Some Like It Wilder Page 26
Wilder, of course, was searching for a co-screenwriter after George Axelrod’s return to Broadway. His choice fell on Wendell Mayes, who had written a teleplay about a midwestern family that TV critic John Crosby had favorably reviewed in the Los Angeles Times. Wilder convinced Hayward that they should hire Mayes at a salary of one thousand dollars a week. As a neophyte screenwriter, the easygoing Mayes enjoyed working with Wilder. He did not take umbrage at Wilder’s sassy wisecracks; he thought Wilder was very witty. The writing partners committed themselves to spending the entire summer on composing the first draft of the screenplay.
Lindbergh occasionally sat in on Wilder and Mayes’s script conferences when he was in town. They met in Wilder’s home because the reclusive Lindbergh would not go near the studio. Wilder found it frustrating to work with the shy, taciturn Swede; he thought Lindbergh “standoffish” and “not easy to get through to.” As time went on, Wilder continued, “I found that I was beating my head against a cement wall, because I could not write into the script a single personal scene with him; only what was in the book.”14
Lindbergh, Wilder, and Hayward went to Washington so Lucky Lindy could show them the original Spirit of St. Louis, which is on permanent display, suspended from the ceiling, at the Smithsonian Institution. The museum officials erected a platform alongside the plane so that Lindbergh’s guests could see the interior of the aircraft at close range. It was a revelation for Wilder to see how crude the single-engine monoplane really was: a little bit of metal, canvas, and wood. The original Spirit cost $13,000, whereas the three replicas used in the movie cost a total of $1.3 million.
During their story conferences, Wilder and Mayes were confronted with the dilemma of how to get away from the monotony of the thirty-three and a half hours that Lindbergh spent alone in the cockpit in the course of his solo flight. They ultimately decided to fill the time between takeoff and landing with periodic flashbacks to Lindbergh’s early life, accompanied by Stewart’s narration in voice-over on the sound track. For example, Wilder shows Lindbergh as a barnstorming aviator performing stunts at air carnivals. Wilder also wanted to introduce a companion for Lindbergh to chat with during the flight. So he, with Lindbergh’s permission, invented a fly that stows away in the monoplane, attracted to the cockpit by the sandwiches Lindbergh has brought along. Lindbergh, who sees the fly as a fellow flyer, says, “You’re good luck, because nobody has ever seen a fly crash!” That line is one of the few flashes of the Wilder wit in the screenplay. Wilder joked that he had the animation department at Warner Bros. pencil the fly into the scenes it was in, because the live fly he hired refused to follow the script.
Wilder recalled the scene in Hold Back the Dawn in which Charles Boyer absolutely refused to address a cockroach. By contrast, James Stewart was willing to converse with an insect. “After all, they don’t talk back,” he explained. “Mr. Stewart did not object to talking to insects,” Wilder opined, because “he had had to deal all his life with agents and producers.”15 During the shooting period, however, as time wore on, Stewart said, “I recall getting a little annoyed with the fly and asked Wilder to get rid of the bug.” So Wilder had the insect fly out the window when the plane is over Newfoundland.16 Thinking of the thousands of miles that still lie ahead for the Spirit, Lindbergh quips, “I don’t blame you.”
Wilder turned in the preliminary draft of the screenplay to Jack Warner in August 1955. Warner advised him that Stewart was committed to filming Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) until the end of August; shooting on the Lindbergh film was scheduled to begin in September. Stewart prepared for the role of Lindbergh by spending any spare time he had studying old newsreels of Lindbergh, the better to impersonate him in the picture. He also practiced piloting one of the three replicas of the Spirit built for the movie from the original plans.17
Meanwhile, with preproduction in full swing, Wilder and Hayward put together a crack production team, including cinematographers Peverell Marley (The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952) and Robert Burks, who was shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much. Editor Arthur Schmidt was cutting his fourth Wilder movie, and composer Franz Waxman was scoring his fourth Wilder picture.
