Pictures at a Revolution (29 page)

“Casting is destiny,” says Warren Beatty. “Particularly in movies, because casting
is
character—and character is plot. Casting really controls story. One guy would do a thing, another guy wouldn't. And if you're the guy in the close-up, character acting isn't going to help—you either are that guy, or you aren't.”
⁴⁵
If that is the case—and it's hard to find a movie from the mid-1960s in which it is
more
the case than
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
—then Stanley Kramer had a serious problem once Rose finished his script. The movie, he felt, would be unfilmable, and unfinanceable, if he couldn't sign the three principal actors he wanted. The film couldn't simply be about a nice white couple welcoming a nice black son-in-law; it had to be about the screen's most famous romantic duo symbolically opening their arms to its biggest black star. And that didn't look likely: Sidney Poitier was busy—and, for the first time in his career, expensive. Katharine Hepburn had all but officially retired. And Spencer Tracy was dying.

J
ack Warner's office overlooking his studio's Burbank lot was designed for genuflection. Warner was not a tall man, and he had his desk built on a platform raised eight or ten inches above the carpet, with two small stairs behind his chair. “‘Look up at me—don't look down at me'—that was the message,” says Joel Freeman, who worked for Warner in the mid-1960s.
¹

For years after the release of
Bonnie and Clyde
, a story persisted that Warren Beatty got down on his knees in front of the man who had run the studio since its founding in 1918 and begged him to finance the film. The anecdote, which Beatty himself kept alive for a while, made its way into
Time
magazine at the end of 1967, vividly ornamented with the detail that the actor “prostrated himself before the old man, dug his nose in the rug, and moaned, ‘Look, Jack, please do what I say. I won't waste your money.'” Warner's putative reply: “Get up off the floor, kid. You're embarrassing me.”
²
Long after Warner's death in 1978 and Beatty's eventual denial that the incident ever occurred, this particular piece of what Beatty calls “the apocrypha surrounding the movie”
³
survived, probably for two reasons: It sounds like something he would have done, and it sounds like something Jack Warner would have enjoyed.

“If Warren did do it,” says Robert Benton, “it wouldn't have been the first time. He was prone to do that with people.”
⁴
Supplication was just another weapon in Beatty's arsenal of strategies, to be deployed as needed. He used it with Robert Towne during
Bonnie and Clyde
's long shoot in Texas, when Towne wanted to go back to Los Angeles for a few days. “He literally got down on his knees and said, ‘Oh, please don't,'” recalls Towne. “Well, what can you say to that but ‘Okay, I won't'? No one can know the depth of that man's persuasiveness. It wasn't an illustration of how important I was to the project, but of the lengths to which he would go to make anything he wanted to happen happen. He says, ‘Save me! Rescue me!' And I suspect somehow that was not the least of his seductive charm when it came to women.”
⁵

Nor would it have been the first time that Jack Warner had experienced—or relished—that kind of flattery. Warner, at seventy-three, was proud of the power he had consolidated over so many decades in charge and unself-conscious about exercising it. He had had things his own way for fifty years, even when it cost him his relationships with his own brothers. He liked his subordinates—and that included the men who worked most closely with him—to call him “Mr. Warner” or “Chief” or “Colonel”
⁶
(an essentially honorary designation he had picked up in exchange for producing anti-Nazi films during World War II)
⁷
—but never “Jack.” “I've often thought of the studio as a palace that had everything but a moat,” says Richard Lederer, who worked as Warner's head of advertising in New York. “There were gates within gates within gates. Warner lived like a king, and Warner Brothers was his kingdom, even if it was a kingdom that, at that point, churned out nothing but crap.”
⁸
And anyone who wanted to get his way with the boss knew that self-abasement, tears, and outright pleading often worked. In 1966, around the time Beatty paid him a visit, Jack Warner was immersed in the planning stages of what was by far the most expensive movie on his 1967 slate of releases,
Camelot
. Even though the Lerner and Loewe musical had received mixed reviews and was by no means an unqualified success on Broadway, Warner was so convinced that director Joshua Logan's film version would follow in the path of
My Fair Lady
that he planned to put his own name on the movie as producer for only the second time in ten years. Alan Jay Lerner had recovered well enough from his tabloid divorce and the disaster of his involvement with
Doctor Dolittle
to write the script, but it was wildly overlong. When Joel Freeman, who was to function as
Camelot
's producer in everything but name, went into Warner's office to tell him that the movie would run a draggy three hours as written and that the screenplay needed to be cut, Warner agreed, and Freeman went to tell Lerner, who was waiting in a downstairs office.

