Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  Since a release date was looming (the film was scheduled to open at the prestigious Radio City Music Hall), a judge decided to cut through the conflicting arguments and watch both versions. The result: he liked the studio cut and found hers tedious. May lost her case before a judicial film critic.

  A New Leaf opened to solid business and generally favorable reviews. Critics decreed that she had delivered a clever, if mordant, comedy.

  My own critique of the experience was somewhat harsher. I made a vow never again to advocate a project with a firsttime director, no matter how prestigious, unless I had personally spent time with that wannabe filmmaker and was persuaded that he or she would do their homework and entertain outside opinion. Indeed, if another Elaine May type came along I would be dogged in derailing that movie, as I should have done with A New Leaf.

  LESSON: Literary inspiration does not necessarily translate into cinematic inspiration.

  In the early seventies, John Schlesinger seemed to dwell in an orbit aglitter with talent and celebrity. Wherever he’d appear, the likes of Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay, and Maggie Smith seemed to swirl around him. Other English directors had achieved success (witness Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones or Lindsay Anderson’s If ) but Schlesinger’s hits, like Midnight Cowboy and Darling, were defiantly provocative. They simply dominated the cinematic conversation of the moment.

  I had encountered Schlesinger several times in London and Los Angeles and found him to be a brilliant, self-effacing man who was bemused by his own fame. Portly and balding, Schlesinger was openly gay—indeed, among the first of his generation of filmmakers to acknowledge that fact, which, in turn became part of his celebrity.

  In my mind, Schlesinger was linked to the glitz and panache of the London film scene, its hot clubs and parties. I was therefore surprised one day when he told me of his ambition to shoot a film in Hollywood, indeed to shoot the ultimate Hollywood film. We had been trading stories about our favorite books of the moment when he said that he was obsessed by the Nathanael West novel Day of the Locust. The book was dark, the story disjointed and the ending apocalyptic, but he was convinced it could be the basis for a powerful movie. And he would readily shoot it exactly where it was set—in Hollywood.

  It took me a while to assimilate Schlesinger’s words. Locust seemed antithetical to everything Schlesinger embodied: Set amid the shacks and bungalows that were the true underbelly of Hollywood, Locust told the story of the industry’s struggling wannabe artists and artisans. Schlesinger explained that Locust evoked the Hollywood of the thirties just as Darling had reflected London in the sixties. Its allegories also fascinated him; the portents of the novel all pointed to war and economic collapse. The novel was about Hollywood, but it was also about a society that was coming unhinged.

  Over the next few weeks I did some research on Locust. Schlesinger had earlier tried to develop it at Warner Bros., but the talks had gone nowhere. Hence his was not a casual interest but rather a serious commitment to the material.

  When I learned Schlesinger was shortly returning to Hollywood, I pursued our discussion. Over drinks one afternoon, I asked him whether an audience would empathize with these pathetic characters who, mothlike, were drawn to the luminous glow of Tinseltown?

  The filmmaker did not waver. The movie industry was entering an entirely new phase, he insisted. Audiences yearned for films that challenged existing value systems and that cleaved away from the traditional formulas.

  I was uneasy, but I was also thrilled at the prospect of working with this vibrant and robustly optimistic man, albeit on a downbeat movie. Paramount would develop Locust, I told him, and we would all see where it would take us.

  To craft the script, Schlesinger brought in Waldo Salt, who had written Midnight Cowboy. He also wanted Jerome Hellman, his producer on that film, to supervise Locust. Before long a $7 million budget was presented to the studio with Paramount putting up half the production budget, the rest coming from a tax shelter group.

  Bluhdorn, Yablans, and Evans all quickly signed on—this would be a go project. Even as the casting was being lined up, however, the cofinancing group suddenly changed its mind. I called Yablans and told him Paramount would be on the hook for the entire budget. Courageously, Yablans said, “Let’s make it anyway.” Schlesinger and Hellman agreed to defer most of their salaries. The production would be kept lean.

