by Mark Harris
The evening’s glummest attendee was probably Stanley Kramer. Ship of Fools had been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but Kramer, whose direction of the movie had come in for stinging criticism in many reviews, was not among the Best Director nominees, and his own gloomy assessment that the film had fallen short of greatness had not been contradicted by its mediocre grosses or by the bad night it was having (it won awards in the black-and-white categories for Cinematography and Art Direction, but nothing else). Kramer also had to contend with the bleak news that his bad run at the box office had just put an end to his next project, Andersonville. An ambitious, large-scale battlefield drama could never be made within the $3 million budget ceiling that Columbia had imposed on Kramer, and longtime ally Mike Frankovich had let him know that his studio had now decided not to bankroll the movie at all, even though he had been working on it for nearly four years. For the first time since he had become a producer, Kramer had nothing on his plate.
In the audience, Rod Steiger sat nervously waiting for the Best Actor category. Two rows in front of him was Lee Marvin, who, as he was taking his seat, turned around and joked that he was planning to wait until Steiger’s name was announced, then trip him on his way to the stage.47 Steiger was an actor’s actor, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a movie star. Reviewing him in The Pawnbroker, Judith Crist called him “a brilliant and bravura actor whose performances…are unforgettable but who, of course, just doesn’t rank at the box office the way a Rock Hudson or a Heston does.”48 He had been nominated once before, for playing Marlon Brando’s brother in On the Waterfront. But in the decade since, Steiger’s career had drifted; he made a number of unmemorable movies, then showed up in a few television series. In the early 1960s, fed up with his inability to get work in the United States, he and his wife, actress Claire Bloom, moved to Europe,49 where he worked for the Italian directors Francesco Rosi and Ermanno Olmi.
Steiger had a major role in Doctor Zhivago, which was by far the biggest hit of his career, but it was his work in The Pawnbroker, which he had finished more than two years earlier, that marked a triumphant homecoming for the actor—that is, once the film reached the United States. The brutal, small-scale character study had been developed for MGM, but after the studio demanded that the script be softened, independent producer Ely Landau decided to finance the $1.2 million film out of his own pocket. When Sidney Lumet took over as director during preproduction after Landau fired Arthur Hiller, Steiger had already been cast. Lumet’s initial reaction was disappointment. “That was my one hesitation in taking it,” says Lumet. “I knew Rod. We had worked together in live television, and I liked his work. But I felt he was a rather tasteless actor—awfully talented, but completely tasteless in his choices.”50 Steiger’s Achilles’ heel was what even his own wife recognized as his tendency to go over the top; Bloom wrote that he could “be all over the place, out of control, no sense, just the spewing out of a scene” on the first take.51 “The New York Post used to have a columnist named Max Lerner, a really cantankerous fool,” says Lumet. “A friend of mine, the scenic designer Boris Aronson, was once asked why he didn’t like Lerner. And he said, ‘For five cents, he gives you too much.’ I felt that way about Rod.”
Lumet, if he had had his way, would have cast James Mason as the haunted camp survivor, but Steiger ended up surprising the director. “During rehearsals, we talked about how important the repression of the character’s feelings was, and Rod was more than willing to go that route,” says Lumet. “And he worked out just fine.”52 When The Pawnbroker made its debut in June 1964 at the Berlin Film Festival—an especially meaningful venue given its subject matter—it received a sustained ovation, and Steiger won the Best Actor prize for what many hailed as the performance of his career. But the movie was rejected by every studio in Hollywood because of less than five seconds of footage—a scene in which a black prostitute exposes her breasts to Steiger’s character, whose memory flashes, in a split-second shock cut, to his late wife, also bare-breasted, in the concentration camp. Lumet had decided not to film a “protection shot” (an alternate take of the scene without nudity): “I figured, what the hell, it’s private money, we’re all working for next to nothing, and I’ll just dump the problem on Landau.”53 But the Production Code’s ban on nudity was absolute. Without a PCA seal from Geoffrey Shurlock, and its nonsecular equivalent, an approval rating from the Legion of Decency (by then called the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures), no major company would touch the picture. Landau, to his credit, refused to remove the footage, and The Pawnbroker remained unseen in the United States for almost a year after its Berlin premiere.
