Pictures at a Revolution (21 page)

The next day, Dick Zanuck sent a telegram to Harrison assuring him that it was nothing personal at all. “From the very beginning you were always our number one choice,” Zanuck wrote. “I am extremely gratified to receive your wires which express your attitude of honor and integrity…. Really Rex I am dreadfully sorry that things have turned out this way.”
⁴¹
Then he fired him.

T
he weekend that Warren Beatty contacted Robert Benton and read the script for
Bonnie and Clyde
also brought the opening of the film he had let slip away,
What's New, Pussycat?
Buoyed by the combination of Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers, the movie became a substantial hit for United Artists; except for
Goldfinger
and the three blockbuster musicals that were still dominating American screens,
Pussycat
was the highest-grossing film of 1965.
¹
But the final product contained only shreds of the idea that had attracted Beatty in the first place—the notion of turning a man who was unsuccessfully juggling relationships with several different women into a comic hero. “I know Woody [Allen] didn't agree with me on this,” says Beatty. “His point of view was always, if you're successful with women, what's the problem? But even after my bad experience on
Pussycat
, I still thought the compulsive Don Juan could be a basically sympathetic character.”
²

Soon after the movie opened, Beatty found, by accident, a writer who agreed with him. Like so many young filmmakers in the mid-1960s, Robert Towne was working for Roger Corman—he had written 1964's
Tomb of Ligeia
, the last in a long series of luridly enjoyable Edgar Allan Poe horror films starring Vincent Price that American International Pictures had been turning out for years. Towne and Beatty shared a psychotherapist, and their friendship began to develop after they met in his waiting room. Towne was working on a rewrite of a western in which Corman wanted Beatty to star, and Beatty, though he wasn't particularly interested in the project, liked the writing.
³
He began to talk to Towne about his idea for what he called “an updated version of Wycherly's
The Country Wife
—a guy pretends to be gay, but he's really getting more action than anybody. In [the 1960s] if you were a hairdresser, people assumed you were gay. So we talked about making the guy a hairdresser and began to work on it.”
⁴
In its early stages, the screenplay was called
Hair;
eventually it became
Shampoo.

As that project began what turned out to be a decade-long gestation, Beatty kept his eye on
Bonnie and Clyde.
François Truffaut's unexpected return to the film rekindled the hopes of Elinor Jones and Norton Wright for a couple of months during the summer, but Truffaut's idea for how to make it seemed, suddenly, to be disappointingly close to the vision Jean-Luc Godard had expressed that
Bonnie and Clyde
should be shot quickly, cheaply, and without any big names. Alexandra Stewart, despite her distinct French Canadian accent, would be fine for Bonnie, he insisted. And when Wright suggested they get in touch with Paul Newman about playing Clyde, Truffaut replied that Newman would make the film “too important and disproportionate….. Scooter Teague [Anthony Teague, an actor who had played a tiny role in
West Side Story
] and Robert Walker [Jr.] seem to me adequate for the two male parts.”
⁵
And Elinor Jones's belief that United Artists would jump at the project now that Truffaut was ready to commit himself proved unfounded. “He was not considered by United Artists someone who could make money,” she said. “David [Picker] always backed it—but he needed [Krim and Benjamin's] approval. He couldn't pull it together himself. And they didn't want it.”
⁶

Once it became clear to Truffaut that there was no way
Bonnie and Clyde
could be shot before
Fahrenheit 451
(which was to be made by Universal), he lost interest in the movie altogether, and at the end of August, he dropped out for the second and last time.
^*
The movie Robert Benton and David Newman had conceived as an American version of a French New Wave film had now lost both of the directors who inspired it, and the Nouvelle Vague itself, by late 1965, was no longer the representation of cinema's future that it had seemed to be two years earlier. The fickle attention of American audiences was shifting decisively from France to England, in particular to the brittle, contemporary, sexy London comedies—
Darling, Alfie, The Knack, Morgan
—that were creating a new generation of stars.

