For DeMille, film was perfectly suited to bringing the story of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection to the masses because of its ability to convey a story plainly and simply. The film is presented primarily in images, without an overwhelming number of titles or a lot of dialogue. DeMille felt that what earlier generations had learned through reading, the younger generation would need to learn from the movies. “The story will present to the coming generation who now fill our schools and colleges a picturization of the life and particularly the ideals of this Man of Galilee,” DeMille told the cast and crew at the first reading of the script. DeMille’s concern for reaching younger generations emanated from a study he had read describing the lack of biblical knowledge among college students. In the discussion following the script reading, DeMille suggested addressing the theory that the disciples had removed the body of Christ from the tomb, and his brother W. C. DeMille commented that audiences would believe what they had always believed and that this film would not change anyone’s mind. “They are not going to believe in it anyway just because they see it on the screen.” To which the director responded, “Yes, they are. . . . Their idea of the life of Christ is going to be formed by what we give them. This next generation will get its idea of Jesus Christ from this picture.”5 DeMille’s boast was not primarily a personal one but, rather, an indication of his belief in the importance of the subject and the power of motion pictures. “I am only the humble and thankful instrument,” he told a radio audience, “through which the screen . . . is carrying the greatest of all messages to hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings.”6 DeMille felt that the Roaring Twenties were the ideal time to bring this message to the screen, since a decade earlier the movie industry had not established itself as an artistic medium “embodying the thoughts of many of the world’s greatest thinkers.” Also, a pre–World War I audience would not have needed to be told the story of Christ because “religion was a thing conventionally accepted by the great majority of people.” The Great War had changed all that and sent man on a search for understanding. “The ideals of the Man of Nazareth have persisted throughout all the centuries, and there is an almost universal demand for the return to greater knowledge of Him and the influence of His mission.” For DeMille, The King of Kings would fill a void in the spiritual education of the nation. “At no time in the world’s history has humanity so hungered for the truth. Science has declared there is a God. And a groping, eager world cries, ‘How may we find Him?’”7 DeMille, through Hollywood and the motion picture industry, would lead the way.
A film with as much importance as DeMille placed on The King of Kings deserved a premiere equally impressive. DeMille teamed up with theater owner and showman Sid Grauman to coincide the premiere of the film with the grand opening of Grauman’s newest movie palace, the Chinese Cinema Temple on Hollywood Boulevard. Advertised as “The World’s Most Magnificent Playhouse,” Grauman’s Chinese Theater promised moviegoers a spectacle for its opening night. Not only did the theater host the premiere of The King of Kings, but Grauman staged a lavish show both inside and outside the theater. He convinced the city of Los Angeles to declare May 18, 1927, a “holiday in honor of the Chinese Government,” and he proclaimed, “Every patron at the opening will be presented with a magnificent Mandarin coat to be worn throughout the performance.” He also promised “miles of Chinese lanterns . . . , one thousand Chinese Cavalry soldiers as honorary guards—two hours of spectacular fireworks and illuminated arches, the courtesy of the Chinese Government, which will make the heavens jealous—one thousand Chinese beauties—one hundred floats!” All to celebrate “TWO GREAT EVENTS Crystallized Into the One Night of Nights in Motion Picture History.”8 An estimated 25,000 people came to witness the event, and a riot broke out as crowds tried to catch a glimpse of the stars attending the premiere, some of whom claimed to have left their cars “several blocks away” and to have fought their way to the theater. Headlines proclaimed, “Hundreds of Police Battle to Keep Crowds in Check.”9 The Los Angeles Times declared the evening’s affair to be “the most important event in recent Western theatrical history.”10
With 2,258 seats, Grauman’s Chinese Theater is not the grandest of the movie palaces, but it does hold the distinction of its famous courtyard, in which movie stars’ foot- and handprints are preserved in concrete. One story claims the idea came from Fairbanks and Pickford, who, after inspecting a newly installed irrigation dam at their Rancho Zorro outside of San Diego, had pressed their hands and written their names in the wet cement. Their friend Sid Grauman, who happened to be looking for a gimmick for his new theater, embraced the couple’s idea. Indeed, Pickford and Fairbanks were the first to imprint the courtyard, on April 30. Another story claims that actress Norma Talmadge accidentally slipped into the wet cement during construction, thereby inspiring Grauman, but Talmadge’s official prints do not appear until May 18, after Pickford and Fairbanks made their prints, making it more likely that the idea was the couple’s. By January 1928, ten stars had placed their mark in the courtyard, including comic actor Harold Lloyd, western star William S. Hart, actresses Colleen Moore and Gloria Swanson, Charlie Chaplin, film cowboy Tom Mix, and his horse Tony. The courtyard of Grauman’s, with its ever-growing number of foot- and handprints, turned the theater into a Hollywood landmark that attracted visitors as well as audiences, allowing audiences to be transported to far-off places (even before the program started) and, at the same time, allowing visitors to compare their foot and hand sizes with those of their favorite stars. Grauman’s theater enabled people to escape their lives and enter an exotic world, where their film stars were larger than life in the theater and ordinary humans, with life-size feet, outside. Like sports figures, movie stars needed to be both extraordinary and ordinary.
