Thursday, March 7, 2019

Writers in Hollywood: 1915-1951 (1990)

by Ian Hamilton

I used to be very disappointed by older history books. The sources and quotes used in them always seemed a bit random and caused much of the work to seem slightly unfocused. But when I eventually began writing my own histories I came to have an overwhelming admiration for people writing in the pre-Internet days. Of course their sources were going to seem fairly random because they had to take what they could get, be it tangential or even slightly off topic, and still had to tie everything together into a unified whole. Writers in Hollywood, by Ian Hamilton, certainly fits that mold, but it is still one of the seminal works on screenwriting in Hollywood. Hamilton begins his work with an interesting introduction, dealing with his earnest desire to get a copy of the screenplay to The Sweet Smell of Success. To his dismay, his cinéaste friends ridiculed him for not focusing on directors the way they did. As these things mostly do, it was his intense interest in screenwriting and the paucity of information available that made him take on the project. The epigram that opens the book is wonderfully ironic. It is a lengthy, descriptive passage from James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose’s screenplay for King Kong, going into great detail about the colors seen on Skull Island, all of this for a black and white film.

Another irony is obviously the role of the screenwriter in the days of silent cinema. At first it was simply a matter of coming up with scenarios and ideas of what to shoot, but eventually that developed--as did the literacy of films--into the writing of title cards. The two big names in the early days were C. Gardiner Sullivan and Anita Loos. Hamilton also touches on the failed attempt of Samuel Goldwyn to attract major writers to Hollywood, especially after the ones who were eventually tempted saw their works churned up by the collaborative efforts of the various departments and spit out onto the screen in a form nearly unrecognizable to the author. With the brevity and wit needed for title cards, Hollywood eventually turned to New York, with Herman Mankiewicz and his friend from Chicago, Ben Hecht, making the biggest names for themselves. F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last of the great writers to come to Hollywood during the silent era. In his mind he was doing them a favor, but he found the slog every bit as tough as his predecessors, who realized that it was Hollywood doing them the favor by hiring them. It wasn’t until the transition to sound that the studios felt underequipped in the writing area and began purchasing novels, stories, and Broadway plays, “dialogue by the ton” in Hamilton’s words. But sheer quantity did not equal quality and Joseph M. Schenck quipped at the time, “the trouble with the whole industry is that it talked before it thought.”

Of course the stock market crash drove many writers out to California as well, the snobbish ones because they had lost their fortunes and the rest because the money was too good not to try for it. Crime writer W.R. Burnett made a name for himself in films like Little Caesar and High Sierra, while P.G. Wodehouse was more than happy to let the newspapers know just how little he actually did to earn his one-hundred-thousand dollar a year salary from MGM. Hamilton describes the petulance with which Theodore Dreiser took on Hollywood over An American Tragedy . . . and predictably lost, as well as the stultifying effect of censorship on writers who had never before had to consider what religious groups or middle America thought of their work. The reality was, however, that there wasn’t much censoring going on at the beginning of the thirties. It wasn’t until 1935, and the Legion of Decency, that Hollywood was forced to clamp down, and there were only a few writers, like Mae West, who were unable to make the transition. This also necessitated a new kind of writing, one at which Ben Hecht was particularly adept at: script doctoring. With some of the high-priced writers the studios had under contract, they didn’t need them to concoct original stories for their screenplays. They had their lesser lights do that, and then paid the good writers a much smaller fee to fix it up and give it a more polished overhaul. And for some, like Hecht, they found that the more they gave up screen credit the more work they could get.

It wasn’t until the mid-thirties, with the Depression in full swing, that writers, like other members of the abused Hollywood underclass, began to unionize. The Screen Writer’s Guild was formed, and one of their battles was over who was given screen credit for writing. At the time, not unlike rock and roll records of the fifties, the studios could give screenwriting credits on films to pretty much whoever they wished. The Guild was almost destroyed when many of its members wanted to merge with New York playwrights, but the government stepped in and the SWG was saved. Naturally, however, this pre-war show of strength in numbers was spurred on by many left-leaning writers who could see the power of communist principals in action as the Guild began to thrive. Writers tended to be a left-leaning group anyway, and their eagerness to support the Soviet Union as American allies during the war would come back to haunt many of them in the immediate post-war period as communist hysteria took hold. But that would not be for another decade. In the meantime, the writer in Hollywood had to contend with one very omnipresent fact that was probably articulated best by Aldous Huxley:

          A good subject to talk about, cinematography. But is it a good medium to work in? I say no,
          because you can’t do it by yourself. Without co-operation your ideas can’t become actual. You
          are at their mercy. I shall stick to an art in which I can do all the work myself, sitting alone,
          without having to entrust my soul to a crowd of swindlers, vulgarians and mountebanks.

But Huxley’s foray into screenwriting could at least be considered a success, where many others weren’t. For one thing, Huxley needed the money, and once teamed with a studio veteran, was able to produce within the Hollywood system with a firm understanding that his work there would never be his own. F. Scott Fitzgerald, however, was never able to make that transition. “Huxley didn’t mind this; Fitzgerald minded it intensely, believing as he did that being left alone, he would have something splendidly original to offer.” But Fitzgerald was even worse off financially than Huxley, and yet he continued to believe that Hollywood should reward him for deigning to work there. “From MGM’s point of view, he wasn’t good enough . . . Scott just didn’t have the ‘the knack,’” while at the same time, “Fitzgerald himself believed that he was worth more than he was being paid.” Nathaniel West, on the other hand, was under absolutely no illusions about the place of the writer at the studios, but with no literary success behind him he found it even more difficult to find work, and did most of his writing on B-pictures as a result. And that was just fine with him--a job was a job. In fact, in his final year he made far more money writing original treatments, essentially fleshed-out story ideas, than working on actual screenplays. But in December of 1940 both Fitzgerald and West died, within a day of each other, symbolizing that the kind of writing in vogue during the depression was on its way out. Hollywood, like the rest of the country, was steeling itself for an inevitable sequel to the European war that had closed just over two decades earlier.

