Warren Beatty: Dick Does Tinseltown

As on all of his productions, it was the casting of Dick Tracy that worried Warren Beatty the most. "It's like buying a country," Beatty has said of casting in the past. Once the inhabitants of the country are assembled and Beatty decides he likes them, he relaxes. Well, somewhat. There were many challenges in casting Tracy, not the least of which was how to bring the gallery of the detective's arch-villains to the screen. Since there were no actors who look like Mumbles, Pruneface, Big Boy, 88 Keys, and The Blank, makeup experts Doug Drexler and John Caglione were hired to create a galaxy of grotesque visages. But the question remained: who would wear their state-of-the-art Halloween masks and bring them to life?

Beatty hit on a ploy that would give Tracy some added star luster, and hopefully create publicity in the bargain: he'd cast the villains with top stars. And it's a tribute to Beatty's clout that he was able to get names like Al Pacino (to play Big Boy), Dustin Hoffman (to play Mumbles), and the one-time Tracy contender James Caan (to play Spuds Spaldoni). This guess-who's-who-under-the-special-effects game has been played before, from The List of Adrian Messenger to Coming to America, but Beatty reportedly got his inspiration from the Ziggy cartoon pinned up in his office: it asks, "If Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman aren't the same person, then howcum they are never in the same film together?" Now they are.

To get Pacino, Warren took advantage of a casual lunchtime encounter at La Scala in Burbank. Beatty friends say he's shrewd enough to know that you don't walk up to Pacino and say, "We want you in our movie," so he reportedly confided that he was having a tough time casting Tracy's gangster nemesis. "For more than a year we've been through everyone," Beatty told Pacino, "starting with Brando." Then he gave Pacino a passionate pitch about the movie, but especially about Big Boy, who owns the Club Ritz where Breathless Mahoney struts her stuff. Pacino reportedly called the very next day, saying that he thought he'd be perfect for the part.

According to the call sheet, Big Boy was played by one Guido Frascati, and indeed, with his sharp chin, pencil moustache, liver spots, and black hair slicked back, Pacino is unrecognizable. Everyone on the set went along with the joke, calling him Guido, never Al. Observers say he stayed in character all day long, wisecracking in his Big Boy rasp, "Gimme a walnut or I'll crack your head like a walnut."

Last April, less than six hours after Dustin Hoffman had won his Oscar for Rain Man, and three days before he was due in London to begin rehearsals as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Hoffman too sat in the Tracy make-up chair for three hours a day, to be transformed into Mumbles, all thick fake eyebrows and overblown, warped lips. ("Next-time-Warren-calls-say-no," Hoffman kept muttering to himself like a mantra as he sat in the makeup chair. After their ill-fated teaming on lshtar, Hoffman of all people might have known better.) One visitor was confronted with the bizarre sight of the purple-hatted, twisted-lipped Hoffman pacing back and forth on the cartoon-colored set, declaiming Shylock's immortal lines.

Beatty only had Hoffman for three days, so he shot like there was no tomorrow. Because Mumbles couldn't be understood, Hoffman could say anything he wanted and get away with it. His outrageous, bawdy asides reportedly made for great outtakes, much to the entertainment of the cast and crew. In any case, by the time Hoffman left for England, Beatty had captured a full hour of Mumbles on film.

When Beatty told fames Caan that he would have key scenes with Al Pacino, Caan readily agreed to come aboard. This was the first time the two actors had been teamed up since The Godfather, and so Caan proposed playing his character a la Marlon Brando in his Oscar-winning role. Makeup czars Caglione and Drexler gave Caan a hawk-like Italian nose with age spots, and Beatty let Caan run with his inspiration.

Caglione and Drexler approached Beatty, telling him they had a perfect casting idea for the role of Pruneface: Ronald Reagan. After all, they reasoned, the ex-president was now jobless, and perhaps he'd welcome the chance to resurrect his acting career. But when Beatty turned out to be cool to the idea, the makeup duo retained their notion by giving the Pruneface mask a decidedly Ronald Reagan-ish look. R.G. Armstrong, a character actor who has appeared in such films as The Best of Times and Predator, landed the role.

In the old comic strips, Tracy's villainous foe The Blank was really mobster Frank Redrum, a hood who hid behind a featureless mask. But for the movie, The Blank went through several revisions. "Warren was more particular about Blank than anyone else," says Drexler. "He wanted to hint at dark tragedy, to get more mystery into the story than Gould's drawings suggest."

The identity of the actor who plays The Blank was the most closely guarded secret on the secretive Tracy set. In true comic book cliff-hanger style, Blank turns out to be the key to the whole movie: all is revealed in the final reel as Blank peels off his face to become--well, guesses ran from Jack Nicholson, Beatty's co-star in The Fortune and Reds, to Madonna, who, it was rumored, lobbied hard to play another character in disguise.

A "Love Boat's" array of other guest stars turn up in Tracy, from Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde co-stars Estelle Parsons and Michael J. Pollard, to Dick Van Dyke, Mandy Patinkin, and Charles Durning.

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