Whoah.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Was there a down side to Harold Lloyd?
A down side? Whaaaaat?
Why, certainly.
We could start with the talkies. Like every other huge star of the silent screen, the advent of the "talking picture" (originally called "talkers", a more logical term) traumatized Lloyd to the point of forcing him to seriously regroup. Eventually he came to realize he was under immense pressure to let all the old pieces go and start from the ground up.
He found it nearly impossible. My feeling is that he stubbornly held on to aspects of his past filmmaking success, certain in his mind that at some point, things would turn around and the old visual style of comedy would return.
Though sight gags never entirely disappeared and still figure large in a lot of comedy, an actor's signature phrases ("I'm sorry, Ollie", "My little chickadee", "Hey, Abbott!") became essential for moving a comic persona forward. Another dimension had popped out, the other half, so to speak. You didn't have to have a "great" voice or even a "good" one. You just had to have a memorable voice that expressed the character in no uncertain terms. (Perhaps the acid test was this: could you recognize it on the radio?)
Garbo made it because her dark, velvety voice startled people and dovetailed beautifully with her smoky, exotic looks. Can you imagine W. C. Fields without his whiny and irritating, carnival barker's delivery? And with their endless eccentric bantering, Laurel and Hardy were reborn as huge stars. But these were the few who lucked out.
At the beginning, almost no one knew how to use the voice to best effect. Early "talkers" were pretty atrocious (I just saw an unintentionally hilarious one called The Vagabond Lover on Turner Classics, in which the hums, buzzes and crackles on the sound track nearly drowned out the dreary, colorless delivery of the lines). It didn't matter much, because the public flocked to them anyway.
It took a few years for things to settle. I always see 1931 as the year that things began to really work. An actor's voice became his calling card, and it didn't have to be conventionally audiogenic. Those actors in the gangster pictures had nasty snarly voices to go with their nasty snarly personalities. Vocal sneers. But this non-law also applied to leading men. Think of Jimmy Stewart with his high, wavering, stammering delivery which somehow, almost magically conveyed integrity. Now how did he do that?
But Harold, now. Harold somehow didn't get it. After so many years of mastery, of innovative film-making, he didn't see the train coming. When all this mayhem was going on, he was making a silent feature called Welcome Danger - an awful one, as it turned out, which is puzzling because he had never done anything like that before. It was 1929, everything was changing, and like Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd was stubbornly hanging on to what had worked for him before.
A critic named Welford Beaton, whose very name suggests doddering and fustiness, had some decided opinions on what was happening at the time: "The silent drama has become a great art and I hope the advent of sound is not going to arrest its development." Sidney Kent of Paramount (and who knows who the fxxx Sidney Kent of Paramount was, but hey, it's a great quote) wrote, "Personally, I believe the time will never come when the outstanding silent pictures will be out of the market. We are trying to work out the best possible combination of sound and silent."
This reminds me of nothing more than Martin Short's insanely hilarious character Irving Cohen, a doddering old Hollywood relic: "So I walked into Jolson's office, at that time, and I said to him, Asa, this talking picture business will never get off the ground!"
As for that "best possible combination," such an unlikely hybrid was bound to fail, as Harold found out with his ill-conceived Welcome Danger. Legend has it he watched a movie short full of "punk gags" like whistles blowing, fire engine sirens, etc. - anything involving sound - and the audience was laughing uproariously. Shocked out of his denial about talking pictures, he suddenly decided to graft a sound track on to his partially-completed movie, with awkward, badly-dubbed results.
I have seen Welcome Danger one-and-a-half times, forcing myself to stay with it after bailing the first time. I was watching it in a hotel room with my husband a few years ago. "Look! There's a Harold Lloyd movie!" (He thought we were in for a couple of hours of enthusiastic squeaking and ahhhh-ing.) The first time Harold opened his mouth, I said, "Oh nooooooooooo." Midway, I sadly turned it off. "He didn't have a good voice," Bill said. But it was much more than that.
I still don't really know what Welcome Danger is about. It goes on far too long, though the original cut was an astonishing two hours and forty-five minutes. Why was Harold making so many mistakes, even before this disastrous failed transplant? Only one picture ago, with Speedy, he was at the very top of his game. Now this. To me, it's an indication that Lloyd was profoundly spooked and had already lost his way.
Harold's character in this mess, a man with the hideous name of Bledsoe, is some kind of botanist trying to break up a Chinese opium ring while pursuing a girl dressed like a boy. But when he opens his mouth to speak, he sounds like Jiminy Cricket on helium. That fussy, strident quality is an immediate turnoff. Whatever emotional appeal he had in his silents - and in most of them, his character was vulnerable enough to have it - evaporated, and sadly never really returned.
