All Good Things

On the plane out west the other week an idea for a book clonked me on the head so hard that I missed at least 500 miles of the trip. So the week that I figured would be devoted exclusively to Basil Rathbone became split between Basil and a couple of other film greats, and this new project has been percolating on the back burner as I’ve tried to concentrate on current work so I can move on to what’s cooking in my head.

Not that I didn’t visit the old touchstones while in L.A.. As you’ll see on the Errol & Olivia and Errol Flynn Slept Here Facebook pages, I visited some places important to Flynn and de Havilland. Among these were Busch Gardens, where Robert Florczak and I explored the area in depth, for hours, and debated what was shot where (Busch was the setting for, of course, the Robin Hood archery tournament, the Santa Fe Trail West Point graduation, and the They Died With Their Boots On West Point parade ground scenes); The Los Angeles County Arboretum, where, thanks to RF, I could pinpoint where scenes from Gentleman Jim and Objective, Burma! were shot; Forest Lawn/Glendale, where Flynn is buried; and most important to me, the site of the Flynn estate of Mulholland Farm, where now Justin Timberlake holds court—literally, on his basketball court where once stood Errol’s tennis court stood.

I was hit, and hit hard, by some truths on this trip. On the one hand, 60 and 70 and 80 years isn’t much to some places related to Hollywood’s Golden Era. Some sections of Forest Lawn haven’t changed a stone in all that time. Not one stone. Rathbone’s two Hollywood homes are as vintage as we could hope for, one on Los Feliz and the other in Bel Air. Olivia de Havilland’s tidy little Spanish-style house on Nella Vista is entirely approachable where so many star homes now hide behind high fences or hedgerows or other impenetrable vegetation and omnipresent security cameras. If you want to sit and contemplate Flynn’s home on North Linden, where he hosted Olivia de Havilland to dinner on the occasion of their first date, there it is, big as life.

On the other hand, sadly, Mulholland Farm is no more. There are four or five pieces of evidence that the place ever existed, and these are so subtle you are likely to miss them. As I’ve noted before in various places, the street off Mulholland called Torreyson Place was once Flynn’s long driveway. A street off Torreyson is called Flynn Ranch Road. Errol’s very naughty casino building, so well documented in Errol Flynn Slept Here, has been converted into a small private residence. The plot of ground that was once Errol’s tennis court is still there, but resurfaced for basketball. And the memorial to James Lankershim that was built in 1931, when the Boy Scouts owned the entire parcel (most of which was sold to Flynn in 1935), is still there and marks the boundary of the old estate. Otherwise, Mulholland Farm is gone, gone, gone, and lives only in the memories of those of us who were lucky enough to visit it way back when.

But, you know? That’s the way of things. Time marches on. As Tom says of Max Steiner, “…many modern film music enthusiasts…don’t much care for his work.” Who can be surprised at that? So many composers for the screen have come and gone since Steiner and Korngold. Generations. Herrman, Goldsmith, Horner, Williams, Edelman…too long a list to even rattle off. Along the way a great snobbery has sprung to life that looks down on the old pictures as hopelessly dated and over the top and inept. Some are even in black and white! We know better and luckily came along at a time and place where we could see, and still see, the beauty, the brilliance, the craftsmanship.

I want to take a moment and address a couple of comments submitted this month. A new contributor (as of May 4), Lynne McGrath, notes that “Apparently Lili Damita was married (briefly) to Michael Curtiz about 1925-26.” When I first dug this out of our trusted World Wide Web a couple of years ago while researching Errol & Olivia, it made a whole lot of sense and explained why Curtiz rode Flynn like a beast of burden through 11 pictures. When I floated the idea, it was Rudy Behlmer who pounced. Rudy wanted to know the source and when I stammered that I found it on the Internet, well, disdain followed and it was a lesson to me not to believe everything I read. Word to the wise: Anybody can cast anything in stone on the Internet, whether real or imagined, and suddenly there it is, forever. Isn’t it curious that when Errol Flynn, Lili Damita, and Michael Curtiz were some of the most famous names on the planet, this fact wasn’t known…but 60-odd years later it just appeared? In the interim, a world war came and went, destroying much of the legal paperwork of a continent. So we’re likely never to be able to confirm or deny that Damita was ever Mrs. Michael Curtiz. But I’ve grown to doubt it.

This is why both Errol Flynn Slept Here and Errol & Olivia are footnoted throughout, and when I draw a conclusion, it’s based on evidence. A lot of evidence. In one case, yes, I did conclude that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That’s on the subject of a physical relationship between Flynn and de Havilland. When I started writing the book, I didn’t think there had been one. The evidence led me in a different direction. And continues to lead me that way. So stay tuned for the Second Edition of Errol & Olivia when more comes to light.

And by the way, the book is doing very well. It has “legs,” as they say in the picture business, and earned nice recognition with a Bronze Medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards to be presented in New York City on June 4.

The other comment to be addressed comes from new contributor Rob in the U.K. He wants to find Olivia de Havilland’s address so he can send her flowers on her upcoming 96^th birthday. First of all, WOW, OLIVIA! NINETY-SIX AND GOING STRONG! I have admired you since childhood and still do. Secondly, I’m sorry, Rob; I can’t divulge Olivia’s address. Your sentiment is genuine and I wish I could help, but my birthday present to Miss de Havilland is to see that flowers not arrive at her home courtesy of a referral from me. I think she’s earned her privacy. Several times over.

