Last Remaining Seats: Peter Pan

Another season of Last Remaining Seats comes to a close. Per the tradition, they capped it off at the Orpheum for a silent movie with live organ accompaniment. In this case, it was the 1924 film adaptation of Peter Pan. Robert Israel provided the soundtrack on the Mega Mother Wurlitzer (officially the Mighty Wurlitzer, but Mighty doesn't do that behemoth justice), as he always does. And as he did at the American Graffiti screening three weeks ago, he provided the pre-show music (7pm-8pm), another poignant reminder of Bob Mitchell's passing last year. If you read my post on American Graffiti, you might remember my aside on the inestimable Mr. Mitchell. Instead of hearing me gush about him again, though, let me give it to you straight from tonight's program. The L.A. Conservancy dedicated tonight's showing of Peter Pan to Bob, and inside the program they have the following obit.

Los Angeles icon and great friend of the Conservancy Bob Mitchell passed away last year on July 4, 2009 at age 96. A highly accomplished musician, Bob played piano and organ at Last Remaining Seats for years, starting with the very first season in 1987 and ending with last year's opening night, May 27, 2009, one of his last performances [Note from Tom: The movie that night was The Sting].

Born in Los Angeles on October 12, 1912, Bob started playing piano at age four and played the organ by age ten. In 1924, the twelve-year-old got a job playing organ at the Strand Theatre in Pasadena, where he improvised scores for silent films. Though his silent movie career seemingly ended at age sixteen with the emergence of talkies, Mitchell would go on to revive the accompanist's place in cinema sixty years later in the early 1990s, playing weekly at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue.

A classically trained organist, at age eighteen Bob became the youngest candidate to receive the degree of Fellow of the American Guild of Organists. He also won a scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music and the New York College of Music. In 1934, Bob became the organist at St. Brendan's Catholic Church in Los Angeles. He founded the Mitchell Choirboys (also known as the Mitchell Singing Boys), which continued for nearly seventy years. The group performed in more than 100 films, toured extensively, and made thousands of radio and TV appearances. It was also one of the first racially integrated professional choirs in the United States.

During World War II, Bob served in the Navy and played the keyboard for the Armed Forces Radio Orchestra. Back in Los Angeles, he served as music director for many religious institutions, staff pianist/organist at several radio and television stations, and the first house musician for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Bob was widely admired as a man of deep faith, boundless energy, and extreme generosity. Through his performances at Last Remaining Seats, he gave countless fans a great gift beyond even his music: an authentic connection to the history of Los Angeles and the movies. The Conservancy is grateful for having Bob as part of our family for so many years. We greatly miss him.

Awesome, huh? I'm glad they chose tonight's screening for his dedication. Of course, it makes perfect sense given the venue and that they were showing a silent movie, but still, I'm glad because tonight was one my favorite LRS screenings so far. Not only was this one of the most loyal adaptations of Peter Pan, it was one of those silent films where the audience gets involved. Robert Israel gave us the heads-up about that after Orpheum owner Steve Needleman gave a little talk. After the lights went down at 8pm, Conservancy head Linda Dishman gave her welcome spiel before introducing Steve. He talked about the Mighty Wurlitzer and all the time and effort and care they've put into maintaining it. He said they're still using the original pipes that came with this bad boy when it was installed here in 1928, when the Orpheum was all of two years old. One modification they recently made to it, Steve said, was connecting said original pipes to a computer. The Mighty Wurlitzer is connected to the computer as well. In other words, the computer is now the Mighty Wurlitzer's go-between, and this apparently helps maximize the organ's sonic power. I guess that's cool. I'm not a music expert so I'm not sure I'd know the difference with or without a computer. No mistake, though, Steve went on for several minutes about how much time and effort it took to do the whole computer thing. This is the first time he's shown his face at this event since I started coming two years ago, so it must've been a project and a half.

After Steve talked, Robert Israel talked about what an awesome man and mentor Bob Mitchell was, and that any hope he had of filling those shoes were nil. I certainly don't envy him having to do the pre-show entertainment in addition to the live accompaniment. Even though he is the crème de la crème in the organ biz, he, like every other organist, is a pygmy next to Bob. This is when Robert gave us the heads-up that he was going to have us whoop like Indians at one point in the film. He didn't say when that scene would be, and quite frankly it had been too long since I'd seen any Peter Pan adaptation to remember at what point Hook's men pretend to be Indians. It turned out to be toward the end. Anyway, when that scene finally rolled around, Robert was like, "Now!" Sure enough, pretty much the entire sold-out house of about two thousand people hollered their best Native American war cries. Awesome. See? That's why tonight was one of my favorite screenings so far. That, and another interactive moment after the Indian one. It's when Peter Pan turns to the screen and pleads with the audience to save Tinkerbell. Again, the whole crowd got into it. I know it sounds corny, but at the same time it was just so cool.

After Robert's talk, they put on a vintage curtain presentation by Steve Markham. I've seen this guy before, at the final LRS screening in 2008 when they showed silent comedy classics at the Orpheum starring Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton. Steve Markham's this older guy with a company called Markham Collection. From markhamcollection.com:

Steve Markham started his career in show business as a baton twirling vaudeville performer and then became the classical music radio host for radio station KFAC.

He has been collecting and restoring vintage theatre drapes since the early 1980s. He has found drapes in warehouses, old theatres, the occasional dumpster and one at a commercial dry cleaners that had been cleaned but never paid for.

His drapes have been featured in the TV movie Gypsy starring Bette Midler and the hit TV series Murder She Wrote. His drapes can be seen at the Magic Castle and numerous award shows at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. His curtain show during the LA Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats film series is an audience favorite. He has been featured in newspaper articles, on TCM and most recently in LA Magazine.

The vintage theatrical curtains in this collection are for rent on a weekly basis for motion pictures, television shows and stage productions.

Due to the vintage nature and condition of the collection, a representative for the collection will supervise the installation and strike for each rental.

Rentals are restricted to a 75-mile radius of downtown Los Angeles.

Check out his site when you get a chance. He's got full stage drapes, scrims, swags and travelers. Tonight he showed five full stage drapes. The Orpheum stage is deep enough for Steve to have all five curtains set up, one behind the other, so he could reveal them one at a time and give the history and backstory for each. One of them was this beautiful golden curtain that creased very neatly as it rose. After that was a curtain decorated with nymphs, apropos for Peter Pan. The turquoise curtain with the seal was actually found at the Orpheum. I think it had been discarded and forgotten about, but for Steve it was a gem hiding in plain sight. Another curtain featured a watercolor with a white tree.

After the curtain bit, the famous movie critic Leonard Maltin came out to give a talk about Peter Pan. I love this guy. I've been a fan since discovering him on Entertainment Tonight back in the eighties. I think one of the reasons I like him is because he's a kind critic. A lot of critics, it seems, especially in publications like the L.A. Times and N.Y. Times, can be really vicious. Maybe because they write for such reputable publications, they feel this unspoken obligation to be hard-asses, I don't know. But Leonard's never been that way. He's fair, don't get me wrong. If he sees schlock, he'll call it schlock, but he does it without the vitriol that seems de rigueur in the movie review business these days. I've also seen Leonard at a few of the L.A. Times Festival of Books. He's a great speaker, very personable and folksy.

