Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Walter MacEwen had worried since production began about being beaten to screens by another Depression-era gangster movie, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, that Roger Corman was directing for 20th Century-Fox; he wanted Bonnie and Clyde in theaters by the summer of 1967 without fail. “Stay as sweet as you are,” he wrote to Beatty at the beginning of the shoot, “[and] complete the goddamn show on schedule.”56 And Jack Warner could barely muster enough enthusiasm to send the traditional first-day-of-filming cable to Arthur Penn. “Every good wish on the start of your picture,” he wrote. “Know you will bring production in on schedule. And for the budget,” he added, before crossing the last four words out.57 “Warner was so pissed off that they were in Texas,” says Walter MacEwen’s assistant Robert Solo. “He’d say, ‘Why aren’t they on the lot? Why do they have to be in Texas? Mike Curtiz could shoot on the lot! Mervyn LeRoy could shoot on the lot! What’s wrong with these guys?’ He would rant and rave and carry on every day. Finally, he forced them to come back.”58

  Bonnie and Clyde moved to Burbank for its final weeks; the technical requirements of filming the driving sequences would eventually have forced the production onto a rear-projection stage in any case. Since so much of the movie is set in the very crowded getaway car, all five principal actors were there as well as Gene Wilder and Evans Evans. “If the movie had been shot just a couple of years later,” says Penn, “there would have been no need for rear projection. But the terrain of the road was just too rough for those cameras and the sound equipment, so we had to go to the lot.”59 Jack Warner had gotten his wish; the film was now nominally under his control, although he hadn’t seen the unprecedentedly bloody and brutal footage that Dede Allen and her assistant, Jerry Greenberg, were beginning to cut together. Obsessed with Camelot, he hardly paid attention to Bonnie and Clyde. When he did, he expressed little enthusiasm. “We had shot one scene in Dallas—the scene where Buck, the brother, is first seen with Clyde…about fifteen times,” said Beatty. “When we got back to Hollywood, we did some over-the-shoulder shots—all of this same scene. We had about 125,000 takes…and this was the one day, of all the goddamn days, that Jack Warner picked to come and see the rushes. He came up to me afterward and said, ‘Hey, kid, Bogart wouldn’t do that. You think Errol Flynn would put up with that many takes? For Christ’s sake, kid!’”60

  On the film’s last day of production, the seventy-four-year-old studio chief found an opportunity for one last assertion of authority. “There had been a long tradition at Warner Brothers, with their B movies, that Jack Warner would give them a time frame and then come down to the set, no matter how far along they were, and say, ‘Your picture wraps tonight.’ That became sort of legendary,” says Penn. “Well, we finished Bonnie and Clyde on a Friday and we were having a wrap party, but the photographs that open the movie—the stills—we were gonna do without the crew, in a studio off the lot. And we kept the costumes for them. So here’s this wrap party going on, and Jack comes down and says, ‘You finish tonight.’ And lo and behold, we were forced right then to do the stills, while the crew was sitting there eating and drinking. It was, I guess, an exercise in power for him. But it was also a last hurrah.”61

  PART THREE

  TWENTY

  The two girls were naked. That fact alone represented three problems. Naked was, of course, the first problem; even if there had been no other issues, naked was a deal breaker all by itself. Girls was the second problem; not women, but girls. Wasn’t one of them, one of the two that were giggling and wrestling and rolling around the floor naked, supposed to be a teenager, perhaps not even of the age of consent? And two was a problem; two girls together, with everything that might suggest to a moviegoer. Not to mention the presence of the male photographer whose clothes they were tugging off, who was happily diving into the action, threatening to become naked himself. Three naked young people, tumbling and laughing and thrashing and clearly about to have sex in several different combinations.

  And then there was the scene in which the photographer stood over Sarah Miles, locking eyes with her, while another man thrust into her.

  This was not possible.

  The first letter that Geoffrey Shurlock sent to MGM had been polite but firm. Nobody at the studio could say they hadn’t been warned; they had been warned as far back as March, before the movie had even been shot. “As you know, nudity is prohibited under the Code,” Shurlock had reminded the studio, as if any reminder were necessary. “We notice that the story calls for Thomas to have a sex relationship between two teenagers. This…would not be approvable.” And the scene in which he just…watches? “This suggestion seems to us to verge on the pornographic.”1 Shurlock had warned MGM again in April, after the movie’s title had changed from The Shot to just The Antonioni Picture; this time he had used stronger language, phrases like “heightening the degree of offensiveness” and “unacceptably irreverent.”2 And he had tried one more time in July,3 but by then it was too late, because Blow-Up, as it was now called, was shooting all over London in the summer of 1966, and the old Code, thanks to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Alfie, was already on its way out. By the fall, when the movie was completed and edited, Shurlock was overseeing the new, more relaxed Code, which everyone knew was a halfhearted attempt to maintain the integrity of a system that still demanded a certain toeing of the line by studios while giving filmmakers a little more room. A little more room. Not room for bare teenage breasts and three-ways and a man trying, as Shurlock put it, “to incite the girl into a state of orgasm.”4

  This time, Shurlock knew that he had Jack Valenti in his camp. Valenti was liberal, he was open-minded, he had sided with Warner Brothers and against the Code on Virginia Woolf, and he admired Antonioni, but, he said, “I don’t believe that everything that’s put into a film by a man of quality is sacrosanct…. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”5 And the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, even with a more permissive advisory board now in place, would certainly condemn the film. So Shurlock knew that MGM would have to yield: The studio needed to get a Production Code seal somehow. For a while toward the end of 1966, negotiations seemed possible. MGM even approached Shurlock for an ex parte discussion: What if the studio agreed to release Blow-Up with the “Suggested for Mature Audiences” label that had recently become an official part of the Code? Would that do the trick?6

  It would not. The two girls were still naked.

