11
What I’ve Wanted to Do All My Life
Korda backed off, permitting the director of Things to Come to attend the Los Angeles premiere of his own picture. The film was getting a lot of advance play in the local press—more, it seemed, than it had in England—and Menzies hoped all the hype would reestablish him as a viable director of American movies.*1 The reviews from New York were more mixed than the British notices, Wells not being the national treasure he was in the U.K. (No one in England, for instance, dared label the film “solemn and dull and depressing” as had Norbert Lusk, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.) “Picture has been cut 16 minutes since its first showing in London,” reported the stateside Variety notice, “and can stand 10–15 minutes more clipping.” Happily, Menzies was generally given his due, Frank Nugent in The New York Times recalling “a pessimistic, frightening, yet inspiring picture … which does credit to its maker, Alexander Korda of London Films; to its director, William Cameron Menzies of Hollywood, and to its cast and technical crew.”
Business on Broadway was reassuringly sound, with lines trailing six abreast around the corner from the box office and stretching an entire city block. Over the first three and a half days of its run, 47,312 patrons purchased tickets to see Things to Come, billed on the marquee as “The Most Amazing Picture Ever Made.” In Los Angeles, Menzies basked in the kind of glory he never again expected to see in his adopted hometown.
“Things to Come is mechanically brilliant,” Philip K. Scheuer proclaimed.
The destruction of “Everytown” on Christmas Eve in 1940, with its contrasts, sharp and bitter, between the quick and the dead, is unforgettable. Then desolation and ruin—the Wandering sickness—the rise of “The Chief,” small-time dictator—the arrival of the Scientist, and his challenge: Law and Sanity vs. Brutes and Fools—war, and the Gas of Peace—the city of tomorrow, with its simple spaciousness and pleasant whirring sounds—the race to the Space Gun, and finally the flight into darkness … these are depicted on a scale as grand as it seems practical. The players are no more impressive than figures seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Story threads are picked up and dropped, as in the inconclusive episode of the Chief’s woman. Occasionally dialogue halts progress. And with it all, I emerged convinced that I had seen the first real motion picture in a dog’s age.
Menzies tried lining up another Hollywood movie to direct, but all he was offered, by his own account, was a single “very class ‘B’ one.” Korda, evidently, was the only producer in the world who was willing to entrust him with a major production. Indeed, while he was still in New York, trimming Things to Come for the American market, Korda had announced him as co-director (with actor-playwright Miles Malleson) of Hamlet, a first for the talking screen with Robert Donat in the title role. Having no comparable offers at hand, Menzies reluctantly left for England again on May 4, having spent exactly two weeks in the company of his family.
“I don’t think Mother wanted to go to begin with,” Suzanne Menzies said of Mignon’s reluctance to accompany him. “She didn’t want to leave her nice house and her girlfriends. They had a big fight and he said, ‘Well, don’t go.’ And she said, ‘Okay, I won’t go.’ She took that opening and used it as an excuse for not going, which we heard about for the rest of our lives. ‘He told me he didn’t want me.’ I know Ned Mann took his family over … the Americans were taking their families over. So we stayed here, for which I was very glad, although I missed him.”
Menzies had feared he might be making a mistake in not leaving immediately upon receipt of Korda’s wire, and it turned out he was right. The Donat project having quickly evaporated, Korda was urgently seeking Menzies’ return to direct Stanley John Weyman’s Under the Red Robe with Conrad Veidt, Annabella, and Raymond Massey as Cardinal Richelieu. But upon his arrival, he found the picture had already been given to another director, leaving him with no story and no prospects for a speedy return. “I don’t know whether he was put out or not,” Menzies said of Korda. “I’m afraid I’m a little inclined to vacillate and it’s lousy in business. However, maybe I’ll get something better, but I’m afraid I will be definitely longer. The studios are enormous, and I feel a little lost after the small one.”
