Pictures at a Revolution (20 page)

By the time Bricusse turned in the first draft of his screenplay on October 22, the runaway success of
The Sound of Music
, which had been in theaters for seven months, was so apparent that every studio in Hollywood was pushing hard to get a giant road-show musical, or two, or three, into production. Warner Brothers was actively developing
Camelot
, the film it hoped would be the next
My Fair Lady;
Disney was planning to follow
Mary Poppins
with
The Happiest Millionaire;
Columbia had bought the rights to the Broadway shows
Funny Girl
and
Oliver!;
MGM had commissioned six new songs from Irving Berlin for a biopic called
Say It with Music;
UA was adapting
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
Alan Jay Lerner's
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
had just opened on Broadway that week, and the rights were going to Paramount; and Universal could boast the biggest casting catch of the year, having secured the services of Julie Andrews for
Thoroughly Modern Millie.
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Nowhere was the urgency greater than at Fox, where
The Sound of Music
had almost single-handedly undone the damage wrought by
Cleopatra.
So it was hardly a surprise that when Dick Zanuck and Arthur Jacobs read Bricusse's script, their orders to him were simple: Make it bigger.
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In part, Jacobs meant that literally:
Doctor Dolittle
would have to run at least two and a half hours in order to merit an intermission and a reserved-ticket, road-show-style release. Some members of the Fox team disagreed with that strategy: Mort Abrahams, who was to serve as the movie's associate producer, wondered whether the material was strong enough to make
Dolittle
a must-see event for parents and children, an audience that any road-show release needed to be successful.
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David Brown, who had left New American Library to become Zanuck's associate in New York, was analyzing the musical boom with more wariness than many of his colleagues; he noted that musical budgets were growing fast and that the pictures tended to perform poorly in markets outside the United States, an area of revenue that was already considered critical by the 1960s.
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But Jacobs and Zanuck persisted with their more-is-more vision.
Doctor Dolittle
was going to be shot on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, on location in England, where they intended to find a town to double as Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, and in the Caribbean. The studio wanted Poitier's role enlarged with a major new sequence, a flashback to Bumpo at college early in the picture, to give them more bang for their $250,000.
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And although he no longer had any hope of signing Julie Andrews, Jacobs was still hoping for big names to fill out the remaining principal roles in the cast: Emma Fairfax and the doctor's merry Irish friend Matthew Mugg.

As Fox started pulling deal memos together—the studio agreed to pay Fleischer $300,000 plus 5 percent of the net profit and $7,500 for every week the film ran over schedule,
²³
and Harrison, over and above his salary, was to receive a rising percentage of the gross if the film became a hit
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—Jacobs continued to hunt for talent. Looking for an Emma Fairfax, he went to New York in an unsuccessful effort to woo Barbra Streisand (“Forget about her,” Dick Zanuck wrote after her agents asked for $500,000).
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He then began talks with Hayley Mills, the very popular child star of Disney's
Pollyanna
and
The Parent Trap
who was, at nineteen, attempting a transition into young adult roles. Mills's participation would have been a tremendous boon in marketing the movie to kids, so much so that Fox was willing to offer her $300,000 and billing equal to Rex Harrison's.
²⁶

For the role of Matthew, Harrison, who was continuing to make his feelings known on everything from casting to Jacobs's choice of cinematographer, was enthusiastic about David Wayne, a character actor and TV mainstay in his early fifties who had been a familiar face since the Katharine Hepburn–Spencer Tracy comedy
Adam's Rib
in 1949. Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby were also among the names that had been floated.
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But Jacobs wanted a younger leading man, and an obvious candidate presented himself in Bricusse's creative partner, Anthony Newley, who at thirty-four was just wrapping up a run on Broadway in their flop,
The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd
, and was eager to relocate to Los Angeles with his wife, Joan Collins, and their two small children. After some push and pull over his salary, Fox signed him to play Matthew for $200,000,
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and the Newleys relocated to Bel Air, where Collins reentered the Hollywood social scene she loved with the vigor of an Olympic athlete.

