Jack Warner’s office overlooking his studio’s Burbank lot was designed for genuflection. Warner was not a tall man, and he had his desk built on a platform raised eight or ten inches above the carpet, with two small stairs behind his chair. “‘Look up at me—don’t look down at me’—that was the message,” says Joel Freeman, who worked for Warner in the mid-1960s.1
For years after the release of Bonnie and Clyde, a story persisted that Warren Beatty got down on his knees in front of the man who had run the studio since its founding in 1918 and begged him to finance the film. The anecdote, which Beatty himself kept alive for a while, made its way into Time magazine at the end of 1967, vividly ornamented with the detail that the actor “prostrated himself before the old man, dug his nose in the rug, and moaned, ‘Look, Jack, please do what I say. I won’t waste your money.’” Warner’s putative reply: “Get up off the floor, kid. You’re embarrassing me.”2 Long after Warner’s death in 1978 and Beatty’s eventual denial that the incident ever occurred, this particular piece of what Beatty calls “the apocrypha surrounding the movie”3 survived, probably for two reasons: It sounds like something he would have done, and it sounds like something Jack Warner would have enjoyed.
“If Warren did do it,” says Robert Benton, “it wouldn’t have been the first time. He was prone to do that with people.”4 Supplication was just another weapon in Beatty’s arsenal of strategies, to be deployed as needed. He used it with Robert Towne during Bonnie and Clyde’s long shoot in Texas, when Towne wanted to go back to Los Angeles for a few days. “He literally got down on his knees and said, ‘Oh, please don’t,’” recalls Towne. “Well, what can you say to that but ‘Okay, I won’t’? No one can know the depth of that man’s persuasiveness. It wasn’t an illustration of how important I was to the project, but of the lengths to which he would go to make anything he wanted to happen happen. He says, ‘Save me! Rescue me!’ And I suspect somehow that was not the least of his seductive charm when it came to women.”5
Nor would it have been the first time that Jack Warner had experienced—or relished—that kind of flattery. Warner, at seventy-three, was proud of the power he had consolidated over so many decades in charge and unselfconscious about exercising it. He had had things his own way for fifty years, even when it cost him his relationships with his own brothers. He liked his subordinates—and that included the men who worked most closely with him—to call him “Mr. Warner” or “Chief” or “Colonel”6 (an essentially honorary designation he had picked up in exchange for producing anti-Nazi films during World War II)7—but never “Jack.” “I’ve often thought of the studio as a palace that had everything but a moat,” says Richard Lederer, who worked as Warner’s head of advertising in New York. “There were gates within gates within gates. Warner lived like a king, and Warner Brothers was his kingdom, even if it was a kingdom that, at that point, churned out nothing but crap.”8 And anyone who wanted to get his way with the boss knew that self-abasement, tears, and outright pleading often worked. In 1966, around the time Beatty paid him a visit, Jack Warner was immersed in the planning stages of what was by far the most expensive movie on his 1967 slate of releases, Camelot. Even though the Lerner and Loewe musical had received mixed reviews and was by no means an unqualified success on Broadway, Warner was so convinced that director Joshua Logan’s film version would follow in the path of My Fair Lady that he planned to put his own name on the movie as producer for only the second time in ten years. Alan Jay Lerner had recovered well enough from his tabloid divorce and the disaster of his involvement with Doctor Dolittle to write the script, but it was wildly overlong. When Joel Freeman, who was to function as Camelot’s producer in everything but name, went into Warner’s office to tell him that the movie would run a draggy three hours as written and that the screenplay needed to be cut, Warner agreed, and Freeman went to tell Lerner, who was waiting in a downstairs office.
