The mysteries of Howard Hawks

The headline is probably promising more than this post will deliver because the mysteries are not about Hawks but about two of his films: Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Big Sleep (1946). The mysteries are whether the first one was a box office failure and the other is the question of who killed Sternwood's chauffeur, Owen Taylor.

Let me take the second one first. Any writings on The Big Sleep are likely to say that the plot is hard to follow, and that the death of Owen Taylor is unexplained. You can also easily find online discussions about "Who killed Taylor?" on Reddit, Twitter, and other places. The plot is said to be so difficult to follow that at one point Hawks sent a telegram to Raymond Chandler, who wrote the source novel, asking him who killed Taylor. Chandler is supposed to have answered that he did not know. (Some question whether this actually happened but in a letter Chandler wrote to Jamie Hamilton in 1949 he mentions getting that telegram so it probably happened.)

Yet in the novel it is not a mystery. Taylor was driving away from Geiger's house when he was stopped by Joe Brody, who hit Taylor, still in the car, on the head. Somehow Taylor managed to drive off, but he did not get very far before he drove into the river and drowned. In the book, the police, the D.A., and Marlowe, think that Taylor probably was disoriented, or became unconscious, due to the head injury and that the death was accidental, or maybe, although that is less likely, it was suicide. There is nothing in the film to suggest any other explanation. There is no mystery, and there is no forgotten or unknown killer. It is rather straightforward, including a confirmation from Brody that he did hit Taylor on the head before Taylor managed to drive off.

The case of Bringing Up Baby is less straightforward. It has become conventional wisdom that it was a flop and that it led to Katherine Hepburn being called "box office poison." I have dealt with the issue of box office poison in an earlier post so suffice to say here that it is a dubious and unfair accusation from an organisation for cinema theatres and not something that should be taken seriously.

If you read about Bringing Up Baby you will usually see the figure of $365,000 mentioned, the amount it allegedly lost. That is the figure mentioned in Scott Eyman's book about Cary Grant, in Barbara Leaming's book about Hepburn, and in Todd McCarthy's book about Hawks. William J. Mann, in his book about Hepburn, mentions the figure of $300 000. In neither of these four books is there a source for that figure, but the $365,000 seems to come from Richard B. Jewell's article "How Howard Hawks Brought Baby Up: An Apologia for the Studio System" published in Journal of Popular Film and Television in the autumn of 1984. (An un-sourced sentence reads " The final RKO loss on Baby amounted to $365,000.") He repeats that figure in an article ten years later in Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television.

But what does this figure mean? The first thing to consider is that the film was not a flop in terms of expected audience attendance. Since it cost so much to make (primarily due to Hawks's expensive contract and slow filming process), in order for it to turn a profit it would have to be seen by a lot more people than the production company RKO considered possible for such a film, yet it exceeded that estimate. If you read the box office reports in the trade papers at the time there was no cause for concern. It was for example doing good business in Los Angeles, Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, Washington, Denver, Pittsburgh, and had a strong opening in San Francisco. When Boxoffice magazine evaluated its performance about a year after its premiere they said it was doing above average. When The Hollywood Reporter in December 1938 summarised Hollywood's achievements of that year, it included Bringing Up Baby among RKO's "top grossers." The only noticeable upset was that it failed at Radio City Music Hall in New York where it closed after one week only, replaced by Jezebel (1938) which opened one week earlier than planned.

When Gerald Mast in 1988 investigated the box office figures for Bringing Up Baby, his findings suggested it made a "modest profit" on its initial run: $12,000. It made $1,096,796 against a budget cost of $1,109,000. Then it made an additional $150,000 when it was re-released in 1940, so in total a profit of $162,000. (Peter Swaab in his book on Bringing Up Baby from 2010 uses Mast's figures.) But are these figures accurate? Do they include the cost of marketing and such? I do not know.

As I have written before, historic box office figures are both unpredictable and unreliable. I do not feel confident in calling Bringing Up Baby either a success or a flop. There are too many parameters and too much uncertainty concerning the figures that any film historian would be wise to be cautious. I think we should put to rest though the widespread belief that it was a confirmed flop. That Hawks complained about it in interviews is proof of nothing, and might only mean that it did not make enough of a profit for him to get a bonus on top of his already high fee.

