A Star Is Born: The Making of the 1954 Movie and Its 1983 Restoration (30 page)

Earl Bellamy concurs: "Judy was demanding from the standpoint of
wanting things right. She was very demanding of herself, basically; but she
was demanding of others too-like wardrobe, for example. She didn't like
[that dress], and they tried; [but] the ultimate result was no, it didn't work,
and we shut down until we got things organized."

Getting things organized meant bringing in a new costume designer-in
Allen's words, "to try to give her a figure ... she was difficult to dress."
The person chosen to do this was Jean Louis, Columbia's ace designer, who
had created glamorous images for Rita Hayworth, Rosalind Russell, Lucille
Ball, and Judy Holliday. He was exceedingly busy, and it took the intervention of Cukor himself with Harry Cohn, head of Columbia, before the
designer agreed to do it.

Garland's personal problems were intensified by the fact that Luft,
whom she depended on for support and reassurance, was gone for several
days to attend his father's funeral in New York. When he returned on
December 21, he found the production in a near shambles. Garland had
been unable to work since the i 8th; while she was out, Cukor and the rest
of the company had shot various bits and pieces of retakes and journeyed down the coast to Wilmington to film scenes of Norman on location in the
early parts of the story. The day before Christmas was spent looking for
suitable locations in Laguna Beach to double for the location of Norman's
suicide in Malibu, which was not considered isolated or dramatic enough.
These shots were filmed late in the afternoon the day after Christmas and
were completed relatively smoothly and quickly.

With Luft back, Garland was able to begin work again. Everyone was
now keyed up and ready to start one of the most spectacular of all the
sequences in the script-the crucial and expensive Shrine Auditorium
benefit.

As noted earlier, Cukor had taken Hart's one descriptive paragraph and
expanded it into an evocation of the confusion, hysteria, and glamorous
razzle-dazzle of a big, important Hollywood opening night. Cukor had been
to many such events, but with the exception of The Robe opening he had
never studied them in detail. As he later stated: "When you know you are
going to do a film, you look at things with different eyes. I delve into the
texture of life and reality and then recreate the whole thing. Reality must
be observed, then transmuted."

Once this particular reality-the theater, the crowds, the excitementwas established in the opening sequences, Cukor, as per the script, had to
introduce the principals, make story points, and stage and photograph the
first musical numbers. To achieve all this would take, according to the
production office, approximately eight days, twenty-two transportation
units, 496 dress extras, sixty-eight additional extras for small speaking parts,
five stand-ins, eight limousines, three yellow cabs, five portable dressing
rooms, a thirty-six-piece orchestra with instruments, five television cameras,
four actual film cameras, sixty-five separate pieces of lighting equipment,
eight horses, and two animal wranglers-the latter because it had been
decided to use Monte Montana's entire Wild West Show as the opening
number of the benefit show.

The venerable Shrine Auditorium lent itself perfectly to the scale of this
sequence. Built in 1926 from a design by architect G. Albert Lansburgh,
it was a Moorish fantasy of domes, turrets, and arches; with its 6,700 seats,
it was the largest theater in the world. Its vast stage and cavernous auditorium had been seen only once before on film, for the New York debut of
the giant ape in 1933's King Kong. The stage was one of the largest in
existence; wing space was equally large, and Cukor intended to take full
advantage of it in the tense scenes showing a drunken, riotous Norman creating havoc amidst the already frantic backstage activity of the benefit.

For Bellamy and Llewellyn, the organization of such a large sequence
was a matter of scheduling and keeping track of literally hundreds of details.
The makeup, dressing, and feeding of the extras and bit players was a
mammoth job, but fortunately the Shrine Auditorium had a sister structure
in the back: the Shrine Exposition Hall, which could comfortably accommodate several thousand people, dining tables, makeup cubicles, and costume racks; food could be prepared and served from the in-house kitchen.

