A Bridge Too Far (1977)

William Goldman (0:31)

I've been very lucky in the movies I've done, in that I've only done movies I've wanted to do. That's not dealing with movies that I've doctored, because doctoring movies is about craft.

But when I read the Ryan Book, the great thing about the Ryan Book was, it was a disaster for the Allies. If it had been a standard World War II story, where John Wayne drags the poor but cuddly Americans to victory up the hill, I would have not done it, because I hate those movies. There were so many screw ups by everybody on this, from the Germans to the Brits, to the, I mean, we came out pretty well. The Americans did pretty well. I mean, it was our, if anybody was heroic in the sense of a plan going the way it was supposed to, it was our part of market carton, but it was a disaster, and the disaster of it, and the fact that Mr. Levine wanted to do a depressing story, and was, and we must never forget this, he was spending his money. He was not a studio. He was the only one then that did it, and no one does it now.

Levine asked me to read it.

I met with Attenborough. We had, I think, a bad meeting in England, in which he got the impression, I think, that I didn't want to do it, and I think he thought I had the impression I didn't want him to do it. Now, Attenborough at this point had done two movies, a great movie, Oh, What a Lovely War, and then a terrific flick, Young Winston, both of which were flops, and that Levine gave him this giant thing is amazing. Attenborough was already passionate about gandy. And I think the theory, I'm not sure on this, but I think Levine was gonna do gandy next if this worked, blah, blah, blah. I've never had an experience like this. I've never felt such pressure. Levine had it in his head for some mad reason that we were gonna open on a certain date.

And counting backwards, I don't know why he had that in his head. Maybe he had luck with that date before. But counting backwards, we had a finished shooting by X, and we had to start shooting by Y. We had to start shooting, I'm gonna say by May in Holland, because you had to shoot in Holland, because that's where the bridge is. And there was no way if my script stunk and they hated it.

Or if they liked the script, it was too late. They had to start building before they had anything. And I've never had that in Hollywood before. Always in Hollywood, everything depends. No one wants to hear this, but everything depends on the screenplay. You get a screenplay, the studio says, yes, we'll make this. Here are X trillion dollars for you to play with. The movie then is launched. In this case, there was no time for that. And since this was Levine's own money, it was doubly scary. If the script had stunk, or Attenborough had hated it, or Levine had hated it, he would have been out a lot of money, millions and millions of dollars, because we were hiring people and starting to build and trying to get the rights for this bridge and that bridge.

John Berlingame (3:54)

I'm John Berlingame. I write about film music for Daily Variety, and I teach the history of film music at USC. I'm the author of three books on the subject, most recent of which is Sound and Vision, Sixty Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks. John Addison was a British composer, born in 1920 in Surrey, educated at the Royal College of Music in London, and began scoring films in 1950 for the Bolting Brothers. A thriller they did called Seven Days to Noon was his first film score. Over the course of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, he scored about 70 movies, including some of the best known British pictures of the 60s and 70s, Sounds Like a Taste of Honey, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones, for which he won the Academy Award in 1963 He scored Torn Curtain for Alfred Hitchcock in 1966, after Hitchcock's long relationship with Bernard Herrmann came to a very bitter and abrupt end. It was Addison who was brought in to re-score that picture. In addition to Tom Jones, he received two other Academy Award nominations, one for Sleuth, marvelous, marvelous job he did on that picture in 1972, had kind of an almost English music hall quality, and for A Bridge Too Far. And for that score, he actually won the British Academy Award.