Jack Black in Hollywoodland

Ex-burglar turned successful author Jack Black would do like so many writers then and now: heed that call and make the lonely journey to Hollywood. Though generally imperturbable after all he’d been through he was perhaps more surprised and pleased, and honest with himself, than most.

After all what are the chances that a three-time loser who copped a twenty-five-year jolt and fully expected to kick behind bars would find himself, after a once-in-a-lifetime jailbird’s appeal that reduced his sentence to a year, working for a San Francisco newspaper and, befriended by its editor, encouraged to write his story for publication. Well? And then a call from a movie studio rep to boot? A shot in the dark, son, and Jack took it by gosh. By the time he published his one and only book, You Cant Win, in 1926 he was about fifty-five years old. He liked to say then that he’d spent fully half his life in the underworld, either on the road, on the lookout, and on the run or else in stir. Now, though still hidden behind his name, a mask he very rarely relinquished no matter the circumstances (even in the upper world to ask would be to invite suspicion; he remained an avowed creature of the night), he was about to embark on the most eventful years of his life in the straight world.

Following the fine notices of his adventure-filled autobiography, in November of 1926 he traveled south from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a leave of absence from his position at the San Francisco Call with the hearty approval of his friend and mentor the fighting editor Fremont Older. The year to come of course turned out to be an eventful one in Hollywood, as silent movies reached their artistic peak and the first so-called talking picture would be released come October 1927.

Jack was employed as a $150-a-week writer on staff at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio. In a letter from January of 1927 written on MGM stationery he states that he is presently helping write a prison story and that it is nearly complete. Though no credits have been found* it was not unusual for three, four, half a dozen, or even more writers to be assigned to the same project, frequently simultaneously and working anonymously. Additionally, in the literalist mind of movie producers, hiring an ex-con to write about convicts and prison life is movie common sense, even if you cant use his stuff. (PR will cover his weekly.) Jack may have applied his talents as a scenarist, a dialogue or intertitle writer, or in Fitzgerald’s self-derogatory term a script clerk. (MGM crews at the time were given to likening work in the studio to that, they imagined, of laboring at the jute mill, that is, prison drudgery.)

Irving Thalberg, the skillful young production head of what was by the time Jack arrived the biggest studio in town, was a surehanded and honest to god perfectionist who tinkered knowledgeably behind the scenes in just about every aspect of the making of a picture. One of his projects in the late 1920s was The Big House, set in San Quentin, which wasnt released, however, until 1930. It reeked of authentic locales and dialogue; his mania for getting things right no matter how many folks he disturbed along the way stands the film in good stead to this day; an Academy Award for writing was presented to the film. This was the kind of venturous man Jack could admire and it’s quite possible he worked under his aegis, if not on this picture per se.

Over at Paramount noted egghead and prolific wordsmith Ben Hecht was writing a movie about the underworld called, wonderfully enough, Underworld, released in 1927 and a prototype of the gangland culture action movies and melodramas to come right around the corner. The criminal-minded mixed and feuded and enticed the law and betrayed one another and got killed or caught and went to prison and then of course escaped, or tried to, before it all begins again. Sure it was kind of stagey but compellingly new. (Hecht would win one of two of the first Academy Awards presented for writing for this movie; the Academy was opened for business and award giving in 1927.) The 1920s was prime time for underground cultures being sampled by the well heeled as a swell form of entertainment: hard-boiled dick stories, crime pictures, working-class dramas, and oddly enough hobo memoirs. Of the latter, the former road bum and rod rider Jim Tully’s popular and acclaimed books—a pair of autobiographies and a couple of novels so far—had landed him onto the Paramount lot as well, but he’d been in town a bunch of years already, working first as a tinseltown reporter and then, after selling some books, as a Hollywood picture scribe where in 1928 he contributed to the screenplay of the life a vagabond girl on the run called Beggars of Life (he’d used this neat title for one of his glorified memoirs, subtitled in case you missed it “a hobo’s autobiography”). Directed by Wild Billy Wellman and starring Wally Beery and Louise Brooks it was notable for its boxcar perspectives, hobo fraternity (rumor had it genuine tramps were used in the picture as extras to provide “authenticity”), and on-the-lam adventures including one heck of a runaway train sequence.

