DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval by Wes Anderson's & Jake Perlin

Author:Wes Anderson's & Jake Perlin [Anderson's, Wes && Perlin, Jake & Anderson's, Wes && Perlin, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2023-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

A STAR-STUDDED FILM ON THE MARGINS OF THE HOLLYWOOD SYSTEM

Lew Wasserman, the powerful head of the MCA agency to which Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were both under contract, put his whole weight behind the project. Thanks to him, Miller and Taylor were able to assemble a dream cast that fitted perfectly the choices they had originally made. At one time, they had considered Robert Mitchum for the part of Gay Langland.

Elliott Hyman, head of Seven Arts, contacted him, and he seemed interested in reading the screenplay, but did not get in touch again. On November 13, 1959, Clark Gable met Miller, who talked to him about the project, and especially about the character of Langland. Gable was very puzzled at first and wondered just what kind of a script it was: a western, or something else? Miller found a definition that settled the question: ‘It’s a sort of Eastern western.’ After that, Gable felt ready to take the plunge.

With Montgomery Clift, on the other hand, whom they had in mind for the part of Perce, the problem was that no insurance company would cover him after the terrible car accident that had disfigured his face and intensified his self-destructive impulses. But Miller and Huston insisted on having him, and they eventually won the insurers over. Both of them were very happy with the way Clift behaved throughout the shoot, as well as with his moving portrayal of Perce. He is extraordinarily powerful in two of the film’s most affecting scenes: in the first, a monologue, he calls his mother from a phone box at the side of the road just before arriving in Dayton to ride in a rodeo; in the second, lying stretched out on the floor in the back room of a saloon, he confides in Roslyn, his head resting on her knees. When these scenes were shot, Clift was word-perfect; his fellow-actors and the whole crew were amazed. The parts of Isabelle, Roslyn’s landlady in Reno, and the pilot were played by Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach, two good film actors who had also acted on the New York stage.

From its origins to its production, The Misfits seems like an independent film, conceived in a completely different way from the traditional studio system. The impulse behind it belonged entirely to Miller, the screenwriter, an unusual state of affairs in American cinema, where the initiative always came exclusively from the producers. But the presence of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable was enough to guarantee finance for the film, whose initial budget was three and a half million dollars, a reasonable sum for Hollywood at that time, given also that Monroe’s and Gable’s fees accounted for a significant part of it.

An atypical production like The Misfits was possible at the beginning of the 1960s because the industry was going through a serious crisis caused by the first effects of competition from television. The studios started investing heavily in producing TV series, and many film sets were requisitioned or adapted to the needs of the new medium.

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