Filming without tears

Larry Adler

Adventures with D. W. Griffith Karl Brown (Seeker and Warburg £4.00)

The book is more than its title, being a collection of yarns about some extra-ordinary perfectionists in the early days of Hollywood. Griffith wanted the best and the best wanted to work with Griffith.

Karl Brown, who started as a still photographer, got a job with Griffith's cameraman, the great Billy Bitzer, by nagging, wheedling and flattering Bitzer into hiring him.

He starts off describing Griffith's working methods. When lining up a shot, he would start to shadowbox a "one-man. exhibition match," Brown called it. It seemed to be therapy for Griffith.

Brown overloads with technical details. The cues on the film slate (Brown invented the slate numbering technique for listing film scenes) might read, "MM ER MRH PSRH X 4 35 4.5." Now does that entry grab you? Do you ache to know what it means? Neither do I, but Brown sits you down in class and lectures to you. He describes film developing "He (Joe Aller) used the standard metol-hydroquinone-sodas but with a difference that consisted mostly of heavy on the hydroquinone, don't forget the metabisulphate and administer the bromide." Well, absolutely, and I couldn't have said it better myself. But who gives a damn? And who are Brown and his editor, Kevin Brownlow, aiming for? These details, and they festoon the book, do nothing for the general reader except to get in the way, a pity, because Brown's stories are fascinating.

He has some great quotes from Griffith on the set. Griffith watched what Brown describes as "a goggle-eyed, wobbly-gaited, dim-witted idiot-type" shamble across the set. "Ah, "murmured Griffith, "masturbation is a dreadful thing!"

Brown divides directors into three categories, Teachers, Showers and Tyrants. The teachers explained everything, and he quotes W. S. Gilbert saying to his Iolanthe chorus girls, "A little more virginity if you please, ladies."

The showers were hams who out-acted the actors. The tyrants were bulldozers.

"Griffith fell into none of these convenient pigeonholes. He did not teach or preach, he did not act things out, and strangest of all, he never knew what he wanted except in a broad general way."

Griffith's way was to rehearse, ceaselessly, with cast, crew, carpenters, errand-boys, everybody. They would improvise, endlessly, until Griffith "felt" what would work. He quotes Da Vinci: "Trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle." In a kitchen scene Bitzer said that, as Griffith wanted to do it, "we won't be able to see her (Mae Marsh's5 face." Griffith replied: "If we see her face, it will be Mae Marsh washing dishes. If we see only her back and arms, it will be every woman in the audience washing dishes. We'll play it with her back to the camera."

There is an hilarious incident which Brown bravely tells aginst himself. Griffith wanted a drooping lily, to portray lost innocence. Brown worked for hours, reasoning that a picture every 10 seconds ought to work. When the finished product was ready, everyone

came to the projection room to see the result. Well, as Brown describes it, that drooping lily was the greatest example of phallic symbolism in defeat that ever was. The audience, all pros, grew demented with laughter. Griffith said: "That is without doubt the damndest thing I have ever seen."

Not that Brown uses such terms as 'phallic symbolism.' He is surprisingly coy in sexual references, making them more obscene, to my mind, than had he used blunt language. He drops his guard once, when quoting director Lloyd Ingraham's advice to Dorothy Gish, in a comedy sequence. "Now honey, when you open that telegram ... you get so excited that you pee a ring around yourself."

People like W. S. Van Dyke, Monte Blue and Erich van Stroheim worked as crowd handlers for Griffith. They coundn't handle elephants, though. In the fall of Babylon, for Intolerance, the elephants were supposed to push towers towards the walls but, being male and female elephants they were more interested in each other than pushing towers. Griffith had to fire the males (I'd like to have been present at that moment) and let the females do the tower-pushing. And you think you've got problems?

Intolerance came out at the wrong time. When Griffith began work, the US was isolationist. I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier, to Kill Some Other Mother's Darling Boy, was a hit song. Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term on the slogan, "He kept us out of war."

But the film Intolerance was a year and a half in the shooting. By then the Lusitaniahad been sunk, Nurse Cavell executed, the Germans were wreaking havoc with U-boat warfare (one had even entered New York harbor) and the US was spoiling for war.. Sauerkraut was re-named, so help me, Liberty Cabbage and frankfurters became hot dogs. (In World War Two, in New York, vichysoisse was titled DeGaullesoisse. It tasted the same.) Griffith's crowd-handler, von Stroheim, became a star because he could epitomise the dreaded Hun, the Prussian monster. He became The Man You Love To Hate. Intolerance was a flop, though it did better in England where, as Kevin Brownlow points out, the public took the film to be on their side.

Brownlow, in his introduction, considers Brown's book "the most exciting, the most vivid, and the most perceptive volume of reminiscence ever published on the cinema." That, I think, is over-gilding the drooping lily. It is a damned good book but it might have been better as two books, one for the pure student of film-technique, amd this one, with the science left out, for the fan, albeit the intelligent fan.

A yarn not in the book, because it's about DeMille, reminds me of Griffith and his headaches on Intolerance. During the making of The Ten Commandments they got to the scene involving the storming of Jericho. DeMille positioned three cameras, one to take the beginning of the charge, two at the side, to photograph the armies as they swept past and the third at the walls themselves. It could only be shot once, of course, because those walls were going to come tumbling down. They rehearsed all night and at dawn everything was ready. DeMille cued the action and the charge began. It was magnificent. Then DeMille called to his crew.

"Camera one, okay?" "Boss, I'm sorry, but the sprockets jammed and we didn't get a thing." "Kee-rist!" said De Mille. "Camera two you all right?"

"Boss, we didn't allow for the dust. They raised such a cloud that I don't think we got anything worth using." "Oh my God. Camera three, what about you?" "Any time you're ready, boss!"

Larry Adler, the American musician, is now resident in London.