My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  Just like Stanley Donen, he said, “I have no idea. I asked her to do a few things and she did them well. But I have no idea whether she can act or not.”

  She came in to see me, and she was so charming, I said, “Okay, this is the Virgin Connie Swail.” She was nervous about it. Actors have to feel comfortable with each other, and in the first couple of days, I saw her sitting off to the side. I said to Danny and Tom, because they liked her instantly, “Any time you guys are sitting and talking, ask Alexandra to come over and sit with you. Make her feel part of this, because I think she's a little intimidated.” Pretty soon, she was just one of the gang. We called her our lucky penny.

  Triple Jack and a Joint

  At the beginning of the picture, Danny and I made a pact, which was that he was not to smoke marijuana while we were working and I wouldn't drink while we were working. Now, it was easier for me to keep that because, although I loved Jack Daniel's, I didn't drink when I worked anyway. So every night after we wrapped, I would go into Danny's motor home or he'd come into mine. He'd have a joint, and I'd have a triple Jack Daniel's. We were driven home by teamsters. On our first day, Danny said, “May I address the police officers?” and I said, “Oh, shit.” There were about a dozen of them on their motorcycles. He said in his Jack Webb voice, “We are about to embark on a great adventure. We will be all over the City of Los Angeles; the City of Angels. I would like to announce to all of you right now that, in the months to come, you will notice that I smoke a lot of weed.” I've never seen the blood drain out of a dozen police officers.

  There was a silence, and the head sergeant said, “Well, Mr. Aykroyd, I'm sure whatever you do in the privacy of your motor home is none of our concern,” meaning, don't you dare walk around with a joint because we'll have to bust you. That was Danny's way of getting it straight, letting them know and finding out from them so he didn't have to ask anybody. We'd be filming around L.A. and I'd have my Jack Daniel's, and Danny would have his joint.

  Sometimes, when we were downtown, I drove myself. At the end of the day, I'd come out of the motor home and the sergeant would say, “Ready to go home, boss?” I'd say, “Yup.” Two or three of them, with lights flashing, would go out into the middle of Hoover, stop traffic, and escort me onto the freeway. It was the greatest sense of power I've ever had in my life. I said to the sergeant, “Yeah, but will you do that once the picture's over?”

  And he said, “Not a chance.” People would see my car go by and ask, “Who's that prick that's holding everything up?”

  Sketch Artist and Actors

  Sixty percent of the movie is Danny and Tom. So I'm going to have many over-the-shoulders and many close-ups. I saw right away that Danny, in spite of a lovely performance later in Driving Miss Daisy, was not really an actor. He's a sketch artist, and he is always best on the first take, or the first two takes. He's still good on the fourth take, but that kind of explosion that Danny has is in the first couple of takes. Tom is really an actor, and he's almost always best on the third take, the fourth take. I could see that the first couple of days, so I went up to them and said, “Now listen, because we're going to be doing this for months, I'm always going to shoot Danny first so that he can get that off. And Tom, you've got at least two or three takes of Danny's to wind up on. They both said, “Thank you so much,” because they'd seen it right away as actors.

  Chris Plummer had his performance down. So you tuned him in like a radio station that you're not quite getting perfectly. After a take, I'd just gesture a little bigger or a little smaller. He'd nod. You're not going to put your arm around Chris Plummer and take him for a walk and explain to him the intricacies of the line he's saying. He knows what he's doing. Dabney, the same way. I don't think I ever directed Dabney once because he was locked. Elizabeth Ashley had a few nights when she couldn't remember. We had to shoot line by line. That was kind of a tragedy. She comes out fine in the picture; she's a pro. But she had some problems at the time.

  Danny had Jack Webb down pat. It wasn't an imitation, it was an incarnation. He had his speaking patterns, like the fact that you don't say, “Yes, sir,” you say, “Ya' sir.” We hired Harry Morgan, who had done the series with Jack the second time around as his partner, as Captain Gannon, Danny's boss. Harry used to say, “I close my eyes, and son of a bitch, it's Jack. I can't believe it. The syncopation with the speech pattern.” Harry Morgan had played in M*A*S*H, the television series, and was very funny. Harry said, “You know, for the first fifteen years of my acting life, I only played creeps and petty crooks and stoolies in every drama possible. I got that part in M*A*S*H, and now all they want me for is comedy. I could always do comedy, but they never hired me to do comedy.” Suddenly, he was a comic actor.

