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“She’s not wearing any eye shadow,” Abrahams said. “And that dye job on her hair. It looks like it was done with black shoe polish.”

Jacobs switched on the light by his seat. “Call Ben Nye and tell him to take a look at this.” Nye was the head of the Studio makeup department. “That’s the cheapest lipstick I ever saw.”

“She’s not playing Anna Christie, for Christ’s sake,” Abrahams said.

“Tell Ben Nye I want him to make her up himself,” Jacobs said. “We’ll reshoot on Monday.”

Later that afternoon, the sketches for the main title design of
Planet of the Apes
were delivered to Jacobs, and he and Abrahams drove over to Stage 9 to show them to the film’s director, Franklin Schaffner. The designer of the titles was a young man named Don Record, who had also designed the main title of
Dr. Dolittle
. He was wearing a bright red shirt and plaid mod pants with a wide leather belt. Record’s first renderings of the
Planet of the Apes
titles had been rejected by Schaffner, who thought them too mechanical and realistic. It was only in the titles that the actual space trip of Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts would be seen, and Schaffner wanted to hold back the surprise that the spacecraft had crashed through the time barrier.

Schaffner was talking to Heston outside the latter’s dressing room when Jacobs, Abrahams and Record strolled onto the set.

“Jesus,” Jacobs whispered to Abrahams, “don’t tell Chuck we’ve got the sketches. We’re going to have enough trouble satisfying Frank.” He raised his arm in greeting to Heston. “
Salud
.”

“
Salud
, Arthur,” Heston said.

“The dailies look great, Chuck,” Jacobs said.

“I think we’ve got something more than mere entertainment here,” Heston said.

“Jesus, as long as it’s not a message picture,” Jacobs said nervously.

“We’ve got entertainment
and
a message in this picture, Arthur,” Heston said.

“Great,” Jacobs said.

Schaffner lit a thin cigar and walked back toward his trailer. He is a wary, edgy man in his late forties who had made his reputation in live television. His trailer was sparsely furnished with a plaid couch, a desk and a bulletin board, on which Record set the title sketches. He explained that he had tried to overcome Schaffner’s previous objections by keeping the realistic effects in the background and using optical effects, montages and changes of color to suggest the passage of time. Schaffner was still not impressed.

“In the first place, we’re supposed to show the people aging,” he said. He tapped one of the sketches. “Well, we’ve got a hand insert here, but the guy’s fingernails haven’t grown any longer. And will we show him growing a beard?”

“Good point,” Jacobs said.

“I think it’s too overwhelmingly technical,” Schaffner
said. He examined the sketches intently. “Look, we’re telegraphing to the audience that the space ship is going through the time barrier. There’s one, two, three, four shots of the computer clock going from 1968 here to the year 3250 in the last one. I want to set that up dramatically, not in the titles like you’ve got it here.”

“A point,” Jacobs said.

“But, Frank, so what if the audience knows, the crew doesn’t,” Abrahams said.

“My point is that we’re robbing the audience of a surprise,” Schaffner said, biting each word off carefully. “I don’t want to telegraph it. I want to set it up in dialogue. I think that’s reasonable enough to ask.”

“Right,” Jacobs said. “The important thing is the picture, not the titles.”

“As I understand it, you want to extend the space trip because the only time we see it is during the titles,” Schaffner said. “Right?”

Jacobs nodded in agreement. “And to show the concept of time, of separation, of the shattering loneliness.”

Schaffner deliberately ground out his cigar. “Well, these titles don’t sell that concept to me. Now how are we going to show that concept, realistically or abstractly?”

“I guess abstractly,” Jacobs said tentatively.

“Is it possible,” Schaffner said, turning to Record, “to use black-and-white as well as color?”

Record nodded.

“Let’s try that then,” Schaffner said. He touched Jacobs on the arm and walked out toward the set.

“You’ve got the idea, Don, right?” Abrahams said.
“We’re agreed we want to show the separation, loneliness and the passage of time.”

“Abstractly,” Jacobs said.