The combination of religious spectacle and Hollywood ballyhoo in Chinese garb illustrates the ambiguous nature of Hollywood. In the 1920s, the industry realized its potential impact as a positive contributor to society, and at the same time it exploited the public’s thirst for the latest fads and sensationalism. While The King of Kings sought to enrich and enhance the lives of the audience, the events surrounding the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theater were meant to entertain visitors through the exploitation of the exotic and the extreme. The day after the premiere, Grauman’s ads in local papers declared that “30,000 persons sought to gain admittance to the opening of the showplace of the world. . . . Never before has any box office turned away so many people.”11 Even the film itself was a calculated business venture that prolonged the life of DeMille’s studio. DeMille and his financier and partner Jeremiah Milbank used an inflated budget of over $2.6 million for The King of Kings to cover a million dollars’ worth of studio improvements and paychecks. Later, when they sold the studio, they retained the rights to The King of Kings, since on the books it looked like an unsuccessful film, while in reality it did make money. The film broke box office records, running at New York’s Gaiety Theater longer than any previous film.
For the motion picture industry, respectability came not only from the approval of churches and local boards of censorship (those concerned about content) but also from the industry’s ability to make money. By 1927, the motion picture industry had become the fourth-largest industry in the nation. While studios competed for talent and film projects, they were united in keeping government censors at bay and in promoting the industry as a whole. The MPPDA dealt with promoting a positive image for the industry, but it did little to promote film as an art form or to coordinate the various segments of the motion picture industry and the various studios. To this end, the Hollywood elite joined together to form the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Initially conceived, in part, as a response to the Studio Basic Agreement of November 1926, which provided for the unionization of carpenters, painters, electricians, stagehands, and musicians at nine major film studios, the academy sought to bring standardization to the industry in both business practices and motion picture technology. The id
ea for the academy arose from a dinner conversation at the home of producer Louis B. Mayer among Mayer, producer and director Fred Niblo, and actor Conrad Nagel. They all agreed that the industry needed a single organization to represent the industry against attacks from outside groups, such as reform organizations and censorship groups. They also agreed that the organization should represent all aspects of motion picture production within the five categories of actors, directors, producers, technicians, and writers. Unlike the MPPDA, this organization would be primarily concerned not with the exhibition of films (that is, neither making suggestions to steer clear of censorship boards nor promoting wholesome films and activities) but with the production of films. Mayer hosted a dinner of thirty-six invited guests representing all facets of motion picture production at the Ambassador Hotel on January 11, 1927, to propose the idea of the academy. Among those in attendance were producers Irving Thalberg and Jesse Lasky (Lasky’s Feature Play company had merged with Adolph Zuckor’s Famous Players to form the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation in 1916, which became Paramount Studios in 1927), producer and theater owner Sid Grauman, directors Raoul Walsh (What Price Glory? 1926) and Cecil B. DeMille, writers Jeanie Macpherson (The King of Kings) and Frank Woods (Birth of a Nation, 1915), set designer Cecil Gibbons (who designed the “Oscar,” the Award of Merit statuette), special-effects artist Roy Pomeroy (Wings, 1927), and actors Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford (who is often listed as a producer), and Douglas Fairbanks. The group of thirty-six became the founding members of the academy and went about the task of organizing the academy and its five branches representing the five categories of film production. By mid-March, the founders selected a board of directors (later changed to a board of governors) and officers, with Fairbanks as the first president of the academy. By May, the state of California had granted the organization a charter for incorporation, and the founders planned an organizational banquet for May 11, 1927.
