Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (10 page)

And it was. Although rumors have circulated that the slap exchange was in jeopardy of being cut as a sop to southern audiences, it was, in fact, shot and released the way it was born on page sixteen, scene twenty-five, of Silliphant’s treatment. The slap is Silliphant’s creation: it’s not in the Ball book.

“The slap scene was in the script,” Director of Photography Haskell Wexler confirmed, “the producers knew, everybody knew. There were questions even if the film should be made, and the producer was considered brave. It is hard for some people to realize what was considered daring for Hollywood at that time.” 
[100]

“Wonder of wonders,” marveled actress Beah Richards, who appeared in the film, “a white man [was] actually slapped, which must have blown minds all over the United States and Europe.” 
[101]

“Imagine, for me” Silliphant enthused, “to go from being told that I can’t put Joe Louis’s child on the lap of his white trainer to a scene in which Sidney Poitier slaps, as hard as he can, a rich, white land owner in the Deep South. That is progress.” 
[102]

The 166-page first draft script dated January-February, 1966, which Silliphant delivered, shows the writer’s savvy in knowing whom he was writing to attract — at this stage Poitier had not agreed to star — by describing Tibbs as “well-dressed, despite the heat. His nose seems the nose of an aristocratic white man, the line of his mouth slender and well-formed. The eyes are even more remarkable. Something dances behind them, a kind of banked fire.” In other words, a starring role.

As for Gillespie, the script clearly states his unresolved status as Wells’s police chief. “I’m new here,” he says on page seventeen, “going on my fourth week. Come up from Texas to take over the department.” The final film will remove this backstory, including a moment when one officer tells another that their boss is still in his trial month. Instead, various civic leaders remind him every now and then that his future depends on solving the murder, adding to the pressure to do so. A March 1966, polish was apparently enough to secure Poitier’s consent. Next it was Jewison’s turn.

“It wasn’t, then, an especially elegant piece of writing or plotting,” the director recalled, “but what it had going for it was, at its core, a compelling confrontation. For this period, this was incendiary material, the notion that a black was in any way superior to whites. It had the potential to make a provocative and progressive statement about race in America. But it wasn’t perfect.” How does a thirty-nine-year-old director, hitherto mostly of frothy comedies and TV variety shows, explain this to a seasoned forty-eight-yearold writer with 150 acclaimed titles to his credit? Jewison used psychology. He put check marks beside lines he thought could be improved, only he didn’t explain what they meant, hoping Silliphant would feel the need to make changes on his own. Silliphant bit. ’That line you marked on page forty-two, Norman?’ he said the next day. ‘I got thinking about it last night, and it’s too perfect for a movie. It’s overwritten, just too pat. I fixed it.” 
[103]

“It turned out that he had planned it all along,” Silliphant confirmed. “Well, six months later I was still working on that script. And he was fantastic about that. He made you
want
to change it. He challenged you. He would just guide you from one thing to the other. That’s a talent — Norman has that great talent.” 
[104]
And so went the best collaboration of both men’s careers.

By July of 1966, a 140-page script was not only shorter, it was sharper. Now Tibbs was from Philadelphia, a northern city with a more substantial black population than Phoenix. Leslie Colbert is no longer the murder victim’s daughter but his wife, which reduced the prominence of Sam Wood and made Gillespie the primary antagonist. 
[105]
Above all, the moment is refined in which Tibbs, having been hauled into Gillespie’s office from the train depot, is taunted by the Chief, who sees his wallet bulging with cash, “Now just what do you do up there in Pennsylvania to earn that kind of money?” to which Tibbs, at the end of his (and the audience’s) patience, says, “I’m a police officer!”

“At that moment,” Silliphant grinned, “the film
explodes
into life and doesn’t stop until the final moment — at the train station — when the Sheriff reaches for — and Tibbs surrenders to him — Tibbs’s bag — two human beings have bonded. We protracted that moment of initial impact as long as we could — right down to the precise frame of film at which point we felt we might be teasing the viewer
too
long. 
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This was from the beginning the intent of my screenplay and anything which did not advance that dynamic was ruthlessly rejected.

“This may be the most ‘controlled’ and ‘deliberate’ piece of craftsmanship of all my work,” Silliphant admitted, adding quotation marks to show disdain for such calculated construction. “Usually, in writing, I let emotion and feeling dominate, lead me down unknown and, for me, still-unexplored pathways.” But
In the Heat of the Night
demanded precision. “In discussions early on with Norman Jewison, we agreed that, if the crime story were plotted as the alphabet, from A to Z, how much of it could we pull out and play off-screen without ever seeing or making any reference to? We kept A and jumped to F, then from F jumped to L and from L to P — then from P to Z-and then we tried to see how we could still pull more exposition out of that fragmentary crime-story structure. We applied this principle to every scene: wherever we could, any explanation or exposition, we stepped on it. The result of this withholding of information was to compel the viewer to invest attention to the least detail. Maybe there was a clue in the look Gillespie gave Virgil — maybe not. But we’d better watch and see.”

Although Poitier was to receive top billing, the film needed an equally strong presence to play Gillespie. Mirisch first asked George C. Scott but, as the deal was being finalized, the mercurial actor decided to do a play in New York with his temporarily ex-wife, Colleen Dewhurst. 
[107]
At one point
Daily Variety
even ran a squib that Raymond Burr, best known for playing Perry Mason on TV, had been approached. 
[108]
Rod Steiger was Jewison’s second choice and he consented to do the film after he wrapped the Russian
Napoleon
in Italy. 
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He was paid $150,000. 
[110]

With all the fireworks surrounding the racial theme of the film, another equally significant casting decision went almost ignored: Lee Grant. Grant had been nominated for an Academy Award in 1951 for her first film,
Detective Story,
and then found herself on the Blacklist when she refused to testify against her husband, Arnold Manoff, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 
[111]
For the next twelve years she found it hard to get work, and playing Louise Colbert — who, unpoisoned by racism, is the person, rather than Endicott, who pressures the town to listen to Tibbs — helped revive her career. Warren Oates, as Sam Wood, was another notable addition. Though the Kentucky-born Oates had appeared in countless television episodes and movie westerns, this was the first time he had a chance to hint at his acting potential. Likewise, Scott Wilson made his film debut; his next role would be in Richard Brooks’s memorable
In Cold Blood.

With Jewison winning the battle to shoot on location, the problem then became, “What location?” The authentic Deep South was out; even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed two years earlier, the region’s attitudes had not measurably improved. Besides, only a short time earlier, Poitier and Harry Belafonte had nearly been killed by Klansmen while on a civil rights mission to Mississippi. After scouting upwards of 200 northern townships that might pass for Dixie, Jewison and production managers James E. Henderling and J. Howard Joslin settled on Sparta, Illinois, sixty miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. Serendipitously, when the advance construction crew arrived to change the signage from
Sparta
to
Wells,
they discovered that it was so pervasive that it was easier to change the script, so Wells, South Carolina became Sparta, Mississippi, courtesy of Sparta, Illinois.

Production started on September 26, 1966, during an uncharacteristic cold snap. 
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Director of Photography Haskell Wexler was no stranger to the south or the Civil Rights Struggle; he had made the heralded 1965 documentary,
The Bus,
about a group of activists driving to the August 1963, demonstration in Washington, DC. He and Jewison decided to shoot their film with low light levels, not only to achieve a
noir
mood but in order not to wash out Poitier’s dark skin, as often happened in studio movies, whose high key lighting favored Caucasian actors. The result was a gritty, yet assured, verisimilitude.

The company was billeted in Belleville, Illinois and bused forty miles on the state highway every day to Sparta. Even while keeping a low profile, the filmmakers’ presence was constantly monitored by the townspeople. “We had a situation in the motel,” recalls Wexler, “where some white guy — Southern Illinois is like the Deep South — said that his wife was shacked up with someone in the film crew. The guy was drunk and came to the motel and one of the rooms he knocked on was Rod Steiger’s room. When he banged on Rod’s room, Rod quickly got out and said, ‘No she’s not here’ and went over to Sidney’s room, which was a couple down, ‘cause if that guy got anywhere near Sidney at that time…”

The production did, however, venture briefly into Jim Crow territory for the Endicott/Tibbs slap that needed to be shot on a cotton plantation for authenticity. True to Poitier’s concerns, there were incidents with local thugs knocking on doors at the crew’s Dyersburg Holiday Inn and a general chill from the town’s residents, so much so that the company left a day and a half ahead of schedule, forcing them to finish their scenes on matching sets at LA’s Producers Studio (now the Raleigh Studio). “We felt we weren’t getting the cooperation we needed,” Jewison understated diplomatically to
Variety
’s Army Archerd. 
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Principle photography wrapped on November 8.