As a publicity tie-in for
The Sweet Ride
, Joe Pasternak had agreed to give a small walk-on in the picture to a Las Vegas showgirl who had won the title of “Miss Talent International.” “We won’t get much space out of it,” said Milt Smith, the Studio publicity man assigned to
The Sweet Ride
. “But every little bit helps.” Several days after the stunt was agreed upon, Smith walked disgustedly into his office. “You know that slob with the boobs?” he said. “ ‘Miss Talent International’ she calls herself—how do you like that? Well, she’s making a hundred and a half a week in Vegas, but you know what she wants? Five hundred a week net. For waving her knockers in front of the camera. So Joe says, ‘Tell her to go fuck herself.’ ”

Richard Zanuck took his place at the head of his private luncheon table in a small, tree-guarded alcove outside the Studio commissary. A portable awning protected one end of the table from the hot summer sun, but Zanuck, who is a health enthusiast, sat in its glare. On his plate, as there was every day, was a piece of paper listing the closing price of Fox stock on the New York Stock Exchange and the number of shares traded. The closing price that day was 55¼ and the volume traded was 17,000 shares.

“Down an eighth,” Stan Hough said. Hough is one of the four people who lunch with Zanuck every day, the other three being Harry Sokolov, Owen McLean and Doc Merman. There were three other places at the table for favored Studio employees and guests. Hough passed the market information down the table, and the conversation turned to a scandal that had just broken in the papers that week about high-stakes gambling at the Friars Club, a private club in Beverly Hills whose members were largely connected with show business. According to the reports, a few of the club’s members enticed other Friars and outsiders into rigged gin-rummy games. Some of the losers had been taken for $200,000
and $300,000, and a number of such eminent show business figures as Phil Silvers and Tony Martin had been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the case in Los Angeles. Doc Merman was a Friars member, and as he explained how the games were fixed, an agent named Kurt Frings appeared at the table.

“I got the big news,” Frings said. He was a large, red-faced man with a thick German accent. “I got subpoenaed this morning.”

“Are you a victim, Kurt, or were you a winner?” Harry Sokolov said.

Frings made an obscene gesture toward Sokolov. “I’m not even a member,” he said. “I play there twice. On a Saturday and a Sunday afternoon. Two days, I didn’t even go down once. Not once.”

“How much did you lose?” Zanuck said.

Frings threw up his hands. “I made a deal,” he said. “I don’t want the publicity. I said I’d talk if they don’t mention the money I lose.”

Zanuck cut into a shrimp. “I heard they were only subpoenaing people who tapped out for fifty grand, Kurt.”

Frings moved his shoulders expressively.

“Two afternoons, you must have been good for a hundred anyway,” Merman said.

“Please, I don’t want to mention the money,” Frings said. “You know how they did it? They brought in a guy from out of state to bug the place.”

“That’s what brought the Feds in,” Sokolov said. “You bring a guy in from out of state to put a bug in and you’ve got the FBI on your hands.”

“They had a peephole in the ceiling,” Frings said. He
had ordered lox and capers and a caper had stuck to the corner of his mouth. His face was wreathed with sweat. “The guy up in the ceiling had some kind of magnifying glass set up so he could see the whole table. And the guy playing who was in on the fix had some kind of buzzer system around his waist. Say the pigeon had two kings and the other guy was going to drop a king. The guy in the ceiling would give him a little jolt with the buzzer. Two for drop, one for don’t drop, I don’t know, but it worked. They took Tony Martin for a hundred grand, I hear. Anyway, the guy would get the jolt, stick his king back and drop something else.”

“The guy upstairs must have been a good gin player,” Zanuck said.

“I hear they pay him $200 a day,” Frings said.

“What I don’t understand is who blew the whistle,” Hough said.

“The wives,” Merman said, slowly sipping a cup of coffee. “The wives squawked. A guy comes home and tells his wife he dropped fifty grand playing gin, it’s a big thing.”

