Pictures at a Revolution (41 page)

By the end of the shoot, several of the cast members were barely on speaking terms with their star. For Geoffrey Holder, the last straw came in February, when the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie came to Los Angeles to visit the set of
Dolittle
during a week-long trip to the United States. The day he visited the set, Fleischer was filming one of the many sequences set in Africa that had originally been planned for St. Lucia. “Selassie was very quiet,” says Holder, “and his coolness and composure made Rex look
short
. And Rex couldn't stand it when he wasn't the center of attention—you can't even say that it was
My Fair Lady
that went to his head, because it was all there already. So we meet Haile Selassie, and do you know what Rex had to say to him? ‘Uh…how do you like
our
jungle?'
Our
jungle! What a bitch he was.”
²²

Nevertheless, Harrison, as the key selling point of
Doctor Dolittle
, still wielded extraordinary power on the production. Long after Anthony Newley had filmed one of his songs, Harrison insisted that it be taken away from the character of Matthew and be reshot with Dolittle singing instead, and Jacobs assented.
²³
At the same time, Dick Zanuck was still concerned that the film wasn't big, spectacular, or special enough; at great expense, he commissioned two new songs and rehired Bricusse, who thought he had seen the last of Harrison and animals months earlier, to write them.
²⁴
When the movie finally finished production, Harrison had one last bombshell for Jacobs: Having insisted on performing all of his songs live during the movie's production, he now announced that he wanted to rerecord them. Lionel Newman, the head of Fox's music department, was furious, calling Harrison's latest whim “a crock of shit,” but he got his way, and even Newman had to admit the results were an improvement.
²⁵

Doctor Dolittle
finally wrapped in April, with little fanfare or ceremony for its exhausted crew. Zanuck and Jacobs both knew that their main job on the movie until it opened in December would be salesmanship, regardless of whether the product was worth selling. In
Variety
, a huge ad announced that reserved-seat tickets for the first nineteen weeks of the movie's premiere run at New York City's Loews State Theatre, which was to begin on December 21, 1967, were available at sky-high prices ranging from $2.50 to $4.00,
²⁶
and Richard Fleischer began shrewdly positioning the movie for an Academy Awards campaign by giving an interview in which he called for the abolition of the annual prizes given by the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and various craft unions on the grounds that they diminished the impact of the Oscars.
²⁷

Dolittle
's astonishing final cost
²⁸
—$29 million after the then astronomical $11 million marketing budget was factored in
^*
—should have been enough to make the blood of any studio executive run cold. But in the spring of 1967, blind belief in the future of the movie musical reached an apex of irrational exuberance. Universal Pictures had just opened
Thoroughly Modern Millie
, a long, silly 1920s pastiche put together by producer Ross Hunter for $7 million when he couldn't get the rights to the stage musical he really wanted to adapt,
The Boy Friend
.
²⁹
Hunter had paid top dollar to secure Julie Andrews, whose success in both
The Sound of Music
and
Mary Poppins
had made her the biggest box office star in the country at the end of 1966, according to a survey of theater owners. When director George Roy Hill insisted on cutting what he called “20 minutes of meaningless cream puff”
³⁰
from the movie, Hunter fired him and restored the footage, bringing
Millie
back up to a bloated but road-show-friendly 153 minutes, complete with an overture and an intermission. The movie may have been dreary, but it was also critic-proof;
Millie
eventually grossed $40 million worldwide, making it the studio's biggest hit in five years. If Universal, a company that in the late 1960s was widely and justly regarded as inept at both the making and the selling of movies, could find its feet with a musical, the possibilities for other studios seemed limitless. As
Millie
took off at the box office, Dick Zanuck reunited Andrews with her
Sound of Music
director, Robert Wise, and put the three-hour musical
Star!
into production for release in 1968. Warner Brothers, awaiting the fall release of its own musical behemoth,
Camelot
, decided to repurpose that film's magical-forest set and hired Francis Coppola to shoot
Finian's Rainbow
on it.
†
And Buena Vista decided to take its Fred MacMurray comedy
The Happiest Millionaire
and expand it into a massive 164-minute reserved-ticket musical, the company's first attempt ever to make a road-show movie that could play huge theaters like Radio City Music Hall at higher ticket prices.

