James Whale

James Whale created iconic films in the early half of the 20th century. He's one of the main reasons that Universal Pictures became synonymous with the horror genre. But his interests as a creator were far wider than creating gothic spook stories.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Tracy here with news about some live appearances
we have coming up. Saturday July seven, I will be
at History Camp Boston, where I will be part of
the History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, Sunday,
July eight, at two pm, Holly and I both will
be doing a live podcast at Adams National Historical Park

(00:20):
in Quincy, Massachusetts, where our show will be John Quincy
and Luisa Catherine Adams Abroad. This is an outdoor show
and it will happen rain or shine, and we're coming
back to Convention Days in Seneca Falls, New York. Our
show is at four pm on Saturday, July twenty one
in the historic Wesleyan Chapel. You can get more information

(00:41):
about all of these shows with links to buy tickets
where applicable at missed in History dot Com. Click on
live shows in the menu. Welcome to steph you missed
in History class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello,

(01:07):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, I have been kind of working
through my list, as you may have noted. I think
we've both been doing some of that lately. Yeah, this
is another episode that has been on my list for
a very long time, and originally I thought I might
use it as one of our October Halloween programming episodes,

(01:29):
but I changed my mind, and I will explain why
I changed my mind at the end of this episode.
We are talking today about the film director James Whale,
who created such iconic imagery in the early half of
the twentieth century, particularly the very early part of the
twenty century, that images of the characters from his films
are still found everywhere. He is one of the main

(01:51):
reasons that Universal Pictures became synonymous with the horror genre,
but his interests as a creator were far wider than
simply make being gothic spook stories. If you've seen the
movie Gods and Monsters with Sir Ian McKellen, which in
my mind is a recent movie but in reality came
out twenty years ago, you'll you'll already know some things

(02:13):
about the end of his life, which do include him
taking his own life. So if that's a troubling spot
for you, then just be aware. He yeah. Also, just
heads up, we don't really talk about that particularly particular film.
It is based on his life, but it is a
fictionalized bioping. There there are entire people that didn't exist
in the real world correct that we're made up as

(02:36):
as um story devices to kind of talk about different
parts of his life. But it's a wonderful film and
I highly recommended. I think Brandan Fraser is amazing in it,
as well as sir Ian McKellen. But it's definitely not
when you walk away from going I learned so much
about James Whale, because those may not be correct now
that came out. I think during a time when I

(02:56):
was working a kind of a weird schedule and I
saw it in the daytime, midweek, and I was in
a theater alone, and I left just feeling very devastated.
Oh that sounds perfect. It kind of was, But you know,
I'm like a wallower, like I like a good dour
scenario to watch kind of a dark film. So to me,

(03:16):
that sounds perfect. But so to get to his actual
life story. He was born on July twenty eight, eighty nine,
large working class family and Dudley worce to Share in
the UK. His father, William worked at a blast furnace
and his mother, Sarah Peters Whale, came from a mining family.
The number of siblings that he had varies depending on

(03:38):
the source. The documentation wasn't very good. He did have
some siblings for sure, though, and the family lived in
a small fore room flat. Yeah, we there are six documented.
There may have been additional siblings, we don't know. James
initially attended school at the Dudley Bluecoach School, but he
didn't complete his education in there. The family needed income,

(04:02):
so young James, like his two older brothers before him,
started working at an early age to contribute. He worked
as a cobbler and a sign letterer, and he squirreled
away a little bit of money here and there to
pay for night classes at the Dudley School of Arts.
He eventually switched to a labor job, working in sheet metal,
despite being poorly suited for physical work, because it paid

(04:24):
better and it offered more hope that he would actually
be able to pay for a complete education. In nineteen fourteen,
James Whale was swept up into World War One, and
at first he just did not have any interest and
enlisting in staid. He volunteered at the y m c A,
which offered a lot of support services to the military.
In October of nineteen fifteen, though he finally did enlist

(04:46):
he was convinced that a draft was coming anyway. Yeah,
there was definitely some animosity towards young men who went
the route he did where he opted to do this
volunteer work instead, so that may have also played to
part that he was getting a lot of social pressure.
He went through officer training and he became part of
the Worcestershire Regiment in nineteen sixteen. In nineteen seventeen, Wales

