“Often at seven at night we would get script changes, and Tony and I and Erik’s girlfriend Brigitte would stay up all night Xeroxing,” Ken Kaufman said. “It was incredibly intense and it went on for months.”33
Even with substantial rewriting, the opening scenes of the chattering young women arriving at the yacht refused to ignite. The irresolvable problem was that after having conducted extensive interviews and working closely with a top French casting director, Margot Capellier, Preminger and Erik had selected five young actresses who were not convincing playing characters from prominent wealthy families who attended one of the finest European finishing schools. “All five of them were tough-looking and so scruffy in appearance that they would have been thrown out of Le Rosey in Switzerland,” Hope said. “Actually, they would never have been accepted in the first place.”34 And as actresses one was worse than the other, although everyone agreed that the prize went to Kim Cattrall, cast as the American hostage, daughter of a senator. Three decades later Cattrall became famous playing an urban nymphomaniac on television in Sex and the City, but in her first film, as Ken Kaufman recalled, “She was just awful. At that time she had no talent, not a whit of talent. She was only seventeen, so green and raw. The two other finalists for the role had been Connie Selleca and Kim Basinger; Otto didn’t think either one could act, but both were drop-dead gorgeous. Kim Cattrall not only couldn’t act, she was also, at seventeen, not sexy. But if she had any chance at all to be good, Otto robbed her of it the first day of shooting.”35 As Erik recalled, “In one shot Kim had to lean out of a window on the yacht and say some bad dialogue that I had written. I rewrote it, and asked Otto if she could try it the new way. He said, ‘No, she can do it the original way’ Why did he do this to the poor girl? It was painful. After making Kim do the shot over and over, Otto said to her, ‘Darling, you remind me of Marilyn Monroe, not in looks, of course, but in lack of talent.’ I’m amazed Kim stayed in the business.”36
No matter what he did, whether he shouted or whispered, threatened or cajoled, Preminger could get nothing from any of the young women. “The girls were frightened of him, the big Hollywood director,” Wolfgang Glattes said. “They just froze up with him. He could not get through to them, and it was his deficiency.” The second day he fired one French actress, who was
The five hostages (from left, Brigitte Ariel, Isabelle Huppert, Debra Berger, Kim Cattrall, Lalla Ward) in Rosebud, watched over by their Palestinian captor (Josef Shiloah). In casting the hostages, Preminger, with almost perverse perfection, batted zero.
an anorexic, and replaced her with another one, Brigitte Ariel, who was almost equally scrawny and had blackened teeth. All the women were terrified of doing a harshly lighted nude scene. “Of course they didn’t want to do the scene,” Glattes said. “But on the day we shot it they didn’t rebel. You didn’t rebel with Otto.”37 Of the five hapless women, Isabelle Huppert was the one most able to hold her ground against Preminger. But speaking up did her no good; her performance is as empty of talent and charm as that of the others.
Preminger’s other casting was also ill-starred. As a high-powered Israeli agent, Preminger chose Cliff Gorman, an actor who had had a great success in the stage and film versions of The Boys in the Band and onstage as the self-destructive comedian Lenny Bruce in Lenny. “Cliff came prepared, ready to work, trying to do an Israeli accent,” as Tony Gittelson observed. “But he was a meteor that had burnt out. And Otto, who never bullied him as he did the girls, just couldn’t shape a performance out of him.”38 Although nabbing former New York City mayor John Lindsay to play a senator had generated almost as much publicity as his almost casting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Advise and Consent, Preminger “couldn’t extract even the barest semblance of acting from Lindsay,” Wolfgang Glattes said. “He was very nice to the mayor, very nice indeed, but as we all saw on the set he just could not get any sign of life out of Lindsay”39 (“I tracked Lindsay down in Majorca, and he agreed to do it, although his first asking price was unrealistically high,” as Bud Rosenthal recalled. “Otto was adamant that the casting had to be a front-page story in the New York Times. It was, but not without some heavy-duty arm-twisting on my part. I thought if I was unable to persuade Abe Weiler at the Times I might lose my job.”)40
