Working with Lollobrigida

From HOLLYWOOD EXILE Or How I Learned To Love the Blacklist

by Bernard Gordon

(Bernard Gordon was hired by Philip Yordan to produce BAD MAN'S RIVER.)

My problems with Lollobrigida were just beginning. Absolutely nothing pleased her. She even refused to submit to the routine doctor's examination required for our insurance. "I know these doctors," she snapped. "They're all the same. They just want to look up under my skirt!"

"You know, Gina, it's the same on every film. We have no choice. We have to have the insurance for the Errors and Omissions policy."

She ungraciously agreed to see the doctor at his office, but, having conceded this, she figured she had me at a disadvantage and used the moment to ask me for a favor. "My good friend is here. He's a marvelous photographer, and he's going to stay here with me. I'd like you to give him a job as still cameraman on the film." Working on that kind of stringent budget limits we had, I regretfully turned her down and found her even more resentful and uncooperative after that. I was learning that no matter how much they earned, some stars never stop trying to milk more money out of a production.

Her complaints continued until the very last day of her schedule. On an evening when our friends David and Betty Lewin had arrived in Madrid and were having dinner with us, Lollobrigida called me. David was a very successful journalist who specialized in writing about film personalities for the London press. He personally knew almost every screen star on either side of the Atlantic.

"I've never been paid!" Lollobrigida was screaming into the phone. "It's the last day of filming and the money was never deposited in Rome!"

I knew nothing about this. "I'll look into it right away," I promised.

"Right away! Right away! That's not soon enough. I'm supposed to finish work here tomorrow!"

"I'll call Rome now. I'm sure I can straighten it out."

She didn't believe me. "If the money isn't paid tonight, I don't come to work tomorrow. I leave."

If she really did leave, we would miss her important final scene. "That won't be necessary, Gina. I'll get it worked out tonight." But I had no idea how I would do that. She hung up.

I found Yordan and Fisz at a hotel in Rome, explained the matter to Yordan, who turned me over to Fisz, who started to give me a lot of double-talk. "Don't worry. She'll be paid. It's complicated because they want a tax deal. Tell her to relax."

It was my turn to scream. "Never mind all that crap, Benny. You get in touch with her or her agent and get this settled. Tonight. I need her on the set tomorrow."

"Tonight? You want me to open the banks tonight? There's nothing I can do tonight. You shouldn't be so excitable. And you shouldn't talk to me that way. You just go ahead and talk to her." The ball was in my court. I was left on my own.

My loud shouting on the telephone, even from my office in the apartment, had easily been heard in the living room. I explained the impasse to David Lewin. He was amused. "I know her very well," he said. "Let me talk to her." I didn't think that was a good idea, not at the moment.

I called her back. "I just talked to Mr. Fisz in Rome. He's the executive producer who made the deal with your agent. He said he'll get it all settled tomorrow. There's nothing he can do tonight."

She wasn't satisfied. "You can forget about me for tomorrow."

"In that case, Gina, what can I do? I'll have to rewrite the scene, write you out of it. That's a pity. It's one of my favorite scenes in the film and one of your best. You know it's the pay-off for your funny double-crossing character." This hit the actress where she lived, but she still wouldn't budge.

As a last desperate ploy, I said, "Listen, Gina, I have a friend of yours here. David Lewin. He knows we're working together and wants to say hello."

"David Lewin?" Her voice rose in pitch. "Don't tell me he knows what's going on?"

"He doesn't know anything. I'm back in my office. He just wants to say hello."I hurriedly briefed David. He was to know nothing about our problem. He understood and got on the phone. They talked about nothing consequential, just that he was a good friend of mine and had heard good things about the film and was looking forward to seeing it.

When he was through, she asked to talk to me again. "I'm glad you were able to work things out in Rome," she now told me. "I'll see you on the set tomorrow."

I believed that Lollobrigida was right to worry that the deferred salary would be slow in coming - if it ever came. There are many escape routes for contracts made across national borders and Fisz knew them all. But that was not my department.

