Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (122 page)

Wizard of Oz, The
(1939),
11,
51,
98,
163,
172,
228,
243,
282–316
; cast of,
167,
224,
265,
280,
282–3,
286,
287,
291,
294–300
; little people “Munchkins” in,
302,
303–6,
307–9
; musical score of,
285,
287–9,
290,
291–2,
296,
308–12
; use of Technicolor with,
288–9,
294,
314,
326
; TV showings of,
283,
312–13
; VF’s direction of,
3,
5,
8,
9,
151,
282–4,
286–90,
293–303,
307–15,
333,
338,
503,
506

Wolfson, P. J.,
220

Wolf Song,
129,
145–8,
159

Woman of Paris, A,
102

Woman’s Face, A,
361

Woman’s Place,
89

Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The
(Baum),
283,
284,
285,
290,
303–4,
313–14

Wong, Anna May,
234

Wood, Jean,
430

Wood, Sam,
326,
340–1,
345,
348,
349,
350,
354,
361,
374,
429–30,
502,
505

Woods, Frank,
44

Woolf, Edgar Allan,
288

World War I,
48,
93,
119,
258
; armistice signed in,
65
; VF’s service in,
4,
11,
22,
26,
54–74

World War II,
178,
237,
267,
280–1,
307,
349,
360,
409,
429
; D day in,
406,
447
; Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in,
401,
402,
406
; Pacific theater in,
406

Worsley, Wally,
293–4,
378,
380

Wright, Harold Bell,
105

Wright, William,
410

Wright
brothers,
56

Wuthering Heights,
354

Wyeth, N. C.,
213

Wyman, Charles,
56

Wyman, Richard V.,
56

Wyler, William,
274,
354,
402,
404,
443,
453,
487

Wynn, Keenan,
388,
390,
391,
415

Yankee Doodle Dandy,
60

Yeager, Chuck,
262

Yearling, The
(film),
234,
283–4,
340,
357,
375–85
; VF’s departure from,
375,
383–4

Yearling, The
(Rawlings),
284,
356,
357,
375,
376,
383

Young, Frederick,
107

Young, Loretta,
237

Young, Robert,
177

Young, Waldemar,
258

Youngerman, Joseph C.,
141

Young in Heart, The,
376

Young Mr. Lincoln,
225,
227–8

Zanuck, Darryl,
393,
403

Ziegfeld, Florenz,
102,
303

Ziegfeld Girl,
363

Zimbalist, Sam,
197,
396–7,
399–400,
402,
404,
407,
437–8,
443,
499

Zinnemann, Fred,
266

Zola, Emile,
181

Zukor, Adolph,
49

Errata

Page	For	Read
52, line 12	Howard Hawks, who was studying mechanical engi-neering at Cornell.	Howard Hawks, who had done some prop work for Dwan and was studying mechanical engineering at Cornell.
52, line 13	Hawks never gave Fleming credit for starting him in the film business	Hawks never gave Fleming credit for boosting him in the film business
54, line 19	It’s the sort of square Western that the hero of Wild and Woolly would devour	It’s the sort of square Western that the deluded hero of an earlier Fairbanks film, the Wild West parody Wild and Woolly, would devour
75, line 26	(Jerry Lewis would use a similar set for The Ladies Man four decades later, just as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean- Pierre Gorin would in 1972 for Tout va bien .)	(Maurice Tourneur used a similar set the previous year for The Hand of Peril, as Jerry Lewis would in The Ladies Man four decades later and Jean-Luc Godard and Jean- Pierre Gorin would in 1972 for Tout va bien. )
77, line 13	Late in 1918, Sid Deacon finally struck it rich in oil when some wells he had helped locate in Texas began to produce (given the timing, it was likely in Burkburnett, the scene of MGM’s 1940 film Boom Town ) . His initial pay-day was a stunning $100,000.	By late 1918, Sid Deacon had finally struck it rich: his Signal Hill oil royalties began coming in. And some wells he had helped locate in Coleman County, Texas, started to produce, around the time of the Burkburnett, Texas, oil boom that inspired MGM’s 1940 film Boom Town. His biggest payday from his Texas holdings would be a stunning $100,000.
91, line 35	They and a writer named Jack Colton had already formed a Thalberg friendship group nicknamed “the Three Jacks.”	Along with playwright John B. Colton ( Rain, Shanghai Gesture ), they had already formed a Thalberg friendship group nick-
92, line 24	Love thought Mrs. Hawks took that statement literally.	Mrs. Hawks took that statement literally. So did Love.
96, line 10	(The only surviving copies are said to be at Gosfilmofond of Moscow, but repeated inquiries there haven’t turned them up.)	(Gosfilmofond, the Russian state film archive, was said to have the only copies of these movies. But when it gave Call of the Canyon to the Library of Congress in 2010, all that was left of the film was a four minute, nine second fragment containing a vertiginous stagecoach ride and an interior shot of a man and a woman.)
112, line 13	Little Bear Lake	Lake Arrowhead
113, line 28	“big boy from way back”	“Big Boy from Away Back”
133, line 7	He becomes one of the anonymous urban poor and, in a climactic twist, chooses to preserve his reputation (and his family’s) and accept a prison term for his own murder. The Way of All Flesh was an ideal conveyance for Jannings’s adroit masochism. (Unfortunately, even this famous film has been lost.)	He becomes one of the anonymous urban poor. In recently restored fragments of the final sequence, the broken man, years later, watches from a balcony as his son, a violin virtuoso, closes a concert with a lullaby his father used to sing to him. In the final shots, the fallen patriarch spies on his family’s home from the sidewalk on a snowy Yuletide night. He rouses a beat cop’s suspicion, then receives the charity of his son before walking away, unknown and alone. The Way of All Flesh was an ideal conveyance for Jannings’s adroit masochism. (Unfortunately, these climactic minutes are all that survive of this famous film.)
138, line 8	July 24	July 22
192, line 16	Another report	A more fanciful report
342, line 4	(possibly from Pickfair days)	(he dated Lu’s daughter Helene when she was between marriages)
514, line 18	[New text]	When this book was published in its original edition, I wrote Pantheon managing editor Altie Karper that its generous reception was partly the result of “the Pantheon imprimatur—the Pantheon care in production—and the Pantheon care in editing.” The book, in its final stages, came together so quickly I neglected to thank key members of the publishing team in my acknowledgments. Here, at last, is my bone-deep appreciation for all that Altie, Robert Gottlieb’s then-assistant Sarah Rothbard, and production editor Victoria Pearson did to help make the book a success. I am equally thankful to Anne Dean Watkins, Iris Law, and Bailey Johnson of the University Press of Kentucky for shepherding this new edition into print with a similar devotion to clarity, accuracy, and elegance.
516, line 6	9 “he was part Indian”: Interview with John Lee Mahin in McGilligan, Backstory.	9 “he was part Indian”: Todd McCarthy and Joseph McBride, “John Mahin: Team Player,” in McGilligan, Back-story.
520, line 27	[New text]	44 the director of the Metropolitan Opera, Otto Kahn: Otto Kahn was a financial titan, but he was celebrated in high society, café society, and popular culture as a patron of the arts. Cole Porter put him at the start of a song called “Opera Star,” in which a diva attributes her fame as “the opera’s most sensational soprano” to her way of “putting passion in the roles that I portray for Otto Kahn-o.”
