It wasn't until the late eighties that I finally got the chance to direct another picture, this one a TV movie called The Madonna and the Dragon. It was based on a story about a couple of news photographers covering the "People's Revolution" in the Philippines. Written by Reza Degathi and Selim Nassib, the yarn was pretty good, but I still insisted on writing my own adaptation. The picture was financed by Jean-Franccois Lepetit, the French producer behind the original Three Men and a Baby. He got me the cast I wanted, which included Jennifer Beals, who played photographer Patty Meredith, and Patrick Bauchau, as the arms dealer, Pavel. For Christa, I wrote the juicy little role of Mama, the madam of a local bordello, which she had fun doing. For myself, I created a cameo role as bureau chief of a big international news magazine.
The prospect of shooting another movie in the Philippines was exhilarating but also daunting. The country was now fraught with political unrest as well as tremendous poverty. I was able to hire the wonderful production coordinator Bernard Lorrain, who knew the Philippines and understood how to treat people respectfully. I knew he'd avoid the many pitfalls that awaited us and set the right tone for the entire crew. He did. The film opened with a map of the world, focusing on hot spots of political unrest, panning across the South China Sea to a close up of the Philippines, as Jennifer Beals's character says, "Everyone here is booby-trapped, double-crossing, or double-crossed."
We shot in Super i6 mm, my first experience with one of those smaller, hi-tech cameras. I enjoyed all the opportunities for unusual angles and original camera movements based on the new technology. Even so, I resorted to my old ways, firing a pistol to get scenes started, then shouting "Forget it!" to stop the action. Conditions were tough in Manila, but our cast was wonderful, always cooperative. I remember a long sequence we filmed of Jenny Beals as she climbed a hill of stinking garbage, cameras slung around her neck. The place was horrible, an enormous dump surrounded by shanties. A trooper all the way, Beals plodded through the muck and fuming mess as if it were nothing, while the crew held handkerchiefs over their noses to stifle the stench.
In the Philippines working on The Madonna and the Dragon
On that shoot, I was pushing eighty but just as energetic as ever. Being in production always got my adrenaline pumping. After the day's scenes were in the can, I'd go to production meetings or watch dailies until late at night. When I finally returned to our hotel, high above Manila Bay, it was like landing on another planet, far from the squalor and poverty below. The view from our room's balcony was splendid, but I couldn't get the abominable sights of hungry people out of my head.
One night when I walked in, four beautiful ladies-Jenny Beals, makeup artist Diane Duchene, my Christa, and Assumpta Serna, Patrick Bauchau's girlfriend-were gossiping frivolously over cocktails on the hotel terrace. I was tempted to join them, basking in their sensuous voices and laughter. But I couldn't. I was haunted by the nightmarish visions of hungry people. I sat down and made extensive notes for my editor back in Paris. My idea was to show footage of Imelda Marcos's enormous collection of designer shoes juxtaposed with those Filipinos scavenging through garbage for something to eat.
For Chrissakes, people didn't have to live in garbage! Hell, when a crooked leader plunders a nation's resources, citizens always end up with the short end of the stick. Whatever "ism" was leveraged to their private advantage, all those sonsofbitches had the cheek to call themselves "patriots" while fleecing their countries. I hated the Marcoses and all the rest of the horrible demagogues in this world.
Once The Madonna and the Dragon was finished, I started work on an interview book called Il Etait une Fois Samuel Fuller (Once Upon a Time There Was Samuel Fuller) for the Cahiers A Cinema people. Publishers had often approached me about doing an autobiography. I'd refused all offers, too busy dreaming up my own tales, creating characters much more interesting than me. The idea of a series of taped conversations with film critics Noel Simsolo and Jean Narboni was less cumbersome, more easygoing. Telling stories is what I like to do the best. Simsolo and Narboni did a good job shaping all the material into an oral portrait, warts and all.
