The Sheila Variations

Ha! yes, it is axiomatic that lousy on-set atmosphere produces Great Movies, sort of the movie version of the bad-dress-rehearsal superstition that theatre actors harbor.

(Of course it's not always true. Rosalind Russell loved making His Girl Friday, for example.)

Campaspe - I always love when you show up. Thank you thank you. Come to think of it - Bringing Up Baby was a famously HAPPY set and you would never call that movie "dull"!!

I went to an acting seminar that Susan Sarandon gave once and she said an almost identical thing - that the movies that were the biggest nightmares turned out to be the great ones. hahaha!!

(Interesting that both of our examples are Howard Hawks movies .... coincidence?)

A couple of other examps just popped into me head: Some Like it Hot, where Tony Curtis was ready to strangle Marilyn; A Star Is Born, where Cukor finally became fed up with Garland; and not exactly in the great movie category, but the tension-packed set of An Officer and a Gentleman, which culminated in the lap-sex scene where Debra Winger's pure disgust - hatred - of Richard Gere looked like pure sexual desire on the screen. Gone With the Wind was notoriously difficult. And pretty much every Kubrick film. Hmmm. Miss Hepburn might be referring to The African Queen, which was an unhappy set not only for personality conflicts but just the sheer difficulty of filming in Africa. Do you think it's mostly a strong personality thing? An ego thing? A professionalism thing? Or a creative differences/creative process thing? It's intriguing, and probably a miracle that any movie ever gets made, considering all the things that could go maddeningly wrong.

Relative happiness on the set is completely related to the quality of catering. That's my belief. Give 'em excellent bagels and you're home free :)

xxx Stevie

Stevie - I think she was talking more generally. You know - often strife and angst cause great and urgent art. Like Apocalypse Now. or Deer Hunter. Often personality conflicts come across as WAY more interesting than "accord" and eveeryone playing nice-nice, know what I mean? Your example of Officer and a Gentleman is perfect. Susan Sarandon was talking about some of the films she's made - where it was literally like a love-fest every day on the set, everyone getting along, everything running smoothly - and when the movie eventually was made, it was so boring you wanted to slit your wrists. I can't remember which movies she was talking about, though. It might be in my notes.

Since Roy Scheider is a recent subject, I'll throw this one in. Making "Jaws" was a miserable experience, according to a little book I have. Not personality conflicts so much as the sheer physical difficulty of filming it. But it turned out to be a classic.

Jaws was a notoriously insane shoot. Months behind schedule, broken sharks, WAY over-budget, everyone trapped on Martha's Vineyard for months on end waiting for it to be over.

Was that Carl Gottlieb's book, by chance? I read it, not long after the movie came out. Something about Spielberg jumping into a boat and speeding away, shouting "I shall NOT return!" (He'd got wind the crew was going to throw him into the sea or something, perhaps prefiguring the Gatorade bath. Perhaps not.)

In any case, it's a great example of the phenomenon. I read the book before I saw the movie, and with apologies to any Benchley fans in the salon, "dreary, overplotted potboiler" is what comes to mind. The movie blew the doors off the book, and that rarely happens.

In the general line of "set/production dynamics," there's something else I've wondered about. On the set of a movie like, say, The Muppet Movie or The Princess Bride or (in my opinion, anyway) The Stunt Man or, perhaps most to the point, Toy Story II*, is there a moment when people start to realize, "Hey, of course we went into this thinking we would do good work, but we're on to something really powerful here."

I mention Toy Story II in particular because the initial expectations for it were modest. According to what I've read, it was initially slated for direct-to-video release, and during the production Disney and Pixar realized what they had on their hands and decided to make it a full theatrical release.

I saw it probably two dozen times when the kids were really little, and I'm still not tired of it. Pixar has never made a bad movie, but Toy Story II (along with The Incredibles) stand fair in the company of the best movies of the last 25 years, at least.

