"He's got to return the money to the bank," said Mayer. "Then he gets a medal."
"Only a fool would return the money," I insisted.
Is it any wonder that my third script was rejected? I couldn't blame Mayer for not producing my yarn. He and the other Hollywood moguls were sons of immigrants. They were grateful to this country for getting the opportunity to become rich and famous. Mayer wanted to reach as many people as possible with each movie. He felt that if he liked and understood a film, it would sell tickets. He was a master of not stepping on toes. Hell, I was the son of immigrants, too, and I wanted to reach a mass audience as well. But I'd do it with truthful stories, without the sugar coating.
Studio executives haven't changed much. Nor has the system. They think they know what audiences want. They have a flair for mass-appeal movies. Writers who have the same kind of tastes as the studio boys do better than those trying to create something original and hard-hitting. Kipling wrote adventure stories. He didn't have the same difficulties getting established as Kafka or Baudelaire. A writer with a unique, personal vision will almost automatically turn away from popular tastes. I'd written three scripts since my return to the West Coast. Each one had been bought but remained unproduced. I wasn't discouraged. I'd done good work and earned a helluva lot of dough. Life was good, and to top it off, my mother was enjoying sunny California. Except she had one big worry.
"I'm afraid if they ever make one of your scripts into a movie, Sammy," said Rebecca, "the bubble will burst."
"Let it burst, Mama."
Believe it or not, the same Louis B. Mayer who thought Crime Pays was too harsh for MGM offered me a seven-year writing contract. I passed. Sure, I wanted to make steady money. But I couldn't see myself being one of the studio's paid chattel, having my yarns diluted or shelved at their whim. For cryin' out loud, I wanted to see my stories up on the goddamned screen the way I'd originally envisioned them!
My next yarn was called The Lovers. Feldman sold it to Columbia. It was about a female ex-con named jenny Marsh and her parole officer, named Griff Marant. The great Douglas Sirk directed that script in 1949. Apparently they didn't like my title, so the studio renamed it Shockproof. One of my postwar scripts had finally been made into a movie, so I didn't give a damn what they called it.
My next project was supposed to be with Fritz Lang. We'd always wanted to work together again since the prewar days of Confirm or Deny. When we crossed paths again, we started talking about psychotics. He'd read The Dark Page. Both of us were interested in why ordinary people go nuts in extraordinary situations. Lang had a special fascination with people with mental illness. His first wife had committed suicide. His second wife and writing partner, Thea von Harbou, had become a Nazi sympathizer and betrayed him.
I'd seen plenty of guys going berserk during the war. One GI named Brown lost his mind in the cacophony of an enemy bomb attack. On top of the explosions, our artillery was firing back at the enemy. Brown ran insanely toward our big guns.
"Stop this noise!" he screamed. "I want you to stop this noise!"
The officer in charge pushed him away.
"I'm asking you politely!" Brown continued. "Stop it now! My ears are hurting! STOP IT!"
"Put him down," the officer ordered, meaning someone was supposed to shoot Brown in the leg. No one would obey the order, not to one of our own. So the officer shot Brown himself, wounding the crazed dogface before he got himself killed.
Another time, in the Harz Mountains in Czechoslovakia, we'd taken cover in a cave. One of our men just wouldn't come out the next morning. He wanted us to leave him alone in that cave. He stared at us with his pathetic, crazed eyes, but he wouldn't budge. We had to carry him outside. It was tough just to get him to stand up on his own two feet.
I always considered myself lucky to have spent time with some of the greatest directors, among them Fritz Lang. Here, Lang (on the platform at right) directs a scene from his masterpiece Metropolis, circa 1926, at UDF studios in Germany.
Behind each battlefield, medics would set up a big tent for the wounded. On one side were soldiers who'd been hit, blood all over the place. On the other side were soldiers lying in silent shock without any apparent wounds. We didn't pay much attention to them. We were too busy carrying in the bloody GIs for emergency treatment. The sad truth was that the soldiers in shock were deeply wounded, too, whether we knew it or not.
