Blogs Rabble Rouser RABBLE ROUSER: "There Will Be Blood" - Reel Life versus Real Life | RABBLE ROUSER: "There Will Be Blood" - Reel Life versus Real Life |
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| Written by Kent Victor Schuelke | |
| Sunday, 13 January 2008 | |
 Daniel Day-Lewis portrays a fictional oil baron sitting in the real study of the real Greystone Mansion, built by the family of real oil baron, Edward L. Doheny Sr. There will be Blood is not only the finest film of 2007, but an instant classic that ranks among the great films in American cinema. Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a performance so rich that it should be considered equal or superior to the genius of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. There will be Blood is both epic and deeply personal. One storyline is as big as the California sky in the film's beautifully composed frames: the movie examines the real-life Southern California oil boom that began 116 years ago. Another storyline is micro-focused: the film delves into the interior psychology of its protagonist - oil man Daniel Plainview.  Paul Thomas Anderson Anderson's film sticks closest to California's real history in its general depiction of the state's 19th-Century oil boom and the harsh labor conditions and profit fever that ruled and drove that boom, which started in 1892 and peaked in 1898. While Anderson's broad strokes about the oil boom ring true, Daniel Plainview's interior psychology - which is the brilliant black heart of Anderson's movie - is not based on anything historians know about the heart and mind of Edward L. Doheny, Sr. And there's nothing wrong with that. Anderson is nothing but straightforward that his film is fiction. But cinematic images are powerful ones and it doesn't hurt to reiterate that if you want to meditate on the historical aspects of this movie story, embrace Anderson's generalized depiction of the chase for black gold, but don't associate the Daniel Plainview story at all with the real-life Doheny legend. There are a few facts genuinely shared by the fictional Plainview and real-life Doheny. Both men were born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and both men were penniless drifters in the late 1800s, unremarkably prospecting for fortune (Doheny for gold, Plainview for silver) in the Western U.S. before striking it rich and inaugurating the Los Angeles oil boom that would roll on well into the 20th Century. Let's call these shared details "the 30,000 foot-view," and from that height the stories seem to be uncannily similar, but it's the close ups of these two men that bare little resemblance. The real-life story of Edward L. Doheny, Sr., is a fascinating one. In 1892, the destitute Doheny convinces a former mining partner to invest $400 in a vacant lot on the outskirts of downtown LA (current location of Dodger Stadium) and the men begin looking for underground oil deposits. Picks and axes, brute strength and human resolve carve a five-feet-by-seven-feet shaft extending 155 feet into the LA earth. They sharpen a 60-foot Eucalyptus tree into a crude drill and extend the hole to 460 feet where they find oil. A seven-barrel-a-day output soon increases to 40 barrels a day. Doheny's oil field leases expand to other parts of Southern California, and eventually Mexico, where he becomes the primary character in the development of the Mexican oil market. The Mexican operation alone earns Doheny $31 million by 1902. In 1925, Doheny's wealth is estimated at greater than $100 million, making him the richest person in the United States, overshadowing even the fortunes of another oil baron, some fella named John D. Rockefeller.  Harry Ford Sinclair
 Edward L. Doheny Sr, right, with his attorney during the Teapot Dome Scandal  Upton Sinclair
Enter novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair's best known literary work is The Jungle (1906), which exposes the unsanitary and brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards and inspires passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
His writing career in seeming decline in the 1920s, almost twenty years after the publication of The Jungle, Sinclair seeks an issue in which he can use his pen to stir American's conscience. When oil is discovered just outside of Los Angeles on land that is owned by his wife, Upton Sinclair attends a meeting of local property owners and the greed he witnesses becomes the seed for his next novel, Oil!. The writer, no relation to oil man Harry Sinclair, makes a fictionalized account of the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which oil-men Sinclair and Doheny were key participants, the centerpiece of Oil!. This key event in Upton Sinclair's novel is not depicted at all in Anderson's film.