The new studios at Denham were indeed enormous, but far from complete. It was, in fact, a non-Korda production, Max Schach’s Southern Roses, that became the first to shoot there. Still, one could walk through the well-kept gardens adjoining the old country house that contained Korda’s offices, along a woodland path bordering the River Colne, and peer across the water at the gray battlements of the castle built for The Ghost Goes West. In a distant field, the tower used in the Space Gun scenes for Things to Come still stood, as did, close by, the weathered remains of Everytown. “There seems to be a gentle air of gloom around the studio,” Menzies reported on May 23. “I don’t think things are going so smooth and of course they expect to lose money on [Things to Come].*2 I have a story to read, but it’s terrible, I think. I have only seen Korda once, and he was very friendly, but I have a hunch I may be a little in the dog house. Seems to be my doom.”
The “terrible” story was titled Troopship, and it was to be the second film produced under Korda’s aegis by Erich Pommer, the onetime head of production for Germany’s UFA. Korda himself was preparing to direct Charles Laughton in Rembrandt, another in London Films’ series of historical biographies, and needed the help of men like Pommer to keep the new studio complex busy. Troopship was oddly suited to Menzies in that the setup had the various members of a British regiment returning home after a long stretch of foreign service, only to learn they had just six hours with their loved ones before deploying once more. The early material was from Wolfgang Wilhelm and Henry Koster, both, like Pommer, German émigrés, and Korda didn’t seem to like anything they produced.
Ralph Richardson recalled Korda as a man beaten down by construction delays and the dual onslaught of two simultaneous pictures with H. G. Wells. “His manner to me was mostly one of ironic weariness,” the actor said. “He gave me the impression that I slightly bored him—very likely I did—but at the same time he drew me towards him.” Menzies struggled with Troopship, the portmanteau concept defeated by the weakness of its individual stories. “I have been practically suicidal since I got back here,” he admitted in a letter home after a month’s work. “The only saving thing is the visitors, but they have made it so expensive that that is spoiled.… It sounds as if I have a marvelous time, but just think of the lousy, lonesome, boring days in between. Hours of story conference and hanging around to worry about cast, etc.… They are still working on the script, and they are getting some new writers. I may have Bill Lipscombe and Clemence Dane, both very good, before we shoot. I have no idea how long it will take, but it should be very interesting, along the lines of ‘Grand Hotel.’ ”
Pommer had another American director, William K. Howard, for his first film under Korda, an Elizabethan drama called Fire Over England. “Pommer is so involved in getting Bill Howard started that I haven’t seen much of him lately and the story seems to be progressing very slowly,” Menzies wrote in July. “They have never gotten a new labor permit for me and mine has been out for about a month, so I suppose I will be thrown out of the country soon, and the way I feel tonight, the sooner the better.… I wish I could quietly make a great picture and get out, but that isn’t the way they do things over here.… Once in every few days I get the horrors and the homesick blues and this is one and a Monday.… I hope that things will work out and that I get on with the picture soon.”
Howard began shooting a few days later, and Menzies, concurrently, got War Office permission to use an actual troopship. The plan was to sail it, with his cast and crew, to Alexandria, Egypt, and come back with real soldiers. “Things still seem very wobbly at the studio,” he fretted. “I don’t know where the money comes from that they are pouring in.” On July 29, he glumly observed his fortieth birthday: “I hear about all the boys doing well in Hollywood. This one becoming a producer and that one becoming a director and it makes me go nuts marking time.… I passed forty without any pain, but it does seem as sort of [a] turning point in your life. I’ll never be the boy art director again.” In a nostalgic mood, he lunched with writer Tom Geraghty and they talked of the old Fairbanks days. “Doug is here,” he wrote Mignon. “I saw him at a restaurant the other night. [His new wife, Sylvia] Ashley looked very attractive, Doug old.”
By the middle of August, Menzies had half a new Troopship script by Ian Hay and Clemence Dane. “It’s a lot better and, all things being even, I may be able to make a good picture. I like Pommer in spots, but I think he is fair.” Then, having put three months’ work in on the film, he was abruptly shifted to Korda’s latest enthusiasm, an ambitious filming of Robert Graves’ 1934 novel of the Roman Empire, I, Claudius. Korda had originally intended to direct the picture himself, but the process of developing a screenplay had seemingly defeated him, as had the prospect of once again directing Charles Laughton, this time in the role of the lame and stammering Tiberius Claudius, grandson of Mark Antony and uncle of the murderous Caligula.
