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Annex - Hope, Bob (Cat and the Canary, The)_02

The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of (Special Halloween Edition): “The Cat and the Canary” (1939) or “How Horror Movies Saved Bob Hope’s Hollywood Career”

October 28, 2015 Doug Krentzlin Leave a comment

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

Betcha didn’t know that Bob Hope was in a horror movie, didja? And unlike its companion piece The Ghost Breakers, which was a comedy with horror content, The Cat and the Canary was a serious horror picture with Hope playing the comedy relief. Yes, it was made before Hope was a big enough name to be able to pick and choose which films he would make, but he was glad to do the picture because it was a major step up that convinced the Paramount suits that he had the makings of a star. In fact, Paramount’s decision to make The Cat and the Canary happened only because Universal Pictures defiantly ignored the demands of the Hays Office, the censors charged with enforcing the Production Code. But, first, a little backstory…

One of the main goals of the 1934 Production Code was to eliminate two popular genres the professional scolds found particularly objectionable: horror movies and gangster pictures. To the bluenoses, both genres lacked any redeeming values because they “glorified” protagonists who specialized in killing people. Leave it to Warner Brothers, the studio that didn’t invent the gangster genre but was responsible for making it box office gold, to find a way to do an end run around the Hays Office by making pictures where former gangster stars like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson played officers of the law who fought the mob in pictures like “G” Men and Bullets or Ballots. (The joke was that these more “respectable” gangster pictures were far more violent than their earlier counterparts. Seems the censors didn’t mind the bad guys being blown away graphically.)

A few horror pictures managed to get past the Hays Office, such as Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which had been in the pipeline too long (under the title The Return of Frankenstein) to be canceled. But Universal’s plans for an elaborate sequel to Dracula (1931) were revised, and the resulting film Dracula’s Daughter (1936) was done on a much smaller scale than originally planned. (Although it was still a first-rate atmospheric little horror tale.) Warner Brothers’ The Walking Dead (1936) was a rare case of a horror film benefiting from the Code’s restraints, resulting in a much more subtle and haunting mood piece than had been previously planned and featuring one of Boris Karloff’s finest performances.

In the two-year period of 1937-38, however, Hollywood made no horror pictures whatsoever. (Unless you count Warner Brothers’ 1937 comedy-mystery Sh! The Octopus as a horror picture.) As film historian William K. Everson pointed out in his 1986 book More Classics of the Horror Film, the censors in the UK, one of Hollywood’s most profitable foreign markets, were also demanding a crackdown on American horror movies, yet another inducement to curtail the genre. The ban on horror films might’ve lasted even longer but for the fact that, in 1938, Universal Pictures was on the verge of bankruptcy. They desperately needed a surefire hit in order to stay in business, and seeing as the two biggest box office successes in their history were Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, it was a no-brainer to make a third Frankenstein picture, the Hays Office and British censors be damned. Released in mid-January 1939, Son of Frankenstein proved to be (pardon the expression) a monster hit. Predictably, all of the Hollywood studios started scrambling to cash in on the horror “revival.”

Which brings us back to Paramount Pictures, who’d had Bob Hope[1] under contract since 1937. Why they signed Hope isn’t clear because the Paramount suits didn’t have much faith in Hope’s box office potential. To them, he was a just second-string version of a radio comedian they already had under contract, Jack Benny. In fact, it was Benny turning down a role in the all-star musical extravaganza The Big Broadcast of 1938 that led to Hope being cast in his first Paramount film. Despite Hope and Shirley Ross’ rendition of the Leo Robin-Ralph Rainger number “Thanks for the Memory” (soon to become Hope’s theme song) getting the best reviews in the picture, the front office still didn’t see a future for Hope. They demoted Hope to producer Harold Hurvey’s low-budget unit at Paramount (“Hurley’s B-hive,” Hope called it), where he made two more pictures with Ross and three pictures where he played second-banana to Martha Raye, who was the one the suits were convinced would be the next big comedy star. The only reason the studio didn’t drop Hope’s option altogether was his increasing popularity on radio.

When Son of Frankenstein revived the horror genre, Paramount decided to produce a new remake of John Willard’s 1922 stage thriller The Cat and the Canary, which had been filmed twice before, first as a visually stylish and highly-acclaimed 1927 silent picture directed by German emigrate Paul Leni and then as a 1930 early talkie (retitled The Cat Creeps) which was less well-received.[2] (Both of these versions were produced by Universal Pictures.) The hero of the play is a comic coward named Paul Jones, a “horse doctor” who’d had a crush on the story’s damsel in distress since childhood. He appoints himself her protector even though he’s scared stiff of the mysterious going-ons in the play’s creepy old mansion setting. (Unlikely as it seems, Henry Hull, perhaps best remembered for his dramatic performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, played the role in the Broadway premiere.) In Leni’s silent version, the character was played by Creighton Hale, but as Everson put it, “Leni was hardly a comedy director, nor was Hale much of a comedian.”

Someone at Paramount, probably producer Arthur Hornblow Jr., had the inspiration of casting Hope in the film’s equivalent of the Paul Jones role. Renamed Wally Campbell (coincidentally Paul Jones was also the name of a Paramount producer who worked on several of Hope’s pictures), the character became a radio actor who’s done his share of mystery plays on the air. Thus, anticipating Scream and The Cabin in the Woods, Wally is well aware of the clichés of the mystery and horror genres and is able to anticipate or comment on the tropes as they unfold in the film’s course. Hope remained grateful for the opportunity for the rest of his life and referred to The Cat and the Canary as “the turning point for my movie career.” Significantly, although he was given top billing, Hope’s name doesn’t appear in the credits until after the title, making it clear that this was an ensemble effort, not a starring vehicle for Hope. Although he had ample opportunities to take center stage, the entire picture doesn’t completely revolve around his character. (Richard Zoglin, author of last year’s biography Hope: Entertainer of the Century, described The Cat and the Canary as having “a mise-en-scene and narrative coherence that sets it apart from any of Hope’s previous films.”)

The direction was assigned to writer, director, and sometimes actor Elliott Nugent and the screenplay to Walter DeLeon and Lynn Starling. (Nugent’s most notable credit was starring in and co-writing with celebrated humorist James Thurber the 1940 play The Male Animal, a satire on red-baiting in American academia.) Nugent had previously directed Hope in two of the pictures he did with Martha Raye, Give Me a Sailor (1938) and Never Say Die (1939), and would go on to direct two more Hope vehicles Nothing But the Truth (1941) and My Favorite Blonde (1947). Nugent was a good if not terribly inspired director so undoubtedly the credit for the movie’s considerable visual creativity belongs far more to Charles Lang’s chiaroscuro black and white cinematography (with some uncredited assistance from Ted Tetzlaff) and the atmospheric sets by Hans Dreier (Paramount’s foremost art director) and Robert Usher. (Some of the sets, like the exterior and grounds of the decrepit old estate and the dark foreboding labyrinth that runs through and under the house, were obviously influenced by the German Expressionist silent films of the 1920s.) Dr. Ernst Toch’s haunting music score, with its ghostly chorus in key scenes, also counted as a major contribution to the movie’s spooky feel.

After the main credits (which are superimposed over a pair of shutters eerily opening and closing in the wind), we are given our first glimpse of the movie’s gloomy setting with the following introduction text:

“… not far from New Orleans there still exist in strange solitude the bayous of Louisiana…”

(The play was set in a remote area of upstate New York.) In separate parties, guests are being transported via either canoe or motorboat to an old dark dilapidated mansion isolated on an island in the swamp that once belonged to the late Cyrus Normand. The deserted estate has been entrusted to the care of a mysterious Creole housekeeper named Miss Lu (Gale Sondergaard, who would soon be typed in mysteries and horror films). (In the play, the housekeeper was Mammy Pleasant, described by Willard as an “old negress.”) The occasion is the midnight reading of Normand’s will ten years after his demise.

The first to arrive is Normand’s lawyer and executor Mr. Crosby[3] (George Zucco, who would also become a mainstay in horror pictures). After he extracts the will from the wall safe, Crosby notices that the envelope has been obviously been opened and resealed, indicating that one of the potential heirs has already seen the contents of the will, the first indication that foul play is in the works. The next group to arrive include Aunt Susan (Elizabeth Patterson, who’d played the same role in The Cat Creeps), a caustic shrewish spinster; Aunt Cicily (Nydia Westman), a rather flighty, scatterbrained type; Charlie Wilder (Douglass Montgomery), a charismatic scoundrel who’s the “black sheep” of the family; and Fred Blythe (John Beal), a sour, sullen young cynic who’s the antithesis of Charlie’s carefree playboy. Finally, about eight minutes into the movie, as the film cuts back to the swamp, Wally appears in a canoe rowed by an Indian native (Chief Thundercloud). Wally tries to strike up a conversation with his guide, but to no avail. Then he tosses the cigar he’s smoking out of the canoe, only to do a double-take when an alligator snatches up the stogie in its jaws. He again attempts to lighten the mood.

Wally: (nervously) “You seem like the jolly type, Clarence. Do you like jokes?” (no answer) “You don’t mind if I ramble on, do you? It keeps my mind off the malaria germs.” (gulps) “Anyway, here’s one. A farmer had a cow. He couldn’t afford to feed it alfalfa, so he fed it sawdust. He saved a lot of money all right, but he sure wasted a lot of time getting the splinters out of the milk!” (laughs) “Doesn’t that just—“ (no response) “—uh, splinters, milk, don’t you get it?”

Indian: (deadpan, taciturn) “Heard it last year. Jack Benny program.”

After reaching the mansion and going through the introductions to the others, Wally looks around.

Wally: “Well, where’s the leading lady?”

Crosby: “Leading lady?”

Susan: “Young man, did you inherit the streak of insanity that’s runs through this family?”

Fred: (sourly) “What was that ‘leading lady’ crack?”

Wally: “Oh, nothing really, but all this, midnight, the alligators—I mean, the heirs—and the family lawyer all gathered to hear the reading of the will. It reminds me of a lot of melodramas and mysteries I’ve played in.”

Cicily: (giggles nervously)

Wally: “Uh… thanks. And in every one of those plays there was a leading lady, young, beautiful… a modern, charming—“

Joyce: (off-stage) “Thanks. Will you take this for me please?”

Right on cue, Joyce Normand (Paulette Goddard, looking most fetching) makes her entrance. (“Well, I got here. Oh, I’m terribly sorry to be so late.”) The party now complete and the stroke of midnight chiming on a grandfather clock, the reading of the will commences. As Crosby takes the document out of its envelope, a mysterious gong sounds seven times. Eyes closed and hands folded as in prayer, Miss Lu begs her “master” to tell her “the name.” Questioned by Crosby what those sounds mean, she explains, “They mean seven will live. There are eight people in this room. One will die before morning.” As Crosby tries to resume reading the will, Wally snaps his fingers and says to Charlie, “I’ll bet you two to one Joyce is the heir.”

Crosby: “What’s that?”

Wally: “Oh, did I speak out of turn?”

Crosby: “What was back of your remark?”

Wally: “Oh, nothing.”

Fred: (accusingly) “Come on, you meant something!”

Wally: “Oh, nothing, really. Well, it’s just that in practically every mystery play I’ve been in the leading lady turns out to be the heir.”

Miss Lu: (reverently) “You have the power.”

Wally: “Yeah, uh… me?!”

Miss Lu: “There’s spirits all around you.”

Wally: (nervously) “Well, could you put some in a glass with a little ice? I need it badly.”

Fred: (threateningly) “Don’t you ever stop babbling?!”

Douglass Montgomery, Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, John Beal

As indicated by the dialogue exchanges quoted above, Hope had already started what would become a career-long habit of letting his personal gag writers see his movie scripts in advance to provide him with additional one-liners. The two most memorable (and oft-quoted) of these lines find Cicily playing straight man to Wally.

Cicily: “Don’t big empty houses scare you?”

Wally: “Not me. I used to be in Vaudeville.”

And later in the film when Wally and Cicily explore the house’s basement:

Cicily “It’s awfully spooky down here. Do you believe in reincarnation?”

Wally: “Huh?”

Cicily “You know, that dead people come back?”

Wally: “You mean like the Republicans?”

And then there’s Wally’s line that would be stolen by just about every comedian in Hollywood: “I’m so scared even my goose pimples have goose pimples.”

Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard

As it turns out, once the will is finally read, Wally’s prediction was accurate; Joyce is indeed the sole heir to Cyrus’ fortune and estate. But there’s a codicil: if the heir should die or be proven to be insane within one month of the will being read, an alternate heir named in a second will receives the inheritance. Fred is particularly outraged and rightly points out that the will “is practically an invitation to commit murder!” Miss Lu also presents Joyce with a letter that proves to be a clue to the story’s second MacGuffin, a priceless diamond necklace secreted somewhere on the estate. And there’s one more joker in the deck: an armed guard named Hendricks (John Wray) from an asylum for the criminally insane is prowling the island in search of an escaped homicidal maniac known as “The Cat.”

Paulette Goddard

At this point, sinister events begin happening within the house. Crosby is seized and kidnapped by a grotesque hand that emerges from a hidden panel in the library. Wally and Joyce figure out where the necklace is hidden, but while Joyce lies in bed, the same hand reaches out from a panel above her and takes the necklace, leaving her in hysterics. When Wally ties to find the tripwire that opens the panel, yet another secret panel opens and the body of the first murder victim tumbles out from it. (Leni filmed this moment in the silent version from a low angel so that the corpse fell toward the camera. In addition to becoming one of the movies’ most oft-repeated clichés, it also became obligatory to use this low angle for the exact same scene in all the subsequent film versions of The Cat and the Canary.) And then there’s another particularly frightening moment in the library when Joyce thinks she’s alone, but I’m not about to spoil that one. (The moment in question was taken directly from the stage version.)

Paulette Goddard in the film’s climax

It’s in the last ten of the movie’s brief 75-minute running time that the terror quotient gets kicked up to full blast. Wally makes his way into the house’s series of hidden corridors through the panel in the bedroom. Joyce, once again seemingly alone in the library, sees the panel that Crosby disappeared into opening. She steps up to the entrance as Wally calls her name from the bedroom. Thinking that Wally’s voice is coming from inside the hidden passage, she enters and is locked in by the killer. A chase begins through a series of dark underground tunnels with the maniac in close pursuit of Joyce. Yet two more people will be violently killed before the film’s end. (You’ll have to watch the movie for yourself to learn the outcome, including the final reveal of the story’s villain.)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS983ISUqxM&w=420&h=315]

Released in early November of 1939, The Cat and the Canary was a resounding success at the box office. Hope’s stardom was cemented in his next film when he co-starred with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in the first entry of what would become Hollywood’s most successful film franchise to date, Road to Singapore (1940). The popularity of The Cat and the Canary made a follow-up effort with Hope and Goddard a foregone conclusion. Paramount dusted off another old stage thriller, Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard’s The Ghost Breaker (1914), and retitled it The Ghost Breakers. This time Hope got first-billing above the title for the first time in his film career, indicating that this was a star vehicle designed especially for Hope. The Ghost Breakers was more of an out-and-out comedy than a horror picture, with comedian Willie Best added to the mix as Hope’s houseboy.[4] Although it had some spooky moments to rival the best of serious horror movies, The Ghost Breakers fell short of the overall quality of The Cat and the Canary. It didn’t help that the film was clumsily constructed and that the characters didn’t arrive at the story’s haunted Cuban castle setting until the movie was two-thirds over. Also, frankly, the director George Marshall was a pedestrian filmmaker. (Acclaimed mystery author Raymond Chandler, whose original screenplay The Blue Dahlia was filmed by Marshall, described the director as “a stale old hack who had been directing for thirty years without once having achieved any real distinction.”)

In 1978, The Cat and the Canary was filmed for a fourth (and, so far, last) time in Britain, with Americans Michael Callan and Carol Lynley in the leading roles. Director Radley Metzger (who got his start in softcore porno films) added some kinky touches to the story, but, despite a stellar cast (including Edward Fox, Wendy Hiller, and Wilfred Hyde-White), this remake had absolutely none of the haunting atmosphere of the 1927 and 1939 versions.

For decades, the 1939 version of The Cat and the Canary was unavailable due to being one of the films excluded from the Paramount library when it was purchased by MCA (Universal Pictures’ parent company) in the 1950s because of being tied up in copyright conflicts. W.C. Fields’ You’re Telling Me (1934) and the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers (1930) were also among the films stuck in this copyright limbo. You’re Telling Me was bailed out by Universal in the early 70s after William K. Everson made a big deal out of its unavailability in his 1967 book The Art of W.C. Fields. It wasn’t until 1974, when UCLA student (and future television writer) Steve Stoliar collected several thousand signatures on a petition, that the Universal suits finally gave in to settling the pending copyright issues and rereleased Animal Crackers to the theaters.[5] Amazingly, it wasn’t until 2010, over 70 years after its release, that Universal finally made The Cat and the Canary available to the public on DVD. At least now, it can be appreciated as the superlative thriller it is as well as a real treat for Bob Hope fans.

[1] Hope’s only previous film appearances had been in a single two-reeler for Educational Films and handful of short subjects made at Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone studios in New York.

[2] In the 1920s, stage thrillers set in creepy old houses were especially popular on Broadway. In addition to Willard’s The Cat and the Canary, other examples include Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s The Bat and Ralph Spense’s The Gorilla. All of these plays were filmed as silent pictures and remade as early talkies. I covered this subgenre extensively in my article about Roland West’s 1930 remake of The Bat, The Bat Whispers.

[3] Crosby was the lawyer’s name in the original play and the previous film versions, so it’s not an in-joke reference to the Road pictures series Hope would go on to do with Bing Crosby.

[4] An extremely talented black comedian who was invariably cast in stereotyped roles, Willie Best (earlier known as Sleep ‘n’ Eat) has been a problem for modern-day (usually white) film critics who feel obligated to disparage or apologize for Best’s scared “feets don’t fail me now” shtick. (Hope, however, went on record as saying that Best had the best comic timing he’d ever seen.) Another equally talented black comedian Mantan Moreland who also played perpetually scared stereotypes has also been the target of this same patronizing attitude, leaving it to the genuine movie connoisseurs to enjoy their comic mastery. (Moreland went on to enjoy a newfound popularity in supporting roles on 1970s and 80s television sitcoms.)

[5] Stoliar was rewarded for his efforts with a job as Groucho Marx’s secretary and archivist in the last three years of the comedian’s life, an experience documented in Stoliar’s excellent book Raised Eyebrows: My Years in Groucho’s House.

Reviews

Return to Tomorrow: Making “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979)

April 2, 2015 Stuart Galbraith IV Leave a comment

Even for those whose universe doesn’t revolve around Star Trek, the problem-plagued production history, release and reception of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) is unique in the annals of Hollywood, and in more ways than one.

For starters, it was the first-ever big-budget movie adaptation of a (perceived) failed television series, one unceremoniously cancelled nearly a decade earlier to boot. The project then went through an agonizingly long process of developmental hell lasting several years. Initially the revival was planned as a medium budget theatrical feature before the decision was made to reworked it as a weekly television series, the flagship for a then-revolutionary, studio-backed fourth television network. Plans shifted again in the wake of Star Wars (1977), and Star Trek became a Motion Picture once more, this time with no expense spared. That process took more than three years, with teleplays written and actors cast for the never-produced TV version, and even sets and miniature models constructed that had to be junked or extensively retooled when Star Trek became a big-budget movie.

A deal between Paramount and theater owners fixed the movie’s release date: December 7, 1979. That meant the picture had to start filming with a shooting script only two-thirds done. Numerous unanticipated technical problems and deliberations over the script pushed it further and further behind schedule.

The other, even bigger shoe yet to drop concerned Star Trek’s special visual effects. Paramount contracted with the firm Abel & Associates, a company with zero feature film experience but famous for their visually dazzling television commercials. Robert Abel’s firm ordered state-of-the-art equipment, created concept art, built models, etc., but $6 million and 12 months later they had nothing to show for it, with zero usable footage.

Effects veteran Douglas Trumbull reluctantly assumed command, while a second firm, John Dykstra’s Apogee Co., was contracted to handle the overload. Together, they had just nine months to complete two years’ worth of visual effects work.

All of this – the years of script development, money wasted on sets, models, and talent for the never-produced TV series, delays with the live action unit, the millions wasted by Abel & Associates, and the unimaginable overtime and manpower required to finish the special effects in order to meet the film’s release date, pushed the Star Trek’s final cost to $42 million (though possibly even higher than that), making it one of the four or five most expensive movies ever made up to that point. The race to the finish line was so close there was no time to preview the film, no time to fine-tune the editing, no time even to strike premium 70mm prints for the biggest movie houses; Paramount wasn’t even sure whether prints would reach theaters in time.

This fascinating, one-of-a-kind tale is exhaustively (and, boy, do I mean exhaustively) chronicled in Preston Neal Jones’s Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, from Creature Features Publishing. The book itself has an equally serpentine history dating back to 1979. Jones interviewed the entire principal cast, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, director Robert Wise, and virtually all of the other key production personnel, some 60 interview subjects in all. The work was originally slated as a cover story for a proposed double-length issue of Cinefantastique, at the time the Rolls Royce science fiction-fantasy-horror cinema magazines, one rich in unusually scholarly articles and reviews about old and new genre films.

For various reasons Jones’s piece was never published. The book reworks the material into a massive, 672-page oral history. On the plus side, it’s fascinating to read 35-year-old interviews conducted mostly around the time the movie was just going into release, December-January 1979/80. All of the trials and tribulations of the making of the film are there, and many of the interviewees are extraordinarily frank in their displeasure and frustration, though most are upbeat and look back fondly on what proved to be an extraordinarily demanding experience. And because of Jones’s obsession to even the tiniest details, Return to Tomorrow paints a vivid portrait of the long and arduous process of studio movie making as few film books have.

But it’s also a bit like poring over several dusty cardboard boxes of raw research material. The most obvious problem with the book is its endless repetition of nearly identical remarks. Even Lukas Kendall, in his brief Afterword, jokes about this: “Everybody loved Robert Wise.” Indeed they did. It’s probably not an exaggeration to state that at least 50 of the 60 participants say something along the lines of, “Were it not for Robert Wise’s experience and expertise in all facets of filmmaking, and especially his eternally calm demeanor, the whole project would have fallen apart.” Moreover, probably half of the 50 say basically the same thing multiple times – three of four times in some cases. Actor DeForest Kelley, “Bones” McCoy, remarks about several lines of dialogue shot but cut from the film, again and again, throughout the book. Someone on the special effects team will discuss the inception and creation of a particular visual effect, and then another member of the same team will talk about the same effect in essentially the way, all over again, sometimes over many pages.

The making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an inherently engrossing, even highly suspenseful tale. Disaster strikes often. Shit! How are they ever going to be able to overcome that obstacle? Will the movie be finished in time? But reading Return to Tomorrow is like watching the Indy 500 in extreme slow motion, with the racecars crawling down the track at 20 mph.

The book has absolutely no sense of pacing, of telling a story. The red-letter day when the famously unfazable Robert Wise finally blew his stack after screening Abel’s pitifully inadequate smattering of completed effects shots receives little build-up, and when that turning point in the production finally happens, it’s unceremoniously tossed in the literary laundry basket, jumbled in with the rest of the dirty clothes, given the same weight, maybe even less, that the prolix coverage of the creation of warp coil lighting effects.

Despite little bits of bridging material here and there, Return to Tomorrow rarely places the production of Star Trek into context. For instance, there’s virtually no mention at all of Paramount’s aims and long-term strategies with Star Trek relative to the company at large, or its place in the mad scramble by Hollywood to duplicate Star Wars’s success during 1978-84. No other Paramount movies concurrently in development or production are mentioned, and there’s practically zero discussion about the state of the film industry at large in the late 1970s, all of which would have helped to put Star Trek into better contextual focus.

Though primarily an oral history, the author’s own voice is largely absent; there’s no 35-year hindsight, reflection, and analysis. Though it would have been a hard sell to non-Star Trek fans, the work is really geared for the hard-core buffs only, a shame. In the hands of a strong editor and with a lot of pruning (like, 75%), the book might have lost very little of note while transforming itself into a truly insightful, exciting work that, in addition to shedding lots of new light on this volatile production, could have appealed to a much wider audience, and have been a remarkable case study of studio production, art vs. commerce, right at an industry crossroads.

What Return to Tomorrow underemphasizes, when mentioned at all, is how remarkable an achievement The Motion Picture is beyond having made its release date by the skin of its teeth. Though flawed in many respects, the first movie Star Trek accomplished a great deal largely unrecognized at the time, and in retrospect the movie plays a lot better than it did for many when it was new. Indeed, there’s really been nothing quite like it, before or since.

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First, the movie was burdened with having to reinvent the wheel through a maze of contradictions. It had to look enough like the old TV show to be recognizably Star Trek and to please its hard-core fans, the perceived core of the movie version’s box-office. And yet to avoid being laughed off the screen it couldn’t look too much like the old show – tastes and technology had changed more in those intervening ten years than perhaps any decade of the 20th century – and it was imperative that a movie Star Trek equally appeal to mainstream moviegoers barely aware of the old show’s existence.

Similarly, the script needed to conform to the spirit of Star Trek and include those elements and characters deemed essential to its appeal, reintroducing iconography intimately familiar to some moviegoers, brand-new and unfamiliar to others. It was a project with a singularly proprietary executive producer and co-writer (Roddenberry) clinging to certain, not always good concepts while notably ineffective as a producer in other ways. There were leading actors muscling in on the script, largely to protect their own interests and their vision of characters they had been inhabiting on and off for more than a dozen years.

Further, the show’s hardcore fans, the Trekkies (or Trekkers or, as they seemed to call themselves then, as the book suggests, Trekkians), after waiting song long for their beloved series’ revival, had their own ideas about what a Star Trek movie should be like, meaning a lot of them would be impossible to entirely please. That Star Trek: The Motion Picture manages to get it right at least 85% of the time is nothing short of miraculous. One need only look at movie adaptations of other popular TV shows (Sgt. Bilko, Lost in Space, The Avengers, etc.) to see just how easy it is to be so profoundly wrong-headed.

The other remarkable thing about Star Trek: The Motion Picture is better appreciated in this age where high-concept, short attention span completely dominates, and adult, intelligent, and methodically paced big-budget movies are practically non-existent. The biggest complaints levied against the movie by interviewees in Jones’s book are the pacing (too slow) and that it needed less emphasis on the special effects and more on character interaction, particularly among the original cast. That’s true to a point, and clearly this was addressed in the sequels beginning with Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982), in which the characters’ relationships with one another was the whole point.

What’s interesting though about Star Trek: The Motion Picture is how utterly different it is from all of the other Star Trek movies, even those featuring the original cast. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that it’s closer in spirit to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) than Wrath of Khan. While Star Trek explores ideas already done to death in literary science fiction, they were relatively new in science fiction cinema, and so far out as to completely baffle some critics. (Amusingly and infuriatingly, my old nemesis Richard Schickel predictably gave the film a highly negative review, partly because he couldn’t figure out why, in his mind, the Klingons piloting the V’Ger ship didn’t show themselves at the climax. Wait – what?)

Further, while the movie maybe could’ve used a bit more humor (more original series producer Gene L. Coon’s realm than Roddenberry’s, who preferred his Star Trek deeply serious; even 2001 has its share of deliberate laughs), it more than satisfies most of the basic requirements of a bona fide Star Trek movie. For instance, one of the original series’ tenets, an optimistic, tolerant, and culturally and racially diversified vision of the future, is there, in spades, throughout the film. So is one of the central themes of the TV show: Captain Kirk’s Horatio Hornblower-like sense of duty to his ship and his uniquely talented instinct as a leader in times of crisis, which sometimes cause personal and professional conflicts with his junior officers.

It’s a movie that requires its audience to think about problems and abstract ideas. In going along for the ride, the audience is required to share in the mystery while exploring these “strange new worlds.” Not everything is made plain. In this way The Motion Picture is more like a link between Kubrick’s 2001 and Peter Hyams’ way-too-explicit sequel, 2010 (1984).

Meanwhile, the film does much to expand upon preexisting concepts. One interesting point that the book reveals is that Wise was very insistent that the immense size of the USS Enterprise be emphasized, which is why there are all those extras in that big recreation room set, and why in dry-dock and elsewhere are there always seen drone-like workers in space gear floating around, fixing things: to lend a sense of scale. Many viewers complained that the introduction of the Enterprise goes on too long, but for this writer then as now it’s practically perfect. Wise and his encouraged effects team were painting on a big canvas, for wide Panavision screens. On small TV monitors yes, this sequence seems to go on forever, but in big movie theaters and now, on Blu-ray, even on obviously smaller 100-inch projection systems, its effectiveness still impresses.

In any case, Return to Tomorrow is the kind of book that’s extremely interesting on many levels, but it’s like panning for gold and sifting through tons of silt over many hours to find maybe $50 worth of nuggets. There’s a mountain of great raw material here but, Lordy, it could have been presented far more effectively.

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Feature Articles

Life After the Manson Family or How Hollywood Got Bigger and Smaller at the Same Time – Another Exploitative Memoir

August 6, 2014 Todd Tranner Leave a comment

After being purged from the ranks of Manson International (see earlier memoir) just in time for Christmas 1985 I spent most of 1986 watching the TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz in a bourboned haze while polishing feature scripts to a greasy sheen. In the fall the phone rang. A former co-worker at Manson, Warren Braverman, was now CFO at a company called Carolco. Warren asked if I wished to join Carolco as director of distribution services to help set up the Business Information Systems program we had developed at Manson International. The computer was virgin dirt in foreign film distrib. At Manson we created primal software with BIS; incorporating purchasing, shipping, and inventory for electro ease. Having grown weary of Fassbinder’s gargantuan parade I decided to plunge into the marvel which was Carolco (the name Carolco is meaningless, a prehistoric Panama City company at best).

At that time Carolco was situated in the City National Bank building sandwiched between Sunset and Doheny, near enough to Beverly Hills to have Paul Lynde in your CNB banking line every other Friday but still in West LA so Charles Nelson Reilly was in line alternate Fridays.

Carolco was in a state of joyous chaos. Carolco’s third (or fourth) production First Blood II had erupted a volcanic fortune, tripling the domestic 50 million of First Blood and exploding BO records on international frontlines. America embraced John Rambo as their lovable, guilt scrubbing sonny boy, the one they’d been seeking since the fall of Hanoi. The money was washing over Carolco in tidal wave proportions. The accounting department, formerly attended by Linda “Dallas” Evans’ sister Charlie, had desk drawers filled with greenbacks literally splashing out.

I shared one office and one desk with Ceci Vajna, the wife of Andrew G. Vajna. Andy with Mario Kassar owned and ran Carolco. Andy and Mario had their office a few doors from mine and they too shared one office and one desk with each other. This was not a space issue. It was how Andy and Mario preferred to work, facing one another across a table, producing mega munchers as a game of friendly checkers or frantic chess. Ceci believed the same split desk strategy would work for her and me as well. For the most part it did. But such proximity meant familiarity with Ceci’s world whirl outside foreign distrib.

Happiest of times.

Ceci had been Andy’s secretarial assistant at his old Hong Kong wig company. She told me she used to live in a tin hut with her mother and siblings. Now Ceci had her chauffeur on call by our office door reading his Variety. Instead of paltry Hong Kong getups Ceci never repeated an outfit during my employ. New wardrobe items arrived by UPS each day. She wore hot pants suits, trending Asian chic meringue. No Suzie Wong retro sexo 60s duds. Actually Ceci was pals with Nancy “Suzie Wong” Kwan who opened her restaurant Joss on the ground floor of our building facing Sunset. I went with Ceci and Andy for a pre-opening tasting there. Kwan helped serve the dim sum asking our opinion of each item. I commented quietly that we wouldn’t be eating this fab dim sum if Marlon Brando hadn’t derailed France Nuyen from playing Wong. Before I could ask Nancy if she ever thanked Brando Ceci poked me with a fork.

Ceci planned Beverly Hills homie dinner parties, checkered with A-listers and B-climbers. I counseled her on soiree dilemmas.

“I wish Mickey Rourke would take a bath. It’s hard to eat sitting near him.”

I suggested, “Seat him next to Nick Nolte. They may cancel each other out.”

When her son was sick and home from school (before personal game consoles were in every universal corner) she’d call an arcade rental company and have a coin op batch delivered by semi to their manse for his rehab. “One Asteroids, one Donkey Kong and Tapper.” I suggested my fave Centipede for the office but she countered with “You don’t need one. You aren’t sick or sad.”

Ceci oversaw “letter of credit” payments, the spark for overseas printing and element access. I maintained the rest of the distribution scene, receipt and delivery, anguish and anxiety. I worked with producers and post on the completion of Extreme Prejudice and Angel Heart pleading for them to finish before Carolco sales king Rocco called again about Japan changing release dates. At the behest of legal I created the domestic delivery schedule boiler plates for Tri-Star and began my demonic romance with attorneys and their reasoned obfuscation of everything.

The company populous was inflating. Production offices were required. Three or four floors of bank building were tight, elbows were getting bruised. Time to take over a whole building. So a structure was built at 8800 Sunset Boulevard across from Tower Records and Old World restaurant (way gone institutions.) We took a “hard hat tour” of the steel shell and I discovered I had my own office and Ceci had hers. Our “wedded bliss” would end while Andy and Mario would continue their one desk, one office practice in the new digs.

8800 Sunset Boulevard.

Amid the moving mania and the moolah flood, there was still a family feel to Carolco. Andy’s mom, Clara, served her fried chicken on birthdays. Employees’ offspring were often hanging out playing with the profusion of Rambo toys. Mario’s assistant Kim would bring in king cakes at Mardi Gras, supplied by Kim’s significant other Louisiana comic Ellen DeGeneres. There were comfy holiday parties at Le Dome with secret Santas and typical inebriated antics.

Much hubbub, personality and product flowed through our offices. Jerry Goldsmith came in wearing an immaculate white caftan dressed perhaps for a river baptism. He was very upset brandishing a Variety ad by the musicians’ union contending that Goldsmith’s score for Hoosiers was un-American and not worthy of Oscar consideration because it had been recorded at Carolco’s recording studio in Budapest with “Red instrumentalists.” Ceci soothed a sobbing Goldsmith reassuring him that he wasn’t a Communist. I half-expected her to call the arcade company and order Jerry a Space Invaders for home use. Jerry may have received some solace with Walter Hill being “persuaded” to dump his buddy Ry Cooder in favor of Goldsmith’s Extreme Prejudice score.

Alan Parker paced the office distressed over the MPAA (who except the MPAA isn’t distressed over those slicing screwheads?) demanding an edit of Lisa Bonet’s naked blood bath to get Angel Heart an ‘R’. Bill Cosby’s name came up as an arbiter and quickly dipped below the surface again.

A large carton of designer jeans arrived in my office. The legs on every pair had been brutally slashed and frayed by razor. I showed the abused denim to Ceci assuming they were hers clarifying I didn’t do the cutting.

“No, those are Sly’s. He has them cut like that.”

In due Sly showed up. Shaped like a muscled V with face like an Italian McCartney after a pummeling, Stallone squeezed into my office, stacks of check prints and MFX mags clogged the room.

“You got my jeans in here? You oughta clean this place up, Toddles.”

“You wanna help me clean it up?”

He tittered like a thug, “Just give me my jeans.” I did and he slipped off before I could ask him how Rambo III was evolving (not very well, I’d heard). Like many I was enamored with the concept of Rambo vs. Rocky, the ultimate matchup, in the ring, the Sahara or in Richard Crenna’s pants it didn’t matter where as long as they beat each other to a pulp and retreated into oblivion.

McCartney before and after the fight.

Once Red Heat started up Schwarzenegger made office visitations. It was “unwritten” company policy never to have Stallone and Schwarzenegger on the same floor at the same time. Warning signals were traded when they both had identical day meetings. Was it simple ego clash or the chance of two potent objects engorged with testosterone and steroidal jelly bumping in a hallway and exploding on contact? I tend to believe it was a safety concern.

Along with Sly’s tortured jeans, random multimillion dollar checks to no one, and the odd boxes of jet engine lubricant we also got Rambo fan letters, most followed this template:

“Dear Rambo, Please come to my house and (sic) to watch TV. There’s food to eat and if anybody bother (sic) you feel free to shoot them.”

