11/9/23
Newsletter #508
The Crack of Dawn
Me and my friend, Don Bacardy (artist and Christopher Isherwood’s former lover), went to the movies on the Third St. Promenade. After our mutual friend, Rick, died, Don and I continued going to the movies together for a while. Anyway, we saw a movie that neither of us cared for. Afterward we strolled the length of the promenade. When we got to the end, one of us asked the other, “What movie did we just see?” The film was so unimpressive that 30 minutes later neither of us could remember the title, hard as we tried. So, we wandered back down the promenade toward the theater, both of us actively trying to remember the title of the movie, and aggravatingly unable to recall it. We got back to the theater and saw that the title of film we couldn’t recall was Unforgettable (1996).
I was a 2nd unit director for a year on the first season of Hercules. I graduated up to main unit director on the last episode. If a director has any brains – and quite a few don’t – they assign as much as possible to the 2nd unit right away. Although this isn’t entirely true, 2nd unit doesn’t work with actors; just stunt people and doubles who don’t deliver dialogue. 2nd unit covers things like inserts (extremely tight shots, like fingers on triggers), feet walking, sunsets, scenic shots: waves on the shore, birds in the sky, dew glittering on the grass, etc. 2nd Unit also bats clean-up, picking up shots that the main unit missed.
But one of 2nd unit’s main functions is to shoot action scenes. In a scene where Xena beats the crap out of ten guys, 2nd unit can shoot almost the entire sequence with stunt people and a Xena double. Then main unit only needs to get a close-up of Xena pretending like she’s fighting and you’ve got the entire scene. Therefore, if it’s an important, big action scene, 2nd unit can spend days shooting it, giving it the time and attention it needs.
Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, the biggest 2nd unit director in Hollywood was Andrew Marton. Marton also had a legitimate directing career, and even co-directed a hit movie, King Solomon’s Mines (1950), but for one reason or another (probably money) he kept returning to 2nd unit direction. When I would see his name in the credits, I just envisioned some burly, white, British guy, with red hair, smoking a pipe. It wasn’t until years after having seen his name listed a hundred times that I bothered to look him up. Andrew Marton (real name, Endre Marton) was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1904. He spent his 20s and 30s working on films in Europe before finally settling in Hollywood. Marton became the fix-it guy, which is what he did in a big way on King Solomon’s Mines, when he replaced the director. I don’t know this, but I think that when he stepped in and saved a big, Technicolor, A-movie on location in Africa, and it turned out to be a hit, he became known as a miracle worker. His next best credit is as one of three directors listed on Darryl Zanuck’s World War II epic, The Longest Day (1962), which was an enormous hit, but Zanuck got all the credit. Andrew Marton directed two movies in 1965 that I saw as a kid and really liked: Crack in the World and Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion.
Anyway, Andrew Marton’s most famous, and spectacular, work was as co-2nd unit director on, my man, William Wyler’s film, Ben Hur (1959). As I’ve previously explained, remaking Ben Hur was a very big deal to MGM, which had been dogging their books since the silent, 1925 version. Wyler took on the picture because he finally saw a way to make some money, which he did. But Wyler knew that the key sequence that would make or break the film was the chariot race.
The chariot race in the 1925 version is pretty damn good, and Wyler believed that he had to out do it. To make sure of this, plus making the best use of his production time, Wyler gave the scene to Andrew Marton, along with the top stunt man in Hollywood, Yakima Canutt (real name, Enos Edward "Yakima" Canutt). Canutt was a former rodeo champion who basically reinvented stunt work in movies. He became famous for two big stunts in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), where he got dragged under the stagecoach. Marton and Canutt had carte blanche for the shooting of this one scene, and they really did a first-rate job. I love that as charioteers wipe out and are destroyed, we see that there is a system in place to remove the bodies and debris. There had to be. There’s one stunt of Ben Hur’s chariot jumping a disabled chariot, causing him to come down hard on the edge of the chariot, crotch-first, that hurts every time I see it. I’ve seen it with an audience several times, and everybody groans.
By having Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt shoot this scene, and work it all out, when Wyler finally came in with the main unit to shoot the shots of Stephen Boyd viciously whipping Charlton Heston, they were able to play parts of it pretty wide without killing their actors. It’s truly perfectly conceived and executed.
Andrew Marton, an unsung Hungarian master of his craft, whom I wrongly assumed to be British. Alas.
I’m off to Atlanta tomorrow.