Shaw on Film : The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will screen ‘Pygmalion’ and a series of other movie adaptations of the Irish playwright’s works

Although George Bernard Shaw’s plays were once considered too talky to be successfully translated to the screen, GBS had an association with the movies a young Turk like Shane Black might envy.

Shaw turned down $1 million for the screen rights to his plays in 1920, when $1 million was worth something more than a fixer in the Palisades, arguing that silent pictures couldn’t do justice to his dramas of dialogue and ideas. And in 1938, when he was 82, Shaw won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1938 British version of his play “Pygmalion.”

Indeed, in the 1940s, when Shaw was pushing 90, someone asked him if he would have written for the movies instead of the stage, if he had it to do over again.

“Yes,” he answered with Shavian directness.

“George Bernard Shaw on Film” is the subject of an upcoming series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The program begins Friday with the screening of the 1938 “Pygmalion,” starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, and the 1959 Hollywood version of “The Devil’s Disciple,” starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier.

Ronald Haver, head of the museum’s film department, said he organized the program because of the enthusiastic response to earlier screenings of Shavian films, many of which are unavailable on video and rarely screened in commercial venues. He pointed to rarities such as director Otto Preminger’s 1957 version of “Saint Joan,” to be screened Feb. 21.

“It got devastating reviews because of Jean Seberg, but Preminger is a master,” Haver said. The program will also include the restoration of “Major Barbara” underwritten by the Turner organization.

The surprisingly sanguine story of Shaw and the movies has been told several times, notably by Donald P. Costello in “The Serpent’s Eye” and by Bernard F. Dukore in “The Collected Screenplays of Bernard Shaw.” Michael Holroyd also deals with Shaw and the cinema in the recently published third and final volume of his mammoth biography of Shaw.

Shaw, who was born in Dublin in 1856, fell in love with the movies the first time he saw one. He loved Buster Keaton and cowboy movies as well as the films of Sergei Eisenstein. And movie makers loved him. As the most famous playwright in the Western World, he was just the kind of classy property with a record of commercial success that Hollywood moguls couldn’t wait to get their hands on.

Dukore reports that by 1915 Shaw already had so many film offers that he asked his secretary to make a special file folder for them--if she hadn’t already.

In the Golden Age of the Hollywood studios, Harry Warner, Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Goldwyn all made pitches to the master. Shaw once turned down a Goldwyn offer by explaining, “The problem is, Mr. Goldwyn, that you are interested in art, whereas I am interested in money.”

In fact, Shaw was interested in both. He saw early the remarkable potential of the movies to reach a far greater audience than books, let alone theater. The camera, he predicted, would fascinate the audience like “a serpent’s eye.” He lobbed the occasional verbal grenade about Hollywood but made it clear that he would entertain all serious offers. At various times, he almost concluded deals to make “The Devil’s Disciple” with John Barrymore and productions of “Saint Joan” with Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo.

But Shaw thought Hollywood was singularly hapless in exploiting the potential of this wonderful new medium that could explode the claustrophobic boundaries of the theater stage. Hollywood believes, he sniped, “that 95% of a film must consist of going up and down stairs and getting in and out of motorcars. Not even the success of Chaplin has taught them that staircases are not interesting unless the hero falls down them.”

Shaw wanted control over the films made from his movies. He got far more than most writers. In the 1930s, when he finally allowed his plays to be filmed, he insisted on both script approval and a percentage of the gross. That’s gross, Mr. Buchwald, not profits. As Shaw explained, “There may be no profit, but there are always receipts; and it sometimes takes 10 lawsuits to determine what profits are, but you can always determine the receipts.”

Shaw visited Hollywood in 1933, during his only trip to the United States. He stayed at San Simeon with William Randolph Hearst, whom Shaw described as “a personal friend and first-rate paymaster.” Shaw then flew with his wife, Charlotte, to Los Angeles, where a sudden storm forced them to land on the beach in Malibu. They lunched in Marion Davies’ bungalow on the MGM lot in Culver City, with Chaplin, Gable and Louis B. Mayer. Davies didn’t care if Shaw was one of the most famous intellectuals in the world, she thought that he had a nasty wit of the Irish sort.

The first major Shavian movie in English was “Pygmalion,” directed by Anthony Asquith. It was also the beginning of the playwright’s mutually beneficial relationship with the film’s producer, Gabriel Pascal.

By all accounts, Pascal was a self-invention, a man of little or no cinematic experience who created a fascinating past for himself, a childhood that included caravaning with Gypsies in his native Hungary and a suggestion that royal blood flowed in his veins. The chutzpah certainly flowed. Pascal claimed to have met Shaw when both were taking a nude swim off the French Riviera. When Pascal subsequently knocked uninvited on Shaw’s door, Pascal suggested that the playwright might remember “the young man with the brown buttocks.”

