Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (9 page)

It’s an axiom that good books make bad movies, but bad books have a shot at becoming good ones. And then there’s the middle ground of books that contain underdeveloped seeds, which perceptive filmmakers can nurture into something that transcends the original without detracting from it. This is what happened with
In the Heat of the Night,
and it made screen history.

Turning books into movies is easy to do but hard to do well, and few screenwriters did it better than Silliphant. For example, practically the entire canon of Stephen King (with the notable exceptions of
Stand By Me,
Misery,
Carrie,
and
The Shawshank Redemption
) has arguably been mangled en route from page to screen because the adapters, including at times King himself, think the plot is more important than the subplot. In shorthand, the
plot
is what
happens
in the story but the
subplot
is what the story is really
about.
In King’s stories, his plots are usually about weird goings-on, but his subplots — which most film adaptations ignore or suppress — are about challenges to human sensibility and to society’s ethos. (This is why he is not only a popular writer but one whose work is more profound than is generally acknowledged.)

Getting from page to screen is more than just removing the
he saids
and
she saids.
Take a simple line of prose: “John so longed for Mary that he couldn’t sleep for all the yearning he felt in her absence.” That single written sentence introduces John, limns his situation, and offers a hint of backstory. But it is internal, told
about
John rather than
by
John. How to make it cinematic? Imagine the camera on John asleep — pan over to show his hand resting on a photograph of a woman pressed into the pillow of his half-empty double bed — move in closer to the photograph and it’s inscribed, “To John, I’ll never leave you, love, Mary.” And the photograph is torn in half. Describing the shot takes more words than the original sentence, but it makes the point that movies need to
show
things in the visual language of cinema.

Silliphant often said that he preferred originals to adaptations. “Number one,” he compared, “originals come out of my own experience and feelings. Number two, you don’t have to waste time reading somebody else’s work. Number three, you seldom get a really fine piece of material to adapt, since the best-written material is usually not able to be adapted. How would you like to take a crack at Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past,
for example? In discussing originals, we start with a handicap:
What
originals? I may have seen, over a lifetime of moviegoing, only a handful of what, to me, were films with stories different from the mainstream ammo line fired off by all the Hollywoods of the world. One shining example of an original piece of filmmaking is the Wim Wenders film
Wings of Desire.
Another was the original Kurosawa
Seven Samurai.
Another is [Kaige Chen’s] Chinese film
Life on a String.
One or two of Bergman’s films would qualify, and possibly one or two of Godard’s early ones. We all have our private lists, but my point is that, even being as charitable as one’s standard of judgment may permit, you would be stressed to name
fifty
films
ever
written which might hope to compete in a contest of quality with
fifty
of the best pieces of literature ever produced by man.

“So, setting aside that sense of the word
original,
let us proceed to the nuts and bolts of the film biz, by the rules of which an original screenplay is one cooked up as a ‘concept’: by a studio, a money group, a producer, or a director or writer — or by
anybody:
A screenplay
not
explicitly based on a published novel, article or stage play suggesting a narrative line, characters and dialogue already written. It is my contention that adapting the work of another writer is far more trying and requires infinitely more professional ability than writing one of these so-called ‘original’ screenplays.”

And that’s exactly what Silliphant faced in turning John Ball’s short (184 pages), crisply written, Edgar®-winning 1965 novel into what became an Academy Award®-winning film. The process — and it was not easy — shows what can be done when a committed screenwriter and relentless director agree from the start on what kind of movie they want to make, then keep plugging away until they reach it.

Set in the fictitious small town of Wells, South Carolina,
In the Heat of the Night
begins with a highly trained homicide detective from Pasadena, California — Virgil Tibbs — waiting at a railroad depot for a connection home on the night an important businessman, Enrico Mantoli, is murdered. White police officer Sam Wood takes Tibbs into custody not just because he’s a stranger but because he’s black. The friction increases when Wood and the town’s new police chief, Bill Gillespie, realize that Tibbs’s investigative skills can solve the killing, but they must also admit that a Negro (sic) knows more than they do. Pressure is applied by City Councilman George Endicott, who comes from the North and wants Tibbs to stay and help. Complicating matters, Patrolman Wood has eyes for Mantoli’s daughter, Duena; exhibitionist Delores Purdy accuses him of rape; Wood and Gillespie wrongly accuse local man Harvey Oberst of the crime; and various rednecks attack Tibbs before the actual killer is caught.