The invitation-only banquet brought together 300 film professionals; Cecil B. DeMille, reinforcing his belief in the power of film, stated that the attendees “constituted the most powerful group ever assembled in the world, a group that influences the mental processes of all mankind.”12 The founders invited the attendees to “join unselfishly into one big concerted movement, . . . to effectually accomplish those essential things which we have hitherto neglected,” such as to take “aggressive action in meeting outside attacks that are unjust,” “promote harmony and solidarity among our membership and among our different branches,” “reconcile any internal differences that may exist or arise,” “protect the honor and good repute of our profession,” “encourage the improvement and advancement of the arts and sciences of our profession by the interchange of constructive ideas and by awards of merit for distinctive achievements,” and in general “develop the greater power and influence of the screen.”13 The admission fee was $100, and 231 people paid it to participate in the organizational banquet and become charter members of the academy, whose first official act was the granting of an Honorary Membership to Thomas Edison for his pioneering role in the development of motion picture technology and the motion picture industry. While the creation of the academy did help bring more standardization to the industry, publicly it announced to the world the status of the industry by selecting distinguished practitioners for membership in an organization based along the lines of scholarly academies.
The public’s main interest lay in the “awards of merit,” which were first presented in May 1929 for films released in the Los Angeles area between August 1, 1927, and July 31, 1928. While the ceremony did not have the suspense or prestige that later years would bring (winners were selected by committee and announced months before the awards banquet), it did serve to distinguish films that were considered of artistic merit from the hundreds of films released each year. By singling out a few selected examples of the best of the industry, the academy, in a sense, educated the public about superior film art. The awards were meant not to reflect public tastes but, to some degree, to shape them. While Pickford, Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Bow were the top movie stars in terms of box office appeal, only Chaplin was nominated for an acting award, and he lost out to German actor Emil Jannings (for his work in The Command and The Way of All Flesh). Chaplin did receive a special award of merit “for versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing, and producing The Circus.” Fairbanks and The Gaucho were not mentioned, and only Pickford’s cinematographer on My Best Girl was given a nomination. Out of the six films Clara Bow released in 1927, only Wings (which was not really a Clara Bow vehicle even though, as the biggest box office draw in the cast, she received top billing) was selected, winning awards for its engineering effects and as Best Picture. Seventh Heaven was the most-mentioned film (nominees not winning an award received honorable mention awards), with three awards (for actress Janet Gaynor, director Frank Borzage, and adaptation writer Benjamin Glazer) and two honorable mentions (for art direction and best picture). Sunrise also won three awards (for actress Gaynor, who received the award for three performances: Seventh Heaven, Sunrise, and Street Angel; for cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss; and for “Artistic Quality of Production,” a category used only in the academy’s first awards), and an honorable mention (for art direction). The films recognized by the academy as superior achievements shared another aspect of respectable art: serious subjects. In the case of Seventh Heaven and Wings, that subject was the Great War. Seventh Heaven is the story of two lowly Parisians, Chico (Charles Farrell), a sewer worker, and Diane (Janet Gaynor), a slum-dwelling waif living with an abusive sister. The two find happiness in their seventh floor apartment until Chico is called to war. Diane’s love endures through the absence and his presumed death, and is rewarded with his eventual return on Armistice Day.
