Pictures at a Revolution (31 page)

As
Doctor Dolittle
fell further behind schedule with every day of rain, Dick Zanuck voiced his support for the production, and his father backed him up, at least publicly. Although 20th Century-Fox had lost $39 million during the catastrophic era of
Cleopatra
in 1962, it had reported an $11.7 million profit for 1965. Darryl Zanuck may have grumbled that “stars today think nothing of asking $500,000 to $750,000…. I used to make entire pictures—good ones—for that!”
⁵⁵
but he wasn't about to change the think-big strategy that had brought the studio
The Sound of Music
.

Jacobs, however, found himself under increasing pressure. He was already thinking ahead to the Los Angeles shoot, trying to book Maurice Binder, creator of the famous title sequences for the James Bond movies, to shoot
Dolittle
's opening credits without any principal actors, using the animals that had been sent back to Jungleland;
⁵⁶
he was replacing cast members on the spot (Richard Attenborough stepped into a role that was originally to be played by character actor Hugh Griffiths with barely a week's notice); and, most pressingly, he was trying to decide whether the production should tough it out in Wiltshire or cut its losses. At first, Jacobs had leaned toward keeping the
Dolittle
crew in England well into September, but as the weeks dragged on, he realized it was time to give up. Doctor Dolittle's elaborate house and yard would have to be meticulously reconstructed on a soundstage in Los Angeles. In mid-August, he and Fleischer decided to shut down the production, and his health got worse. Jacobs fought an ongoing battle with Fox about what the studio considered his overuse of limousine drivers, telling them that “I have been in the hospital and I am not allowed to carry heavy suitcases.”
⁵⁷
But as production in England wrapped, there were some days he was so ill that he couldn't even get out of bed in his suite at the Savoy Hotel in London. “Arthur would always insist he had indigestion,” said director J. Lee Thompson, a friend. “But we knew it was heart trouble. He was not a well man.”
⁵⁸

I
n the summer of 1966, Norman Jewison and Hal Ashby began working together on preproduction for
In the Heat of the Night
. Ashby was an editor by trade; he had learned his craft working under the veteran film cutter Robert Swink, assisting on William Wyler's
Friendly Persuasion
and
The Children's Hour
and also on George Stevens's
The Diary of Anne Frank
and
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. By the time Jewison met him, Ashby had gotten his first job as lead editor, on Tony Richardson's
The Loved One
; the professional bond that began when he edited Jewison's
The Cincinnati Kid
was cemented when the two teamed up on
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.

Although Ashby's only credit on
In the Heat of the Night
is as its editor, he was, by every other definition, what would now be considered a co-producer; his work with Jewison was, according to cinematographer Haskell Wexler, the single most important creative partnership on the movie, and it started before a foot of film had been shot. Ashby was a rarity in mid-1960s Hollywood: a day-in, day-out pothead who was also a workaholic. Although at thirty-six he was at least a generation older than the kids who were converging on Haight-Ashbury and beginning to preach the gospel of Timothy Leary, Ashby, an ex-Mormon raised in Utah, grew his blond hair long, wore beads, and was the first in his crowd to tune in and turn on. But, at least at that point in his career, he did it without dropping out. “In those days, there was a kind of bohemian aspect to filmmaking,” says Jewison. “We worked on a Moviola, and the cutting room had that pungent smell—the smell of film. And everybody smoked a little pot. It was a very relaxed atmosphere. Hal was a hippie. But I've never seen anyone so obsessed with film. At nine o'clock at night, I'd say, ‘Hal, I have to go, I've got kids, I've got a wife, we've been working all day, I've got to go, and
you've
got to go. Now come on.' And he'd say, ‘Hey, man, I know what, let me take another whack at this, we can tighten it.' And I would come back and he would have slept there all night. He went through five wives that way.”
¹

For all his aging-flower-child eccentricity, Ashby had serious ambitions, and he was up front with Jewison about his desire to get away from the Moviola and start directing his own movies. But until that happened, he reveled in the opportunity to work under the wing of the director, who considered him a “younger brother.” Ashby became a jack-of-all-trades on
In the Heat of the Night;
he served as liaison between Jewison and Mirisch, he helped to fill out the movie's supporting cast with casting director Lynn Stalmaster and supervised the hiring of a crew, he worried over story points in Silliphant's script, he nudged Jewison when he was falling behind in duties like location scouting, and he made suggestions for shots that he was already anticipating putting together in the editing room.

