Nicholas Ray
Page 72
Books and other sources: James Jones, To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones, ed. George Hendrick (Random House, 1989); Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer (Houghton Mifflin, 1985); Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Circle of Pain: The Cinema of Nicholas Ray,” Sight and Sound (Autumn 1973); Andrew Sarris, “The Acid Test of Auteurism,” Village Voice (Nov. 11–17, 1981); Wim Wenders/Chris Sievernich, Nick’s Film/Lightning over Water (Auflage, 1981).
Also by Patrick McGilligan
Cagney: The Actor as Auteur
Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff
George Cukor: A Double Life
Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
Clint, the Life and Legend: A Biography of Clint Eastwood
Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only
Edited by Patrick McGilligan
Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist(with Paul Buhle)
Six Scripts by Robert Riskin
Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s
Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s
Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s
Backstory 5: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1990s
Credits
JACKET DESIGN BY MILAN BOZIC
JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: FRONT © DENNIS STOCK/MAGNUM PHOTOS;
BACK © BOB WILLOUGHBY/STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY
Copyright
NICHOLAS RAY. Copyright © 2011 by Patrick McGilligan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* The school is known today as Lincoln Park High School.
* The school has since become the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse.
* Frazee and Sanders were popular professors. Cashman was a fellow student and Buskin Club member.
*The house is known today as “Hillforest House,” but letterhead from Stark’s time spells it “Hilforest.”
*Although director of Piranese Calico was Ray’s first major Taliesin credit, he would see his name misspelled in the local Spring Green newspaper as “Nicholas Bay.”
* Author’s emphasis.
*The First Studio: Sullerzhitsy-Vackhtangov-Tchekhov by P. A. Markov (Group Theatre, 1934).
* All the arts were trending toward the left and the Communist Party. Ray’s pal from La Crosse, Alonzo Hauser, was busy finishing a portrait of Angelo Herndon, a Communist Party organizer from Atlanta facing imprisonment on trumped-up charges, while another friend in their artists’ circle, Aaron Ben-Schmuel, was working on a sculpture entitled “Head of Lenin.”
* Incidentally, neither Kazan nor the unsung female “stenographer” was credited as a writer when the play opened.
* Ironically, as Robinson recalled in his memoir Ballad of an American: The Autobiography of Earl Robinson, playwright Blankfort himself betrayed the left-wing movement two decades later with cooperative testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
* Morris Watson, himself fired for helping to organize the Newspaper Guild, fought his case up to the Supreme Court and won.
* But there were not enough donations and Losey’s “Social Circus” died stillborn.
* Mary La Follette was the mother of Robert La Follette Sr. and grandmother of Robert (“Young Bob”) La Follette Jr., the Wisconsin Progressive Party adherent who succeeded his father as senator from Wisconsin.
* “I Know Where I’m Goin’ ” is a traditional Scottish or Irish ballad about lost love; “Darlin’ Corey” is a folk tune about a mountain woman recorded by many, including Burl Ives on his debut album, Okeh Presents the Wayfaring Stranger, in 1941.
* Afterward, though he claimed to have enjoyed the show, Woody Guthrie wrote a long letter to proprietor Max Gordon, praising the performers but questioning Ray’s staging and other aspects of the performance: the seating arrangements, the choice of songs, the acoustics (Josh White was using the club’s only microphone, while Lead Belly had to bellow his songs), the patter of the female emcee, even the advertising display case out front. Perversely, Guthrie wrote his letter from the Almanac House, where he and Ray both were residing. “He’s staying here at the Almanack house for a few days right now,” Guthrie wrote, “till he can find him another place, I suppose this letter will be in the mail before he gets a chance to look it over.” Showing the letter to Ray, Guthrie wrote Gordon, was up to him, “if you want to.”
*Interestingly, Ernst’s father, Morris Ernst, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was already known as a virulent anti-Communist. In 1940 he led the ACLU in driving the veteran Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn off its board and passing a resolution that condemned and excluded Communists from membership.
* The 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, as Ray well knew, was also based on an Ethel Lina White novel; the reference would have resonated with Houseman.
