Pictures at a Revolution (11 page)

At lunch, the conversation turned to Arthur Penn's 1958 film,
The Left Handed Gun.
“We were all interested in how a western could be made a different way,” says Wright. “And Godard turned to me and said, ‘Could you arrange a screening for me by tomorrow?' I thought, this is a challenge—Godard is saying, I wonder if this kid has enough clout to set up a screening on short notice.” Wright managed to book a showing of Penn's film, after which he says Godard warmed toward them a bit.
¹⁹
For their part, Benton and Newman had quickly transferred their enthusiasm to the director—whom, after all, they had already labeled a pillar of the New Sentimentality. “I think they were just so enamored of his work and of the possibility of getting another one of their film heroes,” says Jones.
²⁰

“Bob and David just wanted to get it made!” says Leslie Newman. “To have people like Truffaut and Godard coming in—oh, my God, these were their idols, the people whose movies they worshipped.”
²¹

But the producers had as many doubts about what Godard would bring to Benton and Newman's script as Godard had about them. “The truth is that Norton and I didn't want Godard—we didn't like him for
Bonnie and Clyde,”
says Jones. “I think that particularly upset David.”
²²

It was in this context—one of growing tension, unarticulated concerns, and intense time pressure—that the key players in
Bonnie and Clyde
gathered at Elinor and Tom Jones's apartment on September 19 for a meeting that has since become one of the great gallows-humor moments in the film's history, although decades of embellishment and retelling have blurred some of the precise details.
²³
Assembled in the living room were Godard, Jones, and Wright; Benton and Newman; and Helen Scott, who was continuing to act as a liaison on the project.
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After some pleasantries, they got down to business. “Everybody remembers that meeting differently,” says Benton. But it began to go wrong almost from the start, when Godard, with little preamble, announced that he wanted to begin preproduction on
Bonnie and Clyde
in December—just three months away—and that he intended to shoot the movie in New Jersey in January, on a four-week shooting schedule. He also said he wanted to give the script to Columbia right away, information that took everyone by surprise.

Nobody in the living room had very much to say as Godard talked, but after a few minutes, Norton Wright's reservations boiled over into panic. “I said to him, you know, that's really not the way to do it. This is a period piece, it's an expensive piece, we should shoot it on location in the places where Bob and David had done their research. The spring would be good, or maybe the fall—but it's snowy and cold and wet in New Jersey.”

Whatever Wright's exact words were—he had apparently referred to meteorological reports—they caused the temperature in the room to plunge dramatically. According to Benton, Godard stood up, said, “I'm talking cinema and you're talking meteorology,” and walked out of the apartment.

Others at the meeting don't recall Godard's departure as being quite so dramatic; he may have excused himself to use the restroom and said his good-byes and left soon after that. Norton Wright says Godard's comment about “matters
météorologiques”
was made not at the meeting, but to Benton and Newman the next day; over drinks, just before Godard left for Paris, he told the two writers, “Call me when the script reverts to your ownership.” But nobody disputes the astonishing swiftness with which the meeting and Godard's involvement in
Bonnie and Clyde
were terminated.

Elinor Jones and her brother were ashen. Jones tried, the next day, to reconstruct what had gone wrong in a conversation with Helen Scott, who filled in a key piece of information that Godard hadn't shared with them: He had been trying to get out of a contract to shoot the film
Alphaville
for Columbia, and in order to have a chance of getting the studio to agree to a switch in projects, he needed
Bonnie and Clyde
to replace it in the exact same spot on his schedule. Harrison Starr, who was still hoping that he might be able to produce the film if Jones and Wright fell out of the picture, felt it could have worked on Godard's terms. “Mike Frankovich had worked in Europe, so he heard the beat of the drum—he could pick it up, that way of making movies,” he says. “We could have done the picture very well for $350,000, and that's what Columbia was looking for.”
²⁴

Godard, though nobody involved in
Bonnie and Clyde
knew it at the time, had been so serious about shooting the movie that, while in New York, he had met with Elliott Gould—then known only as the man who had recently married Barbra Streisand—and Buck Henry, who had both flown from Los Angeles to discuss making the film with him over dinner at the Algonquin. “I go into the restaurant, and there's Jean-Luc Godard, sitting cross-legged on a banquette,” says Henry. “And we sit down and have a meal. It made no sense at all. Apparently, Elliott had talked to Godard about doing
Bonnie and Clyde
, and he was going to get him a writer to do it, and we had this strange conversation where I guess I told Godard how much I liked his films, and he said a lot of things to me that I didn't understand at all, culminating in, ‘I will write things on legal pads and send them to you!' I said, ‘Great.' I went off, spent the night in Barbra and Elliott's apartment, and I don't think I ever heard about it again.”
²⁵

Godard was a “strange, mad guy,” Helen Scott told Jones. But, she added, her and her brother's inexperience was what had really caused the problem. Producers more schooled in handling directors with volatile temperaments would have read the situation correctly and just rolled with whatever Godard was suggesting; they would have understood that all decisions made now could be altered later. Had Harrison Starr been present at the meeting, Scott told her, he would have known how to handle Godard. The director “wanted simple enthusiasm from us,” Jones wrote in the notes she had begun to keep after important meetings. “But our cool response to giving the script to Columbia really turned him off, and the word ‘meteorologically' really threw him…. He felt we were formal, slow, reserved [and behaved as if we were] ‘not sure we really wanted Godard.'”
²⁶

When Truffaut heard what had happened, he called it “unfortunate.” Wright and Jones, he said, shouldn't have shown their distress; “they should have known that Columbia would have decided when it could have been done.”
²⁷

More than forty years later, Wright says, “I take great pride that I was the fella that prevented the movie being made by Godard, because he would not have made a good movie out of a marvelous, exceptional, groundbreaking script. We had just equated Truffaut and Godard with the New Wave in our minds, but the difference was immense—Truffaut had a huge humanitarian heart, and Godard was doing almost self-reflexive movies after that.” But at the time, Wright was mortified by the cave-in his innocuous comment had caused and, like Jones, wondering what their next move could possibly be.
²⁸

Helen Scott encouraged Jones to shrug off the meeting, calling it “terribly funny.” “Don't feel desolate!” she said. “You've had an experience with Godard.”
²⁹
But Jones and her brother were devastated; in the space of two weeks,
Bonnie and Clyde
had lost two directors. And Benton and Newman were no less glum. “After that, all the air seemed to go out of it,” says Leslie Newman.
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“It was really nobody's fault,” says Benton, “but we thought, ‘That's it. It's over.'”
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As the fall
of 1964 began,
The Graduate
was no closer to finding a home at a studio than
Bonnie and Clyde
was. Larry Turman had pitched his movie to every studio executive on both coasts, assuring them that the film could be made for just $1 million, but he had overestimated the degree to which Mike Nichols's involvement would be a selling point. “I couldn't get to first base at the studios with Nichols,” he says. “They didn't care about
Barefoot in the Park
—he had never directed a movie before.”
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The fact that Turman was trying to make a deal without having a script to show anyone may have made his task even more difficult. Paramount's production chief, Jack Karp, turned him down flat; so did Mike Frankovich, who, focused on Europe, had never heard of Nichols. Even when Turman went to United Artists to talk to David Picker, who at thirty-three was one of the youngest and most forward-looking studio executives in the business (he had been the first to recognize the potential value of the James Bond franchise), he got a flat no: Picker looked at the novel's sparse descriptions and uninflected dialogue and said, “What's funny about it?”
³³

While Turman was making the rounds, Nichols was in the middle of his own misadventure in Los Angeles, getting a taste of the difference between New York theater culture and the priorities of a Hollywood studio. He and Peter Shaffer had made good progress on the script for
The Public Eye
, working together in Nichols's New York apartment at the Beresford every morning—or, given Nichols's night-owl lifestyle, every afternoon. “He was so sweet,” says Nichols. “We had a great time. He used to get very pissed off at me for oversleeping—he'd be there waiting, and I'd be late to a meeting in my own apartment!”

Nichols had not yet met the man who was to produce
The Public Eye
for Universal, Ross Hunter, the discreetly gay, indiscreetly extravagant, luxury-obsessed creator of what had become a house style for the studio's “women's pictures.” The prolific Hunter was probably Universal's most important in-house producer at a time when the studio didn't have much to show for itself: He would deliver several films a year, usually a mix of very lucrative Doris Day pictures,
Tammy
movies, and melodramas like the remake of
Imitation of Life
, most of which shared a deep passion for interior decoration, hair, costume design, makeup, and scores drenched in Mantovaniesque strings. Nobody, including Hunter, made great claims for the film's scripts or performances, but his ability to deliver moneymaking movies had won him a measure of respect and power at the studio. “I have nothing against art,” Hunter once said.
“Hiroshima Mon Amour
is great, but I wouldn't have produced it if I'd had the chance.”
³⁴
At Universal, there was no danger of that.

Hunter was an odd match for a project that came from a British playwright and a New York director, but Shaffer, says Nichols, “was very funny and nice about it. I'd say, ‘What will we do about this guy Ross Hunter?' And Peter would say, ‘Well, I'll take care of him.' And he started doing things like writing, ‘She appears at the top of the stairs' in the script, and then he would say, in parentheses, ‘beautifully gowned.' He'd put in a lot of that shit to keep Ross Hunter happy.”

When Shaffer finished the screenplay, Nichols was invited to Los Angeles to meet Hunter face-to-face. The two men had absolutely nothing to say to each other, but, determined to make the best of it, they spent the evening watching Norman Jewison's
Send Me No Flowers
, one of the rare Doris Day movies that Universal had made without Hunter's supervision, which was to open in October. When the screening ended, Nichols, feeling awkward, said to Hunter, “Did you enjoy the movie?”

“Well, it offended me as a producer,” said Hunter.

“I said, ‘How do you mean?'” Nichols recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, as a producer, I was very offended by it.' I said, ‘I don't understand, completely.' And he said, ‘Well, as a producer, I wanted to rush up to the screen and just rip every bow off her dress.' And I said, ‘Okay.' And I went back to my hotel and called my agent and said, ‘I can't do this—I can't make this movie.' I mean, it would be hopeless. I knew I would kill him.”
³⁵

Nichols got out of his commitment to make
The Public Eye;
there was a vague announcement in the press that the film would be postponed “for a while.”
³⁶
“I think there was something unpleasant, a deal in which I owed Universal a movie, and I think it cost me money, too. But anyway, it was over,” he says.
³⁷
The Graduate
was now slated to be Nichols's first movie after all, if Turman could find anyone willing to make it—and just as
The Public Eye
was falling apart, he did: Joseph E. Levine, the founder of Embassy Pictures.

Embassy wasn't a Hollywood studio; it was, wrote Turman later, “the last stop on the line.”
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But the company was also a rarity in 1964: a well-financed American producer and distributor of movies that operated at the whim of one man independently of the studios (though he would sometimes produce movies for them). Levine had founded Embassy in the 1950s, using it as a pipeline through which he brought Italian movies to the United States—cheap, redubbed sword-and-sandals action films and Hercules pictures. “He was a great character, Levine,” says Buck Henry. “For the Hercules movies, he hired me to be the voice of young Ulysses, the putz who trails after Hercules and keeps saying, ‘No, Hercules! Don't go there! That's where the sirens live!'”
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