Ken - according to Talia Shire, Burt Young, Irwin Winkler, Carl Weathers et al ... they knew that Rocky was a wonderful script - they all were in love with it - but at a certain point, they all began to realize that this was one of those pictures. Meaning: one of the magic ones. They all said it. Shot in 28 days. There was no budget. They dressed in freezing bathrooms and they shared trailers. Talia Shire bought her own wardrobe. It was that low-budget. So low budget that they had to cut all the extras in the ice skating rink scene and Stallone had to rewrite it so that it was just them in the rink. Think of how magical that scene is - as it is now - and it totally came out of hardship and having no money to fill up that rink with people. The shoot was FULL of accidents like that - even the casting. They had no money so that automatically discounted half of Hollywood to star in it - they couldn't afford anyone huge. And so that limitation, of course, turned out to be the film's greatest asset. I mean, Talia Shire was hired because she was "cheap", basically - they could afford her ... but look at what she did! Its just amazing.

Talia Shire said she always felt that "the angels were working with us on this one ..." - all of the accidents and limitations aligning to create something special.

Now none of them knew that 30 years later, we'd be sitting around watching Rocky - and Carl Weathers visits, oh, Timbuktu and some person shouts, "HI APOLLO CREED" at him as he walks by. Nobody could predict THAT kind of success - but they all say that they felt it was a "special" picture. They all just KNEW it.

(Of course sometimes the very same feeling means you are delusional ... or sometimes you have the same feeling, and it just doesn't work out ... That's the heartbreak of being an artist who requires success, monetary success.) You know: "I thought we were working on something so special ..." That happens all the time, too.

But for whatever reason (and there were probably 15 different factors) - Rocky WAS that kind of movie - and if it came out today as opposed to back then, it might not have done as well - it HIT with the populace at that time ... and of course it continues to do so. But it was very much of its era ... and it had the bleakness of all of the films of the 70s - the great ones, anyway ... but then it had this great hope in it, too. Also, let's not forget the absolute brilliance that Rocky LOSES that first fight.

If he won, I am convinced the movie would have been a flash in the pan. Maybe it would have made a couple bucks - but it certainly wouldn't have lasted so long, and made such an indelible impression.

Rocky HAS to lose in order for that film to work.

Extraordinary, when you think about it,.

That's exactly what I was driving at. Thanks!

I would imagine, though, that with something like Toy Story - where there is no "set" at all ... it might be harder to gauge something like that.

This surprises me. As you know I am reading that biography about her and the happiest sets she worked on were on movies that George Kukor (her dear lifelong friend) directed (like "Little Women" and "The Philadelphia Story") which were also some of her best films. Curious.....

I think her larger point is: to be nice-nice and polite does NOT necessarily a good movie make. Lots of times happy friendly sets bring boring movies.

Case in point: Bringing Up Baby - directed by Howard Hawks. Generally a happy set - but Hepburn herself struggled with that part, and the comedy of it - she really had to WORK at it ... and had to struggle against knowing that folks like Hawks and Cary grant were waiting for her to "nail" it.

Now the result is comedic genius and is not considered a classic - but in the moment, it was tough going for her!

Let's not be too literal with the comment and try to pinpoint which movie she was talking about. She was a big rule-breaker, although she was a part of the establishment - she always felt that those who were too "obedient", or too concerned with being "nice" - were not the best artists. Art needs a little bit of mess.

Good directors cultivate mess. What Arthur Penn calls "happy accidents".

Not to ruin good folklore but... Now this is the scientist and director in me talking. As an artist, I've always hated theater "sets" where there was more drama on stage than off. But my scientific and statistical mind is wondering whether, since those telling those stories are all artist-participants, it doesn't just seem as though the least boring sets turn out to produce the most interesting films because, given the level of sturm and drang at the time, your expectations became radically lower and when the thing actually turned out to be good by contrast it seemed soooooo much better. And those films which were disasterous on the set and were awful films, well we don't talk about those because they're not watched and no one remembers them.

There's plenty of folklore on both sides.

I think it's similar to the many many stories of the HILARIOUSLY comedic vibes on the sets of tragic films ... or, opposite, the tragic sturm and drang behind the scenes of wacky comedies.

