My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  The problem with adapting a famous novel, a bestseller, is the book is, let's say, 400 pages long. If you write that as a screenplay, you've got a six-hour movie. There is a real science to trying to glean out six scenes that are pivotal. Then you have to figure out how you're going to do this in 125 or 130 pages. It really is a complicated process. The question is not whether you're going to lose something from the novel, but how much. The novel works at 400 pages. You've got to make your movie work in two hours. I'm really adapting 140 pages of that book. Oddly enough, for me, it's easier to write an original, because at least you can go where you want to go. It should be easier to adapt, because there's the story. But you feel very guilty when it's a book like The Eagle Has Landed, which was a bestseller. You say, “Boy, I hope I do this justice, because lots of people really like it.” It would be like The Da Vinci Code. People are going to say, “I thought the movie was fine, but I really loved the book.” When a book becomes a big bestseller, it's very difficult to make a successful movie. The picture was a huge hit in Europe. Perfect European subject matter with that cast and a plot to kidnap Churchill by the Nazis in World War II. Juliet Mills, a great friend of mine, who did Nanny and the Professor, called me and said, “That's my favorite movie of all time.”

  For the London opening, I stayed at the snootiest hotel in the world, the Connaught. The opening night for The Eagle Has Landed was going to be a command performance for Prince Charles and Princess Anne. I walked into the hotel lobby and said to the concierge, “John, I'll need a car tomorrow night.”

  He said, “Yes, Mr. Mankiewicz. Will a Daimler suffice?”

  I said, “I'm sure a Daimler will be just fine.”

  Behind me, I heard a tut-tut noise. It was the hotel manager, Bill Gustav. He said, “Mr. Mankiewicz, please. When one goes to one's own royal performance, one always arrives in a Rolls.” And he leaned past me and said, “Get Mr. Mankiewicz a Rolls.”

  I said, “Thank you, Bill.”

  He said, “Not at all, sir. Reflects on the hotel, you know.”

  He was the quintessential hotel manager. He let me walk through the lobby in blue jeans during filming because I was leaving at six in the morning, but he asked me, very nicely, if I could use the rear entrance to the hotel when I came back at six o'clock in the evening, because he didn't want people with blue jeans going through his lobby. And you respected him. He asked Paul Newman to leave because there were fans out in front of the hotel and he didn't feel it was fair to the other guests to have to walk through those fans in and out. Dad stayed there. Henry Fonda and David Niven were the two actors that he allowed. There were never any fans out in front.

  I was going at the time with a British actress named Suzy Kendall who was just beautiful. She was in To Sir, with Love. I had just arrived in London, and she was going to spend the night in the hotel. I was checking in, and she was standing next to me. Bill looked at her and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Mankiewicz. And how long will Mrs. Mankiewicz be staying with us?”

  Suzy said, “Just visiting, thanks.”

  He said, “Very good, madam.”

  He knew damned well who she was because she was quite popular at the time and she was Dudley Moore's ex-wife. But News of the World would be by, and that would be a no-no for his hotel. Not fair to the other guests. Dick Donner would say, “You have to hold a mirror under people's noses to see if they're alive here.” I was going to have a drink at the Connaught bar with Christopher Plummer, a friend of mine (later, I directed him in Dragnet), who was at the National Theatre. You were not allowed in the bar without a tie on. They had three Mankiewicz ties ready to wear depending on the color of my shirt. It was a wonderful hotel, and that was London in the seventies. It was snootier than Claridge's and very small.

  Suzy Kendall was just a dream. One of the things I really missed in life was not having any kids and never having a bad marriage. Suzy, for some reason, couldn't have children. She and Dudley tried. I tried so hard to give her a kid. When Dudley married Tuesday Weld, Dudley, Tuesday, Suzy, and I would have dinner. There's something rather sick about that. Suzy lived in Hampstead. Beautiful little house. I don't know what happened to her. I haven't seen her in a long time. She was just adorable.

  Going Deep

  In 1976, right after Mother, Jugs & Speed, Peter Yates committed to direct The Deep, which was Peter Benchley's next book (after Jaws). Peter Benchley was a friend of mine, since we went to school at Exeter. He was one of those guys, like Elmore Leonard, oddly enough, who insisted on writing the first draft. He's not a very good screenwriter. It's a different kind of writing. Mario Puzo never finished a screenplay: he was a wonderful novelist, but he wasn't a good screenwriter. One is written through the ear with the dialogue, and one is written through the head. Peter Benchley had written the first draft, then they got somebody else on it.

  It was Peter Guber's first picture as a producer. He did something that I've never heard of before or since in movies. He got Robert Shaw, Jackie Bisset, and Nick Nolte to sign off the book. They never read a script. Guber said, “We're going to lock you in. Peter Yates is available, the script's being written now, and here's Benchley's book.” Peter Yates was unhappy with the script, but not like Robert Shaw was unhappy. When Shaw got to the Caribbean, he said, “We're not going to shoot this.” So Peter Yates and Peter Guber called me. “You've got to come down here. You're the doctor.”

  They sent me the script. I said to Peter Yates, “It's really not very good.”

  Peter said, “I know. That's why we want you down here. If it was very good, we wouldn't have sent it to you!”

  So I said, “Okay.”

  The production was in Tortola, British Virgin Islands. I left L.A. in such a hurry I forgot my passport. The flight went from L.A. to Miami to San Juan, and then San Juan to British Virgin Islands. I got through Miami to San Juan because Puerto Rico's an American protectorate and you didn't need a passport. Peter Guber had somebody go to my house to get my passport. It was handed to a Pan Am pilot and flown down to San Juan, where I stayed at the San Juan Hilton for two delightful days waiting for it.

  Peter Island is a small island, and most of it was the Yacht Club. At the top there were four interconnecting bungalows with a courtyard. The four bungalows were Peter Yates, Jackie, Derek Cracknell (the assistant director), and me. The pages started flying. Peter Guber wrote a book about the making of The Deep. He wrote, “Thank God, Mankiewicz is here and he and Shaw just love each other.”

  Shaw was so smart. He was a huge drinker. In his contract with Columbia, it said that he couldn't drink. Terrible alcohol problems. He had ten kids. He had been married to a beautiful actress, Mary Ure, who died the opening night of a play. She was in Look Back in Anger with Richard Burton. He finally married the nanny, which was great because she took care of all the kids. He died at fifty-two years old. Heart attack. Sean Connery told me about when they were doing Robin and Marian and Shaw played the sheriff of Nottingham. He'd be drunk in the fights. But he was so smart and had a great sense of humor. He could be very cutting. He said, “Now, this line, it's a little complicated for Jackie.”

  I said, “A little complicated?”

  He said, “Well, words aren't exactly the only thing that belong in her mouth.”

  Nick Nolte worshipped him. One day, Nick came on the dive boat and he had a copy of the BBC Radio Times. Rich Man, Poor Man was being run in England, and there was his picture on the cover. Nick asked, “You're from England. Is this good?”

  Robert said, “Why yes, I would say more people per capita get the BBC Radio Times than get TV Guide in America. You can safely be assured your picture will be on everyone's coffee table in the United Kingdom this week.” Nick grinned. Shaw said, “I'm so happy for you, dear boy. Now, perhaps, finally, I can stop explaining to people who you are,” and walked away.

  Nick said, “Isn't he great?”

  I finished half the script and we were all reading it. I was never a big Nick Nolte fan. Not a bad ac
tor, but Jesus, a human being out of control. Robert was making good notes. Nolte said, “Now, this line; I would never say this line.”

  Before I could say anything, Robert said, “Nick, are you saying you wouldn't say it or the character wouldn't say it?”

  And Nick said, “Well, I guess I'm saying I wouldn't say it.”

  Then Robert turned to me and said, “You know, that's the trouble with young actors these days. They don't want to play anything. They just want to be themselves.”

