Merrill's Marauders got good reviews. Critics for Time and Newsweek remarked that the film had a documentary flavor, giving a realistic depiction of war's simplicity and death. The only thing they said was "Hollywood" in the film was the ending. Ironically, the opposite was true. The ending that Jack Warner's boys tacked on was real documentary footage of a military parade. In the context, it seemed phony. My film was fiction. But it smelled of truth.
Tempted by
Television
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M errills Marauders turned out to be a financial and critical success. Yet I had two big regrets about the picture. Gary Cooper's illness and death denied me the chance to cast him in a role that would have provided him one last triumph. I'd never get that chance, and it made me sad. Jeff Chandler's premature death immediately after the shoot, due to his back operation, was also very disturbing.
Jack Warner was so pleased with the box-office results on Merrills Marauders that he offered me a bonus. He'd pay for any car I wanted to buy. Though I considered several makes, I ended up picking a Cadillac. It was pricey, but Warner could afford it. The picture made an $i8 million profit, a helluva take back then.
I never gave a damn about fancy cars, or any of the other frills in Hollywood. By the early sixties, my lifestyle had never been more modest and solitary. Living alone, I wrote day and night, knocking out yarns one after another. It was my salvation. Offers came and went but still no studio or producer was ready to green-light The Big Red One.
Little Rebecca Baum from Poland was constantly in my thoughts. I remembered my late mother's sense of humor, her feistiness, and her mettle, raising seven children all by herself. I could see her in my mind's eye, wearing her polka-dot dress and her pearl necklace, a warm smile on her face, ever ready to tell a funny story to cheer me up. She was vital until the very end. At the age of eighty-five she'd been repainting her house the day before she died. She went to sleep and never woke up.
Nobody ever really gets over the death of a parent. At first, you resent a mother or a father for not being immortal. Time soothes the pain and brings perspective. You remember beloved qualities, not human imperfections. Even today, three decades after her death, my mother's spirit remains with me. Loving one's parents is a lifelong undertaking. There is no greater satisfaction than showing respect and gratitude for parents. After they pass on, your affection and dedication remain intact. As long as you are thinking of parents with love, they aren't dead. They're right there in your heart and mind.
People in Hollywood had nicknamed me "Slam-Bam" Sam. Surrounded by the town's honey-tongued characters, I guess I seemed pretty brusque. Deep down, I was full of love and gratitude. Hell, injustice made me damned angry. When I felt frustrated-which is how Hollywood made you feel most of the time-I could be harsh. One thing was for sure, I was always up front with people. I've never talked behind any- one's back. Good or bad, I'll tell you straight to your face what I think about you.
A man who always liked my candor was my screenwriter pal, Charles Marquis Warren. Warren was also a director, having made movies out of his own scripts, like Hellgate (1952), Arrowhead (1953), and Flight to Tangier (1953). He'd gotten into television by producing the series Gunsmoke (1955-56), one of the biggest successes in early TV history. He'd also launched the hit TV series Rawhide (1959-61). Charles came over to visit me one day in late 1961.
"Sam, I want you to write and direct the pilot for a new TV show I'm going to do based on The Virginian. You know the novel by Owen Winter?" said Charles.
"I loved that book when I was a kid!"
In the twenties and thirties, all boys my age read The Virginian. Wister published the book at the turn of the century, the first Western in American literature. His romantic approach to frontier life encompassed all the cliches that became emblematic in Hollywood's early movies.
"Forget the original," said Charles. "Universal is putting up the dough for the series. They bought the title and are letting me do whatever I want. The show needs your own special vision. You'll be doing me a great favor, and you'll get a crack at TV. Believe me, it's well-paid work."
"Okay, Charles. What kind of characters do you have in mind?" I asked.
I was talking like a chef who is willing to adjust his recipe to hit the client's taste buds right on the head. Didn't Bertolt Brecht say that art was a culinary experience?
"I want a judge who incarnates the law," said Warren.
"Who do you have in mind to play him?"
"Lee J. Cobb."
"Great!"
I was a happy chef. Cobb was like a good soup bone for my stew. I needed some tasty meat, so I told Charles that I wanted to use Lee Marvin as a cattle rustler, the villain. Lee was my kind of actor, a real tough-looking, tough-talking sonofabitch.
"Okay, Sam," said Warren, "we'll get Cobb and Marvin. Now write me a script for the first show in the series."
I dreamed up a European-style crime, the kidnapping and ransoming of a king. Frontier judges were like kings in the Old West. They held sway over vast domains and thousands of cattle. My villain, a cattier rustler, concocts a scheme to kidnap a powerful judge. The judge turns out to be a thief too, exploiting the law for his own benefit. The rustler is caught and brought to trial. Only the rustler knows that the judge is just as much a criminal as he is. Since the judge has the law on his side, he condemns the rustler and ends up looking like a saint.
I was pleased and surprised that the studio execs at Universal okayed my unorthodox yarn. The minute the trade papers announced I was writing and directing an episode of The Virginian, the editor in chief of the Saturday Evening Post wanted to do a story. It was a big deal that a movie director was making a two-hour program for television with major actors. Back then, it was unthinkable for filmmakers to work in both mediums. The Post reporter showed up on the set and stayed throughout the shoot.
