My Life as a Mankiewicz (50 page)

He told me Jack Webb would read off a teleprompter a lot. He had those long speeches. It was the most economically done television show in the world. Harry was with Jack six years on the show. He said, “I had the same fucking suit, every episode. The only place where you're on for six years and you don't want any of the wardrobe. It's that one suit.” They would do scenes from several shows at the same time where Jack's standing on the left and Harry's standing on the right and they interview the hotel manager behind the desk. It's three shots; Jack, Harry, and the hotel manager. When they're finished, they wheel the hotel desk out and put in a fireplace and the girl is sitting there. They're interviewing her, and the lighting is exactly the same, the same three-setup. Harry said, “The efficiency of it was just unbelievable. Nobody moved a fucking light.” Jack became huge; Mark VII Productions, Marty Milner and Ken McCord,
Adam-12; Emergency!
with Julie London and Bobby Troup.

A Master and a Disaster

Our production manager, Don Zepfel, called me. “You know who's available? Bob Boyle.”

I said, “Bob Boyle. I know the name.”

He said, “How about the guy who built the Bates Motel for
Psycho?
He did all of Hitchcock.”

I said, “Oh, jeez, let's get him on.” Boyle was seventy then.

One of the things that was most gratifying to me was when he got the honorary Oscar years later. They did a montage of all of Bob Boyle's work, and the last shot was Danny and the Virgin Connie Swail pulling in to park under the Hollywood sign. I wanted to have them kiss for the first time under the sign in the parking lot. The problem is there is no parking lot. The Hollywood sign is stuck in the middle of a mountain. Bob Boyle said to me, “No problem. We're going to have a beautiful parking lot and the Hollywood sign.” It's such a staggering shot, the Hollywood sign and the glow over the parking lot as they pull in. The picture came out in the summer, and the people who lived on the streets above the sign had to call the police because there were so many teenagers who wanted to park underneath it that they were creating traffic jams. There's no parking lot there; it looked so realistic. Bob Boyle was one of those people you meet in your life and you say, “My God, I worked with John Williams, who wrote a score, or Vittorio Storaro, who shot a picture.” There was nothing he couldn't do, and do quickly and do well and do better than you thought.

I don't like to fire people. We had a Universal special effects guy named Whitey Krumm, and it took him three tries to blow up a car in Venice. It was just pitiful. Six cameras were rolling, and nothing. Then the trunk flew open. We finally blew it up. Bob Weiss was the producer. He worked on the
Naked Gun
movies. I said, “Bob, listen, here's where the producer comes in. Whitey's fired.” I don't like to throw tantrums on the set. It's not in my nature. I said to Bob, “As of tomorrow morning, I've got to have somebody else. Can you call Universal now?”

My bungalow at Universal was next to director Joe Sargent's bungalow. He was, for his sins, doing
Jaws: The Revenge
, starring Michael Caine. Apparently, Michael had three months free. I was walking out of my bungalow one morning, shooting on the lot, and I heard Joe Sargent's voice. “Mank?”

I said, “What.”

“Did you fire a guy named Whitey on your picture a couple of days ago?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Why?”

“They just put him in charge of the shark on my movie.”

I said, “Joe, maybe he's good at sharks. You don't have any cars blowing up in your movie, do you, because he's not good at that.” I never saw
Jaws: The Revenge
, but I read a not-so-good review. “And the shark moving across the water looks like a copy of the
New York Sunday Times.”
I thought, There he is. Whitey strikes again.

“We're Shooting a Movie Here!”

We are shooting on the 405 Freeway, which you're really not supposed to do, but we have so much police help. It's a car shot with mounts involving Danny and Tom. We keep shooting and shooting, and now it's getting to be rush hour on the 405. Of course, we have our own cars behind Danny and Tom's car, so we're slowing everything down. People are honking, and there's lots of obscenities being yelled. The motorcycle sergeant comes over and says, “Boss, I think we better call it a day here. There's going to be a revolution.”

So we pull Danny and Tom's car over, and I say to Danny, “That's it for today. We're causing a lot of trouble.”

Danny gets out of the car in his Jack Webb garb, looks at all the people driving by, and says, “Sure, maybe they've been waiting two years to go to Hawaii and this is the only flight they can take and if they miss it, they can't get on another. And sure, maybe somebody's fiancée is arriving from Europe and now he's not going to meet her and she's going to be all upset and go home. And sure, maybe a guy back there is having heart palpitations and he can read ‘Emergency Hospital' a mile away but he can't get there. But don't they realize, we're shooting a movie here!” His mind was like a steel trap. Half of Danny is this wild guy on the Harley, John Belushi's best friend, and a habitual pot smoker. The other half of him just loves the police, has impressionist paintings, has been married to the same woman, Donna Dixon, for twenty-five years, and has got a farm. Lorne Michaels once said about him, “Dan Aykroyd's ultimate fantasy would be to commit the perfect crime and then arrest himself.”

