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"Strictly for Money": Dana Andrews on the Movie Business
From: Columbia University
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Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
During the 1940s and '50s, Dana Andrews (1909-92) starred in such movies as The Ox-Bow Incident, Laura, The Purple Heart and The Best Years of Our Lives. In this 1958 interview with the Columbia University's Oral History Research Office, Andrews talks about the financial pressures faced by Hollywood studio executives, whom he describes as "gamblers" with "no artistic sensibilities at all." He also offers perspective on what it means to be hot in Hollywood. |
Dana Andrews talks about working in Hollywood.
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 got the part in Laura because of that little conversation with Virginia Zanuck. That was Saturday afternoon. I had been turned down for the part. Monday morning Otto Preminger called me and said, "I don't know what happened, but you got the part." He was trying to get me, too, but he was running into this opposition. |
 After I got Laura and did this part--boom, I was a star overnight. The other thing (The Purple Heart) had started it, but this really clinched it. People thought of me as this detective Mark McPherson, which was an attractive character. So people started sending me scripts which were nothing in the world but very poorly disguised imitations of Mark McPherson under a different set of circumstances. I had five, six, 10--and it got to where they were saying "a Dana Andrews type of detective." Of course, to me this is ridiculous, but that's the way these things are done. I think it's lack of imagination, for one thing, because I'd been around for six or seven years, and they could only see me in what they had seen me in. |
So I got Laura, and I was a star. Then The Best Years of Our Lives, and that was better. Then My Foolish Heart, also very good. Then we got into these series of pictures which I told you I didn't want to do--Fallen Angel, Daisy Kenyon. This is casting. Boomerang was before that, 1947. That reached the proportion of my fans who are intelligent and appreciate the type of story this is; it was also a good character, but not in the romantic he-man vein. People begin to associate the stars with certain characters. |
I think another thing happened at this point which is very important. I was built up as a star, because the studio could so build me up because they had theaters. And whether the theater managers wanted me or not, they could depend on a certain amount, almost enough to pay for the picture, in the way of playing time in the USA, that would get them back their money, because they could say, "This is what you're going to have." |
At this particular stage in my career, that situation changed: the government forced the studios to divorce the theaters, and although they have some control to some extent, which is not acknowledged but nevertheless true, it's not anywhere near what it used to be. |
Also, then motion pictures began to be invaded by television, and returns were not as voluminous as they had been, and people began to get scared. Believe me, when Hollywood gets scared, they really get frightened--because they're very much afraid for their jobs, and not without cause. It's one of the few of the larger industries (at one time the fifth-largest industry in the US; I don't think it is anymore) in which there is no sense of security in any job, right up to the head of a studio. You might be fired tomorrow. So everything depends on what you do today, and what you've done yesterday. So if you have a run of two or three bad pictures, no matter how hard you try to get out of them they put you in there just the same, and in the resultant failures they don't credit the fact that it's the picture, not you. Naturally: "This picture made money, that star is a moneymaker." Or vice versa. |
This is done in Box-Office Digest very simply: they put down how much money the picture made, and whichever stars are in that picture go up right with that picture. It doesn't matter if they give a horrible performance and are hooted at--it doesn't make a bit of difference. |
So Mr. Holden--who is a very fine actor and a very charming man, one of the top men in the business--I can remember very well that at the time I was "hot" and going great guns, Mr. Holden was a very discouraged and disgruntled man. He was very bitter about the whole thing. He'd gone away to the war; he got back; he had a contract with Paramount and Columbia, and Columbia put him in a picture that I doubt very much if 3 million people saw or even 2 million. It just didn't show. Some silly thing about a little boy--it might have been a cute little story, but it just wasn't any good at all. This was just before Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard made a lot of money. Mr. Holden went right up with it. Naturally, he got better parts, which in this case turned out to be actually better parts. He was built up with that. |
As to John Wayne--I don't think anybody who observes acting as such would say that John Wayne is an actor. He's John Wayne, a big hulk of a man who has learned how to walk in a very masculine sort of way, with high boots. He can talk to some extent, but it's always the same. In Ghengis Khan, for instance, it was just ludicrous to see this cowboy speaking as Ghengis Khan. Ward Bond, a very good friend of his, said, "Just when I thought he'd had it, he became the biggest star in the business!" |
This is directly attributable to the kind of character that Mr. John Ford is very able to get onto the screen, and he did that in the case of John Wayne in two or three pictures. These pictures made fabulous amounts of money, because of the type of pictures they were, because of the John Ford direction, and because of the characters that were written in there for Mr. Wayne. I think for three or four years running after that he was the top money drawer. Of course, he isn't now such a drawer, but I think he was for five or six years in a row top box office with Alan Ladd, who nobody would say is an actor. This Gun for Hire is the best thing he did, and he didn't say anything in it, much. |
