Wallflower at the Orgy (22 page)

Nichols is too modest and far too intelligent not to realize the absurdity of being in this position after making two films and directing for only seven years. “Every time you get too much for what you’ve put in,” he said, “you know it’s going to come out of your ass later.” But, for now, he is going about his business—wandering about the set, in stylish fatigue jacket and slender corduroy pants; offering Oreos and Oh Henrys to the crew; bringing his low-key techniques to his actors’ assistance; and somehow managing to keep his macroproduction company happy and on schedule.
Catch-22
is to shoot in Mexico for four months, move to Los Angeles for four weeks of airplane-interior shots, and then to Rome until mid-June. After ten months of editing, it will be ready for release in mid-1970.

It has taken eight years to bring Heller’s book to the shooting stage. In the interim, the novel, after a slow beginning and mixed reviews, has become a modern classic, with a Modern Library edition and two million paperback copies in print. The film property has passed from Columbia to Paramount/Filmways, from Richard Brooks (who did little or nothing with it for four years) to Mike Nichols, from Jack Lemmon (who originally wanted to play Yossarian) to Arkin, and from one unsuccessful treatment by Richard Quine to four drafts by Henry (whose previous film credits include
The Graduate
and
Candy
). It took Nichols, producer John Calley, and designer Richard Sylbert over a year just to
find the ideal spot to build the island of Pianosa and its air base—largely because the logical locations in Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica no longer look like Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica did in 1944.

Casting began, with Nichols selecting a group of actors, all of whom look like ordinary people, to play fighter pilots, and with Frank Tallman, the stunt pilot, rounding up a group of authentic fighter pilots, all of whom look like movie stars, to fly the planes. Tallman also set to work locating and assembling a squadron of B-25s—eighteen of them, each purchased, repaired, and made skyworthy at an average cost of ten thousand dollars. (One of the planes, a wedding present from heiress Barbara Hutton to playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, came complete with reclining seats, bed, and leather-paneled toilet.)

Sylbert and Calley finally found the location on the northwest coast of Mexico, twenty miles from the town of Guaymas, Sonora, the home of Guaymas shrimp and little else. The location was a flawless one photographically—with ocean flanking it on one side and mountains set just two miles behind—but it was reachable only by boat. It cost one hundred eighty thousand dollars to build the five-mile-long highway to the spot, and two hundred fifty thousand more for the six-thousand-foot-long runway. Both construction jobs were undertaken, ecstatically, by the mayor of Guaymas, who just happens to own a contracting company. Seventy-five
peones
working with machetes cleared the one-mile-square site of cactus, brush, and rattlesnakes, leaving only mesquite trees, which resembled the small olive trees native to Italy. And Pianosa rose from the sand, with its tents, corrugated tin huts, mess hall, control tower, lister-bag setups, and piles of bombs stacked like supermarket
oranges along the runway. War-beaten stone buildings were designed with collapsible walls, in preparation for the moment in
Catch-22
when Milo Minderbinder (played by Jon Voight), leads the men in a bombing raid on their own base.

The most critical problem Nichols and Henry faced in translating the book to cinematic terms was in finding a style for Heller’s macabre comedy. “The book, and, as a result, the film, have to be somewhat dreamlike, not quite real—either something remembered, or a nightmare,” said Nichols. “That’s very hard to do with living actors, with pores and noses, because they’re so definitely there. If you’re making a film in which an officer says, ‘You mean the enlisted men pray to the same God that we do?’ and in which the men bomb their own base, you have to find a style that makes it clear, from the beginning, that such things can happen.”

The solution was to make the story arise from a fever Yossarian develops after being stabbed in the side by Nately’s whore; the film leaps back and forth from vaguely-remembered-horror to farce to better-remembered-horror. “The picture will be cut as if Yossarian’s delirium were cutting it,” Henry explained. The style has been further carried out in the set—which has a ghostly quality—and in Nichols’ decision to send home two hundred extras after the first week of shooting, leaving only Yossarian and his friends to fill out the huge air base. In addition, David Watkin, the English cinematographer who shot the Richard Lester Beatles films, has lit
Catch-22
so that all the actors are in shadow and the background is burned out; the effect is of a subliminal limbo.

