Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  That we could almost dismiss, but the other two we couldn’t—two works by film scholars noted for their ability to find people, hunt up lost screenplays and production notes and dig at the facts, both books to be published within a week of each other next month.

  We’ve obtained permission to reprint the relevant portions of the two books, and the whole of that magazine article (including the stills) by way of introduction to this special issue dedicated to the Passing of the Western Movie from the American cinema—taken together, they seemed to strike exactly the right note about the film form we seem to have lost.

  Join us, then, in a trip backwards in time—twice, as it were—to both the real events that inspired the films, and to the movies made about them fifty years later.

  And, as they used to say on the Chisholm Trail, “always keep to the high ground and have your slicker handy!”

  —John Thomas Johns

  * * *

  From: The Boise System: Interviews with Fifteen Directors Who Survived Life in the Studios, by Frederick T. Yawts, Ungar (Film Book 3), 1972.

  (From the interview with James Selvors)

  Selvors:

  . . . the problems of doing Westerns of course in those days was finding suitable locations—that’s why they set up operations in Boise in the first place. See, no matter what steps people had taken, they’d never really gotten any good constant rainfall in the Idaho part of the basin—oh, they could make it rain occasionally, but never like anywhere else—it was the mountains to the west. They call it orographic uplift, an orographic plain. There used to be one on the west coast of Peru, but they fixed that back in the Nineteen-teens by fooling with the ocean currents down there. They tried that up here, too, in Washington State and Oregon, messed with the ocean currents; instead of raining in Idaho, all they got was more rain on the Pacific slope, which they did not need.

  Anyway, Griffith and Laemmle came out to Boise in ’09, 1910, something like that, because they could be out in what was left of the Plains in a few hours and they could almost guarantee 150 good-weather days a year.

  First thing the early filmmakers had to do was build a bunch of western towns, since there weren’t any out there (nobody with any sense ever stopped and put down roots in the Idaho Plains when Oregon was just a few days away). What few towns there had been had all rotted away (there still wasn’t much rain but it was a hell of a lot more than there had been sixty years before). The place actually used to be a desert—imagine that, with nothing growing but scrub. By the time the pioneer moviemakers got there it was looking like old pictures of Kansas and Nebraska from the 1850s—flat grasslands, a few small trees; really Western-looking. (God help anyone who wanted to make a movie set in one of the Old Deserts—you’ve got farms all up and down the Mojave River and Death Valley Reservoir and Great Utah Lake now that get fifty bales to the acre in cotton.) There was the story everybody’s heard about making the Western in one of the new nunatak areas in Antarctica—the snow’d melted off some three thousand square miles—taking fake cactus and sagebrush down there in the late ’40s. I mean, it looked like a desert, flat bare rock everywhere; everybody had to strip down to just shirt, pants, and hats and put on fake sweat—we heard it froze; the snow’s melted in Antarctica a whole lot, but don’t let anyone tell you it’s not still cold there—it has something to do with not getting as cold by a couple of degrees a year—like the mean temperature’s only risen like four degrees since the 1880s. (Filming icebergs is another thing—you either have to do miniatures in a tank, which never worked; use old stock footage, ditto; or go to Antarctica and blast the tops off all jaggedy with explosives—the ones in Antarctica are flat, they’re land ice; what everybody thinks of as northern icebergs were sea ice.) Somebody’s gonna have to do an article sometime on how the weather’s kept special effects people in business. . . .

  Int.:

  What was it about the Cloudbusters series that made them so popular?

  Selvors:

  Lots of people saw them. (laughs)

  Int.:

  No, seriously. They were started as short subjects, then went to steady B Westerns. Only Shadow Smith dying stopped production of them. . . .

  Selvors:

  I’ve talked to lots of people over the years about that. Those things resonate. They’re about exactly what they’re about, if you know what I mean. Remember Raining Cats and Dogs? The Second Johnstown Flood? Those were A pictures, big budgets, big stars? Well, they all came later, after the last Cloudbusters movie was made. I mean, we set out to make a film about the real taming of the West—how it was done, in fact. All these small independent outfits, going from place to place, making it rain, fixing up things, turning the West into a garden and a lush pastureland. That was the real West, not a bunch of people killing off Indians and shooting each other over rights to a mudhole. That stuff happened early on, just after the Civil War. By 1880 all that was changing.

  We wanted just to make a short, you know, a three-reeler, about thirty minutes—there was a hot documentary and a two-reel color cartoon going out with the A picture Up and Down the Front, about Canadians in the Big 1920 Push during the Great World War (that being the closest the U.S. got to it)—this was late ’34, early ’35 [release date April 23, 1935—Int.]. So that package was too much stuff for even a fifty-five-minute B picture. Goldfish and Thalberg came to me and George Mayhew and asked us if we had a three-reeler ready to go—we didn’t but we told them we did, and sat up all night working. Mayhew’d wanted to do a movie about the rainmakers and pluvicultists for a long time. There’d been an early silent about it, but had been a real stinker [Dam Burst at Sun Dog Gap, Universal 1911—Int.], so Mayhew thought up the plot, and the mood, and we knew Shadow Smith was available, and Mayhew’d written a couple of movies with “PDQ” Podmer in them so he thought up the “Doodad” character for him, and we went back to Thalberg next day and shook hands on it and took off for Boise the next morning.

  Int.:

  It was a beautiful little film—most people remember it being a feature.

  Selvors:

  Mayhew kicked butt with that script—lots of stuff in it, background and things, lots of action, but nothing seemed jammed in sideways or hurried. You remember that one was self-contained; I mean, it ended with the rain and everybody jumping up and down in mud puddles, and the Cloudbusters rolling out for the next place. I think if we’d never made another one, people would still remember The Cloudbusters.

  Int.:

  It was the first one to show the consequences, too—it ended with the Cloudbusters sitting in the Thunder Wagon bogged up to the wheelhubs and having to be pulled out by two teams of oxen.

  Selvors:

  That’s right. A beautiful touch. But it wasn’t called the Thunder Wagon yet. Most people remember it that way but it wasn’t, not in that one. That all came later.

  Int.:

  Really?

  Selvors:

  Really. Wasn’t until the second one their wagon was referred to as the Thunder Wagon. And it wasn’t painted on the side until the third one.

  Int.:

  How did the features, and the rest of the series come about?

  Selvors:

  Thalberg liked it. So did the preview audiences, better than anything but the cartoon. It even got bookings outside the package and the chains.

  Int.:

  I didn’t know that. That was highly unusual.

  Selvors:

  So much so they didn’t know what to do. But by then we were into the second, maybe the third. All I know is they set up a points system for us.

  Int.:

  Even though you were on salary?

  Selvors:

  Me and Mayhew were in pig heaven. Smith got part of it, but the brightest man of all was Podmer. He wasn’t on contract—he was, like, a loose cannon; sometimes him and Andy Devine or Eric Blore would work on two or three movies on different lots a day. Anyway, he sure cut some sweet deal with M.G.M. over the series. P
odmer talked like a hick and walked like a hick—it was what we wanted in the character of “Doodad” and he was brilliant at it—but he could tear a pheasant with the best of them. . . .

  Int.:

  So if you and Mayhew set out to tell a realistic story, about the rainmakers and the real business of winning the West . . .

  Selvors:

  I know what you’re going to ask next. (laughs)

  Int.:

  What?

  Selvors:

  You’re going to ask about the Windmill Trust.

  Int.:

  What about the Windmill Trust?

  Selvors:

  That part, we made up.

  * * *

  From: The Sidekick: Doppelgangers of the Plains by Marvin Ermstien, UCLA Press, 1972.

  (This interview with Elmer “PDQ” Podmer took place in 1968, a few months before his death at the age of ninety-four. It was recorded at the Boise Basin Yacht Club.)

  ME:

  Let’s talk about the most popular series you did at M.G.M.

  Podmer:

  You mean The Cloudbusters?

  ME:

  You’ve been in, what, more than three hundred movies . . . ?

  Podmer:

  Three hundred seventy-four, and I got another one shooting next month, where I play Burt Mustin’s father.

  ME:

  I’m still surprised that people remember you best as “Doodad” Jones. Three of the films were shorts, five were B movies, and I don’t think any of them have been on television for a while. . . .

  Podmer:

  Izzat a fact? Well, I know last time I saw one was mebbe ten year ago when I was over to my great grandniece’s house. I remember when Bill Boyd was goin’ on and on about television, way back in 1936 or so. He told all us it was the wave o’ the future and to put all our money in Philco. He was buying up the rights to all his Roman Empire movies, that series he made, Hoplite Cassius. We all thought he was crazy as a bedbug at the time. He made quite a bundle, I know that.

  ME:

  About The Cloudbusters . . .

  Podmer:

  Well, it was a good character part. It was just like me, and the director and writer had some pretty good ideas what to do with him. Also, you remember, I was the star of the last one. . . .

  ME:

  The Thunder Wagon. That was the one being made when Shadow Smith died.

  Podmer:

  That was it. Well, originally of course it had pretty much another script—they’d filmed some of it—in fact they’d filmed the scene that was used in the movie where Shadow talks to me and then rides off to do some damn thing or other. Next day we got the news about Shadow drowning in the Snake River while he was hauling in a fourteen-pound rainbow trout. They found his rod and reel two mile downriver and the trout was still hooked. . . .

  ME:

  There were lots of ironic overtones in the death notices at the time.

  Podmer:

  You mean about him being in The Cloudbusters and then dying that way? Yeah, I remember. He was a damn fine actor, a gentleman, just like his screen character. We was sure down for a while.

  ME:

  So the script was rewritten?

  Podmer:

  Yep. Mayhew wanted to make it a tribute to Smith, and also do some things he hadn’t been able to do before, so he turned out a hum-dinger! I got top billing for the first and only time in my life. In the cutting on the new version, they had Smith say whatever it is; then as he turns to ride away they had this guy who could do Smith’s voice tell me where to take the Thunder Wagon, which sets up the plot. That puts me and Chancy Raines (that was Bobby Hornmann, a real piss-ass momma’s boy, nothing like the character he played) smack dab up against Dryden and the Windmill Trust on our own. ’Course the real star of that last picture was the wagon itself. Mayhew’s screenplay really put that thing through some paces. . . .

  ME:

  Tell us about the Wagon.

  Podmer:

  You seen the movies, ain’t you?

  ME:

  Three or four times each.

  Podmer:

  Then why ask me?

  ME:

  Well, it looked like you firing off the Lightning Rockets and the Nimbus Mortars. . . .

  Podmer:

  It was me. I didn’t use no stuntman! I wisht I had a nickel for every powder burn I got on that series. Some days I’d be workin’ at M.G.M. morning and hightailing it all the way across Boise to the first National lot, and runnin’ on the set sayin’ my lines, and the makeup men would be bitching because I’d burnt half my real beard off, or had powder burns on my arms, or something. One of those other films I ain’t got no eyebrows in a couple of scenes.

  ME:

  What about the Sferics Box? I know some critics complained there was nothing like it in use among the rainmakers in the real Old West.

  Podmer:

  Do I look like a goddamn engineer? I’m a thespian! Ask Mayhew or Selvors about that stuff. I do know I once got a letter from a guy what used to be a rainmaker back then—hell, he must have been older when he wrote that letter than I am now—who said he used something like that there Sferics Box—they’d listen for disturbances in the ether with them. Had something to do with sunspots, I think.

  ME:

  That was twenty years before deForest sent the first messages. . . .

  Podmer:

  They wasn’t interested in talkin’ to each other, they was interested in makin’ a gullywasher! That’s what the guy wrote, anyway.

