Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (59 page)

After preparing
The Outlaw
and then doing
Sergeant York
and
Ball of Fire
back-to-back, Hawks was physically spent, almost ill, and told Feldman that he needed to rest and recuperate before launching into another picture. He refused another future box-office giant starring Gary Cooper, Sam Goldwyn’s inspirational biography of Lou Gehrig,
The Pride of the Yankees
, which Sam
Wood also ended up directing. Hawks was tempted, but Feldman reported to his staff that the way he was feeling, Hawks “didn’t care whether he did the picture or not, if he was going to be rushed into it.” Warner Bros. paged Hawks to take the reins on the Edna Ferber Western
Saratoga Trunk
, but Hawks didn’t want to work with Errol Flynn and told Hal Wallis he’d consider it if Cooper would star
(which he did, opposite Ingrid Bergman, under the ubiquitous Sam Wood). Warners also proposed to Hawks
The Hard Way
, which Vincent Sherman ended up directing memorably, as well as Jesse Lasky’s Mark Twain biography, which Irving Rapper eventually took on.

One Warner Bros. picture Hawks definitely was not involved with was
Casablanca
, his own claims to the contrary. One of Hawks’s tallest tales
was about how, one day, he and Michael Curtiz were supposedly commiserating about the lousy projects Warner Bros. wanted them to do, Curtiz complaining about how he didn’t know anything about Tennessee hill people and Hawks moaning about a silly story about a bunch of people who meet at Rick’s nightclub. Between them, he said, they agreed to swap pictures, and the rest was history. However,
Sergeant
York
began shooting in December 1940, eighteen months before
Casablanca
, so the timing is considerably off. Warner Bros. did send an early draft, called
Everybody Goes to Rick’s
, to Hawks while he was working on
Sergeant York
, as it did to Curtiz. But
Slim, whom Hawks had trained to read and analyze scripts for him, told Hawks it was terrible—granted, this was a long way from what the final screenplay
would be like by the time shooting was completed. Curtiz agreed to direct the film in March 1941. When he saw the finished film, Hawks said he liked it, but claimed it had “an awful musical comedy quality” and admitted, “I never had any faith in my doing anything like that.”

When Hawks and Slim were married, Slim was referred to in the press as a “film writer,” a typically Hawksian exaggeration
that nonetheless had an explanation, even if no one was asking. In the first of what were to be many schemes by Hawks and Feldman to buy literary properties and then sell them to the studios, Hawks brought to his agent’s attention “Phantom Filly,” a story by George Agnew Chamberlain published in the
Saturday Evening Post
, which was bought in the names of Nancy Gross and the CKF [Feldman] Corporation
for $7,500, written into a script by Feldman client Winston Miller and unloaded to Fox for $60,000, resulting in a huge profit for Slim and Feldman. Henry Hathaway directed the picture in 1944.

In late November, two weeks before Hawks’s wedding, Feldman was trying to put over another idea, that of selling Hawks and Gary Cooper as a package. Even though Feldman didn’t represent the actor, who
was still under contract to Goldwyn, the prodigiously creative agent argued, “I am thoroughly convinced, because of Hawks’ relationship with Cooper, that Gary will definitely do almost anything that Howard wants to do.” Of course, any studio in town would have been interested in these two men under any terms that were remotely realistic, but Feldman was zeroing in on the unlikely target of Universal,
which did best with such lowbrow fare as Abbott and Costello comedies and Deanna Durbin musicals, since he believed he was most likely to win the greatest profit participation and artistic control from the studio most eager to land such prestigious talent.

Feldman’s brief to Universal on behalf of his client emphasized his recent successes and his friendship with Hemingway, “who is now working
on a new book and to whom Hawks has given ideas.” Feldman further argued that Hawks deserved to get considerably more than Universal’s highest-paid director, Gregory La Cava, whose deal called for $125,000 and a percentage, saying that La Cava, “in my opinion, isn’t one tenth of the director that Hawks is.” As it eventually transpired, Universal would end up with Hawks but not Cooper, the one they
actually coveted.

At the same time, Feldman had Hawks close to a lucrative one-picture-per-year deal at Fox, but the studio backed down, just as it did with a similarly expensive deal for Capra. The week before his wedding, Hawks
had a dinner with Cary Grant at which they agreed to make two pictures together over the next three years.

