Oh What A Time... - #121 Silent Films (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!Time to go back to the golden age of cinema; this week we’ll tell the story of how sport first burst onto the big screen, how the first silent films were soundtracked and how F Scott Fitzgerald fell in and out of love with Hollywood.And we’re also discussing the things that take us back in time (like the theme tune to Going For Gold). What takes you back in time? AND PLEASE SEND US YOUR QUAINT LOCAL ATTRACTIONS! (With a pic of the leaflet if possible).You can email everything in here: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Kingston Buskers rendezvous is back. Starting July 10th, come to downtown Kingston for this crowd wowing festival and enjoy four days of jugglers, musicians, acrobats, comedians and more. Talented performers from all over the world can't wait to entertain you all weekend long. It all starts on Thursday, July 10th with performances right in the heart of downtown Kingston.

And don't miss Buskers After Dark, the Friday Night Fire show. For more information, go to downtownkingston.ca. From Wondery, this is The Spy Who? This month we open the file on Oleg Lelin, the spy who saved MI5. Lelin's actions changed the course of the Cold War in the 1970s, a Russian who defected to Britain after being caught in a love affair that shook the world. His actions triggered the biggest removal of spies by any government in history. It's a story of an overstretched security service in need of a win and a covert plan to bring catastrophe to Britain's streets. Follow the Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts,

or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Saved MI5 early and ad-free with Wondery Plus. who saved MI5 early and ad free with Wander E+. This is part two of Silent Cinema. It's gonna want the show. So, lovely, lovely boys, today I'm going to talk to you about the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich and how an unexpected job in silent movies set him on his way to becoming A, one of the most famous classical composers in the world, and B, into a situation that would save his life. Right.

This job had a key impact on saving his life later down the line. Just a glimpse behind the magician's cloth, we had to talk about another goal of pronouncing Shostakovich's name, which for a man with such a Radio 4 background, I thought was absolutely disgraceful. However, I asked our editors to nip it out, which is, that's true Radio 4. So it's coming through in some way. So, let's give you a little bit of a background of Shostakovich's life.

He's born in St Petersburg, Russia, 1906. He shows incredible musical talent from a young age despite hardships along the way. Most notably his dad dies when he's young. To make ends meet his mum has to sell the family piano to put food on the table. At which point Shostakovich told his mother, it's quite a heartbreaking quote this from a child, just wait mumma, I'll give concerts and make money and then just see how we'll live. How heartbreaking is that? Oh my gosh. Family piano's gone, but he's promising his mum, don't you worry, it's going to work out, I'm going to write these concertos, people will love me and our family will be okay. And indeed, in 1919, it starts to seem like this dream could become a reality. Barely two years

after the Russian Revolution, he lands a place in the acclaimed Petrograd Conservatoire. He graduates in 1925, he goes on to compose, get this, not bad, 15 symphonies, six concertos, three operas and three ballets. No, whatever, he just didn't have a phone. If he had a phone he would have done any of that stuff. And if I didn't have a phone, I'd have done that stuff. He'd have concertos coming out your arse, wouldn't he? It wasn't partaken in the attention economy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Completely. He went to the toilet, he thought about his concertos rather than

just watching highlights of a Champions League. So he's so talented. This fact blew my mind. It gives some kind of reflection of the skill of this person. He was so talented, he would often compose entire symphonies in his head before writing them down. As he described it, he thought long and wrote fast, meaning he would fully conceive a piece mentally before committing it to paper, which is incredible when you consider that his symphonies lasted over an hour. So he'd sit down and think through every movement, key change, violins, harmony, whatever it is, the whole thing for over an hour. He'd have it completely in his head and then he'd go and write it down on paper. Isn't that just mad?

That's extraordinary, yeah. Do you think in the same way as a world champion boxer, there's a genetic element with someone like that? Do you think genius was just in his genes? Or could, if you, again, going back to this idea that Bon Iver locked himself in a cabin until he'd written a great album, do you think anyone is capable of this in the right circumstances?