In honor of the publication of Il Etait une Fois, a launch party and luncheon was organized at Fouquet's, the world-famous brasserie where French movie people hang out. I'd had my share of encounters with wheeler-dealers and bullshitters there. Discussing movie projects that never happened at Fouquet's seemed as French as fois gras. That day, a lot of good people stopped in to say hello. Some, like Agnes Varda and Roman Polanski, I knew well. Others, like Yves Montand and Fanny Ardant, were casual acquaintances. The French press had given my interview book terrific reviews, calling me a "visionary" or "lyrical poet." Still, Paris critics were politicized. Many remembered and still clung to Georges Sadoul's flawed, prehistoric judgment of me as a hard-line, anticommunist right-winger.
Montand was seated next to me at the luncheon. As a young man, he'd been fully committed to leftist causes, drawn to communism like many artists and intellectuals around the world. At one point during the meal, Yves leaned over toward me.
"Sam, you were right," he said confidentially.
"Right about what?" I said.
"Stalin," said Montand, shaking his head wistfully, almost whispering the Russian tyrant's name. I didn't respond. Evidently, my reputation as an anticommunist, seeded in the fifties by the French critical establishment trying to overanalyze Pickup on South Street and China Gate, was still embedded in French minds. It was useless to explain to the great star that my disdain for Joseph Stalin was not because of his ideology. I just didn't like dictators.
At least, Montand (born No Livi) had woken up, coming out publicly against the Soviet Union's deplorable violations of human rights. Other die-hard leftists would continue to hold on to a thread of hope for the future of communism even as the Berlin Wall was being toppled. I'd never had any hope for communism. Decades before, Will Rogers used to say that communism was "like Prohibition, a good idea that just won't work." One of my heroes, Adlai E. Stevenson, put it more succinctly back in 1951 when he said, "Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice." Let me set the record straight for all time: I'm antitotalitarian, not anticommunist.
I remember a Russian filmmaker named Andrei Smirnov I met in the eighties at the Tours Film Festival, in the Loire Valley, the French heartland. Smirnov was an accomplished filmmaker and an animated kibbitzer. We shared too many Bloody Marys one evening at the festival.' Smirnov's movie, Byelorussia Station (1970), had been an official smash in the Soviet Union, with over twenty-eight million tickets sold at the box office. Yet Smirnov never got an extra kopeck. All profits went to the state. Worse, Smirnov told me, he got no respect, having to scramble to get each subsequent movie off the ground. Apparently cameramen had more clout than directors in Russia. Since Gorbachev had legitimized glasnost, Smirnov could complain openly. But there wasn't a thing he could do about the situation.
I'm proud to be an American filmmaker. We complain about our system, but at least profits go back into making movies, not into propping up a Politburo. Believe me, I'm not condoning bloated studios or dishonest producers who rip off screenwriters by underpaying them residuals. Some even refuse to pay anything until audits force them to cough up a little of their profits. Look at guys like Julius Epstein, who fought for forty years for a piece of the royalties from Casablanca (1942) after the millions the picture generated. It's disgusting. Nevertheless, in this country we have guilds that mediate in our behalf and civil courts that can be called upon to force dishonest producers to pay up.
After that evening with Smirnov, I had a terrible nightmare. Maybe it was a reaction to the Russian director's tales of woe, or to the thoughtprovoking Amos Gitai movie, Berlin Jerusalem (1989), about the poetess Else Lasker-Schuler, which we watched that night at the festival. In my dream, I was sitting atop the Berlin Wall. A gigantic hand picked me up. A voice was singing "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall." Then a giant hand dropped me into the
emptiness. I fell and fell and fell, finally landing on Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. I woke up in a sweaty flush. I couldn't figure out what the hell the dream's message was, except to stay far away from Bloody Marys.
At the end of the eighties, a grand celebration of international news photography held in Paris stands out in my mind. Thousands of stills had been submitted as part of a competition, and I was asked to be president of a jury of artists, writers, and photographers. We were driven from gallery to gallery across Paris to look at all those incredible photos from around the world. Many were devoted to life in Latin America, powerful portraits of soldiers, street urchins, shopkeepers, artisans, and peasants, so many noble and mysterious faces.
Ever since my journalism days, images of real people in real-life situations had always had an intense effect on me. One moment's emotion, frozen in time, was very inspiring. I've tried to construct my movies around those kinds of simple compositions that bring up complicated feelings. They speak in a way that people everywhere understand. I thought of that world-famous photo from the sixties of peasant children in Vietnam running in terror from a napalm bomb. That shot did more to end the Vietnam War than all the peace conferences and protest marches that were ever organized.
