Once In A Lifetime – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1930 ★★★

Then Along Came Jolson

Hollywood didn’t fall in a day. It actually took just over a year, from the debut of the first feature-length picture with sound, Don Juan in August 1926, to that of a much more famous “talkie,” The Jazz Singer in October 1927. Very quickly, everything in moviedom changed forever.

Suddenly, as Norma Desmond would put it, actors needed more than faces. They needed voices, too. This had seeds of both tragedy and comedy. An early example of the latter marked the debut of one of American theater’s most successful writing partnerships, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

As the powerful, short-sighted studio head Herman Glogauer puts it: “What did they have to go and make pictures talk for? Things were going along fine. You couldn’t stop making money – even if you turned out a good picture you made money.”

The challenge of sound comes at the right time for a trio of busted-flat vaudevillians who make up the center of the play. One of them, Jerry Hyland, dashes home from the cinema after seeing The Jazz Singer. He wastes no time getting partners May Daniels and George Lewis on a train to California. Their plan: set themselves up as authorities on elocution and voice training.

A life of booking shows in Bellows Falls, Vermont and dining at the Automat is about to end for a trio of vaudevillians. From left, Patrick Lane as George, John Wernke as Jerry, and Julia Coffey as May, as portrayed in a 2011 Bay Area Theater production in San Francisco.
Image from https://stageandcinema.com/2011/10/15/once-in-a-lifetime-act/.

Can it work? Maybe if George can learn to keep his own mouth shut. The guy has a heart of gold, but a brain of lead, and a tendency to spout the last thing he heard or read, whatever the situation. He is introduced noshing on Indian nuts and reading Variety, his favorite pastimes:

GEORGE is about twenty-eight, a clean-cut, nice-looking young fellow, with the most disarmingly naive countenance it is possible to imagine. Completely without guile. He is the sort of person insurance men and book agents instinctively head for, and in the case of GEORGE, it might be noted, usually succeed in selling.

The set-up of Once In A Lifetime is fairly simple and ripe for humor. However, it is in the development is where Kaufman and Hart make their score. In the first scene, our three main characters are introduced naturalistically and with a modicum of overt comedy, other than May’s wisecracks at George’s thick head.

As the play rolls along, however it gradually shifts into more antic gear, playing up the movie industry culture, or lack thereof. At the same time, it transitions from reality into a full-on screwball comedy, where Hollywood’s elite are exposed as vain, pretentious, gossipy, imperious, and utterly without a clue as to making movies or anything else.

Playwrights Moss Hart (at left) and George S. Kaufman wrote for the stage but found much success in Hollywood, too. Their first collaboration, Once In A Lifetime actually took most of a year and two aborted stagings before becoming an overnight sensation.
Image from https://stageandcinema.com/2011/10/15/once-in-a-lifetime-act/

Kaufman and Hart bring a snappy cynicism you expect from Manhattan-based stage writers, and not a lot of curveballs. There are knowing winks in the direction of John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, and the Hays Office. Gossip columnist Helen Hobart is a thinly-concealed lampoon of Hedda Hopper, bragging about her many important friends: “You know, it was I who gave America Gary Cooper and Rex the Wonder Horse.”

The spicy backstage lives of celebrities are also targeted:

KAMMERLING: But Dorothy Dodd is not a country girl! She is a woman – a woman who has lived with a dozen men – and looks it! Can I make her over? I am just a director – not God!

GLOGAUER: But if it was explained to her! How long would it take to explain a country girl?

KAMMERLING: But everyone knows about her – it’s been in the newspapers – every time they break a door down they find her!

