“
The Last
Tycoon ”
film
1976
Hollis
Alpert “The Last Tycoon”
American
Film magazine March 1976
Κινηματογραφικά
Το εξώφυλλο του περ.
“American
Film”, March 1976, vol. 1, Number 5.
( Ingrid Boulting and Robert De Niro )
Robert De Niro as Monroe Stahr, Ingrid
Boulting as Kathleen, in the forthcoming film version of The Last Tycoon.
Sam Spiegel,
laden with Academy Awards, as producer; the vaunted Harold Pinter as
screenwriter; the noted Elia Kazan as director; and a cast which includes
Robert DeNiro as Monroe Stahr, Robert Mitchum as Brady, Jeanne Moreau as an
actress, and, in somewhat lesser roles, Jack Nicholson, Tony Curtis, Ray
Milland, and Dana Andrews.
Robert DeNiro in a tycoonish moment.
Behind him is the actual intercom used by a Paramount executive in the late
thirties.
“What’s
Spiegel like?” a friend asked me, afterward. I try to answer. I’ve met him
several times over the years. He’s seventy-three now, and yet he has changed
little, if at all. He’s a bit on the heavy side, but he always was. He has an
accent, and it’s the same accent I knew before. Yet he speaks with precision,
always searching for the right word, a little annoyed and dissatisfied until he
finds it. “He has charm,” I say vaguely, “and a way of knowing what’s in your
head. Say something he likes to hear, and he glows, almost boyishly. He can be
kindly or very tough, and when he’s tough it comes across with regret and
purposeful indignation.” I gave up. Sam Spiegel is Sam Spiegel, an immutable
force.
“I want this
picture,” Spiegel continues, “to revert to that classical concept of movies
which will attract audiences who have been alienated from theaters — from movie
theaters — by violence. This picture has drama, but not melodrama. There is
violence of temperament rather than violence of fists. Rather than a plot,
there is a theme to this picture. No, there is both theme and plot. One without
the other wouldn’t mean anything. I really hope it will be a picture that will
bring back audiences who haven’t been to the movies in many years.”
Sam Spiegel
can afford not to make pictures, so it can be said that he’s doing this one for
fun, and for love. Not that he doesn’t want it to make money. Perish that
thought. A good producer produces successes, and he has more than enough to his
credit: “The African Queen”, “On the Waterfront”, “The Bridge on the River Kwai
, “Lawrence of Arabia”, to mention only a few. He’s had to wait three years for
The Last Tycoon to get before the cameras. Another producer might have gotten
something else into the works, but not Sam. This is the one he wanted to do.
“Why?”
“Before this
Hollywood wave of nostalgia began,” he said, “I wanted to do a story about
Hollywood as I had known it, to recapture the sense of what it was. I would
walk onto a lot and see the emptiness, stages used for television series and commercials,
if they were used at all, and I wanted to see them alive again.
So I began
making notes, putting down memories, notions for a story, and nothing jelled. I
must have filled a few hundred pages, and I knew it wouldn’t work. Then it
struck me that The Last Tycoon had already said it, and said it well. As it
turned out, the rights were available. They had reverted some ten years ago to
Fitzgerald’s daughter, Mrs. Frances Fitzgerald Smith. Lester Cowan and MGM had
owned them for a time, and it had gotten as far as an Irwin Shaw script. I
didn’t read that script, because I knew I didn’t want to do a Lester Cowan kind
of picture. Others had been after the rights, but Mrs. Smith had very jealously
guarded them and refused to part with them. When I approached her, she flattered
me by saying that I was the only man she would let have the rights. That flattery
was accompanied by a very exorbitant demand for money. But, why not?”
Once he had
the rights, Spiegel needed a director and screenwriter. He sent the book to a
few directors he thought would be suitable for the project. Mike Nichols was
interested; so, as it turned out, was Elia Kazan, who wrote him saying that The
Last Tycoon was the one assignment that would turn him from novel-writing back
to directing. Spiegel sent him the book. Meanwhile, negotiations with Nichols
had proceeded to the signing point, and, as part of the deal, Buck Henry (whom
Nichols preferred to work with) would write the screenplay. Kazan was hurt and
indignant.
But Buck
Henry dawdled. He had other things to do first. Months went by, and finally
Spiegel notified Nichols that another screenwriter would have to be found.
