It only took Warren Beatty 15 years, 10 directors, 4 studios, and 1 lawsuit--not to mention over $30 million-- to bring his version of Dick Tracy to the screen. Here's how it happened:
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When Warren Beatty, filmmaker and procrastinator extraordinaire, finally commits to a film project--a process he approaches as joyfully as he would, say, castration--all the decisions are made around the huge, circular kitchen table at his Mulholland Drive home high in the LA. hills. The shape of that table is fraught with almost Freudian significance: when he was a child, Beatty's school principal father terrorized the family from his position at the head of the dinner table, so Beatty's table deliberately has no head. It doesn't need one. Wherever he is, Beatty is in charge, and given his druthers, he doesn't move far from the spot, except to bicycle over to his office on Beverly Glen Circle.
Grazing foods are laid out--carrots, celery, oranges, and nuts--Beatty has a slight sugar problem, and needs to eat frequently. To this table over the past 15 years have come actors, producers, agents, production designers, directors, writers, costume designers, cameramen, all of them anxious to be part of Beatty's long-cherished dream of transforming Chester Gould's upright, lantern-jawed crimebuster Dick Tracy from a yellow-hatted comic strip detective into a full-fledged superstar of the big screen.
When it comes to putting a film together, Warren Beatty has the drawing power of a Coppola or a Spielberg. This is the guy, after all, who made Bonnie and Clyde, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, and Reds. What's a little Ishtar among friends? When Beatty calls, they come running, whether it's at the crack of dawn, or after midnight.
Visitors report bumping into Madonna making popcorn in the Beatty kitchen, finding a dripping wet Beatty wrapped in nothing but a towel, or coming upon Al Pacino sitting all alone at the table, dressed in dark colors as though he'd stepped out of the last scene of The Godfather to contemplate the mysteries of Gould's complex villains.
"It was the hottest spot in town," says one of the frequent visitors. And now the results of all that heat are coming to the big screen. For better or worse, Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy is the most eagerly anticipated film of this summer.
This isn't the first time showbiz has tried to capitalize on the success of Dick Tracy, one of the longest running comic strips in history. An actor named Ralph Byrd made a cottage industry out of playing Tracy, in four Saturday afternoon serials churned out by Republic from 1937 to 1941, then in two of the four Tracy features produced by RKO from 1945 to 1947, then on the hit ABC-TV series that ran from 1950 to 1951. (No doubt Byrd, rather like Clayton "Lone Ranger" Moore and Adam "Batman" West, would still be fighting to wear his fedora at shopping mall openings today, had he not died of a heart attack in 1952.) In 1961, Tracy returned to TV as a Saturday morning animated cartoon.
But that's ancient history. The modern history of Dick Tracy begins 16 years ago, and makes for a dizzying tour of the confusion that reigns in the corridors of power in Tinsel-town: though many saw the box office potential, the project died a thousand deaths during the 16 year wait to get the green light.
Fade in, 1974. Convinced that audiences are ready for movies based on comic strips, producer Michael Laughlin buys an option to make a new movie version of Tracy, and sees maybe Philip (_The Right Stuff_) Kaufman as the director. Laughlin's agent at the time, Mike Medavoy, is so excited by the idea, he takes Laughlin along to pitch it to Universal's Sid Sheinberg. But Sheinberg is betting instead on another pop culture icon--The Lone Ranger.
Not discouraged, Laughlin shops around, finds that Martin Scorsese is interested, with perhaps Robert De Niro or Robert Redford or Paul Newman or maybe even George C. Scott playing the man with the two-way wrist radio. Excited, Laughlin enlists first Dick Lochte, then Tom (_The Man With the Golden Gun_) Mankiewicz to write Tracy, and takes it to UA--where he's met with thumbs down.
Cut to late 1974. Laughlin shops Tracy to Warner Bros., where he learns that writer Charles Roven has already completed a Tracy script on spec. Laughlin likes Roven's work, and they team up--only to have Warners unable to meet their price for the project. Universal likes Roven's script, too, so Tracy finds a home there after all. By mid-1975, on the basis of Shampoo, Warren Beatty is a top box office name. Laughlin and wife Leslie Caron (a past Beatty paramour) have dinner in Paris with Beatty and current paramour Michelle Phillips. Names of possible Tracy directors range from Orson Welles to John Huston, and Laughlin takes a meeting with Welles. But then Beatty says he rather likes the idea of playing Tracy if the director is his old pal Roman Polanski. All these discussions prove academic, however, because it's impossible to pin Warren down. He has more momentous fish to fry, like his proposed bio-pix of John Reed and Howard Hughes. Laughlin's option runs out, and the movie dies.
