Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  “I feel awkward taking this job,” said cinematographer Billy Williams. Schlesinger asked him to be more explicit. “Well, it’s the subject,” he said.

  “Look, it’s a question of how it’s handled,” replied Schlesinger.

  Unlike his contempt for the Midnight Cowboy crew, Schlesinger handpicked the British technicians on Sunday Bloody Sunday. He deeply admired and cared about them; he considered them a family. But the Kiss strained those relationships. He wanted it filmed as he would handle any heterosexual kiss—in close-up—and that’s just how he planned to shoot it.

  After Schlesinger rejected Hiram Keller to play Bob, he went with newcomer Murray Head, whom he’d seen in the London production of Hair. Having delved into hippie pansexuality on stage, Head didn’t blink at kissing another man for his first major screen role. “The Kiss!” he exclaimed. “To me it was an infinitely simple gesture, which caused eruptions right, left, and center.”

  On the day of the Kiss, Head was surprised that people treated him with such deference. Grips, costumers, and script girls kept coming up to him, saying, “It’s the scene!”

  He glanced at his script. “Well, I can’t find the dialogue, what scene?” he asked.

  “Ah, you know, the Kiss!”

  “Oh yeah, yeah it is.”

  He looked around. Instead of the usual two photographers, there were five men with cameras ready to document the big moment.

  “There was a tenseness on the set,” Head recalled. “Everybody getting jumpy, and I started to pick up the vibes of uneasiness. I thought, sod them! This is ridiculous to get into this pitch over such a simple gesture of affection.”

  Schlesinger asked for numerous takes of the Kiss. Finally, the camera operator turned around to ask, “John, is this really necessary?”

  “Yes, of course it is!” he snapped.

  The tension on the set carried over to the screening room, where the cast and crew viewed rushes of the Kiss. People started coughing and sputtering, lighting up cigarettes, crossing and uncrossing legs. “The more it went on, the more they were embarrassed. I started to worry about it,” said Head. And then he had an epiphany amid all the cigarette smoke and bent limbs. “It let the world in for me because it helped me to get myself into perspective. I thought, well, at last as a young person I don’t find any trouble accepting this kiss at all. It consolidated my own feelings and the feelings that I knew people my age would have about the scene and the film, as opposed to the older generation that was sitting all around me in the viewing room.”

  In the weeks that followed, members of the crew sought out the young actor to have tête-à-têtes with him about the film’s subject matter. They somehow always got around to asking him, “Of course, you being an actor, I suppose . . . I mean, I don’t know, but it’s the sort of thing that would worry me. I mean, when you kissed Peter Finch, didn’t you feel, well . . . disgusted?”

  Head said no. “Well, you know, I really can’t help you. I can see it’s bugged you, but no, it didn’t feel any different from anything else I have to do in the film. I don’t feel any problem about it.”

  For his part, Finch always took the high road when people asked him about the Kiss. “I did it for England,” he said. Or when he had exhausted that retort, he simply said, “I just thought of the Queen Mother.”

  Schlesinger filmed the Kiss around the time of the Academy Awards. Two weeks before the ceremony, UA’s David Picker phoned to tell him, “You’re the hot dark horse. We think you have a good chance. We’ll pay for shutting down production for three days, and you and Michael come to the Academy Awards.”

  Schlesinger and Childers talked about it. Childers wanted to make the trip. “We had a huge argument. I thought Midnight Cowboy would get one or two awards,” he said.

  But Schlesinger decided to stay in England, explaining that it would be hard on the crew, “To ask them to work overtime to catch up with the days I’d missed—that would be impossible. I couldn’t go for that reason.”

  The final moments of the four-hour Oscars telecast came at about five o’clock in the morning, London time. Schlesinger and Childers were in bed when they received a phone call from Judy Smith, who’d been one of the director’s assistants on Midnight Cowboy. Backstage at the Oscar telecast, where she worked as production manager, Smith held up the phone receiver so Schlesinger could hear what was being said onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. He heard the “Everybody’s Talkin’ ” theme song from Midnight Cowboy. Waldo Salt had just won for best adapted screenplay. Then Myrna Loy took the stage to announce the best director winner. “John Schlesinger, Midnight Cowboy.”

