Oscar Bound

Why is Brigitte Bardot "petrified with fear?" And why is B.B. making her first U.S. visit with a score of wigs (so she will pass unnoticed) and 50 dresses (so she will be noticed)? Because Viva Maria is premiering. Why has Thunderball's Director Terrence Young dropped in on New York from London? Because Thunderball is premiering (see CINEMA). And why is British Actress Julie Christie reducing photographers to awed silence as she peels down to her slip? Because Doctor Zhivago is premiering, along with a dozen other big films this month.

The reason behind all these reasons is simple: the regulations of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences state that a picture, in order to qualify for an Oscar, must play "in Los Angeles for a consecutive run of not less than a week after an opening prior to midnight of Dec. 31." Of all this year's pictures that have come down to the deadline, none carry a heavier freight of talent and hopes than Director David Lean's $11 million version of Boris Pasternak's distinguished bestseller, Doctor Zhivago, and none squeezed the deadline harder. Perfectionist Lean, 57, was overseeing the final cuts, the musical score and dubbing until the last hours before its press preview, which is the day before the official Manhattan premiere this week.

Don't Rat. "I haven't read the script, but I hear they've made it into a soap opera," snorts Producer Sam Spiegel, who crossed swords often enough with David Lean while filming Lawrence of Arabia. "I'm of Russian extraction," says Producer-Screenwriter Anatole de Grunwald, "and I came to Zhivago wanting to dislike it and was sure I would. But I think it is the best script I ever read--almost Tolstoyan." Those few who have been allowed inside Lean's wall-to-wall-carpeted cutting room on MGM's Culver City lot where Lean began his ordeal two months ago have seen only unfinished footage. But they are convinced that Lean has matched the intensity of The Bridge on the River Kwai, combined it with the sweep of Lawrence of Arabia, and in Julie Christie has caught a rising star and catapulted her into astro-orbit. If true, then Lean, who garnered seven Oscars for each of his past two films, including in both cases "best film" and "best director," is likely to collect as many more again for Zhivago.

But Is Lean's Zhivago Boris Pasternak's? The answer is neither yes nor no, but something like. From the moment Lean read the novel on shipboard and found himself gulping with tears, he knew he was committed. "I don't see how it is to be done," he declared. "But we must do it." For the screenplay, he called in British Playwright Robert Bolt (Man for All Seasons), who had salvaged the Lawrence script. "All I could see," says Bolt, "were the difficulties." His solution was to compress, invent, and try desperately to avoid "ratting on Pasternak."

Staggering Honesty. To encompass the whole, Bolt calculated, would take a film that lasted about 45 hours. Then, too, Zhivago in the book is more a passive observer, a spokesman for Pasternak's own vision and soaring humanism than a Hotspur to action. In portraying an age of revolution, the novelist relied heavily on coincidence for his plot, skimped on motivation in his characters. For film purposes, Bolt had to cope with the fact that Pasternak "jumps absolutely obligatory material." There is, for instance, not a single kiss between Zhivago and his mistress Lara in the novel, and the reader is never told how their monumental affair was consummated. "It simply took place between chapters," says Bolt.

It was the character of Lara, whom Pasternak modeled in part on his own mistress and charged "with all the femininity in the world," who fascinated Lean with her "staggering honesty and devotion." And with that, the decision was made. "The Russian Revolution itself was a towering historical event," Lean has since stated. "However, this is not the story of the Revolution. The drama, the horror and the turbulence of the Revolution simply provide the canvas against which is told a moving and highly personal love story."

Ultimatum to Succeed. To make his settings authentic, Lean in the past has labored in the jungles of Ceylon and ice-cooled film in the 130DEG heat of the Jordanian desert. For Zhivago, Lean was invited to Russia, but he never went: "I knew they would only try to talk me out of making the film." After all, the book is still banned by the Soviets. Instead, he set out on a 10,000-mile trek in his Rolls-Royce with Production Designer John Box, traveling all the way to the border of Finland and the U.S.S.R. They were on the lookout for extras, equipment, and what Box calls "eyefuls"--vast stretches of snowy forest for Pasternak's partisan bands, Siberia-like wastelands, and steppe-like fields of waving grain. For the main set, they settled on Spain.

With his canvas in mind, Lean next began to people it. Producer Carlo Ponti, who had bought the screen rights, says that preliminary talk about including his wife Sophia Loren in the cast went by the boards because Lean "wanted an author's, not a star's, film." Lean did buy Ponti's suggestion that they try an unknown, Geraldine Chaplin, now 21, as Zhivago's wife Tonya. Given an ultimatum by her father Charlie Chaplin, "Either you succeed in three pictures or you renounce," Geraldine, with her fresh, almost innocent portrayal, may well have succeeded in Zhivago.

For the key role of Zhivago, Lean first thought of his Lawrence, Peter O'Toole, then, to add "a certain foreignness," he decided on Egyptian-born Omar Sharif (whose hair was thatched over and his eyes slightly pulled back to give him a vaguely Tartar gaze). For subsidiary roles, Lean picked two knights, Sir Alec Guinness as Zhivago's brother (making Guinness' fifth picture with Lean, beginning with Great Expectations) and Sir Ralph Richardson, who plays Tonya's father, with Siobhan McKenna as Tonya's mother. To add further strength to the cast, Lean tapped Rita Tushingham (The Girl with Green Eyes), Tom Courtenay (King Rat), and, for the role of Lara's calculating seducer Komarovsky, the film's only American actor, Rod Steiger.

