Adventures in the Screen Trade (2 page)

poll of theatre owners for fifty years now. Ana it's flawed: In the middle seventies, the star who was being offered the most money often wasn't even on their list, but that was because Steve McQueen wasn't working. Still, the Quigley poll is the best we have. Theatre owners, after all, should know at least a little bit about whose movies perform best in their theatre. Following is the Quigley list of the top ten stars of last year, 1981:

(1) Burt Reynolds (2) ClintEastwood (3) Dudley Moore (4) Dolly Piarton (5) Jane Fonda (6) Harrison Ford (7) Alan Alda (8) Bo Derek (9) Goldie Hawn (10) Bill Murray

Now let's go backjust five years. H 1976:

(1) Robert Redford (2) Jack Nicholson (3) Dustin Hoffman (4) Clint Eastwood (5) Mel Brooks (6) Burt Reynolds (7) AI Pacino (8) Tatum O'Neal (9) Woody Alien (10) Charles Bronson

In just five years, only two repeaters: Eastwood and Reyn olds. This is five years before then-the top ten of 1971:

(1) John Wayne (2) Clint Eastwood (3) Paul Newman (4) Steve McQpeen (5) George C. Scott (6) Dustin Hoffman (7) Walter Matthau (8) Ali MacGraw (9) Scan Connery (10) Lee Marvin

Only Eastwood is still on from the '81 list. And only Eastwood and Hoffman still were around to make the list in '76.

This last list is from 1961. I know that twenty years is a long time. But we are talking here about the ephemeral quality of performers, which often manifests itself in their behavior and material. Also, twenty years isn't that long-not in the career of a professor or a doctor of internal medicine.

(1) Elizabeth Taylor (2) Rock Hudson (3) Doris Day (4) John Wayne (5) Gary Grant (6) Sandra Dee (7) Jerry Lewis (8) William Holden (9) Tony Curtis (10) Elvis Presley

Now some of these people are dead, and some are retired. But a bunch of them are still there, but they're not making this kind of list anymore. Dedine and fall can't ever be easy, but for a star it's torment. Because, when they are on top, they are so adored. Movie stars, as has been stated elsewhere ad nauseam, are perhaps as close as we come to royalty. So the distance of the drop is much greater than the rest of us may (or will) experience.

But more than that, these people are role player. They had lives, grammar school, high school, just like the rest of us. But they weren't contented with their parts. That's why they become actors. And when they become not just actors but stars, that's getting-what-you-wish-for time.

There's a cliche that goes "Be careful what you wish for, you might get it." The problem with stars is they get their wish but not for long.

Which is why it's crucial for a screenwriter to remember this: Never underestimate the insecurity of a star. Look, we're all insecure, we know that. Even brain surgeons probably get the shakes when no one's watching.

But movie stars? It's all but inconceivable. They are so blessed, and not just with physical beauty. They have talent and intelligence and command and an unending supply of self-deprecating charm.

We have read their interviews in the papers and we've seen them on the talk shows, and it's very hard to realize that what we are seeing are not the people themselves but the actors doing what they do best: acting.

George Segal may have put it best. I had watched him be terrific on a talk show, playing his banjo or whatever the hell instrument he plays, and joking it up. I asked him if he had always been able to enjoy himself that way.

He said, "That's like class: I prepare myself--I do an acting exercise. I tell myself I'm playing a character who's enjoying himself."

In my early days. whenever I met anyone who had worked with performers I revered, I would always pester them with the same question: What was that performer really like?

I already knew the answer, of course: They were the parts they played. Alas, not so.

A man who worked with Bogart told me: "Miserable pain in the ass, always making trouble, always grousing that he had shit to say and everybody else had the good lines. Whined and hitched the whole shoot." Bogart whining?

A man who worked with Gary Grant told me: "Gary was at his peak. I did two pictures with him and both times it was the same fight: He was convinced he had no charm and couldn't do a lot of scenes because the audiences wouldn't buy him. It was madness-here he was, maybe the most charming actor ever, and it was like pulling teeth. He was absolutely certain that his charm had gone."

Grant without charm?

