My husband, Bob Franklin, and I approached Dr. Louis Starr, then director of the oral-history collection, with a plan to interview and tape-record movie people as they passed through New York. Our aim was to document, through personal recollections, the era of silent films, the impact of sound, the triumphs and inequities of the major studios, and life in the glittering film capital, and to capture a glimpse of how movies were actually made--quite a tall order.

	Narrative Tension in Oral History Interviews
	Oral historians conduct interviews because they are dissatisfied with the ability of the written record to tell us about the interior life of people in culture and history, writes Ronald J. Grele, former director of Columbia's Oral History Research Office. According to Grele, practitioners of oral history, like traditional historians, struggle with the tensions between analysis and storytelling: "The tension, as it expresses itself in an oral history interview, is more complex than the usual argument over narrative or analytical history. Historians, trained as they are in the canons of the profession, bring to the interview a drive for analysis. In the pre-interviewing preparation, a set of topics or questions are developed that depend in their sequencing, their logic and their very existence upon a set of analytic principles that the historians hope will inform the interview... On the other hand, the stories told to us by the people we interview are not without analysis. The narratives we collect are dependent for their meaning upon individual and collective interpretations of the past, and those interpretations are, in effect, analysis. When we interview, we ask the people to whom we are speaking to explain their history, i.e., to link one event to another in such a way as to make the past comprehensible." In "Narrative Tension: Theory and Practice in Oral History," Grele explores discusses why it is important to teach oral historians to consider the way in which they construct these memories. Full feature Article by Ron Grele, former director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office. Copyright 2001 by The Trustees of Columbia Univerisy in the City of New York.

Approaching actors, writers, producers and directors who visited New York was a problem until we discovered a column in Variety that chronicled visiting celebrities. We also subscribe to a little sheet distributed by Earl Blackwell that was based, primarily, on tips from hotel clerks as to the arrival of their famous guests. As a result, almost all of our interviews were conducted in posh New York hotel suites.

Bob was relentless in approaching famous, sought-after movie moguls and detaining them beyond their allotted time. I, with my native Yankee reticence, was tongue-tied and overly polite--bad traits in a would-be journalist. However, we were totally charmed by these brilliant, often eloquent, personalities and by hearing for the first time some of their riotous observations and anecdotes.

Composer-pianist Jack Shaindlin recalled playing 12 hours a day in the nickelodeons, and arguing with a sound-effects guy who sounded a drum, a bird whistle and a frog croak at every opportunity. One of Hollywood's most accomplished screenwriters of all time, Frances Marion, spoke of her mission not only to amuse people but also to show them the world and understand kindness to animals, children and old people.

Perhaps the longest interview we conducted was with Eddie Sutherland, a fellow who was little known outside Hollywood and worked extensively with Chaplin. Eddie re-created the dangers of early movie stunts. Once he jumped off a moving train for Mack Sennett and wound up in the hospital. He spoke at length about Chaplin's methods in The Gold Rush and other pictures.

The first movie cowboy, "Bronco Billy" Anderson, reminisced in his late old age about making The Great Train Robbery in New Jersey and trying to pretend he was "born on a horse." Billy took many roles in that four-minute epic, which so thrilled audiences that they refused to leave the theater.

We became friends with Harold Lloyd after our tape recorder broke down during an interview. Lloyd first got himself onto the lot as a job seeker, he told us, by putting on makeup and just walking past the guards. He was indignant at the notion that the famous clock scene in Safety Last was shot just a few feet off the ground. "We had platforms, with mattresses, about 20 feet down," he said, "on the highest building we could find in Los Angeles. From up there, they looked like postage stamps."

When sound came in, Ralph Bellamy remembered trying not to bump into the new microphones. Lila Lee had to shout dialogue during intimate scenes so the mike could pick it up. Harold Lloyd had to cobble up dialogue to lead into silent comedy routines. For a silent comic artist like Buster Keaton, talkies were a new, alien world. Others spoke sadly of the end of John Gilbert's career: his high-pitched voice belied his manly looks.

