Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [513]
Kramer knew he couldn’t possibly shoot Matt’s statement in one continuous take. “But,” he said,
it was the summation of everything he felt. What everybody else felt. What they should feel. Et cetera, et cetera. “And don’t interrupt me!” That sort of thing. So it had to be made to feel like one. My own experience as an editor helped some, because I broke it into five sections, so that he only had to do one page per day. Maybe one day was one-and-a-quarter pages and the next day was three-quarters, depending upon where it ended. But it always ended on a turn and an exit, so that it could be picked up on the next day. Or on a close-up, so it could drop back to a [wider] shot the next day. And it was all plotted out, rehearsed, reviewed with him how he would do it. And he was such a consummate artist that it [just felt] as one.
Kramer scheduled a private rehearsal—only the two of them and Marshall Schlom—for Saturday, May 6. There would then be a full rehearsal with the cast on Monday morning. Then the actual filming of the scene would begin, five days in all.
Tracy worked as usual on May 4, then was caught short of breath while Kate was still at the studio. “He was sitting in a chair hyperventilating,” Dr. Covel remembered. “Over-breathing out of anxiety.” He had no call for Friday, and Hepburn thought it best to forgo the Saturday rehearsal Kramer had scheduled. The rehearsal for Monday had to be scratched as well, and Kramer was forced to substitute a San Francisco bar scene with Poitier and Houghton for Tuesday’s scheduled work on the summation.
In a letter to a journalist, George Glass described the on-the-set situation as “tenser than tense.” There was a terrific sense of relief when Tracy reappeared on Wednesday morning and work on the sequence could finally began. The company was now five days behind schedule, but Kramer could see no way of picking up speed without exacerbating Tracy’s latent anxieties and risking the completion of the picture. The actors took their positions, and, after some preliminaries, Tracy began his oration:
MATT
I have a few things to say and you just might think they’re important. This has been a very strange day—I don’t think that’s putting it too strongly. I might even say it’s been an extraordinary day…
The first day’s work was completed at 11:45 and Tracy went home to nap as he did on Thursday and Friday, working for the week a total of six hours and ten minutes. On Monday it took another two hours for Tracy to work up to the point where, on Tuesday, the fifth day, he could make one of the most affecting speeches of his life. His call, as usual, was for ten o’clock, but Kramer, in concert with Bill Rose, had eliminated the last scene in the script, where the families gather at the airport to see John and Joey off to Geneva. This would be it—the end of the picture—and it couldn’t be done in the space of two hours. Tracy, for the last time on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, would work a full day.
Told by Mrs. Prentice, in a previous scene, that he has forgotten it all, forgotten what true passion is, Matt has remained out in the night air, pondering what she has said, what Christina has said, what John and Joey have said, and attempting to square it all with his own values and beliefs. Rose’s screenplay called for Matt to show fierce intensity, to shake his head, to register uncertainty, doubt, anxiety.
Now he stands staring vacantly up into the night at where, when he was a boy, Heaven was said to be. His glance moves slowly but with the speed of light from star to star as he recalls exactly what it was like to love Christina as he first loved Christina. And it’s true: he had forgotten, and he knows it. He stands there, and his expression now reveals a kind of astonished wonder. He seems stunned. Quietly, but aloud:
MATT
I’ll be a son of a bitch…
Tracy had dispensed with the tics and grimaces called for in the text, giving the audience a clean slate on which to overlay the character’s thoughts and transitions.