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  A few days later, Maunder signed the long-form contract. The terms were as stipulated in the short form—$250 a week initial salary with a $500 bonus for every show in which he appeared. He would receive no contractual remuneration for such ancillary rights as rodeos or radio and television guest appearances. His salary would be raised every option period. “It really doesn’t mean that much,” McLean said. “If the show’s a hit, the contract will have to be renegotiated. There’s just too many ways the star of a series has you over a barrel. He can claim he’s sick and not show up, he can show up late, he can make trouble on the set. What are you going to do? You build a series around a star. He’s not there, you don’t have a show. A series is bang, bang, into the can, start the next segment. There’s not any time for temperament. So when the star gets balky and his agents come to see you, you renegotiate and try and get the best deal you can.”

  “Most TV shows are what I call Donna Reed’s living room,” Irwin Allen said during a break in the shooting on Stage 18. “Donna goes to the door, opens the door and there’s the milkman. ‘Oh, hello, John,’ she says. ‘Two light cream, three heavy cream.’ But John’s got a problem, so they go into the living room, sit on the couch and talk for seven pages. ‘Oh, John, you found out your wife is giving you a surprise birthday party and you don’t want her to know you know.’ They shoot the seven pages and then they go home for the day. Me, if I can’t blow up the world in the first ten seconds, then the show is a flop.”

  Allen was not blowing up the world in the show he was preparing, but in the first moments of the initial segment of the series, he was planning to crash a space ship on an uncharted planet populated by giants. The name of the series was Land of the Giants; it was created by Allen and, as with all his projects, he was directing the first episode. The show was scheduled as a midseason replacement on the ABC Television Network in the event that any of its fall entries faltered in the ratings; if there was no need for a replacement, Land of the Giants would go on the air the following fall.

  Allen drank some orange juice and patted his stomach, producing a loud belch. On the adjoining stage, his crew was setting up the crash shot. The passengers on the space ship included the pilot and co-pilot (who was a Negro), a stewardess, an orphan, an international con man with a bagful of swag from his latest caper, a Howard Hughes-type businessman, and a girl described in the script as a “socialite-swinger.” On the strange planet, they would be in effect Lilliputians; all the props were built on a scale of twelve-to-one—tree trunks were thirty feet in diameter, safety pins four feet long, tables thirty-six feet high.

  The shot was finally ready, and Allen, still drinking orange juice, checked the camera. A cutout of the spacecraft’s cockpit was canted on a platform that the crew would roll forward through the giant-sized prop underbrush, simulating the crash landing. Allen’s camera was placed to the rear of the platform and would photograph the crash over the space ship’s control panel and out the cockpit window. Allen was in good humor and began feeling the muscles of the crew members who would push the platform.

  “Okay, fellows,” he said. “When I say go, shake, rock, roll and return. This is jiffy productions, instant crashes of ultramodern space ships.” He yelled for some fog and a prop man laid a coverlet of artificial fog over the set.

  “Action,” Allen shouted. “Shake. Rock. Roll. Return.” The crew pushed the platform, their muscles straining. The spacecraft scuttled through the underbrush and the fog. “Cut,” Allen said. He stood with his hands on his hips, a look of displeasure on his face. “Fellows,” he said deliberately, “it wasn’t fast enough. This is a space ship. It is not a Spad. You remember the Spad. It’s an old World War I airplane. A Spad is not supposed to go faster than a space ship. But it just did.” He beamed. “You’ve got to push, fellows. You’ve got to put your hearts into it.”

  The cockpit was rolled back and the greenery replaced. The old fog was blown away and new fog laid down. The bell rang and the stage went silent. Allen called for action and the platform moved slowly forward, the crew straining, the ship gathering speed. “Push,” Allen shouted. “Push, put your heart into it, think of the beer tonight, push, push.” The platform ground to a halt. “Beautiful,” Allen said. “Print it. One space ship crash.”

