Mark Rydell vs. The 800 Pound Gorillas

In short order, Rydell was out and 77-year-old, illness-ridden Martin Ritt was in as Streisand's director of choice--while the budget soared skyward. "She got what she wanted," observes Rydell, but Nuts "got sacrificed on the altar of Barbra's narcissism. A picture that could have meant something was glamorized to a point where hairdos were more important than reality." One can only imagine what Rydell might say with the gag removed.

Following the Nuts debate, Rydell fell "madly in love with" Marshall Brickman's highly touted script of Avery Corman's novel 50. He's under gag order on this one, too, but the story around town suggests a scenario something like this: After 20 Rydell-Marshall Brickman screenplay drafts, and mere weeks before the production was scheduled to start, star Richard Dreyfuss decided to do another movie instead. Rydell then secured Nick Nolte, but the studio, somehow more confident of Dreyfuss's box-office clout than Nolte's, insisted he recapture Dreyfuss. The director wooed back the quixotic Dreyfuss and cast around him Susan Sarandon, Marsha Mason and Elliott Gould. With sets built and two days to go before the first rehearsal, Dreyfuss reexited.

Although the names of other actors were proffered--James Caan's especially--the studio pulled the plug, leaving Rydell "staggeringly disappointed" over losing the chance to do "the town's best, most exquisite unmade script." (And, considering the enormous financial charges against it, it's likely to remain so.)

This is bitter stuff, especially for a guy as sensitive to actors--and stars--as Rydell, but he'd been through worse before. Get him talking about Harry and Walter Go to New York, a costly 1976 period picaresque about a pair of vaudevillians-turned-safecrackers played by Caan and Elliott Gould. Touted as a lavish, turn-of-the-century buddy romp on the order of The Sting, with costly co-stars like Diane Keaton and Michael Caine, it was a monumental dud. Then, as now, there was talk--and lots of it--about drug use on the set. "That's an exaggeration," Rydell asserts, with a dismissive wave of the hand. Moments later, he says, "In those days, there was ..." then trails off. Well, what he might have said is that in those days there was a radically different stance toward drugs: Out-there behavior from stars was more often tolerated. Finally, Rydell, who says that he's a teetotaler himself, admits, "Well, there might have been some flirtation with drugs, but it was not excessive. Drugs are a tragic escape from reality, and reality is the only thing that's going to give an actor any genuine source of inspiration. The minute an actor tempers his ganglia by narcotizing them, he's use less to me. If it happens, and it has, I won't shoot that person."

A few years ago, Rydell directed some "Just Say No" public service spots featuring bone-chilling First Lady Nancy Reagan as well as other luminaries like Clint Eastwood and James Woods. "I was asked to do it by Jerry Weintraub and there was no way I could refuse," Rydell says. "We who are more fortunate than others have to give back, even if it's in a Band-Aid form like 'Just Say No.' The fact that in this insane culture, Terminator 2 makes millions of dollars within days when the Los Angeles Child Development Center has to beg for money for therapy for needy children, speaks to a cultural distortion that needs to be addressed somehow." It sounds as if the former First Lady, whom Rydell finds "a remarkable woman," displayed a few cultural distortions all her own. "I met her in her trailer and Clint Eastwood, who is a friend, introduced us," he recalls. "She betrayed a lack of knowledge of drugs that stunned me by saying: 'This is a crack [spot] we're doing? I thought we were doing something about cocaine.'"

Rydell's adventures of the last few years, with Nancy, Caan, Midler, Streisand, Dreyfuss and the rest, pale by comparison to his trials-by-fire with Steve McQueen. Rydell and McQueen met when they were both starting out as actors at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. By 1958, when McQueen had hit big as the star of the TV hit, "Wanted: Dead or Alive," he convinced the producers to cast Rydell--a Bronx-born boy who had never ridden a horse--in a virtually all-riding role. Eleven years later, in 1969, after both William Wyler and John Huston had dropped out of directing McQueen--then the biggest boxoffice star in the movies--in a film version of The Reivers, Rydell won the shot at directing his old pal in a big-budget adaptation of William Faulkner's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Sounds like a plum assignment, until you stop to consider that maybe Wyler and Huston had both been around long enough to know when to get out. McQueen was, says Rydell, "very unbalanced, difficult, suspicious and paranoid."

McQueen had spent a chunk of his childhood in a reformatory, and was big on tearing up the asphalt with motorcycles and racecars, rabble-rousing, and womanizing. He also had a notorious reputation for trashing his directors. Norman Jewison, who made The Cincinnati Kid and The Thomas Crown Affair with McQueen, once called him "the most difficult actor I ever worked with." It wasn't much easier for Rydell: "In New York, I had been dating Neile [Adams, later McQueen's wife] until [he] met her and I was finished. On The Reivers, a very attractive girl who was going to be in the picture came down to the location and flirted with me, and I responded. The next day, McQueen was impossible--vocal and negative, challenging every decision I made. I couldn't figure out why. Finally, someone told me that this actress was Steve's girlfriend and I said, 'I'm sorry. I had no idea.' But if you ask me, that was no excuse.

McQueen made it very, very difficult for me for a short period." Push nearly came to shove when Rydell, watching from high atop a crane, shot McQueen and two co-stars for hours as they were splashed with mud in a scene that in¬volved getting a car out of a ditch. Finally, McQueen growled, "Ryyyyyyyyydelllll, get over here!" Rydell recalls that as he descended from his perch "My heart stopped. The crew stood still. McQueen was a physical presence given to brutality. He'd demonstrated to me many times that he was a first-class karate Tae Kwon Do kicker. He said, 'You know, there's only room for one boss on this picture,' and before he could continue, I said: 'Yeah, that's me.' Inside, I was trembling but he walked away because he saw that if he wanted to fight, I was ready." McQueen continued to be difficult. He wanted to slice out all the Faulkner dialogue, and he went to Bill Paley, the head of CBS Films, and told him he wanted Rydell fired. "Bill had seen the dailies, loved the film, and realized that it was a function of an actor's ego, not reality. He told him: 'Rydell's the director. Shut up and get back to the set.'" In the end, the men patched up their relationship. "To his credit, he came to me after the picture opened and said how proud he was of it," Rydell says.

Rydell hadn't had a powerful ally while making The Cowboys back in 1972. Though the director campaigned to get George C. Scott for the role of an aging rancher leading a bunch of young greenhorns on a cattle drive, Warner Bros. wanted--and got--John Wayne, whom Rydell describes as "a man who chewed up and spat out directors before breakfast."

"Not only was I going up against a legend," says Rydell, "but also someone with whom I had the most extravagant differences politically. I flew to New Mexico on the Warner jet with my fists balled, prepared not to surrender. He was charming, seductive, and said, 'I'd sure like to play this part, Mr. Rydell,' and I fell for it like a ton of bricks. I left thinking: I've been had."

Rydell defended himself as well as he could. He made sure every crew member on location in New Mexico was young. "None of Wayne's old cronies," he explains. "I wanted to keep him on his mettle." He also peppered the cast with such Method-trained scene gobblers as Bruce Dern. But when Rydell was preparing to shoot the big "Move 'em out!" cattle drive kickoff scene, which involved 1500 head of cattle ("When you're dealing with cattle, you can't yell 'Action!' until they're all moving"), Wayne jumped the gun--not waiting for Rydell's cue from atop the camera crane--and actually started the scene himself. "In front of hundreds of people, including the press, and [screenwriters] Harriet and Irving Ravetch, I began yelling uncontrollably, jabbing my finger at him, 'Don't you ever do that! You're an actor on this and I'll tell you when we're going to roll! Now get back to your spot.' He did, we made the shot, and he got in his car and drove off. The crew--man by man--walked over and shook my hand as if to say goodbye. The Ravetches, whom I love and adore, said, 'Mark, how could you?'

What [Wayne] did was just awful, but I was horrified at my stupidity and lack of control. All the while we drove the 50 miles back to Santa Fe, I figured that [Wayne's pal, director] Andy McLaglen would be in the next day to replace me."

Rydell returned to his location offices to find four telephone messages from the Duke. "I screwed up my courage to call back and he asked me to have dinner with him. We sat down and he said, 'Let's have a drink.' He drank a lot of tequila. I don't drink, but even I had a few and all through dinner, he never once said a word about the incident.

He excused himself to go to the bathroom and came back with the whole right side of his pants soaking wet. I asked, 'What happened?' and he said, 'Always happens to me. I'm standing there peeing and the guy next to me goes, 'You're John Wayne,' and pees all over my leg.' Now, I know for a fact that he had done that to himself as a joke. He never once mentioned my reprimand. And he called me 'sir' the rest of the picture because he enjoyed the fact that I had the chutzpah to confront him with the fact that he was wrong. Because of his opinions, I was prepared to loathe him, but I came away admiring him and realizing that many of my friends, with whose politics I agree, are not half the man he was."

Rydell found in Jane Fonda, once famous for terrific performances and liberal politics, a more kindred spirit--but that did nothing to ensure that the making of their film went smoothly. Fonda had bought Ernest Thompson's sniffly Broadway play, On Golden Pond--about the summer vacation coming-together of a pair of octogenarians and their daughter and grandson--as much to find a project on which she and her father could work as to help him land a long overdue Oscar. But this grand rapprochement was not to be easily effected. Legends of Henry Fonda's cruelty to his daughter during the shooting abound. "Everything you've heard is true," Rydell says. "I have to hand it to her for pursuing him so assiduously, when he resisted her and was so difficult and cruel to her. It was painful to watch. She threw up before every scene she played with him. It was sensational for me because it was what the picture was about. So, if you're a really good director, all you have to do is take what's really going on, let it happen, and have the camera ready. But a very difficult relationship resolved itself that summer. They became friends after years of difficulty."

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