Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  “It’s the kind of book that needs local color. I read it in college and I always wanted to direct it, but after his success with Ulysses Joseph Strick got the job. Then there was an upheaval, which I had nothing to do with, and Strick dropped out of the picture. I had just finished Sweet November with Sandy Dennis and was getting ready to rest at the beach when the offer came through. I jumped at the chance. If we shot the whole book it would be a 27-hour movie. We’re just doing the essence of the book. But problems? We haven’t had any. The people of Selma probably realize this film is boosting the local economy by about half a million dollars, but whatever their reasons, they’ve been lovely. Negroes they’ve seen. You know what really fascinates them? James Wong Howe, the cameraman. They’ve never seen a Chinaman before.”

  Cecily Tyson, a fine Negro actress from New York, drops by the table. “When I heard they were coming down to Selma I nearly fainted. This is a film that should be made in the South, but why Selma? Also, I had heard about all the horrors the Negro actors in Hurry Sundown went through in Louisiana. But the people have bent over backward to be nice. I was in the dime store the other day and this woman introduced me to everybody in the store. One lady said, ‘We heard you were afraid to come down here,’ and I said, ‘Well, lady, wouldn’t you be?’ Then my fiancé Miles Davis came through on his way to do a jazz concert in Spain and the mayor of Selma even had his picture taken shaking Miles’ hand. I think the whole mood down here toward Negroes is changing.”

  The company’s main problem has been boredom. Selma has only one night spot with any action and it is owned by one of the acquitted accused murderers of Viola Liuzzo, so the company refuses to go there. Mostly they just sit around in their rooms at the Holiday Inn Motel and watch George Wallace’s speeches on TV and cook their food in popcorn poppers. Everyone visiting from New York is instructed to bring CARE packages. Alan Arkin’s wife flew down with a Nathan’s corned beef, a pastrami, two five-and-a-half-foot kosher salamis, a Reuben’s cheesecake and six dozen bagels, and the whole take was gone in 40 minutes.

  But life goes on. The company moves past decaying Negro shacks with holes in the roofs, past Bar-B-Q stands and the Silent Nite Tourist Court For Whites Only, to an old deserted 13-room Southern Gothic white gingerbread house the color of divinity fudge, which the group rents for $125 a month (“Which,” winks a grip, “means if we weren’t a film company we’d get it for $75”). Cables line the staircase and stepladders clutter the scuppernong arbor. Alan Arkin, who plays the deaf-mute named Singer, plays cards under a Tiffany lamp in the master bedroom. Sondra Locke, in blue jeans and a denim shirt, leans against a fireplace that looks like it survived the Civil War. She’s a cotton-haired, creamy-dreamy moon-pie Southern teenager from Shelbyville, Tennessee, who looks like a young Kim Stanley. Like most Southern kids, she has been playing movie stars all her life. She spends most of her time off-camera reciting to the cast from All About Eve and she can practically remember Geraldine Page’s entire telephone call to Walter Winchell in Sweet Bird of Youth. “I read this ad in the Nashville paper that they were gonna make this movie, so I thought I better go to Birmingham and see if I could get in it. It was 200 miles away from Shelbyville, but I had played Laura in Glass Menagerie and Emily in Our Town, you know, and my parents knew this was just what I wanted to do, be in a movie, so they didn’t stop me. I read with all these other girls for this New York talent scout who discovered the two girls in The World of Henry Orient and she asked me come to New York and read again, so they brought me up to New York and put me up at the Y.”

  “The Y!! Haven’t you ever heard of the Plaza Hotel?” I asked, visualizing Warners spending some of those My Fair Lady profits at the Y.

  “Well, the movie people recommended the Y, I guess ’cause I was unchaperoned. Anyway, I got the part and I still can’t believe it. The hardest part is cryin’. You know, I had this scene where my parents told me I had to quit school and I just got so wrapped up in it that I started cryin’, but then they stopped the camera and shot it from another angle and I couldn’t cry again. I mean some people can just keep cryin’, you know? But they had to put somethin’ in my eyes. I haven’t read the book. I couldn’t get through it. But I just love makin’ movies. Now I think I’d like to skip college and go out to California because if I wait five years after this movie comes out, people will just say, ‘Who are you?!’ They forget, you know? But boy, I don’t know. Hollywood is a long way from Shelbyville.”

