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  “Yes, Dick,” Brown said. He pulled out a pipe and blew through the stem.

  “It looks like we won’t be able to start The Strangler until the week after New Year’s,” Zanuck said.

  “What’s that do with Bob Shaw?” Brown asked.

  “He’s intrigued with the idea, but he won’t comment until after he sees some pages.”

  A billow of smoke rose from Brown’s pipe. “When will we have a script?”

  “Fryer says November 1st.”

  “A long time to keep him waiting,” Brown said. He puffed on his pipe. “Can we lay off Severed Head on Metro?”

  “I talked to Freddie Fields and he’s working on it,” Zanuck said. “He says it can be made for one-eight. I think we’re in for two-five minimum.”

  “Minimum,” Brown said. He took a pencil and wrote some figures on a scratch pad. “$300,000 for Shaw, $150,000 for Aimee, $210,000 for Raphael, $100,000 for the producers—that’s almost $800,000 above the line and that doesn’t include a director. What’s the director laid in for?”

  “$75,000,” Zanuck said.

  “You’ll never get anyone for that,” Brown said. “It’s too low.”

  Zanuck nodded. “For anyone good.”

  “How about Michael Winner?”

  “He’s one-fifty after The Jokers.”

  Brown watched Zanuck carefully. “It’s a marginal property,” he said finally. “No question, we’d jump at it for one-six.”

  “With overhead,” Zanuck said.

  “With overhead,” Brown echoed.

  Zanuck leaned back in his chair. “Let’s drop it then,” he said with finality. “One more thing. Larry Turman said that Joe Levine was interested in In the Spring the War Ended.” Turman was a young producer under a non-exclusive contract to Fox. He had brought the novel by Steven Linakis to the Studio, which had spent several hundred thousand dollars developing a screenplay before deciding not to go ahead with the project. “I told him we put $280,000 into it, all told, and that if he could lay it off on Levine, we’d settle for fifty cents on the dollar.”

  “Fine, Dick,” David Brown said.

  Star! was shooting on Sound Stage 14, and a day or so later I walked onto the set as director Robert Wise was setting up a shot. A onetime film editor who worked with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane, Wise won Academy Awards for his direction of West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He was sitting high up on a camera crane, shouting instructions through a salmon and gray bullhorn. The shot was a studio pickup of a double-decked London bus carrying revelers to a party given by Julie Andrews, who was playing Gertrude Lawrence. The first part of the sequence had been shot on location in a mews in London, the last in a park in New York. The intermediate segment, now being set up, was a matte shot of the bus rolling toward its ultimate destination in the park. Behind the bus was a giant blue screen on which later would be projected the English countryside passing by, thus giving the illusion that the bus was actually moving.

  The scene was number 79 and the script directions read:

  UPPER DECK—NIGHT (PROCESS)

  Here also the guests are undoing their presents. Tony stands at the front of the upper deck blowing a loud and joyful “View Halloo” on a long hunting horn.

  On the side of the vintage red bus was written “London General Omnibus Company, Limited, John Christopher Mitchell, Secretary & Treasurer,” as well as an itinerary—“Bank—Ludgate Circus—Strand—Victoria Station—Walham Green—Hammersmith.” The bus was on a hydraulic jack, and on either side stagehands were rocking it gently with two-by-fours pried underneath to give a semblance of motion. High up in the rafters, another stagehand slowly waved a prop tree branch in front of a light onto a screen so that the shadow of passing shrubbery could be seen reflected in the bus’s windows. The shot took in only the upper deck, so that the bottom was empty. The principals and extras were all dressed in evening clothes, white tie for the men, period 1920’s dresses for the women.

  On the crane, Wise peered through the camera, composing the shot, his hands expertly working the flywheels. When he was satisfied, he picked up the bullhorn. “All right, let’s have a rehearsal,” he shouted. “I want a lot of brouhaha. This is the 1920’s and you’re all a little high. I think some of you might have been a little high before, so you need no instructions from me.”

  The actors laughed and began to shout and move around the top of the bus. The stagehands rocked the vehicle.

