Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  The foreword to the screenplay, unsigned but betraying evidence of having been written by Hawks, begins as follows: “Red Line 7000 is the story of three men and the women who love them. The three stories have little or no connection except that the men are race drivers. They are those prima donnas who handle incredibly fast combustions of steel and other metals and do it as a virtuoso plays a violin. Racing is the epitome of the dangerous professions, and while in some ways the men are similar in their abilities as men they are vastly different.”

  As he had on his last several pictures, Hawks wanted to put two writers on it simultaneously, but not in collaboration. Steve McNeil would be one, while the other would be a television drama writer from New York with no previous film experience, George Kirgo. “He picked me because he had seen a TV show I wrote, Arrest and Trial, in which Diane McBain told her hit-man boyfriend Richard Conte, ‘I have bad luck with men.’ Howard liked that and hired me on the basis of that one line.”

  Kirgo said Hawks “didn’t have much story,” just a few character ideas, such as the driver with only one hand, based on a well-known real driver named Allan Heath, and a woman who was considered “damaged goods.” During the first week of May 1964, the writers, at $750 a week apiece, started work, listening to Hawks describe racetrack incidents and scenes from some of his old pictures. The director also prepared a story chart with a different color for each character. “He wanted to put in a character named Galveston,” Kirgo remembered. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you just call her Fort Worth?’ and that shut him up. But in honor of Howard, in Don’t Make Waves I named a character Malibu, who was Sharon Tate.”

  With the script barely under way, Hawks began making plans to film some actual races that summer, and he saw in his new buddy Bruce Kessler, a former member of the world championship Ferrari team but not a stock-car driver, the ideal man for the job. Hawks had called the young man in the first place because of a short film Kessler was making about racing called The Sound of Speed. Hawks came to watch some of the shooting and later invited Kessler to the Palm Springs house, where they had rambling talk about nothing in particular. “But the feeling he expressed to me was that I understood life and death.” Kessler intuited that Hawks felt “‘We knew.’ All of that was in his pictures, all of those guys not afraid of death. I wasn’t that way at all, but he saw me in that light, and I listened to him, he said he’d like to have me work for him, and I said, ‘Doing what?’ and he was very oblique about that. You were with him or against him. That was how Howard kind of saw things. If you were one of his, he figured you could operate the camera, fly an airplane, do anything that was necessary to do on the picture.”

  Intent upon proving that he could make a commercial film quickly and cheaply, Hawks agreed to a $1.35 million budget, including 26 percent overhead. Of that, Hawks took $200,000, plus another $20,000 for the story. Quickly, he lined up cooperation from NASCAR to film at the organization’s races and, over the next half year, Kessler shot several actual races: the Firecracker 400 at Daytona Beach, Florida, on July 4, 1964; the Southern 500 at Darlington, South Carolina, on September 7; the National 400 at Charlotte, North Carolina, on October 18, and the Motor Trend 500 at Riverside International Raceway near Los Angeles on January 17, 1965. Through most of this, there was no script, at least none that Hawks would show Kessler. “I didn’t know what to shoot,” the second-unit director confessed. “Howard told me, ‘Use your own judgment.’ So I just figured out how to stage, how to shoot everything.” Except for the few dialogue scenes set at the tracks, Kessler shot all the location material in the picture, as well as the background plates used for the process photography.

  Back at the studio, Hawks divided his time among the script, the casting, and promotional tie-ins. After decades of keeping brand names out of movies, Hollywood was just waking up to the financial potential of product placement in pictures, and Hawks and Jerry Lewis, also at Paramount at the time, led the way. With the help of an old carny character named Jack Meurice, Hawks lined up tie-ins with at least a dozen companies, which, for a certain consideration, would have their products prominently displayed on-screen; among them were Ford, Puroil, Pepsi-Cola, Honda, Rolex, Revell Toys, National Car Rental, and Holiday Inn. Some of the plugs were so blatant as to be embarrassing; after seeing the picture, Pepsi registered a complaint over the way the drink was featured, undoubtedly in reference to the phallic implications of the Pepsi bottles in the romantic scene between Marianna Hill and James Caan. Newsweek, in its reviews of the picture, sarcastically observed, “Red Line 7000 is the first melodrama ever made in which the hero is plainly identified by a ‘Pure’ sign on his coveralls.” Robert Donner half-joked, “Every shot in that movie is panning over to a Pepsi-Cola or Holiday Inn sign, and everybody’s wearing logos. That picture didn’t need to make a dime for Howard to make money. Anything it made was pure gravy because they had subsidized it so much with corporate entities.”

