12
Production Designed By …
Bill Menzies had never read Gone With the Wind—it not being one of the “gloomy books” he kept in stacks by his bed—but he certainly knew its impact. First published by Macmillan in 1936, it was an instantaneous hit with more than a million copies in print by the end of the year. The British edition, published in September, was issued in a cautious printing of three thousand just as Menzies, immersed in the trappings of ancient Rome, was preparing to direct I, Claudius. At no time did the book, a thick Civil War romance, strike him as exceptional picture material, and he took little notice when its author, Margaret Mitchell, won the Pulitzer Prize in May of the following year. By then, of course, he was dickering with David O. Selznick and knew that Selznick owned the rights, having bought the novel, unread, just as it was gathering momentum.*1
There was talk of starting the film in 1938, but the script had not yet been completed, and Menzies saw no reason to believe he would play a crucial role in its making, assuming he was destined to play any role at all.
Menzies’ involvement with the film grew over a period of four months as Selznick weighed the advantages of having someone on Gone With the Wind who was uniquely qualified to not only manage aspects of its physical production, but to give it a graphic cohesion lacking in most American films. Sidney Howard had been engaged to adapt the 1,037-page novel to the screen and had been at work on a script since the beginning of the year. George Cukor had been set as director even longer and, together with Selznick, had been focused on casting the picture with a seemingly endless array of names, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn being the top picks for Rhett Butler, and practically every competent actress in town vying for the role of Scarlett O’Hara. Menzies continued his work on Nothing Sacred through September, directing retakes and added scenes, store window shots and inserts. He was laid off in October with the understanding he would submit ideas in connection with Gone With the Wind, after which Selznick would decide if, when, and under what circumstances he would be engaged for the picture. In the interim, he promised he would start no other job without first checking with the studio, as he wanted the directing work only Selznick seemed willing to give him.
In December, Selznick determined he could likely start GWTW much sooner than he originally thought—possibly as early as February—and directed Henry Ginsberg to speak to Menzies about handling the supervision of the art department as well as the “cutting script” (as it was described at the time). Ginsberg was also to ask Menzies what sort of assistance he wanted in the way of a unit art man, Menzies having already recommended Hobe Erwin, formerly of RKO, as set decorator.
“I have finally reached Bill Menzies’ Gone With the Wind sketches,” Selznick informed Ginsberg and Daniel O’Shea on December 15, “and I am completely sold that we should have him on this picture. I have told Bill that until our future plans are settled I do not want to get into any contractual commitments of any size. On the other hand, there is the possibility of our getting word to start production in March, which does not give us any too much time, Lord knows, and we may be wasting precious weeks of preparation that can never be gained again because of any one of several things, such as the [Clark] Gable schedule and the dates that we must take him if we are to have him at all.”
On Christmas Eve 1937, Selznick finally confirmed to Ginsberg that William Cameron Menzies would be going back on the company payroll effective January 3, 1938. Production illustrator Dorothea Holt would act as Menzies’ assistant.
In the early days of Gone With the Wind, there was no complete screenplay, just the novel and the reference materials gathered by Selznick personnel on two trips to Atlanta—photos of old houses, primarily, and the Georgia landscape. Then there was Wilbur G. Kurtz, a well-known architect and painter recommended by Margaret Mitchell as “our greatest authority on the Civil War in this section.” Kurtz was introduced to George Cukor on a visit to Clayton County in March 1937, and was subsequently retained by the studio to act as technical advisor to Menzies and the production team. When he came west in late January 1938, Kurtz’s first three weeks were spent in the Selznick art department, where he and Menzies conferred on the book and its settings.
“At these conferences,” recounted Kurtz,
we designed Tara, Aunt Pitty’s house, Melanie’s house and the Atlanta sets which included the big car shed. Twelve Oaks was another matter; the Wilkes estate, as described, is pure fiction, for there never was such a place in Clayton County. However, it was a necessary piece of fiction in that the storywriters demanded at least one glimpse of the traditional moonlight and magnolia atmosphere of the old South. Since Twelve Oaks was a myth in the novel, it was treated as such in the picture—hence those glorious interiors, the monumental stairways, and an atmosphere of opulence that would make a Clayton County farmer rub his eyes. Scarlett, herself, designed her Atlanta house, summoning thereto all of the bad taste of the period and most of Rhett’s money. The Art Department let her have her way here, and thereby an effect was achieved that was entirely keeping with the facts.
When they first met, Menzies told Kurtz he had already made hundreds of “shorthand” sketches, presumably from Sidney Howard’s draft script dated November 27, 1937. “I’d see him out in the backyard,” said Suzie Menzies. “He’d wash his hair and then dry it in the sun. He’d sit with that sketchbook and stare into space. And then he’d draw something; sometimes it was my mother’s rear end, and other times it was Tom Sawyer or Gone With the Wind. He was a great one for staring into space.”
As Howard gave Kurtz his own copy to read, Howard remarked: “Here’s a four-hour picture. It’ll have to be cut to two hours, more cutting than Mr. Selznick and Mr. Cukor will admit at present.” As it turned out, Howard’s work displayed an excellent grasp of camera technique—when to truck, pan, or shoot direct. From his preliminary boards, Menzies graduated to larger, more finished watercolors of key sequences—exteriors at first—taking Howard’s ideas, along with episodes from the book, and refining them into masterful scenes of graphic drama. Kurtz found himself admiring one such rendering, lifted straight from the text and recalled in Howard’s screenplay, in which the Union army corps are closing in, one just nine miles away, and a lighted lamp is left behind as Rhett, Scarlett, and the others drive off toward Tara, the sequence ending on the stark imagery of that single camphene lamp.
Owing to the lack of stock footage in the new three-strip Technicolor process, Menzies directed an unusual amount of second unit work for Nothing Sacred (1937). Exteriors shot on the Forty Acres backlot included tattoo store and fish stall inserts as well as this impromptu window display attesting to the flash celebrity of Hazel Flagg.
Menzies’ sketch shows the wagon and the starved horse—and the rest—in a silhouette against the lighted lamp in front of the open gate of Aunt Pittypat’s house. Menzies said that this lone lamp business was one of the most telling touches in the book.… I cannot begin to relate in detail the various novel conceptions of Menzies’ sketches—dramatic and novel effects are aimed at, and color—always color—must be uppermost, for GWTW is to be in Technicolor! He despairs of red soil—must have it—even if the old spray gun is used, with barrels of red paint splattered on California terrain!
They got to the design of Tara on February 2, Menzies having previously proclaimed himself “afraid” of it. In the art studio where he spent most of his time—he had a formal office and secretary in the main administration building but was rarely there—Tara and Twelve Oaks gradually appeared, roughed out on big sheets of tracing paper. Menzies, Kurtz observed, was gleeful over the covered way to the kitchen, insisting on a variety of building textures toward the rear of the house to break the monotony of white brick. “The ash-hopper was new to him, but he could understand the covered well. He never heard of a scuppernong, looked at me like he thought I was kidding.”
Early on, Margaret Mitchell had taken Cukor and the other “Selznickers” through Clayton County, showing them old houses that were built “before Sherman got there” and cautioning them that white columns were the exception rather than the rule. “I besought them to please leave Tara ugly, sprawling, and columnless, and they agreed. I imagine, however, that when it comes to Twelve Oaks they will put columns all around the house and make it as large as our new city auditorium.” Kurtz artfully talked Menzies out of columns on three sides of the mythical Twelve Oaks, and eventually Menzies embraced Doric columns over the complex Ionic columns on which he had initially insisted. These were to be only the first of many such renderings, and both iconic structures would evolve over time.