Dudley Nichols was one of the new breed of writers. Nichols specialized in that, now hoariest of all Hollywood clichés: the transfiguration. The idea was not new even then, a perfect example being the ending of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities--which had been made into a popular film by MGM with Ronald Coleman back in 1935. With war on the horizon, and especially during the war, the idea of the noble, redemptive sacrifice nearly guaranteed success at the box office. Nichols’ greatest achievement, however, was the twelve films he made with John Ford, including Stagecoach and The Informer. Nunnally Johnson was another of these writers but his specialty was literary adaptation, especially the works of John Steinbeck who had a short stint in Hollywood as well. Johnson began his career as a newspaper columnist and short story writer after the First World War, but when the markets for his stories began drying up he made the move into films. Johnson was a humorist and was assigned a number of B-films films at Paramount in the early thirties, one of which, Mama Loves Papa, was a big success, and when Darryl Zanuck made the move from Warner Brothers to form 20th Century he decided to hire Johnson away from Paramount. It was a great move for Johnson because Zanuck loved his work. Best of all, Zanuck’s friendship assured that he, unlike most of his other colleagues in the business, rarely had to wrangle with directors. “Under Zanuck’s patronage, Johnson progressed to associate producer, then producer, and in the end he was in a position to produce, direct, and write films of his choice.”

William Faulkner, of course, was one of the biggest names in literature to work in Hollywood, and the stories of his time there are legend. Every studio he worked for claimed some version of the author’s desire to work from home rather than an office on the lot. The studio head would agree, and then learn a few weeks later that Faulkner was indeed at home . . . in Oxford, Mississippi. Stories of drunkenness, disappearances, collecting checks without working, and engaging in an affair also collected around the author during his screenwriting years. Howard Hawks befriended him, and hired him for a number of films, few of which used his material at all. “But there had been binges and disappearances and in twelve months he had notched up merely one half-credit,” on Today We Live, a script made from his own short story, “Turn About.” He left Hollywood then, essentially a failure. But like so many other literary screenwriters, his perilous financial situation drove him back to the movies a few years later. What he never counted on was mismanagement by an inexperienced agent and he found himself tied for seven years to Warners for a fraction of what he had been making before. Beggars, however, as the saying goes, and Faulkner threw himself into his work for the remainder of the war, mostly writing for Hawks, and most significantly on To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, but being asked to lend a hand on a number of other studio projects as well. Faulkner never completed his contract, severing with Warners and working on only one more picture after the war . . . again, for Hawks.

By the time the United States had been catapulted into World War Two at the beginning of December 1941, Hollywood writers had already been hard at work on anti-Nazi and pro-Allied pictures at Warner Brothers, from the literal, like Confessions of a Nazi Spy, to the allegorical, like The Sea Hawk. Even Charlie Chaplin had climbed on the bandwagon with The Great Dictator. But while these films roused anti-German sentiment and American patriotism, they weren’t necessarily good box office. Once the Nazi’s took over Western Europe, however, they banned American films altogether, and that put an entirely new spin on things.

          With no customers to lose, a number of movies that had been kept on hold during the first half
          of 1940 began to trickle out. MGM made its first anti-Nazi statement in The Mortal Storm (re-
          leased in June 1940), 20th Century-Fox weighed in with Four Sons (June 1940), and Paramount
          contributed Arise, My Love (November 1940). And it was this trickle that Culminated in Gary
          Cooper’s momentous change of heart in Sergeant York (September 1941).

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s White House set up Lowell Mellet to coordinate a propaganda effort that could now proceed without hindrance. What Mellet and his colleagues at the Bureau of Motion Pictures didn’t expect--and were horrified by--was the vehement racism presented in so many of these films, especially when it came to the Japanese. Mellet’s bureau urged the studios to produce more positive message films like Mrs. Miniver and Since You Went Away instead. Once the BMP began demanding script approval, however, and even went so far as to rewrite screenplays, the studios had enough. “The producers could live with the Hayes Office . . . [but it would never] tell the studios that they ought to make better pictures. The BMP did, and that is why it had to be shut down.”

Of course any book on writers in Hollywood is eventually going to come to the Communist witch-hunts, but what most people don’t know is that the process began well before the war was over. “By 1943, over two hundred screenwriters were serving in the armed forces.” But for those who stayed, it was because many of them didn’t have a choice. “Each of them was the subject of an FBI dossier stamped ‘PAF’—Premature Anti-Fascist. Later on, the Hollywood Nineteen would have one thing in common—none of them served in the armed forces during the war.” And yet for many of the leftist writers during the war, they discovered their own political inclinations suddenly lining up with the prevailing view from Washington. The great shame of the BMP--and Hollywood itself--as well as the cruel irony of the whole sad chapter in American history, is the propaganda pieces about Russia that Mellet’s bureau urged the studios to film. “The most repugnant distortion of the facts” came in Mission to Moscow, a whitewash of the Stalinist purges. “There were other pro-Russian films in 1943, though none so solemn and shameless as Mission to Moscow.” Not only were leftists writers trapped in Hollywood, unable to participate in the war effort by joining the armed forces, they were led to believe that the exposing of their sympathies by being assigned these films was in the country’s best interest. But to then have people like Richard Nixon come along after the war and attempt to portray them as some sort of artistic fifth column, simply as a way to advance their own political careers, and whip up fear of Communist infiltration in the country just as the Nazis had done--and with even less justification--it demonstrates just how closely the political right in this country was, and continues to be, aligned with fascist ideology.

Easily the best summation of the whole sordid period comes from actress Patricia Neal, even though she mistakenly uses Senator Joseph McCarthy as the representative for HUAC, though he was part of a Senate committee rather than Martin Dies’ House committee. And while her comments do not appear in Hamilton’s book, they do bear repeating.

          I thought it was just a revolting, hideous, disgusting thing that happened to Hollywood in those
          days. McCarthy was a revolting man, he and the two men with him. Peoples’ careers were just
          destroyed. It was really a horrible thing he did. I don’t think Communism was a big, serious
          threat; I really don’t. People love to be radical and that sort of thing, but Communism didn’t
          have a chance in this country, and I just think it was disgusting what McCarthy did to people’s
          careers, their lives, their everything . . .

Despite whatever sympathies the writers and other Hollywood employees may have had at the time, there was never a systematic pro-Communist agenda at work among them . . . ever. For the most part, these people were simply doing what they were told to do as part of their jobs. And any qualms they may have had about repercussions after the war were surely assuaged by the general tenor of the propaganda coming from the rest of the country’s media as well. “With Life magazine naming Stalin as its “Man of the Year” for 1943 and describing the Russians as ‘one hell of a people . . . [they] look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans’ it is perhaps surprising that leftists screenwriters were so restrained.” For those writers who were determined to use their films as a vehicle for political change, however, “even in a period of license, the screenwriter could do little more than slip in the odd line here or there, or at best attempt a civilizing scene or two.”