  While I was proud of my studio for backing Locust, decisions about casting began to worry me. The central character, Tod, was an individual who, like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, did not motivate the action. He was a literary device—more poetic vision than character. Jon Voight was nonetheless eager for the part. Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay were also possibilities. Schlesinger, however, was persuaded that the role should belong to a newcomer—a young actor named William Atherton was his choice. I saw his test and felt he lacked the charisma of a potential leading man. Schlesinger assured me that he wasn’t looking for charisma.

  Sally Struthers, from All in the Family, wanted to play opposite Atherton, but Schlesinger preferred Karen Black, who had appeared in a cult film called The Pyx. Supporting roles went to Donald Sutherland, Geraldine Page, and the great character actor Burgess Meredith. Schlesinger was confident that his cast would deliver.

  From the outset Schlesinger was troubled by the technical challenges of his climactic scene—an opulent movie premiere which would end in an apocalyptic riot. The scene would be both real and surreal. Three soundstages on the Paramount lot were linked together in a maze of black plastic, the facades of Hollywood Boulevard re-created with stunning vividness. Nine hundred extras all but choked the space. Some were found who resembled thirties stars like Ginger Rogers and Dick Powell.

  According to the script, the character played by Donald Sutherland would be lynched by the mob, and Sutherland volunteered to do the stunt himself. With the crowd raging, the destruction of Los Angeles was completed in ten days of shooting, with a hint that some would survive the nightmare.

  Even as an exhausted Schlesinger went home to England, he exhibited signs that he, too, was now uneasy about how his film would be received. Upon seeing a rough cut, Schlesinger wrote to his assistant director, “I know the film cannot by its nature please everyone. I simply hope it pleases enough.”

  Alas, it failed to please anyone. The premiere in Westwood ended with the audience filing out in stony silence. Schlesinger and his companion, Michael Childers, took refuge at La Scala, a favored restaurant in Beverly Hills, only to find Warren Beatty and Julie Christie dining across the room, having just come from the screening. There was no interaction until the end of the meal, when Beatty stopped by and mumbled some embarrassed vagaries of encouragement. Schlesinger understood the subtext.

  The critics were not kinder. Pauline Kael commented that “Schlesinger’s direction seems to grow worse in direct relation to the number of people on the screen.” The box office results were no more encouraging. The film ended up grossing a paltry $2.3 million, failing to cover its advertising costs.

  Paradoxically, the failure of Locust was interpreted by many as a reflection of John Schlesinger’s hatred for Hollywood. I knew this to be a misconception; his fascination with the subject matter mirrored his fascination with Hollywood as a dream factory. By the end of the movie, Schlesinger was considering the purchase of a house in town; he ultimately bought one in Palm Springs, where he spent his final days with Michael Childers following a stroke.

  In his thoughtful biography of Schlesinger, William J. Mann argued that Locust took the heart out of its auteur. “Never again would John Schlesinger attempt so lofty, so sweeping an observation,” Mann wrote. “The Day of the Locust would remain his grandest, most ambitious expression as an artist.”

  By the time Locust came out, Bob Evans was caught up in Chinatown.

  Yablans was engaged in bitter corporate battles both with Evans and Charlie Bluhdorn. Everyone was too distracted for recrimination. No one said to me, “How could you have
fostered such a uniquely uncommercial venture?”

  The admonitions were unnecessary anyway; I was already keenly aware that Nathanael West’s novel should have been left as a literary phenomenon. It was not the grist of cinema.

  CHAPTER 10

  Rising Stars

  With Hollywood’s studio system crumbling in the 1950s and 1960s, movie stars were among the most visible casualties. Ironically, the top stars had always complained about the studio mandarins who’d dictated their roles, their salaries, and even, on occasion, their wives (or husbands). The Jack Warners and Louis B. Mayers had final say on whether an actor would become a lover or a gangster and whether their renown would be that of bravery or buffoonery. Stars were often suspended by studio bosses for turning down roles or otherwise defying decrees. The gossip columns of that era were steeped in angry rhetoric from actors directed against their career tsars.

