From Movietone News 50 (June 28, 1976): 1–8. Reprinted by permission of Richard Thompson.
Sam Fuller was twelve when, in the early 1920s, his father died and he moved with his mother and brothers to New York City from Worcester, Massachusetts. There, he continued his vocation: newsboy. “My mother did nothing—she was a mother,” Fuller says. His brothers—one an excellent cartoonist—are now dead.
At fourteen and a half, he became Arthur Brisbane’s private copy-boy, going everywhere with Brisbane, then editor-in-chief of all Hearst papers. Fuller even rode to work in Brisbane’s car, which was equipped with a dictaphone for each day’s page-one editorial. At seventeen, Fuller wanted to be a police reporter. Brisbane said no; one had to be a good twenty. The New York Graphic called, looking for a head copyboy; Fuller demurred, saying he wanted to be reporter. The Graphic countered with an offer of higher wages and a quick rise to reporter.
The man who hired him away was Emile Gauvreau, who inspired both the play and the 1931 film, Five Star Final. As head copyboy, Fuller wrote every chance he got; he’d hand it in, and they’d throw it away, he recalls, “without interrupting the flow of the movement of their arms.” Finally he was promoted to police reporter at $38.50 a week, $5 expenses. Per Fuller, The Graphic was full of crime and gossip.
This interview took place April 4, 1976, at Fuller’s home above Laurel Canyon, where he lives with his wife, the actress Christa Lang Fuller, and their then sixteen-month-old daughter Samantha, Fuller’s first child. Fuller works—and interviews—in the large converted garage of his home called The Shack, surrounded by about three hundred completed film scripts, all as yet unfilmed. (He adds six or so a year to the list.)
He still thinks of himself as a newspaperman, and he still speaks with the sound of New York.
SF: You can always tell about a leaper by the distance his toes are from the edge of either the window or the ledge of the roof he’s threatening to jump from. If you’re covering it, watch those toes. If they stick out, he’s not a fraud, he’s going, and he’s going fast. He usually makes a silly speech.
[As a New York newspaperman,] I had collected a lot of suicide notes. When you cover a story, you ask the coroner, “Can I have the note?” Ironically, 90 percent of the notes end with: “God forgive me.” No matter who the hell they are, they always say that before they’re going to die. It’s a fear complex. They turn to the only commodity sold to them and forced down their goddamned young throats: “God.” It’s silly.
I decided [in those days] I’d write a book called God Forgive Me—God Forgive Me, about all these characters, and reprint their notes. The best note I had was [from] this girl who wrote it with an eyebrow pencil on a small paper bag. “This is my Independence Day. Here is the way I am celebrating it. God forgive me.”
I left the notes with my mother and went to Frisco. She was very panicky about them. My mother said, “How can you even hold on to these?” It depressed her. Every one of those little pieces of paper, by God, she lost them. It was just a terrible thing. It was my fault, I kept them all in a paper bag.
One of them was from three old maids, sisters, between seventy and eighty-five years old; they were panhandlers, beggars, they worked the subway entrances for money. Then they decided they had nothing to live for. They had eight or ten cents when a cop found them. They pooled their money and bought nightgowns and stuffed all the goddamned cracks and gassed themselves to death. This was my lead: “Three old, old maids joined the young in heaven yesterday.” My night editor liked that very much.
Q: Your film Park Row (1952) is about the newspaper business in New York of the 1880s. You told me that, preparing the film, you became frustrated corresponding with the Mergenthaler Co. Their lawyers wrote back repeatedly trying to discourage you from dramatizing their namesake, Ottmar Mergenthaler, 1884 inventor of the Linotype.
SF: So finally I got a handwritten letter from Ottmar Mergenthaler’s son. He was then about seventy. He said, “This is just a matter of course, the lawyers [say ‘no’] automatically.” He wanted to subside my anger. I wrote him a letter telling him I didn’t want anybody’s permission, including his. Then he wrote me another letter saying, “Your anger interests me, you must think a lot of my father.” So I wrote him, “I wouldn’t have gone through all this unless I thought a lot of your father, and I’m going ahead with this project, and I don’t want any further communication about it.” I was pretty sore. So he wrote, “I’m inviting you to New York, come and see me.”
Q: There’s a still of you before a Linotype machine you used in Park Row. Where did you find the replica of Mergenthaler’s invention? Or did you build it?
SF: I went to Mergenthaler Co., I met the son—wonderful man called Herman, he’s dead now—he tipped me off to a man who had an old Lino machine here in L.A., and with a little mock-up, [this man] re-created the original blower, the forced-air machine that blew the matrix.
