In 1956, a band of brothers - director George Englund, actor Marlon Brando and screenwriter Stewart Stern - journeyed to Southeast Asia, soldiers not of war but in search of a great film story about those who quietly work for peace. That journey led first to "Tiger on a Kite," Stern's original treatment for a movie that never got made. Seven years later, in 1963, it wove into a movie as timely now as when it came out, "The Ugly American."
Stern told me about that journey when we discussed standards in Hollywood and the movies. The Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning screenwriter now lives in Madrona. (Aspiring Queen Anne filmmakers might check out TheFilmSchool, founded by Stern and Tom Skerritt, Emmy-winning star of "Picket Fences." Their Master Storyteller's Series brings in important, influential writers, actors and producers and is open to the public.)
We were visiting at his home on a typical Seattle day, sky sauced with clouds and dashes of sun. A shelf above Stern's rolltop desk held mementos of his career: photos of friends James Dean, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, of writer friends from Sundance, farmer friends, artist friends and family.
Although made 40 years ago, "The Ugly American" so plumbs our national psyche that it mirrors dynamics we face today. To get their vision on film and into theaters, Brando, Stern and Englund went through a saga that illustrates moviemaking at its ethical best.
They heard about the incredible work being done, under the United Nations Technical Assistance program, to help people in less developed countries improve their way of life. "Experts from more 'advanced' nations," Stern said, "for practically no pay, interrupted successful careers to put themselves where the need for their skills was most urgent."
Producer-director Englund, only 28 at the time, "not only persuaded Paramount to take a flyer on us, with no guarantee that we'd come up with a story," Stern said, "but also convinced the Secretary General, the United Nations Secretariat and the whole Tech-nical Assistance Program as well. With this unprecedented cooperation, our young triumvirate toured the back-country of Asia for eight weeks."
In countries like the Philippines and Thailand, cities like Singapore and Hong Kong, they met with leaders from presidents to village headmen, and with experts of every nationality working in health, sanitation, engineering, agriculture and midwifery. They traveled by rickshaw, samlor, elephant and U.N. jeep, and often stayed in huts where the experts lived among the people.
"Those experts gave us as close a look at human suffering, dignity and aspiration as it's possible to get," Stern said. "They let us witness many incidents of simple human healing and community improvement that overwhelmed us."
By journey's end, the three had become increasingly informed observers not only of United Nations foreign assistance but also of U.S. aid programs, as well as other U.S. agencies abroad. As a result, they began to be embarrassed by the insensitivity in some Americans to the people among whom they worked.
The filmmakers found "an incredible lack of curiosity in or knowledge of the manners, cultures and traditions of other people, and what seemed an almost obsessive aversion to learning local languages, which, had they been able to understand them, might have averted some clumsy and dangerous mistakes."
As it chanced, two other writers, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, were at work on a book called "The Ugly American." Published in 1958, it became an immediate bestseller and added a catchphrase to the language. And so it happened that Englund, Brando and Stern found themselves together again, this time at Universal Studios. After two years of trying and failing to adapt the book, Englund and Stern went back to their research for "Tiger on a Kite" and used it to weave a new story around three major characters and one episode from the novel.
In the resulting film, Brando plays a U.S. ambassador to Sarkhan, a small (and mythical) Southeast Asian country, where he meets a wartime friend, now a Sarkhanese people's leader with communist links. The ambassador, who thinks in black and white, can understand neither his friend's motives nor that Sarkhan's unrest and anti-Americanism bespeak a longing for national sovereignty.
As might be expected, the filmmakers' unflattering portrait of American policy in Southeast Asia faced a struggle with certain powers in Washington. According to Stern, "the State Department refused what Englund had requested: never cooperation with the filming, but simply a promise of non-interference, which, since shooting was planned for Thailand, would be vital. It was only after Englund appealed personally to the newly elected President Kennedy that the bureaucratic obstacles at State were suddenly lifted, and denunciations on the Senate floor by people who had never seen a script began to dissipate."
Stern concluded, "People of good will in Washington afforded those of good will in Hollywood a chance to make a movie that tried to bring good will to the world, that tried to present a cautionary lesson to the American people that to abandon our ideals for the sake of expediency, by ignoring or misunderstanding the struggle for freedom in other cultures, can threaten our survival and prove calamitous to our reputation in the world."
EACH OF STERN's movies that I have seen shows the bringing of human darkness and ignorance into the light of understanding. From a fictional Asian nation's struggle for sovereignty, to a young man's struggle to be better in "Rebel Without a Cause," to the journey of a young woman with multiple personalities to wholeness in "Sybil," the stories have a Shakespearean theme: to thine own self be true. Stern's life illustrates that theme as well.
He was born inside the movie industry; his uncle, Adolph Zukor, founded Par-amount Pictures. His sense of social responsibility was, he said, "incubated at the Ethical Culture Schools in New York, and their high school, Fieldston, founded at the turn of the century by the 19th-century philosopher Dr. Felix Adler.
"From the first grade, we were taught ethics every week," Stern said. "We learned how various civilizations throughout history had treated their people, and, through experiences provided in the classroom and the neighborhoods around our school, how we can be our brothers' keepers.
"While still quite small, we were exposed to the work-life of the city, even the life that went on at night, witnessing how things we used or consumed were grown and baked and distributed and how every job had value. Each year we went as a class to spend a week on a farm, to participate in farm activities."
He served in World War II and, as an infantry squad leader, took part in one of the final, and fiercest, battles in the European theater of operations, the Battle of the Bulge.
After the war, Stern began working in Hollywood.
"Standards in Hollywood," Stern said, "have always been a schizophrenic experience. On the water tower over MGM studios, above the image of Leo the Lion, was the rainbow-shaped legend: ars gratia artis - Art for Art's Sake. While many strove for that, or for the reputation such an ensign might bestow, there was always The Bottom Line."
Then as now, careers were mostly measured by their commercial value. "Art meant awards; awards meant reputation," Stern said. "While studios were always looking for that happy combination, the highly artistic work that also made big money, in the old days they accepted a division. The yearly program was heavy with sin, a plethora of expensive films that seemed to have the best commercial chance, and while lighter on virtue, included inexpensive films of social or psychological consequence - the studios' films of conscience."
He finds that today the conscience and most of the art have been taken over by the independents. The major studios remain "satisfied with imitation and are enormously successful for raising the bar on technical standards with almost every try. The independents, with far less to lose financially, experiment in marvelous non-technical ways, bringing originality, idiosyncrasy, unpredictability and pure heart to a degree undreamed of in the old days."
Stern sees signs that our local Seattle film community is gaining much-needed support. And, through TheFilmSchool, he and Tom Skerritt want "to coordinate a presence which will do all it can to increase standards among young filmmakers and put them in communication," he said. Out of that may well come what he pictures as "a viable nucleus of filmmakers, with a budget to film in the Pacific Northwest."
Stewart Stern finds the mission of the actor and entertainer well expressed by dancer Ruth St. Denis: "To give each member of the audience, if only for a second, a glimpse of their own capacity for magnificence." I think he achieves his own ideal.
To reach TheFilmSchool, 2828 Boyer Ave. E., Seattle, WA 98102, telephone 709-2555 or 1-866-709-2555 or visit TheFilmSchool.com [[In-content Ad]]
