According to Nicholson, Russell Crowe was never fully satisfied with the script and frequently refused to appear if changes he demanded were not made. He disliked the crucial speech ‘in this life or the next, I will have my vengeance’, telling the writer: ‘Your lines are garbage, but I’m the greatest actor in the world and I can make even garbage sound good.’ Even so, Crowe’s commitment to realism was impressive – many of the cuts and stitches in the battle sequences were real, and in filming the gladiatorial fights he broke bones in his foot and hip.
As if Crowe’s behaviour were not trying enough for the writers, Richard Harris disliked learning new lines when changes were made and would frequently just speak the dialogue he had already memorized. Oliver Reed, a famously wayward performer, accepted the role of Proximo because he liked the idea of a ‘free trip to London to see a couple of shows’; his only demand was that he never work past five in the evening. Supporting the film’s narrative, if not the film-makers themselves, Crowe and Harris became friends on set but Reed disliked Crowe and on one occasion challenged him to a fight.
Reed suffered a fatal heart attack in Malta with much of his key material still to be shot. As his role was vital, the insurance company faced a claim estimated at $25 million [$33 million] to reshoot a large proportion of the footage with a new actor. After nearly six months of shooting, Scott and his crew were already exhausted so the director decided to complete Reed’s scenes using a mix of body doubles and CGI (computer-generated imagery); the decision saved the insurers $22 million [$29 million].
The film, dedicated to Oliver Reed’s memory, recouped its costs within weeks of its release and went on to win five Oscars.
2002 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
Real-life music legend Tony Wilson tries to justify a disastrous turnout for the opening night of his new Hacienda club.
TONY
The smaller the attendance the bigger the history. There were twelve people at the Last Supper. Half a dozen at Kitty Hawk. Archimedes was on his own in the bath.
Dir: Michael Winterbottom • Scr: Frank Cottrell Boyce • Cast: Steve Coogan (Tony Wilson)
Not everyone represented in the story appreciated the way they were portrayed. Peter Hook, New Order’s bassist, described the result as ‘a film about the biggest cunt in Manchester, played by the second biggest’.
2008 TAKEN
A retired CIA agent speaks with the man who has kidnapped his daughter.
BRYAN
I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
Dir: Pierre Morel • Scr: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen • Cast: Liam Neeson (Bryan Mills)
Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan kept a strong human focus despite its unsparing depiction of combat.
Though many of her most memorable roles came later in her career, Joan Crawford’s youthful beauty remains iconic.
Woody Allen’s characteristic bemused expression remains as familiar as his sardonic humour and neurotic characters.
Zeroes
1937 LA GRANDE ILLUSION
Lieutenant Maréchal is a man of simple pleasures.
LIEUTENANT MARÉCHAL
The theatre is too deep for me. I prefer bicycling.
Dir: Jean Renoir • Scr: Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak • Cast: Jean Gabin (Lieutenant Maréchal)
1941 SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS
LeBrand and Hadrian discuss Sullivan’s previous film — a flop.
LEBRAND
It died in Pittsburgh.
HADRIAN
Like a dog!
SULLIVAN
Aw, what do they know in Pittsburgh.
HADRIAN
They know what they like.
SULLIVAN
If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh!
Dir: Preston Sturges • Scr: Preston Sturges • Cast: Robert Warwick (Mr LeBrand), Porter Hall (Mr Hadrian), Joel McCrea (John Lloyd Sullivan)
Sturges got the idea for the movie from John Garfield’s account of his travels as a hobo during the 1930s. Apparently without irony, the secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wrote a letter to the director congratulating him on his ‘dignified and decent treatment of Negroes’ in the film.
1947 THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
A lawyer is caught up in an increasingly complex plot to fake a man’s death.
MICHAEL
Some people can smell danger. Not me.
Dir: Orson Welles • Scr: Orson Welles • Based on a novel by Sherwood King • Cast: Orson Welles (Michael O’Hara)
1949 KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS
Murderer Louis Mazzini tracks a D’Ascoyne family member.
SIBELLA
He says he wants to go to Europe to expand his mind.
LOUIS
He certainly has room to do so.
Dir: Robert Hamer • Scr: Robert Hamer, John Dighton • Based on a novel by Roy Horniman • Cast: Joan Greenwood (Sibella Holland), Dennis Price (Louis Mazzini)
1951 ACE IN THE HOLE
A newsman always gets his story — even if he has to make it up.
CHUCK
I can handle big news and little news. And if there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.
Dir: Billy Wilder • Scr: Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, Walter Newman • Cast: Kirk Douglas (Chuck Tatum)
1957 A FACE IN THE CROWD
Mel disparages the brash television star he and Marcia work for.
MARCIA
Got his introduction ready?
MEL
Home town boy, not only making good, but making everybody.
MARCIA
For a mild man, you sound vicious.
