Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics)

by Sragow, Michael

  Yet another nascent Hollywood luminary was hanging around racing cars back then. Howard Hawks, the Pasadena rich kid who became Fleming’s pal, traced their relationship to a dirt-track race Hawks said they competed in when he was about eighteen and Fleming, now going back and forth between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, was about twenty-five. “[When] I used to drive a race car,” Hawks told the film critic Richard Schickel,

  in one race there was a fellow coming up on the outside and I put him to the fence. We weren’t very polite about driving in those days. I won the race. After the race was over, I saw the fellow coming and I thought, Oh Lord, here we go. I’m going to have a fight. Instead he came up and he said, “That was pretty good. But,” he said, “you better not try it again because next time I’m going to run right into you” . . . We used to be on the point of a fight many times, but we never quite got into it. We always had to laugh before it started.

  Hawks’s biographer, Todd McCarthy, has written, “True, false, or merely exaggerated, the story sets the tone for an enduring friendship that had a strongly competitive edge but that the men never allowed to become endangered by personal or professional jealousy, despite repeated opportunities over the years.” The story was probably false: an early example of Hawks’s retrospective one-upmanship. Hawks entered Cornell University in the fall of 1914. Fleming stayed enrolled in the hard-knocks school of early filmmaking.

  In those days, knowing how to drive a car was as crucial to the makers of outdoor adventures as knowing how to ride a horse. Fleming wrote for a 1944 Lion’s Roar article that in 1914 “we used to load director and principals in one car, cameraman and crew in another, and go looking for scenery that would look well as background. Sometimes we changed stories to suit the scenery!” As he put it in Action, cowboy actors brought “their own props from the bunkhouses and corrals,” and autos were so rare “that few actors knew how to drive and not many cared to attempt it. As a result, those of us who could drive were invariably used to double for the stars in those early thrill scenes when automobiles were in the picture.” Cowboys left the studio an hour early so they could ride to location on horseback. “The natives were never quite sure whether it was a hanging party or a movie outfit that rode down upon them before the sun was high in the heavens. We frequently used them for atmosphere.”

  It was a good thing that Fleming had grown up with California landscapes, for he saw less of them when he became a cinematographer than when he was a driver—as a cameraman he had to carry equipment in his lap en route, and it blocked his view. Dwan and his Flying A compatriots put a premium on speed, utility, and movement. They were, Fleming wrote in Action, making motion “pictures and we moved nearly everything but mountains. We employed house painters and carpenters who could achieve their art with brush, hammer and nails, because regular stage technicians were familiar only with canvas scenery and structures of but one dimension. We even took on ‘powder monkeys’ from the mines to work as actors, because in the movies we used real fire, and when the script called for an explosion we didn’t do it with bass drums, but dynamite.”

  Without ego inflation, Fleming painted a self-portrait of a gutsy youth making his way into a brave new aesthetic world sans stuffiness or rules:

  There was no science of artificial lighting. It was the California sunlight, of course, that originally brought the motion picture industry to the West. In addition, we had the advantage of a variety of scenery which no stage artist could hope to duplicate. On one side there was the Pacific, on the other the snow-peaks of the Sierra and in between the rolling range. When the script called for a train scene we set up near a railroad right-of-way and if there happened to be water in the story, we located on a stream, or down beside the sea. Work began at 7 o’clock in the morning and we knocked off about 4 in the afternoon, usually with our picture in the can.

  According to Action, even during Fleming’s days with the Flying A, its crews fell prey to marauders. When he was assisting Neilan on camera during a location shoot in La Mesa, “bullets began to sing around the camera from a mesquite thicket. It was evident that the sniper wanted to wreck the camera rather than the operator, but that didn’t prevent me from flattening on the ground, and I wasn’t alone.” The culprit, Neilan decided, was somebody who “wants to put us out of business”—and not necessarily an agent of Edison’s patents group. “There was war among the independents in those days and on some occasions it filtered on down through the ranks.”

  Nevertheless, the company put out two pictures a week so efficiently that many casts and crews ended up with four free days out of every seven. That left plenty of time for Fleming and Burton to savor Santa Barbara’s balmy hills and beaches or take that three-hour train ride to Los Angeles.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, some scrappy filmmaking conditions, the pioneer cinematographer Overbaugh spoke of his Flying A years as a lark. Before the California outpost got a lab of its own, the film was edited on the camera negative, then sent to Chicago for printing. During one period of economic squeeze, the moviemakers could use only four-hundred-foot rolls of film instead of thousand-foot rolls (one thousand feet—roughly ten minutes’ worth of film—was the standard length of a one-reeler). When the action outlasted a four-hundred-foot roll, the actors would “play statue” until the cameraman could reload and let the director finish the scene. “There were quite a few incidents,” Overbaugh summarized, with amusing understatement. When a planned collision of two cars—one filled with dummies—went awry, the impact caused mannequins to “skyrocket” into State Street, where onlookers fainted dead away.

  Dwan, the top man on the lot, said the corporate officers in Chicago were hands-off and congratulatory. “They didn’t make any comment except ‘Fine, keep them coming.’ ” Of course, Dwan made it easy for the company to be appreciative. He was a thrifty, all-business filmmaker. “We never shot over two thousand feet. I was very sparing with film—all of us were. Very often, if I had gone out and hired twenty extra horses and men for a chase, I’d make two or three extra chases since I was paying these men for a certain period of time, and so I accumulated a library . . . That was economical and saved us from doing it over and over.” Dwan even married within the company, to the leading lady Pauline Bush, in 1915.

  “In the ‘middle ages’ of silent pictures,” Fleming once wrote, “a director concentrated on telling his story through action and pantomime. It wasn’t particularly important what an actor was thinking while walking—or running—through the scenes. By makeup and broad ‘mugging’ plus explanatory titles, you established your player’s type and let it go at that.” But as he said in Action, “There was some fine acting in those old flickers on occasion and always there was the gamble of hardship and danger against fame and fortune.”

  One of the few Flying A players to make a lasting impact was J. ( Jack) Warren Kerrigan—“a tremendous figure in those days. He was a wonderful individual, big, handsome, had a Roman-type nose,” said Harold Lloyd, who watched him from afar when Lloyd was an extra and Kerrigan was a star at Universal. “He was certainly the star of that lot,” said Lloyd. Fleming recalled, “He was known as the Gibson Man, because he seemed to be the masculine type which served as model for the drawings by Charles Dana Gibson, who was then America’s foremost illustrator . . . When he came to us at American Films, Kerrigan still considered pictures as a temporary medium, good enough to join between theater engagements. He became the idol of the screen.” Jack Kerrigan was also gay. “Quite a lady himself” is how Allan Dwan described him many decades later.

  There was some raw kidding between the silver-screen idol and the ultra-heterosexual cowboy extras and crew, but there was also enough hard-nosed tolerance in the corps for all to get on with their jobs. In an enclave like the Flying A in Santa Barbara, everyone knew he or she was part of the same celluloid circus. Kerrigan was powerful enough to promote his twin brother into the position of business manager at the Flying A. And when Kerrigan, the studio’s to
p gun in front of the camera, had a showdown with Dwan, the top gun behind it, the outcome was clear. Hutchinson, like many a latter-day studio chief, fired Dwan. Dwan ended up in L.A. at Universal. (Before long, so did Wallace Reid—and Kerrigan.)

  Just as Fleming’s connections with Dwan, Neilan, and Overbaugh brought him into Santa Barbara moviemaking, they’d soon propel him back to Los Angeles. Under Dwan’s aegis, Neilan became a director at Universal and parlayed that experience and another acting stint (this time at Biograph) into powerful jobs at the Kalem studio in Santa Monica—first as a producer-director and head of his own unit and then as production chief. Neilan hired Overbaugh to head his camera department with Fleming as his assistant. Although the locale had changed, the business hadn’t. Wherever he went, Fleming still found himself most often shooting “horse operas,” again at the rate of one or two a week. These dramatic shorts, mainstays of theatrical bills that also included brief comedies and newsreels, remained in demand even after most theaters started scheduling features of increasing length, from forty and fifty minutes up.

  Not yet the intricate complexes they’d become over the next two decades, the Los Angeles studios were patches of bungalow offices and bare-bones stages with wooden platforms for flats and muslin or canvas reflectors, deflectors, and diffusers. A single business often ran several studios simultaneously—Kalem already had one studio in Glendale and one in Santa Monica, and in 1914 Neilan established a new site for Kalem in Hollywood at the former Essanay Studios.

  In these rough-and-tumble days, Fleming got the broken nose that added to his hard-bitten handsomeness. His daughters believe their father smashed his proboscis in a racing crack-up, but the premier silent-film historian Kevin Brownlow heard that the real culprit was Art Acord. Also a veteran of the Flying A (he replaced Kerrigan when the star went to Universal), Acord was the most rambunctious of the cowboy actors who would rodeo or ride the Wild West circuit in the spring, then ranch in the fall and find picture work in the winter. “World Champion Bulldogger” in 1912, he won renown for his off-camera fistfights with Hoot Gibson. “With both alcohol and fury in his veins, Acord was as spectacular a sight in the barroom as he was on a horse,” writes Brownlow. The fight with Fleming may have erupted when Acord starred in a 1913 two-reeler called The Claim Jumper, whose cast featured a future actor-director friend and MGM colleague of Fleming’s, Jack Conway. Brownlow writes that Acord “broke Fleming’s nose, when Fleming cast doubt upon his cowboy origins.” But could Acord’s authenticity ever have been in doubt? More likely, Fleming ridiculed the improbable chirp that emerged from the mouth of the square-jawed Acord, who was destined to speak only four lines in a sound film (a 1930 Gibson, Trailin’ Trouble) before committing suicide in Chihuahua, Mexico.

  “When something went wrong we could not sing out for a new camera,” wrote Fleming. “We poked our head down in the works and made repairs, while Neilan and the crew stood by without any too much patience.” It was at Kalem’s Hollywood studio that Fleming first branched out into comedy by shooting entries in the slapstick Ham and Bud series starring an endomorphic Mutt and Jeff team—the six-foot Lloyd Hamilton and the four-foot-eleven-inch Bud Duncan—and, sometimes, Neilan himself. “The legend of the great silent-film director who dissipates his own success in a welter of fast parties and bootleg liquor has at least some basis in reality: the crippled career of Marshall Neilan.” That’s how the film historian Richard Koszarski summarized Mickey Neilan. The biographer Jack Spears nailed him as “the Hollywood version of the Scott Fitzgerald image in a fabulous period of bad booze and good times. ‘I can stand anything but to be bored,’ he once said.” Hailed as “the youngest Big director in the motion picture industry” in 1918, “Mickey was a genius who didn’t grow up until it was too late,” said that dazzling comedienne, Colleen Moore. Fleming had the luck to know him on the rise. Neilan would soon start making a string of Mary Pickford movies of enduring charm, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Little Princess, Stella Maris, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M’liss, and Daddy-Long-Legs, as well as Tess of the D’Urbervilles with his second wife, Blanche Sweet.

  As the studios consolidated and their bosses became true moguls, Neilan refused to blunt his criticism, even if its ethnic slant marked him as an anti-Semite—just as Fleming’s gibes at David O. Selznick would brand him as one decades later. Said Lina Basquette, who acted for Neilan in Penrod (1922), “You must remember that lots of people were anti-Semitic in those days. They just didn’t say so the way Mickey Neilan did.” Budd Schulberg, who liked him “a lot,” says Neilan shared some Gentile directors’ “built-in resentments of the Jewish bosses,” who were “not the greatest people; not the greatest Jews. It was something these directors expressed more amongst themselves, when they were bitching about things.” Neilan made Louis B. Mayer uneasy with his irreverence and sauciness from the moment the fledgling producer met the already-renowned director on the set of Mayer’s first Hollywood movie, In Old Kentucky. In 1924, Mayer’s company and the Metro and Goldwyn Studios merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Mayer celebrated with lengthy staff-wide pep talks. Neilan walked out of one proclaiming, “Oh, shit! I’ve got a picture to make!”

  Still, Neilan’s ability to wring the best out of his actors impressed his bosses—and Fleming. “Irishmen like Mickey or Jack Conway or Tay Garnett had a great deal of ham in them,” Basquette recalled. “With them talking you through a scene, and with the music playing in the background, why, they could get a performance out of a turnip.” Neilan would act out the movie’s parts himself for his actors, then lie back during shooting to see if the performers were merging his conceptions with their own broad or subtle talents. Ironically, his last work in movies would be as an actor for a very different kind of director, Elia Kazan, in A Face in the Crowd (1957). He brought his old silent-comedy chops to the role of a stuffed-shirt senator who needs media coaching from Andy Griffith’s megalomaniac TV personality, Lonesome Rhodes. Griffith recalled, “We were shooting a scene in a duck blind, I believe it was, and he started sinking, his feet started sinking, in the marsh, you know. And he did it like a silent movie. He was waving his arms around saying, ‘I’m sinking,’ but all with his arms. We all got amused at that.” (Kazan cut that scene but retained a reference to how ridiculous the senator looked shooting ducks.)

  To Neilan, the signal traits of screen actors were “beauty, personality, charm, temperament, style, and the ability to wear clothes”; the guiding emotional intelligence would belong to the director. Fleming hadn’t been a stage actor, and he did his job differently from Neilan. Like Neilan, he saw the need for a director to convey the essence of a scene and then calmly observe where the performers would go before he built on it. But for Fleming, the process wasn’t a matter of pre-acting the parts or chewing them over in the manner of an art-theater director. He used his immense presence and vitality, his psychological cunning, and his powers of physical suggestion to throw the meaning of the drama into the souls of his actors as unerringly as a crack ventriloquist throws his or her voice into the mouths of sidekicks. Then he let the action take on a life of its own.

  Consider the testimony of Gene Reynolds, a child actor who became a notable television director. He collaborated closely with Fleming when the filmmaker was retaking some shots for the credited director, Richard Thorpe, on The Crowd Roars (1938). In his one big moment, Reynold’s character learns that his mother has died. Dissatisfied with Reynolds’s performance, Fleming talked him through the scene. Sixty-five years later Reynolds remembered, “The emotion in his voice made me get it. His emotion overtook me, so I did it and he got it in one or two takes. You could communicate as an actor with Fleming because he was not afraid of seeming vulnerable. Fleming got you to sense his belief in the scene. I could see it touching him, so it touched me.”

  In 1915, Dwan catapulted Fleming into the first ranks of filmdom—and a literal Hollywood Babylon—when he brought him into the Triangle Film Corporation. D. W. Griffith, one of
the three producers that Triangle was named for (the others were Mack Sennett and Thomas Ince), was in California shooting his mad masterpiece Intolerance. Brownlow has noted that an entire post-Griffith generation of Hollywood action directors cut their teeth by helping the Master on this project, and Fleming was one of them. Intolerance put him at the center of the most elaborate live-action scene in movie history: Griffith’s unbridled imagining of Persia’s ruler, Cyrus, storming Belshazzar’s Babylon. In his Adventures with D. W. Griffith, the cameraman Karl Brown says that Griffith “used dozens of assistants, each in charge of this unit or that.” He dressed them all in antique battle regalia and planted them among the extras on Babylon’s celestial walkways or parapets, or among the troops marching to assault it. They had their own battalions: “Another hundred to von Stroheim, another to Woody Van Dyke, more to George Hill, Vic Fleming, and so on.” They’d move their men based on the signals they got from Griffith’s first lieutenant, Monte Blue, either from the report of his revolver or from the waving of a red, green, or yellow flag.

  Fleming would go on to film the most famous crane shot in movie history for Gone With the Wind: the camera moving back and up to take in the wounded and dying soldiers of the Confederacy. Here he had a firsthand look at its most illustrious precedent: Griffith moving up and in on Babylon as its citizens crowd the streets for the Feast of Belshazzar. Using two elevator-mounted cameras on a moving platform, Griffith was able to hold in focus each member of his cast of thousands. In the red-tinted siege scenes, the flames of Babylon burned as vibrantly as those of Civil War Atlanta would on the Selznick lot more than twenty years later.

  Fleming had never been east before Dwan brought him along to shoot at the Triangle studios in New York City. “New York was the mecca to which nearly everyone in the business hoped to go, sooner or later,” Fleming wrote in 1939; “now,” he mused, “the New York people head for Hollywood.” For the young man with the broken nose and daredevil attitude, who had used his native intelligence and ingenuity to hammer and drive his way into a career in a fledgling industry, this was a leap into “fast company.” His breakthrough would come with an actor-producer whom Griffith didn’t understand: Douglas Fairbanks. Fleming’s first filmmaker-star relationship was different from the ones he would have with a slew of child actors like Reynolds or even with Cooper, Gable, and Tracy. When you shot or directed Douglas Fairbanks, the goal was to bottle electricity.