The second screening of the Last Remaining Seats series saw Mildred Pierce on the big screen last night at the Million Dollar Theatre. One of the oldest of the dozen theatres on L.A.'s Broadway, the Million Dollar was the brainchild of Sid Grauman, who is by far and away most famous for building the Chinese Theatre in the center of Hollywood. That happened in the twenties, as did his Egyptian Theatre, about two blocks east of the Chinese. Well, in 1918, dude spent a then astronomical million bucks to build what's probably the only theater on the planet that's named after its budget. In the fifties it became the first theater on Broadway to stage Spanish variety shows, helping the theater eventually be one of THE venues for Latino entertainment. Parallel with this, and maybe in part due to this, Broadway became less of a movie palace row and more of a Latino shopping district, which is what it primarily is today. Eventually the Million Dollar became a church before finally closing its holy doors in 2001. The family that bought it soon after did a yeoman's job restoring the sucker to Sid's original vision. It only just reopened this year.
Providing the gravy last night was that, like last week, I got to see a movie that I'd always wanted to see but just hadn't gotten around to tossing onto my Netflix queue. I'd been wanting to see this since forever. I'd always known Mildred garnered Joan her sole Oscar win.
Before the film started, a rep from the L.A. Conservancy came out and said that Conservancy head Linda Dishman couldn't be here tonight 'cause she was being honored by some architectural society for all the awesome old buildings she's been able to help restore. Just as big a deal as her getting this honor was the fact that this was the first Last Remaining Seats screening she'd missed since 1992.
The main speaker before the screening was a chap called Rode, Alan K. Rode. Officially Alan is a film historian and director of the Film Noir Foundation (I had no idea there was a Film Noir Foundation, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised). Unofficially he's the biggest die hard Joan Crawford fan in existence. He was like, "This is how Joan Crawford is meant to be seen! Not on DVD, but on the big screen in this gorgeous movie palace!" Or something like that. Anyway, dude loves Joan. Mildred Pierce was one of the movies he grew up with. Alan didn't look that old, so he either caught it on TV a lot or, more likely, bought the thing on video. Part of the film's plot is sort of film noirish, so it makes sense that Alan would enjoy it. He fed us quite a few tidbits of trivia that I found pretty interesting as a film buff and which helped put the film in context.
First of all, this was Joan Crawford's first film in two years. Whereas it's not uncommon at all for an actor to take time off in this day and age, apparently it was so unprecedented in Joan's time that her two-year break was referred to as "self-imposed exile" and whatnot. And even when she came back to do Mildred, she wasn't even forty. Our Joan still had quite a bit of work left in her. Her salary for this piece was about a hundred grand or so, a huge sum back then. The budget for the film was $1.3 mil. The studio was extremely nervous about spending that amount of money on a single picture. Remember that it was the early 1940s. Our country wasn't out of the Depression just yet, although WWII certainly helped us escape those woods. Anyway, the studio bosses were all set to take money out of Joan's paycheck for any shooting days she missed. Luckily, though, Joan called in sick only one day during the three-month shoot.
Released in the autumn of '45, Mildred Pierce was adapted from a 1941 novel by James M. Cain. Soon after it was published, producer Jerry Wald purchased the movie rights from James for something like $15K (again, a phat sum in those days). Here's the interesting thing about how it was adapted into a screenplay. Instead of just tapping one or two screenwriters to adapt the thing, Jerry farmed out screenwriting duties to no less than a dozen or so people. And here's the thing, each of the dozen had no idea someone else was working on it. So they each wrote an entire screenplay based on the novel and sent their scripts to Jerry. And then Big Jer pored over all of them and took the best of each and cobbled those pieces all together into a single script. What's more, only one of the dozen got credit. If you see the film, you'll notice in the credits that the screenplay's by Ranald MacDougall. Don't be fooled. Ranald was only one of many who toiled over the thing. I'm not sure why he was the only one who got credit. Perhaps Jer took the most from his version. Luckily you can't tell at all that so many cooks were in the kitchen preparing this thing. Many times something like that can be detrimental to a film's cohesion, a recent and glaring example being Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Again, that thing had about a dozen screenwriters working on it at one time or another, and boy, did it suffer for it. Not Mildred, though. The film was phenomenally successful, both commercially and critically. It earned Joan her first Oscar nom, and her only win (she was nominated two more times). And Mildred was quite a coup for Ranald. It was only his second screenplay, and the boy had only just turned 30. It got him a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (he lost to Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett for The Lost Weekend, which also scored Best Actor for Ray Milland, Best Director for Billy Wilder, and Best Picture). Not a bad way to kick off a screenwriting career. One of those uncredited screenwriters, by the way, was none other than William Faulkner.
