← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 12263 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2004-02-11
2004-02-11 08:21 | User Profile
[COLOR=Purple]The Kubrick thread got me thinking "why not one of my personal favorites as well?", thus this little tribute to a terrific moviemaker who never ever gets his proper due - Wild Bill Wellman. Now, granted, not everybody has a preference for old black-and-white movies of the 20s and 30s - I suspect most audiences today find them primitive, and while [B]I[/B] think very highly of Wellman in general, it's possible many of you have never heard of the guy. If you haven't: Wellman was a helluva man and a damned accomplished film artist. And don't be fooled by Wellman's self-deprecating tone either: he did fine, heartfelt work in any number of genres more often than he liked to let on. I re-watched PUBLIC ENEMY last week for maybe the 50th time and it [I]still [/I] blows me away.
Rather than analyze his individual films, I'm posting an excellent interview from late in his life that affords the reader of today an insight not only into the movie business of generations past, but a now-long-gone America, and a world that must now seem not 50 but 500 years out of reach. And even if you've seen Wellman's movies and hate em, you must admit he gives Good Interview.[/COLOR]
[url]http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/online/wellmanextra.htm[/url]
"WILD BILL": WILLIAM A. WELLMAN
This interview, originally published in 1978, appeared in issue #29 of Focus on Film. Many thanks to Scott Eyman for letting us reprint it.
William Wellman was the stuff of which legends are made. Wildly iconoclastic, with a reputation for real-life roistering every bit the equal of the cinematic escapades of Wayne, McLaglen and Co., Wellman is a man spoken of with sly smiles, libellous if loving reminiscences and unprintable anecdotes by his friends and coworkers. What the beloved Hollywood legend of "Wild Bill" wilfully obscures is that under the carefully cultivated roughhouse exterior lay a serious, sensitive film-maker, addicted not to political charades or paeans to conformism but to oblique, level-headed sociological essays and-as Andrew MeLaglen, who served his directonal apprenticeship under Wellman, told me-"common sense adventure."
In his stories, character relationships and film-making technique, "common sense" is the watchword. Wellman's characters may occasionally do crazy, irresponsible things, but they do them for very good reasons. Even when dabbling in the sentimental cynicism of screwball comedy, Wellman's characters act out of real and even desperate needs: Nothing Sacred's Carole Lombard believing she is dying, Roxie Hart's Ginger Rogers on trial for murder, etc.
On the rare occasions when Wellman let himself be seduced away from the gritty realism of his character's inner emotions and outward actions, disaster struck - as in the eminently silly, foolish and almost unwatchable The Next Voice You Hear in which the voice of God, for no discernibly obvious reason, speaks via radio to the People as represented by shirt-sleeved working stiff James Whitmore and tells them of the errors of their ways-off-screen, of course, for what does the voice of God sound like? C. B. DeMille? Charlton Heston? I don't know and obviously neither Wellman nor Dore Schary, whose misguidedly reverent production it was, did either. Being such a pretentious exception to the rule, the gauche and naive The Next Voice You Hear can probably be safely attributed to Schary's passion for preaching to the proletariat. To their everlasting credit, the proletariat didn't seem nearly as interested in listening as Schary was in talking.
Then there's the question of Wellman's supposedly "grotesque," antique style. Along with Chaplin, Wellman was probably the only director of his generation to really appreciate the dramatic value and pictorial possibilities of the medium long-shot. Only when faced with the essentially claustrophobic occurrences of The Ox-Bow Incident(neatly emphasised by the use of tightly-enclosed studio sets-much of the compact punch of the film would be irrevocably gone had Wellman resorted to the easy alternative of shooting it in Monument Valley) - only then would Wellman resort to the convenient option of filling his frame with faces.
One of the best things about William Wellman was that he never took himself that seriously when he was making movies and he certainly didn't in his old age. Unlike the name-dropping of a Bogdanovich, with his endless recitatives of what he said to Orson and Marlene and what they said to him, or the bucolic deprecations of a Ford, Wellman was keenly aware of both his good and bad films. Full of neither false ego nor phoney modesty, Wellman was replete with blistering contempt for the venal money men who run the industry and full of passionate, unstated love for the medium itself.
Probably no other director of comparable talent has been ignored and downgraded for so long. In a modern critical environment where the only universal characteristic is gross exaggeration, the neglect is all the more mystifying. Critics in recent years have been stumbling over themselves trying to find objects of veneration in the rubble of American programme films, stopping the sifting to occasionally throw a stone at a genuinely monumental structure - the vicious and irresponsible downgrading of Chaplin, for instance - to make amiable lightweights like Dwan, Sirk, Leisen, and others too ordinary to even mention, seem larger by comparison - all this while mentioning Wellman in terms of his energy (called "crude") or his intentions (patronised as "good").
Yet, when viewed as a whole, Wellman's career maintains an astonishingly high standard - from the film that singlehandedly created a genre, the grandiloquent and immensely moving Wings, to Lafayette Escadrille, that romantic, aborted, mistitled epic, the most bluntly autobiographical film ever made by an American director and the movie that closed his career.