Hamilton uses Dalton Trumbo as a case study for the way all of this played out during and after the war, almost in spite of the writers themselves. “In 1938, the near-pacifist Trumbo wrote a novel called Johnny Got His Gun,” which tried to realistically depict the devastation of modern warfare on helpless populations. During the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, “Trumbo was at first labeled as a faithful [communist] party-liner. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia, he was relabeled--by the right--as a hero of isolationism.” The U.S. Army censored the book, and at the same time he became a right-wing hero to all kinds of racists and anti-Semites. But the book was not strictly pacifist, and did support the idea of “a good and worthy war [and] he himself was now pro-war . . . By 1942 Dalton Trumbo was acknowledged to be one of Hollywood’s most sonorous word warriors.” In 1943 a national writers’ conference was held at UCLA to outline “the social obligations of the mass media during and after war-time.” It seems innocuous enough, and just the sort of thing that would please the Legion of Decency and other reactionary groups. But instead, the New York Times reported that the writers had, “in effect served notice on the entertainment industry that they are about to take over Hollywood.” As the creative position at the studios with perhaps the least amount of power or pull, the idea that writers were going to “take over” anything was laughable. But from there it was just a short step to Martin Dies’ lackey Jack Tenney declaring that the conference was being “promoted and controlled by the communists.” In response, another group was formed a short time later, full of right-wing zealots in Hollywood and calling themselves the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. And before the war was even over, the slippery slope began to tilt from under the feet of writers--Dalton Trumbo among them--who were being set up as scapegoats for Communist hate groups, chief among them the legislative branch of the U.S. government.

Another important development during the war is that the Screen Writers’ Guild was finally given the sole responsibility of determining screen credit for writers, complete with an arbitration panel to sort out disputes. Hamilton then goes on to detail two of the most highly contentious battles, over the films Citizen Kane and Casablanca. On Kane the fight was between Orson Welles, who had been given virtually carte blanche by RKO, and was thus resented by nearly every filmmaker in town, and Herman Mankiewicz, each of whom claimed to be the author of the screenplay with only marginal assistance from the other. The whole thing would seem to be a moot point, as they wound up sharing screenwriting credit on the picture, but the film eventually became a masterpiece and the more accolades it received the more each of the participants wanted all the credit for themselves. The fact that the only Oscar the film was awarded was for the screenplay only made matters worse. Far more murky--at least in 1990 when the book was published--was the pedigree of the Casablanca screenplay at Warners. In a terrific line, Hamilton characterizes the screenplay as an “anthology . . . not so much a story as a stringing together of great moments to remember.” Julius and Philip Epstein, twin brothers on the writing staff at Warners, were originally given the assignment by producer Hal Wallis, then Howard Koch was brought in when the Epsteins went to Washington for a few weeks to work on Frank Capra’s Why We Fight. Later on Casey Robinson was said to have contributed much of the romance that was missing from the earlier drafts. Though none of the screenwriters denies participation by the others, they all tend to diminish the extent of that participation in the final product.

Hamilton opens his next chapter by delving into a different kind of writing style that emerged during and after the war: collaboration. Of course writers in Hollywood had always been forced to work with other writers in the studio system, but some writing partnerships in this period functioned almost like songwriting teams. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett are one example of just such a duo, credited with scripting the Oscar-winning The Lost Weekend among others. Another team was Albert Hackett and his wife France, who penned the series of Thin Man mysteries for MGM. Since both of those film plots revolve--at least partially--around drinking, Hamilton uses the occasion to segue into the career of another heavy-drinking “Hollywood wreck,” Raymond Chandler. When Brackett refused to work on James M. Caine’s Double Indemnity, Wilder was forced to co-write with Chandler. Despite their “hate at first sight,” as Wilder called it, the two managed to turn out an impressive screenplay, Wilder because he was also the director of the film, Chandler, no surprise, because he needed the money. Wilder’s rise from writer to director was presaged by Preston Sturges, who had done something similar during the Depression, and Hamilton details the specifics Sturges’s work on Sullivan’s Travels as an example of his popular style.

Hamilton then returns to the 1943 writers’ conference, but this time contrasting their urge to edify the public, especially necessary they believed because the soldiers returning from the front would have had their eyes opened to the real world, with the hard facts that the function of the movies has always been to entertain--even more important to soldiers who had seen enough reality to last a lifetime. His example is Daryl Zanuck’s message film about the need for the United Nations, especially after the failure of the League of Nations after the last war. Wilson, however, a major production, was also a major flop.

          With the war over, Zanuck and his co-visionaries had to revise their notions of what the new,
          changed audience might swallow in the way of entertainment. It seemed clear that the return-
          ing veteran--not to speak of those to whom he was returning--might not, after all, wish to be
          preached at by morale-builders or urged to fight the peace as heroically as he had fought the war.

Other post-war films that dealt directly with the aftermath were more successful, like the Oscar-winning The Best Years of Our Lives. And yet in a bizarre twist, it was one of the films the fascist MPAPAI listed as a subversive film. Suddenly all of the teamwork and sacrifice depicted in the movies in order to unite Americans in the war effort was somehow turned on its head and charged with being blatant examples of a screenwriter’s allegiance to Communism. It would have been comical had the results not been so tragic.

The book ends, naturally enough, with the HUAC hearings that take the story to its grim conclusion in 1951. Reactionary right-wingers of all stripes fomented the belief in a Communist plot in Hollywood that was entirely fictional. It resulted in blacklisting and jail sentences for writers, directors and producers, and to this day has never properly been repudiated by Republicans in the way it should have. It’s an embarrassment and a stain on the history of a nation that seems bent on repeating the same mistakes in this century for no other reason that to be able to say it was right all along--which it clearly wasn’t. And as bad as the phony accusations and demands for naming names in Washington were, almost worse was the utter abandonment of the writers by nearly everyone, both within Hollywood and without. It’s a sobering end to a vibrant and fascinating story of one section of the movie-making process during the first half of the twentieth century. While the story is arranged chronologically, it benefits tremendously from Hamilton’s decision to eschew a strict year-by-year chronology in the telling. The book is about “Writers,” after all, and it is the personal stories of the people themselves, and the evolution of the craft, that is at the heart of the tale. As a piece of history, it is also written with real style, not quite informal but clear that the author refuses to cast himself as the infallible source of all cinematic wisdom. Writers in Hollywood is a terrific book, and one of the most entertaining film histories I’ve read in a long time.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

The Films of Jon Garcia: 2009-2013

by Eric B. Olsen

The Films of Jon Garcia: 2009-2013 is about the zeal for making motion pictures that informs the kind of work that goes on in the Portland film community every day. Most of the people involved in these independent projects aren’t looking for money; they are looking for an artistic outlet that they can’t get anywhere else. And regardless of what winds up on the screen, there has to be a certain grudging praise for artists who are able to realize their visions despite all of the factors working against them. Portland writer-director Justin Koleszar put it this way: “To be honest, I really hope that people can, if nothing more, just appreciate that the film was done well. It’s not going to be everyone’s favorite, but I hope that they appreciate the performances of the actors and all the work that went into it, the entire cast and crew.” In the context of the kind of sacrifice that goes into an independent feature in terms of finances, time, and effort, it’s not an unreasonable request, and a sentiment that I’m sure every independent filmmaker shares.

