Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)
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239 “That business of not being typecast”: Los Angeles Times, Nov. 18, 1962.
240 “Fox had him playing villains”: Mayer quoted in “What Makes a Star,” American Weekly, June 8, 1958.
241 “pomp and respectability”: Daniel Selznick, interviewed by Eyman in Lion of Hollywood. Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple recalled Mayer’s attitude toward Catholicism in a 1975 oral history for the University of California, Berkeley. He said when he asked Mayer why he didn’t make pictures about Jews, his reply was, “Rabbis don’t look dramatic. A priest has all these trimmings and all this stuff.”
241 Cantwell . . . had summoned: This account is in the Archbishop John Timothy McNicholas Papers, Catholic University. “You will be glad to know,” Cantwell wrote a week later to McNicholas, “I was assured that there have been no bad pictures made in the last three months.” That June, Irving Thalberg visited Cantwell to complain about Father David Lord, who helped author the Production Code and headed the Sodality of Our Lady in St. Louis. Lord had written in his publication, The Queen’s Work, that Thalberg “made of his wife a harlot in her pictures.”
241 “Most of the men and women”: Breen to McNicholas, March 1934, McNicholas Papers.
241 “The priests are all such superior men”: Kanin, Tracy and Hepburn.
242 “America’s faults”: Seelye’s expansive essay on the book and film of Captains Courageous serves as the introduction to the 2005 Penguin Classics edition. Among the piece’s many felicities, Seelye calls the character of Disko Troop “a Puritan Ulysses, for whom the voyage out is the voyage home, the whole irradiated with a triumphant sense of a job well done.”
242 Luke 5:1–11: In verses 4–6 (King James Version): “Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught. And Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net. And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake.”
243 “backbreaker about heaven”: New Republic, June 16, 1937.
243 “the only one with which I was truly happy,” “Instead of the usual concoction”: From the Reminiscences of Marc Connelly (1959) in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, pp. 11 and 12.
245 “Geez, this is a beautiful kid”: McGilligan, Backstory.
246 “The film of a book”: Powell, Million Dollar Movie.
246 “half Portuguese and half black”: Mahin in Marshall, Blueprint on Babylon.
246 “in which white children”: Seelye, introduction to Captains Courageous.
247 Rooney said he couldn’t resist: Rooney, Life Is Too Short.
247 a contemporary profile states . . . a mere three days: Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16, 1937.
247 coaching from Fred Lewis: Witnessed by Thomas Jones, one of the Sea Scouts. Jones is the current owner of Fleming’s Bel-Air estate.
248 “iron egg”: MGM production notes detail the workings of this device and the “self-wiping windshield.” They describe the iron egg as “a heavy egg-shaped mass of solid iron suspended from a framework, and to which the camera is attached, permitting it to swing like a pendulum. The result will be stability within five degrees, no matter how a boat may toss.” And the “self-wiping windshield” is “a disc of plate glass, about eight inches in diameter, rotated before the camera lens at high speed, by a motor. Pressure plates about its circumference keep it wiped and polished at all times, so that spray, waves, or drops of sea water can never obstruct the lens.”
248 “You’ll never know”: Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1937.
248 “Courageous is all done”: Lighton’s Christmas letter to his family, December 1936, Lighton Family Papers.
249 “will not move the camera”: James Wong Howe interviewed by Alain Silver for UCLA Oral History Program (1969).
250 “Freddie always came in”: Mahin in Marshall, Blueprint on Babylon.
250 “You never have to fake”: Gladys Hall, “You Can’t Put Spencer Tracy into Words,” Motion Picture, Nov. 1937.
250 “one long outing”: The New York Times, Jan. 24, 1992.
251 “When a man gets angry”: Kazan, Life.