Preminger’s biggest problem, however, was with his leading man. “Robert Mitchum loved Otto, and the two of them used to whore around in the old days, in London in the early 1950s on press junkets,” Ken Kaufman said. “But when he arrived in Corsica, where his first scenes were to be shot, Mitchum was drunk, and he stayed that way.”41 “He was also on drugs,” Glattes claimed.42 “The problem,” according to Erik, “was in bringing Mitchum in a few weeks before he was needed. That was pure stupidity on Otto’s part. Mitchum had no problem at all with dictatorial directors and remembered Otto with great fondness (their blowup during Angel Face was long since forgotten), but with nothing to do and just hanging around he started to drink more and more heavily, and that was the end of the story.”43
“Mitchum was reeling in every scene, and slurring his words,” Hope said. “When Otto brought in the press, Mitchum stood up and said, ‘I’m only doing this crap because I need the money.’ He was not long for us after that.”44 According to Tony Gittelson, on the day of reckoning Preminger took the actor aside and told him in a quiet, level voice, “ ‘Bob, we can’t go on like this.’ Mitchum, blind drunk that morning, said to Otto, ‘Shake my hand.’ And then Mitchum, who really didn’t give a shit, left the set.” Always calm in such a moment, Preminger “stood there for thirty seconds,” as Gittelson remembered, “and then said, ‘Let’s move to the chapel scene.’ Then he knocked off and went back to the office. Otto didn’t brood, he didn’t look back, but put his mind to what he knew he had to do: find another star quick.”45 (“The next day Mitchum ripped a phone off the wall,” Ken Kaufman recalled. “Otto, furious now, told me to get the police. But I hid in the bathroom; I knew not to call the police, because I knew Otto’s anger would pass.”)46
“We got Peter O’Toole down to Corsica within forty-eight hours,” Bud Rosenthal said.47 Like Mitchum, however, O’Toole had a history of acute alcoholism, and as a result of his illness had only one lung and one kidney. As a replacement for an alcoholic, he was indeed a peculiar choice, but somehow a fitting one for this bedeviled project. O’Toole showed up, as Gittelson noted, “looking totally dissipated, at death’s door.”48 “Otto knew he was going from one drunk to another,” Glattes said, “but he and O’Toole respected each other—from a distance.”49 Like Mitchum, the new star was indifferent to his role and to the film. “This gig was merely a payday for O’Toole, and he couldn’t have cared less,” Kaufman said.50
“Peter did not drink on the picture,” Hope claimed.51 Nonetheless, the health of the ravaged-looking actor was fragile and when the production moved to Paris he had a serious ulcer attack and had to be rushed to the American Hospital. Otto had no choice but to suspend shooting, and for the next two weeks, as Glattes remembered, “the crew loved relaxing in Paris on a per diem.”52 As his crew dallied, Otto went off to Israel with Erik to check once again on the locations he had lined up.
When Preminger resumed in Paris, O’Toole received a letter informing him he would be the target of a bomb. “We were filming in an apartment on top of the Tour d’Argent, and we evacuated the building after the threat,” Glattes said. “Later that day we found out that the letter was a joke, an ugly joke, perpetrated by [the critic] Kenneth Tynan. O’Toole went bananas. He went and beat up Tynan.”53 “O’Toole, a nasty man nobody liked, was also a coward,” Ken Kaufman said. “His henchman held Tynan as O’Toole hit him hard, over and over again. He could have killed him. He certainly wanted to.”54
Preminger, O’Toole, Erik, the interns, and a skeleton crew then went to Berlin and Hamburg for a few days. After returning for some pick-up shots in Paris, Preminger was to relocate the entire production to Israel. Ten days before the Israeli shoot was scheduled to beg
in, however, Otto and Erik still did not yet have a “villain,” the chief terrorist who had planned the kidnapping. “We’d been dealing with the heavy since Otto had bought the book,” Erik said.
