The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

by William Friedkin

  Seeing it again recently, I found it charming, innocent, and touching in many ways, but Robards and Ekland are mismatched and have no chemistry as lovers. Wisdom and the other actors are convincing, but Bert Lahr hardly registers. Before we finished even a third of the work he was to do, he fell ill, had to leave the production, and died within the week. His absence left a hole in the film’s emotional center.

  The zeitgeist was changing, and a nostalgic piece of fluff about a bygone era was out of step with the rise of independent cinema.

  Painful to remember, Minsky’s was a disaster that set me back in every possible way. There were many problems with it, but the biggest was my own ineptitude. I had researched the period but I didn’t know how to convey the right tone. I was in over my head. The crew sensed this and knew I was in over my head; from first assistant director Burtt Harris, to choreographer Danny Daniels, to director of photography Andy Laszlo. A film crew can be like the sailors on the USS Caine, on the verge of mutiny. If they sense weakness in the captain, plenty of junior officers are ready to step in and take over. Part of it is self-preservation. Key crew are in demand because of previous success, not failure. If a film goes down, it can take all hands with it.

  The burlesque sketches had to play broadly, each joke punched up to the max. I tried to make them “real,” more contemporary. Huge mistake. How do you make this exchange sound real: “Who is that lady I saw you with last night?” “That was no lady, that was my wife!” Each time I set up a shot or talked to an actor about a scene, I was filled with uncertainty.

  Norman Lear was aware of the situation and one day asked me if I would let Danny Daniels stage the burlesque routines.

  I was relieved: “Fine. But if I were you, I’d fire me.”

  “Is that what you want?” he asked.

  “We’re not on the same page, and it’s your show. . . . I know I’m no help to the actors either—”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the characters are stereotypes. Every line in the script is a setup or a punch line.” Clearly Norman knew more about what we were doing than I did, as witness his subsequent career.

  Fantozzi and I spoke by phone later that evening.

  “I know you got problems,” he said, concerned. “David Picker doesn’t like the dailies and wants to get rid of you—”

  “What about Lear?” I asked.

  “Lear hasn’t agreed to that.” A note of urgency came into Fantozzi’s voice. “Don’t quit,” he insisted. “These studio guys talk to each other every day. If you quit or get fired, it’ll be professional suicide. If you pull this picture off, you can wind up with a multipicture deal at UA.” I didn’t quit. I brought what I could to the picture, but I was the director in name only.

  Years later I was surprised to hear Norman Lear’s version of our sole collaboration. To my shock, he has no memory of the vitriol that marked our work together. He doesn’t remember my telling him I hated the script. “There were many scenes I thought you got exactly right,” Norman said. And though he loves the film to this day, his anger at me kicked in after I turned in the rough cut and left the very next day for London to prepare to direct The Birthday Party. While there, I gave an interview to a late-night talk show saying I thought Minsky’s was a terrible movie and that people needn’t bother to see it. My anger at myself caused me to confess my own incompetence in a misguided attempt to expiate my guilt. This little caper was thoughtless and self-destructive.

  Two days after that interview, I got a call in London from Fantozzi in Los Angeles: “David Picker called me, and he wants to kill you.” There was anger in his voice. “What you said was inflammatory; Yorkin and Lear are furious, and I don’t know how to solve it.” They thought I was trying to sabotage the film before it came out, and Picker told Tony I’d never work at UA again. Tony worked to build my career from nothing, and now he was telling me he didn’t think he could save it. Hearing his words was like receiving a death sentence.

  The final cut of Minsky’s was Norman’s, with assistance from our title designer, Pablo Ferro. Much as I’d like to absolve myself of blame for the film, I see my handiwork all over it, especially in the documentary approach to many of the scenes.

  As a complete change of pace, I began to prepare Pinter’s The Birthday Party in London. It was the first film I really wanted to make, understood, and felt passionate about, but I embarked on it with a heavy heart, my career in shambles. I was thirty-one years old and had burned a lot of bridges in Hollywood. London in the 1960s was a perfect antidote: the Beatles, the Stones, the angry young men of British theater and film, Chelsea, Carnaby Street, a culture more diverse than any I had ever experienced. And from a creative standpoint, the year I spent with Pinter on the screen adaptation of his first play was an awakening and a life-changing lesson in the art of creating serious, suspenseful drama.

  4

  SILENCES

  Tony Fantozzi arranged a meeting with Edgar Scherick, former president of the ABC television network, who had recently gotten financing from the network to start his own film company, Palomar Pictures. Palomar was trying to make low-budget films with young directors who wouldn’t cost or spend a lot of money. The Birthday Party was alone on my wish list.

