Schute’s biggest challenge was in moving the entire company from Jerusalem to Cyprus. (Although the scenes set on Cyprus open the film, they were the last to be shot.) “We finished all the Israeli scenes at lunchtime on a Friday,” Schute said,
and Otto told me, “Let’s start in Cyprus at 9 a.m. on Monday.” It was my job to make it happen—and it was a huge job. First of all, I couldn’t start flying the cast and crew until after sundown on Saturday. We had a crew of about 120, the ship, twenty army trucks in English colors, camera equipment, twelve electrical generators, thirty lamps. I slept on Friday night and then not again until Monday night. Eva Monley was putting people into hotel rooms on Cyprus. I arrived on Cyprus from Israel on the last plane out, 2 a.m. Monday morning, and we were ready to shoot at 9 a.m. that morning, exactly as Otto had ordered. I received no thanks: I was doing my job. That’s what I was there for.23
“Otto expected Martin and me to do the impossible,” Eva Monley remembered.
We were to do as he said, and to find a solution even when there didn’t seem to be any options. You couldn’t say no to Otto, you didn’t dare tell him that what he was asking couldn’t be done. You had to find a way. Because Otto insisted that the composer, Ernest Gold, had to be on hand for the entire shooting (Otto told me, “Gold will live the film with me and write music as we go along”), it became my job to see that Gold’s grand piano was shipped to the location. Then I had to see that the piano moved with us whenever we moved. It was not easy, and I knew that if there had been so much as a single chip in that precious instrument, my head would roll.24
Throughout the shooting in Israel, Otto, whose lifelong policy was not to turn anyone away from his office, received a stream of complaining visitors. Representatives of the moderate Haganah party and the extremist Irgun objected to the way they had heard they were to be depicted. Irgun spokesmen demanded that Preminger give them sole credit for having masterminded the Acre prison break that was to be the big action set piece in the film’s second part. “Menachem Begin, who had been with the Irgun, felt the script was giving the group short shrift,” Hope recalled. “When Otto asked how he had gotten a copy of the script, Begin answered, ‘I wasn’t in the Irgun for nothing.’ ”25 A delegation of Sabras (native-born Israelis) decried the character of Ari Ben Canaan, the film’s hero, insisting that Israel had been founded through collective action rather than the Hollywood-style heroics of a single political adventurer. Israeli Arabs asked Preminger not to have Arabs attack the children’s village of Gan Dafna. “You do not want to rewrite the script, you want to rewrite history,” Preminger countered.26
He handled every Israeli complaint with aplomb. With a number of his actors, however, he was not as deft. He got off to a bad start with his star, Paul Newman, playing the heroic Sabra Ari Ben Canaan. “On the first day of shooting Paul arrived on the set with five typed pages filled with suggestions for improving the script and his dialogue,” Hope said. With a tight smile Preminger informed Newman that he had approved Trumbo’s script and would not change one word of it. For a scene in which he was to stand behind two other actors, eavesdropping on their conversation, Newman asked his director what he should be thinking. “To Otto this seemed like an exercise for the Actors Studio,” Hope said. “Otto had no patience or respect for the Method, which was so different from the Max Reinhardt tradition he had been trained in, and he told Paul, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, just stand there.’
“Newman, a cold man, was remote from the minute he walked on the set, and he remained icy throughout the shooting,” Hope said. “On the plane from Cyprus to New York after the filming was over he told Otto, ‘I could have directed the picture better than you.’ ”27
“After a certain point in the filming, Paul would not take direction from Otto,” as Jill Haworth, making her film debut at fourteen, recalled. “They had an arrangement: if Otto had something to say, he was to say it to Paul privately, away from the rest of us.”28 Ironically, when they were filming a scene when Preminger should have had “something to say” to Newman, he didn’t think he needed to. “Otto didn’t seem to realize that Newman was not doing a good job delivering Ari’s big speech in the final scene,” Martin Schute recalled. “Otto shot the scene in his favorite method, in a long take, because he wanted to let the camera just watch what Newman was doing. Newman, however, was doing a poor job with it, but Otto shot that speech in a way that we couldn’t cut—he hadn’t covered the shooting, so there was nothing to cut away to. And that was a mistake because in the film Newman’s inadequate performance of that final speech takes the speed out of the picture.”
Eva Marie Saint, playing what in many ways was the pivotal role, a Gentile nurse who falls for Ari and gradually becomes converted to the Zionist cause, was also unhappy with Preminger. Like her costar, Saint was Method-trained and a member in good standing of the Actors Studio. “Eva Marie didn’t like Otto,” Martin Schute recalled. “She felt he was directing traffic rather than helping her to explore her character’s motivation.”29 “Eva Marie went to sleep every night crying,” according to costar Michael Wager.30 “I don’t like to say anything bad about anyone—I’ve been in the business too long,” Eva Marie Saint said. “I’ll just say that Otto yelled a lot, but not at the stars. He was a very good filmmaker, nonetheless.”31
Like both Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint, Michael Wager, playing a prominent resistance fighter, was also a member of the Actors Studio and therefore, from Preminger’s point of view, a potential adversary. Wager, who is Meyer Weisgal’s son, was accustomed to a bellowing patriarch. “My father and Otto were of the same ilk,” he observed. “After my opening night on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire [Wager appeared as the newspaper boy], my father came backstage and said, ‘For this they pay you?’ Not nice. It was no fun being Meyer Weisgal’s son. But I never heard yelling from him of the kind we got from Otto, who was very Hapsburg.” Wager received the Preminger treatment on a scene in which his character is reunited with his fiancée. “ ‘Don’t you know how to kiss a girl?’ Otto yelled. He made us do the scene twenty times. It was humiliating. Mike Wallace was there the day we shot the scene, and maybe Otto felt he had to prove something. The first assistant director walked off the set. It was the worst thing to scream at me.” And in this instance counterproductive: in the film Wager’s embrace is passion-free.
“The next day I confronted Otto in our hotel and criticized him for yelling at me. With that seductive quality he shared with Elia Kazan, he said, ‘I yell at you? You’re a charming young man. Why would I do that?’ ” Unlike Wager, George Maharis, playing a member of the Irgun, responded in kind to a Preminger tirade. “We were in a small room, Paul, George, and I,” as Wager recalled, “when Otto started in on George, who yelled back at full volume. Otto said, ‘I wish you had such emotion in your acting.’ That shut George up. Otto had a huge talent as a filmmaker, but not as a director of actors. ‘Just do it,’ he’d say.”32
Preminger’s skirmishes with Newman and Saint were as nothing compared to the full-force explosion that occurred during a scene shot in the plaza of the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, where, to a crowd of 40,000 extras, Lee J. Cobb (also Actors Studio), playing Ari’s father, Barak Ben Canaan, was to announce the United Nations vote to partition Palestine. To attract extras, Eva Monley had come up with the idea of holding a lottery with cash prizes of 20,000 Israeli pounds and six free trips to the film’s opening in New York, and the night of the shooting her ploy drew more than one-fourth of Jerusalem’s 160,000 inhabitants. The scene was scheduled to be shot at 5 p.m., and Preminger assured Meyer Weisgal, who was to appear briefly as Ben-Gurion, that he would be needed only for “five or ten minutes.” But as Preminger demanded take after take, “ten minutes” stretched into twelve hours. After Preminger had asked for at least a dozen retakes, Cobb, who had the only spoken lines in the scene, and Preminger, perched on a crane at the opposite side of the square, started screaming at each other. Eyewitnesses agreed about the inte
nsity of the outburst—it was Vesuvian— but disagreed about what had provoked it.
Hope Preminger: “Lee had had three or four weeks off, and the night of the shooting he did not know his lines. Otto didn’t want to cut the speech— he wanted to film it in one take, to give it a sustaining power. Lee said,
Barak Ben Canaan (Lee J. Cobb) announcing the birth of a nation to a crowd of 40,000 extras in Exodus. A disagreement with Cobb ignited one of Preminger’s most incendiary flare-ups.
