20th Century Un-limited Page 11

  His comment: “When did we begin a high school program?”

  “I wish the script for Hey! Hay Fever! was that funny,” I replied and kept typing, although by now my fingers were aching. Ten minutes later they were all collected around my office door when I exited, the new typed script pages in my hands.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, and tipped my smart, brand-new little fedora to them as I walked out.

  “Who’s that?” I heard one ask.

  “That’s your replacement, Garson.”

  “He’s twelve years old.”

  “Remember what you looked like when you first arrived?”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Seiter and Rafferty both liked the changes.

  Sue-Anne said, “Oh, these are perfect, Chris! My lines are just perfect!”

  Probably because I made Sue-Anne’s character speak just like she did.

  “What’ll we do about the writing credit?” Seiter asked.

  “Chris,” Raff asked, “You got another name up your sleeve?”

  “Blaine Anthony,” I said, thinking quickly, recalling and then reversing the name of the Evelyn Waugh character I most wanted and probably had the least chance ever of getting to play onscreen.

  “He’s got a million of ’em,” Rafferty said, with a sigh. “I’ll send Frances another, temporary, contract for your writing.”

  By the time we’d finished shooting two weeks later—yes, five weeks shooting altogether!—everyone in the set had asked for line changes from me. Even Billy Bartlett, who, amazingly, had no hard feelings about what had happened.

  “I always thought I looked like a prison ex-con on the silver screen,” he explained to us one day, philosophically.

  “But you’re not giving up show business?” Sue-Anne asked.

  “For a while. I’ll go fishing, I think. Deep-sea fishing.”

  He would end up with his own yacht and a business on the ocean. Out of Port Hueneme, up the coast.

  The wrap party for our dopey little movie ended up at the Brown Derby on Selma and Vine. To my great satisfaction, Marlene Dietrich was there also, along with a bunch of Germans including Sacha Viertel and Franz Werfel. At our end of the place, people were making toasts, and I was forced to stand on a chair and bow repeatedly for “saving the movie” via my script changes.

  I could see Dietrich narrow her eyes as she looked me over then, and I thought, I would be only a tiny canapé in her vast, gorgeous, lipsticked mouth.

  Then Randolph Scott showed up and she gestured him over. He stood by her side and I suppose she asked who I was. But instead of gesturing ignorance, I could see his lips saying my name. So I had made something of an impression on him at the Haines-Shields party. Good!

  Later on, he was at the counter with two nice-looking young women when I walked by. “I’m free tomorrow,” I said. “My film wrapped today. I hear Roberta wrapped too. So you must be free yourself…I was thinking I’d come by and take a dip in your piece of ocean. Say at noon?”

  “Just you? All by yourself,” he asked. “You know our place has a terrible reputation.”

  “Everyone calls it Bachelor Hall,” one of the women said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “How old are you anyway?” Scott asked.

  “I’m of age.”

  He looked me over.

  “Actually, I’m a whole lot older than I look.”

  I didn’t add that I was sixty-five and old enough to be his father.

  He looked me over again. Finally, he said in a lower voice: “Aren’t you afraid that something bad will happen?”

  He was wearing a tan and pale blue jacket and a deep blue shirt and I thought he looked totally edible and smelled like heaven.

  Had. To. Have. Him. Simply Had! To!

  “No. I’m just afraid that nothing bad will happen,” I said.

  That amused him. “Okay. You asked for it, kiddo.”

  “Yes, I did!”

  “Ladies,” I added in a louder voice as I tipped my hat and left.

  All three were gone when I exited the men’s room.

  Marlene was there, however, and she was saying, “No. I will never go back there again! They are all monsters there now. Nazi monsters! And the rest are all zombies!”

  The others in her group began to argue with her.

  But Marlene held up her hands in their purple silk gloves, saying, “No. No. Never!”

  I thought: She must know what’s really going on in Germany. She really must know!

  15

  Hey! Hay Fever! had a surprise preview showing the day after it was ready, held at the amazing Fox Theatre in Westwood, with its huge, four-sided tower. Patrons who’d come in to see the Sunday serials and the children’s show were given free tickets to the special showing to be held after most people’s dinners at eight p.m. A huge poster for our movie, like the one I’d seen on Vermont Avenue, had been up on a nearby building for several weeks already, so we had a solid crowd show up, virtually all of them under twenty: our target audience.

  Sue-Anne, Billy and Milly and I snuck into the movie house during the last fifteen minutes, and when the curtain went up, Thom Rafferty asked people to stay and meet the featured players. This had been my idea, as I’d thought it would be a more intimate way than filling out a form asking how you liked the movie, the usual way movies were previewed in 1935.

  All but the edges of the loge and part of the downstairs had been closed off for this special showing, so of the six hundred people present, about twenty left, including a girl in the balcony who came to the edge and shouted down, “I love you, Christopher Hall. But I’ve got a curfew of nine-thirty.” This earned her applause and laughter.

