by Carl Reiner
I was aware that we were operating on a minimal budget, but I did not realize how minimal until we flew to New York to search for locations. We toured the city in the dead of winter, riding about in a rattling car of indeterminate make and vintage. It had no heater, one window that could not be closed, and brakes that needed aggressive pumping to stop. In spite of the inconveniences, we enthusiastically went about securing locations, hiring actors, and behaving as if we were not working for minimal salaries and no perks.
Somehow, our budget constraints did not inhibit our ability to recruit an excellent cast of actors. George invited me to see his friend Ron Liebman in an off-Broadway play, and I was impressed by his extraordinary performance.
“George,” I whispered, “he’d be perfect to play your brother, if he were older.”
“He could be,” George whispered back, “if he took off his toupee.”
Surprisingly, I did not know he was wearing one.
“Great, tell him to lose the rug, and he’s got the part!”
“You tell him,” George replied, “he’s never been seen without it.”
“Has he ever been in a big Hollywood movie?” I asked. “It might be an incentive.”
I don’t remember which of us broached the subject of his doing the part toupeeless, but after reading the script and realizing what a juicy part he was being offered, young, virile Ron Liebman, who had never been in a movie, agreed to stow his hairpiece and play a balding, older man.
Having toiled half my life as an actor, I prefer to cast a film by offering the job to someone I know would be right for the role, rather than having many actors read for the same part. For the role of Louise, Gordon Hockheiser’s love, I asked the casting director Marian Dougherty to invite no more than three actresses who, she felt, would be perfect for the part—and she did. I met with three wonderfully talented and beautiful actresses, Diane Keaton, Trish Van Devere, and Bernadette Peters, two of whom it pained me to reject. The pain was relieved when, ten years later, I had the opportunity to make amends by offering the wondrous Bernadette Peters, a former “rejectee,” the part of Marie, Steve Martin’s girlfriend, in The Jerk.
Diane Keaton, the other perfect actress whom I didn’t hire, had somehow managed to get over her disappointment and go on to win an Oscar. She has since become a director and asked me to audition for an acting role in her film Hanging Up, and evened our score by rejecting me and wisely choosing Walter Matthau. I carry on as do Diane and Bernadette and all actors who suffer rejection.
When Paul Sorvino came to read for the part of the manager/owner of Gus and Grace’s home for old people, he was contemplating a return to the acting profession. Paul had been a struggling actor, but at this juncture was a successful advertising executive who was frustrated and demonstrably unhappy. Paul’s wife insisted that life in their home would be a lot more fun were he working in the profession he loved. On his way to bigger and better things, among them helping to raise his award-winning daughter, Mira, Paul worked for me again, doing a scathingly funny satire of an evangelical preacher in Oh God!
I had no trouble casting twenty-two-year-old Rob Reiner as the angry anti-Vietnam-war activist. In the courtroom scene, the character shouts scatological invectives at the general, played by everyone’s favorite character actor Barnard Hughes.
The general, in one scene, has just gleefully testified that he had machine-gunned a whole platoon of Vietcong soldiers, and that one soldier’s body, sawed in half by his bullets, had fallen over, “and if I had yelled ‘Forward march,’ those scrawny little legs would have walked over by themselves.” I tell you all this to make you understand that the “obscene” language Bob Klane had chosen for the young activist to shout was appropriate. The scene was shot in a real courthouse, in a real New York borough, Brooklyn. It was a complicated scene to shoot, as all courtroom scenes are, requiring many camera setups for the many angles needed to edit the scene effectively. George Segal was questioning the general while the judge, Bill LeMassena, a Call Me Mister alumnus, and the courtroom spectators, were all staring openmouthed at the general’s gruesome recounting of the battle. At the height of the general’s graphic description, the antiwar activist loses control, vaults the defense table, and comes after the general, shouting the ten-letter word “Cocksucker!!!”
After that very first take, my assistant director, Norman Cohen, informed me that the camera didn’t get a clean shot of the action and asked that we do another take right away. Being on a tight schedule, and knowing we only had the courtroom for one day, I was not aware that when I shouted, “Okay, Rob, we’re going do it from where you yell, ‘Cocksucker,’” I was asking my son to say the very word that Lenny Bruce had been arrested and incarcerated for using six months earlier! What kind of father was I?!
The scene was shot four or five times, and each time Rob vaulted the table and shouted the actionable ten-letter word, a couple of burly uniformed policemen would grab him and drag him kicking and screaming from the courtroom as he continued to rail louder and louder against the horrors of the unjust war. I had no trouble embracing the sentiment, but that it was delivered in a wild, satiric comedy about a dutiful, guilt-ridden son and his seemingly dotty mother was surreal and sobering.
Two other memories about the shooting of Where’s Poppa, bubble up from time to time. One of them was a confrontation I had with Ruth Gordon. Miss Gordon, who invited me to call her Ruth the first day we met, was an actress and playwright of talent and renown. The incident took place on the first day of rehearsal. We were in the dining room set that was built on one of the stages of the Twentieth Century Fox New York studios on Eleventh Avenue. The scene required Ruth Gordon’s character to fall asleep in a dish of mashed potatoes while having dinner with her son and his new girlfriend, Louise. When Ruth stopped the scene to complain that there was something in the script that she did not like, I assumed she was referring to the previous scene in which she showed Louise the first two knuckles of her pinky and said that her son’s penis was no bigger than that, but I was wrong. What Miss Gordon objected to was falling asleep in the mashed potatoes.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” she said simply.
“I think it is,” I said smiling. “And if it isn’t, I guarantee it will not be in the final cut.”
“I would prefer we didn’t shoot it.”
“But we’ve all read it, and nobody’s objected to it.”
“Well, I’m objecting now!”
When the discussion started, George Segal was standing beside me, and I felt that I had his support. As the exchanges between Miss Gordon and myself became more pointed, I could feel an impasse coming. I could also feel George physically backing away. When I turned, looking for support, he was gone. He had quietly vanished into the darkened stage, and he was right to leave it to Ruth and me to come to an accommodation, and we did.
“I refuse to do the scene the way it is written,” she said, pausing dramatically, then adding forcefully, “unless the director orders me to.”
She looked at me and waited for my response.
“Ruth,” I said, feigning strength and resolve, “I order you to do the scene as written.”
I don’t know if Ruth Gordon was testing me to see if I had the “stuff” to direct or faith in my convictions but whatever her motive, those were the last contentious words we had. We had a lovely time working and promoting the film together.
If you remember the film, you probably think that Ruth Gordon prevailed, because the scene was not as I described it. In rehearsals we found that we could get two or three extra laughs if Gordon, to discourage his mother from remaining at the table, would, when serving her, give her just a dollop of the mashed potatoes and one green pea, then place the serving plates out of her reach. Instead of her head falling into a mound of potatoes, she fell asleep on a dollop of potato, saving both time and money. No redoing Ruth’s makeup and no remashing of potatoes.
There is a law in New York that forbids a movie compan
y from filming people running around their city in the nude. An important scene in Where’s Poppa? required Sid, Ron Liebman’s character to run across a street stark naked, his clothes having been stolen by a playful bunch of Central Park muggers. The police had been with us all day, helping with traffic and crowd control, and were very pleasant and cooperative. The sergeant in charge knew about the scene, and we assured him that, if we ever got to the scene that night, Ron would be wearing boxer shorts. To avoid there being spectators watching us shoot the scene, we shut down at midnight and did not fire up the lights until three in the morning, seconds before Ron was to dash across street. With his tush facing the camera, he was to run into the apartment building at Sixty-fifth Street and Central Park West, the building in which George Segal actually lived. Five seconds before we lit up the street, it was deserted, and two seconds before we rolled the cameras, hundreds of people appeared miraculously from the ether, to see what was going on. The police sergeant was at my elbow when I yelled “Action!” We had two cameras rolling and got what we wanted in one take.
