Studio (9780307817600) Read online

  Zanuck’s announcement of his candidacy stirred no enthusiasm on the board of directors, which was concerned with his profligate ways in both his business and private lives, and lines were drawn for a proxy fight. The prospect of a destructive proxy battle, however, was far less tolerable to Fox stockholders than the return of Darryl Zanuck. Whatever his faults—and his rivals took pains to chronicle in detail Zanuck’s romantic interludes and the millions he spent in abortive efforts to make stars out of such former consorts as Bella Darvi and Juliette Greco—Zanuck at least offered a lifetime of film knowhow, experience totally lacking in the bankers and brokers who opposed him. The stockholders threw their support to Zanuck and the board backed down, naming him president and relegating Skouras to the figurehead post of chairman of the board. There was still the matter of the new production chief. “D.Z. asked me who I thought was best qualified,” Richard Zanuck recalls. “And I told him. Me.”

  Immediately after taking over as president, Darryl Zanuck shut the Studio down, fired most of its personnel, and threw out all the story properties bought by the previous management. The only production activity was one television show then in the dying days of its run. “It was desperate.” Richard Zanuck said. There is a strained quality in his voice that becomes a slight rasp when he gets impatient. “There were only about fifty people here—everyone else had been canned—and we just sat around looking at each other. We closed down the commissary to save money, and everyone—secretaries, producers, carpenters—ate lunch in a little electricians’ shed. It’s an awful thing to say, but things were so tight, we were trying to figure out ways to get another janitor off the payroll.”

  Zanuck fingered one of the bronze baby shoes. There were charges when he took over the Studio that his appointment was due only to Hollywood’s tribal law of primogeniture. The accusations of nepotism did not disturb him. “Quite frankly, naming me as production chief made a lot of sense,” he said, draining the cup of coffee. “As the largest stockholders, my family stood to lose the most if the company went under. What nearly killed this company was the politics, the antagonism between the money people in the East and the picture people out here. With D.Z. in New York and me out here, that antagonism is gone now.”

  Like almost everyone brought up in the movie industry, Richard Zanuck is almost immune to the world outside. He reads voraciously, but mainly scripts, and his mind is an encyclopedia of plots, gimmicks and story angles. No detail escapes his attention. “How about a midget for the shoeshine boy?” he asks the director of a thriller. “There’s something insidious about a midget.” A producer’s suggestion that an actor in a Western wear a mustache gets a quick veto. “We had a picture here once, The Gunfighter, with Greg Peck, and it bombed out. You know why? Peck wore a mustache.” (Zanuck was thirteen when The Gunfighter was released.) He mentions a Gary Cooper comedy shot at the Studio years before. “Good picture,” he says, “but small hat. You could never put Coop in a small hat and get your money back.”

  The two Zanucks keep in close contact, communicating by telephone and teletype several times daily. “In the old days, my father could staff and cast a picture in minutes from the card file listing everyone under contract,” Richard Zanuck said. “Nowadays, planning a picture takes longer than making one. Jesus, you spend hours fighting with agents over billing, salary, fringe benefits, start dates, stop dates, the works.” He leaned back in his chair and ran his finger across his hairline. “D.Z. doesn’t have the temperament for this sort of thing,” he said. “His inclination was always to throw an agent out of his office. Not me. I like to wheel and deal.”

  Several days later, Richard Zanuck asked me to come by his office as he demonstrated his capacity for wheeling and dealing. He was slumped at his desk, picking at his fingernails with a letter opener. With him was Owen McLean, the studio’s executive casting director, a heavy-set, round-faced man whose lips are set firmly against his teeth. “Agents always travel in pairs,” Zanuck explained, nodding at McLean. “You can’t play a lone hand against them. You’ve got to have someone backing you up, taking notes.” His lips parted in a quick smile. “Just in case.”

