Moving Pictures, Page 3

  If B.P. sounds like the only boy writer of his day, I should add that there were others in that Middle Stone Age of the cinema. Bannister Merwin wrote the very first serial, What Happened to Mary, named for Mary Fuller, one of the Edison Company’s earliest stars. Harold McGrath wrote another of those early serials, The Adventures of Kathlyn, starring Kathlyn Williams, who worked for Colonel William N. Selig, a fabled film prospector in the early days of the Gold Rush, a man who was to loom large in my Hollywood childhood. Another filmwriting pioneer was Hal Reid, whose son Wallace was soon to become one of the screen’s first matinee idols, along with Mary Pickford’s flamboyant brother Jack and the irrepressible Marshall (Mickey) Neilan.

  Father in the year of my birth was ready to soar from a salary of two hundred dollars a week to a luxurious five hundred dollars. A writer with a facile, retentive mind, a flair for showmanship, and a sense of his own worth as a literate diamond in the murky field of illiteracy, he had come to the right business at the right moment, when it was growing out of its funky nickelodeon phase.

  There was a stampede to “get into the movie game,” and if you couldn’t get a job in front of the camera as a featured player or as a five-dollar-a-day extra, or behind it as a director, cameraman, or technician, you could always try your hand at scribbling. When my father and mother wheeled my fancy carriage through Mt. Morris Park, they would be intercepted by passersby who had heard that young Schulberg was Edwin S. Porter’s Scenario Editor and would press on him their latest inspirations for Mary Pickford. Scenario writing became such a national madness that books on how to grind out these newfangled concoctions became bestsellers. While I was being pushed through that park, or being induced to eat with games like “Here we go down into the subway!” with my mouth encouraged to open to provide the subway entrance, associates of B. P. were writing books like The Reel Thing and The A. B.C. of Motion Pictures. In The Motion Picture Story, B.P.’s friend William Lord Wright advises, the trend of the motion picture is now upward, not downward, and the more refined one makes his stories the more will he contribute to the general uplift of cinematography…. Write of what you know; you have no business knowing anything about the seamy side of life. If you do know it, keep it to yourself.

  As an example of an effective “heart-interest story,” Wright recommended Three Children, written by James Dayton and produced by Harry A. Pollard for the Universal Film Manufacturing Company. Here is the original synopsis:

  Billy and Grandfather are ‘pals.’ One is not happy without the other. However, Billy’s mother is frequently annoyed by Grandfather’s old-fashioned ways and influences her husband to send Grandfather to the Old Folks’ Home. Grandfather realizes his son’s position and does not object. Billy misses Grandfather greatly. He visits him occasionally at the Old Folks’ Home. Grandfather tells Billy that he has no teeth, no hair, and can’t walk very well, and that Billy’s Pa and Ma cannot afford to have him around. A new baby comes to Billy’s home. Billy doesn’t think much of the new arrival, he would rather have his Grandfather. He notices the new baby has no teeth, no hair, and cannot walk so he resolves to trade it to the Old Folks’ Home for Grandpa. Grandfather brings Billy and the new baby home safely and Billy’s mother decides that all three children are indispensable to her happiness.

  The book includes a 14-page shooting script, building to this climax:

  SCENE 56. INTERIOR OF LIVING ROOM.

  The husband and the wife both ashamed, uncomfortable—Billy brings grandfather in—asks his mother whether grandfather can’t stay and live with them—his mother smiles at her husband and goes to grandfather—shakes hands with him and asks him to stay—everyone happy—mother places the baby in grandfather’s arms—all fuss over the baby.

  SUB-TITLE 16______THREE CHILDREN

  CLOSE UP. Tint for firelight effect of the grandfather, Billy, and the baby lying on the couch asleep—

  FADE OUT

  That, says Mr. Wright, “is a good example of a heart-interest photoplay as written by a staff writer.”

  These fustian little how-to books passed on to me by my father represent the missals of the new church of motion pictures into which I was born, and in which I was to be reared as an acolyte dedicated to the gospels of Porter and Griffith.

