When The Shooting Stops Read online

  In 1970 I cut Hal Prince’s first movie, Something for Everyone, a picture that I liked, but to my surprise hardly made a stir. Prince is royalty on Broadway, where he has spent most of his career. Although he was very professional and pleasant to work with, the problem for me was his lack of film sense. The way he shot the film, it was apparent that he expected very little from the editing process, and the way he reacted to my advice, it was clear that he expected just as little from the editor. If I suggested a subtle change or a cut that would heighten someone’s performance, he was enormously grateful, as if I were making a contribution way beyond the call of duty. He saw the editor as a mechanic who, by whatever magic, cleaned up certain problems that arose in the shooting or assembling of scenes. And so the best I could do on Something for Everyone was a technically proficient job.

  The opposite problem arose the next year in a picture I cut for Ivan Passer called Born to Win. Passer was one of a group of Czech directors discovered by American cineastes in the late sixties. His reputation seemed to have been built on a very poetic seventy-one-minute film called Intimate Lighting (which I had heard had put David Picker to sleep when he screened it at United Artist). Born to Win, a low-budget, offbeat comedy written by David Scott Milton and starring George Segal and Karen Black, was his fourth film and his first American feature.

  I met Passer, a clerkish, medium-sized man of about forty, for a feeling-out session over dinner at the Duck Joint, a Czech restaurant on First Avenue. The first words he spoke to me were, “I want this picture to look as if an American had directed it.” I smiled, unaware of the insecurity responsible for that remark. The picture was shot on schedule, the dailies looked interesting, the performances were solid. Then, during the editing, Passer would arrive at the cutting room and each of us would wait for the other to make a move.

  The waiting game was a frustrating, emotionally intricate ritual that lasted for days. Passer was so slow-moving and soft-spoken I wondered how he got the picture shot on schedule. He didn’t want to talk about the film. The big decision of the morning, which arose around eleven o’clock, was where we would go for lunch—and being a Middle European, he was accustomed to making lunch the major meal of the day, a two-hour affair at least. All the while, I was waiting for him to give me some idea of where he wanted to go with the film; but he said nothing. I probably understood on some level that he was waiting for me to take charge of the thing and make an “American” movie out of it, but I wanted his participation.

  After a couple of weeks of this, the frustration overwhelmed me, and I began to cut the picture myself and to put a scratch score to it. Passer sat by in the same nonchalant manner, occasionally looking rather pensive, but never making an effort to get involved. One day, as I worked, he mused out loud that the ideal way to make a movie was to spend five years on it, mold it into a major work of art, and then burn it. This seemed a maniacal statement to me, engrossed as I was in fitting his film together, but I realize now that such way-out thinking was a reflection of his inner conflicts. Part of him must have craved to take over the picture and yet he was too frightened to do so. I can only guess at the helplessness he felt over not being able to express an opinion, to give me the smallest suggestion, to participate in the work in the slightest way. And I resented him for it. Not because he was destructive, but because there was something fundamentally false going on: I was carrying him, and he was behaving as if it were business-as-usual. If this picture were to succeed, this man, who impressed me mainly for his helplessness during the time we worked together, would be hailed as a new discovery. The truth of my contribution would never be acknowledged, not even between us.

  Years earlier I’d had a comparable experience cutting Two Tickets to Paris, a film that was created as a vehicle for Joey Dee, a rock singer whose hit, “The Peppermint Twist,” was making him and his group, The Starlighters, a hot item in New York in the early sixties. The film was directed by Greg Garrison, who has since become very big in television, producing and directing the Dean Martin shows and other big variety specials. Garrison was a slicko, cool, macho dude, sueded and silvered from hat to shoes, a director who could write the book on how to look the part. During the screening of the first day’s dailies, when everyone is traditionally laboring under crushing anxiety, Mr. Cool leaned over to me, pointed up to the chorus girls on the screen, and said something like “You see the second one from the left? She’s terrific—any time you want her, she’s yours.”

  As far as I could tell, Garrison spread no sweat on his suede during the remainder of the shooting either, and when it was all done, he took me aside and laid it on the line: “Look, I’ve heard a lot about you. You know what you’re doing. I’m taking off for California for a few weeks, and when I come back, you’ll show me what you’ve put together.”

  I had a magnificent time cutting that picture. True, I was younger and easier to please, but the difference between Garrison and Passer was that Garrison knew where things stood and had enough character to be explicit about it. And the results were quite dazzling from the editorial point of view, even though the picture was otherwise strictly from hunger. True to his word, Garrison blew in from the coast about a month later, spent most of our time telling me about a great Italian shoe store on Broadway, looked at what I had done, said it was “terrific” and that I should continue in the same vein, and then blew on out of the way again.

  The Sporting Club was the beginning of my disillusionment with editing. It was the first picture I had ever backed away from and the first time I considered abandoning the cutting room. It was an extreme situation, because Larry Peerce, whom I like very much and rate as one of the finest collaborators I’ve ever had, was in the midst of personal turmoil and displaying an intense insularity. To know that a picture was a disaster from the start and to be unable to get the director, who in this case was a friend, to shift off his fixed idea long enough to read my distress signals, was so disturbing that I finally began to wonder whether the lack of authority inherent in the editor’s position made it the wrong profession for me.

  Then in 1972 came Stanley Jaffe’s first production since Goodbye Columbus, Bad Company. The project started out pleasantly. Jaffe, whom I’d liked and was happy to see again, introduced me to the two screenwriters, David Newman and Robert Benton, whose work— including Bonnie and Clyde—I knew and respected. Benton, a gentle, professorial man with a slight build, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a slow-burning cigar, was directing. I thought the screenplay for Bad Company was good, perhaps too stylized, but nowhere near as stylized as what Benton soon shot. I was disappointed when I saw the first dailies coming back from Kansas, and I think Jaffe was nervous, too, for he sent me out to the cornfields for added insurance. I spent a few days trying to discuss with Benton the photographic coverage we’d need for an adequate assembly, but I found myself engaged instead in a conversation about aesthetics, lighting, composition, and other fine points of photography—all the things that I generally consider the secondary aspects of filmmaking. Benton was all fired up about film theory and art and rather uninvolved with questions of drama and action and whether the picture would actually engage an audience.

  When it came time to edit, I found that Benton was completely unwilling to entertain any ideas about the over-all feeling of the film. I remember in particular a very long dolly shot in an early scene that must have lasted about seven minutes. Viewers were bound to have trouble understanding the two main characters because they are so far away, and I automatically began intercutting some of the close material. It was important that they be clearly visible because they were just being introduced. Benton objected. He said he wanted to maintain the “purity of the camera move,” a phrase I had never heard coming from a serious director. I tried to explain that the audience wants contact; that they’ll never appreciate the unbroken photographic sweep if they’re irritated by not knowing what’s going on or, worse, asleep. He said, no, he’d only shot the close material for protection, h
e had no intention of using it, and that was the way our discussions went for the remainder of the film.

  Now it’s all right to work on a loser, which I knew I was doing, but it’s torture to see solutions and not be allowed to attempt them. The whole thing culminated with Benton’s announcement that the musical score would be a solo piano, which I knew at once would accentuate every mistake in the film and stand out in a pretentious, self-conscious way. Convinced of imminent disaster, I made a final plea to Jaffe. I felt that I was fighting for the most basic right—to be able to use my knowledge to keep my end of a team enterprise aloft. I was overruled. When I was younger, attitudes like this didn’t bother me. I could look at the horrid editing stalls in Fox’s back building and dismiss the implications because I was too involved in climbing the ladder of success to worry about being well used. But by the late sixties and early seventies my dissatisfaction grew to the point where I began to feel there must be something wrong with me. I began to doubt whether there was any justification for my perennial discontent, and wondered if I wasn’t just wrong for the part. Was I being neurotic, irrational? Or was the system I worked under irrational? Although in the coolness of reflection, or in the balancing presence of my wife, I could comfortably denounce the whole show-business star mentality, the blunderbuss about auteur directors, the way people in charge treat subordinates like machines, another voice said, “It’s you, Ralph. You will never be satisfied. You’re incapable of it.”

