by Scott Eyman
The Green Berets, then, was always intended to illuminate the administration’s—and John Wayne’s—view of the war. The American involvement in Vietnam fit right into Wayne’s worldview—Communism had to be fought everywhere it surfaced, whether Hollywood or Southeast Asia.
In June 1966, Wayne went to Vietnam to work on a documentary for the Defense Department that he was narrating. “I’m going around the hinterlands to give the boys something to break the monotony,” he said. He was amused by the urchins of Saigon, who immediately recognized him and called out “Hey you! Numbah one cowboy!”
In time, Wayne would make trips to all four of the combat areas of Vietnam, and most of the forward camps, purely by himself and without any accompanying entertainment units. During one of the visits, he received a Montagnard bracelet from a Strike Force under the command of Captain Jerry Dodds. The Montagnards were mountain tribesmen who had fought for the French during the Indochina war and were currently working as mercenaries for the Americans in Vietnam, usually as the defenders of isolated camps in the highlands or elsewhere.
Wayne was deeply moved and wrote a letter saying that he hadn’t removed the bracelet since it was bent around his arm. Indeed, the bracelet can be seen on Wayne’s wrist in several movies of the late ’60s.
Working from Robin Moore’s book, James Lee Barrett completed a first-draft script of The Green Berets in August 1966, to which the Pentagon strenuously objected. Barrett’s script involved a Special Forces unit going into North Vietnam on an offensive mission, which was forbidden for the Green Berets. Mike Wayne didn’t tell his father about the rejection. “I was actually afraid to because he would have said, ‘You dumb son of a bitch!’ ” Barrett went on a research trip to Vietnam, and came back to do a second draft. The Pentagon objected to some specifics, and a third draft was soon under way.
By the end of March 1967, the Pentagon agreed to assist Batjac, provided specific modifications were made in the script. Mike Wayne and Barrett made the changes. In April of 1967, Jack Valenti wrote Wayne that the Defense Department had approved the script of The Green Berets. “I urged them to go all out on equipment and material cooperation. Let me know if you run into road blocks. Good luck.” Michael Wayne wrote George Stevens to thank him for his help.
The Green Berets was to be the second picture on a two-picture deal Wayne had with Universal (the first was The War Wagon). In many respects, Wayne was making the same deal John Ford had been forced to make for The Quiet Man—an overtly commercial film in exchange for a far dicier personal project.
The Green Berets was penciled in to begin shooting in the late spring of 1967, but after stalling for a few months Universal backed out of the project, ostensibly because of changes the studio wanted to make in the script, but mostly because they got cold feet. Batjac quickly moved the picture over to Warner Bros., with production scheduled to start in August.
Ed Faulkner hadn’t worked with Wayne since McLintock! and asked his agent about getting him an interview for The Green Berets. His agent couldn’t do anything, so Faulkner sat down and wrote a personal letter. “Like yourself, I’ve worn a Stetson long enough. Maybe a change in hats is called for.” He signed it and sent it over to Mary St. John. Five days later, Faulkner’s agent called and asked if he had talked to Wayne, because a script for The Green Berets was on the way to Faulkner.
At this point, the picture had a budget of $5.1 million and a sixty-two-day schedule. Okinawa was being considered as the primary location, but the Huey helicopters needed for the movie wouldn’t be available from Japan until the end of the year. The Department of Defense preferred a Fort Benning location because it would involve fewer personnel. Besides that, the terrain, they said, was similar to Vietnam.
Wayne finally agreed to Fort Benning. The Pentagon handed over five acres, on which Batjac spent $171,000 building a Green Beret camp, which was left intact for training purposes. Batjac also spent $305,000 in salaries for personnel, 80 percent of which was to off-duty or furloughed soldiers. In return for the Pentagon’s land and equipment, Batjac was charged a grand total of $18,623.
Wayne was acting in the picture for $750,000 plus 10 percent of the gross over $7.5 million. For directing the picture, he was paid an additional $120,000. Co-director Ray Kellogg was on board for $40,000 for twenty-two weeks’ work, second unit director Cliff Lyons was getting $1,000 a week, and cinematographer Winton Hoch was getting a total of $17,500.
