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152 IT TOOK NINE TAILORS
When the ship came into the harbor, one of his retinue hurried up to him and exclaimed that he had just seen the most beautiful woman in the world. The king immediately dashed to the other side of the ship to see this woman, who turned out to be the Statue of Liberty— a feeble joke, perhaps, but people liked it. In order to make this scene we went out in a tug and boarded an ocean liner that was actually arriving. Since there was time for only one take, everything had to be well rehearsed in advance. As the ship sailed past the famous statue, we shot the scene.
One day, as we were making the final scene of The King, Walter Wanger came out to the Long Island studio with a very long face.
"What's wrong?'' I asked.
"We ran The Grand Duchess and the Waiter last night," he told me, "and it's terrible. It doesn't make any sense."
I couldn't believe my ears; I knew that we had made a good picture. So we went to the projection room and ran the film again, and Wanger was right. Something had happened to our picture. It had been cut to the bone by some idiot in the cutting department. All the wonderful scenes that Mai and I had labored over were gone. That is the sort of thing that can happen in the picture business. I raised such a row that I could be heard in Times Square.
"I'm taking that picture back to Hollywood," I shouted. "I'm going to put it back the way we shot it or I will quit!"
There was nothing else that could be done for the picture was hopeless the way it was; so I caught the Twentieth Century while Monta stayed in New York to finish cutting The King.
When I got back to the studio, Ralph Block, a writer and associate producer, went to work with me to try to put The Grand Duchess back in shape. We worked days and nights reassembling the picture, and we also had to shoot one added scene. When you cut and assemble a picture, you have to view all the film that has been shot— not once but dozens of times. The story soon begins to bore you stiff and you can't tell whether a scene