by Allen Drury
The day will come when you will sue him in New York State Supreme Court over the release-date of the film—and win. The day will come when he will cry angrily, “I am not so sure you don’t want to see me in jail!” and bang down the receiver on you. But that, in turn, will be succeeded by a renewal of friendship, so that eventually, after it is all over, you will still regard him as a delightful if somewhat unpredictable friend, who may not be Gentle Otto but is still quite a guy, in his own unique way.
For the moment, however, all is sweetness and light as the adventure begins. Presently he comes down to Washington to look over the Senate, somewhat in the manner of Napoleon giving Moscow a preliminary glance, or Nero trying out his fiddle in front of the fireplace in the study. The first thing he tells you is that he is determined to secure permission from the Senate to shoot scenes in the Senate chamber. You tell him this permission has never been granted to anyone. He says he will ask the White House. You say the Senate couldn’t care less what the White House thinks when it comes to matters concerning the Senate. He dismisses this skeptically. You begin to see shaping up the outlines of a titanic battle: Otto Preminger vs. the U.S. Senate. After 18 years around the place, you know who is going to win—the Senate. But you can’t tell Otto. It makes for fun.
A year goes by, during which he keeps worrying all the Senators he can reach about the chamber; without success, though he does get the same cordial permission to shoot corridors, committee rooms, exteriors and everything but the chamber, that is granted to any legitimate applicant. During this period his script-writer, the brilliant Wendell Mayes of Anatomy of A Murder, begins to write the shooting script.
Generously, because the contract does not bind him to it, Otto allows you to read it in each succeeding version and offer your suggestions. You offer fifty or sixty and he accepts five or six, which you have already come to understand is par for the course. In the same fashion, later on, he asks your suggestions on casting. By that time you have learned to be rather vague, because you know he will go right ahead and do it his way, anyway. He does. Fortunately his ideas agree with yours all along the line, so little harm is done to the basic story, the basic philosophy, or the basic characters of the novel.
(His attitude, in fact, gives rise to one of the many private amusements you have as the movie goes along, for you will often hear him describe to visiting reporters how he “made sure that each of the characters, whether you agree with him or not, is shown as being dedicated to his own concept of what is best for the country.” You will also hear him announce proudly on many occasions that he “made sure that the story did not lean either to left or right.”
Since both of these things are exactly what the novel achieves, you are a little amused by this stirring self-portrait of the director rushing gallantly forward to claim credit for doing what your book already does. But you reflect, with a tolerant smile, that when a man is producing a $3,000,000 film, he perhaps has a right to cast himself in an heroic role if he so desires.)
Script completed, Senate still adamant on the chamber but cooperating on their Capitol Hill locations, the day comes when the director and his top lieutenants descend on Washington to begin detailed planning of each individual scene. There is a long-day expedition around the city. Scenes are scanned through the view-finder. Lighting and camera-angles are discussed by a group of businesslike strangers who will soon become as familiar to you as the Washington press corps. Hotel accommodations and the complicated logistics of housing and feeding a movie company are carefully checked. It is roughly two weeks from starting-time, and it appears that the problems with the Senate are not concluded yet.
Now there is a problem that is really typical of the Senate: it won’t stop talking, adjourn for the year, and go home so that the movie can have the premises to itself.
Nonetheless, there is a shooting schedule to be adhered to, the moneybags of Columbia Pictures, which will finance and distribute the film, are impatient for action, stars and technicians have made their plans, hotel reservations are waiting—the machine has reached a momentum that even the Senate can’t stop now. The decision is made to “shoot around” the Senate—to do all the other Washington scenes and locations first, in the hope that the Senate will presently conclude its business, and vamoose.
Even this, however, is not conceded by the director without a struggle. Since many of the Senate exterior and corridor scenes are not near the chamber, he argues that he should be permitted to go ahead and shoot them, even though the Senate is still in session. Once again he runs into the Senate’s stubbornness, finds it greater than his own, and loses. No, Senators say, they simply cannot have cameras and other equipment clogging up their corridors in the last hectic days of a session when tempers are short and work-load heavy. The Senate Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, begins to lose a usually steady demeanor as one emissary after another tries to persuade him to change his mind. He won’t do it, and that’s that. At last the director accepts this. Shooting begins far from Capitol Hill, some 10 miles across town in a quiet residential street where Advise and Consent’s fictional Senator Brigham Anderson lives with his wife and little daughter.
At this point the Washington summer, which heretofore has been reasonably mild, not too hot and not too soggy, decides to go out in a burst of glory. It is the last week of August, and whambo! The temperature shoots toward the upper 90’s, the humidity keeps it company, and those who have worked with the director before begin to talk darkly about their experiences on his version of Exodus, shot in the Israeli desert.
Because he is a stickler for realism, he has chosen private homes in which no rooms can be rebuilt, no walls can be knocked out to permit the camera freer movement, no sets can be expanded to accommodate the 50 or 60 people who crowd in and hover around every scene. The majority are there because they are directly involved in the shooting—the director, the stars, the cameramen, the electricians, the grips, the prop and wardrobe people, the script-girl, the director’s lovely wife, his secretaries and assistants who stand ready to run errands and get questions answered. Others, such as Mrs. Peter Lawford, are there as welcome visitors, friends of the director, the stars, the technicians, the author. The director is extraordinarily generous about this, and only once, in Hollywood, does anyone abuse it. That is Randolph Churchill, and the clash between the two of them is classic.