(05:10):
was involved in the Flanders Campaign when he was taken
prisoner and he was moved to Holdzmanden in Germany. The
next fifteen months, basically the remainder of the war were
spent as a pow but Wale put his creativity to
use during that time. He actually staged plays for the camp,
in which both captors and prisoners were the audience, and

(05:31):
he did a great deal of drawing. Early on in
his imprisonment, a group of twenty five of his fellow
Brits mounted an escape from Holzmanden, but Wale was too
timid to join them. Wales's theatrical efforts didn't end when
the war did. When he went back to England, he
pursued a full time stage career. This was a decision
he came to based on his experience at the Camp,

(05:52):
where he fell in love with the stage. Despite the
unusual circumstances that he was performing in immediately after the war,
or Whales also sold a couple of cartoons for publication
he had continued drawing, but despite that seemingly auspicious start,
he didn't get any further than that with his cartoons.
He decided to move from the increasingly costly London to

(06:14):
Birmingham and he started working for the Birmingham Repertory Company.
Although he was working for the theater without pay for
a while before he was hired on as more than
a volunteer, and as his theatrical career progressed, he worked
with a number of people who would later become quite famous,
for example, Noel Coward, Elsa Lanchester, of course, who his
his story gets tied to quite closely, and John Gielgud,

(06:37):
among others. And it was during this time that he
also met costume and set designer Doris Zenkison. Doris was
dramatic and artistic, and James Husi called whale Bone, found
her just fascinating. The two of them became engaged ine
and they became the couple in the art scene. They tangled,

(06:58):
they went to clubs, they seemed to comp them in
each other just perfectly. But they broke up in This
is really the last time that Whale would appear to
be a straight man, But he spoke really highly and
lovingly of Doris for the rest of his life. As
for Doris, she went on to marry an executive at
Johnny Walker Whiskey not long after they split up. Yeah,

(07:20):
In interviews with people who knew him for the rest
of his life, they all talked like, I really do
think he was in love with her in some way,
even though they also acknowledged that they believed that he
knew at that point that he was not a straight man,
but he just had this deep affinity that carried on
pretty much for the rest of his life for her.

(07:41):
James Whale was also pretty unique in the time and
place that he lived, and that he was living fairly
openly as a gay man in the nineteen twenties. Uh,
most of his colleagues knew that this was the case.
It was kind of one of those things that was
not spoken about a lot, but was common knowledge and
he did nothing to dissuade anyone from the king it.
And this is interesting because you may recall from previous

(08:03):
episodes of this podcast that homosexuality was illegal in England
until nineteen sixty seven. Yeah, everybody people describe it from
the industry at the time. It's sort of like an
open secret, where like they weren't running around yelling about it,
but everyone knew. Yeah. Acting had really drawn Whale to
the stage, but he also worked in other roles, including

(08:27):
in stage management. But it was as a director that
he truly made a name for himself. On June twelfthree,
a one act play called Father Noah opened at the
Strand Theater. This was wales directorial debut. Father Noah didn't
get a lot of attention or accolades, but it was
the first step in some more leadership roles within the

(08:47):
theater and then in nive he joined the Oxford Players,
which was a small, underfunded company. The nature of the
group meant that Whale once again worked in a variety
of roles on any given production. Act ding, set design,
and assistant directing all landed on his plate. As a
theatrical director, Wale got a lot of accolades when he
staged a play called Journeys End in Night. The play

(09:11):
depicted a British infantry dug out during World War One
over the course of four days while they awaited a
German attack. The original star of the play was twenty
one year old Laurence Olivier, although when the production became
so successful that they had to move on to a
bigger venue, another actor stepped into the role. The following year,
the critically acclaimed play moved across the Atlantic for a

(09:35):
Broadway run, and that New York engagement actually proved pivotal
in James Whale's career. In the late nineteen twenties, something
big was happening in the film industry. That was talkies.
Actors couldn't rely just on their physical characterizations to carry
a motion picture. There was a very real need in
Hollywood for coaches who could help the stars of silent