Going back to my childhood, I remember a kid named Zookie who hawked newspapers near the Brooklyn Bridge. One day, he killed his mother. What would drive a son to kill the woman he most adored in the world? What caused the tension inside that boy to build and build until he exploded in violence? What writers do is recreate the inner tension that leads to abnormal behavior. It is our responsibility to portray a character's breaking point, his or her emotional threshold. Cold, clinical explanations of criminal conduct are for scientists. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is breathtaking because it shows a man driven into the depths of his ugliest self.
I pitched Fritz Lang a yarn about a mental hospital that I called Straitjacket. It opens in the asylum's corridor with men and women chained to a bench. Inmates have to shit and piss right there because nobody's attending to them. The camera dollies down the hallway shooting close-ups of their anguished faces. I'd heard about asylums abusing patients, making money off their relatives, and I wanted to expose those kinds of institutions. My subplot followed the relatives who, outside the asylum in "normal" society, acted just as crazy as the patients inside.
From my newspaper days, I knew the milieu. Once, I'd witnessed firsthand an unforgettable scene in New York's Bellevue Hospital, when a tough cop demanded to interrogate a patient. They let the confident cop into a room full of nutcases. Somehow, the big iron door automatically clicked shut. Suddenly, the cop's face changed. He started to perspire.
"I'll get someone right away," I said from outside the door.
"Don't talk so loud!" whispered the panicked officer, terrified to be stuck with all those loonies.
The tension of that incident gave me an idea for a scene in Straitjacket in which my lead, an investigative reporter, gets accidentally locked inside a ward with a bunch of sex-crazed female patients, who attack him. Fritz loved my script. However, he wanted me to change the main character to a woman so that Joan Bennett could play the role. Fritz had a production deal with Universal in association with Joan and her husband, Walter Wanger. Bennett was a great actress, but I was worried that a woman in the lead would transform the whole tone of the story. For Chrissakes, a woman being attacked in the asylum by crazed men just wouldn't work. A violent fight scene ended my yarn. I just couldn't see a woman playing that role.
Straitjacket never got made. The story would become, about fifteen years later, my own film Shock Corridor. However, to have spent time with a master like Fritz Lang was a privilege in itself. His career would span forty years, from his first film, The Golden Lake, in 1919, to his last, Diabolical Dr. Mabuse, in 1960. Hollywood, where Lang moved in the thirties, didn't care if Fritz was a world-class artist. I did. His Metropolis (1927) is still one of the greatest films ever made. Whenever I saw Lang over the years, we talked about him directing one of my yarns. It would never be. I loved the man and his acidic sense of humor, remaining close to him until he died, in 1976. Toward the end of his life, Fritz turned a little bitter about not having a family and children. When Christa came out to California with me, people thought she was Fritz's niece, since Christa's family name was Lang as well. In their sweet complicity, Christa and Fritz allowed the confusion. It tickled both of them.
By the end of the forties, I'd decided that I could direct my yarns as well as anybody else. Maybe even better. Sure, I was still happy working behind a typewriter. But now I started looking for an opportunity to direct a picture of my own, using a motion-picture camera to tell my tale. All I needed was a producer who'd put his faith in me. Just when I needed him, Robert L. Lippert showed up in my life.
The First
Adult
Western
24
Because of Robert L. Lippert, I got my first opportunity to direct a picture in 1948. Lippert was an independent producer who'd pioneered drivein theaters in 1945, starting in Fresno, California. Eventually he controlled over a hundred movie houses. He got into producing pictures in 1946, turning out over 245 features in the next twenty years, first under Lippert Productions, then as an executive producer at Twentieth Century Fox. In 1965, Lippert built the first multiple theater, or multiplex, in Alameda, California, with the idea of showing several films at once in the same building, giving more movie choices to patrons. Lippert tracked me down through a secretary in the New York office of Duell, Sloan & Pearce, publishers of The Dark Page.
"I'm interested in backing you so that you can turn one of your stories into a movie," Lippert said when we met. "What've you got?"
"I want to do a film about an assassin," I told him between puffs on my cigar. "Cassius!"
"Who's that?" he asked.
