In addition to adjusting to a demanding new job, Erik also had to face the responsibility of being a father himself, when (in January 1968) Barbara gave birth to their son, Chris.
“When I started working for him my father was facing a deadline,” Erik recalled.
He was going to have to deliver a picture to Paramount, with whom he had a unique contract: Paramount had to do a lot, Otto only had to deliver. But he was still having trouble with the Hersey book. Despite the contemporary setting, the story really was an allegory, a retelling of Mephistopheles, and Otto was a realist who didn’t really respond to nonrealistic material: that’s why his best film was Anatomy of a Murder. His first plan was to get rid of the allegory, which left him with a story that seemed to be on quicksand. Too Far to Walk just wasn’t coming together, and he was worried about what his next project was going to be.16
“Otto hired me as something like the seventeenth writer on Too Far to Walk after he had read a screenplay of mine about hippies in San Francisco called Skidoo,” Doran William Cannon recalled.
My agent, who had worked for Otto as a secretary, had sent him the screenplay as a writing sample. He liked it and summoned me to New York, putting me up royally at the Plaza Hotel, to work with him on the screenplay. When I told him why I thought Too Far to Walk wasn’t working—I had read all the versions, and each one was worse than the last—Otto responded by saying, “I want short scenes, like in your marvelous Skidoo.” “Why not make Skidoo?” I said. “I think I will,” he responded, and just like that he called his agent and put the deal together.17
“Otto latched onto Skidoo for many reasons,” Erik said. “He had done research on the drug scene for Too Far to Walk; he had some sense of where he was, sociologically, on Skidoo, and that sense was important to him. And he liked the antiestablishment thrust of Bill’s script; in reality, Otto never had much respect for the establishment, and he appreciated the absurdity of conservatism. He also felt it was a story he could make quickly.”18
Cannon’s screenplay was about a retired mobster, Tony Banks, forced by a Mafia chieftain called “God” to make one final hit—in Alcatraz he is to kill Packard, a gangster planning to cooperate with a Senate crime-investigating committee. But after he has an accidental acid trip, Banks has a jailhouse epiphany, deciding once and for all that he will forsake violence. In the finale, he joins his wife and daughter, who have fallen in with hippies, on a love-in on “God’s” yacht. “Otto loved my concept of pitting hippies against the Mafia, which I represented as the establishment, which may have been the way the Mafia thought of itself,” Cannon said.
To Otto I represented youth and freshness and the counterculture, and when we started he thought I was the most talented writer in the world.
But frankly, I knew from the beginning that working with Otto would go from good to worse. He really did want me to do well, but his story sense flew in the face of mine. At the time, as in my screenplay for Brewster McCloud, I wanted to use movies to change the world. I thought Skidoo delivered an important message of peace and love at a time when America was engaged in the war in Vietnam. But Otto was trying to deal with his own demons, as well as with the sheer improbability of his directing a movie like this.19
Tension developed between Preminger and Cannon about how the Mafia figures were to be depicted. The author wanted them to be treated realistically; Preminger was itching to turn them into cartoons. “Otto wanted to magnify the silliness rather than the truth of the Mafia,” Cannon recalled. “I told Otto from the start that if he directed Skidoo the way he had directed In Harm’s Way, it would be funny. But he thought the broader you played comedy the funnier it could be. There wasn’t a chance of his understanding that if you played it straight, it would be funnier.”
When Preminger asked him to write a violent scene early in the film Cannon balked.
