Ross Hunter: Beautiful Dreamer

By now, sure he was launched, Hunter told studio boss William Goetz that he wanted to make--or rather, remake--big, fat love stones like those that made icons of Claudette Colbert and Irene Dunne in the '30s and '40s . "I told them," says Hunter, still a persuasive pitch man, "that people go to movies to escape. Pick up a newspaper and you just might want to kill yourself. Audiences want to be moved emotionally, to see glamorous people in fabulous set-tings, because their own humdrum little lives are just the opposite." Hunter suggested re-warming that old chestnut of the 30s, Magnificent Obsession, with Rock Hudson, then Universal's "B"-movie hunkola, in the lead. "I told Goetz: Rock is better than the westerns and tits-and-sand stuff he's been in. Clean him up and you're going to have a great, big, smashing romantic star on your hands.' Goetz said, 'No one wants to see this kind of movie anymore, but I'll give you $850,000 to make it--only if you get a top female star.' Like Stanwyck, Jane Wyman was willing to do the movie for a mere $25,000 and a considerable piece of the profits. However, her then-agent. Lew Wasserman, turned me down. Had Jane taken a percentage, she would have made close to $7 million." Which is to say that Magnificent Obsession was a megahit. Hunter and Hudson went on to make five more movies together, and Hunter himself became the studio's schmaltz king.

Why did audiences so eagerly chow down Hunter's brand of swill? "Chemistry," he says, not missing a beat. "I can predict whether two actors are going to spark. Chemistry enhances glamour. Period." He doesn't mention the fact that quite apart from chemistry, audiences always Jove a good cry--which he proved again and again by reworking already proven tearjerker material.

None of Hunter's creations spark him to talk today as much as Imitation of Life and Pillow Talk. He lights up when he describes how he turned the former, a remake of a 1934 Claudette Colbert saga of the trials and tribulations of a black mother and a white mother, into a publicity feeding frenzy. The studio bosses thought Hunter was mad to want Lana Turner--then a scarlet woman believed by some to have killed her small-time gangster/gigolo boytoy--for the lead. 'That's exactly why I wanted her," Hunter explains. "It was two months after the killing, and everyone else in town considered her finished--an untouchable. At first, she turned down the script, be-cause she thought it was too close to her own life, her own daughter. But every woman in the world said, 'Oooh, if 1 could only be Lana for one minute.' Every woman would like to have a stud like Johnny Stompanato--dead or alive, Lana had him."

The kid who had dreamed of one day touching Turner now had her within reach. He doggedly plied Turner with dozens of roses; she agreed to let him stroll the Malibu sands with her and read her the script aloud. "She cried through most of it," Hunter asserts. When she'd dried her tears she said yes to Hunter's now-standard formula: a reduced fee, but with a healthy percentage of the take. To offset Turner's old-time movie queen allure, Hunter cast as her daughter Sandra Dee, a squeaky former model who became his "manufactured star--I wouldn't let her out of the house unless her hair was done and her makeup wonderful."

Universal predicted doom for Imitation of Life in the theaters of the South. Hunter recalls "going to theaters all over the South for two months--some of them 'For Blacks Only'--telling people, 'It's not the story of a white mother and black mother but the story of two mothers, one of whom happens to be black. I'm going to do every-thing I can to make a movie that will give you people a chance to go into a darkened theater and cry unashamedly.' " The movie opened to box-office bedlam. The trouble that did arise had nothing to do with what Universal had feared. Hunter took his star cross-country to pro-mote the movie. "As we got off the train in Chicago, Lana was shot at." Whether it was by a member of the Stompanato family or a gun-happy fan, Hunter doesn't know. "Rut being the trouper that she was, Lana still got up on those stages to he interviewed before each and every showing of the movie," Now that's show business. And, be-cause of windfall profits from the movie--and later star turns in Portrait in Black and Madame X, that resulted from her resurrection from the Stompanato affair--Hunter enthuses, "Lana never has to work again in her life."

Imitation of Life marked the peak sob of Hunter'scareer. Afterward, he jumped to pumping new life into another all-but-forgot ten staple of the '30's and '40's, the sex comedy. (How well Hunter had learned from stars of the big studio days to reinvent his image every few years.) Pillow Talk put Doris Day and Rock Hudson together--"both poison at the box office at the time, but their chemistry jumped out at you," Hunter says--and spawned a mini-industry. "Audiences had seen Doris as the girl-next-door for so long, they said: 'Hell, why should I pay $2 to see what I can see in the mirror?' Well, she had the wildest ass in the business, so I called Jean Louis and said, 'Let's do something about that great figure,' I said to Bud Westmorc, 'Let's wipe off the freckles' and to Larry Germain, 'Let's give her a chic, sophisticated hairdo.' Again, the studio thought I was out of my mind, but I said: I know my public. Since every girl-next-door thinks she's Doris Day, they'll think, If she can look like that, maybe I can.' The world was against it because it was a sophisticated comedy. Nobody wanted to book it. But the country was ready to laugh, and the rest is history." Pillow Talk and Hunter's other Day sex farce, The Thrill of It All, were both smash hits.

Hunter and his production partner Jacque Mapes grew so successful they decided to up their output to several movies a year. Meanwhile, finally, Universal--as well as other studios--rushed to crank out starry and, well, glamorous carbon copies of their films. Fox worked up the suds with two Peyton Place movies, From the Terrace, and Ten North Frederick. United Artists churned out By Love Possessed. Paramount did Where Love Has Gone, from a Harold Robbins book based on the Turner/Stompanato scandal. MGM turned out Butterfield Eight, The V.I.P.s and The Sandpiper, and Hunter's own studio made such frothy sex farces as Come September, That Touch of Mink, The Grass Is Greener, and Bedtime Story. The knockoffs looked so much like the originals that critics complained that both Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers, Rock-and-Doris movies made by other producers, were not up to Hunter's standards.

Recognizing that he'd typecast himself as the progenitor of the two genres, Hunter felt the need to stretch. He thought he could make Rodgers and Hammerstein's with-six-you-get-eggroll musical, Flower Drum Song, work on the screen, but--to put it mildly--it didn't. Another musical, this one an original--Thoroughly Modem Millie starring Julie Andrews--broke box-office records everywhere. No producer was more powerful--or hands-on--than Hunter. Millie director George Roy Hill tried to bar Hunter from the set, but the producer showed just who had the real clout by recutting the movie himself. In all the heat, his relationship with Universal curdled. "I saw it as my duty to try and get a blockbuster every year to keep the studio going, "Hunter says of his alma mater. "The studio started going downhill when Lew Wasserman bought it for $11 million. You had to know something was wrong immediately because the library (of old films) alone was easily worth $100 million. Wasserman was my agent, my father confessor, and although he has one of the greatest minds in the world, unfortunately he hasn't the slightest idea how to produce a movie."

Hunter followed up the musical blockbuster with the first all-star "disaster movie," Airport, and broke box-office records all over again. The breaking point between Hunter and Universal came over the movie version of the hit Broadway musical "Sweet Charity". Even today, Hunter refuses to go beyond generalities in discussing what happened when he worked with Bob Fosse, who had directed and choreographed the original stage version. "I walked out on 'Sweet Charity,'" he says flatly, "because I knew it was going to be a bomb." Yet, according to eyewit-nesses, he and Fosse, who had been star Shirley MacLaine's own choice as a first-time movie director, clashed epically, Hunter believed that MacLaine, whom he thought had never "carried" a box-office hit on her own, should be supported by Jack Lemmon and Cary Grant. Fosse instead insisted on John McMartin, from the stage production, and Ricardo Montalban in those roles. In the end, Wasserman stunned many industry insiders when he backed Fosse instead of his veteran moneymaker. Hunter left. The movie bombed.

Hunter really saw the handwriting on the wall when he suddenly found no home at Universal for long-planned pet projects like Jazz Babies, a musical that would unleash his Thoroughly Modern Millie stars Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Channing in the Hollywood of the '30s. Then Elephant Hill, which was to star Susan Hayward, got canceled not long before production was set to begin, "When I realized what was happening at Universal, I asked [to be let out of] my contract. They wouldn't let me out--until finally they said they would...providing. The provisions were shocking to me." Apparently, Hunter was so desperate to get out and regain his creative freedom that he met them. With great fanfare, Hunter signed a deal with Columbia--the studio where he had been a contractor--to produce such movies as the Broadway comedy Forty Carats with Audrey Hepburn and Dean Martin. Too had he didn't. Instead, Hunter agreed to produce the studio's musical version of Lost Horizon.

