by Mark Harris
The man next to Silliphant turned out to be Sidney Poitier’s agent, Martin Baum, who told him, “I want you to know something: Sidney doesn’t blame you for this picture.” Then Baum gave him a piece of advice: Get another screenplay assignment fast, before this turkey opens and word about it starts to spread. Two days later, Baum arranged a meeting between Silliphant and Walter Mirisch at which Mirisch gave him John Ball’s novel In the Heat of the Night.19 When Mirisch had first purchased the book, he intended the writing job to go to Robert Alan Aurthur,20 a friend of Poitier’s who had written an episode of The Philco Television Playhouse for the actor that was so well received, it became a feature with Poitier, 1957’s Edge of the City. But Aurthur hadn’t worked out, and Mirisch, on Baum’s recommendation, turned to Silliphant.
Anyone taking on the challenge of adapting Ball’s novel would have a great deal of work to do, since In the Heat of the Night, on the page, was a far cry from the story it became on the screen. Ball’s basic outline was workable and remains recognizable in the finished film: Virgil Tibbs, a black police officer, is waiting for a train in a small southern town, having just visited his mother, when a murder occurs. After first being questioned as a suspect, Tibbs reveals his profession and stays on to work with the grudging, racist, and suspicious local police force to help solve the case.
But the way in which Ball had fleshed out the story and characters would have to be completely discarded. Ball had first conceived the plot of In the Heat of the Night back in 1933 and had written the novel in 1960; it took him four years to find a publisher.21 Virgil Tibbs was already, by 1965, a retrograde character whose placid reaction to a racially charged situation was far too outdated for Poitier to play, or for any moviegoer who would choose to see this film in the first place to believe. On screen, Poitier was a master at keeping a lid on his anger while letting his audience know it simmered just beneath the surface of his characters, but Tibbs, in the novel, seems to be almost completely untroubled and to have no interior life at all. In Ball’s novel, the character of Police Chief Gillespie is a minor one; the murder victim (and the reason for his killing) is different; and Endicott, the white tycoon who rules the small town, is a friendly, pro–civil rights progressive. Tibbs himself is imagined almost completely from the outside, often from the perspective of Officer Sam Wood (the character eventually played by Warren Oates): “The Negro climbed out and submitted without protest when Sam seized his upper arm and piloted him into the police station,” writes Ball.22 Tibbs, in the novel, explains his investigative techniques with inexhaustible patience and pages-long loquacity; the mystery concludes with him gathering all the suspects in a room and, like Mr. Moto or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, laboriously detailing the path of his deductive reasoning until the guilty party is identified. “You’re a great credit to your race,” Gillespie tells Tibbs. “I mean, of course, the human race.” Tibbs then asks Gillespie if he might be allowed to sit on the “Whites Only” bench until the train comes to take him away. Gillespie grants his permission, and the novel ends.23
Silliphant knew that any successful version of In the Heat of the Night would have to dispense with viewing Tibbs as nothing more than “the Negro”; a character who submitted to insults without protest and asked permission for everything was not one he wanted to write. On December 15, 1965, just a week before The Slender Thread opened, Silliphant turned in a seventy-six-page treatment in which he started to reimagine In the Heat of the Night as a civil rights drama. “I do not want [Tibbs] to have come from Pasadena, California,” as he does in Ball’s novel, Silliphant wrote. “I want Tibbs to have come out of Harlem, to have fought and bled and suffered his way out of a crushing environment.” Silliphant felt he should be a New York City homicide detective first-class and “a far more sophisticated, experienced human being than anybody out of Pasadena.” And, he added, “I want Tibbs to have an ulcer.”24
In relocating Tibbs, Silliphant wasn’t just making the story’s North-vs.-South tension more geographically explicit; he was responding to the news. In the civil rights movement, the galvanizing event of early 1965 had been the march in Selma—a call-to-action moment for many in the movie business, who started writing checks, raising money, holding benefits at Hollywood nightspots like the discotheque the Daisy,25 and publicly identifying themselves with the cause. But by the summer, the riots in Watts had begun to shift the battlefront of civil rights away from the inequities in the South (where most of the major legal battles had by then been won) and toward the frustration, poverty, and anger of inner-city black Americans. “We shall overcome,” the rallying cry of 1963,26 had given way to “Burn, baby, burn!”27 in just two years, and since the film industry was beginning to realize how far behind current events its movies had fallen regarding race relations, there was every chance that a screenplay ripped from today’s headlines was going to feel embarrassingly outdated by the time it reached theaters. In November, as Silliphant began working on his treatment, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published to wide attention and acclaim, and accounts of black rage, not just of black oppression, began to make their way onto the evening news. The serene unflappability of Virgil Tibbs, a gentle black visitor to a town full of racists, would no longer be credible in a motion picture. Of course Tibbs would have to be angry. And the cause of his rage, in Silliphant’s treatment, would be woven right into the southernness of the locale. Noting that in the novel, Endicott is “a ‘nice’ guy,” he wrote, “The only Southern ‘heavy’ in the book…is a councilman…who tells Gillespie to get Tibbs the hell out of town. In the book this threat is never fully developed…. I believe we must build and dramatize this threat against Tibbs so that it lies behind and ahead of every scene…. I want to change the book’s George Endicott into a worthwhile enemy.”
Under the heading “The Negro Community of Wells” (the town in the novel), Silliphant remarked, “I feel that the author of In the Heat of the Night may never have spent a night in, let alone lived in or around, a Negro community, so underdeveloped is his subtext in this area…. I want to write a larger sense of the community and Tibbs within it.” He also announced his intention to reduce the importance of Officer Sam Wood and in turn to reshape the character of Gillespie, who in Ball’s novel is a tall, lean thirty-two-year-old with only nine weeks on the job, into a second main character and Tibbs’s primary adversary. Silliphant knew that a northern black detective squaring off against a southern sheriff would be far more dramatic than a polite Negro from Pasadena repeatedly explaining his actions to a low-level beat cop.
Not all of Silliphant’s ideas for In the Heat of the Night made sense; some were awful. He was writing fast and off the top of his head, as was his custom, and he didn’t censor himself. Sometimes his mystical bent got the better of him; nothing else could explain his proposal for a scene in which Tibbs, interrogating a woman who serves as the town’s abortionist, would pull her into an confrontation in which he “digs into his cultural African past” and essentially challenges her to an all-night voodoo duel “using their minds and their eyes.”28 But in the overall thrust of his approach, Silliphant had already gone a long way toward turning Ball’s story line into a viable movie and Virgil Tibbs into the most sophisticated iteration of the black outsider, burning with rage but always keeping cool, that Sidney Poitier had yet played.
As Silliphant started to write In the the Heat of the Night, Mirisch was still looking for a director, and Norman Jewison was lobbying for the job. Nothing in Jewison’s background or résumé suggested any particular kinship with either the detective genre or a hard-edged story about civil rights; he was a native of Canada, and like many directors then in their thirties, he had come up in television, directing episodes of Judy Garland’s short-lived variety series for CBS. In 1962, Jewison got his first chance to make a feature, a throwaway comedy for Universal called 40 Pounds of Trouble with Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette. The studio signed him to a seven-picture deal and intended to keep him busy; on his s
econd movie, he was paired with Universal’s biggest star, Doris Day, on The Thrill of It All, a quintessentially early-1960s spoof of network TV, Madison Avenue, and suburban domesticity on which Jewison put what he called the “genuine hatred for commercials and their interruptions of the television shows I had been producing for CBS” to adroit use.29 The movie, in which James Garner costars, may be the best of Day’s films from that period.