Despite its age,
In the Heat of the Night
remains astonishingly modern; the only elements that date it are the cars (which might well still be on the road in Sparta) and, surprisingly, Quincy Jones’s original score, parts of which sound like canned music from a ‘60s TV cop show. The interplay between Poitier and Steiger is breathtaking. Jewison suggested that Steiger chew gum in addition to sporting yellow sunglasses and an overhanging gut. At first, he resisted the gimmick, but he quickly discovered that he could convey Gillespie’s mood by how fast he chewed at any given time. A Method actor, he stayed in character throughout the shoot, causing Poitier to marvel, “I was on the threshold of discovering what acting really was.” 
[114]

Their symbiosis led to a scene that has been the subject of ongoing, though good-natured, controversy ever since it was shot. Scene 296, starting on revised page 123 and dated September 28, 1966, takes place at night in Gillespie’s functional apartment. He is drinking as Tibbs waits for word that will lead him to Mama Caleba (Beah Richards), an abortionist who may unwittingly know who the killer is. “They’d eaten a poor meal of bread, butter, pork, and beans,” Silliphant’s script indicates. “Gillespie is pouring the fourth or fifth bourbon for himself.”

“You’re the first colored I ever sat in a room with like this,” Gillespie says. Feeling comfortable enough to be sarcastic, Tibbs responds, “You can’t be too careful.” Hitting the Wild Turkey again, Gillespie says, “You know everything, don’t you, boy? What do you know about insomnia?”

“Bourbon can’t cure it.”

“Thirty-seven years old. No wife, no kids. Scratching for a living in a town that doesn’t want me. A fan I have to oil for myself. Desk with a busted leg.” He looks at the wallpaper. “This place.” He looks at Tibbs. “Know something, Virgil? You’re the first person who’s been around to call. Nobody else has been here. Nobody comes.” Then, writes Silliphant, “In a sudden spontaneous gesture of compassion, Tibbs reaches out, touches Gillespie on the shoulder, a simple and moving human contact. But it only infuriates Gillespie, who barks, ‘Don’t treat
me
like a nigger, Tibbs!’” Tibbs stiffens at the rebuff. In the film, the line becomes, “Oh, now, don’t get smart black boy. I don’t need it.” 
[115]

“It would have been good if Gillespie said
nigger,
” Wexler explained clinically, “because that’s what he would have said. There were all kinds of words that you couldn’t say on many films. The thing about the film is the concept. What was happening at the world at that time was far advanced to what
In the Heat of the Night
was, but
In the Heat of the Night
was far advanced for what movies were.” 
[116]

Added Silliphant, “To me that’s what Lenny Bruce must have felt when he used obscenities to make the point that the problem is not with the words, the problem lies in our dirty little minds. It’s a cultural imprint and nothing more So by getting the word
nigger
out there and looking at it simply as a word, not as a pejorative term, I think you can get air into it. Air and hopefully sunlight — and maybe the need to use it will disappear as the impact of the word itself becomes diminished.”

The “Gillespie apartment scene” has, over forty years, become a point of contention, Silliphant said. “I have heard that everybody claims to have written that scene — Haskell Wexler, Rod Steiger, and, Lord knows, even the generator man. I can only assure you that I conceived it and wrote it. Rod did switch a couple of words around, but with an actor of his talent I made no objection.”

Indeed, Silliphant was not present on location, so director and actors felt free to change his words when necessary. When, for example, Gillespie asks Tibbs where he’s from and Tibbs responds, “Philadelphia,” Gillespie asks, “Mississippi?” Not only was the southern town of Philadelphia, Mississippi the first thing a southerner would think of, it’s also an allusion to the place where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by Klansmen in 1964.