  Time was running out, which was bound to work in the Production Code’s favor. It was the end of November. Blow-Up was booked to open at New York City’s Coronet Theater on December 18. And Antonioni was apparently willing to make some cuts. A few seconds here, a few frames there. Cuts would, of course, be the best way to solve this. A small, willfully difficult art movie that would be seen by only a handful of East and West Coast cinephiles wasn’t worth the rupture of a system that had been in place for decades or the demolition of a new set of guidelines that had barely been road-tested.

  On December 17, Shurlock and Valenti handed down their final decision. Blow-Up would not receive a Production Code seal.

  The next day, MGM opened the movie anyway. The technicality the studio used was an insult in itself: It simply invented a new company, “Premier Production Company, Inc.,” which was not bound by the authority of the Code, and released the movie under that banner.7 The lion didn’t roar before the movie started—the lion wouldn’t have roared anyway, since MGM had decided to retire it a couple of months earlier in favor of a new, “mod” solarized lion graphic8 that its executives believed would appeal to young people—but the impact was the same. Variety’s reviewer predicted that Antonioni’s film would never go into general release and complained that “it goes far beyond the limits of good taste, thru nudie action and play which undoubtedly will be found offensive by many.”9 MGM didn’t even bother to get an official ruling from the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures before the movie opened; by the time they gave Blow-Up a “C” rating in early Ja
nuary, their condemnation was moot. The movie was a smash: It played not just in New York and Los Angeles, but everywhere in the United States, in Michigan and Minnesota and South Carolina and Vermont, returning a huge profit to the studio. Ten years of steady art-house releases by upstarts and masters of the New Cinema from Europe had created what critic Stanley Kauffmann called a “Film Generation” whose conversation was no longer confined to cocktail parties and thoughtful essays in the kinds of magazines that published thoughtful essays: “Everyone in Zilchville [saw] Blow-Up,” wrote Kauffmann, “not just the elite.”10

  Blow-Up began 1967 by throwing a stick of dynamite into the middle of the movie business, and the fifty-four-year-old Antonioni, a saturnine man given to pronouncements on the order of “I hate my films and do not wish to talk about them,”11 suddenly seemed to be the unlikely leader of what, for the first time, looked like a full-out revolution. A few theaters across the country were unwilling to show the movie without a Code seal; other exhibitors eagerly stepped in to take their place. The reviews, for the most part, were raves: In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote favorably about Blow-Up four times in less than a month and pointedly asked, “Why should a picture as intelligent and meaningful as this one be stigmatized by the Production Code people and condemned without any appreciation by the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures?…I would say that, in this instance, both organizations have committed a grievous error.”12 Crowther had been at the Times for twenty-seven years; he was known as an aesthetic conservative and was belittled by many of his colleagues for his sludgy, malaprop-riddled writing style and his middlebrow primness. But Crowther also had a long-standing and passionate aversion to anything that smacked of censorship, and he was a writer who was more than comfortable with the clout his particular pulpit gave him. His sustained praise for Blow-Up served notice that the country’s most powerful newspaper had lost its patience with the Production Code in any form.

  Blow-Up’s success, though it enhanced MGM’s bottom line, only increased the atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia that seemed to pervade the major studios at the end of 1966. When Arthur Penn remarked that Jack Warner’s eleventh-hour seizing of the reins on Bonnie and Clyde was a last hurrah, he meant it literally; in November, Warner had sold a third of his shares in Warner Brothers to Eliot Hyman’s production company Seven Arts, and the industry knew it was just a matter of months before Hyman took over completely.13 Warner’s decision, along with the sudden death of Walt Disney on December 15 at sixty-five, would leave Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox as the only mogul from Hollywood’s golden age still in power. United Artists was also being sold; days after Warner’s decision to go into business with Seven Arts, UA entered formal negotiations to become a subsidiary of the Transamerica Corporation,14 an insurance company that had in recent years become a diversified conglomerate, albeit one with no experience in the entertainment business. MGM itself was facing a proxy fight in February 1967,15 and the trade papers were full of talk that a French bank was beginning a takeover bid for Columbia Pictures.

