by Peter Davis
Yet Mossy granted the movie pioneer a brief appointment, and he was wheeled in by Renata, who serviced his needs and hadn’t figured out how to leave her helpless husband. Blatchley could walk only jerkily, sixteen frames per second like his old two reelers, he scribbled ruefully to Mossy, so he needed the wheelchair.
Blatchley had a book in his lap. “He wants to produce for you,” Renata began. “He has a property he knows he can develop if you’ll buy it. A bitter romance, a rich man, his unhappy wife, their lovers. We can work well together.”
“I’m sure you can, Renata,” Mossy said. “You’re looking tip top, old man,” he added. “How’s he holding up?”
“Doctors say he’ll talk again soon.”
“Well then,” Mossy said with a smile, “I’m so glad you came in now.” He chuckled and Renata tried to. “Tell me, what’s the property.”
“Willow wants you to know he has mellowed. He’s a much easier, kinder man than when you knew him. In his stroke he has found humility.”
“That’s nice, darling. I can’t say I envy you. What’s the property?”
With trembling hands, Blatchley lifted the book off his lap. “D-d-d-d-d,” he tried, but as he held the book he seemed to be shaking it at Mossy rather than offering it to him.
Renata took the book from her husband. “It’s by Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth,” she said. “We think Walter Huston would be perfect. He’s cold lately, he’ll come cheap.”
“I know the book and I saw the play. Keep your copy. It’s a downer, people don’t want that now. Huston’s washed up. Glad you came in, keep your chin up old man.”
Elena hustled them out, wheelchair and wife, almost before they saw how much Mossy had enjoyed turning his old mentor, and tormentor, down. Mossy didn’t want Dodsworth at Jubilee, but he owed a small favor to Sam Goldwyn and he suggested the book to him, with Walter Huston’s name attached. Goldwyn got Willie Wyler to direct Huston in the part. When he heard about it, Blatchley had another stroke, this one fatal.
In came a clown, down on his luck. He’d made the silent-to-talkie transition, had a contract at Jubilee, but lately his comedy wasn’t getting laughs. With a face like putty, he could make his features resemble a rooster, a spastic taxi driver, a jackhammer. Mossy admired him.
“Nobody likes my material any more,” he complained. “You ought to let me out of my contract. I’ll go back to where I started, play county fairs, birthdays.”
Mossy saw the man was not just the traditional sad clown but acutely discouraged, and he tried to cheer him up. “That’s an idea for a picture right there,” he said. “I’ll get Maurice Sugarman on this, he’s always spouting ideas, he’ll like thinking about a county fair and a comic who’s been laying eggs.”
“Jokes, though, I need jokes and business,” said the inconsolable clown.
“Sugarman will come in on it. He’s full of jokes.”
“The worst of it is, I can’t tell you.”
Mossy became more interested. He’d been suspicious when the comic asked out of his contract. Maybe Columbia or somebody was making him a better offer. Now he saw the man was in real pain. “What’s so awful you can’t tell.”
“I’m dead in my pants.”
“It happens,” said Mossy. “So I’ve heard.” He turned away from the sad comic.
“My wife is patient, but it’s been weeks. I hate to admit it, I tried another woman.”
“I’m shocked.”
“It was worse. I don’t know what to do.”
“This too shall pass,” Mossy intoned Biblically. He thought of something. “Hey, what about bringing your wife over to Catalina on my boat. Tell her you’re going to star in a new picture and the chief insisted you steal his yacht for a few days. The sea air, the birds, the island itself. Go crazy.”
“Gee, the worst it could do is cheer me up. You know I dreamed I was on a boat, scared, we were going through the Panama Canal and everybody wanted to dunk me.”
“You flunk geography—it’s the Equator where they dunk you. Panama Canal, you’re home free.”
“So that’s what it means.”
