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“He’s the star, so what are you going to do?” Newman said one morning as he and Courage worked on the arrangement of the music behind the main titles of
Dr. Dolittle
. He is a stocky, gray-haired man whose conversation is sprinkled with pleasant obscenities. On the table in front of him was a plate of doughnuts and a cue sheet of the proposed title music. The sheet was marked into segments timed down to one-third of a second.

“We’ve got animated titles,” Newman said. “The problem is we got to make it cute without making it Disney goddamn pixie.”

Courage held a stopwatch in his hand. “We’ve got fifty seconds here,” he said. “Maybe we can drop “Talk to the Animals’ in this spot.”

“Ready when you are,” Newman said.

Courage set the stopwatch. “Go,” he said.

Newman began to hum “Talk to the Animals,” waving his pencil as if it were a baton. “Da, da, da, da, DA, da, da, dee, dee, dee, da, da, da, da, dee.”

He finished and looked at Courage. “Fifty-seven seconds,” Courage said.”

“Shit,” Newman said. “It’s such a lousy song anyway. So what do we use?”

Courage mentioned another song from the score. “That’s not so hot, either,” Newman said. “But at least it’s got melody.”

He hummed the new song, banging his pencil on the table, while Courage clocked him. “Great,” Courage said, when Newman finished. “With five seconds schlemming around, I think we got it.” He checked the cue sheet. “That will take us up to the associate producer’s credit.”

“Great,” Newman said. “We got time up the ass.”

A few days later, Newman was on Sound Stage I, where he was conducting the Studio orchestra while they recorded a portion of the background score. The blower was out of order and the stage was hot and reeked of sweat. Instrument cases were scattered around the floor. There were fifty-eight players in the orchestra, all of them dressed in sport shirts and loose-fitting muumuus. That day’s call sheet called for the orchestra to record twenty-six pieces of music, ranging from thirty seconds to four minutes long. Newman stood on a podium in front of the orchestra, a set of earphones over his head, facing a screen on which the scenes to be scored were projected. The scenes were in black and white and the dialogue had been erased from the sound track so as not to distract the orchestra. Beside Newman on the podium was an enormous timer.

Newman pulled at his gray polo shirt. “Jesus, isn’t there any air in here?” he said. He sniffed the air around him. “I know I don’t smell this bad all the time.”

He called for a take. The shot was an insert of Dr. Dolittle peering out from a window in the prison on the floating island of Popsipetel where he had been incarcerated. The shot then cut to an exterior view of the native village, which was covered by a thick carpet of frost. A red “Take” sign flashed over the screen. The orchestra began to play, a slow, menacing staccato underscored by the beat of drums. The take lasted thirty-two seconds.

“Jesus, you’re great,” Newman said. “The Lionel Newman Philharmonic Orchestra.”

He gave the orchestra a five-minute break and asked for a playback. The film flashed on the screen again, this time with the dialogue and the music. Newman listened intently. The music drowned out the dialogue, but it would ultimately be mixed with the screen sounds so that everything would be perfectly modulated. Just as the playback ended, Arthur Jacobs walked onto the stage.

“Hello, lardass,” Newman said amiably. He turned to the orchestra. “This is Mr. Apjac. He’s the tiger in your tank.” Jacobs looked disconcerted, his sad, dark eyes nervously flickering back and forth between Newman and the orchestra.

“Listen, lardass,” Newman said, “is there any chance we can get a longer shot in the percussion sequence? As it stands now, the percussion comes right in on the dialogue.”

“I think we can get you a few extra feet,” Jacobs said.

“That’s all I want, Arthur,” Newman said. “You do that for me, I’ll stop telling these people what a lardass you are.”

Jacobs took a seat at the rear of the stage, drumming his fingers on a cello case while Newman recorded another piece of music. When the take was over, a dapper little man walked onto the stage. His name was Happy Goday and he was the song plugger Jacobs had hired at $500 a week to get singers to record the
Dolittle
songs.

“Arthur, I got to tell you,” Goday said in a raspy little voice. “I got Kate Smith interested.”

“That’s a thrill,” Jacobs said.

“Don’t knock it, Arthur,” Goday said. “She’s very big with the ‘God Bless America’ crowd.”

“So?” Jacobs said.

“Arthur, you’re not thinking,” Goday said. “You get them and they take their grandkids to the picture, you can stay home and count your money. You’re home free, Arthur. Get it?”

Jacobs smiled and began to hum the first bars of “God Bless America.”

Jacobs was also producing
Planet of the Apes
, a melodrama about a civilization where apes and men had reversed their roles. The picture starred Charlton Heston as an astronaut whose spaceship had catapulted through the time barrier and crashed on an uncharted planet ruled by an ape society. With the exception of Heston, all the picture’s stars—Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall, James Daly and James Whitmore—played apes. The makeup problems were staggering. Initial substances employed to change human features into the likeness of simians stiffened on the actors’ faces so that their features were neither mobile or expressive. Nor could the actors chew, suggesting that they would have to subsist on a liquid diet during the shooting of the film. Experimentation with new rubber compounds resulted in the development of materials that permitted full facial mobility and allowed the actor’s skin to breathe inside the heavy layer of ape makeup. But in the first tests, the makeup required six hours to apply and three to remove. Ultimately the Studio makeup department got the application time down to three hours and the removal to one. In actual filming, other problems arose. The dark furry makeup offered nothing other than eyes that could be effectively highlighted. And since the actors wore false protruding jaws
fitted with ape-like incisors, care had to be taken in lighting and the selection of camera angles so that both the actors’ real and ape teeth were not visible on film.

The afternoon after the
Dr. Dolittle
scoring session, Jacobs drove his golf cart over to Stage 9, where
Planet of the Apes
was filming. As he came on the set with Mort Abrahams, an ape waved and said, “Hello, Mr. Jacobs.”

“Hi, hi, how are you?” Jacobs said. He lit a brown cigarette. “Who the hell was that?” he asked Abrahams. “You see someone in ape drag, you don’t know who the hell it is.”

Jacobs hoisted himself into a director’s chair. “Animals on
Dolittle
, apes here,” he said to no one in particular. “You think you got problems? Try apes and animals.”

“And Rex Harrison,” Abrahams said.

Jacobs sighed. “And Rex.”

He flicked some ashes off his brown V-necked sweater. “Why do I always pick the tough ones?” he said. He waved a hand in the general direction of a group of apes. “I’ve been involved with this one for three years,” he said. “Three years and $360,000. I took an option on the novel in 1964. Every studio in town turned it down. ‘Who needs from apes?’ they said. A legitimate question. So I decided I had to have a concept. I hired a lot of art directors and they all did sketches, you know, ape drag and that kind of stuff. Still no sale. Finally Warner’s said they’d take a chance and we got Rod Serling to do a script. Then they couldn’t budget it. They dropped the whole thing and sold it back to me for all the money they put into it. Three hundred and sixty grand. When I came over to Fox with
Dolittle
, I presented
it to Dick Zanuck.” He smiled as he remembered. “A present like that he didn’t need. But every time I came into his office I brought it up. It got so I never even got the name of the picture out of my mouth. I’d say, ‘Dick, what about …’ and he’d say, ‘No.’ You got to hear Dick Zanuck say, ‘No.’ He means ‘No.’ But I worked on him and finally I got him to agree to a test to see how people looked as apes. We wrote a long dialogue scene, you know, so you could see their faces moving. Well, Dick liked it and said he wanted to show it to Darryl. So we brought it to New York.” He ground out the cigarette under his shoe. “Jesus, there were nine guys in that screening room watching the test. If any one of them laughed, we were dead. But they didn’t laugh and we were in business.”

“And now you got apes and animals, Arthur,” Abrahams said.

“And Rex,” Jacobs said.

Pandro S. Berman sat in the anteroom outside Richard Zanuck’s office. He is a short man, in his sixties, with monogrammed shirts and a modulated voice seemingly half an octave above where it should be. He had been a staff producer at M-G-M for years and had come over to Fox at the same time that Joe Pasternak did. In his lap was a copy of a script adapted from Lawrence Durrell’s novel,
Justine
, that he had been assigned to produce under his new contract with the Studio.

“You never change much, Mr. Berman,” one of Zanuck’s secretaries said.

“Well, thank you, dear, that’s a compliment, especially if you’ve been around as long as I have,” Berman said.

“Oh, you haven’t been around that long,” the secretary said.

“Oh, yes, I have,” Berman said. “I started out at the old FBO Studios when I was eighteen years old. There was a writer at the studio at that time, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and he was one of the most successful writers in Hollywood. Do you know who that writer was?”

The secretary shook her head.

