Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Newley’s hiring was bound to inflame Harrison, who had already made clear his distaste for musical theater actors and younger male costars, but at the moment, his mood was plummeting for other reasons. Joseph Mankiewicz’s first script for The Honey Pot had been too innovative and bizarre for United Artists—the characters in his original screenplay included Production Code censors who were to show up periodically during the movie itself to delete unacceptable material—and to Harrison’s disappointment, he had redrafted the film as a far more conventional dark comedy by the time shooting began. Mankiewicz fired his first cinematographer; the second died suddenly during the shoot; Rachel Roberts, upset that Maggie Smith had won the role she wanted in the film, was spiraling into deep depression and barbiturate abuse, and Harrison and Mankiewicz, by this point, felt, in the words of Mankiewicz’s agent, Robert Lantz, “enough residual contempt [for each another] to last a lifetime.”29

  At the moments when Harrison was able to turn his attention to Dolittle, he did so with irritation and volatility. Fleischer had found a picturesque English town called Castle Combe to serve as Puddleby, Dolittle’s home village, but in November, Harrison told Jacobs and Fleischer that he didn’t want to have to shoot the film in England; before agreeing to Castle Combe, he forced Fleischer to go on a pointless location-scouting trip to Ireland. The towns he found there, he told Harrison, were “depressing, faceless places, more suitable for a Great Potato Famine story.”30 (Castle Combe itself was far from ideal; a National Weather Institute memo sent to Fox warned the studio months before the shoot that the sun shone only five days a month during the summer,31 but in the manic optimism that preceded the production of Dolittle, the news was ignored.) Harrison also insisted that he be allowed to perform his own songs live on the set rather than lip-synching to tracks that would be recorded before the start of production, a costly whim that nobody at Fox thought was likely to yield any usable scenes. “Everything Rex did and said indicated that he was very hesitant about saying yes,” says Mort Abrahams. “He wasn’t happy with the book, with the score, with the script.”32

  Harrison’s inconsistency bewildered Jacobs and Zanuck, who could barely keep pace with his mood swings. On December 7, his discontentment boiled over. Laurie Evans, Harrison’s agent in London, called Arthur Jacobs to tell him that Harrison had read Bricusse’s screenplay and was rejecting it. Jacobs was floored. “He would like to get out of his commitment,” he wrote in a memo to Zanuck. “He claims it was not written for him. It is not what his fans expect of him. He claims it is for a small round man like Edmund Gwenn. He said he will not do prat falls. He said he will not be part of a trio. He said he will not be sung to [by other actors]…. Laurie said that Rex said, ‘Why don’t you get Cary Grant to do it and let me out?’…I said I was totally amazed, stunned and shocked and would get back to him.”33

  Five days later, Dick Zanuck received a more serious and troubling critique of the script—a thirteen-page memo from his own father. Darryl Zanuck, in his sixties, was still a fiercely competitive man, and his son’s relationship with him was, in some ways, an extended Oedipal wrestling match (literally so when the younger Zanuck was a kid and he and his father would go at it every weekend, each trying to pin the other to the ground).34 He had given his son a studio to run, but even though he now spent most of his time in New York or Europe, he still held on to his own authority and oversight. As Dick became more self-assured in his position, his father gave him a freer hand, but when he chose to step in, he did so with formidable force. Fox’s willingness to throw good money after bad on Cleopatra had almost destroyed his studio and cost hundreds of people their jobs, and the elder Zanuck was not about to let that happen again. “Since this is the most expensive project on our entire program we have got to be positive that the final script will be a masterpiece,” he wrote. “This story can become great only if it is really funny and delightful from beginning to end…and if the musical numbers are outstanding…. In Doctor Dolittle we do not have any genuine suspense, no danger and no conflict…. This leaves us then with comedy and music as our foundation. It will only reach the top brackets if we are almost continually funny, delightful, and musically superior…you could eliminate almost any one of the individual episodes and you would not miss it, particularly in the last half of the screenplay. These are facts that must be analyzed even if they cannot all be ‘cured.’”