Wayne cast George Takei, who had just finished the first season of Star Trek, as a South Vietnamese officer who relishes killing Vietcong. Takei stifled his ambition and told his prospective director that he was opposed to the Vietnam War.
“I respect your opinion, George,” replied Wayne. “I know a lot of people feel the same way. David Janssen and Jim Hutton, who are also in the movie, feel as you do. But I want you guys in this movie because you’re the best actors for the job. I need your help. I’ll need your ideas to make this a good movie. And I’ll try to do what I can to make this a good movie.”
Takei remembered that Wayne was “forthright, persuasive and charming. After all, he was John Wayne.” The picture started shooting on August 9, 1967, and they were on schedule until August 21, when the heavy rains that are always a part of summer in the South began. They were four days behind by September 1, and Warners informed them that the picture was $187,000 over budget. Mike Wayne responded that they were still within the final $5.6 million budget.
Wayne was averaging between six and nine setups a day, slow but not unreasonable for a picture of this size, but he continued to fall behind schedule. Warners was increasingly worried about the film. Wayne had an eye infection and put off shooting his own close-ups, which the studio interpreted as a lack of coverage. But a simple phone call would have cleared up that problem.
Late in the first week of September, the trade papers announced that Mervyn LeRoy, the venerable Hollywood pro who had directed pictures great (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Five Star Final ) and far from great (The Bad Seed, The Devil at 4 O’Clock) was on his way to Georgia to “assist” (Variety) or to “handle the direction” (Boxoffice) of The Green Berets.
LeRoy was a legend around the Warners lot because he had been married to Harry Warner’s daughter. He had been one of the studio’s mainstays in the 1930s until decamping for MGM and $10,000 a week. LeRoy’s compensation under his current Warners contract was $3,000 a week, $200,000 a picture, and a whopping 15 percent of the profits—a figure that attests to his familial relationship with Jack Warner.
LeRoy’s contract ran until March 1973, and it had a clause that said only Jack Warner could produce one of LeRoy’s pictures. (Jack Warner had sold his shares of the company to Seven Arts Productions in November 1966 for $32 million, but he was still running the studio.)
Just as The Green Berets was getting under way in Georgia, Jack Warner was editing his personal production of Camelot, and downshifting to the status of an independent producer. With Jack Warner preoccupied, the Seven Arts people may well have been trying to use The Green Berets as one of LeRoy’s commitments, with Batjac taking the fall for his salary.
According to LeRoy, Seven Arts was simply nervous. They told him that he had a free hand with the picture—if he wanted to shut The Green Berets down, he could. All this certainly suggests concerns that transcended missing close-ups.
The upshot of all this was that by the end of September, Fort Benning had nearly as many directors as soldiers. Ray Kellogg and Cliff Lyons were directing a unit for scenes that didn’t have any of the main actors in them; Wayne was directing the main unit; Mervyn LeRoy was . . . around. Variety reported different stories at different times—Wayne was directing the scenes he wasn’t in, or, alternately, LeRoy was directing the scenes that featured Wayne. David Janssen told Variety’s Army Archerd that LeRoy directed Wayne and Janssen in their first scenes together.
LeRoy’s claim that he worked for five and a half months on the picture is more or less borne out by t
he documentation—he followed the picture all the way through the dubbing of Miklos Rozsa’s score—but the testimony of the people that worked on the movie indicates he was functioning more as an associate producer than a director.
“Mervyn was a nice man,” said Ed Faulkner, “but he didn’t do much. He was there looking over Duke’s shoulder. He may have said things to him privately, but he didn’t make a lot of noise publicly.” David Janssen said that LeRoy “just went through the motions to keep Warner happy. And anyway, he didn’t want his name on the credits.”
“Duke directed the dialogue scenes,” said Faulkner. “And he certainly directed all the scenes I was in. Cliff Lyons was coordinating the stunts, and Ray Kellogg was directing the second unit. Often Wayne would be blocking a shot and Winton Hoch would say, ‘Duke, you’re supposed to be in this shot. Where are you?’ Wayne would nod at Faulkner, who had been nicknamed “Deacon,” and say, “The hell with it; let’s get the Deacon in there.”
