Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  Guess what? They get their chance.

  Now, guess where the big match takes place? Bingo--at the Grand Hotel.

  Variety then went on to explain that the last half hour of the film took place at the Grand. And that the match itself took place where the logo of the Grand was on the ring mat, so that every shot was a plug for the hotel. Variety had one word for this self-promotion--

  --"shameless."

  That word in that review was the final nail in my coffin. (It didn't matter when I next found out that the Bette Midler movie Jinxed also had scenes at the Grand. And it also didn't matter that the Falk picture took place at the Grand in Reno. Because they look alike. It was the same as if someone had said to me, "Don't worry that there's this other movie in the Anaheim Burger King, ours is in Cucamonga."

  I met with Jewison, Hamlisch, and the Bergmans. They were all bright and they had wonderful ideas and they weren't bothered by all the other movies. But the musical people hadn't been through the same grinding-down process I'd experienced. And Jewison was about to begin directing a Burt Reynolds-Goldie Hawn film, so he was busy for the next nine months.

  I had to go into my room and do it. Try, somehow, to make Grand Hotel come to life.

  And I couldn't.

  I had one final meeting with Norman. It was, at least for me, very sad. We wished each other well, that was that.

  Looking back on the experience six months later, I feel it was the right and only thing for me to have done. At least it was right for me.

  Could I have written the script?

  Absolutely.

  I could have filled 135 pages. If you'd lifted it, it would have felt like a screenplay. If you'd looked through it, it would have resembled a screenplay.

  Would it have had any quality at all?

  Doubtful.

  My confidence was all--all--gone. The moonrise could not make me a virgin. When I am hired to try a movie, I may turn in a garbage script. But at least I know that, rotten as it may turn out, it was written by the best me available.

  At the end, on Grand Hotel, I wasn't there....

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Bridge Too Far

  Until the reviews came out, A Bridge Too Far was probably the best experience I've had in films. And, as I said in the introduction to this section, the most unusual. What made it so unusual, from my point of view, was this: It was the only time that a picture was actually into production before a first draft screenplay or so much as a word of it was seen by anyone.

  This kind of risk is unheard of for a studio-financed picture. But Bridge was not backed by a studio; rather it was one man using his own money, the producer Joseph E. Levine.

  And if that isn't risk enough, remember this: We are not talking about a cheapie here. Levine knew from the outset that Bridge, a mammoth undertaking, was going to be expensive. But I doubt that he could have guessed that, when things were at their most desperate, he was going to be personally on the line for twenty-two million dollars....

  Joseph Edward Levine was born in the Boston slums in 1905. He was the youngest of six children and his father, an immigrant tailor, died when Levine was four. He endured one of those classic horrendous childhoods, moving always from tenement to tenement.

  His mother called him the broytgeber--the bread giver--and he was always working, selling paper, shining shoes, stealing wood, so the family wouldn't freeze in the New England winters. The slum stink draped across his early years, and there seemed no escaping.

  There was also no food. Weekly, he would go to the rabbi for religious instruction and the rabbi would always eat black bread during these sessions and never offer any. The rabbi also had a stick, and whenever Levine made a mistake, the rabbi would strike him on the wrist. One day the rabbi made a mistake and hit too hard, whereupon Levine grabbed the stick and hit the rabbi, which put an end to his theological studies.

  At fourteen he quit school. All he had to offer was energy; he became an errand boy in a dress factory and worked his way up to being a traveling dress salesman. But he didn't like it. He opened a dress shop when he was twenty--called LeVine's--and did all right for a few years. But he didn't like the dress shop any more than being a traveling salesman. He tried New York, scuffled, drove an ambulance before he knew his way around the city. Back to Boston and into the restaurant business. But always he was looking for something.

  Finally, forty-five years ago, he found the picture business.

  An art house, more precisely--the Lincoln Theatre in New Haven. The first two movies he showed were Un Carnet de Bal, the French classic, which did well with the Yalies, and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, which not only "dropped dead, some people threw eggs at the screen." Art films and exploitation films--he has been allied with both ever since.

  Eventually he moved from exhibiting films to the distribution end. Paisan, Open City, Bicycle Thief, 81/2--he brought over some of the best pictures ever. By his own reckoning, A Bridge Too Far was the four hundred ninety-second film he had either produced, coproduced, financed, presented, or distributed.

  But the one that made him famous was Hercules.

  It's a little difficult to explain to an audience today the impact Hercules had in 1959. The movie business was undergoing yet another crisis of confidence--studios were retrenching, long-term executives were being laid off--and television was the chief villain. The movie executives hadn't the least idea how best to cope with it--but they knew that tv had stolen their audience. Levine's importance in the history of this period may well be that he proved that the new despair-ridden movie business was, as a Fortune magazine article about him said, "really the old movie business under new conditions--and a pretty good business at that."

  The Hercules story began in New York when Levine, who was basically a New England distributor, had a talk with a Metro employee who told him of the existence of the Italian sun-and-sandal epic. No other company would touch it for America, but Levine knew as soon as he heard the title that it was for him.

