by Lorna Luft
The movie’s scenario, so unsettlingly comparable to Judy’s own backstory, is a meta–“Hollywood on Hollywood” tale: the consequences of the ascent of a new star, while her mentor, a major player in the movies, falls into decline and self-destruction. The script made the character of Esther Blodgett a singer instead of a fledgling actress, to take advantage of Judy’s talents. However, much of the plot remains the same as it was in 1937: Norman Maine meets Esther Blodgett and helps establish her film career as the renamed Vicki Lester. They ultimately marry and her professional career soars while his falters due to his severe addiction to alcohol. She plans to leave her career to save him, but he commits suicide to save her. At a Hollywood event shortly after his death by suicide, she memorably introduces herself not as Vicki Lester but as “Mrs. Norman Maine.”
Judy persuaded Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin to compose the film’s unforgettable music and lyrics, including “The Man That Got Away,” which became one of Garland’s signature songs. However, the film’s production was beset with troubles, fueling the Hollywood pessimists who maintained that it was doomed from the start. Jack L. Warner experimented with various technological enhancements early in the film’s production before selecting CinemaScope and Eastmancolor, which proved costly. Garland’s ongoing personal problems caused delays as well, escalating the film’s negative cost to $5,019,770 (not including distribution and promotion costs). Garland came close to admitting culpability for these overruns in an article published in 1957: “I’d be the last to deny the picture took an awful lot of time and went way over the budget. But there was a reason for all that. I’m a perfectionist; George Cukor, who directed, is a perfectionist; and so is Sid. We have to have it right; and to make it right took time. It was right too. It was a good picture—as good as we’d hoped it would be.”1
The crowds who mobbed the Pantages Theatre to be near the event were estimated to be over twenty thousand strong.
A Star Is Born premiered at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood on September 29, 1954. The three-hour film—the second-most-expensive Hollywood production at that time, after David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun (1946)—drew an audience of more than 250 stars, including Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, and James Dean. Warner Bros. lavished on A Star Is Born the biggest advertising and marketing launch in their studio history. They even touted the production’s expense (“$6,000,000 and 2½ Years to Make It!”) as part of their campaign.2
The crowds who mobbed the Pantages Theatre to be near the event were estimated to be over twenty thousand strong. In addition to a dozen radio stations, KTTV television broadcast the festivities live in Los Angeles as a half-hour local television special with a portion of the telecast aired on NBC national television on the New York City–based The Tonight Show. After the premiere, Jack L. Warner hosted a lavish party at the famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel.
The reviews were laudatory toward Garland, and the film as a whole won virtually unanimous praise. Those who saw the original, uncut film were mesmerized. The film grossed nearly $700,000 at only seventeen theaters in its first week of release, a figure industry trade paper Variety described as “A showing a little short of phenomenal” and described the film’s commercial potential as “Boffola box office, period. It will not only mop up as a commercial entry [but] sets a number of artistic standards. Fort Knox, move over.”3 Life magazine declared, “A Star Is Born, the year’s most worrisome movie, has turned out to be one of its best.… A brilliantly staged, scored, and photographed film, was worth all the effort.… But principal credit for A Star Is Born unquestionably goes to imaginative, tireless, talented Judy herself.”4 Time proclaimed that Judy “gives what is just about the greatest one-woman show in modern movie history.”5
Garland had accomplished a miraculous feat. She rose like a phoenix from the ashes of her failed movie career of just four years earlier and produced a masterpiece. However, like the story, A Star Is Born the film was to end up as the Hollywood story without a happy ending.
