When The Shooting Stops Read online

  The screening room was barely relit before I was confronted with the tremendous anxiety that had accumulated around this film. At frequent intervals throughout the screening I had noticed that bodies were slipping in in the dark, and now with the picture over I found myself surrounded by the imploring faces of Allen’s managerial and production team. Jack Grossberg and Woody’s two managers, Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, were among them. Joffe, who was also the producer of Take the Money, spoke first: Could I fix the film?

  The picture was so choppy and uneven that I could not be certain on such short notice that it had enough solid material to survive an overhaul, and, avoiding a commitment, I asked to see the script. The first thing I discovered when I read the script later that day was that it contained a wealth of jokes, many of them very funny, that I had not seen in the film. When I questioned Grossberg about this, he assured me that all of this material had been photographed, as well as a considerable bunch of jokes that Woody had improvised or invented while shooting. With that assurance, I took the job: Joffe and I met, agreed on a fee and a title—“editorial consultant”—and shortly thereafter he called to say that it was time for me to meet the director.

  The attitude of Woody’s managers seemed to be that their young ward was a delicate orchid who might wither if approached incautiously. I was instructed to meet them at the corner of Seventy-second Street and Madison Avenue, and from there they ushered me to a nearby seafood restaurant where Woody was sitting alone at a corner table, quietly eating his dinner.

  Woody was very serious and very soft-spoken. He didn’t put on airs. He wasn’t “on.” He didn’t betray the minutest desire to impress me or to establish himself as The Director, or The Authority, or The Senior Partner, or Anything. I felt comfortable with him and liked him very much.

  We talked generally about the picture. Often, when Woody spoke, I had to lean forward to hear him, for in a gesture of involuntary modesty he put his hand in front of his mouth whenever he was chewing. He told me he was about to leave New York for two or three months to go on the road with his play Play It Again, Sam, and that in the meantime all the original film for Take the Money and Run would be sent to my cutting room. He made no effort to control what I would do with it in his absence.

  A few days later a truck delivered two hundred boxes of film to my office, and for the following two weeks I screened a collection of skits that were so original, so charming, so funny in absolutely unexpected ways that it made this period one of the most pleasurable in all my years of editing. A publisher stumbling upon the unpublished notebooks of a young Robert Benchley might have felt similarly.

  Many of the discarded jokes were every bit as good as those I’d seen in the film. Invariably, they had flaws, flaws that could easily be cleaned up or worked around or finessed. But as I discovered when working with Woody on this and subsequent films, he has little patience with his own material when it’s not working; as a first-time director without any experience patching or revising in the cutting room, he had immediately removed anything that seemed inadequate. His editor, Jim Heckert, a competent West Coast veteran, was accustomed to the Hollywood system in which cutters are expected to follow orders and was therefore not inclined to raise objections or offer unsolicited solutions. The result was a picture that was too short, with too few jokes, and with enough dead spots to convince an untrained viewer that the entire work was rather flat or mediocre, if not a total dud.

  As for the dead spots, they survived because of Woody’s obsessive desire to keep a strain of seriousness running through the film. His enduring need to communicate emotional anguish finally surfaced in the form of the indisputably sober Interiors’, but during the making of Take the Money the gravity was strictly in the way.

  “When I think of that picture,” Woody told us recently, “I think of a very, very unpleasant experience. I felt I was stuck with a bad picture, and I was very pleasantly surprised that it did as well as it did. But it was a negative experience. Not the shooting, not the cutting, but once I started screening it and realized I had serious problems. My instinct from the first when I was making films was to always go for pathos and for a down ending. I shot the ending very brutally. I had been wired for hits by A. D. Flowers, the special-effects man who did all the stuff for The Godfather and a million other films. The window panes behind me smashed, blood spurted out—I mean it was a real killing. I remember showing that film with that ending to the people who backed the picture, and they were just stunned. It was a bad screening. There were just the four heads of Palomar, me, and Charlie Joffe. There was no laughter. Occasionally the guys would laugh a little bit, but there was no audience bursting with laughter, and it was all very down. And then I get killed. And they said to me, ‘Is that really how you want to end the film?’ They were very nice about it, they were being very polite, but they couldn’t hide their disappointment. I knew they were talking about not releasing it.”

