The fear of loss of potency and mastery that runs through the film is announced in the odd opening, in which Tony and Flo, with remote control devices, switch television channels. Their battle for control of representation, for gaining dominance over the image—Flo wants to watch a Senate crime commission investigating mobsters; Tony looks at ads for deodorant and toothpaste, another example of his insecure self-image—anticipates the director’s struggles throughout the film to contain an alien subject.
Despite Preminger’s attempts to gain the upper hand, Bill Cannon’s loopy, anarchic story keeps slipping out of his control. The result is a fascinating train wreck, deeply fractured, schizophrenic through and through, as Otto, an inveterate realist, tries without success to ground the mayhem on terra firma. He boasted that, except for one set, the electronics-laden apartment of the hot-blooded young mafioso played by Frankie Avalon, he shot on location. “I feel that wherever possible, even in a comedy like this, it gives a feeling of reality to work in real places rather than in studio built sets.”35 But Skidoo, a pop-art cartoon, needs fantasy and whimsy rather than “a feeling of reality.”
Nonetheless, Preminger occasionally nabs the “sharp left turns” in the script, as for example in his smart use of Day-Glo colors for the hippie scenes as against the virtual absence of color in the prison scenes. However, for the three big production numbers—Tony’s life-changing acid trip, a phantasmagoric garbage can ballet, and Carol Channing’s performance of the title song—Preminger can’t disguise the fact that, creatively, he is skating on perilously thin ice. In each case, his editing decisions are the wrong ones. For the acid trip and the ballet, which could have been delirious showstoppers, his cutting is flaccid and halfhearted when it should spin with a manic staccato flair. And, maddeningly, he breaks up Channing’s eleven o’clock number into fragments when he should have shot it in a single take, standing back to observe the musical theater veteran dressed in a sailor suit out of Gilbert and Sullivan perform “Skidoo” in a joyful style that could melt any but the most unforgiving viewer.
However, despite the fact that its raft of old-time stars pulls the film into the orbit of Hollywood past rather than anchoring it in a late-1960s summer of love; despite Preminger’s transformation of a supposed comedy about hippies into an almost laugh-free examination of his own “demons;” despite the fact that neither Jackie Gleason, a good straight actor who gives an inappropriately strong dramatic performance, nor Groucho Marx, no actor at all, has a single funny line or piece of business, this infamous, endearing flop ends up revealing more about the hippie sensibility than any other film of its time. Preminger’s goodwill toward all the characters, the mobsters as well as the hippies, and his neutrality about free love and drugs capture a sense of the film’s cultural moment. Indeed, Skidoo may have the most permissive attitude toward LSD of any film in Hollywood history, and in the love-in at the end (filmed on John Wayne’s yacht!) several taboos are smashed. “God’s” black mistress marries a young white mobster in a service officiated by saturnine George Raft holding a book called The Death of God. And “God,” wearing what looks like an Indian wedding veil, “marries” the Professor, their union consecrated as they share a tote on a boat.
At the end Preminger himself interrupts the hippie bacchanal to bestow his blessing. “Stop! We are not through yet,” he announces in a voice brimming with bonhomie and good cheer. “Before you skidoo we’d like to introduce our cast and crew.” And then the credits are performed to music and lyrics composed by Harry Nilsson. “Reading the credits at the end was in my original screenplay,” Bill Cannon said. “But the idea of hiring Harry
Carol Channing performs the title song in the finale to Skidoo, Preminger’s strangest movie.
