With Stuart Gilmore also tied up on Hawaii, Hawks took his recommendation of an editor, John Woodcock, who began cutting the picture together on location in Tucson. Woodcock said, “Hawks shot in conventional fashion, but when I tried to draw him into a discussion about the editing he gave me the brush-off, indicating that the editorial problems were all mine and to leave him out of it.” Woodcock was also surprised, he said, that while most of the cast and crew chowed down every night on steak, ribs, chicken, and other meaty fare, “all that I ever saw Howard Hawks eat at any meal was a plate of assorted fresh fruit.”
The camaraderie on the set was mostly casual and friendly, and Hawks and Wayne were buoyed when John Ford, frail and mostly confined to a wheelchair, came to the location for a visit. But relations between Wayne and newcomers could always be cause for concern. The way James Caan put it, “I was this little punk working with Wayne and Mitchum … Wayne? He’d push you. He was like a twelve-year-old kid. He took a liking to me but I lost it one day and almost took a whack at him. Mitchum broke it up, and from that day on it was fine.” The young actor shortly became Duke’s chess partner during the long waits while Rosson set up and Hawks retreated to his trailer to tinker with the dialogue. Caan, who had been so displeased about Red Line 7000, acted headstrong even with Hawks at times but was basically made to feel that this was a great opportunity for him and he shouldn’t cross the line, so, as he did with Wayne, he advisedly backed off. According to Hawks, Caan never realized his role was supposed to be funny until he saw the finished film, and when the actor asked him why he hadn’t told him, Hawks supposedly said, “You’d have spoiled it. You’d have tried to be funny.” The way Caan remembered it, during the first week of shooting “I was playing all this for real and all of a sudden I realized that Jeeze, I’d better start smiling because some of this shit I’ve gotta say is pretty fucking ridiculous. So I started smiling. Everytime John Wayne would talk, I’d be standing alongside smiling.”
For Caan, his personal relationship with Hawks was ultimately more important than his professional one. “I had a great time with him, I loved him,” the actor reflected. “I don’t remember him so much as a great director, but I do remember him as a great man. I don’t remember him ever giving me direction as far as the way I should or shouldn’t be feeling, but his writing was so pertinent that you had to be pretty much of a moron not to understand where you’re supposed to be. I never felt Hawks put great importance on any film. It was like, ‘We’re doing a film, for Chrissakes. If they don’t like it, give them their nickel back.’ It wasn’t all that important, we weren’t curing cancer, like a lot of young people think they’re doing today. You never heard Hawks say, ‘We’re losing the light,’ or ‘Oh, my God, I’m five days over schedule.’ Who cares? It was nothing; it wasn’t the end of the world. What we heard was, ‘I’m hungry. Let’s wrap it for the day. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.’
“He was a guy who just deserved, and got, a lot of respect from everybody,” Caan observed. “At the end of his career, he did what he liked, he did what would make it enjoyable for him, and for everybody around, pretty much. He had people around him, not necessarily because they were the best, but because they were decent and fun, people that he liked. There was nobody I ever remember that I disliked when I was around Howard. The guy earned the right to do things that he liked and be around people he liked and I find absolutely no fault with that whatsoever.
“For me,” Caan concluded, “he became more of a father figure than a director. He taught me the meaning of life: ‘She’s good looking, she’s not; that’s a good steak, and that’s not; and this is fun, and that’s not.’ So that’s who Howard was to me.” Caan, who had an infant daughter but whose marriage was going south at the time, started a romance during the shoot with his costar Michele Carey, who was divorced with a four-year-old son. The couple announced their engagement in June 1966, but they never married.
Robert Donner remembered, “I got engaged on El Dorado and Hawks and Duke Wayne and Bob Mitchum were having a little tequila one night. I was playing one of the heavies and they just thought it’d be hilarious if I had to get married looking as I looked. I mean, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I had a full beard, and the three of them were friends of Bill Wellman, who would be my father-in-law. So they figured out a way to switch the schedule around so I was still on the picture when I got married, and I had to get married in my full beard and long hair. They thought that was very funny.”