After all these overtures, proposals, and negotiations, Hawks
ended up signing two different contracts in early 1942, each of a long-term nature the likes of which he had avoided in recent years. The first, which he signed in February, was with Warner Bros., where he agreed to make one picture per year over the next five years for $100,000 per picture. For each production, Hawks was obliged to sixteen weeks of work, beyond which he would earn $6,250 per
week. Warners was not yet amenable to paying their talent percentages, but Hawks did receive wide latitude in his choice of stories, and knew that he and Feldman would be able to sell just about any property they wanted to Jack Warner for a big profit.

Two months later, Hawks signed a long-brewing deal at Universal to produce and direct three pictures over three years. Again, he would receive
$100,000 for sixteen weeks of work, but he was also cut in for 50 percent of the net profits. Here, the budgets would be lower—no more than $650,000, not including the salaries of the producer-director and the stars—but Hawks could get his “A Howard Hawks Production” credit in letters 75 percent the size of the title, whereas Warners would only allow it to be 40 percent. Hawks optimistically believed
that with everything neatly set up and the top stars in Hollywood dying to work with him, he could make two pictures per year and earn more than $200,000 per year and still have twenty weeks left over. All those zeroes looked nice on paper, even if it was sheerest fantasy that he could ever be that prolific.

Before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood had produced a number of contemporary combat films.
A
Yank in the R.A.F.
, starring Tyrone Power, was the fourth most popular film of 1941;
Dive Bomber, I Wanted Wings
, and
Flight Command
had stressed the importance of military preparedness. But once the war started, the film industry immediately joined hands with the government to produce ultrapatriotic, even blatantly propagandistic entertainments designed to bolster the war effort. Warner Bros.’
first wartime drama to hit the screen was Raoul Walsh’s
Desperate Journey
, starring Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan as pilots trying to make their way out of Germany. But the studio’s first major push was on behalf of what became
Air Force
.

Hawks always said that Major General Henry (Hap) Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps, asked him to make this film, which was intended to promote the Air Force’s
role in turning the war around from its disastrous start. Hawks had known Arnold through flying circles for some years, but the contact that launched
Air Force
began at a higher level, between Arnold
and Jack Warner. Warner, who from this time on liked to be referred to as Colonel Warner, was, with Zanuck, the most gung ho of all the studio heads, which is reflected in the extraordinary wartime
output of his studio. Once Arnold arranged for the cooperation of the War Department, Warner brought Hawks and the screenwriter Dudley Nichols onboard to prepare the script.

Hawks said it was Arnold who proposed the basic story “about the flight of B-17s that had left Hamilton Field up in Northern California and gotten past the point of no return when they heard over the radio that the Japanese
had hit Pearl Harbor. They got in there that night, in all the smoke and everything, and were afraid of being hit again, so they were sent down to Manila.” The idea was to concentrate on the crew of one plane, and the Air Force appointed Captain Samuel Triffy as technical adviser to Hawks and Nichols. Resurrecting a method used on
Scarface
, Hawks and Nichols tacked red, yellow, and blue cards
to a large cork board to lay out story strands and characters. They initially miscalculated, however, since the first draft of Nichols’s script begins with fifty-five pages of character development before the plane even takes off. This was quickly remedied, and the film benefited enormously from having the group of men thrust almost immediately into action.

Leaving Nichols to continue writing,
the producer, Hal Wallis, to concentrate on the logistics of organizing the shoot, and Slim to check into Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles for the first of many “rests,” Hawks took a trip to Washington, D.C., in mid-May to consult with Hap Arnold and the War Department Motion Picture Board of Review. On the train he got to know another general and an older sergeant, the latter of whom supplied
the basis for the service veteran played in the film by Harry Carey. The excited, proud little boy in Hawks came bursting out when he was embraced by all the military top brass. He boasted that he found that the Air Force’s gunnery manual was a useless document that couldn’t teach a soldier how to hit anything. Arnold supposedly challenged Hawks to rewrite it, which Hawks claimed he did. Arnold’s
parting directive to the director was, “Tell the story of how the Japs laced hell out of us. Then tell how we struck back at them with our own medicine. Tell the whole story—its bitterness and sadness and bravery. Tell the story of the greatest fighters the world has ever known.” Hawks then joined Captain Triffy in Tampa, Florida, where the exteriors would be shot; not only would Drew Field serve
as a plausible stand-in for Hickham Field in Hawaii, but the ongoing fear of a
Japanese invasion on the West Coast completely ruled out filming with any Japanese-marked planes in California.

