Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Finishing the movie had dragged on into midsummer, as Lionel Newman, the cantankerous head of Fox’s music department, tried to fix one dead spot in the picture after another by patching scenes together with a score he had never much liked in the first place. Newman treated Jacobs with semiaffectionate contempt: “Hello, lardass,” he would say when the producer showed up on the recording stage. “Listen, lardass, is there any chance we can get a longer shot in the percussion sequence?” Newman particularly disliked “Talk to the Animals,” which he called a “lousy song”;3 in fact, nobody who had worked on the film thought much of it. Most of the Dolittle team assumed that the breakout single from the movie would be the ballad “When I Look into Your Eyes”—that is, if listeners could ignore the fact that in the movie, Harrison croons the love song to a seal that he had dressed as an old lady just before he flings the animal over a steep cliff into the ocean, presumably sending her on a long plunge toward freedom.

  In Dunne’s 1969 book, The Studio, a classic of movie business reportage, he offers a bleakly funny account of the moment that everybody’s hopes for Doctor Dolittle came crashing to earth. The Fox team had set off for Minnesota with high expectations and immense anxiety. “All I know is that when we go to Minneapolis, I’m going to take along a big bottle of Miltown and slip it into all that vodka you drink so much of,” Jacobs’s fiancée, Natalie Trundy, told him.4 The collective nervousness was more than understandable. Dolittle had become Fox’s most expensive movie since Cleopatra. Although Darryl Zanuck didn’t fly out for the screening, everyone else at Fox was there, filling three rows of the theater.

  Dick Zanuck knew the movie was in for trouble as soon as he saw the audience, which included almost no children. He hoped that perhaps what he was witnessing was just a reflection of the fact that it was a nighttime screening. Perhaps word hadn’t gotten out that they were showing an adaptation of a children’s classic, because if it had, and this was an indication of the lack of interest kids had in it…The lights went down, and the movie, which ran close to three hours, began. In Dunne’s description, the audience was “unresponsive” and “muted.” “The second half of the picture did not play much better than the first,” he wrote. “When the house lights came on, the only prolonged clapping came from the three rows where the Studio people were sitting.”5

  By the time Zanuck and his twenty-eight-man team returned to their rooms at the Radisson, it was painfully obvious that Doctor Dolittle was no Sound of Music. On the surface, the comment cards might have seemed encouraging: 148 moviegoers rated the movie “Excellent,” 76 rated it “Good,” and 42 called it “Fair.” (“Poor” was not offered as an option.)6 But Zanuck knew the results were terrible: A massively expensive movie that almost half of its first audience declined to label as excellent was all but doomed. As is often the case after a bad preview, gloom quickly gave way to an atmosphere of frantic, hypercheerful rationalization. Kids would turn the movie into a hit, if kids could just be gotten into the theater, and their enthusiasm would spread to their parents! This wasn’t a death sentence, just a heads-up that they could make the movie even better! The problem wasn’t the movie, it was the audience—it was just a dead house! The problem was the movie, but it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a few trims here and there—it wouldn’t take much to guarantee that the next set of comment cards wouldn’t include the phrase Too long, which seemed to be an issue for a surprising number of people.

  The Fox team left Zanuck’s suite and went back to their own rooms, where they got a few hours of sleep, or tried to. “There was no point,” says Zanuck. “Nobody could sleep.” At 5:00 in the morning, Zanuck called them all back to his room. It was time for a more sober, no-bull round of decision making.7 Even though the image of Rex Harrison riding a giraffe had made the cover of Life magazine, the long prologue in which it appeared would have to go. Leslie Bricusse would write a new song for Anthony Newley to sing with a group of kids, something that would enliven the movie’s second half and underscore its appeal to young viewers. Richard Fleischer was tasked with spinning the preview results to Rex Harrison, who was apt to use any bad news as an excuse for a drunken tantrum and whose cooperation would be needed at various premieres and benefits to promote the movie. They would find a way to salvage at least one shot of the giraffe. And then they would retest the picture. Preferably in a city as far from Minneapolis as possible.

  Everyone returned to Los Angeles that afternoon comforted by the knowledge that at least they now had a game plan. But Dick Zanuck knew it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. “When a picture previews badly, there’s very little you can do,” he says. “You can make it a better picture by putting some things in or taking some things out, but you can’t save it. The hand has been dealt, and there’s no way of putting the cards back in the deck.”8

  “This is to reassure you that there is absolutely no cause for any concern whatsoever,” Fleischer wrote to Harrison in a three-page single-spaced letter in which he cheerfully described the preview as “a very enlightening experience” and then told his star every detail of every change they would have to make, most of which involved the removal of footage in which Harrison appeared. “When you [preview] an original musical, it is really a New Haven opening…. After a great deal of analysis and agonizing reappraisal we came to the conclusion that the main offender was our lovely prologue…. What we have done is to remove approximately 71/2 minutes of film that were really slowing us down terribly.”9 Zanuck, Jacobs, and Fleischer ended up cutting a good deal more than that, peeling off verses from several songs that threatened to slow the movie’s already leisurely pace to a crawl.

  Harrison, predictably, exploded—he was particularly bitter about the trimming of his final song, “Something in Your Smile.” “Cannot have music department butchering any characterization of Dolittle by eliminating verse,” he cabled Zanuck. “Surely you cannot be in such time trouble that you cannot allow the leading character to round himself off and complete his statement.”10 Zanuck cabled Harrison back immediately, telling him that he had “sensed a restlessness during the verse” among audience members and assuring him that “the ending of the picture and your characterization plays much better without it.” Attempting to calm his star, he reminded him that “as you know, I have ruthlessly cut Newley.”11 A somewhat mollified Harrison wrote back, “I see your point,” but grumbled, “For two years I was promised a tour de force number…comparable to ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’”12 and never got it.

  In late October, Zanuck previewed a shorter version of Doctor Dolittle in San Francisco with results that, as he feared, showed no change in the audience’s response: The film’s “Excellent” rating, which had been 56 percent in Minneapolis, was now 57 percent. One night later, he showed a significantly shorter cut in San Jose, and the “Excellent” rating improved to 63 percent.13 Zanuck decided that the San Jose version, which ran 151 minutes, would be the final cut of Doctor Dolittle. By then, the internal cheerleading was ramping up again: Harrison suddenly announced that he was “relieved to have lost that number”14 from the end of the movie, and Darryl Zanuck, who had bluntly warned his son two years earlier about the risks involved in making the picture, offered warm words of reassurance, telling Dick that “it is my prediction that even though at the beginning adult audiences may not break down the doors to get in it will eventually end up by having every child in America insist that their parents take them at least three times.”15

  By then, Dick Zanuck knew that they were all whistling past a graveyard. In October, Warner Brothers had opened Joshua Logan’s $17 million, three-hour Camelot, the pride of Jack Warner’s retirement and a picture that the studio had once hoped would play first-run engagements of a year or more in some theaters. Reviews were largely terrible, with The New York Times slamming its “dull and pretentious patches of realism and romantic cliché” and “grossly whimsy-whamsey Disneyland setting”16 and Time writing that the movie, “which should have opened u
p the drama, shuts it down instead…. Even the makeup seems to have been applied by an amateur.”17 But far worse news was the fact that audiences had absolutely no interest in going to see it—the film made back barely a third of its budget in domestic rentals. The Broadway pedigree that had created such high awareness for My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music did nothing for Camelot, which turned out to be one of the biggest financial failures of the late 1960s. Its demise sent a shudder through the major studios, which were in production or deep into preproduction with more than a dozen large-scale musicals that were slated to open between 1968 and 1970.

  “You look back now and ask, how could you have been so stupid?” says Zanuck. “Doctor Dolittle was conceived in a period of euphoria. We were all riding a musical wave that we didn’t realize was going to come crashing down on the beach all at once. Sure, there were probably signs and warnings out there, but you’re already so committed financially and emotionally that it’s very hard to pull the plug on these big undertakings. Thinking of it now, we should have sent the songs out before we made the picture to see if any of them worked! I like Leslie very much, but outside of one or two songs, there wasn’t anything really spectacular.” For Zanuck, there was no turning back: He had already committed 20th Century-Fox to Star! (which, he consoled himself, at least had Julie Andrews as one of its assets) and Hello, Dolly! (which at least had a familiar score). “But none of that mattered,” he said. “When the big musical ended, it ended with a thud. And we got hit hard.”18

