One day I lost the notebook. I was beside myself, because it seemed that everything I knew was in that notebook. I’m not superstitious, I didn’t think that the loss of the notebook meant the loss of my luck as well, but it had very valuable information in it and unfortunately, once I write something down in black and white, I tend to forget it.
I called Noah Dietrich. I had him retrace my routes that I’d traveled that day from Muirfield Road back and forth to United Artists. I told him to drive down that road and get down on his hands and knees every ten yards to see if it had fallen out of the car. He also had to creep around the studios – he sent me the cleaning bill for his trousers – but he still couldn’t find the notebook. I advertised in the newspapers. I offered a $500 reward and spent more than a thousand dollars in advertising to get that little ten-cent notebook back, and I never did. That still burns me up when I think about it.
By 1927, when I was twenty-one years old, I had decided that I wanted to make a big, realistic picture about flying in the First World War. I wanted to do something important. I wanted my life to be of significance. I had the energy and arrogance of youth. And I had money to back them up.
They’d made a few flying pictures before then, but none were realistic, and by then I’d started to fly regularly and I knew all the hot pilots around Southern California – Charlie LaJotte, Frank Clarke, Frank Tomick, Roy Wilson, Jimmie Angel, Ross Cook, Al Johnson, Lyn Hayes, all of them. A lot of those guys had flown in the war and they’d seen some of these films that had been produced, including Wings, and they said, ‘Howard, it just wasn’t like that.’
I said, ‘Well, tell me what it was like.’
We had a lot of bull sessions – they liked me, because they thought I was crazy, like them – and the more they told me, the more I could see there was a great picture to be made, if it was made the way it was. The first time I heard that phrase, ‘the way it was,’ was from Ernest Hemingway. But that was twenty years later, when Ernest and I were friends.
In 1927 I made the commitment. I began to shoot Hell’s Angels.
We did things in that movie that had never been done before. I’m talking about the second version, because there were two. I shot it silent, and then talkies got started and I decided it was impossible to do this picture as a silent. The Vitaphone process had come in and I knew that it was to movies what the Sharp-Hughes drill bit had been to the oil business. I’d learned my lesson young: if you move with the times you can survive and do well, but if you want to come out on top of the heap you have to move just a little bit ahead of the times. You have to take the risks involved as well.
I decided to reshoot the picture in sound. It wasn’t necessary to do the flying scenes a second time – and it would have cost a fortune – because there was very little talking during the battles, and that could be dubbed in the studio. It did take me a while to figure out how to get the sound of planes in combat, but I finally hit on the solution. We hung a pair of microphones from a helium balloon about a thousand feet over Caddo Field in the San Fernando Valley, and I got Pancho Barnes – a famous aviatrix and stunt pilot – to buzz the mike two hours a day for nearly a week. Pancho flew a Travel Air Mystery S racer, and that engine could sound like a squadron of Fokkers when she revved it up and did a steep climb. We mixed those sound tracks every which way and got all the effects we needed.
We did something in that picture that was revolutionary. First of all we shot some of the scenes in Technicolor, which was a new process. There’s a scene in England, where the pilots, just before they’re taking off on a mission, have a big dance – and that was shot in color and cut into the film, which was of course made in black-and-white. And we had a red glaze over the film in some of the other parts. That was all new.
I did another thing that was even more exciting. We used a widescreen film like Cinemascope but then it was called Magnascope. There’s a moment in the picture just before the night sequence when the boys, Ben Lyon and Jim Hall, go out over France on a mission.
A title flashed on the screen: ‘SOMEBODY ALWAYS GETS IT ON THE NIGHT PATROL.’ And then the German planes started to come over. We had a system of pulleys rigged up in the theaters, and the screen got wider and wider and you’d hear the German Fokkers coming. We had special amplifying equipment and the noise got louder and louder, until that whole screen opened up and you saw a skyful of planes. That was a revolutionary device and it was my idea. We never had a preview, but I sat in the back row in some of the first performances. People shrank back in their seats when the German planes roared on to the screen. The screen kept growing bigger, and those planes looked like they were coming right at you and you were going to get chopped up by the props. Men sucked in their breath. Women screamed. I loved it. I was like a kid with a new toy, I’d built the toy, and my toy worked.
I had three airfields, and several hundred planes to simulate the actual combat aircraft. Most of the planes were real, like the Sopwith Camels, Avros, and a captured Gotha bomber, and I had some of the Fokkers shipped from Germany. I got Fokker himself, the man who built them, to round them up for me. I spared no expense. My whole idea was, and still is: once you commit, don’t hesitate or skimp. Do it right.
The guys who flew these ships were the real thing. Frank Clarke was a hell of a pilot, and a wild man. He was chief pilot on the picture, Tomick was in charge of the camera ships, and I was directing from the air in my Waco. Frank Clarke would fly anywhere in anything and take any risk – or, almost any risk. It turned out there was one he wouldn’t take. There was a scene where a plane had to come in toward camera and make a sharp left bank at about 200 feet.
Frank said, ‘I can’t do it, Howard.’ This was a Waco, with a Le Rhone engine, which has a hell of a torque. ‘At that altitude,’ he said, ‘this goddamn plane’s going to crash right into the ground.’
I didn’t believe him. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
‘Howard, don’t.’
‘I can do it, Frank.’
He couldn’t talk me out of it and I couldn’t shame him into doing it. I took the ship up, went into the turn, and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital, half my face in bandages. I had a crushed cheekbone and needed some surgery to repair it; you can still see the indentation. That was my second crash. Frank ran up to the plane afterwards, they told me, to see if I was still alive, and I was, and he said, ‘Thank God! I thought we’d lost our meal ticket.’
I laughed when I heard that. I loved those guys, those pilots. They could say anything, even the truth, and it didn’t matter.
One time, when we were still getting ready to shoot Hell’s Angels, we’d got the German Gotha bomber fixed up in pretty good shape. Frank Clarke and I, with a couple of girls Frank had lined up for us, flew up the coast – except the Gotha wasn’t fixed up as well as all that, and we had some engine problem and Frank brought us down to a nice landing on a strip of beach near Monterrey, where we spent the night in a little Portuguese fishermen’s settlement where hardly anyone spoke English.
Frank was a good pilot, but he wasn’t much of a mechanic. And I was a pretty good mechanic but I couldn’t fix what was wrong with the Gotha. We had to send back for parts and spend the night there with these two girls in a little shack. Kind of crowded, just one room with the four of us. An odd experience for me. I’d never gone in for orgies. It made me feel kind of funny, the four of us in one room. And we each had our own girl, and then we switched the girls.