The film does have real roots in the book, however. Eli Watkins is a famous radio evangelist in Oil! and Sinclair based this character on real-life female evangelist, Aimee Semple MacPherson. In There Will Be Blood, Paul Dano plays Eli Sunday, an evangelist. The secular ambitions and corruption of organized religion are themes in both Sinclair's novel and Anderson's film. As many critics have noted, these stories concern "profits" and "prophets." Blood of the lamb, indeed. Daniel Plainview routinely introduces strangers to his young son - H.W. - by referring to him as "his son and partner." Oil!'s depiction of a fictional wildcatter named J. Arnold Ross and his son Bunny Ross as they traverse the dirt roads of California in an automobile stopping at farming communities to convince poor land owners to lease their property for Ross oil drilling is almost identical to what father-and-son Plainview do. In Oil!, J. Arnold Ross becomes strikingly rich and the key figure in the Los Angeles oil story and he attempts to groom his son for the family business, but the young man in Sinclair's novel is too egalitarian for his father's competitive capitalist ways. Bunny Ross sides with striking oil workers in protests against his father's tyranny. In There Will Be Blood, a gusher explodes from the earth and sparks an accident that leaves young H.W. permanently deaf. This tragedy is the beginning of the deterioration of H.W.'s relationship and "partnership" with his prospector father. In the Sinclair novel, it's politics that comes between dad and Bunny Ross. Edward L. Doheny's son - Edward Jr., known as "Ned" - plays prominently in his father's story. After graduating from the University of Southern California with a business degree and serving in the U.S. Navy, Ned Doheny is hired by his father to be a vice president in the family business. Neither Bunny, nor Ned Doheny, were deaf. And it isn't business or politics that comes between Ned and Edward Sr. It's death. First, a bit more background on the Dohenys. In 1914 Edward gives Ned a 22-acre plot in Beverly Hills as a wedding present. Ned spends three years and $3.1 million building the extraordinary Greystone Mansion on the land his father gave him.  The Greystone Mansion In 1929, only six months after moving into the mansion with his wife Lucy, 35-year-old Ned Doheny is found shot to death in one of the mansion's guest rooms, the apparent victim in a murder/suicide. The assailant is Ned's personal secretary, T. Hugh Plunkett, who police say shot Ned Doheny and then himself. The authorities do not hold a formal inquest, and the police rule it a homicide/suicide after hearing multiple testimonies about Plunkett's unstable mental behavior during the six months leading up to the killings. Why Plunkett does what he does will probably never be fully understood. Alternate theories include a quarrel over salary, and a romantic relationship between Ned and Hugh, and yet another that Hugh is the intended target for what he knows about the Teapot scandal, which had yet to come to trial. The murder-suicide is still an inspiration for rumors and true crime speculation even after 80 years.  Body of Ned Doheny, foreground, and body of Hugh Plunkett in hallway, background. Ned's widow remains in the mansion until 1955. The Greystone Mansion and its grounds are acquired by the City of Beverly Hills in 1964, and the large sloping lawns and the exterior of the house are now open to the public.  The Greystone Mansion  The Greystone Mansion  Birdseye view of The Greystone Mansion But the closest collision of fact and reality is yet to occur. When looking for a realistic home bowling alley for a scene in There Will Be Blood, P.T. Anderson and his crew look to Greystone Mansion. Ned Doheny's 55-room mansion contains a bowling alley and it provides Anderson the perfect setting for his finale. When Anderson's location scouts check out the alley, it is uncared for and essentially a storeroom. Anderson's people go to the City of Beverly Hills with an offer. The filmmakers will renovate the mansion's bowling alley if the city will give them a reduced price on a permit to film at the mansion. This means PT Anderson achieves an aspect of realism that was not in the cards for legendary director Orson Welles, for Anderson did shoot in the Doheny mansion but Welles did not shoot in the Hearst Castle. But give Orson credit for the guts to make a loosely disguised bio film on a powerful living figure, not a dead one. In addition to the bowling alley scene, the Mansion is used to film scenes in which Daniel Plainview works in his private study, and a phenomenal moment in which Plainview takes gun target practice inside the house. Using the real-life Doheny home as a shooting location in the fictional film can inspire any rational person to scratch their head in confusion and wonder, "Is this reel life or real life?" But the majority of There Will Be Blood is not filmed in California, but thousands of miles away in Texas. "Texas-T." Although it is the junior Doheny who lives in Greystone, the man who is the seed of this whole tale also, unsurprisingly, lives in the splendor bought for him from 30 years of speculating, prospecting and drilling for oil. The senior Doheny lives in a 22-room mansion near the USC campus in downtown Los Angeles. The house still stands and and has historical preservation status and is part of the campus of Mount St. Mary's College.  