Steiger wasn’t Norman Jewison’s first choice to play In the Heat of the Night’s Bill Gillespie. Jewison wanted George C. Scott, an actor against whom Steiger often found himself competing for roles. But Scott was already committed to playing a rascally southerner in a con-artist comedy called The Flim-Flam Man that Larry Turman was producing while he waited for The Graduate to come together, so Steiger got Walter Mirisch’s next offer1 and signed on to the film for $100,000, half of what Sidney Poitier was receiving.2 By the time he did, Gillespie had been transformed from the tall, lean lawman of John Ball’s novel into a physical incarnation of the southern sheriff—older, bigger bellied, more confrontational—that ten years of television news stories about civil rights unrest had made familiar to everyone in America.
Gillespie’s makeover wasn’t the only change that Jewison brought to the screenplay once he started working with Stirling Silliphant. By the time Silliphant turned in his final draft, the plot, the characters, and the racial conflict that pulsed beneath every scene had all been both stripped down and sharpened. The story’s setting had been moved from South Carolina to Mississippi, and Tibbs was no longer from Arizona, but from Philadelphia, making the two police officers explicit stand-ins for the attitudes and politics of North and South. Virgil’s line “They call me Mister Tibbs,” a punch line in the novel that Silliphant had dropped in the first draft, was reinstated, but with anger this time3—it was now the verbal roundhouse wallop that Silliphant knew would mark the moment “the film explodes into life.”4
In Silliphant’s earlier draft, Tibbs faced an ingrained, pervasive culture of southern racism again and again. Jewison encouraged the writer to refocus his attention on the way in which prejudice can play out between two people rather than between one man and an entire town (a plot gimmick that Silliphant had already deployed in too many episodes of Route 66). He pushed Silliphant to cut scenes in which Tibbs was the target of official bigotry, including one in which he was made to wait outside of a whites-only hotel, and to trim any sequence that might distract moviegoers from the push and pull between the two main characters. That relationship reaches its climax in a scripted scene in which Tibbs visits Gillespie’s run-down home for a drink and the sheriff begins to open up to him. “Thirty-seven years old,” he says, “no wife, no kids … scratching for a living in a town doesn’t want me. Fan I have to oil for myself … desk with a busted leg … this place. Know something, Virgil? You’re the first person who’s been around to call. Nobody else has been here … nobody comes.”5 (Although Jewison, Poitier, and Steiger all later claimed that the dialogue in the house was largely improvised on the spot—and, in fact, it was fleshed out considerably during the production—Silliphant always insisted that he had written the scene, and dated drafts of the script bear out his account.)
“There’s no doubt what the film is about,” says Jewison. “We knew people would be aware of it from the very beginning, from the way Tibbs is treated when he’s arrested.”6 But the director worried that long speeches and explicit message moviemaking would be ruinous to In the Heat of the Night, as would the depiction of Gillespie as an overdrawn Deep South racist. In the final draft, Silliphant dramatically reduced the number of times the word nigger was used, particularly by Gillespie. Lines like “Now what’s a northern nigger doing in South Carolina?” became “Now what’s a northern colored boy doing down here?”7 With each alteration, Gillespie evolved from an unreconstructed Bull Connor to a man who was, although prejudiced, one step smarter and less bigoted than the rednecks around him and self-aware enough to be slightly on his guard in Tibbs’s presence; he’s someone who knows that the rules are beginning to change. The final draft of In the Heat of the Night still contained enough uses of “nigger” to trouble Geoffrey Shurlock, who wrote in a Production Code memo to the filmmakers that while the presence of the word was “quite valid … unnecessary repetition could prove objectionable. We urge that you eliminate one or two uses.”8
At the same time, Silliphant and Jewison toughened their depiction of Virgil Tibbs, paring away so much of his dialogue that he became, by the final draft, someone who uses silence, withholding, and watchfulness as a weapon. In some ways, the changes were designed to tailor Tibbs to Poitier’s special talent for controlled anger while allowing him to take a stride forward from Lilies of the Field and A Patch of Blue into a hipper, more contemporary persona. (“Where you going?” Gillespie asks at one point as Virgil walks away from him. “Where Whitey ain’t allowed,” snaps Tibbs.) The accommodationist Negro of Ball’s novel was disappearing, in part because Silliphant and Jewison knew it was already outdated and in part because Poitier, who had a good deal of influence in the shaping of Tibbs’s character during the screenwriting process, was no longer interested in playing the role of an appeaser.
Many of the refinements were structural rather than political. “I never spent a great deal of time talking to Stirling about prejudice or racism,” Jewison says. “We were more concerned with the construction of the mystery.”9 In particular, the two men zeroed in on the main weakness of Ball’s novel—the murder case at its center was not particularly intricate or complex, and its solution hinged on the clumsy last-minute introduction of new information. Silliphant made a few changes in the mystery itself, generally for the better; the murder victim was changed from a music promoter planning a local concert to a northern liberal industrialist who had come south to build a factory in the town. But he and Jewison decided to build suspense simply by omitting as much information about the case as they could without rendering the narrative incomprehensible. “If the crime story were plotted as the alphabet,” Silliphant said, “from A to Z, how much of it could we pull out and play off screen? We kept A and jumped to F, then from F to L …. The result of this withholding … was to compel the viewer to invest attention in the least detail. Maybe there was a clue in the look Gillespie gave Virgil—maybe not. But we’d better watch and see.”10
By July, Poitier felt that Silliphant’s screenplay— twenty-six pages shorter than his first draft11—was “a very forward-looking piece of material”; what had begun as a police procedural had been reimagined as a racially charged dual character study effectively disguised as a whodunit. In the Heat of the Night now had a script Jewison wanted to shoot, and just in time, he had acquired the clout to do it his way. A month before Silliphant delivered his draft, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming opened and, somewhat unexpectedly, became the best-reviewed movie and biggest hit of Jewison’s career. The success of Russians, which had been shot largely on location, gave Jewison the power to go to Mirisch and tell him that for the sake of authenticity, In the Heat of the Night would have to be shot in the South, not on a studio lot. Mirisch agreed.12
Sidney Poitier did not. His memories of being tailed by Klansmen the previous summer while visiting Mississippi with Harry Belafonte were vivid, and horror stories were beginning to come out of Louisiana, where the racially mixed cast of Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown was enduring harassment and death threats, the film’s black actors were being turned away from restaurants and hotels, and a crew member was chased out of a local Laundromat by someone who didn’t want him using it to wash the black cast members’ hotel bedsheets.13 “You can cut the hostility with a knife,” said Diahann Carroll on the set. “Down here, the terror has killed my taste for going anywhere.”14 Poitier’s fears were not unjustified, since his own family had recently been menaced. On June 6, James Meredith, who had become famous as the first black student at the University of Mississippi, was shot as he began a “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson. Meredith recovered, and a couple of weeks later, Poitier’s ex-wife, Juanita, held a fund-raising reception for him at the Pleasantville, New York, home the couple had shared. When she did, a cross was burned on her lawn.15 Poitier, now America’s most recognizable black actor, was not about to turn himself into an even bigger target. “Sidney didn’t want to go below the Mason-Dixon line,” says Jewison. “There was no goddamn way he’d do it.”16
On June 1, 1966, Jack Valenti, a forty-four-year-old former Texas advertising executive who had become a special assistant to Lyndon B. Johnson, left his White House post to head the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA had had only two presidents since its founding in 1922: Will Hays, the architect of the 1930 Production Code that still governed the content of Hollywood movies, and Eric Johnston, whose death in 1963 had left the organization rudderless for almost three years. The MPAA had many functions, the most economically significant of which was to operate as the movie industry’s lobbying arm in Washington. But at the moment Valenti took over, the association was consumed by the issue of censorship, and in particular by its oversight of the failing and outmoded Production Code. While Code administrator Geoffrey Shurlock was still systematically ticking off the number of uses of “hell” and “damn” in every script and informing producers by letter what lines, scenes, and even gestures would have to come out of their screenplays, American filmmakers were rising in insurrection not only against the Code’s restrictions, but against its very existence.
