Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  But the Code’s rigidity had recently begun to work against it. The influx of European films, some with nudity, that weren’t produced by studios and didn’t require a Code seal had created a double standard; local theaters, meeting the demands of their audiences, were increasingly willing to show movies without Code approval, as well as those that had been branded with the Catholic rating of “Condemned.” The double standard didn’t apply only to sex: Dated and rarely enforced Code provisions against things like “trick methods shown for concealing guns,” “illegal abduction,” and the depiction of any “notorious real-life criminal” who had not been punished for his crimes19 had turned Hollywood’s rule book into a bizarre patchwork of policies, some rigorously enforced and others routinely ignored. Distributors were challenging local censorship boards in courts across the country and almost always winning, while conservative and religious organizations were calling for the Code to be abolished altogether and replaced by film ratings,20 an idea that the studios resisted, believing it was a first step toward outright censorship. The studios had reason to distrust the motives of those who were calling for a classification system; the only “ratings” for films at the time were handed out under the aegis of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which classified movies on a scale based not on age appropriateness, but on degree of moral turpitude, up to and including condemnation. The National Catholic Office was blunt about its desire for a ratings system that would keep movies with adult subject matter out of many theaters altogether.

  Valenti knew the Code was preposterous, but he worried that a ratings system might bring even bigger problems; he correctly surmised that film ratings would result in more freedom rather than less, since once a movie could be designated as being for adults, it could offer unapologetically adult content. That, he feared, would lead to more clashes with municipal censorship boards or a fight against church leaders that Hollywood was desperate to avoid. But he knew that in its present form, the Code was doomed. The 1965 decision to approve the nudity in The Pawnbroker because of the film’s high quality had created an untenable loophole, suggesting that one standard existed for good films and another for ordinary ones. Although the studios had always cooperated with Shurlock, they had no interest in allowing him to judge their movies on merit.

  Valenti and Louis Nizer, who had signed a five-year contract to serve as the MPAA’s senior counsel,21 hadn’t even unpacked their boxes when Jack Warner decided to use Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to finish what The Pawnbroker started. Although the first time they saw the picture, Warner and his executives had famously reacted by saying, “My God, we’ve got a $7.5 million dirty movie on our hands,”22 Nichols had jockeyed skillfully behind the scenes to keep much of its profanity intact. The vast circle of New York friends he had acquired in the years since he had starred with Elaine May on Broadway proved to be a critical asset; Virginia Woolf won a perfectly choreographed private endorsement from Jacqueline Kennedy, who, at Nichols’s request, attended a small screening and made sure to say, within earshot of a key member of the Catholic film board, “Jack would have loved this movie.”23 After extensive internal debate, the National Catholic Office gave Virginia Woolf a rating of A-IV, “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations.”24 This coup, which allowed the film to escape not only a “C” (Condemned) rating, but a “B” (“morally objectionable in part for all”), would put even more pressure on the Production Code authority to approve the film.

  Jack Warner then came up with his own preemptive way of undercutting the Code. On May 25, 1966, he announced that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be released with the label “For adults only” and that theaters would have to sign contracts agreeing not to admit minors without adult accompaniment.25 While newspaper ads for independent or foreign movies had carried “adults only” labels for years, the label was used as a racy tease, not as a studio-approved enforceable restriction. Warner’s maneuver, which effectively created the “R” rating two years before a ratings system existed, unsettled Geoffrey Shurlock. Shurlock was now seventy-one and had enjoyed extraordinary influence over the years; at one point, he was even able to order Alfred Hitchcock to reshoot the opening scene of Psycho. But his investment in the Code was rooted more in a desire to protect his own power than in any innate prudishness. When Warner Brothers bought Virginia Woolf, Shurlock had warned them that there was unacceptable language on Chapter Six of the script.26 But after Warner’s decision, Shurlock knew his own standing was at stake and decided not to risk a public defeat. For the first time ever, he declined to make any ruling and privately advised Jack Warner to end-run him and take Virginia Woolf straight to the Code’s appeals board.27 That jury, led by Valenti, who had spent just ten days in his new job, approved the movie using the same pretext they had offered for The Pawnbroker, announcing that they would not have given the seal to “a film of lesser quality” and warning that “this exemption does not mean that the floodgates are open.”

  But of course, it meant exactly that. Valenti had already stated that he had serious questions about “the entire philosophy of self-censorship,”28 and in his first week running the MPAA, he ordered a complete overhaul of the Production Code—which, he said, Shurlock would continue to administer. (Shurlock quickly announced that he thought Virginia Woolf was “marvelous” and had simply been following the rules by withholding a seal.)29 The Virginia Woolf experience, said Valenti, “was Fort Sumter…it revealed to me that the past was done. I wasn’t quite sure what the future was going to be.”30 But he was sure of one thing: After a heated hours-long private meeting in which he, Nizer, Jack Warner, and Warner’s New York distribution chief, Ben Kalmenson, had dickered over every single profanity in the movie before it even went to the appeals board, he said to Nizer, “I’m not going through that again. I’m not going to spend my life sitting in…offices and saying, ‘I gotta take out one “shit” and one “screw.”’ This is crazy.”31

  If Warner had any worries that the controversy over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would endanger its profitability, they were quickly allayed. The trade paper Variety, which used to headline its major reviews with a prognostication about the film’s box office, simply and accurately wrote of its prospects, “Big.”32 They weren’t wrong; Virginia Woolf became the second-highest-grossing film of 1966, trailing only Thunderball, as the lure of seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton behind closed doors doing something suitable “for adults only” proved irresistible. Reviews were stellar, with many critics pointedly endorsing Warner’s use of a warning label and to applauding the license it would give Hollywood filmmakers to tackle rougher material.