Jones and Wright had three months left on their option, and they made some halfhearted runs at directors, hoping to attract, among others, Philippe de Broca, who had directed 1964's farcical
That Man from Rio
.
⁷
Having been turned down by every major studio they had approached, they also contacted producer Claude Giroux to see if an independent company, Allied Artists, might be interested in the film.
⁸
But Jones and Wright both knew their chance to make
Bonnie and Clyde
had probably passed. At one point, Jones began to wonder if there was a problem with the script that she just wasn't seeing. “I thought, maybe it has to be rewritten. And Bob and David said no, and they were right.”
⁹

In the fall of 1965, Beatty made a single attempt to get in touch with Elinor Jones, calling her in New York and leaving a message. Jones ran across the hall to tell her brother (who had, with his wife, moved into an apartment across from the Joneses). “We thought, hey, this is terrific—when he calls back, we'll say, let's get into business together,” says Wright. But they never heard from Beatty again. “Why did he call?” says Jones. “It's a mystery to me. I think he found out, after that call, that the option was up in two months and just waited us out.”

Jones and Wright went to see Arthur Penn's
Mickey One
that September at the third annual New York Film Festival, where it was coolly received. Wright thought it was “a turkey of a movie—one of Penn's few.”
¹⁰
Beatty's concern during the long Chicago production that the movie was “too fucking obscure” turned out to be well-founded.
“Mickey One
is a strange and sometimes confused offbeat yarn which is going to need careful nursing if it is to make real impact at the wickets,” warned
Variety
's reviewer.
¹¹
But Columbia Pictures was ready to cut its losses on the film, and it snuck into (and out of) theaters three weeks later. “The morning after
Mickey One
opened, I called the studio and said, how did it do?” says Beatty. “They said, it did thirteen dollars. I said, is that good?”
¹²

On November 27, 1965, Jones and Wright's option on
Bonnie and Clyde
lapsed. The same day, Beatty bought Benton and Newman's script, paying them $75,000.
¹³
The producers were disappointed but not angry. “My reading of it is that Beatty moved, professionally and with alacrity, once the option expired,” says Wright.
¹⁴
“He did what a smart producer would do.” When Jones saw the movie two years later, “I was very proud,” she recalls. “I knew that we had done all we could. We believed in Bob and David's screenplay, and seeing the movie, I knew we had bet on the right horse.”
¹⁵

 

That fall,
when Sydney Pollack's suicide hotline movie
The Slender Thread
had its first preview in Encino, its screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, was sitting in the audience. In the network TV universe, Silliphant was famous, regarded on the same level as Paddy Chayefsky or Rod Serling. An adulatory
Time
magazine profile in 1963 titled “The Fingers of God” had called him “television's thinking man”
¹⁶
and noted that he now commanded $10,000 to write an hour of episodic drama, a fee that added up quickly since Silliphant was, by any standards, extraordinarily productive. In the first season of
Naked City
, his innovative, textured police drama, he wrote thirty-one out of thirty-nine episodes himself; by the early 1960s, he had turned his attention to
Route 66
, a series about two young men traveling across the country in a Corvette. The show, though it had a couple of continuing characters, was really an anthology that allowed Silliphant to explore any themes that grabbed his attention—he had a particular taste for politically chancy, forward-looking topics—within the space of an hour, creating a new set of guest characters and conflicts every week (he later referred to the show as “a dramatization of my personal four-year psychiatric exhumation of all the shit that was bubbling inside me”).

Silliphant had written a handful of feature films in the late 1950s, but, consumed by work on his television shows, which brought him a seven-figure annual income, he hadn't had a big-screen credit since the 1960 horror movie
Village of the Damned
when he completed
The Slender Thread.
“Stirling was the most prolific writer in the world,” says Pollack. “He used to write on toilet paper when he was in the bathroom, literally. He was extremely fast and extremely facile—so facile that he could sometimes go off in crazy directions. He could write on a plane, in a waiting room, on napkins, and he didn't know where it came from. He was a very mystical guy, and he thought his own talent was mystical.” On
The Slender Thread
, Pollack had eventually brought in his own writer, David Rayfiel. “I was lying and hiding the rewriting going on with David, but when Stirling found out, he wasn't upset or possessive. He just said, ‘Fantastic, can we get him to do some more?'”
¹⁷

Silliphant had been attracted to the idea of writing a script that paired Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft in a drama in which “race was totally ignored [because] neither hero nor heroine could see each other.” But the gimmick, which might have been able to sustain an episode of
Route 66
, proved too flimsy for a feature-length film, and far from ignoring race, it also made the story disconcertingly similar to
A Patch of Blue
, another drama in which a white woman drew strength from Poitier without actually seeing him. As he watched the preview of
The Slender Thread
, Silliphant later said, “It was clear the picture was NOT giving off sparks.” The man sitting next to him felt it as well. “A bomb, huh?” he said. “A fucking bomb, from start to finish,” Silliphant replied. “I doubt that [a] single person in America will ever bother to buy a ticket.”
¹⁸

The man next to Silliphant turned out to be Sidney Poitier's agent, Martin Baum, who told him, “I want you to know something: Sidney doesn't blame you for this picture.” Then Baum gave him a piece of advice: Get another screenplay assignment fast, before this turkey opens and word about it starts to spread. Two days later, Baum arranged a meeting between Silliphant and Walter Mirisch at which Mirisch gave him John Ball's novel
In the Heat of the Night.
¹⁹
When Mirisch had first purchased the book, he intended the writing job to go to Robert Alan Aurthur,
²⁰
a friend of Poitier's who had written an episode of
The Philco Television Playhouse
for the actor that was so well received, it became a feature with Poitier, 1957's
Edge of the City.
But Aurthur hadn't worked out, and Mirisch, on Baum's recommendation, turned to Silliphant.

Anyone taking on the challenge of adapting Ball's novel would have a great deal of work to do, since
In the Heat of the Night
, on the page, was a far cry from the story it became on the screen. Ball's basic outline was workable and remains recognizable in the finished film: Virgil Tibbs, a black police officer, is waiting for a train in a small southern town, having just visited his mother, when a murder occurs. After first being questioned as a suspect, Tibbs reveals his profession and stays on to work with the grudging, racist, and suspicious local police force to help solve the case.

But the way in which Ball had fleshed out the story and characters would have to be completely discarded. Ball had first conceived the plot of
In the Heat of the Night
back in 1933 and had written the novel in 1960; it took him four years to find a publisher.
²¹
Virgil Tibbs was already, by 1965, a retrograde character whose placid reaction to a racially charged situation was far too outdated for Poitier to play, or for any moviegoer who would choose to see this film in the first place to believe. On screen, Poitier was a master at keeping a lid on his anger while letting his audience know it simmered just beneath the surface of his characters, but Tibbs, in the novel, seems to be almost completely untroubled and to have no interior life at all. In Ball's novel, the character of Police Chief Gillespie is a minor one; the murder victim (and the reason for his killing) is different; and Endicott, the white tycoon who rules the small town, is a friendly, pro–civil rights progressive. Tibbs himself is imagined almost completely from the outside, often from the perspective of Officer Sam Wood (the character eventually played by Warren Oates): “The Negro climbed out and submitted without protest when Sam seized his upper arm and piloted him into the police station,” writes Ball.
²²
Tibbs, in the novel, explains his investigative techniques with inexhaustible patience and pages-long loquacity; the mystery concludes with him gathering all the suspects in a room and, like Mr. Moto or Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, laboriously detailing the path of his deductive reasoning until the guilty party is identified. “You're a great credit to your race,” Gillespie tells Tibbs. “I mean, of course, the human race.” Tibbs then asks Gillespie if he might be allowed to sit on the “Whites Only” bench until the train comes to take him away. Gillespie grants his permission, and the novel ends.
²³