Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [109]
2 The winner for Best Actor went to John Wayne in Henry Hathaway’s True Grit. Wayne was considered long overdue for the award, which was given to him for what was, decidedly, not his best performance or movie. The other nominees were Richard Burton, representing old, glamorous Hollywood, in Charles Jarrott’s Anne of the Thousand Days; Dustin Hoffman, part of the new generation of actors, in John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy; Jon Voight, also part of the new wave, in Midnight Cowboy; and Peter O’Toole, also old Hollywood and, like Burton, foreign, something the Academy always revered, in Herbert Ross’s Goodbye Mr. Chips. Interestingly, neither Newman nor Redford was nominated, despite the fact that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid grossed $103 million in its initial domestic release ($500 million in 2010 dollars), a truly astonishing amount of money for 1969, when the average ticket price in America was $3.50.
3 Peter Revson’s father was Martin Revson, his uncle Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, the family cosmetics empire. His brother, Douglas, was killed in a racing accident in Denmark, in 1968. Peter died in 1974 at the age of 35 in a racing accident in South Africa.
4 The broken leg was not the only discomfort Steve endured to indulge his favorite sport. Steve suffered from acute hemorrhoids and had to wear two sanitary napkins to ease the pain of years of bouncing up and down on hard leather triangular riding seats.
5 According to a source who wishes not to be identified here, at one point during production Cinema Center considered replacing Steve with Robert Redford and making a much less expensive film. Redford considered the idea but turned it down. Apparently Steve was unaware of Cinema Center’s growing panic, or if he was, he did not care. It is unclear if he knew about the Redford offer.
6 There is some question as to why Steve really fired Kamen. According to industry sources, Steve had wanted to let him go for a while because Kamen had refused to take a cut in the industry-standard 10 percent agent commission. Even if he had wanted to, Kamen’s employer, the William Morris Agency, had an ironclad policy about commission rates. Some believe this was the real reason Steve let Kamen and William Morris go, and used the dispute over the rewrite as the excuse to break his contract.
7 Freddie Fields, a partner in First Artists, was also the founder of Creative Management Associates (CMA), one of the first serious rivals to William Morris’s domination of Los Angeles-based talent. CMA later became International Creative Management (ICM). Because Fields also became Steve’s manager, he was able to play fast and loose with his fees, and reportedly often waived his agent fee while collecting his management fee. Fields, who died in 2007, was also the longtime agent for Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Barbra Streisand. He was known for his ability to handle “difficult” clients. Later on, he would help make stars out of Mel Gibson and Richard Gere. Steve McQueen originally joined First Artists in 1971, followed subsequently by Dustin Hoffman in 1976. Approximately two dozen films and television shows were produced by First Artists. First Artists was the brainchild of Creative Management Associates talent agent Freddie Fields. Stars would forgo