When Tom Hanks first heard that Universal Studios was developing a movie called Dragnet, he wanted in. "I went up to the black tower on the Universal lot and said to the executives 'Hi guys. Here's why I would like to do Dragnet. See, I want to wear a gun and a badge and have some muscle on my arms and not have to jump into bed with anyone.'"
Dan Aykroyd also wanted in. After watching the show on television--it's still being syndicated around the country--"he flipped," says the producer, David Permut. Permut, who says he had the original idea--"Well, I gues it was really Jack Webb's idea," he admits--definitely wanted in. It was the essence of high concept: IT'S DRAGNET WITH DANNY AYKROYD AS JOE FRIDAY!
But perhaps more than anyone else, Tom Makiewicz wanted in. A second-generation success story peculiar to show business, Mankiewicz started making a six-figure income in his middle twenties rewriting movie scripts and writing, and later directing, the television series Hart To Hart. But in Hollywood that wasn't enough: Young "Mank" wasn't living up to his legacy. His uncle Herman co-wrote Citizen Kane (and, according to Pauline Kael, contributed more than anyone knew). His father, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was a true Hollywood phenomenon: He collaborated (stormily) on F. Scott Fitzgerald's screenplay, Three Comrades (1938), produced The Philadelphia Story (1940) and wrote and directed All About Eve (1950), among many others.
So Tom Mankiewicz was expected to achieve more sublime successes. The pressure came not only from his family but also from Hollywood itself. Dragnet is his debut as a director.
Shot on more than 35 Los Angeles locations in 56 days (and seventeen straight nights), the film was so long at one poin that Mankiewicz, whose sense of humor is legendary in Hollywood, dubbed it Lawrence of Dragnet. "I had 30,000 square feet of film, and I only needed 12,000," he says. "Ten minutes of excess in a movie like Witness isn't a problem--ten minutes extra in a comedy is a nightmare." If the film seemed long then, when Mankiewicz first saw the screenplay, it ran 300 pages--180 more than a normal script. And as of April, after a few people around Hollywood had seen a rough cut, word had it that the movie might still be a bit too long.
If Dragnet seems long, the development process was shockingly short. "It's the opposite of Oliver Stone," says Permut. "In a business where things take years, this happened pretty quickly. It's a little over a year since I got the idea." The complicated part was figuring out who owned the rights to the TV show. "I had to check through Jack Webb's entire estate," he says, "and I finally found out they belonged to MCA." MCA owns Universal, which loved the idea--particularly with Aykroyd attatched.
The story of the movie, says Mankiewicz, "is how Joe Friday and his partner, Pep Streebeck, uncover a plot by a gang of nefarious pagans to take over control of Los Angeles. Friday and Streebeck triumph," he adds. I wouldn't want people to think Joe Friday doesn't triumph in the end."
Aykroyd became Joe Friday, nephew of Webb's original. "Danny walked around all day listening to cassettes of Jack Webb," says Hanks. "Aykroyd's voice has the same timbre and frequency as Webb's," adds Mankeiwicz. "It's almost eerie." Alan Zwiebel, who collaborated on the screenplay, agrees. "We were role-playing while we wrote one draft at Danny's house on Martha's Vineyard in February 1986. I really felt like I was living with Joe Friday."
Though Zwiebel and Aykroyd have known each other since their Saturday Night Live days, Zwiebel says, "We're totally different people. He's a Canadian goyishe and I'm a huge Jew from Long Island. So it's a nice mix. Our approaches are totally different, but after three or four days we were really working." Hanks plays Streebeck very straight. "He likes being a vice cop," says Hanks. "We knew Friday represented an anachronistic time warp," says Zwiebel. "So we wanted him to have a partner who had a new way of thinking." Still, the original TVshow is "a touchstone," according to the director, "and we want to touch just enough...."
At first Mankiewicz didn't want to touch it at all. In the spring of 1986, after two decades as one of Hollywood's best-paid script doctors, he had finally got himself a deal with Universal to produce, direct and write. No more saving other people's movies--as he had done on The Deep and Diamonds Are Forever and Superman, among many others. Mankiewicz was finished playing the fixer. "I didn't want to read other people's scripts anymore," says Mankiewicz, a tall, bookish bachelor. Tow weeks later, Universal's then-president Frank Price asked him to read a screenplay by Aykroyd and Zwiebel called Dragnet. "Frank said to me, 'Tom, I know you don't want to read scripts--but I wish you'd reconsider.' So I started reading this one, and somewhere between page 20 and page 30, I fell in love. I thought, This is great, as in fun! Then in May 1986, I met Danny, and he said, 'Don't worry. I can get you out of it.'" But Mankiewicz was hooked. He signed on to help rewrite and then to direct Dragnet. He was given a budget of $18 million, which swelled to $20 million by the time it wrapped, not including investing and marketing.
