A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (54 page)

My pacing back and forth in the back of the theater had been watched
for some time by a young usherette, who was alternately fascinated by the
movie and by my behavior. Finally, she walked up to me and asked me if
I had something to do with the film. When I told her I did, she smiled
at me and said, very genuinely, "Well, don't be nervous. It's a terrific movie
and it should be a big hit!"

The film moved toward its climax, and I remember one image very
vividly. The back area of the Music Hall, the "standing room" section, has
a chest-high partition running the length of the theater, separating the seats
in the auditorium from this rear area. For the last twenty minutes of the
film, about twelve of New York's Finest, police who had been assigned to
the event, were lined up solidly, leaning against this partition, elbows and
arms resting on the divider, all in exactly the same position, one foot crossed
over the other, billy clubs and pistols hanging at their waists, staring raptly
at the screen, unmoving, completely involved in the proceedings. I wished at that moment that I had a camera-it was absolute proof of the picture's
power to engross even the most hardened audiences.

As Judy Garland walked toward the microphone at the film's climax, the
theater became so quiet that you could hear the collective breathing of the
audience. As she spoke her curtain line-"Hello, everybody. This is Mrs.
Norman Maine ..."-the audience in the film began applauding but was
drowned out by the sound of the audience in the Radio City Music Hall,
who started clapping, then cheering-and continued for the next two
minutes that it took for the film to end and the curtain to come down. And
even then they didn't stop. I tried to get down the aisle to reach Doug and
Fay, but the crowd was too dense and too clamorous. I saw a flying wedge
of policemen and ushers surrounding the celebrity party, moving them
swiftly through a side door and into the backstage area. Doug told me later
that both Liza and Lorna had to be taken into a dressing room, where they
cried and held on to each other for the better part of twenty minutes: the
emotions generated by the film and by seeing their mother in her favorite
movie, and the intensity of the audience involvement, were more than they
could handle.

Afterwards, we all went back to our respective lodgings. Doug, who was
staying in the Village, later related to me that he walked home and, too
excited to go to sleep, went up to the roof of the building in which he was
staying and watched the moon go down. Just before dawn, he looked
toward the city skyline, and at that moment a shooting star arced across
the beginnings of the morning sky-a symbolic ending to a memorable
event.

My own favorite story about this evening involves two friends of mine
who had been to the Music Hall and seen the film, then took the subway
home. Their car was near-empty except for one other passenger, one of
New York's less fortunates, who evidently lived in the subway, or at least
did most of his drinking there. He was bleary-eyed and truculent; seeing
my two friends, he weaved his way unsteadily toward them. Holding onto
the pole, he stared at them, then noticed the program for A Star Is Born.
He looked at it quizzically, then sat down abruptly next to them and in a
very slurred voice asked: "Tell me-is it really her best work like everybody
says?"

i
he New York premiere of the film was a triumph for the Academy Foundation and for the cause of film preservation. Following the
Radio City Music Hall opening, we took the picture to Washington, D.C.,
where we had the only mishap of the entire tour. As the "Lose That Long
Face" segment began, the picture and the sound went out of synchronization; instead of stopping, the engineer handling the track tried to speed it
up to catch up to the picture. Meanwhile, the audience was having fitsthe one number everyone wanted to see was being ruined. The engineer
paid no attention to anyone. It finally took Gene Allen's rushing up to the
projection booth and ordering him to stop before we could quiet the crowd
and start the number over.

James Mason and Lillian Gish traveled with the film to Oakland; in
Dallas, Mason was joined by another celebrity guest, Ginger Rogers, who
had started her show-business career as a chorus girl at the Majestic Theater, where we were showing the film (and which had been the scene of
its original Dallas premiere in 1954). In these cities and in Chicago, the
film was greeted with enthusiasm and appreciation, almost as if it were a
new movie-which in a sense it was, since most of the people in the
audiences for these presentations had never seen it in its full glory. These
audiences were made up of an eclectic group of moviegoers; the picture's
appeal cut across all barriers of age, race, and class. In Los Angeles, the
three-day-long engagement at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theatre
was such a success that several more performances had to be scheduled to
meet the public demand.

The second night of the picture's presentation at the Academy, I was
approached by a young black man who informed me that his wife was one
of the children who had danced with Garland in "Lose That Long Face."
He took me over and introduced me to her, and I tried to get to Gene Allen, who was the emcee that evening, to let him know so that he could introduce
her. But he had already started speaking; then the film started, and it was
too late. After the screening, I looked for them, but they were gone, and
I could not remember their name. If they read this, I hope they will know
how much I regret not being able to introduce the young lady, who was
listed in the credits as Patricia Rosamond.

Another, more bizarre incident came about because of the screenings at
the Academy. On the third or fourth night of the screenings, I was standing
in the lobby talking to some people. In another corner of the lobby, a young
man was loudly proclaiming to a crowd of listeners, who evidently knew
him, that we were misrepresenting our reconstruction as "complete." He
was outraged because we had not included the scene on the rooftop with
the landlady, the neighbors, and the children. I knew this fellow as one of
the more obnoxious Garland fans. On this particular night, after the film
had started, he became involved in a shouting match with another patron,
who objected to his constant talking to a companion during the screening.
At the intermission, I noticed that the companion was none other than the
local exhibitor who had insisted that the film editor at the Burbank Studios
had the original "Lose That Long Face" footage. The two came up to talk
to me, and once again the exhibitor bewailed the fact that we had been
unable to convince the film editor to give us the negative. I agreed that it
was unfortunate but remarked that even if he did have the negative, there
was no way of getting it from him short of turning him in to the police
as a possessor of stolen merchandise-something I did not want to do. As
we talked, I noticed the loud friend turn abruptly and go over to a pay
phone. It was such a purposeful and sharp movement that it caught my eye
and stuck in the back of my mind briefly. I then thought no more of it.

