When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  When he became frustrated, when he saw something in the acting he didn’t like, when he recalled an affront by Joe Coffey or Zero Mostel, or when he became upset with his own little failures, he abandoned himself to anger with no apparent thought of the effect he was having on those around him. He always seemed ready to explode, and we never knew what would ignite him or what form the explosion would take. Once he erupted by throwing every object within reach across my two rooms—grease pencils, film cannisters, tape dispensers, the ashtray that would one day be his ashtray—as my burly assistant, an angry young man who used to speak with glee about the sensual pleasure he took in axing down doors during his weekend stints as a volunteer fireman on Long Island, hid behind the draperies at the window.

  Only once did I shout back at Mel and reprimand him for his behavior. Mel calmed right down, looked a little contrite, and then went back to whatever he was doing, as if nothing had happened. I realized then that while shouting matches left me debilitated for hours or days, to Mel they were an accepted everyday phenomenon. He could demean, insult, or threaten you one moment—or suffer the same sort of treatment himself—and return to business as usual the next. This awareness did me little good, however, for I felt violated by his rancor and moodiness until the last day of cutting.

  A midnight preview of The Producers was held in the fall of 1967 at what is now the Playboy Theatre on Fifty-seventh Street. Hundreds of people attended, including scores of Mel’s show-business friends and Joseph E. Levine with his entourage from Embassy Pictures. For fifteen minutes Mel stood in front of the crowded room and performed. The audience was in a state of utter comic delight before the film ever began.

  An hour and a half later Mel stood in back of the theater as all his friends shook his hand, kissed him, and congratulated him. He spotted me coming up the aisle with Davida. It was a month since we’d been in the cutting room and I had already begun work on Minsky’s. My distaste for him was still strong, though, and I had no intention to stop and chat. Mel shook himself loose from the crowd and came over to us. He said something pleasant to Davida, then put his arm around me and led me away. He walked me out into the early morning street, down the block toward Sixth Avenue, and away from the stragglers. “Thanks for making it look professional,” he whispered. And that was the last I ever saw of him.

  Ali MacGraw, Jack Klugman, Richard Benjamin, and Monroe Arnold as Uncle Leo in the wedding scene from GOODBYE COLUMBUS

  (Courtesy Paramount Pictures)

  15 ■ Goodbye Columbus

  The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

  The more an actor knows about films, the more he realizes his helplessness, the more he therefore will seek to control the selection of story, director, and cameraman, as well as that process of ultimate demolition known as editing.

  —JOSEF VON STERNBERG

  In 1927 Stalin banished arch-rival Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Union and thus helped initiate a new and unhappy twist in the editing of films. Sergei Eisenstein, who had just completed the final cut of Ten Days That Shook the World, a picture about the Bolshevik rise to power in which Trotsky figured heavily, was now compelled to re-edit the film for the sole purpose of purging every trace of the vanquished Soviet hero. An ordeal for Eisenstein and an affront to history, it was the sorriest cut of all for the luckless actor who played the young Leon Trotsky. He no doubt realized, as many actors have learned since, that in film as in revolutions even a star performance is a very vulnerable thing.

  In recent years, as directors have relied more heavily on editing as the means of determining the shape and substance of their pictures, an increasing number of actors have suffered Trotsky’s fate—seeing their contributions slashed, distorted, or entirely discarded during the ever lengthening periods that modern films spend in the cutting room. Paul Richards’ disappearance as Chuckles the Chipmunk from A Thousand Clowns is an extreme but not altogether unique occurrence. During the editing of John Frankenheimer’s 1968 film, The Fixer, the director made a late revision in the script that eliminated one of the key male characters, and supporting actor Jack Gilford saw several months’ labor hit the cutting-room floor. In both Godfather films major performances by Diane Keaton (as Al Pacino’s wife) were whittled down to insignificance. While in Annie Hall, the film that finally made Keaton a star, a half dozen other performances— including Colleen Dewhurst’s biggest scene—were decimated or lost completely as the plot changed in the editing.

