Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (11 page)

Not long after the apartment scene, the mystery is solved: Ralph, the night man at the town diner, accidentally killed Colbert in a robbery to pay for Delores Purdy’s abortion. Next day, Tibbs boards his train back to Philadelphia. The script has the two men saying a perfunctory goodbye; in the film, however, Gillespie turns and says, “Virgil? You take care, you hear?” The men trade careful smiles — editor Hal Ashby cuts between them twice to cement the unspoken bond — and Ray Charles sings the exit theme. 
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The film premiered in New York on August 2, 1967, and in Los Angeles on August 23, after which it went into general release, collecting nearly $11 million in rentals. The reviews were strongly positive, but it encountered a strange backlash from three distinct, yet overlapping, audiences. First, Poitier had been facing growing resistance from the African-American community for his frequent casting as a near-saint despite the barrier-shattering strength of his roles. Then the film itself suffered from critics who, while applauding its craft, got picky about how easy it was to take sides. Then there was the audience who, the filmmakers hoped, would see the movie as something more than a racial polemic. Silliphant bristled when they didn’t.

“I have been quoted and misquoted on this point for two decades,” he said with a measure of impatience. “What I was referring to was the fact that the film had never been appreciated for its craftsmanship or for its unique and polished style of holding back, holding back, but was judged on the level of its black-white content. I felt then and still feel that such a judgment is overly simplistic and, for that reason and that reason alone, I made the statement that getting plaudits for
In the Heat of the Night
was like waving the American flag or pushing Mom’s apple pie. It was just too damn easy to manipulate people in issues which, for the moment, have flagged their attention. It was impossible
not
to like
In the Heat of the Night
at that time. Today’s phrase is ‘politically correct.’ I hated to be politically correct since I felt there was no validation for the work in such a posture, but only a knee-jerk reaction on the part of a populist majority opinion on what happened by chance to be the subject matter of the film.”

“I think [he] was reflecting the revolutionary changes America had gone through since he wrote his script,” opined Poitier, “and so, in some way, he was apologizing for something he couldn’t have helped. At the time he wrote the script, most of America was where he was, and, to my mind, it was a very forward-looking piece of material; naturally, there were things in it that black people would have preferred to see more of, but, on the whole, it was revolutionary as mass entertainment.” 
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Perhaps these controversies, as well as the film’s genre (mysteries seldom win “Best Picture” Oscars despite such outstanding examples as
The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, L.A. Confidential
), combined to deny Norman Jewison a directing Oscar. Even Arthur Penn, whose
Bonnie and Clyde
revolutionized American cinema, was passed over that year. Academy voters gave their directing statuette to Mike Nichols for
The Graduate,
marking one of the rare times that the Picture-Director awards have been split.

“About Norman Jewison, both the talent and the man,” Silliphant stated, “he is superb in both departments. I adore him — did from the beginning, always will. He was a magnificent sport when the Academy passed him over. I can only tell you that those of us who went up to get our Oscars felt little personal triumph because Norman — who made it all possible — wasn’t up there with us. For that matter, neither was Sidney. But then the Academy had to decide: Sidney or Rod. It couldn’t be both.” 
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Naturally, Silliphant was approached to write a sequel. His files contain a blue, loose-leaf notebook with forty-five pages of character and story notes, quotes from Dick Gregory and others, a highly personal deliberation about Black Power, and a six-page unsigned letter/summary to Walter Mirisch dated May 20, 1968. Nothing came of it.

Ball’s book, boosted no doubt by the success of the film, led to six more Virgil Tibbs novels and two short stories. There were two film sequels sans Silliphant (
They Call Me Mister Tibbs!,
1970, and
The Organization,
1971) and a seven-year television adaptation that cleverly cast Carroll O’Connor against Howard Rollins. In 2011, a stage adaptation by Matt Pelfrey titled
John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night
used the original novel (thus the possessive title) but not Silliphant’s script. Its New York production was not enthusiastically received. Silliphant received no compensation from any of these.

