Made In America (49 page)

In 1917 the Motion Picture Patents Company was declared an illegal cartel and ordered to disband. It hardly mattered. By that time, Hollywood (and from here on in I am using the term generically) all but owned the movie business. It is a curious fact that this most American of phenomena was created almost entirely by non-Americans. Apart from Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford (who were in any case both Canadian), the early studios were run by a small band of men who had begun life from strikingly similar backgrounds: they were all eastern European Jews, poor and uneducated, who had left Europe in the same decade (the 1880s), and had established themselves in the New World in mostly lowly trades before they all abruptly – and instinctively, it seems – abandoned their careers in the first decade of this century and became seized with the opportunities to be found in the nickelodeon business.

It is most odd, but consider: Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was a scrap merchant from Lithuania. The Hungarian-born Adolf Zukor of Famous Players Studios was a janitor and later a furrier. Samuel Goldwyn of the Goldwyn Picture Company was a glove salesman from Warsaw. Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, was a German who had run a clothing store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. William Fox (real name Wilhelm Fried) was a Hungarian who worked in the garment industry before founding Fox Pictures. Joseph M. Schenk, creator of Twentieth Century Productions, was a Russian-born fairground showman and pharmacist. The Warner brothers – Albert, Harry, Jack and Sam were from Poland and had worked at various, mostly menial jobs. None had any link to the entertainment industry. Yet in the first years of the century, as if answering an implanted signal, they all migrated to New York City and became involved in the nickelodeon business – some as owners of nickelodeon
parlours, some as makers of films. In the second decade of the century, another signal appears to have gone off in their heads and they decamped
en masse
to Hollywood. Some understandable confusion exists concerning Samuel Goldwyn and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Though his name accounts for the middle initial in MGM, Goldwyn was never part of the company. He sold out to the Metro studios and Louis B. Mayer in 1924, and was astonished to discover that they took his name with them – though that was no more than Goldwyn himself had done. The Goldwyn Picture Company was not in fact named for Goldwyn, but rather he for it. His real name was Schmuel Gelbfisz, though for his first thirty years in America he had called himself – perhaps a little unwisely – Samuel Goldfish. Goldwyn was a portmanteau of the names of the studio’s two founders: Samuel Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn. It wasn’t until 1918, tired of being the butt of endless fish-bowl jokes, that he named himself after his corporation. After the MGM takeover, he had to go to court to win permission to continue making movies under the Goldwyn name.

It would be putting it mildly to say that Goldwyn never entirely mastered the nuances of English. Though many of the expressions attributed to him are apocryphal – he never, for instance, said to a pretentious director who wanted to make a movie with a message: ‘If you want to send a message call Western Union’ – he did actually say ‘I was on the brink of an abscess’, ‘Gentlemen, include me out’, and ‘You’ve bitten the hand of the goose that laid the golden egg’. Warned that a Broadway production to which he had acquired rights was ‘a very caustic play’, he shot back: ‘I don’t give a damn how much it costs.’ And a close friend swore that once when they were walking on a beach and the friend said, ‘Look at the gulls,’ Goldwyn stopped in his tracks and replied in all seriousness, ‘How do you know they’re not boys?’ He had a particular gift for mangling names. He always referred to
Mervyn LeRoy as ‘Moiphy’ LeRoy, to Preston Sturges as ‘Preston Sturgeon’ and, to his unending annoyance, to Ernst Fegte as ‘Faggoty’.
¹³

Not just the studio chiefs, but directors, composers, art directors, musicians and actors were as often as not foreigners working in this quintessentially American medium. The 1938 movie
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
for instance, starred an Australian, Erroll Flynn, and an Englishman, Basil Rathbone, was directed by a Hungarian, Michael Curtiz, scored by a Czech, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and had sets designed by a Pole, Anton Grot. Consider the backgrounds of just a few of those who made Hollywood pulse in its early years: John Ford (born Sean O’Fearna) was Irish, Greta Garbo Swedish, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant and Stan Laurel English, William Wyler Alsatian, Billy Wilder Hungarian, Frank Capra Italian (at least by birth), Fred Zinnemann and Erich Von Stroheim Austrian, and Ernst Lubitsch German. Never has an industry been more international in its composition or more American in its output.

As the years passed studios endlessly formed and reformed. Mutual, Reliance and Keystone amalgamated into the Triangle Film Corporation, which, despite having America’s three leading directors – D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett and Thomas H. Ince – soon went under. RCA and the Keith Orpheum theatre chain teamed up to form RKO. Joseph Schenk’s Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox’s Fox Film Corporation merged into Twentieth Century-Fox. Many more fell by the wayside: Star, Biograph, General Film and even the Edison Company. But Hollywood itself went from strength to strength, filling the world with a distinctively American mix of glamour, adventure and moral certitude.