Cameraman Winton Hoch had done landmark work for John Ford on 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers, but he left the distinct impression that this last reunion with Wayne was not his favorite shoot: “There were three directors on that show, Ray Kellogg, John Wayne and Mervyn LeRoy, and it’s a little difficult to work with three directors.”
Despite the production pressures, Wayne remained the father figure on the set. “On August 21,” remembered Ed Faulkner, “my wife was scheduled to deliver my fourth and last daughter. I told my wife, ‘I don’t know where I’ll be, but I will try to call you every day at noon L.A. time, 3 P.M. Georgia time.’ I told Jim Hutton about all this. Duke knew that my wife was pregnant, but he didn’t know about our plans to stay in touch.
“On August 21, we were twenty miles outside of Columbus [Georgia]. I had finished lunch, there was no way I could get to a phone, and I was worried. And suddenly I felt this big arm around me. It was Duke. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be making a phone call?’ he asked me. He turned around, and there was the production manager with a Pontiac wagon with a bubble top. And they broke every traffic record in Georgia to get me back to my apartment to make my phone call at 3 P.M.”
With all the pressure, Wayne was chewing tobacco. When people would raise an eyebrow about the tobacco, he’d respond by saying “That can’t hurt me.” Occasionally, someone would offer him a cigar and he’d always accept it.
Georgia in August and September is no time to shoot a movie—if it’s not broiling, it’s raining—and the production was still running behind, but not a great deal; production manager Lee Lukather estimated that the picture was about one third finished: “We have had seven full days of sunlight and two half days. The rest have been overcast. Tremendous rain storms, etc. . . . Duke, Kellogg, Mervyn LeRoy and everyone have been working their hearts out, but when the weather doesn’t cooperate, we are lost.”
Lukather said that theft was rampant, so the production had to post guards on every set so that trucks, wheels, tires, and lumber wouldn’t disappear. In addition, the promised military vehicles from the Defense Department hadn’t shown up, so the production had to rent them, along with Teamsters. Nevertheless, wrote Lukather, “Duke has the strength of a Lion and the patience of a saint to do the job that he is doing.”
Wayne kept up a reasonable pace. He lost fifteen pounds over the course of production, but was constantly on the move, and no more liable to suffer in silence than he had been on The Alamo. “I want it black in the background,” he yelled during the shooting of the night battle scene. “We’re going to come back here every goddamn night until I get it black in there!”
Besides the heat, the rain, and the studio, Wayne was also having trouble with Aldo Ray, whose drinking problem, he had been assured by Ray’s agent, was in the past. As soon as Ray was firmly established in the picture—i.e., it would be prohibitively expensive to reshoot his scenes—he fell off the wagon with a resounding crash. At one point, Ray was so drunk he couldn’t stand up to act. There wasn’t anything Wayne could do other than give Ray’s dialogue to other actors.
It was a long slog of a shoot, from August to November on location, then back to Warner Bros. in Burbank for a week or two of studio work. The last scene of the film was shot at Point Mugu in Malibu, which is why, for the only time in history, the sun sets in the east.
When production wrapped up in December 1967, The Green Berets was eighteen days over the scheduled seventy-two-day shooting schedule, at a final cost of $7 million. As soon as the picture was finished shooting, Warners tried to add $150,000 to the budget by assessing Batjac for the services of Mervyn LeRoy, but Mike Wayne was adamant, reminding Warners that “it was [their] agreement . . . in which the salary, expenses, charges, etc. relating to Mervyn LeRoy would not be charged to the production cost of The Green Berets.” The tab for LeRoy was to be an ongoing dispute between the studio and Batjac, with the amount in question rising to $162,000.
As the picture wound its way through the postproduction process, Wayne was already on the defensive, without ever acknowledging it. In January 1968, he wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times saying that his purpose in making The Green Berets was “to make an exciting motion picture about the bravery of the men in the Special Forces, not to make a controversial film about the war. . . .
