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Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master - Hardcover

Buch 18 von 86: Screen Classics

Sragow, Michael

 
9780375407482: Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375407480 ISBN 13: 9780375407482
Verlag: Pantheon, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The full-length, definitive biography of the legendary director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

Victor Fleming was the most sought-after director in Hollywood’s golden age, renowned for his ability to make films across an astounding range of genres–westerns, earthy sexual dramas, family entertainment, screwball comedies, buddy pictures, romances, and adventures. Fleming is remembered for the two most iconic movies of the period, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but the more than forty films he directed also included classics like Red Dust, Test Pilot, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Captains Courageous. Paradoxically, his talent for knowing how to make the necessary film at the right time, rather than remaking the same movie in different guises, has resulted in Victor Fleming’s relative obscurity in our time.

Michael Sragow restores the director to the pantheon of our greatest filmmakers and fills a gaping hole in Hollywood history with this vibrant portrait of a man at the center of the most exciting era in American filmmaking. The actors Fleming directed wanted to be him (Fleming created enduring screen personas for Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper), and his actresses wanted to be with him (Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, and Norma Shearer were among his many lovers).

Victor Fleming not only places the director back in the spotlight, but also gives us the story of a man whose extraordinary personal style was as thrilling, varied, and passionate as the stories he brought to the screen.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Sragow is the movie critic for The Baltimore Sun, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker. He has also written for Salon, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, among many publications. He edited the Library of America’s two volumes of James Agee’s work, as well as Produced and Abandoned: The National Society of Film Critics Write on the Best Films You’ve Never Seen. He lives with his wife, Glenda Hobbs, in Baltimore.

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Introduction

The Real Rhett Butler

A composite between an internal combustion engine hitting on all twelve and a bear cub”—that’s how a screenwriter once described the movie director Victor Fleming. An MGM in-house interviewer discerned that he had “the Lincoln type of melancholia—a brooding which enables those who possess it to feel more, understand more.” Known for his Svengali-like power and occasional brute force with actors and other collaborators, Fleming was also a generous, down-toearth family man, even in a sometimes-unfathomable marriage. He was a stand-up guy to male and female friends alike—including ex-lovers. He was a man’s man who loved going on safari but could also enjoy dressing as Jack to a female screenwriter’s Jill for a Marion Davies costume party. After he married Lucile Rosson and fathered two daughters, he reserved most of his social life for the Sunday-morning motorcycle gang known as the Moraga Spit and Polish Club. His ambition in the early days of automobiles to become a racetrack champ in the audacious, button-popping Barney Oldfield mold grew into a legend that he’d really been a professional race-car driver. (Well, he had, but just for one race.) He was one of Hollywood’s premier amateur aviators. Studio bosses trusted him to deliver the goods; many stars and writers loved him.

Victor and Lu Fleming’s younger daughter, Sally, encouraged me to write this book after she read an appreciation of her father that I’d written for The New York Times on the occasion of The Wizard of Oz’s sixtieth anniversary in 1999. She asked what led me to take on Fleming as a subject. For decades I’d known and loved the half-dozen great movies he’d directed before salvaging The Wizard of Oz for MGM and Gone With the Wind for the producer David O. Selznick in 1939— movies like The Virginian (1929) and Red Dust (1932) and Bombshell (1933). But as I told Sally, I’d only recently seen the first film he made after that historic year—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)—and I’d been astonished by its candid sexuality and by how much better it was than its reputation. Sally, who sprinkles frank convictions with spontaneous wit, laughed and said, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—that’s the film that’s most like Daddy.” It didn’t take long to find out that Fleming was a man of more than two parts.

In 1939, the MGM publicist Teet Carle, trying to sell Fleming as a subject for feature stories, noted how remarkable it was, even in what we now consider the golden age of Hollywood, for a director to be “a man like Fleming who has really lived through experiences.” Moviemakers like Fleming, who came of age in the silent era, forged their characters beyond camera range. Andrew Solt, the co-writer of Fleming’s disastrous final picture, Joan of Arc (1948), told his nephew Andrew Solt, the documentary maker (Imagine), “Victor Fleming’s story is the perfect Hollywood story, from A to Z; it represents the picture business of his time better than anyone else’s.” What the elder Solt meant, of course, was that Fleming’s story wasn’t merely about the picture business—it was about what men like Fleming brought into the picture business.

