SOURCE: Jacobson, Harlan. “As Many Notes as Required.” Film Comment 20, no. 5 (September-October 1984): 50, 53-5.

[In the following essay, Jacobson explores the working relationship between Forman and Saul Zaentz, the producer of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.]

So long and so used to measuring the achievements of individual genius, we have built a culture devoted to it. Time tells us that we have begun trying to teach the fetus in the womb. In the most wanton and random of our acts, war, we single out a man here or there for a medal. And in between, we have this problem of the artist: is he an artist if he doesn't sell? When does the man in the businessman's suit become an artist—when the artist he produces fails?

So it is with all who live here, each wrestling with the dark angel of doubt. “Genius” has been debased, and “brilliance” is a cheat word used by critics and stolen by producers to sell the only mediocre people who are honest about it—the suckers born every minute—in the Sunday entertainment page ads. How abused are the terms of endearment common to our myth-making apparatus, the movies.

Producers do say “Loved your story,” as do magazine editors, and “I'll get back to you on it.” No producer wants to make a picture and lose money—even Monroe Stahr sensed he was no longer a producer, at that point. Oh, we've gotten sophisticated over time and can see the pattern: at Academy Awards time the popular but low productions are spurned and the midcult “serious” films are rewarded, their essential qualification being popular with not just everybody (see Groucho Marx on joining a club, here) but with the right bodies.

Seen in the proper light, the cult of the director, the auteurist invention, is no more, no less than finding a path to repatriate movies into mainstream culture: See, they are a venue for individual accomplishment, just like the perfect game, despite the cant that films, like baseball, are collaborative.

So how very ironic is this return of a partnership, Milos Forman and Saul Zaentz, to make Amadeus, each doing what they do best, Forman directing, Zaentz producing, or is that prodding, a story about the quirky individuality of a misfit in a world of drones. The last time these two worked together, on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975, they produced the first film since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night in 1934 to win all five major Oscars.

True enough, this Amadeus celebrates Mozart's specialness as much as it denounces the weekly paycheck living death that most of us lead. But this man (Wolfie, as he is known to his wife), genius though he is, ends up in a burlap sack in potters field. What a double message the culture tortures us with: Be unique! Be yourself! Innovate! You gotta do it—and have it—your way! But, we'll kill ya if you do, just starve you right past the point of fashion until you disappear between teardrops. Why is there so much handwringing when it is an open secret that ossified personalities make it in a system that values ossification? The rule is simple: Lay low, because if you don't have the sense to die of embarrassment (the primary social constraint) when you risk an anti-herd profile, then by God the herd will simply flatten you (the ultimate social constraint).

This is also the somber message of Zaentz and Forman's Cuckoo's Nest, in which Jack Nicholson, as novelist Ken Kesey's Randall Patrick McMurphy, was the magnificent exponent of the sore thumb sticking out. But while thematically Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus both lament the snuffing of the life spirit in its heros, the emphasis has shifted from the organization running amok in Nest to its having fallen back asleep in Amadeus to its having become gray and being resentful of the impertinent reminder. The agenda in Amadeus is far more introspective than Cuckoo's Nest, which pointed Kafka's finger.

Perhaps the shift in emphasis is explainable as equal to and mirroring the same shift in social outlook from the Sixties' and early Seventies' suspicion of authority to the self-obsession cast of the last ten years. Both Zaentz, who came up through the recording industry, producing Lenny Bruce on his Fantasy label as early as 1957, and Forman, who had a thing or two to say about his native Czechoslovakia in The Firemen's Ball in 1967, and later this country in his Taking Off and in his altogether excellent and overlooked adaptation of Hair, were willing to call the system nuts. Amadeus is an altogether more self-effacing work. The times, they-have-a-changed, and we now know how little to expect from official bodies. It is ourselves lately with whom we have been engaged.

One must figure Zaentz, as the producer, for more than simply Moneybags. It was to Zaentz that Forman, after seeing the stage play in London in '79, turned to produce Amadeus (perhaps repaying the compliment when Zaentz and co-producer Michael Douglas handed a down-on-his-luck Forman Cuckoo's Nest on a hunch in '73). And Zaentz chose to produce it, like all good producers having seen some point larger than profit. Forman says that “for Saul, the meaning of the story is very important,” and that his appreciation springs from “a little deeper level than just (his) brain.” Behind the thick lenses of his glasses are eyes that say Older Brother: “You want it, kid—don't worry, I'll make it happen.” Or perhaps they are the eyes of an emperor who sees his Mozart clearly. Zaentz takes from Amadeus a warning not “to do things damaging to someone who is creative or has ability. Does he envy his director's talent? “No. I'm not a director and I never will be. I think I'm a good producer.”

