Excerpt of the Week: Film Crazy
For this week’s excerpt, I present one of my favorite stories from Hollywood’s early years. Had I been able to locate this book last week, I would have definitely launched the series with the following. As it is, I’m just happy to be able to share it with you now. Not only does it show that, even in the early days of studio-produced motion pictures, there were those fighting to get the truth up on the screen, but is also proof positive that a mogul as powerful and influential as Jack Warner sometimes didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
This particular passage is lifted from the book Film Crazy, published by St. Martin’s Griffin in 2001, which features a series of interviews that the author, Patrick McGilligan, conducted throughout the 1970’s with some of Hollywood’s earliest players (including the likes of Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock and George Stevens). In the following, McGilligan is interviewing screenwriter Sheridan Gibney about the Warner-produced 1935 film, The Story of Louis Pasteur, directed by William Dieterle and starring Paul Muni.
Let me know what you think of it:
McGilligan:I gather The Story of Louis Pasteur was another dubious project – dubious at least from Warner’s point of view.
Gibney:I’m sure they thought Pasteur would finish me off at Warners, because nobody else wanted to touch it. The studio didn’t believe in it. They didn’t believe in it at all. Pierre Collings had written a very brief treatment on the life of Pasteur, which (Paul) Muni was dying to do. (Producer Hal) Wallis read it, Jack Warner, I suppose, also read it. The only reason they went ahead with the project at all is that Muni had story approval. He had gone into Jack Warner’s office and said, “I want to do Pasteur”. They showed him the outline, he thought it was a good beginning, and asked if I could write the script.
McGilligan:Why was Muni fixated on doing Louis Pasteur?
Gibney:I don’t know. His wife told me that he had always wanted to play someone with a beard and that is what intrigued him [laughs]
McGilligan:Had you become friends with Muni?
Gibney:Muni had been about finished when he did I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, and this revived him. He became, overnight, a box-office attraction. Warner Brothers signed him to a five-year contract, and they gave him story approval, which is very important to what happened with The Story of Louis Pasteur. I didn’t get to know him at all until I came back to Warner Brothers in 1933 with The World Changes. After The World Changes we started to become friendly because he liked that story very much and the film turned out very good, with Muni getting older and older, which he loved to do. I really had great admiration for him. He thought of himself basically as a character actor, not in any sense a leading man. And his instincts as an actor were almost always right.
McGilligan:Was Wallis the hands-on producer of the picture?
Gibney:No, it was Henry Blanke, who also supervised Green Pastures. Blanke was very good with writers, very good with me certainly, very patient and understanding and supportive. I always liked Henry. He had taste, unlike Wallis.
Anyway, Jack Warner was just doing Pasteur to oblige Muni. When Muni talked to me about the script, he said, “Let’s make it as true and factual as possible, a kind of documentary film”. I said, “Well, then I have to work with some scientists and I have to research some experiments to make it believable. I don’t know anything about science”. I talked to Henry Blanke, who arranged for me to go to the L.A. County Hospital. There was a pathologist there who made me cultures of anthrax and other things. I spent eight weeks doing nothing but research, not writing a line. I read all the material I could find about Pasteur. I was so full of research that it only took me about four weeks to write the script.
When I got through with the screenplay, it came back from the stenographic department, about twenty copies, and Muni happened into the office. He asked, “How’s it coming?” I said, “It’s finished”. He took a copy and said, “I’ll read it over the weekend”, and went home.
Apparently Jack Warner also read it on Saturday night, and Jack was horrified. He called up Hal Wallis, who was, I believe, at Lake Arrowhead or Tahoe, and sent the script up by special messenger. Monday morning, when I got to the studio, I had a three-page telegram from Hal Wallis, saying that I was to be taken off the script immediately and Laird Doyle was to be put on the project. And there was to be no mention in the script of any disease that would frighten women, no experimentations with dogs , because of the Cruelty to Animals Society, no mention of Russian scientists , because that would offend [Randolph] Hearst, who was anti-Russian, and Mr. Muni could not wear a beard, and that the whole story would take place while Pasteur was in college. There he falls in love with the daughter of the Dean of the Medical school, but the problem is that Pasteur is not a medical student, he is a science and chemistry major! The Dean of the Medical school will not allow his daughter to marry a chemistry student. “Take it from there…”, wrote Wallis.
Also, I was called immediately to report to Jack Warner.
Just then Muni came by with the script under his arm, slammed it on the desk and said, “I love it!’ I showed him the telegram from Wallis and he was furious – I’d never seen him so mad. He grabbed a pen and wrote on the cover of the script: “I approve this as written”.
So then I went up to Jack Warner’s office and Jack bawled the hell out of me. Jack said I had committed insubordination, that no actor should ever see a script unless a producer has first examined it. Now, they were in a terrible state and it was going to cost the studio hundreds of thousands of dollars because they couldn’t make this dog of a picture, yet Muni insisted upon it.
Well, Muni did insist and Henry Blanke was the only other one holding out for it. They gave it the lowest possible budget an A star like Muni could work with, which was $330,000, and they cast it all with company people under contract. They gave it an unknown director brought over by Reinhardt, who could barely speak English at this time – Bill Dieterle. He could read, but his vocabulary was limited, and he had to have the script translated to him by his wife, who spoke excellent English. And Bill Dieterle hated the script. This is the way we went into the picture.
We had to repaint an old Busby Berkeley set for the palace interior. I remember the whole film was done on a shoestring. I was on the set every single day of the filming to make sure the actors spoke the words I wrote, and to explain the English to Dieterle, who was a little afraid of Muni. Of course, Henry Blanke, who spoke German, was there to help also. When it was done, my contract was up and [I] was told I’d never be back at Warner Brothers and I left for London to work on a play.
I was gone about six months, and I got a cable saying I should come right home. The picture was nominated for an Academy Award! When I got home, I was met at the dock, to my amazement, by the top New York executive of Warner Brothers, who had a limousine waiting to take me to my hotel. Sure enough, I won the Academy Award. But winning the Academy Award meant my salary automatically tripled, and even if they had wanted me back now, I was beyond the range of Warner Brothers. So I signed with [Darryl] Zanuck, who was over at 20th Century Fox by now and wanted me to come to work for him.
The aftermath of this whole story is, two years later, Jack Warner was invited to Paris by the President of France and given the highest arts decoration, and kissed on both cheeks by the President himself, for this wonderful monument to French science. And for years afterward, Warner wouldn’t let Muni appear in anything without a beard!
