Pictures at a Revolution (28 page)

Valenti and Louis Nizer, who had signed a five-year contract to serve as the MPAA's senior counsel,
²¹
hadn't even unpacked their boxes when Jack Warner decided to use Mike Nichols's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
to finish what
The Pawnbroker
started. Although the first time they saw the picture, Warner and his executives had famously reacted by saying, “My God, we've got a $7.5 million dirty movie on our hands,”
²²
Nichols had jockeyed skillfully behind the scenes to keep much of its profanity intact. The vast circle of New York friends he had acquired in the years since he had starred with Elaine May on Broadway proved to be a critical asset;
Virginia Woolf
won a perfectly choreographed private endorsement from Jacqueline Kennedy, who, at Nichols's request, attended a small screening and made sure to say, within earshot of a key member of the Catholic film board, “Jack would have loved this movie.”
²³
After extensive internal debate, the National Catholic Office gave
Virginia Woolf
a rating of A-IV, “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations.”
²⁴
This coup, which allowed the film to escape not only a “C” (Condemned) rating, but a “B” (“morally objectionable in part for all”), would put even more pressure on the Production Code authority to approve the film.

Jack Warner then came up with his own preemptive way of undercutting the Code. On May 25, 1966, he announced that
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
would be released with the label “For adults only” and that theaters would have to sign contracts agreeing not to admit minors without adult accompaniment.
²⁵
While newspaper ads for independent or foreign movies had carried “adults only” labels for years, the label was used as a racy tease, not as a studio-approved enforceable restriction. Warner's maneuver, which effectively created the “R” rating two years before a ratings system existed, unsettled Geoffrey Shurlock. Shurlock was now seventy-one and had enjoyed extraordinary influence over the years; at one point, he was even able to order Alfred Hitchcock to reshoot the opening scene of
Psycho
. But his investment in the Code was rooted more in a desire to protect his own power than in any innate prudishness. When Warner Brothers bought
Virginia Woolf
, Shurlock had warned them that there was unacceptable language on Chapter Six of the script.
²⁶
But after Warner's decision, Shurlock knew his own standing was at stake and decided not to risk a public defeat. For the first time ever, he declined to make any ruling and privately advised Jack Warner to end-run him and take
Virginia Woolf
straight to the Code's appeals board.
²⁷
That jury, led by Valenti, who had spent just ten days in his new job, approved the movie using the same pretext they had offered for
The Pawnbroker
, announcing that they would not have given the seal to “a film of lesser quality” and warning that “this exemption does not mean that the floodgates are open.”

But of course, it meant exactly that. Valenti had already stated that he had serious questions about “the entire philosophy of self-censorship,”
²⁸
and in his first week running the MPAA, he ordered a complete overhaul of the Production Code—which, he said, Shurlock would continue to administer. (Shurlock quickly announced that he thought
Virginia Woolf
was “marvelous” and had simply been following the rules by withholding a seal.)
²⁹
The
Virginia Woolf
experience, said Valenti, “was Fort Sumter…it revealed to me that the past was done. I wasn't quite sure what the future was going to be.”
³⁰
But he was sure of one thing: After a heated hours-long private meeting in which he, Nizer, Jack Warner, and Warner's New York distribution chief, Ben Kalmenson, had dickered over every single profanity in the movie before it even went to the appeals board, he said to Nizer, “I'm not going through that again. I'm not going to spend my life sitting in…offices and saying, ‘I gotta take out one “shit” and one “screw.”' This is crazy.”
³¹

If Warner had any worries that the controversy over
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
would endanger its profitability, they were quickly allayed. The trade paper
Variety
, which used to headline its major reviews with a prognostication about the film's box office, simply and accurately wrote of its prospects, “Big.”
³²
They weren't wrong;
Virginia Woolf
became the second-highest-grossing film of 1966, trailing only
Thunderball
, as the lure of seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton behind closed doors doing something suitable “for adults only” proved irresistible. Reviews were stellar, with many critics pointedly endorsing Warner's use of a warning label and to applauding the license it would give Hollywood filmmakers to tackle rougher material.

