Studio (9780307817600) (10 page)

“They did, Julie, they did,” Wise said soothingly.

The shot was a closeup of Julie Andrews.

Wise stood by the camera reading Julie Andrews’ cue line—“One can imagine the poignancy of this reunion.” After each take, Wise asked for one more: a strand of hair on Julie Andrews’ wig had fallen out of place; the projector flickering in the back of the shot was not lit. “Fine, good,” Wise said. “I like it. Let’s have one more.”

Julie Andrews experimented with gestures and business. “It started off funny, but I thought it picked up in the middle,” she said after one take. “But my eyes were so damn busy.”

“That’s okay,” Wise said. “We picked up that business with the eyes. I like it. Let’s use it again in the next take.”

The shot was finally completed and the stand-ins moved to their places so that the lights and camera could be positioned for the next setup. Julie Andrews flopped into a chair in her dressing room outside Projection Room 3-A. A makeup woman wiped her face with a piece of Kleenex. The unit publicist knocked on the dressing room door and asked if she were free for an interview with a visiting journalist from Chicago.

“Just a minute, luv,” she said. “Those damn lights. I’ve got to catch my breath.”

“It will only be a short one, Julie,” the publicist said.

“Only till they set up the next shot,” Julie Andrews said. She pressed her hands against her eyebrows. “These damn interviews.”

“This one will be twenty minutes at most, Julie,” the publicist said.

“Well, if it will help get back ten million dollars,” Julie Andrews said, “what’s twenty minutes?”

Richard Zanuck settled into his chair to watch the dailies, and the lights in the screening room dimmed.

“What do we have?” he asked Barbara McLean.

“
Star!
, a
Tony Rome
trailer, and Walter Doniger wants you to take a look at a scene from
Peyton Place
.” Doniger was one of the three rotating directors of the
television serial. It was rare that Zanuck watched any television rushes. “It was a tough one and he thinks it came off pretty well.”

Zanuck grunted. The
Star!
footage flickered on the screen. It was the projection room sequence shot from a variety of different angles. No one in the small room spoke. The phone rang and Zanuck picked it up. It was his broker.

“What’s it up to?” he said softly into the telephone. He listened while the
Star!
footage ended and the trailer (or coming attractions preview) for
Tony Rome
, a detective thriller starring Frank Sinatra, came on screen. “Shall we dump it at the opening?” Zanuck said to his caller. He listened again. “Okay, let’s hold it for a couple of days and then we’ll see.”

He clicked off the phone and turned his attention back to the screen. The
Tony Rome
trailer had a narrator’s voice-over, and the sound of it made Zanuck fidget in his chair.

“I hate that guy’s voice,” he said. “It’s terrible. Change it.” He turned on a table light and glanced at his watch. “I’ve got an appointment at three o’clock. What’s left?”

“The
Peyton Place
stuff Doniger wanted you to see,” Barbara McLean said.

Zanuck hesitated for a moment. “Tell Walter I saw it and thought it was great,” he said. He picked up his coat and headed for the door.

Stan Hough laughed. “Maybe what he wanted you to see was a mile-long negative scratch.”

“Jesus,” Zanuck said. “You don’t think.” He smiled and disappeared through the door.

Zanuck’s appointment was with Paul Monash, executive producer of both
Peyton Place
and
Judd
, another television series. A handsome, nervous man of fifty, Monash was also producing his first feature picture for the Studio, a thriller called
Deadfall
, starring Michael Caine. The film was being made in Europe and Monash actually did not have much to do with it. All he could really do was watch the dailies when they were shipped in and, when something caught his eye, talk occasionally to the film’s director, Bryan Forbes, on the telephone. It was not a very satisfactory arrangement but, for Monash,
Deadfall
was at least an entree into feature film production. At the moment, he was concerned with Giovanna Ralli, an Italian actress who was Caine’s co-star and love interest in
Deadfall
and who was having a great deal of trouble with her English. Much of her dialogue would have to be “looped,” or dubbed, in post-production.

“She’s intelligible for the most part, but she just can’t think in English,” Monash said. His lips seemed set in a self-deprecating half smile. “So it’s really slow. I talked to Bryan on the phone and he’s having a terrible time. She doesn’t come off badly. I mean, she’s got a lot of presence, but it just takes so many takes.”

“Can we dub her?” Zanuck said.

“Not without her permission,” Monash said. “That’s her deal.”

“What’s Bryan say?” Zanuck said.

“He thinks he’s got an out,” Monash said. “He says he’s going to tell her she’s got 500 loops and when she hears that, maybe she’ll get discouraged and let someone else dub.”

Zanuck methodically folded a piece of paper and slit
it open with a letter opener. “She’s not going to be that easy to dub,” he said finally. “I’ve been watching her in the dailies. Her mouth just kind of fumbles around. It’ll be tough, real tough.”

The following week, Monash called and asked if I wanted to drive out to the Desilu lot in Culver City, where the Studio rented space for the filming of his TV series,
Judd
. Monash divided each day between the Fox lot in Westwood, where he spent mornings working on
Peyton Place
and
Deadfall
, and Desilu, where he went after lunch every afternoon to oversee
Judd
, a melodrama whose hero was a peripatetic lawyer in the F. Lee Bailey mold.
Judd
was a new show, scheduled to begin on the ABC Television Network that fall, and Monash was hopeful that, within the limits of television’s taboos, it could dip into social criticism in much the same manner as had
The Defenders
, another earnest liberal series about the legal profession.

“I’ll make $500,000 this year,” Monash said from behind the wheel of his blue Corvette Sting Ray on the way over to Culver City. “Maybe five-fifty. And I’ve got all the deals going for me. I only take $2,500 a week and spread the rest of it out. And now I’m going into depreciation. There’s a multi-million-dollar apartment project I’m involved in down in Fort Worth. You can spread the depreciation out to avoid the tax bite. If the project burns down, what the hell? So much the better.”

The Sting Ray halted at a stoplight. Monash let the motor idle. A car pulled up alongside. When the light turned, Monash gunned his motor, leaving the other car in his wake.

“I’ve got a house in Mandeville Canyon, I walk in the
peace marches and I worry about Watts,” Monash said. “How can I improve things?” He laughed dryly at himself. “It’s academic to worry about the rats in Watts when you’re making half a million a year. You think you’re being realistic, but how many Negroes are going to move into Mandeville Canyon?”

It was a ten-minute ride to Desilu. Monash parked his car in his space and walked into his bungalow. His office was austere to the point of anonymity. There was a typewriter at his desk along with a Roget’s Thesaurus and the American College Dictionary. In the bookcase was a twenty-volume set entitled
Speeches and Papers of the Presidents
. There was also a small kitchen stocked with diet soft drinks. The sink was littered with dirty dishes.

Monash opened a Fresca and collapsed into a chair. “You know, I’m in therapy,” he said. “It’s an old story, but it’s given me an insight into myself. I’m a big producer, but what do I do? I’m not doing anything on
Deadfall
and the TV shows take care of themselves. Bryan Forbes says he’s directing
Deadfall
for the money, to give him the loot to do a good picture. So much for
Deadfall
.” His eyes and lips crinkled wistfully. “Maybe I should write a book. I’d like to take a year off and do a book on the Detroit riots.” He pulled on the soda bottle. “Of course, there wouldn’t be any motion picture rights for something like a book on the riots. But it would give me the feeling of accomplishing something. Maybe I will.” He shifted his position in the chair. “A friend of mine got $175,000 paperback for a book he wrote.”

Monash kicked off his alligator loafers and began
rubbing his feet. “Hollywood gets to you after a while,” he said. “My wife went to Europe to visit her family and so I went to the bank and got her some traveler’s checks to cover her expenses. She comes back and I asked her if she spent it. ‘Not all of it,’ she says. I ask for it back. ‘No,’ she says, ‘It’s mine.’ I say it’s ours. Well, it’s been a running situation ever since she got back. This morning she takes the checks and showers them on me.” He seemed to consider the scene and its possible effect on me. “It’s a real Hollywood story,” he added.

Monash took the bottle of soda and deposited it in the kitchen on top of the dirty dishes. He came back and sprawled into the chair again.

“Are you happy?” he said suddenly.

By the end of the summer, the Studio’s television department had eight series in preparation for the upcoming season: two new ones,
Judd
and
Custer
, the latter a deodorized Western about the life and times of General George Armstrong Custer: and six holdovers from previous seasons,
Peyton Place, Batman, Felony Squad, Daniel Boone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
and
Lost in Space
. Even then, however, the television department was making plans for the season a year hence, calculating how many shows might be canceled during the forthcoming season, estimating what formats the networks might favor a year or even two years in the future (was the campy
Batman
cycle played out, were
Westerns or detective series coming back into vogue, what kind of hero needed a Negro sidekick?). Scripts were read, prospects weighed. The stakes were high. The cost of making a pilot film for television had become so prohibitive—sometimes in excess of $500,000—and the chances of selling that pilot to one of the three networks so slim—roughly one chance in ten—that a few errors in judgment could cost a studio several million dollars and the executive who made the errors his job. Many studios tried to cut their losses by showing the networks a “spinoff” episode from an existing show, using the new characters and plot situation within the framework and budget of a show already on the air, or simply, if their past track record was good, going to the networks with only a package and a pilot script and presentation.

Either possibility posed enormous problems for Irwin Allen, who created and produced two science-fiction series for the Studio,
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
and
Lost in Space
. Allen’s sci-fis were so enormously complicated and utilized so many special effects that it was difficult to visualize a concept for a new series from a script. Rather than shoot an enormously expensive pilot, he had settled on the solution of showing the network a ten-minute presentation film that sketched out the main situation and visual highlights of the proposed series. The presentation films had no plot and were only ten minutes long, but each one cost in the vicinity of $100,000.

One afternoon late in the summer, Allen assembled his production staff in his office to discuss a new science-fiction project that he was presenting to CBS called
The Man from the 25th Century
. The color
scheme in Allen’s office on the second floor of the Old Administration Building is based on a rather lurid orange. The couches and chairs are orange leather, and by the window, casting its baleful red globular eyes over the office, is a large robot, a prop from
Lost in Space
. On one wall are graphs, sketches, charts and paintings of new sci-fis that Allen has in preparation—
Aladdin, Safari, City Beneath the Sea
and
The Man from the 25th Century
. A bookcase was filled with promotional material for each segment of the two shows Allen then had on the air,
Lost in Space
and
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
—toy robots, miniature submarines, rubber fright masks (for a segment of
Voyage
titled “Man of Many Faces,” Allen had sent every major television editor in the country a rubber mask used by the Man of Many Faces). On the floor below, Allen had a full-time crew of artists sketching storyboards for each segment of his shows, as well as a staff of researchers compiling all available information on time, space, the ocean and giants, for possible use as both effects and plot points on his current and proposed series. In the presentation script of
City Beneath the Sea
, there was an eight-page appendix of “new underseas projects and discoveries to be used in combination or alone as premises for
City Beneath the Sea
episodes.” Among the projects and discoveries were: