Cohn was the son of a German tailor and a Russian mother. He grew up with the same ruthless drive and sloppy sentiment of the moguls born in the old country; but his unabashed vulgarity sometimes made even them blush. In 1924, Cohn changed the name of his company to Columbia, in an effort to upgrade at least its reputation. The new gag around town was “Columbia, the Germ of the Ocean.” In 1928, Cohn hired Frank Capra, a young director at loose ends after several years directing comic shorts. With the days of the silent clowns dying out, Cohn broke in Capra with a series of “quickie” feature films budgeted at $20,000, then graduated him to more serious material. By the time soundstages were erected on Columbia’s lot, Frank Capra was their leading director, the man who might rid them of their Poverty Row reputation. Cohn became well known for what he called his “foolproof device” for judging a picture’s quality: “If my ass squirms,” he once said, “it’s bad. If my ass doesn’t squirm, it’s good. It’s as simple as that.”
George Cukor, who later directed at Columbia, said, “The Sam Goldwyns and L. B. Mayers and Jack Warners all produced by the seat of their pants too; Harry Cohn just had the bad taste to say it.” In a 1928 interview, Cohn commented on his profession by noting the “most important point I can stress is that any man with a normal degree of intelligence knows as much as the other fellow in six months. It is an open business.”
That was never more true than in the twilight of the silent era. At Paramount Studios alone, a lot of men (noticeably better educated than their predecessors) made their marks during this period of flux. Twenty-six-year-old David O. Selznick had got no closer to his adolescent dream of attending Yale than taking some extension courses at Columbia University; but he was a ravenous reader. After quarreling with Thalberg at MGM, he became B. P. Schulberg’s executive assistant. While still in his twenties, Dartmouth graduate Walter Wanger—smart and suave—was named general manager of production for Paramount on both coasts. Herman Mankiewicz, the son of a German intellectual who taught at New York City College, graduated from Columbia before he was twenty, became a foreign correspondent, theater critic, playwright, and head of Paramount’s scenario department before he was thirty. His kid brother, Joseph, also a Columbia alumnus, followed three years later, writing silent film titles, then dialogue, for Paramount in his early twenties.
A few Gentiles made their presence known in town as well. Howard Hughes—a lanky Texan with a hearing deficiency, and an heir to a tool company—began producing his own pictures at age twenty-three. A former art student from Kansas City who moved to Hollywood in his early twenties began drawing an amusing character, a mouse named Mortimer; the next year, twenty-seven-year-old Walt Disney changed the rodent’s name to Mickey. Disney integrated music with his animated pictures, starting a series called “Silly Symphonies.” He set up shop in the Silverlake district of Los Angeles.
Hollywood’s gradual embracing of sound caused a flurry of expansion, especially of the most successful studios. Stock certificates were flying every which way. Warner Brothers merged with First National and moved into a new studio the latter company had built on farmland in Burbank. William Fox built his Fox Movietone Studios in an area between Beverly Hills and Culver City. He was quietly buying up Loew’s stock, which would affect MGM, then erecting soundstages a short ride away from the new Fox lot. Joseph Kennedy muscled into the Pathé organization, which he merged with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and David Sarnoff’s Radio Corporation of America. In late October 1928, Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corporation was born. RKO moved into studios on Gower Street in Hollywood and promptly invested half a million dollars in construction for talking pictures.
Down the block, on Melrose Avenue, were the United Studios, which Paramount Pictures Corporation (the name Famous Players-Lasky started to use) bought. Their Publix theater chain was actively buying up other circuits—paying part in cash, the rest in rising Paramount stock. “As a sentimental salute to our beginnings,” Jesse Lasky insisted on moving the original Squaw Man barn—only fifteen years after he and Sam Goldwyn had first rented it—to the new Paramount lot. He plopped it down in the middle of the vast studio so as “never to lose sight of the modest way we started.” For years, it sat there uselessly, a relic.
In 1929, Sam Goldwyn moved into new offices on the United Artists lot. The former Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, with the back of its two-story office building forming the only wall against the traffic of Hollywood, ran the 7200 block of Santa Monica Boulevard. It had an eastern entrance on quiet Formosa Avenue. More modest than most of the major movie factories in Los Angeles, the homey lot was often referred to as “Doug and Mary’s.”
As the fortunes of the actor partners of United Artists—Pickford, Fairbanks, Swanson, and Chaplin (who did not release a single picture between 1928 and City Lights in 1931)—faded, the fate of the company fell into the hands of its full-time producers, Joe Schenck and Sam Goldwyn. To meet the demand for product, Goldwyn needed an associate. He hired Arthur Hornblow, Jr., a bright young man who, more than anybody, enabled him to become a successful producer of talking pictures.
Hornblow was the debonair son of the managing editor of Theater Arts Monthly. A Dartmouth graduate, young Hornblow was erudite, epicurean, and exacting. A playwright and producer, he had adapted Edouard Bourdet’s controversial play about lesbianism, The Captive, for the Broadway stage, for which he got carted off to jail on opening night. Now that motion pictures were starting to talk, they intrigued him.
“All I really like, all I care about,” Sam Goldwyn later told Hornblow’s third wife, Leonora, “is class. That’s why I liked Arter.” Goldwyn never got closer than that to pronouncing his most indispensable employee’s first name; but it was better than the job he did on Arthur’s last name—which usually came out “Hornbloom.” Hornblow immediately felt that Goldwyn himself possessed that class he so desperately sought, that “Sam was really a Polish prince who no doubt had been left in the woods as an infant.” Years later, Hornblow would note that all the studio heads were “monsters,” Sam included. “The only difference was that Sam laughed ... even at himself.”
Hornblow’s first assignment was to develop material for the talking-picture debuts of Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman. Goldwyn believed the only way to determine their futures was to put each of them to the ultimate test. He provided Banky with daily English lessons; and Colman had already lost much of his accent in just the few years he had lived in America. Then Hornblow and Goldwyn read Variety as though it were a Ouija board, looking for trends.
“KIDDING KISSERS IN TALKERS BURNS UP FANS OF SCREEN’S BEST LOVERS,” read a page-one headline in 1929. The problem came from the new realism that sound brought to a scene. As Variety explained: “In the silents when a lover would whisper like a ventriloquist, lips apart and unmoved, and roll his eyes passionately, preparatory to the clinch and then kiss, it looked pretty natural and was believable. The build-up to the kiss now makes a gag of the kiss.” Many leading men got hooted off the screen.
Hornblow persuaded Goldwyn that his primary concern should be the proper presentation of his actors. He believed audiences should meet their new talking stars in roles that came close to revealing who they actually were, displaying their distinctiveness rather than disguising it. Ronald Colman, he suggested, was a reserved Englishman who would elicit laughs if he continued appearing as a passionate Latin lover. Vilma Banky was a simple, beautiful Hungarian immigrant, who should not be passed off as an exotic woman of mystery, a Garbo.
Goldwyn had a “screen play” of his next film for Vilma Banky, a silent picture—almost one hundred pages laying out the film’s 384 shots and 150 title cards. Under Arthur Hornblow’s supervision, this Cinderella story of an innocent immigrant who landed a job flipping flapjacks at Child’s restaurant and fell in love with a millionaire passing himself off as a chauffeur would be adapted to include talking. Several scenes with spoken dialogue were patched in. The eleven pages of lines contained but a few words for the female le
ad.
On Friday, January 11, 1929, while the sound sequences were in rehearsal, Goldwyn screened the first assembly of the film, This Is Heaven, and was thrown into a quandary. He felt it was “so fine and complete in that form” that it could stand perfectly well as a silent film. He was convinced that “pictures either had to be entirely silent or all talkie and that part silent pictures were doomed to failure”; but he was afraid of going down on a sinking ship. Variety was already printing rumors that Vilma Banky’s accent was so thick that he could not put her in talkies.
Goldwyn ordered three spoken sequences stuffed into the ninety-minute film. The idea was to give Banky a simple but endearing scene at the opening, in which to introduce her voice to the audience, a snappier exchange of dialogue in the fourth reel, and a wordier scene in the final reel. After they were recorded, Goldwyn sat on the film for several months, debating whether or not he should even release it.
He turned all his attention to his first all-talking picture. Despite Ronald Colman’s own reservations about the suitability of his voice for motion pictures, Goldwyn admired his diction and knew that the former stage actor could handle genuine scenes of dialogue. Colman was also Goldwyn’s only leading man under contract. At the producer’s command, Arthur Hornblow tried to wrest the rights to Arms and the Man from George Bernard Shaw. The playwright resisted, sticking to his much-quoted policy that he was only interested in money while Mr. Goldwyn was interested in “art.”
Arthur Hornblow found the perfect solution to Goldwyn’s immediate problems in a writer who was interested in both. Sidney Howard was one of the most dashing figures on the Broadway scene in the late twenties. A scrappy northern Californian with wide gray eyes and a neat stripe of a mustache, Howard had studied playwriting at Harvard, served in the war as both an ambulance driver and the captain of a bombing squadron, then written book reviews for Life before beginning his career as a playwright. They Knew What They Wanted, an exploration of sexual mores that was bold for its day, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 (and later became the basis for the Frank Loesser musical The Most Happy Fella). He followed that with another hit Lucky Sam McCarver, then two more great successes (Ned Mc-Cobb’s Daughter and The Silver Cord), produced by the Theatre Guild within a month of each other. Subject to bouts of depression, he was unhappily married to an elegant and talented actress, Clare Eames, whom he divorced; then he married Polly Damrosch, of the distinguished musical family.
Sidney Howard had steadily declined propositions to write for films. When Arthur Hornblow came to call, they began to talk about several works that might be adapted to the new medium. Howard admitted that the addition of sound created the “opportunity to make tremendously important [pictures] of a wholly new kind.” Mindful of Goldwyn’s reluctance to produce a love story for Ronald Colman’s first talking picture, they agreed that a wonderful “talkie” could be made from the character of Bulldog Drummond, which had already proved successful in a series of novels, on stage, and in a score of silent pictures. Although Colman lacked the bulldoggish physical attributes of Hugh Drummond, he was wanting in none of the urbanity required of the former army officer turned detective.
In fact, Goldwyn owned the rights to this story and had solid adaptations for both silent and sound versions. The latter script differed from the former only in the occasional expansion of a title card into a volley of dialogue. Goldwyn felt the talking version of the script needed brushing up, a playwright’s hand. Hornblow talked Howard into accepting that job for $10,000 with the mutual promise of developing future films together at a higher salary. “It was a real coup,” recalled George Cukor. “After O‘Neill, Sidney Howard was the most renowned playwright in America, and here Sam Goldwyn had him writing for the movies. Sam was extremely clever that way, because he not only got unusually good scripts for the time, but also enormous publicity.”
Most early talking pictures suffered from monotony, visual and verbal. Because the camera was housed behind glass and actors were planted near microphones, there was little motion except for the actors’ mouths. Monta Bell, one of the leading directors during these transitional years, also pointed out that “in the early stages of talking pictures the producers and the public wanted them to talk, so we let them talk and at length. Much too lengthily.” If a refinement to pictures was to take hold, Bell believed, “All lines spoken [should] be for the purpose of furthering the story” and visual tedium could be relieved only by “making the screen continuously interesting.”
Toward that end, Goldwyn assembled a team of filmmakers as creative as they were experienced. He had George Barnes photographing, assisted once again by his imaginative protégé, Gregg Toland. Although the motion picture camera was still partially paralyzed, the two of them never stopped experimenting with unusual camera angles, lighting, and composition.
In casting Bulldog Drummond’s leading lady, Goldwyn took a chance on a beauty making her sound-feature debut, an actress he had not seen since her childhood appearance as a page in his production of The Eternal City. In the intervening six years, Joan Bennett had bloomed into a stunning blonde with exquisite features. She had recently made several screen tests at Paramount’s Astoria studio, in which her stage-trained voice came across as lovely as her photographed image. Over the next few months, all the studios saw her tests; but as Miss Bennett later remarked, “Sam was the only one who picked up on me.”
At Goldwyn’s insistence, the director, F. Richard Jones, rehearsed the actors for several weeks, as though it were a play—a Griffith procedure that had long since fallen into disuse. Such run-throughs became standard practice on Goldwyn talking pictures for the rest of his career. On January 28, 1929, cameras rolled film—twenty—four frames per second instead of the silent equipment’s sixteen (which accounts for the frenzied gallop of old silent footage when viewed on modern equipment). Film studios still operated on a six-day week, and Bulldog Drummond was put “in the can” by March 18.
The film met all Goldwyn’s requirements. Although it appears static by modern standards, Monta Bell (who had nothing to do with the production) remembered it as one of the handful of “moving” pictures of that year. The damsel-in-distress mystery has no love scenes to speak of: Joan Bennett utters “I love you” in the film’s final seconds, just before she and Colman embrace and fall behind a trick doorway. At a total negative cost of $550,000, it was one of the least expensive films Goldwyn had produced in years, three quarters the cost of the Colman-Banky epics. Striking prints and advertising the film (plus interest on Goldwyn’s bank loan) would make the total outlay just under $700,000.
The film’s greatest unbudgeted expense occurred after its editors had assembled a rough cut. In the opening scene, set in a London club, an elderly waiter, “with the manner of a graveyard Sexton, is passing with a tray of drinkables” and drops a spoon. “Tinkle of spoon dropping,” reads the sound effects cue. A “Peppery Colonel” harrumphs, “The eternal din around this club is an outrage.” After sitting through the entire two-hour screening, Goldwyn asked his staff, “What is that word ‘din’?” He was told it meant noise.
“Then why didn’t the writer say ‘noise’?” he demanded. When Goldwyn did not hear a satisfactory answer, he ordered the entire scene redone. The sets had already been dismantled and the actors had been dismissed; but Goldwyn said, “It makes no difference. We have to re-shoot it. The word is archaic.”
While the set was being reconstructed and the actors rehired, Goldwyn carried on about the use of this peculiar word ... until nobody less than William Randolph Hearst himself assured him that “din” was not archaic. Goldwyn ordered the rebuilt set dismantled and the actors dismissed.
Both Bulldog Drummond and This Is Heaven opened in New York in May 1929. The future of Vilma Banky’s picture was instantly clear. Goldwyn’s instincts about the public’s not buying part-talking pictures had been correct; and the star’s heavy accent became the discussion of every review. He took a $200,000 bath on the $600,000 pictur
e.
Goldwyn might have stuck by Vilma Banky had she been more diligent about her speech lessons. Instead, he dropped all plans for future films with her. He tried to get her to pay the fifty dollars a week for the vocal coach, but she refused. “My face belongs to the screen,” she said, “but my voice belongs to Goldwyn.” Abe Lehr and Arthur Hornblow discussed the possibility of an indefinite suspension of her $5,000-a-week salary until some new project for her presented itself, but she refused to let that one picture seal her fate. She asserted that she was still willing to work, even if Goldwyn had to farm her out to another studio.
Irving Thalberg borrowed her for one picture at MGM; but her co-star, Edward G. Robinson, later remembered that “it did not take long to realize that Miss Banky was seriously out of her depth. The glorious creature ... was seized with stage fright and inability.”
After that, she entertained thoughts of making films in Europe. Goldwyn could not have cared less. He no longer even went through the motions of maintaining her speech lessons or seeing that she was properly groomed in public. In 1930, he summoned her to his office and said, “Vilma, you have two years to go on your contract at $5,000 a week. Now you go to the bank every week and you get your money.” Goldwyn never saw her again.
“I have just reached a decision to quit pictures entirely and become once and for all Mrs. Rod La Rocque,” Vilma Banky announced at a press conference. “We are so happy. We will never, never part, I know. I am an American citizen now and I am ever so happy.” She lived for most of the next fifty years in Beverly Hills with her husband. He, too, gradually disappeared from motion pictures. “Oh, Wilma was so dumb,” Goldwyn said to Leonora Hornblow many decades later; then, with the sweetest look, he added, “but she was so adorable.”
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