Wellman's main concerns were with men much like himself, men bristling with kinetic energy and violent enthusiasms, men inclined to trample opposition or interference. What keeps his characters, and indeed himself, from being merely legendary bullies is an abiding sense of vulnerability underneath the crust; Wellman's men are eminently tameable by women of like guts and courage.
It is indeed ironic that his self-imposed retirement was the result of a producer tampering with Lafayette Escadrille-interference he could not surmount, dealing with a subject with which he was too close to settle for half-truths - his own youth.
Like many final works often do, Lafayette Escadrille reveals much about the man who made it. Narrated in a surpassingly gentle and perceptive tone by Wellman himself, it reveals the essential duality of a man who can appreciate both a not-so-good-natured fistfight and a passive moment of contemplative innocence. In one of the most touching and elegiac moments in all of Wellman's work, the camera slowly tracks over rows of young men sleeping in a barracks somewhere in France as Wellman's voice softly describes the tragic fate that lies waiting for most of them, marked for destruction by the juggernaut of war.
In essence, Wellman's was a profoundly American personality, full of drive and energy, while at the same time being fully capable of comprehending and pondering the inescapability of death and dissolution: a quintessential combination of pagan and poet.
Wellman died on December 9, 1975, of Ieukaemia, at his home in Brentwood where this interview was conducted. He was seventy-nine and remained vital and feisty to the end. Respecting his wishes, Wellman was cremated and his ashes scattered from an airplane into the clouds and sky that he always loved.
[I]You were born in New England?[/I]
Yeah, in Brookline, Massachusetts. My father was a stockbroker, although not a particularly successful one. And my mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman. She was a little bitty gal named Cecilia McCarthy; she was from Ireland. She had two sons, my brother and myself. When she died she was within two months of being ninety-eight years old and sharp as a tack!
When I was a kid, I was a crazy bastard. I was a good athlete; quarterback on the football team, shortstop on the baseball team, and rover-the fastest and dirtiest player of them all - on the ice hockey team - in those days, there were seven men on ice hockey teams.
When my father had some money, my mother became the probation officer for Newton Highlands, outside of Boston. She always called the delinquents "wayward boys"; she absolutely refused to let anybody call them anything else. So, when I got kicked out of high school, I had to report to the probation officer of the city of Newton for six months - who was my own mother.
[I]What did you do to get kicked out?[/I]
I dropped a stink bomb on the principal's bald head. A direct hit. My mother was such a successful probation officer that she was asked to speak to Congress about juvenile delinquency. She told them that of all the thousands of boys she'd worked with, the only one she couldn't control was her own son!
[I]So you had a turbulent, middle class upbringing?[/I]
I think it was a little above middle class. But I had a beautiful boyhood, with a wonderful mother. My dad had a little drinking problem, but my mother was in love with him and there was never anyone else. My brother and I had a hell of a boyhood. I used to borrow cars at night and take them out for a ride. But we always brought them back.
[I]After you got booted out of high school, did you go directly into the Lafayette Flying Corps?[/I]
No, I tried various things. I tried being a candy salesman, but I never sold a pound of candy. I tried being a cotton belting salesman but I never sold a foot of that. Then my brother, who was in the wool business, got me into Coffin and Gilmour, a Philadelphia wool firm, as a salesman. I never sold any of whatever the hell you sell wool by, pound or whatever. So then I went to work in a lumberyard, and I was a hell of a success.
I started in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the middle of the winter with great big freight cars full of South Carolina flooring. I started out as a lumper and then a piler and I did those things so well that they made me a truckdriver. Then I lost control of the truck one day in Roxbury, Massachusetts and drove through a barn. They fired me, so I decided to get the hell out of there. I'd always wanted to learn to fly, so one of my father's brothers, Francis Wellman, got me in the Flying Corps.
[I]Just because you wanted to learn to fly?[/I]
That simple.
[I]Didn't the prospect of getting killed enter your mind? [/I]
I was nineteen years old, a crazy bastard. It never occurred to me until I got into it. When I got out there, I thought to myself, "What the hell are you doing here?" Then I wished I'd never gotten into it.
[I]How close did you come to getting killed?[/I]
I had a crack-up caused by the most useless things in the entire war: anti-aircraft guns. I and an Englishman are the only ones I know of who got shot down by those things. It didn't hurt me, but it blew my tail off so I had no control over the thing at all. Greatest goddamm acrobatics you ever saw in your life.
[I]The courage it must have taken to go up in those flimsy crates . . .[/I]
It wasn't courage: we all wanted to learn to fly and that was the quickest way. We only had four instruments, none of which worked, and no parachutes. It was wonderful!
[I]Are you scared of dying?[/I]
I hate to think about it. Certainly I am. I don't want to die now and I didn't want to then. I just didn't think about it as much then as I do now. I'm funny that way; I'm an Episcopalian, supposedly. I'm supposed to think there's a God. I say my prayers every night because my mother always taught me to.
