Off To See the Wizard

Yesterday, wandering through Beverly Hills, I ogled a private home that looks as though it should house a Wicked Witch or two. It was a vivid reminder that Los Angeles -- land of giant donuts, movie palaces modeled on Chinese temples, and a suburb named after Tarzan of the Apes -- has always spawned fantasy. Today it’s clear that fantasy, Hollywood-style, is still very much with us. I’m referring to the blockbuster opening of Disney’s Oz, The Great and Powerful, based on characters devised by one of SoCal’s adopted sons, L. Frank Baum. Now the race is on for both Disney and Warner Bros. (which holds the rights to MGM’s classic Wizard of Oz) to bring additional Oz material to the waiting public.

Surely, nothing will ever supplant the 1939 musical in our collective imagination. But The Wizard of Oz, which has been called the most watched motion picture in history, didn’t start out as a surefire hit. I’m taking most of my information from Aljean Harmetz’s invaluable 1977 account, The Making of the Wizard of Oz. Harmetz, whose mother had toiled in the studio’s wardrobe department, provides an insider’s view of the twists and turns surrounding the film’s completion. Her book, one of the first “making of” volumes ever written, captures an era that itself is now very much somewhere over the rainbow.

For one thing, fantasy was something new in Hollywood back then. It was only because Walt Disney’s Snow White had been a worldwide sensation that MGM ventured its own brand of once-upon-a-time. The financial risks were huge. Idiot’s Delight, starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer, and based on a drama direct from Broadway, shot for 8 weeks at a cost of $1,519,000. This was about average for a major MGM film in 1939. By contrast, Wizard of Oz took 22 weeks to shoot, and cost $2,777,000. MGM would not recoup its investment for twenty years, until television sales made all the difference.

 Then there were screenplay and personnel problems. Believers in auteur filmmaking should know how many hands wrote the script, and how many directors stepped in to call the shots. Famously, Judy Garland became Dorothy when Fox wouldn’t lend out Shirley Temple, and Buddy Ebsen had to relinquish the role of the Tin Man ten days into production because the  aluminum powder makeup made him deathly ill. Margaret Hamilton, who became justly famous as the Wicked Witch of the West, was a last-minute replacement for Gale Sondergaard, who objected when her role shifted from a glamorous but deadly villainess (as in Disney’s Snow White) to a green-faced hag.

In 1939, special effects were still primitive, and Margaret Hamilton bore the brunt of an experiment in the Munchkin Land sequence. As she remembered, “There was a little elevator that was supposed to take me down, with a bit of fire and smoke erupting to dramatize and conceal my exit. The first take ran like clockwork, I went down out of my clothes, the fire and smoke erupted, and that's the one you see." But on the second take, the timing was off, and she was exposed to the flames. The grease in her copper-based makeup caught fire, leading to second-degree burns on her face and hands. She was hospitalized for six weeks, before returning to the Culver City lot.

Harmetz faults The Wizard of Oz  for sentimentality, but also argues for its psychic power in capturing and surmounting childhood fears:  “It is in the tangled subtext—beyond or beneath art—that the film has remained alive.” Let’s see James Franco top that!

Elizabeth and Hazel: One Picture that’s Worth Ten Thousand Words

Black History Month is over, but I musn’t neglect a book that gives a fascinating glimpse of life in the civil rights era. David Margolick’s Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock is a stunning recognition of the power of one photo to change history. In passing, the book also reveals the extent to which lives are shaped by images seen on TV and at the movies.

Let me explain. On September 4, 1957, two fifteen-year-old girls set out for Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth Eckford was one of nine black students who’d volunteered to desgregate the all-white school. The other eight approached Central High as a group. Through a misunderstanding, Elizabeth arrived alone – and was instantly set upon by a mob spewing racist epithets. In the first photo to hit the press, Elizabeth is in the foreground, her tense face half-hidden behind oversized dark glasses. But the picture’s focal point is Hazel Bryan, her mouth distorted as she screams invectives at the girl she refuses to accept as a classmate.

This photograph galvanized the nation. At a North Dakota concert venue, it prompted the usually genial Louis Armstrong to deliver a blistering attack on the Jim Crow South, and his words were quickly turned by the USSR into anti-American propaganda. Before long President Eisenhower announced he was sending federal troops to ensure the peaceful integration of Central High. It was hardly the last time black-versus-white friction would make the evening news.

Margolick’s book, zeroing in on the two girls at the heart of the photo, makes some surprising discoveries about their motivations. Elizabeth, painfully shy, was partly inspired to enter Central High by crusading attorney Clarence Darrow. She’d come to admire Darrow through Inherit the Wind, which she watched in one of Little Rock’s segregated movie theatres. She and her family felt the stirrings of black pride – “There’s a Negro on television!” – whenever Nat Cole, Harry Belafonte, or Ella Fitzgerald appeared on the tube.

Hazel, theatrical by nature,  had chosen her tight-fittimg dress on that fateful day to emulate Marilyn Monroe and other Hollywood stars. Always craving attention, she stood outside Central High (in Margolick’s words) “yelling awful things, awful enough for people to notice, even before it was frozen on film.” As the hateful photo circulated, then became published in textbooks, “her image increasingly became the official face of intolerance.”

In later years, Hazel made a U-turn, renouncing intolerance and making a sincere attempt to befriend Elizabeth. But her former image stuck, especially when the two appeared together on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and their famous host seemed unconvinced of her change of heart. Meanwhile, Hollywood and the U.S. government joined to turn the Little Rock desegregation battles into happy talk. 1964’s Nine from Little Rock  was commissioned by the U.S. Information Agency to show foreign nations how America was overcoming its racial issues: Elizabeth appeared on camera holding college textbooks, but the emotional problems that ultimately thwarted her college dreams were hidden from view. (The film won an Oscar for best documentary short.) A 1981 TV movie, Crisis at Central High, and Disney’s 1993 The Ernest Green Story (focusing on the most successful of the Little Rock Nine) also put a positive spin on an experience that has shadowed Elizabeth’s and Hazel’s lives in complex and often painful ways.  

I’m delighted that David Margolick will be one of my panelists at the annual conference of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, discussing his career as a biographer. It happens on Saturday, April 27 in New York City, and the public is cordially invited. 

And for lovers of biography and memoir, here’s a brand-new social media site called Riffle, on which to discuss your favorites.

A Potpourri of Papal Piffle

So at the moment we are popeless. As of last Friday, Benedict XVI was handing over the reins of power and flying off to the world’s cushiest retirement home. Now it remains for a covey of cardinals to meet in the Sistine Chapel and – beneath Michelangelo’s magnificent renderings of God and man – elect the next head of the Roman Catholic Church.

I’ve got to hand it to the Catholics: they’ve got a genius for organizing spectacles. There’s high drama in the fancy vestments, the burning of ballots after each secret vote, the puff of white smoke that signals when a consensus has been reached. Add to all that the jubilant tolling of the Vatican bells and the emergence of the new pontiff on a balcony high above the cast of thousands assembled to greet him in St. Peter’s Square. Sounds like a movie to me.

Actually, I’ve never been much for religious flicks. And I can’t think of too many that have the papacy at their center. The first that comes to mind is The Shoes of the Fisherman, a 1968 cold war epic in which Anthony Quinn is unexpectedly chosen as the first Slavic pope, in order to head off a doomsday scenario involving Russia, China, and some stray nukes. Of course he questions his faith and suffers a lot. So does Tom Tryon in The Cardinal, another big Sixties movie in which an earnest American priest faces up to virtually every social challenge of his day, from celibacy to race relations to the  Church’s dealings with the Third Reich. (Remarkably, the Vatican’s official liaison officer for The Cardinal was Joseph Ratzinger, who now of course is The Cleric Formerly Known as Pope.)

From 1965, there’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, based on Irving Stone’s ponderous but popular novel about the painting of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Charlton Heston (who else?) is an intense Michelangelo, opposite Rex Harrison’s foxy Pope Julius II. In Becket (1964) the main conflict is between England’s King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) and Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), once a drinking pal but now taking all too seriously his role as Archbishop of Canterbury. At one point, Becket makes a quick trip to Rome, where he fails to persuade the Holy Pontiff to release him from his office. This brief Vatican visit plays out on a sumptuous set that got a second airing when Roger Corman – filming at London’s Elstree Studio – used it to represent the interior of Prince Prospero’s doomed castle in The Masque of the Red Death.

Though Roger Corman was born a Catholic, he’s not one to be overawed by the majesty of the Church. When he considered filming a World War II drama, The Spy in the Vatican, he instructed an assistant to get the Pope on the phone and arrange for a few weeks of shooting in Vatican City. Over her protests that the Pontiff and his staff might not cotton to this plan, Roger calmly advised her to “tell them I’m a registered Catholic.” He also pooh-poohed her fears that the Vatican might be displeased with the existing script’s slant on the role of the Church in World War II.  Said Roger, “In that case, we will make up a script to send them.” (Needless to say, it didn’t work.) 

As for me, I’m most impressed with the new Pope Emeritus having traded in his spiffy red shoes for everyday brown ones. I suspect that giving up the ruby slippers is never easy. Particularly if -- as you sometimes discover -- there’s no place like Rome. 

Woody Strode: Django Overlooked

Before seeing Django Unchained, I had pasta for dinner. That seemed entirely fitting, because the Oscar-winning epic (best original screenplay) is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s salute to spaghetti westerns. His particular model is the original Django, the 1966 Italian horse opera in which a common man who’s suffered great loss is elevated into a hero bent on revenge.

One huge difference, of course, between the original Django and Tarantino’s version is that his is set in the Ante Bellum South, and his avenging angel is not Franco Nero but Jamie Foxx. It’s a black man, not a white one, who rises from near death and lays waste to everyone and everything around him. Casting off the shackles of slavery, Fox’s Django is empowered by righteous anger. Truly, he comes to embody the wrath of God.

It’s the sort of role that didn’t exist for a black man when Woody Strode broke into the movies. Strode had a major career, spanning more than forty years. He was a favorite of some of the greatest action directors in the business, notably John Ford, for whom he appeared in four films, including a key role in Sergeant Rutledge. But though Strode played the title character, a Buffalo soldier in the U.S. Cavalry in the late 1880s, his role is largely that of a victim. He’s been accused of the rape and murder of a white girl, then flees to avoid prosecution. Inevitably it’s that cinematic staple, the Good White Man, who saves him. Top-billed Jeffrey Hunter, as the counsel for the defense, finds the real killer in the courtroom, and Strode is freed.

Along with victims, Strode played the occasional bad guy, most dramatically as the gunslinger in the opening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a  Time in America. And, inevitably, he played sidekicks. In Richard Brooks’ The Professionals, he’s part of a four-man posse that includes Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Robert Ryan, but only Strode is omitted from the above-the-title credits. In his best-known part, he’s an African slave forced to fight fellow captives as a gladiator. Audiences have always thrilled to the moment when he sacrifices his life so that Spartacus can live on.

 Woody Strode never planned on being an actor.  He was a multi-sport phenom at UCLA, circa 1940. While former UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson was changing the face of baseball, Strode became one of the first African-Americans to play professional football. Then he moved into professional wrestling, where he discovered (according to his son Kalai) that he could be applauded by white Southerners for beating up a white opponent. It was all in the staging: “My dad could not pounce upon and hit and punish these white wrestlers without the audience’s approval. The white wrestler has to beat my dad up to a pulp. Then my dad has to turn to the audience and say, Shall I really give it to ‘em – shall I do it? They all scream, Yes, hit ‘em, hit ‘em! And then my dad can hit him, and win, and everyone’s cheering.” As Kalai explained to me, Southern fans would “start off white against black, but they’re really good against bad.” And Woody Strode, from the start, struck them as a good guy.

 From wrestling, it was just a short hop to an acting career. He shaved his head to play a native chief in TV’s Ramar of the Jungle, and never looked back. With his strong presence and exotic look (he was almost half Native American), Strode was always a contender. But not, in that era, the mythic hero he could have been. 

Here are some photos from Kalai Strode's collection, one of Woody in a Tarzan film and one taken late in life at his Glendora, California home. Maybe I'll have a chance to write more about Woody Strode (and his family) someday soon. 

 

Of Boobs and Men . . .

On the 2013 Oscar broadcast, host Seth MacFarlane found a way to flaunt his bad-boy credentials while at the same time seeming to repudiate them. We saw Captain Kirk, time-traveling from the future to critique MacFarlane’s Oscar-night outing, chastise him for a naughty ditty that had infuriated all the women in attendance.  Cue a production number: MacFarlane singing “We Saw Your Boobs,” gaily naming Hollywood lovelies who’d popped their tops on screen. The camera helpfully picked out those implicated. Most of them hardly looked amused by this reminder of the peep-show side of the movie biz, and of their role in indulging the fantasy life of horny males like the evening’s host.

Bare breasts was first sanctioned in a Hollywood studio film in 1964, when Sidney Lumet made The Pawnbroker. Lumet’s purpose was serious, not prurient. He was exploring the horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the loss of human dignity among the denizens of a Harlem ghetto. That’s why the MPAA censors recognized it was time to loosen the Academy rules against on-screen nudity.  

The change came in an era when hip young American filmmakers were looking to Europe for artistic inspiration. Continental Europeans, always more relaxed about displaying their bodies on beaches and in ad campaigns, had been far quicker than their American counterparts to incorporate on-screen nudity into their filmmaking. This served, of course, to heighten eroticism, while also launching a full assault on puritanical self-restraint. Back in 1960, François Truffaut made fun of American prudishness in Shoot the Piano Player by showing his leading man, Charlie, in bed with a friendly and very naked hooker. As they joke about TV and films, Charlie briefly covers his bed-mate’s large breasts with a sheet, quipping, “This is how it’s done in [Hollywood] movies.” (Ironically, the shot of her exposed breasts was briefly cut out of the film’s first American release in 1962.}

But after The Pawnbroker, American filmgoers were discovering breasts in a big way. Sometimes female breasts were exposed for thematic reasons, to shock the audience into sharing a character’s humiliation (see Schindler’s List, The Accused, Boys Don’t Cry). In such cases, we were meant to feel violated ourselves. Helen Hunt’s full-frontal nudity in The Sessions was, conversely, a thematic statement about her character’s healthily matter-of-fact acceptance of the human body, despite its imperfections.

Most often, though, we’re expected to be in the mind of the male titillated by the female form.  The Graduate flashed almost subliminal glimpses of Mrs. Robinson’s bare breasts to reflect the psyche of Benjamin Braddock, torn between horror and lust by the sight of his father’s partner’s wife in full cougar mode. When the zaftig and not-so-young Kathy Bates stripped and entered the hot tub in About Schmidt, we shared a moment of truth in with the confused middle-aged man played by Jack Nicholson.

Most filmmakers, of course, are male. And most American films featuring female breast nudity contain more than a pinch of voyeurism. Take it from a Roger Corman veteran: Breasts are the cheapest special effect in our business. Given Roger’s penchant for hiring smart young women as writers, directors, and producers, it is female Cormanites who’ve often found themselves teasing out plot excuses for well-endowed cuties to bare their boobs. Cuties like a young Sandra Bullock in Corman’s Fire on the Amazon. Yes, Seth MacFarlane could have included her on his list too. Ah, Hollywood -- land of the lustful male gaze! Which may explain why Lena Dunham seems to enjoy baring her own imperfect body, since she’s in a position to do it on her own terms.