I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History

33. The Return of Peter Sellers

33 The Return of Peter Sellers P eter Sellers’s career, which had always been something of a roller coaster, had turned to the upside by the mid-1970s, largely due to the resuscitation of the Clouseau character in The Return of the Pink Panther in 1975. Peter was in Los Angeles in 1976, working in a film, when I called him and told him I wanted to talk to him about my idea to do a send-up of the classic Anthony Hope novel The Prisoner of Zenda, which had been made into the ultimate romantic film in the 1930s, with Ronald Colman and Madeleine Carroll. In the 1950s, MGM remade it with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. I thought the idea of Peter doing a dual role again would be fun. He and I started talking about moving the story into a different milieu, and we became enthused about its possibilities. I told Universal the idea, and the studio approved it. I chose a team of writers, Fred Freeman and Lawrence Cohen, to prepare a screenplay. I thought it was quite good, but Peter had reservations and suggested Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, another team of writers with whom he had recently been working. By this time, Peter had become impressed with Stan Dragoti, who had directed him in a television commercial, a genre in which Dragoti was very successful. I looked at a reel of his film, and I thought it was very good. I thought we could get something fresh and modern with Stan, and he joined our team. We all continued to work with La Frenais and Clement. 348 In the interim, Peter had married a beautiful young woman, Lynne Frederick. Lynne was about twenty-five years younger than Peter and had appeared in a few movies. Peter now became concerned about his appearance. He told me that he had made up his mind to have plastic surgery, which seemed to me the classic attempt of an older man trying to keep the love of a young wife. Peter, who had his first heart attack on Kiss Me, Stupid, had by now been implanted with a pacemaker for his cardiac problems, and he had to have it replaced on a couple of occasions . As we continued to work on the script, I realized Peter had begun to take the story much more seriously than we had originally conceived. He wanted his wife to play the female lead, and I began to feel it would be more Ronald Colman than Peter Sellers in the role. I had been trying to keep the script comedic, but Peter began to see himself as a romantic hero. Next he had a falling out with Stan Dragoti and insisted he be dismissed . I told him I thought we should finish the script before choosing another director. I was sorry to lose Stan, because I thought he could give us a hip, funny picture, but you couldn’t begin a picture with Peter Sellers, of all people, and a director he didn’t want. I next went to visit Peter in St. Tropez, where he had a house, and Ian and Dick, our writers, came along. We were going to do the final polish there. We spent two lovely weeks in St. Tropez. We stayed at a hotel and went to his house every day and worked a reasonable amount of time. Sometimes we’d go out on his boat with him and Lynne. It was a lovely combination work-vacation period. But we finally did hammer out a script. While I was in St. Tropez, Peter told me how much he and Lynne were now looking forward to her playing Princess Flavia. I wasn’t too troubled by this request, since she was an attractive young woman who had appeared in a number of films, and whom I judged to be perfectly adequate to the demands of the role. We also talked about the casting for some of the other parts. He wanted Graham Stark, an “old mate” of his, to be in the picture. Then Peter told me that he had a marvelous idea. He had talked to Blake Edwards about our need for a director, and Blake had suggested to him that we employ Richard Quine, an old friend of Blake’s who had directed many films, including Solid Gold Cadillac, Bell,Book and Candle, The Return of Peter Sellers 349 / [3.147.103.202] Project MUSE...