Nilsson was Otto’s. I was skeptical, but I feel now that Nilsson was a fabulous choice.”36
In 1968, everyone, including the filmmaker, regarded Skidoo as a mistake. Over the years, however, the film has acquired a considerable underground reputation, and some of those who worked on it have softened their original opinions. “There was definitely a sweet side to Otto, and that side is displayed in the film, which is very sweet-natured,” Bill Cannon said. “I had no love for the movie in 1968, but now I like it much better and I can see why growing numbers of people are fascinated by it. I’m grateful for the cult appreciation, and I have enjoyed being both maverick (in 1968) and icon (over thirty years later).”37 “It wasn’t the greatest career move on my part,” John Phillip Law reminisced. “I did Skidoo instead of Midnight Cowboy, but I’ve grown to like the film, and I’m proud to be in something that has developed a big cult reputation.”38 At the time Erik thought the film “was just horrible, but when I gave a talk at one of the annual screenings of the film held at the Roxy Theater in San Francisco, at least I could see what Otto had been trying to do. However, isn’t being a cult favorite a sign you did it wrong?”39
A writer named Christian Divine (his real name, even more improbable when he discloses that he is Jewish) was hooked when he first saw the film, on acid, at the Crest Theater in Sacramento in 1990 on his twenty-third birthday. At this writing he is working on a book about Skidoo:
Before I saw it, I’d heard about how bad it was; I’d been told it was one of the worst films ever made, and I had always wanted to see it. But that’s hard to do because it just isn’t available. Seeing it was mind-blowing. I saw it again the next day because I had to be sure I’d seen what I thought I saw. It’s so bad it’s good—it’s great. It’s straight camp that represents an awful union between Old and New Hollywood: Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid, which was Wilder’s Skidoo, is in the same category. Preminger in Skidoo is on a weird page no one else was on. His direction is misguided; the lighting is atrocious; the film is edited with a butcher knife and yet despite the fact that because of his Teutonic nature Preminger can’t fit into the hippie ethos—he just doesn’t get it—the film has a good spirit, a likable, quite captivating naïveté. It’s a psychedelic Rorschach blot. The minute you think it can’t get any weirder, it does. In the late 1960s, the studios did not know what was happening in the real world. With filmmakers breaking free of the Hollywood codes, the rug was being pulled out from under the studios. The big roadshow movies were bombing. In his own way with this film Preminger helped to break through the massive repression and hypocrisy that was strangling Old Hollywood at this transitional period. I knew in 2000 I needed to find out what it was like on the set: Otto Preminger directing Jackie Gleason in an acid trip; Otto Preminger directing Groucho Marx smoking a joint. My title: The Unmaking of “ Skidoo”: A Psychedelic Movie Misfire.40
During the summer of 1968, as he was working on postproduction of his hippie comedy, Preminger turned to another project he hoped would alter his old fogy persona. Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, based on a novel by Marjorie Kellogg, is a story about three young misfits struggling with physical disabilities who meet in a hospital and form a surrogate family. On Skidoo, Erik had been more or less a bystander—Skidoo had been his apprenticeship—but this time Otto wanted his son to take a more active part. He gave Erik, billed as Erik Kirkland, a title, executive assistant to the producer, and had him attend all the meetings with Marjorie Kellogg, who was adapting her novel. “Otto had minor disagreements with Marjorie, but in my presence I never heard him raise his voice. Nobody could yell at Marjorie because she exuded acceptance, calm, and love,” Erik said.41
“When I started working with Otto, he gave me a little office of my own, down from his office at Paramount, where he was finishing Skidoo,” Kellogg said.
One morning he began to get very abusive, as if it were in his blood, which I think it was, and I simply started packing to leave. He came down the hall like a lamb. There was never another cross word during the almost four months we worked together. Junie Moon, a simple story that avoided becoming maudlin, was very different from the kind of big epics he had been working on and I saw that he was trying to respect the understated quality of my wr
iting. But the fact that this was a very small, personal story was the aspect that was difficult for him—he had been used to directing the Israeli army, but this had to be done in an intimate way.42
With the endorsement of Erik and Marjorie, Preminger selected newcomers for the two male leads. For Warren, a gay paraplegic, he cast Robert Moore, who wasn’t an actor at all but a director with two current stage hits, Promises, Promises, a Broadway musical, and The Boys in the Band, an off-Broadway play with an all-gay cast of characters. For Arthur, an epileptic, he chose another movie tyro, Ken Howard, whom he had seen on Broadway playing Thomas Jefferson in the musical 1776. As the title character, whose face has been badly burned, he cast Liza Minnelli, who had been seen in only one film, Charlie Bubbles, in 1967.