My story was about the powers of nonviolence, and I refused to write violent things. Otto’s sense was that these are gangsters, this is Hollywood, this is what people want. To have a violent scene so early in the film would destroy the comedy, but Otto’s sense of comedy was perverse. I was out, and to rewrite me he brought in Mel Brooks, a nice madcap choice. “I am not going to hire this man,” Otto told me later. “Between you and him I would go crazy.” Instead, with my blessing, he hired Elliott Baker, the author of A Fine Madness, to do the rewrite. When Elliott showed me what he had written, I said, “You are doing just what he wants.”20
When the rewritten script was completed to his satisfaction by the end of 1967, Preminger, with help from Erik, who had sat in on most of the writing sessions and was now in charge of casting, quickly assembled a one-of-a-kind all-star ensemble. As Tony Banks, the reluctant hit man: television icon Jackie Gleason. As Tony’s ditzy wife Flo: Broadway’s original Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly!: Carol Channing. As the jailhouse stool pigeon: Mickey Rooney As “God”: Groucho Marx, in what was to be his last film. As an up-and-coming mafioso: former teen idol Frankie Avalon. As senior mafiosi: Old Hollywood stalwarts Cesar Romero and George Raft. As hippies: John Phillip Law, Otto’s young leading man from Hurry Sundown, and John’s brother Tom, a real hippie. As various figures of authority: Burgess Meredith (a prison warden), Peter Lawford (a senator), Doro Merande (a prissy mayor eager to get the hippies out of town).
To play the pivotal role of “the Professor,” a draft-dodging drug guru and technical wizard who orchestrates his and Tony’s escape from Alcatraz by getting the entire prison high on LSD-spiked soup, Preminger cast a movie newcomer, stage actor Austin Pendleton, who was a friend of Bill Cannon’s. When Preminger was in San Francisco in late February scouting locations, he summoned Pendleton for an interview. “I was to meet him at his hotel and to ride out with him to a location he would be using in the film,” Pendleton recollected.
He was “auditioning” me as a favor to Bill. This happened right in the middle of an incredibly turbulent time when opposition to the war in Vietnam was escalating; Eugene McCarthy had done well in the New Hampshire primary; Johnson was to withdraw; and Martin Luther King was to be assassinated. We talked politics, about which Preminger had such a good grasp. At the end of the drive, during which we had not exchanged one word about Skidoo, he asked his driver to take me to the airport where I was to catch a plane to Los Angeles. I thought he had decided I was out. But just before we parted, he said, “I like talking to you; you don’t need to do the test because the part is yours.”
I liked Preminger’s movies, even the ones people didn’t like, and he was enchanting on that drive, simply and completely enchanting. But I felt Skidoo would be a disaster—I had a terrible sense there would be a head-on collision between Otto and the material—and I turned him down. He said fine, but Bill was after me, and with a little more money offered in a second round of negotiations—they get interested when you say no—I had to accept. A couple of weeks later, I went out to Hollywood with a heavy heart.
I had just finished a tour of Little Foxes with Beah Richards, who laughed when I told her I’d be working with Otto. “He’s a monster,” she said, but she liked him anyway. She told me that she had complained to him that from a black person’s point of view a scene in Hurry Sundown made no sense. “I wrote the scene,” Otto told her, clearly offended. “But you’ve never been black,” Beah said. “How would you know?” Otto shot back. At that moment Beah said she decided that she would just enjoy him.21
Shooting his first scene standing naked in a prison shower with Otto yelling at him, Pendleton wished he were back on the stage. Fearing that if he stayed this first film was certain to be his last, he placed desperate calls to his agent, Deborah Coleman, asking to be released.
“I can’t get you out of this, they’ve got you on film,” Deborah said. So I had to keep on. One day soon after, Otto came up to me and said, “I am so pleased with what you are doing I am expanding your part.” I was very upset. And then, the next day, when I didn’t hit my marks during camera blocking, he explode
d. “You are an amateur, you don’t know how to behave in front of a camera,” he screamed. “Yes, I know I am, Mr. Preminger. Can you help me?” And at that, he melted, he just melted, and for the rest of the film he coached me while the crew was setting up the lights. Explaining what the scenes were about and how I should play them, he directed me more than he did anyone else; Otto Preminger gave me a course in film acting, and I began to see why Jane Fonda had told me that Hurry Sundown was her best work. Otto kept saying the camera liked honesty; well, I was a scared actor playing a scared character, and the camera recorded my fear. I thought the camera was going to reveal how insecure I was—it did. And that’s why the performance worked.22
Pendleton felt that Preminger devoted so much time to him because he didn’t know how to direct anybody else.
