by Lee Hill
In contrast, McGrath appreciated Southern’s nonthreatening way of offering advice and suggestions. He says Southern saw the tone of the adaptation as symbolic of the end of the sixties. “Terry said, ‘We’ve really got to show a period. This is what’s happening to us at this time. Our kids will never believe us.’ Because you could literally do anything. ‘You want to direct a movie? Go ahead and direct a movie.’”
McGrath and Southern began discussing a follow-up project, The Last Days of Dutch Schultz. William Burroughs, who was living in a flat near Piccadilly Circus, was fascinated by the gangster’s life and a transcript of his dying words. With Southern’s encouragment, he began working on a screenplay.
“My wife and I, Terry, Burroughs, and Alexander Trocchi met at Burroughs’s flat in St. James’s to talk about Dutch Schultz and getting the rights,” recalls McGrath. “Burroughs said okay, let’s meet up and talk about it. So we went up to Burroughs’s place and met Alex Trocchi, who was a novelist of the fifties, but he was from Glasgow, an Italian Glaswegian. I was thinking, ‘I’m going to meet Alex Trocchi and Burroughs, this is really great.’ We got up there and Trocchi just spent about an hour or two talking to me about Glasgow. Burroughs was talking to Terry and my wife [Peta Button, an assistant art director on The Magic Christian] was there. I realized that we were sitting around an orgone box in this flat. He had chairs, but there was this orgone box. Burroughs had brought a few bottles of whiskey and we were just drinking whiskey neat and talking and we never got anywhere with Dutch Schultz. Not anywhere. That was the end of that evening and time went on and Terry said, ‘I think…Hilly Elkins, a stage producer…eventually got the rights,’ but Burroughs had said that he wanted Terry and me to do it, but we could never get the rights from this guy. So Burroughs was telling us one thing, but on another level, the guy who had the rights wouldn’t give them to us. They disappeared. Eventually the movie was made. Somebody bought the rights and the movie was made in some warehouse in Covent Garden, and it has never been shown. Pity, too.”
Gerber recalls that the various actors doing cameos in The Magic Christian seemed to revel in the chance to poke fun at their images. During the Hamlet striptease, Laurence Harvey kept pestering McGrath to do one more take so he could push the scene a little further. Yul Brynner appeared in drag singing “Mad About the Boy” to Roman Polanski. The next day he kept his wife and chauffeur waiting outside the screening room so he could watch his dailies several times.
On May 4, Peter Sellers threw a wrap party for The Magic Christian at Les Ambassadeurs, a London casino. All four Beatles showed up for the event and Southern got his picture taken with the group. In addition to Starr, the Beatle connection was strengthened by the involvement of Paul McCartney. He produced the original music recorded by Badfinger and wrote the theme song, “Come and Get It.” The single was released several months before the film’s release and became a hit.
One crucial scene remained to be shot: the arrival of the Magic Christian superliner in New York City. The sequence would culminate with Guy Grand erecting his offal-filled vat of money at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Much to McGrath’s surprise, the U.S. National Parks Service agreed to the use of the location. According to Southern, Gail suggested it would be great to travel to the location by the Queen Elizabeth II. Thus, McGrath, Starr, Sellers, and Southern found themselves sailing to New York in luxury style at roughly $10,000 a head (on the studio’s dime).
“So we all went on this fantastic cruise and crossing,” Southern remembers. “Peter Sellers had just discovered hashish and was absolutely enthralled. He couldn’t get enough of it. It was very strong stuff. Before we left, I’d introduced him to this Arabic pusher, who had given Peter some hash oil, which is the essence of hash. A very thick oil. Peter put drops of it with an eyedropper on tobacco and smoked the tobacco, or if he had cannabis, he would drop the oil on that and smoke it. It was just dynamite, like opium. So the whole trip was spent in a kind of dream state. Instead of eating in the ordinary first-class place, they had this special dining room. It was beyond first class. It was called the Empire Room. It was a small dining room with about six tables in it. That was another $2,000 right there.”
