4/24/24
Newsletter #589
The Crack of Dawn
I love this story.
In 1852 when Thomas Edison was five years old, he lived in Milan, Ohio, near the shore of Lake Erie. There was a crazy old inventor in town, whom I see as Frank Morgan playing the Wizard of Oz, who built a very early hot air balloon. As Edison described it, the whole town came out to watch the inventor’s first flight. The ropes were cut, the balloon floated up into the air and the people cheered. Everyone silently watched as the balloon rose straight up, higher and higher. Finally, it caught an air current, then began to drift slowly off over Lake Erie. After a while, the balloon and inventor drifted out of sight. The balloon and the inventor were never seen again. Soon thereafter, the Edison family moved to Port Huron, Michigan, which is where Thomas Edison grew up.
So, in the next episode of my Netflix limited series, Selznick, three weeks into shooting Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable, the biggest star in the world, and the basis on which Gone with the Wind was being financed, said something along the lines of, “I won’t work with that fruit director, George Cukor, anymore. He only cares about the female characters and their dresses. Get me a man’s director. Get me Victor Fleming.” Fleming and Gable had previously worked together a few times, starting with Red Dust (1932), which was a hit, and had recently made Test Pilot (1938) with Spencer Tracy and that was also a hit. Victor Fleming was at that very moment directing MGM’s most expensive film, The Wizard of Oz, right next door to Selznick’s office at RKO-Pathe (formerly the Thomas Ince lot).
Because that’s the way Clark Gable wanted it, George Cukor was fired, and Victor Fleming was hired. He actually left the shooting of Wizard of Oz three days early (he got his buddy, King Vidor, to complete it). But George Cukor had done all of the preproduction with Selznick for the previous six months, so his fingerprints are all over the film. It’s George Cukor’s (and Selznick’s, of course) taste in casting, art direction, cinematographers, and the rest.
Clark Gable might have been acting like a big shot movie star dick when he had George Cukor fired, but Victor Fleming turned out to be the right director for the job. He subsequently won the Oscar for Best Director of 1939. He was also nominated for The Wizard of Oz that year, which is considered by some the best year for movies, ever. It was certainly Victor Fleming’s best year.
Victor Fleming started in the movie business in 1916. One of the great early filmmakers, Allan Dwan, and his company of two big old convertible cars containing the entire cast and crew, were out looking for a location and dreaming up a story they would shoot that day. It was all improvised, since there were no scripts back then. As Allan Dwan explained it, in 1916 one of the cars broke down outside L.A., maybe in Palmdale, and they stopped at a gas station. The young mechanic found the problem and promptly fixed it. Allan Dwan was impressed and said, “Kid, want to work in the movies?” and hired him, and he was of course Victor Fleming. Fleming first became a director of photography, then began to direct in 1919.
Episode #3 of Selznick, the Netflix limited series, is called, What Script Are We shooting?
In an awesome piece of diversity and inclusion casting, Clark Gable is portrayed by Peter Dinklage. And Vivian Leigh is played by the girl from Precious.
There you have it.
I would watch this series!