  “We screamed in our pajamas!” said Childers. Then Elizabeth Taylor appeared onstage to read the titles of the five movies nominated for best picture, her voice noticeably tense, perhaps reflecting her resentment that John Wayne, for his performance in True Grit, had beat out her husband, Richard Burton, for Anne of the Thousand Days. She read the nominated titles: Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Hello, Dolly!, Midnight Cowboy, and Z.

  “And again, we heard the Midnight Cowboy theme song,” said Childers.

  The two men got to Bray Studios at 7 A.M. to find dozens of waiting reporters and photographers. United Artists even splurged on a champagne lunch. “Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay—all of John’s stars came to the set to congratulate him,” said Childers.

  When he’d finished production, Schlesinger took great satisfaction in screening a rough cut of his film for the camera boys. They brought their wives, and basically were happy with what they saw onscreen. It delighted Schlesinger when the camera operator—who had said of the Kiss, “Is this really necessary?”—told him, “Oh, it’s a wonderful film, and I see what you were getting at, and it’s not in the least offensive.”

  But the men with the cameras were not the United Artists executives. If Schlesinger had qualms about showing them Midnight Cowboy, he harbored fewer fears about Sunday Bloody Sunday. He was, after all, a different director now. An Academy Award–winning director.

  So much for the Oscar.

  Schlesinger called it one of the more difficult screenings of his career. “We’d filled the little theater with secretaries and assistants and all that kind of thing, because I didn’t want it just to be the suits who were watching the movie. And there was a lot of lighting up of cigarettes and wobbling of knee joints, and they were obviously embarrassed. At the end, the reaction was not good,” he said.

  The head of publicity, who’d loved Midnight Cowboy, told him, “Well, you’ve given us a hard one, John.”

  The director was accustomed to UA being a friendly place. The doors to the executive offices were always open, with people inviting him to come in and chat, especially after Midnight Cowboy turned into an unexpected box-office hit and then won the Oscar.

  “Well, on this occasion, after the screening, a lot of doors were closed,” Schlesinger noted. “I should have expected it. They must have known, when they saw it, that they were in the presence of quite a bold film that dared to tread where nobody really had gone in such an overt fashion.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Summer 1970, Retreat

  Regarding “overt fashion,” John Schlesinger could have been talking about Myra Breckinridge, if not for the fact that he hadn’t seen Myra Breckinridge.

  Michael Sarne continued to edit his sex-change opus right up to premiere night, June 24. It was a night that only poured salt in Raquel Welch’s wounded ego. With two thousand fans as her witness, Raquel endured being upstaged by a woman fifty years her senior. No sooner did Welch exit her limousine and begin to walk the red carpet into New York’s Criterion Theatre than “two men grabbed me by the arms and pushed me through a side door,” the actress claimed. What she didn’t know is that Mae West had demanded a solo entrance, as well as the evening’s last entrance, and her limo had been circling midtown Manhattan for at least an hour to guarantee her that s
pectacular bow.

  At the opening-night party, held at a club appropriately called Iperbole, Mart Crowley saw West sitting alone, except for the company of two musclemen bodyguards. He couldn’t miss her, decked out in off-white silk gabardine, white marabou stole and diamonds, the only dollop of color being the many rubies choking her neck. Crowley’s The Boys in the Band movie had recently opened to pickets in San Francisco, where the Mattachine Society deemed it offensive to homosexuals. The young gay activists who denounced the movie, a faithful adaptation of the stage play, which was still playing Off Broadway, were part of the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” generation, and they forgot for a moment that most of the tormented, repressed characters whom they now objected to in The Boys in the Band were over thirty.

  Crowley introduced himself to the screen legend. “I wrote The Boys in the Band,” he told her.

  Mae West barely blinked. “I wrote that play forty years ago,” she replied. “It was called Drag.”

  Despite being upstaged at the premiere, Raquel Welch played the good girl. The very next afternoon she went on The Dick Cavett Show to christen the movie a “head-on smash” even before a full day of movie tickets had been bought.

