11/21/22
Newletter165
The Crack of Dawn
In Airplane! (1980) the stewardess goes down the aisle of the plane offering magazines and newspapers. An elderly lady asks, “Have you got any light reading?” The stewardess says, “How about this pamphlet about Jewish sports heroes?” and hands her a one-page document. The joke here is that Jews don’t go into sports. In the twentieth century there are really just a handful of Jews who went into, let alone succeeded, at sports. Here in Detroit we had Hank Greenberg on the Detroit Tigers in the 1940s; Sandy Koufax on the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers; Max Baer was world heavyweight champion for one day short of a year in 1933-34 (and the father of Max Baer Jr., who played Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies); and Mark Spitz, Olympic gold medal swimmer. Presently, as far as I know, there are no Jews in: baseball, football, hockey, or even golf. Although many Jews enjoy watching sports; most Jews would never consider going into sports professionally. So, white supremacists need not worry about Jews replacing them in professional sports. Besides, black folks already did that.
I am reminded of early in the run of the David Letterman Show, he had routine of asking a question, then calling into an information line for the answer. The question was: the films of Neil Diamond. Letterman dialed the phone and the recording said, “The Jazz Singer, 1980; The Jazz Singer, 1980; The Jazz Singer, 1980 . . .”
As far as big-shot directors go, the oldest director was D.W. Griffith, who was born in 1875, whose career lasted from 1910 to 1930 – 20 years. In the next bunch, all ten years younger than Griffith, there was: Cecil B. DeMille, Raoul Walsh, Henry King, John Ford and Allan Dwan, all of whom began directing between 1913-1915. What I find fascinating is that all of these directors started right before Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), saw the movie, had an epiphany, adopted every one of Griffith’s techniques, then all went on to have at least 50-year careers.
Raoul Walsh directed from 1914 to 1964. Walsh was a handsome young man and played John Wilkes Booth in Birth of a Nation, so he got to see what Griffith was doing first-hand. He immediately made Regeneration (1915), a pretty good gangster film using all of Griffith’s innovations, and dare I say it, was much more adept than Griffith as a director.
Allan Dwan was working for Griffith in 1915 making short films, and he too got to see what Griffith was doing up close. Dwan had started what may well be the very first movie studio in California, The Flying A Studio in 1911. Allan Dwan had studied to be an electrical engineer. When Griffith made his second epic, Intolerance (1916), he had one of the biggest sets ever built before or since of Babylon, with giant stone elephants, and a thousand extras. Griffith wanted to start in close, then pull back and rise up to reveal the whole set, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. Allan Dwan was right there directing another film, and suggested using a freight elevator mounted on a train car on a short length of track. And that’s how they got the shot. Dwan made his biggest hit film in 1949 – 40 years into his career – The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) with John Wayne. When Peter Bogdanovich tracked him down in the late-1960s, Allan Dwan was in his 80s, he was living in a borrowed apartment above a garage in Van Nuys. But he directed from 1911 to 1961.
And finally, I will get a chance to vent my spleen against Henry King. I personally cannot stand the way Henry King directed, and he was the favorite director of Darryl Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox. Other than he was well-known for coming in on-time and on-budget, the guy sucks. He made a lot of movies, and a couple of good ones in spite of himself: Jesse James (1939), Song of Bernadette (1943), Twelve O’Clock High (1949), and The Gunfighter (1950), but that’s four out of a hundred, and those movies bug me, too. Henry King will not cut unless somebody puts a gun against his head and forces him to. I watch all of his films thinking, “OK, now cut to another angle because this one has stopped working and I can’t see what’s going on. Or just cut to close-ups, or anything,” but no. King had to meet Zanuck at the track or something. Henry King was a top-notch director in 1920, then never improved. Maybe he let Zanuck win at cards or something, but it still annoys me. Well, I’m glad I finally got that off my chest.
A good day to one and all.