To get a head start on a picture Jack Warner was adamant to have in theaters by December 7, the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the miniature unit began shooting under the director Roy Davidson on May
18 in the ocean off Santa Barbara. They spent fifty-nine days creating scenes duplicating combat in Makasar Strait, the Coral Sea, Haruna, and the Celebes Sea.

On June 15, Hal Wallis was shocked when Dudley Nichols submitted a 207–page screenplay, nearly double the normal length for a feature film. Not only that, but the script was still incomplete. Hawks and Nichols had long since decided to
make the plane, the
Mary Ann
, rather than any actor, the star of the picture. Helping set a predictable pattern for future combat films, the bomber crew was composed of a societal cross-section, mostly played by relative unknowns—John Ridgely’s stoical captain, Gig Young’s upper-class WASP, George Tobias’s comic Jew (similar to his character in
Sergeant York
). The only major name in the cast was
John Garfield, whom, Hawks said, had always loved
Scarface
and was simply interested in working with him.

Many logistical problems had yet to be solved, and both Boeing and the Air Force were having trouble securing a Flying Fortress that could be spared for a significant period. Warners finally rented a mock-up interior from Paramount, and Hawks began filming in it on June 18 with his ten actors.
With the script in such a tentative state, it was impossible to set a precise budget and shooting schedule, but a hefty $2 million and seventy-two days were allocated going in. Because of the long schedule, Hawks’s salary was bumped up to $150,000. Hawks’s favorite assistant director, Jack Sullivan, was at his side again, as was the cinematographer James Wong Howe, with whom he hadn’t worked
since
Viva Villa!
in Mexico. Originally, the film was to have been shot by Sol Polito, who had done
Sergeant York
, but Howe ended up with the job, assisted in the special effects and rear-projection work by the veteran Hans Koenekamp. The entire first month was devoted to interior bomber scenes with the core crew, and Hawks moved along at the reasonable pace of one and a half to two pages of script
a day (although at this rate, Nichols’s full screenplay would have taken more than two hundred days to film). Hawks covered many of his set-ups in a single take, but a handful of difficult group shots required as many as twenty-two takes.

After completing three days of hospital interiors, the company departed Los Angeles by train on July 21 for the 58½-hour journey to Tampa. Hawks found things
far from well when he arrived. Setting up headquarters at the Tampa Terrace Hotel, Hawks learned that while the War Department was trying to cooperate the best it could, because of the demands of the war it had come up woefully short on equipment, including lights; that requisitioned electrical supplies and gasoline were going to be difficult to come by; and that many adjustments were going to
have to be made in the script as a result. Furthermore, it was the hottest summer in Tampa in thirty-four years; the entire company was ordered to take daily salt pills and drink lime and quinine water. Although Hawks later claimed that he shot all the action himself without the aid of a second unit, the facts were otherwise. None other than Breezy Eason headed up the second unit, which worked out
of nearby Mather Field while Hawks remained at Drew. Eason concentrated mainly on aerial shots coordinated by the great flier Paul Mantz, who had flown stunts on
Ceiling Zero
, and photographed principally by Elmer Dyer, who had worked on all of Hawks’s other aviation films, with assistance from Charles Marshall and Rex Wimpy. In Florida, Eason shot for nineteen days, covering just about all the
aerial footage for the picture, including the Zero attacks, while back in Los Angeles he directed an additional twelve days of Japanese ship movements, battle material, and explosions.

From the start, problem begat problem. The enormous lamps Howe set up to facilitate night shooting attracted swarms of insects, so that Howe was forced to erect an extra bank of lights one hundred yards away and
turn it on first, which distracted the bugs long enough to allow for about one minute of shooting. Asian extras were at such a premium in Florida that in most cases local Cubans were recruited to play Japanese and Hawaiians; for certain close-ups, a few Chinese were found, and Howe, Chinese himself, submitted them to what he called the “cruel system” of lighting, or head-on illumination without
any relieving or softening spotlights, resulting in a harsh, high-contrast look of evil. Engine noise drowned out much of the dialogue, planes developed problems or were called away for essential government use, rain caused delays, the crew constantly complained about being forced to live in barracks and to eat military rations, and virtually all the main actors came down with severe colds or the
flu as a result of the extended waits during night shooting. To top it off, Jack Warner was becoming irate, not only at how little footage was coming back from Florida but at how the scenes he saw in dailies were not necessarily those in the script. Hawks was up to his old tricks again, and in early August both Warner
and Wallis ordered the director to speed things up and not change dialogue or
rearrange scenes on location.