  When the Screen Club presented its first Annual Ball in 1913, on the eve of my birth, it was celebrating “the first social and fraternal organization to be formed for the folk of the motion picture art.” The first president of the Club was King Baggott, with the classic profile and slicked black hair of the Broadway matinee idol he had been before “photo playing.” In his film debut for Carl Laemmle’s IMP Studio (forerunner of Universal) he had played opposite Florence Lawrence, the first true star of the “moving picture show,” known as “The Girl of a Thousand Faces,” who had been signed “for life” at a spectacular fifteen thousand dollars a year. The Screen Club testimonial to King Baggott packs a lot of film history into a few quaint lines: “The result of his work in his first effort was so gratifying that a most tempting offer was made to Mr. Baggott, which caused his forsaking of the drama for pictures. Since his first appearance in pictures in 1909, he has played in no less than one picture every week. He has written and played in more than fifty of his own pictures in a year.”

  The First Vice-President of The Screen Club was John Bunny, the first of the movies’ fat-man comedians, who had played everything from circuses to Shakespeare before coming to the screen in 1910. Second Vice-President was a man my father knew well and loved to talk about, whose name had been Max Aronson before it was anglicized to Gilbert M. Anderson. But it was as Broncho Billy, the first cowboy star (after his movie debut in The Great Train Robbery), that Gilbert né Max was known to the growing film audience that was making the American western its favorite subject.

  Broncho Billy always claimed that he had been born in Arkansas and had been a cowpuncher before going into vaudeville, the path that led him to Edwin S. Porter’s office at the Edison Studio. Porter told my father than an authentic cowboy was just what he needed for his chase scene at the end of the picture. The chase was to be filmed in the wilds of New Jersey, not far from the Edison Studio. Broncho Billy was told to meet them at the location on horseback. When he failed to show up, Porter had to double for him himself. When the company got back to the livery stable where the tired nags had been rented, Porter asked if anyone had seen the missing Anderson. “Oh yeah,” the liveryman reported. “He rented a horse—but he didn’t seem to know the head from the tail. Bessie here threw him off before he got to the end of the driveway. He was afraid to get on again, so he took the next train back to New York.” Eventually Broncho Billy climbed on again, and scored in one-reelers to become the father of the cowboy stars.

  Billy was also the first actor to go into business for himself, in tandem with George K. Spoor, one of the Chicago pioneers. Spoor and Anderson’s Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was one of the early “majors,” with the enterprising Anderson shooting his Broncho Billy series at the rate of one a week on location in California. Because he and Spoor ran their own company, Broncho Billy was the first star to get his name on the screen, at a time when the “manufacturers” were opposed to screen credit because it would give the players an exaggerated sense of their own worth.

  A young English comedian touring with the Karno mime company—Charlie Chaplin—was lured from the stage by Mack Sennett to bring his cane, derby, and baggy pants to the screen at a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a week. Chaplin’s name wasn’t even attached to these riotous one-reelers, but audiences didn’t need a name. They just wanted to see more comedies with the funny little fellow in the baggy pants. Broncho Billy, working in California in his own unending cowboy series, went to see Charlie and—even though Spoor had literally never heard the name of Charlie Chaplin—talked his partner into offering him one thousand dollars a week. The shrewd Charlie bargained this salary to twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week, and the Chaplin come
dies began making millions for Essanay. While I was still crawling around my playpen, Chaplin’s salary was to leap from $75,000 to a world-shaking $670,000 a year, when Mutual outbid Essanay’s half-a-million.

  At that first ball of The Screen Club, two hundred of the movie game’s overnight elite celebrated in the Terrace Garden of the old Hotel Astor until dawn. While Father stayed on after midnight to drink with his cronies, Mother had to leave to get up early the next morning for her job with the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society. She was also working for the Educational Alliance. A child of the ghetto who still looked like a child, this little package was deceptive, for she was determined to rise above that ghetto background. She was already a bear for culture, for self-improvement, hungry for books, ideas, causes. She wanted something fine, “the better things,” not just the material success that Ben was beginning to enjoy through his lofty position with Edwin S. Porter, but Knowledge, Art, a Meaning to Life. She wanted to associate with intellectuals, like the young socialists on the Lower East Side who talked so eloquently of the need to overthrow the Czar, to free not only the Jews but the toiling masses of the world…

  Ad fancied herself a socialist, as well as a suffragist, a champion of unwed mothers and the sweatshop workers in the dingy garment lofts grateful for their 14-hour-a-day jobs at five dollars a week. Nor was her young husband insensitive to the plight of the poor on the narrow streets of lower Manhattan. He had written a feature story for the Mail about the ragged Irish and Italian children who send Santa the list of toys they most desire, only to wake up to empty stockings. Why couldn’t metropolitan “Santas” read their appeals in the dead-letter section of the Post Office and surprise the kids with at least one of the things they asked for? Father’s suggestion touched a nerve, setting off a spontaneous campaign to bring toys to the city’s poor.