[I]Nowadays, lots of people look on World War One with nostalgia, as the last of the "noble" wars.[/I]
Balls. In that movie The Blue Max and others, these guys would come back to these beautifully dressed dames and champagne. Goddamn! At Lunéville, where I was stationed, there was one fairly good-looking girl and her mother. One. All the menfolk had been killed and she and her mother took in laundry. She wore wooden shoes, and your reputation was based on whether you were a no shoe man, a one shoe man or a two shoe man. If, during sex, you could shake both her shoes off, you were a hell of a lay.
[I]She took everybody on?[/I]
Not everybody. She confined it mostly to flyers. But, hell, there was no one else.
[I]How many pilots were left after the war?[/I]
Out of 222, eighty-seven were killed. I flew with Tom Hitchcock, the great polo player. Tom and I were in the "Black Cat" group.
[I]What happened after the war?[/I]
During the last six months of the war, I joined the American Air Corps because I was broke and they were trying to get us in. They made me an officer and sent me down to Rockwell Field in San Diego. I taught combat. I used to fly up and land on Doug Fairbanks' polo fields and spend the weekend with him; he had met me when I was playing hockey up in Boston and he was playing at the Colonial Theatre in a thing called "Hawthorne of the U.S.A." He used to come up and watch us play at the Boston Arena on Sundays. For some reason or another, he liked me and asked me to come backstage at the Colonial; that was the start of a very wonderful relationship.
So one day he told me that, after the war was over, he'd have a job for me. So when it was all over, he made me an actor. I was the juvenile in Knickerbocker Buckaroo and then I played a sub-lieutenant in Evangeline.
Eventually, I had guts enough to go look at myself and it made me so sick . . . I ran out of the theatre, went to Doug and said, "I don't mean any disrespect, but I'm no actor." Jesus, the guys from the Lafayette Flying Corps that were still alive were sending me the most insulting letters!
So Doug said, "What do you want to be?" So I pointed to Albert Parker, who was the director of occasion, and said, "Well, what does he make?" So Doug told me and I said "That's what I want to be." It was purely financial. So I finally got a job as a messenger boy, as an assistant cutter, an assistant property man, a property man, an assistant director, second unit director, and eventually I became a director.
[I]What were those early westerns, your first directorial jobs, like?[/I]
Oh, we had stories. Bad ones. That was when I made two of the worst pictures I've ever made in my life. One was with Dustin Farnum called The Twins of Suffering Creek [actually released as The Man Who Won]--now, you can just tell what a hell of a picture that had to be. Then I made one with Buck Jones, who was a western star, called Cupid's Fireman. Great, great pictures!
If you look through my whole record, I made a lot of lousy pictures (never intentionally), a lot in the middle, and a few I puff my head out about. I think that's true of everybody. Even Jack Ford, as much as I admire him, went overboard on the Civil War. I got so sick of all those Civil War pictures; he used to have books under his pillow about the Civil War.
[I]Tell me about Wings.[/I]
God, I made it in 1927, it's silent, the whole method of making pictures is different, the tempo is different, even the frame size is different. I look at some of those scenes today and say "Jesus, I couldn't have made that." But Clara Bow is magnificent; she holds the thing up. And Coop is good.
[I]The battle sequences are still magnificent.[/I]
Oh yeah. All done with hand-cranked cameras. And those air battles - Arlen and Rogers had to go up and do it.
[I]There's even a zoom lens effect in one shot: Rogers crashes and jumps in a shellhole; then the enemy plane dives in on him, shooting. As the bullets splash around him, the camera zooms in; how'd you get that effect?[/I]
You really want to know the answer? I don't know; I can't remember. Honest and truly, I'd tell you in a minute but I can't remember. I think I did it with a hand-held, battery-run Eyemo. I think. We didn't have zooms, I know that.
[I]In the air battles, how did you get the effect of the planes being on fire after they were hit?[/I]
Well, we didn't set them on fire. Almost. We had incendiary torches that the guys would release from the cockpit on signal. We hoped that they wouldn't set the planes on fire and they didn't. We had a great bunch of guys on that film - all those crazy flyers, crazy as I am. We got along fine. They'd do anything I asked.
[I]Did you do any flying yourself?[/I]
I did one stunt-one of the German planes that landed and rolled over a few times.
[I]How did you avoid getting hurt?[/I]
How can you get hurt? You're strapped in, you duck your head, and let the goddam thing roll over. And you have very little gas in it, to avoid setting yourself on fire.
[I]Being a young director on his first important film, didn't you feel a bit unsure of yourself directing a famous actor like H. B. WaIthall?[/I]
No, he was a wonderful guy. I always got along well with character men and women. It was only the stars I had trouble with. And a lot of the stars other directors had trouble with got along fine with me.
[I]How did you come to pick Gary Cooper for Wings?[/I]
I'd been looking at so many people, so many guys, and suddenly I saw him. He had that wonderful smile, that wonderful way. I took him down to Texas for weeks. We did the scene and he came up to see me in my hotel room, calling me "Mr. Wellman".
"Mr. Wellman, could I do that over again?"
"Well, what is it that you think you can do better this time?"
''Well, I picked my nose.''
