A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 27
Lippert had a small distribution company that booked his films into his own movie houses as well as into little theaters across the entire country. Lippert's network was especially strong in the South and the Midwest, the so-called Bible Belt, cradle of American bigotry. After a film played on that circuit for a while, it was destined to be forgotten. But I got lucky.
Out of the blue, the manager of the Palace Theater in New York City decided to book I Shot Jesse James after the film's regular run in the Bible Belt. Word of mouth among movie bookers had it that the film was a hot ticket. The Palace, at Forty-seventh Street and Broadway, was one of the greatest movie houses in the country. Before it became a two thousand-seat movie house, the Palace was a legitimate theater with big-time headliners like Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and Fanny Brice. When it was transformed for the movies, the Palace played big Hollywood productions with major stars. The fate of my film, and maybe other low-budget features, changed overnight. I Shot Jesse James opened at the Palace in early 1950. A little movie did great business in a big theater in New York City. The door was suddenly open for independent pictures to get a release in major movie houses in big cities across the country.
I had no idea that audiences from other countries would love the film, too. It got picked up, subtitled, and played around the world. A French critic wrote that the close-ups in my movie had "an oppressive intensity the cinema has not experienced since Dreyer's Joan of Arc." The critic's name was Jean-Luc Godard.
I Shot Jesse James was a big boost to my confidence. Lippert had trusted me, giving me the independence to do the film my own way, and I hadn't let him down. The film's critical and box-office success was thrilling, espe cially after having had my three previous scripts turned down. There were scores of phone calls from producers with all kinds of offers. But I was going to stick with Lippert because he'd believed in me. Now he wanted to produce my second picture. For that, I settled on a yarn about one of the greatest con men of the nineteenth century.
With Preston Foster (left) and John Ireland (right) on the set of I Shot Jesse James. The ham Im holding was given to us by some Big Red One pals for Thanksgiving 1948, when we were in production.
The original release poster from I Shot Jesse James
Earning Some
Clout
25
I'd come across the story of The Baron of Arizona during my hobo days in the thirties. I was sitting in a bar in New Mexico ong day drinking whiskey with another newspaperman when the man pointed out the window at a government building across the street.
"See that place?" he said. "That's where Reavis worked."
"Who's Reavis?" I asked.
"James Addison Reavis. Fooled the U.S. government into thinking he owned all of Arizona."
I was intrigued. After doing some research, I'd written an article for the American Weekly about Reavis, a bizarre character from nineteenthcentury frontier days who'd falsified official documents about territorial grants, creating one of the greatest land scams of all time. The federal government was forced to attack Reavis's claims to Arizona and parts of New Mexico. If Reavis had prevailed, he'd have been the legitimate owner of an enormous piece of the United States, including all its resources.
Bob Lippert was ready to produce another film with me directing, and he liked my pitch about Reavis. He asked that I put a tagline on the movie's writing credits that said "from an article first published in the American Weekly." I agreed to this little conceit. At the time, the majors were adapting classics into movies. David Selznick was producing Dos- toyevsky's The Idiot at MGM and Paramount was making Dickens's Oliver Twist. Like the big Hollywood studios, Lippert wanted to produce an adaptation too.
I had to get into Reavis's head to write that script. Reavis was a flamboyant and ingenious gambler, so I wanted to use as much of his real-life personality as possible. From there, I concocted a yarn that was more interesting than Reavis's actual story. I imagined his fraud being meticulously planned and carried out over many years. I also invented a love story between the swindler and a little Mexican girl whom Reavis trains to become his baroness. Lippert was concerned about the implications of a little girl living with a grown man. The censors might make us cut it. I promised I'd soft-pedal the situation. Until Sofia becomes a grown woman, I always have a governess or Pepito, the girl's guardian, in her scenes with Reavis. When Sofia is no longer a minor, Reavis proposes marriage. Now a respectable young woman, Sofia falls in love with the swindler, no matter that he's more than twice her age.