“An hour or so later, I walk back into Jack’s office,” says Freeman. “Kneeling in front of his desk was Josh Logan, with tears in his eyes. I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ Logan got up, never said a word to me, and walked out the door. I said, ‘What was that all about?’ And Jack said, ‘Executive decision. Leave the script the way it is.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? You just agreed to all these cuts—you know it’s too long.’ And he walked me outside his office to a window, looked out, and pointed to a water tower with the studio insignia. He said, ‘What does it say? When it says Freeman Brothers, you can decide how long it should be.’”9
The water tower routine was a favorite of Jack Warner’s, although it’s safe to say that nobody had ever responded to it the way Warren Beatty did. When Warner, during a lunch with the actor, pointed to the tower, Beatty paused for a moment and said, “Well, it’s got your name, but it’s got my initials.”10
“I think Jack Warner found me funny,” Beatty says. “But I think something about me also scared him—I don’t know if something had once happened with another actor, but he never wanted to be in a room alone with me. But all the stories about me not being able to get Bonnie and Clyde financed—they’re not true. I didn’t have to beg, because I had offers from three studios. Well, two, and something I could have turned into an offer, but I didn’t want to be misleading.”11
For a time, Beatty considered trying to finance the film himself. “Originally, he thought he would be able to come up with the budget for the movie out of his own pocket,” says Elaine Michea, who worked as his assistant on Bonnie and Clyde for more than a year. “This was when he was thinking it was going to be much less expensive. We worked together trying to see how little we could make it for. He was very frugal—he lived well, but he didn’t throw money away.”12 Once Beatty abandoned that plan and started making the rounds with the script, not everyone was interested in working with him. He was considered, as Time put it, “an on-again, off-again actor who moonlighted as a global escort,”13 and the studios greeted the news that the “sullen, difficult, stubborn performer who fouled up [scripts] with his demands for rewriting” and “quarreled with directors” was planning to become a producer “with only slightly more enthusiasm than that summoned up for the announcement that Ross Hunter would produce a third Tammy picture,”14 said Life magazine.
Beatty’s confidence as he walked into one executive suite after another was disarming. “We went into a meeting … and Warren said, ‘This is what they’re gonna ask, this is what we’re gonna say,’ and he was right. He’s a great wheeler-dealer,” Benton and Newman told Rex Reed.15 But some studio chiefs couldn’t begin to comprehend Beatty’s enthusiasm for the heavily annotated screenplay he was pitching. “That’s one that I kick myself in the ass for,” says Richard Zanuck, who, deep into preproduction on Doctor Dolittle at the time, had no interest in having Beatty make the movie at Fox. “Warren came over and presented me with the script, and we had lunch in my office. It was like 250 pages long and had all these different-colored pages—blue, red, gray, green. I said, ‘What is this?’ I read it, and I didn’t have the belief that I should have had in Warren. That was one of my big mistakes.”16
United Artists’ David Picker, who had tracked the project since Elinor Jones had pitched it to him, still wanted to make the movie, but Bonnie and Clyde had gotten more expensive since the first time he’d heard about it. Harrison Starr, the associate producer of Mickey One who had talked about producing the movie with both Truffaut and Godard, was for a time working with Beatty and Penn, hoping to serve as production manager on the film. He talked to the two men in Texas, where they were scouting potential locations, and then went to New York to discuss terms with Picker. “I was foolish,” says Starr. “He said, ‘What can you make it for?’ And instead of giving him the lowest price, I thought, ‘I’ll give myself some room.’” Starr suggested a budget of $1.75 million. Picker countered at $1.6 million, and by the time he was able to convince his bosses to back the movie, Beatty had moved on, and UA and Starr were out of the picture.17 “I can only tell you that when that deal blew up, it broke my heart,” says Picker.18