(09:56):
films make the transition to talkies. In It was in
that capacity that James Whale made his way to Los
Angeles from New York. Wale worked as a dialogue director
for Paramount Pictures, and then he was hired onto the
high profile film Hell's Angel starring Geene Harlow, the actress
was still quite green and uncertain of herself at the time,

(10:19):
and in a scene in which she was supposed to
seduce one of her male co stars, she asked Whale
for instruction on exactly what to do, to which he replied, quote,
my dear girl, I can tell you how to be
an actress, but I cannot tell you how to be
a woman. But starting a film career was not the
only thing that significantly changed for Whale. While working in Hollywood,

(10:39):
he also met a story assistant named David Lewis. At
the time, Whale was forty one and Louis was, and
the younger man was not really impressed by the Englishman.
Whale found Louis captivating, though, and over time the two
men struck up a friendship, which became a romantic relationship.
Whale and Lewis spent the next two decades together as

(11:00):
a couple. And we're going to get into James Whale's
career as a film director in just a moment, But
first we're going to pause for a little sponsor break.
We were just talking about nine before we cut to break.
And Whale also directed his first feature film in nineteen

(11:21):
thirty that was the adaptation of his successful stage play
Journey's End. It starred Colin Clive. That was the actor
who had replaced Olivier on the London stage and who
collaborated with James Whale many more times throughout his career.
After Journey's End made it successful transition to the screen,
James Whale was signed to a contract at Universal Studios

(11:42):
by studio head Carl Lemley Jr. Wales's first assignment under
this new contract was Waterloo Bridge, which was another adaptation
of a stage play. Like Journey's End, this film was
set during World War One. It focuses on a young
American woman in London during the conflict who has to
turn to x work to make money. Her life becomes

(12:03):
entwined with a convalescent soldier from the Canadian Army, and
then the plot centers around the people in the young
woman's life who see this young man as a potential
savior for her. Wales's adaptation came out in nine thirty one.
Two remakes of it came out in nineteen forty and
nineteen fifty six, although the latter version is a lot
different and is titled Gabby Whale had pleased the studio

(12:29):
with his production. He had stayed on schedule, he had
stayed on budget, and though the film subject matter met
with some controversy and had to be edited in some markets,
it was successful enough that the director was given his
pick of projects for his third film, and that's how
in one Wale directed what would become one of his
most famous films of all time, Frankenstein, another adaptation. Obviously,

(12:52):
the screenplay was based on Mary Shelley's novella, and the
appeal of the Frankenstein's story for Wale was really simple.
He just didn't feel like making another war movie that
strikes me as ironic for reasons that will become clear
as we go forward. Part of what made this picture
so unique is the fact that Whale wasn't a horror director,

(13:15):
even though as a genre that was still kind of congealing.
But he told the story of the doctor driven by
his obsession and the monster that he created as though
it were a street drama, and audiences loved it. It
made Boris Carlaw famous, and it really put horror on
the map as a respectable and commercially viable genre. And
it also gave James Whale a great deal of power

(13:38):
at Universal Studios. While executives at the studio wanted Whale
to repeat his Frankenstein's success, he decided to make a
film called The Impatient Maiden next. This is about a
young woman and a doctor who meet, fall for each other,
decide not to pursue a relationship, and are later pushed
together when the doctor has to perform an emergency appendectomy

(13:59):
on her. I feel like I've seen this episode of
Grey's Anatomy right Like. There are so many of James
Whale's films that I feel like set up tropes that
happened forever after that, and they weren't by any means
the first ones. But in a lot of cases he
made those types of stories really famous. Now that I

(14:20):
think about it more, I think it really was an
actual episode of Doogie House or MV where he had
to operate on his girlfriend. Anyway, Whale had chosen The
Impatient Maiden as a project because he didn't want to
be pigeonholed in horror, but it turned out to have
been a poor choice. This romance drama fared really poorly
with both critics and audiences. In two, Whale made a

