Paramount's Path To Sunset Boulevard --- Part One

For Paramount, Sunset Boulevard was an idea whose time had come, but no one expected such a poisoned pen house of horrors a mere two years after the studio's bouncy and energetic The Perils Of Pauline, its nostalgic optimism personifying a town proud for having taken care of its own. Who was Billy Wilder to dredge up ugliness that could only bring embarrassment, if not discredit, on an industry reeling from court ordered disposal of affiliated theatres and the oncoming locomotive of television? Louis Mayer said it best after that invitational screening. How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him? If indeed the director replied as he’d later claim, to wit --- I am Mr. Wilder, and go f--- yourself, then I’d not argue Mayer’s justification in attacking him. For the record, however, I don’t believe Wilder said any such thing. Long dead ogres like L.B. made easy marks for self-serving anecdoters bragging of how they stuck it to the Hollywood establishment way back when (this sort of thing comes up often with those who live long enough to get the last word). Wilder’s lucky his movie turned out to be so great. Otherwise, he’d have probably been run out of the business on a rail. Taking a long chance can end in triumph when you deliver the goods as BW did with Sunset Boulevard. Fifteen years and Kiss Me, Stupid finally tripped and felled the director on his vaunted outrageousness. Lucky for us Wilder had sufficient youth and cheek in 1949 to bring off a project that all but heaped manure in his own back yard.

Paramount’s Henry Ginsberg hosted a reception for eastern and studio executives in March 1949. At that time he announced the coming slate of releases. Notable here were special invited guests representing old Hollywood. The photo above shows a proud assemblage --- (L to R) William Farnum, Mack Sennett, Adolph Zukor, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. DeMille, and Hedy Lamarr. Sennett’s story would be brought to the screen, said Ginsberg. A golden era of comedy promised laughter for a new generation. Contemporary stars Betty Hutton and John Lund, reunited after the success of The Perils Of Pauline, were set to play Mabel Normand and Sennett. It would be a nostalgic tribute to that quaint, but still vital period, recalled with affection by several generations of moviegoers. Old-timers and the flickers they’d made had long been objects of gentle mockery. All in fun were shows like Hollywood Cavalcade and Glamour Boy, wherein industry cast-offs gave fleeting encores for fans who remembered. Serious attention was less often paid to those discarded. Blanche Sweet was a silent star down on her luck in Warner’s 1930 Showgirl In Hollywood, first among pictures to recognize casualties inflicted by the microphone. Director Robert Florey appreciated the career ruin brought on by talkies. His 1936 Hollywood Boulevard, also from Paramount, portrayed in realist terms desperation felt by those who’d been major names but a few years before. Warners would throw a twentieth anniversary screening of Don Juan in 1946 for cast and crew survivors, the object being less to pay tribute to their heyday than to celebrate two decades of sound that had displaced them. Betty Hutton’s Pearl White in The Perils Of Pauline had little to do with an actress by then comfortably deceased, and little ailed William Powell’s curmudgeon matinee idol in 1949’s Dancing In The Dark beyond need of a few week’s work in talkies.

As if to confirm the hopelessness of Norma Desmond’s proposed Salome remake, late 40’s revival of silent films was virtually non-existent outside museum screenings. By way of gauging background, I came across tentative bids to relive past times while Sunset Boulevard was being prepared for release. Then, as now, people’s interest in antique movies was limited to those they could laugh at. Fox West Coast ad manager Seymour Peiser dug up the original Keystone Kops as ballyhoo for his November 1949 booking of Down Memory Lane, a Mack Sennett compilation with as many sound highlights as silent ones (note Gloria Swanson’s prominence in the ad shown here). Another Sennett chestnut, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, occasioned the time-honored Chaplin lookalike gag popular since Grandma’s day. Indeed, Chaplin himself would reissue City Lights just ahead of Sunset Boulevard’s 1950 opening. Warner Bros. compiled newsreel and entertainment footage for a backward look called Fifty Years Before Your Eyes. That opened in five NYC newsreel theatres during July 1950. Producer Robert Youngson treated modern viewers to glimpses of Valentino and Ben Turpin, among many others. It’s hard to believe an era just twenty years gone could be so irretrievably lost. Silents were stone age relics best left on scrap heaps, or worse, bonfires to which studios consigned non-talking libraries. Imagine such a yawning chasm between the screen life of today and 1985. Have times changed so drastically since Back To The Future, Witness, and Rocky IV? I’ll venture that silent films were more suppressed by the industry than forgotten by those who’d attended them. They were an affront to progress supposedly made between 1927 and 1949. Such passage of years made Wilder’s gothic treatment credible to audiences who viewed silent stars as things ghostly and suggestive of decay. I can only imagine how Mary Pickford felt when Paramount's team went to read her the script. Brackett and Wilder were casting about for an authentic silent name to play Norma, but retreated in the face of Pickford’s horrified reaction. How could she, or anyone of her generation, have responded otherwise in the face of such a lacerating depiction?