Graves later blamed Korda’s reliance on Hungarians “who were not altogether qualified for the jobs which he gave them, especially in the English department.” Specifically, early drafts of the script had been written by Lajos Bíró and his frequent collaborator, Arthur Wimperis. “I was eventually shown a bit of the … a bit of some sort of a script in which a character comes in, I think it was Caligula comes in and says, ‘My armies are revolting,’ which … seems rather odd use of English. There was a lot that was revolting in the script besides.” At one point, Graves himself was commissioned to write a screenplay, which he said was apparently “filed somewhere.” When Menzies came aboard, the scenarist was Carl Zuckmayer, the German playwright who had written Rembrandt.
Just as Menzies had put across the majesty of the reborn Everytown in Things to Come, so would he, in Korda’s mind, do the same for ancient Rome. Within days, he was on his way to Italy with Laughton and costume designer John Armstrong, toting a Leica he had borrowed from Vincent Korda. On the train, Laughton seemed to delight in attracting attention and then reveling in Menzies’ discomfort. “You know, I can cry on demand,” the actor said at one point, and then proceeded to do so. In Rome, he sat himself in front of a statue of Claudius and emoted enough to attract a small crowd, Menzies cringing and no doubt wishing he could disappear.
“The Fascisti thing is terrible,” Menzies said in a letter to Mignon. “Everyone saluting + bragging about Mussolini + on every wall writings or posters ‘Vive il Duce.’ They seem very well off + the best looking people as a rule (especially the women).” They visited Tivoli, site of the famous Villa d’Este, attended a cocktail party with the Ministry of Cinema and Propaganda, toured the Vatican Museum, and spent a full day studying the Forum and the new excavations in the hills around it. They drove on to Naples and Pompeii, the words “Vive il Duce” on practically every tree along the way.
“Charles loves Americans + I made a great hit with him. He is one of the nicest people I have ever met + I don’t think [he] has any strange practices outside of eating too much. I have made a great hit with him which will be easier for me during production.” The party left Naples in time to put Laughton on a train for the south of France. “I fell on my face in bed after we saw Chas off + the next morning we were rushed out to see the sets for a huge Italian picture principally made by the gov’t.*3 The sets were enormous but not very good. They are using 18,000 people in one scene.” On the whole, the whirlwind trip had given Menzies “a new viewpoint on the script and sets” although, he said, he had “never worked so hard” in his life.
Production was set to start in September, the principal cast, apart from Laughton, comprised of Emlyn Williams, Flora Robson, Alan Aynesworth, John Clements, and, in the role of the scheming Messalina, second cousin to Claudius, Merle Oberon. The dark-skinned beauty, who had blossomed into Korda’s only true female star, was in Los Angeles working for Samuel Goldwyn. It was Oberon’s absence—she was shooting Beloved Enemy with Brian Aherne and David Niven—that forced a delay of two months, prompting additional work on the script and a return to Rome for Menzies, this time in the company of Vincent Korda. “I feel alright,” he wrote on the 26th of October, “but never high, and the atmosphere about the lot is a bit depressing and I feel so sort of guilty that ‘Things to Come’ didn’t clean up for them. I will be shooting in a week or so and altho that will probably mean temperamental difficulties, I think it will snap me out of it. Vincent Korda has been a great help, as he is usually cheerful and very philosophical. I certainly have acquired a great deal of knowledge of ancient Rome; at least movie life is an education.”
