A wonderful movie is a small miracle. So many things have to go right, and they usually don’t. What is needed? A good story, and good actors, and a competent cinematographer, and a talented editor, and decent dialogue, and a sensible producer, and a director capable of mixing all the elements together into a cohesive whole.
A terrific new book by a Hollywood producer named Jonathan Sanger tells the story of the almost-enchanted series of lucky breaks and clever calls that made his first film a singular and genuine classic.
Sanger was a young go-getter in 1970s Hollywood who learned the craft of filmmaking as a production manager and assistant director. One day his babysitter asked him, shyly, if he would read a script cowritten by her telephone-solicitor boyfriend. He did, and was stunned by it. He paid the boyfriend (and his cowriter) $1,000 to reserve the right to produce the screenplay as a movie.
Soon thereafter, the 33-year-old Sanger found himself working for Mel Brooks on Brooks’s Hitchcock parody High Anxiety. Brooks was setting up a production company to make serious movies and immediately took to Sanger’s optioned script. Brooks thought Dustin Hoffman might want to star in it. Showing both nerve and judgment, Sanger said the part had to be played by a relative unknown: “The audience would always be looking for Dustin under the makeup.”
The script was called The Elephant Man (1980), and it told the story of a sideshow freak named John Merrick who had a moment of glory when sentimental Victorian London clasped him to its bosom. In the first miracle of its miraculous gestation, Brooks hired Sanger to produce it and left him mostly alone. The second miracle was Sanger coming across a crazy little movie called Eraserhead at an art-house theater. Sanger went to it, was transfixed, and set up a meeting with its director—a Reagan Republican from Montana who’d made Eraserhead in his spare time and on the weekends.
It is hard to convey what a wildly unconventional choice David Lynch was to direct a picture set in the 19th century with a cast right out of Masterpiece Theatre. He’d never made anything with a plot line, or with more than a few characters, and had never been to London, where the movie was to be filmed. But Lynch was as likable and self-effacing as his work was extreme.
Sanger’s book is a tale of exhilaration, as every element seemed to fall into place with shocking ease—including the hiring of veteran editor Anne V. Coates and cinematographer Freddie Francis, who recognized Lynch as a master in the making and served both as teachers and protectors of a man who was something of a novice. Lynch and Sanger managed, as well, to cast the movie perfectly, with Anthony Hopkins as the doctor who treats the deformed title character—played with unimaginable elegance and pathos by John Hurt, who died this past January.
But Making the Elephant Man is also a story of high anxiety itself. The movie almost plunged into disaster when it came to Hurt’s appearance. Lynch spent months working on a full-body get-up for John Merrick, the Elephant Man—he had done all the effects for Eraserhead himself—but when Hurt finally donned Lynch’s creation, it looked like a costume and had to be scrapped. A desperate Sanger hired an obnoxious and unknown Briton named Christopher Tucker to do the makeup at an outrageous price. Tucker needed weeks to perfect his effects, and so Lynch had to film around the fact that Hurt could not yet be seen as John Merrick.
This concession to reality provided the most important miracle of the process. Before Lynch shows us Merrick, we see how others react to Merrick—including a staggering shot of Anthony Hopkins’s eyes slowly filling with tears of terror and sorrow, a mark then and now of his all-but-unparalleled greatness as an actor.
Only three years after the babysitter had handed Sanger the script, The Elephant Man was nominated for eight Oscars. The winner that year, Ordinary People, is now recognized as the mediocre melodrama it always was. But take two hours to watch The Elephant Man today and you will see a movie of great beauty and power undimmed by the passage of time. Indeed, it seems to have emerged full-blown from nowhere and has proved unduplicable. Sanger never made anything remotely as good, the screenwriting duo never wrote anything a tenth as good, and Brooks never produced anything as good. Neither Hopkins nor Hurt were ever better. Lynch went on to become perhaps the most adventurous American director of his time, but his often-perverse and inexplicable oeuvre has never been as accessible as The Elephant Man.
A wild comedic auteur allowed a novice producer to hire an inexperienced avant-garde art student to direct a major motion picture from a highly dramatic script by the boyfriend of the novice’s babysitter. As Sanger shows in this highly detailed and engrossing memoir, The Elephant Man could have been a disaster. It should have been a disaster. It should never have been made. And yet it was. Miracles do happen.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