  I asked him about Steven Spielberg. “Is Spielberg really as good as I think he is?” They had, of course, done Jaws together. Shaw said the most prophetic thing. “Young Steven has exquisite taste. He is a wonderful director. But he has one problem: a rather plain-looking fellow, and they're already sending private jets for him and he's going out with actresses. Steven will never be able to make a film about a man and a woman. Ever. He'll never know what it's like to sing under a lady's balcony and have a hot tub of shit poured on your head. Never going to happen to him.” Shaw was absolutely right. Spielberg is a master filmmaker: E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Close Encounters, Jaws. He tried one relationship film called Always. Didn't work. He's never had a love story between a man and a woman. Robert saw it right away. By the way, Shaw's in my favorite James Bond film, which contains one of the best fights ever, the vicious fight in the train compartment between Shaw and Sean. From Russia with Love. That's my favorite Bond. I love that picture.

  I would spend days with Robert. He never wrote a line, but he wanted to talk to me about all the scenes. He had written a great play called The Man in the Glass Booth about Adolf Eichmann. He said, “I'm not going to write this fucking script.”

  I said, “No, I know that.”

  He said, “Nor do you want me to, but we'll talk.”

  Peter Yates would come back from scouting locations at three in the afternoon and Robert and I would still be there, Robert drunk. Visibly. Peter asked, “How can you let him do that?”

  I said, “Peter, I don't know where he gets it. There's no booze here. He either hides it in his pants or it's prehidden inside the bathroom.”

  Howard Curtis, whom I was later going to work with—he was R.J.'s stunt double on Hart to Hart—was Robert's stunt double for diving. Robert had to dive every now and then so they could get pictures of him through his face mask underwater. I tried to go under, but I would use up my forty minutes of air in eleven minutes. I was just panic stricken down there. By the way, Jackie Bisset learned how to scuba dive in the swimming pool of the Peter Island Yacht Club. She was just so wedded to Al Giddings, the underwater photographer. He would say, “Don't worry about the one barracuda. But if you see a school of barracuda, get out of the water as soon as possible. If you see a shark, just get behind me.” I was down there one day, and a shark came swimming by. Suddenly, there were eighteen, twenty people behind this one guy. He just swam right up to the shark and bopped him right in the nose, and the shark went away.

  There was one day on the dive boat at ten o'clock in the morning when Robert Shaw was drunk. He was going to go under, and Howard Curtis said, “Robert, you're not going down. You're pissed.”

  Robert said, “I am not. I haven't had a drink. I'm going down.”

  Howard said, “No, you're not.”

  Robert said, “Get out of my way, Howard,” and Howard coldcocked him. He really protected him because you could die if you go down when you're drunk. And Robert just adored him, loved Howard for that, that he would do that. A lot of stuntmen would say, “Oh, fuck him. He's a big star, let him go down. If he gets the bends or has a heart attack, I tried to stop him.” Howard was terrific.

  The writing credits for the film read Benchley and a very good writer who didn't do a particularly good job on this, Tracy Keenan Wynn (Ed Wynn's grandson). Peter Guber and Peter Yates were so surprised because they thought Tracy Keenan Wynn was going to turn in a corker. But they were not satisfied. I don't want to run anybody else's work down, but Robert was absolutely adamant about it. He said, “We can do better than this.” So my reputation as a script doctor kept growing. Today, there are famous script doctors—for instance, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Paul Haggis. He rewrites the Bond movies for a million bucks. They bring him in to do what I did on The Spy Who Loved Me. I started Moonraker. Cubby asked, “Can you help me and Lewis Gilbert out? We have a premise about a space shuttle being eaten at the beginning of the picture. Can you come up to NASA with us in San Jose for a few days and write some stuff down on a couple of pages?” Which I did because I was so loyal to Cubby. And, Lewis Gilbert, who directed Alfie, was a good director.

  The Deep grossed more than $100 million in 1977, which would be like grossing $350 million today. Whether you get credit or not, everybody knows you were down there doing it: Peter Yates knows, Peter Guber knows, Robert Shaw knows, Jackie Bisset knows, and the studio knows. Peter Yates had a big piece of The Deep: 10 or 15 percent of the profits. David Begelman, not the most honorable fellow, but a good executive who was running Columbia at the time, was a good friend of Peter Yates's. They were offering Peter another picture. Peter went to see David one day. He said, “First, David, let me just say, my business manager and my agent say that you guys owe me six million bucks from The Deep.” There was a silence. He said, “Six million. They've looked at the grosses.”

  David said to him, in essence, “You're probably right. We probably do owe you six million dollars. We're going to offer you two; take it or leave it.” And Peter took it because he knew the alternative was to be in court with the studio for years. He said, “If I go on The Tonight Show and say two million wasn't enough, people will throw food at me. On the other hand, Begelman just cheated me out of four million dollars.” So you always have to make that decision when you have monkey points.

  Clint Eastwood was a cash cow at Warner Brothers. They treated the people that they had deals with so wonderfully. But Clint finally went to them one day and said, “Here's the deal. I'm going to take Screen Actors Guild minimum. Take Screen Directors Guild minimum. When the picture opens and the theaters keep their 30 percent, it's ‘hello partner.' No deductions of any kind; not publicity, not cost for opening it, not interests, not loans, just ‘hello partner.'” A “hello partner” deal is when a studio partners with an actor to share box office gross on a film from dollar one. And they made a “hello partner” deal with him. He was the only guy who could do it then.

  The best deal ever made was by two people who changed television and movies. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball wanted to shoot I Love Lucy in L.A. because they lived there. It was going to be more expensive by—and we're talking the early 1950s—$5,000 an episode, and a whole episode only cost $40,000. And, Desi wanted to do it on film. He was a very smart guy, not the second banana to her, a really good business man. He said to the network, “I'm going to film it.”

  They said, “No, you can't film it, for God's sake. Everything's on tape, on kinescope.”

  Desi said, “I want to film it. We'll put up the five thousand extra every week, Lucy and I, and we want to own the negatives.”

  The network said, “Absolutely.” They laughed at him because there were no reruns in those days. There were no videotapes, there were no DVDs, there was no ancillary market at all. Nobody could ever imagine rerunning them. All of a sudden, Lucy and Desi owned the shows. That was a big event.

  I was watching NCIS and now it says, “Producer: Mark Harmon” in the eighth year. Gunsmoke is one of the longest-running series in the history of television. At a certain point, Jim Arness, playing Marshal Dillon, had to sign up again for three years. He said, “I want a piece of the show and I want to be executive producer.” Bill Paley was running CBS at the time. Another CBS executive said, “If we do this, we're opening a door that can never be closed.” The executive didn't talk with Paley, and John Meston, a producer- writer on the show, was hired in secret to write the show where Marshal Dillon is killed. Burt Reynolds, who was in the series at
the time, becomes the marshal, and they'll just go on and call it Gunsmoke. The executive went to Bill Paley and said, “Here's the situation, Mr. Paley. This is what Mr. Arness wants, and his contract's up in three months. We had an episode written and we can kill him.”

  Paley said, “You mean Gunsmoke, that's been on already for twelve years, and my kids' favorite show? Let me ask you a question: If we give Arness a piece of the show, his production company, are we still going to make money?”

  The executive said, “Oh, yeah, we'll make money.”

  Paley said, “Then do it.” And that started the trend where you see an actor's production company having a piece of the show.

  Rewriting Superman

  At this point, in 1977, I had rewritten The Deep and The Spy Who Loved Me, among others. I was the fixer, and I didn't really want to be the fixer. I wanted to do screenplays like The Eagle Has Landed or Live and Let Die, where I was on from start to finish. Dick Donner had been a really close friend for so long. I was lying in bed, it was five o'clock in the morning, the phone rang, and it was Donner with the most unmistakable voice in the world. He never has to introduce himself. He said, “Get up, get up. I'm in Paris.”