A Star Is Born (Turner Classic Movies)
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The rushed romance adds an element of sex to What Price Hollywood? but the true love story at the heart of the film is the tale of Mary and Max: starlet and mentor, friends, colleagues, little sister and big brother. They are an entertaining, platonic duo. Selznick and Cukor based Lowell Sherman’s character on silent-film director Marshall A. Neilan and the great John Barrymore. (Sherman himself was a director and a drinker who died at age forty-nine, two years after the release of What Price Hollywood?) As played by Sherman, Max Carey is dashing and impulsive, witty and urbane, well dressed, with a sophisticated sexual ambiguity. Constance Bennett, who had started her career in flapper-type roles of the 1920s, was transitioning into a screen sophisticate of the 1930s. The part of Mary Evans allowed Bennett not only to wear her costumes well, but to display both her comedic and dramatic skills, further establishing her as the embodiment of the soigné, witty modern woman.
Cukor quickly had become identified with film properties featuring strong female leads (Tarnished Lady, with Tallulah Bankhead and Girls about Town, with Kay Francis, both in 1931). Apart from the dexterity with which he handles Bennett’s scenes, his work on What Price Hollywood? demonstrates traces of the high polish of his later pictures.
FROM LEFT: the director Max Carey (Lowell Sherman), millionaire playboy Lonny Borden (Neil Hamilton), and screen star Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) in a scene from What Price Hollywood? (1932).
The film’s imagery, especially that which takes Mary Evans from starlet to star, when her glamour portrait, small at first, is propelled forward into a montage culminating in applause, is striking. The montage—one of several filled with kinetic editing, dissolves, and optical effects—was the work of visual effects specialists Slavko Vorkapich and Lloyd Knechtel. Another notable montage is Max Carey’s screen suicide. Max’s death scene is particularly memorable for the director’s choices to employ quick cuts of shots reliving his life in flashes, exaggerated sound effects, and slow motion when Max collapses to the floor. It is an early, unforgettable, slow-motion death in a Hollywood movie, predating by decades the balletic massacre in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion slaughter in The Wild Bunch (1969). Before Carey turns his gun to his own chest, there is an exceptional sequence of flashbacks set amid swirling rings of clouds. Accompanying this mental break is a buzz of sound, like a swarm of bees, and yet not quite. The total effect is mesmerizing—an unusually expressionistic gesture in a mainstream film. The remakes of 1937 and 1954 deal with the suicide in a far less brutal manner, the latter backed up with a Judy Garland ballad.
What Price Hollywood? was nominated for one Academy Award: Adela Rogers St. Johns and Jane Murfin were singled out for Best Writing (Original Story), but lost to the renowned screenwriter Frances Marion for King Vidor’s The Champ (1931). In the film realization of St. Johns and Murfin’s tale, Hollywood is presented as a haven of craft at times approaching artistry, and a disciplined industry, as David O. Selznick would have it. It’s also a business, its bottom line a monster that can destroy every aspiration. It can devour piece by piece its seasoned professionals, and swallow whole its starry-eyed neophytes. Max Carey lost himself. Mary Evans bought in. In the end, Hollywood always wins.
Selznick made the film on a budget of $416,000 and it earned $571,000, but lost money at the box office ($50,000) as it failed to recover print and advertising expenses during distribution and received mixed reviews despite a compelling story that expertly weaves the comic and tragic, Cukor’s sophisticated direction, and fine performances. According to Selznick, who left RKO in 1933 to strike out as an independent producer, A Star Is Born was inspired and formed by What Price Hollywood?1 He believed the screenplay for What Price Hollywood? didn’t live up to the full potential of its subject, and for this reason Selznick revisited the material for A Star Is Born five years later.
