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  PAGE NO. 68

  SET: EXT STREET IN FRONT OF TAYLOR’S APARTMENT

  LOCATION

  CAST: ALBERT, MR. TAYLOR

  BITS: POLICEMEN (2), STUNTMAN FOR FALL?

  EXTRAS: PEDESTRIANS, MOTORISTS (30)

  SPECIAL PROPS: POLICE CAR

  SYNOPSIS: ALBERT RUNS THROUGH STREETS, ALLEYS, ETC., PURSUED BY POLICE AND MR. TAYLOR—IS FINALLY CAPTURED

  Fleischer tapped the breakdown with a pencil. “What do you mean only thirty extras, Doc?” he said impatiently. “This is a main city thoroughfare and the shot covers two blocks. Are you trying to tell me that in the middle of the day in Boston you’re only going to find thirty people on the street? Come on, Doc. We need 130 extras anyway, and even that’s not enough. Make it 150.”

  PAGE NO. 80

  SET: EXT FRONT OF STATLER AND DEPARTMENT STORE WINDOW

  LOCATION

  CAST: ALBERT, ANNA SLESERS

  EXTRAS: PARADE SPECTATORS—MEN, WOMEN

  SPECIAL PROPS: CARS

  SYNOPSIS: ALBERT RE-CREATES SEEING ANNA SLESERS—FOLLOWING HER—GOING THROUGH STORE WINDOW AFTER HER

  Fleischer pressed his hands against his temples. “I think we’ve got to shoot that here,” he said. “You set up outside a department store at midday, you’ve got a madhouse. We need control.” He thought for a moment. “How about using the New York street at Metro?”

  “That’s $6,000 a day,” Merman said. “Are you sure you can’t shoot it in Boston?”

  “Sure I can shoot it, Doc,” Fleischer said. “But you start tying up a main drag, it will take four weeks to shoot.”

  “If we’re going to spend $6,000 a day, I’d rather build a set here,” Merman said.

  “Sure, if you can do it, fine,” Fleischer said. “I’m not in love with the idea of giving Metro money. But let’s keep the idea on the back burner.”

  Late one afternoon, Richard Zanuck received a telephone call from Governor Ronald Reagan’s office in Sacramento. The caller was one of Reagan’s aides, who wondered if the Studio had a spare lawyer it could lend the administration to help out in the utilities commission during the summer holidays. Zanuck listened politely to the caller and said he would get back to him. When he hung up, he rang Harry Sokolov.

  “Ronnie Reagan wants to borrow a lawyer,” Zanuck said. “They’re short-handed in Sacramento with everyone taking vacations up there. Check the legal department and see if we can spare one, and if we can, let’s throw him one for four weeks. It never hurts to have a friend in Sacramento.”

  Paul Monash was having trouble finding stories for his new television series, Judd. It was Monash’s hope that his lawyer hero would each week become enmeshed in a controversial case that involved a certain amount of social commentary. The difficulty lay in the fact that Judd still had not premiered on the air and so was unproved in the ratings; until it was proved, the amount of controversy was limited, and a crusading lawyer without controversy was a peculiarly bloodless anomaly. It was during this limbo stage that Monash met late one afternoon with a writer named William Froug, who himself had produced a crusading liberal lawyer series, Sam Benedict, for another studio several years before. A casual, slightly puffy man in his late forties, Froug had an idea for a Judd segment that he wanted to discuss with Monash. (Under the rules of the Writers Guild of America West, a member of the television branch cannot put one word on paper without being paid for it; the usual procedure is for the Guild member to talk over an idea with a producer, and if the producer likes the idea, the writer is given a monetary commitment and told to go ahead.)

  Monash adjusted the air conditioner to high, opened a diet soda, shucked off his shoes and nestled into the chair. “Shoot,” he said.

  “Support your local police,” Froug said.

  Monash arched an eyebrow. “That’s your story?”

  “An ironic twist off it,” Froug said. “We’ve got this editor in Texas …”

  “Does it have to be in Texas?” Monash asked.

  “No.”

  “Then let’s put him someplace else,” Monash said, tucking his legs beneath him. “Texas is too easy.”