  Outside in the cold, the crowd stands wrapped in blankets, watching James Wong Howe spray the camellia bushes with sugar and water. “This Southern movie, I see bulleflies,” he says, perched on a ladder in a ten-gallon cowboy hat, smoking a cigar and waving a mean-looking bamboo stick. The crew blows smoke into the frosty air in wool coats and mufflers and sips hot chocolate to warm numb lips. So far, nobody has caught pneumonia. “Pneumonia,” says Miller to cheer up his freezing actors, “is just a cold handled by MCA.”

  The scene begins. Alan Arkin, in a light summer suit, walks across the lawn, which has been sprayed green because it’s supposed to be summer. The “bulleflies” have discovered Howe’s sugar water, and they are swarming in front of his filter lens. Miss Locke, sobbing on the porch, is, in front of the cameras, an actress to the manner born: she has just been slapped by her father. Biff McGuire, the actor who plays her father, has left town on a plane for New York two weeks ago, so she must remember the slap. Arkin pauses on the porch, where Miss Locke screams, “GO AWAY, I HATE YOU!” through a cascade of glycerine teardrops. Howe’s camera rises up the side of the house, peers through the organdy curtains as Arkin turns the light out in his rented bedroom. Cut.

  “Would you pose for a still, Alan?” Arkin shoots a hard look at the photographer. A red-faced director’s assistant rushes over. “Mr. Arkin does not like to pose after he does a shot. If you ask him again, I won’t be responsible!” Howe interrupts, poking the photographer with his bamboo stick. “I once asked an actor to pose for a still in the middle of Ventura Boulevard and he told me to go tend my goddam noodles.”

  Arkin’s sensitivity possibly stems from the torturous role he plays. He is the mute around whom the other characters revolve, representing man’s inability to communicate. Everyone talks to him, but he talks to nobody in return, showering his love instead on a mentally retarded Greek, a part originally planned for nightclub comic Jackie Vernon, who was fired when Strick walked off the film. Now the part belongs to 300-pound TV comic Chuck McCann, who was recommended by Arkin’s son Adam. McCann is so fat that nobody could find a Southern icecream suit big enough to fit him until Miller’s wife Pola hit upon the idea of checking the Warners wardrobe department in Hollywood for Sydney Greenstreet’s old costumes. Now moviegoers will see McCann in Greenstreet’s actual mean-man suit from his old Bogart movies.

  Arkin himself has studied sign language from an Alabama man whose parents were both deaf, and now he knows it so well that he often stops scenes when he misspells a word on his fingers. “It’s easier to play a blind man than a deaf man,” he says. “An actor’s job is to listen and I can’t listen in this role because I’m not supposed to hear what anybody is saying. You can close your eyes and not see, but you can’t put contact lenses in your ears. I visited a deaf-mute school in Montgomery and I learned they are not freaks. Because his parents were deaf, my teacher said he used to try to sneak in late at night when he was a teenager. Every time they’d come in and beat the hell out of him. Once he broke his foot and couldn’t get out of bed and if he needed something he’d stamp his other foot on the floor and they’d come running. Most parents with normal hearing probably wouldn’t hear that vibration. The sign language was the easiest thing to learn. I got it in a day or two. Now I can talk to mutes who visit the set. Stereotyped in my mind, they were always people who were not terribly bright, wildly animated at all times in trying to express themselves, and undisciplined emotionally. I guess I got that from watching Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Then I met the
m and found an infinite variety in character, personality and intelligence. Some are very straight-laced, others talk a blue streak. So there is no one way to play a mute. This character remains a million miles away from me, so I have to look for details in the role to make it real. Like the script said ‘He reaches in pocket for loose change.’ I didn’t feel he would have loose things in his pocket, so we got a little change purse. I carry a watch fob with a gold chain, and a Mark Cross pencil. I planned the way he arranges things meticulously in a little toilet kit in his room. I don’t know if audiences will notice these details, but they’ve made this mute come true for me and sometimes out of my reactions to people there’s even humor I hadn’t planned onscreen that I never got onstage. Movies have been my first love all my life, I waited for 25 years to do films and I think I’ll stick with the medium now. The thought of another year in a play fills me with dread. After three months in a play I start falling to pieces. That’s what happened to me in Luv. This is the hardest role I’ve ever played, but as far as playing the mute as a freak, that’s out. I’ve learned that the only difference between them and us is that when they make love they’re much quieter about it.”

