The Man in the Celluloid Armchair [Sample Tape]
Hello, I'm Bill Grisham, the man in the celluloid armchair.
The only show in greater Chicago devoted exclusively to films, one half hour weekly on WLTD -AM, The Voice of Nostalgia.
I was trained as an actor -director at the University of Washington where I received my master's degree.
I've been in a great many plays on the West Coast and I've directed, written, and produced about 75 films mostly for industry and a number of documentaries.
My PhD training has been in film history.
I received a Rockefeller grant to continue those studies in Europe at the British Film Institute and I've also been the recipient of grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the American Film Institute.
I produced, directed, and written the hour -long film The Beautiful Lady, which is narrated by Beverly Bane, one of the film stars.
She was a star in 1911 and through the early 20s.
This film reconstructs a time when Chicago was a major film capital from 1904 to 1920.
There were three major studios in Chicago, SNA, Selig, and the American Film Manufacturing Company.
In my collection of old film stills and scripts are 350 SNA scripts, the largest collection of such scripts in the world.
But my the man in the celluloid armchair attempts to do is bring the old and the new together.
Every week we go back in time to the turn of the century.
To the 20s perhaps are the films of the 30s and we never forget the present.
The listener hears capsule reviews of the current offerings in Greater Chicago and I interview someone in the film business, a director perhaps, a film cutter, musician, an actor.
On this sample tape of my shows in 1973 and 1974, you'll hear notes on two film versions of A Star is Born.
The real David Wark Griffith, father of American films, comes to life.
A discussion of filmed pornography also on this tape.
An interview with Jim Bridges, director of The Paper Chase, one of the better films of 1973.
You'll hear about the old studios in Chicago, interviews with a good many of my friends who are in the business of making films.
It's a lively show and occasionally it starts out with a simulated cracked Edison recording of an old -timey director, a Mr.
Baker, who directed films at S &A in Chicago the first decades of the century, who is talking to Beverly Bain, Francis X.
These were stars of the old S &A studio.
So make sure your popcorn has enough butter on it and enjoy these excerpts from my show, The Man in the Celluloid Armchair.
Grendel, will you show Miss Bain the gun? Now remember, play within the white lines on the floor, otherwise the major won't get you into the picture, into his camera.
Have you a bag of butter popcorn handy? Then sit back as The Man in the Celluloid Armchair.
One -to -one stroke, Esther Blodgett becomes Vicki Lester and Mrs.
She cannot arrest her husband's swift descent, nor can she keep him when he steps gallantly from the scene.
Little Esther has her success, but she pays for it.
The script certainly does have moments.
Oliver Niles, the producer, is played to the hilt by Adolf Manjou.
In another he had originally wanted George Cukor to direct his A Star is Born, but that Cukor balked.
In fact, the director irritated Selznick on other occasions, but Cukor changed his mind later in 1954 and another A Star is Born was delivered.
Mosshart wrote the screenplay, this time based on the Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, Robert Carson, William Wellman, David O.
We are treated this time to music and lyrics by Harold Arlen, Ira Gershwin, and Leonard Gershia, produced by Sidney Luft and Warner Brothers, and it opened to rave reviews at the Paramount and Victoria Theaters.
Esther Blodgett this time is played by Judy Garland and Norman Maine by James Mason.
Wouldn't it be great to, you know, revive both of these films on a double bill? I think it would be a very long double bill because the second version lasts almost three hours.
Crowds of enthusiastic people milled about the Paramount and Victoria Theaters to attend the gala activities surrounding the premiere of the second version.
Judy Garland made an appearance at the Victoria and then rushed over to the Paramount.
The event was covered by television cameras and radio reporters, armed forces, overseas radio, press and newsreel photographers, and the sidewalks in front of the two theaters were carpeted in the traditional red velvet and searchlights sliced into the night sky.
Some of you may have seen at one time or another the Birth of the Nation, directed by the father of American films, David Wark Griffith.
Griffith was the producer of all of the great biograph successes, the man who really revolutionized the motion picture drama.
He was founder of the modern technique of motion pictures, I think you could say.
It has been said quite incorrectly that D .W.
Griffith invented the close -up, the fade -out, the tracking shot, and so on.
The fade -out had been part of the language of the magic lantern.
So was the close -up for that matter.
And there were panorama visuals prior, many years prior to Griffith.
What Griffith did is really utilize these visuals less as effects and more as a way of telling a story.
Griffith put these devices to creative use.
The Birth of the Nation was a milestone.
It was the first feature to be made in the same fluid way as motion pictures are made today.
Today we can see a dim print of this film replete with a small score and several reels cut out.
But the originals, the early prints, made film history.
Lillian Gish writes in her book, the movies Mr.
Griffith and Me, she says, in going through Mr.
Griffith's papers recently, I came across some so -called facts about the Birth of the Nation.
And they read, like most press releases of that day, Robert Edgar Long.
