Studio (9780307817600) Read online

  John Gregory Dunne

  THE STUDIO

  John Gregory Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended Princeton University. He is the author of twelve books, including Nothing Lost; Vegas; True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Studio; and Playland. He was a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He died in 2003.

  Also by JOHN GREGORY DUNNE

  Nothing Lost

  Monster

  Playland

  Crooning

  Harp

  The Red White and Blue

  Dutch Shea, Jr.

  Quintana and Friends

  True Confessions

  Vegas

  Delano

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 1998

  Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1985, 1998, copyright renewed 1996, 1997 by John Gregory Dunne

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. A slightly revised paperback edition was published in 1985 by Limelight, New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., New York, in 1969.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dunne, John Gregory, 1932-

  The studio / John Gregory Dunne.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81760-0

  1. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. 2. Motion picture industry—United States. I. Title.

  PN1999. T8D8 1998

  384′.8′06579494—dc21 97-36329

  Author photograph © Quintana Roo Dunne

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  v3.1

  For Jean and Brian Moore

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction to the Vintage Edition

  Foreword

  The characters

  Epigraph

  1: “And now he’s working for me,” Darryl Zanuck said

  2: “I like it better than Frank’s,” Arthur Jacobs said

  3: “You’ll get the music lovers, no doubt about that, none at all,” Richard Zanuck said

  4: “Wet she was a star,” Joe Pasternak said

  5: “I’m Tomo from Andro,” Irwin Allen said

  6: “Pizazz—that’s a show business word,” Gene Kelly said

  7: “It transcends business, Irving,” David Brown said

  8: “It’s a superb example of what it is,” George Axelrod said

  9: “For when we show it in Israel,” Harry Sokolov said

  10: “Hello, Mother,” Paul Monash said

  11: “That’s what we come to Minneapolis for,” Stan Hough said

  12: “And I think Lincoln is a hell of a part,” Pandro S. Berman said

  13: “You’ve got to have twelve letters in your name,” Ernest Lehman said

  14: “I hear this picture is something, a really wonderful picture,” Joey Bishop said

  Introduction to the Vintage Edition

  I tend to distrust, and almost never read, books about show business, in particular those about the motion picture community. Too many are written by people who secretly yearn to become communicants at the altar of fame where the religion of film is consecrated. Envy is the currency of such writers. The “warts and all” approach to which they gravitate (recognizing the readership value of the deep, if unsubstantiated, dish) generally means all warts, exposed of course in the interest of truth, thus evening the otherwise unequal equation between unknown author and too well-known subjects. The crimes and misdemeanors of personality tend to take precedence over the work; what is base is valued in these volumes more than what may be lasting. This is not to say that the sources themselves are without sin or an agenda; there is nothing like the printed word, especially if it is unattributed, for massaging an ego, justifying a career, settling a score, or kissing an ass.

  Most of these books belong to the literature of anecdote. Facts are unforgiving, while anecdotes are only factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss and purged of nuance and subtext in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing. For best effect, they are usually set against gilded venues (or mean streets for contrary effect) and populated with the famous, the infamous, and the familiar, as if fame, infamy, gilded venues, and mean streets certified authenticity. Whether biographical or autobiographical, all anecdote is essentially self-aggrandizing, allowing the anecdotalist to bask in his or her own created (or someone else’s reflected) glory, and to demonstrate whatever it is in the anecdotalist’s interest to demonstrate, either for his or her own good fortune, or someone else’s ill fortune (an equally winning hand under certain propitious conditions). Since these anecdotes are usually provided by professional storytellers, the not altogether unbecoming result is that the stories show folk tell about themselves have the shorthand sense of being scenes from a screenplay, with dialogue, set decoration, and camera movements. In such circumstances, the narrative is all, and truth an acceptable casualty.

  What makes accurate books about the machinery of the movie business so rare is the difficulty of obtaining access. For all their grandiosity, for all their ability to infuriate, movie people are rarely stupid. What they cannot control they do not trust, and a reporter with access they view as others might a terrorist. I have a friend, a producer of some significance, who kept getting calls from the press (or “the media,” as movie people invariably call the press) during the production of one of his pictures; was there trouble and temperament on the set between his stars? Absolutely not, he would tell each reporter, but have you heard what’s happening on the Streisand picture? In a single call, he both averted investigation of his troubled set, and, by pointing the reporter toward another troubled set, won a marker he could perhaps later redeem.