A heart attack, a budget that had tripled, and a production that had lasted ten months had not deterred Arthur Jacobs from investing his energy in another movie musical or from working with Rex Harrison again. Jacobs sold MGM on a musical version of its 1939 drama
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
and flew to Portofino, where Harrison and Roberts had fled as soon as
Dolittle
wrapped, to try to convince him to take the role that had won an Oscar for Robert Donat. When Harrison passed, Jacobs moved on to Peter O'Toole without missing a beat; he then returned to the Fox lot, where he had a new movie going into production. Science fiction was a genre that had almost no box office traction in the 1960s; audiences enjoyed the more outlandish technological excesses of the James Bond movies, but “flying saucer” adventures were part of a B-picture genre that was more than a decade out of style. What Stanley Kubrick was planning with MGM's
2001: A Space Odyssey
was still a mystery: Studio head Robert O'Brien had said only that “it won't be a Buck Rogers type of space epic,”
³¹
and Kubrick, who had been working on the film since 1964 and had kept it in postproduction for a year while he worked on the special effects, wasn't talking. Most studios avoided sci-fi altogether, but Dick Zanuck had had some success with Richard Fleischer's
Fantastic Voyage
and was willing to green-light another space travel film as long as Jacobs agreed to stick to a tight $5 million budget. A month after
Doctor Dolittle
wrapped, cameras started to roll on
Planet of the Apes
.

T
he first, put-together version [of a movie] is like a suicide note,” Arthur Penn has said, only half-jokingly. “It has no rhythm, it's flaccid, excessive—there
are
no ‘emerging qualities.'” In the spring of 1967, Penn was, at least, able to experience the mild despair he was feeling on his own terms;
Bonnie and Clyde
was being cut in Manhattan, away from the prying eyes of the studio, and he and Beatty were working at their own, deliberate pace while Dede Allen was giving them both a master class in what can be accomplished—and rectified—in postproduction. The skills of a great film editor are almost always invisible, and when Allen's work on
Bonnie and Clyde
is discussed, the focus tends to be on her split-second cross-cutting in the shoot-out that ends the movie or the breakneck robbery getaway scenes. But Allen's contribution was far more nuanced than the creation of a couple of showpiece sequences. Allen, who has called herself a “gut editor—intellect and taste count, but I cut with my feelings”—was almost peerless in her ability to focus on “character, character, character”:
¹
She had visited the set for a few days to get a sense of what Penn and his cast were trying to accomplish and returned to her Moviola with a sense of what to bring forth in each actor. Allen knew just how long she could hold a shot of Beatty to reveal the insecurity beneath Clyde's preening; she seemed to grasp instinctively that sudden cuts to Dunaway in motion would underscore the jagged, jumpy spirit of Bonnie Parker and that slow shots of Michael J. Pollard's C. W. Moss would mimic his two-steps-behind mental processes. And Allen cut
Bonnie and Clyde
with an eye and ear for the accelerating pace of the story, making the building of its panicky momentum her priority.

Allen and Penn shared an admiration for the suggestive, almost sensual editing of French New Wave movies: The sequence in which Bonnie first sees Clyde's pistol—a series of disembodied shots of her moist lips and flashing eyes, his gun at his waist, her lips parting in excitement as her mouth plays over the rim of a Coca-Cola bottle, her hand tentatively reaching over to fondle his gun, and a couple of close-ups of his distracted, detached expression—conveys Bonnie's charged, troubled sexual appetites and Clyde's uneasy relationship to his own body purely through the rhythm of shot selection and cutting. Beyond that, Allen proved instrumental in shaping the performances of a group of actors who, aside from Beatty, were largely new to film and whose work could vary wildly from take to take and within single takes as well. “Dede is enormously sensitive to a good, well-acted moment,” says Penn. “A lot of actors owe a great deal to her.”
²