“Dr. Freud tells you what they mean. I put them on the screen. A county fair and the Panama Canal, a comic who needs a break. Sugarman’s meat and potatoes. I’ll send a car for you and the little lady to take you to my boat in Long Beach. Get out of here.”
Not that this was all generosity on Mossy’s part. If he thought someone was what he called an official talent, he’d do anything not only to hang on but also to put the talent so heavily in his debt that when the Columbias and Foxes came around they had no one to talk to.
Writers slouched in. As MGM was known for being a producers’ studio, Jubilee prized writers. “In the beginning was the word,” Mossy repeated to his salaried dreamers, “and in the end is my word. If you guys don’t do your job, no one else has a job.” That didn’t mean writers were happy; always disgruntled, they had to sit still for being condescended to by everyone else in the food chain. Ordered to appease church attacks on Hollywood, four writers were working on the story of Job, complaining they were in as much pain as Job himself. Mossy told them it would be spectacular when the Red Sea parted. They said that wasn’t the Job story; a good man lost his family, property, and was struck with sores on his body, all because God and Satan were arguing over him. Mossy thought for a moment. “The story is God and Satan, Job is the field they play on. Walter Pidgeon and Lionel Barrymore fight over Trent Amberlyn. Get going, children, type me some good and evil.” The fun we had.
A red-maned actress, Brenda De Baule, had two minutes to convince Mossy she was right for a gangster moll after he had lost faith in the producer’s ability to cast his own picture. “The part is important,” Mossy told her, “because if we don’t believe she has a mind of her own we won’t care when the heavy pushes her into a wall.” Declaiming a line from the script, the actress said, “This broad don’t take no guff from nobody, and that means you, Mr. Big Nobody!” Mossy liked that. When they stood to shake hands, the actress stared at Mossy’s fly before fixing on his eyes, keeping hold of his hand. She waved her hair off her face but it settled right back over one eye as she smiled goodbye. “Elena,” Mossy said to his secretary after the actress had gone, “find out if Miss De Baule is free for lunch tomorrow. Maybe today.”
Mossy’s next meeting was a ream. Poor Jim Bicker was in to hear instructions on the adaptation of a novel he’d taken over from another writer. Bicker was difficult and surly. He and Mossy were like animals genetically programmed to fight, but Mossy knew Jim gave his scripts an edge that made gritty pictures. He was stuck with Poor Jim anyway because of his two-year contract.
“Story has no charm,” Bicker said.
As if you have, Mossy wanted to say but held back because he needed the work out of Jim. “Charm’s not what it needs. It needs pace, action, toughness.”
“This picture and I can’t find each other.”
“Good,” Mossy said, “keep looking. That’ll make whatever you do find better. The novel’s okay, for a novel anyway. I bought it for the characters, the ex-con, his wife and daughter, the detective, the teacher who drinks, the crooked lawyer, the bowling alley guy. Now we’re going to have those people do what it makes sense for them to do in a motion picture. They’re no longer going to be staring at each other while they think and we read what they’re thinking. They’re going to be doing, playing, fighting. They need visible energy. The characters are still the meat, but we need gravy badly, and mashed potatoes, beans, then ice cream. Gravy comes from what’s already inside them, like a turkey’s gravy from giblets—heart, gizzard, liver. Part of this gravy is the ex-con maybe wants to prove he was innocent in the first place. Shut up for a minute. I know in the novel he is guilty, but the people who go to pictures really like a man who’s been, pardon my French, butt fucked, so we watch him come back against the odds and right the wrong. We don’t know that at first, everyone just assumes he’s guilty, his wife and daug
hter included, but he wants to clear his name, so naturally he has to find out who actually pulled off the robbery he did time for. See?”
Mossy and Poor Jim were mirrors of each other. Though inherently hostile, both believed in happy endings. One saw Shirley Temple’s smile in every sunrise, the other the destruction of the old order, replaced by the new order where greed was abolished. One saw everyone saluting the flag, studio profitability, and the pure virtue of American life. The other saw a tomorrow with a motto: to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability. No one was selfish in this vision, not really.