IN SELZNICK’S REIMAGINING OF WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD? CAUSED A MUCH bigger stir in Hollywood than its predecessor. A Star Is Born (1937) is more glamorous, more expansive, up-to-date, and shot in the early three-color Technicolor process. In her review of the film, titled “Star Is Born Shows Hollywood as It Is,” gossip columnist Louella O. Parsons recommended her readers to “… lose no time in going to see this delightful human interest drama. Somehow it has completely captured the mood of this business of motion pictures, and two of our most experienced and delightful players, Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, do much to make Mr. Selznick’s dream of presenting the real Hollywood via the screen come true.”2
A few expository scenes into this drama, a dewy girl from North Dakota, Esther Blodgett, arrives in Los Angeles, and, suitcase still in hand, makes her way to Hollywood Boulevard and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where—even as early as 1937—the famous forecourt is a must-see for tourists. She marvels at the star power at her feet, especially when she pauses above the foot and handprints of matinee idol Norman Maine, her first “encounter” with him. Esther’s daydreams now have a literal, concrete foundation, even though her heart is still in the clouds. Back home in the rustic nowhere, she declared to her family, “I’m going out and have a real life! I’m going to be somebody!” Her sympathetic Grandmother Lettie (May Robson) funds her granddaughter’s venture with money she had saved for her own funeral.
“… Somehow it has completely captured the mood of this business of motion pictures, and two of our most experienced and delightful players, Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, do much to make Mr. Selznick’s dream of presenting the real Hollywood via the screen come true.”
The cruel reality of daily life in Hollywood quickly challenges Esther’s dreams of stardom. Her room at the Oleander Arms will cost her $6 a week, and at Central Casting, she is bluntly but gently informed that her chances of making a living in the movies are 1 in 100,000. Esther doesn’t hesitate to defend herself: “But maybe I’m that one.” Janet Gaynor’s Esther has a forceful inner confidence and strength that propel her. Constance Bennett as Mary Evans represented beauty meeting up with opportunity. Judy Garland’s 1950s Esther would be a far less ambitious young woman, grateful that she is paid to sing anywhere, possessed of a voice that is greater than she knows. Gaynor’s heroine, however, has little raw talent, but a fierce determination to succeed.
Gaynor had won the hearts of moviegoers in the late silent era, her sweet, unassuming charm filling the gap Mary Pickford left when she outgrew youthful roles. By the 1930s, Janet Gaynor was shorthand for “girl-next-door,” yet she also was an Academy Award–winning star; she had won the first-ever Best Actress Academy Award in 1929 for her portrayals in two Frank Borzage films—7th Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928)—as well as F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). She was a logical Esther for Depression-era audiences to embrace. Furthermore, William A. Wellman had just directed her the year before in Small Town Girl (1936), and he was helming A Star Is Born.
With fellow tenant and friend Danny McGuire (Andy Devine), an assistant director, Esther attends a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where several rows ahead, an inebriated Norman Maine (Fredric March) confronts a surly press photographer loudly and physically. Esther is alarmed, but a small smile overrides any judgment in her second encounter with Maine. Esther’s cash on hand dwindling, Danny hustles up for her a one-night assignment as a server at a Hollywood party. Balancing a silver tray of hors d’oeuvres, she seeks attention by mimicking Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Mae West for the unimpressed guests. (Mary Evans also imitated Garbo in What Price Hollywood?) The appearance of Norman Maine, fueled by scotch and soda, throws Esther out of her imaginary spotlight in her third encounter with the famous film star. He follows Esther into the kitchen for more of her innocent chatter. Instead, clatter ensues as he drops a plate, then another, and then takes a platter to the head, courtesy of the date he abandoned. However, Esther is still giving Norman the benefit of the doubt as they escape together, hand in hand, out the back door.
At the Oleander Arms, Wellman lines up an unusual and beautiful shot. Framed in the crook of Maine�
��s arm, Esther’s face is half in shadow, her visible eye admiring him. Then as he turns to go—perhaps surprised that the evening has ended without his making a pass—he pauses and utters the famous line that resurfaces in the next two films, “Mind if I take just one more look?”
One-sheet poster from A Star Is Born (1937).
Star Janet Gaynor, director and cowriter of the original story William A. Wellman, and supporting actor Adolphe Menjou confer during production of A Star Is Born (1937).