One of the enduring mysteries of film is that of the producer who, without the hands and eyes that yield the artifact of a picture, must first simply see a vision—either his or someone else's—and then worry it into being. The hacks are easy to spot. They make money if they're lucky, they continue to make films even if they're not. At some deeper level, an individual producer must not only see that the costume drama of, say, Mozart's life bears on the present moment, but accept the fate of Joseph II—to be never known, certainly forgotten soon, and never to be apotheosized. Only Thalberg and perhaps Selznick have been remembered, and the mountains that they climbed were a product of a unique business terrain ground down and no longer extant.

And while Zaentz will tell you that he doesn't try to second guess the public, or the critics, and that he has simply always produced what he liked (does Creedence Clearwater Revival, the source of his first fortune, count here, too?)—all the right things to say—can it be that he doesn't harbor the one secret sentence that passes through the brain of each of the invisible members of his ranks, “I want to be known as the producer of …”? Well, what he does say is this: “You're never really through with a picture in your mind or your heart, because there's always something you felt you could've done. It's like any artist, any writer, any painter, any musician, any director who always feels the day after he's finished that painting, or film, or piece of music that he could improve on it. Always. Otherwise, you're not really an artist.” You judge whether he cares about what his name goes on besides the checks.

Or the Czech. “I trust him,” says Forman. “Not only in his honesty, but his judgments and his feelings—right or wrong—they're always honest, you know. And he makes me feel that he trusts me. So … a barrier which very often prevents people from saying stupidities falls down, and nothing is more comforting in the creative process than to be unafraid to be stupid. Because if you try to be brilliant every moment, after a while you become pretentious. Because nobody is brilliant every moment.” Not even Mozart. Well, maybe Mozart.

Inevitably, the producer has the gloomy mission of negotiating reality in an enterprise ultimately and specifically devoted to forgetting, distorting, or refracting it. To that end, the director, like Mistah Kurtz, goes up the river, in fact has been handsomely rewarded in the coin of the realm—money and the title “artist,” as if he were an endangered species of mynah—for his past forays into the netherworld of souls and is being paid here to do it again. Up there, where passion runs hotter as the borders recede, someone needs to remain sane while seeming part of the expedition, authoritative while seeming slightly quizzical.

“You go crazy,” says Forman. “You get excited about some detail, some something which at this moment is so brilliant an idea, so important an idea that you are now willing to spend more time, more money, more effort, more energy that. …” Forman moves in his seat. “If I had the luxury of distance, say a week, I could tell myself what I am doing, that this wonderful moment has just led me astray. It was stupid.” Note the concretion of “it,” the power “it” has, the move to the passive voice. That is what Zaentz is there to counteract, to reduce the fever on the brain, and that is not fun.

For example in Amadeus, recalls Forman, “There was a scene I liked very much … at the end of the alto concerto, Ludwig Mozart, the father, is there and has a very touching scene before the emperor where he's seizing the opportunity to talk to Mozart—not directly, but through the emperor.” Zaentz thought the scene was redundant and argued it would squander precious location time won from the authorities reserved to shoot the concerto. “In the final analysis, the conversation scene would've been cut from the film,” says Forman.

On Cuckoo's Nest, however, the situation had been reversed: “Oh, I was very excited by a theoretical idea that the whole film (will remain inside the hospital), you know, and only at the beginning and later at the end, when the Indian breaks out, will the outside breathe in the screen. Yet, in the book, is this wonderful scene with the boat ride outside—I didn't want the scene there—and Saul, when we wrote the first version of the script (we collaborated), said ‘I just feel sorry that the fishing scene isn't there. It's a wonderful scene.’ And I said, ‘Saul, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't play, because it's a hospital story and what confinement is doing to people …’ And I went on and on explaining why the scene shouldn't be in the film, and he was just nodding, and he said, ‘It makes sense what you say, but I still feel sorry the scene's been cut. Let's not talk about it.’ And the moment he said this, it started to hurt my head.” Weeks later, after further script revision, Forman came to Zaentz’ senses. “Yes, its logical, my thinking, but psychologically who cares? If the scene would be great, it shouldn't diminish the end. And the scene is really good. Is right.”

