Welcome back to my visit with producer Robert E.
Relyea, who continues to share with us some more anecdotes from his remarkable
career. If you remember from part one, the principal wooded exterior location
for the Elvis Presley picture Kid Galahad
(1962), was the small mountain community of Idyllwild, California, near Palm
Springs. Relyea had kept the location in mind for his next film, The Great Escape (1963). As hard as it is to believe, director John Sturges and United Artists
were all set to shoot right there in sunny southern California, building the POW camp in the California hills with only some second unit shots done on location in Germany. This strategy would have obviously ensured that the movie was shot on a relatively low budget. Relyea told
Sturges “It’s not exactly the Black Forest, but it does have a few treesâ€. Relyea advised Sturges they could hire locals
to play the large number of POWs – all they would need is a waiver from the
Screen Extra’s Guild. In this
pre-production stage, their best-laid plans fell apart.The Guild insisted they bring out the
hundreds of union extras each day from Los Angeles. With a prohibitive cost like that, Germany
suddenly seemed rather appealing and a lot simpler.
Troubled icon: McQueen in The Great Escape
This revelation gives you a sense of how Hollywood
studio brass thinks and acts, which is not always in the interest of art over
commerce. However, in this case, we have to thank the Screen Extras Guild, long
since merged into the Screen Actors Guild, for unexpectedly playing a role in
the creation of a classic. Thanks to the Guild, The Great Escape benefited from the kind of authenticity that you
could only get from shooting in Germany itself. The unit shot at the Bavaria Studios in
Geiselgasteig near Munich, with the camp set and railway station stunningly
constructed in a real forest setting right behind the studio lot. Â As assistant to John Sturges, Relyea got the
necessary government permission to clear some 400 trees and the permission from
the German railways to shoot those crucial scenes. In addition to personally helping Sturges,
Relyea also was second-unit director and even performed one of the film’s most
dangerous stunts. Remember when the German plane James Garner and Donald Pleasence
escape in crashes into the trees short of the Swiss border? The regular stunt
pilot did not want to deliberately crash the single engine, two-seater vintage
Bucker Bu 181. Having a license to fly and not wanting to hold up production,
Relyea simply went ahead and did it himself. It is quite a story that Relyea relates
in detail in his recent autobiography Not So Quiet
On The Set. The crash caused him some considerable
pain, but like a true professional, he did not allow it to interfere with
getting the picture made. Speaking of stunts, the famous iconic jump was indeed
performed by Steve McQueen over that barbed-wire fence – only not in the film. McQueen
was frustrated that the insurance company wouldn’t allow him to do the stunt on
film – so he secretly did it on his own time in secret just to prove he was up
to the task. Still -as every devoted fan knows- on screen, Â it was his close friend and motorcycle
enthusiast, Bud Ekins who performed the classic stunt. McQueen still performed
all the other bike sequences, even - through the magic and skills of editing -
chasing himself dressed as a German soldier. Relyea directed the actual jump,
not Sturges, and even though on screen it was only a very few celluloid seconds,
it would go on to become an iconic sequence in film history. Another
interesting fact is that, because Sturges refused to work at night, the task of
filming the actual escape from the tunnel sequence fell to Relyea. Sturges simply told him, “Don’t shoot it like
I would –surprise me!â€