  In one respect, the casting process was a field day for Hawks, in that the large number of roles designed for young unknowns gave him the excuse to see an endless procession of sexy models and aspiring starlets. On the other hand, distressingly few of the aspirants had any talent to speak of, and Hawks was under pressure to cast the picture relatively quickly. Some roles would go to people he already knew: Charlene Holt, Norman Alden, Cissy Wellman, Robert Donner, and even Hawks’s ex-wife Dee Hartford.

  James Caan, a twenty-five-year-old actor from New York, was seen that summer in his first feature-film role, in Paramount’s Lady in a Cage, and Hawks felt his brooding intensity would work for the nominal lead of the driver with a purity hang-up when it came to girls. For the two other main drivers, he wasn’t so fortunate, choosing John Robert Crawford and James (Skip) Ward, both of whom were blond, bland, and nearly interchangeable.

  For the women, Hawks went the route he’d been traversing ever since Bacall: he scoured TV shows, commercials, and magazines, looking for faces that caught his fancy. Bruce Kessler recalled, “We’re driving down the street one day and he [sees] this girl on a billboard, and he says, ‘Find out who that girl is. See if she wants a screen test. I think she’s the type of girl I’m looking for to play this kind of part.’” It turned out that Kessler had known her when she was very young, before she went to New York and became a successful model, which is how Gail Hire, a dusky brunette, came to play the “bad luck” lead in the film. Laura Devon, a blonde who had made an impression on television’s The Richard Boone Show, was cast as the more innocent tomboy, Julie, whom George Kirgo named after his own daughter.

  Perhaps still inspired by Chance, Hawks decided that the third important female part would be a French girl, and he was determined to have one of the hottest young French actresses of the moment, Françoise Dorléac, play her. It’s easy to understand why he wanted her, since no one ever fit the ideal of the Hawksian woman more than this willowy twenty-two-year-old beauty, whom many people felt was even more stunning than her younger sister, Catherine Deneuve. Hawks tried for weeks to pin her down through agents, raising his offer to $3,500 a week, far more than anyone else in the cast was getting—James Caan, for instance, earned $500 a week. But her European agent was hesitant, Dorléac herself proved elusive, and she ended up making her English-language debut in a terrible epic, Genghis Khan.

  Instead, Hawks found one of the sexiest actresses he ever used in a film, Marianna Hill, to play the French girl whose “secondhand” status so bothers James Caan’s tormented driver. Hill, who had done a bit of TV work, proved to be by far the most lively performer in Red Line 7000, and it would have seemed that she, of all of Hawks’s discoveries of the 1960s, had what it took to become an effective screen personality; in the event, however, she popped up in films only sporadically over the years, notably in Medium Cool and The Godfather, Part II.

  As the summer and fall wore on, George Kirgo assumed the dominant role in writing the picture since Steve McNeil was becoming unhappy and depressed; he spent an increasing
amount of time in his cups at nearby Olblath’s, until Hawks abruptly fired him in December. When the Writers Guild later assigned Kirgo sole screenplay credit, McNeil initially objected, but realized, he said, “The changes since I went off the picture have been so extensive that I see little point in protesting.” When he came in from Palm Springs, Hawks would lunch with Kirgo at the studio’s executive dining room. Hawks would tell stories—about Faulkner, Egypt, the old moguls—much more than he would discuss story with Kirgo, who came to love his boss but nonetheless found him “the most self-involved, self-obsessed man I’ve ever met,” a considerable statement in Hollywood. “He was such a poseur. I remember he always laughed when someone would send him a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma. ‘I just aim the camera at the actors,’ he liked to say, ‘and they make up all these things about me.’”

  Another who found Hawks “very inside himself” was Howard W. Koch, a former director and producer who was appointed head of production for Paramount in the summer of 1964. “Paramount was a leaderless company when Howard Hawks was here,” Koch explained. “Everything was all set up before I got here, the deals had been made, so there was nothing for me to do. The company was very rich at that time, partly because they sold their old titles to Universal for $50 million—it would be $1 billion today.” This state of affairs suited Hawks just fine, since it guaranteed no executive interference, although Koch was a close friend of Jack Warner’s, and the latter was not shy about confiding to Koch about some of Hawks’s more devious methods.

  While Kirgo was trying to give shape to Hawks’s vaguely expressed ideas for the racing picture, Leigh Brackett was busy preparing a different script for the director. Even if Hawks was anxious to prove he could make a hit without John Wayne, he was also keen to work with him again. In March 1964, with Bill Hawks handling the deal, Paramount bought Harry Brown’s Western The Stars in Their Courses for $35,000. Published in 1960 by Alfred A. Knopf, the epic novel, set in the late 1870s, was consciously crafted to be a Western Iliad. The story had three strong leading roles, considerable violence, and more than enough drama for a film. Hawks put Leigh Brackett to work in May, but after spending a couple of days with her to go over story points, he more or less left her alone while he concentrated on pulling Red Line 7000 together.

  Postponed from its original December 1 start date, principal photography on Red Line 7000 got under way on January 19, 1965, two days after Kessler shot the final race in Riverside. Hawks hired Milton Krasner, his cinematographer on The Ransom of Red Chief and Monkey Business, to man the camera, and the director began putting his young cast through their paces on sets that looked even phonier than the ones on Man’s Favorite Sport? Kirgo hadn’t completed the script in any final sense, and in usual Hawks fashion, he stayed on through much of the shooting to make adjustments. Some problems arose after a draft was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America for code approval. At a time when the decades-old censorship standards were on the verge of crumbling completely, the MPAA was still objecting to words like “bastard,” the description “nice breasts,” and the implication that two characters were having sex. In particular, the MPAA took offense at a bed scene (Hawks’s first) between the tomboy, Julie, and her new, and possibly first, lover, Ned Arp, criticizing “pages of the dialogue which refer to the boy’s past sex experiences and Julie’s attitude that she desires to be the best sex companion possible. We do not wish to imply here that the problem is one of treatment. In our opinion, the fact that there is a sex relationship between the two could not be approved.” Paramount and the MPAA went back and forth on this scene several times, the eventual compromise being a totally watered-down interlude that features no discussion of Ned’s past experiences or of sexual performance; instead, Julie monotonously asks time and again what makes a woman sexy, to which the dim Ned has no reply. The MPAA also insisted that Julie’s brother be given a scene in which he explicitly condemns Ned for his behavior with her.

  Hawks labored to make the story and the actors come alive. Because of his cast members’ limited experience, Hawks got much less creative input from them than he normally liked, and he had to deal with burgeoning egos. Caan, who called Hawks “Coach,” was professional, although Norman Alden knew that “Jimmy always hated doing that picture”; in later years, Alden said, “he’d never want to hear about that.” Cissy Wellman, who choreographed the musical number in the bar and appeared as a waitress, said that as much as she loved her surrogate father, she was very disappointed when she worked with him on the film. “He picked people who couldn’t act,” she said, “and some people needed direction. I think we all wanted it very much.” She realized that her father, who was exactly Hawks’s age but stopped making films in 1958, had gone through the same thing. “It’s a question of age, of timing. It’s called ‘adapting.’ … When he was directing, he would try to do Lauren Bacall all the time with every actress he had.” James Caan felt the same way, allowing, “Hawks was a big believer in me. Unfortunately, I got Hawks when he was … well, not a little beyond his years … but a little behind the times, let’s say.” Intimidated by Hawks anyway, these young performers would tense up even more when they felt they were being molded to fit a preexisting image that the director had in mind, and it just didn’t work. Hawks took to standing by and not saying anything at all. The reason there is an uncustomary amount of standard over-the-shoulder coverage in the picture is that instead of guiding and correcting his actors, Hawks would just cut when he didn’t like the lines or the delivery and decide he would use a reaction shot and lay different dialogue over later on. He didn’t know how to get what he wanted from his cast, and he may have realized that there was nothing there to get anyway.

  Hawks felt that the production “started off half-cocked” because he didn’t have the time to find a full cast of good actors, and things just got worse from there. Gail Hire did an excellent test, but once she had the part she changed from something of a headstrong rebel, which the director liked, to a star in her own mind. Laura Devon didn’t pan out either, and the same went for John Robert Crawford and James Ward. Hawks liked the work of Caan and Hill—“those two people could act and the others couldn’t,” he said flatly. There were many times Hawks’s patience reached its limit, and Kirgo often saw him become red with anger, but Hawks still never blew his top. Because of the limitations of most of the actors, Hawks was also unable to steer his drama in a more comic direction, which had long been his natural instinct. Nor did he feel comfortable with the music, which consisted of corny “rock” versions of standards like “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” along with a silly Carol Connors—Buzz Cason number, “Wildcat Jones,” “talked” by Gail Hire, and other odds and ends contributed by Nelson Riddle, whom Hawks probably engaged because of his celebrated theme for the Route 66 TV show.

  Hawks did have one bit of fun with an unexpected cameo performer. Jerry Lewis was the big man on the Paramount lot at the time, and one day, as Paul Helmick remembered, “Howard said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we had Jerry Lewis driving one of the cars?’ So I went to Jerry Lewis … and he said, ‘I’ll do it under one condition, that Hawks will pay me scale for one day’s work.’ So Howard did it, signed the check himself, and Jerry said, ‘I’ll never cash this.’ So we put him in a black-and-white stock car, hunched over the wheel wearing a helmet. He mugged, of course, and it was kind of a mutual admiration society between him and Howard.” Helmick maintained that Lewis is visible in one insert shot of a driver, but it is impossible to recognize him. Also in briefly are Terry (later Teri) Garr as a dancer and future Russ Meyer starlet Edy Williams.

  Hawks prolonged the agony of the shoot, going about a month over schedule—he wrapped production on April 16—and in the process nearly doubled the budget, which soared to $2,425,176, effectively negating the reason he made the film in the first place. With Paramount hoping to release the picture as its Thanksgiving attraction, Hawks pushed through postproduction and went, with some of his collea
gues, to its first sneak preview, at the Alex Theater in Glendale on Friday, August 20.

  It may have been the worst night of Hawks’s professional life. The showing was a nightmare, more catastrophic than anyone could have imagined. George Kirgo, who had left the picture in March and was seeing it for the first time, said, “Beginning with Gail Hire’s soliloquy, the audience just started cracking up, laughing uncontrollably.” Robert Donner remembered, “There was this roped-off section for us all to be in and you just got lower and lower in your seat.” Norman Alden, who accompanied the director, recalled, “I didn’t really know what to say. I felt embarrassed. No one was ever going to doubt him to say anything, and it wasn’t my place … it wasn’t anybody’s place, I guess.” George Kirgo, so mortified by the reaction that he said, “I lost most of my hair that night,” left with the film’s young star and said, “James Caan was suicidal.” Paramount executives were so horrified that the studio discontinued all bidding by theaters for the picture. Hawks was able to take it more in stride than a younger person might have done, but he did react at once, instantly cutting fifteen of the film’s 127 minutes and, on August 24, temporarily pulling Leigh Brackett off her Western script to prepare new dialogue for Red Line 7000 which was dubbed in to try to improve things a bit. Kirgo was subsequently called back in to revise a few pages of Brackett’s material.