The Big Screen (7 page)

“The Cinema” starts off on a note close to contempt: “People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies.”

Woolf does not attack the movies. Rather, she notices the very thing about them that may be most profound and lasting: the altered relationship with reality. Speaking of the things seen (essentially documentary phenomena), she notes:

The closest Woolf comes to an example is in mocking the prospect of a movie made from
Anna Karenina
(there would be one in 1927, called 
Love
, with Garbo as Anna): “For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind—her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls and her velvet.”

Love
was an M-G-M film, made under Louis B. Mayer's aegis, and 1927 is the year of
Sunrise
. There's little chance that Mayer or Murnau had read Woolf's essay, but ideas critical of the cinema had been in the air ever since realization of what sway the new medium had with the public. The movies could have endured that worrying without stress. But scandal had been piling on the bandwagon of ill repute. And scandal is as much a part of the movies as popcorn and daydreaming.

As motion pictures were established in America as a factory system of production and a mass medium, so the frontier town of Los Angeles (bracingly far from eastern supervision and controls) observed the unsurprising behavior of attractive young people given money and adulation for their part in sensational scenes of adventure, frolic, and something close to orgy. That may not fit today's estimate of silent cinema, but it catches the thrill of photoplays and shimmering nitrate imagery larger than life in the 1920s. In just a few years the vestiges of Victorian restraint and modesty were thrown aside.

Roscoe Arbuckle was a very successful comedian. For a moment, he was in the class of Chaplin, with a $1-million-a-year contract at Paramount. But he was known as “Fatty,” and that was his persona on-screen. He was overweight; he had a drooping forelock and a naughty grin. Over the Labor Day weekend of 1921, Arbuckle drove up the coast to San Francisco in his brand-new Pierce-Arrow automobile and threw a party at the St. Francis Hotel. It filled three adjoining suites and went on day and night; it was what the press called a wild affair. At the end there was a corpse, Virginia Rappe, a starlet with a bad reputation, the kind of young woman who is often enlisted for celebrity parties. She had been found screaming, claiming assault, and she died in the hospital of a ruptured bladder. Stories spread that she had been raped and murdered, and since it was Fatty's party, manslaughter charges were leveled at him. Some said Rappe had actually accused the comedy star. Had Fatty done a foul thing? Did the facts matter in the furor of scandalous attention?

The suites were trashed, liquor was available, and more than fifty people were involved. Naked women had been seen—or so people seemed to remember. But at the movies, too, even in 1921, people sometimes believed they had seen outrageous things on that screen, things they could not touch but could not stop thinking about. There were three trials, and two split juries, before Arbuckle was acquitted. The third jury added to their verdict the thought that “A grave injustice has been done him.” But the fiancé of the dead woman, the director Henry Lehrman, said, “This is what comes of taking vulgarians from the gutter and giving them enormous salaries and making idols of them. Some people don't know how to get a kick out of life, except in a beastly way.”

It was hard for the public to regard Fatty as innocent when that face was on the front pages, the face that had made him. Paramount had cancelled his contract—there was invariably a morals clause in such deals, an opportunity for the studio to walk away if the star was beastly, or difficult. Arbuckle was never the same again. He had to work as a director under a pseudonym—Will B. Good was suggested—but he was dead by 1933, aged just forty-six.

Fatty's was the most famous scandal, but there were others. In September 1920 the beloved and sentimental star Olive Thomas—once called “the most beautiful girl in the world”—was found dead at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. She seemed to have taken bichloride of mercury, a poison, but it was reported that she had also been using heroin and cocaine. The same year, Griffith's actor Robert Harron (the hero in the modern story from
Intolerance
), shot himself in a New York hotel; it was described as an accident. Then, in February 1922, the director William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his apartment in Westlake, Los Angeles, shot by a .38. Studio agents got there ahead of the police. Love letters were burned and pornographic pictures were discovered. Very soon, the actresses Mabel Normand and Mary Miles Minter, both of them in Taylor's thrall, were implicated. Normand, a national sweetheart, was found on the Taylor premises searching for letters; she said it was “to prevent terms of affection from being misconstrued.” The case has never been solved.

A year later, Normand's chauffeur shot and killed a millionaire who had been pursuing the actress. Her career was wrecked and she was dead by the age of twenty-six.

In March 1922, Wallace Reid, a popular actor and director, was taken to a sanitarium addicted to morphine. He had been given the drug after a car accident. Later he turned to booze—in all this period, the era of Prohibition, alcohol was as natural as the light, but its presence was a frisson for the public. Reid died in 1923.

Hollywood took fright. There was a fear among the business leaders that these scandals would assist the large but vague moral disapproval of the sensationalism in movies. So this is the moment when Will Hays, campaign manager and then postmaster general for Warren Harding, was hired to be the first head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, a post he held until 1945.

Hays couldn't police every love nest in the Hollywood Hills, but he set down a code of propriety and hypocrisy for the pictures. It was the Hays Code that would become the Production Code in 1930. It outlined a lot of subjects that could not be dealt with and sights that could not be shown. What no one admitted was that scandals added to the entertainment value of the picture business and seemed to endorse the suggestiveness of the medium. The process was inseparable from a new press attention on the movie world, the founding of fan magazines through which the studios could promote their properties while offering pin-up pictures as fetishistic objects. Indeed, the public wanted to believe the worst of its idols (because that distant worship goes hand in hand with malice and a need for retribution), and took that hostility as a kind of right. It is the start of a weird and pious energy in the public, delivered through mass media, a love-hatred for the figures in the light. (The huddled masses may have hurt feelings, resentment, and even murder in their hearts.)