  Nichols was once again the man of the moment, but not an especially happy one. Jack Warner had treated him badly during postproduction of Virginia Woolf. Nichols had wanted the film’s composer, Alex North, replaced with André Previn; when he pushed too hard, Warner bristled and had him barred from the editing room with only a day or two of work left.33 North’s score stayed in, but Nichols had won almost every other battle. Still, his first Hollywood movie had left him battered and exhausted, and he found the overwhelming praise for his movie debut disorienting. “I am…upset by good reviews…. I get to feeling very unreal and very undeserving,” he told the Today show.34 Nichols was now becoming as famous as many of the people he directed and too busy for his own comfort. Production of The Graduate was supposed to start in the fall; he had just signed to direct the movie version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which was to start shooting the following summer; and with the first three Broadway plays he directed all still running, he had also agreed to stage his first Broadway musical, a trio of one-acts by the composer and lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof called Come Back! Go Away! I Love You! (later retitled The Apple Tree). In early 1966, ABC decided to make him the focus of an hour-long special, The Many Worlds of Mike Nichols.35 There turned out to be too many worlds: Nichols decided to retreat. He canceled the special, pushed Catch-22
further into the future, and postponed production of The Graduate until the spring of 1967.

  Throughout the summer of 1966, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shared its place atop the box office with The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. The cold war comedy was several shades lighter than Dr. Strangelove had been, thanks largely to its droll, playful script by William Rose, a writer with fifteen years of screen credits who was nonetheless something of an enigma to the studios. Rose spent very little time in Los Angeles; many people in the industry weren’t exactly sure whether he was American or English. In World War II, he served under Canada’s Black Watch regiment in Europe, later reenlisting for the United States.36 In the 1950s, he had won Oscar nominations for writing two English comedies, Genevieve and the Alec Guinness classic The Ladykillers; by the 1960s, he was spending most of his time in England’s Channel Islands, where he lived on the isle of Jersey with his wife, Tania. Rose was actually a native of Jefferson City, Missouri, albeit one who preferred to view America, and his chosen industry, from as great a distance as possible. “Bill got very nervous when he came to Hollywood,” says Norman Jewison. “He hated Hollywood. When the plane landed he would break out into a sweat. He was not good with studios or anything.”37

  In 1963, Rose had written the screenplay for Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Kramer liked Rose’s work, and the two became friends; Rose then began to work on Andersonville for him. When Columbia pulled the plug on Kramer’s plan to make the film, Rose happened to be in Los Angeles visiting him. After dinner at Kramer’s home, the director recalled walking Rose out to his car when Rose brought up an idea for a screenplay he had been considering about racial intermarriage in South Africa. “I said, off the top of my head, ‘Why don’t you set it in the United States?”’ wrote Kramer in his memoirs. “‘Oh, sure,’ replied Rose. ‘They’d name it picture of the year, at least in Harlem.’”38 (Rose’s memory of the project’s origin was somewhat different and probably more accurate; he later said that he never conceived of setting the story in South Africa and had had the idea for an American comedy of intermarriage since at least 1960; documents show that he had his agent pitch the premise to Kramer as early as the summer of 1962.)39

  Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, although it would be widely publicized by its studio as a taboo-shattering comedy, was not the first American movie to depict an interracial relationship. In 1964, director Larry Peerce’s low-budget One Potato, Two Potato, about a white divorcée (Barbara Barrie) who marries a black man (Bernie Hamilton), had been released by the independent distributor Cinema V; the film had shown at the Cannes Film Festival, played throughout the United States, including the South (although primarily in black neighborhoods), and won an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. And audiences, at least in the North, had just seen the first stirrings of another interracial romance in A Patch of Blue.

  Nonetheless, Kramer was certain that building an entire movie around the topic would put him on dangerous ground. He and Rose quickly talked through a plot that sounded like the premise of a very old-fashioned drawing room comedy: An affluent white couple, proud liberals in late middle age, would have their political and personal principles put to the test when their daughter walked through the door with a black fiancé. The premise was thin—little more, really, than the expansion of the then-familiar line “But would you want your daughter to marry one?” that had been applied by WASP America to Catholics, then to Jews, and then to blacks over the last thirty years. Rose brought a veteran screenwriter’s sense of structure to the piece, talking it through with Kramer first on long walks through Beverly Hills and in meetings at the Beverly Wilshire40 and later when Kramer flew overseas to Jersey. Expanding on the plot’s original quartet, he added characters—a winsome monsignor who could call the bride’s parents on their hypocrisies, the groom’s father and mother, who had reservations of their own about the proposed wedding, and the white family’s loyal and suspicious black maid—and he compressed the plot’s chronology: A story line that Kramer had originally imagined would unfold over two or three days was now to take place in twelve hours and be built around a single suspenseful question: Would the father of the bride grant permission for the marriage or not?