His name is Gordon Willis, and I suppose most people would know his work from The Godfather.
He shot The Godfather, Clute, Up the Sandbox, Loving, End of the Road.
He's just done a new film for Alan Bacula called Parallax View.
And Gordon is more than just a cameraman.
He really is a director of photography, and we worked very closely together, the whole film.
There is no hard light in the film at all.
It's all reflected light, which is very...
Well, you have the feeling, especially when the students meet in these study sessions, that it's almost a Rembrandt you have.
Well, the hope was in those study sessions, the look was that we wanted to do young men in portraits, you know, portraits of old judges.
And the hope was that we would have the kind of our gang comedy grown up in these portraits of old judges.
So it was a kind of, you know, in -joke a little bit.
I mean, it's also sort of sepia -toned, isn't it? I feel that there are very warm colors.
The idea was that, you know, the New York Times magazine section of the Sunday Times, the look was we wanted to achieve that kind of Eastern warm autumn look.
I understand you have several projects in the wings, a new play, and you're working with Christopher Isherwood right now, preparing a screenplay based on Isherwood's novel, A Meeting by the River.
Is this something that you're going to complete, Charlie? Yeah.
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi wrote a theatrical adaptation, a play of the novel, A Meeting by the River, which I directed in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum a year ago with Sam Waterston and Larry Luckinbill.
And I just yesterday morning finished working with Chris and Don on the first step out.
But you'll remember him for his role as the pitifully crippled young war veteran in Dalton Trumbo's anti -war Johnny Got His Gun.
Timothy's also played the young man stuck in a dying Texas town in The Last Picture Show.
He co -starred with the British actress Maggie Smith in Love, Pain, The Whole Damned Thing, directed by Alan Pakula.
He has also starred as Eugene Gant in the television version of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel.
And prior to all that and from the age of 13 on, he played in semi -professional productions in Santa Barbara, 50 productions in all, including The Happy Time and West Side Story, although only 21 he has put in his time and knows his acting craft.
John Houseman as the bloodless Professor Kingsfield is one of the most remarkable men in the acting, writing, directing professions.
The first installment of his autobiography, Run Through, was a best seller last year.
And since 1968, he has been the head of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School of Lincoln Center.
Born in Romania in 1902, Houseman was educated at Cambridge.
In 1931, he wrote and directed for the theater.
His first success in New York was in 1934 when he directed the famous Gertrude Stein Virgil Thompson opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.
During the Depression, he headed two projects for the Federal Theatre of the WPA, the Negro Theatre in Harlem, where he and Arson Wells worked on Macbeth and Mark Wittstein's The Cradle Will Rock.
In 1937, Houseman and Wells co -founded the Mercury Theatre.
During a stint in Hollywood, Houseman collaborated with Herman Mankiewicz on the script of Citizen Kane.
You animate something one frame at a time, an object that's in front of you, why, and they, clay has all sorts of advantages that say like the puppet animation of the European studios, doesn't it? Oh yes, Joop Gezenk of Holland does this kind of animation, don't they? They do beautiful work, but it's...
Well, I even understand that you put President Nixon in clay animation.
Now you're talking back a couple of years.
Sure, we started the company to produce, we were trying to take the concept of political cartooning as it exists in newspapers and translate it to some media that could be used on television so that your announcer could come on and say, and now for our evening political commentary on the news.
Well, what happened to the political commentary? Well, the networks all told me that I was seven years to, three to seven years ahead of my time.
Of course, now it's three years later.
Now you should be right on target.
You can be as vicious as you want to be.
Well, I'm afraid that when you're talking about the public airwaves, they just don't have the freedom that say like the newspapers have.
They don't have that governmental authority hanging over them.
Right, it's a little more classic, I would imagine.
I think perhaps rightfully so because it's not quite as selective really.
You have, when you're listening, you...
Well, just try to imagine a Herb Block cartoon being put into some form of animation for the airwaves.
You get four irate letters and you go off the air.
Ted, what is your background? I understand many of you also may have read the Citizen Kane book by Pauline Kale, which details the talented team that raised Kane, or I should say put that remarkable film together.
Also, Howard Cooke's Casablanca script and legend, and that comes from the Overlook Press.
And Joseph Mankiewicz writes about his film All About Eve in More about All About Eve.
And don't fail to put the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers book by Arlene Croce on your Christmas shopping list, published by Dutton.
In that last book, the author describes an Astaire solo in Roberta as, and let me quote, full of stark -legged steps on toe, wheeling pirouettes in which he seems to be winding one leg around the other, and those ratcheting tap clusters that fall like loose change from his pockets.
She writes revealingly about the Astaire 30s category of films, and she says, In the class -conscious 30s, it was possible to imagine characters who spent their lives in evening dress, to imagine them as faintly preposterous holdovers from the 20s, slipping from their satin beds at twilight, dancing the night away, and then stumbling.
By that time, S &A had turned out scores of films.
