William K. Howard — You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down (1927) 🇺🇸
His name, the full name, is William K. Howard, but they call him Bill, and he recently directed a very fine picture made from Edna Ferber’s story, “Gigolo” — fine not because it cost a million dollars and boasted a hundred sets, but because it was charming and simple and was handled with the most excellent taste.
by Laura Ellsworth Fitch
Everybody is tickled to death about Bill’s fine picture, because he’s the kind of fellow of whom people say, “Wait until that boy gets his chance!” Not that Bill hasn’t done effective and money-making things before, such as The Thundering Herd, The Border Legion, and Volcano for Lasky besides several surefire pictures for De Mille [Cecil B. DeMille | William de Mille], but it’s that now he has gone and done something that has attracted the attention of the finest reviewers in the country. One of them said that Bill and Marcel de Sano, a young director out at Metro-Goldwyn, are the most important new directors on the field. Nice for a young fellow just getting started, wasn’t it?
Another reason everybody’s so glad about Bill is that the whole little town of Hollywood, and its hounds, know him and his wife Nan like you know the folks next door. You can drop into Bill’s house at all hours of the day or night and be as welcome as if you had chosen a civil time for your visit. There’s always a cheerful fire, and a cheerful crowd talking pictures and books and plays and games — because that’s all the people in Hollywood want to talk about, anyway, say what they will to the contrary. Any afternoon around five o’clock at Bill’s, you’re liable to run into Bebe Daniels or Shirley Mason or Jack Ford [John Ford] and his beautiful wife or Rod La Rocque or the most famous criminal lawyer in the State or a well-known magazine writer and illustrator or a jazz-Orchestra leader or a fellow with gray temples who plays “bits” or Pat O’Malley’s three red-headed kids, and perhaps a couple of stray dogs all cleaned up and adopted.
Which makes two reasons why everybody’s glad about Bill. Here is a third. Every one knows the story of his struggles — the way he has fought up from the bottom without yessing or bootlicking — defying a lot of people, who could have been of help him, because he didn’t believe in them or they in him. And to defy people who can help you when you need help takes a lot of courage. For Bill hasn’t always had his big house in Hollywood, with a car and chauffeur out in front and a Filipino in the kitchen. Not so long ago that he can’t remember it, he used to stand on street corners rattling pennies around in his pocket wondering if he had enough of them for car fare. He usually didn’t.
Bill started out in the movie business with a lot of enthusiasm and a pretty good job with a certain big film concern. The job was selling pictures that other fellows had directed, and he sold them so well that he finally landed quite a good job at quite a good salary.
Then came the war, as the old saying goes.
The motion-picture companies were very patriotic. They put shiny silver stars on a flag for those of their men who enlisted and they put in one for Bill, who was young, unmarried. Irish, and patriotic himself. Everybody “backslapped” him.
Good kid, Bill! Atta spirit! Going to clean up the little old war, eh? So saying, they sat back in their chairs and held down their jobs. Another fellow got Bill’s at a cut in salary. But Bill didn’t worry about it — he was too busy dodging things the Germans were throwing at him to worry much about anything else.
After a couple of years, Bill came back from the war. At the first available opportunity, he dashed up to the home office with the light of love in his eyes. Well, well, well, so you’re back from the war, Mr. Howard! Didn’t seem to have hurt him any. He looked very well. Very glad to see him, they were. Nice of him to drop in. His job? Oh, yes, his job! Well, to be perfectly frank, Mr. Nitwit was filling it very well and at a much smaller salary — they felt they really had no justification in firing Mr. Nitwit. Perhaps if Mr. Howard would drop around in a month or so, there might be an opening.
Now, at this Mr. Howard saw red. He saw red as crimson as the blood of seventy-seven thousand men who didn’t get back to the jobs they wouldn’t have had anyway — and then he laughed. The film-corporation people thought he was a bit touched by the war, don’t you know — so many of the young men were. He went on laughing and laughing and when he was finished, and not a whit before, he shouted, “If I were a wounded, or a married man and you did this to me, I’d go down on the street, get a handful of rocks, and break every window in this place!”
After that, he left.
He went hipping it down the street wilder in his heart than unexplored Africa. He bumped people right and left and was glad of it. Just as he went around a corner he bumped into a little Jew who grunted, grabbed at his windpipes, and then grabbed Bill.
“Say, I was chust looking for you!”
Taking a look at the speaker, Bill recognized the cigar of the head salesman of a rival film concern.
“I got a chob for you,” the little one went on. “We got a set of pictures we want you to sell.”
It so happened that a job was what Bill wanted nothing else but, and he was so dog-gone glad to get it that he didn’t stop to realize that it came too easily not to have a catch in it somewhere. He didn’t realize that until he saw the set of pictures he was to sell. They were, to borrow a word from the trenches — well, to be polite, they were simply n. g.
“You want to sell these or give them away?”‘ asked Bill.
“Well, sell all you can,” advised the little one, apologetically. “You’ve got a tough route to travel and maybe it can’t be done.”
“You bet it can be done!” put in Mr. Howard. “They’ll take ‘em and like ‘em!”
That’s how bad he felt!
And the funny part of it was. they did take ‘em and like ‘em! He made a record-breaking trip through the meanest part of the country selling the worst set of pictures ever released by a film company before or since. It was sort of a sensation at the time. People in film exchanges got to talking about that kid who could sell rotten pictures to exhibitors who weren’t, as a rule, interested even in the good ones.
In time Carl Laemmle heard about him, and Carl Laemmle has a warm spot in his heart for young men Who can do things that can’t be done. The upshot of that was that Bill came to Hollywood to meet Uncle Carl and, the first thing any one knew, he was general manager of Universal City, with his name on a glass door and a waiting room full of callers. Like all general managers at Universal he came — and went. No one knows just what happened there. The Irish are hot-headed, and Bill had never been a yes man.
After that, things didn’t go so well with Bill for a while.
He finally got a job as an assistant director. Then, because you can’t keep a good man down, he got a job as a director of Westerns and melothrillers. He made one picture with Johnny Walker [Johnnie Walker] that got a good break — The Fourth Musketeer. That’s when people started saying, “Wait until that boy gets his chance!” And they kept right on saying it up until Gigolo. Then they didn’t have to say it any more.
The nice little hand that everybody gave him as a result of that film has left Bill just where it found him — with an ardent desire to make another good one: He’s young enough to be excited about the praise he has occasioned and to want to justify it. He wants to make “A Friend of Napoleon.” He has his heart set on it. I hope he gets it.
If he does, he’ll go into it just as he went into Gigolo — with a funny kind of a persistency in his eye, the temperament of a prima donna, the consistency of a draftsman, and a brand-new suit of clothes. And they’ll take it and like it! That’s Bill.
Bill perilously directs a scene from the side of a train.
Bill Howard’s own hard experiences, both during the war and as a result of the war, made him peculiarly suited to direct such a picture as “Gigolo.”
Photo by: George Baxter
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, March 1927