Promise of Joy (64 page)

(Now and then, of course, this excuse does not hold water, for there are times when he rides some member of the cast—always a minor one—mercilessly. The victims assure you later, rather nervously, that, “We know that when he criticizes us he’s really telling Laughton or Pidgeon what to do.” But it is obvious that this is no fun for the substitutes, however they may rationalize it in their own minds.)

So the shooting moves along through the first weeks of September, and the days settle into a familiar pattern. Essentially it boils down to: set up the scene—rehearse it—shoot it—strike the scene; set up the next scene—rehearse it—and so on. More subtly, each new scene is a challenge, each has its own problems of lighting, camera-angle and interpretation, and each contributes its bit of shading to the overall impact that will be achieved weeks later in Hollywood when the film is out and edited and put together in proper sequence.

Around this process, an endless bustle of human detail goes on all the time.

The hair-dresser and the make-up man, patting and fluffing and retouching Gene Tierney, who plays the society hostess, Dolly Harrison, and Inga Swenson, who plays Brigham Anderson’s wife. The chief wardrobe man, a professional but good-natured cynic, making his sourly amusing comments as he squabbles with the script-girl over which tie Don Murray wore in a related scene five days ago. The script-girl, worrying endlessly about just such details, which must be consistent when the completed sequence is put together later. The casting director, parading a string nervous beauties before the director so that he may choose one to be a Senator’s secretary. A lawyer for one of the technical unions, explaining to the director why extra—and useless—men must be paid salaries to sit around doing nothing. The director’s explosive and loud-voiced rebuttal. The airplanes, flying over just as a dramatic scene reaches its peak, so that sound man Harold Lewis yells “Stop!” and the whole thing has to be started over—and started over—and started over—. The visiting foreign journalists, expressing their naïve horror at the fact that anyone would be honest enough to depict some of the harsher aspects of the political process: “Eeen my countree, we woold not
dare!
” Which makes an American think: too bad, about your country.… The daily showing of yesterday’s “rushes,” the raw, un-cut, unedited versions that send the director and the head cameraman into hitter tiffs over the fact that somebody goofed and forgot to shade a light, so there’s a big shadow on Walter Pidgeon’s face or a strange, sharp angle to Gene Tierney’s. The card-games and the gossip as the company sits about waiting for another scene to be set up. The disruption of a quiet community as half a dozen enormous sound-trucks fill the tree-shaded street, grinding out form their own power plants the electricity needed for the enormous lights and the voracious camera. The police-whistle of the director’s assistant, commanding silence, and his constantly reiterated cry, “Shooting! Everybody please be very quiet!” The anxiously-awaited, “Cut! Print!” of the director as he finally, after the third or fourth or seventh or eighth take, gets what he wants.

How the actors manage to give it to him is one of the major miracles of movie-making, for there they are, pinned in the eye of the camera under the glare of a dozen lights, watched by a hovering ring of attentive, critical people, required to portray the most intimate emotions on one with what Charles Laughton refers to as “the conviction of the first time.”

“However many times a scene is taken,” he says, “you must always be able to approach it with the conviction of the first time.”

It is the achieving of this that some of the most fascinating elements of a movie come into play, for here the actors make their own highly personalized contributions to the film. Their styles range from that of Laughton himself, who confesses that he approaches each scene with “terrible butterflies”—only, of course, to do each scene brilliantly—to the “method” type of acting that gives Don Murray his particular sensitivity and strength.

For Laughton, Pidgeon, Lew Ayres, Franchot Tone and others of the older Hollywood generation, it is a matter of studying the script, memorizing it, analyzing the characters, planning bits of “business” that will bring out the portrait that each star sees in the character he has been selected to play, growing into the part inch by inch, patiently building it with a thousand deft touches.

For Don Murray, for George Grizzard, who plays the blackmailing Senator Fred Van Ackerman, for Inga Swenson, it seems to be, either consciously or unconsciously, the sort of acting associated with the “Method” school—a more intuitive, more emotional, more inward approach to the character.