Pascal made Shaw laugh, and Shaw gave him permission to make “Pygmalion.” Pascal found backers, including a former flour magnate named J. Arthur Rank. Shaw wanted Charles Laughton to play Henry Higgins, but Leslie Howard got the part. Shaw thought that he was all wrong. Shaw feared that Howard was too likable and that audiences would want him to marry Eliza, which was the last thing Shaw wanted.

Apparently feeling some obligation to his friend and paymaster, Shaw wrote a letter to Pascal suggesting Marion Davies for Eliza (one imagines Shaw crossing his fingers as he dictates), but he apparently wanted Wendy Hiller from the start.

Other remarkable people, then relatively unknown, were also involved in “Pygmalion,” including David Lean, who was the editor, and actor Anthony Quayle, who played Eliza’s hairdresser.

Although Shaw enthusiastically accepted paternity of the finished film, it wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. The most dramatic change was the ending. Asquith shot three, including Eliza marrying a minor character named Freddy, which was the conclusion Shaw wanted. But behind the elderly playwright’s back, Asquith and Pascal gave the audience the happy ending it sought.

The American version of the movie was changed even more drastically to meet the puritanical demands of Hollywood’s production code, an institution Shaw had publicly denounced. The word slut was snipped, and so was the wedding of Eliza’s father to her mother. The fact that they were finally getting married underscored Eliza’s illegitimacy, and the Hays Office couldn’t have that.

Pascal’s next effort for Shaw was “Major Barbara” (1941). This time Pascal directed. The production was complicated in a major way by German bombs, which began raining on London on virtually the first day of shooting. According to Dukore and Holroyd, Pascal was a disaster as director. He was bailed out by David Lean, who was billed this time as assistant to the director. Lean would give Pascal an empty camera for what the cast and crew called “Gaby takes.” Then Lean would shoot the actual footage, saying he was merely covering the titular director’s work.

“He was certainly a hustler, and he knew how to get what he wanted,” Haver said of Pascal. But Haver makes it clear that he doesn’t mean that as a blanket condemnation of Shaw’s collaborator. “If people don’t do that, sometimes things don’t get made.”

“Major Barbara” (which will be screened Feb. 14) was far less successful than “Pygmalion,” although you couldn’t tell it from the American ad campaign. As Dukore points out, American distributors often capitalized on Shaw’s image as a charming eccentric. One American poster for the film featured a cartoon of Shaw pushing two dolls in a baby carriage, one labeled “Pygmalion,” the other “Major Barbara.” The copy exulted: “Barbara’s my biggest and best--and at my age, too!”

The Shaw-Pascal partnership ultimately faltered with “Caesar and Cleopatra” (1945). The Shavian epic, which will be screened Feb. 21, was the “Heaven’s Gate” of its era. Years in the making, it was the unhappiest of productions. At times neither Vivien Leigh nor Claude Rains, the stars, were speaking to Pascal. Plagues the Bible never dreamed of beset the production.

Because of fuel rationing in wartime Britain, Flora Robson, who played Leigh’s Egyptian servant, couldn’t bathe often enough to remove all her body makeup daily, so her skin color changes in intensity throughout the finished film. Pascal ultimately took the production to Egypt, where, among other unforeseen complications, thousands of extras discovered their props were edible and devoured their shields. (“I’d take that with a grain of salt,” said Haver, who adds that “Caesar and Cleopatra” is his favorite film on the program because of its humor and spectacle.)

The movie lost millions and caused Pascal to be banished from the British film industry, for what was perceived as unpatriotic extravagance in time of war. Pascal’s subsequent schemes, including a Shaw-backed plan to create an Irish film industry, fizzled.

As Dukore writes, Shaw finally warned Pascal off, counseling him to find another partner. “Look for a young Shaw; for though Shaws do not grow on the gooseberry bushes, there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Devotion to an old crock like me is sentimental folly.”

Shaw died in 1950 at age 94.

Pascal died only a few years later, in 1954, at age 60.

It is not surprising that so many memorable films have been made from Shaw’s plays. For all his talk about ideas and their importance, Shaw believed, above all, in character and the drama that grows out of it, the very stuff that top-notch films are made of.

“If you want to flatter me, you must not tell me that I have saved your soul with my philosophy,” he once wrote. “Tell me that, like Shakespeare, Moliere, Scott, Dumas and Dickens, I have provided a gallery of characters which are realer to you than your relations and which successive generations of actors will keep alive for centuries.”