My Lucky Stars

by Shirley Maclaine

  I worked with a director who was so despised by the cast that we banded together and took direction only from each other. During a press junket later, each cast member promised the others we’d reveal what we really felt. The director never did get it. He thought we were just ungrateful.

  On a film where the husband and wife were very influential, I began to see that they both hated the director. The wife was a sexy star who couldn’t act. Her husband was her manager, who had nothing to do with the film. There was dialogue that the husband despised. On behalf of his actress wife, he pulled a knife, walked up to the director, and threatened to slit the director’s throat if he forced his wife to say the lines. Not being trained in guerrilla combat, the director cut the dialogue. He also quit the picture (or was fired, I’m not sure which).

  The film shut down for a few weeks while another director was brought in. However, it wasn’t long before the same thing happened again. The manager husband objected to a scene his wife was scripted to play; the scene was fine with her. In order to flex his power, the husband threatened to beat his wife up so that she would be unphotographable. He drove to the producer’s home and explained in detail what sort of grave bodily harm he would inflict upon his wife’s face and body. The producer banned the husband from the lot and the scene stayed.

  The wife had to make her own peace with the maniac she was married to. If ever she snuck a piece of chocolate or took a bite of someone else’s dessert, he chastised her publicly and unmercifully. More often than not, she’d leave the set or the dinner table in tears. Yet she was addicted to the power and control her husband exerted over her. He had been a pornographic filmmaker in his younger days, and when he met her she was only fourteen years old. Her age notwithstanding, he recruited her for his films, not only as an actress, but as a makeup artist who was to learn the professional tricks of the business by applying makeup to genital parts, which was rubbed off during the sexual activity of the scene. She spoke of her past with her husband in humorous, reverential tones. She believed everything he said and everything he did. I wondered which planet I was living on.

  Machiavellian strokes of dishonesty are as common in Hollywood as garden-variety lying is elsewhere. A person whom I respect and know very well wanted to hire a director for his picture. The director wanted to do another picture with a topflight female star. My friend brought the female star to his screening room, ran a particularly bad film by the director in question, and after the lights came up proceeded to downgrade the director so unmercifully that the female star decided to walk away from the director. My friend then hired the director the next day because he was “free.”

  People in our business are more than susceptible to what other people think. Everyone’s opinion is valuable. That’s because we never know what films might make a hundred million dollars. Even if a picture is completed and everyone hates it, they’re not really positive it won’t be a hit. The gift of persuasion (true or false) is highly honed. So not only can you never be sure whether people are telling you the truth, but more important, if they are telling you the truth, you must find out why.

  I learned from the movie business that the truth is relative, as it is, of course, in life.

  15

  MOVIE SETS

  THEN VS. NOW

  When I saw the movie Sunset Boulevard, I wondered whether I was seeing aspects of my own future. Gloria Swanson had done the part of Norma Desmond when she was forty-nine, and she was playing a has-been! When she returned to Paramount and “Mr. DeMille” and relived her memories of being part of the moviemaking family, I identified completely. I can still remember crew members who knew the contours of my face better than I. I can still feel their caressing eyes as they watched the light of their handiwork play across my cheekbones. I can still feel the strain on their arms as they were asked by the cinematographer to hold a gobo against the key light at just the right angle to produce a dramatic shadow across my shoulder.

  The young crew members don’t know how to do that anymore. The training grounds have disappeared. Studio personnel are transient. The masters are few and far between.

  So, we of the old school sometimes long for the past, when mastery of the craft was at its height. Yet those were also the days when writers were banished after a script was completed. The studio head was the boss. Directors were basically for hire, except for the truly great ones. Even then, the head of the studio had the final cut and they could pull the plug anytime they felt like it.

  Today there is more spontaneity. Writers speak up and rewrite on the spot. Actors improvise dialogue, which was not only unheard of in the old days, but would have been terrifying. We were more formal then. We okayed a script and we stuck to it. Actors knew their lines perfectly and were expected never to deviate. The man in the chair (the director) was a well-respected dictator. He was the captain of our creative ship and the master of our emotional souls. His vision was to be served. No one else’s. Yet the studio head, then and now, could destroy a director’s vision because he has the final cut.

  Directors and the front office would fight and threaten to kill each other, but the sets were well run with a well-established pecking order and a code of behavior.

  Nowadays the sets can be a free-for-all. Loss of formality, even loss of control, is simply the way it is. Stars get huge salaries yet some wander onto a set two hours late. Stars wield power more than they ever have. They can command script changes no one else agrees with. They can run the show.

  The most difficult cultural change has been the influence of drugs on so much of our industry.

  I never had much curiosity about drugs. I’ve smoked two marijuana cigarettes in my life. The first time I ended up staring at the test pattern on a television set for about five hours. The second time I got so hungry I nearly ate the furniture in the hotel room. I think I’ve found coke and LSD and other drugs uninteresting because of my fear of losing control. I’ve always needed to be aware of my environment and my behavior in it. So I am at this stage in my life completely naive about the effect and cause of so much that goes on with drugs in our industry.