Ashby and Jewison were deep into prep work for the shoot when Sidney Poitier left for London; while he was waiting for
In the Heat of the Night
's late September start of production, he snuck in another movie, almost as an afterthought. The entire budget of Columbia's
To Sir, with Love
was a rock-bottom $640,000. The project, based on a 1959 novel by Guyanese writer E. R. Braithwaite, had been kicking around for years—Harry Belafonte had once considered playing the lead
²
—and it's likely that Mike Frankovich decided to make the film only because he had a professional relationship with both Poitier and producer-director-writer James Clavell, whose novel
King Rat
had been adapted into a reasonably well-received drama for the studio in 1965. Poitier's role in
To Sir, with Love
was a chance for him to play the flip side of
The Blackboard Jungle.
This time, he would be an idealistic but sharp teacher who manages to make an enduring impression on a group of surly but not terribly menacing British teenagers. Even the studio, wrote Poitier, felt the script was “too soft, too sweet, too sentimental.” But at a time when the actor's every decision—most recently his tentativeness about whether to play Othello—subjected him to public scrutiny and interrogation, Poitier may have relished the chance to escape from the Central Park West apartment where he now lived in solitude; and from American racial politics altogether. The shoot took up just a few weeks, and Poitier, though he felt Columbia's budget was “offensively meager,” agreed to a salary of just $30,000 in exchange for a percentage of the overall gross.
³

While Poitier was filming at England's Pinewood Studios, Jewison was traveling through the Midwest, looking for a location that could be visually convincing as Wells, the sleepy southern hamlet described in Ball's novel and Silliphant's script, but would still satisfy his star's requirement that
In the Heat of the Night
be shot north of the Mason-Dixon line. He finally settled on Sparta, a tiny Illinois town south of St. Louis near the Missouri border that had everything the screenplay required except a cotton plantation, an essential location that nobody wanted to write out of the script. Jewison gambled that once production got under way in Illinois, he would be able to convince Poitier to head south to cotton country for at least a few days of work; meanwhile, he concentrated on finding ways to keep the budget as low as Walter Mirisch wanted. Making a movie on location with two well-paid stars for significantly under $3 million meant cutting corners wherever doing so wouldn't hurt the movie; the town of Wells was renamed Sparta, for instance, just so the production wouldn't have to pay crew members to repaint the name on the local water tower.
⁴
Economizing also meant using unknown actors in smaller parts, and that meant looking to New York theater and television. For the role of Harvey Oberst, the drifter who becomes Sheriff Gillespie's primary murder suspect, Jewison had considered several young actors, including Jon Voight; he was about to cast Robert Blake when Lynn Stalmaster met Scott Wilson, a lean, handsome twenty-four-year-old Georgia native who had never made a movie before. Stalmaster and Jewison were looking for an actor who was physically fit enough for a long, complicated chase sequence. “At the time, I was parking cars in Los Angeles at the first topless place in California,” says Wilson. “It did a brisk lunchtime business as guys would drive up, jump out of their cars, run in, and run out again. You had to park their cars up in the hills and run back and forth, up and down, so I was in good running shape.” Wilson auditioned the day before Blake was to be offered a contract and won the job on the basis of a cold reading in which he knew nothing about the character he was playing.
⁵

For most of the other roles, Stalmaster turned to actors he had used in TV shows. William Schallert, who played the town's racist mayor, was a veteran of
The Patty Duke Show
. Anthony James, another suspect in the film, had read for a small part in the western series
Death Valley Days
, and his lanky, intense look stuck in Stalmaster's mind. Many of the actors, including Warren Oates, who was hired to play Officer Sam Wood, had been cast by Stalmaster in
Slattery's People
, a politically progressive CBS drama about urban politics that was well reviewed but canceled in 1965 after one season. (Oates beat out a pair of actors Stalmaster cast regularly throughout the early 1960s, Ed Asner and Gavin MacLeod.)
⁶