Universal liked what it saw enough to put Jewison right back to work on another Day picture, 1964’s Send Me No Flowers, the last of the three comedies she made with Rock Hudson. The film had a weaker script than The Thrill of It All, and Jewison was beginning to chafe; he hadn’t spent a decade paying his dues in television only to end up directing feature films that looked and read like sitcoms. For the first time, he started to turn down assignments; “I was fed up with being a hired hand,” he wrote.30 Jewison said no to two more comedies, Goodbye Charlie and Sex and the Single Girl, before giving in and making a fourth, The Art of Love, with Dick Van Dyke. Not until the first preview did he realize that “I had directed my first bomb.” Jewison had recently seen Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and left the theater both thrilled by the movie and profoundly depressed that “my life was being wasted on these commercial comedies where everyone ended up happy and went to the seashore.”31
In late 1964, Jewison got a lucky break, engineered in part by his agent, William Morris’s canny and powerful Abe Lastfogel (who also worked with Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty). A long-forgotten clause in Jewison’s contract with Universal set a deadline by which the studio had to inform him it was exercising its option for a fifth movie. Jewison, counseled by Lastfogel, sat quietly by and let the deadline pass. By the time Universal realized it had made what amounted to a clerical mistake, Jewison was free of his contract32 and jumped at the first drama he was offered, MGM’s The Cincinnati Kid. The circumstances couldn’t have been much worse: The movie, a poker table version of The Hustler in which Steve McQueen was to play a young cardsharp facing off against a veteran, had already chewed through five writers (including Paddy Chayefsky and Ring Lardner Jr.); its other leading man, Spencer Tracy, had bowed out on the advice of his doctors just two weeks before shooting was to begin, and only four days into production, the director, Sam Peckinpah, had shot a nude scene without the authority of Martin Ransohoff, his producer.33 Ransohoff was not a prude; he had already battled Geoffrey Shurlock and the Production Code (and lost) over a very brief nude scene in The Americanization of Emily earlier in the year.34 But he thought Peckinpah was a loose cannon and hated his footage. Peckinpah was fired; Jewison came in with less than a week to prepare, and although the film he made was no masterpiece, he got considerable credit for pulling together a coherent story and focused performances under difficult circumstances.
For Jewison, The Cincinnati Kid was the movie that “made me feel I had finally become a filmmaker.”35 It also marked the beginning of a significant professional relationship between the director and Hal Ashby, whom Jewison hired to edit the movie. Jewison and Ashby teamed up again on his next film, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, a dark comedy about cold war paranoia that brought him to UA and the Mirisches. This time, Jewison was careful not to be trapped, as he had been at Universal; he signed a deal with Mirisch for just two pictures, for each of which he would be paid $125,000 plus 25 percent of the profits; his contract guaranteed him a voice in development, casting, and editing.36
At $3.9 million, The Russians Are Coming was a little more expensive than the average studio comedy, but Mirisch was justifiably optimistic about its commercial prospects, and Jewison had earned some leverage with him. He heard about In the Heat of the Night while Russians was in postproduction and was immediately interested. Mirisch tried to dissuade him, telling him the film was too small; the producer didn’t intend to spend nearly as much on this picture as he had on Russians,37 and he may have wanted Jewison to direct a bigger property, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He also let Jewison know that In the Heat of the Night would have to be shot on the Goldwyn lot. In the mid-1960s, the issue of “runaway production,” the ever rising percentage of studio films that were shot outside of Hollywood (and often outside of the United States), was inflaming tempers and unsettling studio economics,38 and Jewison—who had no intention of shooting In the Heat of the Night on the lot—decided not to press the point yet. Mirisch gave him the job.