As for whether Errol Flynn attended the spring 1940 Academy Award ceremony when Olivia de Havilland did not receive an Oscar, even the Academy doesn’t know. Several researchers tried in vain to determine a certain answer.

My final thought for the day is that I must hear the siren’s call of my current and future projects and draw my weekly blog to a close. I’ll be back now and again when there’s something to report, but in the meantime you can content yourself with 98 posts over two full years, with hundreds of important insights from you, the reader. And, hopefully, in the future you can enjoy the new friendships created through these weekly explorations into Golden Era Hollywood as I’ve chased this legend and that over the continents and the decades. My thanks to all of you for a fantastic time.

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Tunes of Glory – Part 2

I was away, in Las Vegas (business) and Los Angeles (research). Preparation for the trip, taking the trip, and then returning from the trip led to my short hiatus from the blog, but also gave you a respite from my sometimes fierce opinions. Check out the Facebook pages for Errol Flynn Slept Here and Errol and Olivia for some news and some photos from the trip. It’ll take a while to post it all.

In the intervening three weeks since I opened the topic of musical scores and the men who made them, I’ve thought a lot about what to write next. It strikes me that Erich Wolfgang Korngold is considered the gold standard of composers for the screen, and it’s hard to argue with this notion if you’re a Warner Bros. fan and consider Korngold’s work for three of Errol Flynn’s finest. I agree with everything you said about The Adventures of Robin Hood, Rosemarie, and your thoughts about The Sea Hawk, Tom. And yours about The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Inga, and Escape Me Never as well. And we can’t forget the majesty of the Captain Blood score that helped to catapult Flynn to glory and stardom?

All that said, I’m a Max Steiner guy. Somehow I find Steiner to be more accessible and more pleasing to my ear. I’m no musical expert, but my dad was a band leader and played in some orchestras and big bands and was known as “the music man” and some of that love of music has been passed on to me. And for whatever reason, just about every time, I get Max Steiner.

According to Hugo Friedhofer of the Warner Bros. music department, “Jack Warner was really hooked on Max.” Thank God for it, I say. I’d like to pause here and note once again how many good things the Boss was responsible for, this being another of them. Thanks to Jack Warner being hooked, Max Steiner batted clean-up during his long career at the studio and smacked more musical home runs than any other composer. Let’s not go down the list, except I have to mention the score for Dodge City and ask, how did an Austrian nail the Old West so perfectly? It seems like he scored just about everything. Not long ago I happened on The Caine Mutiny and there was Steiner again, with that rousing nautical march that is giving me chills right now just thinking about it. Come to think of it, how did a land-locked Austrian nail the high seas so perfectly?

When David O. Selznick needed someone to score his high-pressure, controversial production, Gone With the Wind, who did he turn to? He begged Jack Warner to let Max do it. The result is another important piece of cinema history. And while I’m at it, how did an Austrian nail the Old South so perfectly?

Boy could Max Steiner write Spanish themes. Treasure of the Sierra Madre reeks of struggle and courage and those dusty Mexican mountains. And Adventures of Don Juan tops them all, to me at least, with romantic themes that make my jaw go slack. I can’t keep the tears out of my eyes when Juan parts from the Queen any more than I can when George says goodbye to Libbie. We owe all that to Max Steiner.

Two of my favorite film historians are also great guys: Rudy Behlmer and James V. D’Arc. In 2004 they teamed up on a new CD version of the Don Juan soundtrack that includes a 28-page booklet written by them both and detailing the turbulent environment in which the picture was produced and the score created. I highly recommend that you run out and purchase it from amazon.com or other sellers because listening to this score will remind you how great Max Steiner really was.

Two more things about motion picture composers in general and Steiner in particular. First, German composer Richard Straus was supposedly Steiner’s godfather, and Straus wrote a tone poem called Don Juan that I listened to so much in college that the grooves wore out on the vinyl. In no way would I liken Straus’s Don Juan to Steiner’s—they are very different approaches to the subject, but I like it when history overlaps.

Second, did you ever notice that composers like Korngold and Steiner would give themselves a nice big fanfare or music change, sometimes both, when their names appeared in the opening credits? That always makes me smile. Korngold is especially effective doing that in the Essex opening credits, but Steiner would do it too. It just goes to show how good these guys were and best of all, it’s a little bit of proof that they knew it.

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Tunes of Glory, Part 1

It’s too bad we can’t watch classic motion pictures with the music turned off. Just images with dialogue and sound effects, minus the music. It would be disconcerting, I assure you. I’m in the video business and the rough cuts are often dry as toast without music added. In fact, many of my projects began with music—music that grabbed me, that I knew fit the purpose of the piece, and everything from the words to the story and images were built around that piece of music.

Even as far back as the silents a hundred years ago, motion pictures had music. That music was played live in the theater to accompany the images onscreen. When sound could be paired with the images, it paralyzed the industry for a time because they hadn’t figured out how to integrate the two, and there are lots of movies from 1929 and 1930 that contain no music at all, or just sporadic stings of violins, and you’re left with the hissing of the primitive soundtrack. Yes, music was used increasingly in 1931 and 1932, but it was Max Steiner who changed the game in 1933 with his musical score for the super-high-visibility King Kong, in which he created themes that underscored each key scene. He did it in Little Women that same year and in Errol Flynn’s Charge of the Light Brigade in 1936.

But I don’t mean this to be a dissertation on the chronological development of the soundtrack in motion pictures. I want you to stop and think about the importance of music in film. One of my favorite pictures is one you might not think I’d like: Animal House. Several decades from now the very mention of this title will cause our friend Robert Florczak to turn over in his grave, but Louie, Louie, Shout!, Hey Paula, (What a) Wonderful World … just hearing these song titles evokes my favorite scenes. When Otter seduces Mrs. Wormer, the music played is Max Steiner’s theme from A Summer Place. And of course the soundtrack for Animal House was composed by one of my favorite soundtrack composers, Elmer Bernstein. In fact, I have to ask, what would The Magnificent Seven be without Bernstein’s score? Think how many thousands and millions of people got hooked on cigarettes because the score from The Magnificent Seven signaled the appearance of the Marlboro Man on television in the 1960s and 1970s.

And think about this: Imagine if your life could be scored musically by Elmer Bernstein or Max Steiner. I bet you’d be a lot more interesting to the rest of the world. You’d wake up with a piccolo or maybe some light strings. Brushing your teeth might evoke a base horn. A harp might represent the cascading water of the shower. Your love scenes would swell with violins and if you got very lucky, violas. If you happened to rescue a shopping cart rolling across a parking lot, the heraldic combination of brass and strings would convert you into a supermarket immortal.

Music reflects how you’re supposed to feel in a particular scene. No, I take that back. It just doesn’t underscore how you’re supposed to feel, it drives how you’re going to feel. That’s how important music is to motion pictures.

So, you know exactly where I’m going with this. Some months back one of you talked about the importance of the musical score, and you mentioned Max Steiner and thought this might be the basis for a column. Well, here is that column, and I would like you to tell me about your favorite scores in Flynn and/or de Havilland pictures, what the music did for you the first time you heard it, what it does for you now. What payoff do you get from soundtracks in movies in general? More to come next week in Part II.

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Reaching Sherwood

by Rosemarie Buxton

I might be risking sacrilege for admitting that a book about the early movies of that dashing reprobate, Errol Flynn, shared space with my Book of Common Prayer in the totebag that I brought to my father’s hospital bed. I must also admit that the movie book, not the prayer book, was the one I was perusing as I sat by his bedside the night before he died. Most of the time, Dad slept, but at one point, he awoke in some discomfort, and he looked at me. As I waited for the nurse to come, I talked about the book that I was reading and the pictures I was looking at of his heroes – Captain Blood, Wade Hatton, George Custer, and of course, Robin Hood. Dad looked at me, and I don’t know if he understood what I was talking about, but it seemed to quiet him to hear my voice. I began to retell the stories Dad had told me so many times of his fond memories of going to the movies with his own father.

On Saturdays, my father would eagerly await his own father’s trips to Springfield, Massachusetts. In those days, people dressed to go “downtown” to run errands, even for someplace as mundane as the hardware store for a tool or a part for the washing machine. The sight of my grandfather in a suit and the smell of shoe polish signaled that such an excursion was in store. My father would drop numerous hints that he wanted to tag along, and often, my grandfather would consent.

My father describes the experience of riding the bus with his father, which was a privileged form of transportation in a time and place where only the wealthy had cars, and even bus fare could be considered a bit of a luxury. When they got off the bus and walked to the destination for the errand of the day, my father would look at the movie marquees of the theaters they passed and read them aloud in an unsubtle attempt to persuade my grandfather to take him to the movies. If the movie were an Errol Flynn picture or a Western, the hints would become even more insistent. Unlike Olivia’s dismal opinion of Dodge City, my father’s view was that it was not second-rate fare, but a double bonus – Errol Flynn and a Western! If my father was lucky, his dad would give in to his demands to take in a flick.

I have to be unapologetic about my father’s politics, for as a child raised during the Depression with young uncles who supported themselves and their parents through WPA jobs, Dad grew up to be an unabashed New Deal-style Democrat. But with such a joyful warrior for class equality as Errol’s Robin Hood, one can hardly blame Dad. Warner Bros. was his favorite studio, that studio of the WB logo and the familiar lush and stereophonic fanfare. Warners was the studio of the common man, the studio of sweaty Depression backstage musicals and redeemable gangsters. Those Errol Flynn pictures were the big-budget jobs, but many of Warners’ products in the ’30s and early ’40s featured outlaws of a grittier sort. Unlike Robin Hood, the gangsters played by James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties or Angels with Dirty Faces or Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra came to a tragic end. Robin Hood not only gets to buck the system, he does so exuberantly, and unlike other outlaw heroes, he gets to live happily ever after, with the beauteous Maid Marian on his arm.

For my father, there was nothing better than Errol Flynn shouting commands as he set sail on the high seas or leapt from tree to tree or parapet to parapet. Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, who pronounces that he hates injustice and speaks treason fluently, who feasts joyfully with the oppressed, who strides courageously into the banquet of the powerful with one of the king’s deer on his back, is the myth that retains resonance, not the story of Errol Flynn the actor, who eventually succumbed to his own self-destructive lifestyle. It was the myth that my father fell in love with, at 12, when he first saw The Adventures of Robin Hood, and it was that myth, combined with the memories and the lived experience of his father’s love, that shaped the values he lived by.

In the last few months of my father’s stay at the nursing home, my mother bought a portable DVD player, and in January, I sat with my father, sharing a set of earphones and that picturebook Technicolor world of The Adventures of Robin Hood. My father complained of the tinny sound, and of course, the images in that compact player were a diminished version of the larger-than-life figure of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, but Dad’s eyes often filled with tears as he watched his hero on horseback, or with a deer on his back, or wooing that lovely girl with the braids. Whatever Flynn did in real life, I feel, was redeemed by those moments of pleasure–of a boy going to the movies with his father, of a lonely adolescent girl watching movies on TV with her dad, of an elderly man reliving his happy boyhood.