After discovering Jon Garcia’s film The Falls in my local public library, I started watching other films that featured the two stars of Garcia’s films, Ben Farmer and Nick Ferrucci. It was then that I began to realize just how many terrific films had been made in Portland in the past decade, and had it not been for accidentally stumbling across The Falls I might never have know about them. They are independent films, to be sure, and certainly suffer from the severe budgeting restrictions that come with young filmmakers struggling to realize their vision. But one thing that can’t be restricted is artistic vision itself, which can be seen in the narrative quality of their work that sets it apart from much of the independent filmmaking happening in the rest of the country.

My initial concept for the book was an ambitious one. I had identified a dozen films by eight different directors and planned to spend the majority of the text dealing with my own analysis of the films, using the interview material to supplement and add dimension to that analysis. But it soon became clear that I was going to have to limit the scope of the project, and maybe do just a few films or directors at a time in multiple volumes. The choice for the first volume in the series was equally clear. Of all the directors I had interviewed, only one had made more than two films, and that was Jon Garcia. In fact, one of the things that became abundantly clear about him throughout my research is that he really is a filmmaker. His ability to write screenplays, his vision as a director, and his determination to continue to make films of high quality despite the necessity of low budgets, has set him apart from most other independent filmmakers.

The book itself is also somewhat unique in the way that it is written. I have read numerous books on film and the history of cinema over the years and while they deliver a lot of good information and historical background, I find most of them wanting in the way that they approach their material. What most of these books lack is a cohesive narrative in which all of the elements of a film—history, interview and analysis—occur simultaneously in the text. This is the kind of book about film that I’ve always wanted to read, so it’s the kind of book I decided to write. The book examines the first four films of Garcia’s career in order to provide a deeper understanding of works that transcend the limitations of independent filmmaking and to show how they have attained the status of art. Part oral history and part film analysis, it provides a detailed textual commentary on Tandem Hearts (2010), the director’s first film, The Falls (2011) and The Falls: Testament of Love (2013), his most well known films, and The Hours Till Daylight (2016). The Films of Jon Garcia: 2009-2013 takes an in-depth look at a writer-director who has earned a reputation as one of the Pacific Northwest’s premier filmmakers.

Friday, April 28, 2017

The Gold Rush: BFI Film Classics (2015)

by Matthew Solomon

Poor Matthew Solomon. He begins his book on Chaplin’s The Gold Rush by saying, “I have wanted to write one of these books ever since I read Peter Wollen’s contribution to the BFI Film Classics series” [Singin’ in the Rain, 1992]. Unfortunately, he’s gone on to write one of the worst books in the series . . . and that’s saying something. Right from the beginning he latches on to one of the most commonly understood realities of the silent era when talking about the film. “For most of the second half of the twentieth century, it was duplicated, distributed and re-duplicated on 8mm and 16mm film, videocassette and videodisc in dozens of different versions.” And then he proceeds to go on and on and on about the same thing for a full twenty-five pages. The book is only a hundred pages long, so for a full quarter of the text he obsesses on this idea with the only regret that he couldn’t go on about it longer. “I am interested in the shadow reproduction histories that lie behind dozens of unauthorized versions of The Gold Rush rented, sold and uploaded over the years . . . to determine their respective provinces . . . when and by whom these versions were copied, recopied, cropped and merged with different soundtracks.” A more tedious book it would be difficult to imagine, but that’s exactly what Solomon has written.

What is so incomprehensible is that he uses this as an excuse to avoid really talking about the film at all, confessing that he will only touch upon those few scenes that “are the ones most vividly recalled by viewers and most frequently remarked upon by reviewers and other commentators.” This is in marked contrast to the intent expressed by Peter Krämer in his BFI book on Buster Keaton’s The General, which is “a detailed and systematic analysis of the film’s story, themes and style.” The rest of Solomon's book is filled with fairly arcane minutia from the daily production reports, length in feet of the various cuts, and dates of various previews and premiers, along with a seemingly endless stream of legal challenges Chaplin made in the courts to control the content of his work. The book is actually maddening in its lack of discussion about the actual film, and most of what is said about it isn’t very enlightening. Solomon goes on to discuss, at length, scenes that never made it into the film, and the generic underpinnings that do very little to add to the reader’s knowledge of, or appreciation for, Chaplin’s work. The only variant of the film that really matters is Chaplin’s 1942 reworking of the material into a version that added his narration and music composed by him, but it’s obvious that this was his way of staying in the public eye and creating a film that had some measure of validity in the wake of sound films completely losing their relevance to modern audiences. And in that respect, it was no more successful than something like the sound version of Universal’s The Phantom of the Opera with a dubbed soundtrack from 1930, despite the contemporary reviews.

But Solomon’s obsession reaches the absurd when he quotes an article called “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” by Walter Benjamin, and before he can even get to the text he is compelled to add that this is, “an essay, it is worth noting, that exists in five distinct different versions.” Sigh. In his BFI companion to the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, Kevin Jackson spends a mere six paragraphs in total discussing the variant versions of that film, even though a court had ordered all the prints destroyed world wide. The same conditions were present for Nosferatu that resulted in the numerous variants of The Gold Rush, and there were just as many alterations made of Murnau's film as there were of Chaplin's. It’s as if Solomon were writing a book about the board game Monopoly, and spent the entire text detailing the various times he played it as a child, who won each game, how they did it, how many hotels he had on Boardwalk and Park Place in each game, the number of times he went to jail and on and on and on, without ever discussing the history of the board game itself. The cumulative effect is mind numbing.

Before long, however, it becomes painfully clear what Solomon is actually doing. He is taking the deconstructionist principles that have destroyed college literature classes and putting them to use to do the same to silent films. This actually begins earlier in the book when he states that, as far as The Gold Rush is concerned, there is no definitive version because, “how the film is remembered depends partly on which version(s) one has seen and heard.” From there he makes the tired analogy of film as text in order to further his deconstructionist agenda, by quoting Benjamin’s article.

