50th ANNIVERSARY

Texas-Sized "Giant"

The following appeared in John Rosenfield's "Resident Arts" column in the Autumn 1956 issue of Southwest Review. The literary quarterly has been published at SMU since 1924.

Chagrin is, perhaps, not the word to describe the bad temper of Texas motion picture men when premières for Giant were announced for such remote centers as New York and Los Angeles. Texas would get an early release to satisfy a pardonable obsession with the story and its film version. No rituals, no visits of stars, or anything else were planned to bind Giant and Texas as a regional expression.

Since Texas motion picture theater chains are potent and the Interstate Circuit, centering in Dallas, is one of the most influential in the industry, the importunities were hard to resist. Interstate in particular had a strong argument. Giant is a leviathan among movies, running three hours and forty minutes. It presents a major exhibition problem. Like Gone with the Wind, it can be shown at most three times a day, more practically only twice.

Naturally it would have to be shown at almost double the usual admission price to compensate for the double length running time. For motion picture theaters have two problems. One is to get the public in and the other, if the picture is popular, to get the public out to make room for other customers. Exhibitors prefer theater seats that are neither leather nor plush, velveteen nor plywood -- only "hot."

Not since 1939, when Gone with the Wind was released, have theaters had to wrestle with the outsize movie. Then, in the fall of 1956, they get two of them, both clamoring for play dates. The other is the three and a half hour War and Peace, a picturization of the Tolstoy novel. War and Peace is a Paramount release. The big city theaters of Texas, operated by Interstate, are actually owned by United Paramount Theaters. In spite of the federal court decree divorcing theaters and production, there must be ties between pictures and theaters both bearing the name Paramount.

Giant is a Warner Brothers release and its claims for preferred exhibition conditions are urgent but not nearly so compulsive in Texas. So there was danger that Giant would be deferred well past its day in the sun of ballyhoo and novelty. And this in a state relied on to pay a sizable part of Giant's production cost, which may now total $5,000,000. So if Texas could not have the premières, spiced by personal appearances of the leading actors and producers, the picture slumped badly in the movie market.

The situation was saved by Interstate's vice-president and general manager, the veteran exhibitor R.J. O'Donnell, who bowed to the inevitable. Bows, incidentally, are not O'Donnell's habitual gesture. At the risk of tying up his de luxe theaters, never more than two to a town, on War and Peace and Giant, he considerately gave Giant its chance. All of which should give a reader, thus far, insight into the fact that there is much more to showing a picture than merely making it.

Although O'Donnell's guard is never down in knock down film buying negotiations, he privately admitted to us that George Stevens and Henry Ginsberg, makers of Giant, were quite judicious. The "colossal" effort should be presented without regional significance or its success would be jeopardized. Texas, in other words, would be the worst place possible for premières, granted that Texas theaters would benefit.

He argued, violently enough, that Gone with the Wind had to do with the Civil War siege of Atlanta and Atlanta was the scene of a fancy première. But he had his misgivings. Texas is different. It is a state both envied and resented. In some theatrical locations it is box office poison. So O'Donnell surrendered on the grounds that it is probably best in the long run that Giant be presented to the national public as a powerful if outlandishly unverifiable story which emphatically is not Texas expressing itself.

So much for the shaping of theatrical thought control or, as they confess in Hollywood, public "brain washing." Otherwise Texas had much to do with Giant, one of the biggest movies of all time. A saga of the big-rich, the story has a peculiar Texan quality. Most of it was filmed on location in and around Marfa, Texas, on the high plains southeast of El Paso and a modest, rural gateway to both the Davis Mountain country and Big Bulge outside the Big Bend leading to Presidio, Ojinaga, and, hopefully, to the Mexican metropolis of Chihuahua.

The Marfa expedition is said to have cost more than $1,000,000 of the total production budget. Half the dialogue was recorded on the spot -- an unusual practice these days for location jaunts. While it is customary to take part of the cast on trips to natural settings, the junkets are quick and for the purpose of gathering footage that can be ingeniously "processed" with the actors at the studio. But this was not the case with Giant. It is safe to say that its outdoors scenes were both filmed and recorded at Marfa and only its indoors sequences at Warner's Burbank studios.

