Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [81]
Capra smiled. “That wasn’t in the script,” he said. “I didn’t even know they had that sliding floor at Beverly Hills High. But when we got there that day to shoot the scene, someone on the crew told me about the pool, and I knew I had to use it. We had already shot the scene that came after it, when they walk home from the dance. So we’d have to reshoot it, because now they’d have to have wet hair and be dressed in robes.”
I was confused. “What does that have to do with not making movies anymore?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t do that today,” he said. “I’m too old. I’d just shoot the script. And that’s not the way you make a good movie.”
Sigh.
I then told Capra that I was planning on remaking that very movie, and I asked if he’d consider being a consultant on it. It would be such an honor to work with him, I said. His response was a most definite no.
His answer saddened me. I not only wanted to spend time with him, but even more, I wanted his approval.
“Well, do you have any advice for me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Don’t do it.”
I tried one more time to convince him, by comparing his classic film with all the classics in literature that had been retold many times through the years, some of them for centuries. But his stand was clear. He wasn’t angry. He was, well . . . Sicilian. And if there’s one thing I’d learned from my life experience, it was that you don’t talk a Sicilian into or out of anything. I really couldn’t blame him. He just didn’t want to be a part of the remaking of his own classic. I loved him, I honored him, I had wanted him to be a part of it. I hoped now he wouldn’t blame me for wanting to remake it.
So we forged ahead.
One of the most memorable characters in the picture is Mr. Potter, who was played in the original by the great Lionel Barrymore. Potter was a true villain. He owned everything in the small town of Bedford Falls, and delighted in buying up even more, no matter how much it destroyed other people’s lives. He was the original “greed is good” character.
In my mind, no one could replace Barrymore in that part but Orson Welles. The head of ABC movies, Brandon Stoddard, bet me a hundred dollars I would never get Welles—and for a while, he was winning the bet. At first, I couldn’t even find him, but Cybill Shepherd (who lived with Peter Bogdanovich, a great pal of Orson’s) sneaked me his home number. I tried him at all different times of the day, but he was never there, and I didn’t want to leave a message. The surprise attack is always your best chance.
Frustrated, I tried him at eight in the morning. Oh God, I thought as I listened to his phone ring in my receiver, what if he gets mad at such an early call? What if he just hangs up on me?
A groggy voice answered the phone. It was unmistakably Welles. I immediately dove into my pitch, chirping on about how I was producing a television remake of the movie, and no one but him could possibly replace Barrymore, and that we’d schedule the shoot so he only had to work five days—I was talking as fast as I could. And the poor man was just trying to wake up.
Finally I took a breath, and he spoke.
“How much will you pay me?” he asked.
“How much do you want?” I said.
“Ten thousand a day.”
“Sold!” I said.
I already had a hundred dollars from Brandon. Now I just had to find the other $49,900.
WE CAST WAYNE ROGERS as my husband, and he was terrific in the part. But as we started to work on the script, what was really interesting was to see how our gender-switch underscored the difference between men’s and women’s roles. For me to play the George Bailey part, our screenwriter, Lionel Chetwynd, barely had to change a line from the original screenplay. The character was in financial ruin, brought on by the greedy Mr. Potter, but was so loved in the town that his neighbors all stepped forward to rescue him. That scenario could happen to a man or woman, so it wasn’t hard to change the gender for that character.
Orson Welles and me. There’s something I never thought I’d say.
Bailey’s wife was another matter. In the original, all Donna Reed