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Oscar Week
2001

Ron Miller
A Classic Revisited
The First Oscar Night

By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com

In the mid-1980s, the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel had fallen on bad times and looked like the sort of rundown flea trap where Norma Desmond might stay while her dilapidated mansion on Sunset Boulevard was being fumigated. On a lark, I spent a day at the hotel, asking staff people if they knew anybody who attended the first Academy Awards show there.

"What you been smokin'?" one maid asked me rather scornfully. "This look like the place where they give out awards?"

No, by then it sure didn't. Though the Roosevelt was refurbished and restored to a semblance of its original glory in the 1990s, it still looked like the ghost of a great hotel in the mid-1980s. I couldn't blame the maid for thinking I was nuts. It certainly didn't look like the place where the very first Academy Awards presentations were made.

But it was, all right.

On May 16, 1929, about 70 or so Hollywood luminaries crowded into the Blossom Room at the Roosevelt to watch one of America's greatest screen stars, Douglas Fairbanks, present the first Academy Award for "best picture" to studio boss Adolph Zukor for Paramount's "Wings." They watched it on film, not live, because the presentation had been made at New York's Astoria Studios, well in advance of the real Academy Awards night.

That's "IT" girl Clara Bow as the live wire connection between Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Richard Arlen in "Wings."

Nobody in the crowd was shocked that "Wings" beat out the other best picture nominees. That cat was out of the bag big time. Back then the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences didn't hire the accounting firm of Price-Waterhouse to tabulate the votes and keep the winner a secret. Suspense didn't count. In fact, hardly anybody cared about the new film industry awards that hadn't even been nicknamed "the Oscars" yet.

Today the Academy Awards is one of the most-watched broadcasts of the television year, an international event that holds tens of millions of viewers spellbound for three-plus hours, even if only a small number of them have seen any of the contending films or the nominated performers. It's a big, splashy, glitzy show - too big, too splashy and too glitzy for a growing number of self-appointed critics.

There's even considerable support for that attitude in Hollywood itself. Many who work in the movie industry are steamed that almost all the crafts and technical awards have been shoved out of the telecast into a separate, non-televised ceremony a week ahead of the big Oscar TV show on ABC. Even those lucky enough to be in competition for the big awards often are miffed that they're hustled off the stage before they can say what they want to say--simply because the awards show belongs to the TV audience now, not the movie industry.

So, it's no surprise that many Hollywoodians long for the days when the Oscars were handed out like they were in 1929--at a private dinner for the Hollywood elite where you could be yourself and say what you liked, as long as the studio boss wasn't close enough to hear you say it.

There's no going back, though. In fact, you wouldn't recognize the Academy Awards "show" if you could step into a time machine and re-visit the first awards ceremony in 1929.

Here are some of the differences you would notice right away:

· Today's Oscars are awarded in March for films released during the prior year. But the 1929 ceremony was for films released between Aug. 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928. That split year approach continued until 1934.

· The Academy no longer gives awards for "title writing." They gave one in 1929, though, to Joseph Farnham, who wrote the titles for "Telling the World." Titles, of course, were used in silent movies--and that was the only year in which almost all the nominations were for silent pictures.

· Actors in supporting roles weren't recognized with nominations. That didn't start until the 1936 awards.

· Both winners for the top acting awards--Janet Gaynor and Emil Jannings--were nominated for several roles, not just one. That doesn't happen anymore, though actors can be nominated in both the lead and supporting categories in the same year.

· There were no songs, no dance numbers and no comic hosts in 1929. You might even think you had accidentally wandered into the best sales awards at a vacuum cleaner factory.

· The 1929 awards ceremony was the first and last time a separate award was given for comedy direction. Incredibly, it was won by Lewis Milestone ("All Quiet on the Western Front") for his World War I service comedy, "Two Arabian Knights," beating out the immortal Charles Chaplin for "The Circus."

Charles Chaplin had reason to smile at the first Academy Awards event: A special award for "The Circus."

For most of us today, the years 1927-28 seem so distant and remote that we probably can't imagine being interested in any of the pictures or stars whose films were in contention at the 1929 ceremony. But that's too bad. Some of those award contenders are well worth our time today--and a surprising number are now available on video.

One great example is Paramount's "Wings," the first "best film" winner in Oscar history. Directed by William Wellman, "Wings" is still, along with Howard Hughes' "Hell's Angels," one of the all-time greatest films about World War I aviation. The aerial action sequences are incredible because they were done with real aircraft and expert stunt pilots. The rare sequences involving the immense German Gotha bomber are stunning. Wellman, who had served in the Lafayette Escadrille, knew what air combat of that era was all about --and the film is loaded with authenticity.

It also features Clara Bow, Hollywood's "It" girl, at her vivacious best; a pair of handsome young actors in Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Richard Arlen, the Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck of their day, as the male leads--and a strong supporting performance by a young Gary Cooper as a doomed aviator. Sports fans also should look for "Gunboat" Smith, one of the great heavyweight boxers of the Jack Dempsey era, in a small, but commanding role.

All three of Janet Gaynor's award-winning performances also are on video: "Sunrise," "Street Angel" and "Seventh Heaven." The latter two are heart-string tugging romantic dramas that both cast her opposite handsome, debonair Charles Farrell. The third film--F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise," which won an award for "artistic quality" in 1929--is one of the most beautifully-photographed and deeply moving of all silent films.

(Here's a 1927 to 2001 connection: Director Murnau is portrayed by John Malkovich in "Shadow of the Vampire," one of the films in contention for Oscars this year.)

Gaynor, who was just 21 when she won the first best actress award, was a lovely young woman with immense talent. If the silent movie style keeps you from appreciating an actor's performance, check her out in the 1937 "A Star is Born" and you'll realize what a marvelous actor she was at a very young age.

I've seen only one of Emil Jannings' two 1929 award performances, but it's a great one: The former Soviet general who's reduced to being a film extra in Hollywood in Josef von Sternberg's 1928 drama "The Last Command." This is a really mesmerizing film that's available on video. (It also features a sizzling "dark" performance by William Powell.) His other winning performance in "The Way of All Flesh" (1927) is not yet on video.

Also noteworthy are the two films that lost out in the contest for the 1927-28 "artistic quality" award: King Vidor's "The Crowd," which many consider the last great silent film, and "Chang," the incredible documentary made on location in Siam (now Thailand) by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, who later would rock the movie world with their "King Kong."

Though Chaplin didn't win either the best actor or best director award for his "The Circus," the Academy celebrated his film by giving him a special award for his "versatility and genius" in writing, acting, directing and producing "The Circus." This is one of the least celebrated of Chaplin's great feature films, but it's an absolute gem--and is widely available on video.

Yet another great silent comedy was an award nominee in 1929: Harold Lloyd's "Speedy," a rousing 1928 silent comedy in which meek Harold wants to save New York City's last horse-drawn trolley. It has a wild chase scene that's one of the high points of the slapstick era. This film is also available on video.

As for our time machine trip to the 1929 Academy Awards show, it probably would be a real letdown for anyone raised on the TV ceremonies of today. None of the best actor nominees showed up and Gloria Swanson, the biggest star among the female nominees, also snubbed the ceremony. Douglas Fairbanks, the evening's host, was no Billy Crystal.

But there were some compensations. Everybody who attended got a gourmet meal of jumbo squad and lobster. And if you happened to be seated next to Janet Gaynor or Clara Bow, that could make up for an awful lot.

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