The sole exception to Jewison's decision to populate the cast with lesser-known performers was Lee Grant, who was signed to appear in two short but important scenes as the murder victim's widow. Fifteen years earlier, Grant had won an Oscar nomination for her film debut as a shoplifter in William Wyler's
Detective Story
, only to have her movie career destroyed by the blacklist. As was the case with many Hollywood victims of McCarthyism, says Stalmaster, “we were able to bring her into television, mostly in New York. In the days of shows like
Ben Casey
and
Slattery's People
, there were people, directors like Sydney Pollack and Leo Penn and Mark Rydell, who abhorred the abuses of the time and would hire these people.”
⁷
In 1966, the effects of the blacklist were still being felt: Members of the Writers Guild of America were battling with the studios over the issue of withholding credit from writers who had taken the Fifth Amendment about their political beliefs,
⁸
and directors were in federal court, fighting their own guild's requirement of an anti-Communist loyalty oath.
⁹
For Jewison, who was such a committed liberal that a friend once joked that “if Norman gets reincarnated, he'll want to come back black and Jewish and blind,”
¹⁰
casting Grant was a chance to rectify an injustice. At the time she was hired for
In the Heat of the Night
, Grant had just won an Emmy for the TV soap opera
Peyton Place
, but she had not worked in a major role in a studio film for more than ten years.

 

Bonnie and Clyde
was also heading toward its first day of production, but now that Arthur Penn was aboard, Robert Benton and David Newman's screenplay was being rewritten, and in one of its final overhauls, Clyde Barrow became unambiguously heterosexual. How and why the ménage à trois between Clyde, Bonnie, and their male getaway driver was eliminated from the script months after Benton had warned Beatty that its inclusion was non-negotiable (and after Beatty had assured him that he wouldn't flinch at playing a bisexual character) remains a matter of dispute even after forty years. “It never occurred to me to tamper with that,” says Beatty. “It would have been a sign of some sort of chickenheartedness. When Arthur decided to do the movie, he said, ‘I want to make a change.' I said, ‘I would think that'd be the
last
thing you want to change,' and he said, ‘No, I think it dissipates the passion between Bonnie and Clyde.' And I agreed with him. I think that if you have somebody going in two directions at once, it's a different can of peas. What does the character want? It's the thing you have to ask in any picture.”
¹¹

“We had been working with Arthur in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on rewrites for about a month,” says Benton, “and Arthur said, ‘First of all, I want you to understand something. This is not coming from Warren, it's coming from me. There are two problems. One is that you haven't written the emotional complexity of this [ three-way] relationship. And two, people will say, “Of course they're gangsters—they're a bunch of sexual freaks.”' The moment we took it out, I knew it was right. What Arthur was saying was, you can only take the audience so far. In most gangster movies, there's a moment when the audience can stand outside, at arm's length from the characters. We were very careful
not
to do that. We wanted their affection for the characters to remain.”
¹²

But others recall Beatty himself as having an aversion to Clyde's bisexuality. Mart Crowley, author of
The Boys in the Band
, had worked briefly for Natalie Wood in the mid-1960s and knew Beatty through her. “I remember running into Warren in the Daisy nightclub one night, and I said, ‘Listen, Clyde Barrow was gay—are you gonna do anything about that?' And the sense I got from him was, ‘Are you kidding? That's not the kind of picture we're doing.'”
¹³
And Newman wrote soon after the film's release that “Warren was adamant about [the bisexuality] being removed for two reasons, the first being that it was not such a terrific thing for his image and the second being that it ‘just wasn't working,'”
¹⁴
a point he reiterated in 1997.
¹⁵

Penn may have claimed responsibility for the decision in order to protect Beatty, but he also wanted to solve what he called the problem of “the script turning too dark too early, when they introduced this big, oafish third figure that Bonnie was hitting on while we were dealing with Clyde's homosexual tendencies.”
¹⁶
No matter who ultimately made the call, it must have been completely obvious to everyone involved at the time. To imagine otherwise would be to ignore the reality that a homosexual or bisexual protagonist in a Hollywood movie was then unthinkable, and the makers of
Bonnie and Clyde
knew it. The Production Code had maintained a complete ban on the subject until a few years earlier and now permitted homosexuality to be depicted only as an “aberration.”
¹⁷
When homosexual characters began to show up in a handful of studio movies, they were seen only as mincing, effeminate sissies in comedies and as murder or suicide victims in dramas like
Advise and Consent
and
The Children's Hour
. Characters who were incidentally gay, or heroic and homosexual, simply didn't exist, nor did any kind of movement to lobby for more positive portrayals.
¹⁸
In a lengthy essay published at the beginning of 1966,
Time
magazine (whose movie critics used the word
fag
in their reviews without a second thought) spoke for and to much of America when it called homosexuality “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life…it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.”
¹⁹
The following year, when Mike Wallace's CBS report
The Homosexuals
aired after three years of preparation, the documentary's subjects were photographed in silhouette and the tone was so clinical and grim that one reviewer wondered whether even a moment could have been spared for “the minority viewpoint that homosexuals are just as normal as anyone else.”
²⁰