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By Root 420 0

the screen tests, to which I agreed. I was just doing it as a favour, but it was obviously going quite well because one day David suggested that he actually tested me for the main part. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if we shoot it this way, and maybe comb your hair like this . . .’ and we did, but when we saw the tests we both knew straight away I wasn’t right. ‘So what do you want?’ I asked David. He thought a bit and then he said, ‘What I want is a man who’s taken a long hard look at life and has decided there’s absolutely nothing to be done.’ It came to me in a flash. I had just seen Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia and I said, ‘Omar Sharif!’ And David said, ‘Really?’ He thought some more and then he said, ‘You know, you could be right – I’m going to test him.’ And he did – and Omar got the part – although I’m not sure I’ve ever told him how it came about. So there you are – if I hadn’t failed the bloody screen test, like so many other things, I’d have been Dr Zhivago . . .

Next door to MGM there is another small studio, built by Thomas Ince, one of the first great silent film producers. The front door of the office block was very posh, designed to look like the front door of George Washington’s mansion, Mount Vernon. David O. Selznick, who was already a successful producer, bought it in 1935 for his own independent productions. One of these was Gone with the Wind – and the front door of the studio was used as the front door of Scarlett O’Hara’s mansion, Tara. David O. Selznick was a great and also very frugal producer. When he needed to film the burning of Atlanta for Gone with the Wind, he did it here on the back lot and burned all the old sets from King Kong, The Last of the Mohicans and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Not only did he get free firewood, he created the space to build Tara itself out of plywood and papier mâché. The set was eventually dismantled and is now for sale in 3 x 1 inch rectangles. As Selznick said himself at the time, ‘Like Hollywood, it was all a facade.’

Facade or not, like everyone else, I am in awe of Gone With The Wind – it’s one of my Top Ten all-time-favourite films (you’ll find more on this and the other nine at the back of the book) and Vivien Leigh is one of my all-time-favourite actors. I only met her once, while I was passing through London on my way to Louisiana to start the filming of Hurry Sundown with Otto Preminger in 1966. I was in a restaurant and John Gielgud came over and introduced himself and said that he and his companion – a tiny woman wearing sunglasses – had just been to see Alfie and had loved it. I thanked them and then the tiny woman whipped off her sunglasses and it was Vivien Leigh. I took a deep breath – even fresh from my first experiences in Hollywood I hadn’t quite got used to rubbing shoulders with a screen legend – but I was determined not to miss this chance. I explained I was about to play a southern character in Hurry Sundown with Jane Fonda and I needed some help. ‘What’s the basis of doing a southern accent?’ I asked her. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, (and she was being very nice to an annoying young actor), ‘you say, “Foah Doah Ford” – Four Door Ford – all day long. That’s all you do – “Foah Doah Ford” – Michael, and it will come to you.’ And I did say it over and over again, but I never quite sounded like Scarlett O’Hara . . .

After Selznick left, the studio became RKO pictures and Howard Hughes made some of his movies there, and after that it became Desilu, Lucille Ball’s studio. Now it is an independent studio again. I did Bewitched there myself in 2005, though even I would not claim it was in the same category as Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Citizen Kane or King Kong . . .

In their early years, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, Disney and the other great movie studios were all run by the moguls who had built them. By the time I arrived in Hollywood, the studio system had moved from the hands-on personal domination of the great studio heads, to the corporate structures they remain today. And a new set of power players had emerged: the actors themselves – and their