There are several things to glean about the workings of these two from these instances, other than ‘Lets not talk about it’ being one of the great acts of passive aggression: A) In Amadeus, the excision saved money; in Cuckoo's Nest, the addition cost money, so money is not the fulcrum of Forman's and Zaentz’ discussions, though it is a factor. B) Both films have in some way touched on Czechoslovakia, either metaphorically in the instance of Cuckoo's Nest, or physically in Amadeus, filmed in Forman's native Prague. An exile since the Czech summer of '68, Forman left an ex-wife, twin sons and the memories of foster parents and birth parents, the latter taken from their apartment by Nazis when he was nine. Though Forman dismisses the Cuckoo's Nest metaphor for its obvious broader, universal applications (Zaentz says Forman must watch what he says), and insofar as he avoided painful parts of Prague during shooting Amadeus as too disconcerting, it is not difficult to see the potential for a displaced emotional response when filming that close to the edge.

Therefore, a swaggerer as a producer will not do. “It's not the words, it's how a person talks to you,” Forman says of Zaentz. “You don't feel that Authority is talking to you. He talks to you like a partner. It's up to you which way to sway. Very intelligent approach.”

“I don't know any artist, any genuine artist, who's a fool,” says Zaentz. “Most are fairly rational. You say look, we can't have 600 horses because we'd have to bring 400 in from Egypt and it'd cost too much.’ Milos knows that if I thought it would be worth it for the picture, then we wouldn't be arguing. He's not going to say something totally insane. He's not wasteful, but he likes, in doing a picture like Amadeus, 700 extras in costumes, and it drives you crazy, but you know what you're getting into upfront.”

Upfront, Amadeus was budgeted at ＄15 million, with three of that earmarked for Forman, Shaffer, and Zaentz deferred. The film ended up costing ＄18 million and went 37 days overschedule, the latter aggravated in part by what Zaentz cites as Czech bureaucratic snafus. Also the day before she was to begin filming her role as Constanze, Meg Tilly tore her Achilles tendons, costing her the part (to Elizabeth Berridge) and the production nearly two weeks. Unexpected air freight bills ate up hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back home, after a four hour roughcut, Forman realized he couldn't deliver the picture by its planned February 25 release date via Orion (which in its previous executive incarnation as United Artists had released Cuckoo's Nest) and requested a few more months of editing time. “We could've come out in April,” Zaentz says, “but then we'd run into the big block of summer pictures in May.” So Amadeus was rescheduled for September 19, a six month delay that added a million dollars in interest and labor.

One question both Zaentz and Forman faced early was whether or not to assume the conventional Hollywood insurance policy of casting major stars in lead roles. “If we had stars,” Zaentz says, “then people would say ‘Isn't Nicholson, or Pacino, or Scheider, or whoever wonderful as Salieri?,’ and not ‘Look at Salieri, that son-of-a-bitch.’” It's a neat enough rationale, particularly after Zaentz’ calculation that “A star is good for one or two weeks if the picture's no good. If it's no good, it's going to die anyway, even with Redford.” Instead, Zaentz banked on the play to buy the audience for the first two weeks, and the film (with F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce as Mozart) to carry itself thereafter—without the ＄10 million burden of a top-heavy cast.

If there's a Zaentz credo, it's “Humor me, it's my money.” It's one sentence he uses when he has to go into battle to achieve some logistical toehold prior to or during lensing, or when he must defend against his (and his collaborators') baby being held hostage to some strategic kidnapping by the marketing mafia of the studio. “I try to be rational, maybe a little tougher because they're coming to you from a business aspect,” Zaentz says. “But if I spend three and a half years on Amadeus (four and a half on Cuckoo's Nest), the same for Milos, and Peter has spent seven or eight, I feel we're entitled to a little more than a cursory ‘Yeah, yeah’ and then do what they want to do.”

After adding in prints and advertising and figuring in the exhibitors share, break-even could run as high as ＄70 million at the box office—an achievement made more difficult by its two hour, 33 minute running time which reduces the number of performances in the important major markets. Just as Zaentz says, “But we made the film we wanted to make,” one secured by a mortgage on his studio complex in San Francisco, Forman says “It has just as many notes as required—no more, no less.” It is a line neatly borrowed from Mozart's response to Emperor Joseph II, who thought The Abduction from the Seraglio too long.

“We have reached that kind of knowing each other where I don't mind being with him doing nothing,” says Forman. “I was even in his house in Italy, and he was there doing his things, and I was doing mine, and when we felt like it we'd sit down and talk. It's wonderful when you can feel comfortable with somebody even being silent.”

As written by Peter Shaffer for the stage, Amadeus is more a play about Salieri than it is about Mozart, more about the rule rather than the exception. If Forman has elevated Mozart as an incandescent presence to equal and surpass for a time the force of Salieri and all he represents, then the film really sharpens the core question of self-confrontation, “Am I Mozart, or am I Salieri?” It is Forman's good fortune that he has a friend who understands his answer: “I am both.”