Substantially Similar--A Blog on IP Issues, Writing and Film
On Movie Musical Dubbing and Les Miserables
by John Aquino on 01/05/13
This is an update of a previous post.
The new movie based on the Broadway musical Les Miserables which was released last week is going against over 80 years of filmmaking practice in its decision to have the actors sing their songs live on the soundstage and on location. New technology allows them to do it, the filmmakers claim. But there have been reasons not to do this, and the reasons mostly hold.
Dubbing dialogue post-filming is a common practice in movie making, as actors go before microphone and re-record lines that—either because of background noise on location or some other reason—are found not to have come across as clearly as needed once what had been filmed is carefully examined. With the early film musicals, singers performed their songs live on the soundstages. Sound recording was so new that the film studios were happy to have it recorded at all. But over the next decade, the practice of pre-recording musical vocals, pioneered by Douglas Shearer, became the norm.
There were a number of reasons for this. First, there was an economic issue. The voices of even the best singers crack or go flat on occasion. Rather than have the entire company with actors in costume stand and wait, the union clock ticking toward overtime, and, on location, the light fading while the singer did it over and over, it proved to be less expensive to deal with these problems in the sound studio with just the singers and orchestra. And there are days when a singer may simply not be in the best of voice. Rather than have the filmmakers reassemble the company and hope that the singer is in better voice, the vocals have been brought to the best quality possible prior to filming.
Another reason is that singing is sometimes a messy business. In the early days of sound musicals opera singers like Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett showed that, up close, the singer’s face would grimace while pushing out that high note, the neck veins would bulge, and the salvia would spray. Prerecording the vocals allowed the singers to take it easier on camera. And when the singer is both singing and dancing, prerecording allows him or her not to appear breathless.
For non-singers, prerecording gave the filmmakers the opportunity to judge whether the person’s singing would pass muster. As the technology approved, the technicians could piece together an acceptable vocal by going through multiple recordings note by note and selecting the best ones. This was done for Gloria Graham in Oklahoma! (1955) and Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls (1955). If nothing could be done to help the non-singer, a professional singer could be hired to dub the vocals. In doing so, the pro would have the advantage of the non-singers’ recordings to try to mimic the style and inflection in order to sound as much like the other performer as possible.
Sometimes less care was taken with this than others. Lucille Ball’s inability to carry a tune became a running joke in her 1950s TV series I Love Lucy. When she starred in musicals a decade earlier in such films as Too Many Girls (1940) and DuBarry Was a Lady (1942), she was dubbed, and since there was a distinct disadvantage of the dubber sounding too much like Lucy, she didn’t and sang as well as she could. And yet, in 20th Century Fox’s 1956 film version of The King and I, Marni Nixon sounds like Deborah Kerr would sound if she could sing. There is some evidence that the film technicians used some of Kerr’s recordings for the lower notes and Nixon’s for the higher ones, coming close to 50-50 or at least 70-30 between Nixon and Kerr. Eight years later when Nixon dubbed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (1964), however, the mix was said to be 98 percent of Nixon and 2 percent of Hepburn.
Performers in movie musicals were still encouraged to sing along to the pre-recordings on the set so that the throat muscles did move a bit and it looked like they were really singing. I remember the opera singer Rise Stevens, who appeared in such films as Going My Way (1944), saying in an interview that she was advised to sing along an octave lower so as not to tax the voice or cause the throat muscles to not just move but bulge. The non-singers were encouraged to sing along too, often listening to their own recordings. This double-singing didn’t matter because what would be used on film was the pre-recording dubbed in. Some dubbed performers like Rita Hayworth were, however, content to just show up, mouth the singing of others, and did not pre-record.
There have been times prior to Les Miserables in more recent years when some singing was done live. When Rex Harrison recreated the part of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1964), he asked to do it live since most of his numbers involved talk-singing (basically speaking to the music rather than singing) and for him to mouth himself speaking would look artificial. Harrison went on to win the Academy Award for best actor.