Spiegel called Harold Pinter in London. Pinter hadn’t read The Last Tycoon; in
fact, he had read very little Fitzgerald. But he promised a quick answer. The
answer took two days to arrive at Spiegel’s yacht harbored in the south of
France. Not only would Pinter be happy to do the script, but he would put aside
all other work until it was finished.
Spiegel had Harold
Pinter meet him in California. They spent three weeks there together. The time
was mostly spent with Spiegel showing Pinter Hollywood as he had experienced it
and had known it. He toured him through the MGM lot, using a guide who had been
at the studio—as a guide—for forty years. “One day,” the guide told them,
“Greta Garbo came up to me and said she had seen me often and that she knew how
much the studio meant to me. I cried.” The guide broke into tears again. Pinter
made a note to include the moment in the script. It’s there.
“Let me mull
awhile,” Pinter told Spiegel, as he was about to leave for London, “and then
we’ll see what I come up with.” Six weeks later he notified Spiegel that he had
a complete first draft. “That draft,” Spiegel said, “is essentially the
construction of the film as we’re doing it now. There have been changes, many
changes; more than a year of changes. In fact, very early on, Mike Nichols was ready
to proceed with it, but I felt it needed more work.”
With the
script close to being in shape, it was time to begin casting. “The Monroe Stahr
part,” Spiegel said, “was simple. There were three names, and we could pick one
of the three. The fourth doesn’t exist. Now you must remember that Pinter
doesn’t exactly write an orthodox script. There are no technical directions, or
directions for actors. The nearest thing to a direction is the word, 'pause’.
The script is full of those 'pauses’.
Even Kazan,
when he came on the project, was puzzled by this, until he got to know Pinter
and his methods. Harold does it deliberately. He wants the director and the
actor to add their own creativity, their own cadenzas. He, in fact, forces them
to do this.”
The three
names were Dustin Hoffman, A1 Pacino, and Robert DeNiro. No doubt the fourth
name does exist somewhere, but it isn’t a star. An odd thing is that Spiegel
simply won’t admit that the Monroe Stahr character is based on Irving Thalberg,
yet Hoffman, Pacino, and DeNiro all bear at least a mild resemblance to the
fabled figure. Is it, perhaps, that Spiegel sees a little of himself in Stahr?
The Pinter
script was sent to all three. Pacino never answered. Spiegel sent another, a
slightly more refined version. Still no answer. Spiegel asked a friend who knew
Pacino to call him. An associate of Pacino’s finally called to say that the
script wasn’t right for the actor. “Thank you,” said Spiegel. “At least you had
the decency to call up and let me know.”
Dustin
Hoffman did call. He wanted to talk about the part, but he was busy producing a
play on Broadway, and, until opening night came and went, he was not in a
position to read anything properly. Then there was the Lenny premiere, and
Dustin was too tired to talk and wanted to head for London, from where he would
send his observations on the script.
“I received
the observations,” Spiegel said, “through an actor friend of his, and was somewhat
offended, but held my peace. In London, Dustin’s agent called Pinter, and gave
him a kind of royal command: ‘Would you please come to see Mr. Hoffman at
Grosvener House at such and such a time?’ Pinter sent him a wire to the effect
not precisely to jump in the Serpentine but that he was unable to accommodate
him.
“Robert
DeNiro, on the other hand, answered immediately, saying he would be delighted
to do the picture, but he had two months to go to finish Bertolucci’s 1900 in
Italy. So I waited, not two months but six months. But he had also arranged
with Mike Nichols to start Bogart Slept
Here, a Neil Simon comedy, as soon as 1900 was finished. That took
precedence over my deal with him. So, a picture that was to start in the spring
now had to be postponed until October, and it wouldn’t have started then if Bogart Slept Here had not been
canceled.”
There has
been much gossip in Hollywood about that cancellation. Spiegel’s version is that
DeNiro, the superb actor he is, was not suited for Neil Simon’s comedy, that
Simon felt the casting was wrong, and that Nichols by now was dubious about the
script. “Anyway,” Spiegel said, “everyone seemed pleased to stop the picture
after two weeks of shooting.”
But then
there was another bombshell for Spiegel. Mike Nichols decided, regretfully,
that he did not want to direct The Last
Tycoon after all. “I don’t know,” Spiegel said. “Perhaps he was nervous, or
wanted to get out of film directing for a while. But that left me with a
script, a cast, but no director.
I went back
to Kazan, shamefaced, I suppose, but putting on my best mien, so to speak. I
told him, truthfully, the whole story, and said, “I’d love you to do it.