  “That’s it, that’s it,” Wise said. “Slurp a little champagne. Blow your horn, Michael.” Michael Craig, an English actor who was playing the Horse Guards officer who was Gertrude Lawrence’s lover, raised the hunting horn to his lips and began to blow it drunkenly. There was no sound; the sound would be dubbed in later. “That’s okay, that’s nice, more where that came from,” Wise said. “Okay.”

  Wise took his bullhorn once again. He told Craig to keep blowing his horn a few seconds longer and asked Daniel Massey, another English actor who was playing Noel Coward, to come in faster on his line. “You’re waiting too long, Dan. There’s other actors with dialogue in this scene and they’re waiting on your cue.” He looked through the camera again. “Okay, let’s take a picture.”

  The actors returned to their places. The buzzer was sounded and the set doors were locked. The slate boy wrote “Scene 79, Take 1” on his board and snapped it in front of the camera. The assistant director, Reggie Callow, a bulbous, apoplectic-looking man, called for quiet. “Ac-tion,” Wise said.

  The camera started to roll. Almost immediately Wise called “Cut.” Impatiently he shouted down to Callow. “Reggie, what’s the matter with the blue screen? There’s a shadow over there on the right.”

  Callow dispatched an electrician to look at the blue screen. Seconds later the electrician reported that a light had burned out behind the screen causing the shadow.

  “Goddamn it, that’s the second time this morning,” Callow bellowed. “Fix the goddamn thing.”

  Wise climbed down from his perch. He was nervously jiggling a handful of coins. “This is what makes picture making tedious,” he said, settling into a leather director’s chair on the back of which was written “Robert Wise.” I asked how long he had been working on the film. “Three years,” he said. His eyes moved slowly around the set, taking in everything. “I didn’t really want to do another big picture,” he said. “Period pictures take so damn much time. For The Sand Pebbles”—Wise’s last picture for Fox, a $12 million story about the U. S. Navy in China during the 1920’s—“we had to build our own junks and our own rickshas. The ones they had in Hong Kong and Taiwan weren’t period.” He shifted the coins from his left to his right hand. “I want to do something where I don’t have to take down television antennas in order to shoot. A nice simple picture where the people wear their own clothes and I can shoot the TV aerials.” He pushed his hand through his graying hair. “But who knows. There was a picture of mine on TV the other night—The Haunting—a nice small picture that didn’t make a dime. Then I made one with Harry Belafonte, Odds Against Tomorrow, again a nice small picture, and it dropped out of sight.” The coins went back into his pocket. “So I guess I’m stuck with the big ones.”

  The light was finally fixed and Wise climbed back up onto the crane. The script called for Julie Andrews to say, “Open your presents, everyone,” but because she was not included in the shot, she was not on the set. “Okay,” Wise said through his bullhorn. “I’ll say Julie’s line and everyone look toward the back of the bus. This is a take, not a rehearsal, so everyone open the presents. Don’t throw the paper out of the bus, please,” he explained patiently, as if talking to a child. “Just put it on the floor.”

  Callow called for quiet and the red shooting light began to flash on the stage door. As the bus rocked on its jack, the actors bustled about on the upper deck, opening the presents. Each box contained a bathing suit for the swimming party they were on their way to attend.

  “Cut,” Wise said, when the sh
ot was completed. “That was nice, very nice. Let’s print it.”

  On the bus, an actress stood up and waved at Wise. “Are we supposed to get the same suits we wear at the party?” she said.

  “Yes, dear,” Wise said.

  “But I was fitted for a green one and this is a blue one.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Callow said.

  A resigned look flickered across Wise’s face. The swim suits were rewrapped and sorted out so that each actor got the bathing suit for which he had been fitted. It was nearly an hour before the scene was ready to be reshot. The actors milled around the stage. Some read The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety and others talked and drank coffee.

  “Don’t spill any goddamn coffee on those costumes,” Callow bawled.

