Shooting began on
The Blue Dahlia in March of 1945 without a completed screenplay. As the production was rushed through to ensure that star Alan Ladd was finished before he had to be back in uniform, writer Raymond Chandler worked feverishly to get the script done.
Production on
The Blue Dahlia got off to a good start. Director George Marshall moved the shooting along at a brisk pace, and the film was coming in ahead of schedule. "It was not until the middle of our fourth week that a faint chill of alarm invaded the studio when the script girl pointed out that the camera was rapidly gaining on the script," recalled John Houseman in a 1965 article he wrote for
Harper's magazine. "We had shot sixty-two pages in four weeks; Chandler, during that time, had turned in only twenty-two-with another thirty to go."
Chandler's main problem was that he did not have an ending to the story. Originally, he had intended the killer in the story to be Buzz (William Bendix), one of Alan Ladd's Navy buddies who returns home with him. Buzz, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, would have committed the murder of Ladd's wife during a blackout and been completely unaware that he himself was the killer. However, when the Navy got wind of this plot twist, they vehemently objected. The Navy did not want a service man to be portrayed as a murderer. As a result, Paramount told Chandler that he had to come up with a new ending.
The pressure of having to finish the screenplay to
The Blue Dahlia combined with the curveball of having to write an entirely new ending was too much for Raymond Chandler. He quickly came down with a severe case of writer's block. "Still, I was not worried," said Houseman. "Ray had written such stories for years and I was quite confident that sooner or later (probably later since he seemed to enjoy the suspense) he would wind up the proceedings with an 'artistic' revelation (it was his word) and a caustic last line. But as the days went by and the camera went on chewing its way through the script and still no ending arrived, signs of tension began to appear."
The panicking studio called Chandler to a meeting that was kept secret from Houseman. The Paramount brass told Chandler that if he didn't deliver the rest of the script ASAP the entire future of the studio would be in jeopardy. As an incentive, the studio offered him a $5,000 bonus to hurry up and finish
The Blue Dahlia.
The reaction that the studio had hoped to inspire in Chandler backfired. Chandler immediately went to John Houseman to tell him about the meeting and the bonus offer. "It was the front-office calculation, I suppose," said Houseman, "that by dangling this fresh carrot before Chandler's nose they were executing a brilliant and cunning maneuver. They did not know their man. They succeeded, instead, in disturbing him in three distinct and separate ways:
One, his faith in himself was destroyed. By never letting Ray share my apprehensions, I had convinced him of my confidence in his ability to finish the script on time. This sense of security was now hopelessly shattered.
Two, he had been insulted. To Ray, the bonus was nothing but a bribe. To be offered a large additional sum of money for the completion of an assignment for which he had already contracted and which he had every intention of fulfilling was by his standards a degradation and a dishonor.
Three, by going to him behind my back they had invited him to betray a friend and fellow Public School man. The way the interview had been conducted ('sneakily') filled Ray with humiliation and rage." Chandler was so shaken up by this move that he considered walking off the film, but Houseman convinced him to sleep on it before he made any decisions. There wasn't any time to lose-there were only 10 days left before Alan Ladd was due to go back into the army.
The next day Chandler returned to John Houseman's office. He was willing to finish the screenplay, he said, but he wasn't sure that he would be
able. Chandler, who was a well-known alcoholic, told Houseman that he had put down the bottle a long time ago. However, drinking, he said, is what made him a better writer. "This brought us to the crux of the matter;" said Houseman, "having repeated that he was unable and unwilling to continue working on
The Blue Dahlia at the Studio, sober, Ray assured me of his complete confidence in his ability to finish it at home --
drunk."
Working from home was a privilege rarely granted to writers employed by the studio, but Chandler insisted that it was the only way he would be able to finish the screenplay. He also presented a list of requirements that he would need in order to fulfill his obligation. They included "two Cadillac limousines, to stand day and night outside the house with drivers available," "six secretaries," and "a direct line open at all times to my office by day, to the studio switchboard at night and to my home at all times." After thinking Chandler's proposal over, Houseman agreed. "Ray now became extremely cheerful," said Houseman in a 1962 interview. "It was almost noon, and he suggested, as proof of my faith in him, that we drive to the most expensive restaurant in Los Angeles and tie one on together. We left the studio and drove to Perino's, where I watched him down three double martinis before eating a large and carefully selected lunch, followed by three double stingers. We then drove back to his house, where the two Cadillacs were already in position and the first relay of secretaries at their posts..."
Even though he was "horrified" by it, John Houseman considered Chandler's willingness to start drinking again in order to finish
The Blue Dahlia to be a noble sacrifice for the good of the studio. "[Chandler] did not minimize the hazards [of drinking];" said Houseman in 1964, "he pointed out that his plan...would call for deep faith on my part and supreme courage on his, since he would in effect be completing the script at the risk of his life. (It wasn't the drinking that was dangerous, he explained, since he had a doctor who gave him such massive injections of glucose that he could last for weeks with no solid food at all. It was the sobering up that was parlous; the terrible strain of his return to normal living)."
