The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (371 page)

Franklin J. Schaffner
(1920–89), b. Tokyo
1963:
The Stripper/Woman of Summer
. 1964:
The Best Man
. 1965:
The War Lord
. 1967:
The Double Man; Planet of the Apes
. 1969:
Patton/Patton: Lust for Glory
. 1971:
Nicholas and Alexandra
. 1973:
Papillon
. 1976:
Islands in the Stream
. 1978:
The
Boys from Brazil
. 1980:
Sphinx
. 1982:
Yes, Giorgio
. 1987:
Lionheart
. 1989:
Welcome Home
.

Once upon a time, Gore Vidal was discombobulated to see a theatre marquee with the proud come-on: “Franklin Schaffner’s
The Best Man.”
This was the auteur theory up in lights, and it was nonsense (years later,
Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid
, on TV, may have been a little more authorship than anyone wanted). The movie of
The Best Man
is as acerbic and as limited as Vidal’s play. It is full of good, insider talk; it has an eager love of power—despite Vidal’s steady, bitchy disavowal of that force; and it is an overly neat, schematic narrative. Schaffner served Vidal, and it would have been interesting for Vidal to have been given the job of directing. He might have learned how to write a better play.

But Schaffner was blessed by a moment. Having spent much of his childhood in Japan (as the son of missionaries), he served in the navy and then joined
March of Time
. From there he went to CBS and moved from news to directing drama:
Twelve Angry Men
(54) and
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial
(55), for instance, both of which won him directing Emmys—he got another, a few years later, for handling Jacqueline Kennedy’s tour of the White House.

His movie debut was highly praised, but it is an adolescent melodrama in which Joanne Woodward and Richard Beymer seem staid. It does not convey the claustrophobic smalltown tumescence in William Inge’s original play,
A Loss of Roses
. Schaffner’s style was cold, neutral, and classy, and so he demonstrated only aimless versatility in his best years, ranging from the Dark Ages epic of
The War Lord
to the TV-like
Planet of the Apes
.

But
Planet of the Apes
was a very influential hit on which Schaffner’s numbness got out of the way of the Pierre Boule novel and Rod Serling’s script.
Patton
was another hit, but a strange product. Francis Ford Coppola did a lot of the script. George C. Scott commandeered the project (he said he believed it needed Henry Hathaway’s boldness). But maybe George Patton made the picture, along with the very arresting opening and the way, in 1969, that the topic cut against the liberal age.

Thereafter, Schaffner was booked in for big pictures—long, slow, and allegedly “major.”
Nicholas and Alexandra
is only long and slow.
Papillon
is very slow, but it has a fine performance from Steve McQueen.
Islands in the Stream
was Schaffner’s most intriguing film, for it came close to an intimate rendering of Hemingway’s disorganized confessional. With Scott again, it is moody and wistful.
Boys from Brazil
was too stark for Schaffner: it came out as mere political melodrama—the horror and absurdity took second place to Gregory Peck’s tortured act as Mengele.

His final pictures ranged from Egyptology to the movie debut of Pavarotti to a story of children searching for Richard I to a story about a returned veteran who finds his wife has remarried. And so the onetime maker of big pictures was reduced to inconsequence.

Dore Schary
(1905–80), b. Newark, New Jersey
“How to be head of the studio and not very important”—that might be the Schary story. It amounts to the hypothesis that, the higher an executive position in movies, the less creative influence it exercised, and the more its holder was exposed as a would-be seer trying to handle prickly talents and preempt public fickleness.

Schary figures prominently in
Picture
, Lillian Ross’s account of the making of
The Red Badge of Courage
. The idea for the film had been proposed to MGM by John Huston and Gottfried Reinhardt, a producer. Huston takes up the story, as recorded by Lillian Ross: “ ‘Dore loved the idea,’ Huston said. ‘And Dore said he would read the novel.’ A couple of weeks later, Schary had asked Huston to write a screen treatment—a rough outline for the detailed script. ‘I did my treatment in four days,’ Huston said … Schary approved the treatment, and the cost of making the picture was estimated at a million and a half dollars.’ Huston wrote the screenplay in five weeks, and Schary approved it. ‘Then the strangest things began to happen,’ Huston said. ‘Dore is called vice-president in charge of production. L. B. [Mayer] is called vice-president in charge of the studio. Nobody knows which is boss.’ ”

It was a classic contrast between two men equally insecure—in 1950—about their ability to make consistently successful, prestigious pictures, such as MGM prided itself on. Although forty-five years old at the time of
Red Badge
, Schary was thought of as “young,” if only because of the looming seniority of Mayer, sixty-five years old and one of the founding fathers of the industry. Mayer had flourished in the days when movies had no rival, and when returns proved the merit of aiming at the lowest common denominator of the audience. If MGM had risen above Andy Hardy it was because of men like Irving Thalberg and Arthur Freed. But Mayer had survived, in power, and apparently vindicated by longevity.

Some in the studio may have recognized the searching test put on movies by TV, and Schary’s appointment in 1948 was on the basis of his brief success at RKO with enterprising, low-budget movies made from more intelligent scripts than Hollywood was used to. In the mid-1940s, Selznick hired Schary despite MGM warnings that he “was more interested in trying to sell his causes than in making pictures.” But Schary’s whole record signaled a lightweight, whereas Mayer was plainly a godfather reluctant to hand over office. What most characterizes the fumbling ineptness of Hollywood moguls is not the way that they allegedly ruined a potentially great film: in the outline and tattered remains,
Red Badge
looks like Huston in his lofty, “art” mood. The real giveaway is that no one at MGM had the confidence of their misgivings. Mayer was flatly hostile, but Schary hedged around with a pusillanimous cheerfulness caught naked in Ross’s recollection: “There was resistance, great resistance, to making
The Red Badge of Courage
. In terms of cost and in other terms. This picture has no single incident. This is a period picture. The story—well there’s no story in this picture. It’s just the story of a boy. It’s the story of a coward. Well, it’s the story of a hero.”

The picture went ahead, with cheerfulness turning colder every day. The intrinsic bias of the studio executive was to curse a project with gloom, to fulfill that bias by withholding promotion, and then to incorporate the failure into some glib paternal philosophy. The most odious moment at the end of
Picture
comes when Nicholas Schenck, chairman of the board, says that he knew the picture would flop but that Schary had to be taught a lesson. But the most likely reasons for proceeding with a forlorn venture were scuttling insecurity and the secret design to oust Mayer. For in 1951, Mayer resigned from MGM (with compensation of $2,600,000) and Schary became the nervous occupant of Mayer’s seat. Perhaps he trembled at such an exposed eminence. He lasted only five years, and in 1956 was abandoned to roam listlessly about the theatre and independent production.

In retrospect, the wonder is that he ever got so far. An actor in stock and small Broadway parts, he began writing plays, and in 1932 was briefly hired by Walter Wanger at Columbia. He was an itinerant screenwriter through the 1930s who had his successes at MGM in pictures close to Mayer’s rabble-rousing ideals:
Big City
(37, Frank Borzage);
Boy’s Town
(38, Norman Taurog);
Young Tom Edison
(40, Taurog); and
Edison, the Man
(40, Clarence Brown). In 1942, MGM promoted him and he produced
Joe Smith, American
(42, Richard Thorpe);
Journey for Margaret
(42, W. S. Van Dyke); and
Lassie Come Home
(43, Fred M. Wilcox).

He then went to Selznick and worked for his Vanguard company on
I’ll Be Seeing You
(44, William Dieterle). Next he packaged a few things that Selznick traded away to RKO:
The Spiral Staircase
(45, Robert Siodmak);
The Farmer’s Daughter
(47, H. C. Potter); and
The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer
(47, Irving Reis). That led to his appointment in charge of production at RKO:
Till the End of Time
(46, Edward Dmytryk);
Crossfire
(47, Dmytryk);
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
(48, Potter), this for Selznick through RKO; executive producer on
The Boy with Green Hair
(48, Joseph Losey) and
They Live By Night
(48, Nicholas Ray); and
Walk Softly, Stranger
(50, Robert Stevenson).

He went to MGM in charge of production in 1948, but was never responsible for anything as exciting as the Losey and Ray debuts. His time was largely spent in company politics and in supervising all the films on the floor. But he did have a more personal hand in the production of:
Battleground
(49, William Wellman);
The Next Voice You Hear
(50, Wellman);
Westward the Women
(51, Wellman);
Plymouth Adventure
(52, Brown);
Take the High Ground
(53, Richard Brooks);
Bad Day at Black Rock
(54, John Sturges);
Trial
(55, Mark Robson);
The Last Hunt
(56, Brooks);
The Swan
(56, Charles Vidor); and
Designing Woman
(57, Vincente Minnelli). In the main, these are orthodox, old-fashioned films, with
Black Rock
the most pungent and the greatest success.

After that, he produced two pretentious and dull films:
Lonelyhearts
(58, Vincent J. Donehue), which he scripted from the Nathanael West novella;
Sunrise at Campobello
(60, Donehue), from his very successful play about Franklin Roosevelt. He also directed a film version of Moss Hart’s autobiography
Act One
(63), but it was barely released.

Roy Scheider
(1932-2008), b. Orange, New Jersey
With a narrow face, broken nose, and furtive eyes, it was always most likely that Roy Scheider would be a supporting actor. So it has worked out—and there must be disappointment after several leading roles in large and successful ventures, most notably the police chief in
Jaws
(75, Steven Spielberg), and an Oscar nomination playing the Bob Fosse figure in
All That Jazz
(79, Fosse). Since then, a real decline has set in, leading to a rather halfhearted monster of medical insurance in
The Rainmaker
(97, Francis Coppola).

He was educated at Rutgers and Franklin & Marshall, and he had several years on stage before he got into movies. His debut was as Roy R. Sheider in
The Curse of the Living Corpse
(64, Del Tenney); but then he did
Stiletto
(69, Bernard Kowalski);
Loving
(70, Irvin Kershner);
Puzzle of a Downfall Child
(70, Jerry Schatzberg); memorable and sly as a pimp in
Klute
(71, Alan J. Pakula); winning a supporting actor nomination as the sidekick cop to Gene Hackman in
The French Connection
(71, William Friedkin);
The Outside Man
(73, Jacques Deray);
The French Conspiracy
(73, Yves Boisset);
The Seven-Ups
(73, Philip D’Antoni);
Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York
(75, Sidney J. Furie);
Marathon Man
(76, John Schlesinger);
Sorcerer
(77, Friedkin);
Jaws 2
(78, Jeannot Szwarc);
The Last Embrace
(79, Jonathan Demme);
Still of the Night
(82, Robert Benton);
Blue Thunder
(83, John Badham);
2010
(84, Peter Hyams);
The Men’s Club
(86, Peter Medak);
52 Pick-Up
(86, John Frankenheimer);
Cohen and Tate
(89, Eric Red);
Listen to Me
(89, Douglas Day Stewart);
Night Game
(89, Peter Masterson);
The Fourth War
(90, Frankenheimer);
The Russia House
(90, Fred Schepisi);
Naked Lunch
(91, David Cronenberg);
Romeo Is Bleeding
(94, Medak);
The Myth of Fingerprints
(97, Bart Freundlich); as RKO boss George Schaefer in
RKO 281
(99, Benjamin Ross). And then increasing activity in mediocre films.

Maria Schell
(1926-2005), b. Vienna
She is the older sister of Maximilian Schell. It is a curiosity that Maria Schell’s narrow talent should twice have been employed to perfect effect, and twice so ludicrously as to undermine films entirely. As the long-suffering wife in
Une Vie
(58, Alexandre Astruc) and the girl in
White Nights
(57, Luchino Visconti) her shortcomings were turned to advantage. That fretful cheerfulness and the distraught smile that might curdle milk were very touching in Astruc’s portrait of a naïve girl gradually made aware that her husband is cheating her.
Une Vie
contains marvelous images of her rising panic and apprehensive romanticism, and it says a lot that she is made a figure of tragic dignity. In
White Nights
, however, Visconti channeled all her wide-eyed feyness into Dostoyevsky’s dream story of a girl whose faith in a mysterious lover is finally vindicated. On the debit side, her giggly Grushenka in
The Brothers Karamazov
(57, Richard Brooks) is one of MGM’s more risible casting coups. That film was always a forlorn project, but her presence in
Cimarron
(60, Anthony Mann) is a serious obstacle to a fascinating story of pioneers being domesticated.