Wait, did A Dog really win the first Oscar for best actor?

If you are under 60 years old, you may not know who Rin Tin Tin is. It’s a shame, as there was a time when Rin Tin Tin was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Born in Fliery, France, in 1918, Rin Tin Tin (sometimes called Rinty for short) was a German Shepherd found on a French battlefield by an American soldier named Lee Duncan, fighting in World War I. Upon returning from the war, Duncan trained Rinty to act on camera and simply walked the dog from studio to studio, asking if they were looking for an animal to perform. Rin Tin Tin made her film debut in the 1922 film “The Man from Hell River,” replacing a finicky wolf. He would later play a wolfdog in the 1923 film “Where the North Begins,” launching the popular dog into the mainstream.

Throughout the 1920s, Rin Tin Tin would headline more than 20 films, often playing himself. He was one of the best-trained dogs in Hollywood and became the advertising face of several dog-related products. Some ticket sales estimates place Rin Tin Tin as the highest-grossing film star of the era, although those figures cannot be fully corroborated. Sadly, many of Rin Tin Tin’s films have been lost to the ravages of time. Fortunately, audiences can still see the dog’s first color film, John G. Adolfi’s “The Show of Shows,” a high-profile revue film featuring singers, dancers, a Shakespeare scene and a large number of dogs.

In the 2011 biography. “Rin Tin Tin: The life and the legend” by Susan Orlean (whose book “The Orchard Thief” was the inspiration for the Nicolas Cage-directed “Adaptation”), started a legend that has persisted in Hollywood for some time. Orlean stated, repeatedly (included in an article in the New Yorker), that Rin Tin Tin received enough votes to win Best Actor at the first Academy Awards (held on May 16, 1929). He said Rinty was denied the award after the show’s producers decided that awarding a dog would not give the new awards the prestige they deliberately sought.

Unfortunately, this is not true.

It should be remembered that the Academy Awards were not created to celebrate a growing art form, but were a deliberate and mercenary attempt by studio super boss Louis B. Mayer to discourage Hollywood players from unionizing. /Film has written about Mayer’s Oscar machinations in the past and how his attitudes toward unions were based on the personal costs he incurred commissioning a lavish home in Santa Monica, California. The Academy was formed as a means to distract workers, directors and actors with a symbolic trinket, an award they could say had prestige.

With this in mind, it is reasonable that the Academy wants the first Oscar to retain as much prestige as possible. Giving Best Actor to Rin Tin Tin would have stripped the ceremony of that prestige and completely undermined the purpose of the awards ceremony. The Orleans hypothesis seems correct from this perspective.

But, as Wrap noted in 2017Rin Tin Tin’s Oscar was an urban legend. Orlean simply embellished a widely spread myth about Rin Tin Tin’s voting and the subsequent embarrassment of the brand new Academy. As the Wrap article noted, all ballots for the 1928 Academy Awards were signed that year (it was not yet a secret ballot) and all were preserved in the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, located in Los Angeles, California. One can look at the ballots and discover that Rin Tin Tin’s name was not written on any of them. The dog star was a big enough star to keep Warner Bros. afloat, but no one really voted for the good guy’s performance.

Note: The photo above is not of Rin Tin Tin, but Rin Tin Tin IV as she appeared in the 1954 television series “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.” Everyone’s favorite doggo was simply the first in a legacy of canine entertainers.

The origins of the Rin Tin Tin Oscar rumor lie in a story about Fox co-founder Daryl Zanuck, who was an executive at Warner Bros. in 1929, and in letters he shared with screenwriter Frank Woods, Fox’s first paid executive. the Academy. Following Mayer’s idea, Woods liked the idea of ​​the film industry giving awards to the best films of the year and approached several executives in hopes of gaining some support. Zanuck reportedly responded very negatively to the idea of ​​the Academy Awards, considering the idea of ​​an industry rewarding itself to be pretty silly.

Zanuck, according to the Wrap article, wrote a sarcastic letter to Woods, including a fake version of his own ballot in which he voted only for Warner Bros. productions. Why, Zanuck thought, would any executive vote for other people’s films? studies? He also sarcastically wrote that Rin Tin Tin should receive the Best Actor award. It was a joke.

Zanuck may well have told his Rin Tin Tin joke to Jack Warner, the head of WB, and the top executive wrote his own joke ballot that also included Rin Tin Tin as Best Actor. Warner’s ballot also jokingly wrote Casey Jones (who died in 1900) into the now-moribund Best Engineering category.

However, having Rin Tin Tin’s name on two executive ballots left some true believers tormented and rumors began to spread that the votes were serious. Soon, the rumor grew with some claiming that Rin Tin Tin got enough votes to win Best Actor. The rumors lasted until 2011, when Orlean wrote his book.

The rumors are definitely not true. Other media have discredited them.. Rin Tin Tin is a very good guy, but he is not an Oscar winner.