What was anyone thinking? Another Asian-themed musical for the man who made chop suey out of Flower Drum Song?. Although Hunter says today he thought the Larry Kramer script "just awful" and battled Burt Bacharach and Hal David over their "terrible" songs, the juggernaut was in motion. Hunter should never have agreed to use Liv Ullman (fresh off Forty Carats) in the leading role. Then, as now, she was hardly known for her song and dance skills. Hunter proponents say, in fact, that he had so little to do with the making of the movie, few expected his name would even appear on the credits. Others believe Hunter should have fought to make certain the studio removed his name. "It was just a ridiculous movie," Hunter says. "I was too successful and lots of people in the industry who were unhappy over that gloated." At that point, it would have made sense--and added perhaps another decade to Hunter's longevity--for a studio to pair the producer of Airport with another of the disaster epics then ruling the box office, but Hunter rejected projects from Columbia and Warner Bros. Hunter says, frankly, "Let's call my state of mind what it was--depression."

Hunter thought it best to slip into glamorous reclusion. "I was never going to produce movies again as long as I lived," he recalls. "I was going to see my friends, do some writing, some theater." Instead, old friends helped persuade him to take an offer by George Barrie, the president and CEO of Faberge, to run Brut Productions, the TV and film company that had recently scored a hit with A Touch of Class. After three and a half months of unsuccessfully trying to get favorite projects into production, Hunter walked, in what the papers described as a "direct result of artistic differences with George Barrie," Then Hunter got his hands on Neil Simon's script of Patrick Dennis' bawdy, ersatz showbiz memoir, Little Me, which had been a big hit Broadway musical for Simon in the early '60s. Hunter signed on to make it at Paramount, envisioning a sterling cast that would have included Goldie Hawn, Carol Channing, Rock Hudson, Peter Sellers, Burt Reynolds and Joel Grey, The day Hunter arrived at the studio, Barry Diller replaced Frank Yablans as studio chief and promptly put Little Me on the back burner. "I stayed for all three years of my contract while everybody knew Paramount wasn't letting me do any movies because I wasn't brought there by Barry Diller."

Blocked by that three-year contract from producing for the big screen, Hunter instead produced a mini-series of Arthur Hailey's best seller 'The Moneychangers." The ratings were so strong NBC agreed to Hunter's demands for complete autonomy, zillions of dollars up front, and ownership of the negatives of any TV movies he and Mapes did. "I didn't like TV," says Hunter, "although it made me much more financially secure than movies.

"Everywhere I go, people ask, 'When will you come back to bring beauty and entertainment to movies?' I'm flattered that I'm sent scripts all the time, but I know why: they're looking for people who know how to produce and to make pictures for a decent amount of money. I blame this whole new breed of super-agents for blowing the business way out of proportion. If I have to pay Jack Nicholson $ 12 million and a piece of the gross, what do I have left for a script and production? The so-called super-agents of the world have decided they're going to dictate to the heads of the studios. And the studio heads are accepting it instead of taking a stand. There's no reason on earth to do a movie today because there's no way you can come out making money."

Couldn't Hunter be lured back by the chance to do his specialty, a massive career rehab on a star in a slump? Say, Bruce Willis? "A terrific screen personality who could be a wonderful Pillow Talk-type actor if only he'd stop drowning himself in action."

How does he see Mel Gibson? "Much more talented than we've seen. I'd like to see him in a suit and tie, but he's going the Bruce Willis route because violence sells."

And Madonna? "My hat's off to her for creating an image for herself, but it's not a lasting one because it's too slutty."

Tom Cruise? 'Too much, too soon. He could be a very romantic leading man, but he's being paid way out of proportion."

Julia Roberts? Suddenly, Hunter is on fire. "That girl is a star," he asserts. Recently, he admits, he was consumed with the idea of pairing Roberts and Shirley MacLaine in a remake of the great stage musical Gypsy--which he planned to make with private money--until his budget man told him the movie would cost between $40 and $45 million, "If I find the right project, I'll do it with smart people willing to go back to the old way, the best way. Nobody will get a piece of the gross, but we'll all gamble on a piece of the profits. And, oh yes, it will be glamorous because glamour is coming back personally in the people who are buying tickets. They're trying to look better, buying 'designer' type clothes. They're washing their f aces, and combing their hair again. Glamour must come back because audiences will demand it."

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Stephen Rebello wrote our June cover story on Christian Slater.

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