Brad Stevens - Monte Hellman - His Life and Films

In 1952, Hellman cofounded the Stumptown Players Summer Theater in Guerneville, California (north of San Francisco), directing their productions of Emlyn Williams' Night Must Fall , John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle and John Patrick's The Hasty Heart , and acting in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story and Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday. In the latter, he played Paul Verrall, while the other cast members included Joan Wilcox as Billie Dawn and Frank Wolff as Harry Brock: "Once, when an actor failed to make an entrance and I had asked all the questions Garson Kanin had provided me, Frank ad libbed the line 'What else do you want to know, pal?' The Stumptown Players used a theater in the middle of Armstrong Redwood State Park. We put in platforms for the seats so that every two rows would be higher than the rows in front. We also used salt water dimmers to control the lights (pickle jars with one metal plate attached to a string so that the lights would dim as the plate would rise in the jar separating it from the plate at the bottom). We shared tiny restrooms outside the theater with the audience. One night during intermission a woman went into the ladies room with her little girl. She inadvertently opened a stall with Joan Wilcox sitting on the john. After she closed the door, Joan heard her whisper to her daughter, 'That's Miss Wilcox, dear'." 6

Between the second and third seasons, Hellman lived in the San Francisco area and played Tom in a production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie staged at a community theater in Sausalito: "That winter I also directed Of Mice and Men , which was for my company, but put on in the Mill Valley high school auditorium. Sausalito is just across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco, and Mill Valley is about seven or eight miles north of that. I was living in San Anselmo, another town in the same area, and working by day in San Francisco as a window dresser at the Emporium department store. One of my co-founders of the Stumptown Players, Harvey Berman (who was later to direct Jack Nicholson before I did), was also working as a window dresser with me. One day he looked around and said, 'You know, I think everyone else in this department seems to be gay, except you and me. And I'm not so sure about you.' I felt the same way. The night we did the Halloween display you never saw so many guys modeling women's fur coats!" 7

During his company's third season, Hellman directed Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. After this season, he married the troupe's leading lady, Barboura Morris, 8and in 1955 moved to L.A.: "At the end of our third season the company seemed to be falling apart for political reasons, and one of our group had been offered a job at the American Broadcasting Company in the film editing department, and he was not interested and he knew I had an interest in film, and so he told me about this job. I applied for it and got it. It was a very challenging job: cleaning out the old film vaults at the ABC studios, which had been one of the first movie studios in Hollywood. So these vaults had been there for God knows how long. I have these terrible allergies, and so I suffered for my art, cleaning out these dusty vaults." 9While at ABC, Hellman would eat his lunch in nearby Griffith Park: "One day I go up there and Roger Corman is shooting something. I didn't say hello to him then, but a year or two later I had the opportunity to meet him because my wife at the time had started acting in his movies." 10

In 1956, Hellman became an apprentice editor on the television series Medic (shot at Ziv Studios): " Medic dealt with doctors and medical conditions, and had episodes as various as the doctor who treated Lincoln after he was shot to a two-part study of post-partum depression. I was officially an apprentice, whose job was splicing dailies. I started syncing dailies as well, and ultimately became a kind of low-grade assistant, standing behind the editor, Bob Seiter, and handing him trims. This was when I learned most of what I know about both editing and film directing. I made no decisions. I don't remember if I got a credit, but my name was frequently used on the hospital paging system. The sound editor on the show was Jim Nelson, who became a life-long friend, and worked on most of my movies, as well as Star Wars as Post Production supervisor and Associate Producer. He took his name off, after a dispute with George Lucas over profit participation. On Medic , the hospital paging system also paged him on a regular basis." 11

Following his departure from Ziv early in 1957, Hellman went to work for Columbia, "syncing dailies for all productions, not working with a particular editor," 12but left in September: "Knowing I had to wait eight years before the union would allow me to be a full editor (you didn't have to be working, all you had to do was be in the union), I decided to quit work as an apprentice and go back to the theater. I started a company in Los Angeles, and put on a series of four plays." 13These plays were staged in the Dahl Theater: "It was named for the two brothers who owned the building. I think we changed the name during my tenure to the Playgoers Company, then later, because of copyright infringement, to the Theatergoers Company. It was an actual full-blown theater, with a revolving stage, which seated around three hundred people. It had been built by the Actors' Lab, the same group I had ushered for, but not the same theater where I had ushered. The Lab built my theater while I was away at Stanford, and I never saw any productions there." 14Roger Corman was among the investors, and the opening play was the first Los Angeles production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot , staged as a Western, with Pozzo a Texas rancher and Lucky a Native American: "I'd read it and it was a brilliant play and I wanted to do it. I didn't think I would direct it, primarily because it was our first play of the season and I didn't think I'd have time to start the company and start the season going and get the theater organized and direct the first play. I hired a director, and as he began to prepare, I realized that I couldn't let somebody else direct Waiting for Godot. So I took over the directing and still continued to prepare the season, and it was probably the most important artistic experience in my life. Shortly before beginning to do the show, I happened on an evening of vaudeville that was put on by two great vaudevillians, Jack Albertson and Joey Faye. I realized that they were the characters from Godot , and I cast them. That was probably the most brilliant thing I've ever done. They were so wonderful, and the show was so great, that there wasn't one person in the company who missed a performance. During the return engagement, Jack Albertson had to take a week off for surgery on a detached retina. I tried to recast the role for a week, rehearsed a new actor for two days, then decided he couldn't cut it. I decided to play the role of Didi (Vladimir) myself. Mind you, Jack was one of the greatest comics ever. On one double-take, when Pozzo says, 'And so I took a knock' (pronounced with a hard 'k'), Jack does the take, then says, 'A knook?' looking directly at the audience. He got a laugh that lasted most nights over a minute. Trying to do it as best I could the way he did it, I got a laugh of 20 seconds, which I was very proud of." 15

Hellman also directed Eugene O'Neill's The Great God Brown , as well as producing Jean Anouilh's Colombe and William Saroyan's The Cave Dwellers (starring Katherine Squire and George Mitchell, both of whom would appear in Ride in the Whirlwind and Two-Lane Blacktop ) . Although the theater only lasted one season, it became a magnet for several young L.A.-based actors, notably Jack Nicholson, who was attending Jeff Corey's acting class at the time. Other class members included Roger Corman, Barboura Morris, Robert Towne and B. J. Merholz: "I was caught between two worlds. I was trained at Stanford University by a wonderful director and teacher named F. Cowles Strickland, who was part of the great tradition of the first half of the twentieth century which was still partially indebted to the nineteenth century. And then, about the middle of the twentieth century, a new tradition sprang up out of the Actors' Studio and the Group Theater and so forth, and so I was trained in the traditions of the old and also I was trained in the new traditions when I came to Los Angeles and studied with people like Martin Landau and Jeff Corey. And I think that that combination gives me the weapons and tools with which to work with actors of various types. I feel very comfortable with all kinds of actors. I love actors." 16