Irwin Winkler - A Life in Movies: Stories from 50 years in Hollywood

Copyright 2019 Irwin Winkler

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936294

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3452-6
eISBN: 978-1-68335-528-1

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TO MARGO
There was a star danced, and under that was she born.

When I walked onto the MGM lot in Culver City in January 1966, it was not the MGM I had imagined. When I was growing up, the MGM lion roared, promising the greatest movie stars, tuneful musicals, inspirational family dramas, and an occasional comedy or period film. It was America in all its small-town wholesomenessno accident that the families in Meet Me in St. Louis or the Andy Hardy series featured happy, secure, middle-class, white fathers and mothers who never seemed to have a job other than taking care of the household and children (however, you never did see a pregnant woman or a gay man or woman). The MGM musicals were glamorous, inventive, and brought the great composers (Irving Berlin, Aaron Copeland, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter) to a mass audience. They also brought unbelievably talented dancers (Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse), vocalists (Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds), even Olympic swimmers (Esther Williams), and the movie stars Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Mickey Rooney, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Lana Turnerall working for Mr. Mayer and company. For every nook and corner of America there was a film a week, fifty-two a year. MGM boasted hundreds of actors under multi-year exclusive contracts, schools for the child actors (Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney), dance classes, elocution lessons, doctors, dentists, barbers, bankers, chiropractors, and a team of masseuses to soothe the bodies of the executives and stars. The back lot, a couple of miles south of the main studio, had an authentic-looking French town with a lake and a moat (why travel all the way to Europe?), a New York City street (why go east?), a small-town Andy Hardy village, a railroad station, and an MGM-owned-and-operated generator plant (so MGM didnt have to depend on the city for its power). Storage facilities housed the valuable antiques that were used on sets, costumes from janitor overalls to glamorous gowns, even jewels for actors to flash. A large group of ex-Los Angeles police officers made up the security force to protect the actors and executives, who might themselves get into trouble on or more probably off the lot.

By 1966, most of that was gone. The man whose name was over the lion, Louis B. Mayer, was also gone, and an auction was soon to sell off the costumes, the props, and the real estate. A few television shows were renting out the soundstages where Gene Kelly had danced with Leslie Caron to George Gershwins An American in Paris. The once-bustling dream factory was sad and sparse.

Movies thrived before and after World War II, but in 1947 the United States government broke up the ownership of the theaters and the studios. No longer could the moviemakers control where the films played, and no longer could the movie theaters control the films that were produced. Television soon came along, and by the time I showed up at MGM, more than 90 percent of the homes in America had TV sets. As television audiences grew, movie attendance shrank. In the 1940s, almost 60 percent of America went to the movies once a week; by 1965 only 10 percent went that often. Not only MGM but all of the once-powerful studios had experienced a radical upheaval. In 1958 the talent agency MCA took over Universal Studios, primarily to produce television shows through the subsidiary Revue Productions. Twentieth Century Fox had lost its leader, Darryl Zanuck, and, to keep the movie studio running, sold most of its back lot, now known as Century City. In October 1966, Paramount was sold to Gulf and Western, a conglomerate run by a very shady Charles Bluhdorn. Warner Bros. Studio, despite winning an Academy Award for Best Picture with My Fair Lady in 1965, ended up in the hands of the New York parking lot owner Steve Ross after Jack Warner sold it to a small company, Seven Arts. Columbia Pictures lost its leader, the autocratic, much-hated Harry Cohn, in 1958 (at his funeral the actor Red Skelton, upon seeing the massive turnout, remarked, Give the public what they want, and theyll come out for it). Columbia Pictures was on the verge of bankruptcy until the mid-1960s, when a young producer, Bert Schneider, made a bunch of successful low-budget movies starting with Easy Rider. The Walt Disney Company we know now as one of the (if not the) most successful entertainment companies in the world was a mere shell of what it had been in the glory days of Mickey Mouse and the Seven Dwarfs, as Walt Disney himself died on December 15, 1966.

When I stepped out of my dilapidated car and looked up at the MGM sign, I was in awe, but when I walked around the lot trying to find my office, I ended up in the barber shop, where Slick the shoe-shine man (who, I was told, had been shining shoes at MGM since the 1930s) pointed me to the Thalberg Building, named after the creative head of MGMs glory days, Irving Thalberg, who died in 1936. That seemed to be all that was left of an era when the studios motto was More stars than there are in heaven.

The MGM sign (without the lion) now sits atop a small office building on Beverly Drive in the commercial district of Beverly Hills, just one block east of the much more famous and glamorous Rodeo Drive. No lot, no soundstages.

As I wrote this memoir, we finished shooting Creed II, a spinoff of the Rocky series, with Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone, and The Irishman, the story of mob hit man Frank Sheeran, with Marty Scorsese directing Bob De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. Both Creed II and The Irishman prove that, although the dream factories may be gone, the dreams live on.

My introduction to show business came via a circuitous route (dont many important things in life?). Growing up in Coney Island, I played and worked on the famous boardwalk, selling hot dogs and cotton candy and taking tickets for kiddie rides. Whenever I had free time, I would end up in one of the two local movie theaters. The one that showed mostly MGM films was the favorite for datesthose were the romances and the musicals in blazing color. The other movie houses showed the much tougher Warner Bros. James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart gangster films. For those films, no dates. I graduated from high school early and was seventeen and a half when I entered New York University.

It was 1949, and NYU was crowded with mature students who were attending college under the GI Bill. I was lost, had few friends, didnt like school, and after a couple of years I enlisted in the United States Army, figuring if I couldnt study with soldiers, Id fight alongside them. The infantry unit I was assigned to in Camp Polk, Louisiana, was training for duty in Korea, where the North Koreans had invaded South Korea. (A useless war in which fifty-two thousand Americans died, and we seem to be at it again!)