  On the face of it, film offers great advantages to actors. It permanently records their work, making their best efforts available for generations. It can spread a single tour-de-force performance before millions, thereby generating immediate recognition or stardom. Never have so many actors been so well known to so many people. And yet, largely because of the power of editing, the actor’s importance to the over-all production—compared to what it has been in the theater—is greatly diminished in film. His heightened vulnerability and dependency never struck me so profoundly as in the cutting of Goodbye Columbus.

  Monroe Arnold is a mid-sized, jowly Jewish actor with an eager generosity and a loquaciousness that, once in high gear, vibrates through his cheeks, achieving at peak moments an urgent, rheumy inflection. In 1969, when he was thirty-six years old and plodding up through the ranks of minor character actors in television, theater, and film, he ran into Larry Peerce, with whom he had recently worked on a “Dick Tracy” TV pilot. Peerce reported that he was about to direct a film version of Philip Roth’s popular novella, Goodbye Columbus. “I said terrific” recalls Monroe, “and I said, ‘I may as well ask you the question now so we can have a normal conversation: Is there a part in it for me?’ ”

  Peerce was noncommittal, but he had an idea that his friend might be right for the part of Uncle Leo. Uncle Leo is a secondary but important character. He appears only in the wedding scene, about two-thirds of the way through the story, but he dominates that scene and is highly memorable.

  Peerce believed that Uncle Leo was a man full of suppressed rage, and he thought Monroe Arnold had enough anger in him to do that rage justice. But he had doubts—would the studio insist on a name actor? should he cast someone who would give the part a funnier edge?—and because of these doubts he was reluctant to put up a fight when his producer, Stanley Jaffe, also expressed reservations. “I want you to stay and work with me until I can smooth the whole thing out with Stanley,” is what Monroe remembers Peerce saying. And so, until a date was set for his own try out, he worked with Peerce, helping him cast the other actors and hoping that through his physical presence he would become an inevitability. “I had never met Stanley Jaffe,” says Monroe. “I was told he was very young and a heavyweight business kind of guy, and this made me very nervous. So I asked Larry, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ And Larry said, ‘Make him laugh, get him upset, and then make him laugh again.’ And I said, ‘O.K., I’ll do it.’ “

  Monroe was received for his tryout like any other actor. Jack Weston, a successful, rotund character actor who had played in the TV series “The Hathaways,” as well as a half dozen movies—usually as a bumbling penny-ante gangster—was in the waiting room when Monroe arrived. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, if this guy is here, and that’s the caliber of the people they’re calling, how am I going to get the part? What the hell are they doing to me?’ And all the other paranoid thoughts that jump into your mind.”

  After Weston left, Monroe rose to go in, reminding himself of Peerce’s instructions. “There were a couple of steps down as you entered the office, so I threw myself down those steps and landed flat.” Stretched out near Jaffe’s and Peerce’s feet, he looked up and, brimming with Donald Duckish earnestness, said, “Oh, hello, Mr. Jaffe!” Jaffe was amused. “God, I can’t control my feet I’m so nervous!” squeaked Monroe, and this slapstick absurdity burst the otherwise tense moment; Peerce and Jaffe looked at each other and started to laugh.

  “Then I jumped up and sat down on the couch and said, ‘Let’s be dead seriou
s. How much are you going to pay me for this part?’ At that Stanley’s face got very long, and he mumbled and grumbled and said, ‘Discuss money with me, mumble, mutter,’ and I said, ‘Sure I’m going to discuss money with you. If you think I’m going to take this goddam part without being paid . . .’ and so on and so forth.” Then, says Monroe, as Jaffe looked on in astonishment, “I gasped and clutched at my heart, and said, ‘Oh my God! . . . Oh! . . . Ah! . . .

  Oh!’ and fell off the couch.” The young producer became very agitated. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Nothing!” said the triumphant actor with Romper Room glee. “I fooled you! I fooled you!” Jaffe started laughing again and said, “You son of a bitch, you got the part!”