          The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke. It is assembled
          from a very large number of images and image sequences that offer an array of choices to the
          editor; these images, moreover, can be improved in any desired way in the process leading
          from the initial take to the final cut . . . The film is therefore the artwork most capable of
          improvement
.

Improvement according to whom? This is precisely the kind of lecture hall drivel that has undercut the idea of creative genius in college classrooms with the express intent of obviating students from the rigors of thinking. As Solomon says, this idea is central in “eroding the very concept of authenticity and dispelling what [Benjamin] describes as the ‘aura’ of both the original art object and the live stage performer.” In other words, the observer can make whatever they wish of the work of art and no one can tell them that they are wrong--because there is no meaning in something that has no inherent concreteness. But the reality is, the very quote he cites refutes his entire argument when Benjamin mentions the phrase “final cut.” That is the definition of a work of art. When the director has assembled the final cut, there is no other version, any more than a writer’s rough drafts call into question the veracity of the final published work. Solomon should stay in his classroom serving this pabulum to eighteen-year-olds who don’t know any better. To anyone at all knowledgeable about film, this kind of puerile posturing is highly disingenuous and pathetically juvenile.

Granted, silent films have been subject to much tinkering over the years that directors could not control, for the simple fact that they had no soundtracks to disrupt, but that in no way makes them any less of a cohesive vision once restorations are made with the express purpose of creating a version as close to what the director intended as possible. The fact that certain scenes may be slightly different--or even removed--or that different takes are used in divergent versions that are no longer in circulation in no way alters the primacy of the director’s original vision or the story the film is telling. It may alter the way it is told, but it doesn’t diminish its existence or create a completely different film, which seems to be Solomon’s point. And frankly, it’s insulting to the reader for Solomon to even suggest it. But ultimately it’s Solomon himself who refutes his own argument at the end of book, admitting that, “Since Chaplin was well known for continuing to shoot retakes long after everyone else on the set was ready to move on, some outtakes--apart from those containing outright gaffes or those shot for scenes that were eventually omitted--would be indistinguishable from the takes Chaplin originally selected to include in the film.” In essence, this renders his argument entirely moot.

Finally, it will be no surprise to learn, Solomon also spends the last twenty-five pages of the book recounting and rehashing a seemingly endless series of variant Gold Rush prints, on film, videotape, laserdisc, DVD and digital versions, though to what purpose is mystifying. The same could be said about any number of films from the silent era without really illuminating a thing about the film itself. The author chooses instead to go into great detail about the scenes that didn’t actually make it into the film. The overall effect is as if someone took a three-hundred-page work on the film and removed all of the elements that had nothing to do with the story on the screen and put that into a separate book. There is a brief chapter on a few of the memorable scenes, but this only emphasizes the fact that there is phenomenally little else about the actual film in the entire book as a whole. But then, according to Solomon, there is no actual film so that apparently makes some kind of perverted sense. Ultimately, Solomon’s book is more than just disappointing, it’s bad. And that’s a shame. There’s a real need for a book about The Gold Rush that goes in depth about the actual film, but this isn’t it. So if that’s what you’re looking for, stay well away from this one.

Monday, October 31, 2016

Young Frankenstein (2016)

by Mel Brooks

The first time I heard there was going to be a book about Young Frankenstein was on The Tonight Show when Mel Brooks came out to promote it. The large, coffee table format of the book make me think it would be short on text, but I ordered it anyway. Sure enough, even though I lingered over the pictures, it took less than an hour to get through it. It’s unfortunate, because a film of this magnitude deserves a far more detailed historical analysis than the People magazine sized remembrances about each actor and crewmember of the film. The text of Young Frankenstein: The Story of the Making of the Film, even with the huge font and including the pictures, barely comes in at a disappointing 200 pages. And yet, because there really isn’t anything else out there, one can’t be too critical. Most of the text is written by Brooks himself, telling about how he cast the picture and vital role played by the rest of the major crew members. The book is also augmented by sections of an article by Loraine Alterman—the future Mrs. Peter Boyle—that she wrote for Rolling Stone magazine. The rest is mostly pictures, and there are some good ones.

Some of the photographs are clearly filler, screen shots that are accompanied by “scenes” from the film, really just tiny bits of dialogue with shots on either side of the page. The behind the scenes photos are really what the book is worth getting for, that and the text by Brooks. What I didn’t really know is that Brooks and Gene Wilder began working on the screenplay for the film while they were shooting Blazing Saddles. Rather than taking their hot hand from that film and rolling it into the next one, they hadn’t had any real box office success beyond The Producers, and had no guarantees that Young Frankenstein would even be produced. One of the things that could have enhanced the book is the original screenplay, which is actually more similar to the farce of Blazing Saddles than it would be the carefully crafted satire of the eventual film. And it was also surprising to learn that it was Brooks who reined in Wilder’s more excessive gags. But that is absent from the book as well. What there is about the way Brooks hired his cast and crew is ultimately satisfying if somewhat brief. Something else that it was good to hear Brooks admit is that this was his proudest creation. I’ve never liked the over-the-top, broad comedy of his other films, but Young Frankenstein was so lovingly created that it deserves the status of classic.

The way the principal cast came together was because both Marty Feldman and Peter Boyle were represented by the same agent as Gene Wilder. And of course it turned out that they were perfect together. I had heard some time ago that Brooks himself had thought about playing Igor, but he made no such reference in the book. Brooks lucked out that Alan Ladd Jr. had just been hired to run 20th Century Fox, and simply believed in shooting black and white the way the director wanted. His cinematographer, Gerald Hirschfeld had experience with the medium and was the perfect choice for director of photography. And I was also pleased to read Brooks heaping praise on one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the film, the score by John Morris. His main theme, the “Transylvanian Lullaby,” is one of the greatest horror music cues of all time. Coming off of the unexpected success of Blazing Saddles, the film was a smash at the box office and was ultimately responsible for making Brooks a bankable name in Hollywood. While he would never again reach the heights he achieved with this film, it is a testament to the genius of Brooks and Gene Wilder that the film has stood the test of time. Young Frankenstein: The Story of the Making of the Film, while certainly not the book fans of the film would have hoped for, is still a loving tribute to one of the greatest horror-comedies of all time.