‘Otto, you can always piece it together.’ To Otto, those were fighting words. There was no excuse for Lee to have to ad-lib his lines—and of course Otto was the least likely director to accept any ad-libs. It gave him an opportunity to explode. And explode he certainly did.”33
Eva Monley: “Cobb didn’t know his lines and the confrontation became two stubborn men bumping heads.”34
Martin Schute: “Cobb knew the lines but he didn’t say them the way Otto wanted him to. Cobb, a Method actor, wanted to perform the scene his way, and when Otto started yelling, Cobb yelled back. They screamed at each other at long range. Another problem was that we didn’t have enough lights for a long shot of the whole crowd. We couldn’t shoot the whole square and the figures on the balcony all in one great long shot, which is what Otto wanted. I had thirty lights but I needed more. Otto was frustrated because he couldn’t get the all-inclusive wide shot he wanted.”35
Lee J. Cobb: “To pinprick this idiocy, it wasn’t a question of any 14 lines. I knew those lines, for God’s sake! Otto Preminger forced thousands of extras to stand in the square—these were local people, some quite elderly— and it got to be 3 a.m. I suggested something should be done. Unpredictably, like a madman, Preminger flared up. So I gave him a piece of my mind.”36
An anonymous crew member: “The shocking thing is evidently Otto is spreading his version, and I think he’s probably convinced himself it’s true. The lottery cost him only 30,000 [Israeli pounds] to get the extras, whereas if he had paid regular rates it would have been 100,000 or more. Drawing for prizes was supposed to be at midnight, but Otto kept stalling around, from 8 to 3. The crowd was standing there hour after hour, and old women were fainting—it was just awful. Of course Cobb knew his lines—and it was two pages, not 14 lines. Otto kept doing it over and over, first from one angle, then another. Finally, at 3, he was satisfied and then he decided he wanted one more shot. It was then Cobb told him off. He really let him have it—told him he was inhuman, had no consideration or a shred of decency”37
During the blowup, Meyer Weisgal tried to intervene but Preminger silenced him. After Preminger came down from the crane, he and Weisgal were driven to the King David Hotel. “That son of a bitch, I pay him $95,000 and he doesn’t even know his lines,” Weisgal recalled Preminger saying.38 Otto fired Cobb, a moot point as all the actor’s scenes had been shot, and canceled Cobb’s room at the King David. “It was mean,” Michael Wager said. “Everyone thought his behavior to Cobb was unforgivable.”39 “Before Cobb left Israel, every member of the company shook his hand and thanked him for having the guts to do what no one else had,” reported the irate crew member who, six years after the fact, requested anonymity.40 Preminger and Cobb never spoke again. “Lee is excellent in the film,” Hope Preminger conceded.41
In a characteristic turnabout, Preminger was especially kind to his two youngest actors, Sal Mineo, giving the performance of a lifetime as Dov Landau, a Holocaust survivor determined to join the Irgun, and Jill Haworth, doing superbly as Karen, a Danish refugee. Haworth had been the last actor to be cast. “Otto and I went to drama schools in England, and in Cologne, Germany, auditioning a great many youngsters for the role, all of them about fourteen,” Hope said. “I think Otto felt a little as if he was auditioning again for Saint Joan. When we tested a young English girl, Jill Haworth, we thought she had an extraordinary instinct for how to play the role.”42 “I was in a children’s theater school, taking day classes,” as Jill Haworth recalled.
Mr. Preminger saw my photo in the school book and wanted to see me. I auditioned along with five other English girls, three times. Then Otto asked me to make a screen test. The next day I went with my mother and a lawyer to see Preminger in his suite at the Dorchester, and two weeks later I was in Israel.
