William Bast recalls the making of The Betsy
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Novelists have
always found the rich and famous fair (and sometimes not so fair) game.
Honore de Balzac parodied the Baron Rothschild after dining at his
table. In the 1920s Edith Wharton chronicled the affairs of the
descendents of New York's Dutch settlers whose blood (not to mention
fortunes) had thinned by the time Mrs. Wharton impaled them in her pages. |
The one-time obscure studio accountant knew a motherlode when he hit one, and over the years Robbins turned out a steady stream of bestsellers on Hollywood and pseudo-Hollywood themes. Literature indeed proved a happy calling. Harold
collected a home in the south of France, a custom made Rolls-Royce, and
an 85 foot yacht on which he cruised the Mediterranean. Until his death
in 1997, however, there were persistent rumors that cocaine and
ghostwriters helped assist Robbins's overworked muse. |
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Lorimar purchased the film rights and pulled off a coup
by signing Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) to play Loren Hardeman, the family
patriarch with an eye for young ladies. The august English actor had previously
appeared in films based on the works of a number of notable novelists
(Bronte, Austen), not to mention a playwright named Shakespeare.
Tommy Lee Jones, a young Harvard graduate, played
Angelo Perino, the Italian-American car designer and racer set on
conquering both the Hardeman empire and Hardeman heiress. Robert Duvall
was the wily Hardeman scion, and Joseph Wiseman played a character
loosely based on Meyer Lansky. (Gangsters were another Robbins staple.) |
AL: | How did you come to adapt The Betsy for the screen?
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WB: |
I was offered the adaptation after Walter Bernstein had
done an earlier draft. Normally, I wouldn't have considered sharing credit,
but when I heard Olivier had been signed, I decided this was something I
definitely wanted to do. |
AL: | How did you approach the job?
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WB: |
Robbins had provided a very good story, and luckily had done all the technical research. Aside from re-shaping the plot, which involved adding a number of flashbacks to provide continuity, I accentuated Olivier's fixation on Katharine Ross (who played his daughter-in-law), and filled out the homosexual affair and suicide of Olivier's son who was played by Paul Rudd.
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AL: | Did you write any scenes with Olivier specifically in mind?
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WB: |
I didn't get to know Olivier until after the movie, but I had seen him playing an American in a British TV production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and realized his American accent was in serious trouble. So I wrote into the script that Loren Hardeman, the character Olivier played, didn't have an American accent because he had been raised in England. When Dan Petrie, the director, returned from location in Detroit, I asked him how Larry's accent had worked out, and Dan rather sheepishly told me that Larry had prevailed and used his famous "Kansas" accent anyway.
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AL: | Olivier had been in MGM's version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
(1940) and Samuel Goldwyn's version of Charlotte Bronte's Wuthering Heights
(1939). How did he feel about filming Harold Robbins?
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WB: |
He never brought the subject up, but he seemed to be having a good time, like a kid getting up to mischief. He very much enjoyed being back in Hollywood again. It brought back memories of the good old days. In fact, Paul Huson, who had played the Prince of Wales in Larry's movie, Richard III (1955), and I took him to dinner at Musso & Frank which tickled him a lot.
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AL: | Harold Robbins was allowed more freedom of expression than the Bronte
sisters.
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WB: |
Olivier relished the idea of the Robbins sex scenes. However, he felt that one scene that required him to have sex in a clothes closet with his wife's French maid might prove too arduous for him. He believed it would require "a light Cordelia" (as John Gielgud said of King Lear's youngest daughter), or at least a harness in which to suspend the maid. As the scene was shot, the culminating act was left to the audience's imagination. On the other hand, Larry's ogling Katharine Ross breast feeding the baby and his subsequent tryst with Katharine in bed, were not cut. Later, Harold Robbins told me that he considered The Betsy the "best movie adaptation of any of his works."
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AL: | Was director Dan Petrie faithful to your script? |
WB: |
I found Dan always faithful to the script. I made mutually agreeable adjustments in consultation with him before shooting began. However, Olivier did give Ivan Moffat, his English-born chum, a helping hand by roping him in to do some diddles on his dialogue on the set. I learned this afterwards. But that was Larry's mischief.
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AL: | How did the studio react to the film's R rating?
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WB: |
The studio found Dan's cut to be rather tame, so he went back and filmed an additional sex scene between Lesley-Anne Down and Tommy Lee Jones, in a rented hotel room, as I recall. It seemed like they were looking for a R rating, although nobody ever said so, of course. They did want Dan to "heat it up." I don't believe Betsy's nude swim scene was in the book, nor Larry's line "never shit a shitter." Ladylike Jane Alexander's bitter line, "Did you f--k her?" was left in the final cut, surprisingly. So was Tommy Lee Jones's line, "Yeah, I got a tape recorder hidden up my ass." These are only some examples of the rough language everybody wanted, to do what they saw was justice to Harold Robbins's material. To the best of my recollection, there was no effort to avoid a R rating--rather the opposite, it appeared.
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AL: | What was Dan Petrie like as a director?
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WB: |
Thorough, calm, surprisingly easygoing. He got what he wanted by being a gentleman, not by bullying. On top of everything, he never lost his cool.
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AL: |
Reviewers and critics too often overlook the editing and cinematography work in a film.
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WB: |
In cutting and editing, Rita Roland did a splendid job. I had only a few suggestions, most of which she'd already considered and done. Rita not only took my idea of seeing the impact of Loren Hardeman, Jr.'s suicide on his young son, but she used stop-action to emphasize it which lent it a terrific impact. I'll never forget Mario Tosi's shot of the kid watching the shooting.
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AL: | The flashbacks to 1930s Detroit and the auto baron's grand lifestyle
stood out in the film.
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WB: |
I though Dorothy Jeakins took us back in time and kept us up to date with remarkable elegance and dexterity in her costuming. John Barry's score was a wonderful surprise. It was both classic and classy. And topping everything was Dan Petrie's extraordinary direction.
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AL: | During the filming, did you have much interaction with the female leads:
Lesley-Anne Down, Katharine Ross, Jane Alexander?
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WB: |
Only cursory meetings and script discussions. They all took the project seriously and were very committed. Surprisingly so, for a Harold Robbins's piece--you'd have thought it was Shakespeare. But good actors always take their roles seriously.
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