  As Dolittle’s opening approached, 20th Century-Fox was hit with another unpleasant surprise—a $4.5 million lawsuit brought by Helen Winston, the would-be producer whom Arthur Jacobs had aced out of the rights to the Dolittle books four years earlier.19 Winston had seen the movie and taken note of a scene in which the animals around the doctor threaten to go on strike, a plot element that her screenwriter, Larry Watkin, had included in the draft of the movie she had tried to sell to studios back in 1962.20 When news of the suit broke, “Arthur Jacobs called,” remembers Hugh Lofting’s son, Christopher, “and said, ‘Helen is threatening us over this scene. We know it’s bullshit, but can you tell us what book it’s from?’ I said, ‘Arthur, I have bad news for you. She’s right! It was never in the books.’ We were all surprised because it had seemed like such a natural idea—Leslie had seen the script [that Winston commissioned], assumed it had come from one of the books, and put it in.”21

  Fox eventually settled with Winston. There wasn’t time for the distraction of a lawsuit. Whatever trepidation Zanuck and his colleagues were feeling, they had a gigantically expensive movie to open and promote, records to sell, and premieres to stage around the world in as many cities as possible. At one point, they even wondered if they could get Harrison to attend the movie’s opening in Lima if the Peruvian government agreed to bestow some honor on him (“I think I can get him, I don’t know, the Condor of the Andes or something like that,” suggested Fox’s head of Latin American publicity).22 As for Jacobs, his aspirations for the film had no ceiling—among his publicity talking points were “Vatican screening” and “Local Boards of Education to declare Doctor Dolittle Day and release children from school.”23 The veteran publicist-turned-producer was back in his element and, blithely disregarding the ominous mood around him, started planning Doctor Dolittle’s Academy Awards campaign.

  While Mike Nichols was filming The Graduate, staying in a rented house that had once belonged to Cole Porter, and cutting himself off from everything that didn’t lie within the universe of Benjamin Braddock, he fell into a morning ritual: He would get up very early, listen to Sounds of Silence or Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, the Simon and Garfunkel LPs that his brother had sent him—the music he had fallen in love with during rehearsals for the movie—and then go to the Paramount lot to shoot for the day. He’d come home late at night, go to bed, get up, and play the same music the next morning. Only a few weeks into the shoot, he decided to follow the instinct he had had during rehearsals and approach Simon and Garfunkel. “This is your score!” he thought. “Listen to it! How could it have taken so long to figure it out?” Nichols got in touch with them, showed them footage of a few scenes he had put together, and asked them if they’d be interested in writing a new set of songs for the movie.24

  The two singer-songwriters, both twenty-five and already highly successful, didn’t jump at the chance—with credibility to protect, they sniffed at anything that might smack of a Hollywood sellout. “Paul and Artie were, as they were about everything back then, unenthusiastic,” says Nichols. “But they consented—Paul consented—to write a few songs.”25 Leonard Hirshan, the agent who represented Simon as well as Anne Bancroft, struck a deal in which Simon would be paid $25,000 to submit three new songs to Nichols and Larry Turman, any two of which they would have the right to use in the movie.26

  Long before production was over, Nichols was cutting sequences in his head to “The Sound of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair.” A few weeks later, Simon turned in two new pieces. One, “Punky’s Dilemma,” was a comically acid-trippy daydream of a song that contained a nod to the alienation of living in Southern California; the other, “Overs,” was a melancholy tune about the disintegration of a romance, a ballad that was intended to be, says Nichols, “for, or about, Mrs. Robinson.” Nichols didn’t think either song worked. “Have you got anything else?” he said.

