The $40 Million Gamble

By Gerald Clarke

ABC goes all out on its epic The Winds of War

Before it is through, boasts ABC, it will have reached virtually every American twelve years of age and older. It will have conveyed its message through direct mail, school study guides, a film documentary, TV and radio spots, and newspaper and magazine ads--well over a billion "impressions" in all. If these projections are accurate, then doubtless you already have the word: on Sunday, at 8 p.m. E.S.T., ABC will begin broadcasting the most expensive, most spectacular mini-series ever made, a $40 million, 18-hr, adaptation of Herman Wouk's 1971 novel, The Winds of War.

"Sunday night is the hook," says Brandon Stoddard, president of ABC Motion Pictures. "That's family night, the highest viewing night of the week. By the end of those opening three hours, people will be involved with the characters and interested in what happens to them. After that, the hook gets deeper and deeper every night. Or so I hope."

So hopes everybody at ABC, which is giving a full week of prime time to Wouk's sweeping story of the events leading up to America's entry into World War II. When the show concludes on Sunday, Feb. 13, network executives pray, enough people will have been hooked to push the ratings close to--or, who knows, even past--those of the champion miniseries, Roots. "I think it will be the highest-rated program of the season," predicts George Keramidas, ABC's vice president of TV research, "and among the highest-rated mini-series of all time."

Or is it possible that the quarry, the more than 100 million people who ordinarily hover in front of the screen during prime time in this peak viewing month, will swim way from this costly bait? "hat they may be lured instead by Dallas or Magnum, P.I. on CBS, or Hill Street Blues on NBC? That they may (dire thought) turn to cable or flip on a video game? Or just decide to read Jane Austen? Of course it is. The bottom of the rating charts is Uttered with such failed mini-series as King, The French Atlantic Affair, MacArthur and Beggarman Thief. "Obviously The Winds of War is a high risk," says ABC President Fred Pierce. "But most things that lead to success are risky."

Advertisers share enough of ABC's optimism to have paid $175,000 for a 30-sec. commercial and $350,000 for a full minute. This means that the network, having sold all the commercial slots,' stands to break even on the $32 million it paid Paramount Pictures, which produced the series. (The studio put up the remaining $8 million in costs.) ABC's profits, if any, are expected to come from reruns. But more than money is at stake. The Winds of War is a key to ABC'S drive to supplant CBS at the top of the ratings (see following story). February is a sweeps month, in which the ratings of local stations are measured and then used as a basis for advertising rates. If the show does badly, ABC'S affiliates will be poorer, and doubtless unhappy with the network executives who decided to gamble seven nights of prime time on one make-or-break show. If ABC'S plan works, however, the concentration into seven nights will give it a grand slam. People all over America will go in to work every morning next week talking about what they saw the night before. Word of mouth will send ratings higher and higher, and ABC affiliates will be able to approach advertisers encased in the golden glow of victory.

In an effort to provide that wattage, the network has been promoting The Winds of War for nearly a year, almost an epoch in a business that measures time in fleeting electronic images. To capture viewers for whom World War II is a hazy memory or ancient history, 550,000 copies of a 24-page color magazine were mailed to schools, libraries and special-interest groups, introducing them to the time and the five major wartime leaders: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin. The magazine has served as a basis for a half-hour documentary narrated by John Houseman, one of the mini-series stars, that was sent to ABC'S affiliated stations.

On Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Day, ABC began running 30-sec. promotion spots between its regular programs, and local affiliates were sent The Winds of War promotion announcements taped by the series' leading performers. The network also distributed five four-minute shorts on the making of the show, which local stations may use. "The best way of selling TV is TV," claims ABC Vice President Dick Connelly, who has coordinated all the hype and hoopla. NBC agrees, and it is already promoting its own antic counterprogramming for Feb. 6. In a 30-sec. spot, Orson Welles says: "Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars. Watch Steve Martin's The Winds of Whoopee. See it all in one hour on Sunday."

By Feb. 13, ABC and its affiliates will have allocated about $25 million to promote the extravaganza. That amount includes the value of on-air promotion time that otherwise might have been sold to advertisers. "There is always a risk of promising more than you can deliver," admits Connelly. "But given the magnitude and excellence of this product, we don't think we're overselling. We think we've got a hell of a winner on our hands. The Winds of War is a love story, a war story, an adventure story and a historical epic."

