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27 Q3 2017 / CINEMONTAGE extensively. Like Ferber and Kaufman's play, the movie was set in the fictional Footlights Club, based on the actual Rehearsal Club, founded in 1913 as a "residence for professional women of the theatre" on West 53rd Street, just off Broadway. But, building on the ensemble representing a spectrum of social backgrounds and attitudes, the movie tied the women's separate situations in the play into involving, interwoven plots to depict them developing emotional bonds and conflicts with one another. In doing so, the director, writers and cast created a movie every bit as fresh, funny and deeply moving today as it was in 1937 — and far more engaging than its now- dated source. With characters fuller than their stage originals, the movie Stage Door shines as a comedy/ drama of women as individuals defining themselves in an art that is also a business. Many of Kaufman's plays had been adapted to the screen but, seeing the finished film with almost all of his dialogue missing, he called it "Screen Door." He was also reacting to the movie's elimination of a subplot in the play that chastised Hollywood for luring actors away and compromising their art, as well as losing a leftist writer character, based on Clifford Odets. While producer Berman did not want the movie business criticized in his picture, he had no problem with portraying the similar commercial demands and compromises in live theatre. Apart from the gripes and groans expressed by the women over the kinds of stage work they take to keep working, how the theatre business works is embodied in a character invented for the film by screenwriter Anthony Veiller — a manipulative producer, played by veteran man-about- town actor Adolphe Menjou, and based on Jed Harris, a prominent Broadway figure of the time. Harris had produced The Lake, the 1933 Broadway flop notorious for Dorothy Parker's review, "…see Katherine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions all the way from A to B." Hepburn stated in her 1991 autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, that her experience with Harris taught her the importance of taking responsibility for her own career: "…hands down, the most diabolical person I have ever met." Veiller also used lines from The Lake in "Enchanted April," the play-within-the-movie for which the naïve and rich Terry Randall (Hepburn) is hired as lead player; they pointedly serve the star in depicting her character's inexperience. Hepburn thought it was "a brilliant idea." When RKO signed her for the movie, Hepburn's career was in a slump after four of her films, all historic costumers, died at the box office. The Independent Theatre Owners Association of New York even sent the studio a telegram protesting her casting. Nevertheless, producer Berman was shrewdly set on pairing the flagging star with studio contract player Rogers, who had already been partnered with Fred Astaire in seven hit musicals. Then ranked as America's third top female box office attraction (to Hepburn's 17th), Rogers desperately wanted to prove herself as a serious actor who could draw an audience without Astaire. Still, for this picture, Hepburn's salary was about $5,000 more than Rogers'. For the other residents of the Footlights Club, La Cava cast actors on the basis of how they sounded and interacted. In The Three Phases of Eve, Arden's 1985 autobiography, she notes that the director told her, "I can't offer you a specific part, but I like certain qualities I see in you." She suggested she carry her cat in the movie; on the first day of shooting, she draped the cat around her neck to reach for some pecans in a scene — and 'Henry' stayed through the whole movie. Coached by Lela Rogers (Ginger's mother) in RKO's Little Theatre acting school, Ball wrote that La Cava cast her in "my first standout part…at Lela's prodding" in THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY Stage Door. RKO/Photofest