  As Allen walked back onto Stage 18, his secretary handed him another glass of orange juice. He sat on a stool in front of his desk and looked at the storyboard of the next shot. The “socialite-swinger,” played by actress Deanna Lund, and the pilot of the spacecraft, played by actor Gary Conway, stumble into a laboratory run by a team of giant scientists. Everything in the lab is outsized—pencils eight feet long, books fifteen feet high, file drawers eighteen feet high. The shots of the space travelers would be photographed on the giant set; shots of the scientists would be filmed on an exact duplicate of the set built to normal scale. Use of the two sets demanded the most precise planning. Allen had dozens of Polaroid snapshots of each set so that he could match every camera setup exactly. If both giants and space travelers were to appear onscreen at the same time, the individual shots of each were processed into one strip of film by the optical and special effects department, using a variety of matte, process and split-screen techniques. In the scene scheduled next, Conway and Deanna Lund were supposed to hide behind an outsized insect box when they heard the footfalls of the giant scientists approaching the lab. The insect box shot would be filmed as a separate insert; then, in the Studio’s special effects department, this shot would be reduced and laid over the insect box as it appeared in the setup of the normally scaled lab.

  Allen yawned and faked a punch into the midriff of Land of the Giants’ associate producer, Jerry Briskin, who had two actors in tow. Briskin winced and straightened up. “Irwin, what do you think of these two?” he said.

  “Beautiful, Jerry,” Allen said. “Who are they?”

  “We need two guys for later, Irwin,” Briskin said. “One for the guy smoking the pipe, one to play the scientist.”

  “Fine, Jerry, fine,” Allen said. “If you like them, I’m not going to examine their teeth, I trust your judgment.” He took one of the actors by the arm and pointed to the storyboard. “Stick around,” he said, “I’ll show you how to make movies.”

  Allen climbed on a camera crane and was hoisted up near the rafters. He lined up the shot, using a bullhorn to instruct Conway and Deanna Lund on how to skulk across the giant desk and shinny up the pigeonholes to the top, where they were to hide behind a spool of thread. The thread was to be their means of escape. They were to knot it around an oversized needle, stick the needle into the desktop, and let themselves down hand over hand to safety.

  “Let’s run through it once from the top,” Allen shouted down.

  Conway and Deanna Lund started across the desk top. It was so large that it took up nearly a third of the sound stage. “Good, good,” Allen said. “Now up on the drawers. Good. Start knotting the thread. Deanna—now! You hear the giant. Hide, hide, hide. Beautiful, beautiful. Behind the jar now.” Allen was peering through the camera. “I’m picking up your fanny, Gary. Move in farther. Deanna, I’ve got your fanny now. It’s lovely, but not for home consumption. Beautiful, we get all this in the master, we’re a bunch of geniuses.”

  The boom was lowered and Allen walked back over to his desk. He was sweating profusely. Conway, an athletic-looking young man with flaring nostrils and a lot of hair, stood hesitantly behind him.

  “Irwin, I was wondering,” Conway said. “Will that needle hold my weight when I come down?”

  “Good point,” Allen said. He yelled for the head grip and explained the problem to him.

  “No problem,” the grip said. “You let Gary wind the thread around the needle. Then you cut away to something else. We’ll anchor the thread underneath the needle. We’ve got a support under there.”

  “Beautiful,” Allen said. He turned to Conway. “Worry no more.”

  Conway still seemed perplexed. “What about the timing?”<
br />
  “Don’t worry about the timing here,” Allen said patiently. “I just shoot for film here. The timing I make later in the cutting room.”

  “But are we going to be able to match after you cut away?” Conway persisted. “I mean how.”

  Allen took him by the arm and whispered conspiratorially into his ear. “I know a very smart Chinaman, that’s how,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll cut in and out. I’ll use an enormous process shot of you in the background and the giant in the foreground.”

  Conway was not yet convinced. “Don’t worry, baby,” Allen said. “I could cut to a Chinaman and you wouldn’t be aware of it.”

  Despite its similarity in structure and technique to other cinema verité pix at N.Y. Film Fest’s “Social Cinema in America” sidebar event, Frederick Wiseman’s The Titicut Follies differs from them commercially: its four-letter words and prolonged views of male genitalia completely eliminate television as a potential market.

