Word: kwai
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Victors. Dismayed by Hollywood's handling of The Bridge on the River Kwai, which he wrote, and The Guns of Navarone, which he wrote and produced, Carl Foreman wrote, produced, and this time directed an epic he calls a "personal statement" about the futility of war. Both victor and vanquished are losers, Foreman says. Then he says it again. His film delivers not one statement but a whole barrage of them, all strung together in newsreel clips and hit-or-miss dramatic vignettes that pound, pound, pound...
...savored and detailed. $1,725,000 in salary. Then 10% of most of the gross. This is not just the most money that anyone has ever been paid in the history of show business, more than doubling the $3,000,000 that William Holden siphoned out of the River Kwai. It is the most money that any employee has ever been paid for anything...
...Spiegel had traveled the red carpet toward the top Oscar twice before-in 1954 for On the Waterfront, and in 1957 for The Bridge on the River Kwai. And Central Casting itself could not produce a more classic prototype of the Hollywood producer. He chomps cigars, calls everybody baby except babies, speaks nine languages, all of them except his native German with a heavy accent. He is a hard man to work for. The story goes that when Writer Irwin Shaw was working on Waterfront, his wife awoke one morning at 3 o'clock to find her husband...
...with regular types like Robert Taylor and Betty Grable, but with a combination considered far-out indeed-Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Queen became the first Spiegel film to get an Oscar (Bogart's), and others trod hard on its golden heels: Waterfront won eight, River Kwai brought the total to 16. Lawrence made...
...explore the variations on the theme of a man being basically in conflict with his own destiny, asserting his instinct for constructiveness, conflicting with the destructive forces around him." But his search for motion-picture reality is earnest: he built miles of roads in Ceylon while making River Kwai, hired 16 elephants to haul the 30,000 cu. ft. of timber used to build the bridge. "One Hollywood joker," says Spiegel, "said that 'If you like Palm Springs, you'll love Lawrence,' but the point is that Lawrence was great largely because it was obviously not made...