A less happy example was Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), in which the singing was recorded live to accommodate non-singers such as Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd and, not surprisingly, caused many delays and problems. Bogdanovich wanted people suddenly bursting into song to appear as natural as possible, much as Woody Allen did in Everyone Say I Love You (1996). Neither film was considered a success.
As for Les Miserables, the technology is such that the filmmakers contend that singing live allows the actors to appear more natural, to look as if they are really singing, because they are. They wanted to capture the spontaneity of the performance. The actors wore ear pieces that fed the sound of a live piano played off-stage. The piano followed the pacing of the actor rather than have the actor following the orchestra, which was added in later. In a 60 Minutes interview, Hugh Jackman, who plays Jean Valjean, applauded the technique and demonstrated how it encouraged him to feel the music and lyrics more.
On seeing the finished film, it's clear that the director Tom Hooper felt he had a choice: drama or singing. He chose drama. If you want to hear "I Dreamed a Dream" sung beautifully, don't listen to Anne Hathaway. Listen to the original cast album, the 25th anniversary video, or Susan Boyle. Hathaway sobs during the song, her voice cracks. She is acting. Other performances are unbalanced. Hugh Jackman, who has musical theatre experience, does appear to be projecting to the back row. His veins push out. His gestures are large. In contrast, Russell Crowe, playing Inspector Javert, although he does not have as big a voice as Jackman, sings more naturally and is mostly on key. While Jackman and others are singing and running down streets, their voices waver and tend to go sharp or flat.
In addition, since the singers are acting their songs, musically, most songs never end--the actors speak the final word of the lyric with emphasis or swallow the word up with emotion. And since the offstage piano is following the singer rather than the singer following a conductor and an orchestra, the composer's designated time and rhythm are for the most part ignored.
The director seems oblivious to the problem and even makes it worse. When Samantha Barks sings "On My Own," which she does very well, Hooper has her do it live on the set in the rain. It's just common sense that you would sing better if you did not have water pouring down your face, or going in your nose and in your ears. As she sits dying next to Marius, Hooper turns on the rain again. When Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter sing the reprise of "Master of the House," they do so while being carried upside down and down the stairs by footmen.
The economic principle was evidently also a factor. Cohen was interviewed on the Today show by Matt Lauer who asked him about Lauer's favorite song, "Master of the House." Cohen said that after weeks of rehearsal his voice was gone, but with the crew waiting they shot him full of steroids so he could croak out the song. He said he hated what he saw in the finished film. The overidding economic issue was that since, unlike most movie musicals that have dialogue and some songs, Les Miserables is entirely sung, prerecording the singing would have meant that the actors would have basically do the whole movie twice.
Having said all this, the choral singing and Eddie Redmayne as Marius are excellent. It's an exciting story and Hooper, while he cannot direct singing, knows how to film spectacle.
But the end result does show the benefit of prerecording, and having the singing done live on the set does appear to be another experiment that did not succeed.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino
On Unfinished Manuscripts
by John Aquino on 12/12/12
Unfinished manuscripts represent both a lure and curse for literary executors and attorneys. For some reason, it reminds me of a quote from Alfred Hitchcock about his struggles to adapt for film a play by James Barrie, Mary Rose, which is about a woman who vanishes and returns decades later not having aged a day while everyone she knew is much older. Hitchcock said that what intrigued him about the play—and what also rendered it undramatic—is that it is framed around the question, if the dead were to return to life, what would we do with them?
Unfinished manuscripts are like that. Forgotten, only to emerge full of promise and hope that can never completely be achieved because the author is, in most cases, dead. Books in search of an author.
Some who have been faced with the decision of what to do with them have simply published the unfinished manuscript, and if that hadn’t been done with Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood there would have been no 1935 Claude Rains film, no Rupert Holmes musical, and no 142 years of efforts to solve the mystery that is unsolvable.
On the other hand, there are those who wish the estate of Ernest Hemingway had not published his unfinished novel The Garden of Eden in 1986, 25 years after Hemingway died, or even Islands in the Stream, published 9 years after his suicide. Works have usually been left unfinished for a reason. But the financial rewards are hard to resist. Both books were even made into movies.