  “Sure,” Froug said. “No problem.” He unbuttoned his Madras jacket. He had an even café-au-lait colored tan. “Anyway, this editor writes an editorial saying the local chief of police is a sadist. He beat up a suspect in jail or something. The suspect is a kid involved in a mugging, something like that, and our cop let him have it. He maybe even murdered the kid.”

  Monash sucked on the soda bottle. “Why’s the editor write the editorial?” he said.

  “Because he wants a libel suit,” Froug said. “He knows the cop will sue him for libel, and he figures if he can get Judd as his defense attorney, Judd can break down the cop in court and prove he was a murderer.”

  “I don’t get the chief’s dilemma,” Monash said. He knotted his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, considering the story.

  “You mean the turn in the middle?” Froug said.

  “Mmmmm,” Monash mused. “I mean what makes the chief a sadist. Maybe there’s some kind of venal reason.” He kept examining the ceiling. “And I don’t think your editor works. Editors are too careful about libel.”

  There was silence in the office as both Monash and Froug contemplated alternative plot possibilities. The only sound was the whirring of the air conditioner.

  “How about this?” Monash said finally. “How about a letter to the paper? The editor can publish a disclaimer, ‘the views in the letters column are not the views of the paper,’ some bullshit like that. You see, the editor covers himself, but at the same time he has some inside information he wants out in the open. So he gets a citizen with status in the community to write the letter.”

  “Someone with clout,” Froug said.

  “Now we need a little motivation,” Monash said. He began snapping his fingers. “Why does a guy get hot pants to get the chief?” He thought for a moment. “Maybe he just wants the excitement.”

  Froug looked doubtful.

  “Look,” Monash said, “part of the reason I went to the peace march in Century City was because I thought it was going to be exciting. Sure, it mirrored my views, I think the Vietnam war is shit, but I thought I’d get a little jazz out of the march, too.” He stared somewhat enviously at Froug. “You were there, weren’t you beaten up?”

  “No, I was just ducking blows,” Froug said. “Quite frankly, that’s how I came up with this idea.”

  “Con-tro-ver-sy,” Monash said. He laughed disparagingly.

  “That’s right,” Froug said. “I know you want controversial subjects for Judd. Well, you got one in police brutality.” He brightened suddenly. “We could even have a demonstration in this story.”

  Monash seemed resigned. “What in TV terms would be an acceptable demonstration?” he said. “We can’t have a peace march, we know that.”

  “The only acceptable demonstration in television land is against stamping on dogs,” Froug said.

  “I’ve got it,” Monash said suddenly. “Who says we’ve got to say what kind of demonstration? What if we never said what the demonstration was all about? What if we just let the audience fill it in in their own minds?”

  Froug considered that. “What about a love-in?” he countered. “I’m very interested in kids. I’m executive director of Community Action for Fact and Freedom and we helped negotiate peace on the Sunset Strip when the kids rioted up there.”

  Monash shook his head. “The problem with a love-in is that it’s not mobile enough in camera terms. Look, we don’t have to say the Century Plaza, but that’s what it’s all about.”

  “Okay,” Froug said.

  “And we’ve got to make the situation with the police chief more venal. Someone should have his hand in the till. We need a crime, because I don’t think the demonstration will fill out much in terms of plot. You get a crime, you get some pressures between Judd and the principals. And a crime works in the mytholand of TV.�
�� Monash ran his fingers around the neck of his turtleneck sweater. “We might even have Judd lose this one.”

  “Has he lost one yet?” Froug said.

  Monash shook his head. “No, but I think the time has come. We can’t have every case turn on, ‘Yes, Mrs. Mazurki, but is this the prescription for your glasses?’ ”

  Froug laughed. “The name of the game today is race riots and police brutality and we’re sitting here doing stories on crooked cops.”

  “Don’t fight it.” Monash shrugged. “There’s one more thing. You got any good stories left over from your Sam Benedict days that we could steal? We’re hurting.”

  “Sure, no problem,” Froug said. The suggestion did not seem to surprise him.

  “You got any, we’ll disguise them,” Monash said. “Change a him to her, a gun to a knife, you know. But we are really hard up for stories. I just bootlegged a copy of a Defenders script on the M’Naghten Rule to see how they handled it.”