251 “I didn’t want to play Manuel”: Many articles about Tracy’s discomfort with the role were published. This one is from Hall, “You Can’t Put Spencer Tracy into Words.” But Tracy later wrote in his daybook, “Best picture ever made. Best part ever, too. Once in a lifetime . . .” (These lines can be seen in the 1986 documentary The Spencer Tracy Legacy, directed by David Heeley.)
253 one of his own top three: Ed Sullivan column, Nov. 10, 1938.
253 “in iced water”: Paul Harrison column, June 11, 1937.
253 “a corking yarn”: New Republic, June 16, 1937.
254 “One must be insensitive”: Paris-Soir, Oct. 29, 1937.
254 “have shown here a remarkable capacity”: Times (London), May 6, 1937.
254 “they had made a good show of it”: National Board of Review Magazine, June 1937.
254 “leave the lot”: From unsigned memorandum in Fleming’s MGM file; it quotes a note from Fleming dated Feb. 5, 1937. MGM legal files.
254 united behind Shearer: From Lambert, Norma Shearer: “He was directing Captains Courageous at the time, and in March, 1937, when attorneys for both sides had still failed to reach any kind of agreement, he called the General in New York. Almost everyone at the studio, he said, felt that Mayer and [Robert] Rubin had cast themselves as heavies opposite Norma’s true-blue heroine, and the situation was bad for the company’s image. Schenck agreed.”
254 “It looks all right”: Lighton to his family, Dec. 1936.
254 “To my dying day”: From the audiotape of Bartholomew’s interview for the 1992 documentary When the Lion Roars, produced for Turner Network Television.
254 “He was a fabulous character”: Rooney, Life Is Too Short.
255 a father and son once again: The film cast an afterglow on all the families involved with it. For John Carradine’s son Keith, “It’s one of my favorite of all Dad’s films, a beautiful picture.” After making it, John Carradine bought a sixty-three-foot Gloucester-style schooner—and years later, Keith bought a hurdy-gurdy like Manuel’s. Similarly, Tracy handed down his scale model of the We’re Here to his daughter, Susie. Sally Fleming has her father’s leather-bound edition of Captains Courageous.
19 Test Pilot
256 “They’re still trying names”: Louella Parsons column, April 18, 1937.
257 Vic’s fidelity to Lu: McCarthy, Howard Hawks.
258 Nine writers: MGM legal files. The studio later gave the estate of the test pilot Jimmy Collins, who died in a power dive, $5,000 to settle a plagiarism suit. He’d written a series called “Flying Stories” for New York’s Daily News, and his editor compiled them into a book called Test Pilot. Fleming never cited Collins’s articles. He does put over the sensations that they described: “Centrifugal force, like some huge, invisible monster, pushed my head down into my shoulders and squashed me into that seat so that my backbone bent, and I groaned with the force of it,” becoming “blind as a bat,” “dizzy as a coot.” As the pilot takes a power dive, Collins wrote, the land shows up “like something looming out of a morning mist.”
258 Fleming, Wellman, and Tay Garnett: McCarthy, Howard Hawks.
258 “Vic Fleming was the most exacting”: Unused notes for The Lion’s Share, Bosley Crowther Papers, Brigham Young University.
259 “It’s incredible”: Hedda Hopper column, Nov. 12, 1939.
259 “I wanted out”: Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1955.
259 “a personal favorite”: Kotsilibas-Davis and Loy, Myrna Loy.
259 “I just didn’t have the heart”: Susan Myrick, White Columns in Hollywood.
260 “exchanged glances and smiled”: Chicago Tribune, Nov. 9, 1934; mention of Fleming’s cracked oil tank appeared in the Sportsman Pilot, Dec. 15, 19
34. The Lockheed Sirius “was notoriously difficult to fly and unforgiving of pilot error,” says the New Zealand writer and historian Ian Mackersey, a biographer of Kingsford Smith. Mackersey has written that the aviator was afflicted with a morbid fear of flying over the sea.
260 “of what big-studio moviemaking could be”: Kotsilibas-Davis and Loy, Myrna Loy.
