A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 28
soon as Gene was gone, Lippert said, "Sammy, this guy's an unknown."
Exteriors for The Steel Helmet were shot in Griffith Park. My cameraman, Ernest Miller, made it look wild and rugged. In the movie's first scene, Zack's life is saved by Short Round, a Korean war orphan. Short Round's faith and devotion to Zack are crucial to the story. I established the sergeant's rambunctious, unlovable character right away in his first exchange with the boy.
SERGEANT ZACK
Quit following me.
SHORT ROUND
Cachi cachida. That means we must travel together.
SERGEANT ZACK
You go cachi cachi by yourself.
SHORT ROUND
But your heart is in my hands.
SERGEANT ZACK
My what is where?
SHORT ROUND
Buddha say when you save a friend his heart is in your hands.
SERGEANT ZACK
Look, you've done your good deed for the day. Now blow! I don't like kids around me.
SHORT ROUND
But I good scout.
SERGEANT ZACK
Don't need one.
William Chun in costume check for his role as Short Round. He was a good kid.
SHORT ROUND
I know where river is.
SERGEANT ZACK
So do I.
SHORT ROUND
But you said ...
SERGEANT ZACK
Beat it!
Zack relents and lets the boy stick with him. They meet up with a lackluster bunch of dogfaces on patrol. Instead of a happy-go-lucky, meltingpot squad, these soldiers are angry and frightened. They capture a wounded North Korean officer, and Corporal Thompson, the black medic, patches him up. As a black man, Thompson has suffered at home. Now the North Korean forces him to consider his predicament:
POW
I just don't understand you. You can't eat with them, unless there's a war. Isn't it so?
CORPORAL THOMPSON (Dressing POW's wound)
That's right.
POW
You pay for a ticket. But you even have to sit in the back of a public bus. Isn't that so?
CORPORAL THOMPSON
That's right. A hundred years ago, I couldn't even ride a bus. At least now I can sit in the back. Maybe in fifty years, sit in the middle. Someday, even up front. There are some things you just can't rush, buster.
POW
You're a stupid man.
CORPORAL THOMPSON
You're the stupid joe. Why don't you get wise, buster?
(POW spits. Thompson gets even by ripping some tape away from POW's wound)
You're ruining my dressing.
That kind of dialogue was a slap in people's face. Yet why back away from confronting racism in America? After all, it wasn't just blacks who suffered injustices. I wanted to show that other minorities were abused, too. Long before the Nisei internments of Japanese Americans was general knowledge, I had my characters in The Steel Helmet talking about it.
The picture tries to convey the violence through the eyes of a soldier on the front line, not from the safe vantage point of the generals' map room. In my climactic scene, Zack rises silently in a fog of smoke and confusion after the enemy attack, stunned beyond words. We shot the scene to look like an excruciating nightmare, harking back to the horrible images I'd never forget from Omaha Beach.
All hell broke loose as soon as The Steel Helmet was released. Despite, or maybe because of, the controversy, the film did great business. One reporter, Victor Reisel, called me pro-communist and anti-American. One of the country's most reactionary newspapermen, Westford Pedravy, wrote that I was secretly financed by the Reds and should be investigated by the Pentagon. My mother telephoned to congratulate me about all the great publicity for the picture.
"Hello, comrade!" laughed Rebecca.
With my military record, how could those conservative bastards attack my integrity? For Chrissakes, I'd fought a war for freedom of expression and real democracy. Nevertheless, I heard that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI started an investigation. Just as irrationally, the lefties loved my movie for their own agenda. The Daily Worker wrote, "This shows what beasts American soldiers are." The reviewer called me a "reactionary" for making a "beast" the hero of the movie. Hedda Hopper, grand dame of patriots and conservatives, put in her two cents: "I can't see anything in The Steel Helmet that the Commies can use to their benefit, except smearing the picture, by implication, with their support. It's strongly anti-red."
