B004YENES8 EBOK (6 page)

Chapter 8 

SERENDIPITY IN CHINATOWN 

The announcement that Corday had become the vice president of comedy development at ABC was made official, and I gave her a major party at our home to celebrate. My new deal at Paramount was a rich one, quadrupling my previous draw under Mace and assuring me big bucks in success. It also provided me with a suite of offices only slightly less ostentatious than those of Benito Mussolini.

The contract with Paramount was for my exclusive services with one exclusion: “
Cagney & Lacey
, a movie-for-television.” The Writers Guild was about to declare one of its periodic strikes against management and my new offices needed painting; it seemed like a good time to suspend and extend my Paramount contract and make a movie for CBS.

We had a Cagney (Loretta Swit). Our search began for a Lacey. Ms. Swit had her choices, a not-so-long list of perhaps twelve names. CBS had its preferences as well, mostly stars of other series on their network (the most noteworthy among them being Michele Lee of
Knots Landing
).

We also had a license fee from CBS of $1,850,000 and a budget, based on what Filmways figured it would cost to shoot the entire film in New York, at $2,250,000. The potential deficit of $400,000 was way too much for a simple movie-for-television.

We re-budgeted for filming in Los Angeles with less than a week of establishing shots and second unit work in the Big Apple. The figure came down $200,000, but the bottom line was still too rich for Filmways’ coffers. They asked me to rewrite, setting the show in Los Angeles. I refused.

During this minor impasse, Richard M. Rosenbloom, Filmways vice president and line producer, and I filled a day or so selecting director Ted Post and interviewing actresses for Lacey. One strong candidate emerged: Tyne Daly. She was also on Swit’s list, but conspicuously absent from the network’s.

At this juncture, Tom Brodek reminded me of the not-too-unpleasant experience I had had making
American Dream
in Chicago with a crew composed almost completely of local talent. His point was that you could do the same thing in Toronto, where there was an existing film community. Furthermore, in Canada, because of the monetary exchange rate in the early 1980s, when you arrived on a Monday with a million dollars, on Tuesday you had a million, two hundred thousand. We were talking about shooting Los Angeles to look like New York,why not Toronto? It might even be easier; like New York, Toronto has bundled-against-the-cold citizens in the background and slate gray skies similar to New York. Better yet, there were no palm trees.

We sent production manager Stan Neufeld (no relation to Mace) off to Canada to scout out the situation and thus began the trend toward shooting in what has since become known as Hollywood North.

Cliff Alsberg, who had left ABC and was now a vice president at Filmways under Rosenbloom, was inadvertently a big help with his incredibly naive and chauvinistic notes on the screenplay. The young executive unwittingly served two valuable services: a reminder to be ever on the alert for that traditional male mentality that had stymied the project for so long, and secondly, by ignoring the comments and notes from Alsberg, and simply moving on, the tone was set for how I would deal with Filmways on creative issues. It was a course from which I never deviated.

The script that Avedon had finalized, loosely based on her earlier screenplay coauthored with Corday, had many of the Cagney/Lacey/Harvey and squad room moments millions of Americans came to appreciate in the ongoing series. Unlike the series, it was very heavily plotted. The primary cop story dealt with what appeared to be a serial killer of Chasidic Jews in New York’s famed 47th Street Diamond District. In the story, much to the chagrin of the ambitious Christine Cagney, she and her partner find themselves excluded by the male cop elite from working on this prestigious case.

The killer, we eventually learn, is Schermer, a fugitive Nazi war criminal, who has effected his unlikely escape to the United States after the war by taking on the identity of a Chasidic Jew—complete with beard, peot, and tallis.

Midway through the drama, the female detectives overhear in the squad room that the serial killer just might be a regular procurer of prostitutes. Cagney and Lacey, having been relegated to the “John Detail”, now have a lead of their own, directing them to a material witness in the Chasidic neighborhood, a prostitute who reveals that, unlike other émigrés of his age group, one suspect has no Nazi death camp tattoo. (In one draft the hooker also confirmed this particular customer [Schermer] is not circumcised and therefore, despite all other outward appearances, probably not Jewish). It was a not-unclever cop story, one that was plausible in the involvement of our novice, third-grade detectives, and one that fully exploited the relationships they maintained with each other, with their loved ones, with their jobs, and with the all-male bastion of conservatism with which they came into contact on a daily basis.

