Monday, May 21, 2012
Centennial Tributes: Richard Brooks Part III
By Edward Copeland
It isn't often that a masterpiece of literature begets a masterpiece of cinema yet both retain distinct identities all their own, but that's the case with In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" and Richard Brooks' stunning film adaptation of his book. Capote often gets credit for inventing the genre of adapting the techniques of a novelist to that of straight reporting, but earlier attempts existed — Capote's stood out because In Cold Blood 's excellence made everyone forget any other examples (at least until more than a decade later when Norman Mailer added his own brilliant take on the genre with The Executioner's Song). Brooks, with his job as a crime reporter in his past, on the surface appears to follow Capote's approach, but the director, forever the activist, skips the objectivity that Capote tried to evoke in his book. Brooks didn't want to minimize the horror of the crime that occurred at the Clutter farm in Holcomb, Kans., but he also wanted to humanize the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. In a way, Brooks' film inspired the path for the two films made decades later telling the story of Capote's writing of the book and his getting to know the killers first-hand as they waited on Death Row. Even today, Brooks' 1967 film remains more powerful and better made than the two more recent tales. Undoubtedly, In Cold Blood remains Brooks' greatest film. If you got here before reading either Part I or Part II of this tribute, click on the respective links.
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Capote begins his book with that paragraph in the first chapter titled The Last to See Them Alive. Brooks begins the film of In Cold Blood introducing us to The Last to See Them Alive in the forms of Robert Blake as newly paroled inmate Perry Smith and Scott Wilson as an acquaintance he met in prison who had been freed earlier, Dick Hickok. Brooks gives Blake — and the movie — a memorable entrance, especially thanks to his decision to go against the grain of the time and film in black-and-white Panavision. We see a bus driving down a two-lane highway, passing signs showing the distance to different Kansas towns, including the horrific Olathe. On the bus, a young female stumbles down the aisle to get a closer look at the pair of pointed-toe cowboy boots with buckles on its heels before creeping back. The shadowy man who wears the boots also has a guitar strung around his neck. A flame suddenly illuminates Robert Blake's face as he lights a cigarette and Quincy Jones' ominous yet jazzy score kicks in to start the credits. The sequence not only sets the tone for the film that follows, it also introduces us to the movie's most important participant — cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (though he didn't need to use the L. yet since his son, Conrad W. Hall, wasn't old enough to follow his dad into the business).
The movie spends its opening minutes introducing us to the soft-spoken Perry and getting him hooked up with Dick. Whereas Blake's Perry comes off as a puppy repeatedly kicked by his owner, Scott Wilson portrays Hickok as a cocky, livewire and a chatterbox — and Brooks gives him great lines, especially in the scenes where he and Blake drive around. "Ever seen a millionaire fry in the electric chair? Hell, no. There's two kinds of laws, one for the rich and one for the poor," Dick imparts as wisdom to Perry. When the two buy supplies for the planned robbery of the Clutter farm, Dick shoplifts some razorblades for no good reason, leading Perry to chastise him for taking such a risk for something so small. "That was stupid — stealin' a lousy pack of razor blades! To prove what?" Perry asks. Smiling, Dick replies, "It's the national pastime, baby, stealin' and cheatin'. If they ever count every cheatin' wife and tax chiseler, the whole country would be behind prison walls." Though in the two recent biographical films about Truman Capote's research into the case, it's strongly implied that Capote at least developed a crush on Smith and that Perry may have been gay. In Cold Blood never explicltly claims that Perry Smith was gay, but throughout the film Dick taunts him by
calling him "honey," "baby" or something along those lines. Hickock on the other hand chases every skirt he gets near and during the robbery/murder, Perry intervenes to stop Dick from raping the Clutters' 16-year-old daughter Nancy (Brenda Currin). Wilson made his first two feature films in 1967 and he landed roles in two of the biggest — this one and the eventual Oscar winner for best picture, Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night. The jaws of younger readers should hit the floor when they see Wilson's great work here and it slowly dawns on them that playing Dick Hickok is a younger incarnation of Herschel on AMC's The Walking Dead. When Perry and Dick do get together, they meet at Dick's father's house where Dick tries to aid his old man, who's slowly losing his battle with terminal cancer. (Veteran character actor Jeff Corey, who co-starred in the Brooks-scripted 1947 classic Brute Force, plays the elder Hickock.) Contrasting Capote's take with Brooks' version fascinates in the ways the works reflect each other yet, like a mirror, many things appear on the opposite side. The book introduces its readers to the Clutter family first before Perry and Dick enter the story (by name anyway). Brooks' screenplay reverses the order, beginning with the killers then letting us meet the Kansas family. However, both aim to draw parallels between the victims and their eventual murderers. "That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because
he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had — a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City's First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire," Capote described the Clutter patriarch. A few pages later in the first chapter, Perry Smith makes his entrance into Capote's book. "Like Mr. Clutter, the young man breakfasting in a cafe called the Little Jewel never drank coffee. He preferred root beer. Three aspirin, cold root beer, and a chain of Pall Mall cigarettes — that was his notion of a proper "chow-down." Sipping and smoking, he studied a map spread on the counter before him — a Phillips 66 map of Mexico — but it was difficult to concentrate, for he was expecting a friend, and the friend was late. He looked out a window at the silent small-town street, a street he had never seen until yesterday. Still no sign of Dick," Capote wrote. Brooks uses a visual link to draw victim and killer together, showing Herbert Clutter (John McLiam) performing his morning shave. As Clutter leans into the sink to rinse the remaining shaving cream from his face, the face that rises up and looks in the mirror sees Perry Smith, excising his excess whiskers as well.