“Hey, Mr. Reiner,” the officer asked politely, “that actor was bare-ass naked—did you know that actor was going to be naked?”
“No, dammit, I didn’t,” I shouted, feigning anger, “he was supposed to be wearing boxers. Norman!” I called to my assistant, “Who the hell told Ron he could take off the boxers?”
“Not me!” he answered innocently. “Probably Ron’s idea, you know these method actors.”
“You planning to shoot it again?” the sergeant asked.
“No, sir, everybody is pooped,” I said, disappointed, “we’ll just live without the damn shot. All right, Norman,” I shouted, “that’s a wrap!”
“See that it is a wrap!” the officer ordered.
I smiled at the sergeant, and the sergeant smiled back. He knew I was lying and would use the nude shot, and I knew he knew and was grateful for his appreciation of the creative process. We all gained from the sergeant’s kindness. The author’s work was respected, the audience got an extra laugh, and those who fancy a well-toned buttock got a good look at one.
Of the many pleasures working at New York’s Twentieth Century Fox Studios, the one that George Segal and I enjoyed most, was the al fresco dining on Eleventh Avenue. On more than one occasion we left the studio by the back door, strolled a short distance, to our favorite curbside vendor, and ordered a couple of Sabrett hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut.
Again I am proud to report, we finished our movie on time and miraculously on budget. We returned to California where, with my trusted editor-friend, Bud Molin, who worked with me for five years on The Dick Van Dyke Show and on all but two of my fifteen films, we made Where’s Poppa? ready for previews in a relatively short time.
We screened it for the United Artists executives and a couple of our friends, who all genuinely loved what they saw. Mel Brooks concurred and said that he could not believe we dared to make a movie he should have made. The UA executives, fresh from this successful screening, had such faith in the film’s potential that they opted to present not just a short trailer of their new product to the National Alliance of Theater Owners’ convention in Miami Beach, as other studios were going to do, but to screen the entire film. It was a gamble, but one they felt comfortable taking.
The audience reaction was definite and measurable. It was this first reaction that was, in good part, responsible for the ultimate place that Where’s Poppa? holds in film history.
Of all the films I have directed, only Where’s Poppa? is universally acknowledged as a cult classic. A cult classic, as you may know, is a film that was seen by a small minority of the world’s filmgoers, who insist that it is one of the greatest, most daring, and innovative moving pictures ever made. Whenever two or more cult members meet, they will quote dialogue from the classic and agree that “the film was ahead of its time.” To be designated a genuine cult classic, it is of primary importance that the film fail to earn back the cost of making, marketing, and distributing it. Where’s Poppa? was made in 1969 for a little over $1 million. According to the last distribution statements I saw, it will not break even until it earns another $650,000.
That fateful evening in Miami Beach, more than half the audience, led by the older, conservative, outraged wives of the theater owners, walked out, en masse, mumbling and grousing as they went. Those who found the film hilariously funny were greatly outnumbered by the humorless folk, who found it deeply disgusting. The sad fact is that many millions, who might have loved the film, were scared off by the vehement badmouthing of its detractors. However, those millions, by renting a copy of Where’s Poppa? still have an opportunity to judge for themselves who is right and who is humorless. If there are enough of you, it is not impossible to hope that Where’s Poppa? will make new fans and enough new income to lose its standing as a cult classic.
