Alleviating rest

It is a question too tough to be shelved as to how far film has helped in that.It`s nice sometimes to have a shining light, but not if it leaves us a blurred mass, instead of a collection of alert, critical individuals.Eisenstein had come and gone in Hollywood, but many Russians had stayed.In the 1930s, there were people in pictures who went to Communist meetings, and read the Marxist texts.One day in 1938, Salka Viertel was lunching at the Brown Derby in Hollywood.Viertel was Austrian, and married to Berthold Viertel, a director.They had come to Hollywood in 1928 and lived in a house on Mabery Road in Santa Monica that was a salon for creative people, especially refugees.That day at the Brown Derby, she saw an old friend in the restaurant, Melchior Lengyel, an Hungarian playwright.Do you have any ideas?He said he`d think about it.Next day he called Mrs.Viertel and told her, yes, he did have something.Come over to the house and tell her, said Mrs.By the time Lengyel got to Mabery Road, Garbo was swimming in the pool.She stroked over to the side and put her elbows on the tiling.And Lengyel said, Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris.She meets romance and has an uproarious good time.Capitalism not so bad, after all.In a few days, the studio had paid $15,000 for those three sentences.Months later, Lengyel was nominated for the original story of Ninotchka, a picture that would not have been possible but for a quartet of Europeans who, one way or another, had come to the land of restaurants, pools, and fanciful money.As Ninotchka got under way it was agreed that Ernst Lubitsch, a Berliner, would direct it.Lubitsch had only lately returned from a visit to Moscow.He had gone there with high hopes, for in the late 1930s there were many in America, and among the Mabery Road crowd, who felt optimistic about the Soviet Union.But in Moscow, Lubitsch had been soured on the whole venture.He tried to meet Eisenstein, but was refused.He came home early, and though he never talked about the experience publicly, he was not the same man politically.But he never pursued that career.He became a gigolo, a journalist, and then a screenwriter, and in 1934 he came to America.He was drawn to Lubitsch, not just because of their similar histories, but because Wilder loved Lubitsch`s bittersweet tone.And so they made Ninotchka together, and Wilder was part of the collective wit that allowed for this exchange.As Ninotchka arrives in Paris, the three trade delegates she has been ordered to investigate meet her at the train station.How are things in Moscow? they ask.Very good, she answers.The last mass trials were a great success.And Lubitsch and Wilder and the others on the picture felt that Communists, no matter their intellectual integrity, lacked humor.The movies assumed that the times would get better, but that might depend on Fred outlasting Adolf.It is a moment of crisis in which entertainment cannot be separated from politics, no matter how hard the business leaders tried to ignore the link.So diversions were in order.Everything was happening at once.The movies were central in the crisis, and in crisis themselves as a business, but now radio was breathless with the simultaneity.Between 1930 and 1932, the price of a radio in America fell by half.Four million receivers were purchased, and by 1934 the medium reached 60 percent of the country.There were movie theaters within reach, but the small light in the radio was their rival, even if reception fluctuated in the remote places.Not even rural distance could escape the outer world.Adolf Hitler was a voice on radio before most citizens in the United States knew what he looked like.A few days later he put the banks on compulsory holiday.Two days later there was a 6.4 earthquake in Long Beach that killed 115 people, and for those impressionable storytellers in Southern California show business, it could not be missed as a metaphor.If this seems like ancient history, we still have crises that resonate with symbolic meaning.As earthquake, tsunami, and radiation struck Japan in 2011, America was hearing about its own fiscal downfall.But in 2011 there were so few movies that dealt with our troubles, or offered a delightful distraction from them.In the 1930s the movies shared in the nation`s troubles.From 1929 to 1933, national income dropped by half.And in 1933 the population of the country was 125 million.But the production cost of movies doubled, if only because of the heavy investment required to soundproof studios, to equip theaters for sound, and to pay the new generation of talent who could make talking pictures.This entailed composers, songs, and music.Astaire, Bette Davis, Cagney, Bogart, Dietrich, Laughton, Jeanette MacDonald, the Marx Brothers, Shirley Temple, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant, and the talent that could write their best lines.Nearly every movie studio suffered in the impossible equation of costs and revenue.From 1930 to 1932, Paramount went from a profit of $18.4 million to a loss of $21.0 million.That was characteristic.Every other enterprise suffered bankruptcy, or major reconstruction.Fox disappeared, to be replaced as Twentieth Century–Fox.The damage was done at the local level, too.From the late 1920s until 1933, the number of theaters in America fell from 23 