When they arrived in New York, Sellers found out the producers did not want to pay for the New York shoot. An angry series of telexes flew back and forth across the Atlantic. The scene was eventually shot on June 23–26 near the newly built National Theatre on London’s South Bank. During the lull, Starr invited Southern, Gerber, McGrath, and Button to join him in the Bahamas for a weeklong holiday. They were all guests of a Greek millionaire, Luna Nicastro. For Southern and Gerber, the Bahamian idyll would be one of the last revels of the decade.
As Terry and Gail made their way back to Connecticut from the fun times of The Magic Christian shoot, Easy Rider was near completion. When filming wrapped in late June 1968, Hopper assembled a three-hour rough cut. That length proved unworkable to Fonda, Bert Schneider, and a growing collective of “auteurs” that also included Henry Jaglom, Jack Nicholson, and the official editor, Donn Cambern. They all took turns pruning and cutting the film down to a more commerically palatable ninety-minute running time.
Many of the cuts were long balletic shots of the bikers on the highway. Other cuts included the initial setup of the coke score on Sunset Boulevard, a longer title sequence with billboards providing ironic commentary, ten additional minutes of the volatile roadside café scene, more dialogue in Madame Tinkertoy’s, and extended versions of all the campfire scenes.
Hopper was livid when he saw the new version. “You’ve ruined my movie,” he told them. Fonda, Schneider, and the others persuaded Hopper that they were maximizing the film’s potential. Some of Hopper’s visual ideas, which he would take to the limit in The Last Movie, were simply wrongheaded. Hopper wanted the Mexican opening screened upside down. Southern persuaded him that this Brechtian device would alienate not just the straights in the industry but the hip, young audience they wanted to see the film.
Hopper was able to ditch a proposed score by Crosby, Stills and Nash and use the songs laid down for the rough cuts. The music of Steppenwolf, the Byrds, the Band, Holy Modal Rounders, Jimi Hendrix, Electric Flag, and others underscored the film’s broad appeal to the counterculture.
Throughout 1968, Hopper and Fonda screened the film for friends and associates. Mike Nichols and Michelangelo Antonioni were early champions. The film was invited to the Cannes Film Festival as the official American selection. Southern was originally going to be the sole screenwriter credited, but during postproduction he was asked by Hopper and Fonda if he would agree to share credit. Against the advice of the Writers Guild of America, who had won the right to strictly limit directors angling for such credit, Southern agreed. His naive rationale was that a three-way credit accurately reflected the collaborative spirit behind the venture. He also felt it would make it easier for them to produce future projects.
When Easy Rider was unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival on May 13, 1969, the ending was greeted with silence and then loud and vigorous applause. While the Palme d’Or went to Lindsay Anderson’s If…, a poetic allegory of late sixties rebellion, Hopper was given the Camera d’Or for Best New Director. When the film went into major release, it proved to be a runaway hit and the fourth-highest-grossing picture of 1969, raking in more than $19 million that year and grossing more than $50 million by the end of the eighties. By contrast, number five, Twentieth Century-Fox’s big-budget musical, Hello, Dolly!, had cost $26.4 million and grossed only $15.2 million. Columbia executives, who were previously embarrassed by Easy Rider, were now scrambling to imitate this model for box office success. The film would receive two Academy Award nominations: for Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson) and Best Original Screenplay.
As Easy Rider began to gross its millions at the box office, Southern turned his attention to finishing Blue Movie and his mounting problems with the IRS. Businesswise, Southern was beginning to find himself in what Vietnam v
ets might call “a world of shit.”
On the surface, the seventies appeared to be a continuation of the good years. As 1970 began The Magic Christian and End of the Road entered theaters almost simultaneously. Road’s X rating combined with the misleading Life magazine hype led to almost universally hostile reviews. Allied Artists cut back the release schedule. Although George Avakian says the film did quite well in the few theaters it played in New York and Los Angeles.
The Magic Christian received its world premiere on February 12, 1970, in New York. Roger Greenspun in the New York Times praised its “gentle throwaway virtuosity,” but he was in a minority. Pauline Kael in the New Yorker dismissed the film with a few lines of vitriol. Christian was a modest success, but the collapse of its backer made it difficult for it to achieve momentum outside New York and Los Angeles.