In the home of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hight, therefore, with actors, director, cameramen, technicians, visitors and all jammed into the living-room, or the sun-porch, or the halls and bedrooms, the stars must emote as the 95-degree temperature makes the great spotlights and arc-lights even hotter than they ordinarily are. You very rapidly begin to acquire a great respect for Hollywood people, most of whom are earnest, dedicated and hard-working.
You realize that this favorable impression is partly attributable to the fact that in Advise and Consent the cast is made up mostly of mature, established, responsible actors and actresses. It is not a story conducive to the Monroe-Brando-Taylor type of temperament, and that type of temperament is not included in the cast. By the same token the director, while he frequently blows up verbally as a calculated means of maintaining the proper pitch of attention on the set, is not given to wasteful displays of temperament. Most of his pyrotechnicians have a definite purpose. After it is over, you can reflect that in two months of shooting you have seen him genuinely angry on only four or five occasions. For the most part, he has shown a long-suffering and admirable patience with the crew while its members have fussed and fumed and taken the last possible moment of time in order to get a scene or a lighting set-up perfect. He is a perfectionist himself, and usually his displays of temper have been designed to bring out exactly what he deems best in a given scene.
(Now and then, of course, this excuse does not hold water, for there are times when he rides some member of the cast—always a minor one—mercilessly. The victims assure you later, rather nervously, that, “We know that when he criticizes us he’s
really telling Laughton or Pidgeon what to do.” But it is obvious that this is no fun for the substitutes, however they may rationalize it in their own minds.)
So the shooting moves along through the first weeks of September, and the days settle into a familiar pattern. Essentially it boils down to: set up the scene—rehearse it—shoot it—strike the scene; set up the next scene—rehearse it—and so on. More subtly, each new scene is a challenge, each has its own problems of lighting, camera-angle and interpretation, and each contributes its bit of shading to the overall impact that will be achieved weeks later in Hollywood when the film is out and edited and put together in proper sequence.
Around this process, an endless bustle of human detail goes on all the time.
The hair-dresser and the make-up man, patting and fluffing and retouching Gene Tierney, who plays the society hostess, Dolly Harrison, and Inga Swenson, who plays Brigham Anderson’s wife. The chief wardrobe man, a professional but good-natured cynic, making his sourly amusing comments as he squabbles with the script-girl over which tie Don Murray wore in a related scene five days ago. The script-girl, worrying endlessly about just such details, which must be consistent when the completed sequence is put together later. The casting director, parading a string nervous beauties before the director so that he may choose one to be a Senator’s secretary. A lawyer for one of the technical unions, explaining to the director why extra—and useless—men must be paid salaries to sit around doing nothing. The director’s explosive and loud-voiced rebuttal. The airplanes, flying over just as a dramatic scene reaches its peak, so that sound man Harold Lewis yells “Stop!” and the whole thing has to be started over—and started over—and started over—. The visiting foreign journalists, expressing their naïve horror at the fact that anyone would be honest enough to depict some of the harsher aspects of the political process: “Eeen my countree, we woold not dare!” Which makes an American think: too bad, about your country.… The daily showing of yesterday’s “rushes,” the raw, un-cut, unedited versions that send the director and the head cameraman into hitter tiffs over the fact that somebody goofed and forgot to shade a light, so there’s a big shadow on Walter Pidgeon’s face or a strange, sharp angle to Gene Tierney’s. The card-games and the gossip as the company sits about waiting for another scene to be set up. The disruption of a quiet community as half a dozen enormous sound-trucks fill the tree-shaded street, grinding out form their own power plants the electricity needed for the enormous lights and the voracious camera. The police-whistle of the director’s assistant, commanding silence, and his constantly reiterated cry, “Shooting! Everybody please be very quiet!” The anxiously-awaited, “Cut! Print!” of the director as he finally, after the third or fourth or seventh or eighth take, gets what he wants.
How the actors manage to give it to him is one of the major miracles of movie-making, for there they are, pinned in the eye of the camera under the glare of a dozen lights, watched by a hovering ring of attentive, critical people, required to portray the most intimate emotions on one with what Charles Laughton refers to as “the conviction of the first time.”
“However many times a scene is taken,” he says, “you must always be able to approach it with the conviction of the first time.”
It is the achieving of this that some of the most fascinating elements of a movie come into play, for here the actors make their own highly personalized contributions to the film. Their styles range from that of Laughton himself, who confesses that he approaches each scene with “terrible butterflies”—only, of course, to do each scene brilliantly—to the “method” type of acting that gives Don Murray his particular sensitivity and strength.
For Laughton, Pidgeon, Lew Ayres, Franchot Tone and others of the older Hollywood generation, it is a matter of studying the script, memorizing it, analyzing the characters, planning bits of “business” that will bring out the portrait that each star sees in the character he has been selected to play, growing into the part inch by inch, patiently building it with a thousand deft touches.
For Don Murray, for George Grizzard, who plays the blackmailing Senator Fred Van Ackerman, for Inga Swenson, it seems to be, either consciously or unconsciously, the sort of acting associated with the “Method” school—a more intuitive, more emotional, more inward approach to the character.
“When I want to portray anger,” Don says with a grin, “I pretend I’m giving Otto hell. Pretending is the only chance I’ll ever get to do it!”
In pursuit of the “method,” he can usually be seen prior to one of his scenes, pacing up and down, concentrating with a frown on some past experiences whose memory will produce the emotion he is after. In the same fashion, Inga Swenson says that in one of her big emotional scenes a remembered piece of music produced the necessary mood.
That all of them manage to perform so superbly under the hot lights, the camera and the ever-watchful audience is a tribute to innate genius fortified by years of discipline. It seems even more remarkable when one realizes how much of a movie is done in disjointed bits and pieces. The setting dictates the shooting. All the scenes in Brig’s house, some early in the movie, some midway, some later, are completed in a week of shooting at the Hights’.
Often, moreover, they are not even shot in the sequence of early, midway, and late. Some of the late ones are shot first, some of the first are shot toward the end. In this process both actors and director must maintain the correct pace and the correct pitch, so that emotions in the scene that will come early in the finished picture will rise gradually into the emotions in a scene that will come later. All of this requires a constant control by the director, a carefully phased expenditure of effort and emphasis by the actors. It is one of the things that makes of each scene a fascinating study in technique, so that in two months there is never a day but has its own special challenge, its own excitement that carries the company forward through many long and grueling hours of dramatic episodes—and what is perhaps even more wearing, the “hurry up and wait” aspects of it, as the technicians take anywhere from one hour to four to get a scene properly arranged and lighted.
This, too, has its excitements and its challenges and its constant interest. Always there is some technical problem to the solved, some new challenge from the camera to be met, as it glides in and out through the action of its long cranes like the head of a great mechanical snake. To solve these problems there are the head cameraman, Academy Award-winning Sam Leavitt, and his assistants; the grips, and the electricians, most of whom have worked together before on many pictures; and the one man who appears to be indispensable, the Key Grip, Morris Rosen. A hundred times a day the shout of, “Rose!” echoes through the set as the need arises for some special gadget to assist the shooting, a wedge of wood to raise a chair or desk, a special type of silk screen to soften a light, some errand or other that must be run. And up comes Rosie, short, stocky, good-natured and even-tempered under the constant provocations of being shouted at by everybody, to do what needs to be done.
The scenes in Brigham Anderson’s house completed, the company begins to move out, in a series of tentative probing operations, toward Capitol Hill where the Senate still sits talking, oblivious to the crisis that it is creating for a motion picture company.
There are moments when it is possible to suspect that the Senate couldn’t care less, but this harsh thought is banished by the director, who lives by the Conspiracy Theory of life. Somebody is against him, that’s why the Senate won’t adjourn; it isn’t the public business that keeps it there, it’s just a willful desire to thwart Gentle Otto. In similar fashion, when permission is first granted him to shoot scenes in the White House, then is withdrawn on the ground that in the present state of the world such goings-on would look too frivolous, it is not because of this reason, in his mind, that it is done. “Somebody over there is against me,” he says darkly. It’s a tough life.
In any event, though the Senate still remains touchy about it, he does move the company close for some ou
tdoor scenes on the Old Senate Office Building steps, and along the Mall that stretches between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. And in due time, of course, the Senate does decide to adjourn, and the Hill is his.
Then come some of the big scenes of the picture, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s examination of Advise and Consent’s nominee for Secretary of State, the elusively equivocal Robert A. Leffingwell, portrayed by Henry Fonda. He and Charles Laughton, portraying Senator Seabright B. Cooley of South Carolina, have great fun acting together.
“You could have ten pink elephants on the stage, all wearing diamond-studded robes, and Hank could come on in a business suit and say, ‘Hi,’ and the stage would be his,” Laughton says. The same thing of course is true of Laughton, in the rumpled suit he wears as Seab Cooley. Together they strike dramatic sparks from each other and provide the picture with some of its most exciting moments. And in these moments, shot in the historic Senate Caucus Room which has held such things as the Pearl Harbor Hearing, the Army-McCarthy hearing, the midget on Morgan’s knee and many another real-life drama, Washington gets into the act as thousands of extras, drawn from all the levels of capital society, participate.
Amiable Casting Director Bill Barnes, besieged by Senators’ wives, ambassadors’ wives, lawyers, doctors, merchants, chiefs, manages to keep nearly everybody happy by funneling most of them into either the Caucus Room scenes or the society party scene at the home of Gene Tierney’s fictitious Dolly Harrison. This party takes place at “Tregaron,” the one actual thing, of all those charges against you, the author, by curb-stone experts on your novel, that you had in mind when you wrote it. You may not have been thinking of Senator X, Senator Y or President Z, as the experts archly insist but you were thinking of “Tregaron.” It gives you real pleasure, therefore, suggest it to the director for a setting, to arrange for him to see it, and to have him agree to use it.
