My Life as a Mankiewicz (29 page)

I said, “No, no, Stanley, it's all right.”

I met with Gene Hackman, who'd read the script. Gene said, “Listen, I'd love to do this, but I can't do it until September or October, and let me tell you why. I have worked nonstop since
The Poseidon Adventure.
I've done six or seven movies in two years, and if this stinker doesn't put me out of business…My wife wants to divorce me. My son is on drugs. I've got to spend a couple of months with my family.”

I said, “You're our first choice, but Peter said we can't wait till September.”

Hackman said, “I saw a man on television last night who would be wonderful. He was a black comic named Bill Crosby.”

“You mean Bill Cosby?” I said. “He did a series once called
I Spy
with Robert Culp, and he's pretty good. Nightclub star, comedy star, and a wonderful actor.”

We called Laddie, and he said, “That's really interesting.” We flew up to see Bill performing in Lake Tahoe. He'd read the script.

He said, “I'd love to do this. I have one question. I understand this was offered to Gene Hackman. Gene and I are not usually cast in the same part. So how would you change this for me?”

I said, “I'm not intending to change one line.”

He said, “Then I definitely want to do it.” It was a part written entirely for a white person.

Cosby took deferred money. Harvey Keitel, who played Speed, took deferred money. We wanted Valerie Perrine to play Jugs, but she wouldn't defer any money. We thought, it's unfair for other people to defer money and not her. Raquel Welch, her tongue hanging out to play Jugs, would defer money. So we had this crazy group of people: Bill, Raquel, Harvey, Larry Hagman, Chicago Bear Dick Butkus in his first part, Allen Garfield (whom Vincent Canby called “the Laurence Olivier of American sleaze”), Bruce Davison, performance artists like Toni Basil, and the weirdest cast in the world. We shot the whole picture on location out of something called a Cinemobile. We found a pool hall that was being condemned and turned it into the ambulance company in Venice. We shot the whole movie really fast and came in at 2.99999 because we had to juggle the books. We got Charlie Maguire, who was Elia Kazan's first assistant and one of the great production managers of all time, to be the associate producer to make sure we were on track.

Raquel was very insecure in the beginning, and she had five women who worked for her. Makeup, hair, public relations, wardrobe. I called them the Raquettes. They would always say, “Raquel wants to see you.” In the beginning, I was going out once a day, “Yes, Raquel?”

She said, “My motor home is supposed to be the same size as Bill Cosby's.”

“It is, Raquel.” We're sitting in it.

“His looks much bigger. I was in there.”

I said, “Raquel, that's because you wanted a ceiling-to-floor mirror, and the only place to put it is right in the center, so it tends to cut your motor home in half, but it's exactly the same.”

She said, “There must be a larger motor home available.”

Charlie Maguire told me what to say. He was giving me producing rules. I said, “I'm sure there is, Raquel, and if your staff finds one, have them bring me the info and we'll take a look.”

She said, “Okay.”

Charlie said, “Her staff's never going to find one. She was waiting for you to say, ‘Okay, we're going to bring three here tomorrow and you pick one.'”

Larry Hagman, who was totally nuts, would arrive on the set one day dressed as an astronaut and the next day as a World War I French general. This was Dick Butkus's introduction to filmmaking. Allen Garfield was a compulsive gambler, and when we hired him, we didn't know he was. One day, he called me and asked, “Can I have all of my money?” He was signed for ten weeks at $5,000 a week.

I said, “Allen, I don't know if I can do that. Let me see if I can help you out.”

I called Laddie, who said, “Hell, no, he can't have all his money. He's getting five thousand a week for ten weeks.”

Garfield's wife's lawyer called saying, “Don't give him the money, because he'll just gamble it away.”

We were looping the picture at the end of shooting. Peter and I were waiting for Allen in the looping theater, and he was very late. All of a sudden, two guys who look like they're from the national company of
Guys and Dolls
came in and said, “Mr. Garfield here?”

We said, “No, he's not. Are you looking for him?”

They said, “Yeah, we're looking for him.”

“We're looking for him, too.” Poor Allen, shit.

