The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (437 page)

He returned to San Francisco to make
Chan Is Missing
for $22,000, a whimsical mystery story set in Chinatown. Better by quite a bit was
Dim Sum
(still his best film), a tender, meditative story about family, once again set in San Francisco.

But Wang was already uncertain about where he belonged. (He has been married twice: to the American scenarist Terrel Seltzer and to Hong Kong TV actress Cora Miao.) Can he make films for Asians living in America? Can he make American pictures?
Slam Dance
was his most complete failure. How many times can he count on the providential availability of rich material like Amy Tan’s
The Joy Luck Club?
Things have not worked out well. With a script by Paul Auster,
Smoke
was a modestly entertaining picture about a cross-section of life. But when the same team improvised
Blue in the Face
, afterwards, the results were dismal. Equally,
Chinese Box
, set in the last days of British Hong Kong, turned into a dreary and implausible romance with two uneasy leads—Jeremy Irons and Gong Li.
Anywhere but Here
then reduced the Mona Simpson novel to sweet pap. But nothing was as bad, as clumsy, or as naïve as the alleged eroticism of
The Center of the World
.

Walter Wanger
(Walter Feuchtwanger) (1894–1968), b. San Francisco
Walter Wanger was the gent, known for class, diction, wardrobe, and education. He had graduated from Dartmouth College, and some said he was as keen on Ivy League honorary degrees as he was on Oscars. Hollywood was proud of him, and a little protective. Observing Wanger one day in 1932, Morris Safier (a small-time hustler) remarked: “Mr. Wanger is certainly a very fine gentleman and while I hope I am wrong for his sake, it is my opinion that he has too much class for this gang around here and I doubt very much whether they even understand his English.”

A case can be made that Wanger only qualified for the men’s club in 1951. That was when he shot Jennings Lang in or close to the groin. Lang was an agent, above all the agent to Wanger’s wife, actress Joan Bennett, and the producer had some reason to think that affections were being alienated. The bullet put Wanger in prison for a spell, but it seems to have impressed Ms. Bennett. And prison moved the educated man: he came away inspired to make a picture advocating prison reform. Still, Wanger was one of the boys by then, a trusted con, a guy who could believe in making
Cleopatra
(not quite honorary degree material).

Cleopatra
was a project Wanger had nursed for forty years and that, between 1958 and 1963, he brought laboriously to life. It was his dream; since seeing
A Place in the Sun
, he had imagined Elizabeth Taylor in the lead. Wanger published a hilarious account of
My Life with Cleopatra
, which shows Hollywood’s confusion at the time. No one man could be held to blame for the monstrous swelling of the budget. It was as if, in its death throes, Hollywood wished to demonstrate how it had always been administered by incompetent men. Wanger’s presence eventually proved sacrificial. He was at that time an independent producer who hired himself out to Fox to make the movie. He survived the resignation of director Rouben Mamoulian, the wholesale recasting and rewriting, Taylor’s London illness, the miserable Pinewood weather, even the paparazzi-haunted romance between his Antony and Cleopatra. It was late in a very long day that Fox dismissed him and Darryl Zanuck arrived to cut off all loose ends. Although technically fired, Wanger could not be denied a credit, and thus his name fronts this monument to expensive dullness, a dream rendered null by misapplied resources. And even at the end of his career, the “thoughtful” Wanger seemed short of real cinematic judgment. The one man on
Cleopatra
who might have made it spectacular was Mamoulian. Mankiewicz, by contrast, was a forlorn resort to order and respectability. And yet here is Wanger’s comment on the “difficulties” that Mamoulian posed to the smooth running of the Fox zoo: “Rouben is an Armenian who is very set in his ways but he has great integrity. He cannot tolerate not knowing what is going on, he doesn’t like interference, and he doesn’t like to be ‘pushed’ as Rogell [one of many studio herd-riders] is ‘pushing’ him. He takes great pride in his artistry. Like many directors, he fancies himself an expert on the entire art of cinema. He considers himself a cameraman—and is not always tactful about speaking out.”

Mamoulian’s films amply justify such confidence, and it is proof of Wanger’s limitations that he could not recognize that, even though
My Life with Cleopatra
is littered with references to his own vast experience and achievement. Wanger’s record is good, but hit and miss; and the hits coincide with directors of exceptional talent. Time leaves producers as stranded as Ozymandias.

Wanger worked in the theatre, served in the First World War, and was on Woodrow Wilson’s Peace Mission before, in 1921, he joined Paramount as a purchaser of material and talent. He claimed to have brought Valentino to the studio for
The Sheik
, to have bought the rights to
Beau Geste
, and to have insisted that the studio film Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
(no wonder he liked
A Place in the Sun
).

He took a holiday in the theatre, but returned to Paramount as manager in charge of production and was responsible for, among others,
Applause
(29, Mamoulian’s first film). Between 1929 and 1934, he held executive positions at Columbia and MGM—where he produced a lofty political allegory,
Gabriel Over the White House
(33, Gregory La Cava), and Garbo in
Queen Christina
(34, Mamoulian)—and it was then, with a third period at Paramount, that he began to function consistently as a producer:
The President Vanishes
(35, William Wellman);
Every Night at Eight
(35, Raoul Walsh);
Private Worlds
(35, La Cava), which starred Joan Bennett;
Mary Burns, Fugitive
(35, William K. Howard); and
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
(36, Henry Hathaway).

He left Paramount for United Artists and produced a string of interesting pictures:
You Only Live Once
(37, Fritz Lang);
History Is Made at Night
(37, Frank Borzage);
StandIn
(37, Tay Garnett);
Blockade
(38, William Dieterle), a sententious parable about the Spanish Civil War;
Trade Winds
(38, Garnett);
Algiers
(38, John Cromwell), Hedy Lamarr’s American debut;
Eternally Yours
(39, Garnett);
Stagecoach
(39, John Ford);
Foreign Correspondent
(40, Alfred Hitchcock);
The Long Voyage Home
(40, Ford), that strange rehearsal of deep-focus photography by Gregg Toland; and
Sundown
(41, Hathaway).

In 1941, Wanger and Joan Bennett married. He was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Apparently at his peak, he moved to Universal and to smaller fry:
Squadron
(42, Arthur Lubin) and Maria Montez and Sabu in
Arabian Nights
(42, John Rawlins). With his wife and Fritz Lang he formed Diana Productions, who made
Scarlet Street
(45, Lang) and
Secret Beyond the Door
(48, Lang). But his other films at Universal were more conventional:
Gung Ho!
(43, Ray Enright);
Salome, Where She Danced
(45, Charles Lamont); the excellent
Canyon Passage
(46, Jacques Tourneur);
Smash-Up
(47, Stuart Heisler);
The Lost Moment
(47, Martin Gabel), a misguided and slow rendering of
The Aspern Papers;
and
Tap Roots
(48, George Marshall).

He left Universal in 1948 and freelanced for small companies: the Ingrid Bergman
Joan of Arc
(48, Victor Fleming) for RKO;
Tulsa
(49, Heisler) for Eagle Lion; and
Reign of Terror
(49, Anthony Mann). He produced his wife in
The Reckless Moment
(49, Max Ophuls) for Columbia, and not long afterwards served some three months in prison. When he emerged, he made
Riot in Cell Block 11
(54, Don Siegel), out of social conscience, and
The Adventures of Hajji Baba
(54, Don Weis), out of cell daydreams perhaps.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(56, Siegel) was his last really interesting film. But in 1958 he had great success with
I Want to Live
(58, Robert Wise), which won an Oscar for Susan Hayward—star of
Canyon Passage, Smash-Up, The Lost Moment, Tap Roots
, and
Tulsa
.

After that, he made
Cleopatra
, final cost not much short of $40 million.
Cleopatra
had many handicaps, including Wanger’s faith that immense vulgar spectacle could be harnessed to distinguished psychological case histories—that these gods could
talk
. Whereas, in smaller films—like
Scarlet Street
and
The Reckless Moment
—Wanger had seen the eloquence of fallen angels.

Andy Warhol
(Andrew Warhola) (1928–87), b. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
That blank, friendly inertia Warhol offered the world—somewhere between spiritual lassitude, behavioral acquiescence, curiosity about us, and willing edging toward automaton existence—does not fit the thousand-word introductions to significant moviemakers of our time. He would not see any difference between such essays and the brochures for motorcycles, the rapturous endorsements of cosmetics, or the interminable monologue of any person trying to hold back silence. But Warhol might respond to this book if it were described as the enormous, chronic, and purposeless expression of its author’s obsession. It is the difference between calling the book “A Dictionary of Cinema” or “Ten Thousand Hours in the Dark.”

Warhol’s subject was looking itself, and for anyone reading this book alphabetically it is a happy chance that—near the end—Warhol insists on its theme more uncompromisingly than anyone else. Because the medium is his interest, not his message, it is useful to call Warhol a conceptual filmmaker. Although we are taught to think of his previous, graphic art as “pop” art, that too was conceptual, exactly in the way Duchamp requalified a urinal by signing it, picking it out as the work of an artist, an artwork. Thus Warhol made an epic movie of the Empire State Building and turned several modestly talented associates into superstars by trusting so many long setups to their whim. Warhol’s “museum” art was mundane, commercial, what McLuhan called “ditto devices,” copies that deceived the eye, infinitely reproducible—mass produced, unauthored, glossy but impersonal. The soup cans were to make us redefine art, just as the variation portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were studies in the deforming power of different portraiture processes. The extreme thematic simplicity—if not insolence—of these works should not have obscured their philosophical subtlety.

Exactly the same thing struck me in Warhol’s films. What are the ingredients of his film style? First, there is the meek, childlike pleasure in taking photographs. Warhol saw that the mass of people bought cameras that were foolproof, that exposed automatically, so that images could be recorded under all feasible conditions. The deliberate use of lights and a variable aperture struck him as archaic craftsmanship—like Dürer drawing every sinew in a leg infinitely and tediously—less important than the fact that the camera is a recording instrument, requiring neither skill nor technique, but still capable of making us say, “Yes, that’s Suki, or me.”

Thus, his images are grainy, flatly illumined, sometimes out of focus, and invariably uncomposed. Now, it is not possible to abandon composition by deciding to do without it. That abdication itself constitutes a policy and a style. Warhol and his actual director, Paul Morrissey, chose to be as radical as possible, setting the camera down in one corner and directing it at people in another corner—often crowded there so that the camera could be static. He might leave the camera unattended and eschew those small adjustments in framing that we take for granted and that signal the tidiness of artistry. But no matter how automatic the emphasis, Warhol’s films have the sort of stylistic minimalism and dislike of expressiveness to be found in Ozu, Hawks, Bergman, Dreyer, Rossellini, Godard, and Renoir; the style, I would argue, that is most elevated in cinema. Those directors compose and frame, but only in the way that most novelists try to write lucidly. They shared Warhol’s reluctance to urge meaning into the action through the ingenious placing of the camera. Like him, they tried to serve their actors.

With that, we come to Warhol’s single overriding defense of his method: to let us see that “the people are beautiful.” But as always with a conceptual artist, that statement needs to be considered at several levels: 1. His people contradict Hollywood’s definition of beauty: they are unschooled—they often speak unclearly, and invariably without a script—their “talent” is not defined in terms of the story being told, but remains muddy, personal, and private; they are unkempt, sometimes unwashed, and occasionally visibly flawed and unhealthy. Even Viva, the most conventionally attractive, is scrawny, mannered, and prickly. While Joe, who is good-looking, is obdurately impassive and unable to animate his beauty. So abruptly stars, they have no need to be actors. Presence and the performance of self are enough, as they are, incidentally, with all true stars. Pimpled, inadequate, and inarticulate, they move with the ponderous shyness of gods at play. Warhol’s “superstars” are thus a tacit illustration of the nature of screen presence.
Blue Movie
, an extensive study of love-making between Viva and Louis Waldron, is intimate, funny, reflective, and tender. It bridges the gap between performed and achieved sex and shows that mature people need be no more alarmed by that gap than trapeze artists by the absence of a net.