Studio (9780307817600) Page 11

  “Good point,” Jacobs said.

  “I think it’s too overwhelmingly technical,” Schaffner said. He examined the sketches intently. “Look, we’re telegraphing to the audience that the space ship is going through the time barrier. There’s one, two, three, four shots of the computer clock going from 1968 here to the year 3250 in the last one. I want to set that up dramatically, not in the titles like you’ve got it here.”

  “A point,” Jacobs said.

  “But, Frank, so what if the audience knows, the crew doesn’t,” Abrahams said.

  “My point is that we’re robbing the audience of a surprise,” Schaffner said, biting each word off carefully. “I don’t want to telegraph it. I want to set it up in dialogue. I think that’s reasonable enough to ask.”

  “Right,” Jacobs said. “The important thing is the picture, not the titles.”

  “As I understand it, you want to extend the space trip because the only time we see it is during the titles,” Schaffner said. “Right?”

  Jacobs nodded in agreement. “And to show the concept of time, of separation, of the shattering loneliness.”

  Schaffner deliberately ground out his cigar. “Well, these titles don’t sell that concept to me. Now how are we going to show that concept, realistically or abstractly?”

  “I guess abstractly,” Jacobs said tentatively.

  “Is it possible,” Schaffner said, turning to Record, “to use black-and-white as well as color?”

  Record nodded.

  “Let’s try that then,” Schaffner said. He touched Jacobs on the arm and walked out toward the set.

  “You’ve got the idea, Don, right?” Abrahams said. “We’re agreed we want to show the separation, loneliness and the passage of time.”

  “Abstractly,” Jacobs said.

  As a publicity tie-in for The Sweet Ride, Joe Pasternak had agreed to give a small walk-on in the picture to a Las Vegas showgirl who had won the title of “Miss Talent International.” “We won’t get much space out of it,” said Milt Smith, the Studio publicity man assigned to The Sweet Ride. “But every little bit helps.” Several days after the stunt was agreed upon, Smith walked disgustedly into his office. “You know that slob with the boobs?” he said. “ ‘Miss Talent International’ she calls herself—how do you like that? Well, she’s making a hundred and a half a week in Vegas, but you know what she wants? Five hundred a week net. For waving her knockers in front of the camera. So Joe says, ‘Tell her to go fuck herself.’ ”

  A conversation with Joan Baez is a crash course on rudeness. I discovered that as a fellow guest on a segment of the Donald O’Connor Show. Miss Baez, close-cropped, had chopped off her locks the week before. It was an act of defiance, I suppose: she said she doesn’t think an entertainer should have a trademark, or mannerisms. In that case, Miss Baez should study her manners. Throughout the talk, she proved that her words, like her tax returns, won’t stand up under analysis. She delivered a lot of drivel on Vietnam, weaponry, the need for “caring” and for changing our political system. “What do you think of Mr. Nixon?” asked her host. “You discuss Nixon,” she snapped. “I have never voted. I never will.” Miss Baez must consider that smart. I consider it irresponsible. She has a beautiful singing voice, but her style hasn’t matured anymore than her comportment. She is miles behind the really hip young people of today.

  On a program whose guests included David Janssen and a swinging twosome, the Avant Garde, she even made Donald O’Connor lose his cool. “What shall we talk about!” he asked Miss Baez.

  “You have a list of questions there. Ask them.”

  “Okay, baby, you want to be asked, I’ll ask you,” Donald said. “How does it feel to be up the river?”

  Joyce Haber, The Los Angeles Times

  Richard Zanuck took his place at the head of his private luncheon table in a small, tree-guarded alcove outside the Studio commissary. A portable awning protected one end of the table from the hot summer sun, but Zanuck, who is a health enthusiast, sat in its glare. On his plate, as there was every day, was a piece of paper listing the closing price of Fox stock on the New York Stock Exchange and the number of shares traded. The closing price that day was 55¼ and the volume traded was 17,000 shares.

  “Down an eighth,” Stan Hough said. Hough is one of the four people who lunch with Zanuck every day, the other three being Harry Sokolov, Owen McLean and Doc Merman. There were three other places at the table for favored Studio employees and guests. Hough passed the market information down the table, and the conversation turned to a scandal that had just broken in the papers that week about high-stakes gambling at the Friars Club, a private club in Beverly Hills whose members were largely connected with show business. According to the reports, a few of the club’s members enticed other Friars and outsiders into rigged gin-rummy games. Some of the losers had been taken for $200,000 and $300,000, and a number of such eminent show business figures as Phil Silvers and Tony Martin had been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the case in Los Angeles. Doc Merman was a Friars member, and as he explained how the games were fixed, an agent named Kurt Frings appeared at the table.

  “I got the big news,” Frings said. He was a large, red-faced man with a thick German accent. “I got subpoenaed this morning.”

  “Are you a victim, Kurt, or were you a winner?” Harry Sokolov said.

  Frings made an obscene gesture toward Sokolov. “I’m not even a member,” he said. “I play there twice. On a Saturday and a Sunday afternoon. Two days, I didn’t even go down once. Not once.”

  “How much did you lose?” Zanuck said.

  Frings threw up his hands. “I made a deal,” he said. “I don’t want the publicity. I said I’d talk if they don’t mention the money I lose.”

  Zanuck cut into a shrimp. “I heard they were only subpoenaing people who tapped out for fifty grand, Kurt.”

  Frings moved his shoulders expressively.

  “Two afternoons, you must have been good for a hundred anyway,” Merman said.

  “Please, I don’t want to mention the money,” Frings said. “You know how they did it? They brought in a guy from out of state to bug the place.”

  “That’s what brought the Feds in,” Sokolov said. “You bring a guy in from out of state to put a bug in and you’ve got the FBI on your hands.”

  “They had a peephole in the ceiling,” Frings said. He had ordered lox and capers and a caper had stuck to the corner of his mouth. His face was wreathed with sweat. “The guy up in the ceiling had some kind of magnifying glass set up so he could see the whole table. And the guy playing who was in on the fix had some kind of buzzer system around his waist. Say the pigeon had two kings and the other guy was going to drop a king. The guy in the ceiling would give him a little jolt with the buzzer. Two for drop, one for don’t drop, I don’t know, but it worked. They took Tony Martin for a hundred grand, I hear. Anyway, the guy would get the jolt, stick his king back and drop something else.”

  “The guy upstairs must have been a good gin player,” Zanuck said.

  “I hear they pay him $200 a day,” Frings said.

  “What I don’t understand is who blew the whistle,” Hough said.

  “The wives,” Merman said, slowly sipping a cup of coffee. “The wives squawked. A guy comes home and tells his wife he dropped fifty grand playing gin, it’s a big thing.”

  Several months before, the Studio had finished shooting on Valley of the Dolls, a relatively inexpensive non-roadshow production based on Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel and produced by David Weisbart and Mark Robson (the latter had also directed the film). By midsummer, while the picture was being scored and edited, a major publicity campaign was already underway, for the Studio expected Valley of the Dolls to be its principal soft-ticket attraction during the winter months. One morning late in July, Frank Neill, a chunky, beet-faced man who was the assistant director of Hollywood publicity, walked into the office of Lou Dyer, another Studio press agent
. Chewing on an unlit cigar, he went to the bookcase and took out a copy of The Motion Picture Almanac. He sat heavily on the couch and began flipping through it. His finger ran down a page and then stopped. “David Weisbart,” Neill said softly.

  “What about him?” Dyer said.

  “He just dropped dead,” Neill said. “He was playing golf with Mark Robson. Just keeled over.”

  “What hole?” Dyer said.

  “I don’t know,” Neill said. “Take care of it, will you, Lou? Get hold of the Times and the Examiner. We’ve got enough time for the trades.”

  “The wire services will pick it up from the papers,” Dyer said.

  “Right,” Neill said. He spat out a piece of the cigar. “It was at the Brentwood Country Club.”

  Dyer picked up the telephone, dialed the Brentwood Country Club and asked for the manager. He identified himself and explained that he was checking on the circumstances of Weisbart’s death. “What is your name, sir?” Dyer said. “Mr. Gill.” He reached for a pencil and began taking notes. “With Mark Robson, yes, I have that. He’s the director. Was it a twosome or a foursome? Just a twosome. I see. And what hole was he on? Or had he just teed off? The tenth? Fine. Well, thank you, Mr. Gill.” He checked his notes. “Oh, one thing. What is your first name? For the papers, that’s right. And you are the manager. Thank you, Mr. Gill, thank you very much.”

