Pictures at a Revolution
Page 61
* Jewison’s relationship with the Mirisch Company was friendly but often tense; the original contract the company offered him to direct In the Heat of the Night had so many points that were objectionable to him that he didn’t officially sign the deal to make the movie until it had already been in theaters for a month. Jewison ultimately agreed to a salary of $200,000 plus a share of the profits.
*“Punky’s Dilemma,” “Overs,” and a completed version of “Mrs. Robinson” with revised lyrics all appeared on the duo’s 1968 album, Bookends.
*A couple of years later, Hal Ashby stuck a joke about what an easy out the movie provided for its white audience into his Harlem comedy, The Landlord, when Lee Grant, playing an upper-middle-class suburbanite horrified that her son is engaged to a black woman, tries to prove to him that she’s not a racist by saying, “Didn’t we all go see Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner together?”
*The National Society was, for years, dominated by critics for whom Bergman could do no wrong; the group gave him its Best Director prize again the following year for Shame and Hour of the Wolf, and two years after that for The Passion of Anna.
*Starr says he was at the meeting as well, although neither Jones nor Benton recalls his presence, and Jones’s notes from the time strongly suggest he is misremembering, conflating the meeting with the earlier lunch at the Algonquin.
*Simon also accused Mike Nichols of filling the movie with “little New York Jewish touches,” although the lines he flagged as sounding inappropriately “Jewish” came directly from Charles Webb’s novel.
*Coles was referring to Johnson’s January 17, 1968, State of the Union address, in which he said, “Our nation is accomplishing more for its people than has ever been accomplished before…. Yet there is in the land a certain restlessness—a questioning.”
*Although one recent biography of Beatty has suggested that Feldman also hurt Beatty’s pride by reminding him of “your money problem,” what Feldman actually wrote was “you too must be mindful of our economic and money problems”—he was warning Beatty that, given his history of balkiness and last minute departures from projects, he expected him to keep his word and show up on time for Pussycat’s September 1964 start date.
*Although the spring of 1965 had brought the start of anti-Vietnam “teach-ins” and the first major antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., the war was not, at that point, on the political agenda for Hollywood, which was concentrating almost all of its activist efforts on the civil rights movement and on individual political campaigns.
*Rebner would go on to serve as script supervisor on both In the Heat of the Night and The Graduate.
*After six years of waiting, Truffaut was finally able to start shooting Fahrenheit 451 in January 1966; after its indifferent reception, he never directed another film in English.
*In his memoir The Measure of a Man, Sidney Poitier writes that Silliphant’s script originally called for Tibbs to respond to Endicott’s slap with a disdainful stare and then walk out and that he insisted to Walter Mirisch that Tibbs return the slap instantly. But the scene Poitier rejected may have only been an idea that was discussed, since the second slap appears to have been in Silliphant’s screenplay as early as its first draft.
*Goornicht is Yiddish for “nothing”; Newley was punningly translating the title.
*The sexuality of Hepburn and, especially, Tracy remains a matter of controversy. In Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), William J. Mann gives a scrupulously researched and balanced account of Hepburn’s relationships with women and reports that Tracy may have had sex with men; the vehement disdain with which this possibility was greeted by some critics says much about the persistence of romantic embellishment that attaches itself to the history of Hepburn and Tracy and about the difficulty of sorting out fact, fantasy, and self-invention in their lives, especially since Hepburn herself, as she got older, proved to be such a deft retailer of all three.