My wife and I were recently guests at the Hollywood gala celebrating the publication of LEADING LADY, our friend Stephen Galloway’s biography of pioneering producer and studio head, Sherry Lansing.

 

As one of those whose contributions to the book Stephen acknowledges in a postscript—my name is there right alongside Jerry Brown’s, I approached the party with trepidation, fearing I might be overwhelmed by a hoard of people seeking the pleasure of my company and the bragging rights that would go with it.

 

You know.

 

Those hoping to be able to tell their friends and neighbors that they spent most of the evening in conversation with Dan Bronson!

 

I needn’t have worried.

 

It was a bit like high school when everyone was afraid to ask out the prettiest girl and she ended up without a date for the prom.

 

People, intimidated at the prospect of introducing themselves to me, seemed to gravitate to lesser lights like Angelica Huston, Christine Lahti, Judge Judy, Adrian Lyne, and the heads of Fox, Sony and Universal.

 

It was a relief, frankly, to have been spared the crush of the crowd.

 

I did, however, end up in a long conversation with Nick Meyer, whose list of minor credits—things like The Seven-Percent Solution, Time after Time, Sommersby and the even numbered Star Trek films, emboldened him to approach me.

 

Though our resumes are somewhat different (he’s famous, and I’m not), it turned out that, as certifiable film fanatics, we did have something in common—a boundless, obsessive love of the movies.

 

We chatted about all things film, finding ourselves in agreement, for example, that Carol Reed’s three best films were The Third Man, Fallen Idol and Odd Man Out. This led to talk of James Mason, whose death, Nick pointed out, was virtually ignored by the press.

 

I said, “Well, his real death couldn’t have compared to his death scene in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Nick responded with my favorite quote from this, one of my favorite films: “I am dying…” And I joined him in chorus to complete the line: “…and the Nautilus is dying with me”

 

“I am dying, and the Nautilus is dying with me.”

 

To this day, these words, which I first heard at the age of thirteen or fourteen, send chills up my spine.

 

(Mason was terrific at death scenes. Just as good…his departure in George Cukor’s A Star Is Born, where he commits suicide by walking into the sea.)

 

Nick and I were lucky to have come of age during a great blossoming of film artistry.

 

We were there to witness the last, occasionally great gasps of a studio system weakened by the Paramount Consent Decrees and the competition of television.

 

And we were there to experience first-hand the rise of the independents, what Peter Biskind has called the era of easy riders and raging bulls.

 

Hardly a week went by that we did not see a film so breathtaking, so original that it stood us on our heads.

 

The dance of death at the end of The Seventh Seal.

 

Slim Pickens, riding that bomb like a bucking bronco at the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove, shouting in triumphant celebration of the end of the world.

 

The dazzling cut in 2001 from that thighbone tossed into the air to a nuclear satellite circling the earth—from the first, most primitive weapon to the most recent and most sophisticated, tens of thousands of years of evolution in a split second on the screen!

 

The magnificent film fugue of Godfather One and Two—which, together, are an offer I can never refuse.

 

The twenty-three characters tracked with dazzling editing and overlapping dialogue in Nashville and the unforgettable death of Barbara Jean, which still worries me.

 

Week after week.

 

Year after year.

 

Masterpiece after masterpiece.

 

It is no wonder that Nick and I and countless others, fired by our love of these wonderful films, found our way to Hollywood.

 

Love brought us here, and love sustained us…even in the face of the almost insurmountable obstacles of the system.

 

But I have to admit that, of late, my love has faltered.

 

Why?

 

A glance at the cover of the latest Entertainment Weekly, with its summer movie preview, provides a quick answer.

 

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

 

Wonder Woman

 

Baywatch

 

Transformers

 

Pirates of the Caribbean

 

Atomic Blonde

 

And more!

 

Would that God could spare us more.

 

But even He seems to be no match for the corporations that have engulfed and devoured the studios, handing the bean-counters and the marketing gurus the reigns of power, pandering to their “target audiences” of fifteen year-old kids and uneducated third-worlders, turning out of steady junk-food diet of remakes and sequels, comic book fantasies, teen sex comedies, and horror films.

