Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  An example: “If a guy comes down the steps of a Baltimore town house and steps on the tail of a sleeping cat — and the cat screams holy hell — you now have to decide how this guy reacts to what he’s just done. Is he pissed off at the cat? At his own clumsiness? Does he feel any guilt? Or does he wish he’d stepped on the [cat’s] head? If some kid has seen it happen and stares at him as though he’s a Martian, what does he say to the kid? It’s all a matter of choices. Every moment in a drama, one character impacts on another — or his environment impacts on him — or he simply impacts on himself. What’s driving him? What are the ghosts in his closet? Where is he going right now? Or doesn’t he have anywhere to go? So you follow this and see where it takes you and you hold back and hold back and try not to reveal more than a momentary bit of information about the character. If a guy is sitting on a step and a great looking bimbo in a mini-skirt sways by and the guy just keeps looking straight ahead and pays no attention to the girl passing, what’s his problem?

  “I always try to find the unexpected when I introduce a character. For example, if a guy who’s behind in his rent has to get back into his West Side tenement and the landlord is out front, hosing the sidewalk — and waiting — what does our guy say as he breezes in? Assume the landlord says, ‘hey, Eddie, you forgot what today is?’ (meaning the goddamn rent is due right now), what does Eddie say as he continues into the tenement? Well, if it’s one kind of character, he might say, ‘Yes, isn’t it the 926th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings?’ Jesus, we have to say, who is this guy? He looks like a bum, but what’s this shit about the Battle of Hastings?”

  The action in The New Centurions is set against the 1965 riots in the Watts area of Los Angeles, a tinderbox neighborhood that went up August 11-17 when police officers tried to arrest a resident on a DUI and the whole place erupted in long-simmering resentment against the LAPD. But by the time The New Centurions was released in 1972, the timeliness of the riots had passed. In addition, the LAPD was staring to clean up their act. [243]

  Silliphant explained: “I had a wonderful producer, Bob Chartoff, who permitted me to work closely with Dick Fleischer. We were able to arrive at a mutual concept. We decided to do a nonlinear script, a sort of pastiche, a great number of short scenes with impact, constantly hitting at you, so that the structure of the story, which covers a five-year period, seems to be formless, yet its form is within the changing aspects of the characters, and the multitude of experiences they undergo, which you, the audience, undergo with them. And, at the end, when one of the characters is killed, you’ve got the end of the story. You could figure out twenty-five different approaches to the book. We chose this nonlinear structure in order to give us a large canvas covering a great deal of time.” [244]

  “The decision to stay away from the Watts riots was a joint one made by Bob Chartoff, Dick Fleischer, and myself,” Silliphant continued, “We felt it would date the picture and, frankly, I didn’t want to exacerbate that unhappy time by re-staging it and possibly rekindling it. Also, I felt that switching it over into the Hispanic street gangs was somewhat fresher and more contemporary of the period at the time we were shooting the film.” [245]

  By the time The New Centurions was in production, Silliphant was in Hawaii. After writing fourteen drafts for producers Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, he refused to do any more, and Robert Towne was brought in. [246]

  Not long after The New Centurions, Silliphant was asked to write a Dirty Harry sequel. When the original Dirty Harry came out in 1971, director Don Siegel’s forceful police drama was criticized by liberals, such as The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, as a fascist treatise on law enforcement. Its first sequel, 1973’s Magnum Force, offered a seeming rebuttal as Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan goes after, not a psychotic killer, but vigilante cops. [247] Its firm box office assured a third outing for Clint Eastwood’s iconic Detective Callahan.

  In 1975, Eastwood had received a spec submission called Moving Target from two Oakland High School students, Gail Morgan Hickman and S.W. Schurr, who somehow got their script over the star’s transom. The story brought Harry into conflict with a revolutionary group something like the Symbionese Liberation Army who had kidnapped Patty Hearst in February of 1974 and robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco two months later. [248] Perhaps it was because Silliphant lived in Marin County, Northern California, and was close to Eastwood’s home in Carmel, or perhaps it was Silliphant’s rich association with Don Siegel, but, one day, the star picked up the phone and dialed.

