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

songs and seeing a portion of his script, Harrison agreed to continue. The question now was who was going to direct the picture. The three biggest names bruited about were John Huston, William Wyler and Vincente Minnelli, each an Academy Award winner. “Darryl wanted Huston,” Jacobs said, “but I figured there was already enough temperament with Rex without getting Huston involved. Minnelli was old-fashioned and Wyler would take fifty takes of every shot and the picture would end up costing thirty-five million. Who else was there? Dick Zanuck liked Fleischer ever since
Compulsion
, so I said okay. Now we had to persuade Rex, so Fleischer and I fly to his home in Portofino and I sort of indicated to him that if he didn’t want Fleischer, maybe we could get along without him. We spent a nice weekend, and at the end, Rex gets me alone to talk about Fleischer. ‘Nice chap, good chap,’ he says, and that was that.”
    Jacobs leaned across his desk. “So now Rex had a contract, he was getting more money than God, we were in business,” he said. “Then Rex says, ‘Good-by,sue me, I’m not going to do it.’ ” Jacobs shuddered theatrically. “We have a picture called
Dr. Dolittle
, twelve million going in, and no one to play Dr. Dolittle. We scratch around and come up with Christopher Plummer. The studio liked him, he’d been in
The Sound of Music
, but it was no secret we were in a jam and we had to lay out $300,000 to get him. So Fox wires Rex, something like, ‘As per your request, you have been relieved of your
Dr. Dolittle
assignment and replaced by another artist.’ Next day his agents call, Rex didn’t mean it, he just wanted a few changes, and so on and so forth. So we pay off Plummer, he’s got us over a barrel with a nice legal contract. But Rex is back and we’re ready to go.”
    Dr. Dolittle
actually began shooting in England in late June, 1966, with Harrison, Samantha Eggar, Anthony Newley and Richard Attenborough in the leading roles. In fifty-eight days of shooting in England, only five were rainless. Most of the English locations were in a classic little Wiltshire village called Castle Combe. Fleischer had obtained all the necessary permissions for widening and damming a small river nearby, turning Castle Combe into the tiny seaport of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, where Dr. Dolittle lived. (He had also built a community television antenna, so that he could remove anachronistic TV aerials from Castle Combe’s cottages.) The first morning of shooting, two young Englishmen, objecting to Hollywood’s transformation of the village, tried to blow up the dam. This set the tone for relations between Castle Combe and the
Dolittle
company for the rest of its stay in England.
    Another problem was the training of the animals befriendedby Dr. Dolittle. Months before shooting began, hundreds of animals had been selected for training at Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, California. Because of the strict quarantine laws in the United Kingdom, two sets of animals had to be trained, one for shooting in Hollywood, the other for shooting in England. All the principal animals in the cast—Jip the Dog, Polynesia the Parrot, Chee-Chee the Chimpanzee, Sophie the Seal and Gub-Gub the Pig—had doubles. Pigs grow so rapidly that Jacobs had to replace Gub-Gub every month with a new and properly sized porker, and both Chee-Chee and Jip had not one but three backups. Simulating sound-stage conditions, the trainers at Jungleland constantly flashed lights at the animals and moved among them so that they would not get skittish when finally confronted with the high-powered arcs and the hundreds of people present on a set. Six months were devoted to teaching Chee-Chee the Chimpanzee how to cook bacon and eggs. On Stage 20 at the Studio, Dr. Dolittle’s study was constructed in anticipation of the fact that few of the animals were housebroken. The floor was slightly tilted and fitted with a drain so that it might be hosed off easily. In