My Life as a Mankiewicz

by Tom Mankiewicz

  The best movie stars are wonderful actors. Jimmy Stewart is the perfect example of Tom Hanks. Jimmy Stewart could play farce comedy in Harvey with an imaginary eight-foot white rabbit, he could make you cry in It's a Wonderful Life, he could play a hard-boiled guy in a western, he did five pictures for Hitchcock, he could play sophisticated comedy like The Philadelphia Story. The audience trusted him. Audiences are used to paying, in those days, two bucks or five bucks, or today, ten bucks, to see a movie star. In public, they tend to stare at Robert Redford. “That's Robert Redford, that's Robert Redford.” They don't go up to him. Sean Connery, when I was with him on location, was very intimidating to people; their jaw would drop. He was very difficult to approach. You walk down the street with Robert Wagner, everybody goes up to him because he's a television star. My theory is people are used to watching him while they're lying in bed, or they're on the can, or they're getting laid, or the kids are running around the house. They feel like those people are part of their family. They watch them for free. So television stars are very approachable. Robert Wagner is the perfect example of a guy who's been a star in various ways on television and in movies for fifty years. Everybody feels like they know him, and he spans so many generations. Women in their fifties and sixties are looking at him from Hart to Hart or It Takes a Thief, older people are looking at him from the movies in the fifties, and little kids know him as Number Two in the Austin Powers movies with Mike Myers. He's just part of the furniture in a wonderful way.

  I would have told you, conventionally, that after Rawhide, Clint Eastwood would not be a star. I never thought Tom Hanks would be as big a star as he is. I mean this in the nicest way possible, Danny Aykroyd was so lucky to be a movie star, because he wasn't really a good actor. But he was billed above the title for a long time. Chevy Chase, the same way; not a really talented person that way to be a movie star. I thought Bill Cosby was going to be a bigger movie star, but I think a lot of that had to do with what he wanted to do. If Bill had decided, “I'm going to be Sidney Poitier, I'm going to take some heavy roles,” he could have been a big star, because he is a really talented actor.

  George Segal was headlining in all these movies, King Rat, A Touch of Class with Glenda Jackson. George was riding high. Then the audience suddenly said, “No, we've had enough of him.” He made a very big mistake. George Segal was cast by Blake Edwards as the lead in 10. George was doing a few drugs at the time; he was never an addict, but he was riding high. George's then-wife, Marion, wanted to be an editor. He said, “I'll do the picture, but I need my wife to be signed on as an assistant editor. She wants to learn how to edit. That's a condition of employment.”

  And Blake said, “Okay, then, see ya.” Blake went with Dudley Moore, who became a star off that movie, albeit an unlikely movie star. You count your pictures if you're Dudley because you're a wonderful specialty act. You can make people cry and laugh, but basically, Dudley was a little guy who was married to two beautiful women, Suzy Kendall and Tuesday Weld.

  Monkey Points

  Today, if you're going for a star of Tom Hanks's stature, you're talking $20 million, $30 million, or they might take less, but a big piece of the pure gross. For The Da Vinci Code, Hanks got a big piece of the gross along with the director, Ron Howard. The theater's take is about 30 percent, at least the first week, sometimes it goes down after that. Seventy percent of what you read was grossed comes back to the studio, then you're giving away pure gross to these people. Whereas, if you make a film like X-Men, which did hundreds of millions of dollars, there was no actor big enough to get a piece of the gross, and the director didn't get a piece of the gross. So Fox keeps everything.

  The net profits are what Eddie Murphy once called “monkey points.” I just got a check from Mother, Jugs & Speed the other day; I have a piece of the net. Also, The Eagle Has Landed is in profit. All the Bonds, which I didn't have a piece of, and practically everything I've ever had a piece of, are in profit. Dragnet is the one picture that I got stiffed on. I have 5 percent of the profits of Dragnet, and it was a big hit. But Universal has loaded up the red column. In fact, they stopped sending me statements. Hanks has a smaller piece than I do, but he's rolling in money. He hasn't had to sue to pick up a million bucks. Danny, because he had done Ghostbusters, had a piece of the gross. The whole cost of a suit would be on me. Then what you do is spend hundreds of thousands of dollars going to court, the studio lawyers make life difficult for you, and if you win, they'll appeal or they'll low-ball you.

  The Best of Both Worlds

  Right after Dragnet, Danny Aykroyd wanted to direct a movie. So he rewrote his script Valkenvania. Got Warner Brothers to finance it. Forty-million-dollar budget. Great cast—Danny, Chevy Chase, Demi Moore, who was a big star at the time, and John Candy. There wasn't a first-rate comic actor that wasn't in this movie, but it just died. It was appropriately called Nothing but Trouble. I walked on the set about two weeks in. Danny said to me, “I'm having some problems.” Immediately, I saw what one of the problems was. All the actors had their own video screen. So they would look at their own takes and decide whether they wanted to do another one. Please! You can't do that. Danny said, “This is crazy. If I could quit, I would. Everybody wants to know everything. Two hundred questions a day: Is this okay? Do you like her hair that way?”

  I said, “Danny, here's the solution. The answer to every question is either six or green. Just keep saying six or green.”

  He called me about midnight that night and said, “You know what? It works!”

  But again, it takes a certain emotional makeup to be a director. To like it. Writers write alone, or if you write with somebody, it's the two of you alone. It's an antisocial experience. Directing is a very social experience. Everybody comes to you with their problems. Everybody asks, “Where are we going next? What's the next shot? Do you like her wardrobe? We can't get to that location tomorrow; what do we do now?” You're socializing. You're the ringmaster at the circus. A lot of writers have directed once. David Giler directed a movie called The Black Bird, which was very funny. It was a takeoff on The Maltese Falcon. Never wanted to direct again. A guy like Paddy Chayefsky wasn't even interested in it. Lots of actors tried it once. Marlon Brando, One-Eyed Jacks. Anne Bancroft, a picture called Fatso with Dom DeLuise. She said, “I realized halfway through the movie that, when I act, everybody takes care of me. When I'm directing, I'm supposed to be taking care of everybody else, and I don't like to do that.”

  Almost every director admires every other director just for the job that he or she has. So you won't find directors saying that even crappy directors are crappy. Writers, on the other hand, are very jealous people. The reason that more editors have made good directors than any other occupation is that they are, in effect, the director of the second half of the movie. They're working under the director, but their profession is trying to cut that scene together so that it plays great; so that you get the most out of the dialogue, the location, the camera shots. David Lean was an editor. Cameramen are very much like actors. Most of them try it once and they don't ever want to do it again. Gordon Willis tried it once. When you have a love scene in bed, the cameraman is more interested in how the light is streaming through the window, whether he can see through her negligee, how the breeze is wafting. He couldn't give less of a shit what they're saying to each other; he's interested in how it looks.

  My father always used to say, “If you can direct what you write, then you've got the best of both worlds because when you have written a script, it has already been directed. As you wrote it, you saw it. My definition of a good actor is someone who says a line better than I heard it when I wrote it.” Moss Hart used to turn to actors who tried to change dialogue and say, “Where were you when the pages were blank?” Redford is a good director. Quiz Show and Ordinary People are wonderful films. Olivier, of course, with Henry V and Hamlet. He was in them, but they're well directed. My father always said about Orson Welles, his first two films were his best two films
; Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. He said, “If Orson had been smart enough to just direct and keep himself out of the movies—even though he was a wonderful Kane. He never made a truly good movie after those two.”

  When you can write and direct, then that's a filmmaker. I love being a writer-director. The two-hour pilot of Hart to Hart. Dragnet. I did a lot of work on the script of Delirious, but I didn't take any credit. Dad always used to say, “If you've written it and directed it, when you run into a problem, the writer's on the set.” What's always shocking to me is how many talented directors who are really intelligent people cannot write their way out of a paper bag. They haven't got the slightest idea what the line should be, and they're wonderful directors. But they're not writers. If you're in trouble on a Billy Wilder movie, son of a bitch, the director's a pretty good writer.

  I asked Wilder once, “Who's the most difficult actor you ever worked with?”

  He said, “There were lots of them, but the most puzzling was Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. She would arrive late. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were really pissed at her. There was a scene where Tony Curtis is doing his Cary Grant imitation. He's on his yacht and he's wooing her. Tony had thirty-five or forty lines, and she had three. She kept blowing her lines. We tried writing them out on a card. Tony was getting very frustrated and a little pissed. It went take twenty. I said finally, ‘Everybody take ten minutes. We'll start fresh.' I walked up to Marilyn and I said, ‘We'll just take ten minutes and don't worry about it.' She looked at me very genuinely and said, ‘Worry about what?' There was not the slightest recognition that we were on take twenty because of her. She was being totally sincere. I thought, boy, this is a whole other realm that I can't get into.”

