Studio (9780307817600)

by Dunne, John Gregory

  In a corner of the room, Fleischer was going through the cards by himself. “Most of the ‘Goods’ say the picture was too long,” he said. “With the cuts we have for San Jose tomorrow night, all the ‘Goods’ will be ‘Excellents.’ ”

  Jacobs poured himself another drink. “I don’t know about ‘Where Are the Words?’ ” he said. “I hate to lose it. It’s a good number.”

  “Arthur,” Zanuck said, “you’ve got to stop thinking about numbers. You’ve got to think about the whole picture. A shorter picture is a better picture.”

  Dr. Dolittle was previewed for the last time the next night in San Jose. Along with the cuts made for the San Francisco preview, the musical number “Where Are the Words?” was eliminated entirely and another Anthony Newley song, “Beautiful Things,” trimmed to the bone. The cards at the small theater in San Jose were the best of all three previews, and after viewing them, Zanuck decided to freeze the picture. It was the San Jose print that was to be shown at the world premiere of Dr. Dolittle in London on December 14.

  14

  “I hear this picture is something, a really wonderful picture,”

  Joey Bishop said

  The day before Darryl Zanuck left for England and the London premiere of Dr. Dolittle, the first snow of the year hit New York. Slush clotted West 56th Street outside the main office of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. The Studio’s headquarters are in a cheerless warehouse-like building on the far reaches of the West Side, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, surrounded by seedy tenements and boardinghouses. The interior of the building is as cold and anonymous as the slum outside. The light is bad, the hallways like a maze, the slow, creaky elevator more suitable to moving sides of beef than people. Darryl Zanuck’s office on the third floor seems about the size of a jai-alai court and has roughly as much personality. There was, the day I visited him there, a twelve-clock console on a shelf behind the desk, a covey of Oscars and Thalberg Awards, a Picasso and a Van Gogh (both copies) and, dominating the office, a large dark cigar behind which sat Darryl Zanuck. He was dressed all in gray—shirt, suit, tie; the only hint of color was the rosette of the Legion d’Honneur in his buttonhole. A puff of cigar smoke drifted toward the ceiling like a small mushroom-shaped cloud and Zanuck began to talk, nonstop, his monologue pitted with detours, but somehow always to the point, the point being himself, not himself in the abstract, but himself as Czar of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  “I’m so goddamn sick of being written about,” he said. “What the hell am I going to say about myself that I haven’t said before?” He adjusted his sunglasses. “Of course, I was disappointed after Minneapolis. It was a bad preview. But I hadn’t lost confidence in the eventual outcome of the picture. Dick sent me a wire. ‘I haven’t lost confidence,’ he said. We know what was the matter with the picture now, and it taught Dick one thing. Never take distribution people or sales people to a preview. I’ve been telling him that for years. They don’t know a goddamn thing except selling pictures and they’re not going to do you any good going around with long faces in Minneapolis or any other goddamn place.”

  Zanuck rolled the cigar around in his mouth and then flicked a mountainous ash into the ashtray. “We’ve got $50 million tied up in these three musicals, Dolittle, Star!, and Hello, Dolly!, and quite frankly, if we hadn’t made such an enormous success with The Sound of Music, I’d be petrified. You’re never sure of a hit in that category. You’re never sure of a hit any goddamn time, but when you’re talking $20 million, it’s a bigger gamble. You take a picture like The Sweet Ride, I don’t bother with anything like that. I concentrate on the roadshows and the potential roadshows, who are we going to cast, what do you think of him, what do you think of her? I’m at work at eight o’clock in the morning. It’s afternoon in Europe, for Christ’s sake, you’ve got to be. You never get your telephoning done otherwise. I can call London, the operator’s number is 11348, I just dial her and give her the number, I’m connected in three, four minutes. You dial Rome, the goddamn Italians make you wait an hour sometimes. Then I’m on the telex six or seven times a day to Dick, when it’s afternoon here, it’s morning out there, and if I want to talk to him about something special, I just pick up the phone and call him.”

  As if to prove his point, Darryl Zanuck picked up his telephone and had his secretary place a call to Richard Zanuck in Los Angeles. The Studio operator said that the younger Zanuck was at lunch, and Darryl Zanuck said, “Well, try him at the commissary, for Christ’s sake, he’s got a telephone there.” A moment later Richard Zanuck was on the line.

