This is the second part of a series of articles. Read the first part.
The week before rehearsals started on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie “The Red Badge of Courage,” Gottfried Reinhardt, its producer, and John Huston, its director and screenwriter, found it a little hard to believe that they actually had a starting date (August 25, 1950) and a work schedule (nine rehearsal days and thirty-four shooting days). For several months, the idea of producing the picture had been strongly opposed by Louis B. Mayer, vice-president in charge of the studio, and by most of the other studio executives. Then, for reasons neither Huston nor Reinhardt completely understood, Mayer gave them his reluctant blessing. They knew that Dore Schary, vice-president in charge of production, had told Mayer that “The Red Badge of Courage” was a picture M-G-M ought to make, and they suspected that Nicholas M. Schenck, the president of Loew’s, Inc., the company that produces and distributes M-G-M pictures, had backed up Schary, but they couldn’t be sure. Then Schary had said to them, “Boys, we’ll make this picture! Stop worrying. Just go ahead and make the picture.” Mayer had said to them, “I wouldn’t make this picture. You want to make this picture? Dore wants to make this picture? All right, make this picture.” Now, as the rehearsals approached, Reinhardt kept repeating to Huston that they would make a great picture;” the picture would be profitable to Loew’s, Inc., and at the same time it would duplicate the quality of the Stephen Crane novel and be great artistically. Huston, in turn, kept repeating that the picture had “a wonderful cast, with wonderful faces,” and that he had interesting plans for using those faces, and exciting plans for himself, because this would be the first time he would direct a picture from horseback, since most of the picture was to be shot on his own ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Whenever Huston or Reinhardt received an interoffice communication from one of the thirty-two departments involved in the production of their picture, he was able to reassure himself of the reality of the project by noting that on the memo the “Subject” was described, convincingly, as “Production No. 1512” (the fifteen-hundred-and-twelfth picture to be produced by M-G-M) and that copies were going to all the key executives, including Schenck himself, whose headquarters are in New York. If a memo went to Schenck, it was real. A couple of times, when Huston was looking over a memo, he said to Reinhardt, “You know, we’re really going to make the picture.”
On the eve of the first rehearsals, I dropped in on Reinhardt and Huston at Reinhardt’s house, where they were working on the script. Reinhardt lived in Bel Air, on a winding, narrow road high in the hills overlooking Beverly Hills. The house was in a hollow, and it resembled the English mansion in the movie version of “Wuthering Heights”—gabled, dark, and forbidding. I found the two men in a study that had deep leather armchairs, two love seats, and a green-tiled fireplace, in which stood a couple of tropical plants. Beyond a wide archway was a gloomy, cavernous room where the outline of a grand piano was visible. Reinhardt, holding a copy of the script, was pacing back and forth in front of an armchair in which Huston, comfortably dressed in a pink-checked cotton shirt, gray flannel slacks, and loafers, lay sprawled, his long legs stretched out and a copy of the script on his lap. Reinhardt’s collar was unbuttoned and his necktie hung loosely around his shoulders. A long strand of hair had fallen over his right eye, and the stub of a cigar was in his mouth. He explained to me that they were devising dialogue for a scene in which the Youth—the hero of the film, to be played by Audie Murphy—and his comrades, marching to their first battle, are taunted by battle-scarred veterans.
“You got anything?” Reinhardt asked Huston, stepping over his legs. Albert Band, Huston’s assistant, entered the room and started pacing behind Reinhardt. Huston was rhythmically banging his chin against his chest. Then, after drawing little sketches of Reinhardt in the margin of his script, he scribbled some words. “Write this down, Albert,” he said. “ ‘Hang your clothes on a hickory limb, and don’t go near the battle!’ ”
“Good,” Band said, writing it down. “Very good.”
“Now!” Reinhardt said, standing still for a moment. “We need words for Scene 110. Or you can ad-lib on the set.”
Huston turned the pages of the script, a mimeographed booklet stamped on the cover with the words “Production No. 1512,” to the scene:
MEDIUM SHOT—BACK OF THE LINE OF FIRING MEN
Huston said, “I think this would be good if it’s not said. Just have this little bit of action.”
“You have to say something,” Reinhardt said.
“We’ll do it on the set,” said Huston. “I want to see how it looks first.”
Reinhardt rotated the cigar stub in his mouth. “Albert, go tell the cook we’ll eat in half an hour,” he said, and Band left the room.
Huston shifted to a love seat and lay back, his hands clasped behind his head. He seemed lost in some remote thought. Suddenly he jerked his head in a conspiratorial way at Reinhardt and, taking a piece of paper from his pocket, said he wanted to read something aloud. On April 23, 1863, he said, his great-grandfather, Colonel William P. Richardson, received a silver-sheathed sword from the noncommissioned officers and privates of the 25th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and he was going to put the sword in the movie; it would be worn by the actor playing the part of the Youth’s general. “We ought to put this kind of talk in the picture, too,” he said. “Listen. This is from the speech my great-grandfather’s superior officer made when he presented it to him: ‘Wealth, influence, or favoritism might procure such a gift as this, but the esteem and confidence of brave men cannot be bought.’ Jesus, Gottfried, people don’t talk like that any more!”
Reinhardt nodded, then glanced impatiently at his script.
“My mother had that speech copied,” Huston said. “He was her grandfather. I’ve got a Brady of him.”
“Your mother would have been pleased to know that you’re making ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ ” Reinhardt said. He looked rather taken with his own adroitness in bringing his director back to the task of the hour.
“Nothing I ever did pleased my mother,” Huston said.
Band came back, and Reinhardt said that they would have to work on the script every night after rehearsals. Huston told him they were farther ahead than he seemed to think.
“We accomplished a lot today,” Band said.
“We really must finish,” Reinhardt said, with restrained desperation.
“Don’t worry about it, amigo,” said Huston.
“Remember that night in this room when we both said we wanted to make the picture?” Reinhardt said. “I said to you, ‘What about making “The Red Badge of Courage”?’ And you said, ‘That’s my dream.’ And we shook hands.” Reinhardt looked very serious. “L. B. begged me not to do this picture,” he said. “He was like a father to me.”
Mrs. Reinhardt came in, wearing black jersey ballet tights and shirt, and ballet slippers. She had a black apron tied over the tights, and the apron strings floated behind her like a tail. She was accompanied by Mocha, her black French poodle. Band started to sit down in an armchair, but Mocha beat him to it.
“Today, Mocha ate four bananas,” Mrs. Reinhardt said.
Reinhardt did not look at her. He said to Huston, “L. B. called me into his office and talked for hours about the kind of pictures that make money. He said he was telling me for my own good. I thought he would weep.”
“L. B. is weeping?” Mrs. Reinhardt said.
“He didn’t want us to make the picture, honey,” Huston said.
Mrs. Reinhardt said, “Gottfried, should I let Mocha eat strawberries?”
Reinhardt said, “L. B. told Dore if he thought we should make the picture, to go ahead and make it.”
“Hang yourselves, boys, in other words,” Huston said cheerfully.
Reinhardt looked at him shyly and laughed. “Now L. B. puts Dore on the spot with this picture,” he said. “He has his arm around Dore. And he says he loves Dore.” He laughed, and then he looked serious. “Frankly, I’m worried,” he said. “The book is about the thoughts of the Youth. Will we show what really goes on inside the boy?”
“Audie Murphy will show it, Gottfried,” Huston said.
“You wanted Audie,” said Reinhardt.
“Yes,” Huston said in a patient tone.
“Montgomery Clift—” Reinhardt began.
“Don’t worry, Gottfried,” Huston said.
“This must be a great picture,” Reinhardt said.
“Don’t worry, Gottfried,” Huston said.
Around the same time, Huston’s agent, a man named Paul Kohner, submitted the script to a local psychologist for reassurance that the theme of “The Red Badge of Courage”—that of a boy (the Youth) who runs away from his first battle and then, when he returns to his comrades, performs heroic acts in his next battle—was valid. The psychologist turned in a typewritten report stating that the script told the story of a soldier who surmounts his fear complex and becomes a hero, in accordance with the established theory that a courageous action can be a direct reaction to cowardice. “Of course, it is presupposed dramaturgically that the psychosis of fear is taken as a fact,” he wrote. “And so automatically the question arises as to whether such a conception can be generalized. . . . Since the motives of his heroism are of purely psychopathic origin it should be stated that the filmic description of the psychological evolution fails to convince at the important moments. This is a cardinal fault in regard to the conception of the matter.” He then suggested several additional scenes that would explain the Youth’s change from cowardice to heroism in battle. “These differentiated psychological Zwischentöne have to be plastically formed,” he wrote, and added that if his suggestions were followed, “the picture could be the outstanding one of the year.”
Huston and Reinhardt read the analysis, exchanged bleak looks, and had it filed.