This is one of the very odd things about motion pictures. A character will get set and then, depending upon the pictures he makes subsequently, he will be box office. I think Susan, Alan's wife, was very particular about selecting the type of pictures he did. This type of part is not the type I would have liked to have played. I've always approached my professional career as if I were a writer. I wouldn't want to write something that was tripe, and I didn't want to do such things in pictures. In this selection, very frequently, I probably would have made some mistakes as to box-office success, but they might have been fine pictures. The Ox-Bow Incident only very recently has cleared the original cost. This is amazing, because it's an art picture. You can get the greatest picture from Europe and just play it in the art houses to the intelligent people, and it'll flop and it doesn't make a star of anybody. But it is so much more gratifying to work in a good picture. It's very difficult to get such a picture made. They don't want to make a picture which doesn't appeal to the whole segment of the public. It's nearly impossible. Because actually motion pictures are strictly for money. It's a business. The men who make pictures, in my opinion, are only gamblers. They don't know very much about their business except the results of it and what it can do for them personally. They have no artistic sensibilities at all, because they're money men. They talk in terms of money, and if a little trollop off the streets comes and makes money for them, they are on her side and she's a great lady. I've seen it happen many times. Until she is that, she is just ... nobody. |
On our 10th wedding anniversary, Mr. Wyler and a number of his friends were over, and his wife called and said, "We're having dinner with Johnny Hyde"--who was an agent with the William Morris agency--"and wonder if we can bring him along." I said, "Well, it's just a buffet thing, of course, bring him along." She said, "He has a girlfriend with him; could she come?" "Fine." |
So this girl came. I must say she didn't look very attractive, and she didn't have anything to say, and nobody paid any attention to her. All of the other people were well known--directors, people like Preminger, people I worked with. It was not a large Hollywood-type party, a party where I didn't know anyone personally. They were all close friends. And everyone said about this girl, "Who the heck is she?" with a sort of derogatory expression on their faces. I said, "Oh, it's some friend of Johnny Hyde's." I went over and tried to engage her in conversation and didn't have much luck. She seemed shy. I thought, this is very peculiar, for her to be with Johnny Hyde, who's quite a man of the world. |
If you'd been at that same party two years later, everybody would have been trying to talk to her. Her name was Marilyn Monroe. |
This is the way Hollywood is. The girl was there; she was just the same as she is now, more or less, yet they weren't able to see it. Johnny Hyde saw it. He's the one who got her into pictures. |
Take this as an example: If I had played in The Bridge on the River Kwai the part Bill Holden played, I think the picture would have been less box office than it was, because at the time he played, Bill Holden was at the top. |
When studios had to let independents produce--because overhead was getting so heavy--the independents can't afford to build a star. They have to get someone who's already there. Now, Mr. Holden would not have the percentage of that picture that he has if that had been made by a studio. Under no circumstances. But Mr. Spiegel, getting his financing, had to go to these men and say, "I have Bill Holden." He's quite a promoter: When he did On the Waterfront, he had a contract with a particular studio to make that picture, and they were not particularly hot about it and he was having trouble getting the financing that he wanted. In the meantime, through mutual friends he got Marlon Brando interested. He went to another studio where he got a better releasing agreement--he'd get a larger percentage of the picture. So he went to the original ones and told them he'd like to get out of the contract, he couldn't put it together. So they released him from the contract, and he immediately announced the next day that he had a contract with Columbia to produce On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando. Well, of course, United Artists was out of their minds. It was a dirty trick. Because he had Brando all the time, but he got a better releasing agreement from Columbia. |
This is the way promoters work. I must say, we need them in the business. Who but Mike Todd would ever have produced Around the World in 80 Days? It could never have been done without a man of great imagination and great guts. |
In putting together his picture, Mr. Spiegel got two British stars, and an American star for the American public, and a British director and a foreign story--which appeals to the world at large--and made it in Ceylon, which appeals to the East. |
You see, our box office now is 58 percent foreign, outside the US. This is a terrific success, for that reason, because it [River Kwai] is universally appealing. But without Mr. Holden, he could not have gotten the money that he got to make the picture. Consequently, Mr. Holden's agent was very smart, and they demanded this terrific percentage. Mr. Spiegel is notorious for giving away percentages anyway. |
On African Queen, for example, later he didn't want it to be successful--because every time it took in $1, he had to pay out $1.10. He had sold more than 100 percent of the picture. He'd given it away or made trades with it. And he was just tearing his hair out, you see. |
These stars are built up this way. Because of the independent structure, they have to have a star. These stars are the ones already built up, and consequently they can't get rid of them. I'm sure that they would like to get people for less money, naturally, or people who could demand less. But the public does not know them, and the public is not going to get to know them, because they're not put in the pictures. The pictures they're put into aren't seen by the public. They just don't go anymore. So nobody is building stars anymore. Fox is trying. They used to tie in a large star with a secondary, somebody they were building up, who consequently would get seen. Nowadays they want both of them to be top money drawers. So you get older and older leading men. |
If younger ones get in, it's just happenstance. If it hadn't been for Mr. Kazan, Jimmy Dean would never have been in pictures. He saw him in New York and got him into pictures, but he was not built up by a studio. At the time of his death, he was at the top. He could have gone on till he was 50 years old, because he hit immediately. Studios as a rule can't do this anymore. |
As to my present position, they have at United Artists a strict money tag on every star. They look in a book and say, "He's worth this much; he'll bring in so much money if he just plays the telephone directory." As my rating is now--of course, I'm not young--I'm a medium drawer. The top stars number not more than six or seven. I'm probably within the first dozen. That's looking at it as objectively as United Artists does. I can't think of more than a dozen within whose class I fall. I get a percentage, depending on how much I get in money. These independent deals really don't pay off; these days, box office being what it is now, a picture made for $500,000 (which used to be a small budget) has to gross well over a million dollars in order to pay off. At that time, you will get what you defer, which the government demands that you put down. You can't get half your salary. It's established by what you got in the past. I'll be frank to tell you, my price is $100,000 per picture. |
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