The Academy and the Award by Bruce Davis

Author:Bruce Davis [Davis, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781684581207
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

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1. General Yen had received heavy advance publicity as the first motion picture ever to play the Music Hall, a fact that worked to magnify its failure.

2. Thalberg was easing back into Academy affairs after a near-absence in all of 1933 as the result of a heart attack he had suffered—his second—on Christmas Day of 1932.

3. It was not, unlike a number of fat, glossy, and deplorable publications much later in the century, a device for separating starry-eyed innocents from their money by selling them expensive photo shoots, space in the book, and the fiction that casting agents relied heavily on it. Actors had to have a studio contract or professional representation to qualify for the Directory.

4. The Players Directory maintained its stature as the industry’s casting bible until 2005, though it existed for the last forty or so of those years as a service to the industry rather than as an Academy profit center. As it became clear that there were more convenient, inexpensive, and nimble ways of providing casting information than by dropping eight-pound books off to subscribers three times a year, the Academy sold the Directory rights to a commercial company.

5. The history of labor activity in Hollywood in the 1930s is central to the early history of the Academy, but it is so vast and tangled a subject that I’ve had no choice but to streamline it both here and in the previous chapter. Those looking for more detailed treatment of the formation of the major film-related guilds are referred to three excellent treatments of the subject: Murray Ross’s indispensable Stars and Strikes, published in 1941 when memories, and wounds, were still fresh; the first two chapters of The Inquisition in Hollywood, the 1979 study of the Blacklist by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund; and Nancy Lynn Schwartz’s The Hollywood Writers’ Wars (1982), which focuses primarily on the SWG and, like the Ceplair/England book, on post-1930s events.

6. Chaplin’s attitude toward the Academy was always a little distant. He had retained his membership, and he responded more than once to Academy funding pleas, but on the very few occasions when he agreed to be a part of one of the organization’s events, he sent regrets at the last minute. He may have been miffed, at this point in his career, by the Academy’s failure to nominate City Lights (1931) in any category. Or he may have felt that a central role for him at the Academy’s March ceremonies would look as though he were campaigning for honors for Modern Times, released in February, for the next year’s awards. An essentially silent film released nine years into the sound era, Modern Times would also fail to win Oscar nominations.

7. Unlike the only other Oscar decliners, George C. Scott (1970, Best Actor, Patton) and Marlon Brando (1972, Best Actor, The Godfather), Nichols eventually accepted his. Fourteen years later, on Valentine’s Day of 1949, Academy president Jean Hersholt sent him a billet-doux and a statuette. Nichols returned a

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