Roy finally left, and I asked John, “What was all that stuff about no autographs?”
John was signing some autographs at that point. He said, “Didn't you see his hand? It was trembling. He can't sign.”
I said, “No shit, I didn't notice.” John picked up on it right away. He was such a sensitive guy that way. John said he didn't think Roy could hold a pen. I said to him, “Good on you.” Who would notice that? John Candy would. When we left, they gave us drinking glasses of Roy and Trigger. We insisted on paying for them. It was quintessential John Candy because, first of all, the idea, yes, of course, you're going to go to the Roy Rogers Museum, you couldn't miss it for the world; and second, that little moment in there that he would pick up on immediately.
Delirious sneaked out; no publicity. I just hated everything about the business. What I loved was working. I loved it when the bell rang at seven in the morning. I loved the grips and the gaffers and the stuntmen and the actors. But all of the people who were in the offices absolutely sickened me.
From Delirium to a Crypt
I directed a Tales from the Crypt around the time of Delirious. Donner was one of the executive producers. I got Mariel to do it. She was thrilled, and the episode was terrific. It starred Andrew McCarthy, Mariel, and Kathleen Freeman, whom I'd used in Dragnet, and David Hemmings, my great friend, who played the evil landlord in the basement. That was a lot of fun. It was five days' work and you shot fourteen hours a day. The crew loved it because they were all young and athletic and they got into platinum time every fucking day. The episode was the season's opener. Arnold Schwarzenegger directed the one before me, and Bob Zemeckis was directing the one after me. Everybody worked for scale. I just got a big check from the show the other day, actually. It's the first time Tales from the Crypt went out on DVD. They packaged three episodes on each DVD and put mine on the first DVD because Mariel was bare chested in it; saw her tits. It was a fun show.
Miami House of Horrors
I wanted to do a picture called Skin Tight based on a novel by that wonderful columnist in Miami, Carl Hiaasen. I was down in Miami, I even prepped it. That was an MGM picture, and I had already written a screenplay under the people, including John Goldwyn, who were at MGM when we started Delirious. Now, Laddie took over and Tom Selleck was going to do it, but Selleck wasn't box office enough because he'd done too many bad movies. Then Burt Reynolds wanted to do it. Even though he was CAA, he didn't give a shit. Craig Baumgarten was going to produce it. He and Burt Reynolds and I met in the bar at the Bel Air Hotel, that big oak-paneled bar. Burt, who was just nuts by this point, said to me, “This is going to be great, and I know Miami. Working with you is going to be fabulous, you know? We'll hire a good cameraman.” He was grabbing my wrist all the time and cutting off my blood supply.
He had just done a film in Vegas, Heat, with a director named Dick Richards, whom he really hated. I said, “I heard you punched him out.”
Burt said, “Well, yes. We got in an argument in the casino, and pop. The punch only went about four inches, I cold-cocked him onto a crap table.”
I thought, oh, fuck, I'm going to Miami with this guy. It was like a house of horrors. It was unbelievable. Then there was a rumor that Burt Reynolds had AIDS. He didn't have AIDS. But something was wrong. I thought, I'm trapped in the fucking funhouse here. I'm going crazy. I said to Laddie, “Tom Selleck would be perfect for this.”
Laddie said, “I don't know. It can be expensive in Miami.” And I thought, oh, fuck it all.
Hiaasen took me around Miami and showed me where all the drug lords lived and the business they'd done. They'd laundered so much money through Florida banks, and the banks really wanted them there. The deal they'd made with the State of Florida and the City of Miami was, as long as they didn't kill each other there, they were welcome. As long as there wasn't crime. Hiaasen would say, “Now, here's a guy from the Cali cartel.” You'd see guys with machine guns patrolling his house behind the wall. It was a strange place, Miami. But Skin Tight was a really good script. Annie and I loved that script. But it never got made. Another abandoned project. It seems like my career had been one wonderful picture followed by an awful experience, followed by a Hart to Hart—a wonderful time—then a Legal Eagles; then a Dragnet—wonderful—and so on.
Joe Calls It a Wrap
My father, at a certain point, just stopped working. He never developed any interests in life. He was a giant intellectual who would still toy with movies. He would figure out how not to do a movie. After Sleuth, which was his last picture, there was only one project he really liked, Jane. It was a wonderful novel about a girl who is sleeping with three guys and gets pregnant, and nobody knows who the father is. It provided him with a huge capacity to comment on modern society. He was writing it, he had a draft, but then he got in fights with the producers and the studio and he said, “Oh, fuck it.” It was the one real regret he had. He wanted to do Jane. Columbia owned it. But he stopped.
Redford came to him with All the President's Men. He found a reason not to make it. Paul Newman, who was his neighbor, was over all the time. They were going to do a movie in which Paul was going to play a gay track coach. But Dad figured out how not to do it. Universal asked him to remake Front Page, which Billy Wilder eventually did, and he figured out a reason not to do it. But he was always figuring out a reason not to make the picture. I never realized it until I was getting real hot at Warners and I got the studio to buy Jane away from Columbia for him. It was a deal. It wasn't terribly expensive. I surprised Dad on his birthday. I said, “Dad, I got you Jane. And you can do it.”
There was a silence, and he asked, “You're producing it?”
I said, “No, no, Dad, you make it. Go ahead and work on it. My company owns it, but you have 100 percent creative control.” There was a silence, and I thought, boy, he doesn't want to make another movie. I had seen him turn down all these things, but he always found an excuse. In his life, he never had an interest—gardening, horses, collecting art, running for public office. Anything. It was like he'd shot his bolt pleasing Pop, his father. If he hadn't been married to Rosemary, he probably would have died ten years earlier. I was determined not to have that happen to me. I started getting interested in the zoo and teaching a film course. Then I bought a couple of racehorses and got into racing. I got on the Board of the Thoroughbred Owners. And I found out how much life there was other than in show business. Show business is still my first love. Ninety percent of my friends are in the business. All my happy memories are of working. The work. But the rest of it, you can have.
I worked in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. At a certain point, you just say, “God, it's enough now.” There are some people who can't stop. Billy Wilder couldn't stop. Wilder's one of the greatest talents that ever lived in the history of film. Yet if you look at his last four or five films—films like Avanti!—he was too old. The opposite is true of William Wyler, who goes back to The Best Years of Our Lives and Roman Holiday and all these great movies. After he did Funny Girl, he said, “I quit. That's it. Thank you.” My dad's life pre-Cleopatra and post- Cleopatra were two completely different lives, professionally. He got into numerous fights and arguments with Daryl Zanuck, who fired and then rehired him. Dad did a couple of films after that. There Was a Crooked Man with Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas is a fun movie. He fell in love with Robert Benton and David Newman. He loved them as writers. Sleuth was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture. Dad was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director. Both Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine were Oscar nominated for Best Actor, the entire cast. He thought, all right, I'm going off on a high note. I don't want another thing to happen.
Dad passed away February 5, 1993, in Bedford, New York. Heart failure. The Academy held a posthumous tribute to my father. There was a new print of Suddenly, Last Summer out. Almost every Mankiewicz was there at the tribute, including many cousins. Ben Mankiewicz, who's a Turner Classic Movies host, was the moderator of the panel. I had
a piece of a minor league ball club, Class A, the Reno Silver Sox. I barely knew Ben because he'd been working in Atlanta so long, but he could tell me everybody who played on the Reno Silver Sox. He knew more about sports than anybody I'd ever known. Has a lifetime love of films. TCM got him to be the host on the weekend. It's the greatest gig in the world. He tapes one day a month and gets paid a lot of money. He's very popular. My father once said, “My life was over, Tom, when I met Tuesday Weld and she said, ‘Oh, you must be Tom's father'”; I said to Ben, “My life was over the minute people asked, ‘Are you any relation to Ben?'”