 

These are not the sort of films likely to inspire the next Nick Meyer or even the next Dan Bronson.

 

They are, instead, the sort of films that led Sherry Lansing to say goodbye to Hollywood.

 

The turning point for her, as Stephen reports in Leading Lady, came with Lara Croft. It was, from a story-telling point of view, an absolute disaster—a film about nothing at all.

 

But her top marketing executive told her not to worry—he could sell it in spite of its flaws. He advised her against spending any more money to improve it because it wouldn’t make any difference at all at the box-office.

 

He was right.

 

Lara Croft made $275 million dollars worldwide.

 

Sherry—who loved dramas about serious issues, who was proud of films like The Verdict, China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction and The Accused—was disturbed by the increasingly corporatized environment in which she was working, where quality no longer mattered, where “clever sales strategies could redeem all but the most abysmal of movies…”

 

And so she left.

 

Her departure came not long after my own.

 

Hers was voluntary.

 

Mine was not.

 

In my case, the work dried up…simply because there was no longer a market for the sort of stories I loved to write.

 

When I left the business, my enthusiasm for the movies left me. I—who used to see every movie that came out (and the good ones two or three times), who built everything in my life around what was in my opinion the greatest of all the arts—found myself seeing fewer and fewer films.

 

It’s hard to work up much enthusiasm for pictures like The Fate of the Furious or even the mindless but mildly entertaining Kong: Skull Island.

 

I was convinced that my love had died, but a chance encounter not long ago brought it back to full-blooded life.

 

Sonja and I were staying at a friend’s house in Morro Bay, and we headed into San Luis Obispo to catch a screening of The Zookeeper’s Wife, a movie we hoped would break the corporate mold of today’s films.

 

But we got there early and discovered that the local multiplex was showing…

 

Are you ready for this?

 

I was not.

 

The local multiplex was showing…North by Northwest!

 

One of my favorite films of all time.

 

A film I’d not seen on the big screen since it’s release in 1959.

 

I went.

 

I saw.

 

It conquered.

 

It conquered me all over again and reignited my love of the movies, the love I was able to express in that conversation with Nick Meyer.

 

It’s not a love likely to be fulfilled in theatres featuring today’s studio films–like Snatched or the umpteenth remake of The Mummy.

 

But there are the occasional cable wonders like Downton Abbey and Feud.

 

And there is TCM.

 

And so, return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

 

 

 

 

 

For twenty years, Bill O’Reilly has been reporting (perhaps I should say interpreting) the news.

 

Now he is the news.

 

Why?

 

The answer is simple.

 

Bill committed the unpardonable sin.

 

He got caught.

 

It was an unfortunate, completely unexpected blunder on his part. He is, after all, a sophisticated, experienced man of the world. He knows how things work. His carelessness is and will remain a mystery.

 

As for the dozen or so accusations of sexual harassment, they are simply evidence that Bill has been upholding a noble, long-standing tradition of the entertainment world: the liberal use of the casting couch.

 

Now some of you might argue that Bill is in news, not entertainment, but such an argument reveals an appalling ignorance of the glorious revolution Fox brought to the world of news, transforming it virtually overnight from a matter of dull facts to provocative, stimulating, sometimes thrilling entertainment.

 

It began with the introduction of long blonde hair and jiggle to weather reporting and moved out in ever widening circles until, in no time at all, newsmen and newswomen were superstars—superstars like Bill O’Reilly.

 

As a star, Bill was simply exercising a prerogative shared by many at the top of the Hollywood and Broadway pyramids.

 

By making himself available to young ladies much further down the ladder of success than he, he was offering them opportunity—the opportunity to keep the jobs they already had and possibly even the opportunity to become stars themselves.

 

It is, as I suggested earlier, a venerable tradition that dates back to the very beginnings of theatre and film and that reached its fullest expression in the heyday of the studio system.

