Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [139]
Ursula Andress was growing so weary of the interminable production that she started complaining to the press hounds. “I started the film on January 11,” she sighed to Sheilah Graham in April. “It was to be just a few weeks. It is already three months, and we can’t finish before June. Why? There are so many things. If Peter feels tired, we must slow down. We are never allowed to rush because of him. . . . [And] he writes a lot.”
Andress, for example, was originally supposed to have performed a scene with Peter atop an elephant, but Peter nixed it and decided that the scene should really feature bagpipers. The deleted elephant had, however, provided Peter with an opening, which he seized, in one of his early battles with Orson Welles. Welles and Sellers were shooting the key scene in which LeChiffre and Tremble play the crucial rounds of baccarat. Welles decided it was time for him to do a little improvising, so instead of going along with the script, which required his character to lose the game, he performed some off-the-cuff card tricks and won. Sellers is said to have blown a gasket. “No!” Peter shouted in front of the assembled crowd of technicians and extras. “I’ve had enough from one elephant.”
The stories keep coming. According to McGrath, there was to have been a scene with “a giant roulette wheel when Sellers had a dream. And he’s the ball, spinning around on this giant roulette wheel, and the red and black divisions of the roulette wheel are girls’ legs in dresses—they’re in black and red. He’s spinning around the rim, and then he rolls into someone’s crotch.” The sequence was shot but discarded; Peter didn’t like it.
Then, in what Jacqueline Bisset recalls as a “sick joke,” Peter shot her in the face with a blank. In the scene in question, Tremble creeps into a window with his gun drawn and is most surprised when the occupant, Miss Goodthighs (Bisset) recognizes him and calls out his name. Tremble was supposed to turn and fire the gun in her general direction, but Peter pointed it right at her and pulled the trigger. “First I thought I had actually been actually shot,” Bisset later said. “Then, when I realized it had been a blank, I thought I had been blinded. My face looked like a shower spout of pinpricks leaking blood. To get shot in your first scene with a big star—that’s a nightmare.”
And day after day, everybody was kept waiting for everybody else to show up on the set. In the annals of Casino Royale, Peter has taken the brunt of the blame for the delays. But the production logs tell a more nuanced story: “Waiting for Mr. Sellers.” “Waiting for Mr. Welles.” “Waiting for Miss Andress.” “Waiting for Mr. Welles.” “Waiting for Mr. Sellers.” “Waiting for Crowd . . .” By mid-March, with Casino Royale already running weeks over schedule, Peter was calling in sick. “Only able to shoot fifteen seconds.” “Only able to shoot twenty seconds.” “Only thirty seconds possible.” By the beginning of April, Feldman had calculated the total of Peter’s delays at fourteen-and-a-half days at a cost of $705,000. Peter simply left the production sometime in May or June, which is the reason Terence Cooper suddenly takes over as yet another 007. At that point, somebody had to replace Peter, and it didn’t much matter who.
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Casino Royale was the biggest, most overproduced mess of Peter’s career, but even it has a few good moments, one of which features Peter in a ridiculous striped outfit of no discernable category—a one-piece affair with shorts and a revealing V-neck (in the back), a sort of Matelot pajama—spinning with Ursula Andress on a round and revolving fuschia-covered bed surrounded by mirrors. Andress’s character, Vesper, is filming home movies at the time, after which, meaninglessly, she shoots still photos of Evelyn Tremble as Hitler, Napoleon, an anonymous flaming