A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
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Sure, offers came my way. In 1969, producer Frank McCarthy asked me to direct a biopic about General George S. Patton. I turned it down, just like I'd passed on the request by Patton's own son in the fifties. Hollywood people thought I was a meathead for turning down a big-budget studio picture. Franklin J. Schaffner ended up directing Patton (1970), a damn good movie with an outstanding performance by George C. Scott. Not for one instant have I regretted not making it. After my war experiences, I didn't have the necessary detachment to do a picture celebrating the man.
In 1968, I got an enticing offer to write and direct a movie in Spain for Emiliano Piedra, who'd made a helluva lot of dough distributing Shock Corridor. Piedra was one of the backers of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1965). Reputable and serious-minded, Emiliano would go on to produce some of Carlos Saura's best pictures. I pitched him a story that I'd been incubating, called The Eccentrics. A famous woman writer, a combination of Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw, cracks up, isolating herself on a houseboat with a band of hippie admirers. They soothe her ego with their devotion but end up destroying her. With its tense emotional scenes and stream-of-consciousness nightmares, the yarn had a ton of potential. It would be a helluva lot more personal movie for me to make than Patton.
One day Peter Bogdanovich came by the Shack with Danny Selznick, associate producer of Peter's first film, Targets. Danny's father was David O. Selznick, of Gone with the Wind fame, and his mother was Irene Mayer, Louis B.'s daughter. When I told the boys my story, Danny thought the role of my eccentric woman writer was perfect for his stepmother, Jennifer Jones. Danny's dad had divorced his mother in the late forties and married Jones (born Phyllis Isley). Jones had won an Oscar for her role in The Song of Bernadette (1943), but I think she did even better work in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946). She was looking for a comeback vehicle, so Danny set up a dinner at the Selznick villa, a swank place, to say the least. Jennifer loved the part. Over the course of more meetings, I tailored the script for her like a seamstress fitting a wedding dress to a bride.
For my male lead, I contacted the French actor Maurice Ronet, whom Christa had worked with on a Claude Chabrol movie. I knew Ronet from his terrific performance in Louis Malle's Le Feu Follet (1963). Emiliano Piedra also wanted me to use Charlie Chaplin's daughter, Geraldine, as one of the young hippies in the movie. Geraldine was already living in Spain, mother to two children with Carlos Saura.
Christa and I left for Spain in May 1968 to work on the script and scout locations. Emiliano and his partner, Octavio Lieman, put us up in the posh Torre de Madrid Hotel. We had a chauffeur-driven car day and night. I reworked the story, injecting more local color based on our day trips to Aranjuez and Toledo. As soon as I had a finalized script, I sent it to Jennifer Jones back in California, along with photos of a houseboat we'd found where Jennifer's character was supposed to be living. Jones was enthusiastic. Then the shit hit the fan. No sooner had we set a start date than a feud broke out between the two production partners. Both Emiliano and Octavio came to me for my blessing to buy the other one out. I was in a real bind, especially so close to the shoot date. I decided that the only ethical thing to do was to stick with Emiliano. I'd started the picture with him and would finish it with him, one way or the other. Emiliano was a real professional, the rare combination of shrewd businessman and movie lover.
The production was back on track. Then, one week before Jennifer Jones was supposed to arrive in Spain, we got the horrible news that she'd tried to commit suicide. She wouldn't be able to come at all. As it turned out, she'd never make another movie. The disturbing irony was that my script opened with the Jennifer Jones character contemplating suicide, having reached painful middle age, surrounded by admirers, fearing that she had nothing to say anymore through her art. Jennifer recovered, but The Eccentrics didn't. Desperately, we tried to pick up the pieces. Janet Leigh wanted to play the lead in the movie. So did Jeanne Moreau. But everything was canceled when Emiliano threw in the towel. Sure, we'd been living in splendor for five months in Spain, but now it was time to go home with another fiasco to swallow.
