Post by petrolino on Dec 3, 2018 18:41:03 GMT
Otto was not satisfied with the gentlemanly Mitchum's holding back on the force of the blow and kept insisting on another take in which he was instructed to slap her even harder.
In take after take the director would shout instructions to slap her harder- harder-HARDER! Poor Jean had tears coming from her eyes as her cheek got redder and redder.
Finally Mitchum could take it no longer, and approached the director to get further instructions.
"Otto, I just don't get it -- do you want me to slap her like this?" -- then hauled off and smacked Preminger full across the face, then stormed off the set.
An outraged Otto shouted out to the departing actor that he was fired and would never work in the industry again! (although they did collaborate on RIVER OF NO RETURN the following year).
Mitchum went to the nearest florist and ordered two dozen roses to be sent to Simmons, with a note of apology.
Great story, thanks. 
Lots of French, Spanish and especially Italian directors are said to have pushed actresses way over the edge, slapping and the rough stuff being a genuine commonality in 1960s and 1970s genre cinema that later caused some consternation. In theatre, actors tend to be tougher because they push their bodies live, night after night. Otto Preminger witnessed a lot in the theatre that would never simply fly in Hollywood. Some people he pushed to the brink, be it Robert Mitchum or Jean Seberg, came back to work with him.
I really don't trust the gossipy Mitchum though, he seems to have a negative quip or anecdote for just about everybody he ever worked with, as if his own don't stink. Just today, I was reading some of Mitchum's typically blunt and opinionated comments on director Dick Richards, whom he apparently rated highly : "The producer, Elliott Kastner, comes by with Sir Lew Grade, the British tycoon. He has a black suit, a black tie, a white shirt and a whiter face. 'I know nothing about motion pictures,' Sir Lew says. 'What I know is entertainment: Ferris wheels, pony rides.' I suggested we buy up the rights to Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell, re-release it and go to the beach. But, no, they hired a director, Dick Richards, so nervous he can't hold his legs still. They have all the hide rubbed off them, He started doing TV commercials. He was accustomed to, you know, start the camera, expose 120 feet of film and tell somebody to move the beer bottle half an inch clockwise. He does the same thing with people."
Robert Mitchum, Otto Preminger & Jean Simmons
"Laura was a very big hit and Preminger was established at Fox as a director. For nearly 20 years he had an expert touch, invariably producing his films and so promoting himself as a producer that it was easy to miss his directorial style. Preminger moves the camera like an angel. He loves to show people in interactive groups. He is a genius on the space between people and the way they look at each other.
He is a very great director and a big shot as a producer at once. Over the next decades, you see him fighting censorship over The Moon is Blue, launching the splashy search for Saint Joan, dealing with a taboo subject like drug addiction in The Man With the Golden Arm, hiring the black-listed Dalton Trumbo to do Exodus, daring to make an all-black musical out of Carmen Jones (and getting his secret mistress, Dorothy Dandridge, the first lead Oscar nomination for a black player). His productions were always heavily promoted (with cool Saul Bass credit and poster designs), and by the late-1950s he launched himself with due deliberation at a series of weighty topics: the law (Anatomy of a Murder), nationalism (Exodus), democracy (Advise and Consent) and religion (The Cardinal). The first three of that quartet are brilliant films and very intelligent entertainments."
He is a very great director and a big shot as a producer at once. Over the next decades, you see him fighting censorship over The Moon is Blue, launching the splashy search for Saint Joan, dealing with a taboo subject like drug addiction in The Man With the Golden Arm, hiring the black-listed Dalton Trumbo to do Exodus, daring to make an all-black musical out of Carmen Jones (and getting his secret mistress, Dorothy Dandridge, the first lead Oscar nomination for a black player). His productions were always heavily promoted (with cool Saul Bass credit and poster designs), and by the late-1950s he launched himself with due deliberation at a series of weighty topics: the law (Anatomy of a Murder), nationalism (Exodus), democracy (Advise and Consent) and religion (The Cardinal). The first three of that quartet are brilliant films and very intelligent entertainments."
- David Thomson, 'Sex It Up'
'In the early 1960s, Preminger was revered by both British and French critics, who placed him high up in "Top 10" polls, but in recent years, his stock has fallen. It is the Austrian-born director's misfortune that his tantrums are as well remembered today as his movies. "I always felt he was a little underrated, and that people judged him more on his personality," says Foster Hirsch, who is currently putting the finishing touches to his biography of the film-maker, entitled Subject to Fits.
Look a little more closely and it soon becomes apparent that Preminger was indeed a far richer and complex film-maker than the newspaper headlines about his combustible temperament suggested. Besides, the tantrums served a purpose. Like other film-makers, from Von Sternberg to Von Trier, he was a skilled self-publicist who knew the value in column inches of behaving like an ogre.
Even his strange fetish for playing Nazis, despite being Jewish, was understandable. He was trying to convey to US audiences just how atrocious Hitler's regime really was. "He wanted to make them look as horrible as possible," his widow Hope Preminger says. She was married to him for 30 years and the man she describes is far removed from the film-maker of popular myth: a devoted father and husband, exemplary host, loyal and generous friend.
Preminger's best films (some screening in new prints at the National Film Theatre's forthcoming retrospective) hold up remarkably well. What is most startling is their diversity. He worked in every genre conceivable: film noir, Western, musical, courtroom drama, comedy, historical epic, melodrama, espionage thriller. Some of his pictures are chamber pieces. Others are on a vast scale. "That was his personality," says Hope Preminger. "He tried never to do the same things twice. Whenever anybody asked him which of his films was his favourite, his answer was always, 'The next one'."
Look a little more closely and it soon becomes apparent that Preminger was indeed a far richer and complex film-maker than the newspaper headlines about his combustible temperament suggested. Besides, the tantrums served a purpose. Like other film-makers, from Von Sternberg to Von Trier, he was a skilled self-publicist who knew the value in column inches of behaving like an ogre.
Even his strange fetish for playing Nazis, despite being Jewish, was understandable. He was trying to convey to US audiences just how atrocious Hitler's regime really was. "He wanted to make them look as horrible as possible," his widow Hope Preminger says. She was married to him for 30 years and the man she describes is far removed from the film-maker of popular myth: a devoted father and husband, exemplary host, loyal and generous friend.
Preminger's best films (some screening in new prints at the National Film Theatre's forthcoming retrospective) hold up remarkably well. What is most startling is their diversity. He worked in every genre conceivable: film noir, Western, musical, courtroom drama, comedy, historical epic, melodrama, espionage thriller. Some of his pictures are chamber pieces. Others are on a vast scale. "That was his personality," says Hope Preminger. "He tried never to do the same things twice. Whenever anybody asked him which of his films was his favourite, his answer was always, 'The next one'."
- Introducing the Otto Preminger Film Season at the National Film Theatre
"Q : Having withdrawn from his “Anatomy of a Murder,” would Miss Turner ever work with Otto Preminger?
A : “God forbid— not if my family and I were hungry.”
- Howard Thomson, Lana Turner Stars At Town Hall In Films And Onstage Interview (April 14, 1975)
Billy Wilder & Otto Preminger
