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This Quarter in Film History

Anne Bauchens receives a kiss from film star Victor Mature (top clipping), while a newspaper announces the engagement of Barbara McLean to director Robert Webb.

O Pioneers! These Picture Editors Led the Way for Women in Post-Production During the Golden Years of the Studio System

by uncredited July 26, 2024

written by uncredited 14 minutes read

By Lucy Donaldson

Last November, I attended an event organized by the Guild’s women’s steering committee to celebrate this year’s female Emmy nominees. The committee members and nominees numbered 40 in total. It was a great get-together, and it was heartening to see how many women are editing award-worthy shows.

BOSS: Margaret Booth, above, ruled post-production at MGM with an iron fist, with the 1965 letter below capturing her cool style.

That got me thinking about some research I did more than 14 years ago, when I was studying for my M.A. at the National Film and Television School in the U.K. The resulting paper was eventually called “Matriarchs and Moviolas: Women in the Cutting Rooms of Early Hollywood.” The spark was the excellent documentary “Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing” by Wendy Apple. The story of these pioneering women captured my imagination and inspired me at the start of my career — and it might inspire others, too.

After some initial research, I found there was a small group of women who had exceptionally successful editing careers that started almost at the birth of cinema and continued for much of the 20th century. However, according to a 1945 Los Angeles Times article, out of about 300 working editors in Hollywood, only eight were women. How did this group get started and why were they so outnumbered?

In the early days, cutting, patching (gluing trims together), sorting and tinting were seen as functional rather than creative or technical roles, and since women were the cheapest available labor, they were the most likely candidates to fulfill them. Ironically, the fact that these women were doing a job that was perceived as irrelevant gave them a foothold on what would turn out to be a key role in the filmmaking process.

As the role evolved, so did the skills of the women doing it. As Ally Acker points out in her book “Reel Women,” “by the time filmmakers began to discover that film could be arranged, shuffled, and cut in ways that would make the final effect much more powerful for an audience, women were technical masters.”

ONE FRAME AT A TIME: Anne Bauchens followed Cecil B. DeMille to Hollywood. Right inset, Barbara McLean watches dailies with Darryl Zanuck.
Left inset, a magazine interview with editor Alma Macrorie.

To find out more about these remarkable women, I searched for recorded evidence of female editors working in Hollywood between 1900 and 1940. Here I came up with a surprisingly short list of 11 names, all belonging to women who had very significant editing careers: Anne Bauchens, Margaret Booth, Adrienne Fazan, Viola Lawrence, Alma Macrorie, Barbara McLean, Irene Morra, Blanche Sewell, Rose Smith, Dorothy Spencer and Eda Warren. Other names cropped up in my research: Dorothy Arzner accumulated a handful of editing credits before turning to directing; Patricia Rooney, Madge Tyrone, Mildred Rich and Helen Lewis edited a number of films but their careers petered out after a few years. Undoubtedly, there must have been others lost to recorded history.

Of the 11, I decided to concentrate on four (based largely on availability of information): Margaret Booth (“Camille,” “Mutiny on the Bounty”), Barbara McLean (“All About Eve,” “Wilson,” “Alexander’sRagtime Band”), Adrienne Fazan (“Singin’ in the Rain,” “An American in Paris”) and Anne Bauchens (“The Ten Commandments,” “The Greatest Show on Earth”).

All of these women were gifted artists who were at the right place at the right time. They seem extremely hard-working, dedicating their lives to the studios, seemingly for the joy of doing a good job, whether or not they got their due from their employers. They cultivated strong key relationships with powerful figures within the studio system and displayed a lot of loyalty, resulting in some extraordinarily long-lasting working relationships. They seemed perceptive about the moods and whimsies of directors and producers, possessing what today would probably be called emotional intelligence: knowing how to handle delicate situations. And lastly, they were as tough as old boots, giving as good as they got when challenged and demanding respect from those around them.

SHOP TALK: Adrienne Fazan confers with “American in Paris” star Gene Kelly.

Their stories might hold some lessons for us today.

MARGARET BOOTH (1898–2002)

Margaret Booth began working with D.W. Griffith in 1915 and was the supervising editor for MGM for more than 30 years, supervising up to 50 films a year. Her loyalty to the studio and her discretion were legendary. Film historian Kevin Brownlow described her in later life as having the manner of an expensive doctor: “Time with her was short and you were grateful for it.” Despite her reputation, she was nominated for just one Oscar for “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1936) (she didn’t win). But she eventually received a Special Academy Award in 1977 after 62 years in the industry.

After her stint with Griffith, Margaret Booth joined Louis B. Mayer’s studio where she came into direct contact with the director John Stahl and later, after the merger with Metro and Goldwyn, Irving Thalberg (“the greatest man who ever was in pictures”). She credited Stahl as being the person who taught her to cut.

She was undoubtedly tough, as she was tapped by Thalberg to work with director Erich Von Stroheim, the intemperate director who had, unsurprisingly, a lot of problems working with editors.

The technology of the time was rudimentary. In the early days, editors cut using negative prints since the labs that generated the positive prints hadn’t yet moved out West. Before the introduction of the Moviola in 1924, the cutters cut by hand, without key numbers.

“We just looked at it and matched the print with the negative,” she later said. “We had no numbers at all — we matched the action…. When I cut silent films, I used to count to myself … to get the rhythm.”

She thrived under Thalberg but declined his offer to make her a director, saying that she would rather be an editor. After Thalberg’s death, Mayer asked her to be supervising editor and to let him know immediately if she saw anything wrong with the pictures under her jurisdiction, particularly concerning how the stars were photographed.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing. Booth later described how she was bullied by Al Lewin, the associate producer on “Mutiny on the Bounty” (1935), who accused her of not using the best material. But she had formidable allies, including Thalberg.

Margaret was on the front line when sound technology came in. She admitted to it being “a period you just suffered through.” Frustrated by the process while working on MGM’s first sound picture, “Broadway Melody” (1929), she threw up her hands shouting: “If it’s not in sync I’ll kill myself!”

“I believe like writing, good cutting cannot be analyzed,” Booth once said. “It is intangible, like all branches of showmanship or artistry. Instinctively you know whether or not a scene is coming out right. If it is not, there is no way to patch it up. There is nothing to do but start from the beginning.”

ANNE BAUCHENS (1882–1967)

Anne Bauchens is credited with many firsts: She was the first woman editor to win an Oscar (for “Northwest Mounted Police” in 1940; she ended up winning three in total), the first person to start a secretarial department in Hollywood, and was apparently the inventor of the role of script girl.

Like many women in early Hollywood, Bauchens started her career with a typewriter. She came to New York from St. Louis to try to find work as an actress. She ended up working as an assistant for William DeMille, the New York playwright. But Anne’s future would be most closely linked with William’s brother, Cecil B. DeMille.

When Cecil packed off to Hollywood, Anne (and William) followed him. So began a collaborative partnership between Anne and Cecil spanning 40 years and 42 films. De Mille insisted on Bauchens cutting all his films.

Their relationship seemed to be extraordinarily close and affectionate, eventually joking about mutual hearing loss and other signs of aging. But there was no romantic element to the relationship. A biographer recounts a story in which, after a near-collision, their car ended up with two wheels over a precipice. Bauchens threw her arms around De Mille’s neck and cried “Oh Cecil!” De Mille later said it was the only time in their relationship that he “roused her to passion.” (She never married; DeMille was married to the same woman for more than 50 years.)

It cannot have been easy being the editor for DeMille. For “The Ten Commandments” (1956), he shot 100,000 feet of film, which Bauchens had to reduce to 12,000. That translated into 16-hour work days during post.

But she earned the director’s gratitude, which he expressed in his own way. “There were times when, looking at certain completed scenes, I felt like running into the hills to hide,” he said in an interview, referring to their work relationship. “But

Annie says quietly, ‘Go up to the ranch for a few days, I’ll take care of this.’ And she always does.”

For ‘The Ten Commandments,’ Bauchens had to cut 100,000 feet of film to 12,000.

ADRIENNE FAZAN (1906–1986)

Fazan was the editor of the legendary musical “An American in Paris” (1951), but I suspect very little would be known about her had Donald Knox not written his 1972 book “The Magic Factory – How MGM Made ‘An American In Paris’.”

That book offers some candid insight into MGM and what it meant to work for the formidable Margaret Booth. Fazan worked until the latter part of her career almost exclusively for MGM, with filmmakers such as Vincente Minelli, Arthur Freed and Gene Kelly.

She was born in Germany to a French father and German mother, and had a varied early career. She got her break recutting talkies into silent films and then adding titles for movie theaters that had not yet installed sound equipment.

She then worked on MGM’s foreign-language films. At the time, the studio remade big pictures using foreign actors in four or five different languages. After this, she worked on shorts and documentaries for the studio and only broke into features during World War II, presumably when the studios lost many of their male editors to the armed forces.

“I would normally be assigned to a picture a few days before they began to turn cameras. The head of the editorial department would mostly come in and say, “Here’s a picture,” and throw a script at me. That’s how I first heard about ‘An American In Paris’,” she later said.

Fazan was, according to one writer, known for her “noisy disagreements” about projects and showed a marked impatience with studio rules. Rather than argue about overtime, she would work late into the night without pay. She was also outspoken about the wages at MGM and the studio’s pay structure. She was furious to discover that the top rate for editors was reserved for “relatives or favorite people” of studio boss Louis B. Mayer. “Mayer had THOUSANDS of relatives,” she later said, disgustedly. “Good God!”

The inequities remained even after she had won her two Oscars for “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) and “Gigi” (1958).

Asked about Margaret Booth’s involvement on “An American in Paris,” Fazan replied: “None, thank God… Mr. Minnelli didn’t want her on the picture… [T]here were many directors who didn’t want her on their pictures, and there were some directors who couldn’t go to the toilet without her holding their hand.”

Fazan’s brittle relationship with Booth ended in 1964, when by her own account, she got into “quite a deal with Miss Booth… a real war.” According to Fazan, Booth reneged on a promise to let her edit a feature, then added insult to injury by offering her work “helping out on a TV show.” Fazan went “straight up through the roof” — and thus her 34 years at MGM came to an unpleasant end.

BARBARA MCLEAN (1903–1996)

Barbara “Bobbie” McLean in many ways could be seen as Margaret Booth’s opposite at Twentieth Century Fox.

She edited 62 out of her 64 films for Fox, and in 1960 she became the supervising editor there. However, she received more external recognition than Booth did, with seven Oscar nominations, including a win for “Wilson” in 1945, plus a Career Achievement Award in 1988.

She began her career in her father’s film laboratory and arrived in Hollywood in 1921. She worked at the Pickford Company, sharing elevators with silent film star Mary Pickford and enjoying what she later described as “a close-knit family” atmosphere at the studio.

McLean didn’t escape the torment of the era’s new technologies. In 1928, when she was working in the cutting department at First National on “Lilac Time,” music was being added to pictures by way of a disc playing in the theatre that was supposed to sync up with the action in the picture. “Every day when the picture opened we used to go over to Carthay Circle Theatre and try to get it in sync,” McLean later recalled. “Using a stopwatch and syncing the music crescendos to the airplane crashes, they would desperately try to get music and picture working together by adding a little more music or more length to the titles.”

McLean ended up doing some of the very earliest dialogue editing. Once, Mary Pickford had exclaimed on-camera about “these beautiful red roses” in a scene – although on black-and-white stock, the roses appeared white. McLean discreetly cut out the word “red.” “You’d think I’d performed a brain operation,” she later joked of the praise she received for the cut.