  His secretary buzzed and announced that agents Evarts Ziegler and Richard Shepherd were in the outer office. There was a minimum of small talk as the agents entered the office. The project under discussion involved Paul Newman, director Martin Ritt and the husband-wife writing team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., the quartet responsible for the hugely successful Hud. Their new project was a Western called Hombre, the story of a white man who preferred to live among the Indians and who against his will came out into the white man’s world. The meeting had certain ritual aspects. The game lay in not yielding a point too easily, in dreaming up new demands just as a detail appeared settled. No one seemed to think it extraordinary that the two agents began by demanding $1.3 million for the four people in the package.

  There was no argument over Newman: $750,000 against 10 per cent of the gross until the picture showed a profit. After that, a piece of the profits.

  Then the Ravetches. “They get $150,000 a picture,” said Ziegler, a smooth, expensively tailored man who doodled constantly with a gold pencil.

  Zanuck agreed without comment.

  “Irving is going to co-produce,” Ziegler said. “That’s fifty more.”

  Zanuck looked up quickly. “It was twenty-five the other day,” he said. “You changed the figures.”

  “Not changed,” Ziegler replied. He searched for the proper word. “Corrected.”

  “No,” Zanuck said.

  Ziegler doodled a row of zeros on a piece of paper and without looking up said, “Richard Zanuck is being cold to me.”

  Zanuck shrugged. Ziegler did not argue the point.

  The longest discussion was over Ritt. He had once been under contract to Fox and the Studio was now suing him for failure to live up to that contract’s provisions. All film companies file charges almost promiscuously, since a lawsuit is a potent bargaining tool in any subsequent negotiations. Few of the suits ever come to trial.

  Painfully earnest, with furrowed brow, Shepherd opened for $350,000 for Ritt. Zanuck laughed.

  “He’s getting $300,000 for his current picture,” Shepherd said.

  Zanuck picked up the letter opener and laughed again. Shepherd agreed to cut Ritt’s price to $250,000, if Fox dropped the lawsuit.

  A look of surprise crossed Zanuck’s face. “If we drop the suit, he only gets one-fifty,” he said. He gnawed at a fingernail. “All my legal people tell me we’ve got an open and shut case.”

  “You’re putting a price tag on the merits or lack of merits of a piece of litigation,” Shepherd protested.

  Zanuck smiled. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “If we drop the suit, my legal department is going to lose the prestige of winning a case. That means a lot to a lawyer. I’ve got to consider that.”

  They argued back and forth, Shepherd prefacing every remark with “In all honesty … I must be truthful … In all fairness …” His figure dropped slowly and Zanuck’s came up. They finally met at $200,000, with Fox agreeing to drop the litigation. Shepherd was still reluctant. “I’ll have to check Marty’s financial needs for the rest of the year,” he said.

  When the agents finally left the office, Zanuck picked a piece of paper off his desk and showed it to McLean.

  “We’ll make a deal,” he said. “No doubt about that.” The paper was a carbon copy of a memo he had sent Darryl Zanuck in New York several days before, stating that he could tie up Ritt and the rest of the package for exactly what he had just agreed to pay. The deal was confirmed the next day.

  2

  “I like it better than Frank’s,”

  Arthur Jacobs said

  By the time I returned to the Studio, Hombre had been completed and was in release. (“Hombre’s 4th Frisco Frame Boff 16G”—Daily Variety.) There were forty-eight features in various stages of production, nine television series shooting and a sc
ore of others in the planning and pilot stage. Three new sound stages had been built at the main Studio lot in Westwood, bringing the total to twenty-two, but space was still at a premium. Television production had spilled over onto the Studio’s secondary lot on Western Avenue, near the Hollywood Freeway, and when all that space was in use, the Studio was forced to rent additional stages from Desilu in Culver City, where two more television shows were shooting. At the Studio’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley, Planet of the Apes, a science-fiction morality tale about a simian civilization, starring Charlton Heston, was shooting its exteriors, as were two television Westerns, Custer and Daniel Boone. In the absence of a back lot, every available inch at the Westwood lot was in use. An alley had been converted into an all-purpose French street, the exterior of Sound Stage 5 into the Gotham City Municipal Library for the television show Batman, and the outside of the commissary into the Colonial Post Inn in Peyton Place Square.