The morning of the day rehearsals were to start, on Huston’s ranch, Huston, a red-and-green-checked cap on his head, a brown cigarette in his mouth, and his arms folded on the top bar of a white rail fence separating a small ranchhouse from his stables, watched his fifteen-year-old adopted son, Pablo, saddle a big black horse. It was the horse from whose back Huston intended to direct the picture. The horse moved impatiently under the saddle.
“All right, baby,” Huston said soothingly.
“Take it easy, baby,” said Pablo. “Dad, you want me to walk him a little bit?”
“Just hold him there, Pablo,” said Huston, and exhaled a stream of cigarette smoke with an expression of happy fulfillment. He mounted the horse, and with a quick, dramatic gesture, he pulled his cap down farther over his forehead, and then, taking the reins in both hands, he sat facing the dry, rutty dirt road leading away from the stables. The big horse stood motionless. Huston sat in silence, staring grimly ahead for a moment. “Well now, Pablo,” he said, with intense emphasis on each syllable. “Keep an eye on everything back here, amigo.” Then he started the horse down the road (MEDIUM SHOT) at an easy, rocking walk, stirring up a cloud of dust in his wake.
Huston stopped his horse beside a large oak tree next to a dry, barren, yellow field. Studio limousines and a large studio bus were parked in the field. A pyramid of rifles was stacked near the bus. Under the oak tree sat Harold Rosson, the cameraman, with Reggie Callow, an assistant director; Lee Katz, the unit manager; Andrew Marton, the “leapfrog” director, whose job was to arrange matters so there would be no time lost between scenes; Colonel Paul Davison, the technical adviser; and Albert Band.
Callow stepped forward and gave a brisk salute. “The troops are in good shape, Mr. Huston, sir,” he said. “Been drilling them for an hour.”
“Very good, amigo,” Huston said.
“Rough day,” Katz said. “Hot, hot.”
A dozen of the studio’s stock actors, in blue uniforms and kepis, lounged about on the grass. Not far from them was another group, consisting of a script clerk, a still photographer, a few assistant and second assistant directors, a few assistant and second assistant cameramen, grips (the movie equivalent of stagehands), and property men. The leading members of the cast, all in blue uniforms, sat in a circle on the ground playing poker: Audie Murphy, the Youth; Bill Mauldin, the character known as the Loud Soldier; John Dierkes, the Tall Soldier; Royal Dano, the Tattered Man; and Douglas Dick, the Lieutenant.
“All right, lads,” Huston said. He dismounted, tied his horse’s reins to a branch of the tree, and spent the next hour conferring with Rosson on camera problems. The stock players lolled about, blank-faced and resigned. They were being paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars a week, and audiences wouldn’t notice them enough to remember their faces. Some were on the way up; that is, they were being given work more and more regularly. Others were on the way down. All of them had the manner of men who expected no major surprises. The leading actors made a great show of casualness and boredom, and then became genuinely bored, genuinely casual, and gave up the poker game. Bill Mauldin, his kepi pushed back and a cigarette holder stuck jauntily in his mouth, held the others’ attention for a while with a series of jokes.
“Hell, this is ditch-diggin’ work,” Mauldin remarked at one point. “I’m just here raisin’ scratch, so’s I can go back home and work on my play.” He started to roll a cigarette.
Dano took a pack from his pocket and held it out.
“Hell,” Mauldin said, “I was rollin’ my own when you was in three-corner pants.”
“Gosh, Bill,” Dierkes drawled. “You talk just like the Loud Soldier.”
“Hell,” Mauldin said, looking proud and pleased, and ducked his head.
Dano remarked amiably that working in pictures was fine with him. He seemed at ease and as well suited to the role of the Tattered Man as Mauldin was to the Loud Soldier. He was unshaven and gaunt—so skinny that his bones protruded. He has large dark eyes, long lashes, and black hair, which was hanging raggedly over his ears. His uniform was torn and his shirttail was outside his trousers. He looked as though he had always worn tatters. He yawned, stretched out on the ground with his head on a rock, and went to sleep.
Dierkes turned to Murphy, who, with a troubled expression, was staring at the top of a tree, and asked him how he felt.
Murphy said that his malaria was acting up again, that he had had an attack of nausea while driving out to the ranch, and that he was going to lie down in Huston’s ranchhouse.
As Murphy walked slowly away, Dierkes shook his head and said to Mauldin that he was amazed whenever he realized that Murphy was the most-decorated soldier of the last war. “When the war ended, he wasn’t even old enough to vote,” he added. In a tone of deep respect, Dierkes, who has an enormous interest in other people, said that Murphy was one of nine children of a Texas sharecropper who abandoned his family when Murphy was fourteen. The mother died two years later. Murphy was working in a radio-repair shop when the war came. He tried to enlist in the Marines and then in the paratroops but was turned down because he was underweight. He finally got into the infantry. Among his decorations were the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Croix de Guerre, and the Purple Heart. “Now look at the little sport,” Dierkes said.
“Hell, amigo, he’s in a war picture, ain’t he?” Mauldin said.
“All right, lads!” Huston called. They woke Dano up, and the first rehearsal began.
The rehearsals concentrated less on the acting than on preparations for getting the actors photographed. Huston studied his actors from various points through a finder, and conferred with Rosson about the placing of the camera, composing the basic plan of each scene with the meticulous care of a painter at work on a picture. A scene in which the Loud Soldier was to run up to a group of comrades and shout that the Army was moving into battle would have to look as if it were near a river where, in the previous scene, the Loud Soldier had heard the news. The latter scene would be filmed at the Sacramento River location, near Chico, California, several hundred miles north of the ranch. At the end of the nine-day rehearsal period, the company would go up to Chico for several days of additional rehearsal and shooting.
After a couple of hours, the cast and crew had lunch, provided by an M-G-M catering truck, in the field. Lee Katz told Huston that in the course of making the picture ten thousand five hundred box lunches would be served, at a cost to Metro of $15,750—one of the smaller items in the picture’s budget. During lunch, a prop man brought Huston a box containing old-fashioned watches of several styles and asked him to choose one for a scene in which the Loud Soldier, fearing that he will be killed in battle, gives his watch to the Youth. Another prop man carried over three small, squealing pigs and asked Huston to choose the one that would be stolen from a farm girl in a scene featuring a soldier pillaging a farmyard. Huston chose a watch and cast a pig, and then called for a rehearsal of a scene between Murphy and Mauldin just before their first battle.
Murphy sat under an oak tree, and Mauldin sat several yards behind the tree. Huston and Rosson squatted in front of them. Callow, his script open to the scene, stood behind Huston. The script clerk, whose name was Jack Aldworth, conferred with Callow about time schedules. Colonel Davison sat at the roadside with Marton, who began to tell how he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of African natives while making “King Solomon’s Mines.” The stock players lolled nearby.
“All right, Billy, come on down,” Huston said to Mauldin, putting the finder to his eyes. Through it he watched Mauldin come down and lean over Murphy’s shoulder, saying, “Why, hello, Henry. Is it you? What yeh doin’ here?”
“Oh, thinkin’,” said Murphy.
Huston did not seem to be paying any attention to the performances of the actors. Occasionally, he interrupted to ask them to look in this direction or that, and he discussed with Rosson where the camera should be placed and how much of the tree should be in the picture.
After the rehearsal of the scene was over, Huston made his first comment on the acting. He drew Murphy aside and told him that there was a humorous aspect to the Youth’s fear. “Fear in a man is something tragic or reprehensible, you know, Audie?” he said. “But fear in a youth—it’s ludicrous.”
Murphy nodded solemnly.
“All right, amigo,” Huston said, clapping him on the shoulder. “You just work it out for yourself.”
“Here comes the producer, boys!” someone shouted. “Act busy!”
Reinhardt plodded slowly across the sun-baked, yellow field. A fresh cigar was in his mouth, and a blue beret was on his head. He shook Huston’s hand and asked him how things were going.
“Wonderful, Gottfried,” said Huston. “Just wonderful.”
As the rehearsals progressed, Huston seemed to show a greater interest in the acting of some scenes, and he was particularly interested in one in which Murphy discovered his comrade the Tall Soldier, Dierkes, in the line of wounded men straggling away from the battle the Youth had run away from. Dano, the Tattered Man, trudged along a dirt road, one arm dangling at his side. Murphy came from behind a clump of bushes and fell in with him. The Tattered Man looked fervently at him. “Th’ boys ain’t had no fair chance up t’ now, but this time they showed what they was,” Dano said. “I knowed it’d turn out this way. Yeh can’t lick them boys. No sir! They’re fighters, they be. Where yeh hit, ol’ boy?” Dierkes came shuffling past them. Murphy started after him, calling his name, and put a hand on his arm.
At this point, Huston fell into step with Murphy and Dierkes, his face signalling grotesque and terrible emotions, which were not apparent in the faces of the actors. Band brought up the rear, following the lines in the script.
“I was allus a good friend t’ yeh, wa’n’t I, Henry?” Dierkes said, in a kind of delirium. “I’ve allus been a pretty good feller, ain’t I? An’ it ain’t much t’ ask, is it? Jest t’ pull me along outer th’ road? I’d do it fer you, wouldn’t I, Henry?”
