Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God
Page 27
61. Interview with Author, February 10, 2013. Tiana refers to the classic joke about the starlet who was so stupid that she slept with the screenwriter to get the part. (Added writer Richard Powell, “If you change the screenwriter to a director, the joke doesn’t work, but the starlet does.”)
62. Froug, op cit.
63. The Route 66 season finale for 1961, not Silliphant’s 1981 series pilot.
64. The episode is believed to be “Sheba” (January 6, 1961) and one of the rumored reasons was a contract dispute with Maharis.
65. Contracts in Silliphant family collection.
66. Blog post, www.davidmorrell.net
67. Michael Ventura, “A Swastika in the Snow” from If I Was a Highway. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2011.
68. This episode was also the basis for a 1992 musical called The Finders by Peter Morley and David Walters.
69. Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1964.
70. Dayle had entered the Jesuit-run Santa Clara University but changed her mind while still a novitiate. She married twice, both times to Jewish men.
71. Silliphant’s widow, Tiana, said that his skepticism of Dayle’s commitment came from her demand for a credit card on which she charged numerous un-nunlike expenses. He enjoyed telling how he visited her one day and she put on her habit so quickly that she accidentally stabbed her scalp with a hatpin. When he saw her white cornette spotted with red, he thought, thinking of stigmata, “She really did give herself to God!”
72. In November 1962, Maharis pulled out, citing hepatitis, and was replaced by Glenn Corbett until the series ended in 1964. The Maharis episodes ran through March of 1963.
73. Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT) had a distinguished career prosecuting the Nuremberg Trials before serving in the House from 1953 to 1957 and the Senate from 1959 to 1971. He and Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) held hearings in 1954, 1961, and 1964 into TV violence that produced a reactionary clamp-down. Dodd was censured by the Senate in 1967 for campaign finance irregularities. His son, Christopher, was also a Senator (D-CT) from 1981 to 2011, after which he was, perhaps ironically, hired as CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, which controls film content, while insisting it doesn’t, through its rating system.
74. Froug, op cit.
75. Including the author who, in preparing the Backstory interview, borrowed several and returned the favor by buying pro copies for the family when tapes turned up in used video bins.
76. www.classictvhistory.wordpress.com plus correspondence with Author. The chain-of-title itself could make a detective story.
77. The author met briefly with Leonard toward the end of 1998 to negotiate a feature film deal for Route 66, ennobled partly by the wishes of the late Stirling Silliphant and his widow, and interest from a legitimate production company. After several phone calls, Bert and I met on Monday, December 7 at a post-production facility in Santa Monica, California where he said he was colorizing Rin-Tin-Tin episodes. I found the then-76-year-old Leonard alert and affable but unyielding in insisting on writing and directing the film himself, a decision I knew no studio would accept. We parted amicably. I tried reaching him a few times after that, just in case he had changed his mercurial mind, but never got a return call.
78. Stephen Bowie, The Classic TV History Blog, June 12, 2012.
79. “A Chat with Kirk Hallam,” January 17, 2008, by Ron Warnick, www.route66news.com.
80. Shout! Factory press release, November 7, 2011, www.tvshowsondvd.com/news
81. “More details about Route 66: DVD release August 4, 2007” by Ron Warnick, posted on www.route66news.com, August 4, 2007.
82. And they were an estimable procession that included Robert Altman, James Goldstone, William A. Graham, Tom Gries, Jeffrey Hayden, Arthur Hiller,
83. Philip Leacock, Robert Ellis Miller, George Sherman, Elliott Silverstein, Sam Peckinpah, and David Lowell Rich.
84. There is controversy among collectors that the available versions of this episode have been shortened from the original running time. The copy viewed for this book ran 52:30.
In the end, he gives the $100,000 bribe to the convent anyway, “as a wedding present” for Bonnie. No mention is made that the money is tainted.
85. According to Altman’s biographer, Patrick McGilligan, Altman and Wynn did some rewriting on location when they weren’t drunk. Even though the results were effective, Bert Leonard vowed never to hire Altman again (Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).
86. Deal memo, Silliphant family papers.
87. A British army officer, citing other blond birth epidemics, points to a map and says, “In the Communist world there were two time-outs similar to the one at Midwich. One at Irkutsk, here, and the borders of Outer Mongolia. A grim affair. The men killed the children and their mothers.”
