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TRICKSTERS AND HUCKSTERS: SHOW BIZ ARCHETYPES
by Addison De Witt
“The Producer”
[Dear Reader: For this, my first column for HeadlineMuse, I have chosen for my nom de plume the character created by Joseph L. Mankewicz and performed by George Sanders in the film classic ALL ABOUT EVE. Addison De Witt is a man who is completely of Show Business, and yet somehow just enough removed from it, in his role as commentator and critic, to (presumably) avoid having his own heart broken on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Sadly, Dear Reader, as you will see in this and subsequent columns, unlike my hero Mr. De Witt, I myself am not invulnerable to the slings and arrows of the Show Business life. (All right, if you must know, I’m an open, gaping wound.)
Let’s begin this month with an Absolutely Guaranteed True Tale from the very start of
my career, shall we? (Note: Some of the names in this column have been changed to protect the innocent from the vengeful.)]
Mandy Bellows is a producer. In retrospect, I have often thought of her as a kind of modern Circe, luring me with her siren song of Hollywood success, only to have me crash on the rocks moments before reaching its shore. The bait: A chance to write my first screenplay.
It is not uncommon in these days of credit proliferation to wonder just who, or what, a “producer” is. The ancient Greeks had a word for it: hubris. In the good old days of 20th Century showmanship, a producer was usually a single larger-than-life individual (as opposed to a corporation or a not-for-profit theatre company), like P.T. Barnum, Florenz Ziegfeld, David O. Selznick, Mike Todd, and David Merrick. These charismatic men were entrepeneurs, risk takers, dictators – and if they weren’t always pleasant to deal with, if they were, in fact, often downright ruthless, well, their achievements spoke for themselves. You knew exactly where the buck stopped.
Desperate to pour herself into this mold was Mandy Bellows, an Ivy-League grad who, through breathless ambition and unmitigated ego, had managed to parlay her meager talent into a budding career as a film and television producer. By the time I met her, in the fall of 1980, she had already co-written, produced and directed what would now be called an “independent film”, which boasted the unforgettable slogan: “A little laughter, a little pain, a little seltzer.”
At the time, all of her publicity said she was 30 years old (which was considered young at the time, I swear). The amazing part is that, ten years later, according to the press about her, she was still 30. Though in reality she must be pushing 60 by now, I have no doubt that she is still 30 in Show Business years. But I digress.
One thing I’ll say for Mandy Bellows, she was bisexual way before it was fashionable. To clarify, let me say that she was bisexual professionally, meaning that she would swing whichever way was expedient for her career. One of her steady lovers was Claire, a sad-faced, spinsterish 40-something university dean, who supplied Mandy with a steady stream of eager young students for typing, filing, getting coffee, house cleaning, grocery shopping, and picking up Mandy’s dry cleaning.
At the same time, Mandy’s (under)paid secretarial staff had strict instructions to keep careful tabs on their boss’s monthly cycle. There were to be no unwanted pregnancies, and heads would roll if Mandy wasn’t reminded not to have heterosexual relations when she was ovulating. And Mandy did have heterosexual relations, according to the various interns and staff people under her employ. In one famous incident, she even bedded Sandy Gold (a vertically challenged Oscar winner) in an attempt to woo him into starring in a television film. Sandy sent Mandy a huge flower arrangement the morning after, but declined to play the role.
When I first came to her as an intern, Mandy had acquired a book about a weighty subject and hired America’s Greatest Living Playwright to write the teleplay. Mandy Bellows knew how to get attention. (Though she called the Playwright’s script a total mess, and boasted she’d rewritten it herself. I should have realized at the time, if Mandy had no problem rewriting America’s Greatest Living Playwright, what hope did I have?)
As it turned out, rewriting the script was only the beginning. In a stroke of unparalleled chutzpah, Mandy decided to cast an extremely controversial performer in the lead, the equivalent of casting Charlton Heston as James Brady in a movie against gun violence, though this comparison doesn’t begin to do justice to the audacity of Mandy’s coup-de-publicite. Mandy’s stand in defense of her star and her film got her the kind of media attention that no money can buy. If Mandy Bellows herself did not become a household name, her film certainly did. The ratings went through the roof. I shall never forget watching Mandy on TV as she leapt from her seat and ascended the steps in an off-the-shoulder gown to accept her Emmy (yes, Dear Reader, it’s true, nice people are rarely rewarded in Show Business, but we’ll save that for another column). Oh, the many lessons I learned at the feet of Mandy Bellows! Among them that bad taste in combination with ruthless ambition can take a person far.