Several months before, the Studio had finished shooting on
Valley of the Dolls
, a relatively inexpensive non-roadshow production based on Jacqueline Susann’s bestselling novel and produced by David Weisbart and Mark Robson (the latter had also directed the film). By midsummer, while the picture was being scored and edited, a major publicity campaign was already underway, for the Studio expected
Valley of the Dolls
to be its principal soft-ticket attraction during the winter months. One morning late in July, Frank Neill, a chunky, beet-faced
man who was the assistant director of Hollywood publicity, walked into the office of Lou Dyer, another Studio press agent. Chewing on an unlit cigar, he went to the bookcase and took out a copy of
The Motion Picture Almanac
. He sat heavily on the couch and began flipping through it. His finger ran down a page and then stopped. “David Weisbart,” Neill said softly.

“What about him?” Dyer said.

“He just dropped dead,” Neill said. “He was playing golf with Mark Robson. Just keeled over.”

“What hole?” Dyer said.

“I don’t know,” Neill said. “Take care of it, will you, Lou? Get hold of the
Times
and the
Examiner
. We’ve got enough time for the trades.”

“The wire services will pick it up from the papers,” Dyer said.

“Right,” Neill said. He spat out a piece of the cigar. “It was at the Brentwood Country Club.”

Dyer picked up the telephone, dialed the Brentwood Country Club and asked for the manager. He identified himself and explained that he was checking on the circumstances of Weisbart’s death. “What is your name, sir?” Dyer said. “Mr. Gill.” He reached for a pencil and began taking notes. “With Mark Robson, yes, I have that. He’s the director. Was it a twosome or a foursome? Just a twosome. I see. And what hole was he on? Or had he just teed off? The tenth? Fine. Well, thank you, Mr. Gill.” He checked his notes. “Oh, one thing. What is your first name? For the papers, that’s right. And you are the manager. Thank you, Mr. Gill, thank you very much.”

Neill came back into the office with some photographs
of Weisbart and a canned Studio biography of the producer. “I think we can still make the first editions,” Neill said. “We’ll send a bag downtown. And, Lou, when you call the papers, don’t forget to say that Robson had co-producer status on the picture.”

Dyer dialed again and got the city desk of the
Los Angeles Times
. He quickly explained the circumstances of Weisbart’s death to the desk man on the other end of the line. “A messenger is coming down with a bio,” he said. “But let me give you a couple of his hits. He produced
Kid Galahad, Our Miss Brooks, Rebel Without a Cause
—that’s the picture that zoomed James Dean to stardom. He started out as a film editor working with such film greats as Michael Curtiz.” Dyer paused. “Curtiz. That’s C for Charlie, U, R, T for Tom, I, Z for zebra.”

As the script for
The Boston Strangler
neared completion, director Richard Fleischer and producer Robert Fryer flew back and forth to Boston scouting exterior and necessary interior locations. At the Studio, Stan Hough’s production department worked out the final details of the budget. When he was in Los Angeles, Fryer spent hours every day in a Studio projection room looking at footage of actors being considered for parts in
The Boston Strangler
. A few days after Edward Anhalt turned in the final draft of his screenplay, the script was mimeographed and distributed to all the Studio department heads so that they could make a final estimate of the costs their departments would incur on
the picture. The correlation of the below-the-line costs was overseen by Hough and Doc Merman. One Thursday afternoon Merman called the
Strangler
production staff and the Studio department heads together for a final budget meeting.

The meeting took place in the conference room of the production bungalow. Fryer, Fleischer and Merman sat at the head of the T-shaped conference table and the rest of the thirty or so conferees sat down on either side of the table. Everyone in the room was given a mimeographed production breakdown of each of
The Boston Strangler
’s 90 sequences and 256 scenes. The breakdown was titled “
THE BOSTON STRANGLER—STORY 147—PRODUCER: ROBERT FRYER—DIRECTOR: RICHARD FLEISCHER
.” Every sequence in the script had been broken down into its basic elements—set, location, major cast members, bit players, extras and animals (if necessary), special props, special effects and sequence plot synopsis.