I believe that there is an afterlife, where every day is Saturday, and my father is holding his own dad’s coat sleeve, reading the brightly lit marquees. The matinees are endless, and there are no responsibilities or reasons to refuse the child his wish. Who knows, perhaps there’s a “saucy fellow” straddling a tree giving him a cheerful “Welcome to Sherwood,” too.

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Odds and Ends

Ilsa was never in love with Rick; he was rebound guy after Victor was thought to be murdered by the Nazis. When she bumped into Rick again in Casablanca, she tried to use her old flame to secure an exit visa for the one true love of her life: Victor.

That’s the conclusion I reached at the Wednesday matinee of Casablanca at a plush new theater complex in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t not go to see Casablanca on the big screen, and I’m glad I did. I never thought about the story that hard before, watching it on TV, but here with everyone 20-feet tall, the ambiguity of Ingrid Berman’s character finally resonated—she was way more complicated and sophisticated than Rick, but in the end, he knew what her game was and that was why he almost happily played out the charade and let her go. It was not the act of a self-sacrificing lover, but rather the self-preservation of a realist who knew that if they stayed together, he would never be able to trust his former lover again.

So that’s one item checked off my list for this week. To go way back to the past several columns and your reactions to them, let me catch up a little.

Tom, it’s not that I can’t relate to anything about A Star Is Born, since I hang on every two-strip Technicolor shot of vintage Hollywood, the soundstages, Santa Anita, and so on. And the way alcoholic Norman Maine is presented, you know there were many models for this character running around town, downing scotch like water. The thought of Norman cajoling the bartender to pour full tumblers of liquor and then downing them great gulps is rather horrifying—and this from a guy who likes his liquor straight. A Star Is Born loses me when the story centers around Vicki Lester as portrayed by Janet Gaynor. That Gaynor ever became a star at all is what I don’t get and it is, for me, the great conundrum. I can’t for a moment believe that Vicki Lester could have been a movie star, and yet Janet Gaynor became a movie star!

Fredric March is an actor who I find it impossible to dislike. I agree, Rosemarie, that March couldn’t pull off his part in Anthony Adverse and it should have gone to Flynn. And yet two years later March would make a very cool Jean Lafitte in The Buccaneer. It’s funny that Fredric March always seemed to be up against Flynn in the early casting discussions, and might well have starred in Dodge City if the picture had focused on Wyatt Earp as originally intended.

Elle, I need to do some research at the Academy to find out if Errol Flynn was in attendance at the 1940 Oscar ceremony wherein Hattie McDaniel won the Supporting Actress Academy Award and Olivia didn’t. I’ll see if there were records kept about who attended. If only there could be evidence of Flynn coaching de Havilland through that difficult experience, it would be great stuff for the second edition of Errol & Olivia.

Inga, Tracy Nelson holds a grudge against Flynn for paranormal reasons. As detailed in the book Hollywood Haunted and retold in television’s Celebrity Ghost Stories—the producers of which also reached out to me for help—Tracy states that she was visited by Flynn’s ghost, who warned of the coming death of her father. Tracy saw the haunting of Mulholland Farm as increasingly dark, which had a negative influence on Rick Nelson. Tracy’s brother Gunnar also believed that his dad suffered by spending too much time in the house. But you’re also right, Inga, that Rick Nelson held Flynn in very high esteem and was on cloud 9 when he was able to buy the home of his idol. As I’ve said many times, co-author Mike Mazzone and I went into the writing of Errol Flynn Slept Here believing that the haunting was a footnote at best, but the ghost stories we heard came from people of all walks of life, including Evangelical Christians. It really got our attention.

Rosemarie, I agree with everything you said in your assessment of Warner and his treatment of his stars. And I maintain that he was a genius of a businessman, and this was how he far outlasted his rival moguls. At every turn I’m seeing Warner Bros. pictures of the 1950s and ’60s that were studio-made on J.L.’s watch. Just yesterday it was Them! about the giant ants. It’s very good sci-fi (if you don’t think too hard about it). Warner took a flyer on James Dean and a couple of years later Marilyn Monroe. From Mr. Roberts to The Music Man to My Fair Lady and Bonnie and Clyde—the hits kept coming from the motion picture division of Warner Bros. while its television unit soared into the stratosphere. By no means am I calling Jack L. Warner a moral man. Just sitting at the Archives and reading about how he fired his own son and barred him from the lot, my blood ran cold. But my respect for the businessman grows as I learn more about the odds he beat during the decline and fall of the studio system.

I took a little beating regarding my views on Olivia de Havilland in Captain Blood, but if it’s Hal Wallis and me against the world, then so be it. I just don’t think Livvie could feel the character of Arabella as well as she could Lucille in Irish. Lucille was who de Havilland aspired to be, and would become five or so years later—an independent modern woman who drove her own car and her own life story. It’s very interesting to read the daily memos and realize how much Wallis didn’t like—which he seemed to be invariably right about—and yet how little of the footage that bothered him was reshot. Like the bowl of fruit on the table of Captain Blood’s ship as de Havilland and Henry Stephenson play a scene. Wallis went on and on griping about the propping of that scene and how could fresh fruit be available on a ship on the high seas? But there just wasn’t budget or time to reshoot the scene without the bowl of fruit, so 77 years later it endures.

