8/21/22
Newsletter79
The Crack of Dawn
It’s dark and raining, with an occasional flash of lightning.
Thirty years ago my beloved 95-year-old Hungarian grandmother was in Sinai Hospital (where I was born) here in Detroit dying. At Sinai they have a volunteer program where older Jewish men and women go around visiting the patients. One of these volunteers, a man in his 70s wearing a white lab coat, visited my grandmother and the nametag on his coat said, “Pasternak.” I asked him, “Are you related to Boris Pasternak?” Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago. He said that he’d been asked that many times, but no, he wasn’t. I then asked, “Are you related to the producer, Joe Pasternak?” The man’s eyes lit up, “Yes, he was my uncle. Nobody’s ever asked me that before?” Joseph Pasternak (real name, József Paszternák from Szilágysomlyó, Hungary) started in the film business in Europe in 1923, then immigrated to America in 1928 and became a producer, first at Universal, then at MGM. With the arrival of sound, musicals immediately became very popular. The head of MGM’s musical department was songwriter, Arthur Freed (who wrote the song, then later produced the movie, Singin’ in the Rain), and Joe Pasternak was second-in-charge. Pasternak produced a long string of hit musicals with Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, Esther Williams and Gene Kelly, among them the smash hit, Anchors Aweigh (1945), with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Pasternak continued working into the 1960s when he produced two Elvis Presley movies, Girl Happy (1965) and Spinout (1966). His autobiography, Easy the Hard Way, was very amusing.
In 1919, early in the career of the great silent comedian, Harold Lloyd, the prop department screwed up, and instead of a prop bomb, they gave him a real bomb. The explosion blew off the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Lloyd had a skin-colored glove made with a clever bendable thumb and index finger. He then went on to be known for doing many outrageous stunts, the most famous was hanging from the clock. When I watch his films – a very funny one is Dr. Jack (1922) – I can’t help but focus on his right hand. The prosthetic glove works great, but if you’re looking for it, you can see it.
Silent comedy producer, Hal Roach, discovered Our Gang, later known as The Little Rascals, and Laurel & Hardy. When asked why he put Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy together, Roach said, “One’s fat, the other is skinny, I thought it would be funny.” When the silent comedies came to an end with the introduction of sound, Hal Roach continued to work, producing the sound Laurel & Hardy features, but surprisingly, he produced the classic, Of Mice and Men (1939) and the smash success, One Million B.C. (1940; later remade as One Million Years B.C. with Raquel Welch), which launched the career of Victor Mature. Hal Roach lived to be 100.
Due to the rain clouds, it’s still dark out. But it’s a sunny day in my heart.