“We
were just leaving the movies - Casablanca ,
with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan…” I
had the idea one time to use this as the opening of a story, to signal it was
alternate history. This casting was supposedly
floated, at some point, but it was a public relations stunt; Hal Wallis, the
producer, later said he never wanted anybody but Bogart. Quentin
Tarantino published a book, year before last, called Cinema Speculation , and my first thought was that he’d speculate . For example, Howard Hawks once claimed that
he was set to direct Casablanca , and
Michael Curtiz was assigned to Sergeant
York , but Curtiz wanted to get out of doing a picture about “hillbillies”
and he, Hawks, was uncomfortable making a “musical,” (I’m not sure what he
means by that, La Marseillaise , As Time Goes By ?) and they switched
movies. I don’t know whether to credit
this. Hawks is clearly the right guy for
Gary Cooper, and Curtiz is just as clearly the right director for Casablanca . In fact,
Warners kept two crews working simultaneously, so Curtiz could prep his next
picture while he shot the current one: he was that efficient – or ruthless,
some would say. All the same, Tarantino
is nothing if not a fanboy, you knew that, and you can imagine how entertaining
he might be with What Ifs.
Sam
Peckinpah was fired from The Cincinatti
Kid about a week in. Ostensibly,
because he was making a dirty movie; he did a scene with Rip Torn and a naked
girl in a fur coat. (“Oh,” Peckinpah
says, “and I was shooting in black-and-white.”)
Not to mention, Sharon Tate got the boot in favor of Tuesday Weld, and
Spencer Tracy was signed to play Lancey Howard, but Edward G. Robinson came off
the bench when Tracy
had health issues. Norman Jewison gets
the director credit, and Cincinnati Kid
is a halfway decent picture – Robinson is terrific, too, he steals the movie –
but you can’t help wondering. In the
aftermath of the Major Dundee
disaster, The Cincinnati Kid could
have put Peckinpah back on the map, Steve McQueen a brand name already, even if
shooting a major release in widescreen color is the better box-office
call. McQueen and Peckinpah of course
did Junior Bonner and The Getaway later on.
Here’s
a story Quint does tell. McQueen passed on Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid , after Paul Newman had been
signed. They offered Sundance to Warren
Beatty, but Beatty wanted to play Butch, and he wanted Elvis as Sundance.
A lot
of people probably know that Dirty Harry
started out as a Frank Sinatra vehicle - the original pitch for Columbo had Bing Crosby to star, too – but
after they settled on Clint Eastwood, he brought Don Siegel over from
Universal, to direct. Siegel, at one
point, wanted to cast Audie Murphy as
Scorpio, the serial killer, because Audie Murphy had a baby face and didn’t
look the part (although he’s credited with killing 241 enemy combatants in
WWII). Siegel had made two pictures with
Audie, one, The Gun Runners , a remake
of To Have and Have Not . Also, if you think Audie can’t act, you
should check out The Unforgiven , his
second picture with John Huston. *As a
footnote, Andy Robinson, who did play
Scorpio, has a good hundred credits under his belt, but it took him twenty
years to shake his association with the part (he’s really that good in Dirty Harry ), and even then, it was because he wore heavy
prosthetics in Deep Space Nine .
Nobody
but Gable was ever going to play Rhett Butler, but there are dozens of
surviving screen tests for Scarlett. Everybody wanted the part. 1400 interviews, 400 callbacks. Katherine
Hepburn. Paulette Goddard had a good
shot, but she was shacked up with Chaplin, and not married to him, which gave
Selznick the jitters. Tallulah Bankhead. Susan Hayward, Frances Dee, Jean Arthur, Lucille
Ball, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Carole
Lombard, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, Joan Bennett. Bette Davis was an early favorite, but
Warners wouldn’t lend her out. She was
chafing against studio discipline, and Jack Warner wanted to teach her a
lesson. She did Jezebel at Warners, which is basically the same story as GWTW , and the better picture, for my
money. The question is whether you can
see her as Scarlett. Or if you can see anybody else as Scarlett, once Vivien
Leigh is in the room. She takes up all
the air. You may or may not actually like the movie, but she surely makes it hers . Cutting
back to Quentin, he does get up to some mischief, not so much in Cinema Speculation , but in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood , you have
Leo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton playing the Steve McQueen part in The Great Escape , and Damian Lewis, as
McQueen, bemoaning the fact that he’s not getting into Sharon Tate’s
pants.
The
question isn’t whether it’s real, but whether it’s convincing. I personally can’t conjure up Brando or
Albert Finney in Lawrence of Arabia ,
but they were both offered the part. Lee
Marvin walked away from The Wild Bunch
to do Paint Your Wagon . You just never know. Somewhere out there are these ghost pictures,
that never got made, or got made with the wrong talent, or somehow went off the
rails.
We’ll never
get to see those movies, running in the private drive-in of our mind’s
eye. But maybe we’ve been spared.
All Rights Reserved Book Blog