In
The Day of the Locust
, his 1939 Los Angeles novel, Nathanael West felt the smoldering anger in the crowd looking at movie life on- and off-screen. These were the masses who had gone west, on the roads or in their spirit, hoping for so much. But the hopes were not met, and they festered in the sun:

Perhaps that sounds more like today. Not many were as pessimistic or outspoken in 1939, and West was killed in a car crash in 1940, the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died (he may have missed a stop sign when he heard of Scott's death on the car radio). Still, in those industry leaders whose own lives had been transformed, there was no missing the dread of envy and worse in all those—like “everyone”—who had been disappointed. So perhaps it was better to have rules to stave off another insurrection.

Will Hays was the model for self-regulation by the industry, and the bosses also needed a shield to settle the risk of separate states taking action against “indecent” films, and as a preventative measure against federal intervention with movie content.

The scandals abated a little after 1921–23, but there were still ugly or mysterious incidents, such as the sudden death of Valentino (1926), the death of director Thomas Ince (1924) on William Randolph Hearst's yacht, or, soon after his body was removed from it, the breakdowns that afflicted Clara Bow in the late 1920s, or the death from narcotics of actress Barbara La Marr in 1926. Gone at twenty-nine, she had been married five times. Americans had not led such lives before—or not had them so widely exposed to the public.

Of course, those personal downfalls, so easily illustrated, helped mask another type of scandal that was habitual in the film business: the misreporting of financial returns, the steady use of business malpractice, including a defiance of antitrust statutes in a trade so new the lawyers were laboring along behind the bosses' cunning. Remember, in the 1920s, when so much money was made, agents hardly existed. The young talent had to deal with the studios on their own, or through parents, husbands, and ill-prepared lawyers.

Ahead of agents, there was another form of life feared and mistrusted by the system: unions. In November 1926 the producers signed the Studio Basic Agreement with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Technicians (known as IATSE), a union that covered laborers, stage hands, carpenters, painters, electricians, and even projectionists, but not the talent credited on movies. This was bad enough, but it threatened the organization of actors, writers, and directors.

No one was more concerned over this than Louis B. Mayer, horrified at the mania for collectivization that had swept his old country. So it was Mr. Mayer who called the dinner party to inaugurate the idea of the Academy. He was also eager to tame the atmosphere of bad behavior that he feared was demeaning the movies. So he saw the Academy as a bland uber-union, a forum where grievances could be aired and settled, and the companies would act as benign arbiters. But he loved the other notion, that an academy should identify excellence. If there could be something like a “Best Picture,” then by implication movies were striving to be good, wholesome, and enriching for the public.

The Academy merely delayed the forming of unions, the Screen Actors Guild (established in 1933) and the Writers Guild (older but only really active from 1933), which would stir up trouble in the 1930s and '40s, so that they were often thought to be “Red.” The Directors Guild came into being in 1936. But the Academy was a set of rose-colored spectacles that substantially fooled the audience. To this day, the hope persists (just) that our movies must be worthy because of that silly statuette, and the show that marks its offering—it was called Oscar, probably, because Margaret Herrick, the first librarian of the Academy, looked at the sketch made by Cedric Gibbons (the top designer at M-G-M) and said it looked like her Uncle Oscar.

The first Oscars were announced on February 18, 1929, to cover films released between August 1927 and July 1928. There were special awards to Chaplin for
The Circus
and to Warner Brothers for
The Jazz Singer
—hardly good but certainly the future. Rochus Gliese on
Sunrise
lost for “Interior Decoration” to William Cameron Menzies for his work on two films. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss won the first cinematography Oscar, for
Sunrise
. Janet Gaynor took the Best Actress Oscar, but for her work on three films:
Sunrise
,
7th Heaven
(1927), and
Street Angel
(1928) (all Fox productions). There was no single Best Picture that first year. Instead, there was one award for Best Production—it went to
Wings
, a Paramount picture, directed by William Wellman, a spectacular account of air combat during the Great War. And an award for “Artistic Quality Production” went to
Sunrise
. In fact, the board of judges had at first voted King Vidor's
The Crowd
(1928) the winner in that category. No matter that
The Crowd
was one of his own studio's films, Louis B. Mayer argued all night with the board that the award should go to
Sunrise
. He got his way. But that was the only year in which the Academy tolerated a split in its soul and acknowledged that art was not business. Thereafter, no such rift was permitted. The Best Picture would be the best picture. So
Sunrise
stands alone for both the crystallization of movie atmosphere and as a gesture to the system's desire for class.

Murnau had not long to live. He tried other films at Fox, without recapturing the status of
Sunrise
. His reputation sank as swiftly as it had risen. He found himself pleading a case now to a William Fox no longer smitten by German genius. For
City Girl
(or
Our Daily Bread
; 1930), Murnau said, “I should like to make a tale about wheat, about the sacredness of bread, about the estrangement of the modern city dwellers and their ignorance about Nature's sources of sustenance.” He never quite realized that Fox dealt in corn.