Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [221]
When M-G-M, in effect, took over Tracy’s contract—moneywise it was a lateral move—Fox reserved the right to make one additional picture within a year’s time at a rate of $3,000 a week. It was almost a corporate face-saving device, something thrown in as an afterthought, and when Zanuck was apprised of their “gentlemen’s agreement” in March 1936, he expressed no interest whatsoever in taking advantage of it. Ironically, he was then in the early stages of developing a picture about Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 expedition in search of the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, the project that would ultimately bring Tracy back to the studio.
According to screenwriter Philip Dunne, Zanuck’s early attempts at a scenario were completely lacking in suspense and, from a historical perspective, “pure eyewash.” Failing to break the back of the story didn’t diminish Zanuck’s faith in the idea, however. In June 1937 he sent a thirteen-member crew, headed by second-unit specialist Otto Brower, to Africa to shoot authentic backgrounds and wildlife. Having previously been on safari himself, Zanuck gave Brower a list of locations—Lake Nakura for flamingo shots, Arusha for the Zanzibar sequence, Serengeti for various animals—and Mrs. Martin (Osa) Johnson as technical adviser. Included in the Brower company were three doubles, one calculated to match Tyrone Power, whom Zanuck envisioned for the lead. Over a period of four months Brower and his crew made nine camp moves across Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, exposing nearly a hundred thousand feet of film.
Prior to Brower’s departure, Zanuck had made Stanley and Livingstone part of the studio’s 1937–38 program, lining it up alongside Alexander’s Ragtime Band and In Old Chicago as his top pictures of the year. While Brower was away, Sam Hellman, Ernest Pascal, and Edwin Harvey Blum attempted screenplays. Zanuck thought Hellman’s dialogue weak: “Not dramatized enough—punch into personal story—too narrative.” By the end of the year, the project had been tabled. When Dunne and his writing partner, Julien Josephson, were assigned in the spring of 1938, they read all that had come before and tried to get out of it. Zanuck, in the meantime, had told the story to director Henry King, and it was King who suggested a complete reversal of Stanley’s motivation.
“Forget the silly business of the missionary befriending the boy from the work house,” Dunne wrote in his memoir. “The new Stanley has never even heard of Livingstone. He’s a hard-boiled city news reporter whose only ambition is to bust the Tweed ring in New York, but he’s browbeaten by his equally hard-boiled publisher, Bennett, into undertaking the search for Livingstone as a great publicity stunt for the newspaper … Kicking and screaming, as it were, Stanley—no longer handsome Tyrone Power but now rough Spencer Tracy—goes unwillingly to Africa.”
Tracy, who knew Zanuck from his polo days and Looking for Trouble, took time to meet with him while awaiting the start of A New York Cinderella. Expecting to do Northwest Passage in the spring, Tracy wasn’t enthused about a second consecutive adventure subject nor the prospect of spending half a year on location. A loose loan-out agreement existed between M-G-M and Fox as a result of the latter having loaned Tyrone Power to Metro for Marie Antoinette. In return, Zanuck expected Myrna Loy for The Rains Came and Tracy for Stanley and Livingstone.2 King had come aboard as director, and by November 26, 1938, Tracy was officially set for the film.
The script was finalized on January 18, 1939, and the picture, budgeted at $1,338,000, began shooting on February 2 at the Fox Hills studio Tracy had once considered home. Now merely a guest, he found himself assigned skater Sonja Henie’s dressing room, an insistent