  Goodbye Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman, a sensitive but aimless college dropout (played by Richard Benjamin) whose wisecracking obscures an uncertain idealism. Neil, who works in a library and comes from a poor Jewish family in a working class section of the pronx (Newark in the book), falls in love with Brenda Patimkin (played by Ali MacGraw), a perky, self-confident beauty of the suburban Jewish nouveau riche. They have a summer love affair, much to the chagrin of her status-conscious parents; he spends two weeks as a houseguest at the Patimkin’s manorlike home during which he and Brenda secretly make, love every night; he accompanies her to her brother’s wedding, where he overhears her boozed father pledge his everlasting love and support for his princess; and they break up in the fall after Brenda allows her mother to discover her diaphragm in her bureau drawer. It was a love powered by an enormous lust and passion, a love that flickered and then died in an instant.

  The emotional turning point is the opulent wedding scene in which Neil gets a failed-life speech from the rapidly deteriorating Uncle Leo. Leo is crushed by the disparity between his station in life and that of his brother, Brenda’s father. Reading the story or the script, one senses that Leo, whose financial status is not that distant from Neil’s, is an ugly reminder to the younger man of the threat that Brenda poses to his identity. Embracing Brenda and her comfortable world may seduce Neil into denying his own background and values. Perhaps, in some unseen way, the process has already begun.

  Like a cryptic, ancient seer clothed in rags and covered with sores, Leo attaches himself to Neil and, with great self-serving pathos, unloads his disappointment and pain. Arnold Schulman’s dialogue (with additions by Monroe Arnold) was adapted almost verbatim from Roth.

  LEO: You’re Brenda’s boy friend, huh? (He nudges Neil confidentially.) You got a good deal there, boy, don’t louse it up.

  NEIL: She’s very beautiful.

  LEO: Beautiful, not beautiful, what’s the difference? You’re Aly Khan you worry about movie stars. I’m a practical man. On the bottom, you got to be.

  Leo is a traveling salesman who makes less than a cabby and doesn’t even own a car. “His brother, and I don’t even own an automobile.” He tells Neil that only two good things have ever happened to him, one being a low-rent apartment his mother-in-law found for him in Queens after the war and the other the oral-genital affections of Hannah Schreiber, a schoolteacher “with long, slim Christian legs and a Jewish bust,” whom he met one night while still in the army. At one point, for no apparent reason, he blurts, “I’m the only guy I know who wears out three pairs of rubbers every winter. Most guys get new ones when they lose the old ones. I wear them out like shoes.” With all his woes, he naturally likes to stop after work for a couple of martinis, but his wife complains of the expense. “I spend all day on the road. I don’t want to come home and drink a martini from a jelly glass.”

  The one-sided dialogue continues as Leo, drinking sloppily, follows his reluctant listener about the ballroom. The script carefully follows the novella: men and women are dancing, eating, and carrying on everywhere. One fat relative puts his hands over his wife’s breasts as the photographer walks by and calls out, “Hey, how about a picture of this!” Gradually, people start leaving or passing out on the sidelines. Brenda’s father (Jack Klugman), on the verge of stupor, stops for a moment and offers Neil a ride home, then teases his brother, calling him “Bigshot.” Afterward, Leo traps Neil again and resumes his obnoxious rambling, much of it concerning Leo’s observations that Neil is “nobody’s sucker,” that he’s a “smart boy,” that he’ll “play it safe,” that “next time I see you it’ll be your wedding.”

  LEO: The son of a bitch who invented the fluorescent bulb should drop dead! They never wear out, those things, you know that? They last for years. Look at me. I sell a good light bulb. What does it get me? Who needs a guy like me any more? Salesmen—you spit on them. . . . I got more brains in my pinky than my brother Ben has in his whole head. Why is he at the top and me at the bottom? Why?

  The soliloquy continues in this fashion, with minor interruptions, for several pages.

  “I felt that Leo was the pivotal character in the film,” says Monroe. “I read the script, and I read the book a number of times, and I realized why Philip Roth devoted so much time to Leo—because he gives you the other side. One side is wonderful, the big wedding, the brouhaha, the upper middle class—and Leo represents the underbelly of that whole way of life. I felt that in order to play Leo, you had to play him hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the softness on the inside would bleed through until eventually Leo would break down.”

  Although Monroe worked constantly with Peerce in various informal capacities during the casting and production, he remained anxious about his part almost until the day of his performance. “As far as I could ascertain, there seemed to be some doubt about me, about my range, and whether I could handle the part. I had a constant dread that inevitably somehow I would be fired from what I considered to be my big break.”

