Hatari! had its world premiere on June 19, 1962, at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood as a black-tie benefit for Hollywood Friends of Africa. The next morning, Hawks flew to New York, where a marquee several stories tall on the De Mille Theater advertised “Howard Hawks’ Hatari!” and the East Coast premiere took place that night. The reviews were decidedly mixed, with everyone agreeing on the merits of the animal footage but most critics deriding the egregious 159-minute running time and pointing out the lack of dramatic urgency in the story. Business started out strongly, the film bringing in just slightly less than Hitchcock’s Paramount smash Psycho had at the same theater, but didn’t hold at that high level. The film was very popular with kids that summer but was basically perceived as a pleasant and exotic diversion though not essential viewing for adults. A fine performer in the Midwest and Southwest, it did less well in bigger, more sophisticated markets. Hawks continued to feel that Paramount didn’t make the most out of it and, after all the work and high hopes, was a bit disappointed with the commercial results.
By the time Hatari! was completely played out and removed from release at the end of 1964, Paramount had collected $4,755,913 in domestic film rentals on a box-office gross of $10,015,179. Overseas, it did well, particularly in Japan, where it had a huge opening at the Hibiya Theater in Tokyo and went on to earn more than $1 million. Still, as Paramount sank nearly $10 million into production, prints, advertising, and marketing, the film remained officially in the red until the 1970s, when television sales started generating residuals.
Even though Hawks had virtually unlimited control and power in the making of Hatari!, his particular way—both loose and strong—of creating films, the specific mix of personalities involved, and his willingness, even eagerness, to discover his film in the process of making it, meant that it turned out quite differently than the motion picture he’d had in his mind at the outset. Today, making a film in this manner at a Hollywood studio would be impossible, intolerable. And yet, despite the strain and discord among the troops, Hatari! is the most genial film in the world. As the critic Joseph McBride and other devoted fans of the picture have noted, there are few, if any, films that offer such enjoyable company, where one would like to just step into the screen and join in the action. If you don’t like the film, it is legitimately open to criticism as being too long, juvenile, silly, undramatic, and inconsequential. If you do like it, none of this matters, and the more than two-and-a-half hours spent with the characters may not be nearly long enough.
Among the numerous individuals who “discovered” Hawks at the Museum of Modern Art during the summer of 1962 was the future film critic Stuart Byron. Years later, when he was asked to contribute to an anthology about favorite movies of all time, Byron chose to write about Hatari! Although he rivaled Jacques Rivette in critical extremism when he presumed that “even John Simon, forced to see Hatari! ten times, would understand its greatness,” Byron astutely positioned Hawks at the center of the whole auteurist critical debate of the period, pointing out that “it is through Hawks that most people ‘come to’ auteurism,” or “see the light.” He then described Hatari! as the most perfect expression of everything Hawks believed in and represented; Hawks was, the critic maintained, “a Darwinian without regrets,” a proponent of “a kind of atheistic humanism” who posited the value of personality and human beings against the “spiritual void” depicted in all of his films. Byron argued, “Inasmuch as he has no nostalgia for religion, Hawks is more starkly modern than Bergman (or for that matter, Wallace Stevens)—and … he can only be compared thematically, among the major modern figures, with Samuel Beckett.”
Thus were drawn the battle lines—and such they were—in the dramatic debate over whether or not Howard Hawks was an “artist.” As Hawks made his final films over the next few years, the argument would heat up to feverish, sometimes insanely passionate levels.
36
A Fishy Story: Man’s Favorite Sport?
By February 1962, Charles Feldman and Jack Gordean had already spent sixteen months trying to hammer out Hawks’s rich deal with Columbia. In the usual Hollywood manner, it kept getting stalled and delayed, and after making his agents worry when he kept adding provisions that no studio would ever grant, Hawks decided he didn’t want to go through with the deal after all. The reason he gave involved changes in the tax law that looked to pass shortly in Congress, laws that would put a financial damper on his plans to base his activities in Europe. After talking it over on the phone, Hawks and Columbia chairman Leo Jaffe mutually decided to call the whole thing off, but it was still embarrassing to Feldman, who had just produced Walk on the Wild Side for the studio and was also preparing Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, the one James Bond novel not owned by Hawks’s old friend Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. Feldman and Hawks brought Leigh Brackett out to Los Angeles to discuss an approach to the script, and Hawks fancied the idea of Cary Grant in the role of the dapper 007. Later in the year, Feldman and Hawks got an advance print of Dr. No from England and thus were among the first Americans to see the initial Sean Connery Bond film. Hawks promptly lost interest in pursuing Casino Royale, but Feldman persisted.
For his part, Hawks quickly entered into a deal to stay at Paramount that was virtually identical to the one he had nearly consummated with Columbia: three pictures to be made by his Laurel Productions over five years, with Hawks receiving $200,000 a picture and 50 percent of the profits. There was briefly talk of the director reuniting with John Wayne and Dean Martin on a CinemaScope epic, tentatively entitled “The Yukon Trial,” about a cattle drive to Alaska during the Gold Rush days. But Hawks, who had not made anything fully in the romantic-comedy vein in more than a decade, was more interested in a story by Pat Frank that had recently appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, “The Girl Who Almost Got Away.” The modest tale centered on Roger Willoughby, a light-tackle specialist who, as the most successful salesman of the year, receives a bonus and a trip to the famous Wakapoochee Bass Tournament. This is a considerable challenge since, despite his profession, he has never fished in his life.
Still anticipating huge grosses from Hatari!, Paramount immediately approved the story, a $3.5 million budget, and the idea that Cary Grant, just then enjoying a late-career peak in popularity, would star as the befuddled would-be fisherman. Setting the production up was easy; almost nothing, after that, would go as Hawks planned. So pleased with her work and company on his last two pictures, he called Leigh Brackett to write the script for him, but she was headlong into a new novel and didn’t care to put it aside for several months. Instead, he decided to try two relatively untested writers, John Fenton Murray and Steve McNeil; the former was for years Red Skelton’s head writer on radio and TV and had just written It’s Only Money for Jerry Lewis, while the latter was a busy television writer with ninety-seven Saturday Evening Post stories to his credit.
As he had done so many times before, Hawks held long meetings with his scribes, going over ideas for scenes and characterization, then sent them off on their own to work separately and deliver pages which would go straight into Hawks’s bulging briefcase. Neither writer was entirely happy with this arrangement, and Murray, who never really hit it off with the director, quickly came to actively resent it. Paul Helmick dropped by Paramount a few times over the next couple of weeks and, in a note to Brackett, said, “You’d laugh if you could see how the two writers corner me to find out about Hawks, how he works, what he likes, how one knows if he likes something, etc. At first, they were quite relaxed and patient, but now, they’re nervous wrecks.”
Throughout June, Hawks was tied up with Hatari! openings and related events, and late in the month he traveled back to Paris, “looking for new talent,” as Helmick said. While there, he received word of William Faulkner’s death in Mississippi on July 6. Shortly after Hawks returned to California in July, Cary Grant took him to lunch to make a proposal: If Hawks would direct “The Great Sebastian,” a project Grant wanted to do with the producer Saul Sc
hwartz at Columbia, he, Grant, would definitely commit to star in Hawks’s fish story. The actor should have known by now that Hawks would not take on a job for hire; in the event, the director did not like the “Sebastian” project, a sentiment that must have cooled Grant’s interest in it. Grant, despite wanting to work with Hawks again, remained less than fully enthusiastic about his friend’s new story, refusing to be pinned down, until he finally decided that he preferred a witty and romantic suspense script by Peter Stone called Charade, in which the director Stanley Donen wanted him to star opposite Audrey Hepburn.
Hawks was stuck, and Paramount was not pleased. Although the director felt that the Murray-Fenton screenplay needed some more work, he was still basically happy with the story and wanted to go ahead with the film, with Rock Hudson replacing Cary Grant. Having recently proven his mettle in such romantic-comedy hits as Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, Hudson was then one of the biggest box-office draws in Hollywood, and Paramount agreed to arrange to borrow him from Universal. But in October, Hawks and the studio came to an impasse on the director’s choice of a female lead. Although he was initially interested in a young actress named Joanna Moore, as soon as Hawks saw footage on Paula Prentiss, an attractive, twenty-three-year-old MGM contract player from Texas who had recently married the up-and-coming actor Richard Benjamin, he felt she was the perfect choice for the pretty, domineering woman who eggs on the flustered man. So strongly did he believe in her potential that he changed studios over her; when Paramount insisted on a bigger name to play opposite Hudson, “Howard went for a meeting, came back, and said, ‘We’re going to be moving over to Universal right after lunch,’” as Paul Helmick remembered it. “It all happened within one hour. When we got to Universal our names were already painted on our parking places.”