Maine pesters studio head Oliver Niles (Adolphe Menjou) in the middle of the night, insisting on a screen test for his new discovery. Niles rewards the impressive test (that the audience never sees) with a contract and a new name: the tossed-off “Vicki Lester,” a spin on her first and middle names, Esther Victoria. Matt Libby (Lionel Stander), the studio press agent, creates a new biography to suit her new name and image, and Esther undergoes a cookie-cutter transformation in the form of a makeover and posture and elocution lessons. Libby is excellent at his work, a profession that forces him to clean up after Norman Maine, who is in decline and a publicist’s nightmare.
Esther’s fourth encounter with Norman Maine plays out in the studio commissary, some time having passed, when Norman spies Esther across the counter rehearsing a bit part to herself. Setting his hangover aside, he “reintroduces” himself, and is taken anew with her simple charms. A lightbulb almost appears over his head as he realizes she is exactly the girl the studio has been trying, and failing, to find to play opposite him in his next picture. In the 1954 A Star Is Born, Esther/Vicki is a musical singing star whose career doesn’t cross over with Norman’s; their careers diverge as their lives intertwine. Here, the two are career contemporaries.
There were other major alterations made to fashion A Star Is Born out of What Price Hollywood? Selznick changed names and added new characters to update the narrative. Matt Libby serves as an antihero for Maine to have an actual antagonist, while Grandmother Lettie is a voice of encouragement to open and close the film. The character of Danny McGuire is blended in as a friend for Esther. Max Carey, the noted director and alcoholic, becomes Norman Maine, the famous actor and alcoholic; Maine is truly a womanizer, while Carey’s exploits with women are merely rumor. The plot change necessitated the elimination of Lonny Borden. Mary Evans keeps her own name in 1932, but in 1937, Selznick rechristened the character Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester. The former is a lively blonde, in waiting to be a blonde bombshell in pictures; the latter is just off the farm, a big dreamer in a small package. Studio executive Julius Saxe evolves into studio chief Oliver Niles, a debonair man of the world, and friend to Maine.
Though not technically a direct remake, A Star Is Born borrows heavily from What Price Hollywood?—so heavily, in fact, that the RKO legal team threatened, at one point, to file a plagiarism lawsuit against Selznick. RKO never commenced legal action, owing in part to Selznick’s careful reimagining of the first film. An entire ensemble of writers reconfigured the original into a freshened story, and the characters into a tighter group. In fact, the writers assigned to the script outnumbered the movie’s principal players. Dorothy Parker (the full-time wit), Alan Campbell (her part-time husband), and Robert Carson composed the screenplay out of the story by director Wellman and the aforementioned Carson, with inspiration provided by Adela Rogers St. Johns’s original story. Other contributors—uncredited—included Selznick himself, Ben Hecht, Rowland Brown, John Lee Mahin, Ring Lardner Jr., and Budd Schulberg.3
The final script was quite different in tone and content from What Price Hollywood?, offering more details (and an additional twenty minutes in running time) about its heroine’s rise to stardom and her troubled courtship and marriage. At the big sneak preview of her screen debut with Norman, the moviegoers are over-the-moon for newborn star Vicki Lester, but just plain over the failing Norman Maine. As they leave the theater, Norman tells Esther, “A star is born!” The after-party, at the Café Trocadero, belongs to Esther/Vicki, since she unintentionally stole the picture from Norman. Out on the terrace, overlooking the Los Angeles nightscape, Maine proclaims to Esther, “It’s all yours, from now on you know. You’re a success. You can have everything in the world you want. I hope it will make you happy.” The words are poignant, for happiness has eluded Norman, despite his success. He discourages Esther’s declaration of love for him, fearing that his self-destructive nature is beyond salvation.
Norman Maine (Fredric March) and Vicki Lester (Janet Gaynor) attend the preview of their new movie in A Star Is Born (1937). The film makes Vicki an overnight success while moviegoers lose interest in Norman.
Libby enthuses prematurely about a Hollywood wedding, advancing Esther’s nascent career and salvaging Norman’s. Norman has proposed to her at a noisy, messy prizefight, the two acknowledging the elephant in the ring: his drinking. Maine quips, “We thought we’d elope, in the conventional manner.” However, Libby wants “the biggest elopement this town ever saw.”
The scene cuts to a California county courthouse where, with inmates as witnesses, Esther Blodgett and Alfred Hinkel (Norman’s birth name) tie the civil knot. However, Libby has tracked them down, angrily accusing Norman of betrayal. Garland, James Mason, and Jack Carson play an almost identical scene in the 1954 version, after a similar civil service. A lakeside honeymoon via trailer is attempted, but whipping up a simple dinner in the jostling vehicle sends Esther and her steak to the floor. A muddy and rutted road strands them completely.
Wellman steered away from any cinematic flourishes in his take—or Selznick’s—on fall and rise in Hollywood. Wellman was not an obvious second choice when George Cukor passed on A Star Is Born. He was known for directing the Academy Award–winning aviation epic Wings (1927), the gangster classic The Public Enemy (1931), and the uncompromising Great Depression drama Wild Boys of the Road (1933). But the director invested himself in the project, adapting the story with many of his and Carson’s ideas from their original story, It Happened in Hollywood. In that story, they created a character called Esther Blodgett who dreams of movie stardom and an alcoholic screen star Norman Maine, whose stardom is waning. It Happened in Hollywood also featured the scene in which Blodgett wins an Academy Award, and the ending in which Maine commits suicide by drowning himself in the ocean. (Wellman maintained that this was based on silent star John Bowers, who drowned himself in the Pacific and his body washed ashore on Malibu Beach the next day. However, his death occurred after the script was completed.) Wellman also drew on memories with his ex-wife, the former screen star Helene Chadwick, who has a bit part in the film.4
Wellman claimed it was Irene Mayer Selznick who convinced her husband to produce the film. She remembered, “Star Is Born came about because I nagged and nagged and nagged David—since R.K.O. I said, ‘Hollywood—it’s all around you—you can’t avoid it. What Price Hollywood? came out of that, but it wasn’t right. And David kept fellows around on it, and there was a whole pile of stuff. Out of that nagging came a lot of stories.”5
Production began on October 31, 1936 at the Selznick International Studios in Culver City, and wrapped on December 28, 1936. During a period when Wellman battled severe influenza, Selznick temporarily replaced him with directors Jack Conway and Victor Fleming—yet it is Wellman’s picture, typical of his subtle, straightforward, and well-paced style. Wellman’s delicate handling of Fredric March is particularly skillful. March came into prominence playing the flamboyant Tony Cavendish (a character based on John Barrymore) in George Cukor’s The Royal Family of Broadway (1930) and won the Best Actor Academy Award in 1932 for his outstanding work in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), a role previously associated with Barrymore’s bravura performance in a 1920 silent-film version. March continued to make excellent films directed by top directors such as Ernst Lubitsch and Cecil B. DeMille and starred opposite Garbo in Anna Karenina (1935). He underplays Norman, giving a performance entirely devoid of histrionics. Indeed, March’s performance is arguably the most powerful piece of acting in the
film, despite the fact that Janet Gaynor’s role was pivotal, the actress playing a part tailored to her talent. Although silent film player John Bowers’s death was said to have informed Norman Maine, the best evidence suggests that John Gilbert and John Barrymore were the models for Maine’s self-destructive behavior. Cukor visited John Barrymore in a west Los Angeles sanitarium that the actor had admitted himself into to stop drinking. The director attempted to rally the ailing actor with the offer of a good supporting role in his forthcoming film Camille (1936). The Barrymore incident made it into the final script of A Star Is Born through Cukor’s friendship and long association with Selznick.6
Leading up to a critical Academy Awards ceremony, Maine sees his star eclipsed by his wife’s supernova. He takes joy in her success, but, after losing his contract and close association with Oliver Niles, Norman seeks solace in alcohol and becomes a cautionary tale as he loses his identity (he is sometimes referred to as “Mr. Lester”) and sense of purpose. At the awards banquet, Vicki wins for the film Dream without End, and in a passage lifted later for Judy Garland in the 1954 remake, says simply, “Ladies and gentleman, when something like this happens to you—and you try to tell how you feel about it—you find that, out of all the words in the world, there are only two that really mean anything. ‘Thank you.’ All I can do is to say them from my heart. All I can do is to keep on saying them.…”