When The Shooting Stops Read online

  Shortly thereafter he took five actors into a small West Side studio and had each of them read a portion of the script. The next day, Peerce, the producer Lee Rich, and I screened the dailies, and Larry said, “What do you think?” The part was that of a crazy rich charmer who was going to blow up a sporting club. One actor obviously had a feel for it and played it with just the right psychotic edge. He was sensational. A second actor was adequate. Two others were homosexual, and that came through in their performances, which made them all wrong. Last was Larry’s friend Bob Fields, a very good actor, but totally inappropriate for this part. That’s what I told Larry, and Lee Rich seconded my analysis. Said Peerce, “I’m going to go with Bob Fields.” He said he was going to reach in, shove his hand down Fields’ throat, and pull the performance out of him. Again, I figured, this guy has lost his mind.

  I was just finishing a picture with Hal Prince late in 1970 called Something for Everyone, when Larry’s dailies started coming back from Arkansas. Instead of the normal three thousand feet a day (about thirty minutes), he was shipping ten thousand feet. It was coming in torrents, and it was awful.

  In February 1971, just before Larry was due back from location, I went to Washington with my wife and my son, Paul, for a short Lincoln’s Birthday vacation. On Saturday morning, while in the shower at our motel, I dared to ask myself for the first time in my career whether I would continue with a film to which I was already committed and for which I had already begun an initial assembly. The internal response was thunderous: I cannot do this picture. This picture is going to kill me. I’m going to lose my mind. I imagined it lasting a year in the cutting room and being remorselessly depressing. The one-two-three punch of A Thousand Clowns, The Producers, and The Night They Raided Minsky’s still hung over me like a warning cloud, and I feared that another year of desperate cutting would sink me. Worst of all, I didn’t think this picture could be saved.

  When I returned to New York, I did something I’d never done before and about which I still get a twinge of guilt. I called Avco Embassy and told the executives that by doctor’s orders—because of high blood pressure or some such thing—I had to beg off. I agreed to serve as supervising editor, but someone else would have to cut the film.

  The picture was in my cutting room for thirteen months. It was edited and re-edited right down to the wire in an ever-expanding atmosphere of panic. In the end, eighteen people, including sound-effects editors, assistant sound-effect editors, apprentice and assistant cutters, worked in four teams to patch and repatch, mix and remix the constantly changing final touches.

  In 1972 The Sporting Club opened in New York and played for less than a week, during which it was demolished by the critics. Pauline Kael said, the “film is loathsome, a word I don’t think I’ve ever before applied to a movie.” Later that year Avco Embassy pulled it out of release and gave the finished film together with all the unused rushes to an editor in California to see if it could be saved. After several months of examining some 250,000 feet of film, he sealed it all back up—nothing could be done.

  Peerce went on to make two more commercial disappointments, A Separate Peace and Ash Wednesday, before seeking some made-for-TV work to regain his footing. He then came back with a solid Middle America hit, The Other Side of the Mountain (about twenty-five million in profits), and a sequel that was also a financial success. As of this writing, he is again considered a major commercial director, having just completed his tenth feature, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Monroe Arnold, who in the decade since Columbus has struggled to rechannel his talents into writing, directing, and the managerial side of filmmaking, is listed as the associate executive producer.

  “The rest of it stinks.”

  16 ■ My Problem with Directors

  Artists were too happy, so God invented film.

  —SIDNEY MEYERS

  When you’ve worked in one field for most of your life, a time comes, I suppose, when you have to take a stand if you’re going to continue to live with yourself. Although I’ve held long-smoldering opinions about the attitude and behavior of movie directors, I’ve only spoken heatedly on the subject on four occasions. Each time it was to a director, and each time I lost my temper, a relationship improved: Mel Brooks piped down; Billy Friedkin bought me a gift; William Asher invited me to work with him in California; Howie Morris wept. On many other occasions I’ve suffered silently, mistakenly choosing discretion in situations that badly wanted valor. In any case, I now have over three decades of observations and feelings about what I consider a serious problem in filmmaking, and I would like to express them before I go on to explain the circumstances that led me to work the last five years almost exclusively on Woody Allen’s films.

  Because filmmaking has become the foremost popular art form, its practitioners have become the cultural heroes of the twentieth century. First we had the age of the producer, then the age of the actor, and now, thanks to the achievements of a few extraordinary people and the critics who championed them, the age of the director.

  Great filmmakers, like Renoir, Fellini, Hitchcock, and Bergman— the men who made the word “director” stand out in the list of movie credits—frequently write their own material, envision it almost cut for cut, and carry out their vision with a technique acquired through years of immersion. Because of their almost total control, they go beyond the position of a theater director, who is recognized mainly for his ability to interpret an author’s work, and are seen as authors in their own right. Some, like Chaplin and Allen, also star in their films and on occasion even write the scores. None can get by without the help of talented associates—Eisenstein’s work was deeply affected by the photography of Edouard Tissé and Bergman’s by Sven Nykvist, while other directors have depended on a close association with an editor or a screenwriter or an actor. But in an art form that is otherwise essentially collaborative, a handful of directors approach the independent stature of a great writer or painter, which is a remarkable achievement.