 

No one—not Howard Hughes, not Harry Cohn, not Jack Warner—was a more accomplished practitioner of the art of the casting couch than Darryl F. Zanuck.

 

In fact, there are even those who say he invented it!

 

Zanuck was devoted to his art.

 

Every afternoon at four o’clock, no matter how busy he might have been (and he was a busy, busy man), he would take half an hour to entertain one of the many starlets at 20^th Century Fox and encourage them in their hopes for a big career opportunity.

 

His generosity was legendary—he shared himself (well, at least a part of himself) with virtually every aspiring actress he had under contract.

 

While the couch never again attained this level of perfection and institutionalization, it continued to play an important role both in Hollywood and on Broadway for decades to come.

 

In fact, my lovely wife Sonja was offered its comforts many times during her decade as an actress in New York.

 

A wide-eyed Minnesota girl who, like Gatsby, saw in the City nothing but beauty, promise and wonder, she once arrived for an interview at the office of a well-known producer who proceeded to chase her around his desk…until, breathless, she stopped…and started to laugh.

 

He, having lost his…enthusiasm…and realizing that she was not going to take advantage of the opportunity he was offering her, shifted course and began to tell her how much she’d like his handsome young son.

 

She, for reasons I’ll never understand, rejected both father and son and the big break that might have come with them.

 

On another occasion, she walked into the office of another big-time producer, and as she was sitting down, he asked, “Shall we fornicate?”

 

(He actually used a somewhat stronger term.)

 

Her answer?

 

She stood up, and without speaking a word, left the office.

 

Opportunity knocked at her door so many times, but talented as she was, she never answered it.

Then there was the case of a close friend—an actress, blonde and blue-eyed like Sonja but much better known—who was discovered by one of the best-known directors of stage and screen.

 

(I can vouch that she’s a hell of an actress because she has always insisted that her initial encounter with said director occurred when she was thirteen or fourteen when, according to the IMDB, she was, in fact, twenty. Okay, she fudged a bit, but she had me convinced for years. That is what I call acting!)

 

In any case, the great man cast her as a teenaged seductress in what turned out to be a classic play, and in his selfless attempt to prepare her for the role, he worked very hard to seduce her.

 

It was the quintessence of Method acting and direction, with its heavy reliance on associative memory: he was, I’m sure, simply trying to give her some memories she could draw upon to enhance her performance.

 

She, however, rebuffed him, and as a result of her obstinate refusal to take his direction, never worked for him again.

 

Though I myself never witnessed it during my years in Hollywood (possibly because I was neither blonde, blue-eyed, sexy or female), I’ve always suspected that there are still those out there working diligently to perpetuate the custom of the couch.

 

And now we have such sterling types as O’Reilly and his former boss, Roger Ailes, confirming my suspicion—along with Bill Cosby, who has taken the ritual to a whole new level.

 

In a world suffering future shock, a world reeling and writhing with unprecedented change, it’s reassuring to know that certain revered practices abide—fixed, immutable, imperishable.

 

If only the current custodians of the couch had had the wisdom of their predecessors—the wisdom to keep their generosity a closely held secret from the public, we’d still have Ailes sharing his fair and balanced view of the world, O’Reilly spinning his stories freely, and Cosby telling his big lies in one of his Little Bill Books for Beginning Readers.

 

First of all…

 

…an apology.

 

In a recent blog, I vowed that I would banish seriousness from my posts—that in the future, I would revert to the irony, the self-mockery, the smart-ass tone that characterized my work in the past.

 

I lied.

 

It’s to be expected, of course.

 

As I pointed out in my irresistibly funny memoir Confessions of a Hollywood Nobody, it’s what we do in TinselTown: every player knows it’s one of the requirements for the job.

 

There was no malice aforethought. I truly believed I had put sobriety behind me forever.

 

However, as I pondered my latest subject, I found myself following the example of Herman Melville and his famous meditation on “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the whiteness that “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.”

 

Melville’s goal was to punch through the blank mask of God and the universe.

