Warner bros, p.7
Warner Bros, page 7
That was January 1926, when Harry was telling Jack (who was trying to act for Lubitsch) that Kiss Me Again never managed to play longer than three days in one venue. “His pictures are over people’s heads,” said Harry. He told Lubitsch his pictures were “too subtle. . . . The world wants thrills and excitement.”7 Soon Lubitsch would be at Paramount, a more suitable home, because his touch was appreciated there, and because Paramount had distribution resources and theatres that surpassed anything at Warners.
Sam and Jack together had persuaded Harry to offer John Barrymore a contract—for $75,000 a picture—on the grounds that so handsome and distinguished a reputation was bound to work on film. Harry had been dubious: he had heard that Barrymore was a womanizer and a drunk, as well as an actor who tended to pose and offer his celebrated profile to the movie camera. But Barrymore came to Warners for Beau Brummel (1924), The Sea Beast (a version of Moby-Dick, 1926), and Don Juan (1926). The latter had been most interesting because it was a film that came with a synchronized sound track—though only music. There were also more than a hundred kisses in the film, as Barrymore wooed characters played by Estelle Taylor and Mary Astor (his former lover, discovered for Beau Brummel, but then cast aside in favor of Dolores Costello).8
This gesture towards sound was the product of Sam’s enthusiasm. It was he who had attended demonstrations at Western Electric’s Bell Laboratories, and been struck by the authenticity of sound effects. He had persuaded Harry and the others to look at the tests that involved a synchronized sound-on-disk system. Harry (the decisive figure still) had been unimpressed, except in the matter of musical accompaniment. Nagged by Sam, he had agreed to Don Juan having music. As for talk, he thought that was unnecessary, pedestrian, and contrary to the spirit of movies.
Don Juan opened on August 6, 1926, in New York, with the disk system as perfected by Vitaphone. It’s fascinating to see how far Harry and Warners as a whole were at cross purposes. They had a new gimmick at the very least, and they had spent nearly $800,000 on Don Juan. Harry himself organized a big opening. The Warner Theatre at Broadway and 52nd was then the only place equipped for Vitaphone. So Harry telephoned Will Hays, once postmaster general, now head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and soon to devise a censorship code for movies. He asked Hays to do a short introductory speech on Vitaphone. Hays remembered it as 325 words. He wrote the speech and rehearsed it. He had the text written up on cards and put on an easel. “In the recording room that evening I stood in front of a microphone and a camera and said my piece—with gestures.” Hays attended the première and observed that he “didn’t set the world on fire.”9 But suppose Barrymore had talked, and kissed, and sighed.
When he wrote his memoir, Hays recalled a Dallas newspaper that had heard and guessed at the truth: “Nothing has happened in New York this summer which is more important for Dallas than the opening of the New Warner Motion Picture Theatre. It means that before long the greatest artists will be available to the remotest villager, in a form so lifelike that the very personality of the artist seems to be present, and it is easier than not to believe he is actually before you.”10 Silent pictures were about icons; sound delivered actual, impulsive humanity.
In the months that followed Don Juan (it was only a modest hit), Sam had a brainwave to urge on his brothers. If a project was called The Jazz Singer, and if it was about music, why let it stay a silent picture? Suppose Jackie/Jack would sing. What happened next comes to us from Jack Warner as a fast-talking dialogue scene of a kind that was still a few years away at Warner Brothers. But it plays, and Jack’s version makes him central, even if Harry was still leader.
The studio is about to put The Jazz Singer into production. So Jack calls George Jessel, the attached actor, about a start date. Jessel points out that his original contract had said nothing about singing. Jessel could sing, but with no special dramatic urgency.
“I guess I don’t like your attitude,” says Jack. “You want more money, right? How much?”
“I want ten grand more,” Jessel tells him.
“You’ve got it. Come on out and I’ll give you a binding letter.”
“The letter first, then I come out,” says Jessel.
“Goddammit it, Georgie. I give you my word.”
“That’s not enough. Your brother Harry will never go for the deal.”
“Okay, Georgie. If you can’t take my word let’s forget the whole thing.”
“All right, the deal’s off,” says Jessel. He had been a big-timer once, but he was walking into his closet in history.11 He would add later that he was offended by the way the movie changed the play by having Jackie sing Kol Nidre and then go back to show business. Having your matzo and eating it.
In his book, Jack says he asked himself, “Now what the hell do I do?” at Jessel’s departure. But maybe he had a hunch. He went to Eddie Cantor, who told him, nicely, that he’d rather not betray Jessel. So then Jack thought of Jolson—“He had the sob in his voice” and was less sensitive to betrayal. Jack sent Morrie Safier, an executive, to find Jolson, who was playing in Denver. In an hour the deal was done: seventy-five thousand, with a third up front in cash. The contract was signed May 27, 1927. That famous opening was less than five months away. Years later, Jessel would say that he believed Jolson had contributed money towards The Jazz Singer budget to secure the part. Yet the picture cost less than half the amount of Don Juan.
The Jazz Singer is so archaically sentimental, and pious towards its sentimentality, that it seems to come from the nineteenth century—yet sometimes so alive, naked, and exhilarated that it can leave you wanting to make a new movie yourself. God knows what Harry Warner thought it might do for race relations. Did he really believe this epic schmaltz would make Jewish culture more acceptable? Did he fail to see the injury done to black people, and the travesty made of “jazz”? The Jazz Singer is a helpless admission of the existential distress felt by European Jews trying to assimilate in America. No one knew that passage better than Al Jolson, whose father despised Al’s show business glory. Al’s brother Harry would say, “The chief difficulty in our home life was that Al and I had been absorbed by American customs, American freedom of thought, and the American way of life. My father still dwelt in the consciousness of the strict, orthodox teachings and customs of the old world.”12 Who else should play the part?
And so the painful story seeps its way from the screen, so slowly as to make an extra marvel of sound when it comes. Melodramatically, this is still a silent film—so when the father (played by Warner Oland, the Swedish actor who would later play Charlie Chan) whips his son Jackie for singing at the local beer hall, there is no sound of the whip or pained cries from behind the closed door. But the boy, rather well played by Bobby Gordon—who really could be a kid Jolson, with staring eyes and looming head—says he will run away to the world of jazz, beer halls, and show business. The father tells the mother that they have lost their son—and many families were split apart on dilemmas like those of the Rabinowitzes. The broken family thrives in the movies: it is there in Symphony of Six Million, one of the classic films about Jewish assimilation in America; it can even be felt at the heart of The Godfather, an epic on the old ways and the new (where one brother has another killed at the close of Part II).
When Jack’s real life is made clear, the father is stopped in his tracks. He falls ill, as if stricken—this is like the collapse of Raymond Massey’s father in East of Eden. But show business can handle death, like a gambler palming a card. The insolent compromise of The Jazz Singer is that Jack’s demanding Broadway show is canceled for only one night; the errant son can go home to sing Kol Nidre so that his father passes away in peace (and it is Jolson singing the sacred song). And then next night, there he is, back on stage with “Mammy” and the other songs that besmirch real jazz. The solution to the drama was to have it both ways, to get both big scenes on the same plate, to be pious while making a killing. At that point, you may recall the climax of The Godfather, where a series of brilliant executions is crosscut with the liturgy of a christening and irony is buried in the self-satisfaction of the double act.
That dramatic implication is lost in the technological wonder. In the summer of 1927, the many problems were dealt with: the camera had to be soundproofed; the buzz in the Klieg lights was eliminated; the stage itself had to be a soundstage, devoid of extraneous noise; secret places were found for the microphones; and the camera and the disks were coordinated—by the time of the film’s projection, there were fifteen reels of film and fifteen disks that had to be timed together. Not least, the performers had to learn to act and sing at the same time—Jolson had no greater asset than his understanding of that. But a moment came when he talked.
The plan was to have him sing several songs—at the beer hall, in his Broadway show, the Kol Nidre, but most important of all, with his mother, played by Eugenie Besserer with a doting, monotonous intensity. So Jolson sang and gave every song the thrust that was second nature to him. But then “it” happened, and apparently it was almost by chance.
