HATS AND SHOES

The studios’ costumes (in the black-and-white days) were magnificent. The industry supported a population of hundreds of (predominantly Italian) tailors. All of the male stars’ suits were made-to-order by masters. I don’t know where or if one could achieve that quality today.

Not only were the suits cut perfectly—that is, to accentuate the star’s best features—but the fabrics were chosen for their ability to catch the light.

Female stars, each of whom had her favorite designer, were appreciated not only for their acting ability but for their presentation of a fashion show.

Some would change outfits fifteen times in a film. (Kay Francis was followed by women fans who came to see what she was going to wear.) And women were, then, not only the largest percentage of moviegoers but noted as tiebreakers in spousal discussions of which movie to watch.

A large part of the fashion interest and curiosity was The Hat.

These were designed and employed, onstage and off-, to call attention to the face, accentuating, masking, suggesting, or teasing through the shape, the tilt, the adornment, and the veil. The glance was drawn to the hat, and the attention stayed on the face.

The aspect ratio (height to width) of the screen was then 1:1.33, perfect for a close-up, and approximated today on iPhones as Portrait mode.

The close-up sold the face. The hat and clothes were designed with that intent. Frills, heavy necklaces, busyness around the shoulders and throat, distracted from the star’s face, which, finally, was what the studios were selling. The wise director used the hat just as the actresses and their sisters did, to command the eye. (“The hand is quicker than the eye” is an inaccurate description of close-up magic. The hand is not quicker than the eye. Manipulation consists in forcing the viewer to look where you need him to look.)

Men were easier to clothe, as the suit coat or sport coat naturally draws the eye to the face—the V of the jacket, the collar points, and the tie all drawing the eye up, as did Brando’s leather jacket, and Bogey’s turned-up-collared trench coat.

The women’s hats made it challenging to light the face, so the director and the Director of Photography (DP) had to give it some thought. The artists among them realized that this offered not constraint but possibility. (See Rembrandt, a painter.)

The hat-wearing star needed to be lit from below or from the side. (As Joe Sternberg did with Dietrich.)

Most films today, and all comedies, drench the screen with light, devoted not to the creation but to the recording of a story. It’s not only boring but confusing, as, if everything is lit evenly, the audience is not aided in their quest for pertinent information.

How important is the distinction between thoughtful (let alone artistic) and cover-the-earth lighting? See Sternberg’s Dishonored, 1931.

Here Sternberg casts Dietrich as the most glamorous spy of World War I. She is sent, undercover, to Russia. Her cover is the bovine Slavey, and there she is, up on a ladder, all dirndled out, and unrecognizable. Even knowing she is Dietrich, we don’t recognize her. The makeup helped the disguise, which was achieved, more importantly, by the lighting. He didn’t light her as Dietrich.

Men stopped wearing hats in 1959, when John Kennedy showed up at a ball game bareheaded. The next morning the men’s Hat Industry was dead.

Women in my mother’s time wore hats to go Downtown Shopping. And they smoked. The hats and the cigarettes drew attention to the face—one could at any moment adjust, remove, or replace the hat or the veil, or take another puff and exhale the smoke, wreathing the face, and so on…

Today’s women perform the same instruction to the viewer by tossing their hair, or indeed by turning away, the motion drawing the eye of its intended recipient.

This, like arranging the hair, raised the breast in an immemorial bid for male attention—not a strategy but a survival mechanism.

Today they do not wear hats. The interest, care, money, and imagination once devoted to them have gone elsewhere—into shoes. My wife refers to money as “shoe coupons.”

A luxury shoe store in my neighborhood has been smashed-and-grabbed several times in the last three years—the purloined shoes can be sold on the internet, price cut, no questions asked, resembling, in this, the historical use of the movies as a laundromat for money. It comes in with no questions asked (dirty), it goes out, as movie revenue, clean as a hound’s tooth.

I asked my wife why the interest in shoes. Victorian men admired a woman’s ankles, as, apart from the face, they were the sole part of the anatomy not disguised in drapery. But, I said, today’s men look at neither feet nor shoes. “Women do,” she said. Ah.

I did a film with a fly-by-night producer who’d started as a dry cleaner.

He was an immigrant, moved to Hollywood. He noticed that the rich folk here would pay much more than the going rate for their cleaning, as they didn’t know what the cost of their cleaning was—they would dispatch their housekeeper or “Household Manager” to pick up the cleaning, and no one ever saw, let alone questioned, the bills. He started cleaning for the movies.

He saw that dry cleaning was a small part of the Costumes Budget, which was a small part of the whole, so began brutally raising his prices, and was thrilled to find that nobody noticed. Hmm, he thought, or words of that sort, I have to look into this movie business; and he did.

He found, like our beloved Mafia of old, that every aspect of a business could be exploited.

The Mafia didn’t have to own the business they strong-armed, they just had to demand that the proprietor buy their beer, food, linens, and garbage collection, and hire employees from Mafia-controlled unions.

Those shook down couldn’t squawk. (To whom, when the Mafia owned the cops?) And the movie folk couldn’t squawk to the dry cleaner, as they weren’t paying attention. So he branched out into catering, car rental, costume rental, and other constituent film services.