Cut to 1977. Writer-director Floyd (American Hot Wax) Mutrux bumps into Laughlin on the street, hears that Laughlin no longer has the option on Tracy, and gets excited. Mutrux and producer Art (The Untouchables) Linson buy the rights to the comic strip for a modest $25,000--and march over to see then-Paramount chief Michael Eisner.
"Floyd has a million dollar idea," says Linson.
"It's James Bond for Paramount," says Mutrux. "The Adventures of Dick Tracy."
Eisner gets excited. "Get in here," he yells to producer Don Simpson, then working in the studio's story department. Everybody agrees this idea will fly. Mutrux and Linson's lawyer, Tom Pollock (now head of Universal), makes the deal with Paramount. James Caan and Harrison Ford are the leading candidates to play Tracy. Mutrux, set to direct, flies to Bora Bora to work out the screenplay with Lorenzo (King Kong, Flash Gordon) Semple Jr., who is in the tropics toiling on Dino De Laurentiis' Hurricane. But nothing comes of it. For years the Tracy project languishes in development--though money's spent, no green light is forthcoming to make it a "go" picture. Mutrux, wishing to get on with other movie projects, steps aside as director, though he and Linson will produce when--and if--a movie is ever made.
Cut to 1981. Over at Universal, John Landis is now excited. A Tracy fan from childhood, he has always wanted to put his comic book hero on the big screen. Dirty Harry Clint Eastwood is so anxious to play Clean Dick, he actually lobbies Landis, but Landis--who has hired struggling screenwriters Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. to pen an entirely new screenplay-- nforms Eastwood that as far as Universal's concerned, Beatty still has the inside track. Cash and Epps, starting over from scratch, claim that their script "has nothing to do with what Floyd has written. We've enlarged the Breathless Mahoney character to make her a sultry torch singer, part of a romantic triangle with Tracy and Tess Trueheart." Then suddenly, Landis exits the project; he has his hands full with heavier matters--the legal fallout from the Twilight Zone helicopter crash.
Cut to 1983. Director Walter Hill enters the picture. Needless to say, he's excited. We're still at Universal, though now Paramount and Michael Eisner are in on the action too: Tracy will be a co-production, under Hill's direction for producer Joel Silver, with Mutrux and Linson wearing executive producer hats. Months of work go into the new version of the script. Beatty will play Tracy--but just in case he changes his mind again, Harrison Ford's waiting in the wings to assume the fedora. Sure enough, Beatty doesn't sign on the dotted line--he's reportedly asking for $5 million, plus 15 percent of the gross, and is giving studio executives palpitations with demands that would put profits into Beatty's pocket before MCA and Gulf + Western get theirs. In any case, at $18 million, the picture is getting too pricey. Then comes an even more crucial crunch: the director and star have genuine "creative differences"-- Beatty, who's still around but still hasn't signed on the bottom line, wants to make a comic book movie with heavy makeup and exaggerated colors, while Hill wants to bring the characters to life realistically, on the streets of Chicago.
Cut to February 1984, and we're back at Paramount. Barry Diller, still suffering aftershocks from Beatty's huge Reds budget, insists on scaling Tracy back even more--to a downright insulting $14 million. Beatty pulls out, but the studio moves ahead. Richard Benjamin is going to direct this smaller, less tongue-in-cheek Tracy. Sets have been built to the tune of $1 million. Then, exit Benjamin, who's off to direct Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in City Heat, and re-enter Martin Scorsese--and Warren Beatty.
Cut to April 1985 and, with Barry Diller gone to Fox, Tracy's fate at Paramount hangs in the balance. Besides the continuing concern about controlling the cost of the film, another factor looms: Beatty just doesn't seem ready to commit to making Tracy. It begins to look like Tracy won't happen. It doesn't happen.
Cut to August 1988--three years have gone by. lshtar has happened to Beatty's career, so he's now ready to make Tracy. Taking his belief in Tracy with him, Michael Eisner has gone from Paramount to Disney. Tracy gets the go-ahead there, as long as Beatty can stick to the strict $25 million budget. The credits have now changed to read: produced, directed, and starring Warren Beatty (no mention anywhere of Mutrux and Linson). The script is from Cash and Epps, with uncredited assists from Beatty, Bo Goldman, and--it is whispered--Elaine May. (Those close to Tracy say Ms. May whispers back that those are not her fingerprints on the script.)