“I almost made the movie at United Artists,” says Beatty. “But I had a better offer, and I liked Jack Warner.” Warner Brothers ended up offering Beatty a $1.8 million budget, still well below the average for a studio picture, and Beatty agreed to take a lower-than-usual combined acting/producing salary of $200,000 in exchange for 40 percent of the film’s profits.19 No kneeling or begging was necessary, largely because of the efforts of two supporters of Bonnie and Clyde at the studio, Richard Lederer and production chief Walter MacEwen. Lederer read the screenplay and thought it was “terrific”; he knew it would represent a welcome departure for what he called “a very conservative studio that put out one terrible movie after another. Nobody seemed to realize that the audience was changing and we’d better change, too.”20 Lederer knew that Ben Kalmenson, the New York–based head of distribution and one of Jack Warner’s closest colleagues, could persuade Warner to make the movie. Kalmenson had worked with Warner for twenty-five years, and Jack Warner took his advice seriously. Warner also liked to use Kalmenson as a bad cop: When Warner would reject projects, he would often tell producers that “New York” had told him they wouldn’t be able to sell their movie to audiences.21 Lederer walked Beatty down to Kalmenson’s office with the script. “Kalmenson said nice things,” says Lederer. “But I knew that the minute we left, he picked up the phone and told Jack Warner not to make the movie.”22
“The decision [to green-light Bonnie and Clyde] was made by Walter MacEwen,” says Beatty. “Jack Warner never got into it.”23 But it wasn’t that simple: MacEwen liked the script very much, but he had worked for Warner for decades; he tended to make his case for or against a project and then defer to his boss’s wishes, and he knew that Warner would need a good deal of convincing. The studio had made Beatty famous with Splendor in the Grass, and Jack Warner was still angry that Beatty had backed out of Youngblood Hawke and refused to star in PT 109. “Warren wasn’t a favorite of Jack Warner’s,” says MacEwen’s assistant Robert Solo. “He thought Warren was uppity. The man was, at the time, pretty stuck in his ways. He ran the studio, but he was more subject to the whims of actors and directors than he had been twenty years ago, and he didn’t like it. So anybody who didn’t play ball his way, he didn’t want anything to do with. We tried very hard to talk Warner into it.” MacEwen had his own concerns: Geoffrey Shurlock would soon weigh in with a Production Code memo calling various scenes “unacceptably brutal,” “excessively gruesome,” and “grossly animalistic.”24 But he liked the project, and he and Solo enlisted Martin Jurow, Warner’s head of European production, to lobby Jack Warner as well. Solo also used his connection with Jack Schwartzman, who was his neighbor and Beatty’s attorney; he would secretly coach Schwartzman on what to say during the time Schwartzman was negotiating the deal’s fine points with the studio’s head of business affairs.25
What may ultimately have convinced Warner to make the movie was, ironically, his own poor judgment: He was convinced that Kaleidoscope, the forgettable little thriller Beatty had made with Susannah York, was going to be a hit for the studio, and he knew from the film’s producer, Elliott Kastner, that the actor had behaved himself on the set, allowing production to wrap on time and on budget. By the end of August, Warner “was comfortable that he would have limited financial exposure,” says Solo,26 and he agreed to make Bonnie and Clyde without even reading the screenplay. A month later, when he did look at the script, he expressed bitter regret. Warner wasn’t put off by the movie’s innovations (which he couldn’t see on the page). On the contrary, he thought the story was decades out-of-date, nothing more than a relic of a slightly disreputable genre his own studio had pioneered and used up in the 1930s. “I can’t understand where the entertainment value is in this story,” he wrote to Walter MacEwen. “Who wants to see the rise and fall of a couple of rats …. I don’t understand the whole thinking of Warren Beatty and Penn. We will lose back whatever we happen to make on Kaleidoscope … this era went out with Cagney.”27
If Bonnie and Clyde escaped Jack Warner’s close scrutiny until it was too late for him to reverse himself, the distraction of Camelot was at least partly responsible, and Warner was hardly alone among studio chiefs in neglecting the rest of his films in order to concentrate on a single big-ticket entertainment that could prove to be the next Sound of Music. At Fox, Dick Zanuck was presiding over a lineup of movies being planned for release in 1967 that included several potential box office successes: Hombre, a western that would reunite Paul Newman with his Hud director, Martin Ritt, an adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s best seller Valley of the Dolls, and Two for the Road, a sophisticated bittersweet comedy about marriage starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney that a more relaxed Production Code had finally made it possible to green-light. But in the summer of 1966, everything was taking a backseat to Arthur Jacobs’s mammoth effort to get Doctor Dolittle off the ground.