On June 10, 1969, two weeks before shooting, Preminger began to rehearse with his cast as if they were preparing for a play “The gratifying thing is that the three actors became friends, very much like the characters in the book,” Preminger observed.43 Erik agreed that “the spirit of the company was very good—that translated into everyone working very hard. There really developed a huge feeling of camaraderie: the three leads bonded, and Otto was patient because he saw they were trying to do their best.”44 Adding to the bonhomie was James Coco, cast as a fishmonger who befriends the outcasts. “He was warm and cuddly, and enormously funny— he was one of the great loves of my life,” Hope said.45
On June 22, Liza’s mother Judy Garland died in London; it was left to Liza to make the arrangements for the funeral. As always in this kind of crisis, Preminger behaved with compassion. He offered to suspend rehearsals, but Liza asked only that they be held at her apartment so she could handle calls and be spared from reporters. “Liza was a mensch,” Erik observed. “Throughout rehearsals she never showed the slightest hint of temperament, and once we started shooting she never once asked for a single favor.”46 At one point during shooting, as Ken Howard recalled, “Liza’s lips started to tremble and you could see this emotion about her mother start to take over. Otto said, ‘Are you all right?’ and he stopped what we were doing. ‘You tell me when you can begin again,’ he said.”47 When filming began in San Diego, Minnelli had a kidney-stone attack, and when Otto found out that she would have to be taken to the hospital that night, at 1 a.m., he insisted on going with her.
Working happily on the film with an inexperienced screenwriter and a trio of movie novices, Preminger also hired a first-time editor, a young black man named Harry Howard. “I played tennis at a club in Grand Central, The Tennis Club, and a lady in the waiting room asked me what I did,” Howard recalled.
When I said I was a film editor, she said that her husband was looking for an editor. When she said her husband was Otto Preminger, I was impressed. She said she could get me an interview, but I mentioned that I had only edited thirty-second television commercials. “Otto’s given people a shot before,” she said.
When I went to his office at 711 Fifth Avenue he was shaving his head with an electric razor. “Please come in,” he told me as he continued to shave. We talked, and after looking at my résumé he said it was not possible for someone with my credentials to work on an Otto Preminger film. I told him I was an editor and I could cut anything. I left, thinking that was it. Two weeks later I got a call to come up to the office. “I’m going to take a chance here,” he said. “I have a good feeling about you. Can you start in two weeks?”
He hired me to help Henry Berman, the editor of record of Junie Moon. The film was being cut in New York, but Henry, who was so old he had cut Gunga Din in 1939, didn’t want to stay in New York that long. I was there every day for about two months and I learned a lot. Otto was very good with Henry; he wasn’t telling him everything, and giving him a lot of leeway. When Henry left I finished up.
Otto gave me my first shot, then he hired me to edit his next film, Such Good Friends, and I went on to have a big career because I had a credit on a Preminger film. It meant a lot. Otto was like a teacher to me—I think he felt like he was training me, and he seemed to enjoy that. He hired me when he could have hired a blue-eyed white guy, and I’m very grateful. Later I heard rumors about Otto being a racist. Otto Preminger was not remotely a racist—my God, not even close!48
At the time Preminger was finishing postproduction on Junie Moon in the fall of 1969, Gypsy was diagnosed with lung cancer. Whenever Erik asked to be released from his responsibilities on the film and at the office so he could spend time with his mother, Otto readily assented. Although their relationship had often been fraught, Erik, with Otto’s blessings, now became close with his mother. During the last months of her life Erik traveled back and forth from New York to Los Angeles more than a dozen times. On one of Erik’s last visits she inquired for the first time about his relationship with Otto. “He’s been great through all this,” Erik told her. “He gives me all the time I need to visit you, and he always finds an excuse so the studio pays the way.” “I sensed he was a good man, in spite of his reputation,” Gypsy said. “That’s one of the reasons I picked him. That and his mind. I could have had a child by Mike [Todd] any time, but Mike had a mean streak that I didn’t want my child to inherit.”49 Gypsy died, at fifty-six, on April 26, 1970.
