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  Joe Scully shook his head and he too doodled a square in the air.

  There was laughter around the table. “Your enthusiasm overwhelms me,” Baur said. “Well, he should be a cinch for Tora, Tora, Tora. He can always play a young Naval officer.”

  “And he’s square enough to use in Tom Swift,” Kinney said.

  “Okay,” Baur said. “Fun is fun, but don’t forget, this is a $10,000 knock.” He began to check up on the week’s activities with each of the casting directors. “How about Judd, Bill?” he asked Kinney.

  “We sent a script to Ian Bannen and he likes it,” Kinney said. “But he has to check with his accountant in London to see if he has enough days left in this country to beat the tax rap.”

  “How much they offer him?” Baur said.

  “$3,500,” Kinney said. “It’s the same thing with all these English guys. He doesn’t want to cut into his few days left here if he can still get a picture in this country. You know, the money.”

  Baur checked his notes again. “As you know, we’ve got a new series on the back burner called European Eye. It’s about a private eye based in London who takes on any American in Europe who gets in trouble. It should be exciting. Locations all over Europe. We need a name leading man. Cliff Robertson, Hugh O’Brian, Mickey Callan—you know, one of those half-baked guys who want to do pictures.”

  “And can’t get any,” Kinney said.

  Baur shrugged. “Daniel Boone?” he said. “What do you need, Ross?”

  “Are there any young fops in the New Talent Program?” Ross Brown said. “I need a young fop for Boone.”

  “What’s the role?” Baur said.

  “Just that,” Brown said. “A young fop. The story’s about this Indian girl and she’s living with these white folks. They find out she’s an Indian and they don’t want her to marry their young fop son.”

  “Richard Krisher,” Curt Conway said. “A perfect fop. A Billy DeWolfe type, only younger.”

  Brown looked at his clipboard. He mentioned another young actor in the New Talent Program. “Has he been drafted yet?” he asked. “I need him to play an Indian.”

  “He’s got blue eyes,” Baur said.

  “Hazel,” Brown said. “It can work.”

  “Hell, yes,” Scully said. “They were making a Western over at Universal a couple of years ago, in color, and when they looked at the dailies, they discovered that the Indian chief had blue eyes. It was too late to replace him, so they put the research department to work and they found a tribe in North Dakota or someplace where every redskin had blue eyes. They wrote in a line of dialogue to cover it and they were home free.”

  Elizabeth Bergner is houseguesting with Mildred Natwick here. Catching up with her at her lawyer Arnold Weissberger’s Sutton Place apartment, I was reminded of what George Bernard Shaw said about her in my memorable visit with him the summer before he died: “Miss Bergner played Joan as if she were being burned at the stake when the curtain went up, instead of when it went down.” In spite of this wicked appraisal, Elizabeth has clung through the years to the letters G.B.S. has written her, but now she has turned them—and her correspondence with James M. Barrie, who wrote his final play, The Boy David, for her—over to Sotheby’s for auction. They should net her a tidy sum, which, I assume, is the reason she’s selling them.

  Radie Harris, The Hollywood Reporter

  The background music of Dr. Dolittle, meanwhile, was still being arranged and scored. The task of arranging Leslie Bricusse’s original score into background accompaniment fell to Lionel Newman, head of the Studio’s music department, and his associate, Alexander Courage. Film scoring is an enormously tedious job. Because it must be timed exactly to the action on the screen, it is recorded in snippets sometimes only a few seconds long. The scoring of Dr. Dolittle presented another problem not usually encountered in film musicals. The normal procedure is for the cast to pre-record musical production numbers before a full studio orchestra; then, when the number is actually filmed, the actors mouth their lyrics to a recorded playback. Rex Harrison, however, refused to do a playback; he argued that he was an actor, not a singer, and that it was difficult for him to act convincingly while trying to follow a playback. He insisted on being recorded live while his numbers were being shot, accompanied only by a piano on the set. The full orchestral background was mixed in later. The process was costly and time-consuming, but it was the only one to which Harrison would agree.

  “He’s the star, so what are you going to do?” Newman said one morning as he and Courage worked on the arrangement of the music behind the main titles of Dr. Dolittle. He is a stocky, gray-haired man whose conversation is sprinkled with pleasant obscenities. On the table in front of him was a plate of doughnuts and a cue sheet of the proposed title music. The sheet was marked into segments timed down to one-third of a second.

  “We’ve got animated titles,” Newman said. “The problem is we got to make it cute without making it Disney goddamn pixie.”

  Courage held a stopwatch in his hand. “We’ve got fifty seconds here,” he said. “Maybe we can drop “Talk to the Animals’ in this spot.”

  “Ready when you are,” Newman said.

  Courage set the stopwatch. “Go,” he said.

  Newman began to hum “Talk to the Animals,” waving his pencil as if it were a baton. “Da, da, da, da, DA, da, da, dee, dee, dee, da, da, da, da, dee.”

  He finished and looked at Courage. “Fifty-seven seconds,” Courage said.”

  “Shit,” Newman said. “It’s such a lousy song anyway. So what do we use?”

  Courage mentioned another song from the score. “That’s not so hot, either,” Newman said. “But at least it’s got melody.”

  He hummed the new song, banging his pencil on the table, while Courage clocked him. “Great,” Courage said, when Newman finished. “With five seconds schlemming around, I think we got it.” He checked the cue sheet. “That will take us up to the associate producer’s credit.”

  “Great,” Newman said. “We got time up the ass.”

  A few days later, Newman was on Sound Stage I, where he was conducting the Studio orchestra while they recorded a portion of the background score. The blower was out of order and the stage was hot and reeked of sweat. Instrument cases were scattered around the floor. There were fifty-eight players in the orchestra, all of them dressed in sport shirts and loose-fitting muumuus. That day’s call sheet called for the orchestra to record twenty-six pieces of music, ranging from thirty seconds to four minutes long. Newman stood on a podium in front of the orchestra, a set of earphones over his head, facing a screen on which the scenes to be scored were projected. The scenes were in black and white and the dialogue had been erased from the sound track so as not to distract the orchestra. Beside Newman on the podium was an enormous timer.

  Newman pulled at his gray polo shirt. “Jesus, isn’t there any air in here?” he said. He sniffed the air around him. “I know I don’t smell this bad all the time.”

  He called for a take. The shot was an insert of Dr. Dolittle peering out from a window in the prison on the floating island of Popsipetel where he had been incarcerated. The shot then cut to an exterior view of the native village, which was covered by a thick carpet of frost. A red “Take” sign flashed over the screen. The orchestra began to play, a slow, menacing staccato underscored by the beat of drums. The take lasted thirty-two seconds.

  “Jesus, you’re great,” Newman said. “The Lionel Newman Philharmonic Orchestra.”

  He gave the orchestra a five-minute break and asked for a playback. The film flashed on the screen again, this time with the dialogue and the music. Newman listened intently. The music drowned out the dialogue, but it would ultimately be mixed with the screen sounds so that everything would be perfectly modulated. Just as the playback ended, Arthur Jacobs walked onto the stage.

  “Hello, lardass,” Newman said amiably. He turned to the orchestra. “This is Mr. Apjac. He’s the tiger in your tank.” Jacobs loo
ked disconcerted, his sad, dark eyes nervously flickering back and forth between Newman and the orchestra.

  “Listen, lardass,” Newman said, “is there any chance we can get a longer shot in the percussion sequence? As it stands now, the percussion comes right in on the dialogue.”

  “I think we can get you a few extra feet,” Jacobs said.

  “That’s all I want, Arthur,” Newman said. “You do that for me, I’ll stop telling these people what a lardass you are.”

  Jacobs took a seat at the rear of the stage, drumming his fingers on a cello case while Newman recorded another piece of music. When the take was over, a dapper little man walked onto the stage. His name was Happy Goday and he was the song plugger Jacobs had hired at $500 a week to get singers to record the Dolittle songs.

  “Arthur, I got to tell you,” Goday said in a raspy little voice. “I got Kate Smith interested.”

  “That’s a thrill,” Jacobs said.

  “Don’t knock it, Arthur,” Goday said. “She’s very big with the ‘God Bless America’ crowd.”

  “So?” Jacobs said.

  “Arthur, you’re not thinking,” Goday said. “You get them and they take their grandkids to the picture, you can stay home and count your money. You’re home free, Arthur. Get it?”

  Jacobs smiled and began to hum the first bars of “God Bless America.”

  Jacobs was also producing Planet of the Apes, a melodrama about a civilization where apes and men had reversed their roles. The picture starred Charlton Heston as an astronaut whose spaceship had catapulted through the time barrier and crashed on an uncharted planet ruled by an ape society. With the exception of Heston, all the picture’s stars—Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall, James Daly and James Whitmore—played apes. The makeup problems were staggering. Initial substances employed to change human features into the likeness of simians stiffened on the actors’ faces so that their features were neither mobile or expressive. Nor could the actors chew, suggesting that they would have to subsist on a liquid diet during the shooting of the film. Experimentation with new rubber compounds resulted in the development of materials that permitted full facial mobility and allowed the actor’s skin to breathe inside the heavy layer of ape makeup. But in the first tests, the makeup required six hours to apply and three to remove. Ultimately the Studio makeup department got the application time down to three hours and the removal to one. In actual filming, other problems arose. The dark furry makeup offered nothing other than eyes that could be effectively highlighted. And since the actors wore false protruding jaws fitted with ape-like incisors, care had to be taken in lighting and the selection of camera angles so that both the actors’ real and ape teeth were not visible on film.

  The afternoon after the Dr. Dolittle scoring session, Jacobs drove his golf cart over to Stage 9, where Planet of the Apes was filming. As he came on the set with Mort Abrahams, an ape waved and said, “Hello, Mr. Jacobs.”

  “Hi, hi, how are you?” Jacobs said. He lit a brown cigarette. “Who the hell was that?” he asked Abrahams. “You see someone in ape drag, you don’t know who the hell it is.”

  Jacobs hoisted himself into a director’s chair. “Animals on Dolittle, apes here,” he said to no one in particular. “You think you got problems? Try apes and animals.”

  “And Rex Harrison,” Abrahams said.

  Jacobs sighed. “And Rex.”

  He flicked some ashes off his brown V-necked sweater. “Why do I always pick the tough ones?” he said. He waved a hand in the general direction of a group of apes. “I’ve been involved with this one for three years,” he said. “Three years and $360,000. I took an option on the novel in 1964. Every studio in town turned it down. ‘Who needs from apes?’ they said. A legitimate question. So I decided I had to have a concept. I hired a lot of art directors and they all did sketches, you know, ape drag and that kind of stuff. Still no sale. Finally Warner’s said they’d take a chance and we got Rod Serling to do a script. Then they couldn’t budget it. They dropped the whole thing and sold it back to me for all the money they put into it. Three hundred and sixty grand. When I came over to Fox with Dolittle, I presented it to Dick Zanuck.” He smiled as he remembered. “A present like that he didn’t need. But every time I came into his office I brought it up. It got so I never even got the name of the picture out of my mouth. I’d say, ‘Dick, what about …’ and he’d say, ‘No.’ You got to hear Dick Zanuck say, ‘No.’ He means ‘No.’ But I worked on him and finally I got him to agree to a test to see how people looked as apes. We wrote a long dialogue scene, you know, so you could see their faces moving. Well, Dick liked it and said he wanted to show it to Darryl. So we brought it to New York.” He ground out the cigarette under his shoe. “Jesus, there were nine guys in that screening room watching the test. If any one of them laughed, we were dead. But they didn’t laugh and we were in business.”

  “And now you got apes and animals, Arthur,” Abrahams said.

  “And Rex,” Jacobs said.

  Pandro S. Berman sat in the anteroom outside Richard Zanuck’s office. He is a short man, in his sixties, with monogrammed shirts and a modulated voice seemingly half an octave above where it should be. He had been a staff producer at M-G-M for years and had come over to Fox at the same time that Joe Pasternak did. In his lap was a copy of a script adapted from Lawrence Durrell’s novel, Justine, that he had been assigned to produce under his new contract with the Studio.

  “You never change much, Mr. Berman,” one of Zanuck’s secretaries said.

  “Well, thank you, dear, that’s a compliment, especially if you’ve been around as long as I have,” Berman said.

  “Oh, you haven’t been around that long,” the secretary said.

  “Oh, yes, I have,” Berman said. “I started out at the old FBO Studios when I was eighteen years old. There was a writer at the studio at that time, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and he was one of the most successful writers in Hollywood. Do you know who that writer was?”

  The secretary shook her head.

  “Darryl Zanuck,” Berman said. His head nodded up and down. “That’s how long I’ve been around. Joseph P. Kennedy owned the studio then. I was making $25 a week and I wanted a raise. We never saw Mr. Kennedy, but I waited by the front door for thirty days and it finally paid off. On the thirtieth day, Mr. Kennedy came out and I asked him for a raise and he raised me five dollars right on the spot, to $30 a week.”

  “Those must have been wonderful days,” the secretary said.

  “Oh, they were,” Berman said.

  “Do you ever remember an actress called Marjorie Reynolds?” the secretary said.

  “I certainly do,” Berman said.

  The secretary pointed to the other typist, a slender redheaded girl with a bouffant hairdo. “That’s her daughter.”

  “Is that a fact?” Berman said. “Marjorie Reynolds the movie star. Well, you’re a lot taller than your mother.”

  “No, we’re the same size,” Marjorie Reynolds’ daughter said. “Maybe it’s because my hair is different.”

  “That must be it,” Berman said, “because you certainly look a lot taller than your mother.”

  Zanuck was finally free and Berman went into his office. The Studio had poured a great deal of money into Justine. It was one of Darryl Zanuck’s pet projects. There had been a number of scripts written, the latest by Ivan Moffatt, a former Hollywood writer now living in England. Moffatt had worked on Justine with Darryl Zanuck, then had returned to Hollywood to polish the screenplay with Berman.

  “I think it’s a good screenplay, Richard, a very good screenplay,” Berman said. “My wife liked it and she and Ivan got along perfectly. But Larry Marcus is in town and he’s just dying to do this picture.”

  Zanuck did not know Marcus and asked to be briefed.

  “Well, Richard, I knew him years ago when he was doing little melodramas, but now he’s very big with those new young English directors. He just finished Petuli
a for Richard Lester, that’s the new Julie Christie picture, and that’s going to be very big, a very big picture, Richard. Metro wants him to do a screenplay—as a matter of fact, he was just over there this morning—but he would postpone that commitment if he thought he could do this picture.”

  Zanuck pulled at a hangnail. “What’s wrong with Ivan’s screenplay?” he said without looking up.

  “Nothing, nothing at all, Richard,” Berman said. “But the thing is, I think we’re agreed that we’d like to get one of those bright new English directors on this picture, Lindsay Anderson or John Schlesinger, and I just thought it would be easier if we approached them with a writer they knew and respected.”

  “Has he read the script?” Zanuck said.

  “I gave him a copy and he promised he would read it this very evening,” Berman said. “As you know, I sent a copy to Schlesinger and Nelson and I think if we could tell them that we had Larry Marcus, well, I just think we could get a deal.”

  Zanuck was now gnawing on a knuckle. “Well, let’s see what he says after he reads the script.”

  “This is really putting the cart before the horse,” Richard Zanuck said later about Justine. “You get a director and naturally he’s going to want to make some changes, so then you get another writer. But this way is really putting the cart before the horse. You don’t know if Schlesinger or Anderson will even do the picture—or if they’ll want Marcus if they do do it.”

  MARCUS INKED BY 20TH

  Larry Marcus has been signed by 20th-Fox to write the final screenplay of the Pandro S. Berman production of Justine, it was announced today by Richard D. Zanuck, vice president in charge of production.

  The Hollywood Reporter

  “The time to hit in this town is before your first picture comes out,” the young agent said. He was sitting in a Beverly Hills restaurant sipping an Americano. He ordered a steak rare with French-fried potatoes. “You get the word-of-mouth going. Nobody’s seen the picture. It can be a piece of shit, but who knows? You get the word-of-mouth going, you can start making deals all over town. We handle a guy”—he mentioned a young director—“who just finished a picture over at Paramount. Nobody’s seen it, but you spread the word that George Cukor loved it. Somebody tells somebody else George Cukor loved it and pretty soon you’re not in if you haven’t seen it and said it was sensational. Natalie Wood, Arthur Jacobs, they all loved it. Who cares if they’ve seen it? It’s the names that count. Once the word-of-mouth momentum gets going, you move in. The guy’s locked in for six pictures all over town. If the picture’s good, fine, but if it stinks, he’s still set up for a ton.” He asked the waitress for a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. “You fail upward here. A guy makes a ten-million-dollar bomb, the big thing is not that he’s made a bomb, but that he put together a ten-million-dollar picture. Next time out, they give him a twelve-million-dollar picture. It’s crazy, but that’s how it works. The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a small success. You make a picture for seven-fifty, it’s a nice picture, it makes a little money, but you’re dead. They aren’t interested in pictures that make a little money. Everybody’s looking for the killing. So you bomb out at ten million. Well, you put together a big one, and the next time out, you might hit with one.”