Newley's hiring was bound to inflame Harrison, who had already made clear his distaste for musical theater actors and younger male costars, but at the moment, his mood was plummeting for other reasons. Joseph Mankiewicz's first script for
The Honey Pot
had been too innovative and bizarre for United Artists—the characters in his original screenplay included Production Code censors who were to show up periodically during the movie itself to delete unacceptable material—and to Harrison's disappointment, he had redrafted the film as a far more conventional dark comedy by the time shooting began. Mankiewicz fired his first cinematographer; the second died suddenly during the shoot; Rachel Roberts, upset that Maggie Smith had won the role she wanted in the film, was spiraling into deep depression and barbiturate abuse, and Harrison and Mankiewicz, by this point, felt, in the words of Mankiewicz's agent, Robert Lantz, “enough residual contempt [for each another] to last a lifetime.”
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At the moments when Harrison was able to turn his attention to
Dolittle
, he did so with irritation and volatility. Fleischer had found a picturesque English town called Castle Combe to serve as Puddleby, Dolittle's home village, but in November, Harrison told Jacobs and Fleischer that he didn't want to have to shoot the film in England; before agreeing to Castle Combe, he forced Fleischer to go on a pointless location-scouting trip to Ireland. The towns he found there, he told Harrison, were “depressing, faceless places, more suitable for a Great Potato Famine story.”
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(Castle Combe itself was far from ideal; a National Weather Institute memo sent to Fox warned the studio months before the shoot that the sun shone only five days a month during the summer,
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but in the manic optimism that preceded the production of
Dolittle
, the news was ignored.) Harrison also insisted that he be allowed to perform his own songs live on the set rather than lip-synching to tracks that would be recorded before the start of production, a costly whim that nobody at Fox thought was likely to yield any usable scenes. “Everything Rex did and said indicated that he was very hesitant about saying yes,” says Mort Abrahams. “He wasn't happy with the book, with the score, with the script.”
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Harrison's inconsistency bewildered Jacobs and Zanuck, who could barely keep pace with his mood swings. On December 7, his discontentment boiled over. Laurie Evans, Harrison's agent in London, called Arthur Jacobs to tell him that Harrison had read Bricusse's screenplay and was rejecting it. Jacobs was floored. “He would like to get out of his commitment,” he wrote in a memo to Zanuck. “He claims it was not written for him. It is not what his fans expect of him. He claims it is for a small round man like Edmund Gwenn. He said he will not do prat falls. He said he will not be part of a trio. He said he will not be sung to [by other actors]…. Laurie said that Rex said, ‘Why don't you get Cary Grant to do it and let me out?'…I said I was totally amazed, stunned and shocked and would get back to him.”
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Five days later, Dick Zanuck received a more serious and troubling critique of the script—a thirteen-page memo from his own father. Darryl Zanuck, in his sixties, was still a fiercely competitive man, and his son's relationship with him was, in some ways, an extended Oedipal wrestling match (literally so when the younger Zanuck was a kid and he and his father would go at it every weekend, each trying to pin the other to the ground).
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He had given his son a studio to run, but even though he now spent most of his time in New York or Europe, he still held on to his own authority and oversight. As Dick became more self-assured in his position, his father gave him a freer hand, but when he chose to step in, he did so with formidable force. Fox's willingness to throw good money after bad on
Cleopatra
had almost destroyed his studio and cost hundreds of people their jobs, and the elder Zanuck was not about to let that happen again. “Since this is the most expensive project on our entire program we have got to be positive that the final script will be a masterpiece,” he wrote. “This story can become great only if it is really funny and delightful from beginning to end…and if the musical numbers are outstanding…. In
Doctor Dolittle
we do not have any genuine suspense, no danger and no conflict…. This leaves us then with comedy and music as our foundation. It will only reach the top brackets if we are almost continually funny, delightful, and musically superior…you could eliminate almost any one of the individual episodes and you would not miss it, particularly in the last half of the screenplay. These are facts that must be analyzed even if they cannot all be ‘cured.'”

Darryl Zanuck's lecture to his son continued with a reminder that he had been in the movie business since Rin Tin Tin was a star and thus spoke from experience when he wrote, “It is my belief that you will not be able to do more than half the ‘animal scenes' that are written into the script.” The production, he warned, was bound to be “a hell of a mess.” He told his son that animal trainers always overpromise good results, that the film was too long, that Bumpo's dialogue was flat (adding, “I have never seen Sidney Poitier in a comedy”), and that a scripted encounter with a pirate ship would only raise the budget and should be eliminated.

Zanuck's conclusion was grim: “I am deeply concerned about the overall cost,” he wrote. “This is a big physical picture with enormous mechanical problems…it is absolutely essential that every episode we photograph remain in the picture. This is not a film where you can afford to overshoot.” Of
Dolittle
's planned June 1966 start date, he wrote, “Since I must speak frankly I believe you are taking a hell of a gamble…. I know of no motion picture that needs more careful and expert preparation than this one. When you deal with a number of almost uncontrollable items, it goes without saying that you have to know exactly what you can and what you can't do from a practical standpoint, otherwise it can be an economic disaster.” The memo was signed “D.F.Z.”
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Dick Zanuck's response, which was sent a few days later by cable, was amiable but firm. He reassured his father that they planned to make changes in the script, but he insisted on keeping the pirate ship sequence and calmly concluded, “Despite the multitude of problems and difficulties I do feel that we will be prepared by July First.”
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Father and son were in agreement on only one point: Rex Harrison, without knowing it, had finally overplayed his hand. The actor's tyrannical irascibility had pushed his employers to the breaking point. “He will drive us all to an asylum,” Darryl Zanuck wrote. For the first time, the Zanucks and Jacobs began a fresh discussion: What if Rex Harrison wasn't in
Doctor Dolittle
after all? Over the next several days, the three men started talking over a new list of names. What about Alec Guinness? Too much of an “art-house star,” said Darryl Zanuck. “All the boys here [in New York] are dead set against Peter Sellers,” he added. “And they are also not in favor of Jack Lemmon…while he is a star he is an out-and-out comic and a far cry from the character of Doctor Dolittle.”
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Darryl Zanuck was intrigued by the idea of Peter Ustinov, but his son resisted the suggestion, wanting to protect Richard Fleischer from another star who was thought to be uncontrollable by directors. During these discussions, Harrison's agents, oblivious to the deep trouble in which their client now found himself, were cabling Arthur Jacobs wanting to know whom he was planning to hire to rewrite Bricusse's script, music, and lyrics and conveying Harrison's wish that Alan Jay Lerner be wooed back to the film, or perhaps Frank Loesser.
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In the last week of December, the Zanucks finally found their new leading man: He had been in front of their noses for almost a year. Christopher Plummer, star of
The Sound of Music
, would be hired to replace Harrison. The studio offered Plummer $250,000
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and also spent a great deal of money to buy out his contract for Peter Shaffer's Broadway play
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
, in which he had been starring since October. By the time Harrison himself got wind of what was happening, he was too late. On December 30, he cabled Dick Zanuck himself, pleading ignorance of his agent's most recent demands. “Personally consider am fully committed Dolittle,” he wrote frantically. “Can we not clear this up personally?”
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