 |
| Warren Beatty in 'All Fall Down:' Angelic arrogance and Angela Lansbury |
 |
| John Houseman |
“Shooting started in late
spring, and within 48 hours John Frankenheimer and I were locked in a fearful
dispute. He rushed into my office from the set after the second day’s shooting
and announced that my friend Angela Lansbury was ‘impossible,’ that he could
not direct her and that the part must be recast immediately,” Houseman wrote.
Houseman had wooed Lansbury
“desultorily” in the early 1940s after her notable film debut in “Dorian Gray”
and “Gaslight.”
“I disagreed,” Houseman
recalled. “It got to the point where he announced that if she didn’t leave the
picture, he would. I stood firm.
Forty-eight hours later they had become inseparable, and he refused to make his
next film, ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ without her.
“From the start, our most
serious problem was young Mr. (Warren) Beatty,” Houseman said. “With his
angelic arrogance, his determination to emulate Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean,
and his half-baked, overzealous notions of ‘Method’ acting, he succeeded in
perplexing and antagonizing not only his fellow actors but our entire crew.
“While the company was on
location in Key West, our veteran cameraman, Curly Lindon, became so
exasperated with him that a flew a camera-bearing helicopter within a few
inches of his head. And on the last day of shooting, in a secret agreement with
the local police, Warren Beatty was left to languish overnight in a bare cell
of the Key West jail while the company flew back to California.”
Despite all that, Houseman
noted that “All Fall Down” was the most satisfying of the films he made during
the second phase of his MGM career, and that all Beatty’s obnoxious
self-promotion turned out to be justified by “his subsequent brilliant career
in a series of highly successful films as actor, director and producer.”
Source: “Final Dress” by
John Houseman
No comments:
Post a Comment