John Wayne _ The Man Behind the Myth - Michael Munn [149]
That would have started the rumor that we were already in trouble.
“What the Pentagon objected to was to do with the massive attack by Vietcong on the American base. The officials wanted the South Vietnamese helping to defend the camp, so that was easily rectified.
“They objected strenuously to the second half of the story in which a Special Forces team was to carry out a covert raid in North Vietnam, kidnap a North Vietnamese general, and blow up some of their bridges in the escape back. The Pentagon said that the Green Berets would not invade North Vietnam.
“So I rewrote the script so the second half was about the Green Berets kidnapping a Vietcong general who’s inside South Vietnam.
But there were hundreds of other changes they kept coming up with. A maverick director would have said, ‘To hell with them. I’m making the film my way.’ But Duke was no maverick. He believed it was his moral obligation to make a film that represented our government’s policies in Vietnam. The problem was, the Pentagon didn’t really want the public to know what was really going on, and so the script became just a flag-waving war film. They finally gave their approval to the script. But my typewriter was worn out with the rewrites. I’d say both Duke and I, as his writer, suffered the backlash the film encountered—Duke more than I. But he stood up 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 279
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to it all. The one thing he would never do is criticize his country, and he wasn’t going to blame his country for some of the film’s failings.
“And the one thing we were going to get across in the story was that Communism is not an option for Americans—or for anyone.
And the critics—especially the ones on the East Coast—saw something distasteful about that. But they thought it was wonderful when they saw American soldiers behaving like Nazis in Apocalypse Now. Mind you, wasn’t that a great line? ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’ As a writer I have to admit that’s a great line. But as a piece of entertainment for American audiences, I thought it was pretty appalling.”
Jim Hutton, who provided the film with most of its more humorous moments as the picture’s resident light comedian, and also its darkest moment when he is impaled on a bamboo booby trap, said, “Duke was trying to please too many people who had an interest in what the film finally said. Hollywood is such a fickle place. If The Alamo had not created such a storm simply because it had been directed by John Wayne, then Duke would have been able to make The Green Berets into his film. But what Warner Bros. did was send another director to take over a few months into production, and it caused problems for Duke.”
The new director was Mervyn LeRoy who had directed Wayne in Without Reservations.
I spoke to LeRoy by phone in 1981 and asked him how he came to codirect The Green Berets. He said, “When Duke Wayne was making his Vietnam War film, I found myself fulfilling a family obligation. Before working at Metro, I was at Warner Bros. where I married the daughter of Harry M. Warner. So I became related to all the Warner brothers. Jack Warner agreed to back The Green Berets around the time the studio was taken over by Seven Arts, and Warner Bros.–Seven Arts was the company producing The Green Berets.
“So Jack Warner called me and said, ‘Duke Wayne is making an expensive war picture for us. It’s about the Vietnam War.’ I said,
‘Yeah, I know, and I have to tell you, nobody’s ever made a film about the Vietnam War and I think it’s risky.’ Jack said, ‘Yeah, I 21184_ch01.qxd 12/18/03 1:43 PM Page 280
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know. But it could be a good old-fashioned war picture but instead of the Japanese or Germans, John Wayne is fighting the North Vietnamese.’ I said, ‘Jack, there are people in this country who don’t want this war.’ He said, ‘But there are still enough people in this country who’ll see John