Promise of Joy (65 page)

Authenticity holds throughout: the antique desks, exact replicas of those in Washington furnished by the manufacturers of the originals; the Oriental-style carpet, loomed by the manufacturers of the original; the two ivory gavels; the snuff boxes; the swinging glass doors into the party cloakroom and so on. The $250,000 replica is five feet smaller all around than the actual Senate chamber, but neither to the eye nor the camera is this apparent!

Although it would have been a great publicity coup for the director to be the first movie-maker to be allowed to shoot a film in the Senate, it soon becomes apparent that it is infinitely better from the standpoint of his picture that he had to build a Hollywood set, for this permits the camera a freedom it could not otherwise have. In obedience to its demands, desks are pulled out and put back, seating arrangements are changed, walls are knocked down and removed—the mock Senate undergoes transformations the real Senate of course not could undergo.

Publicity’s loss is the picture’s gain, for in this way it is possible for the director to achieve effects that he could never achieve on Capitol Hill. The long, snaking takes in which the camera moves in and out among the desks to catch, now this actor, now that, this way in which it is able to back away and survey the action from a distance—particularly the magnificent final scene in which it moves away and up, above gallery-level, to look down upon an adjourning Senate—all are made possible by the studio set.

Here, too, as in Washington, there are the visitors, ranging from Laughton’s delightful wife, Elsa Lanchester, to the soggy son of a noble father, Randolph Churchill. Mr. Churchill wheezes on the set one morning under a full head of steam and indignation, and before you can say “double Scotch Old Fashioned,” he and the director are locked in mortal combat.

This begins during an uproarious luncheon at the nearby restaurant where most Columbia employees go for food, a pitched battle in which Mr. Churchill and the director, each of whom has finally met his match about each other into silence. It goes on to a private dinner party given by the director at which Mr. Churchill insults various guests, sends one of the ladies into tears, brings dire threats from male guests, and finally succeeds in breaking up the evening. Next morning he receives an icy letter from the director and is barred from the set. Undaunted, he rolls away home, having contributed his particular brand of liveliness to the fun-and-games side of the shooting of
Advise and Consent
.

There are other aspects of this, of course, a few parties and dinners: but one soon realizes that Hollywood does most of its personal hell-raising between pictures. There just isn’t time or energy, while one is going on. Here, as in Washington, the day’s activities begin on Sound Stage 14 at 8 a.m. or very shortly thereafter, and frequently last past 6 p.m.; it is a stout soul who could party every night and still arrive bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to face the jaundiced gaze of the camera every morning. Make-up an do wonders, you note, but in the few instances when someone has parties hard the night before, the fact is quite apparent. Sensible stars always be this in mind. “The industry” is indeed an industry, and those who truly succeed in it bring to it a firmly business-like and no-nonsense approach particularly in the care of their principal asset—themselves.

Even so, one cannot help but get some sense of the strange combination of fact and legend that goes by the name “Hollywood,” and it is quite apparent that in this present stage of its existence it is a nervous and uneasy place. There is something in the sun-drenched air, as the soft bland days of South California autumn relentlessly follow one another, which indicates a community in the grip of a profound disturbance. There is a mood of uncertainty, a desperate emphasis on security—possibly because an increasing number of its residents have increasingly less of it—a tensely questioning mood. More and more “runaway productions”—made abroad with cheaper foreign labor, on cheap foreign locations—are being announced. More and more vast sound stages are standing empty every year. Opportunities are dwindling for both actors technicians.

Major studies are gambling their budgets and their futures on mammoth extravaganzas that run into the red in million-dollar terms of a star so much he’s a day of sniffles. The endless search for means to beat the competition of television results, not so much in better and more appealing pictures, and in a desperate reliance on the spectacular and super-colossal that has always been Hollywood’s answer to attack. But in these times it is not enough, and even as its residents go through the motions, it is possible to perceive that they know it is not enough. Under the edge of the sunny air lies the cold hint of fear. It makes even more insistent the feeling you begin to have, as the two months of shooting of
Advise and Consent
draw to their end, that while it has all been great fun, it is time, now, to think about getting back to reality and re-entering the workaday world.

There comes, finally, the last day of shooting a scene in the home of Hank Fonda, nominee for Secretary of State, otherwise known as Robert A. Leffingwell. For the last time the electricians and the grips and the cameramen fuss about, getting everything just right. For the last time the director orders, “Rehearsal!” For the last time he shouts, “Action!” And then for the last time he cries, “Cut! Print!”

And the adventure is over.

Over for the cast and the crew and the author and everyone else directly involved in the past two months, but not, of course, for the group that now takes command. For another month the director, working with the editors, the musicians, the film-cutters and sound-men, will mold the rough cut, sift through the scenes, choose the best takes from countless possibilities. This assembly of the pieces involves the most minute detail—so minute, in fact, that it will sometimes come down to something as fleeting as one sentence of dialogue. That one sentence will have been recorded possibly six times. Out of those six tapes the final sentence is literally put together word by word, so that the beginning of the sentence the audience hears may have come from the first take, the middle phrases from the third take, the concluding words from the sixth take. In the same way the film itself is cut and pieced together. So smooth is the editing that the final product on the screen carries with it all of Laughton’s “conviction of the first time”—artfully created by technicians in a laboratory.

And the final product, as it marches across the screen after the Saul Bass titles, the waving flags, the muted martial music? Well, since the director has adhered faithfully to the novel’s intention to lean neither to right nor left, and since he has faithfully stressed its major purpose of showing that almost all the characters are motivated by genuine love of country, you can afford to be well pleased.

You can tell questioners truthfully that you are “perhaps 85 percent satisfied—which is a pretty good average, for an author in Hollywood.”

And you have another satisfaction, too.

For two months you have been privileged to work with a group of talented, pleasant and dedicated people in what must surely be one of the most fascinating business in the world.

A little unreal, maybe, but fascinating.

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About the Author

Allen Drury is a master of political fiction, #1
New York Times
bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for the landmark novel
Advise and Consent
. A 1939 graduate of Stanford University, Allen Drury wrote for and became editor of two local California newspapers. While visiting Washington, DC, in 1943 he was hired by the United Press (UPI) and covered the Senate during the latter half of World War II. After the war he wrote for other prominent publications before joining the
New York Times
’ Washington Bureau, where he worked through most of the 1950s. After the success of
Advise and Consent
, he left journalism to write full time. He published twenty novels and five works of non-fiction, many of them best sellers. WordFire Press will be reissuing the majority of his works.

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