  The wedding scene was shot in the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue. Peerce, who is Jewish himself and at least as alienated as Roth from the garish behavior for which some suburban Jews are easily satirized, filmed the wedding in full parvenu splendor, with some two hundred extras (who were simply told to “behave as you would at a Jewish wedding”), three cameramen (including one on roller skates), and a heavy concentration of gorging, goosing, and other sorts of mildly grotesque behavior.

  Monroe was used intermittently throughout the wedding scene, but his major monologue came at the end, when almost everyone has left but him, Richard Benjamin—who is seated at a long table covered with pieces of food, crumpled napkins, and half-empty bottles and glasses—and the two extras who played Leo’s wife and daughter, asleep on the other side of the now deserted ballroom, their heads flopped down on another slop-covered table. The scene was shot just before midnight, and among those who remained to watch Monroe’s performance were Peerce’s wife and mother, Jaffe’s wife, and Ali MacGraw, all of whom were to be deeply affected by what they saw.

  “I decided to play Leo Patimkin with a cigar,” says Monroe, “which I kept in my hand and at some points put in my mouth and talked through. I played as if I were the other Patimkin—as if I had the money, as if I had the power. The drinking that I did while going around the table was very helpful, too, because I suddenly started to play him slightly drunk, and it was the slightly drunk that allowed me to play the breakdown, the disintegration of Leo Patimkin.”

  Every actor lives for the experience of feeling completely at one with the character he’s playing, and as Monroe rounded the ravaged dinner table, drinking champagne out of a bottle and spilling it out of his mouth and down the front of his shirt, his command of Leo Patimkin was so thorough that the mixture of repulsiveness and pain that oozed out of him was frightening to watch.

  “I played it coarse, but gradually I began to soften the character, and when I got to the very end, they pulled the camera down so that it was pointing up to my face. I looked up and I said, ‘Those fluorescent fixtures, they never wear out, those things,’ and it was at that point that I started to break down and cry. I finished that section in tears.”

  The camera momentarily focused on Richard Benjamin’s
reaction and then returned to Monroe, as the observers on the sidelines watched with mounting involvement. “And that’s where I gave him the warning, the one place where I was neither rude, crass, gross, or maudlin. I just looked at him and said very straight, don’t make the same mistake I did—marry the girl. Then I crossed the ballroom.

  “I was totally self-involved now, and it was easy for me to mobilize any feelings I wanted—they were all on tap. The camera picked me up walking toward the table where my wife and child were seated, and again I made a change of character. I thought to myself, how would this kind of man act toward his wife and kid? What does he got to be with them? A prick—what else could he be? How does he justify his existence? So when I reached the table—all this was done on impulse—I took the cigar and put it in my mouth and with all the rage I could muster, I smashed the table. I said, all right, wake up, it’s time to go home. And the two people jumped up. I hit the table so hard, that regardless of whether they were sleeping or not they would have jumped. I looked at them and hustled them out, and that basically was the end of the scene.”

  When Monroe finished his ten-minute performance, he immediately sensed the spell he’d cast over everyone in the room. “I can’t explain how I was feeling. It was wonderful. When you’re really acting, it’s like being high. I was twenty feet tall. Because I knew I had done something. I kept saying to myself, ‘You did it! You son of a bitch, you did it, you finally did it! And you did it where it counts, in front of the camera.’ MacGraw was standing there and she said, ‘Man, you’re something else!’ Stanley Jaffe came over to me and he said his wife had to leave the room, because she was hysterical. She had an uncle like that and she couldn’t stand it. Larry’s wife, who up to that point hadn’t liked me very much, said, ‘I thought Larry gave you the part because he was your friend, but actually you’re a friend to him.’ And then Larry came over to me and put his arms around me and kissed me and said, ‘You’re absolutely magnificent.’ Jaffe was delighted, he was beside himself. ‘I never would have believed it,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.’ There was a feeling in the room that I still remember vividly—that they were in the presence of some kind of special person. I had never thought of acting that way; I never conceived of ‘movie stardom’ and all that. But all in all, it was a wonderful, wonderful moment for me.