Studio (9780307817600)

by Dunne, John Gregory

  “No kids,” he said. “Everyone is over thirty.”

  “It’s the kids who’ll make this picture a hit,” Harry Sokolov said.

  In a corner of the room, Owen McLean sat down on a couch beside David Raphel, the Studio’s vice president in charge of foreign sales. “Well, David,” McLean said, “What did you think?”

  Raphel, a distinguished-looking middleaged man with a slight foreign accent, wiped a piece of hamburger bun from his lips. “A very useful preview,” he said carefully. “This picture will take very special handling to make it the success we all know it’s going to be. We mustn’t forget the older people. They’re the repeaters. The children won’t get there unless their grandparents take them. The grandparents, they’re the repeaters. Look at The Sound of Music.”

  “There are people who’ve seen Sound of Music a hundred times,” McLean said.

  “My point,” Raphel said. “My point exactly.”

  Slowly the party began to break up. It was after one A.M. and a number of the Studio people were leaving for Los Angeles at 6:30 the next morning. At the door of Zanuck’s suite, Ted Ashley shook hands with Jacobs.

  “You’ve got yourself a picture, Arthur,” Ashley said. “It’s all up there on the screen.”

  “It’ll work,” Jacobs said. “Cut a few things, switch a few things.”

  “It’s going to be great, Arthur,” Rosenfield said. He patted Jacobs on the arm. “None of us has any doubts about that.”

  Zanuck’s suite cleared by one-thirty in the morning. At four A.M. he called Harry Sokolov and told him to round up Hough, McLean and David Brown for a meeting in his room. They convened in Zanuck’s suite at 4:45 A.M., and for the next hour Zanuck went over the picture reel by reel. Before the meeting broke up, shortly before six, it was tentatively agreed to cut the prologue. A decision was deferred on whether to cut any of the musical numbers. Arthur Jacobs was not present at this meeting.

  12

  “And I think Lincoln is a hell of a part,”

  Pandro S. Berman said

  The Monday after the Minneapolis preview of Dr. Dolittle, the following item appeared in Army Archerd’s gossip column in the Hollywood trade paper, Daily Variety: “Arthur Jacobs back from Minneapolis getting congrats on the sneak of Dr. Dolittle.”

  A few weeks later, another item about the Minneapolis sneak appeared in “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade” in the Sunday supplement Parade. (“Want the facts? Want to spike rumors? Want to learn the truth about prominent personalities? Write Walter Scott.”)

  Q. My wife caught the sneak preview of the movie Dr. Dolittle in Minneapolis, and she says it is slow. Did this picture really cost 20th Century Fox $27 million?

  D.T.L., St. Paul, Minn.

  A. The film cost approximately $17 million, but with sales and promotion costs added, the company needs $27 million to break even. The Dr. Dolittle sneaked in Minneapolis, admittedly too long, has now been edited into a shorter, faster moving version.

  The Studio, after the Minneapolis preview of Dr. Dolittle, would have liked to cut the picture’s prologue in its entirety. It was too long, it did not get the anticipated laughs, it delayed the first musical number until too deep in the film, it did not firmly establish the identity and character of the picture, and it made the long cartoon credits that followed anti-climactic. But eliminating the prologue meant cutting the only sequence in the picture in which Rex Harrison rode the giraffe, and the giraffe with Harrison aboard was the major motif in the Studio’s advertising and promotion campaign for Dr. Dolittle. With the world premiere in London less than three months away, it would have been prohibitively expensive for the Studio to institute an entirely new campaign. In addition, millions of dollars worth of merchandising gimmicks tied to the giraffe would have had to be scrapped. The problem was how to cut the prologue and keep the giraffe, and it was Richard Zanuck who finally came up with a solution. Late in the picture, after the intermission, there was a sequence in which Dr. Dolittle goes off through the Sea Star Island jungle in search of a giant whale. In the script as written (and the picture as filmed), the scene dissolved with Dr. Dolittle heading off into the jungle, picking him up in the next sequence on the coast of Sea Star Island. Zanuck suggested that the giraffe sequence from the prologue be cut in between these two scenes so that Dr. Dolittle is actually seen traveling through the jungle. The dialogue from the prologue was excised and in Paris, where he was making A Flea in Her Ear, Harrison looped new words to cover the giraffe’s change in destination. With this detail taken care of, the Studio then cut the rest of the prologue out of the picture. The only remaining problem was that Harrison, in the prologue, wore a different costume than he wore during the island sequences; he disappeared into the jungle in shirtsleeves and one pair of pants, rode the giraffe wearing a frock coat and another pair of pants, and arrived at the coast in the first costume. There was nothing the Studio could do about this. Richard Fleischer, for one, did not seem particularly disturbed by the bad costume match. “Who’s going to notice it?” he said. “If they start picking on that, we’re dead anyway.”