Everyone who wins the Academy Award goes back to work the next day carrying Hollywood’s best-kept secret: although an Oscar brings money and power, it does nothing to erase the self-doubts that creative people carry with them every moment. Silliphant was no exception. He confessed that, “Every [new] one is, ‘Can I do this one?’ It’s what an actor must feel. Most of my friends are actors, and I know, even when they’re superstars, when they go on the set, they’re very, very uptight. You know you
can
do it but you’re not sure how
well
you can do it. Each one is a new challenge.” 
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Following
In the Heat of the Night,
Silliphant was offered every old, dusty project that the studios had on their shelves, and was asked to revamp it by adding a black character. He reacted haughtily by saying that using token blacks in films is “dangerous” because it portrays American racism as being a thing of the past, which, in fact, it was not. He even went so far as to call the film companies’ attitude toward blacks a “modern slave trade.” 
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Only someone on a post-Oscar roll could have dared such a charge, but Silliphant was too busy to care. The same year that saw the release of
In the Heat of the Night,
he also wrote the pilot and two episodes for MGM Television’s series
Maya,
about a boy and his elephant, based on their 1966 theatrical film. Both the feature and the series were produced by the King Brothers, the low rent siblings who had earned a place in movie history for having hired blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo under the name “Robert Rich” to write
The Brave One,
which won Trumbo a 1956 Oscar that he was unable to claim until 1975. 
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By the time
Maya
aired in September, Silliphant was already at work adapting Daniel Keyes’s short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” into what became the 1968 movie
Charly.
Cliff Robertson had starred in the live February 22, 1961, broadcast of CBS’s “The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon” on
The United States Steel Hour.
He was taken with the star-making role and felt it could lead to a movie career. But he was painfully mindful that his starring role in
Playhouse 90
’s October 2, 1958 production of “Days of Wine and Roses” had gone to Jack Lemmon when the lush property had become a feature. Robertson made sure that wouldn’t happen to “Flowers for Algernon” by buying the screen rights to the story and producing it — and, of course, starring in it — himself.

Published in the April 1959 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
after several rejections from other periodicals because Keyes wouldn’t change his ending to a happy one, “Algernon” unfolds through the diary entries of a thirty-seven-year-old janitor with an IQ of sixty-eight who works in a box factory. Charlie Gordon is the subject of taunts from his coworkers, whom he thinks are merely giving him attention. He takes an adult education course from Alice Kinnian so he can “get smart” but, when this fails, she introduces him to research scientists who have had luck increasing the intelligence of a laboratory mouse, Algernon, and are ready to try the experiment on a human. The procedure works and Charlie becomes a genius but, when Algernon’s newfound intelligence decays and the mouse dies, Charlie realizes that his own mind will go too. On the verge of reverting to his old self, he asks Miss Kinnian to please leave flowers on Algernon’s grave.

Keyes expanded his short story into a novel in 1966, adding a backstory about Charlie’s parents, a subplot about a sexual liaison with a neighbor, and a drinking habit that parallels his rising IQ. Over the years the book has faced numerous censorship assaults from groups who think it stigmatizes mentally disabled people when, in fact, Keyes wrote it to humanize them.

Bent on turning the novel into a feature, Robertson ignored James Yaffee’s 1961 teleplay and approached a young novelist he had met through his cousin, and whose energy and interest had impressed him. This was William Goldman, who would become one of the screen’s most honored writers. 
[123]

Goldman tells it a little differently, reporting that Robertson had read the manuscript of his 160-page, 1964 novel,
No Way to Treat a Lady,
and was misled by its short chapters into thinking it was a film treatment. 
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When the actor asked him to write “Flowers for Algernon,” Goldman says, he didn’t know what a screenplay looked like, and even when he found a how-to book on the subject, it made no sense. “To this day,” he writes, “I remember staring at the page in shock. I didn’t know what it was exactly I was looking at, but I knew I could never write in that form, in that language.” 
[125]

But Goldman managed. He eventually called Robertson, said he had finished, and wanted to give him the script of what was to be called
Charly.