  Most movies have nothing in common with the masterpieces for which the title director has won its awesome respect. In the sixties some six thousand feature-length films were released in this country, most of them bearing titles and credits of well-deserved obscurity. Of those that made a brief or lasting impression on the public consciousness, only a handful owe their strength to consummate direction.

  Since 1945 I have worked with close to two hundred directors in advertising, television, and feature films. Some had been agents before they became directors, others had been writers, still others businessmen or actors. Some lacked the talent to direct and disappeared after one or two tries; others had just enough ability to get by in the field, and either stuck to minor projects in advertising or TV or consistently aimed too high with disappointing results; still others developed undeserved reputations and were carried by the talents of their associates. As in any other field, only a few are worth remembering or writing about. If I were a producer I would give almost none of them the right to “final cut.” But whether they made one-minute television commercials or pulp assembly-line thrillers, almost all directors I’ve known identified themselves with the giants of their trade, assumed that the shared title accorded them equivalent stature, and, in the case of feature directors, immediately began demanding the right to control the final cut of the film, not because their ability or their body of work justified it but because their swollen sense of self-importance coveted it.

  In 1969, a time when the concept of the Star Director was surging through the trend-addicted world of film, the old-time Hollywood director Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny, Murder My Sweet, The Young Lions), who had been an editor himself during the thirties, commented on the unwarranted egotism that was spreading among his colleagues: “In our own guild,” he wrote in the Directors Guild magazine, “the annual meetings invariably erupt with cries of, ‘Let’s fight for the right to control the cutting of our pictures.’ It’s been interesting to note that these cries almost always com
e from our youngest, least experienced members, men who would probably strangle in their own trims if they were placed at the bench and told, ‘There, go ahead, cut!’ "

  By and large there is little harm done if a writer who works for a popular magazine imagines himself to be Tolstoy. But a director is fundamentally a leader, and such grandiosity stifles the contributions of subordinates, who are crucial to a film’s success. A director’s prideful resistance to any idea that is not his own—or not shrewdly planted in a way that allows him to believe it’s his own—is symbolic of the handicaps under which films have been made for the last twenty years. Another aspect of the problem, one that is rarely discussed, is the inclination of innumerable directors, infatuated with the excessive attention they receive, to conclude that their immense gifts acquit them of the courtesy and decency that would be required of almost any other human being. The subservience and kowtowing they demand and get from the artists and skilled technicians with whom they work is a disgrace to the whole profession.

  Mel Brooks terrorizing people on the set of The Producers was symptomatic of distortions that the director mystique has inflicted on the business of making films. And yet Mel’s behavior, extreme as it was, is representative of the way the title director goes to men’s heads. I have seen countless numbers of accomplished adults, highly respected in their fields, dressed down unmercifully by a vainglorious director, and each time my opposition and distaste hardens. Waiting for an elevator at Columbia Pictures, I was embittered to have to witness a distinguished director browbeating a man who had worked for him for years and, sadly, was also someone I knew. But unfortunately it has become common for a director to bawl out a sound man, or a makeup man, or a set designer and pile humiliation upon humiliation by doing it in front of the cast and the crew and anyone who happens to be passing by.

  Year after year I’ve had to face these men, many of whom are drawn to directing mainly because of the power and prestige the position has accumulated, and spend huge portions of my working and nonworking hours racking my mind for a nonrebellious way to deal with their arrogance. Bill Asher, the man who conceived “The Patty Duke Show,” whose indecision almost destroyed it, and who was finally bought out and replaced as the producer/director a week before the first installment was aired, was, as I experienced^, so insulting that nothing but a direct challenge could possibly salvage one’s dignity. It was an ugly, violent fight, my first real confrontation, and afterwards I harbored the irrational hope that it would never need to happen again.

  I spent only four or five weeks working with Billy Friedkin, but he was the sort of man who let you know he was in charge before he finished his first sentence, and, like Asher, he was unmoved by polite protests. You expect, perhaps, if you work with an Ingmar Bergman that you may have to put up with some moodiness, but you try to take it in stride because you’re getting so much in return. But in someone who had barely directed a film before, the temper and rudeness seemed premature.

  I well remember, in the middle of the second week, parking my car two blocks from the studio and starting the argument with Friedkin as I walked to work. As so often happens in cases like this, all my carefully rehearsed objections spurted out in a single indiscreet sentence: “If you don’t change your attitude, you can take this film and shove it up your ass!” Friedkin was even more taken aback by this outburst than I was, making it obvious to me in retrospect that no one had ever stood up to him. Hollywood was in its down-on-your-knees-to-youth phase at this time. The studio executives had billed Billy as a prodigy—who could be surprised if he behaved as if he were on an altar?

