Jimmy Stewart by Marc Eliot

Author:Marc Eliot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307352682
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2006-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Lew Wasserman was waiting for him with welcome arms and a new deal, one he felt was “perfect” for the actor, a movie called Winchester ’73. The film would change the direction of his career. The deal behind it would change his life.

The seeds of the negotiations for Winchester ’73 lay in Wasserman’s early forties “million-dollar contract” with Warner Bros. for their second-tier player Ronald Reagan, the “Errol Flynn of the B’s,” as he was then known in the industry. Wasserman had managed to secure for Reagan $758,000 from the studio for forty weeks of guaranteed work a year, for seven years. During this time Reagan appeared in twenty-nine films, including William Keighley’s Brother Rat (1938) and Lloyd Bacon’s Knute Rockne, All American (1940—in which he said the immortal line, “Win one for the Gipper!”), before giving what is generally considered his best on-screen performance, in Sam Wood’s Kings Row(1942), which was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Black and White Cinematography (James Wong Howe). After the critical and commercial success of Kings Row, Jack Warner believed Reagan was at last ready to make the leap to A-list stardom. To prevent him from signing with another studio, as Wasserman implied was about to happen, Warner bumped up Reagan’s contract to a cool million a year, breaking that glass ceiling for contract players.

Wasserman was now looking to make the same kind of spectacular money jump for Stewart at Universal, only not as a long-term deal, but within the limits of per picture framework. Wasserman set up a gross-percentage deal for Jimmy to appear in Winchester ’73. While not unprecedented, only a handful of stars had ever been awarded this golden goose. Most of those who bargained for back-end money usually wound up settling for the illusory promise but not the money of net profits.3

The key to making the deal happen was Jimmy’s phenomenal success on Broadway in the title role of Harvey at a time when his film career had been at a low. Although the show had already been a hit before he filled in for Frank Fay, it was nothing like the smash it became with Jimmy.

During the run, Wasserman quietly negotiated a series of well-planned moves to ensure that Jimmy would be offered the title role in the screen version. First he brokered the sale of Harvey’s film rights to William Goetz, the head of production at Universal, in what today might look like a suspiciously inside deal, as every other studio had wanted a chance to get their hands on the property. Goetz (who happened to be Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law), paid the playwright Mary C. Chase, also represented by Wasserman, $150,000 for the rights to her play. Once he had the rights, Goetz offered Jimmy $200,000 plus a share of the film’s net profits if he agreed to star in it. To get him, Goetz had to make the offer through Wasserman, who wanted a second movie for Jimmy built in to the deal, with terms that sounded irresistible to Goetz on every level.

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