* Super-patriot Fred E. Busbey, later a key supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, was a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover and often fed off Hoover’s anti-Communist leaks and accusations.
* Houseman knew Dozier as a decent, intelligent producer but also, incidentally, as the man who had succeeded him as Joan Fontaine’s lover (they would be married later in 1946).
* Mankiewicz’s script for That Girl from Memphis was never completed or filmed.
* “Object track” is a screenwriters’ term for an object that is tracked through the story line.
* Farley Granger said, later, that when Howard Hughes took over the studio, Hughes reconsidered the book’s original title before vetoing it on the grounds the public might misinterpret it as Thieves Like Us.
* Though uncredited, Guthrie’s version of the song “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” is faintly excerpted on a car radio in one scene just before the three fugitive criminals abandon the vehicle, with the song still playing, and set it on fire.
*Later, after years of being blacklisted, Will Lee became well known to younger generations of television watchers as Mr. Hooper on Sesame Stre
et.
* There was even an anti-Nazi version of Grand Hotel called Hotel Berlin in 1945, incidentally with a script by Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten.
* Technically, Mankiewicz had been credited once before, as producer of a W. C. Fields film back in 1932, but he was one of several nominal co-producers then, when perhaps the credit should have been “co-refereeing.”
* Bogart’s son Stephen Humphrey Bogart quoted his mother Lauren Bacall about the liberal star’s political “change of heart” in his 1995 book In Search of My Father: “He [Bogart] felt coerced into it, and he was never proud of it.”
* Bernard Sawicki was a reform school parolee who made a courtroom confession to killing a policeman during a Chicago crime spree in 1941. His public defender, Morton Anderson, was the model for Nick Romano’s lawyer Andrew Morton in Willard Motley’s novel.
* But the writer of the Ebony article, comparing the Willard Motley novel to the Hollywood film, complained that the courtroom scene contained the “only mention of racial discrimination in the picture,” and that Sunshine, pointedly jobless in the novel, was employed in the film version as a rack boy in a local pool hall, “establishing him in a menial role.”
* The waterfront setting was a clear reference to Australian-born longshoreman Harry Bridges, who led fierce strikes in the Bay Area. Bridges was often accused—though it was never proved conclusively—of being a Communist.
* The “old 97” was a Southern mail train that jumped a curve while traveling at a high speed and plunged into a ravine near Danville, Virginia, in 1903, killing the crew and mail clerks. The train tragedy had inspired a well-known ballad recorded by many folksingers, including Woody Guthrie.
* A short time later, the liberal, anti-Communist Mankiewicz reversed himself by calling for voluntary signing of the loyalty oath. The oath was resubmitted and approved by the Directors Guild membership on May 27, 1951.
* Naming names for HUAC was a betrayal of ideals, in the view of some; doing Hughes’s dirty work of retakes on another director’s picture was another form of betrayal, in the view of Josef von Sternberg. Ray claimed to have asked the legendary director’s permission to tinker with his unreleased films, but whether he did or not, von Sternberg did not appreciate the result. “Nicholas Ray is an idiot,” von Sternberg later told film historian Kevin Brownlow. “He did terrible things to Macao, he cut it and ruined it. His name did not appear but mine did. It was a great injustice.”
* David Dortort would go on to create and produce the iconic Western television series Bonanza.
* Only McCoy and Dortort would be credited for the script on-screen, not Parrish, with Stanush alone credited for the story.
* No relation to future president Richard M. Nixon.
* Pasinetti later returned to Italy and worked several times as a scenarist with Michelangelo Antonioni.
* Even so, Truffaut, at this juncture, considered Ray’s They Live by Night to be “still his best film.”
* The Cinema d’Essai was on the Right Bank on the Avenue des Ternes. It was not exactly a revival house. Originally it was intended to show “difficult” films of all sorts.
* In 1956, a year after Rebel Without a Cause was released, Lindner died of a heart ailment at the age of forty-one.