  X-Man

  You didn't split with CAA. There was a famous writer at the time who left and almost never worked again—Joe Eszterhas. Rand Holston, my agent, was a terrific guy. But Joe Eszterhas kept saying in interviews, “Rand Holston said to me, ‘We're going to beat you down—make sure you never work again.'” Ovitz had completely infiltrated every studio, and they were dependent on CAA. CAA represented just about everybody.

  It's the late eighties. I'm reading lots of scripts now. I'm a director of a hit movie, Dragnet, and I read a script I really want to do called Sleeping with the Enemy. I thought it was a terrific script. It turns out Leonard Goldberg, my friend at Fox, who's now head of production, owns the property. So I call Leonard and say, “I would love to do Sleeping with the Enemy.” There's a strange silence, and I don't know where the silence is coming from.

  Leonard says, “Oh, Rand gave that to you, did he?” This is not Leonard, it's other people at CAA.

  I get a message through CAA, “If you get one of the following three people to play the girl, you can do it: Kim Basinger,” who was very hot at the time, “Demi Moore, or Debra Winger.” What I didn't know at the time was Debra Winger and Demi Moore had already read it and passed on it, and CAA was saying to Kim Basinger, “You don't want to do this movie.”

  I meet with Kim at the Bel Air Hotel for an hour and a half. At the end of the meeting, she says, “Great, let's do it.” I'm driving out of the Bel Air gate, and I call Leonard Goldberg and say, “I got Kim Basinger.” Total silence. I thought, what the fuck is wrong here? It turned out Leonard had already decided to leave as head of production of Fox, which he didn't want anybody to know about. This was going to be his first movie. I felt as though there was a conspiracy for me not to do this movie. I said, “Guys, somebody's lying to me here.” CAA kept saying, “The next big picture's yours.” I got an offer from Fox that they would pay me $250,000, as if I had done the picture. I said, “Listen, I'm not a whore; I don't take money for pictures I don't do. I want to do the picture.”

  Nobody was fucking telling me the truth about anything. It got to be so crazy that I started to hate these people. When you're on the inside and you watch them maneuvering somebody else, like putting Legal Eagles together, it's fun. But it's a different story when you are the maneuveree. So I took my life in my hands and I called Jeff Berg, who had been my agent before. Apparently, he announced that I'd called him at an ICM meeting, and they burst into applause because CAA was taking everybody. I said to Jeff, “I might want to come back.” Jeff Berg came over to my house like a shot, and we sat down. Now, Jeff is very dry. He once said to me, “I may be a prick, but I'm your prick”; that's Jeff's philosophy. He's not a romancer and a charmer. This is how this town works, and I suddenly started to get so exhausted.

  Jeff goes home and puts an item in Army Archerd's column saying, “Tom Mankiewicz Thinking of Leaving CAA.” CAA calls me and I say, “No, I'm not, guys. I'll be very honest with you, I'm talking to people. I haven't left CAA.”

  CAA says, “Well, we want to keep you, obviously. But you have to call Army Archerd and tell him that's not true.”

  I say, “I don't have to call Army Archerd. I didn't call Army Archerd in the first place. I'm not calling Army Archerd.”

  Dick Donner, who is a CAA client, was deputized to take me on his boat and talk to me about staying with CAA. Coincidentally, we're going to be driving his boat right by CAA honcho Ronny Meyer's house. Ronny Meyer is going to be out there waving. It just got crazy. I thought, fuck, I just want privacy. I want peace and quiet. I don't want to be part of this whole fucking circus. So I went with Jeff.

  Suddenly, Frank Price and Universal weren't so sure that they wanted me on the lot, even though I had two years left on my contract. I would hear from people that CAA agents were knocking me to every executive: “You don't want him. Drinks too much.” That kind of stuff. I couldn't get work. Nobody wanted to fuck with the CAA. Jeff Berg wasn't powerful enough to get a package going.