  But the sons of defeated fathers, if they had the talent and the “go,” were rapidly becoming Americanized. The spirit of Horatio Alger was a heady brew. Look at the little orphan who lived on their block, Eddie Cantor, determined to become a comedian, even though the act he performed at one of B.P.’s Townsend Harris highschool debates, combining a Yiddish accent with blackface, convinced Ben, Ad, and all his other young friends that he must give up this silly dream and find an honest job. And there were Benny Leonard and the other clever Jewish boxers literally fighting their way out of the ghetto. And the teenage Jews who were scornful of their pious, passive fathers, and who were hustling, scheming, studying, and clawing their way into the mainstream. B.P. wasn’t going to climb up on a horse like Broncho Billy Aronson/Anderson and there was no way he was going to change his name (although he did hide his provocative middle name Percival under the initials he used all his life), but he was a kind of intellectual Broncho Billy galloping out of Rivington Street through the New York Mail and “The Conning Tower” and Film Reports to the parvenu but self-important Screen Club.

  A prodigy in all departments, B.P. had already learned to mix pleasure with business. He liked to sit through the night playing poker and drinking with his pals Al Lichtman and Al Kaufman, and with an Irish crony of whom Ad spoke all her life with fury and indignation: Joe Roche, an Irish writer of sorts, a happy-go-lucky good-time Joey who, she was convinced, had been placed upon this earth to lead B.P. from the straight and narrow. Joe used to come home with B.P. at dawn and sleep it off on the couch while Ben went back to his desk as scenario editor. B. P. had great energy, a gourmand’s appetite for life, an ability to burn his candle at both ends and still manage to last the night.

  Mr. Porter was impressed with Ben’s creative vitality and his conscientiousness. As films rapidly improved in quality—leading Porter, the mechanic, into a world of mass entertainment he had helped to create and yet was not adequately prepared for—he found the young man with the facile typewriter and the quick turn of phrase the ideal right hand for his growing production company. Porter had graduated to more complicated films like Alice in Wonderland that needed a somewhat more literate touch, although a few years later my father would laugh at the “literacy” of those naive subtitles.

  Our next step upward geographically and socially was to an apartment at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street overlooking Central Park. Not only outside but inside as well, my three-year-old eyes perceived a haze of green, from the leather chairs to the drapes and carpeting—a testimony to the Irish persuasiveness of Father’s sidekick. Although I failed to appreciate the improvement in my station, the Schulbergs were moving up in the world. We now had an Irish maid, apparently just off the boat from County Somewhere, who Yes Mum’d my mother, who was uneasy about this new relationship because she had not yet learned to give orders. But by the time I was old enough to remember these things she would be ordering servants around like a Nabokov Baroness. Imagine the Jews of Pinsk and Dvinsk and Minsk with goyische maids! This was part of the Americanization that our first generation was taking to with such ease. Our maid was called Jemmy and she was paid at the going rate of five dollars a week. She was to be the first of a long line of nurses, Fräuleins, and mademoiselles who would serve as mother-replacements in the days of our opulence.

  3

  I DID NOT KNOW why we had moved to a grander apartment. I do remember more space to explore and a larger park to play in and marvelous packages on Christmas with a large bell symbolizing the wonders of F. A. O. Schwarz. I was unaware that this largesse stemmed from an important merger between Edwin S. Porter and Adolph Zukor, one of the original moguls. Like Porter, Zukor became surrogate grandfather to take the place of my nebbish Grandpa Max and my reprobate Grandpa Simon. That’s why I find, while I know virtually nothing about Simon and remember only dimly Max’s gray, unsuccessful life, I seemed to know, from an early age, everything about “Uncle” Adolph.

