Stroheim

14. Walking down Broadway

14«[fllkinll down :Broflitwflg ,8trohtim's mdl-publicized difficoltitS with The Wedding March and Queen Kelly and the revocation of his agreement with Universal for a sound version of Blind Husbands had damaged his reputation as a director almost irrevocably. In the Hollywood film industry, a director is considered only as good as his last film, and Stroheim was rapidly fading. Although hardly forgotten, he was remembered as "difficult," talented but profligate. Furthermore, with the coming of sound, numerous silent film directors were dropped, and a revolution in style, technique, and subject matter took place. The Fox Studio-which in 1930 had been wrested away from William Fox, its founder-was in corporate difficulties. In 1931, with a gross of almost $39 million, the hitherto profitable company lost $5.5 million. The year 1932 would be even worse, with a gross of about $30 million and an astounding loss of almost $17 million. In charge of production at the foundering studio was Winfield Sheehan, another Irishman, who respected Stroheim's talents and was convinced by the persuasive Austrian that he could once again direct a marketable and profitable film. In the summer of1931, Sheehan agreed to let Stroheim develop a property called Walking down Broadway. Wary ofthe difficult artist, Sheehan had the legal staffdraw up a contract on 315 316 STROHEIM September 2, 1931, which stated that Stroheim was to limit himself to eighty-five hundred feet (about ninety-five minutes), that he would draw one thousand dollars per week but not in excess of seventeen weeks, and that he would be paid thirty thousand dollars upon the film's completion. Either party could terminate the contract. Stroheim was to be assigned a business manager, and the director could not spend any money without permission. In addition, Stroheim was not to appear in the film. Sheehan, in short, tied Stroheim's expensive hands rather tightly. Walking down Broadway was based on an unproduced play by Dawn Powell, a New York novelist who often examined the problems of small-town Americans who leave their provincial precincts for the big city, as Powell had left her own unhappy Ohio past. On the surface, the project might seem uncongenial to a man who had rendered the Alps, Paris, Monte Carlo, andVienna, but life in NewYork City in a lowermiddle -class milieu was close to Stroheim's own experience and not that different from the world of Greed. Furthermore, Walking down Broadway dealt with a subject that he had covered before: innocents abroad, not in this case Americans in Europe but small-town people thrown into the cauldron of the city. He was keenly interested in taking average Americans and giving them the neuroses that would enrich their characters on the screen. Although well regarded in her time, Dawn Powell (1897-1965) was never a popular novelist--someone once remarked that all her books were first editions-but a major article by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books (November 5, 1987) helped bring her renewed recognition. By 1989, five of her novels had been reissued; in 1994, a volume containing two of her novels and several short stories appeared; and in late 1998, a biography of her was published. Powell once wrote: "My novels are based on the fantastic designs made by real human beings earnestly laboring to maladjust themselves to fate. My characters are not slaves to an author's propaganda. I give them their heads. They furnish their own nooses."l How remarkably close this is to Frank Norris! A clearheaded observer ofhumankind, Powell had no agenda. She was not of the "left" (so popular and fashionable in the thirties), nor can she be adopted by the feminists as a crusader, for both her men and her women have flaws. The editor of a recent collection of her Walking down Broadway 317 writings, Tim Page, describes her as "a worldly, determinedly clearsighted , deeply skeptical romantic-but a romantic all the same. Love and joy, however transitory they may prove, both exist (Powell had seen them plain) and are well worth fighting for, at virtually any cost this side ofself-delusion."2 Obviously, Powell and Stroheim were kindred spirits. They both saw reality, admitted that love-even if transitory -could exist within it, and had no agenda but to tell the truth. Fox paid $7,500 for the play, and Powell noted in her diary on September 11...