When Hollywood Was Golden - Part 2: Jump Cut: When Was The Golden Age?

[ JUMP CUT ]
When Was The Golden Age?

So it is 1969 and the Navy has ordered me to Hollywood. I’ll talk about how that happened a bit later, but what does that have to do with the Golden Age of Hollywood?

Well, not much at the time since the Golden Age had been dead for at least ten years. There are as many stories about when the Golden Age took place as there are people who write about it. Some say it started in the early days of Hollywood, when the Star system first came in; the days of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon, Mary Pickford, Pauline Frederick (no relation), and many others.

As a movie fan from the time I was four, I am entitled to my opinion, which goes like this. Sound came in in 1927, and for many years they did not know what to do with it. The films were stiff, stilted, and mostly boring. There was little music, and what there was sounded like tin cans banging together. By the middle Thirties, things had gotten a lot better, The Star system had gotten bigger and better, as were the films themselves. Each studio had not only a roster of Stars; Gable, Flynn, Cagney, Robinson, Bette Davis, Stanwyck, Arthur, Lombard. MGM boasted “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven” And it was almost true, cinemawise anyway. Each major studio was something like a little city, even down to having their own fire and police departments. Major employees; actors, directors, producers, were under contracts that were both limiting and lengthy, but the reality of the Great Depression kept down signs of discord, at least for quite awhile.

The Majors players were MGM, Warners, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Colombia, who cranked out fifty films a year, plus cartoons, newsreels, and short subjects of all kinds. For the average moviegoer, which by 1941 meant even me, it was heaven, admission was usually well under and quarter, and you even might have a chance to win a set of dishes. It was also a great baby sitter, though my parents had to sit through Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo twice to keep me quiet.

JUMP CUT, and we are back to 1969, and I’m still in the Navy in Hollywood.

Click on this Google Search bar to see what was really happening in 1939!

No, wait! I want you to Google great movies made in 1939. That adventure will tell you more about how big movies had become to the American public, than anything I could come up with in the next few paragraphs.

For in 1969 you see, I began to gain entry to the Studios and meet the Stars of the Golden Age, who were not only working, but still thriving. The days of fads, phonies and pseodo stars, were well into the future we now find ourselves living in. So, return with us now, to those golden days of yesterday, when I began to meet and even work with, some of the cinema idols that I had looked up to as a child. John Frederick rides again. More or less. The less comes first.

After countless promises of future employment after I left the active duty Navy, I soon found our what Hollywood promises mean. Nothing, and that even after I had obtained for Universal studios, an entire aircraft carrier that was set to be mothballed, so that they could film their sci- fi movie Silent Running more cheaply. I also aided a producer how to make The Last Detail, a Navy themed film that starred Jack Nicholson, without Navy cooperation. Oh, those promises. Off to the unemployment line, but a good friend was able to put me on temporary active duty for two weeks every so often, making Navy spots for local TV. I was learning my craft.

One morning in 1972 I got a call from the Executive Officer of a Destroyer Squadron in Long Beach, who asked if I had worked at the Navy Public Affairs Office in Hollywood. I answered in the affirmative, and he followed with another question. “Do you know anything about making movies?” I did not hesitate. “I know everything about making movies,” I lied. This bit of false bravado led to a lifesaving 120 days of active duty during which I was to make a movie out of 12,000 feet of film that was already ‘in the can’. No new footage and no retakes possible. It would be my University and Graduate School education in Film 101.

Reserve Destroyer Squadron 27 consisted of 4 overage Destroyer Escorts from WWII. They were manned by a skeleton crew of Regular Navy personnel, to be augmented in a crisis by the ‘weekend warriors’ of the Naval Reserve.

One of the Reservists, a Chief Photographers Mate, had talked the Commanding Officer into filming the Summer training cruise to Hawaii, when the Reservists would come aboard for two weeks, and this blended crew would come together to carry out the Squadron’s mission. There would be ASW, Anti Submarine Warfare, Gunnery, underway refueling and other joint exercises that would test both ships and crews and, hopefully, make for some exciting viewing.

That was the plan, except the Chief had never made a movie before. It also turned out that fully a third of this epic had been shot in and around the bars of Honolulu. The prospect of having to put it all together had driven the Chief to drink, and he had temporarily vanished, only to resurface when he found out that I, like Mighty Mouse, was coming to save the day.

My first Monday in Long Beach, the CO and XO led me to an office that contained an old moviola, a movie projector, a tall stack of film cans, and a hungover CPO. My new bosses wished me luck and departed. How to begin? The Chief looked my way with red eyed hope. “I’d like to see the script”, I said. The Chief handed me a single sheet of paper. “This isn’t a script, it’s a shot list!” I had learned something in that two years in Hollywood after all. The Chief seemed quite disappointed that his script wasn’t a script. “That’s IT???”, I offered in a decibel level that my wife always called ‘yelling’. I calmed down. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I wanted to see what we had, all of it. I tried viewing the footage on an old, chattering Moviola, but the image was too small. We didn’t have a screen, so we projected the ‘movie’ on the bilious green the Navy uses to adorn its bulkheads/walls.

The first scene(s) featured a sailor wearing a chef’s hat and a white mask. The sailor stood facing the camera behind a cutting board. Picking up a cleaver and a head of lettuce, he began to chop, and chop, and chop. The scene dragged on for what seemed like an hour, though it could not have been more than two minutes.

As it droned on, I noticed that the Chief had perked up, his eyes gleamed, he was besotted by the images he had created. He caught me eyeing him and confided, “He does tomatoes next” You could have heard me across the street…

“Not in my fucking movie he doesn’t!”

At this point, as my screenwriter friends would say, “Let’s cut to the chase”, or at least, “The end of the chase”. We finished the movie in 120 days. It had a title, Operation Readiness and it was narrated by a star, Naval Reserve Captain Glenn Ford. I watched every foot of that 12 thousand feet of film over a dozen times. I found enough action footage; 5 inch guns firing, crews racing to General Quarters, Bridge Watch teams carrying out orders, and other decisive action shots that I could put in the film every two or three minutes to keep viewers awake and continue to tell the story that the Navy wanted to hear. We had a successful preview, my bosses were happy, and it was shown more than once on Long Beach TV. There were a few dissenters. My dad, not one for effusive compliments, offed this comment. “Not very good is it?” I loved my dad, besides I agreed with him and I replied, “No, dad, it isn’t, but the people I made it for think it’s Gone With The Wind, and who am I to say nay?”

For the first time I had ‘a product’ in hand and things began to turn almost immediately. I was selected to write and produce another Navy film, The Turning Point, that starred Dick Van Dyke. My next assignments were Navy, though I did them as civilian.

Flight From Yesterday and Wings of Eagles, Wings of Gold, were made to raise funding a new Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, a museum which is today one of South Florida’s major tourist attractions. A high school friend, Jim Drury, who starred in the long running series as The Virginian, narrated Yesterday, while Rod Serling, a Twilight Zone idol of mine, was the voice of Wings of Eagles, Wings of Gold.

I have a copy of the script of that film and it signed, “To John, for a solid job of writing, Rod Serling.” I thought I was on my way, and I was, though it was never going to be easy.

Who needs easy anyway?

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Our next story will take a look at the downside of the Studio system during the Golden Age, and what happened to hasten its demise, as well as what happened to those great stars that were under studio contracts.

If you haven’t ready my book, StarCatcher: A Real Life Hollywood Fantasy, you should. In fact, I got a special deal for you. Click on the LOOK INSIDE picture to the right, and you can get a FREE preview of the first two chapters of my book in the Kindle edition, whatever that means. If you like it, I’d love for you to buy a copy to read the rest. You can click on the link on the preview to do that. Your purchase will help me to continue to cover the costs of doing stories like these and quite possibly, help me to write a second book!