SEVENTEEN

Norman, since I talked to you this afternoon, I’ve become so goddamned, furiously frustrated from anger I don’t know what to do except sit here at this typewriter and rant and rave,” wrote Hal Ashby to Norman Jewison on October 5, 1966. “To think Walter [Mirisch] would put this kind of pressure on you is beyond the realm of my comprehension…. I guess Russians wasn’t enough to prove you are an honorable and responsible man. I swear to Christ what do you have to do.”¹

Almost every day, a new letter from Ashby would arrive in the hotel in Belleville, Illinois, that served as headquarters for Jewison and the cast and crew of In the Heat of the Night. The film was two weeks into production; the director and his sixty-man team would drive thirty-five miles to Sparta every day for the shoot. “We were the biggest thing in Sparta,” Haskell Wexler recalled later. “It was like the carnival coming! Guys had [girls] stashed, some of them had wives…there were a lot of dramas…mostly because we were exotic and exciting and they were vulnerable and stupid and had nice boobs and didn’t know anything about predatory northern city people.”² But while some in the town may have been dazzled, nobody involved in the movie itself was likely to mistake In the Heat of the Night for a glamorous, free-spending Hollywood production. Certainly not the local extras, who were paid all of $1.50 a day (“It beats cleaning house,” said one);³ or the worn-out, constantly chilled crew, who had been passing around the same head cold for weeks;⁴ or Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger, whose only star treatment on location consisted of space heaters in their dressing rooms,⁵ or the younger actors, who had to pretend they were sweating through a humid summer evening in the Deep South when in reality the nights in Sparta were so cold that they had to keep ice chips in their mouths in order to prevent their breath from showing up on camera, spitting them out just before each take.⁶ Jewison was doing what he could to keep costs down—most of the younger actors, even those in major supporting roles, were working for $100 a day⁷—and he was pushing through the shoot under difficult circumstances: His producer, Walter Mirisch, who never came to the set, was hundreds of miles away in Los Angeles, and so was Ashby, his closest ally. Mirisch was pressuring him about the already low budget; Ashby was running interference as well as he could; and Jewison was left to make every decision himself, serving as his own uncredited line producer.⁸

Jewison had arrived in Belleville in early September to start preparing for the movie, relying on Ashby, whose commitment to recreational drugs didn’t seem to impede his skill as a superb detail man, to take care of every loose end: the selection of blouses and wigs for Lee Grant, the name of the movie that would appear on the marquee of the Sparta Cinema House (“Walter suggested How to Succeed [in Business Without Really Trying],” he wrote to Jewison, “as it is scheduled for release about the same time as Heat”), even whether a Sony or a Zenith radio should be used in the background of a scene. As Jewison combed through the screenplay one last time before the actors arrived, Ashby tried to chase down the answer to every one of his questions and anticipate those that he hadn’t yet asked: “DEADIES,” one of his letters began. “I did check with the coroner’s office since we talked and he said 99 out of a hundred times when somebody is done in the eyes are open. Not wide open mind you, but you can most certainly tell they are open.” Ashby went on to explain—and to illustrate—the way the film’s makeup men should simulate the pooling of blood in the corpse.

The inimitable shorthand psychedelic patois of Ashby’s daily memos, which were usually festooned with two or three salutations and pseudonymous sign-offs (he called himself everything from “lonesome luke” to “Capt. Ashby/Ret”), sometimes made him sound like a free-associative LSD adventurer: “The above typographical-marginal errors are a direct result of a malady ( non-zymotic, fortunately) closely akin to bad brains,” he once wrote without elaborating. But nothing escaped Ashby’s attention: He was a persistent dramaturge (“Chapter Seven to Chapter Seven…I’m still concerned…it just seems too pat and convenient”), a conscientious editor who thought ahead (“Scene 5—Sam in car in front of diner—remember to get some kind of signing-off deal at end”), and, when needed, a cautious cheerleader: “Saw some good dailies today and would say a few words, but there are many words necessary…. For the moment, know I left the projection room with a smile. Bye, bye black evil moon. Love, me yah yah.” On the rare occasions Ashby became angry, it was on Jewison’s behalf. “When I look at our dailies, and see the extra quality—I’m talking about those values which can not be evaluated—and then hear what you told me today I feel like I’m going crazy,” he wrote to Jewison after his quarrel with Mirisch. “If there is anyone you want me to kick in the shins or bite, please let me know.”⁹