Ben married the only African American member of our family, Contessa, who was the press secretary to Rocky Delgadillo, L.A.'s district attorney, and she's now with the Poverty Law Center. Ben's brother, Josh, got up at this huge dinner and said, “Contessa, look around the room and mark every Mankiewicz that's here, because you may never see this many Mankiewiczes in one room again for the rest of your life.” There were that many Mankiewiczes at Dad's tribute. Josh, a correspondent on Dateline, has been with NBC for a long time. He's a godfather to Brian Williams's kid. Josh has been a lifelong bachelor, though always with a girl. A little bit like me in the sense that Josh has been with lots of women but he is never going to get married.
John, who used to be all screwed up, was there that night. He's Don's son. Don was a dreadful father. Compulsive gambler. As I've mentioned, Don wrote a Harper Prize Novel called See How They Run about horse racing. He wrote the pilots for Marcus Welby and Ironside, got very successful, and lost almost everything at the track. John, when I really got to know him in L.A., was bulimic. He'd throw up after every meal. He was skinny, doing drugs, but he was a talented writer. I signed him to write a script for my company. He wrote a beautiful one about a blind guitar player in the south. We could never get the money for it, but it got him going. He was one of the writers on the staff of Miami Vice, the Don Johnson series, and one of the original writer-producers of House. He resuscitated a USA Network series, In Plain Sight. Now he's one of the writer-producers on The Mentalist, which is one of the biggest hits on television. He's the only Mankiewicz, wounded though he is, who doesn't drink or do drugs. He really is a success story, with a wife and children who are functioning. In the Mankiewicz family, they're the Ozzie and Harriet, even though Mankiewiczes are usually peculiar.
My stepmother, Rosemary, was there. My dad was married to her for thirty-one years. I'll bet you he never fooled around on Rosemary. Never. She kept him alive. She loved him. They moved to the country—first, Pound Ridge, then Bedford, New York. They loved that area so much. Alex Mankiewicz, my half sister, Rosemary and Dad's daughter, was in Australia and couldn't come to the dinner. Chris didn't show. He was the only Mankiewicz who wasn't there but could have been. He doesn't like Rosemary. I love Chris because he's my brother, but at the same time, we've had so many difficulties. There were also some honorary Mankiewiczes like Ann and Bobby Stevens in attendance: Annie, my assistant for twenty-five years; Bobby, my DP on a couple of pictures. Dad loved them both.
Richard Meryman, who used to be the entertainment editor of Life magazine, wrote a book about Uncle Herman called Mank. Although I didn't really know my uncle that well because I was eight years old when we moved to New York and Herman was living in Los Angeles, I did offer to Meryman that we Mankiewiczes don't seem to have the same outward affection of some families, but we caress each other with one-liners. The hardest meals I've ever worked were Mankiewicz Thanksgivings. I mean, you've got all those people around the table, you'd better be good. If you're going to say, “A funny thing happened to me yesterday,” it better be a funny thing.
Who Are These People?
The thing that finally did it was a Showtime script, Taking the Heat, which wasn't in good shape at all. Would I direct it? The producer was Gary Hoffman, a really smooth guy. I had a meeting with him, and I said, “I'd have to rewrite this script.” It was written by Dan Gordon, not a bad writer, but it just didn't work.
Hoffman said, “Okay, sure. You can rewrite it, but I started this with Dan. So even if it's totally your script, will you agree to let Dan have sole credit?”
I thought, okay, I have so many good credits. I said, “Fine, I just want to get it written the way I want it,” which I never should have done.
We started to assemble a really good cast: Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle, George Segal, Tony Goldwyn, Lynn Whitfield, who'd just won the Emmy for The Josephine Baker Story. Hoffman, who later became the head of television movies for Fox, nickel-and-dimed our production to the point where he would say, “Shoot these eleven pages on Thursday.” I'd say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He was trying to shorten the shooting schedule. We were going to New York for action sequences with helicopters, and Hoffman wanted to arrive on a Saturday and shoot on a Monday. I said, “Wait a minute. We've got to rehearse here. Have you guys heard of John Landis? There's all kinds of action. There's thousands of squibs, there's helicopters. Fuck you. I'm going to write a letter to the Directors Guild and I'm going to say, ‘I'm not responsible for anything that happens on Monday and that these were exactly your instructions.'”
He said, “You can't do that.”
