Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age: At the American Film Institute - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140004054X ISBN 13: 9781400040544

Publisher: Knopf, 2006

Synopsis

The first book to bring together these interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute’s renowned seminars—a series that has been in existence for almost forty years, since the founding of the Institute itself.

Here are the legendary directors, producers, cinematographers and writers—the great pioneers, the great artists—whose work led the way in the early days of moviemaking and still survives from what was the twentieth century’s art form. The book is edited—with commentaries—by George Stevens, Jr., founder of the American Film Institute and the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies’ Harold Lloyd Master Seminar series.

Here talking about their work, their art—picture making in general—are directors from King Vidor, Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang (“I learned only from bad films”) to William Wyler, George Stevens and David Lean.

Here, too, is Hal Wallis, one of Hollywood’s great motion picture producers; legendary cinematographers Stanley Cortez, who shot, among other pictures, The Magnificent Ambersons, Since You Went Away and Shock Corridor and George Folsey, who was the cameraman on more than 150 pictures, from Animal Crackers and Marie Antoinette to Meet Me in St. Louis and Adam’s Rib; and the equally celebrated James Wong Howe.

Here is the screenwriter Ray Bradbury, who wrote the script for John Huston’s Moby Dick, Fahrenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man, and the admired Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplays for Sabrina, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and North by Northwest (“One day Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore.’”).

And here, too, are Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (“Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It’s absolutely impossible to improvise”).

These conversations gathered together—and published for the first time—are full of wisdom, movie history and ideas about picture making, about working with actors, about how to tell a story in words and movement.

A sample of what the moviemakers have to teach us:

Elia Kazan, on translating a play to the screen: “With A Streetcar Named Desire we worked hard to open it up and then went back to the play because we’d lost all the compression. In the play, these people were trapped in a room with each other. As the story progressed I took out little flats, and the set got smaller and smaller.”

Ingmar Bergman on writing: “For half a year I had a picture inside my head of three women walking around in a red room with white clothes. I couldn’t understand why these damned women were there. I tried to throw it away . . . find out what they said to each other because they whispered. It came out that they were watching another woman dying. Then the screenplay started—but it took about a year. The script always starts with a picture . . . ”

Jean Renoir on actors: “The truth is, if you discourage an actor you may never find him again. An actor is an animal, extremely fragile. You get a little expression, it is not exactly what you wanted, but it’s alive. It’s something human.”

And Hitchcock—on Hitchcock: “Give [the audience] pleasure, the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”

About this title

About the Author:

George Stevens, Jr., is an award-winning writer, director and producer, and founder of the American Film Institute. He has received eleven Emmys, two Peabody Awards and seven Writers Guild of America Awards for his television productions, including the annual Kennedy Center Honors, The Murder of Mary Phagan and Separate but Equal. His production The Thin Red Line was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture. He worked with his father, acclaimed director George Stevens, on his productions of Shane, Giant and The Diary of Anne Frank and in 1962 was named head of the United States Information Agency's motion picture division by Edward R. Murrow. Stevens was director of the AFI from 1967 until 1980, before returning to film and television production. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

It sounds like bragging, but we didn’t borrow from the bank. We kept a certain amount of money aside and financed our own pictures. In a way we gambled a little heavier than some people do at Las Vegas, but we always got away with it.

HAROLD LLOYD

(Born in Burchard, Nebraska, 1893—Died 1971)

There are few more fondly remembered screen images than the young man with horn-rimmed glasses desperately clinging to the hand of a clock high over Los Angeles. That young man was seventy-six years old the night he joined twenty aspiring filmmakers who had earlier seen a thirty-five-millimeter print of Kid Brother in the old library of the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills. For most of them this was their first look at Harold Lloyd, a comic genius whose screen triumphs four decades earlier had made him one of the world’s most famous faces, an international star who produced his films and took responsibility for every detail. He never took director credit, but he was the guiding light of his comedies.

Lloyd owned his films and preserved them, but kept such a tight grip on them that he missed the opportunity for the kind of revivals enjoyed by his contemporary rivals, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In fact, most filmgoers remember him only for the famous clock scene in Safety Last! because it is seen so often in film history compilations. But in the 1920s audiences crowded into theaters and howled at Lloyd’s antics in Grandma’s Boy, Girl Shy, The Freshman, The Kid Brother and Speedy—which were always accompanied by a live orchestra. I remember Lloyd insisting that a piano was all right for two-reelers, but you had to have a big orchestra for features.

He was slight at five foot nine, optimistic and genial. When he arrived at AFI he seemed more like someone’s happy uncle than a man whose success had enabled him to build a forty-four-room house in Beverly Hills with a hundred-foot waterfall, a nine-hole golf course and a staff of sixteen full-time gardeners.

Lloyd gave the world thrills and laughs. His era was the magical time of grand movie palaces, huge audiences and shared laughter, and his legacy includes some of the finest comedies ever made. It’s just as well that Lloyd, a perfectionist who died two years after his AFI seminar, didn’t live to see the postage-stamp screens of the modern shopping mall.

I invited him to be AFI’s first speaker because I felt it important to establish this series with a pioneer who went back to the roots of American filmmaking, a pioneer who understood the importance of AFI’s goal of preserving our motion picture heritage.

Lloyd’s friend and colleague King Vidor joined the fellows in the questioning.

HAROLD LLOYD

September 23, 1969

May I just say that being a guest here tonight, I feel highly honored being in on the initial shove-off, as it were, of the AFI Conservatory. Certainly I’m sure that everyone here, every guest you have, is rooting that it’s going to go tremendous places. I’m happy to say that I have the honor also of being one of the original men on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and to tell the truth, I don’t believe it was as big as this when we started. I was on the original board that elected Doug Fairbanks, Sr., president, and it has gone quite a ways, so I’d say that if your institute here gathers momentum and keeps going, you may well outdistance the Academy Awards. I hope that takes place.

This picture that you’ve just seen, Kid Brother, well, we had a little problem with that one. It is what I call a “character comedy.” I made two different types of pictures. I made what we call “gag pictures,” for instance Safety Last!, where I climbed a building and hung on a clock. But Kid Brother is more what I call a character comedy because we start slow, we plant the character, we very carefully try and let it grow, letting the picture gain momentum as it goes on through to the end. I think we accomplished that. Now, where we took quite a chance with Kid Brother was in putting a fast-moving half-hour composite at the front of it with mostly comedy business and gags. After you’ve gone that length of time and then stop—and start a picture from scratch to build your character—you are taking quite a chance.

I used to hear stories about how adroit you and the cameramen were at slowing down right in the middle of a scene. Did you have the same cameraman with you all the time?

Yes, Walter Lundin. He was with me for years and years.

These were all done with hand-cranked cameras?

That’s right.

I was amazed at the scene with the bus running through what seemed to be normal traffic. They must have had everything else on the street move at a snail’s pace.

No, that was done right down here in the streets. I mean, we had our own traffic. We did that in New York, too. In fact there was a picture called Speedy where I had two horses pulling a horse cart down the thing, and we’d block off about three blocks. We looked like we had the whole police force there with us. We had our own traffic. It wasn’t cheating. Of course, we had a terrible time on that one. One of our own cars got in the way of the horses, and to keep from running into the car, the man had to pull the horse and go down the subway. It didn’t hurt the horse, I’m happy to say, but we never used him again. He was a little shy after that. But these scenes you saw here were shot with our own traffic and generally with the car in front or in back with the camera. The camera was taking every bit as much of a chance.

The bus was going very much faster than anything else?

We had that bus on a cantilever and the bus tipped itself, so as we’d go around the corner we’d tip it and over you’d go. One thing you had to watch was when you’re hanging over the edge—which I was—that you didn’t get your leg caught in between the tip. But we actually did all that stuff. You see, you can’t slow your camera down too much because the pedestrians look jerky. In fact in the film they might be jerky, but we didn’t want them to look that way.

What speeds did the cameras run at?

I’d say they were down around fourteen frames per second, except in some places they might drop it even more. As you were saying, the cameramen in those days had a certain technique and an ability to really keep that crank going. The majority of the audience think we cranked that way, they think we wanted it to go exceptionally fast, and they accept that as the way we made it. Of course, everyone here knows it’s not true, but no matter how many times you tell people it was cranked at a much different speed, and that you had to get a much smaller number of frames through the camera than you do now and therefore it’s got to go much faster, they don’t hear you at all. As much as it’s been repeated, I don’t think the majority of people have any idea about speed. They don’t care, really. I guess if they did care, your picture wouldn’t be worth a damn. But the students here would know the difference.

Now, a picture that I was always afraid of was Safety Last! because I had several scenes in there and they moved pretty fast. But I put it in front of an audience, and it didn’t seem to spoil the laughs any. I showed it recently to a group of high school students at Hollywood High and it went as well as it ever did with the crowd I first made it for. So why am I worrying about speed?

Do you think audiences today like the film because of the fast pace?

In some cases they might, and in other places, no. But I think if your comedy is basic enough and they’re with you—they’re laughing with you as well as at you—I really don’t think it makes too much difference.

There’s a thematic element in The Kid Brother, and I’m curious about how it evolved and how you feel about it now.

Basically the theme is “brains over brawn.” In the film I have two older brothers who are behemoths, and I’m the puny little fellow, the boy who thinks and in the end outwits those people who just use their muscles. In a lot of the pictures—especially the character comedies—we tried to have some kind of hidden theme in there. I guess if you boil it down to “be yourself” that would be about the shortest you could make it.

But when it comes to the theme of a picture, we’re supposed to be comics, and the audience came to get a chuckle or two. I’d go back to another picture we made that Hal Roach and I had a little contention on, and we were both right, in a way. Hal Roach and I made Grandma’s Boy and we previewed it, and it kind of lay there, to a certain degree. The film had a fine theme in it, that of “mind over matter.” The boy’s a terrific coward and his grandmother recognizes that. To help him out she gives him a talisman that she says his grandfather had owned. His grandfather had been more cowardly than he, but with this talisman he [the boy] just can’t fail, and he becomes a great hero. Of course, at the end he finds out that the talisman was just a handle to her umbrella. He finally realized he’d accomplished these things himself. But we didn’t put enough comedy in it, so the audience didn’t laugh as much as they should have.

Did you ever preview any of your pictures?

I thi...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 140004054X
• ISBN 13: 9781400040544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 736
• Editor: Stevens Jr. George