Three days before Wilbur Kurtz was to leave for home, the news on the lot was that Selznick had bought a new story. The Gay Banditti, a sly melding of grift and sentiment by the Australian-born poet and novelist I. A. R. Wylie. Selznick needed a picture for actress Janet Gaynor, who had last appeared for the studio in A Star Is Born. He also needed to fulfill an eight-picture distribution commitment to United Artists, thus keeping his options open with regard to Gone With the Wind. The Selznick Research Department was put on the case, and an adaptation of the London-based story was commissioned from Britain’s Charles Bennett, working in collaboration with the American playwright and scenarist Frederick Jackson.
Meanwhile, in a memo to George Cukor, Selznick expressed growing satisfaction with the GWTW development process: “I am more enthusiastic than ever about the script and will be calling Menzies in to conferences practically each day so that by the time we finish the script, we will have almost all the physical production mapped out as well.” As plans for The Gay Banditti (soon retitled Miss Fortune Leaves It to Them and, ultimately, The Young in Heart) went forward, Selznick had Menzies added to the budget as Lyle Wheeler’s supervisor and arranged for him to be copied on all memos regarding script changes.
As a dry run for Gone With the Wind, Menzies acquitted himself admirably on Young in Heart, functioning as an uncredited assistant to the producer while overseeing set design and personally sketching the continuities of key sequences. For the film’s opening on the Riviera where the various members of the Carleton family are introduced, he and Wheeler created a grand terrace on multiple levels that allowed the camera to flow smoothly from one exchange to the next. The vast showroom of the Flying Wombat sedan, with its twirling display chassis and power train, was matched by the executive office of the British-American Civil and Hydraulic Engineering Co., its walls clad with the muscular figures of industrial workers as rendered by Dan Sayre Groesbeck. Menzies also suggested alternate ways of shooting the train derailment that marks the climax of the first act, proposing to either film it as a miniature or entirely from the interior, as had been done for a dirigible crash in The Lottery Bride. Both approaches, he noted, would cost approximately the same.
Sample pages from a spiral-bound sketchbook show some of Menzies’ earliest “shorthand” visualizations for Gone With the Wind (1939). (MENZIES FAMILY COLLECTION)
Production got under way on May 3 with the prolific Richard Wallace directing and Gaynor; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; Roland Young; Paulette Goddard; and Billie Burke heading the cast. Menzies’ work was principally with cinematographer Leon Shamroy, leaving the amiable Wallace to handle the actors. An efficient shoot, they were done in six weeks, but then retakes and added scenes carried them into September, Lewis Milestone directing nine days of them, Menzies the balance. Menzies also designed and shot the main titles, generic scenes from the story as played in silhouette, the credits laid over the incidental action, a classy opening to a perfectly pleasant picture that was budgeted at close to $1 million.
For Menzies, the real significance of The Young in Heart was in his personal credit, for Selznick had been struggling with the matter for months. In February, he had written publicist Russell Birdwell, who, in a draft press release, had portrayed Menzies as something akin to a draftsman on Gone With the Wind. “I don’t think the word ‘drafting’ is fair to Menzies,” he cautioned.
This term in motion picture language means simply a draftsman working under an art director. Menzies’ task is a monumental one and I am anxious that he receive a fair credit. Actually what he is doing is “designing” the picture and “designing” it in color, if it is to be made in color. If Mr. Cukor for any reason does not like this term, I suggest you get together with him and let me see some alternatives. Whatever phrase is chosen should be satisfactory to both Mr. Cukor and Mr. Menzies, and nothing should be sent out on this announcement that is not seen and approved by both.
Cukor evidently had no objection, and so the credit that was settled upon was the one that Selznick himself had coined in September of the previous year. It became Menzies’ handle on Gone With the Wind, even though the release of that picture was still eighteen months in the future. In the meantime, Menzies was to embrace the same approximate responsibilities on a pair of more modestly proportioned Selznick productions, and so the producer decreed that the credit so arduously arrived at for GWTW would became Menzies’ credit on The Young in Heart as well: “Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies.”