As part of that big photo show, there were exhibitions by the masters Edward Steichen, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ernst Haas, Robert Capawhich I loved revisiting. Seeing the work of Capa again touched me deeply, and not only because I'd known the man, loved his fervor, and mourned his death. As corny as it sounds, Robert's stuff made me realize that, for better or worse, my past was always part of my today.
Being Serious
Without Taking
It Seriously
55
When producer Jacques Bral approached me about writing and directing a film based on the David Goodis novel Street of No Return, I got a hard-on right away. The book was the story of a crooner who's in love with a gangster's girlfriend. The crooner gets his throat cut by the gangster's goons, narrowly escaping death. With his vocal cords out of commission, the singer's career is finished. He becomes an alcoholic bum, obsessed with getting his gal back and getting even with the heavies. My script changed the crooner into a modern pop singer. The race riot from the book became my opening, guaranteed to jolt any audience to attention. See, the book's title referred to Market Street in San Francisco, where, for Chinese immigrants forced to work under horrible conditions, there was "no going home." The situation exploded frequently.' As a reporter, I'd covered a horrifying race riot in the streets of Harlem in the early thirties. Nothing on a movie screen could come close to the chaos and destruction I'd seen with my own eyes between people who attacked others just because of the color of their skin.
When I'd met David Goodis in 1946, he and I were both knocking out scripts and trying to sell them to the studios "in between novels," like a lot of aspiring writers. Neither of us were doing that well at the time. David and I would chow down together at Musso & Frank's, drink vodka, and commiserate. He was a sensitive soul, deeply affected when one of the studio goons, upon rejecting somebody's original script, would say something discouraging like, "You should go back to driving trucks." I didn't give a damn about what those meatheads said about my work, but David took it hard. He was a brilliant, shy loner searching for utopias who never quite made it as screenwriter.
David's novels brought him a measure of respect in Hollywood, beginning with Dark Passage (1947), the Delmer Daves Bogart-Bacall vehicle. David gave me a first edition of the book, which I still have and cherish.`' Bogart played a man convicted of murdering his wife who escapes from prison in order to prove his innocence. He finds that his features are too well known, so he's forced to seek some illicit backroom plastic surgery. The postoperation part of the film is shot from Bogart's bandaged point of view. The audience doesn't see his face until the Bacall character takes off his bandages. Holy cow, that was great moviemaking!
Jacques Bral's fascination with Street of No Return followed a long line of French filmmakers who'd turned David's books into films, starting with Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960), adapted from Down There.' General recognition came too late for David Goodis. Booze killed him in 1967, at age fifty.
I told Bral that I'd been pals with Goodis. In my mind, by doing that film, it was my chance to do right by an old friend and a helluva writer. I had a great time adapting David's book, almost as if he were looking over my shoulder all the while. I think he'd have been happy with my script.
The production got off on the right track. I got the cast I wanted, with the brilliant Keith Carradine as my lead, Michael, transforming himself from a slick rock 'n' roll star into a long-haired vagrant roaming the streets in search of another shot of whiskey. His love interest, Celia, was played by the sensual Valentina Vargas. The imposing Bill Duke took the role of my tough cop, Lieutenant Borel. I'd met Bill in 1984 at the Antwerp Film Festival, where he was presenting his film The Killing Floor (1984). It was a moving story about a poor black southerner who travels to Chicago to find work in the slaughterhouses, then gets embroiled in the organized-labor movement. Duke was a gracious, talented man.