  This unusual encounter of actors and audience had come about because a few days before, I’d overheard Rafferty talking about the sneak peek with Seiter and someone else from the Marketing department. I’d talked to Sue-Anne and then to our agent, and we two had of course reminded Frances about how bad the script had been and my role in rewriting parts of it. We’d managed to persuade Frances to ask for a post-production meeting for us at MGM to discuss our “role in marketing the movie to teens.”

  Her initial response to this was “Good luck, kids!” Followed by a game “I’ll try. But I can’t promise!”

  It was unclear how much persuading she did, but it must have been substantial, as the meeting was indeed called and that afternoon our director and his assistant and then Thom Rafferty showed up and eventually so did an executive from Marketing named Lloyd Talmadge, who looked like he’d had his job when the studio first opened, several decades earlier, making silent two-reelers. They all tried to look concerned about this gathering and instead came off looking perplexed.

  As per our plan, Frances led off, reminding them about the script rewrites and our roles in that and then reminding them that all of us in the room had a strong interest in the movie’s success. She added that Sue-Anne and I wanted to continue to help its chances. Once the others were softened up, Frances gave me the floor and I asked how they planned to audience test.

  Rafferty merely chuckled. He was slowly getting used to whatever I might come up with, which was certain to surprise. The others looked at each other, pretty much at sea.

  “We’ll pass out impression cards, like we always do,” Talmadge said.

  “What if, on top of that, we did something else?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “What if me and Sue-Anne and Mr. Seiter got up after the movie and asked the audience questions directly?”

  “What kind of questions?” Talmadge asked, fiddling with his cravat—not tie—cravat, that’s how old-school he was.

  “Questions like ‘How long have you been gay? And who buys those awful cravats?’” I wanted to say. But I restrained myself and instead said, “Well, I thought we’d ask questions that teenagers would ask each other. I mean, I believe we are going for a predominantly teen audience, right?”

  “Right.” He was actin
g like it was a trick question.

  “So why don’t we take advantage of having this self-selected sample of our key audience,” I asked, unsure but hoping that “sample” and “key” were already existent in his professional lingo, “to find out what they really want to see?”

  “Well, that could open the door to all sorts of…”

  “To see in this kind of teenager movie,” I interrupted to clarify.

  “What kinds of questions?” Rafferty asked me. I turned to Sue-Anne, who had a short list we’d worked out.

  They all seemed to ponder that and eventually Seiter spoke: “I see no harm in any of those questions.”

  “We might actually hear what teenagers are thinking!” the assistant director added.

  “I think it will mean a lot to those teenagers,” Sue-Anne now said, “if they see us right there, accessible to them.”

  “Well, that’s hardly been the policy for the studio’s actors,” Talmadge began.

  “Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper do road shows all the time,” Frances argued.

  “What if they are unfriendly? Aren’t you afraid of criticism?” Talmadge asked Sue-Anne.

  “No. I welcome it!” she said boldly.

  Then Talmadge and Rafferty got up and left the room and evidently spoke together, and when Thom came back in he was smiling. “We’ll try it. One time only. And Talmadge wants his people to rework those questions.”

  So here we were, actually implementing this strange request.

  Talmadge’s assistant in Marketing began with “How did you like the film?” which earned him applause. We’d gotten applause as the film had ended and when we actors marched in front of the proscenium, so we knew that already. Nice, if useless.

  I’d tried to skew the questions a little more usefully, so that for example instead of asking what did you like or dislike, the Marketing fellow next asked, “Are these kids you’d like to get to know better?”

  A resounding yes.

  Which ones?

  Sue-Anne and myself, first, of course. And, unbidden, the young audience began telling us what they most liked. “The way they talked to each other,” one girl said, “was just like we talk to each other.” Applause followed that. “They seemed real,” a boy said, and blushed deeply. More applause.

  What could be better? Say, in another film with these characters? Seiter asked them, “More singing? More dancing?”

  No, it turned out. They wanted more realistic stories.

  “This one was fun and enjoyable,” one very put together young lady said. “But we’ve got real problems too. We’d like to see those up on the screen too.”

  That very answer was why I’d demanded a Script department representative to be there. Even Seiter claimed to be surprised. So I asked that girl, “Even if the stories taken from real life are sad, or even tragic? Would you go still see that?”

  The reaction among the teens was widespread, positive, and especially the older teens agreed. The boys began mentioning problems they had, and I copied them down quickly.

  One girl charmingly said she thought “Billy and Milly were the funniest. But Christopher Hall was the swooniest!” This was followed by shouts of agreement and even a few wolf whistles.

  We’d suggested that to “reward” our marketing audience that extra “cards”—little posters for our movie, the size of the announcement cards placed outside of the theater—be printed up, and we began handing those out and were surprised when we ran out of them, it was such a popular idea. We four actors signed the posters and a few of the patrons stepped forward and met us directly after that session was over and we heard even more useful comments from them, some of which we immediately asked them to repeat to the executives there.

  We went to the local after-hours diner on Gayley Avenue afterward, a UCLA hangout, where more members of the audience came up to our big corner booth.

  We remained long after it had emptied out, at which point I said: “To summarize: They love us, but…they want more realistic dialogue, more realistic stories, and more real teen problems.”

  The representative from Scripts said, “That’s not going to be as easy as you think, you know. We don’t know much about teenagers’ problems.”

