Stories from Terry Southern, Part 3 (Candy)
More from screenwriter, novelist, essayist, and screenwriting instructor Terry Southern. Today Southern discusses his involvement in two rather scandalous movies Candy (1968) and Barbarella (1968):
Before Candy was directed by Christian Marquand, you were involved in the adaptation as a coproducer as well as writer.
Yes, the first plan for Candy was for David Picker, who was the head of United Artists at the time, to produce and Frank Perry to direct. Perry had just come off David and Lisa, [1963], so he was big. We were going to get Hayley Mills to play Candy. She was perfect. [However,] John Mills, her father, wouldn’t let her do it. We were still in the process of trying to persuade him to let her do it when David Picker lost his position. Then, my good friend Christian Marquand, the French actor who was trying to break into directing and was certainly competent enough to direct at the time, begged me to let him have the option for two weeks for nothing, so he could put a deal together. So I did, and sure enough, Marquand immediately put Brando in the cast because Brando was his best friend. They were lifelong friends to the extent that Brando named his first son after Marquand. So on the basis of getting Brando, he was able to add Richard Burton and having gotten those two, he was able to get everyone else. Then, he disappointed me by casting a Swedish girl [Ewa Aulin] for the lead role, which was uniquely American and midwestern. He thought this would make Candy’s appeal more universal. That’s when I withdrew from the film. The film version of Candy is proof positive of everything rotten you ever heard about major studio production. They are absolutely compelled to botch everything original to the extent that it is no longer even vaguely recognizable.
Buck Henry wrote the final screen adaptation. Did you know him at all?
I didn’t know him at all at the time. I wasn’t even aware that he had written a script of Catch-22. I just thought he was the creator of Get Smart.
Did you look down on TV writers at the time?
Well, how would you feel? I mean, situation comedy! What could possibly be creatively lower than that? It has nothing to do with TV versus film. It’s just that situation comedy is mass produced and not something that has much to do with writing.
In the fall of 1968, you went to Rome to work on Barbarella.
Yes, I stayed there during the shoot at Cinecitta. I was living at the top of the Spanish Steps in a good hotel there. It was a good experience working with Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda. The strain was with Dino De Laurentiis, who produced the picture. He was just this flamboyant businessman. His idea of good cinema was to give money back on the cost of the picture before even going into production. He doesn’t even make any pretense about the quality or the aesthetic.
Vadim wasn’t particularly interested in the script, but he was a lot of fun, with a discerning eye for the erotic, grotesque, and the absurd. And Jane Fonda was super in all regards. The movie has developed a curious cult following, and I am constantly getting requests to appear at screenings at some very obscure weirdo place like Wenk, Texas, or a suburb of Staten Island. Around 1990, I got a call from De Laurentiis. He was looking for a way to do a sequel. “On the cheap” was how he expressed it, “but with plenty action and plenty sex! “ Then, he went on with these immortal words: “Of course, Janie is too old now to be sexy but maybe her daughter.” But nothing, perhaps fortunately, came of it.
As a teen, I not only to read the book “Candy,” but also saw the movie adaptation. I had no idea if either was any good aesthetically, I just knew both were erotic and for an adolescent living in Southern California in 1968, that was groovy, baby! Look at who starred in Candy:
Charles Aznavour — The great French actor played a hunchback juggler
Marlon Brando — Played a Fake Indian guru
Richard Burton — An eccentric poet
James Coburn — A doctor who performs public operations
Walter Matthau — A sex starved military general
Ringo Starr — An Hispanic gardener
Here’s the trailer to the movie:
And that right there pretty much sums up the late 60s!
Tomorrow more stories from Terry Southern.