No, I don't think I do. No, I don't actually. I think there's an ability to, with this for example, to hear melody simply by thinking about it and completely understand it. I think that requires a certain type of brain that allows you to do that. Yeah. And you will always improve the old 10,000-o rule. Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can take it. Anyone can learn an instrument and anyone can get good, I think. But that

kind of absolute mastery of music, I think, not everyone can do that. Yeah, that's freakish genius. Yeah, completely. So he masters symphonies. He writes his incredible symphonies, incredible chamber music, but it isn't the only sort of music he writes. He also writes 30 film scores, which make him popular outside of classical music circles, both in the silent and the sound eras. Films including October 10 Days That Shook the World, which is by Sergei Einstein in 1928. Also Alexander Fatasimov's The Gadfly from 1955, which contained one of Shostakovich's most famous melodies,

which is called The Romance. But what is most interesting and why we're talking about it today is that writing these pieces of film were not his first job in cinema. Do you want to guess what his first job in cinema is? Considering this is one of the most incredible composers and pianists ever, what do you think his first job was in cinema? Usher. Selling choc-ices. Yeah. It wasn't choc-ices, it wasn an usher. He was a cinema pianist.

Oh yes. For those who don't know about this, in the silent movie era, there'd be a pianist who would sit at the front and would provide a live score to the film occurring on screen. And in the autumn of 1924, he landed his first job doing this. It's a hard job, this, okay? I want your reaction on each of these points. This is so tough. Pianists were often not given music, so they just had to improvise to whatever was happening on screen, okay? So it's a packed cinema. You're at the front with a piano. You're watching the film and reacting to what happens and having to play music according. It reflects what's happening on skill.

I reckon the evening showing will be better than the martini. Yeah, yeah. But I imagine if you're a good musician, that's going to be a lot of fun, isn't it? You could really have some fun. Yes, you'd hope that. But as we will find out, he didn't really love it. There's other aspects. I want your reaction to this. You had to reflect often well-known classical songs around at the point, almost like if it was today, you'd have to know all the pop music was in the charts, and then do pieces that reminded people of those songs and the emotions that those songs gave them, because that had an particular impact, almost like an old school movie soundtrack.

That's what it was, essentially. So something is happening on screen. You think, OK, what current song can I do a little, do a version or hint at that will people go, oh, I know that. That makes me think of romance. That reminds me of that. That will reflect what I'm watching on screen. So you also had to be across all of that stuff, the contemporary music,

what people were listening to at the time. And the hardest one of all, pianists had to play for hours without a break, sometimes multiple screenings directly after one another. So you'd just be there the whole day at the piano. Sometimes they'd hide food or drinks in the piano itself and would have to lift the lid, have a bite of a sandwich, close the lid again and continue playing just to keep themselves going. So they're playing for hours. And as a fun side fact, Harpo Marx, the actor and comedy harpers all this sort of stuff, he lasted just two weeks as a silent

film pianist as he only knew two songs, which were Waltz Me Round Again and Love Me and The World Is Mine, which he would rotate, speeding up or slowing down his fingers in the hopes of sort of fitting the music to what was ever on screen. Okay. So he gets his first job in the Bright Real Cinema in St. Petersburg. It pays him a hundred rubles a month. But Chris, you think that it sounds fun, you're saying you'd enjoy that. It's not plain sailing, okay? He later tells a friend, it was extremely exhausting work. I was paid my fee only once during my two-month stint. I was forced to quit the job, take them to court to try and get what was owed to me and to look for other means of livelihood. And the following year, he moves to a different

cinema. This time a place called the Splendid Palace, now called the House of Cinema in St Petersburg. This time for better pay, but it turned Palace, now called the House of Cinema in St Petersburg, this time for better pay, but it turned out to be even less satisfying because they wanted less improvisation. And here they gave him pieces to play and he was forced to play the same pieces, the same pre-prepared pieces of music that he hadn't written over and over and over again. It reminds me of like, you know, when you take your kids to a theme park, like Leggalang, whatever, and there's people working on the rides and having to listen to the same song. I always think I would lose my mind after an hour of that. This was the

case for him. He's having to play the same songs over, over and over again. And he started to get bored. Sometimes he's bored and got the better of him. Once he was playing along to a film called The Swamp and the Waterbirds of Sweden, just thought, I'm just not gonna play the music anymore. He starts to mimic the sounds of the birds on his piano, what he thought they might have heard sounded like, rather than play the usual music. The crowd turn, they hate it, they start booing him,

they start yelling, you're drunken in charge of a piano. Gets really aggressive in there. He then quits the splendid palace because people are just heckling him and giving him grief for expressing himself too much. In December, 1925, he tries to leave that sort of work altogether. Depp brings him back in again,

this time at the Piccadilly Cinema, later the Aurora on Nevsky Prospect. And once again, he just hates it, okay? He hates this work. This guy is genuinely a genius, as we will later find out in his life. At this point, he's forced to do this work he hates. He writes a letter to a friend. And he explains it like this. He says, The cinema has finished me off because I am somewhat sensitive. When I arrive home, the cinema music is still ringing in my ears and my dreadful hero still appear before

my eyes. As a result, I can't fall asleep for ages so in the morning I get up very late with a headache and in a foul mood." And in a separate letter he added, I'm in a bad mood because of my cinema job. Right now the drama The Great and the Immortal is playing there. It's been on non-stop for five weeks and the music is the same all the time. To five weeks and play the same songs all the time. I'm terribly tired of it. It'd be wonderful not to think about my daily bread or anything else. Instead, do what only I love. I want to compose.