  Besides cutting Dr. Dolittle for the San Francisco sneak, which was scheduled for late October, Fleischer was also preparing The Boston Strangler. At his instigation, the Studio had finally assigned the title role in the Strangler to Tony Curtis. It was a piece of offbeat casting. Curtis’ career was in trouble. He had gone through a number of agents and appeared in a string of frivolous formula comedies that had flopped at the box office. The good picture offers were not coming in and he was seriously considering a bid to host a television series about detectives, in which he would also appear in a given number of episodes. Curtis was desperate to change his career image from the mindless comedy parts he had done for so many years. When he heard that Fox had bought The Boston Strangler, he put in a request to play the part. Mindful of his recent performances, the Studio’s reaction was frigid. A number of name actors were anxious to get the role and scores of unknowns had been auditioned. But Curtis persisted. On his own, he had himself made up to look like his conception of the Strangler, fleshing out his nose and features with putty, rearranging his haircut, dressing himself completely in black. In this reincarnation, he had photographs of himself taken and sent over to Fox. The Studio was still cool. But Curtis as the Strangler intrigued Fleischer. In a Studio projection room, Fleischer went over three of Curtis’ earlier pictures—The Sweet Smell of Success, The Defiant Ones and The Outsider—frame by frame. In each, Curtis had played a man driven and on the run. Fleischer was convinced that Curtis was the man to play the Strangler and, together with producer Robert Fryer, he broke down the Studio’s resistance. The Studio drove a hard bargain with Curtis. “We have the right but not the obligation to use his name in the credits,” Owen McLean said. “It’s a gimmick, sure. But in a lot of situations, his name doesn’t do anything for you. People might think the picture is just another Tony Curtis comedy.”

  One afternoon early in October, Fleischer supervised the setting up of a Panavision camera in a corner of Stage 8 for makeup tests of Curtis as the Strangler. The sound stage was empty save for a clutter of struck sets, props and sketched building exteriors. Nervously puffing on a large brown cigar, Curtis picked his way through the props and entered a portable dressing room set up by the stage door. He was wearing makeup and was dressed all in black—shoes, chino pants, turtleneck sweater. He had flown to Los Angeles that morning from Las Vegas, where he was making his first night club appearance, hosting a show starring Tammy Grimes, and he was due back in Las Vegas for the first show that evening. He checked his hair and his makeup and came out of the dressing room arm in arm with Fleischer.

  The purpose of the test was to see how Curtis’ makeup job looked on film. The bridge of his nose had been built up and his face was slightly puffier. Curtis sat on a stool before a black screen. Fleischer looked through the camera and then went over and brushed some hair from Curtis’ forehead. “Can we have the nose shaped a littl
e more?” Fleischer said. “The same profile, but a little thinner.”

  He went back behind the camera. The film started to roll. An eye-light lit Curtis’ face from the nose upward. Slowly Curtis revolved on the stool, stopping, looking, his eyes flashing.

  “Now look up, Tony,” Fleischer said. “Now down, you hear something, listen, you’re scared, but they don’t have anything on you. That’s right, that’s good, once more around, slowly, slowly, okay.” He went up to Curtis, who offered him a cigar. Fleischer smiled and shook his head. “That was good,” he said. “If we can just shape the nose a little. It looks too much like a prizefighter’s now. Too thick. And we should change the hair a little. Make it longer. You know, the Italians are always combing their hair. Make it longer and we can have a lot of business with a comb.”

  Fleischer asked for another take. This time Curtis circled counter clockwise on the stool. Fleischer shook his head. “Your left side doesn’t look so good,” he said. “Let’s favor the right side today.”