That may have been especially true of Dunaway, whose performance as Bonnie was full of brilliant, quicksilver flashes that had to be selected carefully from takes in which her nerves got the better of her. The help came at a critical moment for the actress. The fact that she had been cast in three films in quick succession had won her a spate of “It girl” publicity, but as Penn and Allen were editing
Bonnie and Clyde
, Dunaway's first two movies opened to receptions that were indifferent or worse. Elliot Silverstein's
The Happening
never quite decided whether it was supposed to be a lark about youth culture or a crime thriller; it opened early in the year, just as the idea that 1967 was to be a “Summer of Love” was gathering currency, and its portrait of hippies as “menacing” hoods already seemed quaint and silly, two steps behind the romanticization of Haight-Ashbury, LSD, and human be-ins. And
Hurry Sundown
was a disaster; no trace of comprehension of the very real contemporary racism that the cast and crew had experienced in making the film under the shadow of the Klan in Louisiana had rubbed off on the movie itself. When Paramount released Otto Preminger's long, turgid melodrama, which showcased a depiction of southern race relations that included a group of black farmhands spontaneously bursting into song on a porch, reviewers moved into shoot-to-kill mode. “Gather roun', chillun, while dem banjos is strummin' out ‘Hurry, Sundown' an' ole Marse Preminger gwine tell us all about de South,” wrote Judith Crist, saying it “stands with the worst films of any number of years.”
³
Even
Variety
, which rarely had a negative word to say about any expensive studio picture, shook its head at “the darkies-are-a-singin' discredited racial stereotype.”
⁴
Dunaway's brief, strong performance was completely overshadowed by near unanimous contempt for the “awful glop of neo–Uncle Tomism”
⁵
that defined the movie as a whole.

Then Dunaway got a lucky break: Norman Jewison, having been turned down by Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Christie, and Brigitte Bardot, was still looking for an actress to star opposite Steve McQueen in
The Thomas Crown Affair
. Jewison hadn't been any more impressed by
The Happening
or
Hurry Sundown
than critics or audiences had been, but when Allen and Penn offered to show him sequences of her performance in
Bonnie and Clyde
, he was sold. Everyone else took some convincing. “Nobody
knew
Faye Dunaway,” said Jewison. “She wasn't hot.”
⁶
Even McQueen accepted his decision only grudgingly and replaced the nickname—“Fadin' Away”—that Dunaway had acquired on Penn's set with a crueler version. According to cinematographer Haskell Wexler, McQueen was so sure his new leading lady was headed nowhere that he wrote her off as “Done Fade-Away.”
⁷

While Jewison prepared to shoot
Thomas Crown
, he experienced his first real lapse of optimism about
In the Heat of the Night
. Postproduction had, he felt, been going smoothly; he had brought in the movie for just over $2 million,
⁸
and he and Hal Ashby had been working together in the editing room for weeks, fine-tuning each scene, stripping away anything that felt extraneous—including almost every moment that remained of Virgil Tibbs's relationship with a black family in Sparta (“I sure resented being preached at like that,” Jewison's own secretary told him after she saw the scenes).
⁹
Together, they whittled the finished film to a taut 110 minutes. Jewison had liked the jazz-inflected scores of Sidney Lumet's
The Pawnbroker
and Sydney Pollack's
The Slender Thread
, so he hired the same composer, thirty-three-year-old Quincy Jones, to score
In the Heat of the Night;
Jones suggested that they sign Ray Charles to sing a bluesy, mood-setting title song over the opening credits.

In the spring, the Mirisch Company scheduled the film's first sneak preview, and Jewison and Ashby took a print to San Francisco, a city they chose for its hip, liberal, antiauthority moviegoing audience. “In those days, we used to do real sneak previews,” says Jewison, “on a Friday or Saturday night. After the audience had already seen a film, we'd say, ‘If you want to stay, we have another movie to show you.' And that's what we did on
In the Heat of the Night
.” The audience watched quietly as the first few scenes of the movie unfolded—the discovery of a dead body on Sparta's main drag in the middle of the night, the introduction of Virgil Tibbs as he's hauled into the police station for questioning, and his first encounter with Chief Gillespie. “When Steiger said to Poitier, ‘What do you do up there in Philadelphia to make that kind of money?' and Poitier answered, ‘I'm a police officer,'” says Jewison, “the audience went nuts. But with
laughter
. They were stamping their feet, they thought it was so funny.” The laughter came again, in a tremendous wave, when Poitier spoke his signature line, “They call me
Mister
Tibbs!” and Jewison's heart sank completely. As the movie ended, he walked out of the theater dazed and sorrowful, with Ashby trailing behind him.

“I thought I had made a film that had a little bit of humor,” says Jewison, “but not a comedy. I was devastated. Truly devastated. I said to Hal, ‘Oh, my God. What have we done here?'”