Two weeks after the premiere, Harry Warner, Jack L.Warner’s elder brother and president of Warner Bros. Pictures, decreed the film was too long and had to be cut by over thirty minutes from the original 181-minute running time to placate exhibitor demand for a shorter film. Although Gone With the Wind (1939) had been reissued in 1954 at 220 minutes (not including intermission) and proved one of the top-grossing films that summer, Benjamin Kalmenson, president of Warner Bros. distribution, dismissed this precedent and ordered A Star Is Born cut down to 154 minutes. The press and public condemned the decision. The film’s revenues and positive word of mouth quickly evaporated. The unique motion picture experience created by George Cukor and Judy Garland suddenly became a deeply unsatisfactory one. “A Star Is Shorn” headlined New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther’s 1954 assessment of the shortened version. Crowther lamented, “… virtually every cut in the picture leaves a gaping and baffling hole, so that not only the emotional pattern but the very sense of the thing is shorn.”6
Garland’s subsequent loss of the Best Actress Academy Award is still regarded as one of the greatest upsets in the history of the Oscars. Despite the superb showcase of her talent and the verisimilitude of her performance, Garland lost to Grace Kelly in The Country Girl (1954). The Academy’s rebuke of Garland and the film itself is demonstrated in the fact that out of the six categories in which it was nominated, including Best Actor, Best Actress, Art Direction, Costume Design, Music Score, and Song (“The Man That Got Away”), A Star Is Born didn’t win a single award. The dismissal of her film by the Academy and the film’s commercial failure meant the cancellation of her production company’s multipicture deal with Warner Bros. Sadly, and almost incomprehensibly, given the positive critical and public reaction to the original cut of the film, A Star Is Born effectively ended Garland’s career as a major movie star. After A Star Is Born, she was forced to return to concerts and began to perform on television to earn a living and appeared in only a handful of films thereafter.
In 1982, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, through its Academy Foundation, spearheaded the reconstruction (a full restoration was not possible as all the footage could not be found) of the full-length version of the film. A new version was assembled using still photograph montages animating the missing footage with the whole original soundtrack running 176 minutes. Warner Bros., working with the Academy, supported this work and their involvement with the film’s reconstruction extended to supporting a tour of the new version in six major cities. The world premiere was held before a capacity crowd at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on July 7, 1983, and enjoyed a clamor of critical and popular acclaim.
Ronald Haver, head of the film department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, undertook the reconstruction work as his personal mission. Everyone who admires the film is in his debt and are fortunate also to have his written history of the making and reconstruction of the film—published in 1988—from which this book draws inspiration. As a result of Haver’s work and the Academy’s promotion, what was once a mutilated motion picture has now become an undisputed masterpiece. The fact that the Library of Congress selected A Star Is Born for the National Film Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films in 2000 supports this assertion. In 2010, Warner Bros. scanned the film’s original camera negative at 6K resolution for preservation purposes and tweaked the 1983 reconstruction to achieve the highest possible visual and aural quality. The first Turner Classic Movies Film Festival gave this enhanced, digital version of A Star Is Born a world premiere on April 22, 2010, with Lorna introducing her parents’ film. In a life and career filled with “comebacks,” it is only appropriate that Garland’s film continually reemerges to recapture the interest of the moviegoing public.
As complicated as its star, A Star Is Born remains a dazzling rendition
of an old Hollywood tale. The latest remake, in 2018, starring Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) and directed by, costarring, and coproduced by Bradley Cooper, demonstrates the enduring appeal of this story as it entertains a new generation of filmgoers.
—JEFFREY VANCE, LOS ANGELES, 2018
One-sheet poster from What Price Hollywood? (1932).
Chapter One
BEGINNINGS:
WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? (1932) AND A STAR IS BORN (1937)
SEVENTEEN YEARS BEFORE JUDY GARLAND MADE CINEMA HISTORY IN Warner Bros.’ A Star Is Born (1954), David O. Selznick produced the first film of that famed title. But the story doesn’t start there. The roots of the 1937 version lie in yet another film with a similar plot, an early pet project of Selznick’s titled What Price Hollywood? (1932). A tragic love story with the glamour of Hollywood as its backdrop, the film is a Depression-era Cinderella tale with a dark undercurrent that explores the emptiness of celebrity. As one Hollywood star ascends, another great talent declines, and the story climaxes with a suicide. It established the archetype for the classic Tinseltown rise-and-fall tale, and was the first truly noteworthy film by the esteemed director George Cukor.