The real Reavis was caught and convicted because of the ink on the documents he forged. I definitely wanted to use that historical aspect. I was fascinated that ink was able to condemn a man. Since my days as a copyboy, the gooey black substance that the presses used to make type appear on blank paper had always tickled my imagination. I remember the printmen on Park Row screaming out as the presses rolled, "We need ink! More ink!" In my research, I discovered that Spanish monks had used bark from oak trees growing at the monasteries to fabricate their own ink. Over the years, the ink faded in a special way. Reavis's crime was exposed because one of his forgeries was written with modern ink. His writing was perfect, but the ink wouldn't lie.
For the role of Reavis, I needed an actor who'd pass as an erudite fraud. My first choice was Fredric March. I met with March to explain the story. He was enthusiastic about the part. However, he was one of the top actors of that period and Lippert couldn't pay his asking price. I kept looking. On a trip back to New York, I saw a tall actor in a Broadway play with the dignified appearance of an Old World gentleman. He had an impressive voice and all the gestures and movements of a bygone era, just the guy I needed. I went backstage to his dressing room and introduced myself. He'd never heard of me. That was all right, as I'd never heard of him either. We smoked cigars. I told him about the Reavis character, and he loved it. Then and there, I offered him the part in my movie. We shook hands on it. The actor towering over me was Vincent Price.
Central to the movie is the struggle betwen Reavis and John Griff, the forgery expert who demasks the fraud. Reed Hadley, who had played Jesse James in my last picture, got the role. Reavis and Griff are archenemies, yet there is also a bond of mutual admiration between them.
In my yarn, Reavis builds his swindle around the fact that the United States promised to honor Spanish land grants from the eighteenth century. Reavis invents a phony eighteenth-century grant from the king of Spain to a certain Miguel de Peralta. He then finds Sofia and convinces the orphan's guardian that the girl is the rightful heir to the Peralta grant, and therefore the baroness of Arizona.
To make the scam credible, Reavis must falsify records in the archives of an isolated Spanish monastery. He spends years doing this to perfection. Then he returns to the States and marries the grown-up Sofia. Staking his claim, Reavis pretends to be the baron of Arizona, setting off a panic among the local settlers that reaches all the way to Washington.
I wrote Reavis as an arrogant sonofabitch, always maintaining his aloof composure, treating everyone, except Sofia, like shit. No one can dissuade him from taking possession of the lands "rightfully" left to his wife by the fake Peralta grant. The government tries to get Reavis to drop his claim with a multimillion-dollar bribe, but Reavis even refuses that. The townspeople hate him because he threatens to evict them. Later, they try unsuccessfully to lynch him. Even with a noose being tightened around his neck, Reavis still manages to belittle them, screaming, "You're hypocrites!"
Griff suspects the truth about Reavis and relentlessly closes in on him with evidence of the forgeries. In one of the film's final scenes, Reavis knows he's about to be found out. Cornered and humbled, the phony bastard must confess the truth to Sofia. Her love is his only real treasure.
On the set of Baron of Arizona, with Vincent Price as James Addison Reavis and Gene Roth as Father Guardian
REAVIS
You still want me?
SOFIA
I'll want you until the da
y I die. It is not death, it's dying that alarms me. It is not your crime, it's your weakness that alarms me.
REAV I S
Arizona! It seems so small. You suddenly seem so great. I know what I was looking for. A woman who would love me for what I am. No man can live without that. No man can ask for more.
Six years later, Reavis is released from prison. He's broken and lost. Sofia, wise and masterful, is waiting for him at the prison gates in a horsedrawn carriage. Their relationship has come full circle. I wanted an upbeat ending to the picture, even though I knew that it wasn't historically factual. The real Reavis lived out his final years in a shack, penniless and abandoned. In the movie business, a good ending must sometimes hold sway over the truth.
I was lucky to have James Wong Howe, one of the greatest cameramen in Hollywood, working with me on The Baron from Arizona. I'd met and befriended Howe in the late thirties, thanks to Herbert Brenon. Howe was a great guy and a great artist. When word got out that The Baron of Arizona was going into production, James came knocking timidly at my office.