It was such a liberating experience being out on the streets, working with such diverse talent as Cosby, Keitel, Hagman, and L.Q. Jones. During the shooting of that film, Peter Yates and I were walking to lunch one day and passed a guy leaning up against the wall with a big beard. He looked like a bum. He said, “Peter?”

Peter turned around and said, “Oh, my God, Patrick?”

He said, “Yes.”

Peter said, “What's happened?”

He said, “No, no, I'll be all right. Just nice to see you.”

It was Patrick McGoohan, the
Prisoner, Secret Agent
man. It was booze. I didn't recognize him at all, but the minute Peter said, “Patrick?” I said, “Oh, my God, it's Patrick McGoohan.” Obviously, he recovered from that, because he went on to do many things.

Peter was a delight to work with. He had in his contract that it was a “Peter Yates production.” But he said, “Since you're writing it and we're both producing it, why don't we call it a Yates/Mankiewicz production?” Nobody's ever offered me a credit like that. When the main title came out and read “a Yates/Mankiewicz production,” Peter said, “Oh, I wish I hadn't done that, because Mankiewicz is such a long name. I look like a fucking strawberry.”

I made a deal with Jerry Moss and A&M. We had Peter Frampton, Brothers Johnson, Quincy Jones, Herb Alpert. They gave us all the music and the rights to use it and score it with A&M music. The picture opened huge. We made that film for $3 million, and it grossed about $17 million. In those days, ticket prices were about two bucks. Everybody got their deferred money. It won two festivals in Europe because they thought it was anti-American, and anything that was anti-American was automatically nominated. To open a picture in those days cost you $2 million. Today it costs $15 to $20 million to open a movie properly. Laddie says, “Now, today, if I'm running a studio, I'm not going to have seventy million dollars in a little ambulance picture. But then, my reasoning was, I've got Tom Mankiewicz, who writes great, and I'm laughing in spite of the offensive nature of his picture. I've got Peter Yates, who directed
Bullitt
, and Bill Cosby, Raquel Welch, and Harvey Keitel. I'm making this for three million bucks. What's the worst that can happen to me? The picture only grosses a million, five, I've lost a million, five. If it does what it did, if it grosses seventeen, and then I sell it for another three, this is hugely profitable to me. Then it has a life forever on tapes and DVDs.”

I get a profit check every year for
Mother, Jugs & Speed.
I went to a screening of some film a few years ago, and Elvis Mitchell, who is African American and was a film critic for the
New York Times
, said to me in the lobby before, as we're all having a glass of wine, “You know a picture of yours that is so terrific and really wasn't treated with the respect it should have had when it came out?”

I said, “It's
Mother, Jugs & Speed
.”

He said, “You're right. And it's also Bill Cosby's best performance ever.”

I said, “I love that picture.”

Two weeks later, I'm down at the Music Center. I was talking with Leonard Maltin, who writes film reviews, and he says, “You wrote a movie that I gave a bad review to, but I saw it again the other night on cable and I'm changing my review.”

I said,
“Mother, Jugs & Speed
.”

He said, “That's right.” It now says, “Hilarious black comedy.”

The first half hour of that film is very funny. Then, Bill Cosby and his partner, Bruce Davison, get a call down to a junkie's house. There's little Toni Basil with a shotgun, and she says, “I want drugs.” Bruce Davison says, “I'm hip, but lady, listen, we don't carry the kind of drugs in our rig that you want, but we'll get you some.” She says, “Liar,” and blows his head off. Cosby's got a gun stashed in his rig, and he says, “Hold it there, lady,” and she puts the shotgun in her mouth and pulls the trigger and kills herself. Our first preview was in Saint Louis. Twenty people got up and walked out. They thought this was going to be a rollicking ambulance comedy with Bill Cosby. Afterward, Peter, Laddie, and I went for a drink, and Laddie asked, “Do you really need the scene with the shotgun? You saw what happened. This is Middle America. Do you really need that?”

And Peter and I said, “We really, really do. That's really what the picture's about.”