I want to play, not fabricate music to staggering dramas. And you see how frustrating that must have been. Like, you're that brilliant. Oh, yeah. You're stuck playing the same piece of music over and over and over again. Like, you know, when you were doing loads of stand-up helles but you knew deep down you were a podcast. Yeah, yeah. I was a genius podcaster. You were a genius. Exactly, yeah, yeah.

Of course, to do the same 20 minutes set every night. Exactly. I'm John Robbins and on my podcast I sit down with incredible people to ask the very simple question, how do you cope? From confronting grief and mental health struggles to finding strength in failure, every episode is a raw and honest exploration of what it means to be human. It's not always easy, but it's always real. Whether you're looking for inspiration, comfort or just a reminder that you're not alone

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and motivational series. Exactly. However, as I mentioned earlier, there was a huge positive to all of this. Eventually Shostakovich is able to resign from being a taper, which is what cinema pianists were called, in February 1926. And in time, he came to realise why it was such a valuable experience. Care to guess why he in time came to realise why that initial time in the cinema was so important to him? It's quite interesting actually. Why do you think he came to realise? He surely started having to write soundtracks. That's a very good guess. He didn't

start to have to write soundtracks. What he came to realise is that it gave him a profound understanding as to the relationship between picture and sound and the reaction from the audience. So that heavily impacted the music he wrote for film and theatre later on in his life. And he realised that without that first-hand visual, you know, literally seeing there and then how what he played affected the way the audience reacted, it had a huge impact on the music he wrote later and was a major reason why he was able to write such fantastic film scores. But the big question of course is, film scores. But the big question of course is why did this save his life? Okay, this happened some years later. On the 26th of January 1936, now if you're a Russian composer, you've written an opera as Shostakovich has, Lady Macbeth-Sensk at the Bolshoi Theatre

in Moscow, okay, you look out through the curtains, who's the one person you don't want to see coming in? What year is this? 1936? It is 1936 in Russia. So Stalin is head of the Soviet Union. I don't want him anywhere near that theatre. He looks out through the curtains, in comes Stalin. Stalin sits in the front row. You're thinking to yourself, is he a laugh? Exactly, yeah. For any listeners who aren't completely across Stalin,

not the best guy, not a chill guy, I think is fair, okay? So Stalin watched the opera and he hates it. He visibly hates it. It's sexually explicit. It shows a chaotically unstable view of human relationships, all of which goes against the sort of like moral conservatism, the equilibrium that Stalin and his fellow communists are trying to propagate. It's everything that Stalin hates. Stalin hates it so much that he stands up visibly in front of everyone and just leaves the theatre. He hates it. Shostakovich fears

for his life. He rushes home. He's packing a suitcase. He's thinking, I'm done for. He genuinely thinks this could be the end of me. Even more so in the pro-Stalinist press in the coming few days, a review comes out which just tears it to shreds saying it's everything that should not be in the theaters, that it is against Stalinist ideals, all this sort of stuff. It just completely slaughters the show. And he just thinks, okay, I'm done for, I'm done for. However, the thing that's saying to him is that Stalin absolutely loves his film score.

Just thinks those are brilliant. And it's this that saves him from political persecution and in turn, many argue, saved his life. So if he hadn't had that job, working as a pianist in St. Petersburg as a teenager, if that hadn't given him the skills to write fantastic film scores, if Stalin hadn't loved those film scores and Stalin had simply turned up and watched this opera and hated it, who knows, it could have been the end of this fantastic pianist. Isn't it amazing? I bet it's fantastic. The lottery of life. Okay, it's time now to go back to 1925 and revisit our old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. He's come up on the show before.

He's back and he's just published The Great Gatsby, fantastic novel. And it really left an indelible mark, not just in American literature, but I would say all of culture. In fact, my dad's got a little villa in Spain and there's a restaurant around the corner that is jazz themed that is called The Great Gatsby. Oh, lovely. You can walk in there and you can get an English breakfast any time of day. Jazz breakfast.

