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| Ben Hecht |
Interviewed for Variety by Radie Harris, printed in the UK in World Film and Television Progress, Apr-Nov 1938.
Ben Hecht, looking somewhat like a Goldwyn "folly" himself, in a blue moire dressing gown, sat in the living room of his three-room suite at the Hotel Algonquin, N.Y., and confided that he had just finished his daily dozen for the year by elevating his right thumb to his nose and waving all other four digits exuberantly in the direction of Hollywood!
It seems that Mr. Hecht and his latest employer, Samuel Goldwyn, have had a tiff, and now they're farther apart than Cecil Beaton and Conde Nast. "I left in a childish huff," Hecht explained, "because Sam wouldn't allow me to bring a few of my friends in to the projection room to look at some of the rushes on The [Goldwyn] Follies. I asked Sam whether it was in a desperate effort to save it from the public, but I'm afraid the significance was lost on him. I didn't really want to write another Follies, anyway. The current one was revealed to me in a dream and you know how unreliable dreams are so I packed my luggage, crossed off a couple of zeroes on my next year's income tax, and here I am back in New York, to write a novel for Covici-Friede, my first since A Jew in Love. I'm about a third way through now, but it won't be finished for another year. I'm calling it Book of Miracles—and it has no picture possibilities." (That's one of the major miracles; it will most likely be sold from the galley proofs!)
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| The Goldwyn Follies (1938) |
As a matter of fact, Hecht has a great admiration for Goldwyn. When the latter called him in to look at the rushes of The Hurricane, after the picture had been in production for several weeks, he asked Hecht his opinion of it. "I think it stinks," answered Hecht, telling the truth with a sledge hammer. "So do I," was Goldwyn's comeback. "I want you to rewrite it." And while Hecht recuperated from the shock of meeting a Hollywood producer who could stand honest criticism, Goldwyn took a terrific loss and started from scratch.
"Goldwyn is a genius—after a picture is finished," Hecht declares. "He smoothes and polishes until it is like a cameo—perfect in every detail. He can tell within 20 per cent of what the gross will be. He has a projection mind. He can look at tests endlessly; five, six, seven days—who counts? He has a good stomach for pictures. "On the other hand, Selznick, for whom I worked on Nothing Sacred, hasn't Goldwyn's showmanship, but he's a terrific guy on stories. He carries a phantom typewriter with him wherever he goes."
However, what Hecht thinks of the current method of Hollywood production, the current film public and the current crop of exhibitors, wouldn't pass the NBC censor board—minus Mae West in her Garden of Eden. Expurgating it for reading purposes, it goes something like this: "Catering to the imbecilic type of moron who clutters around first nights and hotel lobbies, pleading for autographs, in the delusion that this public must be served, is just so much pap. Half of these whacky kids never go into a picture house, because if they did they might miss 'Dolly Delovely' at a theatre a few blocks away. The only way to defeat this public, who unfortunately symbolize the 'Great American Movie Public' of today, is to substitute them with a new public and the only way to do that is to have Hollywood go into the state of collapse it is inevitably heading for, and start anew with a sane production budget.
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| Ben Hecht with Charles MacArthur playing backgammon [photo via New Yorker] |
"A picture that should cost 200 grand has to gross two and one-half million dollars to break even, and in order to meet this profit it has to cater to a vast undiscriminating audience. Cut down on these gigantic production costs, which only serve to feed a producer's ego—make a picture, a good picture, for less than a million, and to aitch with catering to audiences, exhibitors, actors, writers, directors, etc., etc. "Here's an illustration to prove my point. Several years ago I wrote a story called Scarface. Paul Muni, who had been kicked around like a gong at the old Fox studio, came over to U.A. playing the title role for a couple of hundred dollars a week. We signed a young Valentinoish looking wop for the second male lead, and gave him $75—his name was George Raft. The girl who played the heroine had been an extra at MGM we gave her $50. She's done all right for herself, too—her name is Ann Dvorak. The picture grossed $3,000,000. Remember another picture called Underworld! George Bancroft and Evelyn Brent thought they were pretty lucky to be in it, even though the Government didn't take away half of their salary. It was grossed $4,000,000.
"Lombard and March cleaned up more than a quarter of a million between them on Nothing Sacred—and there was 'nothing sacred' about my weekly stipend, either; it was positively indecent! I would have taken less, but nobody asked me to. As for March and Lombard, they both turned out pretty swell pictures in Laughter (Par) and 20th Century (Col), minus that gargantuan salary. The point I'm trying to prove is that I could have made Nothing Sacred on a far more conservative budget than Selznick (exclusive of the Technicolor, of course) and it still
would have been a good picture!"
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| Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred |
At this point, the insistent ringing of the phone diverted Hecht from his analogy. It was his erstwhile co-producer and playmate, Charlie MacArthur. It was the perfect cue to ask when the Messrs. Hecht and MacArthur were to resume their zany partnership again—or had they forsworn pictures for all time? "But certainly not," Hecht demurred. "I'd rather do a movie anytime than a stage play—it's far more fun. We were considered two screw-balls when we were working out at Astoria, because, we played backgammon on the set and didn't hold conferences in our office every lunch hour. The reason we didn't into our office—it was always packed with the strangest looking people, and the reason we played backgammon on the set was because it gave us an added interest in our work! "Seriously though, we didn't waste 50 bucks on extraneous matter like travelling across the country with a print of the picture and the entire cast in tow—or throwing cocktail shindigs for the press—or staging Hollywood premieres simultaneously in 24 cities, so that we could quote Mrs. Ipswich telling the world, 'that it would be a crime to miss Crime Without Passion—or making 5,692 tests of unknowns, and then using a player under contract -or running three weeks behind schedule, because for those three weeks we were 'on location' in the conference room. No, long before The Seven Dwarfs our slogan was 'Whistle While You Work' only the next time we do it, we'd like to have the help of a kid named Bill Fields.
"A few years ago Gene Fowler and I wrote a story for MGM which was supposed to suit the talents of Marie Dressier. We grabbed the opportunity of writing in a part for Bill. When we finished the yarn we weren't surprised when it was rejected—the story turned out to be a starrer for Bill Fields, with Marie Dressier playing his stooge!"
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