Movieland by Jerome Charyn

I remember something Charles Laughton told Tyrone Power once upon a time. Be careful. If Power, the movie star, wanted to act on stage, he would have to shed a particular demon. He might be an actor reading his lines, but he would “also be the monster, made up of all the characters [Power had played on the screen.” And Power would have to dispose of that monster by breathing and looking like a man. Perhaps. But the monster would still be behind every move. That mingling of time, roles half-remembered

About Louis B. Mayer and Fritz Lang’s M:

Where’s the love interest? Louis B. Mayer would have asked. What about the happy ending? Hollywood would hire Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre, the director and the star of M, a movie about a child murderer that turns in upon itself, like an amazing corkscrew, as Lorre, with an “M” marked on his back, tries to explain his own demons to the underworld of Berlin, who’ve captured Lorre and sentenced him to death, because his very existence has threatened their own profitable relationship with the police. M is a kind of Brechtian opera without song.

But Lorre’s cry to the underworld screams in our ear, forces us to examine who the hell we are. It’s not designed to comfort us in the dark. Lorre’s chubby, childlike face seems to make monsters of us all. We partake of his death. We convict him, as we convict ourselves.

Mayer never read scripts. But the idea of such a movie would have enraged him. He’d have demanded that a pair of lovers be thrown into the pot. Some police inspector, played by Richard Dix (borrowed from RKO for such a minor vehicle), and a queen of the underworld who reforms herself and marries Dix, while the murderer is shoved into the background. But whatever the limits of MGM, all its sugared life on screen, only Mayer’s Hollywood could have conceived Casablanca and Gone With the Wind.

Its message was that no one in America need be exempt from love. The newsboy could marry the millionairess if only he was industrious enough, and looked a little like Gable. Nothing got in the way of romance. In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald has his film producer Monroe Stahr explain the basic melody of any motion picture. “We’ve got an hour and twenty-five minutes on the screen-you show a woman being unfaithful to a man for one-third of that time and you’ve given the impression that she’s one-third whore.”

Thalberg:

MGM was only a little giant, not to be compared with Paramount, which had De Mille and Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow, or United Artists, formed in 1919 by Chaplin, Mary and Doug, and D. W. Griffith, or that enormous acreage Irving left behind with Uncle Carl at Universal City. It was Hollywood, after all, and film companies could come and go, like those pirates who’d arrived in California, running from Edison’s people. Mayer wasn’t as even-tempered as Uncle Carl, and no one thought the Boy Wonder would survive very long with the junkman. But Irving had matured in movie-land. He was twenty-four. He’d given up woolen underwear and become a fixer. He could patch up any film. He was the producer-magician who could sense a structural flaw and locate the melody of a given scene. The Thalberg legend began to grow. “Of this slim, slight, nervous man it was said he lived in a motion picture theater all his waking hours and knew instincitively whether the shadows on screen would please the public.”

On Fitzgergald’s Love of the Last Tycoon:

Stahr was a popularist of the imagination, a tender of dream-scapes. He could assume only one condition, that he “take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar.”

But Fitzgerald himself understood the power of that dream-scape, the magic behind the hollow walls. “Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland-not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French châteaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire.”

The fire of Plato’s cave.

On Raymond Chandler:

He was a very formal man, bound by the strict codes of Dulwich College. Chandler wouldn’t walk into the street without a jacket and a tie, but he was also a Bedouin in his ways, often moving once or twice a year. He had over seventy different addresses in Southern California. And he was an alcoholic. He lost his job in the middle of the Depression because of the drinking he did. And the failed poet started writing fiction for the pulp magazines. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language.”

He saw himself as “a man without a country,” neither English nor American, but some kind of cultural half-breed caught in the crazy quilt of Southern California, where men and women had to reinvent their lives. And Chandler, a good Dulwich boy who longed for tradition, had come to a place without a past, where whole peoples had to define themselves against the deserts, mountains, valleys, seas, and citrus groves.

Chandler was one more anonymous soul who’d become “a plots. y writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about His apprenticeship wasn’t easy. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was fifty-one. And even after Philip Marlowe was world-famous, Chandler grumbled about his own status in the United States. English intellectuals idolized him, adored his work, and Chandler “tried to explain to them that I was just a He was a very formal man, bound by the strict codes of Dul-wich College. Chandler wouldn’t walk into the street without a jacket and a tie, but he was also a Bedouin in his ways, often moving once or twice a year. He had over seventy different addresses in Southern California. And he was an alcoholic. He lost his job in the middle of the Depression because of the drinking he did. And the failed poet started writing fiction for the pulp magazines. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language.”

He saw himself as “a man without a country,” neither English nor American, but some kind of cultural half-breed caught in the crazy quilt of Southern California, where men and women had to reinvent their lives. And Chandler, a good Dulwich boy who longed for tradition, had come to a place without a past, where whole peoples had to define themselves against the deserts, mountains, valleys, seas, and citrus groves.

Chandler was one more anonymous soul who’d become “a plots. y writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about His apprenticeship wasn’t easy. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was fifty-one. And even after Philip Marlowe was world-famous, Chandler grumbled about his own status in the United States.

…

He understood that film was “not al transplanted literary or dramatic art … it is much closer to music, in the sense that its finest effects can be independent of precise meaning, that its transitions can be more eloquent than its high-lit scenes, and that its dissolves and camera movements, which cannot be censored, are often far more emotionally effective than its plots, which can.”

They don’t know you’re lying.

They didn’t know what it took to sell tickets to young people, and I remember Francis Coppola saying to me, “Just go in there and tell them you know the answer. Just tell them. They don’t know. They don’t know you’re lying. You walk in there and you say, “This is your lucky day because you want to make money in movies, and I want to make money in movies, and I know how to get money.”

Paul Schrader talking about the studios in the early ’70s.

A whole dozen or fifteen filmmakers came in that gap with that sort of braggadocio, and they got empowered, and some of them actually did make money.

from Rock Me On The Water: 1974 The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics by Ronald Brownstein, which we got at Chevalier Books on Larchmont.

Didion on Hollywood/gambling

The place makes everyone a gambler. Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial. The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: “A very imaginative deal,” they say, or, “He writes the most creative deals in the business.” There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside. The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.

I think about this one all the time. Source. Nobody was tougher on “critics.”

To recognize that the picture is but the by-product of the action is to make rather more arduous the task of maintaining one’s self-image as (Kauffmann’s own job definition) “a critic of new works.” Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

and:

Perhaps the difficulty of knowing who made which choices in a picture makes this airiness so expedient that it eventually infects any writer who makes a career of reviewing; perhaps the initial error is in making a career of it. Reviewing motion pictures, like reviewing new cars, may or may not be a useful consumer service (since people respond to a lighted screen in a dark room in the same secret and powerfully irrational way they respond to most sensory stimuli, I tend to think most of it beside the point, but never mind that); the review of pictures has been, as well, a traditional diversion for writers whose actual work is somewhere else. Some 400 mornings spent at press screenings in the late 1930s were, for Graham Greene, an “escape,” a way of life “adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun.” Perhaps it is only when one inflates this sense of fun into (Kauffmann again) “a continuing relation with an art” that one passes so headily beyond the reality principle.