  Tom Ryan, the scriptwriter and co-producer, is the man who knows the whole story. For him, the McCullers novel has been the object of six years’ hard work. “I closed the book on January 11, 1962, and wrote the movie. In August of 1963, I went to her home in Nyack and read it to her. She loved it. Sidney Lumet was supposed to direct with Monty Clift as Singer. Then we couldn’t get any insurance on Monty and it fell through. David Susskind optioned it. Ely Landau optioned it. He wanted Warren Beatty—can you imagine? Warren Beatty?—and we could never agree, so he dug in his heels and I dug in mine and we got nowhere. The rights reverted back to me and I was right back where I started. It’s got no story. I couldn’t interest people by telling them, ‘Well, it’s about this deaf- mute . . .’ Everybody said, ‘It’s absolutely beautiful and I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.’ Then Alan Arkin got into the act. He had just opened in Luv and his agent called and said, ‘Alan is the only actor in the world to play Singer.’ Three years passed and Russians Are Coming was out and he was hot in movies and he walked into this restaurant and said, ‘You gotta give me the part now; I’ve gone to all the trouble of becoming a star just so I could play it.’ So I had a star and a script and no money. The only company that liked it enough to back it was Warners-Seven Arts. They said, ‘Some pictures you just have to make whether they make money or not!’ Then Joe Strick wanted to direct, and we were on. Ben Edwards, the set designer, is a Southerner, so he suggested Selma and when we saw it we agreed. We came to Selma the end of August and shooting was supposed to begin September 19. Then we had an artistic clash about the script. Strick wanted a decidedly homosexual interpretation to the mute’s love for the Greek. He saw it very downbeat, depressing. He even wanted the scenes filmed in gray, like the Ascot number in My Fair Lady. I had already re-written it 18 times, so I tried to do it his way, but I just didn’t believe in it. Strick said, ‘We’ve reached an impasse and I’ll make it very easy for you. I’ll just quit.’ And he did. I never suspected he’d quit. I thought he’d listen to reason. Then Miller, who I remembered from a TV show he directed about a retarded child, took over and now I’m delighted with the way things are working out. Everybody is working for scale except Alan, who is getting half his regular salary. Even James Wong Howe, one of the most expensive cameramen in the world, agreed to cut his price. Fifty years in the business and he wanted to do it because he loves the property. I wrote Hurry Sundown and I don’t want anything like that to happen to this film. Somebody sent me a theme song with a Tex Ritter-type voice strumming a guitar singing ‘The sun is hot, the sky opaque/You feel so hot you think you’ll bake/The heart is a lonely hunter, searching for someone to love . . .” We’re not going to have anything monstrous like that. Adolph Green accused me of writing it myself as a joke. I’ve written the best script I know how to write. It’s the first time in my life I’ve felt that. And it’s coming out on the screen the way I saw it in my mind when I wrote it. No writer has any right to expect any more than that. I think—I hope—Carson McCullers would be proud.”

  And so, a few months after her own untimely death at the age of 50, Mrs. McCullers’ best novel is coming to the screen. But the problem remains: can they make a commercial Hollywood movie out of a poetic story about a teenage girl so desperate to find her identity that she pulls her baby brother along the streets of a burned-out Southern town in a wagon just to hear the sound of music floating through the windows of other people’s houses, a deaf-mute who never speaks, and a mentally retarded Greek whose death results in the mute’s own suicide? On paper, it’s art. But will they buy it with their popcorn in Cactus Junction? Back at the old house, where they’re now shooting the suicide scene, two views. Things are tense. The light goes off in Arkin’s room. A gunshot. Miss Locke runs up the stairs and lets loose with a scream so blood-curdling even Bette Davis would approve. Tom Ryan beams under a magnolia tree. “You’ve either got a great movie or you’ve got crap. I think we’ve got a great movie.” And out on the street, in the crowd of onlookers, an old codger smoking a corncob pipe turns to his wife and says, “Well, c’mon, Leota, les go home, we done missed half the Dean Martin Show awreddy.” Carson McCullers couldn’t have written it better herself.