CONTEMPT of ULYSSES

From DINO The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis

by Tullio Kezich and Alessandra Levantesi

(Desiring to make an international film with an American star, Dino De Laurentiis decided to do a movie of THE ODYSSEY.)

His memories regarding the early phase of this project are foggy. It's certain, however, that the initial impulse came from the director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, an underemployed German cinematic master. Pabst had come to Italy at the invitation of a Milanese production company to film THE ODYSSEY, and while he was scouting locations on Ischia he met Silvana, to whom he offered a role. Consulting an ancient press clipping that recounts these confused events, Dino can't hide his perplexity: "I certainly don't recall that it was Pabst who got ULYSSES under way."

It's a strange thing to forget, because in 1954, right on the heels of Dino's first international adventure, the eminent novelist Alberto Moravia published CONTEMPT, the tale of a German director summoned to Italy to make a film of THE ODYSSEY. (It was later brought to the screen by Jean-Luc Godard in LE MEPRIS [CONTEMPT], produced by none other than Carlo Ponti.)

The title means nothing to Dino: he hasn't read the book or seen the film. In other words, he was unaware that years after his appearance in Soldati's FUGA IN ITALIA, he had fed the imagination of yet another great Italian writer. For Moravia's novel includes a portrait of a producer, Battista, with more than a passing resemblance to Dino.

Casting BAD MAN'S RIVER

From HOLLYWOOD EXILE Or How I Learned To Love the Blacklist

by Bernard Gordon

The principal casting was, as usual, done out of London by Ben Fisz. He assembled a fairly impressive cast. In addition to Lee Van Cleef, we now had Gina Lollobrigida as our female lead and James Mason as the heavy. Julian, our man in Rome, had to work with Lollobrigida to order her wardrobe. She had expensive tastes and carefully reserved her approval for gowns she intended to take with her after finishing the film. Julian called, troubled about how to handle this, but nothing could be done, as he discovered, without enraging her.

When our star reported for work in Madrid, I picked her up at the airport. She was sullen and instantly let me know where things stood. "You know, I don't usually work for this kind of money," she sniffed, "$50,000."

Since I knew nothing about the deal she had made and didn't want to let her know that was the kind of producer I was, I hesitated to get into this but was saved because she went right on."My agent made this deal for me to be paid at the back end and get a participation. It's a tax deal," she concluded airily.

Preparing the way for ULYSSES

From DINO The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis

by Tullio Kezich and Alessandra Levantesi

(After World War II, De Laurentiis eventually went back to work as a producer at Lux. He and another producer, Carlo Ponti, were the most successful at Lux, so they decided to break away and form Ponti-De Laurentiis productions; though the on-screen credit would read "Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti".)

Inspired by Gualino's lessons at Lux, animated by his dream of creating an international cinema, Dino undoubtedly was thinking big. He envisioned films shot in English (which he didn't understand), with appearances by the great stars of Hollywood (with whom he couldn't exchange a single word), the whole thing underwritten by large reserves of capital (which he didn't possess). But the early 1950s, however, the producer couldn't deny that the real action was taking place in Los Angeles. He refused to be cut out of it, despite the obstacles. In fact, the challenge attracted him, as if it were an immense blackjack table.

This attitude put him in opposition to Ponti, who preferred a less risky policy. Carlo wanted to stick with the Toto films, which cost little to make and earned plenty, and with those tales of romance and tragedy enjoyed by the vast legion of Sunday moviegoers, whose ranks hadn't yet been decimated by television. Carlo's reasoning was simple enough. Why should they risk their necks to make a spectacular that could sink them financially, when they could earn equal (or even bigger) profits with the usual junk?

With Ponti, we never had a financial structure that would allow us a complete production-distribution cycle: we were living day to day. We worked with minimal guarantees from the distributors, selling the completed films to Lux, Titanus, and other companies. And the film division of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro took its cut from these contracts, having already advanced us low-interest loans. So we scraped along until each film was released, but if the film didn't take in any cash, we were in trouble, and meanwhile we had to keep covering our general expenses and our interest payments.

These were serious problems. The general expenses had to be tallied on a film-by-film basis, but sometimes the budget was too modest to absorb the appropriate items. Sometimes we exceeded our estimates, and in those days, if you went over by even a little, it was already too much, becasuse we were always on the ropes: a bounced check would be enough to put us out of business. I realized taht we had to free ourselves from this nightmare of promisory notes. And in order to do that, we needed to think on a bigger scale, with a single financial point of reference.

Ponti, who had his doubts, tried to rein in his partner. But Dino refused to give up his dreams, which were perhaps tinged with megalomania. The first widescreen epic that De Laurentiis tackled, dragging Carlo along behind him, was ULYSSES.

How Eugenio Martin for BAD MAN'S RIVER?

From HOLLYWOOD EXILE Or How I Learned To Love the Blacklist

by Bernard Gordon

The story was about four notorious band robbers in the Old West who are hired to slip into Mexico and blow up a Mexican ammunition dump. Normally, it might have been difficult to get a director to go with this script, though recalling Yordan's ploy with Siodmak and CUSTER, I had no doubt that the would find a way to cross that ditch, and it was even easier this time, because, to get Spanish nationality for the film, we had to have a Spanish director. Sacristan came through with a recommendation, a local director who had even made a couple of films in England, a man with excellent English. We ran the films he had made in England and found them quite professional by our own standards. A man of about forty, Eugenio Martin was slender, sensitive, and pleasant-looking. He had grown up in Granada, the site of some of Franco's worst brutalities, including the murder of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, but Eugenio had been a boy at that time and grew up to become a teacher and professor of English. I always assumed that Eugenio was civilized to deplore Franco, but this was still Franco's time in Spain and people did not express any negative opinions about their generalissimo. Eugenio was thrilled to be hired for an American feature, to be paid well by Spanish standards, and to be working with the distinguished Academy Award-winning Philip Yordan.

JOVANKA E LE ALTRE, aka FIVE BRANDED WOMEN

From DINO The Life and Films of Dino De Laurentiis

by Tullio Kezich and Alessandra Levantese

Set in Yugoslavia, it followed the story of five women who'd had love affairs with the occupying Germans and had their heads shaved by the partisans as a badge of shame. When he first heard the plot, Dino had one of his inspirations: "In a flash I saw an enormous poster with the shaved heads of the five girls, and underneath the names of five famous actresses." Reading through the screenplay, he decided that Gina Lollobrigida should play the protagonist. Meanwhile, he signed up the director Martin Ritt, whom he admired more than ever after having seen NO DOWN PAYMENT.

The troubles began at once. First, there was the inconvenient fact that the Yugoslav partisans in Ugo Pirro's original novel were fighting Italy's army of occupation. The villains were transformed into Nazis. Today, Dino denies that the decision was made under pressure from the government: "The fact is that the Italians conducted war in which the human factor really counted, while the Germans everywhere exceeded them in sheer cruelty." More serious difficulties arose when the Yugoslav government refused to collaborate on the film of even to authorize the shoot. Dio realized that in this region, the partisan war was considered a quasi-mystical event, a story that couldn't possibly be told by a foreigner. No problem, thought Dino: he'd shoot the film near Klagenfurt, Austria, where the terrain was quite similar. But there too, historical sensibilities got in the way; the Austrian extras were reluctant to don Nazi uniforms.

Meanwhile, on the eve of shooting, Lollobrigida withdrew from the project. The official reason was that she was unwilling to have her head shaved, and in fact, she had worn a kind of skullcap for the screen test. According to some, however, the star didn't want to risk being just another face in the crowd, especially when the crowd included four top-drawer actresses: Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes, Jeanne Moreau and the young Carla Gravina. Of these, only Gravina agreed to have her hair cut in front of the press. Miles also went along with the tonsorial program, although she had her scalp shaved in private. But both Bel Geddes and Moreau opted for the skullcap, creating real headaches for the makeup artist.

