Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [89]
WHEN THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR completed production, Steve wasted no time moving on to Bullitt, the first Solar/Warner film project to actually get past the development phase and into production. Relyea had found a 1963 novel he liked called Mute Witness by Robert L. Pike (a pseudonym for author Robert L. Fish) and thought it would be perfect for Steve. Mute Witness follows the last days of an aging cop in New York’s 52nd Precinct. The book had been optioned four times before, and each time it proved unmakeable for one reason or another. A film about an aging New York City cop was not a concept that especially turned anyone on in Hollywood.
Nonetheless, when former TV producer Phil D’Antoni read it, he took out an option and brought it to Warner, with Spencer Tracy in mind for the lead. Warner passed, mainly because of its uncertainty over the increasingly frail Spencer’s ability to carry what was, essentially, an action film. The project lay dormant for several years until D’Antoni sent it to Relyea at Solar, who liked it and called Steve about it. “I received his approval without anything more than a five-minute conversation.”
Relyea then hired Alan Trustman, who had written The Thomas Crown Affair, to write a new draft that shifted the locale to San Francisco, lowered the detective’s age by at least two decades, and renamed him Frank L. Bullitt. Always reluctant to play any authority figure and especially a cop, Steve was nevertheless intrigued at the film’s possibilities.
When Relyea received the revised script, he called in Harry Kleiner, a screenwriter he knew and liked (Kleiner had written the script for Richard Fleischer’s highly successful 1966 Fantastic Voyage). Steve trusted Relyea’s opinion and readily agreed that Kleiner should turn the screenplay completely inside out, eliminating most of the dialogue, emphasizing the action, and, because Steve always preferred location to studio settings, using the actual streets of San Francisco whenever and wherever possible. After reading Kleiner’s version, Steve okayed it, even if the plot now seemed a bit muddled and confused.
According to Relyea, the script had problems that went back to the original novel and couldn’t be solved. “With all due respect, Pike’s novel will never be mistaken for a literary masterpiece, and our screenplay left holes in the story big enough for tanks to dance through. The fact that Bullitt had a weak script points out how, in filmmaking as in other art forms, it’s possible for a silk purse to evolve out of a sow’s ear.”
Not to worry, Neile, ever the advisor, told Steve; the title alone would make it a blockbuster.
Steve now began screening films in search of a director. He was after new blood, someone he hadn’t worked with before but who he felt could handle the film’s showpiece, a nine-minute-and-forty-two-second car chase through the streets of San Francisco. After viewing dozens of films, none of which did anything for him, Steve and Relyea watched relative newcomer Peter Yates’s little-seen Robbery, the British-born director’s take on London’s Great Train Robbery. The film is stark, fast-moving, and well detailed in police procedures, but the thing about it that really caught Steve’s eye was its great car chase, shot on location through the crowded cobblestoned streets of London. Although the film was not a big hit in America, it was a smash in Great Britain and proved to be, after four good small features and several episodes of the highly popular ITC TV series The Saint, Yates’s mainstream directorial breakthrough. Steve liked the film and loved the chase. He and Relyea sent Yates the script for Bullitt, and Relyea sat down to work out a budget with Warner.
In addition to the location shooting and car chase, with a wild climax at the San Francisco Airport, Steve also wanted Relyea to budget for an L.A. crew he wanted to bring with him, something that was not normally done by the studios mainly because it was too expensive. On-site shoots always used local pickup crews.
Relyea took the budget to Warner, which promptly turned