"You keep on picking your nose and you'll pick your way into a fortune."
I told Cooper to always back away from everything and as long as he did that he was great. Hell of a nice guy.
[I]Buddy Rogers has always said you were the best director he ever had.[/I]
I love Buddy. He's a tough son of a bitch. To show you how tough he is, he hates flying - it makes him deathly sick. He logged over ninety-eight hours of flying on that one picture. Every time he came down, he vomited. That's a man with guts. I love him.
In the fight scene that takes place in the training camp, Arlen, who I don't like as much as Buddy - too cocky - came to me and said, "You know I can fight. You better tell Rogers because I don't think Rogers knows how to fight." So I said O.K. and that I'd tell Buddy to be very careful. So I went to Buddy and told him exactly what I just told you. He said, "Well, I don't know how to fight." I said, "I know, but you can still kick his brains out." And he did. Kicked the living hell out of him, simply on guts alone.
[I]Did you feel yourself getting into a rut with the aerial combat type of picture?[/I]
Not really. After Wings was a hit, they asked me to do another one and I said O.K. [Legion of the Condemned, 1928.] A little while later, Howard Hughes wanted me to do Hell's Angels. They told me, "You don't have to do it, just make an appearance. We don't want to get in wrong with him." So I went over and met him and said, "No, I'm sorry. I've just done two of them and I'm sick to death of them. I wouldn't make a good picture for you." He was very nice and we had an amicable talk. That was the only time I met the great Hughes.
[I]Why did you make Young Eagles?[/I]
Buddy's [Rogers'] box-office had fallen off and it was an attempt to make another Wings. It was frightful - a bad movie.
[I]Why did you move from Paramount to Warners?[/I]
Money. Every time I ever made a change, it was for either freedom or money, usually money.
[I]How did you come to make Public Enemy?[/I]
I got the story from two druggists from Chicago. They were visiting the studio when they stopped me and asked me if I'd read their story. They were such nice guys that I asked them to sit down and have lunch with me. There they told me the story. At that time, it was called "Beer and Blood". I went nuts about it and went in to see Zanuck and told it to him. He said, "Bill, I can't do this, I've just made Little Caesar and Doorway to Hell." I said, "I'll make this so goddamn tough you'll forget both of them." So he said O.K.
[I]How'd you pick Cagney?[/I]
Didn't pick Cagney - Eddie Woods played the role, the main role. We had shot for three days, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On Sunday, I went in to see the rushes and called Zanuck who was in New York at the time.
"We've made a frightful mistake. We've got the wrong man playing the wrong part. This Cagney is the guy."
So he said, "O.K., make the switch."
[I]Didn't Woods resent it?[/I]
Sure he resented it, but I didn't give a goddamn. I said, "Look, you're not good enough for us. Play the second lead." And he was lucky to get that. I had to be honest with him. So he agreed - what else could he do? I could always get somebody else if he didn't like it and he knew it.
[I]What about the famous grapefruit scene?[/I]
I've been married so many times, and they were all beautiful. 90% of all the domestic troubles I had with these wives was my fault. But this one particular wife, whenever there was any anger (and you've got to have a few rows, for Christ's sake), this beautiful face would just freeze and wouldn't say a word. It used to just kill me. You're whipped, you're licked before you start. Anyway, I like grapefruit halves and when we used to eat breakfast I often thought of taking that goddamn grapefruit and just mushing it right in that lovely, beautiful, cold face. I never did it really, because I did it in Public Enemy.
[I]That was your scene?[/I]
That was my scene. I know Zanuck says it's his but he's a goddamn liar. I can show you in the script. Cagney was supposed to throw the grapefruit at the woman.
I'm one of the very few directors who likes Zanuck - as a producer. You see, pictures that still live, that are still successful, are made with the combination of a writer and a director and a producer. The writer and the director gave the producer the talent, the producer gave them the money and got the hell out of the way. Now, for Christ's sake, there's the Producer, the Associate Producer, the Assistant to the Producer, the Assistant to the Associate Producer, all of them lined up against one poor goddamn director. And all the women that they've got, whether they're married to them or living with them . . . Jesus, the pillow talk that goes on has ruined more great pictures than anything you can imagine, including the agents and the unions.
[I]Tell me about A Star Is Born (1937).[/I]
I wanted to do A Star Is Born. I wanted to do it badly. Unfortunately, David Selznick, who was a dear friend of mine, turned it down. So I had a long talk with his wife, Irene, who loved the story. They went on a long trip to Honolulu and by the time they got back he said, "You know, that might make a good film after all." Which just goes to show you, anyway you can do it, do it. And try to stay clear of agents.
[I]I take it you don't have prints of your own pictures?[/I]
I don't and I never will. The hell with them. I know one director who runs one of his pictures every Christmas. Jesus Christ, if I ran one of my pictures every year, I'd go crazy.
People have asked me a million times, "Why don't you like your own pictures?" I don't know why. I do know that every time I look at one of them, I realize I could have done it better; I can see mistakes.