The biggest difference between the book and the movie came with Brooks' introduction of a Truman Capote surrogate, a magazine reporter named Jensen, who travels to Holcomb to cover the case. Jensen isn't played in a way similar to the extremely distinctive Capote — such as the way that won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar for Capote, that Toby Jones played even better in Infamous or that Tru himself played best of all as Lionel Twain in Neil Simon's 1976 mystery spoof Murder By Death. Brooks wrote the Jensen character straight (no pun intended) and conventionally, even giving him a narrator's function at times. He doesn't precisely follow how Capote researched the story though because Capote didn't arrive in Kansas until after Smith and Hickok had been apprehended. In the movie, Jensen arrives almost from the beginning of the investigation. For the role of Jensen, Brooks cast another veteran character actor — Paul Stewart, whose first credited screen role was the butler Raymond in Citizen Kane. His 42-year film and television career ended in 1983 with an episode of Remington Steele and he died three years later, a month shy of his 88th birthday. After starting with Kane, a few of Stewart's eclectic highlights included Champion, Brooks' Deadline-U.S.A., The Bad and the Beautiful, Kiss Me Deadly, Hell on Frisco Bay, King Creole, Opening Night, Revenge of the Pink Panther,
S.O.B. and appearances on nearly every episodic police or detective show between the 1950s and the 1970s, including The Mod Squad. The Jensen character arrives around the same time that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation joins the case led by John Forsythe as Alvin Dewey, what may be Forsythe's best performance. Brooks gives him a lot of speeches — and some come off as less pristine than others, but Forsythe succeeds at selling most of them. Forsythe gets so identified with Dynasty or as a voice on Charlie's Angels that I think people forget that he really act when the material was there for him as it was here or in the short-lived and underrated Norman Lear sitcom The Powers That Be and having fun with Hitchcock in The Trouble With Harry (though no one could help Topaz much). He also was a replacement performer of one of the major roles in Arthur Miller's All My Sons on Broadway. Granted, didn't see him, but he had to show some chops to land that one. Of his filmed work though, I think In Cold Blood stands as the best. Sure, this speech reads as overwrought, but he pulled it off as he delivered it to Jensen. "Someday, someone will have to explain the motive of a newspaper to me. First, you scream, 'Find the bastards.' Till we do find 'em, you want to get us fired. When we find 'em, you accuse us of brutality. Before we go
into court, you give them a trial in the newspaper, When we finally get a conviction, you want to save 'em by proving they were really crazy in the first place. All of which adds up to one thing — you've got the killers," Dewey tells Jensen as he's taking down to the basement of the Clutter house. Dewey also serves as Mr. Exposition, explaining why these two numbskulls just out of prison would decide to go to this one particular farmhouse and rob this family, making sure to "leave no witnesses," even though Dick and Perry only gain $40 from the crime. A fellow investigator asks Dewey if Clutter might have been rich and Alvin sort of laughs knowingly. "Ahh — the old Kansas myth. Every farmer with a big spread is supposed to have a secret black box with lots of money in it." It isn't until the ending that you realize the Brooks gave Dewey some of that dialogue because he's supposed to symbolize the parts of the system that disgust him. Brooks ardently opposed capital punishment and he made no secret that he wanted the ending to make clear that it was murder. At Smith's hanging, another reporter asks Dewey about how much the executioner makes. "Three hundred dollars a man," Dewey answers. "Who does he work for? Does he have a name?" the reporter follows up and then poor John Forsythe has to deliver the clunkiest line of dialogue in the entire film. "Yes. We the people." Earlier, it had been the topic of discussion between Jensen and an imprisoned Hickock.DICK: Perry's the only one talking against capital punishment.
JENSEN: Don't tell me you're for it.
DICK: Hell, hangin' only getting revenge. What's wrong with revenge? I've been revenging myself all my life.
Part of the film's brilliance stems from the way Brooks structures the scenes detailing the crime itself. Toward the beginning of the movie, he presents what probably remains the greatest sequence of his directing career without actually showing the murder. Then, as the film winds down, he shows us what we didn't see and it's horrifying. Through a window of the farmhouse, we can see Nancy kneeling beside her bed saying her prayers. At that moment, it isn't made clear who could be seeing that — are Dick and Perry outside her window or are we simply the voyeurs right then? A split second later we spot Dick and Perry still sitting in the car beneath the cover of night. I guess it was us. The discordant sound of a doorbell suddenly fills the soundtrack and the viewer realizes he or she has moved inside the Clutter house — and sunlight shines through the windows. The camera tracks slowly around the furniture of the living room as it makes its way toward the front door. A woman and some other people open the door calling out for the Clutters. We faintly hear church bells tolling and the visitors wear their Sunday best. The woman continues to call out the Clutters by their first names as she ascends the stairs to the second floor. The film cuts quickly to the house's
exterior just as we hear the woman let out a horrified scream. Coming on the heels of The Professionals, it's as if somehow Brooks transformed himself from a competent director and damn good writer into a master of both. I don't know if the fact he had Conrad Hall working as his d.p. on both films made any sort of difference or if that proved to be just fortuitous, but that one-two punch sealed Brooks' artistic reputation forever beyond what respect he'd earned before. I've never been fortunate enough to see In Cold Blood on the big screen and allow Hall's haunting and beautiful mix of light and shadow to bathe me in its glow, but I did get the next best thing when in 1993 at the Inwood Theater in Dallas I saw Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels' documentary Visions of Light, a film devoted to the art of cinematography and highlighting some of its greatest practitioners and their best moments. One of the highlighted scenes comes from In Cold Blood when Robert Blake as Perry gives an emotional monologue about his father in his prison cell while he looks out the window at the rain coming down. The reflection of the raindrops cast shadows on Blake's face that make it appear as if he's crying. The moment stuns in its beauty — even when you learn that as so many say, accidents ends up producing some of the best parts of film. Hall admitted it hadn't been planned but the humidity in the prison set had pumped up the window's perspiration so much (as well as everyone else's) that's how the magic happened. Thankfully, YouTube had that clip.It must be said how good a performance Blake gives while at the same time acknowledging that it can't be viewed the way many of us assessed it originally. When a Naked Gun movie pops up and you see O.J. Simpson play an idiot and constantly take a beating, somehow that's OK. When you watch In Cold Blood again and see Blake give such a convincing and chilling performance as a mass murderer (especially when Forsythe's Alvin Dewey engages him in conversation during the ride to jail and Perry tells him, "I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought it right till the moment I cut his throat."), you can't help but recall that a few decades later, the actor stood trial and received an acquittal for killing his wife. It doesn't stand out as groundbreaking now, when last night's Mad Men said shit twice, but in 1967, In Cold Blood became the first major release to utter the word bullshit. For the second year in a row, Brooks received Oscar nominations for directing and adapted screenplay and Hall got one for cinematography. Quincy Jones also picked up a nomination for original score, though Jones didn't receive one for his music for In the Heat of the Night. I don't understand how the nimrods at the Academy left it out of the top five for best picture. They nominated two films that deserved to be there: Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. The film that won, a fine film but certainly expendable: In the Heat of the Night. A perceived prestige project of social significance that's overrated as hell: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The fifth nominee that would make no sense in any year: Doctor Dofuckinglittle. Basically, three out of the five films could have been tossed to make room for In Cold Blood. A few other more deserving 1967 titles: Cool Hand Luke, The Dirty Dozen, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Accident, Wait Until Dark, Point Blank, The Jungle Book. The National Board of Review did honor Brooks' direction. Brooks also received his sixth Directors Guild nomination and his sixth Writers Guild nomination. With the exception of the WGA, Brooks would never be named for any of the top awards again. In Cold Blood marked his best, but from there things went downhill fast.
One of the most difficult films to find (I've never seen it) for that recent a film with a best actress nomination. Brooks wrote his first original screenplay since Deadline-U.S.A. as a vehicle for wife Jean Simmons. From descriptions I've read, Simmons plays Mary Wilson, who was raised on romantic notions of marriage from the movies, finds herself in a funk on her anniversary and flies to the Bahamas on a whim, running into a free spirit (Shirley Jones) while there.
I missed this one as well. From TCM's web site; "In Hamburg, Germany, American Joe Collins (Warren Beatty) is considered by bank manager Kessel (Gert Fröbe) to be the most honest, hard-working bank security expert in the world. Unknown to Kessel, Joe has been devising a plan with his girlfriend, American expatriate prostitute Dawn Divine (Goldie Hawn), to take the contents from bank safe-deposit boxes owned by several criminals and place them into one owned by Dawn. Roger Ebert gave it three stars in his original review.
I wanted to see this one, but just ran out of time. Here's what qualifies as TCM's full synopsis: A former roughrider (Gene Hackman) matches wits with a lovely but shady lady-in-distress (Candice Bergen), as a drifting ex-cowboy (James Coburn) and a young, reckless cowboy (Jan-Michael Vincent) join in on a 700 mile journey. Ebert gave it three and a half stars in his original review.
I've actually seen this one. In fact, as we near the end of Brooks' career, I've watched two of the last three movies. As an unrelated sidenote, this year also marked the end of Brooks' 17-year marriage to Jean Simmons. If by chance you aren't familiar with this movie, think of it as sort of the Shame of the 1970s — and I don't mean the Ingmar Bergman movie. Diane Keaton stars as a teacher of deaf students whose affair with her college professor ends badly. She reacts as anyone would to a breakup — she starts cruising New York bars and picking up strangers for one-night stands while also developing a taste for drugs. The film definitely didn't belong in the genre of liberated women films of the 1970s as Keaton's character will pay. I saw this when I was a young man and I found it distasteful then, though it did have more sensible plotting than last year's Shame. Brooks directed his last performer to an Oscar nomination with Tuesday Weld getting a supporting actress nod. Keaton won the best actress Oscar for 1977 — but for Annie Hall. Brooks adapted a novel by Judith Rossen that was loosely based on a real incident, but most reviews by people who had read the novel seemed to indicate that Brooks changed key elements. Then, that matches the speech Brooks gave the movie's cast and crew on the first day of shooting, according to Douglass K. Daniel's Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks. "I'm sure that all of you have your own ideas about what kind of contributions you can make to this film, what you can do to improve it or make it better. Keep it to yourself. It's my fucking movie and I'm going to make it my way!" Daniel wrote. Goodbar also featured Richard Gere in one of his earliest roles. This clip plays off the tension of whether fun and games are at hands or something more dangerous.
Brooks referred to this film as "the biggest disaster" of his career. Later, he amended it slightly, blaming TV for purposely not coverage the film because the movie criticized "checkbook journalism." Having watched Wrong Is Right for the first time recently, this compels me to ask, "It did?" Sean Connery stars as a globetrotting reporting for what appears to be a CNN-like news station. The opening sequence contains some amusing moments, (including a young Jennifer Jason Leigh, nearly 30 years after her dad Vic Morrow played the worst punk in Brooks; Blackboard Jungle) but what could be cutting-edge satire of a media form just being born transforms into a scattershot satire involving fictional oil-rich African countries, the CIA, a presidential race and arms dealers trading suitcase nukes, Based on a novel, I hope that it had a plot, but Wrong Is Right just ends up being one of those strange satires like The Men Who Stared at Goats where once it ends you still don't know what the hell happened. This clip shows the opening sequence. Nothing after it deserves your attention.
I've got good news and bad news when it comes to Richard Brooks' final film. The good news: it brought him awards consideration again. The bad news: It was at the Razzies where it earned nominations for worst picture, worst director, worst screenplay and worst musical score. I'm not sure whether or not it relieved him that the film lost in all four categories, with Rambo: First Blood Part II taking worst picture, director and screenplay and Rocky IV winning worst score dishonors. I have not seen Fever Pitch which TCM hasn't even given a synopsis, but I know enough to tell you that Ryan O'Neal plays an investigator reporter doing a story on compulsive gambling who discovers he suffers from the problem. The subject of the movie came up on my Facebook page and Richard Brody, critic at The New Yorker, commented, "I saw Fever Pitch when it came out and loved every overheated second. Haven't seen it since then. Seeing The Connection has brought it back: no detached observer but a participant almost instantly in over his head." At the time of its release, it became one of the rare films that Ebert gave zero stars.
Following Fever Pitch, Brooks toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay about the blacklist, basing it around an incident in 1950 when fights broke out at the Directors Guild over the loyalty oath, but he didn't get around to it. The man who could be quite a bully on the set, had quite a bit of bitterness toward the industry by now as he showed in the second half of that 1985 interview.
Richard Brooks died of congestive heart failure on March 11, 1992, at 79. He did have close friends, but most of them had died themselves by then. The stepdaughter he basically raised as his own when he married Jean Simmons, Tracy Granger, made certain, his tombstone bore the only appropriate epitaph for the man.
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Labels: Arthur Miller, blacklist, Books, Capote, Connery, Diane Keaton, Ebert, Hackman, Hitchcock, J.J. Leigh, James Coburn, Jean Simmons, Jewison, Mailer, N. Lear, Neil Simon, P.S. Hoffman, W. Beatty
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Friday, May 18, 2012
Centennial Tributes: Richard Brooks Part I
By Edward Copeland
"First comes the word, then comes the rest" might be the most famous quote attributed to Richard Brooks, who began his life 100 years ago today in Philadelphia as Ruben Sax, son of Jewish immigrants Hyman and Esther Sax. He wrote a lot of words too — sometimes using only images. In fact, too many to tell the story in a single post. so it will be three. His parents came from Crimea in 1908 when it belonged to the Russian Empire. Like the parents of a great director of a much later generation and an Italian Catholic heritage, Hyman and Esther Sax also worked in the textile and clothing industry. Sax's entire adult working life revolved around the written word — even while he busied himself with other tasks. “I write in toilets, on planes, when I’m
walking, when I stop the car. I make notes. If I am working at a studio, I work at the studio in the morning, then come home. I am really writing two days instead of one. After the studio, I have my second day (at home). I write whenever I can,” Brooks said in an interview with Patrick McGilligan for his book Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s. After high school, he entered Temple University where he majored in journalism, though he left early when he realized the financial hardship that his tuition put on his parents. After drifting around the eastern half of the U.S. for a while by train, Sax returned to Philadelphia and got a job as s sports reporter at The Philadelphia Record where he first adopted the name of Richard Brooks. When he later got hired by The Atlantic City Press-Union, he met another reporter with an independent streak who would eventually make his way to Hollywood by the name of Samuel Fuller. Shortly after moving to New York for a job with that city's World Telegram newspaper, only leaving the sports beat behind for crime reporting. Brooks discovered that radio jobs provided bigger paychecks so he took a job at the 24-hour radio station WNEW, first as a disc jockey. "Played records 23 of those hours," McGilligan described in the introduction to his interview. Later, the station promoted him to news where he edited four news broadcasts a day newspaper jobs and wrote one. His work there led to a news job at NBC Radio's Blue Network where he also got to do commentary. At the same time, in 1938, Brooks tried his hand at playwriting, which led in 1940 to co-founding The Mill Pond Theater in Roslyn, N.Y., with David Loew. It's on that stage that Brooks made his debut as a director, taking turns with Loew helming productions at the summer theater. A falling out with other members of the theater sent Brooks to California where he worked for NBC Radio from the other coast. Among his duties was writing and directing the broadcast Richard Sands. Brooks also began writing a short story every day and reading it on air. “I’d written some short stories before, but none was published. Anyway, every day, another short story. Everything became grist for a short story. It began to drive me crazy…a different plotline every day. My ambition: write one story a week instead of a different story every day. In about 11 months, I wrote over 250 stories. I even devised a system whereby on Fridays I wouldn't have to write a short story. I called that day 'Heels of History.' I would take a fable and convert it. As a matter of fact, I used one afterwards in The Blackboard Jungle,” Brooks told McGilligan. Brooks gave the example of how he took the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk," citing how while he's portrayed as a hero, Jack's actually a dumb, bad kid who ignores his mother's order, shows little concern for an ailing fire and steal, even if it's from a giant. Granted, it doesn't appear to have been broadcast nationally but I wonder if Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine came across this when
conceiving Into the Woods?. Witches can be right, giants can be good… Brooks, like what happened when he learned radio paid more than newspapers, discovered in California that screenwriters earned bigger paychecks than broadcasters. He set up a meeting with George Waggner at Universal, where Waggner — who later would direct The Wolf Man and much episodic TV including many installments of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Batman — was the assistant producer of White Savage, a Maria Montez film directed by Arthur Lubin. Waggner asked if Brooks wrote because they desperately needed a rewrite. It was his first movie job and Brooks made "$100 (weekly) plus a day or two prorated, and they put my name on (the screen) as 'additional dialogue,'" Brooks told McGilligan. White Savage wasn't the first film Brooks worked on to be released though — two others and a serial came first. He also hung on to the NBC gig and got the chance to write for Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. Brooks produced countless sentences and paragraphs and but still lacked a "written by" credit on a screenplay credit. Once he did and, later, when he directed, he'd impact filmmaking both during and beyond his life, often with social themes few would touch (though occasionally in a heavy-handed way). He also managed to write some novels on the side — while with the Marines during World War II, where he'd also crank out a couple of screenplays (including his first credited one on Cobra Woman, directed by Robert Siodmak and again starring Montez) and report for Stars & Stripes as well while learning about filmmaking from Frank Capra's motion picture unit and eventually on his own editing combat footage into documentaries while attached to the 2nd Marines, Photographic Unit. If the Allies only needed a typewriter to defeat the Axis, Brooks might have been a good option for the weapon. First comes the word… 
Though Brooks' legend derives predominantly from his film legacy, he experienced his first rush of acclaim with the publication of his debut novel, written while stationed at Quantico at night in the bathroom, according to the account in Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks by Douglass K. Daniel. Several publishers rejected it until Edward Aswell at Harper & Brothers, who also edited Thomas Wolfe, agreed to take it — and he shocked Brooks further by telling him (after a few suggestions) they planned to publish in May 1945. This news flabbergasted Brooks who obtained a weekend pass to go to New York because Aswell insisted on informing him in person. Now Brooks had to return to Quantico where the top officers of the Corps about shit bricks when The New York Times published a big review of The Brick Foxhole soon after it hit shelves. (Orville Prescott's take was mixed, assessing it as compulsively readable but weak on characterization.) Its story of hate and intolerance within the Marines brought threats of court-martialing Brooks, since he'd ignored procedure and never submitted the novel to Marine officials for approval ahead of time. They wanted to avoid bad publicity, especially with all the good feelings as the war wound down. "There was nothing in that book that violated security, but their rules and regulations were not for that purpose alone," Brooks told Daniel. Aswell prepared to launch a P.R. counteroffensive with literary giants such as Sinclair Lewis and Richard Wright ready to stand by Brooks. In case you don't know the story of the novel, it concerns a Marine unit in its barracks and on leave in Washington. Through their wartime experiences, some of the men truly turned ugly, suspecting cheating wives and tossing hate against any non-white Christian. It turns out, though the real Marines let the matter drop, what bothered them
about the book wasn't the anti-Semitism or racist tendencies of the characters but the murder of a Marine some of the other Marines learn is gay. The U.S. Marines didn't want to promote the idea there might be homosexuals serving in the military. Ironically, they got their wish when The Brick Foxhole transferred to the big screen in 1947 as Crossfire. Brooks wasn't involved in the film version, but they made the murdered Army (The Marines even got to toss it off to another military branch entirely) soldier Jewish in the film. The film actually happens to be very good and was nominated for best picture and earned Robert Ryan his only Oscar nomination ever as supporting actor. What's even sadder is that Crossfire ends up being a much more powerful film against anti-Semitism than the creaky Gentleman's Agreement that took on the same subject that year and won best picture. If there weren't already enough ironic twinges in that story for you, Gentleman's Agreement, probably the grandfather of that tried-and-true staple "let a white guy be the hero of a story about another ethnic group" with Gregory Peck playing a Christian going undercover as a Jew to learn about anti-Semitism, won Elia Kazan his first directing Oscar. Edward Dmytryk, one of The Hollywood Ten, directed Crossfire, which dealt straight on with anti-Semitism and the effects of warfare on men. Then again, once Dmytryk served his jail time, he became the only one of the 10 to name names to HUAC because he wanted to work again.
While he didn't want to make a movie of The Brick Foxhole himself, another former newspaperman turned socially conscious film artist met with Brooks about working with his independent production company. At first, Mark Hellinger tried to lure Brooks away from Universal with the promise of doubling his salary if he'd adapt a play he liked into a movie, but before Brooks could consider that offer, Hellinger called with a more pressing matter. He was producing an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's famous short story The Killers. The problem: someone had to dream up what happened after the brief tale ends because it certainly wouldn't last 90 minutes otherwise. Hellinger flew Brooks out to meet Papa himself, but he didn't get much out of him but he did come up with an idea for what would happen after the story ends. Hellinger liked it and sent it to John Huston, who wrote the screenplay as a favor. Since both Brooks and Huston had contracts at other studios, neither got screen credits, so Ernest Hemingway's The Killers' official screenplay credit goes to Anthony Veiller, who received an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. He'd previously shared a nomination in the same category for Stage Door. The film also made a star out of Burt Lancaster, who would work with Brooks several times and be his lifelong friend. In fact, Lancaster would star in the next screenplay that Brooks wrote, a Mark Hellinger production directed by one of those people Edward Dmytryk eventually would name before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film, of course, would be the still-powerful Brute Force, the director, Jules Dassin.