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Referenced books:

Chandler, Raymond (1939) The Big Sleep

Eyman, Scott (2020) Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise

Glancy, Mark (2020) Cary Grant - The Making of a Hollywood Career

Leaming, Barbara (1995) Katharine Hepburn

McCarthy, Todd (1997) Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

Mann, William J. (2006) Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn

Mast, Gerald (1988) Bringing Up Baby: Howard Hawks, Director

Swaab, Peter (2011) Bringing Up Baby

The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959 (2000)

Articles:

Boxoffice Feb 1, 1939.

Jewell, Richard B. "How Howard Hawks Brought Baby Up: An Apologia for the Studio System" in Journal of Popular Film and Television Volume 11, 198, Issue 4.

Jewell, Richard B. "RKO Film Grosses, 1929-1951: The C.F. Tevlin Ledger" in Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television March 1994, Vol. 14.

The Hollywood Reporter March 8, 1938.

The Hollywood Reporter Dec 31, 1938.

Variety March 9, 1938.

My previous related blog posts:

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-actors-who-were-called-box-office.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2021/09/on-dealing-with-box-office-figures-and.html

The actors who were called box office poison

Whenever the career of Katharine Hepburn is discussed, it is mentioned that she once upon a time was considered "box office poison" and that The Philadelphia Story (1940) rescued her career, or put it back on track. Sometimes when Marlene Dietrich is discussed, the "box office poison" label is also brought out. What is rarer is for some specification of who called them that, and if the claim was even true. As part of my "box office figures of 1930-1945" project from the spring of 2021 I wanted to look into that, and although that project has been cancelled due to the unreliability of older box office figures, I still want to discuss that "box office poison" in some depth.

It did not originate in any article or research paper but comes from an ad in The Hollywood Reporter, in May 1938, and in it a lot of actors, some named and some unnamed, were referred to as poisonous. But for some reason, it is Hepburn who is now the one that is primarily singled out. It is not obvious why.

The ad was from the Independent Theatre Owners Association (ITOA further on) and their complaint was that the studios had lots of actors under expensive long-term contracts and therefore they had to let them star in film after film, even though the actors were "box office deterrents" and as a result, the cinemas were losing money. Beside Hepburn ("Hepburn turned in excellent performances in 'Stage Door,' and 'Bringing Up Baby' but both pictures died.") and Dietrich (she "too, is poison at the box office.") the ad also mentions Mae West, Edward Arnold, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Kay Francis. They also say, "We want the Myrna Loys and Gary Coopers and Sonja Henies, but we want them when we get value, not when they drive people away from the box office."

There is a lot of confusion here though. It is true what they say about Kay Francis, that she was doing B-movies at Warner Bros. and that she refused to give up her contract even though the studio wanted her to. This is not proof of her being unpopular but stems from other reasons, and it seems Warner treated her badly. It is not obvious she deserves to be included.

About Katharine Hepburn, the first thing to clear up is that it is not true that Stage Door (1937) died. It turned a profit for RKO. The situation for Bringing Up Baby (1938) is more mixed, it cost more to make than it took in, which was partly because of Howard Hawks's particular position as a freelance director. He had negotiated an unusually large fee for directing it and he, as he often did, went over schedule and over budget. (It cost almost twice as much to make as the previous year's screwball hit The Awful Truth (1937).) The film did well in some parts of the country, although it was unexpectedly a failure in New York, so these two films do not prove that Hepburn was repellent for audiences. Still, there were concerns about her career in 1938 since the last time she had acted in a film that did really well at the box office was in 1935: Alice Adams. In 1940 she was back at the top.

Two of the three most recent Hollywood films that Dietrich had made before the ad, Desire (1936) and Angel (1937), had both been successful, although Angel especially so in Europe. In 1937 she made Variety's top ten list of the most bankable stars. Hence calling her "box office poison" is wrong, and her next film, i.e. the next release after the ad had been published, was Destry Rides Again (1939) and it was one of the biggest hits of that year.