Another approach has been to have someone finish the novel. Raymond Chandler left his eighth Philip Marlowe novel Poodle Springs unfinished when he died in 1959. His estate brought in noted mystery writer Robert B. Parker of the Spencer for Hire series of novels to finish it. When published in 1991, it sold well and it too was made into a movie starring James Caan, although the critical consensus was that it added luster to neither Chandler nor Parker’s reputations. Again, money seems to be a major if not the sole factor in the decisions. Seldom does anyone find an unfinished work that is a great novel that just needs someone to push a few more breaths of air down its lungs to give it life.
I want to focus on two unfinished books that I was briefly connected with. One may have never made it beyond the note-taking stage, the other was started, left unfinished, and may not even exist anymore. But I still have a secret hope that someone will do something with them some day.
The first was to be an autobiography by the actress Jane White. I knew of her primarily from the original cast recording and television version of the 1960 Broadway musical Once Upon a Mattress, in both of which she played the wicked queen Aggravain.
Jane was a light-skinned actress of African-American and European descent. Her father was Walter Francis White, a notable civil-rights leader and national secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955. While at Smith College, her white roommate told the school that unless Jane left Smith her roommate would leave. The school told the roommate that she could go and that Jane’s housing assignment would not be changed. The roommate stayed, and so did Jane. The great actor Paul Robeson helped her get her first part. In addition to Mattress, she starred in a number of classical works.
My wife Deborah met Jane in 1988 when Jane was playing the role of Queen Constance in King John at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Deborah was a consultant on the play, and the two became friends. A few years later, Jane was appearing as Volumnia in Coriolanus at the Shakespeare Theatre, and we arranged to take her to brunch at the Hay Adams.
It was such a treat for me because I had first heard her singing the song "Sensitivity" on the original cast album for Once Upon a Mattress when I was nine. I told her this and how I had taken the part of Merton, the Queen’s aide, and sang along with her on the record—really all Merton does is say, ��Madam, I think” a few times and the queen ignores him and goes on and on about how because she is royal she feels the slightest thing wrong with her bed keeps her awake, which is when she devices a plan to put a pea under a mattress of her son's intended. Jane immediately began to sing the song in the restaurant, I said Merton’s few lines, and she was wonderful, remembering every word 30 years after the show’s premiere. People at other tables applauded, her, of course. It was a wondrous time.
She began to tell us of her plans for an autobiography, not only of her time in the theatre but of her father. She was so full of life, so bigger than life, and so excited about the prospect of telling her story. At one point she said, “What I need is for someone to help me write it.” That was all I, or any young writer, needed to hear. “How about me!”, I said with assurance. Jane stopped chewing, swallowed, and looked at me with the same look that the star cheerleader has when she tells the head of the chess club that she’d like to go out with him but has to wash her hair. What she actually said was even less kind. “Oh, no!” she blurted out, oblivious to whether she was being unkind or not. “I don’t think you’re the right person to tell my life!”
She was right, of course. I was, at the time, the editor-in-chief of a trade magazine, the author of some trade books and a few published short stories. It would have been a major project, dealing with both the theatre and the civil rights movement. I probably would have muffed it. It hurt, though.
We finished the brunch cordially. I wrote her a letter saying, “If you should ever change your mind…” and never heard back. Deborah kept in touch with her for a while.
Jane died in 2011. She never did publish her autobiography. She did tour in an autobiographical cabaret show. She left her papers to Smith College, and the catalog listing suggests she was indeed squirreling away material for that autobiography. Maybe there are plans for a biography. If not, I hope someone does one some day. She was a grand lady.
