The Academy and the Award
The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
9781684581191
9781684581207
Distributed for Brandeis University Press
The Academy and the Award
The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The first behind-the-scenes history of the organization behind the Academy Awards.
For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history.
Now that story is finally being told. Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy for over twenty years, was given unprecedented access to its archives, and the result is a revealing and compelling story of the men and women, famous and infamous, who shaped one of the best-known organizations in the world. Davis writes about the Academy with as intimate a view of its workings, its awards, and its world-famous membership. Thorough and long overdue, The Academy and the Award fills a crucial gap in Hollywood history.
For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history.
Now that story is finally being told. Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy for over twenty years, was given unprecedented access to its archives, and the result is a revealing and compelling story of the men and women, famous and infamous, who shaped one of the best-known organizations in the world. Davis writes about the Academy with as intimate a view of its workings, its awards, and its world-famous membership. Thorough and long overdue, The Academy and the Award fills a crucial gap in Hollywood history.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Beginning: Unions, Censors and Scandals
2. Academies. And Awards?
3. A Little Figure for Cedric Gibbons
4. A System Evolves
5. The Hays Incursion
6. . . . And Sciences
7. Academy Washed Up
8. Better than Precious Ointment
9. Frank Capra’s New Deal
10. Honorary Awards
11. Bette Davis and the War
12. Post-War and Cold War
13. Straining at the Leash
14. Into the Modern Era
15. Oscar Full-Blown
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
1. The Beginning: Unions, Censors and Scandals
2. Academies. And Awards?
3. A Little Figure for Cedric Gibbons
4. A System Evolves
5. The Hays Incursion
6. . . . And Sciences
7. Academy Washed Up
8. Better than Precious Ointment
9. Frank Capra’s New Deal
10. Honorary Awards
11. Bette Davis and the War
12. Post-War and Cold War
13. Straining at the Leash
14. Into the Modern Era
15. Oscar Full-Blown
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Excerpt
For all of the near-fanatic attention brought to bear each spring on the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences— has never been well understood. A lively interest has developed over the most recent decade in the organization’s makeup in terms of age, gender, and race—there’s no shortage of that kind of data—and of course the Awards decisions the Academy renders remain the subject of wide and warm debate.
But anyone looking for information about the history and objectives of the Academy, particularly in its crucial formative years, may have been surprised to find how hard that is to unearth. The organization itself has never produced a thorough account of its birth and its touch-and-go adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality, as though no one had seen much value in taking a close look at how one of the best-known organizations in the world had grown to be that.
The emergence of the Academy in the late 1920s, and its struggle with the sequence of difficulties that prevented it from thriving— even after its awards had become world famous—is an intriguing story in itself. And the narrative gains weight from the fact that the men and women shaping the organization’s early choices are among the motion picture’s most significant figures to that point. The story of the Academy’s birth and maturation is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. (…)
Since the focus here is primarily on the first three decades of Academy history, it doesn’t seem indiscreet at this point to release a few organizational cats from their bags. I retired from the Academy in 2011, after thirty years on its staff. I had been the organization’s executive director for a shade more than twenty of those years, and I left persuaded that it was time that someone provided the Academy (and anyone else interested) with some of those lost details of its formative years.
I was aware, from my conversations over the decades with members, that almost no one in the organization claimed more than a blurry set of impressions about why the organization came into being and what sort of concerns had shaped it. This project taught me that I had no reason to feel superior. Large, embarrassing quantities of the information in this book were completely new to me when—with the slightly wary, but much-appreciated blessing of the Academy officers—I began wading into the formerly off-limits material. I had known enough to be skeptical of some of the received mythology— that Oscar had been conceived on a restaurant tablecloth, for example, or named after a shadowy uncle—but there had been other fable-filled stories, such as the accounts of Bette Davis’s allegedly cantankerous presidency, that I had never squinted at quite as carefully as I should have.
The collections that had been out of view were of two primary kinds: decades’ worth of Academy records that had been boxed and transferred to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in the 1990s, and the full run of Academy Board minutes.
The largely unprocessed collection of Bankers boxes, I learned as the Herrick’s amiably efficient staff began arraying them around me, might hold almost anything. One of the first ones I tugged the lid off of revealed the signed, marked ballots from the first Academy Awards. (Price, Waterhouse, wouldn’t become the stewards, and the final repository, of the voting materials until a few years later.) Another box yielded long-lost late-1920s photographs of the Academy’s Club Lounge headquarters at the just-opened Roosevelt Hotel—shots that even the hotel’s archive didn’t have. One sequence of boxes was heavy with transcripts of meetings of the committees that had met when the Academy served as a mediator of industry disagreements. Small groups of distinguished filmmakers would come together to referee grievances filed by actors against producers, cinematographers against directors, and nearly every other kind of film worker who might, in the course of a shoot, decide that he or she had been unfairly used by some other party. The disputes were often amusingly gossipy, but they invariably provided sharp-focused views of the day to-day details of early-sound-era moviemaking.
But the most crucial source made available to me were the minutes of the Academy Board of Governors. Bound in black pebbled leather, and beginning with meetings even prior to the organization’s founding, these volumes—so shrouded that they had never been entrusted even to the Academy Library—were indispensable to this project. It is true that they were occasionally more discreet than I might have hoped for (and at two points were entirely silent about the rationales for puzzling decisions), but they regularly brought characters and issues to vivid life. Intentionally or not, the board minutes transformed decades’ worth of governors from a gray, crochety, largely indistinguishable herd into a lively group of industry figures (e.g., from just the 1939 /40 roster: Frank Capra, Ronald Colman, C. B. DeMille, Clark Gable, Mervyn LeRoy, David O. Selznick, James Stewart, and Darryl F. Zanuck) who generally got along but sometimes scuffled energetically.