Bowled Over. Lara, in Pasternak's phrase, was "unequaled in spiritual beauty--martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored." Besides, during the film she must range in age from 17 to 40. When Lean tested Julie Christie, 24, for Lara, he had seen her only in Billy Liar--in which by simply walking wordlessly down a street she made cinema history. Asked to fly to Madrid for a screen test, Julie figured, "They must be off their nuts," went mainly for the free holiday.

And then she met Lean. "He bowled me over with his force," says Julie. "He made me feel he wanted something, and I would give it to him." Says Lean: "You watch her, wondering which way this cat's going to jump. She doesn't disclose everything. The difference between good actors and big stars is that good actors disclose everything; big stars are mysterious."

When the cast assembled outside Ma drid one year ago on Dec. 28, they found almost ten acres of reproductions of Moscow streets and buildings, and three hours north, on the Spanish plains near Soria, were Zhivago's Ural settings. MGM, which financed the film, had all but given Lean a blank check. As a result, costume details, down to wool petticoats, were authentic and logistics were superb. Marveled Sir Ralph Richardson, "This is what it must have been like traveling with Napoleon."

Hot Winter. Rita Tushingham, who plays Lara's and Zhivago's love child, found working on the set "terribly intense." Tom Courtenay grimly recalls being asked to pose as Strelnikov on the platform of the armored train: "No dialogue. No expression. But that bloody scene took two days to shoot." Geraldine Chaplin's most vivid memory is working in the hot Spanish sun while wearing black wool stockings, boots, three sweaters and a fur jacket: "I was so soaking wet, I felt I was leaving big soggy footprints."

"There were times when I felt like killing David," Julie Christie confesses. But she also admits that, as an actress disciplined in underplaying roles, she was taught to soar by Lean. "David would say to me, 'None of that timid sort of stuff.' So I let myself go. I went over the top. It was exciting."

Lean's feeling was that nothing could defeat him but an inability to match Bolt's script and measure up somehow to the looming background figure of Pasternak. For although Bolt and Lean had simplified the novel to bring the love story into bright focus, Lean still had to cope with the evocation of revolutionary Russia and the land itself. "I don't think this is so much a novel," says Bolt, "as an enormous disguised poem."

Frozen Instant. To evoke Pasternak's poetic imagery, Lean led a camera unit almost to the Arctic Circle, hired Lapland nomads to portray Siberian refugees. To record the long train trip from Moscow to the Urals that is the central odyssey of the novel, Lean went into below-zero temperatures in the northern Finnish lumber town of Joensuu, photographed the "refugees" trekking across Lake Pyhaselka, over which, during the 1940 Russian invasion of Finland, the Soviets had actually laid a winter railway.

Lean got what he went for, including the most tantalizing shot in the script. It calls for a frosted pane of glass, through which Zhivago is gazing, to dissolve into a field vibrant with daffodils. Lean found the perfect pane in a ski shack, hauled it into the open for the cameras. Then back the camera crew went to Spain, where 4,000 potted daffodils were put in place to complete the scene. On film, the sequence takes only an instant to show the change of seasons, but for Lean the effect is essential.

Sound of Snow. When the shooting in Madrid finally ended last Oct. 9, Sharif reports, "The cast wept." Even Lean, readying the last scene, said, "I don't want it to end." In fact, for Lean it was really only beginning. Back he flew to Hollywood with 31 hours' worth of color footage to be cut down to the final 3 hrs. 17 mins. To Lean, who made his reputation in the mid-'30s as a film editor, cutting is the ultimate art and his all-engrossing love. He moved into the stucco cottage on Metro's Culver City lot, formerly a schoolhouse for Child Stars Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland and Liz Taylor, and began the ordeal that for the past ten weeks has kept him in the cutting room until 2, 3 and, over last weekend, until 6 a.m.

Repeatedly he has trudged to the nearby sound studio. There French Composer Maurice Jarre, an Oscar-winner for his Lawrence background music, was conducting his 104-man symphony orchestra to synchronize with the Zhivago images flickering on the big overhead screen. In Metro's screening theater, Lean has slumped, listening to the mix of 20 different soundtracks being blended into the four final ones, occasionally growling criticisms, such as "There's no sound of it snowing" or "That baby's crying is too loud." Not until noon this Monday, when he falls aboard the plane for the New York premiere, will the film be finished.

How good will it be? "Having been so close to it, I have no idea," Lean confesses. "I'll know whether I like it the first time I see it with an audience. It doesn't have to be more than two people, and they don't have to open their mouths. I can just sense it." Moviegoers have already sensed that Zhivago will be good: advance sales now stand at $250,000. But just "good" will not be good enough for Lean. From the moment the film opens with its eerie long shot of a massive curved dam, along which a girl is seen approaching from a great distance, Lean's passion has been directed at sweeping up the spectator and holding him with an intensity and involvement that in cinematic form rivals Boris Pasternak's novel. For Lean, nothing less will do.

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