by Staggs, Sam
* * *
All About Expenses
The filming of All About Eve was to have ended in May 1950, but since production ran over a few days, Mankiewicz didn’t call a wrap until the first week of June. According to Fox records, the film was brought in for $1,400,000 ($500,000 of which went to cover cast salaries). The original estimate for total cost of the film had been $1,246,500.
Attached to the copy of Mankiewicz’s treatment dated September 26, 1949—the copy that bears the original title, Best Performance—is a sheet headed “Planning Production Cost Estimate” for Story 309, which was the story number assigned to All About Eve. This itemized sheet shows, or should show, a breakdown of the original estimate of $1,246,500—the amount given as “Grand Total” at the end of the sheet. But the figures add up to $1,108,508.29. We can only wonder if the discrepancy was caused by math anxiety or creative bookkeeping.
Planning Production Cost Estimate
Story Rights and Expenses
3,500.00
Scenario
47,208.29
Cast
300,000.00
Production Dept. Service
278,385.00
Adm. Overhead
137,115.00
Art
16,000.00
Set Cost
55,000.00
Light Platforms
4,500.00
Strike Labor
9,500.00
Rerecording
10,000.00
Titles, Inserts, and Fades
8,500.00
Talent tests
3,000.00
Editorial
5,000.00
Production and Dir. Secys.
3,000.00
Staff
15,000.00
Extras
20,000.00
Operating Labor and Management
25,000.00
Camera
22,000.00
Sound
12,000.00
Electrical
2,000.00
Mech. Effects and Snow Dressing
2,000.00
Set Dressing
23,000.00
Women’s Wardrobe
16,000.00
Men’s Wardrobe
6,000.00
Makeup and Hairdressing
7,000.00
Process
3,000.00
Spec. Effects and Scenic Art
3,500.00
Production Film
20,000.00
Stills
3,500.00
Location Exp.
23,000.00
Misc.
25,000.00
Grand Total:
1,246,500.00
Cast salaries, according to surviving figures compiled by casting director Bill Maybery, were as follows:
[NB: stock = under contract to 20th Century-Fox]
Anne Baxter—$4,000/wk to 3/25/50; then $5,000/wk (stock)
Bette Davis—$130,000 for 12 wks
Celeste Holm—$35,000 for 8 wks—pro rata thereafter
George Sanders—$6,000/wk for 10 wks
Hugh Marlowe—$750/wk (stock)
Thelma Ritter—$1,750/wk for 6 wks
Gregory Ratoff—[no figure given]
Barbara Bates—$250/wk (stock)
Leading Man—Craig Hill—$100/wk (stock)
Marilyn Monroe—$500/wk—1 wk guarantee
Doorman—Leland Harris—$175/wk—1 wk
Walter Hampden—$2,500/wk—1 wk
Claude Stroud—$750/wk converted from $150 a day
* * *
Chapter 17
The Time I Looked Through the Wrong End of the Camera Finder
After shooting had ended, Stage 9 on the Fox lot breathed out the melancholy air of a ballroom when the dancers have gone. Margo Channing’s house, walls stripped of paintings and ready to be dismantled, would soon vanish except as a celluloid image. Her big tropical plants had been carted away for a jungle picture, and her furniture and gewgaws, including the candy dish and the piano it sat on, had, after careful inventory, been packed up once more in a studio warehouse. The Stork Club, bare and deserted, resembled a loading dock. The dining hall of the Sarah Siddons Society was bare, the chandeliers and distinguished theatre portraits all dispersed. Gone were the tables from the banquet, and gone, too, were their white tablecloths; the flowers; the rich paneling of the ornate dining hall. Carpenters had already recycled the wood for another set.
Over at last. The cast and crew of All About Eve would never be together again. Even now they had scattered. Bette and Gary, inseparable, lived by the sea in her house in Laguna Beach. For variety, they sometimes drove up the coast to his place at Malibu. Marilyn retreated to her little apartment at 718 North Palm Drive, and Celeste and Thelma flew back to New York. George and Zsa Zsa continued to spar over his flirtations, real and imagined. And Joe Mankiewicz was the new president of the Screen Directors Guild. On May 31, a week before shooting ended, his peers had elected him to this prestigious post. He was nominated by Cecil B. DeMille. After such an eventful spring Mankiewicz needed a break, and in late June he took his family to Europe for a vacation in France and Italy.
* * *
Mankiewicz on Himself and Others
Mankiewicz on Cecil B. DeMille: “DeMille has his finger up the pulse of America.”
On Katharine Hepburn: “The most experienced amateur actress in the world.”
On Keys of the Kingdom (1944), starring Gregory Peck and produced by Mankiewicz: “217 minutes of high thought and low lighting.”
On F. Scott Fitzgerald: “I wonder if Scott had looked more like Wallace Beery whether his reputation would be as great.”
On Hemingway’s dialogue: “Read it aloud and you start to giggle, it’s so bad.”
On being the younger brother of Herman Mankiewicz, who for a long time was more highly esteemed than Joe: “I know what they’ll write on my tombstone: HERE LIES HERM—I MEAN JOE MANKIEWICZ.”
During the frenzied filming of Cleopatra, Taylor and Burton dominated the world’s headlines. When an Associated Press reporter, on the set in Rome, asked Mankiewicz The Question, the director said: “The real story is that Richard Burton and I are in love and Elizabeth Taylor is being used as our cover-up.” Then Joe kissed Richard Burton on the mouth and walked off the set.
* * *
All About Eve was finished, but the movie still didn’t exist. It was no more than an unwieldy batch of celluloid in metal cans, thousands upon thousands of tiny images. Those little frames of film formed an inchoate mass, like words in a dictionary that the storyteller must quarry and weigh and arrange for his tale.
In the case of Mankiewicz, that dictionary of images was abridged, for, unlike many directors, he edited his films, in a sense, while shooting them. This directorial trait has rarely been mentioned in commentary on Mankiewicz’s work, but Celeste Holm says, “He’s the only person I ever saw who cut while he shot. You’d be doing a scene and he’d put his hand over the camera and say, ‘Cut to’ this or that. He said, ‘I’m not giving that cutter one frame that I don’t want on the screen.’” (John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, and other top directors also edited through the camera, so that, at least in theory, it would have been impossible to put their films together differently.)
Mankiewicz knew, of course, that the less surplus footage he provided for editors and producers to pick over, the tighter his own control of the picture would be. Such control lessened the chance of a film belonging aesthetically to someone else. Tom Mankiewicz, the director’s son, corroborates Celeste Holm’s assertion. “Like many directors, Dad protected himself that way. He wanted to shoot a film in his own style. So he’d film certain scenes the way he wanted them, with no coverage, and then if Zanuck said, ‘That scene is too long,’ Dad could say, ‘Darryl, we’ve got what we’ve got. We can’t cut it.’”
Many actors wouldn’t notice this subtle director’s ploy, but Celeste Holm ha
d a keen interest in all aspects of moviemaking. In fact, she even learned basic cutting from Barbara McLean, the editor of All About Eve and many other famous films.
“You want to see how to cut a scene?” McLean asked Celeste one day on the Fox lot in 1946, while Celeste was at work on Three Little Girls in Blue.
“You bet,” said Celeste.
McLean glanced around the editing room at a few million feet of film. “Who do you like best?”
“Vera-Ellen,” Celeste replied, referring to one of her co-stars in the picture.
“All right,” said Barbara McLean, “let’s make this her scene.” And the editor demonstrated how to “give” a scene to a particular player by cutting to her reaction.
“You see,” said Celeste, “the director in the theatre shows the audience where to focus its attention through the movement of all the actors onstage. But motion pictures do it with cutting. So the movie audience just sits mindlessly, not making any choices.”
