Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  “I remember the party, as does everyone who went near it, very well,” says Buck Henry, who was in Los Angeles working with Mel Brooks to create a new comedy series, Get Smart, that would make its debut on NBC in the fall. “I’m not even sure I was invited, but I went anyway, because I knew a lot of people. What I recall was the feeling that there was the adults’ room and the kids’ section, where it was really fun to be. There was a space for [Henry] Fonda and the establishment in the back, but there was certainly a large percentage of young Hollywood—because there were all of Jane’s friends. People got into big trouble, people left and came back, there was a lot to drink, a large segment of the group was going outside to do drugs of one level or another. And of course, the Byrds were playing, and they moved me almost beyond words.”21 At one point, Henry Fonda went over to his happily stoned son and yelled, “Can’t you get them to turn it down?”22

  Although the term generation gap was beginning to come into popular use, the question of who belonged to old Hollywood and who didn’t was not one that could be resolved by age alone. About some of the guests, there was no doubt: Old Hollywood, defiant, resistant, and crotchety, was William Wyler, who after thirty years behind the camera was trying to stay abreast of contemporary material with an adaptation of John Fowles’s sadistic thriller The Collector but couldn’t hide his disgust at the increasing popularity of movies like 8 1/2 and Last Year at Marienbad. “What is it?” he fumed. “It’s just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts!…The public wants to know what a story is all about. It does not want to leave a theater wondering what it saw.”23 Old Hollywood was Darryl Zanuck and George Cukor, both staring dumbstruck as a barefoot young hippie began to nurse her baby in front of them.24 Old Hollywood was, as Sydney Pollack put it, “the same people doing the same things they had been doing for the last twenty-five years.”25

  Others, though, weren’t so easily labeled. Warren Beatty, who had been groomed for movie stardom by the well-oiled workings of the old studio system, had returned to the West Coast with Leslie Caron for a visit. He hadn’t yet won control of Bonnie and Clyde, but he was already thinking about casting, and the party offered up at least three possibilities for Bonnie: Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood, and Fonda herself. Weld was new Hollywood, trapped in a series of sex-kitten parts but bringing a highly charged, troubled element to her screen personality that occasionally broke through to the surface of even a banal role. Wood, although she was a year younger than Beatty, had made her film debut as a child in 1943 and was old Hollywood to her core; it was the only world she could imagine. “The whole routine about submerging your personality [while acting] is a lot of bunk. You have to bring your personality to every part you play,” she had said at twenty, airily dismissing what she called “the nose-picking ‘Method’ fringe group, who never got closer to the Actors Studio than Sunset Boulevard.”26 Even if the term new Hollywood had been in use, Wood certainly would have considered herself no part of it; and in 1965, it’s doubtful that Beatty, watching his contemporaries get high on the beach, would have identified himself as part of the counterculture. He would have been more likely to head for the back room in the hope that he’d find the people with whom he really wanted to work—Wyler, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann.

  The “kids’ section” of Fonda’s party was populated by people who would come to define new Hollywood and yet, at that time, were barely inside the door—Peter Fonda and his friends Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, all of whom were scraping by on a combination of episodic television gigs and low-budget movies and were now entering the orbit of American International Pictures (AIP) and exploitation-movie king Roger Corman. Vadim described the boys as being “particularly cheerful” that night, and as the sun went down and the celebration escalated, Peter Fonda climbed onto the roof of the house of another son of Hollywood, Robert Walker Jr., and, blissed out, watched the action below, thinking, “God bless grass.” (A couple of months later, when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl for the first time, Peter Fonda and the Byrds would go to an afterparty with the Fab Four, where he would take one of his first acid trips.)27

  In the “adults’ section” sat Sam Spiegel, who was, that summer, Jane Fonda’s boss and Arthur Penn’s as well. Spiegel was sixty-five, a hands-on producer whose name (or self-chosen pseudonym, “S. P. Eagle”) had been on The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia. The Chase was his first movie since Lawrence had won him his third Best Picture Oscar in 1962; although David Lean’s film had marked a career high point for him, in the wake of its success Spiegel’s arrogance and autocracy were alienating even longtime colleagues. During production of The Chase, Spiegel was making Penn’s life so miserable that the director would leave Hollywood after the shoot vowing never to work for a studio again.28 Penn, who already felt the script was a “dog’s breakfast,” later said that he had “never made a film under such unspeakable conditions,” which included the daily delivery of script rewrites that were so clumsy and incoherent, he suspected they must have come from the pen of Spiegel himself.29 After seeing a cut of Penn’s difficult little passion project, Mickey One, a Columbia executive said, “No more artsy-smartsy pictures.”30 Now he was back working for the same studio and was, ironically, trapped by Mike Frankovich’s willingness to leave creative decisions in the hands of an independent producer. With Spiegel calling all the shots from casting (he apparently made liberal use of the couch) to location shooting (there would be none, despite the movie’s southern setting and multiple outdoor scenes) to rewrites, there was little Penn could do but report to the set and shoot the screenplay—whatever it happened to be that day. (In postproduction, Spiegel would take The Chase away from Penn and edit it himself, to the satisfaction of almost nobody involved.)31