Robertson came to Goldman’s Manhattan apartment and picked up the story in his Archive of American Television interview: “He said, ‘You can go in the other room and read it.’ I said ‘No, I wouldn’t do that to you, I’ll take it home.’ I lied. I took it down to the corner delicatessen. and I’m looking through it, and although he’s a brilliant writer, he somehow had missed it. I wasn’t about to say that to him. But I went home and I swallowed my pride — well, best-laid plans — I have to get somebody else. I called Bill and said, ‘Bill, I just don’t think it’s gonna work.’ He said, ‘But you paid me.’ I said, ‘I know.’ 
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Says Goldman, “The next event of consequence was when I found out that I was off the project and Stirling Silliphant was doing the screenplay. (And wonderfully, too, without a scintilla of mine in the finished work.) I couldn’t believe it. Getting canned is always two things, shocking and painful. I was rocked. I’d never been fired before. No one ever told me specifically what was wrong with my work. But if I were forced to guess, I would say, odds on, my screenplay stunk.” 
[127]

“So that’s how Stirling Silliphant got involved in
Charly
the movie,” Robertson continues, “and I worked with Stirling very closely through the whole picture. I might add that Bill was misquoted later on in an article about Hollywood where he said I fired him. I never fired Bill. I never fired anybody in my life. But he was quoted as saying that I fired him, you know, from
Charly,
but I didn’t fire him, and he’ll admit that. I simply paid him the money and it wasn’t gonna work out.” 
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Silliphant’s first problem was a major one, the one that, if it didn’t play, would sink the whole film: the surgery that increases Charly Gordon’s intelligence. “Okay,” he explained, “
what
surgery? If it exists, why aren’t surgeons sawing away night and day at the unfortunate mentally deficient? I didn’t want to write a science fiction piece. I wanted — and Ralph Nelson, our director, wanted — and Cliff Robertson, our Charly, wanted — all of us wanted to make this a film dominated by the sense of real life, of reality. So I had to understand for myself — even if I never used any of the research — how the brain works. Imagine my astonishment, after digging into towering stacks of medical works and after meeting with numerous neurosurgeons and other experts, to discover that nobody really knew too much about the human brain. That is, knew for
sure.
And the more research I did, the more I found that each successive writer had somehow slightly poached on the work of a previous writer, and that, ultimately, if you traced this pyramid to its foundations, everybody was borrowing from a few seminal sources.

“For this reason, I arrived at the wondrously devious answer to my problems: when in trouble, punt. I dismissed everything I had learned and summed it all up in a simple scene between Claire Bloom (Kinnian) and Cliff in which she asks the poor chap, still in his moronic stage:

Kinnian:
Would you like an operation like that?

Charly:
Yeh.

Kinnian:
Why?

Charly:
Well, so I can be smarter and understand Gimpy and the other guys at the bakery cuz they use a lot of words I don’t understand. So I could get a little closer to them.

“Go fight City Hall! You can’t tear into
that
one because there’s nothing to tear into. By staying away from everything I’d learned about neurosurgery — which was that there still remained more questions than answers — I solved my problem.”

Silliphant’s other major change is invisible: he moved the story from Charly’s first person point of view, which worked in print, to the point of view of an objective third party, which works on screen, including scenes that Charly is not present to observe. He made Kinnian a widow, removed the subplot of Charly’s tryst with the neighbor, and cut the book’s backstory about how Charly’s father landed him a job at a box factory to keep him from being institutionalized. “By staying strictly within the human story and following Charly around,” Silliphant explained, “sharing with him both the joy and the anguish of super-intelligence, I followed his arc to its peak, then to its nadir.”