  “Well, we do! Sue-Anne and me and our friends,” I said. “So maybe we should partner up with you people on the next script—from the very beginning. What do you think, Mr. Rafferty? That might work, couldn’t it?”

  “It might. But do you really want to do all that work?” he asked us. “You’re young people. You’re earning a lot of money. Wouldn’t you like to go out and enjoy yourselves? You, Sue-Anne, don’t you want to buy ball gowns with your earnings? Maybe get a horse of your own and all those riding outfits. And don’t you want to go out dancing? I’m sure there’s plenty of young fellows who would take you.”

  “Well, sure, but when I heard what some of those kids had to say, I don’t really, Mr. Rafferty. I mean of course, I like all that, what girl wouldn’t? But there’s other things going on in the world too! And then, Chris is so good with my dialogue. I’m sorry, Mr. Herman, I know you people work hard and you try hard, but if Chris could write my lines from now on, I’ll make as many movies as you want me to.” Billy and Milly took up that statement and supported it. They all liked my dialogue far better than what they’d first been given.

  “Christopher?” Rafferty asked. “That’s a great deal more work for you.”

  “I don’t mind, although I’m sure I’ve got a great deal to learn from you, Mr. Hermann,” I said and I added, “You know, things are happening so fast nowadays, I’m not at all surprised that we four here are the only ones at the studio who really know what young people are thinking anymore. We’re beginning to have our own movies. Soon we’ll have our own music, and our own books and…”

  So that’s where it began, tentatively enough, and of course it was evident that the “grown-ups” would be looking over our shoulders every inch of the way, because after all, there was so much money on the line. But that’s when it was first agreed to let us begin to generate the stories for our movies from then on.

  As we were getting into cars to go home to bed, Thom took me and Seiter aside.

  “You both understand that if this works as well as it seems from that preview that it will work, that we are all looking at a Schiller and Hall franchise?”

  “Meaning how many films, on what kind of schedule?” I asked.

  “It’s early July. I’d say two, or maybe three more movies this year. That’s a lot of work for you both.”

  “I don’t have anything else planned. What about you, Will?” I asked.

  “I’m free,” he said, with a chuckle, “and if you and Sue-Anne are right, this could be some kind of youth sensation.”

  Talmadge couldn’t be bothered to come to our preview, but his second in command, who was considerably younger, had grown more enthusiastic as the evening went on. “Those handout posters worked better than we thought!” he said. “I’ve collected a dozen names and addresses of kids who asked for one, after those were all gone.”

  “They’ll put them up in their rooms and they’ll tell all of their friends,” I said. “Because that’s what teenagers do.”

  “Let’s hope so. You know, Talmadge didn’t think this would work at all.”

  “What will you tell him?” I asked.

  “Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll ask to meet with Goldwyn or Louis B. and tell him directly.”

  “You can take the credit for the idea,” I said.

  “Of course I can. It was my idea,” he lied and stalked off.

  Once Frances and Thom and Sue-Anne and I were packed into his Buick, headed back home, I said, “Blaine Anthony will begin the next scenario right away. I had an idea for a title: Different Curfews! He’s a soda jerk and works after school in his dad’s grocery or newspaper shop, and she’s from a close-knit traditional family. Maybe even bring up religious differences.”

  “I like that,” Sue-Anne s
aid.

  “So do I,” Frances agreed.

  “No religious differences!” Rafferty declared with finality. “Remember, this is a family studio…But perhaps we do have a basic plan.”

  Sue-Anne was quieter than usual when Rafferty dropped us off at her residence hotel. I saw her to her door at Miss Irene’s and asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Chris. It’s just that until tonight, I’d never thought that we could, you know, make a difference in other people’s lives. I guess I’m kind of surprised by what those kids said. I sort of feel that we have a responsibility to them. What if we do or say something wrong?”

  “We do have a responsibility, Sue-Anne. But you’re so wonderful you won’t say or do anything wrong. You heard how crazy they were about you.”

  “And about you! Why, I think I ought to be jealous after how those girls were talking about you.”

  “Except…we don’t have that kind of friendship, do we? I mean off the screen?”

  “We don’t? No, you’re right, Chris, I’m sorry to say we don’t.”

  “You’re sorry, but not that sorry because you do like a friend of mine a great deal already in a short time, don’t you?”

  “Don’t you dare say a word to him! Well, maybe a word.”

  “Done. But as soon as I’m done with the scenario for Different Curfews, you’re going to read the whole twenty pages and discuss it with me in excruciating detail. Before I hand it to those jerks. Do we have a deal?”

  I stuck out a pinkie, to seal it.

  She joined me with her own. We twisted them together.

  “Deal! G’night, Chris—the swooniest—Hall!”

  At the Alsop House, Pops woke up long enough to say, “Your friend was here looking for you.”

  “Which friend? Don’t you know I have hundreds, Pops?”

  “The guy that first brought you here, in the middle of the night.”

  He meant Larry Allegre. The costume jewelry sales rep! I’d forgotten all about him. “I hope he left his number.”

  “It’s here somewhere. There it is.”