Donner also recalled the regular poker games in Ed Asner’s Ramada Inn motel room, which was right next to Hawks’s. One night the game got pretty loud. “Ed’s saying, ‘Keep it down, Jesus. You know, Hawks is next door.’ And, well, we weren’t keeping it down, I guess, because all of a sudden, there’s this beating on the wall. We quieted down a little bit more, the game goes on, it gets a little louder … all of a sudden we hear, ‘BAM! BAM! BAM!’ Three shots. We go running outside, and there stands Hawks in his boots and a nightshirt, and he’s got this .44 in his hand. And he says, ‘Anybody I see in one minute is going home.’ And you never saw people split faster in your life.”
Ed Asner was one man John Wayne didn’t take to, referring to him derisively as “that New York actor.” Nobody, least of all Asner, could understand what provoked this, since nothing ever passed between them, although in later years, when Asner became an outspoken liberal, people joked that Wayne had been prematurely sensitive to Asner’s political leanings.
As for Mitchum, Hawks hadn’t been wrong in thinking that he’d be a perfect foil for Wayne. Given the actor’s reputation for boozing and laziness, the director was pleasantly surprised by his work habits, even if Mitchum didn’t mix with the rest of the company all that much, preferring to retreat to his trailer when not involved in a scene. Hawks said, “When the picture was half over I said, ‘You know, you’re the biggest fraud I’ve ever met in all my life.’ He grinned and said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘You pretend you don’t care a damn thing about a scene, and you’re the hardest-working so-and-so I’ve ever known.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’”
Completing the Tucson part of the shoot after thirty-six working days, the 156-person company flew back to Los Angeles on November 22, the very week Red Line 7000 was opening in Los Angeles. Six more weeks of production were scheduled at the studio, but Hawks, with Rosson’s help, took nine, finally wrapping on January 28, 1966, three and a half months after he started. The $4,535,322 final price tag had certainly exceeded the intended budget by more than 10 percent, but Paramount, of course, hadn’t said a word; by fall, the current regime would be out in the wake of Gulf + Western’s take-over of the company, with Robert Evans installed as head of production.
There were no disputes about the writing credit this time, but Hawks got into extended disagreements about the title—he wanted El Dorado written as two words, Paramount wanted one—and the reference to Harry Brown’s novel. The director now insisted that his film was based not on The Stars in Their Courses but on Rio Bravo. However, since Paramount had already paid a tidy sum for the rights to Brown’s book—which Hawks was now saying, with a straight face, that he might want to make into a film one day—and was not inclined to pay an additional stipend to Warner Bros., this line of reasoning was soon dropped.
As the editor, John Woodcock put the picture together virtually alone, and he was astonished when, upon informing the director that the rough cut was ready for his appraisal, Hawks proceeded to invite about thirty people to see his new film at the studio theater without ever having seen it himself. Hawks gave Woodcock a few instructions during the projection, added a few more comments after the well-received screening, then took off into the night.
The initial public preview took place on April 22 at the Plaza Theater in Palm Springs, not far from Hawks’s house on Stevens Road. The reaction was a world apart from that to Hawks’s last film, producing relief all around. However, Hawks and Woodcock tinkered a bit more, eliminating a musical number remini
scent of Rio Bravo when Gregg Hawks told his father that “a sheriff shouldn’t sing” and, in order to get the all-clear from the Catholic Legion of Decency, cutting the scene in which a topless Marina Ghane (who was spending a lot of time at Hawks’s place in Palm Springs these days) tells James Caan which way the bad guys have gone. Paramount had long since given up the idea of putting the picture out that summer and, with the new regime in by fall, ended up holding back its domestic release for a year and a half from the time it finished shooting.
The world-premiere engagements actually began on December 17, 1966, in Tokyo and Osaka, where the film did outstanding business. By the time it opened in the United States, in June 1967, it was going head-to-head with another John Wayne Western, The War Wagon, produced subsequently by the Duke’s own company, Batjac. This may have been unfortunate, but it probably didn’t have much effect on business, which was strong for both pictures. Within a year, El Dorado had generated rentals of $6 million on box-office receipts of $12 million making it the twelfth biggest picture of 1967. Hawks had proved that, at least when working on familiar territory with big stars, he could still deliver the goods.
38
The Last Roundup
With the release of El Dorado, Howard Hawks was irrevocably thrust into the arena of the film buffs. The film’s commercial success and reception by mainstream reviewers as a return to form after an eight-year lull (most critics truly did not note the close resemblance to Rio Bravo) gave it sufficient stature to be argued about, and El Dorado soon became one of the flashpoints in the raging battle between the auteurists and their enemies, of which there were at least three stripes. For the pro-Hawksians, who had been forced increasingly into a corner by his recent missteps, El Dorado provided proof once again that Hawks was one of the immortals who still walked among us. For Andrew Sarris, the guru of stateside auteurism, it was a masterpiece, the best American film of the year, “a poetic fantasy … tinged with melancholy.” For his archrival, Pauline Kael, who had liked Hawks films in the past only to turn against him when she saw the cult building up around him, the picture looked like a TV movie. Inaccurately stating that it was entirely shot in the studio, “except for a few opening shots,” she accused Hawks, as well as Wayne and Mitchum, of being too old and rich to care anymore. To Sarris, by contrast, Wayne’s “oldness has become spiritually resurgent. His infirmities ennoble rather than enfeeble him, and every wrinkle on his skin has come to terms with his endless quest.”
How could such opposing views ever be reconciled? In fact, they could not, which goes a long way toward explaining why Hawks, not to mention Wayne, remained caught in the cross fire of opposing critical factions for so long. To one side Hawks represented Hollywood classicism, tradition at its purest. To others, he was old-fashioned, conservative, worn out, someone not to be taken seriously or even valued anymore. Others resisting the acclamation of Hawks were modernist critics, literary-oriented and mostly Eastern intellectuals with a built-in bias against genres in general and Westerns in particular, and liberals and leftists for whom anything with John Wayne’s name on it was automatically discredited.
But perhaps the most blistering evaluation of El Dorado came from Harry Brown, the author of The Stars in Their Courses. In a letter to Hawks, Brown claimed that the finished film bore no relation to his novel, and demanded that the attribution be removed from the picture’s credits, adding, “Someday directors, Great [sic] or not, are going to stick to set-ups and camera-angles and let writers handle the scripts. I’d hate to be hanging until that day came, though.”
Hawks brushed Brown’s objections aside, and the credit stuck. The director didn’t take the highfalutin claims made for his work by some of his ardent admirers very seriously either, but he was certainly grateful for their support and did nothing to discourage it. In an apparent first film festival appearance for a Hawks work, El Dorado was selected as the official United States entry in the San Sebastian Film Festival in June, and on the 23rd of that month Hawks flew to Paris to promote the picture. He spent a good deal of time with Chance, who took some particularly striking photographs of him in front of the film’s giant poster on the Champs-Elysées that show him looking anything but tired and over-the-hill.
He also became fast friends with the picture’s specially engaged publicist, Pierre Rissient, a great and gregarious film buff who sat in on and translated during his myriad interviews and dinners over the course of several days. Some of these interviews, notably the one conducted by Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narbon, and Bertrand Tavernier for the recently politicized Cahiers du Cinéma, became difficult when they touched on the subject of Hawks’s intended next project, a drama about the Vietnam War.
Hawks said he intended to make “a film that is true, realistic.” Like Red Line 7000, it would consist of “three stories blended into a single one. It’s based on a true incident. It’s the story of something concrete that the army wants to accomplish, and that they do accomplish in the course of the film.” Asked his point of view about the war, Hawks said, “You know, it’s a whole new sort of war, it doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever seen before. The Americans are fighting against very short men, who are right at home in their land. A tiny little bag is enough to carry all the equipment that a Vietcong needs to defend himself.… The Vietcong move around more easily. The people I’ve talked to say that it’s the American soldiers who come from farms, from the country, who adapt the best. They’re supposed to be awful good.”
