You can’t get much more Hollywood than the new film Cat’s Meow, a dramatic mystery about a 1920s scandal that involved such real life Tinseltown movers and shakers as newspaper baron and studio mogul wannabe William Randolph Hearst, his mistress, actress Marion Davies, aspiring gossip columnist Louella Parsons, legendary movie comic Charlie Chaplin and film pioneer Thomas Ince.
It was Ince’s mysterious death in 1924 and the rumors surrounding it that motivated the research and fired the imagination of Steven Peros, who wrote both the screenplay for Cat’s Meow and the original play of the same name from which it was adapted.
According to Cat’s Meow director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon), also a respected author and film historian and no stranger himself to scandal or the inner sanctum of Hollywood, Peros got much of his information from Kenneth Anger‘s infamous tome Hollywood Babylon, an inside look at how Hollywood misbehaved in the old days. Peros and Bogdanovich also plumbed Aldous Huxley’s After Many Summers Dies the Swan and Cordelia Frances Biddle and Patricia Campbell Hearst’s novel Murder at San Simeon, both fictionalized accounts of Ince’s mysterious demise.
Although the film in some respects covers old ground, Bogdanovich says that “Steve really worked out the mechanics of what happened and how it happened, and I think he really did a great job.”
“In fact,” he adds, “I believe his account is the true one.”
Setting the Scene
Because Cat’s Meow adds up to a nifty mystery, it wouldn’t be fair to give too much away. Suffice it to say that the story takes place during one of multi-millionaire Hearst’s fabled trips on his luxury yacht, the Oneida.
When the Oneida leaves Los Angeles’ San Pedro Harbor in November 1924 for a weekend of partying, among those on board is a combustible triangle: the very jealous Hearst (Edward Herrmann) fears that his mistress, Marion (current Vanity Fair cover girl Kirsten Dunst), is having an affair with Chaplin (English cross-dressing comic Eddie Izzard), and his fears are not unfounded. They do indeed have something going on.
Added to this volatile mix is the financially pressured Ince (Cary Elwes), desperate to get Hearst’s financially robust Cosmopolitan Pictures to back him; Parsons (Jennifer Tilly), a New York-based film critic eager even by Hollywood standards to secure a Hollywood gig as a newspaper tattler; and L.A.-based British novelist Elinor Glyn (the Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley), who coined the famous Hollywood epithet “It,” as in “The It Girl.”
In the film, the yachting weekend ends prematurely and shockingly with a death and cover-up.
Bogdanovich explains that in reality, there was such a yacht trip and these people were on board, although Chaplin denied he was a passenger (others insisted he was there). It’s not surprising that the subject matter appealed to Bogdanovich, who was at the center of a scandal a little over two decades ago when his girlfriend, Dorothy Stratten, was murdered by her jealous and estranged husband.
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A Long Time Comin’
Bogdanovich hadn’t directed for the big screen in a number of years before Cat’s Meow, but even though the subject matter was familiar, he hadn’t considered the story as a film project before Peros brought it to him.
“I wasn’t looking for this,” said Bogdanovich. “It just arrived as an accident. Orson [Welles] had told me the story about 33 years ago. He had heard it from Charles Lederer, who was Marion Davies’ nephew. Lederer knew about this since he was a kid and he, too, told me about it.
“Peros didn’t know I was familiar with the story when he sent me the script but, because of my background, I was the first person he and the producers thought of. Coincidentally, I had just shared the story with Roger Ebert on a QE 2 cruise, where he lectured about Orson Welles. We were discussing the fact that Welles‘ Citizen Kane was based on a composite character, not just on William Randolph Hearst.
“I got home from that trip and, to my total surprise, found the Cat’s Meow script on my desk.”
Runaway Production
Although Cat’s Meow brilliantly evokes its show biz legends in the glitzy Hollywood of the ’20s, nary a foot–or Cat’s paw–of the film was shot on U.S. soil or waters, let alone in Los Angeles. The film was a “runaway” production that filmed interiors in Berlin and exteriors in the Mediterranean off Greece.
But Bogdanovich wasn’t nervous about capturing this Hollywood a tale in such faraway locations.
“Movies are movies and crews everywhere know how to do their jobs,” he says. “Both our cast and crew were truly international. Our director of photography (Bruno Delbonnel, who also shot the hit Amélie) and our production and costumer designers were French, our [camera] operator was Australian, so much of the crew was German, and about eight of our 14 actors were English. And I loved that.”
Bogdanovich–and his German and Canadian backers–also loved the fact that the shoot overseas enabled the film to be captured in a quick 31 days with an approximate $6 million budget.
“I’ve always shot very tightly and here even more efficiently than usual,” Bogdanovich explains. “In fact, we got more than half the shots in one take. And everyone took a cut in pay and worked for practically nothing. Whereas in so many Hollywood-made films today, you have more money spent but you get less quality.”