Like the novel, the film hangs on the notion of Catch-22,
a masterpiece of muddled military logic. “Let me get this straight,” says Yossarian to Doc Daneeka in the script. “In order to be grounded I have to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded—that means I’m not crazy any more and I have to keep flying.”

“You got it,” says Doc Daneeka. “That’s Catch-22.”

As a multitude of reporters and critics have observed since the book was published in October 1961,
Catch-22
has almost become a primer for the thinking that has seemed to be guiding the war in Vietnam. At the same time, the predicament of Yossarian has become more relevant in the context of the antiwar movement in this country. “The interesting thing about the book,” said Buck Henry, who despite his disclaimer has been quite faithful to the novel, “is the enormous power of prophecy Heller had. He was writing about a man who had finally decided to opt out and who in the end ends up in Sweden. That was a total absurdity when he wrote it, a really far-out kind of insanity. Well, it’s come true.”

That
Catch-22
is being made in an atmosphere of such good feeling is as much a part of the Nichols approach as any of the directing techniques he utilizes. “If you’re on the set shooting,” Nichols explained, “and you say, ‘Let’s do it again,’ and there’s one guy who rolls his eyes or turns away or groans, it sours it for everybody. John and Buck and I said, ‘Let’s see if for once we can have nobody like that—just people who like each other.’ And it worked.” Many of the cast members are old friends and about half have worked with Nichols before. They have been laughing ever since a chartered jet brought them from Los Angeles to Mexico on January 2 and landed them smack in the middle of the utterly barren, desolate desert. “Look at this,” Bob Newhart
said, as he stepped out of the plane. Everyone looked around at what looked like the end of the world. “Ten years ago I could have bought land here,” said Newhart, “and look at it now.”

When the film is between takes, the cast sits around and roars with laughter as Bob Newhart spins out a routine on night life in Guaymas (there is none) or Buck Henry and Tony Perkins improvise on the subject of free falling and parachute jumping:

Perkins: “What about all this we hear about the free-fall mass?”

Henry: “There are two free-fall masses.”

Perkins: “The eleven o’clock and the seven o’clock?”

Henry: “No. In the fall of 1965 a town of thirteen hundred people in Nevada went up and made a fall.”

Perkins: “I was speaking of the free-fall mass, not the mass free fall.”

Henry: “The free-fall mass is where the falling priest throws the wafer and the parishioners jump out of the plane and dive for it. It’s called diving for the wafer. That’s where the expression comes from. Dive for the wafer, dig for the wine.”

Perkins: “What about this lady who jumped with her cats?”

Henry: “Well, actually, that story was not reported accurately. There was a lady, but she jumped with her lawyer, whose name was Katz.”

When the film is shooting, the director and crew stand behind the camera, biting their lips and gritting their teeth to keep from exploding with laughter during the take.
Nichols’ snorts of appreciation affect the actors in about the same way the bowl of food did Pavlov’s dogs. “I’m so overjoyed when he laughs,” said Paula Prentiss, “that I don’t even care that half the time I don’t know what he’s laughing at.”

“You never get hung up if Mike is directing you,” said Miss Prentiss’s husband, Dick Benjamin. “If you’re doing a scene you’re not comfortable with, he senses it, and before it can get to be a problem for you, he gives you two or three specific things to do—like a piece of business or a new line or something. And you think, Oh, I get to do
that
. Like a kid who’s been given a birthday present. Everything else sort of falls into place and you get your little goodies. And Mike talks in terms of that. He’ll say, ‘I’ve really got a present for so-and-so when he gets to Rome.’ And he means he’s got some wonderful shot, something to do, some way the actor will look that is just sensational. And you really take it as a present.”

