HOLLYWOOD, according to Orson Welles, was ‘the biggest electric train any boy ever had.’ It was a Mecca for the gifted, and ungifted. Herman Mankiewicz, co-author with Welles of Citizen Kane (1941), telegrammed screenwriter Ben Hecht – ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’
The cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ is 1927 (when sound started withAl Jolson’s The Jazz Singer) to 1960. 1960 marked key moments in screen history. The studios were forced by striking actors (led by Ronald Reagan) to release them from the stranglehold of long contracts; and to allow them a (negotiable) percentage of the gross. The studio system was dying. 1960 was the year of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, seemingly unstructured; of Godard’s Breathless (with its jump cuts) and Hitchcock’s Psycho, where our heroine is whacked in the first reel. The monopoly of studios had been dented when the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 they had violated anti-trust laws and must sell their cinemas. The response to the threat from TV was vast projections – Todd-AO, CinemaScope, Cinerama – and equally vast epics like the interminable Ben-Hur (1959) to fill the space. [The standard length of a movie, 90 minutes, was dictated by the supposed capacity of the female bladder.]
The moguls who ran the studios were monsters. [Actors could be monstrous too – Rex Harrison was known as ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’.] Moguls could break careers. Refuse to make a film, dispute a contract, and you were ‘suspended’. Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, Tyrone Power, Gina Lollobrigida all fell foul of bosses. The most repulsive was Harry Cohn of Columbia, a sex pest (and fan of Mussolini). Hayworth refused his lunges, so did Kim Novak. Joan Crawford refused but she wasn’t always so fastidious. Davis said of Crawford: ‘She slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.’
Elizabeth Taylor, latterly famous for baubles and boozing with Burton, was the sweetest of child actors. Their earnings were mostly stolen by their parents. Jackie Coogan was allowed pocket money of $6.25. His mum took $4 million. During the Depression people fell in love with Rin Tin Tin, a dog, and Shirley Temple, a cutie. In the prodigy department, said Atlantic Monthly, only the baby Jesus rivalled Shirley. Rintie earned $1000 a week. Shirley earned $10,000 but by the age of 22 her dad had squandered the lot. Judy Garland said: ‘My mother had a marvellous talent for mishandling money – mine.’ Sound did for some silent actors like Clara Bow, with her Bronx accent. A dancer’s career was usually short but Fred Astaire danced until he was 70. An RKO report said of his first audition – ‘Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a bit.’ He changed his name from Austerlitz ‘because it sounded like a battle’ (it was). Garland was born Frances Gumm, Diana Dors was Diana Fluck, big John Wayne was Marion Morrison. Studios could fix your name. And your life. Rock Hudson was supplied with girls to camouflage his gayness.
Hollywood was created when Cecil B. DeMille decamped to Hollywood’s bright sun from New York to make the first full-length feature film, The Squaw Man, in 1914. It’s awful but it had no competition. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1916) was terrific (it’s shunned today because the Ku Klux Klan are the heroes). Hollywood was now king (in the absence of war-torn Europe). Griffith invented the language of cinema (as Edison invented the technology). But one film typifies Hollywood’s genius for spectacle (and hokum and hypocrisy), Gone with the Wind (1939), created by David O. Selznick, an independent producer (and hustler). Irving Thalberg of MGM misspoke when he warned that ‘no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.’ GWTW is the most successful film ever. It looks superb; the music by Max Steiner soars, the set pieces like the burning of Atlanta are stunning. The man who forecast the weather on D-Day also forecast the weather before ‘Atlanta’ was burnt (which included the 1933 King Kong set). Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara) was preferred to Paulette Goddard because Goddard was living in sin with Chaplin. Brazenly. The movie’s stars were all adulterous – but discreet. Clark Gable (Rhett Butler), paid five times Leigh’s salary, dismissed the film as a ‘woman’s picture’. Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes) called it a ‘terrible lot of nonsense’, a Technicolor soap opera. Selznick’s main problem was not bolshy stars but Rhett’s last line – ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ ‘Damn’ wasn’t allowed by the Hays Code, Hollywood’s self-imposed moral guardian. An alternative, weaker line was proposed –‘I don’t give a hoot.’ Selznick was used to people saying ‘yes’. He was adamant. Change the Code, he said. And so they did.
