Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [32]
THE ONLY problem was, CBS would still not let Steve make any features (especially westerns), and it appeared that he would have to pass on the film, as he had already done with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Steve threw a fit and called on Hilly Elkins to intervene.
Elkins wasted no time in getting Dick Powell to agree to a sit-down meeting. Powell, however, was having none of it. He had a hit TV series and a star that he had created, and wasn’t about to give him away to the movies. No matter how Elkins tried, Powell would not budge. Later that day, Elkins called Steve and told him, calmly, to have “a little accident.”
Steve understood what Elkins meant. After a scheduled promotional stop for Wanted: Dead or Alive in Hartford, Connecticut, Steve took Neile up to Boston for a quick holiday in his studio-supplied rented Cadillac. According to Elkins, “He promptly took his rented Cadillac and ran it into the Bank of Boston and came out of it with whiplash, which everybody gets when hitting something hard when driving. Most Hollywood insiders thought it was a staged act even with Steve’s neck in a brace. He was a racing car driver. He knew exactly what he was doing and understood what I was asking him to do. The car had a few dents in it.”
When Steve returned to Los Angeles, his neck was indeed swathed in a stiff white brace. Powell was not amused. He knew Steve was faking, using his “injury” to hold up production on the series until he received the okay to star in The Magnificent Seven. He had to settle this before Steve’s contract expired. An industry-wide strike was about to hit Hollywood and shut down any new projects (including negotiations on Steve’s new contract for another season on the series) but not affect any existing contracts or any film already in production. Powell tipped over his king and allowed Steve to make the movie.4
Elkins, however, wanted more. “Not only did Powell let him do the picture, but I also demanded they double Steve’s salary before he would return to the series.” Infuriated, but fighting against the strike clock, Powell agreed to that as well. The next day Steve signed on to play the part of Vin, one of the other six behind Brynner, who would only allow lesser-name actors to appear in the film with him.
Sturges, meanwhile, wanted a whole new script written and suggested Walter Newman for the job. Newman’s previous screen credits included Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, written with Lesser Samuels and Billy Wilder, and which had been nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar. Newman had also written the first episode of the enormously popular TV western Gunsmoke. The Mirisches promptly hired him.5
Sturges wanted something else as well—sole producing credit on the movie. That ignited a lawsuit between Sturges and Morheim. Walter Mirisch then approached Morheim and asked what it would take to make him and his lawsuit go away. According to Morheim, money was paid, he agreed to change his credit to associate producer, and he had no involvement in the making of the film. Then Anthony Quinn sued Brynner and UA for $650,000, claiming he had been promised the leading role, but he lost in court.
Sturges then set about casting the rest of the film. He had been impressed with Charles Bronson’s work on Never So Few and signed him on, as well as Brad Dexter, who had been in Sturges’s Last Train from Gun Hill. Sturges cast Horst Buchholz, a German film star still largely unknown in America, as Chico, a move that upset Yul Brynner, who didn’t want another European “exotic” in the picture. As a result, Brynner kept his distance from Buchholz during the entire production. Another surprise move by Sturges was casting Eli Wallach, who at this point had made only a handful of films, most notably Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, and was considered primarily a New York stage actor, for the key role of the Mexican outlaw leader Calvera.
To this day Wallach claims to be “mystified” by the choice, but nonetheless threw himself into the role. “In all the cowboy pictures I saw as a boy, the