Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (8 page)

When
Route 66
ran out of gas, Silliphant had less work and more to do. Although he had never concentrated exclusively on a single project, being relieved of the obligation to turn in one script every nine days, plus rewrite the old ones, plus plan the new ones, meant that he could make a new play for the movies. That was where the money was and, more than that, the prestige.

Strictly speaking, he had never really left features, although
Huk!, Maracaibo,
and the other early attempts were not going to put him on Hollywood’s “A” list. As a matter of fact, when
Route 66
had been fueling up in 1959, he delivered a stealth science fiction classic that was rushed into production for 1960. Based on John Wyndham’s 1957 novel
The Midwich Cuckoos,
the resulting film, directed by Wolf Rilla, was released by MGM as
Village of the Damned.
It was a major hit, and a major struggle.

The story is profoundly creepy: One afternoon the entire British village of Midwich falls asleep for several hours. Months later every fertile woman in town delivers a blond, hauntingly intelligent child that may have been “fathered” by extraterrestrials who visited earth while everyone was unconscious. Only local scientist George Zellaby (George Sanders) is able to gain the trust of these hybrid progeny who can read and control human thoughts. He learns that other cities around the world had similar visits, and he vows to destroy the tow-headed monsters. Distracting the telepathic children by concentrating on the image of a brick wall, he annihilates them — and himself — with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.

Silliphant was hired by MGM for $5,000 on July 8, 1957, to write a screen treatment (in prose) from the book “of not less than fifty (50) pages.” 
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The screenplay came next. By the time it was released, it was credited to Silliphant, Wolf Rilla (later the author of the widely read text
The Writer and the Screen),
and George Barclay, who wrote elsewhere under the name Ronald Kinnoch. There’s a story there. Originally bought by MGM on a pitch from Wyndham, who also wrote 1961’s classic
The Day of the Triffids,
Cuckoos
was intended as a production by MGM’s home studio in Culver City to coincide with the book’s publication. Reported Silliphant, “MGM’s New York office was so high on the book that they airmailed me microfilm of each page of the manuscript as the author finished writing it so that I could get a jump-start on the script. My producer was Milo Frank. We offered the script to Ronald Colman, who accepted. Unhappily, this fine gentleman died before we could advance the production. At that point an incredible thing happened. The then-head of MGM, Robert H. O’Brien, who was Catholic, apparently actually read my script and flipped —
negatively.
The idea of human females being impregnated by ETs and bearing laser-eyed young’uns sent him into a religious cartwheel; what the fuck were we trying to say here? Were we making a mockery of the Virgin Mary? Or something to that effect. Bottom line:
Village of the Damned
got cancelled so fast Milo didn’t have time to pack his briefcase and leave the lot. As for me, I was so pissed I left features (for a while) and went over to TV. That’s when I went into business with Herbert Leonard and did the first year of
Naked City
for ABC.

“In any event, the script hung in limbo for months, then suddenly it surfaced in England as an MGM English project and that’s when Rilla and Barclay were brought in. They did little, if anything, to change my script, but in those days our WGA didn’t have power over English writers and there was nothing we could do about their credit-grab, which, to this day, I regard as a form of larceny on the part of these two British highwaymen. What they did was to make the dialogue more English than my American, which is why some of my dialogue ends up sounding like ersatz Noel Coward. In terms of the mood, I would say the filmmakers can make little claim to adding that. The mood came out of the original novel and I zealously preserved it in my draft. But that entire concept of George Sanders erecting the image of a brick wall in his mind in order to block the thought penetration by his ‘son’ is mine mine
mine.
I spent a week cerebrating over that one. In short, this is one the Brits got away with because our Guild had not yet extended its arbitration machinery to those precious writers over there. Otherwise — and I speak with the objectivity of decades — I would have been awarded the solo credit I merited.”

