My Year of Flops (6 page)

Richard Dreyfuss:
Playing Dick Cheney was great. It was like a great meal. Unfortunately, it was done by a guy who took the politics out of the story, so it'll have no legs. He had an opportunity to keep a very important character in the film, and that character was you and me, the ones who really were, for a while, afraid of their own president. But by deciding to keep the story in the White House, it looked like business as usual, so the character couldn't appear. And there's no
reason to see the film after you get past the performances or whatever. Josh [Brolin] is great, [Elizabeth Banks] is great, I'm really good.

And Oliver [Stone] is a putz who screamed that I was the worst actor he'd ever worked with, and I'd ruined his film, he had to cut around me. And I said, “Oliver, you've made one strategic error.” He said, “What was that?” I said, “The junket has yet to come.” And then I ripped him apart at the junket. They said, “What did you think of the film?” And I went … [Grimaces.] I answered the question. And as I'm doing now, I'm continuing to do that, because he was a bully, he was graceless at the top of his lungs, and he blew a great opportunity, artistically, commercially, whatever you want to call it. And I have a just-big-enough ego. I don't do favors for people who treat me like a pig. So as far as I'm concerned, you can lead this story off by saying, “Richard Dreyfuss still thinks Oliver is an asshole.”

Nathan Rabin:
Were you able to empathize with Cheney over the course of playing him?

RD:
Empathize? No. I think that he was true to himself, you know? He really did believe that the executive branch was superior to the legislative and the courts. He really did believe that the executive had the right to tell Congress to go fuck itself.

NR:
It was an imperial presidency.

RD:
Yeah. And he believed in the PATRIOT Act. And there was never a conspiracy with the Bush people. They never planned anything. They just waited for our outrage, which never appeared, so they took the next step. We're the villains, because we have lost our outrage.

Book-Exclusive Patented, Pain-Free Case File: The Great Moment

In Preston Sturges' 1941 masterpiece
Sullivan's Travels,
the pampered, wildly successful comedy director behind such fanciful frivolities as
Ants In Your Pants Of 1939, Hey Hey In The Hayloft,
and
So Long Sarong
tires of pumping out mindless escapism and sets out to make
O Brother, Where Art Thou?,
a timely, socially relevant drama about the
human condition. To prepare, he escapes the comforting womb of Hollywood and experiences poverty firsthand as an undercover hobo. He ends up on a chain gang for his troubles but learns he can do far more good for the ever-suffering masses as a maker of mirth than as a dour chronicler of the human condition.

In 1942, Preston Sturges, the pampered, wildly successful comedy director, set out to make a timely, socially relevant drama about the human condition and the cruelty of fate called
The Great Moment.
He was punished for his ambition with just about every indignity short of a stint on a chain gang.

When he made
The Great Moment,
Sturges was in the midst of one of the greatest streaks in American film, a five-year stretch that encompassed such unassailable apogees of cinematic comedy as
The Great McGinty, Christmas In July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek,
and
Hail The Conquering Hero.
Yet Sturges' success mattered little to his bosses over at Paramount. The debonair filmmaker watched in horror as
The Great Moment
was reedited against his will, his prologue discarded, the running time trimmed to 81 minutes, and the film's title changed twice (from
Triumph Over Pain
to
Great Without Glory
to
The Great Moment
). Then it lingered on a shelf for years. Upon its eventual 1944 release, moviegoers ignored it and critics dismissed it.

It was the beginning of the end for one of our greatest writer-directors. After
The Great Moment
spelled the death of his formerly fruitful relationship with Paramount, Sturges endured a disastrous stint co-running a nonstarting film studio with Howard Hughes. He suffered from mounting debt and projects that never got off the ground. Between the release of
The Great McGinty
and
The Great Moment,
Preston Sturges went from being seen as the miracle man with the magic touch to a difficult filmmaker whose best days were behind him.

Sturges' lively exploration of the birth of painless dentistry was fucked in myriad ways, most of them related to timing. The studio flinched at releasing a film called
Triumph Over Pain
during World
War II. Pain was everywhere. Audiences went to movies to escape pain, not to be reminded of it. To audiences smarting from the recent Depression and a bloody world war, the pain aspect of the film's original title negated the triumph part.

As documented in James Curtis'
Between Flops: A Biography Of Preston Sturges,
the filmmaker originally began the film with a prologue that begins, “One of the most charming characteristics of Homo sapiens, the wise guy on your right, is the consistency with which he has stoned, crucified, burned at the stake, and otherwise rid himself of those who consecrated their lives to his further comfort and well-being so that all his strength and cunning might be preserved for the erection of ever larger monuments, memorial shafts, triumphal arches, pyramids, and obelisks to the eternal glory of generals on horseback, tyrants, usurpers, dictators, politicians, and other heroes who led him, usually from the rear, to dismemberment and death.”

There you have it, folks: Strap yourself in tight, eat some popcorn, put your arm around your best gal, and enjoy a film about a great man who finds himself “ridiculed, burned in effigy, ruined, and eventually driven to despair and death by the beneficiaries of his revelation.” Decades later, the original prologue still feels bracingly dark, with its bleak vision of a world where fools who send men to horrible deaths are sanctified, while people who ease pain are crucified. At the beginning of World War II, it must have seemed borderline treasonous, especially its reference to “generals on horseback” leading from the rear. It's no surprise that the prologue was amputated from the final film.

Yet World War II was also, strangely, the perfect time to release a film about the development of anesthesia. Sturges posits that William Thomas Green Morton's refinement of sulfuric ether as an anesthetic marked the birth of modern medicine, the moment when pain stopped being a necessary evil and became controllable. Sturges gives us a secret history of Western medicine as a half-blind grasping toward progress from a motley assortment of semi-disreputable
figures. Wouldn't Americans, especially GIs, want to learn more about the man who made it possible for them to doze dreamily during operations, oblivious to the pain of surgery? In this instance, the answer was definitely no. Ignorance was bliss.