Another difficult task was creating scenes that showed Charly’s accelerated thinking. Workers at the bakery — Charly no longer works in a box factory — mock his low intelligence by challenging him to operate a complicated bread dough machine. When his mind improves and he effortlessly aces its sequential switches and levers, his “friends” circulate a petition that gets him fired. And he shows that he has surpassed Kinnian when he presents her with an apparently nonsense sentence that she cannot punctuate, but he can. 
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Such tangible, visual moments are what lift
Charly
off the page.

One of the most affecting moments — and arguably the
raison d’être
for the whole piece — occurs in a bar late in the story when a mentally retarded busboy drops a tray of glasses and the customers laugh at him. Charly does not; he leaves his table to help the busboy collect the pieces, and the room grows ashamedly silent watching them. Earlier he had said, “Why is it that people who would never laugh at a blind or crippled man would laugh at a moron?” This wordless scene powerfully underscores that point.

A deeply disturbing note of another kind is struck when Charly, whose paintings reveal his sexual thoughts, forces himself on Kinnian. It not only begs the viewer to ask why such an intelligent man is allowing his libido to trump his brain, it calls for Kinnian to angrily rebuff his advances by calling him a moron. The impact on both of them is so jarring that the film has to digress with a long montage showing Charly’s month-long quest through various lifestyles, experiences, and distractions, after which he and Kinnian are seen reconciled. It requires a leap, especially considering the screen’s disgraceful history portraying rape, and only Robertson’s and Bloom’s acting skill pulls it off.

Finally, Silliphant dared to remove the flowers from Algernon’s story so he could focus the ending on Charly and Kinnian, right up to the moment when Charly, knowing he is about to return to the shadows of severe retardation, rejects her offer of marriage and asks her simply to leave. “If you will watch the final good-bye scene between Cliff and Claire,” Silliphant said, “you will see me in my Pinter period — dialogue so clipped — emotions so restrained — playing against the tragedy of the parting — that the film really ends as Claire goes out the door. We have a coda to close — Charly on the seesaw — and we freeze frame with his silly, moronic expression — at the top of his swing upward — and leave him, childlike, back where he began.
Charly
is one of my favorite films because it is simple and human and unpretentious. And Cliff ’s performance was deeply moving. As you know, he was given the Academy Award for Best Actor.” 
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Robertson tried repeatedly over the years to produce a sequel to
Charly,
sometimes funding it out of his own pocket, other times raising investment money that always seemed to drop out just before production. 
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He died in 2011 at age eighty-eight, still hoping to revive his signature role of Charly Gordon.

Murphy’s War,
which Silliphant wrote next and that came and went in 1971, is a war movie that is practically without a war. Exquisitely acted by Peter O’Toole and fearlessly directed by Peter Yates (coming off
Bullitt,
1968), it’s set in the waning days of World War Two and has a British seaman (O’Toole) wreaking revenge on the German U-Boat commander (Horst Janson) who sunk his ship. His obsession infects his relationships with those around him, particularly a kindly Quaker nurse (Sian Phillips) and a colorful salvage operator (Philippe Noiret). Silliphant adapted it from the novel by Max Catto.

“
Murphy’s War,
in my opinion, fell through the cracks,” Silliphant stated bluntly. “It is a far better film than either the public or most critics ever perceived. Richard Schickel, in his review in
Life
magazine, was one of the few critics who resonated with director Peter Yates and me on the wave-lengths of the film. His review was one of the most laudatory any of my scripts was ever given. It was a curious project; indeed, our purpose was to make a flat-out statement about the absurdity, the meaninglessness, of war. So we went for minimal sound, minimal dialogue, a kind of intense fumbling toward death, toward the showdown between enemies who have no further reason for enmity except the blind stupidity and vengefulness of the Peter O’Toole character. And this is why, at the end, in a high angle shot, director Peter Yates closed out the film with the sub sinking, the barge sinking, and the river surging above both, covering them for all eternity. Over this he shot a ragged flight of jungle birds, wheeling off, the only survivors of this pointless encounter between men and their machines.