Southern would later dismiss the film as a vulgarization of his novel. Yet he was as intimately involved with its production as a screenwriter could hope to be. He had certainly enjoyed working on the movie and with McGrath. True, the adaptation lacked the comic precision of Dr. Strangelove, but many of the set pieces, especially the climactic voyage, were marvelously staged. Southern could take comfort in the film’s cult status. In the nineties, the comedy writer and performer Paul Merton called it “one of the few British films with an epic sensibility” and even hosted a retrospective screening at London’s National Film Theatre.
Southern retreated to California for a while to work on a script with William Claxton. The photographer wanted to break into films with an independent production. Claxton optioned Trixie, a novel by Wallace Graves, about a black high school dropout who is taken under the wing of two college professors. Through a series of experiments, they try to see how quickly they can raise Trixie’s educational level. The script, which was also known as Electric Dreams, was set against the backdrop of the Watts riots.
In the fall of 1970, Blue Movie was published. Stylistically it was a departure for Southern. There was a raw edge to the description and dialogue that accentuated the coarseness of the cynical film world of the novel. Boris Adrian, a critically acclaimed director with box office clout, is wooed by B-movie producer Sid Krassman to make The Faces of Love, which will be an erotic film with all the production values A-list talent can buy. In Barnum & Bailey style, Krassman has arranged for the film to be shot in Liechtenstein, which will not only double as the location, but turns out to be the only place where Adrian’s masterpiece can be seen.
Once Southern briskly establishes this premise, he spends the remainder of the novel exploiting the comic possibilties of Adrian’s bargain with the devil. Despite the film’s explicit subject matter, the same problems that plague a traditional Hollywood production occur. The director and producer must reassure a neurotic starlet, Angela Sterling. On-screen sexual encounters become off screen ones. Drugs and alcohol are consumed to cope with the boredom and isolation of location filming. Arcane technical problems need to be resolved. The book’s plot is driven by Adrian’s struggle to create, in collaboration with Tony Sanders, “the hot-shot writer from New York,” unique and original variations of the sex act. As the film wraps, the negative is seized by a special Vatican commando team to prevent such sacrilege from being unleashed on the masses.
In addition to its ribald dialogue, Blue Movie features several of Southern’s most inspired crazies. Sid Krassman is a vulgar, sex-obsessed movie producer par excellence. His engaging brand of sleaziness is surpassed only by Teeny Marie, a birdlike seventy-eight-pound body double whose stock in trade is her dazzling white teeth and perfectly shaped mouth. Like Krassman, Marie is a whirling dervish of lust and greed. In addition to the all-American Angela Sterling, there is her costar, Arabella, a worldy veteran of the European art film. Arabella manages to seduce both her director and costar during the making of The Faces of Love. Boris Adrian is perhaps the strangest creature in this showbiz menagerie. His motives for making the film are murky. Adrian doesn’t need the money, but he is also tired of his career. The Faces of Love is an aesthetic challenge, to be sure, but Adrian’s genius is quickly revealed to be a higher form of self-delusion.
The book’s publication was hampered by the New York Times’s refusal to run ads for it. Reviews were decidely lukewarm. There was a consensus that Southern was simply recycling Candy in a different guise. David Dempsey in the New York Times conceded that the Hollywood vernacular rendered by Southern was funny, but concluded, “This is one of the longest peep shows ever made, and the dullest. It is pornography without Portnoy.”
But Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books not only gave the novel a positive review, he also provided one of the few rigorous looks at how Southern’s style had evolved: “[his] language here is no longer ironic or mocking. It is comic, rich and fluent, full of jargon and gags, but it is a language of its own, not a series of echoes.”
Wood zeroed in on Blue Movie’s tragic theme: “The point is not that you can’t make a truthful and beautiful movie about the most intimate moments in sex—but that making such a movie would be an inhuman activity, which it becomes in this book: a clinical cruelty under the alibi of art.”
