For those of you out there in Cinema Retro Land, who
are not familiar with the name Robert E. Relyea –well how about I drop a few
other names… ? The Magnificent Seven, The
Alamo, West Side Story and Bulllitt for
starters – all films on which Mr. Relyea has served as a valued member of the
production. Whether he was in the role
of Assistant Director, Assistant to the Producer, Unit Production Manager or
even Executive Producer, Relyea played an important part in the making of those
great, iconic pictures. At 78, he’s still as sharp as ever and for the first
time , he has decided, at the bequest of son Craig, to document his career in
the recently published autobiography Not
So Quiet on the Set –My Life in
Movies During Hollywood’s Macho Era. As a film historian, I highly recommend
his book, especially if you supplement it with two other volumes that also came
out last year –Escape Artist: The Life
and Films of John Sturges  by Glenn
Lovell and I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History by Walter Mirisch. These
books offer their own unique perspectives, something I hope to capture in this
article. So if everyone’s ready –we’ll call action!-
 and go for a take!
It was a beautiful sunny January morning, when I drove
out to Westlake Village northwest of Los Angeles to visit a man I felt I
already knew. Growing up back in London,
England, I kept seeing his name coming up in the credits of so many of my
favorite movies. Now I was driving
through this classy suburb that once used to be where the cattle grazed and
stampeded on TV’s Rawhide. In a magnificent corner home complete with
white picket fence, I was greeted by the 6ft. 3in. retired studio executive
himself. Having spent a few hours on the
phone weeks earlier, we were already on the same page - although he did
surprise me and say that his and his lovely wife Dorothy’s favorite movie genre
was horror films. Of course, if he had
cloned himself, he could have worked on Hitchcock’s Psycho in-between making The
Alamo for John Wayne and The
Magnificent Seven for John Sturges. Those are among the honor roll of
famous names Relyea has worked with – in addition to William Wyler, Robert Wise
and Richard Brooks. The first of these
legends to recognize talent in the young 29 year old Relyea was the Duke. Wayne was looking for a First Assistant
Director for his upcoming lifelong dream epic The Alamo. Relyea’s successful work on that high pressure film saw
his salary instantly doubling, along with a rise in his reputation within the
industry. Upon returning home to LA from Texas on Christmas Day 1959, he got a
present that was far more rewarding than anything under the tree: an offer from
action director John Sturges to work in Mexico on something called The Magnificent Seven..
Ultimately, the ploy worked and
McQueen was released to do Sturges’ film for a hefty $50,000 pay check. Having worked a few years earlier for Sturges on Never So Few, Relyea relished the idea
of reuniting with this giant of the cinema. Sturges was not only a master at
casting the right actors in the right roles, but he also had a penchant for
recognizing artists with great star potential, as evidenced by the presence of
up-and-comers Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Robert Vaughn in
the cast. Each of these newcomers was trying very obviously to upstage each
other and star Yul Brynner and Relyea was right there trying to keep them all
from chewing up the widescreen scenery. There was plenty of time to think up
bits of business, like McQueen adjusting his hat or his gun, as the script was
being written and re-written on a daily basis.Â
Robert Wilkie was supposed to be the knife thrower, until Sturges
decided to take a chance with James Coburn.Â
Bronson had been around for some time , but it was his first big break,
too. As for McQueen getting in the
picture while under contract to Four-Star Productions on TV’s Wanted: Dead or Alive, the story that Relyea
tells is that the negotiations between McQueen’s agent Hilly Elkins and
Four-Star executive Tom McDermott rivaled any gunfights to be enacted in the
film. Â Having appealed earlier to
Four-Stars principle owners Dick Powell and David Niven, Elkins was passed on
to McDermott, who didn’t like McQueen and was determined to stop him from
getting out of his $750 a weekly TV contract. Thus, after a much-heated debate,
McQueen broke his contract by faking a
car accident and refusing to continue his TV role as Josh Randall , bounty
hunter.Â
Stars on the rise: Relyea had to keep the up-and-coming superstars of The Magnificent Seven in line.
Speaking of TV western stars getting out of their
contracts, Relyea relates that James Garner literally had to buy his freedom
out of Maverick.. Warner Brothers was only paying him $450 a
week – plus the studio took 50% of any earnings he made from public
appearances. Even when when he had the
opportunity to do a feature film on hiatus, he was contractually bound to work
for Warner Brothers. It was on the set of William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour that Robert Relyea first met Garner. This was
the actor’s first film after finally buying his way out of his TV contract –
and now he was under the direction of the industry’s most intimidating
filmmakers. As the new boy amongst a
cast that included Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, Garner was the one
Wyler constantly picked on. Even for
Relyea, who had already been exposed to the tantrums and bully tactics of other
veteran directors, Wyler was the ultimate study in power-tripping. On the very last day of shooting the film,
Wyler became exasperated with an actress who was having trouble delivering a
line as it was written. What followed
became a public execution, a slow public humiliation of the actress in front of
Relyea and other members of the cast and crew. It caused the poor young woman
to give up acting completely. Yet, Relyea recalls, that Wyler was not one to
offer a single kind word to her.
In total contrast to Wyler, Robert Wise is described by
Relyea as “a class actâ€. Relyea worked
under Wise and co-director Jerome Robbins on their classic film adaptation of West Side Story. With two captains of the ship sharing
power, it wasn’t long before the ship hit a reef. Wise was already an
established and respected film director, but Robbins had similar clout on
Broadway, where he directed the stage version of West Side Story to enormous acclaim. Relyea recalls that from day one, it became
obvious these two men could not work together and one of them would have to
leave the production. Ultimately, it
fell to Relyea to orchestrate the unpleasant task of having Robbins removed
after only three weeks of shooting. The is the part of an AD’s job that exists
below his official duties: having to navigate between the egos and politics on
a film set. In doing so, Relyea often felt he had the most thankless job in
show business. Furthermore, the AD takes the rap for seemingly everything that
goes wrong on the set, from a star reporting for work in a drunken stupor to
someone parking in someone else’s sacred parking space. It’s all blamed on a
person who, all too often, never even gets the offer to rise to being a full-fledged
director. Still, the Assistant Director has to be part drill sergeant, part
social worker, part diplomat and full-time mind reader. Â
In the 1960s, The Mirisch Company was one of the
hottest production companies in Hollywood.Â
Financed and later owned by United Artists, the Mirischs –Harold, Marvin
and Walter, working with the likes of John Sturges, Robert Wise, William Wyler
and Norman Jewison - would garner some eighty-seven Academy Award nominations
and twenty-eight Oscars. West Side Story
alone won ten Oscars out of the eleven nominations it received in 1961. From the start, Robert Relyea was considered
an invaluable member of the Mirisch film team.Â
He was elevated to Production Manager on Elvis Presley’s remake of Kid Galahad. For Relyea, working with
Elvis was a pleasure he had previously experienced when her served as AD on Jailhouse Rock for MGM. Relyea had seen
first-hand how professional and easy-going the twenty-two year old superstar
was. His talents even extended to suggesting choreographic direction for the
iconic jail block musical number. Elvis
had no ego, and Relyea recalls he was always the first person on the set and
even made the coffee for the cast and crew. The location setting for the new
film was supposed to be the Catskills in upstate New York. In typical Hollywood
fashion, the movie was actually shot near Palm Springs in the  small mountain community of Idyllwild. The
location may have been convincing but Elvis and his Memphis Mafia were not
enamored of it, as the community was legally “dry†and liquor could not be sold
or consumed. The real problem as far as Relyea was concerned, was co-star and
notorious drinker Gig Young. Relyea recalls having to have Young “kidnappedâ€
from a bar over the town’s border on a regular basis – as well as breaking up
fights between him and co-star Charles Bronson, both of whom were trying to
“out-macho†the other.Â
House of Numbers
Among the film genres Relyea had worked on in his early
years as an AD was the legendary prison movies, which studios seemed to grind
out by the batch. He worked as a Second
Assistant Director on MGM’s House of
Numbers starring Jack Palance.Â
Curiously, the cast  was made up
primarily of four hundred actual San Quentin inmates. Relyea recalls that
Palance had no trouble impressing the real life tough guys through his athletic
prowess. However, there was also a more sensitive side to Palance that wasn’t
advertised to his “co-starsâ€: he fancied himself a poet and would write prose
on breaks during the film. One less pleasant memory Relyea relates is the
evening he and other cast and crew members were almost shot while exiting the
prison. Apparently, a rookie guard in the tower mistook the artists for actual
convicts who were attempting a breakout. Relyea and the others suddenly found
themselves under the glare of a spotlight and under threat of death if they
moved. (Relyea does confess that this was at least partly the crew’s fault for
failing to walk in single file, as they had been instructed.) In the course of
his career, Relyea has experienced actual deaths on movie sets. We’ll review
those experiences in the forthcoming second part of my article – along with how
that Idyllwild film location played a role in The Great Escape. Â
Click here for a review of Mr. Relyea's autobiography and a link to order it from Amazon