What's a jazz? What is a jazz breakfast? I don't know. Everything's all mixed up on a plate in a way you wouldn't expect it to be. All the food comes out at different times. Just whatever the chef feels. It could just be all sausage. There's your improvised eggs, sir. Trumpet mushrooms. You'd have that. Yes, the Great Gatsby inspired English speaking restaurants in Spain, but it also defined

American literature and really just summed up the spirit of the Jazz Age. Critics hailed F. Scott Fitzgerald as the voice of a generation and he was glamorous, reckless and also disillusioned. But while the literary world was celebrating Fitzgerald, he had a nagging suspicion that the novel's golden age was coming to an end. Remember this is 1925. Fitzgerald could see a new art form on the horizon, one that was louder, flashier, more democratic. As he put it there was something... Techno! He was just getting into underworld. It was coming. As he put it there was something rankling in seeing the written word subordinated to

another power, a more glittering, grosser power. And that power was, of course, cinema. Fitzgerald could see where things were headed. Storytelling was moving from the page to the screen. He once wrote with a touch of resignation, the novelist may choose to see himself as the last defendant of that old order. Oh God.

I mean, what would have Fitzgerald, I mean, F. Scott Fitzgerald could see that, you know, the age of the great novel may be ending. Yeah. And I just had no idea about things like you've been framed, blind date, all the innovation that was to come. Surprise, surprise. But here's what F. Scott Fitzgerald did. He decided, I'm not going to dig in and stick with the novel. I'm going to adapt. Now, Fitzgerald had been captivated by films since childhood. He spent his early years going to movie theaters

and later watched the industry explode. He understood that American cinema, and particularly Hollywood, was becoming the cultural language not just of his own time, but of the modern age. As one of his characters put it, you can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. He knew it. He knew it. That's how I feel about TikTok. Don't get it.

So in 1927, Fitzgerald got his first hands on experience. United Artists brought him to Hollywood to write a screenplay, a fine modern college story called Lipstick. It was never produced. Fitzgerald spent more time partying than writing and later admitted, I honestly believe that with no effort on my part, I was a sort of magician with words. Total result, a great time and no work.

Pretty much like me at university. Yeah. I am a misunderstood genius and I will hand this coursework in at the last possible moment. And it will floor my lecture. He will be absolutely flabbergasted. You did this last night in the library. Yes. Wow. Escott Fitzgerald only stood to be paid if the film was made.

And of course it wasn't. But he didn't leave empty handed. Fitzgerald used the experience to learn about filmmaking, the nuts and bolts of production, the rhythms of editing and the cutting edge sound technology that would soon revolutionise the industry with the arrival of talkies. Hollywood had already been adapting his stories since 1920. By 1926, the studios had optioned four of his short stories and two novels. I guess in the 20s, this is a great time to be a bestselling novelist.

Yeah, of course. Because they're like, much like today, people want ideas. And if you've written them all out, it could be massively lucrative. And it was lucrative for F. Scott Fitzgerald, very lucrative sideline, if not always creatively satisfying. In one telegram to his wife, Zelda, Fitzgerald celebrated selling the rights to head and shoulders for $2,500, which in today's money is about $50,000. So there's a lot of money at the time.

Yeah. But his enthusiasm didn't last. So he found Hollywood up close to be shallow and behind the times. He wrote, the social attitude of the producers was timid, behind the times, banal. And when the studios turned their attention to the post-war generation, this is the post-First World War generation, his generation, Fitzgerald thought they ran it into its cinematic grave. He gave it, however, another shot in 1931,

he returned to Hollywood, and he found it was even worse. And he had a terrible time. So by now he is completely disillusioned and humiliated. He stayed away from Hollywood until 1937 when he returned, this time deep in debt, emotionally drained and considered by many to be yesterday's man. Back in Los Angeles, he found the industry had only become more frustrating. Studio sliced and rewrote his dialogue and he raged in a letter

this is F Scott Fitzgerald. For 19 years I've written best-selling entertainment and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top but I learned from the script that you've suddenly decided that it isn't and you can take a few hours off and do much better. I'm a good writer. Honest. Oh man. That must be so frustrating. Oh yeah. For a be so frustrating. Oh yeah. For a novelist of his standing. You do know who I am and what I'm writing. Yeah.

