Read Online The Magnificent Elmer by Pearl Bernstein Gardner, Gerald Gardner - Free Book Online
Authors: Pearl Bernstein Gardner, Gerald Gardner
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a cookie full of arsenic.”
—J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco
Look in the 2000 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and you will find an expression called “sweet smell of success,” the seductive power of money over principle. It is what they will tell you lured Elmer away from Carnegie Hall, Clifford away from the Broadway theatre, and many other good men from Faulkner to Fitzgerald, to the tinsel of Hollywood.
“Sweet Smell of Success” is a phrase invented by an assistant to a Broadway gossip columnist. His name was Ernie Lehman and before he graduated to writing such great thrillers as North by Northwest and such saccharine stuff as The Sound of Music , he wrote a corrosive novella about a malignant gossip columnist in the tradition of Walter Winchell. Ernie worked for celebrity press agent Irving Hoffmann. He knew the sleazy world of nightclubs and cigarette girls, and he serviced the columnists of the time with gossip items. Winchell was a rabid anti-communist who resided in the side pocket of J. Edgar Hoover. Sweet Smell of Success appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1950, ten years before Helen Gurley Brown would turn Cosmo into catnip for working women.
Clifford had always been cynical about the sweet smell of success in the movie business. So when Ernie Lehman grew sick during the filming of Sweet Smell , Odets was called in.
Burt Lancaster played the odious columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and he produced it along with his pal Harold Hecht. I always found Lancaster a bit of a bully, conversationally and physically. Ernie Lehman had bowed out of the screenwriting chores of Sweet Smell when he suffered from a tension-induced spastic colon the size of a fist. (It is fitting, I suppose, that writers should have problems involving the colon.) Ernie planned a therapeutic cruise to Tahiti, and Burt Lancaster confronted him. “You’re not that sick! You’re ruining my movie! I’m going to beat you up!”
“Go ahead,” said Lehman. “I could use the money.”
***
Clifford sat in the back of a prop truck outside New York’s 21 Club on West Fifty-Second Street, a typewriter in his lap, and a blanket thrown over his shoulder for protection against the midnight cold. The street looked like the staging site for the Anzio beachhead. There were equipment trucks, trailers, honey wagons, lights, extras, grips, detail cops, and a nest of cables. In the midst of all this glorious debris, Clifford sat typing his acidic dialog for the next scene in the schedule. “Falco enters club, looks about for J.J.’s table…”
Elmer had been hired to write the movie’s score and the result was the hottest sound since he had brought jazz to Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm . There was a lot of perilous jazz around the year they filmed Sweet Smell of Success . And of course, Elmer knew New York well. We had lived two miles north of the action of the story. “The section is between Columbus Circle and Times Square,” observed Elmer, “and inthat tiny area careers were made and destroyed by the gossip columnists.” Elmer’s music reflected the anguish that was in the air.
The movie was American film noir of the highest order, and it created the most exciting words and music team you’ll ever see—words by Clifford Odets, music by Elmer Bernstein.
The movie presents the bitter relationship between J.J. and Sidney Falco, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. For ninety minutes you sit and watch two despicable guys tearing one another to pieces with their bile and cynicism.
Elmer really took to this setting, and Clifford really took to this Manhattan melodrama. Clifford stretched the two-week assignment to four months, deconstructing every one of Julie Epstein’s scenes and virtually every one of his sentences.
In capturing the big city Elmer and I had deserted for Hollywood, I thought that Sweet Smell captured better than any film I’d ever seen the atmosphere of Times Square, the excitement of big-city
—J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco
Look in the 2000 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and you will find an expression called “sweet smell of success,” the seductive power of money over principle. It is what they will tell you lured Elmer away from Carnegie Hall, Clifford away from the Broadway theatre, and many other good men from Faulkner to Fitzgerald, to the tinsel of Hollywood.
“Sweet Smell of Success” is a phrase invented by an assistant to a Broadway gossip columnist. His name was Ernie Lehman and before he graduated to writing such great thrillers as North by Northwest and such saccharine stuff as The Sound of Music , he wrote a corrosive novella about a malignant gossip columnist in the tradition of Walter Winchell. Ernie worked for celebrity press agent Irving Hoffmann. He knew the sleazy world of nightclubs and cigarette girls, and he serviced the columnists of the time with gossip items. Winchell was a rabid anti-communist who resided in the side pocket of J. Edgar Hoover. Sweet Smell of Success appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1950, ten years before Helen Gurley Brown would turn Cosmo into catnip for working women.
Clifford had always been cynical about the sweet smell of success in the movie business. So when Ernie Lehman grew sick during the filming of Sweet Smell , Odets was called in.
Burt Lancaster played the odious columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and he produced it along with his pal Harold Hecht. I always found Lancaster a bit of a bully, conversationally and physically. Ernie Lehman had bowed out of the screenwriting chores of Sweet Smell when he suffered from a tension-induced spastic colon the size of a fist. (It is fitting, I suppose, that writers should have problems involving the colon.) Ernie planned a therapeutic cruise to Tahiti, and Burt Lancaster confronted him. “You’re not that sick! You’re ruining my movie! I’m going to beat you up!”
“Go ahead,” said Lehman. “I could use the money.”
***
Clifford sat in the back of a prop truck outside New York’s 21 Club on West Fifty-Second Street, a typewriter in his lap, and a blanket thrown over his shoulder for protection against the midnight cold. The street looked like the staging site for the Anzio beachhead. There were equipment trucks, trailers, honey wagons, lights, extras, grips, detail cops, and a nest of cables. In the midst of all this glorious debris, Clifford sat typing his acidic dialog for the next scene in the schedule. “Falco enters club, looks about for J.J.’s table…”
Elmer had been hired to write the movie’s score and the result was the hottest sound since he had brought jazz to Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm . There was a lot of perilous jazz around the year they filmed Sweet Smell of Success . And of course, Elmer knew New York well. We had lived two miles north of the action of the story. “The section is between Columbus Circle and Times Square,” observed Elmer, “and inthat tiny area careers were made and destroyed by the gossip columnists.” Elmer’s music reflected the anguish that was in the air.
The movie was American film noir of the highest order, and it created the most exciting words and music team you’ll ever see—words by Clifford Odets, music by Elmer Bernstein.
The movie presents the bitter relationship between J.J. and Sidney Falco, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. For ninety minutes you sit and watch two despicable guys tearing one another to pieces with their bile and cynicism.
Elmer really took to this setting, and Clifford really took to this Manhattan melodrama. Clifford stretched the two-week assignment to four months, deconstructing every one of Julie Epstein’s scenes and virtually every one of his sentences.
In capturing the big city Elmer and I had deserted for Hollywood, I thought that Sweet Smell captured better than any film I’d ever seen the atmosphere of Times Square, the excitement of big-city
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