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Archive for the 'Directors: Sturges' Category
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS: A usable past
Hellzapopppin' (1941).
DB here:
By now everybody is used to allusionism in our movies—moments that cite, more or less explicitly, other films. But we tend to forget that movies have been referencing other movies for a long while. One classic form is parody, as when Keaton's The Three Ages (1923) makes fun of Intolerance (1916). Another example occurs in Me and My Gal (1932). Spencer Tracy tells Joan Bennett that he just saw a movie called "Strange Innertube," and then Raoul Walsh gives us a comic version of the inner monologues used in Strange Interlude (1932).
Some allusions are in-jokes that sail by most viewers. Almost everybody notices when Walter Burns (Cary Grant) in His Girl Friday mentions that a character played by Ralph Bellamy looks like "that fella in the movies—you know, Ralph Bellamy." Probably fewer people catch the later line, Walter's threat to the authorities: "The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat." Grant's real name, of course, was Archibald Leach.
Week-End at the Waldorf (1945) is a sort of updating of Grand Hotel, so when one character remarks that a plot twist "is straight out of the picture Grand Hotel," we probably catch the self-reference. But the other character piles on the allusions by replying: "That's right. I'm the baron, you're the ballerina, and we're off to see the wizard." Did people notice MGM congratulating itself twice? And you wonder how many viewers catch the spoiler in Hellzapoppin' (1941), released only four months after Citizen Kane. Chic Johnson spots a Rosebud sled hanging outside an igloo and remarks, "I thought they burnt that."
At the beginning of the 1940s, two novice directors seemed to be bringing fresh air to Hollywood cinema. Preston Sturges and Orson Welles were identified with innovative approaches to genre and storytelling. So we might expect them to inject something new into this practice of alluding to other movies. I think they did.
Consider a particular strategy that Sturges and Welles toyed with. Today, we enjoy it when a director treats characters in non-sequel films as sharing a fictional world. Tarantino imagines shifting his characters or brand names (e.g., Red Apple cigarettes) from movie to movie.
When I sell my movies, I retain the rights to characters so I can follow them. I can follow Pumpkin and Honey Bunny or anybody and it's not Pulp Fiction II.
Jackie Brown (1997) features Michael Keaton as FBI agent Ray Nicolet, who also appears, played by Keaton, in Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998). The tactic fitted these directors' adaptations of novels by Elmore Leonard, who tends to carry over characters from book to book.
It's a bit surprising to see this impulse in Sturges and Welles too. The governor and the political boss in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) are McGinty and the Boss in The Great McGinty (1940), and they're played (uncredited) by the same actors. A newspaper glimpsed in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) contains a column, "Stage Views," by drama critic Jed Leland, a major character in Citizen Kane (1941).
Today fans are used to spotting things that most viewers might not get, but in the early 1940s, it was rarer. I've proposed earlier that sometimes Hollywood's creative community is addressing not the broad audience but its own members, perhaps letting dedicated outsiders "overhear" the conversation. One example would be the nearly-hidden jokes that can be wedged into the background or on the edges of the action. In an entry about a year ago, I considered how sequences around the small-town movie theatre in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek carry barely-noticeable jabs at current films, mostly those by Sturges' home studio Paramount. And Luke Holmaas has pointed out to me that Hail the Conquering Hero contains a billboard advertising Morgan's Creek—a sort of joking product-placement. Today, I want to suggest that Welles moved onto the same terrain but followed even more circuitous paths.
The past, not recaptured
Make pictures to make us forget, not remember.
Comment card from first preview of The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942.
The Magnificent Ambersons is, everybody knows, a film about the past. Its story action begins around 1885 and concludes just before World War I. Most of the plot concentrates on the decline of the Amberson family, due partly to financial mismanagement and the willful pride of Isabel Amberson's son, George Minafer. Parallel to that decline is the development of the town into a city and the rise of the automobile company founded by Eugene Morgan, a failed suitor for Isabel's hand. A major turning point comes when, after Wilbur Minafer's death, Isabel is left a widow. She'd like to marry Eugene, but she declines because George is opposed. At the same time, George tries to win Eugene's daughter Lucy. After the death of Isabel and her father Major Amberson, the family is destitute and George must find a way to support his aunt Fanny. Struck by a car, George is hospitalized, and only then does he reconcile with Eugene and Lucy.
After weak previews, the film was drastically recut, and some new scenes were shot. The original version has not yet been found, so we're left with a ruined masterpiece. Still, there's enough there to let us appreciate Welles's effort to make sense of a crucial period of American history. Old money was giving way to modern, technology-driven fortunes; Eugene's auto company is the Dell Computers of its day. The film also evokes changes in urban life, with shifting property values and rising pollution shown as consequences of progress. It's the most downbeat of the "nostalgia" cycle of the 1940s, which includes Strawberry Blonde (1941), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and Centennial Summer (1946).
Many other films have sought to present the past, recreating the settings and costumes and props of an era. But Ambersons is about pastness. It conveys a melancholy recognition that things are always changing, that we struggle to make sense of events only after it's too late to affect them. It's a film centered on missed opportunities and what might have been. Eugene might have married Isabel when they were young, but his drunken serenade turns her against him. If George weren't such a prig, he might have reconciled himself to Isabel's remarriage; only at the end, kneeling in prayer, does he seem to realize how his stubbornness cheated many people of happiness. The original ending would have shown Eugene visiting Fanny in a boarding house, with her long and unspoken love for him counterpointing his suggestion that he's been true to Isabel.
Ambersons carries its sense of an unrecoverable past into the very texture of its telling. At first, the aura of things gone by is given by Welles' voice-over narration. In affectionate comedy he introduces us to habits and routines of an era of streetcars and changing men's fashions. After Eugene's botched serenade, the townsfolk add their voices to the chorus with comments on the scandal. More backstory is given when George is shown growing from a spoiled boy to an arrogant young man. Our narrator recalls "the last of the great Amberson balls." Eugene arrives, a widower, bringing his daughter Lucy, and George begins to court her that night.
Now the narrator's past-tense explanation withdraws for some time. Instead, characters take up the burden of narrating the past. "Eighteen years have passed," says Isabel's brother Jack at the ball. "Or have they?" Before Eugene dances with Isabel, he remarks that the past is dead. Unfortunately, it won't stay buried. The old romance between Isabel and Eugene will be rekindled, and bad business decisions and George's spendthrift ways catch up with the family.
Welles's plot construction relies on ellipsis. The scenes skip over major story events—Wilbur's death, the decline of the family fortune, Gene's second courtship of Isabel, and Isabel's death. So much occurs offscreen that we are left to play catch-up. We must listen to characters report on what has just happened, or reflect on the more distant past. The film is built on recollection and reaction. We don't see Fanny at Isabel's deathbed; she simply flies out of the room to embrace her nephew: "She loved you, George." We don't see George and Isabel on their European trip; we learn of it from the doleful Uncle Jack, who thinks that Isabel is falling sick. This refracted narration allows Jack to voice his concern—he's probably the one Amberson whose judgments we trust—and Gene to display helpless, rigid sorrow at the news.
One of Ambersons' most famous scenes, the long take of George and Fanny in the kitchen, is characteristic. Under her questioning, he explains that Gene and Isabel were starting to reunite at his college graduation. A peppy nostalgia movie would have shown us that cheerful moment on the campus, but Welles channels the information through George's insensitive report and Fanny's uneasy questions—and the scene climaxes with her breaking down in tears. As ever, melancholy wins out. As a result of George's telling, Fanny will plant the suspicion that gossip about Isabel has been destroying the family's good name.
Similarly, another film's finale would show the reconciliation of the young lovers, George and Lucy, in the hospital. Instead Welles' original script presents that moment through Eugene's somber report of it to Fanny in her boarding house. (In the version we have, we get the report in the hospital corridor.)
Sometimes, the gaps in time and action are abetted by the studio's reediting. In the present version, we learn about Aunt Fanny's failed investments later than in the original version. But even then the information would have been presented after the fact. On the whole, the sense of the sadly unalterable past is built into Welles' screenplay. As each scene unfolds, we get news about what has happened in the gap since the last scene, or what has happened years before. At the railroad station, Uncle Jack, about to depart, recalls a woman he left here long ago. "Don't know where she lives now–or if she is living." Here the pastness he evokes is familiar to us from earlier in the film: "She probably imagines I'm still dancing in the ballroom of the Amberson mansion." At the limit, Major Amberson's garbled fireside reverie takes us back to the origins of life: "The earth came out of the sun, and we came out of the earth . . . so–whatever we are must have been in the earth." Now the past is primeval.
Retro as remembrance
Welles enhances the aura of pastness through specific film techniques. Critics have rightly been alert to creative choices that carry over from Citizen Kane: looming sets, drastic deep-focus cinematography, low angles, chiaroscuro, and long takes, often employing splendid camera movements. But the film displays some unique choices that are, historically, anachronistic.
The most noticeable old-time technique concludes the idyll in the snow. Jack, Fanny, Lucy, and George are riding in Eugene's horseless carriage. This, one of the few scenes that doesn't replay the past in its conversation, is given special treatment as a moment out of time. The iris out that concludes the scene is something of a visual equivalent to the old song the riders sing, "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."
Similar is the vignetting that softens the edges of the opening sequences, starting with the first shot showing the streetcar stopping for the lady of the house.
Welles' visual techniques aren't faithful to the period when the story action takes place. Assuming that the snow idyll occurs around 1904, the iris wouldn't have appeared in films of that time. And the earlier period of the streetcar shot and changing men's fashions probably predates the invention of cinema. But by 1942, these techniques were associated with silent film generally and give a cinematic tinge of "oldness" to the action.
I say "by 1942" because recent years had made intellectuals especially conscious of film history. Several books, notably the 1938 translation of Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach's Histoire du cinéma (translated as The History of the Motion Picture) and Lewis Jacobs' sweeping The Rise of the American Film (1939) had concentrated on the stylistic innovations of Porter, Griffith, and other pioneers. With some theatres reviving silent classics like Caligari and The Birth of a Nation, cinephiles in urban centers had some opportunities to see silent movies. Most notably, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library was founded in 1935 and under the curatorship of Iris Barry, began building a permanent archive and screening retrospectives.
MoMA also assembled many films into traveling 16mm programs that could be rented by schools, museums, libraries, and other institutions. Silent films also circulated in 8mm and 16mm prints from private companies like Kodascope and Castle Films. Throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, silent comedies were the most popular; Chaplin reissued The Gold Rush in a sound version in 1942. Welles's interest in silent slapstick is shown in the recently discovered pastiche, Too Much Johnson (1938), which evidently owes a good deal to Entr'acte (1924), a MoMA-canonized classic.
Ambersons offers other, less obvious allusions to old cinema. One cluster of them comes during George and Lucy's stroll along the sidewalk. George, somewhat petulantly, is insisting that his trip abroad with his mother may last a long time. "It's goodbye, Lucy." Angling for a declaration of devotion from her, he gets brittle, agreeable indifference. When he has stalked off, we learn that she is actually quite shaken by the prospect of separation. Watching the dramatic interplay in this long traveling shot, we are probably not likely to pay attention to the posters the couple pass outside the Bijou theatre.
The advertisements announce movies that could have played the Bijou in 1912. The ones in the rear of the lobby are impossible to make out, and there's one outside I can't be sure of. (See the codicil.) Raking the frames on DVD and on a good 35mm print, I've been able to discern The Bugler of Battery B (1912), Her Husband's Wife (aka, How She Became Her Husband's Wife, 1912), Ten Days with a Fleet of U.S. Battleships (1912; in the foyer), and The Mis-Sent Letter (1912). There were several Jesse James films circulating in 1911-1912, but one two-reeler named for the bandit (at the bottom of the second frame here) seems a likely candidate.
These casual background details betray extraordinary fussiness on the part of Welles and his colleagues. Few viewers would pay attention to all the posters, and very few viewers would realize that they're all from the same year. It's one thing to include authentic automobiles from the era, as car fanciers would be sure to spot mistakes. But 1912 two-reelers? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the filmmakers put the posters in to satisfy themselves. (If you're skeptical, I'd ask: If you'd thought of it, wouldn't you do it?)
There's more. The most prominent hoarding advertises a Western, The Ghost at Circle X Camp (1912), from Gaston Méliès. Surely the name also evokes Gaston's brother Georges, by then an established pioneer of film history and a figure doubtless known to Welles. Is this a sideswiping tribute from one magician-cineaste to another?
There's also a deliberate anachronism. Tim Holt, who plays George, was the son of action star Jack Holt. A lobby card over the box office announces "Jack Holt in Explosion."
I can find no trace that such a film existed. Moreover, films of that era seldom identified the main actors in advertising, and in any case Holt was not a featured player in 1912. In order to create an in-joke/homage, Welles seems to have prepared a poster for a fictitious film—as Sturges did with Chaos over Taos and Maggie of the Marines in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.
Perhaps the most sneaky allusion comes at the very end. After the florid voice-over credits for technical contributions, Welles intones: "Here's the cast." Medium-shots of the actors dissolve into one another as the voice-over identifies them. The images recall photographic portraits from the nineteenth century. They also seem to be a variant of those 1930s opening credits that catch the players in shots extracted from the movie to come. Still, there's something peculiar about these.
Some of the actors look straightforwardly out at us, as we'd expect.
But others turn their heads slightly or shift their gaze, toward or away from us.
Sometimes the shift is tiny, as with the Joseph Cotten cameo. But the tactic is made into a joke when Tim Holt, staying in character, snaps his glance furtively to the camera.
Why these fillips? Here's my conjecture. Some 1910s films, from both America and Europe, introduced their casts with shots of the actors standing as if on a theatre stage. The actors then looked to left, then right, pretending to take in all sides of a live audience. Here's an example from Reginald Barker's The Wrath of the Gods (1914), featuring actor Thomas Kurihara.
None of the 1910s examples I know was framed as closely as Welles's shots are. But I surmise that Welles offered a modernized variant of a minor silent-film convention. If this is right, it has to be an allusion more far-fetched than even the ones Sturges supplied.
Maybe I've gone too far. Once filmmakers start playing these games, overreach is a constant temptation. In any case, I think there's enough evidence that Welles, like Sturges, was invoking early film history as a way of reinforcing the overall pastness-strategy of his film.
I'd go further and speculate that Welles's obsessively pinpointed allusions may have stirred a competitive spirit in Sturges. Now we can see the Miracle of Morgan's Creek tracking shot past the movie house posters as a variant, two years later, of the angle Welles chose for his long take.
And perhaps the audacious inclusion of footage from The Freshman (1925) at the start of The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947) was sparked by Welles' virtuosically faked newsreel in Citizen Kane. As the two boy wonders from the East took advantage of the biggest train set a kid could play with, they may have egged each other on.
For more on the practice of allusionism and world-building see The Way Hollywood Tells It. Thanks to Ben Brewster for information on Jack Holt's career. My quotation of the Ambersons preview card comes from Simon Callow's Orson Welles vol. 2: Hello Americans (Viking, 2006), 87.
The Holt and Méliès posters are mentioned in the cutting continuity in Robert L. Carringer's The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction (University of California Press, 1993), 214. Alas, the other posters aren't specified.
The poster that I haven't identified, and that drives me nuts, sits underneath The Bugler of Battery B. Here's a blowup from 35mm.
The poster's illustration, which we can glimpse more fully in a later phase of the shot, shows a man thrashing an American Indian while a woman stretches out her arms in the cabin in the background. At first I thought the first words are The Car, but I can find no film from the period that begins with that phrase. (It would fit more closely with Ambersons thematically than most of the other titles, but in fact "car" wasn't then a common term for automobile.) Then I thought it was The Coin Box Girl, but again no such film seems to have existed, and that title is hardly in keeping with the illustration. Any ideas?
Yes, I know. Welles would have had a good big belly laugh at these efforts.
P.S. 10 June: I've been pursuing some readers' leads about the still-mysterious poster. In the meantime, Joseph McBride has has corresponded with me with more ideas and information about Ambersons. Joe is the author of many books, including What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless, and Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit, a meticulous study of those two murders. He is one of the world's top Welles scholars, so naturally I'm happy to pass along his thoughts.
AMBERSONS is my favorite film, as you probably know, even in its partly ruined state. I think all your analysis is acute, and I like your focus on the self-conscious awareness of pastness that Welles conveys and dissects in the film. The film is redolent of Welles's youth and even more so of the period before he was born (the period for which I find most of us are most nostalgic). Nostalgia was considered a neurosis in the pre-modern era, a sign of inability to adjust to reality rather than the warm-and-fuzzy state it's thought of being today. There's a deep melancholy throughout the film, even if Welles, good magician that he is, distracts us with misdirection via comedy in the beginning while simultaneously laying the seeds of destruction and foreshadowing George's "comeuppance," etc.
Last month I was at the Welles conference in Woodstock, Illinois, which has preserved much of its nineteenth-century flavor, including the Opera House where Welles put on TRILBY (but most of the Todd School for Boys he attended is gone). That town and its main square, with bandstand and Civil War monument, seems very Ambersonian as well. I have always seen AMBERSONS as Welles's most deeply personal film, and his claim that Eugene Morgan is partly based on his father (and that Booth Tarkington knew his father) is noteworthy, as is George Amberson Minafer's evil-twin resemblance to the young George Orson Welles.
I would only add to your insights that there was much more about the loss of the Amberson fortune in the full version of the film (you allude to that a bit), even though, as you intriguingly note, Welles employs an elliptical style throughout. Welles's use of ellipsis is Lubitschean (he considered Lubitsch a "giant"), although used for somewhat different reasons, Welles doing so mostly to condense the story in witty ways (and, as you observed to me, focus on characters' emotional reactions to offscreen events, in the manner of Henry James) and Lubitsch to evade censorship while providing subtle rather than blunt treatments of sex. And some of Lubitsch's German films, as you know, start with specially posed head shots of him and his main actors, somewhat similar to what Welles does at the end (though he teasingly keeps himself out of frame, partly to stress the voice aspect and also to keep the identification of himself with George stronger). Tim Holt gazing accusingly at us in the end credits is startling — maybe it's not only to keep him in character but also to say, "I'm you."
Welles is terrible (archy, corny, and putting on a phony kid voice) as George in the radio version, which, however, is much like the film in some ways. During the night devoted to radio in the 1978-79 "Working with Welles" seminar I co-hosted for the AFI at the DGA Theater, Welles's longtime associate Richard Wilson and I ran the first ten minutes of the radio show as the soundtrack for the film imagery, and it worked amazingly well. Welles's use of ellipsis in the film recalls his radio work, in which he and his writers would condense a large novel into one hour, etc. The vignettes at the opening of AMBERSONS are very much drawn from radio. He sold the project to RKO's George Schaefer by playing the radio show, though the fact that Schaefer fell asleep before the end might have given them pause.
