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Busby Berkeley was a premier dance director of motion pictures. His originality and sharply-defined style brought him professional acclaim and financial reward. He saved a studio from bankruptcy and a doomed genre from senescence. “Buzz” Berkeley wasn't interested in dance steps and didn't know a “buck and wing” from a “shuffle and riffle”. Ascending a makeshift dumbwaiter twenty feet or higher above a cavernous soundstage, he peered into his large eyepiece and maneuvered his ensemble and his camera to the formations of his mind's eye as he dance-directed. This book presents colleague reminiscences, newspaper stories, legal documents, court records, studio memoranda, and never-before-published accounts from Berkeley's memoirs to describe the man.

Buzz and Eta moved to Palm Desert, 140 miles east of Hollywood. They settled for a quieter life, less demanding, in a climate that suited them both. Weather notwithstanding, the fact was that the Palm Desert abode made Buzz happy. Despite years of inactivity, Buzz retained his membership in the Directors Guild of America. Jumbo had a choppy history. For this film, Buzz's first in almost eight years, his credit was to be “second unit director”. But, Buzz had nothing to do with Jumbo's ultimately disappointing finale, “Sawdust and Spangles and Dreams”. Buzz was correct in his assessment. The film opened in December 1962 to middling reviews and seriously underperforming ticket sales. Buzz returned to the desert and kept himself busy dictating new story ideas to a professional secretary. There were three titles that never found a publisher, if publication was ever pursued.

The latter years of Buzz Berkeley's life was marked with tributes and attempts to film his biography. Buzz's palmy days were spent in idle pursuits. There was the occasional round of golf, but he was no scratch player. The sweltering summers kept him housebound, and the phone rang infrequently. Buzz was confined to his home, and Etta spent her days doting on her husband. The interviews stopped, his phone went silent, and the motion picture of his life story went no further than the announcement stage. It might have been Gertrude who persuaded her son to keep and treasure his career collectibles. Buzz maintained scrapbooks with hundreds of articles, newspaper clippings, and photographs. On March 14, 1976, Busby Berkeley died due to a combination of acute fatal dysrhythmia and generalized arteriosclerosis, at the age of eighty.

Gertrude was ready to quit the stage when Buzz entered the military. Buzz wanted to go to France, and he had heard that artillery service was the ticket to get there. His goal was to be a commissioned officer. He got his wish and was sent by ship to France. It was a couple of months into his howitzer training that Buzz was awarded his commission. Overseas letters to his mother were delivered with regularity, and she responded in kind. The news of his commission was proudly acknowledged. In her correspondence, he learned of his mother's burgeoning film career. After a time, wanderlust or boredom, or both, made Buzz itchy for new surroundings. Buzz was arrested and placed under guard for being AWOL. Buzz planned his own reuniting when he obtained approval from his superior. By the time of her son's disembarkation, Gertrude had been retired from the stage for almost two years.

Buzz moved in with his mother and regaled her with military anecdotes. His successes with amateur theatrics fell on disapproving ears. Gertrude had hoped her soon-to-be-mustered-out son would find a job, any job, in any field except show business. On August 17, 1919, a week after Buzz had returned from France, a small headline in the New York Times read “A Soldier-Made Actor”. Though show business had captured Buzz, he had had his fill of the demands of a long-running road show. He wanted to direct. Buzz joined the Somerville Theater Stock Company in Somerville, Massachusetts, directing the musical farce Going Up. The play had been a big hit in New York and Chicago. He became a full-fledged director in Boston when the original director had to leave the show for a family emergency. Later, he married Esther Muir.

In September 1832, Buzz moved to Warner Brothers. The filming of 42nd Street went well for Buzz. Later, he fell in love and married a petite redhead with a sunny smile named Merna Kennedy. However, by June 1934, only four months into their marriage, they became estranged. In 1935, the name Busby Berkeley was so well known to movie fans that his last name was linked to projects in which his participation was limited to the musical numbers. A Lloyd Bacon or Mervyn LeRoy picture was a Busby Berkeley movie to them. The fan letters continued to pour into the studio, and Buzz's popularity had never been higher. A man who combined groundbreaking technique in the artistry of film while seamlessly merging his craft with the classicism of dance was designated by Warner Brothers a cinematerpsichorean.

This chapter describes a car accident involving Buzz Berkeley, when his convertible car blew a front tire on the Roosevelt Highway near the Santa Monica Canyon. This led to the deaths of Ada von Bresen, William von Briesen, and Peggy Daley. Buzz was charged with manslaughter, that was later upgraded to second-degree murder due to William Hudson's testimony that Buzz was intoxicated during the accident. Warner Brothers hired Jerry Giesler, who just happened to be one of the shrewdest defense attorneys in the state, in order to protect their interests. Giesler's tactic was simple and profound: blame the front left tire for the accident. On Christmas Eve 1935, a hung jury voted ten to two for acquittal. Buzz and Giesler regarded the verdict as a moral victory feeling that the judge's harsh treatment of the defense witnesses backfired with many jurors. And after two retrials, Buzz Berkeley was finally acquitted.

