Russ Columbo was an enormously popular crooner of the early 1930s, rivaling Bing Crosby in his rise to stardom. Unfortunately he went to a friend’s house one afternoon in 1934, cleaned his friend’s gun and was the unfortunate recipient of a bullet that discharged by accident, thus ending his career (and life). Nothing about that story truly makes sense but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.

I want to show you a demonstration of what a director can do with a fairly simple piece of scripted action to make it come alive and turn it into a genuine scene. CLICK HERE TO VIEW A CLIP from Columbo’s final movie, ‘Wake Up and Dream’ (1934). The director, Kurt Neumann (later best known for ‘The Fly’) was fairly new to the game but clearly determined to leave his mark on this fairly insipid piece of material. I’ve not seen the entire film but clearly the point of this moment is for a rehearsal of a show to be interrupted as an unknown singer takes the stage and auditions, surprising those in attendance–producer, chorus girls, musicians and assorted others–with his excellence. I imagine the screenplay read something like this:

INT. THEATRE–Russ gets up and sings. The band members and the producer look on skeptically. But soon he wows them. At the end of the song he gets a round of applause and his agent follows the producer out of the theater to talk about hiring him.

Now, what makes the difference in scenes like this–they’re quite common in old musicals–is how carefully built the action is. Neumann doesn’t stint on the coverage. I count nineteen sepearate camera set-ups (not cuts–there are many more of those) which gradually tell the story of his triumph in the moment. Neumann breaks the story telling down into several different interior stories. The band plays cards and couldn’t care less. Until they hear him, that is. They then pay him the ultimate tribute–they pick up their instruments and begin to accompany him. The producer goes from skeptical to interested as Russ’s agent sits behind him, trying to judge his reaction. The female pianist–who seems to be Russ’s sweeheart–notices how well things are going and gradually turns from supportive but nervous to supportive and thrilled. Even the chorus girls begin to dance in unison, up on a catwalk–it’s a charming shot and it comes at 2:30. It’s then followed by a cut to another performer standing on the steps beneath the chrous girls indicating perhaps that she’s the star of the show. And boy does she give Russ the once-over. Clearly the star has set her eyes on Russ and plans on plowing over Ms. Good-hearted piano girl. All in all, this masterful three-plus minute piece of filmmaking is a delight as well as being instructive to any filmmaker in terms of looking for stories within a scene that can be expanded upon, thus taking something that might be simply trite and giving is emotional resonance. And something tells me Kurt Neumann had producers storming onto the set asking why the hell he was shooting so much Goddam material–wasn’t this 2 1/8ths of a page supposed to be banged out in the morning before breaking for lunch?