There are a lot of stories about the intense conflicts between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. An oft-told one says that at a party Dennis Hopper went up to George Cukor, pointed a finger in his face, and said, “We’re gonna bury you.” This sense that the new Hollywood was at war with the old one — that the new could only live if the old died — was a commonplace idea at the time. But it was not a view held by one of the hot new directors of the Sixties, Peter Bogdanovich.
I’ll probably say more about Bogdanovich’s artistic debt to Old Hollywood in another post, but for now: When he came to Hollywood, Bogdanovich made a point of getting to know the people who had made so many of the movies he loved. He compiled a book of interviews with old-time directors — he also did one with old-time actors, but the one with directors is particularly noteworthy.
Of all those interviews, the most fascinating is the very first one, with Allan Dwan, because Dwan was present at the creation. He had played football at Notre Dame, got an engineering degree there, worked on designing lights for early filmmakers in Chicago — no one had thought of going to Los Angeles yet — and gradually drifted into making movies himself. He sold some stories, then became a scenario manager (that is, someone who sought and recommended stories for turning into screenplays) and ultimately a director, making dozens and dozens of films — none of them especially famous. His attitude towards movie-making was workmanlike, and he just accepted the tasks set before him.
(He told Bogdanovich that when directors started taking seventeen weeks to make a picture that he would have made in seventeen days, that brought in the producers to manage everything. After that, no director was safe from studio interference. This reminds me of something Christopher Nolan said in his Desert Island Discs interview a few years ago: that right from the beginning of his career he made a particular point of bringing his movies in ahead of schedule and under budget because that was the only way to keep the studio execs away from his sets.)
Dwan’s stories are wonderful because they show what it was like for Hollywood to be invented. Nobody knew what they were doing. He tells about his days as a writer and scenario manager: he showed up at a shoot in Arizona only to discover that the director had disappeared and the actors were just sitting around. He called his bosses in Chicago to report what had happened, and they told him, “Well, you’re the director now.” He had no idea what a director did — but, with the help of the actors, he directed the movie. This happened in 1911. Dwan kept directing movies until 1961.
He tells another story about getting his car repaired and talking to the mechanic, who turned out to be interested in photography. Dwan hired him as a cameraman because he desperately needed one and in those days they weren’t easy to find. That mechanic-turned-cameraman eventually became a director — his name was Victor Fleming, and one of his pictures was Gone with the Wind. Dwan remembered a prop man who liked to wear fake teeth and prosthetic noses. Dwan asked him, “Why are you doing this? Do you want to be on the other side of the camera?” The guy said, “Well, kind of.” That was Lon Chaney.
He also tells of watching a pickup baseball game near the Paramount lot and seeing a girl — maybe 11 or 12 — who was the best player out there and made sure everybody knew it. She was whacking the ball all over the field and taunting the boys mercilessly. Dwan talked to her; he thought she’d make a great impression in the pictures. Her name was Jane Peters, but eventually a studio changed it to Carole Lombard.
(Lombard, by the way, was quite an athlete: Clark Gable fell in love with her after she thrashed him in a tennis match.)
Dwan had a thousand stories like this. It’s fascinating to see how this industry — this art form — developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised — and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.
And when you put all the improvised and then repreated techniques together, you get the dominant artistic medium — and the dominant form of entertainment — of the 20th century. But nobody could possibly have guessed any of that when Dwan was just getting started. It’s to Bogdanovich’s great credit that he listened to these people. All his interviews with directors are good but the one with Dwan is the most illuminating.