  I have no idea why Richard Zanuck gave me free access to Twentieth Century Fox while I was researching The Studio. I am sure that Lillian Ross, the author of Picture, has no idea why Dore Schary and John Huston let her have the run of the set and the MGM offices and cutting rooms during the production of The Red Badge of Courage. And sure also that Julie Salamon wonders why no one realized that her presence on the set of The Bonfire of the Vanities was counter to their best interests as she recorded what became The Devil’s Candy. In each instance, I suspect, a combination of hubris and aberrant behavior. With no false modesty, let me say that Picture, The Devil’s Candy, and The Studio are the three best books outsiders have written about how American movies are made. The debt that Ms. Salamon and I owe to Lillian Ross is incalculable; she did it first, seventeen years before I did The Studio, forty years before Ms. Salamon wrote The Devil’s Candy: she proved it could be done—if you had the access.

  If there is one thing these three books have in common, it is the respect the three of us gained for the people who make pictures. It is brutally hard work, sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and the closer a picture edges toward disaster, the harder the filmmakers work to prevent it. There are no surprises: everyone can smell a stiff in the making. Having worked myself in the movie business as a screenwriter for nearly thirty years, I know now there is something I missed in The Studio. It is easy to report, and to make light of, the feuds and duplicity, the alliances and conspiracies, that occur on every movie. It is another thing altogether to be part of them, to be overcome with the rages brought about by some minor malfe
asance, or even by not getting your own way. Tension is the given of any movie, and it has less to do with ego than with the intensity of short-term relationships, a lifetime lived in a seventy day shoot; if there are location romances, there are also equally irrational location hatreds.

  I missed that, but otherwise The Studio is not half bad.

  New York

  August 1997

  Foreword

  I finished The Studio in the summer of 1968, but it was ten years before I actually read it. I did not read it in manuscript, I did not read it in galleys, I did not read it after it was bound. I disliked the book and at one point asked my publisher not to publish it.

  I suppose the main reason that I disliked The Studio was that it was the only book I have ever written that went exactly according to plan. Before I started, I knew the voice I wanted: the omniscient cool narrator. I knew the style I wanted: short takes, shifting among a whole range of onstage and offstage characters. I knew where I wanted the book to start (at the annual stockholders’ meeting) and I knew where I wanted it to end (at the premiere of a major motion picture). I needed only access; if I got the access, I knew I had the book.

  The access was granted by Richard D. Zanuck, who was then the vice-president in charge of production at Twentieth Century Fox. There was no reason for him to give it to me, and to this day I do not know why he did; the nature of reporting is such that it certainly was not to his advantage to let me, or any reporter, see the inner workings of his studio. But Richard Zanuck did not hesitate for more than a moment after I proposed that he give me the run of the place. He called in his secretary and dictated a memo to all producers and department heads telling them to give me all the assistance I wanted. If they thought any information was privileged, they were to tell me it was off the record, or ask me to leave the room, location or set. It is an indication of the access I enjoyed that I was put “on hold” only once in the months I was at the studio.

  I was given a parking space and an office, and a secretary to type my notes. I never availed myself of the last perquisite. It was several weeks before the personnel at the studio were comfortable in my presence, but after that I became as anonymous as a piece of furniture. My notebook was always out and visible, but I rarely took notes. After a meeting, I would race back to my office and transcribe the scene I had just witnessed—always in dramatic form; if a meeting or a confrontation was running long, I would duck into the men’s room and jot down the things I wished to remember. Because I wanted no complaints that I had suckered anyone, I always identified myself and what I was doing.

  Some months after I began my research, the studio’s vice president in charge of public relations came out to California from his headquarters in New York. He was appalled at the access I had been given and ordered it stopped. At a meeting in his office, he offered to buy me off, to make it “worth my while” to let the studio have editorial control over my book. If I refused, I would not be let back on the lot. I was in a quandary. I had no intention of giving up editorial control of the book, but at the same time I needed two set pieces—the preview of Dr. Doolittle in Minneapolis and the picture’s premiere in Los Angeles—to complete the research on the book. I asked to see Richard Zanuck.

  We had seen each other nearly every day I was at the studio, sometimes at lunch (I had a standing invitation at his table in the commissary), sometimes at dailies (I also had a standing invitation to watch the rushes with him). I told him that I could not in good conscience give him veto over the book and that, if that were the condition, I would pack it in. I suspect he wondered if I already had enough material to make a book; I also suspect he thought that throwing me off the lot at that late date would make any book I wrote less amiable. He finally asked if he could read the manuscript and make suggestions that I would be under no obligation to follow. I agreed. He ultimately asked me to delete three minor references. One—a producer’s bad rapping of an actor—my lawyer had already said was libelous; the other two would have complicated Zanuck’s divorce proceedings from his first wife. I made the deletions he requested.

  The Studio was simplicity itself to write. It was mainly a matter of transcribing and rearranging my notes. That there were no surprises—I knew exactly what I was going to do—was for me the problem. Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in The Studio. My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.

  When I finally read The Studio—I had picked it up because I had to check something in it—I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. In the decade since I finished it, I myself had worked extensively in the movie business. Indeed, the first picture I wrote was for Richard Zanuck and Twentieth Century Fox. “Look,” he told the producer, “do you mind if we don’t mention The Studio in the announcement? It would make my life simpler.” He remains the best executive I have met in the movie business, forceful and decisive. If he makes a wrong decision (and I think he might like to reconsider opening up Fox to me), he sticks by it, never apologizing, never explaining. That I had written The Studio was one thing; that I had now written a screenplay ready to go into production was another altogether.

  If I were writing The Studio today, I would probably be more compassionate, but that is a factor of age and experience. The story of Henry Koster’s meeting with Zanuck troubles me more than anything in the book, yet I think I would probably still put it in: a fact of the movie business is that people are used and discarded like so many wads of Kleenex. I would also change a nuance here and a nuance there, largely because I am convinced that it is impossible for anyone who had never worked in the movie business to understand the dynamics of any given picture. But on the whole, I am surprised and a little gratified at how accurate the portrait remains. In some circles, it is an article of faith that Hollywood is dead, the studios extinct. To which I can only say rubbish. Movies must still be financed and distributed, and they are still largely financed and wholly distributed by the major motion picture companies. If there are fewer pictures, the stakes are higher. A film like Star Wars can redeem the mistakes of ten years. Richard Zanuck was fired by his father at Fox; he went to Warner Brothers and was fired there. He formed an independent production company, went to Universal and co-produced Jaws, which probably has made more money than all the films his father produced personally in a lifetime.

  Hollywood is a technological crapshoot. Table stakes open at a million dollars. It was true in 1968, it is true now.

  I suppose that is why after seventeen years I like The Studio now. I got it right.

  Los Angeles

  January 1985

  The characters

  DARRYL F. ZANUCK, president, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

  RICHARD D. ZANUCK, his son, executive vice president in charge of world-wide production, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

  And in Alphabetical Order

  MORT ABRAHAMS, associate producer of Dr. Dolittle

  IRWIN ALLEN, a science-fiction entrepreneur

  JULIE ANDREWS, a film star

  EDWARD ANHALT, a screenwriter

  ARMY ARCHERD, a gossip columnist

  TED ASHLEY, president of the Ashley-Famous Artists Agency

  GEORGE AXELROD, a Renaissance Man

  JACK BAUR, assistant head of the Studio’s casting department

  PANDRO S. BERMAN, a film producer

  JOEY BISHOP, a television personality

  JACQUELINE BISSET, an actress

  PAUL BLOCH, press agent

  JOHN BOTTOMLY, technical advisor on The Boston Strangler

  LESLIE BRICUSSE, scenarist-composer-lyricist, Dr. Dolittle

  DAVID BROWN, husband of Helen Gurley Brown and the Studio’s vice president in charge of story operations

  ROBERT BUCKNER, producer
/>   REGGIE CALLOW, assistant director of Star!

  CAROL CHANNING, an actress

  GEORGE CHASIN, partner in the Park-Chasin-Citron Agency

  CHER, as in “Sonny & Cher”

  CURT CONWAY, New Talent School

  GARY CONWAY, a television actor

  ALEXANDER COURAGE, co-arranger of the score of Dr. Dolittle

  WARREN COWAN, partner in the public relations firm of Rogers, Cowan & Brenner

  TONY CURTIS, a film star

  PAMELA DANOVA, New Talent School

  BOBBY DARIN, singer

  JOHN DE CUIR, production designer of Hello, Dolly!

  JAMES DENTON, the Studio’s head of West Coast publicity

  BOB DENVER, an actor

  ABE DICKSTEIN, the Studio’s head of domestic sales

  LOU DYER, a Studio press agent

  JAMES FISHER, the Studio’s West Coast story editor

  BERNARD FLATOW, head of Latin American publicity

  RICHARD FLEISCHER, director of Dr. Dolittle and The Boston Strangler

  HENRY FONDA, a film star

  KURT FRINGS, an agent

  WILLIAM FROUG, a television writer

  ROBERT FRYER, producer of The Boston Strangler

  PHIL GERSH, an agent

  HAPPY GODAY, a song plugger

  JOYCE HABER, a gossip columnist

  SHEILA HACKETT, assistant to Michael Kidd

  LINDA HARRISON, an actress in the New Talent School

  REX HARRISON, a film star

  HARVEY HART, director of The Sweet Ride

  DALE HENNESY, a Studio art director

  HAL HERMAN, television production manager

  CHARLTON HESTON, a film star

  JACK HIRSHBERG, a Studio press agent

  STANLEY HOUGH, head of the Studio’s production department

  ARTHUR P. JACOBS, producer of Dr. Dolittle

  GENE KELLY, director of Hello, Dolly!

  MICHAEL KIDD, choreographer of Star! and Hello, Dolly!