Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (73 page)

A few months later, he got a break: D. W. Griffith, director of
The Birth of a Nation,
asked him to co-star in his latest movie,
Intolerance.
So von Stroheim headed for the world’s emerging film capital—Hollywood, California.

Intolerance
was von Stroheim’s ticket back into the movie business. The anti-German sentiment died down enough to where he acted in a dozen more silent movies. They were commercial hits, so in 1919 Universal Pictures allowed him to direct a script he’d written, called
Blind Husbands.
It, too, performed well at the box office, so Universal let him direct more movies. But von Stroheim was a self-styled artist who refused to compromise his artistic vision. Shoots ran long, dozens of takes were required—von Stroheim would do whatever it took to get exactly what he wanted. Result: his movies went
way
over budget.

To rein him in, Universal hired a new studio head—21-year-old Irving Thalberg. For their first film together,
Foolish Wives,
Thalberg gave von Stroheim a $250,000 budget. Despite Thalberg’s attempts to penny-pinch, von Stroheim managed to spend $1.25 million. Halfway through production of von Stroheim’s next film, 1923’s
Merry-Go-Round,
Thalberg decided that he was still spending too much money, so he fired him. Von Stroheim signed with rival studio Metro-Goldwyn.

Thalberg’s method at Universal was to make cheap, profitable movies, period. At Metro-Goldwyn, executives believed they
could make commercial movies and turn a profit while allowing directors to make the movies they wanted to make (as long as they stayed under budget). So, seven years after he’d first discovered the book, von Stroheim pitched his idea of adapting
McTeague
to the studio bosses
.
They gave him the go-ahead with only one condition: He had to retitle it
Greed.

Hoping to make the most of his artistic freedom, but also hoping to avoid pushing his bosses at Metro-Goldwyn too far, von Stroheim had to make sure he had enough money to make the
Greed
he wanted, so he supplemented the movie’s budget with his own personal funds. To get the money, he took out a second mortgage on his house and sold his car. To further lower costs, he took a pay cut. Although contracted to write, direct, and edit the picture, he accepted only a small fee for editing—two weeks’ scale salary.

Have you ever watched the movie version of a novel you read, and found yourself disappointed because too much had been left out? That’s pretty much a necessity—a book contains far more material than can be included in a two-hour film. Von Stroheim didn’t want that to be the case with
Greed.
He wanted to include
everything
—every subplot, every line of dialogue, every piece of furniture and physical trait present in the novel. That would be an extremely ambitious concept today, but this was 1923—color film, special effects, and even sound were not yet available.

So in striving for realism and staying absolutely faithful to the book, von Stroheim had to innovate: He filmed on location, which was seldom done in 1923. (
Greed
was the first feature film ever made without any sets or soundstages.) The bulk of the action takes place in and around McTeague’s apartment in San Francisco, so von Stroheim rented a dilapidated house there and furnished it with run-down furniture exactly as Norris’s book described. To get a better sense of their characters, von Stroheim even made his actors
live
in the house. He also insisted that the scenes that took place in Death Valley, the hottest place in North America, be shot there. During filming, the temperature reached a blazing 142°F. Jean Hersholt, who portrayed Marcus, was hospitalized for internal bleeding triggered by dehydration.

It took von Stroheim nine months and $500,000 to make
Greed—
18 times longer and five times more expensive than most movies of the time. But it was worth it to von Stroheim: Every miniscule detail of all 496 pages of
McTeague
was present in
Greed.
As a final touch, to emphasize the recurring themes of wealth and greed, von Stroheim hand-painted the actual film, using gold paint to color every gold object in the movie.

The director had made his masterpiece, but there was one big problem: It was more than
nine hours
long. No movie studio in Hollywood would release a movie that long, not even one that let directors do what they wanted. Von Stroheim realized he’d have to abandon his original vision of
McTeague
…and chop it down to a more manageable length.

But first he held a private screening of the complete, “true”
Greed
for his friends, family, and a few reporters. Exactly 12 people saw the nine-hour film in its first showing. It was also the
only
screening ever made of the full film. Those 12 people are the only ones who ever saw von Stroheim’s masterpiece the way he intended it to be seen. And they loved it.

But in April 1924, there were big changes at Metro-Goldwyn Studios. Lowe’s Theatres bought the company. They also bought Mayer-Schulberg Studios, and merged them into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Former Mayer-Schulberg chief Louis B. Mayer was appointed head of production, and he did not share Metro-Goldwyn’s “the director rules” approach. He shared Thalberg’s philosophy: Make a movie fast and cheap with a producer overseeing expenses. In fact, Mayer hired Thalberg—von Stroheim’s nemesis at Universal—to enforce these new rules.

Von Stroheim, meanwhile, still had a movie to finish. He carefully edited
Greed
, somehow getting the running time down to four hours with most of the plot, subplots, and themes intact. He sent the four-hour cut to his friend, editor Rex Ingram, asking if he could recommend anything else to delete. Ingram removed an hour, then sent the film back to von Stroheim with a note reading, “If you cut one more foot I shall never speak to you again.”

Von Stroheim presented the three-hour version to Mayer…who didn’t even watch it. Instead, he passed it off to a staff editor with instructions to cut it to an even 120 minutes. The two-hour
Greed
was a completely different movie from the nine-hour, the four-hour, or even the three-hour
Greed.
According to
Film Monthly
magazine, it “turned a tragedy rich with telling detail into a bare outline.”

The two-hour
Greed
concentrates exclusively on McTeague (Gibson Gowland), Trina (ZaSu Pitts), and Marcus. Most of the many subplots and characters were eliminated. Here’s a taste of some elements that were in Norris’ novel and filmed by von Stroheim, but completely removed from the final film:

• McTeague’s backstory, showing his early life, growing up in mining towns, and how he learned dentistry.

• Two old people who live in an apartment near McTeague’s. They fall in love over the course of the film—a counterpoint to the slow destruction of McTeague and Trina’s relationship.

• A subplot concerning Maria, a greedy junk collector who sells Trina the fateful lottery ticket. Her boyfriend, Zerkow, marries her because he believes she has a secret stash of gold dishes worth a fortune. When Zerkow discovers they are made of tin, he kills Maria and then kills himself by jumping into San Francisco Bay. (The actor playing Zerkow actually jumped into the San Francisco Bay during filming and contracted pneumonia.)

Contractually obligated to screen it
somewhere
, Mayer debuted the film in a single New York theater during the Christmas season of 1924. A blunt tragedy about the dark side of humanity is not the kind of movie people want to see at Christmas and, predictably,
Greed
bombed at the box office. For tax purposes, MGM wrote off the production costs—$500,000—as a total loss.

But was the full nine-hour
Greed
ever smuggled out of MGM? Later in his life, von Stroheim claimed that he’d screened it personally in Argentina during World War II, and that he’d given a print to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. And there’s a rumor that David Shepard of the American Film Institute supposedly found it in a garage several decades later, but it’s untrue—the uncut
Greed
is on the AFI’s list of most wanted lost films.

As for von Stroheim, he made an interesting comeback. In the 1930s, after the
Greed
debacle and a few more box-office bombs, he moved to France, where he starred in Jean Renoir’s 1937 classic,
La Grande Illusion.
Then, in 1950, director Billy Wilder cast him in
Sunset Boulevard,
which reflects on the broken careers of giants of the silent film era. Von Stroheim portrayed Max von Mayerling, one of “the three great silent film directors” next to Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith, now reduced to working as the butler for his ex-wife, silent film star Norma Desmond. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in
Sunset Boulevard
, and appeared in seven more films before he died in 1957 at the age of 72.

As far as anyone knows, the nine-hour
Greed—
more specifically, the seven hours of cut footage—really is gone. Irving Thalberg later told reporters that the missing footage was melted down for its valuable silver content (photographic film contains tiny silver salt crystals)
.
There probably was only one print of the full version—von Stroheim’s working copy. MGM certainly wouldn’t have paid for duplicates if Mayer had no intention of ever using them.

Von Stroheim’s masterpiece did eventually see the light of day…sort of. In 1999 film preservationist Rick Schmidlin set out to restore and recreate
Greed
as much as possible. Taking the existing footage and 650 surviving production stills, with von Stroheim’s screenplay as a guide, Schmidlin constructed a four-hour version believed to be, based on Stroheim’s production and editing notes, very close to the director’s four-hour cut. It aired on Turner Classic Movies in December 1999. If you didn’t see it then, you may never see it. Jut as the nine-hour and four-hour versions are lost forever, Schmidlin’s take is not available on DVD.

Here lies a man named Zeke,
Second-fastest draw in Cripple Creek.

When Oscar Robertson first started playing basketball in his hometown of Indianapolis, he was known as “Li’l Flap,” after his big brother, Bailey “Flap” Robertson (named for how his wrist turned after a shot). Oscar honed his skills playing against older, taller Crispus Attucks stars like Flap and Hallie Bryant, and he practiced constantly, perfecting a one-handed jump shot, behind-the-back passes, and “fakes”—moving one way and then the other to put the defender off guard. He was quick and agile, and by the time he made the varsity squad at Crispus Attucks as a sophomore in 1953, he was 6’2”. When he scored 15 points as a substitute in the team’s first game (a win), Coach Ray Crowe made him a starter. And after he almost single-handedly won a game against Shortridge High in double overtime, people stopped calling him Li’l Flap.

It’s not an understatement to say that, between Coach Crowe’s aggressive game plan and Robertson’s size and talent, they revolutionized high school basketball. Instead of scoring 50 or 60 points a game, the Attucks team scored 80 or 90. Robertson didn’t have to rely on holding the ball for minutes at a time or passing from corner to corner, hoping for an opening. Because he was bigger and faster than most players, he could dribble past his defender and either shoot a basket or pass it to a teammate who had a wide-open shot because the other defenders had moved to cover Robertson. As Willie Merriweather, who played forward with Robertson, put it, “Their team would be in disarray, and then we would start to run.”

In 1955, with an older, taller Oscar Robertson (he’d grown to 6’4”
since losing to Milan the previous year), the Tigers were practically unstoppable. The city of Indianapolis had never won a State Championship, and everyone—black and white—started rooting for them. Ticket demand was so high that many of their home games were moved to the 15,000-seat Butler Fieldhouse (the basketball arena of nearby Butler University). The team went 21–1 in the regular season. Their only loss that year was in the dead of winter to a small-town team whose gym floor was laid over a frozen swimming pool…and that was the last time an Attucks team with Oscar Robertson would
ever
lose a game.

Having beaten their playoff opponents by an average of 28 points, they cruised to the 1955 State Championship Final game in front of 15,000 fans at the now-familiar Butler Fieldhouse. Their opponent: Gary Roosevelt High, another all-black segregated school. That made it the first time in Indiana history that two all-black schools faced off in the State Final. Gary Roosevelt had an excellent team, including a 6’6” center named Jake Eison, who was named Indiana’s “Mr. Basketball” that year, and Dick Barnett, a future NBA star. But Attucks ran away with the game, winning 97–74.