by Mark Harris
Hunter was an odd match for a project that came from a British playwright and a New York director, but Shaffer, says Nichols, “was very funny and nice about it. I’d say, ‘What will we do about this guy Ross Hunter?’ And Peter would say, ‘Well, I’ll take care of him.’ And he started doing things like writing, ‘She appears at the top of the stairs’ in the script, and then he would say, in parentheses, ‘beautifully gowned.’ He’d put in a lot of that shit to keep Ross Hunter happy.”
When Shaffer finished the screenplay, Nichols was invited to Los Angeles to meet Hunter face-to-face. The two men had absolutely nothing to say to each other, but, determined to make the best of it, they spent the evening watching Norman Jewison’s Send Me No Flowers, one of the rare Doris Day movies that Universal had made without Hunter’s supervision, which was to open in October. When the screening ended, Nichols, feeling awkward, said to Hunter, “Did you enjoy the movie?”
“Well, it offended me as a producer,” said Hunter.
“I said, ‘How do you mean?’” Nichols recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, as a producer, I was very offended by it.’ I said, ‘I don’t understand, completely.’ And he said, ‘Well, as a producer, I wanted to rush up to the screen and just rip every bow off her dress.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And I went back to my hotel and called my agent and said, ‘I can’t do this—I can’t make this movie.’ I mean, it would be hopeless. I knew I would kill him.”35
Nichols got out of his commitment to make The Public Eye; there was a vague announcement in the press that the film would be postponed “for a while.”36 “I think there was something unpleasant, a deal in which I owed Universal a movie, and I think it cost me money, too. But anyway, it was over,” he says.37The Graduate was now slated to be Nichols’s first movie after all, if Turman could find anyone willing to make it—and just as The Public Eye was falling apart, he did: Joseph E. Levine, the founder of Embassy Pictures.
Embassy wasn’t a Hollywood studio; it was, wrote Turman later, “the last stop on the line.”38 But the company was also a rarity in 1964: a well-financed American producer and distributor of movies that operated at the whim of one man independently of the studios (though he would sometimes produce movies for them). Levine had founded Embassy in the 1950s, using it as a pipeline through which he brought Italian movies to the United States—cheap, redubbed sword-and-sandals action films and Hercules pictures. “He was a great character, Levine,” says Buck Henry. “For the Hercules movies, he hired me to be the voice of young Ulysses, the putz who trails after Hercules and keeps saying, ‘No, Hercules! Don’t go there! That’s where the sirens live!’”39
Levine loved publicity; he’d call press conferences to announce nothing in particular and take out twenty-page ads in trade publications touting his upcoming films if he felt he was being ignored. No matter how often someone would call him crass or a philistine or even make fun of his enormous belly, he’d keep coming back for more; in 1963, he had allowed himself to be the subject of a documentary by Albert and David Maysles called Showman that depicted him in all of his overblown, hyperbolic glory. Levine didn’t even seem to mind it when remarks like “You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right” were attributed to him, as long as the headlines kept coming.