  The power and impact of Harold Pinter’s play and its potential as a film became my obsession. Fantozzi contacted the William Morris office in London, where Pinter lived, to find out if the rights were available. In a matter of days I was on the phone, hearing Pinter’s mellifluous baritone. He had no idea who I was or why I’d want to make a film of The Birthday Party or if I had the wherewithal to do so, but his interest was piqued. Scherick was willing to gamble on a difficult piece of material. Since he couldn’t compete with the major studios for stars or material, he had to sail against the wind. Given Pinter’s recent worldwide fame, Scherick thought The Birthday Party, filmed in London on one set for a budget of $1 million or less, would bring prestige to his company. Fantozzi put him in touch with Harold’s agent, and they worked out a tentative agreement. But Harold would only finalize it after we met and found common ground.

  I checked into an inexpensive hotel in Bayswater and took a short cab ride to Number 7 Hanover Terrace, one in a long crescent of white six-story stucco houses designed by John Nash in the early nineteenth century in Regent’s Park.

  Harold came to the door. I was warned that he tended to be intimidating, but I found him engaging, accessible, courteous, and modest. He was taller and more muscular than I had expected, with black curly hair and dark, penetrating eyes.

  His expression morphed from a wicked smile to a feigned wince of pain to a penetrating stare. While listening, he would cock his head to one side, occasionally smoking a cigarette. He was dressed in black trousers and a black silk shirt. He was five years older than me and had achieved international success. His house was elegantly furnished, filled with good paintings, books, and fresh flowers, so unlike the drab interiors of his plays. Harold’s top-floor study was crammed with photographs of famous cricketers. Cricket was his passion. He had created a comfort zone from which he seldom ventured.

  His wife, Vivien Merchant, a distinguished stage and film actress, was usually at home when I visited. She and Harold had been married for eleven years. They met while both were struggling young actors and he was working under the stage name David Baron. She always called him “David” around me, and when I asked why, he explained that his own name sounded too Jewish, given the undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the British theater during the 1950s. I personally thought “David Baron” sounded as Jewish as Harold Pinter. They had a son, Daniel, then eight, a quiet, gifted child who frequently sought his father’s advice while doing his homework. Vivien would have a pot of tea for us before we started work each day. They seemed a perfect family, though I sensed an underlying tension, which I attributed to my presence as an outsider, vying for Harold’s attention. Vivien was Harold’s muse, having appeared in a number of his plays and television shows as wel
l as the film Accident. The year we met she had a great success in Alfie, for which she received an Academy Award nomination, and she was appearing on stage as Lady Macbeth in an unforgettable performance with Paul Scofield. She was quiet, sultry, mysterious.

  I must have seemed as strange to Harold as his plays did to many theatergoers. I was young but with no interesting film credits, no theater experience, no impressive education, and I was American to boot. I had little to recommend me except Fantozzi’s assurances to Harold’s agent that I was a brilliant director. I had two mediocre films, one of which was yet to be released, and an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Harold’s fame was spreading. He had shifted the paradigm of what was possible in serious drama, blurred the line between truth and falsehood in his characters. “Pinteresque” had entered the language to mean something challenging or difficult to decipher. I had the financial backing to make the film but Harold didn’t need money. He had become the most fascinating and celebrated playwright in the English language. The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming—all of his plays were being performed around the world, and he had written screenplays for the critically acclaimed films Accident, The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, and The Quiller Memorandum.

  I was clearly way over my head, but The Birthday Party had a profound effect on me from the first time I saw it in San Francisco in 1962.

  The play is set in a shabby boardinghouse in a small town near Brighton. Meg, a slovenly middle-aged woman, runs the place with the help of her husband Petey, who has a part-time job setting up deck chairs on the beachfront. They have only one boarder, Stanley, a broken man who appears to have lost interest in life. A neighbor, Lulu, a would-be sexpot, occasionally comes to visit but can make no connection with Stanley, while Meg treats him with compassion and something like love. She claims that today is his birthday and wants to give him a party, but he denies that it is and doesn’t want a celebration. Into this seemingly banal environment two men unexpectedly appear, Goldberg and McCann, looking for a room. They are well dressed and slightly sinister, and we wonder why they would come to such a run-down hovel. The mood shifts abruptly with their arrival, and the tension mounts.

  With these six characters Pinter creates an atmosphere of suspense and violence. Goldberg and McCann seem to have come to this out-of-the-way boardinghouse expressly to find Stanley, interrogate and persecute him. But why? What has he done? Or is it a case of mistaken identity? Stanley is afraid. Something in his past has come back to haunt him. The party takes place against his wishes and becomes his worst nightmare. The next morning he’s led away by Goldberg and McCann. Petey is powerless to help, and Meg only remembers how much fun she had the night before.

  The play can be viewed as a metaphor for the police state, society’s need to make the individual conform, the need of the strong to dominate the weak, the futility of resistance, the tyranny of religious persecution, and our inability to empathize with the suffering of others. It’s all of this and more, but it’s best enjoyed for its surface pleasures, a disturbing comedy-drama about irrational fear and paranoia. It’s not that Pinter’s characters can’t communicate—they communicate only too well, even though they use language to conceal their true feelings.