John Huston wasn't happy. Producer Jerry Wald called him, excitement in his voice, to tell him he'd secured the rights to Maxwell Anderson's Broadway play Key Largo for Huston to direct. This didn't thrill Huston, who thought the play gave new meaning to the word awful. Written in blank verse, Anderson's play concerned a deserter from the Spanish-American War. People at a hotel do get taken hostage, but by Mexican hostages. Essentially, Huston tossed the play in the trash bin. Huston hired Brooks to co-write an in-title only version and, still pissed at Wald, barred him from the set. Part of Huston's anger stemmed from the HUAC nonsense, (His outrage would drive him to move to Ireland for a large part of the 1950s.) so he couldn't stomach adapting a play by Anderson whom he considered a reactionary because of his hate of FDR. Despite Huston's distaste for the project, he
turned it into a classic film with a little help from Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Claire Trevor in her Oscar-winning role and, last but certainly not least, Edward G. Robinson as exiled mobster Johnny Rocco, who likes to brag about the power he used to wield. "I made 'em — like a tailor makes a suit of clothes," he tells a former associate. Knowing the story of what happened prior to filming makes you chuckle when you see the credit that reads, "As Produced on the Spoken Stage." It's great to watch Robinson and Bogart go toe-to-toe. Rocco makes a particularly memorable first appearance, lounging upstairs in a hotel bathtub, looking in a way like a prediction of that famous photo of Dalton Trumbo that would be taken decades later. Bogart, updated to a returning WWII veteran, perfectly plays his role of Frank McCloud so that you never know if he's being savvy or scared of the crimnals terrorizing them. "You don't like it, do you Rocco, the storm? Show it your gun, why don't you? If it doesn't stop, shoot it," Frank says at one point, but when he gets a chance to grab a gun and take him out (though Rocco's men would certainly finish Frank afterward), he nonchalantly declares, "One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for." The script's dialogue crackles and for additional fun touches we get a great Max Steiner score and the multitalented German émigré Karl Freund as cinematographer. The most remarkable thing that Huston did though was to invite Brooks to stay on the set during the film's shooting, something he'd never done as a writer and that he talked about in this YouTube video in 1985.While I would have liked to have viewed more of Brooks' work that I've never seen (and to re-visit some which I have), time and availability, combined with his prolific nature and the industry's increasingly cavalier willingness to let both old and recent films fade into oblivion, proved to be a problem. After Huston's generosity, Brooks' directing debut would arrive two years later. Four films where Brooks worked
solely as a writer remained — the Paris-set spy thriller To the Victor; Any Number Can Play with Clark Gable as an underground casino owner advised by his doctor to get out of the business because of his heart disease; Mystery Street with detectives Ricardo Montalban and Wally Maher consult a Harvard forensics expert (Bruce Bennett) to solve a mystery when a decomposed body washes ashore; and Storm Warning, where model Ginger Rogers goes to visit her sister in a particularly unfriendly town and secretly witnesses a mob lynch a man that her sister (Doris Day) tells her was a reporter who denounced the KKK. Rogers' character gets a bigger shock when she realizes baby sis' husband participated in the lynching. After 1951, every film Brooks worked on he at least held the title of director, beginning with 1950's Crisis with Cary Grant as a doctor vacation with his wife in a small country when the dictator (José Ferrer) kidnaps them to force the doctor to treat his life-threatening condition. The doctor's ethics get tested by his oath and the idea that if he lets the man die, life for the country's people will improve. For a writing-directing debut, Brooks makes a pretty good start even if it doesn't come close to some of the films he wrote. His next four films as director and writer or co-writer I haven't seen, though I tried to watch the last one. The next film, The Light Touch (1952). starred George Sanders and Stewart Granger a collector of stolen art and an art thief, respectively, trying to get their hands on the masterpiece Granger stole and that his wife Pier Angeli stays busy counterfeiting
enters their lives. At the time, Granger was married in real life to Jean Simmons, who would become Brooks' second wife about 10 years later. The next two films both starred Bogart. First came Deadline-U.S.A. with Bogie playing an investigative reporter trying to expose a gangster as his paper faces imminent closing followed by Battle Circus co-starring June Allyson where they played medical personnel at a MASH unit during the Korean War. The final film, which I almost watched, was The Last Time I Saw Paris, based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and co-written by Brooks and the Epstein brothers, Van Johnson plays a former soldier returning to the city he liberated in the war, now despondent over his attempts to be a writer. He gets invited to parties with the city's beautiful people and finds one (Elizabeth Taylor) who enchants him. Unfortunately, the DVD transfer on Netflix’s rental copy proved abysmal. The Technicolor has faded beyond belief and it was filmed in an odd 1:75:1 spherical ratio, so every image looked distorted because they just flattened it full screen. After a few minutes, I had to shut it off. Apparently, it's a Warners Archive title now, but of course, they don't offer those for rental so the shitty DVDs will remain for people who don't believe in buying blind. I haven't caught his next two directing efforts either, but they stand out because they marked the first two times (and it only occurred three times) that Brooks directed screenplays written by someone else. In 1953, he directed Richard Widmark as a Korean War vet now serving as a tough drill instructor for new GIs bound for Korea while he's bitter that his request to return to Korea keeps being denied in Take the High Ground! In 1954, Brooks helmed Flame and the Flesh with Lana Turner as unlucky woman trying to get what she can for nothing visiting Europe who finds herself wooed by a gigolo.With 1955, Brooks wrote and directed the first film that truly garnered him an identity as more than a writer who directs but as a director with Blackboard Jungle, a film that admittedly manages to look both dated and timely simultanouesly, First, as so many old films did, it had to start with a long scroll explaining that American schools maintain high standards, but we need to worry about these juvenile
deliquents before this gets out of hand. It gets off to a rockin' start — literally — with opening credits that can't help but make you think of the original beginning to TV's Happy Days as Bill Haley and the Comets get everything moving to "Rock Around the Clock" as new English teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) arrives to work at all-boys high school North Manual Street. Most of the school overflows with miscreants, especially his class who start calling him "Daddy-O" to avoid pronouncing his name. (Though it's never been confirmed, many assume that the movie inspired Leiber & Stoller's lyric "Who called the English teacher Daddy-O?" in The Coasters' huge late '50s hit "Charlie Brown.") The ensemble Brooks assembled, including some of the "teens" who would make their names much later included Anne Francis as Dadier's pregnant (and, quite frankly, neurotic) wife; Louis Calhern as a veteran teacher left with nothing but cynicism and a