Jerry Wald produced something like 70 flicks in about 20 years. Poor guy kicked off from a heart attack when he was only 50. He must've been quite a character because apparently Budd Schulberg used him as the inspiration for Sammy Glick in the novel What Makes Sammy Run?. He never did score a Best Picture trophy, but he did garner two Best Pic noms, one for Peyton Place and the other for Sons and Lovers, the latter about a year or so before he died.
Even more impressive than Jerry was the Hungarian director of Mildred Pierce, Michael Curtiz. Mike had just scored a Best Director Oscar for none other than Casablanca for Pete's sake, so he was on a role. And while that was the only Oscar he won, he'd been nominated three other times in the late thirties and early forties: Four Daughters, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. He scored those first two nominations, by the way, in the same year. He was pushing 60 when he helmed Casablanca and Mildred. Obviously he knew what he was doing at this point and was gladly demonstrating it to the world. Man, to churn out stuff like he did and almost consecutively, too. Is there any director today pulling that off? What's more impressive is that he did all this while speaking shitty English. His whole life he could only speak English with a syrup-thick Hungarian accent. Communication snafus happened all the time on his sets. For this one scene in Casablanca, right? He asked one of his crew guys to make a puddle or something. Well, the poor crewman thought Mike said poodle, so he went and got a poodle. Lack of English fluency obviously didn't cramp his style. Mike directed 172 movies by the time he passed away at age 75 in the spring of '62. Other flicks from his oeuvre include White Christmas and the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood.
As for the film itself, I shouldn't say too much about it. Well, first of all, I can say that I loved it. Four stars out of four, all that stuff. But I shouldn't spill too much of the plot because it all turns on a murder. Talk about starting with a bang, though. Literally the very first shot of the film is, well, a bunch of shots. Gunshots. You've got this poor bastard getting shot millions of times, falling to the floor, and muttering the name "Mildred" just before he expires on the living room floor. And then we cut to outside the house, a very nice beach house in Santa Monica, as a woman who from a distance bears a resemblance to Joan Crawford, hurries into a car and speeds away. The dead guy, we learn in no time, was Joan Crawford's husband Monte. Joan gets hauled into the police station and interrogated. Her interrogation basically becomes her narration of the last few years of her life. She gets married to this one guy named Bert, with whom she has two daughters. The marriage falls apart. She meets and eventually marries Monte, all the while opening up her own restaurant called--you guessed--Mildred's Restaurant, which is a phenomenal success and becomes an L.A. chain. And so basically the whole movie shows everything Mildred is telling the cops. Ultimately the cops put together who really killed Monte. Anyway, good stuff. The cast is terrific, especially Eve Arden as Ida, who helps Mildred run the restaurants. She steals every single scene she's in, hands down. You've also got Jack Carson as Wally, who is both a childhood pal of Mildred's as well as a real estate agent and general business partner. Playing Mildred's older daughter Veda is Ann Blyth. Veda is basically the character you love to hate in this one. Talk about giving new meaning to the term bad seed. What made last night's screening a bit more interesting was that Ann Blyth's daughter was in the audience with us. That was kinda cool. Also cool was that the restaurant they used for Mildred's Restaurant in the film was located on the corner of Laurel Canyon Blvd. and Magnolia Blvd., which is only about, oh, four or five miles from my apartment in the Valley. Before the screening, Alan mentioned that the house they used for Mildred's house in the film (her main house in Glendale, not the Santa Monica beach house) is not only still standing but is currently being lived in by a gal who offers tours of the joint to anyone who's interested.
And now for some photos of the Million Dollar.
Okay now the three photos below are of a restaurant I supped in prior to the show. Called The Edison, I'd heard of it because of the ads they frequently have in the L.A. Opera programs. It's in the building that was originally the headquarters of Edison Electric about a century ago. The whole ambiance of the joint is of that era, very 1920s-esque. The first photo shows the outside. The second very dark one is of one of the bars, which I took from near the top of the stairs (once you go in, there's a lounge, and then the bar and restaurant proper are down two flights of stairs). And then in the third photo you've got my order: lobster corndogs! Actually you can only see one lobster corndog, as I'd already eaten the other two and was so tickled to be eating them in the first place that I felt compelled to take a photo. Just behind it you can see a sort of metal basket thingee. That's what my Edison fries came in. Notice you don't actually see any fries, though. I made pretty short work of them too.