19
Billy Wilder’s Bratwurst
Estelle and I were fortunate to have been able to spend fifteen idyllic summers vacationing in our small house in the south of France. There in our modest backyard we cultivated tomatoes that tasted like real tomatoes—the kind they sold in the Bronx in the 1930s, the kind my mother bought from Abe, our neighborhood vegetable man who my mother fixed up with her stout cousin, Helen—a successful matchmaking that ensured my mother bringing home the freshest vegetables and the plumpest fruit. Besides cultivating real tomatoes during those carefree étés in France, we cultivated real friends, who are still in our lives. One such friend is central to this story, and if, because of the title, you guessed Billy Wilder, you guessed wrong. While in France, we never saw Mr. Wilder or anyone who resembled him. Among the half dozen people with whom we bonded was a couple whose hospitality helped make our days so special. To protect their privacy, I will call them Jim and Betty. Their real names are Arman and Corice, and as I think about it, Arman doesn’t want his privacy protected, he being a world-renowned artist who loves and deserves his renown. His massive sculptures and brilliant paintings grace the squares and museums of the world’s great cities. Corice is a beauty, a gourmet cook, a hostess in the Perle Mesta tradition, and if their children, Yasmine and Philippe, are any testament, a very good and caring mother. I am not sure how we met Corice and Arman, but I think it was through a mutual friend, who I will call Jeffrey Robinson, because he is an author of best-sellers who loves seeing his name in print. Jeffrey and I met years earlier when he was a young interviewer for the European edition of the Herald Tribune and I was a middle-aged interviewee. I’m not clear about why Arman and Corice invited us to lunch at their extraordinary home in Vence. It might have been because Jeff vouched for our character or because of my fame as a minor celebrity or my wife’s ability to sing jazz—whatever it was, I’m happy it came about. Estelle and I saw things at Arman and Corice’s home that we had never before seen anywhere, nor, I’ll wager, have you, unless you’ve been to a house that has the following:
• fifteen hundred glistening chromium-plated washing-machine drums welded together, positioned to frame the roof and the front door of the house.
• a swimming pool, the access to which requires your strolling through a cavelike grotto where 2,500 telephones of various shapes, colors, and styles adorn every inch of the grotto’s walls and ceiling.
• on the back patio, a two-ton bronze sculpture of a vintage Citroën auto, so badly pitted that one must surmise that it had been dredged up from the ocean’s floor. Its title, Future Archeological Find, suggests that it had been resting there for hundreds of years.
• a fifteen-foot free-form pyramidlike sculpture that utilizes dozens of porcelain bathroom washbasins that becomes a soothing waterfall when the topmost basins’ faucets are turned on.
• a living room with a club chair fashioned from hundreds of plastic paint-tube containers, a sofa constructed of wooden shoe lasts, and a fairly comfortable couch made up entirely of empty guitar cases.
I could cite a dozen more breathtakingly original examp
les of Arman’s home art, but if I do that, we’ll never get to Billy Wilder’s bratwurst.
Throughout the years, Corice and Arman continued to wine and dine us lavishly in their homes in Vence and in New York, and sadly, we were never able to reciprocate in kind. Our guilt was almost unbearable, so when we learned they were coming to Los Angeles to attend the opening of Arman’s new work at the Urbinati Gallery, we jumped at the chance to even the score—well, not exactly even it, but make it a tad less lopsided. We invited them to be the honored guests at a dinner party in our home to which we would invite some of our mutual friends and some who would become mutual. As an inducement, I added that it would be a home-cooked dinner. The moment the Armans accepted our invitation, Estelle started to worry about what to cook for this couple with the sophisticated palates, whose best friend was Roger Vergé, owner/chef of Le Moulin de Mougins. Estelle was not of a mind to compete with Roger Vergé or Corice who, at every one of her dinners, was invariably asked by one of her guests, often Estelle, “Can I get the recipe for that?”
What to make, what to make? We went through a list of the wonderful dishes we had eaten at the Armans’ and knew that gourmet-wise we could not compete. We thought of all the great recipes Estelle had gotten from her mother, Minnie, like brisket of beef, chicken fricassee, or her lighter-than-air cheese blintzes, but decided that even though the Armans would think a good Jewish meal to be quaint, our relationship centered around our time together in France. Since we adored peasant-style French food and had never eaten any at their home, we opted to go with our all-time favorite peasant fare, choucroute Alsacienne!