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  “Someone who’s not beautiful isn’t conventional,” he said. “Out here a beautiful girl is just that—she’s got the long hair, the boobs, the nice legs, the suntan. It’s more original not to be beautiful. But you try telling the Studio that.” He snubbed out his cigarette. “These kids, though, they think they can con me, as long as I’ve been in the business. There was this one girl, Janine Something, she came in one day for a reading. Wanted to get in the program. Her agent was gushing all over me. Well, she wasn’t very good and I gave her the old routine, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ As it happens, I had to go to the hospital for an operation. I get out of the hospital and her agent calls and I don’t return the call. Then one day I get a letter from this Janine. ‘Dear Mr. Conway,’ it says. ‘I’m so glad you’re out of the hospital and on the road to recovery. I’m especially glad because I’ve just had some bad news in my family. My father was in the hospital and they sent him home.’ Etc., etc. Cancer of the pancreas, I think it was. Inoperable. And then she says, ‘Every night my father looks at me and says, I just want you taken care of, Janine. If you got that Fox contract, I could die happy.’ ” Conway ran his fingers through his hair. “How do you like them apples?” he said.

  The following week, a young actor in the New Talent Program sauntered into the commissary with his new agent, a dark, feral young man scarcely older than his client, very junior in the agency, just a few months out of the mail room. The agent headed for the producers’ dining room, but the head waitress steered him to a table in the far corner of the room. Annoyed by his table, the agent started to move back across the commissary, then thought better of it and slipped down next to his client. He snapped an order of cottage cheese and lettuce to the waitress and then bit angrily on a piece of ice.

  “We don’t take any crap from this studio or any other studio,” the agent said. Some of the ice had begun to melt and drip out the corner of his mouth. He berated the waitress for not having a napkin at the table, and when she stared coolly at him, he finally wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “When you sign with us, we call the shots,” he said. “We don’t think you should test, you don’t test. We don’t think you should read, you don’t read. They take you on our terms and they don’t like it, we take you someplace else.”

  The young actor spread some butter on a roll. “I like it,” he said. “I really like it.”

  8

  “It’s a superb example of what it is,”

  George Axelrod said

  Early in August the Studio began preparing for a meeting of eighty of its foreign distributors and publicity men from all over the world. The purpose of the gathering was to expose the distributors to the Studio’s upcoming pictures that were to be released during the next year. Planning for the convention was left in the hands of the publicity department, which began to resemble an isolated country convent getting ready for the annual visit of the auxiliary bishop. A full schedule of events was evolving. Public Relations had prepared a brochure for the conventioneers with a combination of firm and breezy advice (“You are lodged at the Century Plaza Hotel. No COD’s, please, and watch the long distance calls.… The hospitality room is Joel Coler’s suite on the nineteenth floor, where the advice on all matters is a lot more free-flowing and less reliable than the liquor”). On Stage 2, the actresses and actors in the New Talent School daily rehearsed a variety show prepared especially for the exhibitors; the show consisted of scenes from Fox pictures shooting or in preparation interspersed with patter songs highlighting Studio successes past and present. A trip to Disneyland was on the distributors’ itinerary, and arrangements were made for French, German and Spanish-speaking interpreters to guide the delegates over the Matterhorn, through the Jungle Ride and on the Submarine Trip. The final event of the convention was to be a cocktail and dinner party, catered by Chasen’s, to be held in the elaborately landscaped garden of director George Cukor. Cukor was just lending his house; he did not plan to attend the party. It was agreed in preliminary discussions to invite only the girls in the New Talent Program to Cukor’s; the boys in the Program were scratched unless they had featured billing in a forthcoming Studio production. As a result of a Studio directive, producers of all pictures currently shooting were putting together trailers to show the exhibitors. Darryl Zanuck himself was scheduled to make his first appearance at the Studio since his takeover four years before. A few days before his arrival, posters went up around the lot welcoming the delegates. Each poster showed a waving American flag, a photograph of Darryl Zanuck wearing sunglasses, and the words: “A Salute to the President.”

