Jimmy Stewart
Page 47
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2. McLean, meanwhile, went east, married a hat-check girl who worked at the Stork Club in New York City, and eventually drank himself to an early death.
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3.Gross percentage is the money a film earns before any and all expenses, including salaries, negative cost, distribution, and advertising are paid back to the studio. Net profits are what is left over after all expenses are deducted. Obviously, a studio would rather spend its profits on more advertising to generate more revenue, which are then listed as expenses, than pay much, most often nothing, in so-called net earnings.
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4. The original studio memo, dated February 15, 1950, actually guarantees Stewart 50 percent of the film’s profits, defined as all monies left after a maximum 25 percent of the gross was deducted for distribution, production of the original negative, and general studio overhead, including advertising and distribution pay out.
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5. Mayer and Goetz never spoke to each other again.
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1. No relation to the Logan Triangle Players.
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2. The film, released the same time as Broken Arrow, which came out after Winchester ’73, was overshadowed by Broken Arrow ’s enormous popularity.
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3. Jane Wyman won Female Most Popular performer for her Academy Award–winning (Best Actress) role in Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda, released in 1948. Male photoplay runners-up were Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, and William Bendix. Female runners-up were Olivia de Havilland, Ingrid Bergman, June Allyson, and Loretta Young.
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4. The twenty-four films Stewart made in the fifties are out of an astonishing total of the eighty feature films he made during his lifetime, plus more than fifty appearances as himself in various documentaries, two TV series, and forty-two TV appearances as himself, including eight on the Jack Benny Program, six on the Dean Martin Variety series, and nine on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
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5. According to Lew Wasserman biographer Dennis McDougal, “Stewart’s [contract] success launched a full-blown actors’ revolt. Every star on and off the MCA client list now wanted Wasserman to swing the same kind of profit participation deal for him.” Those who successfully renegotiated their contracts were Tyrone Power, Tony Curtis, and Clark Gable, all of whom became millionaires for the first time by virtue of aligning themselves with MCA, Lew Wasserman, and his new team of aggressive agents who used Jimmy’s two-picture deal as their contract model.
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1. John Ford’s The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne, was nominated for Best Picture. Wayne was also nominated for Best Actor.
Gary Cooper, a well-known Hollywood right-winger and one of the so-called Friendly Witnesses before HUAC, won for Best Actor in High Noon. Gloria Grahame won, but not for her role in the DeMille film. She was nominated in the Supporting Actress category for her part in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful. John Ford, another Hollywood conservative, but one with integrity, broke with DeMille over what he saw as that director’s unsavory actions in support of the blacklist, and won Best Director for The Quiet Man. The only other award The Greatest Show on Earth won was for writing, with Oscars going to DeMille, Fredric M. Frank, Theodore St. John, and Frank Cavett.
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2. Best Actor nominees included Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata, Gary Cooper in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, José Ferrer in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, and Alec Guinness in Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob; Best Supporting Actor nominees included Richard Burton in Henry Koster’s My Cousin Rachel, Arthur Hunnicutt in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sky, Victor McLaglen in John Ford’s The Quiet Man, Jack Palance in David Miller’s Sudden Fear, and Anthony Quinn in Kazan’s Viva Zapata. Jimmy was voted Look magazine’s “Actor of the Year,” an award he said meant just as much to him as any Academy Award.
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3. Stewart received no fee for the appearance. In return, Sullivan agreed to air promotional clips from Thunder Bay.
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1. The dates cited are years of release. The other two films were To Catch a Thief (1955) and The Trouble with Harry (1955).
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2. Stewart’s ongoing persona by surname continues—Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Thomas Jefferson Destry Jr., in Destry Rides Again, Tom Jeffords in Broken Arrow, Jeffries in Rear Window.
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3. Woody Allen uses variations on this stylistic touch in several of his movies, most notably in Zelig (1983) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985).
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4. One of the “jokes” of the film is that Stewart’s character winds up with two broken legs—double the arousal, double the impotence—Hitchcock’s commentary on Jeffries’s succumbing to the temptation of marriage, even to Grace Kelly. “That wasn’t in the script,” Stewart told New York Times interviewer Janet Maslin in 1983. “On the day we were going to shoot, Hitchcock came up to me and said, ‘What would you think about breaking another leg?’” During production, both casts had hinges on them so Stewart could get out of the wheelchair and walk around in between shooting his scenes.
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5. In an interview with the author, June Allyson claimed she greatly enjoyed playing Mrs. Miller and all the other Stewart wives, and that her favorite of their movies together was The Glenn Miller Story, primarily because of all the great music.
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6. Stewart earned the title via profit-percentage deals he had negotiated for Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, Thunder Bay, Harvey, The Glenn Miller Story, and Rear Window.