Friday, December 25, 2015

The Greatest Gift (1943)

by Philip Van Doren Stern

The screenplay for Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life was cobbled together by no less than four writers, plus the director himself. That makes sense because of the nature of the source material written by Philip Van Doren Stern. The short story The Greatest Gift was originally published by Stern himself as something of a Christmas card for family and friends. The brevity of the story required a lot of fleshing out to provide background on the characters, as well as injecting a host of peripheral characters and a villain for the film. Still, the original story provides all of the basic material for the film. Stern’s agent was unable to sell the story for a couple of reasons. The first is that it was incredibly short, and the second is that it was considered a fantasy story. That’s when he had the idea to have it professionally printed and send it out as a Christmas card. What his agent was able to do, however, was sell the movie rights. It was originally purchased as a vehicle for Cary Grant, but it didn’t translate well in screenplay form. Finally Frank Capra bought the story with Jimmy Stewart in mind. Though the film was not initially a hit, Stewart personally thanked Capra for allowing him to appear in the film and recognized its timeless message. While the story took a tortuous route to get to the screen, Philip Van Doren Stern wound up writing one of the greatest stories ever told.

In Stern’s version the protagonist is George Pratt, and the story begins with George on the bridge considering suicide. Quietly, an older man tells him he shouldn’t be thinking about that, and should consider Mary and his mother. At first the impetus for his death seems fairly innocuous, that he’s stuck in a small town while other men his age have gotten out. But George also mentions that the Army wouldn’t take him, something that caused a lot of young men to take their lives at the beginning of World War Two. Then George wishes he’d never been born, to the delight of the old man who seems to feel this is the solution to everything and grants George’s wish. When the old man gives him a salesman’s sample case full of brushes, George tries to give it back and discovers the old man isn’t there. Heading back through town to go home, George sees that the bank where he works is closed and for sale. Across the street he sees a friend of his still at work in his office, but of course the friend doesn’t know him anymore. The friend tells him that the bank closed because the young man who applied for the job the same time that George did stole most of the cash and ran off, nearly bankrupting everyone in the small town. The thief’s brother, it turns out, married George’s girl, Mary Thatcher.

The most significant change to the story comes at this point in the tale. In the film there is a moment toward the end that never made a lot of sense to me. The angel, now named Clarence, has taken George Bailey on a tour of the crime-ridden town, showing George what things have become because of his absence. Finally, George wants to know what has become of his wife, Mary. Clarence doesn’t want to tell him and the audience fears the worst, especially after Clarence tells George he’s not going to like it. Then when George grabs him by the lapels the angel blurts out that she’s an old maid who never married. Rather than being a bad thing, in the context of the film this seems like a huge relief. I suppose that never finding love would have been bad for her, but it’s not nearly as bad for George as seeing her with another man. But that, of course, would be much more realistic, and that is exactly what Stern writes in his story. George knows that he can’t just blunder into her house first because it will be too upsetting for him, and so he goes to see his parents to find out a little more about her. While they tell her that she has two children, George can’t get his mind off of something that is different in the house, and that’s when he learns that his kid brother Harry had died at sixteen because George hadn’t been there to save him. He makes an awkward departure and then heads for Mary’s house.

George puts on his salesman’s act for her and she invites him in, where he’s barely able to speak because of his longing to be home with her as his wife. He meets the kids, who are brats just like her husband, and then the belligerent husband comes home and George leaves to save Mary any trouble with him. When George finds the old man back at the bridge he begs him to have his life back. Not for himself, but for the others in the town who are suffering because of his absence. The old man takes pity on George and the rest plays out like the film, with George visiting all of the places he had gone to and seeing them back to normal. In looking at what the screenwriters did on Capra’s project, it’s impressive. While the bank is still there in the original, the idea of the building and loan run by his father, and the father’s death keeping him trapped in town, is inspired. This allows for George’s uncle to lose the deposit money and create a genuine reason for his desperation and thoughts of suicide. The film even retains the title of Stern’s story, when Clarence tells George that he’s been given a great gift, to see what the world would be like without him. The book form of the story, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the film, is a beautiful volume with woodcut pictures and an afterward by Stern’s daughter. Like its title, Stern’s story could be said to be The Greatest Gift in cinematic history.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

The Caine Mutiny (1951)

by Herman Wouk

Though I have watched and enjoyed the 1954 film version of Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Caine Mutiny, for years, I never took the time to read the original novel until recently. It was quite a revelation. As good as the film The Caine Mutiny is there’s a lot to admire in the original work, especially in the depth of character Wouk is able to achieve. Based on his personal experiences during World War Two, the novel was published in 1951 and author goes to great pains to assure the reader that the character of Captain Queeg is not based on a real person, and that certain events and their timing were manipulated for dramatic purposes. The novel veritably drips with a fifties sensibility in the writing, both in the dialogue and the way the characters are drawn. Wouk was also apparently fascinated by the profanity used onboard ships during wartime, and writes about trying to capture the ubiquity of its use without actually writing it out. His reasoning is that it, “is largely monotonous and not significant, mere verbal punctuation of a sort, and its appearance in print annoys some readers.”

As in the film, Ensign Willie Keith is still the protagonist and still the focal point of the story, but his experience is much richer and fuller than the limitations of film allowed, and the extensive detail given to his girlfriend, May Wynn, as well as those aboard the Caine, add immeasurably to the reader’s understanding of motives and decisions those characters make. One of the major differences, at least in the beginning of the book, is with Willie himself. While he is the Everyman character in the film, the lens through which the viewer understands the events in the story, Wouk infuses much more of his privileged background into the character of the novel, imbuing him with a mild sexism and racism that were part and parcel of the day. When he meets may Wynn, he’s the piano player at a club where she is auditioning. She keeps her coat on during the audition and it’s not until she goes out with him later for dinner that he finally coaxes her into taking it off:

          May Wynn rose, almost as reluctantly as if she were being compelled to strip. “I'm beginning
          to think you’re very silly-- Well,” she added, her face flushing, “stop looking at me like that--”
          Willie had the appearance of a startled stag--for good enough reason. May Wynn’s figure was
          glorious. “You have a figure,” said Willie, taking his seat in slow motion. “I thought you proba-
          bly had elephant thighs or no chest.”

He’s just as crass later, after finding out that May is Italian. “They were mostly poor, untidy, vulgar, and Catholic. This did not at all imply that the fun was at an end. On the contrary, he could now more safely enjoy being with the girl, since nothing was going to come of it.” And he is equally racist, in his own condescending way, after he meets May’s manager, Marty Rubin. “He was quite sure Rubin was a Jew, but thought no less of him for that. Willie liked Jews as a group, for their warmth, humor, and alertness. This was true though his home was in a real-estate development where Jews could not buy.”