Giant was, to start with, Edna Ferber's lampoon of Texas published in 1952. Nobody has claimed that Miss Ferber is a major literary figure. Her language is an odd, awkward blend of "slicks" and "pulp." Her strokes are so broad as to look like caricatures to her many detractors. Miss Ferber, however, can afford to let the critical esteem go. In fact she can afford almost anything. She has grown rich from a succession of best sellers, one of which was Giant. She has become richer through the sale of screen rights to the three productions of Show Boat and its continuation on the stage as the Hammerstein-Kern operetta, as well as from the cinema adaptations of So Big (made twice), Mother Knows Best, Cimarron, Come and Get It, The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, Saratoga Trunk, and Stage Door.

In Giant she spans thirty years in the story of Cattle Baron Bick Benedict, his gentle wife from Virginia, Leslie, and the rise of the flamboyant oil millionaire, Jett Rink. The caste problem of Mexican peons and the emergence of showy parvenus and their abrasive, bovine, mink-drenched wives are the other elements.

Actually Miss Ferber so juggled her people and locales as to create little more than a fanciful novel. But Texans, reading it in 1952, insisted it was a roman à clef involving the Klebergs of the King Ranch, Glenn McCarthy of Houston's Shamrock Hotel with its incredibly bacchanalian opening, and other recognizable figures. The press reviewers spouted indignantly and the conversation on country estates fairly sizzled.

The sale of the book was enormous. The gaudy set, who either were subjects or hoped they were, could not help buying it. The blue-jean Texan also bought it and secretly cheered. George Stevens and Henry Ginsberg bought it for the movies. And it was in the spring of 1954, when we were paying a short visit to Hollywood, that Stevens dug us out, took us to lunch, and asked apprehensively if we thought Texas would reject a picture version.

"Those dealt with won't be able to pass it up; the rest will glory in it," we predicted.

Stevens' partner, Ginsberg, had been a highly successful distribution executive since early manhood. In 1940 he was placed in charge of studio activities for Paramount Pictures and held the position for a decade until he resigned. George Stevens had been one of the most admired Hollywood directors for twenty years but always worked for a studio and had taken no steps to project his name into the public ken.

He couldn't help himself in 1952. The movie world had gone ga ga over third dimension and the many new sizes and shapes of screens. Whereupon Stevens simply did the big business of the year with a conventionally proportioned Western called Shane. For once the pioneer was approached as a character study instead of an athlete. The atmosphere got away from the hills and took a look at the beer stained bars, the tobacco juice on planked sidewalks, the desolation of Boot Hill Cemetery.

Stevens also won honors that year with a different type of picture, A Place in the Sun, which was a film version of Dreiser's An American Tragedy. The film fans, who follow Oscar awards on radio and television more avidly than general election returns, were made aware of one George C. Stevens when he won the director's trophy. More important Stevens pictures for RKO, MGM, Paramount, and others include Something to Live For, I Remember Mama, The More the Merrier, The Talk of the Town, Woman of the Year, Gunga Din, and his first claim to fame, Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams with Katharine Hepburn.

For a man who had labored so long and reliably for the glory of his studios, Stevens has unusual color. He is tall and lumbering. He gives everybody a little time but not much, talks patiently to everybody but not for long. His manners are impeccable and his concealment of his thoughts practically hermetic.

He has the habitual aloofness of somebody born and bred in the theater, as he was. He was born in Oakland, California, only fifty-one years ago. His father was leading man of a stock company and his mother the leading lady. His maternal grandmother, Georgia Woodthorpe, had been a stage beauty in San Francisco's Gold Rush days. His paternal grandfather was James Stevens, a prosperous gold stake lawyer. And then there was his brilliant brother, Ashton. He wound up as the leading drama critic of Chicago.

George Stevens was on the stage at the age of five. After leaving high school be tried for a job in his father's company but even his doting sire found his acting an embarrassment. So Stevens showed up in Hollywood about 1921 and caught on as a cameraman. In 1929 he got a chance to direct "custard pie" comedy for Hal Roach. He progressed through minor film efforts until 1935 when he was assigned Alice Adams at Katharine Hepburn's insistence.

In 1953 Stevens was persuaded that both the fame and the financial awards of the business came from independent production. He teamed with Ginsberg, for whom he had worked at Paramount, and Miss Ferber to create a special company for Giant. The finances of this project never have been explained. The producers, we infer, have control of most of the money. Warner Brothers, however, have an interest, veto rights as to total cost, and the right to finish the picture if Stevens doesn't. Of course, Stevens did and we have heard of no countinghouse rhubarb. Both location and studio facilities were drawn from Warner, which will release Giant.

There was a time, just before the outbreak of the war, when the bright young directors of Broadway were preferred to the old line movie men. But the DeMilles, Stevenses, LeRoys, and others have ridden out the threat. They had something the Kazans, Logans, and Cukors did not. It was a realization that a motion picture is primarily a picture. To them the visual almost tells the story and the dialogue, while not neglected, is used for exposition and clarification. The climactic moment of a Stevens picture, or a DeMille or LeRoy picture for that matter, is always something to see and not to hear. They have not forgotten that the screen made a rich place for itself in entertainment and industry before it ever acquired a voice.

These directors often exasperate a thrifty studio by retakes. But there is no limit to the number of "takes" they will make to get the right "picture." They have an instinct for the pacing and rhythm of a sequence, and when they splice the picture in the cutting room it generally has pulse as well as vista. Basic weaknesses of plot or mediocrity of dialogue are reduced to nonessential factors. By its own pictorial poetry the picture can tell the essential story.

When Gone with the Wind was undertaken, Producer David Selznick made the mistake of seeing the Margaret Mitchell panorama as verbal drama. It was not long until he changed directors and settled for an old line motion picture man whose work would not be subtle but would, at least, be loaded with pictorial values. No speech of this epic is memorable. Many scenes are.

Stevens put himself to almost two years' preparation on Giant. He "researched," as Hollywood says, voluminously. Better, he plotted each move so that every trip and every day had its agenda. Then he reached the all-important question of casting. So in October, 1954, we received an odd long distance call.

"You know," said Stevens on the other end, "I don't know what a Texan looks like. I am afraid that if I follow my ideas I will show types that Texans in particular will hoot at. I want you to find me a good portrait artist who will visualize six leading characters for me. I want him to do this without any reference to established movie stars."

What Stevens was asking, of course, was a total reversal of the process of portraiture. This is for the artist to face his subject, study the outward aspects, and then try to find the inner man or woman behind the figure. Now Stevens wanted to submit three hundred word character sketches of Bick, Leslie, Luz, Uncle Bawley, Old Polo, and Jett Rink. The artist was to invent the face and the figure from the "inner" detail.

Ed Bearden of the Southern Methodist University faculty was willing to undertake the experiment. He was a good choice as he can be an incisive portraitist if given a chance and is, furthermore, used to working fast and practically. He soon had sketches in Hollywood which delighted Stevens and which were speedily bought and paid for. Stevens then invited Bearden to attend some of the early shooting when it started eight months later.

How much the Bearden sketches influenced production could be learned at Marfa. His pen portraits had been blown up and displayed in the business office as a sort of guide to the makeup and costume crews. By this time Giant had its cast: Rock Hudson as Bick, Elizabeth Taylor as Leslie, Mercedes McCambridge as Luz, Chill Wills (of Seagoville near Dallas) as Uncle Bawley, James Dean as Jett Rink, and Alexander Scourby, a notable Broadway actor, as Old Polo. There were others like Jane Withers, Judith Evelyn, Paul Fix, Dennis Hopper, Fran Bennett, and Mary Ann Edwards in the east, but these were outside Stevens' preoccupation with visual rightness.

