Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (90 page)

26
Thomas Flyers: The same make, although not the same model, that won the 1908 race from New York to Paris.

27
“We’d wait until it rained”: Howe’s anecdote about Fleming and the cowcatcher is contained in the Reminiscences of James Wong Howe (1971) in the Oral History Collection of Columbia University, pp. 17 and 18.

27
Brian J. Leavitt: One of the more colorful figures in early Southern California racing, he sponsored racers and races—including a three-hundred-mile contest against a Stearns in August 1909, with winnings of more than $10,000—and occasionally got behind the wheel himself.

29
“That’s where you get a job”: Behlmer,
Henry Hathaway.

30
Allan Dwan: He continued to direct into the early 1960s. He became a favorite of film historians for his detailed anecdotes of early filmmaking—although many failed to notice that sometimes he was cheerfully putting them on—and a favorite of film critics for finding the energy in low-cost projects like the
High Noon
rip-off
Silver Lode
(1954). He died in 1981, age ninety-six.

31
“A chauffeur in those days”: Harmetz,
Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”

31
Charlotte Burton: She possibly was born earlier than 1893, the year she usually gave, or 1892, the year on her death certificate, since her daugh
ter
was born in 1906. Burton had been married to a man named Wooldridge when she returned to Santa Barbara, where she had family roots. In 1917, she married the cowboy actor William Russell when they both were acting in a serial,
The Diamond from the Sky.
She appeared in fifty-five films and serials until 1920. The marriage ended in divorce, and she is known to have married at least twice after that. As Charlotte Stuart, she died in 1942. Her daughter, Charlotte Burton Coombs, died in 1986, age eighty.

31
“superb figure”:
Moving Picture World,
Nov. 16, 1912.

31
“We developed some sort of engine trouble”: Interview in Bogdanovich,
Who the Devil Made It.
In a 1970 interview with Richard Schickel, Dwan said Fleming had his back to the vehicle and announced, “One of your tappet valves is missing,” without looking up. Dwan, trained as an engineer, would undoubtedly have been impressed.

32
Roy Overbaugh: Fleming credited Overbaugh and his assistant, R. D. Armstrong, with helping get him a job in the developing lab at Flying A, something that may have happened when Armstrong tried his hand at acting in 1913. Fleming moved up to be Overbaugh’s assistant cameraman after that.

33
“I used to drive a race car”: Interview in Schickel,
Men Who Made the Movies.

33
“True, false, or merely exaggerated”: McCarthy,
Howard Hawks.

33
“we used to load”: Victor Fleming, “Directing—Then and Now,”
Lion’s Roar,
July 1944.

35
“There were quite a few incidents”: “In the Days of the Flying A,”
Noticias,
March 17, 1954, reprinted by the Santa Barbara Historical Society, Fall 1976.

35
“They didn’t make any comment”: Bogdanovich,
Who the Devil Made It.

35
“In the ‘middle ages’ ”: Fleming, “Directing—Then and Now.”

36
“a tremendous figure”: Slide,
Silent Players.

36
“Quite a lady himself”: Interview in
Bright Lights
(online), Sept. 1996.

36
raw kidding: Mentioned in Mann,
Behind the Screen.

37
Neilan established a new site:
Moving Picture World,
Dec. 27, 1913.

37
“With both alcohol and fury”: Brownlow,
The War, the West, and the Wilderness.

37
“The legend”: Koszarski,
Evening’s Entertainment.

38
“the Hollywood version”: Spears,
Hollywood.

38
“Mickey was a genius”: Eyman,
Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart.

38
“You must remember”: Ibid.

38
“Oh, shit!”: Samuel Marx,
Mayer and Thalberg.

39
“Irishmen like Mickey”: Eyman,
Mary Pickford, America’s Sweetheart.

39
“beauty, personality, charm”: Marshall Neilan, “Acting for the Screen: The Six Great Essentials,” in
Opportunities in the Motion Picture Industry
(Los Angeles: Photoplay Research Society, 1922).

40
“used dozens of assistants”: Brown,
Adventures with D. W. Griffith.

3 The Importance of Shooting Doug

41
“he often enjoyed”: Fairbanks to Schickel, March 27, 1972, evaluating Schickel’s article on Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in the December 1971
American Heritage.
Part of the Booton Herndon Papers, University of Virginia.

42
presumed
he
was half-Indian: Lu Fleming’s daughter from her first marriage, Helene Rosson Bowman said, “I think he probably was,” to David Stenn, but neither of Vic and Lu’s daughters recalls ever being told that he was, or that people said he was. Neither had Fleming’s niece Yvonne Blocksom, born in 1915. Those who did included Allan Dwan (who described Fleming as “half-Indian” to Fairbanks’s biographer Booton Herndon), David O. Selznick (who mentioned Fleming’s “American Indian” quality to Charles Samuels), and Ingrid Bergman’s publicist, Joseph Steele (who wrote of Fleming as “part Cherokee”).

42
“has definitely abandoned”:
Variety,
Sept. 24, 1915.

42
“He went out West”: Fairbanks to Schickel, March 27, 1972.

42
“The director is much overestimated”:
New York Telegraph,
Nov. 24, 1918.

43
“Once even I found myself”: Kael,
When the Lights Go Down.

43
“shattered, messy childhoods”: Ibid.

45
“this nocturnal scene”: Bingham,
Great Lover.

45
“My tits!”: Carey,
Anita Loos.

