The rewritten script had an FBI agent infiltrating the KKK, with Lee Marvin's role changed into a southern sheriff. Richard Burton was cast as a local landowner, and O. J. Simpson, the ex-football star, was given a part for good public relations. A white woman is raped, and white townspeople try to lynch a black man as the innocent victim. What a tired goddamned plot device!
The reworked story made no sense as social commentary and was repugnant as entertainment. They'd turned my original work into a disastrous piece of bullshit and launched the production. Against my objections, they left my name on it. I challenge anyone to read my original script and then compare it to the finished version of The Klansman. It's like night and day.
Lee Marvin was as furious as I was. However, he was under contract and had to do the movie. I understood his predicament.
"The limey doesn't know what he's doing," Lee told me in a phone call from the set, referring to Terence Young. "And he doesn't care either."
As first-time producers, Bill Alexander and Bill Shiffrin were powerless against the studio's demands. They felt terrible about the situation and invited me up to the set, somewhere on location in northern California. It was crawling with press because Richard Burton was getting frequent visits from Elizabeth Taylor. I declined to go anywhere near the place, feeling double-crossed by this new episode of commerce triumphing over art. I told myself that at least I'd made some dough on the deal, trying not to acknowledge the deep hurt of having another original script taken out of my hands and bastardized. For Chrissakes, I could've made that script into a terrific picture!
Foolishly or not, I held a grudge against Terence Young for a helluva long time. Years later, I ran into him in France, when we were both members of the jury at the Cognac Festival. I brought up The Klansman. Terence swore he'd never meant to squeeze me out of the picture. He'd never even read my original script and couldn't have cared less about America's social problems. His manager had pushed him to accept the job purely for the paycheck. Terence had big expenses to keep up on his estate on the Cote d'Azur and an expensive French girlfriend. He knew he'd made a lousy picture. How could I begrudge such an honest guy who freely admitted his greed? To this day, I've never had the courage to sit through The Klansman. Lee Marvin invited Christa to the premiere. She couldn't believe how they'd totally distorted every scene that I'd written. When the lights came up, Lee said nothing about how bad the picture was, or about his own disappointment. He just gently touched Christa's big belly, for she was already pregnant. "Let's think about future projects," he said.
One day, I ran into Lee Marvin at Wittner's, my favorite cigar store, right across from Farmer's Market on Fairfax. For as long as I could remember, Hans Witmer had been selling cigars to me and many of my Hollywood colleagues, including Ernst Lubitsch and Alfred Hitchcock.
"Sammy," said Lee, as we leaned on a glass countertop and lit up a couple of my favorite Camachos, "when are we doing The Big Red One?"
Marvin knew about the precious movie that I'd been working on all those years. I'd kept him in the loop.
"You'll be my sergeant!" I said, making a promise I'd never break.
There were just two projects I wanted to focus on now: the baby that Christa was about to have and The Big Red One, the movie that I had to find a way to give birth to. To hone my story, I set to work on a novelization of the material. Bantam brought out The Big Red One as a paperback before the movie happened. The book stood on its own through three printings. But I still wasn't getting any closer to finding a producer. My old friend, Peter Bogdanovich, decided to get involved. He'd formed a production company with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin.
One day Peter came up to the Shack to announce that he'd convinced his partners to back The Big Red One if I could make the picture for a million dollars. I told Peter that I appreciated the offer, but it couldn't be done for that small a budget. He promised to keep trying to convince a studio to kick in more. Peter was now living with Cybill Shepherd in Bel Air. He'd alienated a lot of people, but it was mostly jealousy. With me, Peter was generous and caring. I'll always be grateful for his efforts on behalf of The Big Red One.
Christa's pregnancy went to term without a glitch. On January 28, 1975, our beautiful daughter, Samantha, was born. It was one of the most glorious days of my life. At the age of sixty-three, I'd become a father for the first time. I'd never felt more ambitious or energetic. Nothing and no one could ever get me down again. After all, I wanted my little girl to be proud of her daddy.
Let Them Judge
for Themselves
49
At Peter Bogdanovich's urging, Paramount offered me a deal to do The Big Red One. Frank Yablans, the studio's chief, understood that I didn't want to make just another war film. I told him how I'd turned down The Longest Day and Patton to do a movie without any grand combat or glorious heroes. My story followed four young GIs and their sergeant into infantry battles, first in North Africa and Sicily, then at Omaha Beach on D day, through the snowy forests of Belgium and the cities of Germany, finally discovering the terrible truth about the Nazi camps in Czechoslovakia.
See, I'd stored up all the nuts and bolts of foot soldiering-the condoms over the Mis, the wet socks, the land mines, the ricocheting bullets, the grenades, the K-rations-but I had no intention of making a documentary. No audience would stomach the reality of war. It was too gruesome. I had to use images straight out of my imagination-like the shell-shocked black stallion galloping wildly in my prologue-to convey the horror of war and the harsh life of the men who had to fight it.
Every frame of my picture would be based on firsthand knowledge. A wristwatch on a severed arm floating in a sea of blood was a sight from Omaha Beach that had stayed with me my entire life. For the movie, I'd tone down the terror by focusing on the hands of a wristwatch as the lapping waves get redder and redder, blood from all the dying soldiers offscreen. Beyond the realism, my four infantry soldiers and their sergeant had an allegorical dimension. They were symbols of survival. Their relentless advance was a strange death dance, absurd and incomprehensible, like war itself. With the conclusion of hostilities comes the recognition that the healing must begin. I wanted The Big Red One to end on hope.
Writing that script affected me viscerally. During the final months of revision, Christa told me I'd have terrible nightmares, screaming out unintelligible phrases in the middle of the night. My subconscious was teeming with all that war stuff, and the movie finally allowed painful memories a spout to pour out.
Before we could get the movie into production, Frank Yablans left the studio, and the new boss at Paramount let the option expire. We were back to square one again as all the movie's rights reverted to me. Bogdanovich was just as upset as I was. He brought his friend and lawyer Jack Schwartzmann over to discuss what could be done. Jack had become a top executive at Lorimar, a new independent movie outfit headed by Merv Adelson and Lee Rich, guys who'd made a lot of dough with the TV show The Waltons. We struck a deal with Lorimar to produce The Big Red One with a tight budget and deferred payments to all participants. I'd get a slice of profits as writer-director. Bogdanovich was my personal choice as producer on the project, but the Lorimar people were dissuaded by Peter's recent box-office setbacks. Instead, they hired Gene Corman, brother of independent producer Roger Corman. Gene turned out to be an excellent team member, calm and even-tempered, making smart decisions throughout the difficult shoot.
Gene wanted me to cast Steve McQueen as the sergeant. Steve was interested, and I would've loved to work with him on a movie. He did a helluva job in Don Siegel's Hell Is for Heroes (1962). The truth was that I couldn't imagine anyone except Lee Marvin as my lead. Lee's wonderful horse face combined with his low-key style made him born for the part. I sent over the completed script to Lee's place by messenger. He called me the very next morning.
"Sammy," he barked when I picked up the phone, "this is your sergeant speaking!"
It was Christa's idea to cast Mark Ham
ill as Griff. Mark had just appeared in the enormous box-office hit Star Wars (1977) and would help the picture find a younger audience. I was doubtful Mark would accept a supporting role under an old-timer like Lee Marvin, but he did, apparently on the strong urging of George Lucas. The role of Zab, the dogface who's loosely based on me, went to Bobby Carradine. At one point, Corman and I discussed casting the twenty-eight-year-old writer-director Martin Scorsese as the Italian soldier Vinci, but the part finally went to Bobby Di Cicco. Kelly Ward, who'd had a role in Grease (1978), got the role of Johnson.
Where do you shoot a film about a world war thirty-five years after the fighting is over? Our top three contenders were Yugoslavia, Tunisia, and Israel. Gene brought back a good scouting report from Yugoslavia. They had everything we needed, but their bureaucrats hiked prices sky-high because we were an American production. I took a scouting trip to Tunisia, where producer Tarak Ben Ammar invited me to look over all their wonderful beaches, ruins, woods, and deserts. Tunisia had it all. Besides, Tarak came from a very influential family, so we were promised government cooperation. Still, costs were too high.
Meanwhile, a series of interminable budget meetings were taking place at Lorimar, itemizing the cost of each scene in my shooting script. They came up with a total of twelve million dollars. That was whittled down to ten. The cost cutting continued until we had less than four million to do the entire movie. I had to pare down scene after scene without truncating the rhythm or the truth of the movie. We decided to shoot in Israel, where we'd get the most bang for our buck. The only problem was that they had no forests in Israel.
Before I gave Corman the green light, I flew to Israel and immediately went over to the beach. Alone, I walked along the Mediterranean thinking about our nighttime invasion at Staoueli, Algeria, trying to relive that first amphibious campaign. Yes, the Israeli beach would do. But to recreate Omaha Beach at Normandy, we needed a large stretch of sand, plus a high plateau looking down upon it. Gene suggested we build a riser out of rocks and scaffolding to replicate Omaha's topography. When I saw the design by our art director, Peter Jamison, I was sold.
One of our Israeli crew members heard I was looking for a wooded area. He took me to see a sanctuary outside Tel Aviv that had a patch of beauti ful trees. The trees had inscriptions on them, having been planted thirty years before by member states of the United Nations, when President Truman recognized the state of Israel, in 1948. It was an unforgettable place but much too small to use as a location. We'd end up shooting the Belgian and Hurtgen battle scenes in the forests of Ireland.
The sergeant (Lee Marvin) with his four dogfaces (left to right), Griff (Mark Hamill), Zab (Bobby Carradine), Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), and Johnson (Kelly Ward), on the beach at Normandy (Israel)
My biggest location headache was the Falkenau concentration camp scene. After much searching, we located an abandoned armory in the heart of Jerusalem called Camp Schneller. The Israeli army had used the place to store ammunition during the Six-Day War. It was just what we needed. The problem was the armory was just across from a Hasidic religious school. Corman tried to discourage me from planning the scene there, figuring that we'd never get permission from the military authorities.
Camp Schneller's commanding officer was General Shilo. The general and I shared a passion for cartoons. With the aid of a drawing pad, I showed the general what we wanted to do in the armory. Then I gave him the drawing pad as a souvenir. I promised to shoot as quickly as possible and then remove the portraits of Hitler and the swastikas before the Hasidic Jews found out about it. Formal permission was granted.
To populate the movie's concentration camp, I picked the skinniest, boniest extras I could find, framing their dark eyes as they stared blankly into space. The camp and its prisoners needed to look like they came out of Picasso's "blue period." In the camp scene, Griff comes upon the startling evidence of Hitler's Final Solution, finally confronting a young SS soldier hiding among the ashes and bones inside an oven. The actor we hired to play the SS soldier was a young Israeli attending a religious school. The kid confessed that he didn't know that the camps were as horrible as the set we'd recreated. Taking him aside during a break, I explained how the real camp we liberated at Falkenau was much, much worse. I told him about the smell of death that permeated the place, about the emaciated corpses. He was stunned. What the hell were they teaching those kids at school? Certainly not reality.
The camp scene was emotionally draining for everyone on set. Griff loses his control and brutally kills the SS trooper. Many crew members ended up in tears. Mark Hamill played it beautifully, a sweet young man out of place as a warrior, turned suddenly vicious when face-to-face with the evil he's been battling.
One of Gene Corman's principal worries was Lee Marvin's reputation as a hard drinker. Lee did get drunk a couple of times, but, for cryin' out loud, he was carrying the entire picture on his shoulders! Lee's infrequent binges never interfered with our tough shooting schedule. It was a dream come true to make a movie with an actor like Lee Marvin. We didn't have much to say to each other before we'd shoot a scene. He'd always get himself in character. Many times, a glance, a nod, or a grin would be all the direction I'd give him. I've rarely been as locked in on the same wavelength with an actor.
The entire cast worked hard to hit each emotional nail on the head. The frills of larger budget productions were completely absent from The Big Red One. My crew needed to be innovative in every scene, relying many times on close-ups rather than on crane shots to convey the scope of the conflict. With our bare-bones budget, my DP, the talented Israeli cameraman Adam Greenberg, was a blessing. Greenberg could overcome every hurdle. Adam now lives in Hollywood and shoots big studio pictures, like The Terminator (1984), Ghost (1990), and Sister Act (1992.). Arne Schmidt, my assistant director, was terrific. He's a prominent producer today. His sweet wife, Laurel, came along as our set photographer.
Everyone recognized this was my beloved project and worked their asses off for me. Since they understood the high aspirations of the film, I didn't want to let them down. For everyone who'd put their trust in me, I was intent on making The Big Red One a film they'd be proud of. Most of all, it had to honor the soldiers from the First Division, especially the ones who didn't survive.
The irony of shooting the century's biggest yarn in the little country of Israel was constantly apparent. I had Israelis costumed as soldiers of the Reich, wearing their yarmulkes under Nazi helmets. For the part of Schroeder, the SS commander, I'd cast the German actor Siegfried Rauch. His getup brought back terrible memories, and the Israeli crew treated him coldly. Rauch had been born after the war and felt lousy about his country's legacy. Still, as long as he wore that SS uniform, people had a knee-jerk reaction and scorned him. The greatest irony of it all was that I, a nonpracticing Jew, skeptical of all religions, had wound up directing my most cherished picture in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Feeding the crew was problematic because many kept kosher. Our caterers did the best they could. Slipups were inevitable. Somebody once sent us a box of delicious American doughnuts. We wanted to share the goodies, so we offered them around. With disapproving looks, the kosher eaters refused to even taste them. The doughnuts were traife, or unclean.
Every day of The Big Red One shoot, I was thankful for my independent production. Cast and crew slowly got caught up in my story and worked around every obstacle. Holy smoke, to think that at one time I'd been close to signing with Warner Brothers to do a big studio picture with John Wayne! When you're making small-budget films, you've got to be constantly on your toes, shooting at an incredible pace. On top of that, the heat in the Mideast is phenomenal, like being in a permanent sauna. Despite my slight sixty-six-year-old body, I felt like a spring chicken on the set of The Big Red One, solving problems right and left. Even then, I'd get sideswiped unexpectedly. My crew revolted one day because a costume designer from California who'd been doing excellent work made an unthinking anti-Semitic remark. Nar
rowly averting total mutiny, I fired the man on the spot and sent him back to the States. We finished the picture with Israeli costumers.
One of the big disasters was Gene Corman's hiring of an inexperienced film editor. I found out later the guy had never cut a feature film before. No wonder he'd overlooked numbering the cans of exposed film coming off the set each day. When I found out, I blamed myself. I should've insisted on having my own editor with me, a real pro like Gene Fowler Jr. I thought Corman knew what he was doing, but he was trying to save money in the wrong place.
During most of the production, Christa, Samantha, and I were staying at the Sharon Hotel in Herzliyya. Samantha was three and a half by then, picking up Hebrew easily. She called us Ima and Aba, the Hebrew words for "Mother" and "Father." To this day, my daughter is comfortable around people of different languages and ethnic backgrounds because of all the countries we lived in when she was a little girl. Many evenings, after the day's shooting was finished, I took the family to nearby Netanya in a horse carriage, where we'd have supper in a modest restaurant on the beach. One evening, we met another couple with a small boy at that place. The man bore a striking resemblance to Francois Truffaut. He was Elie Wiesel, who'd win the 1985 Nobel Prize for Peace for his writings on the Holocaust. There and then, we struck up a friendship with Elie, his wife, Marion, and their little boy, Elijah. Marion wanted to bring Elijah to the set because the boy was dying to meet "Luke Skywalker" in person. A visit with Mark Hamill was arranged.
The Wiesels were warmhearted, intelligent people. As the world knew, Elie's whole family of fourteen had been wiped out in the Nazi camps. He gave me one of his books that evening. Since then, I've read all his stuff. I have only admiration for the way Elie Wiesel has used the terrible legacy from the Holocaust to search for spirituality and purpose, to remind us not only of the pain that we can inflict on each other but also of the damage we can absorb. Weisel has never seen his prominence as anything but a platform to raise a red flag against injustice and to warn against apathy.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 49
