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The week after
The Sweet Ride
began shooting at the beach north of Trancas, Pasternak boarded a chauffeur-driven Studio car for a ride out to the location. He nestled into a corner of the back seat and opened a script he was considering called
Guitar City
. He is a short man on whom the years are beginning to tell. He has closely cropped gray hair, his step is sometimes not quite steady, and he still speaks with a heavy Hungarian accent. The car headed onto the Santa Monica Freeway and then at the beach sped north along the Pacific Coast Highway. Pasternak closed the script and stared out the window.

“You know what the real story for today’s kids is?” he said. “It’s about an eighteen-year-old girl who fucks but who’s afraid to fall in love.” He seemed to concentrate on the story possibilities for a while. “The big problem in Hollywood today is replacement. All the big stars are on crutches. You get a young girl falling in love with Cary Grant. In real life, she sleeps with him once or twice to see what it’s like, then she leaves him. In Hollywood they live happily ever after.”

It was a gray, muggy day and off to the left of the highway, surfers were waiting out beyond the summer combers. The beach and the sand and the water put Pasternak in mind of Esther Williams and he began to ruminate about the pictures he had built around her. “I used to keep her in the water 99 per cent of the time,” he said. His lips curled in a tentative smile. “Wet she was a star.”

The
Sweet Ride
location was on Point Dume, three miles past Trancas. The Studio had built a road from the highway down to the beach-house set it had rented
for two months. The road was necessary to accommodate all the trucks which hauled out equipment from the Studio every day. (Under union rules, nothing could be left on the location overnight. Even the cast could not drive out to the location in the morning; they had to report to the Studio and be driven out in Studio cars.) The script had called for two houses on the beach, but when such a site could not be found, the Studio rented a large house trailer and installed it next to the most suitable house available. The lot behind the house was filled with equipment trucks, portable-dressing-room trucks and portable-bathroom trucks. Cables covered the ground. The crew sat around in chairs reading the trade papers. Pasternak studied the slate-gray sky. “Most days you want sun,” he said. “But if you get weather like this, you hope it stays this way all day. The sun comes out now, it’s a bad match. And a bad match costs money.”

Pasternak picked his way through the cables and between the lights down to a sundeck where
The Sweet Ride
’s director, Harvey Hart, was setting up a shot. “You’re running late,” Pasternak said.

Hart did not look around. He was sitting in a director’s chair decorated with red hearts. He waited until the lights and camera were in the proper position and then gestured wearily up toward the house, where Tony Franciosa was standing, smoking a cigarette.

“Tony showed up an hour late this morning,” Hart said. He still had not turned around. “He said he was sick. What can you do? It gets the day off to a bad start.”

Pasternak put his hands in his pockets and gazed out
at the ocean. “You know Tony Franciosa doesn’t draw flies at the box office,” he said.

Hart did not move.

“But he’s a good actor,” Pasternak said, almost to himself. “You’re not buying box office any more. You’re buying talent.”

He turned around and stared up the steps toward the house. Jacqueline Bisset was standing at the top of the stairs. She is a young English girl in her early twenties. She saw Pasternak looking at her and slowly came down the stairs.

“Good morning, Mr. Pasternak,” she said.

“It’s afternoon,” Pasternak said. The day was going too slowly for him. He looked at her and then smiled. “This girl I love,” he said.

Jacqueline Bisset smiled hesitantly.

“That bikini you were wearing yesterday,” Pasternak said. “Was it yours?”

“Yes, was something wrong?”

“It looked baggy in the rushes.”

“It’s not really. It fits.”

“Doesn’t fit tight enough,” Pasternak said. “Get one from wardrobe.”

“It fits when it’s dry,” Jacqueline Bisset said. “It’s just that I got such a pounding when I was in the water. It’s a terribly long scene.” She laughed. The scene called for a wave to wash the top off her bikini. “I had my arms over here”—she crossed her arms over her bosom—“and I couldn’t pull the bottom up. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so modest. But that’s why it didn’t look tight. Honest.”