The first thing he told us about this adaptation of Peter Pan was that the Scottish guy who wrote the original play, J.M. Barrie, was still alive when this came out. He was in his early sixties and was apparently involved in the filmmaking process. I'm not sure if that was common back then, but today that would be extremely rare. If you've written a play or a novel or what have you, and Hollywood wants to adapt it for the silver screen, your involvement would usually begin and end with selling or optioning your material. You collect your paycheck and the producers take it from there, thank you very much. Not here, though. In fact, the opposite was the case. J.M. Barrie actually hand-picked Betty Bronson to play Peter. I can't think of a single example in modern times when the writer of the original source material was granted carte blanche of that magnitude. Thank God he did for Betty Bronson's sake, right? Here you've got this teenager from New Jersey with a few tiny parts to her name, some of them uncredited at that, and all of a sudden she gets picked for a role over which the likes of Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson were salivating.

Before you ask: Yes, it was perfectly normal for a woman to play Peter Pan. This is a tradition that continues to this day. Why, just a few years ago at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, I saw a production of Peter Pan in which Peter was played by this woman in her fifties. I shit you not. She was this petite gal who even had grandkids. And she was brilliant! She did an amazing job pretending to be a teenage boy who can fly.

Leonard Maltin said it wasn't until the 1953 Disney cartoon version of Peter Pan that Peter was played by a boy, a sixteen-year-old named Bobby Driscoll. He didn't just voice the part. Disney filmed him in live action and then used the footage as inspiration for the animated character. What a tragic story he is. Here's a kid who scored an Oscar when he was 12. He didn't win in any of the traditional categories. They actually created a special category that year specifically for him, "outstanding juvenile actor" or something like that, because he did an awesome job in two movies that year. And then he parlayed that into becoming the first actor ever to sign a long-term deal with Disney. Seriously, he should've had it all, but then he suffered severe acne that put a crimp in his style. Disney nullified his contract not long after Peter Pan. That's when the downward spiral began. Poor Bobby became a drug addict and wound up homeless in New York. He was only thirty-one when he died. No one in New York knew who he was so they buried him as a John Doe in a pauper's pit. A year later they took his fingerprints and discovered his identity. Depressing as hell, huh? What a tragically ironic outcome for the first male actor to play the kid who doesn't want to grow up.

On a much brighter note, the actress who voiced Wendy in the 1953 Peter Pan was at the Orpheum tonight to watch the show with us. Kathryn Beaumont is in her seventies now. In fact, she just turned seventy-two three days ago. She didn't come up to the stage, but Leonard talked about her for a bit. She was ten when Disney cast her to voice Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Like Bobby Driscoll in Peter Pan, they used Kathryn as the model for the animated Alice. It took three years for Alice in Wonderland to come out, and soon after that came Peter Pan. At this point she was finished high school and wanted to have a normal college life. Although she was originally from England and her folks were still back there, her years working for Disney in Burbank made her a fan of Southern California. So for college, she stayed and went to USC. She worked for Disney during the summers to stay busy, but otherwise she was a normal college student. She graduated in four years with a Bachelor's in Education and teaching credentials. Kathryn became an elementary school teacher in L.A. and never looked back. Apparently her students loved asking her about her Disney experiences and hearing her do the character voices. Disney made her an official Disney Legend in the late nineties. Kathryn's retired now, but once in a blue moon she'll lend her voice to Alice or Wendy for a video game or something, which is cool.

Anyway, let's get back to Betty Bronson. That J.M. Barrie picked a nobody from New Jersey was a wee bit shocking to say the least. I'm not sure about Gloria Swanson, but Mary Pickford got over it soon enough. She even had the class to visit Betty on set to extend her congratulations. From Betty's point of view, that must've been a pretty awesome experience. Mary Pickford wasn't just another pretty face. Indeed, to this day she's one of the most powerful women in Hollywood history. She co-founded the Academy Awards. And she was one of the four, and the only woman, who created United Artists, the others being Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. In fact, she'd already helped establish United Artists five years before Peter Pan, so her fame and clout were secure.

As for Betty, her fame barely lasted the fifteen minutes eventually mandated by Andy Warhol. It wasn't entirely her fault. Part of it was that the studio and her reps weren't sure which scripts were most suitable for her. Another part of it (and this happened to many actors from the silent era) was the advent of sound. Betty's forte was pantomime. Her acting talent per se was only so so, and that becomes harder to hide when the audience can hear you. What's more, with sound came changing tastes. The public became less interested in sappy, sentimental stuff and more interested in stories with characters who were like them. It wasn't a categorical loss. Betty held her own with Al Jolson in The Singing Fool, but still, it didn't last. Whereas Mary Pickford eventually retired on her own terms, Betty had a sort of "forced" retirement, got married and, well, vanished from the limelight.

Leonard talked a little about the film itself. He warned us, if "warn" is the right word, that this film is a "delicate piece" and a "film of its time." "Just go with it," he advised. "You've already proven you're cool." He talked a bit about the cast. Apparently the actresses who played Wendy and Mrs. Darling, Mary Brian and Esther Ralston, became friends during the shoot and stayed friends for life. And get this: The guy who played Nana, the Darling's family dog, was George Ali, the same guy who originated the Nana role for J.M. Barrie in the stage production twenty years earlier. He was pushing forty then, which means he was pushing sixty when they made this. Knowing that and now having seen this, that's quite a feat. He must've been suffocating in that thing. The veteran of the cast, Leonard said, was the guy who played Hook, a Scot named Ernest Torrence. Apparently he was quite renowned for playing bad guys. He just had that look, including a rather intimidating nose. A role like this, which calls for a well-cooked ham, was right up Ernest's alley. Another role he relished was Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. You get the idea.

While they did shoot on location for a few scenes, the screen was for the most part treated like a stage. In fact, although I've never seen the original play, I wonder if they changed much of anything. As with plays, a lot of the scenes in the movie were very long, as in ten minutes or more. That's very common for stage fare, but the next time you see a movie, try to keep time for a few scenes. I doubt most will last as long as two minutes, which is why your average feature film tallies upward of sixty to eighty scenes.

None of that detracts from how much I enjoyed the film and the evening in general. It felt kind of cool seeing a version of Peter Pan made at a time when J.M. Barrie was not only still living but was actively involved in the production. And I got to see Nana played by the original actor. How cool is that? It's like watching history as it was made. And as I said above, it was neat how the audience got involved with the film. You should've heard them, they were really into it, both the Indian war cries and especially the very end when Peter needed our help to save Tink. I love that Mighty Wurlitzer.

Rest in peace, Bob Mitchell.

Last Remaining Seats: The Graduate

Back to the beautiful Los Angeles Theatre we go, my favorite theater on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, where just three weeks ago Mom and I saw the 1967 flick How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Tonight they showed The Graduate, another film from '67. That's not a coincidence. If you read the How to Succeed post, you'll know that 2010 is a special year for the Conservancy. It's the year of Sixties Turn 50, a project by the Conservancy's Modern Committee, or Mod Com. As the literature says, the sixties start turning fifty in 2010, and so what better way for a group like this to celebrate it than to show movies made in the sixties? Or, in the case of American Graffiti last week, movies that take place in the sixties? The Sixties Turn Fifty is a nine-month program highlighting and celebrating sixties architecture in Los Angeles County and how best to preserve and protect it. As they were three weeks ago, members of the Mod Com were set up on the lower level of the Los Angeles, in that huge wood floor space between the men's and ladies' rooms that was originally a kids' playing area in the theater's heyday. They were manning their tables and chatting up folks while video kiosks looped footage of sixties buildings around L.A. County.

