Recorded at the Historic Camelot Theater, Palm Springs, CA on April 7, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
(ALIECE PICKETT:) Today’s special guest speaker is brought to you by Film Society.
Kristen Lopez is an entertainment journalist and Film Editor for “TheWrap”.
She is a regular contributor to TCM, most recently introducing the film “Mildred Pierce” (1945).
She has written for “Variety”, “Roger Ebert”, “MTV”, and she was the TV Editor for “IndieWire”.
She recently contributed an audio commentary for the Criterion Collection.
She is the creator, producer, and co-host of the classic film podcast, Ticklish Business, TicklishBiz.com, now running for eight years.
She has interviewed the families of today’s stars, Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea, which she and I will discuss after the film.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get scoops on those interviews.
She is the author of the book, “But Have You Read the Book?, 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films”.
She will be signing her book after our discussion, after the film is screened.
Please join me in welcoming Ms. Kristen Lopez.
(KRISTEN LOPEZ:) I am thrilled to be talking about one of my favorite Screwball Comedies, probably one of my favorite movies.
And I’m thrilled that we’re all here to experience “Sullivan’s Travels”, (1941).
How many people are watching this for the first time?
Pretty good amount of people.
You are in for a treat.
I’m kind of jealous you get to experience this for the first time.
The first time I watched this movie, I was a budding classic film fan who had a lot of free time since I was in college.
I watched this movie having known that it was an inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000).
You’ll figure out pretty easily where they got the inspiration from.
I wanted to see why the Coens were so moved by this film.
I fell in love with it right away.
It is both a send-up and a tribute to Hollywood filmmaking, as well as the power of comedy.
“Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), is a movie about why we love movies, for their power to inspire and to act as an aid to transcend our circumstances.
It’s also about the power of comedy, and how often an ability to draw a laugh helps more than drawing a tear.
Though you might also be crying from all the laughter that you are about to experience over the next 90 minutes.
Joel McCrea plays John L. Sullivan, a disillusioned movie director who wants to tell what he believes is a timeless classic about the downtrodden entitled, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”.
But he realizes that being an entitled Hollywood big shot, he hasn’t actually experienced the life which he seeks to portray.
Rather than be accused by people like me of not caring enough to do proper research, he decides to go with the life of a “forgotten man”.
His journey takes him on a madcap adventure that sees him verbally spar with a cool blonde known only as “The Girl”, played with zeal by my favorite actress, Veronica Lake, and culminates with an alleged murder and a trip to prison.
Ultimately, director and writer Preston Sturges, through the character of John L. Sullivan, illustrates that laughter can be used in films to create social change and put an eye on serious topics.
You don’t always need to, “have a little sex in it”.
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll get that terminology.
It’s a really interesting movie to look at in the grand scheme of Screwball Comedy, because if you’ve seen Screwballs of the 1930s, Screwballs of the 1940s feel different.
I’m not just saying that if you’ve watched “The Thin Man” (1934), and seen the amount of drinking that is not taking place in the later “Thin Man” movies.
By the 1940s, the Screwball Comedy had undergone a huge shift in the wake of the Great Depression coming to an end, and the rise of World War II.
Gone were daffy heiresses like Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby (1938), and the out-of-touch old money families who need a member of the lower or middle classes to put them in touch with the type of people that they had forgotten.
If you’ve seen “My Man Godfrey” (1936) with Carole Lombard, you know the type of family of which I speak.
People had seen the horrors of the Depression, and with an impending war, the lives of the rich and entitled, though good intentioned, didn’t strike the right tone.
And because of the rising moral majority of the time, things like sexuality, drinking, carousing, were seen as not being something that they wanted to utilize in filmmaking for audiences of all ages.
On top of that, the acceptance and full integration of the Hollywood Production Code had seen nearly every film end with the binary belief that good people prospered, and bad people got their comeuppance.
So, the work of Preston Sturges, a screenwriter since the 1930s, with his first directorial work, “The Great McGinty” (1940), sought to acknowledge how that landscape had changed.
Sturges had made a success being a Hollywood script doctor, whose fingerprints were seen in uncredited script work for features like “The Invisible Man” (1933), “Imitation of Life” (1934), the one with Claudette Colbert, not Lana Turner, and “Remember The Night (1939).
Sturges said about writing “Sullivan’s Travels”, he wanted to eskew the preachy stories he had been seeing, saying that films, “seem to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message”.
It’s why the movie is dedicated “To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this picture is affectionately dedicated”.