What Price Hollywood? is the end result of a complicated evolutionary process. In 1932, Selznick purchased a juicy yarn by Hollywood journalist and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns called The Truth About Hollywood. Playwright and screenwriter Jane Murfin further developed this original treatment, after which Ben Markson adapted it into a screenplay that was later revised by journalist and screenwriter Gene Fowler and Rowland Brown. Rewrites, and uncredited contributions from Robert Presnell Sr., Roger Stevens, and Allen Rivkin resulted in the screenplay that producer Pandro S. Berman and executive producer David O. Selznick approved, and George Cukor agreed to direct for RKO Pathé.
A succession of working titles for the script matched its string of writers: The Truth About Hollywood, Hollywood Madness, and Hollywood Merry-Go-Round were all considered but ultimately rejected. The film’s final, definitive title is a reference to the famous 1924 anti-war play What Price Glory? by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings that had been made into a popular film in 1926. Selznick selected glamorous blonde Constance Bennett for the lead role of Mary Evans, with actor-director Lowell Sherman playing opposite her as film director Max Carey. Neil Hamilton as romantic interest Lonny Borden and Gregory Ratoff as producer Julius Saxe (a character modeled after movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn) filled out the key supporting roles.
George Cukor, who had codirected his first film, Grumpy (1930), just two years earlier, was a veteran of the New York theater world and served an apprenticeship as “dialogue director” during the transition period from silent pictures to “talkies,” most notably for Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). His stage experience resulted in a well-deserved reputation as a superb director of actors. Cukor adored performers and performing. Telling stories about actors was to be a common thread in his work and would inform A Star Is Born. Though it was an integral launching pad for Cukor’s career, What Price Hollywood? was Selznick’s passion project. The producer guaranteed his film’s success not only with a fine cast and a sympathetic director, but also with rich black-and-white cinematography by the doyen of Hollywood cameramen, Charles Rosher, excellent settings imagined by art director Carroll Clark, and a striking musical score by composer Max Steiner.
What Price Hollywood? opens on Bennett’s Mary Evans primping for her evening shift as a waitress at the famous Brown Derby restaurant, where the Hollywood elite dine. A movie magazine has informed her which silk stockings to slide on, which dress to don, and which lipstick to select, and how to apply it. In a memorable visual introduction to Mary’s fantasy world, she holds up a page featuring an image of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable, and, imitating Garbo, plays a miniature love scene with her magazine idol Gable. Judy Garland, a few years later, would recall this scene by singing “You Made Me Love You” to a scrapbook full of Gable pictures in Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), creating a pivotal moment in her early career.
Mary is a young, pretty Hollywood hopeful, but not an innocent. She trades on her guile and her beauty, wringing the most out of every opportunity to place herself squarely in the sights of the producers and directors who frequent the Brown Derby. Mary is ready to be discovered—curled, lashed, and peroxided—but unconcerned with the work and the commitment that must follow the superficial powder and polish. She sets her sights on director Max Carey, in top hat and tails, who stumbles into the restaurant one evening, inebriated but endearing. Mary sidles up to his table, stars in her eyes, schemes in her head, and charms the director.
Carey is momentarily taken with Mary; he invites her to leave her job at the bowler-shaped restaurant to attend the premiere of his latest celluloid triumph at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. At the event, she matches him move for move, line for line, and while wearing just street clothes and arriving in a dilapidated Ford Model T, she affects the air and accent of British nobility to impress the crowd and the radio audience, then swans into the theater with a hearty laugh. The next morning, in his own bed and hung over, Carey remembers nothing of the night before, while Mary, who has slept on his sofa, is credited with getting him home safe and fairly sound. Carey admires Mary’s moxie. When she plainly states that all she needs is a break, he instructs her to be on his set the next day for a bit part in his current production.