“I never quite knew that Larry had been to every other outfit,” says Nichols, “either because he didn’t tell me or because I was still so naive. I certainly knew, though, that in every possible sense, Joseph E. Levine was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”40
But like so many men in the movie business accused of being coarse or tasteless before and since, Levine also wanted to be thought of as a Medici. Every so often, Embassy would depart from its dub-’em-and-dump-’em distribution model; in the last couple of years, it had brought Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style to U.S. screens, and Levine’s knack for promoting the films with ads that played up their “forbidden” European sexuality, as blunt a tactic as it may have been, was also responsible for helping those films reach a much larger audience than they otherwise would have found. Levine himself had put up the money for Sidney Lumet’s highly praised 1962 adaptation of Long Day’s Journey into Night and was about to release Godard’s Contempt, exploiting its star, Brigitte Bardot, for every millimeter of exposable skin he could get away with showing. “Levine was a vulgar vulgarian, but he wrote a check for the entire cost of Long Day’s Journey without blinking,” says Sidney Lumet. “He had Katharine Hepburn in a Eugene O’Neill play—it was just what he wanted, which was class with a capital K! We went out for the Academy Awards—I had never met him until then—and I remember him sitting in the Polo Lounge, so happy, a hooker on each arm, each hand on a different tit. But I ended up having a real affection for him—he really stuck by the film when it was doing no business. He didn’t have taste, but he knew it when he saw it.”41
“Joe was the king of the schlockmeisters,”42 says Turman, “crude and crass, but not dumb.”43 Though publicly all Levine had to say about Fellini and Truffaut was that “some of these films are liked by the critics and nobody else,”44 he enjoyed the Oscar nominations and the temporary luster that being connected with their work brought to Embassy. Levine, who was based in New York, knew Nichols’s work and his reputation and was eager for the chance to associate himself with the director. He and Turman had a brief, tense standoff when Levine demanded executive producer credit. Turman refused, and Levine blinked first. On October 7, 1964, Embassy announced that it would finance The Graduate and that the film would begin production in the summer of 1965.45
Nichols was now back in New York, happy to know that The Graduate had a backer and happier still to be working in the theater again. That summer, he had directed his first off-Broadway play, Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack, a British comedy that marked an early venture into the “swinging London” genre; his direction received rave reviews, and the play went on to run for more than eighteen months. In the fall, he returned to Broadway with another comedy, Murray Schisgal’s Luv, an extended three-character sketch about neurotic New Yorkers in which Nichols had a cast that was up to his level—Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson—and material that allowed him to exploit every possibility for a laugh. The play was a smash, running for more than two years and sending Nichols on his way to a second consecutive Tony Award for Best Director. With three hits now running in New York simultaneously, his reputation as a director started to outstrip his fame as a performer. “Things have reached such a monkey-see monkey-do situation that it is now incumbent upon anyone who has written a funny play or novel…to send the work to Nichols with a note exhorting him to direct it,”46 said The New York Times. The same week, Time magazine called Nichols “one of the more gifted and promising new directors to take his place in the American theater since Elia Kazan left Constantinople.”47
If studios hadn’t known who Nichols was when Turman was trying to sell his movie, they did now, and one of them was about to make him an offer that would set The Graduate back more than a year. In March, Jack Warner had spent $500,000 to acquire the movie rights to Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?48 Warner thought the play—if its raw language could ever be sanitized enough to meet the stringent requirements of Production Code chief Geoffrey Shurlock—would make a great vehicle for Bette Davis and James Mason,49 and he hired Ernest Lehman, who had adapted West Side Story, to write the script.
Though he had never overseen a movie before, Lehman somehow convinced Warner to let him produce Virginia Woolf as well and also won the right to cast and director approval. The studio thought briefly of Henry Fonda, who had admired the play (and who had lost a chance to originate the role of George on Broadway when his new agent preemptively turned down the “no-balls character”).50 Jack Lemmon and Patricia Neal were also considered.51 But when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton expressed interest, all casting questions came to an end, and what had been a chancy purchase of a controversial property s
uddenly became a gamble on which the potential risks and rewards were much higher. Fred Zinnemann52 and John Frankenheimer53 had both been mentioned as possible directors, but no deal had been made. Nichols had gotten to know Burton in 1961, when he was on Broadway with Elaine May and Burton was just down Shubert Alley playing Arthur in Camelot; he had spent time with Burton and Taylor in Italy during the filming of Cleopatra,54 and the couple had talked about starring for Nichols in The Public Eye.55 “Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were pushing, really pushing, for Mike,” says Larry Turman. “And I thought, let Mike do all his learning on Virginia Woolf and then he can do my movie second. I thought I was being smart.”56
Once Taylor wanted him for Virginia Woolf, Lehman and Jack Warner wanted him, too. Nichols, who loved the play, jumped at the opportunity. In December, he signed on as director for $250,000.57 Production was due to start in March. The Graduate would have to be postponed. 58 In early 1965, he headed for Los Angeles to begin preproduction. He had less than three months to learn how to make a movie, outmaneuver a notoriously combative studio head and a cautious, passive producer, and figure out how to direct the world’s most famous couple. And, he says, “I wasn’t entirely sure how a camera worked.”59
SIX
Between August 1964 and March 1965, four new movies sold so many tickets and made so much money that, collectively, they pointed toward a dramatic shift in the tastes of American moviegoers and suggested an entirely new way for the studios to do business. Hollywood did not react well. Historically, the only event more disruptive to the industry’s ecosystem than an unexpected flop is an unexpected smash, and, caught off guard by the sudden arrival of more revenue than they thought their movies could ever bring in, the major studios resorted to three old habits: imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic.
