By Joseph McBride
In a career for which the word "eclectic" might have been coined,
Edward L. Bernds worked with everyone from D. W. Griffith, Douglas
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Buster Keaton to Frank Capra, Cary Grant,
Fred Astaire, Elvis Presley, Sam Peckinpah and the Three Stooges.
A pioneer radio operator in Chicago, Bernds was brought out to
Hollywood in 1928 by United Artists to help with the transition to
talking pictures. After moving to Columbia Pictures, he became Capra's
regular sound mixer, working on all but one of Capra's films from 1930
through 1939, including such classics as "It Happened One Night"
(1934), "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" (1936) and "Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington" (1939). Bernds also worked with Howard Hawks on
"Twentieth Century" (1934) and "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939) and
with Leo McCarey on "The Awful Truth" (1937).
Bernds was a soundman on Three Stooges shorts at Columbia in the 1930s
and wrote some of the popular two-reelers before becoming a director
in 1944. He went on to direct 25 Stooges shorts and two of their
features, as well as parts of their television series "The New Three
Stooges." Stooge historians Tom and Jeff Forrester describe Bernds as
"the Stooges' all-time favorite writer-director. . . . The team loved
working with Bernds, whose affable personality and vast experience
lent itself to the Stooges' workmanlike approach."
Bernds' other films as a director include several in the "Bowery
Boys" and "Blondie" series as well as "World Without End" (1956),
"Reform School Girl" (1957) and "Queen of Outer Space" (1958).
In recent years, Bernds became a valuable source for film historians
and appeared in the documentaries "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to
Follow" (1987) and "Frank Capra's American Dream" (1997). In 1998 he
was honored by the National Board of Review with its Lifetime
Achievement Award for Film Technology, and in 1999 he received the
Cinema Audio Society's President's Award.
In April 1999, Scarecrow Press published his autobiography, Mr. Bernds
Goes to Hollywood: My Early Life and Career in Sound Recording at
Columbia with Frank Capra and Others (to which I contributed the
introduction). Edward Bernds passed away on May 19, 2000, at the age
of 94. We talked in December 1999 at his home in Van Nuys, California.
McBride: Some of Hollywood's first talking pictures were very clumsy,
but it took only a couple of years before they began to greatly
improve. Why do you think that was?
Bernds: They began to realize that the soundman was not a nuisance. I
was able to establish a rapport with Capra fairly early, thank
goodness. Because of the fluke that hooked me up with him — because
another mixer, Harry Blanchard, thought he could get out of a cold
night on location [on Ladies of Leisure] and got me to
substitute — it changed my whole life, and for that matter,
Blanchard's too. In that group of pictures, the Capra crew were
first-class people all the way. Capra was a good judge of people, and
he managed to get pretty much the top man in each craft. I showed very
early that I understood what he was trying for, what constitutes good
acting, what constitutes good sound — not loud sound, not necessarily
intelligible, but sound that serves the scene and serves the picture.
Working as a soundman was fine, but that got to be pretty much a
routine. It was no more difficult to record a super-A picture than it
was a two-reeler. Mixers didn't have as much control over the quality
as you might think. The quality was determined by the system, the
recording system, which generally was excellent; there were no bad
recording systems in the studios. Too easy to get excellence.
McBride: It takes a lot of experience to time gags properly. How did
you learn to do comedy?
Bernds: Working on the two-reelers as a soundman broke me in on the
basics of it. I think I always had it in me to be a good comedy writer.
Even to this day, when I'm sleepless, I often think of comedy routines.
McBride: You were a soundman on some of the Stooges shorts Del Lord
directed in the '30s, such as "Three Little Beers" (1935).
Bernds: Oh, yes, a lot of 'em. Del Lord was Mack Sennett's leading
director in the silents for chase scenes. He did some really hairy
work in car chases, because he could do a lot more expensive and
elaborate things with Sennett; Sennett had more money to spend than
Columbia. "Three Little Beers" was memorable. That's the one with the
barrel chase, with barrels coming down the hill. It also has the scene
of the Stooges tearing up a golf course.
McBride: You wrote in your book that they really tore up the golf
course and the poor greenskeeper was going crazy.
Bernds: He really was. The script called for Moe to go hacking, taking
divots a foot long, at the old Rancho Golf Course on Pico Boulevard.
It actually didn't do any real permanent harm. He was chopping it up,
but a lot of those divots you saw there were not real divots.
McBride: So you learned a lot from working with Del Lord?
Bernds: I gained a lot from him as a soundman. And I got acquainted
with the boys. It could have worked with this disadvantage — if they
had been snooty and said, "Hey, wait a minute, we don't want this
rookie director, this soundman, give us a real director." But I had a
talk with Moe before I started directing. He assured me of his
cooperation. Del Lord, who had graduated to features, gave me a
good sendoff. He told Hugh McCollum [who produced half of the
Columbia short subjects] and he told the boys, "There's no reason he
can't do it."