As her remark indicates, Holm preferred stage acting to movies. She once said, “Hollywood is a good place to learn to eat a salad without smearing your lipstick.” Whatever her caveats about the movies, however, Celeste Holm’s admiration for Mankiewicz was enormous. “He was the most sophisticated director I ever worked with,” she said.
Part of his sophistication was the belief that only he could shape his work. Other fingers, including editorial ones, would leave a sticky smudge. But if a picture must have an editor, Barbara McLean (1904–1996) was one of the best. Tom Mankiewicz emphasizes that his father wasn’t afraid McLean would sabotage his picture: “He only worried about Zanuck.”
Born Barbara Pollut in New Jersey, she married Gordon McLean, a projectionist, in 1924. They left immediately on the long trip to Hollywood, where, like thousands of movie-intoxicated youths, Barbara intended to become an actress. In photographs of the period she has dark hair, almond-shaped Egyptian eyes, and thinly plucked brows. Her resemblance to silent stars like Vilma Banky and Pola Negri was no doubt intentional.
Few aspirants made it to silent stardom, and Barbara McLean was not among the elect. But she did possess a Hollywood skill. As a girl she had worked in her father’s film laboratory in Palisades Park, New Jersey. There she cut negatives and patched together release prints. “I learned all about the density of positive and negative film,” she recalled many years later.
Her marriage broke up and she needed work. Because of her experience, she got a job at Fox’s laboratory on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. (This was a few years before Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century.) In those days, editing frequently amounted to little more than simple cutting—trimming edges and splicing loose ends to arrange shots in elementary continuity. The term for those who performed such work was “cutter,” a word still sometimes used in a faintly derogatory sense in place of the more high-end job description, “editor.”
The first film McLean edited after her apprenticeship was Coquette (1929), Mary Pickford’s first talkie. McLean didn’t own a car, so America’s Sweetheart, en route from Pickfair, stopped for her every morning and dropped her off at night. (It’s unclear why Coquette, Pickford’s United Artists film, was being worked on at Fox; by the late twenties UA had built its own studio.)
After Zanuck and Joseph M. Schenck formed 20th Century-Fox in 1935, “Bobbie” McLean, as she was known in the industry, went on to edit some of the studio’s most prestigious productions, including Alexander’s Ragtime Band, The Song of Bernadette, Viva Zapata, Niagara, and many more. Nominated seven times for Academy Awards, she won an Oscar for Wilson in 1944. In 1949 Zanuck promoted her to head of the studio’s editing department, a post she held until her retirement twenty years later.
Described as “creative, imaginative, and expert in her art,” McLean “repeatedly demonstrated a solid dramatic grasp, a knowledge of what could be done with film, and a keen awareness of story values.”
Some studio directors wanted their editors on the set, while others considered an editor’s presence a threat to their authority, and fierce arguments often resulted. Barbara McLean generally spent three or four hours on the set with every director she worked with, noting their approach, particularly during the first weeks of filming. In the case of All About Eve, she waited until production moved to Los Angeles before observing Mankiewicz at work.
In 1951 Barbara McLean married the director Robert D. Webb, who specialized in action-oriented films. Webb’s most famous picture, however, is Love Me Tender (1956), a Civil War drama with ballads, which marked Elvis Presley’s debut. McLean and Webb met and started dating when Susan Hayward, a Fox star, invited them to dinner at her home.
Barbara McLean once estimated that she studied half a million feet of film every year. “I see every picture that I cut more than a hundred times,” she told a reporter. “I sit all day before a Moviola—half photograph and half loudspeaker—watching the action and listening to the dialogue.” Her aim, like that of most good editors, was to make the final cut so seamless that it looked as if she had done nothing at all. McLean believed that women were better film cutters than men “because every woman is at heart a mother. A woman uses the scissors on a film like a mother would—with affection, understanding, and tolerance.” In spite of her rather jarring metaphor, McLean did treat the films she edited with devotion and tenderness.
According to film historian Ephraim Katz, “Editing has traditionally been one of the few movie crafts wide open to women, most likely because the position involves little contact with the male-dominated technical crews, but also because it requires manual dexterity rather than brawn and an observant aesthetic eye.” Another film historian, Martin Norden, speculates that “women very early got a foothold in editing because it was originally seen as a menial job, requiring only that they follow the orders of men as to the duration of a sequence or the order of the shots. By the time filmmakers began to discover that film could be rearranged, shuffled, and cut in ways that would make the final effect much more powerful for an audience, women were technical masters.”
Dede Allen, considered one of the most creative American film editors, believes one reason the field has always been open to women is because “they are good at little details, like sewing.” Margaret Booth, still another legendary editor, had a passion for detail; she recalled that before there were “edge numbers” on a film frame—those tiny numbers that identify a particular shot—she would sit for hours trying to determine whether Lillian Gish had her eyelids closed or open.
In Barbara McLean’s unair-conditioned workroom, in June 1950, hung strips of celluloid, and on every flat surface were stacks of film cans. There was an inspection table where she and directors and producers could eyeball the goods, but the most important object was the Moviola, an editing device with a small viewing screen that showed film running at sound or slower speed. The Moviola could be stopped or started on individual frames, enabling an editor to examine scenes closely and to mark them for sound synchronization or optical effects.
Superficially, at least, the process of editing a film seems to run parallel with editing a book for publication. The manuscript arrives in what the author considers its final form. One or more editors at the publishing house then take over, making few changes if the manuscript is “clean” but sometimes totally reshaping one that’s unwieldy. The author then approves or disapproves the changes and, necessary compromises having been reached by all concerned, the book is sent to the printer.
But such is not the case in editing a film. The main difference is that movies have usually been routinely edited as they are shot. There is no real equivalent in publishing, since writers don’t ship off their work at the end of the day for assemblage. Film directors do.
This editing practice, not widely known outside the film industry, often surprises even those who are well versed in other aspects of the movies. For example Tom Stempel, a film historian who interviewed Barbara McLean in 1970, asked her: “Was this standard policy to cut
the picture as it went along? I’d always had the impression that the films were cut after the shooting had stopped.” McLean answered: “Oh no, you cut as you go along. Every studio does that. You’d be in a hell of a mess otherwise. What if you needed some stuff and the sets had already been torn down? By the time you got through with the whole picture, it was pretty nearly set. All you had to do was just add the whole bit up together.”
Bitter quarrels often erupted over the final cut of a film. Would the release version please the director, or the producer? Rarely did they share the same vision.
All About Eve is the exception that proves the rule, for it seems to have pleased Mankiewicz, Zanuck, McLean, and all other interested parties. No one connected with it is on record as having complained about the film’s ultimate arrangement. It’s impossible to pin down the minutiae of editing All About Eve—who selected which shots, who suggested that others be dropped, and the like. Such records either were not kept or they have disappeared. But we do have clues.
The best indication of the film’s integrity is that the story we see on-screen remains basically as Mankiewicz conceived it from treatment through shooting script. Second, in the words of Tom Mankiewicz, “Dad was riding high at the time. He was bouncing off A Letter to Three Wives and the two Oscars he won for that picture, so he was at the height of his power and control—the height of his artistic testosterone, if you will. Meaning he was able to win fights against Zanuck because he was the fair-haired boy of the studio.” Third, although no director had final cut in the studio era, Mankiewicz, like most important directors, “was in the editing room all the time,” according to his son. Yet his presence there didn’t jar Barbara McLean. Later she said, “We were very good friends,” and Tom Mankiewicz states that his father always spoke “very affectionately” of her. After they finished the picture, the director gave McLean a key chain with a gaggle of tiny Oscars attached to represent her own Academy Award and those of the other Oscar winners on the picture.