“When I want to portray anger,” Don says with a grin, “I pretend I’m giving Otto hell. Pretending is the only chance I’ll ever get to do it!”

In pursuit of the “method,” he can usually be seen prior to one of his scenes, pacing up and down, concentrating with a frown on some past experiences whose memory will produce the emotion he is after. In the same fashion, Inga Swenson says that in one of her big emotional scenes a remembered piece of music produced the necessary mood.

That all of them manage to perform so superbly under the hot lights, the camera and the ever-watchful audience is a tribute to innate genius fortified by years of discipline. It seems even more remarkable when one realizes how much of a movie is done in disjointed bits and pieces. The setting dictates the shooting. All the scenes in Brig’s house, some early in the movie, some midway, some later, are completed in a week of shooting at the Hights’.

Often, moreover, they are not even shot in the sequence of early, midway, and late. Some of the late ones are shot first, some of the first are shot toward the end. In this process both actors and director must maintain the correct pace and the correct pitch, so that emotions in the scene that will come early in the finished picture will rise gradually into the emotions in a scene that will come later. All of this requires a constant control by the director, a carefully phased expenditure of effort and emphasis by the actors. It is one of the things that makes of each scene a fascinating study in technique, so that in two months there is never a day but has its own special challenge, its own excitement that carries the company forward through many long and grueling hours of dramatic episodes—and what is perhaps even more wearing, the “hurry up and wait” aspects of it, as the technicians take anywhere from one hour to four to get a scene properly arranged and lighted.

This, too, has its excitements and its challenges and its constant interest. Always there is some technical problem to the solved, some new challenge from the camera to be met, as it glides in and out through the action of its long cranes like the head of a great mechanical snake. To solve these problems there are the head cameraman, Academy Award-winning Sam Leavitt, and his assistants; the grips, and the electricians, most of whom have worked together before on many pictures; and the one man who appears to be indispensable, the Key Grip, Morris Rosen. A hundred times a day the shout of, “Rose!” echoes through the set as the need arises for some special gadget to assist the shooting, a wedge of wood to raise a chair or desk, a special type of silk screen to soften a light, some errand or other that must be run. And up comes Rosie, short, stocky, good-natured and even-tempered under the constant provocations of being shouted at by everybody, to do what needs to be done.

The scenes in Brigham Anderson’s house completed, the company begins to move out, in a series of tentative probing operations, toward Capitol Hill where the Senate still sits talking, oblivious to the crisis that it is creating for a motion picture company.

There are moments when it is possible to suspect that the Senate couldn’t care less, but this harsh thought is banished by the director, who lives by the Conspiracy Theory of life. Somebody is against him, that’s why the Senate won’t adjourn; it isn’t the public business that keeps it there, it’s just a willful desire to thwart Gentle Otto. In similar fashion, when permission is first granted him to shoot scenes in the White House, then is withdrawn on the ground that in the present state of the world such goings-on would look too frivolous, it is not because of this reason, in his mind, that it is done. “Somebody over there is against me,” he says darkly. It’s a tough life.

In any event, though the Senate still remains touchy about it, he does move the company close for some outdoor scenes on the Old Senate Office Building steps, and along the Mall that stretches between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. And in due time, of course, the Senate does decide to adjourn, and the Hill is his.

Then come some of the big scenes of the picture, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s examination of
Advise and Consent
’s nominee for Secretary of State, the elusively equivocal Robert A. Leffingwell, portrayed by Henry Fonda. He and Charles Laughton, portraying Senator Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina, have great fun acting together.

“You could have ten pink elephants on the stage, all wearing diamond-studded robes, and Hank could come on in a business suit and say, ‘Hi,’ and the stage would be his,” Laughton says. The same thing of course is true of Laughton, in the rumpled suit he wears as Seab Cooley. Together they strike dramatic sparks from each other and provide the picture with some of its most exciting moments. And in these moments, shot in the historic Senate Caucus Room which has held such things as the Pearl Harbor Hearing, the Army-McCarthy hearing, the midget on Morgan’s knee and many another real-life drama, Washington gets into the act as thousands of extras, drawn from all the levels of capital society, participate.