Another element of the story that is far more extreme than in the film is the genuine filthiness and disrepair of the ship he is stationed on. The Caine in the film looks almost sanitized in comparison. And Willie’s relationship with the first captain, DeVriess, is equally intensified. In the film it is more disappointment than anything else. In the novel, however, “Willie’s accumulated resentment, weariness, and disgust coagulated at that moment into hatred of Captain de Vriess . . . He had fallen into the hands of a bullying stupid sloven.” And this is an important character trait of Willie’s as it will come into play during the mutiny. Another character who benefits from increased development is Tom Keefer, because Wouk is able to make his motivation much clearer early on in the novel. While he was a young writer, he isn’t actually an author yet, as Keefer himself admits to Keith upon their first meeting, “I was trying to be one before the war.” And while in one way he sees the war as an interruption of his attempt at a career, viewed another way it also presents him with the possibility of dramatic things to write about--if he were to be given the opportunity. Unfortunately Keefer is stuck on the Caine, and there seems to be no way out.

          Hell, I just want to see some war, as long as my sands are running out uselessly . . . The nub
          of this Pacific war is the duel of flying machines. Everything else is as routine as the work of
          milkmen and filing clerks. All uncertainty and all decision rides with the carriers . . . War is
          ninety nine per cent routine--routine that trained monkeys could perform. But the one per
          cent of chance and creative action on which the history of the world is hanging right now
          you’ll find on carriers. That’s what I want to be part of.

This dissatisfaction, then, is the seed that grows into the conspiracy, and is reflected in a line tossed off by Keefer over desert one night, that “sin is relative to character.” Because of who he is, Keefer doesn’t think of his acts as wrong. At the same time, Willie becomes overly impressed by Keefer’s academic inclinations and the fact that he’s writing a novel about his wartime experiences which, along with Willie’s inexperience, explains how he is able to be pull the young ensign into his conspiracy so easily. But before the new captain takes command, Willie meets the officious captain of another minesweeper and has what should have been a revelation.

          He had considered De Vriess a tyrant; but compared to Iron Duke Sammis his captain was
          lazily benevolent. Then, the Moulton was model of naval order and efficiency, the Caine a
          wretched Chinese junk by comparison. Yet the smart ship had dropped a paravane; the rusty
          tramp had led all the ships in minesweeping performance. How did these facts fit together?

Unfortunately Willie isn’t there to hear De Vriess explain those facts to the new captain, Queeg. When talking about the dedication of the men aboard the Caine, De Vriess says, “The strange thing is, most of the crazy bastards like it. Damn few of them put in for transfers. But they have to do things their own way. It’s the hooligan navy, to look at them. But give them a chance, and they deliver.” This on its own, however, is not the real key to the conspiracy. That is the first officer, Steve Maryk. Unlike the film, here he is only introduced gradually into the story. And where Keefer’s dislike of Queeg mirrored the rest of the crew’s, in the book Keefer is far more insidious, going so far as to argue with Maryk about how necessary a strict captain like Queeg is for the Caine, this after being dressed down by the captain earlier that same evening. But eventually even this gets under Keefer’s tough exterior and after the Yellowstain incident he practically dares Maryk to tell the captain to court-martial him. In actual combat Queeg’s deficiencies are clear: he is deathly afraid of being killed, and he punishes the men for small infractions in order to compensate for his lack of bravery.

It’s easy to see why the novel was so popular. The Korean War had just begun and Wouk’s descriptions of his experiences aboard the minesweeper are a unique window into armed conflict. At the same time he has a certain skill as a writer that is both engaging and creative. When Willie goes aboard a large supply ship to have some communications decoded, he instantly notices a distinct difference between the men on the large, well-equipped vessel and his own: “They looked different from his own crew; generally older, fatter, and more peaceful; a species of herbivorous sailor, one might say, as contrasted to the coyotes of the Caine.” And with the expanded length of the book, there are more incidents of cowardice for Queeg and much more of a feeling of concentrated tyranny over the officers and men that make the eventual mutiny seem even more justified than in the film. One of the other interesting aspects of the story is the wartime view of the enemy from Willie. In describing the Japanese he seems oddly detached, especially given the extremes of the propaganda about them.

          There was nothing at Kwajalein but a few thousand Japanese soldiers to face the monstrous
          fleet rising out of the sea . . . Since the Japs appeared illogically unwilling to surrender, the
          naval bombarders set about annihilating them with an oddly good-humored, ribald ferocity
          . . . Willie enjoyed and applauded the spectacle with no thought of its fatality . . . Like most
          of the naval executioners at Kwajalein, he seemed to regard the enemy as a species of animal
          pest.

This, however, is juxtaposed with a view of the Germans in which he seems almost personally bitter toward them. It happens when Queeg decides that there is a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox and he strips all hands in order to find it. “The process of stripping the sailors rasped his nerves; it seemed to him an almost German rape of their personal rights.”

The typhoon, which precipitates the mutiny, is rendered similarly in the film, with one notable exception. In the novel, after Maryk has taken command and Willie has backed him up, the crew actually sees the hull of one of the capsized ships in the water. This could only serve to reinforce the decision by Maryk in the novel, but is only mentioned in passing in the film. Another difference between the two versions is Willie’s relationship with May. In the novel Willie is the one who breaks off the romance, and his assessment of her is not a kind one. “May Wynn was bright, yes, unbearably attractive . . . She was also vulgar, brassy and overperfumed . . . She seemed a little soiled to him, a little cheap; and in every way jagged and wrong for his planned future.” In the film, however, May is the one to break it off with Willie for the very reason they joke about in the novel. When he tells her about the mutiny, confessing his worries about the punishment, she replies, “Willie dear, you couldn’t mutiny--not even against your mother, let alone a ship’s captain--” But there’s also another minor difference that seems to be a major one in retrospect. During the court-martial the prosecutor goes to great pains to elicit from all the witnesses that Queeg was never raving or acting insane. What he did, though, was freeze in the middle of the typhoon, and in the film it never comes out. It’s a point that certainly should have been in the film, as Willie states in his testimony in the novel. “He froze to the engine-room telegraph. His face showed petrified terror. It was green.” Maryk supports this when he says that Queeg’s response to his questions were “mostly a glazed look and no answer.”