Otto didn’t understand comedy, or the sudden left turns of the script—he kept trying to make it clear, in a way it didn’t want to be. He didn’t know what to say to the comic actors like Gleason and Channing and Groucho. I was not playing a clown, but the kind of role that could have been in other Otto Preminger films, and so I was the only one in the film to whom he could give the kind of direction he knew how to give.
Between Preminger and Jackie Gleason there was no point of contact. “There was no yelling,” as Austin Pendleton observed, “there was just no communication at all. Gleason wasn’t hostile, he was depressed—the pilot light was out, and Otto sensed it. Gleason never wanted to rehearse. He couldn’t even do camera blocking, which with Otto was always complicated. He had no humor offstage and he was a prima donna who made his wardrobe man kneel down to tie his shoes.”23 “There was a kind of wall between us,” Preminger conceded. “While I could not argue about what he was doing—it was all correct— there is such a difference between us, in the texture of our characters (he would probably say he is very happy about the difference). There is a different attitude toward life, toward our profession, toward man, toward woman, toward friendship, toward love, toward war, toward peace, toward politics—toward everything.”24
“Preminger and Gleason were afraid of each other,” Bill Cannon felt. Preminger, however wasn’t afraid of the other legendary comic actor on the set, and several times he went after Groucho. “I had wanted Otto to play ‘God,’ but he wouldn’t and so I suggested Groucho Marx,” Bill Cannon said. “Otto’s reaction had been negative. ‘He’s too old.’ But he hired him anyway. When Groucho showed up on the set, he asked Otto, Are you drunk?’ But Otto at that point was always in complete control of his faculties. Otto didn’t like the comment, and when he couldn’t get anything out of Groucho
The lack of rapport between Preminger and Groucho Marx is apparent on the set of Skidoo.
as an actor he yelled at him, many times.”25 As Hope said, “There were many tense moments with Groucho, who was gross, uncouth, extremely unpleasant to everyone, and like Jackie Gleason did not have a funny bone in his body A more humor-free person you could not imagine.”26
Unlike her costars, Carol Channing worked hard to please the boss. “Preminger was a wonderful producer, but I didn’t like working with him,” Channing recalled.
He enjoyed beating me up in front of the company—and I just made a dishrag of myself. My son says I have a sign: “Take me, I’m a masochist.” I was wrong. I should have said, “Mr. Preminger, I’m leaving. You get someone else.” But it’s my nature not to walk. Because he was extremely able in his field I kept blaming myself, thinking I was just not able to give him what he wanted. How sweet he could be to other people; he wanted to show me how sweet he was to his wife and children, and I felt there was something sadistic about it, toward me. He adored Hope, there was no doubt of that, and she was adorable: kind and gentle and nice to everyone on the set, just the opposite of him. I thought I would try to kill him with kindness, but it didn’t work. For me it was like having a nightmare in which you open your mouth and no sound emerges. I never saw the film, and I never will.
Channing’s refuge was Erik, “kind and good and I loved him. When I was upset Erik would be so caring, so sensitive about my feelings. I thought he was trying to make up for how Preminger was behaving.”27 “In Hollywood there are two categories of people,” Erik said. “There are those who don’t remember you, and those who are human beings. Carol Channing, bless her, is in the latter category. She was delightful to work with, and whenever she sees me, it’s ‘Hi, Erik,’ accompanied by her big welcoming sunburst of a smile.”28
“I don’t think Otto knew what to tell me about playing a hippie,” John Phillip Law said.