Rosenbloom and director Ted Post were preparing to leave for Toronto. I would stay behind until we had a Lacey. Before I let him get away, I wanted Post to meet with Barbara Avedon. I felt by spending a few hours with this talented and brilliant woman he might gain some insight into the feminist perspective, which was such an integral part of this project. Three or four hours with Barbara Avedon could not possibly hurt my then-sixty-something-year-old male director, I reasoned. I set the appointment and instructed Barbara to give him an earful. She called early that evening. “Barney, all he wanted to talk about was Schermer!”

Director Ted Post had spent the afternoon with one of Hollywood’s foremost feminists, author of the first buddy film ever made with women leads, and what he wanted to glean from that encounter was a deeper understanding of the (male) villain’s character. According to Avedon, he sloughed off any conversation regarding the attitudes of the two women leads, their relationship, their politics, or their history. Does it help the reader to understand my incredulity if I include the information that in the screenplay Schermer has no lines of dialogue?

I determined I had better finalize the Mary Beth Lacey casting and get to Toronto, pronto.

CBS was really pressing for Michele Lee. I was weakening. I liked her as well as CBS star-of-the-time Mimi Kennedy. Besides, I was anxious to get up to Toronto and see what damage was being done. Rosenbloom and Post were on the phone from Canada. Would I take one more fight with the network for Tyne Daly ? I took two more. The first ended in their agreement to meet the actress.

The next morning Tyne Daly and I convened for breakfast at Dupar’s, a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley. Aside from some pleasantries at her interview a few weeks before, this was our first conversation. I tried to distract her from being nervous. A half hour later, we held hands as we walked across Ventura Boulevard to the offices of CBS movies for television chief William Self.

Tyne had to be tense. You could never tell. I’ve known her now over twenty-five years, and I still can’t discern when she is acting off-stage and when she’s not (maybe it’s because she is always acting). Anyway, she was easy and charming in the interview. Self, Frankovich, and the rest were affable but noncommittal as Tyne and I left the office together at meeting’s end.

It was later that afternoon I got the call from CBS . “Go ahead with your choice. Tyne Daly is approved.”

We were Toronto-bound.

The first Cagney. Loretta Swit and me on the Toronto location in 1981.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

The shoot was one of the most pleasant of my career. At that time, working with CBS as opposed to ABC was like trying to compare Tahiti with the Gulag. The writers’ strike had development at a standstill. My Paramount offices would therefore be closed for the duration. For the first time in many years, I was allowed to focus on what was at hand. What a contrast to the way my life had been just months before.

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
had aired on ABC just weeks prior to our production start. It garnered extremely high ratings and pretty good critical notices. The pilot of
American Dream
debuted while I was on location in Toronto to not such high numbers but universally enthusiastic praise. Both received a fair share of award nominations.
⁸

Director Post got us through our twenty-day schedule with alacrity (especially noteworthy since he had a crew that in those days was not nearly as experienced or efficient as a Hollywood company). Ted may not have been the best casting for this type of material, but he listened and tried to give me what I asked for; I’m plenty grateful for that.

We finished in Toronto and moved on to Manhattan for two days of whirlwind photography in order to get as many of those typical New York settings with our principals in the foreground as possible. Dick Rosenbloom had worked with award-winning director Joe Sargent on
Hustling
.
⁹
He passed on to me what the director had taught him about how and where to design the maximum amount of shots in order to effectively convince the viewer that the film they were seeing was entirely shot in the locale in which that story took place, despite having a very limited time at the site. Basically, it came down to concentrating the bulk of on-site filming at the very outset of the piece in places that were clearly identifiable, in order to firmly implant in the viewers’ mind that what they were seeing had been shot in its entirety “on location.” When
Cagney & Lacey
aired on CBS , friends of mine who lived in New York chastised me for being in town for so long and not making contact. They were astonished when I told them the company was only in the city for two days.

