Introduction 1 Innovations in 1920S and 1930S Hollywood
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Notes Introduction 1. Otis Ferguson, “Life Goes to the Pictures,” in Robert Wilson, The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971), 4. 2. Those Who Made It is the latest entry in a select group of comparable interview collections that features Hollywood personnel speaking out about their work behind the camera. One of the earliest was Austin C. Andrew Sarris’s Interviews with Film Directors (1967), an anthology conducted by a variety of interviewers; Leonard Maltin’s Behind the Camera (1971), featuring five interviews with cinema- tographers Hal Mohr, Conrad Hall, Hal Rosson, Lucien Ballard, and Arthur Miller; Kevin Brownlow’s three volumes of interviews chronicling the silent era, The Parade’s Gone By, The War the West and the Wilderness, Behind the Mask of Innocence ( 1968–1990); and Joseph McBride’s two- volume Filmmakers on Filmmakingg (1983), derived from a series of seminars conducted by the American Film Institute. My own previous contribution to this series is my edited volume, Introduction to the Photoplay (1977), an annotated collection of Hollywood n otables— including pro- ducer Irving Thalberg, art director William Cameron Menzies, scriptwriter Clara Beranger— speaking out at a seminar at USC in 1929 on topics relating to the dawn of sound. All, save Brownlow’s Parade’s Gone By, are long out of print. 3. Jean- Luc Godard, Introduction a une veritable histoire du cinema (Paris: Albatros, 1980), 100. 4. William Hazlitt’s “On the Conversation of Authors” was first published in the London Magazine, September, 1820 and reprinted in P.P. Howe, ed., The Best of Hazlittt (London: Methuen, 1947). 1 Innovations in 1920s and 1930s Hollywood Cinematography, Sound Technology, and Feature-Length Animation 1. Glen died just six years after this interview. 2. Note: Excerpts from this interview originally appeared in American Classic Screen magazine, January 1979. The full interview has never been published until now. 3. The legendary partnership of Gottfried Wilhelm Bitzer (1874–1944) with D.W. Griffith established the camera techniques that set the standards for the future of cinematography. For an amusing and informal account of working with Bitzer and Griffith, see Karl Brown, Adventures with D.W. Griffith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 10–14. 4. The so-called Patents War, roughly 1 908–1914, was a struggle over patents control between independent filmmakers and the Thomas Edison- led Motion Picture Patents Company. This colorful period often saw violence breaking out on both sides. For a concise assessment, see Anthony Slide, The American Film Industry (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 223–224. 5. See Kevin Brownlow’s tribute to the silent- era cameraman in Hollywood: The Pioneers (New York: Knopf, 1979), 230–239. 209 210 Notes 6. For accounts of life on the set of Douglas Fairbanks’s silent films for Triangle and Artcraft, see my Douglas Fairbanks and the American Centuryy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 30–141. The role Allan Dwan played in Fairbanks’s career can scarcely be overestimated. For the best account of his life and work, see Frederic Lombardi, Allan Dwan and the Rise and Decline of the Hollywood Studios (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013). 7. Victor Fleming also belonged to the Fairbanks team at this time, assisting in the photography of Fairbanks’s His Picture in the Papers (1915) and Wild and Wooly (1917). After the War he directed Fairbanks’s When the Clouds Roll byy (1919). Of course, he became best known for MGM classics, notably The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Windd (1939). 8. Information is scant, but the Fox film was released in 1929 and directed by Harry Delft. 9. Two of the best single- volume accounts of Hollywood’s transition to sound are Donald Crafton, The Talkies: America’s Transition to Soundd (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), and Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926– 1930 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 10. Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known by his stage name of Stepin Fetchit (1902–1985) was an African- American actor in Hollywood films in the 1930s notorious for his stereotypical shuffling, slow- talking personae in films like Hearts in Dixie (1929) and Judge Priest (1934). He became the first black actor to become a millionaire. For a profile, see Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 105–107. 11. MacWilliams photographed six Jessie Matthews ( 1907–1981) musicals in London, between 1933–1938, including Waltzes from Vienna, Evergreen and First a Girl. Matthews’s autobiography, Over My Shoulderr, appeared in 1975. For a detailed account of one of Waltzes from Vienna, one of Hitchcock’s rarest films, see my Composers in the Movies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 3 0–32. 12. For an informative interview with Arthur Miller ( 1895–1970), one of Hollywood’s greatest and most respected cinematographers, see Leonard Maltin, Behind the Camera (New York: Signet, 1971), 66 –90. 13. The full interview appeared originally in American Classic Screen magazine in September–October 1979. Reprinted here in excerpted form by permission. 14. Audrey Kupferberg in her account of the filming of The Jazz Singerr in Take One (January 1978, pp. 28–32) supports this contention that the dialogue was ad- libbed. No dialogue, she says, was included in the original screenplay for The Jazz Singer. She disagrees with Brown, however, when she postulates that the dialogue sequence between Jack Robin and his mother has all the appearance of an ad- libbed scene. Two other good articles that deal with The Jazz Singerr in detail are Rosalind Rogoff’s treatment in American Classic Screen, Sept./Oct., 1977; and J. Douglas Gomery’s in Screen, Spring, 1976. 15. Initially, sound editing on disc had been accomplished by manual operation of the turntables. 16. Fitzhugh Green in The Film Finds Its Tongue claims the practice of “duping,” or re-recording discs, began with the scoring of In Old San Francisco for the Warner Brothers in 1927. This process enabled the soundmen to record several discs onto one composite disc. 17. The sound- on-disc process died hard. The imperfections of the sound- on- film method— film “hiss”, tints and dyes distorted sound, film shrinkage and Notes 211 expansion distorted sound, etc.—were intimidating to industry chiefs who pre- ferred to rely on the already established disc system. 18. This had been a real problem previously when Warner Brothers was working with sound earlier in the old Vitagraph studio in Brooklyn. “Shielding” meant enclosing apparatus in metal so it would absorb radio waves. This meant protect- ing everything—every bit of wire, every vacuum tube, every transformer and condenser. 19. The equipment used by Vitaphone was originally designed for telephone and/or phonograph recor ding. Thus, the condenser microphones were not made to be mobile. The microphone, for instance, was connected directly to a condenser- transmitter amplifier, which was necessary to give the immediate boost to the incoming signal. The amplifier itself was too bulky and too microphonic to be moved very much. 20. For an account of Mohr’s work on The Jazz Singerr, see Leonard Maltin’s Behind the Camera. 21. The “Playback” room at Warner Brothers was located at a distance from the sound stage at the time and was not in use during filming. 22. Paul Mantz was one of Hollywood’s most respected stunt pilots at the time. An amusing anecdote demonstrating his fame transpires in a scene in John Ford’s Air Mail (1933), for which Mantz flew the stunts. When one of the actors dashes to the locker room to don leather jacket and flying togs, Mantz’ name can be seen inscribed on one of the locker doors. Many years later, during the filming of Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), Mantz died while flying the scene where the jerry- built airplane disappears beyond the rim of a sand dune. The picture is dedicated to him. An informative profile of him can be found in Air Classics, October, 1975, 44–48. 23. The comments of a number of filmmakers on the uses and effects of sound can be found in “Directors on Sound,” Take One, January, 1978, 23–26. 24. By far the most comprehensive collective history of the Nine Old Men— Les Clark, Wolfgang Reitherman, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, John Lounsbery, and Marc Davis—is John Canemaker’s lavishly illustrated Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men & the Art of Animation (New York: Disney Editions, 2001). “Think of your favorite moments and characters in Disney films from the 1930s through the 1970s— pathos, comedy, or action performed by heroes, heroines, villains, or clowns— and chances are most were animated by one of the Nine Old Men” (from the Preface, ii). 25. “More than one critic wrote that Disney’s leap from short subjects to [Snow White] was comparable to a sudden vault from the thirteenth century to the fourteenth, when Masacio found new ways to create the illusion of depth, texture, weight, and expression, leading to the Florentine Renaissance” (Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business (New York: Scribner, 1997, 107)). 26. Ollie Johnson and Frank Thomas, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981), 27. Ollie introduced Walt to amateur railroading. It became a passion for both. See Michael Broggie, Walt Disney’s Railroad Storyy (Pasadena, CA: Pentrex, 1998). Ollie Johnston wrote the Introduction. 28. Note: This interview appeared in a different version in American Classic Screen: Interviews (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010). 29. Johnston and Thomas pay a detailed and illustrated tribute to Moore in their book Disney Animation (n 26), 119–129.