At least the Shack was still in good shape. Our young friend Curtis Hanson had been looking after everything for us. The only way I knew how to recover from the setback was to plunge into another yarn. I wrote a script for a children's movie called Pecos Bill and the Kid from Soho. It was lighthearted and mischievous. Pecos Bill is an adult who never really grew up. He tells tall tales about the West to a little English kid with a Cockney accent. The two of them take imaginary trips. Christa got it optioned to Sid and Marty Krofft, who owned a toy factory and produced the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf. We made some dough, but the option expired and they never made the picture.
I locked myself away in my study and kept on writing, not knowing when my next movie would get off the ground. I wrote a comedy called The Lusty Days, bringing a little laughter back into our lives. It's still one of my favorite scripts, a swashbuckling Civil War movie without a battle or a death, told like a forgotten chapter of American history.
See, a politico is hired by President Abraham Lincoln to comb the battlefields convincing soldiers to vote for "Honest Abe" in his campaign to get reelected. The politico must use any means at hand to influence the voters. He teams up with a beautiful French dancer, who shakes and shim mies her ass to get the soldiers' support. The dancer's generous derriere does more to get votes than any politician's campaign speech. Because she thinks she's getting rich, the French girl puts up with the scam. But one day she spies soldiers wiping their asses with Confederate money. That's the currency she's accepted as payment for her services. She blows her top and turns the cheating politico over to the enemy. He gets chucked into prison. Since my story was all tongue in cheek, the politico and the dancer end up together at the end of the picture.
I had a ball portraying President Lincoln as more shrewd than idealistic, and Jefferson Davis, the Confederate leader, as a stubborn, bumbling adversary. Martin Poll, producer of The Lion in Winter (1968), loved The Lusty Days. His offer to option it was ridiculously low, but since Marty not only appreciated the yarn but was such an intelligent producer, I accepted it. After all, Marty was going through a divorce and couldn't come up with a lot of dough until a studio signed on the project. We met with Henry Fonda, who was ready to play the roles of both Lincoln and Davis. Even with Fonda on board, Marty couldn't get a green light. The rights for The Lusty Days eventually reverted back to me. It was filed away on a shelf in my study, where it lies today with a helluva lot of other unproduced scripts.
Christa got a call from a well-known German critic who was in Hollywood with a film crew to shoot interviews of famous American directors. The critic and his crew came up to the Shack to interview me. They stayed on to share a meal with us. The wine, the German jokes, and the laughter were flowing. I called up John Ford and Howard Hawks to set up interviews for the German critic. The guy was so grateful that he asked me if I wanted to make a picture in Cologne, where he had good contacts in the film industry. Nobody was banging down my door, so I said, what the hell, I'd consider any proposal. Shooting a film in Germany sounded like fun. Besides, it would give Christa the opportunity to spend time with her family in Essen, only a short distance by car from Cologne. Soon after, a German producer named Joachim von Mengershausen contacted me. We negotiated a deal by which I'd shoot a movie for the big state-controlled TV production company. My film would be broadcast in Germany, but I'd retain all American rights.
When I first started out as a director, I never bothered with ownership issues. All I wanted to do was finish one picture and go on to the next. But after my problems with producers, I'd been dreaming of the chance to own the rights to one of my movies. So I jumped at the opportunity. Christa and I packed our suitcases and were off to Germany to make a cartoon caper movie called Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street.
Off the Radar
Screen
45
As soon as we'd arrived in Cologn
e, Joachim von Mengershausen screened a few films for me that were written and directed for Tatort, one of the country's most popular TV shows. My movie would be the first broadcast on that show. The program's "realism" was admired in Germany in the late sixties. Some of the stories were quite good, but others were goddamned dull. Hell, I wanted Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street to be funny and self-mocking, bringing a breath of fresh air to their stale realism. A highly cultured man, Joachim laughed when I growled about the dreariness of the Ttort series. I think he hated producing the show; he was in it purely for the dough. Von Mengershausen and I enjoyed each other and had a good time working together. I couldn't pronounce the man's name correctly, so I called him "JM."
"Sam," JM told me, "you make the film you want to make, as long as you respect our budget. I only have two specific requests."
"Shoot," I said.