  The week before the convention opened, Studio executives from New York and Europe began filtering into Los Angeles. One of the immediate problems facing them was not pictures but parking. Under the terms of its agreement with the Aluminum Company of America, which owns the Century City complex tangent to the Studio, as well as the property on which the Studio stands, Fox has the use of its land under a 99-year lease. In the summer of 1967 there were some 4,000 people working at the Studio, and parking spaces were at a premium. But Alcoa had begun to apply pressure on the Studio to give up some of its parking facilities near the front gate, where Pico Boulevard meets Avenue of the Stars. Alcoa claimed that it wanted to build a high-rise on the Pico lot. But what Alcoa actually desired was a piece of land on the Studio’s back lot, near the Century Plaza Hotel, where it wanted to build a hotel garage. The back-lot property was production land, containing both the moat and the tank, where underwater photography and water scenes were shot. Alcoa wanted it because of its accessibility to the Century Plaza. By threatening the Studio with eviction from the Pico lot, Alcoa hoped to persuade Fox to make a deal whereby it offered instead to give up some of its back-lot land. The question before the Studio executives as they filed into Richard Zanuck’s office a few days before the convention began was what was more valuable to Fox—the back lot or the Pico parking lot.

  “Do we use the moat a lot?” Zanuck said. The Alcoa file was open before him and he cracked his knuckles methodically.

  “Five days last year,” Stan Hough said.

  “How about the green tank?” Zanuck said.

  “Thirty days,” Hough said.

  Zanuck looked surprised. “Even with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?”

  “Yes, Rich, but how little we use it is beside the point,” Hough said. As the Studio’s production manager, responsible for keeping budgets and below-the-line costs in check, Hough was unalterably opposed to giving up production land. “If you try to rent a tank at another studio for thirty days, you’re talking big money.”

  Zanuck noted Hough’s objection with a nod of his head. He brooded for a moment and turned to Harry Sokolov. “Say we give them something in the back lot and they build a garage, do we get any free parking in it?”

  “We said we wanted 400 spaces,” Sokolov said. “200 free and 200 at a negotiated rate. They won’t buy it.”

  Zanuck began chewing on a fingernail. His eyes blinked rapidly. No one in the room spoke. Finally he picked up a letter from the folder and tapped it with his finger. “Alcoa says they’re dealing from strength,” he said. “Anybody who puts that kind of statement in a letter is trying to bluff. I say we’re the ones dealing from strength.”

  “Amen,” Hough said.

  Zanuck acknowledged Hough’s interruption with a quick smile. “Let’s tell these guys we’ll give them 97,000 square feet of the north lot out back and throw in lot four besides. But we’ll tell them we want all the Pico lot and won’t give up any production land.” He looked around the office. “What do you fellows think of that?”

  “I’m all for it, Rich,” Hough said. He glanced around the room. “I’m speaking from the production angle, of course, but if you start giving up production land, you can’t just say we’ll build a moat someplace else. You fellows don’t realize how much costs have gone up.”

  There was neither agreement nor disagreement with Hough. Most of the men s
imply stared into the middle distance, as if weighing the problem. At last Frank Ferguson, the head of the legal department, cleared his throat. “I don’t think we should give them an ultimatum, Dick,” he said deliberately. “After all, we’re going to be neighbors for a long time and they could make things very difficult for us.” He looked at the stolid faces around him. “I’d ease up with them, Dick. State your proposition and then say we’re prepared to discuss.”

  “I don’t think so, Frank,” Zanuck said quickly. “It’s not to our advantage to prolong it. Let’s smoke them out first—and then we’ll discuss.”

  Arthur Jacobs eased his golf cart into Richard Zanuck’s parking place outside the administration building. Mort Abrahams looked at Zanuck’s name painted on the curbstone and then back at Jacobs.

  “He’s gone,” Jacobs said. “He’s off the lot for a couple of hours.”