In July, while Menzies was staging the titles for Young in Heart, Selznick was urgently pondering the question of who should direct his final release for United Artists. Its basis was Rose Franken’s 1937 novel Of Great Riches—retitled Made for Each Other—and it was to be Carole Lombard’s second picture for Selznick International. On a list of possible candidates, the names of John G. Blystone, Sidney Lanfield, Edward H. Griffith, George Fitzmaurice, Elliott Nugent, Irving Cummings, James Flood, E. A. Dupont, Allan Dwan, James Whale, William K. Howard, Frank Tuttle, Rouben Mamoulian, and Wesley Ruggles had all been crossed off. Those with check marks next to them were Tay Garnett, Edmund Goulding, George Cukor, H. C. “Hank” Potter, Ernst Lubitsch, Sam Wood, and Alexander Hall. There were only three names on the list that were circled: John Cromwell, Richard Wallace, and Henry King. It was about this time that William Burnside, a British sales consultant who had worked with Selznick on the U.K. release of Tom Sawyer, made a pitch:
Once before, in conversation, I mentioned to you that Bill Menzies could, in my opinion, if given the opportunity, turn in a swell directorial job. As I am the only person here on this lot who has worked with him in a directorial capacity [on Things to Come] and as I have worked with a considerable number of so-called “ace” directors, I can assure you that from my observations Menzies can produce a “joker” for their “ace” every time.… I would be the last to detract from either Wallace’s or Shamroy’s work on The Young in Heart but I wonder if even you fully realize the great assistance that Menzies was to both of these men on that picture, both from a point of view of camera angles and practical physical direction.
Selznick didn’t select Menzies for the job—he instead chose John Cromwell, the director of two previous films for the studio—thinking, perhaps, that Menzies would too fully have been taken away from Gone With the Wind if given the assignment. Moreover, the film, at least at first, didn’t require the kind of pictorial fireworks Menzies was used to providing. The intimate story of newlyweds and their day-to-day trials, Made for Each Other was an actors’ picture, and Selznick arranged to borrow James Stewart from M-G-M to play the role of the young attorney opposite Lombard. Ironically, Menzies ended up spending more time on added scenes and retakes for Made for Each Other than he did on The Young in Heart, keeping him busy on the picture, between extended bouts on GWTW, into January of 1939.
By the end of July, he was back in New York, quartered, as before, at the Essex House and shooting second unit footage. “Another trying hot day,” he wrote Mignon on the evening of the 29th. “We got all set to shoot this a.m. but had to call it off as the haze set in again. I’m afraid we won’t get any real shooting weather until we get rain. I am afraid I am not as good a wanderer as I used to be, my darling. New York depresses me. It’s so boisterous and tough and cheap, and I’m sick of smelling like a gymnasium.” Plans seemed to change hourly, and there was no screenplay to work from—just a synopsis. “I haven’t been able to get up to New Haven,” he added, “as things are in such a mess I felt I should stand by to hear from the coast.”
It was a measure of the urgency Selznick felt in delivering the picture that Made for Each Other went before the cameras on August 26 with just thirteen pages of script. Veteran screenwriter Jo Swerling worked just ahead of Cromwell and his company, minimizing the value Menzies’ continuity sketches routinely brought to a production. Instead, it became Menzies’ job to keep Lyle Wheeler on track and ensure the sets were available when Cromwell needed them.*2 Menzies was also assigned the opening of the picture, in which Selznick wanted stock footage of New York to lead to Stewart’s introduction on a busy sidewalk. “The entire effect of this is to be going down through the canyons of New York to pick out any average citizen, and I should like to see it laid out in sketches by Bill, regardless of whether we utilize stock film.”