I didn't give a good goddamn whether lefties or righties liked the picture. I didn't make The Steel Helmet to please any constituency. At its origin, a work of art is apolitical. Popular taste and history can transform it. So what if Hoover and McCarthy didn't like my film? Our country was supposed to be founded upon free speech, not only allowing for controversy, but fostering it. My goal was to show the organized insanity of war. The movie had touched some raw nerves. That wasn't my purpose but, hell, it was a free country, wasn't it?
What really made reactionaries go nuts was my scene in which Zack gets so mad that he kills the POW with a machine gun in cold blood. The Pentagon asked me to come to Washington to be questioned about the movie. So I went. It turned out to be more like an inquisition. About twenty officers sat around a big conference table. There was a screen and a projector. They'd just watched The Steel Helmet before I walked in.
"Your film looks like communist indoctrination, Fuller," said one general.
"You're joking!" I said.
"Hardly," said another general. "The black medic. His name is Thompson, isn't it?"
"Yes, Thompson," I said.
"Why did you call him Thompson?" asked a colonel.
"I don't know," I answered. "I've always liked the name because of my friend, Turkey Thompson, the heavyweight fighter. It's a good, strong name for the character. I liked it."
"It sounded good for the character?" said another general. "Thompson," explained the colonel, "is a code name for clandestine communist workers in the United States."
My mouth dropped open. I didn't know a damn thing about code names for communists.
"It's pure coincidence," I said.
"Pure coincidence, Fuller?" said another officer.
On location in Griffith Park for The Steel Helmet, shooting with direct sound and natural light. The tight budget and ten-day schedule made us get it right the first time and move on to the next scene.
"You know Turkey Thompson?" I said.
They all nodded, recognizing Turkey's name, for he was a helluva boxer in those days.
"Call my house," I said. "Turkey is staying there while I'm away. He's looking after things for me. Ask him about me using his name for a character in The Steel Helmet."
The colonel shifted gears.
"You show the squad hiding out in a Buddhist temple, Fuller. I've been to Korea. There are no Buddhist temples there."
I pulled out of my file a map of Korea that I'd gotten from the Korean consulate when I was writing the script.
"Look!" I said, pointing at the map. "Here's the site of an ancient Buddhist temple."
"Fuller, what we're most concerned about is your showing an American soldier shooting a prisoner of war. Why did you do it?"
"Because it happens!" I said. "I fought a war. Things like that happen! And you know it!"
"Did a prisoner of war ever get shot?" I asked him.
"Of course they did," said General Taylor.
I thanked him and hung up. We all knew the Geneva Convention rules. But war's irrational. Order breaks down. A guy who's been trying to kill you sticks his hands in the air and says that now he's your prisoner. Sometimes it doesn't fly, because he just shot your buddy. You kill him. It's shameful. It's against the convention. But it happens, damn it. I was only reporting it with a camera.
"I answered every one of your goddamned questions!" I said to them as I got up to go. "If you have any more, you call me Mister Fuller! I'm a civilian now! And hap
py to be one!"
Soldiers were trained to fight the fascists during the war. Now the bigoted winds of McCarthyism were blowing across democratic America, spreading the seeds of another kind of fascism. The only way to fight those people here at home was to expose their stupid, reactionary ideas. I was proud to poke holes in their fundamentalist bullshit.
Maybe The Steel Helmet cast a stone at the facade of intolerance and simple-mindedness. Maybe it didn't. In any case, the picture was an unexpected box-office smash. Unbelievably, my share of the profits was a couple million bucks after taxes. That gave me a little financial independence. One of the first things I did with my dough was buy that house in the San Fernando Valley that I'd been renting for my mother.
Now the offers came streaming in from the majors. I met with all the studio heads, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn. They were interested in me for no other reason than the big profits they dreamed about making on small-budget pictures. The last man I saw was the head of Twentieth Century Fox, Darryl Francis Zanuck. He was a writer by background. As a young man, Zanuck had turned out scores of stories and scripts for studio pictures, usually under the pseudonym of Melville Crossman or Gregory Rogers. He was the uncredited writer of Little Caesar (1930), one of the classic gangster pictures of all time. The Rin Tin Tin pictures were Zanuck's, too. When I first met him, Darryl was already a mogul, the only mogul who didn't talk about money.