McLean forged strong alliances with powerful leaders, including an extremely close relationship with Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck that in some ways resembled the ties between De Mille and Bauchens. “Studio executives knew that when Mr. Zanuck prefaced a statement with ‘Bobbie says…,’ he was not expressing an opinion but announcing a decision,” as one account put it. ■

Lucy Donaldson is a picture editor.

July 26, 2024 0 comments

Words Like Bullets: How ‘Sweet Smell’ Met with Success

by uncredited March 28, 2022

written by uncredited 4 minutes read

By Presley Balholm

A confession: As a child, I used to duct-tape a tape recorder to the bottom of our kitchen table, leaving it there to collect the day’s gossip that I later studied and disseminated at will. (‘Spying!’ you exclaim, wagging a punitive finger at me. No, dear reader: character analysis). I’ll plead to a certain impulse towards self-preservation. As the only girl in the family, I required ammo. Blackmail proved as effective a weapon as any. My hands were kept clean, the bruises were invisible and should either of my brothers step out of line, I had verifiable proof of their misdeeds. Beneath this streak of childhood nastiness was a far more banal truth: I liked words. I was fascinated by the individual rhythms of speech, the mysterious spaces between that which was spoken and that which was not, the double meanings, the verbal feints and parries. There was a war going on, and conversation was the battleground.

A consequence of growing up: Eventually, you develop a conscience. At some point, I submitted to becoming a respectable member of society. Still, my appetite for cruelty (fictional, of course) never waned. Then, as now, I liked my stories filled with meanness. The inflection point came in the form of Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 noir “Sweet Smell of Success,” where words are as lethal as bullets.

The players: Sidney Falco, played by Tony Curtis as the human embodiment of a sneer. With a twitchy, obsequious charm that all but oozes off the screen, Curtis’ press agent plays acolyte to Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker. A familiar monster to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the entertainment industry, Hunsecker is a domineering columnist and tastemaker, a spectacle-clad monarch who rules over his seedy kingdom with ruthless omnipotence. (Yes, we nebbish story analysts like to dream of a world where the whims of wordy gatekeepers are king… we all have our fantasies). The symbiotic relationship between a press agent and columnist may be arcane today, but the sadomasochistic interplay is the same playing out in every corner of the corporate world: boss and lackey, top-dog and hungry striver, host and parasite. Here’s a fun way to pass the time: Divide your colleagues into the Falcos and the Hunseckers. (A tip: Anyone who thinks himself a Hunsecker is most definitely a Falco.)

Together, Hunsecker and Falco’s shared capacity for cruelty is a vernacular unto itself. Words are the trade, currency and weapons of choice in this putrid universe. Language is not merely language here: It’s a thieves’ cant, an acid-laced jargon meant to dominate others into submission. It is also the thing that separates Hunsecker and Falco from the rest of the world, tying them together as members of the same species. To speak fluently in the stylized argot of this rarefied group is to ascend to significance, to become a real person. Everyone else is merely matter.

As a teenager, I fantasized about becoming one of those hyper-articulate monsters — a cleverer version of myself with a sharp quip readily at hand, the kind of person who never started a sentence without knowing how to end it. With age came a new understanding of my favorite film: For all of Falco and Hunsecker’s poetic putdowns and velvet-clad threats, neither man has any real idea how to communicate with people. In a world where “integrity” is a dirty word and authenticity is considered fatal, both men are trapped in a childish game of cruelty and dependence. There is no real substance to their speech: It is the hollow language of hollow men.

Since working as a story analyst, I’ve come to appreciate writers with an acute ear for the awkward nuances of speech. We rarely say what we mean, and even when we do, it is usually inelegant and imperfect. There is still a music to it, among those stumbling tangents and verbal tics. Perhaps it’s not the polished jazz of “Sweet Smell of Success,” but the distinct colors and odd rhythms of our verbal failings make symphonies of even the most mutilated speech. I should know: The proof is on my tape recorder.

Presley Balholm is a story analyst specializing in book adaptations for Netflix and AMC. She can be reached at presleybalholm@gmail.com.

March 28, 2022 0 comments

Features Tail Pop This Quarter in Film History

TAIL POP: The Enduring Influence of Jean-Luc Godard and ‘Band of Outsiders’

by uncredited July 8, 2021

written by uncredited 4 minutes read

By Billy Mernit

I grew up in a Long Island suburb among people about whom a friend once said, “If they can’t eat it or wear it, they don’t want it.” So of course, like any other teenager in the late ‘60s who had creative aspirations, going against the grain of that straight-and-narrow sensibility was my reason to live. As a rabid rock’n’roll fan starting to write my own songs and stories, I was all about defying authority, bucking the system, and embracing change.

Nonetheless, when it came to movies, I’d grown up on the classic Hollywood fare my parents watched on TV: screwball comedies like “Bringing Up Baby,” westerns like “My Darling Clementine” and glossy thrillers like “North by Northwest.” These traditional, conventionally told stories were ingrained in my sensibility. Boy got girl, good won out over bad, and every mystery was sensibly solved in the end; for all of my young rebel attitudes, when it came to film, I was an unconscious conservative.

Then an older, savvier film buff I knew insisted I see a Jean-Luc Godard movie, calling him “the Picasso of cinema.” I dutifully ventured into the city, where art houses playing such exotic fare were ubiquitous. Because I’d gotten the time wrong, I walked into the New Yorker in the middle of Godard’s “Band of Outsiders” (“Bande a Part”), only to soon realize that it didn’t really matter. Seeing this French film was like inhaling cinematic helium—I could feel my American mind and heart imploding and expanding with each scene. Enthralled, I stayed for the first half, and noting that the story made just as much sense when viewed in this bifurcated fashion, I watched it again in its proper sequence. This one visit to an uptown movie theater upended everything I knew about stories and how they could be told, changing both my moviegoing and writing life.

“Band’s” story is pedestrian: Two small-time Parisian crooks convince a naïve young servant girl to help them rob the wealthy woman she works for; the guys compete for the girl’s affections, and ultimately everything goes fatally south. Shot on a shoestring budget in documentary-like black and white, the film thrives on a romantic, revolutionary spirit that said hello to me at my impressionable age because it willfully, gloriously does everything wrong.

In what should be the suspenseful scene of three accomplices planning a robbery, the restless, bickering Arthur, Franz, and Odile agree to a moment of silence—and the entire soundtrack shuts off: For some 40 seconds, we’re literally in a silent movie. Soon after, the trio decides to dance, but narrator Godard interrupts their cool, charmingly clumsy choreographed number, wanting us to know what each character is thinking. We learn that Odile (a luminescent, wide-eyed Anna Karina), is wondering if the boys notice her breasts moving under her sweater, while Franz wonders “if the world is becoming a dream, or if a dream is becoming the world.” Prior to the robbery itself, the trio kill time by racing madly through the entirety of the Louvre, seeing no art at all. These characters glance at the camera and tell stories that have nothing to do with the plot. With its playful self-consciousness, “Band” sends itself up at every turn, while its inspired filmmaking transforms banality into a peculiarly poignant dream.

“Band” became my gateway drug to a brave new cinematic world. Other foreign, visionary auteurs like Bergman and Fellini who were expanding the language of film, telling personal stories as if they were visual poems, continued to transform my imagination. Soon I could never watch a traditional mainstream movie in the same way again, and when I started writing screenplays, they were irreverent, risky, and indie-spirited.

Some 50 years later, that first Godard experience remains a North Star when I’m trying to navigate a story of my own, or sitting at my desk in the belly of the industry beast with a spec script to cover. My mind has remained more open to the artful unknown than it might’ve been, because “Band of Outsiders” taught me the most essential thing: that you can do anything in the dream that is a movie. Everything is permitted.

-Billy Mernit is a Story Analyst who lives in North Hollywood, Calif.

July 8, 2021 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

How Emilio Fernández’s Classic ‘Enamorada’ Boosted Mexican Cinema

by Edward Landler December 13, 2019

written by Edward Landler 10 minutes read

by Edward Landler

In Mexico around 1915, a day after his army has taken Cholula, the revolutionary peasant general shouts (as crudely as a stereotypical wolf-whistling construction worker) as a young woman walks by on the street, “Just to see her legs again, I’d let her slap me!”

The woman, the daughter of the city’s richest man, turns around, lifts her skirt, walks straight up to him and slaps his face, declaring, “If you’re a man, you’ll take another slap for you looked at both my legs.” Grinning, he turns his other cheek to her, and she hits him with a full straight-armed backhanded slap that knocks him off his feet.

“That’s the woman I’ll marry,” the general utters as she strides away — the first major dramatic turning point of “Enamorada” (“In Love”). It premiered in the United States 70 years ago this month, on December 2, 1949, as “The General and the Senorita” for a short run at New York City’s Playhouse Theater. The movie had originally opened in Mexico City three years earlier, on December 25, 1946, running seven weeks there in its first run.

Writer/director Emilio Fernández’s story and screenplay, written with Iñigo de Martino, was inspired by Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” (1594) and a traditional Spanish tale first written down in Don Juan Manuel’s “The Tales of Count Lucanor” (1335) as “What happened when a man married a very strong and fierce woman.” In the film, however, the strong woman does not just obediently submit to masculine domination.

Instead, with depth and insight, “Enamorada” portrays the emergence of a real love. This love leads the general to reject his macho bravado and beg for her forgiveness, and it allows the woman to recognize her wealth and position as accidents of birth and to see the justice of the revolutionary cause. Together they will help to advance a new and more equal Mexican society.

Yet, with hardly any physical contact between them and not a single kiss, the second half of the film becomes suffused with the deep emotion and sensual desire that draws them together. For “Enamorada”, director Fernández collaborated with cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, editor Gloria Schoemann, and stars María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz — all major figures of the 1940s’ El Cine de Oro (the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema) — to fashion a moving and classic romantic film.

In 1947, “Enamorada” won seven Silver Ariel awards, the Mexican equivalent of the Oscar, and Fernández won the Golden Ariel for his contributions to his country’s film industry. Gaining international recognition later that year, the film won awards for Best Direction and Best Cinematography at the Brussels Film Festival and was presented at the Venice Film Festival.

Its reputation rising over the years, “Enamorada” has been screened twice at the Cannes Film Festival, the first time in 2005 as part of the Cinéma de la Plaza program. In 2018, a 4K High Definition restoration by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project was premiered as part of Cannes Classics, introduced by Martin Scorsese.

Despite having directed about 40 movies in Mexico, filmmaker and actor Fernández is probably best known in the United States for his vivid portrayal of the brutal (and muy macho) Mexican Federal General Mapache in Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969). Nicknamed “El Indio” for his striking features inherited from a Native American mother and mestizo (mixed race) army officer father, he went into exile to the US in 1924 at the age of 20 after taking part in a rebellion against the ruling Obregón government. For the next 10 years, he worked in the Hollywood film industry as a production assistant and extra.

According to Emilio García Riera’s 1987 biography of the filmmaker, Fernández became enthralled with cinema “as the most splendid means of expression” upon viewing fragments of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s footage for the unfinished “Que Viva México!” (completed posthumously in 1979) in a Hollywood cutting room in 1933. Granted amnesty in 1934 when Lázaro Cárdenas was elected president of Mexico, Fernández found work in its film industry in hopes of creating his own vision of a progressive nation with respect for its indigenous roots.

As World War II approached, the US expanded its Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, helping Mexico enjoy an economic boom and greatly benefiting the film industry. Hollywood gave Mexican filmmakers technical support, raw materials and, occasionally, invested in their productions. The resulting hike in production made Mexico the home of the world’s leading Spanish-language movie industry.

