Hooray for Hollywood? Volume 2

We're back with another selection of remarks from our recently-procured book "Hollywood on Hollywood." Rather than put the book's cover on another post, I've opted to use Miss Deborah Kerr and one of her apt quotes on Tinseltown. And there are some more selections to follow! 

"The name Hollywood is, to this day, a misnomer-one very small section of an enormous area where many people work in the movie business, but hardly any people who work in that business actually live in Hollywood, as such." -- Deborah Kerr, 1977. (And still true today...!)

"I have thought, since my tours, that we in Hollywood run a great danger of becoming too insular. I know I was near it when I left. Hollywood is such a tight unit in the American scene that a Hollywoodite's map of the world is apt to show one large eastern seaboard area labeled 'New York,' and one west coast section labeled 'Hollywood.' There are a few pin dots scattered over the map reading, 'Sun Valley,' 'Palm Springs,' 'Miami Beach,' 'Bermuda.' The space between is arid waste. There are no dots reading 'Cincinnati,' 'Sioux City,' 'Augusta,' 'Spokane.'" -- Jeanette MacDonald, 1947. (Wow... Very perceptive and prescient. And decades later people on the coasts were still referring to the "flyover country" in-between.)

"I brought Ruth Warrick out to play Mrs. [Citizen] Kane because the part called for a lady. I have not been able to find a lady in Hollywood." -- Orson Welles, 1947. (He certainly did his fair share of looking...!)

The aforementioned Ruth Warrick in Citizen Kane (1941)

"Hollywood is not an easy place for two people to work. When you leave your house, you're both sleepy, since it's the crack of dawn. When you come home, you're exhausted. All you want is an Old-Fashioned and some peace and quiet. The two of you, as a result, are so full of your own problems that you can't help each other at the time when you most should." -- Cornel Wilde, the 1940s. (Wilde was, at the time wed to actress and sometimes costar Patricia Knight - from 1937-1951. Just after their divorce, he wed Jean Wallace in a union that lasted 30 years and many joint projects, but that, too, wound up in divorce.)

"People outside Hollywood don't understand how it is here. It's a battle to maintain a basic integrity; a scrap against bull and baloney. You've got to fight all the time." -- Burt Lancaster, 1949. (Lancaster was already forming a production company in order to maintain more control of his projects and it eventually emerged as Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, a success venture that put forth several notable movies.)

"There's more pressure on you in Hollywood than in New York. On Broadway, you do your performance every night and that's it. Here you have to get up at five in the morning - which is tough on me - in order to get ready in time at the studio. Then you have to rehearse, do your scenes, and you get home late where you have a relaxing dinner and start studying till bedtime. There's no let-up. There's also so much fussing about costumes and makeup and hair all day on the set. That's plausible, I guess, since the camera is on you - if you're lucky enough to get a close-up. One the stage your audience is at least twenty-five feet away." -- Vera-Ellen, 1949. (Vera-Ellen, a spectacular dancer, receded from view in the late-'50s when her sort of musicals were on the wane and a variety of ailments began to affect her physicality. The sudden death of her only child - of SIDS - in 1963 cemented her retirement from public view.)

"Young love deserves a better break on the screen. The over-age stars get all the clinches, while the young actors in Hollywood today - if they're lucky - get the meaningless kiss or two." -- John Derek, 1951. (Derek more than made up for any slights when he presented film after film featuring wife after wife in anything from semi-nudity to outright nakedness on screen! Inset features his costar Jody Lawrance.)

"In Hollywood you do nothing for yourself. You don't even apply your own make-up. You are awakened, taken to the studio, made up. You play your roles in snips and driblets, harassed by delays, interruptions and stupidities. Over the proceedings hangs a pall of indecision, the fear of the studio swami that the work may in some fashion upset a coal miner in West Virginia, a lama in Tibet. Timidity was the screen's curse. It still is. - Tallulah Bankhead, 1952. (From one of the least timid souls on earth...! This did change in the 1960s and '70s, but it's since pendulumed back to focus groups, committees, "correctness," et al, with a few exceptions.)

"Hollywood is full of these watching, waiting helpers, who look for pretty girls in distress. Mostly what they want is to help take your clothes off in their apartments. Many of them do have valuable connections, and will use them-but the asking price is rather high." -- Mamie Van Doren - 1964. (This quote was from her auto-bio "My Naughty, Naughty Life" [likely a play on Errol Flynn's "My Wicked, Wicked Ways."] She would later pen an even more frank book, "Playing the Field.")

"When I first arrived in Hollywood, they told me to get a new name, so I thought back to the best times I had as a kid playing on the tidal land [in Wales]. There was a tannery and old mills. It was really mill land. So I called myself Jack Milland but they said, 'In Hollywood, only dogs are called Jack,' so I looked down a list and picked the shortest name I could find - Ray." -- Ray Milland, 1972. (Milland was born Alfred Jones, January 3rd 1907, in Neath, Glamoran, Wales. Regardless of his desire for "Ray" he was nonetheless billed early on as "Raymond!")

"They treat you so great in Hollywood, make you feel important even if you really aren't. The technician there, you could have them in your home. They're bright they're alert, they're intelligent, they're trying to help you." -- Paul Lynde, 1973. (I wonder if ol' Paul ever had a Key Grip or a Best Boy over for tea and cookies? Ha ha!)

"There's a dismal swamp out there in Hollywood where the money goes and it's never accounted for. I had 5% of Patton (1970), which cost $10 million to make and grossed $40 million, and I've never made a dime." -- George C. Scott, 1974. (Movie accountants have long been noted by many people for their "creativity" with the numbers...!)

"There I was on the screen, a pancaked, lacquered Hollywood purse made out of a Cincinnati sow's ear." -- Doris Day, 1975. (I'm drawn to quotes that include Cincinnati, as that's where I reside. Day was raised not far from my area and the aforementioned Vera-Ellen just blocks from my house! By the way, popular as she was, I think she really blossomed most when they allowed her more natural - often comedic - attributes to come more to light than all the "lacquer.")

"In Hollywood they like you until you're standing on a pedestal and they hand you an Oscar. Then they say, 'How did he get up there? Let's knock him down.'" -- Yul Brynner, 1975. (True as this may be, Yul had it better than many others... And it doesn't seem to have applied to people like Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep, to name more recent recipients.)

"Certainly, there are good marriages in Hollywood, but to imagine that people who are beautiful, and glorified by the camera and publicity, wardrobe and make-up departments and who are thrown together in close proximity day after day; to imagine they don't get involved with each other, especially when the emotional requirements of their scenes are that they be in love with each other- I mean it's not human to believe they don't!" -- Shelley Winters, 1980. (Shelley did know of what she spoke...!)

"I've always enjoyed working in Hollywood. They are so efficient. And it's so exhilarating." -- Vivien Leigh, 1964. "I loathe Hollywood, and for no other part [Scarlett O'Hara] would I have dreamed of signing a contract. All their standards are financial ones. The more I see of Hollywood, the less possible it becomes." -- Vivien Leigh, quoted posthumously in the 1969 book "Vivien Leigh: A Bouquet." (So who knows what to believe....?!)

Still Quoting....!

"When I worked on The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), Vanessa Redgrave tried to convert me to a form of communism, Trotskyism, whatever the hell it is. Talented broad, but everyone ducked behind a camera when she came around. I asked her, 'Vanessa can you shoot a pistol?' 'Why?' 'Well, when the revolution comes...' 'No, no,' she interrupted. 'Someone else will do that.' Some Trotskyite. She travels by Rolls Royce." - ROBERT DUVALL on VANESSA REDGRAVE

"Then, I thought to myself, 'Darn it, maybe I can't do what Vanessa Redgrave can, but can Vanessa Redgrave do what I can do? Who's kidding who here? - RAQUEL WELCH on VANESSA REDGRAVE

"What seemed like such a nice, simple, artless performance in Superman (1978) was the finest kind of acting. Reeve's timing-and humor-has to be just about perfect to make the character come off." - director SIDNEY LUMET on CHRISTOPHER REEVE (who he directed in Deathtrap (1982.)

"It was my father who told me I should develop my body seeing as how I wasn't born with much of a brain an' it was the only thing I had to fall back on. Then I saw Steve Reeves an' I thought, 'Jesus, anybody can go to school an' become a lawyer, but I wanna be able to pull down a temple, shift a bridge, take on a whole Roman army. ...That's a man to me.'" - SYLVESTER STALLONE on STEVE REEVES

"It's the man's tremendous wit that just keeps coming across. Listen, there's no acting style. Most people just play themselves. Spencer Tracy used to say to me after a scene, 'Did I ham that one up?' If I said yes, he'd say, 'Okay, let's do it again.' There's that same honesty in Burt Reynolds. He's a throwback to the old school." - MYRNA LOY on BURT REYNOLDS (whose mother she played in The End, 1978.)

"He is the one the ladies like to dance with and their husbands like to drink with. He is the larger-than-life actor of our times. He is gifted, talented, naughty-but nice." - FRANK SINATRA on BURT REYNOLDS (and in whose Cannonball Run II, 1982, he appeared.)

"Burt has a quality that nobody else has. He's funny, sexy, glib, likeable and still very macho. But Burt tries to be all things to all people... He thinks that unless he's doing...intense dramatic work-then he's not an actor. But I don't think he's comfortable with that kind of intense emotional revealing. He doesn't like to reveal himself that way in life, yet he's mad at himself because he can't do that on the screen." SALLY FIELD (one-time romantic partner and costar in Smokey and the Bandit, 1977, The End, 1978, Hooper, 1978, and Smokey and the Bandit II, 1980) on BURT REYNOLDS in 1985.)

"She's one of the reasons I left show business... We'd give her a new scene, and she couldn't remember the lines. She couldn't sing and, surprisingly, she couldn't do the dances. And all through the horror of it all she was smiling and grinning and unreal. There's no denying her appeal to the public. That's what makes her so dangerous. She almost smiled me into bankruptcy." - PAUL GREGORY (producer of the 1959 musical The Pink Jungle, which closed prior to its scheduled 1960 Broadway opening and involved at least seven Actors Equity motions) on GINGER ROGERS

"Don't let her fool you. Tangle with her and she'll shingle your attic." BOB HOPE on JANE RUSSELL (his costar in The Paleface, 1948, and Son of Paleface, 1952.)

"...One of the best actors alive. But my opinion of him as an actor is much higher than my opinion of him as a man." - JOHN HUSTON on GEORGE C. SCOTT (who he directed three times in The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963, The Last Run, 1971, and The Bible: In the Beginning, 1966, the last of which included a booze-fueled relationship with Ava Gardner in which Scott reportedly beat her to the point of hospitalization.)

"But everything [on High, Wide and Handsome, 1937] became a little bit brighter when I got to know Randolph Scott, one of the finest men in Hollywood... Now a retired millionaire, he's still as handsome as he was in 1937, totally charming and loads of fun." DOROTHY LAMOUR on RANDOLPH SCOTT

"Randy Scott is a complete anachronism. He's a gentleman. And so far, he's the only one I've met in this business full of self-promoting sons-of-bitches." - director MICHAEL CURTIZ on RANDOLPH SCOTT (who he directed in Virginia City, 1940.)

"I think his mother had gained such an incredible influence over him that he virtually abdicated his own rights to any individual personality... Finally, he had to invade other bodies to register at all. He had to inhabit, he was like a ghoul, he had to feast off somebody else! But he did it so well, it became an art. He was not a genius, Sellers, he was a freak." - SPIKE MILLIGAN on PETER SELLERS (his frequent stage, television and movie cohort.)

"Talk about unprofessional rat finks." - BILLY WILDER on PETER SELLERS (who Wilder directed, uncredited, in Casino Royale, 1967.)

"Norma, who I have always like and got along with, was at notorious loggerheads with Joan [Crawford.] You see, she was treated as Queen of the Lot because of her marriage to the boss, Irving Thalberg. Joan had made a lot of money for the company, and I imagine that's what annoyed both of them; it was a competition of who was really the Queen of the Lot." ROSALIND RUSSELL on NORMA SHEARER and JOAN CRAWFORD (all three stars of The Women, 1939.)

"And you can tell Miss Shearer that I didn't get where I am on my ass." - JOAN CRAWFORD on NORMA SHEARER (to the press.)

Grilling The Hindenburg

Did you honestly think I was out of 1970s disaster movies?? I’m getting dangerously close to the end of them. I guess I’ll eventually have to go back over each one and ruminate some more until I’ve discussed every background extra and every piece of Styrofoam rubble! For today, though, I give you one of the most unique (and, to be truthful, pretty dull) entries in the genre, The Hindenburg. Released in 1975, it failed to ignite the public's fascination to an extent that would help justify its $12 million budget.

In what was one of the mid-20th century's most startling (and baffling) events, the massive German dirigible The Hindenburg was landing in the U.S. after crossing the Atlantic and suddenly burst into flames, killing roughly a third of the people on board and one ground crewman. No one has ever definitively proven what went wrong that day and this film presents a case for sabotage. Based on a detailed book by Michael Mooney, it fabricates a fair amount of storyline, but does boast some very authentic casting and some really impressive attention to detail in the art direction.

In 1937, a time of much espionage, George C. Scott plays a German colonel sent along on the airship to investigate any potential misdeeds among the passengers and crew. Roy Thinnes is a Gestapo agent, also on board, whose methods of investigation differ greatly from Scott's. The men clash at times and Scott even grabs Thinnes by the throat at one point.

A large spectrum of passengers includes: Anne Bancroft as a despondent, pot-smoking countess en route to join her deaf daughter in America, Gig Young as a nervous (and visibly drunk) advertising executive, Robert Clary as an excruciating Jewish entertainer, Rene Auberjonois and Burgess Meredith as untrustworthy gamblers, Peter Donat and Joanna Moore as a decadent Broadway writing couple and Alan Oppenheimer and Katherine Helmond who, with their three children, are returning to America after a visit to Germany.
Among the crew, William Atherton plays a shifty-acting rigger, Richard Dysart is the designer of the ship and Charles Durning is the captain. Scott entertains a sort of German Hercule Poirot stance, sizing up the people on board as the floating vessel billows its way towards its destination until, finally, he discovers the dastardly plans to blow the whole thing to smithereens. At one point Scott grabs Atherton around the neck as well! (Had the Countess been played by Ava Gardner, he no doubt would have half-strangled her, too, as he tended to do during their stormy romance during the filming of The Bible: In the Beginning…!!)

That the ship eventually explodes should come as no surprise to anyone unless he was born under a rock. We really will probably never know for certain what caused the baffling event. People have been debating it for more than seventy years.

Wise, a fine editor (of no less than Citizen Kane!) prior to becoming a highly accomplished director, was in a stage here of filming everything with a numb-inducing solemnity (see also the dire Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which began and probably would have ended the franchise were it not for the more energetic and colorful sequel a few years after! This is an ironic prelude to that film, which also employed many slow shots, paired with lush music, of a giant vessel either hanging stationary or careening around.)

The title vehicle is gorgeous to behold and is shown against varying beautiful landscapes, sunsets, clouds, etc... while some lovely, at times, majestic music by David Shire is heard. Virtually no detail went unchecked in recreating its look, inside and out. It is practically the whole show here since the human element gets short shrift. The scale model work and effects photography are exemplary for 1975 and the 25-foot long “miniature” that was used now hangs in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.