The Great Moment
deviates dramatically from the Great Man model of history by presenting its hero (Joel McCrea, also the star of
Sullivan's Travels
) not as a solitary genius but as a hardworking, ambitious, but not terribly bright failed medical student who revolutionizes anesthesia by building upon the work of colleague Dr. Horace Wells (Louis Jean Heydt), who popularized nitrous oxide as a painkiller, and pompous college professor Dr. Charles Jackson (Julius Tannen).

For the film's structure, Sturges returned to the achronological template of his screenplay for 1933's
The Power And The Glory,
a critically acclaimed drama about the rise and fall of an industrialist (Spencer Tracy); it was a key influence on
Citizen Kane.
In Sturges' original script, William's story is told in flashback by his wife, Elizabeth (Betty Field), and his assistant, Eben Frost (William Demarest). They trace a reverse American success story where triumph and innovation are followed by rejection, poverty, despair, and anonymity.

In case the darkness and futility of the subject's story aren't evident enough, Sturges planned to have the written prologue appear in front of its protagonist's long-forgotten gravestone. Instead,
Moment
opens with William being fêted by adoring onlookers as he presides over a parade in his honor. Sturges' jaundiced take on the fate of great men makes it on-screen in a less incendiary form via a prologue, arguing, “Of all things in nature, great men alone reverse the laws of perspective and grow smaller as one approaches them. Dwarfed by the magnitude of this revelation, reviled, hated by his fellow men, forgotten before he was remembered, Morton seems very small indeed, until the incandescent moment he ruined himself for a servant girl and gained immortality.”

This bracing cold shower of a prologue is followed by an even more despairing sequence where Eben purchases one of his boss' medals from a pawnshop. It's dedicated “To The Benefactor Of Mankind
With The Gratitude Of Humanity.” Eben brings the medal to Elizabeth, who recounts how no one showed up at William's funeral except herself and his children. The fight is lost before it's even begun. We've buried a sad, broken, defeated man before we've had a chance to get to know him.

The film then flashes back to William receiving news that Congress is considering a bill to award him $100,000 as a tardy reward for his service to humanity. For reasons too convoluted and complicated to go into, our hero never receives the money and is pilloried by the media as a scheming opportunist. Poverty, disgrace, and death await.

The film's first 10 minutes contain death, a lonely funeral, crucifixion by the press, a fortune that morphs into public humiliation, a great man's spirit being broken, and complicated legal and legislative wrangling. It's tragedy before triumph, the funeral before the birth of a great idea. Banking cynically on the popularity of Sturges' previous films, Paramount tried to sell
Moment
as “hilarious as a whiff of laughing gas.” One can only imagine how audiences expecting another wacky Preston Sturges romp must have responded to this opening gauntlet of hopelessness and despair.

Before ether, William's interactions with customers resemble a Mexican wrestling match more than a medical procedure. It's all screaming and scary-looking torture devices and patients slinking away from the waiting room in abject terror. The bloodcurdling screams of patients haunt William's nightmares and jangle his nerves. There has to be a better way.

Our hero begins to stumble toward a panacea for pain when he accosts an angry and inebriated Dr. Jackson at a bar. Jackson flaunts his contempt for what he remembers as a “rather dull student” and says, “One of the cankers of our profession is the number of youths without funds or proper background who try to worm their way into it for the rich rewards they imagine it holds.” Yet it's Jackson who accidentally gives William the idea that will make his career when he discusses the pain-deadening qualities of sulfuric ether.

In a genre rife with hagiographies, Sturges' biopic impishly begins its hero's journey to greatness with him badgering a misanthropic former teacher until that teacher is willing to do anything to end their unstructured conversation, even if it means giving a lowly dentist invaluable professional advice.

The world's first and only dental-ether tragicomedy,
The Great Moment
gets endless comic mileage out of ether and nitrous oxide's mind-warping effects on patients. Demarest, a longtime fixture of Sturges' repertory company, is a hoot as William's first and most enthusiastic patient, a professional human guinea pig who submits to ingesting ether out of a desire to clean up on William's double-your-money-back guarantee but continues taking it because he really, really likes getting high. The film balances physical comedy and wrenching drama in the terrifying/amusing moment when a horrified Elizabeth stumbles upon her husband, who has gotten high on his own ether supply. He's lying at his desk with a look of narcotized contentment, marveling approvingly at the metal rod he's jammed into his hand. If
Road House
has taught us anything, it's that pain doesn't hurt, especially when accompanied by William's magic elixir.

William's creation proves successful in a medical trial, but the Hippocratic Oath forbids doctors from using patent medicines with unknown ingredients, so William must decide between martyring himself for humanity's sake and revealing his secrets, or holding on to his patents and his shot at unimaginable riches.

By beginning at the story's tragic conclusion and working diligently toward the middle,
The Great Moment
ends with William's defining moment, his decision to sacrifice his own success so that others might be spared pain.
Moment
opens on a sustained note of funereal gloom but rouses itself to become a funny, vibrant, deeply sad look at the way the system fails dreamers and idealists. Paramount took the film away from Sturges, but his playful spirit pervades the production.

Paramount sat on
The Great Moment
for two years before dumping it into theaters with a trailer breathlessly promising a far-fetched
yet improbably true yarn from “Hollywood's madcap Preston Sturges, who created that laugh riot
Miracle At Morgan's Creek
.”

With its emphasis on raucous slapstick and overheated prose, the trailer is designed to mislead, yet it accidentally tells the truth. The only drama Hollywood's madcap Preston Sturges directed doubles as a pretty terrific, surprisingly moving Preston Sturges comedy.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success