"What story do you want to make next, Sammy?" he asked me. Holy smoke, that was the question I was waiting to hear! More than any other studio head, Darryl loved stories. That made me love the guy from the first moment I met him. He'd get excited hearing about the yarn for your next picture. His big office had animal heads all over the place, moose, lions, bears, a whole goddamned menagerie gazing down upon you. Darryl would act out scenes with me. He'd even get on the floor when there was a body in the script. If he said "Okay, let's do it," your movie was in production. My deal with Darryl was for six pictures. Half a year I'd work for Fox, the other half I could do anything I wanted. A new period of creativity and accomplishment was dawning. I knew I'd have to fight to keep making hard-hitting movies on my own terms, rejecting all the labels people wanted to stick on me, except the only one that really mattered: "WriterDirector."
Outside a New York movie theater that was playing The Steel Helmet. The line of patrons was mostly men, many veterans, no doubt, who were hooked on the distributor's tag line: "The roughest, toughest bunch of guys who ever called themselves US. Infantry!"
Pursuit of
Happiness
26
The Steel Helmet paid off big. Those were the days when an independent producer guaranteed you a piece of the action and you actually got it. When I worked for Zanuck, each picture at Fox generated paychecks for screenwriting and directing. All the dough never meant very much to me. Certainly, I never lusted after the loot. All I ever wanted was to write my stories and direct them. Money meant freedom to do just that. I didn't need much to make me happy other than my Royal, plenty of ribbons, cigars, and vodka. For someone like me, coming from a modest background, having money in the bank felt good, especially with a wife with sophisticated tastes.
I bought a beautiful house on twenty acres of land in Coldwater Canyon, above Beverly Hills, for Martha and myself. Designed by Julia Morgan, architect of William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon, the house had been originally built for one of Hearst's sons. There were a helluva lot of bathrooms in the place. Each one had a unique design of handpainted tiles. I hired a lovely Chinese couple to cook and clean for us and a full-time gardener for the grounds. It was a swell lifestyle and, for a while, glossed over our incompatibility.
It came time to do my first picture for Zanuck. We were sitting in his big office, smoking cigars. The stuffed animals were looking down on us as we tried to figure out what my movie was going to be about. Darryl was still raving about The Steel Helmet.
"What a movie!" he said. "No star. Not even a girl in the cast. Those gritty shots, so real, almost surrealistic. Sammy, your picture is being screened at all the studios. They'll copy it one way or another."
"Let 'em try," I said.
"So, what's next?" asked Darryl.
"A story about Russia," I said, taking a puff on my cigar. "A story that's never been made."
Darryl Zanuck presenting me with a commemorative admiral's cap on the set of Hell and High Water. Zanuck was one of the greatest movie producers of Hollywood, with groundbreaking films like Public Enemy (1931), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Gentleman's Agreement (1947)• and The Iron Curtain (1948) among his many, many credits. I loved the guy.
Zanuck chuckled. "There isn't any story that's never been made, Sammy," he said.
"Oh yeah?" I said. "Wanna bet on it?"
"Okay," said Zanuck without hesitation. "How much?"
"One hundred cigars," I said. "I'll win the bet with just two words!"
"Then let's bet two hundred cigars on it," said Zanuck.
Darryl was pretty sure of himself. Why shouldn't he be? He was one of the most prolific producers in town.
All right," I said, feeling pretty cocky. "If I win, I want my brand of cigars, not those horrible cigars you smoke, without nicotine."
"Okay, Sammy," he laughed. "Shoot."
"Red Square," I said, taking a contented mouthful of smoke.
