"Laurel And Hardy Anxious To Write Their Own Gags"

By Virginia MacPherson - Hollywood, March 26, 1945

The fat man and the skinny man, who've kept Laurel and Hardy fans in
stitches for 20 years, aren't very happy themselves. They're awfully
unhappy, in fact, and here's why:

They'd like to write their own material. Only nobody'll let 'em. The
result, they say, is a long list of Laurel and Hardy comedies that went
sour.

"Nobody ever thinks of giving us a plot," Stan Laurel moaned today.
"All they do is tell us how funny we are and then push us in front of
a camera."

They are, they insist, strictly situation comedians. Those fast running
gags are fine for fellas like Abbott and Costello, where one acts as a
straight man. With Laurel and Hardy it's pantomime.

They make the customers laugh by falling into went cement of pushing
paste posts into each other's faces. And these antics have to fit into
some kind of plot.

This was the same corporate rationale handed to Boris Karloff when he asked
the Columbia front office to make a few minor script improvements in one of
his "Mad Doctor" series of 1939-41. John McCabe called this "the buck
besting the brain." Still, those Columbia Karloffs aren't bad.

--Hal E

What is interesting is that there evidently were plans to make
additional films at Fox and MGM. We know that Fox closed its B-unit and
the boys made their escape. I wonder why the plans at MGM fell through.

See ya!
Joe L.

I wonder if the fact that the boys were complaining about their
situation in print (something they seemed loathe to do until after the
fact -- see the polite letters to Ralph Edwards and the subsequent
tetchiness in TV Guide) had anything to do with it. L&H as studio
poison?
Chris

joelibby@joimail.com wrote:

Out of curiosity, what paper did Virginia MacPherson write for?

You could be right in saying that both Stan and Oliver did do their
movie careers in by letting the press know what was pretty much
standard proceedure in handling contract players during this time, the
height of the studio system. If she wrote for Variety or The Hollywood
Reporter or other major trade papers it certainly would have been read
by the likes of Louis B. Mayer or Darryl F.Zanuck and/or their minions
and would have ruined their careers--there would be some hardcore film
buffs out there would could nominate some who lost their standing in
Hollywood due to airing their grievances in the press.

Kind of sad that in 1945 L&H thought that the best vehicle for them
would be a "musical comedy with two or three big name stars": in other
words, The Rogue Song or Fra Diavalo. Only in Fra Diavalo did this
ever work well. Plots were hardly the make-or-break factor in an L&H
comedy. In fact, what killed much of the humor in their later films
was overplotting. Did Stan really think that their fans wanted to see
them play second bananas to Dick Powell or Betty Grable?

Rob Farr
www.slapsticon.org

cseguin wrote:

Virginia McPherson was a syndicated newspaper columnists for United
Press. It's easy to see the writer "slanging up" Stan's dialogue for
the readers.

If you read a lot of these short newspaper interviews with Stan & Babe
from the late 40's through early 50's, two things invariably crop up:
the poor quality of the scripts at Fox and the idea that THEY quit, and
the fact that they're seen as temperamental. In fact, "temperamental"
seems to be the ongoing theme.

Brian wrote:

cseguin wrote:

This is around the same time that Lou Costello was refusing to do more
than one take at Universal when he had a big card game going on the
set, no?

Ed Watz wrote:

Were'nt Abbott and Costello pulling that routine throughout the 40's as
well?

It seems to me that Abbott & Costello had more bargaining power in the
early/mid 40s than Stan & Babe did! And it was probably more a case of
prima donnaism than A&C fighting for creative control of their work.
Chris

Mister Levity wrote: