Cinema Retro correspondent Gareth Owen was invited by Warner Brothers to join a select number of journalists to interview famed film critic and documentary producer/writer/director Richard Schickel for the official Cannes Film Festival press kick-off of his five hour history of Warner Brothers, You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story. The documentary, for which Clint Eastwood is executive producer, will be broadcast this September on TV and a 550 page coffee table companion book will accompany its premiere. The following questions were compiled from those asked by Gareth and other journalists during the interview.
Q: When did you begin work on the documentary?
RS: We did our first interview for it in the fall of ’06. We
started the cutting a year ago next month (June 2007).
Q: Was it a daunting assignment?
RS: Sure it was daunting! But it was also irresistible. I
always wanted to do a studio portrait. I had come close once before but
somebody else got the job. But patience is always rewarded because Warners has
always been my favorite studio and the one that most interested me – the films
they did, the stars they had, the directors they had. That goes back to when I
was a little kid, ten years-old looking at Saturday matinees. Somehow at that
time, I noticed there was something a little different about Warner Brothers
that appealed to me. They were kind of tough and they took up subjects that
somehow interested me as opposed to MGM which was glamour. There was an edge to
them, a toughness about them.
Q: What films influenced you the most?
RS: Back then – the early 1940s? I would say Air Force was one. Casablanca,
certainly. Yankee Doodle Dandy, certainly.
Those were the big movies I remember from that time. I was born in 1933, so it
was mid-War before I was allowed out of my house to go to whatever I wanted to
see. So some of those war-time movies were the ones that kind of hooked me.
Q: What is the status of the Warner Brothers documentary, You Must Remember This?
RS: It’s a five-hour project. Two hours are finished and the
third hour is just about finished. We’re starting on hours four and five now.
Getting it finished on a deadline basis is fairly difficult. People think these
things are easy, but they’re very difficult. Documentaries are one of the more
difficult forms of filmmaking. If you’re making a fictional film, you can go
back and reshoot the scene. I can’t reshoot the scene from Casablanca. It’s there. You have to live with it. It’s
difficult to link the movies to star and director careers and to the studio’s
general history. You know, Harry and Jack Warner fighting with each other all
the time, for example. It’s a question of balancing. There are lots of things
I’ve had to cut out of this film that I would have preferred to have in the
film, but there are time constraints.
Q: Has Warners pressured you to present a rosy picture of
the studio?
RS: Not in the least. That’s where Clint, as executive
producer, has been very helpful. When we first talked about doing this, I said,
“I want you to be in on this."...
He said, “Yeah, I’d like to do it – but only if it’s not a puff piece.†We
didn’t want to just say “Warner Brothers is a great studio. They never made any
mistakes. Everything was just great. They never did anything stupid†So with that kind of understanding behind
you, they really just left us alone and that’s been very pleasurable. I
interview who I want, play the movies I want. It’s that kind of a deal. In the
course of doing all the films I’ve done, I’ve never really been interfered
with. Only one time, that I can think of, and that was a network I was making a
picture for. A particular person got to be a real pest. But we stumbled through
it and I don’t feel I compromised in any important way. I’ve had a lucky
filmmaking life. I haven’t had a lot of contentiousness with studios.
Q: What were some of the most surprising and most
disappointing things you found on this project?
RS: In terms of surprising, lots of little movies from the
pre-code era like Heroes for Sale, a
Bill Wellman movie about exploited veterans that’s a wonderful picture. I also
found clips from a movie – I forget the title now- but Pat O’Brien is a
telephone repair man and he has to go into people’s houses to fix the plugs and
what have you. And it’s very sexy because he’s intruding on women and there’s a
lot of funny cross-talk there. Then there’s Three
on a Match, which I was aware of but wasn’t as aware of as I became, a
wonderful movie about drug addiction, among other things. I wish I had a lot
more of Warren William, who was wonderful and very amusing playing slimy
characters. He had a picture I really wanted to get in but couldn’t, called Employee’s Entrance. It’s a terrific
little movie but I couldn’t figure out a way to get it in. I would have liked
to have done something about John Garfield. I would have liked to have done
something about Ann Sheridan, who was a special favorite of mine when I was a
kid, as was Garfield
– a very interesting, New York-kind of actor. Joan Crawford surprised me. She’s
pretty good. She’s not an actress I though that highly of at the time. But
there’s something about the intensity of her work in those pictures as a young
woman trying to rise in the world, particularly in Mildred Pierce. The surprises are always kind of nuanced. There’s
another movie and, again I can’t remember the name of it, but it has Kay
Francis in a really sophisticated movie about gambling addiction that was made
around 1935. But these surprises haven’t
made me change my mind about Cagney, Errol Flynn or Bette Davis – people I’ve
always loved. I think the era from the beginning of sound through,
roughly, White Heat (1949) was a great era and Warner Brothers was the
greatest studio. It was very fractious. Everyone was always yelling at each
other and going on suspension. Warners was kind of like a rat’s nest. Everybody
hating Jack Warner and him trying to keep all these people working and doing
what he wanted them to do, and they
didn’t want to do it. But I think that out of that kind of foment came the qualities
of the studio that I admire. Jack Warner was a really cheap guy. He wanted his
pictures to be low-budget, to get done on time, to have the actors he wanted in
them, and if they didn’t want to do it, he’d try to make them even if he
couldn’t. It’s a wonderful story of that kind of activity at the studio. I
think in some ways Warners was better than some of the more smoothly-running
studios. I mean, MGM really was a
factory that turned out that material without a lot of apparent difficulty with
the personnel.