Welles said he included the "Jack Holt in EXPLOSION" gag did to please Jack when he visited the set. Jack was an action star for Capra before AMBERSONS and turns up in THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, in the scene in which John Ford pays homage to his high school teacher Lucien P. Libby by naming a boat after him. Another of those in-jokes that permeate even classic Hollywood, as you say. Mr. Libby influenced Ford's portraits of Lincoln and other folksy politicians as humorous storytellers.
Welles's early films show a keen awareness of film history and culture, more than he would let on later he knew at that young age. He described THE HEARTS OF AGE to me as a spoof of THE BLOOD OF A POET and LA CHIEN ANDALOU. TOO MUCH JOHNSON is full of film influences and allusions (I think I sent you my essay on the film from Bright Lights. And KANE has its share of in-jokes, such as Gregg Toland interviewing Kane on board a ship and Kane responding with his first words in the film after "Rosebud" — "Don't believe everything you hear on the radio."
Thanks to Joe for corresponding.
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941).
Innovation by accident
DB here:
The old drama is being reenacted before our eyes, and as often happens, Harvey Weinstein plays the villain. The American release version of Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster, which has cut and changed the original, is being decried as a travesty, the dilution of an artist's original conception in the name of what somebody thinks will sell.
I hope to take up The Grandmaster in another blog. For now, I just want to point out the archetype goes back long before Harvey came on the scene. A screenwriter or director comes up with a fresh approach to telling the story. But a producer rules it out as something the audience won't buy, or even understand. Moral: In Hollywood, the creative force is stifled by a money person who insists on doing things as usual.
The 1940s in Hollywood was an era of narrative innovation. It gave us weird dream sequences and insane protagonists and subjective point of view and byzantine flashbacks and talking houses and complicated replays of action we thought we understood. While working on a book on this era, I've begun to wonder what the limits of innovation might be. What could make the boss tell the filmmaker that a particular narrative choice just went too far?
Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy production
A Letter to Three Wives (1949).
One example I found was purely anecdotal, but nifty nonetheless. In preparing the screenplay for Out of the Past (1947; aka Build My Gallows High), screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring wanted to have the story told by a deaf-mute boy. Apart from the fact that the boy plays a minor role in the opening of the film as it was finished, the idea of someone who cannot hear or speak serving as narrator proved to be something of a stretch for the time. Mainwaring reports that the idea was rejected.
That's the kind of thing I wanted to find. Yet my searches sometimes came up with cases where the producer's notes actually resulted in improvements. Take A Letter to Three Wives (1949), justly praised as one of the best films of the 1940s.
John Klempner's original novella (published in 1945) and novel (1946), both titled A Letter to Five Wives, obviously involved two more couples. After some other writers had drafted versions, Vera Caspary was assigned to prepare a treatment. Probably with the input of producer Sol Siegel, she eliminated one couple. Her adaptation already contains much of what is distinctive about the movie as we have it. Instead of the many distributed flashbacks in the originals, the treatment consolidated them into three lengthy ones. At Siegel's suggestion, Caspary brought the three women together on the boat. To Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck we apparently owe the idea that one woman, Deborah, would be the primary vehicle of our sympathy and would initiate and resolve the mystery of whose husband has defected. Above all, Caspary's treatment includes the unforgettable voice-over of the never-seen Addie Ross.
When director Joseph L. Mankiewicz saw Caspary's final adaptation, in effect "A Letter to Four Wives," he declared he "looked upon the Promised Land" and quickly turned it into a screenplay. After reading Mankiewicz's screenplay, Zanuck intervened again , demanding that another wife be lopped off. Mankieiwicz called this "an almost bloodless operation."
It's probably irrelevant that A Letter to Three Wives won that year's Academy Awards for best screenplay and best direction. Even if it hadn't been honored, after reading the original tales and Caspary's adaptation, I have to conclude that the film is the best version of the lot. I suppose it partly goes to show the old rule that bad or so-so books can make very good movies. (Exibit A: The Birth of a Nation; Exhibit B: The Magnificent Ambersons; Exhibit C: The Godfather. Defense rests.) But clearly, the cuts and changes demanded by Siegel and Zanuck improved the property. The "creatives"–Klempner, Caspary, Mankiewicz–were by force majeure steered toward good results.
You can argue, though, that no written version of the film tried to be innovative, except perhaps for the device of Addie's spectral presence. And Mankiewicz declared himself happy to make the adjustments. What about cases in which genuinely bold ideas were curtailed by the powers above? So I looked into two titles that, when released in the producers' cuts, were denounced by their writer-directors.
Two years after Preston Sturges finished and cut his film about the discovery of ether anesthesia, Paramount producer B. G. "Buddy" DeSylva supervised and released a reedited version called The Great Moment (1944). Sturges noted of the film:
It is coming out in its present form over my dead body. The decision to cut this picture for comedy and leave out the bitter side was the beginning of my rupture with Paramount. . . The dignity, the mood, the important parts of the picture are in the ash can.
A second example is a more famous release, Twentieth Century-Fox's All About Eve (1950). After the success of A Letter to Three Wives, Zanuck allowed Joseph L. Mankiewicz to film his three-hour screenplay as a "shooting draft." When Zanuck saw the result, he insisted on cutting it to 138 minutes.
Throughout his life Mankiewicz was an angry man. His interviews and writings excoriate mothers, film festivals, doctors and nurses, Michelangelo Antonioni, television, the American male, theatre operators, Graham Greene, the AFI, PBS, Richard Nixon, Dennis Hopper, The Untouchables (film version), British craft unions, and other malefactors. High on the list was Darryl F. Zanuck. Long before the Cleopatra debacle, Mankiewicz was already carrying a grudge because Zanuck removed a replayed scene from All About Eve. He definitely didn't consider that a bloodless operation.
Zanuck had final cut and he got bored with the same scene shot from different points of view.
Here, I thought, were sterling examples of creators bumping up against what was impermissible. Yet the more I looked, the more I found that the situation couldn't be reduced to the daring director versus the philistine producer. I was forced to consider the possibility that the producers' changes yielded not timid conformity but instead some unpredictable results–things that were themselves novel, in intriguing ways. The suits hadn't intended to do something bold, yet in revising and patching up the films shot by two venturesome directors, they actually found themselves pulled in new directions.
Call it inadvertent innovation. Not surprisingly (this is the 1940s), it involved flashbacks.
Which great moment?
Kitty Foyle (1940).
By the early 1940s, movie flashbacks adhered to several conventions that we still recognize. Typically, we're given a situation, the narrative Now, in which a character is recounting or simply remembering past events. We then move to those events, a shift often signaled by a track-in, a musical cue, a dissolve or other optical effect, and/or sounds from the next sequence mingling with the spoken transition. We may hear the voice-over remarks of the lead-in character at times during the action we see. Once the flashback action is complete, we return to the present, with the character who launched the flashback finishing the testimony or closing off the memory. And if the film includes several flashbacks, they are typically presented chronologically, so that the earliest events from the past are shown before later ones.
Kitty Foyle (1940) offers a clear example. In the present, Kitty recalls her romances. As they develop, we return to the present at key moments to gauge her reactions. For the sake of clarity, the romances themselves are shown to us in 1-2-3 order, tracing the events that lead up to the crisis that launched her memory journey.
Not all flashbacks respect chronology, though. Citizen Kane's first flashback traces Kane's career as the banker Thatcher knew it. His recollections show us Kane as a child, a young man, and then a much older man forced to sell his newspaper empire. The next flashback, as recounted by Kane's business manager Bernstein, takes us back to show Kane as a young man assuming control of his first newspaper. Several years before Kane, Sturges had composed a script based on similarly shuffled chronology. The Power and the Glory (1933), directed by William K. Howard, presents an old man recalling episodes in the life of tycoon Thomas Garner, and those are presented out of 1-2-3 order. (I analyze that film here.)
Sturges was confronted by the problem of order in preparing Triumph over Pain. This project would tell the story of Dr. W. T. G. Morton, the popularizer of surgical anesthetic. Biographical films about scientists and inventors had become a successful cycle in the late 1930s, but Sturges wanted to stay fairly close to the facts. The problem was that Morton's story couldn't lead easily to a triumphant finale. Sturges noted dryly:
Dr. Morton's life, as lived, was a very bad piece of dramatic construction. He had a few months of excitement ending in triumph and twenty years of disillusionment, boredom, and increasing bitterness. . . . To have a play you must have a climax and it is better not to have the climax right at the beginning.
Accordingly, Sturges had somehow to rearrange portions of Morton's life.
Since [the writer] cannot change the chronology of events, he can only change the order of their presentation.
The title Sturges gave to his final version, Great without Glory, indicates its tone. A quasi-documentary prologue hails the modern benefits of anesthesia. We move to the late 1800s, when Morton's friend Eben Frost finds a medal given to Morton now sitting in a pawnshop. He brings the medal to Morton's widow Elizabeth, and as they sit in her parlor, the film's first long flashback starts. It presents the public celebration of Morton's triumph, as he and Eben are driven through the crowded streets.
The ensuing scenes trace the aftermath of his discovery—the fact that he could not patent it, his efforts to build a business on sale of ether bottles, a bout of illness, and then his receiving the medal while he is plowing on his farm.
Sturges' version returns to the narrating frame, as Eben examines some more personal memoirs that Elizabeth has written. The second flashback initiates the play with chronology. It traces events leading up to the action we saw completed at the start of the first one. The plot takes us back to the couple's courtship, the first years of Morton's dentistry practice, and his arduous experiments with ether. He finds prosperity using it on his patients. Challenged to demonstrate his invention in a public surgical operation, he realizes that his demonstration will show his rivals his trade secret. He is about to leave the operating theatre when he sees the patient: a girl about to have her leg amputated. Unable to let her face agony, he turns back to reveal his discovery to his peers.