88. Earlier sources reported that the outspoken Ashley dropped out of the project in a contract dispute.
89. Sidney Poitier, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (San Francisco, California: HarperCollins, 2000).
90. Daily Variety, December 22, 1965.
91. Signed deal memo dated November 17, 1965 and received September 16, 1966, Silliphant family archive.
92. Among their credits: The Magnificent Seven, West Side Story, The Great Escape, The Apartment, The Russians Are Coming, The Pink Panther, and many other successes.
93. Source: Walter Mirish, We Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Jewison says $1.5 million in his autobiography. Today it would easily cost $100 million.
94. Jewison’s signing was announced August 15, 1966 (Hollywood Reporter).
95. Norman Jewison, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me (Toronto, Canada: Key Porter Books, 2004)
96. Walter Mirisch Collection, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
97. Author’s Note: Silliphant’s human rights credentials were impeccable. Here he was writing in the characters’ biased voices.
98. January 7, 1966, treatment, AMPAS.
99. Poitier interview with Author, November 16, 2012.
100. Trevor Hogg, “Daring Ideas: Haskell Wexler Talks About In the Heat of the Night & Medium Cool,” www.FlickeringMyth.com, September 12, 2012.
101. Carol Munday and Robert N. Zagone, Fade Out: The Erosion of Black Images in the Media; Nguzo Saba Films, WNET-TV, New York, 1984.
102. ibid./p>
103. Jewison, op cit.
104. Interview in William Froug, The Screenwriter Looks At the Screenwriter.
105. At one point Wood becomes a suspect, allowing Gillespie to tell Tibbs, who insists the cop is innocent, another oft-quoted line of dialogue: “What do you mean I’m holding the wrong man? I got the motive, which is money, and the body, which is dead.”
106. At 15:26.
107. Mirisch, op cit. There is no record of the play being produced.
108. December 22, 1965.
109. Jewison, op cit. Also Hollywood Reporter, August 12, 1966.
110. Mirisch, op cit
111. “Annual Report of the Committee on Un-American Activities for the Year 1952” (Washington, DC: Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, 1952).
112. Daily Variety, November 8, 1966.
113. Daily Variety, November 14, 1966
114. Sidney Poitier, This Life (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). He would have an equally intense acting lesson on his next film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, opposite Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
115. The line occurs at the bottom of page 24 on Silliphant’s July 1, 1966, Revised First Draft.
116. Wexler interview with the author.
117. Marilyn and Alan Bergman wrote the lyrics without credit.
118. Poitier interview, ibid.
119. In 1999, Jewison was voted the Irving G. Thalberg Award by the Academy’s Board of Governors.
120. Interviewed by Bill Collins, “Bill Collins Showbiz,” Aug
ust 19, 1979, Seven Network, NSW (Australia).
121. Daily Variety, January 23, 1969.
122. It was presented to him by a contrite Academy the year before he died.
123. A partial list includes Marathon Man, All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Misery, and The Princess Bride.
124. Goldman says he started each chapter on a new page to pad the book’s length. It was made into a film starring Rod Steiger, George Segal, and Lee Remmick in 1968.
125. William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade, New York: Warner Books, 1983.
126. Cliff Robertson interview courtesy of the Archive of American Television, interviewed by Stephen J. Abramson on March 1, 2005. (http://emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/cliff-robertson)
127. Goldman, op cit./p>
128. Abramson, op cit/p>
129. Punctuate this: That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is. (Answer: That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.)/p>
130. …which Robertson was unable to collect in person because he was in the Philippines shooting Too Late the Hero with Michael Caine and couldn’t travel to Los Angeles.
131. Boston filmmaking crews report that some footage was shot.
132. “The Reed Farrell Show,” courtesy Silliphant archive.
133. Dayle, his daughter with Ednamarie, born 1955.
134. Ethel Silliphant never remarried.
135. Stirling Garff Rasmussen interview, February 14, 2013.
136. Interviewed by Bill Collins, “Bill Collins Showbiz,” August 19, 1979. Seven Network, NSW (Australia).
137. Newsweek, January 31, 1972. Silliphant was saying that he originated A Walk in the Spring Rain rather than being hired by someone else to write their project.
