Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [169]
MacDonald went to Mannix. “You see, at this point I was going pretty strong at Metro, having just done Naughty Marietta and Merry Widow, which surprised them all. Mannix said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ I said, ‘Yes I would like to do it, providing we get a decent script out of it.’ ”
The earliest bit of extant writing on San Francisco is a draft of the opening sequence by Herman Mankiewicz, Joe’s elder brother, dated January 9, 1935. The full screenplay, however, was the work of Anita Loos, the tiny novelist and screenwriter who, like Hopkins, had spent her childhood in San Francisco. According to her, the character she and Hopkins envisioned for Gable was based on the late playwright and scam artist Wilson Mizner, who had once run a gambling house on Long Island. Sometime in April, Loos’ progress on the script was halted, presumably when Gable said he would not do the picture.
“I was all for San Francisco,” MacDonald said,
because I felt like the mother of it in a way. Since Hoppy had said, “This is a picture for you and Gable,” I was stuck with this, this idea had clung to me, and then I found out that Mr. Gable didn’t want to do it. The story that came to me from Mr. Mannix was, “Who wants to sit there with egg on his face while she sings? Nobody can do anything while she’s singing.” (He may not have used that expression then but that’s what he meant.) That was primarily his reason for not wanting to be in San Francisco.
So they started to mention this one and that one and I kept saying, “No, no, no. It’s for Gable and me and I’ll wait.” They said, “What do you mean you’ll wait? Gable has another commitment. He says he doesn’t want to do it anyway.” “Will he do it after his other commitment?” “Well, yes, he has to. He doesn’t have it in his contract that he can sit back and say no.” I said, “All right, I’ll wait until this other commitment is finished.”
You see, my contract called for so much a picture. I wasn’t on a long-term contract but on a picture-to-picture basis. So many pictures and each picture was a certain price and the price rose with each picture, plus a guarantee of so many weeks. After that, I got prorated money if it ran overtime. So when I found I would have to wait another six months in order to do a whole picture, contractually and financially they said, “Either we do it or we don’t do it, and how are we going to get around it?” I said, “I’ll wait” and they said, “What are you going to do about the pay?” I said, “I’ll just forfeit the pay. Just let it go, and I’ll sit out the six months that I should be paid for because I want Gable that badly. I think Gable is right for it.” Then some stupid person told Gable that I had said I would wait and that I had said I wanted him for my picture. He said, “Her picture??” You see? Immediately he was rubbed the wrong way.
Work on the script resumed in the fall, when the film was assigned to producer Bernard H. Hyman, a Thalberg protégé, and W. S. “Woody” Van Dyke, the director of MacDonald’s two previous movies for the studio. (“We just seemed to think alike,” MacDonald said of Van Dyke.) The genial Hyman initiated a series of story conferences with Hopkins, Loos, her husband John Emerson, and Van Dyke, working not so much on developing the relationship between Gable’s character, Blackie Norton, and MacDonald’s Mary Blake, a prim country preacher’s daughter, but rather the more shaded and complex story of Blackie, the Barbary Coast gambler, and his childhood friend, Father Tim Mullin. It would be Mullin’s job, with the help of the 1906 quake, to open up Blackie’s spiritual side, and it had to be credible—couldn’t be sappy. Quickly, they got down to business: Blackie and Tim clashing over Blackie’s exploitation of Mary, Blackie’s frantic search for Mary before the hall is dynamited, Blackie thanking God when he finds she’s okay. It was, as Loos later described it, “unadulterated soap opera,” and the proper casting of the priest became the key to making it work.
Typically, priests in movies were played by character men—Edward Arnold