Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (10 page)

There are no official production records for Associated Producers, but the best evidence suggests that the company was responsible for fourteen pictures between 1920 and 1923: eight by Neilan, and three apiece from Dwan and
Holubar. Things got off to a promising start the first year with two big hits by Neilan.
Go and Get It
was an offbeat newspaper story highlighted by some daring aviation stunts and a notable appearance by a child actor named Wesley Barry in a secondary role as Dinty. Neilan, well known for his skill
directing kids, immediately came up with a starring vehicle for Barry called, plausibly enough,
Dinty
, a heartrending rags-to-riches melodrama about an orphaned Irish kid on the streets of San Francisco. The company’s final entry for the year was Dwan’s warm melodrama
The Forbidden Thing
, about Portuguese fishermen and their women in Provincetown.

Dwan followed up with a commercially and artistically attractive entry for early 1921,
A Perfect Crime
, a sort of Jekyll & Hyde fantasy about
a “pinhead” bank clerk played by Monte Blue who, at night, upon removing his glasses and straightening up his posture, becomes the dashing spinner of Münchhausenesque stories. The picture marked the screen debut, in a small part, of a twelve-year-old distant cousin of Hawks’s named Jane Peters, whom Dwan spotted playing baseball in the street. When she resumed her screen career several years later,
it was under the name of Carole Lombard.

With their next productions, however, Associated Producers got rather carried away. For his first contribution to the company, Allen Holubar made a pretentious spectacular entitled
Man-Woman-Marriage
, a study of man’s treatment of woman through the ages. Expensively appointed, it was not a hit.

This was nothing, however, compared to Neilan’s superproduction
Bob Hampton of Placer
, an epic of the Old West that climaxes at Little Big Horn. Based on a 1910 novel, the film was confusing and misguided in the telling and was a mess both in production and on the screen. Hawks admitted that they used trip wires in the cavalry scenes, which made many horses fall onto their heads and necks, a practice that was later outlawed. Hawks was in charge of the second
unit and, after two failed attempts to film Custer’s Last Stand, one in Montana and another in Arizona, the company announced that the battle would be filmed from a blimp. But when the blimp refused to leave the ground, Hawks had the brainstorm of shooting the sequence in the Arroyo Seco, a large ravine along the western edge of Pasadena very near the Green & Green house at 408 Arroyo Terrace,
where the Hawks family had lived some years before. Not wanting to lose the publicity benefits of the blimp story, Hawks had a window washer–style platform dangled off the Colorado Street Bridge over the ravine; he then had the platform jostled so that it would still look as though the cameras were on an airship. In an unusually vicious review,
Variety
attacked the film mercilessly, advising that
“What might save [Neilan] would be action on the part of his backers. Hand him $35,000 and no more. Tell him to make a picture with it. Then he would have to use his brains, not money. Then possibly we would get something again.”

Due to all the mishaps and lack of organization, the film went wildly over budget, and the problem fell directly into Hawks’s lap. In fact, the situation became so
bad, and relations between Neilan and Hawks so strained, that it resulted in a major lawsuit, which revealed that, contrary to Dwan’s impression, Hawks was directly involved in the financing of at least some of Associated Producers’ films and may have been wealthier than Dwan thought. Hawks’s complaint against Neilan, filed in June 1923, stated that Hawks had loaned Neilan a total of $95,490 (roughly
$2 million by today’s standards) toward production costs on
Bob Hampton
. To cover the rest of the budget, Hawks arranged a bank loan of $125,000. However, as the costs grew, Neilan, supposedly without telling Hawks, borrowed an additional $50,000. When Neilan delivered the picture to First National in February 1921, he was reimbursed for the agreed-upon budget $200,000, but this still left a large
gap, since the actual costs came to $287,066.

After much equivocation, in 1924 both sides met and agreed upon a settlement by which Neilan would pay Hawks everything he owed plus interest; but shortly thereafter Neilan reneged and denied that he had ever agreed to pay interest. At the end of the year, the case was finally dismissed with prejudice against the defendant, suggesting that Hawks was
reasonably treated in an out-of-court settlement. Allan Dwan said that Neilan also owed him a great deal of money during this period, although it apparently never led to a lawsuit.

Hawks, in turn, was sued by one of his lenders, William Shea, for failing to pay back five hundred dollars he’d borrowed in January 1923. When Hawks did not respond to a summons, a writ of attachment was issued for
Hawks’s bank account as well as for that of a company called Hawks-Morosco Productions, in which Hawks was partnered with Walter Mitchell, also known as Walter Morosco, presumably to help finance the Associated Producers features. It took two years, but the court finally removed $531 from Hawks’s bank account to satisfy Shea.

Once the company took this costly wrong turn in 1921, it was never
the same again, although, remarkably, Hawks and Neilan continued working together on five more pictures. On the heels of
Bob Hampton
, Dwan contributed
A Broken Doll
, a contrived, sentimental tale about the farfetched misadventures of a ranch hand (Monte Blue again) who tries to replace the favorite doll of the owner’s crippled daughter. For his part, Neilan followed up with another commercial
disaster but a film Hawks actually liked a great deal,
Bits of Life
, featuring Wesley Barry and Lon Chaney, an ambitious attempt to tell four unrelated stories in a single feature.
As a group, they were remarkably grim and depressing, following seedy characters to gloomy conclusions. This is precisely what impressed Hawks, who found it “a very good picture—very bitter, downbeat.” Still, he admitted
that it had no chance of success because “it left you feeling very bad.”

But despite the film’s failure, Hawks remained highly intrigued by the challenge of telling multiple stories in the same picture and was directly inspired by
Bits of Life
when he was preparing
Red Line 7000
more than forty years later. The results then, however, proved no more popular than they were in 1921, leading Hawks
to conclude that the problem with such a film was that “just when you get people interested, you have to drop one story line to go on to start another.”

Remarkably, Neilan was able to finish yet another picture for the company that year,
The Lotus Eater
, a curious story in which John Barrymore played a young man who stumbles upon a deserted island inhabited by some shipwrecked folks who have
fashioned a free-thinking society far from civilization. Despite the dashingly romantic figure cut by Barrymore, the film was not one of his more popular attractions. It is doubtful that at the time Hawks even met the actor, then at the virtual pinnacle of his celebrity, since the picture was shot off Miami and in New York.

In 1922, Allan Dwan moved on to make the enormous and enormously successful
Robin Hood
with Douglas Fairbanks, which launched the most important phase of the director’s long career. But Neilan kept on with three more pictures for Associated Producers and First National.
Penrod
, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel and play, relied heavily on the antics of Wesley Barry and other child actors. Much more interesting was
Fools First
, a prime example of what Hawks described
as Neilan’s rare ability to switch moods, lay in unexpected business, and subvert audience expectations. Co-starring Richard Dix and Raymond Griffith, the latter to become a friend and favorite of Hawks, it was fundamentally a Hell’s Kitchen story and an account of a bank robbery, but one elaborated with unusual character motivations, themes of redemption, and plot twists. Neilan paused, for
example, to show the human side of the gang leader by having him sensitively tend to a lost child. Neilan also laced the more grisly elements of the story with black, macabre humor. Hawks, who was making a point of studying his directors very carefully, was impressed most of all by Neilan’s approach. “He always had a good foundation for a story,” he told Peter Bogdanovich, “but his method of treating
it lightly crept in, or of stopping in the middle of something very dramatic to get a laugh. He always worked that way and it looked like a good idea to me.”

Neilan’s final contribution to the company was a picture he directed with Frank Urson for early 1923 release. A rather standard romantic comedy,
Minnie
is about an ugly girl who pretends to have a secret admirer but then not only wins
the heart of a newspaper reporter but is transformed into a beauty at the end through plastic surgery.

Allen Holubar weighed in with two further pictures, beginning with
Hurricane’s Gal
, a large-scale adventure in which his wife, Dorothy Phillips, played the orphaned daughter of a high-seas smuggler who tries to continue his rough, illegal dealings, only to see the error of her ways. The 1922
film concluded with a spectacular sea battle that attracted considerable attention. Associated Producers’ last venture, which came out in the spring of 1923, was Holubar’s
Slander the Woman
, a melodrama in which Phillips reappeared as a Montreal society girl who is branded the “other woman” in a murder case and retreats to her father’s hunting lodge near Hudson Bay, where she becomes involved
in further intrigue before her name is cleared. It was, from all accounts, a real dog, an ignominious end to a company that started out strongly but had, at best, an erratic artistic and commercial track record. Hawks simplistically blamed the failure of the company on the fact that all three of his directors were led astray by women, which in his mind somehow clouded their judgment and prevented
them from making any more good pictures. He told Kevin Brownlow that “each one of them ran into some girl he thought was Sarah Bernhardt. And they started to make pictures and that was the end of us. Oh, brother, we made some stinkers. I decided no more other directors, I was going to direct myself. And that I was never going to get mixed up with any girl—that can be done outside of office hours.
Because it was very strange. All three of them went the same way. Just that quick.… Mickey Neilan was by far the better of the three of those, but he went the fastest.” Holubar died on November 20, 1925, of an internal disorder and gallstones, while Dwan and the Hawks boys drifted apart, their careers taking them in separate directions, although Hawks retained his admiration for Dwan. “He was a pro—tough
and hard with a good touch,” Hawks later said. “He didn’t dwell on things—he just hit ’em and went on.”

Once he had decided he wanted to direct himself, Hawks began seeing as many movies as he could, often two or three a day. When he saw a picture he particularly admired, he would sit through it a second time to study the storytelling techniques and the director’s approach to the camera and actors.
Above all, he appreciated the work of John Ford, who, in 1923
was still Jack Ford, a director of Westerns, but was on the verge of breaking through with the monumental production
The Iron Horse
.

But wanting to direct and actually doing so were far different things, so Hawks had little choice in the short term but to continue as a producer, although this time with the added creative role of screenwriter.
He came up with an efficient story for a modern Western, about a young army officer posted along the U.S.–Mexico border to crack a major drug-smuggling ring. The officer falls in love with the daughter of one of the U.S. Customs Service investigators but comes to suspect that she is in league with the gangsters. It turns out that she is an undercover agent, and when the father, daughter,
and officer are captured by the smugglers, the U.S. Cavalry must ride to the rescue.

Hawks said he made
Quicksands
because a colonel he knew, presumably from shared army days, offered him the use of the Tenth Cavalry, “a Negro cavalry that chased Pancho Villa,” along with food and lodging in Texas. In exchange, Hawks made a short filmed history of the Tenth, including a reenactment of its pursuit
of the outlaw Mexican leader who would serve as the subject of one of Hawks’s feature films twelve years later. Financing the production himself, Hawks cut every corner, arranging that his stars, Richard Dix and Helene Chadwick, could finish their scenes in the minimum amount of time to keep costs down; pulling in favors; and generally paying everyone next to nothing. It remains difficult to
believe that he brought it in for eighteen thousand dollars, but it may not have been much more. The director was Jack Conway, another member of the rugged circle to which Hawks was drawing closer, which included Vic Fleming, Eddie Sutherland, and Harold, Richard, and Art Rosson. Conway, nine years older than Hawks, had previously been an actor and an assistant to D. W. Griffith; he had already proven
himself, through a decade of experience, to be a versatile director. Sutherland, an actor and production assistant who was a year Hawks’s senior, shared Hawks’s Eastern prep school background, and the two became frequent golf companions. Sutherland, who in the mid-1920s became a very busy director, was also an amusing bon vivant whose home at the Bachelor Lodge in back of some buildings on Hollywood
Boulevard was the scene of a constant party in the postwar years. Subsequently, he and Jack Conway shared a penthouse at the Hollywood Hotel, where the carousing was only partly interrupted by Sutherland’s marriage to Louise Brooks between 1926 and 1928. On
Quicksands
, Sutherland was one of two stuntmen, along with Richard Arlen, a sportsman and pilot who began acting
the following year and would
later costar for Hawks in
Tiger Shark
. Shot in late 1922, the film was made hectically and very quickly. When it was finished early the following year, the American Releasing Corporation picked up distribution rights, but despite a solid cast and good reviews, the picture did only fair business. In 1927, it was bought by Paramount Famous Lasky, cut from seventy minutes down to an hour, and briefly
rereleased. No print is known to survive today.