  “What’s mine is yours,” Froug said. He stood up and yawned. “I’ll go through the files to see what I have and then I’ll call you in a couple of days about the editor and the police chief.”

  RIOTING HALTS “MAYA”

  Srinigar, Kashmir—Street rioting between Hindus and Moslems, now in its third week in this northern India capital, has halted production of the King Brothers, MGM-TV series, “Maya.”

  The Hollywood Reporter

  As the summer wore on, the Studio was more and more convinced that in Valley of the Dolls, which was still being scored and edited, it had its biggest non-roadshow grosser since Peyton Place. In its preliminary estimates, the Studio’s sales department predicted a gross of $20 million. The record hard- and soft-cover sales of Valley of the Dolls had made its author, Jacqueline Susann, a celebrity in her own right. So sanguine was the Studio about the box office prospects of Dolls that it was anxious to capitalize on the author’s celebrity by tying up the film rights for her unfinished new novel, The Love Machine. Jacqueline Susann’s business affairs were overseen by her husband, a shrewd former television producer named Irving Mansfield, who had a genius for promoting his wife, Valley of the Dolls and The Love Machine, in whatever order the circumstances dictated. The unprecedented success of Dolls had been as much a surprise to the Mansfields as to anyone else, and they were slightly perturbed that they had let the film rights of the book go to the Studio for relatively so little money—$85,000 down with an escalation clause that brought the final price up to $200,000. The Mansfields were convinced that if they had waited until the book had climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, they could have received a minimum of $450,000, along with a share of the film’s profits. With this experience in mind, they were determined not to let The Love Machine go for anything less than top dollar. Though Jacqueline Susann did not yet have a completion date for her new book, Fox was already jockeying to see the manuscript before any other studio in Hollywood, and was willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. One morning David Brown, the Studio’s vice president in charge of story operations, called George Chasin, Jacqueline Susann’s West Coast agent, and sounded him out on the possibility of Fox’s getting first look at The Love Machine. Brown’s inducement was $125,000. Rather than going directly to Jacqueline Susann, this sum would be paid to Mansfield to produce a picture mutually acceptable to himself and the Studio. If on the basis of its first look, Fox subsequently bought The Love Machine, Mansfield would receive an additional $125,000 to produce this picture also. The Studio’s offer of a quarter of a million dollars to Mansfield was only a sweetener; it would not be applied to the ultimate purchase price of The Love Machine (a figure estimated as high as $1 million). As a final lollipop, Brown told Chasin that if the Studio bought the book, it would also cut the Mansfields in on 5 per cent of the film profits on Valley of the Dolls.

  “There’s not another studio in a position to make that kind of offer, George,” Brown said, sucking on his pipe. “We think Dolls is going to be a big one.”

  When Brown hung up the telephone, he brooded for a moment, tamping down the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with a book of matches. “Agents are so noncommittal,” he said finally. “He said he’d think about it and get back to us.”

  Brown rang for his secretary and asked her to get Irving Mansfield at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The Mansfields were scheduled to leave for New York within the hour.

  “Irving,” Brown said, when Mansfield came on the phone. “I just wanted to say safe trip. It was good seeing you, Irving. It’s always good seeing you and Jackie.” He leaned back in his chair and let a puff of smoke curl toward the ceiling. “I just talked to George Chasin, Irving, and made a little proposal to him. I’m sure he’ll be getting in touch with you. Well, have a good trip back, and Helen and I will get together with you and Jackie in New York. Friends, Irving, friends. It transcends business, Irving.”

  Several days later, Owen McLean and Jack Baur walked over to Stage 2 where the New Talent Program was headquartered. They were scheduled to watch a young neophyte actress test for the program. The Studio had started the talent school in the chimerical hope that a roster of contract players could reverse the spiraling demands of the major independent stars. Talent scouts combed the U.S. looking for faces and figures. There were approximately twenty-five applicants to the school every week, and of these the Studio auditioned five and selected one. The chosen were signed to an exclusive long-term contract; the initial salary was $175 a week, and at the beginning of the contract, there were options every six months. Once accepted, the students attended classes on voice, dancing, mime, action and acting techniques. The school was run by Pamela Danova, a diva-shaped European actress and voice teacher, and Curt Conway, a veteran Broadway actor, but responsibility for final selection to the school rested with McLean and Baur.

