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AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER Carey Perloff, Artistic Director • Ellen Richard, Executive Director

PRESENTS

Once in a Lifetime

By George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart Directed by Mark Rucker American Conservatory Theater September 22–October 16, 2011

words on plays vol. xviii, no. 1 Elizabeth Brodersen Director of Education Dan Rubin Publications Manager Michael Paller Resident Dramaturg Emily Hoffman Publications and Dramaturgy Associate Amy Krivohlavek Marketing Writer Zachary Moull Dramaturgy Fellow

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© 2011 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Table of Contents

1 Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Once in a Lifetime

6 “A Loving Look at That Craziness”: An Interview with Director Mark Rucker by Dan Rubin

11 Mixing Media: An Interview with Video Designer Alexander V. Nichols by Amy Krivohlavek

16 Going by Michael Paller

20 Entertainment Revolution: Video Killed the Vaudeville Star by Emily Hoffman

25 Terrible Mike and the Transition to Talkies by Dan Rubin

32 The Big Five: The in Early Hollywood by Emily Hoffman and Zachary Moull

34 Once in a Lifetime Glossary by Zachary Moull

44 Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .

ON THE COVER in Modern Times (1936). Courtesy Jerry Murbach, Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. Chaplin began his career in vaudeville in 1910 before becoming a silent sensation. The arrival of sound in the was a challenge for Chaplin, who had won worldwide fame with pantomime. He told one interviewer, “Dialogue does not have a place in the sort of comedies I make.” Modern Times marks the last appearance of Chaplin’s famous Little Tramp character and the final dialogue-free film of one of ’s last holdouts. OPPOSITE Painted from Life, by Earl Christy, Photoplay (December 1929)  Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Once in a Lifetime

The original Broadway production of Once in a Lifetime opened on September 24, 1930, at the in City. It received a Broadway revival at the Circle in the Square Theatre in 1978. Director Mark Rucker produced a workshop production of Once in a Lifetime with the a.c.t. Master of Fine Arts Program class of 2011 in spring 2010 at Zeum Theater.

Characters and Cast george lewis...... Patrick Lane may daniels...... Julia Coffey jerry hyland...... John Wernke helen hobart...... René Augesen susan walker...... Ashley Wickett mrs. walker...... Margo Hall herman glogauer...... Will LeBow miss leighton...... Nick Gabriel florabel leigh ...... Jessica Kitchens phyllis fontaine...... Marisa Duchowny lawrence vail...... Alexander Crowther rudolph kammerling...... Kevin Rolston weisskopf...... Jason Frank art sullivan...... Kevin Rolston

Once in a Lifetime has a total of 70 roles; a.c.t.’s production uses 15 actors to play them all. The aforementioned actors, along with ensemble member Crystal Noelle, also perform the roles of: Bellboy, Biographer, Bishop, Bridesmaids, Chauffeurs, Cigarette Girl, Coat Check Girl, Electricians, Ernest, George’s Secretary, Mr. Flick, , Light Men, Maids, Meterstein, Norton, Oliver Fulton, Pages, Painter, Policeman, Porter, Reporter, 12 Schlepkin Brothers, Tie Man, and Victor Moulton.

OPPOSITE The Singer at Warners’ Theatre, October 6, 1927. Courtesy University of San Diego.

 Setting New York, Hollywood, and a pullman car en route, 1927.

Synopsis act i. scene 1. A room in the West Forties, New York. George Lewis, one third of a nearly washed-up vaudeville act that’s played small towns across the country for the last four years, sits in a rented room cracking Indian nuts and reading Variety magazine. May Daniels, the second third, enters in bad humor about the trio’s dire financial straits: they’ve been in New York for a month without booking a gig. Jerry, the final vaudevillian (with whom May is in love), returns to the flat in a fervor: he’s just been to the opening night of , the world’s first talking picture (made possible by the invention of the ), and is con- vinced that the three must leave immediately for Hollywood to get in on the ground floor of this revolutionary new art form. Not waiting for the others to agree, Jerry has already sold their act; fortunately, his enthusiasm is contagious. After some initial skepticism, May comes up with a plan: they’ll start a school of elocution to teach silent-film actors how to speak. They decide to set out for the next morning. act i. scene 2. A pullman car, en route to . On the train to California with Jerry and George, May studies elocution books in hopes of adding some validity to their scheme. She catches sight of Variety critic Helen Hobart, America’s foremost movie authority. May was in a theater troupe with Helen ages ago, and, real- izing she can use Helen’s ego to her advantage, she invites her into the car. The gorgeously arrayed Helen complains that a dippy, young, would-be actress, Susan Walker, has been pes-

 tering her for help with her career. May pre- tends that she is ignorant of Helen’s success because she has been in England for the last eight years founding an extremely successful school of elocution. She introduces Jerry as her business manager and George as Doctor Lewis, her technical advisor. George wins Helen over by quoting Variety articles. Thrilled at the opportunity to talk about her own success, Helen is soon eating out of May’s hand. Helen “convinces” May that she must start an elocution school in Hollywood: she tells her that they will get Herman Glogauer (a movie executive who will now buy anything, since he passed up the Vitaphone) to pay for it. Susan enters, wanting to continue her con- versation with Helen; Helen dismisses her, but George is immediately smitten. act i. scene 3. The Gold Room of the Hotel Stilton, Los Angeles. The Gold Room of the Hotel Stilton is where the rich and famous of Hollywood come to mingle, and Susan, whom George has promised to introduce to Glogauer, is completely starstruck. Helen introduces May, Jerry, and George to Glogauer, who is in a panic about the fate of his studio and terrified by the idea of losing ground to his competition, the 12 Schlepkin brothers. After May performs a quick elocution demonstration on two of Glogauer’s stars of the silent screen (whose ter- rible speaking voices are slightly improved by the exercise), the producer is sold on the idea of the school. act ii. The reception room of Glogauer Studios. Glogauer’s reception room is a flurry of activity, presided over by the impenetrable receptionist, Miss Leighton. May, on break between elocu-

Renderings of May (left), Jerry (right), Helen Hobart (page 4), and George (page 5) by costume designer Alex Jaeger

 tion lessons, reveals her anxiety that the classes, which she has been teaching for six weeks now, are not going over well with Glogauer. Helen gives May the cold shoulder, deepening May’s suspicions that her job is at risk; her fears are confirmed when a paint- scraper comes to remove her, Jerry, and George’s names from the door of their new office. To make matters worse, her relationship with Jerry, who has “gone Hollywood,” has been derailed by his busy schedule of schmoozing. Meanwhile, Susan Walker is distraught because her father is insisting that she stop wasting her time in Hollywood and return home. George decides he will speak to Glogauer on Susan’s behalf. While waiting, he strikes up a conversation with Lawrence Vail, a disillu- sioned playwright on salary at the studio. The writer has not been given a single assignment since he arrived from New York six months ago, and he has been waiting to talk to Glogauer for “days and days.” Vail rants about the evils of Hollywood and storms out just before the elusive Glogauer enters, deep in a fight with Kammerling, a German director who insists that the leading lady Glogauer has cast in his film is all wrong. George suggests Susan as a replacement. Glogauer shoos George away, screaming that they must have someone with “a name.” George, taking his cues from Vail’s tirade, begins a muddled but forceful dia- tribe against the movie industry. Impressed by George’s fearless frankness, Glogauer gives Susan the part and makes George supervisor of the film—with Jerry and May as his staff.

act iii. scene 1. A set on the Glogauer Studio lot. George presides over the chaotic set on the final day of shooting. Everyone is thrilled that the movie is about to wrap—on schedule, no less—except for May, who confesses to Jerry that she thinks the film is going to be terrible because of all the blunders George has made along the way, which include repeatedly cracking Indian nuts near the sensitive sound equipment. Glogauer enters and toasts George, presenting him with a 106-piece solid-gold dinner set with his initials in diamonds on every piece. Glogauer stays to watch the filming of the final scene and realizes, to his horror, that George has made the wrong picture—Gingham and Orchids, a flop previously made by Biograph in 1910. As Glogauer focuses his rage on George, Jerry distances himself from his old friend. May, on the other hand, sticks up for

 George. Glogauer fires them both. Disgusted by Jerry’s cowardice, May tells him their relation- ship is over. act iii. scene 2. A pullman car, en route to New York. It is the day after Gingham and Orchids opened, and May asks the porter to bring her the papers so she can read how the film was received. The train makes a stop to pick up passengers from a sanatorium for playwrights. Lawrence Vail, recovered from a breakdown brought on by “underwork” at Glogauer Studios, enters the car. The porter delivers the papers, and May and Vail flip open to the reviews. To their utter disbelief, Gingham and Orchids is a huge success. The reviewers have interpreted all of George’s mistakes as brilliant innovations. May receives an urgent telegraph from George, begging her to come back to Hollywood: Jerry has also abandoned him, leaving him all alone and in charge. May decides to take the next train back. act iii. scene 3. The reception room of Glogauer Studios. George is now a big shot at Glogauer Studios. May’s arrival is followed soon by that of Jerry, who left in search of her. The three one-time vaudevillians rejoice at their reunion. Glogauer enters in a rage: George has bought two thousand airplanes (from a very convinc- ing airplane salesman). Glogauer storms out, and it looks like the three will be fired once again. Glogauer reenters moments later with wonderful news: all the studios now want to make airplane pictures, and Glogauer Studios has cornered the market. Miss Leighton enters and tells Glogauer that a demolition team has arrived with orders to tear down the studio. Glogauer turns to a smiling, confident George and decides to let them go ahead: George can apparently do no wrong.