The extra quality Ashby was talking about in the footage Jewison was shipping from Belleville may have been exactly what alarmed Mirisch, since, from his first day working on In the Heat of the Night, Haskell Wexler was determined to shoot the film in a style that had never been seen in a color Hollywood movie. In 1966, the industry’s long-held principle that black and white connoted serious, gritty reality and color suggested spectacle or frivolity was finally crumbling; black-and-white films were falling victim to the ubiquity of color television and the changing tastes of moviegoers. A handful of movies were still shot in black and white, but only if the budget was extremely low, or a veteran director who was uncomfortable with color was digging in his heels, as Billy Wilder did on The Fortune Cookie,¹⁰ or the use of color would reveal a flaw (for instance, the artificiality of Elizabeth Taylor’s makeup in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).

In the Heat of the Night was Wexler’s first chance to shoot in color. After the indoor confinement of Virginia Woolf, he was hungry to try new techniques and more than ready to eschew the stiff, floodlit, immobile framing to which many of Hollywood’s older cinematographers had clung as they switched from black and white. Wexler admired the jagged, shadowy work that Raoul Coutard had been doing for Jean-Luc Godard, and he wanted his camera to move with the jolt and immediacy of photojournalistic footage. Setups were jerry-rigged on the spot: For a scene in which Scott Wilson’s character runs through the woods pursued by dogs, Wexler, holding the camera himself, knelt on a platform made of two-by-fours. Four crew members carried him and dodged low-hanging branches as they tore past the trees alongside Wilson, sometimes racing backward through thick brush. “I remember being very impressed by him,” says Wilson. “I thought, damn, that fucking guy could get his eye poked out.”¹¹ For a shot in which Wilson was to run across train tracks just ahead of an onrushing locomotive, Jewison and Wexler didn’t have the money to hire a train to arrive on cue, so they would just tell Wilson to start sprinting as soon as he heard the railroad whistle and hope that he wouldn’t run out of camera range.¹² In the climax of the chase scene, in which Wilson tears along a bridge trying to cross the Mississippi River to Arkansas, Wexler used a zoom, giving the shot a semidocumentary feel. The effect was that of a gunsight training on its target, with a rough, grainy quality that evoked the Zapruder film, a technique that would be appropriated by action-movie directors and cinematographers throughout the 1970s.

Wexler’s technique was no less innovative in the movie’s dialogue sequences. In the Heat of the Night’s palette—inky black nighttime scenes with patches of dull greenish or reddish illumination—was a violation of the shadowless, picturesque aesthetic that had ruled Hollywood color movies for decades. The visual motif Wexler created was harsh, murky, resolutely unscenic—a portrait of darkness with a few isolated spots of light that was very much in tune with Jewison and Silliphant’s decision to keep the film’s murder mystery elliptical and the town’s atmosphere heavy with intangible menace. Wexler and Jewison have both said that his low-light technique was at least in part a cost-saving measure, and their do-it-yourself approach is evident even in the film’s opening shot, in which the lights of a train reaching Sparta first appear as an abstract array of colors penetrating an overwhelming blackness. The striking effect was achieved by the cheapest means imaginable: Wexler held a piece of screen door in front of the lens, focused on it, and then slowly adjusted his focus to the locomotive.¹³

But Wexler’s choices for In the Heat of the Night were never simply expedient: The bland light of a diner, the lonely glow of an empty train platform, and the institutional bleariness of a police station were all given sharp, specific looks—and so, for once, was Sidney Poitier. Unlike almost all of his colleagues at the time, Wexler knew that white and black actors shouldn’t be lit the same way. The low light he used throughout In the Heat of the Night was designed in part to make his star’s facial features completely clear; Poitier had often been the victim of thoughtless over-lighting designed for white actors that added glare to his face and rendered his expressions indistinct, but here, Wexler and Jewison made sure that every unspoken thought that played across his lips and eyes would read on camera and be visible to moviegoers.

