A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (18 page)

"After the war I just got pulled back into the film business and started
all over as a sketch artist, first at Fox, then at Warners, which is where I
met Lem Ayers. He looked at some sketches I was doing and asked me to
come and work for him doing some drawings of people backstage, and I
guess he liked them, because he said, 'I'd like you to come up to a meeting
with me.' So I went up with him and there were the art director, the
costume designers, and the cameraman, and there was George Cukor,
whom I'd heard about for years and saw his movies, and they're all sitting
around talking about A Star Is Born. They were working on the design for
the Malibu house, where [Norman and Vicki] would live after they were
married. I knew that Lem Ayers was very involved with that, the design
of it and all-he was interested in the kind of furniture and was working
with the decorators on all that. And it was all very fascinating to me,
because I'd never been in any production meetings before....

"I had read the script and loved it. Then along comes a new draft and there was a scene missing that I thought was really good-the wedding
scene, where they get married in a funny little jail in some small town. So
at the end of one of the meetings I stuck my hand up and said I thought
it was a marvelous scene and perhaps they should think about putting it
back. Cukor just sort of looked up at me and never said anything, but the
very next day along come the famous blue pages for that section, which
means that the scene's been put back. I guess it impressed him ... maybe
he thought, `Here's a guy who not only sketches but thinks about story' or
whatever, because after that I got a lot more attention and was asked a lot
more questions by George Cukor."

From the recollection of everyone involved, it is evident that the look
of the film was of much concern to Cukor, especially the use of color. He
did not want it to be bright and colorful as was the custom with musicals.
This was, after all, basically a tragedy, a dark, poignant story. The color was
to be carefully controlled to enhance the mood and define the emotional
impact. He wanted it lush but subdued, realistic with a touch of stylization.
The year before, he had been much impressed with John Huston's Moulin
Rouge, which had used Technicolor in a new and innovative method to
evoke the era and works of Toulouse-Lautrec. Huston had brought in the
eminent still photographer Eliot Elisofon to supervise the color design of
the picture, and the results had caused much excited comment in and out
of the industry.

While Cukor was pleased with the ideas of his art director and set
decorator, he still felt the need for an imaginative color advisor who would
use the spectrum as a design element. One of his close friends was the noted
fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. Born in 19oo in St. Petersburg, his father was a Baltic nobleman in the service of Czar Nicholas
11; his mother was the daughter of the United States minister to Russia.
Living in Paris after the Revolution, he became a fashion illustrator, then
a photographer, eventually rising to the top of his profession as the preeminent photographer for Paris Vogue from 1930 through 1945. His work
brought life and realism to hitherto stereotyped, unnatural poses and was
distinguished by the use of a dominant color, in order that, as he said, "the
eyes do not get distracted." He carefully coordinated the art direction and
the wardrobe people so that "it all jelled. You have to know how the camera
records things." Hoyningen-Huene had moved to Los Angeles in the late
194os. He worked when the fancy struck him. He had an inordinate
wanderlust, traveling ceaselessly and extensively. In mid-1953, he was off on one of his extended wanderings, when Cukor decided that he was just the person to work on A Star Is Born and immediately began trying to track him down.

While production meetings on the film were getting under way, two more events took place which muddied the technological waters even more. On May 21, Universal International opened a James Stewart film called Thunder Bay at Loew's State theater in Manhattan. The picture did astounding business-zoo percent better than normal for a Stewart western-and the reason seemed to be the heavily advertised emphasis on "our gigantic wide-vision screen and stereophonic sound." The theater had boosted its image size from 17 by 21 to 24 by 43 and curved its screen deeply in an imitation of Cinerama: the ensuing long lines of eager patrons turned the film into one of the smashes of the spring season. At almost the same time, Paramount had startled the industry by announcing that it would no longer make 3-D movies,*
nor would it take up CinemaScope; instead, it introduced its own wide-screen system, called VistaVision ("Motion Picture High Fidelity"), which allowed a picture to be photographed and exhibited in any ratio from 1:33 to 1, to 2 to i. This industry disarray and lack of agreement as to what format would be the standard played havoc with the production plans of most films of the time, especially A Star Is Born. Cukor had been unenthusiastic about Warners' announced intention to make the picture in 3-D, feeling that the story would best be served without annoying glasses and other gimmicks. He evidently pressed home his distaste to Warner, for in the subsequent announcements on the film there was no mention of 3-D. And Hart shared Cukor's concern about the new screen shapes; having seen the CinemaScope demonstration and taken a look at both Shane and Thunder Bay in their big-screen incarnations, he wrote Cukor, "I do hope that you can talk them into doing it with a regular size screen, and not WarnerScope or CinemaScope. It may be vital, that choice. I have a horrid suspicion that [those] might drain the emotion out of so personal a story as this." As long as the decision as to what technique to use on A Star Is Born was postponed, it was extremely difficult to do the physical planning of the film-a fact that was becoming obvious to everyone connected with the production meetings now going on almost daily.

By early June, the script was ready to be submitted to the Production Code Administration, which reviewed it for any possible infractions of the
prevailing morality. Joseph Breen, the chief censor, warned against danger
spots:

At the outset, we direct your particular attention for the need for the greatest
possible care in the selection and photographing of the dresses and the
costumes of your women. The Production Code makes it mandatory that the
intimate parts of the body, specifically the breasts of women, be fully covered
at all times ... We would like to suggest that you eliminate the jail portion
of the wedding ceremony, in order to treat the ceremony in a more dignified and respectful manner ... Please eliminate the expression "And Lord
knows ..." in Danny's denunciation of Esther for her conduct after Norman's death.... Also Danny's eulogizing of Norman's suicide is unacceptable. There is, in this dialogue, a glorification and justification of suicide,
which is specifically in violation of the Production Code. Particularly, we call
your attention to the lines ". . . It took guts to do what he did when he found
he couldn't lick it. But he did it. And the one thing he was proudest of, the
only thing he ever did in his life that paid off, you, you're tossing it right back
into the ocean after him. Who gives you that right? Because it hurts?" This
flavor of approval to the act of suicide should be eliminated.

The PCA had just faced the first serious challenge to its authority from
independent producer-director Otto Preminger, whose filming of the innocuous F. Hugh Herbert stage comedy The Moon Is Blue had used
dialogue and situations strictly forbidden by the thirty-year-old Codewords like "seduce," "virgin," and "pregnant." Preminger refused to delete
the dialogue, so Joseph Breen denied the film a seal of approval, the first
time any film from a major releasing organization had been so penalized.
The regulatory system had originally been set up in the early 1930s, when
the studios controlled their own theaters, and all signatories to the Code
agreed not to exhibit pictures without a Code seal. But when the government insisted that the studios divest themselves of their theaters, the
exhibitors who took over the houses were not bound by this agreement.
United Artists, the company that had financed and would release The
Moon Is Blue, resigned in protest from the Motion Picture Association of
America, the parent organization of the PCA, and went ahead with plans
to release the picture without a seal. This created a nationwide sensation
and any number of censorship problems in cities and towns whose guardians of morality were outraged by the words in question. It was the first successful defiance of the Code's stranglehold on filmmakers, and its impact was not lost on Cukor, who carefully noted the objections to the script of A Star Is Born and remarked: "The Code [is] a kind of straight-jacket. You have to find ways around all these ridiculous objections. It's not so much a question of morality, but one of taste." Emboldened by Preminger's example, he rejected outright the suggestion of dropping the jail portion of the wedding-but he did reluctantly go along with Warner's request that the speech in question be rewritten, which Hart did by simply eliminating the lines "It took guts to do what he did ... But he did it" and "Who gives you that right? Because it hurts?" Even with these concessions, the PCA would keep a watchful eye on the film, carefully noting each change in the script and warning that "final Code approval will be based on the finished film."