 “A Loving Look at That Craziness” An Interview with Director Mark Rucker

By Dan Rubin

Over the last decade Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker has dazzled a.c.t. audi- ences with Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet, The Rainmaker, and The Beard of Avon, which are just three of his many directing credits at regional theaters around the country. But his first love wasn’t theater—it was film. “In sixth grade,” Rucker remembers, “when other kids were memorizing baseball stats, I memorized the performances that had been nominated and won .” Perhaps that had something to do with his Southern Californian upbringing and close proximity to Hollywood. During high school, his passion for the silver screen led him to theater, in part as a result of his admiration for the work of George Kaufman and Moss Hart. Film, however, was never far from his mind. After graduating from college, he worked for a Hollywood “breakdown service”: “We did casting breakdowns. Agents get this list every day telling them what movies are being cast and descriptions of what the casting direc- tors are looking for. I was a field rep, which means I went around and made sure that the casting directors were all happy. At one point my beat was mgm, Fox, and Paramount. Every day, I would drive onto the lots and park and walk around, so I got a taste . . . it was still a time when you could get a feel for what the studios were like. Walking around mgm was amazing.” While studying directing in graduate school, Rucker started experimenting with blurring the line between film and theater. For his thesis, he adapted the screenplay of one of his favorite films, (based on the play by Kaufman and and starring and Ginger Rogers), for live performance. The play shares some of the same anti-Hollywood sentiments Kaufman contributed to Once in a Lifetime, Rucker explains: “It’s about these girls who are struggling to be actresses. One of the actresses goes to Hollywood and becomes a star and then comes back to be on the legitimate stage and fails miserably. It’s all about how the ones who stayed are better than the one who went away.” Unfortunately, two days before the production opened, the studio that owned the film sent Rucker a cease-and-desist order. They eventually allowed the production to play for one run, but he had to sign away all the work he had done on the adaptation. “It’s one of my passions (one that I’m not sure will ever be fully realized) to find a way

 Katharine Hepburn with Ginger Rogers, , and the cast of Stage Door (1937). Courtesy Jerry Murbach, Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. to get these early screenplays and make them stage plays,” says Rucker. “But the studios aren’t very interested, so it’s complicated.” Rucker looks back on most of his own brief time as a Hollywood director with smil- ing chagrin. “There was a short period when my film [Die, Mommie, Die! (2003)] was in the Sundance Film Festival that I was getting called to go out and pitch for movies. Mostly people wanted to hear my ideas for movies, but I didn’t really have any: ‘I’d like to do a set on a tropical island. Give 20 million dollars.’ I did get to pitch to direct the movie of Rent, but I was terrible at it. You’re in these rooms full of guys who are about your own age, and they’re all looking at you, and it just feels horrible. I was really, really uncomfortable. My nadir was when I pitched to direct a movie called Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, and I studied all the films of Rob Schneider. I went in and pitched: ‘Deuce Bigalow: Everyman. Blah blah blah. Yada yada yada.’ There was dead silence, and then they asked, ‘How about the chase scene?’ That’s when I got out.” He escaped the movie business, perhaps, but not his affection for the form. We spoke with Rucker two weeks before he began rehearsals for Once in a Lifetime about his plans to bring his love of old-time Hollywood to a.c.t. audiences.

 You’re drawn to early 20th-century American culture and entertainment—both film and theater. Can you speak to what you find attractive about this period? I’ve been fascinated by early Hollywood since I was a little boy. I’m not sure why, but I know that I became obsessed enough to pore over the TV Guide for reruns of movies that I thought were interesting and then set my alarm to wake me up in the middle of the night so I could watch them. (This was before you could record shows.) Anything from the beginning of talkies, mostly classic Hollywood films of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. There was something magical about those great black-and-white Hollywood films, something deeply attractive; it had something to do with female movie stars. I had a real empathy with them. I realized at a certain point that I was deeply, deeply attracted to Katharine Hepburn made in middle age, where she often played a schoolteacher or spinster, like The Rainmaker. There was something about a little gay boy and those single women: a wistful sadness that I totally connected to.

How did you first come across Once in a Lifetime? I fell in love with Kaufman and Hart when I was a boy, too. It was when I read Act One, Moss Hart’s autobiography, which is really one of the best autobiographies ever written. It intensely chronicles the making of Once in a Lifetime; that’s how I first became inter- ested in the play. Then we did—as a lot of high schools did 150 years ago—[Kaufman and Hart’s] You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner, and I acted in them. When I was in high school I also went on a theater trip to London and saw a pro- duction of Once in a Lifetime at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was really, really fun, but also pretty terrible. It was the first time I realized British actors weren’t gods and goddesses; they did bad American accents. It’s interesting that I discovered that with this play. I brought back the poster and framed it and put it in my bedroom and was, from that moment on, obsessed with Once in a Lifetime. When I started directing, nobody would produce Once in a Lifetime because it’s too big. If a theater is going to do a big play, it’s usually going to be a well-known classic, like Shakespeare. So these American plays from the ’20s and ’30s don’t get done. I’ve worked on Once in a Lifetime twice, but both times with students: first with undergraduates at the University of Southern California [usc] and then last year with our m.f.a. students here at a.c.t. That’s one of the reasons it’s great to have a conservatory program; the same thing happened with The Rainmaker [in 2007]. A project can be done in the Conservatory and everyone gets excited about it and so we decide to do it on the mainstage.

How did the m.f.a. Program production differ from the undergraduate production at usc? The usc production had a cast of 40. It was huge. It was much more interesting when I did it with the m.f.a. students here, because I had the enormous challenge of doing it with 12 actors. We also had a smaller budget, which forced me to be much more

 inventive and think about how to double and triple the roles and make that a part of the design of the show. It was very fun in the m.f.a. production to help doubled-up actors find distinctive characters by looking at some of the iconic performers from the period. With YouTube, it’s so much easier than when you had to rent the movie; with YouTube you can look at clips and find character actors whose performances you find interesting. I was able to say to the actor playing Helen Hobart, “Go on YouTube and look up My Man Godfrey,” which is a film in which they get a forgotten man (a bum) and turn him into the butler of this rich family. The mother of that family is this archetypal, melodi- cally voiced society matron: nonstop chatter. So I asked the actor to look at her and try to imitate that woman as a way in for Helen Hobart. The actor who played Lawrence Vail spent a week doing because that, for some reason, spoke to him; as we expanded, he ended up doing a Cary Grant–ish Woody Allen. Tapping into those voices was a way of making double or triple roles interesting and fun for actors. I’m hoping we’re going to do that even more so with this production.

Do you hope that this production will encourage people—your actors and your audience—to look at old films? It’s interesting to me that this play was actually the first in a series of plays that were critiques of Hollywood. Kaufman had a famous disdain of Hollywood, and there was a time when a lot of his plays were about Hollywood versus Broadway: the actor of sub- stance and integrity stayed on Broadway, and the sellout went to Hollywood. Same with the writers. And certainly Once in a Lifetime is all about what happens when people go to Hollywood. But over the years the play has become a loving look at that craziness. It’s not that mean-spirited, really.

Can you speak to how Once in a Lifetime resonates today? Because I went through this myself, I have a soft spot for that time in your life when you’re almost 30 and you realize you’ve gotten out of school and you’re in the world and you see that you have a choice to do something—or not. I was literally going to go either to grad school for directing or to travel agent school. That’s when I shook things up. I, like Jerry and May, was struggling, doing lesser stuff. At a certain point, I said, “I’m quitting my day job. I’m going to survive by doing theater or I’m not going to do theater anymore.” I almost didn’t survive, but I got by for a couple of years assistant-directing and doing summer theater. It was rough. The play is about these three characters realizing that they have a chance to grab this opportunity, or they can just let it go by. “We’re not superstars, and we’re not going to make it. Do you want to take a chance at doing something huge or just keep going around on this dying circuit?” Those are their options. I empathize with that, and it’s true of a lot of artists. It might not happen at age 29 or 30, but at some point it does.

 Can you talk a little about the use of video in this production? The use of video onstage is not new. I was using it ten years ago at usc. But the way it’s integrated has changed. When video first started happening in theater, I always felt like the play is over here [he gestures to the side] and those big screens are up there doing something else. We’ve become more sophisticated, so video has become more integrated into the storytelling and the atmosphere and it’s not necessarily like you’re watching supertitles. I feel like this production is a.c.t. finally fully embracing video. When a.c.t. produced Brief Encounter [in fall 2009], everyone was like, “Oh, yeah, of course.” In this production, there’s a little window in a New York apartment through which you’ll see video of architecture outside and lights moving. You’ll see the desert moving outside the railroad car during the cross-country train rides to and from Hollywood. And we’re storyboarding Gingham and Orchids [the film-within-the-play] and shooting it ourselves nearby. There will be a screen that drops down between each scene. We’ll show clips that will start with existing material (from The Jazz Singer, , and this clip our video designer, Alex Nichols, found); then it’s going to shift to our own screen tests with our actors, and then to the Gingham and Orchids movie. We’re hoping to use video creatively. In act ii, a door opens and we see the filmed performance of a bellboy, and then it closes. The top of act iii has the most characters onstage at one time, in the cacophony of the soundstage—there are 40 roles but we only have 15 actor bodies—so we want to use a combination of video and sound to fill it. We may also use mannequins for the 12 Schlepkin brothers and some of the electricians and bridesmaids.

How does the scenic design interact with the video? Dan Ostling is an amazing designer. It’s an old-fashioned play, and in a way he’s done a nod to old-fashioned design. I like it because you never see that anymore. The very first scene in New York is monotone and really small, really downstage. It’s just this little space. And then the second scene, the train, is low and long. But when we get to Hollywood, everything explodes. Then on the soundstage we open up the stage and you see the back of the train and the back of the hotel room—the sets from other scenes in the play—it’s all there. We expose the theater so you can see all the stored drops.

Is there anything you’re excited to revisit in this production? What we didn’t get to do in the m.f.a. production was flesh out the character changes. There are some incredibly quick changes that I am hoping will make the audiences say, “Wow!” We had some train wrecks when we only had 12 actors—that’s why we have 15 now.

 Mixing Media An Interview with Video Designer Alexander V. Nichols

By Amy Krivohlavek

The screen is an object of fascination for the fame-chasing characters of Once in a Lifetime, so it seemed perfectly natural for director Mark Rucker to incorporate film into the play’s design. To summon up a dynamic landscape that includes elements of both theater and film, his production will be accompanied by film excerpts and animated digital backgrounds—both newly created and borrowed from classic films—that will not only stand alone as clips but will also lend dimensional, “moving” atmospheres to many of the scenes. Although it is certainly no longer a “new” technology, the use of video projection in the theater is still an evolving art form—and exciting new terrain for imaginative designers. At the forefront of this brave new video world is Alexander V. Nichols, who worked with Rucker last year as the projection designer on Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet. In that production, his videos were of the more atmospheric kind, conjuring the storms of Hurricane Katrina to simmer ominously in the background. Over the last two years, he has also worked at a.c.t. as the lighting designer on November and last season’s The Homecoming (on which he collaborated with Once in a Lifetime scenic designer Dan Ostling and costume designer Alex Jaeger) and Clybourne Park. Nichols began his artistic life in the ballet, and it was a family affair: his mother danced with Ballet and his sister was a principal dancer there for 30 years. So it’s no surprise that he launched his career by lighting dance productions, including work at such companies as San Francisco Ballet, American Repertory Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, ODC, and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, where he is resident “visual designer.” As a student at San Francisco State, he dabbled in stage work, but his “real big break” came at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where he created projections for a production of The Life of Galileo in 1999. “That got me attached to the ability in theater to really work and refine things,” says Nichols. “In dance you sort of run into the theater with two days to get a piece up on its feet, and then it’s fixed for the rest of eternity. But in theater you actually get a process: you sit there through tech rehearsals and previews and work on the design aspects of the piece.”