"Sammy, I want to shoot your picture," he said.
"You must be crazy, James!" I said. "The whole movie costs less than your salary!"
"I don't care about the money. There are more important things in life." Howe kept his word and shot the film for a fraction of his normal fee. He gave the film the dark, Gothic look I wanted. For the monastery scenes, our location was in a nearby canyon where they used to film a ton of Westerns. Howe captured the austerity of the place beautifully. When Price, as Reavis, jumps into a wagon and flees the monastery, Howe made the ensuing crash and the tumble down the hillside look exciting and real. In the lynch scene in Phoenix, I told Howe that I wanted the mob to look like a Ku Klux Klan rally gone mad. He shot the crowds scurrying around with burning torches. Juxtaposed with those shots are close-ups of the main characters' faces, making you feel the mob's hatred and terror.
The cameraman's job was complicated because I insisted on using direct sound. Dialogue on the set is much more real than what you can repro duce later in a studio. While the actor is walking and talking, his or her words seem more natural. I liked to get the whole shot, dialogue and all, without having to go back on a soundstage and fool around with the actors' voices later.
I never interfere with my cameraman on the set. I simply tell him how I envisioned the scene in my head when I wrote it, without going into much detail.
"You see the eyes of that woman?" I'll say. "That's all I want to see on the screen."
The cameraman is master of his own kingdom. I feel the same about the rest of my crew: sound technicians, makeup people, hairdressers, costume designers. We'd discuss the kind of picture I wanted to make. Then I'd give them ample freedom to get the job done. They always did, no matter the budget or time constraints. I was always lucky with my production crews. Preparation, resourcefulness, and perseverance were the keys to staying lucky. The Baron from Arizona wasn't a big success. At least it was fun to make. More importantly, I was becoming more confident as a director and earning some clout in the movie business. After Baron, James Wong Howe wanted to do another film with me. James was determined to find the money to produce it, with me writing and directing it. I'd pitched him a story idea called Sampan that he loved. The whole movie takes place in China on the Yangtze River among the boat people, showing their way of life on the water. It was a great idea, but we never got to do it.
In Baron, Reavis arrives to stake his claim to Arizona. The townspeople watch, but later their fear and hatred will push them to try lynching the phony bastard.
Newspaper headlines pointed me toward my next yarn. In 1950, the controversial war in Korea was raging. It seemed a natural for me to come up with a tale set in that ongoing conflict, utilizing my own firsthand experiences from World War II. Whatever the confrontation and wherever it's happening, the underlying story is one of destruction and hatred. I wanted an opportunity to show audiences that war was more complex than the front-page newspaper articles. You never saw the genuine hardship of soldiers, not ours nor the enemy's, in movies. The confusion and brutality of war, not phony heroism, needed to be depicted. The people who chanted "We are right, and they are wrong" needed to be debunked.
The Steel Helmet was written quickly, like a reporter on a scoop, the story "torn from the headlines," as they used to say. I concocted a squad of GIs in Korea cut off behind enemy lines. They're of different races and backgrounds. Together, they must assault a Buddhist temple, now an enemy observation post, as part of a big offensive operation. The first image on the screen is a dogface's helmet with a bullet hole in it. The helmet rises slowly to reveal the gritty, cigar-chomping face of Sergeant Zack, a World War II veteran. The bullet hole makes that steel helmet "lucky." It becomes an essential symbol of survival throughout the movie.
When I pitched The Steel Helmet to Bob Lippert, I told him the last image wouldn't be a typical "The End" but would say "There Is No End to This Story." Bob asked me why. It was my way of saying that, until we end the violence, this was just one episode in a continuum of horrible war tales. Violence begets violence. I sensed that if we started to fight in any corner of the world, it would be a repetitious cycle. Lippert gave me a green light, thank God, for if I were to make it my way, The Steel Helmet had to be done independently.