While Houseman took Chandler's behavior as a sacrifice, others considered it to be nothing more than the self-serving manipulations of a functioning alcoholic. In a 1978 article for
Action magazine called "Through a Shot Glass, Darkly: How Raymond Chandler Screwed Hollywood," Billy Wilder's biographer Maurice Zolotow called Chandler's plan a scam "of such daring and brilliance that rich old screenwriters still tell the story with awe as they sip their martinis in the late afternoon on Brentwood patios." Zolotow went on to say that Chandler had never stopped drinking, and once he had obligated himself to writing the screenplay for
The Blue Dahlia his drinking made it difficult for him to keep up with the writing pace expected of him. When he came to John Houseman with his elaborate plan to finish the screenplay, according to Zolotow, Chandler was simply looking for an excuse to be able to work from home and drink at the same time.
According to the 1997 book
Raymond Chandler: A Biography by Tom Hiney, Chandler's offer wasn't quite so calculated. "Wilder's biographer presumes deviousness," wrote Hiney, "when more often Chandler's lies were a form of self-delusion. The fact was that Chandler frequently resorted to fantasy when making excuses for his alcoholism, or for other truths he wanted to forget."
Whether it was a self-sacrifice on Raymond Chandler's part or the scam of an alcoholic looking for a reason to drink, the new plan to finish
The Blue Dahlia worked. Chandler, working and drinking from home, was happy and productive during the last weeks of writing. "I went over there from time to time," said John Houseman in 1962, "and he would extend a white and trembling hand and acknowledge my expressions of gratitude with the modest smile of a gravely wounded war hero who has shown courage well beyond the call of duty." Soon, true to his word, Chandler was able to deliver the completed screenplay as promised. "During those last eight days of shooting," said Houseman, "Chandler did not draw one sober breath, nor did one speck of solid food pass his lips."
With Chandler's finished screenplay and a new ending,
The Blue Dahlia managed to finish shooting on schedule, much to the disappointment of director George Marshall, according to John Houseman. "I think George had looked forward to saving the day by improvising the last week's work on the set and that he was disappointed and perhaps a little hurt that we preferred the work of a man in an advanced stage of alcoholism to his own," said Houseman. "But he behaved admirably...The film was finished with six days to spare and Alan Ladd went off to the Army and Paramount made a heap of money."
While the studio executives may have been happy with how
The Blue Dahlia turned out, there were several things about the film that Raymond Chandler didn't like. First, there was the ending that the Navy Department had forced him to change. In a letter to friend and crime literature critic James Sandoe in June 1946 Chandler wrote: "What the Navy Department did to the story was a little thing like making me change the murderer and hence make a routine whodunit out of a fairly original idea. What I wrote was a story of a man who killed (executed would be a better word) his pal's wife under the stress of a great and legitimate anger, then blanked out and forgot all about it; then with perfect honesty did his best to help the pal get out of a jam, then found himself in a set of circumstances which brought about partial recall. The poor guy remembered enough to make it clear who the murderer was to others, but never realized it himself. He just did and said things he couldn't have done or said unless he was the killer; but he never knew he did them or said them and never interpreted them."
Chandler was also unhappy with Veronica Lake's performance as Joyce Harwood. He referred to the actress as "Miss Moronica Lake" and complained to Sandoe in a letter: "The only times she's good is when she keeps her mouth shut and looks mysterious. The moment she tries to behave as if she had a brain she falls flat on her face. The scenes we had to cut out because she loused them up! And there are three godawful close shots of her looking perturbed that make me want to throw my lunch over the fence."
Also, despite director George Marshall's promise to not improvise his own dialogue into the script, Chandler claimed in a letter to Sandoe that he almost walked off the film because of it: "...it is ludicrous to suggest that any writer in Hollywood, however obstreperous, has a 'free hand' with a script;" said Chandler, "he may have a free hand with the first draft, but after that they start moving in on him. Also what happens on the set is beyond the writer's control. In this case I threatened to walk off the picture, not yet finished, unless they stopped the director putting in fresh dialogue out of his own head."
In his defense, George Marshall denied any significant tampering with the script. In a letter he wrote in 1974 Marshall said, "When the treatment was handed to me exactly as written on yellow foolscap paper, I was so impressed by the material and the quality of writing I remarked to an associate...that in all the years I had been making films, I had finally found a story which was so beautifully written I could shoot it right from the treatment...Why would I want to re-write something which I had thought so perfect at the beginning? Surely because the material had been put into script form would be no reason for destroying its inherent value." The only thing that Marshall admitted to changing was a scene in which Leo (Don Costello) and a fellow thug kidnap Johnny Morrison. While the scene was being shot, actor Costello had an on-set accident and broke his toe. Because of the injury, Costello's broken toe was incorporated into the story. Since Raymond Chandler was busy working from home at the time, Marshall did not consult him on the changes.
Regardless of Chandler's complaints, audiences flocked to see
The Blue Dahlia when it opened in April 1946. Critics responded with positive notices, and Chandler received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
by Andrea Passafiume