  If the wave of Jewish immigration in the Eighties and Nineties could be divided into nebbish and mensch, little Adolph was a giant mensch. This small, quiet man who spoke simple English with a pronounced Hungarian accent, and who continued to keep me supplied with milk and eggs from his country estate, was one of the very few in the rough-and-tumble world of pioneer moviemaking who never lost B.P.’s respect. Toward most of the tycoons, first to last, from Thomas Edison and his hatchetman Jeremiah J. Kennedy, boss of the powerful Film Trust, to later moguls like L. B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, B. P. was to bear bitter grudges, cultivated with a devotion born of a thin skin and an erratic temperament better suited to the arts than to business. But when it came to Adolph Zukor, from my father’s first day on the job to his traumatic release from Paramount some twenty years later, I never heard a word of criticism or even the hint of rancor.

  It was my father who told me the true-life fable of the 15-year-old Jewish orphan from Eastern Europe who had come to America in the late 1880s, his baggage consisting largely of intelligence, determination, an appetite for hard work, and an instinct for the main chance. An undersized urchin with forty dollars sewn into the lining of his secondhand vest, little Adolph found a job at two dollars a week in an upholstery sweatshop. From there he graduated to four dollars a week as an errand boy for a furrier. Adolph tipped the scales as a miniflyweight and he learned to box so he could protect himself from the bigger boys in the loft.

  In his days as a teenage fur-worker, Adolph Zukor happened to work alongside a bigger, slightly older boy who had come over from Hungary a year earlier: Maxie Schosberg—my father remembered the name because it was so similar to our own. With a year’s headstart on Adolph, Maxie was already bursting with the go-getting American spirit. Why work for a boss who turned the sweat of your labor into profit for himself? The main chance lay in business for yourself. And the way to begin was literally waiting for them on the floor around their work bench. A natural salesman, Maxie saw the birth of a new fad: fur scarfs. They could take the fur trimmings on the floor and sew them into scarfs. They worked at this after hours in the shop and in their separate tenement rooms. Adolph did most of the hand work; Maxie sold the scarfs in
the street. They made them fast and he sold them cheap and soon they had a handful of capital to buy their own pelts. Adolph began depositing the modest (but for him impressive) profits in the Dry Dock Savings Bank. The restless Maxie moved on to Chicago where the fur business was thriving. Soon after, Adolph withdrew his savings, now several hundred dollars, and caught a cut-rate train to Chicago where he quickly found work as a fur cutter at twelve dollars a week. But the seed of going into business for himself had taken root, and soon he was in touch again with Maxie Schosberg. They pooled their meager savings to form the Novelty Fur Company.

  The company facilities consisted of a single room on LaSalle Street and a rented sewing machine. Adolph did the sewing, Maxie the selling, and at the end of their first season each of them banked one thousand dollars above expenses. At the end of the first year the Novelty Fur Company had expanded, with a flourishing branch in Peoria and twenty-five employees. Adolph’s bank book showed a balance of more than eight thousand dollars.

  Still, there seemed no logic in giving up a modestly profitable fur business in Chicago to try his hand at the newfangled moving-picture show. “Mr. Zukor backed into the movie game more or less by accident,” B.P. told me. He had loaned a relative three thousand dollars to invest in a penny arcade on 14th Street in lower Manhattan. Penny arcades were becoming the new low-life entertainment. A nickel in a slot brought coochee-coochee dancers and other delights on Edison’s Kinetoscope, or Sousa’s Band on his Graphophone. There were rifles to fire at moving ducks, and bags to test punching power against the recorded impact of the reigning prizefighters of the day. Passersby had nickels jingling in their pockets; a restlessness for new forms of entertainment was in the air. But somehow the penny arcade in which Zukor had entrusted his three thousand dollars was being mismanaged, and so the young furrier decided to move back to New York and look into the business himself. Fade out Zukor the furrier, fade in Zukor the motion-picture pioneer. Fascinated with the potential of the new entertainment, he joined forces with Marcus Loew, another ex-furrier, and decided to expand the operation with branches in other cities. Then young Zukor met Bill Brady, the big, out-going, energetic, openhanded Broadway man-about-town.