Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [439]
With Jesse L. Lasky during the making of Desk Set. (BETTY LASKY)
After the preview, Louise, who could be excused for detesting the movie, came over to the Ephrons in the lobby. “It’s wonderful,” she said graciously. “We’re going to call Spencer as soon as we get home.”
Work on The Old Man and the Sea had resumed on July 2, 1956, but the Nassau expedition was, by and large, a failure. They got some long shots of the boat with the fish lashed alongside, they got some backgrounds for Tracy, some sunrises and sunsets, and some usable shots of shark fins racing through the water. There were, however, no live sharks to be photographed—at least none that would respond to direction or appear in numbers large enough to make an impression on screen. The artificial fish, they found, was completely unphotogenic, and it was subjected to repainting after some tests were made. Carefully posed, the fish would be convincing enough dead, but as a living thing it was pretty much hopeless. Nassau was a costly location, even without Tracy’s participation, and production was suspended again on July 28, John Sturges wanting to rethink every aspect of what had been done so far. Soon he found himself at odds with Ernest Hemingway’s mania for realism.
“They got mixed up with reality and film,” he later said.
The fact that the story takes place in the Gulf Stream off Cuba doesn’t mean that that’s the right place to shoot it. It isn’t. The Gulf Stream goes at 12 miles an hour and it’s rough. They took a very realistic approach to the film. And if you’re going to do that, then I don’t think Spencer Tracy was a good choice. He’s an actor of obvious skills and emotional power and all the things that make him such a great actor. But he’s certainly not a starving Cuban fisherman. I think if you attack the picture that way, you’re in trouble. The plans they had to get the shark, the plans to get the fish, got all scrambled up and 50 sets of people came up with 50 sets of solutions and the first thing they knew was that they’d spent $3,000,000. Why I took it on I’ll never really know. I knew Tracy well. The idea intrigued me, to play it as an exercise in imagination and emotion. A theatrical approach. Now if anyone objected to that, the hell with them—they weren’t going to like the film. This approach I found interesting and I felt I could profit by the mistakes they’d already made.
At Warner Bros., Leland Hayward had Zinnemann’s footage cut together. In early July he and Tracy ran the material—opening with the Old Man coming into the harbor and continuing through to his leaving at dawn—and thought it all quite beautiful, some of it breathtakingly so. They talked of where the narration should go and how it might conflict with the scripted lines of spoken dialogue. They decided it would be almost impossible to mix the two on shore, and Hayward suggested that the voice-over carry the story until the Old Man found himself alone out at sea. “He didn’t remember when he first began to talk aloud when he was by himself,” the narrator would say. “If the others heard me they would think I was crazy,” the Old Man would then say aloud, “but since I am not, I do not care.” Whether Tracy could take both roles—that of the narrator as well as that of the Old Man—was still undecided.
Tracy deflected other offers, eager to be done with the marathon project. He saw Sturges and cinematographer James Wong Howe off for Hawaii on June 9, 1957, and followed on the fifteenth accompanied by John, Larry Keethe, and a new secretary, Jeri Tyler, whose job it would be to keep John entertained. The Kona Inn was a beautiful place with a large pool, and John and Jeri spent their days swimming, sunning, shopping, and practicing tennis. Kona had been selected because there was no current or tide to speak of, the color of the water was right, and it was possible to shoot very close to shore. It was, in other words, a quiet location that could, above all else, be controlled. A rented camera barge called the Julie B. was outfitted as