  After lunch, Curtis left the Studio to return to Las Vegas. In the afternoon, Fleischer returned to Stage 8 to make some camera tests. He had been impressed by the multi-image technique used by the films shown at the Montreal World’s Fair, and with the Studio’s approval, was going to use the same techniques with The Boston Strangler. Instead of using a single frame that covered the entire screen, Fleischer would in certain sequences project multiple panels onto the screen, showing related elements of the same scene played simultaneously. He was planning to get some cut footage to see how the process actually looked on screen before The Strangler began shooting in Boston in January. Using two young actresses from the New Talent School, Fleischer shot a number of related scenes from the script—a girl talking on the telephone to a caller making obscene suggestions, her roommate racing to another apartment to get help, a closeup of the caller himself, a boy from the New Talent School. On Fleischer’s chair was a storyboard showing how the three individual shots would be juxtaposed on a single frame, with the different panels growing and diminishing in size as the action progressed.

  Fleischer gave the two girls as much attention as he would veteran actresses. When he was finished he quietly thanked each. “That was nice,” he said.

  “Nice, but I still don’t know what the hell the scene was all about,” the assistant director said.

  Fleischer smiled. “It was dirty,” he said.

  Outside the stage, Fleischer stood in the hot afternoon sun and ran his fingers through his graying hair. “We’ve never made use of the big screen,” he said. “All we’ve done is take what we used to put on the small screen and make it bigger. And then pictures, all pictures, have always had the same frame. It’s like you told every artist in the world that all paintings had to fit in the same sized frame. But with these multiple panels, if you have a horizontal picture, then you use a horizontal frame, a vertical a vertical, an oblong an oblong, all different sizes and shapes.”

  He leaned down to tie a shoelace and started to walk to his office. “This won’t work with every picture,” he said. “But it will work with this one. We’ve got an abstracted story and an abstracted character in Albert DeSalvo.” He paused and raised his face to the sun. “Of course, there are all sorts of problems with a new technique like this. You’ve got to have precise counts or the action on one panel will overlap onto the action of another. You’ve got to lead the audience without letting them know they’re being led. You do it by color, by movement, by action, by size changes in the panels, making them follow the story you want them to follow.”

  He was engrossed in the process and as he walked seemed to be talking almost to himself. “It’s so complicated we’ve got to use a storyboard for the picture. I hate them. I’ve never used one before. They’re for beginners. But with a technique like this that no one has ever used before, it’s the only way you can show your crew what you’re doing. And I’m using a cutter who’s never cut a picture on her own before. She’s been an assistant, that’s all, so she doesn’t have any preconceived ideas. She’s not like a lot of those old cutters, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, this is how we did it on such-and-such a film. This is as new to her as it is to me and she’s been able to come up with a lot of good ideas.”

  He paused on the steps of his office. “And there’s not an abundance of them around,” he said.

  Though Tony Curtis’ wardrobe in The Boston Strangler consisted almost entirely of work clothes, he insisted that everything be custom tailored. The assignment fell to costume designer William Travilla, a high fashion couturier under his professional name, Travilla, and the designer of Errol Flynn’s costumes in some of his swashbuckling and codpiece epics. “I’m not knocking Tony, but he is a pain in the neck to work with,” Travilla said one day. “He’s such a perfectionist. But I guess it’s a very serious picture and the clothes couldn’t be handled by just buying a green zipper jacket. We wanted to get as slender a look as possible, so the pants were dropped to the hipbone and made with fewer pockets. Then the work shirts were made to measure so there wouldn’t be a lot of bulk to push down into the pants. Then everything was put in the washing machine and mangled so that they’d have character. Oddly enough, the changes we made in the clothes aren’t noticeable. The character comes out moody and nasty and certainly doesn’t look custom made. The clothes create a more sensuous approach, and after all, the Strangler had to have sex appeal to get into all those women’s apartments.”

  With a start date set for Hello, Dolly! the Studio was now turning its attention to other roadshow possibilities. One was a dramatization of Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem, John Brown’s Body. The project had been assigned to producer Pandro S. Berman, who had hired playwright Paul Osborne to do the screenplay. A few days after the first draft of the screenplay was completed, Berman and Osborne were summoned to Richard Zanuck’s office to get his reaction.