Forgive me, but I feel at this point you’d be the right person to do it.” He
was really very, very generous about it. Kazan is basically a very generous
human being. He wasn’t always that way. But in recent years he has mellowed
enormously.” Spiegel smiled, a bit mischievously. “Maybe it’s the therapy of
writing his novels that has mellowed him. One inevitably has ups and downs in
any relationship, but after the first flare of misunderstanding, or resentment,
there is always an attempt on his part, or on mine, to see the other fellow’s
point of view. We have never had a serious misunderstanding on this picture,
only some minor ones.”
Spiegel held
up a thick folder which had been lying on his desk. It was filled with memos
from Kazan, he said. Kazan was a compulsive typist of notes to him. “You have
never seen so many notes, pages and pages of them. He wakes up at some ungodly
hour and types notes to me.”
The week
before my visit, there was night location shooting on Mulholland Drive, which
happens to be on the top of the mountain that looks down on Beverly Hills on
the one side, and the Valley on the other. Even in balmy Southern California,
it gets cold up there at night. Heated trailers for the three actors involved
in the scene had been provided for comfort between takes. But no trailer had
been provided for Kazan. “He wrote me a letter in the morning,” Spiegel said,
“as if I were the dispenser of trailers.” Spiegel began reading the letter with
impish amusement.
“Dear Sam,” it began, “I want some personal
advice from you, friend to friend. It’s about my feet and a certain
psychological problem I have....” The problem had to do with cold feet during
night shooting on location, perhaps the most difficult kind of all. There they
were, wrote Kazan, somewhere out in the high reaches of this faceless city,
attempting to conquer technical problems that took the crew a long time to
handle.
Kazan had
long waits between each shot, and had nowhere to sit down, no shelter from the
cold, no place to study the script. Robert DeNiro had a nice bungalow on
wheels, and Angelica Huston and Ingrid Boulting even nicer ones. The property
people had a large truck with heaters and refreshments on hand. Kazan felt that
all deserved these excellent accommodations, but that there was a neglect of
the director of the picture involved. Could something be done in the future?
“The letter
goes on for three typewritten pages,” Spiegel said. “All he had to do was say
in advance he wanted a trailer, and he would have gotten a trailer. But someone
forgot to tell the production manager. But this enormously talented man loves
to be babied, as I guess we all do. I must tell you, I was touched by it. I
called him immediately and said I would personally see to it that he got all
the trailers he desired, and that I was taking the matter up with the
production manager.
He said, ‘Do
me a favor and destroy that letter. I’m ashamed I wrote it.’ I said, ‘No, that
letter is the perfect illumination of our relationship. I’ll never destroy it,
because it’s really beautiful to know that we are all children at heart, and we
like to have parental care, friends’ care, someone above all to complain to—a
wailing wall to go and wail before.’ ”
Sam Spiegel and Elia Kazan between
takes at Paramount during the filming
of The Last Tycoon.
Spiegel’s own
company, Horizon Pictures, had done the preliminary financing of The Last Tycoon, and he had first
arranged to shoot it at the MGM studios, using, for the films within the film,
some old MGM movies.
“MGM was an
empty studio at the time, and I wanted an empty studio. But by the time the
oral deal was to be reduced to contract, MGM abolished its distribution, and
their films were to be distributed by United Artists. Well, I don’t need two
distributors getting wealthy on a picture; I prefer to have some of it for
myself. Paramount immediately came in and offered me a better arrangement. ’’
There was one
important casting area that had been left to the last. Who was to play Monroe
Stahr’s love object, Kathleen? Here is how we meet her in the novel, and more
or less as we will meet her in the film:
One of the
women came sliding smoothly down the cheek of the idol, and Robby caught and
set her on solid ground.... Robby turned to Stahr for judgement.
“What will we
do with them, chief?”
Stahr did not answer. Smiling faintly at him from not
four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression.
Across the four feet of moonlight, the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl
blew a little on a familiar forehead; the smile lingered, changed a little
according to pattern; the lips parted—the same.... The river passed him in a
rush, the great spotlights swooped and blinked—and then he heard another voice
speak that was not Minna’s voice.
“We’re
sorry,” said the voice. “We followed the truck in through a gate. ’’
Not only
would the actress chosen play Kathleen, but also the dead Minna, in scenes of
her film. The daughter of producer Roy Boulting, Ingrid, (her stepmother is a
young woman her own age, Hayley Mills) had heard about the production of The Last Tycoon, and spent close to two
years applying for the part.