You might say L.A. is the perfect place to celebrate sixties architecture. Seriously, if you have a minute, head over to laconservancy.org and click through to their Sixties Turn Fifty site (yes, they built a whole site for this) and check out some of the landmarks. We're talking an awesome mix of styles. It's funny. When I go to Opera League seminars, sometimes they talk about these top notch European composers who moved to L.A. for the great weather and the lucrative work in the movie industry. Well, it was sort of like that with architecture. Some of the most awesome architects from around the world came to L.A. for the work and the weather. The result? While Hollywood movies were being made with some of the best soundtracks ever, some of the most awesome and unique residences and office buildings and churches and hotels were being designed and built right here. L.A. sounds like a fun place to be in the sixties, doesn't it? Folks who were around at that time, the more discerning folks at least, were getting to see the modern L.A., the L.A. we all know and love, the L.A. Randy Newman sings about, being born.

Whereas the Modesto-set American Graffiti was filmed in Northern California and How to Succeed was made in New York (or at least takes place in New York, I'm not sure where the interior sets were), The Graduate has an extra dimension of relevance to the Sixties Turn Fifty because a lot of it was filmed on location in L.A. It's not set here, mind you. Like American Graffiti, the story takes place up in the Bay area. George Lucas actually did shoot American Graffiti in the Bay area since that was his home. The Graduate director Mike Nichols, on the other hand, stayed close to the studio, and perhaps close to where most of the cast lived. As a result, the UC Berkley scenes were actually shot at USC. That hits home for me since I was a student there in the late nineties. Doheny Library really stands out, as does Von KleinSmid Hall, where the business school is based. The program I attended, Masters of Professional Writing, was based on the fourth floor of Waite Phillips Hall, next door to Von KleinSmid (since then it's moved across the way to Taper Hall). You can see the phys ed building at one point as well. Other L.A. spots used in the film include the United Methodist Church in La Verne, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley about thirty minutes east of L.A. That's where they shot the wedding at the end. As for Mrs. Robinson's house, that was actually someone's real house in Beverly Hills on North Palm Drive.

Most memorable of all, though, is that hotel where Ben and Mrs. Robinson carry on their affair. In the story, it's a fictional hotel called Taft. In real life? Mike Nichols shot all that at none other than the legendary Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. When it was demolished in 2006, many people wept. And I'm being literal. The Ambassador occupies an irreplaceable plot of L.A. history. It was built in the early twenties with designs from the same architect, Myron Hunt, who designed the Rose Bowl, Caltech, Occidental College, and the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. The Ambassador was no ordinary hotel. Taking up twenty-four acres, it was a world unto itself. Whether you were staying there or just out for a night at its famous Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador was just that: A dignitary from another land, in this case one of escapism, who knew what you wanted. The Cocoanut Grove was not only a hot spot on L.A.'s nightlife map, it was one of the most popular concert venues in the West. Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Diana Ross, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Julie Andrews, the list of legends who played at the Grove is endless. As for the hotel itself, presidents stayed there. Visiting leaders did the same. Marilyn Monroe got her start there, modeling with a poolside agency. Howard Hughes didn't just stay there, he lived there. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated there (a year after The Graduate was filmed). Are you getting the picture? And as for Hollywood filming, The Graduate is, in fact, part of a long list of productions that found a use for the Ambassador. The Academy Awards were held there a few times early on, such as the 1940 ceremony when Gone with the Wind swept. So the next time you see The Graduate, you can appreciate those affair scenes, huh? Besides which, as I learned in film school, the Ambassador scenes are also awesome from a film geek standpoint. That one scene in particular where they're in bed and Mrs. Robinson spills the secret of Elaine being an accident in the back of a Ford, how that scene starts with Ben wanting to have a conversation for a change and ending with him not wanting to talk at all after Mrs. Robinson grabs him by the hair and makes him swear never to tell, they showed us that scene in film school I don't know how many times. It's a perfect scene. Well played. The beats are hit on schedule without making the whole thing seem artificial. No small feat.

So there you go. The Graduate, more than any other film in this year's Last Remaining Seats series, aligns with the Mod Com's Sixties Turn Fifty program. Watching this film means you're watching L.A. in the sixties.

Before Conservancy head Linda Dishman came out to give her welcome-and-thank-you spiel, they screened a short film by Mel Brooks called "The Critic." This marked Mel's first foray into film, and it's an awesome example of less is more. Made in 1963 with a running time of about five minutes, it's basically a series of abstract animations set to a harpsichord. Voiceover is provided by Mel as an old man who complains the whole time because he doesn't understand what the animation is supposed to be about. Mel was only in his thirties at the time, in fact about the same age as Anne Bancroft, whom he married the following year, but he totally sounds like a grouchy old geezer.

Tonight's host was Tony Valdez, a sixtysomething (there we go with the sixties again!) newscaster from L.A.'s local Fox affiliate, Fox 11. Like Charles Phoenix at last week's American Graffiti screening, Tony is a Last Remaining Seats regular. More than that, he's a Conservancy member and sometime volunteer docent for the Conservancy's downtown walking tours. Being a TV news guy, you won't be surprised to learn Tony's got a lot of charm. He's a little white-haired chubby guy who went to hell and back in Vietnam....and is probably the best, funniest, most personable host in the Conservancy's rotating lineup of LRS hosts.

Tony spent a few minutes before the movie interviewing the guy who produced The Graduate, Lawrence Turman. He's in his eighties now and has been teaching at USC since 1991. Among his former students are Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, creators of Smallville. Lawrence was in his forties when he produced The Graduate, easily the first notable thing he helmed. Since The Graduate, he's been working quite steadily. In terms of films I've heard of, Lawrence produced John Carpenter's remake of The Thing in the early eighties, starring Kurt Russell. And then he and Kurt teamed up a couple years later for The Mean Season. Lawrence was also the brain behind the two Short Circuit movies. That's especially awesome as those were definitely among my faves growing up. I still think about Number 5 sometimes. "Input! More input!" Love it. Other eighties and nineties flicks from his oeuvre include the buddy cop comedy Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines and an unknown Jimmy Smits playing the bad guy (I haven't seen that in ages), The Getaway, The River Wild, and American History X. So our man Lawrence has been around. And for someone in his eighties, he seems like he could still produce a movie today.

I've seen producers interviewed before, and they all seem to enjoy talking about how hard it is to be a producer, how tough it is to get people, namely studio suits, to believe in their projects. Lawrence was no exception. The first thing he talked about was how hard it was to get The Graduate made. The Charles Webb novel on which it's based was published in 1964. Now to me, three years doesn't seem like a very long time to make a feature. It's almost a matter of course now'days for a feature to consume at least two or three years from pre-production to red carpet premiere. But judging by how he went on and on about it, those must've been three very long years. It sounds like the instant the novel was published, he was all over it. He said he shopped it to every studio in town, and they all said no.

In yet another example of how the most precious irony occurs in real life, The Graduate's savior turned out to be a producer named Joseph Levine from a company called Embassy. Joseph was just north of sixty and had already accomplished quite a bit. The way he started out in the biz was to buy the distribution rights to foreign flicks on the cheap and then release them in the States and support them with advertising. In fact, Joseph and his Embassy became well known for their TV spots. His first fortune came from the distro rights to the original Godzilla movie from Japan. The Italian film Hercules and the Princess of Troy was another one he nabbed. As you might've deduced by those two titles, Joseph's forte was the low-budget stuff. Lawrence called him a "schlockmeister." Other pre-Graduate credits include Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Morgan the Pirate, Where the Bullets Fly, Sands of the Kalahari, Mad Monster Party?, and The Tiger and the Pussycat. He made another fortune in the sixties with a sexploitation flick called The Carpetbaggers, which came from a novel that was a thinly disguised bio of Howard Hughes. I believe schlock is in the eye of the popcorn eater, so whatever you think of Hercules and Godzilla, Joseph certainly didn't mind the money. Nor the accolades. The same year he produced The Carpetbaggers, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the folks behind the Golden Globes) honored him with their Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures. Almost as if being jinxed by that recognition, Joseph's next movie was universally reviled: The Oscar, which unfortunately marked the movie debut of Tony Bennett, who was forty and already a name to conjure. Ol' Joseph was also known for being terrible with names. Check out how he butchered Dustin Hoffman and Simon and Garfunkel during an interview: "If Mike Nichols wants Dustin Farnum in The Graduate, I let Mike have him. Now for the music he wants Simon and Schuster." Pitching The Graduate to Joseph was a last-ditch effort. As you can now see from his resume, a guy like that is the last person you'd expect to have any interest in a movie like this. And yet he did. Joseph saved the day.

Lawrence said the screenplay by Buck Henry, who went on to do Catch-22 and stuff as recent as To Die For, one of my favorite Nicole Kidman movies, was very loyal to the novel. More than that, he said the script was all but a verbatim rewrite of the novel in screenplay format. A lot of the dialogue was reproduced "to the T," he said. And speaking of the novel, apparently Charles Webb based a lot of it on his own experiences. Charles was from Pasadena. He attended college at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Like Dustin Hoffman in the film, he moved back home after graduating and didn't know what to do. He ended up having an affair with a woman a lot like Mrs. Robinson. She was a socialite who was older, very beautiful, and very married. Pasadena was and still is a relatively conservative enclave so I can only imagine the hot water he got into. And just as Raymond Chandler wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, at Musso & Frank in Hollywood, so Charles Webb found a public place to work on his debut opus: The Pasadena Huntington Hotel.

Lawrence didn't say how hard it was to find a director. Mike Nichols had done next to nothing at this point in terms of directing. He'd done a play on Broadway, which is awesome, but that was it. He certainly knew comedy, though. Have you heard of Nichols and May? Mike Nichols and Elaine May were quite the comedy duo in the fifties. They did live gigs in nightclubs and on the radio. And they made records. In fact, the two of them plus a few others were the ones who created Chicago's still famous Second City comedy troupe. And that one play he directed? Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. It was a smash. After that, Mike knew he wanted to direct. Lawrence could see it too. "I had a feeling about him," he said.

Finding an actor to play Ben was the hardest part. Their ideal candidate was Robert Redford, but he said no. And so came the auditions. Lawrence said they auditioned literally hundreds of guys before they found thirty-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Dustin had done a few things at this point, mostly TV stuff. It's safe to say he was still waiting for his big break when The Graduate came along. And speaking of his being thirty, that's something you forget when you watch the movie, how close in age the actors are. Dustin was thirty, and Anne Bancroft, the "older woman," was thirty-five. Katharine Ross, who played her daughter Elaine, was twenty-seven. Hilarious, huh? In terms of the audition process, Lawrence said they made up a fake scene with Ben and Mrs. Robinson that had nothing to do with the movie, but they didn't reveal that to the prospective Bens. Reading the Mrs. Robinson part was Joanne Linville, a forty-year-old actress already well established in the TV world. She's still alive today and has done tons of TV work and no mistake. Lawrence said they hadn't found their Mrs. Robinson yet. They never considered Joanne Linville for the part. It's just that she and Lawrence were pals, and she agreed to help him with the readings. When it was Dustin Hoffman's turn to read with her, he made her cry. That's when Lawrence and Joseph knew they had their Ben. As a side note, Joanne was married at this time to Mark Rydell. Also still alive today (they divorced in the early seventies), Mark did TV stuff in the sixties like The Fugitive and Gunsmoke and since then has done movies like On Golden Pond and Even Money.

As for Mrs. Robinson, the actress they were gunning for was Doris Day. She certainly was the ideal age for the part, early forties. After she said no, they went to Patricia Neal, but she was recovering from a stroke and wasn't ready for the rigors of film production. Meantime, other actresses were approaching them for the role. I guess the buzz was building. We're talking the likes of Ava Gardner and Joan Crawford. Wow, huh? As for Mr. Robinson, they wanted Gene Hackman, but Murray Hamilton had to suffice. It does make you wonder, doesn't it? If they'd gotten their dream cast of Robert Redford, Doris Day, and Gene Hackman? How awesome would that've been? Although, after having seen it so many times, it's almost impossible to imagine it without Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.

Lawrence had just done a film with a Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack before The Graduate: The Flim-Flam Man with George C. Scott. The future Patton plays a con man (the title character) who meets and befriends an Army deserter and recruits him (pun intended) to be his young apprentice. It's also got Slim Pickens in it, as well as Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the Stanley Kubrick version of the Nabokov novel a few years earlier. Most interesting from my standpoint is that The Flim-Flam Man was directed by Irvin Kershner. Kersh, as his friends called him, directed The Empire Strikes Back, my favorite of all six Star Wars films. I was lucky enough to see a Q&A with him at a screening of Empire at the ArcLight Hollywood a few years ago. Pretty cool guy. Lots of energy for someone in his eighties.

But anyway, and ironically, even though Lawrence had just worked with Simon & Garfunkel, it never occurred to him to hire them for The Graduate. As I said about the cast, I can't imagine The Graduate without Simon & Garfunkel. Their music is one of my favorite things about the film. Lawrence said we should thank Mike Nichols for suggesting them. Now get this: The song "Mrs. Robinson" wasn't really about Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson. It was about Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know that? I didn't before tonight. Here's why, though. Originally Simon & Garfunkel were supposed to write three original songs for the film, but because they toured all the time and had other obligations, they only had time for one, "The Sounds of Silence." Mike Nichols didn't find this out until he was nearly done editing the piece. Naturally he became sort of stressed. In an attempt at mollification, Simon showed him this other song he was working on about the former First Lady which just happened to have the title "Mrs. Robinson." Mike took it. What a lucky break, huh? Indeed, Lawrence said The Graduate is a great example of the stars aligning.

When they had their final cut, they did two test screenings, one of them in the smallest movie theater in Chicago. Their editor, Sam O'Steen, attended that one. Afterward, he assured Lawrence and Mike they had a hit on their hands. The other screening was in New York City. Again, nothing but positive feedback. Lawrence said that, after the New York screening, he walked out into the lobby to find one of the studio moguls who'd turned down The Graduate. Apparently this particular mogul had claimed the story just wasn't funny. "Not funny, huh?" Lawrence said right in his face. That had to feel good.

Last Remaining Seats: American Graffiti

Tonight, for the third of six movies in this summer's Last Remaining Seats series, the Los Angeles Conservancy screened the 1973 film American Graffiti, the second feature film directed by George Lucas. His first was THX 1138 and his third was, yes, Star Wars. Oh wait, sorry. That would be Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. Funny that American Graffiti was his second feature and not his first. I've been a movie fan longer than I've been a book fan, and it's definitely the tradition that the first feature a director makes is a deeply personal one, just as a novelist's first novel is an autobiographical one. But of course, THX 1138 was pure escapist fantasy, a plot-driven eighty-or-so-minute film about a guy (Robert Duvall in his first leading role) who was tired of being a medicated number. No, it wasn't until his second film that George drew from his own life experiences. If you haven't seen American Graffiti, it's definitely worth a watch. Just know that it's not exactly action packed. It's an hour and fifty minutes chronicling the last night a bunch of recent high school grads spend together before going their separate ways.