MEL
Didn’t you know? All mild men are vicious. They hate themselves for being mild, and they hate the windy extroverts whose violence seems to have a strange attraction for nice girls. . . who should know better.
Dir: Elia Kazan • Scr: Budd Schulberg • Cast: Patricia Neal (Marcia Jeffries), Walter Matthau (Mel Miller)
1959 NORTH BY NORTHWEST
An innocent businessman is pursued by a gang who believe he is a government spy; the authorities try to persuade him he is not in danger.
ROGER
Now you listen to me, I’m an advertising man, not a red herring. I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don’t intend to disappoint them all by getting myself ‘slightly’ killed.
Dir: Alfred Hitchcock • Scr: Ernest Lehman • Cast: Cary Grant (Roger O. Thornhill)
The famously dapper Grant was profiled in Esquire magazine in 1960: ‘Although Grant, who is fifty-six, favours such abominations as large tie knots and claims to have originated the square-style breast-pocket handkerchief, he is so extraordinarily attractive that he looks good in practically anything. He insists upon tight armholes in his suit jackets [and] finds the most comfortable of all underwear to be women’s nylon panties.’
THE MAN WHO SNEEZED IN LINCOLN’S NOSE
The creation of North by Northwest (1959) is a fine example of the collaboration between writer and director on a wholly original screenplay. Alfred Hitchcock was planning to adapt Hammond Innes’s novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare and his composer friend Bernard Hermann suggested he hire Ernest Lehman (Sabrina, Sweet Smell of Success, West Side Story) to write it. After several weeks, Lehman claimed he couldn’t find a way to make the book play on screen, but the two men enjoyed each other’s company so much they resolved to put their energies into a different project. When Hermann said he wanted to write ‘the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock picture
s’, the director confessed he had always wanted to shoot a chase on Mount Rushmore, a vast carving in the Black Hills of South Dakota featuring the faces of four American presidents.
The way they developed the plot was almost the exact opposite of the traditional process for a narrative work. Starting only with this brief visual sequence, they devised several other scenarios as building blocks: a murder at the United Nations, a dead body in a car on an automobile production line, a tornado and a grand finale in Alaska. Hitchcock suggested a narrative focusing on a protagonist mistaken for a spy by a criminal gang and the result did indeed deliver one of the director’s most perfect creations: Lehman was nominated for an Oscar, and the film remains as popular with critics as it was with the public.
Not all the initial scenarios made it into the final draft: Alaska was abandoned in favour of the Mount Rushmore chase, and Hitchcock was eventually persuaded that a scene where Thornhill hid in one of Lincoln’s nostrils only to suffer a sneezing fit was undignified. The sequence where Thornhill finds himself alone on the vast Indiana plains pursued by a tornado was rejected by Lehman on the basis that the cyclone is certainly dangerous but could hardly be blamed on the criminals. Hitchcock capitulated, and the famous biplane sequence (‘That’s funny, that plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops’) was devised.
The result is seamlessly crafted and contains many outstanding cinematic moments; screenwriter William Goldman suggests the ending is one of the greatest ever examples of filmic storytelling. In his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), he writes:
Near the conclusion of North by Northwest, Cary Grant finds himself in something of a pickle.
His true love, Eva Marie Saint, is dangling helplessly in space on the face of Mount Rushmore. If she falls, splat. The reason she has not fallen is that Grant is holding her with one hand while with the other he grabs a rock ledge. Not easy. Watching all this is Martin Landau, the sub-villain, who stands a few feet away, holding the precious statuette that contains valuable microfilm inside, said microfilm being of great danger to America should it fall into enemy hands. Grant, desperate, looks up at Landau and asks for help.
Landau walks over to Grant and, instead of bending down and aiding him, puts his foot on Grant’s fingers and begins pressing down. He grinds his shoe down as hard as he can.
That’s the pickle.
Now, between that moment and the end of this superb Ernest Lehman–Alfred Hitchcock collaboration, the following occurs.
(a) Landau is made to cease and desist.
(b) Grant saves himself.
(c) Grant also saves Eva Marie Saint.
(d) The two of them get married.
(e) The microfilm is saved for America.
(f) James Mason, the chief villain, is captured and handed over to the authorities.
(g) Grant and Saint take a train ride back east.
That’s a lot of narrative to be successfully tied up. And I would like you to guess how long it takes in terms of screentime for it to be accomplished. Got your guess? Here’s the answer — forty-three seconds.
