All Wise, Always
Charles Champlin
Director Robert Wise's versatility precludes an easily identifiable mark--but earns him yet another honor.
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Los Angeles Times
Robert Wise this week becomes the 26th recipient of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, the most prestigious film honor outside those given by the motion picture academy itself.

At that, he has four Oscars from the academy, two each (as director and producer) for “The Sound of Music” and “West Side Story,” as well as the Irving Thalberg Award for his body of work. He has been president of both the motion picture academy and the Directors Guild, from which he has had its top honor, the D.W. Griffith Award. At 83, he finds he doesn’t have the time, or the stamina, to get to all the film festivals eager to honor him.

Wise has produced and directed films both critically and commercially successful in every fiction genre except animation. As he noted philosophically in his Beverly Hills office one recent afternoon, this versatility has not endeared him to film theorists who insist that a director must leave his unmistakable signature on every frame of a movie.

“Some of the more esoteric critics claim that there’s no Robert Wise style or stamp. My answer to that is that I’ve tried to approach each genre in a cinematic style that I think is right for that genre. I wouldn’t have approached ‘The Sound of Music’ the way I approached ‘I Want to Live!’ for anything, and that accounts for a mix of styles.”

The hallmark of a Wise film, from his first solo effort, “The Curse of the Cat People” in 1944, is a seamlessness in which the director is identified more by an unobtrusive fidelity to the story.

So it went, year after year, genre after genre: high drama, film noir, biography, romantic comedy, dramatic adventure, the supernatural, suspense and the crowning achievements of two musicals, “West Side Story,” which he co-directed with choreographer Jerome Robbins, and “The Sound of Music.”

Born in Winchester, Ind., Wise had a year at Franklin College, aiming for a career in journalism (“I’d been sports editor at the high school paper, and I kind of liked it”). But his father’s grocery store was failing and the family advised him to join his older brother Dave in Hollywood. Dave had gone west with a pal whose father ran the local cinemas and gave them letters of introduction to the studios. Dave, later an accountant, had found work at RKO.

Luckily, the props department, where Dave got Robert an interview, was full up. But Jimmy Wilkinson, who ran the editing department, needed another strong back to carry prints to the screening room. He hired Wise, thus launching what was to be Wise’s 65-year career.

Wise soon moved into sound effects editing and spent two years there. But he perceived that most of his fellow workers had been in the same jobs for as long as 10 years. “It was a dead end,” Wise said. He begged Wilkinson to transfer him to the picture side and--this being Wise’s second or third piece of good fortune--Wilkinson did, assigning him to Billy Hamilton, a first-rate editor who was also a periodic drunk. Wilkinson said: “Bob, remember, you’re his assistant, not his nurse.”

But he and Hamilton became quick friends, and Hamilton (another break for Wise) started him off immediately doing first rough assemblies on a day’s shooting, giving Wise invaluable experience and expert guidance.

“Billy had me assemble a scene on my very first picture, ‘Winterset.’ I stumbled through it somehow, and within two more pictures I was doing all the first cutting while Billy was up on the set with the director.”

On the last three films he did with Hamilton, including “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle,” Billy insisted they share screen credit. Wise was editing “My Favorite Wife” (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) as a solo credit when Wilkinson asked him to meet a new lad at the studio, Orson Welles.

“He’s pulled a fast one,” Wilkinson told Wise. “He got an OK to make some tests and they realized they’re not tests, they’re scenes from the movie.”

Wise went down to the RKO Pathe studio in Culver City, where Welles, made up as the elderly Charles Foster Kane, was shooting a picnic scene. After a brief chat, Welles OKd Wise. Wise thinks Welles took to him because he and Welles were virtually the same age, as opposed to the cynical old-timers Welles had met.

These days Wise is asked about working with Welles on “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons” almost as often as he is asked about his own work. Nothing magical about it, Wise says. Welles never came into the editing room. Wise did the usual first rough assemblages and after they were screened he and Welles would talk and Welles would give his notes.

