Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Chapter 8. Golden Boy

91 Chapter 8 Golden Boy On the night of December 23, 1935, director King Vidor summoned a handful of prominent colleagues to his Beverly Hills home to discuss their concerns.Probably the rumor of a pay cut for all studio employees was as worrisome as the recent edict at Paramount ordering its directors to accept any picture offered them or lose their contracts. By January 16, Mamoulian had joined some forty other directors at the Hollywood Athletic Club to form the Screen Directors Guild. Vidor was elected president and Mamoulian was named to the board of directors . The founders followed the steps of the Screen Actors Guild and the Screen Writers Guild at a time when rising trade unionism in all fields was met by intense opposition from industrialists and conservatives. Hollywood would be no different. “It was tough to get important directors in because they had a lot to lose, big salaries to lose,” Mamoulian said, adding that the Directors Guild’s mission was “to lift the position of the average director,” who earned relatively little.1 Mamoulian recalled years later that the organizers “kept discussing the sad fact that while everybody had a union or a guild, the directors didn’t have any. We thought that was a very sad situation,” he said. Characteristically, he also saw the Directors Guild as a way of leveraging artistic autonomy from the studio heads. “The idea that moved us was not just to get more salary for the director and to get directors more authority. The ultimate purpose was better films. We were thinking about the quality of films.” The studio moguls reacted by threatening to fire directors who joined the Directors Guild, but membership grew rapidly as the founders met prospects over dinner and convinced them to join.2 MAMOULIAN 92 At the guild’s second meeting, at the Hollywood Athletic Club on January 22, only the politically conservative Cecil B. DeMille attacked the project “when he cautioned those present not to rush in and sign application blanks for membership until they had carefully studied the purposes and benefits.”3 He objected to any collaboration with the Screen Actors Guild, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. According to Laurence Beilenson, attorney for the actors and directors guilds, DeMille “thought this was practically Bolshevism to have a union among directors. And he made an impassioned speech at the meeting denouncing unionism in general.”4 It would not be the last time DeMille and Mamoulian were on opposite sides in the politically divisive field of Hollywood union politics. The studio heads agreed with DeMille’s assessment and fought to ignore the claims by the guilds to negotiate on behalf of writers, actors, and directors. Mamoulian, along with Howard Hawks and Edward Sutherland, were members of the guild’s negotiating committee.5 Finally, on March 13, 1939, the National Labor Relations Board recognized the guild as a legitimate union for directors and assistant directors, two years after the guild thwarted an attempt by studio bosses and mobsters to impose a puppet union on the directors. The recognition of the Directors Guild was a step, if almost imperceptible at the time, toward the dissolution of the studio system that had governed Hollywood like a factory town. The unending struggle between commerce and art was a theme in Mamoulian’s first picture after returning to Hollywood from Broadway. The Gay Desperado (1936) began with an idea whose potential for satire appealed to Mamoulian. Producer Jesse Lasky, working in a business partnership with silent star Mary Pickford, had Italian opera singer Nino Martini under contract and planned to star the tenor in a comedy for United Artists, a prestigious and financially successful distribution company for independent-minded producers. At one time or another David O. Selznick, Alexander Korda, Howard Hughes, and Mamoulian’s mentor Walter Wanger produced pictures for UA. Searching for a suitable project for Martini, who was having more success at the Met than in Hollywood, Lasky showed Mamoulian a screenplay based on Gounod’s Faust. “It intrigued me but the script was all wrong,” the director recalled. “Jesse was desperate: Martini’s first film had flopped, and he couldn’t think of another vehicle. Then while we were talking, a man Golden Boy 93 called [Leo] Berinski arrived with the idea for a Mexican film.” The concept involved Chicano banditos, inspired by Hollywood gangster movies to modernize...