Hawks on Hawks

11. MGM and Viva Villa!

73 11 MGM and VivaVilla! Metro was the best studio in the world for getting a script and handing it to a director with it all cast and the sets all built—they had the best set designers, and they had good writers—but I don’t think that an independent worked very well over there. I didn’t make much at Metro. I made the one with Joan Crawford, I told you, the Faulkner story which was messed up. And I made Viva Villa!, which was messed up [Hawks was fired during the shooting and replaced by Jack Conway], so I was glad to get out of that goddam place. You also directed part of The Prizefighter and the Lady without credit for MGM in 1933. Why was that? The Prizefighter and the Lady was a story that I worked on. It was written for Gable and Harlow. Gable was the dominant one, and Harlow was the empty-headed blonde. They cast it with Max Baer and Myrna Loy—complete opposites. In other words, Max Baer was the stooge, and Loy was the lady, the prizefighter and the lady. I said, “I don’t want to make the picture.” I wouldn’t make it with them. And they said, “Will you help out, do a couple of weeks’ work, give Baer a start, teach him a little about acting? Then Woody Van Dyke will take over.” I said sure. [John Lee Mahin, who wrote the script, disputed this version, contending that Hawks was fired after two days of shooting because he worked too slowly. Hawks was fired from Viva Villa! after completing location work in Mexico; Mahin said Hawks and studio chief Louis B. Mayer came to blows over Hawks’s shooting pace. Hawks claimed the fight was over Mayer’s demand that he fire actor Lee Tracy. See chapter 12.] What was it like working with Thalberg? Jack Warner was a showman. Harry Cohn was a showman. They let you alone. But Thalberg would let you make a picture and then would get you in very nicely and say, “Look, we’ve got the sets, we’ve got all the Hawks on Hawks 74 people, everybody’s under contract. Now, I think you could do a little bit better with this.” And he’d make about ten days’ work over again and make a whole different picture out of it. He didn’t do that with any of mine. We were good friends. We used to talk things over before we made it. Tell me about your experiences on Viva Villa! When we went down to Mexico to make Viva Villa!, they had some sort of gangsters down there, and I was taken out by these gangsters to meet the man who shot Villa. We were going on horses, it was the only way we could get up there. They all carried guns, so I carried a gun. I used to be a damn good shot with a revolver. I took the gun out and shot at a tin can and made it roll along the ground. Shot again and made it keep on going, put the gun back. That was all luck, you know. Oh, golly, they looked at me—they weren’t going to start anything if I could shoot that way. One guy down there was going to show me how to kill somebody. I’d made Scarface and, you know, they thought—he got ahold of a poor little taxi driver and was gonna shoot him. I stopped him. Then all his A train holdup in Viva Villa! “It was nutty,” said Hawks of the Mexican location. MGM and Viva Villa! 75 bodyguard pointed guns at me. I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. When I met him he had a pink leather suit on. I’d much rather he’d be wearing a leather suit when he killed a man than this awful blue suit.” “Oh, OK, OK,” he said, and he came running back and said that the pink suit had gone to the laundry, but when it came back again he would kill a man while wearing it. No kidding. Oh, hell! We had the soldiers and the peons, we would search them all two or three times, and they’d whittle wooden bullets, which, if you put a gun close enough to somebody, would go into his...