Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty

Author:Tracy Daugherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

14. Where Is World War II?

IF IT HAD BEEN ACAPULCO, Joe would have beaten the film crew there. But the location scouts had staked out a patch of desert twenty miles northwest of Guaymas, in the Mexican state of Sonora. According to Catch-22’s screenwriter Buck Henry, the area offered a “breathtaking panorama of poverty, dust, [and] unidentified plant life”—not the ideal setting in which to ring out the old decade and, along with the roar of over half a dozen B-25s, ring in the new.

Originally, the film crew had hoped to shoot where Joe had fought the war. John Calley, the movie’s producer, and Richard Sylbert, the production designer, flew to Corsica. Up and down the coast, they asked (“in our failing Italian,” Sylbert said), “Where is World War II?” Joe could have told them. Nowhere. Oil refineries and highways had replaced the old American air base.

Besides a desire for accuracy, Mike Nichols, the film’s director, wanted a setting that conveyed Yossarian’s “how-do-I get-outta-here feeling.” He found such a place near the Tetakawi mountain, known as “Goat’s Teats,” north of Guaymas. There, the crew built a $180,000 five-mile highway to haul necessary equipment to the location, and a $250,000 six-thousand-foot runway for the B-25s. The mayor of Guaymas welcomed these improvements to the infrastructure, particularly because he owned a local construction company.

In the years preceding production, Columbia, which had first optioned the book, sold the film property to Paramount/Filmways. At one point, Jack Lemmon wanted to make the movie (and play Yossarian). Later, Richard Brooks said he would do it, but he wound up making a version of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim instead, exhausting his capacity for orchestrating war movies.

Columbia had financed Dr. Strangelove and purchased Fail-Safe, so the studio released two antiwar movies in the same year. “[T]he Pentagon didn’t like it,” Joe said. “Each of the studios has a man in Washington who talks to the generals and the admirals, and keeps them happy, and [the Columbia heads] didn’t want to embark on another movie that they thought the Pentagon might not like. Then a stockholder’s fight got in the way. All this time my reputation was suffering because the rumor was spreading that Catch-22 was hard to adapt to the screen. And I was getting stigmatized. People in Hollywood and New York were saying, ‘That’s Heller over there—his books don’t make good screenplays.’ I stopped being invited to parties.”

Joe was kidding when he made these remarks during a talk at the Ninety-second Street Y, but he wasn’t exaggerating much.

Enter Mike Nichols. With two phenomenal successes, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, he had earned the right—in a shifting Hollywood climate—to make whatever he wanted. He had become the first American director since Orson Welles to gain creative control of his movie, including the right of final cut and the option of keeping studio executives from seeing daily rushes. Welles had wielded such power with Citizen Kane in 1941. Now, Catch-22 was to be an important “auteur” film.

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