Adventures in the Screen Trade (35 page)

"I wouldn't know if it was a whole movie or nol. But he was here a long time." How long?

"I'm not really sure. Eight weeks maybe. Maybe twelve." This was the first I had ever heard of Lookin ' to Get Out, a movie Ashby was directing with Jon Voight and Ann-Margret. I didn't know the name of it then, of course, but I did know this: I was shocked, I was pissed, but most of all, for the first lime on this project, my confidence was shaken.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you're trying a screenplay, you know it's never going to be Bergman. If it's a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk.

But if you're a writer, that's what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence.

You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I'm going to do it this one time. I'm going to tell you things you never knew. I've-got-secrets.'

When I was trying Harper, one of my confidence builders was that there hadn't been a tough-guy detective movie in years. If I'd found out that Clint Eastwood was doing a Dashiell Hammett, I could have handled that. I would have told myself, what the hell, there have been lots of tough-guy detective movies in the past, there is always room for another if it's good enough.

But when I found out, after years of working on Butch Cassidy, that another movie was planned called The Wild Bunch (the name of Cassidy's gang), that was a blow. There was always room for another Western-but you couldn't be the second Butch Cassidy film. In Hollywood, often success comes not from being best but from being first.

I went back to my room at the Grand and called Jewison. He was just as stunned, I think, as I was. It was crazy-because the same company that was distributing the Ashby film was distributing ours.

But there was no point in going out the window. The important thing was to read Lookin ' to Get Out and find really what similarities the two films had.

Back in New York, I read the script to the Ashby film: He had, indeed, shot everything in the hotel. The same locations we wanted to use. All. My reaction on finishing, it, though, was probably less depression than bewilderment.

Because, first of all, the script was written to shoot at Caesars Palace. Caesars had apparently taken one look at it and said "nothing doing," so Ashby went across the street and got the Grand's consent. ' The Unsullied Grand.

That pristine diamond of the Metro crown had refused to trust us in '77, and here they had okayed a script that had, among other things, a scene where one of the male leads waits outside in the corridor so his buddy, inside, can get a blow job from a whore.

And as far as putting their executives in a bad light, one of the main plot points of Lookin' to Get Out hinged on the hotel's top man not being able to recognize the voice of a good friend, thereby giving imposters the run of the hotel.

Okay. The idea for Grand Hotel was already a little tired. And Ashby had shot everything we wanted to use. Still, our stories were completely different. And most important of all, we were doing a musical, a full-fledged musical set in Las Vegas-no one had done that for a while.

Then I found out that Francis Coppola was shooting One from the Heart, a full-fledged musical set in Las Vegas.

I was, to put it bluntly, in despair. My secrets were being stolen away. Every time I thought about the movie, the presence of Ashby and Coppola blocked any hope I had at vision. Whenever I thought of a musical moment, I wondered if Coppola had come up with the same idea; every book scene went flat be- cause I knew that wherever we put it in the hotel, the audience would have been there already.

When I write, I must convince myself that it's going to be wonderful. (There is a character in a great play by Tennessee Williams, Camino Real. She's the Gypsy's daughter and she's a whore, but in her heart, each moonrise makes her a virgin.) I'm like that-each moonrise makes me a virgin, too-I'm going to write it and this time, this time, it won't be crap. When I don't have that confidence, I'm in big trouble.

I don't think I realized finally quite how big my trouble was until I read the Variety review of a movie starring Peter Falk called Ail the Marbles. Falk played a character who managed a lady tag-wrestling team, hustling his ladies up the rungs of the wrestling world, hoping for a shot at the world's championship. Guess what? They get their chance.

Now, guess where the big match takes place? Bingo-at the Grand Hotel.

Variety then went on to explain that the last half hour of the film took place at the Grand. And that the match itself took place where the logo of the Grand was on the ring mat, so that every shot was a plug for the hotel. Variety had one word for this self-promotion- -"shameless."

That word in that review was the final nail in my coffin. (It didn't matter when I next found out that the Bette Midler movie Jinxed also had scenes at the Grand. And it also didn't matter that the Falk picture look place at the Grand in Reno. Because they look alike. It was the same as if someone had said to me, "Don't worry that there's this other movie in the Anaheim Bur- ger King, ours is in Cucamonga."

I met with Jewison, Hamlisch, and the Bergmans. They were all bright and they had wonderful ideas and they weren't both- ered by all the other movies. But the musical people hadn't been through the same grinding-down process I'd experi- enced. And Jewison was about to begin directing a Burt Reynolds-Goldie Hawn film, so he was busy for the next nine months.

I had to go into my room and do it. Try, somehow, to make Grand Hotel come to life. And I couldn't.

I had one final meeting with Norman. It was, at least for me, very sad. We wished each other well, that was that.

Looking back on the experience six months later, I feel it was the right and only thing for me to have done. At least it was right for me. Could I have written the script? Absolutely.

I could have filled 135 pages. If you'd lifted it, it would have felt like a screenplay. If you'd looked through it, it would have resembled a screenplay. Would it have had any quality at all? Doubtful.

My confidence was all-all-gone. The moonrise could not make me a virgin. When I am hired to try a movie, I may turn in a garbage script. But at least I know that, rotten as it may turn out, it was written by the best me available. At the end, on Grand Hotel, I wasn't there. . . .

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Bridge Too Far

Until the reviews came out, A Bridge Too Far was probably the best experience I've had in films. And, as I said in the introduction to this section, the most unusual. What made it so unusual, from my point of view, was this: It was the only time that a picture was actually into production before a first draft screenplay or so much as a word of it was seen by anyone.

This kind of risk is unheard of for a studio-financed picture. But Bridge was not backed by a studio; rather it was one man using his own money, the producer Joseph E. Levine.