  On his own at the party, Sidney Poitier, at thirty-eight, belonged to neither old nor new Hollywood; once again, he was a category unto himself, liked by all but claimed by nobody. His fifteen-year marriage to Juanita Hardy was finally at an end; Hardy, who was herself becoming an active and engaged civil rights fund-raiser, was three thousand miles away, living in the home she and her husband had once shared in the New York suburb of Pleasantville and raising their four daughters. After the divorce, Poitier later wrote, “I remember feeling liberated—but from what?” He had not been happy in his marriage, but with his relationship with Diahann Carroll far from settled, there were lots of “empty, lonely times” ahead.32 That evening, missing his kids, Poitier naturally gravitated toward Roger Vadim’s little girl, Nathalie, and he and Gene Kelly spent part of the night playing with her and teaching her to tap-dance.33

  Poitier was ready to fill the emptiness with work, and since In the Heat of the Night had no director or script yet, he would soon head for Seattle to begin shooting a movie for Sydney Pollack, a thirty-one-year-old TV director making his first feature. The project, The Slender Thread, was based on a Life magazine article by Shana Alexander that had been transformed by writer Stirling Silliphant, the man behind CBS’s popular Route 66, into a melodrama about a suicide hotline worker who tries to help a depressed woman (played by Anne Bancroft.) Poitier may have found the role appealing because it had nothing in particular to do with the “Negroness” of his life, but there turned out to be a saccharine ideology behind his casting after all—the notion that if a black man in mid-1960s America could explain to a desperate woman why life was worth living, the film would be all the more believable. Poitier was, as always, an amiable collaborator, and he was willing to push himself even when the material didn’t challenge him—he brought his own acting coach to Seattle to help him figure out how to play his big scenes with nothing but a telephone receiver as his costar. But The Slender Thread wouldn’t prove to be much better than his other recent films, despite its energetic director. “You have to take Dramamine to watch that movie,” says Pollack. “I was trying so hard to shake off the stigma of television that everything was moving and zooming and panning. I did
n’t know what the hell I was doing.”34

  In the middle of the party, and yet, as always, standing at a cocked eyebrow’s distance from it, was Mike Nichols. Once again an immigrant in a new land, he surveyed the tribal rituals, the lapses of etiquette, the deferences and courtesies and small humiliations of this hothouse of West Coast privilege and restlessness, and filed them away for future use. At one point in the evening, he wandered from the crowd and found himself under the canopy of a huge tree around which part of the tent had been set up. A small knot of revelers was slouched around the trunk, and when Nichols approached, one of them looked up at him and said, “Are you having a good time in L.A., Mike?”

  Nichols responded in his slow deadpan, “Yes. Here under the shadow of this great tree, I have found peace.”

  The laugh he got came from Buck Henry. Henry knew Nichols’s work, but not the man himself; although as children they had briefly overlapped at New York’s Dalton School, and Henry had performed improv with a group called the Premise at around the same time Nichols and May were gaining a following at the Village Vanguard, their paths had never crossed. As Nichols remembers it, Henry picked up his little jab at Big Sur–meets-India mysticism and ran with it. “We started laughing,” Nichols says, “throwing some of that shit back and forth. I had found a buddy.”35

  The party broke up into smaller groups that straggled away at dawn, with the younger guests who had stayed on as long as there was fun to be had now asleep, stretched out on mattresses in the house or on the veranda as the tents came down. The older guests had retreated earlier, back to their homes in Beverly Hills and Brentwood, perhaps amused and perhaps alarmed at their first extended glimpse of the inheritors of their kingdom. Vadim and Fonda, in each other’s arms, looked out at the ocean and back at the revelry’s debris. Vadim thought it looked like a movie. But not a Hollywood film. More like something by Fellini or Antonioni,36 unresolved and inchoate, that would leave everyone walking out of the theater talking and wondering what would happen next.

  PART TWO

  NINE

  Every time he made a movie that fell short of his hopes, Stanley Kramer felt “a kind of pain that starts somewhere near the groin and goes up to the chest, as though you’re having a heart attack in your stomach.”1 Lately, he was feeling it again. His latest film, an all-star adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools, was due to open on July 29, and Kramer could already recognize the onset of the sickening deflation of his own expectations. How could it have been otherwise when, by his own admission, he “had dreamed it would be a great accomplishment, a definitive motion picture showing what the medium can be” and not merely “a good piece of work that didn’t quite fulfill our aspirations”?2

  In 1965, Stanley Kramer was, at fifty-one, as enshrined a member of the Hollywood establishment as anyone in the movie business, and there was probably not an active producer or director who would have hated that description more. Kramer had been making movies since the late 1940s. He had started as a producer, overseeing Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave, an adaptation of an Arthur Laurents play that dealt with racism in the American military. Kramer went on to produce The Men (Marlon Brando’s movie debut), High Noon, Death of a Salesman, The Member of the Wedding, and The Caine Mutiny in the space of a few years. His movies were emblematic Hollywood prestige projects, and he made sure his name and reputation were so firmly associated with them that by the mid-1950s, moviegoers already knew what a Stanley Kramer movie was—something serious and charged and significant and edifying, if not necessarily innovative or aesthetically unsettling. In the 1955 movie-biz melodrama The Big Knife, Jack Palance, playing a down-on-his-luck movie star, barks at his wife (Ida Lupino), “You know that this industry is capable of turning out good pictures—pictures with guts and meaning!” “Sure, sure,” she replies, “and we know some of the men who do it! Stevens, Mankiewicz, Kazan, Huston, Wyler, Wilder…Stanley Kramer!”

