Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [53]
For several days Sturges waited around for two more screenwriters to arrive from Hollywood to try to find a way to make Steve’s part more acceptable to him.
But it didn’t happen as quickly as either Sturges or Steve had hoped, and Steve’s refusal to participate in any more filming threatened the entire production schedule. To try to improve the situation, the always-cool James Coburn and an increasingly disgruntled Garner got together with Steve to try to hash things out and come up with a solution. According to Garner, “Coburn and Steve came over to my place in Munich and I said, ‘What’s your problem, Steve?’ It turned out after a few hours of talking, Steve wanted to be the hero [in the film] but he didn’t want to do anything heroic. Turned out there were a lot of things that were suggested to him but he turned them all down, saying they were corny. Finally, we simply told him he was a hero and he liked that. If you remember, he escapes by himself. They capture him and he becomes a hero, and that’s what he wanted. Or at least that’s what Coburn and I convinced him he wanted.”
Despite volunteering to help solve the impasse, Garner never liked Steve’s professional manner or style of acting. Years later, while being interviewed by Charlie Rose, Garner remained critical of Steve’s abilities, especially during the filming of The Great Escape: “Steve was a little out-of-hand always. He had a great persona that people loved, but I could always see him ‘acting,’ and that was the kiss of death.”
Steve’s behavior offset also caused the production problems. He drove himself to the production every day from his hotel in Munich in a souped-up Mercedes that was always followed closely by the German police who, despite Steve’s “bodyguards,” during the course of the shoot gave him thirty-seven tickets—for speeding, for nearly hitting stray farm animals, and once for wrapping the car around a tree. In court for that appearance, he was almost sent directly to jail when the judge discovered Steve had left his driver’s license back in the States. Steve’s self-presented defense was that he used his driving time to help him prepare for his role in the film—mental Method acting. The studio lawyers were in court nearly every day trying to keep Steve from being locked up. Their most effective argument, and the one that kept him free, was that if Steve couldn’t work on the film, the production would shut down and the local economy would lose millions (this despite the fact that Steve had been on strike for several days before he ran into his legal problems).
Up until now, despite all of Steve’s disruptive behavior, Sturges’s belief in his star’s ability had never wavered. “When you find somebody with that kind of talent, you use him. Steve is unique, the way Cary Grant is unique, or Spencer Tracy or Marlon Brando. There’s something bubbling inside of him … that’s why you can’t take your eyes off him on screen.”
But after the script was revised and Steve was still grousing, Sturges finally gave up and told Steve not only that was he going to write Virgil Hilts out of the script but also that Garner’s role would be enlarged. “We’re going to blend McQueen’s character into Garner’s,” an enraged Sturges shouted to the entire set. “Steve McQueen is no longer on this picture!”
Furious, Steve called Stan Kamen and William Morris Agency head Abe Lastfogel in New York, both of whom immediately caught a plane and arrived in Germany the next day, hoping to get Steve and the film back on track. After several hours of negotiations between the four parties, Sturges agreed to try to build up Steve’s character even more than he already had. The first thing Sturges did was to promise that the baseball-and-mitt routine would run through most of the film. The second thing Sturges okayed was something Steve had from the first lobbied to get into the film: the motorcycle