The Big Screen (14 page)

That's montage for you. You had to be there that night, or ready to swallow self-dramatization. But even at a distance you can see how the fragmented excitement of this autobiography resembles the stepping stones of his script. It was a great night, but Eisenstein would never have it so good again.

“Applause like the crackle of rifle shots” thrilled Eisenstein at the Bolshoi Theatre that opening night of
Potemkin
. (He really was a bit of a military man.) He won prizes and praise and gained entrée to the smart people of the world, celebrities as well as intellectuals. In the next few years, he was invited to Berlin to visit the studios there. He gave lectures. He chatted with George Grosz and Pirandello. In London, he talked to George Bernard Shaw (the dramatist wanted him to make
Man and Superman
) and then lectured at Cambridge. In Paris, he met Einstein, Joyce, and Cocteau. When they visited Moscow he greeted Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and they told him he should come to Hollywood. He was excited and, having signed a vague contract with Paramount sufficient to get entry papers, on May 8, 1930, he, Tisse, and Grigori Aleksandrov set sail for New York on the
Europa
, where the meat was above reproach.

His first films had been endorsed by the Party. He was charged with making a picture for 1927 that would honor the tenth anniversary of the Revolution—that turned out to be
October
, or
Ten Days That Shook the World
, and it is a predictable rendering of insurrection against tyrannous reactionary forces turned into an exercise in montage. But the exercise is more studied now. There is not the Proletkult gang; there is not the fascination with violence. In addition, Eisenstein was ordered to omit any mention of Trotsky and Zinoviev.

There was another film,
The General Line
, which is a study in the old and new methods of agriculture—a subject that never taxed Orson Welles or Billy Wilder, but that patently began to erode Sergei's vigor and nerve. Even then, Stalin himself intervened and ordered that Eisenstein was not to show how the Revolution had disposed of inconvenient and disobedient kulaks. These are both films that try to convey the idea of the masses as the film's heroic force. Alas, the real masses were unmoved, or unexcited. The Party might approve of the film, but the Soviet people gave every indication of being just like the American audience of the late 1920s: They were ready for Jolson and Garbo and Harold Lloyd. They wanted fun and relief. It was mainly in certain recesses of Beverly Hills, the Ivy League, and the Upper West Side that Marxist theory went down well.

Eisenstein by 1930 was in the habit of calling what he did “Intellectual Cinema.” That was the title of some of his lectures (and he was usually able to speak in the language of the city where he was). And so he set out for the last place on earth where it was sensible for a filmmaker to give lectures or use the word
intellectual
. And yet he had fun—that was the inner bubbling that makes Sergei so appealing. So you owe it to him to remember his humorous gaze every time you find yourself reading things like this (from “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” written in 1929). He begins with Marx and Engels on the “dialectic system,” and plunges ahead:

The layout (the visualization) may be more interesting than what is being said. Still, the use of “art” and “correct” in the same sentence could make a Stalin, or others among us, feel for his revolver. There are diagrams and equations in some of the lectures, and they grind on and on. So never forget the lyrical cinematics of
Strike.

On the East Coast of America, Eisenstein got the best of both worlds. In a rapid tour, he lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. He also visited a Paramount sales convention in Atlantic City, to meet the people who would be selling his pictures, and he recalled company executives Jesse Lasky, Sam Katz, and B. P. Schulberg prepping him before he appeared:

There's so much comic accuracy in that montage, you want to see Sergei turned loose with the Marx Brothers (a Paramount property, and yes, his hair did resemble Harpo's). Alas, that teaming didn't happen. Paramount was paying Eisenstein $500 a week (with another $400 to be shared by Tisse and Aleksandrov), and eager for a project to emerge. They spoke of Eisenstein in Hollywood as “a noble project,” and Sergei slyly noted that some Americans used the same phrase to describe the Soviet Revolution. Others were more hostile. Major Frank Pease, president of the Hollywood Technical Directors Institute, denounced Eisenstein's presence in Los Angeles as “more dreadful than an invasion by a thousand commandoes.”

He was a new star in town, renting a house in the Hollywood Hills. For a moment, everyone wanted to see him. He was pals with Mickey Mouse and Rin Tin Tin. He watched Garbo at work and was surprised that she employed no “academic technique,” just inspiration. He played tennis with Charlie Chaplin, who told him he'd recently screened
Potemkin
again—“In five years it hasn't aged a bit,” declared Charlie. The comedian marveled that Eisenstein had made his picture in just three months with only two weeks of editing. Chaplin himself was by then into the five-year plan of taking longer and longer on a picture, until he got it right.

There were many hopes. Eisenstein's first thought was a picture about a city made entirely of glass where everyone could look into anyone's private life. (Shades of our surveilled society, or Facebook.) B. P. Schulberg, the head of production at Paramount, killed that idea when he was told it would cost $1 million to build the city—which would then have no use as a standing set. So Schulberg encouraged another scheme,
Sutter's Gold
, about a pioneer figure in the California gold rush. The studio appreciated gold, but then it was perturbed to discover that Eisenstein saw gold destroying the people who found it; that sounded too close to Marxism.