Zanuck had succeeded in shaving $2 million from the budget, although Rex Harrison had thrown a tantrum and threatened to quit when he learned he wasn’t going to be working with Sidney Poitier after all.28 But Fox’s attempts to economize were almost completely undone in the next couple of months, as the start of production approached. Work at Jungleland, the animal-training facility in California, was proving more arduous than anyone had anticipated, since, in addition to teaching a rhino, a giraffe, and several hundred chimps, pigs, birds, mice, sheep, cows, squirrels, chickens, and parrots to perform tricks, the handlers had to spend time simulating the noisy conditions and flashing lights of a studio soundstage in order to accustom the animals to being on a set.29 The American Humane Association (AHA) was taking an interest, writing detailed memos about the script to the studio. (“When Bellowes … flings the skunk away from him,” AHA director Harold Melniker reminded Fox politely after reading the script, “the use of a dummy skunk is in order.”)30 And for every item that had been extracted from the budget in the spring, another had taken its place, pushing the film’s price tag past $14 million once again. The new cost estimate included $276,000 more for animals, real and mechanical; an additional $226,000 in previously unforeseen expenses for the location shoot in England; $72,000 more for sets; $20,000 to pay Harrison’s personal public relations agent; a voice double to sing Samantha Eggar’s numbers; a trainer who was up to the six-month task of trying to teach Chee-Chee, the chimpanzee (and his three stand-ins), to cook bacon and eggs in a frying pan; and $97,000 in projected overtime costs for the services of Leslie Bricusse,31 who had to redraft an entire script without Poitier’s character and make almost endless revisions to keep Harrison happy.
That was proving impossible. After his ill-considered attempt to select his own team of songwriters for Doctor Dolittle, Harrison had finally reconciled himself to working with Bricusse, but the fact that Bricusse’s best friend, Anthony Newley, had come on to the project as a costar sent him into fits of anger and paranoia. He was sure that Newley and Bricusse were working together in Beverly Hills, shaping the script into a showcase for their talents and rewriting it to diminish his own role.32 Harrison wasn’t entirely wrong to think that Newley’s casting meant that the part of Matthew would be expanded. And his disdain for Newley was predictable—he had as little use for a British song-and-dance man as he had had for Sammy Davis Jr., whom he had dismissed as an “entertainer.” But undisguised prejudice, well-known among those who had worked with Harrison before, was also a factor. Before and during Doctor Dolittle’s production, Harrison would disparage Newley, sometimes to his face, as a “Jewish comic” or a “Cockney Jew.”33 Newley was braced for it and, at least at the beginning, too excited about working on the film to care. In April, when he and the cast began learning the movie’s choreography in Los Angeles, he wrote exuberantly to his friend Barbra Streisand, who was then performing in Funny Girl onstage in London, “We started rehearsing the dances for ‘Dr. Dolittle,’ or as it’s known amongst the Hebrew elements, ‘Dr. Tagoornicht’!!* I shall have the pleasure of working with that well-known anti-Semite, Rex ‘George Rockwell’ Harrison,”34 he added, referring to the head of the American Nazi Party.
Throughout rehearsals, Bricusse sequestered himself in his home office in Beverly Hills, rewriting and refining the script, changing song lyrics, and trying to meet the demands of his star, Arthur Jacobs, and Fox. He was beginning his second year on the job and tiring of it. “I am desolated that I was not with you at the Grove last night,” he wrote after turning down an invitation from Newley and Joan Collins. “The strain of ‘Dolittle’ has been beginning to show lately, but I do so desperately want it to be good. This is our first cinematic outing in Hollywood, Newberg, so how can I expect you to be as good as I want you to be unless I give you something to be good with? Deep down beneath several crusts of misery that have been heaped on to me during the past few months is the same happy, laughing idiot we all used to know and love.”35
Much of that misery came at Harrison’s hands. Whatever the actor’s other faults, laziness was not among them, and he besieged Bricusse with questions, requests, and revisions. To Harrison’s credit, he was taking his role as Doctor Dolittle seriously; he filled a June 1966 draft of the script with handwritten notes, some of them directions to himself (“very real despair,” he jotted next to one of his lines), some of them suggestions that Bricusse incorporate more dialogue from Hugh Lofting’s books, and some of them sharp-eyed notations of lapses in logic. Harrison was a close reader and circled lines in which his character seemed to be repeating himself; he also had an experienced performer’s sense of what would and would not work once he was on the set interacting with actual animals. “It is no good taking a chance that something [funny] will happen,” he wrote of a scene in which Dolittle was to stroll through his menagerie. “Each animal cannot do the same thing …. Think cockerel is important. Perhaps the cockerel doesn’t approve of Dolittle. I feel that it [will be] the reaction of the animals [that] gets the laugh—not what Dolittle does so much.”36