  He told me Jack Webb would read off a teleprompter a lot. He had those long speeches. It was the most economically done television show in the world. Harry was with Jack six years on the show. He said, “I had the same fucking suit, every episode. The only place where you're on for six years and you don't want any of the wardrobe. It's that one suit.” They would do scenes from several shows at the same time where Jack's standing on the left and Harry's standing on the right and they interview the hotel manager behind the desk. It's three shots; Jack, Harry, and the hotel manager. When they're finished, they wheel the hotel desk out and put in a fireplace and the girl is sitting there. They're interviewing her, and the lighting is exactly the same, the same three-setup. Harry said, “The efficiency of it was just unbelievable. Nobody moved a fucking light.” Jack became huge; Mark VII Productions, Marty Milner and Ken McCord, Adam-12; Emergency! with Julie London and Bobby Troup.

  A Master and a Disaster

  Our production manager, Don Zepfel, called me. “You know who's available? Bob Boyle.”

  I said, “Bob Boyle. I know the name.”

  He said, “How about the guy who built the Bates Motel for Psycho? He did all of Hitchcock.”

  I said, “Oh, jeez, let's get him on.” Boyle was seventy then.

  One of the things that was most gratifying to me was when he got the honorary Oscar years later. They did a montage of all of Bob Boyle's work, and the last shot was Danny and the Virgin Connie Swail pulling in to park under the Hollywood sign. I wanted to have them kiss for the first time under the sign in the parking lot. The problem is there is no parking lot. The Hollywood sign is stuck in the middle of a mountain. Bob Boyle said to me, “No problem. We're going to have a beautiful parking lot and the Hollywood sign.” It's such a staggering shot, the Hollywood sign and the glow over the parking lot as they pull in. The picture came out in the summer, and the people who lived on the streets above the sign had to call the police because there were so many teenagers who wanted to park underneath it that they were creating traffic jams. There's no parking lot there; it looked so realistic. Bob Boyle was one of those people you meet in your life and you say, “My God, I worked with John Williams, who wrote a score, or Vittorio Storaro, who shot a picture.” There was nothing he couldn't do, and do quickly and do well and do better than you thought.

  I don't like to fire people. We had a Universal special effects guy named Whitey Krumm, and it took him three tries to blow up a car in Venice. It was just pitiful. Six cameras were rolling, and nothing. Then the trunk flew open. We finally blew it up. Bob Weiss was the producer. He worked on the Naked Gun movies. I said, “Bob, listen, here's where the producer comes in. Whitey's fired.” I don't like to throw tantrums on the set. It's not in my nature. I said to Bob, “As of tomorrow morning, I've got to have somebody else. Can you call Universal now?”

  My bungalow at Universal was next to director Joe Sargent's bungalow. He was, for his sins, doing Jaws: The Revenge, starring Michael Caine. Apparently, Michael had three months free. I was walking out of my bungalow one morning, shooting on the lot, and I heard Joe Sargent's voice. “Mank?”

  I said, “What.”

  “Did you fire a guy named Whitey on your picture a couple of days ago?”

  “Yea
h.”

  “Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.”

  “Why?”

  “They just put him in charge of the shark on my movie.”

  I said, “Joe, maybe he's good at sharks. You don't have any cars blowing up in your movie, do you, because he's not good at that.” I never saw Jaws: The Revenge, but I read a not-so-good review. “And the shark moving across the water looks like a copy of the New York Sunday Times.” I thought, There he is. Whitey strikes again.

  “We're Shooting a Movie Here!”

  We are shooting on the 405 Freeway, which you're really not supposed to do, but we have so much police help. It's a car shot with mounts involving Danny and Tom. We keep shooting and shooting, and now it's getting to be rush hour on the 405. Of course, we have our own cars behind Danny and Tom's car, so we're slowing everything down. People are honking, and there's lots of obscenities being yelled. The motorcycle sergeant comes over and says, “Boss, I think we better call it a day here. There's going to be a revolution.”

