When The Shooting Stops Read online

  Throughout most of that year Lear had to use all his managerial magic to keep my spirits from slipping beneath the minimum working level. Even with the first reel completed, the plot had barely been tackled, and I had only a thin vision of how the dramatic portions could be made to work. I had taken Minsky’s on not because I believed it would be a great editorial challenge but because I saw it as a lark. I had just come off six months on The Producers, a trying experience that pickled my nerve endings, and I badly needed a soothing job. Lear, who had been impressed with my work on A Thousand Clowns and had tried to get me to relocate to California (where he had recently produced Divorce American Style), had been responsible for bringing me in on this project, and I expected a pleasurable collaboration. The script revealed a frothy, unimportant film full of musical numbers, the kind of thing that might be snapped into shape in six to eight weeks of editing. I loved cutting musicals; I expected a short stretch of mindless fun.

  Now I alone was responsible for rescuing what everyone but the irrepressible Lear believed was a hopeless failure. I resented the burden all the more because, while I was being asked to perform the greatest filmmaking feat of my career, someone else’s name would be signed to it if I succeeded. This was a difficult barrier for a man who had never liked the adoration that is customarily bestowed on directors. And it was especially difficult after having spent several weeks working with Billy Friedkin, who at that time was in his late twenties and the stereotype of the arrogant kid prodigy. Still relatively unknown in the business—his only previous feature had been a budget movie called Good Times starring Sonny and Cher—he leaned heavily on aggressiveness and rank-pulling, which I attributed to the young director’s typical fears about inexperience and failure. Now that he was gone, I resented and envied him. Time and again I thought, “I wish I could be in Friedkin’s spot; I wish I could be out.” Meanwhile, as the weeks wore on, Lear’s persistent pressure to make edited scenes “even better” wore my good feelings toward him thinner and thinner. But as the producer, co-author, and sole responsible agent for three million dollars of other people’s money, his reputation was on the line. He would not relent until he got his New Look.

  About two months into the cutting, Lear called me into his office, closed the door, and, handing me a folder, said, “I thought you’d like to see this.” It was a transcript of a late-night television show that Friedkin had appeared on in London. During the interview, Friedkin was asked what his last project had been before leaving the States. “The biggest piece of crap I ever worked on,” were his approximate words, “something called The Night They Raided Minsky’s.”

  Friedkin directing Bert Lahr in rehearsal.

  (Courtesy United Artists Corporation)

  2 ■ The Night They Raided Minsky’s

  Part II: Life Sentence

  The chief drawback of Minsky’s’ dramatic episodes was their predictability. The script had aimed for an old-fashioned charm, but, with a few important exceptions, no new twist of sophistication was added to please a modern audience. Jason Robards does succeed in seducing Britt Ekland, and Ekland does ultimately bare her breasts on stage, but the result is neither a fresh New Look nor reliable Old Drama. The first cut revealed a slightly more explicit version of something that had been seen so often before we were sure that audiences would be able to guess the lines before the actors spoke them.

  Early in the film Norman Wisdom, who plays a sweet fall guy to Robards’ fast smoothy, occupies the vacant afternoon stage to teach Ekland the meaning of burlesque. She looks on with smiling awe (of course) and occasional laughter as he steps into a bucket, falls down a flight of stairs, and throws open an exit door only to run into a brick wall. Her typical expressions are “Oh! Uh! Oh!” They frolic, they embrace, they go out into the streets, where Wisdom buys her a knish, something she’s never eaten before. Nothing lifts their adventures above the harmless.

  Sometime around the dawn of film a ridiculous short was made of a stiff little boy dating a prim little girl. He drives up to her on a city sidewalk in his kiddie car, steps out, offers his arm, takes her for a ride, buys her an ice cream, and without saying a word, very formally embraces and kisses her—then looks away shyly. I had seen this short on my first trip to the film library, and, unable to resist it, had ordered a print with no particular use in mind. As I intercut snatches of it now with the Wisdom-Ekland sidewalk courtship, it seemed to release the pent-up humor of the scene. This was confirmed when we tested the film before audiences. Viewers would watch silently as Wisdom mugs and Ekland coos; they would chuckle weakly and seem to fear that the scene was slipping irretrievably into embarrassing nai’vet£. But each time the kiddie short popped in, they laughed with pleasure. Apparently the short not only takes the Wisdom-Ekland absurdity a needed step into the comic beyond, it also signals, much to the audience’s relief, that no one is expected to take this mind-bending naïveté seriously. This was a problem that had to be conquered in a dozen different ways throughout the editing of the film.

  Take, for example, the moment when Robards provokes a fight between Selwyn, the owner of the delicatessen where the Minsky crowd hangs out, and Trim Houlihan, the pin-striped gangster (played by Forrest Tucker) who serves as the movie’s Captain Hook. A disagreement over the price of a bagel escalates, Laurel-and-Hardy fashion, into an all-out war.

  TRIM: Hey, wait a minute. What’s that?

  SELWYN: You said an order of bagel.

  TRIM: That’s an order of bagel? One bagel is an order of bagel?

  SELWYN: New policy.

  TRIM: Two! bagels is an order of bagel anywhere in town!

  SELWYN: I don’t care about anywhere in town. Here you order another bagel, you pay another nickel.

  An ensuing exchange of epithets grows into a slapstick fury of bagel-tossing and vest-throwing, each man trying to prove by disposing of his valuable possessions how little money means compared to the “principles” involved. Thinly amusing, the episode is only a minor improvement on the many scenes of grown men fighting that used to force chuckles out of children during long afternoons of silent funnies.

  To give it added dimension, I laid down some vaudeville music over the fight and cut it to achieve a choreographed look. The music, an old number called “Gentlemen,” has already been used to back up a Robards-Wisdom onstage bit; it lifts the bagel fight out of the context of plot and into the nonsense world of the burlesque stage.

  The by now inevitable inclusion of stock footage lifts it some more. The first cut in the stock montage is a piece from an ancient newsreel depicting an Italian immigrant holding an infant child. As the man waves a little American flag, he points across the water to something significant, presumably the Statue of Liberty. To my pleasure and surprise, audiences consistently burst forth with laughter at the appearance of this cut—the land of individual opportunity, where grown men fight maniacally over the price of a bagel! The other stock cuts follow in rapid succession: kids on a pier diving into the East River along with their dog, a fighter attacking a punching bag, postal clerks sorting mail at an incredible speed, Isadora Duncan-style dancers leap-frogging over one another on a roof, the immigrant and child again—an odd assortment meant to suggest the zaniness of the times. Within this context, the bagel business slips safely into a new role as a launching pad for a nostalgic representation of the era.

  The cuts range from six to sixty-eight frames apiece—the last ones being the shortest for a speeded up effect. Since there are twenty-four frames to a second, many cuts last only a fraction of a second, and the whole sequence is over in less than half a minute. The vaudeville music that began with the bagel fight continues throughout the stock snippets. Toward the end of the half-minute montage, snatches of Robards, Wisdom, and Ekland running along the street are interspersed with the other cuts. The third time the trio appears, they stay. The music stops abruptly with the first words of dialogue, and we are into the next scene.

  Another episode that leans heavily on stoc
k material comes toward the end of the film when Houlihan, who has absconded with Ekland, beats up the pursuing Wisdom and Robards in a penny arcade. It’s a brutal scene for all its nonsensicalness, Houlihan batting the two heroes across the arcade over and over again like a couple of fat softballs. By this time the pattern I had established earlier in the film dictated that I again spice the action with a vaudevillian flavor and frenetic editing.

  The penny arcade itself is suggestive of nuttiness, being filled with old-fashioned movie scopes that enable viewers to hand-crank animated scenes of cops and robbers, train crashes, and other sensational bits of inanity. I set up the montage in such a way as to suggest a connection between the movie-scope episodes and the fight scene itself. As Houlihan gleefully creams his pathetic opponents, Wisdom flies feet first into a nickelodeon, which—by editorial fiat—suddenly lights up and starts playing. With the music engaged, the montage begins, this time including a man cranking the animated pictures, pedals dancing off player-piano strings, and figurines fighting, along with the now obligatory items: a huge smokestack tumbling down, a falling telephone pole hitting a man on the head and driving him into the ground, a log roller tumbling into the water. A few seconds into the frantic montage, which keeps flashing back to the three combatants, the camera speeds up to create an old-time, jerky-jointed animated effect. Once again, the flood of amusing, ingenious, and unexpected elements mercifully sublimates the original material.