Beverly Bane and Francis X Bushman were among the stars, one of the first romantic screen couples.
Fans could wait outside, would wait outside the studio and mob the great profile Bushman.
The studio never let anyone know that he was married and had several children.
Luella Parsons was in charge of the script department.
Rod LaRock was a lesser -known star at S &A.
Walthold, Edward Arnold, Bryant Washburn, Ruth Stonehouse, Harry Norton, Charles Stone, Ben Turpin, Edna Mayo, Sydney Ainsworth.
These were just a few of the many film stars at S &A.
It was a hugely successful studio.
The young Wallace Berry was also hired and was featured in the Swedish series, S .W .E .E .D .I .E.
He played a Swedish maid, wore a big red wig, a gaudy dress, and large floppy shoes.
Wally had been a circus or carnival man and had appeared in New York in bit parts, and he was a good -natured guy, good -natured enough to clown through many, many S &A films.
When he punched the time clock at the end of the day at S &A, he turned into a speed demon.
The pride of his life was a big yellow Mercer with a cutout.
He and Gloria Swanson, who was an extra girl at S &A, would speed up and down Sheridan Road.
A few shocked homeowners wrote to the studio demanding that Berry take his Mercer elsewhere, a cliff perhaps.
Do you have anything to say to the young filmmakers who are coming up, graduating from film schools, and who want to stay in Chicago and make a name for themselves? Yes, they're going to have to apply themselves.
They're going to have to forget this eagle trip.
What do you mean by an eagle trip? Well, they haven't learned their lessons.
They haven't had the opportunity.
For example, we have a rule of thumb on the West Coast so far as editing is concerned.
There are three stages of editing.
First stage is when you edit, you edit for mechanical matches to see that the close -ups cut well with the long shots.
When you've mastered that, then you move on to the second phase, which is you edit for performance.
You get the best out of your people, the best out of your film that was shot.
And the third stage is when you edit for story.
When you edit for story and you've mastered the performance stage and the mechanical stage, then you have learned your lessons.
And that's what the young filmmakers of Chicago have to learn.
Well, I hope that they can work with you, Don.
Thanks so much for being on the program.
They're stage and screen names, if I may start from right to left.
Bill Morrie, without any changes, and Adele Malice, without any malice of forethought.
Adele is sitting right across from me as wet as she can be.
This has been pre -recorded and there's a driving thunderstorm out there and Bill looks a little wet himself.
Today I'm going to ask Adele and Bill about a film that has meant very much to them, the film Prime Cut, which many of you saw some months ago, and a film with judicious cuts which may appear on television.
Bill, you and Adele were married on the set, so to speak.
Can you tell me about that up there in Canada? Well, we were married on top of a mountain, a mountain orcay, which was a great deal easier to find than this.
To get to the wedding, we were married up there and we had a lot of people from the film in Canada.
Sounds like a lazy dog barking.
Two F's and a P and all those other things.
No, but it's B -A -N, which makes it hard to pronounce.
But to get there, you had to go up on a ski lift, which was rather interesting, and a couple of the people.
Matter of fact, there were some young guys who were shooting a documentary film about the making of a film, one of them had agoraphobia.
He had to blindfold himself to go up on that ski lift.
That's right, he did get drunk.
And then they threw him up the ski lift.
Anyway, it was a marvelous wedding.
It was well attended, though, anyway.
Everyone came and God was there.
When you're there, that far up.
Everybody was there, but Lee Marvin.
Lee Marvin, who is one of the stars in the film, along with Bill Murray and who else? Gene Hackman.
Oh, Gene Hackman happened to be in it.
And Howard Platt from Chicago.
Les Lammon and Clint Edison, all from Chicago.
Well, both of you are stage actors primarily, although you've been in many, many, many films and a number of multimedia presentations for clients as varied as Rath Ham and Brunswick bowling balls.
So, Bill, how did you get the call for this major Hollywood production? A local agent.
Yeah, and they contacted her to line up some actors, you know.
And they wanted, they were going to have Chicago Irish actors.
In deference to New York Italian actors.
All the What's the story in this film? It's the apotheosis of the antihero film, isn't it? Since there are only good bad guys in it and bad bad guys.
Who did you play? We were good bad guys.
Bill was the best good bad guy of the whole thing.
Super good, super good bad guy.
I really shouldn't have because he had a terrible record, didn't he? No, bad guy.
We had nothing to do with the public.
We were hired to get to Kansas City and collect a half a million dollars from Gene Hackman, who was the bad guy, who was named in the movie was Mary Ann.
Well, I think the director made of it what he would.
And we went down to collect from him.
But in the course of this, we discovered as we arrived there on the scene at this big barn, that along with the cattle that was auctioning off, he was also auctioning off young girls.
Well, this is Bill Grisham, the man in the celluloid armchair.
I hope you enjoyed today's program.
Next week, more films, more reviews, more of the old and the new.
In the meantime, see a movie and make certain you settle down with some well buttered popcorn.