Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [56]
Interestingly, Steve hit upon the notion of owning his own production company five years before Clint Eastwood formed Malpaso. For his first venture, Eastwood chose Hang ’Em High, directed by Ted Post. What motivated Clint to create Malpaso was exactly the opposite of what drove Steve to form Solar. Clint was thrilled with the success of the Sergio Leone trilogy of spaghetti westerns that had made him an international star. The character was golden for him, but the payoff wasn’t. Clint wanted to own his pictures so he could maxmize his profits. He figured, correctly, that he could make any picture he wanted if he was also the executive producer. Eventually this led him to directing. Malpaso became a factory, and its major (and almost) exclusive product was Clint Eastwood as director, producer, and star. Once his image had been set in gold with the Leone movies, he would make films with that winning character over and over again—and make a fortune doing so.
Steve, however, had no such iconic character and no such grand ambitions. He created Solar primarily as a tax shelter that would give him creative control and pay him a salary of $300,000 a film plus a percentage of the profits while building up a solid bank account that he could call upon as his acquisition fund when he finally found a movie he wanted to produce for himself.
He began looking for that script, something of high quality and not very expensive that would show off his acting and make money for both him and Solar. He came across Soldier in the Rain, a 1960 novel by William Goldman that the author had turned into a screenplay. Steve read it, liked it, and made it Solar Productions’s first acquisition. He was able to get it relatively cheap because the original book had not been a big hit and the author was still relatively unknown.
With new property in hand, Steve struck a one-off deal with Allied Artists, which agreed to put up the money to make the movie in return for distribution rights if Steve agreed to star in it as well as executive produce. To commemorate their new partnership, Allied Artists gave Steve Gary Cooper’s old dressing room to use while he made the film.
He quickly put together a production team for Soldier in the Rain that included Ralph Nelson, an up-and-coming film director Steve knew from his days in live TV. To produce and direct, he chose Blake Edwards, who’d made 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film Steve particularly liked (he was still smarting over Dick Powell’s refusal to let him star in it because of the production schedule of Wanted: Dead or Alive).
And for what he thought was the cherry on top, Steve signed Jackie Gleason to co-star in the film. Gleason’s relatively late but fabulous comedic run-up on live television had made him hot enough to return as a star to the big screen, where he had struggled as a nameless character actor before moving to TV. Gleason’s film career had had a spectacular relaunch when he appeared as Minnesota Fats in Robert Rossen’s 1961 The Hustler, playing opposite Paul Newman, after which the rotund comic actor appeared in a number of increasingly less significant movies, including Nelson’s 1962 film version of Rod Serling’s teleplay Requiem for a Heavyweight. By the time Steve asked him to co-star in Soldier in the Rain, Gleason was eager to work again in a “big” film.
Soldier in the Rain had a military setting that was a familiar and welcome one for Steve—no doubt one of the reasons he chose this novel to produce and star in—but with a major difference that separated it from his other war movies, Never So Few, Hell Is for Heroes, The War Lover, and The Great Escape. Goldman’s novel, like so much of his early work, was a light comedy drenched in romanticized autobiographical melancholia. Comedy was something with which Steve had never been successful. The last time he had tried it,