On writing the Popeye movie screenplay

GROTH: Can you tell me how you got involved in writing the Popeye screenplay?
FEIFFER: Well, first of all, my love of Popeye really started late. In some bookstore or other, I ran into the Bill Blackbeard collection of 1936 Popeyes that Woody Gelman put out. And it was a revelation to me, because I had not remembered Popeye as being that witty. I liked it as a kid, but I couldn't imagine why I would ever read it again as an adult. And then I started reading this stuff, and it was hilariously funny and very sophisticated. But more importantly, it created a kind of universe, and had a philosophy that seemed to be apt for our time. A sense of-I don't even know how to describe it, but, well, Popeye really occupied a social-Darwinian world all along. And I loved it. And I thought, not to make too fine a point of it, there was something Kafkaesque in that world, and there was something Beckett-like in that world, and his use of time-certain sequences could stretch on for days and days and days, where virtually nothing happened, and it was so full of events, somehow or other. The leisureliness, the use of time. Another thing that Eisner does extraordinarily well, that use of time. And Eisner learned from Segar. So I fell in love with it. Then I got a call from Robert Evans maybe a year or so later, saying he was doing a movie of Popeye, and was I interested in doing the screenplay. Evans came to me because his production designer on the film was going to be Dick Silbert, who was the production designer on Carnal Knowledge and an old friend of mine. Evans, in talking to Silbert, said. "Who are we going to get to dramatize this material and make these cartoons real?" And Silbert had just seen my show Hold Me! based on my cartoons, at the Westwood Playhouse in L.A., and said "The only one who can do that is Feiffer." So Evans called me, and he asked me if I was interested, and I said, it depends, if you want to do Max Fleischer's Popeye I'm not your man. If you want to do Segar's Popeye no one else can write it but me. He said, "I want to do any Popeye you want to do." So that's how it started. These guys had never heard of Segar. So I gave them all an education. There was great enthusiasm for the project from the beginning. Dustin Hoffman was originally supposed to play Popeye. It was designed with Dustin in mind. He read the first 50 pages of the script, loved it. It went on with great enthusiasm. Silber and Evans loved the first draft. Dustin hated it. At one point it became a question of him or me. Evans stayed with the script, which he supported completely. Dustin pulled out. You don't get many cases of a Hollywood producer losing his financing in order to stay with a script which was simply going to go on the shelf, because who else was going to be in it? A year or so later, Robin |Williams] became a hit in Mork and Mindy and Evans suggested him for the part, and that's how the film got off the ground again. Otherwise it would have been still on the shelf.
GROTH: Can you tell me what happened to the film? I was talking with a friend of mine, and we decided everything about the film was good, except the film.
FEIFFER: [Laughter].
GROTH: The script was good, the actors were perfect.
FEIFFER: What happened was that it went around the various directors. None of them wanted to do it. Altman loved the script. At one point they wanted to go to Jerry Lewis.
GROTH: [Horrified] Were you in favor of that?
FEIFFER: No. Altman loved the script, said he could do it. I was worried. Altman and I were old friends, and yet I knew well what he did to other people's screenplays. On the other hand, I was a great admirer of much of his work. I knew well his failures, but also knew he could create a reality that no one else could on screen, and was a true artist, and by that I mean that he was like an action painter in films. But I also knew that action painters didn't pay much attention to text. And Altman was notorious for thinking that dialogue is something that you use with two people at one time. But I figured that I wasn't going to get anybody better or more talented, and everybody had to have his own Altman experience once. I suppose I figured that Segar could take it. That if it was a script that I had written out of my own work, that I couldn't. But Segar could. Popeye was tough enough. First of all, the realization, the visualization of it was extraordinary from the very beginning. Why we had to shoot it in Malta, didn't know, and I still don't.

...

But Altman's problem with scripts, and it's always been the case, going back to McCabe and other films, is that the story on paper is really not the story he wants to film. He wants to do another story that takes place behind the film, and that he will make up as he goes along, with his extras, with his characters. That's his secret. And that's the real film he wants to watch, the background film, and that's the one he wants to shoot, and then slowly that begins to take over the film up front. My struggle with him was to keep his film in the background while my film and Segar's was in the forefront. And sometimes I won at that, and sometimes I lost. I figured I didn't do too badly, because about 60% of what wrote got on the screen, but I think that if the other 40% got on it would have been better. As it was, I don't think the film turned out badly. [I strongly disagree.] I think the worst part of the film is the last half-hour or so, which is after I had been worn out and left Malta, and he was free to do his art in peace, and certainly did.
GROTH: Why did you leave early?
FEIFFER: ...I was just tired of protecting the material which I thought in the end I couldn't protect because I wasn't going to be in the editing room. Although, in fact, at one time he gave me access to the editing room, and let me recut a scene I disagreed with. I don't know how many directors would do that. I've never heard of one. He gave me the freedom of the editing room. I recut a scene between Popeye and Olive when they discover Swee' pea in the basket. Because I said that the relationship had been cut out of it, that they were not--I mean, this should be a lovely moment between Popeye and Olive, and it wasn't. It was just Robin getting off-script and improvising, and I said, I want the improvs taken out, I want the ad libs taken out, I want the script returned. He let me cut it So that that would happen. The scene you see in the film is essentially my cut, my edit of that.

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For me, the most thrilling part of this is that I got I a letter just at the time the film came out from Segar's daughter in Chicago, saying she heard me on interviews, talking about her father, and she had been ripped off terribly over the years, and told me a story which you guys maybe don't know about or should look into, which was like Siegel and Shuster's story with Superman. Her father on his deathbed, signed away rights--do you know about this?
GROTH: I've heard that.
FEIFFER: O.K. You know what I'm talking about. Just one story of rip-offs after another, and that her father had generally been forgotten and so she hoped that the film would not be one more dishonor to his memory. Although she didn't have much faith. She left her phone number, so I just called her up immediately. She got on the phone, she couldn't believe it was me. She had just come from a screening of the film. It hadn't opened yet, but it was being screened. She was in tears. She said it was everything she had hoped it would be. That it was his Popeye, she was just bowled over by it. She was crying and I was crying. It was wonderful. It was just wonderful. So that made a lot of worthwhile.
GROTH: Can you confirm or deny a story that I heard that the reason the last half-hour was as bad as it was was because Altman ran out of money?
FEIFFER: Yeah, that's right.
GROTH: He just jerry-rigged an ending to end it.
FEIFFER: Yeah, the ending I had was very different. He just ran out of dough.