Recorded at the Historic Camelot Theater, Palm Springs, CA on April 14, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
(ALIECE PICKETT:) Today’s special guest speaker is Mr. Rob Kozlowski.
He is a film historian, journalist, author, and educator.
He has made a lifetime study of comedy in film and live performance.
He has taught comedy writing at Second City Chicago and at the Cinema and Television Arts Department of Columbia College, Chicago.
Mr. Kozlowski’s first two books in the entertainment industry are “The Art of Chicago Improv” and “The Actor’s Guide to the Internet”.
His most recent book is “Becoming Nick and Nora, The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy”.
This book is a dual biography of William Powell and Myrna Loy charting their lives and careers from their parallel paths as screen villains to the beloved stars they became in “The Thin Man” series.
The book examines their films in the context of the time in which they were made, and why these films still resonate with today’s audiences.
Mr. Kozlowski’s research of archival studio records, not available to prior biographers, dispels oft-repeated stories, including what led to William Powell and Myrna Loy being cast in “The Thin Man” (1934).
He will be signing his book in the lobby after our discussion following the screening of today’s film.
Please join me in welcoming Mr. Rob Kozlowski.
(ROB KOZLOWSKI:) Thank you, Aliece.
And thank you very much to the Film Society of Screwball Comedy for hosting me for this screening.
I think you’re going to love this movie.
How many of you have seen the first “Thin Man” movie?
Great.
If you love the first one, you’ll almost certainly love the second.
It’s one of my favorite titles for a sequel.
Inevitably, MGM executives ask what comes after “The Thin Man”?
“After the Thin Man”.
One of the challenges, as you may or may not know, “The Thin Man” was based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, who was well known for writing “The Maltese Falcon”, “The Glass Key”, and several other detective novels.
“The Thin Man” was released in June of 1934 by MGM after an extremely fast pre-production, production, and post-production schedule.
MGM bought the rights to the novel in January, and the film was released in June.
They went through the process of casting the film, writing it, filming it, editing it in five months.
You don’t see that today.
The film was an unexpected smash hit.
Nominated for multiple Oscars, including Best Picture, the film made superstars of William Powell and Myrna Loy, who previous to “The Thin Man” were known for dramas.
We know them today, 90 years later, as great comedy stars.
But they both started their careers as villains in silent films.
Their personas eventually evolved in the early ’30s to become dramatic stars.
So, their emergence with “The Thin Man” becoming comic stars was unexpected, and a wonderful surprise for MGM.
As with any enormous smash hit, once the film became a box office sensation MGM knew immediately they wanted to make a sequel.
Hunt Stromberg, the producer of the film, came up with a treatment just a couple of months after the release of “The Thin Man”.
He wanted to bring back every supporting character from the first movie.
He knew he wanted to start the second movie immediately after the end of the first.
For those of you who have seen “The Thin Man”, it takes place during the Christmas season.
Once the mystery is solved, Nick and Nora get on the train from New York to go back to their home in San Francisco.
So, with this second film, they’ve just arrived in San Francisco.
It’s New Year’s Eve.
That’s all I’m going to tell you right now.
That’s all Hunt Stromberg could come up with in August of 1934.
The problem was that the author Dashiell Hammett did not have any more “Nick and Nora Charles” stories.
So MGM, to their chagrin, had to hire Dashiell Hammett to come up with a story and screenplay.
Hammett was notoriously unreliable, as an unrepentant alcoholic.
It took him about a year to come up with a story and a treatment.
But he came up with one.
I think it was September of 1935, he delivered the treatment to MGM.
Screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a married couple, took on the mantle of writing the screenplay for the second film.
A lot of credit is given to the personality of “Nick and Nora Charles” to Hammett’s original novel.
But if you read Hammett’s original novel, there’s a lot that’s in that first movie that’s in the novel.
But so much of it is created by the screenwriters Goodrich and Hackett, a very vibrant, creative, ingenious married couple who worked as writing partners for decades, and who contributed to screenplays for such future classics as “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) and “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959).
Goodrich and Hackett gave “Nick and Nora” their personalities.
Of course, without William Powell and Myrna Loy, we wouldn’t be sitting here 90 years later watching the film on a big screen.
So Goodrich and Hackett delivered, were able to work on the screenplay in late 1935.
There was one little hitch, Myrna Loy.
By this point, at the beginning of 1935, once “The Thin Man” was over, MGM wanted to cast William Powell and Myrna Loy in every movie together.
They wanted to pair them up in everything.
So, they paired them up in a movie called “Escapade”.
If you’ve never heard of “Escapade”, it’s because no one can see it.
It’s been tied up in legal problems for decades.
You can’t even get bootlegs on the internet.
Myrna Loy was cast as this winsome Austrian girl. Very much a supporting role to William Powell.