At the urging of his colleague Joe Mankiewicz, Lumet took the then unusual step of appealing Shurlock’s decision to the Motion Picture Association’s thirteen-member board. Mankiewicz himself was a member of the appeals committee, and thanks to his impassioned lobbying, in March 1965 The Pawnbroker became the first movie with bare breasts to receive Code approval, with the Code announcing that it was “to be viewed as a special and unique case.” Notwithstanding Shurlock’s insistence that the decision was, as The New York Times dryly put it, “an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent,”54 the reversal was the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years. And the National Catholic Office’s decision to stand firm and give the movie a “Condemned” rating was just as damaging to its own authority; for the first time, the Catholics were pointedly belittled by other religious film advocacy groups. The Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches gave The Pawnbroker a best picture award, and the editor of the newsletter the Christian Advocate wrote in defense of the nude scene, “Anyone obtaining salacious pleasure from those terrifying moments is already dead to the rest of life, and hardly a subject for further stimulation.”55
Steiger’s work in the film moved Life magazine to praise his “endless versatility”56 and The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill to write, “By a magic more mysterious…than his always clever makeup, [he] manages to convince me at once that he is whoever he pretends to be.”57 Steiger was considered, along with Ship of Fools’ Oskar Werner, a front-runner for the Oscar, and his visibility in Doctor Zhivago could only help. When Julie Andrews opened the envelope and announced that the winner was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou, Steiger, according to one account, “momentarily choked.”58 Marvin was a well-liked actor who, after years of playing heavies, had delighted and surprised audiences by giving a deft comic performance in the western spoof. He went home the winner, and Steiger and Claire Bloom went back to their hotel, miserable. “I can’t say I was happy about it,” he said. “I think I wound up telling her not to feel so bad.”59 Soon after, Steiger took a role in The Girl and the General, a minor Italian antiwar comedy, and returned to Europe. His comeback had stopped short of either an Academy Award or a single job offer from Hollywood.
FOURTEEN
Steiger wasn’t Norman Jewison’s first choice to play In the Heat of the Night’s Bill Gillespie. Jewison wanted George C. Scott, an actor against whom Steiger often found himself competing for roles. But Scott was already committed to playing a rascally southerner in a con-artist comedy called The Flim-Flam Man that Larry Turman was producing while he waited for The Graduate to come together, so Steiger got Walter Mirisch’s next offer1 and signed on to the film for $100,000, half of what Sidney Poitier was receiving.2 By the time he did, Gillespie had been transformed from the tall, lean lawman of John Ball’s novel into a physical incarnation of the southern sheriff—older, bigger bellied, more confrontational—that ten years of television news stories about civil rights unrest had made familiar to everyone in America.
