When The Shooting Stops Read online

  “The next day Jaffe called me into his office and from what had been a very cool relationship, he greeted me like a long-lost brother. Friendly, warm, he said, ‘Monroe, how would you like to be nominated for an Academy Award?’ I didn’t know what the machinations of that kind of thing were, but I took it as a tremendous compliment to my work. I had been acting ever since I was a kid. I never went to school, I was just an actor. I went away and joined the Merchant Marine—I was a galley boy—and when I came back I started acting. I started at the Y in the Bronx, and I continued through the amateurs, the professionals, and finally got to Broadway. I felt without a question this performance would’ve put me in the category of actors like Rod Steiger, like Edward Arnold, like Edward G. Robinson. I have the energy—I don’t act any more at all now—but I have the energy, and I have the intelligence, and I have the sensitivity, and a lot of experience. Certainly, in regard to my career this was the big break.”

  Watching the “dailies,” or “rushes”—interchangeable words referring to the accumulated film from each day’s shooting—usually takes no more than a twenty- to fifty-minute bite out of each evening during the making of a movie. Actors are not generally welcome at the screening of the dailies, which partly accounts for the fact that Monroe Arnold has never seen the single most stirring performance of his career. Those who do come—the producer, the director, the editor, the cinematographer, the makeup man, the sound man, the electrician, the set director, the script supervisor—are present not out of desire but necessity, to make sure that each aspect of production is operating smoothly. Because he is in the best position to be objective and neutral about the raw footage, the editor often makes his first important contribution during these sessions. As Peerce says, “The editor may see a piece of film that I hate because I hate the actor, or I hate what I had to do with the actor, or what the actor did to me that day. And if he remains divorced from those feelings, it’s a tremendous help.” Dailies are screened before or after work hours, customarily around six-thirty in the evening, and after the first few weeks, even required attendance slips off.

  Watching dailies is nothing like watching a finished film. It consists mainly of viewing the same action over and over again from different angles. “Scene 40” may be a “master shot” of Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw having their initial conversation outside the Briarpath Hills Tennis Club. Scene 40-A: a re-enactment of that conversation with the camera focused solely on Benjamin. Scene 40-B: the same action with the camera in close-up on MacGraw. Then there may be an additional take or two from one or more of these angles. Each scene—which in film can be anything from a three-second establishing shot of Neil’s arrival outside the Patimkin home to a several-minute dinnertime fiasco around the Patimkin family table—begins with the clap of the clapstick and the voice of an assistant cameraman saying, “Scene two hundred one-H, take two.” The name of the film, the director and other principals, as well as the number and take of the scene, are all chalked on the clapstick’s surface. The assistant holds it in front of the camera and smacks down the black and white diagonally striped arm that is hinged to the top of the board. The moment of impact is used by the editing assistants to align the separate audio and visual reels on the synchronizer, a job they must perform each day before the dailies can be screened.

  The rushes from Goodbye Columbus were a routine affair until we came to the wedding scene and Monroe’s performance. Then for over ten minutes we forgot that we were working and became transfixed by the action on the screen. I had no doubt that this was the tour-de-force performance of the picture. No one did. It was electrifying.

  As it happened, the wedding scene also initiated the first problems in the cutting room. All through the summer of 1968 Peerce and I edited the film with almost uncanny ease, and a rather snappy, fast-paced movie was evolving. But the wedding scene was very complex. Before Monroe comes on for the melodramatic conclusion, we are introduced to a handful of minor characters and hundreds of extras. The plot continues in skeletal fashion, but the hectic atmosphere of comic excess had to be pieced together like a mosaic.