Collaborating on “Ambersons,” as history knows, became another matter. They had not finished editing the film when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war was on. Welles was summoned to Washington and then agreed to fly to Rio de Janiero and work with South American filmmakers as part of the Good Neighbor Policy aimed at keeping Latin America neutral or on the side of the Allies.

Before Welles flew off to Rio, Wise took the film to Miami, where he and Welles spent three days in a borrowed cartoon studio going over it. Wise would not see him in person again for several years.

When he had finished the final editing, Wise was to fly to Rio himself and go over it with Welles, but suddenly civilians were embargoed from international flights. A print was shipped to Welles, and he and Wise worked on it during crackly international phone calls and the guidance in one 35-page cable from Welles.

“The studio was very nervous--’Ambersons’ had cost a lot of money for the time, a million dollars or more--and we sneak-previewed the film in Pomona. It was an absolute disaster. The audience walked out in droves. They laughed at Aggie Moorehead’s characterization. The film was also awfully long for those days, more than two hours.”

Wise trimmed the film and it played slightly better. “We cut again, so much that we had continuity problems.” A new scene was required, which Wise directed. Then the studio decided on a new ending, a change of locale rather than substance, Wise says. It was directed by RKO’s production manager, Freddie Fleck.

“We had a fourth preview in Long Beach, and the audience seemed to sit for it, didn’t walk out and didn’t laugh. That’s the picture we see today, and I’d have to say it was better than the original version.”

The film, Wise believes, was a victim of its time. When it went into release, the country was at war; men going into service, women into factories. “Nobody cared much about the Amberson family in turn-of-the-century Indianapolis.”

Then another piece of good fortune, the largest yet, came as Wise was editing “The Curse of the Cat People” for the brilliant young producer Val Lewton. It was being directed by Gunther von Fritsch, a well-regarded documentarian doing his first feature. “He’d used up his whole schedule and only shot half the script.”

On a Saturday, Lewton and the executive producer, Sid Rogell, took Wise to lunch and told him he was taking over the picture on Monday. “I must have sounded hesitant about replacing him, but Rogell, never a man to mince words, said, ‘Bob, he’s not going to be there Monday morning; somebody else is going to be there. It can be you or it will be somebody else.’ ” Wise had told the studio he wanted a chance to direct, and as awkward as the situation was, Wise said, “I’ll be there.”

Wise finished the film in the 10 days he was given, and it is still a cult film in the horror genre. RKO signed him to a seven-year contract.

Wise’s jump to big-budget films was his western “Blood on the Moon.” He and a producer had found the property on the shelf at RKO and got a go-ahead from the studio for a first-class script. Meanwhile, Wise had signed with an agency, at the suggestion of French actress Simone Simon, who had starred in “Cat People.” The agents had promised to take no commission until they had bettered his deal at RKO.

One day, Wise says, Rogell called him in and said, “Bob, you better check up on your agents. They’re in the front office trying to undermine you and get one of their big-time $100,000 directors to do the western.”

Wise was getting $20,000 a picture. Dore Schary was running the studio in those days, Wise says, and told the agents, “This is Wise’s film and he’s going to do it, and that’s that.” Wise did, and found a new agent, Phil Gersh, who has been his agent for half a century.

“The Set-Up” in 1949 was Wise’s last film at RKO. Howard Hughes had shut down all production after he bought the studio, but Rogell finally persuaded him to let Wise make the film, which was based on a long narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March.

“You know,” Wise says, “one of the things a director has to do is research the subject matter, get to the truth and the reality of what he’s working with. When I was getting ready to do ‘The Set-Up,’ I found an old boxing arena down in Long Beach like the one we would have in the film. One side of the card used one dressing room, the other side the other room. I used to go down there on fight nights at 6, before anybody else got there, and spend the whole night in the dressing room, watching the fighters--how they came in, how they were dressed, how they went out to the fight, how they came back in whether they’d won or lost. It’s what you do.”