138. Somerset, Tennessee is ripe for scandal when the town’s dignified black undertaker Lord Byron (“L.B.”) Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) hires an old-line white lawyer (Lee J. Cobb) to handle an uncontested divorce from Lola Falana, who is having an affair with a white policeman (Anthony Zerbe). Problems erupt when Falana unexpectedly fights the divorce and the white community pressures the usually docile Jones to back off. At last standing up for his dignity as a black man, Jones announces “to hell with the white man” — a decision that costs him his life.
139. For a complete report see the author’s Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors.
140. Jan Herman, A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director. New York: Da Capo Press, 1997.
141. Robert later wrote the motion pictures The Creeping Terror (1964), The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965),and the cult classic The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964). He died in 1999.
142. Washington Afro-American, March 18, 1969.
143. San Jose Mercury News, December 4, 1969.
144. Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1969.
145. San Jose Mercury News, December 4, 1969
146. Brief, In re Johnson (1995) 35 Cal.App.4th 160, 41 Cal.Rptr.2d 449.
147. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
148. Lee’s other private students included James Coburn, James Garner, Lee Marvin, Roman Polanski, Joe Hyams, and Steve McQueen.
149. Linda Lee and Tom Bleecker, “Bruce Lee Goes Hollywood,” Black Belt magazine, Burbank, California: Rainbow Publications, September, 1989.
150. Silliphant estimated the date of their meeting as mid-1968. He would later achieve second cue green belt in Shotokan karate.
151. John Corcoran, ”Up Close and Personal with Stirling Silliphant.” Kick Magazine, July-September, 1980. Hollywood, California: CFW Enterprises.
152. “Bruce Lee: The Mandarin Superstar,” The Pierre Berton Show, Screen Gems Canada, September 12, 1971.
153. Armchair psychiatrists can ponder whether the name Lee, common to both Bruce and Silliphant’s father, had a connection with this epiphany.
154. Lee to Silliphant, Christmas, 1967; Silliphant to Lee, letter dated (incorrectly) January 3, 1968 (sic). Silliphant collection, UCLA.
155. Philip Marlowe (James Garner) agrees to locate the missing brother (Roger Newman) of a movie starlet (Sharon Farrell) and stumbles into a blackmail plot, gangland-style ice-pick murders, and shady psychiatrists.
156. Ironically, the scene involved the sort of exhibition karate — breaking boards and such — that Lee disdained.
157. Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1971.
158. Broadcast September 16, 1971.
159. He often joked, “If anyone wanted to get Longstreet, all they’d have to do is stand across the street with a high-powered rifle and, as the dummy comes out with the dog, blow his head off.”
160. Berton, op cit.
161. Berton, op cit.
162. Warner Bros. has maintained that they were, by sheer coincidence, developing the same idea with writers Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander when Lee pitched it. Lee considered the loss of Kung Fu one of his greatest personal disappointments.
163. Berton, op cit.
164. An undated clipping from Martial Arts Magazine in Silliphant’s UCLA Collection 134 (Box 21, File 1) reports that Hong Kong GH company found an unfinished manuscript for The Silent Flute and asked Chinese director Ng See-Yuen, then a staff filmmaker at Shaw studios, to finish it. There were no other details. See-Yuen made Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth (1976).
165. Copied in the Silliphant collection, UCLA.
166. New York Times, March 28, 1971.
167. Silliphant to Corcoran, op cit.
168. In 1968, Silliphant and McQueen devised an idea called Project Leng for which they hired Mark Silliphant at $150 a week to find a published novel that would match their title. Nothing came of it. Silliphant also figures in Pingree Productions (q.v.).
169. Receipts owed to Warner Bros. that the Indian government insisted they spend in the country rather than remove and risk collapsing the economy.
170. Martial Arts Magazine, Summer, 1978. UCLA Archives, no further identification.
171. Letter, Coburn to Singh, January 13, 1971. Silliphant collection, UCLA.
172. Silliphant papers, UCLA.
173. Game magazine, August, 1976. The official Bruce Lee website attributes his death to the pain meds.
174. Corcoran, op cit.
175. In 1969 Mark Silliphant and Bruce Lee were asked to assign their rights in the project to Silliphant. (Letter from Barry Hirsch’s office, September 16, 1969). Silliphant collection, UCLA.
176. Conversation with producer Paul Maslansky, February 4, 2012.
177. In 1953, Moore cofounded Panavision with Robert Gottschalk to develop lenses and cameras that revolutionized wide-screen photography and camera portability. He was given the scientific and engineering achievement award in 1959 from the motion picture Academy.