A STAR IS BORN AGAIN

The search for the missing half hour from George Cukor’s classic had all the ingredients of a detective story.
Ronald Haver

(Part 2 of 3)

Two years later, when I was working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with archivist David Shepard, we decided to show A Star Is Born as part of a Cukor retrospective, and to accompany it with a brochure, using stills and script extracts, to show exactly what had been cut. Cukor lent us his script and his complete collection of still from the film, and we were able to finally itemize just exactly what had been taken out, and assess the damage to the story.

In the picture as it has been seen for the past twenty-nine years, Norman Maine, after hearing Esther Blodgett sing in an after-hours dive, talks her into quitting the band she’s been working with and promises to get her a screen test. She decides to take him up on the offer. Fade out. Fade in: She’s at the studio being made up for her test.

Originally, there were nine additional scenes between the offer and the screen test. Esther the next morning says goodbye to the members of the band, while across town a hung over Norman is being poured into a limousine and taken off to a midsea location for three weeks. She waits for his call; meanwhile, he, out at sea, is making frantic efforts to locate her, but cannot remember the name of the motel where she is staying. In the ensuring weeks, Esther tries for find work, moves to a cheap rooming house in the downtown Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, gets a singing job (doing voice-over for a puppet commercial for shampoo), and finally ends up as a carhop at a Sunset Boulevard drive-in. Norman, having returned, hears her voice on the television commercial and tracks her down. They have an awkward reunion on the roof of the rooming house, which then fades to the studio makeup scene.

Also removed from the film was a two-minute scene of Norman driving a nervous Esther, now Vicki, to the preview of her first starring picture, trying to calm her; she makes him stop the car and gets sick all over an oil derrick. Another deletion was a five-minute segment showing Vicki recording a song while Norman watches; afterward, his marriage proposal and her refusal is picked up by an open microphone and played back by the engineers, leaving her no choice but to accept. The final deletion removed both of Vicki’s renditions of the song “Lose That Long Face’; one had followed Norman’s drunken humiliation of her at the Academy Awards ceremony, and the other had come immediately after her dramatic breakdown in her dressing room with Oliver Niles, the producer (Charles Bickford). A total of twenty-seven minutes was taken out. The deletion of the growing emotional involvement of Norman and Esther eliminated much of the story’s poignance and diminished its tragedy.

I was very proud of the brochure; George looked at it cursorily, murmuring, almost to himself, “They don’t deserve a good picture,” and then beyond a brief “It’s very nice” never said another word. Evidently, it only served to remind him of one of the major disappointments of his career.

One thing the brochure did was to generate renewed interest at Warner Bros. In finding the missing footage. Rudi Fehr, then vice-president in charge of post production, told me that he had his people to through their records and storage vaults and that they turned up nothing. Evidently, the cut sect6ions had been kept for several months and then destroyed, a common practice at most major studios. I was convinced that if I could get free, unlimited access to the studio vaults, a careful combing through all those thousands of cans of film would turn up the footage, possibly in mismarked cans. But studios don’t like novices, no matter how well meaning, rummaging through their vaults, so it looked as though I wouldn’t get the chance.

One day, from out of nowhere, came a call from an apprentice film editor at Warner Bros. Named Dave Strohmaier; he told me that he had come across the complete mixed soundtrack to the three-hour picture. He had not, however, been able to turn up any footage. Then, one evening in November 1981, at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I hosted a tribute to lyricist Ira Gershwin, which ended with an excerpt from A Star Is Born: Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away.” Introducing the finale, I commented on the fact that two of Arlen and Gershwin’s best songs had been removed from the film. Fay Kanin, president of the Academy and someone with a long and close relationship with George Cukor, said afterward how wonderful it would be if the complete version of the film could be found.

In addition to being a writer of great sensitivity (Friendly Fire, Hustling), Fay, who has a deep-seated and passionate commitment to film, to film history, and to preservation, is a member of the AFI Board of Trustees’ Preservation Committee, chaired by Jeanine Basinger and including Brian O’Doherty of the National Endowment for the Arts, Jean Firstenberg of the AFI, Mary Lea Bandy of the Museum of Modern Art, and several other individuals concerned with national archive issues. At the request of the committee, the AFI’s board has designated the next ten years the Decade of Preservation. A Star Is Born seemed a perfect vehicle to highlingh the problems of preservation. Questions had already been raised about the stability of the film’s color negative; the mater stereo sound tracks had evidently been erased years ago; and existing prints were on the old Eastmancolor release stock, which has a tendency to fade. So Fay contacted Robert Daly, chairman of the board of Warner Bros., and he eventually granted permission to go through the company’s film-storage facilities.

GO TO PART THREE