Between August 1964 and March 1965, four new movies sold so many tickets and made so much money that, collectively, they pointed toward a dramatic shift in the tastes of American moviegoers and suggested an entirely new way for the studios to do business. Hollywood did not react well. Historically, the only event more disruptive to the industry’s ecosystem than an unexpected flop is an unexpected smash, and, caught off guard by the sudden arrival of more revenue than they thought their movies could ever bring in, the major studios resorted to three old habits: imitation, frenzied speculation, and panic.
Three of the pictures were musicals—Disney’s Mary Poppins, Warner’s My Fair Lady, and Fox’s The Sound of Music. By the end of their runs, each film was the highest grosser in the history of its company, and in 1966, The Sound of Music passed Gone With the Wind to become the biggest moneymaker ever.1 Musicals had been reliably popular throughout the sound era, but the repeat business for this trio of films, the extraordinary duration of their theatrical runs, and the sheer amount of cash they yielded changed the industry’s understanding of what the ceiling on a movie’s potential grosses could be. The numbers seemed to point to an evolution of popular taste in road-show movies away from biblical epics and historical pageantry and toward lighter, song-packed family entertainment. This was an ominous turn of events for George Stevens, who had spent the last several years of his career pulling together The Greatest Story Ever Told, and for John Huston, who had been working without end on The Bible, a film that seemed like a shrewd business idea when it was conceived in early 19632 and looked more like the last relic of a rusted-out genre by the time it opened in 1966. But it was generally good news for Hollywood, which had always known how to produce musicals and would now simply make them bigger, longer, and more frequently. Though they could be complicated and costly, musicals were a good fit for old-guard studios that were still wedded to a decades-old production model, holding on to their in-house costume construction shops, expanding their lots, and keeping music departments with seventy-five-piece orchestras on call. If the audience needed more musicals, the studios would just build more soundstages, buy the rights to every Broadway show that was still on the market, and, once that well ran dry, invent musical versions of old films from their own libraries.
The fourth movie to change the business represented a conundrum, since it seemed to contradict the message of the other three. United Artists’ Goldfinger was the third James Bond movie to open in the United States in a year and a half. The first 007 vehicle, Dr. No, first arrived on American shores in the summer of 1963; it was shot cheaply, for $1.4 million,3 and initially made a profit for the studio and for producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli that was too small to merit much attention. But even in 1961, when UA made its first deal with Saltzman and Broccoli,4 executives Arthur Krim, Robert Benjamin, and David Picker had envisioned the Bond movies as a series that would build a growing audience with every installment. At a time when other studios simply hadn’t considered that immense amounts of money could be made from movies with recurring characters (what would later be called “franchises”), UA’s bet paid off staggeringly well. Working quickly, they brought out From Russia with Love, which cost $2.2 million and returned almost $10 million to the studio,5 in early 1964. Goldfinger, which opened in December, cost $3.5 million to make—about average for a studio picture—and brought UA $23 million,6 a then staggering sum that put the movie alongside the three musicals among the ten top grossers in history. And the money came fast: Goldfinger earned back its cost after just two weeks on sixty-four screens, a feat so widely publicized that it landed in The Guinness Book of World Records.7
With the next Bond installment, Thunderball, already promised for December 1965, the studios could no longer ignore the fact that United Artists, the company that didn’t play by their rules, was beating them at their own game. The Bond films exemplified UA’s strategy of bringing in strong independent producers, letting them make their movies their way, and splitting the profits when the money rolled in, and their immense success was a major factor in the erosion of the studio system by the end of the 1960s. But in early 1965, UA’s competitors couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that the UA model would supplant a way of working that had been in place since the 1930s. Even Universal, then the most minor of the majors, was still signing a roster of young actors as contract players in the mid-1960s as if nothing had changed in decades.8 The studios knew there was a lesson to be drawn from the success of the James Bond movies, but they chose the wrong one: In the next three years, they would release more than three dozen Bond rip-offs, spoofs, and second-rate copies.
If UA’s success with the Bond series was an irritant to its rivals, the box office performance of Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music proved to be a stimulant that led to the equivalent of gold rush fever. A year earlier, when Arthur Jacobs had started to chase the rights to Doctor Dolittle, he was a producer in search of a property that could serve as his calling card to studios. Now, suddenly, he owned the cornerstone on which 20th Century-Fox was building its hopes for 1966, and his leading man, Rex Harrison, was no longer Cleopatra’s aging Caesar, but My Fair Lady’s “sexy Rexy,” the star of a box office smash that was on its way to winning eight Academy Awards.
All of which would have elated Jacobs except for one thing: Nine months after he had made his Doctor Dolittle deal with 20th Century-Fox’s Dick Zanuck, the movie’s screenwriter, Alan Jay Lerner, was not a day closer to turning in a first draft. Jacobs had known from the start that Lerner wouldn’t be easy or exceptionally fast: He had been struggling for four years with the book and lyrics for a new Broadway musical, I Picked a Daisy, first attempting to collaborate with Richard Rodgers, who grew tired of his delays and distractibility and quit, and then with Burton Lane.9 Lerner had made it clear to Jacobs that he would not begin work on Doctor Dolittle until he finished his own show.10 But I Picked a Daisy still seemed to be in limbo, and Jacobs was driven mad by Lerner’s tendency to drop out of communication with him for weeks or months at a stretch with no explanation.
Lerner’s deadline to deliver a treatment of the Doctor Dolittle script to Jacobs was October 1, 1964,11 a date that drifted by without a word from him. Aware of the pressure Lerner was facing from both his Broadway show and his impending divorce proceeding, Jacobs agreed to give him an extension until January 15.12 A month before the new due date, Jacobs cabled Lerner and told him that it was “imperative” they meet to discuss the script before Lerner handed in his work.13 Fox wanted a clear timetable, and Jacobs did, too: Their new plan was for Lerner to finish a thirty-page treatment in January, report to Los Angeles to begin work on the screenplay and lyrics in April, and turn in a full first draft by September 1, 1965.14
Just before the January deadline, Lerner finally responded—by asking for still more time to write the treatment. Jacobs was out of patience. He told Lerner he had ten more days, until January 25, at which point Jacobs himself would go to New York to pick up Lerner’s completed work.15 Lerner agreed. Ten days later, Jacobs boarded a plane, flew across the country, and took a car directly from the airport to Lerner’s apartment. When he got there, he was told that Lerner had gone to Rome.16
Jacobs, now livid, sent Lerner a cable: “Extremely distressed by your failure to meet with me. … As you know I made special trip to New York for the express purpose of meeting you and receiving Dolittle treatment. … The entire arrangement including payment of your $100,000 is in complete jeopardy.”17
That got Lerner’s attention, and Lerner had Louis Nizer, his divorce lawyer, plead his case directly to Dick Zanuck, who was now concerned enough to demand a face-to-face meeting with the writer himself. Lerner was under intense pressure to finish I Picked a Daisy, Nizer told Zanuck, and there was also “the domestic relations matter,”18 which was due to go before a judge in March. Around this time, Lerner’s representatives made a counterproposal to Fox: Might he simply dispense with writing a treatment altogether if he agreed to hand in a screenplay by the end of April? After Lerner met with Zanuck in late February, the studio was temporarily mollified. “I was delighted with our meeting,” Zanuck wrote in a cable on March 4, adding, “As I pointed out to you it is imperative that we have your first draft screenplay May 1st and I was greatly relieved when you guaranteed this Stop I am convinced more than ever that we are going to have a great picture.”19
Fox’s hope that Doctor Dolittle would, as the studio’s publicity materials had promised, represent 1966’s Christmas gift to the world had all but evaporated. But the studio still wanted to hold on to the film’s creative team, and the bigger a box office hit My Fair Lady became, the stronger a hand Lerner had to play; soon after his meeting with Zanuck, he had his agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar, finalize his $350,000 fee.20 But by then, Lerner’s missed deadlines were putting the whole project in jeopardy. Vincente Minnelli, Jacobs’s original choice to direct the film, had long since departed, and Rex Harrison’s participation was now up in the air. On April 5, 1965, Harrison won the Best Actor Oscar for My Fair Lady and found himself, for the first time in his long career, in demand as a movie star. Since the late-1965 start-of-production date that had originally been planned for Doctor Dolittle was now an impossibility, Harrison could have gotten out of his commitment to make the film, and he considered walking away. Jacobs prevailed upon Lerner, who had caused the problem, to fix it, asking him to meet with Harrison in New York and get him to agree to a schedule in which Dolittle would begin production in May or June 1966.21 In a moment of post-Oscar exuberance that he came to regret, Harrison had just decided to reunite with his Cleopatra director, Joseph Mankiewicz, on a comic update of Volpone that would start shooting in the fall of 1965,22 so he was amenable to a later start for Dolittle and agreed to stay on board for the moment.
As Lerner’s May 1 screenplay deadline approached, a familiar and unsettling silence set in once again, and in late April, Jacobs got in touch with Lerner’s team and heard, one more time, that “because of Lerner’s preoccupation with the writing of material for his play” (now retitled On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), not only would he miss his deadline, but he “would not be in a position to do any work on the Doctor Dolittle treatment before the first of October.”23 Jacobs, perhaps for the first time, realized that he had wasted more than a year waiting for a script on which not a word of work had been done. On May 7, he fired Lerner and demanded the return of the $100,000 he had paid him to start writing the movie.24
In the 1960s, the producers of the Academy Awards began what eventually became a tradition of inviting the previous year’s Best Actor and Actress recipients back to the show as presenters the following April. So in the spring of 1965, one year after taking home his Oscar for Lilies of the Field, Sidney Poitier found himself at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium again, this time handing a statuette to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins, and watching the prize he had won last year go to Harrison.
If some in the film industry had indulged themselves in the belief that Poitier’s Academy Award would create new opportunities for black actors in Hollywood, or even for him, Poitier had not let himself be tempted by false optimism. For all of Bob Hope’s tinny jokes that evening about how the Oscars looked more and more like the United Nations, Poitier’s career in the year since the success of Lilies of the Field had not changed markedly. For six months after the award, he didn’t work in movies at all but spent much of the spring and summer of 1964 taking his most significant steps yet toward civil rights activism. In New York, he appeared at an NAACP benefit to honor the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision ordering the desegregation of schools. He went to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the landmark Civil Rights Act, which passed in July.25 (Title VII of the bill, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment, finally provided the legal clout the NAACP needed in its ongoing struggle to integrate movie industry unions.)26 And, urged on by Harry Belafonte, who was far more politically engaged than Poitier and was forever pushing his friend to join the movement more wholeheartedly, Poitier traveled with him to Greenville, Mississippi, just days after the murder of three civil rights workers, to meet with Stokely Carmichael and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at a small dance hall. The two performers were followed the entire time they were there by members of the Ku Klux Klan. “Don’t worry,” Carmichael assured them, “if they’ve got cannons, we’ve got cannons.” They stayed only a few hair-raising hours, under heavy security, before returning to New York.27
Poitier, still deeply conflicted about the end of his marriage, his tumultuous relationship with Diahann Carroll, and the fact that, as he later wrote, “it was still just Sidney Poitier out there,” was impassioned about the process of psychoanalysis at the time and spent four or five sessions a week on the couch, talking to his therapist.28 He was less excited about returning to work. Professionally, he now resided in a netherworld that placed him somewhere between movie star and role model. America seemed most comfortable with him as an embodiment of nebulously defined dignity and incremental social progress, and the movie industry was happy to deploy him as a sort of international goodwill ambassador, sending him off to the Berlin Film Festival as a cold war exemplar of America’s open society. But where were the great roles? At one point in the wake of his Oscar, Poitier complained that two-thirds of the parts he had played in movies were “triggered by the Negroness of my own life. I’d hate for my gift—or whatever—to be circumscribed by color. I’d like to explore King Lear, for instance.”29 But he also must have wanted a privilege of stardom that was routinely accorded his white contemporaries—roles created especially for him, which at the time almost certainly meant race-specific parts.
In late 1964, Poitier went back to work. He costarred with Richard Widmark—a friend with whom he had worked twice before—in The Bedford Incident, a drama set aboard a navy destroyer in which he played a visiting journalist and Widmark the tyrannical captain with whom he comes into conflict. The film, shot in black and white, was not particularly distinguished—Poitier himself called it “a bad movie”30—but it represented a $400,000 payday for Poitier (though half of it was to be deferred for more than a decade)31 and a relatively rare chance to star in a movie in which race was not a central theme. Bedford was due to open at the end of 1965, along with a movie that Poitier had started shooting in March, just before that year’s Oscar ceremony. The new film, MGM’s A Patch of Blue, was, like Lilies of the Field, a racial homily, in which a young blind white woman (Elizabeth Hartman) falls in love with a black man. Poitier thought both movies were “fables” with “very little relation to objective reality,” and he had little interest in his saintly, restrained character, who again kept his serenity and temper in the face of racist abuse and was not allowed to manifest more than a hint of sexual appetite or energy. By the time Poitier finished the movie, he said, “I was at my wits’ end.”32
No matter what kind of role he took, Poitier ended up feeling neutered. A race-blind part in a mediocre film like The Bedford Incident was more a step sideways than forward—in a country roiling with racial unrest, why make a film that averted its eyes from the problem? On the other hand, every time he played a character like A Patch of Blue’s Gordon Ralfe, whose race was integral to the plot, he seemed to end up becoming complicit in a fantasy designed to explain to white America that racism was wrong because it meant mistreating someone as free of human flaws and foibles as Sidney Poitier.
The actor’s frustration was reaching a peak at about the time that his agent, Martin Baum, got his first look at the manuscript for a new mystery novel by John Ball called In the Heat of the Night. Ball’s book had been shopped to several studios; the playwright and activist Larry Kramer, then a twenty-nine-year-old reader in Columbia Pictures’ New York story department whose job was to scout outside material for the studio, recommended that Mike Frankovich (who had made The Bedford Incident) purchase the rights as a possible vehicle for Poitier, but Franko vich wasn’t interested.33 Ball’s novel found a taker when Baum brought it to the Mirisch Company, which for the last several years had been the main independent supplier of movies to United Artists. The Mirisch brothers— “Harold was the older brother, who kind of made the final decisions, Walter was the production guy, and Marvin was the accountant,” recalls director Norman Jewison— didn’t develop their own material. “They were middlemen,” says Jewison, “kind of wholesalers,”34 whose strategy was to pursue material that already had a strong director or star attached to it and then take the projects to UA to work out a deal. The Mirisches didn’t spend more money than they had to—budgets for the first forty films they made for the studio generally stayed between $1.5 million and $3.5 million. They were efficient, and they were remarkably productive; in the most recent renegotiation of their deal with UA, in September 1964, they had promised the studio forty-eight films in ten years.35
When In the Heat of the Night arrived, the Mirisch Company was in the market for new material. And Ball’s novel, which was published in March 1965 and received warm reviews, was new, although not as new as many in the movie business may have imagined. Poitier’s decision to play Virgil Tibbs, who in the book is a polite, chatty Pasadena police officer who passes through a town in the Carolinas on the evening of a murder and stays to help solve the crime,36 was noted as a Hollywood milestone: No black actor had ever starred in a detective movie before. But Tibbs was hardly a groundbreaker in mystery fiction, a genre in which black detectives and cops had already constituted a small but strong subcategory for years. In 1957, Rebecca’s Pride by Donald McNutt Douglass, a novel narrated by a black police captain in the Virgin Islands, had won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best first novel. The following year, Ed Lacy’s Room to Swing, a first-person novel about a black private eye in New York, won the Edgar as the year’s best mystery. And by the time In the Heat of the Night reached bookstores, the black writer Chester Himes had already published a half dozen of his lively, bawdy, richly textured Harlem novels featuring a black police team, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, books that would come to be viewed as classics of the genre.
Himes’s novels came from a specifically urban, black perspective (it’s no surprise that they were more attractive to Hollywood in the 1970s than in the 1960s). And although Ed Lacy was white (Lacy was the pseudonym for a political activist named Leonard Zinberg who was married to a black woman), Room to Swing, with its casual references to Marcus Garvey and black nationalism, its depiction of the intraracial class distinctions between light-skinned and darker-skinned African Americans, and its casual mockery of both patronizing white liberals and outright racists, was a good decade ahead of Hollywood in its thinking and far more sophisticated than anything In the Heat of the Night had to offer.37 But what made those novels strong on the page—the specificity and “blackness” of their worldview— is exactly what kept filmmakers away. In the Heat of the Night’s take on race was easier for the studios to grasp. Virgil Tibbs is a foreigner in an unfriendly land, and Ball, who was white, wrote in a tone that was not omniscient so much as it was neutral; the novel simply observes Tibbs and the white cop and police chief with whom he is forced to work without attempting very much in the way of viewing things from Tibbs’s vantage point or understanding his state of mind. As in The Graduate, the novel’s relatively spare prose style allowed readers to fill in its blanks however they chose; and Ball’s storytelling presented an opportunity to place Sidney Poitier in a position that seemed to please moviegoers—not as the master of his own fate, but as a low-key, unexpected, mostly affable presence in a predominantly white world.
Poitier liked the idea of playing Tibbs, but Mirisch, who was both a good liberal and a pragmatic businessman, knew the film might face resistance both from United Artists and from audiences, who were used to crime movies in which, as an article announcing Poitier’s casting phrased it, “Negro actors [stay] on the sidelines … dogging the heels of the detectives as helpful servants or comedy relief.”38 Mirisch’s solution was to sell UA on the film as a potentially profitable enterprise, not a worthy cause. “I made the argument [to UA] that, even if there was a great deal of exhibitor opposition to the picture below the Mason-Dixon line, it certainly would find a ready audience in the great northern cities,” says Mirisch. “And I argued that the cost of the picture was not so great that it couldn’t recoup, even if it were never to play in the South at all. But we had to make the picture for a reasonable price.”39 Coming off of the success of Goldfinger, United Artists also knew that the character of Tibbs—even though he had appeared in only one novel—might represent another potentially lucrative film series for the studio, and the Mirisch Company had included, in its deal with Poitier, an option for two sequels. When Mirisch agreed to keep the budget low—around $2 million—and convinced Poitier to take $200,000,40 half of what he had received for The Bedford Incident, to play Tibbs, the studio gave the project its approval. In June 1965, soon after he finished A Patch of Blue, Poitier signed for the starring role.41
1. Variety, January 4, 1967.
2. Grobel, Lawrence. The Hustons: The Life & Times of a Hollywood Dynasty, updated ed. (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 532–533.
3. Picker, David. “How UA Bonded with Bond.” Variety, May 3, 2005.
4. “Inside Dr. No.” Written and directed by John Cork, produced by David Naylor and Bruce Scivally. DVD documentary on special edition of Dr. No (copyright 2000, MGM Home Entertainment Inc.).
5. Rubin, Steven Jay. The Complete James Bond Encyclopedia, 2nd ref. ed. (Contemporary Books, 2003).
6. Ibid.
7. “The Goldfinger Phenomenon,” Directed by John Cork, produced and written by Mark Cerulli and Lee Pfeiffer. DVD documentary on the special edition of Goldfinger (copyright 1995, MGM/ UA Home Entertainment Inc.).
8. “New York Sound Track,” Variety, January 11, 1967.
9. Jablonski, Alan Jay Lerner: A Biography, op. cit.
10. “Lerner to Write a Movie Musical.” New York Times, January 6, 1964.
11. Memo from Jack Schwartzman to Arthur Jacobs, February 25, 1965, Jacobs Collection.
12. Ibid.
13. Cable from Arthur Jacobs to Alan Jay Lerner, December 15, 1964, Jacobs Collection.
14. Memo from Schwartzman to Jacobs, February 25, 1965, op. cit.
15. Cable from Arthur Jacobs to Irving Cohen, January 15, 1965, Jacobs Collection.
16. Dunne, The Studio, op. cit., pp. 32–33.
17. Telegram from Arthur Jacobs to Alan Jay Lerner, January 25, 1965, Jacobs Collection.
18. Memo from Schwartzman to Jacobs, February 25, 1965, op. cit.
19. Cable from Richard Zanuck to Alan Jay Lerner, March 4, 1965, Jacobs Collection.
20. Cable from Owen McLean to Irving Paul Lazar, March 11, 1965, Jacobs Collection.
21. Cable from Arthur Jacobs to Alan Jay Lerner, April 8, 1965, Jacobs Collection.
22. Harrison, Rex, op. cit., pp. 208–209.
23. Letter to Arthur Jacobs from Frank R. Ferguson, resident counsel, 20th Century-Fox, Jacobs Collection.
24. Telegrams from Arthur Jacobs to Alan Jay Lerner, May 3 1967, and May 7, 1967. Jacobs Collection.
25. Goudsouzian, op. cit., p. 221.
26. “N.A.A.C.P. Weighs Movie Job Suits.” New York Times, July 9, 1965.
27. Poitier, This Life, op. cit, pp. 279–283.
28. Ibid, pp. 268–269.
29. Thompson, Howard. “Why Is Sidney Poitier the Only One?” New York Times, June 13, 1965.
30. Barthel, Joan. “He Doesn’t Want to Be Sexless Sidney.” New York Times, August 6, 1967.
31. Goudsouzian, op. cit., p. 235.
32. Barthel, “He Doesn’t Want to Be Sexless Sidney.” op. cit.
33. Author interview with Kramer.
34. AI with Jewison.
35. Balio, op. cit., p. 180.
36. Ball, John. In the Heat of the Night (originally published by Harper & Row, 1965; reprint by Carroll & Graf, 2001).
37. Lacy, Ed (aka Len Zinberg). Room to Swing (originally published 1957; reprint by Blackmask.com, 2005).
38. “Poitier to Play Film Detective.” New York Times, June 19, 1965.
39. AI with Walter Mirisch.
40. Canby, Vincent. “Poitier, as Matinee Idol, Is Handsomely Rewarded.” New York Times, November 18, 1967.
41. “Poitier to Play Film Detective,” op. cit.