Old Hollywood Stories

I love old Hollywood stories. Call me a nostalgic dude but something about people who were so…glamorous who acted so real seems to make me feel less alone about the filmmaking process. TRUE FILMmaking. Not digital. Barf.

Anyway, this one involves director Preston Sturges & Howard Hughes. Which, by the way, if you haven’t seen “Sullivan’s Travels” PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE seek it out. A sexy Veronica Lake, if anything, is a great reward for sitting through it. She’s the girl we all want. Sassy and brassy. And it’s about the movie business. Great lessons to learn in that movie. Even in modern times.
Here's her stroking it...to make YOU happy: https://streamable.com/d7q3

The year in 1950, and Sturges meets billionaire weirdo Hughes. They make a handshake agreement on movies Sturges was to direct. This would be unlimited pass to make his movies. Imagine this…a billionaire comes up to you and offers to fund every movie you make. ONE stipulation…if at ANY TIME, either one can call it completely off. Meaning, it would be the end of this arrangement, ANY reason at all. It would just end like that. Invoices would go to Hughes, and he’d sign every check.

The movie is “Vendetta” in 1950. They were into the heat of shooting the movie, roughly 40 days in, when Sturges gets a phone call from Hughes. He wants to call the whole thing off. Here’s things to remember…first movie they work on together…Sturges is an established director. Hughes just calls it off. On a day where there were over 100 extras, production shut down just like that. No reason given. Nothing was spoken of this for years. One day, over a lunch…someone who was attached to that production mentioned their theory as to why that had ended so abruptly. Seems during the production, Sturges had gone up to the horse trainer, and during breaks had asked the trainer how much it would cost him to ride the horse. To which the trainer said “Mr. Sturges…for you…c’mon…” So, Sturges would ride the horse daily free of charge. So he thought.

Turns out the horse trainer was charging production a massive sum every time Preston went riding. And as Hughes kept getting the invoices for this frivolous expense, the more steamed he got. He felt money was being wasted on things that wouldn’t end up on screen. Unbeknownst to Sturges. Hughes wasn’t the type to confront these things to get the truth. Only that he saw what he saw, and unlikely to budge from the perception.

I love stories like that. These anecdotes make me realize the insanity to which we go to, in an industry of mind-wandering people.