When The Shooting Stops Read online

  But because we had much bigger issues to worry about, we totally ignored such matters as whether Murray and Nick moved in the same direction from cut to cut or whether the same person stood on the right or the left. This was a different sort of film action, one in which the real continuity was on the sound track, while the visuals offered a kaleidoscopic view of the World of Murray Burns. It was a style arrived at by desperation and repair.

  It is difficult for an outsider to imagine how tedious cutting a scene, especially a complex one like this, can be, and how boring it is to observe. Visitors who’ve come to watch me work invariably depart with awkward apologies after just a few minutes. When New Yorker critic Pauline Kael was preparing a major article on the making of The Group, the last picture I cut for Lumet, she put aside four hours to sit in on the editing. She lasted twenty minutes. Few have lasted longer.

  Even fast movies rarely proceed at more than a few minutes a week, but Clowns was not fast. It was especially trying because we never knew for certain if we were on a wild-goose chase. Whole weeks were spent in fruitless exploration. Once, an entire month was lost composing what amounted to an eight-minute satirical short on the lunchtime habits of New York business people. Everyone loved it, but it didn’t fit in the film. The constant agony over wasted effort can be very disheartening and, as much as anything else, accounts for some of the extreme feelings that sometimes emerge in the cutting of a motion picture.

  The title scene of people going to work, the new opening scene with Murray and Nick, and the bicycle montage were our three stylistic guides that would now rule the editing of the remainder of the film. As Murray and Nick complete their wanderings and return to their Brooklyn apartment, they are met by two social workers, and the movie settles down for its first dramatic episode.

  The pair of social workers who arrive at the Burns residence this morning have their own barely concealed problems. Albert Amund-son is impersonal and priggishly professional (“not one of the warm people” he later admits), whereas his fiancee and junior partner, Sandra Markowitz (Barbara Harris), is a much more emotional individual who, one way or another, tends to become overly involved in her cases (“I hate Raymond Ledbetter,” she cries, “and he’s only nine years old!”). Sandra tries to live up to her co-worker’s standards, but faced with Murray Burns and his diversionary tactics, even Albert begins to show signs of disarray.

  Murray immediately throws the two off guard with his lighthearted responses to their solemn questions. He freely admits that he has been unemployed for five months, that Nick has been living with him for seven years, that the question of the “little bastard’s” real father is a who question not a where question, that Nick’s mother communicates with her brother Murray “almost entirely by rumor,” that “Nick” is not the boy’s official name, but merely his current infatuation. “He went through a long period of dog names when he was little,” Murray explains. “He received his library card last year in the name of Raphael Sabatini. His Cub Scout membership lists him as Dr. Morris Fishbein.”

  If Murray’s aggressive nonconformity flusters the social-work instincts, they re-emerge in an aroused condition when Nick produces his “favorite plaything,” Bubbles, a twenty-four-inch bare-chested hula girl whose electronic breasts blink on and off in spectacular fashion. None of Nick’s efforts to add sobriety to the image of the Burns household (“We play many wholesome and constructive games together”) can dampen the excitement that Bubbles has created: “Nick, tell me,” says Sandra, “do you like best the fact that the chest of the lady lights up?” Nick: “Well, you got to admit, you don’t see boobies like that every day. You want to see the effect when the lights are out, when the room is dark?” Sandra (oozing social-work sanctimony): “Tell me, Nick, is that what you like best about it, that you can be alone in the dark with it?” Nick (unaffected): “Well, I don’t know. But in the dark they really knock your eye out.”

  As Sandra tries to probe for Nick’s fixation, asking if the statue reminds him of his mother in any way, her punctilious partner can no longer contain his discomfort and requests that Bubbles be turned off. At this point, Murray loses his patience and informs Sandra that Nick’s mother’s chest did not light up and that Nick “is no more abnormally interested in your bust than Mr. Amundson is.” This throws Albert into a high state of anxiety and defensiveness, and much to her own anguish, Sandra cannot contain her mirth. The crumbling team argues privately in the corner (as Murray watches with binoculars), and finally Albert leaves in a huff.

  Sandra now emerges as the leading lady in the film, the woman who falls in love with Murray and hopes to steer him toward the responsible behavior that will satisfy the Child Welfare Board and thus allow him to keep Nick—a project that proves to be almost beyond her powers. Meanwhile Herb Gardner and I will struggle to break up their dramatic scenes with cinematic activity, to keep anything from staying in one place too long.

  Alone in the apartment with Murray, Sandra, who realizes she has lost both her boy friend and her job, begins to weep, lamenting all her limitations as she does (“I cry all the time and laugh in the wrong places in the movies”). Robards offers her a pastrami sandwich, assures her she’s well rid of both Albert and her job, and proposes a trip to the Empire State Building.

  We leave the apartment for about three minutes to follow Robards and Harris on a Murray Burns Manhattan Outing that includes seeing off an ocean liner, visiting the Statue of Liberty, strolling down deserted after-hours Wall Street, and running across the Brooklyn Bridge. When we return home, it’s the next day and the pair are facing an awkward morning. This was meant to be another long dramatic sequence, but within moments Murray and Sandra profess their love for one another and Herb and I were able to insert our beloved bicycle montage—which had by now been sitting on the shelf for over four months.

  Though the bicycle-riding sequence seems to take place over the course of building an entire relationship, the next scene brings us back to the apartment on the same morning. Albert comes by to inform Murray of the Child Welfare Board’s decision to relocate Nick. He also inquires about “Miss Markowitz,” who didn’t show up at her mother’s house in Queens last night. (She’s hiding in the closet.) Eventually Murray confesses to Sandra that he doesn’t want Nick taken away, and the scene is set for Murray’s great afternoon job hunt.

  At this point the script required that two simultaneous elements be intercut: Murray going on the emergency job appointments that his brother Arnold (who is also Murray’s agent and the voice of responsibility) has set up for him; and Sandra first trying to explain herself on the phone to her mother and then redecorating Murray’s apartment in a style he later derides as “Fun Gothic.” Herb and I saw this as an opportunity to get things flying again by quickening the intercutting and giving the whole afternoon a whirlwind energy.

  We started off with a bang: intercut with Murray making his way through midtown Manhattan to his luncheon appointment, we see a stock shot of a hand with a gun. The sound track bursts forth with a gun blast, then a drum roll, as a flurry of cuts go by depicting the lunch life of a great city—highlighted by sandwiches revolving into view in the Automat (to sound track peals of “Hallelujah!”) and climaxing with a trainer throwing a hunk of meat to a hungry lion. From here on we see Murray entering and leaving his business meetings faster and faster, each of his appearances getting more and more abbreviated, while Sandra’s moments on the screen—putting up curtains, stuffing Murray’s treasured junk into cartons, phoning her mother to say she’s happy and in love—become longer and longer. The sequence ends with Murray meeting her on the street outside his tenement, Sandra laden with grocery bags and Murray laden with guilt over having turned down all the jobs. Avoiding her questions, Murray goes into a song and dance about a unique experiment he engaged in today of apologizing to strangers in the street (“And seventy-five percent of them forgave me!”). At first amused, Sandra gradually realizes what he’s doing. We eliminated a chunk of dialogue he
re and intercut her fading expression with memory flashes of their courtship around Manhattan. This use of flashbacks, one that I would later employ in almost identical fashion at the end of the wedding scene in Goodbye Columbus, replaces her verbal evaluation of the inadequacy of life with Murray Burns.

  As we passed into the second half of the film, Herb and I succumbed to a growing anxiety over whether what we were doing would mean anything to an outside observer. As Herb recalls, “There were those moments of terror when you realize, this may only be for us. What reason would an audience have for responding to it?” We began arranging screenings for friends every Friday evening, and we were soon living and working for their laughter and approval.

  “They responded more than I imagined,” says Herb. “People crying, laughing, and I remember Ralph sitting next to me, and in those few seconds we both would feel, it’s all worth it. You remember how you got into this line of work. Your motive is to tell a story from the most personal source. We made this to show to people—and that’s what we’re doing. And they’re getting the idea of it. It looks like it was meant to be. Yes, that’s where the close-up goes, and that’s where that line goes, and that’s where we cut out that look on his face, and that’s where we didn’t say the extra two lines—because it was meant to be. The audience doesn’t see the cuts, they don’t see the machinery. It’s just this ribbon of emotions running out in front of them.”

  To the very end Herb and I had difficulties over the dialogue. A typical problem concerned the scene in which Martin Balsam (playing Murray’s brother Arnold) confronts Murray in the abandoned Chinese restaurant beneath the apartment. We added only one piece of editorial effects: as Murray tells his brother about his dread of being among the walking dead going to work each morning, we introduced a series of shots from the title scene of the marching New Yorkers. It had been funny with the march music, but now with just Murray’s voice at a rare level of seriousness, it was appropriately and effectively grim. Other than that their confrontation stood on its own.

  But Herb wasn’t satisfied with Balsam’s delivery. Typical of most writers, he was fanatical about every nuance in the dialogue and anxious about an actor’s ad-lib alterations that subtly shifted the emotional tone. In each of his takes, Balsam had left out little words or phrases—the absence of which drove Herb crazy—and added others that prematurely revealed that a major character shift was about to take place. Herb spent hours leaning over the Moviola, obsessed with finding the snippets of each reading that passed his judgment. Balsam’s soliloquy, in which a beaten and compromised man emerges with a dynamic personal statement, is one of the many self-justification speeches that inhabit this work and give it its charm. He tells Murray that he prefers to deal with the available world, that he has a talent for surrender, that he takes pride in being “the best possible Arnold Burns.” At every screening audiences broke into spontaneous applause over this performance, and a year later, the author’s profound misgivings notwithstanding, it won Balsam an Academy Award.

  Balsam was not the only actor who made Herb fret. Like Balsam, Barbara Harris had not appeared in the Broadway production and thus did not have each precious word down absolutely pat. Chunks of her first major monologue were bowdlerized because of Herb’s dissatisfaction, but, again, not before days of agonized uncertainty. It’s a special disease of author-filmmakers, one that I would encounter again with Woody Allen.

  Herb responded to frustration with hours of pacing, often spilling forth dialect jokes and wisecracks instead of the anger and impatience I know he felt. Sometimes he went into the hallway and followed it around the city block the building occupied. He refused to answer phone calls, promising to call back and not doing so for weeks. Or he’d decide to take a call and stay on for hours. Trying to relax, he began to cover the walls of my office with his cartoons, mostly Magic Marker Nebbishes, which I still regret having left behind when I moved. At the time, all this was infuriating.

  Gardner: “There were awful times. I could see Ralph’s disappointment. And he was everything to me at that point—the audience, the editor, son, daddy. And I could see his face falling, blending into the shoulders, drifting down toward his knees—and I’d want to kill him. There was a bench outside the screening room, several doors down from where we were cutting. I’d go sit on that bench so he wouldn’t hear me scream.”

  Now there was one place where Herb’s disappointment over the acting seemed justified to me. Gene Saks, who played Chuckles the Chipmunk on Broadway, was unavailable when the picture was shot, and Paul Richards, who’d played Chuckles on the road, was hired instead. Chuckles is an hysterical egomaniac who caroms wildly from obsessive self-promotion (he presents Nick with a life-sized cardboard cutout statue of himself in full Chuckles regalia) to obsequious exclamations of glee (“Murray, there he is! There’s the old monkey! There’s the old joker!”) to gruesome self-pity (“O.K. the kid hates me. I didn’t go over very well with him. I pushed a little too hard”) to acknowledgments of professional failure (“Oh, have I been bombing out on the show every morning!”) to fury at Nick’s failure to laugh at one of his hideous routines (“Forget it, kid, I just happen to know that that bit is very funny. Fun, funny, funniest!”) and back to self-deprecation (“Oh, my God! Did you ever see anything so immodest! I bring a big statue of myself as a gift for the child! I mean, the pure ego of it. I’m ashamed. Murray, please, could you throw a sheet over it or something?”).

