Encouraged by the progress Trumbo was making, Otto began to lay the groundwork for filming in Israel. To help him gain the permissions he would need, and also to give him entrée to the highest echelons of Israeli politicians, he made a call to an old friend, Meyer Weisgal, the head of the Weizmann Institute of Science, whom Otto had first met in Salzburg in 1924. Weisgal had a lifelong genius for ingratiating himself with great figures. In the 1930s, as Max Reinhardt was forced to leave Austria, Weisgal became one of the impresario’s principal backers; and in the 1940s he was an intimate of Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the first president of Israel. Weisgal agreed to making Israel available to Preminger not out of friendship (or at least not solely out of friendship) but because Otto “promised [him] the Israeli royalties from Exodus and income from all world
In Rehovot, Israel, on one of his initial scouting expeditions for Exodus, with Meyer Weisgal, his Israeli liaison, and Prime Minister and Mrs. David Ben-Gurion.
premieres for the Institute. It meant approximately one million dollars for scientific and a wide variety of cultural and artistic purposes.”4 Weisgal also agreed to appear in the film in a wordless cameo as David Ben-Gurion, whom he resembled.
In July, immediately following his promotional appearances for Anatomy of a Murder and Porgy and Bess, Preminger traveled to Israel to meet with Weisgal and to survey possible locations. The trip did not begin promisingly, however, as the Pan Am jet on which Otto was flying to London with Hope was forced to crash-land. As the best-known passenger, his picture was on the front pages of many newspapers. “Look at those photos; they were obviously prepared for my obituary,” Otto quipped. “There was no time for philosophy during the landing. I never had the feeling something bad would happen, because I am an optimist. I had confidence.”5
At Rehovot, where the Weizmann Institute is located, Meyer Weisgal gave a reception for Preminger and introduced him to politicians, the mayors of Jerusalem and Haifa, army and police officers, and the heads of Israeli trade unions. “Meyer had vim and vigor,” as Hope recalled. “He was a great fund-raiser and he was good with people. He knew every prominent person in Israel. He got us everything we needed, and he even got us the Israeli Army, who were always on twenty-minute alert. He told us Ben-Gurion wanted to meet us. Otto went off alone with Meyer to see the prime minister, but when they got there Mrs. Ben-Gurion called me and said, ‘Come over, I’m sending a car for you.’ The Ben-Gurions lived in a modest cottage and they were so completely natural, as was Golda Meir.”6
“In those days the government machinery for helping a producer make a film in Israel was not what I would call ideal,” Meyer Weisgal observed. “We operated in a wilderness. I was in effect the liaison between Mr. Preminger and the government. They didn’t speak exactly the same language, and I am not referring to Hebrew. Preminger is very demanding, and usually in the right; but his manner of asking sends a shudder down the spine of government officials and bureaucrats who are prone to think that the sun rises and sets with them. The shouting continued for a considerable time until everything was set—or until we thought that everything was set.”7
During this visit, in addition to securing full government cooperation, Preminger also made the decision to film in color. “Originally, I had felt the book lent itself more to black and white. Then, after seeing the country, I definitely made up my mind to shoot in color. I want to show Israel, the real ‘star’ of Exodus, with as much realism and authenticity as possible. I think I can do this best in color, while still retaining the documentary feeling I want to give the film.”8
Soon after returning from Israel, Otto in forty-four intense days in September and October worked on the script with Dalton Trumbo. Although based in New York, Preminger relocated to Los Angeles, where he moved into a cottage on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Every morning he would arise at six to be driven to Trumbo’s house forty-five minutes away in Pasadena. As Trumbo handed him pages Preminger would edit, then Trumbo would work on revisions. With short breaks for food and drink the two would work straight through until six or seven. Throughout their collaboration there was not a single tremor. “Otto had incredible faith in the work Trumbo had written,” noted Martin Schute, once again serving as Otto’s general manager.9 And Trumbo appreciated Preminger’s editing skills. “I’m verbose and sentimental, Otto has a sharpshooter’s eye for verbosity and knows how to assassinate sentimentality,” the writer observed, adding that Otto was “most helpful in construction. He knew how to keep the story moving and how to balance all its elements.”10 After their almost biblical labor of “forty days and forty nights,” Preminger felt the script was finished. During production he would not change a word.
Although faithful to the narrative outline of the novel, Trumbo’s screenplay achieves a Preminger-like balance. “I think that my picture is much closer to the truth, and to the historic facts, than is the book,” Preminger said.
It also avoids propaganda. I am trying to give both sides and I realize events are apt to look contrived: a good person here, who is balanced by a bad one over there. I didn’t let myself be swayed by either side, and I felt that it was the right balance. The book by Uris has a pox against all the enemies of the Jews in it and that is difficult to defend. I found in many talks with Israelis who lived through the time of the British mandate that their feelings toward the British are now very friendly. I learned that there is almost a unanimous consent that any other nation would have been much rougher on Israel. Uris would never be able to acknowledge that. I don’t believe that there are any real villains. If somebody is a villain I try to find out why. I don’t necessarily excuse him, but I try to understand him.11
On November 10, 1959, Preminger flew to London, where he set up base at the Dorchester Hotel. “His [hotel suite] was like a railway station as he began to get his cast and crew together,” Willi Frischauer reported. “An unending procession of friends, agents, actors, technicians came to pay their respects or apply for jobs.”12 On November 16, accompanied by Martin Schute, his production manager Eva Monley (who had been recommended by Schute), his first assistant director Gerry O’Hara, and his art director Richard Day, Preminger returned to Israel to scout locations and to solidify technical support for shooting, now firmly scheduled to begin on March 28.
“Papa, which is what I called Otto, was quite sure I couldn’t handle Israel,” Eva Monley recalled. “After all I was only a girl, and girls didn’t have a break in those days. And too, I was a very quiet little person.” Though quiet, Monley already had a formidable vita: born in Kenya, she specialized in African locations and had worked on The African Queen, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, White Witch Doctor, and Mogambo, and her job following Exodus was as location manager for Lawrence of Arabia.
I was scared of him and to his face always called him “Mr. Preminger.” I was well brought up so I never yelled back when he would get excited—because I was a girl I took the shit when anything went wrong. There was no favoritism with Otto Preminger: we all stayed at the same deluxe hotel throughout our stay. I went to the first meeting with representatives of the Israeli government—we had to make our plans months in advance of the actual shooting— and after the meeting Otto said that we have to respect our hosts. Saturday will be our day off.
I scouted locations with Richard Day. Otto depended on my location notes, the daily report I wrote. I always had to be ahead on these so they’d be ready whenever he asked. Otto and Day decided that we would have to build Gan Dafna [a kibbutz bordering an Arab community where much of the action is set] and it was my job to make it possible to build it. Moshe Dayan assigned his son to work with me on it. When Papa came to the location we had selected for Gan Dafna he snapped, “This is not what I wanted: I wanted purple clover not white clover. Change it!” We replanted the clover and a set painter touched it up with purple.
Then Papa sent me to Italy and Greece to find a ship to appear as the Exodus [which carries European refugees from British-controlled Cyp
rus to Haifa]. I found a lovely ship in Greece, and I came back with photographs. Of course Papa would make the final decision. He made all the decisions. And unlike John Huston, with whom I had just worked in French West Africa and the Belgian Congo on The Roots of Heaven, Otto never changed his mind.
From the first, I could read the signals of when he was about to blow—his body language was very revealing. And from this first trip he knew I knew how to read him. I just sensed that Otto was a human being: when he shook your hand, he shook your hand. I was so proud when at the end of our trip he told me I was smart enough to be Jewish!13
After their visit, Martin Schute wasn’t quite as happy as Eva Monley I could tell that Israel was going to be a very difficult country to shoot in because of the temperament of the people. Otto invited me to sit in on his meetings with the Irgun [radical anti-British resistance fighters] and, being wicked, told them I was English. The Irgun were not best pleased with how they were to be treated in the film. They made threats, and they meant business: they did not approve of Otto’s approach and they told us they would block us. But they couldn’t scare Otto, a shrewd political mover who had the crucial assistance of Meyer Weisgal, also shrewd as hell.
Meyer was chairman of the Exodus company and I was its director, and we both helped to facilitate things. So much Israeli law was based on English law, which I was familiar with, and Meyer had the contacts. He ran the Israeli 10,000 Club, made up of Americans who had donated ten thousand dollars or more for Israel. (Meyer was also a great procurer, who brought in tins of ham for Ben-Gurion
to have for breakfast.) During our visit Otto decided on a fourteen-week shoot, whereas an average schedule for a picture like Exodus would be twenty to twenty-five weeks. But Otto knew he could do it in less time. Otto was a great producer—but he didn’t have the patience to be a great director.14
On December 9, 1959, a week after returning from Israel, Preminger held the first of many press conferences about his blockbuster. On this occasion, he treated each announcement as a bulletin of historic significance. He informed the press that he would be setting up unit headquarters in Haifa and would be ready to begin shooting, in a superwide-screen process, either 70 mm Panavision or MGM Camera 65, on March 28, 1960. As he had on his recent Michigan safari with Anatomy of a Murder, he said he planned to watch the rushes and to edit as he was shooting—a lab in Hollywood would process the footage and return it to him on location within six days. “Ecstatic” about the locations he had just scouted, he boasted that Exodus would be the first American picture to be shot entirely in Israel, and he pledged to welcome on a daily basis a delegation from Israel’s nascent film industry. He also pointed out that a major section of the story, a prison break, would be filmed where the event actually happened, in the former Acre prison, now an insane asylum.15
Over the next several months, as Gan Dafna was being built in Israel, Preminger regularly kept the press informed about his progress and his casting. On January 20, he made international headlines when he announced that he would be giving screen credit to the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. His gesture, which in effect would break the blacklist, was greeted by some commentators as another of Preminger’s courageous stands against intolerance and the forces of censorship. Skeptics, however, decried it as yet another example of what they regarded as the filmmaker’s compulsive publicity mongering. As often with Preminger, it’s likely that it was both—a principled stand as well as an example of promotional savvy The commercial instincts that influenced the filmmaker’s decision might have qualified the “purity” of his gesture but did not alter its fundamental moral sincerity: Preminger regarded the blacklist as un-American, an infringement on his own and Trumbo’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of choice. “My decision to hire Dalton Trumbo was realistic and practical, and not political,” Preminger declared. “I will not participate in the blacklist because it is immoral and an illegal extension of due process of law, just like lynching. It is not my job to inquire into the politics of the persons I sign.”16 In a television interview on January 26, Preminger, maintaining that it had been his intention all along to give screen credit to Trumbo (who had offered to do the job under an assumed name) stressed that he was “violently opposed to Communism. I also believe you never punish a man for what he thinks—you only punish him for what he does. I have complete confidence that if Dalton Trumbo were engaged in activities that endangered the United States, our government would take care of him. It’s the FBI’s job, not mine, to weed out subversives.” A strong objection from the American Legion in February prolonged the debate while also, of course, furnishing the impresario with more preproduction buzz. “I must confess I don’t even know what the American Legion does,” Preminger said in an interview in the New York Herald Tribune on February 2, 1960. “But it certainly has no right to tell other people what to do. Seriously speaking, the Legion should praise me for putting the name on the screen. Without credit for everyone to see, there is suspicion. It is a risk [that Trumbo’s name will hurt the box office] but there are certain risks one must take to keep self-respect.”
“We’re glad to learn that the major studios intend to keep the blacklist rather than follow the Preminger lead,” said an editorial in the New York Daily News on February 5. “There is no lynching spirit in the Hollywood blacklist. Rather the idea is to deny aid to those whose chief ambition is to lynch liberty. No law compels Mr. Preminger to go along with the blacklist. But neither does any law require patriotic Americans to go and see the Preminger-Trumbo movie.” Following Preminger’s lead, Kirk Douglas, producing and starring in Spartacus, for which Trumbo had written the screenplay, announced that he too would be giving the writer screen credit. “Kirk Douglas didn’t announce that Trumbo had written Spartacus until September, many months after Otto had declared his intention,” Hope recalled. “It was Otto who broke the blacklist, yet after Otto died the Writers Guild gave an award to Kirk Douglas for being the first to break it. Dal-ton’s widow, Cleo, was furious and wrote to the Guild to say it was Otto who should be getting the award; but the Guild never answered. Cleo and her family did not attend, and Kirk Douglas, a living celebrity, got the award. After he received the award I met Kirk at several parties, but he refused to speak to me.”17
In Haifa on March 25, three days before the start of shooting, Preminger provided another column item for the international press he had assembled to cover the production: he married his costume coordinator, Hope Bryce, twenty-two years his junior. In Israel interfaith marriage (Hope is Episcopalian) is a virtual impossibility—to everyone, that is, except Otto Preminger. To facilitate the marriage, Otto once again called on Meyer Weisgal. “[Preminger] corralled … a trio consisting of Abba Khousky, the Mayor of
Otto and Hope, blissful newlyweds on the set of Exodus.
Haifa, Khousky’s secretary Milka [who would appear in the film, briefly, as Golda Meir], and me, as coordinators,” Weisgal recollected. “We had to convince the rabbinate of the urgency of the marriage without revealing too many unnecessary details about Hope’s ancestry.”18
We weren’t planning on getting married in Israel [Hope said]. We thought at first we could get married in the American embassy, because there we’d be on American soil. Then we thought we’d marry when the film moved to Cyprus in early July. But Meyer and the mayor of Haifa said that was nonsense. Meyer called the rabbis together and I went to a “trial,” with Meyer as my witness. The tribunal, glum and grumpy, asked Meyer in Yiddish if I was Jewish. I had had to memorize the Jewish names of my mother and aunt, who weren’t Jewish—I hope they understood! Meyer had coached me all afternoon how to say the names. I “passed,” but the tribunal knew if they refused us, funding would be taken away from them. During the wedding ceremony in our hotel room, Meyer began to whisper to me, and the rabbi said, “No coaching.” A chuppah was set up in our hotel room and according to tradition Otto stomped on the glass.19
Included in the small wedding party were Ingo and Kate, wh
o had flown in from Los Angeles, Eva Monley, and Martin Schute. “I’d never been to a Jewish wedding before,” Eva Monley said. “It was quite beautiful—very simple.”20 “I held the canopy at the wedding,” Schute recalled. “For the occasion, Hope was made Jewish. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come, Martin; we Anglicans must stick together,’ she told me.”21 (“Otto and I had been married for twelve years when Meyer ‘exposed’ us in his autobiography,” Hope said. “When Otto heard the rabbi in Israel might deny our marriage, he asked his friend, the [New York State] attorney general Louis Lefkowitz, to marry us in his office. And so we were married a second time, and this time I did not have to pretend to be Jewish.”)
The newlyweds had no time for a honeymoon. “Early Monday morning we were both needed on the set for the first day of filming,” said Hope, who from here on would serve as costume coordinator on every one of her husband’s films but one. “Right after the ceremony I went to my office, set up in the basement of our Haifa hotel, to meet with my crew. I had more people working under me than I would have on any other film—I felt like a general in charge of an army”22
As the commanding officer of a superproduction, Preminger exerted a godfatherlike authority. He expected everything to be done when and exactly as he wanted, as Schute recalled:
My job as general manager of the whole company was to keep the machine rolling at colossal speed, and to do what the boss wanted. “Get that ship out of the ocean; take it away, Martin,” he told me when he wanted to clear Haifa Bay for a shot. Through the contacts we had made I was able to send the SS Jerusalem out to sea until Otto got the shot he wanted. There were so many problems at every turn. Israel didn’t have the equipment we needed—we were shooting on 65 mm negative, in Panavision 65—and we had to fly in all equipment from Italy. The klieg lights were shipped in from Rome. In addition to some Israeli assistants—we used as many as we could, but Israel at the time had no film business to speak of—there were five nationalities in the crew: Greek, American, Turkish, Italian, and English, many of whom had worked with Otto at Shepperton on Saint Joan. We had the army working for us. They helped us in “moving the troops,” transporting cast and crew around the country. But when there were air raid warnings, everything stopped and there would be no movement of any kind. Because Otto didn’t like the food in Israel—there was lots of boiled duck, kosher, and it was awful—we brought in our own caterers. The extras on the Exodus were Israelis, and the consumption of ham rolls by the Israelis was staggering.
Otto Preminger Page 39