James Buhler is an Associate Professor in Music Theory and the Director of the Center for American Music at The University of Texas at Austin. Below, he writes about using materials from the Ransom Center’s David O. Selznick collection to teach students in his Signature Course “Introduction to Music and Film Sound” about the business of being a music composer in Hollywood. [Read more…] about Undergraduates review music production records for “Rebecca” to understand business side of Hollywood film scores
Archives for November 2014
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Mystery Solved at the Harry Ransom Center
As a graduate intern, I have the opportunity to respond to a variety of research queries about the collections. Recently, I helped solve a mystery laid by two differing editions of John le Carré’s 1974 thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Le Carré’s biographer, Adam Sisman, was trying to get to the bottom of a story he had once heard about a difference between the first edition of the novel in the United States and in England.
According to Sisman, just before Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about to be published, David Cornwall (alias John le Carré) had been travelling in Laos and Cambodia with Washington Post journalist David Greenway, and Cornwall had asked Greenway to look through the segments of the novel set in Hong Kong.
Early in the novel, Ricki Tarr describes to George Smiley his anxiety after Irina has failed to appear at a rendezvous: on a hunch he had decided to go down to the airport. “I took the Star Ferry, hired a cab, and told the driver to go like hell. It got like a panic,” Tarr tells Smiley. The airport was then in Kowloon, across the water from Hong Kong Island.
After reading this passage, Greenway asked Cornwall, “Does this novel take place in the present?”
“Yes, why?”
“So if he’s so anxious to get to the airport quickly, why doesn’t he just jump in a cab and go through the tunnel?” (The Cross Harbor Tunnel linking Hong Kong Island to Kowloon, the location of the airport, had opened in 1972.)
“Oh, God!”
As soon as they reached Bangkok, Cornwall contacted his publishers, and though the American edition had already gone to press, it was not too late to change the passage in the British edition.
The Ransom Center has the first British edition and the first American edition. True to Le Carré’s enigmatic style, Sisman asked me to check the “the fourth sentence of the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 7” in both.
Being that it was a spy novel, I was a little nervous about what I would find, but Sisman was right. The American edition mentions the ferry; the British does not. It was a bit of an added thrill to be able to trace the movements of a spy in two different editions.
Adam Sisman’s John Le Carré: The Biography will be published by HarperCollins in the United States and by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom next fall.
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In the Galleries: “Gone With The Wind” producer David O. Selznick demanded proper Southern accents from actors
Letters poured into producer David O. Selznick’s office on the proper use of Southern accents in Gone With The Wind. One woman wrote, “Come South and study our dialect. I don’t know your people as you do, but it cuts deep when we see our lovely old Southern life ‘hashed up.’”
Clark Gable employed a dialog coach, but two days before filming, Selznick learned that Gable was refusing to use an accent. Selznick then had Will Price, from the casting department, and Susan Myrick, a technical advisor, work on coaching the actors in the use of an appropriate accent.
Price and Myrick, in a memo to Selznick and director George Cukor, wrote, “we find that the script includes innumerable attempts at written southern accent for the white characters. Both Miss Myrick and I strongly agree that this is extremely dangerous as it prompts the actors immediately to attempt a phony southern accent comprised merely of dropping final ‘ings’ and consonants. A phony southern accent is harder to eradicate than a British or western accent.” They then advise that the script should be retyped, without the written southern accents.
Filming went on hiatus as Selznick replaced director George Cukor with Victor Fleming. Selznick wrote to studio manager Henry Ginsberg about his concerns over the accent during this period: “We know that Leslie Howard has made little or no attempts in the direction of accent and since he is on our payroll there is little excuse for this…. I am particularly worried about Vivien Leigh since she has been associating with English people and more likely than not has completely got away from what was gained up to the time we stopped.” Leigh was already under fire from the media and many Southerners for being British, so it would have been doubly ruinous for the film if she were unable to employ an accent.
Memos related to the actors’ accents are on view through January 4 in the Ransom Center’s current exhibition The Making of Gone With The Wind. A fully illustrated exhibition catalog of the same title is available. Co-published by the Harry Ransom Center and University of Texas Press, the catalog includes a foreword written by Turner Classic Movies (TCM) host and film historian Robert Osborne.
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