One old New York friend I did contact while in the Big Apple was Michael Fuchs, a rising young executive with the then-burgeoning pay cable system HBO. Michael was a tennis-playing buddy of mine, and I phoned upon my arrival at LaGuardia to ask if he was free that evening for dinner. He wasn’t. He had a date and was doubling with another couple. Then, after a beat, he asked, “Why don’t you join us?”

I thanked him, but said I didn’t want to be a fifth wheel.

“Nonsense,” came the reply, “these are old friends of mine … you’ll enjoy yourself.”

I tagged along, positioned at the restaurant—as luck would have it—between the two women. Michael, having ordered the several course Chinese feast, became more and more engrossed in his conversation about the movie business with attorney-turned producer Bob Levine, who had just completed production on the film
That Championship Season
. I talked to my female tablemates.

Lois Lugar sat on my right. She was a sales executive with Embassy Pictures who had recently moved to Los Angeles. Like me, she was in town on business. The new CBS topper Harvey Shephard (whom I had yet to meet) was, it seems, a longtime pal of hers. She promised to set up a lunch so I could be properly introduced. I was already glad I had accepted Michael’s invitation.

Suzanne Levine, on my left, was more than the spouse of the attorney-turned-film producer who was occupying my host. Ms. Levine was the managing editor of
Ms.
magazine, Gloria Steinem’s famed feminist monthly. It was the publication that targeted the core of the audience I was trying to reach. Beyond that, it was known as a source of material for opinion makers, especially those in Washington and New York.

“Tell me about the project that brings you to the city,” she said.

Be still my heart.

Chapter 9 

THE MOVIE DOCTOR 

I have stated that the experience of our production in Toronto was a pleasant one.

That was generally, but not specifically, true. Rosenbloom’s production ace, Stan Neufeld , brought new meaning to “lean and mean.” Still, I learned a lot from both Stan and his boss and one had to respect their desire to place the dollars on the screen. As mentioned, Director Post just didn’t get the “jokes,” so that, too, was bothersome.

Mostly what was wrong is what is wrong on every film project. You start out with this pure idea and then enter into this unwieldy collaboration. It is your child. At birth you have hopes that the baby will grow and prosper and perhaps, after graduating cum laude from Harvard Medical School, go on to become a famous brain surgeon. Instead, your baby drops out of high school and opts to join a heavy metal band. The trick is finally to remember that, no matter what, it is your baby. You have to fall in love with it all over again, not because it has fulfilled your dreams, but because (no matter what) it is your child.

You have to remember why you wanted to do it in the first place. This is no easy assignment. The development process alone is so debilitating, so time-consuming, and so oppressive that oftentimes when you finally do get the order, there is no joy in it. The good news is you got the order; the bad news is now you’ve got to make this piece of dreck
¹⁰
(for, more often than not, that’s what your idea has become as it has gone through the over-networking of a bunch of TV executives).

After development there is pre-production, location scouting, casting, and budgetary problems—more concessions. Then production, one compromise after another.

“My character wouldn’t say this,” whines the actor, as if he or she were the author. The sun does not set as scripted, nor do the two dozen extras you can afford look like the throng described on paper. Finally, you see the film, assembled by an editor, operating on his or her own, perhaps thousands of miles away from the production itself. This person may be in the throes of some personal crisis or be merely a modest talent.

You look at their work—your work—and it is all you can do not to vomit. You wonder how the hell you can fall in love again with this. Somehow you must, but first there is putting a good face on it all. So what if the picture is twenty-one minutes too long and you have no faith in the director’s editorial sensibilities? The director is entitled to a cut, and in this case there was mercifully no air date or deadline pressure.

“OK,” I found myself saying as the lights went up on our silent and sober audience; the director had brought his wife (for moral support, I guessed). Also, in that West Los Angeles projection room, besides myself, were Rosenbloom, Avedon, and Corday. Despair was in the air.

“It’s going to be good—pretty good,” I went on: “Ted, I’ve never worked with you in editorial before, so I’ll just say it’s yours. You’ve got fourteen days of hard work ahead of you. (It was the minimum guarantee given to members of the Directors Guild.) In broad strokes, I’ll just give you two notes: the picture needs pace, so try to give it that, and please don’t lose any scenes. In other words, avoid the temptation to lop out big chunks and, instead, squeeze out the time.”

Ted Post nodded. He “
knew
” just what I was talking about. Maybe not. Days later, film editor Gregory Prange informed me he hated the instructions he was being given by our director. He threatened to resign—more than once. I urged him to continue on, saying that if what we saw was not an improvement that he and I would have plenty of time together—after the director’s departure—to work it out.

“Not an improvement” proved to be understatement. Two weeks after the initial screening, the film was now no longer twenty-plus minutes long, but a few minutes short; my request for pace had been interpreted as fast. Every line was butted right up next to its predecessor. There was no air, no breathing space, no reactive or reflective moments—just an onslaught of verbiage and information, and, well, it was awful.

The lights went up in the projection room. Avedon was not somber and silent this time. Her head was in her hands, and she was in tears. Mercifully, Corday missed this running. Rosenbloom merely mumbled something as he excused himself from the projection room. Ted Post was stoic. I do not recall his response to the solemnity of his audience in any way. I was in enough of a state of shock that I cannot remember if I thanked the director for his contribution or not. Prange and I went immediately to work.

What was most disturbing about the film was not the pace. Despite this disparity in length and editorial techniques, both Prange’s cut and Post’s had the same thing in common: the lead was unlikable. Christine Cagney came off too hard-edged, too strident. Since she was in nearly every scene, this was disastrous for the film and for what Avedon, Corday, and I had set out to prove all those years before: that a
Newman and Redford
film could be done with women. This version of the Avedon script not only lacked the charm of a typical “buddy movie,” but confirmed the old saw that guys get angry while women get bitchy. The film, unfortunately, was an affirmation of much of the male mythology I had heard about women since beginning this project. That’s what Avedon was in tears about, not some missed joke or some plot point gone awry.

Loretta Swit was the hero’s foil in
M*A*S*H*
, the gal no one really liked. It worked great there; it was a disaster in our film. Could she have been directed out of that? I think so, but hard to tell. Like me, Loretta was so conscious of the fact that her director did not understand the issues of the piece (and so totally into the persona that had made her a star) that she might not have trusted him to change her performance. Anyway, no one tried. She was a major TV star, and it takes a very special eye to discern that what may be OK in one vehicle might have a very different effect in another. I must confess, as is often the case, none of this appeared obvious to any of us until after the film had been assembled. The more I worked on the film, restoring “air” and modifying the pace at which it might play, the more I finally became aware of this systemic problem.

I began to experiment, eventually having Prange recut virtually every scene, playing—almost the entire film—with Loretta just off-stage or with the camera on her back or over her shoulder, forcing the audience to focus on the person with whom our leading lady was interacting and giving them less of a look at the harshness of our leading lady.

Without changing the continuity of the film itself, we had thus restructured the entire picture from inside each scene out. Prange and I worked at a good clip, and we completed our task several days ahead of my self-imposed three-week deadline. Rather than screen early, I took a few days and had Prange add a temporary music track to a number of scenes. It not only gave the film a lift but helped dictate a rhythm for editing several moments that heretofore had been rather lifeless in the movie.

We screened the film again. My sense was that, overall, Director Post was impressed, although somewhat distressed about a couple of shots I had used that were not designed to be shown without a cutaway to Swit. Trying not to be disloyal, Mrs. Post (I must say) still seemed pleased. More important to me were the reactions of Barbara Avedon and Dick Rosenbloom. The latter simply said, “It’s a miracle,” while Avedon threw her arms around my neck and declared me a genius.

As involved as I have always been in the development of ideas and screenplays, writing and writers are not my favorite part of the business. If I could make a living at the job of my choice, it would be “movie doctor.” Among its many honors, the series
Cagney & Lacey
won both an
Emmy
award for editing and an ACE award,
¹¹
always with young and previously unacknowledged editors. The two Best Director
Emmys
¹²
the series garnered were on episodes handed over to me by their respective recipients at from six to nine minutes over length. I was the one who supervised every cut, who spotted every musical cue, and who approved every dub. I’ve rarely seen a film I didn’t believe I could improve—in many cases make substantially better—with just a few days in the editing bay. If I am allowed to stake out only one claim, one singular talent, one area that I am good at and care about, this is it.