I’m not saying Warners made all terrific movies. They had
their share of turkeys but the average was pretty good. There was an attempt to
go being Warner Brothers in the fifties. They did make a few socially
conscientious movies, but the pictures got bigger, they got slower, they got
longer, and the sprightly energy the studio had in the thirties and forties
started to disappear. They were fighting television, which was a huge challenge
to that system. The studio, I think, revived itself in the seventies. There was
a new management. Steve Ross had bought the studio and he had John Calley as
head of production and they’d just do anything and everything they wanted to
do. So, the studio was re-energized in that decade or decade-and-a-half after Ross
bought it. It again became the most interesting studio in Hollywood during that period. That’s when
Clint came there. That’s when Stanley Kubrick started his relationship with the
studio. They were making All the
President’s Men. They were making The
Exorcist. I mean, these were kind of exciting movies. The studio was
stirred again in that period.
Q: It’s a shame some of these films have never been released
on home video…
RS: It’s not only true of Warner Brothers. The studios have
these fabulous movies but the DVD audience is a very vast audience. So if the
picture has Kay Francis in it – whoever heard of Kay Francis in 2008? How do
you market them? They’ve been successful at Warners with a series of film noir
boxed sets because the genre carries them. But they’re going to run out of
them. I think they’re on box four or five right now. But that’s one way of
repackaging films. Even the stars that we all think of – Bogart, Cagney, Davis
– really don’t carry the weight in the DVD market that you think they would.
It’s always a fight. I’m very involved with the guy at Warners who does the
classic catalog and he is always desperate...the star packages of Joan Crawford
and Bette Davis work o.k for him, but they’re a drop in the bucket compared to
some movie they released last December and then put out on video in April.
These are overwhelmingly popular compared to the classic catalog. It’s a risk for
them to do this picture that I’m doing. You have to find a gimmick. They do
alright with Doris Day musicals as a package and some other star packages. But
it’s a fight because the general problem we have – all of us who care about
movie history- is animating interest in that history among the audience. They
need knowledge. They need to know who these people are. They need to know what
kind of social milieu these pictures were made in. If our picture has a
function, I hope it’s to open them up in some way to that kind of knowledge.
Q: What can you tell us about the companion book for your
documentary?
RS: I wrote about six historical essays for the book. It’s a
very beautiful book. Here’s the good thing about Warners: besides having
preserved their films, the archive is extremely rich. It has thousands and
thousands of great photographs. The design of this book is really beautiful.
Another writer, George Perry, has written far more words for the book than I
have. He will get something in on John Garfield and George Arliss. I think the
book, in that sense, will be a little richer than the TV film because it’s like
500 pages. They’ve had their deadline problems bringing the book out. I had to
write my essays in a six week period from late December to early February. It
was awful. I was trying to produce the film on the one hand and write these
essays on the other hand. I was totally exhausted by the end of that period.
Q: How close did you work with Clint Eastwood on this
project?
RS: Well, Clint was probably the first person to see the
first cuts. He said, “I love itâ€. I asked him if he wanted any changes but he
just said, “No, I like what you’re doing.â€
He’s been very, very, very supportive because he likes the project. He’s
been at Warner Brothers since 1976 That’s a long piece of history. I guess he’s
had his arguments with the studio, but he loves the studio. So he’s been
enormously helpful just as a presence.
Q: You were one of the early champions of his films, weren’t
you?
RS: No, I don’t think I was. I came to Clint late. I think
the first movie of his that made me say, “Wow, this guy is really something†is
The Outlaw Josey Wales. I think it’s
a beautiful film. He thinks it’s a
beautiful film. He sometimes says to me that he thinks, in it’s way, it’s as
good as Unforgiven. He’s made a lot
of movies that I like a lot that have been as celebrated as Million Dollar Baby or Mystic River. Honky Tonk Man is a movie I love. I
think it’s great. Tightrope is
excellent. It’s a movie the intellectuals have begun to take more seriously
because it explores sexual issues
Q: Eastwood’s new movie (The
Exchange) is one of his most elegant…
RS: I would agree with you. Sometimes Clint likes a little
roughness in his movies. He doesn’t like them too polished. He feels if you
push actors to the fourth or fifth take, they start losing their energy and
freshness. But with this movie, I noticed it’s richer in things like cut-aways.
It’s more polished than is typical of him. But he’s a very adaptable guy. He
will adapt his manner to the story he’s telling. I think he wanted this to be
the way it looks. Clint is a very, very smart guy. And knowing him all these
years, what’s impressed me is how he’s kind of grown as a director and the way
he meets with the press. He used to be kind of awkward in talking with
reporters, but he’s really very good with the press now. He’s evolved in other
ways, too. I wouldn’t call them political opinions, but social positions.
Q: Isn’t he a Republican?
RS: I don’t know, I guess so, but I don’t think that’s too important.
I know him to be kind of fiscally conservative. He’s a very frugal producer and
director and I think he feels frugality is a virtue for governments or for
moviemakers. That’s kind of his inherent nature. He’s not a guy who’s inclined
to waste a lot of other people’s money. That suits me just fine. Unlike most
people, it seems to me he has opened up in lots of ways: intellectually,
emotionally, as a filmmaker and in his choice of materials. And most people, as
they age, kind of close down. And he’s been expansive.
Q: Do you see DVDs as a danger to the film industry?
RS: No, I don’t. They do produce things that go directly to
DVD but I don’t believe they are successful. They require the platform of a
movie release, the publicity that surrounds the movie, in order to sell DVDS. I
do think that’s true. So I think the relationship is symbiotic in that way. I
don’t see major films being made for DVD – ever.