“Okay,” Pasternak said. He looked at her for a long
time without saying anything. She began to fidget under his gaze, pretending not to notice.

“You got youth on your side,” Pasternak said finally. “Doris Day, she thinks she doesn’t get old. She tells me once it was her cameraman who was getting older. She wanted me to fire him.” The memory seemed to satisfy him. “Ha,” he said.

Richard Zanuck was late. The dailies were about to begin and he still had not arrived at his private projection room in the basement of the Studio’s administration building. Zanuck watches the dailies—the unedited
film shot the previous day on all the Studio’s feature pictures—immediately after lunch every day, always in the company of the same executive quintet—Harry Sokolov, his executive assistant, a doughnut-shaped little lawyer and former talent agency vice president; Stan Hough, head of the production department, a rangy, rawboned man with a deceptively open, country face whose father had the same job at the Studio under Darryl Zanuck; Owen McLean, head of the casting department; James Fisher, West Coast story editor; and Barbara McLean, a small bird-like woman who is head of the Studio’s cutting department.

It was nearly two o’clock when Zanuck walked into the screening room. He had played two sets of tennis during lunch and he was tieless and carrying his coat over his arm. A trickle of shower water ran down the side of his face. He hung his suit coat neatly on a hanger and began knotting his tie. Flopping into an overstuffed leather chair, he pressed the buzzer notifying the projectionist to begin. The room went dark.

“What have we got, Bobby?” Zanuck asked Barbara McLean.

“We start with the
Joanna
test, Dick,” Barbara McLean said.
Joanna
was a picture that the Studio was preparing to shoot in England later in the summer, a contemporary comedy about a provincial girl entangled in the mod morality of London. The picture was being filmed under the Eady Plan, a program by which the British government helps finance a foreign film provided that it is made in the United Kingdom with a predominantly English cast and crew. The enormous success of
Darling, Alfie, Morgan
and
Georgie Girl
had not
been lost on the Studio. All had been made with stars then virtually unknown in the U.S., and, instead of trying for mass appeal, all had appealed primarily to the under-thirty audience. The promise of high return for low investment was irresistible, especially with the Eady Plan covering part of the action, and the Studio had seven low-budget contemporary English pictures in preparation. Like the others,
Joanna
would be filmed with comparative unknowns both in front of and behind the cameras.

The film on the projection room screen was of a girl testing for the title role. The girl was tall and angular and she smiled and pulled on a lock of her hair for the camera, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other. Off camera, the director began asking her questions: What was her father like? “Clark Gable.” Did she like Clark Gable? “Oh, no, I like my father,” the girl said. She brushed the hair back from her face and wet her pouty lips. “He was the best poker player in the Royal Navy. That’s what he and my mother got married on.” Was her father a gambler? “No,” the girl said, “he’s a vegetarian.”

Zanuck stirred in his seat. A scowl slowly began to rend his brow. He turned to Owen McLean. “I don’t care if her father’s a vegetarian or not,” he said. “Isn’t she going to play a scene? What have we got this for?”

“I don’t know, Rich,” McLean said in the darkness. “I thought she was going to do something from the picture.”

“She’s in every scene,” Zanuck said. “I’d like to see what she looks like doing a scene.” His head swiveled around and there were murmurs of agreement.

“Jesus, this is ridiculous,” Stan Hough said. “There’s a lot of money at stake.”

The girl on screen kept wetting her lips. She did a Charlie Chaplin imitation, then sinuously made love to a poster of Clark Gable, her lips synchronized to a Judy Garland record of “You Made Me Love You” playing in the background. Zanuck was getting visibly irritated.

“Don’t they have a script over there, Owen?” he said.

“Sure they do, Rich,” McLean said.

“Ridiculous,” Stan Hough said again. “This girl’s in all but ten minutes of the picture.”

“They got a script and she’s doing Chaplin,” Zanuck said.