The other unfinished manuscript was by my friend Malcolm E. Bessom, and it was on jazz. Mack was a music educator and a journalist. He authored two books—Supervising the Successful School Music Program and Teaching Music in Today’s Secondary Schools: A Creative Approach to Secondary Education. Both were very influential in the field. He was editor-in-chief of Music Educators Journal for the Music Educators National Conference, and he was a rock star in music education—witty, funny, warm, and really, really smart. Mack really loved jazz. When we went to music conferences together, he would always disappear and I would find him listening to one of the performances with music that was really swinging. "I knew I'd find you here listening to jazz." "This is dixieland," he corrected me, and I learned there was a difference.
Mack hired me as his managing editor, and most of what I know about magazine publishing I learned from him. I relearned some things over the years, but it started with Mack.
He was so admired and given so much leeway that the executive director of MENC allowed him to use the conference room every day from 1-3. Mack was not to be disturbed. He said he needed the time to just think. Think about possible articles, think about designs for articles. There he would sit, alone, and go through letters he received, brochures for conferences, and just think.
He felt comfortable with me and even invited me into his inner sanctum to bat around title ideas from articles. I remember we were trying to find a title for an article on new right-brain, left-brain research that had supposedly found which part of the brain fostered music appreciation. I was just kidding when I intoned in a radio announcer-like voice, “Who Knows Where Music Lurks in the Mind of Man?”, mimicking the catch-phrase of the radio show The Shadow. Mack said, “That’s it! You got it!” The article won awards for its design, which was inspired by the title.
But soon, everything changed. Mack’s executive director retired, and the new one was appalled when he phoned Mack’s office and was told that he was in the conference room and not to be disturbed. He demanded that Mack be available to him whenever he needed him. Mack immediately resigned.
I tried to talk him out of it, but he said that it was just as well, that he had a book contract for a book on jazz and needed time to write it. That’s how I became an editor before I was 30, taking over for Mack.
I visited Mack at his home a month after he left and asked how the book was going. He said, “I’ve been working on it a month, and I’m two months behind.” He kept procrastinating and stalling. I knew he was writing because he would call me up and read portions of it to me. But sometime I thought that the six or seven sentences he had read to me were all he had written in a month, or two months.
He became ill and died in 1988 at the age of 48, 12 years after I first met him.
I had been editor of the magazine, but I was not a jazz expert. I decided, though, that I would take the initiative about Mack’s book, and if I needed expert help I would get it. I knew that Mack had been estranged from his family because of his life style. But still I contacted his relatives and said that they obviously owned the copyright in his unfinished manuscript. I said I would like to finish it for him without credit. I never heard back. I contacted Mack’s publisher and was told they had never received a single page from Mack, although he had read portions of it to them too on the phone. I asked them to contact the family, who must have had his possessions. The publisher did and never heard back.
The book was never published. Maybe there wasn’t that much to the manuscript. Maybe his family just discarded it. I like to think it still exists and someone will find it some day and publish it.
And yet, as to unfinished manuscripts, two lines related to movies come to mind. In Graham Greene’s original screenplay for The Third Man, after Harry Lime has been buried the second time, the policeman played by Trevor Howard says to Lime’s friend, Holly Martin, in a line that was cut from the finished film, “Better dead.” The second is Hitchcock’s: “If the dead were to return to life, what would we do with them?”
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquinov
You Can’t Copyright an Idea. I Know from Experience
by John Aquino on 11/27/12
Clients will ask me about protecting their “ideas,” specifically by the copyright law. The bread and butter answer is that you cannot copyright an idea. And I’ll give you an example, which happened to me.
The basic reason you cannot copyright is that copyright protects expression. Copyright protection exists the moment an original and creative artistic or literary expression is fixed in a tangible form—on paper, on film, on tape, in stone or on canvas. Until that happens, it’s just an idea in your head.
But even when you get the idea on paper, it’s the expression that is protected, not the idea. When I have taught classes in copyright I have used the example of an historian who discovers through research a Civil War battle which history has forgotten. He publishes a book. Later he hears that a movie is being made, not based on his book, but with a fictitious story set against the background of the battle. He says, “They’re trying to steal my battle!” But it’s not his battle. It is once again history’s battle. Can you imagine trying to keep track of who “owns” what idea?