  Mae was a little less diplomatic. When a reporter asked about her two musical numbers in the film, she blamed the “inexperience of the director” for the fact that her singing was interrupted by cutaway shots of Raquel. The seventy-seven-year-old star did, however, know how to stroke her fan base. “The gay boys? It looks like they’re taking over,” she said, referring to New York City’s first gay pride parade and festivities, of which the Myra Breckinridge opening was an unofficial event.

  Back in Hollywood, Myra Breckinridge was the worst kind of embarrassment for Twentieth Century Fox. It wasn’t only god-awful. It was a god-awful movie that lost money. Russ Meyer’s equally god-awful Beyond the Valley of the Dolls also opened that June, but took in $10 million on its $2 million budget.

  Still, the one-two punch of Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls signaled the end for Richard Zanuck and David Brown at Fox. To hasten their demise, the prodigal father, Darryl F. Zanuck, staged a coup in one of the studio’s bigger boardrooms, where he brought up another questionable yet-to-be-filmed acquisition that had been green-lit for production by his son and partner in crime.

  Brown recalled the scene: “Portnoy’s Complaint was derailed in the boardroom when Darryl F. Zanuck, in his quest for damning evidence of our cupidity, extracted every prurient word from the script and intoned them to his God-fearing, aging fellow board members.”

  The elder Zanuck relished the sound of the script’s many dirty epithets: “Motherfucker!” “Cocksucker!” “Shithead!” “Blowjob!”

  He even went so far as to count the number of times some of these words appeared in the novel: “cock,” sixteen times; “shit,” twenty-nine times; “tits,” thirteen times. “Shove it in me, big one,” Zanuck had to admit, appeared only once. No matter. It was more filth than the Fox bluenoses could handle, especially after the disgrace of Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

  Brown also reported, “We expected right there and then a hand on our shoulder and a voice to say, ‘You’re fired!’ ”

  Both men eventually heard that voice in 1970, if not felt a hand, at which time they took Philip Roth’s novel to Warner Bros., where it indeed became a worthy addition to their now-complete X-rated triptych.

  PERHAPS IF THE MOVIE versions of Myra Breckinridge, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Portnoy’s Complaint had won a few Oscars, the commercial environment in Hollywood might have been more fertile for Terry Southern’s long-awaited novel Blue Movie, inspired by the writer’s 1962 Esquire interview with Stanley Kubrick. After that chat, the two men developed an on-again, off-again working relationship that included their cowriting the Dr. Strangelove screenplay and their not working on a couple of projects dear to Southern’s heart. Southern had optioned Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange about a gang of young “droogs” who terrorize a futuristic London. He’d even written a screenplay, which Kubrick wasn’t interested in filming.

  “Nobody can understand that language,” Kubrick told Southern, referring to the invented “nadsat” lingo that Burgess created for his violent antihero Alex, who says things like “droogs,” “groodies,” and “devotchkas” when, for example, he means “mates,” “breasts,” and “pretty girls.” There was also the little problem of the British film censors, who dismissed Southern’s adaptation—or anybody’s adaptation, for that matter—with the following condemnation of the Burgess novel: “There’s no point in reading this script because it involves youthful defiance of authority and we’re not doing that.”

  Then there was Southern’s work-in-progress novel Blue Movie. Kubrick was more predisposed to it—or at least he liked one chapter of the novel, which prompted him to write back to Southern, calling it “the definitive blowjob.”

  Maybe that’s why, when the novel was finally published in 1970, the New York Times deemed it “pornography without Portnoy,” and, as they had done two decades earlier with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, the newspaper refused all ads for Blue Movie. Southern continued to hope that Stanley Kubrick would turn it into a movie; he even went so far as to dedicate the book to “the great Stanley K.” But in the end, Kubrick was no more interested in turning Blue Movie into a movie than he was in filming Southern’s screenplay of A Clockwork Orange. Other movie people were equally uninterested. As Nile Southern explained his father’s miscalculation with regard to Blue Movie, “The book itself could not have been more of a slap in the face to the Hollywood that fired him.” Indeed, there was the novel’s plot in which a studio titan, duped into making an X-rated film, has sex with a movie star’s corpse. “Terry thought he was telling a good yarn—à la Nathanael West—but others thought he had gone too far,” noted Nile Southern.