I'm one of the most important writers of... No, I think I'd rather write the dialogue actually. I'm F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yeah. Yeah, it must have been heartbreak because I imagine that he's dealing with quite younger people. He feels he's from this prestigious genre of novel writing and he's dealing with these young upstarts making movies. I think they know more than him about storytelling.

It must be very disheartening. If working in film brought Fitzgerald little joy, it did give him something else. Material. His unfinished final novel, The Last Tycoon, takes place in the heart of the industry, full of producers, directors and actors entangled in a business that, as he put it, left people paid with ruined nerves. And maybe somewhere in the back of his mind Fitzgerald remembered the early reviews, the ones pasted into his scrapbooks, that suggested the film versions of his works were better than his written

stories. This broke his heart. One critic wrote in 1921 that the scenario writer kept it moving. The subtitles are breezy. The story being frail in the original, it makes much better reading via the silver sheet than the magazine page. Eesh. Wow. Poor old F. Scott Fitzgerald. Obviously Fitzgerald was fuming about this. He really disagreed. He thought the two silent film adaptions of his work were absolutely dreadful.

The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922, he wrote, by far the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. And the 1926 version of The Great Gatsby, he wrote, rotten and awful and terrible. Ooh. OK. Wow. You didn't like the film. I get it.

I think there's a lot of history of writers or authors hating the film versions of their work. Roald Dahl famously hated Charlie the Chocolate Man. Yes, yes. It was a massive hit. He thought it was like the worst thing that has ever been made. Yeah, yeah.

He just completely hated it, thought you just don't get it to you at all. But I suppose people are sort of like, when you've worked on a novel, it's so personal to you. And it takes so much time to make it exactly as you hope it will be, to feel it's been stretched to a shape that it's so personal to you. And it takes so much time to make it exactly as you hope it will be to feel it's been stretched in a shape that doesn't reflect that. It must be kind of hard. Well, I loved The Hobbit when I was a kid. I remember reading that when I was seven or eight.

I got taken to see a production of it at the Swansea Grand Theatre. I've been really disappointed because obviously as a kid, you imagine everything that you're reading. Yes. been really disappointing because obviously as a kid, you imagine everything that you're reading. You've got an endless imagination. But if you're performing at the Swansea Grand Theatre on a stage, you are limited to the size of the stage and the props you can muster. I just found it a really underwhelming experience. I went to see a dramatisation of the BFG, and similarly underwhelming. That was down on the Lizard Peninsula at a place called Helston,

and they clearly only had one version of the BFG who was sat down on a chair and massive, and you couldn't see his head, so you just hear his voice, and he didn't move. So in any scene, the BFG was just a big guy sat on it from the neck down, sat in a chair. Even if it wasn't like a chair-based scene. Yeah, okay, I get it. That's just the tallest guy in the drama company. Yeah, no, no. They made it out of like... Yeah, they made it. Didn't move, hands never move.

Oh, they've made it. Yeah, that is even worse. I'd prefer it just to be like Big Andy who's 6'4". Andy, Big Andy have I got the role for you. Yeah, but if you've slaved on something and it is pretty personal to you and you know, I can absolutely see how that must feel. Difficult. Yeah, I mean you're saying like, you would have imagined the Hobbit, but I guess if you're F. Scott Fitzgerald, you've imagined the world of the great Scatsby. You've lived it. You've imagined it in such detail that anything that diverges from that thing you've imagined is going to be absolutely heartbreaking.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wouldn't be the last writer to feel burned by Hollywood. As Tom says, Roedahl famously hated the adaption of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but Fitzgerald was there at the start, one of the first literary stars to be both seduced and stung by the film industry. And obviously we, F. Scott Fitzgerald, we remember him now as the great chronicler of the Jazz Age but perhaps he was also something more, an early sharp-eyed prophet of a new cultural empire, one not built on ink and paper, but on flickering screens, camera reels and movie stars. Really interesting.

Wow. My experience of notes is the opposite. I'd say that whenever I've submitted a script and the producers tweak something I always thought, yeah, that's improved it. Yeah, thanks. Good, yeah, that's better. Well done. I honestly haven't thought of that. Cheers.

So that concludes our episode on silent movies. Thank you so much, as always, for listening. Thank you to our brilliant historian, well, Dr. Daryl Eworthy, for his fantastic work. And also our editor, Jodie, who does brilliant work as well. If you've enjoyed the show and you enjoy listening to the show and you want to leave us a nice review, a five-star review and something, some lovely words underneath, it really helps

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