cars were riddled with bullet holes, but by some great good fortune, no one had been hit or hurt,” Hooks wrote. “The shooters had made their point. All of us were convinced that we were surrounded by some of the dumbest and meanest people on the face of the earth, to say nothing of being the most cowardly”17
Madeleine Sherwood, playing a small-town bigot, received numerous telephone death threats. “Perhaps they were after me because I had been down south with the civil rights movement,” Sherwood reflected. “I’d spent time in jail and when I received a sentence of six months’ hard labor, I was the first white woman to be defended by a black lawyer. One night at the motel, after the seventh or eighth call, I was really scared, and I phoned Otto, who was a caring person and was concerned about all of us. ‘Come outside to the pool,’ he said. I met him there. He took my wrist in his hand and he raised both our hands and cried out, ‘Shoot!’ I was trembling. But thanks to Otto I never got another death threat.”18
“When I had to go shopping locally with Diahann Carroll to get a hat for her character, our driver said that I was to sit up front and Diahann had to sit in the back,” Hope remembered. “The governor [John McKeithen], a Democrat, kept asking us and some of the white stars to a dinner but didn’t invite any of the black actors. Otto didn’t accept the invitation.”19 Preminger retaliated by inviting the governor and his wife to attend a dinner he was hosting for visiting French journalists; the starstruck governor readily accepted, but was surprised to discover that Preminger pointedly had invited none of the film’s actors, white or black.
“Otto behaved beautifully through it all,” Eva Monley observed. “He refused to negotiate and continued to demand equal treatment for everyone in his cast and crew.”20 And despite the intimidation from local hoodlums and the heat, the director, as John Phillip Law enthused, was
the best host on a movie set ever. There we were in the middle of nowhere, threatened by the Klan, and every day under tents in the boiling sun we sat down to tables set with thick tablecloths, fine silver and china. There were no box lunches with Otto, but the finest food, as fine as you would get in the best restaurants in New York or Paris. And Otto would ask—and he really wanted to know—if our hotel rooms were okay. Nowadays you are just flown in and out; with Otto there was a real communal feeling. He kept his eye on his actors off the set, and in fact he might have saved my life. I was having a fling with a local girl who had a boyfriend who was a nut from Vietnam. When I took her home he jumped out of the bushes with a knife. He told me later he bought a pistol to kill me with, but then said he wanted to give it to me as a gift, and that I should meet him face to face in the lobby. Otto arranged with the local police to have him put in jail “until you guys leave town,” as the cops told me. Filming with Otto in Louisiana for three months was my golden age.21
Perhaps because of the us-versus-them atmosphere that overtook the location shooting, Preminger got on remarkably well with most of his actors. Michael Caine, with shrewd instincts about how to handle Otto, told him on the first day of shooting that he
knew of his reputation and that he should know that I was a very shy little flower, and if anybody ever shouted at me I would burst into tears and go into my dressing room and not come out for the rest of the day. He stared at me for a long moment and I waited to be bawled out immediately, as he was not used to being spoken to like this. Certainly he did seem a little taken aback. Finally, however, he smiled and said, “I would never shout at Alfie.” That was the key to the long friendship I subsequently enjoyed with this unpopular man.22 I used to have a go at him when he shouted at the other actors, however. “You’re scaring everybody. You’re getting everybody tense.” “I’m not, Alfie, I wouldn’t do this. They’re not afraid of me.” “They are all scared.” “Of me?” He was truly amazed that anyone was scared of him. He was a very abrasive man but his heart was in the right place at all times. Very much so. He was schizophrenic, because he could be two people. My favorite moment of observing Preminger—and I always watched him very closely—was in a hospital scene with Jane. It was a very, very hot day. And with the extra heat added by all the lights [that were needed to shoot the scene], the sprinkler system in the hospital was ignited. Otto went purple, his voice wouldn’t come, his eyes started to pop out of his head, and my God did he start to scream. And then, as we were getting drenched, we both started to laugh. I’d never heard Otto laugh out loud before. But he just started to laugh. A big, full, wonderful laugh—oh, it was gigantic and gorgeous, that laugh—because he realized the situation and his response were so ridiculous.23
“In the rushes Otto saw how good Jane was; he felt she was holding the film together,” Hope said. “Her politics weren’t at all apparent at the time and it wouldn’t have mattered to Otto anyway. She did her job, attended to her kids, and despite the fact that the Fondas had a reputation for being so icy she was friendly and warm to everyone.” “Jane was extremely disciplined, which of course Otto appreciated,” John Phillip Law said. “I lived with her and Roger Vadim [Fonda’s husband] while we were shooting Barbarella, and she ran the house, took ballet before being on the set, and was professional all the way. Jane was just as pleased as Otto about her work in Hurry Sundown, which she thought was her best until Klute.