The grueling hours between court and set weighed heavily on Buzz. The legal expense, the pages of billing minutiae to the quarter hour, came due on the heels of Buzz's $95,000 settlement. Giesler's fees amounted to almost six figures—worth every penny to keep Buzz from losing his sanity and facing hard time for murder. It was the public perception of the name Busby Berkeley that changed. During the Varsity Show, Buzz began an affair with Carole Landis that later cooled off. During the casting of Gold Diggers in Paris, Buzz took notice of a beautiful young auditioner named Claire James. Flying in the face of convention, the forty-something Buzz and the teenage Claire began dating exclusively. After They Made Me A Criminal was released in January 1939, Buzz transferred to Loew's Incorporated.

Buzz decided to take an ambitious cross-country automobile trip with his mother. They would end up in New York, see old friends and colleagues, and take in a Broadway show or two. In April, Claire James instructed her lawyer to cancel the divorce action she had filed just two months before and sought an annulment at a later date. That same month, Buzz went to work for 20th Century Fox after they made an offer to MGM to “borrow him” for a one-picture deal. In early June, two months after filming began on The Gang's All Here, after the annulment was granted, she married twenty-four-year-old Lt. Ray Dorsey. In July, Jack Warner was back in Buzz's life, after negotiating a deal with MGM that included Joan Crawford.

Cinderella Jones and Rhapsody in Blue didn'pay off. Newspapers reported the demise of Buzz's fifth marriage. If Buzz courted the idea of remarriage, the timing couldn't have been worse. Gertrude was declining rapidly. On the evening of June 14, 1946, Nellie Gertrude Berkeley Enos silently died from cancer at the age of eighty-one. Frank Honda welcomed his grieving employer upon his return from the Ohio funeral. There was little in the way of distraction as Buzz did not have work to ease his troubled mind. He attempted suicide on July 17, but was luckily saved by Frank Honda. After receiving treatment in the Los Angeles General Hospital, he was placed in a psychiatric ward. He soon recovered and was released. Willing to beg for a new job, he asked the forgiveness of Jack Warner. He collaborated with Michael Curtiz, but later had another row with Jack Warner.

Buzz worked on four episodes of Big Town that aired in late 1954 and early 1955. About two weeks prior to the airing of Buzz's first episode of Big Town, he was arrested again on a charge of drunkenness. On January 23, 1958, the final judgment of divorce between Buzz and Marge Pemberton was granted in the California Superior Court. That same day, Buzz and Etta Judd were married. For the fifty-five-year-old bride it was her second marriage; it was her betrothed's sixth. For the first time in his life, Busby Berkeley married a woman without show business aspirations. Etta was broad-shouldered and big-boned and didn't resemble any of her predecessors. She was practical, protective, and, as Buzz could vouch, devoted. After having troubles with some producers, Buzz realized that he could no longer allow himself to be subjected to another producer's empty promises.

Buzz's 1963 Director's Guild dues form showed earnings of $16,000 (Jumbo money and little else). In his late sixties, he was not idle by choice. Although it appeared he would take any project that crossed his desk, he remained optimistic, answering personal and fan letters, devising new musical numbers in his mind, and hopeful that an offer was only a phone call away. He seemed to receive offers of films that never got off the ground. Buzz's world tour of accolades also began. In November, it was announced that UCLA was going to have a Busby Berkeley Film Festival, and soon thereafter, Buzz and Etta left for London. Additional tributes forced the sedentary Buzz to venture out of Palm Desert. In February 1967, the University of Southern California, following UCLA's lead, ran two hours of Berkeley clips, and Buzz and Ruby Keeler were reunited onstage.

This chapter continues and concludes the story of As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon, focusing on two major productions, Buzz Goodbody’s in 1973, and Adrian Noble’s in 1985, and then providing a summary of the play’s performance history until 2013. Goodbody’s production is discussed in terms of its relation both to feminism and popular performance; Noble’s in relation to the phenomenon of Director’s Shakespeare.

Chapter 4 explores community photography and the new radicalism it brought to amateur photographic practice during the 1970s. This movement, begun in London and disseminated through the pages of Camerawork magazine, propounded the potential of photography as a form of collective action which could bring communities together and empower individuals. Through groups such as the Shankill Photographic Workshop, Derry Camerawork, and the NorthCentre City Community Action Project, activists taught photography to community organizations, as well as prisoners, the unemployed, and women’s groups. This new form of photographic activism served a variety of functions. It was a form of practice that brought people together and taught unemployed and demoralized residents of the inner-city skills and self-respect. It enabled communities that had become the object of a media gaze which turned their lives into stereotypes to create representations of themselves, which they felt more accurately reflected the reality of their lives. In these evening classes and dark rooms, photography became a mechanism of raising consciousness and building communal cohesion. Moreover, it provided a way of making sense of the agglomeration of power, class, and gaze which rendered the lives of the unemployed, or inner-city residents only as ‘types’, and so provided these new photographers with a way of critiquing—if not resisting—these processes.