Promise of Joy
Page 60
The 24-hour estate, now standing closed and deserted, belongs to the heirs of the late Ambassador Joseph Davies, and a magnificent mansion it is, though unfortunately run-down and shabby in a number of places. Through the magic of Hollywood (otherwise known as Cold Cash), it is restored to some of its original splendor and reawakened for one night. It is, as many Washington socialites will remember for quite a while, quite a night.
Not only do they find themselves on duty from 7 p.m. to 4 in the morning but many of them find themselves out of camera-range and with nothing to do but exactly what they do at Washington parties all year long—sit around and gossip. For some of them, this finally proves too much. Mrs. Gwendolyn Caffritz, for instance, who fancies herself as being a trifle more important to Washington society than she perhaps is as the years go by, presently decides she isn’t getting enough attention, and departs. Some others do the same. Most, however, are good sports and stay around watching the shooting and learning about movies until champagne is finally served in the small house and they are free to leave the graceful mansion and go home.
In Hollywood—where the company moves in October—the situation with regard to extras is somewhat different. There occurs, in fact, a lively scene with the director, finally exploding into genuine anger at the obvious boredom of the professional extras sitting in the galleries of the Senate chamber set, tells them that, “You sit there like sticks and do nothing! In Washington I had thousands of amateurs and they were all interested, they all reacted beautifully, they were cooperative and wonderful. You do nothing, lousy Hollywood extras!” The “lousy Hollywood extras” hiss him vigorously, and for a moment there is a dramatic exchange of glares before the shooting moves on. A little later he turns it to his advantage by remarking with a chuckle, “Now, react, up there in the gallery. You reacted against me ten minutes ago, so react like you did then.” The extras laugh, grudgingly, and give it a try.
There is not, however, in these professionals who are unionized, security-conscious and fiercely jealous of every last inch of their contract rights, quite the same spontaneous and enthusiastic attitude as you have seen on location. Sometimes, they tell you proudly, they make as much as $10,000 to $12,000 a year just for furnishing background; it is obvious that for them it is strictly a business. In two weeks of shooting in the Senate set, there is just one topic of conversation: money. How much is So-and-So getting? Did you hear Such-and-Such has been given one line to speak, which will raise his $100 a day? Hey, it’s one minute past quitting time! Here we go into overtime!
And so on. It is understandable that in a highly competitive town, with “the industry” in the doldrums (only one other picture is being shot at the same time on all the huge Columbia lot), security should be an aim and the extra buck an obsession. But even so, it is possible to see what the director means. It does not make for excessive sparkle on the faces that fill the floor and galleries of the U.S. Senate, Hollywood version.
Such qualifications about personnel, however, cannot detract from the magnificence of the Senate set itself. This is a tribute to the genius of the production designer, Lyle Wheeler, winner of five Academy Awards (his first for Gone With The Wind.) With the Senate’s approval and cooperation, he was permitted to take some 200 still photographs and make extensive sketches of the inside of the chamber. Out of these, in seven weeks’ time with the aid of more than 100 technicians and carpenters, he has fashioned a Senate replica realistic that when Washingtonians walk in they think for a moment that they are back home on the Hill. (Former Senator Henry Ashurst, playing the part of a sleepy elderly Senator, remarks one day with a start as he wakes from a real-life doze, “It took me a full half-minute to realize I wasn’t back in the Senate.”)
Authenticity holds throughout: the antique desks, exact replicas of those in Washington furnished by the manufacturers of the originals; the Oriental-style carpet, loomed by the manufacturers of the original; the two ivory gavels; the snuff boxes; the swinging glass doors into the party cloakroom and so on. The $250,000 replica is five feet smaller all around than the actual Senate chamber, but neither to the eye nor the camera is this apparent!
Although it would have been a great publicity coup for the director to be the first movie-maker to be allowed to shoot a film in the Senate, it soon becomes apparent that it is infinitely better from the standpoint of his picture that he had to build a Hollywood set, for this permits the camera a freedom it could not otherwise have. In obedience to its demands, desks are pulled out and put back, seating arrangements are changed, walls are knocked down and removed—the mock Senate undergoes transformations the real Senate of course not could undergo.
Publicity’s loss is the picture’s gain, for in this way it is possible for the director to achieve effects that he could never achieve on Capitol Hill. The long, snaking takes in which the camera moves in and out among the desks to catch, now this actor, now that, this way in which it is able to back away and survey the action from a distance—particularly the magnificent final scene in which it moves away and up, above gallery-level, to look down upon an adjourning Senate—all are made possible by the studio set.
Here, too, as in Washington, there are the visitors, ranging from Laughton’s delightful wife, Elsa Lanchester, to the soggy son of a noble father, Randolph Churchill. Mr. Churchill wheezes on the set one morning under a full head of steam and indignation, and before you can say “double Scotch Old Fashioned,” he and the director are locked in mortal combat.
This begins during an uproarious luncheon at the nearby restaurant where most Columbia employees go for food, a pitched battle in which Mr. Churchill and the director, each of whom has finally met his match about each other into silence. It goes on to a private dinner party given by the director at which Mr. Churchill insults various guests, sends one of the ladies into tears, brings dire threats from male guests, and finally succeeds in breaking up the evening. Next morning he receives an icy letter from the director and is barred from the set. Undaunted, he rolls away home, having contributed his particular brand of liveliness to the fun-and-games side of the shooting of Advise and Consent.
There are other aspects of this, of course, a few parties and dinners: but one soon realizes that Hollywood does most of its personal hell-raising between pictures. There just isn’t time or energy, while one is going on. Here, as in Washington, the day’s activities begin on Sound Stage 14 at 8 a.m. or very shortly thereafter, and frequently last past 6 p.m.; it is a stout soul who could party every night and still arrive bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to face the jaundiced gaze of the camera every morning. Make-up an do wonders, you note, but in the few instances when someone has parties hard the night before, the fact is quite apparent. Sensible stars always be this in mind. “The industry” is indeed an industry, and those who truly succeed in it bring to it a firmly business-like and no-nonsense approach particularly in the care of their principal asset—themselves.
Even so, one cannot help but get some sense of the strange combination of fact and legend that goes by the name “Hollywood,” and it is quite apparent that in this present stage of its existence it is a nervous and uneasy place. There is something in the sun-drenched air, as the soft bland days of South California autumn relentlessly follow one another, which indicates a community in the grip of a profound disturbance. There is a mood of uncertainty, a desperate emphasis on security—possibly because an increasing number of its residents have increasingly less of it—a tensely questioning mood. More and more “runaway productions”—made abroad with cheaper foreign labor, on cheap foreign locations—are being announced. More and more vast sound stages are standing empty every year. Opportunities are dwindling for both actors technicians.
Major studies are gambling their budgets and their futures on mammoth extravaganzas that run into the red in million-dollar terms of a star so much he’s a day of sniffles. The endless search for means to beat the competition of television results, not so much in better and more appealing pictures, and
in a desperate reliance on the spectacular and super-colossal that has always been Hollywood’s answer to attack. But in these times it is not enough, and even as its residents go through the motions, it is possible to perceive that they know it is not enough. Under the edge of the sunny air lies the cold hint of fear. It makes even more insistent the feeling you begin to have, as the two months of shooting of Advise and Consent draw to their end, that while it has all been great fun, it is time, now, to think about getting back to reality and re-entering the workaday world.
There comes, finally, the last day of shooting a scene in the home of Hank Fonda, nominee for Secretary of State, otherwise known as Robert A. Leffingwell. For the last time the electricians and the grips and the cameramen fuss about, getting everything just right. For the last time the director orders, “Rehearsal!” For the last time he shouts, “Action!” And then for the last time he cries, “Cut! Print!”
And the adventure is over.
Over for the cast and the crew and the author and everyone else directly involved in the past two months, but not, of course, for the group that now takes command. For another month the director, working with the editors, the musicians, the film-cutters and sound-men, will mold the rough cut, sift through the scenes, choose the best takes from countless possibilities. This assembly of the pieces involves the most minute detail—so minute, in fact, that it will sometimes come down to something as fleeting as one sentence of dialogue. That one sentence will have been recorded possibly six times. Out of those six tapes the final sentence is literally put together word by word, so that the beginning of the sentence the audience hears may have come from the first take, the middle phrases from the third take, the concluding words from the sixth take. In the same way the film itself is cut and pieced together. So smooth is the editing that the final product on the screen carries with it all of Laughton’s “conviction of the first time”—artfully created by technicians in a laboratory.
And the final product, as it marches across the screen after the Saul Bass titles, the waving flags, the muted martial music? Well, since the director has adhered faithfully to the novel’s intention to lean neither to right nor left, and since he has faithfully stressed its major purpose of showing that almost all the characters are motivated by genuine love of country, you can afford to be well pleased.
You can tell questioners truthfully that you are “perhaps 85 percent satisfied—which is a pretty good average, for an author in Hollywood.”
And you have another satisfaction, too.
For two months you have been privileged to work with a group of talented, pleasant and dedicated people in what must surely be one of the most fascinating business in the world.
A little unreal, maybe, but fascinating.
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About the Author
Allen Drury is a master of political fiction, #1 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner, best known for the landmark novel Advise and Consent. A 1939 graduate of Stanford University, Allen Drury wrote for and became editor of two local California newspapers. While visiting Washington, DC, in 1943 he was hired by the United Press (UPI) and covered the Senate during the latter half of World War II. After the war he wrote for other prominent publications before joining the New York Times’ Washington Bureau, where he worked through most of the 1950s. After the success of Advise and Consent, he left journalism to write full time. He published twenty novels and five works of non-fiction, many of them best sellers. WordFire Press will be reissuing the majority of his works.
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