In the Heat of the Night was Poitier’s twenty-sixth movie, and the material had been developed expressly for him, but he was still taken aback by what he encountered when he arrived in Illinois. By his own admission, Poitier hadn’t had a part that really challenged him for years, and although he and Rod Steiger had been casually friendly for some time, he was unprepared for the Method-driven intensity that Steiger was bringing to the role of Gillespie. Steiger’s physical transformation alone was startling; he had soared past 230 pounds and was packing on more every night, as Jewison enthusiastically pushed him to eat two dinners and a piece of banana cream pie at Sparta’s only diner. Jewison also urged Steiger to chew a wad of gum in every scene, and although the actor initially resisted, he came to love it.¹⁴ “Norman Jewison said, ‘Try it for one day, do it for me, will you?’” he said. “And what I found was, by the rhythm of my chewing…slow, fast, or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling…. When things get exciting, he chews faster. When he really gets shocked, everything stops, including the chewing.”¹⁵ With his big gut hanging over a sheriff’s belt, his yellow-tinted glasses, and his black chukka boots, Steiger looked the part and was living it as well, eating, walking, thinking, and talking like Gillespie around the clock. He had worked out a ripe, flavorful southern accent that he used both on and off camera. When script supervisor Meta Rebner, a Mississippian who, as the former mistress of William Faulkner, came by her knowledge of dialect honestly, would tell him, “Mistah Steigah, in the South, we pronounce ouah t’s. You may say whatevah you like, but we pronounce ouah t’s!” he’d growl, “Nobody’s gonna tell me how I talk!”¹⁶

One day, Steiger showed up on the set an hour before his makeup call, already wearing Gillespie’s costume, which he took back to the hotel with him every night. “I said, ‘What are you doing here so early?’” recalls assistant director Terry Morse. “He said, ‘I don’t know…. I just didn’t like the idea that I didn’t need to be here.’”¹⁷ “Much of my acting depends on sheer terror of failure,” he said later. “I’d be so ashamed to be bad, I couldn’t stand it.”¹⁸ It took Poitier only a couple of days to realize that his costar was poised to walk away with the movie.

At first, Poitier was tense and slightly guarded, all the more since his habitual restraint couldn’t have been more at odds with Steiger’s well-known tendency to come out of the gate wild on the first take. “He was a little nervous with Rod, because he felt he was over-the-top,” says Jewison. “When Rod got angry, it’s like you released Al Pacino or a Doberman pinscher. I remember near the beginning of shooting, Rod drives up to a diner and gets out and slams the door. And he slammed the door so hard the car shook. After the take, I said, ‘Cut, okay, I’d like to do one more from a slightly different angle.’ And Sidney came to me and said, ‘Are you gonna let him do that?!’ I said, ‘Sidney, don’t worry about Rod. I will always do more than one take, and the performance will be controlled in editing. You just concentrate on what you’re doing, because I don’t want you to get lost here.’ Sidney was challenged by Rod and was shocked by the fact that Rod was not afraid to play a bigot.”¹⁹

Instead of reacting with hostility, Poitier decided to push himself harder. He watched the technique of his costar with growing admiration. In fifteen years, he had never worked with an actor like Steiger. “His approach to his work fascinated me,” Poitier wrote. “Working or not, he would remain completely immersed in the character of that Southern sheriff. I was astonished at the intensity of his involvement…. Throughout the making of the film I sensed that I was on the threshold of discovering what acting really is.”²⁰

Poitier’s own breakthrough working on In the Heat of the Night came during the night-long filming of the scene in which Gillespie shares a drink with Tibbs and the two men warily recognize each other as intelligent and lonely kindred spirits—a scene that ends when Gillespie, embarrassed by his own vulnerability, abruptly remembers himself and angrily shuts out Tibbs’s gesture of sympathy. In an early draft, Stirling Silliphant had made the abrupt transition too explicit, having Gillespie snarl, “Don’t treat me like I was the nigger!” His rewrite was more subtle, but both actors still felt there was more to explore in the exchange. A thunderstorm had blown into Sparta, and the drumming of the water on the tin roof of the set delayed the shoot for hours. While Jewison, Steiger, and Poitier sat in a parked car trying to stay warm and waiting for the skies to clear, they talked about possible improvisations, with Meta Rebner in the backseat taking notes on the dialogue. Although they eventually filmed the sequence largely as Silliphant had written it, Poitier and Steiger found they shared an exploratory spirit, and as they allowed themselves to think and speak as they imagined Gillespie and Tibbs would, they came to like and trust each other. Steiger tried out his theory that the characters had in common “respect for their manhood and professionalism, their refusal to lie, their refusal to be insulted. So they were brothers that way.”²¹ Poitier, meanwhile, came down hard on himself for “pretending, indicating, giving the appearance of experiencing certain emotions, but never, ever, really getting down to where real life and fine art mirror each other.”²² By the end of that night’s shoot, a bottle of whiskey had been emptied and a deeper friendship had been cemented.²³ “There had been something missing in the film until then,” says Jewison, “and working on that scene provided it.”²⁴