One of the major studios heard about the picture and offered to produce it, with John Wayne playing Zack. That would have taken all the reality out of the film. This wasn't a gung-ho war movie. I was determined to make it look real, my soldiers human and deeply flawed. War brings out the best and worst in you. With Wayne, I'd end up with a simplistic morality tale.
Again we had a strict budget and a tight ten-day schedule, but this time I'd get a bigger piece of the profits. As we approached our start date, we started rehearsals even though I was still missing the actor who could play my hard-boiled sergeant. Only a few days before the shoot was to begin, I was sitting in the production office when an agent walked in with a guy named Gene Evans. Evans was a tall, broad-shouldered actor who'd never had a major role in a movie. I liked this big, slow-talking fellow immediately.
"You in the war?" I asked him.
"Yes, Mr. Fuller," said Gene. "Three and a half years."
"Infantry?"
"Engineers."
"Too bad."
"Well," he said, smiling modestly, "we cleaned up a lot of stuff for the infantry."
I had an Mi on my desk. Without any warning, I threw it at Gene's chest. He grabbed it in midair.
"Rack it back," I said.
Without even thinking, Gene's hands worked the bolt, his fingers moving effortlessly.
"Follow me," I told Gene, taking him upstairs to introduce him to Lippert. "I found my Zack," I said as we walked in.
Lippert asked Gene a few questions. Then we sent the actor out to read the script. As "Yeah, but I want him. He's exactly what I'm looking for."
Just before shooting The Steel Helmet, Gene Evans (here with Richard Loo as Sergeant Tanaka) showed up at our production office. I didn't give a damn about his being an unknown. He was perfect for the part of the sergeant. Hell, he was Zack.
Gene reappeared in my office a couple of hours later.
"Mr. Fuller," he said. "Sergeant Zack only has four or five pages of lines in a ninety-page script, yet he's on camera most of the time. There's got to be other stuff to say, right?"
"No, my boy," I said. "The other stuff's called acting."
"Well, I'm not crazy about a couple of my lines that I have ..."
"Now listen, Gene," I cut him off. "I write the words. You get up there and say them. Everything will be fine once you understand that. We start in three days."
Lippert let me hire Evans. But a couple days into rehearsal, Lippert's associate producer, William Berke, tried to sandbag my star. Without telling me, Berke called Gene into his office and told him they were paying him off and letting him go because a more famous actor was coming in to replace him
. Understandably, Gene was crestfallen. When I saw him later on set, I asked him what was the matter. When he told me, I was furious.
"You stay right here," I said. "You're Zack, or there won't be any goddamned movie!"
I went up to Lippert's office and demanded to know what the hell was going on. Rumors were flying that actor Larry Parks was going to have to appear in Washington at the McCarthy hearings. The bastards would threaten to blacklist him. Then Parks's name would be on the front page of every paper in the country. The guy was probably going to be unemployable, and most likely desperate to work. Lippert's partner had the brainstorm of contacting Parks about playing my sergeant. Parks would work on the cheap and be worth a fortune in free publicity when the shit hit the fan.
I really blew my stack. Hell, I knew Larry Parks very well and felt bad about what those reactionary McCarthy bastards would eventually do to him. Larry was an idealist and a wonderful human being. He'd appeared in one of the first pictures I wrote before I left for the war, Power of the Press. It was a shame the way those sonsofbitches would torture him in Washington. But I'd already cast Gene Evans for the role, and that was that. I stormed out of the production office without closing the door.
"Let's get the hell out of here!" I yelled at Gene. "This place is history!"
We got in my car and sped away. Gene was living in some fleabag hotel. I drove over there and told him to get his stuff, that from then on he was staying at my place. He said he owed them about $zoo. I gave him the dough, he got his suitcase, and we went home. The phone started ringing off the hook. I told Lippert that I wasn't coming back until I got his promise that there'd be no more tampering with my cast. We patched things up that night. The next morning we were back on set. I had a big sign hung on the stage door: NO ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS, CO-PRODUCERS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS OR ANY PRODUCERS ADMITTED HEREIN.