The third project was the most promising: an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel,
An American Tragedy
. Paramount were intrigued because the novel had caused a stir. They reckoned it contained the seeds of a “boy meets girl” story “without going into ‘side issues.'” That was Eisenstein speaking: “What interested me here was depicting the society and the morals that impelled Clyde [Griffiths, the hero] to do everything he did, and then, in the hullabaloo of the pre-election fever, in the interests of getting the prosecutor reelected, Clyde is broken.”

That had a smell of social criticism, and it was what had prompted Dreiser. The novelist was all in favor of Eisenstein's approach. On the other hand, another Hollywood friend, Doug Fairbanks, recommended Jackie Coogan (the boy in Chaplin's
The Kid
, 1921) to play Clyde. Eisenstein worked on a script with his own cohorts, Grigori Aleksandrov (an assistant since
October
) and Ivor Montagu, an English aristocrat-intellectual, cofounder of the London Film Society in 1925, a famous tennis player on the Hollywood courts (even better at table tennis), probably Sergei's lover, and a man who was also spying on Eisenstein and reporting to the NKVD (Soviet secret police) in Moscow. It was a complicated life—and could have made a good movie.

The boy-meets-girl story of
An American Tragedy
is this: Clyde, a poor man trying to make his way in America, meets Roberta in the factory where they work. They become lovers. She falls pregnant. But then Clyde finds Sondra, a rich girl, who smiles on him and offers a better future. What will he do with Roberta? You may recognize this outline: it is
A Place in the Sun
, the somber 1951 romance with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. More than that, the climactic situation of uneasy lovers in a boat on a lake and a man with two women are familiar from Murnau's
Sunrise
, made only a few years earlier and plainly a film Eisenstein knew.

The script for Eisenstein's version of Dreiser survives, and it suggests the possibility of a film as good as
A Place in the Sun
. Here is a key moment from it, as Roberta drowns “by accident,” yet in fulfillment of Clyde's dread dream:

It's hard to believe we haven't seen that film, the mood and the flow are so arresting. I suspect the eloquence in the writing comes from Montagu—spies can be very ambiguous and talented figures, far more so than
Strike
cares to understand.

The script was read at Paramount. No one was more deeply impressed than the young David O. Selznick, making his way up the Hollywood ladder. Years earlier, as an apprentice at M-G-M, he had been struck by the craftsmanship of
Potemkin
and urged the studio to hire Eisenstein. Why not get every talented person out of the Soviet Union and into Beverly Hills? When Selznick was just fourteen, his father, the pioneer Lewis J. Selznick (born in Lithuania), had sent a cheeky cable to the beleaguered tsar (and, at the same time, to the American press):

So David Selznick had some history on his side. But as he read the Eisenstein script for Dreiser, he had to admit to B. P. Schulberg that it was “positively torturing. When I had finished it, I was so depressed that I wanted to reach for the bourbon bottle. As entertainment, I don't think it has one chance in a hundred.” Schulberg followed his advice, and Eisenstein's contract was terminated.

One chance in a hundred was not said casually. A thing that fascinated Eisenstein in Hollywood was the mania for gambling among industry leaders, ready to bet on anything and everything: “On pictures. On stars. On contracts. On scenarios. On races. On the supposed number of knots the liner will do in a day. And even more on elections—state and national (this gives every election campaign an added thrill.)” Add this: in just a few months' time (March 1931) Governor Fred Balzer of the state of Nevada would announce the legalization of gaming in his state. It is a cunning dilution of politics or social study to suggest that whatever happens is just the luck of the draw, and something to be gambled on. Imagine Eisenstein doing a history of Bugsy Siegel!

So Eisenstein was rejected by Hollywood, the place where Lubitsch had triumphed, where Murnau had made at least one remarkable picture, and where von Stroheim had become a grave-faced joke. Sergei was philosophical: he had had a good time. He sat and talked with B. P. Schulberg's son, Budd, sixteen at the time, a Hollywood prince, headed for Dartmouth College and a trip to the Soviet Union that would turn him into a young Communist, and one day the author of the scathing satirical novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
(1941), and of the screenplay for
On the Waterfront
(1954).

Budd reminded Sergei of B.P.'s desire to make
War and Peace
, but Eisenstein said tactfully that he was weary of Russian subjects. He preferred to do an American picture. He also made it clear to Budd that he was once a painter who had shifted his career to working with light. The kid was impressed, but he had enough of the business in him to conclude, “In retrospect, Eisenstein was one of those whose genius cannot accommodate any social system—as ill-fated for Zukor-Lasky capitalism as for Stalin's communism.”

The adventure was only just started. Eisenstein was five months in Hollywood before the firing, and then he turned to the novelist Upton Sinclair with a project inspired by talks with Diego Rivera. The painter had suggested a picture about Mexico. He had itemized the sights and phenomena of that country, and Eisenstein was excited because he didn't want to go back to the Soviet Union. Rivera guessed that the Mexican film could be done for as little as $25,000. So Eisenstein went to Chaplin, for whom that sum was minor. But Charlie reckoned it was more of a Sinclair venture, for the novelist and Eisenstein had been in contact. An admirer of
Potemkin,
Sinclair had written to Eisenstein years earlier, and the Russian had talked about filming Sinclair's 1917 novel
King Coal
.