Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  “This may be the most ‘controlled’ and ‘deliberate’ piece of craftsmanship of all my work,” Silliphant admitted, adding quotation marks to show disdain for such calculated construction. “Usually, in writing, I let emotion and feeling dominate, lead me down unknown and, for me, still-unexplored pathways.” But In the Heat of the Night demanded precision. “In discussions early on with Norman Jewison, we agreed that, if the crime story were plotted as the alphabet, from A to Z, how much of it could we pull out and play off-screen without ever seeing or making any reference to? We kept A and jumped to F, then from F jumped to L and from L to P — then from P to Z-and then we tried to see how we could still pull more exposition out of that fragmentary crime-story structure. We applied this principle to every scene: wherever we could, any explanation or exposition, we stepped on it. The result of this withholding of information was to compel the viewer to invest attention to the least detail. Maybe there was a clue in the look Gillespie gave Virgil — maybe not. But we’d better watch and see.”

  Although Poitier was to receive top billing, the film needed an equally strong presence to play Gillespie. Mirisch first asked George C. Scott but, as the deal was being finalized, the mercurial actor decided to do a play in New York with his temporarily ex-wife, Colleen Dewhurst. [107] At one point Daily Variety even ran a squib that Raymond Burr, best known for playing Perry Mason on TV, had been approached. [108] Rod Steiger was Jewison’s second choice and he consented to do the film after he wrapped the Russian Napoleon in Italy. [109] He was paid $150,000. [110]

  With all the fireworks surrounding the racial theme of the film, another equally significant casting decision went almost ignored: Lee Grant. Grant had been nominated for an Academy Award in 1951 for her first film, Detective Story, and then found herself on the Blacklist when she refused to testify against her husband, Arnold Manoff, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. [111] For the next twelve years she found it hard to get work, and playing Louise Colbert — who, unpoisoned by racism, is the person, rather than Endicott, who pressures the town to listen to Tibbs — helped revive her career. Warren Oates, as Sam Wood, was another notable addition. Though the Kentucky-born Oates had appeared in countless television episodes and movie westerns, this was the first time he had a chance to hint at his acting potential. Likewise, Scott Wilson made his film debut; his next role would be in Richard Brooks’s memorable In Cold Blood.

  With Jewison winning the battle to shoot on location, the problem then became, “What location?” The authentic Deep South was out; even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed two years earlier, the region’s attitudes had not measurably improved. Besides, only a short time earlier, Poitier and Harry Belafonte had nearly been killed by Klansmen while on a civil rights mission to Mississippi. After scouting upwards of 200 northern townships that might pass for Dixie, Jewison and production managers James E. Henderling and J. Howard Joslin settled on Sparta, Illinois, sixty miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Serendipitously, when the advance construction crew arrived to change the signage from Sparta to Wells, they discovered that it was so pervasive that it was easier to change the script, so Wells, South Carolina became Sparta, Mississippi, courtesy of Sparta, Illinois.

  Production started on September 26, 1966, during an uncharacteristic cold snap. [112] Director of Photography Haskell Wexler was no stranger to the south or the Civil Rights Struggle; he had made the heralded 1965 documentary, The Bus, about a group of activists driving to the August 1963, demonstration in Washington, DC. He and Jewison decided to shoot their film with low light levels, not only to achieve a noir mood but in order not to wash out Poitier’s dark skin, as often happened in studio movies, whose high key lighting favored Caucasian actors. The result was a gritty, yet assured, verisimilitude.

  The company was billeted in Belleville, Illinois and bused forty miles on the state highway every day to Sparta. Even while keeping a low profile, the filmmakers’ presence was constantly monitored by the townspeople. “We had a situation in the motel,” recalls Wexler, “where some white guy — Southern Illinois is like the Deep South — said that his wife was shacked up with someone in the film crew. The guy was drunk and came to the motel and one of the rooms he knocked on was Rod Steiger’s room. When he banged on Rod’s room, Rod quickly got out and said, ‘No she’s not here’ and went over to Sidney’s room, which was a couple down, ‘cause if that guy got anywhere near Sidney at that time…”

  The production did, however, venture briefly into Jim Crow territory for the Endicott/Tibbs slap that needed to be shot on a cotton plantation for authenticity. True to Poitier’s concerns, there were incidents with local thugs knocking on doors at the crew’s Dyersburg Holiday Inn and a general chill from the town’s residents, so much so that the company left a day and a half ahead of schedule, forcing them to finish their scenes on matching sets at LA’s Producers Studio (now the Raleigh Studio). “We felt we weren’t getting the cooperation we needed,” Jewison understated diplomatically to Variety’s Army Archerd. [113] Principle photography wrapped on November 8.

  Despite its age, In the Heat of the Night remains astonishingly modern; the only elements that date it are the cars (which might well still be on the road in Sparta) and, surprisingly, Quincy Jones’s original score, parts of which sound like canned music from a ‘60s TV cop show. The interplay between Poitier and Steiger is breathtaking. Jewison suggested that Steiger chew gum in addition to sporting yellow sunglasses and an overhanging gut. At first, he resisted the gimmick, but he quickly discovered that he could convey Gillespie’s mood by how fast he chewed at any given time. A Method actor, he stayed in character throughout the shoot, causing Poitier to marvel, “I was on the threshold of discovering what acting really was.” [114]

  Their symbiosis led to a scene that has been the subject of ongoing, though good-natured, controversy ever since it was shot. Scene 296, starting on revised page 123 and dated September 28, 1966, takes place at night in Gillespie’s functional apartment. He is drinking as Tibbs waits for word that will lead him to Mama Caleba (Beah Richards), an abortionist who may unwittingly know who the killer is. “They’d eaten a poor meal of bread, butter, pork, and beans,” Silliphant’s script indicates. “Gillespie is pouring the fourth or fifth bourbon for himself.”

  “You’re the first colored I ever sat in a room with like this,” Gillespie says. Feeling comfortable enough to be sarcastic, Tibbs responds, “You can’t be too careful.” Hitting the Wild Turkey again, Gillespie says, “You know everything, don’t you, boy? What do you know about insomnia?”

  “Bourbon can’t cure it.”

  “Thirty-seven years old. No wife, no kids. Scratching for a living in a town that doesn’t want me. A fan I have to oil for myself. Desk with a busted leg.” He looks at the wallpaper. “This place.” He looks at Tibbs. “Know something, Virgil? You’re the first person who’s been around to call. Nobody else has been here. Nobody comes.” Then, writes Silliphant, “In a sudden spontaneous gesture of compassion, Tibbs reaches out, touches Gillespie on the shoulder, a simple and moving human contact. But it only infuriates Gillespie, who barks, ‘Don’t treat me like a nigger, Tibbs!’” Tibbs stiffens at the rebuff. In the film, the line becomes, “Oh, now, don’t get smart black boy. I don’t need it.” [115]

  “It would have been good if Gillespie said nigger,” Wexler explained clinically, “because that’s what he would have said. There were all kinds of words that you couldn’t say on many films. The thing about the film is the concept. What was happening at the world at that time was far advanced to what In the Heat of the Night was, but In the Heat of the Night was far advanced for what movies were.” [116]

  Added Silliphant, “To me that’s what Lenny Bruce must have felt when he used obscenities to make the point that the problem is not with the words, the problem lies in our dirty little minds. It’s a cultural imprint and nothing more So by getting the word nigger out there and looking at it simply as a word, not a
s a pejorative term, I think you can get air into it. Air and hopefully sunlight — and maybe the need to use it will disappear as the impact of the word itself becomes diminished.”

  The “Gillespie apartment scene” has, over forty years, become a point of contention, Silliphant said. “I have heard that everybody claims to have written that scene — Haskell Wexler, Rod Steiger, and, Lord knows, even the generator man. I can only assure you that I conceived it and wrote it. Rod did switch a couple of words around, but with an actor of his talent I made no objection.”