The example that concerns me is that I was an expert witness and an unpaid consultant for a lawsuit involving the 2000 movie The Perfect Storm. The wife and children of the captain of the boat in which all were lost in the “perfect storm” objected to the portrayal of the captain and sued under right of publicity rather than libel since those allegedly falsely portrayed in the movie were dead and the dead cannot sue for libel. Rights of publicity statutes were designed to protect people against the unauthorized commercial use of their names and likenesses. The state statute attracted the plaintiffs’ lawyers because it allowed the family of a deceased person whose name and likeness was used without authorization to sue.
The defendants argued that the movie was exempted under the right of publicity statute because it was fiction (even though it claimed to be based on fact) and not a commercial use. I argued in a memo to the plaintiffs’ attorneys that the film was not exempted under the statute in that it was “commercial” because of the extensive product placements. In the movie, George Clooney and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio have a discussion about what suntan lotion each is using and name the products. I asserted that a dead man was being used to shill for suntan lotion.
This argument was never argued because the judge dismissed the case. But I did summarize my argument in a chapter in my book Truth and Lives on Film: The Legal Problems in Depicting Real Persons and Events in a Fictional Medium that discussed the Perfect Storm case.
In 2011, I was watching the episode titled “Net Worth” of the TV series The Good Wife and heard the attorneys in the show use the same argument I had suggested in the memo—that the filmmakers were liable under the right of publicity statute because the film in question was not fiction but a commercial use as evidenced by the product placements. In the show, the defendants settled!
To the best of my knowledge, the argument has not been argued in court. I e-mailed the attorneys for the Perfect Storm case, and they were unaware of anyone else using the argument.
I tried to contact the creators of the show, who also wrote the episode, just to ask if they or their researchers had read my book. I never heard back, probably because they thought I was trying to sue them. The problem with my suing them was that they hadn’t used my expression, just my idea.
It’s possible they read my book in their research for the episode. If so, it would have been nice if they had credited me somehow. It’s also possible that someone else read my book and mentioned it to someone else who mentioned it to someone else who mentioned it to the show’s writers. In other words, once my book was published the idea was “out there.”
I recall reading an interview with George Cukor who was asked if his 1942 film The Keeper of the Flame had been influenced by Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane. Both films were about newsmen who try to write a story about a famous man who had just died and find the public and private images of the man don’t match. Both had atmospheric lighting. Cukor said that Kane had not yet been released when he was making Flame, although it was being talked about. He said that something “must have been in the air” that made the films so similar. With my situation, it’s even possible that the writers in the Good Wife just stumbled on the idea independent of me, although it’s more likely that my idea was talked about and became part of “the air.”
And so you can’t copyright an idea. You can sometimes protect it through contract. But that doesn’t happen when you submit something on spec. It usually is possible when you are well known enough to submit a proposal under a confidentiality agreement. The writer Art Buchwald signed a contract with a movie studio and submitted a scenario for a movie about an African prince who comes to America. The producers decided not to use Buchwald’s work, but they made the movie anyway as Coming to America with Eddie Murphy. Buchwald felt they had stolen his idea. He sued, but not for copyright infringement but for breach of the confidentiality agreement in his contract. And he won.
There’s another story about a famous film person getting protection for his idea. In 1946, the filmmaker Orson Welles approached Charlie Chaplin, the great comic film star, writers, and director of The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator and the creator of the "Little Tramp" character, about Chaplin playing the notorious “bluebeard,” who married women and then murdered them. Chaplin did not want to play a serious part, but Welles’ suggestion prompted him to write a comic screenplay about a bluebeard that became his 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux. Chaplin was encouraged by his lawyers to inform Welles what he had done. Welles insisted that the film credits carry the line, “Suggested by an idea by Orson Welles.” In his autobiography, Chaplin said that this was ridiculous since Welles’ suggestion was for a serious film and not what Chaplin later created. But fearing a legal or at least a publicity battle with Welles, Chaplin agreed, and Welles’ credit is in the film.
There are ways to protect your ideas. But if it’s just an idea you can’t do it through copyright.
Copyright 2012 by John T. Aquino. This article is intended for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or a legal opinion.
On Marilyn Monroe, Actress
by John Aquino on 11/11/12
As a young, would-be actor, I never paid much attention to Marilyn Monroe's acting. Believe it or not, when I first saw the film she made with Sir Laurence Olivier, the Prince and the Showgirl, I was watching Olivier, studying his technique and so on.
Now, as the Dorothy Fields' lyric goes, I'm not asbestos. But when I would watch Marilyn Monroe when I was younger, I thought she was just an incredibly beautiful woman, with a magnificently proportioned body and a giggly voice. I don't think I saw much difference between Marilyn and those who came after her and to a large extent imitated her--Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Joi Lansing, Barbara Nichols, and another vastly underappreciated actress, Sherri North, who was positioned as Marilyn's replacement at 20th Century Fox.
I was wrong, of course. The 50th anniversary of her death has brought the occasion for a reassessment. She was an excellent actress and a troubled human being who took acting very seriously. The problem was that it sometimes overwhelmed to the extent that she could not appreciate her talents.
I just read a wonderful anecdote in the new book, Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Benner that supports the argument that she took acting seriously. She was making Some Like It Hot--the 1959 Billy Wilder movie about two jazz musicians who dress up as women and join an all-woman band to hide from mobsters who want to kill them. She had been told that the singer Sugar Kane, the part she was playing, was a smart woman in contrast to the dumb blondes she sometimes played. But Marilyn went to the legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg and said, "If she's so smart, how 'come she can't tell they're not women?" Strasburg thought about it. The obvious answer was that if she saw through their disguises there would be no movie. Other actresses in her place would just have done it. But she needed to know. Strasberg told her, "She is smart, so smart that other women want to stay away from her. And here, for the first time, there are two women who want to be your friends. That's why she doesn't see through their disguises. She's just so happy to have two friends!" That was all Marilyn needed to create a funny and sad portrait of a smart, gifted, and often lonely woman who sometimes drinks too much.
Even in her "dumb blonde" comedies--We're Not Married, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven year Itch, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn is very funny and very sexy. In Blondes, she is a sexy lady who amazes the rich man whose son she wants to marry by showing him she is not as dumb as people think, while her co-star Jane Russell sometimes comes across as a stolid Amazon Queen, lacking only a breastplate, a big breastplate.
Marilyn could dance, she could sing. She sings all of her songs in Blondes except for the operatic patch in "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" that is clearly dubbed and all of them in Let's Make Love, There's No Business Like Show Business, Bus Stop, and Some Like It Hot. She's supposedly dubbed by Gloria Wood in River of No Return, but the only singing that doesn't sound like her is the title song. She also sounds dubbed in the very brief operetta-like singing in The Prince and the Showgirl, but I really don't know. But hey, she had to be able to sing--she performed for the troups in Korea and sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to President Kennedy shortly before she died. And her dancing in Business and Love is pretty good.
I compare her sadly with Rita Hayworth, who also died so tragically and was chewed up by Columbia Pictures the way Marilyn was by 20th Century Fox. She was a superb dancer who held her own with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly but was too often given mediocre material and who, although she had a pleasing singing voice (listen to her in the Carol Burnette Show she did), allowed herself to be dubbed in all of her musicals. She evidently had so little ambition that she did not insist on cutting her own soundtracks so that she could hear them when she was singing on the screen (and they would dub her later) and so appear more natural in singing. She was evidently quite content to simply mime someone else singing.
Marilyn wasn't content. She wanted to be in The Brothers Karamazov and Freud. She challenged herself in Bus Stop and The Misfits.
Marilyn seems to be a team player in her movies, bringing out the best in young Tommy Rettig in River of No Return, and playing off rather than against such fine actors as Olivier, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Barbara Stanwyck, and Robert Mitchum, and comic actors such as Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Tom Ewell, David Wayne, Charles Coburn, Tommy Noonan, and Elliot Reid. The comic, all-girl teamwork with Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in Millionaire is sharp. All of the stories about her being really late on the set and often absent are probably true, but they tend to date from later in her career.