I don't like Richard Schickel's book about Harold, don't like his lack of respect and assumptions about Harold's personal life, but I have to agree with him that in his sound pictures, his voice was "inescapably colorless and flat - prissy would be the best way to describe it." The voice isn't just pitched too high (though at moments of stress it shoots up into the stratosphere until he sounds like a hysterical girl) - it has a lightness and lack of resonance that doesn't record well. And for some reason, the delivery is unnatural, awkwardly hokey. Of course a comedian can sound weird as all get-out and still make it, but whatever he's doing, it doesn't work. All this from a man who began his career as a stage actor, believing it was his destiny.
Ironically, when you look at interviews with the ageing Lloyd (and like a lot of good-looking men, his looks wore well as he evolved into a twinkly old charmer), his voice has dropped considerably, relaxed and mellowed into something you could easily listen to for two hours. It still isn't particularly deep or resonant, but it has a great raconteur quality, and an expressiveness that never came across in his post-silent films. The odd Nebraskan inflection pops through to charming effect: "While we were working on that picture, I think it was Girl Shy, the fire hose flew up and struck me on the foah-hayyd."
There were so many more after Welcome Danger (which, ironically, had better box office than any of his other movies due to his fans' curiosity about his voice), and I have tried to like them, believe me, I've tried. And the problem isn't just his voice. Though individual scenes work, something just isn't right. Hal Roach, his friend and longtime director, put it this way: "His character couldn't age."
No matter how good he looked, and he did look good even with the slightly higher hairline, you can't slip The Boy into a middle-aged body and work it like a puppet. A scene in Movie Crazy really does drive me crazy as he parodies the melodrama of the talkies: his voice soars up and up, growing more strident by the sentence. Feet First is even worse: he does an aerial stunt (and that's another water hazard of the new era: repeating gags, which most comedians had to resort to), yelling in that shrill near-falsetto for about 15 minutes as he scrambles agonizingly up the side of a tall building. The surreal, thrilling climb that worked so well in 1923 is just awful with grunts, yells and traffic sounds added, and some theatres did their audiences a favor during the sequence by turning the sound track off.
Is there any good news here? Unlike most people, I did sort of like The Cat's Paw, in which he played a missionary (of all things!), but again the high light voice evoked a kind of virginity that had been kept in a glass case. Everything I've ever read about Lloyd indicates exactly the opposite: women loved him from the start, and he was not about to turn them away. Harold lived large, and never wanted just a little of anything.
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The classic musical Singin' in the Rain (often called one of the best movies ever made, which is strange because I hate everything about it) dealt with the revolution in sound film, as did the more recent The Artist. (Ditto. I did not like any of the characters, from that ditsy little girl Blinkie or whatever-her-name-was to the strange Douglas Fairbanks-looking guy or that wretched dog lifted from The Thin Man, or perhaps Frasier.) As everyone predicted, all the actors from that much-touted movie disappeared without a trace, which is probably good for my mental health.
The Jazz Singer supposedly began the revolution in 1927, even though it wasn't even a talkie - my ass it was a talkie, it had titles all the way through it, and only had sound during Jolson's blackface songs about tootsie rolls or whatever. What most people don't realize is that sound could have been introduced several years earlier - the technology had been basically worked out - but the industry dug in and resisted, and viewed from today's perspective, it's easy to see why.
Harold kept at it, ending his movie career in 1947 with an ill-advised comedy called, variously, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and Mad Wednesday. Even the wildly-popular director Preston Sturges (with a nudge from producer Howard Hughes) couldn't save this one. Harold was 54, still playing boys that hadn't quite grown up. I find it excruciating to watch this so-called extension of his legendary The Freshman: he plays a man stuck in his dead-end job, stuck in his lonely life. He hasn't grown up at all. There is a scene where he is obviously deeply depressed, and I just didn't want to see it: his Glass Character never stayed down for long, but this fellow had been down all his life.
How could a man lose such great acting chops after all this time? Maybe he just didn't know how to apply them in an unfamiliar medium. Though Harold went charging forward into a million other activities that he kept up for a lifetime, including a tremendous amount of philanthropy, the loss of his celestial career was sad for him, sad for movie posterity, sad for us all.
Post-blog: There's one movie I've never seen, a mid-'30s Lloyd talkie called Professor Beware. All the evidence I've found that it ever existed are some stills, and all I know about it is that Lloyd didn't like it. He may have done something to the negative - Harold was even closer with his movies than he was with his money - or else it's just hiding in an old tin can in a basement somewhere. There was a rumor it was shown on Turner Classics, but only once. I WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE. Not that it will necessarily be better than the others. It's the fact that it's not available. Is someone, perhaps the mysterious, unknowable Rich Correll, keeping this thing banked for a rainy day?
We didn't do the green thing back then
(This is the sort of pass-it-around thing I don't usually like, but the more of it you read the more light bulbs come on.)
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days." The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."
She was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn't do the green thing back then.
We walked upstairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn't have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Saturday, June 29, 2013
It's official (almost!)
OK, backstory. I've been saving this title card from Girl Shy for a long time now. Like, about three years. That's how long I've been trying to get a deal for my novel about Harold Lloyd, The Glass Character.
Three years, when it took me a year and a half to write.
The trudge through this wilderness of hopeless hope was in stark contrast to the unmitigated pleasure of writing about him. The Glass Character isn't a Lloyd bio, nor is it even written in HL's voice (which would have been impossible, I think). Third person was too impersonal. So I found myself writing in the voice of Muriel Ashford, a young Hollywood hopeful completely obsessed with the idea of meeting her idol, Harold Lloyd.
The two intertwine, smack together and pull apart. Their lives bisect, then whirl in opposite directions. Some editors felt a little cheated. "Hey, I thought this book was about Harold Lloyd!" So who's this chick? But there was no other way for me to write ABOUT him than to write AROUND him, through the eyes of the obsessed and adoring.
So! At long last, Thistledown Press, a respected Canadian literary publisher, said YES to The Glass Character, and now comes another challenge (or series of challenges): to prepare the book for publication in the spring of 2014.
You'd be thinking I'd be jumping up and down by now, but I'm mostly tired and relieved. The next part will be a lot of hard work. I've done this twice already, and though the first experience was enjoyable and fulfilling, the second one was pure hell, a nightmare of miscommunication (when there was any communication at all) and abandonment by those who were supposed to be on my side.
I already have scads of ideas, and will have to come up with a lot more, as to how to get word out on this one. The old-fashioned book tour has become something of an anachronism, and it's not hard to see why. I used to wonder why it was worth it to fly five hours to Toronto on your own dime, stay in a hotel on your own dime, go to a 45-minute reading at a book store that you had to arrange yourself, and then sell maybe ten copies (before flying home on your own dime). Every writer has a heartbreak story about giving a reading and having practically no one show up (as if our egos need to be assaulted any further: and why are writers always described as having "fragile" egos, when enduring such humiliation takes so much strength of character?).
So I will have to use the internet in all sorts of ways, to try to contact all sorts of people It vexes me, always has vexed me, that people incessantly say "it's who you know" and "you need to make the right contacts", when all the contacts I've ever made, no matter how spectacular, always end up saying to me, "Well, best of luck with this!" before showing me to the door.
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Maybe I don't wag my ass enough, maybe I'm not bold enough, but being treated like a pest is humiliating and yet another assault to the ego.
Never mind, it's a YES!, the other side of rejection. For a long time I had these two title cards printed out and kept them back-to-back in a page protector, keeping the "do you call that thing a book?" side facing outwards and hoping that some day I could flip it over to the glorious "YES!"
So I finally flipped! Wish me luck. (And the "almost" refers to details still being worked out. Watch this space for more.)
Friday, June 28, 2013
"This is Harold Lloyd": Kevin Brownlow's brush with greatness
I HATE HATE HATE transcribing material from books - it's the sort of thing I had to do back in 1973 when I was a secretarial student - but there it is, if I want to post this I have no choice. It's part of the introduction to a great book about Harold Lloyd, one of my earliest sources, called Harold Lloyd Master Comedian, written by Jeffrey Vance and Suzanne Lloyd.
Kevin Brownlow, need I tell you, is undoubtedly the world's foremost expert on silent film, and some say he almost singlehandedly rescued the medium from the brink of oblivion at a time when nobody knew or cared. In the early '60s he was an earnest young film student who was already beginning to realize that rescuing and restoring silent movies would be his destiny.
"When I was young and saw Lloyd's best-known film, Safety Last!, uncut and in an excellent print, together with Dr. Jack, in a Wardour Street film library, I was encouraged to write a fan letter to the great comedian. One day I planned to write a book about the silent era, and with this in mind I asked him questions about his career. Lloyd did not reply. He was a successful businessman, after all, hardly likely to have the time to answer letters from fledgling film historians. A pity, but there it was.
By then I had left home, joined the film industry, and was living in a bed-sit in Hampstead, North London. It was Saturday, June 2, 1962 - my twenty-fourth birthday. I was sleeping late, having a most delightful dream. D. W. Griffith was conducting me through the corridor of a spacious clapboard building somewhere in the United States (I had not yet been there). It was a home for retired movie people. He gestured at one door and mentioned the name of a famous film editor; at another, a great cameraman. Before we had time to meet anyone, a telephone began to ring at the far end of the corridor. We set out toward it, and I woke up, realizing the phone was ringing in my corridor. I staggered out of bed, down the hall, and picked it up.