desire to beat the crap out of the punks; Richard Kiley as a nerdy math teacher with a love for jazz; Margaret Hayes as another new teacher who doesn't think about how she's dressing and nearly pays for it; Sidney Poitier as a student who appears to be one of the delinquents yet practices playing the piano and singing hymns; and Vic Morrow as the worst kid in the school, a downright criminal. Also, look for appearances by future writer-director Paul Mazursky as a student, Richard Deacon as a teacher and Jamie Farr as another student when he acted using the name Jameel Farah. While Blackboard Jungle offers much to praise, at times it comes off as too simplistic. It did dare to tackle bigotry and use the epithets. Sometimes, it feels eerily like the awful 1984 film Teachers. I kept expecting Calhern to turn out to be like the Royal Dano character and drop dead at his desk. I wonder what Brooks would have thought if he'd seen The Wire's fourth season. Blackboard Jungle earned Brooks his first Oscar nomination for best screenplay. Brooks' competition consisted of Millard Kaufman (who wrote Take the High Ground!) for Bad Day at Black Rock, Paul Osborn for East of Eden, Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart for Love Me or Leave Me and Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the teleplay that would be the basis for one of Brooks' 1956 films, for Marty. Chayefsky won his first Oscar. Nearly the entire cast excels in spite of some of the weaker parts of Blackboard Jungle (except Francis, burdened with a thankless role) but Morrow stands out in the ensemble as the worst punk. Tweet
Labels: blacklist, Bogart, Capra, Cary, Dassin, Doris Day, Edward G., Fiction, Fitzgerald, Fuller, Ginger Rogers, Glenn Ford, Hemingway, Huston, Lancaster, Liz, Mazursky, Poitier, Robert Ryan, Widmark
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Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone
By Edward Copeland
If I'd located one, a photo of the number "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid" from the first Broadway revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1972 that starred Phil Silvers as Pseudolus would be resting between the still from the original 1962 production starring (from left to right) John Carradine as Marcus Lycus, Jack Gilford as Hysterium, David Burns as Senex and the magnificent Zero Mostel as Pseudolus, which opened 50 years ago tonight, and the photo below it showing the cast of the second Broadway revival in 1996 that starred (from left to right) Nathan Lane as Pseudolus, Mark Linn-Baker as Hysterium, Ernie Sabella as Marcus Lycus and Lewis J. Stadlen as Senex. (Sadly, not only could I only find two black-and-white photos from the 1972 revival, they
never made a cast recording either, so we can't hear what Silvers sounded like singing the part. The song link takes you to the 1962 original Broadway cast recording) This musical comedy registers as a theatrical landmark on many levels, the most significant being that it marked the first time Stephen Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music for a Broadway musical. Stellar support surrounded Sondheim on all levels: I just named some of the cast, the future director of his landmark 1970s musicals, Harold Prince, produced Forum and the legendary George Abbott (then 75) directed. Jack Cole, currently undergoing a bit of a resurrection in terms of his reputation, choreographed the show and the book, based on three works by Plautus, famed playwright of ancient Rome (c. 254-184 B.C.). came from the pens of Burt Shevelove, a writer-director from early TV, and Larry Gelbart, whose best known credit at the time was as part of the many talented writers working for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows but who would go on to turn Robert Altman's MASH into the hit TV series M^A*S*H, be one of the Oscar-nominated (and credited) co-writers of Tootsie, writer of one of the first great HBO movies, Barbarians at the Gate, and author of the book for the Cy Coleman/David Zippel musical City of Angels. On a personal level, Forum holds a special place in my heart because it happens to be the first musical that I ever saw performed live — and Carradine played Marcus Lycus in the production. No, I'm not much older than you thought. I was only 10 at that time and it happened to be a touring summer stock production 17 years after he created the role in the original Broadway show. Somehow, it seems only appropriate that both the first Broadway musical and the last Broadway show I saw featured scores by Sondheim (Passion and Assassins, if you're curious) and so did my irst live musical, even if at 10 I hadn't the slightest notion who Sondheim was. Anyone who knows me personally or has read this blog for any length of time realizes what a devoted Sondheim acolyte I am and, without question, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum certainly must be considered the most entertaining and crowd-pleasing of all musicals for which he composed the score. As much as I love his music, it's also sadly true in far too many cases that Sondheim's scores often end up being vastly superior to the books of his musicals. With Forum, that cannot be said. When you read what Sondheim wrote in his book Finishing the Hat or heard what others said in reviews, Forum may stand as the rare instance of a Sondheim musical where the book actually supersedes the score in quality. Hey, it was Sondheim's first produced show as composer as well as lyricist after all. Before that, he'd only served both functions on his unproduced musical Saturday Night. His Broadway experiences had been limited to being the lyricist (to Leonard Bernstein's music) on West Side Story and (to Jule Styne's music) on Gypsy. As we begin, I should tell you that if you see a link, by all means click on it. For example, at the top the first link on a song title takes you to the original Broadway cast recording of that song from the 1962 production. Sometimes the links direct you to videos, other times just to the songs, but I wanted to get as much comparison in as I could.
Now, a lot of funny things did occur on the way to the Forum (though, technically speaking, no character in the show ever discusses a trip to that famous location in ancient Rome), but getting the musical to Broadway proved to be an entirely different matter. That trip encountered many bumps that threatened to scuttle the production before Forum ever crossed the New York state line, let alone landed on a Broadway stage. Those associated with the show who still walk among us might be able to look back with some relief now (though in Finishing the Hat, Sondheim does deal himself some heavy self-criticism about his work on the show even now, despite the fact that Forum remains the biggest hit of his career). Sondheim writes that he, Gelbart and Shevelove wrote Forum over a four-year period and that the show went through two major producers, two major directors and a major star before getting to the rehearsal stage. Meryle Secrest's biography, Stephen Sondheim: A Life, spells out the specifics of his statement.
Secrest quotes Sondheim about the dogged pursuit of Jerome Robbins, who would never settle on a decision about whether to direct the show or not. "The problem was we went to numbers of producers and directors. Jerry Robbins kept saying yes, then no, and then yes, and then no. We went to Joshua Logan and he wanted more naked boys and things like that. I went to Hal (Prince) and he said, 'Listen, kid, you know me. I hate farce.'…David Merrick agreed to produce. Then we were trying to get Jerry Robbins again. And Jerry said, 'OK, I'll tell you what. I'll do it, but I won't do it with David Merrick. You have to get it away from him." In Secrest's book, Sondheim expresses guilt for making up a lie to Merrick about the show not happening and returning an advance to Merrick but it did convince Prince to sign on though Robbins bailed again. Evemtually, they got George Abbott on board as director, but Robbins would return to play a pivotal role. The search for a lead also proved difficult. Their first choice, Phil Silvers, who eventually would portray Marcus Lycus in Richard Lester's 1966 film version and Pseudolus in the 1972 revival, rejected it out of hand because he couldn't perform while wearing his glasses and he'd be unable to navigate without them. Milton Berle agreed to star but when Gelbart and Shevelove turned in a draft of the book that would have run about four hours and received orders to make cuts (which they did), Berle claimed they removed his best stuff and quit. That's how Mostel got the part. In Secrest's book, Sondheim said that years later Mostel would claim that he didn't want to do Forum, but the truth was he needed the work badly and leaped at the part. Mostel's career, as had many others, had suffered during the McCarthy era, the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the Hollywood blacklist. One hitch: When Robbins returned to help the troubled show later, he'd face the glare of Mostel because Robbins had served as a friendly witness at the HUAC hearings. To make things worse, one of the names he named was Madeline Gilford, wife of Jack Gilford, who was playing Hysterium. Sondheim though sensed other problems.
Sondheim sought the advice of his friend James Goldman, who at this point in his career had written an original play that made it to Broadway and later would pen both the play and movie of The Lion in Winter as well as the book for Sondheim's Follies. Goldman also did some songwriting, so Sondheim let him look at the book for Forum and listen to the songs he had at that point, when the opening number was a song called "Love Is in the Air." According to what Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat, Goldman labeled Gelbart and Shevelove's book as "brilliant" and expressed enthusiasm about Sondheim's score. "The problem," Goldman said, "is they don't go together." Sondheim knew what Goldman meant, but he didn't start doing anything about it right then. Sondheim wrote that he'd been "trained by (Oscar) Hammerstein to think of a song as a one-act play which either intensifies a moment or moves the story the forward.…Prodded by my academic musical training as well as by Oscar, I had become accustomed to thinking of songs as being structured in sonata form: statement, development and recapitulation. For Oscar, it was first act, second act, third act. He tried to avoid writing lyrics that confined themselves to one idea, the traditional approach of every lyricist in the theater and the standard function of songs before he came along and revolutionized the way writers thought about musicals. Show Boat hadn't convinced them but once Oklahoma!, Carousel and South Pacific had become enormous hits, most songwriters converted. The success of those were not entirely beneficial however." In Finishing the Hat, Sondheim noted something Gelbart wrote in his introduction to the published libretto of Forum. "Broadway in its development of musical comedy had improved the quality of the former at the expense of a great deal of the latter," Gelbart wrote.
At one point — frustrated as he tried to unlearn all he knew about composing and fearing he did the show more harm than good — Sondheim even suggested Forum should just be a straight play, but Shevelove said it would be too frenetic and the audience would have no space to breathe (without songs). He informed the composer that the few surviving plays by Plautus sll had songs. Sondheim did end up composing an opening song more in keeping with the spirit of the show that would follow called "Invocation." That also would be dropped but would return in a 1974 farce that Shevelove "freely adapted" from Aristophanes called The Frogs and to which Sondheim added "Instructions to the Audience," which is the only way you can listen to that number now, as in this cut from its 2004 Broadway debut sung by Nathan Lane, Roger Bart and the ensemble. Sondheim writes honestly in his book that he didn't think much of George Abbott's talent or sense of humor — saying they had to explain a joke to the old man once, but Abbott's reputation for saving shows had achieved legendary status and as the show suffered in Washington to scathing reviews and small audiences in big houses (50 people filling 1,000 seats) not laughing a bit, Sondheim described to Secrest the only time Abbott made him laugh "when he said, 'I dunno. You had better call in George Abbott.'" Obviously, that wasn't an option, but given Robbins' worship of Abbott, that made it easier to call him in, though they worried about Mostel's reaction. Part of this can be seen in a clip from a one-man show called Zero Hour written and performed by Jim Brochu and presented at the West Coast Jewish Theatre.
At the time Robbins named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he didn't really have a career beyond New York, so his motives always have proved puzzling and he never settled the question before his death, The most pervasive theory, as seen on an American Masters profile on PBS a couple of years ago and detailed in biographies such as this one on The Official Masterworks Broadway Site that he got blackmailed into testifying out of fear that the rather open secret of his homosexuality would be revealed. (He felt secure
enough to declare himself gay to get out of service in World War II.) The site says, "Robbins was booked for an appearance on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show (The Toast of the Town), but three weeks before the event, Sullivan, convinced that Robbins was a Communist (he had attended the notorious Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1949), canceled the contract. It was Sullivan — threatening at one point to expose him as a homosexual if he did not deliver (directly to Sullivan himself!) a list of names of leftists in show business — who set the machinery in motion that brought Robbins under investigation by the FBI and landed him, two years later, before the House Un-American Activities Committee." Whatever the truth might be, Robbins' uncredited contributions to Forum not only saved the musical, they also changed the way new musicals got their starts forever.
Earlier in the flirtation process, before tryouts had started and Robbins continued to flirt with the idea of directing the show, he demanded that the principals cast the show, get them all in a room to read the script for him while Sondheim performed the songs. In essence, Robbins invented the theater workshop. Prince and Sondheim actually found it helpful at pointing out flaws in the show and repeated the process with their classic collaborations in the 1970s, though Sondheim doesn't like what the practice ended up evolving into later. "What had begun as a learning experience for the authors became transmogrified into thinly disguised backers' auditions," he wrote in Finishing the Hat. As for his contributions to Forum, as soon as he saw "Invocation," Robbins recognized the problem. Secrest wrote in her biography of Sondheim, According to Sondheim, (Robbins) said, "The opening
number is killing the show. You open with a charming number and the audience does not know what it's in for, that it's a real farce. You've got to write an opening number that says baggy pants." Sondheim went back to the drawing board and the show's most famous song, "Comedy Tonight," was born and Robbins did the staging, specifically telling Sondheim to leave the jokes to him. Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat that Robbins also staged the massive Act II chase, meaning that though he received no official credit, Robbins essentially choreographed the two most important pieces of movement in the show. Still, it isn't as if no one realizes he did it. When Robbins directed his own tribute show, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, re-creating his most famous stage creations the show included "Comedy Tonight" with Jason Alexander taking on the Pseudolus role for that number. In fact, three men have been nominated for Tonys for playing Pseudolus in the three Broadway productions of Forum and a fourth inhabited the role for one scene in another show and all four — Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jason Alexander and Nathan Lane — took home Tony Awards. No other part in theater history can make that claim. The song has attained a level of such popularity you'd be amazed by the permutations you can find on the Internet. In fact, I did a separate post on those alone. Unfortunately, no visual record of the 1962 version exists. Instead, we'll start with a poorly shot bootleg of the 1996 revival starring Nathan Lane as Pseudolus (and Prologus, the character the lead actor plays when introducing the show.) If unfamiliar with the show or what I'm talking about, the song spells it out pretty clearly. I actually got to see the 1996 revival.After the disastrous runs in Washington and New Haven, Conn., once Robbins had put the bug in Sondheim's ear about the opening number, he writes in Finishing the Hat that "Comedy Tonight" was composed over the course of a weekend. What is it about pressure
and/or inspiration that some of the greatest works seem to be created when it gets to be crunch time? Most people know the story of Arthur Miller writing the first act of Death of a Salesman in less than a day. Forum opened 50 years ago tonight at The Alvin Theatre where it played through March 7, 1864 when it transferred to The Mark Hellinger Theatre for two months before completing its run through Aug. 29, 1965 at The Majestic Theatre for a total of eight previews and 964 performances. In 1966, a film version with Mostel and Gilford repeating their stage roles and featuring future Phantom of the Opera Michael Crawford opened. Richard Lester, hot off directing The Beatles' films A Hard Day's Night and Help!, helmed the Forum movie. The film eliminated some songs but it also gave Sondheim his first opportunity to design a song specifically for a movie. In Finishing the Hat, he writes about penning a different version of "Free," heard here from the 1962 cast album. He confesses to being a lifelong movie buff and having made some home movies where he especially enjoyed the editing process. (Who doesn't want to see some of these as long as they're suitable for general audiences?) Lester told Sondheim, the composer wrote, that he approved and that his idea would work but Lester never filmed the sequence. "(A)lthough in the finished print, there's a curiously clumsy cut at the place where I'd cued the song, which makes me think it was at least planned. Rereading it now, I wish he had. I didn't get the chance to design another for 26 years, when I wrote two sequences for the movie of A Little Night Music, one of which was filmed the way I wrote it, one of which was not." This clip shows Mostel doing the song during the movie's opening credits.While Sondheim accepted Shevelove's notion that the musical numbers allowed the audience a chance to take a breath from the chaos consuming the stage, he still disagrees to this day about the suitability of stopping a farce for a song. In Finishing the Hat, he wrote, "Although I do think that the book of Forum is the tightest, most satisfyingly plotted and gratifyingly written farce I've ever encountered, I don't think that farces can be transformed into musicals without damage — at least, not good musicals. The tighter the plotting, the better the farce, but the better the farce the more the songs interrupt the flow and pace. Farces are express trains; musicals are locals." We can't see what Mostel looked like onstage singing "Comedy Tonight" in 1962, but we do have a clip of him performing a condensed version of the song at the 1971 Tony Awards.
"I had to write one-joke songs so I picked spots for them where the situations would supply substance: Songs like 'Impossible' and the drag version of 'Lovely,' which were dramatically static but theatrically funny. My mistake was that in trying to unlearn everything Oscar (Hammerstein) had taught me and write static songs which were nothing more than playful, I felt I had to justify them with cleverness, by juggling with words, leaning on rhymes, puns, alliteration and all the other boilerplate devices of light verse," Sondheim wrote. (Links: "Impossible" and "Lovely (Reprise)" both from 1962 original cast album.) Both in his own book and Secrest's, Sondheim praises producer Hal Prince's faith in the show, saying that most producers who endured the tryouts that Forum did in New
Haven and Washington would have closed the show down and never brought it to New York. Prince didn't — and it paid off. The show would turn out to be a blockbuster, admittedly one with a few more hurdles to clear before it reached that point. When Robbins came in to help, everyone worried about the volatile Mostel's reaction. However, he'd behaved as a complete professional with nary an explosion up to this point in the chaotic production, according to Secrest's book. As they hurriedly rehearsed "Comedy Tonight" in New York, the stress weighed on the actors as Sondheim recounted in Secrest's book. "'We got to the afternoon of the first preview with our opening number, the one we hoped would change the show. And we were rehearsing and Zero kept screwing up his lines.' So once when Robbins stopped to consult with Tony Walton, the set designer, Sondheim went down to the footlights — 'I never, never give an actor a critical note in front of other people' — to correct one of Mostel's lines. 'Right, right, right,' Mostel said impatiently. They began again, and again Robbins stopped. Mostel was still making mistakes. 'And I said, "Please, I know you've got a lot on your mind, but it's the plural, not the singular." "Yeah. Yeah." The third time, Jerry stops again — 'Zero, it's the plural!' — and Mostel says in a booming voice that fills the entire theater and makes everyone start and turn around, he says, "Well, maybe if you'd write me a funny line, you cocksucker!" In front of everybody.' There was a silence that lasted for about four seconds. 'And in the back of the house, Mr. Abbott went, "All right, from the top please" and clapped his hands." Sondheim goes on to describe how Abbott defuse the tension that quickly and he realized that was part of the man's greatness. He also believes that Mostel made him the scapegoat for the anger he wanted to hurl in Robbins' direction.
In wrapping up this tribute's first half, I must praise the invention of Twitter, which introduced me to a man who not only witnessed the original production of Forum (as well as other original Broadway shows such as South Pacific with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, Fiddler on the Roof, also starring Mostel and featuring Bea Arthur, Bert Convy, Leonard Frey and Austin Pendleton and, the one that makes me green with envy, Ethel Merman in Gypsy — with Jack Klugman along as Herbie), but whose father became Mostel's doctor and, because of similar backgrounds, eventually the actor's good friend. Pietr Hitzig, also a doctor, wrote me briefly about his memories of those days. "I am 70 years old and as a NYC child had no idea what fantastic theater I was seeing.…Zero died at only 62 years old and had his most productive years destroyed by the witch hunters at the HUAC but is immortal for Fiddler, Forum and The Producers.…Nobody can play any of those roles today without remembering the bushy eyebrows and satanic leer," Hitzig wrote. On Twitter, Hitzig tweeted that his father saw Fiddler on the Roof at least 100 times. Imagine how inexpensive Broadway tickets cost to allow that back in the 1960s. I only paid to see one Broadway show twice (Rent) and saw another a second time because one ticket came to me as a freebie (Ragtime). (Piotr corrected me after I posted this that his father didn't pay all those times. He got free tickets.) "My father was a renowned Park Avenue doctor but lonely as hell as was Zero. They, children of the shtetl loved each other like brothers. Both were funny but had an angry side that alienated their families. After a busy day, rather than come home, my dad would head for Broadway and stand backstage as his idealized childhood in Fiddler was played out once again," Hitzig wrote. In The New York Times archives, I found a funny story that did illustrate Mostel's tendency to get riled. The British comedian Frankie Howerd, who would play Pseudolus in the London premiere of Forum in fall 1963, came to see the U.S. version earlier in 1963. Seated in the front row, Howerd tended to cover his mouth when amused so Mostel misinterpreted that he wasn't laughing at the show at all. "He is not laughing." the article says Mostel complained between numbers. The next day, Howerd, in an apologetic tone, insisted that he enjoyed the show. "I'm not a laugher. I don't lean back and flash my teeth. Actually, if anyone was frightened that night it was me, seeing how good Mostel was," Howerd told Louis Calta at The Times.
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Labels: Altman, Arthur Miller, Awards, Beatles, blacklist, Books, Gelbart, H. Prince, Hammerstein, HBO, J. Carradine, J. Robbins, Merman, Music, Musicals, Phil Silvers, Sid Caesar, Sondheim, Theater Tribute
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