  “Well, Richard, I’m very excited,” Berman said. “I think we have an Academy Award winning picture here.”

  Zanuck cleared his throat. “I’m excited, too, Pandro,” he said. He nodded toward Osborne. “I wish all first drafts were this good.” There was a speck of cigarette ash on his desk and he carefully swept it into a wastebasket. “There’s just one thing. I think we depend too much on narration, you know, on the words of the poem. I wonder if this could be dangerous. I thought I spotted a number of places where action could tell the story instead of narration.”

  Berman shifted easily in his chair. “As a matter of fact, Richard, I’ve been cutting the script, cutting what my wife calls the Mickey Mouse action, and the things I’ve been cutting are just what you’ve been talking about, the narration.”

  “It shouldn’t be used as a crutch,” Zanuck said.

  “That’s right, Richard,” Berman said. “Where the narrator speaks for Lincoln, we can use Lincoln to speak for himself.”

  “Use scenes instead of narration,” Zanuck said.

  “My feeling, exactly, Richard,” Berman said. “And I’m sure it’s Paul’s.”

  Osborne’s face showed no expression.

  “Let the characters tell the story instead of the goddamn narration, great and beautiful as it is,” Zanuck said.

  “Keep the poetry but go deeper with the people,” Berman said. “So the first order of business in the second draft is to translate the narration into scenes.” He turned to Osborne. “Did you get that, Paul?”

  Osborne nodded.

  “Now I thought the love story is a little shallow,” Zanuck said.

  “You want some complications,” Berman said.

  “That’s right,” Zanuck said. “I want to get deeper into the story. Maybe it can do with a little spice.”

  Berman smiled thoughtfully. “If I may suggest it, Paul,” he said to Osborne, “I think we can give Richard what he’s looking for, the sexy angle, by having Clay sleep with Sally.” He turned to Zanuck. “Isn’t that right, Richard?”

  “Right,” Zanuck sai
d.

  “Now it may be too early,” Berman said, “but I’ve got some ideas for casting.”

  “It’s never too early,” Zanuck said.

  “Well, I’d like to draw on my old relation with Sidney Poitier to play Spade,” Berman said.

  “Isn’t he a little genteel?” Osborne said.

  “Not really, Paul,” Berman said. “I had him playing a Mau Mau in Something of Value.”

  “Ah,” Osborne said.

  “And I think Lincoln is a hell of a part,” Berman said.

  “I agree, Pandro, I agree,” Zanuck said. He fingered the script and cleared his throat again. “There’s one small point about Lincoln, though. Do you think it might be too obvious to have someone say to him, ‘Are you going to the theater tonight?’ ”

  “I see your point, Richard,” Berman said smoothly. “And I think we can cut that. Can’t we, Paul?”

  At his party for Renee Valente, his new director of talent, Screen Gems President Jackie Cooper explained that company’s upcoming special, A Christmas Carol. “Christopher Isherwood is writing it,” he said. “Dickens was a terrible writer. In the original, Scrooge is mean and stingy, but you never know why. We’re giving him a mother and father, an unhappy childhood, a whole background which will motivate him.”

  Abby Mann denies the rumor that playwright-buddy Arthur Miller is unhappy with Mann’s screenplay of After the Fall. “For one thing,” says Abby, “Arthur hasn’t even seen it yet. For another, we hope to do another movie together. For a third, Arthur hasn’t any contractual control over the movie at all.”

  Two items in Joyce Haber’s column in

  The Los Angeles Times

  Late in October, Star! was in the final stages of shooting. All the non-musical portions of the picture had been completed and the company had shut down to rehearse the musical production numbers that remained to be shot. Daniel Massey, the young English actor who played Noel Coward in the film, had finished all his scenes but lingered in Los Angeles to loop some dialogue. The day before he was scheduled to return to London, Massey spent the whole morning and afternoon in the looping room in the basement of the Studio Theater. “Looping” means dubbing, and is necessitated by extraneous background noises picked up during filming, the desire to get a different inflection in the actor’s voice, or simply because a long shot precluded the use of a microphone. It is a tedious process and is so called because the loop of film showing the scene to be dubbed is run round and round through the projector and flashed on the screen in the front of the room. The actor must watch his image and synchronize his words precisely to the movement of his lips on the screen.