 Photo of the set model for act I, scene 1 (the rented New York room), of Once in a Lifetime by scenic designer Dan Ostling

While Nichols’s theater credits span the globe, including work on Broadway, off Broadway, and regionally, he describes his previous work with film as “peripheral . . . more video-esque theatrical projects instead of film, per se.” But his cinematic career has also included innovative interdisciplinary pieces. In LIFE: A Journey Through Time, which has been presented at Alice Tully Hall and at the Barbicon Center in London, his video design compliments the work of National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting and the orchestrations of composer Philip Glass. Although his lighting work has naturally evolved into video design, Nichols still approaches video cautiously. “I believe in the theater,” he says. “I’m not one of these guys who wants video to do everything. [But] it can add dimension or motion—it’s a great design tool. If you have that in your arsenal as a scenic or a lighting designer, you can approach a lot of different ways of achieving effects. So it’s a major tool in theater. It’s just all the more important to find balance in the work and to remember that theater audiences usually like [watching live] actors more than they like watching screens.” Nichols spoke to us about his video work on Once in a Lifetime shortly before rehears- als began at a.c.t.

 How has your experience lighting dance influenced your lighting design for theater? Coming from a dance background, you think about lighting a little differently. I’m not saying that theater designers don’t think this way, but in dance you only think about shaping the space. You don’t really think about lighting faces, for example—you just make it interesting. It’s nice having that background to free myself from the rigors of standard theatrical lighting. Don’t put that in there, though—other lighting designers will kill me. [Laughter]

Well, you’re not naming any names . . . Okay. Actually the guy doing lighting for Lifetime is one of my favorites—Jim Ingalls. He’s fabulous. He was the lighting designer for Marcus, so we’ve worked together like this before.

How were you brought into Lifetime? Mark was the director of Marcus last year, and we had a great time working together on the show. He has a very filmic approach to this piece, and his idea is to incorporate video quite a bit. Marcus had a more atmospheric approach to the projections, while Lifetime will be a bit more content-oriented.

Were you already familiar with the play or the 1932 film version? No. And I still haven’t seen the film, but I read the script. I probably should see the film. [Laughter] It would be interesting, but we’re really just trying to do our own thing.

What was your reaction to the play? Well, I think it’s a lot of fun. I love that era, and the way Mark wants to approach this production is as a mix of film and theater, which plays into the whole transition films were going through at the time, from silent films to talkies. We’ll be playing the two mediums against each other. There are a lot of opportunities to dig out some great archival footage of those early films and get them up onstage, which will give audiences a good example of what that era was.

Can you talk more about how you will incorporate film into the production? There are seven scenes in the play, and each will have a lead-in film clip, some pulled from late ’20s or early ’30s film, that will include relevant footage that echoes where we’re at in the play. The other transitions or introductions to scenes will be clips that we actually shoot ourselves. We’re also going to do a location shoot for a movie that one of the actresses is supposedly starring in called Gingham and Orchids, and we’ll be filming that and then treating it to look like a film of that era. And the sets themselves all have elements that can be projected on, whether it’s a window, or let’s say someone opens a door—there might be a screen deck [with moving

 Photo of the set model for act I, scene 2 (the pullman car), of Once in a Lifetime by scenic designer Dan Ostling images] there [so it looks like there is action through that doorway]. We’re going to be incorporating film imagery into the scenes themselves. So there’s this strange combina- tion of real scenery with an almost filmic quality. There’s one scene where they’re on the soundstage shooting part of the movie, and we’re going to have moments where we project someone walking across the stage. Fun little non sequiturs. I think it will be neat—it plays with what you’re looking at. Are you looking at film? Or are you looking at the stage? It will happen in a very subtle way, but I think we’ll have some fun.

So it sounds like, from an audience perspective, we get to experience film on its own terms and then a hybrid of film and theater during the scenes? Yes, that’s correct. Although during the scenes there’s never anything that the actors interact with—it’s more just environmental.

So the actors won’t ever be talking to a filmed person? No, not at all. We’re not doing any of that kind of thing. [Laughter]

What have you been doing to prepare for this project? Watching lots of old films and researching the development of sound in the movies to try and dig up more insight into the mentality of the moviemakers—and also the actors who were making this transition into the talkies who couldn’t, maybe, speak well. [Laughter] They’re big silent-film stars, but now they have to talk on film—and they don’t have good voices. It’s kind of funny to think about, and it’s been interesting to find films that exemplify that dilemma and also ones that reflect the arc of the play itself.

 There are also some video shoots I’m preparing for. There’s one scene that’s on a train that’s moving across the country from New York City to Hollywood. The characters are on there for about 20 minutes, talking on the train, and we need to show the landscape going by. So I’m heading up to Nevada to drive along an empty road somewhere to shoot it for those windows on the train.

Were there any films in particular that jumped out to you in terms of their aesthetics? We’re starting off the show with a clip from The Jazz Singer. I had never seen that, and it’s really our iconic piece of film in terms of style, its content, and its importance to the production as a whole. I’ve also been watching some great classic films, like Bing Crosby’s Going Hollywood and Hollywood Party, which stars Jimmy Durante and has a great cameo by Laurel and Hardy. And studio documentaries—there are some great ones about 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. that give you a sense of the backstage life, culture, and mystique of Hollywood movie studios of the era.

Why do you think film has a place in this production? What will it do to transform the material? To me it’s more of a reference point—the [filmed] transitions are a reference point to help people understand what this era was. Everyone has seen bits or pieces of these films in some form or another, but they don’t necessarily relate them to what was going on with this transition and this flow of talent into Hollywood. A large portion of your subscriber base is going to love this exploration into this historical moment—the movies were so fun and over the top. Secondly, the environmental elements just, I think, help us feel the mix of reality and make-believe, so to speak. Film does that, too—it’s shaped our culture in many ways. It’s shaped us through its interpretation of life. Using film within the scenes is a nod to that idea.

It seems to be such an affectionate nod. And very nostalgic. Yes. And this play just has a simple sense of humor. I think it’s a feel-good show in a lot of ways.

 Going Hollywood By Michael Paller

When Moss Hart wrote the first draft of the play that became known as Once in a Lifetime, vaudeville was, if not dead, on its last legs. The causes were multiple: the incur- sions of both silent and talking movies; the rise of radio, on which audiences could hear vaudeville stars for free; and a change in audiences’ taste towards somewhat more sophis- ticated entertainment. The Depression put the last nail in the coffin. Hart had never worked in vaudeville himself, but he was captivated by it at an early age when, despite the Bronx family’s Dickensian poverty, his Aunt Kate would take him to the Alhambra Theater to see the latest acts. Hart shared an important trait with vaudevillians. Even in its heyday—the late teens to the early ’20s—except for the headliners, life was tough. If they were lucky enough to work, vaudevillians were always on the road living in second- and third-rate hotels or boarding houses, eating fourth-rate food. The shabby theaters in the small towns where they played four shows a day (five on Saturday and Sunday) had few amenities— vermin-free, heated dressing rooms only occasionally among them—and audiences were less sophisticated, patient, and polite than many of their urban counterparts. To survive the life, a performer needed optimism: that particular American brand that woke you up thinking that today might be different, that you’d get the big break that would sweep you out of the small time into the big time, to the Palace Theatre on Broadway, the height of vaudevillian aspiration. It’s that optimism that propels Once in a Lifetime’s May, George, and Jerry, three down-on-their luck vaudevillians, from to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. Hart shared that optimism, although it was often hard-won and interrupted by bouts of crippling depression. Existing on the fringes of show business, by 1929 when he was 25, he’d directed 59 productions of 29 plays in amateur theaters around New York, according to his biographer, Steven Bach. He staged plays in ymhas in and Jersey City, and at Jewish summer camps in the Catskills and Vermont where he labored as social director for four summers, staging and writing plays, musicals, and revues. He directed several productions of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, casting himself as Jones’s right-hand man, Smithers (and once playing the title role in ), experi- ences that found their way into Once in a Lifetime. By the end of that summer, his optimism was battling the creeping conviction that Broadway, fame, and fortune were forever out of reach. While playing Oswald in an

