Studio (9780307817600) by John Gregory Dunne Read Free Book Online

Gersh, an agent who looks like a successful former light heavyweight champion and who represents both Wise and Richard Fleischer. Gershhad no specific reason to see Zanuck, but was merely sounding out the Studio’s intentions toward his clients when their current assignments expired.
    “You ever read
Candy
, Dick?” he said as he sat down.
    “Jesus, Phil. You’re not peddling that one?”
    “Well, you know.” Gersh shrugged. “There’s two new writers on it, Waterhouse and Hall, you know, those English guys. They got a new approach. Nothing pornographic. It’s real cute, in fact.”
    Zanuck was noncommittal. “I’d want to see a script, Phil.”
    “Oh, I understand that, Dick. You can’t have that dame balling everyone on camera.”
    Zanuck smiled. He took an ashtray off his desk and brushed some ashes into it.
    “Listen,” Gersh said. “You got anything for Bob Wise after
Star!
?”
    “I’ve been laying off him,” Zanuck said. “He says he wants a long rest.”
    “He says he wants to do a little picture, too,” Gersh said. “I wouldn’t lay off him too much. There’s a lot of action on the outside and he’s listening to it.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” Zanuck said.
    “He likes it here, he wants to stay, I want you to know that,” Gersh said. “But I got to tell you he’s listening to all this activity.”
    “I’ll give it a thought,” Zanuck said.
    Gersh rose and shook Zanuck’s hand. “That’s all I ask, Dick,” he said. “We’ll talk.”
    “The problems we had with
Dolittle
,” Arthur P. Jacobs said. “I mean the
problems
.” The producer of
Dr. Dolittle
lit a slim dark Sherman cigarettello and droppedthe match into a wastebasket, looking for a moment to see that the basket did not burst into flames. He buzzed his secretary and asked her to bring him in a plate of Triscuits and a diet soda. A trim former press agent with a slack chin and dark, darting eyes, he had recently recovered from a heart attack and was on a diet. He had lost thirty pounds, given up bread and butter and was now drinking only diet soda. The air conditioner in his office in the Apjac bungalow—the name of Jacobs’ production company is an anagram based on his first two initials and the first three letters in his last name—was turned up so high that the temperature seemed almost polar. “I mean,” he said, “if I knew we were in for these kind of problems at the beginning, I never would have done it.”
    Dr. Dolittle
was only Jacobs’ second picture. He had made his first,
What A Way to Go!
, six years before and had spent most of the intervening years trying to put
Dolittle
together. His first problem was getting the estate of Hugh Lofting to release title of the books for a motion picture. For years, the Lofting estate had turned down every effort to film the
Dolittle
stories. A born promoter, Jacobs had interested Rex Harrison and Alan Jay Lerner, the librettist and lyricist of
My Fair Lady
, in the project and with these names was given the go-ahead by the Lofting estate. “So I got Lerner,” Jacobs said, munching on a Triscuit. “He worked on the picture fifteen months on and off, mostly off. We painted an office for him, painted his name on a parking space, and then we waited. And waited some more. I get him on the phone, he tells me he knows what he wants, it’s all in his head. More phone calls. He tells me he wantsto see me here, I go see him, he tells me he’s leaving for New York in ten minutes. I make an appointment to go see him in New York, I go to New York, they tell me he’s in Rome. That’s it. So I signed Leslie Bricusse to write the script and do the score.”
    The signing of Bricusse created another problem, this one with Harrison. A young English writer who had co-authored the Broadway hit,
Stop the World, I Want To Get Off
, Bricusse was an unknown quantity to Harrison, and Harrison preferred working only with people he knew. But after hearing several of Bricusse’s