Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE FOR SEPTEMBER, 1936 99 Shakespeare, adored Shakespeare — then our year and a half of hard work and one of the biggest gambles in picture history were justified. Now we can go into production on the innumerable masterpieces that time has handed down to us, and at the same time know that at last our industry is on a plane with the finest in the world." AT this point my watch and my stomach remarked simultaneously that it was getting late, with the sun nearly gone. "More tomorrow," Cukor said, and slid off his stool. Next day, however, he suddenly decided to make the dreaded nine-minute and fifty-three seconds long "balcony scene," now of cinema fame. So the set was closed as tightly as a leper colony. Wherefore, when you see that sequence at your theater, if you will watch closely you may discern this reporter's nose sticking cautiously through the vines that cover a tiny window in the garden wall. It was the only place of concealment on the stage, and I had to be there. It would be impossible to describe the tremendous tension, the almost tangible nervousness of everyone present before the cameras started. Finally, when Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard stepped on the set, waited for the signal, and proceeded to live the entire scene through without a single hesitancy, a single flaw — relief flooded down and expressed itself in the congratulations, in laughter a little too highpitched to be real. Afterward Cukor, Miss Shearer, the inimitable, acid-tongued Edna Mae Oliver and I sat at a little table while technicians prepared the final shot of the picture — a simple matter of three people walking down a Verona square. And Cukor talked on . . . I said, "What about the story of how you did it all — details and things?" He looked a little harassed. "Well, it wasn't any sort of an easy job. When Thalberg announced that his dream of ten years — the production of 'Juliet' — was to become a reality, and I was assigned to direct it, I realized I was facing the challenge of my life. So was everyone connected with the picture. "The first problem was of course, research. We decided to choose the most charming period of the Renaissance, with all of its gorgeous reaction of the dreary, straight-laced era that preceded. We sent camera crews to Verona to photograph the city. Adrian designed gowns and coiffures from paintings of the masters: Botticelli, Benozzo Gozzoli, Fra Angelico, Bellini, Signorelli. And of course there were the usual studio preparations, with those staggering statistics that you can put in your story if you want to." (Ninety thousand flagstones, two hundred tons of cement, seventy-five thousand feet of lumber, three hundred barrels of paint, eighty books of gold leaf, five hundred yards of carpets, six hundred feet of garden hose, thirty crates of grapes, one hundred gallons of kerosene for torches, three pounds of ginger roots for the parakeets, twelve milliners, twenty-five knitting machine operators, twelve bootmakers, two hundred and fifty seamstresses, thirty embroiderers, one hundred tailors, twenty-five dyers, five hundred painters, one hundred paving workers, one hundred and fifty millworkers, thirty thousand miles of film, ad infinitum and until death do part me from my typewriter.) "And then came the script," continued Cukor. "That was the biggest worry, and proved the least troublesome. We didn't want See if the Shade You Are Using Is Really the Right One for You ! You're pretty sure about the shade face powderyou use, aren't you? quite certain it's the right shade for you. 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