Silliphant was not the first to adapt the book; how he was drawn into the project is an example of Hollywood deal-making. It started when H.N. “Swanie” Swanson, who represented novelist John Ball, sent the manuscript to agent Martin Baum hoping for the involvement of his client, Sidney Poitier, who was America’s top African-American (technically, Caribbean-American) star. Poitier declined to commit without seeing a script, so Baum sent it to producer Walter Mirisch, who had a deal at United Artists. Mirisch sent the novel to Robert Alan Aurthur, who had written
Edge of the City,
the 1957 waterfront drama in which Poitier had scored a career-building success. Aurthur completed a treatment for Mirisch but, after turning it in, informed the producer that he was leaving
In the Heat of the Night
to take on the bigger-budget
Grand Prix
for director John Frankenheimer, MGM, and Cinerama. This was in late 1965.

Then came the fateful screening of
The Slender Thread
and Baum’s promise to line up something quick for Silliphant. Clever agent that he was, he probably already had
In the Heat of the Night
in mind, because, a few days later, Baum sent him to Mirish, who gave him the Ball book and informed him, “Sidney Poitier brought this in to us and we plan to develop it,” not telling him that he was counting on his script to cinch the deal. Poitier would be paid $200,000 and twenty percent of the profits and Silliphant would receive $35,000 with an additional $15,000 if he was accorded sole screen credit (he was). His hiring was announced on December 22, 1965, 
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even though the paperwork wasn’t formalized until September of 1966. 
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Now all they needed was a director.

George Roy Hill, who had just made
Hawaii
for Mirisch, was keen on the project when he heard the producer describe it on the plane to their picture’s Minneapolis sneak preview in early 1966. But Hill — a meticulous craftsman who would later direct
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and
The Sting
 — had let
Hawaii
get away from him, and Mirisch was not eager for another collaboration.

Meanwhile UA was having qualms. Although the company had benefited heartily from its association with the brothers Walter, Marvin, and Harold Mirisch, 
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and despite management’s strong liberal beliefs, they feared that the racial tension that drives
In the Heat of the Night
might spook southern exhibitors who were fearful of pickets or too entrenched in their own personal racism, and they might refuse to book it. That meant that it would have to recoup its costs above the Mason-Dixon line. Defensively, UA allotted only $2 million (though some sources say $1.5 million), which bought only a tight forty-day shooting schedule and no location frills. The final budget would slightly escalate to $2.09 million. 
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Here memories differ. Mirisch says he wanted Jewison to direct; Jewison says Mirisch tried to dissuade him from directing because he thought the impossibly low budget would be an unwise career move. But Jewison, a Canadian by birth and a Progressive by choice, had unusual passion for the story’s milieu. When he was eighteen, he had hitch-hiked through the South and, when he reached Missouri, he heard about a lynching that had taken place there. He later learned that the truck that had given him the ride was the one that had been used to drag the victim to his fate. 
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Despite the tight budget (Mirisch planned to shoot it cheaply on sets at the Goldwyn Studios in LA), Jewison felt the film deserved to be more than a potboiler, and it was on a family ski trip in the winter of 1965-1966 that he got the ammunition to notch it up. On the slopes, the Jewisons happened to meet Robert Kennedy and his family and, when the director told RFK the story of
In the Heat of the Night,
the former Attorney General urged that he make the picture the way he intended, exhorting, “The time is right for a movie like this. Timing is everything in politics, in art, and in life itself.” 
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Mirisch capitulated but kept the budget where it was.

