Quick, go to the movies (before it’s summer again)
It’s not so much that the kids don’t go to the movies in the winter, it’s that the adults do. Classic directors make the movies they care about, to be seen by adults. Those are the films that have serious content.
“Gone with the Wind,” “Citizen Cane,” “Mutiny on the Bounty;” name any Academy Award winner you’d care to, and I’d lay my dollars to your doughnuts they opened after the kids went back to school.
Which brings Arthur Hiller to my mind, surely the loveliest of men, and one of the finest directors ever to grace our screens with excellence. Not only did he fill moviegoers with memories of “The In-laws,” “Silver Streak,” “Love Story” and a treasure trove more, but also he is a past president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
One of his greatest achievements, and one of my favorite films, is his direction of “The Americanization of Emily.” Of course there are endless stories that could be told about any production; Hiller told me this one:
In the not too distant past it was the custom for a producer to have a dozen or so prints struck of his film prior to release, and to give it to friends in the business who would then throw a party at their home inviting fellow professionals, and they would view the film as the highlight of the evening.
Martin Ransohoff, the producer of “The Americanization of Emily,” absolutely delighted with the results of the filming, decided he had something special and would break with tradition on this one. No one was going to get a print. If they wanted to see it they would have to go to the theater.
Many called; all were turned down. “No, you’re going to have to pay to see this one. Sorry, no exceptions.”
Call after call, but the man had made up his mind. And then Sam Goldwyn called.
“No, Sam, I’m sorry. No one’s getting a print.”
“But Marty, I’m sick. I’m in bed.”
“Sorry Sam.”
“My wife has to take care of me. I’m shivering.”
“No Sam. I’m making no exceptions.”
Still, Goldwyn begged and pleaded, “Marty, I promise you only my wife and I will see it.”
And so it went until at last Ransohoff gave in and sent over a print. Goldwyn watched it from his bed with his wife beside him and first thing in the morning he called Ransohoff.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Marty it’s wonderful. Thank you for sending over the film. But I never knew Arthur Miller could direct.”
“No, Sam,” Ransohoff corrected, “not Arthur Miller. It was Arthur Hiller. Arthur Miller is a writer. Arthur Hiller is a director. They’re two different people.”
“I know. I understand that,” Goldwyn said. “But how did you ever get Arthur Miller to write this for you?”
“He didn’t write it for me. Arthur Hiller directed it for me.”
“I got that. But if Arthur Miller didn’t write it for you, who did?”
“Not Arthur Hiller,” Ransohoff said. “He doesn’t write. He directs.”
There was a pause, while presumably Goldwyn went over all of that in his mind.
“Are there any more questions, Sam?”
“No. It’s perfectly clear, Marty. Just give Arthur Miller my regards.”
(Paddy Chayefsky and William Bradford Huie wrote the script for “The Americanization of Emily,” based on the novel by Huie.)
And then there is “Romantic Comedy,” which starred Dudley Moore and Mary Steenburgen. It was a light comedy directed by Hiller, and just for fun, and because we’re long standing friends, Hiller asked me to play the part of a nightclub pianist in his film. The joke (of course funny only to us and our friends) was that I am a pianist. But I had never been before the cameras in a picture, and what was running through my smiling mind was, “If you’re going to make a movie debut, nice to have Arthur Hiller as the director.”
Having accompanied hundreds of scenes on television-albeit off-camera-I wanted to play music that would abet the dialogue, set the right mood and what have you. Hiller, pleased, gave me the script. I read the scene, conjured what I was going to play and was thus prepared.
The scene was filmed a number of times, while I slightly altered what I was doing so to improve the music and to give them choices. But eventually the work was done for the day.
I was preparing to leave when I happened to bump into the producer and I asked him which of the things I had played he preferred.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter what you played,” he said, “the musical director will write his own music and dub it in.”
“So why did they hire a pianist?” I wondered.
“No wonder they didn’t take a single shot of my hands,” I thought, completely overlooking the fact that the whole idea was an inside joke between Hiller and me in the first place.
The kicker to this story is that they cut the scene from the movie, so that none of the above meant anything, except that I had an absolutely delightful, if unrecorded, time.