This was the first time that Richard Barstow's dancers would work in
front of the camera. Barstow had been hard at work on the back lot since
August, devising routines for the four songs that would be full-fledged
production numbers in the film. Bellamy had alerted him that the first song,
"Gotta Have Me Go With You," was scheduled for photography on the
Shrine stage on December 28; Garland had begun working with Barstow
and her "dance-in," Gloria DeWerd, on the movement for this first number whenever she could get time away from shooting. The script called for
Esther and the Glenn Williams Orchestra to go on in place of the drunken
Maine. He, however, will not be kept off, and lurches onto the stage and
into the song and dance. Esther quickly averts an embarrassment by making
him seem part of the act: she works him into the dance, and he, realizing
the situation through his alcoholic fog, rises to the occasion, does a little
step with her, exits in a very showmanly fashion, and then brings her back
on again for a bow, as if it were all preplanned. Barstow had to work all
this out, devise steps for Garland and the two male dancers who accompanied her as she sang, and incorporate Maine into the action.

Staging musical numbers was a new experience for Cukor, although he
had done some similar work in the music-hall sequences of Zaza in 1939
with Claudette Colbert, with Fanny Brice as technical advisor. "I try to
think everything out ahead of time," Cukor commented. "I feel my way
around a long time ahead to see how these things can be managed; everything has to be planned ahead for these big numbers.... In this respect
... I have working with me one of the most talented art directors in the
world, Gene Allen. He is the greatest help to me ... he's an art director
who does everything"-including working out every angle of every shot in
the film. "I was feeling my way on this picture," recalls Allen. "I got to
work with him an awful lot on setting up shots, and more and more he
turned that over to me. I always did tell him what we were going to shoot
next and how we could do it. 'We can do it this way-they run out of the shot and we can [change the angle] over to here and we can pick that up
and all.' Then I'd do a quick thumbnail sketch for the cameraman so he'd
know how we wanted it. Then Cukor'd send me off to work with the
choreographer so I'd know the numbers. Barstow would show it to me and
I'd be working out in my mind where the cameras would be, how it could
be shot. Then Mr. Cukor would come in and look at it and I'd explain what
I thought; he might make some changes-you know, with the camera,
place it differently. So that when we come on the stage and they'd do it,
I'm standing there with Mr. Cukor by the camera as the dance goes on,
so there were no problems between any of us-Cukor, the cameraman,
George Huene-we really had a nice time shooting this stuff."

While these details were being worked out on the stage of the Shrine
and the lineup and lighting were being attended to, Del Armstrong was
overseeing a squad of makeup assistants who were readying the seventy-five
extras playing dancers, jugglers, English buskers, ballerinas, and cowboys
and Indians for the Wild West Show, and the hundreds of others who had
to be ready for the nine a.m. shooting call. "When we were filming down
at the Shrine, it was one of the few times I had to use makeup charts on
the picture, because there were so many people to worry about. I had all
these assistants and I'd make up some drawings and put them up on the
wall to have them all thinking in terms of the same look-that is, a different
look for the audience, a different one for the performers on stage and the
musicians. The principals, of course, are supposed to be pretty normal, but
for the backstage stuff, I made up some harlequins and mannequins,
clowns, ballerinas, things like that-background stuff."

While Armstrong made up the performers, Bellamy was working out the
action for the extras and the bit players. "On the backstage stuff," he
recalls, "Mr. Cukor let George Huene really have his head on this, and I
worked very closely with him. He'd say, 'Now here's the idea, Earl,' and
then it was up to me to get what his idea was and then show him the
standpoint of the staging to see if that's what he had in mind. Now, I had
worked on a lot of other shows before this; I'd familiarized myself with
some of the stuff that Western Costume had, so he and I went over there
and selected a lot of costumes for the Shrine sequences. The button men
in the button suits-the buskers-that was something we added."

An interesting example of the details that a creative assistant director
can add to a scene: As Norman is drunkenly making a nuisance of himself
backstage, he is confronted by Libby, who tries to talk him into a phony press conference to keep him from going on. Norman is engaged in conversation with the English buskers and has donned one of the button coats
that Bellamy refers to. As Libby pulls Norman away, one of the buskers
(played by ex-Keystone Kop Heinle Conklin) moves in swiftly to pull the
coat off Norman, who is so drunk he hardly notices it. "That was just
something I added-I thought it would work, and it did, and Mr. Cukor
liked it. What was so super about the entire film was that so many people,
like George Huene, Gene Allen, and myself, we would all work together
for ideas to present to Mr. Cukor to get the best out of the film. As a result,
I think the stuff at the Shrine-I'm really proud of that, because ... it has
so many things, so many interesting things going, and it really shows what
we could do with CinemaScope."

