I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History

5. The 1950s

5 The 1950s S teve Broidy rightly felt that it was necessary for film companies to get into the business of making films for television. He also felt that, because of the low cost of its operations, Monogram was particularly well suited for television production. He asked me to be the head of a television subsidiary, Interstate Television, which he formed. Unfortunately, Monogram never was able to provide sufficient funding to do very much with this venture. As a consequence, nothing much came of Steve’s well-intentioned initiative. Some time later, Steve asked Ralph Branton to involve himself in television, and Ralph managed to put together a few programs. One involved Joan Bennett as the master of ceremonies in an anthology show. Jennings Lang, who was later involved in a scandal with Joan, was the agent for the show. I continued to develop features that would build on the success of the Cavalry Scout and County Fair formula, namely inexpensive family or action films made in Cinecolor. I tried to create backgrounds of size and a certain amount of spectacle. For Rodeo, I dispatched a crew to photograph rodeos, which became the action basis for the film, released in February 1952. Another of this type was Roar of the Crowd, about the Indianapolis 500, for which we photographed the actual race. Howard Duff starred in this film. Then there was The Rose Bowl Story, also using the same formula. We photographed the Rose Parade and football game and 45 developed a romantic comedy around it, starring Marshall Thompson, Vera Miles, Natalie Wood, and Jim Backus. These films all cost about $125,000 apiece and served to upgrade the quality of our second features or co-features program. Still another in this vein was Flight to Mars, an original science- fiction idea that I developed. In this film, a group of people are selected to be astronauts and are sent on the first space flight. They arrive on Mars, find an underground city, and become involved in the problems of that culture. The Martians looked just the way we do, although their clothes were considerably different. Cameron Mitchell played the lead, with Marguerite Chapman, Virginia Houston, and Arthur Franz. We used models for the spaceship and its launch. It was really comic-strip space travel, but it did anticipate what was to become reality twenty years later. The most important effort I made using this formula was 1952’s Flat Top, the script I developed with Steve Fisher, the writer of I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes. Flat Top was the story of an aircraft carrier during the Korean War. We received permission from the Navy Department to put a camera crew aboard an aircraft carrier and shot a lot of material in 16mm Kodachrome that we blew up to 35mm Cinecolor. Originally I had cast Richard Carlson and Bruce Bennett, but about two weeks prior to production I discovered, while talking with his agent, that I could secure the services of Sterling Hayden to play the lead. It was a difficult decision, and expensive. But I was convinced it was in the best interests of the picture, so I paid off Bruce Bennett with his full salary and employed Sterling Hayden to play the leading role, a tough, hard-bitten naval officer. Lesley Selander directed the film in expeditious fashion. We decided to stage a big publicity premiere to launch Flat Top. We brought a portable projector aboard the USS Princeton, the aircraft carrier on which we had shot some scenes and which was stationed in San Diego harbor. We brought all of the press from Los Angeles down to San Diego. They, along with all of the officers and crew of the aircraft carrier, were given folding chairs on the flight deck, and we used a portable projector to run the film for them. The stunt generated a great deal of publicity. 46 The 1950s / Flat Top received excellent reviews and I was thrilled when it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing. It was the first film that I had produced to gross over $1 million domestically. Having been made at a cost of about $250,000, it was a very successful film. The Academy nomination was the cherry on the cake. The “Bomba” pictures continued to be made at the rate of two a year, and...