Although there is one picture that I really like. I haven't as yet gotten sick of it. You'll laugh when I tell you. I was wild about the dame (in a nice way) and she loved Dotty [Wellman's wife, Dorothy] and the kids. She was the only woman I've ever known who could say four-letter words and make it come out poetry. Carole Lombard. I can watch Nothing Sacred forever.
I'm very proud of that kid jumping out and biting March on the leg - you just know that no one likes him after that happens! I thought of that on the set. It was really a midget and I knew which one to get because I'd done the tail end of a Tarzan picture a little while before. Loved every minute of it, incidentally. Anyway, we had used the midget in the Tarzan picture, too.
[I]Did you ever want to move outside the studio set-up and do something completely independently?[/I]
For all practical purposes, I have. I've done a lot of things with no one to answer to - Story of G.l. Joe, for instance. I've tried both producing and directing, too: Beau Geste and The Light That Failed, that sort of stuff. And then I found (and this is only my opinion) that I didn't have enough brains to handle two jobs.
And the one thing I really hated was that I began to talk money. I don't want to be in that class of people - money. That's one of the things wrong with the industry, the parking lot people who own the goddamn business now. They don't know anything about making pictures. I didn't like Louis B. Mayer, but I admired him; and, God knows, I loathe Jack Warner but you got to admire men like that: they make a lot of pictures.
[I]And they let you make The Ox-Bow Incident.[/I]
You get so discouraged from trying different things that nobody goes to see. For instance, The Ox-Bow Incident. Goddamn it, I bought that from a poor guy that was fired. He was the producer of the B pictures at some studio and they canned him because he got in wrong with the biggies. I liked him.
He called me one day and said, "I'm going to send you a book. If you like it, will you make it with me?" I said, "Sure."
So he sent me "The Ox-Bow Incident" and I went nuts about it. I called him up and said, "You've got yourself a pigeon. Who you gonna put in it?"
He said, "I'm gonna put Mae West in it."
Well, I damn near fell through the phone! These are the things you run up against in this business. I said, "What the hell are you talking about? Am I reading the right story?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Well, what the hell are you going to do with Mae West?" Keep in mind that he may be right - stranger things have happened in this business. He said, "Well, we're going to put a sunken barbecue pit in it and she'll sing some songs to these tired cowboys."
"Oh, shit! Get yourself another boy."
Six months later, I met him again. I'd heard that he was broke, so I said, "Have you still got 'The Ox-Bow Incident'?" He said; "Yes, but I can't find anybody who'll buy it."
I said, "I'll buy it. I'll give you five hundred dollars more than you paid for it."
So I paid him $6500 and I was never so happy in my life. I came home to Dotty [the former actress Dorothy Coonan (Wild Boys of the Road) who married Wellman and retired from the screen, except for a small role in her husband's Story of G.I. Joe] and made her listen to me read the whole goddamn book to her. She loved it but she was scared of it.
I went to David Selznick, for whom I'd made A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred, I went to Metro, I went to everybody that I'd made money for, and they all said I was nuts.
Now, Zanuck and I hadn't spoken to each other for two years - we'd had a frightful row. But he was the only one left, so I finally went in and he was man enough to see me. I told him about it and he said, "Let me read it."
Three days later he called and said, "Come on over, I want to see you. You've got yourself a job." So we got together and he said, "You can do it, but it won't make a nickel. It's something I want my studio to have, I want my name on it and I think it'll be good for you.
So we made it and they sort of pushed it out; it didn't do much. Then they put it out abroad and it was a hit. Then they brought it back. I still don't think I could retire on the money it made, but at least it was reasonably successful. It's a hell of a story.
[I]Did you cast the film yourself?[/I]
Sure. Zanuck and I cast it together.
[I]Casting Jane Darwell, who was usually seen in warm, loving "mother" roles, as a vicious bitch was a brilliant move.[/I]
She was wonderful. Fonda, of course, is a fine actor, but he lacks that one something that makes a great star. I call it "Motion Picture Personality". I don't really know what it is.
[I]Would you have rather had someone else in the part? [/I]
No. He was great in it.
[I]The cyclical nature of the film is striking; in the beginning, the cowboys ride in and there's this old dog rummaging around. At the end, when they ride out, the dog's still there nosing around.[/I]
Oh, that dog. She was an old female with enormous tits that hung way down; I loved her. I used that as a frame for the picture; it started it and ended it. Maybe I'm an artist in some sense, I don't know. I can't draw. I just make pictures.
[I]After you moved over to MGM, you sort of hooked up with Dore Schary.[/I]
Yeah, unfortunately.
[I]Unfortunately?[/I]
Battleground worked out fine, but it didn't end well.
He'd say, "We're gonna make pictures that we want to make."
I'd say, "What are you talking about, 'pictures that we want to make.' You make pictures to amuse the public, not yourself."
Then he got so screwed up politically and with fighting with Mayer for control of the studio that I walked out of the thing. I wasn't interested in either his politics or Mayer's, I didn't give a good goddamn. They could have killed each other as far as I was concerned.
