Adventures in the Screen Trade (36 page)

He is an enormously antiestablishment figure that the media have fixed in the public mind for their purposes. (Once when a national magazine referred to him as a chain cigar smoker, he called the writer and asked why he'd written that, since it was so blatantly untrue. The writer said, "You don't smoke cigars? You really don't?"-pause, then-"Well, you should.")

Eventually, at the peak of his fame and success, Levine sold his company and retired. It didn't take, he still had all that energy. So, edging into his seventies, he decided to make a come- back. The vehicle he chose was Cornelius Ryan's posthumous bestseller, which began with this opening sentence:

Shortly after 10 A.M. on Sunday, September 17th, 1944, from airfields all over southern England, the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single operation took to the air.

In other words, Levine wasn't making it easy on himself. But he was determined to finance as big a movie as any ever made.

And to see that the film was in profit before it ever reached the screen.

Not your everyday gamble. And to risk all that at his age be' comes even more remarkable when you remember the poverty he came from, because most wealthy men who started poor cling to their money with ever-increasing determination as the years go on. Levine had enough money to take the challenge. But, as he's said, "If it had gone bad, I would not have been rich anymore." In 1974, he set out to make it all happen. . . . As if the size of the Ryan epic weren't enough-it dealt with the greatest airborne operation of World War II-the specific subject matter didn't make anything a lot easier or more commercial.

Briefly, the story Ryan told dealt with the Battle of Arnhem. Montgomery, the British military leader, came up with a plan to end the war by Christmas of '44. Put as simply as possible, Montgomery's notion was to airlift thirty-five thousand Allied paratroopers, mainly American, three hundred miles and drop them behind German lines in Holland, where they were to capture and hold a series of vital bridges.

Simultaneously, a British armored corps of thirty thousand vehicles was to crash through the German lines, cross the successive bridges, and race over the final and most crucial one, Amhem Bridge, which led them straight into the industrial heart of Germany, thereby crippling the German forces and bringing surrender. It was a brilliant and audacious plan- -only it failed.

In other words, this wasn't The Longest Day, where everybody got to leave the theatre waving the flag. This was a tragedy. Happy endings did not abound. It was a miasmal, mistake-filled conflict that the Allies lost. Not your most commercial idea.

And Levine's choice for director, Richard Attenborough, was not a commercial one either. Attenborough had won awards with his first two pictures. Oh' What a Lovely War and Young Winston, but they had failed at the box office.

I had seen both films, liked Young Winston and thought Lovely War brilliant. Not only that, the former showed tremendous skill at dealing with size and scope, while the latter had a marvelous incisive eye toward handling antiwar material. So I was thrilled at the chance of working with Attenborough, and I wanted very much to write Bridge. And he wanted me to do it.

Richard Attenborough is by far the finest, most decent human being I've met in the picture business. But our first meet- ing was dreadful. It took place in London, where I was on my way back from location in France for Marathon Man. We talked for quite some time and it was pleasant as could be.

Except that afterward, his impression was that I didn't want to do the movie and mine was that he definitely didn't want me to do it.

Eventually, we tried again, this time in America, and our misconceptions were put to bed and we began to work. This was in the summer of '75.

The Battle of Amhem is almost totally unknown in America, but in England, probably because the British cherish their disasters so, it is the second most famous encounter of the war, topped only by Dunkirk.

So I returned to London and every day for several weeks I read books in the morning and night and talked with Attenborough in the afternoons. There are so many books about Am- hem in England that it seemed to me at the time that every man who was involved must have written his memoirs about it. Our problem was in trying to find a story line. The Ryan book is well over 650 pages of not the largest print. It is filled with fabulous material. And these other books added still more stuff. I would tell him about something I'd just read and ask did he want to include it, and more often than not, the answer was yes, if we can. The heroism displayed was remarkable-on both sides. Amhem will probably go down as the last major battle in which any of the old romantic notions of war still held true. The Bulge, which followed it, was vicious and dirty by comparison.

The movie was always intended to run close to three hours- it was impossible to tell the story in less time.

But which story? There were so damn many. It became clear that there was no way I would be able to finish a first draft screenplay before late fall of '75. Which presented a terrible problem for Mr. Levine. From the first time I met him, he was totally convinced of one thing: A Bridge Too Far was going to open on june 15, 1977. "We will open June fifteenth of '77," he said. That was fixed, for whatever reasons, in his mind. And since he was, in effect, the studio, we knew that June fifteenth was going to be our release date.

We also knew that this three-hour story was going to take approximately six months to shoot. And it had to shoot in Hol- land, because that's where the bridges were.

Because of the weather conditions in Holland, it was crucial to be finished with photography by October of '76. Counting back six months, that meant we had to start in April of that year.

But my script wouldn't be done till, say, November of '75. Well, you can't risk a giant undertaking without top personnel who have had experience with this kind of massive operation. These technicians-production designers, cinematographers, at least thirty in all-are in demand. lf Levine waited till he had a script, the chances were strong that the crew Attenborough needed would be busy on other pictures.

But he went ahead, took the risk, and hired them. If my script stunk, .if it was unusable, they had to be paid. Not only that, preliminary production had to start.

Without a word on paper, Levine was now in for over two million dollars. . ..

Obviously, every writer feels pressure when he tries to make something work. But I've never felt as much pressure as when I went on trying to figure out Bridge, because I'd never had as much of one man's money riding on anything before. (Everyone, I think, was affected by the personal financing of the film. The crew in Holland, when we got to shooting, talked of it all the time. They hustled their tails off--I've never seen a crew work as hard.)

A movie, as a rough rule of thumb, runs a minute per page of screenplay. So I had to write approximately 175 pages of script, far more than I'd ever previously done. The length made so many new and different problems. Climaxes could not come at the same intervals as in something of more normal length.