Jack’s newish friend and fellow prison reform advocate Lewis E. Lawes, warden at Sing Sing in New York, was getting some play over at Warners, where no less than five movies based on his books (fiction and nonfiction both) were produced from 1932 to 1940. I dont want to discuss here, however, Warners’ Wild Boys of the Road, also directed by the ex–fighter pilot Wellman, in 1933, as it doesnt reflect the hoboing experience of Jack  Black and his type of roadie. Wild Boys is very much a depression-era picture and Jack came of age on the road circa 1890, an entirely different era, less socioeconomic Americana and more wild wild west. Even Jack London’s road life proffers a perspective, valuable though it is, later and less distinct than that of Black’s, and altogether too politicized for the professional thief who would later write, “You cant win at the game no matter how clever you are, and it isnt necessary to talk about it,” that is, the game of life both above and below ground.

Buster Keaton released a master work, The General, in 1927 and followed that up with the near-perfect Steamboat Bill Jr. in 1928. Then despite all his success as an independent that year he signed on with MGM for good. It started off fine for him, cash on the barrelhead and another masterpiece, The Cameraman, later in 1928, but eventually, inevitably, being studiobound handcuffed Keaton (a lamebrainer wanted the great stoneface to smile, can you imagine?), and it was the beginning of the end of an era in movies and moviemaking. Still though he didn’t move on so very easily, and not before taking to heart once more what his old pal Fatty Arbuckle had given him to understand about yucks, among much else: short of railroading there may be nothing like house burgling and sneak thieving to present to a funny fat guy (or a small stoic one, for that matter) an open road to comedy. Buster made a final silent comedy in 1929, wherein he mopes in disguise in one sequence and chases down some crooks at the close and then he too went, like nearly everyone else in the world, the way of sound.

There was an actor at MGM whose work resonated archetypically with the singularly unusual life of Jack Black. By the time Jack arrived on the lot Lon Chaney was one of the biggest stars in MGM’s celebrated firmament. Yet Chaney was an atypical movie star, a character actor when the term rose highest in the early cinematic lexicon. He was a master of disguise, yet a man whose many chosen masks revealed, to observers, as much as they hid character. He preferred silence and action (his parents were deaf and hardworking, unsentimental) and on-screen he was both obscured and ever present, it depended on how well and whether or not you wanted to look at the face behind the mask amid the wondrous histrionics. In life he remained a modest cipher, a privateer and a man of restraint, certainly a mystery as compared to Hollywood stars’ open-book lives then and now. Chaney was most convincing as—and in life he threw his lot in with—the outsider, the misfit, the loner, the congenitally lawless man on the move. The phantom. The hunchback. The con man. The thief. The magician and the madman. Apeman and vampire. The carny and the ex-con.

In the 1920 silent Outside the Law, for instance, directed by Lon’s creative partner Tod Browning, Chaney plays an unrepentant but resourceful criminal named Black Mike. The setting is San Francisco’s Chinatown and, in what would become a signature in Chaney’s movies, Lon also portrayed in this picture a Chinaman named Ah Wing. A well-made “crook play” the film deals largely from within the criminal world, at least when Lon is featured and until the predictable ending, naturally, but it is Chaney’s bringing to life both the archcriminal and the faithful Chinese that marks the film. Two years later, in Shadows, he played another Chinaman, and this one was an opium smoker. There’s a PR still of the actor in character lying on his hip assuming the position, but the scene didnt make it into the final film. In 1923 Chaney starred in a movie whose climax was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, titled The Shock, in which he played a career criminal who has to decide either to remain in the life or to change his ways before the roof and much else collapses on his world. The quake symbolized the rupture in the life of the character, just as it had for Jack Black, who was awaiting trial in a San Francisco jail at the time of the great catastrophe two decades earlier. In the original, silent version of Browning’s Unholy Three, produced at MGM in 1925 and overseen by Thalberg, as were all of the Browning/Chaney collaborations of this era, Chaney again plays two roles, a ventriloquist/burglar and an old crow in disguise. This sideshow crime story is all the more remarkable as at the close Lon’s double dealer has a change of heart and confesses his life. He returns to the carny life but a new man. The following year, for MGM and again Browning, he starred in another double role in The Blackbird as a thief and a rescue-mission cripple, completely believable as both characters—it was as if a different actor performed each role, so physically different were they, according to numerous notices—but the grotesque doubled persona of this character eventually led to his death, you may imagine from the madness of lack of distinction in body and mind. Who am I? It was a provocative question to ask in the stark, public light of the new medium.

