Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (7 page)

There was some raw kidding between the silver-screen idol and the ultra-heterosexual cowboy extras and crew, but there was also enough hard-nosed tolerance in the corps for all to get on with their jobs. In an enclave like the Flying A in Santa Barbara, everyone knew he or she was part of the same celluloid circus. Kerrigan was powerful enough to promote his twin brother into the position of business manager at the Flying A. And when Kerrigan, the studio’s top gun in front of the camera, had a showdown with Dwan, the top gun behind it, the outcome was clear. Hutchinson, like many a latter-day studio chief, fired Dwan. Dwan ended up in L.A. at Universal. (Before long, so did Wallace Reid—and Kerrigan.)

Just as Fleming’s connections with Dwan, Neilan, and Overbaugh brought him into Santa Barbara moviemaking, they’d soon propel him back to Los Angeles. Under Dwan’s aegis, Neilan became a director at Universal and parlayed that experience and another acting stint (this time at Biograph) into powerful jobs at the Kalem studio in Santa Monica—first as a producer-director and head of his own unit and then as production chief. Neilan hired Overbaugh to head his camera department with Fleming as his assistant. Although the locale had changed, the business hadn’t. Wherever he went, Fleming still found himself most often shooting “horse operas,” again at the rate of one or
two
a week. These dramatic shorts, mainstays of theatrical bills that also included brief comedies and newsreels, remained in demand even after most theaters started scheduling features of increasing length, from forty and fifty minutes up.

Not yet the intricate complexes they’d become over the next two decades, the Los Angeles studios were patches of bungalow offices and bare-bones stages with wooden platforms for flats and muslin or canvas reflectors, deflectors, and diffusers. A single business often ran several studios simultaneously—Kalem already had one studio in Glendale and one in Santa Monica, and in 1914 Neilan established a new site for Kalem in Hollywood at the former Essanay Studios.

In these rough-and-tumble days, Fleming got the broken nose that added to his hard-bitten handsomeness. His daughters believe their father smashed his proboscis in a racing crack-up, but the premier silent-film historian Kevin Brownlow heard that the real culprit was Art Acord. Also a veteran of the Flying A (he replaced Kerrigan when the star went to Universal), Acord was the most rambunctious of the cowboy actors who would rodeo or ride the Wild West circuit in the spring, then ranch in the fall and find picture work in the winter. “World Champion Bulldogger” in 1912, he won renown for his off-camera fistfights with Hoot Gibson. “With both alcohol and fury in his veins, Acord was as spectacular a sight in the barroom as he was on a horse,” writes Brownlow. The fight with Fleming may have erupted when Acord starred in a 1913 two-reeler called
The Claim Jumper,
whose cast featured a future actor-director friend and MGM colleague of Fleming’s, Jack Conway. Brownlow writes that Acord “broke Fleming’s nose, when Fleming cast doubt upon his cowboy origins.” But could Acord’s authenticity ever have been in doubt? More likely, Fleming ridiculed the improbable chirp that emerged from the mouth of the square-jawed Acord, who was destined to speak only four lines in a sound film (a 1930 Gibson,
Trailin’ Trouble
) before committing suicide in Chihuahua, Mexico.

“When something went wrong we could not sing out for a new camera,” wrote Fleming. “We poked our head down in the works and made repairs, while Neilan and the crew stood by without any too much patience.” It was at Kalem’s Hollywood studio that Fleming first branched out into comedy by shooting entries in the slapstick Ham and Bud series starring an endomorphic Mutt and Jeff team—the six-foot Lloyd Hamilton and the four-foot-eleven-inch Bud Duncan—and, sometimes, Neilan himself. “The legend of the great silent-film direc
tor
who dissipates his own success in a welter of fast parties and bootleg liquor has at least some basis in reality: the crippled career of Marshall Neilan.” That’s how the film historian Richard Koszarski summarized Mickey Neilan. The biographer Jack Spears nailed him as “the Hollywood version of the Scott Fitzgerald image in a fabulous period of bad booze and good times. ‘I can stand anything but to be bored,’ he once said.” Hailed as “the youngest Big director in the motion picture industry” in 1918, “Mickey was a genius who didn’t grow up until it was too late,” said that dazzling comedienne, Colleen Moore. Fleming had the luck to know him on the rise. Neilan would soon start making a string of Mary Pickford movies of enduring charm, including
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, The Little Princess, Stella Maris, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M’liss,
and
Daddy-Long-Legs,
as well as
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
with his second wife, Blanche Sweet.

