Somewhere by Amanda Vaill

Author:Amanda Vaill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767929295
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

MR. ROBBINS: O.K. Ernie, that’s it, as well as I can remember it. NOW LEAVE IT ALONE! (polite laugh)

As Lehman noted later, this was “what we call ‘kidding on the square.’”

Despite the last-minute tongue lashing Jerry gave them, and despite (or because of) the way he had worked them, West Side Story’s cast were devastated by the news of his departure. Natalie Wood in particular was outraged, and (as Jerry would recall later) “marched right in and told Walter Mirisch what she thought”—which was that she wanted Robbins reinstated or she would leave the picture. Jerry, among others, persuaded her to back down, but he was deeply touched. The gesture was, he said, “typical of her. When there were difficulties, she was right there with you.” Three years later—when Wood, divorced from her husband, Robert Wagner, suffered a painful breakup with Warren Beatty—Jerry tried to reciprocate her loyalty by asking her to marry him. (She turned him down, but gently, and the two of them kept up a flirtatious friendship that continued—albeit less flirtatiously—even after her brief marriage to Richard Gregson in 1969 and her remarriage to Wagner in 1972.)

Jerry wasted no time putting distance between himself and the source of his distress. Practically within hours of his typing out the rumble scene for Lehman, he was on a plane back to New York. Even with his departure, though, the pace of shooting didn’t pick up appreciably. In the “Dance at the Gym” number, “Wise did sixty takes to get that shot” of Tony and Maria’s cha-cha, said George Chakiris, and at the end of the rumble, when Anybody’s pulls Tony away over the wire fence, “that was sixteen takes.” But Wise dodged the bullet Jerry had taken: once the United Artists executives had seen the rough cuts of what had been shot so far (which was mostly Jerry’s footage), there was no more talk of schedules and budgets. “I never heard another word about it,” Wise said. It doesn’t seem too farfetched to wonder whether the concern over budgets and schedules wasn’t just a pretext, a way for the producers to toss the upstart Robbins aside after he’d been squeezed for what they knew he alone could give them.

Certainly they wanted to keep him out of the creative process once he was gone. Ten days before he was fired, the Mirisch Company’s lawyer, Ray Kurtzman, sought to clarify with Jay Kanter at MCA (Robbins’s agency) the limits of Jerry’s artistic control of West Side Story. He could edit choreographed sequences, Kurtzman said, only if he stayed until principal photography on the film was finished; otherwise, he could edit only the footage he himself had actually shot.

But Jerry fought back. From December through April he screened virtually all the musical and fight scenes and made detailed, pointed suggestions about how to improve them. As the Jets snap their fingers in the playground, he wrote, there were “one too many snaps before the ball hits the fence. It’s a question of metric phrase.

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