 

Mine: to comprehend the complexities of a white suit worn by one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies.

 

(Okay, okay, so there’s a little bit of a difference in scale, but I’m serious about this, folks. I really am.)

 

The movie in question is my late friend Robert Ellis Miller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

 

Heart stars Alan Arkin as a deaf-mute named John Singer. Isolated in a world of silence, Singer seeks to relieve his loneliness by reaching out in friendship to those around him. He transforms their lives. But they—inadvertently, unwittingly, unconscionably—fail him, and in the end, he takes his own life, unaware of the love and respect each of his friends feels for him.

 

This intense, profoundly moving film opens at night in a Southern town, with Singer’s friend and fellow deaf-mute, Antonopoulis, rolling a hoop down a sidewalk, playing hopscotch on a court chalked on the walkway, and then breaking a bakery window to get at the goodies inside, unable to hear the burglar alarm that summons the police.

 

Singer’s first challenge is to get his only friend out of jail.

 

Robert’s first challenge was to get the film made.

 

He wanted Arkin to play Singer, but Jack Warner insisted that he wasn’t a star.

 

Besides, because the character never speaks a word, Warner wanted to use a big-name French or Italian actor in the role, thinking that it would enhance the European box-office.

 

Robert held out for Arkin.

 

Warner refused to budge.

 

The film did not go forward.

 

Then The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming hit big. Alan called Robert and said, “I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to become a star, so I want you to call Jack Warner and tell him he can go ahead and cast me now.”

 

Once he had the green light, Robert had to find an unknown to play Mick, the gawky but sensitive teenager who is befriended by Singer and who dreams of a life outside the confines of her impoverished family and her small town with its small-minded values.

 

He placed a small ad in the local classifieds, and a young woman named Sondra Locke showed up in a beat-up van and bare feet. She read for him and simply blew him away.

 

The next big challenge was casting Antonopoulis, who is obese, developmentally disabled, driven by insatiable appetite for food and drink.

 

Antonopoulis’ very size made the casting a challenge—very few actors fit the physical description of the character, and it was, for a while, an open question whether Robert and company would find anyone right for the role.

 

The answer to that question came out of the mouths of babes—or rather, Alan Arkin’s eleven year-old son Adam, who suggested Chuck McCann, a local television clown he’d discovered while on location with his father.

 

There remained the question of the white suit Antonopoulis wears in most of his scenes, the suit that reflects his innocent, childlike nature.

 

(There it is, finally—that white suit that I announced would be the subject of this column! Back in my days as a college professor, my students loved leading me off on tangents—it was, as you may have guessed, an easy task.)

 

The problem?

 

The film had virtually no budget.

 

Robert’s costume people couldn’t find a white suit that would fit McCann and couldn’t afford to have one specially tailored for him.

 

This time, it was Robert’s wife Pola who rode to his rescue.

 

She remembered the white suit that Sidney Greenstreet wore in The Maltese Falcon and had the costume designer call Warners to see if it still existed. It did, and Chuck ended up wearing Greenstreet’s white suit…twenty-seven years after it was created for the Huston film.

The irony is, of course, that the suit itself was ironic in The Maltese Falcon.

 

The white fabric—the embodiment of innocence in most people’s minds, like the extreme politeness of Greenstreet’s Gutman, like the cliché of the jolly fat man, stood in striking contrast to the reality of the ruthless, rapacious figure it clothed.

 

The suit, in its second screen appearance, played it straight—an innocent color for an innocent character.

 

My point?

 

Yes, there actually is a point to my ramblings on these pages.

 

In fact, there are several.

 

Film is a collaborative business.

 

Yes, the director is in charge…sort of.

 

He (or she) is in charge if he can manipulate the studio into giving him what he wants.

 

He is in charge if he can communicate his vision for the story to all of his collaborators—if he can put everyone on the same page.

 

He is in charge if he’s open to good ideas whatever their source—be it a child, a spouse, or even (God forbid) a screenwriter.

 

A last point?

 

Costuming plays a more important role in filmmaking than most people realize.