As Valenti began work, the crisis over the Code was coming to a head so quickly that there was little time for deliberation. For decades, control over the content of Hollywood films had been split three ways, in an unofficial power-sharing arrangement between the studios themselves (via the Code), religious organizations such as the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures and the Episcopal Committee for Motion Pictures, and censorship boards whose standards varied capriciously by city and state and which were generally overseen by local police departments. As a result, films with potentially inflammatory subjects would sometimes end up playing in a checkerboard pattern across the country: For instance, it took two years and a fight that went to the Georgia Supreme Court before the Oscar-winning Room at the Top, about an extramarital affair, could be shown in Atlanta.17 The system was intended to encourage self-censorship by the studios: The more stringently they governed their own product, the less risk they would run of a religious anti-Hollywood groundswell or of having to fight costly legal battles to get their movies shown. Until the last few years, that had given Shurlock near absolute power, no matter how many decades behind the times some of the Production Code’s statutes were. In 1961, when he had reviewed the script for West Side Story and ruled that words like “schmuck” and “S.O.B.,” and even a phrase as mild as “he’s hot” would have to be deleted from Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, UA had no choice but to comply.” Even as late as 1964, the Code was able to veto the movie title How to Murder Your Mistress in favor of the somehow more acceptable How to Murder Your Wife.18
But the Code’s rigidity had recently begun to work against it. The influx of European films, some with nudity, that weren’t produced by studios and didn’t require a Code seal had created a double standard; local theaters, meeting the demands of their audiences, were increasingly willing to show movies without Code approval, as well as those that had been branded with the Catholic rating of “Condemned.” The double standard didn’t apply only to sex: Dated and rarely enforced Code provisions against things like “trick methods shown for concealing guns,” “illegal abduction,” and the depiction of any “notorious real-life criminal” who had not been punished for his crimes19 had turned Hollywood’s rule book into a bizarre patchwork of policies, some rigorously enforced and others routinely ignored. Distributors were challenging local censorship boards in courts across the country and almost always winning, while conservative and religious organizations were calling for the Code to be abolished altogether and replaced by film ratings,20 an idea that the studios resisted, believing it was a first step toward outright censorship. The studios had reason to distrust the motives of those who were calling for a classification system; the only “ratings” for films at the time were handed out under the aegis of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which classified movies on a scale based not on age appropriateness, but on degree of moral turpitude, up to and including condemnation. The National Catholic Office was blunt about its desire for a ratings system that would keep movies with adult subject matter out of many theaters altogether.
Valenti knew the Code was preposterous, but he worried that a ratings system might bring even bigger problems; he correctly surmised that film ratings would result in more freedom rather than less, since once a movie could be designated as being for adults, it could offer unapologetically adult content. That, he feared, would lead to more clashes with municipal censorship boards or a fight against church leaders that Hollywood was desperate to avoid. But he knew that in its present form, the Code was doomed. The 1965 decision to approve the nudity in The Pawnbroker because of the film’s high quality had created an untenable loophole, suggesting that one standard existed for good films and another for ordinary ones. Although the studios had always cooperated with Shurlock, they had no interest in allowing him to judge their movies on merit.
Valenti and Louis Nizer, who had signed a five-year contract to serve as the MPAA’s senior counsel,21 hadn’t even unpacked their boxes when Jack Warner decided to use Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to finish what The Pawnbroker started. Although the first time they saw the picture, Warner and his executives had famously reacted by saying, “My God, we’ve got a $7.5 million dirty movie on our hands,”22 Nichols had jockeyed skillfully behind the scenes to keep much of its profanity intact. The vast circle of New York friends he had acquired in the years since he had starred with Elaine May on Broadway proved to be a critical asset; Virginia Woolf won a perfectly choreographed private endorsement from Jacqueline Kennedy, who, at Nichols’s request, attended a small screening and made sure to say, within earshot of a key member of the Catholic film board, “Jack would have loved this movie.”23 After extensive internal debate, the National Catholic Office gave Virginia Woolf a rating of A-IV, “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations.”24 This coup, which allowed the film to escape not only a “C” (Condemned) rating, but a “B” (“morally objectionable in part for all”), would put even more pressure on the Production Code authority to approve the film.
