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Anhalt peered over his half-glasses at Fleischer. “You can use a sundial to show the change of seasons.”

A slow smile flickered across Fleischer’s face. “How about the pages falling off a calendar?” he said. “Or maybe leaves dropping off a tree in full bloom.”

“You must think you’re David Lean,” Anhalt said.

“Listen …” Fryer began. “Dick, listen.”

“Look, Bob,” Fleischer said quietly. “I can’t see how we can possibly be ready to start principal photography in November.” He pointed to Anhalt’s file cards. “Unless we put sprocket holes in those cards and run them through the projector.”

The three men looked at one another. Fleischer drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Now the question is, what do we tell Dick Zanuck? If we can’t make November 1, when do we go?”

“The first of January?” Fryer said. With his finger, he removed the sweat from his brow. “I mean, is that a reasonable time?”

Fleischer folded his arms and glanced at Anhalt. “Okay,” Anhalt said.

The postponement of
The Boston Strangler
upset the delicate balance of the Studio’s feature scheduling. Several weeks before, Richard Zanuck had also dropped
The Nine Tiger Man
from the Fox schedule. The Studio had spent months trying to work out a reasonable budget for the picture, which was to be based on Lesley Blanch’s novel, to be directed by George Cukor, and to star Robert Shaw. “The
Nine Tiger Man
budget started at eleven million, we hacked it to eight, then chopped it down to seven-two,” Zanuck said one morning a few days after Fryer’s meeting on
The Boston Strangler
. “The sets would have cost a million, the costumes five or six hundred thousand. You’ve got to wonder if Bob Shaw can carry that kind of money. I would have gambled on six, but even that would have been a gamble.”

Zanuck wiped a speck of dust off a bronzed baby
shoe behind his desk. Though
The Nine Tiger Man
had been scrubbed, the Studio still had a commitment with Shaw to do a picture for $300,000. One possibility was for Shaw to play the title role in
The Boston Strangler
. Another was for the English actor to star in a film based on Iris Murdoch’s novel,
The Severed Head
. A package for
The Severed Head
had been offered to the Studio, which included Shaw, French actress Anouk Aimee, producers Elliot Kastner and Jerry Gershwin, and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who won an Academy Award for his original screenplay,
Darling
. Zanuck was less than sanguine about the box office possibilities of
The Severed Head
. He thought the property too intellectual for the budget involved and just that morning had expressed his doubts over the telephone to Freddie Fields, president of Creative Management Associates, the agency involved in packaging the project.

Zanuck’s secretary brought in some letters for him to sign. He read them quickly, then flicked on his intercom.

“Yes, Dick.”

“Can you come in?” Zanuck said.

A moment later, David Brown popped in the back door of Zanuck’s office. Brown is a handsome, gray-haired man in his middle fifties, the husband of Helen Gurley Brown, author of
Sex and the Single Girl
and editor of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. He had been the head of the Studio’s story department for years, then had left to go into publishing as editorial director of New American Library. He had subsequently returned to Fox as vice president of story operations, and was now, after the Zanucks, the most important man in the production
end of the Studio. His headquarters are in New York, but he divides his time between his New York office, Los Angeles and Europe. With the Zanucks, he passes on every important property acquisition and is in on all major packaging, casting, budgeting and scheduling decisions. He is bland and slightly vague, except when talking to either Zanuck.

“Yes, Dick,” Brown said. He pulled out a pipe and blew through the stem.

“It looks like we won’t be able to start
The Strangler
until the week after New Year’s,” Zanuck said.

“What’s that do with Bob Shaw?” Brown asked.

“He’s intrigued with the idea, but he won’t comment until after he sees some pages.”

A billow of smoke rose from Brown’s pipe. “When will we have a script?”

“Fryer says November 1st.”

“A long time to keep him waiting,” Brown said. He puffed on his pipe. “Can we lay off
Severed Head
on Metro?”

“I talked to Freddie Fields and he’s working on it,” Zanuck said. “He says it can be made for one-eight. I think we’re in for two-five minimum.”

