Pictures at a Revolution (7 page)

But when Godard visited the set, he seemed to be interested in directing
Bonnie and Clyde
as well. No evidence has been found that, this early on, Truffaut had talked to Godard about picking up the project if he dropped it. But a conversation between the two directors certainly could have happened after the
Gun Crazy
screening in New York, and it would not have been out of character for Truffaut—who at that moment was hedging his bets and about to debut his new film,
La Peau Douce
, at Cannes—to have been uncertain about his next move.

According to Harrison Starr, Godard had a copy of Benton and Newman's treatment in hand when he visited Chicago and, while there, told Starr he was considering directing
Bonnie and Clyde
as an extremely low-budget film with a quick shoot; Starr says Godard asked him if he'd be interested in producing it.
²³
Starr believes that Beatty read the treatment of
Bonnie and Clyde
during the
Mickey One
shoot; Beatty says he vaguely remembers the movie being discussed but didn't read the treatment.
²⁴

If Beatty did get a look at Benton and Newman's work, it clearly didn't make much of an impression. At that moment, he was more concerned with other professional matters.
Mickey One
was turning out to be murkier than he had hoped, and Woody Allen's rewrites of
What's New, Pussycat?
had progressed in an unexpected direction ever since Allen had agreed to a lower writing fee in exchange for a small role in the movie. “Woody's part was little—a guy who jumps around on a pogo stick,” says Beatty. “It was like five pages in his first draft, but I didn't think he had his mind around the pretty-boy Don Juan [Beatty's part] yet. In the next draft, the pogo-stick guy went from five pages to fifteen pages. By the second rewrite, the pogo-stick guy was thirty-five pages, and my character had turned into some neo-Nazi
Übermensch
who was unkind to women. The third rewrite was hilarious. His part was, of course, now
bigger
than my part—he was the lovable guy who found it hard to get laid and had all the really good jokes.” Beatty was far from ready to give up on
What's New, Pussycat?
, any more than he was willing to stop pushing for what he believed would work best on
Mickey One.
Only three years into his movie career, he already felt he needed a comeback. But with Columbia still figuring out when and how to release
Lilith
, and
Mickey One
looking even less accessible, that prospect seemed a little further away every day.

 

If Columbia
and United Artists were viewed at the time as the innovators and risk takers among the Hollywood studios, it was largely because of the men who ran them. In the preconglomerate era, studios often served as clear reflections of the tastes and passions of their leaders. At Columbia, a man like Mike Frankovich, who was genuinely interested in the films and directors coming out of England and Europe, could change the creative direction of the studio he ran and even the way it did business, setting up branch offices in London or Italy. The same was true of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, who had assumed control of the flailing United Artists in the early 1950s and, over the next ten years, built a thriving creative and commercial structure in which independent producers would retain control of their work and share profits with the studio as long as they could reach agreements on cast, cost, director, and script.
²⁵
Krim and Benjamin's dramatic rethinking of the old studio system not only resulted in better movies, but caught the attention of every other studio: From the beginning of the 1950s to the end, even as the overall number of Hollywood films declined sharply, so-called independent production at the majors quadrupled.
²⁶

For an unaffiliated producer like Arthur Jacobs who owned a property as valuable as
Doctor Dolittle
, that sea change both created an opportunity and limited his options. At a moment when the average studio picture cost around $3 million,
Dolittle
was without question going to shape up to be an expensive proposition. In the spring of 1964, Columbia had no interest in getting into the business of large-scale family musicals, and United Artists—whose executives were, at that moment, watching with alarm as the budget of George Stevens's long-in-production biblical epic,
The Greatest Story Ever Told
, soared past $20 million
²⁷
—wasn't about to throw a lot of money at a
Dolittle
-size project. Disney was out of the question: Besides its long history failing to make a deal with the Loftings, the company's movies didn't even have producer credits; they would have undermined the notion that every foot of film came straight from the imagination of Walt Disney himself. Paramount and Universal weren't spending much money in the early 1960s; Universal was a great place to go if you wanted to make a Doris Day movie, but the studio was everybody's last stop, a second-rate empire that was becoming known more as a producer of television shows than a place to make movies, a reputation it wouldn't turn around until the 1970s.

That left three representatives of the old guard: MGM, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century-Fox. MGM had a well-respected new president, industry veteran Robert O'Brien, who had taken over in 1963. But the studio was still trying to wash off the red ink from the catastrophic failure of the 1962 Marlon Brando remake of
Mutiny on the Bounty;
²⁸
O'Brien had room on his slate for only one high-cost gamble and had already chosen to place his bet on David Lean's
Doctor Zhivago.

Which meant that Jack Warner's office was a logical first destination for Jacobs. With the deaths of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn in the late 1950s, the number of czars from the golden age of the studio system was dwindling, but the tenacious Warner, at seventy-two, was still holding on to his throne and the power that came with it. Warner was about to release
My Fair Lady
, a project he had pursued vigorously and on which he put his own name as producer; he believed in musicals, in Alan Jay Lerner, and in Rex Harrison. Jacobs flew to Los Angeles and met with him on February 7, 1964. But Warner may have been a little too familiar with the ever accelerating expenditure that making a Rex Harrison movie could entail. Though his investment would eventually pay off handsomely, he had, to his own shock, spent more than $22 million on
My Fair Lady
, making it the third most expensive movie in history; at one point, with George Cukor calling for reshoots and more reshoots, Warner ordered the Ascot racetrack set bulldozed rather than risk any further elevation of the budget.
²⁹
He listened to Jacobs's pitch for
Doctor Dolittle
and passed.

