The Extras - The Glory of "Zeigfeld Follies"

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

This podcast is one of a series looking back at some highlights from the 2021 Blu-ray releases from the Warner Archive.Warner Bros executive George Feltenstein takes us through the June 2021 Blu-ray release of the 1946 classic film, "Zeigfeld Follies."  Starring an ensemble cast of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Esther Williams, Lucille Bremer, Fanny Brice, Lena Horne, and many more, this beloved film is an imperfect classic made up of dance numbers, comedy sketches, and lots of beautiful girls, as was typical of the Ziegfeld tradition.  George provides background on the complex production challenges the movie faced over multiple years of filming.  And his insights into the songs, dance routines, and behind-the-scenes stories make for an entertaining review of both the film and Blu-ray release.The June 2021 Blu-ray of "Ziegfeld Follies" is another of the many technicolor restorations from the Warner Archive in 2021, and finally allows viewers to see the film in the glorious color and detail of the original film. The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and their release on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host. This podcast is one of a series looking back at some highlights from the 2021 Blu-ray releases

from the Warner Archive. In this episode, George Feltenstein takes us through the June release of the 1946 classic film, Ziegfeld Follies. I can't say Ziegfeld Follies is an excellent film because it's not. It is a film that has great, excellent portions, some very entertaining good portions and some portions that I don't think hold up very well. And it took basically, actually, once it went into production, it was two years from the time they started shooting until it actually got released to theaters. And MGM had several producers who specialized in musicals. And the most famous of the producers and the most successful was a gentleman by the name of Arthur Freed. And he won the Academy Award

for two Best Pictures, 1951's An American in Paris, 1958's Gigi. He was also the producer of Singing in the Rain and The Bandwagon and Easter Parade and Meet Me in St. Louis. So many wonderful MGM musicals. And he started at the studio as a lyricist. He wrote the lyrics for the song Singing in the Rain for the 1929 movie Hollywood Review of 1929. And he is not credited on The Wizard of Oz, but he basically got his producer's training as an uncredited associate producer on The Wizard of Oz. And he played poker with L.B. Mayer and was friends with L.B. Mayer. And L.B. Mayer decided to give him a shot as a producer in 1939 in the film called Babes in Arms with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. And it was a huge hit. And he soon became the premier producer of musical films at MGM,

and he held that position for over 20 years. And MGM had great success in 1936 by making a biography of Florence Ziegfeld, a biography of Florence Ziegfeld, who was a huge figure in the Broadway theater of the early 20th century, really from the turn of the century up through, I believe he died in the early 1930s. But in 1936, they made a film called The Great Ziegfeld and William Powell played Florence Ziegfeld. And it's a three hour film. It won the Best Picture Oscar of the Year. And it was a huge success. Five years later, MGM made a film called Ziegfeld Girl, which was basically a narrative film that used the background of the Ziegfeld Follies, which were the kinds of shows that Ziegfeld produced. He produced these review shows that were called the Ziegfeld Follies. And they didn't have plots. They had

lots of beautiful girls and comedians and novelty acts and singers and so forth and so on. But he did produce some shows later on in his career that are quite famous and did have stories, most notably the stage production of Showboat, which is really the first Broadway musical that told a story and wasn't just a frivolous gathering of songs in a silly book. a frivolous gathering of songs in a silly book. Right. You know, it dealt with issues of prejudice and gambling and alcoholism. And anyway, Ziegfeld produced that show.

And after his death, the great Ziegfeld memorialized him. Five years later, Ziegfeld Girl with Judy Garland, Lana Turner and Eddie Lamar and James Stewart. It's a huge success for MGM because they had the rights to use Ziegfeld's name in movies. of using MGM's unparalleled stable of musical stars and comedians to create what a Ziegfeld Follies would be in 1943. And it started shooting in 1944, but they started working on it way before. And all of these talents that were gathered at MGM were writing original songs and writing comedy skits. And there was so much material being developed. And it was hard to decide what they were going to use and what they weren't going to use. And they finally came up with a first version that they previewed at the end of 1944. I can't remember the city where this version played, but it was almost three hours long.