In January and February 1966, Silliphant began turning his outline into a first-draft screenplay that was in some ways stronger than his treatment and in other ways a retreat from it. As planned, Virgil Tibbs had been relocated from Pasadena—but not to Harlem; now, for reasons that the script never made clear, he came from Phoenix, Arizona. Chief Gillespie had become more central to the plot and his backstory had been fleshed out, but, introduced as “a tall, hard-bodied man in his mid-thirties”39 stepping out of the shower wearing only a towel, he was still more Paul Newman than Rod Steiger. Silliphant had made good on several of his ideas: The story now focused more on the working relationship between Gillespie and Tibbs; the unrelenting oppression of southern racism, including repeated references to Tibbs as a “nigger,” was now threaded throughout the script and worked into scenes involving the mayor and the city council; a subject in which Tibbs befriends a black family in Wells had been developed; and the character of Endicott had been turned into a villain. In what was to become a pivotal scene, set in an orchid hothouse, he slaps Tibbs in the face and, wrote Silliphant, “Tibbs responds instantly, slapping him back as hard—or possibly harder, the blow virtually rattling Endicott’s head.”* In this draft, Silliphant included the idea that Endicott’s elderly black butler, seeing the returned slap, immediately “begins to tremble and pray,” to which Tibbs snaps, “Don’t pray for me! Pray for them!”
But the first draft of In the Heat of the Night was also replete with missteps that demonstrated the limitations of Silliphant’s speed writing. In describing Tibbs, the screenplay seemed to revert to the novel’s white-man’ s-eye view of him: The first time we see the character, Silliphant presents him from Sam Wood’s perspective as “a Negro, in his late twenties…but here’s a strange thing—this Negro is well-dressed, despite the heat, with a shirt and tie…. His nose seems the nose of an aristocratic white man, the line of his mouth slender and well-formed.” (The equation of black refinement with atypical facial features, which came directly from Ball’s novel, was, thankfully, a notion that did not survive later rewrites.) Tibbs, in Silliphant’s first draft, was still a big talker, albeit far less deferential and courtly, and the screenplay hit every beat of the murder mystery plotline so explicitly that it ran to 166 pages, a blueprint for a movie that would run two hours and forty-five minutes. Silliphant had eliminated one of the novel’s wittiest exchanges, in which Gillespie barks, “Virgil is a pretty fancy name for a black boy like you. What do they call you around home where you come from?” and Tibbs replies, “They call me Mister Tibbs.” He had employed some gimmicky shorthand to establish Tibbs’s intelligence, having him carry around The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. He had made Endicott a vicious bigot but also given him a long speech in which he explains, “You can’t legislate tolerance.” And Silliphant’s portrait of a South Carolina black family didn’t feel any more believable than Ball’s: When Tibbs starts explaining his profession to a local garage mechanic’s kids, their father says, “You gon’ spook those chillen!”
Silliphant’s first version of In the Heat of the Night ended with a handshake between Gillespie and Tibbs, a moment Gillespie pointedly avoids at the end of the book. The screenwriter had been able to eradicate the novel’s timeworn sentimentality about race—the idea that black people could be worthy of admiration only if they were better than everyone around them, a stereotype that tied in closely to the exceptionalism that had both shaped and constricted Poitier’s career. But what replaced that idea was no less of a platitude—the concluding image (unintentionally echoing
The Defiant Ones) of a white hand and a black hand clasped together. The final shot embodied a notion that all problems could be solved if two men just got to know each other as people—it may have been politically spurious, but at least it was more contemporary and less condescending than Ball’s ending.
Jewison, however, knew that the script had a long way to go. Silliphant later joked about the finesse with which the director handled him. “He called me and said, ‘Stirling…I have never read a first draft which is so brilliant. I want you to know that I’m not going to change a word.’…I was so honored and flattered, I was in a euphoric state for about a week…. I called Norman and we had lunch, and I said, ‘I’m troubled by your easy acceptance of the script. What I’d like to do is go over it page by page.’ Norman said, ‘It really isn’t necessary, Stirling, but since you insist…’ He takes his script out of the briefcase, and I see that it is bristling with paper clips, one on almost every page.’”40 Jewison, it turned out, had some notes. And Silliphant, the fastest writer in Hollywood, found himself working on the screenplay every day for the next six months. “Stirling always said I told him it was brilliant and then months later he was still working on it,” says Jewison. “But it wasn’t that. We were living in a difficult time for race relations, and I wanted him to dig deeper. What were Virgil’s feelings about race? What were Bill Gillespie’s? That’s where he still had to go.”41