Jack Robin, a star now, comes home to sing to his mother. The excellent research of Scott Eyman places the crucial moment as August 30.13 Jack has just sung “Blue Skies” to his mother—it’s a two shot, with Jack at the piano and Mama beside him. The singing is sugar—it’s Irving Berlin, with Al doing a song he knew inside out. Then hesitation flowers. The son turns to his mother, and Jolson discovers an inner being. He speaks from the heart and mime is gone forever:
“Mama, darlin’, if I’m a success in this show, well, we’re gonna move from here. Oh yes, we’re gonna move up in the Bronx. A lot of nice green grass up there and a whole lot of people you know. There’s the Ginsbergs, the Guttembergs, and the Goldbergs. Oh, a whole lotta Bergs, I don’t know ’em all.
“And I’m gonna buy you a nice black silk dress, Mama. You see Mrs. Friedman, the butcher’s wife, she’ll be jealous of you. . . . Yes, she will. You see if she isn’t. And I’m gonna get you a nice pink dress that’ll go with your brown eyes. . . .”
That repetition of G families could be composed and learned, but no script exists for it. As delivered, it sounds like Jolson taking flight—it is his most jazzy improvisation—the words and the ideas spilling out, with “Yes, she will,” which is unlikely as written but utterly natural as part of an actor’s headlong glee.
Jack Warner said that Jolson did it all on the spur of the moment. When Sam heard it, he got writer Alfred Cohn to turn it into a written speech. Darryl Zanuck said it was his idea. He wondered, “Why doesn’t Jolson turn to his mother and say . . .”14 Sound engineer George Grovers said it was pure ad lib. Another onlooker believed it was a put up job between Sam and Jolson. And some said Jolson cried out, “No one will notice.” The overall feeling at the studio was that it had been incidental, just one of those things.
If you look at the scene, over and over again, nothing saps the vitality of Jolson. It’s as if he, and maybe he alone, understands exactly the new contact that is being opened up between performance and audience. Jack is talking to Mama, but Jolson is elated at the extra dimension. Here was a man who fed on live audience, and yet he has the instinct to sense a new flashpoint. And the theme is moving up in the world, being somebody (as the Warners gangster pictures would say), or—moving ahead fast—it’s, “You told my story!,” the final grasp of love that Clyde Barrow would have for Bonnie Parker in 1967.
Jackie and Jack are meant to be everyone’s friend: he is sweet to his mother; he makes an ultimate sacrifice for his father; he admires Mary (May McAvoy), his costar in the Broadway show, just as he is an encouragement to everyone else involved. He would seem to be the receptacle of honest feeling, a good guy, a perfect mensch.
But Jolson in The Jazz Singer is a lot more complicated. He is so excited he is like a demon. And he is not a nice young man such as the story requires. By the most generous estimate he was forty-one when the film opened. Thus he was only six years younger than Warner Oland, the actor playing his father (and twelve years older than George Jessel). He looks and feels older—he is so far from the conventional juvenile who will make it in the show—the Dick Powell type at Warners in just a few years. He has a haunted face and a large head, with those demanding eyes and a huge brow. He has the intent gaze that could fit a villain, an evil mastermind, a mesmerist even. He could play Nosferatu, Dr. Mabuse, or the homegrown gangsters yet to come. This is not just his appearance, but the way he moves and his air of premeditation. He is coiled like a fighter, violent and so alive he seems hungry. At the rail depot, Jack sits on a tipped-up suitcase, writing a letter, where his stance is electric, elegant, and slightly dangerous. There is another strange moment when May McAvoy leaves him in close-up, and he dreams about her as if ready to devour her.
His sweetness is deeper than adorable. He has something frightening about him, or of such authority you feel his power to take charge. This is a hint towards Bogart, Cagney, Bette Davis, and even James Dean, with a kind of screen personality that depends on the stealth of breathing and a sigh of secret thoughts. It is an essential Warner Brothers character: the riveting protagonist who leaves us wary or afraid. Because the actor has taken over the moment, and then elected to pause. You see it in Cagney, Dean, and Bugs Bunny. Hesitation reminds us of power. This Jolson could be Dracula—in fact, Bela Lugosi opened on Broadway in that play one day before The Jazz Singer premiered. That is a coincidence, of course, but it is a telling concurrence in the history of performed personality and our willingness to embrace something decisive and sudden. (If you want another sign of immediacy in the times, Jack Dempsey versus Gene Tunney, the fight of the long count, had been just two weeks earlier in Chicago.)