  “How do you know?” Abrahams said doubtfully.

  “I know,” Jacobs said. “I just know.”

  He hurried down into the basement toward a screening room. He was running behind schedule. He had a lunch date in Hollywood with Anthony Newley and he had to watch the minifilm of Planet of the Apes. Jacobs makes minifilms of all his pictures. They are longer than a trailer, sometimes running thirty-five minutes, spliced together from footage of finished and near-finished pictures, complete with optical effects, montages, whip pans. Jacobs shows each minifilm to exhibitors to stir up enthusiasm before the picture is actually released. He flicked off the lights in the screening room and the minifilm rolled across the screen—the crash of the space ship, the trek of the surviving astronauts across the desert waste, the dawning realization that the evolutionary process had been reversed. Jacobs impatiently made notes throughout the showing, but spoke only once—when Charlton Heston and his fellow space travelers were swimming nude under a waterfall.

  “I can see their butts,” Jacobs said. “We’ve got to give the impression of nudity without showing Chuck’s ass.”

  That afternoon, Richard Zanuck watched the previous day’s rushes of Planet of the Apes. The scene showed an ape doctor giving a blood transfusion. The recipient was Charlton Heston, the donor Linda Harrison, who played Nova, the mute Earth Girl. In angle after angle, the ape fastened the tube between the arms of the two Earth people.

  “You don’t give a transfusion that way,” Owen McLean said in the darkness of the projection room. “You take blood out of one arm first, then pump it into the other arm. You can’t make blood flow from arm to arm like that.”

  “He’s right, Dick,” Stan Hough said.

  Zanuck was unperturbed. “What the hell,” he said. “Maybe that’s how an ape does it.”

  David Brown had come out from New York for the exhibitors’ convention. The morning after his arrival, he sat in his office, just down the hall from Richard Zanuck’s, chewing meditatively on an unlit pipe. A minor crisis had arisen over Frank McCarthy, who was scheduled to produce the roadshow production of Tom Swift, with Gene Kelly directing. The same duo had recently teamed on the immensely successful Walter Matthau comedy, A Guide for the Married Man. A brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserve, McCarthy had made for himself a distinguished career in the military and the government before coming to Hollywood. During World War II, he had served as military secretary to General George Marshall, and after the war as an Assistant Secretary of State under James Byrnes. In 1945 he had been selected as one of the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce’s ten outstanding young men.

  The problem concerned Tom Swift. Fox scheduled only two roadshow pictures a year, since there were not enough major theaters across the country to handle the number of hard-ticket films the studios had taken to turning out. It was impossible for a studio to make a roadshow picture and then hold it in the can until a theater became available, as the interest rates on the bank loan necessary to finance a film were prohibitive if no theatrical revenues were coming in. Fox had both Tom Swift and Hello, Dolly! ready to go into production. Though Hello, Dolly! was closer to a start date than Tom Swift, it had no director set. The Hello, Dolly! assignment was a plum. Barbra Streisand had been signed to star, along with Matthau, and the initial budget of $20 million was the largest in Hollywood history. The Studio had finally asked Kelly to direct Hello, Dolly!, which meant that Tom Swift had to be postponed for at least a year. This left McCarthy with nothing to do. The situation was slightly if obscurely complicated by the fact that McCarthy, as a former winner, had just nominated Richard Zanuck as a Junior Chamber of Commerce “outstanding young man.” To assuage McCarthy, Zanuck offered him the producer’s spot on a new comedy by writer-director George Axelrod, The Connecticut Look. It was a solution that appealed neither to McCarthy nor to Axelrod. Fox’s purchase of The Connecticut Look, and its assignment of the starring role to Matthau, was in fact partly predicated on the box office returns of McCarthy’s A Guide for the Married Man. Both were of the Doris Day sex-farce genre—a little slicker, a little gamier (the protagonists actually do make it to bed), but, withal, featuring the same moral uplift at the fadeout: the very married hero of Guide takes a crash course in infidelity before deciding in the last reel to keep the home fires burning; in The Connecticut Look, a thirtyish housewife turns prostitute for an afternoon’s dalliance with an actor to restore her faith in romance, and in the process shores up her shaky marriage. McCarthy was not anxious to produce The Connecticut Look nor was Axelrod anxious to have him, and Brown had been assigned by Zanuck to resolve the problem diplomatically.