As soon as his deal was firmed, Silliphant hit the ground typing. He turned in a 22-page “Revised Step Outline” on January 7, 1966. 
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Coming to it already familiar with the film, one sees that it reads like the movie on fast-forward. The storytelling is lean and evocative, yet allows for embellishment. Even at this stage, Silliphant has made telling changes: Tibbs is no longer from genteel Pasadena, California but from the rougher Phoenix, Arizona. Endicott becomes a manipulative racist. The murder victim is no longer a music producer but Philip Colbert, a Chicago businessman who is building a factory in town. And Sam Wood no longer yearns for the victim’s daughter, Duena, whose name is now Louise. The book is explicit in its representation of racism, and unfolds from several points of view, a technique that heightens the tension while diminishing the drama, as Silliphant immediately corrected.

“I found the story more compelling in its opportunities to exploit the situations of the contending characters than I could generate any kind of enthusiasm for what is essentially a very thin and pale little mystery yarn with little surprise or suspense,” he reasoned. “The centrality of the story for me lay clearly in the wonderful concept John Ball had of putting a city-trained BLACK homicide detective in a rural, southern cracker small town where everybody and anybody is a potential enemy — even the Sheriff. I determined to tell this story and this story only.”

To do so, Silliphant made an inspired change: “The main problem was that the book lacked a conflict between two equally matched characters that could drive the plot. The central character is a patrol cop who falls in love with the daughter of the murdered man. I relegated the cop to a minor role and concentrated on building Bill Gillespie’s character. Sheriff Gillespie is a minor character in the novel. I made him a southerner, but from a different state [Texas], so that he was as much an outsider to the town as Sidney Poitier’s character was. They had this alienation from the others as a common bond.” In enriching Gillespie, Silliphant created a man who saw that he needed to change but had nothing in his background that told him how to do so, especially from Tibbs. “Gillespie is beginning to find a manhood in Tibbs far more significant than a skin coloration, a manhood he knows — or hopes he knows — exists deep within himself.” Voicing Gillespie’s thoughts, he wrote in the treatment that it was the “first time he’s ever had to plead with a Negro. Damned humiliating, but he had to make the effort. He decides to play smart with this colored boy.” 
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Other changes deepened the virulence of the town’s racism. Endicott is no longer the one who is pressuring Gillespie to have Tibbs continue the investigation, but is now an entrenched bigot. “We unpeel Endicott slowly,” Silliphant explained, “leaving the condemnation of Tibbs to other more outspoken racists.” Endicott, he added generously, shows “the dilemma of the thinking, sensitive southerner of the better class — a man who regrets the passing of the old ways but begins to realize a new time is coming and that nothing can hold it back.” He achieves this with a scene (which was scripted but didn’t make the final cut) among civic leaders, most of whom are crackers and all of whom revere the elegant Endicott, “in which Endicott recalls how things were with this land at one time — how lovely and lost those times were — and, against this, play the short-fused tempers of the poor whites who only hear that part of what Endicott says, which they can use against Tibbs.” Several later take to their cars to ambush the detective. 
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The Endicott subplot pays off in a scene that has become one of the most significant in American cinema. Tibbs, believing Endicott killed Colbert, visits Endicott’s plantation greenhouse with a puzzled Gillespie in tow. When Endicott realizes that Tibbs suspects him of the murder, he gives Tibbs a firm slap across the face. Tibbs immediately slaps him back, harder. Gillespie witnesses it and refuses to act, and the cards shift. The return slap has come to be regarded as the first time a black man gave it back in kind to a white man in a major American film.

“I couldn’t play a part where I’m asking a chap a legitimate question and he slaps me,” Poitier said. “I told the people who were making the film that I have no interest in it if that is what I have to endure — that he slaps me and I just take it and walk away. No, I will
not
take it and walk away. So pass me and I hope you find someone. And they were very understanding. They had their sessions with the United Artists people. They said they would take care of it and I told them that ‘taking care of it’ means that either I do it that way or I don’t do it; it’s just against my value system. So they said that they would shoot it that way. That’s about the size of it.” 
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