  The trend was up. All twenty-two sound stages on the Westwood lot had been repainted in pastel Mondrian designs. A New Talent Program had been initiated, and every day on Sound Stage 2, the twenty-two young actors and actresses in the school, each paid a minimum of $175 a week, with first six-month and then yearly options on their contracts, underwent a strenuous regimen of dancing and acting lessons. They were given occasional roles in features and television to test their screen presence, were depended upon to attend major premieres, the girls in dresses provided by the Studio’s wardrobe department, and were always available for such publicity functions as launching pigeons by the maypole in Century City to open the Southern California Festival of Flowers. There were whirlwind daily tours through the Studio at $2 a head and there was a more elaborate $50 tour for business executives from 500 major American corporations. The $50 tour included a chauffeured limousine to and from the Studio, a personal guide in a red, white and blue miniskirt, a visit to an active sound stage, a test of the dashboard controls on Batman’s Batmobile, lunch in the commissary, a look at unedited film in one of the Studio’s screening rooms, and a glass of California champagne with the guide at the end of the day.

  But the Studio’s main concern remained what motion picture people call The Product. In the cutting room, the $18 million production of Dr. Dolittle, a musical fantasy starring Rex Harrison and based on Hugh Lofting’s wistful and delicate children’s stories, was in the final stages of editing. On the sound stages, Star!, a $12 million musical biography based loosely on the life of Gertrude Lawrence and starring Julie Andrews, was shooting. No cast had been set yet, nor had the script been completed, for Robert Fryer’s $4.5 million production of The Boston Strangler. And dominating the Studio was a huge billboard that said: “THINK 20TH.”

  There were problems with the script of The Boston Strangler. The Studio had purchased the book from author Gerold Frank for $250,000 and assigned it to Robert Fryer to produce. It was Fryer’s first motion picture assignment after producing a string of hit Broadway musicals, including Sweet Charity and Mame. A stocky, red-haired man with a delayed, slightly abstracted demeanor, Fryer drove a black Rolls-Royce and, as if resisting the studied casualness of the Studio, he still dressed Eastern—tweed jackets, gray flannel slacks, double-breasted blue suits. The Strangler was supposed to start shooting in the fall, but on the hot midsummer afternoon when I first met Fryer, the script was still incomplete. The first script, by English playwright Terence Rattigan, had not worked out, and Fryer had assigned the job of writing a new script to Edward Anhalt, a veteran Hollywood writer who had won Academy Awards for Panic in the Streets and for Becket. One of the highest paid writers in Hollywood, Anhalt works entirely on his boat and had driven onto the lot that afternoon only to report his progress to Fryer and Richard Fleischer, who was going to direct The Strangler. The meeting took place in Fleischer’s office in the ramshackle, barracks-like Old Writers Building.

  “Well?” Fryer said, sinking into a chair and loosening his striped tie.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Fleischer said pleasantly. He is a quiet, infinitely patient man in his early fifties. His father, Max Fleischer, was a pioneer in the animated cartoon field, a guiding hand behind Popeye and Betty Boop. The younger Fleischer directed Richard Zanuck’s first feature film, Compulsion, and had been employed steadily at the Studio ever since Richard Zanuck had taken over as production chief. He had just finished directing Dr. Dolittle, and besides The Boston Strangler he was also preparing to co-direct Tora, Tora, Tora, an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  “I need a Fresca,” Fryer said. The air conditioner was on full, but there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “What am I going to tell Dick Zanuck?”

  “That we’re not going to go to Boston in September,” Fleischer said. He knotted a loose thread around a button on his jacket. “There’s no point in going if the script isn’t finished.”

  Fryer looked across the table at Anhalt. He seemed to be controlling his anxiety with great physical effort. “When are you going to be finished, Eddie?”

  Anhalt neatly arranged a pile of file cards on the coffee table. He was wearing Ben Franklin half-glasses, a turtleneck sweater and a tailored summer-weight hacking jacket. He has a rugged outdoor face, his head is completely shaved and he looks fifteen years younger than his fifty-five years.

  “The first of November,” Anhalt said finally.

  Fryer sighed. “Can’t we send a second unit to Boston in September?”

  “Why?” Fleischer said.