Harrison was willing to shorten his own lines or suggest that the camera cut away from him in order to make a joke work, but he was unable to contain his jealousy and contempt when he came to any scene or speech in which Newley’s character had a lot to do. “All the quips of Matthew are impossible and unanswerable and hold up the scene,” he complained of one exchange. “These unanswerable set ups are monotonous,” he wrote, dashing out lines twenty pages later.37
But many of Harrison’s instincts were wrong and costly—Bricusse had to waste an entire draft accommodating his insistence that Dolittle be depicted as a sophisticated London physician before he admitted the idea was a dead end.38 And even as Harrison was slowing everyone down, his agent, Laurie Evans, was demanding that the actor be guaranteed $75,000 for three weeks of overtime, a situation that Arthur Jacobs apoplectically called “disaster and blackmail.”39 An excitable man on the calmest of days, Jacobs was now beginning to suffer physically from the stresses of Doctor Dolittle; in the spring, he was hospitalized for what he told his colleagues was surgery for “some rather irritating sinus condition.”40 But Jacobs, a forty-three-year-old hyperactive overweight chain-smoker, was really beginning to suffer from heart problems. When he was released from the hospital, he apologized to Harrison for missing a meeting in New York, saying only that he was under doctor’s orders not to travel.41 In the next month, he pushed ahead, hiring crew members, fighting the picture’s rising costs, and telling no one that he was seriously ill.
In late June, the Doctor Dolittle crew flew to England to set up shop in Castle Combe, a small town in Wiltshire that proudly advertised itself as “the prettiest village in England,” a designation it had won from the British tourist bureau. With Barnumesque brio, Jacobs started talking up the production in the press, ordering the staging of a photo opportunity in which Chee-Chee and Polynesia the parrot would “greet” Harrison upon his arrival in London,42 and boasting that the movie would use 1,150 animals, 480 of them for the “Talk to the Animals” sequence alone (“He does the number and the camera slowly pulls back showing 480—I mean four eight oh!—animals standing there,” he announced with delight), and “the biggest publicity and merchandising campaign ever.”43 Jacobs was somewhat more restrained when discussing the budget, telling one reporter the movie would be made for $12 million and another that the final cost would be somewhere between $11 million and $15 million.44 In fact, Doctor Dolittle was already moving briskly past the $15 million mark, in part because of a colossal miscalculation: Nobody at Fox had realized that the hundreds of animals that had been trained in California would have to be quarantined as soon as they were shipped to England. An entirely new troupe of birds and beasts had to be found and trained on the spot, while the Jungleland animals were returned to California to be held for use on the studio lot.
Castle Combe welcomed the production with a combination of suspicion and delight. Residents were not happy when Jacobs’s crew decided the village wasn’t quite pretty enough and went through the town tearing down Coca-Cola signs and antennae. They were temporarily mollified when Jacobs got Fox to pay for a community antenna to bring the quaint little town what it really wanted—better TV reception. But when Jacobs had his construction team dam the local trout stream and fill it with artificial seaweed and rubber fish in order to make it deep enough to pass as a river on which Dolittle could set sail, grumbling gave way to sabotage.45 On June 27, before the actors arrived, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, a twenty-two-year-old baronet, and another man were arrested for trying to set fire to an outhouse with a can of gasoline and blow up the sandbag dam. His goal, he announced, was to stop “mass entertainment from riding roughshod over the feelings of the people.”46 (Fiennes, a distant cousin of the actor Ralph Fiennes, later became a well-known explorer and writer and was briefly considered as a possible replacement for Sean Connery when Connery quit the James Bond series in 1967.) The baronet’s unsuccessful attempt at vandalism did no real damage to the production.