 George S. Kaufman (left) and Moss Hart (1939). Photograph by Maynard Clark, courtesy James A. Michener Art Museum. amateur production of Ghosts, he wrote a play about three vaudevillians who were also staring failure in the face. With a sense of Darwinian fatalism, he called it Every Man for Himself. His resilient native optimism took hold, however, and he renamed it Once in a Lifetime. This was the play’s title when it came into the hands of George S. Kaufman. With a list of collaborators that included Mark Connelly, Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner, , and George and , in a dozen years Kaufman had created a string of hits that formed the core of popular American comedy—all while he was working as chief drama critic and editor of the theater section of . He signed onto Once in a Lifetime as director; Hart, who received an advance of $1.69 against future royalties, was contracted as the work’s sole playwright. Kaufman was 40 in 1930 (while Hart listed his age as 23) and a man of many idiosyncrasies: he stretched out on the floor and played with real or imagined pieces of lint as he worked; disliking physical contact he would never shake hands (he’d wave his fingers at you instead) and washed his own compulsively. His diet was ascetic except for the fudge he loved to make, which his young collaborator, who found it inedible, snuck

 to the bathroom and flushed down the toilet. He had an acerbic wit, an instinct for the underdog, and a knack for puncturing hypocrites and phonies, talents that served him well as the author of such earlier show business plays as The Butter and Egg Man and and as the director of The Front Page. He hated any expression of sentimentality, and love stories were banned from his plays. This was also a weakness, as Kaufman, who admitted to a lack of warmth, knew. It would be a problem he and Hart would face with Lifetime. As they worked through the script, Kaufman realized that the play needed considerable structural and plot help. He began contributing dialogue: so much so that the original contracts were redrawn and Kaufman was awarded second billing as cowriter. He would also play the part of Lawrence Vail, the playwright brought by Glogauer Studios to Hollywood—“one of a shipment of sixteen.” By the time Lifetime began previews in Atlantic City, a significant problem became evident. For the first act and a half, audiences laughed and leaned forward. For the second act and a half, they sat back in silence. Hart, who had no fear of sentiment, realized that the trio of vaudevillians weren’t sympathetic enough to sustain an audience’s interest. They came across as too cynical; every comeback was too snappy. Kaufman was about to bow out of the project altogether when Hart suggested revisions that provided the missing warmth. May’s feelings for Jerry, her distrust of Hollywood’s glitter, and the plot complications prompted by these emotions were late contributions by Hart that lent the characters the human dimension they’d lacked. After two more rounds of tryouts in Brighton Beach and , a raucous third act set in a Hollywood nightclub—inserted after Brighton Beach—was junked for a quieter, two-character scene that emphasized the human cost of “going Hollywood,” as well as a reminder that Hollywood wasn’t about to change for the sake of a little honesty or personal integrity. The new scene was added just before the play opened in New York on September 24, 1930. Hart’s humor, which Bach describes as “a means of embrace” (as opposed to Kaufman’s, which tended to push you away), was what the play needed. Lifetime was a hit and played more than 400 performances. In an opening-night curtain speech, Kaufman, who usually kept the extent of his personal generosity a secret, stepped to the footlights and said, “I would like this audience to know that 80 percent of this play is Moss Hart.” Lifetime’s buoyant optimism and new appeal to sentiment were part of its success; Kaufman’s blunt finger in the eye of the rich and pompous was another. Also, as Bach points out, audiences responded to the play as a comment on the Depression, which after a year was biting hard into every aspect of American life. Unemployment, which had been 3.2 percent in 1929, reached 8.7 in 1930, on its way to 24.9 in 1933. Hart and Kaufman thought they had written a satire on Hollywood, but audiences took Vail’s denunciation of the movies as a wasteful, shameless industry run by incompetents as a comment on American big business in general. Audiences were also surprised to learn that the authors of this Hollywood satire had never been to Hollywood. Hart went for the first time at the end of 1930 to codirect

 the West Coast production of Lifetime as well as to play Vail. He performed the role in Los Angeles and San Francisco to no acclaim whatsoever before replacing Kaufman in the role in New York. When he returned to Hollywood in 1932 to write for mgm, his experiences, while less nightmarish than Vail’s, were hardly what the writer of now two Broadway hits (the other was the musical revue , written with ) was accustomed to. He rewrote other people’s scripts and had his rewritten by others. He turned down an offer to write a screenplay for The Wizard of Oz, suggesting that it be made into a musical. Hart went on to have a fairly successful Hollywood career, writing screenplays for Gentlemen’s Agreement, Hans Christian Andersen, and the 1954 /James Mason remake of A Star Is Born. But he never liked Hollywood. “You sat at your typewriter and hated yourself,” he wrote in Stage magazine, “but in the evening you could leave the studio and forget it until the next morning. You didn’t eat it and drink it and sleep it the way you did the theater.” Kaufman disdained Hollywood and limited his activity there to a screenplay for A Night at the Opera, a favor to his friends the Marx Brothers. Although several of their plays were made into films, including Once in a Lifetime in 1932, such is the way of Hollywood that neither playwright worked on any of them. Nevertheless, one significant filmmaker took note of Lifetime. Shortly after the play opened, Sergei Eisenstein purchased the Soviet rights to the play. The director of Battleship Potemkin had just served six months in the prison of Paramount Studios, which had felt like six years in Siberia. Eisenstein told the press that the play’s take on Hollywood was “underwritten,” because “truth, in this instance, at least, is stranger than fiction and far more absurd.” The play, he said, was less farce than “grim realism.” Not so grim, however, as the Soviet Union, which in the end treated him even worse. His battles with the censors and bureaucracy might have left him dreaming of palm trees, kidney-shaped pools, and the numbskull studio executives who floated in them. He never did produce Once in a Lifetime.

Moss Hart on writing Once in a Lifetime I did not consider that my complete ignorance of Hollywood or of the making of motion pictures was any bar whatever to my writing about both with the utmost authority, and I proceeded to do so with the invaluable help of that renowned trade paper, Variety. . . . Between the lines of the special language used by its writ- ers to put a declarative sentence into simple English, a cunning eye could catch an enveloping glimpse of the wonderful absurdity of the Hollywood scene. . . . The airiest comedies, the most delightful ones to watch, are usually the ones in which the author has shared some of the audience’s delight beforehand, and there was no question that I had had a very good time indeed in writing Once in a Lifetime—a good enough time to make me thoroughly suspicious of it. I had no idea whether it was very good or no good at all.

—Act One: An Autobiography (1959)

 Entertainment Revolution Video Killed the Vaudeville Star by Emily Hoffman

Before there were movies, there was vaudeville. Loud, frenetic, scrappy, clever, in turns hokey and spectacular: vaudeville was America’s favorite pastime from 1881, when Tony Pastor opened his 14th Street Theatre in Tammany Hall on ’s , until 1932, when Broadway’s Palace Theatre—the zenith of the vaudeville circuit— became a movie house. Vaudeville’s origins were in the mid-19th-century music hall—a place men went for beer and bawdy entertainment—and the blackface amusements of the , but it took off as an art form when it cleaned up its act. Pastor, an enterprising variety and minstrel performer from New York, knew he could double his audience and his profits if he could create a variety show suitable for women. So he opened a house for clean entertainments and banned the drinking of alcohol. Other theater owners followed suit, and by 1900 there were two thousand vaudeville theaters in the country, forming a highly organized circuit of small-time, medium-time, and big-time venues all managed by the United Booking Office in New York. If you bought a ticket to a vaudeville show, you were apt to see anything and every- thing. Modern-day vaudevillian Trav s. d. writes in No Applause—Just Throw Money:

[Vaudeville] is its own form, with its own laws. One minute it is a con- cert; the next a freak show; the next a one-act play; the next a gymnastics display. . . . Over the course of a couple of hours the vaudeville audience might encounter singers, comedians, musicians, dancers, trained animals, female-impersonators, acrobats, magicians, hypnotists, jugglers, contor- tionists, mind readers, and a wide variety of strange, uncategorizable performers usually lumped into the category of “nuts.”

Vaudeville gave birth to the notion of “stars” as we now know them: people remembered their names and read about them in magazines; kids collected playing cards bearing their pertinent stats. The industry’s troubles snuck up slowly. First there were the higher-class Broadway revues that started eating up the best talent. Then there was radio. Radio ate up talent, too, but, more importantly, it began to change the way Americans consumed entertain-

 ment; people became less willing to leave their homes when they could listen to the best rou- tines in the comfort of their living rooms. Then there was film. At first, moving pic- tures weren’t seen as a threat by vaudeville managers. In fact, silent film and vaudeville co- existed rather peacefully for a while. Vaudeville actors performed in presentation acts—live prologues for films—and short films were interspersed on vaudeville bills for another bit of variety. Vaudevillians started performing in silent films, but they also continued onstage. Film had the economic advantage over vaudeville, though—managers only had to pay the performers once, and they could show a film in as many places as they wanted, as many times as they wanted. (They could even vary the speed of the film, depending on how many times they wanted to screen it on a given evening. In fact, there are major debates among film scholars as to how fast the early silents were meant to be played.) Hiring vaudeville performers to pres- ent their acts live onstage began to seem expen- The Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles (1894), sive, and the business began to suffer. by The Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati & New York. Theatrical Poster Collection, It was the talkies, though, that really killed . vaudeville—and the silent pictures, while they were at it. Start to finish, it took seven years. In 1925, after being turned down by a number of the major studios, Western Electric managed to sell the Vitaphone to Warner Bros. Vitaphone was a “sound-on-disc” talk- ing-film process that mechanically synchronized a phonograph record to a film projec- tor, so that recorded sound could be timed perfectly (more or less) with a screen image. The other studios were understandably skeptical; for years engineers had been working on synchronization technology, but all efforts had failed. The illusion that a voice is emanating from a person onscreen is a fragile one: the tolerance for misalignment is less than one frame of projection time. Warner Bros., though, was a minor studio with major dreams. In a risky attempt to diversify their business and compete with the larger studios, the Warners acquired the rights to the Vitaphone technology and established a new subsidiary to exploit it. They positioned Vitaphone not as yet another half-baked attempt at a newfangled talking-film machine, but as a “new musical device” that would use phonograph technology to bring great performances to the masses. The great successes in the early days were Vitaphone shorts, a means of bringing world-class entertainment to every small town in America. The program leading up to

 and in Don Juan (1926). Courtesy Jerry Murbach, Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. the first Vitaphone feature, Don Juan, for instance, boasted the New York Philharmonic, Mischa Elman playing Dvořák’s “Humoresque,” singing the “Caro nome” aria from Rigoletto, Efrem Zimbalist playing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, and more. It wasn’t all high art, though; many vaudevillians sold their routines to the pictures— sometimes hastily, for once a routine had been seen on film, it was basically used up. Vitaphone shorts were a huge hit with audiences, and the ability to import high-quality entertainment at a fraction of the cost of hiring live performers proved a decisive blow to vaudeville. Vaudevillians were not the only ones put out of work; the live accompanists of silent films also found themselves obsolete. The integration of sound into feature-length films proceeded more haltingly, and with more mixed results. Early Vitaphone films are peculiar to the modern eye and ear. Sound was treated as a novelty effect, much like the early days of Technicolor, when only select scenes—like a movie’s grand finale—would appear in color. The silent film was an art form with its own rules and logic; it had never been simply a picture without sound, and so adding sound wasn’t as aesthetically straightforward as we might now