The rejection didn't slow Jacobs down for a minute. Three days later, he met with Vincente Minnelli, who had worked with Lerner on
An American in Paris, Brigadoon
, and
Gigi
, and asked him to direct
Dolittle.
Minnelli said yes. On February 21, Jacobs took Julie Andrews to lunch “to discuss the picture,” undaunted by the fact that he had no script to show her and that he had, in fact, no idea what kind of female lead a musical of
Doctor Dolittle
might have to offer her; Andrews, awaiting the release of Disney's
Mary Poppins
, understandably refrained from committing herself to a nonexistent role in an unscripted movie. A few days later, Jacobs met with one of Rex Harrison's representatives to secure his commitment more firmly.
³⁰
And then he set up a do-or-die pitch meeting with the only studio left on his list, 20th Century-Fox.

The odds were not necessarily in Jacobs's favor. For the last four years, Fox's fate had been staked on one movie. At a cost of more than $40 million,
Cleopatra
was almost twice as expensive as any other studio film in history and the most heavily and lengthily publicized picture since
Gone With the Wind.
More than a year before it opened, as Fox's PR team funneled photographs from the set to the press, newspapers ran stories on the dramatic effect Elizabeth Taylor's kohl-eyed, striking makeup was already having on the fashion world. But the headlines quickly turned sour as the news of Taylor's affair with Richard Burton and impending divorce from Eddie Fisher caused a scandal that seriously damaged the popularity of a star whose box office clout was one of the primary reasons for Fox's big investment.

As production dragged on, as footage was scrapped, and as directors came and went,
Cleopatra
's budget rose so dramatically that Fox's president, Spyros Skouras, was called on the carpet at a meeting of livid stockholders.
³¹
In 1962, with the studio projecting a loss of $10 million for the first half of the year alone, Skouras lost his job, and Darryl F. Zanuck, who had spent much of the last decade as a producer, found himself on the winning side of a boardroom showdown and returned to retake the reins of the business he had co-founded thirty years earlier. “I have no illusions about the present plight of the company,” he said. “It has suffered disasters.”
³²
Zanuck quickly kicked
Cleopatra
's director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, out of the editing room, leading to more unwanted headlines.
³³
When
Cleopatra
opened in the summer of 1963, Taylor and Burton, along with Mankiewicz, all but disowned the film, which drew large and curious audiences in New York and Los Angeles and then put them to sleep for much of its four-hour-and-four-minute running time. Cutting the movie, first by twenty-three minutes and then by an hour, only meant less of a bad thing. Although 20th Century-Fox offered elaborate projections suggesting that
Cleopatra
might eventually break even (using studio math that involved plaintively exuberant predictions of lucrative rereleases and vast sums for TV sales that might take place years in the future), the studio continued to be defined by the film's failure.
³⁴

As Fox's financial crisis mounted, leading to a loss of nearly $40 million in 1962,
³⁵
Zanuck had taken a step that was unprecedented in the history of Hollywood's major studios: He shut down the company. By the end of the year, he had laid off half of Fox's employees “for an indefinite period,” and
The New York Times
reported that the only people left on the lot were “those actively engaged in completing
…Cleopatra
or assigned to future television or screen writing projects.”
³⁶
And, in a move that did not inspire renewed confidence, Zanuck handed the job of running Fox's movie production, or the little that was left of it, to his son Richard, a twenty-nine-year-old producer with only a handful of credits, and told him to start swinging the ax.
³⁷
“Everybody was let go,” recalls Dick Zanuck. “There was nobody left. I personally spoke to everyone who had been there over five years, but we closed everything. We were down to a janitor. Fox didn't even have anything ready to go, nothing even resembling a good script. They had one television show on its last legs—
Dobie Gillis.
That was it.”
³⁸

Many in the industry dismissed Dick Zanuck as a Hollywood prince-ling whose father's nepotistic whim had landed him a job running a studio that no longer had a pulse. “A lot of people at the time said, oh, this is it—they'll never start up again and that's why he put the kid in charge,” he says.
³⁹
But neither Zanuck had any intention of presiding over the embalming of the family business, and Dick Zanuck's own ambitions for the studio were not to be underestimated. Though he was based in Los Angeles and his father spent most of his time in New York and Europe, the two were in frequent contact, and the younger Zanuck began hiring screenwriters and developing a slate of modestly budgeted comedy and action films that would bring some life back to the lot and get movies flowing through the pipeline to theaters again.

The Zanucks were taking Fox into a new era of moviemaking, but cautiously. They would sometimes bring in projects from outside producers, as United Artists and Columbia were doing, and they also moved Fox aggressively (and wisely) into television production. But
Cleopatra
did not occasion a fundamental rethinking of Fox's approach to movies: Like most studios, its lineup would continue to consist of westerns, war films, comedies, “filler” (usually low-cost horror flicks or beach party movies), and, once in a while, a bigger roll of the dice on a grand-scale historical epic or musical. These movies, known as road-show pictures, were long, large, and lavish: They opened initially in a limited number of huge movie houses, sometimes with two or three thousand seats, in engagements that offered reserved-seat tickets at significantly higher prices than the national average; only after those engagements had played out did the films move into first-run neighborhood theaters and smaller cities. Handled wrong, these movies could turn into
Cleopatra
or
Mutiny on the Bounty.
Done right, they were
The Ten Commandments
or
Ben-Hur
, money machines that could often play theatrically for more than two years before exhausting their audience.