Oberon returned to London in early November, unhappy with the part of Messalina but eager to get on with it. Predictably, given Korda’s patterns, there were additional delays, and she filled her time traveling—Paris, St. Moritz, Northumberland, Wales. The waiting continued to weigh heavily on Menzies until one day he asked Harry Ham, Korda’s production manager, to tell Alex he was taking the next boat home. Korda’s reaction to the news was instantaneous. “He was amazed that I was so upset + said he was giving me a promotion + I was crabbing so I agreed to direct, produce, shoot, write + cut two pictures for him. It’s what I’ve wanted to do all my life + if the company doesn’t fold up in the meantime I think it will be a great break.… They are completely mine + the credit will be produced + directed by William Cameron Menzies. I am terribly excited—for the first time I can do my own stuff + they are melodramas with one sort of whimsical character running thro. That’s why it will be a series, something on the Charlie Chan type, only better I hope!” He assured Mignon the pictures wouldn’t take as long to shoot as Claudius—likely less than two months. “I am terribly glad to be off Claudius as I am afraid it’s going to be an unpleasant set-up. Anyway, I had two nice trips to Italy.”
Korda put him together with a British novelist and film critic who dabbled in American-style thrillers. The idea, at least at first, was for Menzies to develop the initial entry for a series, a franchise that could become a reliable, albeit modest, source of income for London Film. “I am getting definitely excited about my story,” he said on November 27.
Unbelievable as it seems, the writer is very intelligent and altho I have to help him plenty, he is very sound. If you can, you might get his book thru [Beverly Hills bookseller] Marian Hunter. It’s called “A Gun for Sale” and his name is Graham Greene. It’s very low key, but very exciting. We went out the other night and started at Paddington and walked and drove the whole route of the story thru Soho and ending up on the river at Wapping. It’s amazing how many ideas we got from the trip. In a way, I don’t care what happens as I want to get home, but I would like to do this one entirely on my own, as then I’d know whether I really have something on the ball or not.
Greene was given three weeks to deliver an original story, for which he was paid a fee of £175. “There is a typical Korda snag,” Greene wrote his brother Hugh. “The story is a fairly realistic low-life thriller about race gangs, the hero a stool-pigeon. Korda wishes me to write a part for [the British music hall star] George Robey!” The picture, Four Dark Hours, was given a start date of January 15, 1937. As Menzies said in a letter, “I am trying to have the other one written by the time I have finished the first, and if either one clicks I should make some money. I don’t think the first one will ever win the Nobel Prize, but I think it’s entertaining.… Korda showed a loss since April of £330,000, or about one-million-five-hundred-thousand bucks, which is nothing like the Fox-Chase loss, but plenty over here, so he may fold before I finish.”
Menzies passed another gloomy Christmas in England—his third in a row—and was otherwise focused on script, casting, and continuity boards, the first act somewhat recalling The Woman Disputed in tone and structure. “I’m thick in scenario,” Graham Greene wrote his brother on Boxing Day. “Medium shots and Insert Shots and Flash backs and the rest of the racket. Korda, I’m glad to say, has given up the Robey idea and seems to be leaving us alone. Casting is proving very different. Menzies finds lovely people with appallingly tough faces, but when they open their mouths they all have Oxford accents.”
Menzies later described how he laid out the soundstage with a viewfinder, putting lines down on the floor and only creating sets to occupy the areas within those lines. The technique enabled him to erect four or five more sets on one stage, saving time when moving the company between scenes. Four Dark Hours was shot quickly, utilizing the services of Korda contract players Rene Ray and Robert Newton. Heading the cast as Jim Connor, small-time song-and-dance man, was John Mills, not particularly new to films but by no means a box office attraction. There was, Menzies understood going in, no guarantee the movie would be released internationally, but Korda had nevertheless promised a 10 percent cut of the producer’s profits in addition to a salary of $1,000 a week. The film’s unofficial template became The 39 Steps, a successful “wrong man” thriller Robert Donat had made on loan-out to Gaumont British. The twist in Greene’s story was that it was Rene Ray’s character on the run, falsely accused of killing Newton, with Mills helping her elude the police without knowing she is, in fact, wanted for the murder of his own brother. “We decided to hire an English gangster as an authority and technical advisor,” Menzies later recounted. “In a few weeks I learned more about the underworld of London than any other Englishman except the police. My authority was practically festooned with knives and razors, and when the picture came to an end and I had to discharge him, he got a little tough. I had a gone feeling in my stomach, but I got equally tough and said, ‘Scram, Slug,’ and he went out quite meekly, razors and all.”