Greta Garbo's recent films had all been successful, but here the complaint in the ad was more relevant because her films made most of their money outside the US market, especially in Europe. Conquest (1937) was not profitable for MGM but that was not because people did not want to see it but because it was so expensive to make. But for the ad to question MGM's wisdom for having her on a contract is self-serving since MGM made a lot of money on her films, even if ITOA did not see much of it.

Mae West's films had not been doing poorly either, although her best years in films had been earlier in the decade and her latest film, Every Day’s a Holiday (1937) had been a disappointment. Her response to the ad was quoted in The Billboard in which she pointed out that she was doing excellent business on the theatre stage. She also said, "The only picture making real money was [Disney's animated] Snow White and that would have made twice as much money if they'd had me play Snow White."

Joan Crawford was making more films than any of the others, and the success rate of them varied a lot, but for example The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and Mannequin (both 1937) had done well. A columnist in The Hollywood Reporter asked how it was possible to refer to Crawford as box office poison when her last five films for MGM had all taken in over $990 000, domestically, each.

Edward Arnold is a different kind of actor than the others. He did at times play the lead, but often he was a supporting actor, and it is therefore tricker to evaluate to what extent his presence or absence in a film made much difference. The Toast of New York (1937) in which he played the lead had been a major flop. Even so, when The Hollywood Report in December of 1937 did a survey among exhibitors about the most attractive stars, Edward Arnold was among those that got votes although he did not make the top 12 list. The two films he made in 1938, The Crowd Roars and You Can't Take It With You, did good business and the latter was one of the biggest hits of that year.

It is unclear whether the ad is arguing that Myrna Loy, Gary Cooper, and Sonja Henie were also box office poison, or if they were the opposite, but either way their films, not least Cooper's, were doing very well and Test Pilot (1938), with Myrna Loy, was one of the biggest hits of the year of the ad.

In short, while IOTA might be correct in saying that some of the films in which these actors starred did not do good business in the particular cinemas run by IOTA, it is not accurate to say that these actors were keeping the audiences away overall, calling them "box office poison" is wrong, and suggesting that they should be relieved of their contracts is dumb business advice. The ad though is not really about that but part of a drive to get rid of the concept of block-booking, where the cinema owners could not just book the individual titles they wanted but had to take a slate of films from each studio in package deals, and since the studios did not necessarily care that different films played differently in different parts of the country, the cinema owners had reason to complain to them. But doing it by way of attacking their contracted actors was an unfair move.

Given all of this, and given that it is difficult to assess which the exact factors are that make a film a hit or a flop, or even to quantify what is a hit and what is a flop, it is worth asking how it came to be that critics, historians, and ordinary film enthusiasts, have all fallen for that ad, and still refer to it as some kind of authoritative source.

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Sources:

Kinematograph Weekly, Nov 4, 1937

Picturegoer, March 16, 1940

The Billboard, May 14, 1938

The Hollywood Reporter, Nov 20, 1937

The Hollywood Reporter, May 3, 1938

The Hollywood Reporter, May 4, 1938

Variety, Dec 23, 1936

Variety, Feb 5, 1938

Variety, Jan 4, 1939

Kear, Lynn and John Rossman (2006) Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career

McCarthy, Todd (1997) Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

Sedgwick, John, and Mike Pokorny (2010) "Hollywood's foreign earnings during the 1930s" in Transnational Cinemas vol. 1 #1.

On dealing with box office figures and a list of resources

This year I have frequently referred to box office figures on the blog, both old and new ones. The more I have used it though, the more obvious it has been how flawed the concept is, and how undependable the figures are. The website that is most frequently referenced when it comes to Hollywood box office figures seems to be Box Office Mojo (owned by IMDb, which is owned, not unexpectedly, by Amazon). I have used it myself for gathering statistics for earlier posts. But it has some weaknesses that illustrate the precarious nature of box office figures, especially those from earlier decades.