“Darryl Zanuck,” Berman said. His head nodded up and down. “That’s how long I’ve been around. Joseph P. Kennedy owned the studio then. I was making $25 a week and I wanted a raise. We never saw Mr. Kennedy, but I waited by the front door for thirty days and it finally paid off. On the thirtieth day, Mr. Kennedy came out and I asked him for a raise and he raised me five dollars right on the spot, to $30 a week.”

“Those must have been wonderful days,” the secretary said.

“Oh, they were,” Berman said.

“Do you ever remember an actress called Marjorie Reynolds?” the secretary said.

“I certainly do,” Berman said.

The secretary pointed to the other typist, a slender redheaded girl with a bouffant hairdo. “That’s her daughter.”

“Is that a fact?” Berman said. “Marjorie Reynolds the movie star. Well, you’re a lot taller than your mother.”

“No, we’re the same size,” Marjorie Reynolds’ daughter said. “Maybe it’s because my hair is different.”

“That must be it,” Berman said, “because you certainly look a lot taller than your mother.”

Zanuck was finally free and Berman went into his
office. The Studio had poured a great deal of money into
Justine
. It was one of Darryl Zanuck’s pet projects. There had been a number of scripts written, the latest by Ivan Moffatt, a former Hollywood writer now living in England. Moffatt had worked on
Justine
with Darryl Zanuck, then had returned to Hollywood to polish the screenplay with Berman.

“I think it’s a good screenplay, Richard, a very good screenplay,” Berman said. “My wife liked it and she and Ivan got along perfectly. But Larry Marcus is in town and he’s just dying to do this picture.”

Zanuck did not know Marcus and asked to be briefed.

“Well, Richard, I knew him years ago when he was doing little melodramas, but now he’s very big with those new young English directors. He just finished
Petulia
for Richard Lester, that’s the new Julie Christie picture, and that’s going to be very big, a very big picture, Richard. Metro wants him to do a screenplay—as a matter of fact, he was just over there this morning—but he would postpone that commitment if he thought he could do this picture.”

Zanuck pulled at a hangnail. “What’s wrong with Ivan’s screenplay?” he said without looking up.

“Nothing, nothing at all, Richard,” Berman said. “But the thing is, I think we’re agreed that we’d like to get one of those bright new English directors on this picture, Lindsay Anderson or John Schlesinger, and I just thought it would be easier if we approached them with a writer they knew and respected.”

“Has he read the script?” Zanuck said.

“I gave him a copy and he promised he would read it this very evening,” Berman said. “As you know, I sent a copy to Schlesinger and Nelson and I think if we could
tell them that we had Larry Marcus, well, I just think we could get a deal.”

Zanuck was now gnawing on a knuckle. “Well, let’s see what he says after he reads the script.”

“This is really putting the cart before the horse,” Richard Zanuck said later about
Justine
. “You get a director and naturally he’s going to want to make some changes, so then you get another writer. But this way is really putting the cart before the horse. You don’t know if Schlesinger or Anderson will even do the picture—or if they’ll want Marcus if they do do it.”

“The time to hit in this town is before your first picture comes out,” the young agent said. He was sitting in a Beverly Hills restaurant sipping an Americano. He ordered a steak rare with French-fried potatoes. “You get the word-of-mouth going. Nobody’s seen the picture. It can be a piece of shit, but who knows? You get the word-of-mouth going, you can start making deals all over town. We handle a guy”—he mentioned a young director—“who just finished a picture over at Paramount. Nobody’s seen it, but you spread the word that George Cukor loved it. Somebody tells somebody else George Cukor loved it and pretty soon you’re not in if you haven’t seen it and said it was sensational. Natalie
Wood, Arthur Jacobs, they all
loved
it. Who cares if they’ve seen it? It’s the names that count. Once the word-of-mouth momentum gets going, you move in. The guy’s locked in for six pictures all over town. If the picture’s good, fine, but if it stinks, he’s still set up for a ton.” He asked the waitress for a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. “You fail upward here. A guy makes a ten-million-dollar bomb, the big thing is not that he’s made a bomb, but that he put together a ten-million-dollar picture. Next time out, they give him a twelve-million-dollar picture. It’s crazy, but that’s how it works. The worst thing that can happen to you is to have a small success. You make a picture for seven-fifty, it’s a nice picture, it makes a little money, but you’re dead. They aren’t interested in pictures that make a little money. Everybody’s looking for the killing. So you bomb out at ten million. Well, you put together a big one, and the next time out, you might hit with one.”