  Daily Variety

  Paul Monash stepped out of his bungalow at the Desilu lot in Culver City and let the sun bake into his face. It was only a few yards over to the sound stage where a segment of his new television series, Judd, was being shot. The director, Boris Sagal, was setting up a scene, and Monash stood off to the side of the set as the lights and cables and camera were placed. Finally he moved over and began talking to Sagal. The set was a courtroom and there were dozens of extras hovering about. One of the extras, an elderly woman, kept her eyes fixed on the back of Monash’s gold, short-sleeved turtleneck sweater. Suddenly she came up and put her arms around his waist. Monash turned around, surprised. For a moment he said nothing.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said at last.

  “I thought it was you,” his mother said.

  “Keeping you busy?” Monash asked. He was slightly ill at ease.

  “Oh, yes. How’s Caren?”

  “Fine.”

  “And the children?”

  “Great.” Monash paused. “I’ve been meaning to call you. Caren’s sister is coming next week with her kids.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Yes,” Monash said.

  “Where are you going to put them?”

  “Oh, the kids can double up and Caren’s sister can sleep in the den,” Monash said.

  “That’s nice.”

  Monash examined his watch. “I guess I’ve got to go.” He leaned over and kissed his mother on the cheek. “Bye.”

  “Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re working too hard.”

  Monash smiled. “Good-by.”

  Irwin Allen hovered high above Stage 18 on a camera crane. Down below, an art director for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea waved frantically to attract his attention. He was carrying a sketch of what looked like a blob, but which actually was a costume for a marine monster scheduled to appear in one of the Voyage episodes.

  Allen finally caught sight of the art director. “It better be important,” he shouted down from the crane.

  “I just want you to okay this sketch, Irwin,” the art director said. Allen beckoned for him to send it up. When it got there, he perused it quickly, took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt, then looked at the sketch again. “Okay one monster,” he said finally. He gave the sketch one more check. “One thing. His mouth. Does a monster’s mouth move when he talks?”

  The sketch artist looked bewildered. He wiped his arm across his forehead. “We hadn’t planned on it, Irwin.”

  “A monster looks phony if his mouth doesn’t move when he’s talking,” Allen said. “Fix it. A mouth on the blob.”

  The first week in September, while last-minute trimming was taking place on Dr. Dolittle prior to its Minneapolis sneak preview, the publicity department was deep in plans for the picture’s West Coast premiere in Los Angeles four days before Christmas. The premiere was scheduled for the Paramount Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and was for the benefit of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Tickets were $125 per person, part of which was tax deductible. After the premiere, there was to be a black-tie dinner dance in a tent set up in the parking lot behind the Paramount. Initial planning called for 140 tables, seating ten people each, with the catering done by Chasen’s. In return for having their names on the menu, manufacturers had donated free cigars, cigarettes, liquor and favors. As a special publicity gimmick, it had been decided to have several of Dr. Dolittle’s animal stars arrive at the Paramount in chauffeured limousines. All would be in animal versions of evening clothes and would be accompanied by their trainers. The job of acquiring the limousines fell to Perry Lieber, the semi-retired former head of West Coast publicity who was in charge of premiere planning. One afternoon, Lieber called up a large limousine hire agency in Los Angeles and explained the situation.

  “It’s really cute as hell,” Lieber said. He has a boisterous, enthusiastic voice. “The animals are the stars of the picture and they’ll be the hit of the evening. Sophie the Seal will arrive in a limo, and she’ll be wearing a rhinestone harness and walk right into the Paramount just like she was a star. And Chee-Chee the Chimp, we’ll have him dressed up in white-tie and tails and special patent-leather pumps.” Lieber listened for a moment. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “All the animals will be wearing pants. They better be, or you’ll have some messed-up limos.”

  11

  “That’s what we come to Minneapolis for,”

  Stan Hough said

  There was never any doubt that the Studio would hold its first preview of Dr. Dolittle in Minneapolis. Fox considered the Minnesota capital its lucky city; Robert Wise’s production of The Sound of Music was first sneaked there, and with the enormous success of that picture, the Studio superstitiously kept bringing its major roadshow attractions to Minneapolis for their first unveiling before a paid theater audience. With so much money at stake—the budget of Dr. Dolittle was close to $18 million—the Studio was unwilling to hold a sneak anywhere around Los Angeles, reasoning that it could get a truer audience reaction in the hinterlands, far from the film-wise and preview-hardened viewers who haunt screenings in and around Hollywood. The plan originally had been to go to Minneapolis on Friday, September 8, and to Tulsa the following evening, but early that week the Tulsa screening was canceled. “If the picture plays, we don’t have to go to Tulsa,” Richard Fleischer said. “If it doesn’t play, why go to Tulsa the next night and get kicked in the ass again? You make some changes, then you go to Tulsa.”

  Because of the magnitude of Dr. Dolittle, the Minneapolis screening attracted twenty-eight Studio personnel from New York and Los Angeles. The major contingent from Los Angeles was booked on Western Airlines Flight 502, leaving at 8:30 A.M. on September 8. Arthur Jacobs, accompanied by Natalie Trundy, arrived at International Airport nearly an hour before flight time. He was tieless and wearing a dark blazer and he lingered around the escalator coming up from the check-in counters on the ground floor, greeting members of the Fox party as they arrived. His salutation never varied. “I’m not nervous,” Jacobs said. “I’m not going to Minneapolis. I’m just here to wave you all goodby.”

  “Oh, Arthur,” Natalie Trundy said. “Calm down.”

  “Calm down,” Jacobs said. “Calm down. You treat me like one of the dogs.” He turned to Fleischer. “We’ve got poodles. She treats me like a poodle.”

  “You’re a very nice-looking poodle, Arthur,” Fleischer said.

  They milled around the gate, waiting for Flight 502 to be called, Jacobs, Natalie Trundy, Fleischer, Mort Abrahams, Herbert Ross, the choreographer on Dr. Dolittle, and Warren Cowan, who was once a partner of Jacobs in a public relations firm and whose company, Rogers, Cowan & Brenner, was handling the publicity and promotion for Dolittle. At last the flight was called. As Jacobs and Natalie Trundy walked up the ramp, Jacobs turned to Fleischer and said, “I just don’t want to go to Minneapolis. Let’s go to Vegas instead.”

  “It would be less of a gamble,” Fleischer said.

  Jacobs and Nat
alie Trundy took two seats at the rear of the first-class compartment. Cowan, a short, pudgy man with constantly moving eyes and a voice that sounds somewhat like Daffy Duck’s, sat by himself in front of them and spread the New York and Los Angeles papers on his lap. Jacobs could not keep still. “We land at noon,” he shouted up the aisle. “At twelve-thirty, we visit the public library. At one o’clock, the museum.”

  No one laughed except Fleischer, who tried to humor Jacobs. “At one-thirty, the textile factory,” Fleischer said.

  “And then we have a rest period between eight and eleven this evening,” Jacobs said. This was the time scheduled for the screening.

  “What I like about you, Arthur, is your calm,” Fleischer said.

  “Why should I be nervous?” Jacobs said. “It’s only eighteen million dollars.”

  The trip to Minneapolis was uneventful. Most of the Fox people slept, except for Jacobs, who kept prowling the aisle looking for someone to talk to. It had just been announced in the trade press that week that Rex Harrison had bowed out of the musical production of Goodbye, Mr. Chips that Gower Champion was scheduled to direct and Jacobs to produce for release by M-G-M. “It was all set,” Jacobs said sadly. “Gower and I even went to Paris to see Rex. We drive out to his house in the country and he meets us at the door. ‘Marvelous day,’ he says. You know the way he talks.” Jacobs put on his Rex Harrison voice. “ ‘Marvelous day. Bloody Mary, anyone, Bloody Mary.’ He gets us the Bloody Marys and then he says, ‘Now let me tell you why I’m not going to do Mr. Chips.’ That’s the first we heard about it. It was all set. Well, Gower looks at me, picks up his attaché case and says, ‘Sorry, I’m going to the airport, I’m going home.’ ” Jacobs gazed out the window at the clouds. “It was all set,” he said. “All set.”