As Richard Fleischer put it, “It is the weather, not the bombs, which has made life intolerable.”47 Of the two months the Dolittle production spent in Castle Combe, all but five shooting days were either shortened or canceled altogether because of the constant downpours—a condition about which the studio had chosen to ignore all warnings.48 “Big rain,” says Samantha Eggar, reading from her diary entries at the time. “‘More rain …. Rained all day …. Whiled away the time with Pat [Newcomb] and Tony [Newley] and the Rosses [Herb Ross and Nora Kaye] …. Poured all day …. Pouring again.’ It’s on every page.”49
“Castle Combe is a gorgeous place, but everywhere you walked there was either cowshit or mud,” says Ray Aghayan, the film’s costume designer. “It rained every day except the one day we needed it to rain—we had to shoot that day with phony rain.”50
Even on the rare occasions when the weather was forgiving, the animals were not. Shooting with animals that had barely been trained was “not easy,” said Ross, who had been brought over to stage the musical sequences. “The script just says, ‘Swans do something,’ and we have to see what they do.”51 The fields where many of the animals were kept became so saturated with rain that they turned into swamps. The rhinoceros got pneumonia. In his autobiography, Harrison wrote that the animals became “restless and angry” (“I was bitten by a chimp, a Pomeranian puppy, a duck and a parrot”), that their trainers were occasionally abusive, and that shooting was “inordinately slow.” Even a shot as simple as one in which Dolittle addresses a few lines to an attentive parrot and squirrel who are standing on a railing became a nightmare when the recalcitrant squirrel wouldn’t stay still. When crew members tried to wrap tiny wires around its paws and then attach the wires to the rail with tacks, the squirrel became understandably agitated. The production broke for lunch, and Fleischer, furious, went off to find a local veterinarian to find out how the squirrel could be sedated. In the afternoon, trainers filled a fountain pen with gin and fed it to the squirrel drop by drop. Finally, Harrison wrote, they got “a few seconds of film showing the squirrel … nodding and swaying” before it passed out cold.52
The cast and crew greeted each new catastrophe with gallows humor. “We are deep in the heart of British Occupied Wiltshire making a grand Todd-AO Classic—‘Dr. Dolittle,’” Newley wrote to a friend. “You will probably be seeing it in 1984!”53 But a generational rift quickly developed, with Harrison and Fleischer on one side and Newley and Eggar on the other. Harrison, wrote Fleischer, thought the younger actors were “twits when they clowned around on the set and disturbed his concentration.”54 But Harrison was so consistently unpleasant to Newley that the younger actor had little reason to make things easier for him.
As Doctor Dolittle fell further behind schedule with every day of rain, Dick Zanuck voiced his support for the production, and his father backed him up, at least publicly. Although 20th Century-Fox had lost $39 million during the catastrophic era of Cleopatra in 1962, it had reported an $11.7 million profit for 1965. Darryl Zanuck may have grumbled that “stars today think nothing of asking $500,000 to $750,000 …. I used to make entire pictures—good ones—for that!”55 but he wasn’t about to change the think-big strategy that had brought the studio The Sound of Music.
Jacobs, however, found himself under increasing pressure. He was already thinking ahead to the Los Angeles shoot, trying to book Maurice Binder, creator of the famous title sequences for the James Bond movies, to shoot Dolittle’s opening credits without any principal actors, using the animals that had been sent back to Jungleland;56 he was replacing cast members on the spot (Richard Attenborough stepped into a role that was originally to be played by character actor Hugh Griffiths with barely a week’s notice); and, most pressingly, he was trying to decide whether the production should tough it out in Wiltshire or cut its losses. At first, Jacobs had leaned toward keeping the Dolittle crew in England well into September, but as the weeks dragged on, he realized it was time to give up. Doctor Dolittle’s elaborate house and yard would have to be meticulously reconstructed on a soundstage in Los Angeles. In mid-August, he and Fleischer decided to shut down the production, and his health got worse. Jacobs fought an ongoing battle with Fox about what the studio considered his overuse of limousine drivers, telling them that “I have been in the hospital and I am not allowed to carry heavy suitcases.”57 But as production in England wrapped, there were some days he was so ill that he couldn’t even get out of bed in his suite at the Savoy Hotel in London. “Arthur would always insist he had indigestion,” said director J. Lee Thompson, a friend. “But we knew it was heart trouble. He was not a well man.”58
1. Author interview with Freeman.
2. Kanfer, Stefan. “The Shock of Freedom in Films.” Time, December 8, 1967.
3. AI with Beatty.
4. AI with Benton.
5. AI with Towne.
6. AI with Solo.
7. Thomas, Clown Prince of Hollywood, op. cit., pp. 130–131.
8. AI with Lederer.
9. AI with Freeman.
10. AI with Beatty.
11. Ibid.
12. AI with Michea.
13. Kanfer, “The Shock of Freedom in Films,” op. cit.
14. Thompson, Tommy. “Under the Gaze of the Charmer.” Life, Apr. 26, 1968.
15. Reed, “Will the Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up,” op. cit.
16. AI with Zanuck. The screenplay that Beatty shopped around was actually 157 pages—significantly longer and more dialogue driven than the final shooting script.