Being the son of Joe Mankiewicz could not have been easy. He was as close to a true intellectual as Hollywood directors ever got: Educated in the twenties at Columbia University, Joe's friends were people like Moss Hart, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. Professionally, he tackled everything from Ben Jonson (The Honey Pot) to Tennessee Williams (Suddenly Last Summer), from Shakespeare (Julius Caesar) to Tin Pan Alley (Guys and Dolls). In 1963, he directed (and co-wrote) Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor. From the start, I was very aware that the things I was writing were not All About Eve," says Tom Mankiewicz, referring to one of the two movies for which his father won double Oscars (the other was A Letter to Three Wives). "I was writing entertainment--popular things. For better or worse, I was making my own niche."
Mankiewicz's family gave him every opportunity to discover that niche. When he was eight--"so my brother, Chris and I, wouldn't become Hollywood brats," he says--his family left Los Angeles and moved to a large appartment in New York. "My family was maniacle about education," says Mankiewicz, who went to Phillips Exeter Academy and got his bachelor's degree at Yale. His heroes were regular guests at his parents' dinner table. "One night, when I was twelve, William Faulkner came to a party," says Mankiewicz. "I said, 'Mr. Faulkner, I loved The Sound and the Fury.' He jsut said, 'Thanks.' I was so disappointed." The next day, Mankiewicz's father assured him there would be a thank-you note. "I thought it would be worth keeping forever, him being William Faulkner. And the note came: 'Dear Joe, Thanks, Bill.'"
In 1960, Mankiewicz came up against his father's critical judgement in the professional sphere for the first time. He was acting in summer stock at Williamstown, Massachusetts. It has since become a highly prestigious stock company, but then, says Mankiewicz, it was simply an extension of Yale. His father arrived one night with his friend, director-writer Moss Hart, to see Tom in The Visit. When the visitors came backstage, his father said, "You can do anything with your life. Be a dentist or run a gas station. But as for acting..." "Tom," Hart added, "I beg you: Eat with them, make love with them, divorce them. But please don't become one of them."
Three years later, the young Mankiewicz was trying to write his first screenplay. It wasn't working and he was getting more and more frustrated. At one point, his father walked in, and Tom turned on him, saying, "I really wanted to be an actor, dad, and you deflated me.!" "If you really wanted to be an actor," his father said, "you wouldn't have listened to me at Williamstown. You would have become an actor." Show business patriarchs are touch launching pads. "I'd like to have seen Jamie Lee Curtis the first day she read a review of her work that didn't mention Tony Curtis or Janet Leigh," says Mankiewicz. "That's a big victory. Jane [Fonda] went through all that, too, at the begining on Tall Story, being reviewed as Henry's daughter. If the reviews are good you don't deserve them, and if they're bad..."
Mankiewicz essentially protected himself from the pain of those reviews for the first two decades of his adult life. He worked hard and honed his talents. And he became rich--his beautiful book-filled house high in the Hollywood hills, with original Wyeth's and other superb art, is a testament to that. But Mankiewicz has remained virtually anonymous to those outside his immediate circle of professional peers. A good script doctor is one of the most important contributors to a successful film, but he frequently doesn't even get his name in the credits.
It is clear that Mankiewicz is not entirely happy with what he has accomplished so far. "I think we tend to put on blinders when it comes to segments of our lives,"he says. "We re-shoot, or re-create certain periods so what we remember is different from the reality." And even now, as he prepares for his directorial debut the same month he turns 45, he may still not be ready to face the reality of competing with his father's overwhelming image. He plans to be on his farm in Kenya when Dragnet opens on Juen 26. "Maybe the only thing I've learned through all the stuff I've done is to take things as they come," says Mankiewicz. "You can't get too high or too low. Because those Olympic dives make you scared of extremes. I can get euphoric for others, but not for myself. You have to get up the next morning, and it's better not to wake up humiliated. When you think you won't work again, you get the job. And when you ride too high, something steps on it. Unless you are temperamentally equipped for it, that roller coaster ride is exhausting."