Hoyningen-Huene was responsible for most of the stunning imagery of
these backstage scenes. He brought in reproductions of paintings by Degas,
specifically "The Dancers" and "The Dancing Class," showing them to
Bellamy and Leavitt, who would thereupon set up the staging and photography to suggest the paintings. "Gene Allen would sketch it out," relates
Bellamy, "and we'd show what could be done. I remember Huene wanted
a long, transparent gauze-type thing stretched across the backstage area at
one point. Then he put a pink light on it and we had horses and people
moving behind it and it gave a wonderful effect, especially when Norman
staggered through it ... I thought it was just outstanding. He had marvelous ideas for background, tremendous ideas about shadows, about light:
there's whole areas of the screen that he kept dark. It was very exciting."
Hoyningen-Huene elaborated on his work on these sequences later, in an
interview: "It is in the Shrine Auditorium scenes that color really plays its
big scene. Nearly 8oo extras in the theatre are grouped in accordance with
the color of the women's evening clothes. We put the women in yellow
in one part of the auditorium, those in gray in another. People formed
blocks of color which blended into each other without that restless, dispersed look usually seen in crowd scenes.... We tested the color of the
theatre program four separate times before we decided on the final phosphorescent pink. In the picture, the programs will appear as pinpricks of
red, accentuating the excitement of the crowd pushing their way into the
auditorium."

All of the first day's work at the Shrine was devoted to setting these
details, working out lighting, staging, groupings, and bits of business and
setting up multiple cameras. "We had three or four cameras," recalls Gene Allen, "and everything was on dollies and moveable.... It was exciting and
everybody was cooperating.... Cukor wanted to get all the footage he
could so that he could play with it in the cutting rooms. He wanted to do
things he never did before, things he always wanted to do ... lights flashing,
shining right into the lens ... for years that was a no-no.... Huene was
running all over the place.... He would go and find these bits of gauze
and cloth and put these on the extras to make sure the color was all
co-ordinated."

Finally, mid-morning on December 29, everything was ready for the first
shots to be taken. These primarily involved Bickford and Carson conversing
about Maine in Oliver Niles's box while in the background the Wild West
spectacle is played out on the stage. Also filmed that day was much of the
backstage action, with Sam Colt playing the harassed stage manager trying
to cope with Norman, who insists on riding a horse onto the stage. Finally,
the next day, Cukor shot the opening musical number with Garland, two
dancers, and the Glenn Williams Orchestra: the lively, uptempo "Gotta
Have Me Go With You." Hoyningen-Huene related that "at this point in
the story, Miss Garland is a band singer of no importance, so her entrance
onto the stage is painted in subdued and neutral tones ... the background
is an unimpressive gray." Garland was also wearing the first of the several
costumes that Jean Louis had designed: a navy blue top and skirt, split up
the side to reveal her black-stockinged legs. The only bits of color on her
were her lipstick and the red carnation in her lapel. It took the better part
of two days, and more than forty takes, before the number was completed
with all the necessary angles and "protection footage" that Cukor felt was
necessary.

After a break for the New Year's holiday, the company shot for the next
six days at the Shrine, filming the scenes between Niles, Libby, and Lola
Lavery, the starlet who is one of the studio's "hot properties" and Norman's
inamorata. This was Lucy McAleer's first taste of big-time moviemaking,
and it was during the shooting at the Shrine that her name was changed
to Lucy Marlow. She remembers: "The studio sent me three pages of
names from which I was to choose. My mother said there had been a Julia
Marlowe on the New York stage who was very famous, and she thought that might bring me good luck-so we took the `e' off it to make it a little
more distinctive, and that became my name."