And they spent the next year and a half taking things out, putting things back in, filming new things. It was a disastrous production to make. And they filmed this finale that was meant to have all these women dancing through, of course it was a technicolor, but all these women dancing through bubbles, soap bubbles that were colored in all these different ways. And the bubble machine went bananas, berserk while they were shooting. And basically the footage was mostly unusable. You could see a little bit of what survives in the final film, but they had to bring in ambulances. People got sick from the fumes. It was really a difficult production.

So they finally settled on a group of songs, comedy skits, and production numbers, and released it in 1946 after a tryout in Boston in 1945 that still didn't work. It still didn't work. So there are some numbers in the film that were shot for the film that were cut out that only exist today as audio. We have the audio of the numbers, but not the footage. And we have stills. We can imagine what they would have looked like. We can only have stills. We can imagine what they would have looked like.

But for instance, one of the songs that was cut out of the film was the song Liza by George and Ira Gershwin. Oh. And I think I think Buddy DeSilva also wrote either Buddy DeSilva or Gus Connick. I remember also wrote lyrics to that song. But it's a great song. And there was a production number with an all African-American cast. And Lena Horne is the object of Avon Long, the actor, of his affection. And he sings the song to her with this amazing vocal arrangement. to her with this amazing vocal arrangement. But Lena Horne does not open her mouth to sing at all.

And it seemed really weird for people. You've got gorgeous Lena Horne with this gorgeous voice. Why is she not singing? So that got cut out. Fred Astaire wrote a song. He was a prolific songwriter. None of his songs really became big hits, but he wrote a song called If Swing Goes, I Go Too. And swing music was the music of the era. And it was a big production number. And aside from some surviving stills, we have no idea what it looked like, but we have the recording. we have no idea what it looked like, but we have the recording. And there were many other songs that were cut out. Comedy sketches were cut out. Some things were written that weren't even filmed. There was supposed to be a sketch with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, who had always made black and white movies. They were supposed to do a song called,

Will You Love Me in Technicolor as You Did in Black and White, which was a parody of the song, Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May. That was never filmed. But again, these things were conceptualized and so much work went into it. It ended up costing $3 million. It opened to mixed reviews and huge box office.

It ended up making a $2 million profit, I think, because the audiences loved it. Now, among the highlights are, it opens up with Fred Astaire singing Here's to the Beautiful Girls. And there's a big production number with Lucille Ball dressed in this amazing outfit. And she's taming a bunch of women dressed as cats. So I actually, when we were doing That's Entertainment 3, which was a film that I was the uncredited executive producer of, we used that as the opening of That's Entertainment 3.

And I spent a New Year's Eve of 1995 showing the film to Liza Minnelli and Desi Arnaz Jr. at the screening room at MGM. And Desi Arnaz Jr. was laughing so hard, looking at his mother dressed up in this outfit with this ridiculous number with the cat women. But that's how the movie started. The great highlights of the movie really do belong to Fred Astaire. He does two numbers with a woman who had a very brief career, Lucille Bremer. She plays the older sister in Meet Me in St. Louis. But she is a wonderful dancer who made another film with Fred Astaire called Yolanda and the Thief.

who made another film with Fred Astaire called Yolanda and the Thief. But she did two sequences in Ziegfeld Follies, one to a song written for the film called This Heart of Mine, and then another one that is my favorite part of the movie, actually. It's to an English song from the 1920s called Limehouse Blues. And most of the direction in the film is done by Vincent Minnelli. And this is another one of our Technicolor restorations. And the colors you see in the dancing you see, it's just magnificent. Judy Garland does a parody of Greer Garson, the very, very British actress. And they poke fun at her with it.

The Great Lady has an interview. And then Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly do their only number on screen together, except when they reunited in 1976 when they were both senior citizens. That's Entertainment Part Two. They do a Gershwin song called The Babbitt and the Bromide. Lena Horne does have a production number in the movie called Love, which is really very tropical and gorgeous. And Esther Williams swims and there's an opera sequence with James Melton.

He was supposed to have a lot to do in the movie, and most of it got cut out. And then there are these comedy sequences, which I personally don't find funny. Red Skelton does his guzzler's gin routine. A lot of people like that, and they certainly liked it in the forties. Fanny Bryce, whose life was portrayed by Barbra Streisand and funny girl. Fanny Bryce was part of the Ziegfeld Follies, the original on stage Ziegfeld Follies.

And I guess she was probably, uh, probably about 50 years old, maybe in her early 50s. And she did a sweepstakes ticket comedy sequence with Hume Cronin and William Frawley that is not funny. And there are two other comedy sketches in the movie that I also think are not funny and so you've got to wait and get through the parts of the movie that aren't good for these

parts that are amazing and the beauty of watching the film on this blu-ray is not only has it been yet another Technicolor restoration, but you can skip through the parts that aren't good with your chapter search because we have a song selection on the menu that you can skip the parts you don't like. And I don't mean to be offending anyone by talking about these parts of Ziegfeld Follies that aren't entertaining, but I'm not alone in this feeling. A lot of people I know who are fond of MGM

musicals have problems with these sequences. They may like some of the parts of the movie that I don't and vice versa. But freedom of speech and difference of opinion are good to stimulate conversation. But I highly recommend Ziegfeld Follies. It's great parts are worth whatever is not so great. Right. So I think that's the best way to talk about it. You did mention that Vincent Minnelli is credited as the director, but there were other directors on the movie. Why was that?

Do you know? Well, they credited, he directed more sequences than anybody else. Different directors would direct maybe the. Yes. And they are sub subcredited. The way they have the film set is each sequence begins with a little title card, like you're opening a book. And if it wasn't, it tells you who directed each sequence.

Gotcha. There's one sequence that's directed, I believe, by George Sidney. He was the original director and he was fired off the picture. I don't know if any of his material was kept. I know Lemuel Ayers directed one sequence of it, but there were various MGM contract directors that directed other pieces of it and they're credited for that but most of the sequences like Judy Garland's sequence the Gene Kelly Fred Astaire duet both of Fred Astaire's numbers with Lucille Bremmer they're all directed by Vincent Minnelli and they're all, he's one of my favorite directors and they are just really phenomenal. The dance between the number between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, the Babbitt and the bromide is based on a song that was originally performed by Fred Astaire and his sister on the stage in the 1920s.

And Gene Kelly's career was just beginning. He had just made Cover Girl at Columbia Pictures on loan out, and he was becoming a really big star. By this time, Anchors Away had been released, even though Ziegfeld Follies was filmed before. And Gene and Fred together was a great opportunity. And a lot of people, including Gene, didn't think this was the best use of their talents dancing together. And they have very different dancing styles. But nonetheless, it's really phenomenal to see the two of them dance together because you don't know who to look at. And most people I know tend to watch Fred Astaire, but they had very different styles. And it's wonderful that it's captured on film and that we were able to make a beautiful Blu-ray of it. And I also want to note that MGM had a very sophisticated way

of recording the music for their films and they used multiple microphones. There was no such thing as stereophonic sound in those days. But they recorded the orchestra and the singers with separate microphones with the goal of putting together a very balanced mono soundtrack. Well, many of these microphonic angles survived. And when I first came out to California and I started working with the classic MGM library, I asked about what are all those white boxes over there? And they said, oh, those are the recordings from our old films. And I found out that all of these films had been recorded basically in like a what could be a stereophonic sound. So I tried an experiment with the Trolley song from Meet Me in St. Louis. And I was able to take Judy Garland's vocal and the chorus angle and the orchestral angles and mix them together. And it worked. We were able to do this. And I said, oh my God, we can remix all of meet me in st louis into stereo and we did the same thing for

zigfeld follies this was back in the videocassette laserdisc days of yore right but that stereo track we did for zigfeld follies in the 90s was on the dvd and now is on the blu-ray and now it's lossless. So it sounds amazing because sound really, these films did not sound very good compared to what we're used to today. And it doesn't sound like it was recorded yesterday, but it sounds so much better than if you look at what was being distributed on video cassette in the 1980s or early 90s. So that's an extra bonus about Ziegfeld Follies. George, are there any extras on this release for Ziegfeld Follies? Well, the extras are the surviving audio pieces of all of the sequences that were cut out. The pre-recording for the music survived in the music recordings.

So it gives you an idea of what was cut out and there's also we found within those recordings a little comic monologue that was supposed to be performed by leo the lion i would assume an animated version right i don't know really much about what they intended to do with that. But we put everything but the kitchen sink on this disc that we could find from the movie. And it makes for a great deal of fun. Thanks again to Warner Brothers executive George Feltenstein for coming on the show today. I hope you have enjoyed his review of the June 2021 Warner Archive Blu-ray release of Ziegfeld Follies.

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