  Indeed, Silliphant was not present on location, so director and actors felt free to change his words when necessary. When, for example, Gillespie asks Tibbs where he’s from and Tibbs responds, “Philadelphia,” Gillespie asks, “Mississippi?” Not only was the southern town of Philadelphia, Mississippi the first thing a southerner would think of, it’s also an allusion to the place where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by Klansmen in 1964.

  Not long after the apartment scene, the mystery is solved: Ralph, the night man at the town diner, accidentally killed Colbert in a robbery to pay for Delores Purdy’s abortion. Next day, Tibbs boards his train back to Philadelphia. The script has the two men saying a perfunctory goodbye; in the film, however, Gillespie turns and says, “Virgil? You take care, you hear?” The men trade careful smiles — editor Hal Ashby cuts between them twice to cement the unspoken bond — and Ray Charles sings the exit theme. [117]

  The film premiered in New York on August 2, 1967, and in Los Angeles on August 23, after which it went into general release, collecting nearly $11 million in rentals. The reviews were strongly positive, but it encountered a strange backlash from three distinct, yet overlapping, audiences. First, Poitier had been facing growing resistance from the African-American community for his frequent casting as a near-saint despite the barrier-shattering strength of his roles. Then the film itself suffered from critics who, while applauding its craft, got picky about how easy it was to take sides. Then there was the audience who, the filmmakers hoped, would see the movie as something more than a racial polemic. Silliphant bristled when they didn’t.

  “I have been quoted and misquoted on this point for two decades,” he said with a measure of impatience. “What I was referring to was the fact that the film had never been appreciated for its craftsmanship or for its unique and polished style of holding back, holding back, but was judged on the level of its black-white content. I felt then and still feel that such a judgment is overly simplistic and, for that reason and that reason alone, I made the statement that getting plaudits for In the Heat of the Night was like waving the American flag or pushing Mom’s apple pie. It was just too damn easy to manipulate people in issues which, for the moment, have flagged their attention. It was impossible not to like In the Heat of the Night at that time. Today’s phrase is ‘politically correct.’ I hated to be politically correct since I felt there was no validation for the work in such a posture, but only a knee-jerk reaction on the part of a populist majority opinion on what happened by chance to be the subject matter of the film.”

  “I think [he] was reflecting the revolutionary changes America had gone through since he wrote his script,” opined Poitier, “and so, in some way, he was apologizing for something he couldn’t have helped. At the time he wrote the script, most of America was where he was, and, to my mind, it was a very forward-looking piece of material; naturally, there were things in it that black people would have preferred to see more of, but, on the whole, it was revolutionary as mass entertainment.” [118]

  Perhaps these controversies, as well as the film’s genre (mysteries seldom win “Best Picture” Oscars despite such outstanding examples as The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, L.A. Confidential), combined to deny Norman Jewison a directing Oscar. Even Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde revolutionized American cinema, was passed over that year. Academy voters gave their directing statuette to Mike Nichols for The Graduate, marking one of the rare times that the Picture-Director awards have been split.

  “About Norman Jewison, both the talent and the man,” Silliphant stated, “he is superb in both departments. I adore him — did from the beginning, always will. He was a magnificent sport when the Academy passed him over. I can only tell you that those of us who went up to get our Oscars felt little personal triumph because Norman — who made it all possible — wasn’t up there with us. For that matter, neither was Sidney. But then the Academy had to decide: Sidney or Rod. It couldn’t be both.” [119]

  Naturally, Silliphant was approached to write a sequel. His files contain a blue, loose-leaf notebook with forty-five pages of character and story notes, quotes from Dick Gregory and others, a highly personal deliberation about Black Power, and a six-page unsigned letter/summary to Walter Mirisch dated May 20, 1968. Nothing came of it.

  Ball’s book, boosted no doubt by the success of the film, led to six more Virgil Tibbs novels and two short stories. There were two film sequels sans Silliphant (They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, 1970, and The Organization, 1971) and a seven-year television adaptation that cleverly cast Carroll O’Connor against Howard Rollins. In 2011, a stage adaptation by Matt Pelfrey titled John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night used the original novel (thus the possessive title) but not Silliphant’s script. Its New York production was not enthusiastically received. Silliphant received no compensation from any of these.