Selznick came to rely on Menzies for moody hospital shots, montage and miniature work, background plates, inserts, and the design of key scenes. All the main titles, neatly establishing the marriage of the two principal characters, were sketched and directed by Menzies, as was Stewart’s introduction on the city sidewalk, the camera closing in on the character’s listing in the Manhattan phone book as an inexpensive alternative to “the canyons of New York” when no stock footage could be found that proved suitable. “Mr. Menzies should direct this [sequence] if Mr. Cromwell has no objections. Mr. Cromwell can go over this at any time between now and the time it is shot with Mr. Menzies or myself.” The real work on Made for Each Other came when the picture finished in early October.
The third act centered on the life-threatening illness of the Masons’ year-old son, a bout with pneumonia that can only be arrested with the help of a new serum. Located in Salt Lake City, the medicine is unobtainable due to weather, prompting a daring flight that has little chance of success. With the principals—Lombard, Stewart, Charles Coburn, Lucile Watson—released, subject to recall, Menzies began laying out the sequence, nearly two reels of material, in collaboration with Jo Swerling.
“This,” Selznick wrote in an all-hands memo,
includes the montage preceding Johnny’s visit to [Judge] Doolittle’s home [to plead for the money to bring the serum to New York], winding up with the bit in the Salt Lake City airport.… The Menzies script should also include the entire development, starting with the aviator refusing to take off, after the money has been raised, and going straight through the storm, the parachute drop, the ride over the bridge, etc.… Mr. Cromwell should shoot those two pieces of the respective Menzies sequences which concern the two aviators at the Salt Lake City airport. The rest should be shot by Mr. Menzies, and work should be started with no delay whatsoever on the assembly of stock film, etc., etc., to the end that the shooting of these sequences may commence no later than the day after the picture proper is finished.… If it is at all possible, I would like Miss Holt or such other sketch artist as Mr. Menzies wishes to designate to work right along with Mr. Swerling and Mr. Menzies, to the end that I can consider the script on each draft of this material in sketch form as well as script form.… It is my hope that we will be able to have a preview of the picture by between October 22nd and 25th.
Previews in November and December resulted in nineteen pages of new scenes and retakes, with Menzies finishing the last of these on January 5, 1939. When the final credits were submitted to the Production Code Administration, once again they included the line: “Production Designed by William Cameron Menzies.”
Just as filming was set to begin on Made for Each Other, Selznick signed the contracts with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that called for the loan of Clark Gable and the release of Gone With the Wind through Loew’s Incorporated. Gable, who was preparing to shoot Idiot’s Delight at his home studio, would become available in January, meaning that Selznick would need a finished script, final design approvals on sets and costumes, and a decision on the casting of Scarlett O’Hara. He told his department heads the film could start as early as November 15—a date nobody seemed to take seriously—and that the agreement with M-G-M would in no way compromise its identity as a Selznick International picture. Comparative estimates put the likely cost of the film at $2,250,000; Selznick said that in cutting the script he would aim at holding its cost to $2 million.
By October, Menzies had floated the idea of burning the standing sets on Forty Acres so that room could be cleared for new exteriors, particularly Tara. It was an audacious plan, and Selznick, at first, wasn’t sure what to think. “I would appreciate Mr. Cukor working with Mr. Menzies and Mr. Wheeler on those things which will be needed for the first work in the picture,” he wrote on the 13th, “so that I know about the plans for them before I leave [for a brief Bermuda vacation] next Friday, Oct. 21st. This should include, particularly, the building of Tara and the plans to photograph the burning sets which will be destroyed to make way for Tara.” A few days later, with the starting date finally set, Selznick asked that work start immediately on the remaining set sketches. “I am hopeful that we will have every single set in the picture designed and approved at least three weeks in advance of our starting to shoot—and that stage space will also be all laid out for these sets to the end that there will be no problem whatsoever in connection with the sets during the picture’s shooting, except perhaps for set dressing.”
A month later, after a number of conferences between Menzies, Wheeler, and George Cukor, twenty-four sets had been okayed in sketch form, another six were awaiting approval, and another seven were being modeled. On November 9, Menzies sent his “amplified” script of the fire sequence to Bermuda for Selznick’s approval. “George has seen a detailed drawing continuity of the fire sequence and approves,” he wrote. “He suggested a couple of extra shots not included in this scenario, one of which is described by [Margaret] Mitchell of going through a tunnel of fire, which I think I can trick at the same time.”
