Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz

Chapter 4: “Tell them to let it swing”

115 “Tell them to let it swing” The production of musical films brought together two, normally separate studio departments: writers in the writing department conceived of the story and wrote the dialogue; composers, lyricists, dance directors, arrangers, and orchestrators loosely allied in an expanded music department created the musical numbers. The archival traces left by these two departments offer different, often complementary perspectives on the filmmaking process. Scripts were the blueprints for the studio system production process. These story-centered documents were essential to the system’s rational approach to making an expensive, inherently risky product like the feature film. Beyond the final shooting script, draft scripts, outlines, and treatments afford glimpses of the writing and filmmaking process. Script files put words to pictures, offering clues to how producers, directors, writers, and others were thinking about a film as it was being conceived and prepared for production. Music departments largely worked without descriptive, story-based documents. Archival evidence from the music departments comes in two types: a variety of lists (such as rundowns of musical numbers made for budgeting purposes, recording session schedules, and lists of musical cues and songs used) and musical scores (mostly arrangers’ full scores and conductors’ short scores). Music department matters are taken up in the next chapter. This chapter stays close to the writers, showing how the musical content of Astaire’s routines was understood by the creative figures charged with describing films in words before the cameras chapter 4 116 | Astaire at the Studios started rolling. Along the way, the word choices of several of Astaire’s lyricists come into play as well. Astaire’s postwar screenwriters were a relatively young bunch: most had grown up watching Astaire in his prewar films. For several, Astaire defined what Hollywood and the musical meant, and they approached writing for him with a combined sense of thrill and humility. Leonard Gershe reflected on the experience of writing Funny Face: “Never once did he ask me to define the character, or what the motivation was. I knew how to write a line for Fred Astaire—economical, simple, easy. . . . It was fun to write for that image that you’d grown up seeing, and I knew how he should talk. He dictated to me, in other words.”1 The first generation of Astaire screenwriters didn’t have the advantage of this history. The writers working for Berman at RKO in the 1930s had to invent backgrounds and scenarios into which Astaire’s developing persona would fit. The Duchin version of Swing Time suggests they didn’t always get it right. Astaire’s identification with music and dance of a particular kind shows up regularly in the RKO script files, and there is plenty of evidence that Astaire himself had a role in revising dialogue that got too close to matters that were important to him. At issue in most of these cases are words about music: specifically, the words hot, swing, and jazz. Hot, swing, and jazz were 1930s code words for improvised, highly syncopated music and music making. All carried connotations of black music making, and all turn up regularly in the script materials for Astaire’s films in the 1930s and early 1940s, in both dialogue and descriptive text. The word blues, with a long history in the popular music lexicon, also appears from time to time. When invoked by screenwriters , these key words point toward musical contrasts that might not be heard so easily today. Below is a digest of uses of hot, jazz, and blues in RKO scripts written between 1933 and 1937. Flying Down to Rio: Early descriptions of the dance portion of “The Carioca” show how an American blues sound was to be used as both contrast and complement to the exotic Turuna band. Three Clippers at near-by tables leap to the band-stand[,] seize cornets, and blow “blue” notes, which makes Fred change to a jazz step and then go back into the Carioka [sic]. He waves the crowd back into action. fred: Come on—everybody Carioka [sic]! The music is so arranged that as the Turunas stop, the boys play a hot break on their instruments and the ensemble resume[s].2 Tell them to let it swing | 117 Follow the Fleet: Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor’s final shooting script uses the word hot in descriptive passages from start to finish. Astaire’s star entrance in the...