Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) by Sragow Michael

Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) by Sragow Michael

Author:Sragow, Michael [Sragow, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2013-12-05T22:00:00+00:00


Figuring out who had read the novel became a parlor game for columnists throughout filming. One reported, with authority, that neither Leslie Howard nor de Havilland had done so. When Fleming took the job, he had not, but he eventually did, as his well-thumbed copy indicates. He and Mahin worked nights “for about a week” on script revisions, Mahin recalled. “Every night, Vic would say, ‘Now look on page so-and-so.’ He knew the novel by heart.”

At the time of Fleming’s hiring, the cast was working from revisions by Oliver H. P. Garrett, who was rewriting the playwright Sidney Howard’s screenplay. Fleming quickly got down to business with Mahin after bluntly telling the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.” Selznick ended that arrangement. He was determined to be as independent from Mayer as possible—but Mahin had been spotted meeting with Mayer to discuss his new assignment, and Selznick suspected the writer was behind a Hollywood Reporter scoop crediting the MGM talent pool with rescuing his chaotic production. Next at bat was Ben Hecht—one of the most fecund minds in Hollywood and a fan of the director he called “aloof and poetical.” (Hecht may have met him in 1934 when writing The Prisoner of Zenda for Selznick, who wanted Fleming for that picture; it was filmed in 1937 with John Cromwell directing John L. Balderston’s script.)

Hecht’s rollicking account in his memoir, A Child of the Century, told how he rewrote the first half of the GWTW script in a week for $15,000. (Sometimes he said he worked on the script for two weeks for $10,000; whatever the price, he did stay on to edit the second half of the script in week two.) Hecht’s tale, however rife with hyperbole and inaccuracies, captures the dynamic idiosyncrasies of Fleming and Selznick as well as the excitement of boy-on-a-burning-deck filming performed on a grand scale. Hecht insisted that all he was given to eat was peanuts.

Initially, as Selznick laid out the story to an uncomprehending Hecht (who had not read the novel), “Fleming, who was reputed to be part Indian, sat brooding at his own council fires.” Then, after Hecht gave his blessing to Howard’s distillation of the narrative into “treatment” (really, screenplay) form,

Selznick and Fleming discussed each of Howard’s scenes and informed me of the habits and general psychology of the characters. They also acted out the scenes, David specializing in the parts of Scarlett and her drunken father, and Vic playing Rhett Butler and a curious fellow I could never understand called Ashley . . . After each scene had been discussed and performed, I sat down to the typewriter and wrote it out. Selznick and Fleming, eager to continue with their acting, kept hurrying me. We worked in this fashion for seven days, putting in eighteen to twenty hours a day . . . On the fourth day, a blood vessel in Fleming’s right eye broke, giving him more of an Indian look than ever. On the fifth day, Selznick toppled into a torpor while chewing on a banana.



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