Three of the pictures were musicals—Disney’s Mary Poppins, Warner’s My Fair Lady, and Fox’s The Sound of Music. By the end of their runs, each film was the highest grosser in the history of its company, and in 1966, The Sound of Music passed Gone With the Wind to become the biggest moneymaker ever.1 Musicals had been reliably popular throughout the sound era, but the repeat business for this trio of films, the extraordinary duration of their theatrical runs, and the sheer amount of cash they yielded changed the industry’s understanding of what the ceiling on a movie’s potential grosses could be. The numbers seemed to point to an evolution of popular taste in road-show movies away from biblical epics and historical pageantry and toward lighter, song-packed family entertainment. This was an ominous turn of events for George Stevens, who had spent the last several years of his career pulling together The Greatest Story Ever Told, and for John Huston, who had been working without end on The Bible, a film that seemed like a shrewd business idea when it was conceived in early 19632 and looked more like the last relic of a rusted-out genre by the time it opened in 1966. But it was generally good news for Hollywood, which had always known how to produce musicals and would now simply make them bigger, longer, and more frequently. Though they could be complicated and costly, musicals were a good fit for old-guard studios that were still wedded to a decades-old production model, holding on to their in-house costume construction shops, expanding their lots, and keeping music departments with seventy-five-piece orchestras on call. If the audience needed more musicals, the studios would just build more soundstages, buy the rights to every Broadway show that was still on the market, and, once that well ran dry, invent musical versions of old films from their own libraries.
The fourth movie to change the business represented a conundrum, since it seemed to contradict the message of the other three. United Artists’ Goldfinger was the third James Bond movie to open in the United States in a year and a half. The first 007 vehicle, Dr. No, first arrived on American shores in the summer of 1963; it was shot cheaply, for $1.4 million,3 and initially made a profit for the studio and for producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli that was too small to merit much attention. But even in 1961, when UA made its first deal with Saltzman and Broccoli,4 executives Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin, and David Picker had envisioned the Bond movies as a series that would build a growing audience with every installment. At a time when other studios simply hadn’t considered that immense amounts of money could be made from movies with recurring characters (what would later be called “franchises”), UA’s bet paid off staggeringly well. Working quickly, they brought out From Russia with Love, which cost $2.2 million and returned almost $10 million to the studio,5 in early 1964. Goldfinger, which opened in December, cost $3.5 million to make—about average for a studio picture—and brought UA $23 million,6 a then staggering sum that put the movie alongside the three musicals among the ten top grossers in history. And the money came fast: Goldfinger earned back its cost after just two weeks on sixty-four screens, a feat so widely publicized that it landed in The Guinness Book of World Records.7
With the next Bond installment, Thunderball, already promised for December 1965, the studios could no longer ignore the fact that United Artists, the company that didn’t play by their rules, was beating them at their own game. The Bond films exemplified UA’s strategy of bringing in strong independent producers, letting them make their movies their way, and splitting the profits when the money rolled in, and their immense success was a major factor in the erosion of the studio system by the end of the 1960s. But in early 1965, UA’s competitors couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that the UA model would supplant a way of working that had been in place since the 1930s. Even Universal, then the most minor of the majors, was still signing a roster of young actors as contract players in the mid-1960s as if nothing had changed in decades.8 The studios knew there was a lesson to be drawn from the success of the James Bond movies, but they chose the wrong one: In the next three years, they would release more than three dozen Bond rip-offs, spoofs, and second-rate copies.
