Screenshot for the Week of 08 February 2021: "STAGE DOOR" (1937)

Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door

By the time I first saw Stage Door about twenty years ago, I had already seen well over 1,000 movies and I wondered how a movie could've been that good when I'd never heard of it.  It instantly jumped into my top 101 movies, and it has since moved very close to the top 25.

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From the early days of the studio system through its heyday in the '30s and '40s, a film director was not in charge of his own movie. That was because it wasn't his movie; he was just a hired hand doing a job.  The movie—the ideas, the script, all the artistic input, the responsibility for selecting everyone involved, including actors, writers, directors, etc., the money for it all, along with any profits—belonged to the studio.

Studios had their own stables of actors, producers, and directors who were tied to their studios by contract.  For instance, early in their careers, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, William Powell, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and the Marx Brothers were under contract with Paramount.  Paul Muni, Humphrey Bogart, Dolores Del Rio, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Errol Flynn, and Bette Davis belonged to Warner Bros.  

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the biggest studio, run by Louis B. Mayer and his head of production, "the boy wonder," Irving Thalberg.  Warner Brothers was another big one.  Jack Warner ran it along with Darryl F. Zanuck until the latter moved to the newly-formed 20th Century Fox, which Zanuck then took over.  Paramount Pictures was headed by Adolph Zuckor,  Universal by Carl Laemelle Sr. and Jr., Columbia Pictures by Harry Cohn, and R.K.O. by David Sarnoff and Joseph Kennedy.  Stage Door came from R.K.O.

A studio boss would assign a producer to act in his stead on a particular movie.  The producer would then have total creative control over it, just as directors do today.  Sometimes the studio boss handed the project off with suggestions for the lead players or the director or both; the projects sometimes came with a draft of the script.  But an experienced producer had free rein to choose his own director, choose the lead players, and assign his own writer to come up with a script.  With a working script in hand, producer and director would collaborate to the extent that the producer allowed.  Some producers, like David O. Selznick, were extremely controlling.  Before shooting began, the producer would tell the director what he wanted done, and the director would carry out the plan through his direction of the cast and crew and by being the producer's mouthpiece on the set.

Some directors were so talented they earned the authority to make their own creative decisions.  John Ford, F.W. Murnau, Frank Capra, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh, perhaps one or two others, and eventually William Wyler, were in this group.

But except for the select few, the great movies of the day were made by the producers, and they, not the directors, deserve the lion's share of the credit for these movies' artistic successes—

▶All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) (Carl Laemelle Jr.)

▶Frankenstein (1931) (Carl Laemelle Jr.)

▶Grand Hotel (1932) (Irving Thalberg)

▶42nd Street (1933) (Darrel F. Zanuck)

▶Cleopatra (1934) (Cecil B. DeMille)

▶Top Hat (1935) (Pandro S. Berman)

▶My Man Godfrey (1936) (Charles Rogers)

▶A Star Is Born (1937) (David O. Selznick)

▶Boys Town (1938) (John W. Considine Jr.)

▶Gone with the Wind (1939) (David O. Selznick)

▶The Philadelphia Story (1940) (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

▶Sergeant York (1941) (Hal Wallis and Jesse Laksy [and Howard Hawks, uncredited])

▶Casablanca (1942) (Hal Wallis)

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The producer of Stage Door was Pandro S. Berman and the director was Gregory La Cava.  The two had worked together on a few films before that.

La Cava had been directing films for 21 years, producing for 22, and was just coming off the critical success of My Man Godfrey (1936), which had earned six Oscar nominations and which La Cava both produced and directed.

In his six short years as a producer before Stage Door, Berman had put dozens of movies on the big screen.  (Following the release of this film, he was promoted to Vice President and Production Supervisor at R.K.O.).  In his long career (1931-1970), Berman produced, sometimes with credit and sometimes without, such movies as Of Human Bondage (1934), Swing Time (1936), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), National Velvet (1944), The Three Musketeers (1948), Father of the Bride (1950), Ivanhoe (1952), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), Jailhouse Rock (1957), BUtterfield 8 (1960), and Patch of Blue (1965), among scores of others.

For Berman's and La Cava's collaboration, Stage Door was nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Picture.

Stage Door was performed as a radio play for Lux Radio Theater on February 20, 1939, with Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou reprising their roles and Rosalind Russell taking over the Katharine Hepburn role.

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All through the production of Stage Door, and even before that, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers were in competition for queen of R.K.O. Hepburn had 2 Oscar nominations and 1 win for Best Actress but also an almost-nonexistent fan base on her side of the ledger.  Rogers had 6 Astaire-Rogers musicals behind her, rising popularity, knockout beauty, and box office success on her side, all of which gave her the advantage.  And originally, Rogers was set to get top billing on Stage Door.  But Hepburn was not happy with her billing or the smallness of her part.  She pled her case to Pandro S. Berman.  As a result, her part was significantly beefed-up, and as a result of that, she received equal billing with Rogers.

As great as Hepburn was in Stage Door, the film was a box-office disappointment.  Hepburn's career continued its nosedive, and the following year an industry magazine labeled her and several other actors "box office poison."

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Morrie Ryskind was a wisecracking specialist and the co-writer of the film.  As a young man he was expelled from Columbia University for an editorial in which he referred to the university president as "Czar Nicholas."  He honed his comedic skills writing the screenplays for The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), A Night at the Opera (1935), and My Man Godfrey (1936).  In 1932 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama along with co-writer George S. Kaufman, composer George Gershwin, and lyricist Ira Gershwin for the Broadway musical, Of Thee I Sing!

Ryskind noticed right away that the women on the set of Stage Door had a gift for banter and were not afraid to ad-lib at times.  He told a stenographer to memorize the dialogue in the script, then sit in on the acting sessions, and write down whatever they said that wasn't scripted.  Nearly everything in the stenographer's notes wound up in the film.