by Mark Harris
But many of Harrison’s instincts were wrong and costly—Bricusse had to waste an entire draft accommodating his insistence that Dolittle be depicted as a sophisticated London physician before he admitted the idea was a dead end.38 And even as Harrison was slowing everyone down, his agent, Laurie Evans, was demanding that the actor be guaranteed $75,000 for three weeks of overtime, a situation that Arthur Jacobs apoplectically called “disaster and blackmail.”39 An excitable man on the calmest of days, Jacobs was now beginning to suffer physically from the stresses of Doctor Dolittle; in the spring, he was hospitalized for what he told his colleagues was surgery for “some rather irritating sinus condition.”40 But Jacobs, a forty-three-year-old hyperactive overweight chain-smoker, was really beginning to suffer from heart problems. When he was released from the hospital, he apologized to Harrison for missing a meeting in New York, saying only that he was under doctor’s orders not to travel.41 In the next month, he pushed ahead, hiring crew members, fighting the picture’s rising costs, and telling no one that he was seriously ill.
In late June, the Doctor Dolittle crew flew to England to set up shop in Castle Combe, a small town in Wiltshire that proudly advertised itself as “the prettiest village in England,” a designation it had won from the British tourist bureau. With Barnumesque brio, Jacobs started talking up the production in the press, ordering the staging of a photo opportunity in which Chee-Chee and Polynesia the parrot would “greet” Harrison upon his arrival in London,42 and boasting that the movie would use 1,150 animals, 480 of them for the “Talk to the Animals” sequence alone (“He does the number and the camera slowly pulls back showing 480—I mean four eight oh!—animals standing there,” he announced with delight), and “the biggest publicity and merchandising campaign ever.”43 Jacobs was somewhat more restrained when discussing the budget, telling one reporter the movie would be made for $12 million and another that the final cost would be somewhere between $11 million and $15 million.44 In fact, Doctor Dolittle was already moving briskly past the $15 million mark, in part because of a colossal miscalculation: Nobody at Fox had realized that the hundreds of animals that had been trained in California would have to be quarantined as soon as they were shipped to England. An entirely new troupe of birds and beasts had to be found and trained on the spot, while the Jungleland animals were returned to California to be held for use on the studio lot.
Castle Combe welcomed the production with a combination of suspicion and delight. Residents were not happy when Jacobs’s crew decided the village wasn’t quite pretty enough and went through the town tearing down Coca-Cola signs and antennae. They were temporarily mollified when Jacobs got Fox to pay for a community antenna to bring the quaint little town what it really wanted—better TV reception. But when Jacobs had his construction team dam the local trout stream and fill it with artificial seaweed and rubber fish in order to make it deep enough to pass as a river on which Dolittle could set sail, grumbling gave way to sabotage.45 On June 27, before the actors arrived, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, a twenty-two-year-old baronet, and another man were arrested for trying to set fire to an outhouse with a can of gasoline and blow up the sandbag dam. His goal, he announced, was to stop “mass entertainment from riding roughshod over the feelings of the people.”46 (Fiennes, a distant cousin of the actor Ralph Fiennes, later became a well-known explorer and writer and was briefly considered as a possible replacement for Sean Connery when Connery quit the James Bond series in 1967.) The baronet’s unsuccessful attempt at vandalism did no real damage to the production.