If the stars hadn’t changed their names already, the studios often did it for them to make them fit more neatly into the pleasantly homogenized heaven that was Hollywood. Names
were changed for almost any reason – because they were too dull, too exotic, not exotic enough, too long, too short, too ethnic, too Jewish. Generally, it must be said, the studio bosses knew what they were doing. Who after all could imagine John Wayne as Marion Morrison or Judy Garland as Frances Gumm or Mary Pickford as dowdy Gladys Smith? Spangler Arlington Brugh is a name for a junior high school woodwork teacher; change it to
Robert Taylor
and you are already halfway to stardom. Archie Leach might pass muster as the kid who delivers groceries, but if you want a man of the world it’s got to be
Cary Grant.
Doris Kappelhoff is the 200 lb. chocoholic who baby-sits your little brother;
Doris Day
dates the quarterback. Even little Mortimer Mouse had his name changed to Mickey just four years after his creation in 1923.

In the very early days of the movies stars hadn’t had to change their names because they weren’t allowed any, at least not as far as their fans were concerned. Until the second decade of the century actors and actresses weren’t billed at all. For years Mary Pickford was known only as ‘Little Mary’ and Florence Lawrence as ‘the Biograph girl’. Then, as producers realized that audiences were drawn by certain faces and even styles of film-making, they began billing not just the featured players, but also directors and even sometimes cameramen. The first actress to have her name changed for purposes of enhanced aura (
sex appeal
wouldn’t come into general use until the 1940s) is thought to have been one Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati. Seeking a persona better suited to her dark, exotic looks, someone at the William Fox Company in 1914 played around with the words
Arab
and
death
(goodness knows why those two) and came up with
Theda Bara.
Soon all the studios were at it. Among the stars who found immortality with someone else’s name, we can count the following. (Their original names are on the right.)

And, no, I don’t know why Boris Karloff was thought to be an improvement on Bill Pratt.

In 1926, two new terms entered the language:
Movietone
from the Fox studios and
Vitaphone
from Warner Brothers, and sound movies were on their way. Both employed music and sound effects, but not speech. The
talkies
(often also called the
speakies
in the early days) would have to wait till the following year and the release of
The Jazz Singer,
though even it was only partly speaking. The first all-talking film, a gangster feature called
The Lights of New York,
came in 1928, though such was the quality of sound reproduction that it came equipped with subtitles as well. With sound, movies became not only more popular but immensely more complicated to make.

As the industry evolved through the 1920s and ‘30s, still more words were created to describe the types of films Hollywood was making –
cliffhangers, weepies, sobbies, tear-jerkers, spine-chillers, westerns, serials
– and to denote the types of roles on offer. A character who wept a lot was a
tear bucket.
An actress in a melodrama was
a finger-wringer.
A villain was of course a
baddie.
Many movie terms, particularly portmanteau words like
cinemaestro
and
cinemactress
and fractured spellings like
laff
and
pix,
originated or were widely popularized by the bible of the movie business, the newspaper
Variety.
Many were short-lived.
Oats opera
for a western,
clicko
for a success,
bookritic, eight ball
for a failure and many such
others died in infancy. Scores of others have prospered in the wider world, notably
whodunit, tie-in, socko, rave
(for a review),
flopperoo, palooka
(a word of unknown derivation),
belly laugh, newscaster, to scram
and
pushover.

Behind the scenes, the development of increasingly sophisticated equipment brought a rash of new terms:
scrims, flags, gobos, skypans, inky dinks, century stands, flying rigs, match boxes, lupes
and other arcane apparatus. A
gobo
is a type of black screen (no one seems to know why it is so called), a
skypan
is a big light, an
inky dink
a small one, and a
match box
one smaller still. A
scrim
is a type of light diffuser. Such sophisticated equipment brought with it strange and intriguing job titles:
focus pullers, juicers, Foley artists, gaffers, best boys, supervising drapes, inbetweeners, wranglers, post-punch supervisors, swing-gangs
and so on.
Gaffer
(a corruption of
godfather,
originally a sarcastic term for an old person) is the head electrician.
Best boy
is the chief electrician’s chief assistant.
Juicers
are those who move electrical equipment around. The
Foley artist
is in charge of sound effects; he’s the one who adds the ‘toosh!’ to punches and the ‘gerdoings!’ to ricocheting bullets. It is named for Jack Foley, one of the great sound recordists.
Supervising drape
is the person in charge of drapes, rugs and other such inanimate objects. An
inbetweener
is an animator’s assistant – one who draws the frames between the main action frames.
Swing-gangs
are those who build or rebuild sets overnight.
Wranglers
handle the animals, or indeed any living creatures. ‘Cockroach wrangler’ has been recorded in the credits of at least one film. As you will have gathered, often the title is more impressive than the job, and nowhere perhaps more so than with the
post punch supervisor,
whose responsibility essentially is to look after the photocopying.

With so many exotic professions involved it is little wonder that the credits nowadays seem to roll on for ever. The longest credits yet, for
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,
actually go on for
just six and a half minutes. Even so, they managed to salute 763 creative artists, technicians and other contributors – and that was without mentioning Kathleen Turner, the voice of Jessica Rabbit, who opted not to be credited.