Ernest Lehman: The Reluctant Screenwriter

Four years later, Lehman and William Wyler began work on a movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, but the irascible veteran director of Jezebel and The Best Years of Our Lives fled the treacly project. Lehman recalls Wyler's aversion as typical of Hollywood's. "When Burt Lancaster ran into me in the Fox commissary and asked what I was doing and I said, 'Writing The Sound of Music,' he said, 'Jesus, you must need the money.' Bob Wise, too, turned down the movie at first. I remember thinking, 'So, you think this is a piece of junk? I'll show you.' "

Released in 1965, the fantasia of singing nuns, eerily blonde children, and photogenic Nazis became a worldwide phenomenon that took five Oscars--including Best Picture--and proved to be one the of ten biggest money-makers ever. Many writers of Lehman's calibre would have shunned the assignment. Although it seems hard to believe now, the Broadway musical was successful only with audiences; critics considered it syrupy, substandard Rodgers and Hammerstein. Twenty-five years later, the cash cow continues to provide Lehman, who received 2 percent of the net for writing the screenplay, with substantial--and regular--checks.

Lehman won full producer's stripes on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee's lacerating walpurgisnacht of warring couples. Although Albee suggested Bette Davis and Henry Fonda (or James Mason) as Martha and George, Lehman "lived dangerously" by hiring Hollywood's fun couple from hell, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to star, and also by assigning an "unfilmable property" to a novice movie director, Mike Nichols. "I was astounded by the size of the guns that were suddenly trained on me," Lehman says, referring to his collaborators, "who fought back in ways I wasn't used to."

Lehman spent nine months writing six different versions of the script that eventually retained 11 never-before-heard-on-the-screen "goddamn's," seven "bastard's," five "son of a bitch's," plus "screw you," "hump the hostess," "up yours," and "monkey nipples." The movie, which proved to be 1966's third biggest money-maker, won 13 Academy Award nominations and took five top honors. That same year, 20th Century Fox head Richard Zanuck signed Lehman to a five-picture, writer-producer deal.

According to the literary portrait painted of Lehman at the time by John Gregory Dunne in The Studio, a scathing study of the tottering 20th Century Fox, the new mogul was given to '60s fat-cat ornamentation: a thin gold, custom wristwatch that boasted the 12 letters of his name instead of numbers, an office decorated with a portrait of Barbra Streisand painted by Claire Trevor, and an inscribed silver frame from Mike Nichols. For his maiden production, Lehman chose the Broadway money machine, Hello, Dolly!

Passing over such war-horses as Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Day, and stage star Carol Channing, he hired Barbra Streisand in the title role. Lehman Thought Big. Directed by Gene Kelly ("a killer," Lehman says), the movie ran amok of its 89-day shooting schedule and $19 million budget. Movie audiences came expecting to be wowed but emerged wondering what anyone--particularly Streisand--was thinking of. The sets and production overwhelmed (2,500 extras crammed the screen in one number); the movie lumbered. After its New York premiere, Lehman made a midnight confession to producer Zanuck: "I feel as though a part of me died and was buried tonight."

"I was like Eisenhower planning an invasion," Lehman says. "I need another building here, another hundred troops there." Lionel Newman, on winning the Oscar for the musical scoring of Dolly with Lennie Hayton, thanked Lehman "for being so goddamn beautifully difficult."

Reviewers on both coasts savaged Lehman's next, Portnoy's Complaint--which he produced, directed, and adapted--as the worst picture of 1972. Lehman, failing in his breakthrough to directing features unlike such other screenwriters as Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, had scored the clumsiest debut movie by a first-class writer since Ben Hecht in the early '30s. Today, Lehman recalls his notion to film Philip Roth's book about a mother-dominated masturbator as "a dare-devil, crazy, self-destructive stunt. I was pursuing the Peter Principle before Peter was born. [But] I've seen a hundred _Howard the Duck_s come and go since then. I made a $6 million flop. So, what about it?"

Black Sunday, the 1977 thriller about terrorists taking over a stadium, was Lehman's third misfire, and his last produced screenplay to date. Days after producer Robert Evans and director John Frankenheimer received Lehman's screenplay ("They told me they had never had such an exciting experience working with a writer," Lehman recalls, laughing ironically), Lehman's agent informed him that Evans already had Kenneth Ross, another client, doing rewrites. "I wasn't outraged," Lehman explains, "I wasn't shocked. What had happened to other writers over the centuries was just a new experience for me." Samuel Goldwyn Jr. comments: "Ernie was in the center of a game of egos where one guy had to rewrite another just to prove that he was macho."

After serving from 1983 to 1985 as president of the Writers Guild of America West (Lehman likens that experience to "the slaughter in Azerbaijan"), two consecutive disasters befell him. First, the producers who had hired Lehman to write a movie based on Brenda Strr, the comic strip, were federally indicted for income tax swindles. (The long-shelved Brooke Shields movie of the same name is unrelated to Lehman's version.) Then, the Robert Wise-Saul Chaplin movie musical version of Zorba the Greek, based on what Chaplin calls a "miraculous" Lehman screenplay, folded when Cannon Films, the project's backer, went on the ropes.

"So, why the hell am I not writing a screenplay?" Lehman says, repeating the question he knew was coming. "It's probably too bad that I had a piece of some very successful pictures that I wrote. It makes it possible for me never to write again. But there must also be unconscious devices so completely buried that I'm no longer aware of the fact that it seems ridiculous that I don't. Even in the privacy of my own home. Lack of confidence? Yeah, but I never had confidence. But, in the past, nobody came at me with something that wasn't going to be made, nothing that was only 'in development.' What people don't understand is that I need somebody pressing me to do a movie... Today, you're not excited by knowing that Cary Grant or Hitchcock is going to make this movie."

Many charge that Lehman, who was recently the focus of a career-long film retrospective at the University of Southern California, is a victim of an industry often distrustful of any screenwriter past puberty. "Can you imagine a hot-shot studio executive demanding a writing sample of Ernest Lehman?" asks an indignant associate. (I can, and apparently, they have.)

When the producers of The Hunt for Red October hoped to enlist Lehman to doctor that ailing script, the writer's two-page analysis of the script's maladies prescribed a complete rewrite. Lehman also declined his friend Robert Wise's offer that they team on a biopic about hellraising country singer Merle Haggard. "Sometimes too much knowledge scares you," says Sam Goldwyn Jr., who has offered Lehman an executive position with his company and admits that the writer's advice cooled him on acquiring the screen rights for The Hunt for Red October and Polar Star, a sequel to Gorky Park, each of which he asked Lehman to adapt.

Although Lehman disagrees with colleague William Goldman's now-classic statement that when it comes to moviemaking, "Nobody knows anything," he observes, "I'm neither arrogant nor infallible. The kinds of objections that I might bring to a certain property aren't necessarily valued as I used to think they were. Who was that guy who stood up to Billy Wilder, dealt with Hitchcock, Jack Warner, Taylor and Burton, Mike Nichols, Bob Wise, Gene Kelly, and spent two hours nightly on the phone with Barbra Streisand all through Dolly?. I'd have to go into training before I could face that kind of thing again. But, you know what? There is always a little hope that somebody's going to send me something irresistible. And, if somebody said, 'You have to do it tomorrow,' I would."

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Charles Oakley, a writer and explorer, was last seen on a tour bus heading for Mt. Rushmore.

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