Since a lot of my movie's financing came from Portugal, we shot Street of No Return near Lisbon, in the magical town of Sintra. The place had a dreamlike atmosphere, making everything look irrational, almost utopic. That suited my yarn perfectly. Sintra's town square was perfect for my "video clip" scene, which we shot late one night, with Vargas riding naked through the streets on a white stallion while Carradine's character sings a love song to her. Night lighting is always tricky. Keeping the nervous horse with the nude actress in our viewfinder was even more difficult. The scene was handled expertly by my cameraman, Pierre-William Glen, one of the top cameramen in France-and certainly the tallest, at well over six feet. I affectionately called him "Willy Boy," even though he towered over me. Glen and I worked great together, first planning out how each scene would look, then nailing it every time. A real pro, Glen had already shot movies for Francois Truffaut, Costa-Gavras, Joseph Losey, Bertrand Tavernier, and John Berry, among others. It was a pleasure to work with a cameraman who was that experienced.
Keith Garradine and Bill Duke in Street of No Return. By adapting David Goodiss yarn, I was trying to create a ballsy kind of pulp poetry. The extraordinary urban cityscape of 'Portugal gave the movie a universal look.
We finished Street of No Return on time and under budget. I supervised the editing, then turned my cut over to Jacques Bral. Instead of releasing the picture, Bral spent an entire year recutting it. Throughout that period, I asked him what the hell was going on and got only obscure answers. At one point, I was so fed up with the situation that I told him that he should've written and directed the goddamned movie himself and left me out of it. On top of the delay, members of the crew were calling me to complain about Bral. They contended they hadn't been paid. The situation was terribly embarrassing, especially since I was powerless to help. The fact was that I hadn't been paid my entire goddamned fee either.
Throughout my life, I've always paid people their money on time. Back in California, when Anita Uphoff was my hardworking, full-time assistant, she got her paycheck on schedule for eighteen years, no matter how I had to scramble to cover it. Living extravagantly but not paying people what he owed them, Jacques Bral had a very different notion of ethics. The long hiatus between the end of principal photography and the eventual release of Street of No Return drove me crazy. I didn't hold any grudges against Bral, who was basically a sweet man, but when he asked me to do another picture with him, I had three words for him: "No thanks, handsome."
Street of No Return was finally released in Paris on a hot weekend in August 199o, around the time of my birthday. The posters were unappealing, the marketing campaign, nil. What difference did it make anyway? For cryin' out loud, most Parisian moviegoers were on summer vacation! I knew the box-office results were sabotaged from the get-go, but I didn't lose my temper about it. After all, a se
venty-eight-year-old still directing feature films with a loving wife and a healthy daughter had much to be grateful for and little time or energy for anger.
The movie's premiere was organized in a Left Bank theater somewhere on Boulevard St. Germain. Christa, Samantha, and I attended. Afterward, Jacques Bral threw a surprise birthday party for me. A huge cake came floating down from the ceiling with the Big Red One insignia on it while the entire audience sang "Joyeux Anniversaire." It was very sweet. I chuckled at the razzle-dazzle, feeling like the Zero Mostel character in Mel Brooks's The Producers, celebrating a preordained flop.
The words of the great cinematographer Henri Alekan were ringing in my brain: "Be serious about the movie business without taking it too seriously." Brooding was never in my nature anyway. I'd take the box-office disaster of Street of No Return in my stride. There were still plenty more yarns in me.
Still Burning
Inside
56
Working has always been synonymous with living for me. What difference that I was pushing eighty? Inside, the fires were still burning. Not once did the thought of "retiring" cross my mind. No matter your age, filmmaking means taking chances, so you'd better enjoy living on the edge. Each movie project propels you into a strange new orbit, taking you to a unique place with distinct dilemmas. Maybe you do a picture to exorcise old demons. Then your yarn makes you start grinding your teeth all over again, tormented by images that you've concocted-say, of pitiful chickens cooped up in dark cages under deathly red lights.
Who the hell could have predicted that I'd cast thousands of French chickens as extras in my next movie project? It was a British-French TV coproduction that was part of a series based on a Patricia Highsmith short story. The producers had asked me to pick out a Highsmith tale from over a dozen that dealt with mankind tampering with ecology then suffering nature's revenge. Highsmith's "The Day of Reckoning" seemed the most fun and challenging to turn into a movie. It was about a couple involved in industrial chicken farming. The animals are kept in rows and rows of cages, then systematically slaughtered for processing into packaged meat or animal food. The husband is greedy, his wife, restless, and their disturbed teenage daughter drowns herself in a silo filled with chicken feed.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 54