The downtown LA mansion of Edward Doheny Sr. Daniel Plainview and J. Arnold Ross lose their beloved sons to estrangement. Edward loses his in a bloody homicide. The elder Doheny's donate $1.1 million to USC for a library in Ned's honor. When the library opens in 1932, California Gov. James Rolph Jr. remarks, "Here we see perpetuated the love of a father for his dutiful son." Harry F. Sinclair serves six months in prison for his role in the Teapot Dome Scandal. In 1949 he retires to California. He dies in Pasadena in 1956 at age 80, just a few short miles from where Edward Doheny first struck oil near downtown LA. Upton Sinclair, a fighting social crusader, evolves from socialist to Democrat and is narrowly defeated as the Democratic Party's candidate in the California gubernatorial election of 1934. The Pulitizer-prize winning novelist leaves California in 1966 and dies two years later, and is buried in Washington D.C. His suburban Los Angeles home - the Upton Sinclair House - is now a national landmark. Edward L. Doheny Sr., the great California wildcatter, is indicted for his role in the Teapot Dome Scandal but eventually cleared of all charges. He dies of old age (79 years) in 1935 in Los Angeles, leaving an $85 million fortune to his family. On the very night of his funeral, his widow, Estelle, destroys the personal and business papers of the oil man, honoring Edward's deathbed wish. That historian's loss left the true story of an important Southern California player open to the perks and problems that always accompany mythology, legend and the passage of time. The myth of the oil story is beautifully told in PT Anderson's new cinema classic. Miss this movie at your own peril. The truth of the oil story is buried with Edward Doheny Sr., and his arch rival Harry Ford Sinclair, ironically both spending eternity in the Main Mausoleum of Calvary Cemetery, East Los Angeles USA. The truth of the oil story is buried with Edward Doheny Jr. and T. Hugh Plunkett. Killer and victim are both buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Suburban Los Angeles. The simple grave marker of Plunkett is just 50 feet downhill from the opulent final resting place of the son of California oil.
REFERENCES and EXTERNAL LINKS: The historical references in this article are wholly due to existing research on the relevant issues, and the research for this article and the photos were honed from:
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The Rabble Rouser
Kent Victor Schuelke is The Rabble Rouser. He is an actor and filmmaker, and the editor of www.independentfilmsdirect.com. He has acted in several independent films and on-stage in Los Angeles, and he plans to direct from his own script (but not act in) a digital feature in 2008. He has a long history in film and television production (check him out on IMDb), and also worked in the video game biz. He got his start in journalism as a college freshman in 1981. In 1986, he interviewed movie legend Cary Grant for his little college paper and when the actor died a couple months later Schuelke sold his Grant talk to Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. He is a product of Hollywood's last Golden Era (1967-1980). As a child, Schuelke remembers seeing Bonnie and Clyde on the big screen at about age six. Schuelke watched American Graffiti about 30 times on the big screen at the little single screen movie house in the tiny Iowa farming village where he was reared. He has been almost singularly obsessed by movies since age four. His favorite films are the ultra realistic ones — Dog Day Afternoon is among his favorites and the purest description of the type of filmmaking he holds in highest regard. Schuelke lives in Los Angeles, and loves it. His current professional life is focused on acting, making films and writing about movies, and he is so happy with his life path that he might even consider dropping his therapist. But the Rouser will not go off his medication — his co-workers at IFD will see to that, for everybody's sakes. 