Things got large. It was all about international sales becoming more than half of a film’s revenue. It was about presales with buyers salivating for the newest plum teats. With huge pre-sell cash gushing in for giant product it was natural (seemingly) to make interplanetary deals for even more gigantic productions. Carolco altered the dynamics across this town’s boards. The only way to get what you want was to pay more than anybody else. Scale film budgets became obese.

Peter Hoffman entered the scene as Carolco’s president. Peter was brought in to make things pop, to make magic happen. Hoffman managed an IPO which succeeded against a market usually not prone to loving film speculation. Among the other “magical things” Peter did was buy IVE (International Video Entertainment), a video producer and distributor in Woodland Hills and Canoga Park. One part of IVE was Cabellero Home Video, the old and distinguished porn purveyor, and the bedrock upon which IVE lived. I’d had “fun dealings” with Cabellero while at Manson. The other piece of IVE was Family Home Entertainment, the family friendly stuff. The pre-video boom was a solid mix of kid content and adult content, the public lures which never wane. The owner Noel C. Bloom was a video release pioneer, a prime “golden age of porn” producer and per the state attorney general’s office mob connected. Bloom also collected cars. Every Friday he had his automotive fleet taken by flatbed to a car wash. After they were cleaned he returned them to their stationary, driverless life.

Andy told me we needed to use the IVE telecine and duplication facilities from now on. I’d been using Modern Video and was not overjoyed to work elsewhere but… He said call Jose and set things up. Jose Menendez was running IVE which would become LIVE. Formerly he’d been a muckety-muck with Hertz and RCA. At RCA he supposedly signed Duran Duran and Menudo to the label.

Jose and I traded phone messages for days. When I finally got hold of him Jose seemed over his head in management woes, also unaware of what IVE’s facilities actually were. He said he had to run off to his son’s tennis match and he’d call me back. He never did. When I finally tracked him down Jose claimed they weren’t ready to receive work yet and that he’d call me when they did. Right now he had to run off to his other son’s tennis game. He sure loved watching his sons play tennis. I never heard back from Jose.

LIVE became a profitable entity. The company’s 1989 profit line received its largest bump from a life insurance policy LIVE had taken out on its chairman Menendez.

Strawberries and vanilla ice cream and blood.

Peter Hoffman’s wife Susan took the office next to mine. Following executive spousal tradition I asked her if she wanted to share a desk and she told me she’d worked with another Todd, Todd Rundgren. She was there when he was robbed at gunpoint in his home around 1980. One of the culprits was whistling Rundgren’s song “I Saw the Light” during the theft. Susan’s Carolco task was putting together Canadian tax shelter projects. Her hubby Peter was a tax shelter freak.

Whereas Carolco sales were handled mainly by Rocco Viglietta, with his custom made fantastic pop shirts, Carolco’s legal end began to resemble an army metastasizing at night, each dawn another office was occupied by a new attorney handling some obscure biz tidbit.

Peter Hoffman kept company acquisitions and investments rolling. Productions were in fungi growth mode everywhere. With Hoffman and his staff came ripples of attack buzz and office gaming, regulation job paranoia hit. There was a scent of pandemonium in the corridors.

The Andy and Mario machine began to misfire. When two men who could buy Columbian coffee plantations for kicks engage in combat over the expresso machine you figure something’s more than amiss. The shared desk was history. Separate offices were the new flavor.

Maggie at Technicolor rang me to ask if I wanted to run distribution and post services at a small Hollywood company. They wanted to pay me more than Carolco so I jumped (everyone at Carolco wasn’t overpaid). I told Ceci I was leaving and without looking up she said “Okay” and continued eating her lunch.

I left Carolco before Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct. Before Wagons East! and Cutthroat Island. Before the IRS and the SEC came a’knockin’. Before Andy Vajna split. The last straw for Andy may have been when he asked, “What’s this shooting in British Columbia? Narrow Margin? How come I never heard of it?” In 1989 Mario bought out Andy’s percentage for 100 million clams. Pete Hoffman vamoosed when Oliver Stone pushed The Doors 20 mil over budget with no justification. Andy and Ceci divorced. Andy and Mario remarried and made Terminator 3. At the moment Peter and Susan Hoffman are awaiting trial in New Orleans for a tax shelter scheme.

Skouras Pictures was located at Hollywood Center Studios on Las Palmas. This stage rental studio reeked of lotusland history. In 1919 John Jasper left Chaplin Studios to build three stages and a squadron of bungalows now bordered by Santa Monica, Romaine, Seward and Las Palmas. Names and ownership changed through the decades from (Jasper) Hollywood Studios, Inc. to Hollywood/Metropolitan Studios to General Service(s) Studios to Hollywood General Studios to Zoetrope Studios and finally Hollywood Center Studios.

1040 North Las Palmas

While hands changed everything under the sun was getting made in the shade there. The highlights include Milestone’s Two Arabian Nights, Hell’s Angels, Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother, The Freshman and Speedy, Mae West’s Klondike Annie and Go West, Young Man, Renoir’s The Southerner and Diary Of A Chambermaid, Trail Of the Lonesome Pine, The Flying Deuces, The Thief Of Bagdad, The Jungle Book, A Night In Casablanca, Cagney’s Blood On The Sun, Crosby’s Pennies From Heaven, Love Happy, Destination Moon, Shampoo, One From The Heart, Body Heat, X Men, Zoolander and of course Freddie Got Fingered. From the fifties on television dominated shooting on the lot and it was a home to tube nuggets I Love Lucy, Ozzie And Harriet, Our Miss Brooks, Sky King and the Filmways Five: The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Mr. Ed, Green Acres, and The Addams Family then Perry Mason, The Rockford Files, Baretta, Jeopardy, True Blood and Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

The legend of Skouras Pictures (as school children tell it) began when far away in Greece Dimitri “Tom” Skouras having spent untold time sitting on a beach contemplating the Aegean Sea had the realization that there must be more to the big pic than racing cars for grins and grease. Tom had to step in the celluloid ooze of his ancestors, a Skouras brother trio that ran a theater chain out of Missouri, managed production for the Warner brothers and one brother, Tom’s Uncle Spyros, who would have the longest run as el presidente of 20^th Century Fox telling the world “Movies are better than ever” until he got slugged by Cleopatra. So Tom headed back to the difficult pastures of Hollywood and started a film distribution company. The early cream came from a Peter Elson tip (the same Peter of Manson who sold softcore Sinderella and the Golden Bra to the Mideast, see earlier memoir.) Peter told Tom to check out a little flick by the Cohens (still more brothers) named Blood Simple. The rest was some kinda history.

Skouras Pictures had a foreign division headed by Pam Pickering (Sam Peckinpah’s former assistant also dumped by Manson with me in ’85) and a domestic division run by Jeff Lipsky. My job was to serve both divisions by wearing multi hats. I coordinated all titles’ delivery of preprint elements, answer and check prints, film to tape transfer, trailer creation, release printing, Latin Spanish version, publicity orders, shipping, purchasing, invoicing, letters of credit, distributor contracts, inventory input and tabulation, plumbing and pharmaceuticals. I comforted clueless lawyers, problem producers, distraught directors and screaming overseas buyers. My first week there Jeff Lipsky told Tom to fire me because he hadn’t been consulted regarding my hiring. Tom laughed and Pam laughed but Jeff did not. He wanted me gone, solid gone.