526, line 1	77 rolled-up script pages: On-set photos of Fleming from the 1920s to 1947 show him with script pages either put in the left back pocket of his trousers or, more characteristically, stuffed into his left jacket pocket.	77 rolled-up script pages: On-set photos of Fleming from the 1920s to 1947 show him with script pages either put in the left back pocket of his trousers or, more characteristically, stuffed into his left jacket pocket. A print of When the Clouds Roll By that I introduced at Film Forum in March 2010 has an alternate opening-credits sequence. It pictures Fleming in a more formal suit, without the cap or the script pages. The print lovingly remastered for Flicker Alley’s landmark 2008 DVD box of Fairbanks’s early features contains the sequence as I describe it.
534, line 12	150 “Gary Cooper on a horse”: Anthony Mann, director of such classic “adult Westerns” as The Naked Spur said this on the Universal lot, to Philip Kaufman, who was in the process of writing The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid; told to author by Kaufman.	150 “Gary Cooper on a horse”: Anthony Mann, director of such classic “adult Westerns” as The Naked Spur, said this at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival to writer-director Philip Kaufman, who won the Prix de la Nouvelle that year for Goldstein and would later write and direct The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid; told to author by Kaufman.
544, line 10	[New text]	238 He was likely speaking of the bender: Spencer Tracy’s latest biographer, James Curtis, dismisses this account on p. 926 of Spencer Tracy: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). “By evidence of his own daybook,” Curtis writes, “Tracy was completely dry before and during the filming of Captains Courageous. ” Whatever Tracy wrote in his daybook, Edward C. Hartman, Eva Fleming’s grand-nephew, specifically (and repeatedly) set the story in mid-September of 1936. Fleming asking Hartman’s father to pick up a drunk actor is in keeping with the director’s modus operandi. Fleming dealt with matters himself; it was the trait of a native Californian.
561, line 38	[New text]	362 Bergman turns up on a January 28, 1941, cast list: A January 22 deal letter from Selznick’s company to MGM, uncovered by Michael Arick, specifies that Bergman will play Ivy and mentions Tracy and Turner as her co-stars.
569, line 30	425 laying down bets: Mankiewicz told this story to Selden West while she was researching the life of Spencer Tracy. Fleming was not, however, a member of the isolationist group America First.	425 laying down bets: Mankiewicz told this story to Selden West while she was researching the life of Spencer Tracy. Fleming was not, however, a member of the isolationist group America First. Fleming laying down bets in 1940 that Great Britain would tumble before the Germans typified, as I write, “his blunt and often confounding irreverence to the political turmoil of his day.” But Spencer Tracy biographer James Curtis, on p. 417 of Spencer Tracy: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), quotes another story supplied by West as if to prove that Fleming was a Nazi sympathizer. Anne Revere told West that she beat out Flora Robson to play the mother in Fleming’s aborted The Yearling because Robson was British and “Fleming was violently pro-Nazi. This was ’41, we hadn’t entered the war . . . and he was violently opposed to the English and anyone who was interfering with the boys over there. So he wouldn’t have her, he was against all English.” This absurd explanation has since flown through the Internet and wound up on Victor Fleming’s Wikipedia page. (It mars Curtis’s generally painstaking and authoritative book.) Fleming revered Stevenson and Kipling. He worked with British talents throughout his career. He and a British producer, Victor Saville, cast most of the (continued)
569, line 30 (continued)	( speaking parts in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde —the film Fleming shot in early 1941 , at the same time he was preparing The Yearling —with British and British Commonwealth actors. In the ten years of research for this book, none of Fleming’s surviving colleagues, friends, family members, or professional acquaintances recalled him expressing “pro-Nazi” sympathies, “violent” or otherwise. But he was contemptuous of MGM’s corporate culture—and MGM was the studio that made Mrs. Miniver, a piece of pro-British propaganda that Pauline Kael called “generally offensive . . . one of the most scandalously smug of all Academy Award winners.” Revere’s Oscar-winning turn as Velvet Brown’s mother in National Velvet (1944) proved that she was ideal for maternal roles like the one in The Yearling. Fleming was demonstrating his instinct for putting the right actor in the perfect part, not betraying a political bias. Many Americans thought England would fall to Germany. Fleming was one of the few who would take bets on it. Could Revere have misread Fleming’s impertinent brand of banter? Revere’s interview with West took place “circa 1978”; Revere died in 1990.

Other books

William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice by Styron, William

The Cabin (The Cabin Novellas (Book One)) by Stark, Natalie

1014: Brian Boru & the Battle for Ireland by Morgan Llywelyn

Dominating The Hunk Down The Hall by Misty Rose

Just Kidding by Annie Bryant

Madison Johns - Agnes Barton Paranormal 01 - Haunted Hijinks by Madison Johns

Mockingbird Wish Me Luck by Bukowski, Charles

BadBoysSubBlankEditionHTML by Erika Masten

Little Lost Angel by Michael Quinlan

Filled with the Spirit: Understanding God's Power in Your Life by Meyer, Joyce