Gloria Swanson did her heaviest lifting as Paramount’s roving good will ambassador between October 1949 and August 1950. She was on studio payrolls for, all told, over a year. Upon completion of principal photography, GS hit the road for purposes of increasing the public’s regard for an industry still vulnerable to scandal and condemnation. The Ingrid Bergman stink was hot news and so was a Senate probe into Un-American activities. Swanson combated ramifications of both in hundreds of radio and television appearances nationwide. Emphasizing Hollywood’s good works, she lectured before civic organizations, women’s clubs, and charitable groups. The thousand a week Swanson earned obliged her to thump for The Heiress as well. Paramount knew it could build anticipation for William Wyler’s prestige drama with assist from a well-known and articulate spokesperson. This wouldn’t be the last time a silent luminary was called upon for lecture touring. 20th Fox sent Francis X. Bushman out in support of David and Bathsheba two years later. Silent stars were assured of recognition among community leaders of a generation less likely to recognize contemporary names. A Gloria Swanson as keynote speaker at your Kiwanis Club carried more cache among local opinion makers than a Joan Caulfield would have. The cake cutting shown here was in recognition of 20,000 miles Swanson logged on behalf of Sunset Boulevard, the second wave on her cross-country schedule. That’s co-star William Holden and Paramount advertising-publicity director Norman Siegel flanking her. The Academy Award nomination was well-deserved recognition for a great performance, but I wonder if Gloria Swanson wasn’t actually better off before her own image became so confused with that of Norma Desmond.

Part Two of Sunset Boulevard will go up on Monday.

Bonnie and Clyde Turns Forty

There was less celebration over Bonnie and Clyde’s fortieth anniversary than might have been expected. Generational struggles the picture once represented aren’t relevant anymore, as the disapproving establishment circa 1967 is mostly gone now, and victors who claimed cultural dominance are themselves under siege by revisionist-minded youngsters in diapers (or not yet born) when Bonnie and Clyde was released. One of these wrote an interesting piece for The New York Times a few weeks ago, daring to acknowledge merit in Bosley Crowther’s scabrous review which had set off a firestorm in 1967 and led to the critic’s forced retirement after decades with the paper. A.O. Scott speaks of that epochal struggle, but not in fawnish terms agreeable to a sixties generation still flattering themselves for having pulled down a decaying critical hierarchy too mossbound and obtuse to "get" radical chic flicks like Bonnie and Clyde. Least of all would that rebel audience, grayed but clinging tenaciously to their myths, enjoy knowing they were but lemmings enticed to the sea by what I’d call a plain inspired sales plan on Warner Bros’ part. Wait --- weren’t they supposed to have bungled distribution and fought against Warren Beatty’s vision all the way to those cast-off ozoners where Bonnie and Clyde was supposedly dumped? A recent Newsday column addressed the fortieth thus: Warner Bros. thought so little of the film that they released it as a "B" movie, primarily to drive-ins and second-tier theatres. That’s a damning reference to territorial openings common at the time. What more insulting for New York critics and their acolytes than having the season’s pet movie open in Texas and across the South prior to saturation in urban markets far better able to appreciate such ground-breaking artistry? The fact that Bonnie and Clyde went wide first in the South was something camp followers would never get over. To this day, they call it a black mark against Warners.