"He's the man who had the idea to murder Caesar. Brutus did it. But Cassius plotted it. I want to hook the audience on the question of who's the guilty one. Is it the guy who plans the assassination? Or the one who does it?"
"Caesar?" said Lippert. "You want to make a film about naked guys hanging around Roman baths wearing bedsheets?"
"Exactly."
"Weren't those guys ... ," he said bashfully, "you know, funny?" Lippert was too uptight to even pronounce the word "homosexual."
I was laughing inside, but I played it dumb.
"What do you mean, Bob?"
"Look, Sammy, I don't want to make a picture about guys in bedsheets."
My first producer, Robert L. Lippert (-190976), made his entry into the movie business when he was fourteen, playing the pump organ to accompany silent pictures. When talkies were introduced in -1929, Lippert rented some portable sound equipment and went on tour showing the new sensation throughout the western United States. Lippert was a dynamic guy with a pioneering spirit and, most important, integrity.
"It's a murder movie, goddamnit!"
Lippert shook his head. He produced small films, so period pieces seemed expensive to make.
"I want to do a little film with a good story, Sammy," said Lippert, "where we can have some fun and both make a profit."
"Okay," I said. "I've got another assassin yarn. It's even more exciting. It's about Bob Ford, a great character. Nobody ever made a movie about him."
"Who did he murder?"
"Jesse James."
"Jesse James!" said Lippert. "Now we've got a movie!"
I didn't want to undermine Lippert's belief that Jesse James was a redblooded hero. The real Jesse James was bisexual, masquerading as a girl to hold up trains that were carrying medical supplies. The guy was a lowdown thief, a pervert, and a sonofabitch. But you couldn't show that stuff on a screen back then, demystifying one of the great American icons. I had a knack of talking a movie to death by insisting on reality. The whole truth didn't help get films made. This time, I'd be smart and keep my mouth shut.
"So your movie's about Ford, the assassin?" asked Lippert. "Can't we show Jesse, too?"
"Sure," I said.
Lippert was thinking about all those people in his movie theaters eating popcorn and ice cream and watching macho John Wayne Westerns. He expected my picture to fill the seats the same way. He agreed to let me write and direct the movie. The pay was low, but that was all right by me because if there were any profits, I'd share in them. We shook hands on it. That was all that was needed. Lippert was a smart, honest businessman and always respected a handshake deal. Immediately I went to work on the script for I Shot Jesse James, a yarn about a guy who kills the man he loves. Making just another Western wasn't going to give me a hard-on. Holdups, revolvers, leather gloves, and galloping horses didn't do anything for me. The real aggression and violence in the film would be happening inside the head of a psychotic, delusional killer.
Lippert insisted on my using horses in the opening scene of the picture. I went along with him on that one. After all, he was gambling about a hundred grand on my movie. He was sure that you couldn't market a Western without men on horseback. So I wrote in a scene with Jesse and his gang riding out of town after a bank holdup. It didn't hurt the story. Maybe it even helped. Lippert wanted to protect his investment, and I respected his faith in me.
Ford's story wasn't a morality tale. Sure, he shoots his best friend in the back and he's going to get punished for it. What excited me about the yarn were the echoes of the Cain and Abel fable in Genesis, the first murder. The "brother" killer is condemned to relive his crime over and over, never escaping the shame and outrage of it. I wanted to show Ford realizing that he's sick, then follow him as he sinks deeper into his sickness.
When my film opens, Ford looks like just another tough, half-witted outlaw member of the James gang as they hold up a bank in Topeka. But the robbery is foiled when a teller sets off the alarm with his foot. During the getaway, Ford gets shot and drops the loot, yet Jesse overlooks the incident. Right away, I establish the special fondness between Jesse and Bob after the botched heist. Jesse brings Ford back to his place in Missouri, where he lives under a fake name with his wife and children. As he recovers from his gun wound, Ford stays on with Jesse and his family for six months. He runs into his old girlfriend, Cynthia, an actress in a traveling show. Cynthia won't have anything to do with Ford until he leaves the James gang and becomes a farmer. But Ford is stuck. He's a wanted criminal and faces twenty years in jail, minimum. He has one way out, that of betraying Jesse James by killing him. Murder becomes Ford's escape.