George made it in 1973 but set the story in the spring of 1962 (the film's tag line is "Where were you in '62?"). Why '62, you ask? Because that's when George would've been the same age as the main characters, eighteen and just out of high school. The story takes place in Modesto, again no shocker there since that's George's hometown. It's up in Northern California, east of the Bay area and not all that far from Marin County, where the man lives and works today on Skywalker Ranch. One of the storylines in the film involves drag racing. As a youngster, George loved cars and dreamed of one day becoming a pro racecar driver....until an accident toward the end of high school put a crimp in that. In fact, he's lucky to be alive when you read about how awful that accident was. Not surprisingly, American Graffiti features a terrible car crash that amazingly doesn't kill anyone but does leave one of the characters with a new take on life, something George said he went through and in fact inspired THX 1138. And here's one more interesting tidbit about the film's autobiographical angle: George has said that three of the main guys we follow in the film are based on three different phases of his life. How about that, eh? Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is based on George's personality during his USC days. John (Paul Le Mat) is George Lucas the drag racer. And that nerdy guy Toad (Charles Martin Smith) apparently comes from George the high school freshman, his awkward phase when he couldn't get a girl to look in his general direction to save his life. The main character is Steve, played by Ron Howard. I'm not surprised George didn't base him on anyone. He's sort of this vanilla everyman who serves as a sounding board for the truly unique characters around him, including and especially Curt, John, and Toad.

Funny thing is, though, as personal as it is, George may not have made it had Francis Ford Coppola not challenged him to make a mainstream movie. Coppola's the reason George found a career in movies at all. While still a film student at USC, George made a short called THX 1138: 4EB (Electronic Labyrinth). He submitted it to the National Student Film Festival his senior year and scored first place. One of the judges on the festival? Francis Ford Coppola. This award meant Warner Brothers gave George the chance to spend all day every day on a film set watching a feature being born. The film in question? Finian's Rainbow, directed by....Francis Ford Coppola! No mistake, the Godfather of The Godfather took the young George under his wing and mentored and supported him. It was thanks to Coppola that George got enough money to make a feature version of THX 1138. And it was during the making of that film that Coppola challenged George to follow up that flick, about a sci-fi dystopia that probably wouldn't appeal to a mass audience, with something more palatable to said audience. George later said the reason he opted for something so personal was to show people a culture that wasn't just his culture, but a national culture, that of the hot rods and drag racing. By the seventies, that culture was all but gone, so George wanted to create a film that would serve as a cultural artifact. He couldn't've grown up in a better state for awesome cars. Then and now, California is THE place for auto enthusiasts. After living in L.A. for twelve years now, I can definitely say that if you don't have a car, you don't exist. Drive (or walk!) around any part of L.A. and you'll be amazed at the variety of cars on the road, including a lot of very handsome ones.

Tonight's screening was at the Orpheum. On Broadway between Eighth and Ninth streets, it's the furthest south (and therefore the longest walk from the Pershing Square parking garage) of all twelve theaters on Broadway. It was also the first historic downtown theater I ever visited, back in April 2005 for a Jenny Lewis concert. It was pure serendipity. I had no idea what an historical gem the Orpheum is. The concert was on a Saturday, and I remember telling someone at work Friday that I was going to see a concert at the Orpheum. The guy practically did a double take. "The Orpheum? That's cool!"

Like most of these historic downtown theaters, the Orpheum was built in the 1920s. It was originally part of a chain of theaters called the Orpheum, a popular vaudeville circuit that included four venues in L.A. The theater currently known as the Orpheum was the fourth and final one. It was designed by the same architect, Albert Lansburgh, who designed one of the other Orpheums on Broadway, which today is known as the Palace Theatre. I've never been in the Palace, but apparently both it and tonight's Orpheum have the same French style interior. According to the Conservancy, this style is specific to sixteenth century France. Both the lobby and auditorium in the Orpheum are decorated with salamanders, which was apparently the mascot, if that's the right word, of King Francis I. If you watch that Showtime show The Tudors about Henry VIII, you may already know about Francis. He and Henry were contemporaries, sometime allies and sometime rivals. Francis actually figures prominently during the first season, which starts with Henry in his late twenties, ten years into his reign, and covers a good ten years or so by season's end.

While just about all of these historic downtown theaters originally hosted both movies as well as live entertainment, the Orpheum is one of the few that still serve both purposes. Indeed, the Orpheum's got quite a live entertainment legacy. My having seen Jenny Lewis is piss in the wind compared to the legendary talent that's graced its proscenium. We're talking names like Duke Ellington, Jack Benny, Lena Horne, Burns and Allen, Gypsy Rose Lee, and even Lassie for Pete's sake. As for recent stars, Michael Jackson did concerts here. Lyle Lovett and Norah Jones are even more recent names to conjure. Cool, huh?

What I really love about the Orpheum, and why it might be my favorite Broadway theater, is that organ. The Mighty Wurlitzer! Yep, when you walk into the auditorium, you'll see way up front and center, separating the front row from the stage, this huge organ that was originally used to provide soundtracks during silent movies. And it still is! Every year for Last Remaining Seats, the Conservancy will set aside the sixth and final Wednesday for a silent classic at the Orpheum to give that Wurlitzer (and whoever's playing it) a workout. But even on nights when they're not showing silents, like tonight, they'll have someone up there belting out tunes on that bad boy during the hour between when doors open at 7pm and when the show starts at 8pm. What's even cooler is that they used to have one of the original players of the Mighty Wurlitzer, Bob Mitchell. When he was a teenager growing up in L.A. in the twenties, Bob was already getting gigs at the Orpheum and other theaters to provide soundtracks to silents. He was playing at the Orpheum, in other words, when it was brand spanking new. How awesome is that? He also played the organ at Dodgers games. I was lucky enough to see (and hear) him provide the pre-show soundtrack during the 2008 and '09 Last Remaining Seats. But finally his time came on the 4th of July last year, just days after providing the pre-show entertainment at the final Last Remaining Seats screening, when the Conservancy put on the German silent Pandora's Box. No, Bob wasn't providing the soundtracks for the films themselves anymore. For that they got a younger, more nimble guy. That Mighty Wurlitzer really is mighty and no mistake. Bob was in his nineties. It was just awesome that he could be here at all. He was near and dear to the hearts of many Angelinos. Suffice it to say the 4th of July last year was not a happy day.

Tonight's pre-show music was provided by Robert Israel, the same guy who provides the silent film soundtracks. When the program kicked off at 8pm, Conservancy head Linda Dishman gave her welcome and thank-you spiel before introducing pop culture writer Charles Phoenix. He's a Conservancy regular who hosts at least one screening a year and conducts an interview with someone related to the film in question. The program said they'd have Cindy Williams (Shirley from Lavern and Shirley), who plays Laurie, Ron Howard's love interest in American Graffiti. As it turns out, though, they were able to get a second gal from the film, Candy Clark, who plays the adorable Debbie. They're in their early sixties now and still look great. It's funny, whenever I hear Cindy Williams talk, I immediately hark back to Laverne and Shirley. She still sounds exactly the same. And yes, Cindy and Candy are still working. Candy played Matt Damon's mom in The Informant!. And she was in the David Fincher version of Zodiac with Jake Gyllenhaal. Cindy, meanwhile, does a flick now and again but mainly sticks with TV. She's done a ton of guest spots over the years, most recently on stuff like Girlfriends, Drive, and one of the Law & Order spinoffs.

They obviously had a great time tonight going back down memory lane. They said originally they were supposed to shoot American Graffiti in George's hometown of Modesto, but that didn't pan out. When George went back there in the summer of '72 to start pre-production, he decided Modesto looked too different from the town he remembered ten years earlier when he was still in high school. Next up was San Rafael, which is where George's lack of on location experience caught up with him. He didn't anticipate how long it would take to mount the cameras on the cars. And when you're shooting outdoors, you have to block off the shooting area from the fine folks who actually live there. Cindy said one of the biggest complaints from the locals was that George and crew had one of the town's favorite bars blocked off. Eventually the folks who ran San Rafael got kind of frustrated at all the disruption. What's more, one of the guys on the crew was arrested for smoking pot. Takes care of San Rafael. And so finally they landed in Petaluma, another little town in the Bay area just a few miles away. That proved to be the ticket. Cindy and Candy said they started filming the last week of June in '72 and wrapped it up in exactly four weeks. Because the story takes place over the course of one night, the cast and crew would start working at 6pm and keep going until 6am.

The budget for the film was $750K, which would be about four million smackers today. Yeah, that's a good amount, but still relatively puny by mainstream Hollywood standards. Cindy said most of the money went to the music rights. The cast wasn't that big, nor was the crew, and they were mostly young folks just starting out the industry. They came cheap. They said Harrison Ford's salary, for example, was all of $400 a week. What a difference ten years makes, huh? Look at him in American Graffiti, and then look where he was in 1983: Three Star Wars flicks and an Indiana Jones flick in the can. Anyway, for American Graffiti, it wasn't Han Solo but the soundtrack that drove up the bill. Like a lot of people, including me, George loves the music he grew up to. He was determined to get some of his favorite songs in there, but he couldn't afford all of them. In fact, I bet George had to make a lot of tough choices about what to include. Besides the soundtrack itself, another nod to George's love of fifties and sixties rock comes in the form of Wolfman Jack, the famous DJ whom you hear sporadically throughout the movie and who finally makes a cameo at the end when Curt sort of stumbles into the station and asks the guy there if he can play a song for "the blonde" and tell the blonde to meet him and all that. Not until Curt's gone on his way and hears the radio broadcast does he realize he was talking to none other than Wolfman Jack.

George was a huge fan of Wolfman Jack. When he was still a student at SC, he seriously considered doing a documentary about the guy, but it never panned out. As for the cameo, once again we have to give thanks to Coppola for making that happen. George just assumed a living legend like that couldn't be bothered with a low-budget film starring a bunch of unknowns. But sure enough, Wolfman was the man. In fact, he got pretty into it. He and George listened to a whole bunch, like thousands, of archived phone calls Wolfman had taken on the air from listeners over the years. So when you watch American Graffiti, those calls you hear are real.

Not every scene was shot in Petaluma. You take Mel's Diner for instance. The Mel's they used in the film was on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. Cindy and Candy said it had already closed down and was on the verge of being demolished when George approached the owners about using it in the film. I'll never forget the film's opening scene where Toad rides his scooter into the parking lot. Sadly, right after George was finished with it, Mel's was torn down. But you can find Mel's elsewhere, of course. We've got a few in L.A., including one in Sherman Oaks I used to drive by all the time. There's another Mel's right in the heart of Hollywood, on Highland just south of Hollywood Boulevard. And you've got the one in West Hollywood on the Sunset Strip. That's the only one I've been in. I had no idea until tonight that it was thanks to American Graffiti that all these other Mel's exist. As I said up top, it's a landmark film that impacted people in many ways, especially folks of George's generation. It revived an interest in the small-town culture the film depicts and which is represented by Mel's. In fact, get this. Cindy and Candy said that every year to this day, Petaluma has an annual American Graffiti festival. Cindy said the town hasn't changed all that much from the American Graffiti days.

When Charles Phoenix asked if they ever see Ron Howard anymore, they said no, they haven't seen him in forever. Cindy playfully bemoaned Ron's living in Connecticut (which I didn't know) and having a wildly successful directing career. I actually got to see Ron Howard in person once. Back in 2003 or thereabouts, when he made that movie The Missing with Cate Blanchett, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood (just around the corner from Mel's) had an advanced screening of it with Ron Howard in person for a Q&A afterward. Yes, Opie Cunningham is just as folksy and down to earth as you think he is.

One myth Cindy and Candy debunked was that Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley were spun off from American Graffiti. Nope, not true. That was a revelation to me, but I guess it makes sense if you actually know the plot of the film, where it takes place, who the characters are, and then see that none of it matches up with either show. They both just happen to star Ron Howard in one with Cindy Williams in the other and take place in the nostalgic past. Maybe having "Rock Around the Clock" as the Happy Days theme song, after it had just been used as the opening music to American Graffiti a year earlier, didn't help matters.

Charles asked them if they had any inkling during the shoot if the movie was going to turn out good. It's almost a useless question in my opinion. Film shoots are so long and tedious, with the scenes broken up into so many different shots after so many takes, it's always tough to tell how it's going to turn out. The first Star Wars movie is a great example, maybe one of the best, of where the cast and crew had no idea what the finished product would look like. Partly this is because George is a very quiet guy. I remember Carrie Fisher saying once that some days he wouldn't say a single word to anyone. On the other hand, Candy said that after two weeks of shooting, when they were halfway through principal photography, George showed everyone a rough edit of what he had so far. Candy said the cast was pleasantly surprised at how well it was turning out. Candy really knew they had a hit on their hands soon after the film came out. She went to some random theater in some town somewhere to watch the film anonymously, sitting in the back so she could see reactions (or if people were walking out). When people stood up to dance to "Rock Around the Clock" at the beginning, she knew everything would turn out grand.

And that about does it for another pleasant evening with the Conservancy and their Last Remaining Seats series. Not to sound like a broken record (pun intended), but if you haven't seen American Graffiti, you really need to. It's a true cultural landmark documenting a particular time and place. What's more, when you do see it, and you notice the "THX 1138" on John's license plate, you'll get it.

Last Remaining Seats: Strangers on a Train

I can now check off yet another Hitchcock flick. Strangers on a Train's one of those Hitchcock classics you hear about now and again. You say to yourself, "I've gotta add that to my Netflix queue." And then you don't. This is yet one more reason I love the L.A. Conservancy and their annual Last Remaining Seats series: They feed me these classics I've been wanting to see since forever but never got around to. This applies especially to Hitchcock. While I certainly knew him by reputation as a youngster, I didn't really sit up and take notice until I got to college and majored in film. In fact, during my freshman year I did a term paper on Hitchcock's Psycho and Frenzy, two films that, while very different on the surface, take the same tack in depicting (or not depicting, as the case may be) violence and killing. Suffice it to say I watched and practically anatomized those two films by semester's end. Yes, it got kind of tedious at times, but I sure learned a lot about Hitchcock and, by extension, how to read scenes to glean the director's vision and intention.

Hitchcock's awesome, easily one of the best filmmakers ever. So you can no doubt see why I was psyched about tonight's event. The screening took place at the Million Dollar Theatre. Built in 1918, it's one of the twelve huge historic movie palaces that line Broadway between Third and Ninth Streets in downtown L.A. The brain behind the Million Dollar was Sid Grauman, legendary movie palace impresario. Even if you've never been to L.A., it's very possible you've heard of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. That's Sid's baby. And just down the road, a couple blocks east, you've got the Egyptian Theatre, also Sid's. These are easily among the most famous theaters in town. The Chinese still operates today as a first run venue. The Egyptian, on the other hand, has lived the kind of life more aligned with the life of Hollywood. It started strong and glittery in the heady roaring twenties. For decades it was one of the prime spots to see and be seen. Studios hosted premieres there. Ben Hur premiered there, among many, many others. But then, like Hollywood itself, Grauman's Egyptian fell into disrepair and decay. Its status took a full one-eighty. The Egyptian became a place to avoid and otherwise take a sideways glance at in pity. But wait! The plot takes another twist. In 1998, the nonprofit American Cinemateque swooped in to the rescue. Thanks to membership support and philanthropic pledges, the American Cinemateque bought the Egyptian and restored it to its former glory. It became the Cinemateque's first permanent venue. From the time they formed in 1981 until 1998, the Cinemateque had no home base. They showed films wherever they could, such as the DGA Theater and Raleigh Studios, both in Hollywood. Their buying the Egyptian was accordingly a win for both the theater itself and the Cinemateque. Around the time the Egyptian was reborn, the city of L.A. pledged something like half a billion dollars to the revitalization of Hollywood. Talk about awesome timing, huh? I moved here in August of 1998 and so I just caught the last vestiges of ghetto Hollywood. Man, what a difference a decade makes. It's also kind of funny remembering when the city had that much money. Yes, it's true. Before the Great Depression II, L.A. was reaping the rewards of a property tax windfall. Owning a home in L.A. is tough....for the homeowner, that is. It's awesome for the city. In addition to the half a bil for Hollywood, the city coughed up another half a bil for five one-hundred-million-dollar homeless shelters built throughout the city in an effort to clean up the concentrated homelessness on Skid Row.

I've been to the Egyptian several times. In fact, quite a few of my "At the Movies with Governor Tom" posts on this very blog are Cinemateque screenings, although I should be honest. The vast majority of the Cinemateque events I attend tend to be at their second venue, the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica's Montana neighborhood. The Aero's another single-screen movie house that goes way back, although not as far back as the Hollywood and downtown theaters. It opened in the forties and, like the Egyptian, became a blight on the landscape, in this case Montana Avenue's otherwise posh landscape. The Cinemateque swooped in and resurrected it in 2005. I tell you, whoever's in charge of programming at the Aero is right on my wavelength, as this blog attests.

The Chinese and Egyptian were built in the 1920s. The Million Dollar Theatre is where Sid's legend began. Before you ask, yes: The Million Dollar Theatre is so called because that's how much Sid paid to build the sucker. In today's dollars, that'd be about fourteen and a half million. I don't know, is that a lot for a theater? I reckon so. I wonder how much the ArcLight Hollywood cost to build? Part of the Hollywood comeback, the ArcLight opened in 2002, but I haven't a clue how much Pacific Theaters paid to build it. Nor could I hope to guess. Another question, though: If someone paid fourteen and a half mil to build a movie theater today, would it get the kind of press Sid got when he built the Million Dollar? Probably not. Movies aren't the novelty they were back then.

From the outside, the Million Dollar looks anything but. It takes up the first couple stories of an otherwise nondescript building that could either be for offices or apartments. Inside, however, is a completely different story. Once you get past the low-ceilinged lobby (it's a fake ceiling; the original ceiling, hidden above for reasons I've yet to find out, has murals inspired by King of the Golden River, an old Victorian folktale), you're in a downright cavernous auditorium. Seriously, the first time you see it is one of those times when words fail. All you can do is take it in. The sides and proscenium suggest the walls of a castle, carved and ornate. The ceiling features a dome. King of the Golden River inspired all of this as well. Here's one interesting factoid: The balcony is supported by concrete instead of the more ideal steel truss due to a steel shortage during the First World War. To prove to everyone that a concrete girder was just as safe, Sid tested it with something like 1.3 million pounds of weight. How exactly they tested it and with what, I have no clue. At first, the Million Dollar was a venue for both films as well as live stage shows. And then in the fifties it became a venue for Latin American films and theater. That lasted a good thirty years or so, until even a million dollar heritage couldn't counter the dearth of audiences. An entrepreneur named Robert Voskanian is the man who finally saved it. When I became an L.A. Conservancy member and started attending this movie series two years ago, the Million Dollar had literally just reopened.

The guest host for tonight was Leith Adams, head of Warner Brothers archives and, according to the program, co-author of James Dean: Behind the Scene and Graven Images. He gave us some backstory to the movie. For one thing, I had no idea Strangers on a Train was based on the debut novel by Patricia Highsmith. You've heard of her, right? If you've seen The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon, then you know Patricia Highsmith. That was also one of her novels. In fact, she wrote a whole series of novels, five to be exact, following the trials and tribulations of Tom Ripley. The novels are collectively known as the Ripliad. Well, before she was THE Patricia Highsmith, she was just a struggling writer trying to make ends meet. Part of that meant writing comic books. No, she didn't draw. She helped script the stories so the artists would know what to draw. The funny thing is that, when she applied for the job, she thought it was for a reporter position. Only when she arrived at the office for the interview, fresh from Barnard, did she see the illustrated truth (ba-dump bump). She stuck with it, though. The money wasn't bad, and it only got better when she became a freelance comic scripter. That gave her the free time she needed to write her own fiction. Looking back, that accidental comic book gig ended up being the only job she held down for any length of time before she found success with her novels. Leith told us that it was thanks to her pal Truman Capote that she revised Strangers on a Train enough to attract publisher interest. When she thought it was finished, he told her to give it another stab, but to get away from New York City first. And so Patricia Highsmith wrote the final draft of Strangers on a Train at a writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, NY called Yaddo. She was twenty-nine when it was published in 1950. Hitchcock didn't waste a minute in adapting it. The movie version came out the very next year.

Another thing I didn't know was that Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay. Like Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler hit the big time with his first novel, 1939's The Big Sleep. Here's an interesting factoid: Raymond Chandler taught himself how to write detective fiction by reading, studying, analyzing, and breaking down the Perry Mason stories by Erle Stanley Gardner. When he was working on The Big Sleep, his ritual was to go to Musso and Frank's, the very famous Hollywood restaurant, park himself in a booth with pencil and paper, and write away. The Big Sleep was not only his first novel, it was his first piece of fiction featuring Philip Marlowe as the main character. That name sounds familiar to you, I'm sure, even if you've never read a single word by Chandler. Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye are two more Chandler novels featuring Marlowe. In between novels, Chandler found demand as a screenwriter, most notably for Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.

And then he got the assignment for Strangers on a Train. In his intro tonight, Leith quoted a letter by Raymond Chandler dated November 1950, wherein he mentions September 26, 1950 as the one day that week he worked on the script but could've worked on it more. Hitchcock loved writers, Leith said. His closest friends included writers, but he and Raymond Chandler never saw eye to eye. While he got along with writers in general, Hitchcock tended to lock horns with writers whose specialty was suspense...which just happened to be Hitchcock's forte. Is that irony? Or is that to be expected? You've got to figure Hitchcock had a bit of an ego at this point in his career. Ditto Raymond Chandler. So while part of me wants to label this an irony beyond precious, a bigger part of me isn't all that surprised. Leith related to us the Hitchcock trait I've known about since college, his penchant for claiming to have a film mapped out in his noodle ahead of time, shot by shot. He claimed no less for Strangers on a Train. Raymond Chandler, upon hearing this, posed the very valid question to the auteur that, if he did indeed have it all figured out, why did he need another writer on the project? Weren't the other two, Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook, enough? Hitchcock had just worked with Whitfield Cook on Stage Fright and decided to bring him along to Strangers on a Train (Whitfield was one of three screenwriters credited for Stage Fright). Czenzi Ormonde only wound up on the project when Hitchcock's writer of choice, Ben Hecht, who wrote or co-wrote the scripts for several Hitchcock films, wasn't available. Whatever the case, I see Chandler's point. You shouldn't need a screenplay by committee if you've already got the final cut in your noodle.

Leith said Hitchcock's true secret writing weapon wasn't Ben Hecht, but his own wife. In fact, Alma Reville was his secret weapon in many ways on most, perhaps even all, his films. She got into the film biz before he did, as a film cutter (Hitchcock's foot in the door was art and production design). She eventually became a highly regarded film editor in Britain. When she married Hitchcock and his directing career blasted off, she became her man's invaluable right hand. She'd help him with story treatments, scripts, storyboards, everything from pre-production to the final cut. He took full advantage of her great ear for dialogue and her editor's eye for continuity issues. One great example of the latter comes from Psycho. Apparently in the original cut, after Janet Leigh is stabbed to death in the shower, you could just barely see her swallowing during the slow pan out from her eye to her whole face. Hitchcock never saw it, but Alma did. It was too late to shoot the scene again, so Alma tweaked the negative to mask the swallow. As for scripts, apparently Alma was quite adept at poking holes in storylines and spotting inconsistencies and what have you. Alfred and Alma were life partners in every sense. They were almost born in sync. He was born August 13, 1899. She? A day later. They married in their mid twenties and stayed together to the end. Hitchcock died in 1980, Alma in '82.

Whenever Hitchcock made a film that was based on something else, which was often, first he and Alma would hire someone to take a pass at it. His wife was key here because she was much better at getting along with people and finding quality writers. For adaptations, their main decree to the screenwriter would be to write the first draft without any dialogue. Just write the action. The dialogue and other specifics would be filled in later. With Alma's input, of course. Interesting, huh? Sort of makes you wonder what Hitchcock's oeuvre would've looked like if he'd never known Alma. Once again I'm reminded of Clint Eastwood's Oscar acceptance speech: To succeed in the movie business, it takes a little bit of talent, and a lot of luck. The day Hitchcock met Alma should probably be documented as one of the happiest accidents in the history of cinema.

Leith talked about his personal connection to Hitchcock. He was seven in 1954, the year Hitchcock delivered the one-two punch of Dial M for Murder and, one of my personal faves, Rear Window. After those two masterworks, Leith was a fan. From then on, whenever Hitchcock came out with a new film, it was a big event for Leith. He loved the suspenseful plots, but just as much he loved Hitchcock's wry British sense of humor. His fandom even extended to the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents that came along in the late fifties and early sixties. Leith is the perfect archivist. To be in a job like that, you've obviously got to be passionate about old movies. When he introduced Strangers on a Train, he said something like, "This was made back in the nineteen fifties, when movies were still movies." Not sure I agree with that sentiment, but you've gotta love the passion.

One more topic Leith covered before the movie started was the leading men of Strangers on a Train: Robert Walker and Farley Granger. Apparently Robert Walker was quite the nutjob, although it may not have been entirely his fault. His folks split when he was still a wee tot, and thereafter his home life went to shit. This translated into poor Robert becoming high strung, prone to anxiety, depressed, all that bad stuff. Sometimes he'd channel all this negativity into negative energy. He could get belligerent and downright combative at the drop of a dime. Not surprisingly, he got expelled from school a whole bunch of times. When some bright spark decided it would be best to find a hobby for Robert to focus all that energy, what do you think they decided on? Of course. Acting. And sure enough, Robert excelled. He landed the lead in a school play. He won top prize in an acting contest at the Pasadena Playhouse. After high school, he got accepted into the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met the woman he would marry, actress Jennifer Jones. Ever the committed actors, they decided to honeymoon in Hollywood so they could keep looking for gigs. Mega producer David O. Selznick took a shine to Jennifer during an audition and agreed to be her mentor. He also got Robert a contract at MGM. Sounds awesome, right? Everything was hunky-dory. Or it should've been. That shine Selznick took to Jennifer was more than a mentor's shine. He wanted to jump her bones and no mistake. This was by no means a one-way sentiment. Selznick was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, not to speak of one of the wealthiest. Money and power. Jennifer was hooked. Her divorcing Robert was the beginning of the end for this guy. Remember, he was already volatile in the best of times. After his woman left him, he fell into the bottle and became a cliché. Just as he'd gotten expelled a whole bunch of times as a kid, as an adult he got arrested just as much, for DUI, hit and run, public drunkenness, you name the booze-related crime, he committed it. His career naturally suffered. The work remained steady, but he sucked in it. Perhaps to get back at Jennifer, he made a spur-of-the-moment decision to marry director John Ford's daughter Barbara Ford. Poor Barbara could only tolerate Robert for five months before leaving him. Soon after this, Robert got word that Jennifer and Selznick had officially tied the knot. Cue psychotic break. Robert completely lost it and had to be committed to an asylum.

Amazing, huh? And this was before he did Strangers on a Train. He was barely thirty. Credit the guy with stamina, though. Soon as he was out of the asylum, he went right back to work. He got gigs with the likes of Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster. Strangers on a Train happened when MGM agreed to loan him to Warner Brothers. Even during the days of studio contracts, actors could still find work elsewhere if the studio in question didn't mind. And thank goodness MGM had the flexibility and foresight to do that. Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train is one of the best villain roles ever, certainly one of the best villains in Hitchcock's oeuvre. It was almost like Robert was made for this role since the Bruno character is sort of, you know, nutty. Anyways, the film was a smash and Robert Walker earned kudos. He'd also just married again, but this time it wasn't a whacky kind of thing like with Barbara Ford. And right after Strangers on a Train, he landed a plum movie role opposite Van Heflin. Everything was finally starting to turn around, which makes the next part all the more tragic. Even though he was out of the asylum and working steadily again, he still had to be medicated. In fact, you could say his medication was the reason things were finally under control. But then one night in August 1951, Robert, for whatever reason, started having an episode, getting really agitated and anxious and hot tempered and all that. It must've been pretty bad if the housekeeper felt compelled to call Robert's psychiatrist. So the psychiatrist came over right away and had our man take a barbiturate to calm down. But what I guess the doctor didn't know was that Robert had been drinking a lot that night. And so the medication mixed with the alcohol, Robert passed out....and never woke up. He was thirty-two. And his poor wife was already a widow at twenty-six.

As for the other leading man from Strangers on a Train, it's pretty much the opposite. Farley Granger, who'd worked with Hitchcock once before in Rope, had a very long, steady career. In fact, he's still alive today, in his mid eighties.

Hitchcock's daughter Patricia has a supporting role in Strangers on a Train. She'd been in Stage Fright as well, but it was a bit part. Strangers on a Train was her first fairly prominent role. The fun nearly ended as soon as it began, though. She got married about a year later and didn't act as much as she probably could've. Family first, right? She ended up having three kids. You've seen her if you've seen Psycho. She was Janet Leigh's fellow secretary at that bank in the beginning. She also did a bunch of episodes for Dad's eponymous TV show. She and her hubby are still alive today. They're about the same age as Farley Granger, in fact. What's more, they live up in Solvang, this town in central California that was founded by Danish immigrants and was apparently made to look like a Danish village. It's been on my list of places to visit ever since I drove by it going to and from Heart Castle back in August 2001.

I don't want to go into the plot of Strangers on a Train, but I will say it's Hitchcock at his finest. He's terribly clever with the double imagery. It starts with double protagonists: Bruno Anthony and Farley's character, Guy Haines. Then you've got the double murder Bruno convinces Guy to participate in. You've got people living double lives, double-crossing each other, Bruno ordering a double Scotch, visual cues like the criss-crossing railroad tracks, crossed tennis rackets on a cigarette lighter, all kinds of stuff. Hitchcock even found a way to be "doubly" consistent with his trademark blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo. When he cameos in Strangers on a Train, he's carrying a....double-bass fiddle!