Jack Warner then came up with his own preemptive way of undercutting the Code. On May 25, 1966, he announced that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be released with the label “For adults only” and that theaters would have to sign contracts agreeing not to admit minors without adult accompaniment.25 While newspaper ads for independent or foreign movies had carried “adults only” labels for years, the label was used as a racy tease, not as a studio-approved enforceable restriction. Warner’s maneuver, which effectively created the “R” rating two years before a ratings system existed, unsettled Geoffrey Shurlock. Shurlock was now seventy-one and had enjoyed extraordinary influence over the years; at one point, he was even able to order Alfred Hitchcock to reshoot the opening scene of Psycho. But his investment in the Code was rooted more in a desire to protect his own power than in any innate prudishness. When Warner Brothers bought Virginia Woolf, Shurlock had warned them that there was unacceptable language on 83 pages of the script.26 But after Warner’s decision, Shurlock knew his own standing was at stake and decided not to risk a public defeat. For the first time ever, he declined to make any ruling and privately advised Jack Warner to end-run him and take Virginia Woolf straight to the Code’s appeals board.27 That jury, led by Valenti, who had spent just ten days in his new job, approved the movie using the same pretext they had offered for The Pawnbroker, announcing that they would not have given the seal to “a film of lesser quality” and warning that “this exemption does not mean that the floodgates are open.”
But of course, it meant exactly that. Valenti had already stated that he had serious questions about “the entire philosophy of self-censorship,”28 and in his first week running the MPAA, he ordered a complete overhaul of the Production Code—which, he said, Shurlock would continue to administer. (Shurlock quickly announced that he thought Virginia Woolf was “marvelous” and had simply been following the rules by withholding a seal.)29 The Virginia Woolf experience, said Valenti, “was Fort Sumter … it revealed to me that the past was done. I wasn’t quite sure what the future was going to be.”30 But he was sure of one thing: After a heated hours-long private meeting in which he, Nizer, Jack Warner, and Warner’s New York distribution chief, Ben Kalmenson, had dickered over every single profanity in the movie before it even went to the appeals board, he said to Nizer, “I’m not going through that again. I’m not going to spend my life sitting in … offices and saying, ‘I gotta take out one “shit” and one “screw.”’ This is crazy.”31
If Warner had any worries that the controversy over Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would endanger its profitability, they were quickly allayed. The trade paper Variety, which used to headline its major reviews with a prognostication about the film’s box office, simply and accurately wrote of its prospects, “Big.”32 They weren’t wrong; Virginia Woolf became the second-highest-grossing film of 1966, trailing only Thunderball, as the lure of seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton behind closed doors doing something suitable “for adults only” proved irresistible. Reviews were stellar, with many critics pointedly endorsing Warner’s use of a warning label and to applauding the license it would give Hollywood filmmakers to tackle rougher material.
Nichols was once again the man of the moment, but not an especially happy one. Jack Warner had treated him badly during postproduction of Virginia Woolf. Nichols had wanted the film’s composer, Alex North, replaced with André Previn; when he pushed too hard, Warner bristled and had him barred from the editing room with only a day or two of work left.33 North’s score stayed in, but Nichols had won almost every other battle. Still, his first Hollywood movie had left him battered and exhausted, and he found the overwhelming praise for his movie debut disorienting. “I am … upset by good reviews …. I get to feeling very unreal and very undeserving,” he told the Today show.34 Nichols was now becoming as famous as many of the people he directed and too busy for his own comfort. Production of The Graduate was supposed to start in the fall; he had just signed to direct the movie version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which was to start shooting the following summer; and with the first three Broadway plays he directed all still running, he had also agreed to stage his first Broadway musical, a trio of one-acts by the composer and lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof called Come Back! Go Away! I Love You! (later retitled The Apple Tree). In early 1966, ABC decided to make him the focus of an hour-long special, The Many Worlds of Mike Nichols.35 There turned out to be too many worlds: Nichols decided to retreat. He canceled the special, pushed Catch-22 further into the future, and postponed production of The Graduate until the spring of 1967.
Throughout the summer of 1966, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shared its place atop the box office with The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. The cold war comedy was several shades lighter than Dr. Strangelove had been, thanks largely to its droll, playful script by William Rose, a writer with fifteen years of screen credits who was nonetheless something of an enigma to the studios. Rose spent very little time in Los Angeles; many people in the industry weren’t exactly sure whether he was American or English. In World War II, he served under Canada’s Black Watch regiment in Europe, later reenlisting for the United States.36 In the 1950s, he had won Oscar nominations for writing two English comedies, Genevieve and the Alec Guinness classic The Ladykillers; by the 1960s, he was spending most of his time in England’s Channel Islands, where he lived on the isle of Jersey with his wife, Tania. Rose was actually a native of Jefferson City, Missouri, albeit one who preferred to view America, and his chosen industry, from as great a distance as possible. “Bill got very nervous when he came to Hollywood,” says Norman Jewison. “He hated Hollywood. When the plane landed he would break out into a sweat. He was not good with studios or anything.”37
In 1963, Rose had written the screenplay for Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Kramer liked Rose’s work, and the two became friends; Rose then began to work on Andersonville for him. When Columbia pulled the plug on Kramer’s plan to make the film, Rose happened to be in Los Angeles visiting him. After dinner at Kramer’s home, the director recalled walking Rose out to his car when Rose brought up an idea for a screenplay he had been considering about racial intermarriage in South Africa. “I said, off the top of my head, ‘Why don’t you set it in the United States?”’ wrote Kramer in his memoirs. “‘Oh, sure,’ replied Rose. ‘They’d name it picture of the year, at least in Harlem.’”38 (Rose’s memory of the project’s origin was somewhat different and probably more accurate; he later said that he never conceived of setting the story in South Africa and had had the idea for an American comedy of intermarriage since at least 1960; documents show that he had his agent pitch the premise to Kramer as early as the summer of 1962.)39
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, although it would be widely publicized by its studio as a taboo-shattering comedy, was not the first American movie to depict an interracial relationship. In 1964, director Larry Peerce’s low-budget One Potato, Two Potato, about a white divorcée (Barbara Barrie) who marries a black man (Bernie Hamilton), had been released by the independent distributor Cinema V; the film had shown at the Cannes Film Festival, played throughout the United States, including the South (although primarily in black neighborhoods), and won an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. And audiences, at least in the North, had just seen the first stirrings of another interracial romance in A Patch of Blue.
Nonetheless, Kramer was certain that building an entire movie around the topic would put him on dangerous ground. He and Rose quickly talked through a plot that sounded like the premise of a very old-fashioned drawing room comedy: An affluent white couple, proud liberals in late middle age, would have their political and personal principles put to the test when their daughter walked through the door with a black fiancé. The premise was thin—little more, really, than the expansion of the then-familiar line “But would you want your daughter to marry one?” that had been applied by WASP America to Catholics, then to Jews, and then to blacks over the last thirty years. Rose brought a veteran screenwriter’s sense of structure to the piece, talking it through with Kramer first on long walks through Beverly Hills and in meetings at the Beverly Wilshire40 and later when Kramer flew overseas to Jersey. Expanding on the plot’s original quartet, he added characters—a winsome monsignor who could call the bride’s parents on their hypocrisies, the groom’s father and mother, who had reservations of their own about the proposed wedding, and the white family’s loyal and suspicious black maid—and he compressed the plot’s chronology: A story line that Kramer had originally imagined would unfold over two or three days was now to take place in twelve hours and be built around a single suspenseful question: Would the father of the bride grant permission for the marriage or not?
