71 The Fortune

[Randall Maysin]

The Fortune, or what I saw of it on Youtube, is a weird, frustrating experience. It's a well-written, imaginative, nasty comedy that appears to have had all its punchlines neatly snipped out, which is apparently what Mike Nichols, or someone, did to the script. It's still pleasant enough so I guess it would be worth checking out, mainly to see Jack Nicholson chew up the remnants of what probably would have been the best comedic role of his career. Also, it's funny and not too surprising that there is no crying emoticon for messages in this forum

[MichaelB]

...and final specs for The Fortune.



Everything’s bang on schedule for the 22 January release date.

[hearthesilence]

I have the transcript of the Nichols and May talk somewhere - it's wonderful on paper and I'm sure even better to hear. Honestly, those two hadn't lost a step since their days a comedy duo. One of my favorite one-liners from Nichols comes after May compliments him on a hilariously strange metaphor involving a prostitute.

[MichaelB]

We wanted to include one of their original routines, but the licensing fee was eye-watering. But in many ways this was more appropriate, as it’s entirely about working in the film industry, and it’s not by any means Ishtar-specific.

[hearthesilence]

I hear ya. I'm glad there's a recording of that talk, Nichols made a lot of post-screening appearances in NYC, and I wasn't sure how many of them were ever recorded. (I've seen May introduce a screening of Mikey and Nicky at MoMA, so she does make the occasional appearance as well.)

Their original albums are classics - for anyone who's curious, I don't think their own records are hard-to-find in great condition on used vinyl. I picked one up for peanuts not too long ago. And of course there's always YouTube...

[Ribs]

... so does this mean we shouldn’t be expecting Indicator to put out Ishtar?

[Big Ben]

... so does this mean we shouldn’t be expecting Indicator to put out Ishtar?

I'd love to see Mikey and Nicky instead (Anyone know it's status?) but in this day and age Ishtar would be an interesting relic.

[domino harvey]

Well, this was every bit as staggeringly awful as its reputation suggested. I doubt anything I have to say differs much from what anyone else could possibly say about this, other than to emphasize that this is one of the most arrogant films I've ever seen. I do not believe there is any conceivable step in the process of making this film in which anyone involved thought a single line or scenario here was actually funny. Rather, the implication here is that the mere fact that stars of the stature and talent of Beatty and Nicholson are emoting and delivering Readers Digest versions of Carol Burnett Show skits is supposed to be defacto hilarious. But it's just slumming, and it takes true ego to give performances this bad (Beatty can't even keep his bargain basement gravely "voice" up for more than a line or two, for fuck's sake) and think that it doesn't matter, because they're Beatty and Nicholson. Whoops. Though Stockard Channing's imitation of Estelle Parsons in Bonnie and Clyde is not blameless in its annoyance, she was obviously just along for the ride and not guilty of star tripping (and no actress could have withstood having to recite lines like calling Beatty a "poo-poo head").

I do have to pushback on any praise for the beautiful visual style of the film, though, because pretty pictures only help to accentuate a script, story, characters, themes, etc. On their own, left rudderless and completely at odds with the material shown, they in fact make things worse. Who cares about filmmaking trickery like, say, the tango sequence when the moving figures inside it are these, and their story this one? All this film looking good does is emphasize how bad a movie it still is.

[Beloved Aunt]

To me, this film (or what I've seen of it) feels like a very extreme version of an Ambersons/Fat City-type situation, where the final product of studio meddling, or in this case a very fraught production full of directorial-self-second-guessing, is not merely a fucked-up, incomplete but still glorious film, but instead is only the most inconsequential remains of what still seems, to me, like it was, at some point, a brilliant, visionary project. This movie is not merely damaged, its just the piddling husk of brilliance. At least that's what it feels like to me, based on what we see and what I've read about the behind-the-scenes story. Personally I thought Nicholson was hilarious (I love hammy Nicholson, at least when he's playing some random hayseed idiot like he is here), and he made me yearn for the not-ruined film version of Carole Eastman's script that I imagine existed once upon a time (if only in an incomplete screenplay, I'm not implying there was ever a director's cut or anything--AFAIK), but the film's nastiness makes pretty much everything about it distasteful, because its had its heart, not to mention seemingly all its jokes and funny bits of business, cut out. Kind of like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, all it really has to offer, ultimately, is a polished production and mean-spiritedness, and the result is an uncomfortably decadent-feeling experience. Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls has a few pages about the production, and apparently NIchols was really insecure and working against his own instincts, since he'd just had three flops in a row and wanted to please the studio, so he (allegedly) kept cutting out all the jokes out of Eastman's overlong, unfinished screenplay. (Yes, once upon a time, this film is supposed to have had jokes.)