  “To shoot exteriors,” Fryer said hesitantly.

  “You’ve got a problem,” Fleischer said. He thought for a moment. “Two problems. You don’t have a finished script, you might add locations, you might drop locations. Then you send actors to Boston—I’m not talking about the principals—you’re not sure they’ll still be available when principal photography starts.”

  Fryer looked at Anhalt for support, but Anhalt only shook his head. “I say we can’t start with half a script,” he said. He riffled through his cards. “We’ve got sixty people in the first forty pages and they’re all speaking parts. A lot of those are going to be cut and boiled down and collapsed, so you can’t really cast.”

  “But if we send a second unit, we can get the full feeling of the fall,” Fryer insisted. “We don’t start shooting until January, we’ve got a winter picture. You get a late spring in Boston. It doesn’t get warm until May. We want the change of seasons. Otherwise …” His voice trailed off. “Otherwise we get a winter picture.”

  Anhalt peered over his half-glasses at Fleischer. “You can use a sundial to show the change of seasons.”

  A slow smile flickered across Fleischer’s face. “How about the pages falling off a calendar?” he said. “Or maybe leaves dropping off a tree in full bloom.”

  “You must think you’re David Lean,” Anhalt said.

  “Listen …” Fryer began. “Dick, listen.”

  “Look, Bob,” Fleischer said quietly. “I can’t see how we can possibly be ready to start principal photography in November.” He pointed to Anhalt’s file cards. “Unless we put sprocket holes in those cards and run them through the projector.”

  The three men looked at one another. Fleischer drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Now the question is, what do we tell Dick Zanuck? If we can’t make November 1, when do we go?”

  “The first of January?” Fryer said. With his finger, he removed the sweat from his brow. “I mean, is that a reasonable time?”

  Fleischer folded his arms and glanced at Anhalt. “Okay,” Anhalt said.

  The postponement of The Boston Strangler upset the delicate balance of the Studio’s feature scheduling. Several weeks before, Richard Zanuck had also dropped The Nine Tiger Man from the Fox schedule. The Studio had spent months trying to work out a reasonable budget for the picture, which was to be based on Lesley Blanch’s novel, to be directed by George Cukor, and to star Robert Shaw. “The Nine Tiger Man budget started at eleven million, we hacked it to eigh
t, then chopped it down to seven-two,” Zanuck said one morning a few days after Fryer’s meeting on The Boston Strangler. “The sets would have cost a million, the costumes five or six hundred thousand. You’ve got to wonder if Bob Shaw can carry that kind of money. I would have gambled on six, but even that would have been a gamble.”

  Zanuck wiped a speck of dust off a bronzed baby shoe behind his desk. Though The Nine Tiger Man had been scrubbed, the Studio still had a commitment with Shaw to do a picture for $300,000. One possibility was for Shaw to play the title role in The Boston Strangler. Another was for the English actor to star in a film based on Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Severed Head. A package for The Severed Head had been offered to the Studio, which included Shaw, French actress Anouk Aimee, producers Elliot Kastner and Jerry Gershwin, and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who won an Academy Award for his original screenplay, Darling. Zanuck was less than sanguine about the box office possibilities of The Severed Head. He thought the property too intellectual for the budget involved and just that morning had expressed his doubts over the telephone to Freddie Fields, president of Creative Management Associates, the agency involved in packaging the project.

  Zanuck’s secretary brought in some letters for him to sign. He read them quickly, then flicked on his intercom.

  “Yes, Dick.”

  “Can you come in?” Zanuck said.

  A moment later, David Brown popped in the back door of Zanuck’s office. Brown is a handsome, gray-haired man in his middle fifties, the husband of Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. He had been the head of the Studio’s story department for years, then had left to go into publishing as editorial director of New American Library. He had subsequently returned to Fox as vice president of story operations, and was now, after the Zanucks, the most important man in the production end of the Studio. His headquarters are in New York, but he divides his time between his New York office, Los Angeles and Europe. With the Zanucks, he passes on every important property acquisition and is in on all major packaging, casting, budgeting and scheduling decisions. He is bland and slightly vague, except when talking to either Zanuck.