  “Paul and Artie went off for a few minutes and muttered to each other,” says Nichols, “and then came back and sang ‘Mrs. Robinson.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s great!’ Paul had been working on a song called ‘Mrs. Roosevelt.’ That’s why Joe DiMaggio was in there—it was about icons of a certain generation. But he just dumped that and made her Mrs. Robinson.”27 (“There was no name in it,” insisted Garfunkel in 1968. “We’d just fill in with any three-syllable name…and then Mike froze it.”)28 Nichols wove it into the movie in three repetitive fragments, each about a minute long, one containing only the metronomic beat of the song and the others using “dee di-di-di dee dee dee” in place of actual verses, since Simon hadn’t written any yet and there wasn’t time to do more.* Only two lines of the song are actually heard in the movie, and only one—“And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson, / Jesus loves you more than you will know”—made it into the finished single a year later.

  “Mrs. Robinson,” even in piecemeal form, solved one problem, giving Nichols the jaunty, accelerating sound track he needed to glue together a seven-minute series of scenes near the end of the movie in which Benjamin finds out about Elaine’s wedding and tries to stop it. After production was over, he worked and reworked the sequence with Sam O’Steen in his editing room overlooking Times Square. “We had real trouble with that montage. We had sweated over that scene for a week or ten days—in the script it was just a page,” says Buck Henry. “There was a part we just couldn’t get connected until that song. The fact that the song stops and then starts again still really irritates me, but it’s a great sequence of filmmaking.”29 However, Nichols still had no music to pull together a five-minute, wordless montage earlier in The Graduate, an impressionistic sequence that suggests both Benjamin’s moral drift and his liberation from the constriction of being an A student and a good son. As we watch him, he floats lazily through the summer, drifting from bedroom to backyard, continuing his affair with Mrs. Robinson, and lolling on an inflatable raft in his parents’ swimming pool, letting time glide by. The montage ends with a dazzling seamless cut that had been written and storyboarded early on in which Benjamin appears to simultaneously lift himself onto the raft and onto Mrs. Robinson. In the editing room, Nichols and Sam O’Steen had cut it to “The Sound of Silence,” playing the song until it ended and then moving directly into “April Come She Will,” another track from the Sounds of Silence album. The deeper they got into the obsessive, sixteen-hour-a-day rhythm of life in front of a Moviola, the less able they felt to let go of the songs they had chosen. “‘Hello, darkness, my old friend…’ was what was happen
ing in Benjamin’s head,” says Nichols. “O’Steen and I were beside ourselves, because we knew nothing else would work. We felt that the song expressed the deep depression he’d been in since he got home, an emotional suicide that he commits by starting to fuck Mrs. Robinson. At a certain point, movies just decide what they need. So I finally just said, ‘Can I buy it?’”30

  The decision didn’t seem brilliant, just strange. Movies in the 1960s didn’t recycle pop hits, and “The Sound of Silence” was, by the time Nichols got to it, used up; it had already reached number one on Billboard’s charts in January 1966, and Joe Levine thought it was perverse to play it twice in forty minutes—first over the opening credits as Benjamin and his luggage, parallel objects on parallel conveyer belts, move through the airport, and then in the montage. But Levine relented once Nichols showed him the footage. “I ran it, and he said, ‘I smell money!’” says Nichols, “thereby endearing himself to Paul Simon for all time.”31

  When he saw the completed film, however, Levine lost the scent of profitability as quickly as he had found it. Nichols had trimmed The Graduate to a very lean 106 minutes, remaking several scenes in the editing room; he had dropped 6 minutes from Hoffman and Bancroft’s long, problematic bedroom conversation by cutting large passages of dialogue every time one of them turned the lights on or off. But Levine didn’t see the movie he expected to see: Where was all the sex? By late 1967, The Graduate could have gotten away with far more than it was showing. The new Production Code was already collapsing, along with the authority of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which had condemned five studio movies during the year, from Hurry Sundown to Reflections in a Golden Eye, without hurting their box office a bit.32 Over the summer, Variety had reported that it could no longer find a single major theater chain in the country that refused to play condemned films. Joseph Strick’s adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses had become the first widely reviewed release to use the word fuck, and both Ulysses and Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade had shown a man nude from behind, something the Code and the Catholics had let pass because, as The New York Times’ Vincent Canby explained, the National Catholic Office “believes that females and ‘normal’ males are not sexually stimulated by rear-view male nudity.”33 The MPAA was no longer drawing any lines in the sand; Jack Valenti was just months away from scrapping the Code entirely and replacing it with a ratings system.