In 1942, Fernández directed his first feature, “La Isla de la Pasión,” for a budget of only 100,000 pesos (then the equivalent of about 20,000 US dollars). In 1946, the booming economy and the success of his following films made it possible for producer Benito Alazraki Franco and Panamerican Films SA to raise over 1,500,000 pesos ($300,000) to make “Enamorada.”

While “Enamorada” was still in post production, Fernández’s “María Candelaria” (1944) became the first Mexican entry presented at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix du Festival. This major recognition of a Mexican film justified its director’s attention to authentic themes and images to embody a national identity, and strengthened his role in furthering the industry’s Golden Age.

In Beatriz Reyes Nevares’ “The Mexican Cinema: Interviews with 13 Directors” (1976), he said:

“I understood that it was possible to create a Mexican cinema with our own actors and our own stories, without having to photograph gringos or gringas or tell stories that have nothing to do with our people.”

“Enamorada” began production in July 1946. The interiors were shot at Estudios Churubusco Azteca in Mexico City, but most of the film was shot on location in the State of Puebla in Cholula, a city renowned for its colonial architecture and its 365 churches. One of them, the Church of San Francisco Acatepec, first constructed in the 16^th Century and completed in the 18^th Century, serves as a setting for crucial scenes of the film. Within its sumptuous baroque interiors, cameraman Figueroa’s lensing of the characters evokes their inner shifts of attitude and emotion.

In a 50-year career with over 200 credits (including films directed by John Ford, John Huston and Luis Buñuel), Figueroa worked with Fernández on more than 20 features. The cameraman told Eugenia Meyer, for her 1976 book of interviews, “Testimonios para la historia del cinema mexicano”, “It was with Fernández that I really began to develop my own style. We spoke the same language. We thought in images.” Utilizing composition in depth, low angles, stark contrasts of light and dark, and long tracking shots inspired by muralists José Guadalupe Posada, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, Figueroa also noted that the artists “said my films were murals in movement.”

In 1935, he had been mentored in Hollywood by legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland (“The Grapes of Wrath”, 1940; “Citizen Kane”, 1941), who is cited in Luis I. Reyes’ “Made in Mexico: Hollywood South of the Border” (2018) as saying, “In Mexico, there is only one cameraman stronger than I am: Gabriel Figueroa.” In 1987, he was awarded the Mexican Golden Ariel and the American Society of Cinematographers International Award in 1995.

Like Figueroa, editor Schoemann worked on more than 20 features with Fernández among her more than 200 credits, and was also honored twice for her lifetime achievement — with the Salvador Toscana Medal from the Cineteca Nacional in 1993 and the Golden Ariel in 2004.

Interviewed in historian Meyer’s “Testimonios”, she described the Mexican filmmaking process of the ‘40s: “The custom was to gather the cinematographer, the screenwriter, the director and the editor for a script reading; we would then begin to comment on the continuity and the dialogue… We would visualize what was necessary and the editor had the obligation to indicate which things didn’t add to the whole…or would slow down the film’s rhythm. ‘El Indio’ [Fernández] heard all the comments and was very accessible, a joy to work with.”

For “Enamorada”, like all the films on which they collaborated, Fernández had to write as complete and precise a shooting script as possible and Figueroa had to shoot all the necessary coverage during production. In the Mexican industry, the editor worked in the cutting room, never visited the set, and had to assemble the film with the footage given to her. Schoemann said, “Retakes and additional scenes never happened, so the editor had to figure out how to solve problems the best she could.”

Despite these apparent limitations, the editor composes a smooth and coherent continuity throughout the movie, as the story changes in tone from dynamic political drama to broad romantic comedy and, finally, to sensitive poignant romance. Contributing as well to this affective progression are the performances of Félix as Beatriz Peñafiel and Armendáriz as General José Juan Reyes.

With a natural poise and self-assurance, the beautiful Félix became a star playing an independent woman in full possession of her own body in “Doña Barbara” (1943). For “Enamorada”, her first of five films with Fernández, she was paid the highest salary in the Mexican industry to that time — 300,000 pesos ($60,000), and 6000 pesos ($1200) more for every day over schedule. The hearty and forceful Armendáriz rose to prominence in six previous Fernández films, growing into the director’s leading exemplar of Mexico’s native peoples and revolutionary ideals.

The movie’s seamless integration of acting, directing, cinematography and editing immerses the audience in the story as experienced by the characters through the entire film. Whether it is the almost slapstick one-ups-manship game between Beatriz and José Juan on either side of the locked front door of the Peñafiel household — or, later, the serenade below Beatriz’ window in a sequence built around her emotive eyes as she awakens, rises and watches José Juan and El Trio Calaveras singing in the street — viewers cannot help but be caught up in their feelings.

Curiously, on June 2, 1950, six months after “Enamorada” opened as “The General and the Senorita” in New York, an American remake called “The Torch” opened in wide release in the US. According to a May 13, 1950 article in the Los Angeles “Citizen News”, the movie’s star and associate producer, Paulette Goddard (a former wife of Charles Chaplin), saw the original movie in Mexico in 1949. The remake’s producer, Bert Granet, is quoted saying, “She thought the movie was so good that she wanted to do an English-language version and play the María Felix part.”

More curiously, the remake was shot in the same studio in Mexico City and on location in the same city of Cholula, with the same art director, the same set decorator and the same sound crew as the original — and with Figueroa as cinematographer and Fernández as director. Of the leading cast, only Armendáriz, who had made five Hollywood movies as a secondary leading man since “Enamorada”, returned to play José Juan Reyes (of the minor players, a few actors from the original were cast in different roles).

Instead of Schoemann, Charles L. Kimball, an American editor working in both Mexico and the US, cut the remake. The original’s tightly edited scenes drag clumsily in the remake. Fernández’ and Figueroa’s contributions occasionally suggest they were embarrassed to make this odd hybrid.

The screenplay, adapted by producer Granet with the original’s co-writer Iñigo de Martino, is clearly tailored to suit the American star, more than simply changing Beatriz’s name to Maria Dolores. The coquettish Goddard herself seems to confuse feminine strength with hyperactivity.

As for the movie’s first major dramatic turning point, Goddard’s Maria Dolores delivers a full straight-armed slap, fronthanded, to José Juan’s face, and Armendáriz does fall over — but it is not convincing.

Nobody can slap down a general like Félix’s Beatriz… and make him realize that “it takes a real macho to ask for forgiveness.”

December 13, 2019 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

Popcorn, Dailies and Guinness: John Sayles on the Making of ‘Secret of Roan Inish’

by Edward Landler August 14, 2019

written by Edward Landler 12 minutes read

by Edward Landler

In traditional Celtic lore, the Selkie or “Seal Folk” are beings who transform from seals to humans when they shed their skin and, donning it again, change back as well. The myth of the Selkie lies at the heart of filmmaker John Sayles’ The Secret of Roan Inish, which premiered 25 years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 1994.

Sayles explains to CineMontage, “Like the oral traditions passed on from generation to generation, these stories are hooked into the nature around you, who you are as a person and what you need to know to survive.” A gentle yet enthralling film, Roan Inish examines the vital human bond with nature increasingly threatened by our own industrial and technological development.

The Secret of Roan Inish. Samuel Goldwyn Company/Photofest

Since making his first independent film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), as writer, director and editor, Sayles has established a unique relationship with the industry. While managing to keep creative control over much of his work, he has achieved membership in several Hollywood guilds, representing writers, directors, producers and editors. Regarding his Local 700 membership, he stresses, “I wanted to join the union because I wanted to be fair to our assistant editors and other post personnel.”

Sayles based his Roan Inish screenplay on Rosalie K. Fry’s 1957 novella The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry, a favorite book from childhood of Maggie Renzi, his life’s companion and frequent co-producer. The two met in college and have worked together on most of his movies. They acquired the rights to the book during the production of City of Hope (1991) and, while Sayles was editing Passion Fish (1992), Renzi and co-producer Sarah Green went to Ireland to start scouting locations for the film.

Although faithful to the novella’s main story in his script, the Irish-American filmmaker transferred its location from the Scottish coast to the northwest coast of Ireland. In the book Sayles on Sayles (1998), he tells interviewer Gavin Smith he did this “because one of the things I did get from…growing up was that sense of Ireland being this island that’s obsessed with loss.”

Seeking a connection to home and nature is key to 10-year-old Fiona Coneelly’s (Jeni Courtney) return in 1949 from a bleak factory town on the mainland, where her father works, to her grandparents’ home in the small islands, where making a living from the sea has become more difficult. In the filmmaker’s final revised shooting script (dated December 10, 1992), his written visualization already suggests how Fiona’s growing perspective in the film is interwoven with the seals’ and gulls’ POVs as sentient natural beings who also inhabit the scattered small islands of her home.

The nature of storytelling itself is explored as well. Sayles plays with ways of presenting oral storytelling, arranging voiceovers and cutting to the stories’ narrators differently for each story Fiona hears about her family’s ancestors (one of which married a Selkie in human form) and for the story of how her baby brother Jamie was carried out to sea in his cradle. A concrete sense of magic and fantasy is conveyed through the child’s visualization of these stories. As Sayles tells CineMontage, “It’s 1949 and Fiona imagines the events untouched by film or television…literally, without special effects.”

The Secret of Roan Inish. Samuel Goldwyn Company/Photofest

As Kirk Honeycutt wrote in The Hollywood Reporter in April 1993, to finance the project, “Sayles said he raised the money for the low-budget film through home video pre-sales, foreign money and by investing some of his own money.” Personally putting up a third of the movie’s projected $5 million budget to get production started, the filmmaker set up production offices above a pub in Rosbeg, a town in County Donegal close to all the shooting locations. Scheduled for an eight-week shoot, the film’s production started April 30.

Director of photography was Haskell Wexler, ASC, who had shot Sayles’ Matewan (1987) and would later work with him on Limbo (1997) and Silver City (2004). In an interview with Douglas Bell for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences oral history project, the cinematographer offered, “The Secret of Roan Inish was a film I’m very proud of. I liked the attitude, I liked the sweetness, I liked the fantasy aspects of it.”

Unfortunately, the financing deal Sayles made with Denver-based Jones Intercable was not finalized until two weeks after the shoot began, and the cast and crew began work without knowing if there would be enough money to finish. Wexler relates that an Irish worker who had helped build the thatched cottages and had already been paid for his work “got really super drunk…and he burned down half the sets. The people of the village all pitched in and rebuilt it.”

A July 30, 1993 Los Angeles Times article reported that the fire caused $150,000 of damage and quoted Renzi saying, “Insurance covered us and we started building the next day with 80 locals employed by the production. After the fire, they behaved toward us as if we’d lost a child.” With the Jones deal finalized, the money started coming in and production went so smoothly that it came in under budget. The entire cast and crew, including the locals, received a $650 bonus, and the film’s ending credits conclude with “Thanks to the kind people of Rosbeg and Portnoo, County Donegal.”

The most unpredictable factor during production was the Irish weather. In Sayles on Sayles, the director asserts, “I knew how good Haskell was at making everything match and appear seamless… Some of our montages are supposed to take place in a five-minute period and they were shot on 12 different days.” Every day, the call sheet would be distributed with several different shooting plans that depended on how the weather turned out.

Another major concern was working with the seals. Wexler and his camera crew photographed most of the key seal scenes, but British wildlife cameraman Jeff Goodman, assisted by American Jeff Wood, also shot some of the seal footage. In addition to actual seals, several animatronic seals were constructed and used.

“I told Haskell that the seals and the gulls are characters,” Sayles says. “At the opening, the establishing shot is Fiona from the seal’s point of view. That was the hardest shot in the whole movie. How do you get seals to look where you want them to? We had to put the seal on a fake rock on top of a raft.”

During production, assistant editor Plummy Tucker (now ACE), synched dailies in a cutting room over the pub. She had been an apprentice editor on City of Hope and an assistant on Passion Fish; on her next project after Roan Inish, she was already a full editor. “I like working with assistant editors who are ready to cut,” Sayles notes.

“I cut while I shoot, doing an awful lot of editing in my head,” the director confides. Agreeing, Tucker tells CineMontage, “John is economical in his shooting and very clear about what he wants. He’s incredible with story structure and character, and writes wonderfully nuanced female characters, with a real focus on authenticity. I’d assemble the scene rolls for John to cut on the Steenbeck: wides, mediums, close-ups… ”

It generally took a couple of days for prints to come back from the lab in Dublin, but every night, Sayles would announce, “Popcorn, dailies and Guinness,” and the footage would be screened for cast and crew in the pub. The shoot wrapped on June 28.

During post-production, Sayles and Tucker returned to Ireland and performed a now-obsolete procedure at Dublin’s Ardmore Studios. The assistant editor recalls, “We did actual looping, not ADR. We prepped 35mm full-coat mag loops to record on. That was a throwback!”

While the shooting was finishing up, second assistant editor Sheila Moloney set up cutting rooms in the garage at Sayles and Renzi’s home in upstate New York to be ready for their return. The editor/director worked on the Steenbeck upstairs while the assistant editors worked downstairs.

The Secret of Roan Inish. Samuel Goldwyn Company/Photofest

Sayles remembers that cutting the picture to lock took about 10 weeks at the most. “Editing is where you breathe life into the film,” he explains. “All of post is part of it; it’s not just me, you get to enlist other people… You take all you have from actors, script, cinematography, sets, wardrobe and music — and make it better. The trickiest editing was the sequences with the seals.”

For those scenes and other montage sequences in Roan Inish, Tucker recalls that Sayles had shot a lot of material so he could play with it. Working without an Avid before the great digital changeover, they devised a different method to experiment. “John would lay the sequences out and then we’d take all the shots with handles to a video facility and transfer to tape so he could play with the length of fades, dissolves and supers — you couldn’t do that on film,” she explains. “Then I’d make a detailed count sheet showing how to recreate it, and we’d take that to an optical house to print.”

Composer Mason Daring, who has worked on all but one of the filmmaker’s features, arranged traditional Irish music for the film’s score. After recording some of the score at his own studio near Boston, he and Sayles recorded and cued the rest of the music at Windmill Studios in Dublin (U2’s studio) with native musicians playing traditional Irish instruments.

When picture was locked early in September, supervising sound editor Philip Stockton, MPSE, came upstate to take all the sound material back to prep at c5 Sound in New York City. “John’s jobs were among the first on which I was sole supervisor,” Stockton says (Roan Inish was the fifth of nine Sayles movies he has supervised). “When he locks it, it’s all ready to go. I’m proud of the dialogue editing; the Irish accents are heard clearly among the ocean and other natural sounds.”

The sound editor also praised the special quality of the effects devised by Foley artist Marko Costanzo for the Selkie shedding her skin. For the fifth of the 10 Sayles films on which Costanzo has worked, he reveals, “We created a gooey world using wet chamois cloth peeling over a wet burlap sack… We did an additional pass with hand creams that worked best for the viscous slop.”

After about four weeks of prep at c5 on Sonic Solutions (before ProTools was developed), Tom Fleischman, CAS, did the final mix at Sound One in less than two weeks during October 1993.

In January 1995, after its Toronto premiere, The Secret of Roan Inish became the first Sayles film presented at the Sundance Film Festival. Having no idea of how to market such a unique picture, studios gave it a pass on distribution, but First Look Pictures, a unit of the Overseas Film Group, stepped in for domestic distribution. Released on February 3, 1995 in the US, it earned over $6 million dollars in its initial run, Sayles’ largest box office take thus far in his career. Overseas went on to distribute it internationally.

As our long-term survival becomes more obviously endangered by humankind’s blindness to the natural environment from which we’ve evolved, the reality of the myth depicted in The Secret of Roan Inish may yet find its audience. A child who wants to bring her family back together, and finds living creatures in nature to guide her — that may indeed be a fantasy. But, as the filmmaker himself confirms, “She doesn’t just find the magic passageway or the magic ring. She does the hard work.”

If we all could do the same, we may find reconciliation with one another and with nature itself.

August 14, 2019 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

When Editing Began: The Cut that Launched a Filmmaking Craft

by Edward Landler June 7, 2019

written by Edward Landler 13 minutes read

by Edward Landler

“I was the one who successively came up with all the so-called ‘mysterious’ cinematographic techniques. The cinematographers of artificially arranged scenes have all more or less followed the path I laid down.” — Georges Méliès, “Les Vues Cinématographiques: Causerie (Cinematographic Views: An Informal Lecture),” L’Annuaire Général et International de la Photographie (The General and International Annual of Photography), 1907

Georges Méliès in the late 1800s. Photofest

By the time film pioneer Georges Méliès made this only slightly exaggerated claim, the making and exhibition of narrative film was establishing itself as a business separate from the variety stage and lecture circuit. As more people visited storefront theatres to see moving picture stories, they watched the art and craft of editing evolving on screens right before their eyes.

Within the next 10 years, the emergence of feature-length films gave birth to an entertainment industry boom and, soon after, lavish movie palaces. Before 1900, however, editing — the selection, timing and arrangement of shots to draw attention from image to image within a scene, and to achieve continuity from scene to scene — was just barely imagined.

Throughout the 1890s, virtually all films exhibited were uncut, single-camera setup shots that were about a minute in length. Having made over 200 such pieces between 1896 and 1899, Méliès sought to expand these limited tableaux vivants (living pictures) into longer films and richer stories. He was among the first to imagine and contrive what would become editing and post-production in movie storytelling.

During the spring of 1899, 120 years ago, Méliès filmed and exhibited Le Portrait Mystérieux (The Mysterious Portrait), advertised in his Complete Catalogue of Genuine and Original “Star” Films (1905) as “une grande nouveauté photographique” (a grand photographic novelty). It was the first film to demonstrate what a “cut” can do within a scene. It portrays a primitive cut — substituting one image with another — within a picture frame placed in the movie’s single, uncut, continuous master shot.

In this short movie, the bald, bearded Méliès himself — gesturing like the magician he was — walks onto a theatrical stage, passes behind and steps through a large empty picture frame center stage. He places a landscape painting in the frame and a stool on the frame’s lower edge in the landscape.

With a wave of his hand, the landscape and stool in the frame “cut” to black and a second Méliès sitting on the stool in the painting dissolves into focus in the frame. The two men acknowledge and speak to one another; the Méliès outside the picture frame waves again, and the landscape with the Méliès inside the painting un-focuses into black. A “cut” brings the image of the hilly landscape with the empty stool back into the picture frame — and the movie is over.

Le Portrait Mystérieux (The Mysterious Portrait), 1899.
Star Film Company

To achieve the effect of a cut, the filmmaker used mattes and stop motion. By the 1890s, mattes were common practice of still photographers to create double exposure photos. For The Mysterious Portrait, a matte masked the interior of the picture frame while the whole scene outside the frame was photographed. Then, after rewinding this master shot to the precise film frame, another matte masked the entire shot outside the picture frame and the interior of the frame was shot. To simulate these “cuts” within the picture frame, Méliès utilized the stop-motion technique he had developed to make people and objects appear, disappear or change form in his earlier fantastical movies.

Méliès had discovered moving pictures — a series of photographs projected rapidly enough to create the illusion of movement on the screen — on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café’s Salon Indien in Paris. He was invited there by Auguste and Louis Lumière for the first public screening of 10 actualités (documentary views) the brothers had filmed — and projected — with their patented cinématographe (a combination movie camera and projector).

In 1890, Thomas Alva Edison and W.K.L. Dickson first created movies on their Kinetograph. But these films could only be viewed by one person at a time on Edison and Dickson’s bulky, peepshow-like Kinetoscope. However, the Lumières’ cinématographe could also project its films for viewing on a screen by an audience. More than anyone in the late 1890s, Méliès persistently tried to invent ways to use these machines to tell stories.

Since 1888, he had been the owner and director of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, founded in 1845 by Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the first great modern magician. Up through his introduction to film, Méliès had invented more than 30 elaborate “theatrical illusions” or magic tricks and, in 1895, was elected president of the Chambre Syndicale des Artistes Illusionnistes (Trade Association of Illusion Artists).

The Lumières refused to sell him a cinématographe, but others were fabricating similar moving picture machines. In February 1896, Méliès bought a Kinetoscope copy manufactured by Robert W. Paul, an English instrument maker and early filmmaker. The magician studied its mechanism, designed his own camera/projector and had it constructed by his theatre’s machinist, Lucien Korsten. While in London, Méliès also bought a crate of Eastman Kodak film; back in Paris, he perforated it with holes to fit the sprockets of his own machine.

Théâtre Robert-Houdin presented its first film program on April 4, 1896, and went on to screen films as part of its daily programming of magic shows and variety acts. In 1897, Méliès finished building his Star Film studio in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris. The main building’s walls and ceilings were all glass, and the dimensions of the main stage were the same as those of his theatre. Méliès rarely moved his weighty camera and photographed all his movies as performed on a theatrical stage.

Georges Méliès, right, with workers constructing his glass-walled Star Film studio in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, in 1897. Star Film Company

The minute-long films he made included burlesques, comic anecdotes, fairy stories and fantasies, staged depictions of actual events, satires, scenes from literature and even the first screen advertisements. In his “Les Vues Cinématographiques” lecture, Méliès complained that these short movies were “unconnected fragments” and that he was “like the compère [host] of a revue, there to link the acts that have nothing to do with each other.”

In 1899, shortly after achieving the “cuts” within the single-scene The Mysterious Portrait, the filmmaker broke away from exhibiting only fragmented images and anecdotes. Trying to create cohesive continuities from multiple separate scenes, he experimented with longer and more involving stories. Méliès’ first significant attempt was a series of 11 staged tableaux filmed as actualités reconstituées (reconstituted documentaries), comprising a primitive docudrama of an era-defining military scandal then polarizing the French Third Republic.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was framed for treason and sentenced to life on Devil’s Island, the infamous penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. Accusations of official corruption, cover-ups and anti-Semitism provoked public controversy and, in 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France to be retried.

While the new court martial proceeded through August of that year, Méliès began shooting the segments of L’affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair), perhaps the first politically engaged motion picture. In film historian Georges Sadoul’s 1961 biography Georges Méliès, the filmmaker’s widow, actress Jehanne d’Alcy states, “Méliès was pro-Dreyfus… He was a free-thinker.”

Depicting the major events of the affair — from Dreyfus’ setup and arrest, through imprisonment on Devil’s Island and his return to France — the uncut, single-shot scenes were all filmed at the Star Film studio and completed in September. While still filming the final tableaux, Méliès exhibited the earlier one-minute segments, and also rented and sold prints individually to other exhibitors.