Sigrid, VP of sales, a cheerful adult Heidi with dark wit beneath candied enamel, told me Jeff didn’t want another male on the premises. The Skouras work force was comprised of 15 women and now 3 men (the mailroom staff was two males but not unlike H.G. Wells’s Morlocks they were mostly invisible toilers). Sigrid said Skouras was “Tom’s harem” with Jeff attempting to seize the sultan position from Tom.

Sigrid advised “Now you’re competing for the harem and Jeff wants you out.”

“Tell Jeff not to worry I’m a diehard eunuch.”

Eventually Jeff cornered me in my office. He was a strong presence described by Peter Biskind in “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film” thusly: “Bald as a cue ball – he suffers from alopecia, the Lex Luthor disease, not a hair on his body- Lipsky has an angular face and wore black-framed Mr. McGoo glasses. He was fussy and retentive, intense and intimidating.” Jeff wanted to know my motives, my intentions, and what’s up with women around here “liking you and going out to lunch with you.” He was also not amused that I had my own private WC (in this bungalow I was the sole male among seven femmes). On a biz level I respected Jeff, he was a positive force in getting indie films seen from My Dinner with Andre and Sid and Nancy to Mike Leigh’s masterworks but this confrontation was bizarrely personal. My initial response was a Ralph Kramden stammer then I uttered some Psych 101 speak, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Having said his piece Jeff returned to his office. After that things were copasetic even friendly between us but I remained wary around Lipsky.

Latrine of contention.

The bungalow suite for the Skouras foreign division sat in the northwest corner of the lot where you could breathe a mix of Magee’s Donuts and petro fumes. This part of Hollywood Central is immortalized in the opening track shot of Altman’s The Player.

Skouras’s more expansive courtyard offices, formerly Zoetrope’s main workplace, were in the far southeast corner under a wafting chemical cloud from Consolidated Film Industries. Dozens of journeys were made daily from foreign to the main. These multiple treks across the cozy lot exposed troupes in play. Standard phenom included passing James Garner posed oddly across his car hood, Mike Tyson pontificating on rape, Bill Murray playing hoop with little people, Raul Julia having another incident of eye proptosis, an open door revealing Dan Ackroyd sifting through scripts echoing Drew Friedman’s Spy mag cartoon or one night rushing to Tom Skouras’s aid and nearly colliding in the dark with a “Rickenbacker” wielding George Harrison (or more appropriately Nelson Wilbury).

The office next to our suite had been occupied since 1950 by a 92 year old ex-vaudevillian named George Burns. Mr. Burns would arrive by Cadillac most mornings around 10 AM and spend time in his office before retreating to lunch at Hillcrest Country Club. If I happened to pass during his arrival I’d greet him with “Good morning, Mr. Burns” and he’d wave a stogie the size of Billy Barty’s shillelagh. Sometimes I’d channel Joe Franklin and ask a question.

“Mr. Burns, did you discover Ann-Margret or was it actually George Jessel?”

“No, I did. I discovered her. Or she discovered me. Jessel never discovered anybody. Some showgirls perhaps. What else?”

“Did you ever see W.C. Fields sober?”

“Once. Maybe twice. Don’t you think we better go to our offices and get to work?”

He started to his door then stopped and asked me, “Did they vacuum your office yesterday? I think they forgot to do mine.”

At some point during the shoot for LIFE, Ann-Margret visited with her mentor, the legendary George Burns, in a prop room of a studio where he kept an office, 1961.

Skouras entered a lucrative domestic output agreement with Paramount Pictures for video exploitation of titles. The lead dog in the deal was Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog (the third biggest foreign language BO up to that time after La Cage aux Folles and Das Boot and the source for any industry wallop Skouras had). Delivery was keyed on supplying NTSC analog 1” which was acceptable to Paramount’s QC standards. Creating video masters in those primeval days usually meant use of a low contrast print for telecine (interpositives would soon swap with the LC). The film to tape process had the telecine operator trying to recreate the look of the film on video. A true match was not technically possible so overseeing the transfer was often a labor of frustration for directors and cinematographers who didn’t identify two different mediums. One who understood the dif was Dante Spinotti, the DP for Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers. Working on the transfer with Spinotti was a pleasure as he’d lived in the film’s setting of Venice and he recounted grand memories of swimming in the canals dodging hepatitis A nodules.

Dyan Cannon wrote, directed and starred in The End of Innocence. Dyan supervised her video transfer while I simultaneously peered over her shoulder and at the clock. This was Dyan’s autobio baby and her desire for perfection was understandable. She bounced on a mini-trampoline drinking health elixirs easily manipulating our telecine operator Tim who was madly in love with Dyan. The hours at Sunset Post ticked up as Dyan would go over scenes ad infinitum. Tom Skouras advised me any excessive hours would come out of my pay so I tried gently coaxing Dyan, “Don’t pull a Kubrick or a Billy Friedkin on me, Dyan.” Or annoying her with amusing acid trip anecdotes which Dyan countered with “There’s nothing funny about LSD.” Finally I had a heart to heart with Dyan explaining I was about to get married on a northwest camping expedition and if this isn’t wrapped now… I broke down in mock tears and she said “We’ll finish it tomorrow.” And she did. To cover myself I bought camping gear, found someone to marry and left town for a while.

SIDEBAR: The telecine operator Tim said working with Dyan was “the greatest moment of my life” adding “The only thing that would have made it better was if she was naked.” For Tim’s birthday certain parties at Sunset Post set up a wee gag. A porn actress came in with a work reel to transfer. As Tim labored the flesh thesp complained about feeling “hot and bothered” and began disrobing until… Tim forgot about what had been the earlier greatest moment of his life.

One of Tim’s two greatest moments

My finest Skouras achievements were re-titling Blood Oath to Prisoners of the Sun (apologies to Herge) and Picking Up the Pieces to Blood Sucking Pharaohs of Pittsburgh. For this I was promoted to the absurdisto title Vice President of Post Production. Sigrid called VPs “V-penises” since they were primarily males in the industrial churn.

Tom took over more bungalows in his neck of the woods so foreign united with domestic. I shared my “suite” with sales person Midge, a former Vegas songster from Tuxedo Junction. Our receptionist Peggy was a former Weeki Wachee mermaid. Domestic print juggler Ruth was a former Olympic kayaker. And my assistant Lisa was the former hot dog vendor on the lot who’d impressed with her ability to ward off a crazed Bill Murray.

A wandering maintenance drone, who wandered more than maintained, informed me that Bob Cummings used my office when he filmed his show here in the 50s. He added that when Coppola ruled the roost the office was assigned to Jean Luc Godard but Godard never showed up. Cummings to Godard, Hollywood talent shuffle.

Found refuse: James Cann’s MISERY prop stumps and George Burns’ chimp in Bob Cummings and Jean-Luc Godard’s office.

Tom’s stepdaughter Margie, Skouras acquisitions head, saw sex, lies and videotape and embraced it shouting its brilliance to all and getting it in Sundance. Jeff loved it even more than Margie. It was tossed in Tom’s lap, a service deal, no upfront monies, but Tom forever cautious, often at the expense of success, said no thanks. In his consideration the film’s video rights were already with RCA/Columbia and it was perhaps a hard watch for a man whose favorite film was One-Eyed Jacks. Sex, lies and videotape would end up with Miramax. Miramax would take over earth as Skouras dove for footnote status (read Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures for the grotty niceties).

The company mood was evident at a gloomy American Film Market cocktail party for the opus Beverly Hills Brats, a Terry “Come Back Little Sheba” Moore and Martin “Badlands” Sheen vehicle without wheels. We also attempted to celebrate Shadow of Death but the star Anthony “Pretty Poison” Perkins was not feeling well and didn’t attend. Perkins co-star Lyle “Ernest Goes To Camp” Alzado did show up and confirmed somberly, “Tony’s not doing so well I guess.” Beverly Hills Brats co-star Natalie “The Snake Pit” Schafer began weeping when she confessed to me that she didn’t expect there to be another Gilligan’s Island reunion because her “millionaire husband” Jim “Here Come the Nelsons” Backus was wasting away with Parkinson’s. Beverly Hills Brat Peter “A Christmas Story” Billingsley looked at me and shrugged, “Everybody’s gotta go some time.” And go they did Backus in 1989, Schafer in 1991, Perkins and Alzado in 1992.

Leftovers at the Beverly Hills Brats cocktail party, March 25, 1989.

Pam Pickering was shoved out in a divisive manner and went to Samuel Goldwyn. Assistant Lisa departed months later following Pam to Goldwyn.

Jeff Lipsky quit Skouras in October 1990 when Tom wouldn’t share an interest in Mike Leigh’s great Life Is Sweet. He and Bingham Ray started October Films.

The picture fount was unexceptional. The financial portrait was dim. Not meeting payroll was a whisper topic. The state of things was plainly headed for desolation row only no one was “selling postcards of the hanging” or selling much of anything at Skouras.

As the knives sharpened my phone rang and it was Maggie at Technicolor asking if I wanted to be “V-penis” of distribution at Odyssey Distributors. Odyssey was a foreign distributor of A-product, mainly New Regency titles, started by comic Alan King and some “dubious” New York financiers. Rather than become a casualty in the fall of Skouras I fled the storied bungalows of Hollywood Center Studios and headed west… to San Vicente and Wilshire and a company where the chance of being vomited on by Gerard Depardieu was considerably high.

Reviews

DVD Review: “A Night in Casablanca” (1946)

May 28, 2014 Scott T. Rivers 1 Comment

Let’s dispense with one myth right away: the Marx Brothers did not make A Night in Casablanca to pay off Chico’s gambling debts. Though Chico always needed the money, Groucho and Harpo were itching for a big-screen comeback to erase the memory of their underwhelming MGM farewell film, The Big Store (1941).

Enter David L. Loew and the profit potential of independent production, which was appealing enough to end the brothers’ self-imposed cinematic retirement. The Marxes and Loew joined forces to create Loma Vista Productions, with United Artists handling the distribution chores on their low-budget venture.

Released in May 1946 to mixed reviews but solid box office, A Night in Casablanca would prove a fitting finale to the team’s movie career. Perhaps their best effort since A Night at the Opera (1935), this postwar escapade features the trio in splendid form while recapturing some of the rough-edged spontaneity of their early Paramount comedies.

Before its DVD debut in 2004, A Night in Casablanca had an elusive history on the videocassette market — briefly issued by Independent United Distributors in 1983, followed by a GoodTimes budget release in 1990. Castle Hill Productions (the copyright owner) finally rectified matters by teaming with Warner Home Video to give the film a long-overdue remastered version in excellent quality.

However, there is a comic irony associated with Warner Home Video’s involvement. In 1945, Warner Bros. expressed concern over the storyline of A Night in Casablanca, fearing that the Marxian farce would emulate the studio’s legendary 1942 drama. Groucho fired off a letter to Warner that has since become a classic. In 1997, Groucho’s letter was read during the Library of Congress’ bicentennial celebration:

“Apparently, there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. . . . You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without your permission. What about Warner Brothers? Do you own that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. . . . This all seems to add up to a pretty bitter tirade, but I assure you it’s not meant to. I love Warners. Some of my best friends are Warner Brothers.”

After Groucho explained the plot in a few bizarre follow-up letters, the Marxes heard no more from the Warner legal department. “It might have been better if we filmed the letters to Warner Brothers and left the picture we made in the can,” Groucho later remarked.

In truth, the Warner correspondence was a publicity stunt, which Groucho happily admitted in a private letter: “I wish they would sue, but as it is, we’ve had reams in the paper.” Nevertheless, the Marxes avoided a direct parody of the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman classic — except for the “round up all likely suspects” line (spoken by none other than Casablanca cast member Dan Seymour) and Harpo’s lively turn at the roulette wheel.

Groucho offers Harpo some brotherly advice: “Remember what happened in 1929?”

What makes A Night in Casablanca a standout among the later Marx efforts is the re-emergence of Harpo’s anarchistic brilliance, which was toned down after Duck Soup (1933). Thanks to uncredited contributions from Frank Tashlin, Harpo dominates the proceedings from the start with the famous sight gag involving a collapsed building. After playing second fiddle to Groucho and Chico in the MGM films, the horn-honking pantomimist enjoys a long-overdue free reign. In fact, Groucho and Chico do not appear until 10 minutes into the picture.

Directed by Archie Mayo — a Warner craftsman best known for The Petrified Forest (1936) and Black Legion (1937) — A Night in Casablanca dispenses with the MGM musical gloss and syrupy romance in favor of a more free-wheeling approach. Set largely within the confines of the Hotel Casablanca, Groucho plays the iconoclastic manager and Chico is appropriately cast as a taxi-camel driver. Harpo initially appears as a disobedient valet to Heinrich Stubel (wonderfully played by character actor Sig Ruman — returning as a Marx foil for the first time since 1937′s A Day at the Races), an escaped Nazi who has stashed a valuable treasure in the hotel.

Amid this B-grade plot are several wild scenes and some memorable Groucho dialogue (“Never mind the staff. Assemble the guests. I’ll tell them what I expect of them”). Placing the Marxes in a postwar setting may seem unusual, yet their shenanigans inside the Hotel Casablanca are a refreshing throwback to their first film, The Cocoanuts (1929). In many ways, Groucho, Harpo and Chico have come full circle.

The frenetic (if somewhat belabored) climax finds the brothers on board a Nazi plane, with Harpo knocking out the pilot and taking over the controls with devilish glee. However, art historian and critic Erwin Panofsky found a deeper meaning to this sequence when A Night in Casablanca was first released: “The disproportion between the smallness of [Harpo’s] effort and the magnitude of disaster is a magnificent and terrifying symbol of man’s behavior in the atomic age.” No doubt Chico would have responded to this social commentary by playing the “Beer Barrel Polka.”

Sig Ruman and Harpo Marx.

Loew had little doubt that A Night in Casablanca would make money, but no one expected the picture to become one of 1946’s surprise hits. Moviegoers and devoted fans welcomed back the Marxes with $2.7 million in worldwide ticket sales — resulting in the highest grosser of their career.

Despite renewed box-office success, the trio retired once again from the silver screen. “We decided we were coming down the stretch and that it was high time we quit while we were still partially alive,” Groucho wrote in his 1959 autobiography. (For all intents and purposes, 1949’s Love Happy was a Harpo Marx vehicle, with Chico in support and Groucho as narrator and guest star. The three never share a single scene together.)

Though not without its faults, A Night in Casablanca is a better film than its critical reputation would suggest. And how do the Marx Brothers bid farewell as a full-fledged team? They chase beautiful Lisette Verea through the streets of Casablanca — an appropriate finale for these anti-establishment pioneers.

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Tag Archives: Paramount Pictures

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