“An hour or so later, I walk back into Jack's office,” says Freeman. “Kneeling in front of his desk was Josh Logan, with tears in his eyes. I thought, ‘ Uh-oh.' Logan got up, never said a word to me, and walked out the door. I said, ‘What was that all about?' And Jack said, ‘Executive decision. Leave the script the way it is.' I said, ‘What are you talking about? You just agreed to all these cuts—you
know
it's too long.' And he walked me outside his office to a window, looked out, and pointed to a water tower with the studio insignia. He said, ‘What does it say? When it says
Freeman
Brothers, you can decide how long it should be.'”
⁹

The water tower routine was a favorite of Jack Warner's, although it's safe to say that nobody had ever responded to it the way Warren Beatty did. When Warner, during a lunch with the actor, pointed to the tower, Beatty paused for a moment and said, “Well, it's got your name, but it's got my initials.”
¹⁰

“I
think
Jack Warner found me funny,” Beatty says. “But I think something about me also scared him—I don't know if something had once happened with another actor, but he never wanted to be in a room alone with me. But all the stories about me not being able to get
Bonnie and Clyde
financed—they're not true. I didn't have to beg, because I had offers from three studios. Well, two, and something I could have turned into an offer, but I didn't want to be misleading.”
¹¹

For a time, Beatty considered trying to finance the film himself. “Originally, he thought he would be able to come up with the budget for the movie out of his own pocket,” says Elaine Michea, who worked as his assistant on
Bonnie and Clyde
for more than a year. “This was when he was thinking it was going to be much less expensive. We worked together trying to see how little we could make it for. He was very frugal—he lived well, but he didn't throw money away.”
¹²
Once Beatty abandoned that plan and started making the rounds with the script, not everyone was interested in working with him. He was considered, as
Time
put it, “an on-again, off-again actor who moonlighted as a global escort,”
¹³
and the studios greeted the news that the “sullen, difficult, stubborn performer who fouled up [scripts] with his demands for rewriting” and “quarreled with directors” was planning to become a producer “with only slightly more enthusiasm than that summoned up for the announcement that Ross Hunter would produce a third Tammy picture,”
¹⁴
said
Life
magazine.

Beatty's confidence as he walked into one executive suite after another was disarming. “We went into a meeting…and Warren said, ‘This is what they're gonna ask, this is what we're gonna say,' and he was right. He's a great wheeler-dealer,” Benton and Newman told Rex Reed.
¹⁵
But some studio chiefs couldn't begin to comprehend Beatty's enthusiasm for the heavily annotated screenplay he was pitching. “That's one that I kick myself in the ass for,” says Richard Zanuck, who, deep into preproduction on
Doctor Dolittle
at the time, had no interest in having Beatty make the movie at Fox. “Warren came over and presented me with the script, and we had lunch in my office. It was like Chapter Nineteen long and had all these different-colored pages—blue, red, gray, green. I said, ‘What
is
this?' I read it, and I didn't have the belief that I should have had in Warren. That was one of my big mistakes.”
¹⁶

United Artists' David Picker, who had tracked the project since Elinor Jones had pitched it to him, still wanted to make the movie, but
Bonnie and Clyde
had gotten more expensive since the first time he'd heard about it. Harrison Starr, the associate producer of
Mickey One
who had talked about producing the movie with both Truffaut and Godard, was for a time working with Beatty and Penn, hoping to serve as production manager on the film. He talked to the two men in Texas, where they were scouting potential locations, and then went to New York to discuss terms with Picker. “I was foolish,” says Starr. “He said, ‘What can you make it for?' And instead of giving him the lowest price, I thought, ‘I'll give myself some room.'” Starr suggested a budget of $1.75 million. Picker countered at $1.6 million, and by the time he was able to convince his bosses to back the movie, Beatty had moved on, and UA and Starr were out of the picture.
¹⁷
“I can only tell you that when that deal blew up, it broke my heart,” says Picker.
¹⁸

