Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [362]
Where Adam’s Rib had come together quickly, all the pieces falling smoothly into place, Pat and Mike proved a much tougher job. Though conceived expressly for Tracy and Hepburn, the initial reader’s report was not encouraging: “A not too successful attempt to pound a clever but slight and difficult idea into comedy form. It has lots of laughs, but despite the unquestioned ability and experience of the writers, it doesn’t have quite the flair to put this sort of thing across. Many of the gags are pointless and familiar, as are the trick camera effects. And the galaxy of famous sports and political figures involved certainly deserve a better showcase.”
Pat and Mike was still under development when Tracy finished with Father’s Little Dividend, and the Hacketts said he proposed a plot for yet another sequel, this one taking him and Elizabeth Taylor on a European cruise. Joan Bennett, however, didn’t remember it that way: “When they asked him to make another [sequel] to Father of the Bride, he said no, he didn’t want to be playing Judge Hardy.”
All this left him free for something a little closer to Schary’s heart, a gritty courtroom drama called The People Against O’Hara. Anything but escapist fare, it began as an outline called Johnny O’Hara’s Life by Eleazar Lipsky, a novelist and assistant district attorney who was attached for four years to the homicide bureau of New York County. The author of Kiss of Death, Lipsky proposed a robbery-murder scenario, detailing in documentary fashion the events flowing from an ordinary criminal act. “We will see not only the machinery of justice turning, but also the steps taken by the defense to anticipate the prosecution. The cat-and-mouse play between the two should develop simultaneously.” Offered initially on an option basis, Lipsky subsequently submitted a 366-page manuscript, which became the novel on which the picture was officially based. Molding Lipsky’s story into a star turn for someone of Tracy’s magnitude took nearly a year.
The “contract trouble” Edward Streeter alluded to was typically over vacation and rest periods and the number of pictures Tracy could be required to make in a given year. In August 1949 a new interim agreement was signed that limited him to just two pictures a year and allowed thirteen consecutive weeks of vacation. Late in 1950 the William Morris Agency undertook a further modification of the deal, extending his rest periods to a minimum of six weeks between films and boosting his compensation to $150,000 a picture, or $5,769.23 a week on a fifty-two-week guarantee.
By doubling production, Schary had cut overhead costs per picture in half. He shortened production schedules—Woman of the Year took fifty-nine days to shoot while Father of the Bride took just twenty-eight days—and cut the average number of writers on a project from 7.3 (under the old Thalberg model) to 1.2—a dramatic reduction. He also began to root out the deadwood, bringing in younger directors who weren’t mired in the old Metro ways and were used to working at a faster clip.
One of those men was John Sturges, a former editor who, at the age of thirty-nine, was younger than many directors on the lot by at least a decade. In little more than a year, Sturges had completed four films for M-G-M, including The Magnificent Yankee—which had so impressed Tracy that he recorded a voice-over for the film’s trailer. Sturges, however, still needed Tracy’s approval to direct him in The People Against O’Hara. “It was traditional,” he said, “if you met anybody, you, your agent, and that person, if he was a star, had to meet at Romanoff’s. And we did. And talked about the picture we were going to