  When I came to the wedding material, I knew what I was expected to do. Larry had shot a lot of film of people eating. In particular, there were two little fat girls who were told to dance and then run to a table and eat. He shot a number of takes of these little girls—who, I had to assume, were cast because they were fat, not because they were good dancers—approaching and ingesting the food. Larry and I never discussed our attitudes and prejudices, but the way he photographed the wedding revealed a degree of disgust toward certain aspects of his Jewish background. Of course, with all the raw material I had, I could have produced anything from a Roman Circus to a polite if somewhat exuberant affair. But as Eisenstein said, the filmed material leads you, and with all those shots of people eating, I had little doubt where I was being led—especially since my own background and prejudices were similar to Peerce’s and eager to spur me on in case I hesitated or lost the way.

  It thus developed that when I cut the wedding scene, I brought the two girls to the table and let them eat, cut to people dancing on the ballroom floor, cut back to the kids eating, cut away to other episodes in the crowd, and cut back a third time to those two girls eating. Although it was all done with the same piece of film, the impression I created was that the little fatties were gorging themselves. Peerce fully concurred with my approach in this and numerous other instances, and we were both somewhat pleased with the hilarious demolition job we were pulling off on the offensive relatives that had at one time or another made us ashamed to be Jewish. But our pleasure was mitigated by guilt, and though we never openly shared our uncertainties, we found ourselves taking longer and longer lunch breaks until the editing of the wedding scene consumed as much time as the rest of the picture combined.

  By the time we finished we were so overcome by guilt that the sight of the final cut made our stomachs rise into our throats. “My God!” we thought. “What have we done? This is treason. We’ve got to put some clothes on this thing!” And in a few days of panic-fast revision we had the whole thing cleaned up. We took the workprint of Goodbye Columbus to the Paramount offices in Hollywood, feeling like good Jewish boys again, and much relieved that we had retrieved our pranksterish bomb before it exploded.

  Bob Evans, then the production chief at Paramount and a man who prided himself on seeing all the dailies of all the films that were being produced for the company, viewed our print and immediately squawked, “You’ve left out all the ethnic stuff]” Evans also prided himself on being a master of editing, and his favorite word, one of his own coinage, was “rejuxta.” “All you have to do is rejuxta this and rejuxta that . . .” and, in short, put back all the ethnic stuff.

  Chastising ourselves for having allowed wide swings of emotion to lead us into unprofessional editing decisions, and convinced that we had lost the tone that Roth intended, Peerce and I returned to New York and immediately put back the repeat shots of the stuffing chubkins, put back the extra in the bright red dress who crammed food into her mouth with both hands, put back the goosing and guffawing. In the final version the wedding scene opens with a close shot of an object that looks like a chicken. It turns out to be a chicken-shaped chopped-liver mold. A hand comes into the frame wielding a butter knife, lops off the bird’s head, and spreads it on a Ritz Cracker. The camera pulls back to reveal a long table full of food surrounded by noisy, reaching, chomping celebrants, and cut after cut expands on the raucous irreverence. Many critics singled out the wedding scene for poor taste. Stanley Kaufrmann in The New Republic charged that we dwelled on ethnic characteristics that Roth had handled in stride: “The producer and director and screenwriter” (he mislabeled the villains, a typical problem in film criticism) “are feeling so courageous at making a noncomplimentary picture about Jews that they can’t restrain their courage.” Offended Jews asked, “Do we have to hang our dirty wash in public?”

  With all the hullabulloo about
the ethnic pungency of the wedding scene, only a handful of people knew of the drama that had taken place over the performance of a single pudgy, drunken character who came and went during that scene with barely a notice. The drama concerned Uncle Leo, whose final speech, as magnificent as it was, seemed to drag the picture down like a giant weight.

  “Everybody wanted to take it out,” recalls Peerce, “except Ralph and me. We both made a very emotional connection to the character. But it was an extremely painful performance to watch. Monroe showed so much pain, so much anger—it was so raw and so naked in the middle of this film about people who are living a pretense—it was really almost too much to handle. It was so agonizing that after a while I would close my eyes when we came to it. Anyway, the fight started very quickly—take it out, take it out, you don’t need it.”

