Читать книгу The Book Of Lists - David Wallechinsky - Страница 29

Patrick Robertson’s earlier selections of movie lore appeared in The Book of Lists #3 and The Book of Lists ’90s Edition. He is the author of The Book of Firsts and the continuously updated Guinness Movie Facts and Feats, both of which have appeared in many languages, and is currently engaged on The Book of American Firsts.

1. DISNEY’S HOLY GRAIL

The rarest and most sought-after cartoon film of all time was rediscovered in 1998 when a 16mm print, bought in London for £2 from the disposal of the Wallace Heaton Film Library in the late 1970s, was identified as the only known copy of Walt Disney’s first-ever production, the seven-minute-long Little Red Riding Hood. It was made in 1922 at Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Films, a small animation studio he established in Kansas City and which went bankrupt within a year. Little Red Riding Hood is particularly notable to Disney buffs because, unlike the later Hollywood cartoons such as Mickey Mouse, it was drawn by the 21-year-old fledgling film-maker himself. The reason that the unique print remained unidentified for so long was that the pirated copy bought by silent-movie collector David Wyatt had been retitled Grandma Steps Out. Only when he took it to the Disney company 20 years later was it finally revealed that the holy grail of animated films had been found at last.

2. FATHER OF THE FEATURE

Every movie buff knows that in the early days of cinema all films were one-reelers until D. W. Griffith came along and invented the full-length feature film with epics like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Right? Wrong. The first full-length feature film was called The Story of the Kelly Gang, about desperado Ned Kelly, and it was made in Australia in 1906. And nor was this just a one-off. Other Australian features followed, with no fewer than 16 in 1911, the first year in which other countries began to make full-length movies, with France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Serbia and Spain in the vanguard. In 1912 Hungary made more features than any other country and in 1913 it was Germany. With imports flooding in from France, Germany, Italy and Denmark, American producers were finally forced to accept what they had steadfastly refused to believe: that the kind of unsophisticated people who frequented movie houses were able to concentrate on a story lasting as much as an hour and a half. There was an explosion of production in 1914 with the US releasing no fewer than 212 features, of which one, Judith of Bethulia, was indeed by D. W. Griffith. But it is the long-forgotten name of Melbourne theatrical impresario Charles Tait, producer and director of The Story of the Kelly Gang, which should be honoured as that of the true father of the feature-length movie.

3. THE CRYING GAME

Not all actresses can cry to order and some directors have been known to resort to less than gentle measures to coax tears from the dry-eyed. Maureen O’Sullivan’s tear ducts failed to respond in her deathbed scene as Dora in David Copperfield (1935) until director George Cukor positioned himself out of camera range of the bed and twisted her feet sharply and painfully. Victor Fleming achieved the same effect with Lana Turner, never noted as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished thespians, by jerking her arm behind her back and giving it a vicious twist. Kim Novak, unable to produce tears on demand in the waterfall scene with William Holden in Picnic (1955), asked director Joshua Logan to pinch her arms hard enough to make her cry. The scene took seven takes and after each one a make-up artist swabbed Novak’s arms to cover up the marks. Logan was so distressed by the need to inflict physical hurt on his star that he threw up afterwards. Later Ms Novak was to accuse him of unprompted physical abuse when she recalled the episode. Gregory La Cava was able to obtain convincing tears from Ginger Rogers in response to Katharine Hepburn’s calla lilies speech in Stage Door (1937) only when he announced to her that a message had just come through to say that her home had been burned to the ground. Norman Tourog directed his own nephew, Jackie Cooper, in Skippy (1931). When he was unable to get the 10-year-old to cry on cue, he told him that he would have his dog shot. The ensuing waterworks helped young Cooper on his way to what would be the youngest Oscar nomination for the next 40 years. Otto Preminger stooped even lower when he needed spontaneous tears from a dozen small Israeli children in a scene in Exodus (US 1960) to show fear at an imminent Arab attack. He told them that their mothers no longer wanted them and had gone away never to return. Whatever the vicissitudes of Hollywood, things were worse for child stars in Hong Kong. Veteran actress Josephine Siao Fong-fond recalled her days as the colony’s most famous juvenile of the 1950s: ‘If you were shooting a scene where you had to cry, and they were afraid you wouldn’t be able to deliver, they simply beat you with a rattan cane till you did.’

4. IRISH EYES WERE SMILING Ireland had always been notorious for the vigilance of its censors. Surprisingly, though, Roman Polanski’s 1962 debut feature, Knife in the Water, a film with strong homosexual overtones, passed unscathed. It was argued that homosexuality was quite unknown to the Irish and what they did not understand could not harm them. An earlier generation of censors had been less tolerant. In 1932 the Marx Brothers’ slapstick comedy Monkey Business was banned lest it provoke the Irish to anarchy.

5. MARRIED TO THE MOB

One of the most notorious examples of oppressive censorship occurred not at the hands of a censorship board but what might be loosely described as a ‘pressure group’. The picture was The Godfather; those who were affronted were the Mafia, and the pressure group was the Italian-American Civil Rights League, headed by Joseph Colombo. When the League attempted to halt production of the film, producer Albert S. Ruddy decided it would be in the interests of his personal wellbeing and prospects of longevity to meet Mr Colombo and others of its representatives for a full and frank exchange of views. After protracted negotiations, during which the League asserted that the Mafia did not exist and was a figment of collective hysteria, they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The film could go ahead with no fear of retribution from a non-existent underworld brotherhood provided the word ‘Mafia’ was wholly excised from the script. Ruddy declared that he had no wish to cast a slur on the blameless lives led by New York’s Italian-American community and agreed to the League’s suggestion. As it happened, Joseph Colombo was slain before the picture started, by persons alleged to belong to an organised crime syndicate comprised of citizens of the same national origin as himself. The Godfather (US 1972) was a sensation and became the top-grossing film of 1972 even without mention of the Mafia. But those who decried what they believed was a craven compromise with the mob were mistaken in their criticism. Mario Puzo, author of the original novel and scriptwriter of the film, wryly observed: ‘I must say that Ruddy proved himself a hard bargainer, because the word “Mafia” was never in the script in the first place.’

6. PAY RISE Maybe you can’t measure talent in dollars, but the moolah does say something about box office appeal. While the second half of the 1990s saw a stable of male leads (Jim Carrey, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone) crashing the $20 million barrier, on the distaff side the upfront fees for A-list leading ladies seemed pegged at a miserly $10 million. (What other profession is allowed to pay women half the rate of men in this day and age?) Then Demi ‘Gimme’ Moore pushed the envelope with a $12.5 million pay-check for Striptease, but the picture bombed. Hard on her heels was Julia Roberts, who then established herself as the undisputed Number 1 female star with her hugely popular successes Notting Hill and The Runaway Bride. For her next picture, the even bigger Erin Brockovich, the flame-haired beauty with the letter-box mouth became the first actress to join the $20 million-up front club. It had taken her 14 years since her debut in a long forgotten 1986 flick called Blood Red and she now commanded a fee precisely 20,000 times the $1,000 she was paid on that one.

7. SEABISCUIT PICKED A WINNER The 7,000 extras needed for the racetrack scenes in Universal’s Seabiscuit (2003) would have put the movie into a severe budget bust at the standard fee of $50-$60 per day. Saviour of the movie was one Joe Biggins, the assistant to the unit production manager – not a role that normally wins plaudits from anyone other than the incumbent’s mom. Biggins’ inspiration was lifesize inflatable dolls. Cheap to make and transport, they could be inflated three at a time with a portable pump in 12 seconds. Mixed in with a few live performers, the dolls could be computer activated in post-production to simulate crowd movement. With Seabiscuit in the can and on budget, a triumphant Biggins set up the Inflatable Crowd Co., offering 15,500 roll-up plastic ‘people’ at $15 per week compared with a $300 per week tab for humans.

8. SERGEANT VOSS’S PRIVATE ARMY

Between 1923 and 1940 ex-Sergeant Carl Voss commanded a private army. With a strength of 2,112 former World War I servicemen, when it first appeared in the field of opposing American and German troops in The Big Parade (1925), the Voss Brigade took up arms again as Riff warriors, Hessians, Senegalese, Revolutionary Americans, Chinese, Romans, Maoris and Crusaders in the years that followed. They would not only fight on both sides, but were equally adept as foot soldiers and cavalry, and as artillerymen it was said that there was no piece of ordnance they could not handle from the Roman catapult to Big Bertha. Following a stint as Fascist troops in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), their last battle was fought in Four Sons (1940), some ending as they had begun as German soldiery, others as Czechs. On the eve of America’s entry into World War II, the band of veterans was finally routed by the forces of bureaucracy. The Screen Actors Guild decreed that no agent could accept commission from an extra and their commander Sergeant Voss was decreed to be acting as such. After 232 engagements without a serious casualty, the old soldiers faded away.

9. THE LAST STAR OF THE SILENTS

Two actors who had starred in silent movies – and only two – were still performing in the twenty-first century. But with the death of Sir John Gielgud, who made his debut in Who is the Man (1924) and his last screen appearance in David Mamet’s Catastrophe (2000), there is only one surviving. He is Mickey Rooney, who appeared at the age of five in Not to be Trusted (1926) as a cigar-smoking midget, giving rise to an ongoing belief that he was a vertically-challenged adult who played child roles. Starring as a teenaged, albeit diminutive, Andy Hardy with Judy Garland as his squeeze helped to lay the myth to rest, but MGM could not resist casting the 5ft 3in. Rooney opposite 6ft 6in. Dorothy Ford in Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1947). These roles and the hundred or so that followed may not have had quite the gravitas of Sir John’s, but Mickey outlived him to become not only the silent screen’s last active survivor but one of twenty-first-century Hollywood’s few actors of such unremitting energy that he puts in as many as four performances a year.

10. MOST MARRIED

The most married of many-times wedded Hollywood stars was B-movie luminary Al ‘Lash’ La Rue (1917–96), who went to the altar and the divorce court on 10 occasions, finally ending a turbulent life – in which he had been charged with vagrancy, drunkenness, possession of marijuana (while practising as an evangelist) and stealing candy from a baby in Florida, besides scripting porno movies – unmarried.