Several days later I received a call in my office from Gerald Loeb, who
identified himself as a senior investigator from the district attorney's office.
He asked if he could come and show me something that I might be able
to help him identify-some film that they had recently seized. An hour
later, he was in my office at the museum with a can of 35mm film. I opened
it, looked at it through the film viewer, and found I was staring at the
negative to "Lose That Long Face"! I was flabbergasted-where had this
come from? It was evidently the original, Cukor-approved version of the
number. Loeb explained that the film security office of the Motion Picture
Association of America had received an anonymous tip that a man in the
San Fernando Valley had an enormous collection of stolen and other illegally gotten films. Loeb and several other officers had driven out to a
place called the E.Z. Storage Company in Burbank and found this collector
loading dozens of film cans into a rental truck. They had confiscated the
material, and the one can they brought to me because it had "GarlandStar Is Born" written on the outside. When I asked who the collector was,
Loeb told me his name. It was the film editor from the Burbank Studios,
whom I had believed when he said he knew nothing of this very film!

Suddenly I became enormously excited. Maybe he had the rest of the
footage! Loeb took me and Dan Woodruff, the Academy's film archivist,
down to the Bekins film storage facility, where all of the seized film had
been stored. There were literally hundreds of cans and boxes of film, some
that had been missing from Warner Bros. for years. Two of them were the
only existing 35mm nitrate prints of the last two-color Technicolor features
Warners had made in 1932-33: Dr. X and Mystery of the Wax Museum.
There were also 35mm nitrate Technicolor prints of The Adventures of
Robin Hood and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and nearly
twelve hundred additional cans of 35mm and 16mm films that this fellow
had either bought or stolen over the years. Dan and I spent the next several
days going through this mass of miscellaneous material, hoping to turn up
the other missing negative sections of A Star Is Born, but we found
nothing. The collector, on the advice of his attorney, would tell us nothing:
he was facing criminal charges, he'd lost his job, and he'd lost the one thing
that evidently gave meaning and purpose to his life-his film collection,
which he'd carefully (and perhaps illegally) built up over a number of years.

We took the negative of "Lose That Long Face" to the Technicolor labs
immediately; they printed it up for us, and the next night it was cut into
our print of A Star Is Born, where it turned out to be infinitely superior
to our reconstruction of the number.

The success of the road-show screenings of A Star Is Born across the
country was no surprise to anyone at the Academy. The executives at
Warner Bros., however, were caught completely off guard. Almost immediately after the Music Hall screenings and the additional screenings at the
Academy, Warners announced that the film in its new form would be given
a first-run reissue all across the country. New prints were made with a Dolby
stereo soundtrack. The picture opened in New York, then played a series
of modestly successful engagements all over the country and in Europe, where it had generated a great deal of attention at the Venice, Deauville,
San Sebastian, and London film festivals. Europe had never seen anything
but the short version, and in many countries the picture had been trimmed
to less than two hours, with most of the musical numbers deleted.

A year after the Music Hall premiere, Warner Home Video asked me
to supervise the preparation of the picture for release to the home video
market. The current tradition in home video is to reduce all CinemaScope
films to fit the three-by-four proportions of television sets, which means that
the image must be "panned and scanned"-a process that involves a
technician's rephotographing the film using a three-by-four frame, eliminating almost half the image. I made a strong appeal to Warner Home
Video not to do this with A Star Is Born, arguing that it would violate the
film's artistic integrity once again. I implored them to "letterbox" the
image-put the full CinemaScope frame on the video release-which
necessitates having a black area above and below the image to give it the
correct proportion on a television set. But they were adamant in their
refusal: the public would never stand for it. So, ironically, I found myself
sitting at a video console, electronically trimming the image to fit the new
technology.

Still, even with this compromise, the picture does look beautiful in its
video incarnation, and the stereo track is astounding when heard on a good
home system. Some folks with chandeliers may even manage to recapture
my own experience at the Bal Theatre thirty years ago.

There are two concluding incongruities in this chronicle of ironies. As the
Decade of Preservation draws to a close and hundreds of films have been
saved, they may never be seen, except on video, and perhaps not even there.
One of the reasons is the complicated legal status of these films: the
institutions that have taken on the responsibility for preservation have no
legal claim on the results of their work, other than to store it. For one of
these preserved films to be shown publicly, either by the preserving institution or by anyone else, permission must be granted by the copyright owner,
or the firm or individual that deposited it with the institution that preserved
it. In many cases, the copyright is no longer valid, which means ostensibly
that the film is in the public domain. The film may be, but if it is based
on a novel or a play, or if it has songs in it, then there are underlying literary
and musical rights that must be cleared. This web of permissions, coupled with the reluctance of most archives to allow their films to circulate except
to other archives, means that much of the preservation work that has been
done in the last decade will not be seen by more than a few hundred people,
except perhaps on video-which is the other incongruity.