Gillespie’s makeover wasn’t the only change that Jewison brought to the screenplay once he started working with Stirling Silliphant. By the time Silliphant turned in his final draft, the plot, the characters, and the racial conflict that pulsed beneath every scene had al
l been both stripped down and sharpened. The story’s setting had been moved from South Carolina to Mississippi, and Tibbs was no longer from Arizona, but from Philadelphia, making the two police officers explicit stand-ins for the attitudes and politics of North and South. Virgil’s line “They call me Mister Tibbs,” a punch line in the novel that Silliphant had dropped in the first draft, was reinstated, but with anger this time3—it was now the verbal roundhouse wallop that Silliphant knew would mark the moment “the film explodes into life.”4
In Silliphant’s earlier draft, Tibbs faced an ingrained, pervasive culture of southern racism again and again. Jewison encouraged the writer to refocus his attention on the way in which prejudice can play out between two people rather than between one man and an entire town (a plot gimmick that Silliphant had already deployed in too many episodes of Route 66). He pushed Silliphant to cut scenes in which Tibbs was the target of official bigotry, including one in which he was made to wait outside of a whites-only hotel, and to trim any sequence that might distract moviegoers from the push and pull between the two main characters. That relationship reaches its climax in a scripted scene in which Tibbs visits Gillespie’s run-down home for a drink and the sheriff begins to open up to him. “Thirty-seven years old,” he says, “no wife, no kids…scratching for a living in a town doesn’t want me. Fan I have to oil for myself…desk with a busted leg…this place. Know something, Virgil? You’re the first person who’s been around to call. Nobody else has been here…nobody comes.”5 (Although Jewison, Poitier, and Steiger all later claimed that the dialogue in the house was largely improvised on the spot—and, in fact, it was fleshed out considerably during the production—Silliphant always insisted that he had written the scene, and dated drafts of the script bear out his account.)
“There’s no doubt what the film is about,” says Jewison. “We knew people would be aware of it from the very beginning, from the way Tibbs is treated when he’s arrested.”6 But the director worried that long speeches and explicit message moviemaking would be ruinous to In the Heat of the Night, as would the depiction of Gillespie as an overdrawn Deep South racist. In the final draft, Silliphant dramatically reduced the number of times the word nigger was used, particularly by Gillespie. Lines like “Now what’s a northern nigger doing in South Carolina?” became “Now what’s a northern colored boy doing down here?”7 With each alteration, Gillespie evolved from an unreconstructed Bull Connor to a man who was, although prejudiced, one step smarter and less bigoted than the rednecks around him and self-aware enough to be slightly on his guard in Tibbs’s presence; he’s someone who knows that the rules are beginning to change. The final draft of In the Heat of the Night still contained enough uses of “nigger” to trouble Geoffrey Shurlock, who wrote in a Production Code memo to the filmmakers that while the presence of the word was “quite valid…unnecessary repetition could prove objectionable. We urge that you eliminate one or two uses.”8
At the same time, Silliphant and Jewison toughened their depiction of Virgil Tibbs, paring away so much of his dialogue that he became, by the final draft, someone who uses silence, withholding, and watchfulness as a weapon. In some ways, the changes were designed to tailor Tibbs to Poitier’s special talent for controlled anger while allowing him to take a stride forward from Lilies of the Field and A Patch of Blue into a hipper, more contemporary persona. (“Where you going?” Gillespie asks at one point as Virgil walks away from him. “Where Whitey ain’t allowed,” snaps Tibbs.) The accommodationist Negro of Ball’s novel was disappearing, in part because Silliphant and Jewison knew it was already outdated and in part because Poitier, who had a good deal of influence in the shaping of Tibbs’s character during the screenwriting process, was no longer interested in playing the role of an appeaser.