  The studios seemed to be under siege, and the men running them felt cranky and bewildered—torn between continuing to fight the enemy (which, at various times toward the end of 1966, they identified as runaway production, color TV, the new morality, and the influence of European directors and filmmakers) and trying to profit by allying with their adversaries. The studios’ relationship with television networks was proving particularly nettlesome. The public appetite for theatrical movies on TV was insatiable—in 1967, they aired on at least one network every night of the week but Monday and sometimes drew more than 50 percent of the viewing audience. While the studios were making fortunes by selling packages of their films to the networks, they were also holding movies back: As the year began, MGM rejected a $10 million TV offer for Gone With the Wind and decided to rerelease it theatrically instead.16 With a collective sense of uncertainty and alarm about what the moviegoing public now wanted, many studios clung to the past, announcing plans to put The Alamo, Spartacus, The Longest Day, and The Greatest Show on Earth back in theaters, too.17 The choice of long, massive visual spectacles was no accident; with the conversion of all television shows to color, the only enticements that Hollywood still had to offer movie fans that they weren’t already getting at home were size, scope, length, and lack of commercial interruption.

  But the studios couldn’t ignore the fact that their current product was held in almost universally low regard. Embarrassments seemed to come at every turn; when the 1966 Venice Film Festival announced its selections, it bypassed traditional studio product completely, choosing instead the Roger Corman biker-exploitation movie The Wild Angels, an American International Pictures melodrama about a barely disguised version of the Hells Angels that ended with a drug-saturated orgy in a church. The fact that the picture starred Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra seemed only to underscore Corman’s generational nose-thumbing at what Hollywood’s old guard viewed as its obligation to export its best possible image to the rest of the world. The Wild Angels was hardly Easy Rider; Corman and AIP staked out a shrewd middle ground that was characteristic of the period, making sure that the film was officially appalled by the behavior of its drunken, brawling, sex-mad bikers while giving audiences a good, long, passably lurid look at every one of their misdeeds. After the movie grossed forty times its $360,000 budget, the major studios held their noses and quietly started making plans to produce imitations. At the beginning of 1967, any possible loss of corporate dignity was giving way to bottom-line realities—and there wasn’t much dignity left to lose, anyway. “Experience has long since prepared us to accept the uncomfortable fact that the best work in motion pictures—the most intelligent, progressive, astute and alert to what is happening to people—is being done abroad,”18 wrote Bosley Crowther before announcing that his list of the ten best films of 1966 would include only two studio movies set in America, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.

  Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison spent much of the first part of 1967 running into each other on the awards circuit, as both their films came in for year-end honors. On one evening that quickly earned a spot in the annals of awards ceremony horror stories, they both found themselves in attendance at the Directors Guild of America banquet, where they were among the ten nominees. Walter Matthau, the awards presenter, took the stage to announce that the winner of the guild’s Best Director award was Nichols for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nichols, genuinely startled, got up and made a long, heartfelt acceptance speech, then returned to his seat with his plaque. When Matthau returned to the podium, he announced with some embarrassment that he had misunderstood his presenting task—and that each of the ten nominated directors was to receive the plaque that Nichols had just accepted. The Best Director winner, he then announced, was Fred Zinnemann for A Man for All Seasons. A mortified Nichols somehow managed to laugh it off.19

  After leaving Tennessee, Jewison had wrapped In the Heat of the Night in Los Angeles on a note of confidence. His two stars finished the production as friends, and newcomer Scott Wilson had, thanks in part to Sidney Poitier’s urging,20 gotten a major break that would only increase his stock; just as the movie finished, he and Robert Blake—the actor Wilson had essentially replaced as In the Heat of the Night’s vagrant suspect—had been cast over such big names as Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in Richard Brooks’s high-profile adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for Columbia. The news, and the year of publicity that would precede its release, could only help In the Heat of the Night get noticed.

  Jewison spent the Christmas holidays in Sun Valley, Idaho, skiing with his wife and kids, only to wind up in a local emergency room when one of his sons broke a leg on the slopes. The concerned father sitting across from him in the hospital waiting room, waiting to hear about his own son’s broken leg, was New York’s junior senator, Robert F. Kennedy. The two families beg
an chatting, and Kennedy offered Jewison some encouraging words about his movie, telling him he thought the moment was right for a film about a black detective in the South and promising to mail him research from his Senate office about southern race relations, which he did. “Timing is everything,” Jewison says Kennedy told him, “in politics, art, and life.”21

  Other studios now had the same idea: Just before Jewison’s ski trip, producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. announced that he had acquired the rights to seven of Chester Himes’s detective novels featuring the Harlem cops Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, and Jewison knew that feelers had gone out to Poitier and Harry Belafonte to play the leads.22 But without a director or a script, he also knew there was no possibility the project would reach screens before his own film. With little to worry about, Jewison was ready to spend some time with Hal Ashby in the editing room and to start planning his next film for the Mirisch Company, a light-spirited, sexy comedy-drama about a master thief called The Crown Caper (later retitled The Thomas Crown Affair). He had wanted Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to star,23 but after the huge success of Virginia Woolf, they were freer than they had ever been to choose the films that struck their fancy and embarked on what would turn out to be an ill-fated year of conspicuous consumption and bloated international productions, beginning with Franco Zeffirelli’s leaden adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.