Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [38]
2 The Execution of Private Slovik was eventually made into a 1973 TV movie, starring Martin Sheen in the title role. Sinatra had nothing to do with the project. When he first announced his intention to make the movie, both he and it were met with outrage in Hollywood, led by both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. At the time, Sinatra was actively involved in JFK’s run for president and was heavily pressured by Joe Kennedy to drop the project, which he did.
3 The network actually did prevent him from appearing in at least one other big-screen movie that year, Blake Edwards’s 1961 adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The male lead, the aspiring writer who falls in love with Holly Golightly, instead went to George Peppard.
4 This was the first strike in SAG history and it had to do with the issue of residuals. Only those contracts that were signed before March 7, the strike deadline, were considered valid (the Writers Guild was already on strike for a month and pressuring SAG members to go out as well, to strengthen the industry’s union movement). Hence, Powell needed to renegotiate and sign Steve’s contract before the strike, and Sturges needed to get his film cast and into production to beat the deadline as well.
5 Walter Newman, angry over rewrites to his version of the script, would later insist on having his name removed from the credits.
6 According to Relyea, they weren’t the only bad boys on the set. “Being a newlywed didn’t stop Yul from being Yul. On a few occasions during the shoot, Yul summoned the beautiful young Mexican actress, Rosenda Monteros, to his trailer after Doris drove off in their Cadillac.”
7 It finished out of the twenty top-grossing movies of the year. The top-grossing film of 1960 was Ken Annakin’s Swiss Family Robinson (Disney Studios), which took in $20,178,000. Exact figures for The Magnificent Seven were not made available.
I’ve been through stageville, hatesville and successville, and finally it’s added up to what I’ve been looking for—a degree of privacy that allows me to live in my home on a hill with my wife and the children and doing the best I can at my work. My idea of having it made.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
NINETEEN SIXTY-ONE KICKED OFF WITH AN UNEXPECTED Wanted: Dead or Alive ratings crash and an accompanying celebratory whoop from Steve when the series was canceled. Its ninety-fourth and final episode aired March 29, 1961. The show was the victim of a new time slot, Wednesday evenings at eight-thirty, product of a poorly thought-out network programming strategy that put it opposite the classic sitcom and perennial ratings winner The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on ABC and the prime-time version of the popular NBC daytime game show The Price Is Right, which itself benefited enormously from the blockbuster western series Wagon Train, which preceded it, and The Perry Como Show, a fixture on the network, which followed.
Moreover, Wanted: Dead or Alive was now slotted to follow something called The Aquanauts, which did not do well at all and was quickly canceled, and lead into My Sister Eileen. CBS may have actually wanted to kill the show because of its increasing cost, due primarily to Steve’s ever-expanding contract. Whatever the reasons, Steve celebrated his last scene onset by doing a jig in front of everyone. When asked by a reporter if he was going to miss the show, Steve sniffed, “Now I don’t have to lean on Josh Randall and his shotgun. I’m up for recognition now.… I stole that shotgun when I checked out. I’m gonna have it made into a cigarette lighter.” Later on, whenever he was asked about the show’s cancellation, he would shrug and say that Josh Randall had been killed trying to capture some bad guys. Translation: he would never play that character again.1
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