  Dick Donner was such a great friend. I got Delirious because Dick said, “I read the funniest fucking thing. You'd be so great for it.” I read it and I thought it was hysterical. Nobody from CAA would touch it. Donner said, “Fuck you guys. I'm the executive producer. Tom's going to make a picture. He's going to direct it.” CAA wouldn't mess with Donner. Dick was Mr. Lethal Weapon, Superman, and so on. He was a great friend of Ovitz's. Not one actor in the picture came from CAA. The casting directors knew they couldn't get any CAA actors.

  One day I got a phone call from Ron Meyer, who was second in command to Ovitz. Ronny said to me, “Listen, can you do us a favor? Can you see Loni Anderson?” She was with Burt Reynolds, who was a big CAA client.

  I said, “Yeah, but she's all wrong for it.”

  Ronny said, “I know she's wrong for it, but would you see her anyway?”

  I said, “Sure.” Loni came in. She was very nice. “Burt says hi.” I knew Burt.

  I got a call the next day from Ron Meyer saying, “What's the matter? Why didn't you hire Loni?”

  I said, “I told you she was wrong. You said you knew she was wrong.”

  “Burt's really upset.”

  You just can't fucking win. My career had, apparently, peaked with Dragnet:. Now I was the exile from CAA with the X on his chest.

  9

  The 1980s Gallery

  Uncle Hume

  Hume Cronyn, one of Dad's closest friends, would say to me, “He brags on you all the time. Just not to you. That's just him.”

  In 1981, Hume is doing Honky Tonk Freeway with his wife, Jessica Tandy. They're staying at a hotel two blocks up from Fox because it's easy for them to walk to Fox, where they're shooting. John Schlesinger is directing it. One night Hume is up in their suite with Jessie, and she's doing a crossword puzzle. He says, “I want to go down to the dining room. I'm feeling antsy. Do you want to come down?”

  She says, “No, honey, you go down and get something to eat. I'll just do the crossword puzzle.”

  So he goes down into the dining room, and there's William Holden having dinner with Sterling Hayden. So memorable in Dr. Strangelove, Sterling was a druggie in a wonderful way. He smoked marijuana. He lived on a houseboat on the Seine River in Paris. But he was in L.A., working.
Hume walks into the dining room, and Bill and Sterling both go, “Hume!” because they had worked with him. Hume sits down, and they have the most wonderful dinner. Everybody is drinking way too much, Hume said. It's a long dinner. They finally wrap up. Bill is staying at the hotel, and Sterling has a car outside. Hume turns to Sterling and says, “So, Sterling, when do we see each other again?”

  Sterling says, “Well, how long has it been since the last time?”

  Hume says, “About thirty years.”

  Sterling says, “Well, then I guess never.” Sterling hugs him with a bear hug and walks off.

  Hume gets in the elevator. He walks back into his room with Jessie, and he is crying. She says, “What's wrong?”

  He says, “I'm never going to see Sterling Hayden again.”

  She says, “What are you, crazy? I'm going to call a doctor.”

  Skitch Seitz

  When I was at Yale, one of my roommates was Skitch Seitz. His real name was Raymond G. H. Seitz. His father was Major General J. F. R. Seitz, who was married to, of all people, Jessie Royce Landis, a wonderful actress who played Grace Kelly's mother in To Catch a Thief and Cary Grant's mother in North by Northwest. Skitch and I were close friends. He always wanted to be a diplomat. When we were shooting Man with the Golden Gun in Thailand, he was head of the CIA in Southeast Asia. He was instrumental in getting us helicopters from Air America to fly down to Phuket. Skitch had been head of the CIA in Africa, based in Lagos, Nigeria. Then he became undersecretary of state under James Baker during the Reagan administration. He and a couple of other guys that Secretary Baker co-opted were called the fabulous Baker boys. Skitch used to tell me stories. They would go and negotiate with Hafez al-Assad of Syria. Assad would start by having twenty or thirty toasts to this and that. You had to take some of his booze, a little sip on each toast, so he's hoping to get you a little whacked. He wasn't actually drinking his. It was water. As you got into negotiations, which are supposed to be very long, you would have to pee. But you couldn't leave the president of Syria. So Baker would artificially have these blow-ups where he would get so angry, “I am so outraged,” and he would walk out. Everybody would walk out with him, but of course, they ran to the men's room.