  After a half dozen takes, the shot was finally printed. The lights came on and the camera was shifted for the next bus setup. The scene called for the women to go to the bottom of the bus and the men to stay on the upper deck and change into their bathing suits. Wise did not move from the crane. He told Callow to have the electrician check the lights behind the blue screen once again. The shot was finally set up. The buzzer sounded and the actors on the top of the bus began to undress. Suddenly Wise called, “Cut.”

  “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “this is a period picture. If men wore GI T-shirts during the 1920’s, nobody has bothered to inform me about it. And so I can only assume that no one wore GI T-shirts during the 1920’s. Now is anyone wearing an old-style undershirt, the kind with shoulder straps?”

  Several actors on the top of the bus raised their hands.

  “All right, then you people can take off your shirts,” Wise said. His patience was beginning to wear thin. “The rest of you fake it. Just fool with your buttons until I get the shot.”

  “I’m not wearing anything underneath,” Michael Craig said.

  “Then you can take off your shirt, too,” Wise said. He lingered deliberately over each word. “But only … the actors not wearing anything or who’ve got those old-style undershirts I want to take off their shirts.” He paused. “Are we ready, gentlemen? I’d like to get this shot in before lunch.”

  The following afternoon, Richard Zanuck had an appointment to see Phil Gersh, an agent who looks like a successful former light heavyweight champion and who represents both Wise and Richard Fleischer. Gersh had no specific reason to see Zanuck, but was merely sounding out the Studio’s intentions toward his clients when their current assignments expired.

  “You ever read Candy, Dick?” he said as he sat down.

  “Jesus, Phil. You’re not peddling that one?”

  “Well, you know.” Gersh shrugged. “There’s two new writers on it, Waterhouse and Hall, you know, those English guys. They got a new approach. Nothing pornographic. It’s real cute, in fact.”

  Zanuck was noncommittal. “I’d want to see a script, Phil.”

  “Oh, I understand that, Dick. You can’t have that dame balling everyone on camera.”

  Zanuck smiled. He took an ashtray off his desk and brushed some ashes into it.

  “Listen,” Gersh said. “You got anything for Bob Wise after Star!?”

  “I’ve been laying off him,” Zanuck said. “He says he wants a long rest.”

  “He says he wants to do a little picture, too,” Gersh said. “I wouldn’t lay off him too much. There’s a lot of action on the outside and he’s listening to it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Zanuck said.

  “He likes it here, he wants to stay, I want you to know that,” Gersh said. “But I got to tell you he’s listening to all this activity.”

  “I’ll give it a thought,” Zanuck said.

  Gersh rose and shook Zanuck’s hand. “That’s all I ask, Dick,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

  “The problems we had with Dolittle,” Arthur P. Jacobs said. “I mean the problems.” The producer of Dr. Dolittle lit a slim dark Sherman cigarettello and dropped the match into a wastebasket, looking for a moment to see that the basket did not burst into flames. He buzzed his secretary and asked her to bring him in a plate of Triscuits and a diet soda. A trim former press agent with a slack chin and dark, darting eyes, he had recently recovered from a heart attack and was on a diet. He had lost thirty pounds, given up bread and butter and was now drinking only diet soda. The air conditioner in his office in the Apjac bungalow—the name of Jacobs’ production company is an anagram based on his first two initials and the first three letters in his last name—was turned up so high that the temperature seemed almost polar. “I mean,” he said, “if I knew we were in for these kind of problems at the beginning, I never would have done it.”

  Dr. Dolittle was only Jacobs’ second picture. He had made his first, What A Way to Go!, six years before and had spent most of the intervening years trying to put Dolittle together. His first problem was getting the estate of Hugh Lofting to release title of the books for a motion picture. For years, the Lofting estate had turned down every effort to film the Dolittle stories. A born promoter, Jacobs had interested Rex Harrison and Alan Jay Lerner, the librettist and lyricist of My Fair Lady, in the project and with these names was given the go-ahead by the Lofting estate. “So I got Lerner,” Jacobs said, munching on a Triscuit. “He worked on the picture fifteen months on and off, mostly off. We painted an office for him, painted his name on a parking space, and then we waited. And waited some more. I get him on the phone, he tells me he knows what he wants, it’s all in his head. More phone calls. He tells me he wants to see me here, I go see him, he tells me he’s leaving for New York in ten minutes. I make an appointment to go see him in New York, I go to New York, they tell me he’s in Rome. That’s it. So I signed Leslie Bricusse to write the script and do the score.”

  The signing of Bricusse created another problem, this one with Harrison. A young English writer who had co-authored the Broadway hit, Stop the World, I Want To Get Off, Bricusse was an unknown quantity to Harrison, and Harrison preferred working only with people he knew. But after hearing several of Bricusse’s songs and seeing a portion of his script, Harrison agreed to continue. The question now was who was going to direct the picture. The three biggest names bruited about were John Huston, William Wyler and Vincente Minnelli, each an Academy Award winner. “Darryl wanted Huston,” Jacobs said, “but I figured there was already enough temperament with Rex without getting Huston involved. Minnelli was old-fashioned and Wyler would take fifty takes of every shot and the picture would end up costing thirty-five million. Who else was there? Dick Zanuck liked Fleischer ever since Compulsion, so I said okay. Now we had to persuade Rex, so Fleischer and I fly to his home in Portofino and I sort of indicated to him that if he didn’t want Fleischer, maybe we could get along without him. We spent a nice weekend, and at the end, Rex gets me alone to talk about Fleischer. ‘Nice chap, good chap,’ he says, and that was that.”

  Jacobs leaned across his desk. “So now Rex had a contract, he was getting more money than God, we were in business,” he said. “Then Rex says, ‘Good-by, sue me, I’m not going to do it.’ ” Jacobs shuddered theatrically. “We have a picture called Dr. Dolittle, twelve million going in, and no one to play Dr. Dolittle. We scratch around and come up with Christopher Plummer. The studio liked him, he’d been in The Sound of Music, but it was no secret we were in a jam and we had to lay out $300,000 to get him. So Fox wires Rex, something like, ‘As per your request, you have been relieved of your Dr. Dolittle assignment and replaced by another artist.’ Next day his agents call, Rex didn’t mean it, he just wanted a few changes, and so on and so forth. So we pay off Plummer, he’s got us over a barrel with a nice legal contract. But Rex is back and we’re ready to go.”

  Dr. Dolittle actually began shooting in England in late June, 1966, with Harrison, Samantha Eggar, Anthony Newley and Richard Attenborough in the leading roles. In fifty-eight days of shooting in England, only five were rainless. Most of the English locations were in a classic little Wiltshire village called Castle Combe. Flei
scher had obtained all the necessary permissions for widening and damming a small river nearby, turning Castle Combe into the tiny seaport of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, where Dr. Dolittle lived. (He had also built a community television antenna, so that he could remove anachronistic TV aerials from Castle Combe’s cottages.) The first morning of shooting, two young Englishmen, objecting to Hollywood’s transformation of the village, tried to blow up the dam. This set the tone for relations between Castle Combe and the Dolittle company for the rest of its stay in England.

  Another problem was the training of the animals befriended by Dr. Dolittle. Months before shooting began, hundreds of animals had been selected for training at Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. Because of the strict quarantine laws in the United Kingdom, two sets of animals had to be trained, one for shooting in Hollywood, the other for shooting in England. All the principal animals in the cast—Jip the Dog, Polynesia the Parrot, Chee-Chee the Chimpanzee, Sophie the Seal and Gub-Gub the Pig—had doubles. Pigs grow so rapidly that Jacobs had to replace Gub-Gub every month with a new and properly sized porker, and both Chee-Chee and Jip had not one but three backups. Simulating sound-stage conditions, the trainers at Jungleland constantly flashed lights at the animals and moved among them so that they would not get skittish when finally confronted with the high-powered arcs and the hundreds of people present on a set. Six months were devoted to teaching Chee-Chee the Chimpanzee how to cook bacon and eggs. On Stage 20 at the Studio, Dr. Dolittle’s study was constructed in anticipation of the fact that few of the animals were housebroken. The floor was slightly tilted and fitted with a drain so that it might be hosed off easily. In all, Jacobs spent $1 million simply to train, house, feed and transport the animals.