Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [485]
Bill Rose loathed the idea of working in Hollywood, but with Ealing’s demise in 1957, he found himself adrift and scrambling for work. After a long dry spell, he traveled to California to make the rounds in April 1960, meeting Kramer for the first time in his office on the Revue lot. Rose, as Kramer later remembered it, pitched So Many Thieves along with four other story ideas, verbally developing the property as a “giant comedy” with an all-star cast of comedians, a “monster chase story, heavily larded with visual humor, and spun off against a background of time pressure in which, literally, every minute of screen time represented exactly two minutes of elapsed time in terms of the story’s progress.”
When it came time to put the story down on paper, however, Rose found himself blocked, and his agent at William Morris, Mike Zimring, urged him to simply write it out in the form of a letter. Zimring charged Kramer $20,000 for the resulting document, and another $330,000 for the original screenplay. Rose retreated to his home on the Isle of Jersey to begin work on the script, and Kramer caught up with him only briefly that summer—once in London, again at Cannes.
Rose had a mania for structure. Collaborating with his British-born wife Tania, the first few months of work were spent developing a proper character mix and puzzling out the mechanics of the thing. “For weeks and weeks and weeks,” recalled Tania Rose, “there were these eighteen feet of cardboard lying across our living room floor, marked out as if for some outsize game of snakes and ladders. There was a large white square outlined in blue with blue arrows leading out of it every which way which had simply COLLOQUY written in the middle. And then there was a bit of a grind while Bill got out the dialogue.”
The Roses turned in their first draft, carrying the title Something a Little Less Serious, just as Judgment at Nuremberg was being readied for release. But the massive 297-page script lacked an ending. “We tell ourselves that if there are to be a hundred comedians involved in this business we shall have a thousand suggestions for our pay-off to contend with before this last page is ever shot, and that a lot of them are likely to be better than any of our own devising. And if not, then we tell ourselves that, having got this far in little more than a year, we aren’t really likely to need more than another year to get a last page which really will be The End.”
In December 1961 Kramer and his attorney, Samuel S. Zagon, got Arthur Krim to agree to accept Something a Little Less Serious as one of the pictures due under Kramer’s contract with United Artists. A budget of $5 million was approved, along with the casting of Ethel Merman, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, and Spencer Tracy. Wrote Kramer:
From the onset, we were all agreed that to make it as overpowering an assault of the risibilities as possible, casting should concentrate on the top comedians of the world—all of whom would play straight parts, not their usual characterizations—to heighten the comedic effects of the script itself. That’s where the trouble started. Nightclub and television commitments usually are arranged long in advance … It became apparent after the first three telephone calls that the only way in which we would get all these people together for the minimum of three months in which each would work, would be to shoot in the summer, when they were free of television commitments and could, hopefully, juggle their nightclub dates … Happily, everyone we approached was tremendously interested. Not in the parts we had in mind. There was a considerable amount of horse-trading before we finally arrived at a completed cast.
In spite of his obvious affection for Kramer, Tracy wasn’t convinced he belonged in such company and was frankly wary of the entire affair. If the whole point of the movie was a mass assemblage of great comedians, then just where exactly did he fit in? He had, of course,