A film begins as a vision, a pure idea. One then enters into an unwieldy collaboration with a writer, a financier, a cast, a director, a staff, and a crew, with mechanical equipment, with electrical current, and with God (will the sun shine or will it rain?). Ultimately, each production would come to an end; what was left was me, the film, a machine, and a film editor. The compromises that were part of every day’s routine were now interesting puzzles to be temporarily railed at and then worked out; the collaboration reduced and therefore simplified.

My executive acumen may leave much to be desired. I have limited patience with the pretensions of directors and the persistent bellyaching of a crew. My forbearance with actors might easily be questioned. I can, however, look at the same piece of film over and over again. I am tireless in this arena, remembering every detail and every frame. I am constantly fascinated at how additions or subtractions (however subtle) will affect the overall impact of the drama itself.

I bring this “film sense”, as Eisenstein
¹³
called it, to story and script meetings as well. I can see the movie long before it is made. I argue and cajole the writer into doing the same—to come to a visual, instead of a literary, solution to a writing problem. Oftentimes, a look, a silent reaction, an insert of a specific part of the set or an actor’s anatomy (a shoulder’s shrug, a wince, the wringing of hands) can tell an audience much more than words could ever convey.

When practiced correctly, it brings about a subtle, or elliptical, aspect to certain scenes and to performances. “Less is more” was inscribed on the sweatshirt given me by the
Cagney & Lacey
writing staff, in acknowledgment of the constant lectures I would dispense on this subject.

My editorial (read visual) concepts, in other words, would impact writing, hence direction, and, therefore, performance. Left alone to practice these ideas fully in the mid-1980s, the results are there to be seen in nearly every episode of
Cagney & Lacey
.

The subtlety of performance in that series registers, not just because of good casting, good acting, and elliptical writing, but because we did not cut away. It should be noted that, from the inception of their six-year collaboration, Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly dominated their category at the annual
Emmy
Awards (Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Drama Series). They both were nominated each and every year from the time of coming together as a duo, and one (or the other) won every year: Tyne in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1988; Sharon in 1986 and 1987.

I often remember admonishing editors to hold on Tyne Daly or Sharon Gless for what seemed to the conventional television practitioner an interminable time.

“Just because you have an itch does not mean you have to scratch,” I would lecture, referring to that initial anxious sensation when one might feel an audience will crave another angle, another piece of coverage to get them away from the intensity of this singular view. An argument from a film editor might ensue, and, often, at the very end of a scene, I might make such an accommodation, demonstrating that we did, in fact, have that other angle to go to, but, right now, I would caution, “I want the audience to know that this, and only this, is what we want them to see. That this is what is important. This is our choice.”

It’s very “un-televisiony.” It looks different from what audiences have been used to. It doesn’t have that rocking, rhythmic, close-up, close-up, over shoulder, over shoulder, two shot, close-up, close-up, sing-songy approach that most TV shows—and every MGM and Ray Stark film ever supervised editorially by Margaret Booth —have. It helps, of course, to have the kind of performers who can hold the screen, who command your attention. It’s nice when the script is conceived and designed with this approach in mind. It’s always better when everyone is in sync and stylistically working toward the same goal. It’s better, but not necessary. You can do an awful lot in that cutting room if you’re a storyteller with patience and the “film sense”.

It is generally conceded that one such filmmaker was Darryl Zanuck, the legendary Papa Zanuck of 20th Century Fox and father to the terrific producer Richard Zanuck. Elia Kazan, in his fine autobiography,
A Life
, acknowledged his debt to Zanuck in this area on such films as
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
,
Gentlemen’s Agreement
, and
Viva Zapata
.

In each of these cases, the Academy Award–winning director was en route to his home in New York, within hours of wrapping those productions, leaving the entire editorial process to Zanuck. In that era, there was no stigma connected with this kind of abdication. (Just because you are good with actors and can stage and direct a scene, does not necessarily qualify a director for inclusion in Sergei Eisenstein’s book.)