  I subsequently learned that Woody had held many screenings of the film and all of them had been demoralizing. “I was really not aware,” he says, “of how awful the thing looked, unmixed and with all the sound bouncing around. And I had no idea of the psychology of screenings. I’ve since been at a rough-cut screening with Sidney Lumet. He welcomes people at the door, he sits them down, he tells them exactly what’s happening—where the opticals are going, when, and why. You’re watching the film for twenty minutes and then suddenly you’ll hear a voice pipe up and it’ll be Sidney, saying, ‘There’s an optical going in right here!’

  “We’d post a notice at the USO at Forty-third Street and Seventh Avenue and we’d get twelve or fifteen soldiers. And they’d come up to this little tiny screening room at Sixteen hundred Broadway at five-thirty in the afternoon, and they would see this thing with no titles, no explanation, no sound effects, no music or anything, and we would die with it.”

  While Woody was on the road with Play It Again, Sam, I began to reconstruct the movie. I put back some scenes, extended or recut others, juggled the material to create a rhythm, which in some cases meant moving whole scenes from one part of the film to another, and trimming almost everything to quicken the pace. I took a scene—in which Virgil robs a pistol from a jewelry shop, uses it to hold up an armored truck, is cornered by police in an alley, and opens fire only to have a flame shoot out the top of what is actually a cigarette lighter—lifted it from the middle of the movie, and made it the pretitle sequence. Since the bank-robbery ending with Woody getting blown away by rifle fire would have to be replaced, I took the initial portion, which is very funny—about two gangs holding up the same bank at the same time—and moved it toward the middle of the film where some plotted action was needed.

  Since the film was haphazardly plotted, it didn’t matter too much where one scene or another ended up, and thus I was able to move things around at will to serve the rhythm and the pace. This sometimes created transition problems, and to cope with them, I created a new transitional device by chopping up pieces of the long interview with Starkwell’s parents I found in the rushes but which had barely been used in the first version of the film. I now introduced this wonderful material—in which actors Ethel Sokolow and Henry Leff carry on at length about their son, Virgil—wherever I needed a bridge between two segments of the plotted action that failed to connect in a natural way. Because I could not use the parents everywhere, I also kept track of the spots where Woody would have to write some additional transitional material. Here we returned to the three devices he’d originally employed. If you watch the film carefully, you will see how these elements—the parents, the Jackson Beck narration, Woody’s own voice-over narration, and Beck’s interviews with Starkwell—bind together the otherwise loosely related material.

  The first thing I wanted Woody to tackle when he returned were the maudlin patches. Of immediate concern was an early scene in which Woody meets Louise (Janet Margolin) sketching in the park. After circling nearby with an eye on her purse, he is engaged by
her in a conversation and takes a liking to her. We then see them walking through the park in misty weather in a romantic sequence that looked like something out of Renoir. The lovers walk up a distant hill with frilly music in the background and something like Vaseline on the lens, and the viewer feels as if he’s stumbled into another movie. I said, Woody, it’s a lovely scene, but write some jokes, narrate it, tell us what it was like courting her, what you were talking about behind those trees. And I discovered that if he agreed with me, he could go into a corner and emerge a few hours later with everything that was needed on scraps of paper. His narration for the previously unspoken courtship scene came to over three hundred words. As he and Louise drift into dots on the landscape, he tells us that he knew he was in love because he felt nauseous, that “after fifteen minutes I wanted to marry her, and after a half hour I completely gave up the idea of snatching her purse.” We see them now from a high angle, standing on a slope facing each other, while on the sound track Woody recalls his anxiety over telling Louise that he was a cellist: “Once she asked me some questions about Mozart. She got suspicious because for a minute, you know, I couldn’t place the name.” As the camera circles the young lovers, Woody reflects on his attitude toward women: “In prison, I remember the psychiatrist asked me if I had a girl, and I said, ‘No.’ And he said, well, do I think that sex is dirty. And I said, ‘It is if you’re doing it right.’” Needless to say, any similarity to Renoir was obliterated.