Browning’s macabre shocker The Unknown starring Chaney as Alonzo the Armless, a circus performer with a murderous secret—yet another powerfully sympathetic portrayal of a misfit—was being filmed on the MGM stage set when Jack was a couple of months into his stint in the studio’s writing department, in February and March of 1927. At one point in this intense, disturbing performance Chaney, in a stunning unveiling, reveals his character to have been concealing his arms for nefarious purposes but what is striking for our purposes here is that Lon the actor offers viewers, in this bit, a trade secret: his arms had been strapped to his sides by his being encased in a straitjacket! How Jack would have recoiled if he’d witnessed this sequence, for hadn’t the torture of the prison jacket, in another lifetime, nearly ruined him?

The actor Chaney would continue to play roles both horrific and criminal until his untimely death in 1930 (He made only a single talkie.) He occasionally played the other side of the law as well but with the perspective of the outlaw. In life, Lon Chaney was a solitary man but he had a cause: prison reform. Another MGM role for Chaney during Jack’s tenure found the great actor researching the part of a police detective. He instructed himself, with some help by the LAPD, in all aspects of the trade, from fingerprinting to following a case. He became interested in the treatment of prison inmates. He’d always had a fan base of prisoners, who wrote to him regularly, according to Chaney’s biographer. He even befriended and gave aid to ex-cons. He advocated for years humane treatment for men behind walls and, in January 1930, he even published an article, titled “Wanted: New Medicine,” outlining the need for more rehabilitation programs for prisoners.

Chaney wrote in part: “Apparently there must be prisons, but in them, I think, the idea of punishment will be ultimately replaced with the idea of rehabilitation. When my auto ceases to perform I send it to the repair shop to be repaired—not punished”—the idea, again, of a criminal mind that needs curing, is all, was prevalent in the era—”[and] underlying it all is just one thing—a square deal.” Chaney died only a short time later, in August of 1930, and though his kind of advocacy would seem quaint only a few short years later, as it does alas to us now, it had the strength of fair play behind it, and this is among the points that Jack Black, too, drove home in his own talks and writing on the subject. When Jack left Hollywood he made another career giving public lectures and writing essays on the legal code, prisoners’ rights, and prison reform, themes he’d made his own over so many years following his life as a con.

Let’s be clear, there were no pictures produced in Jack’s time based on anything like his underground experience (okay, with the possible exception of a few moments in Beggars of Life). By the time the movies got around to seriously exploring the perspective of the outlaw and crime as a path self-consciously chosen, a level or three over the all too predictable potboilers, Jack Black’s small-scale deeply embedded far-flung Johnson Family scenario had given way to either full-blown gangster melodramas or, more intriguingly but most improbably, the post–World War I “epic of crime” manifestos perhaps best exemplified and executed in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse series and his M, too, wherein a working, organized, very manifest society of criminals (and the authorities to match them, naturally) labored like jobbers and tick-tick-ticked like a nonstop precision clock in the house of sin. Pretty entertaining on the big screen but mostly fancy.

Certainly MGM, known for its polish and pretension and perfection, wasn’t about to go exploiting cultural depths at this point, it simply wasn’t the studio’s bread. One more thing: William Randolph Hearst, a power broker in the state of California long before movies became big business, started up his own film production studio, called Cosmopolitan Productions, basically for the sole purpose of putting his paramour the talented comedienne Marion Davies in pictures. By the mid- and late 1920s Metro head Louis B. Mayer and Hearst had made a deal and MGM was only too pleased to absorb Cosmopolitan as Davies was becoming a star. Did Mr. Hearst, Jack’s past nemesis and present newspaper owner boss, run into Jack Black in Culver City and talk about topical times up north? If so, and if Jack mentioned he was working on a prison picture, Hearst, himself having joined the rolling bandwagon of prison reform, no doubt would have had a hearty say in the matter. Such was the all-encompassing world of the movies in the jazz age.

Relocated more permanently to LA by early 1927 Jack had decided to turn his acclaimed life story You Cant Win into a play. Why not. Perhaps it was suggested to him by a studio honcho who had him on retainer or, more likely, by a fellow toiler in the movie scribbling trade who told him, well, we all write our own stuff too on studio time. Incidentally F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first trip to Hollywood coincided with that of Jack’s; he worked in the writing department for First National (soon to be Warner Bros.) for a couple of months at the very beginning of the year 1927. A few years later he, too, went to work for the glossies over at MGM.