They have for example a "Top Lifetime Grosses" list, and it seems to be updated on a daily basis. The top ten Domestic list on 28 August, 2021, was as follows:

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Avatar (2009)

Black Panther (2018)

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Titanic (1997)

Jurassic World (2015)

The Avengers (2012)

Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)

Incredibles 2 (2018)

This tells us almost nothing of value, other than the presence of Titanic. It can only be of interest to the accountants, and it is unclear why these figures are reported in the news with such devotion. (That is about the change as streaming takes over from cinemas since streaming numbers are less available, less dependable, and barely useful.) As inflation means that ticket prices steadily increase, the more recent a film is, the more likely it is that it will end up on the top ten list, unless you adjust it for inflation. Although the list above claims to be an all-time list, you will not be able to draw any conclusions about the popularity of these films compared to films made in previous decades, you can only compare them with each other. This is why the presence of Titanic is interesting, because it is about twenty years older than the other films and therefore we can say with some certainty that it was a lot more popular than all the other films on the list, including the ones above it. At least if we know how much the tickets cost. As Titanic was 195 minutes long, the price of the tickets when it came out could be a lot higher than that for a regular ticket, so you need to be aware of that as well when calculating its popularity. [Amendment: A reader asked whether ticket prices for longer films, such as Titanic, really were higher in the US or if this is a European thing. It has happened in the US but I am not certain about Titanic, so that is a subject for further research. It only adds to the difficulties.]

If you manage to find out how to make the all-time list adjusted for inflation on Box Office Mojo, you will get the following top ten:

Gone with the Wind (1939)

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)

The Sound of Music (1965)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Titanic (1997)

The Ten Commandments (1956)

Jaws (1975)

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

The Exorcist (1973)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

As you can see this list is very different. There are no Marvel films on it for example, and the previous number one is not on there at all. Whereas in the first list, the oldest film was Titanic, from 1997, after adjustment to inflation Titanic is instead the most recent film on the top ten. If you want to get an idea of which films have been the most popular over time, this list is more useful whereas the earlier one was useless. Alas, this one is also unreliable, not least since box office figures of the past cannot be trusted. Films and figures can be wrong, or missing completely. On Box Office Mojo, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974) do not appear on any lists, despite being very popular. It seems that Box Office Mojo has no figures at all for them for their original releases. On another site, The Numbers, they have a list called "All Time Domestic Inflation Adjusted Box Office" but for some obscure reason that list only includes films released after 1977, so despite its name it is not an "All Time" list of any sort.

One of the most referenced books for these figures is The Hollywood Story, but it too has flaws and omissions. One example: on the list of most popular films from the period 1961 to 1970, My Fair Lady (1964) is missing, despite being one of the decade's biggest successes. Whoever wants to use these statistics, such as me, has a lot of hurdles to deal with, especially since you will only be aware of key films missing if you already knew that they should have been included.

To add to the confusion there are different ways of reporting these figures, which means that you cannot collect a figure here and a figure there without verifying what the figure represents. Is it domestic rentals? Is it international grosses? Is it for the year of release only, or are re-releases included? Sometimes this is not specified at all, in which case you might as well not use the figure, since you do not know what they mean.

In the past, different studios differed in the reliability of their numbers, or even whether they reported any at all. As I wrote about in an earlier post, MGM and Warner Bros. are for example more dependable than Paramount in this regard. But no list of the box office hits of any given year in the past, at least prior to the 1990s, can be taken at face value. They are almost certainly wrong, and alas that is also true for the top ten lists I have made and presented on the blog earlier in 2021. They are probably more accurate than many other lists you might find in books or online, such as those on Wikipedia, but that is not saying much. One of the most watched films of the 1940s was one called Mom and Dad (1945), but as it was a sensational "sex hygiene" film about the horrors of sex and unwanted pregnancies, you will hardly ever see it mentioned about box office hits, or even mentioned at all in film history books. It was not included on my list for 1945 although it probably should have been.

Talking about film history books, it is dispiriting that in most such books I have read, or biographies of actors and directors, in which box office figures are mentioned, the writers have hardly ever done any due diligence. They use one source for their numbers, such as Box Office Mojo, and accept it uncritically. This is a problem in itself, but when you also try to base some theoretical musings on these numbers you are almost doomed to failure.