  Woody Allen during his early days as a director.

  (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  17 ■ Take the Money and Run

  The Film They Wouldn’t Release

  It has the texture of a collage—blackout sketches, sight gags, fake cinema verité interviews, old newsreel footage, parodies of all sorts of other movies . . . and the kind of pacing—or maybe it’s just momentum—that carries the viewer over the bad gags to the good ones.

  —FROM VINCENT CANBY’S first review of Take the Money and Run, The New York Times, August 19, 1969

  I’ve watched Woody Allen grow from a novice film director to one of the major forces in the movie business today. From a shy, tentative, unsure comic to a man who has total control over his pictures, including hiring, casting, and advertising. From someone with little sense of film pace or composition to a self-taught master of the medium. He has Prussian discipline. He’s the only director I know who finishes a film and then, without any time off, without drinking or drugs or philandering, without celebration, gloating, or self-punishing regrets, goes quietly to work the following day on his next script. He practices his clarinet seven days a week. He finds time to write short stories for The New Yorker. He reads voluminously. When we met, I had kept myself handcuffed to a single occupation for over twenty-five years, despite perennial desires to broaden my scope. In the ten years since, I have ventured into photography, teaching, producing, directing, and now co-authoring a book. Woody’s daring and unceasing growth was an inescapable influence.

  In 1968 Woody Allen was a successful nightclub comedian who had begun to work in film as a writer and actor. He both wrote and acted in What’s New Pussycat?, had a role in Casino Royale, and transmogrified a pulp Japanese spy thriller into a ludicrous farce called What’s Up Tiger Lily? Toward the end of that year, when Larry Peerce and I were putting the finishing touches on Goodbye Columbus, I read that Allen was making his first film from a script he’d written with Mickey Rose called Take the Money and Run, but I knew nothing more until I got a call in January of 1969 from the production manager, Jack Grossberg.

  Jack and I had worked together on many occasions, starting in the mid-fifties with TV pilots. I knew him as the heartbeat of every project he worked on. During filming, he serves as the arm of the producer on the set; he is in charge of the budget, the time, the rentals, the supplies; he must know the cost of everything and everyone from the cast and the crew to the painters, the electricians, and carpenters who are hired for an emergency weekend set change. He’s an encyclopedia of crucial knowledge from union overtime policies to where to get the cheapest and the best of almost anything. Over the years I’ve seen him play the strong-arm man, the facilitator, the psychologist, the referee, and the matchmaker. On this day in 1969, Jack was speaking as matchmaker. Take the Money and Run was in some kind of trouble; there was a general feeling that a new editor was needed; and Jack hoped that I was the right person to work with the introverted director ten years my junior. He invited me to look at the film, which had been in the editing room for some eight months and had progressed to a finished print complete with titles, sound effects, and music.

  At nine-thirty on a Monday morning I arrived at a dilapidated screening room on Forty-third Street. At the time I was unaware of the seriousness of the dissatisfaction, of the fact that no audience had yet been found that would laugh at the picture, that Woody was despondent about it, that the production company, Palomar Pictures, a short-lived subsidiary of ABC, was on the verge of deciding not to release it.

  I soon found myself treated to a very unusual experience, a film that seemed to be flying all over the place, with highs as high as the Marx Brothers and lows as low as a slapped-together home movie. It was the saga of Virgil Starkwell—a timid and unlikely desperado— and his woeful life of crime. The story was introduced in authentic documentary style by the familiar voice of Jackson Beck, the commentator for the original Paramount newsreels. As the camera zooms in slowly on a brownstone in a New Jersey slum, Beck intones with grim urgency:

  On December first, nineteen-thirty, Mrs. William Starkwell, the wife of a New Jersey handyman, gives birth to her first and only child. It is a boy and they name it Virgil. He is an exceptionally cute baby with a sweet disposition. Before he is twenty-five years old he will be known to police in six states for assault, armed robbery, and illegal possession of a wart.

