MAMOULIAN: THE DIRECTORS GUILD MIDWIFE

At the age of 87, Rouben Mamoulian is the last survivor of the 11 directors who anted up $100 apiece at a meeting at King Vidor’s house in 1936 and began to organize what became the Directors Guild of America.

(Mamoulian remembers the ante as $500, but suspects that that is because $100 was worth $500 in 1936.)

He was 38 and already an important figure in stage and film direction when Vidor called the meeting. The career had begun early. Born in Tiflis in the Russian province of Georgia in 1898, he had studied at the Moscow Art Theater, returned to have his own drama workshop in Tiflis when he was 20, went to London with the Russian Repertory Theatre at 22 and remained to study at London University.

He directed his first English-language play in London in 1922, then immigrated to the United States to spend three years at the George Eastman Theater in Rochester, N.Y. In 1926 he became a director in residence at the Theatre Guild in New York and did both the drama “Porgy” and the George Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess” that grew from it.

Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky lured him into the movies and he directed his first feature, “Applause,” for Paramount in Astoria, Long Island, in 1929. By 1936 he had done such landmark works as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” with Spencer Tracy and “Queen Christina” with Greta Garbo.

He had what later usage would call considerable clout, and had little need for the protection of a guild. But that, Mamoulian says, was the point.

“By then,” he remembered the other afternoon in the library of the home he built years ago in Beverly Hills, “the actors had a union, the technicians had unions. We didn’t have anything and the situation had to be corrected.

“What was interesting was that the 11 of us didn’t need a guild. We were paid very well and we had great authority. But the great majority of directors were woefully underpaid and had very little authority.

“So there was a double impetus: to straighten out the financial situation of directors and to give them more authority. Actually, it was in a way the same thing. In the industry and I suppose in any industry, the more they paid you, the more authority you had.”

Mamoulian has his own painful memories of the matter of authority. After a long wooing by Zukor and Paramount, he had begun “Applause,” but quickly found that he received less respect than Rodney Dangerfield at his most depressed.

The troubles started daily with a haughty gatetender who challenged his right to be on the lot and continued with his technicians, including his sound man and the excellent but dubious cinematographer, George Folsey Sr.

“Nobody would listen to me, and after three days I knew it was going to be a disaster. I wanted Helen Morgan to wear a sleazy dress, to be in character, but she was the star so the wardrobe man had made her glamorous. We were going to do a scene in which she sings to her daughter and her daughter is saying the Rosary. I said I wanted to hear both. The sound man said, ‘Impossible.’ ”

Mamoulian, recognizing a crisis when he saw one, stopped shooting and dashed into Zukor’s office, interrupting a meeting. “Am I the director or an office boy?” he says he shouted at Zukor. Zukor called in the crew and ordered them to do it Mamoulian’s way.

“And do it smiling,” Mamoulian added. He was, he admits, less confident of his ideas than he sounded. For one thing, he wanted to attempt a primitive form of overdubbing, superimposing one optical sound track (the singing) over another (the praying).

“I thought it should work but I didn’t know it would work, but I figured, ‘Well, it’s probably my last day on the film, anyway. We might as well give it a try.’ ”

Since anecdotes with disappointing endings don’t usually get preserved, it follows that Mamoulian’s ideas worked; Zukor and Lasky were excited by the rushes, and Mamoulian had all the respect he needed.

“But,” he adds, “I wanted just a little revenge. So the next day for the first shot I said I want four cameras. They said they only had three. I said, ‘Buy one, rent one. I don’t care.’ ‘Yessir, yessir,’ they said, and away they went. I said ‘I want one there, there and there, and one below the floor. We’ll need a space 5x10x6-feet deep.’ ‘But, sir,’ they said, ‘there’s no basement under the stage.’

“I blew my top. I said every day I drive to the studio I see men with those machines (jackhammers) digging up the asphalt. Get those men. They went away, and I finally said, ‘OK, that’s it; forget it; I’ve had my little revenge.’ ”

And the next morning, Mamoulian says, the haughty Irish gate guard was fawningly polite. “Good morning to you, sir, Mr. Mamoulian, glad to see you.” Some mornings are very sweet indeed.