Menzies asked that Selznick approve “actual structural and special effect preparations” that would enable them to shoot the fire sequence on Saturday, November 26. Responding by cable, Selznick declined to approve the preparations “and in any case would certainly not approve this vital sequence until went over in detail with Menzies and saw full sketches.” He asked that it be held until his return “in which case would like Menzies prepare sketches in continuity form in great detail, and will go over first day I am back.”
Reports from the Selznick art department began on the 9th, with the staff consisting of four draftsmen, two sketch artists, Wheeler (initially listed on the manifest as assistant art director), and Menzies. The first drawings were an exterior of Tara and an interior of its living room, while preliminary drawings were of Atlanta streets (for the fire sequence) and the lower floor of Twelve Oaks. The group of draftsmen soon enlarged to include three additional men and a model maker named Al Simpson. Other early sets in the works: the Atlanta rail station, Peachtree Street, and an exterior of the old Examiner office. The typical progression was from multiple sketches to preliminary working drawings, then more sketches, and then the final working drawings.
As Cukor busied himself shooting tests for Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Wilkes, Menzies and Jack Cosgrove tested the characteristics of Technicolor’s new “speed” stock, making night filter tests, a projection screen test, and, finally, an evening fire test at Forty Acres. Menzies also made process tests using a translucent screen. Observed Wilbur Kurtz, who was present for these tests, “This translucent screen is a recent device gotten up as a substitute for the old ground glass screens, which had to be large and were dangerous. Someone might try to walk through one. The test was to see if the same thing could be done properly in Technicolor.”
As the night of December 10 approached, there were daily conferences regarding the fire sequence, which, as Kurtz put it, “is still at the top of studio interest. These conferences work out physical sequences as well as the why or wherefore of them, the psychology of them being paramount.” On Thursday, December 8, preparations on Forty Acres were nearing completion. The freight cars were almost finished and had been positioned on the wooden rails. The old King Kong set had been piped for burning, and the contraption designed to pull it over had been fastened into place. The next night, Friday, December 9, saw the disabled guns in position and the boxcars lettered and painted up.
December 10, 1938: Menzies confers with producer David O. Selznick and director George Cukor prior to calling action on Gone With the Wind.
(DAVID O. SELZNICK COLLECTION, HARRY RANSOM CENTER)
Despite all the preparation, the countless meetings and the innumerable continuity boards, it was obvious that Selznick still was not entirely comfortable with the plan. “We had a big argument about this,” Ray Klune remembered. “He wanted me to call it off and I said, ‘No, you’re going to have to get somebody else to call it off. I just won’t do it.’ So he said, ‘I won’t be there.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe it’s better that you shouldn’t be there, but you’ll be missing something. Even if it’s a disaster, David, why don’t you share it with us?’ ”
Of course, it wasn’t a disaster. “We set about eight houses afire in Culver City,” Klune acknowledged. “But we had that all organized too. There were firemen there in nothing flat. And I think our total damages were $1,200.” Selznick nearly missed out on one of the biggest thrills of his life. When it was all over, and all of the flames had been doused, he sent a wire to Jock Whitney in New York:
SHOT KEY FIRE SCENES AT EIGHT-THIRTY TONIGHT, AND JUDGING BY HOW THEY LOOKED TO THE EYE THEY ARE GOING TO BE SENSATIONAL.
*1 Selznick paid $50,000 for the rights to the book, a fat price for the time but by no means a record. The Grapes of Wrath brought $60,000 and the play You Can’t Take It with You, which won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama, fetched a startling $265,000.
*2 “You had better immediately inform Mr. Menzies and Mr. Wheeler to have the café set ready for Saturday morning,” Selznick warned in a typical memo to production manager Edward Butcher.