Norman Houston (1887-1958) was a sometime actor and director who spent most of his career as a screenwriter, making his mark as one of the principal writers on the extended Hopalong Cassidy series. His limited involvement in MGM’s musicals involved contributing dialogue to The Broadway Melody and directing, without credit, some of the skits in The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
Category: Writers
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Norman Houston
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Sarah Y Mason
Sarah Y Mason (1896-1980) is one of the forgotten women of early Hollywood, having made a significant contribution, and leaving little information behind. I am grateful to the Women Film Pioneers Project for summarizing what information there is.
Dr Roseanne Welch has credited Mason with being the person to name and develop the role of ‘continuity girl’ (now script supervisor): the person on set with responsibility for ensuring continuity from shot to shot and scene to scene. This was in 1918, when she began working for Douglas Fairbanks.
Mason later moved into script-writing, often in partnership with her husband, Victor Heerman. It was she who fleshed out Edmund Goulding’s story for The Broadway Melody into a continuity script, with dialogue added later by James Gleason and Norman Houston.
Mason went on to script They Learned About Women and to adapt Love in the Rough from its stage original. She also worked uncredited on Meet Me in St Louis. She and Heerman won the Best Adaptation Oscar for Little Women (1933).
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Edmund Goulding
Edmund Goulding (1891-1959) is best remembered as athe director of films including Grand Hotel (1932) and Nightmare Alley (1947). But his biographer, Matthew Kelly, has drawn attention to Goulding’s wide-ranging contributions at MGM, which included not only writing and producing but also consultation on music, makeup and costume. His singular contribution to film musicals was to extemporize the plot of The Broadway Melody for Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten. According to the latter, Thalberg’s secretary took notes because they were aware of Goulding’s ability to “tell a story in the morning and forget everything about it by the afternoon”.
Goulding subsequently made an uncredited contribution to the screenplays of Hollywood Party (on which he was also an uncredited co-director) and, understandably, Two Girls on Broadway, the remake of The Broadway Melody. He directed some scenes in A Night at the Opera without credit.
Goulding was never a credited director on a Metro musical, though some sources erroneously claim Blondie of the Follies (1932) to be a musical. The film has a show business background and features one musical number in long shot, but it is actually a romantic comedy with an excellent performance by Marion Davies.
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James Gleason
James Gleason (1882-1959) became an easily-recognized supporting player specializing in hard-nosed, fast-talking types. But early in his career Gleason was a moderately-successful playwright, which explains his dual contribution to The Broadway Melody as both co-scenarist (dialogue) and bit player. (In what has been called a meta-touch, he plays a music publisher named James Gleason.)
Gleason’s only other Metro musical was Babes on Broadway, as the actor-hating producer whose bacon is saved by Mickey Rooney and his troupe.