“And singing Judy Garland records,” Hough said.

“It’s a goddamn subterfuge,” Zanuck said.

“Ridiculous,” Hough said.

“I hate this crap,” McLean said. He knotted his fingers under his chin. “It’s a subterfuge. The girl’s the whole picture. Why doesn’t he give her a scene to play?” He peered through the darkness. “You know why?”

“I know why,” Hough said.

“Jesus, it’s clear to me,” Zanuck said.

“She’s got to be the director’s girl friend,” McLean said. “She’s got to be.”

“Got to be,” Hough said.

“He would have given her a scene otherwise,” Sokolov said.

“Ridiculous,” Hough said.

Zanuck flicked on the light by his chair and finished knotting his tie. He got up and took his coat off the hanger. “Goddamn waste of time,” he said.

The Sweet Ride
was still shooting at the beach. One morning shortly after he arrived on the location Joe Pasternak was accosted by Bob Denver, a loose-jointed young actor who was playing a hippie jazz musician in the picture. Denver was not a piano player and his numbers in the film had been pre-recorded by someone else. Dissatisfied with the pre-recorded piano track, the actor had brought a pianist friend down to the beach and recommended to Pasternak that his friend re-record the piano numbers.

“We’ve already recorded,” Pasternak said. He eyed Denver warily.

“But it’s rinky-dink music,” Denver said. “It’s not in character.” His friend hung in the background. Pasternak turned and looked at the pianist, then back at Denver, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

“Is this guy in the musicians’ union?” Pasternak asked.

“No,” Denver said.

A triumphant smile creased Pasternak’s face. “Then he can’t do it.”

“This guy’s good,” Denver said plaintively.

“The guy I got was good,” Pasternak said.

“He’s got the wrong sound, Mr. Pasternak,” Denver said.

Pasternak plucked at the collar of his blue checked shirt. He patted Denver on the arm. “You’re a good boy, I’ll see,” he said. Pasternak watched Denver and the musician stroll off. “Never say no to an actor,” he said.

Back at the Studio,
Star!
was in the final stages of its book, or non-musical, shooting. At the conclusion of the
book shooting, the company was going to close down for two weeks to rehearse the big musical numbers. An additional two or three weeks had been allotted to shoot the musical numbers. The frame of
Star!
was a time-worn Hollywood storytelling device: Gertrude Lawrence (as played by Julie Andrews) sits in a projection room watching a black-and-white small-screen documentary of her life which periodically dissolves into widescreen, color and stereophonic sequences of what
really
happened. The projection room sequences were all that remained to be shot before the shutdown and Robert Wise had set his cameras up in one of the Studio’s actual screening rooms, Projection Room 3-A.

“You know, I really didn’t want to make the Gertrude Lawrence story,” Wise said as he waited for the shot to be set up. “What I really wanted after
The Sound of Music
was a star vehicle for Julie. It’s a touchy business with stars. They want to see scripts before they commit themselves.” He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. “But I didn’t want to hire a writer, buy all the properties about Gertie’s life, and then have Julie turn it down. Leaving me stuck with the Gertie Lawrence story. So I had my associates do a tremendous amount of research into Gertie’s life, interviewing people, getting anecdotes we could use, an insight into her the books didn’t have.” He stepped aside as a brace of arc lights were wrestled into position, waiting until they were properly placed before he continued. “Then we explained our concept to Julie. She said she’d do it and that was all we needed to get a script together.” He smiled. “Of course, we had to buy all the books then to cover ourselves against a lawsuit.”

The shot was finally set up and Julie Andrews was
called from her dressing room. She was wearing a long, tailored purple coat with a velvet collar, matching skirt and shocking-pink blouse, as well as two diamond bracelets, a diamond pin and a double strand of pearls, part of the jewelry on loan from Cartier’s and worth approximately $100,000. As she arranged herself in a seat in the front row of the projection room, she picked at the full sleeve of her blouse. “My God, how did they ever wear anything like this?” she said.