As Richard Fleischer put it, “It is the weather, not the bombs, which has made life intolerable.”47 Of the two months the Dolittle production spent in Castle Combe, all but five shooting days were either shortened or canceled altogether because of the constant downpours—a condition about which the studio had chosen to ignore all warnings.48 “Big rain,” says Samantha Eggar, reading from her diary entries at the time. “‘More rain…. Rained all day…. Whiled away the time with Pat [Newcomb] and Tony [Newley] and the Rosses [Herb Ross and Nora Kaye]…. Poured all day…. Pouring again.’ It’s on every page.”49
“Castle Combe is a gorgeous place, but everywhere you walked there was either cowshit or mud,” says Ray Aghayan, the film’s costume designer. “It rained every day except the one day we needed it to rain—we had to shoot that day with phony rain.”50
Even on the rare occasions when the weather was forgiving, the animals were not. Shooting with animals that had barely been trained was “not easy,” said Ross, who had been brought over to stage the musical sequences. “The script just says, ‘Swans do something,’ and we have to see what they do.”51 The fields where many of the animals were kept became so saturated with rain that they turned into swamps. The rhinoceros got pneumonia. In his autobiography, Harrison wrote that the animals became “restless and angry” (“I was bitten by a chimp, a Pomeranian puppy, a duck and a parrot”), that their trainers were occasionally abusive, and that shooting was “inordinately slow.” Even a shot as simple as one in which Dolittle addresses a few lines to an attentive parrot and squirrel who are standing on a railing became a nightmare when the recalcitrant squirrel wouldn’t stay still. When crew members tried to wrap tiny wires around its paws and then attach the wires to the rail with tacks, the squirrel became understandably agitated. The production broke for lunch, and Fleischer, furious, went off to find a local veterinarian to find out how the squirrel could be sedated. In the afternoon, trainers filled a fountain pen with gin and fed it to the squirrel drop by drop. Finally, Harrison wrote, they got “a few seconds of film showing the squirrel…nodding and swaying” before it passed out cold.52
The cast and crew greeted each new catastrophe with gallows humor. “We are deep in the heart of British Occupied Wiltshire making a grand Todd-AO Classic—‘Dr. Dolittle,’” Newley wrote to a friend. “You will probably be seeing it in 1984!”53 But a generational rift quickly developed, with Harrison and Fleischer on one side and Newley and Eggar on the other. Harrison, wrote Fleischer, thought the younger actors were “twits when they clowned around on the set and disturbed his concentration.”54 But Harrison was so consistently unpleasant to Newley that the younger actor had little reason to make things easier for him.
As Doctor Dolittle fell further behind schedule with every day of rain, Dick Zanuck voiced his support for the production, and his father backed him up, at least publicly. Although 20th Century-Fox had lost $39 million during the catastrophic era of Cleopatra in 1962, it had reported an $11.7 million profit for 1965. Darryl Zanuck may have grumbled that “stars today think nothing of asking $500,000 to $750,000…. I used to make entire pictures—good ones—for that!”55 but he wasn’t about to change the think-big strategy that had brought the studio The Sound of Music.
Jacobs, however, found himself under increasing pressure. He was already thinking ahead to the Los Angeles shoot, trying to book Maurice Binder, creator of the famous title sequences for the James Bond movies, to shoot Dolittle’s opening credits without any principal actors, using the animals that had been sent back to Jungleland;56 he was replacing cast members on the spot (Richard Attenborough stepped into a role that was originally to be played by character actor Hugh Griffiths with barely a week’s notice); and, most pressingly, he was trying to decide whether the production should tough it out in Wiltshire or cut its losses. At first, Jacobs had leaned toward keeping the Dolittle crew in England well into September, but as the weeks dragged on, he realized it was time to give up. Doctor Dolittle’s elaborate house and yard would have to be meticulously reconstructed on a soundstage in Los Angeles. In mid-August, he and Fleischer decided to shut down the production, and his health got worse. Jacobs fought an ongoing battle with Fox about what the studio considered his overuse of limousine drivers, telling them that “I have been in the hospital and I am not allowed to carry heavy suitcases.”57 But as production in England wrapped, there were some days he was so ill that he couldn’t even get out o
f bed in his suite at the Savoy Hotel in London. “Arthur would always insist he had indigestion,” said director J. Lee Thompson, a friend. “But we knew it was heart trouble. He was not a well man.”58
SIXTEEN
In the summer of 1966, Norman Jewison and Hal Ashby began working together on preproduction for In the Heat of the Night. Ashby was an editor by trade; he had learned his craft working under the veteran film cutter Robert Swink, assisting on William Wyler’s Friendly Persuasion and The Children’s Hour and also on George Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank and The Greatest Story Ever Told. By the time Jewison met him, Ashby had gotten his first job as lead editor, on Tony Richardson’s The Loved One; the professional bond that began when he edited Jewison’s The Cincinnati Kid was cemented when the two teamed up on The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
Although Ashby’s only credit on In the Heat of the Night is as its editor, he was, by every other definition, what would now be considered a co-producer; his work with Jewison was, according to cinematographer Haskell Wexler, the single most important creative partnership on the movie, and it started before a foot of film had been shot. Ashby was a rarity in mid-1960s Hollywood: a day-in, day-out pothead who was also a workaholic. Although at thirty-six he was at least a generation older than the kids who were converging on Haight-Ashbury and beginning to preach the gospel of Timothy Leary, Ashby, an ex-Mormon raised in Utah, grew his blond hair long, wore beads, and was the first in his crowd to tune in and turn on. But, at least at that point in his career, he did it without dropping out. “In those days, there was a kind of bohemian aspect to filmmaking,” says Jewison. “We worked on a Moviola, and the cutting room had that pungent smell—the smell of film. And everybody smoked a little pot. It was a very relaxed atmosphere. Hal was a hippie. But I’ve never seen anyone so obsessed with film. At nine o’clock at night, I’d say, ‘Hal, I have to go, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a wife, we’ve been working all day, I’ve got to go, and you’ve got to go. Now come on.’ And he’d say, ‘Hey, man, I know what, let me take another whack at this, we can tighten it.’ And I would come back and he would have slept there all night. He went through five wives that way.”1
For all his aging-flower-child eccentricity, Ashby had serious ambitions, and he was up front with Jewison about his desire to get away from the Moviola and start directing his own movies. But until that happened, he reveled in the opportunity to work under the wing of the director, who considered him a “younger brother.” Ashby became a jack-of-all-trades on In the Heat of the Night; he served as liaison between Jewison and Mirisch, he helped to fill out the movie’s supporting cast with casting director Lynn Stalmaster and supervised the hiring of a crew, he worried over story points in Silliphant’s script, he nudged Jewison when he was falling behind in duties like location scouting, and he made suggestions for shots that he was already anticipating putting together in the editing room.
Ashby and Jewison were deep into prep work for the shoot when Sidney Poitier left for London; while he was waiting for In the Heat of the Night’s late September start of production, he snuck in another movie, almost as an afterthought. The entire budget of Columbia’s To Sir, with Love was a rock-bottom $640,000. The project, based on a 1959 novel by Guyanese writer E. R. Braithwaite, had been kicking around for years—Harry Belafonte had once considered playing the lead2—and it’s likely that Mike Frankovich decided to make the film only because he had a professional relationship with both Poitier and producer-director-writer James Clavell, whose novel King Rat had been adapted into a reasonably well-received drama for the studio in 1965. Poitier’s role in To Sir, with Love was a chance for him to play the flip side of The Blackboard Jungle. This time, he would be an idealistic but sharp teacher who manages to make an enduring impression on a group of surly but not terribly menacing British teenagers. Even the studio, wrote Poitier, felt the script was “too soft, too sweet, too sentimental.” But at a time when the actor’s every decision—most recently his tentativeness about whether to play Othello—subjected him to public scrutiny and interrogation, Poitier may have relished the chance to escape from the Central Park West apartment where he now lived in solitude; and from American racial politics altogether. The shoot took up just a few weeks, and Poitier, though he felt Columbia’s budget was “offensively meager,” agreed to a salary of just $30,000 in exchange for a percentage of the overall gross.3
While Poitier was filming at England’s Pinewood Studios, Jewison was traveling through the Midwest, looking for a location that could be visually convincing as Wells, the sleepy southern hamlet described in Ball’s novel and Silliphant’s script, but would still satisfy his star’s requirement that In the Heat of the Night be shot north of the Mason-Dixon line. He finally settled on Sparta, a tiny Illinois town south of St. Louis near the Missouri border that had everything the screenplay required except a cotton plantation, an essential location that nobody wanted to write out of the script. Jewison gambled that once production got under way in Illinois, he would be able to convince Poitier to head south to cotton country for at least a few days of work; meanwhile, he concentrated on finding ways to keep the budget as low as Walter Mirisch wanted. Making a movie on location with two well-paid stars for significantly under $3 million meant cutting corners wherever doing so wouldn’t hurt the movie; the town of Wells was renamed Sparta, for instance, just so the production wouldn’t have to pay crew members to repaint the name on the local water tower.4 Economizing also meant using unknown actors in smaller parts, and that meant looking to New York theater and television. For the role of Harvey Oberst, the drifter who becomes Sheriff Gillespie’s primary murder suspect, Jewison had considered several young actors, including Jon Voight; he was about to cast Robert Blake when Lynn Stalmaster met Scott Wilson, a lean, handsome twenty-four-year-old Georgia native who had never made a movie before. Stalmaster and Jewison were looking for an actor who was physically fit enough for a long, complicated chase sequence. “At the time, I was parking cars in Los Angeles at the first topless place in California,” says Wilson. “It did a brisk lunchtime business as guys would drive up, jump out of their cars, run in, and run out again. You had to park their cars up in the hills and run back and forth, up and down, so I was in good running shape.” Wilson auditioned the day before Blake was to be offered a contract and won the job on the basis of a cold reading in which he knew nothing about the character he was playing.5
For most of the other roles, Stalmaster turned to actors he had used in TV shows. William Schallert, who played the town’s racist mayor, was a veteran of The Patty Duke Show. Anthony James, another suspect in the film, had read for a small part in the western series Death Valley Days, and his lanky, intense look stuck in Stalmaster’s mind. Many of the actors, including Warren Oates, who was hired to play Officer Sam Wood, had been cast by Stalmaster in Slattery’s People, a politically progressive CBS drama about urban politics that was well reviewed but canceled in 1965 after one season. (Oates beat out a pair of actors Stalmaster cast regularly throughout the early 1960s, Ed Asner and Gavin MacLeod.)6
The sole exception to Jewison’s decision to populate the cast with lesser-known performers was Lee Grant, who was signed to appear in two short but important scenes as the murder victim’s widow. Fifteen years earlier, Grant had won an Oscar nomination for her film debut as a shoplifter in William Wyler’s Detective Story, only to have her movie career destroyed by the blacklist. As was the case with many Hollywood victims of McCarthyism, says Stalmaster, “we were able to bring her into television, mostly in New York. In the days of shows like Ben Casey and Slattery’s People, there were people, directors like Sydney Pollack and Leo Penn and Mark Rydell, who abhorred the abuses of the time and would hire these people.”7 In 1966, the effects of the blacklist were still being felt: Members of the Writers Guild of America were battling with the studios over the issue of withholding credit from writers who had taken the Fifth Amendment about their political beliefs,8 and directors were in f
ederal court, fighting their own guild’s requirement of an anti-Communist loyalty oath.9 For Jewison, who was such a committed liberal that a friend once joked that “if Norman gets reincarnated, he’ll want to come back black and Jewish and blind,”10 casting Grant was a chance to rectify an injustice. At the time she was hired for In the Heat of the Night, Grant had just won an Emmy for the TV soap opera Peyton Place, but she had not worked in a major role in a studio film for more than ten years.
Bonnie and Clyde was also heading toward its first day of production, but now that Arthur Penn was aboard, Robert Benton and David Newman’s screenplay was being rewritten, and in one of its final overhauls, Clyde Barrow became unambiguously heterosexual. How and why the ménage à trois between Clyde, Bonnie, and their male getaway driver was eliminated from the script months after Benton had warned Beatty that its inclusion was non-negotiable (and after Beatty had assured him that he wouldn’t flinch at playing a bisexual character) remains a matter of dispute even after forty years. “It never occurred to me to tamper with that,” says Beatty. “It would have been a sign of some sort of chickenheartedness. When Arthur decided to do the movie, he said, ‘I want to make a change.’ I said, ‘I would think that’d be the last thing you want to change,’ and he said, ‘No, I think it dissipates the passion between Bonnie and Clyde.’ And I agreed with him. I think that if you have somebody going in two directions at once, it’s a different can of peas. What does the character want? It’s the thing you have to ask in any picture.”11
“We had been working with Arthur in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on rewrites for about a month,” says Benton, “and Arthur said, ‘First of all, I want you to understand something. This is not coming from Warren, it’s coming from me. There are two problems. One is that you haven’t written the emotional complexity of this [ three-way] relationship. And two, people will say, “Of course they’re gangsters—they’re a bunch of sexual freaks.”’ The moment we took it out, I knew it was right. What Arthur was saying was, you can only take the audience so far. In most gangster movies, there’s a moment when the audience can stand outside, at arm’s length from the characters. We were very careful not to do that. We wanted their affection for the characters to remain.”12