Mandy’s success had gotten her a deal with a British media mogul to make low-budget features for the youth market. She had only a title for her first film under her new deal: “Young Greek Gods”. The mandate: A teenage sex comedy set in ancient Greece with broad, scatalogical humor a la Mel Brooks (“I want to have a kid masturbating behind a rock!” Mandy declared). Mandy thought she was being oh, so clever by partnering three young interns, all of us aspiring writers in our early 20’s, yet strangers to one another, to write a single script, apparently believing that three heads would be better than one. (Perhaps she was inspired by the Multi-Headed Hydra of Greek myth.)
Fast forward several weeks, the completed screenplay has been delivered, and the three quivering interns have assembled in Mandy’s office for notes. Mandy rushes into her office in a whirl of paranoia and distress (not atypical for her), clutching a copy of Variety, open to the page which lists the Top 50 Box Office Films of the week. Near the bottom is the Mel Brooks film “History of the World, Part I”, a period sex comedy with scatalogical humor. And at the very top of the list, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, a period action-adventure film. Forget the notes on our screenplay, Mandy was now instructing us to start over from scratch and make “Young Greek Gods” an action-adventure movie. (“You mean, you don’t want a kid masturbating behind a rock after all...?”) This, Dear Reader, was my introduction to the vicissitudes of motion picture development. But more of that in a future column.
It wasn’t long before Mandy’s deal with the British financier crashed and burned. But in the meantime, that summer the entire world stopped to watch The Biggest News Event Of The Decade on television. Within seconds of the Nielsen reports, T.V. movie producers were falling over themselves to get the big three networks to green-light MOW’s about this famous social event. Into the fray went our very own Mandy, with a promise to the network that she could deliver a script almost overnight, shoot the film in the blink of an eye, and get the movie on the air before the other two networks knew what had hit them. Pivotal to Mandy’s plan was to get two of her grateful former interns to agree to write the story and teleplay in a scant four weeks, one-third of the 12 weeks normally granted to write a movie for television.
Now that we had been upgraded to grateful writers, working literally around the clock, a new crop of unpaid interns came in and were instructed to help us by gathering the necessary research (mostly magazine articles and quickie paperbacks). Unbenownst to us, however, Mandy had promised actual on-screen writing credit to these interns and a share of our money. Cut to the next reel, in which we discover that Mandy has hired other writers to rewrite our scenes literally minutes after they are pulled out of our hands. When we protest, Mandy Bellows withholds our paychecks, and threatens to continue doing so unless we agree to pay her interns under the table in cash for their research.
Sleep deprived and confused, we sneak out of Mandy’s office and take a cab to the offices of the Writers Guild of America for advice. After naively believing a promise that our plight will remain confidential (we were literally terrified of Mandy’s wrath), we are counseled not to pay the research assistants out of our own pockets and to trust the Guild’s credit arbitration system to work it all out after the movie is actually shot. By the time we slink back to Mandy’s office, word of our traitorous deed has already reached her and she is on the warpath. I will spare you the details, Dear Reader, but the resultant bloodbath was not pretty, and it took me years (literally) to recover from the sheer ugliness of the scene that transpired. Her final words to me were (I kid you not!): “You will never work again in this town.”
Ultimately, we did receive our writing credit on-screen (shared with Mandy Bellows herself!), and the movie itself went on to ratings heaven, and was even listed as one of the Top Ten Tackiest T.V. Movies of the Year in People magazine. As Mandy herself could have coined, “There is no such thing as bad publicity!”
Postcript: A biblical seven years later, I am summoned to the offices of a legendary, Oscar-winning producer. He is about to enter into a business venture with Mandy Bellows, and he’s heard from a mutual friend that I once worked for her. Mr. Legendary asks me, as a favor, to give him my candid opinion of Mandy. In a room with her, he had been completely charmed. But he has since asked around and been told some pretty horrendous tales. He feels he can trust me to tell him the truth. And I do. You know the adage “What goes around, comes around”? Well, Dear Reader, I had to wait seven years, but the revenge was no less sweet.
Mandy was my first producer. She set the bar of bad behavior very high and kept my
future expectations low, which is a very good thing. Mandy Bellows gave me my big break in Show Business. For that, and for the many lessons she taught me, I am grateful.
Tricksters run the entertainment industry. As William Hynes says in Mythical Trickster Figures: “As an agent of creativity, the trickster is often associated with activities that center upon human creativity: the bringing of culture, laughter, business transactions, as well as opening doors of perception” (213).
And Hynes further posits: “Trickster myths are deeply satisfying entertainment...Is there a bifurcation between matters serious and matters humorous? Between matters educational and matters entertaining? Contributors here have argued otherwise” (Hynes 202-203). And so do I.
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