(14:44):
film called The Old Dark House, which was sort of
a horror comedy. I love this movie and I watched
it while I was working on the outline for this
and starred Boris Karloff, Gloria Stewart, Charles Lawton, and Melvin Douglas.
And it is now also a classic horror trope. A
group of people traveling in the countryside when they get
caught in a terrible storm that makes it impossible to

(15:06):
continue their journey, and they seek shelter in a creepy
house with eccentric inhabitants, and things play out from there.
Wale made two films that released in nineteen thirty three.
The first was The Kiss Before the Mirror. This was
a mystery about a lawyer and his possibly adulterous wife
and a trial in which the lawyer is defending a
man who murdered his own cheating spouse. This was not

(15:29):
a blockbuster, but Whale's second film of nineteen thirty three
had quite the opposite reception. When The Invisible Man hit theaters.
It amazed audiences and delighted critics with its special effects work.
Claude Rains, in the starring role, gave a memorable vocal performance,
and the film became one of the year's biggest hits.

(15:51):
There's obviously a pattern that was developing in James Whale's
career where his most popular films were in this newly
popular horror genre. But rather than make another horror film
after The Invisible Man, he turned his efforts instead to
a rom com called By Candle Light. It was adapted
from a stage play by Austrian writers Siegfried Geyer and

(16:12):
Carl Farcas, and it involved a case of mistaken identity.
A gentleman's butler falls in love with somebody who mistakes
him for the gentleman that he works for. This was
considered to be a light light fair, not particularly serious,
nothing special. Yeah uh and again it it did okay,
not great uh. Whale still, though, opted out of making

(16:35):
another horror film, even though that probably would have been
an easy way for him to say, look, I made
another adant. Instead, he turned to serious drama with an
adaptation of a novel by John Galsworthy titled One More River.
This film features the story of a married English couple
who look perfect to outsiders, but then it's quickly revealed
to the audience that in private, the husband is physically

(16:56):
and emotionally abusive to his wife, who leaves him, only
to have him threaten her with a smear campaign of
adultery despite no wrongdoing on her part. This film was
critically acclaimed and people who saw it thought it was
quite amazing, but not many people actually wanted to see it,
and it flopped at the box office. Maybe because of

(17:16):
that series of lukewarm non horror projects, Wale finally decided
to do what Universal and the public had been asking
him to do for years, which was returned to horror
and make a sequel to Frankenstein. While Treatments had been
proposed for a Frankenstein follow up, it was Wale who
finally decided that a love interest provided the most appealing possibility.

(17:38):
So Wale's work on the Bride of Frankenstein was lighter
in tone than his previous work. He was more at
play as a director, and the look of the film,
thanks to cinematographer John jay Mescomb, was based in the
paintings of Rembrandt, contrasting bright, highlighted sections of any given
frame with the deepest of shadows to create depth and drama.

(17:59):
Wale decided his friend Elsa Lanchester for the role, then
carefully designed the bride's look inspired by the mummies of Egypt.
Her iconic hair was modeled on the head pieces of
Nefer Tit, and her makeup was carefully sketched out by
the director in a series of drawings. Lanchester brought a
unique inspiration to the role. The bride's behavior and movement

(18:21):
was based on the swans at Hyde Park. Yeah, I
uh had only read that recently. I'm sure I've probably
passed over it before, but the idea of the way
she hisses and like turns her roughly was based on
these swans that she had had been observing. There's also
an interesting story where he was already something like ten
days or two weeks into production before he cast her.

(18:44):
They were like, we can't figure out who the actress is,
but we'll just start shooting and we'll figure it out,
which to me sounds terrifying, but James Wales seemed to
have it all in hand. We talked a lot about
the Bride of Frankenstein, of course, in our two parter
that we did about Elsa Lanchester a couple of years ago,
but we didn't at that time really discuss how the
film impacted James Whale's life and career. In terms of

(19:06):
commercial success, the film was an unqualified success. There was
no way you could frame it where it was not
a huge hit. After Whale's Bride had terrified and charmed
audiences and made a lot of money in the process,
Wale was given more or less free reign to work
on whatever projects he wanted to at Universal. This was
a unique situation. Only a very few directors at the
time had this level of creative freedom that James Whale

(19:29):
had earned. And next up, we're going to delve into
what his life was like after the Bride, But first
we're gonna pause for a little sponsor break. Even though
James Whale was getting pressure to make another horror film
immediately after The Bride of Frankenstein, he opted to direct

(19:51):
a comedic murder mystery called Remember Last Night. And this
takes place in the aftermath of a drunken party during
which there was a murder which none of the attendees,
who all got black out drunk, could recall. A hypnotist
is summoned to help recover the partygoers memories, but then
additional murders take place, deepening the whole mystery and sending
everything into disarray. Remember Last Night was a money pit.