Many of the refinements were structural rather than political. “I never spent a great deal of time talking to Stirling about prejudice or racism,” Jewison says. “We were more concerned with the construction of the mystery.”9 In particular, the two men zeroed in on the main weakness of Ball’s novel—the murder case at its center was not particularly intricate or complex, and its solution hinged on the clumsy last-minute introduction of new information. Silliphant made a few changes in the mystery itself, generally for the better; the murder victim was changed from a music promoter planning a local concert to a northern liberal industrialist who had come south to build a factory in the town. But he and Jewison decided to build suspense simply by omitting as much information about the case as they could without rendering the narrative incomprehensible. “If the crime story were plotted as the alphabet,” Silliphant said, “from A to Z, how much of it could we pull out and play off screen? We kept A and jumped to F, then from F to L…. The result of this withholding…was to compel the viewer to invest attention in the least detail. Maybe there was a clue in the look Gillespie gave Virgil—maybe not. But we’d better watch and see.”10
By July, Poitier felt that Silliphant’s screenplay—twenty-six pages shorter than his first draft11—was “a very forward-looking piece of material”; what had begun as a police procedural had been reimagined as a racially charged dual character study effectively disguised as a whodunit. In the Heat of the Night now had a script Jewison wanted to shoot, and just in time, he had acquired the clout to do it his way. A month before Silliphant delivered his draft, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming opened and, somewhat unexpectedly, became the best-reviewed movie and biggest hit of Jewison’s career. The success of Russians, which had been shot largely on location, gave Jewison the power to go to Mirisch and tell him that for the sake of authenticity, In the Heat of the Night would have to be shot in the South, not on a studio lot. Mirisch agreed.12
Sidney Poitier did not. His memories of being tailed by Klansmen the previous summer while visiting Mississippi with Harry Belafonte were vivid, and horror stories were beginning to come out of Louisiana, where the racially mixed cast of Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown was enduring harassment and death threats, the film’s black actors were being turned away from restaurants and hotels, and a crew member was chased out of a local Laundromat by someone who didn’t want him using it to wash the black cast members’ hotel bedsheets.13 “You can cut the hostility with a knife,” said Diahann Carroll on the set. “Down here, the terror has killed my taste for going anywhere.”14 Poitier’s fears were not unjustified, since his own family had recently been menaced. On June 6, James Meredith, who had become famous as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, was shot as he began a “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson. Meredith recovered, and a couple of weeks later, Poitier’s ex-wife, Juanita, held a fund-raising reception for him at the Pleasantville, New York, home the couple had shared. When she did, a cross was burned on her lawn.15 Poitier, now America’s most recognizable black actor, was not about to turn himself into an even bigger target. “Sidney didn’t want to go below the Mason-Dixon line,” says Jewison. “There was no goddamn way he’d do it.”16
On June 1, 1966, Jack Valenti, a forty-four-year-old former Texas advertising executive who had become a special assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson, left his White House post to head the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA had had only two presidents since its founding in 1922: Will Hays, the architect of the 1930 Production Code that still governed the content of Hollywood movies, and Eric Johnston, whose death in 1963 had left the organization rudderless for almost three years. The MPAA had many functions, the most economically significant of which was to operate as the movie industry’s lobbying arm in Washington. But at the moment Valenti took over, the association was consumed by the issue of censorship, and in particular by its oversight of the failing and outmoded Production Code. While Code administrator Geoffrey Shurlock was still systematically ticking off the number of uses of “hell” and “damn” in every script and informing producers by letter what lines, scenes, and even gestures would have to come out of their screenplays, American filmmakers were rising in insurrec
tion not only against the Code’s restrictions, but against its very existence.
As Valenti began work, the crisis over the Code was coming to a head so quickly that there was little time for deliberation. For decades, control over the content of Hollywood films had been split three ways, in an unofficial power-sharing arrangement between the studios themselves (via the Code), religious organizations such as the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and the Episcopal Committee for Motion Pictures, and censorship boards whose standards varied capriciously by city and state and which were generally overseen by local police departments. As a result, films with potentially inflammatory subjects would sometimes end up playing in a checkerboard pattern across the country: For instance, it took two years and a fight that went to the Georgia Supreme Court before the Oscar-winning Room at the Top, about an extramarital affair, could be shown in Atlanta.17 The system was intended to encourage self-censorship by the studios: The more stringently they governed their own product, the less risk they would run of a religious anti-Hollywood groundswell or of having to fight costly legal battles to get their movies shown. Until the last few years, that had given Shurlock near absolute power, no matter how many decades behind the times some of the Production Code’s statutes were. In 1961, when he had reviewed the script for West Side Story and ruled that words like “schmuck” and “S.O.B.,” and even a phrase as mild as “he’s hot” would have to be deleted from Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, UA had no choice but to comply.” Even as late as 1964, the Code was able to veto the movie title How to Murder Your Mistress in favor of the somehow more acceptable How to Murder Your Wife.18