Nichols was once again the man of the moment, but not an especially happy one. Jack Warner had treated him badly during postproduction of
Virginia Woolf
. Nichols had wanted the film's composer, Alex North, replaced with André Previn; when he pushed too hard, Warner bristled and had him barred from the editing room with only a day or two of work left.
³³
North's score stayed in, but Nichols had won almost every other battle. Still, his first Hollywood movie had left him battered and exhausted, and he found the overwhelming praise for his movie debut disorienting. “I am…upset by good reviews…. I get to feeling very unreal and very undeserving,” he told the
Today
show.
³⁴
Nichols was now becoming as famous as many of the people he directed and too busy for his own comfort. Production of
The Graduate
was supposed to start in the fall; he had just signed to direct the movie version of Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
, which was to start shooting the following summer; and with the first three Broadway plays he directed all still running, he had also agreed to stage his first Broadway musical, a trio of one-acts by the composer and lyricist of
Fiddler on the Roof
called
Come Back! Go Away! I Love You!
(later retitled
The Apple Tree
). In early 1966, ABC decided to make him the focus of an hour-long special,
The Many Worlds of Mike Nichols
.
³⁵
There turned out to be too many worlds: Nichols decided to retreat. He canceled the special, pushed
Catch-22
further into the future, and postponed production of
The Graduate
until the spring of 1967.

 

Throughout the summer
of 1966,
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
shared its place atop the box office with
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming
. The cold war comedy was several shades lighter than
Dr. Strangelove
had been, thanks largely to its droll, playful script by William Rose, a writer with fifteen years of screen credits who was nonetheless something of an enigma to the studios. Rose spent very little time in Los Angeles; many people in the industry weren't exactly sure whether he was American or English. In World War II, he served under Canada's Black Watch regiment in Europe, later reenlisting for the United States.
³⁶
In the 1950s, he had won Oscar nominations for writing two English comedies,
Genevieve
and the Alec Guinness classic
The Ladykillers
; by the 1960s, he was spending most of his time in England's Channel Islands, where he lived on the isle of Jersey with his wife, Tania. Rose was actually a native of Jefferson City, Missouri, albeit one who preferred to view America, and his chosen industry, from as great a distance as possible. “Bill got very nervous when he came to Hollywood,” says Norman Jewison. “He hated Hollywood. When the plane landed he would break out into a sweat. He was not good with studios or anything.”
³⁷

In 1963, Rose had written the screenplay for Stanley Kramer's
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
. Kramer liked Rose's work, and the two became friends; Rose then began to work on
Andersonville
for him. When Columbia pulled the plug on Kramer's plan to make the film, Rose happened to be in Los Angeles visiting him. After dinner at Kramer's home, the director recalled walking Rose out to his car when Rose brought up an idea for a screenplay he had been considering about racial intermarriage in South Africa. “I said, off the top of my head, ‘Why don't you set it in the United States?”' wrote Kramer in his memoirs. “‘Oh, sure,' replied Rose. ‘They'd name it picture of the year, at least in Harlem.'”
³⁸
(Rose's memory of the project's origin was somewhat different and probably more accurate; he later said that he never conceived of setting the story in South Africa and had had the idea for an American comedy of intermarriage since at least 1960; documents show that he had his agent pitch the premise to Kramer as early as the summer of 1962.)
³⁹

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, although it would be widely publicized by its studio as a taboo-shattering comedy, was not the first American movie to depict an interracial relationship. In 1964, director Larry Peerce's low-budget
One Potato, Two Potato
, about a white divorcée (Barbara Barrie) who marries a black man (Bernie Hamilton), had been released by the independent distributor Cinema V; the film had shown at the Cannes Film Festival, played throughout the United States, including the South (although primarily in black neighborhoods), and won an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. And audiences, at least in the North, had just seen the first stirrings of another interracial romance in
A Patch of Blue
.

Nonetheless, Kramer was certain that building an entire movie around the topic would put him on dangerous ground. He and Rose quickly talked through a plot that sounded like the premise of a very old-fashioned drawing room comedy: An affluent white couple, proud liberals in late middle age, would have their political and personal principles put to the test when their daughter walked through the door with a black fiancé. The premise was thin—little more, really, than the expansion of the then-familiar line “But would you want your daughter to marry one?” that had been applied by WASP America to Catholics, then to Jews, and then to blacks over the last thirty years. Rose brought a veteran screenwriter's sense of structure to the piece, talking it through with Kramer first on long walks through Beverly Hills and in meetings at the Beverly Wilshire
⁴⁰
and later when Kramer flew overseas to Jersey. Expanding on the plot's original quartet, he added characters—a winsome monsignor who could call the bride's parents on their hypocrisies, the groom's father and mother, who had reservations of their own about the proposed wedding, and the white family's loyal and suspicious black maid—and he compressed the plot's chronology: A story line that Kramer had originally imagined would unfold over two or three days was now to take place in twelve hours and be built around a single suspenseful question: Would the father of the bride grant permission for the marriage or not?

Kramer and Rose tangled over every plot point of
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
“It was a love-hate relationship,” recalls the director's widow, Karen Kramer. “They really were very competitive and could be quite combative. Bill was an egotist, and he was also an alcoholic. Stanley was smart and clever and quippy, and he could also be a bit of a put-down artist—he could really nail you if he wanted to, and when Bill would get out of line, Stanley would go after him and they'd both get really angry. I think Stanley would always say that Bill was a brilliant writer, but he was a very difficult person. They'd really get into it with each other, and Stanley would always win, which would make Bill furious.”
⁴¹

At the time he started working on the screenplay, Rose was in his early fifties; he had been away from the United States for a long time, and judging by his earliest plot outlines for the movie, his knowledge of the American civil rights movement was about twenty years behind the news. A treatment he wrote for
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
describes one minor character as “a sexy little colored girl” and Tillie the housekeeper as “a tough but lukewarmhearted darkie”; later, he took pains to write Tillie's dialogue in dialect, having her say “sumpin,” “jest,” “sposed,” and “lissen.”
⁴²
And the beginnings of Afrocentrism and discussions of cultural identity among black Americans were huffily dismissed by him in a few lines. Rose was still appalled that Cassius Clay had, in 1964, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, so much so that he mentioned it in his treatment. Declaring that Dr. Prentice, the black fiancé, was the grandson of slaves, he wrote, “Prentice isn't at all ashamed of [being called] Prentice. Nor does he really care who he might have been, or what he might have been called, somewhere in the Continent of Africa.”
⁴³

Kramer managed to comb out some, though by no means all, of the screenwriter's condescensions and stereotypes. But he was, characteristically, thinking more like a producer than a director and insisted that Rose play it safe in one significant area: “I wanted the prospective black bridegroom to be a person so suitable that if anyone objected to him, it could only be due to racial prejudice,” he wrote.
⁴⁴
Kramer was sure that if Prentice had any flaws at all, bigots in the audience would seize on them as a reason to disapprove of the marriage, but in seeking to avoid that trap, he fell right into another one: the return of the exceptional Negro, a character type that had by then become so familiar that even white critics were beginning to react against its persistence. In Rose's script, Prentice became not just a doctor, but an Ivy League–educated potential Nobel laureate who worked for the United Nations on worldwide health missions. Kramer's insistence on stacking the deck so heavily in favor of Prentice changed everything about the movie. The answer to the question “Guess who's coming to dinner?” now had to be Sidney Poitier, the only black actor Kramer thought that white America would find believable as a superachiever.