I don't ask that question much anymore. I'm tired of the same surprise. I think I'm like most of us in that I want to believe the image. Don't tell me Clint Eastwood hates horses, I don't want to know it.

And what's this got to do with insecurity? Just this: From the star's point of view, it can get very scary. One example of what I mean, from an early day's shooting of The Hot Rock, a 1972 picture that starred Robert Redford.

We were working at a prison in New York and the shot simply required Redford, who had just been paroled, to exit a prison gate. He was dressed in intentionally ill-fitting clothes.

A bunch of prison workers were standing around while the lighting was finished. Some guards were watching, too, and one of them began talking to me.

"This is how it's done, I guess."

I said it was.

"Always lake this long?"

I said it did, or longer.

Peter Yates, the director, was conferring nearby with Redford. They talked for a while, I assume about last-minute odds and ends.

"My wife would like to fuck him."

This remark caught me more or less by surprise and I turned to look at the guard: ordinary-seeming guy, maybe forty, in his prison uniform.

"I mean, you don't know what she would give just to fuck him."

Yates and Redford separated, Yates moving to the camera area, Redford to the gate.

And the guard, need I add, was not watching Yates. "She said to me today, my wife, that she would get down on her hands and knees and crawl just for the chance to fuck him one time. One time. "

Now, I had seen Redford act on stage: After his brilliant comedy performance in Barefoot in the Park, I was convinced he was going to be the next Jack Lemmon.

And I had known him a little socially. He was attractive and a wonderful storyteller and a good athlete and nobody ever said he was dumb-but rooms did not hush when he entered them.

Suddenly everything was different. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had opened, and Redford was an international cover boy. And here was this goddam guard using every word in his vocabulary to try to convey to me the extent of his wife's sexual passion for a guy who was basically a fine actor from California who had made some disastrous movies. (Anyone remember Situation Hopeless-But Not Serious?) Well, if half the world suddenly thinks of you as this guard's wife thought of Redford, that's bound to be just the least bit unsettling. You've spent three decades walking along being one thing, and you're still that thing-part of you is-but no one's seeing that. You don't know for sure what the public is reacting to, but you do know it's not you. And you don't know how long the reaction will last, but you do know that chances are, it won't be forever.

Stars have to live with that madness. I still remember the first day of my first trip to Hollywood: I met with some representatives of Paul Newman. We were talking about the scheduling of Harper, and I was worried whether Newman would be ready when Warner Bros. wanted to go with the picture. One of the men in the meeting said this after I voiced my concern: "Someday Raul will be Glenn Ford, but right now they'll wait for him."

It was my initial contact with the cruel kind of Hollywood remark that so often tends to deal with heat. Glenn Ford had been, a few years earlier, the number-one star in America and I wasn't aware that his career had stalled. And this was Newman's man forecasting his client's future. But he wasn't cruel, not in his terms. He was simply facing the reality that stars come and go. Only agents last forever. . . .

WHAT IS A STAR?

Used to be an easy answer: A star was a performer who was billed above the title. But those were the days when billing meant something; now, more often than not, it's something that's doled out in lieu of a higher salary. In other fields, it's easier to nail it down. Katharine Hepbum, for example, is a star in the theatre. Put her in a play and count your profits. Put Baryshnikov in tights, he's a star too. It doesn't matter if he's dancing Graham or Balanchine, just so he's dancing. Pavarotti and Itzhak. Periman, regardless of their program, are stars on the concert stage.

The most common definition I've heard out there lately is this: A star is someone who opens. (When a movie begins its run and no one comes, people in the business will say this of the movie, "It didn't open.")

A star may not guarantee you a profit-budgets can grow wildly for reasons totally out of their control-but they will absolutely be a hedge against disaster. A star ensures that, even if the movie is a stiff, the movie wilt open. One of the ways produc- ers measure the appeal of a star is the amount of business a picture does on its first weekend. Is that too stiff a requirement, bringing the public flocking early to a disaster? Look at it this way: If you arc a success financially, and you average fifty thousand dollars a year income for forty years of work, you are making a great deal less than what a star gets paid for three to eight weeks in front of the camera. I don't think staying offdisaster is too much to ask from them. ...

WHO IS A STAR?

Not as easy to answer as you may think.

Example: Back in the late sixties. Life magazine, then a weekly, had a performer on its cover who they said was the biggest movie star in the world. I was meeting that day with the head of one of the biggest studios. I asked if he'd seen Life. He said he hadn't. I told him what I've just told you. And then I asked if he'd care to guess who the performer was. "Newman," he said.

No.

"McQ.ueen?"

Not McQueen.

A pause now. "Can't be Poitier."

I agreed. It wasn't.

Now a long pause. Then, in a burst: "Oh shit, what's the matter with me. I'm not thinking--John Wayne." The Duke was not on the cover.

The situation was now getting the least bit uncomfortable. "If it's a woman it's either Streisand or Julie Andrews."

I said it was a man. And then, before things got too sticky, I gave the answer. (It was Eastwood.)

And he replied after some thought, "They claim Eastwood? Eastwood's the biggest star?" Finally, after another pause, he nodded. "They're right,"

The point being that if a studio giant couldn't guess the biggest star in his business, the territory is a bit murkier than most of us would imagine.

A lot of it has to do with playing hunches. Example: In the early seventies, two big Broadway musicals were made into movies. Cabaret starred Liza Minnelli and was a big hit. Fiddler on the Roof starred Topol and took in twice as much money. But the prevailing wisdom was this: Minnelli was a brand-new star, Topol was carried by the property. Nothing much happened to his film career, but Minnelli starred in several big-budget failures until the disaster of New York, New York sent her scurrying back to the theatre, where she is a star-the biggest) perhaps, on Broadway.

But in movies, the answer to "Who is a star?" is "It's whoever one studio executive with 'go* power thinks is a star and will underwrite with a start date." (A superstar is someone they'll all kill for. . . .)

HOW DO STARS HAPPEN?

Invariably, by mistake.

And invariably that mistake is committed by another performer who is a bigger name at the box office. You may think of Robert Redford as a force of nature, but if Marion Brando or Steve McQueen or Warren Beatty had said yes to the part of the Sundance Kid, Redford might well have remained what one studio executive told me he was when talk of hiring hirti first came up: "He's just another California blond-throw a stick at Malibu, you'll hit six of him."

If Albert Finney had agreed to play the title role in Lawrence of Arabia, Peter OToole wouldn't have happened. If Kirk Douglas had played Cat Ballon, forget about Lee Marvin. Montgomery Clift deserves special mention.

(Clift, for me, is the most overlooked of the great stars. His was a talent that ranked right up with Brando's. I once met Burt Lancaster, and he told me a story of his first days with Clift on From Here to Eternity. One thing you should know about Lancaster: The man exudes physical power. Even today, if he went in the ring against Andre the Giant, I'd bet Lancaster. He told me, "The only time I was ever really afraid as an actor was that first scene with Clift, It was my scene, understand: I was the sergeant, I gave the orders, he was just a private under me. Well, when we started, I couldn't stop my knees from shaking. I thought they might have to stop because my trembling would show. But I'd never worked with an actor with Clift's power before; I was afraid he was going to blow me right off the screen.")

A recent biography of Clift reports that he turned down, in one short stretch, four roles: the William Holden part in Sunset Boulevard, the James Dean part in East of Eden, the Paul Newman part in Somebody Up There Likes Me, and the Brando part in On the Waterfront. These were all crucial roles in their careers-would these wonderful actors have become stars if Clift had given the thumbs-up sign? Hard to say for sure.

It's easy to say, though, that without the aid and assistance of George Raft, there is no Humphrey Bogart. I know that's hard to believe today, since Bogart has become such a revered cult figure. But he scuffled for a decade or more in second-rate stuff. High Sierra began the turnaround, a part that Raft rejected.

Then came The Maltese Falcon. Raft didn't want to play Sam Spade because he didn't trust the first-time-out director, Johnt Huston.

Finally, Casablanca. Would you have enjoyed that great entertainment as much with George Raft and Hedy Lamarr? Or Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan? They were all approached for the parts.

Stars happen when they have a major role in a major hit. If they're not lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, it's back to the cattle calls and unemployment lines-or worse: television.