 imagine. The first sound films used sound as entertainment within the film, rather than for naturalistic dialogue. The Jazz Singer, starring , hailed in movie lore as the first talking picture, reserves sound primarily for Jolson’s musical performances. Jolson’s improvised dialogue takes up a mere two minutes of the feature-length film—the rest of it is a conventional silent. And while Jolson’s first spoken line in the film seems fabulously appropriate to its historical context (“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he exclaims over the recorded applause for the number he’s just sung, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”), this tag was an expected part of his customary stage patter. The Jazz Singer was called a triumph for Jolson, whose star power carried the show, but no review of opening night hailed the film as revolutionary. It was quite successful in its opening weeks, but the initial grosses weren’t any higher than the earlier dialogue-free Vitaphone film Don Juan (1926), or the silent hit Wings (1927), in theaters at the same time. The Jazz Singer was released nationally in 1928 and was outgrossed that year by gangster part-talkie Tenderloin in Chicago, the celebrated Wings in Los Angeles, and the all-talkie The Lights of New York in San Francisco. But the film gained momentum over the course of 1928, in part because of a success- ful marketing strategy: whenever a house became wired for sound, The Jazz Singer was the first picture shown. So, across the country, the arrival of Jolson and The Jazz Singer became synonymous with the arrival of sound. Within the year, the legend of The Jazz Singer’s earth-shattering premiere was rou- tinely referenced by the press—and it’s this rather overwrought mythology that Hart and Kaufman caricature in Once in a Lifetime. The Saturday Evening Post claimed, “[It] opened in New York, and at eleven o’clock that night the leaders of the motion picture industry, who stood cheering in the theater, knew that their business had been turned upside down. All the leaders were there.” In fact, even the Warner brothers, who had pro- duced The Jazz Singer, were not present, as had passed away the night before. In the two years following the release of The Jazz Singer, all the major studios awk- wardly felt their way into talking pictures. They knew that audiences liked sound, but they weren’t sure what kind of sound, or how much of it. The films of 1928 and 1929 are a treasure trove of missteps: stilted faux-British dialogue, melodramatic courtroom drama, long static shots (the cameras’ motors were so noisy that they had to be kept still in a locked box), and “goat glands”—silent films to which sound effects were added after the fact. Many studios also instated a practice of dual release, distributing both a silent and a sound version of each new film. They soon discovered, however, that the sound versions were always more popular. By the 1929–30 season, the way of the future was clear: the number of talkies pro- duced far outstripped the number of silents, and many of the artistic kinks had been worked out. Sound became integrated into the plot and formal devices of films: the soundtrack was modulated (if a door closed, the sound would get quieter), and dia- logue became crucial to the narrative (an important plot point might be overheard in a supposedly secret conversation, for instance, putting the audience in the position of

 Eugenie Besserer and Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer (1927). Courtesy Jerry Murbach, Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. eavesdropper). Although unwired theaters existed in the most rural areas for a few more years, by the early ’30s only Charlie Chaplin was still making silent films—and even he couldn’t hold out for long. By 1932, the Palace Theatre on Broadway had transitioned from a traditional two-a- day vaudeville house to four performances a day—to make up for the lower admissions price they had to charge to stay competitive with pictures. By November of that year, the Palace had become a movie theater, marking the end of an era. Vaudeville disappeared, but vaudevillians remained. Early films are filled with them: , , Judy Garland, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, w. c. Fields, Fanny Brice. Show business, however, changed forever; the Los Angeles studios were a world away from the old circuits. As these intrepid performers searched for new stardom on the silver screen, the life on the road they’d left behind—the third-rate hotels, the run-down towns, the sleazy managers—drew around itself the golden haze of nostalgia.

This article is indebted to extensive research conducted by A.C.T. dramaturgy fellow Zachary Moull. SOURCES Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Morduant Hall, “Vitaphone Stirs as Talking Movie; New Device Synchronizing Sound with Action Impresses with Its Realistic Effects; Noted Musicians Heard Provides Orchestral Accompaniment to Photoplay Don Juan, with John Barrymore,” The New York Times (August 7, 1926); Mark Knowles, Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Company, Inc., 2002); Trav S. D., No Applause—Just Throw Money (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2005).

 Terrible Mike and the Transition to Talkies By Dan Rubin

This is a story of Terrible Mike, the capricious genie of Hollywood, who is a Pain in the Larynx to half of filmdom, and a Tin Santa Claus to the other half!—who gives a Yoo-Hoo-There Leading Man a Voice like a Bull, and makes a Cauliflower-Eared Heavy talk like Elfin Elbert, the Library Lizard—and who has raised more hell in movieland than a clara bow in a theological seminary. Why, you can’t even begin to write the half of the story of Terrible Mike and what he’s done. You can only take a heap of ha-ha’s here, and boo-hoo’s there, laughs and sobs, heart-leaps and heart-aches, sudden wealth and sud- den ruin, funny things and tragic things and howcum things—and try to string ’em together into some semblance of yarn. —Harry Lang, “The Microphone—The Terror of the Studios,” Photoplay (1929)

In the pinwheel days following the 1926 release of Don Juan and the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer, movie studios scrambled. No one was prepared for the new—and imper- fect—technology that was revolutionizing every facet of their industry. It would be years before Hollywood regained its composure. It was clear to most that talking films would become the new standard, but silent films did not simply vanish. For one thing, studios had invested too much in those already in production to throw them out; for another, it would take time to produce new talkies. Meanwhile, there was a movie-going public that needed movies to go to—even if they were silent. Moreover, explains William K. Everson in American Silent Film, “The sound films of 1928 and early 1929 were made . . . to make money . . . to cash in on the sheer novelty of sound . . . [and] to see just what could or couldn’t be done in the new medium.” This moment, in which everything was necessarily experimental and not necessarily of superior quality, gave silent film stars a brief respite in which to protect their careers. In 1927, William Fox of Fox Studios admitted that “many of the present players who may still be popular [in five years] will have to take courses in elocution.” Movie

 studios established vocal training departments. mgm built a two-story building for its teachers and engaged University of Southern California to “test and repair weak spots in voices,” writes historian Donald Crafton in The Talkies. Some studios even “resorted to newfangled devices for quantifying vocal properties in an effort to sidestep subjective judgment.” But nothing about these assessments was objective: in the early quest for the perfect voice, American regionalisms were taboo, drawls and twangs abhorrent to the expert ear. Preferable was the sophistication of British English (especially when nuanced with Irish overtones), to which genteel American theater critics had grown accustomed to hearing onstage. All foreign accents—and there were many in Hollywood at the time—were to be sanded away and polished over. Many vocal training programs were shams, and even those that thought themselves legitimate did not ultimately serve their students well: favoritism for the British- accented speech of the New York stage was based in an elitism not shared by film audi- ences. The crisp enunciation required to project dialogue to the back rows of theaters proved inappropriate for the intimacy of cinema, and elocution quickly became a joke. Welford Beaton lampooned the Hollywood trend in a 1930 Saturday Evening Post article:

An actress would enter a restaurant, order a cup of coffee and wonder where she could find someone to teach her how to order a cup of coffee in a res- taurant scene on the screen. Even the fact that the waiter brought her the cup of coffee she had ordered did not make her conscious of the fact that without training she had managed to get the coffee, which, after all, is the main idea behind the order, either on or off the screen. No matter what degree of artistic perfection she achieved in uttering the order, the sum total of the returns it would bring her would be one cup of coffee, and she got that without even one lesson in elocution.

Harper’s arts critic Gilbert Seldes, in his 1928 article “The Movies Commit Suicide,” predicted a “serious displacement of moving picture favorites,” training or no: “Probably a more intelligent type of player will be required, and the young woman who looks well in a close-up or a young man who expresses ‘it’ by jumping over six-foot fences will receive less fan mail than those whose voices register warmly and clearly and who learn the new technic [sic] of acting which the talking film requires.” In his 1929 American Mercury article “The Pictorial Phonograph,” George Jean Nathan described what would happen to the romance of silent film stars in the harsh morning light of the talkies:

The yokel who once imagined that the Mlle. X., were she to whisper to him “I love you,” would sound like a melted mandolin, now hears his god- dess speak like a gum-chewing shopgirl. The worshiper of the Mlle. Y.’s seductive girlishness now beholds her, in the grim, hard light of the talkies, to be a middle-aged woman with the voice of a middle-aged woman. The farmhand who once dreamed of the Mlle. Z. as an exotic and mysterious dose of cantharides will now see her simply as a fat immigrant with derad-

 Illustration from “The Microphone—The Terror of the Studios,” Photoplay (December 1929)

enoncus and over-developed laryngeal muscles assisting in the negotiation of pidgin-English.

To a certain extent, the naysaying critics predicted correctly: many actors did not sur- vive the transition. ’s voice in the 1928 sounded like “the barkings of a lonesome puppy . . . [or someone singing] ‘In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree’ through tissue paper folded over a comb,” wrote Harry Lang in his 1929 Photoplay article “The Microphone—The Terror of the Studios”; her career noticeably slowed. Hungarian beauty Vilma Bánky worked with New York voice coach Jane Manner for six months, but she was unable to shake her accent—the last movie she made was The Rebel in 1933. Wowing producers with a screen test, Mexican actor Mona Rico had skyrocketed from being an extra to playing opposite John Barrymore in the 1929 silent Eternal Love; “but Terrible Mike has a Nordic superiority complex,” Lang revealed, and her career was just as quickly over. Two of the most notorious crashes were that of Clara

 Bow and , whose voices did not match up to the physical ideals they had famously embodied. The Dueling Cavalier sequence in Singin’ in the Rain famously sends up the fiasco that was Gilbert’s first romantic role in a talking film. In some cases, producers secretly dubbed over the voices of their stars. Mark Larkin broke this story in 1929: “There are voice doubles in Hollywood today just as there are stunt doubles. One is not so romantic as the other, perhaps, but certainly just as neces- sary.” But high-quality voice doubles were hard to find, because talented performers were reluctant to cheapen their own careers. Mostly, panicking studios abandoned their stars and sought reinforcements from the legitimate stage. In his 1930 Photoplay article “Are the Stage Actors Stealing the Screen?” Leonard Hall wrote, “Broadway’s onslaught caught the mellowing [Hollywood] stars with their guard down. . . . The first wave of theater folk to smack the screen kicked to pieces, and ruined for all time, the most cherished fallacy in the history of the motion picture—namely, that screen acting was a sacred, secret art with a magical technique all its own.” But many film actors held on—some with the grace of natural speaking skills, some relying on their origins in vaudeville and stage acting, and some with help from coaches and trainers. Despite her Swedish accent, international silent-film sensation starred in Anna Christie, which became the highest-grossing film of 1930. Likewise, the successes of Bessie Love, , and Richard Barthelmess proved that capable screen actors would always have an edge on the stage player who is unfa- miliar with camera work, noted Al Cohn: “For after all, we are still making pictures.” Howard Barnes, in his 1930 Theatre Magazine article “Talkie Town,” seconded: “The silent film workers’ ignorance of the living stage was as nothing to the theater workers’ ignorance of film technique.” And even that most famous inventor, Thomas Edison, commented in 1930 that “Talking is no substitute for the good acting we had in silent pictures.” After two years of battles between actors of screen and stage, Hall summarized the fallout:

Some older favorites, blessed with spunky hearts and fruity voices, not only held their own but forged far ahead, as in the case of the ever-glorious Swanson. The rest have wrapped their ermine about them and scuttled to their hilltop lairs. Never was the old and tried “survival of the fittest” more perfectly worked out by time and fate. Those of the stage with courage and true talent have, almost overnight, captured their share of Hollywood fame and boodle. The others, with a sockful of savings, have gone quietly back to the roaring canyons of New York.

By 1930, he continued, “Side by side, actors of the stage and of the screen work with but one increasing purpose—the best performances in their power, for the greater glory of the screen and their own advancement.”

 Performers were not the only ones who had to learn new tricks. With the arrival of talk- ies, whole new sound departments had to be created. Sound engineers (also known as tone experts, monitors, and mixer men), sequestered in soundproof booths with glass windows overlooking the action, were responsible for the quality of the sound reproduction and competed with directors for supremacy on set. Meanwhile their staffs were busy with their new, incredibly sensitive equipment. With Clara Bow’s opening “Whoopee!” in The Wild Party, she overloaded the electri- cal system; even when she spoke normally, “the delicate little bulbs quivered and died,” described Albert Boswell in his 1929 Photoplay article “Trials of the Talkies.” Clive Brook, after botching his lines on a number of takes, slapped his leg in frustration: “That slight con- cussion blew but every tube in the recording Illustration by Ken Chamberlain from machine.” In ’s emotional scene “Trials of the Talkies,” Photoplay (July 1929). Original caption: “Rubber is the at the end of The Letter, explains Cohn, “her vogue in the sound studios. The latest is voice rises and vibrates to its highest pitch. It rubber jewelry, adopted to prevent the jangle of real or make-believe jewels being sends thrills up and down the listener’s spine. picked up by the mike.” And the first time it was taken, it smashed the delicate wiring of the recording instrument. It was the same as a lightning flash burning out the electric light fuses.” And Larkin recalls a performance by in The Iron Mask:

His stentorian tones all but wrecked the recording apparatus. Before begin- ning he was cautioned by the sound engineers to speak softly. However, for Doug this was impossible. He could not get dramatic effect with his conver- sation thus cramped. As a result the first uproarious line of his speech brought the sound men pouring out of the mixing chamber like a swarm of mad hornets. Much argument ensued. Finally Earle Browne, director of dialogue, hit upon the bright idea of moving the microphone 30 feet away and turning it so that it faced away from Fairbanks.

The sensitivity of the microphones forced changes in everything from the way actors kissed to the kinds of material from which their clothes were made. In recording, writes Boswell, the suction of passionate kisses sounded like “a horse pulling its hoofs out of the mud”; each forward step of a knock-kneed actress recorded a scene-wrecking “clickety-clock, clickety-clock”; the sound of a man donning his jacket was “akin to the

 noise made by a wind machine going full pres- sure”; when a glass was placed down on a table, it was as if “someone had struck the table with a wooden mallet”; lumps of sugar dropped in coffee sounded like “a sector of the war zone in action,” and a dunked donut, like “Annette Kellerman performing a high dive”; a set of keys or loose change in a man’s coat pocket sounded like “a regiment of King Arthur’s knights in full armor crossing a drawbridge.” Just as each actor had to pass a voice test, the props division had to subject every item to a microphone test. Real jewelry clinked and clicked and had to be replaced by imitation rub- ber, as did the heels of women’s shoes, swords, and cowboy spurs. The costume department, too, had its work cut out for it. One actress had to remove her silk undergarments because they crackled too loudly. Satin made a slither- Illustration by Ken Chamberlain from “The ing sound. Glazed tarlatan, a cotton fabric once Herds of Hollywood,” Photoplay (October popular for shiny gowns, crunched like dried 1929). Original caption: “This Handsome Gentleman used to be a Big Shot in the leaves. Sets had to change because three-sided Writing Racket. Now, in his Hollywood cell, rooms produced a hollow sound and walls made he grinds out Usable Stuff for the movie mills. Here he is, badly stuck for an Idea.” of wood caused voices to bounce. Arc lights gave off sputtering fizzles, so they were replaced with incandescent bulbs. The go-to studio camera of the 1920s made a loud clamoring, so the noiseless Mitchell Company equip- ment became the new standard. Shooting locations had to be picked with care after the hum of low-flying planes, the screech of streetcar wheels, the honking of motorists, the scream of sirens, and the squawk of street peddlers ruined scene after scene. Sounds that were actually desired often had to be manufactured: Real thunder did not sound like real thunder when recorded, nor did real rain—but shaking tin and drop- ping dried peas into a tub served nicely. It was discovered that the thump of a pumpkin made a fine substitute for the fall of a dead human body. According to Marquis Busby in Photoplay’s 1930 “Strange Talkie Tricks,” at least one man made a steady career of doing farm animal impressions. Life on set changed dramatically. Hay fevers and colds—any suggestion of a sniffle— were banned (as was the slurping of soup). Gum chewing was taboo. William deMille described the new working environment in his 1929 Scribner’s article “The Screen Speaks”: “Gone are the shoutings, the music, the noises of electric lights, the hum of the cameras, and the tense directions through megaphones. Instead, a silent group of actors awaits a silent signal upon a silent stage.”

 In addition to these practical matters, suddenly studios needed dialogue for their actors to speak. Writers had been in Hollywood before the talkies writing plot scenarios and titles, but now there was infinitely more work to be done. Playwright Herman J. Mankiewicz cabled New York playwright with this invitation: “Will you accept 300 per week to work for ; all expenses paid. The 300 is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” Word did get around. Hollywood snatched up Charles MacArthur, , Robert E. Sherwood, , , Nunnally Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, , Clifford Odets, Howard Lawson, Willard Mack, Crane Wilbur, Edwin Justus Mayer, and many others, who were all confined to small cubicles with typewriters—“rows and rows of hutches,” writer p. g. Wodehouse told the Saturday Evening Post in 1929. Hall confirmed in “The Herds of Hollywood” that the life of a Hollywood writer was far from glamorous:

In the dear, dead days, they tell me, Hollywood was a sunny languid town, day-dreaming near the sapphire sea. Pictures were lazily planned and pro- duced by the pose-and-knock-off, or yawn-and-stretch method. But that’s all over now. Big Business and its hired men, The Organized Talents, have come to filmland. And the whistle blows, and the time clock is punched, and the hands lock-step into the big foundries, just as though they were making gadgets and widgets instead of your entertainment and mine.

Writers were hired to produce “usable stuff ” and diverse talents were reduced to factory workers, unidentifiable cogs in a machine. Working on short-term contracts, if they could not churn out material at the pace the studios required, they were fired. Many did not last long. “Each cubicle bears a name on the door—that of its present inmate,” said Hall. “The names are changed frequently, and washable paints are popular among the studios.”

SOURCES Howard Barnes, “Talkie Town,” Theatre Magazine (July 1930); Albert Boswell, “Trials of the Talkies,” Photoplay (July 1929); Marquis Busby, “Strange Talkie Tricks,” Photoplay (January 1930); Al Cohn, “How Talkies Are Made,” Photoplay (April 1929); Donald Crafton, The Talkies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); William K. Everson, American Silent Film (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998); Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997); Leonard Hall, “Are the Stage Actors Stealing the Screen,” Photoplay (August 1930); ibid., “The Herds of Hollywood,” Photoplay (October 1929); Harry Lang, “The Microphone—The Terror of the Studios,” Photoplay (December 1929); Mark Larkin, “The Truth About Voice Doubling,” Photoplay (July 1929); “Talking of Talkies,” Photoplay (April 1930).

 The Big Five The Studio System in Early Hollywood

By Emily Hoffman and Zachary Moull

By the mid 1920s Hollywood studios had maximized control of the film industry and, by extension, profit, through a series of mergers that led to total vertical integration. (A Paramount-made film, for instance, would be distributed through a Paramount-owned distribution company and shown in Paramount-owned movie theaters across the coun- try.) At the top were the Big Five—Paramount, Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (mgm), Fox, and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (rko)—all in fierce competition with each other. Paramount was the most profitable studio of the day. Its stars included silent-screen heartthrob , stoic western hero , and such leading ladies as , Mae West, Claudette Colbert, and . The studio produced the early Marx Brothers films (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), and it was the home of prolific director/producer Cecil B. De Mille. Warner Bros., run by brothers Jack, Harry, Albert, and Sam, won its place in the Big Five by gambling on sound films. Warner Bros. purchased the rights to the Vitaphone in 1925, using it to produce Don Juan in 1926 and The Jazz Singer in 1927. It released the two major talkie hits of 1928: the Jolson musical and the crime film The Lights of New York, which pioneered the gangster flick. In 1928 Warner Bros. announced it would be the first studio to go “all-talkie,” putting extra pressure on the other studios to get in on the game. mgm was formed through a series of mergers orchestrated by film exhibitor Marcus Loew, whose Loew’s Theatres took over production companies Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures. mgm was the major studio slowest to adopt sound; executive and production supervisor both had doubts about the new technology’s merit (“The novelty of sound has upset all reason,” said Schenck). But with its collection of such glamorous stars as Greta Garbo, , and Clark Gable, mgm became the leading studio of the 1930s and ’40s. Fox, run by entrepreneur William Fox, was well known in this era for its weekly Fox Movietone News, a revolutionary talking newsreel that used the sound-on-film system that would displace the Vitaphone. Premiering in 1927, the weekly newsreel’s coups included a recorded message from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, exclusive sound

 Two men recording Leo, the lion, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer trademark, December 18, 1928. Library of Congress. coverage of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, and a wildly popular special appear- ance by . In terms of feature-film production, Fox focused espe- cially on westerns; the studio’s first all-talkie was the 1929 Movietone film In Old Arizona. rko was the one Hollywood studio that came into being as a direct result of the sound revolution. The Radio Corporation of America (rca) brought together the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chains (once a major vaudeville circuit) and Joseph P. Kennedy’s Film Booking Offices of America (fbo) in order to create a market for the company’s new sound-on-film technology, the rca Photophone, a major competitor with Vitaphone. rko produced the famous cycle of and Ginger Rogers musicals, launched the career of Katharine Hepburn, and produced a number films star- ring Cary Grant. rko also ran a low-budget horror unit and produced a number of films noirs, (now praised by film critics), as well as King Kong and Citizen Kane. In addition to the Big Five there were a number of small, independent studios, the most powerful of which—, , and Universal Studios— were known as the Little Three.

SOURCE Joel W. Finler, The Hollywood Story (London: Wallflower Press, 2003)

 Once in a Lifetime Glossary By Zachary Moull

$128, $500, $7,500, $10,000, $100,000, The Horn & Hardart Automat (1557 $300,000 Broadway at 47th Street) became the To convert 1928 money into 2011 terms, local hangout for down-on-their-luck multiply the 1928 amount by 13.2 (u.s. vaudeville types—it served a cheap hot Department of Labor): $128 in 1928 meal just steps from the Palace Theatre, would be $1,691 today; $500 would the mecca of vaudeville that housed the be $6,606; $7,500 would be $99,089; United Booking Office. $10,000 would be $132,118; $100,000 would be $1,321,181; $300,000 would be $3,963,543.

“Outdoor advertising, 24 sheets” Billboard sizes are measured in “sheets,” referring to the number of 27-inch-by- 40-inch sheets of poster paper. The stan- dard urban billboard is 24 sheets: 9-feet tall by 20 feet wide.

“That’s when I sing .” This 1871 opera by Giuseppe Verdi is one of the most frequently performed works of the operatic canon.

“The Automat don’t spell home to me.” One of New York City’s famous Automat res- taurants just off Fifth Avenue. Photo by Hikaru Automats were automated cafeterias Iwasaki (1944). The Bancroft Library, University that originated in 1902 in Philadelphia. of California, Berkeley. Patrons of an Automat bought meals from the slots of large vending machines at the price of a nickel per dish.

 “They said John Barrymore used to be Since I’ve been away from you on the legitimate stage.” I can’t wait till I get going John Barrymore—a successful Broadway Even now I’m starting in a call actor between 1903 and 1923, playing such roles as and Richard 111—became California, here I come a Hollywood leading man, one of the Right back where I started from great onscreen lovers of the late silent era. Where bowers of flowers He played the title role in Don Juan, the Bloom in the spring first film with a synchronized Vitaphone Each morning at dawning soundtrack. His talkie career was ham- Birdies sing at everything pered, however, by his alcoholism, which A sun-kissed miss said, “Don’t be late!” brought about his death in 1942. That’s why I can hardly wait The Barrymores were (and still are) a Open up that Golden Gate prominent family of actors; the dynasty California, here I come was skewered in the 1928 Broadway com- edy , written by George Camembert S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. Camembert is a soft cheese with a strong odor and flavor produced by the presence “‘Boots’? By Rudyard Kipling?” of a blue mold. Rudyard Kipling was an English poet of “You can roll them up in camphor.” great renown, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work ranges Camphor is a waxlike substance derived from nationalist and colonialist verse from the bark of the camphor tree that (including the infamous “White Man’s functions as a “plasticizer.” Camphor is Burden”) to children’s books, notably a main ingredient of celluloid—it reacts The Jungle Book. He was awarded the with cellulose nitrate to produce stable Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. “Boots” film stock. Also an insect repellent, cam- (1903), subtitled “Infantry Columns of phor is used in mothballs. the Earlier War,” is a response to the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) in Gary Cooper South Africa. Gary Cooper was a silent-film star of the late 1920s who went on to have a “California, Here I Come” long and successful career as a leading This is the title of an Al Jolson hit from man in the talkies. In 1927 he was signed the early 1920s: by Paramount and became the studio’s star, often playing the hero in westerns. When the wintry winds start blowing Historian David Thomson writes that And the snow is starting in the fall Cooper’s reserved performance style gave Then my eyes turn westward knowing “the impression of being caught unexpect- That’s the place that I love best of all edly in his own thoughts.” California, I’ve been blue

 forces occupied the Italian town of Fiume, which was meant to be turned over to Yugoslavia. D’Annunzio held Fiume for 15 months, declaring it an independent state and proclaiming a constitution that blended anarchism and proto-fascism. Even after his city-state was defeated, D’Annunzio’s position at the forefront of radical Italian nationalism was rivaled only by that of Mussolini himself—until he was crippled in 1922 by an attempted assassination.

“You’re the best dead-pan feeder in all show business.” George appears to be the “straight man” of his vaudeville act with May and Jerry. He sets up the punchlines for the other performers. Writes contemporary vaude-

Gary Cooper in The Texan (1930). All images ville performer-cum-historian Trav s.d.: in the glossary are courtesy Jerry Murbach, Doctor Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans. There’s a tension in all comedy teams between the “funny” member “He used to have cloakroom privilege in and the straight man or stooge. all the West Coast theaters.” One gets all the glory and is every- one’s favorite—the other remains Complimentary use of a theater’s cloak- an unsung hero, appreciated fully room was a privilege extended to vips by only a few aficionados. The situ- and donors. ation can lead to strife, and there are numerous examples of the straight “She says look at Eleanora Duse—her man turning to drink, exploding, or career almost ruined by love. Suppose I just quitting in disgust. turn out to be another D’Annunzio?” Eleanora Duse, a superstar stage actress of the late 1800s, was the Italian answer “The movies are back where they were to Sarah Bernhardt—in fact, the two when the De Milles and the Laskys first were fierce rivals. Duse had a long- saw what they were going to amount to!” running affair with author and politician Director Cecil B. De Mille and producer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who wrote leading Jesse Lasky were pioneers of Hollywood— roles for her in his plays. literally. Their 1914 film The Squaw Man The 52-year-old D’Annunzio fought was the first feature shot in the (then) in World War 1, and after the war his backwater town outside Los Angeles.

 Over the next few years, Hollywood speculation that her accent would play would take its place at the center of poorly and hurt her career. In fact, it only American film production. De Mille and increased her allure. Lasky, along with their partner , went on to long and prosper- ous careers as powerful players in the Hollywood studio system.

“Oh, to be in Russia with Eisenstein!” Sergei Eisenstein, the groundbreak- ing Russian director of such films as Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927), is most celebrated for his develop- ment of montage editing, a technique in which different images are juxtaposed rapidly so as to create an emotional or conceptual resonance for the audi- ence. This nonlinear style of editing was revolutionary in an era when Hollywood films strove for “invisible” editing that maintained continuity of space, time, and Greta Garbo in Anna Christie (1930) perspective. Arriving in Hollywood in 1930, Eisenstein was a noted critic of talk- ing films. He bought the Russian stage Eddie Garvey and the Sherman Sisters rights to Once in a Lifetime, calling the An actor named Eddie Garvey played script “underwritten,” because the true a minor role in the 1927 boxing film Hollywood was “stranger than fiction Knockout Reilly, a silent film produced and far more absurd.” His plans to pro- by Paramount in New York. The Aalbu duce the play in Moscow never came to Sisters, a four-sibling vaudeville act, fruition. played the “Sherman Sisters” in the 1930 Ginger Rogers film Young Man of Greta Garbo Manhattan. A silent-film actress from Sweden who played opposite John Gilbert in the late Four bells 1920s, Garbo made a successful transition The ringing of four bells signaled the to the talkies and became the biggest need for silence on set so a scene could star of the ’30s with such mgm films as be shot. Anna Christie (1930), Mata Hari (1932), (1935), and Camille (1936). Before her talking debut, there had been

 Janet Gaynor starred in several films opposite Greta Janet Gaynor broke into film with roles Garbo. He is often cited as the prime in Fox’s short silent westerns of the mid example of an actor who failed to make 1920s, rose to stardom in 1926, and won the transition to sound: his prim voice the first Academy Award for Best Actress did not match the “great lover” image (awarded in 1929 for her 1927 body of he had created. His feature-length talkie work). Known for her wholesome beauty, debut, (1929), features she was often cast as the innocent victim. a love scene in which he repeats “I love you” to a paramour, which reportedly caused laughter among the young female fans who had once been enthralled by him. This disaster—parodied in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)—along with his famously cantankerous relationship with studio executive Louis B. Mayer, ruined Gilbert’s career.

Gingham and Orchids “Do you know who made this picture? Biograph, in 1910! and Maurice Costello—and even then it was no good!” America’s first company dedicated to film production and a pioneer of early Hollywood, Biograph (founded in 1895) made silent shorts that played at nickel- odeons. Biograph director d. w. Griffith shot Hollywood’s first film (the short In Old California) in 1910—the same year as the purported original version of Gingham and Orchids, which is an inven- tion of Kaufman and Hart. Florence Lawrence, who made hun- dreds of silent films with Biograph and other companies between 1907 and 1914, John Gilbert could be considered the first . She was known simply as the “Biograph Girl” in the early years of her career. John Gilbert Maurice Costello began as a vaude- One of the most popular silent-film stars ville performer, then went on to a prolific and heartthrobs of the 1920s, Gilbert career in early silents starting in 1905—

 often starring opposite Lawrence’s rival, the Production Code of 1930. Four years (the “Vitagraph Girl”). later, the mppda declared that every From the vantage point of 1928, every- Hollywood film must be approved by the thing about a 1910 Biograph film starring Hays Office before its release. This situ- Florence Lawrence and Maurice Costello ation persisted until the code was weak- suggests old and passé. ened by court challenges and replaced by the ratings system in the 1960s. “The Civil War—Didn’t d. w. Griffith The 1930 code’s “General Principles” produce that?” stated: Pioneering director d. w. Griffith got No picture shall be produced which his start making shorts for Biograph in will lower the moral standards of the early 20th century and did much to those who see it. Hence the sympa- develop the new medium. Griffith is thy of the audience shall never be best remembered for his self-produced thrown to the side of crime, wrong- Civil War epic doing, evil, or sin. (1915), a “controversial, explicitly racist, but landmark American film master- Correct standards of life, subject piece,” according to the American Movie only to the requirements of drama Classics Company. This three-hour film, and entertainment, shall be pre- the longest that had ever been made, sented. was the box office success of its era and Law, natural or human, shall not brought feature-length films into vogue. be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be It also recast the history of the Civil War created for its violation. for an entire generation, while villifying African Americans and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. “They’re sitting on top of the world now.” “I’m Sitting On Top of the World” was “There was a drunken man in here just one of Al Jolson’s hit songs from The now.” “[...] Well, they’ll soon be weeded Singing Fool: out—Will Hays is working as fast as he can.” Don’t want any millions William Harrison Hays, a former politi- I’m getting my share cian, became the first leader of the Motion I’ve only got one suit (one suit) Picture Producers and Distributors That’s all I can wear Association in 1922. The major studios A bundle of money won’t make you formed the mppda as an organization feel gay to self-regulate Hollywood after a series A sweet little honey is making me say of scandals raised the specter of gov- I’m sitting on top of the world ernment censorship. The Hays Office Just rolling along released a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” Just rolling along in 1927, which was then expanded into I’m quitting the blues of the world

 Just singing a song the “last half.” To earn a full week’s pay, Just singing a song small-time acts often had to work a first half in one town and then travel over- “Gotta soften those lights! night after the Wednesday performance Hey! Grits! Soften ’em! to another town. Use your inkies.” Bridgeport, located about 60 miles “Inkies” are “incandescents.” These light- northwest of New York City, was boom- ing instruments began to replace arc ing with industry in the late 1920s, but lights on movie sets at the dawn of the it was considered an archetypal “small- sound era. Arc lights used live electrical time” town. Said vaudeville performer Joe sparks to generate bright illumination but Frisco: “Once you leave New York, every made a loud sizzling noise that disrupted other town is Bridgeport.” sound recording. “Way back in the fur business already, “Does she do that one about ‘it takes when I had nickelodeons and they only a heap of loving to—’” “‘—to make a had pennylodeons.” house a home.’” Nickelodeons were the first movie the- This is a reference to American poet aters, often converted storefronts that Edgar Guest’s poem “Home,” published played short films on a continuous loop. in his collection A Heap o’ Livin’ (1916). Admission cost a nickel. They were ubiq- uitous from the turn of the century until “That’s all we need yet—your fine Italian the rise of the around 1915. hand.” Exhibitors then needed larger venues to turn a profit, since a long feature could From Jordan Almond’s Dictionary of Word not be shown as many times a day as a Origins: “This phrase has a double mean- ten-minute short. Consequently, nickel- ing. In the 15th century, Italian penman- odeons fell by the wayside. ship was exceedingly fine and ornate; at the same time, the court politicians were One bell exceedingly sly—and so the term was used to mean ‘sly manipulation covered The ringing of one bell signaled that by beautiful appearance.’” noise could resume on set because the scene had been shot. “Or did you settle for the last half in Bridgeport?” Option Department Unlike the big-time vaudeville houses in An option is a particular type of contract major cities, which booked their popular between a writer and a producer giving acts for a full week or longer, the small the producer the exclusive right to make a time operated on a split-week system. movie based on the writer’s material. Monday through Wednesday was the “first half ”; Thursday through Saturday,

 Pullman car Red light The iconic American sleeping car of the A visual signal on the entrance to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the soundstage that warns visitors to stay out, pullman car had a reputation for luxury. lest they disrupt shooting. Some contained private bedrooms for the very wealthy, but ordinary passengers Rex the Wonder Horse traveled in open sections, which con- Rex was a black stallion who made his verted from paired bench seats for day film debut in the silent film King of the travel to stacked berths for the night. Wild Horses (1924). He was so popular that his name would appear in pro- motional materials and opening credits alongside those of a film’s non-equine stars. He made a successful transition to the talkies in the 1930s and enjoyed a long career as a heroic steed, especially in westerns.

“She knows ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells,’ too.” This is a reference to celebrated writer “Standard pullman car on a deluxe over- Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1850 poem. land limited train from 1910/1920.” Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Buddy Rogers Charles “Buddy” Rogers is best known “Reinhardt begged me not to come! for starring opposite “It Girl” Clara Bow On his knees in the Schauspielhaus he in the 1927 silent airforce drama Wings. begged me!” The innovative work of Max Reinhardt “If I’d have stayed [at the Roxy] I might as the leader of the Deutsches Theater in have been a lieutenant. One of the boys Berlin (1907–20) included important re- I started with is a major.” vivals of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare. Called the “Cathedral of the Motion He was also an important figure in the Picture,” the Roxy Theatre (completed in historical rise of the director-as-artist. 1927) was New York City’s largest movie Reinhardt openly criticized talkie-era palace, seating almost six thousand spec- Hollywood’s practice of presenting thinly tators on three wide tiers. adapted stage plays on the screen. The Roxy’s prestigious, all-male usher The 3500-seat Großes Schauspielhaus corps was a highly organized regiment (Grand Theater) in Berlin, designed that did its job with militaristic precision especially for Reinhardt, was completed and spectacle. The ushers held faux- in 1919. military ranks (e.g., lieutenant or major), wore army-style dress uniforms, and per-

 formed complex drills such as the daily deluded former silent-movie star in the “changing of the ushers.” Most ushers hit film Sunset Boulevard (1950). were teenagers and young men.

Scenario writers The scenario for a silent film consisted of a short narrative description of the images to be seen in the film and the story that these should convey. Where silent films had scenarios and scenario writers, talkies required screenplays and screenwriters, who wrote lines for the actors to speak.

“It’s the biggest thing in New York right now. Strange Interlude! And look at the name you get! Eugene O’Neill!” “Well, did he write the music, too?” Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act stage drama, Gloria Swanson in Why Change Your Wife? (1920) Strange Interlude, opened on January 30, 1928, ran for 426 performances, and won the Pulitzer Prize. It is definitely “You thought Technicolor would help?” not a musical, but mgm did produce a condensed film version, starring Norma By 1928, the Technicolor company had Shearer and Clark Gable, in 1932. been experimenting with color film for more than a decade, but its techniques remained too cumbersome and expensive Gloria Swanson for general use. Black-and-white was Silent-film star Gloria Swanson’s career still the norm, though some large-budget began when she was in her teens, playing epics of the 1920s inserted Technicolor comic roles in Mack Sennett’s Keystone sequences. A few all-Technicolor features comedies before signing with Paramount were produced, but these were mostly in 1918. At Paramount, she played the genre films, like the Douglas Fairbanks romantic lead in silent features through- swashbuckler The Black Pirate (1926), out the first half of the 1920s, often work- which used color for novelty value. The ing with director Cecil B. De Mille. technology in this era was still limited Swanson’s career floundered in the to a two-color process (using a combina- early ’30s with her disastrous independent tion of red and green), which produced film Queen Kelly (1932). She was kept on less vibrant images than the three-color the margins for the first two decades process (red, green, and blue) that was of the sound era, until she was cast as a

 popularized a decade later by The Wizard Pix” (“rural audiences are not interested of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939). in farming films”).

“Miss Walker has a set of gestures that Mae West would do credit to a traveling derrick.” Mae West began her career as a vaude- Traveling derricks are large metal towers ville performer; by the late 1920s, she was that can be moved on rails or skids— writing scandalous plays in New York, sturdy but movable cranes, in essence— where her Broadway debut, Sex (1927), most often used in bridge construction landed her in prison for eight days on and mining. vice charges. Other plays include The Drag (1928), about homosexuality, and “For two cents I would go back to Diamond Lil (1928), her biggest hit. West Germany and ufa!” went on to become a prominent ’30s film star and sex symbol, known particularly The largest film company in Germany for her quick-talking innuendo. between World War i and World War ii, Universum Film AG (ufa) was formed “I want her photographed with Grover with state support in 1917 and held Whalen.” a near monopoly on film production there throughout the ’20s and ’30s. It , the longtime “Official produced the classic horror films of the Greeter” of New York City, was respon- German Expressionist movement, such sible for welcoming visiting dignitaries, as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and heroes, and celebrities when they arrived Nosferatu (1922), as well as Fritz Lang’s from abroad. dystopic masterpiece, Metropolis (1927). “She’s got a new poem that would be fine Variety for a voice test. ‘Yes, I’m a tramp—what of it!’” First published in 1905, Variety began as the weekly trade paper of vaudeville, This is a reference to a poem known as but was soon covering what it called “The Tramp” or “Down in the Lehigh the “legit” stage—Broadway theater—in Valley” from as early as 1881. The author a separate section. Variety helped pioneer is unconfirmed. the film review in the 1920s. Variety’s Los Angeles offshoot, Daily Variety, became Hollywood’s trade paper of record. Throughout Variety’s history, reporters have written their articles in a complex jargon with idiosyncratic slang terms. Phrases are condensed for space and snappiness, leading to headlines like the famous 1935 front-pager “Sticks Nix Hick

 Questions to Consider

1. How do their experiences in Hollywood change George, May, and Jerry? How do they change Hollywood? What are Kaufman and Hart’s criticisms of Hollywood as expressed in Once in a Lifetime? 2. What stories do the design choices in this production—especially the use of film— tell? How do you think film should and should not be used in the theater? How does it change your perception of the play? 3. How does using 15 actors to play 70 roles affect your understanding of the story? 4. Why do you think Once in a Lifetime was such a big success during the Great Depression? How is it still relevant to us today? 5. Is the play hopeful or cynical about the future? How does the birth of the talkies compare to modern revolutions in media technology? What effects do you think Twitter, blogging, and other social media have had and will have on the entertainment industry? For Further Information . . .

Bach, Stephen. Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart. Cambridge, ma: Da Capo Press, 2001. Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1997. D., Trav S. No Applause—Just Throw Money. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc. 2005. Everson, William K. American Silent Film. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926–1930. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Goldstein, Malcolm. George S. Kaufman: His Life, His Theater. Oxford, uk: , 1979. Hart, Moss. Act One: An Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959. Hart, Moss, and George S. Kaufman. Six Plays by Kaufman and Hart. New York: Modern Library, 1942. The San Francisco Silent Film Festival. http://www.silentfilm.org/.

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