One way to see how solid she was on the screen is to compare her with actrresses who played her. Watching Heather Thomas sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" in the 1987 tv movie Hoover v. The Kennedys: The Second Civil War is absolutely painful. Catherine Hicks in Marilyn: The Untold Story, Mia Sorvino in Norma Jean & Marilyn (1996), and Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn (2011) had some good moments, but they mostly come across as frail compared to the real Marilyn.
When you think of it, there are so few films in which she starred--just 13 if you count her share of We're Not Married as one--and 19 in support. James Dean only starred in three films, but if you count all of his television work and his supporting film roles there's a much fuller record of his oeuvre than hers. And of the 13 films in which she starred, there aren't too many bad ones--even River is more than a guilty pleasure and better than comparable films of the time--and a few are very good--Blondes, Millionaire, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, Misfits, and Seven Year Itch.
If she had been playing baseball like her second husband, she'd have batted over .500, which is a pretty good acting legacy.
Book Manuscript Excerpt: How to Get Your Boss to Respect You
by John Aquino on 11/08/12
This is part of a chapter from a book manuscript of mine that I keep trying to place--I've gotten some nibbles but no swallow--about using anecdotes of film making (not film stories like The Godfather but stories about the makings of films--to illustrate business lessons. Hope you like it.
The Marx Brothers—Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo—made five wild, madcap, and even anarchistic films for Paramount Studios in the early 1930s—The Coconuts, Animal Crackers, Money Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. The last one was so wild that the public did not come, and Paramount did not renew their contract. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was becoming the prestige movie studio. It produced Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight. It had “more stars than there are in heaven,” including Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and John and Lionel Barrymore. Irving Thalberg was the head of production at M-G-M. He could be distant and moody, but those who knew him loved him. (F. Scott Fitzgerald based the protagonist of his last, unfinished novel The Last Tycoon on Thalberg.) Atypically, Thalberg thought that the Marx Brothers—minus the fourth brother, Zeppo--could somehow be wild and mad and yet work within the refined atmosphere of M-G-M. In fact, the dichotomy of the Mark Brothers loose in a refined setting was the premise of their first MGM picture A Night at the Opera. Thalberg's instinct was, as usual, correct. A Night at the Opera was a success, revitalizing the Marx Brothers' careers.
Thalberg had some failings, one of which was that he was always late. He had a meeting scheduled with the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers waited and waited for over an hour. Then they went to the studio commissary and bought some potatoes. When Thalberg finally arrived for the meeting, he found the Marx Brothers sitting on the floor, naked, and roasting the potatoes in his wastepaper basket.
Thalberg was never late for a meeting with the Marx Brothers again.
Do not, repeat, do not strip naked and roast potatoes in your boss’ office—even if he is late or shows some other mark of disrespect toward you. The Mark Brothers were the only ones in the history of the world who could get away with something like this. But the point of the story is that bosses tend to respect people who make it clear that they deserve the boss’ respect. Do it quietly and privately—you’ll notice that the Marx Brothers did not strip naked in the studio commissary but in Thalberg’s office—but find some way to indicate that you have earned the boss’ respect. Tell your boss or find an appropriate way—like the Marx Brothers did—to demonstrate it. If you don’t, then it’s simple—the boss will not respect you. He or she is likely to ignore your input, take you for granted, and not treat you well in your remuneration. Thalberg also knew that the Marx Brothers really respected him. Their rebuke was targeted to a particular trait of his and was not widespread insolence. Respect is a two-way street. Groucho Marx would always claim that Thalberg “saved” him and his brothers. After Thalberg died in 1937, Groucho said later that the fun went out of making movies.