The first order of business in 1936 after the pledging of money for a directors guild was to find recruits. The original 11 had been put on an unofficial blacklist as soon as word of their intentions reached the moguls. “The highest-paid directors,” Mamoulian says, “had the hardest decisions to make because they could lose the most.

“Every night we would take one director to dinner and gang up on him. Eventually we got to about 42 members, I think.” They then filed suit with the National Labor Relations Board for recognition from the producers’ association.

In court, Mamoulian was called as the first witness and the examination, coincidentally by a lawyer from Paramount where Mamoulian was working, was aimed at proving that directors like Mamoulian were management rather than employees. It was easy enough to demonstrate that Mamoulian was well paid and had influence over script, cast and crews.

“But,” Mamoulian remembers pointing out, “you make one omission: at any hour of any day, the studio can fire me.” That made him an employee. The legal hassles were long and complicated, but the Guild was eventually recognized, and today has 7,500 members across the country.

Mamoulian continued to divide his career between Hollywood and Broadway, and he directed the landmark stage musicals “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific.”

He was asked to make appearances at the Directors Guild’s eastern branches in connection with the 50th anniversary, but found that it was beyond his strength. He will send a videotaped message instead. But although his step is infirm, his mind is vigorous and his conversation eloquent.

“The important thing,” Mamoulian says, “was to win that protection for the director. But it was protection not just for the director, it was for the art form. It’s a sublime comparison, of course, but if you commit murder, you go to jail. But that should apply to the murder of works of art as well, because we live with them for thousands of years. So if you put a mustache on the Mona Lisa or crop four figures out of ‘The Last Supper,’ you should pay for it. I’m not saying the director is Michelangelo, but each is an artist and each has an individual approach.

“The studios don’t have to buy the work, but if they do, they shouldn’t cut it; they shouldn’t even try to negotiate the matter.”

Mamoulian is discouraged by what he sees as the present level of movie making, its violence, cynicism and lack of subtlety. He made his last film, “Silk Stockings,” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, in 1957, and although he was offered scripts subsequently, he says he wouldn’t have done them “even if I were 18 and desperate to make my first feature.”

Film, he says, “is such a rich, polymorphic form. It has such power. It can be used for so many things. You realize that we went through thousands of years without inventing an art and then, 90 years ago, the scientists, of all people, gave us the possibility of a new art. And D. W. Griffith changed that cheap little toy into an art.”

He retains a vision of film at its most ideal.

“The essence of film,” Mamoulian says, “is imagery in motion. A blind man can get a lot out of a play, from the language, but much less from a film with its visual imagery, the possibility which never existed before for arresting life and movement. All the other elements are secondary, including dialogue and sound.”

Having seen the creation of the Guild as protection for the director’s authority, Mamoulian quickly adds that “The authority of the director is not like authority in the army; it’s not authoritarian. The most important word in pictures is love. If you can create a family, you can do anything. You try to get the best people to work with you. Then you have three tough days. But if you give good ideas and you get good performances, thereafter you get great performances. You give love, you get back love. You achieve your authority on the set.”

In his second film, “City Streets,” there was a succession of gangster murders--not one of which is seen on screen. “You can deal with anything in films,” Mamoulian says, “if you have the inner truth beneath the surface.”

Partly this means using the screen’s great powers of implication. Mamoulian was planning to shoot a bedroom scene in “Queen Christina,” and Louis B. Mayer murmured of a diaphanous gown and eroticism going wild. “I showed nothing but closed curtains,” Mamoulian says proudly, and Mayer understood. “If the moguls thought it was good, that was all they asked.”

Mamoulian does not believe in the message film. “Let Western Union carry the messages. Yes, I agree with that old line. The direct message, that is. But there is the surface, and there is this inner truth, the final impact a film has. The sublime example is Shakespeare: the violence, the murders, the betrayals, there is then a final impact, a final uplift.

“Films can make a statement about man’s dignity, his willingness to transcend himself for the sake of the future. The audience walks out with a feeling of encouragement, a conviction that the future can be made better.”

Mamoulian finds too little evidence that present films try to speak to that kind of idealism. But the possibility is there, which is what, he says, the struggle for the artist’s authority continues to be about.