You might assume that the cast of, oh, King Lear would walk around backstage being gloomy and tragic all the time ... but then there are stories of shenanigans, practical jokes, blah blah blah ... it makes sense. I love that.

I've experienced that.

For example - doing the elegiac quiet lovely Death in the Family in Chicago - where we all spoke the poetry of Agee's words with melancholic reverence, etc. - it was a tender delicate quiet little play ... and backstage? We were raving LUNATICS. There were times when we were literally shaking with laughter right up until curtain time.

It was awesome - if we had walked around in an Agee-like melancholy state BACKstage, it would have been a dreadful experience.

And the play was great - won awards, packed houses, etc.

My experience has been bad rehearsal mojo = bad performance. On the plays where it's been nothing but fun everything went great.

And as for the comedy/tragedy aspects, I can't remember one play where the cast didn't make fun of most of it. Not derisively, but every play I've been involved with, the actors find something (a prop, a costume, a line, a song) to latch onto and deride throughout the production. It directs energy in some positive way I guess ( I don't know). By the way, have you ever been in a production where the cast actually called it by it's name? I haven't. We always came up with a nickname for the show. I don't know why that is either.

But I do know this: group scenes onstage where you have pretend to talk with someone when other actors are actually delivering the audible lines to the audience are some of the most entertaining, and filthiest, conversations I've ever had. We would do our best in RICHARD III to make each other break character onstage. We never did.

Highly professional stuff.

Another great example of all of this is when I was in Rimers of Eldritch - one of the most hopeless plays ever written - and I literally made a lifelong friend of one of the other actresses, because of our onstage shenanigans - during the bleakest play ever written. So hysterical.

Jonathan, your Richard III story brings to mind some group scenes in a horrid production of Lysistrata I did with Sheila (who was brilliant of course) in college. I wet my pants on stage (literally, Jonathan, literally) during one of those "crowd scenes" because a puerto rican actress said something filthy in spanish. dignity, always dignity.

hahaha Classic!!

Jackie - do you remember the night Marilyn blacked out one of her teeth? Just for the hell of it? And finally that was the point when the director was like, "Okay - that tooth thing was a bit too far."

But every time I looked at gorgeous Marilyn onstage, grinning in that open-faced mentally deficient way for her character - with a big blacked-out tooth - I nearly LOST it. I didn't wet my pants but it was close!!

Jackie - I would've paid good money to be onstage when that happened. I had friend who went did a college prod of Lysistrata in Connecticut which he also claims was wretched. Maybe it's just something about the play.

For an actual moment of professionalism and dignity that completely, utterly and whollisticly impressed me was years ago in a production of A Doll's House. Carrie Preston was playing Nora and during her scene with Donna (can't remember her last name) as Mrs Linde, Carrie's stitching in her dress snapped and the entire skirt part below the navel fell right to the ground.

For a brief nano-second I thought, "Oh my god, how are they going to deal with this?" (I was offstage awaiting my entrance as Krogstad) and then without missing a beat at all Donna started chastising Carrie in perfect Ibsenian language for not listening to her about her seamstress, told her to turn around to let her fix it and they performed the rest of the scene delivering all of their lines perfectly while Donna re-snapped up the dress. I almost started crying I was so impressed. After the show, we (as all actors would in this situation) quizzed audience members who had come backstage and none of them had any idea it wasn't a part of the play.

I love the theatre!!!

Jonathan - //in perfect Ibsenian language //

hahaha Awesome. I need to do a post about moments like that I've had myself - I love them so much.

I'd love to read about that. And more elaboration on the pants wetting - that's hilarious!

Jonathan - I wrote a post a while back about the 4 worst shows I was in, and Lysistrata definitely made the list. Here's the post. I believe you are familiar with the half-hour Macbeth!!

Okay, I'm back from reading that piece. The guy storming out of the theatre and not able to successfully exit still has me laughing to myself. And since I'm at work and not supposed to be laughing (lest someone pass by my office and say, "Hey, what's so funny?")'cause you know, I'm supposed to be working, it's making it much harder not to laugh. Oh shit that is funny.