  “I had a call from Clint Eastwood,” Silliphant said. “I mean, from Clint himself. No lackeys, no executive secretary, no ‘Can you fly down to Hollywood, Mr. Silliphant?’ None of that classic shit. It was Clint over to you, Stirling. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘This is Clint Eastwood.’ (You always have to, at moments like this, hold back your impulse to say, ‘And this is Mary Poppins.’) ‘I’m thinking about doing a third Dirty Harry,’ he said. ‘You any notions?’ ‘Matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I do.’ Because I actually did. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll fly up and we’ll meet. Tomorrow, okay?’ ‘Tomorrow’s fine,’ I said. ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘You decide,’ he said. ‘Okay, you know that little restaurant over in Tiberon, by Seal Rock, hangs out over the water, you look across at Angel Island?’ ‘Twelve thirty,’ he said.

  “I loved the guy the instant I met him. We had lunch and I told him he needed a new partner for his third movie — one of the world’s primary underclass — forget African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. ‘What does that leave us?’ he grinned. ‘A woman,’ I said slyly. ‘The female of the species. Can you imagine the absolute horror — it’s truly Conradian — of Dirty Harry being saddled with a woman as a partner?’

  “His eyes began to dance as he played with the concept. Finally, he said he liked it. But what was the story? Unimportant, I said. ‘We’ll come up with some basic caper line — like the French do — but in this third Dirty Harry the emphasis is on the character relationship — the slowly evolving relationship of trust which develops between you and your female partner — how it opens you up as a human being and you begin to shed all the sexist shit human beings are burdened with — and in the end she gets blown away and you go fucking rampage crazy — big shoot-out at the end — and Dirty Harry’s a different man than he was at the top of the show.’”

  In what he called “one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career,” Silliphant rejected Moving Target and constructed The Enforcer, although some of the ideas in the spec script survive, and Hickman and Schurr get story credit. After creating carnage while thwarting a crime by members of the People’s Revolutionary Strike Force, Harry is reassigned out of the homicide division. When his partner (John Mitchum) is killed as he and Harry try to stop another PRSF robbery, Kate Moore (Tyne Daly) becomes his replacement. She slowly earns Harry’s respect but is herself killed during an explosive climax on Alcatraz Island between Harry and the PRSF, who have kidnapped the glory-seeking Mayor (Bradford Dillman).

  “So I was hired and wrote the script and Clint liked it — almost. He felt it still needed more narrative drive, that maybe I’d put too much into the relationship and not enough into the bread and butter stuff that would pull in Clint Eastwood fans. So he took [Moving Target] and, with a writer [Dean Riesner] with whom he had worked before, folded it into my own script.” Tyne Daly, later of TV’s Cagney and Lacy, was cast as Harry’s partner. [249]

  “I wasn’t happy about this, but I liked Clint so much and have so much respect for his sense of what works for him that I put aside my unhappiness. [250] Yet, to this day, I wish we could have persevered with the original concept arrived at that day as we watched the seals in Raccoon Strait and the ketches tacking toward Angel Island. It might have been a memorable film.”

  Despite the revolutionary political possibilities in the story, not to mention Eastwood’s and Silliphant’s political affinity, it’s intriguing that the film avoids pretty much every philosophical conflict except the age-old
battle of the sexes. “No political thought crossed my mind when I gave Clint my idea for The Enforcer and his female partner,” Silliphant confirmed. “My entire thought process was concentrated solely upon the humanistic elements such a combination of all-male and tentative-new-cop-female-gender thrown into the crucible of street crime in San Francisco and having to face the challenges together — and how this would affect each of them — from within and from without. And my take on Eastwood? I’d write a film for him any day or night of the week were he to invite me to do so. I can’t remember a single second of stress or dissension or temperament or authority or arrogance or any manifestation or anything except a kind of self-confident sense of what he was after. But no sniffing-dog stuff, no shark-under-the-surface. Open, forthright, but always with a sense of humor and what we call in Thailand the most important of human attitudes: sanuk (fun).”