As the studios consolidated and their bosses became true moguls, Neilan refused to blunt his criticism, even if its ethnic slant marked him as an anti-Semite—just as Fleming’s gibes at David O. Selznick would brand him as one decades later. Said Lina Basquette, who acted for Neilan in
Penrod
(1922), “You must remember that lots of people were anti-Semitic in those days. They just didn’t say so the way Mickey Neilan did.” Budd Schulberg, who liked him “a lot,” says Neilan shared some Gentile directors’ “built-in resentments of the Jewish bosses,” who were “not the greatest people; not the greatest
Jews.
It was something these directors expressed more amongst themselves, when they were bitching about things.” Neilan made Louis B. Mayer uneasy with his irreverence and sauciness from the moment the fledgling producer met the already-renowned director on the set of Mayer’s first Hollywood movie,
In Old Kentucky.
In 1924, Mayer’s company and the Metro and Goldwyn Studios merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Mayer celebrated with lengthy staff-wide pep talks. Neilan walked out of one proclaiming, “Oh, shit! I’ve got a picture to make!”

Still, Neilan’s ability to wring the best out of his actors impressed his bosses—and Fleming. “Irishmen like Mickey or Jack Conway or Tay Garnett had a great deal of ham in them,” Basquette recalled. “With them talking you through a scene, and with the music playing in the background, why, they could get a performance out of a turnip.” Neilan would act out the movie’s parts himself for his actors, then lie back during shooting to see if the performers were merging his conceptions with their own broad or subtle talents. Ironically, his last work
in
movies would be as an actor for a very different kind of director, Elia Kazan, in
A Face in the Crowd
(1957). He brought his old silent-comedy chops to the role of a stuffed-shirt senator who needs media coaching from Andy Griffith’s megalomaniac TV personality, Lonesome Rhodes. Griffith recalled, “We were shooting a scene in a duck blind, I believe it was, and he started sinking, his feet started sinking, in the marsh, you know. And he did it like a silent movie. He was waving his arms around saying, ‘I’m sinking,’ but all with his arms. We all got amused at that.” (Kazan cut that scene but retained a reference to how ridiculous the senator looked shooting ducks.)

To Neilan, the signal traits of screen actors were “beauty, personality, charm, temperament, style, and the ability to wear clothes”; the guiding emotional intelligence would belong to the director. Fleming hadn’t been a stage actor, and he did his job differently from Neilan. Like Neilan, he saw the need for a director to convey the essence of a scene and then calmly observe where the performers would go before he built on it. But for Fleming, the process wasn’t a matter of pre-acting the parts or chewing them over in the manner of an art-theater director. He used his immense presence and vitality, his psychological cunning, and his powers of physical suggestion to throw the meaning of the drama into the souls of his actors as unerringly as a crack ventriloquist throws his or her voice into the mouths of sidekicks. Then he let the action take on a life of its own.

Consider the testimony of Gene Reynolds, a child actor who became a notable television director. He collaborated closely with Fleming when the filmmaker was retaking some shots for the credited director, Richard Thorpe, on
The Crowd Roars
(1938). In his one big moment, Reynold’s character learns that his mother has died. Dissatisfied with Reynolds’s performance, Fleming talked him through the scene. Sixty-five years later Reynolds remembered, “The emotion in his voice made me get it.
His
emotion overtook me, so I did it and he got it in one or two takes. You could communicate as an actor with Fleming because he was not afraid of seeming vulnerable. Fleming got you to sense
his
belief in the scene. I could see it touching him, so it touched me.”

In 1915, Dwan catapulted Fleming into the first ranks of filmdom—and a literal Hollywood Babylon—when he brought him into the Triangle Film Corporation. D. W. Griffith, one of the three producers that Triangle was named for (the others were Mack Sennett and
Thomas
Ince), was in California shooting his mad masterpiece
Intolerance.
Brownlow has noted that an entire post-Griffith generation of Hollywood action directors cut their teeth by helping the Master on this project, and Fleming was one of them.
Intolerance
put him at the center of the most elaborate live-action scene in movie history: Griffith’s unbridled imagining of Persia’s ruler, Cyrus, storming Belshazzar’s Babylon. In his
Adventures with D. W. Griffith,
the cameraman Karl Brown says that Griffith “used dozens of assistants, each in charge of this unit or that.” He dressed them all in antique battle regalia and planted them among the extras on Babylon’s celestial walkways or parapets, or among the troops marching to assault it. They had their own battalions: “Another hundred to von Stroheim, another to Woody Van Dyke, more to George Hill, Vic Fleming, and so on.” They’d move their men based on the signals they got from Griffith’s first lieutenant, Monte Blue, either from the report of his revolver or from the waving of a red, green, or yellow flag.