“Otto yelled at me quite a lot, but I could just feel that he liked me, and so I was able to shuffle off things he would say to intimidate me,” Law said.
You had to know how to take him. He cast you because you were the archetype of what he wanted, but if you frustrated him by acting too much he’d start in on you. He didn’t approve of the Method, and one time when I was doing push-ups, which was my preparation for an emotional scene, he said, “This is not a gymnasium, Mr. Law, I pay you to act, not to exercise.” Even though asking him to do another take was like getting dispensation from the pope, I felt secure with him in a way I hadn’t with Elia Kazan, who had just directed me in the leading role in The Changeling at Lincoln Center. I felt Kazan resented good-looking guys, but Otto didn’t—he was above it all. For a love scene with Faye Dunaway, who was playing my wife, he said, “Roll over, you have a nice-looking backside.”24
Madeleine Sherwood, devoted to Lee Strasberg and an Actors Studio member, had exactly the kind of training Preminger had no patience for. But he hired her anyway because he had admired Sherwood’s vivid performances as Southern-fried crackpots in both the stage and film versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth and thought she was right for the role. “I developed a good character and Otto thought so too. I asked for props: a box of chocolates, curlers for my hair; Otto laughed and thought they were fine. His focus was the shot, and he was totally absorbed with the technical side, with lighting and placement, and he did not impose any kind of direction on me, or on Burgess Meredith who played my husband. I didn’t like German people then; I recalled World War II, as people of my age did. But I really and truly liked Otto—I enjoyed him.”25
“Something just clicked between Otto and me,” Robert Hooks said.
Preminger showing John Phillip Law how to kiss Faye Dunaway. Throughout the filming of Hurry Sundown, Preminger and Dunaway were bitter antagonists.
“We had one incident when I got my hair cut too short, but I just liked and admired Otto. I lost my father when I was young and Otto in a sense became my father.”26
The goodwill stopped here. If, as some of his colleagues attested, Otto could not function creatively in a conflict-free zone, if he needed somebody to be “it” on each production, in Faye Dunaway, neither then nor later a likely candidate for Ms. Congeniality, he was handed a gift from the gods. From the start Preminger and Dunaway looked each other over and did not like what they saw. As Hope said, “Otto never hated actors—he was simply not a hater. But he hated Faye Dunaway. Otto thought she was the toughest cookie he’d ever met, and she thought Otto was an idiot.”27 Indeed she did. “Otto was one of those directors you can’t listen to because he doesn’t know anything at all about the process of acting,�
�� she maintained. Dunaway, a Southerner playing a character who she felt resembled her own mother, was certain she knew best. “I didn’t think [Otto] was ever right. Later I was to work for Roman Polanski… who was just as autocratic and dictatorial in many ways as Otto, but he was a good filmmaker. And Otto wasn’t.”28
Dunaway claimed that Preminger screamed at her only once, when she challenged him after he “went crazy and began yelling at Freddy [Jones],” a hairdresser who, she felt, seemed “defenseless.” “Otto turned on me like a mad dog and went at me. … I think it’s the only time I’ve really looked full in the face at somebody who’s gone into that complete state of rage… . For the duration of the film, Otto never raised his voice to me again, though there was no attempt to smooth things over either,” Dunaway recalled. “There was only that one time, but that’s all I needed. Once I’ve been crossed, I’m not very conciliatory.”29
About that there is no doubt; but a number of witnesses contradicted Dunaway’s self-serving account of her feud with Preminger, maintaining that the screaming never stopped. “Faye was the whipping boy on the set, and she and Otto fought the whole way through,” Michael Caine said.30 “Everybody could see the anger between them, and it was not pretty,” Madeleine Sherwood corroborated.31 John Phillip Law suggested that the ill will began with “the love scene Faye and I had worked so hard on. As I was bending down, Otto said, ‘Stop, you don’t know how to kiss a girl. You don’t bend over, you bring her up to you.’ Then he banged our heads together. It gave her a fat lip. Faye, a tough gal, was not too pleased.”32
For the only time in his career, Preminger’s “whipping boy” did not have the sympathy of the cast and crew, because Faye Dunaway, hard-bitten, competitive, and self-centered, managed to alienate everyone. “Ms. Dunaway did not defend the hairdresser, as she claimed: quite the opposite, she insisted on getting him fired,” as Hope recalled.
