Month: May 2015

Two for Forty

I just returned from three days at Cinevent, the annual celebration of Golden Age Hollywood in Columbus, Ohio. I got plenty of opportunity to talk about Fireball there, and about my next book, with the likes of author and archivist James V. D’Arc, author and blogger John McElwee, Errol Flynn Slept Here co-author Michael Mazzone, and legendary Warner Bros. archivist Leith Adams, among many others.

While there, John dropped an 8.5×11 sheet of paper in my lap. It was a flyer pertaining to a topic I hold dear, the site of the crash of TWA Flight 3. In a nutshell, a self-dubbed “adventuresome couple” intends to climb to the site and pay for the trip by retrieving crash items and selling them to those who pay $25 in advance for one item; $40 for two.

I’m staring at the flyer now and will scan it for inclusion with this column. I’m not sure how I feel about this. I know I believe in free speech, free choice, free will, and free enterprise. Many aspire to these “free” concepts and today of all days, Memorial Day, they take on special meaning.

I guess I say, more power to you, Adventuresomes! By way of full disclosure, I purchased a piece of crash wreckage somewhere around 1998, back when eBay was new and I was obsessed with the site and anything related to it. In the back of my mind I asked myself, Is this creepy? I asked, but participated in the auction anyway, bidding against others for this item. A week later I held the piece in hand, a rib from the empennage, and yes, I was uneasy having in my possession part of NC 1946, the Douglas DC-3 born in February 1941 in Santa Monica, California, that would live less than a year and end up strewn in a million pieces over the side of Mt. Potosi, Nevada.

A decade later I would finally climb Potosi to visit the site as research for Fireball. Only then did it hit me where I was and what the wreckage represented. Only then, struggling to stand on sheer mountainside at the spot where 22 humans were blown to bits along with that infant of an airplane, did I comprehend the reality that I stood at something akin to a gravesite. I understood because human souls reached out and touched me. The pilot made contact. The co-pilot. The stewardess. Fifteen Army Air Corps guys. I felt them there. My communication with these souls infused life into my writing. Suddenly, the manuscript had a soul of its own.

That’s one of two enduring memories of my day at Potosi: having those people reach out and touch me in a most physical way. The other is the sheer danger, the sheer exhaustion, of the climb up and back. There are two ways into the crash site: One is the way I went, four-wheeling to the embarkation point, then snaking up the mountain, which I felt I had to experience since I would be describing what the first responders faced trying to reach the site. The other way in involves riding the ridges by four-wheeler to a government gate, then hiking a long way and descending from the crest into the crash site—the route used to bring up bodies from the wreck. In the bullet points atop this flyer, the author describes “2.5 miles of hiking up into steep and rocky terrain.” He leaves out words, most appropriate descriptions, like perilous and life threatening. I trust the Adventuresomes are hardbodies who employ a good guide. Thanks to months of training and planning I had both, and it helped and didn’t help. I never would have found the site on my own because it’s a tiny pinpoint on a vast mountain. I had the luxury of following the guide as he used decades of experience in wilderness to lead me up contours of mountainside that could be climbed. But he couldn’t lend me any sure-footedness that day and despite being reasonably coordinated and physically prepared, I tumbled over time and again, smashing on the rocks and bloodying myself as I’ve described to you in the past.

Adventuresomes, and anyone else who takes on Potosi (I met another future climber in Columbus and urged him also), please don’t underestimate this mountain. It’s a killer. I’ve known several people who tried the “easy” way into the site and many didn’t make it for various reasons. Season is a consideration; weather; snakes; equipment; terrain. A normal wilderness hike is great fun, but if you’re struggling for your very life to climb 5,000 vertical feet on 45-degree angles or worse, with footing that gives way unexpectedly, the experience is something else. Even leaving at dawn, we had to hurry to make it back down the mountain before night swallowed us whole, so difficult was the round trip, with less than 90 minutes spent at the site. You can’t move at night on the mountain, believe me. I wouldn’t even underestimate the first and last parts of the journey by four-wheel drive, because the desert path we took, colorfully named Ninety-Nine Mine Road (it passes the old mine entrance), is not for your average driver. I wasn’t behind the wheel the day I went to Potosi—I couldn’t have made it on my own because this is serious off-roading and I don’t have the experience.

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Ninety-Nine Mine Road is much worse in most spots than this photo shows. Here I was able to steady the camera, point, and shoot without being too badly knocked around inside the Jeep.

Behind this mound of earth lay the entrance to the old Ninety-Nine Mine in the foothills before Mt. Potosi.

If you are trying to lug anything extra back down the mountain, say, crash debris, if you put it on your back it’s going to a) weigh you down, b) add extra bulk, and c) change your center of gravity as you try to navigate the steep terrain.

It just occurs to me now that maybe Fireball inspired the Adventuresomes to attempt the climb. I’m not going to make any value judgments about the wisdom of selling crash wreckage to offset costs for the trip. I’m disqualified from making them anyway because I am a past purchaser. On all counts I simply advise, be cautious, dear couple. I want you in one piece to buy my next book, and if that book with James Stewart as main subject inspires you to visit places like Tibenham, East Anglia, where the 445^th Bomb Group was based, or Hamburg or Frankfurt, which the 445^th bombed, be advised: these places will welcome you with no dangerous climbing required.

Splitting a Limo

Nine years ago yesterday: the time they gave me a megaphone. The only time. The reason my clothes are hanging on me is because I was on the low-budget-feature diet, which includes no time for food but the stress-burn of 10,000 calories a day. The guy visible in front of me is my stepson, Rob. Like I say, I called in all markers on May 13, 2006.

The very first reviewer of Fireball, the savvy, revered, and (by a few) despised New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick, praised the book and said, “Fireball would make a great movie.” Since then I’ve heard the refrain often, up to and including this week on Facebook. It happens that I write and direct movies for a living, if one counts videos for NASA and the Department of Energy as “movies.” It’s no coincidence that things I write about present themselves as movies in my head, so it’s natural to describe them that way in books.

I know enough about making feature pictures to be just a little bit dangerous. Nine years ago yesterday, while making the George Washington documentary Pursuit of Honor, I directed more than 100 actors and extras in a Revolutionary War-era battle scene set in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Amidst cannon and buckets of fake blood, horses, cranes, and five cameras stood yours truly with a megaphone—the only time they ever let me use one while directing. All markers were called in that day, and every living, breathing relative who could work as crew or an extra participated. Even my dentist played a wounded Redcoat—so did his brother. This location shoot covered just three pages of the script in a feature that took us to Colonial Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, Old Town Alexandria, and many other shooting sites. I even fell in the Allegheny River while trying to shoot ice floes in wintry New York. This story doesn’t really have a point; I just looked at the calendar and remembered the date, May 13, 2006.

The battle as it appeared in the feature.

Believe me when I tell you, making movies ain’t easy. I was reminded of it this morning when a story crossed the wire about Cate Blanchett’s new lesbian picture 10 years in the making. This article resonated with me on many levels given my present undertaking with Fireball, which is, simply, that I’m in the middle of writing a film treatment of the story. In the Blanchett article about the movie called (ironically enough) Carol, the difficulty of writing a romantic picture came up. Said the director of Carol, Todd Haynes, “…I think love stories are hard to pull off, period. They require forces that keep the lovers apart.”

It’s true, as I’m learning. The best love stories feature lovers struggling to be together, or forced to be apart. The need for this dynamic, the eternal struggle of lovers, sunk the 1976 feature motion picture, Gable & Lombard, which sought to find the conflict separating the characters by inventing it: Gable is a wet-behind-the-ears Hollywood newcomer and Lombard is the brassy movie veteran; Gable is incapable of love and Lombard fears being hurt by it; society torments them for their unmarried relationship until they reach the breaking point and then … well, see the picture. Better yet, don’t see the picture, because it bears no real resemblance to the living, breathing people or their situation, not to mention the grisly miscasting of the actors playing said characters.

In my development of Fireball as a cinematic property, I’ve already run afoul of the physics of how to make the relationship of Lombard and Gable corporeal and not cliché. I used to be angry at the ineptitude of Gable & Lombard but now see what the screenwriters were up against in bringing two highly recognizable Hollywood legends to life as real people. I’m not sure anyone short of John Huston or Joe Mankiewicz could have pulled it off. Or maybe it’s just plain impossible to have an actor and actress impersonate Clark and Carole because their body of work lives on so we know exactly who they were and what they were like.

Impersonate THIS? I have my doubts.