Having read a history of MGM, The Lion's Share, by film critic Bosley Crowther, we were fascinated by the big studios. Director George Seaton told us how the star system worked. Actress Bonita Granville described MGM as a whole world devoted to talent, costumes, scenery and style. Jerry Wald gave us a clue to how Warner's, with their movies "ripped from the headlines," competed with MGM. Humorist Leo Rosten told us a merry tale of writing dialogue while the actors and crews were sitting around waiting for the next few pages. Writer Ben Hecht gave us the downside: "Unerringly, they went for what was corny and trite … but unerringly, the money rolled in at the box office."

When it came to acting for movies, not every player was happy. "I was typecast," complained Ralph Bellamy. "I was always a district attorney," said Walter Abel. "All they cared about was whether my uniform fit," moaned Melvyn Douglas. "But," said Henry Fonda, "it was so real. Real scenery, real outdoors, so unlike theater."

"Tedious," said Basil Rathbone. "Give me the excitement of live theater any day." In the words of Adolph Zukor, the legendary founder of Paramount Pictures, "We used to cast for looks and build. Now every bit player has to know what it's all about."

Many directors spoke about their work, and numerous actors spoke about the directors they had worked with. Director Edward Dmytryk focused on the difficulty of filming emotion, as opposed to action. Rouben Mamoulian modestly recalled convincing Garbo to do more than one take. Jack Lemmon praised John Ford and others for drawing out the best in actors.

In the same vein, the foibles, talents, triumphs and tragedies of the Hollywood tycoons were a fruitful topic. Basil Rathbone and Teresa Wright praised Samuel Goldwyn for his brains and character. Myrna Loy admired Louis B. Mayer for his ability to create and develop personalities. Writer Reginald Denham told us a bizarre tale about the craziness of trying to write a film for Alexander Korda.

Almost every writer who served in Hollywood hated it and hated the whole system. Anita Loos, one of the pioneers, wickedly explained that Irving Thalberg had an enormous staff of writers, 90 percent of whom mostly played golf, and 10 percent did all the work. Dorothy Parker admitted that she, like many others, went to Hollywood for the money: "But it just melted away, like a small piece of ice in your hand." "My job," said Kenneth McKenna, story chief at MGM, "was principally to soothe the writers."

Since all these famous folks had a life outside the studios, we inquired about society in the movie capital. "It was," explained Adolph Zukor, "a gold rush town. Everybody rushed in." Many people recalled a rigid caste system, where stars socialized only with stars, producers only with producers, and so on down the line. Frances Marion sympathetically explained that Hollywood life was very hard on young women who partied at night but had to be at the studio early, and frequently controlled their waking and sleeping with drugs.

Finally, one of the most outrageous Hollywood stories came from Ben Hecht, who received us in his Nyack, New York, residence. Hecht was briefly one of several writers of Gone With the Wind. He described a madhouse scene with director Victor Fleming and producer David Selznick that went on for days, until Selznick collapsed. "David had done 100 brilliant things--costumes, scenery, casting, financing. The only thing he had overlooked was a script." Could that have been old Hollywood in a nutshell?

Transcripts of our interviews were made available to students and researchers, while my husband and I retained the reels, along with rights for radio broadcast. Much later we produced "Memoirs of the Movies," an 18-part series for Westinghouse broadcasting. Each program contained highlights from the celebrity interviews and was narrated by a star.

Following the completion of the Popular Arts Project, which resulted in 200 reels of tape and three drawers full of transcripts, and after the completion of our "Memoirs of the Movies" project in the early 1960s, both my husband's and my careers took a new direction toward broadcast documentaries and journalism.

In the nearly 40 years since these interviews were put on tape--there were no DATs or cassettes at that time--I believe that all of the people we interviewed, except for the very youngest folks, have died. Their films and photographs and books about them remain, but their own versions of reality, their most polished stories, their recollections of colleagues and friends in the industry, and that subtle window into personality that comes with the spoken work are, hopefully, preserved for a very long time to come at Columbia University's Oral History Research Office.