Amiable Casting Director Bill Barnes, besieged by Senators’ wives, ambassadors’ wives, lawyers, doctors, merchants, chiefs, manages to keep nearly everybody happy by funneling most of them into either the Caucus Room scenes or the society party scene at the home of Gene Tierney’s fictitious Dolly Harrison. This party takes place at “Tregaron,” the one actual thing, of all those charges against you, the author, by curb-stone experts on your novel, that you had in mind when you wrote it. You may not have been thinking of Senator X, Senator Y or President Z, as the experts archly insist but you
were
thinking of “Tregaron.” It gives you real pleasure, therefore, suggest it to the director for a setting, to arrange for him to see it, and to have him agree to use it.

The 24-hour estate, now standing closed and deserted, belongs to the heirs of the late Ambassador Joseph Davies, and a magnificent mansion it is, though unfortunately run-down and shabby in a number of places. Through the magic of Hollywood (otherwise known as Cold Cash), it is restored to some of its original splendor and reawakened for one night. It is, as many Washington socialites will remember for quite a while, quite a night.

Not only do they find themselves on duty from 7 p.m. to 4 in the morning but many of them find themselves out of camera-range and with nothing to do but exactly what they do at Washington parties all year long—sit around and gossip. For some of them, this finally proves too much. Mrs. Gwendolyn Caffritz, for instance, who fancies herself as being a trifle more important to Washington society than she perhaps is as the years go by, presently decides she isn’t getting enough attention, and departs. Some others do the same. Most, however, are good sports and stay around watching the shooting and learning about movies until champagne is finally served in the small house and they are free to leave the graceful mansion and go home.

In Hollywood—where the company moves in October—the situation with regard to extras is somewhat different. There occurs, in fact, a lively scene with the director, finally exploding into genuine anger at the obvious boredom of the professional extras sitting in the galleries of the Senate chamber set, tells them that, “You sit there like sticks and do nothing! In Washington I had thousands of amateurs and they were all interested, they all reacted beautifully, they were cooperative and wonderful. You do nothing, lousy Hollywood extras!” The “lousy Hollywood extras” hiss him vigorously, and for a moment there is a dramatic exchange of glares before the shooting moves on. A little later he turns it to his advantage by remarking with a chuckle, “Now, react, up there in the gallery. You reacted against me ten minutes ago, so react like you did then.” The extras laugh, grudgingly, and give it a try.

There is not, however, in these professionals who are unionized, security-conscious and fiercely jealous of every last inch of their contract rights, quite the same spontaneous and enthusiastic attitude as you have seen on location. Sometimes, they tell you proudly, they make as much as $10,000 to $12,000 a year just for furnishing background; it is obvious that for them it is strictly a business. In two weeks of shooting in the Senate set, there is just one topic of conversation: money. How much is So-and-So getting? Did you hear Such-and-Such has been given one line to speak, which will raise his $100 a day? Hey, it’s one minute past quitting time! Here we go into overtime!

And so on. It is understandable that in a highly competitive town, with “the industry” in the doldrums (only one other picture is being shot at the same time on all the huge Columbia lot), security should be an aim and the extra buck an obsession. But even so, it is possible to see what the director means. It does not make for excessive sparkle on the faces that fill the floor and galleries of the U.S. Senate, Hollywood version.

Such qualifications about personnel, however, cannot detract from the magnificence of the Senate set itself. This is a tribute to the genius of the production designer, Lyle Wheeler, winner of five Academy Awards (his first for
Gone With The Wind
.) With the Senate’s approval and cooperation, he was permitted to take some 200 still photographs and make extensive sketches of the inside of the chamber. Out of these, in seven weeks’ time with the aid of more than 100 technicians and carpenters, he has fashioned a Senate replica realistic that when Washingtonians walk in they think for a moment that they are back home on the Hill. (Former Senator Henry Ashurst, playing the part of a sleepy elderly Senator, remarks one day with a start as he wakes from a real-life doze, “It took me a full half-minute to realize I wasn’t back in the Senate.”)