  But when the studios fell apart, these same irate actors suddenly realized that their dreaded employers had served as protectors as well as exploiters. Suddenly no one was around to develop projects or otherwise provide a protective cocoon within which an actor could build a career. Hence, just as the dream factories were falling apart, so were the careers of the pampered stars.

  By the time I arrived at Paramount, in 1967, some stars were behaving like frightened creatures that had been unexpectedly removed from their native habitat. I was stunned at the absolutely terrible career choices being made by panicked performers when faced with the specter of unemployment. Paramount’s release schedule bulged with vivid examples: Lee Marvin singing in Paint Your Wagon, Rod Steiger blustering as Napoléon in Waterloo, Rock Hudson being seduced by Julie Andrews in Darling Lili.

  Other career casualties littered the landscape: Peter Finch in The Red Tent, Tommy Steele in Where’s Jack?, Sean Connery in the The Molly Maguires, Liza Minnelli in Junie Moon, Elizabeth Taylor in Ash Wednesday, Kirk Douglas in Once Is Not Enough, Richard Burton in The Klansman, and Peter O’Toole in Murphy’s War. These were not so much roles as career enders.

  Stars were accepting any role offered them because they realized that a new era had arrived in Hollywood. Studios were looking primarily to directors, not to stars, in assembling their pictures. Equally alarming: the hot young filmmakers didn’t want to work with established actors, preferring to create their own stars rather than cope with the huge egos (and salaries) of the old guard.

  There was also another factor in play, as I soon discovered. Left to their own devices, many, if not most, stars simply didn’t know how to read scripts. They would study their own lines, obsess over a specific scene, but systematically ignore the overarching quality of the material.

  Sometimes they turned out to be either smart or lucky. Mia Farrow was so captured by the lead role in Rosemary’s Baby that she put up with the taunting of her director, Roman Polanski, and the threats of her husband, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra felt that Polanski was brutalizing his wife; more importantly, he wanted her to finish on schedule so that she could next costar in his own movie, which was supposed to start right after Rosemary’s Baby.

  Early on I realized that the most interesting projects tended to involve not the hottest actors, but those who had not as yet reached their zenith. Such was the case with Woody Allen, who had written a play titled Play It Again, Sam that Twentieth Century-Fox was interested in filming. Allen’s ambitions were not only to star in the adaptation but also to direct it. The studio, however, wasn’t interested in either option; they just wanted the property.

  Given the impasse, I approached Fox about selling the project. They rejected my entreaties—studios have always been notoriously paranoid about putting a project into turnaround for fear a rival will turn it into a hit. My sources at Fox, however, disclosed that Fox was keenly interested in an action film I had developed titled Emperor of the North Pole.

  I decided to approach Richard Zanuck, the boss of Fox, about an unorthodox trade: I would give him Emperor in return for Sam, with no money changing hands. To my surprise, he agreed. He really wanted to make Emperor but felt Woody was a lost cause.

  My last challenge was to inform Woody’s very protective handlers that Paramount would now be making Sam with Woody starring, but not directing. The director would be Herb Ross, the esteemed director of Funny Girl. My hunch (and Bob concurred) was that Ross’s work was more accessible and that he would bring a wider audience to Woody’s film.

  Woody reluctantly agreed. Sam turned out to be a major hit and would be the last successful movie in which Woody appeared as an actor but did not direct.

  While Evans and I were trying to identify new stars, Charlie Bluhdorn decided that he, too, could be a star maker. His entry was a fierce-looking Yugoslavian named Bekim Fehmiu—an actor with a thick accent and a complicated name (which he didn’t want to change). To the chairman, he had star quality written all over him.

  Fehmiu was to star in several high-profile Paramount films—the melodrama called The Adventurers, based on the Harold Robbins bestseller, and an action film titled The Deserter. Both bombed. Few filmgoers could understand his dialogue.

  When it came to rancorous quarrels over casting, it was usually Evans who bore the brunt. As an ex-actor, Evans had passionate, and usually accurate, instincts on casting, but I found the process to be utterly exasperating.

  The mechanism of the screen test itself struck me as desperately inadequate. An actor would sit in a cold room, looking utterly terrified, and be fed lines by a casting director. The tests revealed little to me beyond surface attractiveness or nervous tics. But sitting in a screening room, my studio colleagues would become passionate advocates or critics.

  After enduring several such sessions, I asked the studio casting director to do some research for me. I wanted to see great screen tests from the past; what did Brando or Newman look like when they were starting out? Would even I—an admitted newcomer to this business—be able to discern their genius?

  The studio casting guru, a bulky and forceful woman named Joyce Selznick, was delighted to take me up on my challenge, marshaling footage of old auditions. For two hours the two of us stared in awe as Brando and Newman, both raw and obviously intimidated, read their lines and tried to impress their peers. When the lights came on again, Selznick turned to me with a grin.

  “So?”

  “What cliché should I use?” I stammered. “They blew me away. They tore up the scenery ...”

  “You’re damned right.” She smiled.

  “Where can we find actors like that?” I asked dumbly.

  “Beats me,” she replied with a shrug. “I’m trying. That was a different era. Actors in those days had done Broadway, studied at the Actors Studio. But today we’re looking at mannequins.”

  The next morning I advised Evans that I was officially removing myself from casting sessions. Unless, that is, he had found the next Brando or Newman.

  I soon discovered that I was not alone in my impatience with the conventions of casting. Given the collapse of the studio system, more and more young actors saw that their career aims would not be served by making the rounds of casting directors. The process of “discovery” was too happenstance. They’d do better buying a lottery ticket.

  In my initial months at Paramount, I came into contact with three young actors who, despite their obvious differences in background and appearance, struck me as especially aggressive in this pursuit. All three had had promising breaks at the beginning of their careers. Their surface talent and their unique look had gotten them that far. But all realized how tough it was to take that next step. So many in their age group had stalled. They were determined to take that leap, even if it meant developing their own material and packaging their own projects.

  The three in question were Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, and Robert Redford. At that moment in time, all were exhibiting both big talents and big appetites. And as budding students of the system, they knew that Paramount offered opportunity amid the chaos and that we would take
chances that other studios were unwilling to take.

  Of the three (all then entering their thirties) Beatty was the most astute, Redford the most cunning, and Eastwood the hardest to read. Beatty wanted to register the fact that, despite his mythic social life, he was also the smartest kid in town. He played the girls, but he also did his homework. Redford, by contrast, was a serious, very guarded young man who was almost pathologically suspicious of the studios—even in their present disarray. He had a vision of Redford, the Star, but it was still an unformed vision. He knew who he didn’t want to become but wasn’t sure what he was chasing.

  Eastwood, oddly, was the most accessible, though inscrutable. Always attired in jeans and a T-shirt, he seemed comfortable as the handsome, but dim kid who’d made a name for himself in Rawhide. He enjoyed having a beer and talking about girls, but occasionally he would drop his guard: Beneath the pose was an intensely intelligent young man who had no intention of going through life as the hick who played in westerns. When Eastwood decided to “get serious,” his well-concealed intellect was easily as sharp as those of Redford or Beatty.

  The three actors also had this in common: intuitively they knew that they had come along at the right time. The few remaining studio stars, like Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and Spencer Tracy, were too old to compete for the leading-man roles. Montgomery Clift and James Dean had already selfdestructed. Young filmmakers didn’t want to be stymied with studio-bred leading men like Troy Donahue, Rock Hudson, or Tab Hunter. And Brando was being Brando—turning up in disasters like Burn amid reports of bad behavior. No one could compete with Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, but they were older and more expensive. There was definitely room within the ranks of the leading men for the likes of Beatty, Redford, and Eastwood.