(20:16):
Universal took a hit on it because ticket sales were
so dismal. They ended up deep in the red. On
that one. Wale needed a successful film, and his next
picture was just that. It wasn't horror but instead it
was a musical. He adapted the stage place show Boat
into a huge, lavish production that once again pleased the
studio by making a nice profit. Yeah, but because of Showboat,

(20:38):
the studio actually changed significantly. It made a nice profit,
but not for the people that originally started the project.
So when the Lemlies put the studio in a financially
precarious position, they were actually pushed out in six They
had been willing to take risks, both creatively and financially,
but even though Carl Lemley Sr. Had founded Universal alone

(21:00):
that he had taken out to complete the over budget
show Boat ended up doing him in before the picture,
which turned a very nice profit, was even released. Standard Capital,
which had issued the loan, seized control of Universal financier
John Cheever. Cowden became president and chairman of the studio,
and despite just having made a massively successful film, James

(21:22):
Whale suddenly found himself on a tight leash, no more
freedom to do as he pleased creatively. Almost immediately, the
sting of being overseen by leadership that was a lot
more worried about money than artist ry and really hit Whale.
In seven, he directed a film adaptation called The Roadback,
which was based on a novel, and the film was

(21:43):
critical of the Nazi regime. The German government threatened to
boycott all Universal Pictures if the film wasn't edited significantly
to remove all the anti Nazis sentiment. Under the Lemley's
Whale might have had more leverage to keep his movie
as he had made it. A cowed and feared the
loss of the profit from the German market. He had

(22:04):
a second director come in and reshoot entire sections of
the film. Significant editing was done on the portions that
Whale had shot. I feel like that's one of those
things that in retrospect everybody probably felt really stupid for
having done. But that's just me. I don't know, uh.
During seven and eight, Whale directed several small pictures, including

(22:26):
a remake of The Kiss Before the Mirror titled Wives
under Suspicion, but none of those films were really successes.
He had been kind of alienated at Universal, so he
made several movies as a freelance director with other studios.
In NY nine, he made The Man in the Iron Mask,
which was one of his strongest efforts of the last
several feature films. The score was nominated for an Oscar

(22:49):
and it was also Peter Cushing's first film. Reviews were mixed,
but it was ultimately a successful commercial offering. His last
two feature films, Green Hill and They Dare Not Love
We're released in nineteen forty and nineteen forty one. Green
Hell starred Douglas Fairbanks, and a jungle adventure in South America,
was incredibly expensive to make and was such a flop

(23:13):
that the studio reused the lavish sets just to try
to recoup some of their losses in the overhead. They
Dare Not Love was another war picture, this time about
a Prince of Austria forced to flee to London when
the Nazis took over his country. A second director, Charles Vidor,
also worked on that film, allegedly because Whale had gotten

(23:34):
sick with the flu, but there were a lot of
rumors that there were actually on set conflicts with the
director that led to that change. After They Dare Not Love,
Wales stepped away from work for a while. He decided
to return to his roots as an artist, and he
set up a studio in his home. He occasionally picked
up small directing jobs, but for the most part he
spent the nineteen forties and semi retirement. In nineteen fifty two,

(23:58):
Whale returned to England. He was directing a play there,
a farcet titled Pagan and the Parlor. He had asked
his longtime partner David Lewis to go with him, as
he planned to extend the trip into a European tour,
but David, who had been dealing with his own professional challenges,
didn't feel like he could take an extended leave, so
James went alone. After spending several weeks in London seeing