The over-sized cast, with a couple of exceptions, is barely able to make the slightest impact, if at all, as the story covers not only the airship, but plenty of on the ground activities as well. Note how the poster (in the then-popular box format, featuring all the stars and using the same labeling method as The Towering Inferno – “The Captain,” “The Countess,” etc…) has some complete nobody in one of the squares! “The Smuggler.” WHO??

Scott, (who really needed his shiny, blotchy, bent nose powdered in his restaurant scene!) brings some much-needed weight to the film with his thoughtful, shaded portrayal. Atherton does a decent job until his preposterous final moment involving a dog, something that didn’t occur in real life. He also has a hair-raising repair scene on the exterior of the zeppelin. Thinnes comes up with a nice amount of smarmy menace in his character.
Bancroft demonstrates why she was the Mommie Dearest producers' first choice before dropping out, haughtily mouthing off in her period clothes and camping it up a tad bit much. She wears a huge, thick ponytail at one point that could not possibly be reworked into the scant bun she displays during the rest of the film. She does, at least, manage to hold the viewer's attention, which is more than can be said for some of the less colorful personalities present. Despite some big names, the cast seems to get lost in a pallid sea of banality. I’ve seen this film many times and still am always surprised to see people in it who I had forgotten because they are so vaguely drawn and colorless. Those who only know Helmond from Soap and Who’s the Boss? will be hard-pressed to even recognize her here.
Clary, who in real life was imprisoned by the Nazis, is nevertheless an acquired taste on screen. His brand of mugging and performing is not something that will thrill everyone. His piano-playing cohort Donat is another actor whose appeal has always escaped me. While he isn’t terrible in the film, someone with a bit more charisma and flair might have been able to put across his scenes a little better.

Moore is stuck with an unduly thick and fake looking blonde wig. The mother of Tatum O’Neal, she had previously been the wife of Ryan O’Neal and had a tumultuous life. Orphaned when a car crash (in which she was not involved) killed everyone in her family but her (her father dying within a year due to injuries), she later lost three fingers in a car accident of her own. Her marriage to O’Neal only lasted long enough for two children to have been conceived and born. Their bitter divorce helped aggravate a serious drug and alcohol problem and cost her custody of the kids. She died in ’93 from lung cancer.

If you come here regularly, you know that I pay tribute to both 1970s disaster movies and to handsome hunks. However, the two topics scarcely ever converge because for some odd reason, these films rarely have any hunks in them! Meandering through this movie in a subordinate role is the closest thing I could find to a hunk, Colby Chester. Probably best known for playing Jill Abbott’s divorce lawyer on The Young and the Restless back when crazy Brenda Dickson had the role, he is cute even now as a salt ‘n pepper daddy type, but never really got very far in movies. He did land more than a few TV guest roles, however. Love that name, too!

Another familiar face in the cast (who isn’t even listed on imdb.com as being in it!) is that of Susan French. French began as a theatre actress before moving to TV in the mid-60s and then to supporting film roles. She’s probably best known as the old version of Jane Seymour’s character in Somewhere in Time (“Come back to me…”) She has a line of dialogue or two, playing a wealthy, haughty passenger on the Hindenburg and is shown many times. Ironically, she was also a passenger on Karen Black’s damaged 747 in Airport 1975! (And Thinnes was the co-pilot in that one, too.)

Of course, the most infamous person in the cast is Young, who is clearly intoxicated even when he isn’t meant to be. He’d been fired from Blazing Saddles (in the Gene Wilder part!) due to his alcoholism and would soon be replaced by John Forsythe as the voice of Charlie on Charlie’s Angels for the same reason. A handsome young man in the 40s and 50s, career disappointments and personal demons would eventually lead him down a destructive and very sad path. Just three years after this movie, he would marry a German actress forty-four years his junior and in a matter of weeks shoot her, then himself, to death.