Perhaps next week we’ll have a guest blogger, but that’s up to the regular contributor who approached me recently about sharing a highly personal story that I’m very much looking forward to reading.

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The (Un)Luck of the Irish

The Irish was certainly in us yesterday what with all the St. Patty’s Day celebrations. I’m 25 percent Scots-Irish, my people among the dirt-poor Protestants from Ulster who crossed over to America in the nineteenth century. Errol Flynn had a more civilized Irish heritage—the messy part of his heritage was on his mother’s side and involved the H.M.S. Bounty and those pesky mutineers.

At any rate, TCM played The Irish in Us yesterday, which was, technically speaking, Olivia de Havilland’s second picture. It’s often thought that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first, but the production of that one happened over the course of many months and in the intervening period she made two other contemporary pictures, Alibi Ike and The Irish in Us. The latter concerns three New York brothers, a cop (Pat O’Brien), a fireman (Frank McHugh), and an out-of-work fight promoter (James Cagney), all living in an apartment with their mother (Mary Gordon). Livvie plays Lucille, the police captain’s daughter who dates the cop, but falls in love with the fight promoter.

If you’re used to seeing de Havilland in more minor “leading lady” roles supporting Errol Flynn, you’re in for a surprise with The Irish in Us. She’s got a lot of scenes, and some nice chemistry with O’Brien and Cagney, and also with Frank McHugh, with whom she would do strong work in Dodge City four years later. Here was de Havilland all of 18 and working with seasoned pros at the working-man’s studio and easily holding her own. She was, in this picture, one vivacious lady. Watching her in The Irish in Us, and then thinking about Captain Blood—which started just weeks later—I wondered how the really good day player I saw here seemed to get swallowed up on the pirate soundstages. She exuded charm and confidence; it’s fair to say she practically owned every scene in which she appeared; no small trick when you’re working with these particular leading men. Granted neither Cagney nor O’Brien was an insecure actor, and both would have worked generously to ensure that she had a positive experience.

Executive producer Hal Wallis had a very hard time with Livvie when he saw her in the first Captain Blood dailies. Having just recently watched rushes for The Irish in Us, Wallis came to expect a certain onscreen commodity, and he fired off the following memo to director Michael Curtiz: “The little girl, de Havilland, is not as good as she has been in other pictures. She seems to have lost a naturalness…a sparkle…. She should be spontaneous, and bright, and light, and she has a sparkle in her eye, but in this picture, it doesn’t seem to come out.”

Wallis wasn’t seeing the light, and watching Captain Blood I don’t see much of it either, and it makes me wonder why. There are many possible reasons and I suspect it’s a combination of these:

She could never become as comfortable on set with director Michael Curtiz as she had been with Lloyd Bacon.

She was given in-front-of-cameras help by Cagney, O’Brien, and McHugh that she couldn’t get from newcomer Flynn.

The mutual crush she and Flynn experienced added an unwelcome distraction while both worked 9 to 5—or more likely 8 to 6.

She had been given a well-rounded character to play in The Irish in Us but didn’t “get” Arabella as well in Captain Blood.

She felt the pressure of appearing in a million-dollar adventure picture; pressure that was missing in the contemporary, smaller-budgeted The Irish in Us.

If you start at 1942 when Olivia was professionally unfulfilled and work backward, there are certain turning points. The first of these was the realization that picture making was a very hard way to make a living—and she had signed a seven-year contract expressly to provide for her family. The second turning point may have been the shock of exiting The Irish in Us soundstages and entering the Captain Blood soundstages. Did making this groundbreaking adventure picture on the heels of the happy The Irish in Us hit her at a visceral level and forever connect Warner costume epics with unhappiness and oppression? If so, we’re lucky we got the eight pictures out of Errol and Olivia that we did. At the same time, much is explained in terms of her growing discontent through pictures like Elizabeth and Essex and Santa Fe Trail.

Trivia: Appearing as the referee in the climactic fight sequence of The Irish in Us was prizefighter Mushy Callahan, one of Errol Flynn’s cronies through the 1930s and into the Mulholland Farm years.

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Seeing It Their Way

In a couple of weeks, Casablanca is playing 500 big screens across the United States in a one-day saturation run that’s made possible because technology has now enabled the forwarding of motion pictures to digital-capable screens at minimal cost. Think of the old days when Warner Bros. had to commit to 500 35mm prints of a picture and send each of those 10- or 20-pound monsters to far-flung locations. Now it’s a shiny little DVD that costs 50 cents and weighs next to nothing, or, as in this case, it’s a digital satellite broadcast and requires no hard-copy media at all, but on March 21 you’ll be able to see the ultimately restored version of Casablanca the way it was originally presented.

John McElwee of Greenbriar Picture Shows speaks often about what the experience must have been like to see groundbreaking pictures when they were new and 30-feet high on a big screen. We know how it felt to first see Avatar or Titanic, or going back a ways further, Star Wars or Jaws or The Exorcist. But imagine that the lights go down and you see The Sea Hawk, or Captain Blood, or The Adventures of Robin Hood. I still get chills when I hear of the initial screenings of Gone With the Wind when the giant letters composing the title crawled across the screen to Max Steiner’s score and people experienced something akin to a strap-yourself-in-and-hold-on Disney World ride.

