From Cowboy to Mogul to Monster
The Neverending Story of Film Pioneer Mark DamonBy Linda Schreyer Mark DamonAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2008 Mark Damon and Linda Schreyer
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4343-7737-1Contents
Co-Author's Notes................................................................xiPART ONEPSOChapter 1. 1983. Hollywood.......................................................1Alan HarrisChapter 2. 1942. Chicago.........................................................9PSOChapter 3. 1983. Hollywood.......................................................19Chapter 4. 1977. La Costa........................................................23Alan HarrisChapter 5. 1946. Los Angeles.....................................................29Chapter 6. 1949. Beverly Hills...................................................37PSOChapter 7. 1978. Hollywood.......................................................45Chapter 8. 1978. Hollywood.......................................................51Chapter 9. 1979. Cannes..........................................................59Chapter 10. 1980. Los Angeles....................................................67Al HarrisChapter 11. 1951. Beverly Hills..................................................75Chapter 12. 1954. Westwood.......................................................83PSOChapter 13. 1981. Century City...................................................89Chapter 14. 1983. Beverly Hills..................................................95Al Harris/Mark DamonChapter 15. 1954. Hollywood......................................................101PSOChapter 16. 1983. Century City...................................................109Chapter 17. 1983. Cannes.........................................................117Chapter 18. 1983. Century City...................................................125Chapter 19. 1983. Moscow.........................................................137Chapter 20. 1983. Beverly Hills..................................................147Mark DamonChapter 21. 1955. Burbank........................................................157PSOChapter 22. 1984. Beverly Hills..................................................169Mark DamonChapter 23. 1956. New York.......................................................179PART TWOChapter 24. 1984. New York.......................................................209HollywoodChapter 25. 1957. Hollywood......................................................221Chapter 26. 1958. Hollywood......................................................233Chapter 27. 1960. Hollywood......................................................245Chapter 28. 1961. Hollywood......................................................251PSOChapter 29. 1984. Munich.........................................................257ItalyChapter 30. 1961. Los Angeles/Rome...............................................269Chapter 31. 1961. Elba/Rome......................................................303PSOChapter 32. 1985. Century City...................................................313Chapter 33. 1985. Beverly Hills..................................................325ItalyChapter 34. 1962. Rome...........................................................337Chapter 35. 1965. Rome...........................................................349Chapter 36. 1966. Rome...........................................................355PSOChapter 37. 1985. Century City...................................................365ItalyChapter 38. 1967. Naples.........................................................377Chapter 39. 1973. Rome...........................................................387Chapter 40. 1973. Rome...........................................................397Chapter 41. 1974. Rome...........................................................403Chapter 42. 1976. Los Angeles....................................................413PSOChapter 43. 1986. Century City...................................................419Chapter 44. 1986. Century City...................................................427Chapter 45. 1986. Beverly Hills..................................................433Chapter 46. 1987. Bel Air........................................................439Chapter 47. 1987. Cannes.........................................................447PART THREEChapter 48. 2001. Santa Monica...................................................457Chapter 49. 2004. Hollywood......................................................465EPILOGUE. 2005. Beverly Hills....................................................477DAMON'S ADDENDUMS................................................................487Addendum 1: Buyers, Sellers, and Remembrances of Things Past.....................487Addendum 2: Damon's Epilogue to his Epilogue.....................................493TODAY............................................................................499PSOers...........................................................................501Mark Damon Filmography...........................................................503Index............................................................................513
Chapter One
March 29, 1983
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Hollywood, California
If you saw Mark Damon in a tux at the 55th Annual Academy Awards you probably wouldn't picture him in a toga. If he flashed his dazzling smile at his wife, Maggie, your first thought wouldn't be "Oooh, vampire fangs." And if you gazed at his handsome face it would be hard to imagine it covered with beastly hair.
But Mark Damon played a beast and a vampire, rode across the desert in a toga as the son of Cleopatra, walked the streets of Toledo as a Spanish king named Peter the Cruel and cleaned up the West as two Spaghetti Western cowboys named Johnny. He jumped on his horse without putting his feet in the stirrups, raced a Formula 1 Lotus at one hundred and ninety miles per hour and almost rescued his beloved from a cursed haunted house in flames.
As an actor he played a hero, a rebel and a fool in over fifty teenflicks, Spaghetti Westerns and swashbucklers. As a professional puzzle contestant he won a jackpot of money at the age of seventeen. Teen idol, singer, film director, writer and producer, astute businessman, inventor of the foreign film sales business - by 1983, Damon had pursued almost as many careers as a tomcat has lives.
He was happiest when he was working tirelessly. Happier than he was right now, sitting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and waiting to see how close he would get to a 13 1/2 inch gold-plated statuette. Mark liked suspense, as long as it was in a movie. There were only two things he hated - waiting helplessly and losing. And when Johnny Carson introduced Jane Fonda to present the award for Best Directing he was doing one and dreading the other.
As CEO of PSO, his small independent film company, Mark had brought Das Boot to the attention of the world. When the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Wolfgang Petersen for Best Directing, it was stunning. Now the final and most important award was about to be presented.
* * *
Das Boot's journey to America began when Mark heard from various studios about an interesting German mini-series that had no distribution. He and his partner, John Hyde, went to Munich to see it and what they saw was astonishing.
The year was 1941, the height of World War II. In German-occupied France a youthful submarine crew gathered for a last night of drunken revelry before they hit the sea. The scene took place in a bar where the crew feasted, made love and lived it up like there was no tomorrow, which there might not be for thirty of the forty thousand Germans who served on U-boats and never returned home.
"There were about 100 extras in that bar scene," Mark recalled, "and from the 75 movies I had acted in, directed and produced I knew that you bought extras by the pound. But here were 100 of them, all real characters, each with his or her own life." And Wolfgang Petersen's camera found each of them, illuminating them as individuals, in clusters or large groups. The scene lasted over ten minutes. "By the time it was over, it was one of the most intense motion picture experiences I'd ever had," Mark remembered.
"We want in," he told the director, Wolfgang Petersen and Gunther Rohrbach, head of Bavaria Studios.
"Excellent," the Germans enthused.
There was just one problem. No German language picture had ever had any success. Anywhere. Undaunted, Mark started calling some of the top distributors around the world. "I've just seen some extraordinary footage and I'd like to show it to you." He invited them to Munich to see it before they came to the Cannes Film Festival. "This is something very special."
Word began to spread and calls started coming in to PSO. If he'd invited one company in a territory, another company would call and ask why they weren't invited. Pretty soon Mark had lined up the top two competitors in each of the top countries in the world to go to Munich, each jockeying to get there first. He screened what he'd seen and pitched the rest. The combination sold one distributor after another. Some wanted to buy it then and there but Mark stalled them off . "Let's wait for Cannes," he suggested, knowing that when 'market hysteria' set in at the Festival the pressure to buy and sell would drive prices up. By the end of the Cannes Festival he had licensed Das Boot in every country in the world.
When the picture was released he oversaw its marketing in France, Italy, England and Japan. He went to the theatres and watched audiences as they set out to sea in the German U-boat that prowled the North Atlantic, challenging the British Navy at every turn. He studied audience reactions as they were gripped to their seats by the scared, exhausted and courageous crew that fought an endless series of life-and-death challenges below the sea; as they were moved by the humanity of the young men, by their struggle to return home to their families and loved ones. By the time the end credits rolled, from the looks on the faces of the European audiences he knew he had a hit on his hands. But when it came to selling it to the U.S., studio heads laughed in his face.
"You actually think American audiences are going to go see a sympathetic sub-titled German war film about their former enemy?"
"Believe me, this movie is completely unique."
Every studio turned him down. Until his persistence persuaded Columbia Studios, which had never handled a foreign language picture before, to release it. They even set up a new division, which they called Triumph, to handle it. Once again, Mark was in theatres when the film opened in the U.S. He saw how the deeply felt anti-war message had audiences gripped to their seats. How, for the first time, as Americans watched young Germans suffer in the claustrophobic setting of the submarine, they came to understand the terrible toll the war had taken on them.
Das Boot's international theatrical release broke box-office records. It earned over $100 million dollars overseas (in today's dollars it would be twice that amount.) It became the most successful German language film of all time. Then the film garnered more Academy Award Nominations than any foreign language film in history.
When another PSO film, La Traviata (directed by Franco Zeffirelli) was nominated for three more Academy Awards it was a personal triumph for Mark. Zeffirelli, who had known him since he was an actor in Italy, had initially entrusted PSO to distribute the film in the U.S. (unless a major studio picked it up.) Mark had rented theatres to show it to the public and after critics proclaimed La Traviata, starring Placido Domingo "the best opera film ever made," Universal had decided to distribute it.
Now, all Mark could do was wait as Jane Fonda, statuesque in a gown of gold, announced the five nominees for Best Directing: Steven Spielberg for E.T.; Sydney Pollack for Tootsie; Sir Richard Attenborough for Gandhi; Sidney Lumet for The Verdict; Wolfgang Petersen for Das Boot.
When a clip of Das Boot came on the screen Maggie beamed at him proudly. Then the clip ended and two thousand five hundred people, the crme de le crme of Hollywood, applauded the extraordinary film. It was the crowning moment of Mark's career.
Across the world in ninety countries, a billion viewers heard the roar of applause. In Italy, where he had starred in dozens of Spaghetti Westerns. In Spain, where he walked the streets of Toledo as Pedro El Cruel. In Cannes, where he was known as one of the greatest foreign salesmen in the world. And on the Northwest side of Chicago, where he grew up as Alan Harris, television viewers heard the massive applause.
But Mark was hearing another sound. The long ago sound of make-believe applause. The way a nine-year-old boy once imagined it in a tenement in Chicago ...
Chapter Two
January 19, 1942
Chicago, Illinois
Nine-year old Alan Harris sneered at himself in the mirror of the small bathroom. He was George Raft in Scarface. A tough-guy who could do anything. He sneered a little more at the imaginary applause from his fans as he pretended he was stepping out of his Cadillac Fleetwood Limousine at the 15th Annual Academy Awards.
If he tried hard enough, the imaginary applause could drown out the other sounds coming from the living room of the tenement. Not the strains of "White Christmas" playing on the radio. He didn't mind that song. It was the angry words his mother, Lillian, was shouting at his father, Irv, that he wanted to block out.
"Don't lie to me. What did you do with the eighteen dollars you earned last week?!"
"I told you I've got it," Irv answered sullenly.
"Show me," she insisted.
Alan peered into the living room. His father was standing near the front door, wearing a trench coat belted at the waist. He looked a little like Tyrone Power. He also looked ready to run. Except that Alan's mother held onto his arm.
"Show me. Before you go and spend it all."
Alan went back to the bathroom and closed the door. He didn't want to hear any more. His parents had the same fight every week. No, lately it was more like every day.
It was 1942, "a year of blood and strength," according to Time Magazine, citing the War that was raging in Europe which the U.S. had just entered. At home the Depression's long shadow was still darkening millions of families' lives, turning the American dream into a nightmare. Alan's family was one of its casualties.
His father, Irving Herskovitz, who changed his name to 'Harris' shortly after Alan was born, was a bright, handsome and affable man who had borne the brunt of the Depression since he quit high school and went to work clerking at his father's grocery store to help support his kid brothers. His middle brother, Jack, subsequently graduated from Northwestern with a PhD in anthropology; his youngest brother, Al, went on to medical school after college and became a doctor; Irv never became more than a clerk in a grocery store, even though his brothers agreed he was the smartest of them all. Despite his expertise at adding up numbers on a brown paper bag faster than an adding machine, Irv's pay didn't add up to enough to take care of his wife and two young sons, Alan and Bobby. Not after he lost most of it on the horses.
"My father was a gambler," Mark admitted. "That was his fatal flaw. But it didn't take away my love for him."
His mother, Lillian, felt differently. "My ex-husband was not doing things right," she would grumble, decades later. "And what's the use of staying with a man if you can't trust him? When he's just giving money away." To Lillian, it was that simple - Irv was not fit to be her husband.
Lillian (Lil) Elfman was a strong, upstanding, good-looking woman who was raised by her strict Polish parents, Rose and Louis in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Louis had a furniture store. According to Lil, it was Rose who ran the show. "She couldn't read much English but she would come into the store and see things that were wrong. My father would sit back and she would take charge. She was the brains behind everything."
Lillian was raised to believe in right and wrong, black and white, cut and dry. She was strong-willed and determined, had a solid faith in God, was committed to Judaism and fond of telling stories with good, strong morals: "We lived on the second floor along with another family and one time I found toys in the house. Turned out Bobby and his friend, who were about three, had taken them from a candy shop. 'Listen,' I said to the boys, 'just tell the truth because God always sees and knows what we're doing. So let's go give the toys back.' We went to the store and took them back. And that was a lesson for the boys. That they didn't get away with it."
Now she wasn't going to let her husband 'get away with it' either. Not when her mantra was "a man's character is in his bankbook," a phrase she repeated constantly to her two sons. A pretty woman who wore a constantly worried expression, Lillian was given to obsessing, especially over money. It was unfortunate that she'd chosen a dashing gambler like Irv Herskovitz for a husband. Oh, she loved the handsome man she had married. "She was crazy in terms of him," Mark's brother, Bob, would declare decades later. "Even many, many years later you could not mention his name without her going into a tirade." Lil and Irv had vastly different standards and he couldn't live up to hers.
By the age of nine, Alan knew firsthand how high his mother's standards were. When he was seven he had been coached by her to be a " Quiz Kid" on the popular radio show that starred six child prodigies who answered intellectual questions. "I remember how my mother would incessantly push me when I was trying out. Forcing me to read books at night, in a car, walking to school. Just to make certain that I'd covered every aspect. She demanded that I be number one. She required that. I think it came from her tremendous need to be recognized. To be someone important."
Lillian pushed Alan to become what she was not. In her elder son, she had discovered a pupil with a curious mind, a near-photographic memory and a highly competitive spirit. As she drilled him to win, she boasted about him to anyone who'd listen: "Alan went to the museum and explained to everyone how the planets revolved around the sun." "One day, the teacher figured out a math problem and he figured it out differently. He corrected the answer and told the teacher and class they were wrong." "I took Alan to a TV show when he was about five. When the orchestra began to play he told them to stop because they were not playing it right. They started laughing."
Now, as he listened to her call his father a disgrace, he felt terrible. He was pretending he was George Raft when he heard the front door slam. He rushed out to find his mother in the living room, her face flushed.
"Where's Dad?"
"He left.."
Alan looked at the door, devastated.
"What are you doing up at this hour? Please go to bed."
He went but Alan laid there, his heart aching, wishing he could have held onto his father's knees and kept him from going. Decades later he would recall, "I remember him leaving us because he had lost a lot of money and couldn't face it. At least that's what my mother told me."
Four months later his parents got divorced. "I was in a courtroom in downtown Chicago when the gavel went down. Boom. 'You're divorced,' the judge said. Boy, it was tough," he revealed many years later. "If I let myself dwell on the day they were divorced I would start to cry, today, more than sixty years later. That's how much of an effect it had on me."
There was no time to cry when he was nine and his brother, Bobby was only four. Alan had to become the man of the family. Fast. "You're my bluebird of happiness," Lillian always told him. But Alan had never seen a bluebird. And as he faced life without his father he didn't see a lot of happiness ahead.
Pretty soon it became clear that the money they received from Social Services and his grandparents wasn't enough for the three of them. So one evening Alan slipped out and walked to the newspaperman on the corner.
"I need a job."
The man eyed him suspiciously. "What time do you go to school in the morning, kid?"
"Eight o'clock."
"Forget it. I need these papers delivered at six AM." He turned away dismissively.
"When do I start?" Alan persisted.
From then on he delivered papers every morning before walking to fourth grade from Humboldt Park to Lowell Grammar School with his neighborhood buddies, Zave Gussin and Al Schwartz.
At first he only made ten cents a day. Pretty soon that became a buck and a half a week. Enough to buy milk at fourteen cents a quart, bread at nine cents a loaf, sometimes even round steak at forty-two cents a pound.
"I could always depend on him," Lillian asserted decades later. "He was wonderful and so very smart."
Alan was sure his life wouldn't always be like this. "I constantly told my mother that someday I would be someone important," he recalled. "I was always thinking about the day when I'd see my name in the papers. When I would be number one. I didn't care what it took to get there. I was going to make it happen."
Without knowing, he had taken on Lillian's need to be important. For the rest of his life, no matter what he did, Alan Harris (later Mark Damon) would always have to win. Have to be number one. No matter what it cost him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Cowboy to Mogul to Monsterby Linda Schreyer Mark Damon Copyright © 2008 by Mark Damon and Linda Schreyer. Excerpted by permission.
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