Kramer and Rose tangled over every plot point of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “It was a love-hate relationship,” recalls the director’s widow, Karen Kramer. “They really were very competitive and could be quite combative. Bill was an egotist, and he was also an alcoholic. Stanley was smart and clever and quippy, and he could also be a bit of a put-down artist—he could really nail you if he wanted to, and when Bill would get out of line, Stanley would go after him and they’d both get really angry. I think Stanley would always say that Bill was a brilliant writer, but he was a very difficult person. They’d really get into it with each other, and Stanley would always win, which would make Bill furious.”41
At the time he started working on the screenplay, Rose was in his early fifties; he had been away from the United States for a long time, and judging by his earliest plot outlines for the movie, his knowledge of the American civil rights movement was about twenty years behind the news. A treatment he wrote for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner describes one minor character as “a sexy little colored girl” and Tillie the housekeeper as “a tough but lukewarmhearted darkie”; later, he took pains to write Tillie’s dialogue in dialect, having her say “sumpin,” “jest,” “sposed,” and “lissen.”42 And the beginnings of Afrocentrism and discussions of cultural identity among black Americans were huffily dismissed by him in a few lines. Rose was still appalled that Cassius Clay had, in 1964, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, so much so that he mentioned it in his treatment. Declaring that Dr. Prentice, the black fiancé, was the grandson of slaves, he wrote, “Prentice isn’t at all ashamed of [being called] Prentice. Nor does he really care who he might have been, or what he might have been called, somewhere in the Continent of Africa.”43
Kramer managed to comb out some, though by no means all, of the screenwriter’s condescensions and stereotypes. But he was, characteristically, thinking more like a producer than a director and insisted that Rose play it safe in one significant area: “I wanted the prospective black bridegroom to be a person so suitable that if anyone objected to him, it could only be due to racial prejudice,” he wrote.44 Kramer was sure that if Prentice had any flaws at all, bigots in the audience would seize on them as a reason to disapprove of the marriage, but in seeking to avoid that trap, he fell right into another one: the return of the exceptional Negro, a character type that had by then become so familiar that even white critics were beginning to react against its persistence. In Rose’s script, Prentice became not just a doctor, but an Ivy League–educated potential Nobel laureate who worked for the United Nations on worldwide health missions. Kramer’s insistence on stacking the deck so heavily in favor of Prentice changed everything about the movie. The answer to the question “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” now had to be Sidney Poitier, the only black actor Kramer thought that white America would find believable as a superachiever.
“Casting is destiny,” says Warren Beatty. “Particularly in movies, because casting is character—and character is plot. Casting really controls story. One guy would do a thing, another guy wouldn’t. And if you’re the guy in the close-up, character acting isn’t going to help—you either are that guy, or you aren’t.”45 If that is the case—and it’s hard to find a movie from the mid-1960s in which it is more the case than Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—then Stanley Kramer had a serious problem once Rose finished his script. The movie, he felt, would be unfilmable, and unfinanceable, if he couldn’t sign the three principal actors he wanted. The film couldn’t simply be about a nice white couple welcoming a nice black son-in-law; it had to be about the screen’s most famous romantic duo symbolically opening their arms to its biggest black star. And that didn’t look likely: Sidney Poitier was busy—and, for the first time in his career, expensive. Katharine Hepburn had all but officially retired. And Spencer Tracy was dying.
1. Author interview with Jewison.
2. Salary sheets and cast contact information, Stalmaster Co., Norman Jewison Collection, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
3. “In the Heat of the Night,” drafts dated March 14, 1966, and July 5, 1966, Stirling Silliphant Collection.
4. Silliphant in Backstory 3, op. cit.
5. “In the Heat of the Night,” draft dated March 14, 1966, op. cit.
6. AI with Jewison.
7. “In the Heat of the Night,” draft dated March 14, 1966, op. cit.
8. Letter from Geoffrey Shurlock to Walter Mirisch, September 23, 1966, Production Code files, Margaret Herrick Library.
9. AI with Jewison.
10. Silliphant in Backstory 3, op. cit.
11. “In the Heat of the Night,” draft dated July 5, 1966, op. cit.
12. AI with Jewison and Mirisch.
13. Accounts of the troubled production of Hurry Sundown appear in Looking for Gatsby by Faye Dunaway and My Life So Far by Jane Fonda, both previously cited, and in the documentary Preminger: Anatomy of a Filmmaker, produced and directed by Valerie A. Robins (copyright 1991, Otto Preminger Films, Ltd., available on the two-disc DVD edition of The Cardinal).
14. Reed, Rex. “Like They Could Cut Your Heart Out,” New York Times, August 21, 1966.
15. “Cross Burned at Poitier Home,” New York Post, June 21, 1966.
16. AI with Jewison.
17. Letter written by Walter Reade Jr. in advertisement, New York Times, July 9, 1961.
18. Bart, Peter. “Label Babel.” New York Times, December 6, 1964.
19. Revisions to the 1930 Production Code dated December 20, 1938, and December 3, 1947.
20. Archer, Eugene. “Catholics Urge Movie Labeling.” New York Times, December 7, 1962.
21. Canby, Vincent. “Czar of the Movie Business.” New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1967.
22. Thompson, Thomas. “Liz in a Film Shocker.” Life, June 10, 1966.
23. AI with Nichols.
24. Leff, “A Test of American Film Censorship,” Cinema Journal, op. cit., p. 52. Leff’s piece offers a fascinating and valuable account of the internal workings of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which rated films in the mid-1960s based on the combined input of two subgroups, the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae (IFCA) and a newly enlisted council of secular educators and businesspeople called the “Consultants.” The Consultants outnumbered the IFCA members three to one. Although a majority of IFCA voters wanted Virginia Woolf condemned, the Consultants group, which had been assembled only in 1965, voted for the “A-IV” rating and carried the day.
25. “‘Virginia Woolf’ to be Shown as a ‘For Adults Only’ Film.” United Press International, May 25, 1966.
26. Leff, “A Test of American Film Censorship,” Cinema Journal, op. cit., p. 43.
27. Jack Valenti, in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Too Shocking for Its Time,” on two-disc DVD edition of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
28. Canby, Vincent. “‘Virginia Woolf’ Given Code Seal.” New York Times, June 11, 1966.
29. Thompson, “Raw Dialogue Challenges All the Censors,” op. cit.
30. Valenti, in “Too Shocking for Its Time,” op. cit.
31. Thomas, Clown Prince of Hollywood, op. cit., pp. 277–278.
32. Variety, June 20, 1966.
33. Thomas, Clown Prince of Hollywood, op. cit., p. 275.
34. Nichols on Today, July 29, 1966.
35. Adams, Val. “Mike Nichols’s Career Prevents His Finishing TV Show About It.” New York Times, June 2, 1966.
36. AI with Jewison.
37. Ibid.
38. Kramer, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, op. cit., pp. 217–219.
39. Affidavit of William Rose in Plunkett v. Columbia, 1973, with attached letter from Rose to Michael Zimring, July 13, 1962; also letter from Seymour Steinberg to M. Milo Mandel, July 18, 1966; Kramer Collection, UCLA.
40. Newquist, Roy. A Special Kind of Magic (New York: Rand McNally & Co., 1967), p. 34.
41. AI with Kramer. Rose’s alcoholism is also mentioned in Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003), p. 275.
42. Final draft, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, February 15, 1967, Kramer Collection, UCLA.
43. Box 292, Kramer Collection, UCLA, cited in Goudsouzian.
44. Kramer, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, op cit., p. 219.
45. AI with Beatty.