For the big finale, the film suddenly turns black and white. This is so that Wise could interpolate actual archival footage of the Hindenburg explosion. On the one hand, it adds to the film because it’s spectacular, if unsettling, to see, and it’s unlikely that any recreation at that time could top it. And the new footage matches reasonably well with the old, though it can certainly be discerned. On the other hand, it feels like a cop out. It’s as if Wise decided not to create his own effects and stage his own stunt sequences and instead just ran the old footage with a few new bits interspersed. The entire finale, while decidedly eye-popping, is very murky and disjointed. It’s hard to see what’s happening and to whom, at times. Our eyes, used to color, have to adjust to the already bland characters in monochrome.

During the course of the movie, the script spends too much time on the ground and with various military and government officials for the passengers to be fully fleshed out and worthy of any concern. Rarely has it mattered so little who gets out all right. In real life, the stories of survival were otherworldly and people suffered tremendously during the event. The stories of burning and broiling among those who died and, in some cases, lived are horrible. Here it’s all so slipshod and slapdash with the possible exception of Dysart’s emergence from the tangled inferno and Donat’s use of his hands. So negligible are the characters’ fates that, instead of being shown what happens to each of them, a narrator blurts out a few, but not all, of their statuses (i.e. - "Survived", "DEAD", "DEAD") after the fire as some grainy pictures pop up on screen.

It's a striking story and the film does succeed in presenting the elegant setting and also in setting up a reasonable amount of suspense. It fails in creating any particularly compelling people or a rewarding resolution for them. Maybe the writers didn’t want to offend any potential survivors or their offspring? It could also be that audiences had little concern for an airship bearing the swastika and containing a hefty amount of Nazis. It also has to be said that while it’s sort of fun to watch people like Stella Stevens, Richard Chamberlain and Michael Caine ward off flames and heights, when it’s a real situation, the guilty pleasure begins to have the accent on the guilt. James Cameron later proved, however, with his massive hit Titanic that audiences would go (and go!) to see a fact-based disaster film while being fully aware of the outcome as long as they cared about the people involved.

Then there’s Roger Ebert who pointed out that most disaster flicks are entertaining because the catastrophe occurs pretty early in the picture and we experience the survival along with the participants while, in this case, the final twenty minutes or so are spectacular, but are swift and scant payoff for having sat through a lot of tedium beforehand. Other (less polite) critics made reference to the massive gasbag, comparing the film as being about the same in long-windedness and pace!

Due to its inherently disastrous circumstances, this is always lumped into the disaster movie genre when, in actuality, it's really more of an all-star whodunit (or is about to do it) style of mystery, but without interesting enough characters (or, in some cases, actors) to pull it off. It's a bit of a hybrid, featuring none of the best attributes of either genre, but floating by on the merits of its attention to detail and its overall craftsmanship. The film was nominated for three Oscars in the categories of Set Decoration, Cinematography and Sound and was granted two special Oscars for achievement in Sound Effects and Visual Effects.

To demonstrate how really careful the casting was, I’m linking to a wonderful page that shows the real life passengers and crew paired with screenshots of the actors who either played them or played people inspired by them. The author, Dan, has done a terrific job with this page. The main concession to 1975 seems to be that most of the men, when it came to their hair, eschewed the 1930s center part for the more up to date side part. Otherwise, many of the actors suggest the people they are portraying rather well, or at least some thought was put into it.

http://www.airships.net/blog/the-hindenburg-1975-movie

Lastly, I came upon this shot of Mae West at one of the premieres with Robert Wise. For some reason it cracks me up that Mae would be present for a photo op at a movie like this. I have no reason to think it’s funny other than the fact that I just do! Maybe some of you will find joy in the moment of the picture as well… Perhaps she could have made a cameo appearance in the movie to liven up the joint. And as a final note on the film, I think it comes off better on a second viewing. I just don’t know how many people are going to want to subject themselves to two go-rounds of it!