[I]What happened with Across the Wide Missouri (1950)? What's there is so fine, so first rate, but it's cut so abruptly.[/I]
I don't know what the hell they did with it. That was a very good, long picture the way I made it. What might have happened was that they cut it to fit on a double bill with the competition from TV. I've never seen it and never will.
[I]Why not?[/I]
The way they cut it, I don't want to see it. Damn it, that was a long picture and good one, too.
[I]Did the script you shoot have a narration in it?[/I]
No.
[I]Well, there's one in there, bridging all the story gaps. It's supposed to be Gable's son, looking back on his old man.[/I]
Well, that's what the bastards did: they cut out all the action and put in a narration to fill the holes.
[I]Robert Taylor was not a very good actor: how'd you get such a fine performance out of him in Westward the Women (1950)?[/I]
I don't know. I had no trouble at all with him. He did everything I asked him to; he was wonderful.
One day he asked me, "Well, who will I be?"
I said, "Be me."
Maybe it helped him.
[I]Generally, how do you go about working with actors?[/I]
I have never gotten along with actors. Oh, Joel McCrea was all right. And, like I said, Bob Taylor I was very fond of. But, you see, actors are different. Women look in a mirror all their lives to make themselves pretty and attractive and that's one of the reasons you fall in love with them. But a man looking in a mirror all the time, saying lines to himself, looking at his face to see which is the best photographic angle . . . Well, one of two things happens. Either he learns to love the son of a bitch that he's always looking at or he learns to hate him. All the actors I've known learn to love him.
[I]Yellow Sky (1951).[/I]
One of my favourite actors is in that - Greg Peck. I say that sarcastically. We made a good picture with him, despite him.
He asked me one day, "How can I get tough?" I said, "Well, you can't fight. Can you kick a football?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Well, then you're going to kick Widmark's head off."
So I showed him how to do it without hurting anybody. And, of course, the one who gives something like that the effect is the one who gets kicked, not the kicker. It's a question of timing. So that made him look tough. Of course, no matter what Peck did, Widmark took the picture away from him, pinned his ears back.
Another time Peck asked me, "How the hell am I going to fight Anne Baxter?"
So I said, "Anne Baxter will kick the hell out of you. And when you start that fight, you better look out for yourself and wear something over your nuts, because she'll destroy you."
She was a wonderful gal; kicked the hell out of him in that scene. She didn't like him either and that was her one chance of getting even with him.
[I]Did you like working with Wayne?[/I]
Did I like working with Wayne? Even though he's the greatest star this business has ever had, hell, no! I signed a contract with Batjac to make six pictures for them - three with Wayne, three without him. Of the three with Wayne, I was responsible for acquiring two - Island in the Sky and The High and the Mighty. How old is he, anyway?
[I]Sixty-six, I think.[/I]
Well, he's pretty goddamn old to be a star, but the son of a bitch will keep going until he drops dead on top of a horse.
The problem is, he's a very set guy. Stubborn as hell. And he doesn't get along with directors, except for two. He gets along with Ford and he gets along with me. The only time we had trouble, I called him on it.
[I]Which picture was this?[/I]
I think it was The High and the Mighty. I told him, "Look, I'm a goddamn sight better director than you are and you're a goddamn sight better actor than I am. And you coming back here and doing my work is going to be just as foolish as my going up and doing your personality with that lousy fairy walk that you've got. So behave yourself and we'll make a picture." And he did.
[I]Of all your films that I've seen The High and the Mighty is my favourite.[/I]
Damn good picture. I own a part of it and, financially, it's the best picture I ever made. I own a third of it and it made a lot of money.
[I]I'm inclined to agree with you about Wayne as a director, although he told me that his films The Alamo and The Green Berets did fifteen million the first time around.[/I]
If you believe that, you're crazy. The Alamo fell right on its ass.
Well, I wasn't going to tell him he was full of shit.
Well, I'll tell him he's full of shit. As a director, he stinks. That's another problem with him: he's got great ego, he's very stuck on himself, and I think that's true of almost all actors.
[I]What attracted you to Blood Alley?[/I]
Blood Alley I did because everything was all screwed up. They were having trouble with their director, Mitchum was acting up, and all sorts of other garbage. Wayne asked me as a favour if I'd do it. I said, "Yeah, I'll do it, but I think it's silly."
So I had Mitchum fired (it was one of those times when he was walking six inches above the ground) and took over. It was a story about rescuing Chinese. Now I think the Chinese are wonderful people: the kids are cute little fellows, the women are gorgeous, the men are hardworking. But goddamit, rescuing a bunch of Chinese doesn't mean anything to anybody.
I said, "Look, Duke, there's been one picture in the whole history of the business about the Chinese that was a success: The Good Earth." If they'd have filled the goddamn ferry-boat with dames, you'd have had something. But he didn't agree with me, so I did the best job I could on the thing, but it was no good. it wasn't exactly rotten, but it sure as hell was in the middle.
[I]What do you think your weak spots are in relation to film-making?[/I]
You can't tell. The easiest thing to do is to foul up in your choice of material. How the hell can you figure what people are going to go see? I made a thing I thought was a delightful picture - Goodbye, My Lady. No one has seen it yet.