  Darryl Zanuck’s lecture to his son continued with a reminder that he had been in the movie business since Rin Tin Tin was a star and thus spoke from experience when he wrote, “It is my belief that you will not be able to do more than half the ‘animal scenes’ that are written into the script.” The production, he warned, was bound to be “a hell of a mess.” He told his son that animal trainers always overpromise good results, that the film was too long, that Bumpo’s dialogue was flat (adding, “I have never seen Sidney Poitier in a comedy”), and that a scripted encounter with a pirate ship would only raise the budget and should be eliminated.

  Zanuck’s conclusion was grim: “I am deeply concerned about the overall cost,” he wrote. “This is a big physical picture with enormous mechanical problems…it is absolutely essential that every episode we photograph remain in the picture. This is not a film where you can afford to overshoot.” Of Dolittle’s planned June 1966 start date, he wrote, “Since I must speak frankly I believe you are taking a hell of a gamble…. I know of no motion picture that needs more careful and expert preparation than this one. When you deal with a number of almost uncontrollable items, it goes without saying that you have to know exactly what you can and what you can’t do from a practical standpoint, otherwise it can be an economic disaster.” The memo was signed “D.F.Z.”35

  Dick Zanuck’s response, which was sent a few days later by cable, was amiable but firm. He reassured his father that they planned to make changes in the script, but he insisted on keeping the pirate ship sequence and calmly concluded, “Despite the multitude of problems and difficulties I do feel that we will be prepared by July First.”36

  Father and son were in agreement on only one point: Rex Harrison, without knowing it, had finally overplayed his hand. The actor’s tyrannical irascibility had pushed his employers to the breaking point. “He will drive us all to an asylum,” Darryl Zanuck wrote. For the first time, the Zanucks and Jacobs began a fresh discussion: What if Rex Harrison wasn’t in Doctor Dolittle after all? Over the next several days, the three men started talking over a new list of names. What about Alec Guinness? Too much of an “art-house star,” said Darryl Zanuck. “All the boys here [in New York] are dead set against Peter Sellers,” he added. “And they are also not in favor of Jack Lemmon…while he is a star he is an out-and-out comic and a far cry from the character of Doctor Dolittle.”37

  Darryl Zanuck was intrigued by the idea of Peter Ustinov, but his son resisted the suggestion, wanting to protect Richard Fleischer from another star who was thought to be uncontrollable by directors. During these discussions, Harrison’s agents, oblivious to the deep trouble in which their client now found himself, were cabling Arthur Jacobs wanting to know whom he was planning to hire to rewrite Bricusse’s script, music, and lyrics and conveying Harrison’s wish that Alan Jay Lerner be wooed back to the film, or perhaps Frank Loesser.38

  In the last week of December, the Zanucks finally found their new leading man: He had been in front of their noses for almost a year. Christopher Plummer, star of The Sound of Music, would be hired to replace Harrison. The studio offered Plummer $250,00039 and also spent a great deal of money to buy out his contract for Peter Shaffer’s Broadway play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, in which he had been starring since October. By the time Harrison himself got wind of what was happening, he was too late. On December 30, he cabled Dick Zanuck himself, pleading ignorance of his agent’s most recent demands. “Personally consider am fully committed Dolittle,” he wrote frantically. “Can we not clear this up personally?”40

  The next day, Dick Zanuck sent a telegram to H
arrison assuring him that it was nothing personal at all. “From the very beginning you were always our number one choice,” Zanuck wrote. “I am extremely gratified to receive your wires which express your attitude of honor and integrity…. Really Rex I am dreadfully sorry that things have turned out this way.”41 Then he fired him.