Kirk Douglas tells the story of what happens when an employee does not stand up to the boss. Tom Tryon was a young actor who had started out working for Walt Disney in the late 1950s. On television, he starred in the Disney TV series “Texas John Slaughter” (which had wonderfully concise theme song, “Texas John Slaughter made ‘em do what they oughta/’Cause if they didn’t they died.”) and then in the Disney comedy Moon Pilot, which played in theatres in 1961. From what appeared to be the benign world of Disneyland and its trimmings, Tryon went to work for someone whom many compared to the devil. Otto Preminger was a very demanding Teutonic director who often humiliated his actors. In 1963, Tryon was given the starring role in Preminger's film version of the novel The Cardinal and then was part of an ensemble cast in the director's 1964 World War II epic In Harm's Way. Also in the cast of the last film were Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne. Douglas did not have any scenes with Tryon, but, on the sidelines, he saw the director browbeat the young actor, criticizing his every move. Douglas took Tryon aside and told him to stand up to Preminger, that he was a bully who would back down, that the only thing Preminger could do was fire him and that would delay the film. But, he concludes sadly, “I could never get Tom to do that.”
Douglas claims that when Preminger raised his voice to him he walked over to the director, stood nose to nose, and asked him in a low voice, "Are you talking to me?" Douglas said Preminger never insulted him again. Admittedly, Douglas was in a different position than Tryon. Douglas had been a box office champion since Champion in 1949, had his own production company, and produced his own movies like Spartacus. But he had been a young actor once, and his advice reflected his own experience. Beaten down by Preminger, Tryon simply gave up acting. He became a writer and sold some of his books--like The Other--to Hollywood. But In Harm's Way was his last major film as an actor. Congratulations, Mr. Preminger, on driving a fine, young actor out of the business! For what it's worth, In Harm's Way was Preminger's last successful film, followed by failure after failure.
The actor Don Ameche got into a dispute with his director and handled it in such a way that he earned the director’s respect and that of his entire crew. Ameche had been a major star for Twentieth Century Fox in the 1930s and 1940s—The Story of Alexander Bell (1938), In Old Chicago (1938), Moon Over Miami (1941), Heaven Can Wait (1943)--but he stopped making movies for almost 30 years and instead concentrated on the stage and television. In 1982, the insurance company would not cover Ray Milland for his part as an old millionaire in Trading Places because of his ill health, and so the producers hired Ameche, who was then 75. Filmmaking had changed a lot in 30 years. Trading Places—a comedy about a bet between two old rich men on whether a young stockbroker or a young con man will cope better when they change places—was a young persons’ film. Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy were the leads, John Landis was the director. Landis and Aykroyd were just over 30, and Murphy was 22. The rest of the cast and crew were generally young. Ameche was, however, a gentleman and of a convivial sort and so got along well with everyone.
But the script required Ameche to shout out, toward the end of the movie, a four-letter word that he felt was obscene. Ameche was of the old school, and he was also a devout Roman Catholic. He refused to say the word, but Landis insisted. Landis thought that the incongruity between this dignified man and the obscenity coming out of his mouth would get a laugh.
Ameche finally agreed to say the word, and Landis set up the shot. But just as Landis was about to yell, “Action,” Ameche said to the cast and crew, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.” Landis was thunderstruck. Since when did an actor make a speech to the company? What was he going to say?
Ameche continued, “Our director has asked me to say a word that I have never said in my life. I object to it, but he is our director, and throughout my career I have always followed the direction of my director. But I ask you that we all be very good in this scene so that I only have to say the word once.”
Landis was impressed at Ameche’s integrity and yet his fairness. He later remembered that the cast and crew, who probably said the word themselves a hundred times a day, admired and respected him in that one moment even more than they had before. And, although it was a complicated shot, with action going on behind Ameche and people moving in and out of the frame, everyone did it perfectly the first time, and Ameche only had to say the word once.
Ameche, his career revitalized by his performance in Trading Places, won the best supporting actor Oscar two years later for his role in Cocoon.
Ameche stood up to his boss, earned his and the crew's admiration, and yet did not disrupt the shot or destroy the work of others. A good example.