We both felt casting the mastermind as a German, as in the novel, was a mistake: Germans shouldn’t be the villains in this story. We kept looking for who else could be the bad guy. Roy Clark, a writer Peter O’Toole brought in to make his part sound more British (Peter claimed the dialogue we had written for Mitchum didn’t sound right for a Brit), suggested we use an Arabist, who would conform to the long tradition of Arab-infatuated Brits like T. E. Lawrence. Otto and I liked the idea. We decided to call the character “Sloat,” and Roy Clark wrote a scene for Sloat that was completely brilliant. It made the character complex enough to be sympathetic—it explained the character’s political and psychological motivations. But Otto would not allow it. He didn’t want any sympathy for the character. He screamed at me across the room in a Paris restaurant that United Artists would rather burn the film than release it with that scene.55
Erik had a great deal of trouble writing the scene that his father wanted. “Otto could not get that scene out of Erik,” Hope said. “When Erik said he had writer’s block, Vicky said you have to be a writer to be blocked; Erik was not pleased—by this point they were not friends. Vicky, at fourteen, wrote the scene and Otto accepted it.”56
There was a mutiny as the company was about to leave for Israel. “The crew wanted to know if there would be sufficient security in Israel,” as Tony Gittelson remembered. “ ‘If you don’t want to go, you can go home,’ Otto said. It was not said with any anger or rancor at all. He was firm. He did not, however, say he would get the Israeli Army to protect us.”57 “When we got to Israel, I thought Otto went a little crazy,” Glattes said.
One day he fired two drivers. Then we did night shooting near an Arab border, and we had thirty or forty Israeli soldiers guarding us. Otto insisted that this was the only area where we could shoot: once he had locked into an area that was it. Yet there was nothing special about the area. He decided he wanted to shoot Sloat’s scenes in a cave—like Osama bin Laden, the character lived in and issued his orders from caves. The scenes didn’t make sense, yet Otto didn’t seem aware of this. Richard Attenborough, whom we brought in quickly to play Sloat, was doing the role out of friendship to Otto; he knew the scenes were ridiculous. Yet he took his notes from Otto without a word of protest.58
(As the batty Arabist, Attenborough gives a sly performance that, under the circumstances, is also remarkably inventive.)
“Otto wanted to film the scene in which Israeli soldiers enter Sloat’s cave and capture him in salt mines, where you couldn’t use any explosives,” Erik said. “The scene of Sloat’s capture required action, and cutting between Sloat and the soldiers; but because we were shooting in the salt mines we couldn’t have any action and Otto shot the scene in one take. When preview audiences guffawed at the absurdity of the rescue scene—soldiers in deep focus scale down the walls of the cave unseen by Sloat, facing front as he genuflects in prayer—Otto refused to reshoot.”59
After nearly four months of filming in far-flung locations in Juan-les-Pins, Paris, Corsica, Berlin, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the Israeli desert, the production finally ended, on September 6, 1974, in the place where it began, in Juan-les-Pins, with reshoots of scenes in which Robert Mitchum had appeared. The wrap party was held at the Hôtel du Cap d’Antibes. “Erik sat in the corner crying his eyes out,” Ken Kaufman said. “I was a basket case,” Erik admitted.
I broke down for eight hours, and the day after the wrap party I left. I just couldn’t stay around for the editing. It was one of the hardest periods of my life. I loved Otto a lot and desperately wanted his approval. At the beginning, when I saw the problems about the script, I had said to him, “You love me; I love you, but we have different points of view about this. You deserve a script that suits you.” He said that was nonsense. “This is our chance to make a movie together.” It came totally with love from him, and it still makes me feel so sad. I’m not totally responsible; a number of people played a role in this abomination. The script for Rosebud is one of the worst scripts to make it past the wastebasket, and if you like it, you must be crazy.60
When Wolfgang Glattes said good-bye to him at the wrap party, Preminger looked chagrined. “ ‘Wolf, you can’t leave me in the middle.’ So I went with him to London on postproduction for about five weeks. I was holding his hand, really. He had gotten used to me. I stayed with him at the Dorchester, and the two of us—Hope was busy with the children—went for caviar lunches every day. He looked at the film over and over and he liked it. Otto had been a great director, but not on Rosebud; you can see the decline. Maybe his Alzheimer’s was already starting,” Glattes speculated.61 Tony Gittelson did not agree that Preminger was losing his grip.
