Bringing Up Oscar: The Story of the Men and Women Who Founded the Academy

by Debra Ann Pawlak

  Nagel became so popular, in fact, that he rarely had a day off. Filming back-to-back pictures for months at a time, the actor was only allowed an occasional Sunday for himself. The L.A. Times reported:

  He started his vacationless period seven months ago when he played Paul in … Three Weeks (1924). The day following the last scene of that production he entrained for New York to appear in The Rejected Woman (1924). Before he had finished his role he received a wire to return immediately to [Hollywood] to commence work in another picture so the final week of The Rejected Woman was a period of night and day work. He boarded the Twentieth Century Limited with makeup on, having worked until immediately before train time.

  Nagel was sent for to commence work in … Tess of the D’Urbervbilles (1924). Photography had started before he arrived so he went directly from the station to the studio …

  Tess’ production schedule was changed allowing Nagel to complete his scenes in just a few weeks so that he could begin filming another movie the very next day. He was then slotted for yet another picture eight weeks later. Some matinée idols didn’t get much rest.

  No matter what the critics might have written, those matinée girls sure knew how to pick ’em.

  Chapter Seven

  CALLING THE SHOTS

  Sometimes flamboyant, sometimes eccentric and almost always colorful with ambition on their sleeve, early film directors took charge of their productions whether they knew what they were doing or not. Most were men with the exception of one or two determined ladies such as Dorothy Arzner and Lois Weber. Some directors, like many of their actors, came from theatrical backgrounds, while others drew upon military experience that enabled them to bark orders with authority. A few were simply actors or writers plucked from the ranks of their respective studios when necessity dictated.

  One of the earliest film directors, Allan Dwan, was originally a scenarist for a Chicago film company. In 1911, his superiors sent him to California in search of a missing film crew. He located the group in San Juan Capistrano—their director had gone on a binge and disappeared. Not knowing what else to do, the troop was simply waiting for their wayward leader’s return. Dwan wired the bosses back east, explained the situation and recommended they disband the film. They countered by telling him to direct it. Dwan later recalled: “… I got the company together and told them either I direct or you’re out of work and they said you’re the best damn director we ever saw.”

  Most early film companies had their own stable of directors—sometimes up to a dozen. Movies were usually filmed next to each other inside the studio. Rehearsal for a western might be underway while a comedy wrapped up right behind it. At the same time, mood music for a drama might be playing just a few feet over. Sets were simultaneously built while others were torn down. The chaotic environment was anything but quiet. Directors took to using megaphones so they could be heard above the ongoing din.

  Amidst the hubbub, it wasn’t unusual for those early one-reelers to be churned out at a rate of one per week per director who had to be good at multi-tasking. While still filming their current production, they had to prepare for the next one in order to maintain their quota. After studying the selected photoplay, the director chose a cast, approved costumes, ordered sets and developed the scene-by-scene filming schedule. He was also responsible for finding offsite locations to accommodate exterior shots where megaphones were even more helpful. Many of these filmmakers drove fast cars allowing them to quickly travel from place to place. Later on, several of them took to the skies searching for locations from the air. Regardless of how they did it, the prep work had to be done before the camera even started to roll.

  Once the sets were built, the costumes sewn and the make-up applied, the director then went about filming his movie one scene at a time—almost always out of sequence. For budget purposes, all scenes with the same background were completed before moving on to the next scenes, which required different settings. An efficient director would keep a list of all backgrounds along with associated scene numbers to maintain the tight schedule. This saved the company from tearing down and rebuilding sets, as well as traveling more than once to the same place—a very cost-effective use of time, materials and people.

  Filming out of sequence, however, often caused problems with continuity, another thing the director was responsible for maintaining. If a player pins her hair up when she leaves the house, she mustn’t wear it down for the exterior shot in the front yard. Spectators would surely notice the difference and frown upon the director’s sloppy methods, and the overall reception to the film would suffer.

  Before filming each scene, the director stood behind the camera and rehearsed his players. According to author Austin C. Lescarboura who wrote Behind the Motion Picture Screen in 1919:

  Once the director is satisfied with the way his players interpret a scene he calls for the lights (if the scene is in the studio) and gives the order to the cameraman to film the action. At the command “Action! Camera! Go!” the players start work as if electrified, while the cameraman cranks away.…

  At the sound of that famous order, “Cut!,” the cameraman immediately stopped cranking the camera and called out the number of film feet used for the current scene. With only 1,000 feet per reel, scenes often had to be reshot at a slower or faster pace to ensure they were completed at the appropriate length. Timing was everything.

  Once all scenes were filmed, the director began the editing process. He cut away unnecessary footage, inserted title cards and closeups, as well as blended scenes together to effectively tell his story. Nitrate or not, unused footage was often stored for possible use in a future picture—either his own or another director employed by the studio.

  As the motion picture industry evolved from ten-minute silent flickers to full-length features with sound, the best directors, such as Cecil B. DeMille, naturally rose to the top of their field where they remained making high-quality films for several decades. Although their filming methods may have differed, all were creative storytellers who knew how to spin an entertaining yarn. And when it came to embellishing a tale, director Raoul Walsh was hard to top. Mixing a little fabricated fiction with the truth often created a helluva story no matter which version Walsh decided to go with. It’s no wonder he found his way to the megaphone and stayed for over fifty years.

  Raoul Walsh’s father, Thomas, was born in England and came to the United States as a child in 1872. He established himself in New York as a successful men’s clothing designer. In 1886, he married Elizabeth Brough, and on March 11, 1887, Albert Edward (later known as Raoul) was born. The wealthy and socially prominent New York couple had two more children, George in 1889 and Alice in 1891. Elizabeth was an attractive woman who often entertained at home. As a young boy, Walsh remembered hobnobbing with the likes of theater actor Edwin Booth, writer Mark Twain and boxing champ John L. Sullivan.

  After his high school graduation, Walsh briefly attended college, but dropped out when cancer claimed his mother. According to Walsh, his life of adventures began when he and his uncle sailed to Cuba. His sea legs were shaken, however, when their schooner tangled with a hurricane. After floating aimlessly for three days, they were towed into Veracruz. While in Mexico, Walsh learned to break horses, as well as a few rope tricks. He also bragged about a scorching, south of the border love affair he had with a Mexican general’s mistress that almost cost him his life. After narrowly escaping that fiasco, Walsh dashed off to Texas where he tried his hand at roping and riding steers. From the Lone Star state, he traveled by rail to Butte, Montana—at that time a frontier mining town.

  Totally broke due to a bad poker bet, Walsh became an undertaker’s assistant. He claimed he was never paid for his mortuary duties; therefore, he quit and went to work for a local physician assisting with surgeries and administering anesthetics. Walsh professed he may have killed a patient, but the good doctor assured him that the man didn’t have much of a chance anyway. When the doctor unexpectedly died from “lung
trouble,” Walsh’s career in medicine was over. He bolted back to Texas where he broke horses for the U.S. Cavalry in San Antonio.

  A traveling theatrical troupe happened to be in the area. They needed someone to ride a horse onstage as it walked on a treadmill. The producer approached Walsh who was recuperating from a recent knee injury. By now, an excellent rider, Walsh took the job, and made his horseman debut in The Clansman, which later became the infamous film Birth of a Nation. Stage-struck after sailing, cowpoking, undertaking and operating, Walsh finally found something to stick with.

  With some stage experience behind him, he returned to New York in 1909 and took acting jobs both in the theater and the movies. He also studied with family friend and popular playwright Paul Armstrong. According to Walsh, it was Armstrong who suggested he drop the names “Edward Albert” and try the more colorful “Raoul.” Like Mary Pickford and other stars of the time, Walsh too claimed that “Raoul” was his official baptismal name. Completely random or not, the name fit and he made good use of it.

  The idea of switching from actor to director came to him as he worked on a period film that required him to ride a horse down the middle of a street. Describing the director in charge as a “roughneck,” Walsh later recalled the incident:

  … I got off the horse and looked back. I saw that I’d been riding between two trolley tracks. So I told the guy, I said, “Say, they didn’t have any trolley tracks in—.” He said, “Who the hell is directing this picture, you or me?” That’s about when I decided I’d have to become a director.…

  Before he actually took over that megaphone, however, Walsh joined D.W. Griffith and his Biograph team. He played in multiple one-reelers alongside several big names like Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore who entered the studio by way of the alley so none of his theatrical counterparts would see him. When Griffith left Biograph, he took Walsh with him to Hollywood and in between acting assignments put him to work as an assistant director.

  According to Walsh, one of his many shining moments came in 1914 when Griffith decided to make a movie about the Mexican General, Pancho Villa. In one of several versions Walsh liked to tell, Griffith sent him to Mexico in search of the real revolutionary. After making contact with one of Villa’s men, Walsh says he was blindfolded and taken to a run-down building somewhere in Juarez where he met the General and spoke with him through an interpreter:

  I thought to myself, I’d better start off good with this bum.… “Tell the General that the press in America say he is a bandit. I’m going to make a picture of the General to show that he is a great hero and the savior of the Mexican people.” Well that went over and I knew I was in.… “eighty million people would see the picture of the General. And the story that I’m going to tell of the General …” And now I’m thinking like hell—what the hell story was it? I had thought of three of them on the way out on the train.…

  Although his story is sometimes disputed, Walsh maintained that he not only persuaded the General to cooperate, but to play himself in the movie, The Life of General Villa (1914). In turn, Walsh took on the role of Villa as a younger man—the only detail that remained constant regardless of which tale he told.

  Impressed with Walsh, Griffith assigned him to work on the battle scenes for Birth of a Nation (1915) while also playing the part of John Wilkes Booth. He did such a fine job that Griffith finally gave him his own films to direct.

  Other studios took note of the young man’s accomplishments and the following year, the Fox Company, a new studio back in New York, offered him a contract at $400 a week. Walsh’s first film for Fox was also one of the first feature length gangster films, The Regeneration (1915). One pivotal scene in this movie involved a fire that erupted on a crowded riverboat. While filming on the Hudson River, the action was so realistic that the fire department arrived along with the police who dragged Walsh to jail for causing such a ruckus.

