11/29/22
Newletter173
The Crack of Dawn
One of the many pitch meetings I went on in Hollywood was with a woman at a production company located in a trailer on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was pitching my World War I script, Devil Dogs: The Battle of Belleau Wood, which I consider a bright (if not intelligent), true war story. The woman was an effusive young executive who seemed very excited about movies, Hollywood, and being on the Fox lot. As we made small talk before the pitch, she explained that what she and this company were seeking was “brainless entertainment.” In her new-to-Hollywood, enthusiastic way, she repeated the term, “Brainless entertainment” several more times until I got annoyed. I said, “Oddly, I wake up in the morning and my brain is on, and it remains on until I go to sleep. I think this is the case with a lot of people. I’m not sure that ‘brainless entertainment’ is what anybody should be striving for.” I managed to kill her enthusiasm -- which is the recommended first move in a pitch meeting -- and she asked in a flat tone, “So, what’s your story?” The tale of a platoon of U.S. Marines in a 30-day battle of hand-to-hand combat in a hunting preserve was definitely not the brainless entertainment she was looking for. Honestly, my script wasn’t reeking with intelligence, but it was certainly not brainless. She listened with the dull-eyed expression of one listening to an insurance salesman.
Anyway, after the meeting, as I was prone to do, I spent a couple of hours walking around the Fox lot. I found a little park where they shot a musical number for Hello, Dolly! (1969). It’s a completely uninteresting musical number, embedded within a terrible motion picture – directed by Gene Kelly – that contains such an enormous screw-up, that was left in the final film, that one can only assume from seeing it that everybody who worked on the film hated it, including the editor. In the film six young male and female dancers do somersault move over a park bench and as the camera tilts up to accommodate their feet going over their heads, the top third of the frame is filled with the curved roof of a soundstage upon which is clearly written, “20th Century Fox.” It took my breath away. They left that in? Hello, Dolly! was a big expensive movie, and the Oscar-winning sensation, Barbra Streisand’s, second film and follow-up to the smash hit, Funny Girl (1968). Hello, Dolly! was huge bomb, but was slightly infamous for the rumors and stories from the production about how much Ms. Streisand and her co-star, Walter Matthau, hated each other. The film ends with the two them holding each other close and smiling – for too long – and you can just feel the seething hatred between them.
Pauline Kael’s review of the stupid, but expensive, movie, The Boys from Brazil (1978), which has three great actors in the leads, has stuck with me, and tickled me, for 45 years. I could look it up, but I’m not going to. In essence, Kael said, James Mason looks like he knows he’s in a piece of shit and is embarrassed; Laurence Olivier looks like he knows he’s in a piece of shit, and doesn’t care; Gregory Peck thinks he’s in a good movie.
And that's the whole story.