  So, on the strength of the title and the Metro man's recommendation, Levine flies to Rome the next morning to see the movie. He goes to the Metro offices in Rome and sits alone in the freezing basement screening room, watching the picture. His reaction?

  "Lemme tell you something--if you thought Hercules was a stiff when you saw it--and it was a stiff when you saw it, not one of your all-time cinema greats--my God, you should have seen it when I saw it--the color made you sick it was so terrible but the color was sensational compared to the sound. See, they had loused up the sound track something awful. There's a shipwreck scene, and the mast of the ship--this huge mast--it comes crashing down to the deck. Well, when it hits there is dead silence. Nothing. Then a little later, Steve Reeves--you remember Steve Reeves?--didn't sound so good when he talked but terrific muscles--anyway, a little later Steve Reeves is having a love scene with a girl and CRASH--here comes the sound of the goddam mast hitting the deck. It didn't get any better after that, either, I can assure you. Anyway, I bought the American rights for $120,000 and went to work."

  The "work" consisted of what most industry figures agree was the most aggressive campaign any film ever had. If you think Paramount did a job selling Gatsby or King Kong, that was bush-league stuff compared to what Levine did. He spent triple what the movie cost him on newspaper ads alone. He bought billboard space and space in comic books. You couldn't turn on the damn radio without hearing someone hawking this muscleman movie.

  And he went directly to the enemy--television--and spent another quarter of a million dollars on advertisements. Not only did he have these tv ads, he showed all the best stuff from the movie on the ads, secure in the knowledge that no one would dream there wasn't more of the same awaiting them at the theatre.

  Then he ordered over six hundred prints--which isn't uncommon today, but it sure was then--and he gave a party for a thousand people at the Waldorf-Astoria for another forty grand.

  Now, out in Hollywood the executives
are looking out from their foxholes and they can't believe it. This independent from Boston is going crazy--they know he's crazy because they've all seen the picture. It was available for a year but they all passed on it. Their business was to judge public taste and they knew nobody was going to want to see Hercules.

  They were only wrong by twenty million dollars, which is what the picture grossed.

  Levine never stopped running throughout the sixties, and long before The Graduate--his most prosperous enterprise--shattered everybody's concept of what the audiences were looking for in a hero, Levine had become the most famous and the most successful independent film producer in the world. And probably because of that word--independent--he has never been much loved in Southern California.

  It's kind of ironic that Levine, maybe the archetypical Hollywood mogul, has always been acutely uncomfortable in Hollywood. He goes rarely, only when he has to, and usually he stays in his hotel suite, conducts his business as quickly as possible, and, as quickly as possible, takes the next plane out. He's a Boston boy and he always will be. He also defies the mogul tradition in that he is neither fast talking nor cigar smoking; he's a slow talker moving up to medium when excited, and a lifelong nonsmoker--pipes and cigarettes, as well as cigars.

  He is an enormously antiestablishment figure that the media have fixed in the public mind for their purposes. (Once when a national magazine referred to him as a chain cigar smoker, he called the writer and asked why he'd written that, since it was so blatantly untrue. The writer said, "You don't smoke cigars? You really don't?"--pause, then--"Well, you should.")

  Eventually, at the peak of his fame and success, Levine sold his company and retired. It didn't take, he still had all that energy. So, edging into his seventies, he decided to make a comeback. The vehicle he chose was Cornelius Ryan's posthumous bestseller, which began with this opening sentence:

  Shortly after 10 A.M. on Sunday, September 17th, 1944, from airfields all over southern England, the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single operation took to the air.

  In other words, Levine wasn't making it easy on himself. But he was determined to finance as big a movie as any ever made. And to see that the film was in profit before it ever reached the screen.

  Not your everyday gamble. And to risk all that at his age becomes even more remarkable when you remember the poverty he came from, because most wealthy men who started poor cling to their money with ever-increasing determination as the years go on. Levine had enough money to take the challenge. But, as he's said, "If it had gone bad, I would not have been rich anymore."

  In 1974, he set out to make it all happen....

  As if the size of the Ryan epic weren't enough--it dealt with the greatest airborne operation of World War II--the specific subject matter didn't make anything a lot easier or more commercial.

  Briefly, the story Ryan told dealt with the Battle of Arnhem. Montgomery, the British military leader, came up with a plan to end the war by Christmas of '44. Put as simply as possible, Montgomery's notion was to airlift thirty-five thousand Allied paratroopers, mainly American, three hundred miles and drop them behind German lines in Holland, where they were to capture and hold a series of vital bridges.

  Simultaneously, a British armored corps of thirty thousand vehicles was to crash through the German lines, cross the successive bridges, and race over the final and most crucial one, Arnhem Bridge, which led them straight into the industrial heart of Germany, thereby crippling the German forces and bringing surrender. It was a brilliant and audacious plan--

  --only it failed.

  In other words, this wasn't The Longest Day, where everybody got to leave the theatre waving the flag. This was a tragedy. Happy endings did not abound. It was a miasmal, mistake-filled conflict that the Allies lost.

  Not your most commercial idea.

