Show Boat (The Movie that Made My Family Lose Universal Studios)

About two years ago, I made a video called How My Family Lost Universal Studios. I think the title of the video is pretty self explanatory - in case you happen to be new here, my great Uncle Carl Laemmle started Universal Studios in 1912, his son Junior took over the studio at 21 years old, and many of my aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins worked there over the years, as producers, directors, writers, actors and more. After 1936, my family lost the studio. And their last big movie, the movie that lost them the studio, was Show Boat!

Show Boat was a 1936 musical written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, based on the 1926 novel by Edna Ferber. The film takes place from the 1880s to the 1920s, following Magnolia Hawkes on her family’s show boat, where she takes over as leading lady when another actress, Julie, and her husband are forced to leave when it’s found out Julie is part Black and her husband is white. Show Boat has a star-studded cast with Irene Dunne, Paul Robeson, Allan Jones, Helen Morgan, Sammy White, Charles Winninger, and Hattie McDaniel.

The original Broadway show opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on December 27, 1927, and Morgan, Winninger, and White were all in the original Broadway cast. Robeson, Dunne, Jones, and McDaniel all played their roles on stage too in the early 1930s. The 1936 Show Boat is not the first version of this film. Universal made its first Show Boat in 1929 as a silent film, but my Uncle Carl wasn’t too happy with it.

In 1929 the industry was transitioning from silent film to sound. After they finished filming, suddenly everyone was like, “wait … did they expect a musical with sound?!” So the release was delayed and Universal reshot about 30 minutes of singing and dialogue. Then when the movie was finally about to premiere, Show Boat on Broadway really blew up. So Universal had a second panic. “What if audiences expected the same music as the Broadway show?” So a prologue was added featuring the original Broadway cast singing five songs from the show. When the film was finally released, some theaters received the part talkie version, while others got the silent version without the prologue. I guess the long and short of it, is that the 1929 version was a bit of a mish-mosh. And all of that’s to say, that’s why just a few years later, Uncle Carl was making Show Boat again.

I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw who directed this film. None other than James Whale - the same James Whale responsible for Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man! Another reminder of just how talented he was at his craft. But not everyone in the cast felt that way when they found out he was hired. I’ve specifically heard Irene Dunne and Allan Jones thought he was the wrong pick. James Whale wasn’t American, making a very American film, and really only known for horror and war films. I can get their hesitation. I think James Whale got things off on the wrong foot too by coming on too strong with an announcement on one of his first days … essentially telling all the actors who had already spent years performing in Show Boat to forget everything they thought they knew so he could tell them what he wanted. It went over about as well as you’d expect.

But James Whale was determined to get past that shaky start, and determined to prove his artistic talent beyond the horror films everyone was associating him with. It really may have been first day jitters, once filming was underway, James Whale had no trouble collaborating with the actors. I think once you watch the film, it’s plain to see he was the right pick to direct. James Whale didn’t see Show Boat as simply a play being recorded, he had a cinematic masterpiece in mind, and Universal spent almost 1.2 million dollars on his vision. That wasn’t the original budget, but we’ll get into that later.

He had beautifully constructed, lavish sets, where he built old towns, steamboats, and a river. More than 3,000 actors, singers, dancers, and musicians were in the production. Pre-production took about a year, and filming was wrapped in about 3 months. James Whale and Paul Robeson got along particularly well during filming. They had great respect for each other, and Paul Robeson singing Ol Man River in Show Boat is consistently cited as the standout in the film. It’s considered one of the greatest movie musical moments of all time. Go watch it on YouTube like, right after this.

For 1936, the film managed to approach certain aspects of race in a pretty progressive and nuanced way. It addressed racial disparities, it got specific permission from the Hays office to include a storyline with an interracial marriage, and it hired many Black actors to play prominent roles in the film which I know is doing the least, but is still more than many films did back then. On the other hand, this film is not without its tropes and stereotypes, and does include a number with Irene Dunne in blackface. It’s pretty uncomfortable to watch, and double uncomfortable to see all the great press she got over that scene specifically.

When the film was released on May 14, 1936, it got rave reviews. But I feel like this is a good time to pivot to what was going on behind the behind-the-scenes. Like, with my family at Universal. And why this movie is the reason they lost it.

When Junior Laemmle took control of Universal at 21 years old, he made a transition from churning out hundreds of lower budget films a year, to instead releasing a few high quality films with a bigger budget. This meant both high risk and high reward, when things went well they went really well, but if a movie flopped, it was a much bigger loss.

Junior had great vision, and a great mind for the business. After all, it was because of his monster movies that Universal was one of the only film studios not to record a loss during the Great Depression. Junior really believed in his films and with a few big movies in the pipeline, he convinced his dad they should take out a $750,000 loan with a wall street firm called Standard Capital. They had 90 days to pay it back, or Standard Capital had the option to buy Universal.

Unfortunately, their other two films Magnificent Obsession and Sutter’s Gold were going over time and over schedule, and now Show Boat was doing the same. They needed to get Show Boat finished and in theaters to save the studio … but instead they went two weeks over and spent an extra $400,000. Ninety days was up, and Standard Capital made good on their terms. Carl Laemmle was paid out, and stepped down as President. Junior retired as well.

The killer here, is that Show Boat was a wild success! Critics loved it, audiences loved it, and it more than made its money back. The New York Times called it, “one of the finest musical films they’d ever seen.” Variety called it “a smash film-musical. A cinch for big grosses from theaters.” If only that were enough to hand the studio back over to my family!

In the 1940s, MGM bought the rights to Show Boat and withdrew the 1936 version from circulation so people wouldn’t be too attached to the old one when they wanted to remake it. Unfortunately, plans fell through and MGM’s version of Show Boat wouldn’t be released until 1951. In the 1980s, it was finally seen again on TV, and a restored version of the film was released in 2014.

Despite the fact that this movie meant the end of Universal for my family, I can’t deny it’s a great film that left a pretty great legacy. If you haven’t yet seen this film, watch it tonight.