  The one thing the writer declined to give the star, however, was a catchphrase. It’s no accident that there is no “I know what you’re thinkin’” or “make my day” in The Enforcer. “As a dialogue writer I’ve never been apt at such sound bites,” he said. “I leave that catchphrase stuff to ad writers or spin doctors. I am too involved with the human voice. People tend to speak more in the way Paddy Chayefsky wrote them — especially in Marty — than they do in the ping-pong, smart-ass, attempting-to-be-trendy style of most of today’s scripts. You take a flick like most of those made by Arnold Schwarzenegger and you get such magnificent dialogue as — when he has just stabbed a Bad Guy into a door and leaves him hanging there — ’Stick around.’ I got weary enough during the barrage of James Bond flicks with Richard Maibaum’s one-liners (e.g. Bond to Bad Guy he’s just heaved into a moat of piranhas, ‘Bon appetit’’). There is no way, even in my dullest moment, I would allow my brain cells to clot in that direction.”

  As The Enforcer rolled, so did Stirling’s and Tiana’s lives. On July 10, 1976, she gave birth to a baby boy who, after some discussion, they named Stirling. [251] “The discussion was important,” Tiana said, “because he wanted a son named Stirling. I said, ‘don’t you already have a son named Stirling?’ He said, ‘Yes, but he got adopted, so he’s not my son. The mother remarried a man named Rasmussen.’ Stirling declared that our son was ‘from the stars. His birth was life-changing for him, to right the wrongs as a man and father. Stirling wept for joy that our son was born at 3:04 a.m., the same time [seven years earlier] that Loren had died. He enjoyed being a father and took lots of time off to be a parent, which hurt Dayle, of course, as he never did that with any of his children from his other marriages.” [252]

  Living at 915 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills, little Stirling gave his father perspective on where he had been and where he was headed. It was a time to change yet again, and for the country too. Having come out of a deadly, costly, and soul-scarring war in Southeast Asia, America was moving from an age of rebellion into an age of forgetting, and this rankled Silliphant. For years he had wanted to shape the next generation of writers, to imbue them with his sensibilities and discipline. This mission led him into projects that brought as much heartache as elation. To see where this led him, it will be necessary to see where he had been.

  13: The Agony and the Agony

  When Silliphant was hot, he was blazing hot, and in 1966 he got an idea to spread the wealth of his industry access to up-and-coming writers. He established Pingree Productions, not just as a personal loan-out company for his own work but as a place to nurture young scripters. By 1970 his plans were set to roll.

  “I had this idea of getting together some younger writers and directors and trying to find projects and raise the funding to let them make the kinds of films I wished I had made before I got parachuted into the Hollywood mainstream,” he explained. “I acquired the rights to Carlos Castanada’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Learning and made a [handshake] deal with [Avco-Embassy Pictures’] Joe Levine by which Joe was to give me $500,000 for my ‘guys’ to develop and to shoot The Teachings of Don Juan in 16mm for distribution in college towns only, four-wall deals where I planned to rent the theatres and to keep anyone out of the theatre who was any older than twenty-three. Can you believe the arrogance of that?” [253]

  In an era when police rioted against hippies on the Sunset Strip, rednecks beat up flower children, and Ohio National Guardsmen shot protesters, Silliphant’s embracing of America’s growing youth culture seemed strange to entrenched industry types. Unlike many Hollywood veterans, however, Silliphant did not view youths as competition but, rather, as a resource. Calling them “the most exciting aspect of the medium today” he saw video, rather than film, as a looming breakthrough. “Filmmakers will become overnight pop artists and millionaires,” he predicted in a guest column for Joyce Haber. “The variety of video programming will be expanded a thousand-fold and our library shelves will be more crammed with more film cassettes than with books. There will still be room for theatrical super-screen films and broadcasted (sic) television, but the over-all utility of visual media will have need multiplied for the benefit of both artist and audience.” [254]

  Pingree’s first announced project, however, was the stock television series, Maya, for which Silliphant served as Executive Story Consultant, based on the 1966 MGM film about a boy and his elephant. The Casteneda project was assigned to a Pingree subsidiary called Yaqui Film Company. Mark Silliphant, his nephew, who had attended UCLA’s filmmaking program, was deeply involved in this gambit, which veered into another direction that Castaneda scholars continue to debate. On January 23, 1977, Mark Wood Silliphant, then thirty, married Patricia Lee Partin, a nineteen-year-old waitress. Partin was also known as “The Blue Scout,” a woman both embraced and reviled as the spiritual gatekeeper to Castaneda’s inner circle. Although Mark had already passed the entry test, he and Partin separated after nineteen days and filed for divorce two weeks later — it became final in 1978. Some sources say that she then took up with Castaneda himself, to whom Mark had introduced her the year before. Meanwhile, Mark changed his name to Richard Rollo Whittaker (he had briefly used Mark Austin before that). [255] Needless to say, the film was never made.

  There have been whispers over the years that Pingree, beyond its business purpose, was also a boiler room where young writers anonymously turned out first drafts of Silliphant’s lesser assignments that he would then edit and polish before turning them in under his own name. Nothing else, skeptics insist, could account for his immense output from year to year. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the equally prolific Ben Hecht was rumored to maintain such a cottage industry, and some big-name film composers today are indeed known for employing elves to take up their slack. No evidence of this has been uncovered at Pingree of such a scheme.

  While that was going on, Silliphant practiced his craft, did research as needed, toured the lecture circuit, and built his bankability through publicity and hob-nobbing, rare for a writer, but essential for what today would be called “branding.” A Silliphant script came in on time, was read by top people, was eminently shootable, and was distinguished by character relationships, not glibness, that attracted major talent.

  “I am always, always conscious of language and attitude in order to avoid using words which either had lost their significance or not yet gained it,” he insisted. “For example, in now writing Flying Aces, [256] having to write dialogue for people in 1914, I found myself stuck in my tracks yesterday by the use of the word guy. Did anybody say guy in 1914 in reference to another bloke? A check of Patrice’s Dictionary of Slang Usage informed me that the word in that sense came into use in 1896, so I was okay for 1914 — but you can see I just don’t toss off a phrase such as, ‘Cool, man’ or ‘no way!’ in a non-contemporary window of time. But I do make an effort to use the common language of the film’s period. Another example: I would hardly consider referring to somebody being a ‘spin doctor’ in 1914. But in 1992 [the date of this interview] it’s already a cliché.

  “As to TV permitting better
social criticism than features because it’s more timely, in theory that perception makes sense. In practice, it doesn’t. Because the networks, the programmers and 99 percent of Hollywood TV writers deal with social issues in the most superficial, viewer-slanted sense. Life, as you well know, is hardly ever solved in fifty minutes. TV, unlike theatrical films, leaps to its hardcore points, losing mood and texture and depth in its skip-dancing.” [This has changed since these interviews. — NS]

  One of the most disappointing experiences Silliphant faced was the 1981 TV movie that was to serve as a pilot for a series about Vietnam, a subject — indeed, a passion — to which he devoted the last half of his life. Fly Away Home was designed to be, in his words, “a television War and Peace about Vietnam” that he alone would write to the tune of twenty-two hours broadcast over the course of a single year. As early as 1962, he had addressed the difficulties of returning Vietnam veterans in a Route 66 episode, also called “Fly Away Home,” with Glenn Corbett. Silliphant stressed that his series would be not just about one battle, but an overview. Unlike The Deer Hunter, which he didn’t like because it used Koreans as Vietnamese, or Apocalypse Now, which he liked even though they used Filipinos as Vietnamese, Fly Away Home would hire real Vietnamese performers, including Tiana, who would play the surgeon daughter of a Saigon politician. It would go, he promised, “from the Tet offensive in 1968 until the fall of Saigon in 1975 when the last of the invaders butted out. ABC let us make the two-hour pilot, [257] but whatever flicker of courage had caused the network to authorize me to develop such a bold and daring show suddenly was extinguished. I suspect that New York [ABC’s headquarters) shot it down. The sales people probably said to the West Coast, ‘You fucking idiots, what are you guys doing? What corporation is going to sponsor this thing?’