Production
Producers Jerry Bick and Elliott Kastner bought the cinematic rights to The Long Goodbye novel and made a production deal with the United Artists distribution company. They commissioned the screenplay from Leigh Brackett who had written the script for the Humphrey Bogart version of The Big Sleep. The producers offered the script to both Howard Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich to direct it. Both refused the offer, but Bogdanovich recommended Robert Altman, who, initially, was uninterested, until allowed to cast Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe — despite the producers' original choices being Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin.
United Artists president David Picker may have picked Gould to play Marlowe as a ploy to get Altman to direct. At the time, Gould was in professional disfavor because of his rumored troubles on the set of A Glimpse of Tiger, in which he bickered with co-star Kim Darby, fought with director Anthony Harvey, and acted erratically. Consequently, he had not worked in two years; nevertheless, Altman convinced Bick that Gould suited the role. United Artists had Elliott Gould undergo the usual employment medical examination and a psychological examination attesting to his mental stability.
Jim Bouton, cast as Marlowe's friend Terry Lennox, was not an actor. He was a former Major League Baseball pitcher and the author of the best-selling book Ball Four.
Read more about this topic: The Long Goodbye (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)