  As I became more and more engrossed in this film, my misgivings gave way to some extent. I was beginning to have a glimpse of how the final product might look, and as a result my commitment to the project and my proprietary feelings toward it were growing. But, unlike my experience with any film I’ve worked on before or since, my anger and suffocation never faded. Nothing could shake my feeling of having been left to revive a corpse—nor suspend my conviction that I would be sticking tubes, and intravenous drips, and cardiac shocks, and artificial respirators onto and into and out of this patient for the rest of my life.

  Mornings were most painful. Driving out of New Rochelle each day, I would get unspeakable urges to cross the George Washington Bridge and spend the next eight hours exploring Bayonne, and Hoboken, and Union City, New Jersey. I no longer wanted to see Lear. His one-track mind (“Make it better”) had to me become a real-life horror show on the level of Tarantula or The Thing. Perhaps no amount of gratitude or praise would have been adequate, but Lear’s predictable jolly demands made me seethe. At one climactic moment (“It’s great, Ralph, but could you make it better?”), I told Lear to stuff it, crashed out of the cutting room, slammed the door behind me, and an hour later found myself pacing Fifth Avenue, dripping with guilt.

  Each night I carried this monster show home with me in the form of self-pity or an addictive preoccupation with a difficult cut. My wife would dread hearing my key turn in the door. My kids would stiffen: “Here comes Dad.” I yelled. I was surly. I was impatient. But every evening as I left the studio and walked to the parking lot, the same thought would overwhelm me: “Another day has just passed working on two minutes of reel four of Minsky’s. Two minutes. One hundred eighty feet. All day long. There’s got to be something better in life.”

  Lear, on the other hand, never stopped smiling. Unlike me, he was never surly, or rude, or depressed—all of which just heightened my feelings of guilt. He was so positive, I didn’t know whether to cry or grow fangs. And his occasional bursts of inspiration were beginning to strike me as grievous intrusions.

  One day he tore into the editing room with a Big Idea. He wanted to go out to a strip joint on Long Island, shoot a live striptease on a bar, and use the footage to open the film. “Don’t you see,” he cried, “the whole acceptance of nudity today will make a great contrast to the innocent period when the striptease was born!” “Norman, I really don’t see it,” I moaned, “you’re dragging this thing in by its ass.” But nothing could stop him. We went out to Hempstead, spent two and a half days shooting lewd smiles, wiggling thighs, and vigorously bouncing breasts, spliced some of the footage into the movie and finally threw it out.

  Lear had a number of flash inspirations like that, and some were useful. But in addition to feeling trapped and abused, I was thinking more and more like the director and resisting ideas I didn’t agree with. The directorial feeling was most intense during the cutting of certain particularly challenging scenes.

  Indeed, for all the puffing up, rearranging, altering, and reviving that went on throughout this film, one scene more than any other needed resuscitation of mouth-to-mouth intensity. It was a crucial scene, a climax of sorts, because it brings the Robards-Ekland relationship to a long-awaited sexual conclusion. Having at that time never directed a movie, it was difficult for me to imagine what I would have done differently in the original staging to make this sequence work. But as an editor, I had created whole new scenes out of discarded plastic, and that was the first thing I set about doing here.

  We are about two-thirds into the movie, in the middle of the seventh ten-minute reel. It is the second trip to Robards’ hotel room, in which he seeks to give Ekland the single piece of Biblical knowledge she lacks. With Ekland looking and acting like a poof of peach souffle eager to be consumed, the scene is pregnant with titillating potential. Unfortunately, very little that happens in Robards’ room suggests the buildup of enough heat to make this soufflé cook.

  To add some lustful expectation, I manufactured a tense preamble. Borrowing some of the edited-out film from their first trip to the hotel, I intercut it with the production number that is being performed at Minsky’s the moment they are slipping away. The fleeting montage is accompanied by the music from the performance, an old vaudeville theme called “Around the World” (the tune to which schoolchildren have put the words “All the girls in France do the hula-hula dance”). The music continues throughout the Robards-Ekland cuts—we see them talking but cannot hear their words. In addition to establishing the simultaneity of the two pieces of action, the musical overlay lends a dreamlike quality to the lovers’ flight. It’s all done in split-second cuts, and the impact is strong:

  A close-up of a male performer on stage doing a faggy bump and grind to “Around the World”; Robards and Ekland slipping through the crowded hotel lobby; the male dancer joined by eight females in rope skirts; the Knave and the Souffle in the brass elevator cage, chatting and smiling and staring into each other’s eyes; the burlesque queens bumping and grinding; the two lovers dashing down the dark hotel corridor; close-ups of the motley dancers swaying and leering. The light flashes on in Robards’ room, and at that instant the music stops. Action.

  The dialogue begins with Robards’ kiss. Clearly the lovers still need a dose of editorial foreplay:

  EKLAND: Oh!

  ROBARDS: That couldn’t have been your first kiss.

  EKLAND: The first with a clean-shaven man.

  ROBARDS: How was it?

  EKLAND: I thought of a melon with a slice out. . . . You want to make love to me?

  ROBARDS: How do you feel about it?

  EKLAND: I feel to love is to wish to give pleasure.

  ROBARDS: And you wish to give me pleasure?

  EKLAND: Yes.

  ROBARDS: Yeah, well, we’ve got about thirty-six minutes.

  EKLAND: Oh. One thing I wish only, but then it is asking too much. . . .

  ROBARDS: What?

  EKLAND: I dreamed that the first time there would be a sign to tell me it is right.

  ROBARDS: A sign?

  EKLAND: Uh-huh. From Him. A sign. The Lord moves in wondrous ways.

  Robards becomes irritated by this talk and several sentences later gets angry enough to punch his chest of drawers. Without either of them realizing it, the blow has disengaged his Murphy bed, which slowly descends from the wall. Ekland turns to see the bed magically filling the room, and her face takes on the familiar Dawn-of-Creation expression we’ve grown to tolerate. It’s an amusing joke, the Lord being twisted into the Maste
r Procurer, but it cannot hold up the scene alone, especially alongside the fast pace that’s been established for the film.

  Two pieces of music were needed to rescue this episode. The first, bursting forth when Ekland spots the miraculous bed, is Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus (the use of which is always a sure sign that a film is in danger). As she looks on in wonder, we hear nine peals of “Hallelujah” and yet four more when she walks, arms outstretched, to the delighted Robards.

  A loud knock at the door. “Rachel Elizabeth Schpitendavel, this is your father!” We’ve seen the bearded terror arrive in town earlier accompanied by a selection of stock cuts similar to those that escorted Ekland in. With Mr. Schpitendavel snorting and pacing in the hallway, Robards dashes to fold up the bed and hide in a closet. Here a second piece of emergency music, a vaudeville number, enhances the action, while the cutting aims for choreographed panic. Twice Robards runs to put the bed up, and twice it begins to slide down again accompanied by peals of “Hallelujah.”

  After a fierce argument, the father leaves in a fury, threatening to disown his daughter if she is not on the one-oh-five out of Penn Station with him that night. But Ekland has a more pressing matter on her mind. She turns to Robards, opting for her new life. He: “Well, we’ve got seventeen minutes now.” They kiss. Sound track: “HALLELUJAH, HALLELUJAH!” A shameless crutch, it nevertheless succeeds.

  By the fall of 1968, as I inched toward the completion of the film, I could see that something legitimate was emerging. Until then I’d tackled each scene individually, doing what I could to add to the drama, heighten the humor, and disguise the triviality. I had employed every known trick of editing, from the stylish use of stock footage, extensive dependence on music, frenetic cutting, and overlapping episodes to the complete deletion of dialogue scenes, replaced instead by snippets of suggestive action. I had used so many opticals, by which I mean all the special effects that have to be processed in a lab—superimpositions, dissolves, alterations in the film speed, recropping a scene by blowing up a desired segment—that for the first time in my experience a film contained more special effects than original photography. As I reviewed the cumulative impact for perhaps the fortieth time, I saw at last that it was holding together. It had style, some genuinely funny moments, and tremendous pace. Even more important, it had developed the liberated grace to laugh at itself. Somehow the mass of clumsy, dated material had been conquered; a silly, uncohesive musical had become attention-holding for close to ninety-nine minutes.