  Jaffe and Evans were the main antagonists, but the decision was still Peerce’s. We were both very ambivalent. My own feeling all along had been that Goodbye Columbus was an airy and insignificant film, and that Monroe’s speech was the only thing in it of real substance. But like Larry, I slowly realized that instead of giving the picture validity, a ten-minute soliloquy by a newly introduced character at the tail end of the movie seemed to tip the whole thing over, as if it had sprouted a large malignant bud.

  For weeks we jerked with the speech, trying to work it in. Since Larry had shot it from only one angle, making it impossible to break the performance down into bits and pieces and re-create it, we found ourselves lopping off more and more of Monroe’s opening lines. From over ten minutes it went to nine and from nine to eight and from eight to six; and each time we hoped that we had chipped away enough so that it wouldn’t stick out so blatantly. The more we fiddled the further it went. From six minutes to four, and after another screening, to two, but none of these versions worked properly and we kept returning to the old choice—the whole performance or nothing. It was a choice we couldn’t face.

  From almost the first day of editing Monroe showed up regularly, asking to see his performance, and Peerce kept putting him off. I had no objection to setting him up in a corner with a Moviola and his reel of film, as I had done during the editing of Murder Incorporated for Peter Falk, who was very anxious about his first major role. But Larry, knowing what might happen and afraid to give his friend false hopes, refused. “Whenever I was in the cutting room,” Monroe recalls, “they were always cutting something else. I would say, ‘Could I please see the film,’ and Ralph would say, ‘Show it to him,’ and Larry would say, ‘oh, no, no, no. You’ll be surprised. It’s wonderful. You’ll see it when it’s all cut.” Finally one day when Peerce wasn’t around, I let Monroe hear himself on the sound track.

  Knowing that all or most of Monroe’s performance was in jeopardy, I began seeking some alternative means of introducing a negative element into the film—some off-note that would reveal Neil’s subconscious disturbance over his courtship of Brenda. Influenced by my experience with The Pawnbroker and A Thousand Clowns, I settled on the use of flash cuts, which I tied to the end of Monroe’s speech: we see the sloshed and miserable Uncle Leo warning Neil not to repeat his mistakes, to grab opportunity and marry the girl. From Monroe I cut to Neil sitting alone at a table. He has a long, thoughtful face as he watches Uncle Leo leave the room, and alternating with his gaze I intercut a series of eight-frame reprise shots from successively earlier portions of the film to represent his reflections. The reprise lasted only seconds, but with Richard Benjamin’s forlorn expression and the flute music on the sound track, it injected a profound note of doubt, one that could, if necessary, serve as cinematic substitute to Monroe Arnold’s performance.

  When Peerce went to California late in 1968 to screen a final cut of Goodbye Columbus, Uncle Leo’s appearance remained almost intact, but Peerce’s commitment to it had grown very weak. Again he was pressured to remove the scene, and finally on the airplane back to New York, he made the decision. “It came out just like cream,” says Peerce, “whomp! There was no problem, no mixing, not even a pop.” In the final cut all that was left of Monroe’s monologue were the few lines that introduced the flashbacks. From over ten minutes he had been cut to less than forty-five seconds.

  Goodbye Columbus premiered before some six hundred people at the Loews Tower East in New York City in the spring of 1969. As Monroe Arnold approached the theater, dressed up like the rest of us for the big event, he was more confident than ever of imminent success. As luck would have it, a critic from the Daily Variety had attended the West Coast preview that contained Monroe’s complete performance and had written a review that singled him out for praise. The review was all Monroe had to go on, for Peerce had been too frightened to give him the bad news. For my part, I had finished working on the film several months earlier and knew nothing of what had occurred between Peerce and Arnold in the interim. But when Davida and I caught sight of the Arnolds in the theater lobby, I had a terrible feeling that Monroe had not been warned.

