Pictures at a Revolution (46 page)

Warner was spending more and more of his time at home, and Penn and Beatty brought the print to his private screening room, with Walter MacEwen and a couple of publicists in tow. “If I have to get up and pee,” Warner told Penn, “I'll know it's a lousy movie.” “Well, he was up before the first reel,” says Penn. “And several times after that.”
²³
Penn sat there, his mood black, feeling that he had made “the most diuretic film in human memory.”
²⁴
“He didn't like it, didn't understand it, didn't get it, and Benny Kalmenson had already seen it and proclaimed it a piece of shit, so that was that,” Penn says. Warner took in
Bonnie and Clyde
with the eyes, the ears, and the taste of an angry, cut-off man and hated everything about it. The vintage photographs at the beginning were too blurry; the sound was too low; the dialogue was too muffled. “What the hell was that?” he said. “That's when Warren tried his wonderful line, ‘It's an homage to old Warner Brothers gangster movies,' and Jack sort of perked up and said, ‘What the fuck's an
homage
?'” says Penn. “It was the beginning of a dark time, because it was clear that if he didn't like it and Kalmenson didn't like it, it was gonna get dumped.”
²⁵

In the days that followed, Beatty tried a bluff, suggesting to Kalmenson that if the studio was so unhappy with the movie, he would gladly buy it back from them himself. Then the Six Days' War broke out. By its end, Jack Warner was in full triumphalist mode. “Jack was very aroused,” Beatty told the
Los Angeles Times
, “because Israel had done well and he'd raised more money for Israel than anyone in town.”
²⁶
At the end of the war, Warner was so exhilarated that he called the studio's employees together on a soundstage so he could address them one more time as their leader. A few days earlier, he had announced that despite Seven Arts' takeover, the company would continue to be named for him and his family. In a defiant mood, the pugnacious old man wasn't about to sell off anything, even a movie he suspected was worthless.

 

The same week,
Columbia Pictures opened Sidney Poitier's schoolteacher drama,
To Sir, with Love.
The studio's expectations were minimal, especially since reviews were tepid, and critics who had praised Poitier for rising above his material in movies like
Lilies of the Field
and
A Patch of Blue
were now going after him for choosing these roles in the first place. “One hankers for the character he played in
The Blackboard Jungle
instead of the point-making prigs he takes on now,” complained Penelope Gilliatt in
The New Yorker
. “If the hero of this Pollyanna story were white, his pieties would have been whistled off the screen…. The fact that he is colored draws on resources of seriousness in audiences which the film does nothing to earn.”
²⁷
And Hollis Alpert, writing in
Saturday Review
, remarked that he was tired of seeing a “consistently desexualized” Poitier turn himself into “an ever more solid symbol, a minority figure who must eventually triumph…while making prejudice seem lowly and nasty.”
²⁸

Columbia didn't realize that Poitier had been building a tremendous audience base thanks to television, where his movies were showing up more frequently. Until 1965, home viewers had rarely seen black performers on TV outside of guest shots on crime dramas, singing and dancing appearances in variety shows, or
Amos 'n' Andy
and
Beulah
comic stereotypes, but the emergence of Bill Cosby in
I Spy
and, a year later, Greg Morris in
Mission: Impossible
brought a new kind of self-assured African American star into American living rooms and tapped a previously unrecognized viewing audience. During the 1966–1967 season,
Variety
described Poitier as “redhot in TV ratings,” pointing to huge numbers for telecasts of
Lilies of the Field
and
The Long Ships
as well as for the actor's appearance on a variety show celebrating the history of black humor.
²⁹
When
To Sir, with Love
opened, the studio found out that Poitier was not only review-proof, but a much bigger star than anyone in the movie business had guessed. The film was an immediate and sustained hit that played for months and made the actor a rich man. His deal to take just $30,000 up front in exchange for 10 percent of the gross turned out to be one of the biggest paydays an actor had ever engineered. In Poitier's contract, Columbia had stipulated that his yearly take would be capped at $25,000 for as many years as it took to pay him in full. The studio realized it would have to revise that deal when
To Sir, with Love
took in so much money that it would have taken eighty years to fulfill the contract's terms.

Poitier himself agreed with some of the criticism of
To Sir, with Love
. “The guys who write these parts are white guys, more often than not,” he said at the time. “And there are producers to deal with who are also white, and a studio with a board of directors, also white. So they have to make him—the Negro—kind of a neuter…. You put him in a shirt and tie…you make him very bright and very intelligent and very capable…then you can eliminate the core of the man: His sexuality.”
³⁰
For the first time, Poitier decided to channel his frustration into producing: He made a deal with ABC, which was then launching a motion picture division, to produce and star in
For Love of Ivy
, which would mark the first mainstream romantic comedy about a black couple's relationship.
³¹

The success of
To Sir, with Love
was good news for United Artists, which had chosen the beginning of August as a release date for
In the Heat of the Night
and was counting on Poitier's growing popularity to boost the chances of a movie for which the studio had planned only a modest publicity campaign. UA seemed remarkably short on inspiration when it came to selling Jewison's movie; the ideas it sent out to local publicity teams felt almost deliberately designed to avoid any mention of race, conflict, or civil rights. “It's a natural for stores selling air conditioners!” UA suggested. “Don't Lose Your Cool In the Heat of the Night…. Reverse angle, for cooler nites, is ‘When Winter Winds Blow, Sleep “In the Heat of the Night” with (furnace, fuel, or heater tie-in).'” Some posters carried the tagline “They got a murder on their hands. They don't know what to do with it”; other ads featured a still from a seconds-long shot of a strategically concealed nude woman from an early scene and built an entire campaign around her, with the slogan “She always traipses around with the lights on. Somebody sure oughta make her stop it!”
³²
No poster mentioned race at all. Jewison, who was in Boston shooting
Thomas Crown
, saw the posters for the first time when he passed the Music Hall and, not for the first time, complained bitterly to UA.
^*
“I hate to keep flogging a dead horse,” he wrote, “but the picture deserves a little better than this.”
³³

United Artists had not had a hit all year and was counting on one movie, the James Bond adventure
You Only Live Twice
, to turn its bottom line around. The fortunes of the Bond franchise had grown exponentially with each installment, and a new Bond rip-off opened almost every month, but just before the massive success of
Thunderball
in early 1966, another studio decided to take direct aim at the value of UA's hottest property.
What's New, Pussycat?
producer Charlie Feldman owned the rights to Ian Fleming's first Bond novel,
Casino Royale
, the only 007 story that producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli hadn't acquired. Feldman initially approached Saltzman and Broccoli about going into partnership with them; when they stiff-armed him, he decided to make a bigger, wilder, more expensive Bond movie than any that had come before and took the project to Columbia. Creatively,
Casino Royale
was a disaster of fascinatingly outsize proportions: Six different directors and at least seventeen screenwriters (including, at various points, Woody Allen, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Billy Wilder) were swallowed by Feldman's $12 million sinkhole, an incoherent spoof involving a half-dozen would-be Bonds played by, among others, David Niven and Peter Sellers, that was condemned as “total chaos,”
³⁴
“unfunny burlesque,”
³⁵
and “a frightful mess”
³⁶
by the very people who made it.

Feldman oversaw a comically disjointed production during which scenes were sometimes written just to utilize elaborate sets that had been built for other purposes or to work in actors who happened to be in London for a few days, but he nonetheless succeeded in getting
Casino Royale
into theaters two months before
You Only Live Twice
. Abetted by a slogan that sold its gimmick effectively (“
Casino Royale
Is Too Much…For One James Bond!”) and an eye-catching psychedelic poster of a nude woman covered in tattoos, the movie drew huge initial crowds. Bad word of mouth spread quickly, but Columbia had made its money (the film was the third-highest grosser of the calendar year) and done its damage. When
You Only Live Twice
finally arrived, audiences were oversaturated by Bond and his rivals. Even the film's nominally topical plotline, the space race, had been chewed up and parodied by everything from the sitcom
I Dream of Jeannie
to Don Knotts in
The Reluctant Astronaut. Time
magazine's critic called the movie a “victim of the same misfortune that once befell Frankenstein: there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy.”
³⁷
The comparison was not lost on Sean Connery, who had already given his producers notice that he would not play Bond again. “The whole thing has become a Frankenstein monster,” he complained. “The merchandising, the promotion, the pirating—they're thoroughly distasteful.”
³⁸
UA could take some consolation in the fact that the movie managed to outgross
Casino Royale
, but for the first time, the franchise started to contract instead of expand—
You Only Live Twice
, the studio's most expensive Bond film yet, grossed significantly less than
Thunderball
and signaled a dip in Bond's drawing power that would not turn around until the late 1970s.

The notion of a summer movie season as a business model wasn't yet formed in the 1960s, but in 1967 the studios began to grasp that there was money to be made by releasing movies with broad appeal while their potential audience was on vacation or out of school. Two weeks after
You Only Live Twice
opened, just in time for the July Fourth holiday weekend, MGM released
The Dirty Dozen
across the country and made the Bond film look puny. For twenty years, World War II movies had been a reliable box office staple, but they had begun to run out of steam as their plots became repetitive and moviegoers grew bored with their drab, earnest storytelling. The studios were still putting out several war movies every year, but there hadn't been a truly crowd-pleasing entry in the genre since 1963's
The Great Escape
. When
Dirty Dozen
director Robert Aldrich read seventy-year-old Nunnally Johnson's original script about twelve thuggish criminal soldiers in military prison who are melded into a ragtag unit and given a mission to bomb a German château, he thought it “would have made a very good, very acceptable 1945 war picture. But I don't think that a good 1945 war picture is a good 1967 war picture.”
³⁹
He hired the German-born screenwriter Lukas Heller to overhaul the screenplay and made a picture that was far more gory and violent, and far less interested in conventional military heroics, than any action movie Hollywood had produced about World War II.
The Dirty Dozen
's antiauthoritarian message appealed to war movie buffs who wanted an unsanitized look at tough guys in combat, but it also found a tremendous audience of moviegoers in their twenties who had generally stayed away from the kinds of war movies their parents liked. “We got on a wave that we never knew was coming: not a wave, a tidal wave,” said Aldrich. “Younger people by the bushel thought it was an antiestablishment movie.”
⁴⁰

If United Artists had any doubts about whether moviegoers were ready to accept an angrier black man on screen than they had seen before, the success of
The Dirty Dozen
erased them. One of the film's most popular characters was played by former NFL fullback Jim Brown. Aldrich treated Brown's role carefully in some regards: Where almost every other member of the dozen has a record of irredeemable criminality, audiences were told that Brown's character had been jailed for attacking a group of white men, “cracker bastards” who had tried to castrate him. After thus preemptively exonerating Brown from any real wrongdoing, the script went on to turn his character into an anachronism in every respect. He's a street-talking separatist who sounds nothing like a jailed GI in the 1940s. When he's first told to join the unit, he declines, shrugging: “That's your war, man, not mine.”