Murphy tried to get Dierkes to lean on him for support.
“No, no, no, leave me be,” Dierkes said, pulling away.
Huston elbowed Dierkes aside and put Murphy’s hand on his own arm. “When you say ‘No, no, no, leave me be,’ start to go down and make him let go of you,” he told Dierkes. He stumbled and fell forward, loosening Murphy’s grip. “All right, try again—by yourselves this time.”
Huston lit a brown cigarette as the actors moved back up the path to do the scene again. Inhaling deeply, as though in anger, he said that Dano was wonderful. “That boy is an actor,” he said. “He’s a great actor. I don’t have to tell him a goddam thing. The only other actor I’ve known who had that was Dad. But Dierkes will be wonderful in the picture. That face! Even when an actor is limited in his acting experience, you can cover for him. You can get him to do things that don’t require acting.” He threw his cigarette down and ground it out. “You make him let go of you as you start to go down,” he said to Dierkes in a soft voice.
Dierkes looked puzzled. “Don’t I pull my arm away from him?”
“Do whatever you want to do with your goddam arm,” said the director. “The point is you make him let go of you by falling.”
Dierkes looked more puzzled. “I see, John,” he said.
“Once more,” Huston said crisply.
There were only a few days left of the allotted rehearsal time. The company had become tense. With a certain air of impatience with the problem, Huston had tried to communicate to the others his ideas and feelings for composing the various shots, and he had talked about the way things might eventually look on the screen. The others had tried to demonstrate that they understood just what he was driving at. But the strain was beginning to tell. One joke that made the rounds of the cast and crew was “This is getting to be a long war.” The most popular one was “Did you hear about the coward who quit M-G-M to join the Army?”
Reinhardt was becoming dissatisfied with the script. He acted like a man under pressure. He lost weight, and smoked more cigars every day. Huston showed no sign of being under any pressure. He was able to turn from one thing to another with ease, good humor, and concentration. In a single hour one day, he did the following: When Dusty, the official cowboy on Huston’s ranch, wanted to know when he would be given a part in the picture, Huston entered into a long, involved discussion with him about why it was necessary for a man to choose between a career in pictures and life on the range, and how much better the latter was in the long run. From Dusty, he turned to Audie Murphy, and asked him to look through the finder at the hilltop where the Tall Soldier would die. “He goes to die in the open, Audie,” Huston said. “Do you feel the sense of expanse up there?” He went into a long, involved explanation of why a man chooses to die in the open. From Murphy, Huston turned to Rosson, to work out the details of placing the camera on a dolly, or wheeled platform, and of building dolly tracks for scenes in which the camera would have to roll along with moving actors. From Rosson, Huston turned to a telephone to take a call from Sam Spiegel, his partner in Horizon Pictures, his independent producing company; he told Spiegel he might be free to work on Horizon’s next picture, “The African Queen,” in four months. From the telephone, he turned to Hans Peters, the art director, to inquire whether a night scene filmed on a set at the studio would look as real as one filmed outdoors. From Peters, Huston turned to a newspaper photographer who wanted him to pose with Mrs. Huston, who was watching rehearsals, for what he called a happy-go-lucky family shot, and he agreed to pose later that day. From the photographer, Huston turned to a tree branch lying in the road and demonstrated with it how a jockey twirls a whip. From the tree branch, Huston turned to his wife, who told him that he was expected to appear in an hour, in black tie, at a dinner party at the home of L. B. Mayer.
The operating budget for Production No. 1512 was by now complete. It showed that the total cost was supposed to come to $1,434,789, including:
In a breakdown of these figures, the estimate showed that Audie Murphy was scheduled for forty-seven working days at a salary of $2,500 a week; his cost to the production would be $25,000. Bill Mauldin, working the same number of days at $2,000 a week, would cost $15,667. John Dierkes would work thirty days at $600 a week and would cost $3,000; Douglas Dick, forty-six days at $800 a week, would cost $6,133; Royal Dano, twenty-four days at $750 a week, would cost $3,000. The Story and Continuity cost included $10,000 paid to the estate and the publisher of Stephen Crane for the rights to film the novel, and $28,000 paid to the writer of the screenplay—Huston. The Directorial charges included Huston’s $4,000-a-week salary, totalling $137,334.
The Rent and Purchase Props included $33,370 for the use of horses and the services of their trainers. The figures for the battle scenes indicated that they would be violent as well as expensive: eighty thousand rounds of ammunition, at $110 per thousand, would come to $8,800; three caissons had to be reconditioned at $25 each; two hundred and fifty 45-70 rifles with bayonets and slings would come to $200. There would be ten Confederate flags ($65) and two Union flags ($13). Six dummy horse carcasses were to be bought at $275 each. Among the battle regalia that was being rented were two Union battle drums, at $5 each per week; two short bugles, at $3.50 each per week; twenty pairs of carbine boots, at $1.50 a pair per week; thirty nose bags, at one dollar each per week; a hundred infantry packs and blanket rolls suitable for foreground use, at $1.50 each per week; and twenty-five cavalry sabres, at $5 each per week. The Production Staff charge of $30,915 included the cost of Lee Katz ($8,718), of two assistant directors ($5,366, half of which represented Reggie Callow’s cost to the picture), of two second assistant directors ($2,609), and of Jack Aldworth, the script clerk ($1,430). The estimate explained that Aldworth would be paid $160 a week while on location, and $140 a week at the studio. Of the money to be paid to the cameramen, Rosson, at a weekly salary of $750, would receive $11,250.
The Sound charges were broken down in this fashion: twenty-nine days of recording at the studio would cost $7,337; two days of playback, $506; the use of the public-address system for fifty-eight days, $4,002; and 30,000 feet of rerecording, or dubbing, at sixteen cents a foot, $4,800. The estimate for Picture Film and Dev. showed the expenses involved in buying and processing both negatives and positives, and that the job would take more than forty times as much film as was expected to appear in the final product. The 180,000 feet of black-and-white negative, at 4.1 cents a foot, would cost $7,380; the processing of 165,000 feet of black-and-white negative, at 2.5 cents a foot, would cost $4,125; 155,000 feet of black-and-white positive, at 1.283 cents a foot, would cost $1,989; and the processing of it, at 2.6 cents a foot, would cost $4,030.
The breakdown of the Wardrobe charges of $43,000 revealed that uniforms for officers would cost more than those for soldiers in both the Union and Confederate Armies. In addition to old uniforms on hand in the wardrobe department, there would be a hundred and twenty-five new ones for Union soldiers at $50 each ($6,250), twenty-five new Union officers’ outfits at $75 each ($1,875), and ten Confederate officers’ uniforms at the same price ($750). The cost of Music, including a thirty-five-piece orchestra, was figured on a basis of $600 an hour. Box lunches, as Lee Katz had pointed out, would cost $15,750.
The cost of extras and bit players was broken down scene by scene:
One of the least expensive shots would show the body of a dead soldier in the woods. (The Youth would come upon the body after he had run away from the battle.) The only cost for this, other than the overhead and Murphy’s salary, would be the wages of the extra who would play dead—$25. Extras who spoke lines would be paid an additional $23 for each day they spoke. The battle scenes would be the most expensive. The Confederate charge that causes many Union soldiers, including the Youth, to flee would cost $16,469.
Reinhardt, Huston, and the cast and crew of “The Red Badge of Courage” were accompanied to the small town of Chico, in northern California, for the first shooting on the film, by Mrs. Huston, Pablo, and Mrs. Reinhardt. The Hustons, the Reinhardts, and the leading members of the cast were quartered in the Oaks Hotel there. (The other members of the company were scattered about the town.) The Oaks is a small, neat, rectangular building in the center of a small, neat, rectangular town.
Late in the morning of the first day, Mrs. Reinhardt sat gloomily in a high-backed chair in the lobby. She was wearing a high-necked dress of mossy-green sheer silk with a golden butterfly at the throat, and high-heeled black pumps. She looked chic and elegant. The other lobby-sitters were for the most part gentlemen dozing under ten-gallon hats. A newspaper lay in Mrs. Reinhardt’s lap; a black banner head stretched from one side to the other: “AMERICANS SMASH RED ROADBLOCK.” Huston and Reinhardt were on the Sacramento River, eight miles away, with some stunt men who were trying to find a safe and cinematically attractive site for the scene in which the Youth’s regiment would cross a river. The actors were rehearsing in a park four miles away. It was a twenty-four-hundred-acre park, and Mrs. Reinhardt told me she did not have the faintest notion where to find anybody in it, even if she were dressed for the excursion.
“It’s wilderness and you need trousers,” she said to me. “Gottfried loathes me in trousers. The temperature outside is one hundred and five degrees. Have you read the news?” She opened the newspaper and pointed to a headline reading, “MOVING PICTURE CREWS ARRIVE IN CHICO FOR FILMING OF CIVIL WAR DRAMA SHOTS.”
