It all started, as important moments in history often do, with a bottle of booze. In this case, the booze was champagne, given as a parting present to Budd Schulberg '36 from his father B. P. Schulberg, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures.
The elder Schulberg had come to see his son off at a Los Angeles train station as Budd prepared to travel back to Dartmouth to begin production on a film about the school's Winter Carnival. The year was 1939, long before movies like "A Face in the Crowd" and "On the Waterfront" would immortalize Schulberg as one of the great screenwriters of the twentieth century; The man who boarded the train that day was a young up-and-comer, eager to make a name for himself in the bustling world of Hollywood.
But he did not travel alone. Joining Schulberg on his journey back east was another writer by the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The latter had made a name for himself in the '20s with his novel "The Great Gatsby" but was looking to reinvigorate his ailing literary career by getting into the motion picture business. He and Schulberg had helped collaborate on the screenplay for "Winter Carnival," a film that was to mark Fitzgerald's directorial debut. The young Schulberg was probably thrilled to be working with a man who was once such a great literary giant -- what he didn't realize when he opened his father's champagne on that fateful train ride was that Fitzgerald was also a recovering alcoholic.
It takes little imagination to infer that Dartmouth in 1938 was hardly a haven for a recovering alcoholic, especially one who'd already knocked back half a bottle on the trip over. And indeed, moments after he arrived on campus, Fitzgerald hit the sauce harder than a ragey freshman on a Tuesday afternoon. The producers of "Winter Carnival" tried to hide the fact that their erstwhile director was spending more time in frat basements than he was on the set, but the situation came to an unavoidable head when Fitzgerald made a drunken spectacle of himself in broad daylight outside the Hanover Inn.
Thrown off the set of the film, Fitzgerald spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from alcohol poisoning, during which time the studio decided to replace him with the more reliably sober Charles Reisner. Reisner, known for directing such Joe-College classics as "Student Tour" and "Murder Goes to College," seemed like a perfect replacement for the woebegone Fitzgerald. The movie he produced, however, was something else again.
"Winter Carnival" is the story of Jill Baxter (played by Ann Sheridan, best known as the gangster from "Angels with Dirty Faces"), an upper-crust society girl who left her beau out in the cold when an aristocratic duke swept her off her feet at a Winter Carnival years ago. She returns to the latest Carnival to find her former boyfriend now teaching at the school, and -- wouldn't you know it -- it seems that he's awfully lonely this time of year. Ninety minutes of implied sexuality and lines like "oh jeepers!" ensue.
Though the bulk of the narrative was filmed in Hollywood, the creators of "Winter Carnival" spent nearly a week at Dartmouth frantically filming as much as they could of the school's winter festivities. Given the production's time constraints, not to mention the last-minute director swap, six days of pandemonium was inevitable. The film crew combed the campus, snapping up footage of Dartmouth students sledding, skiing, throwing snowballs, talking, drinking, sleeping and doing just about everything else that's done during Winter Carnival right up to this day.
At one point, the producers convinced the town to shut down all the street lamps on Main Street to get ideal lighting conditions for one crucial scene. This chaos eventually spread beyond Hanover, when the crew forcibly held up trains arriving in the White River Junction station so that they could film a sequence there without interruption.
The finished product of all this bedlam was a film that, despite being flamed by critics across the country for its slapdash filmmaking approach (one reviewer called it "a disgrace to freshman composition"), nevertheless became tremendously popular with Dartmouth film buffs for years to come. Jones Media Center now carries a copy, which continues to be checked out by Dartmouth students willing to endure the campy aesthetic of "Winter Carnival" in order to experience a piece of Dartmouth history. For all its goofiness, "Winter Carnival" remains an integral part of any Dartmouth traditionalist's Carnival experience.