  ELEVEN

  The weekend that Warren Beatty contacted Robert Benton and read the script for Bonnie and Clyde also brought the opening of the film he had let slip away, What’s New, Pussycat? Buoyed by the combination of Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers, the movie became a substantial hit for United Artists; except for Goldfinger and the three blockbuster musicals that were still dominating American screens, Pussycat was the highest-grossing film of 1965.1 But the final product contained only shreds of the idea that had attracted Beatty in the first place—the notion of turning a man who was unsuccessfully juggling relationships with several different women into a comic hero. “I know Woody [Allen] didn’t agree with me on this,” says Beatty. “His point of view was always, if you’re successful with women, what’s the problem? But even after my bad experience on Pussycat, I still thought the compulsive Don Juan could be a basically sympathetic character.”2

  Soon after the movie opened, Beatty found, by accident, a writer who agreed with him. Like so many young filmmakers in the mid-1960s, Robert Towne was working for Roger Corman—he had written 1964’s Tomb of Ligeia, the last in a long series of luridly enjoyable Edgar Allan Poe horror films starring Vincent Price that American International Pictures had been turning out for years. Towne and Beatty shared a psychotherapist, and their friendship began to develop after they met in his waiting room. Towne was working on a rewrite of a western in which Corman wanted Beatty to star, and Beatty, though he wasn’t particularly interested in the project, liked the writing.3 He began to talk to Towne about his idea for what he called “an updated version of Wycherly’s The Country Wife—a guy pretends to be gay, but he’s really getting more action than anybody. In [the 1960s] if you were a hairdresser, people assumed you were gay. So we talked about making the guy a hairdresser and began to work on it.”4 In its early stages, the screenplay was called Hair; eventually it became Shampoo.

  As that project began what turned out to be a decade-long gestation, Beatty kept his eye on Bonnie and Clyde. François Truffaut’s unexpected return to the film rekindled the hopes of Elinor Jones and Norton Wright for a couple of months during the summer, but Truffaut’s idea for how to make it seemed, suddenly, to be disappointingly close to the vision Jean-Luc Godard had expressed that Bonnie and Clyde should be shot quickly, cheaply, and without any big names. Alexandra Stewart, despite her distinct French Canadian accent, would be fine for Bonnie, he insisted. And when Wright suggested they get in touch with Paul Newman about playing Clyde, Truffaut replied that Newman would make the film “too important and disproportionate….. Scooter Teague [Anthony Teague, an actor who had played a tiny role in West Side Story] and Robert Walker [Jr.] seem to me adequate for the two male parts.”5 And Elinor Jones’s belief that United Artists would jump at the project now that Truffaut was ready to commit himself proved unfounded. “He was not considered by United Artists someone who could make money,” she said. “David [Picker] always backed it—but he needed [Krim and Benjamin’s] approval. He couldn’t pull it together himself. And they didn’t want it.”6

  Once it became clear to Truffaut that there was no way Bonnie and Clyde could be shot before Fahrenheit 451 (which was to be made by Universal), he lost interest in the movie altogether, and at the end of August, he dropped out for the second and last time.* The movie Robert Benton and David Newman had conceived as an American version of a French New Wave film had now lost both of the directors who inspired it, and the Nouvelle Vague itself, by late 1965, was no longer the representation of cinema’s future that it had seemed to be two years earlier. The fickle attention of American audiences was shifting decisively from France to England, in particular to the brittle, contemporary, sexy London comedies—Darling, Alfie, The Knack, Morgan—that were creating a new generation of stars.

  Jones and Wright had three months left on their option, and they made some halfhearted runs at directors, hoping to attract, among others, Philippe de Broca, who had directed 1964’s farcical That Man from Rio.7 Having been turned down by every major studio they had approached, they also contacted producer Claude Giroux to see if an independent company, Allied Artists, might be interested in the film.8 But Jones and Wright both knew their chance to make Bonnie and Clyde had probably passed. At one point, Jones began to wonder if there was a problem with the script that she just wasn’t seeing. “I thought, maybe it has to be rewritten. And Bob and David said no, and they were right.”9

  In the fall of 1965, Beatty made a single attempt to get in touch with Elinor Jones, calling her in New York and leaving a message. Jones ran across the hall to tell her brother (who had, with his wife, moved into an apartment across from the Joneses). “We thought, hey, this is terrific—when he calls back, we’ll say, let’s get into business together,” says Wright. But they never heard from Beatty again. “Why did he call?” says Jones. “It’s a mystery to me. I think he found out, after that call, that the option was up in two months and just waited us out.”

