This story about Bruce Davis and his book, The Academy and the Awardoriginally appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap magazine.
When Bruce Davis retired in 2011 after 20 years as CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he had an idea of how he might spend the first few years of his retirement: researching and writing a book on the history of the Academy. and his prize. After all, he knew the organization inside and out and was able to access the voluminous internal files found in the AMPAS archives. “I told a lot of people, ‘I think it will take him six months to research and maybe a year to write it,’” he said with a laugh. “It was an exercise in naïveté the whole time.” It took closer to a decade, but Davis’s book, The Academy and the Award, was published by Brandeis University Press this October. When the book came out, she sat down with TheWrap in the Hollywood house where he used to park his Prius with AMPAS plates. (When she left, she did the dish, too.) Here, Davis highlights some of the things he learned.
Bette Davis, Sidney Skolsky, and Margaret Herrick didn’t give the Academy Award the nickname “Oscar.”
“I was determined to try to solve the mystery of Oscar’s name,” Davis said, well aware that discussions about who first came up with the term had been raging for the better part of the last century. Over the years, the three loudest claimants were actress Bette Davis, who won an Academy Award in 1936 and said she decided her butt reminded her of her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson; academy staff member Margaret Herrick, who said her figure reminded her of her uncle Oscar; and gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, who claimed that he borrowed the name from vaudeville comics when he was filing a story in the early morning and had trouble spelling statuette.
The problem was that it was easier to prove who didn’t coin the name than who did. Bette Davis’ eureka moment looking at the back of her Oscar came two years after her name had already been used in print; Herrick didn’t have an uncle named Oscar, and no one has ever found the newspaper article in which she said a reporter conveniently hanging around the Academy office wrote about her new nickname for the award; and the first time Skolsky used the name in print, he noted, “For the profession, these statues are called ‘Oscar’,” a sentence he would not have written if he had invented the nickname on the spot.
“I think I got the top three claims pretty well ruled out,” Davis said. “So she could have been someone else no one has ever heard of, but interestingly, we also have an account of Eleanore Lilleberg.” Assistant at the beginning of the Academy, Lilleberg was in charge of the statuettes from the time they left the factory until the ceremony. Davis found a manuscript from Lilleberg’s brother that said her sister began referring to the statuette as Oscar after a Norwegian Army veteran in their Chicago neighborhood who was well known for standing tall. He also found two other Academy sources at the time who told similar stories crediting Lilleberg in separate interviews. Davis ultimately decided that Lilleberg was the most likely source of the name, later concluding his chapter on the name with this fact: “Almost unbelievably, the word ‘Oscar’ was not registered as a copyright until 1975.”
Bette Davis did not relinquish the presidency of the Academy after big fights with the Board of Governors.
Every time a woman is elected president of the Academy—this year, for example, when Janet Yang won the job—the traditional story of how the Academy’s first female president, actress Bette Davis, faced off with the Board of Directors of AMPAS. Governors and she quit the job abruptly. “I accepted the idea of Bette Davis having big fights with the board and started going through things,” said Bruce Davis (no relation to Bette), who had access to full minutes of every board meeting. “First of all, it was fascinating to realize that her presidency only lasted 50 days and was basically cut short by Pearl Harbor.”
Davis was elected on November 6, 1941, to a term that began with a board meeting on December 4. Minutes from that meeting show that Davis lobbied to change the rule that allowed extras to vote for the Oscars, and that the consensus in the room read: “It is preferable that the Academy Awards be awarded by vote of the members.” of the Academy”. He also recommended that the studios wrap up filming at 5 pm on Oscar day, a proposal that was quickly adopted.
However, in a book he wrote in 1962, Davis insisted that the meeting was stormy and that his ideas met with resistance. That was the only board meeting he attended; she was out of town when a meeting was held on December 17 to discuss what should be done with the Oscars in the wake of America’s entry into the war, though she did send a letter backing a plan (a ceremony but no a banquet) which was adopted . She and she then resigned on December 20, in a letter that she simply said that she thought it would be more valuable to work with other organizations more involved in the war effort.
“It’s almost like he got angrier about his treatment as the years went by,” Davis said. “At the time, he seems to have been quite cordial. He quit because he thought there were more important things to do during a war than worry about movie awards. So God bless her.”
He may have a lot of money now, but the Academy was very broke for a long time.
Although Davis had an inside view of AMPAS finances during the decades he spent as CEO, he had no idea how unstable the Academy was during its first 50 years. “The biggest surprise, without a doubt, was the financial record of the organization,” he said. “They’ve been pushing themselves year after year trying to get ahead, and there’s literally a year where they have to do a collection to do the Oscars. The only source of income was dues, and the Depression hit right after it struck.”
It didn’t help, he added, that the Academy’s founders had no idea their awards program could become a source of nearly all the revenue they’d ever need. “Even when they started letting the show get on the radio, nobody says, ‘Hey, we could get some money for this.’ And so they start this pattern of having to appeal to the producer organization over and over again. And as the guilds start to emerge, people in the guilds are so wary of the Academy because it has producers as important members. And this enormous hostility builds up.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think most people know what a harsh existence the Academy led until well into the television era, actually.”
Read more from the Race Begins issue here.