But despite their unreliability they can still provide an idea of what was popular, if nothing more. I will not pursue that research any longer because the work is not sufficiently rewarding, but I can still use the material I have already gathered for the occasional article.

When I have been gathering the figures I have been using many different sources (as one must) and here are they, at least the ones I remember having used:

Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Ultimate Movie Rankings, Worldwide Box Office, Box Office Madness. 

An article from The Argus Weekend in 1944.

Lots of articles and lists in Variety, such as this one and another one from October 15, 1990, which is not linkable.

Articles in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television about the box office figures for Warner Bros., RKO, and MGM.

Books such as Success in the Cinema - Money-Making Movies by John Howard Reid, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records by Cobbett Steinberg, The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler, The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits by Susan Sackett, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: a Hollywood History by Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, and several biographies of studios, producers, actors, and directors.

Annual publications such as International Motion Picture Almanac.

Use them with caution.

1930 to 1945 by the numbers Part V (adaptations or original stories at the box office)

One of the more common complaints about contemporary Hollywood is that they have run out of ideas and are only recycling already well-known materials and doing remakes and adaptations. It is not only a common complaint now, but it has almost always been a common complaint. Some claim that this is what ruined Hollywood in the late 1970s, that pre-packaged films based on famous books/comics/shows took over what had once been a place of original ideas. But as I pointed out in one of my articles about "New Hollywood" it has always been the case that Hollywood bought the rights to whatever was big and successful and made a film adaptation of it. There is nothing wrong with that, and it is not something that is unique to Hollywood, or to mainstream films. Cinema as an art form is to a large extent built on adapting stories already told in some other art form, whether novels, plays, short stories, songs, poems, essays, or other films. Bergman, Fassbinder, Akerman, Kurosawa, Visconti, Zetterling, Hitchcock, Ford, Tarkovsky, Hawks, Troell, Denis, Truffaut; they have all made films based on other material instead of original stories. That is not particularly interesting. It is what they do with the material that matters. And so it is in Hollywood at the height of the studio era. Continuing my project of investigating the period 1930 to 1945 (read introduction here), I will now take a look at this topic. How many of the box office hits from those years were adaptations, and what were they adapted from, and how many were original stories?

Here are the lists of all films, year for year, and what their source material was. (All the necessary caveats are presented here.) I make a distinction between novel and book, and use the latter when it is a work of non-fiction. The first list is 1930 to 1935, then 1936 to 1941, and then 1942 to 1945. Films marked with yellow are those I believe should be counted among the top ten box office hits of that year but I have not had it confirmed. The many films made in 1943 and 1944 explicitly to boost the morale of troops during World War 2 are difficult to classify.

Out of 166 films, 42% were original stories (70 films), making it the most common form. 50 were adaptations of books, 17 of plays, and 15 of short stories or novellas. The rest were based on other things, like radio shows or operettas. Most of those 17 adaptations of plays were made in the first half of the 1930s, after which they almost disappeared.

One thing to consider is that there is not much point in making distinctions between original stories and adaptations. The quality or originality of a given film is almost completely unrelated to that factor. It is not always easy to decide whether a film is an original story or not, as there are many layers and various factors involved. If a film is based on a novel but entirely rewritten so that all that remains are some characters and the setting, is it even relevant to call it an adaptation. What is an original story anyway? Above I have marked a film as an original story only if it has not got any specific source of any kind. But that does not mean that those stories are more original or that the others are less interesting or daring.

In an upcoming post I will compare the figures presented here with the Academy Award nominees for best film and see whether there are more, fewer, or the same amount of adaptations among them. 

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Previous posts in the 1930-1945 project are:

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2021/03/1930-to-1945-by-numbers-part-i.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2021/04/1930-to-1945-by-numbers-part-ii.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2021/04/1930-to-1945-by-numbers-part-iii-actors.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2021/06/1930-to-1945-by-numbers-part-iv-oscar.html