260 “King and Queen of Hollywood”: The competition for the crowns was set up as a one-day-only contest. On November 28, 1937, the fifty-five North American newspapers in the New York Daily News–Chicago Tribune syndicate asked readers to send in votes for their top three movie actors and actresses to their local papers. Sullivan presented Gable and Loy with the crowns (they sported the newspapers’ mastheads) on MGM’s radio house organ, the Maxwell House Good News program. Initially delighted with the honor—“this will be the nicest souvenir the movies ever gave me”—Gable later felt compelled to mock it with disclaimers like “I’m just a slob from Ohio.”
260 wooden manner in front of a camera: Sullivan hosted his eponymous variety program on CBS TV from 1948 to 1971.
261 “Stop being nervous”: Ed Sullivan column, Dec. 16, 1937.
261 “Don’t worry about it”: Ed Sullivan column, Jan. 6, 1940.
263 “Spencer Tracy as a gay man”: DiLeo, 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember but Probably Don’t.
264 “very motherly”: October production conference notes, MGM Collection, USC Cinema and Television Library.
264 one reviewer in 1938: Hollywood Reporter, April 15, 1938.
264 “amazing”: Mahin in Tornabene collection, Margaret Herrick Library.
264 “had a lively exchange”: Kotsilibas-Davis and Loy, Myrna Loy.
264 “I remember him working out”: Geist, Pictures Will Talk.
264 “Tracy would give his right arm”: Strickling, Tornabene collection.
265 “with a long shot”: Hollywood Reporter, Jan. 24, 1938.
265 “got a little out of hand”: Kotsilibas-Davis and Loy, Myrna Loy.
265 Only Angels Have Wings: Mahin in McGilligan’s Backstory derided Hawks for doing “an aviation picture in South America that was stolen directly out of Test Pilot. He asked me to get the script for him for that. I wouldn’t do it. I said, ‘Howard, I can do just so much. It’s Vic’s script, ask Vic.’ [The movie] had come out. I guess he wanted the script so he wouldn’t have to go to the movie.”
267 “absolutely true”: Bogdanovich’s Who the Devil Made It includes Hawks’s most extreme statements about his supposed authorship of Test Pilot.
268 “the unsung heroes”: From prepared remarks dated April 21, 1938 (and marked second revision), Henry H. “Hap” Arnold Papers, Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
268 “plane, spinning like a top”: Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1938.
268 “One of the outstanding successes”: Hollywood Reporter, April 15, 1938.
268 “A bang-up aviation drama”: The New York Times, April 16, 1938.
268 “many critics were shocked”: Economic and Trade Notes, June 9, 1939. Those fleeing the Third Reich at the time of the movie’s release included the families of André Previn and Mike Nichols, who both came to New York from Berlin on the S.S. Manhattan; the first film they saw when they arrived was Test Pilot.
269 “Don’t you like my papa?”: Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1938. When I asked her about this item in 2003, Susie Tracy laughed and said, “Do you think I’d deny saying something like that?” She also talks in the 1986 documentary The Spencer Tracy Legacy about the “devastating” experience, at age five, of seeing her father “die” in Captains Courageous. (Her mother reassured her it was only a movie, but to this day she finds it “too sad” to watch.)
269 “Why don’t we”: James Salter confirmed this anecdote in an e-mail on July 25, 2003.
20 Salvaging The Great Waltz
270 “almost cracked up”: Hollywood Reporter, April 19, 1938.
270 “I am the only farmer”: Fleming, Action.
271 “he demanded”: Day, This Was Hollywood.
272 Clinton Hale’s extended family: Although Fleming worked as a chauffeur only for the Hale family in Santa Barbara, Julian Ludwig could not recall the woman’s name, and her identity has eluded inquiry.
273 “sensitivity—that quickness”: Fleming, “Directing—Then and Now,” Lion’s Roar, July 1944.