“But you’ve stuck me on a story without a heart,” Jim Bicker said.
“Not every story needs a heart, goddammit,” Mossy said. “This one has kishkas. All you have to do is push the bittersweet relationship, more bitter if you want, give me some mystery about why the detective hates the ex-con so much—are they long lost brothers? Or did the detective see someone who looks like the ex-con kill his mother? Gimme a chase, underground maybe, in the sewers, I don’t know, then punch up the ending. Meeting over.”
For a later draft of the same screenplay, Mossy would tell another writer to give the story heart, but heart happened not to be what he valued in Poor Jim Bicker.
Mossy left his office by his private door to go across the building and give a confidential instruction to Dunster Clapp, no doubt a threat only Clapp could deliver with the menace his boss wanted. Then he stopped in the design room to see what Hurd Dawn, the head set designer, had on his easel. He told Dawn to change a living room into a dining room so the characters would have something to do while they argued.
Meanwhile, Elena ushered in a small squad of writers with their flustered director. The mirrored corridor stretching from the outer office to the inner sanctum gave pleaders time to become even more nervous, and when they achieved the sanctum itself they might be trembling. Finding Mossy gone, one of the writers said it was like a reprieve from the governor just before an electrocution. In this case, the meeting was with all the writers who had worked on a script along with the bewildered director who was trying to turn their work into ninety minutes that would hold together. A week of shooting had produced an indecipherable mess.
The first writer, a former reporter, had been brought in to adapt a current novel. Writer number two came for scene construction and continuity. Writer number three, a playwright, was enlisted to brighten dialogue. Writer number four added physical and visual tension, screen pacing. Writer number five came for gags, despite the fact that the story was fairly serious. Then writer three had returned to touch up the dialogue just before shooting, after which number two came back to tighten the structure. Before all this happened, a reader had synopsized the novel, giving it three pages plus a recommendation, which was don’t touch it. It got touched anyway because Dick Powell loved it, or said he did, or someone said he did.
As the writers fidgeted, a door slammed in the outer office as Mossy returned from his errand and charged down his corridor. He began speaking while no one in his inner office could yet see him. “Over and done with, cut our losses, this is a baby only a mother could love, and I’m no mother. Picture’s canceled.”
They still couldn’t see him and he’d already executed them, especially the director. The writers looked at each other, then at the director, who had his head down, making sounds—“Wha, wah, whaaa”—and nobody knew whether he was starting to cry or trying to say something but couldn’t push out his words.
At last Mossy was visible—double-breasted and gold cuff-linked, dark reddish hair shining, nose pointing like the prow of a ship—in the office itself. One of the writers, who had been in the Army, stood as though an officer had entered.
Another writer thought hopefully, desperately, perhaps Mossy was referring to a different project. “What’s that you’re talking about, Chief?” he asked.
“This picture’s finished,” Mossy said. “The dailies are dreck.”
Trying to come to the director’s aid, a third writer said, “We’ve just been clearing our throats so far. The best stuff starts getting into the can tomorrow.”
“No, not tomorrow, not ever. Picture’s done.”
“We can fix it, Boss, fix it fast,” said the youngest writer in the room, who happened to be number four.
Now Mossy had heard something he could pounce on. “Tell me, tell me right this minute. And a minute is just what you have.”
This writer, whose ideas had been routinely rejected by his senior colleagues, asserted himself. “The pilot,” he said, “shouldn’t be a pilot but the captain of a cargo ship that’s being taken away from him unjustly after he’s rammed by a Coast Guard cutter driven by a man who hates him for having won the girl they were both in love with.”
At the word “love,” Mossy’s ears almost literally pricked up. He leaned forward, saying nothing, always the sign for a writer to continue.