Hayward and Wilder agreed that “it would add immeasurably to the impact and authenticity of the film to shoot as much of the flight as possible on or near the original locations,” writes Arthur Rowan in the most informative article about the making of the movie. In August 1955, before principal photography was scheduled to commence, Wilder decided to get a jump on the shooting period by gathering a small production crew to film aerial footage of the first leg of Lindbergh’s flight, starting at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, where the journey began.18
Wilder and his film unit shot footage along the route that Lindbergh had taken out of New York and went on to film above the mountains of Nova Scotia and over St. John’s, Newfoundland. The crew comprised aerial cameraman Thomas Tutweiler, supervising editor and associate producer Doane Harrison, and Leland Hayward. Having completed the filming of this preliminary portion of Lindbergh’s flight plan, Wilder and his team proceeded to Paris, where Wilder established a temporary production office at the Ritz Hotel.
Principal photography got under way on Friday, September 2, 1955, with the filming of Lindbergh’s landing at Paris’s Le Bourget Airport. Wilder shot the movie’s final scene first because the weather was still mild, approximating what it was on May 21, 1927. Wilder was barred from using the real Paris airport, so he substituted Aérodrome de Guyancourt near Versailles. Wilder said, “Since it was night, who could tell?” Three thousand extras were instructed to break through the barricades near the landing strip and rush hysterically out to the plane, giving Lucky Lindy a tumultuous welcome.
Hayward reported to Jack Warner in a letter dated September 9 that he and Wilder had banked on good weather that night—until it started to drizzle. “I have to tell you, you could have bought the picture for a quarter when it started to rain, with this airport covered with these goddamed French extras. But luckily it stopped, and we got some terrific shots.”19 They finished filming at five o’clock in the morning.
Hitchcock had completed shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much behind schedule, with the result that Stewart could not show up in Paris for the Spirit of St. Louis shoot until mid-September. He had gone straight from one picture to the other, so he insisted that he be allowed to go back to Los Angeles and rest for a week or so before beginning work in earnest on the Lindbergh picture. Weighing on Stewart’s mind was the inescapable fact that Lindbergh was nearly half Stewart’s age when he made his transatlantic flight. Stewart was afraid that, if he began shooting The Spirit of St. Louis right away, his haggard appearance would show him to be every bit of his forty-seven years.20
Be that as it may, Wilder had counted on Stewart’s traveling with him and his camera crew so they could photograph Stewart actually flying the replica of the Spirit over various locations on the itinerary of Lindbergh’s flight, including the Irish coast, the English Channel, and Paris itself. Wilder and Hayward took Stewart to lunch to hash out their disagreement. “Jimmy,” Wilder pleaded, “for God’s sake, trust me and let me get these shots of Lindbergh flying over authentic European locations!” But Stewart was implacable; he abruptly jumped up from the table, saying, “I’ve got to go!”21 He went directly to his hotel, packed his bags, and caught the evening flight to Los Angeles.
After Stewart’s departure, Wilder, Hayward, and the film unit continued to shoot along the flight path that Lindbergh had followed on the second leg of his journey. They filmed in the air over Ireland’s Dingle Bay and the coast of Cornwall, proceeded past Land’s End, crossed the Channel, and finally followed the Seine River to the outskirts of Paris. “We had unbelievable technical problems,” Wilder remembered. “We had another plane in the air to film the plane we were shooting. God, it was horrendous. The weather would change from one minute to the next.” If sunshine turned to clouds, the color of the sky would not match that of the
earlier shots, and the camera crew would have to wrap for the rest of the day. Hayward wrote to Jack Warner on September 25, “There is no escaping the fact that this is probably the most difficult picture that anyone has tried to make—logistically, technically, and every other way it is a bitch.”22
Wilder and the entire unit were back at Warner Bros. in Hollywood by the end of September. Wilder and his producer partner had a powwow with Warner in which they agreed that filming should not resume until the shooting script was finished. Mayes had continued working on the final draft while Wilder was supervising aerial photography in Europe, but they needed to make a joint effort to finish up. Wilder particularly favored this plan because of the dreadful experience he had had endeavoring to work on the shooting script of Sabrina at night while directing the picture during the day. Warner accordingly shut down production for the rest of October.
Wilder was pleased with the final draft. Although Mayes never collaborated with Wilder again, Wilder later recommended him to Otto Preminger to compose the screenplay for Anatomy of a Murder (1959), one of Preminger’s best movies.
Filming on The Spirit of St. Louis resumed in November. The close shots of Lindbergh piloting his plane were filmed on a soundstage in the studio, utilizing process photography. Wilder employed the technique known as rear-screen projection, whereby an actor performs in front of a screen on which images of exterior locations (in this case panoramic shots of cloudscapes) are projected from behind. Wilder had used rear-screen projection on Sunset Boulevard and other films. In this instance he filmed Stewart in midflight while he was seated in a mock-up of a cockpit on a soundstage. It was a pity that Wilder did not have shots of Stewart actually flying the replica of the Spirit over various European locations, as he had hoped. The process shots would have to suffice for the flying sequences of Lindy at the controls of his plane.
The aerial sequences in the movie encompassed flashbacks to Lindbergh’s days as an airmail pilot and as a barnstorming aviator in air carnivals. They were time-consuming and expensive to shoot. Production designer Art Loel established a large location site near Santa Maria on the California coast, complete with airfield and hangars, to film them. These sequences had to be filmed in the air from another plane. Paul Mantz, a veteran pilot of camera planes for aerial photography, piloted the plane in which Tutweiler had mounted his camera.23
Lindbergh came on location only once during the shooting period. Wilder was doing retakes of the Spirit touching down at Le Bourget on May 21, 1927. “Lindbergh turned up unannounced one day,” Stewart recalled, to watch the pilot, Stan Reaver, land the plane. Just before Reaver took off, Lindbergh told him, “Don’t forget to slip in for a three-point landing. Remember, I’m supposed to be flying the plane.”24
Wilder was scheduled to finish principal photography in March 1956, but he fell behind schedule. As a result, the original 64-day shooting schedule expanded to 115 days. In the course of the grueling seven-month shoot, Wilder shot more than two hundred thousand feet of film, much of it devoted to the aerial sequences, which Schmidt, in consultation with Harrison and Wilder, had to trim to twelve thousand feet during postproduction.25 This is the only film for which Wilder shot a huge surplus of footage. Consequently, postproduction took longer on The Spirit of St. Louis than on any of Wilder’s previous pictures. Wilder and his editing team did not complete the edit until June 1956; it clocked in at two hours and fifteen minutes. The movie’s price tag eventually climbed from $2 million to $6 million.26
Jack Warner decided to have the world premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York on February 21, 1957, hoping that the batch of early reviews would be favorable. When the film was unveiled, it began with one of Wilder’s typical printed prologues: “A young man alone in a single engine airplane flew non-stop from Roosevelt Field in New York across the entire North Atlantic Ocean to Le Bourget Field in Paris, a distance of 3,610 miles. In this triumph of mind, body, and spirit, Charles A. Lindbergh influenced the lives of everyone on earth; for in the 33 hours and 30 minutes of his flight the Air Age became a reality. This is the story of that flight.”
The takeoff in the rain from Roosevelt Field on Long Island is a virtuoso set piece. Wilder wanted the plane, with its heavy load of gasoline, to just barely clear the tops of the trees at the end of the runway. “I want a vivid shot of just how the treetops looked to Lindbergh as he skimmed over them on take-off,” said Wilder. The sequence is superbly edited by Schmidt: “Quick cuts of the rear of the plane, then a close-up of Lindbergh, a long shot of the Spirit, followed by a shot of the spectators, a subjective tracking shot of the muddy runway which puts the viewer in the cockpit; and the majestic finale,” as the Spirit clears the clump of trees.27 As the Spirit lifts and soars, so do the strings of Waxman’s rhapsodic background score.
One scene called for Lindbergh to perform a wing-walking stunt, with a stunt man doubling for Stewart. “Hell,” Wilder bragged, “I could perform that simple feat myself.” Stewart bet Wilder one hundred dollars that he would not have the nerve to do it. “Maybe he wanted a new director,” Wilder mused. Wilder boarded the vintage World War I monoplane that Harlan Gurney was piloting; he was strapped in a harness “and flew, standing on the top wing with his arms outstretched,” for a ten-minute ride at eight hundred feet.28
In still another flashback, Lindbergh recalls a priest, Father Hussman, who took flying lessons from him. Hussman gives him a St. Christopher medal, explaining, “St. Christopher helps wayfarers to cross bridgeless waters.” Lucky Lindy replies that he trusts not in God but in his instrument panel and his compass. Nevertheless, a friend of his hides the medal in Lindbergh’s sandwich sack just before the Spirit taxis down the runway for takeoff. Lindbergh discovers it in midflight, when he opens the sandwich bag, and hangs the medal on the instrument panel. Later, when he reaches Cherbourg on his way to Paris, Lindbergh realizes that he is running out of fuel. Fatigued and bewildered, Lindbergh pushes himself to the limits of endurance to reach Le Bourget. Gazing at the St. Christopher medal dangling from the control panel, he blurts out, “Oh, God help me!”
“Lindbergh finally accepts what the medal represents: a belief in a higher power whose existence he had previously doubted,” Bernard Dick writes. Lindbergh then spies the brightly lit Paris, shown in breathtaking long shot; he flies over the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, proceeds along the Seine River, and on to Le Bourget. As the mass of well-wishers cheers him, “Wilder cuts back to the medal, enabling it to share in the applause.”29 Some reviewers were incredulous at finding an expression of faith in a Wilder film. But the director who began every script with “Cum Deo” was not averse to portraying a religious incident in a film, especially since it came from the script’s source. Waxman’s score throughout the sequence is marked by brass, celesta, and shimmering strings. This unearthly music spirals upward, suggesting the heights of human endeavor.
The movie concludes with the authentic newsreel footage of the frenetic ticker-tape parade filmed on the occasion of the real Lindbergh’s official welcome in New York City. Some film historians call Ace in the Hole Wilder’s “virulent hate letter to America,” according to Neil Sinyard and Adrian Turner; “The Spirit of St. Louis is perhaps the nearest Wilder has ever come to writing a love letter to the country of his adoption.”30
The Spirit of St. Louis collected a sheaf of largely positive notices when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall. “Under veteran director Billy Wilder, Spirit comes off as Class A picture-making,” Variety declared. But the reviewer added a caution: “Considering that Lindbergh is today little more than Mr. Anonymous to youngsters, the spontaneous box office appeal” will perhaps not be “commensurate with the scope of the production.”31 Indeed, Warner’s marketing researchers discovered that hardly anyone under forty knew who Lindbergh was.
Inevitably, more than one reviewer jeered at Stewart playing the youthful Lindbergh with a toupee, describing “a geriatric James Stewart in a henna hairpiece.”32 Other critics noted
that the picture’s 135-minute running time was likely to make viewers fidget at times, instead of drawing them into the story.
The movie ultimately took in only $2.6 million domestically—not even half of the production cost. It was an expensive and conspicuous flop. Jack Warner writes in his autobiography that the picture was “the most disastrous failure we ever had. Every studio has them from time to time, but this was one of the worst. I have never been able to figure out why it flopped.”33 Wilder said, “I felt sorry for Jack Warner. I thought of offering him his money back; but then I thought he might take it.”34
Stewart attributed the movie’s disappointing audience response in some degree to Lindbergh’s failure to assist in promoting the picture. Lindbergh did not help matters, said Stewart, by refusing all requests for personal appearances; he would not even talk to the press. Lindbergh was not, after all, familiar to the younger generation of moviegoers, the major ticket buyers. Still, Stewart remained a champion of the Lindbergh film, calling it one of the best movies of his career. “I thought I got right into Slim’s character; I guess he thought so too.” In fact, Lindbergh pronounced a favorable verdict: the movie “captured the spirit of his journey.”35 Historian Joseph Roquemore declares that, except for the pesky fly in the cockpit, “Wilder’s absorbing adaptation of Lindbergh’s memoirs remains perfectly faithful to history . . . and beautifully staged all the way.”36
In addition, Wilder drew skillful performances from the supporting characters who populate the flashbacks, most notably Father Hussman (Marc Connelly) and Bud Gurney (Murray Hamilton), Lindbergh’s sidekick from his air circus days. Wilder tackled difficult subject matter with a sense of humanity and honesty; the result is moving and ultimately hopeful. Nonetheless, the movie’s excessive length makes one wish that Wilder had made a more compressed film.