Here’s how they do it, from the moment where Landau is crunching Grant’s hand. The camera’s in close-up on the shoe and the fingers. A shot rings out. The shoe begins to slide away from the fingers. Next, a cut of the statuette falling safely to the ground and cracking, revealing the microfilm inside. Now Landau falls to his death off Mount Rushmore. Now another part of Mount Rushmore, where Leo G. Carroll, a good guy, thanks a police officer who is holding a rifle. Behind Carroll is Mason, flanked by more officers. Now back to Grant and Eva Marie, him saying you can do it, her saying I can’t, back and forth, quick cuts between them, and then a really brilliant shot of Grant pulling her up, only now he’s not on Mount Rushmore, he’s in the upper berth of a train, and he brings her to him, calls her ‘Mrs Thornhill’ — Thornhill being his last name, so we know they’re married now — and as they embrace, a final shot of the train roaring into a tunnel as ‘The End’ flashes on the screen.
I don’t know a more adroit ending to a film.
1960 THE APARTMENT
Mild-mannered Baxter has a keen eye for detail.
C. C. BAXTER
On November 1st, 1959, the population of New York City was 8,042,783. If you laid all these people end to end, figuring an average height of five feet six and a half inches, they would reach from Times Square to the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. I know facts like this because I work for an insurance company — Consolidated Life of New York. We’re one of the top five companies in the country. Our home office has 31,259 employees, which is more than the entire population of uhh. . . Natchez, Mississippi. I work on the 19th floor. Ordinary Policy Department, Premium Accounting Division, Section W, desk number 861.
Dir: Billy Wilder • Scr: Billy Wilder, I. A. L. Diamond • Cast: Jack Lemmon (C.C. ‘Bud’ Baxter)
1965 THE SOUND OF MUSIC
As Germany threatens to annex Austria, the cowardly Max reluctantly agrees to help the von Trapp family escape.
MAX
I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I’m making.
CAPTAIN VON TRAPP
You have no choice.
MAX
I know. . . That’s why I’m making it.
Dir: Robert Wise • Scr: Ernest Lehman • Cast: Richard Haydn (Max Detweiler), Christopher Plummer (Captain Von Trapp)
Christopher Plummer hated his role in the hugely successful film, referring to it in subsequent interviews as ‘The Sound of Mucus’. He also said of Julie Andrews (a rising star after the release of Mary Poppins the previous year) that ‘working with her is like being hit over the head by a Valentine’s Day card’.
1965 THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD
British secret agent Leamas finds himself disgusted by the hypocrisy of his trade.
LEAMAS
What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not! They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?
Dir: Martin Ritt • Scr: Paul Dehn, Guy Trosper • Based on a novel by John le Carré • Cast: Richard Burton (Alec Leamas)
1968 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
A brutal gunslinger puts a member of his gang in his place.
FRANK
How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man can’t even trust his own pants.
Dir: Sergio Leone • Scr: Sergio Leone, Sergio Donati • Cast: Henry Fonda (Frank)
1968 THE PRODUCERS
A desperate producer tries to impress his new partner.
BIALYSTOCK
You know who I used to be?
Dir: Mel Brooks • Scr: Mel Brooks • Cast: Zero Mostel (Max Bialystock)
A PRODUCER’S HEART
While directors turn their attention to the physical creation of a film, producers are more interested in the waiting public. Without tickets sold there can be no movie at all – or, to be more accurate, no next movie. For an artist, acclaim is success. For a financier, success is success.
Once a producer has decided what kind of story he wants to see and hired a team to deliver it, he has to imagine an audience and take an educated guess as to how many of them will actually make the journey to the cinema. His job title may sound glamorous but its nature is complex: from raising finance to securing distribution, shepherding wayward talent and finessing promises into contracts, every step of the journey is fraught. As the old saying goes, ‘you’re not making a movie until the camera is rolling’. Where many of the cast and crew breathe a sigh of relief that the process is finally under way and they now have a chance to do what they love best, a producer begins to sweat: this is the point where the money is going out – and it may never come back in.
With thi
s level of risk as well as the huge investment of time involved, it is no wonder that financiers keep their eye on the bottom line while they wield a firm hand in the running of the show. But with so many egos under their command, we should not be surprised either that rivalries appear:
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a firefly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.
Fred Allen
Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliché.
Ben Hecht
If producers suffer such familiar complaints, it is largely because those who may have reason to gripe about them – the actors, writers and directors – have easy access to the press. The challenges of getting a project off the ground can seem a thankless task, although when a project is a hit gratitude is rarely needed; prizes and profit points are perfectly sufficient. When the golden envelopes are opened and Variety publishes the weekly takings, producers leap into the limelight claiming, often rightly, that the movie was their personal dream and that it could never have seen the light of day without their persistence.
If no producer, no movie.
Dino De Laurentiis
The Oscar for Best Picture is always awarded to the producer, even though in the eyes of the public the film’s kudos is associated with the director; in 1972 Albert Ruddy took home a statuette for The Godfather while Francis Ford Coppola lost out to Bob Fosse with Cabaret. After that, Coppola made sure he also took a producer’s role on The Godfather: Part II.
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