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7. Whenever asked about replacing Wayne at the top of the list, Stewart always had the same, rather telling answer. “Maybe what it is,” he said, “is that people identify with me, but dream of being John Wayne.” Missing from the list was Cary Grant, who had appeared on it with regularity but had temporarily retired. He appeared in no movies in 1954 but would return to the screen and the list in 1956 after he starred in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, opposite Kelly.
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1. Fonda was never officially blacklisted. He remained on the so-called gray list of actors who were available but almost never hired. He did appear once during that period, in Fletcher Markle’s Jigsaw (aka Gun Moll), made in 1949. Cheaply produced on locations in and near New York City, the plot revolves around a secret, unnamed organization in which it is strongly hinted there are Communists. Many of those who appeared in the film did so as a way of “proving” they weren’t Communists and should not be blacklisted. Among the stars were Franchot Tone, Myron McCormick, Jean Wallace, and Hester Sondergaard. Fonda’s appearance is uncredited. The last Hollywood mainstream movie he made prior to Mr. Roberts was John Ford’s 1948 Fort Apache.
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2. Lindbergh had enough clout to actually get Kerr considered for the part before Stewart, but the young, liberal actor had turned it down for political reasons. He did not wish to portray the aviator due to Lindbergh’s isolationist, soft-on-Hitler activities prior to World War Two. Anthony Perkins and Martin Milner were two other actors Lindbergh preferred for the role instead of Stewart. Both turned it down.
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3. Following movies like Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he co-starred opposite a monkey, Reagan’s film career had hit rock bottom. On February 15, 1954, MCA booked Reagan for the first and only time into Las Vegas, as a headliner and stand-up comic in a show at the ironically named Last Frontier. Also on the bill were vaudeville duos, a singing quartet called the Continentals, and several leggy and bosomy Vegas show-girls. Reagan maintained he took the gig to pay back taxes and a new mortgage for the house he had bough
t for his second wife, actress Nancy Davis. Despite good reviews, he declined to go on the road with the Continentals. He never again played Vegas as a performer. Prior to the engagement, he had begged Wasserman and Stein to get him anything—magazine ads, personal appearances, testimonial dinners. There are many who feel that the Johnny Fontaine character in The Godfather is not really based on Frank Sinatra, but on Ronald Reagan and the dealings with MCA that led to his comeback TV series. Dennis McDougal discusses this in detail in his biography of Lew Wasserman.
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4. The other was purchased by Don Lee, an L.A. Cadillac dealer who also operated the West Coast division of the CBS radio network.
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5. The episode starred a veritable roster of MCA talent, including Stewart, Barbara Hale, Donald MacDonald, Cheryl Callaway, John McIntire, Walter Sande, James Millican, and Edgar Buchanan. It first aired April 24, 1955, on CBS.
In the early sixties, MCA came under federal investigation for its business practices and possible relationship to organized crime. Dozens of Hollywood’s top stars testified; MCA clients mostly in support of Lew Wasserman, including Jack Benny, Rita Hayworth, Rock Hudson, Bob Cummings, Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Danny Kaye. Of particular interest to the government was the deal that Reagan had brokered that changed forever the way Hollywood did business with talent, namely the introduction of residuals on top of freelance contracts. According to Dennis McDougal in his biography of Lew Wasserman: When Fricano, the lead interrogator of the grand jury, zeroed in on the blanket waiver that Reagan helped engineer for MCA as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the actor’s memory failed. “I think I have already told you I don’t recall that,” said Reagan…Later on, grand juror Ruth Ragle said, of Reagan’s testimony: “The only thing he knew was his name.”
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6. The rights to the British film had been purchased by Selznick early on, intended as a gift to Hitchcock for signing with Selznick International Pictures. However, once their relationship broke down, which it did during their very first film, Rebecca, Selznick, looking to recoup, offered the project in 1941 to John Houseman, who tried but ultimately failed to put together a remake. Eventually Hitchcock bought the rights back from a cash-strapped Selznick.
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7. The 1954 Best Director Oscar went to Elia Kazan for On the Waterfront. Other Best Director nominees that year were George Seaton for The Country Girl (also starring Grace Kelly, who was nominated for and won for this performance rather than the far superior one she gave in Rear Window), William Wellman for The High and the Mighty, and Billy Wilder for Sabrina. Rear Window was also nominated for, but did not win, Best Screenplay (Hayes), Color Cinematography, and Sound Recording.
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8. “The ultra Hitchcockian performances are those of James Stewart in Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo; and Cary Grant in Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest. Stewart and Grant gave Hitchcock the means he could not have got from any other actors. In return, Hitchcock gave Stewart and Grant meanings they could not have got from any other director.” (Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, pages 60–61.)
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9. “Que Sera, Sera” was written by veteran movie songwriters Jay Livingstone and Ray Evans. It won the Oscar for Best Song, over “Friendly Persuasion” from the movie of the same name, “Julie” from the movie of the same name, “True Love” from High Society, a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, and “Written on the Wind” from the movie of the same name.
