Hal Roach tries to keep life informal on his lot. There is little security, and employees are identifiable only by the small brass numbered pins they are required to wear. It is not uncommon to see actors running errands for Hal Roach’s parents, who live in an apartment on the property. Everyone eats in the studio commissary on Washington Boulevard.
Hal Roach has built the reputation of Hal Roach Studios by ensuring that every film made has some measure of involvement from himself: an original story idea, a suggestion for improvements, even Hal Roach as director. If it does not, then by definition, it is not a Hal Roach picture.
Neither does Hal Roach make pictures in a hurry. This is not Poverty Row. The creative teams are given time to work. One has to spend money to make money, but one must have the money to spend in the first place. Hal Roach has money, possibly a great deal of it, but is also aware of how easy it is to go from having a great deal of money to having no money at all.
Hal Roach is amiable in public, but worries in private. Sometimes, when particularly vexed, Hal Roach plays the saxophone or the violin. Hal Roach finds this conducive to thought and reflection. Music flows through the lot, and the staff surmise that it is best to leave Hal Roach alone.
Hal Roach is playing his saxophone.
Hal Roach is being left alone.
Elmer Raguse is still complaining about damage to his equipment. Hal Roach believes that if Elmer Raguse were permitted to do so, Elmer Raguse would sleep on the lot each night alongside his valves and microphones, or find a way to take them home to bed with him.
Hal Roach has underestimated the impact that sound will have on his pictures. Hal Roach realizes that dialogue is not simply a spoken version of Beanie Walker’s title cards, that speech is not merely an adjunct to pantomime, that music and action and words must now work in unison. Hal Roach has always prized story, but sound recording has changed the manner in which every future tale will be presented. Some day soon, Hal Roach knows, a comedy will be made in which the humor arises from dialogue alone. Hal Roach would very much like that comedy to bear his name.
And there are rumors of affairs among his stars. There are always rumors of affairs – these people are alarmingly promiscuous – but Hal Roach needs to be kept aware of them, just in case fires must be extinguished.
Some of these rumors are more troubling than others.
Alyce Ardell has been glimpsed on the lot, or near the lot, or has passed the lot waving from a train window, naked from the waist up, while the Columbia Saxophone Sextette plays ‘Frogs’ Legs’. The details are unimportant. This is a family business. Discretion is required.
A quiet word with one of his stars may be necessary.
Most of all, Hal Roach feels control over his studio slipping from his hands, although Hal Roach cannot express this fear aloud. The business details are accreting, and the more successful Hal Roach becomes, the more these matters take precedence over his desire to remain involved in the creative side.
Hal Roach misses this creative aspect, because the fewer opportunities there are to exercise one’s creativity, the harder it becomes to maintain. Already the ideas and gags are not emerging from him as frequently as before. The studio still has a lot of good gagmen, but it can always use more. The more generous of the stars farm out any gags they can’t use, or those that would be better served by another actor, but this is not the same as having someone who can move from picture to picture, set to set, offering guidance and expertise. A steady hand on the tiller is essential, and it can no longer be Hal Roach’s alone.
Reluctantly, Hal Roach sets aside his saxophone and summons his father. Dad Roach is the company treasurer, but also a useful sounding board for his son. Hal Roach cites some of his concerns to his father, although Hal Roach chooses not to burden Dad Roach with the detail about Alyce Ardell, semi-naked or otherwise.
What you need, says Dad Roach, is an ideas guy, someone who knows comedy but also understands how to run a business involving comics. Someone from vaudeville, maybe?
Hal Roach does not think so. Anyone worth hiring from vaudeville is already on the books, just as the stages have been emptied of any actor who can walk in a straight line while stringing together a coherent sentence. Everybody now wants to be in pictures. In the vaudeville houses, the bottom of the bill has moved to the top, and the openers are now the finale. Soon the only act left on vaudeville will be the Cherry Sisters.
But Dad Roach is correct in his assessment. They bat around a few names, but none feels right.
If that’s all, Dad Roach eventually says, I have to get back to your mother.
Hal Roach thanks his father for coming over.
– Happy to help. By the way, is it true what they’re saying about Alyce Ardell?
85
He has never enjoyed working alone, and now it is no longer necessary. Just as he has found in Babe a way to bring out the best in himself as an actor, and thus imbue his character with life, so too does he surround himself with others who can aid him in molding and expanding his material.
Come on, fellas, he will say at the end of a day’s filming, as the crew begins to disperse, I got some sodas back in the dressing room.
And along will follow Jimmy Parrott, and Frank Butler, and Charlie Rogers, who is generally billed as Charley Rogers and cannot seem to convince anyone to spell his name correctly. Charlie Rogers is another exile from across the water. He likes having Charlie Rogers around. It’s sometimes whispered that Charlie Rogers doesn’t have an original idea in his head, which is not to say that Charlie Rogers’s head is empty of ideas: it’s just that none of these ideas is Charlie Rogers’s own. But Charlie Rogers has played every British music hall, and has memorized every good gag performed on their stages, and any gag that Charlie Rogers doesn’t remember, he does. Between them, they are a walking, talking history of stage comedy.
Babe rarely enters these conclaves, unless the light is too bad to play golf, or his luck hasn’t been good, or Myrtle is being tougher to live with than usual. On those occasions, Babe will take a seat and join them in a soda, although these are sodas in name only because this is serious work, and serious work requires a serious drink. The liquor comes courtesy of Richard Currier, the film editor, who has connections. They’ll raise their glasses and shoot the breeze for a while, and then it will begin: dumb ideas, half-dumb ideas, good ideas; gags explained, gags pantomimed, gags practiced. The best of them get written down, the worst discarded, the remainder worked on until it can be determined if they should be saved or sacrificed. But he marshals these men, and the final decision is his. Babe generally just laughs along, but when Babe does speak, everyone listens.