Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [78]
Continuing his Oscar campaign, Steve, in an interview with syndicated columnist Bob Thomas, this time deemphasized Vietnam and talked instead about his level of exhaustion, brought about by the grueling shoot, indirectly continuing his threat to retire. “I don’t mind telling you,” he told Thomas, “I’m beat. The thing I’d like most to do now is go to sleep for 20 hours.” In response to a question about considerable money he was making, Steve said, “I’m just working for the government now. Not that I mind paying taxes. This is a great country, and I’m proud to be part of it. But does Uncle Sam really need all that money? … I’ve also got agents to pay, press agents, a business office, etc.… I work on a salary, that’s a 70-30 deal—70 percent for the government, 30 for me.… If I’m really lucky I’ll be another Jimmy Stewart—last 20 years or more. But it isn’t likely. Three bad pictures and they start giving me smaller dressing rooms.”
After that interview, he wisely turned away from carping about not earning enough money and having to pay excessive taxes, never a good idea for millionaires who play populist heroes in the movies, and set about promoting Nevada Smith, which opened June 29, 1966, to okay reviews. To everyone’s surprise, it went on to become one of the summer’s biggest movies, grossing $13.5 million in America, just behind Mike Nichols’s fiery debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the Edward Albee play adapted for the screen by Ernest Lehman), which earned $14.5 million in its initial domestic release.
The New York Times critic Vincent Canby was not impressed with the film but favored Steve in his review: “It is just too long. It also is too episodic.… [But] Mr. McQueen is tight-lipped, craggy and believable.”
Wanda Hale in the New York Daily News wrote: “You cannot connect the current Nevada with the one played by the late Alan Ladd [in The Carpetbaggers]. Everybody has missed the point, which could have stimulated curiosity: how Nevada Smith got to Hollywood and into the movies. A tedious Western with too little suspense and too much talk.”
Overseas, it caused riots at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain when too many people showed up with not enough seats to accommodate them. In Trinidad police on horseback had to be called in to prevent violence from breaking out due to the same problem. In England, in Japan, and throughout Europe, it was regarded as the quintessential American movie, regularly outgrossing everything there except for one other western that would not open in the United States until the following year: Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood.
The outsize financial success of Nevada Smith, which received no Oscar nominations, did not hurt Steve’s Oscar chances for The Sand Pebbles, and he went back to his unorthodox approach to winning an Oscar nomination for it.
And then he quietly decided he wasn’t through making motion pictures after all.
One day Robert Relyea received a call from Stan Kamen about the possibility of Relyea joining Steve at Solar as the company’s executive director, with a guarantee of getting to direct at least one movie (something that had been Relyea’s primary goal while with Sturges). Relyea said yes just in time to be a part of a multimillion-dollar nonexclusive six-picture deal Solar made with Warner Bros. Given the blockbuster success of Paramount’s Nevada Smith and the pre-release industry buzz for Fox’s upcoming The Sand Pebbles, in October 1966, Jack L. Warner personally announced the details of the deal to the press—six films in five years, three of them to star Steve, and three his company would produce.4 To welcome Solar to Warner’s Burbank location, Jack L. had the studio’s tennis courts replaced with a two-story office building that was to be Solar’s new headquarters. The once-mighty studio was, along with the rest of old-school Hollywood, starting to fall apart, and its founder was desperate to find a dependable star moneymaker. He believed that Steve, with Relyea