273 “there wasn’t a single American”: Interview in Focus on Film (Winter 1975).
273 “Strauss having died”: D. O. Decker, Aug. 19, 1938, MGM legal files.
274 “made magnificent pictures”: The New York Times, April 16, 1939.
275 Hyman declared: The playwright S. N. Behrman’s account of that remark and other indignities inflicted by producers was in The New York Times, July 17, 1966.
275 “They gave me two million dollars”: Desrichard, Julien Duvivier.
275 “New policy at MGM”: Ed Sullivan column, Nov. 7, 1938.
277 “her eyes suddenly filmed over”: Jimmie Fidler column, June 30, 1938.
278 he called her “Angel”: Paul Harrison column, Nov. 21, 1938.
278 direction from the producer Reinhardt: Sheilah Graham column, Sept. 27, 1938.
278 “the lowest ebb”: Interview in Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut.
280 Gravet said: Interview in Focus on Film (Winter 1975).
280 “When they learn to work”: Independent, June 19, 1992.
281 “a dazzling contrast”: Paperno, Notes of a Moscow Pianist.
281 “She never did fully believe me”: Plisetskaya, I, Maya Plisetskaya.
281 “he would rise from his seat”: Korjus died in 1980 at age seventy-one. Evidence of her continued popularity in the former communist-bloc nations still surfaces from time to time, says her daughter Melissa Wells, U.S. ambassador to Estonia from 1998 to 2001. In 2002, when the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, was on a state visit to Estonia, “toward the end of the dinner, when the toasts take place, he said, ‘I’d like to sing a song.’ And he sang ‘One Day When We Were Young.’ And the Estonians recognized it right away . . . And now she’s gone, but the fact that even the Chinese president sings her song, my God!”
281 “and weep like a baby”: Although that sounds like Cold War propaganda, it was told to Korjus, and a distinguished observer, the director Grigory Kozintsev, did think the dictator had trouble distinguishing the screen from reality. Kozintsev recalled Stalin’s running commentary during a screening of his 1935 film, The Youth of Maxim. “He immediately gave vent to his irritation if the people on the screen didn’t work well, say, or praised them when they acted correctly” (quoted in the Independent, June 19, 1992).
21 Putting Oz into The Wizard of Oz
282 “You may wonder”: MGM Studio News, Aug. 14, 1939.
283 “Isn’t Victor Fleming an inspired”: Brooks to Brownlow, March 10, 1969.
284 “Here Vic”: Harmetz, Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”
284 “a picture that searched”: LeRoy’s comment comes from an audio recording on the main commentary track of Warner Home Video’s 2005 three-disc reissue of The Wizard of Oz; it expands slightly on Mahin’s comment to Harmetz in Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”
285 “I’d wanted to make the picture”: Interview with Vernon Scott, UPI, May 17, 1973.
286 “whose work is often rich in imaginative qualities”: Oct. 26, 1938. MGM publicity item.
286 “Parting her hair”: Guilaroff, Crowning Glory.
286 “that man was a poet”: Kobal, People Will Talk.
286 “I wish I was as good”: George Stevens Jr., ed., Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
286 “We got along”: Thompson, Between Action and Cut.
288 He commanded Harburg and Arlen: At least one MGM interoffice memo from Keith Weeks, dated Dec. 21, 1938, confirms this.
288 “The primer provided”: Harmetz, Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”
28
9 A Matter of Life and Death: Released in the United States as Stairway to Heaven.
289 in his memoirs: Powell, Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie.
289 his jumping-off point: Harmetz, Making of “The Wizard of Oz.” In a Washington Post interview published on Feb. 12, 1939, Langley chalked up the framing of Oz in a dream sequence as a “compromise” to “box office.” But that compromise has haunted the vision of filmmakers as cutting-edge as Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).
290 Harburg, likewise: Meyerson and Harburg, Who Put the Rainbow in “The Wizard of Oz”?