  Kramer and Rose tangled over every plot point of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “It was a love-hate relationship,” recalls the director’s widow, Karen Kramer. “They really were very competitive and could be quite combative. Bill was an egotist, and he was also an alcoholic. Stanley was smart and clever and quippy, and he could also be a bit of a put-down artist—he could really nail you if he wanted to, and when Bill would get out of line, Stanley would go after him and they’d both get really angry. I think Stanley would always say that Bill was a brilliant writer, but he was a very difficult person. They’d really get into it with each other, and Stanley would always win, which would make Bill furious.”41

  At the time he started working on the screenplay, Rose was in his early fifties; he had been away from the United States for a long time, and judging by his earliest plot outlines for the movie, his knowledge of the American civil rights movement was about twenty years behind the news. A treatment he wrote for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner describes one minor character as “a sexy little colored girl” and Tillie the housekeeper as “a tough but lukewarmhearted darkie”; later, he took pains to write Tillie’s dialogue in dialect, having her say “sumpin,” “jest,” “sposed,” and “lissen.”42 And the beginnings of Afrocentrism and discussions of cultural identity among black Americans were huffily dismissed by him in a few lines. Rose was still appalled that Cassius Clay had, in 1964, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, so much so that he mentioned it in his treatment. Declaring that Dr. Prentice, the black fiancé, was the grandson of slaves, he wrote, “Prentice isn’t at all ashamed of [being called] Prentice. Nor does he really care who he might have been, or what he might have been called, somewhere in the Continent of Africa.”43

  Kramer managed to comb out some, though by no means all, of the screenwriter’s condescensions and stereotypes. But he was, characteristically, thinking more like a producer than a director and insisted that Rose play it safe in one significant area: “I wanted the prospective black bridegroom to be a person so suitable that if anyone objected to him, it could only be due to racial prejudice,” he wrote.44 Kramer was sure that if Prentice had any flaws at all, bigots in the audience would seize on them as a reason to disapprove of the marriage, but in seeking to avoid that trap, he fell right into another one: the return of the exceptional Negro, a character type that had by then become so familiar that even white critics were beginning to react against its persistence. In Rose’s script, Prentice became not just a doctor, but an Ivy League–educated potential Nobel laureate who worked for the United Nations on worldwide health missions. Kramer’s insistence on stacking the deck so heavily in favor of Prentice changed everything about the movie. The answer to the question “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” now had to be Sidney Poitier, the only black actor Kramer thought that white America would find believable as a superachiever.

  “Casting is destiny,” says Warren Beatty. “Particularly in movies, because casting is character—and character is plot. Casting really controls story. One guy would do a thing, another guy wouldn’t. And if you’re the guy in the close-up, character acting isn’t going to help—you either are that guy, or you aren’t.”45 If that is the case—and it’s hard to find a movie from the mid-1960s in which it is more the case than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—then Stanley Kramer had a serious problem once Rose finished his script. The movie, he felt, would be unfilmable, and unfinanceable, if he couldn’t sign the three principal actors he wanted. The film couldn’t simply be about a nice white couple welcoming a nice black son-in-law; it had to be about the screen’s most famous romantic duo symbolically opening their arms to its biggest black star. And that didn’t look likely: Sidney Poitier was busy—and, for the first time in his career, expensive. Katharine
Hepburn had all but officially retired. And Spencer Tracy was dying.

  FIFTEEN

  Jack Warner’s office overlooking his studio’s Burbank lot was designed for genuflection. Warner was not a tall man, and he had his desk built on a platform raised eight or ten inches above the carpet, with two small stairs behind his chair. “‘Look up at me—don’t look down at me’—that was the message,” says Joel Freeman, who worked for Warner in the mid-1960s.1

  For years after the release of Bonnie and Clyde, a story persisted that Warren Beatty got down on his knees in front of the man who had run the studio since its founding in 1918 and begged him to finance the film. The anecdote, which Beatty himself kept alive for a while, made its way into Time magazine at the end of 1967, vividly ornamented with the detail that the actor “prostrated himself before the old man, dug his nose in the rug, and moaned, ‘Look, Jack, please do what I say. I won’t waste your money.’” Warner’s putative reply: “Get up off the floor, kid. You’re embarrassing me.”2 Long after Warner’s death in 1978 and Beatty’s eventual denial that the incident ever occurred, this particular piece of what Beatty calls “the apocrypha surrounding the movie”3 survived, probably for two reasons: It sounds like something he would have done, and it sounds like something Jack Warner would have enjoyed.