  ME:

  In all those films, Shadow Smith never used a gun, right?

  Podmer:

  Well, just that once. People talked about that stuff for a long time. It was the next to last one [The Watershed Wars, 1937 —ME] and they was that shootist for the Windmill Trust that called Shadow out to a street duel—Shadow’d just gone into the saloon to find him after all those people were killed when the Windmill Trust tried to make Utah Great Lake salty again, and Shadow’s so mad he picks up a couple of guns from the bar and goes out, then you cut out onto the street, bad guy’s standing in it, and Shadow comes out the saloon doors a quarter-mile away and starts shooting, just blasting away and walking up the boardwalk, bullets hitting all over the streets around the shootist, and he just takes off and runs, hightails it away. When Shadow realizes what he’s done, that he’s used gun-violence, he gets all upset and chagrined. People still talk about that. What few Westerns were made later, even the ones they started filming a few years ago in what was left of the Sahara Plains, they’d never done that—always romanticized it, one-to-one, always used violence. Never like in The Cloudbusters, where we used brains and science. . . .

  ME:

  It wasn’t just Shadow Smith’s death that finished the series, then?

  Podmer:

  It wuz everything. Smith died. Thalberg had been dead a year by then, and Goldfish wanted to move Selvors up to the A pictures; he never could leave well-enough alone. The next one we knew was gonna be directed by just someone with a ticket to punch. Selvors tried to stay, but they told him their way or the highway. That was the middle of ’38, just when the European market fell apart, and people was nervous over here—they didn’t have to wait but till August before our market started The Long Fall, and people started the Back-to-the-Land movement; they ate all right but there wasn’t any real money around. Anyway, that’s about the time Mayhew had the garish-headline divorce and we’d be damned if we’d let other people write and direct The Cloudbusters. Also, they took Bill Menzies away from us. He’d designed the Thunder Wagon, and most of the props and did the sets, and about half the effects on the movies—remember the credits, with that big thunderhead rolling in on you and suddenly spelling out The Cloudbusters?—that was Menzies’ doing all along.

  So we all got together, just after we wrapped The Thunder Wagon and we made a gentlemen’s agreement that there wouldn’t be any more Cloudbuster films—it was hard to do, we’d been a real
family except for that shitty Hornmann kid, I hope he’s burning in hell—[Robert Hornmann was killed in a fight in a West Boise nightclub in 1946 —ME] and for me it was walking away from a goldmine, and my only chance to get top billing again. But it was easiest for me, too, since I had a picture-to-picture deal and all I did was line up enough work to stay busy for the solid next year. I also put out the word to all the other comic relief types not to go signin’ anything with the name Cloudbusters on it. . . .

  ME:

  Have you seen Sergio Leone’s A Faceful of Rainwater?

  Podmer:

  Was that the Wop Western about the Two Forks War?

  ME:

  Yes. It’s supposedly an homage to The Cloudbusters, much grittier but not as good, I don’t think.

  Podmer:

  Nope. Ain’t seen it.

  * * *

  From: BLAZING SCREENS! The Magazine of Celluloid Thrills, June 1972.

  SOUNDTRACK THUNDER AND NITRATE LIGHTING!

  By Formalhaut J. Amkermackam

  Imagine a time when most of the American continent was a vast dry desert from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast!

  Imagine when there were no lush farmlands from sea to sea, when coffee, rubber, and tea had to be imported into this country!

  Imagine that once men died crossing huge sandy wastes & when the only water for a hundred miles might turn out to be poison, when the Great Utah Lake was so salty it supported no aquatic life!

  Imagine when the Midwest was only sparse grasslands, suitable for crops only like wheat & oats, or an economy based on the herding of cattle & sheep!

  Imagine a time when rainfall was so scarce the only precipitation was snow on the high mountains in the winter & when that was melted there was no more till next year!

  These things were neither a nightmare nor the fevered dreams of some fantasy writer—this was the American West—where our forefathers actually tried to make a living—less than one hundred years ago!