"This is Harold Lloyd."
I was young enough to have friends who played practical jokes, and I had often been taken in. But there was an authenticity about the voice that, coming out of my dream, caused me to hesitate. It was indeed Harold Lloyd. He was in London for a few days; was I free for lunch? Come over to the Dorchester. . . how about 11:00 o'clock?
What better birthday present could any film historian have? Nonetheless, I was apprehensive. Many comedians are dour and humorless offstage. I remembered meeting Groucho Marx, after a scintillating appearance at the National Film Theatre, in which he had us all in fits, and being astonished at his coldness. He had done his act, and now he was off - that was it.
Lloyd, by contrast, was charming. He was in his late sixties, still good-looking, with a dazzling smile, and a naivete reflected not so much in what he said as in how he said it. He spoke with the inflection of an eager midwestern youth, with a smattering of "Gees" and much laughter. The glasses were now permanent. When we shook hands he used his left, and I saw that his right hand was missing both thumb and forefinger. Not until later did I learn about the bomb that had shattered his hand and nearly wrecked his career during a still photo session.
Lloyd put me at ease, answered all my questions, and behaved exactly as I wanted the characters in my dream to behave. He conjured up the challenge and excitement of making pictures in the silent days with effortless ease; his heart lay in that era, and he soon recognized that mine did, too.
Lloyd had that effusive, hail-fellow-well-met manner that in younger people makes me instantly suspicious. With many, it is simply a sign that they have read Dale Carnegie's How to Make Friends and Influence People, and it reveals them as door-to-door salespersons, real-estate agents, or film producers. With Lloyd, the sincerity and bonhomie were genuine, It was as though he was the model on whom Dale Carnegie based his book."
There is more, oh-so-much more, including Lloyd talking about his Glass Character - yes, he really did call him the Glass Character, though no one could quite figure out why he used the singular when everyone else said "Glasses".
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY? Do you, do you? It's so I'd have a better title, a much more poetic title for my novel than The Glasses Character, which would have been totally lame (just kidding!). Thank you, Harold Lloyd, for handing me that, and for all the "Glass pictures" you made that will stand forever as hilarious works of art.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
As I went out one morning (with a nod to W. H. Auden)
(Author's note. I'll be damned if I remember writing this, but it has to be mine because I can't find it anywhere else. As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden is perhaps my favorite poem, so maybe it got the juices flowing. In any case, I must have borrowed some imagery here and there. Auden I'm not, but we must wade in.)
As I went out one morning
Walking the primal road
My shoulders were bent over
With an invisible load.
And down by the creek where the salmon
Sing all day in the spring
I heard a man with holes in his clothes
Say, “Love has no ending.”
I wondered at his heresy
He wasn’t supposed to speak
Of things he did not understand
And shouldn’t even seek.
“I love you, Lord, I love you,”
the ragged man proclaimed,
although his face was badly scarred
and his body bent and maimed.
The man was clearly crazy
For as he spoke his rhyme,
The salmon danced in the shallow stream
In fish-determined time.
I didn’t try to love him
But I loved him just the same
For he broke the diver’s quivering bow
And called his God by name.
“Oh tell me, man, oh tell me,”
I cried in my anguished state,
“What is the secret of the world?
Where is the end of hate?”
And all at once his face had changed
To an evil, ugly mask
His body had become the hate
About which I had asked.
“How stamp this mask into the mud,
How keep despair at bay?”
“You can’t,” he told me, grinning,
“But my God can point the way.”
“How dare you speak of God, you wretch,
When God’s abandoned you?
How dare you use the Holy Name?
He doesn’t want you to!
Your life’s just spent surviving
With the sidewalk as your bed
And taking poisons in your veins
And scrambling to be fed.”
The man just stood in leaves and mulch
While the salmon sang and spawned:
“Just see the other side of me
And tell me I am wrong.”
Another face appeared just then
A face all beaming bright
Its eyes were streaming like the sun
With pure mysterious light
“You blinded fool, you stand before
A drop of mist made rain
An eye that Paradise looks through
That holds both joy and pain.”
“I cannot understand you, for
You play such games with me!
How can you masquerade as God
And tell me how to see?”
“No one knows how Life began,
From Nothing came our birth.
A stir of seething molecules
Sparked all the life on earth.”
“Don’t tell me, wretch, you are the one
Who made this world come true!
Imposter, get out of my road,
I cannot look at you.”
“Just so,” the man said, streaming light,
“For no one knows the why.
But you will be forever changed
By looking through my eye.”
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