L’affaire Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair), 1899. Star Film Company

When the last segment was shot, showing Dreyfus’ conviction upheld by a majority of the court, Méliès trimmed the heads and tails of all 11 scenes with scissors. Then, scraping off the emulsion at the ends, he glued the scenes all together in order to make one continuous film (running close to 13 minutes), which he released late in September 1899. Meanwhile, on September 21, public reaction to the trial had impelled the government to pardon and release Dreyfus. (In 1906, he was finally fully exonerated and allowed to return to military service.) Opening in New York City on November 4, 1899, The Dreyfus Affair circulated internationally for years.

After completing that groundbreaking project, Méliès immediately took another step toward editing the arrangement of images to tell complex stories. Inspired by a pantomime staged by the Troupe Raymond at his theatre in 1897, the filmmaker shot Cendrillon (Cinderella), described in his studio’s film catalogue as “une grande féerie extraordinaire” (an extraordinary grand fantasy).

Running about six minutes, this version of the classic fairy tale was shot on one reel in continuity on four different sets prepared consecutively on the main Montreuil studio stage. Méliès created in-camera lap dissolves as transitions between the four sets: Cinderella’s kitchen, the Royal Palace ballroom, Cinderella’s room and the church exterior where she and the prince are wed. Within the separate tableaux, the filmmaker also used a few shorter dissolves to suggest passage of time, as well as stop motion for the story’s magical transformations.

Cendrillon (Cinderella), 1899.
Star Film Company

Premiering at Théâtre Robert-Houdin in October 1899, Cinderella was an immediate success, opening on Broadway in New York two months later on Christmas Day. The acclaim the film received encouraged Méliès to make longer, more elaborate films, using “all that I have learned by the seat of my pants during long years of constant labor,” as he stated in his 1907 lecture.

Among his most popular later films were the 10-minute historic spectacle Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), 1900, as well as the science fiction fantasies Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), 1902, 13 minutes, and Voyage à Travers l’Impossible (An Impossible Voyage), 1904, 24 minutes. Except for cutting and gluing together the scenes of The Dreyfus Affair, all of Méliès’ editing until 1903 was done in-camera before he developed his negative.

Post Méliès

In 1900, English film pioneer George Albert Smith made two short films that required actual cutting. That September, his one-minute As Seen Through the Telescope inserts a close shot of a woman’s ankle to show what an old man is viewing in the master shot. And that November, in Grandma’s Reading Glass, a medium-long shot of a woman and her grandson is intercut with POV close-ups of objects the boy looks at through his grandmother’s magnifying glass. In the same month, another British filmmaker, James Williamson, intercut reverse angle shots in Attack on a Chinese Mission, portraying an incident from the Boxer Rebellion.

Grandma’s Reading Glass, 1900.
George Albert Smith Films

Working for the Edison Company in the US, Edwin S. Porter firmly laid the editing foundation of movie storytelling in 1903 with Life of the American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery. With sequences constructed from images shot from a greater variety of camera distances and angles, and parallel action and cross-cutting used more extensively, these story films were instantly popular and were exhibited more widely and longer than any previous productions.

In 1914, Porter told the early trade journal The Moving Picture World that, motivated by this success, “We devoted all our resources to the production of stories [italics Porter’s], instead of disconnected and unrelated scenes.” With increasing public demand for movie stories, most production companies did the same. Between 1905 and 1908, over 10,000 nickelodeons and other theatres had been established in the US exclusively for film exhibition.

Prior to this, however, sometime between 1900 and 1905, the splicer — the first mechanical apparatus invented specifically to facilitate the cutting and joining of segments of film — had appeared. Actually, exhibitors were the first to construct hand-tooled splicers to join together the separate, single-shot views, images and short movies they rented or bought to screen them for audiences as one continuous program.

From 1905 on, filmmakers began seeing themselves as storytellers and took decisive control of the arrangement of shots in their work. By 1910, the standardized manufacture of splicers expressly for film editing and post-production had been introduced to the growing motion picture industry. In all likelihood, Méliès himself used a splicer before his film career ended in 1913, with over 500 movies to his credit.

June 7, 2019 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

There’s More Than a Riot Going On!

by Edward Landler February 15, 2019

written by Edward Landler 12 minutes read

by Edward Landler

Prisons are not visually attractive. That may be why prison movies were not a significant genre during the silent era. But after the introduction of talking pictures and as sound technology was refined, the 1930s saw the studios turn out over 60 movies set in penitentiaries.

Poster art for Riot in Cell Block 11.
Allied Artists Pictures/Photofest

Attuned to melodramatic situations by its very nature, sound underscored the ambience of long confinement and the expression of emotions and conflicts literally pent up until they would erupt into violence. Audiences drawn by action and brutality could also identify with themes of innocence and guilt, rehabilitation and redemption, escape and official corruption. While most prison films to this day vividly depict the hardships of incarceration, rarely do they attempt more than a token reference to the social and economic causes of crime and its consequences.

On February 28, 1954, Allied Artists released Walter Wanger Productions’ Riot in Cell Block 11, a film shot at Folsom State Prison in 16 days on a budget just under $300,000. Its Variety review read, “The picture doesn’t use a formula prison plot. There’s no inmate reformed by love or fair treatment…nor are there any heroes and heavies of standard pattern.” Howard McClay in the Los Angeles Daily News called it “the best film of its kind to ever hit the screen.”

During its initial run 65 years ago, Riot grossed over $1.5 million dollars, a phenomenal amount for essentially a B-picture. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nominated it for Best Film from Any Source and its star Neville Brand for Best Foreign Actor. Director Don Siegel was nominated for the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. The movie also inspired Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to write “Riot in Cell Block Nine,” the Robins’ (soon renamed the Coasters) first R&B hit single, released in June of that year.

From its conception, producer Wanger intended Riot to speak directly to the 30 prison riots that had occurred in the United States in the previous three years. In a terse and exciting 80 minutes, the film’s narrative focuses on the riot itself through a multi-dimensional view of the interactions of sharply drawn characters, offering a complex perspective of American society through the institution of prison.

A month before the movie opened, Wanger told Variety, “I wanted to make a picture that would make the public realize what a failure the prison system is today.” He blamed “vested interests” of the underworld and politics for supporting the system’s major faults: “…idleness, failure to separate and medicate psychopaths, overcrowding and releasing prisoners before they are ready to resume normal life.”

The producer was motivated by personal experience. Like the film’s character of the Colonel, a retired military officer in prison for manslaughter, Wanger realized, “…anyone can land in prison — just like that!”

Late in 1951, certain that his wife, actress Joan Bennett, was having an affair with her agent, Jennings Lang of MCA, Wanger shot Lang in the groin in a Beverly Hills parking lot. Only slightly wounded and wary of damaging Bennett’s career, Lang refused to file charges, but authorities prosecuted. A leading producer for 20 years and two-time president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Wanger had not recovered financially from his big-budget 1948 flop, Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman, and his friends (among them, Samuel Goldwyn, Walt Disney, Darryl F. Zanuck and Walter Mirisch) contributed to his legal expenses.

Despite pleading temporary insanity, the producer was sentenced to four months in the Los Angeles County Honor Farm in Castaic. According to Matthew Bernstein’s 1994 biography, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent, upon his release in June 1952 after serving 98 days of the sentence, Wanger told the press that the prison system “is “the nation’s number one scandal… I want to do a film about it.” The difference between Castaic and San Quentin or Folsom was, he added, “a matter of degree not kind.”

Riot in Cell Block 11.
Allied Artists Pictures/Photofest

Seeking backing for the project, the ex-convict producer approached Mirisch, head of production at the “poverty row” company, Monogram Pictures. With television taking audiences away from theatres, Mirisch was transforming Monogram into Allied Artists (AA), hoping to raise the quality of studio productions to break into the more profitable urban “early-run” market.

Mirisch put Wanger in charge of other AA projects while he developed his prison script. Early in 1953, Wanger discussed the movie with Richard Collins, a writer Mirisch had hired for another project. A former Communist Party member, Collins was one of the original “Hollywood 19” subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted by the industry until, unlike the jailed “Hollywood 10,” he named names as a co-operative witness in 1951. At Allied Artists, he earned $500 a week; before the blacklist he had made up to $1,500 a week.

Collins started work on the screenplay in March with Wanger guiding the tone and the shape of the narrative. The story was drawn from the actual events of the Jackson, Michigan State Prison riot of April 1952, in which 2,600 convicts held nine guards hostage and caused $2.5 million in damages. The movie’s riot leaders were based on the leaders of the Jackson riot, Earl Ward and “Crazy” Jack Hyatt, identified by prison authorities as psychopaths.

Based on Jackson’s assistant deputy warden Vernon Fox, the film’s warden sees the need for reform and sympathizes with the rioters’ demands. The film rioters’ demands were the same as the demands of the Jackson inmates: remodeling cell blocks to give inmates more room and light; separating the mentally disturbed for medical treatment; getting rid of manacles, leg irons, chains and brutal guards; and no reprisals against riot leaders and participants. Wanger added one demand in the screenplay: “Teach us a trade so when we get out we’ll be able to hold down a job.”

He also insisted that Collins eliminate the scripted opening scene starting with a shot of a robin in the warden’s wife’s garden just outside the walls. Instead, he wanted him to drop the wife and open with newsreel footage of prison riots of the early ‘50s.

From the first shooting script to the final cut of October 20, the producer kept up a continuing correspondence with Production Code Administration (PCA) chief Joseph Breen. On June 17, Breen acknowledged that Wanger “had already eliminated references to perverts and homosexuals,” but requested that “the intimate parts of women, specifically the breasts…be fully covered at all times,” referring to pin-up pictures posted in convicts’ cells.

Breen still maintained his major objection to the script on July 21 — “that it definitely throws sympathy to the side of the criminals as opposed to constituted authority and the administration of justice.” The PCA gave its approval in October after Wanger described his research, which included listing the penal authorities consulted: Folsom warden Robert Heinze, associate warden William Ryan, and California Department of Corrections director Richard Magee.

On July 22, Siegel was hired as director for a $10,000 flat fee. Starting in the industry at Warner Bros. in 1934, he worked up from the stock-shot library to editing to founding the studio’s montage department, directing second-unit shoots and editing the material into montages for many Warner pictures until he began directing features in 1946. His early experience is apparent in Riot’s opening prison montage and its smooth transition into the film’s narrative. Editor Bruce B. Pierce, ACE, assembled an early cut while Siegel shot on location, and they worked closely together through post.

As to working with Collins on the final draft of the script, the director told Peter Bogdanovich in a 1968 interview in the English film magazine Movie, “I felt this picture had something to say and didn’t choose sides… I molded the script so it would have the excitement it does have. Dick Collins wrote it all — but I think he would admit I contributed.”

Wanger and Siegel scouted Alcatraz, San Quentin and Folsom as possible locations, deciding on Folsom when they learned the prison had an empty 1880s-built two-story cell block which the production could take over completely. Despite Siegel’s guarantee of a 16-day shoot, warden Heinze was reluctant to permit it because a movie shoot went 11 days over schedule in 1951.

To ease the warden’s mind, Siegel introduced him to the crew members who were on the scouting trip — most importantly, he thought, cinematographer Russell Harlan, ASC, who lensed regularly for director Howard Hawks. But when Heinze met the production assistant on his first movie job (hired with a recommendation from then-California attorney general, later governor, Edmond G. Brown, Sr.), he recognized Sam Peckinpah, the son of prominent Fresno judge Denver Peckinpah. According to Siegel, in the 1993 A Siegel Film: An Autobiography, the warden made the future director the film’s production liaison, telling him, “If you run into any trouble, or have need of any information, be sure to see me, personally.”

Principal photography began August 17 and the lack of recognizable stars strengthened the authenticity of the setting. Like Brand, who had been the fourth most decorated soldier in World War II, fellow actor Leo Gordon had also fought in the war and also used the GI Bill to study acting. But the huge and intimidating Gordon had served five years in San Quentin for armed robbery and Heinze did not want him in his prison for any reason.

Riot in Cell Block 11.
Allied Artists Pictures/Photofest

Siegel and Wanger convinced the warden that not hiring the ex-con would undermine their case for reform in the movie. In his autobiography, the director recalled Heinze agreeing, but with one condition: “Each day Gordon reports to work, he’ll be admitted through a side gate. Guards will strip and search him, both on entering and leaving.”

Throughout the shoot itself, the crisp and precise sounds picked up by recordist Paul Schmutz added immensely to audiences’ immersion in the inmates’ experience. As the narrative unfolds, layers of sound are gradually built over the constant resonant hum of the cell block, from cell door and bar clangs to machine noises, communications systems and loudspeakers, all woven together in the chaos of the major riot sequences.

For the exterior riot scenes, 700 volunteers out of Folsom’s 4,500 inmates were screened by the yard captain’s office and the convict-elected Inmate Council, and selected to participate as extras. None of the convicts could be shown in close ups — only actors, state police officers and prison guards serving as extras. The sequences were shot with armed guards on duty atop the walls.

Describing the shoot for Stuart Kaminsky’s 1974 biography, Don Siegel: Director, Brand said, “We didn’t know what…would happen in that prison yard during the riot scenes. Those were spooky scenes… You had to be there to capture what happened like you were in Vietnam in a documentary.”

Production wrapped on the 16th day, but the following week minor scenes were shot over two days at another location because “of a few cell interiors which presented difficult problems for us to light,” Siegel told Bogdanovich.

Allied Artists launched Riot’s release with a $350,000 promotional budget, unprecedented for the studio. The week of its opening, the bi-weekly general-interest magazine Look published a major feature story by producer Wanger, describing prison conditions and the complexity of reform explored in the film.

With his career re-established, Wanger produced Siegel’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and ended his career with the disastrous production of Cleopatra (1963) that almost ruined 20th Century-Fox. Siegel became a major director, making Clint Eastwood an A-list star in Dirty Harry (1971) and taking him to another prison in Escape from Alcatraz (1979).

Seen today, with the exception of a few minor anachronisms, Riot in Cell Block 11 still speaks directly to our dysfunctional penitentiary system. The growing privatization of prisons, which raises America’s already highest rate of incarceration in the world, gives a new twist to the words of California corrections director Magee in the film’s opening newsreel montage about “the shortsighted neglect of our penal institutions amounting to almost criminal negligence.”

February 15, 2019 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

More Than Just Another Fine Mess

by Edward Landler December 19, 2018

written by Edward Landler 12 minutes read

by Edward Landler

Kurt Vonnegut dedicated his 1976 novel Slapstick “to the memory of Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy” — better known as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In the novel’s prologue, the author explains, “I have called it Slapstick because it is grotesque, situational poetry, like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy… There was often the situational poetry of marriage, which was something else again. It was yet another test — with comical possibilities…”

Those possibilities of that “something else again” were most richly played out in the best of Laurel and Hardy’s feature-length films, Sons of the Desert, released on December 29, 1933. This was their fourth feature, but the first that fully integrated their routines and gags from scene to scene into a story built around their characters’ personal lives instead of playing off typical movie genres. And by coincidence, one day shy of Sons’ 85th anniversary, the new British-made feature Stan & Ollie opens on US screens, starring Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly, respectively, portraying the real-life team in 1953.

In Sons of the Desert, however, the Laurel and Hardy characters are loyal members of Oasis 13 of the fraternal organization that gives the film its title. Reworking a premise from their 1928 two-reel silent We Faw Down, they pretend they are going to Honolulu for Hardy’s health to keep their wives from knowing they are really going to the Sons’ Chicago convention.

With the benefits of extended length, sound and a “solemn pledge” to their lodge, the childlike comics direct our laughter at the consequences of their subterfuge and poke jabs at commonly held attitudes about being men and being married. Audiences of the time responded by making Sons one of the top-10-grossing movies of 1934 (according to both Film Daily and the Motion Picture Herald). The laughter has continued: In 2012, the comedy was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, joining their previously selected short films Big Business (1929) and The Music Box (1932).

The English Laurel and the US-born Hardy arrived separately in Los Angeles in 1917. By 1925, they were both on the Hal Roach Studios payroll — Hardy as an actor and Laurel as an actor, writer and director. In 1927, they appeared together in no less than 10 two-reelers, but as unrelated characters, not as a team.

It soon became apparent to producer Roach and others at the studio that the physical contrast between the tall, stout Hardy and the short, thin Laurel was inherently funny. At the end of 1927, they starred together in their first official Laurel and Hardy two-reel comedy, Putting Pants on Philip. Their popularity was infectious, and the now-iconic duo immediately became an established team making silent two-reelers.

Laurel never received credit as writer or director on any of their movies, and only two of the pair’s later features were credited as Stan Laurel Productions. Nevertheless, there was never any doubt at the studio that it was Laurel who guided the writers, directors, actors and crew, while Hardy spent much of his time between shoots playing golf.

“Stan was Laurel and Hardy,” declared Roy Seawright in Randy Skretvedt’s 1986 book Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies. The chief of optical effects for Roach Studios from 1927 to 1940, Seawright recalled, “I loved Babe [Hardy], but Stan was a writer, a director, a cutter — he did everything. I don’t care what the credits say; Stan was the power behind their whole enterprise.”

During the 14 years that the duo worked as a team with Roach, 20 different directors were credited on the roughly 75 shorts and features they made. Viewing their movies to pick out varying directorial approaches or flourishes only confirms Seawright’s statement that one major creative figure was in control of all aspects of production, starting with the script itself.

In a 1959 interview with Boyd Verb in Films in Review, Laurel explained, “We did have a script, but it didn’t consist of the routines and gags. It outlined the basic story idea and was just a plan for us to follow. Oh, a few gags were mentioned here and there in the script, but they were always worked out on the set.”

Laurel insisted on shooting the scripts in sequence to allow for improvisations that could affect later scenes. “We shot our comedies right from beginning to end,” he maintained in the interview. “The only place I could do it was at Roach’s. Anywhere else, they wouldn’t go for that. And many times, not shooting in sequence just ruined the picture, or the prospects for the picture.” Shooting this way also helped them develop the deliberate comic pacing that emphasized the pair’s emotional and mental processes on screen.

This style easily adapted to sound and, in 1931, Roach scheduled them to make one feature for every six two-reelers they turned out. Though their first three features did well at the box office, Laurel was not happy with them. Then, early in July 1933, the studio hired actor/playwright Frank Craven to write a story treatment for the team from an idea entitled Fraternally Yours.

Over the following two months, while Laurel and Hardy were shooting two shorts back-to-back, Craven’s treatment expanded into a script with help from writer Byron Morgan on continuity. At the end of August, William A. Seiter was signed to direct. An accomplished Hollywood stalwart with almost 150 directing credits stretching from 1915 to 1960 and encompassing shorts, features and television of all genres, Seiter made only this one film (eventually renamed Sons of the Desert) with his close friend Laurel.

According to Bert Jordan, “officially named the Laurel and Hardy film editor,” Stan Laurel had the right of final cut and supervised the editing of each sequence of all the pictures on which he worked.

Seiter and Laurel, with Roach company regulars joining in for brainstorming, worked on the script through September, but the director felt they had no clear ideas for staging the convention scenes. Fortunately, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks held its national convention in Santa Monica that month and the director and his stars were able to observe it for themselves.

On September 28, the script was considered sufficiently complete for shooting to begin October 2. Comedienne Patsy Kelly was originally cast as Laurel’s wife, but she had been loaned out to MGM for Going Hollywood (1933). When that picture went over schedule, the part of Laurel’s wife was given to Dorothy Christy, who joined the cast four days after Sons started filming. Hardy’s wife was played by Mae Busch, who appeared in 12 Laurel and Hardy pictures over seven years, four times as Mrs. Hardy.

True to form, shooting began with the first scene: The local meeting of the Sons of the Desert, filmed on location at the Hollywood American Legion Post with 20 legionnaires among the 60 extras playing the Sons. Director of photography Kenneth Peach, ASC, played with dramatic lighting on the face of the Grand Exalted Ruler but, like all of the team’s cinematographers, was required to keep the lighting as flat as possible on the faces of the two stars.

Also true to form, whole routines appear in the movie that were not in the final script, now in the Production Code Administration records in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library. In the script, the lodge members stand up throughout the opening scene, but are seated in chairs in the film so that Laurel and Hardy’s late entrance can properly disrupt them.

Soon afterwards, Laurel waits in next-door neighbor Hardy’s house for his own wife to get home. During filming, Laurel was inspired to devise the torturous process of eating an apple from a bowl of wax fruit. The surreal image of Laurel’s wife entering with a rifle and a brace of dead ducks was also invented on set; in the script, she was just returning from target practice.

The final sequence of the movie was shot as scripted; with the husbands coming home to learn their supposed cruise back from Hawaii was caught up in a hurricane, they hide from their wives in the attic, then on the roof. Although those sequences were originally filmed in daylight, it was decided to reshoot most of them at night in a simulated downpour, enhancing the gags considerably.

Two big gag scenes written for the convention were not filmed at all. Instead, Roach comedian Charley Chase’s performance as an obnoxious Texas lodge member, wielding an actual two-ply slapstick, was allowed to drive the comedy at a swifter pace. But the first convention scene — the Sons of the Desert parading in the streets, also seen later in a newsreel in the film — had to be shot out of continuity at the end of the shoot.

Before production, on one of his trips to the Elks convention, director Seiter had taken a small film crew to shoot the Elks on parade in the Santa Monica streets. He and Laurel planned to use these long shots as masters and cut in closer views of the Sons in the parade to be shot on the Roach lot’s city street set. Returning to the lot, though, they realized Roach’s city street did not look contemporary enough to cut together with the Santa Monica footage.

Roach decided to modernize and expand his set at a cost of $25,000. Postponing the parade shoot, he had four crews work around the clock to complete 500 feet of new facades in time to avoid extending the production schedule. When they finally filmed on the lot, over 500 extras (including the drill team of the American Legion’s Glendale post) marched on the new set — a studio record for the number of extras used on any film at one time.

By the time production wrapped on October 23, editor Bert Jordan had already started cutting. In 1939, he would go on to edit Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, produced for Roach. But early in his career, in 1932, Jordan “was officially named the Laurel and Hardy film editor,” as he told movie historian Skretvedt in 1980.

According to the editor, Laurel had the right of final cut and supervised the editing of each sequence of all the pictures on which he worked. “I used to be on the set as much as I could,” he attested to Skretvedt. “After I put together my version, the director and Stan would look at it, and they had the privilege of making changes… Mr. Roach would sometimes…suggest some changes — but if Stan didn’t agree with them, they weren’t changed.”

When the movie was released, critic Andre Sennwald of The New York Times noted the difference between Sons and Laurel and Hardy’s earlier features. He wrote that it “has achieved feature length without the benefit of the usual distressing formulae [sic] of padding and stretching. It is funny all the way through.”

The popularity of this unique pair of comedians and this film endures to this day in the real-world Sons of the Desert, a fraternal organization devoted to their memory and their films. Founded by the duo’s biographer John McCabe in New York City in 1964, the organization boasts more than 100 “tents” active worldwide today.