  After one of my longer absences from picture making, I noticed that everyone was younger and nobody interrelated much. There was a rushed urgency behind every move as crew members seemed to go about their work in closed bubbles of their own. The hours were much longer. The family feeling was gone. There was no time to interrelate. A palpable fear permeated the sets; everyone, no matter what their job, seemed expendable due to the hundreds of unemployed waiting in the wings. There were no stories, jokes, or reminiscing about the days when Hollywood set the world ablaze and sometimes melted in its own heat. The young ones didn’t seem interested in what Duke Wayne was really like or whether Elizabeth and Richard were as combustible as their antics indicated. People didn’t want to hear about George Stevens altering the script of Shane in the cutting room, or James Wong Howe’s refusal to shoot the film in the rain. (He won the cinematography Oscar for finally giving in!) And these wonderful tales were only the recent past. The young crew members hardly knew who Gable and Lombard were, much less that they were adored by their own crews.

  To the crews I found myself working with in the late seventies, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were black-and-white stars on TV at three in the morning. I don’t know when the change came. I believe it was Vietnam. The conflict and tearing apart engendered by that war altered our fantasies of romanticism. The glamour of pre-Vietnam Hollywood might seem obscene today. The mystery created then by being aloof, a heavenly body in the rarefied firmament of Hollywood, suddenly was laughable, open to ridicule as manipulative and a sham. The crews and the public as well seemed to want us to become more real, more accessible, more like them. They knew, of course, that we belched, had wax in our ears, and put our slacks on one leg at a time just like they did. What was the big deal about our glamorous past?

  Yet the crews’ cynicism about life and the puncturing of Hollywood romanticism created a depressi
on that seemed to pour through their eyes. So what did they do to help alleviate their pain? They smoked pot, snorted coke, and shoved needles in their arms. The wealthier of the crew members went to designer drugs. I felt like a matron at a street rumble. I couldn’t compute what I sensed around me. There wasn’t much to see. It was something I felt. The camaraderie was what was missing. People were working too fast, too intensely, too urgently to take the time for camaraderie.

  In the earlier days, most of our work was done on soundstages in controlled environments. There were no traffic problems, gawking spectators, or airplane and helicopter interference. The weather, the light intensity, the sound, the emotional peace of mind, and the quiet rehearsals necessary to get the scenes right were under the control of the director and the cinematographer. The crews enjoyed observing the creative process as we found our moves, the levels of comedy and drama, and where we felt most comfortable with the camera. They saw what we were trying to do as we stumbled through our own creative risk taking. Therefore, we felt we were working together. We found what we needed in order to expose ourselves on the screen, and the crews were there to help us. Temperament was never a problem. It was expected and even enjoyed. The crews had something to tell their families when they got home at night.

  Nowadays the actors are thrown out on the street in full view of whoever happens to be passing by. It is usually either too hot, too cold, too smoggy, or too noisy to have a proper rehearsal. No one really wants to work that way, but unfortunately movies have succumbed to economic realities and it is simply cheaper. For television shows, street scenes are still shot on a studio lot, but for movies, hardly ever. To build the sets on a soundstage with union costs escalating is unrealistic now. So the production manager gives a guy who owns a bar a few thousand dollars a day and instructs the director and actors to get the scene in one day because we can’t afford more. Thus the urgency and the necessity of the sharp, swift thrust to just get the thing done. Drugs make the pressure bearable, I guess.

  The audiences require more escape these days. More high-tech violence because they see lives saved and taken on their evening news programs. Since the supply of live information is more immediate and more intensely real than ever before, motion pictures must outdo the news. So I suppose it was inevitable that we’d be out on the streets shooting…. Everyone else is.

  I haven’t shot an entire picture in a studio since the sixties. I’ve shot some interior scenes in studios, but movies are usually done on location now. So, when we are offered films, one of the first questions we ask is, “Where will it be shot?” We know we’ll have to be “away” for at least three months. This is hard on marriages, relationships, and children.

  On the other hand, we are out among real people more than we used to be. No longer are we protected by the care-control mechanisms of the studio. No longer are we “under contract,” belonging to them. We own ourselves now. Our independent companies produce the pictures for the studios. We are in control until it comes to the final cut. (Rarely will a studio give final cut to a director or an independent producer.) Therefore, there is no nurturing, no coddling, no sense of family feuding. We operate independently and fend for ourselves. We owe no allegiance to anyone and no one owes it to us. We are liberated from the stickiness of being cared for while being controlled. With the maturation of democracy in this country, Hollywood has matured also. We are free to be ourselves and have put aside childish petulance and adolescent expectations. It has been a painful transformation and we are still adjusting. But I thank our forefathers and foremothers for blazing the trail of cinematic creativity, pressing the issue of their own frustrations and discoveries at precisely the right pace so that those of us who came later could bring the case for creative freedom to fruition. The stars, the directors, and the producers who live in my memory made it possible for those of us today to advance and enhance our own expression.

  Our responsibility now is to balance the financial with the creative as we attempt to mirror and reflect the culture that we seek not only to please, but to inspire.

  Making films nowadays engenders more than’ ever the necessity for each of us to evaluate who we are and what we’re doing. This evolution can be extremely painful, resulting in ruptured relationships and shattered communication. Our work is about more than what is on the page or in the image on screen. It is about us, our lives, our feelings. We are the people we portray, and the directors and production people are what the films are about.

  Nowadays we understand that the films we are making are not the point. Rather, it is the process of what we learn from the experience; therein lies the teaching. We’re beginning to stop and reflect upon why we are drawn to a certain subject in the first place. No longer is our business only about giving the people what they want. It’s as much about what we want to say. We are beginning to comprehend the wisdom and emotional maturity of believing in something on film. If our hearts are engaged and not just our pocketbooks, the public’s reaction is usually favorable. They, out there in the dark, are collectively looking for artistic leadership. They want to know what we feel. They want to feel what we feel. They have entrusted us with leading them into our dreams. They are willing to invest their time and money if we really believe in what we’re doing. And they can always tell whether we are authentic or not. They can smell our belief system, they can intuit whether we really mean it.

  The arguments over creative differences have changed from years ago. Today there is a genuine difference of artistic opinion. Of course, if we go with what we feel is right, that may have a positive impact at the box office.

  Focus groups and previews are conducted today not to determine whether a picture will be a hit (although that is maddeningly important), but more to ascertain whether we have been clear in our intent. Was our communication comprehended? Did they understand the characters? Do they have suggestions relating to those characters? Guarding Tess, for instance, was originally intended to be a film told in flashbacks about an ex—first lady who is dead at the start of the movie. As a result, the preview audience didn’t laugh. The film was reçut so that Tess didn’t die. The laughs were suddenly there.

  Because of the impact of talk shows and the American habit of emotional venting in public, the studio bosses are trying to keep up with a country that has far outstripped the Hollywood connection. The public comprehends the contradictions of deeper human feelings more than the people making the films do. They are more acquainted with the shadows and gray areas of human nature than the men and women in charge of the scripts.

  The studio bosses think Mrs. Doubtfire was a comedy starring Robin Williams’s crazy, wonderful antics. The public knew it was also about the pain of divorce and child custody.

  The studios thought E.T. and Star Wars were imaginative flights of childhood fancy. But the public, in the main, really believes we are not alone in the universe.

  When Terms of Endearment became a classic, it was because Jim Brooks understood that cancer was ravaging many American families and because the comedy of imperious mothers and insecure daughters who feel they can never please their mothers reflects an endemic American feminine confusion. Thus the success of The Joy Luck Club and others.

  The studios thought Terminator 2 was a hit because Arnold Schwarzenegger was a funny, sardonic interplanetary action hero in high-tech competition with an even higher-tech evil wizard. To me, the picture worked because the mother had had visions of the future that were not pleasant, to say the least, and wanted to protect her family and the families of others from the end of the world.

  To me, Silence of the Lambs worked because Hannibal Lecter gloried in showing his deranged mind, thereby satisfying our curiosity about cannibalistic instincts.

  To me, Jurassic Park speaks to a genetic memory of a time we have all evolved from and wish to remember.

  Schindler’s List was about an unlikely man who finds enough goodness and caring in himself to take action.

  Quiz Show marked th
e moment of decline in public morality in our country. Forrest Gump helped us to feel okay about our own personal histories and commitments in the last thirty-five years.

  When we contemplate making a film, we often find that we have overlooked its true meaning. The audience is the entity that finds it for us and mirrors it back.

  Our ability to see into our material is in direct proportion to our ability to see into ourselves. That’s one of the reasons why so many of us are in therapy, or investigating our unrealized spiritual aspects, or questioning our backgrounds, our childhoods, our parents, our relatives, our relationship to God and to our fellow men and women.

  Filmmakers and the people who finance and distribute films know that self-knowledge is the key to a healthy industry that dares to marry art and business.

  We know that the investigation into the mystery of self will create fireworks. In fact, creative arguments nowadays revolve around who has shown more courage to go within and to analyze why his or her emotional reactions are what they are. Our onscreen characters are defective when we who create them are unclear.

  Meetings these days are almost always peppered with such evaluations of what people want to say and whether they believe in themselves enough to say it. It’s not, what do you want to “do” anymore—it’s what do you want to “say”?

  Studio heads and financial people look to the artists for commitment and passion as a lightning rod for success. Complacency is out. Obsessive caring is in, even if the obsession is a power trip. It is about the work, about the message, about the living feelings that will implode within the filmmaker if he or she doesn’t get the money necessary to realize the dream. When financial people hear the sounds of passion from artists, they write the checks. So many wish they had feelings that intense.

  Yet in spite of that, when a really fine adult film doesn’t gross what is expected, and indeed may not even break even, the studio heads run scared. They play to the broad spectrum of acceptability from the audience.