Stage ten is a crush of snaking cables, stage-light floor lamps, and the buzz of cast and crew at work on a movie called Purple Flame. Carey snags Mary, positioning her on the grand staircase, and gives her an easy line of dialogue as the minor character of Rosemarie: “Hello, Buzzy. You haven’t proposed to me yet tonight.” However, Mary, untrained and nervous, is unexpectedly awkward in her delivery and unable to take direction, showing not a trace of the star quality and assurance she displayed when they first met. Carey instructs his assistant director to find a replacement. Apparently, there have been many such tryouts of his late night “discoveries,” as producer Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff) is all too aware. Max and Saxe are great friends as well as colleagues; the producer is also wise to the fact that his director is a barely functioning alcoholic.
But plucky Mary doesn’t give up. She rehearses on the stairs of her boardinghouse, up and down, speaking the line in every mode her inexperience will allow, until an inner light flashes. She uncovers the walk, the talk, and the manner of the character, and peppers Max with telephone calls pleading for another chance. Styled with Marcelled hair and a slinky gown, she is tested, and the footage is rushed to the screening room for Saxe to view. Mary steals a peek from the projection booth, then overhears dialogue uttered in countless subsequent show business tales: “Terrific!” “Who is that gorgeous creature?” “She’s a great discovery!” “Where is that girl? Find her and bring her back immediately!” She is offered a long-term contract and, encountering Max, cries, “Mr. Carey, I’m in pictures!”
Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) is an aspiring actress given direction by Max Carey (Lowell Sherman) in a scene from What Price Hollywood? (1932).
Publicized as “America’s Pal”—an obvious reference to silent superstar Mary Pickford’s well-known sobriquet “America’s Sweetheart”—Mary’s ascent to stardom is capsulized in a brief but breathless sequence, with searchlights sweeping the sky as her image grows to fill the screen. The 1954 version of A Star Is Born, by contrast, mirrors Garland’s star status by showing the audience what the excitement is based on: the astonishing talents of Esther Blodgett and her alter ego, Vicki Lester. What we see of Mary Evans (no name change) is the filming, after she is an established star, of her singing prettily “Parlez-moi d’amour” on a French cabaret set for director Carey. Max himself is suggested to be in a downward spiral. Suddenly, he appears less focused, less in command, more subject to demon drink and personal despair. The axiom for the physics of Hollywood is set: For every rising star, there is one in free fall.
The
film was produced during the so-called Hollywood “Pre-Code” era, before the industry hired William H. Hays to preside over and strictly enforce the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934, and vigilantly remove suggestive situations and risqué dialogue from the American screen. A typical example of edgy dialogue of this period is delivered by Carey, on things that will not last: “My liver and a movie star’s marriage.” Later, with the Hays Code (the popular name for the Production Code) in place, filmmakers scaled back the racy dialogue for A Star Is Born (1937). The story was sanitized even more for the 1954 version, in which sexuality is sublimated due to Judy Garland’s fluctuating weight and her somewhat androgynous screen presence.
The film was produced during the so-called Hollywood “Pre-Code” era, before the industry hired William H. Hays to preside over and strictly enforce the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934, and vigilantly remove suggestive situations and risqué dialogue from the American screen.
The character of Lonny Borden, the millionaire playboy of What Price Hollywood?, is eliminated from future versions of this tale. He and Mary meet at the Santa Barbara Polo Club and later fall in love, a plotline the subsequent films axe in favor of the romance with Norman Maine. Lonny and Mary dine, dance, fall in love, then marry in a super-charged, publicity-seeking ceremony. On the steps of the Hollywood United Methodist Church, Mary Evans is fiercely mobbed, her bridal gown ending up in tatters. The scene is reinterpreted, in both 1937 and 1954 film versions, into the funeral of Norman Maine; on the chapel steps, the widow’s black veil is torn away as a souvenir, inspired by the experience of widow Norma Shearer at the 1936 funeral of her husband, producer Irving G. Thalberg.