45
“bears the taint”:
The New York Times,
June 11, 1916.

45
“Griffith was not pleased”: The traditional quotation can be found most recently in Basinger,
Silent Stars;
the original text is in
Photoplay,
Sept. 1929.

46
“has already proven himself”:
Variety,
Sept. 24, 1915.

46
“The fact of the matter is”: Fairbanks to Schickel, March 27, 1972.

46
“You had to keep working”:
Bright Lights
(online), Sept. 1996.

47
“We all did”: Bogdanovich,
Who the Devil Made It.

47
“very actorish, petulant”: Richard Schickel, “Good Years, Bad Years,”
Harper’s,
Oct. 1970.

47
“If something went wrong”: Undated notes, interview with Booton Herndon, Herndon Papers.

47
“Douglas Fairbanks was a man”: Harriman,
Vicious Circle.

47
“It was no secret”: Slide,
Kindergarten of the Movies.

48
“basically an actor”: Interview with Booton Herndon, March 10, 1975, Herndon Papers.

49
“called for a degree”: Jacobs,
Rise of the American Film.

49
“was the abnormal norm”: Cooke,
Douglas Fairbanks.

50
“Gee whiz!”: Jacobs,
Rise of the American Film.

50
“whole damn crew”: Herndon,
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

50
Bessie Love: She never indicated when she and Fleming were a couple; most likely they became romantically involved during their time with Fairbanks. She is now best known for
The Broadway Melody
(1929). After marrying and divorcing William Hawks, she moved to London in the 1930s, where she occasionally appeared in plays. In 1972, she was Aunt Pittypat in a short-lived London musical production of
Gone With the Wind.
Her last film role was a cameo in
Ragtime
in 1981. She died in 1986, age eighty-seven.

50
avert the boredom: Fairbanks’s and Fleming’s daredevil offscreen jokes were celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. David Lean referred to them in his final film,
A Passage to India
(1984): Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee) walks on the outside of a railroad car as it crosses a dizzying viaduct and proclaims, “I am Douglas Fairbanks!”

50
“to see which of them”: Love,
From Hollywood with Love.

50
they’d shout “Boo!”: Dan Thomas column, May 10, 1927.

51
“Vic Fleming [was] taller”: Dwan to Herndon, March 10, 1975. Herndon Papers.

51
“a suitcase of valuable bonds”: Harmetz,
Making of “The Wizard of Oz.”

51
Fleming once asked Fairbanks: The version in Oscar Levant’s
Memoirs of an Amnesiac
is what Milestone told him on his TV program, though in his book Levant credited Henry Hathaway. In 1948, the Hollywood columnist Erskine Pearson wrote another variation on that anecdote, calling it “a wonderful story” told by James Stewart. That version involved Fleming, a stuntman, and a flight of steps, and a slightly different punch line: “See,” Fleming said, “that’s exactly what I want. Now do it that way. And call an ambulance for me. I think I broke my leg.”

51
The Good Bad Man, The Half-Breed:
Cinematographer Glenn MacWilliams
told
John C. Tibbetts in
American Classic Screen,
January–February 1979, “By 1917, Doug was nuts on cowboy stuff. His idea of life was to make western pictures. He wanted to go on location among the Indians. . . .

“In those days we had to shoot with available lights and diffusers. There would be many a day when we couldn’t shoot and Doug would organize a footrace. One day he had a marathon, up Sunset, up Vermont to Hollywood Boulevard back to the studio. Doug would put up five dollars and get everybody in on it. . . . He was very energetic, very nervous, but it wasn’t really nervous energy. It was just that he enjoyed everything and he loved making pictures. When he was making westerns, he was in his glory. He was like a little boy playing cowboy. A lot of people don’t believe this, but the whole time I was with him, he never had a stunt man. He kept real cowboys around him all the time. And he never sat still. He was always rehearsing, building up stunts, practicing, working. He’d figure out a stunt and we’d build the whole picture around it.”

51
an impossibly wide ravine: The effect is described in Herndon,
Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

51
Dwan remembered: Booton Herndon often was frustrated by the memories of old-time moviemakers who had no intention of telling any unembellished stories. On September 5, 1973, he wrote a friend, Jim Card:

Allan Dwan told me at great length how he attached a steel rod to a sapling in this picture [
The Half-Breed
] so that Fairbanks could use it as a catapult to throw himself up a big redwood tree. Dick Talmadge said that even with the steel rod, it just wouldn’t work. It was done by reversing the film. I went back to Dwan and he said yes, this stunt was frequently done by reversing the film, and also by using a piano wire, but on this occasion, they just wanted to do it the easy way and did so using the steel rod. Who am I supposed to believe?

Herndon just needed to run that scene backward. Herndon Papers.

52
“the names of actresses”:
Motion Picture News,
undated copy.

52
Howard Hawks: His biographer, Todd McCarthy, describes his first job in motion pictures this way:

The most Hawks ever said about his motivation for entering the film business was, “I just wanted a job during summer vaca
tion.
Somebody I knew at Paramount got me a job in the prop room.” He further explained that an emergency had arisen on the Fairbanks picture—the film needed a modern set built in a hurry at a time when the studio’s sole official art director was away. Hawks, with his limited architectural training, volunteered his services—or perhaps was recommended by Fleming. Fairbanks liked the work as well as the young man who did it, which led to further employment at the studio.

4 In Manhattan for the Great War

55
“with what appeared to be the rest of Hollywood”: Fleming,
Action.