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10. “[The MacGuffin] is the device, the gimmick, if you will…a term we use to cover all that sort of thing—to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is…it’s beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters…. You may be wondering where the term originated. Itmight be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’ ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ And the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.” Hitchcock, quoted in François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut, New York: Touchstone Books, 1985, p138.
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11. Upon its 1987 reissue, critic Andrew Sarris assessed the film this way in his weekly column for the Village Voice: “It is a thrilling piece of cinema for anyone who can appreciate the working out of formal problems as a means of stirring the murky depths of the unconscious…if you come out of the movie relieved that Stewart and Day are back together and happy again with their surprisingly sissyish little boy, then you have missed the whole point of Stewart’s implacability and Day’s delirium. This is no ordinary nuclear family.”
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12. Not everyone, however, was pleased with its critical reception or the financial windfall it produced. Day was sufficiently distressed to want to turn her career in an entirely different direction, to the comedies she would make in the late fifties and early sixties opposite mostly lighter-weight actor/comedians, such as James Garner and Rock Hudson. She also developed a lifelong interest in charity work to relieve poverty, after her firsthand experience while making the film on location in Africa.
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1. Lindbergh was paid $1 million for the rights to his story; $5 million went into the actual production.
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2. Although Hitchcock had initially been quite enthusiastic about Miles, a former Miss Oklahoma, and signed her to a personal contract, after her pregnancy he used her only once more, in the overlooked supporting role of Lila, Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho (1960). There is some question as to whether or not Hitchcock was willing to delay the start of Vertigo to accommodate Ms. Miles. Some reports suggest that Hitchcock was overruled by Paramount, others that he became obsessively smitten with Ms. Novak, and used Miles’s pregnancy as a way to tactfully remove her from the film. In his book-length study of Vertigo, Dan Aulier suggests that Hitchcock indeed originally planned to shoot around Miles’s pregnancy until he saw Novak in The Eddy Duchin Story at an October 1956 screening and may have used Miles’s condition as an excuse to recast the dual roles of Madeleine/Judy with Novak. Peter Brown, who has written extensively about Novak, confirms this version of the story.
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3.Newsweek reported in its September 2, 1957, issue that Senator Smith had indeed personally lobbied on behalf of Lewis.
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4. The other person to be rejected that day was not one of the original ten nominees. Dr. Paul D. Foote, a sixty-nine-year-old retired Gulf Oil Company scientist, had been put up for assistant secretary of defense in charge of research and engineering. Foote was turned down after he told the committee he was unwilling to give up his oil company pension or to sell his stock in Gulf Oil and Standard Oil Companies of California.
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5. Reagan was thirty years old when World War Two began, making him ineligible for the new draft. He enlisted, but was turned down for combat duty due to poor eyesight. In May 2002, he and former First Lady Nancy Reagan were awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal for his role in ending the cold war.
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6. It was a purely commercial move. Novak recalled in a July 2005 interview with the author that when she first read Vertigo, she loved it and went to Cohn, begging him to let her make it. Cohn’s reaction was to say it was “a piece of crap,” but let her do it anyway because Hitchcock was an important director in the midst of a solid commercial run, and thought it would be good for Novak to
appear in one of his films. After its release, when it did only moderate business at the box office, Cohn read aloud the negative reviews to Novak and told her that he still thought the film was crap.
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7. The literal translation being “From Among the Dead,” or the more idiosyncratic “Between Deaths,” or “Those Between Death,” by the writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who had also written the novel Celle qui n’etait plus, a successful French suspense thriller on which the even more popular 1955 Henri-Georges Clouzot French movie Les Diaboliques (aka Diabolique and on TV, The Friends [U.S.] or The Devils [U.K.]) was based.
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8. Coppel was paid $1,500 per week to work on Vertigo. Coppel’s only previous solo screenplay (he had worked with R. C. Sherriff and Oscar Millard on No Highway in the Sky) had been for Anthony Kimmins’s The Captain’s Paradise (1953), a story about a sea captain who changes his personality to please a different girl in every port. Hitchcock may have been attracted to the way multiple personality was portrayed by Coppel in The Captain’s Paradise.
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9. This rooftop reverie may very well have been influenced by Chaplin’s set piece in his 1922 The Kid, during which he performs one of the most extraordinary rooftop-to-rooftop sequences ever imagined on-screen. Hitchcock’s version is, of course, sexually charged. The pain and fear on Scottie’s face will, during the course of the film, take on erotic under- (and over-) tones and take a masochistic twist. Scottie’s damaged sexual lust, his fetishism, eroticizes the pain of his emotional suspension to make it tolerable.
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10. That Midge and Scottie were supposed to have been classmates makes the casting of the brilliant Bel Geddes somewhat problematic, as, despite her inherently maternal presence, she appears to be at least ten years younger than Scottie. In real life, during the filming of Vertigo, Bel Geddes was thirty-five years old, Stewart forty-nine. Novak, Stewart’s love interest, was only twenty-five.