Once again, it helps to have been there. We got Bonnie and Clyde at the Liberty on September 13, 1967. That was a month before Pauline Kael’s review in The New Yorker, which is supposed to have further stoked the tempest. Down where I lived, Bonnie and Clyde was an unknown quantity. The limited openings in New York had taken place August 13 after a Montreal film festival showing on the fourth of that month. Saturation bookings in the South and Southwest would be the public’s first wide exposure to the film. Warners based much of their campaign on positive reviews Bonnie and Clyde received after the Canada and New York bows. Naysayers like Crowther were more than offset by raves elsewhere. The pressbook was salted with laudatory quotes. Better still for exhibitors was a free package of accessories that normally would have run upwards of ten dollars for rental. I noticed that set of door panels right away when the Liberty started Bonnie and Clyde, and a bullet-hole decal on the back windshield of a parked car out front was reminiscent of ballyhoo they’d done back in 3-D and Cinemascope days. It was only when Colonel Forehand gave me the pressbook that I realized these extras were gratis by courtesy of Warner’s sales force. This wasn’t the first time they’d done a little something extra for showmen. Bookings for Chamber Of Horrors in 1966 included a free Fear Flasher/Horror Horn standee with powered lights and sound effects. There was something distinctly ahead of the curve about Warner campaigns. They’d been trend-setting and showing up the competition for over a year prior to Bonnie and Clyde. I’d submit modern movie advertising began with Warner Bros. Note sassy appeals to seen-it-all patrons encouraged to share a wink with Paul Newman’s Harper in February 1966, among the first camped-up and deliberately sarcastic ad appeals for a straightforward detective thriller. That same month saw Inside Daisy Clover and an almost confrontational tagline (thanks to all the slobs, creeps, and finks …) ideally suited to product demands of fashionably disaffected youth. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (June 1966) could not have been marketed with more precise awareness of what its eventual impact would be. Cunning Warner salesmen had painted targets on the backs of sophisticated moviegoers nationwide by the time Bonnie and Clyde’s campaign hit the drawing board.

A plan this good would still work. They’re young … they’re in love… and they kill people. Is that brilliant or is that brilliant? Anyone claiming Warners botched this sale must have rocks in their head. Here are samples of alternate ads to suggest what I’d consider a major reason for Bonnie and Clyde’s fantastic success. Each are knowingly hip and cutting edge. The pressbook refers to dry wit and violent punch. Advertising delivery on both is what put this show over. Stark contrast is furnished by way of Fox’s conventional effort on behalf of The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a not dissimilar product released within months of Bonnie and Clyde. There was nothing wrong with Roger Corman’s movie, other than its running a losing ($264,000) sack race with an arthritic sales force pushing St. Valentine’s as though it were the second coming of Little Caesar --- and what misguided staffer proposed this tie-in for George Segal’s Yama-Yama Man banjo album? Thick with irony is the fact that Bonnie and Clyde filmmakers so brilliantly utilized the same instrument to augment their soundtrack, as I well remember rushing out to buy that 45 RPM single of Foggy Mountain Breakdown. I’m betting the Bonnie and Clyde craze was no accident, despite what others have written. Warners knew it would take off in the South, and that’s why we got it early. For us, it was the second coming of Thunder Road. Dixie territorial openings have a noble history. After all, weren’t we first to get Brides Of Dracula, Ghost and Mr. Chicken and The Wild Bunch? Snobs up north accused (and maintain) Warners abandoned Bonnie and Clyde thusly. The problem the Liberty had was retrieving this show once audience demand tied up available prints. By late Fall, they were exhibitor equivalents of Faberge Eggs. Everybody wanted Bonnie and Clyde, and bear in mind that in those days, four hundred prints in circulation was the norm, as opposed to three to four thousand we see on opening weekends now. It took Colonel Forehand until May 25 the following year to score a return booking.

My fervent embrace of Bonnie and Clyde resulted in two trips to the Liberty during that one-week engagement. I realized early on the price I’d pay in the final third for fun I’d had in the first. That may be why I didn’t revisit the DVD for an anniversary look. Forty years have past, but Estelle Parsons screeching non-stop in the back seat of that blood-soaked car is still a daunting prospect. Bonnie and Clyde may take credit for stoking the revolution, but that’s been over a long time now, and even though their side won, that still doesn’t make it easier to sit through an at-times very unpleasant show. Could this explain so few throwing birthday parties? A handful of sites rose to the challenge of explaining Bonnie and Clyde and why it matters --- or doesn’t. The younger ones come across a little doubtful. They missed going straight from University town showings to march on the Chancellor’s house back in 1967. All that’s left to them is the movie, and how likely is that to pack a wallop equal to what it did four decades back? Much of Bonnie and Clyde’s initial reception was weighted down with politics and social issues largely forgotten now. I wasn’t aware of all that stuff when I was thirteen and seeing it new. That’s just as well, for it compels me less to defend the film now against justified revisionist criticism such as Scott’s in The Times. We’ve all had occasion to accept a film’s greatness on someone else’s authority, and that someone is usually the person who saw it brand new and can summon up memories of impact and emotion we’ll never feel. Bonnie and Clyde will not again deliver the goods as once it did, though I’m glad I was there to flinch with other first-run shocked observers, but what of all those great shows I missed by accident of (too late) birth? Have my perceptions of these been largely shaped by impressions my viewing elders passed down?