Q: So was Herman Mergenthaler now open to you including his father in Park Row?
SF: He explained that there’s a certain funny feeling when people change characters around and, after all, it is his father. He said, “If I were to make a movie about your father, there might be little mannerisms that you wouldn’t like, one weakness, one deceitful shrug, something.” I could understand how he felt about it, even though his father was dead.
I said, “I can’t, and won’t, let anyone read the script, that’s ridiculous. All I know is that I’m using [your father], and if I do anything wrong you can sue the hell out of me.” He said, “I’ll give you all the information you want.” I said, “I don’t want any information. I’ve known the character I want since I was a kid. I’ve read about him, I’ve heard about him, that’s all I want.” He said, “Fine.”
Q: Did you have trouble casting the part?
SF: The actor, Bela Kovacs, looked just like Ottmar Mergenthaler, that’s why I used him.
When the picture was shown for the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association—that’s an annual get-together of editors and publishers representing the dailies in this country—it was an unusual evening. The four Hearst sons were there with George Sokolsky, the very famous reactionary columnist for Hearst; and also, Douglas MacArthur, who was just fired by Truman and the next day was to go to Congress to make his famous “Old soldiers never die” speech. And former President Herbert Hoover. [Fuller shows a still of himself with these luminaries at the event.] I refused to let them release any publicity, including this picture—it’s a great shot. Hoover, MacArthur, the four Hearst boys, and me. You understand, MacArthur was Page One, [the Republicans] were talking about running him for President.
Let’s say MacArthur was a Democrat, let’s say they were all liberals. [Even then,] I would have to say no. In my mind, newspapers are supposed to be above politics. They’re not, of course. The thing is, we ran the movie, and naturally the newspapermen liked the picture, but that’s not important. When it was over, Herman Mergenthaler grabbed me, hugged me, he was crying: he loved the way his father was portrayed. He gave me his bust of his father. Isn’t that unbelievable?
In 1963 I went back down there [to ex–Park Row], and even The World was gone, with the big dome next to the Brooklyn Bridge. The only building remaining from when I started as a copyboy is The New York Journal. It’s now a federal warehouse on Williams Street, right off the Bowery, around the corner from [what was] Park Row. When I was a kid and saw The World, I could use my imagination and think of [Joseph] Pulitzer walking in and out of those doors, and of the young [William Randolph] Hearst, three blocks away, taking over The Journal, and right beyond them were [Horace] Greeley and [James Gordon] Bennett, and [Charles] Dana of The Sun—Jeezus, it was a thrill knowing that once all these fellows were here. I always wanted to make a picture about [all] these men, but you couldn’t. You’d need to have $25 million and do a biographical vignette of each running an hour, hour-and-a-half, a history of journalism.
[With Park Row,] I thought it’d be interesting just to make a composite. The thrill of that film was to have enough money that would allow for the reconstruction of that street. The only fictional addition to that whole damn set was the paper I created owned by the woman, Charity Hackett [Mary Welch]. Everything else was exactly the same.
My thrill also was having that streetcar. We really laid tracks, and really had cobblestones, and I even had the second and third floor built on the set. My cameraman [Jack Russell] said, “[The audience] won’t see it, we’re not going that high,” and I said, “I don’t care. As long as I can see it. I don’t mind.”
It was a UA release, and we opened in a [major] theatre I didn’t want to open in. My ego said yes; in my heart, I knew it was the wrong house, because this was a very small black-and-white picture. It opened at Grauman’s Chinese! I moved the Linotype into the forecourt, and when you bought your ticket you could have the man knock out your name on it. But Park Row died. Wherever it played, it died immediately. For me, it was a flop, though it didn’t really lose money because it cost nothing. I shot it in fifteen days. It went on TV and did very well. It was revived, and did much better theatrically.
At 20th Century-Fox I had a chance to do [Park Row] under another title, and in color. Zanuck had a title called In Old New York. He said, “We’ll make this into a big, big Technicolor picture with [Gregory] Peck, Susan Hayward, Dan Dailey.” It was a fine cast; Dailey would be Steve Brodie and Mitzi Gaynor would be the barmaid, and there’d be a few musical numbers. Anyway, I turned it down. I’m not saying it’s wrong or it’s right, and I like Peck and Hayward, they’re a class team, but it would have been a very expensive picture in those days. And I didn’t like the movie title.
I was also approached by a man and wife music-and-lyrics team to do Park Row as a Broadway musical. You can do a musical about anything! Cain and Abel: [sings] “Would you druther / Kill your brother?”
Q: You broke Hollywood’s rule and used your own money for Park Row?
SF: I sure did. Not all of it, but a lot of it. I don’t regret that. If I had gone to UA or whoever who would have financed it, they would never have OK’d, for instance, that street set. They’d have OK’d only part of it. You’re only supposed to build what you’re going to shoot.
Q: What about the way the newspaperman, Phineas Mitchell [Gene Evans], operates in Park Row?
SF: He explains that, for competition, since he doesn’t have a staff, he steals news, which they all do, they still do. He sends the fellow out for [The Globe], remember, and he tells him, “Use what you can and just change it enough …” and he didn’t have to finish the sentence before the other man says, “I know what you mean.” A lot of writers do that in books and in poems. As an editor, he doesn’t feel that he’s really plagiarizing. He is usurping and utilizing someone else’s facts, but not [their] invention: that’s the big difference in stealing from a newspaper. If you can’t afford AP or UPI today, you just read them, and you say, “Oh my God, how am I going to rearrange this thing?”
What I’m trying to bring out is that every editor has his own approach, and his approach was—I hate like hell to use the word “honest”—it was a legitimate approach.
Q: But him telling that blowhard, Steve Brodie, to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge …
SF: Since in history [Brodie] kept telling everybody he was going to jump off the Bridge, I thought it would be funny for a guy to say, “OK, jump.” And I knew in advance that it would be all right, because we all know he did jump off the Bridge and he lived to tell about it. That to me is a delineation of that kind of newspaperman, whereas Charles Dana of The Sun would not only discourage [Brodie] but would be a little reluctant about how in hell to handle the story. Because to him that was a vivid, exploitable, almost distasteful kind of copy. That’s why the paper was shown as The Old Lady of Journalism, The New York Sun. [The Globe’s] the opposite, that’s all.
Q: You frame your stories in terms of extremes, opposites: having the crusading editor beat the man’s head to a pulp against the noble words carved on Franklin’s statue.
SF: Well, I thought that was legitimate; the statue’s there.
Q: But implicit is that the statue’s there for beating heads on.
SF: That’s the same as in a Western. The horses are there, and when there’s a fight, you take advantage of the legs of the horses, you shoot through them. The best example in the world: when there was a firefight going on in the War, it struck me that many times we would fight in a graveyard, and the reason had nothing to do with dramatic contrasts or shock value, nothing. The run of stones there gave us excellent cover; we would instinctively, like animals, head to the stones, assuming bullets would not go through them. And then it dawned on all of us how ironic it was, that we were killing people where the people were already dead. We don’t let them rest, we don’t let them lie.
Q: I’ve noticed in your career how partial you are to musical numbers.
SF: Yeah? Well, I did have a song in I Shot Jesse James and I’ll never do that again; a girl singing “Beautiful Dreamer”—it just kills me every time I think of it. I put it in because it was germane to that period, but I was wrong. Wrong because saloons at that time did not have entertainment of any kind. They had nothing but bums hanging around in the daytime—most people worked. But if you walk into any saloon in a movie in the middle of the day, it’s packed with people and there’s a musical number!
Q: Why is Park Row so dark, with the characters materializing from shadows and disappearing into them?
SF: Illumination in those days was very, very dark; they didn’t have electricity, they had gas or a lamp. They all had Rembrandt lighting, every one of them, just black, black with a certain grey. I wanted that. If it’s bad photography, it’s my fault. If it had been made at 20th Century-Fox, it would have been very, very bright, it would have been in color, the whole mood would have been different.
To answer your question: you just couldn’t see too much in any of those offices. I told the cameraman, whatever your source of light, that’s up to you, but—for instance, when a man walks into a set and lights a match, I don’t want four lights to come up. We tried [my idea]: I darkened the stage, I lit a match. Well, he said, that’s pretty weak. I said OK, use just a little stronger [light], but not much. And I thought it was an effective thing, to give a feeling that you have something that we take for granted, which is light. I don’t know how many candles Balzac had [for writing], maybe two or three. Why in hell didn’t everybody then go blind? During the War, we had Coleman lanterns. The slight touch of light inside gave us a warmth and a feeling of safety, that’s because we could see each other. If you don’t see each other, you feel each other, but it’s much nicer to see. From a filmmaking point of view, pictorially, it’s important to catch that feeling.
I had a very funny experience with Lucien Ballard, who photographed Fixed Bayonets for me. A scene took place in a cave. Well, I’ve been in caves and they’re dark; that’s why they’re caves, especially if you get away from the entrance. “Here it is,” I told him, “this is the scene, but no light.” “Whattaya mean, no light?” “That’s your headache,” I said. “You’re the professional.” Just a joke! I walked away leaving a bit of egg on his face.