We’re terribly jaded today in this era of saturated communications, with photos snuck off locations and spoilers that spill the beans on twist endings. Everybody’s got a smart phone and I see that we can instantly watch the flight attendant flip out on that flight a day or two ago. We’ve been robbed of the ability to be surprised in daily life. Back in 1939, you waited for your fan magazine to hit the stands to see how many stars the new pictures got. You hung on Bosley Crowther’s review to see if a picture was going to thrill or disappoint. Most of all, you walked weak-legged into a picture palace to enjoy a cartoon and a newsreel and some trailers and maybe a serial and then would come the Warner Bros. fanfare and up there would be Errol and Olivia.

In the summer of 1976 (when I was a small child) I first saw The Adventures of Robin Hood and I was fortunate enough to see an uncut 35mm Technicolor print on the big screen that first time out. Not digital, but celluloid, in a giant old Vaudeville palace complete with a stage and side box suites, the kind Lincoln was shot in. I can think of a few personal experiences that topped seeing Olivia de Havilland in those long braids when she finally took the veil off. I had been dragged to Gone With the Wind prior to this, but I’ll tell you, this wasn’t Melanie I was beholding. (If you’re reading this, Olivia, please avert your gaze, but…) Seeing Technicolor Marian in braids shot my testosterone levels through the roof, and I never quite recovered.

Maybe Four’s a Crowd doesn’t compare well with My Man Godfrey, but imagine you’re seeking a diversion and go to the picture show to see Errol and Olivia doing something truly different.

Maybe Santa Fe Trail seems hokey today, but imagine you’ve had a hard day at the factory and you’re ready to feel like a hero by living vicariously through Jeb Stuart’s exploits.

Maybe you’re worried about the war exploiding across Europe, England, and now America via Pearl Harbor, and you seek escape by going to see bigger-than-life George Custer and his wife Libby in They Died with Their Boots On.

There was a sense of wonder back then when you stepped into a theater that I believe we’ve lost today. I can’t say I’ll be able to manage a trip to see digital Casablanca later in the month, but I’ll give it a shot because I want to know if it’s possible to turn back the clocks to 1943 and the middle of the war, to see if lovers really can reunite in North Africa, and torture each other for a couple of incredible hours. And I can only hope that this unlikely DVD enterprise returns boffo numbers so that other saturated playdates connect us to Robin Hood and Sergeant York and the other heroes of another time.

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Mad Genius

I’ve seen Captain Blood many times on big and little screens. I’ve seen it butchered, and I’ve seen it intact. But while I watched it a couple weeks ago, some realizations hit me, maybe because I’ve been spending time with MGM classics in recent weeks, and the nearness of the pictures of titanic Metro and scrappy Warner Bros. gave me new perspective. I guess you’d have to call it one of those “teachable moments” they talk about.

I sat there thinking about why I’ve always resonated to the Warner pictures and not so much to Metro pictures. Each studio took on the personality of the guy running it, and I’m having to second guess myself in trying to size up Jack L. Warner through the long lens of history, because I’m just not sure I’ve gotten the guy right. In the civilized age that was Golden Era Hollywood, we know that Olivia de Havilland detested Jack Warner for his treatment of her for a period of years. For the two of them, the feud got very personal, and yet de Havilland would steadfastly stick to the theme, “I liked Jack Warner.” Likewise, Errol Flynn’s scraps with Warner have been well documented, and even Flynn would claim that professionally he couldn’t stand J.L., but personally he liked him.

Exactly one generation after Errol and Olivia found stardom at Warner Bros., a young kid actor named James Bumgarner played his first role for the studio in the pilot of the western series, Cheyenne. After J.L. got rid of the “Bum” and created James Garner, the young actor shot to the top as Bret Maverick on TV and in Warner Bros. big-screen adventures like The Great Escape. Garner recently wrote a candid memoir called The Garner Files, and in it, he had this to say about Jack L. Warner: “Jack Warner treated everybody the same: lousy. He didn’t spare his wife, his son, or his mistress.” And, “Warner was rude and crude—the most vulgar man I’ve ever met. He had terrible taste in most things and a filthy mouth.” And, “Warner seemed to enjoy embarrassing himself and everybody in the room.”

I’ve spent a lot of time with J.L. at the Warner Archives. I’ve seen handwritten letters, telegrams, memos, hastily jotted calculations, and doodles in pencil. This is another side of Jack Warner—the business side. The guy had a steel-trap mind for the picture business, of that I’m convinced. I’ve known some talented CEOs who can think rings around you and who see things strategically as if they’re hovering in a helicopter at a thousand feet while you’re stuck on the ground looking up. That was Col. Warner. Would any other mogul have given the go-ahead to approve Flynn and de Havilland as the leads in a million-dollar adventure picture? Such a thing was unthinkable because of the great odds that Flynn could stink up the joint and make the studio and its boss a laughing stock.

Captain Blood brought home for me yet another Warner facet; Jack Warner was a raw force of nature, as seen in every celluloid frame; as raw as the young Tasmanian in the lead, as raw as this band of buccaneers that can be seen inventing what future cinematic pirates would look and sound like, as raw as the swordfights and the exploding ships. For crying out loud, one of the pirates shoots off his own finger because of the rule that if you lose a body part in a battle, you get paid more loot!

