Book Review: I Thought We Were Making Movies
The Saturday Evening Post
Jul 14, 2008
I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History
by Walter Mirisch, 449 pages.
To the public mind, Hollywood producers are for the most part nondescript characters, accountant types who wear business suits and thickframed glasses. One rarely sees them except when they go on stage to receive an Academy Award. But the stereotype belies the fact that the ordeal of producing a movie can be every bit as dramatic as the movie plot itself.
In his new memoir, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, award-winning producer Walter Mirisch offers a rare producer's-eyeview behind the scenes at the making of some of Hollywood's most famous films during one of Hollywood's golden eras. Mirisch produced such classics as In the Heat of the Night, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, The Magnificent Seven, The Pink Panther, and Some Like it hot. That he survived the stress to reach his present 86 years is a tribute to a hardy nature.
From his first successful series, Bomba the Jungle Boy (produced from 1949 to 1955 for Monogram Pictures, a provider of such stirring B-quality entertainment as Bowery Boys and the Charlie Chan films), Mirisch eventually graduated to running his own production company known for its high-quality output. In the beginning, however, the budding producer recalls picking up an old grainy jungle documentary on the cheap to use as background for his Bomba series.
Like most of Monogram's pictures, the Bomba movies were filmed in just eight days. Nobody was more amazed than Mirisch when his first Bomba the Jungle Boy picture received excellent reviews. An $85,000 film netted a half-million dollars in box-office receipts. Not all of the credit should go to Mirisch, however. Some of it must surely be ascribed to the promotions department for bringing brigades of real monkeys into theaters to watch the film preview while chowing on bags of peanuts, to the delight of movie reporters.
But few of Mirisch's pictures were so easy to make. Hiring and firing, and working with prima-donna actors and hotshot directors, proved a challenge as big as finding backers and staying on budget (which almost never happened).
During the filming of Moby Dick, director John Huston's brainstorm to avoid using a phony-looking model for the great white whale was to put a shark inside a whale suit in the water and control it with wires. As Mirisch notes with his typical gentle humor, "We finally were able to convince him that wasn't going to be feasible."
Dealing with codirector Jerome Robbins on West Side Story proved a more formidable task. Robbins deplored codirector Bob Wise's idea for opening with a ballet piece performed directly on the streets of New York, an idea also championed by Mirisch. Finally, Mirisch got Robbins to agree to a filming on the streets that he would view and then reject if he didn't like it. Robbins apparently did like it, because he never protested. That didn't prevent Mirisch from later having to eliminate Robbins from the movie altogether, because his time-consuming squabbles with Wise were pushing the cost of production into record territory.
Sometimes production trouble turned into a gift horse in disguise. For the original Pink Panther movie, director Blake Edwards chose Peter Ustinov to play the bumbling detective, Inspector Clouseau, and Ava Gardner to play the detective's wife. Then Ava Gardner chose to drop out of the cast, and was replaced by an actress named Capucine. Not wanting to play with Capucine, Peter Ustinov withdrew from the cast. Mirisch sued Ustinov, but in the confusion, Edwards hired a young, up-and-coming actor named Peter Sellers for the Clouseau character.
"It took this extraordinary combination of circumstances for one of the comic geniuses of his era to find his way to a role for which he may have been born," writes Mirisch. "The Pink Panther caught lightning in a bottle."
"Producing films is a chancy business," Mirisch writes. "To produce a really fine film requires the confluence of a large number of elements, all combined in the exactly correct proportions. It's very difficult, and that's why it happens so infrequently. It takes great attention to detail, the right instincts, the right combination of talents, and the heavens deciding to smile down on the enterprise." That the heavens did smile on some of them is what makes Mirisch a legendary producer.
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