I was disappointed with TV production people from Day One. They spent money on unimportant things, then they were cheap with essential elements. We were always haggling over important details. I'd done big pictures in ten days because I was working with experienced, capable movie people. We used plenty of tricks that saved money, but not at the expense of what the audience gets to see up on the screen. The climate on a TV set irritated me. Besides, the production results didn't justify all the money they were spending.
My tastes were simple. I was happiest smoking a good cigar and writing yarns on my old Royal, circa 1962.
Charles Warren seemed pleased with the episode I directed for him. It was entitled "It Tolls for Thee." The Post piece was published soon after the show was broadcast. The writer pinned his article on the day-to-day struggles of a moviemaker in TV land. The execs at Universal weren't at all happy about the unfavorable behind-the-scenes account. Still, the studio offered me ten more episodes on The Virginian. I turned them down. I'd had it with television, explaining to Charles Warren that I couldn't take any more sausage-factory storytelling, that I needed the biosphere of a movie production to breathe creatively. Charles laughed at my reaction. Deep down in his heart of hearts, he understood, because he preferred doing movies too. But he was a better businessman than I was and foresaw the huge profits that television would make for its producers.
More offers for television series came in. The only one I seriously considered was from Jackie Cooper, the Hollywood icon turned TV producer. Cooper had been around for decades, ever since becoming a child star as the lead in The Bowery (1933). Jackie wanted me to take on a project about an American Indian detective in New York entitled Hawk, starring an upand-coming actor named Burt Reynolds. With my New York background and experience as a crime reporter, Cooper thought I'd be perfect for the job. He offered me total freedom to write the scripts. The pay was hefty. I sensed that TV would devour me, drying up my creative juices. I passed on Jackie Cooper's series and turned my attention back to getting a feature film into production.
I thought I was finished with television. Yet Charles Warren w
ould entice me to get involved in yet another TV series a few years later. Charles was doing a show called Iron Horse in 1966. I needed the loot, so I accepted Warren's offer to write and direct five episodes on the show. The only one I remember-probably because I came up with the original story and wrote a terrific billiard scene for that episode-was called "The Man for New Chicago." It starred Dale Robertson.
What I discovered from my foray into TV was how much I loved filmmaking. I was used to seeing my characters on a big screen. I wasn't even that impressed with the immediacy of monitoring actors on video. I prefer the surprise of seeing performances at the end of the day's work, in the rushes.
The worlds of moviemaking and TV production are no longer as remote as they were in those days. There've been so many improvements to movie cameras since then. The Steadicam, which allows for smooth traveling shots, is one of the most marvelous. Technology will continue to improve, with 35-mm cameras getting lighter and more mobile. The goal is to make the storytelling process less cumbersome, so the director, his cast, and his crew can concentrate on the emotions of the characters. In my day, the camera, lights, and sound were obstacles that had to be overcome. I hope making movies for future filmmakers will be as simple as typing was for writers like me. A young director with a good script won't need a ton of money to put his movie into production. We'll have all kinds of movies being made, quicker and cheaper, maybe even some good ones.
Television has seen vast changes, too, with a helluva lot of advancements in cameras, broadcasting, and video projection. Good directors don't hesitate to work in both feature films and television nowadays. I think all that versatility is great. And I love all the new technologies as long as they are utilized to bring people together, not alienate them. Rabelais once said that science without a conscience spoils the soul. Moviemaking without a gripping story and believable characters spoils the film.
A script that I'd been polishing for many years was finally ready to go into production. I'd written a version of the yarn fifteen years earlier for Fritz Lang to direct, called Straitjacket back then. All the time I was dabbling with television, I yearned to get back into moviemaking with a picture that embraced the craziness of the early sixties. That movie would be Shock Corridor.
Love Your
Country Despite
the Ulcers
40
n Straitjacket, the yarn that I'd written for Fritz Lang in the late forties, there was a journalist trying to solve a murder that was committed inside an insane asylum. The point of that script was to expose the pitiful living conditions in mental institutions. I showed Fritz photos I'd obtained from newspaper files of mentally ill patients vegetating in American asylums. Sick people were denied basic human dignity, treated almost like animals. It was happening in asylums all over the world. I carried the story inside me like brain baggage throughout the fifties, rewriting it as The Long Corridor. The title was based on my idea for the interminable hallway that would be the principal set for the picture. No doubt, my story had been shaped and sharpened by the legacy of the cold war years.
From abroad, playwrights Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Samuel Beckett had used the "theater of the absurd" as one of the only sane modes to approach the madness of the era. At home, racism and intolerance were still prevalent in the world's greatest democracy. Jim Crow had been outlawed by the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, but President Eisenhower had to dispatch troops to accompany black children into a "white" high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The horrible McCarthy period had left ideological scars, the witch-hunting so unworthy of a democracy.