[beamish14]

I adore this film, and I absolutely understand why the Coen Bros. were so influenced by it. I’ll take it over acknowledged classics from the same period like The Last Detail. Stockard Channing is just remarkable.

[kuzine]

To me, this film (or what I've seen of it) feels like a very extreme version of an Ambersons/Fat City-type situation, [...]

What happened with Fat City?

[beamish14]

Yeah, I don’t believe Huston had any issues with that film. Did you mean The Red Badge of Courage?

[Beloved Aunt]

OK< maybe I shouldn't have thrown Fat City in there...I *think* John Simon's review, and perhaps other stuff I've read, imply that the film was cut by the studio, and/or heavily mucked with by the studio during production. But I'm not sure of that. Huston DID really want Brando for the Stacy Keach role at one point, at least according to Kael. I would imagine, by the by, that having Brando in the Keach role would really change the film, seriously, how the hell would that work? I think that's one film Kael, hip or not, didn't fully get. To me Tully is supposed to be a really unglamorously weak and ineffectual presence, and not some Method actor-y, poetic presence. It's kind of a film that's ahead of its time, to me. But I digress.

[domino harvey]

I am actually revisiting Biskind’s book right now on Audible (highly recommend, the narrator is perfect for the material), so I look forward to hearing more about it. But Nichols’ excuse sounds like a coverup to me— blame the studio for “missing jokes” once it was clear whatever they were going for here (and filmed) doesn’t work

[Beloved Aunt]

I don't want to overhype how much detail Biskind goes into, it's just a page or two but it's interesting esp. stuff about Carole Eastman--I'd love some MORE detail on this rather fascinating project (to me) from someone!

[colinr0380]

I have not seen the film to make my own comments as yet, but there is a bit more about The Fortune in Biskind's 2010 book "Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty" (from pages 199-220 in the "Don Juan In Hell" chapter), in which the blame gets laid squarely at the door of Carole Eastman (who previously wrote the Jack Nicholson starring Five Easy Pieces) and (partially) at Beatty:

Beatty barely had time to catch his breath. He wrapped Shampoo on a Friday, and started rehearsals on The Fortune the following Monday. Production started in early July. He was leery. He realised yet again, that every time he wasn't in control, there was trouble. "Had I produced The Fortune, we wouldn't have started shooting for another couple of months," he says. "In truth I should'a had [at least] a month off, but I wanted to work with Mike and I wanted to work with Jack." But Mike Nichols, who was co-producing, and directing, assured him it would be all right. It wasn't.
....
[Eastman] often hid behind dark glasses, and even disguised her screen credit with a pseudonym, Adrien Joyce, as she did on The Fortune, although this may have been an attempt to disavow the pictures made from her scripts, with which she had never been pleased. [Producer] Don Devlin, for one, couldn't understand why Nicholson "deferred to her wisdom," why he didn't recognise her limitations. But Nicholson prided himself on his eye for talent, and Eastman for him was the mother lode.... [Production Designer Richard Sylbert] Sylbert's wife, Susanna Moore, was working for Nicholson at the time, and read the script for him. She said, "What is this arch piece of shit?" But if she told Nicholson, he didn't listen. Continues Devlin, "Jack is a kingmaker. He gets enthusiasms for people, and he had such great enthusiasm for Carole that he put his faith in her, as opposed to [the script], whether or not he really understood it. Jack often confuses badly written material with complex material. It was that faith in Carole that might have gotten Warren to that table, plus his desire to do a movie with Jack."
...
Set in the late 1920s right before the Crash, and based on two news stories from the period, the script told the story of a heiress to a sanitary napkin fortune named Fredrika Countessa 'Freddie' Biggars. (Rule #1: Beware of scripts in which the characters have whimsical names.) It was originally called The Mousebed Heiress, after a laboriously explained conceit in which Freddie recalls that "mousebeds" were her euphamism for Kotex. Beatty and Nicholson play two dim-bulb friends, Nicky and Oscar, who try to kill her for her inheritance. It was a premise just nutty enough to be promising, but when Eastman got it down on paper, to use a favourite epithet of Nicholson's from those days, it was "lame-o". Says Devlin, "I hated the script. It was terrible". Eastman was not one to embrace criticism, and when he confided his doubts, "she went through the fucking roof".
...
Devlin not only went way back with Eastman, but with Nicholson as well. He had a reputation for being a decent man in a business not always known for decency. "Don is extremely honorable," says Hank Moonjean, a veteran line producer whom Nichols and Nicholson brought in to do the picture. "Whatever he says I would take for gospel." Buck Henry also testifies to his probity: "I'm sure if Devlin said [something] it's true." But this virtue may not have served him well on The Fortune. When the project got the green light from Columbia, Devlin was appalled. "I was the voice of doom," he remembers. "I said, 'What are you doing? You have 240 pages, two acts, no third act.' But I was the only person there saying, 'This script is nowhere near ready, this is ridiculous.' And of course, that did not endear me to anyone."

Beatty had been devoting himself to Shampoo. "I didn't read The Fortune until the day I showed up to work," he recalls. Nicholson, who was on location in Spain with Michaelangelo Antonioni for The Passenger, and went right into Chinatown when he returned, had apparently not been able to focus on it, either. Devlin continues, "None of them had studied the thing, and all of a sudden they were beginning to ask the questions that should have been asked six months or a year earlier." It seemed as if the three prinicpals, Beatty, Nicholson and Nichols, were all so excited by everyone else's excitement, that they didn't notice the script wasn't finished.

Beatty's reputation for being a tough, even ruthless, negotiator, was well deserved. Sometimes Devlin found himself identifying with Freddie, The Fortune's mosebed heiress. He thought that Beatty and Nichols were trying to kill him. "Warren of course wanted to produce it," recalled Devlin. "And Mike had produced, or at least co-produced every movie he's ever made, so it was like, 'Who the fuck is this friend of Carole's who's the producer?' From the moment the three of them decided they were going to make this movie, it was a total nightmare fo rme, because these guys with their power and their influence simply took over the project, and were continually trying to get rid of me".... But Devlin hung in, and got co-producer credit with Nichols.

Beatty disputes Devlin's account of these events in every respect. "I had no control over The Fortune at all," he says. "If anything, I was in the fourth position. It was Jack and Carole, and then Mike came into it, and then me." Indeed, he does not have a producing credit.
___

Meanwhile, the start date of The Fortune was fast approaching.

The problem with the ending of the script was not that it didn't work, but that it didn't exist. Says Henry, "The legend is Carole has never written the end to a film. That was true of The Fortune. It made Mike crazy. He could never get the ending out of her." Says Nichols, "The script was like 345 pages, and it had no ending nor did it ever get an ending from Carole. I had to carve a story out of all those pages. Sort of like a butter sculpture at a wedding. As a result, I wasn't too warmly inclined toward Carole Eastman."

Nichols, who was coming off Day of the Dolphin (1973), an expensive flop, had dropped a lot of his team. Now he changed his mind. According to Devlin, as pre-production proceeded, "Mike got more and more frightened, realising he had no movie, no idea what the fuck the movie was about, and he began firing people in order to bring back all the people he had that he hoped would save his ass." May of those he brought back were also Beatty regulars, like Dick Sylbert. Reassembling the old gang may have reassured Nichols, but it served to exacerbate the bad vibes on the set. The lines were drawn between the Beatty Bunch (Nichols, Nicholson and Sylbert) on the one hand, and those who had never worked with them before, like Devlin and producer Hank Moonjean, on the other. And as often happens in these cases, the insiders disliked the outsiders, and vice versa. Says Devlin, "They and only they were the cool ones."

The first choice for the mousebed heiress had been Bette Midler, but she kept Nichols waiting, and that was the end of that. Nicholson suggested Mama Cass Elliot, to whom he was devoted, but Nichols wryly reminded him of the scene in which he and Beatty stuff the heiress into a trunk and throw her into the ocean. He quipped, "She'll never fit inside it." Eventually, Stockard Channing's name surfaced. She had had virtually no film experience (it would be her second movie, and first credited role), but Nichols liked her and cast her as Freddie.

When Nichols was finished cutting the script down, he had no choice but to say, "We're never going to have a complete script, we're gonna start anyway." It was shot in Culver City on Forty Acres, the old Selznick lot, the site of Tara of Gone With The Wind fame. According to Devlin, Beatty and Nichols immediately quarreled over their approach to the movie. "There was a tremendous disagreement, on the first day of shooting," he recalls. "As soon as Warren and Jack started to perform, everything that had been said about what the film was about went right out the window." Nobody agreed. Eastman thought she had written a Preston Sturges comedy, but Nicholson was playing it for slapstick, and making Nichols laugh. According to Moonjean, "Jack was doing Laurel and Hardy, while Stockard was doing sophisticated Carole Lombard comedy." Devlin continues, "Mike hated what they were doing, because it was so different than what he had anticipated, and they wouldn't do it the way he asked them to do it, so for the first several days they shot A and B versions, Mike's and theirs. They came to despise each other."

"Mike tried to get Warren off the film. I was in the room when he was storming and frustrated, and trying [to get him fired]. He called the lawyers and he found out he couldn't do that, 'cause Warrent was one of the owners of the project." Beatty says of Devlin's account, "It's insane. Utterly insane. Just crazy. Truly bizarre. This is something constructed by somebody who might have felt left out. Jack never had any disagreements with Mike. I never had a moment's unpleasantness on the movie."

Devlin claims Beattry was casually offensing to Channing. He recalls, "Warren turned to Mike, and said, 'Would anybody believe that I would fall in love with this piece of shit?' Right in front of Stockard! It was just as sickeningly rude to say it in front of the actor."... Channing herself says that Beatty and Nicholson acted "like jerks" to her.
...
Eventually, despite the rough patches in the beginning, the production settled down. The weight of Shampoo lifted from his shoulders, Beatty regarded The Fortune as a walk in the park. He and Nicholson enjoyed each other and set the tone, or tried to. Unless there is a real disaster in the making, everybody's a "genius," on a movie set, and this film was no exception. The principals were relentlessly upbeat. The Fortune wrapped at the end of August 1974.
____

Meanwhile, The Fortune had been screened for Columbia in New York, at 711 Fifth Avenue, the company headquarters. The audience was packed with every warm body in the building, the secretaries and kids from the mail room, as well as the executives. The lights went down, and the opening scene flashed on the screen, a long shot of Freddie (Channing) climbing out a window of her mansion and descending a ladder, while Nicky (Beatty) drives up in the foreground to collect her. There was nothing funny about it; in fact, it's too early in the film to know what's going on. But one member of the audience began to guffaw loudly. The others, some embarrassed and most puzzled, turned around to see who it was. It was Columbia CEO Alan Hirschfield, who actually stood up and apologised, said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's just in anticipation - and fear of course."

Hirschfield was right to be afraid. The Fortune was released on May 20, 1975, only three months after Shampoo. The actors acquitted themselves as well as could be expected. The problem was the script. Ostensibly a comedy, there isn't a single belly laugh from beginning to end. Despite the appealing premise, the film is so sluggish and unfunny it makes Ishtar look like Tootsie. Every once in a while the tedium is punctuated by pratfalls that have all the humour of a burst balloon. According to Dick Sylbert, "Warren told me he knew how to fix it, but nobody would listen."

The reviews, save for The New York Times, were dismal. In Time magazine, Jay Cocks wrote, "The Fortune is a bleak, frostbitten farce, desperate for invention and rather a sham." It grossed under $12.5 million. According to Devlin, "Mike was shattered by Day of the Dolphin. Now he was shattered again when The Fortune fell on its ass after one week." He continues, "Warren was laughing, because in the course of making it, he came to detest Mike. And of course he was exulting in the success of Shampoo."

The Fortune proved that even the star-kissed Beatty Bunch could stumble. It seemed that the lavishly talented participants - geniuses all - not only believed their own press, but their friends' as well. As Frank Rich, who had been on the set in August, remarked in a dour postmorten published in New Times, "I heard the word 'wonderful' more times in ten days then I had heard it in my entire life. Everything was 'wonderful,' and some things were 'very wonderful' or even 'extremely wonderful'."

[Aspect]

Count me as another lover of this film. The ending is one of my absolute favorites, and makes me laugh out loud every time.

[therewillbeblus]

I just watched Harry and Walter Go to New York with Gould and Caan, and it feels like a similar situation to this film - a period-era con-artist comedy with Big Stars, where jokes were excised in favor of story, and the attempts at 'humor' just fall completely flat. A lot of talent wasted. I really wanted to like both of these films, though I probably preferred this one for Diane Keaton doing her best (as well as the fun little references of it taking place in my hood)

[beamish14]

I don't want to overhype how much detail Biskind goes into, it's just a page or two but it's interesting esp. stuff about Carole Eastman--I'd love some MORE detail on this rather fascinating project (to me) from someone!

She and her brother Charles, who wrote Little Fauss and Big Halsey and Hal Ashby’s Second-Hand Hearts (a film I love as well, and admirers of this are probably even more rare than fans of The Fortune) were fascinating people