By the time Lee Grant arrived in Illinois, Poitier was, for the first time in years, energized by the work he was doing. Grant’s ex-husband, Arnold Manoff, a screenwriter whose blacklisting had derailed her career as well as his own, had died a year earlier, and the actress threw herself into her two scenes as a grieving widow with pent-up pain and Method specificity, even asking that a strand of hair be placed in a brush she was holding that was supposed to have belonged to the murder victim. “I was the perfect candidate to play that woman at that moment,” she says. “I came to that set with real baggage, and while it was not a subject I needed to go anywhere near as a person, as an actress it was a gift. And Sidney was totally clued in—we improvised, we connected as if there were a magnetic field between us. Working with him was like ballroom dancing.”²⁵

As Poitier started finding his own way into his character during the autumn he spent in Sparta, it became all too easy for him to put himself inside the anger, isolation, intelligence, and impatience of Virgil Tibbs. When Silliphant pared down the screenplay, a subplot he had originally planned about Tibbs’s growing friendship with a local black mechanic and his family had all but disappeared, so Poitier was virtually the only black man on set. He was, as ever, pleasant and collegial to his co-workers; one weekend, he took the entire cast on a road trip to St. Louis, where Harry Belafonte was performing a concert with Nana Mouskouri. But on many evenings, Poitier kept to himself as much as possible, sitting alone during meals, watching the white men around him from a distance. During one dinner break, recalls William Schallert, “I was sitting at the table with the actors playing the town council members, and one of the guys was talking about what his character would say, and he used the word nigger. Sidney Poitier overheard and came up to us, and he was very offended by it. Poitier wasn’t thin-skinned, but he was keeping himself on edge. It was a misunderstanding and was cleared up easily, but it was indicative of a kind of heightened sensitivity.”²⁶

Poitier had pushed Jewison to cut as many uses of the word as he could, but he knew that it had to stay in the movie, and, helped by his costar, managed to draw on his own disgust and rage for his performance. “He and Rod Steiger developed a really good rapport,” says Terry Morse. “We were on this little jail set for a scene between the two of them. We would do a master shot, and then Rod’s close-up, and then Sidney’s—and for Sidney’s close-up, Rod would feed him his lines off camera with exactly the same intensity, just as loud and as fiercely as he had in his own close-up, and he would say, ‘Nigger!’ just to get his eyes popping out. And it worked. After they were done, they grabbed each other and just laughed.”²⁷

Poitier also came to trust Jewison, and when the director asked him if he would be willing to travel to Dyersburg, Tennessee, for a week to shoot the scenes in which Gillespie and Tibbs drive past a cotton field and then confront the racist industrialist who practically owns the town, he agreed. Poitier had told Jewison about his brush with white racists in Mississippi—in fact, Jewison added a scene in which white drivers rear-end Tibbs’s car and nearly run him off the road after he heard about Klansmen following Poitier and Belafonte—and the director promised him that the shoot would be done quickly, with no publicity, and with heavy security. “I promise you’ll be protected,” he said, “and I promise you we’ll all stay together.”²⁸

Jewison booked the four actors he needed and the skeleton crew he planned to use into the Dyersburg Holiday Inn. Even in November 1966, “there was no other place we could find that accepted black people,” he recalls. “The Holiday Inn only did because it was a national chain that had an integrated policy by then.” The threat they all felt once they arrived in Tennessee was not imaginary. “Man, that was an experience for all of us,” says Jewison. “Nobody down there knew what we were doing, but the moment they found out the movie was about a black detective and they saw Sidney Poitier in an expensive suit…it upset people. There were pickup trucks circling the hotel at night, people getting drunk, driving into the courtyard, that kind of thing.”²⁹