  “I walked into the theater without any foreknowledge of what was going on,” Monroe remembers. “I did notice, peculiarly enough, that Jaffe and Peerce and their wives, all the very top executives, did kind of sidle away from me, but I figured they’re into their own things, never dreaming their behavior was in any way connected with me. I was terribly nervous, because my wife and I were about to see this performance for the first time, which was to be the launching of a real career for me on another level.

  “I’d already seen a lot of the picture in the cutting room, and I was waiting for myself to come on, so I said, yeah, it’s good and everything, it works, but I didn’t pay too much attention—I was all tensed up waiting for my scene to come. Now there were a number of little scenes at the wedding that I was in that preceded my big scene, and most of them had been cut. That was the first big shock. I said, ‘Where the hell are those scenes? Where the hell are those scenes?’ They were all relevant; they all had to do with my attitudes toward my brother, ass kissing, telling him it’s quite a wedding you’re throwing here, all of which was relevant to the final build. And I started to wither, to sink in my chair. I felt as if somebody’d kicked me in the balls. I just kept sinking in my chair, until I went down under the seat, because I couldn’t look at the screen any more. Because from what I had done there was practically nothing left.

  “Why did I stop acting? Although I never really admitted it to anybody, I think that this had a lot to do with it. I never understood before the true meaning of power. I wanted to be an actor, I worked very hard, I became an actor, I was given parts. And if somebody could take it away from me with a scissors, that which I had worked so hard to do, then I wanted to be in the position of the man with the scissors, with the power, and I began to develop an interest in directing and writing. I felt my life had been taken from me, and in a certain sense my future. And I suppose the shock was too much for me. I couldn’t absorb the shock. And I didn’t want to open myself up to that kind of thing again.” Shortly after the film’s release, Monroe co-starred with the aging Betty Grable in a tour of Born Yesterday and then gradually withdrew from acting for good.

  Goodbye Columbus was on the screen for just a few minutes before I sensed—by the silences and the general atmospheric response— that the audience was moving with it and that it was going to be a big hit. The picture took off at once, and there were lines around Loews Tower East for the rest of that spring and summer. And then some peculiar things happened to the people who rode the film to the top.

  Stanley Jaffe, the twenty-eight-year-old producer, was soon made the president of Paramount, a position he held for only a year before quitting to become an independent producer again. In 1972 I cut his next film, called Bad Company, a Western without action that died a quick death. Thereafter he was relatively inactive, finally returning to the charts with The Bad News Bears in 1976.

  Ali MacGraw, who had mainly been a fashion model before Goodbye Columbus, was instantly one of the most talked-about actresses in Hollywood—all
the more so after her (very brief) marriage to Bob Evans. Her next film, Love Story, was one of the all-time top grossers. But after marrying Steve McQueen and co-starring with him in The Getaway, she found herself overwhelmed by publicity and negative reviews, and emotionally incapacitated, she withdrew altogether from acting for the next five years.

  Richard Benjamin, who turned in an immaculate performance in Columbus and has had plenty of work since, has yet to fulfill any of the great prophecies that were made about his career. Indeed, he has never been better known than he was in 1969.

  Larry Peerce continued to use my cutting room as his office for a number of months, and during that time he received offers by the cartonload. At one point we were going to do Love Story together, but then he changed his mind. He said he didn’t want to do any more “romantic light stuff.” He continued to turn down offers and put off making a choice, and finally, over a year later, he came to me and said, “I’ve got a script for you to read.” It was called The Sporting Club, based on a novel by Thomas McGuane. I read the script, knowing that Larry could write his own ticket based on the twelve million Goodbye Columbus had made, and I said to myself, this guy has lost his mind. Far from being romantic light stuff, the script seemed nothing short of a maniacal rap at all the institutions of the country. I tried to talk to him. But I ran into a scary sort of resistance, typical of what sometimes arises in this business. He said he was definitely going to make this picture, that he wanted me to cut it, and that he was testing five actors for the leading role.