  “How are you?” Darryl Zanuck said. “It’s snowing like hell here.” There was a pause. “Listen, I got your wire on Elmo. I’ll see him in Tokyo, one day, maybe two, but I don’t want him in my hair all the time I’m there. Did we close on The Klansman? Let’s hold it in abeyance. Did Abe tell you about The Sand Pebbles? It’s the only picture in the whole goddamn country, that and Gone With the Wind. Did you know that David Selznick used dummies in the Gettysburg scene? The Actors Guild sued him.”

  Zanuck hung up the phone. “I was put under terrific criticism when I sent Dick out to head up the Studio,” Darryl Zanuck said. “What could I do? He was the only one I could trust. What was crippling this company was the disloyalty, the fighting between the money people in the East and the picture people in the West. We don’t have that anymore. I’m the only studio president who’s been a producer, a director, a writer and an editor. Who knows the goddamn business. Well, when I took over, I cleaned house. I knew things were bad, but not that bad. I paid off millions of dollars in contracts and threw out every goddamn script we had in preparation. They were all lousy. And then I sent Dick out there. I let him alone. In the first place, I was so goddamn swamped here. And then I thought if I went out there myself, I’d be cutting the ground out from under his feet. People would say, ‘Hell, the old man is here, Dick’s just an office boy.’ So I let him alone. He calls me, he talks me into some things, and I talk him out of some things, I’m a picture maker, and we’ve done all right.”

  There is not so much paternal pride in Darryl Zanuck’s voice as there is pride in his own executive acumen. He had picked a man to go to Los Angeles, the man had done the job he was asked to do, and the man incidentally was his own son. Darryl Zanuck tossed away his spent cigar and lit another. With $50 million tied up in musicals, there were other film cycles to consider. “We think Malcolm X is a wonderful story,” he said. “He was a wonderful man.” A cloud of cigar smoke masked his face. “He preached non-violence and they killed him. He was just the opposite of Carmichael and all those other wild men. A picture like this can make a social contribution. Like The Snake Pit. After I made that, eleven states changed their laws about insane asylums. And How Green Was My Valley. It was laid in England, but it was the first picture to attack unfair unionism.”

  In his own office down the corridor from Darryl Zanuck’s, Jonas Rosenfield, the Studio’s vice president in charge of public relations, watched his secretary hang up her snow-soaked coat. He picked up his phone and dialed the number for the weather report, flicking a button on his intercom so that the forecaster’s voice filled the room. “Good afternoon,” the woman’s voice said. “U.S. Weather Bureau forecast for New York and vicinity, 2 P.M. Central Park reading. Temperature 30 degrees, barometer 30.36 and falling. Snow this afternoon and early evening, ending later tonight with a possibility of two to three inches.”

  “Not bad,” Rosenfield said. “Not bad.” He speaks with a soft Texas accent and wears suits that seem too big for him, giving him the appearance of a slightly fallen soufflé. “Send a wire to Denton at the Studio,” he said to his secretary.” ‘Please advise tomorrow whether editors of Lui, French Playboy magazine, acceptable for interviews with Raquel Welch. Regards.’ ”

  On his desk were the latest figures on the gross receipts of The Sound of Music. “Ninety-eight million dollars,” he said. He repeated the figure again, this time more slowly
. “Ninety-eight million dollars.” Rosenfield shook his head. “I don’t imagine we’ll give that too much publicity. The theater owners and distributors are already after us to cut our admission prices for the picture. They know we’ve made a fortune and we haven’t gone into general release yet. It’s still a hard ticket. So when they hear about $100 million, they’ll be after us even more.” A slow smile spread across his features. “No, I don’t think we’ll give that much publicity.”

  He opened a folder and took out some publicity photographs of Anthony Quinn and Michael Caine, who were in Europe making a film adapted from John Fowles’ novel, The Magus.

  “It’s not a winning title,” Rosenfield said. “I went to our ad agency and asked them to research some new titles for me.” He tossed me a memo that contained four pages of new titles for The Magus, among which were:

  The Love Faker

  Faker of Fate

  Naked Power

  The Fate Twister

  The Goddess and the Demon

  Seduced by Fate

  The Conjurer

  Faker of Life

  A Game for Gods

  Villa of Torment

  Villa of the Conjurer

  Valley of Yesterdays

  The Dream Faker

  Trial by Sorcery

  “None of them quite hits the spot,” Rosenfield said. “But we’ll come up with one.”

  He dialed the Weather Bureau again to get a new forecast, wondering aloud if the snow would delay Darryl Zanuck’s plane to England and the Dr. Dolittle premiere.

  I asked how the Studio set its distribution schedule and Rosenfield leaned forward, tenting his fingers under his chin. “We put out twenty-four pictures a year, plus two roadshows, so it takes a lot of planning,” he said. “Of course, a lot depends on the delivery date of the picture, but we pretty much know how we’re going to handle a film even before shooting begins. You figure that the big grossing life of a picture in general release is ninety days. After that, it just slides downhill. And the peak period for your heavy grossing is that ten-week span between mid-June and Labor Day. You try to get your biggest commercial attractions into the theaters during that period. Your second big period is Thanksgiving through Christmas. If you’re lucky, you get two big holiday spurts. Roadshows you save for the fall. You start building up momentum with the advance ticket sales, and of course you give a roadshow more promotion, so that by the time it opens it hopefully has already built up a head of steam. The questionable pictures you save for the off months. That doesn’t mean they can’t hit big, they just take different handling, special handling. Take The Flim Flam Man. Drop that in during the summer and you get run over. As it happens, it didn’t do well anyway, but a picture like that is a controlled disaster. You don’t have that much invested in it going in, and your print costs and promotion costs are hedged against results.”

  I asked if critics had any effect on the success of a picture. Rosenfield shook his head disparagingly. “The more commercial the picture, the less the power of the critic,” he said. “If you open up in an art house, they can kill you if they don’t like your picture. But what the hell. You’ve got so little invested anyway, they can’t break your back. A big commercial picture’s a different story. A critic doesn’t mean a hoot in hell.” He rummaged through his desk and found a copy of The New York Times. “Take a look at Tony Rome,” he said. “The people who hated it said it was tawdry and dirty. They’re what I’d call money reviews.” He opened the Times. “This is the third piece they’ve run on Tony Rome,” he said. “The third time they’ve called it dirty. That doesn’t hurt the box office one bit. That’s only for the good.”

  Guess who’s coming to dinner with the Rex Harrisons on Christmas Day? Their colored maid, Ruby, that’s who. I had the pleasure of meeting Ruby when I dined with Rex and Rachel on my last Coast visit, and I know how devoted they are to each other.

  Radie Harris, The Hollywood Reporter

  After four years of blood, sweat and tears, Dr. Dolittle finally opened in London at a Royal Command Performance on December 12, 1967. The reviews in the daily newspapers were generally enthusiastic, although the weekly press was far more restrained. In Los Angeles, the Studio immediately reprinted the best of the London reviews in an advertisement prepared for both trade papers, The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety. In Hollywood, however, the word-of-mouth was still bad, and the Studio was immensely gratified when the following item appeared in Joyce Haber’s column in The Los Angeles Times.

  There are certain cliques in Hollywood which seem to prosper on spreading the rumor that a movie is disastrous before it’s even been shown—sometimes even while it’s in the shooting stage. The venom springs from envy, of course, the envy of one man for another’s potential success. The more “spectacular” the movie (all-star and high budget), the more potent the maker’s possible success: nasty rumors have been circulating for months about Dr. Dolittle. The reviews of Dolittle in London, where it opened last week, have put the lie to our local wags. What WE say remains to be seen—but the British are notoriously tough critics, and they gave Arthur Jacobs’ $18 million movie the highest plaudits of any American film in a decade. Only possible exception: Bonnie and Clyde.

  A week to the day after the London premiere, Dr. Dolittle opened in New York. In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther said that “… the youngsters should enjoy it” and that the intermission was “… thoughtfully inserted at just about the right place.” There was little else, however, that Crowther found in the picture’s favor. “The music is not exceptional,” he wrote, “the rendering of the songs lacks variety, and the pace, under Richard Fleischer’s direction, is slow and without surprise. Indeed, toward the end it is perfunctory. Things happen mechanically. The actors appear self-conscious and the fantasy is dull.” Time Magazine said that “size and a big budget are no substitutes for originality or charm,” and even the trade paper, Daily Variety, which depends on advertising from the studios, said the “pic suffers from a vacillating concept in script, direction and acting.… Temptation is strong to call it over-produced.”

  MEMO:

  TO: Arthur Jacobs

  FROM: Jack Hirschberg

  As a result of meetings today between Perry Lieber and myself, the following has been decided regarding the Academy Award campaign for Doctor Dolittle.

  1. We will screen at eight o’clock each night for the following branches of the Academy: art directors and costume designers, cinematographers, film editors, music. Each screening will be preceded by champagne or cocktails and a buffet dinner in the Studio commissary. We may also arrange to provide soft drinks at the theater during intermission.

  2. There will be a meeting Tuesday afternoon of the department heads in Stan Hough’s office which Perry and I will attend. At this meeting, Perry will discuss pertinent matters with the department heads and inform them that Dr. Dolittle is the Studio’s prime target for Academy Award consideration.

  MEMO:

  TO: Arthur Jacobs

  FROM: Jack Hirschberg

  Yesterday I sent you a memo outlining our plans for screenings of Dolittle for those branches of the Academy who ballot early: art directors and costume designers, cinematographers, film editors and music.

  The following notes develop from a meeting today with Perry Lieber to develop an approach for writers, directors and other branches who ballot at a later date.

  1. Nominating ballots for writing, directing, best picture and some other categories will be mailed by the Academy January 26. Polls close February 9, by which date all ballots must have been returned to the Academy. Therefore we are booking the Studio Theater every night—if possible—between January 22 and February 6 inclusive. This may be somewhat of an overkill, so to speak, but we can always cancel some dates if we don’t need them.

  2. We estimate the following membership in the various branches concerned:

  Directors 150

  Writers 250

  Executives 200
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  Publicity 200

  Short Subjects 125

  At Large 175

  Administrators 100

  Producers 150

  This totals, according to my faulty logarithms, 1350. Multiply it by two and we will need 2700 seats. At comfortable capacity of the Studio Theater, this spells seven screenings—but we will have to protect ourselves, hopefully, by having the facility available for other screenings as well.

  3. In addition, we plan special screenings for various guilds and unions who give their own awards—notably the Editors, Writers and Directors. These screenings will absorb some of the people who will also be Academy voters, but those Academy members who miss their Guild screenings can come to ours at the Studio. So we are covered at least two ways.

  The Studio’s Academy Award exploitation plan for Dr. Dolittle was highly successful. Despite mediocre reviews and lukewarm box office returns, the picture garnered nine Academy nominations, including one for Best Picture, and in the final balloting won two Oscars, for Best Song (“Talk to the Animals”) and Best Special Visual Effects. Arthur Jacobs was only momentarily dispirited by Dr. Dolittle’s reception. In the spring of 1968, his production of Planet of the Apes was released and quickly became one of the biggest non-roadshow successes in the Studio’s history. Fortunately for Jacobs, Planet of the Apes and Dr. Dolittle were not “crossed,” or cross-collateralized, a common industry practice in which the profits of one picture are used by the studio to offset the losses of another. So great in fact was the success of Planet of the Apes that the Studio and Jacobs announced plans to film a sequel. And in London, late in May, Jacobs and Natalie Trundy were married. Less than two hours after the ceremony, according to a report in one of the trade papers, Jacobs was in a business meeting about his musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

  With the completion of The Sweet Ride, the Studio was unable to find any new properties for Joe Pasternak to produce and he checked off the lot. The film received bad notices and was saturation-booked into drive-ins and neighborhood theaters across the country. A press release said that Pasternak was “reading scripts” and would soon announce a new studio affiliation. In July, 1968, Star! opened at a Command Performance in London and received enthusiastic reviews. But when the picture opened in New York, the reviews were, at best, bad. None of the denunciations, however, affected the Studio as much as the quiet, unemotional review by Renata Adler in The New York Times, who coolly dismissed Star! in less space than she would ordinarily give to a second-feature beach movie. Shooting ended on The Boston Strangler and the Studio, having shelved the Malcolm X story, assigned Richard Fleischer to direct Che!, a film biography of the late Ernesto “Che” Guevara. (“No one had ever heard of Che Guevara until he died,” Fleischer was quoted as saying in The New York Times Magazine.) The Studio closed the New Talent School, keeping only a handful of the young actors and actresses, including Linda Harrison, under contract. The Studio also paid $400,000 for an original screenplay called The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. Paul Newman was signed to play Butch Cassidy and the picture was retitled Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The film was assigned to the slate of Paul Monash, who was also keeping busy as executive producer of the television series Judd and Peyton Place. At Monash’s instigation, a Negro family was written into Peyton Place’s continuing cast of characters for the first time. “I’m writing a great deal in this area,” he told Daily Variety. “It’s very important—and important also for the future of this show.” A Negro writer named Gene Boland was hired to help with the dramatization of the black characters and was very shortly fired after complaining that white writers were rewriting his work. “Boland did not succeed, in our opinion, as a writer for Peyton Place,” Monash said.