Thread by @thepinksmoke

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the death of F.W. Murnau. He died due to a skull injury sustained in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway near Rincon Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara.

Despite being physically and financially drained from the 18-month production of his latest film TABU: A STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS, Murnau was in high spirits that day. Paramount had bought the film and offered him a ten-year contract. TABU's New York premiere was a week away.

Murnau was traveling in the late afternoon from Los Angeles to Monterey to visit writer William Morris at Carmel del Monte to discuss Morris penning a novelization of TABU and Murnau’s new projects for the cinema including a possible adaptation of Herman Melville’s TYPHEE.

With him in his hired Packard limousine was the rental company chauffeur John Freeland, a 14-year-old Filipino boy named Garcia Stevenson, Ned Marin, manager of the company that did the synchronization for TABU and Pal, Murnau’s German sheepdog.

The most widely-accepted account of the accident is that Murnau allowed Stevenson to get behind the wheel. Eager to prove how well he could drive, Stevenson was going too fast and swerved to avoid an oncoming truck, sending the Packard off the road and into an electric pole.

Only Murnau was injured, dying from a severe skull fracture later that day.

“The ancient Greeks represented death as a handsome young man, with the sombre and enigmatic beauty which the young Filipino who drove Murnau to his death no doubt possessed.” - Lotte Eisner, MURNAU

When details of the accident and the involvement of Stevenson emerged, insinuations about how the filmmaker may have caused the crash circulated around town. Kenneth Anger later infamously recounted these rumors in Cahiers du Cinema and his book HOLLYWOOD BABYLON.

Because of the perceived scandal, only 11 people attended Murnau’s memorial service in Hollywood: Greta Garbo, SUNRISE star George O’Brien, director William K. Howard, character actor Herman Bing and Edgar G. Ulmer among them.

Garbo, a friend and admirer of Murnau, commissioned a death mask of the director. She kept it on her desk during her years in Hollywood, and decades later gifted the mask to Murnau's family.

There was no money to embalm the body for transportation back to Germany due to a question of inheritance. Bing went around asking for help. Emil Jannings donated $3k to the purpose, despite the fact that he and Murnau had been on less than friendly terms for the past few years.

Murnau had planned to visit his mother in Germany. As was his habit he consulted a fortune teller, who told that he would arrive at his mother’s on April 5th but in a different manner from what he expected. His coffin would arrive in Hamburg on the exact day the teller predicted.

A group of filmmakers met the body when it arrived in Berlin: frequent collaborators such as screenwriter Carl Mayer, set designers Robert Herlth & Walter Rohrig, producer Erich Pommer, cinematographers Carl Hoffman & Fritz Arno Wagner, art director Rochus Gliese, Emil Jannings.

Also present were filmmakers Fritz Lang, Ludwig Berger, Robert Flaherty and screenwriter Hans Rameau. Although Lang had considered Murnau a professional rival, he eulogized the director as a tireless and thorough worker full of life and enthusiasm for his art.

Lang: "It is clear that the gods, so often jealous, wish it to be thus. They favored him more than other men and caused him to rise astonishingly quickly, which is all the more surprising because he never aimed at success nor popularity nor wealth."

"Many centuries hence, everyone will know that a pioneer has left us in the midst of his career, a man to whom the cinema owes its fundamental character, artistically as well as technically.”

"Murnau understood that the cinema, more than the threatre, was called to present life as a symbol: all his works are like animated ballads, and one day this idea will be triumphant.”

"Let all sincere creators take the dead man as their example. Aloha oe Murnau.”

Emil Jannings said nothing at the funeral. Profoundly moved, he merely stepped forward and gently passed his hand over the glass that covered Murnau’s face.

Jannings: "Of all the great directors, he was the one who had the strongest character, rejecting any form of compromise, incorruptible. He was a pioneer, an explorer, he fertilized everything he touched, always years in advance. Never envious, always modest. And always alone."

He was 42.