The following month, Erik joined his father, his stepmother, and the cast of Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon for the film’s world premiere as the in-competition opening attraction of the Cannes Film Festival. “Otto had been part of Cannes for so many years he could have shown a home movie there,” Hope said. MASH, the first film produced by Ingo, was also in competition. “Ingo’s film got wonderful reviews, and we didn’t,” Hope pointed out.50 Indeed, Ingo’s debut production was awarded the Grand Prize, while Otto’s film went home empty-handed. “I never saw anything as warm as Otto’s reaction to my father’s success with MASH” Eve Preminger said. “Otto wasn’t doing so well at that time, and I’m not sure he even liked the movie—it wasn’t his sort of thing. He was so proud of Ingo nonetheless. There were no ambivalent feelings whatsoever.”51
The atmosphere on the set of Junie Moon may have been the most amicable in Preminger’s career, but the film is a failure on every level. On the page Marjorie Kellogg’s cool, unadorned style defuses her story’s sentimental premise, whereas on film a more charged approach—the hue and cry of temperamental actors who have been encouraged to let it rip—is needed. All the performers, however, are hollow, and two are downright atrocious: Robert Moore, fey and preening; and Kay Thompson as the rich owner of the house the outcasts rent, a dragon lady who lives in a castle, is chauffeur-driven in a leopard-striped limousine, and seems to have dropped in from another film. Preminger’s insecurity with the material is reflected in the film’s technical incompetence. Pointlessly disorienting zoom shots frequently replace the director’s signature tracking camera and the sound is often tinny and sometimes out of sync. Even the title sequence—Pete Seeger warbling a song of manufactured sentiment—and Saul Bass’s uninspired logo, a drawing of entwined hands and arms, come up empty.
Scorched by the reception in Cannes and expecting the worst, Paramount opened the film in the summer of 1970 (on July 17 in New York; on August 19 in Los Angeles), a slot usually reserved at that time for bottom feeders, and Otto did not promote the movie with his usual fanfare. Notices were downbeat, business lackluster. “The film is so cool and ordinary that it almost made me nostalgic for Skidoo, which was epically bad but the obvious work of a brazenly gifted director,” Vincent Canby wrote in his New York Times review. To be sure, for all its missteps Skidoo exuded the kind of temperament that has been bleached out of Junie Moon. “The film doesn’t work,” Hope said. But more than that, coming on the heels of Skidoo, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a film awash in the kind of sloppy sentimentality Otto had always avoided and the only film in his entire career without a single redeeming feature, seemed confirmation that the once masterful director had lost his way.
After working with his father on two unsuccessful pictures, Eri
k was disappointed, for himself as well as for Otto. But both father and son remained eager to please each other. When Otto, in the spring of 1970, acquired the screen rights to Such Good Friends, a new novel by Lois Gould about a group of prosperous, not-so-nice New Yorkers, he made sure that Erik was by his side throughout preproduction and filming. “Because Marjorie Kellogg had been such a calm collaborator adapting her own novel, Otto decided to hire the author of Such Good Friends to write the screenplay,” Erik said. “But Lois did not have Marjorie’s detachment or her easy manner, and once again Otto discovered that someone who can write a book cannot write a screenplay”52
Preminger dismissed Lois Gould, and asked Elaine May, a good choice to write about a group of Manhattan neurotics, to take over, but May was busy with other projects and declined. His next hire was Joan Micklin Silver, who had had a recent success writing and directing Hester Street, which shared with Such Good Friends a social setting, New York Jewish, but little else. Silver was gone in less than two weeks. Next up, he hired a male, David Slavitt, to write what Preminger called “a woman’s story.” Slavitt’s tenure was three weeks. Over the summer of 1970, when he was in Los Angeles to prepare for the opening of Junie Moon, Preminger worked with Mr. and Mrs. John Gregory Dunne (Mrs. Dunne, Joan Didion, certainly had the edge Preminger was looking for). The Dunnes lasted longer than the previous writers, but when the Premingers relocated to New York come September, the script wasn’t finished and the Dunnes were. At this low point Erik suggested a television and short-story writer named David Shaber: another no-go. The problem was finding the right tone for Gould’s comedy of urban bad manners. Its narrative premise is challenging: a wife discovers her husband’s infidelity with her best friend as well as with many others when he is hospitalized in order to remove a benign mole; through medical malpractice Richard becomes progressively sicker and expires. The story blends black comedy and social satire with a dose of old-fashioned woman’s-film sentimentality, a recipe that none of the treatments had captured to Preminger’s satisfaction.
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