  To help unravel the bizarre psychology of this pathetic and purportedly dangerous outlaw the viewer is offered interviews with people from Virgil’s past. Starkwell’s cello teacher says that the boy blew into his cello—“He had no conception of the instrument.” A schoolteacher relates that Virgil felt up the girls in the class—“Can I say feel?” His parents appear wearing bizarre Groucho Marx disguises, so ashamed are they of their worthless progeny. “He was an atheist,” says the father. “I tried to beat God into him, but it was very tough. . . . How would you like to see my stamp collection?” The wacky documentary atmosphere, complete with nasty neighborhood toughs beating up the young Virgil and smashing his cello, was made even funnier by the constant propensity of the people being interviewed to trip themselves up, remember irrelevant facts, argue with each other, or waste a lot of time in self-conscious mannerisms.

  The film was very primitively shot—which really didn’t matter as long as the gags worked—and was held together by a plethora of visual one-liners: Starkwell has an automatic in his hand. He is lurking on a sidewalk, casing a pet shop. He enters. We wait. He comes running out chased by a gorilla. Virgil is assigned to the prison laundry room. He comes across a bra in the pile of dirty clothes, gives it an odd look, then throws it in with the rest of the wash. His girl friend, Louise (who until his imprisonment believed he was a cellist with the Philharmonic), visits him in prison and brings him food. With a rapt expression, she presses a hardboiled egg through the screen in the visitor’s room, as Virgil reaches up to catch the bits on the other side. Most of these incidents were delightfully surrealistic and very few were developed beyond a minute or two.

  Longer gags included an elaborately planned bank robbery in which Woody’s gang pretends to be shooting a film; an outlandish argument between Starkwell and his wife on the morning of the big heist over the color of the shirt he is going to wear (“What are the other guys wearing?” she asks with pulverizing nonchalance); and a fiasco prison breakout in which Woody’s “gun,” a carefully whittled bar of soap colored black with shoe polish, foams up into a ball of suds in his hand, the result of an untimely d
ownpour.

  The most sensational scene, one that I think will make its way into the permanent annals of comedy, was Starkwell’s first bank job, in which the overly courteous criminal gets into a desperate disagreement with the tellers, who can’t make out his holdup note. With Virgil and the first teller each grasping the note, Virgil tries to clear up the misunderstanding.

  VIRGIL (reading): “I am pointing a gun . . . at you . . .”

  FIRST TELLER: That looks like “gun,” that doesn’t look like “gun.”

  VIRGIL: No, that’s “gun.”

  They argue until the teller calls a second teller who reads the note and finds another spelling error.

  SECOND TELLER (reading aloud): “Please put fifty thousand dollars into this bag and abt natural”—what’s “abt”?

  Soon the people on line begin complaining about all the time Starkwell is taking. Again Woody reads the note, and finally the teller says, “Oh, I see—this is a holdup.” He asks to see Starkwell’s gun. Woody obliges. He then informs Starkwell that he will have to have his note initialed by one of the vice-presidents before he can get any money. Woody complains briefly that he is in a rush, but finally resigns himself and goes to a bank officer’s desk, where the argument over his penmanship resumes, a crowd gathers, and the scene ends with a cut to Woody making his single phone call from inside a police station.

  The film was packed with funny material. It was frenetic and formless and obviously the work of a very fresh mind. But even as I was enjoying it, I began to feel that it was going on forever. The whole thing was put together in a strange, inept way, with little rhythm and a very bad sense of continuity. Whoever made it had no sense of film pace: it would rush along and then stop, then rush along and then stop again. Truly comic incidents were murdered by weak cuts, awkward juxtapositions, excessive length, or lack of completion. Above all, the film was burdened with moments of utterly inappropriate pathos and seriousness and was capped with a grotesque and offensive ending: leading his gang out of a bank after a holdup, Woody is gunned down by the police in a hideous death scene reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde. The last shot in the movie has the camera pulling away from Stark well’s blood-drenched, bullet-ridden body. It was very chilling. I thought, Holy Cow.