And for all who laugh with them, Laurel and Hardy’s endearing innocence and sustained lack of insight resonate deeply in our everyday human existence. It is surely no accident that the team’s mutual dependence and cluelessness is reflected in the bowler-wearing Vladimir and Estragon of Samuel Beckett’s 1952 tragi-comedy in two acts, Waiting for Godot.

Given the world’s present predicament, let us at least find a modicum of wisdom in simple-minded Laurel’s last line to Hardy in Sons of the Desert: “Honesty is the best politics.”

December 19, 2018 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

Fear of a Black Planet

by Edward Landler August 17, 2018

written by Edward Landler 14 minutes read

by Edward Landler

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

— Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)

Over the decade leading to 1973, with the progress achieved by the civil rights movement, a greater awareness emerged in the African-American community of its own history and culture. Despite this growth of self-worth, pride and initiative giving strength to the idea of Black Power, the systemic practice of inequality and oppression of minorities continued to afflict American society — just as it has become obvious that it persists to this day.

The years following the 1963 March on Washington witnessed spontaneous civil unrest in our cities, along with the persecution and assassination of figures who offered insight and effective leadership: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Like today, adding fuel to protest and political action was this country’s involvement in questionable wars overseas against people of color.

On Labor Day, September 3, 1973, 45 years ago, United Artists quietly premiered The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a movie reflecting these issues, at the Maryland Theatre in Chicago’s South Side. With a story shifting from pointed political satire to the plausible nurturing of a black rebellion, it was independently produced by its director, Ivan Dixon, and Sam Greenlee, who wrote the original novel and co-wrote the screenplay with Mel Clay.

Greenlee’s friend, Colostine Boatwright, an actress who played a dancer in the movie and later appeared in Cooley High (1975), told CineMontage, “Sam insisted that it be screened first in his own neighborhood.” Within a week, Mayor Richard Daley’s office, which had denied location permits for the movie to be shot in Chicago a year earlier, pressured local movie houses to pull it from exhibition or face city inspections.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door. United Artists/Photofest

Over the next four months, though, UA arranged a 21-city tour for Spook as a “blaxploitation” movie in black neighborhoods. The trailer proclaimed that its main character “was for five years [the CIA’s] token Negro and, when he got out, he turned ghetto kids into a revolutionary army!”

At the end of September, according to a UA press release, it had grossed “an excellent $361,636 in 13 cities…$40,836 in its first three days at the DeMille and Juliet Theatres in New York.” In the National Association of Theatre Owners’ BoxOffice magazine, a review noted, “It effectively mirrors the increasingly strained black-white relationship.”

Before Spook’s December 19 Los Angeles theatrical opening, the movie was welcomed to LA with an October 29 benefit premiere at the Fox Wilshire Theatre, sponsored by the Hollywood Civil Rights and Education Foundation and the National Association for Sickle Cell Disease, and hosted by vocalist Nancy Wilson and actor Greg Morris (Mission: Impossible, 1966-1973).

But before the end of the year, The Spook Who Sat by the Door vanished from the screen. In a 2011 interview with media studies academics Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall, published in the 2018 book Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” (along with essays and the full screenplay of the movie), Greenlee said he believed that UA “pulled it off the market at the behest of the FBI.”

The distribution prints were all destroyed, but the producers retained the rights to the movie and Dixon vaulted the original negative under a different name. Over the next 20 years, a few bootleg VHS copies circulated, bringing it a reputation as an “underground black classic,” but it remained unknown among general audiences.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door. United Artists/Photofest

In 2001, Dixon and Greenlee gave the negatives to actor/producer/director Tim Reid, who digitally remastered them and released the film as a DVD in 2004 through his Obsidian Home Entertainment. In a January 20, 2004 New York Times article, Dixon said, “Spook was only trying to show black anger, not suggest armed revolt as a credible step.” He passed away in 2008.

With the cooperation of Greenlee, Dixon’s widow Berlie Dixon and others closely involved with the movie, filmmakers Christine Acham and Clifford Ward in 2011 produced Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” a documentary about its making and disappearance from public view. The following year, in 2012, the Library of Congress named Spook to the National Film Registry, established to ensure the preservation of films that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

The movie’s significance begins with the novel. After graduate school, Greenlee served as a foreign services officer for the United States Information Agency in Iraq, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Indonesia. His experience in post-colonial nations, he told Martin and Wall, convinced him “that the instruments of imperialist domination…segregation, discrimination…were identical to those utilized in the oppression of Black America.”

Greenlee returned to the US in 1965, just as the Watts Riots broke out. In Infiltrating Hollywood, he stated, “You saw riots. I saw them as rebellion… The Spook is a handbook on urban guerilla warfare…to encourage blacks to create an action plan to survive in the belly of the beast rather than reacting as victims of a racist society.”

This perspective became that of Dan Freeman, the novel’s lone black CIA agent. After training and serving five years as “window dressing” at agency headquarters, he resigns to turn Chicago’s Cobra gang into the Black Freedom Fighters. In the movie, Freeman (played by Lawrence Cook) tells them, “What we got now is a colony. What we want to create is a nation.”

Rejected by more than 40 American publishers, the book was published in the UK in March 1969 by a firm founded by Clive Allison and Ghanaian-born Margaret Busby. It became a best seller and received “Book of the Year” mentions from London’s The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Irish Times. The book was published later that year in New York by Richard W. Baron Publishing. When a review was featured on WNET’s Soul! (1968-73), a black public affairs show, Greenlee’s story was brought to the attention of the African-American community.

In 1970, the writer adapted his book into a screenplay with the help of Clay, a former member of the experimental Living Theatre, who said in Infiltrating Hollywood, “The novel was as cinematographic as it could get.” Later that year, in Hollywood, Greenlee went to the set of TV’s The Mod Squad (1968-1973) to talk to series star Clarence Williams III about playing Freeman, and met Dixon, a guest star in the episode then being shot.

Rising to film prominence supporting Sidney Poiter in Porgy and Bess (1959) and A Raisin in the Sun (1961), and starring in Michael Roemer’s seminal independent Nothing But a Man (1964) with Abbey Lincoln, Dixon was leaving the World War II POW sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971), which was going off the air. He had read Greenlee’s novel and wanted to direct it. In Infiltrating Hollywood, his widow recalled him insisting, “I’ve got to make this movie.”

Neither Dixon nor Greenlee wished to compromise the story to get studio backing, and they formed a partnership called Bokari, Ltd. Over the next three years, they raised $850,000, mostly from black investors, while Dixon built a resume directing TV and a black detective feature, Trouble Man (1972).

The Spook Who Sat by the Door.
United Artists/Photofest

Assisted by attorney Thomas Neusom, Greenlee’s University of Chicago graduate school classmate, Greenlee and Dixon’s fundraising continued through Spook’s post-production. Chicago-based actor and casting director Pemon Rami, who also worked on Cooley High and The Blues Brothers (1980), explained to CineMontage, “The book created a community of support for its expression of what all blacks have experienced in American society.”

This was also true for crew and cast. Early in her career, the 2017 recipient of the Set Decorators Society of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Cheryal Kearney (Poltergeist, 1982; Coming to America, 1988), brought African artwork to Spook’s apartment sets. She told CineMontage, “When I read the script, I saw how important that was…and that the producers were trying to get as many blacks on the crew possible.” Spook’s camera operator Joe Wilcots, the first African-American camera operator in Local 600, later became a DP on Roots (1977) and Roots: The Next Generation (1979).

The film’s complex portrayal of the divisions within African-American society itself motivated the actors. J.A. Preston (Body Heat, 1981; A Few Good Men, 1992), who played the cop working within the established system, noted for this article, “All of us had read the book and we didn’t expect that it would be a movie… Everybody was doing it at minimum wage.” Rami added that many in the cast brought their own clothes for wardrobe throughout the shoot.

Despite a lack of location permits, production began in Chicago, shooting on and off with a skeleton crew and handheld camera equipment over two weeks in October 1972. In an interview appearing on the movie’s 2004 DVD, Greenlee admitted, “All the scenes in Chicago were…shot guerilla-style…like the shots from the ‘El’ platform at 63rd and Planters Row in the neighborhood where I still live. We just paid and went through the turnstile.”

In contrast, the city of Gary, Indiana opened its arms to the entire company for three weeks in November. Richard Hatcher, the first African-American mayor of the city, had read the book and put everything at Dixon’s disposal: A two-block section of a neighborhood resembling Chicago’s South Side, the fire department and the police department, including its helicopter. All of this would be especially crucial for the movie’s riot scene, which provided temporary employment as extras for up to 500 residents.

Prefiguring recent events in US cities, the final third of Spook begins with Shorty (Rami), an unarmed junkie, being shot and killed running from the police. A neighborhood protest explodes into violence when police bring dogs to the scene. Deploying handheld cameras over a day and a half, DP Michel Hugo, ASC (who also shot Trouble Man), captured more realism than expected. As Preston described it, “Some of the extras got carried away with the action; they even turned over a police car and set fire to it. That wasn’t scripted.”

Filming was completed over two weeks early in December in Los Angeles, where the footage was already being edited by future three-time Oscar winner Michael Kahn, ACE, five years before he began his long collaboration with Steven Spielberg. He and Dixon had become friends over the years that they both had worked on Hogan’s Heroes, and he also cut Trouble Man. Assistant editor on both Trouble Man and Spook was Thomas Penick, who went on edit Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding (1983).

“I was editing what Ivan sent me as he shot, and he came whenever he could,” Kahn commented to CineMontage. “It didn’t feel faked. On the stronger scenes, I went for the jugular; I liked the handheld shots in the riot scene… The story in the novel and the script was well told, and I enjoyed the message.”

The Spook Who Sat by the Door. United <EMArtists/Photofest

While editing continued into early 1973, Greenlee’s community roots enabled him to find music for Spook. Like him, Chicago documentary filmmaker Bernard Williams, who had helped with the Chicago guerilla-style shoot, had attended Hyde Park High School, as had jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock and Hancock’s sister, Jean, who was a close friend.

Williams informed CineMontage, “Jean set up a meeting with me and Herbie. He knew Sam and he knew the book and he put together a recording of a variety of original compositions that Sam could use as he pleased in The Spook.” Hancock’s music for the film strongly reflects the innovative electronic sounds and funky rhythms that were evolving into his best-selling album Headhunters, released in late 1973.

Meanwhile, in LA, Dixon shopped a 10-minute trailer of the movie’s action scenes around to the studios. Thinking they had a hot ‘blaxploitation’ picture, UA put up $150,000 to complete post. Greenlee told Martin and Wall, “When they saw the final cut, they were outraged. I said, ‘You required six copies of the script. Don’t blame me if y’all can’t read. We’ve got a damn contract!’” In accordance with that contract, UA released The Spook.

In 1975, in Alexandria, Virginia, Bokari Ltd. filed a civil action suit against 13 prominent intelligence figures, all currently or previously officers in the CIA or NSA. In the suit, Dixon, Greenlee and attorney Neusom claimed, “…[T]he CIA and the NSA defendants, by colluding and conspiring with United Artists did bar the plaintiffs’ motion picture…from viewing houses…because of the content of the picture which they adjudged objectionable.” The suit also alleged, “…[O]n or about and after November 28, 1973…the CIA and NSA defendants communicated with United Artists regarding the release and distribution of the picture…,” and went on to state, “[A]s a direct and proximate result of said actions by the defendants, plaintiffs have and are suffering grievous financial injuries, all to their damage in the sum of 50 million dollars.”

CineMontage has been unable to determine the results of the suit, or if it was ever heard, settled or decided.

Nevertheless, as the late actor Paul Butler (who portrayed the Cobra/Black Freedom Fighters leader and, in 1990, the family patriarch of Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger), pronounced in Infiltrating Hollywood, “The Spook Who Sat by the Door is the most political film of the ‘blaxploitation’ era, and maybe one of the most political films that’s come out of Black America… The spirit on the set was basically one of rebellion and defiance.”

The last word remains with Greenlee, who died in 2014. On the 2004 DVD release, he stated, “I’m not trying to recruit, proselytize or convince anybody. I want to shake up ‘the Man’ and people to look at that movie and go out of there thinking — and I think I’ve accomplished that purpose.”

August 17, 2018 0 comments

Columns This Quarter in Film History

‘The Piano’ Ain’t Got No Wrong Notes

by Edward Landler June 12, 2018

written by Edward Landler 12 minutes read

by Edward Landler

From the age of six, Ada McGrath refuses to speak, yet film audiences first saw and heard how clearly she communicates on May 15, 1993, when Jane Campion’s The Piano premiered at the 45th Cannes International Film Festival. At the festival’s awards ceremony on May 24, its star, Holly Hunter, was named Best Actress for her portrayal of this mute woman who expresses herself through a combination of self-invented sign language, her eyes, and the exquisite music she creates on her piano.

Also at the close of the festival 25 years ago, writer/director Campion became the first — and still the only — woman director whose film received Cannes’ highest honor, the Palme d’Or (shared with Farewell My Concubine by Chinese director Chen Kaige), for this Australian production shot entirely in New Zealand. Setting the film in her native land in the mid-19th century, yet speaking to the present, the filmmaker captured in Hunter’s Ada a deeply elemental drive for female integrity in a male-dominated society.

Campion had begun writing the screenplay, originally titledThe Piano Lesson, in 1984. In a May 1993 interview with Miro Bilbrough for the Australian film journal Cinema Papers, she said she was inspired by the all-consuming romance of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Emily Dickinson’s poetry and antique photos of New Zealand’s Maori people, “sitting with great dignity…their sense of themselves was so powerful.”

Re-imagining the land’s British settlers and using the piano “as the central mechanism from which the story evolves” allowed her to write, Campion said, “about characters who don’t have a 20th century sensibility about sex… We grow up with so many expectations around it that it’s almost like the pure erotic sexual impulse is lost to us. But, for them, the impact of sex is not softened.”

In 1987, Campion showed her first draft to producer Jan Chapman who stated, as print ads later proclaimed when the film was released in the US, “I was determined to finance The Piano in such a way that Jane’s original vision could be retained.”

After Campion received acclaim for her first two features, Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at My Table(1990), the Australian Film Commission and the New South Wales Film and TV Office jointly invested $85,000 seed money in the project. This helped Chapman attract the attention of the recently founded French production company CIBY 2000.

The Piano.
Miramax/Photofest

CIBY was then producing David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the theatrical prequel to his TV series Twin Peaks(1990-91). Campion completed the shooting script of The Piano late in 1990 and CIBY agreed to provide the $7 million budget for the picture.

Among the actors Campion considered for the mute pianist Ada were Isabelle Huppert, Anjelica Huston, Sigourney Weaver and Juliette Binoche, but Hunter fought for the role. In a fall 1993 article in Filmmaker magazine, she declared, “I read so many scripts where there’s this effort to make a feminist story [but] the women are written like men. I thought Jane was really captivated by the notion of her femaleness. Ada was the perfect palette. It was all the stuff I had not explored before.”

An accomplished pianist, Hunter had learned the instrument during her childhood and into late adolescence. Campion had doubts, however, about the actress’ small stature. She told Cinema Papers’ Bilbrough she had wanted Ada “to be a tall woman with a strong, dark, eerie Frida Kahlo-sort of beauty. But, in Holly’s audition tape, her gaze was stupendous.”

For the music that expresses the emotional core of the movie — both the incidental music and the music that “speaks” for Ada through her piano playing — composer Michael Nyman based his score on Scottish folk and popular songs since Ada was from Scotland. It was, he noted to Bilbrough, “as though I was writing the music of a composer who happened to live in Scotland, then New Zealand, in the mid-1850s.”

Nyman also revealed to Varietyin November 1993 that Hunter found the pieces he wrote for her to perform on screen “so childishly simple that it gave me the chance to write stuff that was more challenging… Not only did she cope technically with everything I threw at her, but she put emotion in the music and made it very, very personal.”

In open auditions with 5,000 other young contenders, nine-year-old Anna Paquin read for the role of Flora, the daughter Ada brings with her half way around the world to New Zealand. “It was remarkable to see someone so young with such an instinct for performance,” said Campion. During production, Paquin and Hunter developed such a mirror-like closeness, the filmmaker observed, “Anna would use all Holly’s mannerisms of performance.”

In preparing for her role, Hunter worked with Darlene Allen (who taught Lily Tomlin American Sign Language for Nashville, 1975) to create an original sign language for Ada that could only be understood by Ada and Flora. Hunter herself taught Paquin this sign language, bringing the two closer together.

From early on, Campion had envisioned Sam Neill as the farmer Stewart, who arranges with Ada’s family to ship her to New Zealand to be his wife. To play Baines, the settler who has taken on Maori ways and is attracted to Ada, the filmmaker sought out Harvey Keitel for his “concentration, masculinity and gentleness.”

Another major character and dominant presence throughout the picture was the landscape of New Zealand itself. The mountainous ocean waves, the dense green bush rising out of thick mud, and the lush craggy hillsides all exist intimately in proximity to the human characters.

The Piano.
Miramax/Photofest

Campion started consulting with production designer Andrew McAlpine back in 1989 to determine the physical atmosphere of the film. Together they scouted locations for two months during pre-production. For the black sand beach upon which Ada’s piano is stranded early in the film, McAlpine told Variety that they chose “one of the favorite beaches of my childhood,” just 45 minutes from Auckland.

During production, the designer had his crew alter every landscape to enhance its feeling or mood. For the land surrounding Stewart’s house, he “transplanted and charred dead trees to create the illusion of a muddy five acres of primary slash burn,” he said in the January 1994 TCI: The Business of Entertainment Technology and Design magazine. “We didn’t want to slavishly re-create some imagined reality, which is so often seen in period films… What I wanted to do was a film in mud and charcoal.”

To enhance period realism, McAlpine found furniture, fabrics and hand props in London markets and Australian auctions. Campion had envisioned an upright piano for the movie’s star prop, but after she learned that uprights did not exist until about 10 years after the film’s action, McAlpine found an 1835 grand piano in London for her. Hunter played this authentic original in scenes set in interiors, and replicas were built and used for location scenes and Foley work.

The 12-week shoot ran from February into mid-May 1992 with director of photography Stuart Dryburgh, who had also shot Campion’s An Angel at My Table and, later, her adaptation of Portrait of a Lady (1996). To evoke the period, he said in Cinema Papers,“We used a 19th century stills process — the autochrome — as an inspiration. That’s why we tended to use strong color accents… the blue-green of the bush, amber-rich mud. ‘Bottom of the fish tank’ was the description we used to help define what we were looking for…working with natural light whenever possible.”

Another significant influence during production was the presence of Maori advisors helping the filmmaker with the indigenous characters’ dialogue and interactions with the settlers. Campion affirmed, “The cross-cultural quality of it was one of the deeply moving aspects of being on the production for all of us, cast and crew.”

After two weeks on location, the shoot continued on sets that McAlpine had built in Auckland, with the house sets surrounded by cycloramas and tree trunks brought from their exterior locations.

For three weeks just prior to production, Campion worked with Hunter and Keitel in an old wooden church in Auckland for six hours a day to rehearse their intimate scenes together. Almost three months later, during the last three weeks of the shoot, all of their interior scenes were shot in sequence.

The director had wanted the actors to help her determine the specific actions of their erotic scenes, but it did not work out that way. As Campion told Cinema Papers’ Bilbrough, “Holly and Harvey said, ‘Whatever you wanna [sic] do, we’ll try.’ They said it was too intimate, that I had to decide what would happen.” One thing the director wanted to happen was full frontal nudity — not to be displayed by Hunter but by Keitel, who willingly complied.

Re-imagining the land’s British settlers and using the piano “as the central mechanism from which the story evolves” allowed her to write, Campion said, “about characters who don’t have a 20th century sensibility about sex…”

Another aspect of Campion’s directing style was disclosed by Claire Corbett in an essay drawn from her diary that appeared in the 1999 book, Piano Lessons: Approaches to ‘The Piano.’Second assistant editor on both The Piano and Sweetie, Corbett describes photos in the editing room of actors and crew members, both male and female, wearing dresses on set, remarking, “Jane always has a dress day at least once during her shoots; all cast and crew have to wear dresses… Jane says she feels much closer to her male crew members once she’s seen them in a dress.”

Corbett started work in the movie’s Sydney editing facility during the first month of a four-month fine cut process. Working with editor Veronika Jenet, who has edited five of Campion’s films, she thought the two-and-a-half-hour first cut of the film was “already powerful.” Corbett added, “We were especially lucky to have Michael Nyman’s music flowing through the cutting rooms for hours every day.”

Joining the post-production team as sound designer was this year’s picture editing Oscar winner for Dunkirk(2017), Lee Smith, ACE, who told CineMontage, “I was doing quite a bit of sound design at that time. In Australia, as sound designer I’m in charge of everything other than the music — the same job as sound supervisor but creating sound as well as supervising.” Campion asked him to join her film after seeing (and hearing) his work in Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm (1989); he later was sound designer for two more of her films.

Exploring the full range of New Zealand’s natural sounds, Smith contacted a wildlife expert with a large collection of recordings of native birds and animals. “We even used sounds of wildlife that no longer exist,” he explained. These and sounds of the natural elements in every scene express the vivid sense of an untouched environment.

The Piano.
Miramax/Photofest

Smith also paid heed to all the intricate personal actions: Ada tapping on piano keys in close ups, Baines’ finger touching the hole in Ada’s stocking, etc. Focusing on the mute Ada, he said, “We heightened the sense of everything she could hear” and, in a violent scene, altered the acoustics of the rain to better convey her state of mind. “Campion loved all the detail that we could put into the sound,” he added. “It was one of my favorite jobs.”

After the final mix, the original title was shortened to The Piano to avoid confusion with August Wilson’s unrelated 1987 play. Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s distribution company Miramax, which bought the American rights, launched an aggressive ad campaign for its release. Despite Keitel’s nudity, the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an R rating.

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, with Campion the second woman ever nominated for Best Director and Jenet the first Australian in contention for Best Editor. In a disturbing irony given last year’s disclosures of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault, and the subsequent rise of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, Miramax proudly ballyhooed that seven of the nominations were for women, including producer Chapman for Best Picture and Janet Patterson for Best Costume Design. The eighth nominee was Dryburgh for Best Cinematography.

The film won three Oscars — Campion for Original Screenplay, Paquin for Supporting Actress and Hunter for Actress. Accepting the award, Hunter added thanks to “…Eileen Parrish, my first piano teacher, and I need to thank my parents for letting me take those lessons.”

A full synthesis of sound and imagery inseparable from Hunter’s performance, The Piano keeps on touching us beyond the screen. Its depth of feeling makes tangible the possibility of an emotional ground on which woman and man may regard one another as equals.

June 12, 2018 0 comments

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