* Jim Stark’s impulsive mooing during the Taurus the Bull part of the planetarium lecture is partly what gets him into trouble with Buzz and his gang.
*Ray later claimed that Jack Warner suffered an anxiety attack about making Rebel Without a Cause early in the shooting, threatening to shut the production down. According to Ray, when he learned of the imminent shutdown he contacted his business manager and tried to buy the film away from Warner Bros., before wiser heads reassured the head of the studio. This made for a fascinating anecdote—told by Ray on several occasions, including to Cliff Jahr on television—for which there is no proof.
* The season in which the story takes place is virtually irrelevant, however, in the film as it exists.
* Dean and Wood had actually shared a long smooch in the small-screen “I’m a Fool,” televised the previous November.
* This sequence evoked the ending to a film by one of Ray’s favorite directors, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, which climaxes with a criminal chased by police perishing atop the British Museum.
* While accepting his adaptation credit, Shulman later filed a grievance with the Writers Guild contesting Ray’s sole story credit and vigorously protested that credit to Warner Bros.
* Only one other Nicholas Ray film contended for any Academy Awards. 55 Days at Peking, his last picture, was nominated (but didn’t win) for Best Original Song and Best Score.
*Also Oscar-nominated for Best Actor, one year later for Giant, Dean lost again.
* Mason had writing credits on several films co-written with his wife, Pamela.
* This was a tip they ignored, and the wife character in the film remained relatively blameless.
*Interesting that Ray, at this juncture, ranked Gérard Philipe alongside Olivier and Brando. Not as well remembered today, Philipe was a handsome, serious actor in quality French films, dead of liver cancer in 1959 before the age of thirty-seven.
* To be fair, Pelligrin was playing the Arab guide—Mokrane.
* Jürgens wrote later in his autobiography that, on location, the ministrations of the executive producer, Graetz’s “pretty blonde wife” Janine, were his consolation prize.
* Cooperative witnesses who supplied names to HUAC typically adopted this rationale in defense of their actions. However, as Victor S. Navasky wrote in his book Naming Names, scolding Schulberg and others like him, “The ‘I didn’t hurt anybody’ argument a) turns out to be not true and b) in any event seems to go more to what lawyers call mitigation of damages than to be a real defense of naming names.”
* Freuchen was a Danish explorer who wrote definitive books about Eskimos and the Arctic and who worked as an adviser to some Hollywood films, including MGM’s extraordinary Eskimo, a.k.a. Mala the Magnificent, starring the half-Inupiat Ray Mala, in 1933.
* Publicity for the film defended Tani’s casting by insisting that there were cultural similarities between Japan and the Eskimos, including physical resemblances and a common tone and accent in the languages.
* Yordan was the only scriptwriter who would see his name up on the screen as writer of King of Kings—except in Italy, where Diego Fabbri, the consummate writer of religious drama, was included.
* Excited about Bazlen, MGM put the attractive young actress under contract. She played Steve McQueen’s girlfriend in The Honeymoon Machine, filmed after King of Kings but released before the life of Jesus in the same year, 1961. Bazlen starred in one more important MGM film, How the West Was Won, before her career tapered off. She died from cancer in 1989 at age forty-four.
* Schnee died of a heart attack at age forty-six in 1962.
* Mel Brooks finally produced a film of The Doctor and the Devils, based on the Dylan Thomas script and having nothing to do with the Nick Ray version, ten years later, in 1985.
* The director always insisted that Dean slept with a gun under his pillow during the making of Rebel Without a Cause. When Warner Bros. took the gun away from him, the star acquired another, according to Ray. Dean had several guns, one of which he bestowed as a gift on the director after the filming, Ray said. That, presumably, was the gun handed to Paris militants—which has never been traced.
*This wasn’t true, of course. Besides Clifford Odets, who had agreed to be identified by him, Kazan in his prepared April 10, 1952, written statement gave the names of seven members of the Group Theatre and a handful of Party functionaries, including low-level officials. What he said off the record, before or later, when being debriefed privately by HUAC representatives or anti-Communist crusaders, has never been disclosed.