When Gina defected, the producer didn't blink an eye. Instead he pulled the customary ace from his sleeve: Silvana (Mangano, his wife). She was more than willing to step in and utterly indifferent to the idea of sacrificing her locks. Asked about the issue, she responded at unusual length: "I must say that my first impression of my shaved head was pretty terrible... I was worried about the reaction of a person who's very important to me: my son Federico. He's not even five, and he adores women with long hair, at least to judge from the way he stares at them. What saved me, though, was another of his great passions: war. I explained to him that I needed to be a partisan, to shoot with a submachine gun, to fight like a man. Wouldn't a man with long hair be ridiculous? I managed to convince him. And then Raffaella and Veronica got into the game: all three of them wanted to get their heads shaved as well.

"The production challenged Martin Ritt. His background was in the theater, so he was unaccustomed to shooting exteriors, and the Italian-style chaos on the set was distracting. What's more, the project entailed transporting 114 cast and crew members up the Grossgluckner, to an altitude of nine thousand feet. With his Hollywood maestro in crisis, Dino turned to his old companion from the Centro, Pietro Germi, who had been hired to play a minor role as an actor. Germi agreed to help the struggling director. In a typical act of generosity, he demanded neither money nor title credit in exchange for having saved the movie.

Why BAD MAN'S RIVER?

From HOLLYWOOD EXILE Or How I Learned To Love the Blacklist

by Bernard Gordon

1971 began on an unpromising note. Yordan had purchased a very large apartment on the northern outskirts of the city, and he had locked himself up there for ten days with instructions that he not be called or disturbed. He was writing a new version, suitable for filming in Spain on our Western street, of an old turkey, BAD MAN'S RIVER, that he had been unable to unload in Hollywood. At the end of the self-imposed exile, he emerged cheerfully and handed me the new script."I wrote this in ten days," he boasted, "and Faith read it and says it's the best script she's ever read."

I was surprised to hear that Faith had ever read a script before. What could I say? I just swallowed hard and replied, "I'll read it right away. Get back to you."

"Oh," he said, "I've also given a copy to Irving to read."

When I finished reading it and found it as bad as I'd feared, I wondered whether I should tell the proud chief how I really felt, whether I should hedge or just go hide. For advice and comfort, I called Irving. "Have you read Phil's script?" I began neutrally.

"Yes."

"What did you think?"

"Not bad," he replied.

I was astonished. "You mean you liked it?" I was still trying to restrain my anger at what appeared to me a cowardly sell-out.

"Well," he said, starting to hedge, "I thought there were some pretty good things."

"Have you talked to him about it?"

"Yes."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him I liked it."

"Look, Irving, how could you? It's a total mish-mash with characters dropping in and out, no continuity, no credibility, nobody to root for. It isn't a comedy. It isn't melodrama. It isn't anything..." I couldn't go on.

"Well," Irving tried, backing off, "it isn't as bad as you think. I..."

Valuable as he was, I understood that Irving had no status or security around there and had to be careful not to offend Yordan. Unlike Irving, I was supposed to function as a producer on this next film - my first real production experience. I had responsibility. I would have to deal with a director, with actors, and, ultimately, with the people who were investing over $1 million in this venture. I knew I didn't have the Teflon veneer to slide away and pass the buck. I was no Yordan. He was never responsible for any disaster. There were always a dozen other people and circumstances to explain failure. He knew how never to admit any association with failure. This was a valuable talent I didn't have. I saw myself drowning on job number one. Since I was absolutely unable to echo Faith's enthusiasm about the script, I dictated three pages of notes about the problems I saw. I figured that at least, being specific might shield me from voicing an over-all judgment.

"I can see a few problems," I said when we finally got together, and I handed him my lengthy notes.

"Sure," said Yordan. "I'll read them. Thanks. There's always some little fixing you can do." If he was impressed with my acuity or industry, he concealed it well. He went on, "You know, we've got to move ahead right away. Lee Van Cleef gets here in ten days. We have to do more casting so we can start shooting. We have to get moving with a production and a budget so we can pay the bills at the studio. The budget's gonna be done from this script the way it is." This was a lecture. I was being given a lesson in the realities of filmmaking.