(24:22):
to the production, Wale moved on to Paris, where he
didn't know very many people, but one night he met
a young man from Strasbourg named Pierre Fogel. Fogel was
twenty five and he started a relationship with the sixty
three year old Whale. James purchased a car and hired
Pierre's his chauffeurst that the two men had a pretext

(24:42):
to travel together. When he went back to London to
continue work on Pagan and the Parlor, Fogel went with him, Yeah,
just for clarity on how the timing of that play worked.
He had gone to London, done several weeks of pre production,
gone away while things like costumes and sets were built,
and then he came back when it came time to
get to rehearsals. But the touring production of Pagan and

(25:05):
the Parlor fell apart because it became apparent that the
leading lady in the show, Hermione Badeley, had a serious
drinking problem. During one performance, she actually stumbled onto the
stage at completely the wrong time, and because her contracts
stipulated that she would retain the role as long as
the production continued to tour, she couldn't legally be replaced,

(25:25):
So the decision was made to shut it down completely
and James Whale returned home to Los Angeles, but he
had a plan to move Pierre Fogel to the United States,
and when he got home, he told David Everything that
he had met a young man in a club in
Paris and that his new romance had really reinvigorated his life,
and that he intended for the young man to live

(25:47):
with them. David Lewis did not want to share his
home and his beloved with a stranger imported from Paris,
and David ultimately decided to move out. It was an
abrupt end to the relation and ship, but the two
men stayed friends. Fogel arrived in l a shortly after
the new year, but then in nineteen fifty three he

(26:08):
returned to Paris, and his exit catalyzed a period of
true hedonism for Wale. He became infamous for hosting wild
pool parties for scores of young men, but when Pierre
returned to Waleses home in mid nineteen fifty four, things
changed almost instantly, and the retired director became almost antisocial.
He had always been known, even before his sort of

(26:30):
hedonism period, for having these amazing parties and knowing really
fabulous people and just having a really fun lifestyle, but
at that point he stopped hosting those famous dinner parties
and he rarely ventured out, only visiting friends occasionally, and
instead he chose to stay home and paint. In nineteen
fifty six, Whale had a minor stroke during dinner. Pierre

(26:52):
could see that something was off, but James seemed to
recover after a few moments and he seemed like himself again.
But within a few days it became clear that there
was some damage. His coordination was off, his mood would
change really abruptly when he finally went to a doctor.
Because he hadn't sought care sooner, there wasn't much that
could be done. Yeah, Pierre had actually said should we

(27:14):
get a doctor, and James was like, no, I think
I'm fine. Like it was a very minor couple of
moments where he was just kind of not quite right
and then felt like he recovered, almost like what would
happen in any number of you know, passing illnesses. So
they thought it was nothing. But then a second, more
severe stroke followed a few months later, and this led

(27:35):
to a hospitalization. This also became uh kind of a
layered treatment situation because he was also diagnosed with depression,
and to treat that, he was given shock treatments. But
after he finally returned home, he hired one of the
male nurses, j Wrigley, who had looked after him during
his hospitalization, as his personal nurse. After this second stroke,

(27:57):
whale did a little design work for various product shins,
but he really had trouble with mood swings. He had
an increasing dismay at needing to be dependent on other people.
On seven, he went about his morning routine, and then
he waded into the swimming pool, where he dove headfirst
into the water, striking his head on the bottom. His

(28:18):
maid found him when she tried to find him for lunch.
James had left a note he saw only decline in
his future and he didn't want to live that way.
He also added a PostScript to that note that his
finances were all handled and he asked those that he
loved to please understand that he was choosing to not
suffer any longer for his wishes. He was cremated, although

(28:39):
why he had wanted to have his ashes scattered, they
were not. They were putting an urn and um Uh
interred in the cemetery. His will divided his estate among
Pierre Fogel for Whales surviving four siblings, and David Lewis.
There were a lot of rumors at the time that

(29:01):
this happened about what had happened, because that note wasn't
public for a long time. Yeah, yeah, there were lots
of u uh theories about what that could have been,
what could have actually happened, and if there had been
foul play, and um, but no, and he was I
I won't say I love it, but I it was