“I almost made the movie at United Artists,” says Beatty. “But I had a better offer, and I liked Jack Warner.” Warner Brothers ended up offering Beatty a $1.8 million budget, still well below the average for a studio picture, and Beatty agreed to take a lower-than-usual combined acting/producing salary of $200,000 in exchange for 40 percent of the film's profits.
¹⁹
No kneeling or begging was necessary, largely because of the efforts of two supporters of
Bonnie and Clyde
at the studio, Richard Lederer and production chief Walter MacEwen. Lederer read the screenplay and thought it was “terrific”; he knew it would represent a welcome departure for what he called “a very conservative studio that put out one terrible movie after another. Nobody seemed to realize that the audience was changing and we'd better change, too.”
²⁰
Lederer knew that Ben Kalmenson, the New York–based head of distribution and one of Jack Warner's closest colleagues, could persuade Warner to make the movie. Kalmenson had worked with Warner for twenty-five years, and Jack Warner took his advice seriously. Warner also liked to use Kalmenson as a bad cop: When Warner would reject projects, he would often tell producers that “New York” had told him they wouldn't be able to sell their movie to audiences.
²¹
Lederer walked Beatty down to Kalmenson's office with the script. “Kalmenson said nice things,” says Lederer. “But I knew that the minute we left, he picked up the phone and told Jack Warner not to make the movie.”
²²

“The decision [to green-light
Bonnie and Clyde
] was made by Walter MacEwen,” says Beatty. “Jack Warner never got into it.”
²³
But it wasn't that simple: MacEwen liked the script very much, but he had worked for Warner for decades; he tended to make his case for or against a project and then defer to his boss's wishes, and he knew that Warner would need a good deal of convincing. The studio had made Beatty famous with
Splendor in the Grass
, and Jack Warner was still angry that Beatty had backed out of
Youngblood Hawke
and refused to star in
PT 109
. “Warren wasn't a favorite of Jack Warner's,” says MacEwen's assistant Robert Solo. “He thought Warren was uppity. The man was, at the time, pretty stuck in his ways. He ran the studio, but he was more subject to the whims of actors and directors than he had been twenty years ago, and he didn't like it. So anybody who didn't play ball his way, he didn't want anything to do with. We tried very hard to talk Warner into it.” MacEwen had his own concerns: Geoffrey Shurlock would soon weigh in with a Production Code memo calling various scenes “unacceptably brutal,” “excessively gruesome,” and “grossly animalistic.”
²⁴
But he liked the project, and he and Solo enlisted Martin Jurow, Warner's head of European production, to lobby Jack Warner as well. Solo also used his connection with Jack Schwartzman, who was his neighbor and Beatty's attorney; he would secretly coach Schwartzman on what to say during the time Schwartzman was negotiating the deal's fine points with the studio's head of business affairs.
²⁵

What may ultimately have convinced Warner to make the movie was, ironically, his own poor judgment: He was convinced that
Kaleidoscope
, the forgettable little thriller Beatty had made with Susannah York, was going to be a hit for the studio, and he knew from the film's producer, Elliott Kastner, that the actor had behaved himself on the set, allowing production to wrap on time and on budget. By the end of August, Warner “was comfortable that he would have limited financial exposure,” says Solo,
²⁶
and he agreed to make
Bonnie and Clyde
without even reading the screenplay. A month later, when he did look at the script, he expressed bitter regret. Warner wasn't put off by the movie's innovations (which he couldn't see on the page). On the contrary, he thought the story was decades out-of-date, nothing more than a relic of a slightly disreputable genre his own studio had pioneered and used up in the 1930s. “I can't understand where the entertainment value is in this story,” he wrote to Walter MacEwen. “Who wants to see the rise and fall of a couple of rats…. I don't understand the whole thinking of Warren Beatty and Penn. We will lose back whatever we happen to make on
Kaleidoscope
…this era went out with Cagney.”
²⁷