  The role of The Director has become so intoxicating that, inevitably, along with the egocentric behavior there has been a great deal of mediocrity dressed up in modern adaptations of the Emperor’s Clothes. So many directors I’ve worked with, or met at parties, or seen on TV talk shows have perfected the swagger, the dress, the jargon, and the attitude of the Autonomous Film Creator. Putting their work alongside their images, one could easily conclude that in the contemporary list of ingredients required for becoming a great director the only noncompulsory item is talent. The contrast was made amusingly vivid for me in 1963 when I was working on Gone Are the Days, from the play Purlie Victorious. One day as the director, Nick Webster, pontificated to one of the actors, the producer leaned over to me and said, “When this picture is over, I’m going to tell Nick what it’s about.”

  As a career editor, I have been very fortunate in many respects, particularly because I had chosen to work in New York, where one is more likely than in Hollywood to find a Sidney Lumet, a Herb Gardner, a Larry Peerce, or a Woody Allen. Having to deal with prima donnas with explosive tempers is an unfortunate inevitability in an ego-drenched business, and, all told, I probably had fewer than my share. But by the late sixties and early seventies I was beginning to perceive another problem. I was old enough by this time to have lost the thrill of merely being able to work on feature films and sure enough of my own skills to be disappointed when a director blocked my attempts to use them. Although few directors I worked with were dramatically unpleasant, even fewer demonstrated a desire or willingness to make the best of their collaborator’s talents. I understood, of course, that directors had to command the creative input on their films, and I never objected to taking orders. But when directors put their images and insecurities ahead of the quality of the work, I found it necessary to subordinate not only my feelings to the director’s ego but my productivity as well. As this issue became more and more pronounced in my mind, for the first time in my career I felt rankled by the film editor’s anonymity. If I could have freely contributed to the common cause, been allowed the pleasure of a job well done, the lack of recognition would have remained a personal problem but not a rankling problem. But under the growing class of imperial directors, this work without acknowledgment, this crucial work that often figures significantly in the critical assessment of the director himself—a dependency that many directors keenly resent and therefore try all the more to deny—had begun to feel like slavery.

  I was developing a reputation around this time as an editor who cut directors’ first films, and already a surprising percentage of my credits were debut efforts for the directors who made them. It was my way of trying to circumvent the director mystique and all its paralyzing ramifications. In some cases my collaboration with inexperienced filmmakers worked admirably. Herb Gardner, Woody Allen, and Joan Silver—for whom I cut Bernice Bobs Her Hair, a 1976 TV special from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story—all welcomed and respected my expertise. I had met Joan when one of my ex-assistants, Kathy Wnning, cut her first feature, Hester Street, and I was called in to help with some particularly difficult passages. I gladly did it without credit, because in the atmosphere of openness and mutual respect that Silver encouraged such informal support is natural and gratifying.

  But the pressure to live up to the image discourages many unsteady beginners from making the most of their co-workers’ skills, with the result that my solution of working with newcomers often amounted to little more than an exploration of the varieties of insecure behavior. And my career as an editor seemed to be approaching a dead end.

  Shortly after Woody Allen’s first picture, Take the Money and Run, was released, the producers asked me to edit the film version of Allen’s play, Don’t Drink the Water, which had just finished a successful Broadway run. The director was Howie Morris, the “pipsqueak” star of Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” who in recent years has been employed mainly doing cartoon voice-overs with occasional appearances on TV and in films. The producers had hired him after their first four choices proved unavailable, and, worried about how Morris would handle the assignment, they asked me to spend some time on location in Florida to keep an eye on production.

  Morris’s comment to me in his introductory phone call—“Hi, Ralph, I understand you’re the guy who saves directors”—indicated that Role Anxiety was going to be the theme of this production. Once in
Florida, I quickly assessed that Morris seemed more intent on playing director than in producing a good film. Regardless of how small the issue, he insisted on having his way, and always in a style that was calculated to remind every one of his co-workers that he was his subordinate. He behaved as if any fresh idea or interpretation or inspiration that didn’t come from him was an accusation of his inadequacy. Big problems arose the moment we began cutting. Morris lacked the expertise to supervise the job himself and yet he rejected every one of my suggestions out of hand. I finally abandoned all efforts at collaborating and simply followed his orders. And in the end, when the people at Avco Embassy saw his cut, they ordered him to let me recut it my way.

  Two incidents dominate my memory of this picture. Once during the editing of a particular sequence I stopped and asked my assistant what he thought of the results. Morris turned a sour expression over this and moments later, in an imperious voice, said, “Ralph, step outside please, I want to speak to you.” Once in the hallway, he informed me that “in California we don’t even allow assistants to talk” such was his anxiety over rank.

  About two days before the fateful screening for the producers, Morris and I were examining the film alone when he pulled rank on me over a trivial matter that sent me into one of my rare bouts of rage. For several minutes I bombarded him with all the terrible thoughts I’d had about him since filming began, while the projectionist, who’d known me for years, looked on in shock. Morris began to quiver and pale and finally broke down, revealing the enormous pressure that living up to the image of the director had placed on him. He told me he was frightened and that he felt his whole career was at stake. It was something I’d never fully appreciated or understood before, and I did what I could for the next few hours to talk with him and stem his occasional tears.