With shooting due to start in mid-November, Hawks quickly moved to fill the other parts. Very keen on Ursula Andress, even more so after Dr. No, Hawks tried to sign her for a long-term deal, beginning with the fishing film. But rightly suspecting that she would be hot once Dr. No was released, Andress and her husband John Derek decided to decline Hawks’s offer. For the secondary woman’s role of the daughter of the fishing-resort owner, he then considered using a Hungarian beauty he had found but settled on another discovery, the Austrian blonde Maria Perschy. As Hudson’s fiancée, he cast Charlene Holt, a fun, spirited, twenty-three-year-old New York model who had already done tiny parts in If a Man Answers and Days of Wine and Roses. But Hawks spotted her in the course of one day in both a Revlon TV commercial and an ad in Life magazine. For her first interview with Hawks in November, the Texas native showed up straight from horseback riding, wearing tight Levi’s, her hair in disarray. Nothing could have excited Hawks more, and he was quite pleased with her subsequent screen test. “I asked how much experienced she had,” the director recalled. “She said this is the first time I’ve had more than two consecutive lines. Every time we worked she got better.” Hawks liked Holt’s laugh, and her charming manner and open, wholesome-looking face reminded him of Norma Shearer. Not only that, but she was unattached and quite amenable to going out with Hawks; for the next couple of years, she was his most frequent female companion.
Deciding to shoot virtually the entire picture on the Universal back lot, Hawks postponed the start week by week, until rolling cameras on December 11, 1962. He surrounded himself with familiar faces: Russell Harlan was back as the cinematographer, Stuart Gilmore as the editor, Paul Helmick as the associate producer, and Henry Mancini would compose the score. In the interim since Hatari!, David Hawks had become a working member of the Directors Guild of America, and he joined the crew as the official second assistant director. But most important, by delaying production, Hawks was able to have Leigh Brackett, now done with her novel, on-board, at one thousand dollars a week, to rewrite the script as he went. Determined to shoot in sequence, an increasing rarity in Hollywood, in order to enhance the spontaneity and allow for changes in the story, Hawks once again had Brackett by his side throughout the filming, writing and rewriting scenes again and again just before he staged them. When it made it into the press that old silent-film director Howard Hawks was making a picture with no script, Hawks came to his own defense by saying that predatory television producers always hungry for comedy gags and situations made it necessary for feature filmmakers to hide their ideas, lest they turn up on the tube before the films hit theaters.
The story was simple enough: Roger Willoughby is forced to endure endless frustrations and humiliations, both professional and personal, at the hands of a brash woman, Abigail Page, the head of public relations for the fishing lodge staging the competition, whose crazy idea it was in the first place for him to be entered. The whole idea turns upon Willoughby, the author of the highly regarded fishing manual Fishing Made Simple, being a fraud, a so-called expert who is the furthest thing from it. It gets so bad between the two of them that Willoughby keeps threatening to kill Abigail for getting him into all this, and the entire story is easily read as an allegory about sex, experience versus inexperience, and expertise versus ineptitude.
Hawks sent Helmick and Harlan to San Francisco to shoot the opening scene, in which the antagonism between the two leads is established during some driving up and down the hilly streets. “He didn’t know what the hell he wanted,” Helmick said, “except that he wanted them to dislike each other. The only thing he did was to pick the cars.” The actors did not go on location, their close-ups in this sequence being inserted later with process shots. In the extended follow-up parking-lot scene, filmed on the studio back lot, of Willoughby diving headfirst through the sunroof in Abigail’s car and flailing away upside down inside of it, it instantly becomes clear that the role was designed for Cary Grant. Rock Hudson doesn’t exactly do a Grant impersonation, but in certain scenes the patterning is exceedingly pronounced. The effect is not displeasing, and even proves amiable, but it unavoidably points to the absence of the genuine article. As was his habit, before each scene Hawks would talk it over with his leading actors, asking them what they would do in the given situation, how they would react, what they would say. More than usual, he would demand a lot of takes in an attempt to get what he wanted from Hudson as well as Prentiss, thereby making them both more insecure than they were in the first place. Hudson gave it the college try throughout, even if it can’t have been pleasant to know that he was second choice to Grant and was being encouraged to act like him. Prentiss, despite the fact that Hawks enormously liked her work, was unnerved by Hawks’s approach, feeling that he was trying to overly channel her performance to resemble the great comediennes he had worked with in the past. On any number of occasions Hawks drove her to break down in tears; another time Norman Alden, who played the “Indian” John Screaming Eagle, did the honors when he attempted to comfort her about a bad review she had received that day in Variety. She started crying at the mere mention of it, “and she had a big scene to do that day, sort of a romantic scene with Rock,” recalled Alden.
For his part, Alden was also a bit thrown off at first, resenting the fact that Hawks was constantly taking Hudson and Prentiss aside to talk to them about their performances but never said a word to him about his own work. Finally, he went to his director to say that he hoped he was doing his job well enough, to which Hawks replied, “Well, if they could act, I wouldn’t have to do things like that.” Alden found Hawks an amazing character, unlike anyone else he had encountered in Hollywood. “I adored him. He’d change clothes during the day and he’d come out and be very elegant. If he wanted a chair for me he’d call for ‘Mr. Alden’s chair.’ He had all that old-time stuff that used to go on in pictures.”
One day when Hawks, Hudson, Prentiss, and Norman Alden were having lunch on the lot, they were startled when a voice from behind them abruptly asked, “Do you mind if I join you?” It was Cary Grant, and the group spent a perfectly delightful noon hour with the man who was supposed to have starred in the picture. A less happy encounter came when Angie D
ickinson dropped by the set. Having been put under personal contract by Hawks only to find herself sold off to Warner Bros., Dickinson had always hoped, even expected, to work with the director again, but he had now made two films since Rio Bravo without ever contacting her. The actress had recently dyed her hair blond, and she recalled saying, “‘Hi, Howard. Gosh, I’d love to make another picture with you,’ and all he said was, ‘I liked you better brunette.’ It was a real put-down. I got the brush. You couldn’t push him.”
The executives at Universal found they couldn’t push the old pro either. One morning when it was fast approaching ten o’clock and the company couldn’t get the indoor lake set ready for a rehearsal, Hawks announced that he would leave and go home if he couldn’t have a rehearsal by ten. Quickly, everyone was assembled and the actors were put in the water, whereupon Hawks turned to his young script supervisor, Bruce Kessler, and said, “‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever seen. Come on.’ And he turns and starts walking out of the stage. I’m right on his tail. Everyone’s grabbing at me and asking what’s going on, but we went off and just rode around for a couple of hours. He went to a Buick agency, but he made sure that I could not get to a phone. I could not get out of his sight. Then he took me to lunch. He didn’t eat lunch. Very rarely would he eat lunch. And I couldn’t go to the bathroom. He sat there and never talked about what was in the scene, or what was wrong with the scene.… Finally, at two o’clock, we go back in. Our production manager is standing there, and he drove right by the man. Didn’t even blink. He went back to work, having decided what he wanted to do, and we did it. But whatever his thought process was, what was going through his head, I’ll never know. He wouldn’t discuss the scene at all.”
Hawks had the costume designer, Edith Head, create some custom-crafted scuba suits for Paula Prentiss and Maria Perschy. Molds were made of each actress’s body, after which liquid rubber was sprayed over the molds to create the most form-fitting outfit possible. Costing ten thousand dollars apiece, the black suits were worth every penny, as they were astonishingly sexy, impossible to imagine getting in and out of. With women very much on his mind, Hawks also commissioned the photographer Don Ornitz to create an elaborate title sequence for which he shot six thousand Play-boyesque color photos of thirty-three unknown models in various athletic pursuits.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 81