In the movie, he's introducing his grandmother to Connie Swail. He says, “And Granny, this is the Virgin Connie Swail.” She says, “You're kidding?” We got a big laugh with, “Granny, this is the Virgin Connie Swail”—he always called her the Virgin. Dan said to me, “Do you think that's going to offend people, that I say the Virgin Connie Swail?”

I said, “No, Danny, believe me, it will get a laugh.”

He said, “Okay, I just don't want to offend anybody with that.” So Danny, who could be this absolute wild man, also had a conservative side.

Daryl Gates was very concerned in the beginning because Danny wanted to go on robbery/homicide calls out of Parker Center. We did some ride-alongs, and it was easier then than it is now. Daryl Gates was a very straight-arrow guy. He asked me, “You're not making fun of the police, the LAPD, in this movie, are you?”

I said, “Well, Chief, it is a comedy with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, but it's affectionate. We're laughing with the LAPD, not at the LAPD.”

He said, “Good.”

He was so nervous about this picture that when we started previewing it, he would send assistant chiefs down to sneak into the previews to tell him. We were in Long Beach and an assistant chief of police introduced himself to me and said, “I'm going to go back and tell Daryl I laughed like hell. There's been one of us at every preview.”

The Picture Comes Together

We previewed the picture very long. I asked Frank Price if I could have a free preview without opinion cards. I said, “Then I'll see where I want to cut. I don't want anybody from the studio there. I just want to run it once and take a look.”

He said, “Absolutely.”

Well, the son of Sid Sheinberg (president and COO of Universal Pictures) sneaked in and the next day said, “This thing's so long. Oh, God. We've got a disaster on our hands.” I'm having lunch in the commissary, and Lew Wasserman, king of all he surveyed, comes over to the booth and says to me, “It's supposed to be a comedy.” And I thought, oh, fuck, it was Sheinberg's kid. So we decided to go back and reshoot a couple of scenes and connect and cut, but the picture never was in trouble.

Tom Hanks loved the movie so much, loved the experience so much, he was pissed off that we were shooting two new scenes. It's hard getting actors back into their parts, because they haven't played them in four or five months. Getting them back into that mood that they were in, recreating the atmosphere in which people can do their best work, is tough to do. It was very rare in the thirties, forties, and even into the fifties that people reshot unless there was something glaring. Then it became a matter of course.
Fatal Attraction
—the Michael Douglas, Glenn Close movie—shot three endings because one ending didn't work in a preview. It suddenly was not abnormal to hear that a movie was reshooting. Let's say you have a bumpy twenty minutes inside your movie where it just isn't hanging together right, slows down, and you realize that you can do a one- or two-minute scene, bridge the gap, and keep the movie going. You watch the rushes every day and you say, “Boy, we nailed that. We nailed that.” Everybody's laughing. Then you put the whole thing together and you say, “Oh, boy, are we in trouble here.” Then the work starts. It's really the second making of the movie. That's why it's good to get a movie on its feet as quickly as possible and show it to an audience.

We reshot a couple of scenes, and suddenly, the picture came together. Danny, doing his Webb, goes to see Tom in his apartment in Venice. One of the extras passing Danny was Japanese. Danny said, “It would be funny if I talked to him in Japanese.” Well, it was so funny that I ruined the first take because I started roaring with laughter. I said to the assistant director, “I'm leaving. Just let them do the second take and print it, all right? If it's fine with Danny, it's fine with me.”

The next day in rushes, people were pounding the seats during this scene. We previewed the movie, and out of three hundred people, maybe ten people laughed. I thought, it's because the picture's too long. We shortened the picture, but we still had the Japanese guy in. Seven people laughed. I said, “Okay, we're doing this wrong. When Danny meets him, give me a Japanese gong.” We do that; nothing. I called Danny and said, “I really hate to break your heart, but say sayonara to the Japanese guy. So far, I would say fifteen hundred people have seen this movie, and twenty-one have laughed. I can't explain it.” The last thing you did at Universal was to send the answer print up to Lew Wasserman's house. We got two thumbs up from Lew, thank God.

Opening night, the premiere was a benefit for DARE, the police drug education program, and everybody arrived in old cars. We had the normal complement of half a dozen or so motorcycle cops. All the cops wanted to be on
Dragnet.
Sometimes we had as many as sixteen. When we broke for lunch, motorcycle cops would appear from everywhere, and we gave them all lunch and invited their families down. And I've never met a better bunch of people in my life. They were terrific.

Dragnet
Redux?

We were the number four grosser of the year, and it was a big hit. It's never stopped running on cable. Universal was going to do a sequel, but it was really difficult because Tom had done
Big
, then this picture's a hit, and he was impossible to get back to play Danny's sidekick. He was already eclipsing Danny. At one point, it was going to be Danny and John Candy. They were thinking about it. But I didn't want to write the script and neither did Danny. The Farrelly Brothers wrote a draft. It was early in their career. It didn't hang together, but there was hysterical stuff in there. Danny and Tom are driving along and they see a Mexican guy about to jump from a roof. They scream to a stop, Danny runs out. You cut to the roof, and you see that he's working there as part of a group, but he's the only one they can see. Danny looks up at him and says, “Sure, maybe you're living twenty in two rooms and you have no health insurance. And sure, maybe you don't speak English and you can't understand a word I say. And sure, maybe nothing's ever going to happen to you in your life.” The guy's staring at him. Danny keeps going, “And sure, your wife is probably ill, and your children don't like—” and he depresses this guy so much, the guy jumps.

Movie Stars and Actors

The kind of stardom that Tom Hanks finally attained is very difficult to predict. I knew he was a wonderful actor. But everybody was the next comedy star. I was the next John Landis. Danny called Tom the white Eddie Murphy. I said to Danny, “I think he's a lot more than that.” I don't think the world had seen Tom do drama until
Forrest Gump
and
Philadelphia
, although
Nothing in Common
, the picture he did with Jackie Gleason, had some dramatic scenes in it.

There are so many wonderful actors that the audience never accepts as a star; case in point, Jeff Bridges. You can go all the way back to
Star Man
, or you can watch him in
Seabiscuit;
just a wonderful actor. He had the lead in a lot of pictures, but the audience said, “No, you are not a movie star. You're a wonderful actor, but you're not a movie star because we say so.” And Tom Hanks is a movie star because they say so. One day I was working at my desk at Warner Brothers. Outside, I heard clink, clink, clink. I looked up, and it was Clint Eastwood dressed in a western outfit walking to a stage. He was doing a picture called
Pale Rider.
I said to my assistant, Annie, “Come in here. That's a movie star.” When the audience accepted him, it was on a whim. He was on
Rawhide
on television, and then he couldn't get a job. He went over to Italy, and Sergio Leone rediscovered him, and he became the Man with No Name in
A Fist Full of Dollars.
And
bang
, he was a movie star. Demi Moore, very good actor and, for a time, the highest paid actress going. She was in lots of pictures. But the audience never said, “Yes, you're a movie star.” Julia Roberts, for at least ten years, was a movie star, and she still could be, given the right part. Audiences would go because Julia Roberts was in it.

The best movie stars are wonderful actors. Jimmy Stewart is the perfect example of Tom Hanks. Jimmy Stewart could play farce comedy in
Harvey
with an imaginary eight-foot white rabbit, he could make you cry in
It's a Wonderful Life
, he could play a hard-boiled guy in a western, he did five pictures for Hitchcock, he could play sophisticated comedy like
The Philadelphia Story.
The audience trusted him. Audiences are used to paying, in those days, two bucks or five bucks, or today, ten bucks, to see a movie star. In public, they tend to stare at Robert Redford. “That's Robert Redford, that's Robert Redford.” They don't go up to him. Sean Connery, when I was with him on location, was very intimidating to people; their jaw would drop. He was very difficult to approach. You walk down the street with Robert Wagner, everybody goes up to him because he's a television star. My theory is people are used to watching him while they're lying in bed, or they're on the can, or they're getting laid, or the kids are running around the house. They feel like those people are part of their family. They watch them for free. So television stars are very approachable. Robert Wagner is the perfect example of a guy who's been a star in various ways on television and in movies for fifty years. Everybody feels like they know him, and he spans so many generations. Women in their fifties and sixties are looking at him from
Hart to Hart
or
It Takes a Thief
, older people are looking at him from the movies in the fifties, and little kids know him as Number Two in the Austin Powers movies with Mike Myers. He's just part of the furniture in a wonderful way.