In addition to its nod to the myth of the virgin birth,
Village of the Damned
has also been seen as a metaphor for a Communist takeover of the west. Silliphant dismissed that as well. “If anybody ever came up with the theory that this film was a metaphor for pulverizing Communism at whatever cost,” he said, “it would have to be the Brits, since nobody in Culver City would ever have had the imagination to concoct so zany an idea. As the guy who wrote the script, I can tell you my only thought was how to blow away these little bastards with the luminous eyes and their sickeningly blond Dutch haircuts. As a matter of fact, I had a dialogue passage in the script about the Soviets nuking their ET kids. 
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If anything, I wrote this out of simple admiration for the fact that the Sovs seemed always to have a better grasp of the harsh realities of existence than some of our Christian lads — especially heads of studios who are devoted Catholics.”

Village of the Damned
(released in the U.S. on December 7, 1960, after a July UK release) was enough of a box office success that it spawned a sequel,
Children of the Damned
(1964). It was remade in 1995 by John Carpenter with a $22 million budget. The original had cost $200,000.

Silliphant’s first produced script after
Route 66
was one that could have been a
Naked City
episode. Based on a
Life
magazine article by Shana Alexander about a suicide prevention hotline in Seattle, Washington,
The Slender Thread
marked the feature directorial debut of Sydney Pollack and was produced by Alexander’s husband, Stephen Alexander. Adapted, if not wholly invented, by Silliphant, the plot has a distraught Anne Bancroft phoning a suicide hotline manned by a lone Sidney Poitier after she has taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and Poitier’s efforts to keep her on the line while he has the call traced so a detective (Edward Asner) can track down her husband (Stephen Hill) and her shrink (Telly Savalas) to intervene. The title is symbolic of both the phone connection and the line between life and death.

“Actually,
The Slender Thread
was not the original title,” Silliphant recalled. “I believe my original title was
The Willow Plate,
which was based on a scene in one draft where Bancroft breaks up the willow plate pattern set of china in her dining room as a futile rebellion against her stifling marriage. But Howard Koch, then head of Paramount, didn’t like my title, so he offered me
The Slender Thread,
which I rather liked (without mulling its metaphoric significance) and I took it. The studio had bought a novel, which was entitled
The Slender Thread,
and had shelved the book, but now saw a chance to recycle the title of the un-shot book.” Other names fielded for the project were
Voice on the Wind,
Call Me Back,
and
Cross Your Heart and Hope.
Elizabeth Ashley was signed when it was called the latter, but the studio insisted on Bancroft, who had recently won the Academy Award® for
The Miracle Worker.
Silliphant noted that Ashley “was bitter about this and, in a book she wrote subsequently [
Actress: Postcards From the Road,
1978], she goes into major detail about the incident, blaming me for playing along with the studio, doing their bidding, and ‘dumping’ her on their orders rather than fighting for her. I got cut up rather badly in her account.” 
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Ironically, Sidney Poitier’s “Best Actor” Oscar for the previous year’s
Lilies of the Field
had been presented to him at the 1964 ceremony by Anne Bancroft. The moment was significant because the two actors kissed on national television, marking an interracial milestone for people who mark such things.

“I didn’t see the 1964 Oscars,” Silliphant said, “and therefore did not see Bancroft kissing Poitier, hence this trans-racial contact had nothing whatsoever to do with the casting of these two fine actors. We picked each one because we felt there was no one around who could better portray what I had written for each. Yes, race was totally ignored. That’s what appealed to me, that neither hero nor heroine could see each other — therefore they did not and could not bring to their brief relationship any prejudices or pre-set standards of evaluation. Their mutual humanity is purely that — the relationship of people without the impact of race, religion or societal pressures — people free to relate to each other on the simplest level of humanity: self-preservation. For this reason, at the end, I elected to have Sidney
not
want to see the woman. Because he
knew
seeing her would diminish the magic which they had experienced, divorced from each other except for their connection by phone — their linkage heart to heart. The character elects to savor the triumph — to preserve it, unspoiled, in his memory.”

The screenplay’s sleight-of-hand has been overlooked, but it is worth mentioning that Bancroft’s story is told from Poitier’s point of view. “It shouldn’t work,” Silliphant agreed, “and, in some instances in the film, I’m not sure it did. But it worked well enough in total to validate the attempt to try something different.”

In his autobiography, Sidney Poitier credits his agent, Martin Baum, with discovering and nurturing the property. “He read the script and found a part he thought I could play, although again the part was not designated for a black actor. Through a determined effort, Marty sold the producer [Stephen Alexander], who in turn sold the film company [Paramount], who in turn gave permission for Sydney Pollack to hire me to play that part opposite Anne Bancroft, Steven Hill, and Telly Savalas.
The Slender Thread
experience gave me great satisfaction. Anne Bancroft was simply fantastic, and Telly, of course, is an infinitely better actor than
Kojak
allowed us to see.” 
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The Slender Thread
holds up today, but, at the time, it nearly stalled the career of everyone involved with it. “In TV I was a comet, blazing across the heavens,” Silliphant appraised. “In features, who he? So the film was vital to me; it had to make its mark —
or else.
But it didn’t, in one sense. And in another, it did. We previewed in Encino [a valley community north of Hollywood] and, as I watched the film and ‘felt’ the audience, I knew I had failed. The picture was
not
giving off sparks. I felt it drag and drag. The subject seemed depressing, and the audiences palpably depressed. End titles up, lights on, the audience virtually limped out, nobody jazzed up, nobody talking. Christ, I thought I’m still in TV, that’s for goddamned sure. This ain’t no comeback, baby! I remember sitting alone in the theater while the Paramount execs, including the always ebullient and affable Howard Koch, were out in the lobby trying to strongarm the rapidly fleeing patrons into filling out reaction cards. A fella with a big smile and red hair suddenly appeared in my row as though he had materialized from the ceiling. He sat down next to me. ‘A bomb, huh?’ he suggested. ‘Yep,’ I agreed. ‘A fucking bomb. From start to finish. I doubt that any single person in America will ever bother to buy a ticket to this flick.’ ‘You have to get another screenplay assignment before the word gets out,’ he counseled. ‘Yeh?’ I asked. ‘And how do I do that?’ ‘I’m Martin Baum,’ he said. ‘I represent Sidney Poitier.’

“I knew Marty Baum represented Sidney along with a lot of other top actors, writers
, et al
and that he was one of Hollywood’s most prestigious agents. ‘So you’re Marty?’ I asked. ‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘And I want you to know something: Sidney doesn’t blame you for this picture.’ ‘Maybe Sidney doesn’t,’ I said, ‘But
I
do. I wrote the thing.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I find that refreshing, that
somebody
in this town can admit he blew it. Look, I’m going to get you a job — fast. It has to be fast — because the minute word gets out about this turkey — forget it.’

“Then he disappeared. Still heavy-hearted, not believing a word of what I had been told, I forced myself to go out to the lobby where I discovered the studio execs congratulating themselves on having a hit. They showed me a half dozen cards marked ‘excellent.’ What they didn’t show me, but what I saw, were the piles of cards they’d thrown away: ‘stinks’ was the average comment. There were a few kindly ‘boring’s. But it was downhill all the way.”

Silliphant is being unduly harsh on the picture, which, though it set no box-office records, confirmed Sydney Pollack’s transition from television to features. He followed it with
This Property is Condemned
(1965), marking his first movie with Robert Redford and beginning one of the most enduring and productive collaborations in cinema.

Personally, Silliphant was adrift. On October 1, 1965 — a year after his divorce from Ednamarie and two months before
The Slender Thread
opened — he married Margot Ruth Gohlke. Although the divorce from Ednamarie was finalized, the settlement dragged on for another four years and tied up Silliphant’s funds to the extent that he had to seek bridging loans from the City National Bank in Beverly Hills. This, despite pulling in $20,000 a month. Ever the optimist and self-assured as a writer, he needed work, and the Baum/Poitier connection was promising. Still, in Hollywood, you can die of encouragement. So he waited.