  Brown tapped his pipe on an ashtray and buzzed Zanuck’s office. “Dick, I talked to Frank about Axelrod,” he said. “He said he’d do it if you wanted him to, he’s got nothing but the highest respect for you, but he has reservations. He’s worried about the morals of George’s picture. He’s afraid the guy and the girl will die a lingering death and he doesn’t want to do anything that will reflect on the success of Guide.”

  Brown listened for a moment. “Yes, Dick, I told George that Frank had the highest personal regard for him and that he knew that George would direct this picture with the greatest of taste. But Frank’s worried about what this story will do to him. ‘I’m worried about me,’ is the way he put it. You understand, his being a general and all, and a good personal friend of Omar Bradley’s. He doesn’t want to make a film that will expose him to personal criticism. I think I understand his predicament, Dick. Let me talk to George and I’m sure we can iron something out.”

  George Axelrod came into Brown’s office later that morning, a tall, nervous man in his mid-forties wearing chino pants, a windbreaker and black velvet pumps on which his initials were stitched in gold. He had written the enormously successful Broadway play, The Seven-Year Itch, two other Broadway hits, a number of screenplays (including The Manchurian Candidate, which he considered one of the two great films ever made in Hollywood, the other being Citizen Kane), and directed one previous picture. Puffing fiercely on a cigarette, he paced back and forth across Brown’s office.

  “I’ve known Frank for years,” Axelrod said. “Socially and professionally, and I’ve got nothing but the highest personal regard for him. In a given circumstance, he would be marvelous as a producer, just great.” He stabbed the air with his cigarette. “However—and here it is—I saw Guide for the Married Man. It’s a superb example of what it is. But it’s a different picture. It’s not my picture.” Axelrod stopped and picked up an ashtray. “I don’t want to destroy my …” he sought the proper word “… my thrust. I’m amenable to any Fox guy you put on the picture, but I just don’t want to destroy my thrust. And of course I assure you I’m going to do this picture with impeccable taste.”

  “I know that, George,” Brown said placidly. “We’re just worried about the specter of Kiss Me, Stupid.”

  Axelrod interrupted his pacing and threw up his hands. “I’m not going to be put in the preposterous position of saying anything against Billy Wilder, who is the greatest filmmaker in the world.”

  “Taste
is the thing,” Brown said.

  “Look, I’m not going to make a picture you can’t release,” Axelrod said.

  “I know that, George.”

  “My fear is having someone in a high position on this picture who is not sympathetic to my views,” Axelrod said. He stalked the room, picking up and putting down ashtrays. “But I don’t want to be placed in a position where I offend Frank, who is a friend.”

  “I know,” Brown said.

  Axelrod changed his tack. “You know, the late Judy Holliday had the kind of purity the girl in this part needs.”

  “She would have been wonderful,” Brown said. He had not shifted position in his chair.

  “And I think the scene with the girl and the movie star in the bedroom is the best thing I’ve ever written,” Axelrod said.

  “He comes off very sympathetic in the end,” Brown said.

  “That’s right,” Axelrod said.

  “And he started off as such a shit,” Brown said.

  “That’s the beauty of the scene,” Axelrod said.

  Brown’s pipe had gone out and he leaned forward and refilled it. “Look,” he said. “We’ll talk to Frank and see if we can reconcile our differences. And if we can’t, we’ll get a guy on the picture who can function as a high-level assistant.”

  Axelrod inhaled deeply and shook his head slowly from side to side as he blew the smoke out. “Just someone who can get Doc Merman off my back when he says we can’t afford a $75-a-week second-assistant assistant.”