[I]I love that film.[/I]
You're the only one that's seen it that I know of. I thought it was lovely. Maybe it would have been a big hit if the boy had had an affair with the dog. I know what went wrong with it, though. It's a very simple thing. Somebody asked me why the picture didn't work: I said, "I'm not Disney."
[I]Maybe that's why I liked it.[/I]
I think Disney's done some good stuff, although not lately. Anyway, that's the answer I gave.
How do you know what goes wrong and makes a bad movie? I worked harder than any other goddamn director I know. I tried harder. I knew how to make a picture, but sometimes something was lacking, sometimes it wasn't. I made some fine pictures.
I've only had one real desire in this business: to make every kind of picture that was ever made. And I did. I made musicals, I made kid pictures, I made romantic comedies, the whole list. I'm very proud of that. Now, how many directors have done that?
[I]Generally, do you overshoot a lot?[/I]
You bet your life I didn't. I'm the best goddamn two-take director in the business. One for the take I wanted, one in case something went wrong in the lab. Overshooting is asking for trouble.
[I]When you went into the studio in the morning, did you know exactly what you wanted to get on film that day?[/I]
Absolutely. I knew exactly what I wanted. I had a script and I worked like hell at home. I used to work in this house as hard as I did on the set. I never slept well - four hours of sleep was a big night, so I did a lot of the work then.
[I]Did you ever get bored by the time-consuming elements of film-making?[/I]
Terribly. I didn't always wait; most of the time, we'd try to figure out some screwy way of trying something new.
[I]What's your definition of a bad movie?[/I]
A lot of mine.
[I]Including Darby's Rangers?[/I]
It's one of THOSE. The thing never stops playing on TV. Must we talk about it?
[I]How about Lafayette Escadrille instead?[/I] That dumb Warner [Jack], my great hate: he raped my Lafayette Escadrille which, by the way, was not Lafayette Escadrille-it was originally called C'est La Guerre.
It was the story of a very dear friend of mine. I had made it as a tragedy, which it was. It was previewed as a tragedy; it was the only preview I ever had where people stood up as the picture ended and said nothing. Then there was a beat and a beat and a beat and they suddenly started cheering.
And that dirty, rotten bastard decided that killing Tab Hunter - don't laugh - was impossible. At the time, he'd made a record that had sold two million copies. So they changed it to a happy ending and called it Lafayette Escadrille: it didn't have a damn thing to do with the Lafayette Escadrille. All the guys that were still alive thought I was nuts. I told Warner that if I ever caught him alone, which in his case is damn near impossible, what with all those disgusting yes-men, that I'd put him in a hospital. And, so help me God, if I could get hold of him right now, I'd try it. I have never hated a man as much as I hate him. And the whole story of the film was true.
The hero was in the Lafayette Flying Corps with me. (I was not in the Lafayette Escadrille. That was first formed by a particularly crazy bunch of Americans that were over in France, Bill Thor among them. I was in the Lafayette Flying Corps, which was formed by William K. Vanderbilt.) One day a French lieutenant - he was a drill sergeant - hit this pal of mine with a riding quirt, so my pal hauled off and knocked him on his ass. He was, of course, put in jail immediately. That night, we broke in and got him out, along with everybody else who was in the jail. He had to get away from there so he started for Paris. He had to get a change of uniform, so he tried to take a poilu's away from him. The poilu happened to be a savate champion, which started the goddamnedest fight that's ever been known. Finally, he knocked him out, got his uniform, terribly maimed all the time, and sneaked out to where his little gal was waiting for him. An old concierge, who'd lost an arm and was a wonderful old guy, and she nursed him back to health. Eventually, he went back to the whorehouse where he'd met his girl and got a job as a pimp, working between the Folies Bergere and the Olympia, I think. I was there when he married his little girl, his great love, who was an ex-whore and whom he'd met as a whore.
Finally one day he got a chance to see General Pershing, whom he talked into letting him go back and get his wings. He became a flyer and was flying, I think, somewhere in the Champagne when he got lost and strayed into Germany, where a couple of Fokkers dove on him and brought him down. His name appeared in the casualty lists that appeared in the daily Paris papers. She saw it and jumped into the Seine River, committing suicide. When they pulled her out, she had his identification tag clenched in her fist. The only two people who knew this story were General Pershing and myself.
Now, to me, that's a hell of a story. A tragedy. I put all my heart and soul into the thing: I almost went crazy over what happened.
So I made a deal. I shot the happy ending and came home to Dotty and said, "Dotty, I'm tired, I've worked too hard and I made a deal with a man I hate, knowing he's wrong. I'm never going to make another picture as long as I live.'' She said, "I don't want you to make another." And I never have.
It's sad that what I wanted to be my best picture became such a rotten, disappointing thing. That wasn't the first time that happened to me, but it was the worst. Usually pictures are screwed up in New York. Up to a point you can control what's happening out here in California. But even men like Capra lose eventually.
[I]You like Capra's pictures?[/I]
Frank Capra, in my estimation, is the greatest director of them all - on one kind of a picture.