My title became Shock Corridor. It had the subtlety of a sledgehammer. I was dealing with insanity, racism, patriotism, nuclear warfare, and sexual perversion. How could I have been light with those topics? I purposefully wanted to provoke the audience. The situations I'd portray were shocking and scary. This was going to be a crazy film, ranging from the absurd to the unbearable and tragic. My madhouse was a metaphor for America. Like an X ray that fathoms a patient's tumors, Shock Corridor would probe our nation's sickness. Without an honest diagnosis of the problems, how could we ever hope to heal them?
On the surface, Shock Corridor was a murder mystery. Newspaper reporter Johnny Barrett wants a big scoop, so he manages to pass himself off as a sex pervert, with the reluctant help of his stripper girlfriend, Cathy. She pretends to be his sister and files a formal complaint against him for sexual harassment. All this so Johnny can get himself committed to an asylum where an inmate was stabbed to death by a still-unidentified murderer. Without arousing suspicions, Johnny hopes to solve the murder by getting close to three patients who witnessed the killing. His articles will be published under big headlines.
The premise was not as far-fetched as it seemed. I remembered bizarre assignments that newspapermen accepted just to get their scoops. There was a reporter who spent the entire night in a funeral home in order to catch a suspected necrophiliac in the act. There was actually a woman reporter who wrote a famous expose of the asylum on Wards Island by pretending to be nuts.
To get this unusual picture going, I needed a producer like Robert Lippert from the old days, a guy who'd give me the dough and have the good sense to let me make the movie my own way. Bill Shiffrin said he knew the perfect guy to help me. Shiffrin was an old-time agent with clients like Bette Davis and George Sanders. He had taken on Robert Stack since House of Bamboo and orchestrated the deal that made Stack the lead in the popular series The Untouchables. Bill used to come around my place to propose TV projects. I turned them all down. We gibble-gabbled about movies in general. Shiffrin had an incredible sense of movie history, rare in Hollywood. Unfortunately, Bill couldn't hold his vodka. He'd get foulmouthed, putting down producers, directors, or writers, assigning them to his own personal blacklist. The next day, he'd be on the phone getting the same people deals. Beneath his brash veneer, Shiffrin was an idealist with a heart of gold.
Bill brokered a two-picture deal for me with real-estate tycoon Samuel Firks. Firks said he'd operate tight budgets just like Lippert, paying me a fee and a share of the profits. I'd have complete artistic control of the production, including final cut. Maybe I should've checked out Firks beforehand, but the deal smelled okay, and I was anxious to get back into movie production. After my early experiences, I trusted producers implicitly. Unfortunately, Firks was no Lippert.
Shock Corridor opens with this legend: "Whom God Wishes to Destroy He First Makes Mad. Euripides, 425 B.C."
Then the screen goes black. In the center of the screen, a dot of light appears. We hear a man's voice:
Johnny (Peter Breck) reassures his gal, Cathy (Constance Towers), that his stay in the insane asylum will get him a big scoop as a journalist. His city editor, Swanee (William Zuckert, far right), and his shrink, Dr. Fong (Philip Ahn, far left), are not so sure. In this scene, notice the one source of light, which cameraman Stanley Cortez used so effectively throughout the movie.
Mad women attack Johnny when he walks into the wrong ward. Later we added Peter Breck's panicked voiceover: °Nymphos!"
JOHNNY'S VOICE
My name is Johnny Barrett. I'm a reporter on the Daily Globe. This is my story ... as far as it went.
The dot slowly grows until we see a bleak corridor that runs off into infinity. The mental patients call it "the Street." Down the full length off the hallway is a ceiling light. Ghoulish music composed by Paul Dunlap comes up. We're in a modern version of Dante's Inferno, which my main character will voluntarily enter, and from which he will never return.
The bleak central corridor of the asylum was essential to get right. At first I'd considered using the hallway of a real mental hospital in order to convey the place's invasive claustrophobia. I was able to hire the art director Eugene Lourie and explained to him exactly what I had in mind.' We didn't have much money for sets, but Lourie didn't mind. Eugene convinced me that we needed to devise a special set to allow plenty of space for cameras
and crew to move freely yet still be able to drive home the idea of total confinement. He built an ingenious corridor of walls and mirrors. At the far end of the set, he painted a hallway that never ended. We hired dwarfs, dressed them as mental patients, and had them drift around down there. The corridor created the perfect illusion of infinity in a finite space. I was grateful to have the experienced and visionary Lourie on my team.
The three mad witnesses Johnny must befriend in the asylum to crack the case allowed me to develop a loose three-act structure. Their sicknesses gave me metaphors to spotlight some of the biggest issues in American society. Stuart, a southern redneck, is a Korean War veteran who collaborated with communists, then repudiated his brainwashing. He now believes he's a Confederate general. Trent is a black man who blew a fuse from the pressure of being a guinea pig for segregation at a racist southern university. His lunacy drives him to believe he is a vicious KKK bigot. Boden is one of the genius scientists who helped develop the A-bomb. Unleashing nuclear devastation has driven him into the mindset of a sixyear-old.
Barrett's investigation is torturous. He is constantly under assault from the asylum's aggressive lunatics. His rotund roommate, Pagliacci, a fanatic opera lover, uses an imaginary dagger to act out the climactic stabbing from Leoncavallo's opera by the same name.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 41
