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As part of “To Save and Project: The 12th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation,” the museum hosts three events led by the Los Angeles dance writer and critic Debra Levine. On October 26 at 4:45pm, Levine will sit down with George Chakiris, who won an Academy Award for his role as Bernardo in West Side Story. On October 27, she screens Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at 4pm. A talk, titled “Ready When You Are, Mr. Diaghilev: Debra Levine on Theodore Kosloff, Cecil B. DeMille and Madam Satan,” follows at 6:45pm. Recently, we spoke to Levine about her passion: dance on film.
How did you become involved with this event?
In 2013, I got a big surprise when the film critic Dave Kehr gave me
a nice shout-out in his column in The New York Times, highlighting my
writing about [jazz choreographer] Jack Cole. We developed a friendship; Dave is a
big thinker about dance on film. When Dave made a move to MoMA to work in its film department with Josh Siegel, he invited George Chakiris and me to be part of the opening weekend of the museum's annual film festival. I've been
doing a lot of events and interviews with George over the last three years—film introductions, Q&As and a tribute night to George at UCLA Film Archive, and so Dave invited
the two of us to come to New York and do our thing at MoMA. It started with
that and then, as these things happen, it grew. [Laughs] The
second invitation was for me to share my presentation on Theodore Kosloff and Cecil B. DeMille and Madam Satan. The triple happiness, since George would be there and is a surviving member of the
cast of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from 1953, is that we would screen Gentlemen.
There is a group of guys who danced behind Marilyn Monroe, and George is among them.
What a fluke that as a young gypsy chorus guy in Hollywood, he went to a Jack
Cole audition and ended up behind Marilyn in “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
How did you get to know George Chakiris?
All roads lead to Los Angeles Times stories. We have an annual Turner Classic Movie film festival in Los Angeles, and I write about the festival every year. In 2011, I interviewed George Chakiris for a small story about the dance content in that year’s festival. I think that was around the time of West Side Story’s 50th anniversary. We bonded over Jack Cole. George loves dance history and is very expert in the history of movie musicals, not just because he lived it—really since the late ’40s—but he dips back further. He’s a film aficionado. The two of us really connected over Jack Cole and have been friends and professional partners since 2011 doing multiple events, including a visit to Miami City Ballet earlier this year when [artistic director] Lourdes Lopez premiered West Side Story Suite on her beautiful company. She brought us to be part of that celebration.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 1953. USA. Directed by Howard Hawks. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
In your conversation with him, will your focus be on his relationship to the movie musical or his career?
In my long interview with George on Sunday, we're talking about his entire career—in dance, film, stage and as a Capitol Records recording artist. But on Monday, when we introduce Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, we’re going for the gold, and George is going to share his memories of Marilyn Monroe. Because when you got ’em, flaunt ’em! [Laughs] He was in two Monroe movies. George danced in Jack Cole’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen and in There’s No Business Like Show Business. George was very much present on the scene and working as a gypsy in the ’50s, and that is content I’ll be exploring in-depth in my Sunday afternoon interview. Again, Marilyn is in There’s No Business Like Show Business, as is George, and there’s some fodder around that. In it, Marilyn dances in Jack Cole’s “Heat Wave," which was originally assigned to Robert Alton, the dance director of the film. Marilyn, who had just come off her incredibly successful collaboration with Jack Cole in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, requested a replacement. She had the star power to do that. Unfortunately George was featured in Robert Alton’s version of “Heat Wave.” Jack Cole came in and brought his sizzling guys to do their thing around Marilyn.
How did you become interested in Kosloff?
I first heard the name Theodore Kosloff not from the dance world but from the film world. I attend classic film events at an organization called Hollywood Heritage. One of the key smart people about Hollywood film history—Marc Wanamaker—approached me about working with him on a book he was planning about Russian artists in Hollywood, and he rattled off many names including the ballet dancer Theodore Kosloff. I said, “Wait, what? Who?” He said, “Kosloff, who worked with [Cecil B.] DeMille.” I started looking into this and some months later published my first writing on Kosloff in the L.A. Times. Kosloff was on the stage in 1909 on the opening night of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet—I use the expression “second string to Nijinsky.” Whatever hierarchy, there he was onstage in that opening season. And as was so much the case with the Ballets Russes, the joke is wherever these people ran out of money on the train, that’s where they settled. Kosloff settled in Los Angeles. It was an eye-widening revelation to see that the guy made 30 films, 20 of which with Cecil B. DeMille, and brought to DeMille’s silent movies many of the skills that he had developed at the imperial ballet school in Moscow. So he’s a ballet guy, a high-art guy and a huge pioneer in this burgeoning wild-and-crazy silent film era in Los Angeles. I went down a rabbit hole of bringing back this gone-missing figure to life. One day I had a revelation that Kosloff’s story could be told through the prism of one film, and that one film would be Madam Satan from 1930. We are screening it, and if you haven’t sat through Madam Satan once in your life, you really have not lived.
Madam Satan. 1930. USA. Directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art Film
Why do you say that?
It’s as good as its title. The words Madam Satan came to me in a similar fashion to “rosebud” in Citizen Kane. By the way, I am calling Kosloff the ballet world’s first millionaire. He did extremely well as an actor. He was a magazine cover boy in the teens and ’20s. Through looking at this very unusual appearance he makes in Madam Satan, I could tell the story of his striving and success beforehand and then his denouement. In a way, everything was a disappointment to him after Madam Satan: Talkies done him in. There are those people, and he’s one of them. The pre-production and production of Madam Satan happened as the Depression hit.
Can you talk about that dance sequence?
I am focusing on a six-minute dance sequence in a two-hour movie. You can’t get more arcane. It’s a kind of society ball that happens dead in the center of the movie in a zeppelin that is parked over the Manhattan skyline. The zeppelin sequence has been a cult item for years due to its exceptional pre-code masquerade costumes designed by Adrian, and for its art deco set design by Mitchell Leisen, who was in the DeMille circle before launching as a director in his own right. But no one has focused on the dance sequence. It’s just been taken as a kind of oddity, and what’s on view in the zeppelin dance is popular dance of the era. Cutting into that romp—it’s a costume party actually, and people are doing popular dance—is a very arty ballet méchanique, and Theodore Kosloff reigns supreme in an extremely unusual costume. [As “The Spirit of Electricity,” he has lightning bolts shooting from his head and hands.] I don’t know where it came from. But for its time, De Mille put an extremely artistic, or Hollywood’s version of an artistic, ballet sequence into this zeppelin episode in his movie, and that’s what I’m putting under the microscope. We get a good look at Kosloff: He would never return to film after that. It was his swansong. Kosloff toiled mightily to establish Russian ballet in Los Angeles. It never really came to anything, but my God he took such a run at it. I’m not saying he was great, I’m not saying he was bad. I’m saying he was.