I learned acting from Preminger on the set of Exodus. I felt rescued by him, and he had such patience with me, such insight. I have seen photos taken on the set of him pointing at me, and it looks threatening; but it wasn’t. People would say, “It’s your turn today,” and I got paranoid. But it was never my turn. Yes, he was an exacting taskmaster: didn’t he have a right to be? But some of it was tongue-in-cheek—he was parodying himself in Stalag 17. I heard rumors that his feelings for me were incestuous: nonsense. He was fatherly; he tried to educate me; he looked after me every moment. I had to be in bed by nine every night and on the set at nine the next morning. He made sure I had a chaperone at all times. He fired the first one because she was always in a bar. After the first two weeks my mother came over to act as my chaperone. I didn’t even know how to kiss for the kissing scenes—Preminger, along with Hope and Sal, helped me there. I overheard Ursula Andress calling her husband John Derek [cast as Taha, Ari’s Arab friend] a faggot, and I had to ask Preminger what that meant. A driver once took me to the wrong place, and Hasidic Jews stoned me: it would never have happened if Preminger had been there. He was wonderful to Sal, too,
and Sal loved him; he knew Preminger was helping him to give a really strong performance. When I got close to Sal, however, Otto advised me against it.43
Despite (or maybe because of) the tensions on the set, which Preminger seemed both to provoke and to thrive on, he finished ahead of schedule. “Amazingly, we came in under Otto’s projection of fourteen weeks, which was already a good six to ten weeks under what I thought the film needed,” Martin Schute said. “Midway through the thirteenth week we wrapped. Otto had managed to shoot all three hours and forty minutes of Exodus in a little over thirteen weeks.” Part of why the machinery spun along with such precision was the arrangement Preminger, with Schute’s assistance, had made for screening the rushes. “Our transport manager, an Israeli just out of the Marine Corps, had the job of seeing that the film we shot in Israel was on a plane to Los Angeles and then flown back to Israel the following day,” Schute said.
Three days after the footage had been shot we saw our rushes on 35 mm in a big theater in Tel Aviv. With Otto supervising, we cut as we went along—and two weeks after the end of shooting we had a rough cut. This was all the more remarkable because Otto had no technical sense about sound or the camera. To say the least, he was very unmechanically minded—he gave me his pocket calculator because he couldn’t work it, he had stubby fingers. He could say why he didn’t like something, but not how to cure it. But he hired the best technical support, and we never had a second-rate anybody. Noteworthy, too, is that Otto did not go one penny over his original four-million-dollar budget.44
Throughout filming Preminger conducted a carefully worked out promotional campaign. The scores of local and international journalists he invited to each day of shooting ensured extensive coverage in newspapers throughout the world. And at four strategic points during the production— on the first day; midway through, when the company moved from Haifa to Jerusalem; near the end, when cast and crew traveled from Jerusalem to Cyprus; and on the final day—Otto placed large ads in newspapers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, the cities where the film would open hard-ticket engagements in December. Each ad included a mail order form. As a result, before Exodus opened on December 19 it had racked up over one million dollars in advance sales, a record at the time. “Exodus looms as a Klondike entry,” reported Variety on December 7, 1960. “Preminger stands to pocket one of the largest amounts ever earned by an independent. He will receive 75% of the profits in addition to a fat producer’s fee as against 25% for United Artists. Uris will receive a small percentage of Preminger’s 75%. Despite his reputation for b
eing difficult Preminger can command the top deals in the industry because he gives fewer headaches to studios than other independents.”
As an executive working on foreign soil, “remaking Israel to his own design,” as Willi Frischauer observed,45 Preminger was in top form: both unstoppable and irresistible. He got what he wanted, even if that meant clearing an entire harbor; cordoning off rural roads and busy streets in Haifa and Jerusalem; taking over the entire premises of the former Acre prison. And throughout the production daily bullets from his own press office about the making of the film entertained thousands of Israelis. Perhaps inevitably, the film’s critical reception did not match the hullabaloo Preminger had generated throughout its making. Archer Winsten’s equivocal review in the New York Post on December 16 was indicative: “Distinctly better than the book, but it still falls short of distinction,” he wrote. “It has weight, appearance, and a good sense of story and publicity. What it lacks is a sensitivity to people, motives, emotions… . Otto Preminger may not achieve the finest cinematic quality—in fact some might assert he never does—but you have to hand him the prize for knowing a hot subject, cutting it down to the sensational core and exploiting that to the last full measure.” In the New York Herald Tribune Paul Beckley commented that “the very bigness of Preminger’s theme makes his film an important one and well worth seeing—its defects by no means offset the excellences.”
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