[I]Do you ever watch your films on TV?[/I] Never. Never.
[I]Even if Nothing Sacred pops up?[/I]
Oh, that's different. I'd watch that, damn right.
[I]How do you feel about the critical attention you've been getting in recent years: the BFI retrospective in London, etc?[/I]
Oh, it's all right. It's a switch from before, that's for sure. I never had a publicity man in my whole life - everybody else did, but I never did. I figured the money should be spent publicising the people I was photographing: the Stars.
Besides, who the hell do you think is going to pay money to see Bill Wellman's new picture unless it's some idiot in New York or Hollywood or London? Out in Oshkosh and places where the money comes that makes the business what it is, they don't know who Bill Wellman is and they don't give a good goddamn. Or Capra or Ford.
They might remember who Hitchcock is, maybe von Stroheim if they're old enough, and maybe Orson Welles, who's always gone both ways. In his time, Griffith was a box-office name. But don't tell me I could retire on the box-office value of Bill Wellman! I'm sorry, but I'd be in the Old Soldiers' Home.
[I]What do you consider the director's job to be?[/I]
To make the picture. I make that film. I am the director, not Mr. Wayne or Mr. Cagney or Mr. Colman. And they knew it. Women always used to hate working with me, because I wouldn't let them use make-up.
[I]What do you think of institutionalized film-making? Do you think someone can learn to make films by going to school?[/I]
I can answer that very quickly. No.
Somewhat in line with that: I won't tell you the director's name. I know him and he's a very successful director. About a year ago, I turn on the TV set and there he is, giving a talk at the American Film Institute - a place, I'm proud to say, where I'm not liked. There were about twenty eager, hopeful directors listening to this man. I said to myself, "This I've got to listen to. Now I'll find out how to make pictures." When that man was through I was so damned confused I wondered how the hell I ever made a hundred pictures. It was pathetic, tragic.
[I]What is the best way to learn to direct?[/I]
You have to learn how to live before you learn how to direct. About fifteen years ago, twelve of the so-called "successful" TV directors asked me to come and talk to them. They wanted to know if there was any way I could suggest for them to break into the making of motion pictures. I've never been in TV but I said, "I'll tell you one way it might be done. Find out what some of our great writers have got that the producers wouldn't buy. Guys like Ben Hecht, Johnny Lee Mahin. Get to know these guys, find out what they've got that they think is great. Then read it, see if it's any good and, if it is, go sell yourself to one of these stars. Don't go to the agents, they'll kill you. See one of the stars and sell it to him with the idea that you make it." That's the only suggestion I could give them.
[I]Do you think Pay-TV will mean the death of movies as we know them?[/I]
I think the industry is dead [I]now[/I]. You can't judge it because of Love Story or The Godfather. God Almighty, you could show those in a toilet and people would pay to see them. In the days I'm talking about, MGM was making sixty-five pictures a year, Paramount the same and so were Warner and Universal - all pictures with stars in them. The problem now is that we don't have any stars anymore, not really. The minute you leave, I'm gonna watch the football game or golf, and I'm gonna watch the stars - the best there are!
[I]What did you enjoy most about making pictures?[/I]
The money. A lot of people will say, "How frightful to talk that way about the 'Art' of motion pictures." Well, whatever you want to call it, I had my own way of making a motion picture. I worked very fast; and no one ever over-acted in one of my pictures. That I couldn't stand. I had my own idea of making a picture and I made it my own way. And I got damn well paid. Certainly I wanted the money. I wanted to get to the point where I'd never have to work again if I didn't want to. When I got to that point, it wasn't as nice as I thought it would be. Now, I don't go to see many pictures because I don't want to get the fever again.
[I]You sound discontented.[/I]
On the contrary, I'm very happy. I'm seventy-eight years old, I've got a lovely wife - we've been married for forty years (she was only nineteen and for a while I thought they were going to put me away for kidnapping). We've got twelve grandchildren and she personally was a magician. She gave me a girl, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. Now, that's calling your shots! And on top of all that, she house-broke me. The only disappointing thing about her to me is how the hell she could stand me for forty years: it hasn't been easy.
As far as my career was concerned, I accomplished what I wanted. I was independent, I made every kind of picture I wanted, I worked like hell and, like I said, I'm seventy-eight years old. What more can a man say?
2004-02-14 05:39 | User Profile
**Another time Peck asked me, "How the hell am I going to fight Anne Baxter?"
So I said, "Anne Baxter will kick the hell out of you. And when you start that fight, you better look out for yourself and wear something over your nuts, because she'll destroy you."
She was a wonderful gal; kicked the hell out of him in that scene. She didn't like him either and that was her one chance of getting even with him.**
Yet another reason to like her. Give him one for me, dollface.
And his "hey - who reallycares about the Chinese?" remark displays the casual They Are Not Us understanding of yesteryear that makes watching old movies such a pleasure.
2004-02-14 08:10 | User Profile
Yellow Sky airs this morning at 8:01 eastern on FMC.
[url]http://www.tv-now.com/stars/director.htm[/url]