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27 1 Discovering a Vocation and a Style The Shakedown (1929), The Love Trap (1929), Hell’s Heroes (1930), A House Divided (1931) William Wyler grew up with the movies. He came to america from Mulhouse (Mulhausen), alsace-Lorraine, in 1920 at the invitation of his mother ’s first cousin, Carl Laemmle, who was the founder and head of Universal Studios. Laemmle’s young cousin would soon eclipse his fame in the industry that would come to dominate american culture. Laemmle himself had arrived in his adopted country in 1884, joining his older brother in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he became a branch manager for a successful midwestern clothier. When he was thirty-nine, Laemmle moved to Chicago, seeking to become his own boss. a chance stroll past a movie theater on State Street aroused his curiosity, and he paid the ten cents admission to watch the film being shown there. Three weeks later, he owned his own nickelodeon. That was in 1906. Within a decade, Laemmle would have a chain of movie theaters throughout the Midwest. by 1910, he had become a film producer and had founded independent Moving Pictures, which later became Universal Pictures. Laemmle also introduced the star system to Hollywood when he lured Mary Pickford away from the biograph Company by offering her more money and prominent billing. Prior to that innovation, actors’ names were not revealed to the moviegoing public. Laemmle vacationed in europe every summer, and when Wyler’s mother , Melanie, learned that her famous cousin would be traveling through Switzerland, she wrote to Carl about her son. He responded by inviting them to meet him at a hotel in Zurich. Laemmle offered the young man a job at Universal’s New York office that paid $25 a week, from which $5 would be deducted until the cost of the transatlantic trip on the Aquitania had been reimbursed. Known for bringing ambitious young men to america, 28 William Wyler Laemmle already had more than a dozen relatives on his payroll. indeed, his penchant for nepotism was legendary, even prompting an Ogden Nash couplet: “Uncle Carl Laemmle / has a large faemmle.” Many years later, however, critic Charles affron would note, “Wyler’s career is an excellent argument for nepotism.”1 William Wyler turned out to be an ambitious kid. Within a year, he asked to be transferred to California, and by 1922, just two years after arriving in america, he was working, in his words, as a “gofer” on The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney (some sources list him as an assistant director). by 1925, shortly after his twenty-third birthday, he was directing his first two-reel western, making him the youngest director on the Universal lot. That first “mustang” two-reeler (twenty-four minutes long) was Crook Buster. Over the next two years, he directed twenty-one mustang films and also worked on MGM’s Ben-Hur (1925). On that film, he was one of sixty assistant directors assigned to control the chariot race scene, for which the studio had hired thousands of extras and built a Circus Maximus. in 1926, Wyler graduated to his first five-reeler, Lazy Lightning, a “blue streak” western. He would direct five more through 1927. The first film to offer intimations of what would become Wyler’s distinctive mise-en-scène was The Shakedown (1929), which was released in both silent and sound versions and cost around $50,000 to make. Wyler’s brother robert discovered the story. He had spent the previous two years at Universal learning the business and preparing to become a producer, and he also had a hand in writing the script, along with Charles a. Logue and Clarence Marks. robert would be associated with a number of his brother’s films in the future, but his contributions to The Shakedown were uncredited. The story concerns a crooked boxer, Dave Hall (James Murray), who is involved in a shakedown ring that travels from town to town, where the bosses arrange fixed fights and encourage the locals to bet on the outcome. after establishing his identity in one town and provoking a fight with battling rolf, a professional fighter, Dave, who has become the local favorite, loses the fight, and the townspeople who have bet on him lose their money. Dave then moves on to establish himself in another town and set up another shakedown. Most of the film takes place in boonton, where Dave works [18.217.144.32] Project MUSE...

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