From KTTV, Los Angeles:

Funeral services were pending today for actor Jackie Cooper, who starred in “Our Gang” shorts as a child and was nominated for an Oscar at age 9, but was known to later fans as Daily Planet editor Perry White in the “Superman” films of the 1970s and 80s.

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When King Vidor first stepped onto the set of The Champ, he was filled with a rare sense of freedom. Frances Marion’s script was unusually simple, focused squarely on a pair of immensely sympathetic protagonists and their relationship. All the key moments, plot twists and emotional climaxes were spelled out on the page, with no false conflicts or manufactured drama to complicate the works. Vidor realized that having such a tight screenplay “would relieve me as a director — now I didn’t have to worry about the story, worry about how I will wrap this up and keep it all together. I could concentrate on little details, touches and things.”

Touches and things. As we learned last week, Vidor equated silent films to ballet: operatic makeup, overwrought facial expressions, stylized movements, and the action punctuated by an enormous symphonic orchestra that — because the players and their instruments were live in the theater — sounded as amazing as today’s very best surround-sound systems. With the advent of synchronous dialogue, all of this vanished — people now wanted to hear actors talk, of all things! Now, rather than mounting a sort of grand operatic ballet, Vidor found himself helming something more akin to a stage play, and the change was jarring and disheartening. How could a director recapture the emotional magic of old, using mere dialogue?

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If you’ve seen Superman: The Movie (1978), you surely remember the character of Perry White, the tough-as-nails editor of The Daily Planet. Played pitch-perfect by actor Jackie Cooper, he’s one of the comedic highlights of the picture. “I want the name of this flying whatchamacallit to go with the Daily Planet like bacon and eggs! Franks and beans! Death and taxes! Politics and corruption!”

Cooper delivers his one-liners in a Preston Sturges staccato that helps give the 1970s film a pleasant 1930s gloss, bridging the gap between comic book and movie. But if, like me, you were just a kid when you saw Superman, you may not have known that here was an actor who, fifty years earlier, was one of the most popular and recognizable in the world, courtesy of a little picture called The Champ. (more…)

Our newest film in this series, 1931’s The Champ, marks the first time we begin our study not with a director but with a writer. Not to say that the director didn’t have a great deal to do with the success of the film — he most certainly did, and (as the title of this post hints) we will review that contribution in good time. But in the case of The Champ, it was the writer who was primarily responsible for the rich familial tone and heart-rending melodrama for which this touching little film (only 86 minutes) is best known and remembered.

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she. (more…)