Sidney Lumet by Maura Spiegel

Author:Maura Spiegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

14

CAREER MOVES

This picture was filmed entirely in New York City.

—TEXT APPEARING BEFORE THE OPENING CREDITS OF SIDNEY’S SECOND FILM, STAGE STRUCK

After the Oscar nominations and critical acclaim for 12 Angry Men, the offers came rolling in. “I was being offered everything in the world,” Sidney recalled. “The bank accounts in Switzerland, with the corporations registered on a ship that was going through the Panama Canal, the whole works.”

He felt some pride in not taking the Hollywood bait. When a major studio head told him, “I’ll tell you what I’m looking for, Sidney, I’m looking for a young Lewis Milestone” (All Quiet on the Western Front, Mutiny on the Bounty, the original Ocean’s 11 and nearly fifty other films), he responded, “What’s the matter with the old Lewis Milestone?” and walked out. Sidney’s agent stated his terms unequivocally to the studios: “Lumet wants to keep himself free and sees no reason for making commitments in advance.”

The studio system turned Sidney off on several counts. The factory-like production was entirely alien to how he’d learned to run the show in television. Out there in Hollywood, “there were thirty-two heads of departments—I’m not exaggerating.” Sidney exclaimed, “The head of the camera department had the right to come to the lot and talk to my cameraman about whether he liked the picture or not. The head of the art department, the head of editing—all these strangers. There was no way I was going to do that.” The directorial control he was used to was unheard of in Hollywood. Even A-list directors were assigned movies they wanted no part of.

Sidney’s objections to Los Angeles were, at that period, pretty comprehensive:

That place has no reason for being.… I’m not the most erudite person in the world—but all the great centers of art have been centers of other things. They’ve either been a geographical center of the country or they’ve been a seaport … they’ve had other functions. The life of a place has been connected to the mainstream of life of that nation, of those people. An art came as a flower of that. Now, Los Angeles [laugh], I’m sorry, it’s not a seaport, it’s lousy land for farming, it’s got no reason for being.… It seems to me that it’s very difficult for any creative work to latch itself on to an unorganic place.… I don’t mean that Hollywood kills work; I just think it makes it tougher to do good work.

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