Fleming would go on to film the most famous crane shot in movie history for
Gone With the Wind:
the camera moving back and up to take in the wounded and dying soldiers of the Confederacy. Here he had a firsthand look at its most illustrious precedent: Griffith moving up and in on Babylon as its citizens crowd the streets for the Feast of Belshazzar. Using two elevator-mounted cameras on a moving platform, Griffith was able to hold in focus each member of his cast of thousands. In the red-tinted siege scenes, the flames of Babylon burned as vibrantly as those of Civil War Atlanta would on the Selznick lot more than twenty years later.

Fleming had never been east before Dwan brought him along to shoot at the Triangle studios in New York City. “New York was the mecca to which nearly everyone in the business hoped to go, sooner or later,” Fleming wrote in 1939; “now,” he mused, “the New York people head for Hollywood.” For the young man with the broken nose and daredevil attitude, who had used his native intelligence and ingenuity to hammer and drive his way into a career in a fledgling industry, this was a leap into “fast company.” His breakthrough would come with an actor-producer whom Griffith didn’t understand: Douglas Fairbanks. Fleming’s first filmmaker-star relationship was different from the ones he would have with a slew of child actors like Reynolds or even with Cooper, Gable, and Tracy. When you shot or directed Douglas Fairbanks, the goal was to bottle electricity.

3

The Importance of Shooting Doug

Fairbanks proved to be a crucial influence on Fleming, personally as well as professionally. Fans knew him as “Doug.” He was the epitome of the self-created individual—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby on a jungle gym. He almost never spoke of his roots. With a swarthy complexion emphasized by a constant deep tan and gray-blue eyes sparkling under his receding brown hair, “he often enjoyed telling some people he had American Indian blood, others Italian or Spanish, or whatever amused him at the moment,” wrote Douglas junior to Richard Schickel. (His son said that Douglas’s brother Robert was even darker.)

Fairbanks’s real story might have tarnished the world-beating super-straight image he coined long before his screen debut. His father was a Jewish attorney, Hezekiah Charles Ulman, who helped Ella Marsh settle the estate of her late first husband, John Fairbanks, and win a divorce from her second husband, a hard-drinking Georgian. Then Ulman married Ella and moved her to Denver from New York in search of a lucky mining strike. Already the mother of two sons ( John Fairbanks and Norris Wilcox), Ella gave birth there to Robert (in 1882) and Douglas (in 1883). Frustrated at her new circumstances and Ulman’s frequent absences, she eventually threw the man out and took the last name of her first husband for herself and for her younger sons, too. When Douglas turned fifteen, the English actor Frederick Warde stopped in Denver with his troupe, and the plucky teenager, with his mother’s help, talked his way into becoming head of the spear-carriers with the company back in New York.

After two seasons touring with Warde, Fairbanks hung out at Harvard, discovered gymnastics, spent time in Europe, and spun his wheels in odd white-collar jobs. He started acting again at age eighteen and by twenty-two had become a marquee player on Broadway. He married
above
his actor’s station, to a tycoon’s daughter, Beth Sully. In exchange for her hand he became a soap salesman for one of her father’s companies, but he was soon back onstage, establishing his new persona as a teeth-flashing battler for good—a happy acrobat and laughing champion. He seemed to spring from nowhere and everywhere. He made mysterious public references to experiences at Harvard and abroad, but no reporter could pry much specificity or truth out of him or the two Fairbanks brothers, John and Robert, who became his business partners.

Fleming, who grew to love fine tailoring and workmanship, must have learned something about “class” from Fairbanks—and something about mystique, too. Knowing that people presumed
he
was half-Indian, Fleming did nothing to dissuade them and in fact may have egged them on. But, more important, Fleming knew that he’d helped Fairbanks invent and sustain a screen personality that tapped into the essence of movie magic. Shortly before Fairbanks’s death in Fleming’s year of triumph, 1939, the director made the star’s credo the title of his studio autobiography. “Douglas Fairbanks believed in the theory of action in pictures, a belief I continue to share with him now. In this business
action is the word.
By action alone can we show characterization on the screen.”