Otto ran the set with supreme authority. The problem was that he was saddled with a bad script. He never once betrayed any hesitation or doubt, and he always knew exactly what his next shot would be. His shadow was on everything. He was both respected and feared, and your day centered on not having Otto blow up at you. He was still a force of nature, and he knew it. And he did everything—from signing checks to climbing huge scaffolds. With complete command he managed a lot of petrified actors and Peter sloshing his way through. During the making of that movie Otto Preminger was sharp as a tack: he was not a director in decline. 62
Throughout four months of strenuous preproduction and nearly four months of a peripatetic, plague-ridden shoot, the filmmaker at sixty-nine had maintained a killing pace as for the first time in his career he worried about the possibility that he would fail to remain within the shooting schedule and the budget (a remarkably tight $2,476,000 for below-the-line costs). Regularly he put in fourteen-to-sixteen-hour days struggling with a never-quite-finished script, a number of temporarily brain-dead actors, and a sometimes defiant crew. At the end of the day, after all the on-the-spot rewrites, the recasting and delays, the illness of his leading man, and complicated location shooting in four countries, he brought the film in under budget and only one day late. On September 25, 1974, Variety dubbed him “the indomitable Otto, never more in evidence than on Rosebud.”
His talent as a promoter also intact, Preminger in pre-opening interviews pointed up all the film’s newsworthy elements. He talked frankly about firing Robert Mitchum and about Peter O’Toole’s poor health. He expressed a sly-fox “astonishment” at all the fuss being made of John Lindsay’s cameo appearance; and when asked if he had told the former mayor that he should be an actor rather than a politician, Preminger quipped, “I don’t ever give this advice. But the difference is not so big.” 63 He admitted that although “he qualified on many counts for the Arab blacklist, there have been no threats up to now, but don’t give anyone ideas.” 64 In disavowing Rosebud’s connection to the Patty Hearst kidnapping, he cannily underlined its similarities. And in all the interviews he complimented Erik and predicted a bright future for his son. “He has legs. He can stand on his own talents as a writer, and even as director or producer,” Otto boasted to Dorothy Manners in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on March 23. “Elaine May thinks highly of him. Right now he is in California working on a project of his own, The Return of Moriarty.” When Manners asked if he planned to turn over any of his future projects to Erik to direct or produce, Preminger answered, “I direct and produce ALL my films, Dorothy. You should know that.”
The film opened (in New York on March 24, 1975, and in Los Angeles on April 30) to a clobbering reception both critically and commercially. In her New Yorker review on April 7 Penelope Gilliatt wrote, “It would have taken Hitchcock, perhaps … to divert our attention from the film’s missing moral comprehension of the story. The enormous ethical questions raised are tempestuously ignored in the tantrums of narrative minutiae.” “Absolutely nothing in the film itself evokes even remotely the fire, the passion, fanaticism and commitment of the political
forces which at this very moment [early 1975] could precipitate another global war,” A. D. Murphy wrote in his Variety review on March 26. In the March 30 Village Voice Preminger advocate Andrew Sarris noted with evident disappointment that the filmmaker’s “treatment of Arab terrorist plot material is by turns disconcertingly casual and coldly ambiguous.”
Juggling three interconnected plot lines—the kidnapping, the media’s handling of the kidnapping, and the search-and-rescue operation coordinated by intelligence officers in several countries—Preminger does not exert the same grip as in earlier films with a similarly serpentine format. Transitions are occasionally ragged, and at times it isn’t clear where the action is taking place, whether in Paris or Berlin, Corsica or Israel. And because of the last-minute tinkering (unprecedented in Preminger’s career), some plot details—how the location of the kidnappers and their hostages is discovered, how the hostages are rescued, how Sloat is captured—are almost deliriously far-fetched. But even with its gaps, Otto and Erik have constructed a narrative engine that hums along with workmanlike proficiency. Obviously flawed and assailable on many grounds, Rosebud is nonetheless a high-wire balancing act without a single dull moment. And throughout, sweeping camera movements remind the viewer of who is in charge. One dazzling setup is a moving shot that follows a car swerving along the Grand Corniche, the blue Mediterranean sparkling in the distance. The shot, which has no thematic relevance—one of the five young women is traveling with her mother to meet her friends aboard the Rosebud— is included for its own sake, as proof that the metteur-en-scènewas still a master of his trade.
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