If UA’s success with the Bond series was an irritant to its rivals, the box office performance of Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music proved to be a stimulant that led to the equivalent of gold rush fever. A year earlier, when Arthur Jacobs had started to chase the rights to Doctor Dolittle, he was a producer in search of a property that could serve as his calling card to studios. Now, suddenly, he owned the cornerstone on which 20th Century-Fox was building its hopes for 1966, and his leading man, Rex Harrison, was no longer Cleopatra’s aging Caesar, but My Fair Lady’s “sexy Rexy,” the star of a box office smash that was on its way to winning eight Academy Awards.
All of which would have elated Jacobs except for one thing: Nine months after he had made his Doctor Dolittle deal with 20th Century-Fox’s Dick Zanuck, the movie’s screenwriter, Alan Jay Lerner, was not a day closer to turning in a first draft. Jacobs had known from the start that Lerner wouldn’t be easy or exceptionally fast: He had been struggling for four years with the book and lyrics for a new Broadway musical, I Picked a Daisy, first attempting to collaborate with Richard Rodgers, who grew tired of his delays and distractibility and quit, and then with Burton Lane.9 Lerner had made it clear to Jacobs that he would not begin work on Doctor Dolittle until he finished his own show.10 But I Picked a Daisy still seemed to be in limbo, and Jacobs was driven mad by Lerner’s tendency to drop out of communication with him for weeks or months at a stretch with no explanation.
Lerner’s deadline to deliver a treatment of the Doctor Dolittle script to Jacobs was October 1, 1964,11 a date that drifted by without a word from him. Aware of the pressure Lerner was facing from both his Broadway show and his impending divorce proceeding, Jacobs agreed to give him an extension until January 15.12 A month before the new due date, Jacobs cabled Lerner and told him that it was “imperative” they meet to discuss the script before Lerner handed in his work.13 Fox wanted a clear timetable, and Jacobs did, too: Their new plan was for Lerner to finish a thirty-page treatment in January, report to Los Angeles to begin work on the screenplay and lyrics in April, and turn in a full first draft by
September 1, 1965.14
Just before the January deadline, Lerner finally responded—by asking for still more time to write the treatment. Jacobs was out of patience. He told Lerner he had ten more days, until January 25, at which point Jacobs himself would go to New York to pick up Lerner’s completed work.15 Lerner agreed. Ten days later, Jacobs boarded a plane, flew across the country, and took a car directly from the airport to Lerner’s apartment. When he got there, he was told that Lerner had gone to Rome.16
Jacobs, now livid, sent Lerner a cable: “Extremely distressed by your failure to meet with me…. As you know I made special trip to New York for the express purpose of meeting you and receiving Dolittle treatment…. The entire arrangement including payment of your $100,000 is in complete jeopardy.”17
That got Lerner’s attention, and Lerner had Louis Nizer, his divorce lawyer, plead his case directly to Dick Zanuck, who was now concerned enough to demand a face-to-face meeting with the writer himself. Lerner was under intense pressure to finish I Picked a Daisy, Nizer told Zanuck, and there was also “the domestic relations matter,”18 which was due to go before a judge in March. Around this time, Lerner’s representatives made a counterproposal to Fox: Might he simply dispense with writing a treatment altogether if he agreed to hand in a screenplay by the end of April? After Lerner met with Zanuck in late February, the studio was temporarily mollified. “I was delighted with our meeting,” Zanuck wrote in a cable on March 4, adding, “As I pointed out to you it is imperative that we have your first draft screenplay May 1st and I was greatly relieved when you guaranteed this Stop I am convinced more than ever that we are going to have a great picture.”19
