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367 16 Final Projects The Collector (1965), How to Steal a Million (1966), Funny Girl (1968), The Liberation of L. B. Jones (1970) after the enormous success of Ben-Hur, Wyler wanted to move away from big, expensive pictures and return to his roots by making a smaller, intimate drama featuring mostly interior sets. Choosing to return to the blackand -white format as well, he first took a second try at Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. as discussed earlier, that film was not successful, but its failure did not damage Wyler’s reputation. He was by then one of the industry ’s giants and an elder statesman. Darryl Zanuck, who was about to become president of Twentieth Century –Fox, wanted him on the board of directors, but after serving in that capacity for a short time, Wyler discovered that boardroom politics did not interest him. Zanuck’s son richard, who had been installed as head of production , then asked Wyler to direct the film version of rodgers and Hammerstein ’s The Sound of Music, which had been running on broadway for three years and won the Tony award for best Musical in 1960. Wyler went to see the play in New York but was not overly enthused about it. He remarked to his friend bob Swink, “They want me to make this picture and i don’t know what to do. The people in this musical are playing a scene and all of a sudden somebody starts to sing. Sometimes they’re just walking along and somebody starts to sing. Why the hell do they start singing?”1 Wyler was obviously aware of the conventions of musicals; he just saw no compelling motivation for many of the songs in the show. Nevertheless, he thought it would be a challenge to direct a musical—something he had never done. Fox had already signed ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, West Side Story) to write the screenplay, and he encouraged Wyler to take on the film. Wyler agreed, and he cast Julie andrews. “i had seen her play My Fair 368 William Wyler Lady in New York and was very impressed,” he recalled. “She was working on Mary Poppins. i went over to the studio and Walt Disney showed me some rushes and introduced me to her on the set.”2 Wyler even went to austria to scout locations and then traveled to Salzburg to meet the mayor and look at settings there as well. While making all these preliminary moves, however, he remained bothered by the idea of making a musical about the Nazis. When Lehman argued that they were really making a film about a heroic family who escaped the Nazis, he seemed at least partially convinced: “i knew it wasn’t really a political thing. i had a tendency to want to make it, if not an anti-Nazi movie, at least say a few things. it was true that Nazism was not what the movie was about; i knew it would be a success; although not that big.”3 Wyler, however, was never entirely happy during preparation for the film, and when circumstances intervened that offered him a chance to back out, he took it. Those circumstances involved a script provided by two young former television writers, Jud Kinberg and John Kohn, who had moved to London and were producing movies for blazer Films. after reading The Collector, the first novel by british author John Fowles, they purchased the screen rights and then interested Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia Pictures’ overseas division, in the project. Next, they sent the galleys of the novel to their first choice to play the lead, Terence Stamp, who was riding high on his success as billy budd in Peter Ustinov’s film and his follow-up triumph on stage as alfie. Kinberg and Kohn also wanted Wyler to direct. When Frankovich was made head of Columbia, he sent the two to visit Wyler at his home. by this time, the producers already had a first-draft script by Stanley Mann (The Mouse that Roared), which they left with Wyler, along with a copy of the novel. Wyler loved the story, telling Time magazine, “i found i couldn’t put the book down,” although he thought Mann’s script needed work.4 He told Frankovich he wanted to do the picture and was even willing to relinquish his producer’s hat to Kinberg and Kohn. Fowles’s novel, which soon became a...

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