Welcome to the Frederick Nolan website.
(a sort of autobiography in the making...)
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Sophia Loren and me
Believe it or not, this stunningly beautiful woman once ruffled my hair and told me not to worry, the future would take care of itself. And she was right, it did! I'll maybe come back to that story later, First I want to tell you about how movies like Brass Target get made.
To my agent's huge surprise--I don't think until it happened that Artie Pine ever believed they would actually make a movie from a book that had only taken six weeks to write--MGM went ahead with their plan to film The Oshawa/ Algonquin Project. It had been announced, you may recall, that it would be directed by Blake Edwards and it would be called The Colonels. That sounded pretty good to me.
Blake Edwards was a former actor-writer with some pretty fine movies to his credit, among them Mister Cory, Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffanys, and Days of Wine and Roses, one of my all-time favourites and the beginning of a long (and I hasten to add entirely imaginary) love-affair with beautiful Lee Remick. The title they'd given the project, The Colonels, suggested someone had even read the book, which was about a plot by two high-ranking staff officers (yes, colonels) to assassinate an outspoken maverick General not unlike the real-life General George Patton whose actions might interfere with the chances of their boss--Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower--becoming President of the United States.
But it was not to be.
Somewhere along the way Blake Edwards decided to bow out of the project, and it wasn't long before I found out why. One middle-of-the-night, the phone rang at my home and I stumbled sleepily to answer it, You know how you feel when the phone rings at four a.m. -- it's got to be bad news, right? Somebody had a car crash, your mother died, whatever, nothing good. But not this time; at the other end was a cheerful Berle Adams, executive producer of the movie.
"Berle," I said, "do you have any idea what time it is?"
"Sure," he said cheerfully, "it's a little after eight p.m."
And it was -- in California.
"I've got some great news," the producer told me. "Couldn't wait to tell you. We just signed Sophia Loren for the movie."
"Sophia Loren, huh?" I said thoughtfully. "That's pretty good."
"Pretty good?" he shrieked, "Pretty good? Didn't you hear what I said -- we just signed Sophia Loren. I thought you'd be cockahoop!"
"Well I would, Berle, except for one thing," I said. "There aren't any women in the book."
Actually that wasn't quite true, but the only females in the story were largely incidental to the plot and there certainly wasn't anyone who could be played by as big a star as Sophia.
"No problem," Berle said brightly, fondly imagining he was reassuring me, "We're writing a part specially for her."
So I learned the Hollywood rules the way all the other writers whose books have been filmed learned them. The best stories I know about the experience are the one by Ernest Hemingway and the other by Irwin Shaw. Papa first. He said what you do is this: you arrange a meeting at the Nevada-California state line. You're in Nevada, the movie people are in California. You bring your book, they bring their money. On a count of three you toss the book over to them and they toss the money over to you. Then you all get the hell out of there and never talk to each other again.
Irwin Shaw's was shorter but no less evocative. He attended the premiere of the movie version of his magnificent World War Two novel The Young Lions, which starred Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin. As Shaw came out of the screening a newspaperman asked him what he'd thought of the movie. And Shaw said "It's a great movie -- as long as you didn't write the book."
And that's how I feel about what became Brass Target.
Look what it had going for it: not just the gorgeous Sophia, but John Cassavetes, Patrick McGoohan, Max von Sydow, Robert Vaughn, George Kennedy, Bruce Davison, Edward Herrman ... how could it fail?
Easy.
Trying to put Sophia into it just screwed up the story, which reduced to essentials was a simple chase--can Our Hero catch the Deadly Assassin before he executes the Unwitting Victim? But the scriptwriter -- a fellow named Alvin Boretz who as far as I have been able to ascertain had never written a movie screenplay before and never did again--made a whole series of killer mistakes: he added hints of homosexuality between two of the conspirators, he gave Sophia some of the dumbest lines ever dished out to an actress and worst of all (from my point of view) he stole the guts of the story central to The Mittenwald Syndicate, thereby not only screwing up Brass Target but simultaneously destroying any chance that novel had of ever being made into a movie.
But of course I didn't know all that then. And anyway, I was otherwise occupied, deep-researching the history of the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad, the lives of the super-rich in the Gilded Age, beginning to work on what would eventually become a big historical novel, Carver's Kingdom. Not to mention writing articles for Bob Guccione's Penthouse magazine, and promoting the hell out of the Jay J. Armes biography which came out in a British hardcover edition around the same time as the American paperback from Avon (by the way, I insisted on the byline "as told to" because if anyone was going to call anyone a liar, I didn't want it to be me). And then, in October ...
... all of that paled into insignificance when Sphere Books launched their £20,000 (this is 1977, remember) publicity blitz for the paperback of The Mittenwald Syndicate--the whole schmeer, dump bins, posters, showcards, bookholders and all the fun of the point-of-sale fair, with double crown posters in railway stations and on 500 London buses--you can't believe what a buzz it gives you to see your name and book title on the upstairs corners of a good old red London double-decker Routemaster from Putney coming up the hill towards Piccadilly.
And then the publicity blitz began. For two weeks between October 24 and November 4, 1977, I was on the road: London, of course, Reading, Brighton, Portsmouth, Swansea, signing books in Edinburgh and Glasgow one day, Manchester, Liverpool the next, Bradford and Birmingham, Newcastle and Bristol, five, six interviews a day on local radio stations, with newspapers and magazines and feature writers. I even, believe it or not, signed books at the Earls Court Motor Show, surrounded by cuties in skimpy t-shirts and even skimpier hot pants (and took some pleasure in the expression on my fourteen year-old son Christian's face as he watched (a sort of "good grief, Dad!" look). It was during that two weeks I invented the publicity disease HHRTB. You go into the studio, you sit down with the reporter, and you get ready to talk about the book, at which point the interviewer confesses that he (or she) has been so busy that they just haven't had the time to actually read the bloody thing. HHRTB -- he hasn't read the book. You would be astonished how often this happens. But you do it anyway because they'll do the article and the article will help sell the book and ... and ... sure enough, just a few weeks later, there your book is on the bestseller list, just above Robert Ludlum's The Rhinemann Exchange and Leon Uris's Trinity (albeit not up there at the top with James Herriot). I celebrate this success by writing a long piece in a trade magazine, "Around The Trade in Eighty Ways." Sales of the paperback are now up around the quarter of a million mark.
So it's not just some consolation but quite a lot of it that you are going on a publicity tour that James Herriot would probably kill for, not to mention Uris and Ludlum. Yes, as the year turns, Edmund Fisher, managing director of Sphere Books, asks me whether I would be interested in making a three week trip to promote the book in Australia and New Zealand, first class all the way and a free seat on the whole ride for my wife Heidi. Who, I said, me?
At the same time word comes in that MGM will begin filming Brass Target, with location work in Munich and Bern. The director is now John Hough. Got no time to worry about that, I'm afraid. Indeed, hard though it is to believe now, it's pretty much incidental because I've just signed a major three-book deal. Here's Paul Nathan again: "A three-book contract for UK and Australian rights in the work of an English writer has been negotiated by an American agent ... The new contract is with Pan Books in London and covers, first, 'Carver's Kingdom,' a family saga set in the U.S. sold earlier here to Warner Books, then novel No.2 taking place in pre-Revolutionary Russia, and one more for which the theme is still to be determined. Pan's overall guarantee comes to approximately £60,000."
Friday, February 24, 1978 is takeoff day. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Brisbane, Sydney, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch await. After that we'll take a break in Fiji, stop over in Hawaii and Los Angeles, and New York ... Can it get any better than this? Believe it or not, the answer is ... yes!!
