I had an idea. Why couldn’t The Willmar 8, the documentary, be turned into a movie for television? I took the doc and the concept to Joan Barnett and Karen Danaher-Dorr at NBC. They got behind it and they got behind me as the director. It would be my first solo directing job for a wide audience. I loved the idea of casting actors I knew in the parts of the real women I’d met in Minnesota. I loved the idea of bringing the issue to a huge public. Not lecturing about women’s issues, but showing the reality of women’s place in the banking industry. In those days, 1984, before cable, the three networks supplied everything to the country, so twenty million viewers for an evening’s entertainment was average. (Three years later, when we made Nobody’s Child with Marlo Thomas, we had forty million viewers.)
We were still living in the Green House when I pitched The Willmar 8 as a TV movie. Joan and Karen gave us the money to go ahead with a script. By the time Joyce Eliason, who’d written the script for Tell Me a Riddle, began working on the script, we had moved to New York. The NBC women set up a meeting with their superior, a mild blond guy, very pleasant, who turned the idea down. Sorry, it was not a topic that would interest NBC viewers. I met with him. Again, pleasant; again, no.
I spoke to our NBC supporters. “The only way to get it on is to convince the head of NBC,” Joan said.
“Who’s that?”
“Grant Tinker.”
“How do I reach him?” They gave me his telephone number.
I sat on the bed in New York reaching for the phone, hanging up, walking around the bedroom, breathing deeply. I sat down and dialed. It was Tinker’s private number. He picked up. I don’t know what I said, or implored, but the essence was, “I know I’m not going through channels and I’m imposing, but I believe this is a good script, and an important one. I’ll accept whatever you’ll say, but I just ask you to read it. I think it deserves that.”
He said, “I’ll look into it.” He read the script and gave it a go. Thank you, Grant Tinker.
I didn’t realize it, I’d moved so quickly, but I was moving on setting the pattern for my next career. The one that not only kept me afloat, but unafraid, fascinated, eager, dazzled, and happy.
I asked Fred Murphy, who shot Tell Me a Riddle, to be on camera, and I asked Everett Chambers, an old close friend and an experienced producer, to produce. Everett was a straight-arrow, by-the-book guy. His brother, Dick, had been Joey’s first partner in the commercial business.
The cast was led by Jean Stapleton. My daughter Dinah Manoff played the twenty-year-old teller. Jean was a huge star at the time, playing the ditsy wife in Norman Lear’s All in the Family. In real life, she was deeply aware of women’s issues and wanted to be a part of this story.
We found a perfect town for Willmar in rural Canada—perfect street, perfect real café across from the bank. Perfect cold weather. Except for the snow. It never snowed. We had to import the snow in trucks from the nearest mountain and pack our set with it.
Our first day I shot exteriors: the women walking in front of the bank with their placards, the town kids throwing snowballs trying to provoke them. I’d worked out a dolly shot with Fred Murphy when Everett came running up.
“That’s not the way to shoot it!” he barked. I stood there, openmouthed, while he explained how the shot should be done. “You don’t know how to direct it!”
My crew and I were quiet as he walked away. I wondered if I still had a crew. This was the first day, the first shot, and we didn’t even know one another. My old friend and mentor Everett, whom I expected to protect me, was going to be an adversary for the whole shoot.
Everett didn’t like how I said “Action.” As an actress, I never noticed how my directors said it. It depended on the intimacy of the scene or the space they had to yell “A-a-a-action”—or whisper it. It was second nature.
Everett coached me: “AK-shun!” Sharp, decisive, crisp, military, achtung!-like. I would say it after him five or six times until he said excitedly, “That’s it!” Then I’d go on set and of course do it my way. Same with cut. “Cut!” he’d demonstrate sharply. “Cut, cut!” I regarded him in bafflement. Such strange behavior from a real person. Bewildering.
Toward the end, Everett called NBC and had executives come down and watch me shoot for two days, with a warning from him that I was incompetent. The executive said to me, “You’re doing a good job. We were really worried getting Everett’s reports about you, that you were a loose cannon.” After that, I was a loose cannon for one night. I wanted an extra scene of celebration at the bank. Everett forbade it. All of us, cast and crew, stayed late and filmed it, without his knowledge. It felt great.
Fred Murphy and the crew were brothers to me. They formed a shield, and from that first day on we bonded. After shooting Willmar 8, Everett and I became strangers.
NBC changed the title Willmar 8 to A Matter of Sex, a title that might draw or confuse an audience. The finished film was a disappointment to me. It resembled the doc but had little of its charisma and power. I take responsibility for that. And I don’t know if it had any great effect. The documentary three years earlier had changed the face of the banking industry. This was Willmar 8 lite.
From then on we sold scripts based on our documentaries to the networks and made an impact with some remarkable content, to huge audiences. It would be the pattern and the key to my directing movies for television for the next two projects.