“Meanwhile, the girl herself, a morsel everyone wants but only the captain has, is being blackmailed by another guy she rejected who happens to know her father was also once involved in a shipping scandal of his own. The father—I’m thinking of Walter Connolly, maybe Roscoe Karns—did smuggle arms to the English when they were first in the war and we weren’t, but it was a good cause. His daughter—a Bebe Daniels kind of woman, sympathetic but put upon, married to the disgraced captain—wants to save the two men she loves, her husband and her father, but doesn’t have the money the blackmailer demands to keep quiet about the father, who’s also running for mayor … ”
“Stop!” Mossy yelled.
Something had happened to change the room from a funeral parlor to the starting gate at a race track.
“I can get Connolly, rest of the cast stays as is,” said Mossy. “Stop shooting. Have the new script by Friday, do you understand? Do all of you understand?”
Eagerness is a poor word to describe the joy, gratitude, alacrity and enthusiasm with which the entire room leaped to “Yes!” their chief.
“One more thing,” said the chief. “I’m not in the complicated-picture business on this one, I’m in the love business. The father, the captain, the guy in the boat, the blackmailer, they all love the girl. Go type me some love.”
Before they had even retreated to the other end of Mossy’s corridor, the director was kissing the young writer. “Salvation,” he cooed. “It’s a different picture, but you saved it and I owe you my firstborn.”
Control was not only Mossy’s goal but his gift. He could smell when a picture was going bad, and this was most often because he could smell the people on it losing confidence. He didn’t so much understand films as he did filmmakers: writers, directors, producers, stars. Not that he didn’t know what he liked and, with even greater decisiveness, what he disliked; but his gift was in knowing who to hire and when to fire. If a writer groused to Mossy about being made to write a script that was only a reworking of a standard formula, Mossy would say, “Formula! Formula? Do you know what formula is? It’s what works, what will work. Okay, I’m a baby and I’m crying, so go out and make me some formula. But make it new and fresh, the stale stuff gives me indigestion.”
Loving his pictures and the audiences he made them for, Mossy also loved having power over his audiences. Once we walked together into a theater playing a Jubilee movie. “Look at this,” he said as the opening credits finished. “In four minutes I will cause the people in this theater to laugh. In twenty-two minutes they will be scared out of their wits, and in thirty-seven minutes I will make them cry.” And so it came to pass.
It was Yeatsman, Mossy’s favorite writer, who best characterized the birth and death of a project at Jubilee. “Ponder the temperament of a bubble,” he told me. “A bubble is bewitching as it floats upward, catching the sunlight, displaying the rainbow on its surface, appearing both two and three dimensional, membrane-thin yet spherical, and it rotates exquisitely on some hidden axis, full of promise of other bubbles as well. Then, with no warning, it pops. Yo
u don’t ask why.”
Yeatsman could go toe to toe on scripts with Mossy, one of the few who dared confront the boss. Towering over Mossy, Yeatsman, with Princeton and early service on the New York Herald Tribune behind him, could fight bare-knuckled, using no educational advantage but referring only to pictures or stories that worked. When Yeatsman wanted to pitch a story he sometimes needed a few paragraphs about characters and plot wrinkles, but that morning he needed only four words to convince Mossy. “Madame Bovary. Palmyra Millevoix.”
“Jesus Christ! That’ll be our biggest picture in 1935. Maybe ’36. It’ll take time.”
When Yeatsman was talking to young writers like me, he would tell us he preferred originals, but he knew his three thousand a week salary wasn’t supported by screenplays he dreamed up. “I’ll do a rewrite if I need to buy a car or put in a new kitchen,” he said, “while an original will only pay for swimming pool repairs or minor renovations. A new house or a divorce requires the adaptation of a best seller.” In a puckish mood he could twit his Irish idol, whose lines he’d garble. Yeats wouldn’t have been amused, but Yancey once finished a drink in the commissary and said, “I must arise and go now, and go to the industry, the labile industry, a small garden of words to tend there as I type alone in the fee-loud glade.”