They gave me an office that belonged to Darryl Zanuck, with a private projection room, and the man I was sharing the secretaries with - there were two secretaries in a large outer office-was one of the greatest composers that ever lived, Gershwin. In fact, at the time, in 1937, Willy Wyler was shooting Dead End and Jack Ford was doing The Hurricane for Goldwyn. Of course, he was a god in those days, he made the greatest pictures. and he raised! You were way down here looking He had an overstuffed chair for whoever his guests would be in the office, and you sat in it, and I swear to God, it went down. you walked all the way over to his desk, so by the time you got there, you didn’t know what the hell you were going to say or what was going on. He had an office a mile long and it was the last-mile walk. He's talked to John Ford." I still thought this was a dream. He’s bringing a young fella out from New York by the name of Garson Kanin and he wants to form a team because he likes your credits. An agent called me and said, “Sam Goldwyn wants to sign you." I said, “You must have the wrong guy." He said, “No, it's you. Oh, I had, some second units as an editor, when they'd let me go out and shoot a few inserts here or there. He signed me as a director - I had never directed a thing in my life. There's one part of my story that is so important, because at one point, out of the blue, I was signed by Sam Goldwyn. So I got into production as fast as I could with the second picture and the second picture was a tremendous hit. Meanwhile, they had given me another story that I flipped over.
It was a nothing picture, but I was lucky because it was for Monogram and they didn't understand how bad it was because they had never made anything that was any good. But he put up the money and we decided on the crazy story A Wave, a WAC and a Marine.
By this time I'm so flabbergasted that I had no idea what I wanted to do. I'm not going to be in it, but I'm going to give you the money to make the picture." He said, "What do you want to make?" I said I don't know. He said, "You know, we've been trying to find you for two years now. I sort of left there, got mixed up at another studio, and the war came along and I was in the service. He would go in and tell the director this is what he wants to do, and he would do itĪnd he would get laughs. I had been an assistant director on Abbott and Costello pictures and I had gone to Lou Costello at times - very gutty to do this, actually, without checking with the director, writer, or producer - and I would suggest gags to him. PHIL KARLSON: How I got my first picture to direct is one of the big miracles of all time, and how I continued directing is another miracle, because that picture was probably the worst picture ever made.
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