“When I was in South Vietnam, I was awed by the varied accomplishments required of these men but one qualification they all share: courage. Danger is with them every moment, but they face it as a necessary part of the work they are proud of doing.”
A few months after The Green Berets wrapped production, Wayne began shooting Hellfighters on location, with Casper, Wyoming, doubling for Venezuela. The film was based on the life of Red Adair, who put out thirty-five to fifty oil fires every year with an insanely risky technique he devised himself—a metal drum filled with one hundred to five hundred pounds of solidified glycerine, a jelly that was pure high explosive. The barrel was attached to a long crane and the entire apparatus backed into the fire until the barrel was in the center of the fire. Adair bailed out of the crane as the barrel was detonated with electrical caps implanted in the jelly. The resulting explosion consumed all available oxygen near the well for a few seconds, which generally extinguished the fire.
All very impressive, but the original script for Hellfighters by Clair Huffaker wasn’t much, and after John Lee Mahin did a rewrite, it still wasn’t much. But Lew Wasserman had offered Wayne $1 million and 10 percent of the gross, which eradicated his doubts about the material. As soon as Hellfighters was finished, Wayne hurled himself into promotion for The Green Berets, which was released in June 1968 to some of the most scathing reviews ever dumped on a major star.
Michael Korda called it “immoral . . . a simple-minded tract in praise of killing, brutality and American superiority over Asians.” Even the trade papers got in on the stomping. The Hollywood Reporter said it was “a cliché-ridden throw-back to the battlefield potboilers of World War II, its artifice readily exposed by the nightly actuality of TV news coverage . . . clumsily scripted, blandly directed, performed with disinterest.”
But the keynote piece was Renata Adler’s review in The New York Times. Adler called Wayne “a filmmaker of truly monstrous ineptitude,” and that was just for starters.
It had not occurred to me until I saw The Green Berets that I had not seen a film in many months which unequivocally, unironically endorsed violence—not even war—just violence. There have been cruel, vicious, messy films all over the place but . . . everyone is or pretends to be laughing or tongue in cheek. . . .
The Green Berets are not of an average 60 years of age, do not parachute about as in World War II, spend hours at nightclubs a la Fontainebleau, set virtuous Vietnamese ladies to seductions, abduct V.C. officials in the night with the help of montagnard crossbows, drugs and a most ridiculous balloon and string, so that passing aircraft can yank them off into the sky; Vietnam is not full of artifical foliage and white birch.
There is cl
early a certain out-of-touchness here—an insanity, an arrogance. . . . The film is a travesty and a falsification, and a foolish romantic falsification at that.
In its first six months of release, The Green Berets grossed $8 million—a million more than it cost. Variety reported that the film eventually took in about $10 million domestically, and $8 million abroad. Internal Batjac correspondence indicates that the figure for worldwide rentals, i.e., net to the studio, was $12.5 million—a success, but not an overwhelming one. Mike Wayne wrangled with Warners for years about their profit accounting, or, rather, their non–profit accounting.1
In retrospect, Wayne believed that the critics made a mistake. “They overkilled it,” he told the military historian Lawrence Suid. “The Green Berets would have been successful regardless of what the critics did, but it might have taken the public longer to find out about the picture if they hadn’t made so much noise about it.”
In terms of Wayne’s directorial career, The Alamo has many defenders, but The Green Berets has none. Disregarding its politics—no easy task—the film is flatly lit, with lots of zoom shots. It seems that there are a great many pine trees in Vietnam, and the troops that fought the war were indeed largely left over from World War II—a sergeant named Muldoon, a scrounger, a lovable orphan. With the exception of a well-done night battle scene that gradually turns into morning, the direction is in a utilitarian style that puts the politics front and center. The Green Berets makes The Alamo look like The Best Years of Our Lives.
Nevertheless, both Wayne and Jack Warner were proud of the picture; in February 1969, Mike Wayne forwarded a certificate of appreciation he had been given by the American Legion. Jack Warner wrote back, “I am extremely pleased that this picture has performed so well at the box office and so many people throughout the country have seen it so they can get some idea of the devotion to duty that characterizes the men in the Special Service unit.