His hardest job of research, Wise says, was unquestionably for “I Want to Live!,” his film about the last days of Barbara Graham, the prostitute who died in the gas chamber, and for which Wise was nominated for an Academy Award.

“The last part of the film is her final evening in the death cell and then the gas chamber. I wanted to be able to say, this is the way it is and not some Hollywood writer’s version of what goes on.”

Wise asked the warden at San Quentin for permission to attend an execution, and the warden consented, telling Wise, “Capital punishment is the law of the state of California, and I think it’s well for the people to see how it works.”

“There’s an outside section,” Wise says, “where the witnesses sit, and there’s an inside section where the warden and the doctor and the guys who do the acid are. I was inside with the doctor. I didn’t know if I could watch without getting sick. The prisoner was a young man who’d killed two women in Oakland and, like Barbara in her day, he’d run out of appeals.

“After Barbara gets a whiff of the gas,” Wise says, “you presume she doesn’t feel anything anymore. A couple of times I cut to her hands twitching. But in actuality that twisting and fighting the straps goes on for seven or eight minutes. There are so many systems in the body it takes that long for them all to shut down. Terrible to watch. Terrible. After the young man died, I thought to myself, ‘What the hell good is this doing?’ ”

When he came to make “Odds Against Tomorrow,” Wise found the blacklist at work in those virulent days. It was a tough, noirish film in which a bank robbery fails when racial bigotry disrupts the three schemers.

“Phil Gersh sent Harry Belafonte to see me. He had this great script he said was by a black novelist named John O. Killens. I set up shop in New York, where we were going to shoot the picture, and one day Harry said he wanted to bring the writer over. I opened the door and it wasn’t a black novelist, it was Abe Polonsky, a blacklisted writer who couldn’t work under his own name.”

Polonsky is now officially recognized as the author of the script, but “Odds Against Tomorrow” was released with the fictitious Killens’ name on it, in collaboration with Nelson Gidding, who worked on several Wise films.

Wise’s “The Sand Pebbles” in 1966 earned Steve McQueen his only Academy Award nomination. It may well have been McQueen’s finest performance, confirming that in his avuncular way, Wise evokes excellent work from his actors, even so temperamental. (McQueen at one point refused to speak to Wise for three days after Wise, setting up a complicated shot, spoke abruptly when McQueen interrupted him with a minor question about the next day’s wardrobe.)

“Yes, he was insecure,” Wise says, “but I never worked with an actor who knew so well what worked for him. We would be rehearsing a scene and Steve would say, ‘I think I can get that point across with a reaction.’ And very often he was right.”

In Wise’s films there is what might be called a detectable unity of intent.

“Whatever it is, whether somebody gives me a script or a book, it’s got to grab me as a reader, an audience, get me caught up and involved and carry me along. That’s No. 1, always,” Wise says.

“No. 2 is what does it have to say? What’s it about? Is it something I agree with theme-wise? Do I agree with its so-called message? I hope the message, whatever it is, won’t come through as a soapbox lecture, but through the telling of the story, the plot and the characters.

“And the third thing you have to ask yourself is: What’s it going to cost? That’s the first thing the front office is going to ask.

“So those are the steps. But obviously any picture begins and ends with the script, with the story. Whatever the weaknesses are in the script, you’d better get rid of them before you start shooting, or they’ll haunt you right to the bitter end.”

Making a film is always a gamble, Wise says. “Nobody sets out to make a picture that audiences won’t come to--but you never know for sure.”

And when you’ve got it all right, Wise says, “You can grab ‘em, tell ‘em something, because you can’t make a good story without saying something. When videocassettes came out, everybody said it would ruin the box office. But they just reminded people that movies are a hell of an entertainment medium, and they always will be.”

* The AFI Tribute to Robert Wise will air on NBC later this year.