As carefully as Menzies prepared and shot the picture, its gritty Soho exteriors giving it a somewhat noirish quality before there ever really was such a thing, he was completely unequipped to direct the stage-trained actors in his cast, who were used to the deliberate pace of British filmmaking and unable to adapt to the snappier demands of the downbeat crime melodrama—an unusual genre in the U.K. As a result, Four Dark Hours—so titled because all its action took place within that specific time frame—lacked the essential element of urgency. When Korda screened it, he was obviously disappointed, and although it was sluggish almost to the point of tedium, no one seemed to know quite what to do about it. The film, Menzies later told the Los Angeles Daily News, was shelved “when the Korda release deal fell through.”
I, Claudius finally got under way in February with Josef von Sternberg, reportedly at the behest of Marlene Dietrich, directing. Despite a brilliant set of elements—script, casting, Vincent Korda’s spectacular sets—the production was every bit as troubled as Menzies predicted, and it limped along for a month, delivering wonderful results while exacting an extraordinary emotional toll on everyone involved. Laughton disliked von Sternberg, Merle Oberon hated her part, and Alex found himself second-guessing every aspect of the process. On March 16, 1937, Oberon was involved in an auto accident—the severity of her injuries exaggerated according to some reports—and Korda seized the opportunity to take an £80,000 insurance payout, canceling the film and disbanding the company. Menzies, with just one unreleased feature to show for his ten months at Denham, left for home aboard the Queen Mary, dispirited and unsure of where next he would work. “His experience with Korda,” concluded Laurence Irving, “had not been very heart-lifting.”
Four Dark Hours continued to languish on the shelf until William K. Howard delivered a more satisfactory example of the genre in Edgar Wallace’s The Squeaker. Inspired, Korda asked Howard to revisit Menzies’ unreleased picture, with Howard’s screenwriter, Edward O. “Ted” Berkman, attempting a revision. (Menzies had frankly considered the film in its original form “impossible to show in America on account of the broad Cockney.”) Sometime late that year, Howard recalled the cast and shot new dialogue sequences, intent on making the picture releasable through United Artists. Menzies had been so reticent in dealing with his actors that John Mills, in his autobiography, could remember only Howard, “happily hitting the bottle,” as the director of the film. “Bill Howard had made some excellent movies,” he wrote, “but by the time we caught up with him, he was, I’m afraid, slightly over the hill.”
In July 1939, British Lion was set to release the picture at a running time of sixty-four minutes. A few months later, it was picked up by 20th Century-Fox Film Co., Ltd., and under the title The Green Cockatoo, was released in Great Britain in March 1940. It wasn’t, however, until July of 1947, after Mills had won a degree of fame for his work as Pip in David Lean’s celebrated version of Great Expectations, that it was finally released in the United States.
Just as Menzies was arriving back in New York, David O. Selznick was entering into negotiations to bring M-G-M assistant art director Fredric Hope to Selznick International, the independent studio he founded in 1935. Talks stalled within days when Hope, thirty-seven, underwent emergency surgery at St. Vincent’s Hospital for a burst appendix. With two pictures in the queue, the first to start shooting in just eight weeks, Selznick, in a lather, phoned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production manager J. J. Cohn. “He said, ‘Joe, I need a man so-and-so, so-and-so, so-and-so,’ ” Cohn recalled. “Matter of fact, he wanted me to go to work there. ‘I’ll call you, David.’ Then I called him back. I said, ‘So there’s a man on his way back from Europe now. Your brother, Myron, is handling it. Because he’d be ideal for you. I think, David, he’s what you want—William Cameron Menzies.’ And I knew Bill pretty well. Socially and otherwise. And I had spent time with Bill in England before that. David was very grateful for that.”
Rene Ray and John Mills in The Green Cockatoo. “The film’s best asset is its players,” C. A. Lejeune wrote in The Observer, “who act at times as if the piece were credible.” (BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE)
On April 16, 1937, while Hope was laid up in the hospital, Selznick dictated a memo to corporate counsel and secretary Daniel T. O’Shea: “We haven’t settled on the Hope matter, but in the meantime I should like you to find out salary, etc., on Menzies—just as a protection. I would be interested in Menzies if he has given up his producing ideas, as a substitute for Hope … if the Hope deal falls through.” Four days later, on April 20, Hope died of complications from the operation he had undergone two weeks earlier.