But that was only one of her many misdemeanors. She took over an air-conditioned trailer and banished dear Diahann Carroll who was to have shared the trailer with her. She made Diahann learn her lines outside the trailer, in the heat. She was insolent to the crew. She was incredibly slovenly about her personal appearance. She wasn’t even nice to John Law, when everybody else loved him—he is a wonderful man, so friendly, and he was terrific with our twins. Ms. Dunaway was even rude to them. She tried to have an affair with Michael Caine, because he was the biggest star on the set.33
(When the shooting ended, the actress took her employer to court to win her release from the five-picture contract she had signed with him. “I could not imagine doing another five films with this man,” she said. The
“How do you know how a black woman would feel and act, white man?” Beah Richards said to Preminger as Robert Hooks looked on during a rehearsal for a key scene in Hurry Sundown.
case dragged on until March 1968, when an out-of-court settlement was reached. “It cost me a lot of money to not work for Otto again,” Dunaway admitted. “I paid him, I paid his attorneys, I paid my attorneys. I regret paying him. … I thought he was awful to work with… . Otto never had another big hit,” she noted, gracious as ever.)34
In his single contretemps with a black performer Otto played a losing hand. As Robert Hooks reported, Beah Richards,
much to everyone’s surprise … effectively stood up to Otto. It happened the day she and I [Richards was playing Hooks’s mother] were shooting the scene where she dies. It was a beautiful, sensitive scene, and she was putting her whole heart and soul into it. Her performance was brilliant. It even made members of the crew cry. But for some reason Otto didn’t like it, which no one but him ever understood. He kept asking her to do it over and over, and we would, much to Beah’s irritation. Each time she would do it with the same depth of feeling as she had done before and each time he was not satisfied. Finally, he rode her about it once too often. Beah looked up at him with an expression I was glad was not directed at me, and said, “How do you know what a black woman in this situation would feel and act? What do you know about it, white man?” There was absolute dead silence on the set… . We all waited with baited breath for the explosion. Otto didn’t say anything at first. Finally he said, “Let’s try it once again, please.” And we did. And it was just as gripping as before. When it was over, Otto just sat there for a moment, then sighed and turned to his cameraman and said, “Print it. Let’s move on.” And we did.35
The heat, the Klan, and Faye Dunaway took their toll, and during the three-month shoot Preminger had a number of blowups. He fired a script girl and a secretary. As John Phillip Law recalled, “On the way to work one day Otto said to a cop, ‘You’re fired!’ ‘I don’t work for you, sir,’ the cop responded. ‘You’re fired anyway!’ Otto steamed.”36 Mystifyingly, he also dismissed Gene Callahan, the production designer who had found the location and negotiated all the construction contracts. “I was notified by an assistant while I was in the hospital recovering from an operation,” Callahan said. “That’s the way Otto does business. I still don’t know why he fired me.”37 Preminger also fired his screenwriter, Tom Ryan. “Before we started shooting Otto had hired a few brushup writers who usually don’t want credit,” Hope said. “As we were shooting Tom kept muddling around with the script and would bring in suggestions, which is not a good idea with Otto, who did not make or welcome script revisions once he began shooting. But Otto really blew up at Tom because when Rex Reed (Tom and he were good friends) came to the location to write a piece for the New York Times, Tom gossiped about the cast to Rex. Otto got very cross. ‘You don’t do this,’ he said. (After Otto fired him, we never heard from Tom again.)”38