On Hurry Sundown he knew exactly what he wanted; on Skidoo, where he actually yelled much less, he was not less interested but he was less focused. We all knew it was a mishmash of styles: social satire/musical/slapstick/melodrama/family story. But the cast did not bitch and moan and stand around making judgments; we all tried to make it work. And that communal spirit, which existed more back then than it does now, came from the top: Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing were both very conscientious and were trying to make some sense of it. We all hoped that Otto had a concept.29
Whether he did or not, Otto kept to his original schedule—shooting began on March 18 and wrapped two months later, on May 17—and delivered Skidoo to Paramount on time. At the wrap party at the Factory, a hip Los Angeles disco, Preminger in a Nehru suit smiled effulgently all evening. “It was an incredible party,” as Bill Cannon remembered. “Preminger wanted so hard to be a thoroughly modern Millie, and laughing and greeting the guests—he was delightful with Sidney Poitier, I recall—you’d have thought he’d just finished a film for all time.”30
“I was at Otto’s house when he screened Skidoo for Paramount executives, including Robert Evans,” recalled Peter Bogdanovich. “There wasn’t one laugh or titter the entire film. When it was over Otto acted like he’d just shown them Laura. He behaved with such aplomb, such grace and charm. Evans didn’t like Preminger’s deal with Paramount, and he certainly didn’t like Skidoo. But since Preminger always came in under budget nobody at Paramount could bother him.”31
Otto arranged for the world premiere to be held in Miami as a fundraiser for the not-yet-built Miami Arts Center. At a press luncheon prior to the screening he touted Skidoo for its cutting-edge subject matter. Then with four cast members he was driven to the premiere in the first car of a long motorcade that made its way along the Miami Expressway. “It was all so beautifully orchestrated,” as Austin Pendleton recalled. “Otto had whipped up a feeling of a big, important premiere—you’d have thought it was the Atlanta opening of Gone with the Wind. But twenty minutes after the film started there began an ever gathering parade of rich people exiting. I knew then that we were in trouble. At the party afterward the atmosphere was strained, but Otto was smooth as silk where other directors would have been rattled.”32
When Skidoo opened in Los Angeles on December 18, 1968 (to qualify for Academy Award consideration!), and in New York on March 5, 1969, it received scathing reviews. “ Skidoo is something only for Preminger-watchers or for people whose minds need pressing by a heavy object,” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, setting the tone for the film’s reception. “The movie has the form of comedy, but its almost complete lack of humor, its retarded contemporaneousness … its sometimes beautiful and expensive-looking San Francisco locations; and its indomitable denial that disaster is at hand (apparent from almost the opening sequence)—all give the film an almost undeniable Preminger stamp.” Although he wouldn’t admit it in public, Preminger, as Hope claimed, “knew the film didn’t work. He really hated it, as I do still. I wish people would just forget about it.”
As the impresario of a tune-in, turn-on, drop-out hippie extravaganza, of course Otto Preminger, a sixty-three-year-old fuddy-duddy, was almost sublimely ill suited. “My God yes, Otto was the wrong director for it,” Bill Cannon said, “but probably nobody but Otto could have gotten it green-lighted. Nobody working within the studio system could or, likely, would have done
it, whereas Otto, an independent, with his unique contract with Paramount, actually made the film.”33 As John Phillip Law commented, the filmmaker had “the courage to jump into something new. That he made the film at all represents an extraordinary combination of chutzpah and ego.”34
Preminger didn’t have the touch, or the life experience, to capture the San Francisco hippie scene in its late-1960s heyday. An early shot in a packed hippie caravan indicates his outsider’s viewpoint. The too composed setup—a sedentary camera stares at the hippies as they sing, paint their bodies, embrace each other—places the audience in the director’s chair looking at a group of exotic others with a cautious, removed interest. Preminger enjoys the hippies—he makes no judgment about their drug taking or their free love—but he is not capable of either understanding or revealing them. As if sensing this himself, his focus shifts repeatedly from the young people to the old-timers. And instead of the with-it comedy about the contemporary zeitgeist that Preminger hoped to make in order to renovate his image, at heart Skidoo is a not hip, not funny story about post-middle-age male anxiety.
Tony Banks obsesses about whether he is really the father of his daughter, and in his acid trip phallic guns float and bend, “God’s” head appears at the top of a gigantic screw, and protruding eyes stare at him accusingly. “God’s” paramour is a tall black woman who cheats on him with two virile young men, a hippie and a mobster, and in order to prevent the old man from watching her trysts she drapes the hidden cameras that “God” has installed in each room on his yacht.
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