"First, we want Christa to play a part in the film."
"I'm writing the female lead especially for her."
"Second, you have to find a role for Eric Caspar, the actor with whom we have a contract for the series."
"Fine. He'll be my heavy, Charlie Umlaut."
For the rest of the cast, I had a free hand. To play Mensur, the head of the syndicate, I cast Anton Diffring, a celebrated German character actor who'd made a career of portraying Nazis. Glenn Corbett, whose first picture was The Crimson Kimono, would play Sandy, my American detective. Glenn had appeared alongside the likes of James Stewart (The Mountain Road, in 1960, and Shenandoah, in 1965) and John Wayne (Chisum, in 1970, and Big fake, in 1971) since last we worked together.
My yarn was a tongue-in-cheek adventure inspired by the headlinemaking Profumo affair in England. That scandal was big news in those days, filling the papers with real-life tales of blackmailed politicians and high-class call girls. In Dead Pigeon, an international syndicate is blackmailing diplomats. One of their victims is a liberal U.S. senator who is butting heads with the Republicans for the presidency. An American private eye is hot on the track of the damaging photo of the senator and a luscious blonde with a strawberry birthmark on her left thigh. The detective is gunned down in Beethoven Street. His partner, Sandy, comes to Germany to pick up the trail of the blackmailers through their beautiful bait, Christa, the girl with the birthmark. He drugs and frames her to get himself into the syndicate. Then they start working as a team for the extortionists. Christa poses with the drugged V.I.P. while Sandy takes the photos.
Sandy and Christa fall in love. She promises to help him get the negative of that compromising shot of the senator. In her attempt, it appears that she gets herself killed by Mensur. Sandy and Mensur have a bizarre duel with antique swords and spears. Mensur dies. Christa reappears with a gun. She's not only very much alive but she wants all the negatives so she can control the syndicate herself. My finale is a shocker. Christa and Sandy genuinely love each other, but they love the buck even more. She wounds him in a street chase. Just as she's about to finish him off, he shoots her under the Beethovenstrasse sign.
In Dead Pigeon, an American detective is gunned down on Beethovenstrasse while hot on the track of a syndicate blackmailing diplomats.
The German producers put us up in a grand hotel in Cologne, while I was working on the script. I'd get up at the crack of dawn and walk around the city, observing the hustle and bustle in the streets. Whenever I'm in another country, I love my morning walks. It brings me up close to real life and working people, the glue of a nation, before I head back to the solitary endeavor of inventing dialogue and images.
At first, it was strange for me to be back in Germany, the country that, thirty years before, had been our total enemy, where my life was at risk every moment of every day, where visions of destruction and death had been hammered into my mind. I couldn't help reseeing those bleak scenes looping in my brain. I'd look at the beautiful banks of the Rhine and listen to the soothing sound of a foghorn on some faraway riverboat, the present mercifully pulling me back from the past.
I wanted Dead Pigeon to be full of high jinks and hilarity. People expected me to be doing war movies or action pictures. I'd always dreamed of doing a comedy, a film of pure entertainment. Here was my chance.
Just before the shoot began, I got a call from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of Germany's up-and-coming directors. He'd go on to make forty films in his short life, including the excellent Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). Fassbinder said that he loved my movies and wanted to meet me. A screening was set up so that I could see one of his films, a Western. It was a terrible movie, and I told him so in a teasing way. He took it warmly. He asked me if there was a role for him in my new film. I seriously considered hiring him, except the only role he could play was that of the heavy. The German bosses would never have accepted substituting Fassbinder for their contract actor. Besides, Fassbinder would corroborate their suspicions that my picture was completely frivolous and eccentric.
I regret not casting Fassbinder. The man was a visionary with real flair and honesty. In his plays and movies, Fassbinder portrayed postwar Germany trying to shake off its Nazi past while striving for material success. Rainer made Germans look at themselves. If they didn't like what they saw, they blamed the messenger. I felt a comradeship with the man. I remember Rainer telling me about the bad rap he'd got for writing a play about an unscrupulous real-estate broker and unrehabilitated Nazi, based on firsthand knowledge from his own father's slumlording days. The play's lead made a crack about Jews. Because of what his character said, critics pegged Fassbinder as an anti-Semite for years.