More precisely Jack culled some scenes and characters brought to memorable life in his book and featured them in play form. In this he had help, enlisting the aid of a former colleague at the Bulletin and currently a successful author and magazine editor back east named Bessie Beatty. She may have persuaded him to sharpen and alter the focus of the story (and the title too) to Salt Chunk Mary, unquestionably a most remarkable woman and a mighty influence on Jack’s life and imagination. (And didn’t Jack anyway write in YCW that the world-class fence and mother to the Johnson Family should have her own book?) The play would be staged in three acts and set in Pocatello, Idaho, Mary’s adopted hometown, a crossroads for underworlders. Jack may not have been entirely satisfied with the form. “There isn’t a word of preaching in my play,” he said, as if in reply to those who claimed a false lesson could be found in the thing, something that naturally would have repulsed its author. Still no doubt he understood from the jump that, in Hollywood, compromise is the name of the game, and lessons not sought one of the booby prizes. Well Jack could play along, too, at least for a little while, and he trusted Beatty.

Jack had extended his stay in southern California and now made a residence there, for a big break had come when the ambitious, witchy stage and sometimes silent screen actress Lucille La Verne took an interest in and bought proprietary rights to Beatty and Black’s work, figuring that, now she was in her authoritative maturity, the larger than life role was just her theatrical meat. In this she was incorrect. A biggish star with her own acting company, and expecting critics to kowtow as usual, when the play finally opened most old stage hands instead came away asking, What’s a Salt Chunk Mary? (Still film buffs of a certain age—way up there—may recognize the name if not the mug of La Verne, who ten years later, in 1937, famously voiced the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; she also had a small, uncredited role in the early gangster epic Little Caesar.) Problem was, as Jack soon found, La Verne was no Johnson. She was bossy without being honest, belligerent without being fair, not the qualities of the woman Jack knew as the straightest shooter who ever sat still for railroaders and gamblers, bums and thieves. Although Lucille befriended Fremont Older and his wife, Jack just never cottoned to “the old dame.”

The play was staged in the fall of 1927 at the Egan Theatre, on Figu2eroa Street in old downtown Los Angeles. One local critic wrote that Salt Chunk Mary was “starkly honest” but another dismissed it as “crook stuff.” Notices the likes of the latter prevailed. Meanwhile Jack was making a home for himself in Los Angeles, residing on North Gower Street in Hollywood, near the locations of several movie studios, possibly still working piecemeal over at “Culver,” as he called it, banking some on his name as a near bestselling author by penning articles for LA newspapers. Early in the following year Black and Beatty filed a complaint against La Verne, who still held the rights to their work. In May, Beatty wrote Jack from New York that other producers and even two studios were interested in their play but that they couldn’t act because the rights were tied up.

By December of 1928 Jack himself was in New York and he wrote Older the latest regarding the complaint by Beatty and Black against La Verne. Good news: a committee of arbitration had decided in their favor and against La Verne, who it was ruled had voided her contract with regard to the work by not putting on a satisfactory production in LA. “The play is ours now to do as we please with it,” Jack stated in the letter, clearly relieved of the burden yet still steamed. “We will have nothing more to do with [La Verne]. She was not fair with us at any time.” He went on to report, his experienced legal mind to the fore as ever, that here in New York the woman could not tie them up further “because the arbitration law [in this state] does not permit anyone to go into court after submitting a case to the American Arbitration Association,” a private contract dispute resolution administrator, so Jack had made damned sure he’d covered all his bases. He knew well how to avoid being burned in the aftermath. He and Bessie immediately had another offer for their work but had refused, he said, because “we don’t want to get shackled up again.”

Now what was Jack doing in the big apple? For one thing he said he and Beatty wanted to give their play “the New York background,” in other words a run on the biggest stage in the land, before they seriously entertained offers from movie studios, which was inevitably the next step. It seemed reasonable at the time. He also apparently needed to move his feet once more, had had his fill of the Los Angeles light. He had meetings with Clarence Darrow—big shot lawyer and yet another prison reform advocate—back east as well as with the editors of the New Rep1ublic and Harpers magazine, who asked him to write for them, and his publisher, Macmillan, in New York, wanted him to get started with another book. Jack Black was in danger of becoming a species of respectable aboveground man. No doubt he looked in the mirror to see his well-worn mask, though not his dignity, slightly askew.


* Footnote: Following are half a dozen MGM pictures from the era that Jack Black was most probably employed at the studio to which he may have contributed in some way. The Big City (1927), in which Lon Chaney plays a hood with a heart; After Midnight (1927), featuring a role of the reformed holdup man; The Thirteenth Hour (1927), in which Lionel Barrymore portrays a mad but clever crook in and out of disguise; Alias Jimmy Valentine (1928), a part-talkie, based on O. Henry’s story of a safecracker; Four Walls (1928), a picture about a gangster who gets out of prison and wants to go straight; While the City Sleeps (1928), in which Chaney plays a plainclothes police detective in New York City.

by Don Kennison