Fleming was born on February 23, 1889, in the orange groves of Southern California, and became an auto mechanic, taxi driver, and chauffeur at a time when cars were luxury items and their operators elite specialists. During World War I, he served as an instructor and creator of military training films as well as a Signal Corps cameraman, and after it, Woodrow Wilson’s personal cameraman on his triumphant tour of European capitals before the beginning of the Versailles peace conference. Fleming became a friend to explorers, naturalists, race-car drivers, aviators, inventors, and hunters. His life and work are the stuff not just of Hollywood lore but also of American history. It may seem puzzling that he hasn’t inspired a full-length biography until now. But he left no paper trail of letters or diaries, and he died on January 6, 1949, before directors had become national celebrities and objects of idolatry.

Long before sound came into the movies, Fleming had mastered his trade, directing Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in two ace contemporary comedies, When the Clouds Roll By (1919) and The Mollycoddle (1920). Fleming was part of the team that perfected Fairbanks’s persona as the cheerful American man of action, deriving mental and physical health from blood, sweat, and laughs in the open air. The director and the international phenomenon were friends from Fleming’s early days as a cameraman and Fairbanks’s as a star. They became merry pranksters on a global scale, whether hanging by their fingers from hurtling railroad cars or turning a round-the-world tour into one of the first full-scale mockumentaries (Around the World in Eighty Minutes). Fleming forever credited Fairbanks with establishing action as the essence of motion pictures. Fairbanks also set his pal an example of the art of selfcreation. The son of a New York attorney who abandoned Douglas’s family in Denver when the boy was five, Fairbanks turned himself into a model of dash and vim. Fleming was born in a tent; his father died in an orange orchard when he was four. But he metamorphosed from a Southern California country boy into a Hollywood powerhouse known for mysterious poetic talent, a courtly yet emotionally and sexually charged way with women, and a macho sagacity that spurred the respect and fellowship of men.

Many of Fleming’s silent pictures boast a prickly, evergreen freshness that emanates from their spirit of discovery. He designed his Fairbanks
films as if they were pop-up toys, playing with special effects, animation, and the audience’s knowledge of Fairbanks as a movie star. (Later, he brought some of that modernism into Bombshell and parts of The Wizard of Oz.) He became a household name in Hollywood. When the author of What Makes Sammy Run? and screenwriter of On the Waterfront, Budd Schulberg, and his boyhood pal Maurice Rapf played at being studio executives like their fathers (B. P. Schulberg and Harry Rapf), Maurice would name King Vidor his prize director, and Budd would counter with Vic Fleming.

That other underrated director, Henry Hathaway (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer), who trained with Fleming, once declared, without reservation, “Clark Gable on the screen is Fleming . . . He dressed like him, talked like him, stood like him, his attitude was the same toward women. He was funny.” But Hathaway hit closer to the truth when he said, “Every man that ever worked for him patterned himself after him. Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, all of them. He had a strong personality, not to the point of imposing himself on anyone, but just forceful and masculine.”

Among the stars of the major studios’ heyday, Gable was the charismatic cock of the walk; Gary Cooper, the natural aristocrat; Tracy, the grudgingly articulate Everyman. Fleming shaped each man’s legacy. Seven years before Gone With the Wind, Gable broke through as the hero of Fleming’s Red Dust (1932); its screenwriter, John Lee Mahin, Fleming’s close friend and collaborator, evoked the director in the character’s brusque authority, technical savvy, rough-edged humor, and lodestone sexuality. Gable was a projection of the Fleming who, on meeting the Olympic swimmer Eleanor Saville in 1932 at the Ambassador Hotel, genially snapped, “Nice legs, sister!” (And that’s all he said.)

A few years before Fleming partnered with Gable, he turned Gary Cooper into the paradigm of a chivalrous cowboy in The Virginian. Cooper became...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375407480
ISBN 13 
9780375407482
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
656
Kontakt zum Hersteller
PANTHEON
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/

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