Rex Reed’s article, “Like They Could Cut Your Heart Out,” which appeared in the New York Times on August 12, 1966, was certainly unflattering—Reed characterizes Otto as an autocrat who seems to be losing his grip. But it is no worse and perhaps even a little milder than other pieces over the years that had contributed to the filmmaker’s reputation. Nonetheless, it cut to the quick. “When the article appeared it was full of the grossest misstatements and described me as a ruthless tyrant,” Preminger, uncharacteristically, complained, as if he were hearing something new about himself. He objected particularly to a quote from Michael Caine: “He’s only happy when everybody else is miserable. Still, if you can keep his paranoia from beating you down, you can learn a lot from this guy.” In his autobiography Preminger took pains to point out that after the article appeared Caine wrote a disclaimer to the New York Times explaining that he had not known what “paranoid” meant and that after looking it up, “I can assure you, paranoid Otto is not.” Preminger also resented Reed’s claim that “in a moment of uncontrolled fury” he had fired his cameraman, Loyal Griggs. “The truth was that [Griggs] had to quit because of a back injury and kept on working in spite of pains until his replacement [Milton Krasner] arrived from California. I was not troubled by [Reed’s] lies,” Preminger protested, unconvincingly “but Griggs, through his lawyer, demanded and received a retraction from the New York Times.”39
Preminger did not succeed in winning over the Deep South in the way he had conquered Israel, Washington, the Vatican, and Hawaii on his other recent shoots. His sense of racial fair play could make no real dent in the racism that had infected the Louisiana bayou for generations. His victory was in finishing on schedule with all of his cast and crew still alive. At the end of filming he addressed the Louisiana legislature. “I spoke of the right we enjoy to disagree without fear,” he said afterward.40 “Governor George Wallace [of Alabama], who at the time was not allowing buses to unload black children at white schools, spoke first,” Hope recalled, “and then Otto spoke. ‘I am a naturalized American citizen and only in America could such two diametrically opposed speakers share the same podium,’ he said, and he got a standing ovation.”41
In September 1966, as he was editing Hurry Sundown, Preminger, to please his six-year-old twins, accepted the role of arch-villain Mr. Freeze, who thrived in temperatures un
der fifty degrees below zero in the television series Batman. (Formerly the part had been played by George Sanders, whom Preminger had directed at Fox in Forever Amber and The Fan) Dressed in a jumpsuit, with purple lips, curled bright red eyebrows, and his head and face painted blue, Otto cheerfully parodied his image. After devoting a full day to makeup tests, for one week he reported to work daily at 6:15 a.m. and remained on the set until seven in the evening, when he was driven to the editing rooms of MGM to continue cutting Hurry Sundown. His one request, quickly granted, was a private phone on which, when he was not needed on the Batman set, he would confer with his two veteran editors, Lou Loeffler and James Wells. For the entire week Preminger earned an A for conduct. “It is much easier being an actor than a director,” he said. “You just take orders. They tell you where to stand and what to say. You become a child again. It’s play”42
Although Preminger and his editors managed to trim the Gildens’ 1,064-page novel into a comparatively meager 146 minutes, many reviewers, along with a host of other gripes, complained of Hurry Sundown’s excessive length. “Sheer pulp fiction … an offense to intelligence,” Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times on March 24, 1967. More tolerantly (and accurately), Variety saluted Preminger for “a hard-hitting and handsomely produced film about racial conflict in Georgia circa 1945. Told with a depth and frankness possible only today, the story develops its theme in a welcome, straightforward way that is neither propaganda nor exploitation.” As Madeleine Sherwood correctly claimed, “Otto was trying to deal with racial issues in a way that at the time nobody else was. The film was dismissed out of hand in 1967, but now it should be regarded as an important piece of history. Yes, it’s too long, it goes all over the place, there are too many stories— but really, it’s a wonderful bad movie.”43
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