Cohn’s endorsement—and Hope’s death—turned Selznick’s attention squarely to Bill Menzies, even as Menzies refused to abandon his dream of producing and directing his own pictures. O’Shea suggested they guarantee him co-direction of one picture a year, on the condition that he “generally do art work for us” at the rate of $1,000 a week. Talks continued into late May, Menzies preferring to freelance, and the contract that resulted was for an initial period, with options, of just three months. Word went out on June 7 that Menzies had been signed in the capacity of “production assistant,” a new position created expressly for him. “Menzies will supervise practically all preliminary details of films, in respect to sets, locationing, and other matters,” Edwin Schallert reported. “In addition he will direct, and his first film will be associated with Robert Sinclair, the stage director.”
Promptly, Menzies was put in charge of second unit work on Nothing Sacred, a picture being written in a “white heat”—as story editor Val Lewton put it—by novelist, playwright, and veteran screenwriter Ben Hecht. Conceived as Hollywood’s first three-color Technicolor comedy, there was little stock footage for the film to draw upon. Establishing shots, montage clips, effects shots, and process plates would all have to be created from scratch. A week after principal photography commenced under William Wellman’s direction, Menzies found himself back in New York, learning the limitations of the new three-color process with Technicolor cameraman Will Cline. A nighttime pan of the Waldorf-Astoria was vetoed by Jack Cosgrove, Selznick’s special effects man, because Technicolor was unable to pick up the incandescent lighting in the hotel’s windows. Similar shots of Madison Square Garden and Times Square were only possible because neon signs registered better.
He made daylight shots of Rockefeller Center and the Waldorf, caught ocean liners steaming up and down the harbor, filmed customs men at work and society figures at play. Through Selznick’s business partner, John Hay “Jock” Whitney, he arranged to pick up a shot of polo players at Meadowbrook, panning down the field with the grandstands in the background. The yachting stuff called for in the still incomplete script was made on the East River with doubles representing Fredric March and Carole Lombard. Selznick praised a shot of a steelworker straddling a girder some forty stories above the city as “startlingly good.” Particularly important were morning shots of the airliner carrying the supposedly doomed Hazel Flagg over Manhattan, Menzies and his crew trailing a Lockheed 12 and shooting plates to be employed in the filming of interiors. “Daddy was on that plane with [stunt pilot] Paul Mantz and was absolutely terrified,” Suzanne Menzies remembered. “There was nothing to hang on to—not even seats, just the camera—and Mantz was nuts. I think they flew under the Brooklyn Bridge.” Through it all, Selznick urged restraint with the expensive three-strip color stock, reminding Menzies they could only use a few feet of anything he shot.
“New York is terribly warm,” Menzies said in a letter to his eleven-year-old daughter, “and full of very unattractive people all looking at things and commenting on them in very loud and very unmusical voices.… For your comfort, darling, you have missed nothing in not seeing New York. It looks more like Glendale on a Saturday night than Glendale, except that it looks more like Redondo than it does like Glendale. Anyway, honey, New York looks marvelous if you know you are leaving it in a very short time.”
Back in California, Menzies tackled the montage sequences for Nothing Sacred and designed the satiric “Heroines of History” pageant. (The Breen Office rejected five sketches of tentative costumes because they allegedly violated the nudity clause of the Production Code.) He was busy directing night footage in San Pedro—three setups involving nineteen firemen and two policemen—the day the studio announced his first co-direction job with Sinclair would be the Janet Gaynor vehicle Angel on Broadway. By the end of August, Selznick, who favored literary classics for picture material, had him sketching the climactic sequence for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
In a screenplay credited to the poet and literary critic John V. A. Weaver, Selznick had built the third act of the picture around an incident in Mark Twain’s novel in which Tom and Becky Thatcher become lost in McDougal’s Cave. Using the book’s original engravings as a guide, Menzies sketched out a potent nine-minute sequence in which the children are dwarfed by the spectacular caverns, beset by bats, consumed by despair and hunger, a hunk of wedding cake their only food, and threatened by the maniacal Injun Joe, whom Tom, with certain death just inches away, sends plunging into the infinite darkness of a deep ravine. It was strong stuff in the vivid new Technicolor, calculated to send hearts racing among adults in the audience and traumatize kids into sleeping with the lights on.
