The Hard Way

The best U.S. motion picture of 1962 (TIME, Dec. 28) was created by a writer and director who had never made a film before. One of its principals had never acted in a movie. Even the cameraman had shot nothing more lofty than a TV commercial.

Eighteen months ago, a 19-year-old Sarah Lawrence College sophomore bought a book called Lisa and David, read it, and showed it to her mother. It was a short novel by a Brooklyn psychiatrist, actually little more than two case histories with dialogue, about a curative love that develops between two teen-age children in a suburban mental home. The mother was Eleanor Perry, 46, who had spent the time she could spare from child rearing in writing plays; one of her scripts (The Third Best Sport) had once had a moderate run on Broadway.

Mrs. Perry showed Lisa and David to Frank Perry, 32, her second husband and formerly an associate producer at New York's Theater Guild. He decided the story had high dramatic possibilities but realized that it would never work as a play, being far too fragmentary in its details, too much a series of swift sketches covering a full year in time. It should do beautifully as a movie. But who would write the script? Who would direct? They looked at each other. "Why not?"

Mrs. Perry turned the doctor's novel into a fully developed screenplay, successfully inventing many scenes to fulfill, rather than simply fill out, the story. It was a very nice piece of work, and when the Perrys tried to get the backing of a major studio, they were not--as custom would have it--turned away icily by the crass boobs of Hollywood. They were just turned away. It lacked size, and the great paradox of movie financing is that it's easy to milk fortunes out of Hollywood for high-budget stupendaganzas, but next to impossible to get a couple of hundred thousand for a low-budget picture. "We can't afford to make small pictures," said U.A. "We have too much overhead." The dimensions of the Perrys' story were necessarily small, and Hollywood could only have suffocated it anyway as a Blazing Psychodrama in Odd A-O with, say, Yul Brynner and Bette Davis as David and Lisa.

Employee Relations. So the Perrys took to the streets and sold their movie to small investors at $312.50 a slice. Broadway plays often crawl onto the boards that way, and that was the world the Perrys knew. Strange grapes were often dangled before the couple. One man said he would come through with about $100,000 if the Perrys would add a rape and a seduction to the script. Another fellow handed them a worthless check for $50,000.

But the money was raised. The next problem was a location. Through one potential backer, the Perrys and their producer, Paul Heller, heard of the old Clothier mansion in Wynnewood on Philadelphia's Main Line, lately vacated by a starchy prep school for girls. The Perrys made a $2,000 donation to the Armenian church group that had taken the place over--and they were in. Many movies drag on for weeks, months', and sometimes years in the making. This one was shot in 25 days--because it had to be if the money was to hold out. The Perrys projected each day's rushes on two sheets of shelf paper tacked to the wall of their room in the Haverford Inn.

Their casting methods were equally unpretentious. Janet Margolin (Lisa) was an 18-year-old whose credits were in television and on Broadway until the Perrys picked her from a group of about 1,000 candidates. As David, Keir Dullea (pronounced Duh-lay) was seeing himself in a starring role for the first time. Howard Da Silva, who plays the chief psychiatrist effectively enough to destroy the beard-and-couch cliche, was making his first picture since being blacklisted a dozen years ago for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee. Most of the supporting cast were amateurs seined from Philadelphia dramatic groups, or girl friends of members of the crew stuck into the film just to maintain employee relations.

Sudden Pals. It seemed a chicken-wire operation if ever there was one. But the result is stunning. Movies about mental illness have often shown considerable clinical insight, but this one is a love story with a clinical background, and the love itself heals two young minds where mere insight could never have helped. The Perrys took David and Lisa to the 1962 Venice Film Festival and won a prize for the best film by a new director. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, Dullea and Margolin were named best actor and actress.

Wiser than most, the Perrys say they will never do a psychological film again. Meanwhile, they are looking for a new story to tell. They are up to their elbows in sudden pals, people with scripts, agents with visions of new El Dorados. One agent said he could make Frank Perry a director at any major studio, starting off with modest $4,000,000 films. The Perrys explained that they want to remain small businessmen, in effect, and would like to make their next picture for about $400,000. "What are you?" said the agent over his shoulder. "A couple of beatniks?"

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