Sort of Like Howard Hawks

            Yesterday morning I got together with videographer Chip Scheuer and retired Watsonville Police Chief Terry Medina to shoot a video trailer for my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away. Along the way, photographer Tarmo Hannula of the Register-Pajaronian, who I’ve known for years, showed up to take a picture.

            And somewhere in the process I got to thinking, this must be what Howard Hawks felt like when he shot a western with John Wayne. Let’s get together with some friends, head for the great outdoors, and have some fun making a movie.

            Of course Hawks was paid handsomely to make his movies, whereas I’m paying out-of-pocket for mine and doing it on a budget. I have to because a You Tube video trailer is considered essential to book marketing in the digital age. I will say this for making a video, though. It’s a lot more fun than applying for an ISBN number for the book.

Shooting in the Great Indoors

            Actually, this video was shot in the great indoors, which if you’re talking about Howard Hawks/John Wayne movies calls to mind Rio Bravo. What we were trying to do this morning was recreate the interior of a hunting and fishing lodge in an isolated mountain area of Northern California, which is the setting for the book.

            Had I but funding enough and time, I would have taken a weeklong trip to the mountains to scout for appropriate locations, rented a place for the day, and brought everybody up there to shoot it properly. In the real world, I was reduced to doing it on the cheap near where I live.

            I considered a few places to serve as the background for the interior of the lodge, but it turned out the right place was literally under my nose. My Rotary Club meets each week at the Watsonville Elks Lodge, which has a huge fireplace, with the head of a mammoth elk mounted over it. The bar and its furniture are of the late fifties, early sixties vintage that the lodge in my book contains. We figured we could make it work by shooting carefully and atmospherically.

            Ideally, we would have had a rainy day, like the ones in the book, but no such luck. It was bright and sunny, but Chip got around that by framing shots tightly and focusing on the fireplace and building artifacts.

One-Take Terry Does His Scene

            Having stood up at numerous press conferences as police chief, Terry is a pro when it comes to being filmed. He also did video training for city employees and earned the nickname “One-Take Terry,” because when he stepped in front of a camera, he generally got it right the first time.

            We did more than one take this time in order to provide different options, camera angles and inflections when the film was edited, then Terry was sent on his way. Then we shot the rest of the scenes and some footage to go with voice-over, and we were finished in three hours.

            When Hawks and Wayne made the classic Red River in 1947, they found themselves sitting on their hands for days because of heavy unseasonable rains. My video has the opposite problem. We’re going to be sitting on our hands until Chip can get out and shoot some rainy-day footage to complete the project. In this year of California’s major drought, that’s a stresser, but the Weather Channel is saying there’s a good chance of rain next Tuesday and Wednesday. I certainly hope so; the show must go on.

           

           

           

They Learned by Doing

            Ernest Borgnine died earlier this week at the age of 95 after a six-decade career that included an Oscar for his starring role in Marty, a hit TV series, McHale’s Navy, and more TV and movie credits than you could shake a stick at.

            In reading the long Associated Press obituary, the line that jumped out at me was that his sole formal training, for a profession in which he was manifestly successful, consisted of four months’ study at the Hartford Academy in Connecticut in the late 1940s. The Times obituary elaborated on his technique with the following quote from a 1973 interview:

            “No Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.”

How The Duke and Cary Grant Did It

            Once upon a time in Hollywood, just about all the actors learned the business like that. John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper had little or no formal training to speak of. What they had was a stage presence, or perhaps more accurately, a camera presence — great faces, an ability to relax in front of the cameras, and a sense of delivery.

            After that first wave, the business became more and more the province of actors who had formally studied their craft in classes and with teachers. Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman come to mind as examples, and now just about all the big names have been through some sort of extensive formal training. We’ve gone from stars who were actors to actors who might become stars. It’s hard to make comparisons because the styles are so different, though the good ones of each style are all good.

            Pauline Kael remarked on the difference in her famous article on the making of the movie The Group, shot in the mid-1960s when the shift had taken place. She noted that the actresses were all trying to build their characters by extrapolating from the script. The great actresses of the 1930s — Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Miriam Hopkins — would have been more likely to try to project something of themselves into the roles instead, she said.

It Isn’t Just Hollywood

            Relying on formal education, rather than learning by doing, has become pervasive. There is no documentary evidence that Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway ever got a degree in creative writing or attended a fiction writers’ conference. Quite a few of the current crop of novelists do those things. I’m skeptical. It no doubt works for some people, but talent (like judgment) can’t be taught and will usually develop itself given the opportunity.

            In the business world it used to be unsurprising to see someone who started with a company in a stockroom, fresh out of high school, and worked his way up to be president. (It was always a he back then). If you don’t have at least an MBA these days, your only hope of running the company is to start it — the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did.

            My old business, journalism, has undergone the same transformation. When I left it 20 years ago, it was unusual to see a job applicant without a journalism degree; two decades earlier I got hired quickly without one. When I took my first journalism class in ninth grade, I asked the teacher, Mr. McDonald, how to write a news story.

            “Read the front page of the Los Angeles Times every day and do what they do,” he replied.

            That was how I learned, and others could do the same. In today’s world, though, they’re not likely to get the chance.