The Academy, in the era that I was examining, was never the serene, opulent, Olympian assemblage that movie lovers might have imagined. There was never a shortage of troublesome issues for the organization. Almost immediately, the young Oscar had to repel an attempt at a takeover by a jealous and hostile rival. In the New Deal era, he found himself in a conflict with the emerging talent guilds, a conflict bitter enough that on two separate occasions his organization nearly expired. Hampered by a steady, frustrating, surprising shortage of ready money—the gilded broadsword notwithstanding—Oscar soldiered on and managed to found an arts academy worthy of standing alongside its venerable predecessors. His organization established the best-known award in the arts, and, perhaps more remarkably, early on solidified the perception that the once disregarded motion picture was one of the arts.
Oscar’s is an early life that deserves a bildungsroman. And, some might argue, a second volume. Oscar Agonistes, possibly. We can talk about that later.
But anyone looking for information about the history and objectives of the Academy, particularly in its crucial formative years, may have been surprised to find how hard that is to unearth. The organization itself has never produced a thorough account of its birth and its touch-and-go adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality, as though no one had seen much value in taking a close look at how one of the best-known organizations in the world had grown to be that.
The emergence of the Academy in the late 1920s, and its struggle with the sequence of difficulties that prevented it from thriving— even after its awards had become world famous—is an intriguing story in itself. And the narrative gains weight from the fact that the men and women shaping the organization’s early choices are among the motion picture’s most significant figures to that point. The story of the Academy’s birth and maturation is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. (…)
Since the focus here is primarily on the first three decades of Academy history, it doesn’t seem indiscreet at this point to release a few organizational cats from their bags. I retired from the Academy in 2011, after thirty years on its staff. I had been the organization’s executive director for a shade more than twenty of those years, and I left persuaded that it was time that someone provided the Academy (and anyone else interested) with some of those lost details of its formative years.
I was aware, from my conversations over the decades with members, that almost no one in the organization claimed more than a blurry set of impressions about why the organization came into being and what sort of concerns had shaped it. This project taught me that I had no reason to feel superior. Large, embarrassing quantities of the information in this book were completely new to me when—with the slightly wary, but much-appreciated blessing of the Academy officers—I began wading into the formerly off-limits material. I had known enough to be skeptical of some of the received mythology— that Oscar had been conceived on a restaurant tablecloth, for example, or named after a shadowy uncle—but there had been other fable-filled stories, such as the accounts of Bette Davis’s allegedly cantankerous presidency, that I had never squinted at quite as carefully as I should have.
The collections that had been out of view were of two primary kinds: decades’ worth of Academy records that had been boxed and transferred to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in the 1990s, and the full run of Academy Board minutes.
The largely unprocessed collection of Bankers boxes, I learned as the Herrick’s amiably efficient staff began arraying them around me, might hold almost anything. One of the first ones I tugged the lid off of revealed the signed, marked ballots from the first Academy Awards. (Price, Waterhouse, wouldn’t become the stewards, and the final repository, of the voting materials until a few years later.) Another box yielded long-lost late-1920s photographs of the Academy’s Club Lounge headquarters at the just-opened Roosevelt Hotel—shots that even the hotel’s archive didn’t have. One sequence of boxes was heavy with transcripts of meetings of the committees that had met when the Academy served as a mediator of industry disagreements. Small groups of distinguished filmmakers would come together to referee grievances filed by actors against producers, cinematographers against directors, and nearly every other kind of film worker who might, in the course of a shoot, decide that he or she had been unfairly used by some other party. The disputes were often amusingly gossipy, but they invariably provided sharp-focused views of the day to-day details of early-sound-era moviemaking.
But the most crucial source made available to me were the minutes of the Academy Board of Governors. Bound in black pebbled leather, and beginning with meetings even prior to the organization’s founding, these volumes—so shrouded that they had never been entrusted even to the Academy Library—were indispensable to this project. It is true that they were occasionally more discreet than I might have hoped for (and at two points were entirely silent about the rationales for puzzling decisions), but they regularly brought characters and issues to vivid life. Intentionally or not, the board minutes transformed decades’ worth of governors from a gray, crochety, largely indistinguishable herd into a lively group of industry figures (e.g., from just the 1939 /40 roster: Frank Capra, Ronald Colman, C. B. DeMille, Clark Gable, Mervyn LeRoy, David O. Selznick, James Stewart, and Darryl F. Zanuck) who generally got along but sometimes scuffled energetically.
The Academy, in the era that I was examining, was never the serene, opulent, Olympian assemblage that movie lovers might have imagined. There was never a shortage of troublesome issues for the organization. Almost immediately, the young Oscar had to repel an attempt at a takeover by a jealous and hostile rival. In the New Deal era, he found himself in a conflict with the emerging talent guilds, a conflict bitter enough that on two separate occasions his organization nearly expired. Hampered by a steady, frustrating, surprising shortage of ready money—the gilded broadsword notwithstanding—Oscar soldiered on and managed to found an arts academy worthy of standing alongside its venerable predecessors. His organization established the best-known award in the arts, and, perhaps more remarkably, early on solidified the perception that the once disregarded motion picture was one of the arts.
Oscar’s is an early life that deserves a bildungsroman. And, some might argue, a second volume. Oscar Agonistes, possibly. We can talk about that later.