17. AI with Starr.
18. AI with Picker.
19. AI with Beatty; “Warren Beatty Sues for Full Accounting on ‘Bonnie & Clyde.’” Variety, June 9, 1971.
20. AI with Lederer.
21. Thomas, Clown Prince of Hollywood, op. cit., p. 184.
22. AI with Lederer.
23. AI with Beatty.
24. Letter from Geoffrey Shurlock to Jack Warner, October 13, 1966, Warner Bros. Collection, USC.
25. AI with Solo.
26. Ibid.
27. Letter from Jack Warner to Walter MacEwen, Jack Warner Collection, USC, cited in Goldstein and Finstad, op. cit.
28. Fleischer, Just Tell Me When to Cry, op. cit., pp. 260–261.
29. Walker, Fatal Charm, op. cit., pp. 332–323; and Dunne, The Studio, op. cit., p. 35.
30. Letter from Harold Melniker to Frank Ferguson, April 28, 1966, Jacobs Collection.
31. 20th Century-Fox budget memo for Doctor Dolittle, May 23, 1966, Jacobs Collection.
32. Fleischer, Just Tell Me When to Cry, op. cit., pp. 260–261.
33. Bardsley, Garth. Stop the World: The Biography of Anthony Newley (London: Oberon Books, 2003).
34. Letter from Anthony Newley to Barbra Streisand, April 6, 1966, Anthony Newley Collection.
35. Letter from Leslie Bricusse to Anthony Newley, April 20, 1966, Anthony Newley Collection.
36. “Doctor Dolittle—Second Revised Screenplay,” by Leslie Bricuse, June 1966, with handwritten notes by Rex Harrison, Rex Harrison Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.
37. Ibid.
38. Bricusse, quoted in Fatal Charm, op. cit., p. 331.
39. Telegram from Arthur Jacobs, recipient unclear, May 1966, Jacobs Collection.
40. Letter from Arthur Jacobs to Rex Harrison, April 5, 1966, Jacobs Collection.
41. Cable from Arthur Jacobs to Richard Fleischer, April 12, 1966, Jacobs Collection.
42. Daily Telegraph, June 21, 1966.
43. Bart, Peter. “At Last, Rex Harrison Agreed…” New York Times, June 19, 1966.
44. Ibid; “19th Century Fox.” Time, July 8, 1966.
45. “19th Century Fox,” Time, op. cit.
46. Newsweek, August 9, 1966.
47. “‘Dr. Dolittle’ Retreating from Britain.” Variety, August 17, 1966.
48. Rex Harrison’s biographer Alexander Walker writes in Fatal Charm that fifty-one out of fifty-six shooting days were marred by rain; in The Studio, John Gregory Dunne says it was fifty-three out of fifty-eight days.
49. AI with Eggar.
50. AI with Ray Aghayan.
51. Reed, “Will They Dig ‘Dr. Dolittle’?” op. cit.
52. Harrison, Rex, op. cit., pp. 214–218.
53. Letter from Anthony Newley to Niels Larsen, July 6, 1966, Newley Collection.
54. Fleischer, Just Tell Me When to Cry, op. cit., pp. 262–263.
55. Canby, Vincent. “Now That Zanuck Is President, He Still Thinks Like a Producer.” New York Times, July 6, 1966.
56. Letter from Arthur Jacobs to Mort Abrahams, July 28, 1966, Jacobs Collection.
57. Letter from Owen McLean to Arthur Jacobs, May 17, 1966, and memo from Jacobs to Mike Pagano, July 1, 1966, Jacobs Collection.
58. Russo, Joe, and Larry Landsman, with Edward Gross. Planet of the Apes Revisited: The Behind- the-Scenes Story of the Classic Science Fiction Saga (New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 2001).
*Goornicht is Yiddish for “nothing”; Newley was punningly translating the title.