That last sentence no one can dispute. Wouk's tale begins in the spring of 1939, with Hitler giving his generals the date for the invasion of Poland: Sept. 1. As the series progresses, other events familiar from the history books fly by: the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the German attack on the Soviet Union and, finally, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Wouk, who wrote the screenplay from his 885-page novel, ingeniously invented a witness to these dramatic events, Victor ("Pug") Henry, a commander (later captain) in the U.S. Navy. Sent to Berlin as the American naval attache in the spring of 1939, Henry, played by Robert Mitchum, meets all the top Nazi leaders. Through his prescience, with just a little help from the author's hindsight, Henry alone anticipates the signing of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, which enabled the Germans to launch the war. That prediction brings him to the attention of President Roosevelt, who thenceforth makes him his unofficial confidant and emissary. As F.D.R.'s man on the spot, he meets Churchill, Mussolini and Stalin and is on hand for memorable occasions like the first conference between the President and the Prime Minister, aboard a U.S. warship off the coast of Newfoundland.

Along with Henry's adventures in history, Wouk has constructed various subplots involving Henry's family, particularly his son Byron (Jan-Michael Vincent), and Natalie Jastrow (Ali MacGraw), the American Jew Byron woos and marries. Natalie is an impetuous and headstrong woman who works as secretary to her Uncle Aaron (Houseman), a cultivated historian who lives in Bernard Berenson-style splendor outside Siena.

A few days before the Germans storm into Poland, Natalie insists on visiting her fiance Leslie Slote (David Dukes), an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Warsaw, and she drags the love-smitten Byron along with her. Through this credibility-straining contrivance, Wouk brings within his action the German blitzkrieg and the bombing of Warsaw. Later, after Natalie marries Byron, she is trapped in Europe with her uncle; as Jews, both are in grave danger of disappearing into Hitler's Holocaust. The persecution of the Jews is one of the dominating concerns of both the series and its author, who is a devout Orthodox Jew.

It took Wouk the better part of 16 years to research and write The Winds of War, and its sequel, War and Remembrance, and he jealously guarded the results of his labor. For years he had no trouble resisting the persistent blandishments of film and TV executives. Finally, in 1977, under the ministrations of Barry Diller, a former ABC executive who had become chairman of Paramount, an extraordinary offer won him over. ABC paid Wouk an estimated $1.5 million, gave him approval of director and producer and, to meet his desire for a high-toned context, allowed him some say over commercials (he wanted none for such things as toilet paper and feminine-hygiene products). Furthermore, ABC agreed to cluster more commercials together, thus interrupting the drama less often. British Writer Jack Pulman, who wrote the BBC's I, Claudius and War and Peace, was hired to do the adaptation. After eleven months of research and planning, he suffered a fatal heart attack. Wouk was persuaded to undertake the script (see box).

To direct the project, Paramount executives were convinced that they needed a general as much as an artist. They turned to Dan Curtis, 55. Though he had an unimpressive list of credits, including a couple of horror movies and the soap opera Dark Shadows, they felt sure that he had the passion, talent and physical stamina for the job. Wouk was put off by Curtis' record. Only after Paramount sent him two nonhorrific Curtis TV specials did the novelist agree to see him. "He came to my home, but he wasn't wearing the bar mitzvah suit I figured a producer would wear upon meeting the author," says Wouk. "I open the door, and there stands this man in black slacks, black shirt, a gold chain, curly black hair. Mr. Hollywood. This made an instant good impression. Here's a guy, I thought, who is what he is."

Among the major roles, Pug Henry was supposed to be solid and authoritative enough to stand alongside Presidents, Prime Ministers and dictators, yet young enough, 50 or so, to look like a rising naval officer. According to Wouk's book, he should also be shorter than his wife. The choice: the cool, laconic Mitchum, who is 65 and 6 ft. 1 in., but radiates authority with every word he does not speak.

Last year's That Championship Season, in which he played the basketball coach, is his most recent picture. After having lunch with him, says Curtis, "I knew he was the man, and I never looked for anyone else." Mitchum's characteristic reaction to the assignment, for which he was to be paid an estimated $1 million: "It promised a year of free lunches."

The woman who played Natalie Jastrow was supposed to be about 33, "a big, dark Jewish girl," in Wouk's words. He wanted her so Jewish-looking that her ethnic background would be immediately obvious in several key scenes. The choice: MacGraw, who, though she claims some Jewish ancestry, does not look Jewish. She is honest enough to admit to being 43, but she looks ten years younger.

MacGraw became a star with her first two movies, Goodbye, Columbus (1969) and Love Story (1971), then dropped out of the business during her marriage to the late Steve McQueen. In the late 1970s, she returned to do such pictures as Convoy, Players and Just Tell Me What You Want, the first two critical failures and the last a box-office flop. The Winds of War may be a turning point in her career, for better or for worse. "Whatever way it goes, it will be rather decisive," she says, "and that's a horrible pressure. I'm sick just talking about it. I've been given a great shot--a great script, a great director and a great company--and there is nobody to hide behind."

The series is only slightly less important for Vincent, who plays her husband Byron Henry. A boyish-looking 37, Vincent has been largely typecast in surfer or truck-driver roles, and Curtis picked him somewhat reluctantly. "But I get down on my hands and knees and thank God that I did," says Curtis, "because he is the one who has surprised me the most. He has incredible instincts." Curtis was also surprised by the unsuspected abilities of Polly Bergen, who plays Victor Henry's wife Rhoda. Bergen, 52, a former singer, won a TV Emmy for The Helen Morgan Story (1957), but she abandoned acting years ago to become a cosmetics executive, lecturer and women's rights activist.

Aaron Jastrow was always thought of as a sort of Jewish John Houseman, and so, in typical Hollywood fashion, the role was given to the late Lee Strasberg. But Curtis belatedly concluded that Strasberg was too New York in his style, and he decided to meet with Houseman himself. Says Curtis: "When John told me his mother was Jewish, I said: 'O.K., you've got the part.'" For the role of Pamela Tudsbury, the young Englishwoman who falls in love with Pug, Curtis and his casting assistants looked in vain at 200 actresses. Then, says Curtis, "I was looking out the window, nearly suicidal, and in walks this girl. I said a prayer to myself: 'Oh, God, please let her be able to act.' " She was able, all right, and as a result the little-known Victoria Tennant, 30, has her best crack yet at breaking through with the U.S. audience.

The choices for the world leaders were perhaps hardest of all. Millions have seen them countless times in photographs, newsreels or historical documentaries, and millions have seen other portrayals. The President, almost inescapably, had to be Ralph Bellamy, who played F.D.R. as a younger man in Sunrise at Campobello. Curtis saw his Churchill in British Actor Howard Lang, whom he spotted from the back on a BBC series called The Onedin Line. "He turned around and he didn't really look like Churchill, but he had that demeanor, that great granite-like face and the big gut," says Curtis.

Stalin, French-Russian Actor Anatoly Shaginyan, looked right after makeup, but at 5 ft. 1 in. (3 in. under Stalin's height) he appeared absurdly short next to Mitchum. For their one scene together, in a Kremlin dining room, he walked on ramps hidden from the camera. Gunter Meisner, who had played Hitler twice before, was most afraid that the Fuehrer's posturing would appear comical. He bought books, looked at photographs and examined documentary films on a videotape machine. Hitler, he eventually decided, was also an actor: "He studied many of his gestures, although he didn't have a video recorder as I had, just a mirror." The man who portrayed Mussolini was not an actor at all, but a director, Enzo Castellari, who strutted in a Mussolini-like way on the sets of his movies.

The making of The Winds of War was almost as full of hazards as a real war, and there were infinite opportunities for things to go wrong. Wouk's script ran 962 pages, contained 1,785 scenes and called for 285 speaking parts, along with thousands of extras. It was shot in 267 locations, in six countries and on two continents, and it took 13 months to film and twelve more to edit. There were about 50,000 costumes, and Mitchum alone had 112 changes. When the cameras stopped, Curtis had 1 million ft., or 185 hrs. of film, which he cut down to 81,000 ft. That will translate, minus commercials, into about 15 hr. of air time.

Curtis, a burly, noisy workaholic, organized his war into five campaigns. There were three phases in Europe, each lasting from nine to eleven weeks, and two in the U.S. During the month's break between sections, he would nail down locations for future scenes. "In more than a year of shooting, we had to stop only twice," he says proudly. "I shoot in everything. Rain, snow, it doesn't make any difference to me. If I can roll that camera and move the people, I am going to."

Sometimes the people moved the wrong way, however. Much of the series was shot in Yugoslavia, including scenes of Polish refugees fleeing the invading Nazis. Hundreds of Yugoslav peasants were carefully assembled for the desperate flight, when rain sent them scurrying for home. "They were there with their animals," explains Associate Producer Barbara Steele, "and they weren't going to give their cows pneumonia for $20 a day."

In another scene, one of the best in the series, black-costumed Nazi "special-action squads" herd dozens of Russian Jews--played, of course, by the all-purpose Yugoslavs--into a mammoth grave, where they are to be shot. As the cameras started to roll, the peasants began to wail. "No one told them to," says Steele, "and you couldn't have dreamt of such a sound. It was just devastating, strange and keening, like the saddest tone in history. The Yugoslavs hate the Germans, and maybe something surfaced from a collective unconscious."

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was reproduced at a Navy base in Port Hueneme, Calif, and the Navy allowed only four days for filming. Rented Navy destroyers were wired with simulated explosives, set to go off in a chain reaction. By mistake a jittery technician fired them before the cameras were ready to role. It took 35 people to rig them up again. A similar delay occurred during filming at Aaron Jastrow's Tuscan villa, which had been chosen because of its faded golden hues, the result of years of weathering. The owner of the villa was so proud to have her house on TV, however, that before the production crew arrived she had it painted a bright, Day-Glo yellow. The first day of filming was upset while the art department hastily tried to restore the centuries-old patina.

Toward the end of the series, Natalie becomes a mother, and the casting scouts found three babies to play the part of little Louis Henry in various locations. "The baby Louie who was supposed to be adorable looked at me and loathed me," says MacGraw, "and the baby Louie who was supposed to cry was always smiling. The third baby Louie was 30 lbs. heavier than the others." So that a real baby would not be endangered, MacGraw was finally provided with a baby Louie doll for the crowd scene in which she hears Mussolini declare war on the U.S. But Curtis com--plained that the doll did not move, as a real baby would. He proposed bundling up a small dog so that something would appear to be twitching in her arms. MacGraw refused. "There is no way," she told him, "that I can hold a dog, watch Mussolini, and fear for my life and child at the same time." Curtis saw her point and finally settled for the doll.

Director of Photography Charles Correll, describing the "storybook, romantic look" he and Curtis strived for, says, "It is kind of hazy in places." That is like saying that Niagara is kind of wet in places. Smoke is Curtis' signature. In scene after scene, he puffed smoke over battlefields, down streets and alleys, into dark interiors. Vincent recalls one setup in an underground restaurant: "Dan and the crew wore surgical masks, and the smoke was so bad that it formed a green gook on the outside. The actors couldn't wear masks, and we would just sit there for twelve hours a day, breathing, smoking and eating salty prosciutto."

Though Paramount's researchers went to considerable trouble to ensure historical accuracy, Curtis often had to settle for the feel of the era rather than exact, archaeological details. Hitler's Berlin, where many of the earlier scenes take place, no longer exists, of course; it was pounded into rubble by Allied bombers and Soviet tanks. Vienna had to do, and in fact it does very well. A huge room in the old Hofburg, the former residence of the imperial family, became the dictator's headquarters. "You couldn't get further away in architectural style," says Production Supervisor Pia Arnold, "but the image, the impact is the same. You see the uniforms going up and down the gigantic stairs of that building, and you get a feeling of the power of the Third Reich."

The cast could scarcely have been more disparate, but the atmosphere on the set soon became familial, with Mitchum playing father offstage as well as on. He suffered from a number of ailments and a fractured shoulder bone incurred in a fall on an ice-covered hill, but he was almost always ready when the camera turned his way. "Bob was once quite ill with the flu," says Tennant. "In one scene I had to run across the room and throw myself into his arms. I kept knocking him over, he was so weak. They finally got someone to kneel behind him and prop him up."

