Yuku free message boards

bipolarber wrote:

---

I have no idea if Mr. O'Brien was a drinker or not. I do remember reading that he had a very unhappy home life, due to the prolonged illness of his wife. (I think it was TB?) Anyway, with all the pressures he must have been under, I could hardly fault him if he did self-medicate like that.

It wasn't just that his wife, Hazel O'Brien, had TB, she was clearly a depressive and had made several suicide attempts in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, in late 1933 she shot dead her and Willis's two sons before shooting herself in the chest. She survived for a year (Don Shay in Cinefex says that ironically she may have extended her life as the gunshot to her chest drained her tubercular lung), with the authorities during that time delaying trying her for homicide because of her medical condition. During that time, Willis started dating Hazel Rutherford - sadly, shortly afterwards she found out that she had breast cancer and, unable to face what was then horrifically disfiguring surgical treatment, committed suicide by jumping from the seventh floor of a hotel. Not long after that, happily Willis met Darlyne Prenett, whom he later married, and an appallingly dark chapter in his life came to a close.

So maybe Willis O'Brien did drink, and drink heavily, but it's hardly surprising.

But in any case, I don't think his uneven career needs to be explained by drink. As others have noted here, he was 47 when Kong was released (indeed, he was already pushing 40 when The Lost World burst upon the silent screen), and after that although he tried to get other stopmotion projects off the ground, the film industry wasn't in the mood - his kind of effects work was both protracted and expensive. And it wasn't as if O'Brien was unemployed - he was a major player in the effects work for The Last Days of Pompeii, on which it must be emphasised that Merian Cooper was happy to work with him. And don't forget that Cooper was also perfectly happy to work with him as they both developed War Eagles. Indeed, War Eagles was orignally a story idea of Cooper's, so whatever Cooper may have said in his interview, whatever he may have thought, there is nothing to suggest that he was not happy to work with Willis O'Brien. Of course, the war came along and destroyed any chance of making War Eagles, and for some time after peace returned, the only fantastic films being made were the relatively cheap Universal horrors. There simply wasn't the market for the highly expensive meticulous and time-consuming work that O'Brien crafted. Mighty Joe Young was probably the earliest project after the war O'Brien could have realistically got anywhere with, and what a triumph it was (and, of course, it was yet another Cooper-O'Brien collaboration!), but by then he was already in his 60s. Think of this: Willis O'Brien was 63 when Mighty Joe Young was released, older than Ray Harryhausen was when he retired after Clash of the Titans!

Yes, O'Brien wasn't a great businessman, but he was also very unlucky. There was never during the most potentially productive part of his lifetime the kind of boom in the kind of fantastic films he was interested in that, for example, there was during Ray Harryhausen's life (and don't forget that Ray's career is peppered with dozens of potential projects that never got anywhere either). After all, the great sci-fi boom of the 1950s was what gave Ray his leg-up, but by then Willis O'Brien was an old man, to expect him to have jumped onto that bandwagon and ridden it is unrealistic, The Black Scorpion and The Giant Behemoth notwithstanding (and considering those movies' reputations, they only serve to make my point all the more). Also, as others here have noted, Willis O'Brien never had a Charles Schneer. The nearest he got to that was Merian Cooper, but Cooper's interests were too wide-ranging for him to ever provide the kind of single-minded attention Schneer could give Harryhausen. Even so, Cooper worked with O'Brien on his two greatest (sound) films, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young; Cooper worked with him on The Last Days of Pompeii; and Cooper worked with him developing War Eagles which, but for the war, promised to have been a spectacular film.

I think all of this gives the lie to the idea that booze affected Willis O'Brien's career.