Paramount Studios is a block away from the Hollywood apartment where I sit. Seven blocks away from that is Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where, during the summer, classic and cult films get projected onto the side of a mausoleum. Next week, my friend Mackenzie Firgens, indie darling and Disneyland adept, plans to dress a crew up as Willy Wonka, Slugworth, Veruca Salt and the rest of the cast for a screening of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. That’s the sort of thing that happens in Hollywood.
Usually I write these columns from my apartment in Brooklyn, where they’d kick your ass for even thinking about dressing up for an outside movie screening. (As if anyone wants to do anything outside in the dense humidity of an East Coast August.) The East Coast/West Coast divide is a fitting frame for the movie I saw last night at Hollywood Forever, one of the greatest movies about East Coast theater vs. West Coast Hollywood – and this week’s case in point:
1950’s All About Eve.
Bette Davis plays legendary theater actress Margo Channing, whose life is turned upside down when the subtly ambitious naïf Eve Harrington works her way into Margo’s circle of theatrical cohorts. Eve, played with layered consideration by Anne Baxter, represents one extreme of thespian ambition – a kind of warning to anyone who’s ever wanted to date a famous actress. The subtle distinction between Eve’s ambition and Margo’s ambition, and the way that distinction brings them into conflict, is the heart of the movie. Eve wants to go to Hollywood and Margo wants remain forever on the Broadway stage. You only have to watch the end of the film to get an idea of what writer/director Joseph L. Mankiewicz thought about those two institutions.
Of course, the sizzle of the movie comes from the astonishing dexterity with which these actors whip out the one-liners and quips that race through every scene. Watching in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the crowd cheered the more famous lines, the most popular of which, the immortal “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” being met with wild applause.
Aside from easy wit, the lines teach us about the relationships in the theater – directors and their actors, playwrights and their producers, and the way all of those egos grapple for control. It is a feast of a backstage comedy, certainly one of the best ever made, filled with the kind of dazzling wit that still draws gasps and belly laughs 60 years later.
Oh and yeah, it also has Marilyn Monroe in of her earliest roles. What else do you need?
Next week: Seriously, get yer mule.