Who both got fired the weekend before they were going to set things in motion. One studio (a small one) even closed the weekend before they were going to set things in motion. The screenplay began to get a certain reputation—one magazine article listed it among the best that had never been shot.
The truth is, after a decade and more, I thought it would never happen. Every time there was interest, I kept waiting for the other shoe to come clunking down—and it always did. But, without my knowledge, events had been put in motion a decade before that eventually would be my salvation.
When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was done, I took myself out of the movie business for a while. (We are back in the late '60s now.) I wanted to try something I had never done, non-fiction.
I wrote a book about Broadway called The Season. In the course of a year I went to the theater hundreds of times, both in New York and out of town, saw everything at least once. But the show I saw most was a terrific comedy called Something Different, written by Carl Reiner.
Reiner was terribly helpful to me, and I liked him a lot. When The Season was done I sent him a copy. A few years later, when The Princess Bride was finished, I sent him the novel. And one day he gave it to his eldest son. "Here's something," he said to his boy Robert. "I think you'll like this."
Rob was a decade away from starting his directing career then, but in '85 we met, and Norman Lear (bless him) gave us the money to go forward with the movie.
Keep hope alive.
WE HAD OUR first script reading in a hotel in London in the spring of '86. Rob was there, as was his producer Andy Scheinman. Cary Elwes and Robin Wright, Westley and Buttercup, were there. So, too, were Chris Sarandon and Chris Guest, the villains Prince Humperdinck and Count Rugen, and Wally Shawn, the evil genius Vizzini. Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo, was very much there. And sitting by himself, quietly—he always tried to sit quietly—was Andre the Giant who was Fezzik.
Not your ordinary Hadassah group.
Sitting suavely in a corner was moi. Two of the major figures of my years in the entertainment business—Elia Kazan and George Roy Hill—said the same thing to me in interviews: that by the time of the first cast reading, the crucial work was done. If you had gotten the script to work and cast it properly, then you had a chance for something of quality. But if you had not, it didn't matter how skillful the rest of the process was; you were dead in the water.
This probably sounds like madness to the uninitiated, and it should, but it is very much true. The reason it sounds like madness is this: Premiere magazine isn't around when the script is being prepared. Entertainment Tonight isn't around for casting. They are only around during the shooting of a flick, which is the least important part of the making of any movie. Remember this: shooting is just the factory putting together the car.
A. R. ROUSSIMOFF was our biggest gamble that rehearsal morning. Under the name of Andre the Giant, he was the most famous wrestler in the world. I had become convinced that if there ever was to be a movie, he should be Fezzik, the strongest man.
Rob thought Andre might be good for the part, too. The problem was, no one could find him. He wrestled 330 plus days a year, always on the move.
So we went ahead trying to find someone else. Strangest casting calls I ever saw. These big guys came in—we are talking immense here—but they weren't giants. Occasionally we would find a giant—but either he couldn't act or he was skinny, and a skinny giant was not at all what we needed.
Still, no Andre.
One day Rob and Andy were in Florin doing final location scouting when a call came—Andre would be in Paris the next afternoon. They flew over to meet him. Not easy, since Florin City has zero nonstops to any of the major capitals of Europe. Not to mention that their scheduling depends on load—all Florin Air's flights are jammed because they wait until they are before they'll take off. They even allow people to stand in the aisles. (I had only seen that myself once, in Russia, on a nightmare jaunt from Tblisi to Saint Petersburg.) Eventually, Rob and Andy had to charter a tiny propeller plane to make the meeting. They got to the Ritz, where the doorman said, in a weird voice, "There is a man waiting for you in the bar."
Andre, for me, was like the Pentagon—no matter how big you're told it's going to be, when you get close, it's bigger.
Andre was bigger.
His listed size was 550 pounds, seven-and-a-half-feet tall. But he wasn't really sure and he didn't spend a lot of time fretting on the scale each morning. He was sick once, he told me, and lost 100 pounds in three weeks. But other than that he never talked about his dimensions.
They chatted in the bar, then went up to Rob's room where they went over the script. A couple of things were clear: Andre had a clock-stopping French accent and, worse, his voice came from the subbasement.
Rob gambled, gave him the role. He also recorded Andre's part on tape for him—line for line, inflections hopefully included—so Andre could take it with him on the road and study it in the months before rehearsal began.
Rehearsal that London morning was intentionally light: a couple of readings of the script, few comments. It was a beautiful afternoon when we broke for lunch, and we found a nearby bistro with outside tables. It was perfect except the chair was far too small for Andre—the width was for normal people, the arms way too close. There was a table inside that had a bench, and someone suggested we eat there. But Andre wouldn't hear of it. So we sat outside. I can still see him pulling the metal arms of the chair wide apart, squeezing in, then watching the arms all but snapping back into place where they pinioned him for the remainder of the meal. He ate very little. And the utensils were like baby toys, dwarfed by his hands.
After lunch we rehearsed again, doing scenes now, and Andre was working with our Inigo, Mandy Patinkin. Andre had clearly studied Rob's tapes—but it was undeniable that his readings were slow, with more than a little rote quality.
They were doing one of their scenes after they have been reunited. Mandy was trying to get some information out of Andre and Andre was giving one of his slow, memorized readings. Mandy as Inigo tried to get Fezzik to go faster. Andre gave back another of his slow, rote responses. They went back and tried it again and again. Mandy as Inigo asked Andre as Fezzik to go faster—and Andre came back at the same speed as before—
—which was when Mandy said, "Faster, Fezzik!" And with no warning he slapped the Giant hard in the face.
I can still see Andre's eyes go wide. I don't think he had been slapped outside the ring since he was a little boy. He looked at Mandy ... and there was a brief pause. A very dead silence filled the room.
And then Andre started speaking faster. He just rose to the occasion, gave it more pace and energy. You could almost see his mind: "Oh, this is how you do it outside the ring, let's try it for a while." In truth, that slap was the beginning of the happiest period of his life.
It was a wonderful time for me, too. After the decade plus of waiting, the most important book of my youth was coming to life in front of me. When it was finished and I saw it finally, I realized that, in my entire career, I only really loved two of the movies I've been involved with: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride.