Dana Andrews -- The Best Years of His Life

With Dana Andrews, Carl Rollyson hit the jackpot. Carl, like all who devote their lives to exploring the lives of others, knows how hard it can be is to contend with the family of a biographical subject. Some relatives are resistant, wanting the family secrets to remain secret. Some want to take control, insisting that their version of events is the only possible interpretation. There’s a grim joke among biographers forced to deal with a deceased subject’s next of kin: “First kill the widow.”  

But occasionally you get lucky. Carl was approached by Susan Andrews, Dana’s daughter, because she and her siblings were seeking a fuller understanding of their famous father. They had letters, memorabilia, and the diary of a man who had always held firmly onto his past. They were happy to be interviewed, but would not interfere with Carl’s conclusions. It was the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at an actor whom Carl had long admired. The book was published in 2012. Carl calls it Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews.

As the title suggests, Dana Andrews was something of  a mystery man. Not for him the flamboyant public life of most stars. He and his family lived well, in suburban Toluca Lake, but he vigorously shielded his wife and kids (as well as himself) from the Hollywood social circuit, with its retinue of eager reporters trolling for gossip. His resistance to glitz and glamour partly stemmed from his upbringing, as one of 13 children born to a strait-laced Texas preacher and his wife. His early years as a cog in the Hollywood studio system also helped shape his attitude. While a contract player (1938-1941) under the imperious Samuel Goldwyn, he was expected to squire starlets around town, in order to generate publicity. Though he badly wanted to wed his sweetheart, Mary Todd, he was forced to seek Goldwyn’s permission before heading for the altar.

As an actor, Dana Andrews was known for portraying common men who reveal an uncommon nobility. His best performances are subtle ones, marked by heroic restraint. Carl Rollyson, once an aspiring actor himself, is at his best when dissecting Andrews’ pivotal role as a lynching victim in 1943’s The Ox-Bow Incident. It was Laura (1944) that shot him to stardom, as the police detective who’s not quite as matter-of-fact as he first seems. But the performance I cherish can be found in 1947’s big Oscar winner, The Best Years of Our Lives. This film about military draftees readjusting to civilian life meant a great deal to my parents – and, I suspect, to many whose lives were touched by the upheavals of World War II. At the Oscar ceremony, Frederic March was named Best Actor for portraying a middle-aged banker whose values shift after his homecoming. And Harold Russell, a first-time actor who’d lost both hands in a military training exercise, won a Best Supporting Actor statuette, while also copping an honorary award for inspiring his fellow veterans. Their performances are undeniably poignant, but Andrews (as a war hero brought down to earth by his lowly civilian status) is the glue that holds the story together. He received no Oscar love then, nor for any other role.

It’s startling to read about Dana Andrews’ problems with alcohol, which ultimately shortened a splendid career. Carl views drink as Andrews’ way of coping with a world in which he felt uncomfortable. In 1972, though, he licked  his demons, then bravely filmed a public service announcement owning up to his alcoholism and urging drunk drivers to stay off the road. As always, he was a class act.

As a biographer myself, I applaud Carl Rollyson’s many achievements. And I can’t resist mentioning a coup of my own: getting an unexpected rave from a New York Times reviewer who favorably compared my Roger Corman bio to a new Corman coffee-table book costing twice as much.

Big Bad Mama Rides Again

Not long ago, 82-year-old Angie Dickinson was interviewed by film historian Stephen Farber. When asked about her starring role in a 1974 Roger Corman gangster romp, she said something like this: “Big Bad Mama does not qualify as a classic, although I was very good in it!"

She was indeed. As a dirt-poor Depression-era Texas mom who turns to a life of crime to give her daughters a better future, Angie is spunky, smart, and above all sexy. In the course of the film she beds both a virile young stud (Tom Skerritt) and a courtly older gentleman (William Shatner), but there’s never any question that she’s the one on top. Whether delivering bootleg whiskey, robbing a bank, or plotting to hold an heiress for ransom, she’s the brains behind the operation, while also tenderly mothering her two nubile daughters. No question that the role kept her busy, but cast and crew all adored her. I should know: I was there.

Vince Rotolo and the good folks behind The B-Movie Cast recently invited me to share my memories of this New World Pictures classic. When I came to work for Roger, my colleague Frances Doel was hard at work on a female gangster story, a more light-hearted variant on Bonnie and Clyde and Roger’s own Bloody Mama. It was Roger’s practice, as a Writers Guild signatory, to get someone around the office to crank out a first draft over a weekend, so he’d only have to pay a guild member a rewrite fee. We next found a Hollywood veteran, Bill Norton (White Lightning), who didn’t realize that the script he was hired to improve had been written by the woman sitting across the desk in our story meetings. He only learned the truth when we got the giggles over his request to meet the originator of the story. At which point he very graciously insisted that Frances share his writing credit. (A modest woman, she still claims he was trying to evade taking full responsibility for the screenplay’s faults.)

Truth be told, the script is a lot of fun. It was a challenge to film, though, as director Steve Carver would be the first to tell you. We had to track down inexpensive 1930s-era locations, like a racetrack, a country church, a small-town Main Street, and a society mansion, all not far from L.A.  Vintage cars and weapons too. Somehow we found what we needed, and persuaded such Hollywood pros as Royal Dano, Noble Willingham, and a very naked Sally Kirkland to help fill out our cast. 

Yes, this was a movie that did not stint on T&A. Tom Skerritt was fine with it, but William Shatner proved a shrinking violet. (It didn’t help that Skerritt, whose character was supposed to be hostile to Shatner’s, took every opportunity to knock his toupee askew.) As for Angie, she knew that Roger expected full frontal nudity. A very sleek 43-year-old, she was comfortable in her skin, and had no hesitation in baring it for the camera. Her example was helpful to the plucky young women playing her daughters, Robbie Lee and Susan Sennett (now the wife of Graham Nash). The script calls for them to frequently take it all off, especially in a steamy ménage à trois scene with lucky Skerritt.

As production secretary I once fielded a call from Playboy, asking if the two were centerfold material. When I explained that Angie had the best figure in the film, the female caller sniffed, “Well, I hope I look as good when I’m her age.”  You wish, lady. You wish. 

The Return of Bonnie and Clyde

So cable TV is taking a crack at Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Three networks -- History, Lifetime, and A&E -- have joined for a simulcast of the mini-series Bonnie & Clyde, scheduled to begin on December 8. In dramatizing a violent episode from America’s past, they’re hoping for the sort of ratings bonanza enjoyed by last year’s Hatfields & McCoys. The reviews I’ve seen don’t make the simulcast (starring Emile Hirsch and Holliday Grainger as the doomed outlaws) sound promising. I’m guessing it will have no more impact than a Broadway musical about the pair, which eked out a mere 36 performances in 2011.

One problem, of course, is that it’s tough to measure up to Arthur Penn’s brilliant 1967 film, which unerringly walked the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Penn’s two leading actors, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, were perfectly cast. Beatty was also the film’s dauntless producer, sweet-talking Jack Warner into financing his passion project and then, when Warner hated the finished film, rescuing it from oblivion and delivering it into the hands of influential critics like Pauline Kael.

 Bonnie and Clyde became a hit partly because it meshed so well with the concerns of its day. The story of two Depression-era outlaws might have meant nothing special to audiences in some other decade. But in 1967, in the wake of the JFK assassination and the escalating war in Vietnam, violence had become a national obsession. And hip young audiences were also increasingly sensitive to questions of social inequality. When I spoke to Arthur Penn in 2008, he made clear the extent to which he had added to Robert Benton and David Newman’s sexy New Wave-inspired script a social consciousness that grounded the lovers’ story in the realities of the 1930s, while also touching on issues that mattered hugely to the emerging Baby Boom generation.

Vietnam was very much on Penn’s mind. In World War II he had seen combat as an infantryman at the Battle of the Bulge. The experience quickly convinced him of the insanity of war: “It was not glorious, not organized, nothing. Nobody knew what the hell they were doing; it was just save your life and chaos.” That’s why, when he came to make Bonnie and Clyde, “I had decided not to mollycoddle the audience about shooting and death. This, after all, was wartime.”

Penn was also remembering the Kennedy assassination, which suggests itself subliminally in the way Clyde’s head is blown apart during the final ambush. Penn emphasized what he considered a fundamentally American bloodlust in the “Ring of Fire” sequence where the outlaws, including a badly wounded Buck Barrow, are surrounded by a circle of men with shotguns. The whooping and the hollering and the rebel yells as the posse moves in on its prey reveal that these representatives of law and order enjoy bloodletting as much as the criminals do.

Penn also showcases the plight of society’s disenfranchised from a Sixties perspective. He doesn’t just focus on Okies, but also positions in the background of many scenes the sort of humble rural black man who three decades later would be the focus of the civil rights movement. At climactic points in the story you can spot down-home African-Americans lounging on a bench or driving past in a truck, essentially functioning as a silent Greek chorus. Once Clyde briefly clasps a black man’s hand  in friendship, a taboo gesture in 1930s Texas. Just one more reason why young viewers in the Sixties connected so viscerally with a drama about a pair who’d lived, loved, and died thirty years before. 

It’s a strange segue from killers to a man of peace, but I want to at least mention the passing of the remarkable Nelson Mandela. Ironic indeed that a new biopic, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, is just now coming into theatres. I gather that its focus is Mandela the saint, rather than the more complicated flesh-and-blood human being, but it seems worth attention nonetheless.

David Groves and the Magic of Storytelling

David Groves tells stories. I know him as a career journalist, a fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. But he’s also dabbled in fiction from an early age. That’s partly why he – still in his teens – connected with the young Gale Anne Hurd, who also aspired to write. Over the years they lost touch, alas, so you won’t see his writing credit on Hurd’s The Walking Dead anytime soon.

But now David’s the proud author of a powerful suspense novel, What Happens to Us. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have movies on the brain. Though he’s writing for the page and not the screen, he considers his new work cinematic in structure: “The protagonist is always in peril, and the viewer knows it. This keeps the viewer on the edge of the seat even when things are slow.” There’s a seemingly unstoppable bad guy, one who uses modern surveillance technology to track his victims, and the plot builds to a breathless conclusion that takes his protagonist up to the point of death – and practically beyond it.

That protagonist is a smart, tough, but deeply conflicted young woman. (In a movie version, David would consider Jennifer Lawrence dream casting. Or maybe Emma Stone.) Though she’s clean and sober when the story begins, her years of alcoholism have put a monster on her trail. Only by returning to the drinking habits of her flamboyant alter ego, Kick, can she begin to figure out why he’s so determined to chase her down. In creating this character, David did not stint on research, but he’s most indebted to Koren Zailckas’s Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, because “what I needed was the raw, embarrassing stories from a female alcoholic’s life to teach me what the pattern was. That book spared nothing.”

At the movies, of course, there are alcoholics aplenty. David mentions particularly Clean and Sober (“The lies, the bargains, the price he had to pay. He really hit bottom.”) Other films he admires include Crazy Heart, Tender Mercies, and the recent Flight, which taught him that “you have to be able to hurt or kill some of your characters if you’re going to have an impact on the viewer or reader.” He dislikes the portrayal of alcoholics in Arthur, and in such classics as Harvey, The Philadelphia Story, and even It’s a Wonderful Life, for showcasing what Hollywood has tended to consider “the funny and harmless drunk. None of them are harmless.”

When he’s not writing, David is a working magician, a member of Hollywood’s famous Magic Castle. To him, sleight of hand is not so different from what a novelist or filmmaker does: “Magic is an elaborately designed deception.  So is a novel or a film.  There is no Luke Skywalker, but Lucas convinces us he exists, if just for that hypnotic moment inside the theatre.” The secret, for both wordsmiths and magicians, lies in the power of misdirection. See below for a sample of David’s magical talents at work.

As for designing a magic act, “it’s very similar to designing a novel or a movie. What you’re manipulating is the interest of the audience, and the same principles apply.” These being: 

Start with a quick bang.

Invite the audience into your head and soul.

Make them identify with you.

Hit different notes all the time, never repeat.

Create callbacks.

Create consistent themes.

Whenever possible, include secrets and withheld information.

Whenever possible, include lies.

End with your best stuff.

Convince them the protagonist is about to fail, then let him or her succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

The Straight Skinny on “Dallas Buyers Club”

There’s much to admire about Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. In the role of Ron Woodroof, a cocky Texan whose HIV-positive status leads him to battle the FDA and the medical establishment, McConaughey is both powerful and nuanced. And at times extremely funny too. But virtually every review praising his performance mentions that he lost over thirty pounds (or forty, or fifty, despending on what source you read) to achieve the skeletal frame of a man dying of AIDS.  This was a far cry from his 2012 Magic Mike, in which he buffed up to play a male stripper.

McConaughey isn’t the first Hollywood star to punish his body in the service of his art. Tom Hanks also got skinny to play an AIDS sufferer in Philadelphia. For Cast Away he ate himself pudgy to portray a sedentary middle-aged guy. Then production was halted for a year of serious dieting so that he could look suitably gaunt as a man marooned on a South Pacific island. Hanks recently revealed he’s got Type 2 diabetes, a situation that may (or may not) have been encouraged by his years of yoyo-ing weight.

Other stars who’ve lost major poundage to take on dramatic roles include Christian Bale (The Fighter), Matt Damon (Courage Under Fire), Matthew Fox (Alex Cross), and Curtis “Fifty Cent” Jackson, who played a football star battling cancer in All Things Fall Apart. Michael Fassbender starved 42 pounds off his frame when portraying real-life Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands in Hunger. Another actor who whittled himself to a point of near starvation was Adrien Brody, playing a Warsaw musician hiding from the Nazis in The Pianist.

Brody won a Best Actor Oscar for his pains, the youngest man ever to do so. Likewise Tom Hanks was honored for Philadelphia, and McConaughey is considered a serious Oscar contender this year. In 2011, Christian Bale won for his supporting role in The Fighter, and Jared Leto (who also dropped significant weight to play – brilliantly -- a transsexual AIDS patient in Dallas Buyers Club) is frequently mentioned in this category. So acquiring a lean and hungry look can have its rewards. Obviously, Oscar voters are impressed by guys who go without dinner.

Women who’ve found success in today’s Hollywood of course know a thing or two about dieting. Even for those who are NOT playing cancer patients or concentration camp inmates, thin is definitely in. The web is full of blow-by-blow accounts of the workout and dietary regime that allowed the already slender Anne Hathaway to squeeze into her cat suit for The Dark Knight Rises. She went beyond slim and slinky to play the tortured Fantine in Les Miserables. For this she too won an Oscar, along with (I suspect) the adulation of teenage girls keen to latch onto her diet secrets.

The determination by Hollywood stars to lose weight at all costs is nothing new. Back in 1967, Faye Dunaway was cast as outlaw Bonnie Parker in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde. Her previous film had been Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown, a Southern-fried melodrama in which she played the supporting role of a hearty country gal. Costume designer Theadora Van Runkle confirmed to me Dunaway’s instinctive sense that she’d need to be thinner to do justice to Bonnie’s 1930s look. She slimmed down almost overnight, strictly through will power: “I never saw her eat anything.” Which made Dunaway not the pleasantest person to have on a movie set. But what price glory?

All the above is making me mighty hungry, so I think I’ll go gobble some pumpkin pie. Happy Thanksgiving!