  The Golden Globe Awards

  February, 1968

  NBC’s telecast of the Foreign Press Association’s 25th annual Golden Globe Awards had to be seen to be disbelieved. This ludicrous event is so suspiciously corrupt even NBC and the Federal Communications Commission have sent lawyers to have it investigated. But award-giving, pointless as it is, is still big business, and it also gives viewers a chance to see their favorite stars make fools of themselves in public, so the Golden Globes were back, minus some of their sponsors, who backed out at the last minute. After a few boring words from the FPA’s president Howard Luft (No relation to Sid—this Mr. Luft comes on like a Sid Caesar takeoff on Eric Von Stroheim, interspersed with shots of the stars laughing at him from their tables), emcee Andy Williams summed up what followed: “If you’re a winner or a loser, it really doesn’t matter too much.”

  Then Mary Tyler Moore, looking like a buck-toothed Dorothy Lamour, and Peter Lawford, looking like a retarded court jester with his new baby bangs, presented the Best Director award to Mike Nichols, who didn't show up. Nancy Sinatra (No matter how she spends her father’s money, she always looks like a pizza waitress) gave the Supporting Actor award to Richard Attenborough, who didn’t show up either (tough-broad closeup of Janet Leigh with a cigarette hanging from her lips).

  Carol Channing accepting the Supporting Actress award, thanked “Julie Andrews and her wonderful cast,” whatever that means (closeup of Julie Andrews, telling somebody a story and not listening). John Wayne staggered onstage to present the Best Actress in a Comedy award to Anne Bancroft, who didn’t show up (closeup of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, eating). Sally Field, “delicious, delectable, delightful” star of Flying Nun, flew in from the top of the ceiling, got tangled up in her wiring, and was left hanging there. Her award went to Best Actor in a Musical or a Comedy, Richard Harris, who didn’t show up. “He isn’t here,” said Faye Dunaway, who didn’t win anything. “For once in his life, common sense prevailed.”

  After some interminable Pagliacci-like suffering from Jerry Lewis, the Best Comedy or Musical Film Award went to The Graduate (closeup of Warren Beatty cursing). Then after an insipidly limp medley of song nominees, Andy Williams introduced his wife Claudine, with something hideous in her hair that looked like stringed popcorn. She gave the Best Song of the Year award to a six-year-old song from Camelot. Rod Steiger did show up to get his Best Actor in a Dramatic Film Award, although presenter Jim Brown called it “In the Heap of the Night” (closeup of Warren Beatty cursing). Natalie Wood, looking like she had just come from a yoga lesson, gave the Best Dramatic Film of the Year Award to t
he same film (another closeup of Warren Beatty cursing). Candy Bergen, in a riding habit, looked alternately shocked and amused (as well she should be) when her film Live for Life won Best Foreign Film of the Year.

  It was the one genuine reaction in an evening of hypocrisy and ho-hum boredom that included a Best Male TV Performer Award, a Best Female Newcomer to the Screen Award, a Best Favorite World Performer Award and, as if determined to prove once and for all what trouble movies are in, there was even something called the “Female World Film Favorite” Award. It went to Julie Andrews, who stopped talking long enough to say a simple “Thank you.” The whole blooming agony looked like it would never end.

  Just last week Newsweek magazine reported denials from the Foreign Press Association that its members give awards to the stars who throw the biggest feeds. “We are not influenced by a glass of champagne,” snapped Luft. “Kirk Douglas threw a party last year, and what did he win? Nothing.”

  This year there was even a special category called the Cecil B. DeMille Humanitarian Award. Who won? You guessed it. Kirk Douglas.