(29:23):
so in character for him to explain that the finances
were all fine, because he had, in part, probably because
he had grown up so very poor, always been really
careful and really smart about money, Like he lived a
very fabulous life, but he always did so exactly within
his means and had put away enough money that when
he decided he didn't want to direct anymore for a while,

(29:45):
that was not going to be a financial burden in
any way. So it does when you read it, it
does sort of strike me as almost comedically perfectly in
character for him to be like, don't worry, the finances
are all taken care of. Uh. That's so very English
of him, in the way that he liked everything to
be very ordered. So uh. While he's known to this

(30:09):
day largely as a director of horror films, do you
actually look at his body of work that does only
make up about twenty percent of it. And that is
why I decided to do his episode now instead of
saving it for October because he didn't feel like he
was a horror director. He felt like he was a
director of many things, so it seemed a little more
respectful to just put it during the middle of the

(30:31):
middle of late spring, early summer. I did, Uh, when
I set up the tags for today's episode, I did
tag him with those episodes because they are related. But
that's just so they'll be in the same collection on
our website. All the stuff you can find in one place. Yeah,
that's I mean. I think for a lot of people

(30:52):
that are film buffs, that might be their entree into
seeing the work of James Whale. But there are some
really fun ones outside of it. Like they're not all
good Greenhill, It's not a good movie. There's like, no,
there's no way to make that a good movie. You
could try. But uh, some of his other films really
are quite interesting. He because he came from that design background,

(31:17):
his eye for the visual was always spectacular, so the
way he would set up shots was really wonderful. Uh.
There are some great stories about how when he first
went to Hollywood as a dialogue coach, he was keenly
aware of how the art of filmmaking was being ignored
a little bit because they were so focused on capturing
the audio of dialogue that they would set up coverage

(31:38):
shots that had nothing to do with composition, but just
where they could put microphones. And he was like that,
there's there are better ways to do this. Uh So,
so he's he's very interesting. Uh. One of the books
I read in preparation for this, that's a biography of him,
is really excellent and talks a lot about his insights
into films he was coming into the business and and

(32:01):
theater as well, and he just seemed like an incredibly
astute and smart person who really knew what he wanted
to do on any given project, which I sort of love.
I have a listener mail. It is also about a
director that we've already talked about, and I lately have
been seeming listener mail quite by accident, but I love
this email so and is from our listener, Lindsay. She writes,

(32:23):
Dear Holly and Tracy. When you mentioned that Lotta Reinenger
grew up in the Charlottenburg neighborhood in Berlin during your
recent episode, I was so excited, Although I didn't know
anything about Lotta Reineger and her enchanting animation. I did
know a little bit about Charlottenburg because I happened to
live there. After learning about her from your well researched podcast,
I set out to find any memorials to her in

(32:44):
my neighborhood, and I was thrilled to find a plaque
on the building where she lived. The plaque reads in English,
I believe more in fairy tales than in newspapers, and
then marks the birthplace at her birthplace uh and talks
about how she was the pioneer of cartoons, and then
it goes on. Between ninety six she created the first
long animated film of film history. It was mainly based

(33:07):
on fairy tales and opera motifs. She designed numerous silhouettes
and silhouette films. She left Germany and I need thirty five,
returned before the end of the war and returned to
Berlin and lived in England from nineteen nine. Lindsay rights.
Because of your podcast, I was not only able to
learn about a little known place near me, but I
was also able to teach my children about lot of
Rehineger and share some of her animation that I found online.

(33:30):
I hope her kids were captivated. I'm very curious how
modern kids perceive animation in that style, so if anybody
wants to share those insights, please do. Thank you so
much Lindsay for this email. What a wonderful thing to
be able to walk out into your neighborhood and find
a lot of Rhineger's birthplace. That sounds very cool to me.
If you would like to email us, you can do

(33:51):
so at History Podcast at how stubb works dot com.
We are also across social media as Missed in History,
and that is also our website Missed in his Ree
dot com, where we have every episode of the show
that's ever existed, is well like show notes on any
of the ones that Tracy and I have worked on together.
So come and visit us at Miston History dot com.

(34:14):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how staff works dot com. M