I’ve had a discussion or three in recent weeks with people on the inside about Fireball the movie—the pros and cons and ins and outs of screenplays in the modern era. Should I concentrate on selling the intellectual property? Should I develop a treatment? Should I write a screenplay? Ask five Hollywood people these questions and you’ll get five diverging expert opinions, each one valid. My response is I’m just doing what I always do; I’m writing, spurred on by vivid scenes that have played on a loop inside my head for years. Weary people stepping inside an airplane. A fireball in the night sky. Men climbing through snow. A husband staring at a mountain. So many vivid moments that now haunt many as they once haunted only me.

Right now I’m trying out the story I want to tell in two hours. I’m picking the best scenes and identifying the characters that will populate my picture. I’m pretty sure my approach, arrived at after a meeting in Beverly Hills, is going to surprise lovers of the book. I’m open to ideas for what to include, and if you forward them to me, keep in mind that I’m not going to guarantee you a piece of the action. But I’ll remember you if I use your idea. Who knows, maybe we’ll end up splitting a limo one of these years on our way to the Oscars. At the very least I’ll give you one hell of a shout-out in my acceptance speech. You and Lou Lumenick.

The Good, the Bad, and the (so) Ugly (it’s GREAT)

You know those pictures that are so good in places it’s like sex and so bad in places it’s irresistible? The best example I can think of is Titanic. There are moments in Titanic that are so damn good and moments that are so damn bad. Those match dissolves from underwater wreck Titanic to 1912 Titanic and back again are spellbinding. Almost every scene with Gloria Stuart pops because she makes the stereotypical doddering old-woman canny and unpredictable. These things are on the one hand. On the other is Billy Zane, an otherwise fine actor who stumbles through Titanic trying to figure out how to play rich-boy Cal. He’s so bad he’s mesmerizing! David Warner as Cal’s sadistic butler is right up there in awfulness as a walking, talking bad-guy stereotype. The bottom line for me is picture-making on a grand scale and the vision of one driven man—a man who sometimes bites off more than he can chew. But I admire the fact that James Cameron swung for the fences just as hard as Selznick did with Gone With the Wind. And hit a box-office home run, just like Selznick.

Kate Winslet and Billy Zane in Titanic. In a moment he will grow melodramatic and sweep the table clean, ruining many dishes in an otherwise peaceful moment.

There’s another motion picture like this for me. The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille’s homage to all things circus. Today, the general consensus is that clowns are creepy—why America didn’t realize this a hundred years earlier, I don’t know. But once upon a time the circus represented an alternative lifestyle and huge entertainment every time it hit town. I never had any interest in the circus. I went one time as a little kid, Cole Brothers I think, with a big top, trapeze artists, clowns, all the rest of it. The only reason I went was they had a contest for coloring the clown and I stayed inside the lines and got a free ticket. Come to think of it, I tried cotton candy for the first time at that circus and haven’t had it since. Even at age seven I knew cotton candy to be too messy for a Virgo.

Anyway, I’m no circus freak, but you can sign me up for DeMille’s bigtop anytime. There’s a terrific documentary on DeMille here—check it out sometime to see the ultimate showman/filmmaker. And here’s the incredible trailer for The Greatest Show on Earth. The hardest thing for me to believe is that C.B. ever died! This larger-than-life powerhouse human and Hollywood mastermind of not one but two versions of The Ten Commandments up and died! Ceased to be! I’m sure he’s as surprised as the rest of us at this revolting man-bites-dog turn of events because people like Cecil B. DeMille should get some sort of exemption from human decline and just go on doing brilliant things. I guess the perception of DeMille as an immortal deity is enhanced by his growling narration on his pictures, Grandfather telling us a five-million-dollar bedtime story, full of surreal spectacle filling the screen long before C.G., along curvaceous, bejeweled women and noble, or hateful, or lustful men. If you watch a DeMille picture, that gravel voice stays with you, or it does me, and suddenly C.B. is narrating my drive to work “as the brawny hills of Pittsburgh shake off their night’s peaceful slumber and a restless giant awakens into the orangish hues of dawn.” DeMille’s brilliance gets in your head, I’m telling you. Come to think of it, he made a picture about early Pittsburgh called Unconquered that, as a colonial historian, made me roll over in my grave, and I’m not even dead yet.

Charlton Heston’s Brad Braden may be jealous of the way the Great Sebastian is carrying on with Holly but it’s hard to tell because Heston just comes off as nuts.