  8: Silliphant, Inc.

  Everyone who wins the Academy Award goes back to work the next day carrying Hollywood’s best-kept secret: although an Oscar brings money and power, it does nothing to erase the self-doubts that creative people carry with them every moment. Silliphant was no exception. He confessed that, “Every [new] one is, ‘Can I do this one?’ It’s what an actor must feel. Most of my friends are actors, and I know, even when they’re superstars, when they go on the set, they’re very, very uptight. You know you can do it but you’re not sure how well you can do it. Each one is a new challenge.” [120]

  Following In the Heat of the Night, Silliphant was offered every old, dusty project that the studios had on their shelves, and was asked to revamp it by adding a black character. He reacted haughtily by saying that using token blacks in films is “dangerous” because it portrays American racism as being a thing of the past, which, in fact, it was not. He even went so far as to call the film companies’ attitude toward blacks a “modern slave trade.” [121]

  Only someone on a post-Oscar roll could have dared such a charge, but Silliphant was too busy to care. The same year that saw the release of In the Heat of the Night, he also wrote the pilot and two episodes for MGM Television’s series Maya, about a boy and his elephant, based on their 1966 theatrical film. Both the feature and the series were produced by the King Brothers, the low rent siblings who had earned a place in movie history for having hired blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo under the name “Robert Rich” to write The Brave One, which won Trumbo a 1956 Oscar that he was unable to claim until 1975. [122]

  By the time Maya aired in September, Silliphant was already at work adapting Daniel Keyes’s short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” into what became the 1968 movie Charly. Cliff Robertson had starred in the live February 22, 1961, broadcast of CBS’s “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon” on The United States Steel Hour. He was taken with the star-making role and felt it could lead to a movie career. But he was painfully mindful that his starring role in Playhouse 90’s October 2, 1958 production of “Days of Wine and Roses” had gone to Jack Lemmon when the lush property had become a feature. Robertson made sure that wouldn’t happen to “Flowers for Algernon” by buying the screen rights to the story and producing it — and, of course, starring in it — himself.

  Published in the April 1959 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction after several rejections from other periodicals because Keyes wouldn’t change his ending to a happy one, “Algernon” unfolds through the diary entries of a thirty-se
ven-year-old janitor with an IQ of sixty-eight who works in a box factory. Charlie Gordon is the subject of taunts from his coworkers, whom he thinks are merely giving him attention. He takes an adult education course from Alice Kinnian so he can “get smart” but, when this fails, she introduces him to research scientists who have had luck increasing the intelligence of a laboratory mouse, Algernon, and are ready to try the experiment on a human. The procedure works and Charlie becomes a genius but, when Algernon’s newfound intelligence decays and the mouse dies, Charlie realizes that his own mind will go too. On the verge of reverting to his old self, he asks Miss Kinnian to please leave flowers on Algernon’s grave.

  Keyes expanded his short story into a novel in 1966, adding a backstory about Charlie’s parents, a subplot about a sexual liaison with a neighbor, and a drinking habit that parallels his rising IQ. Over the years the book has faced numerous censorship assaults from groups who think it stigmatizes mentally disabled people when, in fact, Keyes wrote it to humanize them.

  Bent on turning the novel into a feature, Robertson ignored James Yaffee’s 1961 teleplay and approached a young novelist he had met through his cousin, and whose energy and interest had impressed him. This was William Goldman, who would become one of the screen’s most honored writers. [123]

  Goldman tells it a little differently, reporting that Robertson had read the manuscript of his 160-page, 1964 novel, No Way to Treat a Lady, and was misled by its short chapters into thinking it was a film treatment. [124] When the actor asked him to write “Flowers for Algernon,” Goldman says, he didn’t know what a screenplay looked like, and even when he found a how-to book on the subject, it made no sense. “To this day,” he writes, “I remember staring at the page in shock. I didn’t know what it was exactly I was looking at, but I knew I could never write in that form, in that language.” [125]