7/1/22
Newsletter28
The Ass Crack of Dawn
It’s not the crack of dawn; it’s the middle of the night.
President Harry Truman was famous for being able to fall asleep in thirty seconds. Thirty-six days after Truman became Vice-President, President Franklin Roosevelt died making Truman President. In his first presidential briefing he was informed that the U.S. had developed the atomic bomb, the most destructive weapon in human history, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all agreed that it should be dropped on Japan immediately. Truman said he’d think about it, but first he had to attend a meeting in Potsdam with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. As Truman returned to the U.S. on a navy battleship, he was informed the Japanese had sunk the American battleship, the U.S.S. Indianapolis, and instead of rescuing the survivors, the Japanese left them and most of the crew were eaten by sharks. Harry said, “Drop the bomb on Japan.” When asked later what he did after making that momentous, gut-wrenching, life-changing decision, he said, “I went right to sleep.”
The great Japanese filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, said, “The best thing that ever happened to Japan was losing World War II.”
The only Hollywood film studio to ever have a research and development department was Paramount at the end of the 1920s. Sound had just arrived, changing the entire process of movie-making. What was next? Co-founder of Paramount, Jesse Lasky, had the R&D people develop any camera system they thought might be the next phase. His people came up with a variety of widescreen systems: 70mm, anamorphic widescreen, a process where the film ran sideways through the camera using two frames instead of one to create width, and 3-D. But having just spent a fortune wiring theaters for sound, nobody was ready for widescreen. Three 70mm movies were made in 1930, they all bombed, then the process was discontinued. Jesse Lasky was soon convicted of tax evasion and his career ended. Twenty-three years later, in 1953, when television was taking a big bite out of movie revenue, Darryl Zanuck at 20th asked his camera department to develop a widescreen system. They said they could just buy one from Paramount who didn’t use them. 20th bought the anamorphic process, called it Cinemascope, and it was a hit. Warners bought the sideways process, called it VistaVision, and it was a hit. Big-shot producer, Michael Todd (married to Elizabeth Taylor) bought the 70mm system, called it Todd-AO, and it was a hit. Alas, Paramount had no widescreen system because they had sold them all.
I’ve always been fascinated by “heroes,” which can mean different things. But in the military it’s very easy to recognize a hero. The greatest hero in U.S. Naval history is Commodore Stephen Decatur. At twenty-five he was the youngest navy captain in history. His heroics in first the Barbary Wars (“. . . to the shores of Tripoli”), then the War of 1812, were so astounding that I wrote a (unpublished) book about him. Decatur fought two duels in his life: the first at the age of twenty, which he won; the second at the age of forty, which he lost and was killed. There are twenty-eight cities, counties, and towns named after him, like: Decatur, Georgia and Decatur, Illinois, none of which he ever set foot in, and now nobody remembers him.
My first apartment in Hollywood in 1976 was $65 a month, including utilities, and kitty-corner from Paramount Pictures on Melrose and Van Ness. I decided to get donuts at 4:00 AM, went outside to my car, and spotless, pristine, two-tone black and white,1958 Studebaker Gran Turisimo pulled up and parked behind me. An old man got out with a big a big canvas tool bag. He told him his car was beautiful. He said he’d bought it new. Gran Turisimos were sold at Mercedes dealerships. He had tried a diesel Mercedes, but it was so gutless that “it couldn’t pull a sick whore off a piss-pot,” so he bought the Studebaker. He was the locksmith at Paramount and had been working there for 40 years, since 1936. He told me about opening mistakenly locked dressing room doors for Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier, Bing Crosby, W.C. Fields, on and on.
Republican Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, from 1889 to 1893, spent so much government money that a new word had to be created to express it: a billion dollars.
And there are those pesky blue gels in the sky. I’ve lived to see another day.