The film, I explained, would be a slice of life about an ordinary Russian, a guard at Lenin's tomb. I'd imagined a love story between the guard and his girlfriend, with all the necessary emotional conflict. I'd show American audiences how Russians really lived in those days. They must have had the same concerns as Americans about job pay, raises, medical insurance, pen sions. How did their apartments look? How did their trains run? What made them laugh? What made them cry? I'd go to Moscow with a small crew, hole up in a hotel, and write my script over there as we shot background footage. Since my story was apolitical, I didn't see anything that the Russians would object to.
"Impossible!" Darryl said, waving his hands in the air. "In these times, shoot a film in Russia? Or any Eastern Bloc country? Why, the Pentagon wouldn't allow it."
"With your clout in Washington?"
"Sammy, don't be so naive. There's a war going on, a cold war. Fox produced Fred Zinneman's film with Monty Clift, The Search, and the whole thing had to be shot here on the back lot, not in Germany."1
Nevertheless, I won our bet and got my cigars. Never before had any American movie been made like Red Square. There still hasn't been one like it. I was disappointed we couldn't do it, but I immediately pitched Darryl another original story.
"What about a movie about the birth of a newspaper?"
"Bad timing," said Zanuck. "Your buddy Richard Brooks is about to make Deadline-USA for us."
Brooks and I had both come out of the newspaper business. He'd been writing scripts since the forties, notably Key Largo (1948), John Huston's Bogart-Bacall vehicle. Richard got his first shot at directing with Crisis (1950). The two of us raised hell wherever we went in Hollywood, enfants terribles before anybody ever heard of the "New Wave." To set the record straight about the rumor going round that we wanted to start a revolution, we took out a full page ad in Variety that said: "We love everybody. Sincerely, Richard Brooks and Samuel Fuller."
Lightheartedness was welcome in Hollywood in those days. The artistic climate was appalling. Studios were factories, grinding out "safe" movies like bland sausages, anxious to please right-wing review boards scrutinizing all material for suspicious ideas. In 1950, Congress had passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which established a permanent subversive activities control board. President Truman vetoed the bill on the grounds that it disregarded "ideals which are the fundamental basis of our free society." Unfortunately, Congress overrode Truman's veto. The McCarran Act led straight to Hollywood's front door, because the infamous Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy of Wisconsin exploited it to "uncover" communist influence in the arts.
Brooks and I
tried poking holes in the black clouds of doubt and anxiety. Richard once came on the set of I Shot Jesse James and filmed some "home" movies. Later he threw a party for me at his place and screened his footage for all the guests. We were watching a scene of Jesse talking to Robert Ford, and out of nowhere flashed a couple of seconds of a girl's bare ass. It was hilarious. People giggled, completely thrown off balance.
Richard Brooks was a close friend, a helluva guy, intelligent, witty, and decent. In Hollywood, Richard and I were known as rebels. The truth was we just wanted to make movies our way.
In between the practical jokes, we had our serious moments. Richard helped me throw a party at my big place in 1952 for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Everybody who was anybody in Hollywood, no matter their politics, came to my shindig. Stevenson's speech that night was powerful, yet soft-spoken and idealistic. His book, A Call to Greatness, was one of the most inspiring of the fifties. I thought Stevenson would have made a helluva president.
What title was more appropriate than Park Row for my movie about the spirit and passion of my early days as a reporter? The film would be set on that great street that I first discovered as a newsboy in the twenties. My characters were scrappy reporters and crusading editors fighting for the truth as they scrambled to publish the first popular newspapers. The yarn would remind people of the very foundations of our country, those of tolerance and freedom of speech, that McCarthy and his supporters were assaulting. Richard Brooks's Deadline-USA dealt with the newspaper business too, but it was contemporary, the story centered on a tough editor in chief named Hutcheson, played by Bogart, trying to save his paper with a last-ditch crusade.
"I've read Richard's script," I said to Zanuck. "It's about the death of a modern-day newspaper. Mine is set in the nineteenth century, when Pulitzer was establishing the standards for all newspapers."
Zanuck listened to me thoughtfully. But he wasn't budging on Park Row. For him, the timing was wrong.
"Here's what we do now, Sam. A small group of soldiers in Korea. One set...