in Zanuck’s private screening room in 1952. This photo shows the two seated in oversized leather armchairs in the front row. Zanuck, in sports jacket, slacks, shirt, and tie, seems impatient for the screening to begin. McLean looks very much at ease in a light-colored skirt and blouse. Her face is alert, like someone poised to catch the slighest discrepancy between any two shots—and to correct them forthwith.

Since screenings and modifications of the edited work print usually took place at night in Zanuck’s projection room at the studio, we can imagine him and McLean in a similar pose, and in similar attire, that Monday evening, June 26, 1950, as they sit down after dinner to finish off a long workday. Zanuck presses the buzzer to signal the projectionist, the lights dim, and this early version of
Eve
fills the screen.

“In the projection room,” McLean said, “nobody made a sound. Even if you had a cigarette pack with that cellophane on it, you’d take it off before. Zanuck’s powers of concentration were terrific. The editor sat next to him and when he didn’t like something, he’d just touch you on the arm. I’d write in the dark.”

At this rough-cut stage, of course, there was no 20th Century-Fox logo, no titles or credits, and no music. The abrupt start of the picture was either a long shot of the dining hall of the Sarah Siddons Society, which was Shot Number One in the shooting script; or a full close-up of the Sarah Siddons Award, which Mankiewicz had designated as Shot Number Two.

We don’t know which shot came first in the rough cut, but we do know that the picture opens with the close-up of the award—“a gold statuette, about a foot high, of Sarah Siddons as ‘the Tragic Muse,’” as Mankiewicz described it in the script. Did Mankiewicz decide on this as his opening shot while establishing the rough cut, or did Zanuck make the decision, perhaps in consultation with McLean? As production chief, Zanuck of course retained editing room privileges. In that editing room he personally supervised the cutting of many of the major Fox films.

Who Was Sarah Siddons and Why Did They Name Those Awards for Her?

Sarah Siddons encloses
All About Eve
like dramatic parentheses. The film’s first shot is a close-up of the Sarah Siddons Award, and in the final shot Barbara Bates, as the conspiratorial young Phoebe, clasps this same statuette to her bosom. In addition, midway through the movie there’s a close-up of the Siddons portrait that hangs at the top of Margo’s staircase.

Considered one of the greatest actresses of the English stage, Siddons (1755–1831) was beautiful, talented, and shrewd. A great actress, yes, but also a celebrity in the modern sense, for she used her fame as a tool to manipulate her image. She promoted herself two centuries before the advent of press agents.

Her first entrance was inauspicious, for she was born at the Shoulder of Mutton public house in Brecon, Wales, where her parents were touring with a theatrical troupe. At age eleven she made her stage debut as Ariel in
The Tempest
with her father’s company. Although her stage charisma was remarkable, she trod the usual uneven road to stardom. Success was not immediate, but eventually it made her the First Lady of the British Stage. She mesmerized audiences, then made them weep. Susceptible ladies fainted from the potency of a Siddons performance. Fans worshiped her, and in Scotland the word “Siddonimania” was coined to describe the hysterical adulation poured out by victims of “Siddons Fever.” But fame is never cheap, and in Dublin they pelted her with apples and potatoes. More than once she was fired, thus becoming an early example of box office poison.

Siddons acted in many a play now forgotten, but earned her triumph in Shakespearean roles. Of these, it was Lady Macbeth that made the actress immortal. William Hazlitt, the English essayist and a contemporary of Siddons, described her in this role: “It was something above nature. It seemed almost as if a being of a superior order had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy personified.” Charles Lamb, another contemporary, wrote that “we speak of Lady Macbeth while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. Siddons.” Her first biographer, lucky enough to have attended a Siddons
Macbeth
, paid the supreme compliment: “It was an era in one’s life to have seen her in it.”