Of course Bearden did not exactly see the classical physiognomies of Hudson and Miss Taylor as Bick and Leslie, respectively. But he did visualize their fundamental aspects, bearing, and costumes. Hudson, as Benedict aged, began to take on via makeup the windswept texture of the rancher's skin, as seen by Bearden -- the squint against the Texas sun, the firming lines around the mouth and nostrils. While Bearden did not envision such a flower of grace as Elizabeth Taylor, he did see Leslie as a creature of similar delicacy, if more vibrancy and vitality.

Production began in June, 1955, at Charlottesville, Virginia, where scenes were quickly made for the early, genteel, F.F.V. life of Leslie before she married a most Texanish Texan and moved to Reata. This is a mythical town on the cattle plains, near enough to the border to be inhabited largely by Mexicans. Otherwise Reata was in the environs of Marfa, which location Stevens settled on after scouting likely spots in several southwestern states.

In response to the question "Why Marfa?" he pointed to the flat expansiveness of the range between distant walls of mountains, those around Fort Davis and those in the Big Bend. The sky was mild blue and the vegetation a unique dusty white. Since Giant is in color, Stevens thought much about the hues. The Benedict mansion was seen by Miss Ferber in her novel as something like the main house of the King Ranch cruelly described as a combination of Spanish hacienda and Southern Pacific depot.

Stevens and his art director, Boris Leven, rejected this entirely. And here is where movie experience counted. A Spanish type mansion would only confuse most spectators and entirely mislead a European audience. The cattle-rich Benedicts would enshrine themselves as readily in a rich and rambling Victorian mansion. This would proclaim in unmistakable visual terms the flashy affluence of the cow barons. The design settled on was a dead ringer for what is known as the Waggoner mansion in Decatur, North Texas.

The huge façade was built in Hollywood and shipped to Marfa on flatcars. It was erected in a corner of the Worth Evans ranch, one of the more imposing holdings of the region. And it was a strange sight, its towers visible for many miles, in the middle of the plains. As it was about a half enclosure rather well constructed, Stevens left it to serve the hospitable Mr. Evans as a hay barn.

He brought 250 persons and a million dollars' worth of equipment to Marfa. The Chamber of Commerce generously vacated its rooms in the lovely Paisano Hotel for Stevens to use as office and headquarters. Some stars put up at the Paisano, the smartest hostelry between San Antonio and El Paso. Many others were accommodated in "Sunday houses." These are well equipped bungalows owned by ranchers who make their homes on their distant property. They use the "Sunday houses" only when they or their families come to town for church, shopping, or other doings.

Marfa went through many gestures of welcome but, as a matter of fact, saw little of Stevens' company and profited little from their spending. Work started in the three sites, the Worth Evans ranch, the Jett Rink shack at the railroad stop of Ryan, and the Mexican quarter of Valentine at 7:30 A.M. It rarely ended before 6:30 P.M. Meals were catered by an El Paso firm, lunch on the locations and breakfast and dinner in the Paisano coffee shop.

More outside money came from tourists. Again did Stevens' long experience turn a new trick. These days the temperamental new director "closes sets" or fences locations to work in private. Stevens, realizing that it is never too early to start word of mouth gossip on a motion picture, actually bid for a gallery. He had a place for spectators roped off. He seldom worked to fewer than three hundred onlookers, and his crowds were from seven hundred to a thousand on week ends.

Marfa is a four hour drive from anywhere. Stevens dispatched publicity men to points as distant as San Angelo to organize tours among camera clubs. Stevens gave each visitation time to click away to their hearts' content. It is estimated that sixteen thousand persons saw this picture making during the Marfa stay.

All this happened while Stevens was engaged in the most fragile operations. For, as we said, he was not merely photographing backgrounds but actually producing his picture. To watch him work at close range was to learn a postgraduate lesson in handling personalities. Three years earlier, in A Place in the Sun, he had obtained an unbelievably expressive performance from Elizabeth Taylor, an actress of dazzling beauty but not even in her own estimation a thespian of insight or resource.

Each "take" on Taylor was prepared in detail. Stevens gave her the line "reading" even to inflection. He gave her categories of registers, "wistful," "angry," "surprised," "distressed." There was no evidence to us that Miss Taylor had the least conception of the continuity of her role or was asked to develop any. She was permitted only to concentrate on the "take" and, after rehearsal, did it beautifully.

Hudson, a more resourceful actor, was briefed in more detail. His "takes," unlike Miss Taylor's, were not always satisfactory and often had to be remade. Hudson is a pathologically shy man. And it is the fate of such unfortunate creatures to be misunderstood and resented. He was generally regarded as "upstage" or supercilious, whereas his friends assured us he craved affection and simply went tongue-tied at the sight of strangers. We never found out.

Miss Taylor is also a shrinking violet but is genial, modest, and unassuming if you take the lead. Her conversation runs to clothes and family. A simple halter bodice came undone and she was forced, amid blushes, to ask one of the women in the hotel lobby to retie it quickly. Every onlooking male clucked. On the other hand Mercedes McCambridge, Chill Wills, Jane Withers, and others were expansive. Miss McCambridge is quite a sociologist and for a nickel would bring down from her hotel room the photograph of Adlai Stevenson autographed to "Dear Mercedes."

Giant was finished at the Warner studio on September 30, 1955. There was a celebration on the set and then James Dean, who played the all-vital role of Jett Rink, an analogue of any lavish oil millionaire you know, jumped into his European racer and sped away to a stock car race. His predilection for fast driving had caused Stevens at Marfa to issue his only edict, no cars on location and positively none, owned or borrowed, to be driven by Dean. It is tragic that Stevens' authority had ended. Dean, at twenty-four, was killed in a crash that night.

At this writing, on the eve of Giant's release, there is placement of many publicity stories to the effect that the late James Dean's fan mail at Warner's exceeds any other received, that some claim he is not dead but is being repaired by plastic surgery, that most writers simply attest their devotion to his memory and their resolution never to forget him.

This may be imaginative press agentry. On the other hand all such effective exploitation must have a germ of actuality. It is now realized that young Dean symbolized in two pictures, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, the frustrations or maladjustments of youth. There is apparently an epidemic of this; the young of our times are in conflict. At any rate Dean is very much alive as a screen factor and probably will draw patronage from elements for whom Giant would be meaningless.

At Marfa we first thought Dean rude, ill-mannered, and uncommunicative. Later we found him an easy interview subject -- if one asked the questions and sustained the conversation. Sometimes he roughed things up, boy fashion, with the two "technical" men assigned to keep his accent Texan. Usually, though, he was alone. He mounted a horse and rode endlessly on the fringe of the location compound. Once he galloped up to a vintage automobile in the yard and tossed his hat into it. He recovered his hat and repeated the stunt. He did it again and again. It was obvious that he was rehearsing the visual movement of his next "take."

Dean had the self-absorption of the young and ambitious actor. He must have been a trial to Stevens, who avoided him in town and actually announced wrong starting times for running of "rush" footage. Not that Stevens didn't adore him. He rarely gave him a word of direction. Dean's "takes" were almost always right. To others if not to Dean, Stevens was eloquently appreciative of his actor.

Miss McCambridge, a splendid and experienced actress, needed little suggestion on "reading." Her theatrical intelligence was largely conditioned on the stage, and Stevens took pains to make her broader in movement. She was quick to get the idea.

A day's shooting was immediately air mailed to the Hollywood laboratory, and color prints of the footage were returned in two days. These were projected in an abandoned Mexican movie house next door to the Paisano Hotel, rented by Stevens for his exclusive use during his stay. All "takes" were printed. One saw thirty different shots of Elizabeth Taylor leaving the train at the Reata station, each with its virtues. Stevens was, at this point, in intimate sotto voce conversation with his head cameraman and assistant directors.

Undoubtedly this artist and veteran practitioner of the motion picture has planned Giant as something epochal, to rank in screen history with Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and nothing lesser. And much of it was made at Marfa on probably the most eventful location trip in the history of pictures.

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