“Sidney was getting very uptight, and it was beginning to affect his concentration,” said Steiger, who stayed in a room that was connected to Poitier’s. “We’d go into a restaurant and they wouldn’t say anything, but they’d put down the plate so loudly and rudely they wouldn’t have to.”³⁰ One night, a drunk in a pickup truck screeched into the hotel parking lot and started banging on doors, shouting that he was trying to find his wife. Poitier told Jewison he was sleeping with a gun under his pillow. “The first one who comes through my door,” he warned the director, “I’m gonna blow him away.” Jewison, having discovered that the local police were unwilling to provide any security, got a couple of Teamsters to scare the young man off and quickly made plans to scale back the shoot and get his cast and crew out of Dyersburg as quickly as possible.³¹

In the sequence shot in Tennessee, Haskell Wexler used long, slow pans to fill the frame with an archetypal southern landscape, as Gillespie and Tibbs drive down an empty stretch of road past a field where black workers in rags are picking cotton. “None of that for you, huh, Virgil?” Gillespie mutters, looking at them. Poitier looks at him with a calibrated expression of disbelief and resignation. Jewison didn’t want the driving scene to use rear-projection photography; he needed to capture Poitier actually looking at the field workers. He shot quickly and unobtrusively. “We were not welcome,” says Terry Morse. “Usually, whenever you go on location, the people from the town show up to see who’s there. But we didn’t even have to keep crowds away during the cotton scene. They just didn’t want to see us. And we didn’t want to be there. As we approached the mansion, we saw some cattle next door that we decided we wanted in the shot, and the owner of the cattle said, ‘Just tell me when you want to shoot, and I’ll move them so that they can be on camera.’ So we were getting ready to do the shot, and I told him. And he turned around and yelled, ‘Hey, nigger! Move those cattle over!’”³²

The next scene Jewison filmed is In the Heat of the Night’s dramatic centerpiece. An elderly black butler named Henry ushers the two men into a greenhouse belonging to Mr. Endicott (played by Larry Gates, a New York television actor), a wealthy white bigot whom Tibbs believes knows something about the murder. What begins as a polite exchange of remarks about orchids turns ugly when Endicott compares the flowers to black people, who he says also require special “care and feeding.” When Tibbs coolly asks him a question that makes it clear he considers him a suspect, Endicott walks up to him and gives him a backhand slap across the face. Tibbs returns the slap instantly, and hard.

Endicott staggers backward, then turns to Gillespie. “You saw it?” he says.

“I saw it,” Gillespie replies.

“What are you gonna do about it?” says Endicott.

Gillespie’s answer: “I don’t know.”

“We only did the slap twice,” says Jewison. “I remember telling Sidney, ‘You can let him have it as long as you don’t whack him right across the ear.’ And Larry Gates was wonderful. He said to Sidney, ‘Don’t worry about it—you hit me!’ And they hit each other pretty good!”³³ But as the scene progressed, it was, surprisingly, Steiger who ran into trouble. He tried saying “I don’t know” a dozen different ways. The line “drove Rod crazy,” wrote Jewison. “Nothing he did with that short sentence made him happy…. ‘Rod,’ I said, ‘the reason you say ‘I don’t know’ is because you really don’t know what to do…. It’s a situation you’ve never confronted before.’…We tried the scene again, and Rod said the line as if Gillespie…has come to a turning point in his life.”³⁴

The grace note of the scene is delivered, silently, by Endicott’s butler, who stands still, holding a tray of lemonade, and witnesses both slaps. After Tibbs and Gillespie leave, he looks at Endicott and exits with a magnificently ambiguous shake of his head. In an unheralded piece of casting, the butler was played by Jester Hairston, a sixty-five-year-old actor, songwriter, and choral arranger. Hairston’s grandparents had been slaves; he had attended Tufts University, worked with Ethel Waters, helped to conduct the choir for the all-black musical Green Pastures, and spent sixteen years on the radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy. Hairston had suffered through every indignity show business could throw at him. “I was a native running around [in Tarzan pictures] with a ring in my nose,” he told an interviewer later. “I was a witch doctor.” On screen, the way Hairston shakes his head at Endicott connotes grave disapproval without specifying its target. But personally, Hairston knew exactly how he felt. “I looked as if to say to him, ‘You old son of a bitch…’ I was disgusted with him smacking Sidney like that.” It was a slap that Hairston had waited his entire career to see a black man return in kind.³⁵

“We had a couple of pickup shots left to do down there,” says Terry Morse. “But after that day, Norman said to Sidney, ‘Let’s get out of here—we can do some of these shots back in L.A.’ And we got on a plane that night.”³⁶