YUZU Productions
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YUZU Productions - 30 rue du Colonel Delorme - F-93100 Montreuil - www.yuzu-productions.com Christian Popp - T : +33 6 75 67 03 11 - [email protected] Nick Ware - T : +33 6 06 60 11 23 - [email protected] For the first time one of Hollywood’s greatest stars tells his own story, in his own words. From a childhood of poverty to global fame, Cary Grant, the ultimate self-made star, explores his own screen image and what it took to create it. © YUZU Productions 2015 SYNOPSIS Cary Grant is one of the most enduring icons of the Hollywood golden era. Described by the film historian and biographerDavid Thomson as “the greatest screen actor of all time”, Grant is without doubt the actor whose style as the suave and elegant man-in-the-suit has remained iconic and modern: his image is still used in advertising and inspired Don Draper in Mad Men. Grant played with the notion that the man born Archie Leach had become “Cary Grant” and that this persona, such a powerful target for the audience’s projections, hid a constant search for his true self. In 1958, at the height of his success, Grant is a troubled man in a failing marriage. He becomes one of the first people to experiment with LSD, opening up enormous self-discovery. He continues to take it for many years, and is a primary advocate of its medical properties. The film opens at this crisis moment of his life, as Hitchcock’s North by Northwest becomes one of his biggest hits and he begins an affair with Sophia Loren - emotional, vulnerable and helplessly in love. We travel back with Grant on his long journey of self-discovery: to his poverty-stricken childhood in Bristol, England, and the incarceration of his mother in a mental hospital, a fact hidden from him for 20 years; his long apprenticeship as an acrobat and stage actor, and making 27 films in Hollywood before stardom. This key period is the making and becoming of Cary Grant - his role models, relationships with men, and the birth of the alter-ego that finally made him a star in 1937. Through his screwball period, his premature retirement and the late 50’s comeback, Grant remained a hugely popular actor but an almost completely unknowable man, not least to his 5 wives. His personal demons, anxieties and frailties were kept hidden. Only Hitchcock captured this darker side, the unknown Grant, in 4 films. For the master of suspense Grant emainedr ‘under suspicion’ as in their first feature together in 1941. Amongst our interviewees are Cary Grant’s widow Barbara, who give us access to the family archives. Sophia Loren explains how he pleaded with her to marry him and why she – in the end - refused. Judy Balaban took acid with him in 1959; film-makerPeter Medak had lunch with him every week for a year at Universal Studios in 1963. Critic David Thomson and biographer Mark Glancy reveal how his life and work intertwined, and why we still care about him, 30 years after his death. Above all we will get closer to Archie Leach and Cary Grant than ever before – “The Man from Dream City”, as critic Pauline Kael dubbed him, will finally become flesh and blood. © YUZU Productions 2015 3 TREATMENT Cary Grant never gave a filmed interview – he controlled his image too much to allow it to happen. Our film will instead use primary source material including the autobiography that was never published. We are working with his family to access his home movies, his audio recordings and his many letters to his mother. For the written material, an actor will read these lines, not giving an impersonation, but conveying the tone, emotion and the spirit of Grant. The film will weave Grant’s re-evaluation of his life on LSD through his career and personal story. We will begin with a recreation of his LSD experience, in a therapists consulting room in Beverley Hills. This will shot in an impressionistic way, with no impersonations. (More details are in the Director’s note). A narrator will be our guide, supported by our interviewees who will give us crucial insight, first hand recollections or new evidence of Grant’s life and career. The film will use extensive film clips from Grant’s movies, and related materials from the trailers, production stills and other on-set materials. The film clips will both illustrate his career, and act as illustration of his life and as dream and “hallucinatory” imagery as part of the flash backs he experienced whilst on LSD. The visual style will be rich in imagery of Beverly Hills in the 1950’s, Broadway in the 1930’s and Bristol in the 1910’s. This will be achieved with original archive footage, and where necessary some newly shot material, treated and graded to evoke the period. © YUZU Productions 2015 4 We will film new sequences to illustrate key moments or themes - in particular the acid sessions. Grant also vividly described his childhood home in detail, and we will recreate this classic Edwardian parlour. We will film in a tailors, showing impressionistic images of cutting, measuring, dressing and ironing. This leitmotif will reflect Grant’s own immaculate tailoring, for which he became famous. It is one of the few subjects that he ever wrote about in the first person. His father’s profession was pressing suits, but ironically Grant was forced to wear his mother’s home-made trousers, causing him acute embarrassment as an adolescent. We will film at an acrobatic school to evoke the stilt-walking and tumbling of his days in the Pender troupe. We will use iconic studio photography and archive stills from throughout his life. In the Margaret Herrick library are Grant’s original papers, and we will film many of these with a rostrum to show the annotations he made to newspaper reviews, to letters, contracts and scripts. The music will mix original soundtracks from his films, notably Bernard Hermann’s fantastic score for North By Northwest, with contemporary music. We will commission an original soundtrack from an established composer, and we are currently considering one of these artists to give us a surprising sonic landscape, one which will root Grant very much in the present and enable us to see him as a contemporary, not a distant figure. A LIFE BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT “I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each.” In each of Grant’s life chapters are the remnants of the past and his repressed emotions, but each will also signal changes, as well as ‘trailing’ or anticipating changes that will come in the future. It is possible to see a life pattern of in and out breathing, and of Grant finally finding an equilibrium in fatherhood and retirement. By then he had decided to no longer be a public figure, yet he was tempted back to tour a live show one more time to meet his audience. Throughout, the films in some extraordinary way have mirrored his life journey, as if the producers and Cary knew instinctively what was going on. They will provide a reflection of his inner life, or the lack of it. A contrast of ‘shallow’ versus ‘deep’ mirrors. ©YUZU Productions 2015 5 “There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it.” Bristol beginnings Cary Grant was born Archie Leach in Bristol England in 1904. His father Elias was a heavy drinker and they were relatively poor, but otherwise his early childhood appeared happy. But at the age of 13 his father had his wife Elsie committed to a mental asylum. The reason? She had discovered his long standing affairs. Many biographers write that Grant was told she was dead; our new research proves that to be false. He was told she had gone away, apparently never to return. Archie’s life began to fall part. “There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected each daily activity with which I occupied myself in order to overcome it”. He truanted from school and spent much of days on the docks amongst the sailors and prostitutes. “I sat alone for hours watching the ships come and go, sailing with them to far places on the tide of my imagination, trying to release myself from the emotional tensions which disarranged my thoughts”. It was here that he discovered the Hippodrome Theatre. After getting work as a lighting assistant, Grant befriends and finally joins the Bob Pender acrobatic troupe of knockabout comedians. He becomes a stilt-walker, and finds he has a natural talent for acrobatics, and an ability to remain graceful and composed, even when getting a laugh from the audience. It is a talent that he draws on later in his life. The mood of early 20th century Bristol will be evoked though local film archive reflecting the constraint and rigidity of the era. We will film in his Horfield neighbourhood, his schools and the houses he grew up in, and around the docks where a statue of Grant now resides. The docks will show the call to travel and of re-invention. We reflect the mood of his father’s licentiousness and his drinking, and the dark mood that descends as his mother is locked up. We will film at the asylum, now a museum and a part of the local university.