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Rin Tin Tin, Continued from page 7
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stunt he wasn’t able to do, especially as he got older, just as there are almost always stunt doubles for human stars in films. Rin Tin Tin starred in twenty-two silents and seven talkies in just eight years, a breakneck pace, and he was not a young dog during most of that time. It would have been easy to use another dog to fill in for him in scenes that weren’t close-ups, especially any in which he was doing something any well-trained German shepherd could do, like running or jumping. The fact is that dogs of the same breed do look a lot alike. Only nine of those early films still exist, so we are able to assess just a small sample of his work. The dog starring in those nine silent films appears to be the same dog in the close-ups. In the long shots, the dog really could be any dog, since all you see is a German shepherd–shaped blur. In a few fight scenes, it looks as if a stuffed model is used. Jack Warner didn’t have any cause to say there were eighteen Rin Tin Tins if there was only one. Lee had more reason to deny that other dogs were used in the movies: maintaining that Rinty never had a double was a point of pride for him. It was a question of both the dog’s identity and his own. He had one star, his war orphan pup, and that is what he wanted the world to see. Over time, the story of Rin Tin Tin did end up forming a continuous multiple-strand loop of identity both bona fide and assumed—real individuals playing invented characters, and invented characters meant to represent real individuals played by other individuals chosen because they suited the role. Rin Tin Tin grew from being one dog to being a sort of franchise. And as his fame grew, Rin Tin Tin became, in a way, less particular—less specifically this one single dog—and more conceptual, the archetypal dog hero. I think that’s why the first question I was asked whenever I told someone I was writing about Rin Tin Tin was always, “Was there really just one?” At Warner Bros., it was Sam Warner who thought it would be a good idea to have people talk in a movie. At his urging, the studio bought the rights to Vitagraph, a system for adding music to film, and he believed that it could be developed to add spoken dialogue to film, too. His hunch, which was shared by a number of other Hollywood executives, was correct. In October 1927, Warner Bros. released The Jazz Singer, and actor Al Jolson’s ad-libbing was such a sensation that it changed the movie business forever. Unfortunately, Sam Warner, who had been so certain that the future of film included sound, died of a cerebral hemorrhage the day before the film premiered. As he predicted, talkies took over from silents quickly and completely, wiping them away, altering the entire industry, eliminating whole categories of jobs and an entire generation of actors who couldn’t or wouldn’t make the transition. Only ten years after The Jazz Singer was released, no more silent films were being made. Did Lee see the changes on the horizon? On one hand, he and Rinty had never been busier. In 1927 Rinty made Tracked by the Police, Dog of the Regiment, Jaws of Steel, and Hills of Kentucky (which featured one of his puppies, Rin Tin Tin Jr., in a small role). In 1928, he starred in A Race for Life, Rinty of the Desert, and Land of the Silver Fox, and, in 1929, The Million Dollar Collar. Lee’s contract
with Warner Bros. was up for renewal the following year, but it must have seemed like a sure thing. After all, thirteen different films starring Rinty were playing at theaters across the country. And yet, there were warnings. In May 1929, recognizing the new standard set by The Jazz Singer, the studio cast Rinty in a movie that was billed as “five percent dialog”—in other words, an awkward hybrid of a silent and a talkie. The Variety reviewer sniffed that the film, Frozen River, featured “a lot of badly synchronized barking.” In an interesting bit of backtracking, the movie was then re-released as a silent, with the sound track removed. Later that year, Rin Tin Tin’s twenty-second film, Tiger Rose, premiered in a vast, 2,600-seat movie palace, but at least one review treated it as if it was an artifact of a former time, calling it “strongly suggestive of the old Warner programmers,” but pointing out that Rinty seemed like a “much less prominent doggie than in the days when mutts were glorified by Hollywood.” The review was eerily prescient. “Rinty . . . has been scissored almost out of the picture,” the reviewer added. “He now merely peeps through his paws and gets patted a couple of times. No more saving the express train or racing miles for the United States Marines.” That December, a Warner Bros. executive instructed a lawyer to draft a letter to Lee. Its purpose was to inform him that his contract was being canceled: the studio did not plan to make any more movies with Rin Tin Tin. “It has been decided that since the talking pictures have come into their own, particularly with this organization,” the letter stated, “that the making of any animal pictures, such as we have in the past with Rin Tin Tin, is not in keeping with the policy that has been adopted by us for talking pictures, very obviously, of course, because dogs don’t talk.” Lee was on Sound Stage One of the Warner Bros. studio lot when he was handed the envelope containing the letter and his termination papers. A studio executive standing nearby overheard Lee tell the messenger delivering the envelope that he had been expecting bad news. He walked to a spot where he thought he was out of sight, and read the letter. Then without any fanfare, he packed up his Warner Bros. office, retrieved his dog, and went home. He left behind an oil portrait of Rin Tin Tin that hung in the Warner Bros. Hall of Fame—the first dog portrait to have enjoyed that honor at the studio. But he took all the other mementos that had accumulated in his office over the years: the drawings of Rin Tin Tin that had been sent to him by fans; the bas-relief plaques they had made for him; the carvings in redwood and gumwood; and the statuettes of ebony, ivory, clay, paste, soapstone, chalk, and Plasticine—all the awkward, handmade, heartfelt representations of the dog who had once been his personal war trophy and pet but had been shape-shifted and amplified and projected on the boundless scope of a public dream. Rin Tin Tin had always been Lee’s private story about the possibility that love could be constant. This setback was real, but the dog was now something communal, a shared story about courage and endurance. He flickered past on a screen but he was fixed in immortality. From RIN TIN TIN by Susan Orlean. Copyright © 2011 by Susan Orlean. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.