She first
contacted, in Rome, where she was modeling, the then head of production for
Paramount, Robert Evans, telling him she thought she was right for the part. He
suggested she see Sam Spiegel. In New York, again modeling, and studying
acting—she had done a few film parts in England—she contacted Spiegel, who
thought she was too young for Kathleen, even though she was the same age. “But
I am Kathleen,” she told him. Spiegel agreed to test her.
“I was searching and searching for the right girl,”
Spiegel said. “And I still hadn’t found her by the time Gadge Kazan came on. I
tested Ingrid Boulting twice —Gadge doing improvisations with her— and then
took the tests to London to show Pinter. I wanted a consensus before making any
decision. Harold Pinter was shocked when he saw the tests. ‘Can’t you find an
actress?’ he said. ‘She couldn’t get into rep in England.’ But she looked
right, and sounded right, and we cast Ingrid. I daresay Pinter is now eating
his words. Worst comes to worst, you can cut together a performance, but in
Ingrid’s case we don’t have to.”
Time has
begun to grow short; Kazan wants to see Spiegel about that night’s shooting.
The golden head of Siva had not stayed on its underwater track, and Kathleen
and Edna have nearly been thrown off into the studio tank. Can he look at the
rushes and see what is usable?
Spiegel,
though, took a moment to reminisce. The mood of the film, the late thirties,
reminded him of the time he came to Hollywood, and he wanted it understood that
they were not telling a romantic, unreal story.
“It was
unquestionably,” he said, “a more romantic, more glamorous time. In those days,
I was impoverished, but I used to give New Year’s Eve parties here. They were
famous. A thousand people came. Charlie Chaplin came, and Hedda Hopper, and
they were ready to kill one another. Bogey came, and Gable, and Howard Hughes.
All Holly¬ wood was at my house at 702 Crescent Drive on New Year’s Eve. It was
a corner house, and on New Year’s Eve the pool was covered with a dance floor,
and over it was a huge tent. People came and went from ten in the evening until
seven in the morning. The stars would arrive and sweep in, like royalty.
“This New
Year’s I gave another party, not at the same house, but a rented one in
Truesdale, the newer section of Beverly Hills. Kazan was there, so was Willy
Wyler, and Billy Wilder. They all used to come to my parties. We talked about
the former days, and we all agreed that the quality of people then was
different. Not better, but considerably more glamorous.
Today a star
doesn’t sweep in, he crawls. They come with disheveled hair and dirty hands and
no ties. It was a black-tie affair. The young moviemakers who were invited came
the same way. It would be condescension to put on a dinner jacket, and a
concession to a life-style they don’t believe in. Without sounding too
pretentious about it, I think people were more civilized then, had more
breeding and grace—yes, grace—and it’s a quality that has gradually disappeared
from the film scene. Those days people had it, some superficially, some
substantially. Who in the hell really cares today?”
Buttons on
his telephone were blinking. He sighed, and shrugged. Back to today, and what
to do about the golden head of Siva. I noticed he was not wearing a tie
himself, but it seemed to me clear why he was so immersed in the making of The Last Tycoon.
The Last Tycoon (1976)
σκηνοθεσία:
Elias
Kazan
σενάριο:
F.
Scott Fitgerald (unfinished novel)
Harold
Pinter (σενάριο)
μουσική:
Maurice
Jarre
φωτογραφία:
Victor
Kemper
παραγωγός:
Sam
Spiegel
έγχρωμον
διάρκεια: 123 λεπτά
Γυρίσματα:
Καλιφόρνια
Οι ηθοποιοί:
/
- Robert De Niro
/
- Tony Curtis
/
- Robert Mitchum
/
- Jeanne Moreau
/
- Jack Nicholson
/
- Donald Pleasence
/
- Ray Milland
/
- Dana Andrews
/
- Ingrid Boulting
/
- Peter Strauss
/
- Theresa Russell
/
- Morgan Farley
/
- John Carradine
/
- Jeff Corey
/
- Tige Andrews
/
- Diane Shalet
/
- Leslie Curtis
/
- Angelica Huston
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 3 Φεβρουαρίου 2024 :
“
The Last Tycoon
”
film 1976
Hollis Alpert “The Last Tycoon”
American Film magazine March 1976
Κινηματογραφικά ]
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου