Guthrie’s manner of storytelling is episodic and discursive, and little conflict is generated among the leading characters or members of the crew. But Hawks, deciding that he would devote his entire film to the boat journey, had strong ideas how to change that. Guthrie does very little with the relationship between Boone and Jim, but Hawks saw that latent in that friendship lay an excellent potential “love story between two men.” In the novel, the Indian girl Teal Eye, found in St. Louis after having been kidnapped by a rival tribe, is only ten or twelve years old during the keelboat trip, or decidedly too young to figure in a romantic triangle with the two white men. By advancing her age by about eight years, Hawks created the compelling, if predictable, added dynamic to the plot. One of the central characters in the book is the group’s wise and extremely colorful hunter, Dick Summers, an old coot who “speaks Injun,” knows the territory like the back of his hand, and possesses a sixth sense about the ways of nature and all its creatures. Hawks decided to basically transpose Summers’s personality onto one of the book’s much-discussed but little-seen characters, Boone’s long-lost mountain-man uncle, Zeb, who turns up in the novel only in one episode, when the river travelers find the rather disagreeable old man working as a hunter for a company fort.
The first half of the novel charts the voyage of the Mandan into unexplored territory and ends shockingly with the Blackfeet’s massacre of the entire crew; only the hunters Caudill, Deakins, and Summers manage to escape with their lives. The second half picks up the trio seven years later and evolves into a movingly tragic tale of men who belong nowhere, neither with the Indians, whose ways they have largely adapted, nor with “civilized” white society. Hawks streamlined it into the story of a successful journey, one in which the men’s hard work pays off and the various conflicts, both within the group and between the group and the two forces opposing it, the Indians and the big trapping company, can be resolved. He also took certain key characters from the novel’s abandoned second half, including the Blackfoot simpleton Poordevil and the menacing trapper Streak, and worked them into the story of the river journey. Hawks essentially dismantled Guthrie’s novel and rebuilt it according to his own interests, which lay much more in the area of the interaction among men rather than in the bigger picture of history and the implications of the white man’s incursion into the wilderness of North America.
Hawks’s new secretary, Lorrie Sherwood, worked with Hawks and Nichols at their initial story meetings and, subsequently, taking the writer’s dictation; she said that Hawks laid down to Nichols how he wanted the characters changed and the story to unfold. Nothing, she said, went into the script that Hawks had not either thought of or personally approved. “Everything Mr. Hawks did was his,” Sherwood averred. It could accurately be said that Hawks did the “adaptation” of The Big Sky, while Nichols wrote the screenplay, which, it should be noted, contained virtually no dialogue taken from the novel. He did so quickly, turning out a 220-page first draft in two months.
Lorrie Sherwood would remain an important member of Hawks’s team for the next several years. A thirty-year-old Oklahoman of Irish-Indian descent who had once been married to a professional football player, Sherwood was cute, gregarious, and fun-loving, as outgoing as her boss was reserved. Having previously worked in publicity and casting for Sam Goldwyn, she had just finished a job for Fred Zinnemann when she met Chris Nyby, who sent her to see Hawks. When she drove up to Hog Canyon on a weekend to meet him, she was greeted by the sight of four men playing croquet, one of them—Darryl F. Zanuck—wearing a French bikini. Like all of Hawks’s other female secretaries and assistants, Sherwood maintained that Hawks was always gentlemanly and respectful and never crossed the line between the professional and the personal. At first, the chatty Sherwood was a bit unnerved by Hawks’s long silences, but she soon learned that with him “there was a time to talk and a time to shut up.”
In The Big Sky, much would depend on the quality of the personalities playing the main roles. Hawks’s first choices for the two male leads were Gary Cooper and Arthur Kennedy, even if Cooper was a good thirty years too old for either of the parts as written. Hawks then began juggling such intriguing combinations as Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando, Mitchum and newcomer Charlton Heston, Cooper and Montgomery Clift, then Brando and Clift, Brando and Sydney Chaplin. However, when Brando, who had just worked for Feldman on A Streetcar Named Desire, demanded $125,000, it was too much for Hawks, who in a pique announced that he didn’t need big stars and would shoot the picture with unknowns.
Desperate for a major title from Hawks, RKO had insisted on a start date of no later than September 1, 1950, for the director’s first production. In an attempt to rush it, in early August Hawks organized a location-scouting trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Eugene, Oregon, manned by prospective second-unit director Arthur Rosson and four others, who spent ten days checking out potential river-area shooting sites. Hawks joined them for four days and approved Jackson Hole as a suitable base of operations. But it was apparent to everyone that there was no way to get such an ambitious picture before the cameras in time to beat the winter. With Hawks securing a promise from Hughes to keep Mitchum’s schedule free for the following summer, both sides agreed to postpone The Big Sky one year.
For his second RKO picture to direct, Hawks had the astonishing idea of doing a sex-reversal version of Cinderella, entirely in drag, with Cary Grant as the mother, James Stewart and Danny Kaye as the daughters, and Ginger Rogers as Prince Charming. Hawks claimed that all the actors were enthusiastic to do it, although there is no evidence that a script was ever even attempted. It remained, however, a cherished project that Hawks and Grant discussed frequently over the next couple of years. Hastily, another picture had to be readied for an almost immediate shoot. The material was far from anything in which Hawks had shown an interest in the past, except for “Morning Star”; it also provided him with the means of making by far his most politically charged film.
“I thought it would be fun to take a stab at science fiction,” Hawks said. He originally found the 1938 story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr. (originally signed with the pseudonym Don A. Stuart) in a magazine he idly picked up at the army PX in Heidelberg during one of the innumerable delays on I Was a Male War Bride. “I was sitting there with nothing to do and no place to go and got to wondering: ‘What are people from another planet like?’ I don’t see why they should be so entirely different.”
Hawks paid nine hundred dollars for the story, only to junk most of it for his screen treatment. Campbell’s fifty-seven-page tale involved a group of thirty-seven American soldiers and scientists in Antarctica who discover an alien being that has been frozen in ice for twenty million years. The long first section is devoted to a debriefing on how the beast was detected and dislodged, followed by a debate over whether or not to thaw it out. The device on which the remainder of the story turns is that the alien, once revived, is able to transform itself into various guises, including those of its victims, thereby making it exceedingly difficult to combat.
Needing a script quickly, Hawks called upon two of the fastest and cleverest minds he knew, Charles Lederer and Ben Hecht. Although Lederer had become one of Hawks’s closest friends, Hecht had passed out of Hawks’s orbit in the decade since His Girl Friday and had recently alienated many people both inside and outside the industry with his extreme Zionism, particularly his fund-raising and propaganda writing on behalf of the militant—many said terrorist—Irgun Zvai Leumi. While continuing his screenwriting career, Hecht threw himself into raising money and arms for the Irgun, which was dedicated to forcibly removing the British from Palestine. Hecht had drawn harsh criticism from both American Jews and the British for publishing a letter in fifteen major American newspapers in which he concluded with the following message to Jewish freedom fighters: “Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your bombs and guns a
t the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.” As a result, Hecht’s name was banned from British screens for two and a half years.
Even though Hawks privately scorned Hecht’s extracinematic activities—he even privately implied that denying the writer screen credit on this picture constituted his own form of punishment for Hecht’s political shenanigans—he knew the subject would never come up between them and was therefore irrelevant to the matter at hand: developing a strongly dramatic approach to a story dominated by windy scientific speeches and debates. At first, Hecht wasn’t in the least enamored of the project. But the offer of a thousand dollars a day got him to the table; his interest increased when they decided to tell the story through the eyes of a newspaper reporter; and he soon realized that this modern-day horror story could serve as an effective allegorical vehicle with which to poke fun at growing Cold War paranoia about communism. It is very probable that Hawks remained entirely oblivious to this second level of meaning in the story, but then the mischievous Hecht often had his own private motives for what he wrote. For his part, however, Hawks managed to keep Hecht’s involvement with the project such a secret in Hollywood that, decades later, Chris Nyby professed never to have known that the legendary writer had worked on his first picture.
To speed the work along, Hawks convened the writers daily at Hog Canyon. He later would greatly exaggerate by claiming that they finished the script in seven or eight days, but it actually took the better part of six weeks. Together, Lederer and Hecht earned sixty thousand dollars for their work, or far more than anyone else on the picture but Hawks himself. Joining the three creators most days at the house was Hawks’s new partner, Edward Lasker. A wealthy young man from Chicago, Lasker worked on Los Angeles accounts for his father’s advertising agency, Lord & Thomas, before succumbing to the glamour of Hollywood social life. In 1947, he married Jane Greer, which earned him the enduring enmity of Howard Hughes, and he gradually entered Hawks’s circle through their mutual interest in horses and the track. Lasker was often invited for croquet at Hog Canyon, and he and his wife socialized with Hawks and Marion Marshall before that romance broke up. Their main differences were religion and politics for, like Feldman, Lasker was Jewish and a Democrat. But these things didn’t matter, simply because they never came up. Tall, imperious, taciturn, and always impeccably dressed, Lasker and Hawks were, in many ways, cut from the same cloth; by the early 1950s, Lasker maintained, “I was Howard’s best friend.”
With Feldman increasingly involved with the day-to-day demands of film production in addition to his enormous list of clients, Hawks was in need of some help on the business side of his life. In Lasker’s view, “I don’t think he had any business sense. I never knew for sure, but I always sensed he was broke.” Chris Nyby suggested that there was an ulterior motive for Hawks’s friendship with Lasker: “Ed Lasker was rich, and he would help Howard guarantee loans when he needed the money, so Howard brought him into pictures.” When Hawks formed Winchester, he invited Lasker to become his partner, to be credited as associate producer on each picture. For Lasker, a man with no motion picture experience whatsoever, this was beyond his wildest dreams.
Hawks’s one previous foray into producing another director’s work, Corvette K-225, had not proved memorable on any level, but his financial crunch had motivated him to include just such a provision in his RKO contract; it would be an easy way to pick up an extra $125,000 or so. Studio executives, however, were taken aback when Hawks, instead of selecting a known quantity to direct, drafted one of his own cronies who had never exposed a frame of film before. Hawks had considered handing the job to Charles Lederer; he had directed one previous film, and he obviously knew the material. But after the rescue job Nyby performed on Red River, Hawks had expressed his gratitude by assuring his cutter a shot at directing, and Hawks decided to throw the new project his way. In all candor, Nyby later speculated on the main reason he got the job: “Hawks knew he probably couldn’t have controlled Lederer as much as he did me.” Hawks selected the story and prepared the script; hired some of his most trusted collaborators, notably the cinematographer Russell Harlan and the composer Dimitri Tiomkin, to ensure a professional result; planned to oversee it to make sure all went smoothly; and set a moderate budget of $860,240, which, with 25 percent studio overhead, came to $1,075,300. Hawks’s generosity to Nyby did not extend to the protegé’s salary; of the $50,000 the RKO contract specified for a directing fee, Hawks parceled out just $5,460 to Nyby, keeping the remaining $44,040 for himself.
The part of the job Hawks enjoyed most, and that he largely reserved for himself, was the casting. At long last, he would be able to launch his discovery Margaret Sheridan in a starring role. There were no female characters in Campbell’s original story, but Hawks created the role of Nikki especially for her. The story’s nominal hero, Captain Patrick Hendry, would be played by Kenneth Tobey, who had played a sailor skeptical of Cary Grant’s womanhood in I Was a Male War Bride. Again, Hawks surprisingly came through on his promise to make him a lead in a later picture. From War Bride, Hawks also brought back William Self, while for another role he found a muscular, good-looking young Texan, Dewey Martin, whom he signed to a two-year contract.
But Nyby was responsible for finding the two actors who would become the most familiar faces to emerge from the production that was now called The Thing, albeit for their subsequent work on television. Nyby’s next-door neighbor was George Fenneman, who, after his making his screen debut in The Thing, became famous as Groucho Marx’s announcer on You Bet Your Life. And when Nyby met James Arness, an aspiring actor, at John Ford’s Memorial Day party, he was convinced that the towering young man would be perfect for the role of Streak in The Big Sky, which was then still on the boards. Hawks agreed and cast him, but when the Western was postponed, he gave Arness the thankless title role in The Thing. Arness, of course, recovered to make a career out of Gunsmoke.
Of the countless changes Hawks, Lederer, and Hecht made from story to script, among the most important were moving the setting to the North Pole in order to introduce the element of American surveillance of the Soviet nuclear threat; creating a female lead who fully participates in speculating about alien invasion and in devising a way to kill the Thing; and making a film in which, for arguably the first time in a Hollywood production, science-fiction and horror were equally mixed, as well as one in which the struggle was just as much between the scientists and the military as between men and an alien. One element Hawks took credit for introducing was the critique of scientists and, by extension, intellectuals, in that the biologist played by Robert Cornthwaite is the main culprit for the Thing’s escape. However, this view was present, if in more implicit form, in the original story. On the downside, the screenplay vastly reduced and simplified the powers of the monster, eliminating its ability to mutate, a decision no doubt inspired by the virtual impossibility of creating convincing special effects.
Howard Hughes was dubious about the entire project from the outset; after all, he had signed Hawks to bring some class to RKO, not creaky monster movies. Even his cast and crew were a bit skeptical. The script boy Richard Keinen said, “We all thought this was the dumbest thing we’d ever heard of. We thought, ‘What is Howard Hawks doing making this stupid horror film?”’
Hawks sent Hughes a string of notes and memos assuring him that the picture would be extremely scary in a modern way and that the Thing would be unique, nothing like the usual Frankenstein creature. The beast in the original story was, indeed, out of the ordinary, with three red eyes and blue wormlike hair. The producer made the makeup artist Lee Greenway, who was also a well-regarded painter and sculptor, go through eighteen versions of makeup designs for the Thing. None of them satisfied Hawks, who finally got fed up and dismissively told Greenway, “Make him look like Frankenstein.” A more playful contribution came from the prop department, which made the little “thinglets” growing in the laboratory
out of condoms. No one noticed, however. In any event, the beast wouldn’t even be clearly shown in the final film, the better to emphasize the threat of the unknown. Although grateful to be working at all, James Arness was so embarrassed by his appearance that he usually lunched alone during shooting and otherwise kept his distance from the others in the cast, except for Dewey Martin; in subsequent years, he similarly refused all invitations to participate in reunions or sci-fi celebrations centering on The Thing.
Hawks claimed to have invited the heads of three major electronics companies to his home for dinner on the pretext of asking them to suggest the best way of killing the Thing. Less receptive were the army and air force, both of which refused to cooperate since the story was predicated on a belief in flying saucers, a phenomenon that the military was then strenuously trying to downplay. Official sanction, however, was hardly crucial to the production.
Hawks sent Nyby and a few crew members to Alaska to scout potential locations, but any suitable spots were simply too inaccessible to accommodate a cast and crew of one hundred. Instead, the major exteriors would be filmed at Cut Bank, Montana, a town of twenty-eight hundred people fifty miles south of the Canadian border and forty miles east of Glacier National Park. Cut Bank was chosen, largely on the advice of Hughes himself, because it was, statistically, nearly the snowiest place in the United States and it had a huge military airfield, recently abandoned, that had been used for reconnaissance flights by B-29s toward the Soviet Union.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 64