  Paul Richards’ Chuckles was full of the frenzy and madness that was crucial to the part, but there was something a little scary about him, a little dark, a little brooding. You feared that at any moment he might pull a hand grenade from his pocket. By the time we reached this point in the film, United Artists was satisfied with the legitimacy of the transformation that was going on, and UA executive David Picker, a sympathetic supporter throughout, was able to arrange for the extra funds Herb needed to reshoot the Chuckles scenes with Gene Saks, who was now available. Saks gave a tour-de-force performance, creating one of the most memorable moments in a film full of memorable moments, and Richards’ performance was discarded.

  When we finished the picture, Herb and I had a completed score on our hands, a very unusual, if not unique, event in the making of a feature film. It was only a “scratch” score, though, and to make a proper sound track United Artists had two options: lay out enormous sums for the rights to the recordings we’d pirated—which by this time included Eubie Blake, Dave Brubeck, marching music by various circus bands, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—any one of which might have cost twenty thousand dollars. Or simply pay for the rights to the music and hire an orchestrator to rerecord all the material, using studio musicians. Except for the Eubie Blake material and a main title theme written by Gerry Mulligan, the latter course was chosen. Herb asked Don Walker, a well-known Broadway composer and orchestrator and a friend of the everhelpful Fred Coe, if he would take the job. Walker, reluctant at first to handle a strictly routine and mechanical assignment, finally succumbed to Herb’s pleas. The Academy Awards committee nominated him that year for the best original score.

  A Thousand Clowns was the first turning point in my career since Long Day’s Journey. I was now known as an important contributor to the films I cut. Norman Lear invited me to relocate to California and become a part of his operation—a proposition I refused because of my feelings about the factory atmosphere in Hollywood—and I began receiving my first offers to direct, which at the time I was emotionally unprepared to accept. But most important, A Thousand Clowns was the basic training for the kind of editing that has become my trademark. Since 1965 I’ve put a scratch score to every film I’ve cut in order to establish the rhythm. I’ve stopped looking at scripts, which I had once kept nearby like a Bible, and have assumed the right to follow the raw material into the stronger or more appropriate story patterns it often suggests. Above all, I was forced out of my old conceptions and prejudices about how a feature should be cut. I let my documentary training com
e into play; and my youthful sensation that anything was possible in the editing room was now relevant to every motion picture. This growth would serve me well three years hence when I was left holding the disastrous first cut of The Night They Raided Minsky’s.

  The finished film, shown publicly for the first time at a preview in Fresh Meadows, was certainly one of the most editorially liberated films of its day. With its constant interweaving of scenes, experimental flourishes, startling use of music, energetic overlapping of action, it had no trace of its former stage-bound quality. But there was so much patching in the workprint shown in Fresh Meadows that night that Herb, who delivered the cans of film with the associate editor, Eddie Beyer, had to sit in the projection booth with his thumb on the projector gate to keep the film from bouncing and giving the entire audience a subconscious sense of discomfort. Isolated from the crowd, Herb had no idea how they were receiving his cherished work until just before the end when he sneaked out and heard the clamorous applause. In the lobby moments later, anxiety turned to ecstasy as eight or ten overjoyed United Artists executives congratulated Herb, me, and Fred Coe. They then got into their black limousines and drove back to Manhattan. I got into my car and drove home to New Rochelle. And at midnight in a deserted Fresh Meadows, lugging twelve cans of film, Herb Gardner, who had somehow been forgotten in the shuffle, stood by the Long Island Expressway and tried to find a cab.