thousand to 18 thousand.The two men were very different.Neither had had a higher education, though Mayer had learned to survive the power of the tsar, migratory poverty, and the brutality of his own father.For Thalberg the worst threats were the fragility of his constitution and overattention from his mother.Neither man thought of himself as an artist or a creator, because each believed there were more important tasks.And no student of film should overlook that assumption just because we don`t have men like Mayer and Thalberg anymore.They were editors, if you like, akin to the overseers of newspapers or magazines.And rightness, or family, social, and patriotic propriety, were at the heart of the movies he wanted to preside over.Thalberg was more enlightened, but only marginally.The actors came from the circus itself.But it was made at the studio of sunshine and domestic order.Another producer at the studio, Harry Rapf, warned against the film.When they have seen it, he said, people run out of the commissary and throw up. Thalberg took responsibility.He added that he felt Metro should not dodge the new horror genre, launched at Universal with Dracula and Frankenstein, both of them big hits, but adroitly set up to frighten and reassure the public.Freaks, by contrast, is still honored as a Hollywood movie that defies every concern for comfort in the factory system.But there it is, side by side with Tugboat Annie, produced by the same Harry Rapf, as a continuation of the unexpected screen chemistry established between Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery in Min and Bill from the previous year.He and Dressler had been paired in Min and Bill as lowlife waterfront types with hearts of rough gold.It was for that film, a hit, that Dressler won the Oscar.Beery and Dressler were contract stars, just like all the others.Some of the stars called this servitude, and Bette Davis worked as furiously as a Davis character to escape her Warners deal.But the studios looked after their preferred properties, and many stars built their reputation on the scripts, the camerawork, and the supporting players provided by the studio.The reunion of Beery and Dressler in Tugboat Annie exceeded expectations.The film is about a married couple who run a tugboat, but it`s really about the liberated humor and ham in the players.Mayer and Thalberg were happy to run the show that way, and they regarded directors as figures to be assigned, along with other craftsmen and technicians, studio space and budgeted funds.Tugboat Annie cost just over $600,000 and it made twice that sum in profits.It assists the total stress on youthfulness if old people are uncomplaining characters. In fact, Dressler looked older than her real age.Mayer encouraged that ignorance and told doctors to keep the news from her.But on location in Seattle, shooting Tugboat Annie, the actress saw a little cottage and told a publicity man she loved it.Whereupon, the story goes, Mayer had the studio buy the cottage and transport it down to Santa Barbara where the actress lived.So that the dying actress could sit in it during her last days!The screen can become your world, your residence.It`s a lovely story, good enough for a Dressler picture, but is it true?Such questions are a necessary response to the influence of the Hollywood system, out of which publicity and promotion passed into folklore, leaving legends so hard to confirm or deny that they undermine proof itself.It was regular practice for the studios to run articles, photographs, and interviews on their stars that were essentially fabricated.Events were fabricated.The atmosphere and values of a certain kind of movie story and its publicity have seeped into American culture as a whole, along with the overall hope that stories might be true.Suppose the legend says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?It is a dangerous resignation, and it may sustain deplorable educational standards in the land of the free.The pact Mayer and Thalberg made was in identifying their audience.For that they had to be a mixture of showmen, businessmen, and discreet political leaders such as had never existed before.Mayer and Thalberg came from humble origins, though Thalberg`s family had a modest import business, and he graduated from high school in Brooklyn and considered going to Columbia.Still, Mayer was the senior of the two and the better paid.Others would have said Thalberg was the more enlightened and the easier to work with, which only spurred Mayer`s feelings of rivalry.Mayer would not admit it to himself, but he was not handsome, or ingratiating.But his plainness was something he had in common with Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery and with those millions of customers who lived out of the light.As the Depression set in, it was clear that the studios were making their money from increasingly impoverished people by selling them a dream of infinite success and remote happiness.They could tell the world and themselves that the movies preached the gospel that anyone could make it in America, and Mayer was generous with uplifting stories of his own journey.Exactly right, but only with the corollary that nearly everyone will lose.So it`s instructive to clarify the creative character of the house, and to spell out the ways in which it defied or excluded the thing we call art.His family was of Hungarian descent, but his father was a successful cotton factor in Galveston.So King was in the city on September 8, 1900, when winds of 135 miles per hour struck.The streets were piled high with dead people, and I took the first tugboat out.On the boat I went up into the bow and saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.Vidor was a child of the generation excited by the chance to show such action in moving pictures to the millions.That excitement may never have been the same again as film became more commonplace.Everything in Vidor`s life and work clings to the passion of that novelty.His father suggested a business career.But King was led on by having a camera and by working in a Galveston theater, watching the public watch the screen.He even restaged the Galveston hurricane in a documentary, and trusted that it looked the way he remembered.He went to Los Angeles in 1916 and started directing pictures.He was married to a girl from Texas, Florence, and she became a star for a few years.But Vidor was so much more amiable or American, or Irving felt more relaxed with him.One day I had a talk with Irving Thalberg and told him I was weary of making ephemeral films.They came to town, played a week or so, then went their way to comparative obscurity or complete oblivion.I pointed out that only half the American population went to movies and not more than half of these saw any one film because their runs ended so quickly.If I were to work on something that I felt had a chance at long runs throughout the country or the world, I would put much more effort, or love, into its creation.Is that the search for art speaking, or the need for personal glory?Vidor wrote that in 1953, when the empire of movies was fading and when directors were not much esteemed in America.But Thalberg in 1925 was aroused by his hopes.Did Vidor have particular ideas?It`s not that war is neglected.There are large troop movements plus combat, and good buddies who are killed.But the problem of the war is, above all, that it becomes an obstacle to the romance it has made possible.Movie had come into its own in the time of the Great War, but only by reappraising and taming its true power and its historical lessons.For the masses the light shone on war was arousing and reassuring.No one in Hollywood believed they were involved in propaganda or advertising, yet the vast popular entertainment hardly dared move ahead without the idea of keeping the viewers happy and habituated enough to come back next week.At one point, Vidor had dreamed of an epic panorama filmed on a long, straight road.A second unit shot it, and all they could find was a crooked road.But before the film had loomed so large, the studio came to the director and warned him that it looked as if his percentage wasn`t going to work out!So Vidor agreed to a modest cash settlement instead.That was the factory system at work, the conniving that waited beneath the guise of friendship and collaboration.More or less, everyone believed he was being screwed.But chariot races are easier than complicated ideas.The Big Parade is an impressive picture still, and its battle scenes demonstrate Vidor`s eager eye for composition, action, and dynamics.But it is a love story, and it lacks any kind of pointed, let alone angry, commentary on why the war is being fought.It would be several years more, anywhere in the world, before anyone found the will to say the war should not have been fought, or that its existence was a measure of incompetent leadership or the failure of political systems.All Quiet had the appealing American actor Lew Ayres playing a young German soldier, and the story came from a German novel by Erich Maria Remarque.The battles outweigh the politics.Vidor moved on, confident but confused.He was a great director for his time, a dynamic picturemaker, but he had no consistency.Is that lack of character or the necessary opportunism of being a director in that system?Not long after The Big Parade, Thalberg caught up with him again and asked what he wanted to do next.Well, I suppose the average fellow walks through life and sees quite a lot of drama taking place around him.Never thought of it before, said Vidor.We are in the days of the innocent pitch!The first thought was to call the picture One of the Mob, but then The Crowd took over.It`s about an ordinary couple in New York City, John and Mary.They lose one child.Their fortunes sink, but they rally from the example of another child and because of their perseverance.As the camera ranges over a panorama of desks in an abstract setting, it is as if for the first time modern America has been presented on film, without melodrama or false sweeteners.Another appealing characteristic of Vidor showed up in the casting.A star personality would have defeated Vidor`s idealism.One day on the lot a man brushed past Vidor.The director looked up and knew this was the type he wanted.He discovered the man was a humble extra, James Murray.When Vidor told him he was a director with a part to cast, Murray turned surly and dubious.Sure, he said grudgingly, he`d do a test, but only if he had bus fare to get to the studio.Murray won the part, and he is so natural, so strong and vulnerable, he holds the picture together.Then he disappeared.Vidor had guessed he was a drunk.