Jack Oakie as George and Aline MacMahon as May in a 1932 Paramount film adaptation. It includes a pre-credit message from producer Carl Laemmle Jr. assuring audiences filmmakers like himself could laugh at themselves. The film holds up today as a slice of early sound comedy, and can be viewed for free as of this posting on YouTube.
Image from https://www.abebooks.com/photographs/Once-Lifetime-8x10-Movie-Zasu-Pitts/31290407511/bd

As stories go, Once In A Lifetime is all about making sure the jokes land. Which they did. It became a theatrical success and launched a decade-long run of hit stage and screen productions, which relied on Kaufman’s Groucho Marx-honed way with banter and Hart’s skill as a scenarist.

You see that here in elementary form. Of the main characters, Jerry is very disposable, while May, his potential romantic interest, holds the audience’s interest only with her barrage of wisecracks: “George, you don’t know anything about anything, and if what they say about the movies is true, you’ll go far!”

George is the play’s heart and soul, good-natured to a fault, throwing away his lucky breaks on a ditzy airhead named Susan who wants to be a star, despite her insistence on reciting Kipling verses while marching in place. One roots for George the way one does a hapless Little League team, mostly against one’s better judgement.

While not one of the three protagonists, the star of the show is probably Glogauer, the not very bright producer, played here by David Suchet (center) in a 1988 BBC production. "That's the way we do things out here," he exclaims, "no time wasted on thinking!"
Image from https://screenplaystv.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/once-in-a-lifetime-1988/

The opening two scenes are breezy, simple fun, but the play gets much better with Scene 3, set in a swanky Los Angeles hotel. Here the elite come to meet and be seen, and the playwrights release the satire in a multitude of comic vignettes that must have taxed the stage production:

COAT CHECK GIRL: There’s a call out for prostitutes for Wednesday.

CIGARETTE GIRL: Say, I’m going out there! Remember that prostitute I did for Paramount?

COAT CHECK GIRL: Yah, but that was silent. This is for talking prostitutes.

Glogauer meanwhile complains of being besieged by unwanted auditions: “Everyone acts at me! If I only go to have my shoes shined, I look down and someone is having a love scene with my pants.” For his part, George is impressed: “It kinda reminds me of the first time I went to the circus – only there’s no elephants.”

Once In A Lifetime works like a sketch comedy show or a musical revue, a series of amusing bits strung together to engage an audience. A challenge may be deciding how much of this long play a stage can comfortably hold. Several subplots are woven into the narrative, such as a writer kept waiting in reception, George’s struggle to launch his love object Susan’s career, and an attempted buyout of Glogauer Studio by the Schlepkin Brothers, stand-ins for the real-life Warner Brothers.

The movie stars of the 1920s still cast a spell, but for most of them sound spelled the end of their time in the limelight. As Jerry puts it to his pals: "All the old standbys are going to find themselves out in the cold, and somebody with brains and sense enough to use them is going to get into the big dough."
1922 Vanity Fair cartoon by Ralph Barton from https://www.reddit.com/r/silentcinema/comments/nimoya/when_the_five_oclock_whistle_blows_in_hollywood/

Given total control of the studio after catching Glogauer in a weak moment, George becomes head of production and casts Susan as the lead in his first big movie. Problems ensue. Despite coaching from May, Susan still can’t act for beans and it turns out the script he chose was released in 1910. It looks like the end of the line for our heroes:

KAMMERLING: But after all it is the movie business. It is just the same in Germany.

MAY: It is, huh?

KAMMERLING: Even worse. Oh, it is terrible over there. I think I go back.

Matters are wound up nicely and cleverly, just as they should be in any screwball comedy. The final comedy twist at the end is inspired, if maybe unnecessary. A reconciliation between May and Jerry is pleasant for May, but not involving, while George’s passion for Susan is played entirely for cynical chuckles at her deceptively innocuous nature.

Cynicism is the main takeaway from this play. The phrase “gone Hollywood” is employed here as an euphemism for losing one’s moral compass. The rest of the play works this idea into a clean narrative arc.

Though very much of its time, one can read modernist satire in Once In A Lifetime’s many bits of throwaway banter. Kaufman and Hart make this a memorable calling card for more loaded social send ups to follow.