And if that isn't risk enough, remember this: We are not talking about a cheapie here. Levine knew from the outset that Bridge, a mammoth undertaking, was going to be expensive. But I doubt that he could have guessed that, when things were at their most desperate, he was going to be personally on the line for twenty-two million dollars. . . .

Joseph Edward Levine was born in the Boston slums in 1905. He was the youngest of six children and his father, an immigrant tailor, died when Levine was four. He endured one of those classic horrendous childhoods, moving always from tenement to tenement.

His mother called him the broytgeber - the bread giver-and he was always working, selling paper, shining shoes, stealing wood, so the family wouldn't freeze in the New England win- ters. The slum stink draped across his early years, and there seemed no escaping.

There was also no food. Weekly, he would go to the rabbi for religious instruction and the rabbi would always eat black bread during these sessions and never offer any. The rabbi also had a stick and whenever Levine made a mistake, the rabbi would strike him on the wrist. One day the rabbi made a mistake and hit too hard, whereupon Levine grabbed the stick and hit the rabbi, which put an end to his theological studies.

At fourteen he quit school. All he had to offer was energy; he became an errand boy in a dress factory and worked his way up to being a traveling dress salesman. But he didn't like it. He opened a dress shop when he was twenty-called LeVine's- and did all right for a few years. But he didn't like the dress shop any more than being a traveling salesman. He tried New York, scuffled, drove an ambulance before he knew his way around the city. Back to Boston and into the restaurant business. But always he was looking for something. Finally, forty-five years ago, he found the picture business. An art house, more precisely-the Uncoin Theatre in New Haven. The first two movies he showed were Un Camel de Bai, the French classic, which did well with the Yalies, and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband, which not only "dropped dead, some people threw eggs at the screen." Art films and exploitation films-he has been allied with both ever since.

Eventually he moved from exhibiting films to the distribution end. Paisan, Open City, Bicycle Thief, 8 1/2 --he brought over some of the best pictures ever. By his own reckoning, A Bridge Too Far was the four hundred ninety-second film he had cither produced, coproduced, financed, presented, or distributed. But the one that made him famous was Hercules. It's a little difficult to explain to an audience today the impact Hercules had in 1959. The movie business was undergoing yet another crisis of confidence-studios were retrenching, longterm executives were being laid off--and television was the chief villain. The movie executives hadn't the least idea how best to cope with it-but they knew that tv had stolen their audience. Levine's importance in the history of this period may well be that he proved that the new despair-ridden movie business as a Fortune magazine article about him said, "really the old movie business under new conditions-and a pretty good business at that."

The Hercules story began in New York when Levine, who was basically a New England distributor, had a talk with a Metro employee who told him of the existence of the Italian sun-and- sandal epic company would touch it for America, but

Levine knew as soon as he heard the title that it was for him.

So, on the strength of the title and the Metro man's recommendation, Levine flies to Rome the next morning to see the movie. He goes to the Metro offices in Rome and sits alone in the freezing basement screening room, watching the picture. His reaction?

"Lemme tell you something-if you thought Hercules was a stiff when you saw it-and it was a stiff when you saw it, not one of your all-time cinema greats-my God, you should have seen it when I saw it-the color made you sick it was so terrible but the color was sensational compared to the sound. See, they had loused up the sound track something awful. There's a ship- wreck scene, and the mast of the ship-this huge mast-it comes crashing down to the deck. Well, when it hits there is dead silence. Nothing. Then a little later, Steve Reeves-you remem- ber Steve Reeves?-didn't sound so good when he talked but terrific muscles-anyway, a little later Steve Reeves is having a love scene with a girl and CRASH-here comes the sound of the goddam mast hitting the deck. It didn't get any better after that, either, I can assure you. Anyway, I bought the American rights for $120,000 and went to work."

The "work" consisted of what most industry figures agree was the most aggressive campaign any film ever had. If you think Paramount did a job selling Gatsby or King Kong, that was bush-league stuff compared to what Levine did. He spent triple what the movie cost him on newspaper ads alone. He bought billboard space and space in comic books. You couldn't turn on the damn radio without hearing someone hawking this muscleman movie.

And he went directly to the enemy-television-and spent another quarter of a million dollars on-advertisements. Not only did he have these tv ads, he showed all the best stuff from the movie on the ads, secure in the knowledge that no one would dream there wasn't more of the same awaiting them at the theatre. Then he ordered over six hundred prints-which isn't uncommon today, but it sure was then-and he gave a party for a thousand people at the Waldorf-Astoria for another forty grand.

Now, out in Hollywood the executives are looking out from their foxholes and they can't believe it. This independent from

Boston is going crazy-they know he's crazy because they've all seen the picture. It was available for a year but they all passed on it. Their business was to judge public taste and they knew nobody was going to want to see Hercules.

They were only wrong by twenty million dollars, which is what the picture grossed.

Levine never stopped running throughout the sixties, and long before The Graduate-his most prosperous enterpriseshattered everybody's concept of what the audiences were looking for in a hero, Levine had become the most famous and the most successful independent film producer in the world. And probably because of that word-independent-he has never been much loved in Southern California.

It's kind of ironic that Levine, maybe the archetypical Hollywood mogul, has always been acutely uncomfortable in Holly- wood. He goes rarely, only when he has to, and usually he stays in his hotel suite, conducts his business as quickly as possible, and, as quickly as possible, takes the next plane out. He's a Boston boy and he always will be. He also defies the mogul tradition in that he is neither fast talking nor cigar smoking; he's a slow talker moving up to medium when excited, and a lifelong nonsmoker-pipes and cigarettes, as well as cigars.