Another rule. In a screenplay you always attack your story as late as possible. You enter each scene as close as you can to the

end (movie scenes are, for the most part, terribly short com- pared to scenes in novels or even short stories). You also enter your story as late as you can. But which story?

There were simply too many incidents that cried out for inclusion five Victoria Crosses were awarded for heroism at Arnhem; that's England's highest military honor and it doesn't get awarded easily. Surely I needed those five.

Bridge was also intended to lure an all-star cast. So I had to try to write a bunch of parts that might appeal to stars-problem-

-none of the main characters in the Ryan book died. Well, you can't have an antiwar movie where all the leads live. So I began to fiddle wilh trying to make small roles, roles that would be instantly sympathetic-so that I could have someone to kill in the story. Goddammit, though, which story?

Yes, I had problems, problems of time, problems of story, problems of length, on and on-but there were some problems I was lucky enough not to know about- -for example, gliders.

When the air armada that opens Ryan's book took off from England, there were five thousand planes of various kinds involved-plus twenty-five hundred gliders. Most of the troops were carried into Holland via gliders. Well, when I finally got around to writing that sequence, I had a gay old lime, going from this glider to that, one to another, inside then outside, whatever I wanted. What I didn't know when I wrote it was this-

-there weren't any gliders. Not anywhere. No matter how hard people tried to find one, they had no luck. (Gliders are meant to crash land, and that accounted for their absence.)

Well, I'd known that we would have to build maybe one glider in toto and parts of some others and the rest would have to be made by movie magic, I don't know if I ever would have gotten started.

What finally untracked me was this: I lucked into the structure.

There was a scene I knew we had to have where a British general explained to his armored commanders what was about to happen, how they were about to belt across all these bridges the paratroopers had taken and wheel into Germany. I Fiddled with his speech and it went like this at the end:

GENERAL HORROCKS

I like to think of this as one of those American Western films - the paratroops, lacking substantial equipment, always short of food-- these are the besieged homestead- ers. And the Germans, naturally, are the bad guys.

(he pauses; then - ) And we, my friends, are the cavalry-on the way to the rescue.

That was the light bulb at last going on. Because I realized, for all its size and complexity. Bridge was a cavalry-to-the-rescue story-one in which the cavalry fails to arrive, ending, sadly, one mile short.

That was my spine, and everything that wouldn't cling I couldn't use. All five Victoria Cross stories fell out of the picture. Super material went by the boards. But it had to.

The first draft was done by November and was well received. Shortly thereafter, Levine began one of the most remarkable weeks in his long, remarkable career. ...

In order for his gamble to pay off, what he needed were stars. For two main reasons: (1) Movies are no longer a local operation; they are, all the most successful ones, international. And stars still have meaning in foreign markets.

(2) In foreign countries, there are still giant theatre chains and distribution companies, and they are wildly competitive with one another because of a continual shortage of product. What that means is, if Japan represents five percent of the world movie market, a smash can do a tremendous amount of business. (Towering Inferno, for example, took in over sixteen million dollars in Japan alone, more than the entire cost of the picture.)

Well, if my chain bought Towering Inferno-and I could only get it by outbidding your chain-that means that my theatres take in all that money and you are stuck playing Bruce Lee imitation contests.

What Levine planned to do was to try to assemble a package that would eventually prove so appealing to the chains and distributors that they would pay him record-breaking sums of money in advance of receiving the film,, and with those ad- vances he would pay for the film as it went along.

Obviously, there were bobby traps. Like (a) what if he couldn't assemble an appealing enough cast? Or (b) what if the distributors wouldn't come up with the sums he needed? Or (c) what if they did come up with enough and then the picture got into trouble and ran wildly over budget-there was no one to turn to, he would be stuck with the overrun.

In early January of '76, Levine and Attenborough went to Los Angeles for the talent raid. Certain English performers were already set-Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier-but the crucial American performers were nonexistent.

By "crucial" the foreign distributors meant two names: Rob- ert Redford or Steve McQueen.

Levine felt he had a decent shot at them: Redford was familiar with the project and had let it be known that he looked on it not unfavorably. McQueen was not familiar with it, but he and Attenborough had known each other for years, since they'd act- ed together in The Great Escape and The Sand Pebbles.

They arrived on a Monday and set to work. Redford agreed to meet on Friday. Attenborough got the script, to McQueen, who agreed to read it overnight and have lunch the following

Now two problems arose, the first involving paying stars percentages for their agreeing to work. All stars get profit percent- ages, and the biggest ones work off gross. Levine knew he couldn't pay any percentages because he needed too many stars. So he had to make up for that lack with salary. The figure of a quarter of a million dollars a week was agreed on, half a million a week for cither Redford or McQueen.

Those numbers were, at the time, gasping, and news of the project did not go unnoticed among the agents of Hollywood.

But now came an unexpected crusher: The agents demanded guarantees. What Levine had hoped to do was take the actors' acceptances and use them to flush out the foreign distributors. In other words, pay the actors as he got paid for them.

Many agents doubted the project would ever happen. Levine was not young, he had been away, etc. And they demanded protection for their clients. "Did I scream," Levine said. "I never screamed louder in my life. I'd never given in to a guarantee before, I swore I never would-but I didn't have much room to maneuver; if I did, I didn't see it." So anything Levine agreed to pay out now, he was legally bound for. Himself.

They met with McQueen the next day at the Brown Derby in Beverly Hills. McQueen was prompt, courteous, terrific. But he said no. Permanently.

This was Tuesday, and now the Friday meeting with Redford was the shooting match. On Wednesday, Jimmy Caan said yes. Gene Hackman too. So did Elliott Gould. By Thursday they had Scan Connery and Michael Came. That night they got word that Ryan O'Neal was in.