Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [138]
There was just one thing, Parrish then mentioned. “Peter doesn’t want to film any more scenes with you.” And with that, Parrish later declared, “Orson got up from the table, came over, kissed me—square on the lips—and said, ‘That’s the best news I’ve ever heard!’ ”
The two men returned to London, but shooting still didn’t proceed on schedule. According to Parrish’s wife, Kathleen, Peter would drive around in his car and constantly call the studio on his car phone to see whether Welles was on the set. For his part, Welles would start drinking champagne at nine in the morning and continue all day long. The hours went by—Orson was quite the life of the party—and then Peter would stick his head in the door and Orson would immediately and loudly needle him and nothing would get done that day.
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Charlie Feldman’s contracts alone were creating a massive pile on his desk. John Huston, the director of such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) turned up in March as one of the Casino Royale’s directors as well as one of its actors. Huston had not only just finished directing The Bible (1966). He’d played Noah, the narrator, and the Voice of God, too. Maybe Feldman thought that only He could control Peter Sellers.
The screenwriter John Law began work in March, too. Peter insisted on it. Law was a television writer who worked, along with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Denis Norden, on David Frost’s program, The Frost Report. Peter thought he’d be great for Casino Royale, and so Law was added to the lengthening list of rewriters.
John Law was just the latest in what was to be a very long line of scribes; at least eleven people wrote dialogue for, restructured the story of, tinkered with, and destroyed the work of others on the script of Casino Royale. Only Mankowitz, Law, and Michael Sayers got screen credit. Woody Allen, Val Guest, Terry Southern, and Peter himself contributed to it as well, uncredited. (On top of everything else, Peter and Feldman spent March and April going back and forth with each other over whether Sellers would get a writing credit. He didn’t.) The novelist Joseph Heller (Catch 22), the television writer Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (Batman), and none other than Peter’s Hollywood nemesis Billy Wilder were also brought on board by Feldman at one point or another to try and salvage this great, wobbling behemoth, but nobody has ever really sorted out exactly what any of them wrote or whether any of it managed to find its way into the finished film.
John Huston was ensconced in style at Claridge’s when the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, also in London, tried to get into the act as well. He sent over to Huston some new script pages for Casino Royale with a little note that might have just as easily applied to the whole fiasco: “If you can use the enclosed, help yourself. If not, tear it up.”
By springtime, rumors of the conspicuous catastrophe were raging through Hollywood and London like two clouds of loud mosquitoes. They continued to bite until well after the film’s release. Peter “got hung up on safety,” a Hollywood reporter divulged, “and his constant calls from his Rolls squad car to Scotland Yard to report traffic violations frequently made Page One. He insisted on immediate police action and often got so carried away [that] he would make the arrest himself. Several afternoons of production were lost when Sellers appeared in court with his civilian arrests.” This was an exaggeration, though it is true that on one occasion Peter did bring a reckless driving charge against another driver,