Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [488]
There was this flying unit which Paul and Frank were doing, and they were supposed to supply stunt flying and process plates and points of view, things like that, but they found a gravy train in Stanley. There was a unit manager assigned to this unit, Austin Jewell, an old-time unit manager from M-G-M, but he was ineffectual … No wonder Stanley was running out of money. The flying stuff was supposed to take a couple of weeks, and it was taking a couple of months … Mantz kept piling on the bills, the accountant would pay them. Two-thirds through the picture, no money. Stanley went to United Artists to get the extra money, and UA wouldn’t give it to him. UA said they would scrap the picture.
Kramer’s patron at UA had always been Max Youngstein, the onetime partner and vice president of the company who had backed Kramer when he first said that he wanted to direct. But Youngstein had retired after the Berlin premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, and the remaining management at UA seemed to regard Mad World as another surefire money loser, outsized and unfunny. Kramer eventually had to raise outside capital to complete the picture, even putting in some of his own. Meanwhile, he was struggling to finish with Sid Caesar by Labor Day, when Caesar was due to begin rehearsals in New York for Little Me. By the time they retreated to the studio in early November, the pressure was off. “They had to get rid of the comics because they all had other dates,” Tracy explained at the time. “They let me go to the end. The hell with me.”
Tracy’s principal scenes took place in Culpepper’s office, which had been constructed on Revue’s Stage 29. The cast had been winnowed down to just Tracy and his police station colleagues: Alan Carney, William Demarest, Charles McGraw, Zasu Pitts, Madlyn Rhue, Ken Peters, and Harry Lauter. Concurrently, a second unit was assembling the slapstick finale in which the cast finds itself trapped on the collapsing fire escape of an abandoned high-rise, a sequence accomplished with composite elements and the integration of miniatures.
For Tracy, whose comedy had always grown from character, Culpepper, like all the characters in Mad World, was pretty much a cipher, as one-dimensional as a cartoon. Rose gave him a bit of a backstory, saddling him with an unhappy marriage, a whining daughter, and a pending retirement that looked anything but cushy. It wasn’t much for him to go on, and with nine days of work ahead of him, Tracy made use of a device he had never before needed in his long career—an “idiot board” (as John Barrymore used to call it). “We’d have to set up a cue card here and there—not word for word, but just reminders of little things,” said Marshall Schlom. “And he asked for it.”
Whatever real playing Tracy did in the picture was confined to these Greek chorus scenes, mostly opposite Bill Demarest, who had been with him as far back as The Murder Man and was an old hand at playing cops. It’s Culpepper’s fifteen-year obsession with the Smiler Grogan case that animates him, the buried loot he’s sure is right there under their noses. Cracking the case should be reflected in the size of his pension, Culpepper argues, his pliable face a spectrum of emotions. (“Now come on, Aloysius, get in there and pitch a little for me, will ya? Now you know, you know Al, I got it coming …”) It was a tough part, tougher than it looked, and the scenes on Stage 29 didn’t go as smoothly as they might have at an earlier time, when he wasn’t as drained of energy and stamina. “When you get to my age,” he told a visiting newsman, “you want to do a picture that’s about something—Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind. I don’t know what the hell this picture’s about. But I like to play comedy. It’s hard to explain. There’s a lot more joy connected with it. This picture has been an experience.”
Did he have any regrets? “No,” he said,