Unfortunately for Southern, Wood’s insightful review didn’t appear until March of 1971. Upon Blue Movie’s immediate release, there was a sense that Southern was not keeping pace with the decade he seemed to so embody. As was the case with 1968, 1969 and 1970 were dark years for America. The election of Richard Nixon led to the emergence of the Silent Majority and a backlash against the counterculture. The Woodstock Festival’s celebratory mood was overshadowed by the Manson murders, which shocked many in the Hollywood circles Southern moved in. He and Gail had met Sharon Tate a number of times with Polanski in London and L.A. The Stones’ Altamont concert, with its Hell’s Angels, beatings, and a fatal stabbing, revealed a desperate, selfish side of the counterculture, while the escalation of the Vietnam War led to increasingly militant protests on American streets and campuses. And here, some argued, was the great satirist Terry Southern simply writing about sex yet again.
George Plimpton sometimes thought of his Paris Review friend as a painter whose work is briefly in vogue and then forgotten as the times change.
“I remember I was told Mrs. Bennett Cerf threw Blue Movie in the fireplace when she read it. They never really got behind it that much and it came out when permissiveness was very much in vogue, so it didn’t have the impact it should have. There was some wonderful stuff in it. I thought that book was going to really do well. It was the time of Behind the Green Door and all that. If it came out a year or two earlier it might have worked.”
Southern’s mind was not really on the zeitgeist when the IRS began to squeeze him for back taxes. “Terry made a tremendous amount of money,” said Carol Southern. “As it tapered off, the IRS came around. I remember because I didn’t have any money then—I guess Nile was about ten—I spent the summer in Maine in [painter] Neil Welliver’s extra cabin. It had no electricity or running water. I thought it would be a good sort of camping experience. The IRS came down this dirt road looking for me. I said you have to be joking. They weren’t joking. It took a long time to settle.”
Somehow, despite the steady big-time script assignments over the last seven years, Southern was broke. What little money he had was being siphoned off by the IRS. He could barely keep up the mortgage payments on the house and he was worried about Carol and Nile. In desperation, Southern looked to his friends. On December 5, 1970, he found himself in the humiliating position of asking Dennis Hopper for a point in Easy Rider.
“I am aware that there may be a difference in our notions of who contributed what to the film (memory flash highly selective in these cases), but the other day I was looking through a copy of the original 55th street script that we did together, and was amazed at the amount and strength of the material which went from there intact to silver-screen.
“Please consider it, Den—I’m in very bad trouble.”
From Green to A
mber
If a writer is sensitive about his work being treated like Moe, Curly, and Larry working over the Sistine Chapel with a crowbar, then he would do well to avoid screenwriting altogether,” Southern explained to a panel in New York in the early seventies. However, he added sagely, if one was truly in love with the magic of the lens, “the wise thing, of course, is to become a filmmaker. Simply insist on being in charge of your material—don’t give it up. In the end, they [Hollywood] must relent—because without a story, without a script, without the creative element…there is no film possible.”
When asked if this was what Southern intended to do, he replied without hesitation, “Yes, it’s the only way to protect the work.”
If the postboom years of Southern’s movie career were distinguished by any one theme it was his spectacular failure to achieve either control over a project or win success for even the most cash-starved independent filmmaker. Southern’s “sensitivity” would become slowly bludgeoned by neglect and indifference in the seventies, a decade that should have led to at least one or two more achievements on the order of Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider. It is tempting to argue that Southern was too dangerous for Hollywood, but then so was the early work of Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma, Terence Malick, and all the other young turks who gained an industry foothold thanks to Easy Rider’s success. Although the Hollywood New Wave began to show signs of ebbing around 1975, films as quirky and subversive as The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, M*A*S*H, Little Big Man, Deliverance, Five Easy Pieces, Badlands, Mean Streets, Harold and Maude, The Hospital, The Heartbreak Kid, Blazing Saddles, and Sleeper were green-lighted and achieved wide distribution. Many of these films were satires or parodies or at least employed different strains of irony. Several maverick independent filmmakers—John Cassavetes, John Waters, Henry Jaglom, John Carpenter, and David Lynch, to name a few—emerged or began working in this period. The influence of foreign films on the look and sound of American mainstream studio filmmaking was also reaching its zenith. Colleges and universities were offering various courses and degree programs. Film societies and repertory cinemas kept Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, Barbarella, Candy, and The Magic Christian in constant view. To compound the irony of Southern’s post-1970 decline was the fact that he had helped create Easy Rider, the very film that gave so much momentum to the Hollywood New Wave and encouraged the filmmakers who would ride it to success and fame.