  So we pull Danny and Tom's car over, and I say to Danny, “That's it for today. We're causing a lot of trouble.”

  Danny gets out of the car in his Jack Webb garb, looks at all the people driving by, and says, “Sure, maybe they've been waiting two years to go to Hawaii and this is the only flight they can take and if they miss it, they can't get on another. And sure, maybe somebody's fiancée is arriving from Europe and now he's not going to meet her and she's going to be all upset and go home. And sure, maybe a guy back there is having heart palpitations and he can read ‘Emergency Hospital' a mile away but he can't get there. But don't they realize, we're shooting a movie here!” His mind was like a steel trap. Half of Danny is this wild guy on the Harley, John Belushi's best friend, and a habitual pot smoker. The other half of him just loves the police, has impressionist paintings, has been married to the same woman, Donna Dixon, for twenty-five years, and has got a farm. Lorne Michaels once said about him, “Dan Aykroyd's ultimate fantasy would be to commit the perfect crime and then arrest himself.”

  In the movie, he's introducing his grandmother to Connie Swail. He says, “And Granny, this is the Virgin Connie Swail.” She says, “You're kidding?” We got a big laugh with, “Granny, this is the Virgin Connie Swail”—he always called her the Virgin. Dan said to me, “Do you think that's going to offend people, that I say the Virgin Connie Swail?”

  I said, “No, Danny, believe me, it will get a laugh.”

  He said, “Okay, I just don't want to offend anybody with that.” So Danny, who could be this absolute wild man, also had a conservative side.

  Daryl Gates was very concerned in the beginning because Danny wanted to go on robbery/homicide calls out of Parker Center. We did some ride-alongs, and it was easier then than it is now. Daryl Gates was a very straight-arrow guy. He asked me, “You're not making fun of the police, the LAPD, in this movie, are you?”

  I said, “Well, Chief, it is a comedy with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, but it's affectionate. We're laughing with the LAPD, not at the LAPD.”

  He said, “Good.”

  He was so nervous about this picture that when we started previewing it, he would send assistant chiefs down to sneak into the previews to tell him. We were in Long Beach and an assistant chief of police introduced himself to me and said, “I'm going to go back and tell Daryl I laughed like hell. There's been one of us at every preview.”

  The Picture Comes Together

  We previewed the picture very long. I asked Frank Price if I could have a free preview without opinion cards. I said, “Then I'll see where I want to cut. I don't want anybody from the studio there. I just want to run it once and take a look.”

  He said, “Absolutely.”

  Well, the son of Sid Sheinberg (president and COO of Universal Pictures) sneaked in and the next day said, “This thing's so long. Oh, God. We've got a disaster on our hands.” I'm having lunch in the commissary, and Lew Wasserman, king of all he surveyed, comes over to the booth and says to me, “It's supposed to be a comedy.” And I thought, oh, fuck, it was Sheinberg's kid. So we decided to go back and reshoot a couple of scenes and connect and cut, but the picture never was in trouble.

  Tom Hanks loved the movie so much, loved the experience so much, he was pissed off that we were shooting two new scenes. It's hard getting actors back into their parts, because they haven't played them in four or five months. Getting them back into that mood that they were in, recreating the atmosphere in which people can do their best work, is tough to do. It was very rare in the thirties, forties, and even into the fifties that people reshot unless there was something glaring. Then it became a matter of course. Fatal Attraction—the Michael Douglas, Glenn Close movie—shot three endings because one ending didn't work in a preview. It suddenly was not abnormal to hear that a movie was reshooting. Let's say you have a bumpy twenty minutes inside your movie where it just isn't hanging together right, slows down, and you realize that you can do a one- or two-minute scene, bridge the gap, and keep the movie going. You watch the rushes every day and you say, “Boy, we nailed that. We nailed that.” Everybody's laughing. Then you put the whole thing together and you say, “Oh, boy, are we in trouble here.” Then the work starts. It's really the second making of the movie. That's why it's good to get a movie on its feet as quickly as possible and show it to an audience.