  By the door of the stage was a sign that said, “Remember, An Actor Killed Lincoln,” and on the bulletin board a stern instruction sheet prepared by Pamela Danova and given to each new student:

  WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOU

  The image of the star is what has made Hollywood great. You will reflect that image constantly, whether at the studio or shopping for groceries. You are being groomed for stardom in every possible way. That means you must be a master of your craft, be able to walk with poise, speak with assurance and clarity, and behave with propriety. You will learn to be gracious to anyone and everyone in preparation for the day when you yourself will have fans and admirers of your own. The time has passed for stars to resemble the boy and girl next door or the beatniks. When someone pays money to go to the movies, they expect to see handsome, clean-looking young people—not slovenly, mumbling, scratching delinquents. You will dress properly. That means no more sweatshirts, sweaters and blue jeans. No more straggly hair, slacks and sneakers. Contract players adjudged to be lazy, untidy or undisciplined will be eliminated from the Studio Roster.

  The stage was bare save for a few props. McLean and Baur took chairs between Conway and Pamela Danova. The girl being tested had worked up a scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was a pert young thing in an orange miniskirt and matching orange arm bracelets. The actor appearing in the scene with her was already a member of the program. He was wearing chino pants and an open-necked button-down shirt. The girl sat on the prop couch, her legs hiked up underneath her. The actor did not have much to do in the scene, but he had been in the school long enough to know how to upstage the girl. He prowled behind her on the couch, where she couldn’t see him, picking up things, patting his hair, leaning on a chair almost as if he were doing pushups. The girl knew something was going on behind her, but she could not destroy the mood of the scene and look back. She played with her arm bracelet and ad-libbed a giggle after one of his lines. When the scene was over, she reached back over the couch and with a large smile squeezed the actor’s hand.

  “Cute scene,” Baur said.

  “But I couldn’t hear you,” McLean said to the girl.

  She smiled nervou
sly. Then she giggled. “I’ve got a little voice.”

  McLean chewed on his eyeglasses noncommittally. “Thanks, kids,” he said.

  The girl lingered before she left the room, adjusting her arm bracelets, flipping idly through a script that someone had left lying around. No one spoke and finally she left.

  “She won’t photograph well,” McLean said.

  “Didn’t you think she had a certain … gamine charm?” Pamela Danova said.

  “From a certain angle, she’s got lousy teeth,” McLean said. “But I liked the boy. He’s a strange-looking kid. A lot of balls. He looks like he might be dangerous.”

  “Unfortunately, acting ability is not the primary requirement for pictures,” Curt Conway said a few afternoons later. He has long gray hair and he was inhaling deeply on a cigarette. The New Talent contractees were all in tights, bathed in sweat, going through a dancing lesson. They danced to themselves in a mirror, the dance director’s voice striking like a metronome. “One, two, three, four and TURN,” he said, “… and Kevin-Coates-you-turn-on-your-left-foot.” Conway absorbed the scene and walked back into his office, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the first. “I’m still limited to the beautiful people,” he said. “They’ve got a Tyrone Power tradition at this Studio and that’s what they’re looking for.” He raised his hands in resignation. “Now Christ, you see someone today who looks like a young Tyrone Power and what’s your first reaction? He’s got to be some kind of fag. Let’s face it, it’s hard to identify with the beautiful people. It’s the kids who buy the theater tickets, kids from fourteen to twenty-five. And the people the kids identify with are Belmondo, Streisand, McQueen—the people Jack Warner used to call the ‘ugs.’ They’ve got the sense of anarchy, right, and that’s what the kids like. Streisand, she’s an ug. Well, she’s an ug who’s getting a million bucks from this studio to do Hello, Dolly!” He waved his arm in the general direction of the dancing lesson. “You think any of those beautiful people out there are ever going to get a million bucks a picture?” Conway shook his head slowly.