On February 1, 1989, shooting at last begins, on a closed set at--ironically enough--the Universal Studios lot, the only one with sufficient space available to house the huge Tracy sets.
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.
The casting of Tess Trueheart, Tracy's perennial sweetheart (and in the old strip, his wife) proved tougher than expected. In tried and true Hollywood fashion, Beatty interviewed just about every beautiful young actress in town, searching the glossy starlet crowd in vain for that innocent girl-next-door quality he felt Tess needed. One well-known blonde actress remembers, "Warren thought maybe I'd make a good Tess. He suggested that maybe I'd like to come by his house later. I told him that if I was cast, then maybe I'd come by his house later."
It was Sean Young who finally got the role. But after about a week of shooting, Young--no stranger to losing film parts-- became the film's first victim.
"Tess was a tough call," notes one film aide. "What Warren needed from Sean he couldn't get."
"The chemistry between them just wasn't right," says co-producer Jon Landau. Another observer remarked, "Sean was too hard for Tess--she just didn't have it. Nothing was happening between her and Dick--the sparks weren't flying."
Beatty and his team spent a long weekend watching scores of other videos before finally settling on Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
The film's most coveted role was not Tess, but the pivotal part of bad girl Breathless Mahoney, a classic femme fatale who tries to bend the upright Tracy to her lowdown ways with such vintage vamp dialogue as, "You're lying--you want me the same way I want you." Some of the top names in the business--among them, Kathleen Turner, Kim Basinger, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Melanie Griffith--were considered, but from the moment that David Geffen sent Madonna to see Beatty about the part, she emerged as the front-runner.
Observers say that from the very first encounter, there were sparks--no small matter, when you consider that it's always been part and parcel of Beatty's movie modus operandi to have a highly visible romance with his female co-star. Besides that, insiders insist, compared with high-priced actresses like Turner, Madonna was willing to work cheap--when you take in $35 million a year, you don't need the money.
Apart from their immediate, simpatico understanding of one another's game--Beatty and Madonna are, after all, the sexual icons of their respective generations--the two stars shared a much stronger bond, a hotter draw than just lust: both badly needed a hit picture. Everyone in the business who had hired Madonna for a movie had hoped she'd bring her fans, the very kids that movies court, to theaters. Her following showed some interest in Desperately Seeking Susan, but three successive films thereafter--_Shanghai Surprise_, Who's That Girl?, and Bloodhounds of Broadway--had been flops.
For Beatty, the stakes were--are--even higher. After the commercial failure of Reds and the mega-disaster Ishtar, Beatty knew that many in the film business questioned his judgement. And not only that--he was a virtual unknown to today's kids, just some middle-aged guy Mom used to have the hots for. To remain a player in the Hollywood game he so dearly loves--to have carte blanche control over expensive personal projects--Beatty must deliver a big, popular, moneymaking smash. (Those close to Beatty say that he never intended to direct Tracy, but with so much at stake, he felt he couldn't possibly entrust this throw of the dice to someone else.)
So, though he actually prefers to work with women with whom he's had long-term relationships, Beatty decided to team up with Madonna. Their romance began almost immediately, an affair conducted in classic Beatty fashion, just within camera range of LA.'s hordes of paparazzi, and overnight the tabloids were filled with photos of Beatty and Madonna ducking into, or driving away from, this hot nightspot, that trendy restaurant. Some industry insiders wonder if, in fact, there was any real romance at all between the two, suggesting instead that these two media manipulators were just playacting a hot fling in order to generate reams of copy to help launch Dick Tracy.
Lending some credence to the possibility that their off-screen relationship was not just high-visibility publicity was the private surprise birthday party Madonna threw for Beatty at her house high above Sunset.
"I've never even known him to have a birthday before," says a friend who was invited. "He walked in the door with her and everyone was there: Jack and Dustin, Nick Roeg and Theresa Russell, all his pals--only Roman was missing. And he stayed and had a good time."
Whether their teaming is business, or pleasure, or both, Beatty had to pay a price to work with Madonna, for she's no handmaid worshipping at the feet of the master. Warren may be big guns in the movie world, but in the outside world, it's Madonna who's the real star.
"She's no weak sister," says a Beatty friend, of Madonna. "She's a street kid and she doesn't take any guff from him. Diane Keaton used to say, 'Warren, if you don't get off the phone, I'm leaving.' Madonna just yells, 'Get off the fucking phone,' and that's it. She gives him hell."
It was Al Pacino, not Beatty, who, observers say, was the only one prepared to stand up to Madonna. On one occasion Beatty was trying to get her out of her dressing room, but Madonna kept delaying, telling him, "I'm doing my makeup." Pacino was losing his cool, and when, half an hour later, she showed up in full makeup for the shooting of Pacino's close-ups--in which she wouldn't be seen at all--he had finally had enough. "Get me my agent on the phone," he reportedly yelled. "This woman's not a professional."
While Beatty felt that the casting of Tracy was crucial, production aides say that he was obsessed with his central notion--bringing a comic strip to the screen as never before-- and was determined to make the film's distinctive look the real star of the film. To pull this off, he hired an Oscar-winning triumvirate of the film industry's greatest talents: cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, costume designer Milena Canonero, and production designer Richard Sylbert. Together they agreed that creating the world of Dick Tracy on the real streets of Chicago would be an expensive nightmare. "Even if you could have afforded it, it would just have been The Untouchables with a guy in a yellow hat," notes co-producer Jon Landau.
A whole new world was required, "like no country you've ever seen before," explains designer Sylbert. "An artificial generic world shot against an artificial sky in bold, primary, comic book colors, with the cityscapes painted on mattes." Sylbert used only six basic colors to create Tracy's under-detailed world, where a car means "a car," not a Ford or a Mercury, where money is simply marked Dollar, and the newspaper is called The Daily Paper.
Except for recycling the old Hennessy Street set from Annie at Burbank and finding an old wooden warehouse and brick garage off the lot, the film was shot entirely on Universal sound stages. Insiders say that Sylbert's attempts to create innovative artifice actually managed to keep the costs down. "We shot the movie cheaper than we could have done five years ago," notes producer Barrie Osborne.
On the other hand, having to light the film so brightly caused unexpected headaches. Said a crew member, "Madonna lights like a dream but that kind of light is harsh on aging faces--and Tracy has to look perfect--unblemished."
Drexler and Caglione tried at first to give 53-year-old Beatty an artificial nose and jaw, to make him look like Gould's Tracy--but observers who saw those early tries say that with prosthetics Beatty wasn't Beatty; he looked like a Lebanese arms dealer. So that approach was deep-sixed fast in favor of shooting Beatty with side lighting and long lenses--the same techniques used on Streisand in the last few years.
Even with the tricks of lighting, however, there was Beatty's lifestyle to contend with. Beatty the director was, as usual, happy to work himself to death; but Beatty the actor couldn't afford to look puffy on screen. So, apart from the obligatory disco dates with Madonna, Beatty partied little during production, preferring to see friends on the set. Everyone who was anyone showed up to watch the Tracy shooting sooner or later--from Jack (Nicholson) to Jackie (Onassis).
Finally, the film finished shooting on June 23, 1989. But three months later, there was a new cloud on the horizon. In October, Floyd Mutrux and Art Linson filed suit against Beatty, claiming they're owed at least $500,000, plus on-screen credits as executive producers of Dick Tracy. Their deal, they say, also promises them 5 percent of the profits. Though Beatty, through his lawyer Bert Fields, reportedly responded no way, at press time, Mutrux and Linson were indeed receiving screen credit.
Meanwhile, Disney is preparing to merchandise the daylights out of Tracy, for the tie-ins seem infinite: everything from wrist-top video games to Pruneface masks. And if the picture is a hit there will be the inevitable sequel. Several of the major sets have been put aside, but Beatty has made it clear that his directing chores end with this one.
Sequels, merchandising, and all the rest depend, of course, on a monster hit which those most intimately connected with the picture swear it will be. Disney topper Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was Disney's main worrier on the film, reportedly told Beatty, "You guys have got a lot of nerve--but it works."
"Down the road from now in years to come," says co-producer Jon Landau, "people are going to be using the film as a yardstick for their own work. They'll be saying, 'It's a film like Dick Tracy.' It's going to be one big surprise."
But old-timers tend to be more cautious. Nothing is certain in Hollywood. Says designer Richard Sylbert, "We've let go of the trapeze on this one, we've abandoned cinema history, everything we've known before--and now we're stretching for the bar at the other end."
The drums are rolling, the spotlight is on and we won't know for sure until mid-June whether Beatty's Tracy has made it all the way to the other side of the Big Top.
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Ivor Davis is the West Coast correspondent for The Times of London, and has written for The New York Times and Los Angeles magazine.