9/10/22
Newsletter93
The Crack of Dawn
In 1983 while all of my buddies were making the film Crimewave (aka, The XYZ Murders), I wrote my first (unpublished) novel. As the book was a historical drama, I needed to do research. So, several times a week I’d drive down to the Detroit Public Library. One time, instead of researching my subject, I was perusing the movie books and came across My Hollywood Diary by Edgar Wallace. It was a worn, ragged 1st edition, which I’d never heard of, and have never seen since. I read it and it was fascinating. Edgar Wallace was the bestselling author in England, and the most prolific. Wallace wrote screenplays, poetry, historical non-fiction, 18 stage plays, 957 short stories and over 170 novels, 12 in 1929 alone. More than 160 films have been made of Wallace’s work. Wallace was renowned for writing insanely fast: he could knock out a novel in three days. In 1931 Wallace moved to Hollywood to work on the screenplay for what was then called, “Merian Cooper’s Big Ape Movie.” I’ve already written a piece about Cooper, but he had the idea of a giant gorilla wreaking mayhem, and had written several scenes. Cooper gave Edgar Wallace his notes, and Wallace knocked out the entire screenplay in a week. He turned in the script, went to the famous old Hollywood restaurant, the Brown Derby (the building was shaped like a brown derby), ate a big plate of pancakes, came home, felt sick and died on Feb. 10, 1932 at the age of 56. He never saw the movie, and ended up with a co-story credit.
Preston Sturges was the funniest filmmaker of the 1940s, no question. He had one of the best runs of films of any filmmaker ever. Between 1940 and 1948, Sturges wrote and directed 9 great comedies, among them: Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Unfaithfully Yours. I flashback to being perhaps 14 years old. Every night my family would all go to bed, then I’d sneak back downstairs and watch the Late Show, and the Late, Late Show. I was watching Unfaithfully Yours and was laughing so hard I woke up the whole family. Sullivan’s Travels is about a big-shot Hollywood director who has only made comedies and wants to make a serious film, entitled, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (sound familiar?). The studio executives are horrified and try to talk him out of it, “But your last two pictures were boffo, Ants in Your Pants of 1938 and Hey, Hey, Hey in the Hayloft.” How Sturges got away with the story for The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek in 1944 is still a mystery. Betty Hutton sneaks out of the house to attend a USO dance where there are hundreds of soldiers. While jitterbugging she smashes her head into a lamp. She then realizes that she’s pregnant and all she can remember was that he was in uniform. Anyway, Preston Sturges got caught up the “Hollywood Red Scare,” and went to France. He then wrote his autobiography, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, which ends like this: “These ruminations, and the beer and coleslaw that I washed down while dictating them, are giving me a bad case of indigestion. Over the years, though, I have suffered so many attacks of indigestion that I am well versed in the remedy: ingest a little Maalox, lie down, stretch out, and hope to God I don’t croak. Fade out.” Then there is an addendum: “About twenty minutes later, August 6, 1959, Preston Sturges died of a heart attack at the Algonquin Hotel.”
Preston Sturges wrote a bunch of movies before he became a director, most of which are now forgotten. His script for The Power and the Glory (1933) is the direct inspiration for Citizen Kane, and is shockingly similar. Both Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (1940) are hysterical.
Th-th-th-that’s all, folks.