Ashby was unfazed. A proud hippie, he was more in touch than Jewison was with an emerging post-
Strangelove
generation of moviegoers who weren't interested in earnestness but got the barbed sociocultural joke of a smart black cop waiting with ever-decreasing patience for a backward southern sheriff to drag his carcass into the modern world. They weren't laughing at the movie, he told Jewison; they were just grooving on the humiliating comeuppance Poitier was handing to Steiger in every scene. “You don't understand,” he told Jewison. “They were enjoying the film. They were into it. They
get
it.” Jewison wondered if the movie needed a major recut; Ashby suggested losing a couple of lines here and there, but nothing more. Jewison returned to Los Angeles with serious misgivings. But he was able to console himself with one reaction. “Even in San Francisco,” he said, “when we got to the scene where Endicott slaps Tibbs and Tibbs slaps him right back, there was suddenly no sardonic or ironic feeling in the audience. There was a gasp, an intake of breath throughout the theater that was almost palpable. From the white audience and the black audience. They didn't take that as a joke. And at that moment, I knew we had them.”
¹⁰

 

In March,
Mike Nichols assembled the cast of
The Graduate
on a Los Angeles soundstage for what was to be an almost unheard-of luxury for a small film: three weeks of rehearsal, during which the actors would have a chance to explore their characters, improvise scenes, and feel their way into relationships while Nichols shaped them into an ensemble. Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katharine Ross took their places at a long table, scripts in hand, as did the rest of the actors Nichols had hired: Elizabeth Wilson, who had costarred with Hoffman onstage in
Eh?
, was to play his mother; William Daniels, another theater veteran who had just finished starring in a short-lived sitcom overseen by Buck Henry called
Captain Nice
, would play Benjamin's father, though he was just ten years older than Hoffman; and Gene Hackman, fresh from
Bonnie and Clyde
, had won the role of Bancroft's husband, the unsuspecting Mr. Robinson. Nichols's brain trust was also present: Buck Henry, editor Sam O'Steen, and production designer Dick Sylbert. And, as Warren Beatty had done on
Bonnie and Clyde
, Nichols completed the mix with a veteran cinematographer. Robert Surtees came to the project with three Academy Awards, thirty-five years of experience, and a résumé that had included some of the most difficult productions of the last several years: William Wyler's
The Collector
, Arthur Penn's
The Chase
, and, most recently,
Doctor Dolittle
, from which he had gotten an early parole in order to join Nichols's crew. O'Steen, remembering Nichols's sometimes stormy relationship with Haskell Wexler on
Virginia Woolf
, warned Surtees that Nichols was going to push him hard,
¹¹
but Surtees couldn't imagine that
The Graduate
would offer him any more of a challenge than a thousand animals had. While the actors worked, Sylbert would scout locations in Los Angeles
¹²
and Surtees would begin to map out shots, with O'Steen serving as a sounding board for Nichols and consulting along the way, just as Ashby had done for Jewison on
In the Heat of the Night
.

“Don't do anything,” Nichols told his cast before they opened the script. “Don't push. Don't try to perform. This is just for us.”
¹³
And then they turned to page 1, starting with one of the very few scenes in Henry's screenplay that did not make it into the finished film, an overexplicit prologue in which Benjamin the valedictorian, in cap and gown, reads his speech in front of thousands of classmates. “What is the purpose of these years, the purpose for all this demanding work, the purpose for the sacrifices made by those who love us?” he asks. As he builds to the answer, he begins to panic; he can't remember it. Wind rustles the pages on the lectern; perspiration begins to bead on his brow. The audience stares at him expectantly. “The purpose is…” he says, searching for the word as the pages of his speech blow away. “There is a reason, my friends, and the reason is…,” he trails away, pouring sweat. He never finds the answer.

Two hours later, the actors got to the last moments of Henry's original screenplay, in which Benjamin and Elaine, fleeing from the church, jump onto a bus. “Let's go. Let's get this bus moving!” Benjamin says to the driver.
¹⁴

The bus was not moving. The panic Benjamin expressed in the movie's first scene had, by the end of that morning, spread to the entire table of actors. “That day,” says Hoffman, “I'll never forget. That movie just fell right on its ass. By the time that reading was over, there was a glumness on everybody's faces. The same expression. And I remember Nichols just saying, ‘Okay, let's break for lunch, and then we'll come back and start rehearsal.'”
¹⁵