Mankiewicz is reminded of an experience he had ten years ago when he did let his emotions get away from him. He was having dinner one night with Michael Caine at the Connaught Hotel, where he stays whenever he's in London. Their movie, The Eagle Has Landed, had just landed in New York. "They always put Time and Newsweek in my mailbox at the Connaught," says Mankiewicz, "I suppose because I'm an American. But that particular week, I asked them not to--out of superstition, I suppose. So I'm having dinner with Michael, and he says, 'Oh, Bernard Schickle [Time's] film critic loved the movie.' I run to the desk, ask for the magazines and am told, 'But Mr. Mankiewicz, we gave them away!" I have a vague memory of a tantrum on my part, and a bellboy running to Hyde Park. It was one of the stupidist moves."
These days, Makiewicz never gets obsessive about anything. For more than fifteen years (since he began rewriting--and then writing James Bond films), people have been asking: When was Mank going to make his breakthrough and direct a real movie? "People say, 'Be in the right place at the right time,'" says Mankiewicz. "My theory is to be anyplace at the right time. A movie gets made because an actor is on a plane and is handed a script by a writer he just met."
Mankiewicz was in the right place in 1969--though it may not have seemed so at the time. He had just blundered onto Broadway with a musical based on Georgy Girl. "It died after three nights," says Mank. "I was 27 years old and I'd spent a year of my life on this show. I thought I'd never work again." But David Picker (now Columbia president, then United Artists president), who was in the audience of one of those nights, was looking for a young American who could do the British idiom. He called (James Bond producer) Albert (Cubby) Broccoli in London and said, "I saw something last night called Georgy." Mankiewicz got a two-week guarantee to rewrite Diamonds Are Forever at $1,250 a week. "It was a king's ransom to me, but I was expected to deliver fast." Mankiewicz wrote 40 pages (roughly a third of the movie) right on schedule, and soon he was a regular Bond contributor, reworking scenes, watching shooting at Pinewood Studios, writing at night and on weekends, making money. After five James Bonds (from Live and Let Die through Moonraker), two Superman films and Ladyhawke, even he began to wonder if he could ever step out from behind his father's shadow. And then, an epiphany: "A couple of years ago," he says, "my father called me on the telephone one day and said, 'Well, Tom, now it's changed. I met Tuesday Weld the other day, and she said, "Oh, so you're Tom's father!" "Once, my father and I actually worked together, in London," says Mankiewicz. "It was in the seventies, at Pinewood. I was doing Live and Let Die with forests and grottos and 4,700 extras. And he was quietly directing Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine on another stage in Sleuth (the elder Mankiewicz's last feature to date). One day, he walked calmly onto our set, where it was utterly crazy...I could see he was proud and happy. I never felt as close to him as I did then."
Ironically, it was not because of his blue-chip lineage that Mankiewicz was hired to direct Dragnet. And it wasn't even because of his long experience writing movies--though it must have been part of it. "We gave Mank the job because of his experience on TV--with tight budgets and deadlines," says Permut. "We knew he wouldn't be thrown by the big picture. It was a very rigorous schedule with a lot of moves and a lot of night shooting. Tom went the distance. I know it's boring to say this, " he adds, "but the crew loved him. He really had the respect of everyone." Hanks agrees. "Mank is one of the nicest guys I've ever met in this business," he says. "He's not at all jaded. And he doesn't come on with an air of absolute confidence. He doesn't wield power." It was impossible, in fact to find anyone on the production who could find anything to criticize about Mankiewicz. Even Aykroyd, whom Mankiewicz describes as chameleonlike, said this about him: "Tom Mankiewicz can be added to the list of American directors with an ability which encompasses writing, visionary sense and humor."
The ride to the release of Dragnet has reached the final stage. It's after Easter, and Mankiewicz is still spending long days in the editing room. And though he is, as always, even-keeled and philosophical, he admits with some prodding, "Each time out you want a hit. It it's Platoon, you want to know their guts are churning. Otherwise you've made a home movie. And people who say they don't read reviews are lying." He doesn't say it vindictively; Tom Mankiewicz isn't vindicitve, ever. If anything, he's just a humorous man with a keen mind and a classy pedigree. Natalie Wodd, who was a close friend before she died, once said: "Were there a Hollywood Algonquin round table, Tom would be Robert Benchley. But probably funnier."