Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [8]
Paramount was doing poorly so it had little to lose. Anticipation was already building for the new Warner Brothers movie Bonnie and Clyde, which reinvented the gangster drama as a counterculture fable with two killers as glamorous and sexy antiheroes. Evans wanted to do the same thing for horror—update it for a young crowd. But he knew that would not happen with William Castle as the director. Evans imagined the result: workmanlike cinematography, a low-rent cast, standing under dark shadowy lighting on a studio lot waiting for a payoff with a man in red pajamas and a pitchfork. There would be organ music, perhaps, and a spectacular advertising campaign that included no lack of exclamation marks and promises of extreme terror. Vincent Price would probably be involved.
Evans understood showmen like Castle because he was one himself. Through force of will, he transformed himself from a clothes salesman in New York to a golden-skinned lothario, a studio executive who understood the counterculture, and a populist who traded in art. He knew that you needed someone with more class to turn Rosemary’s Baby into a hit. He called Charles Blühdorn, the head of Gulf and Western Industries, which had recently bought Paramount, and made his case.
Four days later, Blühdorn and Castle hammered out a deal. After shaking Castle’s hand, Blühdorn walked back behind his desk and asked what was not an innocent question. “How old are you, Castle?” The producer knew what that meant. At fifty-three years old, he was considered almost over the hill. “Have you heard of Roman Polanski?” Blühdorn said, making the case that Castle did not want to hear. “A genius. And thirty-two years old. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Polanski, with his youth, directed Rosemary’s Baby and you, with your experience, produced,” he said, sticking in the dagger. “You could teach each other so much.”
Castle’s heart sank. He had seen movies by Polanski and there was no questioning his talent. But Rosemary’s Baby was his chance at respectability. Ever since he left school to work as an assistant to Bela Lugosi, Castle had imagined mainstream success, but the wait had been too long. Castle stood up and angrily resisted. “Look, Mr. Blühdorn, the reason I bought Rosemary’s Baby with my own money was to direct the film,” he protested. “It’s going to be an important motion picture, and I’m not going to miss the opportunity of directing. I direct Rosemary’s Baby or no deal!”
It was an empty threat—and they both knew it. Paramount could tie up his film forever, and with all his savings in the book, Castle couldn’t afford to have it languish. Backed into a corner, he did the only thing he could do: agree to terms and sign up as a producer who would monitor shooting. It was a decision that would haunt him. Even though his name was on the film—and he even made a cameo, showing up outside a telephone booth—Castle was given little power over the artistic direction of the movie, and even less credit for it. While the hiring of Roman Polanski seemed like another example of the kind of backstabbing and office politics that went on in Hollywood, it represented something more than that: a passing of the torch from the Old Horror to the New.
It took a producer from the Old Horror to recognize the potential of a book about the Antichrist, but a new kind of director to shake all the dust out of the story. The man who would modernize the Devil was, pointedly, an agnostic Jew. Roman Polanski did not believe in the supernatural. But he did believe in the existence of a certain kind of evil. He had seen the effects of the Holocaust firsthand growing up in Poland. His mother died in a