You are faking [illumination in darkness], and that can disturb an audience. I’ve seen scenes where someone says, “Kill the light!” and they do, and you still see [the actors] very plainly. You have to, because you have to see their reactions, but that to me is not good motion picture making. There instead, I don’t mind depending on sound, whether it’s heavy breathing, or a whisper, or the sound of feet shuffling: to me, that’s much more dramatic.
Q: Did you see Bruce Surtees’s dark, dark cinematography for Play Misty for Me?
SF: Oh, yes. The best photography I’ve seen in that vein was William Clothier in my picture [Merrill’s Marauders]. I had just had an attack on the side of a mountain, and I set about thirty-six flags for explosions and it’s about eleven at night, no moon, people were carrying lamps so they could talk to each other, one or two work lights for operating the equipment. Then I said, “All right, kill the lights. When I set off the explosions, that’s when we’ll see the men.” And it worked beautifully. No lights, not one. You saw the men falling down and fighting and running and all that. And some of them you didn’t even see, they were too far away, as the explosion wasn’t powerful. That’s the way it was. [Clothier] loved it. Any cameraman would.
I don’t know anything technically about a camera, I really don’t. The cameramen know. I tell them what I would like, and they give it. In I Shot Jesse James, the first time I ever directed, the first shot I did was the last in the ten-day picture. The last shot is where Ford [John Ireland], the assassin who had shot Jesse in the back, now is advancing on the back of the man who took his woman away, John Kelley [Preston Foster]. They said “day for night,” and I didn’t know what they meant. But I told Ernie Miller, who photographed it, I want it so black that there’s only a little bit of moonlight coming. In Western towns, when the moon is at a certain [angle], it’s all dark, and only between a couple of houses would a shaft of light hit the street. I didn’t want it where the moon was high. I wanted black silhouettes all over. And [Ernie] did it and I liked it, but it wasn’t perfect because he was still doing “day for night.” He filtered it, it’s not important, but I still think it’s wrong.
You see on TV automobiles pulling up right past the camera and there’s no shaft of light—they’re shooting “day for night.” When you have a real shaft of light, you’ll see things in the air—dust, raindrops, things flying around—you’ll see it in a room, including a hospital room. They’re all filled with dust. When the light hits [a hospital room] in a certain way, ooh, it’s horrible, for certain people; they’d have a hemorrhage, hypochondriacs would go crazy. That’s what I miss in a night shot with a car. If there’s no dust, it means it’s a set.
Q: How do you organize your shots visually—the composition, the blocking, the camera moves, the editing?
SF: If I were writing a scene about you, and you shook your head and you smiled, I’d have to maneuver that camera in such a way—I don’t want to cut—so that I can be on your eyes as they twinkle while you shake your head. The important thing, it’s not the shaking the head, because if the camera’s over there [in long shot] you can shake your head and we’ll still see it, but we won’t know whether you are laughing to yourself or whether you’re planning to shoot me. You have to be in that close—the camera’s very effective that way. So I judge it for the emotional reaction. I like shock cuts, and I love the idea of eliminating dissolves. I think they’re very poetic, very nice, and highly boring to me unless there’s an essential reason for a dissolve. [Time passing] was replaced [by filmmakers]—the dissolve replaced the intertitle, “The Next Morning.” Then they went in for clocks, and sky and sun and moon and raindrops, snow, flowers, a dog, a full bowl, an empty bowl, all that nonsense. You don’t really need that because, visually, you can go from one image to another within two or three seconds, even on a pullback. Establish that there is a lapse of time by what [a character] is saying, or by what he has done. For example: a man kills a man CUT TO a water faucet, he’s wiping the blood off his hands CUT TO a car, he’s leaving. Visually, it will progress. Tell a story with a camera the way you tell a story at home: “You know what this man did? He killed this fellow, and you know he just went in and washed his hands, and drove off in his car.” That’s exactly what you would say. Why not show it that way?
Q: No wonder you don’t work for TV.
SF: The closest I’ve come to a car chase was in Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. I had one shot of a car chasing a car down along the Rhine. And the second shot is through a bower. That’s all. I tried to cut that down, and I couldn’t. I timed it, and it was four seconds.”
Q: What’s your objection to car chases?
SF: To me, there’s no dramatic stuff involved, there’s no inventive stuff involved, it’s saturated. I don’t like a car chasing a car unless something is different, something original.