In mid-July, Jack Warner announced that the studio, which had been dormant since March, would resume production the following week. The first films to go before the cameras, both filmed in 3-D, would be Hondo, a John Wayne Western, produced by the star for his independent Batjac Company, and Alfred Hitchcock's version of the stage success Dial M for Murder. In announcing the studio's return to production, Warner also dropped another technological bombshell: the introduction of his own anamorphic process, given the rather unwieldy name of "WarnerSuperScope," which, as he pointed out, was "not to be confused with our wide-screen WarnerScope process."
While the idea of the anamorphic lens could not be patented, the design itself could be, and Professor Chretien had done just that; and when Fox bought his process, it also acquired the United States patents, so no one could use the lens without infringing on Fox's rights. But in late March Warner had contacted an independent producer named Carl Dudley, who earlier had joined forces with the Simpson Optical Company in Chicago to devise a lens that would be anamorphic without copying the Chretien configuration. Dudley called his process Vistarama and had offered it in the industry marketplace as an alternative to CinemaScope. Warner immediately began negotiations with him for rights to the process, this despite the fact that his lenses were markedly inferior to Chretien's. And even those, good as they were, had an unfortunate tendency to distort in both directions, so that horizontal lines were curved, vertical lines on the edges of the frame
bowed outward; performers' faces were widened and their bodies broadened unflatteringly. Worse, the light-gathering ability of these early
lenses was very slow, resulting in an image that fairly bubbled with grain.
To rectify these drawbacks, loth Century-Fox was paying nearly $3 million to the American optical firm of Bausch and Lomb to redesign and
manufacture. two hundred and fifty CinemaScope photography and three
thousand CinemaScope projection lenses. The Vistarama lens also had
these problems, along with a soft image and color-distorting factors. None
of this deterred Warner, however, and he pursued Dudley, finally making
a deal for the nonexclusive rights to Vistarama for $75,ooo-the same
amount he would have had to pay Fox for three pictures in CinemaScope. Warner was evidently confident that whatever technical bugs his
new lenses possessed could be eradicated, for he immediately signed a
contract with the German firm of Zeiss-Opton for the redesign and manufacture of both photographing and projection lenses. Warner cannily
announced to worried exhibitors that the lenses would not have to be
purchased, as Fox was insisting on with CinemaScope, but would instead
be supplied for a small rental fee along with the WarnerSuperScope feature, "just the way we used to supply the Vitaphone discs with the first
talkies." When questioned by a reporter whether it wouldn't be better to
standardize and join with others in a single big-screen medium, Warner
replied, "Does GM go to Chrysler for its automotive developments-or
vice versa? Our company has always believed in individual creation. We
... feel that we have the process we want and have decided on a merchandising plan for its use by theaters that will ease their burden of a big
layout." He then announced that the first two pictures to use WarnerSuperScope would be Rear Guard, starring Guy Madison, another 3-D
Western, which would begin filming the next week; and A Star Is Born,
which would go before the cameras on September I.

This announcement of Warner's startled everyone connected with the
film. Luft recalls: "It was just vanity on Jack's part, that whole WarnerSuperScope business. Zanuck went for CinemaScope, and Jack, being the
kind of guy he was, was determined to have his own system. We shot
some tests with these lenses and we looked at them and there was too
much distortion-the whole goddamn thing was a mess. Judy, Eddie, and
I kept begging him to let us do it regular flat in Technicolor, but Jack
says, 'Give us a chance with WarnerSuperScope and the new lenses' ... I mean, what can you say to the man? So we had to wait until they
got these new lenses from Germany, and there was no way we could start
shooting in September, because they didn't even know when the lenses
would be ready."

Cukor too was taken aback at Warner's announcement, since he had not
been consulted about the scheduled starting date or using WarnerSuperScope. At Warners he had made some tests with the Vistarama lens and
wrote to Moss Hart: "The Warner process is a very hit-and-miss business
... they've not had time to take the kinks out of it.... We made some
photographic tests of Judy and Mason and I thought the results were
distinctly unpleasing. On Mason, the distortion was just distracting, on
Judy I thought disastrous." Part of the problem with photographing Garland was that she was about ten pounds overweight, a fact that put
Warner's announced start date into question. She would have to go on a
rigid diet and exercise routine, and it would take her a month or more to
safely shed her excess pounds.