INTRODUCTION

“A CAREER IS A CURIOUS THING,” NORMAN MAINE TELLS ESTHER Blodgett, brilliantly portrayed by Judy Garland, early in George Cukor’s A Star Is Born (1954). “Talent isn’t always enough. You need a sense of timing—an eye for seeing the turning point—for recognizing the big chance when it comes and grabbing it.” A Star Is Born depicts the perfect storm of a great chance and the luminous talent to realize it. But despite the confluence of genius and ambition that find themselves simultaneously portrayed and manifested within A Star Is Born, the film failed to achieve the Hollywood apotheosis desired by its star, Judy Garland and its producer, Michael Sidney Luft (known as Sid Luft). This book tells the compelling story of the making of A Star Is Born, the film that was to be Garland’s crowning achievement but instead—and undeservedly—marked the end of her great career as a motion picture star.

The main focus of our book recounts the behind-the-scenes narrative of the making of Judy Garland’s A Star Is Born, and explores the film’s successes and failures. It has been a long gestating project for Lorna, who visited the film set as a baby, and jokes that A Star Is Born is the closest her parents ever came to making a “home movie.” Lorna’s informal conversations with the film’s costar, James Mason, augment memories and tales of the production heard from her parents. Newfound information has been culled from the massive amount of documentation that survives in the Warner Bros. Archives held at the University of Southern California and the many relevant collections of papers (including those of director George Cukor) held by the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. My collaboration with Lorna began in 2010, when she encouraged me to interview people associated with Judy Garland and A Star Is Born, including the various notables who attended the film’s extraordinary star-studded Hollywood premiere. Over the next two years, I was able to speak with thirty people. Over a third of these interview subjects have since passed on. Those precious interviews, whether referenced or not, have informed the text in myriad ways.

The book’s illustrations draw mainly from Lorna’s own extensive collection, and many have never before been published. The majority of these photographs derive from a complete keybook set of all the behind-the-scenes stills taken by the film’s unit photographer, Pat Clark. Important images from special shoots by celebrated photographers Robert “Bob” Willoughby, Sanford H. Roth, and John Engstead supplement Lorna’s materials, along with classic scene stills, frame enlargements, and ephemera, to chronicle the A Star Is Born story both in words and images.

A Star Is Born is a film with a rich history and one of Hollywood’s favorite stories since 1932, when the precursor film, George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood?, was released to theaters. Director William A. Wellman did his own version in 1937, rechristening it A Star Is Born, and actress Barbra Streisand produced her own rendition in 1976. I have included essays on all of these productions, to provide context for Judy Garland’s film.

Even when What Price Hollywood? was conceived in the early sound era, movies about the movies were nothing new. Hollywood always has been fond of self-regard, and, sometimes, self-flagellation, reflecting back its own image comically, tragically, and—with the advent of “talkies”—musically. In the ancien régime of Hollywood, Charles Chaplin conjured comedy shorts such as the one-reel The Masquerader (1914) and A Film Johnnie (1914), as well as the two-reelers His New Job (1915) and Behind the Screen (1916), depicting the behind-the-scenes workings of moviemaking. Notable silent feature-length films with a backdrop of Hollywood include Maurice Tourneur’s A Girl’s Folly (1917), the Mabel Normand starring vehicle The Extra Girl (1923), Rupert Hughes’s Souls for Sale (1923), James Cruze’s Hollywood (1923), the Colleen Moore–starring production Ella Cinders (1926), and King Vidor’s Show People (1928), starring Marion Davies.

Judy Garland with daughter Lorna Luft, 1953. Photo by John Engstead.

Hollywood always has been fond of self-regard, and, sometimes, self-flagellation, reflecting back its own image comically, tragically, and—with the advent of “talkies”—musically.

What Price Hollywood? was the most significant self-examination of Hollywood culture of the early talking-film period. Other notable film-centric films of the 1930s include Raoul Walsh’s Going Hollywood (1933) starring Marion Davies and Bing Crosby and Hollywood Hotel (1937), both musicals of the 42nd Street (1933) variety. Hollywood Cavalcade (1939) is a nostalgic view of Hollywood’s early days and employs many silent-film veterans. The next decade produced at least one outstanding Hollywood tale: Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), which concerns a movie director, disillusioned with Hollywood high-style comedy, who hobos through the countryside in search of true-to-life inspiration.