The Jazz Singer changed everything, including the balance of power among the brothers. Sam is still hard to figure, but he had bet his life on sound and he had persevered with its mechanics. In doing so, he had opposed Harry and taught Jack that that policy could work. So Jack was liberated, and free to voice a sentimental verdict on his dead brother: “He was a man who was never selfish or vain, he would not even ask to be remembered. . . . The soaring shaft of sound film still stands, and brings to our lives laughter and tears and escape from daily stress. Sam brought it into the world, and gave his own life in exchange.”
9
Now
BY THE EARLY 1930s, riding the waves, Warners had days when the brothers could feel they were in the lead. Unprecedented sums of new revenue were coming their way, and production responded. The audience was facing hard times, but that was gasoline for the confidence at Warners. No other studio did hard times with the same panache. Sound became irresistible in a matter of months, and it carried Warners to the top of the business. It was a national company all of a sudden, and a promise of fun.
But there was something awkward in the fun. The glory days of the talking picture are those of Depression and war, during which the Warner brothers (and every other Hollywood boss) became very rich and nearly royal figures, adept at persuading themselves that they were really for the people, the masses, the strangers—that mob of the disappointed and even the dangerous that alarms Nathanael West in The Day of the Locust (1939), when a movie première may turn into a riot.
In those days, the Hollywood system wanted to believe in its implicit contract with the public: buy a ticket and we’ll cheer you up—you won’t have to be afraid, for now. That uneasy deal made the films celebrated in this book. And Warners deserved the reputation for being ahead of its rivals. The brothers did read the papers; they saw what was coming in Europe; they wanted the American dream to be enlightened and responsible, so long as it didn’t spoil their own dream of being resplendent and unquestioned moguls. The developing conflict between Harry and Jack was a matter of attitude. Harry was ready to let worry show. Jack insisted on his cocksure act. Harry had a sense of posterity, while Jack was all here and now, with a joke to close the show and settle doubts. So Warners owned the snappy answer.
Jack would say anything, for effect. The screenwriter Casey Robinson was fired once by Jack, over the phone—“I just want you to know, smart ass, that you will walk into a Warner Brothers studio again only over my dead body!”
He hung up. Robinson was gone. Then time passed, and Robinson was back on another project, and taken to see Jack. They had never met before. Robinson took a chance; he reminded Jack of the phone call. The comic in Jack grinned, “Well, I must be dead! How’s your health? Welcome to Warner Brothers!”1
In silent pictures, characters had uttered, and then intertitles had delivered their speeches as print. It was like translation, slow and formal. But with sound, urgent crosstalk could occur now, like an itch being scratched. And because it was now, the spoken stuff didn’t have to be Gettysburg addresses or fulsome love testaments. It could be, “You dirty rat!” or “I’d kiss you, but I’ve just washed my hair”—those impulsive remarks that can surprise the person saying them, as well as the listener. Things an actor might have thought of on the spur of a moment, as if to add, “Screw the writer, screw the Warner brothers. This is me, now.” As if actors were people. But it was at Warner Brothers that actors and actresses were most aroused by saying stuff.
To pretend to history: a once-minor studio, rescued from its natural state of poverty by a willing dog, had become not just a force but the unwitting purveyor of insurrectionary sound and a production base that did gangster pictures and a new kind of showbiz musical like kids doing handstands.
It was also the one outfit where it seemed possible that some boss was asking out loud, “Look, is this 1931, 1932, or whatever? So what are we saying about now? And what are we doing to make movies matter?” If the country was in a crisis—and that idea was gaining ground—then shouldn’t movies be there for the emergency? It was part of this mood that Warner films seemed to move, talk, and shoot quicker than others.
