I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History

3. Los Angeles and Monogram

3 Los Angeles and Monogram I t was the summer of 1943 when I first arrived in Los Angeles. Harold had suggested I call a friend of his, Rodney Pantages, who operated the Pantages Theater in Hollywood and might be able to help me get settled. The Pantages was an affiliate of RKO’s. I called Rodney, who was very hospitable, and at his invitation I spent my first night in Los Angeles at his lovely home in the Los Feliz area of the city. He suggested that I stay at the Hollywood Athletic Club until I could find more permanent housing, and he made the arrangements for me. On the following day I moved in. I couldn’t afford to stay there long, but it was a good halfway house for me. Already germinating in my mind was the idea that having now arrived in Los Angeles, I could perhaps, after peace came again to our country, find a position in the movie industry. Shortly after I started work at Lockheed, I met a design engineer there who told me that he had a furnished duplex apartment in the Wilshire district that he was sharing with two other young men. He asked if I would like to move in with them and pay one quarter of the rent. I accepted, and the four of us roomed in this two-bedroom apartment. It had twin beds in each of the bedrooms and was very inexpensive. I couldn’t afford a car, but Lockheed ran its own buses, which took me to work every morning and also brought me home, or at least within a few blocks of home, every night. I contacted a friend of mine, a young man whom I’d known at Madison , who was an aeronautical engineer working for North American 22 Aircraft in Inglewood. This classmate was married and had a young daughter. We became good friends again and spent a great deal of our leisure time together. These were busy times, and although I was working very hard, six days a week, I thought I could make available to other companies some of the methods and practices that we had developed at Lockheed. I began to write articles, which had to be cleared for publication by Lockheed, for various industrial magazines. I wrote a number of them for Factory, one of which, called “Drafting Controls,” was quite detailed . It was an intricate system that we had devised and put in place at Lockheed. I collaborated on that article with another engineer, and we were pleased later on when we learned that other companies had picked it up and were using it. In all, I wrote a half dozen pieces that were published in various magazines during that period. I took a great deal of pride in the contribution they may have made to help the war effort. Most of the people I worked with, at all levels, were serious about trying to do their best, as quickly and as efficiently as they could, in order to keep airplanes coming out of the hangar doors. I continued to work at Lockheed until the war ended dramatically with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At that point, I decided I could now pursue the real ambition of my life, and I started to look around for a position in the movie business. My brother Harold had remained in New York during the war, working as chief film buyer for the RKO theaters. Later on he became general manager of the entire circuit. He spoke to a friend of his, Leon Goldberg , the general manager of the RKO Studio in Hollywood, on my behalf . Leon had also graduated from the Harvard Business School. He was very friendly, but no job offer was forthcoming. Harold next suggested I see a man named Steve Broidy, then the general manager of Monogram Pictures Corporation. Monogram was a movie company that produced so-called B pictures , or second features, during the era when most theaters played double features. I would much rather have worked at RKO if I could have found a position there, but I didn’t. Monogram owned a little studio , located on Sunset Drive, near Sunset Boulevard and Virgil Avenue, which had three small soundstages and a not-very-convincing New York Street. It was able to shoot only one film at a time, since generally all Los Angeles and Monogram 23 / [3...