So yes, C.B. was brilliant, but with qualifications. Even by 1952 standards The Greatest Show on Earth was nailed as a big-old can of corny nonsense, which audiences ate up, making Greatest Show a box-office smash, winner of the Best Picture Academy Award, and generator of imitations for a decade to come. Greatest Show proved to have legs through re-releases in 1960 and 1967, and Steven Spielberg claims it as the first picture he ever saw, age 4—a picture that changed the history of entertainment. He says as a filmmaker, and with glee, “I lost my cherry to Cecil B. DeMille!”

When I learned Greatest Show was playing on Retro the other night I knew I was a goner, and the moment the music began, a swarm of goosebumps consumed me. I’ve got ‘em again just thinking about it. C.B. had me in his grip and didn’t release me until 2.5 hours later when heroic Holly sang the title tune and survivors of the spectacular train wreck lured townspeople to “come to the circus – the greatest show on earth!” The show must go on after all. Goosebumps.

James Jimmy Stewart in The Greatest Show on Earth

James Stewart as Buttons, the only crown I never thought was a creepy killer who would murder me in my sleep.

Of particular interest at this point in my life is James Stewart’s role of a mercy-killer on the run hiding in the circus as a clown who never takes off his makeup. It only sounds ridiculous because it is, but watch the picture and tell me it doesn’t work because Stewart brings to the role quiet wisdom, quiet vulnerability that pays off when he saves the circus boss’s life in the last reel.

Charlton Heston is that circus boss, Brad Braden, and he’s spectacularly over the top; practically the blueprint for Billy Zane. Throughout the 1950s Heston went from zero to Moses in a second; didn’t matter who he was playing, whether he was fighting ants in the jungle or pharaoh in Egypt or the British at New Orleans. He played it BIG with a capital BIG, bellowing his love scenes with fragile Eleanor Parker as surely as he bellowed fire and brimstone at gold-plated Ramses II.

All the women in the circus are in love with Brad, which says a lot about circus folk. Betty Hutton headlines as aerialist Holly, but Dorothy Lamour gets a lot of screen time as Phyllis the “iron jaw” and so does Gloria Grahame as Angel the elephant girl. They’re all sexy in different ways, and why they want Brad at all is beyond me. I have to wonder if C.B. had some issues because his heroines tend to be, well, a certain type. Usually the Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr, Ann Baxter, Dorothy Lamour type, mostly brunettes and some of them bad girls. Betty Hutton was something of a lightning rod as a personality and most people find her icky, but I’m sorry, in this picture, she’s hot too.

Prototypical DeMille girl Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments. Sign me up.

In fact I’m tempted to say that Betty Hutton steals Greatest Show, but how can I think that when James Stewart’s already stolen it? But wait, no he hasn’t. Cornel Wilde steals the show as the flamboyant French trapeze artist the Great Sebastian, swashbuckling his way through the picture just as he did in his other title that year, Sons of the Musketeers. Wilde owns the screen every minute he’s on it; a performance that’s wild all right. The whole picture is wild—we don’t believe any of it as something that could ever really happen, but who cares? These are irresistible people intensely interested in what they’re doing, both the characters on screen and the people playing them.

Because of the Stewart connection, I spent half a day going through DeMille’s personal Greatest Show production files at BYU (thank you, Jim D’Arc, for making me aware of them). What a giant undertaking C.B.’s circus epic was. DeMille was intimately involved in every detail, every act coming out of the woodwork begging to appear, every old character actor lobbying to play the ringmaster. DeMille’s right-hand man was associate producer Henry Wilcoxon, C.B.’s most dependable actor for decades and one helluva behind-the-scenes presence judging from the letters and memos. Some tidbits from the papers:

Betty Hutton spent weeks learning trapeze work and did many of her own stunts in the picture. It’s a tribute to her athleticism that not once does she look uncoordinated up there. In fact, she goes out of her way to make sure we see her—yes that’s her—over and over so audiences knew it was Hutton and not a stunt woman hanging upside down 40 feet off the ground.

Cornel Wilde was thrilled to play Sebastian and after the run of the picture kept sending C.B. letters thanking him for the opportunity. He signed them not Cornel but Sebastian. Wilde’s biceps and abs are ripped like crazy in this picture but, unlike Betty Hutton, he’s doubled extensively in the aerial sequences and there are zero shots where Wilde hangs upside down way up there so we know, “Look, it’s me and not a stuntman!” He left the dangerous stuff to the professionals.

Lucille Ball was set to play Angel the elephant girl but withdrew. To me this is a lucky break because Gloria Grahame is about as sexy as the 1950s got and perfect to play a girl who calls every guy “sugar.”

Dorothy Lamour was on the career skids by now and signed for only $2,000 a week when peers like Ball were signed for $3,500.

The mysterious, on-the-lam clown played by Stewart was originally named Koko, but there must have been a real Koko the Clown who put up a stink, so they had to rename Koko and what a pre-pro firestorm this produced! About 40 names were pitched, and there’s no documentation on how they arrived at the final name of “Buttons.”

James Jimmy Stewart Betty Hutton in The Greatest Show on Earth

“So Buttons, look at this story about a doctor who mercy-kills the girl he loves. Isn’t it a funny coincidence how you go around all morose talking about killing the thing you love? Why, they even talk about killing the thing you love in this article, by sheer coincidence. And, by the way, how come you never take off your clown makeup?”

Stewart didn’t audition for the role of Buttons. He just cabled DeMille and said if you’re looking for a clown on the run, how about if I play him? And C.B. gave him the part on the spot. It’s another of those offbeat, unresolved-issues characters that Stewart went after in the 1950s in the wake of his experiences in the war. In many of his pictures of this period his character had a streak of unspeakable pain or unspeakable violence in him—even good-guy George Bailey who let loose, ripped his living room and terrorized his family in It’s a Wonderful Life. There’s some evidence that Stewart cracked up on one of his missions in the Eighth Air Force, but that’s a story for a major book and feature motion picture down the line.

Stewart also had a “pregnancy clause” built into his contract because his wife was expecting (twins, as it turned out), and he stated he would not report for work until after the delivery.

I can’t imagine any of you under 40 would ever take the time to sit through The Greatest Show on Earth with all the computer-generated thrill shows out there today, Furious 7 and Avengers and all that, but when you run out of titles on your Netflix list and if you settle on Greatest Show, please, I’m begging you, let me know if it gave you goosebumps like it did, and still does—always does—give them to me.

After the circus train crashes in spectacular fashion (move over, The Fugitive), Buttons reveals himself to be the doctor who has killed the thing he loves so he can save Brad so Brad can live happily ever with Holly. In the meantime, being free of Holly allows Sebastian (left) the chance to hook up with Angel (right).

When I Grow Up…

…I want to be Rudy Behlmer. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I can dream, can’t I? If you’re a fan of classic film, Rudy’s work has likely touched you in some way. If you have seen Ken Murray’s Hollywood Without Makeup, which plays often on Turner Classic Movies, then you’ve watched a program directed by Rudy Behlmer. If you have read Memo from David O. Selznick or Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, just two of his many books, then you’ve been enriched by Rudy Behlmer’s scholarship. If you have explored the bonus features of DVDs like The Adventures of Robin Hood or King Kong or dozens of others, you’ve been enlightened by Rudy’s crazy knowledge of the production of classic Hollywood pictures. Rudy is the guy who took us Inside Warner Bros. where he sifted through those terrific inter-office memos that circulated during the production of Warner classics and gave us glimpses of the off-camera dramas. And, of course, Rudy was co-author along with Tony Thomas and Clifford McCarty of The Films of Errol Flynn, the 1969 Citadel volume that put Flynn’s career in perspective. Just this week I was enjoying the BYU CD original score of Dodge City—Rudy wrote the liner notes—70 pages worth!

I have asked for Rudy’s help on a number of occasions and at first it wasn’t easy because the man’s a legend and has an imperious quality about him. He has known and worked with the greats. Every time he answered one of my questions (or 10 of my questions) or reviewed a piece of my writing, I felt honored that he thought my work was worthy of his time and expertise.

No, I will never be Rudy Behlmer when I grow up; there’s only one, and I appreciate his love for Golden Hollywood. I respect his desire to protect the memories of those who made the pictures. I revel in his body of works that have benefited those of us who care about the studios and the stars. If there were a Mount Rushmore of film scholarship, he’d be on it.

I’m curious to know what your favorite Rudy Behlmer work is. If you look him up on IMDB you won’t believe how many credits he has in media. He’s one guy that we just haven’t taken time to appreciate and thank for a lifetime of service to classic film.