  By 1916, Walsh was an established director at Fox now earning $1,000 each week and working with such exotic screen sirens as Theda Bara. That same year, he secretly married petite actress Miriam Cooper—one of the players he worked with under Griffith. Cooper, who was less than five feet tall, also appeared in Birth of a Nation. She was a fearless actress and preferred doing her own stunt work, which must have made quite an impression on the adventure-loving Walsh. The couple couldn’t have children of their own and eventually adopted two boys, John and Robert.

  One year later, Walsh made one of his most important films, The Honor System (1917)—the first of many edgy dramas that he brought to the screen. Shot on location at the Arizona State Penitentiary, the movie explored issues concerning penal reform. Walsh even spent a few nights in the clink just to get the feel of it. Starring Milton Sills, Miriam Cooper and featuring George Walsh, the director’s younger brother, the film was a commercial and critical success defining Walsh as a major filmmaker and proving that he had ability outside of acting. During The Honor System’s premiere, a real convict spoke to the audience about reformation efforts. Right after his speech, he fled toward the Canadian border and disappeared.

  Joining Walsh at Fox was another young director, Frank William George Lloyd. Lloyd, the youngest of seven children, was born in Scotland on February 2, 1886 to a family that lived just outside of Glasgow. His father, Edmund, originally from Wales, was a steamship engineer who encouraged his son’s love for the sea—something that was apparent in many of Lloyd’s films. His Scottish mother, Jane, preferred the theater. As a teen, Lloyd went to London where he performed in various musical comedies and operettas throughout England. In January 1909, he set sail on the R.M.S. Empress of Ireland—the same ill-fated ship that sank five years later in the St. Lawrence Seaway after colliding with another vessel. The accident claimed 1,024 lives making it Canada’s worst maritime disaster.

  While in Canada, Lloyd worked installing telegraph lines before returning to the stage where he met and married singer Alma Haller. The couple came to America and Lloyd worked on the West coast in vaudeville. In 1913, a fellow actor at the Century Theater in Los Angeles introduced him to Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle. Laemmle hired Lloyd as an actor and for the next two years he appeared in dozens of films starting out as an extra and working his way into more significant roles. The Lloyds also had a daughter named Alma born on April 3, 1914.

  Eventually, Lloyd was asked to direct his first motion picture. He wanted a raise, but the company heads countered his request by offering him an extra $25 a week for every reel of film he completed. During his first week on the new job, he turned in two reels and earned an extra $50 on top of his normal $60 salary making him the highest paid member of the group. He also wrote many of his own photoplays and showed his innovative side with The Gentleman from Indiana (1915) featuring popular player Dustin Farnum. The New York Times reported on October 3, 1915:

  Director Frank Lloyd will introduce a novelty by staging a genuine rainstorm at night in the street with lights inside the store windows and the water streaming down the panes. This is a secret effect, which Lloyd has never made public before.…

  Lloyd joined the Fox Film Corporation in 1916 where he continued writing and directing with some success, but it was not until he collaborated with author Charles Dickens that he scored a major hit. Feeling that it might be better to film Dickens’ classic novel A Tale of Two Cities than one of his own original stories, Lloyd went to great lengths to capture the saga with all of its historical details. As a result, one reviewer declared that with these seven reels of film, Lloyd “earned himself a place in the hall of fame of directors.”

  He followed up with several more classic tales such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1917), which clocked in at ten reels and another popular Dickens tale, Oliver Twist (1922), starring child actor Jackie Coogan in the title role along with the versatile Lon Chaney as Fagin. In between, Lloyd wrote and directed many of his own photoplays, and still found time for a classic western, Riders of the Purple Sage (1918), based on the Zane Grey
novel.

  By 1921, Lloyd was head of his own production company and searching for film locations by air. He enjoyed a relaxing round of golf, duck hunting, trout fishing and a good dinner at Musso and Frank. Lloyd also belonged to the Motion Pictures Directors’ Association, which was founded in 1915 by a small group of film directors including one of his closest friends, the Irish-born William Desmond Taylor who ultimately ended up more famous for his murder than his movies.

  Amidst a whirl of missing love letters, and a notorious silk negligee, a suspect list comprised of superstars and an intriguing butler, Henry Peavey, who probably didn’t do it, forty-nine-year-old Taylor was shot in the back in his own home on February 1, 1922. The ensuing investigation revealed that the director’s name was actually William Cunningham Deane-Tanner. Investigators also found that he had been married, but deserted his wife and daughter years before in New York.

  Multiple suspects were questioned, but no arrests were made and no charges ever filed. Silent film comedienne Mabel Normand was the last person believed to have seen Taylor alive. Rumors of a heated argument and scandalous affair between the two pretty much ended her filmmaking days. Letters found in Taylor’s home also alluded to an affair with the young screen actress Mary Miles Minter whose career was all but destroyed after the incident. In addition, Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby, made the suspect list because she owned a gun that fired similar bullets used in the murder. Her motive? Jealousy and/or disapproval over her daughter’s alleged relationship with Taylor.