Sometimes Nichols will give an actor a short suggestion or line reading that will suddenly clarify the role. To Benjamin, who was playing a scene in which he was supposed to be terrified of Orson Welles’ General Dreedle, Nichols—who was himself terrified of Orson Welles—said simply, “Watch me.” To Austin Pendleton, who was confused as to how to play Welles’ son-in-law, Colonel Moodus, Nichols gave a line reading that, said Pendleton, “gave me the key to the whole thing. I realized he wanted me to play the kind of person who says the most insulting things as if he’s being terribly friendly.” To Norman Fell, Nichols suggested playing Sergeant Towser as a military mammy; as a result, Fell delivers the most blood-curdling lines with a
funny little smile on his face, as if he were talking about chicken and gravy and wonderful biscuits.

Occasionally, Nichols will add an especially intimate gift to the proceedings. One morning he was shooting a close-up of Buck Henry (who also appears in the film, as Colonel Korn) and Martin Balsam (Colonel Cathcart). Henry was to lean over and whisper to Balsam, “He’s talking to you.” Balsam was to pop to attention and deliver an answer. Nichols shot two takes of the scene and then called Henry over for a conference. “Let’s do another,” he said. Henry returned to position and the scene began again. “He’s talking to you!” hissed Henry, and he leaned over and goosed Balsam. Balsam jumped, his eyes bugged out of his head, and he managed to deliver his line before losing his composure. The crew broke up. “Nichols Directs,” said Henry, “—a Monograph on the Unusual Techniques of a Young American Director: ‘Use three fingers,’ he said to me.”

On another occasion, Nichols was shooting a love scene between Arkin and Miss Prentiss (Nurse Duckett). The footage—of Yossarian’s hand sliding up Duckett’s leg—was fine, but Nichols had not been able to get the right vocal reaction from the actress. He called a take for sound only. And as Arkin began to slip his hand up Miss Prentiss’s skirt, Nichols grabbed her from behind and plunked his hands onto her breasts. “I let out this great hoot,” said Miss Prentiss, “which Mike was very happy with. Then I was so overcome with emotion I had to go into a corner and be alone. Whenever someone touches me I’m in love with him for about eight hours.”

“It’s perfectly possible,” Nichols conceded, “that we can have this great time now, making the film, and then have it
not be a good picture. The two have nothing to do with each other. But then, none of us knows whether the picture is any good even long after it’s finished, so you might as well be happy while it’s going on. And when the actors break up and the crew is stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths trying not to laugh at Dick Benjamin—or whoever it is—I love it. I love it now. Afterward, it’s up for grabs anyway.”

For the actors, at least, making an air-force film has turned out to be very much like being in the air force. Not when they are working: when they work, making
Catch-22
is like being at a party, a festival, a love-in. But because so many of the actors have small parts, they have a great deal of time to kill in a town where there is almost nothing to do. As a result, many of them spend their empty days discussing how many days of shooting each has to go. When they tire of kicking that subject around, they move on to other tried-and-true service talk. “I’ll tell you what we do around here in our free time,” said Alan Arkin. “We sit in the barracks out at the set with our muddy boots on and talk about women. That’s what you do in the army, isn’t it? Sit around in your muddy boots and talk about women? I don’t know why we do it. Almost everyone here is with his wife or his girl friend. But that’s what we do.”

They complain about the food in the mess hall—that is, the mess hall on the set, which doubles as a lunch commissary complete with regulation army trays. They complain about the living accommodations at the Playa de Cortès, Guaymas’s somewhat unsatisfactory attempt at a luxury hotel. They complain about their isolation from the outside world. And they complain about the incredible difficulty of obtaining newspapers and placing long-distance calls. “We make bets on who’s going to go insane,” says Bob Newhart,
“or has already gone insane. In fact, maybe we’ve all gone insane and we’re all together and we don’t know it and we’ll go home and my wife will call Paramount and say, ‘Listen, my husband is insane.’ We have no norm here. We have no way of judging.”