In his thinking about the project, Hawks was greatly inspired by a film to which Rissient took him, The Anderson Platoon, an hourlong French documentary shot the previous year about a black lieutenant who painstakingly leads his platoon on a mission to take a hill north of Saigon while under heavy attack. The men were shown to possess strong camaraderie and mutual feeling across racial lines, and while exposing the harshness of the war, the film ennobled the human effort expended in fighting it and was not overtly ideological. In other words, it was right up Hawks’s alley. After dining with its director, Pierre Schoendorffer, himself a veteran of Dien Bien Phu who would, twenty-five years later, make an epic dramatic feature about that fateful battle, Hawks began openly stating that he was going to use Schoendorffer to shoot combat sequences in Vietnam, while he, Hawks, would film everything else in the States. As it happened, he discussed this arrangement only in the most general terms with Schoendorffer himself. Schoendorffer said, “Hawks asked me a lot of questions, he listened a lot. We had ‘human’ discussions, about the experiences of men that I had known. Politics was not my preoccupation, and it wasn’t his either. I was full of admiration for Howard Hawks, and would have been interested to see the way it would have turned out.”
During his interview, Hawks did manage to discomfort the otherwise worshipful Cahiers crowd by refusing to be goaded into a critique of American society and the Vietnam war. There is no evidence that Hawks or anyone else ever put pen to paper on the Vietnam project; Schoendorffer never heard from Hawks again after their handful of sessions in Paris. Hawks claimed to have abandoned the idea altogether when a little research showed that official army assistance would not be forthcoming without script approval, and Hawks would never have accepted such a condition. He also insisted that the film would not have made a statement about the war: “I never made a statement. Our job is to make entertainment. I don’t give a God damn about taking sides.” Bertrand Tavernier revealed that when he pressed Hawks further about it, the director said “he wanted to take some of the scenes deleted from Sergeant York and put them into his Vietnam film. That was frightening.” One can only agree with Tavernier’s conclusion that, given Hawks’s naive refusal to engage the inevitable political implications of such a project and his lack of firsthand knowledge about the war, “It’s good for him that he never made that film.”
Not surprisingly, the project Hawks pursued much more seriously during this period was something completely unrealistic, a throwback to his silent days. In 1965, Hawks optioned
the rights to his 1928 success A Girl in Every Port, and to Lewis Milestone’s 1927 Two Arabian Knights, which concerned two devil-may-care adventurers who escape from a World War I German prison camp disguised as Arabs and make off to the United States with a beautiful Arab girl. Mr. Gus, or Now, Mr. Gus, as Hawks variously called the project, went through a succession of story incarnations, winding up, a decade later, as a script that represented a virtual remake of A Girl in Every Port, about two men who circle the globe fighting oil-rig fires in the manner of the celebrated Red Adair. Whatever the premise, “the big erector project,” as Hawks liked to call it, would be a buddy-buddy comedy on a very large scale.
Hawks originally considered John Wayne for one of the two leads, despite his advancing years and paunch, and it can hardly have been a complete coincidence that Wayne played a Red Adair figure named Chance Buckman in Andrew V. McLaglen’s 1968 firefighting adventure, Hell-fighters. This didn’t deter Hawks, who frequently told George Kirgo he might hire him to write the script, received input from Peter Bogdanovich, and talked about it with any number of other creative friends. But it would be a few years before he had anything substantial on paper for his project.
Nor was it entirely coincidental that one of the men he spent the most time with from the mid-1960s onward was a Texas oilman named Ted Wiener. A millionaire many times over, Wiener had a home in Palm Springs and quickly became enthralled by Hawks’s tales of Hollywood, the stars, and his own great accomplishments. The two played golf together regularly, and, in due time, Hawks persuaded his friend that putting money behind a slate of films that he would direct and produce would be just about the best thing he could possibly do with it. Hawks and Wiener spent a great deal of time cooking up schemes by which they could beat Hollywood at its own game, arrangements by which Hawks could make his choice of pictures and both men could rake in a small fortune.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 85