In this exclusive outtake from Bing Crosby Rediscovered, hear never-before-released audio of Bing Crosby singing the lyrics he penned to roast Hollywood director Raoul Walsh. The filming of "Going Hollywood," starring Crosby and Marian Davies, had its obstacles. When Bing poked fun at the director and film, Louis Mayer at MGM Studios banned Walsh and Bing from future MGM productions. VIDEO LINK
THE HONOR SYSTEM: THE LOST FILM In which I find myself in prison and go searching for the ghosts of Milton Sills, Raoul Walsh and Glenn Ford
Movie Geeks United speaks with author Marilyn Anne Moss about her biography 'Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director'.
On my recent visit to my Eye Dr., he was talking about someone who lost an eye, and how he went on to adjust well. I told him about Raoul Walsh. When I got home, I mailed him the rest of the story: "In 'Sadie Thompson' (1928), starring Gloria Swanson as a prostitute seeking a new life in Samoa, Walsh starred as Swanson's boyfriend in his first acting role since 1915; he also directed the film." "He was then hired to direct and star in 'In Old Arizona', a film about O. Henry's character the Cisco Kid. While on location for that film Walsh was in a car crash when a jackrabbit jumped through the windshield as he was driving through the desert; he lost his right eye as a result. He gave up the part and never acted again." "Warner Baxter won an Oscar for the role Walsh was originally slated to play. Walsh would wear an eye patch for the rest of his life." Correction: (I referred to Zorro, in the opening post. I meant The Cisco Kid)
Mapping Raoul Walsh “Walsh’s idea of a tender love scene is to burn down a whorehouse!” joked studio chief Jack Warner, but this amusing remark (sometimes attributed to Jack Pickford), doesn’t take into account the romantic melancholy always running underneath the surface of Walsh’s rough-and-ready films, which sometimes came out into the open as his career progressed.
Raoul died at the age of 93, in Jan, 1981. (Obit) "Some reviewers criticized Mr. Walsh for emphasizing visual excitement at the expense of characterization. He acknowledged that he ''generally decided to play for the public, because that's what kept us alive,'' but among his many commercial successes were a number of distinguished achievements and hundreds of indelible scenes. He was described as a great celebrator of life, who thoroughly enjoyed making movies." "One time I took pioneer and film director Raoul Walsh [1887-1980] to the American Film Institute for a seminar and a Q&A session. He was about ninety-one at the time. He was a great character, wearing his eye patch. He still rolled his own cigarettes and he was a very colorful, profane, outspoken character from an earlier time. He was tougher, more independent, and had more self-confidence about his way of life and his code of behavior, without compromise. So the students were asking him many of the usual questions about the old times, and then one of them asked, ‘Mr. Walsh, I understand that you were once an actor, is that true?’ And he said, ‘Sunny Boy, I played John Wilkes Booth, the man who shot Lincoln, in “The Birth of a Nation” [1915]!’ And there he was, sitting before them. There was a moment of silence, and then they stood and applauded. About fifty or sixty young people. It was like seeing a ghost [laughs], but there he was. " - Gregory Peck
"The man I knew was a lot like his movies too—unpretentious, adventurous, funny, tough, warm—he called me “Pedro,” and when he went blind toward the end of his long life and I’d ask him how it was going, all he ever said was, “Pretty tough, Pedro,” and left it at that. There was no bullshit in his pictures either." "Because he was an actor, however, he was able to help his players throughout the rest of a lengthy career. The brilliant James Cagney, whom Walsh directed in five pictures, told me once that Raoul was his idea of a real director. Which was what? I asked. Cagney answered, "A real director is a guy who, if I don’t know what the hell to do, can get up and show me!” - Peter Bogdanovich
What the Cowboy Life Taught Raoul Walsh And how his work in a Pancho Villa docufilm kicked off an amazing directorial career. Schooled by a Texas vaquero named Ramirez, he learned quickly: “Knowledge came the hard way in drifting the herd away from populated centers where local strays might join in and cause trouble; in standing night watch; in learning to sing and talk to the resting herd and to slap my chaps, so the cattle would not spook at the silence in which the howl of a coyote might make them stampede.” The pay was $30 a month and “found.” “The ‘found’ was beans, sometimes moldy bacon that gave me stomach cramps, and coffee strong enough to melt the spoon. It was a tough life, but I had asked for it. In later years, I would receive a hundred times that much just for telling people how it should be done.” After a few months “I was as brown as an Indian and as hard as nails.” Pancho Villa In 1914, the Mutual Film Company contracted with the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa to make a combination documentary and fictional film on Villa’s life. Mutual actually financed Villa’s battles, for all intents and purposes subsidizing the Mexican Revolution. Walsh codirected and played Villa as a young man; Villa played himself in later scenes. Villa’s intention was twofold: first, to get money to finance his revolution and, second, to create a propaganda film that would earn him sympathy throughout the U.S. and Europe. Villa, the contract specified, would receive 20 percent of all box office revenues. Walsh reported Griffith telling him, “‘You will direct the picture, Mutual will supply a cameraman, and General Villa will be paid $500 in gold each month while the production is going on.’ He did not tell me that Villa had shot a would-be promoter who offered him paper money.” Walsh received little monetary compensation for his efforts. On his way home, when he stopped at a bank in Juarez to change Villa pesos into American money, he figured his share would be worth $40,000. “I had made plans,” he recalled nearly 60 years later. “I would buy a house with a swimming pool, a garage for the Stutz and invite my father and George”—his brother—“to live with me. I was understandably shocked, therefore, when the banker shook his head and said the Villa money was worthless.”
Wyatt On the Set! The frontier marshal strikes out in Tinsel Town. On a sunny day in 1916 Raoul Walsh—the one-time cowboy, sailor and movie actor-turned-film director—was taking it easy between studio shots at the Mutual Film conglomerate in Edendale, California. (Angelinos today know the area as Echo Park and Silver Lake.) An assistant told Walsh that two guys at the studio gate were asking for him. “One says his name is London.” Walsh told the assistant that if his first name was Jack, “bring them in.” Wyatt Earp
I add this bit about meeting Wyatt Earp & Jack London...... "But money couldn’t buy him the legend that working with Pancho Villa added to his reputation. A few years later, when he was still working for Mutual, an assistant informed him that two guys at the gate were asking to see him. “That is how I met Jack London and Wyatt Earp. London was getting on in years, but his seamed face was still as rugged as his stories, which had thrilled me when I was growing up. His books had been published in most countries of the world. The legendary Earp was tall and a little stooped, but I could still see him as the marshal of Tombstone."