“We are famous,” Mrs. Reinhardt said dryly. She closed the newspaper and sighed in utter despair. “Why am I here?” she asked.
Huston was in an expansive mood. He was sitting behind the desk in a room in the Oaks Hotel, his chair tipped back and his heels resting on the desk, and looking over some local citizens who, in response to advertisements, were applying for bit parts in the picture. He loved to use the faces of nonprofessional actors in his pictures, he told me, and besides it cost less to hire bit-part players and extras—a couple of hundred men would be engaged at $10 a day each to appear as members of the Youth’s regiment in the Union Army—locally than it would to transport them from Hollywood. The first applicant to come in was an eager, hard-breathing young man named Dixon Porter. He had a round, innocent face and an incongruously heavy black beard. Huston gave him a gracious nod. “Nice beard you’ve got there, Dixon,” he said. He picked up a long pad of yellow paper and started making sketches of Dixon and various types of beards.
Reggie Callow, who was attending the audition, along with Colonel Davison and the other assistant director, Joel Freeman, said that beards were almost as important as talent for these bit parts.
“M-G-M offers a five-dollar bonus to every man with a good beard!” Callow said, in a raucous voice. “Go ahead, Dixon. Read.”
Dixon Porter read, “ ‘Ain’t they a sight to behold, in their brand-new uniforms! Hang yer clothes on a hickory limb and don’t go near the battle!’ ”
“Thank you, Dixon,” Huston said. “Very good, Dixon. Thank you very much.”
“We’ll let you know, Dixon,” Callow said mechanically, ushering the applicant out.
“That boy is good,” Huston said. “Not tough but good. We’ll find some use for him. Now let’s get some real grizzled sons of bitches.” He went back to his sketching.
The next applicant was a thin young man with a long, dolorous face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a soft beard. He said he belonged to a local little-theatre group. After he had read and departed, Huston told Callow they needed tougher-looking men, tough as hell.
“Every time you get little-theatre, you get these delicate fellas,” Callow said.
The third applicant, who was accompanied by his three-year-old daughter, explained earnestly that he hadn’t been able to get a baby-sitter. Huston tore off the page he had been sketching on, crumpled it up, and threw it on the floor. The earnest father and the three year-old went out again.
“Joel!” Huston said sternly to the other assistant director, a serious young man with a crew haircut. “Joel, you go out tonight to the poolrooms! To the gas stations! Find the tough guys and bring them back. We need guys who look tough.”
“You mean guys who look—” Freeman began.
“Tough!” said Huston.
Reinhardt had finally pinned Huston down to the job of revising the script with him. They worked in Huston’s hotel room, with Albert Band, making some changes requested by Joseph I. Breen, the Motion Picture Production Code Administrator. Huston lay on the bed, his back resting against the headboard, and sketched thoughtfully on a yellow pad as Band read off the lines that were considered objectionable.
“ ‘Gawd, he’s runnin’,’ ” Band read.
“ ‘Look, he’s runnin’,’ ” Huston said in a bored voice.
“ ‘It’ll be hell to pay,’ ” Band read.
“ ‘It’ll be the devil to pay,’ ” said Huston.
“You can’t say that,” Reinhardt said.
Huston said, “The hell you can’t.”
“Joe Breen—” Reinhardt began.
“All right,” Huston interrupted. “ ‘It’ll be the dickens to pay.’ ”
“ ‘Damn tobacco,’ ” Band continued.
“Take ‘damn’ out” said Huston.
“That takes care of your censor problem for now,” said Band.
Reinhardt directed him to make copies of the changes and send them to Metro’s Script Department. Then he looked uncertainly at Huston. “You don’t like to write?” he asked.
“When I put pencil to paper, I find myself sketching,” Huston said. “I can’t write alone—I get too lonely. I have to dictate.”
Reinhardt asked him to try to write some dialogue for the Youth’s officers just before the regiment went into action, to give the audience an idea of the position of the Youth’s regiment in relation to the battle. Reluctantly, Huston set to work. Reinhardt went to his own room for a cigar. When he returned, Huston said, “Here’s a speech. The Colonel rides up behind the lines and says to the Captain, ‘Captain, the Rebs are on that hill over there. We’re goin’ to try an’ push them off. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. Anyway, take positions on that road down there and hold it whatever happens!’ Captain says, ‘We’ll stand, Colonel, sir!’ ”
“Good!” Reinhardt said explosively.
“It’s got to be kept simple,” Huston said, looking pleased.
“Good!” Band said explosively.
The telephone rang. Band answered it and told Huston it was Sam Spiegel, calling from Hollywood. Huston said to say he wasn’t in. Reinhardt bit off the end of his cigar and smiled happily.
Late in the afternoon of the day before the shooting of the picture was to start, Huston asked Hal Rosson if he wanted to go fishing. Rosson said no, adding that he had been bitten by a wasp, burned by the sun, and exhausted by tramping through underbrush in search of locations, and besides he had bad dust cold; he was going to bed. Undaunted, Huston said that he was going fishing. Pablo escorted Mrs. Reinhardt on a shopping trip, from which she returned with an outfit, recommended by Pablo, to wear on location—a pair of Army suntans, a green T shirt, and a green porkpie hat. At the Oaks, Andrew Marton passed around a copy of the Hollywood Reporter in which the column “Trade Views,” written by W. R. Wilkerson, the paper’s owner, was devoted entirely to the leapfrog method being used in making “The Red Badge of Courage.” (This was a reference to Marton’s job of getting scenes lined up for Huston so that they could be shot without delay.) The column said, “Reinhardt and Huston are trying to make the picture with as little cost as possible. Such activity is to be congratulated and given every encouragement.”
At two o’clock in the morning of the day the shooting was to start, Reinhardt sat down and wrote a letter to Huston:
Reinhardt’s letter was not the only one Huston received in the morning. At breakfast with Murphy and Mauldin, he read a letter from Dore Schary that said, “Today’s your day, and with it goes all my best to you. I’m sure, John, we’ll get a damned good movie out of ‘Red Badge’—one that we’ll all be proud of. Good luck and good shooting. Sincerely, DORE.” Joe Cohn, the head of Metro’s Production Office (logistics, budgets, etc.), wired Huston, “YOU ARE DOING A WAR PICTURE. SHOOT—SHOOT—SHOOT.”
The atmosphere at the breakfast table was one of readiness. Murphy and Mauldin, the two leading men, had on their blue uniforms and kepis. They listened abstractedly as Huston, putting his correspondence aside and playing nervously with a couple of quarters, told them about Nate Leipsig, who he said was the greatest coin manipulator in history. Then Huston, who was wearing regulation Army sun tans, stood up, put a Mexican straw hat on, took a gulp of coffee, and said he would see the boys outside. A few minutes later, Huston and Reinhardt, who wore blue cotton slacks and a matching knit shirt and was carrying a pith helmet, came out. Both men were looking grim. “I want to ride out with you, Gottfried,” Huston was saying. Reinhardt nodded benignly and clapped the helmet on his head.
The first scene to be shot, No. 72, read:
It was being set up on a dirt road running through the thickly wooded park. A couple of hundred Chicoans, many of them sporting five-dollar-bonus beards and all of them dressed in Union blues and carrying rifles or swords, were lined up on the road in a column of fours. Near the head of the column stood Dixon Porter, wearing the sword and red sash of a lieutenant; he was one of the extras. A long dolly track, with wooden rails, had been laid beside the road. The camera, fixed on a tripod, stood on a rubber-wheeled dolly at one end of the track. The trees lining the road arched high over the heads of the warlike array. Everybody in Huston’s crew seemed, with a harassed awareness of the dollar value of every minute, to be rushing everyone else. Rosson, standing on the dolly and peering through the camera at the line of soldiers, gave hurried signals to assistants helping him get the camera in position. Huston and Reinhardt made a hasty inspection of the Chicoan army. Marton dashed at Mauldin, collared him, and thrust him into the Union ranks behind Murphy and Dierkes. The time was 8:38 A.M.
In the road, ahead of the troops, lay a soldier, face down, his uniform dishevelled, a rifle under his limp arm, his legs sprawled. Callow was arranging and rearranging the legs. A still photographer aimed a Speed Graphic at the dead man; his flash bulb popped, and he quickly turned his camera on the waiting troops. Band arrived and began to tag after Huston, who walked over to the camera.
“Good morning, boys,” Huston said to Rosson and his assistants. “Good luck, gentlemen!”
Jack Aldworth was writing in a hard-covered notebook. The first page was headed “LOG—PROD. NO. 1512—HUSTON.” Under the heading, he had already written:
He now wrote:
Aldworth would submit his daily log to Reinhardt and to Callow, who would submit it to Lee Katz, who would submit copies of it to Joe Cohn, Dore Schary, and L. B. Mayer, in Culver City, and to Nicholas Schenck, in New York. (Along with the daily log would go a daily report on the time the crew left for location, the time shooting started and finished, the number of scenes filmed, and the number of extras used.) Reinhardt was standing beside the camera, reading a letter that had just been handed to him by a messenger:
The rehearsal began. Callow yelled, “Here we go, boys! Get in line!” The troops started marching toward the man lying in the road. Callow told them to pause and look down at the body as they passed it. Huston peered into the camera and watched the procession, then called to the troops that this was the first dead man they had ever seen, and told them to keep this in mind when they looked down at the body. The time was 8:56.
For all the tension, hurry, and confusion, it was very quiet. At Callow’s command, the Union soldiers, having passed the body, moved back to their starting point. They were silent, and their silence was respectful. A smoke machine mounted on a truck, which had been hidden in the woods off the road, started up with a clatter, and smoke drifted slowly among the trees in the almost windless heat of the morning.
Huston moved about quickly and smoothly. He strode over to the dead man in the road and called for a bucket of water. A prop man scurried off, and was back with it in a few seconds. Huston quickly mussed the man’s hair and sprinkled dirt over his hair, face, and knapsack. Reinhardt looked down with a cynical smile as Huston mixed a handful of earth with water and daubed mud over the man’s face and hands. Huston stood up. Aldworth was holding out a clean white handkerchief. Huston wiped his hands on it and called for blood. A makeup man sprinted over with a tube of “panchromatic blood”—mineral oil with vegetable coloring. Huston, thumbs hooked in the back of his belt, directed the bloodying process. Callow rushed up and said, “Mr. Huston, have the troops lost their knapsacks by this time or haven’t they?” Huston, thoughtfully staring at the dead man, said they still had knapsacks. He sprinkled another handful of dirt over the man. Marton hurried up and asked whether the troops still had their knapsacks on, and Huston gave him the same answer he had given Callow. It was 9:10.
Colonel Davison came up to tell Huston that the drummer boys in the column looked too naked with only their drums. Huston directed a prop man to put packs on the boys. Aldworth was writing:
A makeup man fussed with Mauldin’s wig under his kepi until it covered the better part of his neck. Huston saw the wig and said it was all wrong. The wig was removed, and a smaller one was substituted. Smoke now lay over everybody and everything. The smoke machine sounded like a couple of steam shovels. “Kill that motor!” Callow bawled.
A man carrying a loudspeaker box on his shoulder and a microphone in his hand walked over to Huston. “All right,” Huston said in a dramatically calm voice into the mike. “All right, boys.” Everybody looked at him. “The idea is these troops are coming into a battle area,” he said. “This is the first time you have heard gunfire. I’m going to fire a revolver. This will be the first shot you have ever heard. Each soldier as he passes the dead man will slow down. This is the first dead man you have ever seen. All right.” The time was 9:26.
There was a brief silence—a lull before a battle. Huston told a smoke man not to make smoke, because this would be a rehearsal. Callow reminded the troops that they were not to step over the dead man but pass around him. Huston went over to the camera and called for action. Callow told the men to get going. They began to shuffle toward the dead man. The camera trained on them rolled on ahead, pulled along the dolly track by grips. Huston walked backward behind the dolly, looking intently at the faces of the troops. He gave the Chicoans a menacing look, and slowly raised the revolver over his head. He fired the revolver, still watching grimly, then fired again. The troops shuffled uneasily around the body of the dead man. Callow called “About face!” and the men returned to their starting position. Huston went over to the dead man and sprinkled more dirt on him. Reinhardt laughed. “How he loves to do that!” he said.
The time was 9:35. Jack Aldworth was writing:
Katz said to Reinhardt, “Joe Cohn asked me last night when you were coming back.”
“I wish I knew,” Reinhardt said.
“Consider the whole thing unasked,” said Katz. At the end of each day, he told Reinhardt, the film that had been shot would be flown back to Culver City for developing.
Reinhardt said he wanted to see each day’s film—called rushes, or dailies—the following day. He didn’t want to wait two or three days. “I don’t care how they feel about spending the money,” he added.
“May I quote you?” Katz asked, smiling.
“It’s important,” said Reinhardt.
“Let me just find my studio notes,” Katz said, digging in his pockets.
“If we can get them two hours sooner, I want them,” said Reinhardt.
Katz took out his notes and studied them. “It would mean a difference of ten or twelve dollars a night,” he said. “I’ll talk to Joe Cohn about it.”
“All this for two lines in the script,” Albert Band said. “Would television go to all this trouble for two lines in a script?”
Callow announced that everyone was to be very quiet, because they were going to start shooting. A prop man was chalking on a small slate:
The smoke machine started again. Aldworth wrote:
Pistol in hand, Huston knelt directly in front of the camera.
“Quiet and roll it!” Callow shouted.
The camera buzzed. The prop man held his slate in front of the camera for a moment.
“Action!” Huston said. The soldiers moved forward. The camera moved ahead of them.
Reinhardt looked at Huston with a long sigh. “Now there is no turning back,” he said. “We are committed.”
On their fourth encounter with the body since the shooting had begun, the troops apparently gave the performance Huston wanted. “Cut! That’s it,” he said. “Print it!”
Aldworth wrote down:
The dead man got up and wiped a muddy palm over his muddy face. He asked Band whether he would be paid extra for lying in the road a couple of hours.
“Over Joe Cohn’s dead body,” Band said.
At 2:30 P.M., the temperature in the woods was a hundred and eight. Eight Chicoans had collapsed while Huston was rehearsing a scene that required some troops to run off the road and into the forest and start digging ditches, as the Lieutenant of the Youth’s platoon, played by Douglas Dick, walked toward the camera, smoothing his mustache, youthfully arrogant as he looked forward to his first taste of battle. At 2:32, Huston ordered his crew to print the shot of the troops.
At 4:02, Huston began working on a closeup of Dick smoothing his mustache. Huston lifted his own shoulder slightly to signify youthful arrogance, and encouraged Dick to imitate him. At 4:28, after seven takes, Huston said, “That’s it.”
At 4:45, Huston started working on closeups of the soldiers digging in.
“Do we expect an attack?” Dixon Porter asked him.
“You don’t know what the hell to expect. That’s why you’re digging,” said Huston.
Katz came over and said he didn’t want to rush anybody, but the film had to be flown out of Chico at 6:30. Huston nodded curtly.
Huston directed the camera to be set up behind an elderly Chicoan who was digging in. The man had a long, deeply lined face. Kneeling alongside the camera, behind the man, Huston ordered him to relax and said he would tell him exactly what to do. “Action!” he called. “All right, sir. Move a little forward, sir. Now turn around and look behind you, slowly. That’s right. Now dig. With your scabbard. Hard at it. Now with your plate! Hard. Harder. Very good. Cut!” He thanked the man and looked very happy. It was a face he liked.
Huston was rehearsing a group of soldiers in a digging scene when Rosson told him that they were fighting a losing battle with the sun. In the scene, Arthur Hunnicutt, an actor with a careworn face, was leaning on his rifle, watching half a dozen comrades dig a hole. “I don’t hold with layin’ down and shootin’ from behint a little hill,” he was saying. “I wouldn’t feel a bit proud doin’ it. I aim t’ do my fightin’ standin’ up.” One of the soldiers digging said, “If yeh want t’ get shot that’s yer own business.” Hunnicutt said, “Well, I ain’t goin’ t’ lay down before I’m shot—and that’s all there is to it.”
“Light’s going!” Rosson cried. “Let’s take it.”
Jack Aldworth wrote:
At 6:20, Huston took his last shot of the day. Then he walked over to a rotting log and sat down. He put his elbows on his knees and cupped his face in his hands.
Jack Aldworth noted in his report—a copy of which would be in Nicholas Schenck’s office the next day—that eleven scenes had been shot for “The Red Badge of Courage,” out of a total of three hundred and forty-seven.
On the second day of shooting, John Dierkes, the Tall Soldier, arrived at the day’s location ahead of the other actors. A dusty dirt road wound through patches of wood and brush to the location, which was a broad, level, barren field beside the Sacramento River. Near the riverbank, grips were working on a twenty-five-foot-high tower of steel scaffolding, from which the camera would shoot scenes of the Union soldiers drilling on the field. A dolly track ninety feet long ran across the field at right angles to the river. On the track was the camera, which was to photograph a scene of soldiers drilling before a row of Army tents. Dierkes walked to the far end of the dolly track and sat down on one of the rails. He rubbed the back of one hand over an orange stubble of beard, and with the other he unbuttoned the stiff, high collar of his tunic. He took his kepi off and put it on the ground. With a crumpled bandanna, he wiped the perspiration from his neck. The sun was already hot in the clear sky, and the morning air was humid and buzzing with swarms of giant flies. Two trucks were lumbering past, manned by eight grips, who all had wrestlers’ muscles. Dierkes stood up and saluted them. The grips did not return the salute. They seemed detached and superior, impervious to heat, humidity, flies, and isolation, fixed as though forever in one another’s company, and completely absorbed in their truckloads of tools, ladders, ropes, reflectors, two-by-fours, and tripods. The trucks stopped. The head grip shouted that some small trees were needed. The grips took saws and axes, and headed for a patch of woods. A sound truck was being maneuvered into position near the camera. As it came to a halt, a young man jumped out and set up a microphone boom by the camera. In a little while, a property truck came up. The barrel-chested man in charge of it was stripped to the waist, revealing tattoos on his arms, chest, and back. Cheerfully, he let the truck’s tailboard bang down; inside were stacks of rifles, swords, kepis, and extra uniforms. A few minutes later, buses arrived with the blue-coated army of Chicoans, and they lined up to get their rifles from the prop man. Then the studio limousines brought the other leading players and Huston.
Huston made a brisk tour of inspection past the row of tents, their pyramids of rifles stacked in front of them. Behind Huston came Reinhardt, his pith helmet pulled down over his forehead, and behind him, under another pith helmet, came Band. Huston conferred briefly with Reinhardt, then walked toward Audie Murphy. Dierkes slapped his kepi back on and went over to one of the studio’s limousines and put his head in at the window. The driver was dozing over a newspaper.
“They workin’ ya hard, Ferd?” Dierkes asked the driver.
Ferd looked up. “Am I burned up!” he said. “I was all set to get a couple of guys tomorrow and drive to Reno and hit them ever-lovin’ crap tables. Then I hear they got news for me. We work. On Sunday.”
“Gosh, Ferd,” said Dierkes.
“Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest,” said Ferd.
“I guess they don’t want the picture to get behind schedule,” said Dierkes.
“Behind schedule is all I hear,” Ferd said, and returned to his paper.
Over the loudspeaker, Callow was bellowing for the actors to form ranks preparatory to drilling. Dierkes, on his way to pick up a rifle, walked past the camera dolly. Huston was standing on it, talking to the cameraman. Dierkes stopped, took off his kepi, and mopped his face again. Huston kept on talking to the cameraman. Dierkes got his rifle and took the long way around to the drill field, past the dolly again. He waited a moment, then said good morning to Huston and the cameraman. Huston returned the greeting exuberantly but mechanically. Then, as though something had just occurred to him, he stepped down from the dolly and motioned Dierkes to come closer with one of his conspiratorial gestures. The two men squatted on the ground. “I just want to tell you how glad I am to have you in the picture,” Huston said, with slow, dramatic emphasis. “I just know you’ll be good, John.”
The orange stubble of beard appeared to redden as Dierkes said, “Thanks.” Then he added, “I sure wish the picture was shot.”
“It’ll be over before you know it,” said Huston. “It always is. Too soon.”
“A picture, if it is a hit, is the director’s hit,” Reinhardt said over dinner that night. “If it is a flop, it is the producer’s flop.” He was confident that “The Red Badge of Courage” would not be a flop, that it would, in fact, be both a work of art and a commercial success. The film shot the first day had been developed, and M-G-M’s head cutter, Margaret Booth, whose official title is Executive Film Editor, had telephoned to tell him she had seen the first rushes.
“Margaret says everything looks fine,” Reinhardt reported to Huston. “The march into the forest she loves. She says the trees look terrific, and Audie, too. The dead-man shot is very interesting, she says.”
“That’s something, if this dame says it’s good,” said Huston. “People put more stock in what she says than anybody else. She’s tough as hell.”
“And she told Dore,” Reinhardt said.
On the third day of shooting the picture, the nervous excitement that had permeated the company at the start abruptly disappeared. Even the army of Chicoans seemed suddenly to lose all their eager anticipation. “Pretty cheap outfit, M-G-M,” said one during a break in marching around on the hot drill field. “Ten dollars a day, and it turns out to be work.”
Dixon Porter said to a friend, “I suppose out of all this chaos comes order eventually.”
His friend said, “All this hurry up and wait. It’s just like the Army.”
Reinhardt had brought along a 16-millimetre motion-picture camera, and he was shooting his private movie of the making of the movie. “Mine will be in Technicolor,” he told me. His wife arrived on the set wearing her newly purchased trousers and porkpie hat. Reinhardt groaned when he saw her outfit. “Gottfried!” she announced. “I will keep you supplied with bottles of soda pop.”
Mrs. Reinhardt put a brown cigarette in the corner of her mouth.
“Silvia!” Reinhardt cried in horror.
“We are in a constant state of osmosis,” Mrs. Reinhardt said, paying no attention to Reinhardt’s agitation. “Osmosis has been going on for a very long time. A liquid of a lesser density flowing toward a liquid of a greater density through a thin membrane.” She uttered a shrill, hopeless laugh and gave a hitch to her Army suntans.
Reinhardt wiped his face with a large silk handkerchief. It was immediately soaked with perspiration. He looked morosely at the wet silk as Katz came over to him, smiling gaily. “This a scorcher, in case you haven’t noticed,” Katz said. “Anything I can do you for?”
Reinhardt asked him whether the studio had given permission for the army to ford the Sacramento River.
“Insurance men are studying the river for safety,” Katz said. “They’re going into it themselves.”
“I will go in with them,” Reinhardt said.
“Good, good,” said Katz.
Huston came along and asked about the river crossing.
“Maybe if I were made head of the studio, I would go to you and say, ‘No river crossing!’ ” Reinhardt said.
“Watch out, or that may happen,” said Huston. He gave his choked kind of laugh.
“Then let’s do the river crossing quickly,” said Reinhardt.
A few minutes before midnight that night, I accompanied Huston and Reinhardt to the Vecino Theatre, on Main Street, in Chico. The marquee was flashing the current attraction in electric lights—Jack Carson in “The Good Humor Man.” Waiting under the marquee were Rosson, Marton, Callow, and Band. After the regular program was over, we were going to see the first rushes of “The Red Badge of Courage.” The rushes were being returned in forty-eight, rather than twenty-four, hours.
“This is it, pals,” Rosson said in a low voice as we joined them.
For a few moments, nobody said anything. The men looked at one another nervously. They seemed held together by the same tense expectancy that had marked the first day of shooting. “Let’s go, kids,” Huston said finally.
We followed Huston into a roaring darkness; on the screen several men and a girl were hitting each other over the head with sticks. We found seats in the rear. On the screen, a donkey kicked a man, and the crashes on the sound track mixed with the crashing laughter of the audience. Then Jack Carson was holding a girl in his arms, there was a final blast of music, and the house lights went on. “Christ!” Huston said. He stared blankly at the audience making its way out of the theatre.
Katz came in, and Reinhardt, sitting on the aisle, started to rise to let him pass.
“Sit yourself still,” Katz said, and sat down behind him.
“Cigarette, Albert,” Huston said. Band quickly gave him one and lighted it.
“You gentlemen ready?” a man called from the projection booth.
“Go ahead,” Huston said, in a voice that sounded very loud in the now empty theatre. He slumped in his seat, putting his long legs over the back of the seat in front of him. Reinhardt knocked the ash off his cigar and sighed deeply. The house lights went off.
On the screen, the Chicoan army shuffled along the road; the faces reflected the feeling of tense expectancy that had marked the entire first day’s shooting, and somehow the effect on the screen was just right dramatically. After the raucousness of Jack Carson, the shuffling of soldiers’ feet sounded weirdly subdued. There was a cut to a closeup of the dead man in the road and then to one of Audie Murphy, starting at the sound of Huston’s revolver. The scene of the column scattering into the woods was followed by two closeups of Douglas Dick smoothing his mustache. In the first one, Dick held his shoulders rigid, and the fingers he passed over his mustache seemed unsure of where they were going, of where the mustache was. In the second scene, he lifted one shoulder arrogantly, in an approximation of the way Huston had shown him how to play it. Huston exhaled some smoke and changed his position so that his knees pressed against the seat in front of him. “We use the second one, Albert,” he said. “Make a note.”
When the house lights came on, Huston and Reinhardt walked out of the theatre rapidly.
“Well, now, the stuff looks very good, very good, Gottfried,” Huston said.
Reinhardt agreed that most of the scenes looked good, but he did not like the shot of the regiment coming upon the dead soldier. There wasn’t shock in the scene, he said. It didn’t serve its purpose—to show the Youth’s first frightening impression of war.
Huston said that the shot would be just fine—all it needed was a darker print. “The body is too light, that’s all,” he said impatiently.
Reinhardt still looked troubled. “There is no surprise,” he said,
“It’ll be fine, Gottfried,” Huston said.
Dixon Porter had been promoted from extra to bit player. He was now one of the ragged veteran soldiers taunting the Youth and the other recruits. Huston sprayed Porter’s face with water, then threw dirt in his face, and finally told him to roll around in a puddle of mud, all of which was intended to make him look tough. Another veteran was the man who had played dead. He was a painter and steeplejack named Jack O’Farren, and while he was waiting for the shot to be taken, he handed out business cards reading “The Sky’s the Limit with Jack O’Farren” to all the recruits. Two of the other veterans, a real-estate salesman named Smith and a Chico State College art student named Feingold, rolled in patches of river moss, on their own initiative, after Huston had ordered them to roll in mud. They looked wonderful, he told them. He seemed exhilarated. He led the veterans in loud, boisterous laughter for their scene, slapping his knee and guffawing, and told the veterans they were great, just great; after the shot was taken, he led the spectators in applause for the performance.
With a good deal of zest, Huston then prepared to film the scene in which the Youth comes upon the body of a dead officer propped up against a tree at the edge of the woods. The effect, according to the script, was to be that of a cathedral interior, with the rays of the sun breaking through a thick haze of battle smoke. Huston showed the extra playing the dead man how he should stare open-eyed in death at the tops of the tall trees, and then he showed Murphy how he should approach the sight and move back in slow, hypnotized fascination. Then Huston switched back to the role of the dead officer. He seemed to more than identify himself with the characters; the identification extended to the scene as a whole, including the tree. He sat against the tree, his hand clutching his sword, and again the look of death came into his eyes. Quickly he rose and strode back to the Youth’s position, and again he demonstrated his idea of how one reacted when one came upon the horror of death. Reinhardt stood by watching. Huston did not talk to him.
That afternoon, Reinhardt appeared depressed. Because he was impatient to have a look at the latest rushes, he went to see them in the afternoon, while Huston was still shooting. I accompanied him to the theatre. Katz was standing outside. He told us to go on in and sit down, and said he would bring Reinhardt a soft drink.
“He’ll bring the wrong thing, you’ll see,” Reinhardt said to me. “He’ll bring me root beer and I hate root beer.”
Katz returned with a bottle of root beer, and the house lights dimmed. There were scenes of the soldiers drilling, of Dierkes marching with Murphy and Mauldin, and of Murphy running through the woods, and, at the end, another take of the dead-man shot that had disappointed Reinhardt. “Much better,” Reinhardt said to me. “I had them print this other take.” He seemed to be working himself toward a more cheerful evaluation of the picture. The drill field, he said, looked just like a Brady photograph. Great atmosphere, he told Katz, but they should have used more men in the scene.
“It looks like a lot of people,” Katz said. “It looks almost crowded.”
Reinhardt did not argue the point. Dierkes looked wonderful, he said. Huston had certainly known what he was doing when he picked him. And in the second print the dead soldier looked like a dead soldier and produced a more startling, shocking effect. Murphy would be very good. “John can charm anybody into anything,” he added.
When we returned to the set, Reinhardt told Huston that the rushes were wonderful. Huston seemed pleased. They walked to a shady spot and sat down.
“Tell me all about it, Gottfried,” Huston said.
“The dead soldier is all right now,” Reinhardt told him. “If I had seen that take, I wouldn’t have kicked at all.”
“It’s all right now, then, Gottfried?” Huston asked, grinning at him for the first time since they had seen the first rushes together.
Reinhardt laughed a relieved laugh and said yes. “And it is really Virginia, because there is a cloud,” he said.
Mrs. Reinhardt had gone back home. “I leave in a great rush, in confusion, in a sudden gust of ambivalence toward Chico, actors, directors, producers, and the Civil War,” she wrote in a terse note of farewell to me. “I am returning to Mocha, who understands me.”
The Legal Department of M-G-M had finally given permission for two hundred and fifty uniformed, armed Chicoans to walk across the Sacramento River while two cameras turned. It was to be one of the most important scenes in the picture, Reinhardt told me, and it had been saved for the last day in Chico. At four that morning, Huston went fishing with Murphy. Four hours later, I drove out to the site of the river crossing with Reinhardt and Band. A hired motor launch took us across the river, and we landed near the spot where the camera had been set up, on a platform. Huston was not around. Rosson, wearing only a pair of swimming trunks, was hovering over his camera, surrounded by his assistants, and Callow was supervising the setting up of a fairly elaborate public-address system, over which he and Huston would call out orders to the men crossing the river. Reinhardt was getting his own movie camera ready for the big scene. “I wish Dore could see this,” he said.
On the other side of the river, the soldiers were lining up.
“Everybody ready for D Day?” one of the cameramen shouted.
Rosson said they had to wait for Huston. He stepped down from the camera platform and hunted around in the tall grass along the riverbank, and there he came upon Huston, sound asleep. Rosson woke Huston, who followed him back to the camera, shaking his head sleepily. The director climbed on the platform and sat there, complaining that he and Murphy had not caught a single fish. He looked around glumly at the frenzied preparations for the crossing.
“Let’s go, pals!” Rosson called.
“I’m scared to death,” Reinhardt said, putting his 16-millimetre camera to his eye.
Huston, over the public-address system, ordered the crossing to begin. The Chicoan army crossed the river and emerged soaked but triumphant. Huston stepped to the public-address system and told the men that they had been just great. “When you see this picture, you’re going to see one of the most impressive scenes ever filmed,” he said. “Now we need some volunteers for another shot. It means going back into the river part of the way.”
“I’ll go,” Dixon Porter said, right up front, as usual.
“Good boy, Dixon,” said Huston.
Porter brightened. “Had to chop water all the way across the first time,” he said.
“You looked wonderful, just wonderful,” said Huston.
Albert Band turned up in a blue uniform, grabbed a rifle, and went into the river with the volunteers, as he had once warned Huston and Reinhardt he would. “It felt wonderful,” he said when he came out.
During the day, a new joke made the rounds. Everybody told everybody else that the river-crossing scene would have to be reshot because one wig had been wrong. Reinhardt put in a call to Dore Schary as soon as he had returned to his hotel. The next time Reinhardt saw Huston, he said he had given Schary a full report on the river crossing.
“Dore said to me, ‘O.K., baby,’ ” Reinhardt told Huston.
Jack Aldworth had made his final log note for the work in Chico (“Wrap up—return to hotel—crews start loading equipment for return to studio”), and the company was getting ready to go back to Los Angeles. Huston, Reinhardt, and Band were going to drive back in Reinhardt’s convertible, and they offered me a lift.
“We take John with us as far as San Francisco,” Band said. He seemed to have been highly stimulated by his recent military experience. “One-hup-reep-foh-lelf-righ-lelf! One-hup-reep—” he chanted, marching in soldierly circles around Reinhardt.
“Albert!” the producer said.
Band stopped and saluted.
“Get my camera, Albert,” said Reinhardt.
Band saluted again and went off, chanting his drill-field refrain. Huston showed up shortly afterward, and read a newspaper while Band stowed the luggage. Reinhardt put his movie camera to his eye and focussed on Huston reading the headline “U. S. TROOPS ATTACK REDS.”
“Put the camera in the back seat, Albert,” said Reinhardt. He sighed and said he was fed up with taking his own movies. “I’ve spent a fortune on this picture already,” he added.
Band climbed into the rear seat, and the rest of us sat up front.
“Well!” Huston said as we started off. “How much ahead of schedule are we, Gottfried?”
“A day and a half,” said Reinhardt.
“Reggie says if we had done that shot of the river crossing in the tank at the studio, it would have cost twelve thousand dollars more than this did. Albert, the box of cigars. Under my coat next to you.”
“We can have the river crossing the screen for a minute,” Huston said.
“That long?” asked Reinhardt, who was driving.
“It’s worth it,” Huston said. He slumped down in his seat, arranging his long legs in a comfortable position. Reinhardt stepped on the gas. “Don’t rush,” Huston said, looking out at passing fields of haystacks. “We’re in no hurry, Gottfried. I like to see this kind of country. I just love to see this.”
Nobody spoke for a while, and then Huston said, “I’m so happy about what we did in Chico.”
“It was not so bad, was it?” Reinhardt said.
“One-hup-reep-foh—” Band said from the rear.
Huston sat up and said slowly, “I made a mistake.”
Reinhardt started.
“On the veterans’ closeups,” said Huston. “I forgot to dolly. The long shot was a dolly shot. I forgot that on the closeups.”
Reinhardt closed his lips around the cigar. Maybe they could do some retakes when they returned to the ranch, Huston said. He closed his eyes and went to sleep. Reinhardt stepped on the gas.
One of the first things Reinhardt did when he got back to his office at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was to write a letter to Dore Schary:
The scenes that were shot at Chico had been pieced together in approximately the order they would follow in the finished picture, and Reinhardt had seen them in this form. Now Huston was looking at the film in a projection room at the studio, and Reinhardt was waiting for him in his own office. Dore Schary had seen the film, too, he said, but L. B. Mayer would not see any part of the movie until it was previewed. “Mayer really hates the picture,” he said. “He will keep on hating it as long as he thinks we do not have a story. He would like to see us rewrite the script and give Stephen Crane’s story a new twist.” He laughed sadly. “It reminds me of the time Sam Hoffenstein was given a Tarzan picture to rewrite. He was told to give it a new twist. He rewrote it—he put it all into Yiddish.” He gave a shy smile. “I love that story. It’s a great story.”
Huston burst into the office, followed by Albert Band.
“The stuff looks awfully good, Gottfried,” Huston said. “It’ll cut like a cinch. I have very few criticisms.”
“What criticisms do you have?” Reinhardt asked.
“Well, practically nothing, amigo,” said Huston. He sat down and, tilting back, put his feet on Reinhardt’s desk.
Reinhardt leaned back and put his feet up on the desk, too. “This is an American custom I have embraced wholeheartedly,” he said. “What criticisms?”
“I’ll say right now Audie is superb,” said Huston. “He’s just marvellous. Sensitive. Alive. This boy is something.”
Reinhardt said, “Will you do me a favor, John?”
“What?” Huston asked.
“Get Audie to smile in the picture,” Reinhardt said. “Just once.”
“All right, Gottfried,” Huston said graciously.
A few days later, it was Huston, rather than Reinhardt, who seemed to have become dissatisfied. He was worried about the script for his picture. Specifically, he told Reinhardt that day, he was worried about the way the picture seemed to be turning into an account of the struggle between the North and the South in the Civil War. “All we want to show is that what the Youth is doing has nothing to do with the big battle,” he said. “The battle has gone on for three days and it’s going to go on for another three days. The Youth gets on the roulette wheel and stays for a little while and then he’s thrown off, and that’s all we have to be concerned with. We have to get something for the end that will show that.” All they had at the end now, Huston said, was a scene in which the Youth’s regiment took a stone wall held by the Confederates, and that was the last action scene in the picture. It bothered him, he said, that there was no big scene at the finish. He felt that something was missing.
Reinhardt said it was better not to strive for climaxes. “Sometimes the quiet ending is the more impressive,” he said. “I always think of the strong effect of the quietness of ‘Till Eulenspiegel.’ The average motion-picture guy would say that it is an anticlimax. I do not think so.” Reinhardt seemed to be getting immense enjoyment out of this kind of discussion.
Huston, ignoring the reference to “Till Eulenspiegel,” merely repeated that they would have to get something new for the ending. “I’d just like the situation to be clarified,” he said. “The Youth and his comrades have been fighting all that day and the day before. Now we open the last battle by following the general on his white horse riding along the lines. We go to the Youth and his regiment. They’re part of this big thing. They capture a fragment of the wall. We begin with a big thing and end with a little thing. If the battle depended on this wall, then we would know what the situation is. But we don’t know quite what happened.”
Reinhardt said, “They take the wall. You think, This is the big thing. They take prisoners. Suddenly they get a command to fall in and march away, and they watch as another regiment is committed.”
“I’d like to know from the standpoint of the battle itself what’s happening,” Huston said. “And I don’t know. I don’t even know.” He laughed, and said he would think of something. “Another thing, Gottfried,” he said, at the end of the discussion, “I don’t like the dead soldier Audie finds in the woods. It looks too stagy.”
Reinhardt protested that he liked the scene.
Huston said that he would do it over.
In his living room every night after dinner, Dore Schary ran the rushes of all the pictures in production at M-G-M, and one night he invited me to come over and see the rushes of “The Red Badge of Courage.” Schary lives in Brentwood, a fashionable residential district, where he has a cream-colored English stucco house. The doormat at the front door bears the words “Schary Manor”—the name of his parents’ Newark home, from which they ran a catering business. In the summer of 1950, Schary was forty-five—one year older than Huston, seven years older than Reinhardt, and twenty years younger than L. B. Mayer. He was born in Newark, the youngest of fìve children. He attended public grade school, quitting at the age of thirteen after an argument with a teacher about a problem in algebra. Six years later, having meanwhile worked off and on in the family business, been a necktie salesman, and tried other jobs, he returned to school and, by attending day and night, went through high school in a year. In 1928, he joined the Stuart Walker Stock Company in Cincinnati as an actor, and remained there for one season. He subsequently spent a summer as assistant recreation director at the Flagler Hotel in the Catskills (the director was Moss Hart), and from that he went on to play small parts in the Broadway productions of “Four Walls” and “The Last Mile.” Schary wrote a play that was not produced but was read by Walter Wanger, who signed him to a hundred-dollar-a-week contract as a writer at Columbia Studio in 1932. He took the job, but at the end of twelve weeks Wanger didn’t pick up his option. Schary stayed on in Hollywood, and several months later he helped write the script of M-G-M’s “Big City,” starring Spencer Tracy. Then, also for M-G-M, he collaborated on the writing of “Boys Town,” for which he won an Academy Award. He next collaborated on “Young Tom Edison” and “Edison, the Man,” and was given a job at M-G-M supervising a studio production unit, which made “Joe Smith, American,” “Journey for Margaret,” and “Lassie Come Home.” After this, Schary joined David O. Selznick’s independent producing company, where he produced “The Farmer’s Daughter” and “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.” The success of these films led to Schary’s appointment as head of production at R.K.O., and for that company he made “Crossfire” and “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.” He returned to M-G-M in the summer of 1948, at the invitation of L. B. Mayer. Before long, in addition to serving as superintendent of production for the whole studio, he himself produced “Battleground,” starring Van Johnson, and “The Next Voice You Hear . . .”
Schary met me at the door of his house with an easygoing, homespun grin and told me that he was just about to view the last of the day’s rushes. He was wearing gray flannel slacks and a blue blazer with white buttons. He took me into a large sitting room. At one end of the room was his wife, who paints under the name Miriam Svet, his three children (Jill, fifteen; Joy, thirteen; and Jeb, eleven) and M-G-M’s chief cutter, Margaret Booth, a thin woman with a thin, lined face. Schary led me to a chair near them, and snapped his fingers. A wide panel in the wall at the opposite end of the room slid up, exposing a white screen, and the room was darkened. A projectionist in a booth behind us showed us “The Red Badge of Courage” scenes. These were followed by Technicolor scenes of Clark Gable and an Indian girl making love on a mountaintop. Schary told Miss Booth how he wanted the scenes trimmed, and the lights came on. The children thanked their father for being allowed to see the movies. He kissed them and sent them off to bed, adding that if they were good they could see the rushes the next night, too. Miss Booth left, and Mrs. Schary excused herself, saying that she had to work on a painting.
Schary sat down near me. The rushes of “The Red Badge of Courage” had been magnificent so far, he told me. “John and Gottfried have proved their point that they could make this picture,” he said. “The original estimate on this picture was close to two million, and our estimators said it would take forty-eight days. John and Gottfried said they could do it in thirty and hold the cost down to a million five. Nobody believed it. But I believed it. I believe that no picture is like any other picture. So I believed the boys could do what they wanted to do. I believe that one of the most debilitating things is to have too large a frame of reference.”
Before production started, Schary said, Huston and Reinhardt had seemed almost overwhelmed with doubt, and he had had to steady them. They had come to see him at home, when he was ill. “They were so concerned I went over the whole thing with them. I said, ‘I have no way of comforting you guys by telling you that this is going to be a great picture. I only know that John is a brilliant director. The script is wonderful. This can be an inspiring picture. I don’t think anybody will be able to say it’s a bad picture. Let’s follow our first hunches and first instincts, and let’s make the picture! Let’s make it as efficiently and as economically and with as much enthusiasm as we can. Let’s stop thinking about it as an if picture. It’s to be made. That’s all.’ From that time on, everything has just gone zoom.”
Schary gave me a candid look. “I love John,” he said. “That guy will live forever. He’s a hearty, tough soul. When he wants something from you, he sits down next to you and his voice gets a little husky, and pretty soon you’re a dead pigeon. He wanted Audie for the Youth and he got him.” He shrugged benevolently. “A creative man, when he wants to win a point, he uses effective and dramatic arguments.” Schary shrugged again. “I love to do this imitation of John when he says hello to you,” he said. He did the imitation—getting up and giving a quarter twist to his body and saying “hel-lo”—and then sat down and chuckled at his performance. “I had visualized the Youth as a taller, blonder, freckle-faced kind of kid, sort of a younger Van Johnson,” he continued. “I said, ‘John, you’re a big ham. If you were twenty years younger, you’d love to play this part yourself.’ He said I was right. That’s the kind of guy I had in mind—a guy with an odd, interesting kisser, with hair that falls down in front. But in the final test, I was sold on Audie. John never lost his hunch, and now he’s got something there. Great guy, John. He’s always flying back and forth. He goes here, there, everywhere, in a plane. A schlemiel like myself gets on a plane and it crashes. I love John.”
Schary grinned broadly. “Show business!” he said. “I’m crazy about show business. I’m crazy about making pictures. All kinds of pictures. But my favorites are the simple, down-to-earth pictures, the ones about everyday life. ‘The Next Voice You Hear . . .’ was that kind of picture. I’m crazy about that picture. I love it.” Schary went on to say that he enjoyed seeing the rushes every night. “I like to reaffirm myself,” he said. “The biggest job is the transfer of an image to the screen. For ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ I had an image in mind of dark-blue uniforms against light, dusty roads. This was an image that John moved successfully into the realm of production.” Schary gave a professorial nod. “The boys are making an impressive picture. The only controversy about ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ is whether it will be a success or a failure. It’s as simple as that.” ♦