Show Business is my Life
by Owen Marsh, SOC
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People were running in every direction with
terror in their eyes, screaming and crying, the earth shaking
beneath their feet. A pretty lady wiped the little boy's tears,
picked him up and ran from the falling buildings. The pretty
lady was Jeanette MacDonald, I was the little boy, and the picture
was the 1936 MGM classic, "San Francisco."
I was in the movies!!!! I've been there ever
since.
FADE TO BLACK:
17 years, school, marriage and 2 wars later
FADE IN TO:
Young man standing in front of desk.
"So, you want to get into the union,
huh kid?" The man sitting behind the big desk in this large
wood paneled office and asking this question was in 1952 the
most powerful union boss on the West Coast, Herbert Aller, business
agent for the camera local of the International Alliance of Theatrical
Stage Employees, the IATSE Local 659, Hollywood, California.
He wasn't a large man but with his three-piece suit and steel-rimmed
glasses he ruled this town with fear and hard smart business
sense. "You're Ollie Marsh's boy, aren't you?"
"Yes sir," I answered, hoping that
my dad's name would help me in getting back into the movie industry.
"Well I'll tell you something kid, as
long as I run this union, you will never have a job in any camera
department west of the Mississippi." (Talk about sugar
coating.)
Here I was, twenty two years old, just back
from the war in Korea, and trying to get back into the business
that I had grown up in, and the man on the other side of the
desk was holding a twenty year old grudge against me for something
that my father had done. I guess since my father had died some
eleven years earlier I was next in line to be ticked off at.
In 1932, during the movie industry strike my father along with
four or five other cameramen who had formed the ASC (American
Society of Cinematographers) as an independent union, had taken
their crews across the IATSE picket lines into the studios, bringing
an end to a long period of unemployment for hundreds of workers
and making Mr. Aller look like a fool. Here, plainly, was a man
with a very long memory who had finally found a way to get even.
The fact that he was destroying a lifelong dream of mine didn't
seem to bother him in the slightest. After the strike the ASC
became a fraternal club for Directors of Photography and remains
today as one of the most prestigious organizations in the film
industry.
A side note on Mr. Aller, if you will. The
day after he retired from his long held position with the union,
he became the personal agent for several non-union and foreign
cameramen, telling them that he could get them work in Hollywood
because he knew how to get around the union rules and regulations.
Since I had to make a living to support my
growing family (my wife was soon to give birth to our daughter),
I went looking for any job that had anything to do with the making
of motion pictures. Finally getting an interview with Mr. Norman
Pottel of Technicolor Laboratories and convincing him that he
really should hire me, I became a full fledged motion picture
laboratory technician (lab rat) and for the next three years
called Technicolor home.
If you're ever in Hollywood around Santa Monica
and Cahuenga and you see a huge concrete monolith that covers
a square block, this is the building that used to be Technicolor.
Film labs are, by necessity, places where the sun never shines.
This one ran twenty-four hours a day, and it didn't matter which
shift you were once you got inside. Our recreational activities
became rubberband shooting and locking fellow employees in the
film storage vaults. Try to imagine the euphoric high late Friday
night as you drive out of the parking lot and hear faintly in
the distance someone's cry for help coming from the third floor
vaults, knowing that he wasn't to be discovered for several hours.
And I can still hit a moving target with a rubberband at twenty-five
feet. Some things you never forget!
Technicolor was also the place where I should
have gotten my first clue that the business I was getting into
was not completely sane or rational. My first job there was to
sit in a small concrete walled room for eight hours a day and
vacuum clean (with an old Electrolux) 10"x10" pieces of black
velvet. These pieces of velvet were used in the cleaning of film
negative, preparing it for printing. When I would catch up and
have all of them cleaned I would go into the next room where
they were being used and pick up another stack. It was a never-ending
process that was boring as hell. Months later I was promoted
into the cleaning room (which was also four poured concrete walls)
and allowed to clean the film with those little pieces of velvet
that I had cleaned so well. Only now, when they were dirty, I
would throw them into the pile for the new kid to pick up and
vacuum. I was really moving up the power ladder at an alarming
rate.
Three years passed. My wife presented me with
a daughter (born nine months and two days after my return from
Korea) and then a son, we bought a small house in Pacoima, and
I got laid off. My luck was holding firm!
On to Pathe Lab for a few months, then to Consolidated
Film Industries Lab for another three years. At CFI I moved from
color developing to black and white printing and finally to color
timing (where you read the negative for density and color and
designate what levels it is to be printed on).
During these six or seven years I had been
making the rounds of the studios, still trying to get into the
camera department and follow the career that I wanted: a job
on the "outside" as we called it in the labs. Then, as with all
fairy tales, "It" happened. In 1959, the studios were busy. Companies
were hiring people in all departments and the unions didn't have
enough people to go around. I had been making a pest of myself
at MGM, figuring that I would stand a better chance of getting
a job there since this was where my father had worked for many
years. For more than six months I had been spending at least
four hours a day learning their equipment and loading film (all
without pay, of course) and now I had a break to make it pay
off. Ray Johnson, head of the camera department, called the union,
said that he had an opening and since they didn't have anyone
available, would it be okay to use this kid who had been hanging
around? They said yes and he never told them my name until I
had already worked my thirty days and was on the "producer's
roster." By law, the union and the unforgiving Mr. Aller were
now forced to accept me for membership.
There are many stories about how different
people got into the camera union as it was the most difficult
union in Hollywood to crack. In the twenties, thirties and forties,
some of our best Directors of Photography were former truck drivers.
In those earlier days when someone on the camera crew got sick
or injured on location, the only member of the crew who knew
anything about the equipment, where it was, and more important
what it was and how it worked, was the camera truck driver who
had helped the assistants unload and set up their cameras for
mornings on end. He was instantly made the second assistant cameraman
and, if he worked out, was kept on the crew. My all time personal
favorite story however is that of Rich Benda. While taking the
tour at Universal Studios, Rich found what he saw interesting
and decided that he would like to work in the movie business.
He promptly jumped off the bus, went into the first door he found
and asked for a job. This of course was the camera department.
Two weeks later they called him and he started work as a film
loader. And it took me seven years!
From the book Parking Lots I've Eaten In,
by Owen Marsh SOC. Available at Samuel French's Bookstores
or order direct from: Owen Marsh, Parking Lots; 235 Munsel
Creek Loop, Florence OR 97439. Price of $20 includes shipping.
California residents add $1 for tax. All profits made from
the sale of this book will be donated to the Los Angeles Childrens
Hospital Eye Care Clinic.
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