Take One (Jul 15, 1979)

we talked about some mutual friends. I told him about the idea and he said, “Well, that’s very interesting and | haven't done picture work. They once talked to me about my doing It Could Happen Here, but that was a disaster.” I said, “I would be very happy to offer you a trip to the coast. I'll put you up at the best hotel and send you out here first class.” He said, “Well, that's fun. I enjoy getting out there, I have a lot of friends on the coast. When do you want me to come?” I said, “As soon as you can.” So he came out in a hurry. We sat, we talked, and he read an eight-page outline that I'd written. He said, “I love it.” So I said, “Why don’t you have your representative talk to our people and make a deal?” Which we did. We made arrangements that the story would be predicated on my original notion and the screenplay done by both of us. What was your notion? The notion was to do the story of the War (this was 1943) and do it as an allegory and make it a Western. The characters would literally be Hitler and Mussolini and Churchill, but the names would be changed. Sinclair Lewis made up all the names, because he was a bug about names. Hitler became Hyatt, Goering became Garrett, Mussolini became Mollison. Churchill became Sheriff Church. United States became Ulysses Saunders, France was Frenson, Czechoslovakia was Charlie Sloane. We did the entire story like this. We had a wonderful time, and he worked at my home. He was on the wagon then and he was addicted—this was hot weather, summertime—to iced coffee, with a lot of sugar and a lot of cream. He had oceans of this stuff during the period we worked. He was wonderful company. He kept having to go to the can to pee and then he would come out and come up with statements like, “While standing in front of the bowl, admiring the yellow flow, I had an idea.” We had great fun writing the screenplay. Did MGM like it? When it was submitted, there was quite a furor in the studio and opposition from Jim McGuinness who was—I won't say an enemy—an adversary of mine; he was a member of the Committee for the Preservation of American Ideals. He thought I was the moving force for the whole Communist conspiracy. I had a couple of very sharp run-ins with him. So he went to Mayer. McGuinness, at that time, was sort of an executive in charge of story material for one of the units. (Mayer had divided the studio into units to prevent any one person ever assuming the power that Thalberg once had.) So McGuinness reported to Mayer that he'd read the script and he thought it was Communist propaganda. Here's one of the things he said to prove it: When Slavin first appeared in town, in order to 46 TAKE ONE SCHARY quickly identify him, I first focussed on the rear of his wagon and you saw a hammer and a sickle. Well, McGuinness said that was Communist propaganda. So I said to Mayer, “Yes, it's Communist propaganda in that it’s the Communist symbol, but I don’t know what he means by Communist propaganda. It could also be that Slavin is going to be a heavy. He doesn’t know.” Other people immediately joined in. Then Mayer finally said to me, “T don’t think an anti-fascist picture is important anymore, because after all we're fighting a war.” I said, “This isn’t just an anti-fascist picture. It tells about how an entire world community can be taken over by a ruthless man and how you have to be alert to what's going on.” Then he said, “No, I don’t want to do it.” I thought about it a day or so and then | went in and said, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to quit.” So you left MGM and eventually ended up at RKO, where you became head of production in 1948. Did RKO give youa great deal of leeway to bring in a new stable of directors? I could do anything I wanted. How did Jean Renoir get hired? Jean, as I remember, was under contract to them when I got there, but he hadn’t been doing much; Val Lewton (producer, Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie) was there; Nick Ray. Why didn't Renoir make a great film at RKO? That's a tough question. Nothing was in the way to prevent him from making that picture if he had come in with something to do. He had difficulty finding the material that he wanted to do. It was the same way years later with Stanley Kubrick. I had Kubrick under contract at Metro and said, “Search, anything you want to do, let me know.” He spent a year looking at three or four pictures a day, reading everything, and— well, a few years later he made Clockwork Orange. He gave an interview in which he said, “I’m always grateful to Dore Schary because he let me learn “Goddamn it they'll shit in their seats when they see this picture!” about movies by just watching them. Kept me on assignment.” This was after The Killing? Yes. I saw that picture and I said, “This guy is something.” So you ended up paying him for a year and he didn't do anything. How did he leave Metro? His year was up and he came to me and he said, “I'd like to do Paths of Glory, a Universal movie.” He said, “I’ve spoken to them.” I said, “Go ahead.” So he went there, or to whoever owned it. Losey—he was one of your discoveries. Yeah. I gave him his first movie (The Boy With Green Hair), and it was Losey who told me that Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Sabine Women would make a hell of a musical. Tried to buy it then, couldn't get it. Joshua Logan had it under option. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Yeah. William Wellman’s Westward The Women, which you produced, is a great, little-known movie and it's from an original story by Frank Capra. I loved that picture. Frank Capra wanted to do it at Columbia and he never put it together. Billy Wellman talked to Capra and said, “For Chrissake (I can just hear Wellman saying this), you silly Italian schmuck! Why don’t you produce that fucking picture and I'll direct it?” And Capra said he didn’t want to produce it. Wellman said, “Schary will produce it.” So then Capra called me and said, “Is Bill Wellman full of shit or are you really willing to buy the story?” I said, “Yes I want to buy it. Billy wants to do it and I think he'll make a hell of a movie of it.” So he said, “OK.” Then Wellman asked me if Capra could come on the set. But Capra told Billy, “Get lost! You bought the story—make it!” Was Wellman the sort of director who would fuss over themes and ideas in the script? No, he would have no feeling about such things; but he would say, “It'll make a pisscutter of a picture. Goddamn it, they'll shit in their seats with this fuckin’ picture!” This is the way he talked, his language was—oh, some of the things he did in Battleground—incredible! You know, there was an old army expression, when a guy would wake up: “Let go your cocks and grab your socks, we're movin’ out.” So he told the guys in the tent scene at the beginning of Battleground, “You say it.” They printed one take of it, and he told the cutters, ‘Don’t tell Schary about it, just run it for him.” So they ran it for me and I said, “Tell Bill I thought it was just wonderful and that we're gonna use the first take.” So then I went on the set and Bill said, “You son of a bitch you won't really use that first take, will you?” Did he ever do any writing on his scripts? No, he improvised, that’s what Bill did. Bill to me was the ideal director, for that