  When The Birthday Party was first produced in London in 1957, audiences and critics found it obscure, absurd, and bewildering. The Lord Chamberlain, in effect the censor of plays and movies, dismissed the play as “insane and pointless.” Pinter was a struggling actor and only twenty-eight at the time. The Birthday Party was his second play, and it was a flop. He was broke, newly married, with a baby to support, and living in a basement slum.

  The play closed after eight days, and only six people came to watch the final performance. This would have ended Pinter’s career as a playwright, but a miracle occurred. Britain’s most influential and respected theater critic, Harold Hobson, saw the play at the end of its run and wrote a review for the Sunday Times of London, after the play had closed: “I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London. . . . [He] has gotten hold of a primary fact of existence. We live on the verge of disaster.” Hobson’s review rescued the play and Pinter’s reputation.

  Pinter and I met each day for a week at Hanover Terrace to discuss how to proceed. His responses to my ideas were precise and unequivocal. I had no desire to clarify what he had purposely kept ambiguous. I relished the pauses and the silences that conveyed dramatic effect as much as the language.

  I asked Harold how he came to write the play, and he told me that when he was working as an actor in the provinces, he once stayed in a boardinghouse run by a flirtatious, unkempt landlady. There was another boarder, an unemployed man who claimed to have played the piano professionally. These characters stayed with him and became Meg and Stanley. He started to write about them when unexpectedly “two strangers knocked at the door.” He didn’t know who they were or why they came to this place, but he continued writing to find out. He wrote with no particular theme, no outline, and no explanation for the actions of his characters. Stanley was destined to be a victim, but Harold had no idea why. Everything he knew about the characters was in the play. He was influenced by Hemingway’s short story The Killers, in which two men come to a small town looking for a man they don’t know to kill him “for somebody else,” to “oblige a friend.”

  Though our screenplay would be faithful to the play, Harold wanted three months to adapt it. He was inundated with scripts for radio, television, and movies, along with directing plays of his own and others’, and acting in all media.

  The cast he wanted was the one we eventually secured. Robert Shaw, who had starred in The Caretaker on stage and in the film, would play Stanley. Considered one of England’s best actors, Shaw was the villain in the James Bond film From Russia with Love and played Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons. Patrick Magee worked with Pinter when they were both actors at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was considered the ideal actor for Samuel Beckett’s plays, and Harold admired and respected him. He would have no one else play McCann. Dandy Nichols was a household name in Britain for the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part, which later became the hit American television show All in the Family. She played Meg. For Goldberg, Harold wanted Sydney Tafler. Tafler, a competent character actor, little known outside of England, gave one of the best performances ever seen in a Pinter film. We held auditions for the other two roles, casting Moultrie Kelsall as Petey and Helen Fraser as Lulu. Both had appeared only in small parts on British television, but Harold had an unerring sense of casting. Left on my own, I wouldn’t have known to cast any of them, but to this day I don’t think our cast could have been improved. Scherick decided to bring on two producers he knew and trusted, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky, former New Yorkers who had produced several low-budget horror films in England. Happy to be associated with The Birthday Party, they hired a first-rate British crew. Denys Coop, the director of photography, had been the camera operator on The Third Man and is generally credited with that film’s signature Dutch (tilted) angles; as a director of photography he lit This Sporting Life, King and Country, and Billy Liar, all classics. The production designer was Ted Marshall, who designed Tom Jones, The Charge of the Light Brigade, and The Pumpkin Eater. The set was to be detailed and realistic, not abstract or symbolic. Ted, Harold, and I went to a seaside town called Worthing near Brighton and chose the exterior of a boardinghouse. We filmed exteriors there, but everything else was done on a set at Shepperton Studios.

  I loved the cast and crew and looked forward to working with them each day. It was the opposite of Minsky’s. We rehearsed for ten days, and Harold would give me notes. I encouraged him to talk to the cast as well, and he advised them to say the lines and not look for allegory. “There are no motivations for the behavior of these people that I’m aware of, and no way to determine whether they’re speaking
truth or telling lies. Just find the emphasis in the lines and the rhythm of the scene,” he would suggest. One day after a rehearsal in which the actors seemed to go slightly off script, Harold said, “If you want to do my lines, they have to be word for word. If one word is left out of a sentence or added, the rhythm of the scene falls apart.” One of the actors asked him how to deal with the pauses. “The pauses must absolutely be filled,” was his answer. “Though your character may not be speaking, there is always an unspoken language going on.”

  One evening over drinks, Magee, who according to Harold knew more about The Birthday Party than he did, told me that two lines he remembered from the original production were cut out of the torrent of intimidating non sequiturs with which Goldberg and McCann confront Stanley. They were:

  GOLDBERG: Who hammered the nails?

  MCCANN: Who drove in the screws?

  These were references to the crucifixion, and in the days when the Lord Chamberlain was the absolute authority over the British stage and screen, there could be no reference to the crown or to religion. Magee remembered these lines from the original production, and that evening I called Harold and asked him about them. His response was preceded by:

  SILENCE. THEN,

  HAROLD: What lines?

  ME: The two lines you cut for the Lord Chamberlain.