Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [83]
The Tracys’ movie consumption had leveled off with the coming of talkies. The action pictures Spence liked so much had slowed to a crawl, and Louise genuinely disliked the static musicals that, at least for a while, seemed to be all Hollywood was turning out. “The first sound movie that we saw, we thought that, well, they’ve got to do better than this,” she said. “I can’t remember that we were very impressed.” She wrote her sister after the second audition: “Spencer doesn’t photograph well … we don’t think there is much chance for enough salary to make it worthwhile to leave the stage. So for the present we are just forgetting about the talkies.”
Neither company came back for a second look when The Last Mile hit big, but Warner Bros. scooped him up as a matter of course. The company was making a point of filming practically anyone they could get in a car to its Vitaphone studio complex, a rambling group of gray stone buildings at Avenue M and East Fourteenth Street in the heart of Flatbush. Since each voice and screen test required a crew of eight and about two hours to make, it made better economic sense to put an actor in a releasable one- or two-reeler and apply the $300-to-$500 cost of a test to the production of a short picture. Initially, Vitaphone subjects drew heavily from the concert stage and vaudeville, committing more than one hundred specialties to film in a single year. By 1928, vaudeville playlets, one-act dramas, and comedies were being integrated into the schedule, and the ever-expanding Vitaphone release index consisted of several hundred individual films.
Taxi Talks, which came from the husband-and-wife team of Frederick and Fanny Hatton, was an exercise in modern slang as observed in the back seat of a taxi cab. The Hattons wrote it for producer Rosalie Stewart, who subsequently released it to vaudeville. Vitaphone paid $2,000 for the picture rights—absolute top dollar for a fourteen-minute short—and cast it with Broadway luminaries Katherine Alexander (currently in The Boundary Line at the 48th Street Theatre), Mayo Methot (who had just closed in Sidney Howard’s Half Gods), Roger Pryor (of the hit comedy Apron Strings), and Tracy, none of whom had ever before appeared in a film.
The process of making Taxi Talks was relatively painless. For Tracy, it involved traveling to Brooklyn on March 3, 1930. The action took place almost entirely in the cab, Alexander, as a gangster’s moll, slipping in beside him just as it pulls away from the curb. Tracy’s role, a “gunman” as specified in his contract, was opposite his old girl, the only dramatic segment of an otherwise smart and breezy comedy. “What have I done to make you want to leave me?” the girl implores. “Me, that would die for you?”
“You ain’t done nothin’,” he tells her. “I’m just tired of you, that’s all. I want to get me a new gal … and I’m going to get me one with some spunk and class.”
She threatens to “fix” the other woman. “I’ll put her where she won’t run after you … I know a lot about her … Plenty to put her in hock, and I’ll do it too!”
“You never meant a thing to me,” he tells her finally. “I’d given you up a long time ago, only you were useful. Yeah, and cut out all the talk about suicide, too. Say listen, I never cared for you the way I do for this woman—she’s the only woman in the world I ever wanted, see? Yeah, and she’s mine …”
Unable to take it anymore, the moll grabs a knife and shoves it deep into his stomach. “You got me!” he gasps. “Well … do something … can’t you? I’m dizzy … I’m … you dirty little hell cat, you’ve croaked me! You’ll … you …”
“Joe …” she calls frantically. “I didn’t mean to do it … Joe … Joe … Oh … Oh God! Joe! I didn’t mean to do it—I didn’t mean to do it! Stop this taxi … stop it I say!”
The driver looks back over his shoulder, apparently