by Bryson, Bill
Los Angeles in 1927 was America’s fastest-growing city, and its richest when measured per capita. The population of greater Los Angeles, including the unincorporated communities of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, had more than doubled in a decade to almost 2.5 million, and those lucky citizens were 60 percent better off than the average American elsewhere. And what accounted for much of that was Southern California’s most celebrated industry: motion pictures.
By 1927, Hollywood was producing some eight hundred feature films a year, 80 percent of the world’s total output, plus some twenty thousand short features. Movies were America’s fourth-largest industry, employing more people than Ford and General Motors put together, and generating over $750 million for the economy—four times more than was earned by all sports and live entertainments combined. Twenty thousand movie theaters sold a hundred million tickets a week. On any given day, one-sixth of all Americans were at the pictures.
It seemed crazy that such a huge and popular business could be struggling, but it was. The problem was that turnover was so rapid that few individual pictures made much profit. Programs were sometimes changed three or even four times a week, so there was a constant need for more product. Studios were churning out as many as four new films a week, a rate that was clearly incompatible with quality. When somebody pointed out to MGM chief Irving Thalberg that it was wrong to put a beach scene into a movie set in Paris since Paris patently is not on any coastline, Thalberg looked at the person in astonishment. “We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris,” he replied.
As audiences became more discerning in where they sat, if not always what they watched, theater owners built bigger, more sumptuous theaters in the hopes of coaxing in more people at higher prices. Big theaters began to appear from about 1915 (a reminder that while Europe was at war America was at the pictures), but the golden age of the picture palace was the 1920s. Theaters were built on a scale that was truly epic, with auditoriums that could seat two thousand or more patrons in an atmosphere of opulence greater than any they had experienced anywhere before. People, it was said, went to Loew’s theaters just to enjoy the restrooms.
Architects borrowed freely and imaginatively from any culture or cultural period that had ever built on a grand scale—Persian, Moorish, Italian Renaissance, baroque, Mesoamerican, gilded French. Egyptian motifs became especially popular after the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922. At the Tivoli in Chicago the marbled lobby was said to be an almost exact copy of the king’s chapel at Versailles except presumably for the smell of popcorn.
The problem was that movies alone couldn’t fill such a large volume of seats. Theater owners had to provide extra attractions—musical performances, newsreels, serials, a comic turn, perhaps a magician or other novelty act, dance demonstrations, a round or two of a popular game called Screeno. Some of the big theaters spent as much as $2,800 a week on orchestras alone. Increasingly, the picture became a minor feature of the entire package.
In 1927, an industry insider named Harold E. Franklin produced a book with a dull title but a worrisome message. Motion Picture Theater Management outlined with clinical precision the grim economics of motion picture screening. Rent on a typical new movie palace took roughly a third of gross receipts, and advertising swallowed up half as much again. Orchestras lopped another 15 percent off the intake, and live entertainers typically took about 7 percent more. When all the fixed costs of staff salaries, utility bills, maintenance, property taxes, and so on were factored in, the profit in even the best-case scenario could never be more than a sliver of overall takings.
Despite the economic risks—indeed, folly—of building ever larger theaters, owners somehow persuaded themselves that the answer was to keep doing so. The first half of 1927 alone saw the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, where patrons could enjoy movies from within the sanctum of a faux Buddhist pagoda; the 3,600-seat Norshore Theatre in Chicago, whose interiors were a confection of costly rococo; the similarly ornate and gleaming 3,100-seat Proctor’s 86th Street Theatre in New York; and the granddaddy of them all, the vast, bejeweled Roxy Theatre on 50th Street at Seventh Avenue in New York. Everything about the Roxy was without parallel: it seated 6,200 people; the dressing rooms could accommodate 300 performers; a 118-piece orchestra made every movie a symphonic as well as visual experience; an organ so massive it needed three men to play it provided musical interludes; 14 Steinway pianos were on permanent standby; the air in the theater was cooled and freshened by giant machines in the basement; and drinking fountains dispensed ice-cold water—a thrilling novelty. The Roxy even boasted its own “hospital” where, as the literature proudly noted, “even a major operation can be performed if necessary.” So dazzling was the infrastructure that even Scientific American sent a reporter to write a feature. A cartoon in The New Yorker showed a child in the lobby asking her mother in hushed awe, “Mama, does God live here?”
Building the theater was estimated to have cost between $7 million and $10 million. The money came from a film producer named Herbert Lubin, who was effectively bankrupted by the project, but the name and vision came from Samuel Lionel Rothafel—known to one and all as “Roxy.” A Minnesotan, Rothafel grew up in Stillwater, twenty miles east of St. Paul, the son of a shoemaker, and was headed for a career in professional baseball when he was unexpectedly sidetracked (through a romantic entanglement) into theater management. He quickly distinguished himself as a showman with a particular gift for rescuing troubled operations. The idea of combining movie presentations with live shows was a Roxy invention. The most notable fact about Roxy himself was that he didn’t actually like movies. He lived in an apartment hidden above the theater’s five-story-high rotunda.
The opening of the new Roxy was such a momentous occasion that President Coolidge and Vice President Charles Dawes both sent congratulations (though Coolidge in his predictably odd way praised Rothafel for some equipment he had donated to the Walter Reed hospital in Washington and never mentioned the new theater).
The new Roxy took in $127,000 in its first week, but such business could never be sustained. The New Yorker, in the “Talk of the Town” column in the summer of 1927, noted that just three New York movie houses—the Paramount, the Roxy, and the Capitol—offered seventy thousand seats a day.*
While the picture houses were struggling to maintain their audiences, things were not going terribly well on the production side of the business either. The previous November unions representing the craft trades—painters, carpenters, electricians, and the like—had secured something called the Studio Basic Agreement, which granted them important and costly concessions. The studios were now terrified of being squeezed similarly by actors and writers. With this in mind, thirty-six people from the creative side of the industry met for dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in January 1927 and formed a kind of executive club to promote—but even more to protect—the studios. It was a reflection of their own sense of self-importance that they called it the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, elevating the movies from popular entertainment to something more grandly artistic, scientific, and literally academic. In the second week of May, while the world fretted over the missing airmen Nungesser and Coli, the academy was formally inaugurated at a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. (The idea of having an awards ceremony was something of an afterthought, and wasn’t introduced until the academy’s second anniversary dinner in 1929.)
Then came a stunning setback. On July 9, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered an immediate end to the system known as block booking, wherein motion picture theaters were required to take all or most of a studio’s output, not just its more desirable pictures. Block booking had sustained Hollywood for years. Under it, exhibitors might be compelled to take as many as fifty dreadful to mediocre pictures in order to get perhaps two or three more promising ones. The FTC ruling threw everything into uncertainty, and left the motion picture industry in the excee
dingly odd position of being hugely successful and gravely imperiled at the same time.
Something radical was needed to put the movie business back on track. In Los Angeles, a tiny, somewhat ragtag studio named Warner Bros. stood ready to provide it with a novel picture with sound called The Jazz Singer.
It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh.
The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous.
Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage.
Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made.
Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.
Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow.
Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.
Despite its entrancing aerial sequences and affecting story of bravery, camaraderie, and loss, many people went to Wings not to thrill at the aerial acrobatics, but to gaze in admiration and longing at its female lead, the enchanting Clara Bow.
Bow was just twenty-two years old in 1927 but already a Hollywood veteran. Her background could not have been tougher. She was born into poverty in the Bay Ridge district of Brooklyn and was raised by a mother who was frequently drunk and always dangerously unstable. Once as a child Clara awoke to find her mother holding a knife to her throat. (Eventually Mrs. Bow was committed to an asylum.)
Bow arrived in Hollywood in 1923, having won a photographic competition, and quickly became a star. She was universally adored by those who worked with her. She worked hard, routinely putting in fifteen-hour days, and often going from one movie straight into another. She made fifteen films in 1925 alone, thirty-five altogether between 1925 and 1929. Once she worked on three films at the same time. Her talent as an actress, and no doubt as a person, was an ability to convey an array of emotions, from demure innocence to shameless lust and back again, in a single winsome glance. “She danced even when her feet were not moving,” the studio mogul Adolph Zukor once said of her. “Some part of her was always in motion, if only her great rolling eyes. It was an elemental magnetism, an animal vitality, that made her the center of attraction in any company.”
Her personal life was rather less successful. She was dazzlingly promiscuous. According to Wellman, during the filming of Wings Bow had relationships (not all necessarily consummated—but not necessarily not, as it were) with Buddy Rogers, Richard Arlen, a stunt pilot, two pursuit pilots, “and a panting writer.” At one point in the 1920s, she was engaged to five men in four years. In the same period she had liaisons with many others. Once, according to Roger Kahn, her boyfriend came home and realized there was someone hiding in her bathroom. “Come on out so I can knock your teeth out, you yellow son of a bitch!” the boyfriend yelled. The door opened and out stepped a sheepish Jack Dempsey. She spent much of the summer of 1927 draped like a wet towel over Gary Cooper, whom she had met on the set of Wings, in which he had a small part as a doomed airman.
Bow was originally billed as the “Brooklyn Bonfire,” then as the “Hottest Jazz Baby in Films,” but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the “It Girl.” “It” was first a two-part article and then a novel by a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn, who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating (“she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent”) and for being the mistress for some years of Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India. “It,” as Glyn explained, “is that quality possessed by some few persons which draws all others with its magnetic life force. With it you win all men if you are a woman—and all women if you are a man.” Asked by a reporter to name some notable possessors of “It,” Glyn cited Rudolph Valentino, John Gilbert, and Rex the Wonder Horse. Later she extended the list to include the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
It the novel was a story in which the two principal characters—Ava and Larry, both dripping with “It”—look at each other with “burning eyes” and “a fierce gleam” before getting together to “vibrate with passion.” As Dorothy Parker summed up th
e book in The New Yorker, “It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam-launches.”
The motion picture was completely different. Although Glyn received a screen credit for It, the story as filmed bore no relation to anything she had ever written. All that remained of Glyn’s earlier effort was the title. In the movie, Bow played the part of Betty Lou, a lively and good-natured department store salesclerk who decides to woo and win the store’s dishy owner, one Cyrus Waltham.
The movie was an enormous hit in 1927. With Wings, it confirmed Bow as Hollywood’s leading female star. She received forty thousand letters a week—more than the population of a fair-sized town. In the summer of 1927, her career seemed set to go on indefinitely. In fact, it was nearly at an end. Winsome and enchanting as she was to behold, her Brooklyn accent was the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard, and in the new world of talking pictures that would never do.
Considering that moving pictures and recorded sound had both independently existed since the 1890s, it took a surprisingly long time for anyone to work out how to put them together. The problem was twofold. First was the matter of sound projection. Nothing existed that would allow clear, natural-sounding speech to be played to an auditorium full of people, particularly in the new cavernous spaces of the 1920s. Equally intractable was the challenge of synchronization. Designing a machine that could precisely match voices and moving lips defeated all attempts at solution. As events demonstrated, it was easier to fly a man across the Atlantic than to capture his voice on film.
If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention.