Jésus organized this heist after he became convinced that the man he thought was his mentor had no special feelings for him. (Jésus: “I’m a student to you.” Nazerman: “You’re nothing to me.”) Now Jésus waits on the sidelines, pretending to be uninvolved, until he sees that one of the punks, ignoring his instructions, has a gun and is pointing it between Nazerman’s eyeballs, trying to force the intransigent old man to open the safe. Dashing forward to protect his boss; Jésus is shot. As the others flee, he wriggles into the street, clutching his gut.
Nazerman emerges from his stupor, runs out to the sidewalk, and pushes through the crowd to reach the dying boy. He holds J£sus’s bloody hand as J£sus mutters, “I told them no shooting,” and then expires. Hovering over Jésus’s body, Nazerman puts fierce fingers to his ravaged face and tries to howl. Three brass notes fill his silent scream.
The pawnbroker plunges back into his shop. Slowly he impales his hand on a receipt spindle, trying to reach some answer through the self-inflicted pain, and as he does, he’s visited by a reprise of memory cuts of the last two days, many of them calling forth the customers he’s dismissed as pitiable “creatures.” (The reprise montage was a tame device at this point, too tame to have much impact.) As Jésus is taken away in an ambulance, his mother wailing, and crowds milling in the eternal Harlem day, Nazerman runs hysterically out of his shop and down the street, a man who has finally been forced to feel, but to no advantage.
In the spring of 1963, I took the workprint of The Pawnbroker to Los Angeles to screen it for a high-level Hollywood committee consisting of actor Gene Kelly, director Fred Zinnemann, and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who were responsible for selecting the American entry for the Berlin Film Festival. The screening was set for 3:00 p.m. at the Directors Guild Theatre. At three-forty-five the three men arrived, offered apologies for being late, and additional apologies for the pressing five o’clock appointments that would force them to leave before the end of the film. Inasmuch as I was screening an obscure, privately produced New York film without titles or music, their courteous attention for seventy-five minutes was about as much as I had the right to expect. Nonetheless, when the lights came on in the huge auditorium one hundred and fifteen minutes later, all three were still seated. They were traumatized. The Pawnbroker was selected to go to Berlin, and later that year it won the first prize.
I discovered when I returned to New York that Lumet planned to hire John Lewis, the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, to write the score. I protested that Lewis’s music was too cerebral for this picture and I suggested Quincy Jones, the former trumpeter for Count Basie who was now leading his own band. Lumet invited Jones to a screening from which he emerged (as he later said) “covered with goose pimples.” He had written notes to himself on a matchbook cover. Among his notations were the words “Kol Nidre,” the lamentful Yom Kippur liturgy. Both Lumet and I sensed at once that the right man had been chosen. His score evolved into a mournful blending of Jewish themes and jazz rhythms, rhythms that were so complex he asked his friend Dizzy Gillespie to come to the recording session and tap out the beat for the band. The score was a masterful first-time achievement. Afterward, Jones moved to California, left the record business, stopped arranging for jazz bands, and devoted himself to scoring films. In Cold Blood, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, and The Anderson Tapes are among the more than two dozen films he has since scored.
Despite the Berlin award, The Pawnbroker was quickly mired in serious problems that held up its distribution for two years. Trouble began when the Legion of Decency (the national Catholic censorship board) condemned the picture for frontal nudity. Immediately thereafter, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) refused their seal of approval. Ely Landau, the producer, was enraged; he protested the ruling and ultimately took the association to court. To quell the growing tempest, the entire forty-member MPAA Board was convened, an emergency procedure that had been invoked only twice before in the association’s forty-three-year history. With the help of proponents like the director Joseph Mankiewicz, the seal was granted.
But all this took time, and Landau was impatient. None of the major companies seemed willing to touch the picture, with or without MPAA approval. Even before the Legion of Decency stigma, distributors recoiled at the heavy content of the film. With the court suit stirring publicity, Landau decided to seize the initiative by establishing a private firm to distribute the picture, and in the end that was how it got into the theaters.
Landau’s importance cannot be overemphasized. Considering how thoroughly movies have become identified with their directors, it would be easy to overlook the work of such a tenacious and farsighted producer—not to mention the screenwriters, the cinematographer (Boris Kaufman), and Rod Steiger, who turned in a volcanic performance. Without minimizing Sidney Lumet’s daring and expertise, we should note that The Pawnbroker was preceded by a distinguished novel, that all its characters and themes originated there, and that Ely Landau found the book, optioned it, and hired two men to write the script before the director ever came on the scene. None of this can be fairly omitted from the story of the film’s success.
When it was finally released in 1965, The Pawnbroker was enthusiastically reviewed, and it has remained a favorite—except for some critics, like Dwight Macdonald and Pauline Kael, who were repelled by the degree of triteness and melodrama. (Kael acknowledged being wrenched by the film, but she was unable to say why.) It was a moderate financial success, as well, although Landau believes it would have done three or four times better had a major company handled it.