A continuity board prepared for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938). The cave sequence proved so effective that preview audiences seemed to think it was, in the words of David O. Selznick, “somehow too horrible for children.” (DAVID O. SELZNICK COLLECTION, HARRY RANSOM CENTER)
Selznick, for one, was delighted, and gave Menzies the job of staging the sequence in collaboration with director Norman Taurog. Not long before, he had lamented the inexperience of unit art director Lyle Wheeler, whom he had hired with no previous movie experience, while contrasting it with Menzies’ “very wide experience.” Preparing to mount a production of Gone With the Wind, the rights to which he had purchased the previous year, Selznick began to imagine a much more significant role for Menzies than for Wheeler. “I would like to see him actively take charge of the physical preparation of Gone With the Wind,” he wrote of Menzies, “including advance work on the sets, handling and selection of location shots, process shots, etc.; layouts and effects, etc. for the mass action scenes; investigations and suggestions leading to the proper handling of the street scenes without an inordinate expense; and a dozen other things leading to proper organization of the great and troublesome physical aspects of Gone With the Wind.”
Two weeks later, his thoughts on Menzies’ participation had sharpened considerably. “I think Menzies is going to be invaluable on the montage sequences in Gone With the Wind,” Selznick mused in a memo to studio manager Henry Ginsberg, “and feel I should go even farther than this and have him do a complete cutting script with sketches from the first shot to the last on the entire job of Gone With the Wind. I feel too that he may be the answer to what I have long sought for, which is a pre-cut picture and that with or without the help of [supervising editor] Hal Kern, or some cutter specially designated for the purpose, we might be able to cut a picture eighty percent on paper before we grind the cameras.”
Selznick knew the film would be a logistical nightmare to produce, complex and expensive. The only way to gain absolute control over it would be to pre-visualize it through Menzies’ technique of continuity sketches. On September 1, as shooting began on the cave sequence for Tom Sawyer, he dictated a memo to Jock Whitney and John Wharton, the corporate treasurer of Selznick International, more fully outlining his plans:
I feel we need a man of Menzies’ talent and enormous experience on the sets of this picture, and on its physical production. I hope to have Gone With the Wind prepared almost down to the last camera angle before we start shooting, because on this picture really thorough preparation will save hundreds of thousands of dollars.… While our script is not completed, and we are not yet certain of what we will have to cut, we know there are a half dozen things … such as Tara, the Wilkes house, Miss Pittypat’s home, the ball in Atlanta … that must of necessity stay in, as well as the streets of Atlanta for the news of Gettysburg and the big evacuation scene which involve great physical problems and which will more than utilize Menzies’ time until we can give him a complete script. When he gets the complete script, he can then do all the sets, set sketches, and plans … and can start on what I want on this picture and what has only been done a few times in picture history (and these times mostly by Menzies)—a complete script in sketch form, showing actual camera setups, lighting, etc.…
Menzies may turn out to be one of the most valuable factors in properly producing this picture. One of the minor problems in connection with this arrangement is the matter of Menzies’ credit. Menzies is terribly anxious not to get back to art direction as such, and of course his work on this picture, as I see it, will be a lot greater in scope than is normally associated with the term “art direction.” Accordingly, I would probably give him some such credit as “Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies.”
*1 Specifically, Menzies talked of going with Mary Pickford and Jesse L. Lasky, who had formed a new production company releasing through United Artists.
*2 Its early performance notwithstanding, Things to Come didn’t do well. Worldwide revenues amounted to US $1,121,881 on a total cost of £256,028 (US $1,257,098 at the time).
*3 According to Catherine Surowiec, this was Scipione l’africano (1937).