McBride: How did you see the characters of the Stooges?
Bernds: All the relationships were formed by the time I came in. Moe
was Moe and Larry was Larry and Curly was Curly. The big change
occurred, of course, when Curly wasn't able to work [in 1946, because
of illness]. Shemp brought a whole new dimension in, and I was able to
put a lot more of my stuff in, because in the five pictures I made
with Curly I more or less had to conform.
McBride: Curly had a stroke and he started phasing out, was that it?
Bernds: I think he had a series of them. The first time he passed out
on the set everybody thought it was just a hangover but it appears
that, no, it might have been his first small stroke. That was not on
my picture. I believe Jules White [who produced the other half of the
Columbia shorts and also directed some of them] was able to finish the
picture without Curly, sent him home, improvised somehow. Then I got
Curly on the next picture, and Moe had kind of concealed how bad he
was, the whole problem, not to deceive us but to protect him, you
know. And so on my first picture, you can imagine . . .
McBride: Wasn't "A Bird in the Head" (1946) the first one you directed
even though "Micro-Phonies" (1945) came out first?
Bernds: Yeah. My first picture, my whole future depended on it. If it
went well, I was all right. If anything happened, if the picture was
not good, my 17 years of wanting to be a director would go down the
drain. Really anxious time. But Moe was wonderful. I'll always be
grateful for the help he gave me, a newcomer. He could have stood
back, but even though I was brand-new he pitched right in and helped.
I don't think I could have gotten through the first couple of pictures
without Moe's help. Somehow we got through "A Bird in the Head." It's
not a good picture, but it's not terrible, at least.
McBride: Moe was so mean in the movies that people always wonder if he
was a mean guy in real life.
Bernds: Oh, no, no, perfect gentleman, very fine man, good family man,
good citizen, considerate to people he worked with. Actors somehow
acquire a persona. Moe got that long before he came to Columbia.
McBride: In vaudeville?
Bernds: Yes, with Ted Healy [in an act billed as "Ted Healy and His
Stooges"]. I guess it was very easy to become a grouch with Healy.
Healy was cruel to them. Moe always hated him because he said Healy
would not modify his slaps enough, he'd really hurt them. And on the
stage, Moe said, there were times when he was hit that so hard that he
was a little shaky. But on the stage you can't quit.
McBride: Were the Stooges sometimes rebellious? How obedient were they
to a director?
Bernds: I never had a beef from them. Once in a while I would have a
discussion but never any mutiny or any refusal to do it. Moe was the
spokesman. He was the boss. If he felt a stunt was dangerous and made
out a good case for me, I believed him, I would do something else. He
wouldn't do it just to save himself bumps or bruises, he took an awful
lot of bumps and bruises, but he wanted to escape major hurts. If we
had to have a stunt, we used doubles if at all possible. In the
two-reelers we never bothered with masks. Later, when we did the
features, we had masks of the Stooges — the doubles would wear them.
McBride: In long shot?
Bernds: You could get pretty good close with it. With Larry, that mask
was very realistic. We had the Larry hair, and with the Larry mask you
could get pretty close for fast action.
McBride: Did you use masks because they were getting older then and it
was harder for them to do stunts?
Bernds: No, it was that the technique was new. During most of my
career with the Stooges, the technique of masks didn't exist.
McBride: It's said that you were the Stooges' favorite director.
Bernds: Yeah, I know Shemp liked working with me, probably because I
liked him so much. And Shemp was kind of a sensitive guy and Jules had
a bad habit of showing an actor what he wanted him to do.
McBride: You've said that when Shemp came along you were able to get
more of your own ideas into the films. What was it about Shemp that
you liked?
Bernds: Good actor. Could do anything you wanted. Curly was not really
an actor, he just was something there. If you'd look back, you'd
realize that he very seldom did anything that called for acting. He
just was his zany self. When Shemp came on, he was eager, but he
wasn't able to protect himself against getting hurt as much as the
others. They were so experienced that the slaps were not real — Moe
had a way [Bernds mimes a faked slap involving only glancing contact].
McBride: Did Moe ever feel typecast as a Stooge and want to try
different roles?
Bernds: He loved the Stooges. He wanted them to go on forever, but
when Columbia finally cut 'em off [in 1958] he was heartbroken.
He wanted to work, he wanted to be an actor. I was making a
science-fiction film at the time ["Space Master X-7"], and his
son-in-law, Norman Maurer, was the producer [as well as the Stooges'
manager]. There was a part, not a big part, but a very interesting,
funny kind of part, a cab driver giving some testimony, and Norman
said, "Hey, Moe wants to do it." So we hired Moe to be a typical New
York cab driver. He was excellent. He didn't have much of a New York
accent, but he put on just enough so that he was really convincing. It
was not a comedy scene but it was a scene with humor just because of
who was in that.
McBride: Did you think of most of the titles for the Stooges
two-reelers, including the ones you didn't direct?
Bernds: What happened — I hope this doesn't sound like boasting, but
it's the truth — McCollum was not very good at titles. After a while,
I had done enough for him to say, "Let me do it." I did practically
all of them, not just for the Stooges but for the other shorts too.
Sometimes a writer of a script would bring in a title, but mostly the
titles were mine. One of the producer's prerogatives is deciding on
writers. McCollum more or less turned that over to me and let me
decide which writers we would hire.
McBride: Did you work on the scripts you directed even if you didn't
receive writing credit?
Bernds: Everything I ever directed I worked on — even stuff I wrote
myself. The director's big work is the night before he shoots,
planning. Very frequently I'd rewrite myself based on new ideas and
maybe observation of how the actors were. Maybe figure out that this
actor can't handle this dialogue very well or give him more if he was
good. You could give him a piece of script in the morning rewritten,
if he's good, and he could probably memorize it in 20 minutes or so.
McBride: Did the Stooges change the scripts or improvise?
Bernds: Not the dialogue. Oh, in the heat of battle they would do
things, they would ad lib. I'd indicate their action sequences in the
script, but I can't tell 'em every time to "Pick her up" or say, "Why
you so-and-so." When we'd have a story conference I liked to call the
boys in because it made them feel more that we're working together. It
made them feel good. Especially if you open it to discussion: "How
does this feel? Can we say this a better way? Do you think his speech
is too long, can we cut it?" Jules didn't do it. He'd give 'em a
script and say, "Be here Monday morning." But I would call 'em in even
before a script was even started, just to discuss it. I found it very
valuable. They would all come up with stories. Four of five would be
no good, but then there maybe there'd be a fifth thing that would give
me an idea. You badly need ideas, to get something new.
McBride: What were your shooting schedules and budgets for the Stooge
two-reelers?
Bernds: Four eight-hour days was the schedule. Thirty-five thousand
dollars was the average negative cost of a Stooge two-reeler.
McBride: You recall in your book that you just couldn't go over
schedule. There was no question of an extra day on those films, so you
had to be efficient and disciplined.
Bernds: The only time we knocked off and came back the next day, I
think, was April 12, 1945, the day President Roosevelt died. Knocked
off immediately. Roosevelt was so loved that if the studio head [Harry
Cohn] hadn't said, "Quick, stop production," the crews would have
walked off.
McBride: Since the Stooges knew their characters so well, what kinds
of things did a director have to do to make a good film with them?
Bernds: A great deal was in preparation — preparation of gags,
discussion with the boys — to get everything as ready as possible.
Directors who I believe didn't do as well as I did didn't give enough
time or thought to preparation. Then the mechanics. If there's a gag,
select the best angle. If it's the boys crashing through a fake brick
wall, figure what's going to happen. Figure not just the crash but
what happens to them later. Plan the shots, and while on the set use
the camera to the very best advantage. If the wall is going to take
four hours to redo, then you use two cameras. Maybe put one of the
cameras on a dolly, directly on the boys -- they crash through the
wall, the camera follows 'em, and you can only follow them if you have
the camera on a dolly. With lenses you had great flexibility, this
camera could shoot a fairly close shot from a distance because it was
a long-focus lens, what you call a closeup lens. As far as directing
the boys, show them, not tell them so much what they're going to do,
but what was going to happen. If this wall would break, you don't
rehearse a thing like that, because it takes four hours to rebuild a
fake brick wall. So you show the mechanics, what would probably
happen. If you tell 'em you expect them to fall into the foreground,
they will do it. And I'll tell 'em, "I've got a camera here."
McBride: Did you use two cameras fairly often?
Bernds: No. On a big picture, if a director wanted four cameras he got
'em. But I had a big fight with the production office to get two on
occasion.
McBride: Did you undercrank the camera to speed up the action very
often on your Stooges shorts?
Bernds: Yes.
McBride: Did you shoot those scenes without sound?
Bernds: You can undercrank and shoot sound. You use sound that you
undercrank too, but sometimes that's a funny effect if somebody runs
around in a tizzy and the sound of his voice is squeaking. And noises —
a lot of people don't realize that if you shoot a scene silent and
it's got movement in it, it's awfully hard to recreate the sound with
movement. So we used to shoot sound on everything. The production
office sometimes objected to us shooting sound on what were really
silent scenes. The head film editor took it up to the highest level.
He talked to one of the bosses, who said, "Shoot everything. Film is
cheaper than trying to recreate it later."
McBride: A lot of the effects were added later, the exaggerated sound
effects, the knuckle-rapping on the head and things like that?
Bernds: Oh, of course. I once showed someone an edited reel of a
two-reeler without any sound effects — dialogue but before the
rerecording was added — and it looked so flat. Later, when the film
was finished, I brought back this person — this was not a person
experienced in movies, it was an outsider friend of mine — I brought
him back to show the finished film with the sound effects. All the
difference in the world.
McBride: That's where your sound background came in handy?
Bernds: To an extent, yes.
McBride: Did Columbia use the same sound effects over and over again?
Bernds: Yes. That's done by the sound effects editor. One I remember
was Murray Opper. His cutting room was lined with shelves big enough
to hold rolls of film. He had a file cabinet full of sound effects,
and he had a great memory. If he needed a certain kind of belly bump,
he would pull it out and find it. To the split second he could cut in
a belly bump.
McBride: You told me that in the Stooge comedies you tried to tone
down some of their violence. You didn't like their eye-poking routine.
How did you try to modify it with them?
Bernds: I went to Moe before I was supposed to direct the first one. I
was careful not to antagonize him, but I said, "If one kid anywhere in
the world damages the eye of another kid, I'd never forgive myself."
Moe is a man with a heart, really, and Moe never used it in one of my
pictures except if it was an action thing and he kind of [Bernds mimes
poking two fingers on the forehead and pushing someone].
McBride: And you didn't like the nostril pulling?
Bernds: That I told them right out, and they agreed not to use it.
Didn't you find it kind of distasteful?
McBride: Well, to be honest, when we were kids we used to do that.
Some of the other directors put it in and the kids would imitate that
behavior. It is pretty gross.
Bernds: Well, maybe I was a spoilsport.
McBride: We also did the head rapping. Except that we really did it
and we didn't realize they faked it in the movies. Our mothers used to
get upset about the Three Stooges because we all copied them.
Bernds: I don't blame the mothers!
McBride: But we didn't do the eye-poking, so we must have been
watching your movies! Why do you think it is that women generally
don't like the Stooges but men like them?
Bernds: I guess the women don't like the violence. The men realize
that nobody really gets hurt — it's almost a cartoonlike quality.
Curly gets hit on the head with a sledgehammer and says, "Ouch." But
the women don't like the violence even if they know it's non-lethal.
Men are just rougher. Why do men go for the rougher sports like
football?
McBride: I guess the Stooges movies are like football — it's a game,
it's not real, so that's part of the fun of it for men.
Bernds: The women know it's not real, but the presence of violence
even in that form is abhorrent to them, I think, some of them.
McBride: Did you find that when you were making those movies that
women had that attitude or did you think you were making the movies
for men?
Bernds: I don't think I concerned myself about that. I must have known
that women wouldn't like it. We used women on the set, of course, as
actresses and so on. The script clerk was usually a woman; we always
had a hairdresser; and if we had a leading lady we had a wardrobe
lady. They never were concerned about the violence, and it was
occurring right before their eyes.
McBride: Maybe women also are bothered by the fact that the Stooges
characters aren't very interested in the opposite sex. They aren't
ladies' men, they're childlike, presexual. Would you agree with that?
Bernds: Yeah. They had girlfriends, not girlfriends in the sex sense,
but friends who are girls. We used it for jealousy things, but we
didn't want these romances to be convincing. We never really even
approached sex in the two-reelers.
McBride: How did you like the later features you did with the Stooges?
You hadn't worked with them for a while.
Bernds: The features were pretty good. But the Stooges were older, and
I had to be a little more careful not to run 'em too much. Especially
Joe De Rita, who was in as Curly Joe. He was fat and out of condition,
and I just had a feeling that he was the most likely to drop dead on
me, which would be a very inconvenient thing for me, as well as for
him. I did "The Three Stooges Meet Hercules" (1962) — big, big hit —
and "The Three Stooges in Orbit" (1962). I wanted to do the next two; I
could have used the money. Throughout my career, I needed the money.
For various reasons, no matter how much money I made, I never had a
nice big cushion where I could say, "No, thanks, I don't want to do it."
McBride: Did you enjoy directing those live-action wraparounds for
"The New Three Stooges?" [a syndicated TV series filmed in the summer
of 1965, also using cartoons].
Bernds: They were knocked off in a big hurry, but that didn't hurt 'em
much. The Stooges did their stuff, and they didn't require a lot of
rehearsal.
McBride: When you were directing the Stooges, did you ever think that
these pictures would still be popular many years in the future?
Bernds: We never dreamed. I still don't know why. But there's some
quality there.