Ghosts In Comedy's Past

I have, this past weekend, chased Buster Keaton into a dark cave from which I’ve yet to extricate myself. Did he make a 1928 cameo appearance that has so far gone unknown and uncredited? Based on this just discovered image (top left), it’s just possible he did. Were it not for the fact Brotherly Love is itself a lost film, we could verify Keaton’s apparent routine with Karl Dane, as shown here. Erstwhile barber Buster looks poised to give Karl a too-close shave, but did he actually do so in the released film? Brotherly Love was directed by Charles Reisner, a Keaton friend who’d recently helmed Steamboat Bill, Jr. It was the fifth in a series of feature comedies teaming king-sized Karl Dane with diminutive George K. Arthur. There were seven of these in all. Every one made a profit. After awhile searching for contemporary reviews of Brotherly Love (and discovering few), I found myself drawn into the weirdly fascinating saga that was Dane and Arthur themselves. How could MGM’s premiere laugh team of two seasons and an unbroken chain of seven hits come to be so utterly discarded and forgotten? How does a leading Metro star in 1929 end up selling hot dogs just outside the studio gate five years later? Potential debates over Keaton’s fleeting participation in Brotherly Love became a question less compelling than these foregoing. I’d still like to know if Buster’s in the film. Perhaps a more seasoned Keaton scholar can enlighten me. Puzzle pieces beyond the still shown here are few. It’s an "X" (meaning exploitation) captioned pose, as opposed to scene shots which were issued without the lettered designation. You might conclude this is a mere visit to the set, but would Keaton and Dane go to the effort of setting up what looks to be a routine for filming? --- with Buster holding a razor? Rumors persist that Raymond Rohauer had a 16mm reduction of a single reel from Brotherly Love. There were seven total. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist. Know any ninety-year-olds that caught this one first-run? That seems the only way we’ll ever clear the question up, because from everything I’ve been able to determine, neither Brotherly Love nor any of the six other Dane/Arthurs were ever exhibited stateside after the late twenties. The possible whys are the subject of today’s investigation.

The Dane/Arthurs were studio-manufactured product from the get-go. George K. Arthur had played comedy and character parts, few of them substantial, though he’d shown promise in the title role of The Boob. Karl Dane was just then a sensation in The Big Parade (shown here with John Gilbert), a silent era phenomenon still playing roadshows when Metro executive Harry Rapf informed the two they’d be working together. Neither were committed to blazing new trails in laugh making, but both understood how to take orders. Rookies was the trial balloon. Dane would vary his tobacco-chewing, Big Parade self but slightly to play for laughs opposite effeminate small-fry George, a calculation designed to meet lowbrow audience expectation and satisfy exhibitor demand for feature comedies among seasonal bookings. It is funny from start to finish, came word from Emlenton, Pa. This one’s a scream, said management in Atkinson, Nebraska. If Garbo was what sold in urban markets, Dane and Arthur were what they cried for in the sticks. Rookies (and that's director Sam Wood with D&A here) showed profits of $255,000 and better yet indicated a series would sell. Other companies tried homegrown comedy units to counter independent juggernauts Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. Paramount teamed W.C. Fields and Chester Conklin around the same time, but three entries were all these two could sustain. Antic inspiration was a difficult thing to maintain within a factory environment. Dane and Arthur might have realized this but for non-stop schedules and conveyor belt scripts. Baby Mine was next. Karl and George played roommates at a chiropractic school. Now why didn’t Abbott and Costello ever think of that? Assigned directors were picked less for comedic aptitude than for ability to stay ahead of the clock. Baby Mine realized $113,000 in profits, while their next, Circus Rookies, took the most in black ink for the series ($175,000). This kind of success was seeming confirmation that MGM knew comedy packaging as assuredly as other formulae their artisans mixed. The last thing they needed was Buster Keaton to come in and tell them their business.