  And Levine's choice for director, Richard Attenborough, was not a commercial one either. Attenborough had won awards with his first two pictures, Oh! What a Lovely War and Young Winston, but they had failed at the box office.

  I had seen both films, liked Young Winston and thought Lovely War brilliant. Not only that, the former showed tremendous skill at dealing with size and scope, while the latter had a marvelous incisive eye toward handling antiwar material. So I was thrilled at the chance of working with Attenborough, and I wanted very much to write Bridge. And he wanted me to do it.

  Richard Attenborough is by far the finest, most decent human being I've met in the picture business. But our first meeting was dreadful. It took place in London, where I was on my way back from location in France for Marathon Man. We talked for quite some time and it was pleasant as could be.

  Except that afterward, his impression was that I didn't want to do the movie and mine was that he definitely didn't want me to do it.

  Eventually, we tried again, this time in America, and our misconceptions were put to bed and we began to work. This was in the summer of '75.

  The Battle of Arnhem is almost totally unknown in America, but in England, probably because the British cherish their disasters so, it is the second most famous encounter of the war, topped only by Dunkirk.

  So I returned to London and every day for several weeks I read books in the morning and night and talked with Attenborough in the afternoons. There are so many books about Arnhem in England that it seemed to me at the time that every man who was involved must have written his memoirs about it.

  Our problem was in trying to find a story line.

  The Ryan book is well over 650 pages of not the largest print. It is filled with fabulous material. And these other books added still more stuff. I would tell him about something I'd just read and ask did he want to include it, and more often than not, the answer was yes, if we can. The heroism displayed was remarkable--on both sides. Arnhem will probably go down as the last major battle in which any of the old romantic notions of war still held true. The Bulge, which followed it, was vicious and dirty by comparison.

  The movie was always intended to run close to three hours--it was impossible to tell the story in less time.

  But which story? There were so damn many.

  It became clear that there was no way I would be able to finish a first draft screenplay before late fall of '75.

  Which presented a terrible problem for Mr. Levine.

  From the first time I met him, he was totally convinced of one thing: A Bridge Too Far was going to open on June 15, 1977.

  "We will open June fifteenth of '77," he said.

  That was fixed, for whatever reasons, in his mind. And since he was, in effect, the studio, we knew that June fifteenth was going to be our release date.

  We also knew that this three-hour story was going to take approximately six months to shoot. And it had to shoot in Holland, because that's where the bridges were.

  Because of the weather conditions in Holland, it was crucial to be finished with photography by October of '76. Counting back six months, that meant we had to start in April of that year.

  But my script wouldn't be done till, say, November of '75. Well, you can't risk a giant undertaking without top personnel who have had experience with this kind of massive operation. These technicians--production designers, cinematographers, at least thirty in all--are in demand. If Levine waited till he had a script, the chances were strong that the crew Attenborough needed would be busy on other pictures.

  But he went ahead, took the risk, and hired them. If my script stunk, if it was unusable, they had to be paid. Not only that, preliminary production had to start.

  Without a word on paper, Levine was now in for over two million dollars....

  Obviously, every writer feels pressure when he tries to make something work. But I've never felt as much pressure as when I went on trying to figure out Bridge, because I'd never had as much of one man's money riding on anything before. (Everyone, I think, was affected by the personal financing of the film. The crew in Holland, when we got to shooting, talk
ed of it all the time. They hustled their tails off--I've never seen a crew work as hard.)

  A movie, as a rough rule of thumb, runs a minute per page of screenplay. So I had to write approximately 175 pages of script, far more than I'd ever previously done. The length made so many new and different problems. Climaxes could not come at the same intervals as in something of more normal length.

  Another rule. In a screenplay you always attack your story as late as possible. You enter each scene as close as you can to the end (movie scenes are, for the most part, terribly short compared to scenes in novels or even short stories). You also enter your story as late as you can.

  But which story?

  There were simply too many incidents that cried out for inclusion--five Victoria Crosses were awarded for heroism at Arnhem; that's England's highest military honor and it doesn't get awarded easily. Surely I needed those five.

  Bridge was also intended to lure an all-star cast. So I had to try to write a bunch of parts that might appeal to stars--

  --problem--

  --none of the main characters in the Ryan book died. Well, you can't have an antiwar movie where all the leads live. So I began to fiddle with trying to make small roles, roles that would be instantly sympathetic--so that I could have someone to kill in the story.

  Goddammit, though, which story?

  Yes, I had problems, problems of time, problems of story, problems of length, on and on--but there were some problems I was lucky enough not to know about--

  --for example, gliders.

  When the air armada that opens Ryan's book took off from England, there were five thousand planes of various kinds involved--plus twenty-five hundred gliders. Most of the troops were carried into Holland via gliders. Well, when I finally got around to writing that sequence, I had a gay old time, going from this glider to that, one to another, inside then outside, whatever I wanted. What I didn't know when I wrote it was this--

  --there weren't any gliders. Not anywhere. No matter how hard people tried to find one, they had no luck. (Gliders are meant to crash land, and that accounted for their absence.)