Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [137]
“And then there was a break, and we went into the trailer to talk about another scene, and he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and he swung a punch at me.
“He hit me on the side of the jaw, and it sort of bounced off me, you know—it was halfhearted—but I thought, What the hell? If you want to hit me, come on. So I tried to hit him. Jerry Crampton, a stunt man, was outside, and he opened the door. Peter and I were, as Terry Southern later said, ‘aiming blows at each other like school girls trying to hit wasps.’ Crampton grabbed us and separated us and said, ‘I love you both; I do not know which one of you to hit.’ Sellers and I started laughing, and that was it.
“Then he disappeared again, and he was afraid to come back because of embarrassment. If he came back and I was still directing, and he walked onto the set and Orson was there, everybody was going to say, ‘Oh what a shit you are.’ So he said to me, ‘I’ll come back if I don’t play any scenes with Orson,’ and I said, ‘Get lost,’ and that was it.” And with that, Joe McGrath left Casino Royale.
Actually, Feldman had been against McGrath from the beginning and later claimed only to have hired him because Peter had demanded it. Feldman claimed that he’d wanted multiple directors from the start. If that was really the case, then the producer got exactly what he wanted.
As early as February, Feldman tried to get Bryan Forbes to come on board again, but Forbes refused, particularly after he learned that Columbia executives, still stung by his refusal to accept the job originally, were reacting to his tough financial demands by calling him a blackmailing whore behind his back. Feldman turned to Blake Edwards, who said that all it took was a million dollars. Feldman didn’t have a spare million dollars, so he turned to Clive Donner, whom Peter rejected. Feldman then hired Val Guest. And Ken Hughes. And Robert Parrish. And Richard Talmadge. And John Huston.
All in all, the filming of Casino Royale took place not only at Shepperton but at the Pinewood studios and at MGM’s studios as well, with different directors directing different actors in different scenes with three directors of photography—Jack Hildyard, John Wilcox, and Nicolas Roeg. The whole thing took eight months to shoot.
None of this was easy on Charlie Feldman. There were midnight meetings with Peter and Britt, whom Peter was at one time pushing to be cast in the film. Phone calls and meetings with five new directors along with a growing list of writers. More meetings with Peter and his slew of agents and managers and lawyers—Harvey Orkin, Bill Wills, Freddie Fields, John Humphries. . . . Explanations by letter and wire to Columbia executives in Hollywood, who were becoming apoplectic at the rising costs. Then Orson decided he’d had enough and left for Barcelona.
Feldman brought Robert Parrish onto the project not only because Parrish was an experienced director (Fire Down Below, 1957, with Rita Hayworth and Robert Mitchum, among others), but because he was an experienced editor, too, having cut such films as John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942) and Max Ophuls’s Caught (1949). (Parrish had also been a child actor; he’s one of the mean boys who pitch spitballs at the Tramp in Chaplin’s City Lights, 1931.) Feldman’s hope was that Parrish would know what to do with the countless reels of disjointed footage into which his multimillion-dollar baby, the still far from complete Casino Royale, had degenerated. (The final cost was at least $12 million, at that time a very high price tag.)
Parrish was also known for being a gentleman, someone who could handle a temperamental movie star—or two—so at Feldman’s behest, Parrish flew to Barcelona