The use of the war in Seventh Heaven was secondary to the love story, but it gave the film an emotional resonance for an audience not a decade away from the war. In Wings, the war was the central element in a story of four people affected by the war. Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy” Rogers, from My Best Girl) is the all-American boy who tinkers with cars and has a crush on the wealthy and refined Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston). Mary Preston (Clara Bow) lives next door to Jack and has loved him all her life, but she is seen by Jack as one of the guys and a friend. Sylvia is in love with the wealthy David Armstrong (Richard Arlen), who becomes best friends with Jack when they both sign up to become fighter pilots. As the boys leave for the war, Jack expresses his love for Sylvia, and, not wanting him to leave for Europe brokenhearted, she lets him believe that she feels the same. Meanwhile, a brokenhearted Mary decides to escape town by joining the Red Cross and serving in Europe. While the film does glorify the war, especially in the dynamic aerial sequences filmed from a plane, it does not ignore the costs of war. Mary, having run into a drunken Jack in Paris, is caught in his room with him passed out on the bed and is sent home in disgrace. David discovers that his best friend is in love with his girl, after which he is shot down during a dogfight, but he manages to return to friendly terrain by stealing a German plane. Flying to safety, David is shot down again, this time by Jack, who realizes his mistake as David lays dying. Receiving a hero’s welcome back home, an aged Jack visits David’s parents and witnesses the real toll of the war. He also realizes that his love belongs with the one who loves him, Mary, the girl next door. Although the film questions the cost of the war, by not emphasizing the end of the war but instead focusing on David’s death, it does not question the reasons for the war, something left primarily to such novelists as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) was another war film released generally in 1927 (after two years of road-show engagements), and like Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), it seeks to uncover the shallowness of American patriotism in the Great War. In covering the same critical terrain as the “Lost Generation” writers, Vidor brought an artistic respectability to motion pictures in a manner more contemporary than the historical and biblical dr
amas of D. W. Griffth and Cecil B. DeMille.
hollywood, THE JAZZ SINGER, and jazz
The 1929 Academy Awards ceremony was unique not only because the awards were new, but also because it was the only time the ceremony was not in some way broadcast to an audience, the only time there was an award category for title writing, and the only year the academy recognized silent films. The reason for these anomalies was, of course, the widespread acceptance and demand for sound films after the release of The Jazz Singer (October 6, 1927). While The Jazz Singer was not the first film to employ synchronized sound, nor a fully “talking” picture (the majority of the film is silent, with a musical score and only a few lines of dialogue and synchronized singing by Al Jolson), its success did force studios to abandon silent films and make the transition to sound. It was in the field of sound that the academy did some of its most productive industry work. Early attempts to use the academy as an industry-wide arbiter for labor conditions met with only limited success and created more controversy than results, forcing the academy to withdraw completely from labor issues when its constitution was revised in the 1930s. Nor did the academy provide much leadership in the fight against censorship; that fight was mainly taken up by the MPPDA with the formal writing of a production code in 1930 and its strict enforcement by Joseph Breen starting in 1934. What the academy did succeed in was encouraging and sponsoring education and research in film technology.
In 1929, the academy created the Producers-Technicians Joint Committee to direct “the handling of specific problems that would benefit from cooperative research, investigation, and experimentation.”14 The committee recommended concentrated effort on three main problems: “(1) silencing the camera, (2) developing special set construction materials for sound pictures, and (3) silencing the arc.”15 Most of the early technical bulletins issued by the academy dealt with sound technology. Issued by the academy’s Research Council, such titles as “Theatre Acoustics for Reproduced Sound, also Reproduction in the Theatre,” “Camera Silencing Devices,” “Architectural Acoustics,” and “Methods of Silencing Arcs” helped spread technical knowledge around an industry in which, previously, individual studios had closely guarded their technical secrets. This emphasis on sound technology reflected the studios’ urgent need for skilled sound technicians. By sharing this information throughout the industry, the transition to sound occurred at a faster rate, allowing the technology to keep pace with artistry. This rapid transition was especially important after the start of the Great Depression, when film revenue was lost just at the moment greater capital outlay emerged as a necessity. The academy pooled the resources of the studios to train qualified sound technicians by establishing a school for studio personnel to learn the elements of sound recording and reproduction and by establishing a collection of film periodicals from around the world that would form the basis of the most extensive research library on motion pictures. By emphasizing research and education, the academy brought to the industry not only standardization but respectability, as an industry concerned about advancing knowledge and technology, and not just seeking profits.
1927 and the Rise of Modern America Page 18