Audiences for the most part were devastated. From the very first screenings the response was emotionally calamitous. I still recall an early screening at which a middle-aged woman began weeping uncontrollably and struggled to get out of the room. She was a psychiatrist and the wife of one of the backers. I helped her into the lobby where she waited, sobbing, for the film to end. I believe the effect was so profound because once again an advance in film technique had made something more real. The flashback had gone beyond a convenient plot device and even beyond a backward voyage into an anguished man’s past. It had become, for the first time, an X-ray vision of the anguish itself.
Within a few years all the devices Lumet had pioneered in this picture made their way into film, television, and advertising. The most obnoxious result has been the myriad of hair preparation, deodorant, and sanitary-napkin ads that depict lovers running toward one another in whisper-of-eternity slow motion. The most significant has been a loosening and broadening of film’s ability to suggest the hidden workings of the mind, one of the slowest and most laborious searches in filmmaking history. The Pawnbroker succeeded in penetrating the surface without words; it achieved in cinematic terms what Wallant had done in the novel. And it did so in a way that was accessible to viewers: the movie did not have the confusing tone of an experimental film; Lumet built on convention and took a significant step forward. Fifteen years later, already many of the film’s achievements have become routine. And perhaps in another decade everything we did will seem as archaic as Griffith’s first innovative efforts to banish the dream balloon.
Herb Gardner and Ralph Rosenblum during the cutting of A THOUSAND CLOWNS.
12 ■ A Thousand Clowns
Part I: Flouting Convention
The movie by my measurement is much more than the play. . . . It’s no mere happenstance that author Gardner and Ralph Rosenblum, named as the associate producers, spent ten months on the editing alone.
—PHILIP K. SCHEUER, reviewing
A Thousand Clowns in The Los Angeles Times,
December 19, 1965
In 1964 I turned forty years old. In many respects I had achieved the goal I set for myself at least a dozen years earlier when I determined that I wanted nothing so much as to rise to the top of the editing profession. I had now cut eleven features—the three gangster flicks, five forgotten films called Country Music Holiday, Jacktown, Two Tickets to Paris, Gone Are
the Days!, and The Fool Killer, and three major releases by Sidney Lumet, the last of which, Fail Safe, was completed in 1964. The Lumet films had established me as one of the top two or three feature editors in New York, but to satisfy a more personal ambition, I still felt the need to work with a director who would allow me greater editorial independence.
As the year began I was midway through my second season as the supervising editor of “The Patty Duke Show.” I was still working at the old MKR offices in the Movielab Building on Fifty-fourth Street near Twelfth Avenue, and even though Milford and Katz had long since departed, I kept the MKR name. My offices consisted of four rooms overlooking the West Side Highway and the ramshackle docks on the Hudson River. In the two rooms at either end of the suite, the six editors and assistants I hired to do the actual cutting of “Patty Duke” worked on their separate installments, while the two center rooms I reserved for my current feature work, which at this time was A Thousand Clowns, a filmed remake of a play that had just run for over a year on Broadway.
Nineteen sixty-five was an exciting time to be working in film. The French New Wave directors had shaken many of the premises about how films should be composed, with the result that there was an air of experimentation and daring that showed up in films like Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), Fellini’s 81/2 (1963), Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). In the summer of 1964 Richard Lester released his first Beatle picture, A Hard Day’s Night, with its dizzying editorial flamboyance and unabashed reliance on fast motion, reverse motion, stop motion, and other cutting-room tricks. In the spring and summer of 1965 Lester came out with The Knack and Help! which further flouted convention.
But it was not yet clear what all this fermentation meant or where it was going. No one knew exactly which rules were being broken, and certainly no one had come up with the new set of guidelines to encompass what we have come to think of as modern film style. The biggest film of 1965 was a very old-fashioned picture called The Sound of Music (still one of the top profit-makers of all times), and other hits of the period included Doctor Zhivago (1965), Cleopatra (1963), The Bible (1966), and My Fair Lady (1964), all extremely conventional in technique. The people who were making changes in the cutting rooms of New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, and other major production centers were groping in the dark, sometimes vaguely influencing one another but more often coming to similar solutions out of a shared awareness that the conventional way of making films had come to seem stiff and old-fashioned.
Although I knew that I was living in a period of exploration and change, I had no thought when I came in each morning to piece together the rough cut of A Thousand Clowns that I was stepping into the front lines of the revolution. I had no idea that this would be my chance to really command the editing of an important picture. And the last thing I anticipated was that the film would be hung up in the cutting room for an almost unheard-of eleven months. In those days you either cut a traditional commercial film, a textbook enterprise with a predictable four-to-six-month gestation period, or you cut an avant-garde film, a process that allowed more invention but did not necessarily demand more time. Only an exceptional filmmaker, like Stanley Kubrick, tried to do both by making a serious stab at the time-consuming task of bridging the gap between the traditional film language audiences expected and the new opportunities for expression that were then emerging.
There was no Kubrick in charge of A Thousand Clowns. Rather, we had an unusual combination of personalities—a fanatical young author with a head full of visions, a paternalistic and easygoing director, an experienced and perfectionist editor—that, when stirred together in a woebegone turmoil of enthusiasm, hysteria, and despair, brought forth a transformation that shocked them all.
The script was the work of an illustrator and cartoonist named Herb Gardner who had written the play from which the film was adapted when he was twenty-five and whose only previous popular achievement was inventing the squushy little plastic figure known as the “Nebbish.” For two and a half years Gardner lugged his play from producer to producer, each failure heightening his obsession over what to this day is still the masterwork of his career. “Some producers said it was too funny to be sad,” remembers Herb, “some said it was too sad to be funny, and others said it was too philosophical for a Broadway comedy.” But through Anne Bancroft and her husband, Mel Brooks, Herb was introduced to director Fred Coe, who loved the play, agreed to direct it, saw it through major financial obstacles, and gave tremendous strength to the greenhorn playwright. “My idea of a good production,” says Herb, who probably attended half of the play’s several hundred performances, “was they talk loud and don’t bump into each other. I still remember the opening night in Boston. I saw people actually getting a ticket to go and watch—I was so excited!” Herb went on to write a voluminous screenplay for the film version, and Coe faithfully produced and directed it, taking along many of the Broadway players.
Now neither of these men knew much about the fine points of filmmaking. Fred Coe had produced The Miracle Worker and The Lefthanded Gun, but Clowns was his directorial debut. Herb’s script moved a number of scenes outdoors, allowed for some intercutting between simultaneous pieces of action, and generally attempted to free itself of a stagebound quality. But it was still the most traditional sort of dialogue movie, something that became plain to me when I began the first assembly. I spent a few weeks with the dailies, put them together in a standard, workmanly way, and produced a rough cut that flowed nicely and expertly followed all the nuances of film composition. It wasn’t a very stylish film, but it had some of the funniest material I’d ever seen or heard.
It took me a few weeks to realize, with somewhat wounded pride, that Herb was mortified by what he saw. “I felt responsible as the screenwriter,” he recalls. “They shot what I wrote, but I saw no life in it. It was still too much like a play.” Herb revealed his dissatisfaction to Fred Coe, and thereby initiated the first of a string of peculiar developments that characterized the cutting of this film. Fred, who was enormously fond of Herb, never very possessive about the picture, and not much inclined toward spending painstaking months in the cutting room, agreed to hand over the entire project to the younger man. And that was the last we saw of Fred Coe.
When Herb came to tell me that Fred had moved on to other things, that he, Herb, would be hanging out in the cutting room with me for a while, and that he was hoping to make a few “change-a-roonies” here and there, I thought he meant we’d fool around for a couple of weeks, do a little face-lifting, and soon be on to other things ourselves. He said he wanted to do some more outdoor shooting, that some of the dialogue scenes were too long.
The first thing Herb wanted to do was to look at all the film. “I had never seen a Moviola,” says Herb, “I didn’t know about cutting. I mean nothing. I was a screenwriter, a new screenwriter on top of it, functioning with the authority of the director. I had a lot of feelings and instincts about what I should do, but no vocabulary to translate it. I felt I was in a strange country. I didn’t quite know what an editor did. I remember I said, ‘Which is the machine you put the film on?’ “
For a long time neither Herb nor I had any idea what he was after. But gradually I realized he had no intention of bothering himself with my first cut. He was looking at all the dailies as if a first cut had never been made. More than looking at the dailies, he seemed to be trying to merge with them. The experienced director or the experienced editor looks at the raw material once or twice, selects a shot or an angle, and he’s through. But Herb sat there for hours viewing the same material, often for a dozen times or more, and without any sense of conclusion. For days nothing would happen, except that Herb would run the film.
After weeks of examining the dailies and making little stabs at reworking the opening scene, Herb began bringing in his favorite record albums and asking me to transfer them onto tape—march music, circus music, Dixieland music, Handel’s Messiah, the ragtime piano
music of Eubie Blake. Then he went into a recording studio with Jason Robards, the leading man in both the Broadway and the film production and by now a buddy of Gardner’s, and he recorded him for about two hours playing the ukelele and singing and humming the theme song, “Yessir, That’s My Baby.”
“I was trying to start all over again with a blank canvas,” says Herb. “I thought I’d take the character and try to find music for him. So I got all this marching music, Jason singing, and I labeled it—Jason Soft, Jason Romantic, Jason Whatever. He wasn’t really a singer, he didn’t play the ukelele that great, and his voice cracked and whistled a little, but it was intimate. I’d listen to the tapes over and over, and poor Ralph didn’t know what was going on.”
In fact, nothing in my professional career had prepared me for this dungareed writer who never wore a watch. My major influences were people like Helen van Dongen, who was quick, precise, and efficient, and Sidney Lumet, who was famous for coming in ahead of schedule. Certainly Sidney never sat around staring at a single scene for hours or listening to taped transfers of his favorite records, waiting for an inspiration. We cut Long Day’s Journey in about two and a half months, The Pawnbroker in about five months, and Fail Safe in just over four months. At the end of two full months in the cutting room with Herb Gardner, we had about five minutes of usable film and the promise of eternity hanging over our uneasy marriage. At times I’d look at Herb sculpted before one of the Moviolas and I’d feel like a prisoner in a shaggy-dog joke. I’d want to feed him to the trim bin.
When The Shooting Stops Page 19