11/2/23
Newsletter #501
The Crack of Dawn
It was the summer of 1976. Our country’s centennial year. There’s a song I like from Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), sung by Henry Gibson, called, We Must Be Doin’ Something Right (to Last 200 Years).” I was 18 years old, full of piss and vinegar, and had just moved to Hollywood. I lived at 666 N. Van Ness, kitty-cornered from Paramount Pictures, in a $65-a-month efficiency apartment. My habit was to write at night on my Smith-Corona electric typewriter. It was about 3:00 AM, hot as hell, and there was no AC. I decided to go get some donuts at Winchester’s Donuts that was a 24-hour police hang out.
I came out of my building at the same moment a pristine, 1958, black and tan, two-tone, Studebaker Gran Turisimo Hawke, pulled up and parked behind me on the street. I stopped and inspected the car — it was beautiful. That was a lot of car. An old man with white hair got out of the car. I showed off and said, “’58 Studebaker, Gran Turisimo.” He nodded, impressed, adding, “Golden Hawke,” then went to the trunk and removed an obviously heavy canvas and leather sack. I asked, “Did you buy the car new?” He said, “Yeah, at a Mercedes dealership. Studebaker didn’t have any dealerships left. I went in and test drove a Mercedes diesel. Gutless. That car couldn’t pull a sick whore off a piss pot.” I asked, “What’s with the bag?” He explained, “I’m a locksmith at Paramount. I’ve been there for 50 years. Since they opened. I’ve changed locks for Gary Cooper and Marlene Deitrich. Hell, I even changed locks for that mean old man, Adolph Zukor, the president of Paramount.” I cheerily added, “He just died at the age of 103 years old.” The old locksmith nodded knowingly, “Yeah, the mean one lives to be 103; the nice partner, Jesse Lasky, died young and broke, with IRS after him. Ain’t that how it goes.” I agreed, knowing shit at 18. The old man hefted his heavy bag of clanking tools, grunted, indicating, “what can you do?”, then slowly headed up Van Ness to the side entrance of the studio, known at the Lemon Gate Entrance, or the hiring gate.
Jesse Lasky is a mostly forgotten figure in movie history, but he was vitally important. He was the first Jewish movie mogul born in the United States, in San Francisco. I read and am proud to own a 1st edition of his autobiography, I Blow My Own Horn, which was a perfectly good book. Jesse Lasky started in show business in burlesque in the early 1900s. He and his sister Blanche had an act where they both played trumpets. Blanche quit the act and married a very prosperous glove salesman named Sam Goldfish, who would later change his name to Sam Goldwyn. Jesse Lasky went into theater production. He became friends with a theatrical producer, Beatrice DeMille, who son, Cecil, was an ambitious theater director. Cecil DeMille asked Jesse Lasky, “Know where we can get any money to make a movie?” Jesse Lasky said, “My sister just married a rich glove maker.” Thus, Lasky and De Mille – using Sam Goldfish’s money – set out for Hollywood in 1913 to make the first feature film produced there, The Squaw Man (1913).
The story of the making The Squaw Man always has the fourth partner, Adolph Zukor, included, but he wasn’t there. He didn’t get involved until 1916 when his company, Famous Players, merged with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company, to become Famous Players-Lasky, which was how they were known for their first ten years. Famous Players-Lasky bought one of the big, early film distributors, Paramount Pictures, whose logo was already the familiar mountain.
OK. So, the dust settled. Famous Players-Lasky was originally located on Western Blvd. Then Famous Players-Lasky became Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky Pictures.
Then finally they just became Paramount Pictures. That’s when they decided that they didn’t have enough space. So, being the biggest studio in Hollywood at the time, and flush with cash, Paramount purchased the 23-acre Brunton Studio and film lot, that had been there since 1918, and was briefly Mary Pickford Studio, and that’s where Paramount is now.
Back when I was as a production assistant, 40 years ago, I worked on one of Maria Carey’s first music videos when she was about 18. We shot it at night on the New York Street on the Paramount lot, and it rained like hell. We shot anyway, as movies do, and I saw a lot of water wash down the sewer grates, and they still said (and I presume, still do), “Brunton Studios.” Why change the sewer grates?
This was 1926. Jesse Lasky, the friendly, smart, trumpet playing partner, decided to put in a research and development department. No other studio had such a thing. It only lasted for about six years, until Jesse Lasky lost out in a power-grab by the mean, though long-lived, Adolph Zukor. In the course of that six years, however, pretty much every widescreen process that came into use later were developed.
Unlike what the locksmith with the Studebaker Gran Turisimo Hawke in front of my building at 3:00 AM, said, Jesse Lasky didn’t die all that young – 77 years old, in 1958 (the year I was born), so he wasn’t young, and it allowed him to live long enough to see all of these widescreen processes that he had had developed put to use.
Dawn is just about to arrive.