In Yugoslavia, remembers Vincent, the worst thing that could happen was to be caught in the hotel elevator with vacationing Russians. "Big overcoats. Big suitcases. No baths. You get a group of them packed into an elevator, and you hold your breath. Bob went up one night with a pack of them. He got out on a lower floor, and Bob, whom I called 'Daddy Bad,' put his foot in the door and pulled out a tube of super glue. He ran the glue up one side of the elevator door and down the other and then said, 'Bye.' The door shut, and I heard it took four hours to get them out of there."

Mitchum says that he enjoyed the work as much as he does any work. "It was the sort of film from which you can't steal the clothes," he jokes, "but it was no duller than working on a movie. Whenever I felt abandoned, I'd go get drunk, which is what I have done all my life."

At times the cast felt like wailing as those Yugoslav peasants did, and began talking in the weary way of old soldiers. "If you're in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for a week, you've been to all the restaurants, done everything, seen everything," says Vincent. "You live with the same people in the same hotel, and you travel with them. It is like being in a circus. The days often lasted 16 hours, and Dan started shooting before breakfast, before you could get a cup of coffee. He demanded that we jump and move."

Curtis jumped more than anyone else, taking on the job of producer as well as director. A man of "excessive attitudes," as Steele calls him, he would yell and scream, and then suffer what she calls "excruciating remorse" if he thought he had hurt someone's feelings. "He is the most impatient person in the world," says Bergen. "I'd be half a foot away from him and he'd yell at the top of his lungs, 'O.K., Polly, let's go!' It took me weeks to realize he wasn't really yelling. That's just his energy, and he is deaf in one ear. I started to stand behind him and just as he'd be ready to yell for me I'd shout, 'O.K., Curtis, we're ready to shoot!' " But almost everyone became devoted to him. "He is a very strange man," says Houseman. "He spends an enormous amount of time putting his worst foot forward, pretending to be rough and insensitive. But I ended up liking him very much. The job he did was incredible. The Winds of War was an extraordinary undertaking."

It is, despite some serious flaws, a largely successful undertaking. The huge cast is, with very few exceptions, able and often exceptional. Mitchum, overaged and overweight as he is, is real and rocklike. As the actor says, "Pug sort of functions as a pylon at an air race. Everything revolves around him." Bergen is touching as the flighty, shallow but nonetheless sympathetic Rhoda; Houseman, who has been blessed with a much more amiable character than he usually portrays, is convincing as the civilized survivor of an ancient society who cannot believe that the barbarians have finally broken through the gates; and Vincent brings to the part of Byron a force of vitality and a hard, sometimes menacing passion. The only really bad performance, in fact, is MacGraw's. Although she looks splendid, she flounders in a role for which she is ill suited. Her voice has no inflections, her face has few expressions and her performance has no credibility.

Some of the blame for that must fall on Curtis. Paramount wanted a general to manage this vast project, and in Curtis it got one. Like Ulysses S. Grant, he eventually gains victory, but his tactics can be clumsy, and his formations are sometimes ragged along the edges. He is not, in short, an elegant director. His main concern is to keep the action moving, which he does.

The same might be said of Wouk. His plot is sometimes cumbersome and contrived. The wedding of Natalie's Polish relatives, for ex ample, looks as if it had been borrowed from Fiddler on the Roof, and the timing, the night before the German invasion, is ludicrous. His dialogue is often wooden. "Why did you insist on marrying me?" Natalie asks Byron. "We could have made love as much as you wanted. But now you've tied me to you on this rope of burning nerves." Furthermore, in all the hours of script there is scarcely a glint of humor. As a collegiate critic once said about an earlier work: "All Wouk and no play."

Still, with a little help from history, Wouk and Curtis do create an engrossing narrative. In most historical dramas, the depictions of real events often seem staged, while the author's inventions seem real. In The Winds of War, the reverse is true. The historical scenes, some of them scrupulously copied from old newsreels, are vivid and acute, while the fictional scenes sometimes look stiff and awkward. But those moments pass and the story takes over, building up momentum as it approaches its tragic conclusion, hour after hour after hour. Meanwhile, ABC hopes for a happier ending of its own. Having taken its gamble, the network must wait for the results, day after day after day. -- By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/ Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/ Los Angeles This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.