I’m betting the Dane/Arthurs were business models for Metro’s Keaton series. Comedy was comedy, after all, and theirs were working. Buster pushed up the negative cost on The Cameraman location shooting in New York. $362,000 was more than twice the expense of any Dane/Arthur and final profits for The Cameraman ($67,000) were way below what the team’s efforts were showing. That comparison was MGM’s best argument in favor of increased control over the Keatons. Professional jealousy was a thing unknown to Buster, and he’d made friends with Karl Dane. A cameo in Brotherly Love would have been effective cross-promotion benefiting both series. The Achilles Heel for Dane and Arthur revealed itself with the installation of microphones. English was decidedly a second language for Dane. You couldn’t cut through his accent with a pick-ax. The second season of 1928-29 got by on silents. Metro’s wait-and-see attitude regarding sound forestalled oblivion that would come to a number of contract luminaries. Several Dane/Arthur features went out with music and effects scores in lieu of dialogue. All At Sea and China Bound found a comfortable berth on positive ledgers. As Keaton’s expenses increased, theirs actually lowered. Free and Easy was Buster’s first talkie, and negative costs ran to $473,000. China Bound got done for only $98,000. Keaton’s rentals were higher (worldwide $875,000), but Free and Easy’s final profit was a minimal $32,000. China Bound scored $129,000 to the good. The party had to end when audiences finally heard Karl Dane speak. That was delayed beyond everyone’s suspicion. Why was he seen and not heard in The Hollywood Revue Of 1929? A supporting role with William Haines in Navy Blues revealed the truth. MGM probably overreacted. It seems they never gave Karl’s voice a chance to register. Could his legion of fans accept dialogue with a Danish twist? The studio assumed not and shunted him off to invisible support. As for the Dane/Arthur series, that ended when all-talkies could no longer be avoided.

Machine gunner comics supplanted Karl and George. They would encroach even upon Keaton. Who was Jimmy Durante but a frightful preview of things to come on talking screens? The color image here is poor Dane pounced upon by a yapping Benny Rubin (at left) in footage from MGM’s abandoned The March Of Time, itself cannibalized and released as varying short subjects. They called this incarnation Crazy House (included as an extra on Warner’s The Champ DVD). Dane’s a butt for cruel humor, and halting line readings often unintelligible are no defense against these vaudeville predators. Bits and diminished support at his home studio would send Karl himself on the road for what proved to be a disastrous stage tour. Paramount tried reteaming Dane and Arthur for a short subject and bally appearances in affiliated theatres, but A Put-Up Job only emphasized the hopelessness of continuing with this pair in talkies. It's actually available on DVD, via Kino’s Cavalcade Of Comedy. This may be our sole opportunity to watch the team at work. A half-dozen two-reelers for independent producer Larry Darmour exist, if at all, in ancient 16mm prints. Karl Dane tried other work, going bust on mining schemes with Benny Rubinesque fast-talkers clearing what was left of his meager accounts. The former star comedian went begging to MGM for any job --- extra, carpenter, handyman --- whatever. Onetime studio pals shunned Karl when he turned up just outside the gates peddling aforesaid frankfurters. Perhaps this was a too uncomfortable reminder of how easily such a fate could befall one of them in that perilous business. Anyway, there were no helping hands. Dane finally put a pistol to his head in April 1934. Friend and Metro contractee Jean Hersholt guilted employers into claiming the body and giving their cast-off headliner a decent burial. Internment for the Dane/Arthur features would follow. Of what value were late silents against early talkies? Archival interest was non-existent, and would remain so. Storage fires and neglect claimed at least half these shows. Rookies, Detectives, and China Bound exist, but for all our chances of seeing them, they might as well be London After Midnight, The Divine Woman, and Rogue Song. Might some adventurous Young Composer for TCM tackle one of these? A disc score with effects was distributed with China Bound. Have any Vitaphone rescuers come across those platters? There were at least happy endings for George K. Arthur. He stayed with the industry by way of producing and distribution, living to a ripe eighty-six. The legacy of Karl Dane is beautifully maintained by Laura Petersen Balogh, whose website celebrates his life and career. Some of the images used for this posting are courtesy Laura and her gallery of rare photos.