  In the mid-1950s, Kramer decided to step behind the camera himself and start directing. “Stanley’s drive has always been to be the boss, the man who wants it done his way,” his longtime associate George Glass later said. “The time came in the industry when directors took greater control over picture making than ever before. So Stanley, in my opinion, decided if that was where the action was, that was where he’d be, by God.”3 He loved tackling topics that would make news—racism in The Defiant Ones, the threat of nuclear annihilation in On the Beach, the Holocaust in Judgment at Nuremberg—but, as many of his own friends and colleagues, including Norman Jewison, put it, “Stanley was a better producer than he was a director,”4 and once he was in the director’s chair, he continued to think like a producer, concentrating on the overall package rather than the shaping of individual scenes, performances, and moments. “Guts and meaning” was a label he would have loved, although he sometimes undercut himself by being too willing to trumpet the presence of both qualities in his films. Kramer wanted credit for the politics and moral rectitude that he believed gave his pictures weight and significance, but while he understood that great movies had to be more than the sum of their issues, he didn’t always know how to get them there. He didn’t possess what came naturally to many of the directors he admired—an unforced sense of pacing or camera placement or a particularly visual imagination—and the screenplays for his films (which he did not write) often omitted nuance, surprise, and specificity in favor of a stentorian sense of the wrongness of things that all right-thinking people already agreed were wrong: racism, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the Holocaust.

  Kramer was respected within the world of old Hollywood as a reliable filmmaker and a staunch civil libertarian. In 1960, he had defied a demand from the American Legion that producers not hire “Soviet-indoctrinated” writers, calling the organization’s stance “reprehensible,”5 a position that was not without some risk in a business still very much in the chokehold of McCarthyism. The movies he made were manna for the Academy—his producing career had brought him four Best Picture nominations by the time he won the Academy’s 1962 Irving Thalberg Award, essentially a lifetime achievement honor for a producer—and they were revered by middlebrow reviewers. When Judgment at Nuremberg opened in 1961, The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther pronounced it “persuasive” and said “it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.”6

  But Crowther, typically, never managed to explain what exactly he had needed to be persuaded about, and Kramer’s appetite for matter over art made him into something of a whipping boy for the critical intelligentsia. In 1965, Pauline Kael, who had not yet been hired by The New Yorker but was building a reputation as a pugnacious contrarian as eager to pick fights with her rivals as she was to tear down the movies they supported, launched a blistering attack on Kramer, using the arrival of Ship of Fools as her pretext. She mocked him, not entirely unjustly, for his tendency to sound self-important and chest-thumping in interviews. His reputation, she said, was “based largely on a series of errors.” She twitted him for mistaking storytelling that “represents a blow for or against something” for “art.” She took apart his films one by one, calling them “irritatingly self-righteous,” “messianic,” and “feeble intellectually”; she belittled the “original sin meets Mr. Fixit” style of his plots. “Kramer asks for congratulations on the size and importance of his unrealized aspirations,” she concluded. “In politics a candidate may hope to be judged on what he intends to do, but in art we judge what is done. Stanley Kramer runs for office in the arts.”7

  If François Truffaut exemplified, as Robert Benton and David Newman had written in Esquire, “Style over Content,” Kramer and his films epitomized Content over Style—the “Old Sentimentality” of the Eisenhower era. The label was particularly painful for a director who, unlike many in his generation, was an open-minded advocate of the new directions world cinema was taking in the 1960s and an avid fan of Fellini, Kurosawa, and Antonioni.8 Kramer had a hard time understanding how critics like Kael could gi
ve him so little credit for ambition, especially since his films were sometimes more controversial than those who belittled him acknowledged. His adaptation of Inherit the Wind had been picketed at many theaters; some southern movie-house chains wouldn’t play The Defiant Ones, in which escaped prisoners Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were shackled together as an ironclad symbol of interracial brotherhood. And the critics who charged that Kramer’s movies pandered to what they considered to be a good-liberal consensus ignored the reality that most of the films he directed were financial failures. “All the people who say ‘Messages are for Western Union’ really don’t mean it,” he said. “They mean, ‘Messages that don’t make money are for Western Union.’”9 While The Defiant Ones, thanks to its very low budget, squeezed out a small profit, Inherit the Wind lost almost 90 percent of the $2 million that it cost, On the Beach ended up in the red, and despite its Best Picture Oscar, Judgment at Nuremberg lost money as well.10 How, wondered Kramer, could Kael believe that he was viewed as “some sort of savior”11 when he wasn’t even filling up the pews? And how could other critics fail to see Kramer the way he saw himself, as a lifelong outsider, an independent producer who “took on the establishment within the Hollywood firmament”?12