Loy wasn’t very demanding, but because of the success of “The Thin Man”, she felt that she had some leverage.
And she said, “I need a raise”, because Loy was getting paid half as much as William Powell at this point.
And she said, “All I want is to get paid what Bill gets paid”.
MGM did not agree.
And when Loy was cast in the film “Escapade”, she read the screenplay and was like, “This is terrible”.
“This part is so small, and I’m playing this weak, maid-character.
This is not for me”.
But Louis B. Mayer, as was his habit, begged and begged, and did a little crying thing in his office that she should do the movie.
So, she acquiesced.
After a week of filming “Escapade” in early 1935, MGM started looking for somebody else to play the part, realizing that it was wrong for Myrna Loy.
Myrna Loy was not happy about this.
She was asked to be released from her contract and eventually won that battle.
She went off to Europe, basically on a year-long strike.
So, filming of “After The Thin Man” (1936) was delayed for quite some time.
Interestingly, “Escapade” introduced to American audiences the Austrian actress Luise Rainer, who replaced Myrna Loy.
And Rainer would have a very successful, albeit very short career.
She would win the Best Actress Academy Award, the very first person to do this, back-to-back, for “The Great Ziegfeld” (1936) and “The Good Earth” (1937).
So, it wasn’t until September 1936 that “After The Thin Man” started filming, more than two years after the previous film was released.
Because the first film was such a success, “After the Thin Man” had a budget nearly three times as much as they spent on “The Thin Man”.
They did location shooting in San Francisco.
And there’s a lavish production number.
MGM loved to stick a production number in the middle of every movie.
Even if it wasn’t a musical, there was a subtly musical number.
“After The Thin Man” has that.
The film is about 20 minutes longer, and has more characters.
It set the template for sequels, right?
Sequels have to be more, more, more.
Fortunately, all of the charm of the first film is retained in the second film.
My wife, for one, prefers this film to the first.
She loves the first film, but thinks this one is a smidge better.
You might agree.
This was the second of six “Thin Man” films.
What was particularly valuable for these films for MGM was that you had a very large supporting cast.
They were able to put a lot of their contract-actors in the film.
One of the things I want you to watch for, one of the supporting actors in this film was Elissa Landi.
You probably don’t know that name, but she was another actress who came from Austria.
She made a big splash on Broadway in 1930, and Fox Films signed her to a contract.
She took lead roles in films you’ve never heard of, “Surrender” and “Body And Soul” (1931).
She was seen as a leading lady in early Fox talking pictures.
Unfortunately, her career stalled.
Fox Film went bankrupt and merged with 20th Century Pictures to become 20th Century Fox.
Landi’s contract was ended.
She signed with MGM, as a supporting character.
So, the Elissa Landi that you see in this film is an actor in decline, someone who used to be in leading roles.
Ironically, in the 1931 film “Body And Soul”, which Landi had a leading part in, a young actress named Myrna Loy had a tiny part.
So the roles were reversed for this film.
Another supporting actor in this film is James Stewart.
You might have heard of him.
This was early in Stewart’s career at MGM.
He was just signed the previous year, and made his debut in a film called “The Murder Man” (1935) with Spencer Tracy.
In 1936, he was cast in no less than nine films.
It was MGM’s habit, whenever they signed a new player under contract, they just threw them in bunches of films.
If you look at Jimmy Stewart in 1936, there are some roles you wouldn’t expect him in.
For example, he plays a supporting role in “Rose Marie” (1936), the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy operetta.
He’s in “Born To Dance” (1936), another musical.
There’s all sorts of roles. He has a small part here.
He’s with Elissa Landi.
Other actors of note are Sam Levine, who plays a cop in this picture. He would, 15 years later, catapult to fame playing Nathan Detroit in “Guys And Dolls” on Broadway.
Another actor whose name you won’t recognize is Dorothy McNulty. She would change her name several years later to Penny Singleton, and rise to fame in 28 movies playing “Blondie Bumstead”, based on the comic strip.
So, a lot of other nascent MGM stars would be in future “Thin Man” Pictures.
Donna Reed has a small role in “Shadow of the Thin Man”, which also features Stella Adler, the acting teacher in one of only three movies she made.
“After The Thin Man” was released in December 1936.
It was another big hit for MGM.
They went to work on a third sequel, or a second sequel in a third film, which would be called “Another Thin Man”, but that’s a story for another day.
Please enjoy the film.
One of the things that I like to tell people to look out for is that in 1936, location shooting was still a rarity.
The studios were, they mostly made studio-bound movies.
So look out for the shot in which you see, in the background, the Golden Gate Bridge under construction.🎥
Film Society of Screwball Comedy®
Edited by Aliece Pickett
Copyright 2025