  If nothing else, the novel did manage in its first paragraph to coin one of Hollywood’s most oft-repeated questions, “Listen, who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?!?”

  While an erstwhile Hollywood insider like Southern talked about making a movie with unsimulated sex, it was the maverick Melvin Van Peebles who actually took the plunge. Having rejected a three-picture deal at Columbia Pictures, Van Peebles had tired of being mistaken for “a janitor” on the studio lot, even when his Watermelon Man turned into a big hit. He didn’t want to make another innocuous comedy. He wanted to make his own film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, about an African-American man turned fugitive revolutionary who beats up a couple of cops, kills a couple of others, and doesn’t end up dead in the final reel.

  “Of all the ways we’ve been exploited by the Man, the most damaging is the way he destroyed our self-image,” said the thirty-eight-year-old director-screenwriter. “The message of Sweetback is that if you can get it together and stand up to the Man, you can win.”

  On the first day of his nineteen-day shoot, Van Peebles shot hard-core sex scenes using himself and a few actresses.

  “Some of the actresses weren’t good. They couldn’t fake it. So I had to give them a little of the actuality of it,” he explained. In that first scene, set in a brothel, a racially mixed group of customers watch as a bearded, dildo-wielding lesbian has sex with another woman only to be interrupted by a drag queen, dressed as a fairy godmother, who “transforms” one of the lesbians into superstud Sweetback, played by Van Peebles.

  More important than the verisimilitude of the sex was the fact that Van Peebles, working on a half-million-dollar budget, couldn’t afford a union crew, so he handpicked one that had shot hard-core pornography instead. When union officials came to see his first dailies, “They saw I’m actually doing black porno, which is below the union radar,” he recalled. And they left him alone to make his indie movie.

  The real sex helped budget-wise in other ways, too. “When I caught the clap, I filed for workmen’s compensation. I got it on the job. It’
s job related,” said Van Peebles.

  During the shoot, Van Peebles courted more controversy when he cast his own thirteen-year-old son, Mario, as the young Sweetback, who loses his virginity to one of the brothel’s prostitutes. It was to be a graphic depiction of the adolescent’s first sexual encounter, and required total nudity of both actors as Van Peebles envisioned it. Mario was concerned.

  “Dad, is this going to be an adult movie?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good, then the kids in class won’t see me.”

  Working with equally controversial material, Terry Southern continued to have much more trouble getting his Blue Movie to the screen. And there were worse disappointments that year for Southern.

  Stanley Kubrick suddenly took a second look at Burgess’s novel about the “droogs” and deemed it his next project, after 2001: A Space Odyssey. Southern’s option on the book had long lapsed, and to add insult to that oversight, Kubrick was writing his own adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.

  Southern’s screenplay wasn’t the only one being rejected by Kubrick. Burgess himself had also taken a crack at turning his novel into a screenplay. Burgess took the news of Kubrick’s interest in A Clockwork Orange with somewhat less pique than Southern. Then again, he wasn’t exactly overjoyed, either. He got the news that spring right before he and his wife, Liana, departed for Australia to help open the Adelaide Festival of Arts. Burgess would later remark about the impending film production, “I did not altogether believe this and I did not much care: there would be no money in it for me, since the production company that had originally bought the rights for a few hundred dollars did not consider that I had a claim to part of their profit when they sold those rights to Warner Brothers.”

  But Burgess did care how Kubrick might translate his novel to the screen. He harbored ambivalent feelings about the novel. It wasn’t his favorite. In fact, “It was the most painful thing I’ve ever written, that damn book,” said Burgess. He wrote it to exorcise the memory of what happened to his first wife, who was raped by four American deserters in London during World War II. She was pregnant and lost the child as a result of the attack. A Clockwork Orange, by necessity, had to be a very graphic book. “It was the only way I could cope with the violence,” said Burgess. “I can’t stand violence. I . . . I loathe it. And one feels so responsible putting an act of violence down on paper. If one can put an act of violence down on paper, you’ve created the act. You might as well have done it. I detest that book now.”