Nothing could have been more incorrect. Fassbinder just believed in showing people the truth. I agreed with him that it was stupid to hold young Germans responsible for their elders' mistakes. I cherish the several times Rainer and I got together during that stay. As a going-away present, he gave me a book of poems by Heinrich Heine. I was very moved by his gesture and thought we'd begun a long-term friendship. Fassbinder's premature death, in 1982, at the age of thirty-eight, cut short a prodigious career, though leaving behind a body of work that another director, if he were damn lucky, might produce in a life twice as long.
No matter where I went in the world, there were always talented young directors who sought me out and befriended me as a mentor. Like Fassbinder, they were experimenting with fresh ways of telling stories on film, breaking new ground, making thought-provoking films on every continent. We talked and talked about movies, past and future. It wasn't much, but I always tried to be encouraging. No matter what setbacks I've had in my career, I'm damn proud to have been thought of as a "director's director."
The Dead Pigeon shoot went great. Cologne is very Latin, its cathedral an essential landmark. The French poet and novelist Apollinaire loved the town and praised it in his poetry because his German mistress came from there. During Carnival, the people of Cologne, normally a dignified lot, dress up in costumes, put on masks, and go haywire. They have a song they sing that instructs revelers to have fun and adventures but cautions, "Please, please, don't ask for my name."
For the movie's opening credits, it seemed like a good idea to have the whole cast and crew dress up in wild Carnival costumes so the audience would know we weren't taking ourselves too seriously.
One of the recurring gags in the film was to underscore Sandy's naivete. The Yankee gumshoe is thrilled to be on a big case in Europe. He doesn't anticipate any danger whatsoever, so he never carries a weapon. In real life, detectives are pretty boring people. They take few risks, live a long life, and rarely do anything more adventurous than sit in a car with their thermos full of coffee, eating donuts and spying on cheating wives and husbands. I asked Glenn Corbett to play the nutty detective straight-faced. He did, except once. I had him duck into a movie house where they were screening a Western with John Wayne. Glenn couldn't control his laughter when he saw his pal Wayne speaking perfect German up on the screen. The laughter was so spontaneous, we left the sequence in.
My cameraman on Dead Pigeon was the accompli
shed Jerzy Lipman, the Polish cinematographer who'd shot Roman Polanski's brilliant Knife in the Water (1962). Jerzy accepted without a murmur every camera setup I suggested. It made me suspicious. I like to challenge people and for them to challenge me. When there is a difference of opinion or approach, any enterprise is more creative. I asked Jerzy why he was being such a yes-man. He joked that Polanski had ordered him to "say yes to everything Fuller wanted." Jerzy honestly liked my crazy camera angles and unconventional shots. To get some of those sequences, I asked Jerzy to use my trusty old 16-mm Bell & Howell. We had a lot of fun together.
My German crew was shocked when I requested that they stop referring to me as "Herr Direktor" or "Mister Fuller" and just call me "Sam." They were uneasy about using my first name. It was a sign of disrespect in Germany. That was just one of the many cultural differences. Their society seemed charmingly Old World but took authority too seriously. My demeanor and hands-on approach was entirely New World to them, a little brusque and sometimes too candid. I felt like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court.
We went to Bonn to shoot a scene in the Beethoven Museum. I hadn't been in Bonn since the Big Red One had taken the city and that unforgettable night when I'd slept under Beethoven's piano. The museum director appeared at the entrance and said that having our film crew inside the building was out of the question. The floors were too fragile. I asked if I could take a walk through the museum with Herr Direktor. Holding the man by his arm, I strolled into the place. After a few puffs on my cigar, I asked him how they'd moved the piano on such a fragile floor. The director was caught off guard, curious how I knew about the original position of Beethoven's piano. I also told him there used to be a portrait of an Indian chief above the piano. The young Beethoven was crazy about American Indians.