“Minimum,” Brown said. He took a pencil and wrote some figures on a scratch pad. “$300,000 for Shaw, $150,000 for Aimee, $210,000 for Raphael, $100,000 for the producers—that’s almost $800,000 above the line and that doesn’t include a director. What’s the director laid in for?”

“$75,000,” Zanuck said.

“You’ll never get anyone for that,” Brown said. “It’s too low.”

Zanuck nodded. “For anyone good.”

“How about Michael Winner?”

“He’s one-fifty after
The Jokers
.”

Brown watched Zanuck carefully. “It’s a marginal property,” he said finally. “No question, we’d jump at it for one-six.”

“With overhead,” Zanuck said.

“With overhead,” Brown echoed.

Zanuck leaned back in his chair. “Let’s drop it then,” he said with finality. “One more thing. Larry Turman said that Joe Levine was interested in
In the Spring the War Ended
.” Turman was a young producer under a non-exclusive contract to Fox. He had brought the novel by Steven Linakis to the Studio, which had spent several hundred thousand dollars developing a screenplay before deciding not to go ahead with the project. “I told him we put $280,000 into it, all told, and that if he could lay it off on Levine, we’d settle for fifty cents on the dollar.”

“Fine, Dick,” David Brown said.

Star!
was shooting on Sound Stage 14, and a day or so later I walked onto the set as director Robert Wise was setting up a shot. A onetime film editor who worked with Orson Welles on
Citizen Kane
, Wise won Academy Awards for his direction of
West Side Story
and
The Sound of Music
. He was sitting high up on a camera crane, shouting instructions through a salmon and gray bullhorn. The shot was a studio pickup of a double-decked London bus carrying revelers to a party given by Julie Andrews, who was playing Gertrude Lawrence. The first part of the sequence had been shot
on location in a mews in London, the last in a park in New York. The intermediate segment, now being set up, was a matte shot of the bus rolling toward its ultimate destination in the park. Behind the bus was a giant blue screen on which later would be projected the English countryside passing by, thus giving the illusion that the bus was actually moving.

The scene was number 79 and the script directions read:

On the side of the vintage red bus was written “London General Omnibus Company, Limited, John Christopher Mitchell, Secretary & Treasurer,” as well as an itinerary—“Bank—Ludgate Circus—Strand—Victoria Station—Walham Green—Hammersmith.” The bus was on a hydraulic jack, and on either side stagehands were rocking it gently with two-by-fours pried underneath to give a semblance of motion. High up in the rafters, another stagehand slowly waved a prop tree branch in front of a light onto a screen so that the shadow of passing shrubbery could be seen reflected in the bus’s windows. The shot took in only the upper deck, so that the bottom was empty. The principals and extras were all dressed in evening clothes, white tie for the men, period 1920’s dresses for the women.

On the crane, Wise peered through the camera, composing the shot, his hands expertly working the flywheels. When he was satisfied, he picked up the bullhorn.
“All right, let’s have a rehearsal,” he shouted. “I want a lot of brouhaha. This is the 1920’s and you’re all a little high. I think some of you might have been a little high before, so you need no instructions from me.”

The actors laughed and began to shout and move around the top of the bus. The stagehands rocked the vehicle.

“That’s it, that’s it,” Wise said. “Slurp a little champagne. Blow your horn, Michael.” Michael Craig, an English actor who was playing the Horse Guards officer who was Gertrude Lawrence’s lover, raised the hunting horn to his lips and began to blow it drunkenly. There was no sound; the sound would be dubbed in later. “That’s okay, that’s nice, more where that came from,” Wise said. “Okay.”

Wise took his bullhorn once again. He told Craig to keep blowing his horn a few seconds longer and asked Daniel Massey, another English actor who was playing Noel Coward, to come in faster on his line. “You’re waiting too long, Dan. There’s other actors with dialogue in this scene and they’re waiting on your cue.” He looked through the camera again. “Okay, let’s take a picture.”

The actors returned to their places. The buzzer was sounded and the set doors were locked. The slate boy wrote “Scene 79, Take 1” on his board and snapped it in front of the camera. The assistant director, Reggie Callow, a bulbous, apoplectic-looking man, called for quiet. “Ac-tion,” Wise said.

The camera started to roll. Almost immediately Wise called “Cut.” Impatiently he shouted down to Callow. “Reggie, what’s the matter with the blue screen? There’s a shadow over there on the right.”

Callow dispatched an electrician to look at the blue screen. Seconds later the electrician reported that a light had burned out behind the screen causing the shadow.

“Goddamn it, that’s the second time this morning,” Callow bellowed. “Fix the goddamn thing.”

Wise climbed down from his perch. He was nervously jiggling a handful of coins. “This is what makes picture making tedious,” he said, settling into a leather director’s chair on the back of which was written “Robert Wise.” I asked how long he had been working on the film. “Three years,” he said. His eyes moved slowly around the set, taking in everything. “I didn’t really want to do another big picture,” he said. “Period pictures take so damn much time. For
The Sand Pebbles
”—Wise’s last picture for Fox, a $12 million story about the U. S. Navy in China during the 1920’s—“we had to build our own junks and our own rickshas. The ones they had in Hong Kong and Taiwan weren’t period.” He shifted the coins from his left to his right hand. “I want to do something where I don’t have to take down television antennas in order to shoot. A nice simple picture where the people wear their own clothes and I can shoot the TV aerials.” He pushed his hand through his graying hair. “But who knows. There was a picture of mine on TV the other night—
The Haunting
—a nice small picture that didn’t make a dime. Then I made one with Harry Belafonte,
Odds Against Tomorrow
, again a nice small picture, and it dropped out of sight.” The coins went back into his pocket. “So I guess I’m stuck with the big ones.”

The light was finally fixed and Wise climbed back up onto the crane. The script called for Julie Andrews to
say, “Open your presents, everyone,” but because she was not included in the shot, she was not on the set. “Okay,” Wise said through his bullhorn. “I’ll say Julie’s line and everyone look toward the back of the bus. This is a take, not a rehearsal, so everyone open the presents. Don’t throw the paper out of the bus, please,” he explained patiently, as if talking to a child. “Just put it on the floor.”

Callow called for quiet and the red shooting light began to flash on the stage door. As the bus rocked on its jack, the actors bustled about on the upper deck, opening the presents. Each box contained a bathing suit for the swimming party they were on their way to attend.

“Cut,” Wise said, when the shot was completed. “That was nice, very nice. Let’s print it.”

On the bus, an actress stood up and waved at Wise. “Are we supposed to get the same suits we wear at the party?” she said.

“Yes, dear,” Wise said.

“But I was fitted for a green one and this is a blue one.”

“Son of a bitch,” Callow said.

A resigned look flickered across Wise’s face. The swim suits were rewrapped and sorted out so that each actor got the bathing suit for which he had been fitted. It was nearly an hour before the scene was ready to be reshot. The actors milled around the stage. Some read
The Hollywood Reporter
and
Daily Variety
and others talked and drank coffee.

“Don’t spill any goddamn coffee on those costumes,” Callow bawled.

After a half dozen takes, the shot was finally printed. The lights came on and the camera was shifted for the
next bus setup. The scene called for the women to go to the bottom of the bus and the men to stay on the upper deck and change into their bathing suits. Wise did not move from the crane. He told Callow to have the electrician check the lights behind the blue screen once again. The shot was finally set up. The buzzer sounded and the actors on the top of the bus began to undress. Suddenly Wise called, “Cut.”

“Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “this is a period picture. If men wore GI T-shirts during the 1920’s, nobody has bothered to inform me about it. And so I can only assume that no one wore GI T-shirts during the 1920’s. Now is anyone wearing an old-style undershirt, the kind with shoulder straps?”

Several actors on the top of the bus raised their hands.

“All right, then you people can take off your shirts,” Wise said. His patience was beginning to wear thin. “The rest of you fake it. Just fool with your buttons until I get the shot.”

“I’m not wearing anything underneath,” Michael Craig said.

“Then you can take off your shirt, too,” Wise said. He lingered deliberately over each word. “But
only
 … the actors not wearing anything or who’ve got those old-style undershirts I want to take off their shirts.” He paused. “Are we ready, gentlemen? I’d like to get this shot in before lunch.”