  Neill came back into the office with some photographs of Weisbart and a canned Studio biography of the producer. “I think we can still make the first editions,” Neill said. “We’ll send a bag downtown. And, Lou, when you call the papers, don’t forget to say that Robson had co-producer status on the picture.”

  Dyer dialed again and got the city desk of the Los Angeles Times. He quickly explained the circumstances of Weisbart’s death to the desk man on the other end of the line. “A messenger is coming down with a bio,” he said. “But let me give you a couple of his hits. He produced Kid Galahad, Our Miss Brooks, Rebel Without a Cause—that’s the picture that zoomed James Dean to stardom. He started out as a film editor working with such film greats as Michael Curtiz.” Dyer paused. “Curtiz. That’s C for Charlie, U, R, T for Tom, I, Z for zebra.”

  7

  “It transcends business, Irving,”

  David Brown said

  As the script for The Boston Strangler neared completion, director Richard Fleischer and producer Robert Fryer flew back and forth to Boston scouting exterior and necessary interior locations. At the Studio, Stan Hough’s production department worked out the final details of the budget. When he was in Los Angeles, Fryer spent hours every day in a Studio projection room looking at footage of actors being considered for parts in The Boston Strangler. A few days after Edward Anhalt turned in the final draft of his screenplay, the script was mimeographed and distributed to all the Studio department heads so that they could make a final estimate of the costs their departments would incur on the picture. The correlation of the below-the-line costs was overseen by Hough and Doc Merman. One Thursday afternoon Merman called the Strangler production staff and the Studio department heads together for a final budget meeting.

  The meeting took place in the conference room of the production bungalow. Fryer, Fleischer and Merman sat at the head of the T-shaped conference table and the rest of the thirty or so conferees sat down on either side of the table. Everyone in the room was given a mimeographed production breakdown of each of The Boston Strangler’s 90 sequences and 256 scenes. The breakdown was titled “THE BOSTON STRANGLER—STORY 147—PRODUCER: ROBERT FRYER—DIRECTOR: RICHARD FLEISCHER.” Every sequence in the script had been broken down into its basic elements—set, location, major cast members, bit players, extras and animals (if necessary), special props, special effects and sequence plot synopsis.

  Merman tapped his glasses on the table and brought the meeting to order. “The first problem,” he said, “is what is the last year in the time sequence of the story?”

  “1964,” Fleischer said.

  “So in any street scenes, we can’t have cars later than 1964 models,” Merman said. “Right?”

  “Right,” Fleischer said.

  “And they weren’t wearing miniskirts in 1964,” Merman said. “So we’re going to have to watch that in the crowd scenes.”

  Fleischer nodded.

  Merman went through the breakdown page by page. Occasionally there was a discussion of potential problems within the individual sequences:

  PAGE NO. 7

  SET: INT/EXT POLICE CAR—PARKING LOT OF BAR

  LOCATION: STUDIO

  CAST: JOE

  BITS: CLOE

  SPECIAL PROPS: POLICE CAR, AUTOS FOR PARKING LOT, NEWSPAPER

  SYNOPSIS: CLOE INFORMS JOE OF CARR’S STRANGE SEX HABITS

  “Let’s do that right here at the Studio on the French street,” Fleischer said.

  “There’s not enough room there for a parking lot,” Merman said.

  Fleischer folded his hands on the table in front of him. He stared straight ahead, quiet, almost dreamlike, not looking at Merman. “It doesn’t have to be a parking lot,” he said. “We can dress the French street to make it look like a Boston alley.”

  PAGE NO. 9

  SET: INT HOMICIDE SECTION—POLICE HEADQUARTERS

  LOCATION: STUDIO

  CAST: WILLIS, BRANDY, MC AFEE, JOE

  BITS: NEWSMAN #1

  SYNOPSIS: WILLIS DISCUSSES CRIME WITH REPORTER—ANOTHER KILLING REPORTED

  “Is this going to be an exact replica of Boston Homicide?” Merman said.

  Fryer shook his head. “No, they wouldn’t let us in to get any pictures. The Boston cops didn’t like the way they came off in the book, so they’re not giving us any help.”

  “You should go to Boston, get yourself arrested and take pictures with a Minox, Robert,” Merman said, his beagle features breaking into a grin. “Isn’t that what a creative producer does?”

  “Let’s just build a set,” Fleischer said.

  “How about using the standing set we’ve got for Felony Squad?” Merman said. “It’s nice and modern.”

  “Because it’s an old police station in Boston,” Fleischer said.

  Merman threw up his hands. “So who knows from an old police station?”

  “Me,” Fleischer said.

  “Okay,” Merman said. “I was just trying to save you some money.”

  PAGE NO. 24

  SET: INT ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE

  LOCATION

  CAST: EDWARD BROOKE, BOTTOMLY

  SPECIAL PROPS: ICED TEA, SCOTCH

  SYNOPSIS: BROOKE TRIES UNSUCCESSFULLY TO ENLIST BOTTOMLY IN INVESTIGATION

  Merman blanched when he saw the scene was going to be shot on location. “It’s an interior,” he said. “Why not build a set and shoot it here?”

  “No,” Fleischer said. “You don’t get the same feeling, the desk, the chairs, the mementos.”

  “We can take pictures,” Merman said strenuously. “Duplicate it here.”

  “Uh-uh,” Fleischer said.

  “When do you expect to use this office?” Merman said. “When the attorney general’s out taking a leak in the men’s room?”

  “On a Saturday,” Fleischer said.

  Merman looked down the table at Fryer for assistance. “I don’t want to interfere with your creative talents, Mr. Producer, but you’ve got four and a half pages of dialogue in this scene,” Merman said. “That’s a long day’s work and Mr. Director says you’ll be working on Saturday. Well, I’ve got to remind you, Mr. Producer, Saturday is double time. You build a set here, you’re saving money.”

  “Let’s spend it,” Fleischer said.

  PAGE NO. 43

  SET: INT BLUE FALCON BAR

  LOCATION

  CAST: BOTTOMLY

  BITS: LAURENCE SHAW, HAROLD, CEDRIC

  EXTRAS: HOMOSEXUALS (MALE, FEMALE), BARTENDERS, WAITERS

  SPECIAL PROPS: DRINKS

  SYNOPSIS: SHAW EXPLAINS TO BOTTOMLY HIS SEXUAL ARRANGEMENT WITH M
ISS RIDGEWAY—BOTTOMLY SHOCKED

  “Why not build that one here?” Merman said.

  “I’d rather use a real location and real faggots,” Fleischer said. He smiled benignly down the table at Merman.

  “Well, I guess they must have a faggot bar somewhere in Boston,” Merman said.

  “I want to do as many interiors on location as possible,” Fleischer said. “You get a better feeling, a better sense of place. If we have an interior where there’s a lot of people, which means a lot of staging and a lot of camera movements, we’ll do it here. You can get more control on a stage. Otherwise, if there’s just a small group of people, I’d rather use the real thing on location.”

  PAGE NO. 50

  SET: EXT PROVIDENCE AIRPORT

  LOCATION

  CAST: MC AFEE, BRANDY, BOTTOMLY, JOE, PETER HURKOS, JIM CRANE

  EXTRAS: AIRPORT EMPLOYEES

  SPECIAL PROPS: JET AIRCRAFT, POLICE CARS

  SYNOPSIS: AS STAFF WAITS TO PICK UP HURKOS, MC AFEE BRIEFS BRANDY ON NEW SUSPECT O’BRIEN—THEY PICK UP HURKOS

  “We’ll freeze our ass off if we shoot this in Providence in the middle of winter,” said Buck Hall, Fleischer’s assistant director.

  Fleischer nodded. “Let’s use a local location,” he said. “Santa Monica Airport, maybe. We can spread some snow around and make it look like winter.” He stared off into space, reflecting for a moment. “What airlines fly into Providence anyway?”

  “Eastern and American,” Eric Stacey, the Strangler’s unit production manager, said. “But I don’t think Providence was a jet airport in 1964. So Hurkos would have had to come in on an Electra and American isn’t using them anymore.”

  “Eastern still uses them, but Eastern doesn’t fly into L.A.,” the representative from the prop department said.

  “That means we’re going to have to find an Electra and paint it,” Stacey said. “That gets expensive. It might be cheaper to shoot the scene in Providence.”

  Everyone at the table looked at Fleischer. He shook his head slowly. “Negative,” he said finally. “We use all the same actors in the next scene in the Providence motel room. That’s a set we’re building here at the Studio. If we shoot the airport scene in Providence, we’ve got to keep all the actors on the payroll until we fly them out here for the motel room scene. And that gets expensive. So let’s find an Electra—I think Western uses them—paint it and use one of the local airports.”