In the 1950s, Hollywood looked in the mirror more often. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) delves into the deepening madness of fictitious silent movie queen Norma Desmond, played by real-life silent movie queen Gloria Swanson. Nicholas Ray’s film noir In a Lonely Place (1950) involves a tormented screenwriter suspected of murder. Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) features four former studio colleagues who reflect on the flexible ethical standards of their industry. Hollywood history and pretense are satirized in the musical comedy brilliance of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952).

After the 1950s, the notable films reflecting moviemaking culture decrease in number but nevertheless include such greats as Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), the filmmaker’s avant-garde autobiographical exploration of a director experiencing a creative block, while François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) presents the professional and personal problems facing the cast and crew during production of a movie; The Stunt Man (1980) features a fugitive of the law who stumbles onto a movie set and becomes a stuntman for the film’s autocratic director; and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) is a black comedy (containing many celebrity cameos) in which a film executive murders a screenwriter, courts his girlfriend, and gets away with the crime, while ending up the head of the studio. Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) is a celebration of movie-making as practiced by the low-budget filmmaker Ed Wood. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) delves into the creative world of film pioneer Georges Méliès. Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) reconsiders the falling movie idol/rising star fable, but transfers it to Hollywood of the silent-film era and gives it a happy ending. The Artist is an homage to the original A Star Is Born story, made by a French director and with two French stars, filmed on location in Los Angeles. It is an outsider’s valentine to the enduringly fertile, derided, yet beloved setting: Hollywood. La La Land (2016) muses on the power, but also the fragility, of dreams, sets those dreams to music, and ravishingly photographs them in real Los Angeles locations. All of these movies draw on Hollywood life as it was formed in the first half of the twentieth century: Some were cautionary tales; others chronicled the myths that quickly grew up around the motion picture industry and the culture it engendered.

Other artistic forms have also explored the American film industry. Predating What Price Hollywood?, Merton of the Movies, a 1922 novel by Harry Lean Wilson was adapted into a successful Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. (Merton of the Movies was adapted into a feature film in 1924 and again in 1947.) Another key theatrical work in this genre is Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1930 Broadway hit Once in a Lifetime, a satirical comedy about Hollywood during the transition to sound. (Moss Hart also wrote the script for Garland’s version of A Star Is Born.) No serious consideration of the literature concerning the American movie industry would be complete without mentioning such superb novels as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished roman à clef of 1930s Hollywood The Last Tycoon; Nathanael West’s 1939 The Day of the Locust; and Budd Schulberg’s 1941 What Makes Sammy Run? Hollywood culture during the studio system even enjoyed a serious ethnographic examination. Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker’s 1950 text Hollywood: The Dream Factory, remains a fascinating study of the American film industry as it existed in the late 1940s.

Holding a special place across the decades of classic films, important novels, and theatrical works that stand alongside it, A Star Is Born continues to resonate. What is it about the Star Is Born story that proves so compelling as to always find it being remade? One answer is that, at its basic level, it examines the father/daughter dynamic. This would have appealed to Judy Garland due to her unresolved relationship to her own father and also relates to her own marriage, as the older man nurturing the younger woman certainly reflects aspects of the Sid Luft–Judy Garland relationship. But while the tale told in A Star Is Born in any iteration no doubt boasts many superlative elements, it is Judy Garland that audiences remember. This is attributable not only to the film as a showcase for her immeasurable talents, but also to the sentimental mirroring of reality for Judy Garland herself within the narrative, especially as it relates to her comeback to films after a four-year absence.

Garland’s impressive relaunch of her brand included triumphant concert engagements at the London Palladium and New York City’s Palace Theatre in 1951–1952.

A Star Is Born was Garland’s turning point, but was also George Cukor’s. The film was the director’s first musical, his first film in color, and his first in the widescreen format. The ambitious project was met with much skepticism within the industry. Judy Garland’s career—beset by severe personal and professional setbacks, which included dependency on prescription medication, unreliability at the studio, suicide attempts, and depressive episodes that left her unable to function—appeared to be moribund by 1950, only to be reawakened that year by the magical kiss of her crafty Prince Charming, Sid Luft. As Garland contemplated some kind of show business return, she and her new partner in the “Judy Garland business,” realized that there was not enough money in radio; she had no record contract; and television was in its infancy (not to mention that she had no interest in the medium). Garland’s impressive relaunch of her brand included triumphant concert engagements at the London Palladium and New York City’s Palace Theatre in 1951–1952. After the successes of her live performances in London, New York City, and California, a movie—a big one—was the natural next step. A motion picture comeback with all the bells and whistles could be one ticket to regaining her celluloid stardom.