The major difference in the court-martial is that in the novel the charge of mutiny isn’t even made. It turns out that Maryk’s invocation of article 184 of Navy Regulations, and his subsequent above-board disclosing of the act to proper authorities does not, legally, constitute a mutiny and therefore Maryk is not in jeopardy of receiving the death penalty. In the film, however, the charge is mutiny. The other nice thing that the novel is able to do, is demonstrate the way that the panel of judges is gradually swayed by the work of Barney Greenwald against Queeg, so that by the time he cracks under Greenwald’s cross-examination, the judges are already predisposed to rule in Maryk’s favor due to the abundance of evidence about Queeg’s questionable behavior as captain of the Caine. Greenwald’s drunken speech in which he accuses Keefer of being the real author of the Caine munity, is actually better in the truncated version in the film. In the novel there’s a disappointing sense that Keefer isn’t quite as culpable for what happens as he should be, while the film makes it unmistakably clear that it was Keefer all along who was angling for Maryk to do something he could write about in his novel. In fact, Keefer actually becomes captain of the Caine and Willie his exec afterwards, and Wouk doesn’t humiliate Keefer until a kamikaze hits the Caine and in a frightened panic Keefer jumps overboard

But the best line in the book is from Wouk’s luxurious denouement. After the captain abandons ship, Willie stays onboard and saves the Caine and afterward, in his bunk, thinks about the changes that war has wrought in him.

          Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home
          with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts--
          not the words, the realities--break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul.
          A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime.

He was no longer even the Willie Keith who began thinking these thoughts, says Wouk, “That boy was gone for good.” It’s only then that Willie realizes he wants to spend the rest of his life with May, and writes a lengthy letter to her. This leads naturally to the last discrepancies between the two stories. Unlike the happy ending of the film, the end of Wouk’s novel is a literary one, unresolved but with knowledge that whatever happens in the future it is a future that is more rife with possibility than could have ever happened to for these characters in the beginning.

After reading the novel, the screenplay for the film seems even more impressive. With the success of his novel, Herman Wouk adapted the final section of the book into a play called The Caine Mutiny Court Martial which debuted several months before the film was released, and has gone on to be filmed itself. He was the natural first choice to write the screenplay, but director Edward Dmytryk didn’t like his treatment and looked around for a suitable replacement. Stanley Roberts was primarily known for writing comedies, but the skill needed here was not one of invention but adaptation, knowing exactly what to keep from the original story and what to emphasize to make the film version its own entity. For his work, Roberts was nominated for an Academy Award on the film. But he had kept too much of the original and refused to edit down his screenplay in order to keep the film under two hours. For that, Michael Blankfort was brought it. A veteran of more dramatic films, Blankfort trimmed the story down to the film version that finally came to the screen. As with all original source material for the movies, a lot was changed and in some ways Herman Wouk’s war novel The Caine Mutiny is a vastly different experience from the film, making it a worthy expenditure of time for those who were as captivated by the film as I have always been.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Nosferatu: BFI Film Classics (2013)

by Kevin Jackson

I once wrote about a book called Blue Note Records: A Biography, by Richard Cook, that it broke no new ground, had no new interviews, and unearthed no new facts about the label. Any assiduous reader of Blue Note liner notes would have known nearly all of the information presented in Cook’s book. And yet I also argued that the book was necessary. What Cook had done was to synthesize all of the existing information about the label, its history, and it’s most prestigious records and artists into a cohesive narrative, something that had never been done before. The same can be said about most of the books on classic films in the British Film Institute’s series. If one thinks of them as a very thorough DVD booklet, they’ll get the idea. The series doesn’t usually contain information that isn’t available elsewhere, but it’s nice to have it all in one convenient place. Kevin Jackson’s volume on W.F. Munau’s silent classic, Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens, is a case in point. After a brief introduction about the critical and historical success of the film in the wake of works by Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner, he begins by placing the film in the historical context of the Weimar years and the still looming shadow of World War One.

One of the topics that comes up in the pre-history of Murnau's Nosferatu that is usually never mentioned at all in other works is the influence of German mysticism, still firmly in place during the Nazi years, and recounted wonderfully in the film Invincible by Werner Herzog. All of which explains why the Weimar years were so rife with films of supernatural content. Unlike many directors who worked their way up from cameramen, Murnau was born into a wealthy family and was a scholar in his youth, studying what would today be called comparative literature. But even with this academic bent, he was still a practiced outdoorsman at his father’s insistence. He dropped out of school to join Max Reinhardt’s acting company, and flew as a fighter pilot in the First World War, accidentally flying into Switzerland and spending the remainder of the war putting on productions with the other prisoners. Once the war had ended he created his own production company and made several films prior to being contacted by Albin Grau, an avowed occultist, to direct an unauthorized version of Dracula.

Production began in July of 1921 in and around the Baltic port city of Wismar to shoot the exteriors that would stand in for Bremen of a century earlier. A month later they moved on to Prague and traveled by coach to Dolný Kubín to shoot the Transylvania exteriors in and around Orlock’s castle. Making a couple of stops on the way back for specific shots, they went back to Berlin to finish the film by shooting the interiors. Murnau used the Ufa studio in the Johannisthal district, located in the southeast part of the city and named Jufa. The final element of the production was hiring composer Hans Erdmann to write a score specifically for the film--one of the first of its kind. The middle thirty pages of the book consist of a scene-by-scene analysis of the final film, complete with color tinted stills to emphasize specific examples--though it must be said that the contrast in the prints came out rather dark in the printing. One quote from Murnau that Jackson includes is his injunction to filmmakers to eschew “interesting” camera angles, as they “they only lower the dramatic interest of the story, because they are merely 'interesting' without having any dramatic value.” Samuel Johnson gave the very same warning to writers who they thought had written something great: “and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out,” for the reason that it won’t fit in with the rest of the work.

One of the nice things about Jackson’s analysis is the doing away with defining Murnau’s film as Expressionist. While there are sequences that have some Expressionist influence, the film as a whole is Romantically inspired--like its literary template--and follows a mostly classical style of filmmaking. The analysis uses Murnau’s own annotated copy of the screenplay, which is a welcome addition. Two other myths Jackson mercifully does away with, one of which is the idea that Orlock the vampire represents the “pestilential Jew” in anti-Semitic readings of the film, which in no way represents Murnau’s personal views. The other is the reading of the film as anti-gay, another incorrect interpretation given the fact that Murnau himself was gay and he certainly didn’t view his presence in society as a plague. While the film received mostly positive reviews in Germany, it was a commercial failure, Grau’s production company went bankrupt, and to add insult to injury, Stoker’s widow successfully sued and all existing copies and negatives were ordered destroyed. Fortunately history won out and multiple copies of the film were hidden away throughout the world. Ultimately Jackson’s book is a satisfying summary of most of the well-known aspects of the film, along with some lesser-known items, making BFI’s Nosferatu a welcome addition to any film library.