So You Want to Be a Producer by Lawrence Turman

Author:Lawrence Turman [Turman, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Directors each have their own way, their own style, of communicating with actors. Woody Allen told me that early in his directing career, he talked to his actors a lot, but now pretty much all he says is, “Do it once more, please, just a little faster.” David Lean, two-time Academy Award-winning director, was asked in an interview, “What’s the most important thing for a director to know?” Lean, to my surprise since he was one of the most commanding visual directors ever, replied, “How fast the actors should speak.”

I make it a point never to talk to actors, other than to pay them a compliment if I’m happy with their work. I’ll say anything critical only to my director. Simply defined, the producer is in charge of the movie (or used to be); the director is in charge of the set.

However, talking to actors during filming is sometimes unavoidable. Judy Garland, during the filming of I Could Go On Singing, approached me on the set and complained bitterly that Ronnie Neame, the director, was doing too many takes of each scene. She had already attempted suicide during the first week of filming, so I was eager to keep her on an even keel, emotionally. Ronnie, who was slightly intimidated by Garland (who wasn’t!), was only too happy to comply. So in the next scene, after a single take, Ronnie yelled, “Cut! Beautiful! Let’s move on to the next scene.” Judy immediately rushed to me, saying, “So that’s the game the son of a bitch is going to play.” Sometimes you can’t win.

There’s also a great—very different—William Wyler story. Willy was notorious for doing many, many takes of each scene. He was not an articulate man, nor very communicative with the actors, but he had unerring taste and invariably knew when an actor had captured the moment. On one film he was summoned by the studio head, who told him, “Willy, your actors hate you. You go for take after take after take. They can’t stand it. They hate you.” Calmly, Willy replied, “They’ll love me at the preview.” And he was right.

For I Could Go On Singing, we began Judy’s shoot at the famous London Palladium, with her singing the title song by Harold Arlen. Judy hadn’t done a film in a while and was eager to see herself, so the next day she watched dailies with us. There had been an undetected hair wiggling on the lens. Judy was marvelous, and the scene was definitely usable, but not visually perfect. That night she took too many pills and had to be hospitalized. I immediately called her then-manager, David Begelman, in New York, telling him we were starting out with Judy problems and he’d better get to London as fast as he could. He said he could arrange to come, if I’d pay him $25,000. I was stunned. He and his partner, Freddie Fields, were making a ton of money as Judy’s managers. (Had I a crystal ball to see his future behavior, I wouldn’t have been as surprised.

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