Laddie said, “Okay, let's keep it in.” Laddie knew that it was important to the movie and important to us, and that was his movie. A stupider studio head would say, “Guys, I'm afraid I really have to insist. It's our three million dollars, and let's just say that Bruce Davison disappears and we throw in a line that he's on vacation and we just go on.” But Laddie was a wonderful studio head. The first two pictures he green-lit were
The Omen
, directed by Dick Donner, and
Mother, Jugs & Speed.
We were a little hit, and
The Omen
was huge. But if you made it for $3 million and you grossed $17 million and you sold it to ABC for $3 million more—if they could invest $3 million and get $20 million back—it was almost seven times your money. Later, Scorsese did
Bringing Out the Dead
, but it didn't work. Marty is no good at comedy, and I'm saying that about a guy who's one of the best directors. Every time he tries to do an elegant film or a funny film, God bless him. But
Raging Bull
is one of the best films ever made. He finally won an Oscar for
The Departed.
This guy didn't win for
Mean Streets
, for
Raging Bull
, for
Goodfellas.
Just one after the other. I would say
The Departed
, which is a perfectly good film, is probably his fifth or sixth best.

Jerry Oppenheimer, who is Jule Styne's adopted son, is married to an old friend of mine named Gail Oppenheimer. They were having a small dinner party and Tony Martin was there. He got up during dinner to relieve himself, and as he came out of the bathroom, he suddenly slumped and hit his head, and was down. It was scary. Gail said, “We have to call 9-1-1.”

Blake Edwards was there with Julie Andrews, and Blake was in a crotchety mood that night, which he can be at times. He's wheelchair-bound now. He said, “Don't call 9-1-1. They don't know what they're doing.” Someone called 9-1-1. Those guys were there in ninety seconds. It was unbelievable. Beverly Hills. They were hooking Tony up, and Blake was saying, “They don't know what the fuck they're doing.”

I said, “Blake, they know what they're doing. These people are lifesavers. I did a whole movie about this once.”

The guy who was hooking Tony up asked, “What was the movie?”

I said,
“Mother, Jugs & Speed
.”

He said, “Are you kidding?” He turned around and said, “Hey, this guy did
Mother, Jugs & Speed
! What'd you do?”

I said, “Well, I wrote it and produced it.”

He said, “Jeez, every EMT in the city knows that movie. Every ambulance driver knows that movie.” As he looked past me, he said, “I'm sorry, are you Julie Andrews?”

She said, “Yes, I am.”

He said, “And it's Julie Andrews and the guy who wrote
Mother, Jugs & Speed!”

Tony's vital signs were good, and to show that he was fine, he started singing! So Tony Martin's on the floor singing,
Mother, Jugs & Speed
is a hit with the EMTs, guy wants Julie Andrews's autograph. I said, “This is a medical emergency in Beverly Hills. This could never happen in Omaha.”

The EMT, as he was leaving, said, “I'm serious. Every EMT in the city knows
Mother, Jugs & Speed.
Every ambulance driver knows
Mother, Jugs & Speed.
That's our movie.”

These kinds of films were my corner of the sky. Dad couldn't give me advice on
Mother, Jugs & Speed.
He loved the movie, but the streets of L.A. with ambulances at night, it was nothing he knew. The kinds of movies I was doing weren't up his alley. The only movie I ever did that he said, “Now, there's a movie I might have made” was
Ladyhawke.
He thought it was so sophisticated, and he loved it. There was no, “I'm so proud of you.” But to other people my dad would say, “Well, I can't even keep up with Tom anymore; I don't know what movie he's on, and they all seem to be doing very well.” Peter Yates and I gave a screening of
Mother, Jugs & Speed
for the cast and crew of
Saturday Night Live.
They all wanted to see it. Later on I did
Dragnet
with Danny Aykroyd, and he remembered that screening. My dad didn't say so, but he was so impressed that these hip people on television loved this movie and his son wrote it. But we were not a family like that.

American Germs

This was the age of the disaster movie:
Earthquake, The Towering Inferno.
Two producers who became very famous, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar, later Carolco, put together a package and a script called
The Cassandra Crossing.
American germs—germ warfare—were on a train and suddenly got loose, and the whole train was quarantined but it kept moving. It was kind of anti-American: the implication at the end was that the Americans sent it over a faulty bridge for everybody to die. So it was a fight against time with everybody trying to save themselves. And they couldn't get off the train. The script needed a rewrite, and Peter Guber (the wunderkind head of Columbia) said, “There's only a couple of people who could do this, but you've got to do this quick.”