  As Woody and I reconstructed the movie, I found several instances where scenes could be salvaged merely by replacing the music. The film hit a down note again when Virgil was preparing himself for a date with his new girl friend. Woody had aimed for a Chaplinesque atmosphere—“the worst side of Chaplin,” he now concludes—by showing the rundown hotel room, the pathetic outcast pulling the toilet plunger in order to get his shower running, opening a defunct refrigerator to reveal his clothes hanging inside, opening the freezer portion to remove his shoes, combing his hair and posturing before the mirror in a hopeless attempt at the debonair. I realized that what made it maudlin instead of funny was the mournful music that accompanied the wordless scene. I laid in a piece of upbeat Eubie Blake ragtime in its place, and the effect was magical: “The sequence was heavy and oppressive and unfunny,” says Woody. “And without changing a frame, just changing the music, the thing became funny.” Woody’s spirits took a definite upturn around this time, and his confidence in the material grew.

  Making changes in the score meant re-enlisting the services of the composer, Marvin Hamlisch, whose involvement amplifies all the enchantment the memory of this period arouses in me. Of all the composers I’ve worked with, and there have been many, for composers often work directly with editors, none compares to Hamlisch in knowledge and ability. His mind is so free and so quick to make connections that if he accepts your intent, he can write a new piece of music in virtually any style in an astonishingly short time. Hamlisch and I had an immediate affinity, and a few years later when he was stuck on a passage in his score for The Prisoner of Second Avenue, he sent me a plane ticket to Los Angeles so that we could spend some time on it together.

  Until hired to score Take the Money and Run, Marvin had been surviving mainly as a rehearsal pianist. Pulled onto the film by Jack Grossberg, who was familiar with his work and knew that he had scored The Swimmer, a Frank Perry picture whose release had been delayed, Marvin showed all the talent and none of the confidence of a future multiple-Academy-Award winner. His collaboration with Woody, as important as it was for the picture, was not easy for Marvin, whose expressiveness turned melodramatic alongside Allen’s unswerving calm. According to Jack, the worst moment for these two emotionally opposite men had been the recording session for the main title sequence, an original ballad with which Hamlisch was justifiably pleased. Woody’s impassive reaction—“What was that?” he shrugged when the band finished playing—had so upset the young composer that when Allen left the room, Marvin lay down on the floor and wept.

  Once I joined the project and began requesting alterations, Marvin got in the habit of making frequent calls to the cutting room. Incapable of withstanding a moment’s wait, he would insist on playing new arrangements right over the telephone, as Woody and I, our minds elsewhere, struggled to be receptive. “Marvin was wonderful,” says Woody, “but he really used to drive us crazy. He’d call six, eight times a day, obsessed about everything and nervous about everything. Could I come over and hear a piece of music, could Ralph come over, what kind of cue should he have for this section, would I buy this piece of music, does this sound good, should it just be piano, should it be piano and trombone, should it be funny, could we extend the scene a little bit ‘cause it would help—a million questions about everything.”

  But ultimately the important thing about Marvin was that he could grasp immediately the kind of music we needed in order to transform the tone of a scene, and he unfailingly provided it. A typical example was the escape from the chain gang, Woody’s farcical salute to The Defiant Ones, a 1958 film in which Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier spend more time than they care to in each other’s company. In Woody’s version, Virgil and four other prisoners, one of them black, bust out of the prison camp chained together. After making their way across a field with guards and dogs in hot pursuit, they come upon a roadside diner and after considerable antics steal four bicycles. The idea was good, but the sequence was not nearly as funny as it should have been until I eliminated the diner scene and cut directly from the harrowing escape with the guards shooting at their backs to a shot of the four chained convicts riding down a country road on bicycles with Virgil, also chained, trotting alongside. To amplify the change in context, mood, and level of absurdity that was implicit in the new transition, I replaced the chase music that originally accompanied the bicycle shot with a piece of Quincy Jones bossa nova. Hamlisch immediately liked and understood the alteration and wrote an original piece of bossa nova that took the joke all the way to its completion. For other scenes, we simply told him what tone we were looking for, and he composed impeccably appropriate music. I worked with Marvin again on Bananas, a film for which he created one of the great unacknowledged film scores.

  When I went through the rushes, I found that Woody had shot about a half dozen endings for the movie, all of them sentimental, weakly amusing, or sad. I told him he had to shoot a new end—a demand that I would repeat on three of our next four films together—and suggested that he return in some way to the interview technique that began the picture. The next morning Woody arrived in the cutting room, having written a new scene in which Jackson Beck narrates the events that led to Virgil’s capture and in a parody of TV journalism, interviews those who were close to him near the end or had something to do with his arrest. Louise reflects that Virgil’s been depressed lately: “You know, he never made the Ten Most Wanted List. It’s very unfair voting. It’s who you know.” Woody’s real-life ex-wife, Louise Lasser, was enlisted to play a neighbor astounded to discover that the schlemiel next door was a criminal: “I actually believed that he was an idiot. I mean I really believed it. And I wasn’t the only one. Like, everybody thought so. . . . To think that idiot was a criminal! I just can’t believe it. . . . You’ve never met such a nothing. I can’t believe it! That there was a mind working in there that could rob banks! It’s phenomenal! Phenomenal!” Virgil’s roommate: “Thought I saw his picture on, uh, the post office. I didn’t remember whether it was on the wall or a stamp.” Then there was Stanley Ackerman, the assistant director on Take the Money, a former actor, pressed into service to play the part of a photographer who by sheer accident made a film of Virgil’s spectacular arrest. Asked to recall how it all happened, Ackerman gets hilariously sidetracked in details about taking his pants to the cleaners and what he had for breakfast that morning—“I think it was two fried eggs, toast . . . I don’t know whether it was orange juice or grapefruit, but I, I remember I had a juice”—that you just want to kick him and say, “Get on
with it!”

  Finally, in a scene that was shot just before the film was released in August 1969, Woody is back in his cell being interviewed by the narrator and reflecting on his life of crime as he whittles pensively on a bar of soap and asks, “Do you know if it’s raining out?”

  When the Times critic Vincent Canby discussed the picture for a second time on Sunday, August 24, he made another stab at capturing the film’s charm, one that comes closer than he could possibly have known to the truth about how the film was edited: “The movie has a sort of loose-leaf form. You have a feeling that scenes, perhaps entire reels could be taken out and rearranged without making much difference in total impact, which is good because it all looks so effortless.”

  Ralph and Woody on the set of SLEEPER

  18 ■ Scenes from a Marriage

  Working with Woody on Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death

  When Woody Allen approached me with the script for Bananas early in 1970, we were, in our respective crafts, in close to opposite positions in the motion-picture pecking order. Woody was just beginning as a director, whereas I had been cutting film for twenty-five years. With only one picture behind him, Woody was still relatively untested, whereas my reputation within the industry was firmly established, particularly by my work on A Thousand Clowns and Minsky’s. The circumstances of our first collaboration reinforced my position as an elder statesman: Woody had exhausted his creative resources on Take the Money and Run, and the decision to release the film could clearly be linked to my involvement. Never before had my contribution as an editor been so tangible, nor a director’s position with me so vulnerable.