It also helped that, with the character of “John L. Sullivan”, Sturges, who was born into extreme wealth, was trying to tell stories about people who weren’t like him, and he did not want to be portrayed as a Hollywood rich boy who was just making movies about rich people.
Paramount Pictures gave Sturges $6,000 to write this script.
From there, he set out to find his cast.
Having known Joel McCrea previously, the role of “John L. Sullivan” was always planned for him.
When you watch the movie, it’s hard to believe anybody else could have played the role.
As Wyatt McCrea, his grandson, told me, Joel McCrea was the epitome of a nice guy who was able to play opposite strong women, as well as strong men and never be threatening or attempt to steal their marks or overshadow them in that way.
He said he would never be able to get a biopic made of his grandfather because he didn’t do anything salacious.
He was married to the same woman until he died and was just “a boring guy”.
I don’t think he’s boring, especially if you watch this movie.
In the case of Veronica Lake, Paramount was not keen on her.
They suggested names like Ida Lupino, Lucille Ball, Frances Farmer, and Ruby Keeler.
I think what makes her work so well is that she is not the bright-eyed, apple-cheeked, Ruby Keeler.
Nor is she the overly ardent Ida Lupino or Lucille Ball.
She fits in this nice niche in between both of them.
Preston Sturges had seen Veronica Lake in “I Wanted Wings” (1941), and he pushed for her to get his role.
It’s one, not her best, but one of her best.
Veronica Lake is now a forgotten name in Hollywood history.
But it’s impossible to ignore her cinematic contributions to the 1940s.
Specifically, her famous “peek-a-boo” bang hairstyle, which she detested.
Lake famously said, “I never did cheesecake”, meaning she never posed for the often-stock Hollywood photos of actresses in swimsuits.
Or in the case of Ann Miller, with an Easter bunny in her hat on her head.
“I just used my hair”.
Lake’s acting was initially perceived by critics as cold and sterile, though she was six months pregnant while filming this, so I’ve got to give her credit.
She was a deft comedienne, enjoyed playing comedy, and wished she had done more of it.
She often talked about wanting to re-team with Preston Sturges.
And while he did act as a producer on her 1942 feature, “I Married a Witch”, a project he initially planned to direct, the duo never worked again outside of this film.
As Preston Sturges’ son, Tom, told me, “This was Preston Sturges’ favorite of his films he directed”.
And it was Veronica Lake’s favorite film that she starred in.
Unfortunately for Sturges and Lake, they struggled with life after these successes.
Veronica Lake especially remains a figure maligned by rumors, real and imagined.
It’s been said that she and Joel McCrea did not get along while making this, and that McCrea turned down the role of her co-star in “I Married a Witch”, calling it, “I Married a Bitch”.
Based on what Wyatt McCrea has said, I don’t necessarily believe that’s a true story.
I think that’s one of the imagined rumors about her personality.
In an interview I did with McCrea’s grandson, Wyatt, he said that the pair did have a cordiality to them, and that when Lake was at her lowest ebb living in the Martha Washington Hotel in New York, McCrea would discreetly send her money.
As for Lake, her downfall from Hollywood wasn’t perceived as a curse for her.
She’d go on and do work on the stage, and write her memoirs.
She once said, “There’s no doubt I was a bit of a misfit in the Hollywood of the ’40s.
The race for glamour had left me far behind.
I didn’t really want to keep up.
I wanted my stardom without the usual trimmings.
Because of this, I was branded a rebel at the very least.
But I don’t regret that for a minute.
My appetite was my own, and I simply wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Both her and Sturges had sudden, quiet demises, her in July of 1973, at the age of 51 from cirrhosis; and Sturges would die alone in a Manhattan hotel of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 60, just a few years before, as Tom Sturges said, the wave of nostalgia for classic films, helped by Andre Bazin and his Cahiers du Cinema (renowned French film magazine), and film schools studying the work of old masters, truly took hold.
Tom Sturges says he would have loved to have seen what would have happened if his father had lived into the 1960s, when filmmakers like him were being asked to come, like Billy Wilder, to talk to film students and celebrate the work they had made.
But I don’t think either of these people would want to end on a dour note.
In this movie, they, in conjunction with Joel McCrea, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, a bunch of other great character actors, among others, make us laugh.
As “John L. Sullivan” says, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh.
Do you know that’s all some people have?
It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing, in this cockeyed caravan.”
Thank you, and please enjoy Joel McCray and Veronica Lake, and Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels”.🎥
Film Society of Screwball Comedy®
Edited by Aliece Pickett
Copyright 2025