Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [111]
Steve told Foster he would read it. When he did, he was surprised at how good it was, especially the complexity of the main character’s tough-but-tender nature, which could shift from prison victim to sociopath to passionate lover to generous and sympathetic robber without missing a beat.
And the deal was good, too. Foster, who was producing, could offer nothing up front but a full 15 percent of the gross. The more money the film made, the more he made, and because his share was based on the gross there could be very little industry “tinkering.”
Carter “Doc” McCoy was an outlaw, tough, rangy, and vulnerable, the type of antihero Steve felt at ease playing. McCoy especially reminded him of the charismatic killers done to perfection by his two favorite film actors, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart; no matter how dark the characters these tough guys played, their roots were always in the working class and there was an ever-present element of self-righteous social outrage in them. Because of it, they always managed to hold the audience’s sympathy and compassion in the palms of their fight-scarred hands. Audiences empathized with their plight. The closest he had come to playing a character like McCoy was the rootless and rebellious loner/victim Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles.
When the project was first announced, Joyce Haber, a Hollywood columnist, was given the script to read and immediately saw the connection between Bogart and McCoy. “The role is a natural one for Steve,” she wrote in her interview column. “It’s that of a Bogart-type character who’s involved in a heist.” “He’s bad, he really is bad,” Steve told her with his tongue firmly behind the trigger of his mouth. “And being the Peter Perfect man that I am it’s gonna be difficult for me.”
David Foster’s previous big-screen effort, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which he had done with Beatty in the lead, was a critical success but a financial failure. For a brief period Foster retreated into episodic TV until he came across the 1958 “dime novel” paperback original The Getaway, by Jim Thompson. Thompson was then a struggling crime writer who would achieve lasting fame after his death, but at the time Foster had optioned his book, Thompson was sixty-six, frail, and severely alcoholic. Broke and without any income, Thompson had taken to making photocopies of all his old novels and handing them to any producer he could get close enough to, in the hopes that someone, anyone, would option one. Foster got a copy of The Getaway and immediately saw it as both his and Thompson’s salvation.
Foster recognized in the script elements of Bonnie and Clyde. In The Getaway, tough bank robber Carter “Doc” McCoy’s beautiful and devoted wife, Carol, sleeps with corrupt local Texas politician Jack Benyon, with Doc’s permission, to get him out of jail. In return for his freedom, Doc will rob a bank and split the take with Benyon. However, once Doc is freed, nothing goes as planned, and after some surprise turnabouts, a spectacular hotel shootout and fire, and some intense sexual scenes, Doc and Carol make a last desperate run for the Mexican border and freedom. (They make it—at least in the version of the film seen in the United States. When released abroad, several countries insisted on a different ending, wherein Doc goes back to jail).2
Foster optioned the rights to the book for $2,500, from Thompson’s agent, Mike Medavoy (after Paul Newman had let his option on it lapse), which included an obligation from Thompson to write a first draft of the screenplay. Steve, meanwhile, began preparing for the role. As a model, he used the character of Roy Earle, as played by Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh’s 1941 film of W. R. Burnett’s ex-con adventure novel High Sierra, adapted for the screen by Burnett and John Huston. Steve watched the film over and over again, studying