  Jones and Wright went to see Arthur Penn’s Mickey One that September at the third annual New York Film Festival, where it was coolly received. Wright thought it was “a turkey of a movie—one of Penn’s few.”10 Beatty’s concern during the long Chicago production that the movie was “too fucking obscure” turned out to be well-founded. “Mickey One is a strange and sometimes confused offbeat yarn which is going to need careful nursing if it is to make real impact at the wickets,” warned Variety’s reviewer.11 But Columbia Pictures was ready to cut its losses on the film, and it snuck into (and out of) theaters three weeks later. “The morning after Mickey One opened, I called the studio and said, how did it do?” says Beatty. “They said, it did thirteen dollars. I said, is that good?”12

  On November 27, 1965, Jones and Wright’s option on Bonnie and Clyde lapsed. The same day, Beatty bought Benton and Newman’s script, paying them $75,000.13 The producers were disappointed but not angry. “My reading of it is that Beatty moved, professionally and with alacrity, once the option expired,” says Wright.14 “He did what a smart producer would do.” When Jones saw the movie two years later, “I was very proud,” she recalls. “I knew that we had done all we could. We believed in Bob and David’s screenplay, and seeing the movie, I knew we had bet on the right horse.”15

  That fall, when Sydney Pollack’s suicide hotline movie The Slender Thread had its first preview in Encino, its screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, was sitting in the audience. In the network TV universe, Silliphant was famous, regarded on the same level as Paddy Chayefsky or Rod Serling. An adulatory Time magazine profile in 1963 titled “The Fingers of God” had called him “television’s thinking man”16 and noted that he now commanded $10,000 to write an hour of episodic drama, a fee that added up quickly since Silliphant was, by any standards, extraordinarily productive. In the first season of Naked City, his innovative, textured police drama, he wrote thirty-one out of thirty-nine episodes himself; by the early 1960s, he had turned his attention to Route 66, a series about two young men traveling across the country in a Corvette. The show, though it had a couple of continuing characters, was really an anthology that allowed Silliphant to explore any themes that grabbed his attention—he had a particular taste for politically chancy, forward-looking topics—within the space of an hour, creating a new set of guest characters and conflicts every week (he later referred to the show as “a dramatization of my personal four-year psychiatric exhumation of all the shit that was bubbling inside me”).

  Silliphant had written a handful of feature films in the late 1950s, but, consumed by work on his television shows, which brought him a seven-figure annual income, he hadn’t had a big-screen credit since the 1960 horror movie Village of the Damned when
he completed The Slender Thread. “Stirling was the most prolific writer in the world,” says Pollack. “He used to write on toilet paper when he was in the bathroom, literally. He was extremely fast and extremely facile—so facile that he could sometimes go off in crazy directions. He could write on a plane, in a waiting room, on napkins, and he didn’t know where it came from. He was a very mystical guy, and he thought his own talent was mystical.” On The Slender Thread, Pollack had eventually brought in his own writer, David Rayfiel. “I was lying and hiding the rewriting going on with David, but when Stirling found out, he wasn’t upset or possessive. He just said, ‘Fantastic, can we get him to do some more?’”17

  Silliphant had been attracted to the idea of writing a script that paired Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft in a drama in which “race was totally ignored [because] neither hero nor heroine could see each other.” But the gimmick, which might have been able to sustain an episode of Route 66, proved too flimsy for a feature-length film, and far from ignoring race, it also made the story disconcertingly similar to A Patch of Blue, another drama in which a white woman drew strength from Poitier without actually seeing him. As he watched the preview of The Slender Thread, Silliphant later said, “It was clear the picture was NOT giving off sparks.” The man sitting next to him felt it as well. “A bomb, huh?” he said. “A fucking bomb, from start to finish,” Silliphant replied. “I doubt that [a] single person in America will ever bother to buy a ticket.”18