I said, “Yes, I can, and I will.” The unit production manager, Fred Blankfein, was there. I said, “You're a member of the Directors Guild. You're going to put up with this?” He had made a deal with Gary, and they had told Showtime they could make it for less money than it actually was going to cost. We didn't know we were going to have Alan Arkin. The experience was just like Chinese fucking water torture. I said, “Who are these people?”
I knew and accepted the fact that my career was not anywhere near as stellar as my dad's, loaded with Oscars and accolades. But now, I also had to face the fact that I was just tired, and I was tired of the people that I had to deal with. In retrospect, I never should have left CAA. I never should have been outraged that they lied to me, that they set me up. I got one of the actresses they wanted, and then they decided five different ways I'm not going to make this picture without ever telling me. I should have just said, “Okay, guys, you don't want me to make the picture? What do I get next?” But I have a sense of morality and I don't like to be lied to. So I dug my heels in. Maybe I thought I was a little bigger than I was and I could get away with it. It was like reading your biorhythms, you just know there's something wrong.
Even though I liked Frank Price, Bob Daly, and Terry Semel, I probably would not mention an executive or an agent among the highlights. I would mention actors and composers and other writers and cameramen, but nobody who sat in an office. I couldn't think of one. There were other writer-directors who became disillusioned with people in offices who don't make the movies. John Hughes disappeared for the last ten years of his life; my guess is for much the same reason. He was very disillusioned. He disappeared at the height of his powers. He'd done those wonderful kids' movies, which were the soul of that generation, and pictures like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where Hughes and Candy as writer-director and actor, respectively, could break your heart and make you cry. In every obituary of Hughes, it said he grew disillusioned. I think it's with all the suits. They wanted different kinds of pictures from him than he wanted to make. He did go ahead and make Miracle on 34th Street. When Fox offered me that picture, I was smarter than John Hughes because I said, “If I can't get Sean Connery or Jack Nicholson for Kris Kringle, I ain't doing it.” It had a cute girl, it would have been foolproof. I can't imagine that a guy whose screenplays were so original would want to remake Miracle on 34th Street. It's a classic. It was a strange career choice for him, and, maybe, disillusioning, because the picture was not a big critical or financial success. Even Hughes's moderate successes like Weird Science were big successes with smart people and kids. Nobody over thirty went to see Weird Science, but everybody under thirty got it.
11
The Tag
Out of Film
High concept is the enemy of the writer. The friend of
the writer is the human being, the full-blooded character interacting with another character.
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Team Players
When I was at Warners, it was almost a privilege harking back to the forties and fifties when everybody was under contract to a studio. It was like major league baseball before free agency and Curt Flood. You were on a team. You were with Fox, MGM, Warners, Paramount, or Universal. Then, all of a sudden, there was free agency. Kirk Douglas had his own company. My father was one of the first independent companies, Figaro. They made The Barefoot Contessa and I Want to Live, which Robert Wise directed. Burt Lancaster had his own company. The Mirisch brothers became very famous because they said to filmmakers like Billy Wilder, “You do your film through us. We'll handle all the bullshit. You're not working for a studio. We're working together. You write and direct the film, and we'll get you the stage space and so on.” United Artists was the studio everybody wanted to work for when I was first starting in the sixties. United Artists didn't have a studio lot, per se, but they made the Beatles films, the James Bond films, Tom Jones with Albert Finney, the Woody Allen pictures. They would get the right deal for you in the right place, and they would leave you alone and let you make the picture. Studios always charged 10 or 15 percent overhead just to run the studio, and it was added on to every budget. United Artists had much less overhead because they didn't have a physical plant. So on Diamonds Are Forever, we shot mostly at Universal when we were in Los Angeles. They had the bungalows, the stages, and the back lots that we could use at the right price.
After that big burst of independent fervor, studios started to make housekeeping deals so that Dick Donner would have his company at Warners, I would have my company at Warners. You were not exclusive to Warners like the old days, but they had first call on you. You had to tell Warners if you wanted to do something somewhere else. They could suspend you, pick you up again, or talk you out of it.
My Life as a Mankiewicz Page 43