  We reshot a couple of scenes, and suddenly, the picture came together. Danny, doing his Webb, goes to see Tom in his apartment in Venice. One of the extras passing Danny was Japanese. Danny said, “It would be funny if I talked to him in Japanese.” Well, it was so funny that I ruined the first take because I started roaring with laughter. I said to the assistant director, “I'm leaving. Just let them do the second take and print it, all right? If it's fine with Danny, it's fine with me.”

  The next day in rushes, people were pounding the seats during this scene. We previewed the movie, and out of three hundred people, maybe ten people laughed. I thought, it's because the picture's too long. We shortened the picture, but we still had the Japanese guy in. Seven people laughed. I said, “Okay, we're doing this wrong. When Danny meets him, give me a Japanese gong.” We do that; nothing. I called Danny and said, “I really hate to break your heart, but say sayonara to the Japanese guy. So far, I would say fifteen hundred people have seen this movie, and twenty-one have laughed. I can't explain it.” The last thing you did at Universal was to send the answer print up to Lew Wasserman's house. We got two thumbs up from Lew, thank God.

  Opening night, the premiere was a benefit for DARE, the police drug education program, and everybody arrived in old cars. We had the normal complement of half a dozen or so motorcycle cops. All the cops wanted to be on Dragnet. Sometimes we had as many as sixteen. When we broke for lunch, motorcycle cops would appear from everywhere, and we gave them all lunch and invited their families down. And I've never met a better bunch of people in my life. They were terrific.

  Dragnet Redux?

  We were the number four grosser of the year, and it was a big hit. It's never stopped running on cable. Universal was going to do a sequel, but it was really difficult because Tom had done Big, then this picture's a hit, and he was impossible to get back to play Danny's sidekick. He was already eclipsing Danny. At one point, it was going to be Danny and John Candy. They were thinking about it. But I didn't want to write the script and neither did Danny. The Farrelly Brothers wrote a draft. It was early in their career. It didn't hang together, but there was hysterical stuff in there. Danny and Tom are driving along and they see a Mexican guy about to jump from a roof. They scream to a stop, Danny runs out. You cut to the roof, and you see that he's working there as part of a group, but he's the only one they can see. Danny looks up at him and says, “Sure, maybe you're living twenty in two rooms and you have no health insurance. And sure, maybe you don't speak English and you can't understand a word I say. And sure, maybe nothing's ever going to happen to you in your life.” The guy's staring at him. Danny keeps going, “And sure,
your wife is probably ill, and your children don't like—” and he depresses this guy so much, the guy jumps.

  Movie Stars and Actors

  The kind of stardom that Tom Hanks finally attained is very difficult to predict. I knew he was a wonderful actor. But everybody was the next comedy star. I was the next John Landis. Danny called Tom the white Eddie Murphy. I said to Danny, “I think he's a lot more than that.” I don't think the world had seen Tom do drama until Forrest Gump and Philadelphia, although Nothing in Common, the picture he did with Jackie Gleason, had some dramatic scenes in it.

  There are so many wonderful actors that the audience never accepts as a star; case in point, Jeff Bridges. You can go all the way back to Star Man, or you can watch him in Seabiscuit; just a wonderful actor. He had the lead in a lot of pictures, but the audience said, “No, you are not a movie star. You're a wonderful actor, but you're not a movie star because we say so.” And Tom Hanks is a movie star because they say so. One day I was working at my desk at Warner Brothers. Outside, I heard clink, clink, clink. I looked up, and it was Clint Eastwood dressed in a western outfit walking to a stage. He was doing a picture called Pale Rider. I said to my assistant, Annie, “Come in here. That's a movie star.” When the audience accepted him, it was on a whim. He was on Rawhide on television, and then he couldn't get a job. He went over to Italy, and Sergio Leone rediscovered him, and he became the Man with No Name in A Fist Full of Dollars. And bang, he was a movie star. Demi Moore, very good actor and, for a time, the highest paid actress going. She was in lots of pictures. But the audience never said, “Yes, you're a movie star.” Julia Roberts, for at least ten years, was a movie star, and she still could be, given the right part. Audiences would go because Julia Roberts was in it.