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44 dga quarterly PHOTOS: (TOP) GLEN WILSON; (BOTTOM & OPPOSITE) PHOTOFEST Faces in 'The Crowd' King Vidor's humanity and feeling for ordinary people come alive in his silent masterpiece, The Crowd. Paul Weitz reflects on what makes the film by the DGA's first president a classic. By ROBERT ABELE with the regular studio fare. The film is about an or- dinary guy (James Murray, a studio extra Vidor spot- ted) whose belief that he's meant to stand out from the rest of humanity is routinely shattered by the ups and downs of real life: a dead-end job, romantic bliss with a kind woman (Eleanor Boardman, Vidor's then-wife) that becomes a turbulent marriage, and parenthood wounded by tragedy. Its unusual focus on the realistic plight of everyday people made it a dramatic oddity in its day. However, its reputation grew, influencing directors from Billy Wilder to the Italian neorealists, and in 1989, it was one of the first 25 movies selected to be preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. "In general I'm drawn to movies that discuss the culture through totally personal stories," says Weitz as the film opens with the birth of its hero, John Sims, on July 4, 1900, to a nervous, wide-eyed father who declares of his son, "There's a little man the world is going to hear from." Weitz acknowledges the risks of the kind of realism Vidor was seeking in this scene. "Sometimes you get actors desperately afraid of overacting, and that father, who is emoting a lot, you might say is overacting. But I'll bet if you looked at actual dads seeing their baby for the first time, they're probably mugging like crazy." Vidor segues to now-12-year-old John sitting on a fence with his friends, whose grown-up ambitions include "preacher" and "cowboy," but Johnny's is a nebulous "somethin' big" as he gets a dreamer's look. Adds Weitz, "Somebody did a study recently that showed some ridiculous portion of students said their main goal was to become famous. That's what's happening to the hero in this movie, so Vidor shows PAU L W E ITZ / IN THE SC R EENING R OOM wanted to be a playwright, but I was beginning to fall in love with film," says Paul Weitz as he settles in at his Venice, Calif., offices to re- visit King Vidor's 1928 silent masterpiece, The Crowd, an early favorite from Weitz's younger, movie-bingeing days. "I was probably 19, and would have gotten it from Kim's Video in New York. I loved that it was about the sting in the tail of the American dream, and it seemed extremely modern to me. I saw this, The Big Parade (1925), and Show People (1928), and got really excited about King Vidor." After the enormous box-office success of The Big Parade, Vidor, who was a co-founder of the Direc- tors Guild and its first president, had enough cachet at MGM to pitch his idea for The Crowd to Irving Thalberg, who liked to sprinkle some arty pictures in I REAL LIFE: The Crowd seemed extremely modern to Weitz when he first saw it, with its German expressionist staircase (below) and a wide grid of office workers (opposite), a shot later echoed by Billy Wilder in The Apartment.