The whole theme of Arabella “owning” Peter Blood and later Peter owning her is straight out of the Warner Contract Department. How bitter were both Errol and Olivia because J.L. owned them for seven years at a time. They were gilded-cage prisoners entirely dependent on the mercy of rude and crude Jack Warner. Jack was the runt of the Warner litter and spent a lifetime with a chip on his shoulder over that wretched luck. He had an inferiority complex a mile wide, trusted no one, and even his friends would admit that he was capable of cutting your throat and dumping your body from a speeding car. Figuratively speaking, of course. It’s no coincidence that Warner Bros. legends Little Caesar and The Public Enemy were ambitious and ruthless little guys, and that this same studio would manufacture Duke Mantee, Mad Dog Earle, Fred C. Dobbs, and Cody Jarrett. They were all Jack Warner—snips, snails, puppy-dog’s tails, and psychosis, but with an unexpected streak of human frailty and weary wisdom at their core. Oh, and brains. They were the bosses, see? And you better like it.

It’s pretty clear that J.L. felt the most at home in his projection room watching stories of the mean streets that he’d grown up on. For him, sitting through The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Sea Hawk was like leafing through a picture book. But I’m starting to understand that the costume pictures of Errol Flynn belonged at Warner Bros. because Capt. Blood needed to take charge and play by his own rules, as did Sir Robin, and Wade Hatton, and Geoffrey Thorpe, and Gen. Custer, and Don Juan. Renegades one and all, I figure they’re what peered back when Jack Warner looked in the mirror because they were all him. Heck, the boss even adopted Flynn’s pencil mustache, and if you read the Warner memoir, My First Hundred Years in Hollywood, you know he had a thing for Olivia, even if she was his arch-enemy.

My bottom line for the week: Let’s not sell Jack L. Warner as short as James Garner does. He was a whole lot more than foul mouthed. He was the genius who brought us iconic American gangsters and timeless swashbuckling heroes, and who changed the lives of everyone who reads this blog.

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Margaret, Melanie, & Mildred

I must extend apologies to Virginia, a new contributor who has been temporarily (since January) lost in the messages, mostly spam, that must be dealt with in a Wordpress blog. I’m sorry, Virginia. If English is your second language, then I’m ashamed that it’s my first, because you express yourself beautifully in it. Says Virginia in her January 22 message: “First of all, I hope you’ll excuse me if I make some mistakes, but English isn’t my language. Well, as an Errol and Olivia admirer, I just want to say it’s a real pleasure for me to have found this wonderful blog. So thank so much to the author for sharing, and thanks to the other people for their comments too. Now, I can’t wait to read the book which I’m sure it must be an interesting reading. I wish it could be published in Spain! (my country), but I’m aware these kind of things go slow.”

So that’s where we will start, with international book rights. You would think that either Errol Flynn Slept Here or Errol & Olivia, or both, would be a natural for international book distribution or reprints in U.K., Australia, France, and, yes, Spain. But to date publishers in those countries have not approached us. We have been active in the Frankfurt Book Fair the past two years with no takers. Maybe we’ll try London in 2012.

Inga, it’s interesting that you didn’t resonate to Gone With the Wind, as my American friend (12 years younger than I am) didn’t. Not only is Gone With the Wind a story of the history of the United States, but it’s a story that found popularity in Depression America, prior to World War II. Scarlett’s story is one of escapism from her circumstances, which I think accounts for at least part of its popularity. We also have to consider that America could not look back upon its Civil War for the longest time because it was so horrible and killed half a million of its own. In that sense Gone With the Wind was a catharsis, airing the dirty laundry of a guilty nation

I just don’t know how much Scarlett O’Hara translates to the second decade of a new century. I agree, Tom, that it’s a unique motion picture. If you know anything about the back story, you’re compelled to watch. But what if you don’t? In an era of “reality” television and action pictures with CG and cuts measured in milliseconds, will Gone With the Wind hold up for a broad audience? I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that the answer is, NO, it won’t.

So, Elle, was my friend “sadly misinformed” for not knowing about Gone With the Wind, or did she grow up in a place and time that was not influenced by the impact of the story? I think back to my own parents who experienced GWTW firsthand and who, even in 1970, were speaking derisively about Melanie as a “simp.” For them, these characters were real; that’s the effect that this picture had on those who lived through the Depression and the mania surrounding the book, author, film, and filmmaker.

In college as a history major, I learned about historiography, which is the interpretation of history through the eyes of analysts. Our generation, and I’m speaking here of American “Baby Boomers,” grew up in an era that felt the influence of GWTW. Today I watched A Star Is Born (1937 version), which is, to me, a terribly dated, unfriendly view of 1930s Hollywood and the price that can be paid by movie stars. The producer was David O. Selznick, who was also responsible for Gone With the Wind. I just can’t relate to A Star Is Born; I like to see the 1930s Hollywood locations depicted in two-strip Technicolor, but I can’t relate to the stars or the story. I imagine it’s the same for some who similarly can’t relate to Gone With the Wind. I have to disqualify myself for being too close to the subject, although I have to think there is a vast audience born 1970 and after that will only roll its eyes at this spectacle of the Old South.

And, Tom, as much as I agree with you in most areas, I just don’t know that Gone With the Wind has any more decades to go as an unquestioned classic, let alone many more.

But I will say, how come Basil Rathbone isn’t in this picture? He would have been at home in the Antebellum South or in a role as a Carpetbagger after the war. I hope my research leads me to an understanding of why Selznick failed to cast Basil Rathbone in Gone With the Wind.

Elle, I agree with you about Olivia’s performance in Gone With the Wind. My parents were pre-disposed against Melanie and found her to be weak and a patsy, but only now, as I look at the part in the picture and the actress playing her, do I see that she is anything but. She is at the heart of the story of Gone With the Wind, and, I have to believe, she is the closest to the soul of its author, Margaret Mitchell. As much as Mitchell wanted to be Scarlett, I believe she really was Melanie.

Today I saw part of the 1940 Academy Award ceremonies, part of the festivities leading up to tonight’s Oscars, and there were the announcements of the winners, including Hattie McDaniel as Best Supporting Actress award. I thought then about the discussions we have had about Errol and Olivia…did Errol counsel Livvie through the miserable days and weeks leading up to the ceremony? We know they had grown closer around this time. He had helped her through the shooting of Essex, and she says they spent New Year’s Eve together at Jack Warner’s party. There’s no cutaway to Olivia in the Warner Bros. short subject about the ceremonies that year, so we can’t see her expression the moment Hattie McDaniel’s name was read and not her own, the moment she felt there was “no God.” But I can feel Livvie there while watching the ceremonies, and it’s easy to feel Errol there too. It’s all so long ago, but the story remains vivid.

Lastly, Tom, you mention the big three of Michael Curtiz pictures: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, and Yankee Doodle Dandy, and might I mention another, Mildred Pierce. As refined as the other pictures are, as big and as classic, there’s this fourth Curtiz picture that has transcended. It’s vivid and over the top and today considered a couple hours of camp, but Mildred Pierce remains riveting celluloid and proves anew the range of Michael Curtiz and his grasp of the human condition. I also realized a great deal while watching another Curtiz picture, Captain Blood, this past week. And that will be the subject of next week’s blog.

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Fleeting Glory

As noted in Errol & Olivia, not too long ago I told a friend about E&O and explained Olivia de Havilland by saying that she, of course, had appeared in the most famous movie of all time. “Which movie’s that?” said my friend, blankly. “Gone With the Wind,” said I in surprise. “Oh,” said my friend.

I realized then that either I was sadly misinformed about famous motion pictures or my friend was, and time has proven that it’s me.

Gone With the Wind played Turner Classic Movies this past Friday night, and it didn’t play prime time; it played at 11 p.m. I grew up in a home that revered Selznick’s masterpiece and Clark Gable’s role in it. I believe that I saw Gone With the Wind twice in theaters in my youth, at a time when anticipation hung thick in the darkened theater seconds before Max Steiner’s score ushered in the right-to-left crawl of the letters that formed G-O-N-E W-I-T-H T-H-E W-I-N-D. It is such a memory that even now I am all goosebumps when I hear the music and see the words. On Friday night it took me back decades to the time it was all a part of my childhood, vivid trace memories of my parents and mom and her roadshow program. I remember thumbing through it as a kid. I remember looking at a candid of Gable and Lombard at the premiere in Atlanta, and I still wonder if this is what made me write an entire book about Carole Lombard, trying to figure out the mystique of a candid photo from Atlanta in December 1939.

What was Carol Burnett’s GWTW parody in the 1970s called…Went With the Wind? No one dared parody the classic until 35 years had passed. I think about the decades rolling by and of the humans that are now gone—the people who participated in this extraordinary event. Almost all of them now have passed. Even those of extraordinary longevity are gone, except for Olivia de Havilland and Ann Rutherford. It’s all a memory; something for the history books. I met some cast members over the years—Fred Crane, Victor Jory, Cammie King—and I have corresponded for 30 years with Olivia and exchanged voicemails with Ann Rutherford. But unless you’re one of us of a particular generation, it has all gone with the wind, a title not just about an antebellum way of life that has passed into history, but about a Hollywood way of life long expired, that being moguls and fan magazines and a studio system that promulgated the mythology of a certain breed of Olympian superhumans called movie stars.

It hit me this time, at 11 at night watching Gone With the Wind, knowing what I know of Selznick and the production through de Havilland’s eyes and through the eyes of DOS himself. Once this was the talk of the world; not just Hollywood but the world. Even 40 years later it was a major TV event each and every time it played, and now in 2012 it’s relegated to the late show. Call TCM at 11 on a Friday night what you will, but the placement there and then really struck me as a demotion. Then I started to watch the picture and realized that it’s just not holding up that well, classic or no classic, history or no.

Is it my own familiarity with the actors and the script? Or is it that this really was a script by committee, and direction by committee, and so many retakes and so much second guessing that the resulting product doesn’t hold up as well as it did when I was young? Only now, 73 years after its production, has enough time and enough preconception passed that we can judge this picture as a picture, and I wonder what we’ll say about it in the decades to come. Olivia de Havilland made a career basking in the afterglow of this production. Her video-recorded reminiscence made the 2004 DVD collector’s edition—but at the same time fans were disquieted to learn that Olivia was no longer a down-to-earth superstar but had somehow taken on the old-world personality of Melanie and saw the world, and the production of a classic, through Melanie’s eyes. It was surreal and disappointing, that realization.

What is your own experience with Gone With the Wind? How do you feel when you see it today? Having been involved in film production for 20 years, I still marvel at the scenes and set-ups and sets and costumes. I contemplate the blue pages and the retakes and the matrix on the wall that the production manager lived with for six months. I think about Selznick eating bananas and popping uppers to keep himself going, but I ask myself: In another generation, will anyone even remember Gone With the Wind? And I think back to the last line of Patton, and hear George C. Scott’s voice saying the words that I hear in my head often…“All glory is fleeting.”

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