As he got deeper and deeper into the thing, chuckling at the criminal carelessness of the studios, he realized that if these idiots could succeed at the racket, what could he not do?

And so he became a movie producer.

Now the vast horizon of the New Day opened to him, as did the continent before Lewis and Clark.

Not only could he scam on every department in the making of a film—costumes, equipment rental, transportation, catering, housing—but he could milk the investors, financing a supposedly five-million-dollar film for four, by the simple provision of a second set of books.

He adopted the now standard ruse of approaching the director just before principal photography, confessing the film underfunded, and requesting (demanding) that the director waive his fee. (Every time.) And he added his own real, if inflated and actually fictional, Production Costs to the budget.

One of his henchmen, in a city some five hundred miles away, was jotted down for private jet fare, every week, back and forth to the set. The dull enormity was enlivened by the discovery that the so-called producer never in fact even left home. There was no jet—the school-days lessons of dry cleaning once again paid: no one was watching the books.

The studios did it differently. They were minting money, and they in-housed the various departments, keeping costs legitimately low through volume. But they scammed on the other end. They hid income from profit participants, even on huge moneymakers—they charged back “embedded” costs from failed films of yore they had made.

Film Insiders for years enjoyed a scam of investment in a “package” of films, the profits skimmed from the top, and tax losses taken against the losers.^I

Another producer stole my contingency.

Independent films are made with a budget, an insurance policy (what happens if someone breaks an ankle?), and a contingency fund.

The contingency fund is Mama’s Bank Account. It’s there for a rainy day—a scene that needs to be reshot, too many days of rain, and various everyday occurrences. Most or all independent films come up short or close to it, as they’re being made fast and cheap. So the contingency is a cushion.

On this film of mine, there was no money budgeted for post-production—editing, sound, effects, processing, titles, music: one-third of the time and effort spent on a film.

No money budgeted. But, it was explained to me before I began, I could use the unspent contingency. It was up to me. If I, the director, was careful in principal photography, I’d have the cash to finish the film. Take it or leave it.

It was a logical, if harsh, challenge. I told them I could bring the film in at X; and if I was so all-fired sure of myself, I could go ahead, and bet on myself. I did.

I wrapped the film on schedule and on budget. And the contingency was gone.

G. Oh. En. Eee.

We were calling from the editing room to get a messenger, as FedEx had canceled our account for nonpayment. The money was gone.

Where, I asked my then colleague (one of the producers), was the contingency? “What are you talking about?” he explained.

It had joined the killer of Ron and Nicole.

We finished the film—due largely to the efforts of Barbara Tulliver, its editor. We went to the premiere, Barbara and I, wearing T-shirts reading LOSE ONE MILLION DOLLARS FROM YOUR CONTINGENCY: ASK ME HOW!

The film’s producer—he who began the project as my friend and ended it in cahoots with another bottom-feeder he’d brought on (presumably his new guru)—threw a fit. “What did you mean,” he asked, “impugning my honor?”

I still don’t know how we finished the film.

Now film budgets are diverted not only to the sustenance of scads of lemmings called Producers but to various set harpies, political commissars, COVID annoyers, and other attack-puritans, sustained by an age and industry that has forgotten the phrase “Mind your own business.”

In Ted Morgan’s biography of Maugham, we find The Master searching for the accurate cockney term for one of his characters. He asks a Cockney: If you wanted someone to go away, would you say, “Cop it,” or “Git out of it…?” “You mean,” the fellow said, “if I wanted to tell someone to fuck off…?”

In the age of Netflix, Apple, et al., the opportunities for theft are both lessened and unnecessary. The hegemons can charge whatever they want to a captive audience, and pay whatever they want to a captive workforce.

In Communist Russia this resulted, in painting, in Socialist Realism; and, in film, to Me and My Tractor. The reader will, of course, draw whatever parallels he finds amusing.

But to return to hats and shoes.

The particularities change, but the form persists. Once a co-dependent populace staged wet T-shirt contests for middle-aged men. These were called the high school car wash.

Today in Los Angeles the teenage girls walk about virtually naked, and the males, rather than getting a pass for ogling the good clean fun, are terrified of even inadvertent gawking.

But the urge is innate—males are physiologically drawn to admire beauty and are aroused by the visual. (Or else the porn mega-industry is very mistaken indeed and must be operating at a loss.)

Women wore hats, certainly, to distinguish themselves from other women, with whom they were in competition—for what? For Males, the hat itself operating as does the unique appendage of the lantern fish.

The impulse persists—to “monetize,” as it were, the body, or, better, to use its adornment for a social purpose. But the shoes, though they support the women in competition with her kind, do not attract men, and are not intended to.

And the movies, to arrive at a perhaps clumsy but nonetheless accurate end, today are made and advertised not to excite the natural thirst for adventure and novelty but to satisfy the human desire for conformity. They are no longer, like the Hat of old, in the service of Eros.

I. They also scammed, then as now, with the float, taking all income immediately but paying out, if forced, after all possible delay, and keeping the interest.