Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [82]
The day Orson Welles came to the set, everyone was very excited. I had personally overseen all the goodies to put in his trailer. Then I saw Barney, who worked the cue cards on a lot of variety shows. I asked him what he was doing there.
“I do Mr. Welles’s cards,” he told me.
Mr. Welles uses cue cards? I thought. On a movie? I was flabbergasted. I was about to act in scenes with the great Orson Welles, and he was going to be reading from cards! Sure, Bob Hope and Dean Martin used them all the time on their TV specials, but this was a dramatic film. I felt sick to my stomach.
I needn’t have worried—they didn’t call him Orson Welles for nothing. When we began to rehearse our first scene, it was clear that the way he held his head to read the cards—with his chin slightly down and his eyes peering at me from beneath his intense brow—he looked perfectly right from the camera’s view. And it didn’t hamper his great acting style in any way.
I, on the other hand, didn’t know where the hell to look. His eyes weren’t available to me, and I could hear the cards constantly flipping behind me. I’ve always known that an actor’s performance is in the eyes of the other actor. I remember when I was first studying acting, I asked my father what he did when the actor he was working with didn’t give him anything back. His reply: “I fire him.” Funny, but not practical.
Luckily, in all my scenes with Orson I had to be in a very anxious state. Mr. Potter was the bad guy and I was the little guy being beaten down by him. I barely had to prepare. The real situation had everything I needed to be fearful and anxious.
THE SHOOT WENT SMOOTHLY. Well, we went over budget and over schedule, but the network was thrilled with the rough cut. We were in postproduction, and all we had left to do was put in the music. We had hired Johnny Mandel, one of the great movie composers, to create the score. And after that, we’d be done.
I was looking forward to finishing. Carole and I had been working on the movie full-force for nearly nine months, and we were exhausted. Our plan was to deliver it to the network by Thanksgiving, which was late for promotion, but there was no way we could have done it any faster. It was a miracle that we made it in time for Christmas.
One other reason I was eager to be done was because I was thinking a lot about Phil. We had met in January—just a month before all of this had started—and had been quietly dating throughout. Things were getting serious—so much so that he wanted us to finally come out of the closet with our romance. So he decided to throw a party at his house—rent a tent, hire a band, make it a big bash—to introduce me to his friends and some of the interesting Chicago people he thought I’d like to meet, like Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Mike Royko and others.
Phil’s party was scheduled for the weekend right after we would finish the final mix of the movie—which included the music.
What’s that old saying? “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” The Friday before the scoring session, Johnny Mandel had a heart attack.
We were in shock. Johnny was such a lovely man, and Carole and I had spent many hours spotting the music with him, and had been eager to hear what he was writing. I called the hospital to see how he was. He sounded relieved to be there, but very weak. He was such a pro—he felt terrible to have let us down.
“Don’t worry about us, and just take good care of yourself,” I said. “There will be other pictures for us to work on.”
Okaaay. Panic. We not only had to get a new composer, but we had to have the work done in just a few days or we would miss our mix date. And if you miss your mix date, it can take weeks to get another one. So we needed to move fast: find a composer, sit with him, watch the movie several times, select the right moments for music, then go over every