Ford has his first chance when Jesse is taking a bath, but he can't bring himself to shooting his friend in the back. Instead, he picks up a brush and scrubs Jesse's exposed shoulders. Something is warped about these two guys' relationship. And betrayal is in the air. Another time, Ford wants to plug Jesse on the porch of his home, but misses his opportunity again. On his third try, Ford ends up shooting Jesse in his own living room. Despite the vile deed, Ford is given amnesty by the governor, earning a little reward money in the deal. Jesse's dead, so Ford is a free man. Cynthia accepts him. Now he has to live with the terrible guilt of what he did. He's like a caged animal. Wherever he goes, people revile him as a Judas. Insolent and unrepentant, Ford tries to make money by reenacting the murder for audiences seeking cheap thrills. But his theatrics only sink him deeper into his own guilt, driving him crazy.
To show Ford's self-hatred, I put in a scene in a saloon with a minstrel singing a ballad about Jesse James:
Cause it was Robert Ford, That dirty little coward Wonder how he feels? He ate of Jesse's bread, and slept in Jesse's bed. Then he laid poorJesse dead in his grave!
"I am Bob Ford," blurts out my antihero.
The minstrel stops abruptly, scared for his life.
"Go on! Sing!" Ford orders him. "I want to hear it!"
How long can Ford survive with his own guilt? How much more scorn can he endure? How far will his craziness take him? The core of the movie is the descent into his own private hell. My ending reinforces the dark idea that people kill what they love the most. Ford gets shot by the marshal and lies dying in Cynthia's arms. He's almost relieved to be put out of his misery.
"I am sorry for what I did to Jes'.... I loved him," Ford whispers to her.
The punishment for betrayal is terrible, but there's also forgiveness for even the most wicked acts. Lippert never objected to a man declaring his love for another man. I don't think he noticed the subtle suggestion of a homosexual bond between Ford and James. Critics did, calling I Shot Jesse James "the first adult Western."
I cast John Ireland as Bob Ford because I loved his intense performance in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948). Lippert wanted a name actor in the picture, so I hired Preston Foster as John Kelley, the marshal. Foster had been in one of my favorite films of all time, John Ford's The Informer (1935), in which he played the head of t
he Irish Republican Army. The tall, handsome Reed Hadley played Jesse James, with his deep baritone voice. Barbara Britton got the role of Ford's gal, Cynthia Waters.
A wonderful craftsman, Ernest Miller, came on as my cameraman. Lippert rented a frontier street at Republic Studios for ten days to shoot the entire movie. I'd storyboarded the scenes and rehearsed the actors. On our first day of shooting, we were going to film the movie's final scene. I was very nervous. Even though I'd been on many movie sets, I'd paid little attention to how the camera and lights were set up. I told Ernest and the lighting people about the dark mood I wanted. See, Ford marches down the street toward the marshal, whose back is turned, just like Jesse's was. Now all I had to say was "Action." Instead, I fired one of the prop department's Colt 45s into the air. Everybody jumped, but they sure understood I wanted to get the scene going. At the end of the scene, I yelled "Forget it" instead of "Cut." Holy cow, now I was a movie director!
The time constraints and small budget made I Shot Jesse James one of the toughest films I ever did, but I loved every minute of it. The scenes with little or no action were the most difficult. I used close-ups to reveal as much as possible about my characters' emotions. Everything was done on the cheap. When we ran out of money at the end, we had to film the opening credits on posters tacked to a wall.
The film premiered in Los Angeles. I was a bundle of nerves that night. After all, I'd taken a big risk on my very first film. I'd made a Western without it being a Western. I'd jumbled genres, which could have led to confusion, maybe even disaster. The audience seemed to enjoy it. But the critics could still massacre me the next morning. After the screening, I went out drinking with my friend, the German director E. A. Dupont. There was a lot of vodka consumed into the early hours of the morning as we waited for the dailies to hit the newsstands. Dupont loved my movie and predicted it would get rave reviews. He was my buddy and European, so he could be wrong. I drank until I couldn't feel my anxiety anymore. We got the papers before dawn. The critics loved it.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 26