The plot's true climax is Morton's gesture of sacrifice. Sturges encourages us to see it as a contrast to the way the press and his profession vilified him. During the first flashback, a newspaper cartoon shows Morton preying on innocent patients, as typified by a girl on a gurney.
Sturges expected us, I think, to recall this image when Morton decides to help the girl. In his life, the cartoon came later, but showing it early in the film lets Morton's gesture serve as a rebuke to those who are going to hound him.
After revealing Morton's sacrifice, Great without Glory provides a bitter epilogue. The film ends with a return to the framing situation in Elizabeth's parlor. Eben rises sadly, leaving Elizabeth alone.
Sturges could simply have built his film around Morton's early life and his successful discovery, ending before the decades of poverty that followed. Instead, by focusing his biopic around our failure to appreciate and reward selfless research, he wanted to praise a man who achieved greatness but not the long-lived veneration accorded Edison or Pasteur. Yet showing Morton's fall from grace after the crowd's acclaim meant that the high point of a science biopic would be accomplished far too early in the plot. What we today call the "darkest moment"—Morton's rejection by his public and his poverty—would come too soon. When Sturges showed his cut to his friend John Seitz, a great cinematographer, Seitz asked: "Why did you end the picture in the second act?"
According to Sturges, Buddy DeSylva said the same thing. He was already hostile to Sturges, and after some mixed preview results he set about reshaping the picture. The result is a good example, I think, of unintended innovation.
DeSylva did, as Sturges indicated, "leave out the bitter side" in certain respects. He lopped off the final scene showing the mourning of Eben and Elizabeth. The Great Moment doesn't return to the narrating frame set up from the start of the picture. This is a little disconcerting structurally, but it wasn't unknown at the period. Guest in the House (1944), Dillinger (1945), and other films "forget" the fact that they began with a character recalling the past.
Nor did DeSylva start the plot with Sturges' prologue and narrating frame. He offered something immediately upbeat: Morton and Eben descending to the cheering crowd and riding through the streets to acclaim. This action, surprisingly, takes place during the credit sequence.
By inserting the moment of Morton's triumph at the very start of the movie, before we have even seen a flashback to it, or indeed even know who these people are, DeSylva seems to illustrate the film's title. Our first impression is that Morton's great moment is the public recognition of what the crowds' placards announce is his conquest of pain.
Only after this "flashforward" does the release version settle down to something roughly like Sturges' structure. Eben discovers the medal, brings it to Elizabeth, and elicits her recollections. Some of the scenes are rearranged from Sturges' version; the placement of one, showing Morton sick in bed, seems calculated to lead in to his death (as it doesn't in the Sturges cut). The newspaper cartoon is there, ready to form a parallel with the climax. As in the Sturges version, a return to the narrating frame shows Eben and Elizabeth in the present launching the second big flashback. With other alterations, we go through the couple's romance and marriage, culminating in the discovery of ether and the prosperity of Morton's practice.
DeSylva retains Sturges' climax: the scene when Morton must choose whether or not to reveal his trade secret to his competitors in the public demonstration. Seeing the girl praying on the gurney, he decides to do it. The film ends with him striding into the operating theatre, about to share his discovery. It is here that DeSylva halts the film, without, as we've seen, returning to the frame featuring Eben and Elizabeth.
Both locally and more broadly, the effect is curious. Now Morton's great moment is revealed, as Sturges wished, as the moment of his self-sacrifice, not the moment of his celebrity. But more strangely, without the final frame situation, the film ends just before the opening credits sequence. We could easily imagine the credits as an epilogue, with Morton's entry to his colleagues dissolving to the parade in his honor before the final fade-out. Instead, the film halts and wraps back around itself like a Möbius strip: the last thing we see immediately precedes the first thing we saw.
I'm not trying to make this movie Memento or Primer, but there is something uncanny about the release cut's looped structure. Sturges created a story that was depressing but tidy (prologue, carefully framed flashbacks, epilogue). DeSylva, unable to rewrite Morton's history and apparently reluctant to junk the project, made the story more upbeat but also more untidy. Trapped by Sturges' design, he re-carved it in a uniquely peculiar shape.
Sturges' bold stroke was to switch the two chronological blocks of Morton's life and to make us sense the injustice of Morton's fleeting fame. DeSylva wanted to avoid the grim epilogue in the present and end on an upbeat note. But he did retain the split chronology, so that the contrast between obscurity and fame remains. He inadvertently innovated by making the opening credits preview a scene far ahead in the plot, and then letting the ending twist back to it. By playing the title over the parade, the release version shifts us across two moments, and meanings, of greatness: celebrity and self-sacrifice.
Did Buddy set out to be daring? I don't think so. He faced constrained solutions whichever way he turned, just like us most of the time. More on this matter at the end.
As easy as C-A-C-B-C-B-C
As I mentioned, flashbacks usually sit comfortably in a frame, a well-established present situation that we depart from and return to. The shifts in and out of the past can be eased by various devices, one of which is a voice-over representing the character. The voice-over may be objective, as when a trial witness is testifying, or subjective, representing the "inner voice" of the person remembering what we have in the flashback.
Again, however, a film built out of flashbacks has many options. Coming to direction in the mid-1940s, Joseph L. Mankiewicz was in a position to try his own riffs on current experiments in storytelling.
So, for instance, in House of Strangers (1949), he frames a flashback without a voice-over. The camera coasts up a stairway to a window at night; dissolve to the window in daytime, and pull away to reveal the earlier scene. Our understanding of the time shift is aided by the comparison on the musical track: a phonograph record of a passage from the opera Martha fades out, and in the flashback, the Monetti family patriarch, now alive, is singing it.
Similarly, A Letter to Three Wives (1949) supplies the symmetrical structure in shifting from Deborah to her anxious memories and then back again.
But the voice-over varies from the usual. Instead of hearing her voice asking herself, "Is it Brad?" we hear the voice of Addie Joss, who also narrates the film. The suburban wives' obsession with their rival, who may have run off with one husband, has allowed her to burrow into each woman's consciousness. (In addition, her voice merges with the chugging of the ship to create distortions courtesy of Sonovox.)
House of Strangers is built around one long flashback; A Letter to Three Wives gives us three parallel ones. All About Eve yields yet another variant. Three characters at a banquet recall their experiences with Eve, the dazzling young actress to be given an award. There will be several flashbacks following Eve's career chronologically and skipping from one remembering character to another. Given this plan, Mankiewicz's long version planned for one moderate experiment and one fairly daring one.
The moderate experiment was to eventually eliminate the visual anchoring of the frames. He had planned to start with very clear bookends around the flashbacks and then gradually discard framing scenes. For instance, after Addison DeWitt's voice-over introduces the other characters, including Margo and Karen sitting at his table, Karen's voice-over intervenes. We leave the banquet to flash back to her meeting Eve.
In Mankiewicz's "shooting draft" of the film, we then return to the banquet in the standard bookend fashion. Karen looks over at Margo much as Addison had looked at her. We hear Margo's voice-over, and then her flashback is launched. Mankiewicz planned, in all, three of these base-touching intervals in the banquet. The later flashbacks are simply signaled by voice-overs only, interweaving the memories of Karen, Margo, and Addison as Eve rises in the theatre world. In short, Mankiewicz wanted to replace block flashbacks with "polyphonic" ones, but only after careful preparation.
The more daring experiment, and the one whose loss rankled for years, was the idea of replaying Eve's famous "applause" monologue. We're at Margo's party, and several characters are perched informally on the staircase. Addison and Bill, Eve's fiancé, have argued about the nature of the theatre. Then Eve launches on a brief but impassioned ode to the joys of acting. Applause amounts to "waves of love coming across the footlights and wrapping you up." Mankiewicz wanted this to follow a scene between Karen and Eve in Margo's bedroom. Introduced by Karen's voice-over, this scene shows Eve pressing Karen to help her become Margo's understudy. Following this, Eve's monologue can be seen as a warm testimony to her dedication to the theatre—a confession that Karen watches dotingly from a higher step.
At this point, Margo enters from the kitchen and confronts Eve before insulting the other guests and flouncing off to bed.
Instead of showing this scene's aftermath, Mankiewicz wanted to break chronology and skip back to the beginning of the party, with Margo's voice-over now introducing things. After some scenes showing her efforts to get Eve out of her life, she was to stalk out of the kitchen and hear in the hallway the end of Eve's monologue.
They [Margo and Lloyd] exit into the dining room. As they open the swinging door, the CAMERA REMAINS in the doorway. Margo and Lloyd walk toward the stairs. In the b.g., Eve is talking to the group.
How much she says is dependent on how long it takes Margo and Lloyd to reach her.
EVE (in the b.g.): Imagine,,, to know, every night, that different hundreds of people love you… They smile, their eyes shine—you've pleased them, they want you, you belong. Anything's worth that.
Just as before, she becomes aware of Margo's approach with Lloyd. She scrambles to her feet….
MARGO: Don't get up. And please stop acting as if I were the queen mother.
And as Margo speaks—or before—we FADE OUT.
By following Margo's efforts to cast Eve out, the effect of hearing part of the monologue is to confirm Margo's suspicions that Eve's demure obedience conceals her desire to compete on the stage.
What Mankiewicz wanted, it seems, was to use a replay for a new purpose. In Mildred Pierce and other 1940s films, the replaying of an action fills in missing material, usually with the purpose of dispelling a mystery or providing a surprise. Here the replay contrasts two characters' reactions: Karen finds Eve's speech touching, Margo finds it threatening. Most replays enhanced plot, whereas this emphasized characterization (which in turn advanced the plot).
Or might have. Zanuck, as we saw, cut it out. The incisions left some little scars, as you can see from the discontinuities in the final version. Eve, her trance broken, glances up and sets her expression into standard Alert-and-Deferential Eve mode, as if Margo were coming right at her. Then she gets to her feet. All this apparently happens well before Margo rounds the corner of the doorway.
So Zanuck eliminated Mankiewicz's boldest step. But, in a reciprocal movement, he found Mankiewicz's flashback anchorings over-cautious. Zanuck's version simply cut out all the returns to the banquet except for the very last one.
One consequence is to give greater saliency to the final portion of the banquet ceremony, which has been halted, as if by magic, during Addison's address to us. Other effects of Zanuck's excisions waft through the whole film. The floating voice-overs that Mankiewicz had painstakingly prepared (according to the Rule of Three) now emerge at the very start. Voices slip in and out of scenes, more or less tied to what each speaker could have known at that point but never given the sharp boundaries of the standard blocked-and-framed flashbacks.
These floating voice-overs point ahead to the freedom our filmmakers have enjoyed since the 1990s. We no longer demand that explanatory voice-overs be anchored in any Now; they can braid together as ongoing commentaries on the action. From Hollywood to Wong Kar-wai, filmmakers take for granted that they can discard bookended narration in the way Zanuck did. Mankiewicz objected to Zanuck's habit of cutting scenes "from peak to peak to peak." But the boss, who always liked his movies fast-paced, explained: "I am way ahead of you and so will the audience be."
The choice cascade
There's a lot more to be said about these films and filmmakers, and I hope to develop some of those ideas in my book. For now, there are some interesting lessons.
First, in filmmaking, once you've made certain choices, others follow and some become forced on you. What historians of technology call "path dependence" comes into play. Just as computers use fundamentally the same QWERTY keyboard that came into being with early typewriters, initial choices about a project set limits to what you can do. A trajectory makes certain outcomes more likely than others, and it's hard to reverse.
Once Paramount committed to releasing some version of Sturges' Pain project, DeSylva had to work with the split chronology somehow. But Hollywood tradition demanded an uplifting ending, so one had to be salvaged, even if that meant snipping off the return to the frame story. Similarly, once Mankiewicz commits to presenting Eve's ascent from the perspective of three outside observers, certain narrational processes didn't need as much redundancy as he loaded in. Likewise, Mankiewicz's prized replay didn't create path dependency. It was a branch off the main line and could, as Zanuck saw, be lopped off.
Second, in a routinized film industry, we ought to expect that conflicting demands and changes of plan will yield not only well-wrought plots and narration, but also partial, fractured, even discordant narrative patterns. Snafus and compromises are part of the process.
Finally, film techniques seem innovative only in relation to the norms of a period. Most of the narrative strategies employed by Sturges, DeSylva, Mankiewicz, and Zanuck would have probably seemed startling in the 1930s. By the 1940s, such experiments seemed fresh but comfortable additions to a growing repertoire of storytelling techniques. The studios' solutions were feasible because some flexibility had already emerged in handling frame stories and voice-over transitions.
The history of film forms springs from creative choices made by individuals within institutions. Those decisions have consequences, intended or not. Sometimes the producers don't suffocate new things; sometimes they create them. If only by accident.
Don't worry, though. I won't be making such arguments about The Magnificent Ambersons.
Daniel Mainwaring mentions his plans for Out of the Past in Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s, ed. Patrick McGilligan (University of California Press, 1988), 199.
On A Letter to Three Wives, my comparison of Caspary's adaptation with Mankiewicz's shooting script was enabled by the Caspary collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Thanks to Mary Huelsbeck and the staff of the SHS for helping me access Caspary's papers. Mankiewicz's remarks about the process and Zanuck's request to delete one wife are quoted from Robert Coughlan, "15 Authors in Search of a Character Named Joseph L. Mankiewicz," a 1951 Life magazine article available in Joseph Mankiewicz Interviews, ed. Brian Daugh (University Press, of Mississippi Press, 2003), 17. Caspary was inclined toward modular plotting, as is shown in detail in A. B. Emrys' Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel (McFarland, 2011).
Brian Henderson provides painstaking comparisons among various versions of Sturges' scripts and the final version of The Great Moment in Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges (University of California Press, 1995), 241-360. My quotations from Sturges come from James Curtis, Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 171-172. Another robust biography is Diane Jacobs, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges (University of California Press, 1994). Essential as well is the autobiography Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges, ed. Sandy Sturges (Simon & Schuster, 1990).
Mankiewicz's "shooting draft" of All About Eve has never, to my knowledge, been published. It is available on the Internet, God knows how, here. My extract is from p. 74. A screenplay closer to the finished film was published in 1951 by Random House. It is reprinted in More About All About Eve: A Colloquy by Gary Carey with Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Random House, 1972). Mankiewicz's regrets over Zanuck's deleting the replay are expressed in Andrew Sarris, "Mankiewicz of the Movies [1970]," in Dauth's Mankiewicz Interviews, 31. The characterization of Zanuck's "peak to peak to peak" cutting can be found in Sam Stagg, All About "All About Eve" (St. Martin's, 2001), 171. Zanuck's remarks about being ahead of his director's screenplay are quoted in Mel Gussow, "The Lasting Allure of 'All About Eve,'" New York Times (1 October 2000), AR13.
Two lively and careful critical studies are Kenneth L. Geist, Pictures Will Talk: The Life and Films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Scribners, 1978) and Bernard F. Dick, Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Twayne, 1983). Charyl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer's Joseph L. Mankiewicz (McFarland, 2001) is an indispensable guide to the director's work and writings about it. Both Sturges and Mankiewicz are discussed with polemical relish in Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures:Screenwriters in the American Cinema (Penguin, 1995).
I'm grateful to Laura Russo and particularly John C. Johnson of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center of Boston University. Mr. Johnson kindly supplied valuable information about the version of the All About Eve screenplay held in the Bette Davis collection there.
Another case of the suits' laying down demands to which a director responds creatively involves the final shot in Bill Forsyth's wonderful local here. Details here.
Finally, this entry is one in a series of spinoffs of my ongoing work on narrative in 1940s and early 1950s Hollywood. A gathering point for related blog entries is here, and a relevant web essay is here. As a coda to these 1940s films, it's worth noting that in The Barefoot Contessa (1954) Mankiewicz did get to mount a replayed flashback scene, and in the 1960s he prepared a screenplay of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet that would have presented several characters' perspectives on the central action.
All About Eve.
On the more or less plausible sneakiness of one Preston Sturges
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).
DB here:
It's no news that Preston Sturges occasionally mocked the film industry. Exhibit A is Sullivan's Travels (1941), in which a director of escapist comedies decides to switch to serious social commentary. Sturges' movie starts with a parody of a violent Hollywood climax that ends with two men plunging to their death. Next we're told that Sullivan's previous triumphs are Hey, Hey in the Hay Loft, Ants in Your Plants of 1939, and So Long, Sarong. At a later point we see a somewhat more somber triple feature:
"Swingo" is Sturges' equivalent of Screeno and other 1930s Bingo-like games designed to lure audiences into theatres.
These gags are pretty straightforward. While working on my book on Hollywood in the 1940s, I found that The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) offers us something less obvious and more peculiar.
Three big fake features
Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) has taken Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) out on a date. They've told her highly combustible father (William Demarest) they're going to the movies. Actually her plan is to sneak away and celebrate with soldiers about to be sent overseas. She convinces Norval to cover for her and to loan her his car. Trudy is gone all night. Drunk, pregnant, and now married to an elusive Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki, she drives up to find Norval sleeping curled up in the foyer of the movie house. In the two scenes around the Morgan's Creek Regent theatre, Sturges wedges in some barely noticeable jabs and in-jokes.
Start with what's playing. Four posters are in the foyer around the box office. One is sitting on an easel turned largely away from us. The other three are mostly blocked by actors, partially framed, or thrown out of focus. But by freezing the film we can make out the titles of these three fakes.
The most visible film is Chaos over Taos, clearly a Paramount release.
You can also make out The Private and the Public, which also bears the Paramount logo. Its poster is behind Norval. Much harder to discern is the title of the third feature on the program, Maggie of the Marines. It's barely visible for a few frames, glimpsed over Trudy's right shoulder.
Knowing Sturges' penchant for playfulness, we can see two of these as parodies of Paramount releases. The Private and the Public seems clearly a reference to The Major and the Minor, directed by Billy Wilder and released in early fall of 1942. Sturges began shooting Morgan's Creek in October of that year and finished in early 1943, so he would have been well aware of the Wilder film. As an extra fillip, the star of The Private and the Public is listed as Fred McMany, a reference to Paramount star Fred MacMurray.
Then there's Chaos over Taos. The title is weird enough, relying on an eye-rhyme and being so tough to pronounce that no studio would ever choose it. The star names, Armando Torez and Maria Robles, don't suggest any Paramount contract players to me, but this was the period when Hispanic and Latino stars began to headline Hollywood movies: Carmen Miranda, Lupé Velez, and Cesar Romero are the most famous. Emphasizing Latin American plots, players, and locations was part of Hollywood's contribution to Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy. The effort was seen most famously in Disney's wonderful Saludos Amigos cartoon (1942) but also in a series of Fox musicals with cities named in the titles (Down Argentine Way, That Night in Rio, Week-end in Havana). Chaos over Taos could be Sturges' dig at a then-current trend in political correctness and at another studio's production cycle. As for the genre, Chaos/Taos is a flyboy movie and Paramount made several of those—three B-films in 1941 alone (Flying Blind, Forced Landing, and Power Dive, all featuring Richard Arlen).
What then of Maggie of the Marines? It's likely that Sturges grabbed the title from an October 1942 news story about a dog that wandered into a marine camp in the Panama Canal. Details are at the bottom of today's entry. We can imagine the sort of heart-warming comedy it might have been, as long as Sturges wasn't at the helm.
Etc., etc., and etc.
Finally, there's a matter of exhibition. Just as in Sullivan, the theatre in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek proclaims a very long show: "3 Big Features Tonight, Short Subjects, Newsreel, and Boxo" (another mockery of Screeno). Norval tells Trudy that the whole shebang is scheduled to end at about 1:10.
Unlike the bill of fare in Sullivan's Travels, the long show at Morgan's Creek motivates plot action. Trudy uses the pretext of a long triple feature to get her father's permission to stay out late. But it may not be too much to see in Sturges' interest in triple features another contemporary reference.
Triple features emerged in the mid-1930s, partly because of high output from the studios and partly because of competition among exhibitors. Dan Goldberg wrote in Variety in 1938:
In a wild scramble for immediate returns without any thought to the outcome, the exhibitors have tried freaks and stunts rather than policy and operation. There have been double features, triple features, bank nite, screeno, keeno, bingo, and giveaways of all kinds, including dishes, flatware, linenware, framed pictures, wall plaques, etc., etc., and etc. There are many houses around here [Chicago] which are getting a 15c and 20c admission and giving away merchandise valued at 11c and more.
The studios hated double-feature programs but the public, voting its wallet, preferred them. Duals, as they were called, were largely a subsequent-run phenomenon, but because of the vast number of releases and block booking, they crept into first-run venues too. Triple bills were far less common and typically included two or even three B pictures. Most A-grade pictures aimed to come in under 100 minutes, and a B was typically sixty to seventy minutes long, so a triple feature of an A and two Bs wouldn't be stupendously long. In the Racine triple feature on the right, two Bs flank Dumbo, a 62-minute movie, and the whole program, without shorts, trailers, and intermissions, would last only a little over three hours. Many triple bills seem to have consisted of three Bs. Sometimes the movies weren't all features: a cartoon or a serial episode might be counted as one of the "Three Big Hits" advertised.
Triples were evidently less popular with audiences than duals. Perhaps people weren't willing to spare such a big block of time, or they suspected that the lesser items on the bill weren't worth watching. Jeff Smith suggests to me that adding a B to an A looks like a bonus, but two or three Bs look like a dumping ground. Interestingly, when Trudy tells Norval she plans to skip out on him, he protests: "I won't do it! I won't sit through three features all by myself." Trudy asks plaintively: "Couldn't you sleep through a couple of 'em?"
While Sturges was preparing Morgan's Creek, he might well have noticed some Variety stories tracing a controversy about triple bills in the Midwest. A chain in St. Louis had shifted to this policy, and to retaliate a rival chain began four-hour shows consisting of two features and sixty minutes of shorts. In late 1940, a civic group, the Better Films Council of Greater St. Louis, put pressure on exhibitors to oppose long programs. The Council claimed that such bills were "a physical and mental strain on children and young people," and that family-appropriate films were sometimes accompanied by "adult" ones. Getting no cooperation from the theatre circuits, the Better Film Council announced in early 1941 that it was going to introduce state legislation to ban triple features. This effort evidently came to nothing.
As if in response to bluenose worries about long programs, Sturges gives the lucky Morgan's Creek patrons a movie banquet that ends in the wee hours. And ironically, Trudy would have suffered less "physical and mental strain" in the days and weeks thereafter if she'd gone to the movies and not kissed the boys goodbye. The Regent's absurdly inflated program may be Sturges' dig at both a contemporary trend and those who fretted about it.
Watching me rake these apparently innocuous frames, you may be asking: Is David going all Room-237 on us? Actually, I see today's entry as in the spirit of an earlier one, which also has an enigmatic Sturges connection. I'm interested in the moments when Hollywood is talking to itself.
We tend to think that the studios made movies to communicate with the public, and that's surely true. But we tend to forget that filmmakers were sometimes talking to each other. In the Zanuck-produced Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), a romance of silent-era moviemaking, director Don Ameche turns down Rin-Tin-Tin for a project. The obvious joke is that the pooch became a big star, but how many viewers would appreciate the in-joke that Zanuck launched his career at Warners writing scripts for Rinty? Did the public know that Slim and Steve, the nicknames swapped between Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, were the ones used by Hawks and his wife? Would ordinary moviegoers catch the reference to Archie Leach in His Girl Friday or notice Jed Leland's column in the newspaper in The Magnificent Ambersons?
Some would have. Moviegoers of the day were better-educated than the populace in general, and the biggest fans went several times every week. But even if the audience missed these bits, the filmmakers' peers might not. These movies were made by youngish people who liked to have fun–sometimes at each other's expense—and nothing is more fun than very esoteric in-jokes.
The problem is that these other examples are highlighted in dialogue, but some of Miracle's in-jokes are almost completely buried. They're more akin to the current vogue for Easter Eggs in sets and props. Unlike the recent instances, though, Sturges's hints are hard to catch during projection, and he couldn't have counted on viewers mulling over them frame by frame, as our directors can.
Perhaps he intended to show those posters more fully but had to forego that option during filming or cutting. Or perhaps he included them just for his own amusement–that is, not for the general public, nor even for his peers, but merely for the pleasure of putting in things that only he and his team knew about. If that seems implausible, let me ask: If you could do it, wouldn't you?
The fourth poster, after some fiddling with the Skew and Perspective tools in PhotoShop, reveals itself as another aerial adventure: Eagle something…. Eagle Blood, maybe? For an example of a drama using real film titles in its movie marquees, see this entry.
On duals and triples, see "Triple Features Seen as Nabes' Salvation," Variety (22 January 1935), 3; Dan Goldberg, "Chicago Merry-Go-Round," Variety 24 October 1938, p. 21; "Now It's Duals, with Vaudeville, At the Loop Oriental," Variety (25 January 1939), 5; "Single-Billing Idea Up Again But Practically It's Still NSG," Variety (26 August 1942), 13. On the St. Louis controversy, see "Better Film Council Queries St. L. Exhibs on Duals and Triples" Variety (23 October 1940), 21, and "St. Louis Group Seeks to Outlaw Triple Features," Variety (26 February 1941), 21.
The embedded ad for a triple feature comes from The Racine Journal-Times (11 July 1942), 8.
No need to write me about the most obvious in-joke in Morgan's Creek: the fact that it incorporates two major characters from The Great McGinty (1940) and doesn't even bother to credit the actors. Cheeky, this Sturges fellow.
From The Daily Gazette (Berkeley , California, 19 October 1942).
Pike's peek
The Lady Eve.
DB here:
Hollywood is supposedly making movies for mass audiences, and up to a point that's true. But there's an in-group aspect of Hollywood as well. There are moments in the movies when the writers and directors and actors seem to be talking more among themselves than to outsiders. We're probably more familiar with this nowadays, as when Tarantino and Soderbergh cast Michael Keaton as the same character in both Jackie Brown and Out of Sight. Not only does the gesture suggest solidarity between two directors of roughly the same generation. I think it's also a sign that the directors respect Elmore Leonard's concern to let a character from one novel pop up in another.
You see the same attitude in those in-jokes we occasionally find in Hollywood movies. The most famous, I suppose, is Cary Grant's warning, in His Girl Friday, that the last man who thought he'd beaten him was Archie Leach, "just a week before he cut his throat." Archie Leach was of course Grant's real name. In the same film, Grant as Walter Burns tells the platinum blonde Angie to seduce Bruce Baldwin. How will she know him? He looks like that fella in the movies, he says, "You know, Ralph Bellamy." Angie replies with simple lack of interest, "Oh, him?" Since Bruce is played by Bellamy, this is a little cruel; both character and actor are treated as losers.
Preston Sturges liked such playfulness, as when in The Lady Eve (1941) he used his birthday as the date on a check. In the same movie, the protagonist reads a book called Are Snakes Necessary?
No such book exists, more's the pity. The title pays comic reference to James Thurber's 1929 best-selling satire on marriage manuals, Is Sex Necessary? and confirms the snake-as-phallus imagery that isn't exactly underplayed in the rest of the film. Sturges revisited the gag phrase when he proposed Is Marriage Necessary? as the title for a later picture. Unsurprisingly, it didn't pass the censor, and instead we got a more anodyne title, The Palm Beach Story (1942).
These are comedies, though. On Saturday night, I saw an instance of in-group crosstalk where I hadn't expected it. The Long Night (1947) is Anatol Litvak's somber remake of Le Jour se lève. Unlike Hawks and Sturges, Litvak wasn't exactly known for cockeyed humor, nor was screenwriter John Wexley (The Roaring Twenties, City for Conquest, Hangmen Also Die!). Yet in one shot, there it was, a citation as plain as a pikestaff.
Over several years I've been gathering material for a blog or web essay on product placement. (I'm mostly in favor of it.) So I tend to scrounge around among hand props and other bits of flotsam in the frame, hoping to catch a brand name. Usually this task-driven visual search comes to naught, but The Long Night paid me back.
In Sturges' The Lady Eve, you'll remember, Henry Fonda plays Charles Poncefort Pike, heir to the vast fortune of the Pike brewery. The firm's success rests upon Pike's Pale Ale. A flyer for the product convinces Jean and her father that Charles should be the target of their next con job.
Pike's Pale and its tagline run through the movie as a comic motif. But no such product then existed. It features on a list of fake movie products in a 2006 New York Times story.
All the more surprising, then, is a scene in The Long Night six years later. The rapacious magician Maximilian (Vincent Price) takes Joanne (Barbara Bel Geddes) to a symphony concert. She reads the program avidly, and on the back we can glimpse a familiar brand.
The advertisement even features the same text and layout as the flyer in Sturges' film.
If it's an in-joke à la His Girl Friday, what's the punchline? And how did it even get there? We have two different studios (Paramount, RKO) and different genres (satiric romantic comedy, gloomy romantic drama). Was the ad just lying around a props warehouse? Did Fonda, who plays the hero of The Long Night, keep the flyer as a souvenir of The Lady Eve and ask the producers to include it as a shout-out to Sturges? Was there a company specializing in making printed props for the studios and here it just recycled something it had done for Paramount? Or is it just a case of Hollywood gratuitously referencing itself?
I'd be eager to hear from anybody who knows or has an educated guess. In the meantime, I'll keep scanning frames, and being diverted by the ways that the Hollywood In-Crowd creates a world of off-center echoes and cross-references. It's as if movies fertilized each other, but promiscuously, creating an eccentric world behind the screen, where stray images and lines of dialogue jostle against one another. Of one thing we can be sure: It will be unpredictable.
Today there is a real Pike's Pale Ale. The proprietors of Seattle's Pike Brewing company didn't know about The Lady Eve when they conjured up their brew. I've never tasted it, but you might count this a case of blog product placement. Mmmmm, pale ale….
Ian Patrick displays an imaginative gouache called "Are Snakes Necessary?" here.
Incidentally, The Long Night is another of those 1940s movies with a flashback within a flashback, of the sort I considered in an earlier post.
I top and tail the entry with pictures of Slim because he looks swell when he's thinking.
The Long Night.
PS 19 June: Rapid Response Dept: Alert reader Sean Weitner points out the reappearance of the same newspaper page in a bevy of TV shows. The evidence is here. Thanks to Sean!
PPS 21 June: More bulletins from alert readers. Leo Rubinkowski points out the source of the recurring newspage on Slate here. This wouldn't, I think, explain the reappearance of Pike's Pale, but maybe…. Andrea Comiskey has found that Douglas Sirk was apparently fond of certain foil-etched items. The films are All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, and the pix are here and here and here and here. Leo and Andrea are UW grad students, so I'm especially happy to thank them.


text: Mobile World Congress is generally all about phones, but this year there are a fair number of tablets out and about. Feeling like you're losing track? Check out the roundup below, covering the biggest hits ( HP Slate 7 and Samung Galaxy Note 8 ) and a few unknowns ( ZTE, anyone? ).


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Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice and often described as ŌĆ£The Godfather of Hipsterdom,ŌĆØ kicked a hornets nest this week by suggesting that modern feminism has been detrimental to women.
ŌĆ£WeŌĆÖve trivialized childbirth and being domestic so much that women are forced to pretend to be men. They're feigning this toughness. They're miserable,ŌĆØ McInnes said in part during a contentious and expletive-laced exchange on a HuffPost Live panel on Monday.
McInnes received forceful push back from the panel, media and social media for his comments.
The founder of Street Carnage, however, explained in an interview with The Daily Caller that he has no regrets about what he said, and that his comments were in fact very pro-woman.
ŌĆ£I think the most interesting thing about this story is all the controversy it generated. I consider my comments pretty mundane and when I read them in context. I donŌĆÖt regret anything,ŌĆØ he said.┬ĀŌĆ£Every time I see my words quoted I go ŌĆśyeah!ŌĆÖ
ŌĆ£That study that I cited was all over the news a year ago — Lou Dobbs covered it on CNN — it didnŌĆÖt seem to generate that much controversy when it came out, and all I did was cite that study and say a lot of women in the workforce would be happier at home. What is wrong with that?ŌĆØ he asked.
McInnes said that the real reason his comments set off such a firestorm is that ŌĆ£deep downŌĆØ women realize what he said is true.
ŌĆ£I think a lot of women smash through the ŌĆśglass ceilingŌĆÖ and get to where [men] are and they go, ŌĆśwait a minute, I thought you guys had brandy and went to strip clubs, youŌĆÖre going over expense reports?ŌĆÖ And they see their friends from their small town with 3 kids going to soccer practice and they think, ŌĆśThat looks kind of cool, actually.ŌĆÖ
ŌĆ£So I think they know I am right and that is what is making everyone freak out. All I did was point to the elephant in the room, but as I made very clear in that interview — what made me fly off the handle, too — is I am not saying women should not be in the workforce. If you were meant to be there, by all means, be there, and when I work with a qualified woman who is driven, like a Barbara Corcoran type, I love it because I get the job done,ŌĆØ he said.
He said that overall his words have been twisted into being anti-woman, when in fact believes his comments to be empowering.
ŌĆ£I see a lot of women without kids, in their 40s, who are miserable and I see a lot of women after they have children saying, ŌĆśwhat the fuck was I doing? Why was I doing fashion PR? I was doing seating plans for a fashion show telling what people sit in what chair. Now IŌĆÖm shaping human life,ŌĆÖ he explained.
ŌĆ£And that is another thing maybe I didnŌĆÖt get across, I see the housewife as a far superior vocation to mine, and to most,ŌĆØ McInnes continued. ŌĆ£I mean I make commercials, and funny videos, and T.V. shows or whatever, film projects that people will watch for ten minutes and go ŌĆśhehŌĆÖ and get on with their day. I essentiallyŌĆ" make comic books. You flip through it and youŌĆÖre done. My wife creates life from her vagina and then — thatŌĆÖs just the beginning — then she shapes this human life.ŌĆØ
McInnes explained how much more fulfilling his wifeŌĆÖs day — making memories with their children — than his, working on a ŌĆ£fuckinŌĆÖŌĆØ cheese commercial.
ŌĆ£Who is changing the world more?ŌĆØ he asked.
Of his home life, McInnes said his is a ŌĆ£traditional familyŌĆØ living in New York ŌĆ£an exaggeration of the liberal utopia.ŌĆØ
ŌĆ£I always describe New York as an elephantŌĆÖs graveyard for ovaries,ŌĆØ he said. ŌĆ£All these unhappy women, and I am talking about 100 percent of my friends waiting too long and regretting it, and IŌĆÖm not saying that you have to have babies and you have to stay in the kitchen and you canŌĆÖt have a life. Nobody is saying that. That is a totally unreasonable thing to say. That is a fascist, communist thing to enforce. All I am saying is: Why are you trivializing such a miracle?ŌĆØ
McInnes explained that his children — ages 9 months, 5 years, and 7 years — made him believe in God and become pro-life.
ŌĆ£It made me religious. I was an atheist most of my life and now I am a God-fearing Catholic, because of the miracle of life. And IŌĆÖm pro-life,ŌĆØ he said, noting that he used to be pro-choice and became pro-life with the birth of his first child.
ŌĆ£Amongst my peers abortion is cool,ŌĆØ he continued. ŌĆØItŌĆÖs like, empowering, and they make jokes about it. Some of my best friends go, ŌĆśI accept that itŌĆÖs murder and I am pro-choice.ŌĆÖ ThatŌĆÖs the world I live in.ŌĆØ
He recalled a recent party he was at, in which a pregnant woman, who was planning on having an abortion the following week, was on hallucinogenic mushrooms ŌĆ£and everyone was laughing at it. ThatŌĆÖs my universe.ŌĆØ
According to McInnes, based on his personal experience, women who have had children are significantly less likely to have an abortion.
ŌĆ£I think once women experience it, they change their minds pretty quick — and that is my personal experience, you know, I cannot speak for everyone. But I am probably getting myself in more shit,ŌĆØ McInnes said.
ŌĆ£IŌĆÖm sick of women who havenŌĆÖt experienced [child birth] trivializing it,ŌĆØ he added.
On the flip side, McInnes said that men have become less masculine, ironically as a means to get more women.
ŌĆ£I think men are becoming beta males because feminists have told them to, but youŌĆÖll notice feminists donŌĆÖt fuck those guys,ŌĆØ he said. ŌĆ£I think they are doing this and being submissive…because they are trying to get laid.
ŌĆ£If women said men who dress in clown costumes are hot and cool, then they would fuckinŌĆÖ stick a red nose on.ŌĆØ
McInnes continued that he sees the anti-masculinity push as intrinsically anti-capitalist.
ŌĆ£There is a real latent anti-entrepreneurial ethos going on in America right now with the left and I donŌĆÖt see it as annoying or unfashionable. I see it as a virus because it is ultimately anti-American.
ŌĆ£America is unique: it was built by entrepreneurs with grit, and whenŌĆö what seems just like a bunch of pussies being beta-males and women are railing against people like me simply for defending traditional families, isnŌĆÖt a small deal,ŌĆØ he said. ŌĆ£I think itŌĆÖs a real latent anti-Americanism that, like a virus, starts small and can really hurt us,ŌĆØ he explained, adding that entrepreneurs should be seen as heroes.
He went on to lament the current trend in media, which finds sitcom father figures the idiot of the family.
ŌĆ£If it gets a laugh fine, but we all have to check ourselves and go: ŌĆśHow about some reverence, for a change?ŌĆÖ We revere single moms and we revere drug dealers like Jay Z — how about we revere the people who put on food on the table? Even that Huff Post Live thing — We are sitting there shitting on macho men while using their microphone that they invented and the infrastructure they created. Arianna Huffington is only rich because of her man entrepreneur husband.ŌĆØ
*An earlier version of this story misspelled Gavin McInnes' last name and incorrectly listed the age of McInnes' first child.


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The Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College advances urban education reform by strengthening literacy and mathematics teaching and by supporting teachers as key educational decision-makers. We conduct professional development, program evaluation, and research projects in educational settings ranging from schools to colleges and community organizations.
Featured Work
On Wednesday December 10, our weekly webcast Teachers Teaching Teachers (TTT) hosted a discussion on bringing social justice and current events into the classroom and helping students to process their feelings around recent high profile instances of police violence, systemic racism, and injustice in America. Afterwards, one of the panelists in this discussion, Renée Watson, a NYC educator and author, sat down with the School Library Journal (SLJ) in an article that both explored the TTT broadcast and her own approach to engaging students around these issues. We encourage everyone to view the TTT broadcast and to read SLJ's interview with Renée.
Meghan McNamara, a teacher at the Adult Learning Center, was a featured contributor to the Fall 2014 Webinar Series on science teaching and learning hosted by the National College Transition Network. Meghan shared her work on BPAs, done in the context of Project RISE. You can view the webinar here.
Meghan's section begins at 33:20.
Presentation slides for the entire webinar are here.
Last year's Youth Voices summer program for high school students and teachers was a resounding success. Please enjoy this video, created by Jim Nordlinger and his colleagues at the New York City Writing Project, to learn more about this connected-learning pilot.
Youth Voices has just published a book of student work from the 2013 Summer Program. Please find it here.
We are pleased to share the first of three videos focusing on Youth Voices, the New York City Writing Project's online platform for developing and publishing student work. This video highlights the pedagogy behind Letters to the Next Mayor, which involved NYCWP teachers and students at different grade levels in a project blending writing, research, and civic engagement.
We are proud to announce that a student at the Adult Learning Center, Gaysha Wright, is a 2015 Peter Jennings Scholarship recipient. The Peter Jennings Scholarship provides financial assistance to adults who have earned their GED diplomas through a CUNY Adult Literacy program and who will continue their education at a CUNY college. Gaysha will be honered alongside her fellow recipients at the June 17 ceremony.
The ILS is pleased to congratulate Dr. Jaye Jones, the director of the Adult Learning Center for her recent acceptance of the Phyllis Cunningham Social Justice Award. The Adult Education Research Conference (AERC) presented this award jointly to Jaye and to Professor Dianne Ramdeholl of SUNY's Empire State College for their co-written and co-presented paper, "Weaving Quilts: Remaking and Reimagining Women's Spaces and Places in Adult Literacy." Drawing on their research within adult literacy programs in Chicago and Brooklyn, this paper explores "adult literacy pedagogical practices from a gendered, social justice perspective" while also making "recommendations for creating more democratic adult education learning communities."
Congratulations again Jaye!
The Institute for Literacy Studies is thrilled to announce the receipt of grants totaling $50,000 from the Hive Digital Media Learning Fund of The New York Community Trust and the National Writing Project/Educator Innovator Network. These grants will fund the Youth Voices Inquiry Project (YVIP), a partnership of the New York City Writing Project and BronxNet TV. Please read the NYCWP's press release here and The New York Community Trust's press release here.
Read our 2013-2014 annual report here.[PDF]
Last modified: Jul 15, 2015


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In November, Florida State blasted Florida on the field. When it comes to the class of 2011 and recruiting, Seminoles coach Jimbo Fisher is also doing a pretty good job of dominating the Gators (and Miami, too).
With the resignation of Florida head coach Urban Meyer on Wednesday, things could get worse for the Gators.
Florida's hold on the state, recruiting-wise, already had been slipping this year, while the Seminoles already seemed destined to finish with a top five class, nationally. Typically, recruits are scared off by the uncertainty surrounding a program going through a coaching change.
The questions mount for a recruit: What offense or defense will the new staff run, and will I fit in it? Will they retain that assistant coach/father figure who recruited me for the past 18 months? Will we lose games because this new staff doesn't know what it's doing?
These questions could lead a couple of Florida's current recruits to drop the Gators and move on to Florida State, too.
Florida State is currently dominating recruiting in one of the most talent-rich states in the country, and it may continue for a number of years — and it will show on the field. The recruiting momentum in Florida has shifted in Tallahassee's direction, as opposed to Gainesville's or Miami's.
Big names making visits
As far as official visits go this weekend, Georgia has a monster weekend ahead. Uncommitted Sporting News Top 100 players Ray Drew, Jay Rome, Jeff Pagan and Damian Swann highlight an impressive group of visitors. The Bulldogs are a serious finalist for Drew, Rome and Swann, as well as with SN100 RB Isaiah Crowell, who won't be in attendance this weekend. The Bulldogs could finish strongly, and this weekend could have a lot to do with it.
The top player in the Sporting News Top 100, offensive lineman Cyrus Kouandjio out of Maryland, will make a trip to New Mexico this weekend — a non-BCS school that he swears is in his final list of five. The other top five schools are Alabama — where his brother Arie Kouandjio plays — Iowa, USC and Miami. He visited Alabama last week. Several of Kouandjio's former high school teammates play at New Mexico.
Another top visitor this weekend is Ishaq Williams, a DE/WR out of Brooklyn (N.Y.). He will check out Syracuse, and his other final five are Alabama, Penn State, Notre Dame and USC. He will take a visit to Notre Dame next week. Checking out the Orange with Williams is SN100 DT Kevin McReynolds out of Washington (D.C.), who was at UCLA last weekend. McReynolds told Sporting News he's also quite fond of Arkansas, Maryland and Oregon.
SN100 DB Wayne Lyons will check out Nebraska this weekend, and this is the last of his five official visits. He has already seen Michigan, Notre Dame, Stanford and UCLA. SN100 QB Teddy Bridgewater, who backed off his Miami commitment after the firing of coach Randy Shannon, will trek to Louisville with prep teammate Eli Rogers. Bridgewater is also seriously considering LSU.
Pitt takes recruiting hit
The fallout from Pitt's coaching change has already begun.
On Thursday, linebacker Ben Kline informed Sporting News that he has dropped the Panthers and has joined Penn State's signing class. He had one of the top senior seasons among this year's recruits, accumulating more than 150 tackles for his Dallastown (Pa.) team.
Also, defensive end Desimon Green out of Clairton (Pa.) told Sporting News he would decommit and check out other schools, saying the Panthers would still be in consideration. Green also has offers from Cincinnati, Illinois, Louisville, Michigan, Michigan State, Texas Tech and West Virginia, among others.
Hoosiers' commits like hire
Indiana hired Oklahoma offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson this week, and that has fired up the Hoosiers' large recruiting class of 21 commitments. Wilson coached Heisman Trophy winner Sam Bradford in 2008, and put up huge offensive numbers over the years with the Sooners.
Ralston Evans, a 6-foot-4, 275-pound guard out of Indianapolis, has already been in contact with Wilson, and he likes what he hears. Evans said a bunch of the other Indianapolis-area Hoosiers recruits already like the new coach, too.
"We had a phone conversation and he seemed like a great guy; he is an offensive lineman guy which I like," Evans told Sporting News. "I'm set to go visit the school this week unofficially to speak with him. He told me he is still high on me and that he would still want me to come up midyear and says I have a chance at competing early."


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April 15, 2009
NINETY SIX, S.C. - Sophomore Meghan Doherty (Westerly, R.I.) finished with a three-round total of 252 strokes, as the Holy Cross women's golf team claimed eighth place at the 2009 Big South Conference Championship, held at the Patriot Golf Club. Doherty shot an 83 on the third and final day of play to finish in 29th place as an individual, as the Crusaders concluded the tournament with a team total of 1,087 strokes. Coastal Carolina captured the team title with 911 strokes, while Aruka Felgueroso of Coastal Carolina was the individual medalist with a three-round total of 218.
Sophomore Johanna Gavin (Hackettstown, N.J.) had an 87 in the final round to finish in 36th place overall with a three-day total of 265 strokes, while freshman Ellie Deluca (New Caanan, Conn.) shot a 95 on Wednesday and placed 37th overall with a three-round total of 283. Sophomore Kerrin O'Leary (Milton, Mass.) ended the tournament in 38th place overall (290 strokes), while sophomore Megan McCarthy (Beverly, Mass.) came in 39th (299 strokes).
The Crusaders will return to action on Saturday and Sunday, April 18-19, when they will compete at the Jack Leaman Invitational. On Saturday, the competition is in Amherst, Mass., while on Sunday it is in South Hadley, Mass.
Team Scores: 1. Coastal Carolina 911; 2. Charleston Southern 929; 3. Winthrop 935; 4. Radford 951; 5. Gardner-Webb 971; 6. Bucknell 976; 7. High Point 984; 8. Holy Cross 1087.
Top Five Individuals: 1. Aruka Felgueroso, Coastal Carolina, 218; 2. Olivia Higgins, Charleston Southern, 220; 3. Sara Hester, Winthrop, 228; 4. Jessica Vincent, Coastal Carolina, 229; tie-5. Alicia Grier, Coastal Carolina, 232; tie-5. Amy Maness, Coastal Carolina, 232; tie-5. Brittany Penny, Winthrop, 232.
Holy Cross Individuals: 29. Meghan Doherty, 252; 36. Johanna Gavin, 265; 37. Ellie Deluca, 283; 38. Kerrin O'Leary, 290; 39. Megan McCarthy 299.