I liked a lot of the movies for which the late Mr. Edwards was responsible…and hey, I not only liked the movie of Victor/Victoria, I even liked the Broadway musical they made of it. I also really, really liked the first few films in which Peter Sellers played Inspector Clouseau…and it really is an achievement to create a character like that, one that becomes a "franchise" leading to movie after movie. When I got into the entertainment business, a wise producer told me the following and I think he was right…
The dream of every Head of Development is to have a franchise like that. It's like owning a major star. So at any given moment, they always have at least one project in development that was pitched to them as "The American Clouseau." They almost never get past the script stage because that's a lot harder to do than it looks.
You could probably look back at a lot of movies and TV shows that did get made and realize that was what was on someone's mind. When I saw The Nude Bomb, that none-too-successful attempt to revive Get Smart as a feature film vehicle some years back, I could practically hear someone saying, "Hey, you know who's really the American Clouseau? Maxwell Smart."
Edwards' movies are, I find, worth revisiting. I really disliked The Great Race when it first came out…but I was a kid at the time and years later, watching it again, I can't find anything to dislike. On the other hand, I recently watched S.O.B., a film I liked upon its initial release, and didn't enjoy much beyond Richard Mulligan's incredible performance. Maybe the next time around…
And then there's the Pink Panther. I mean the cartoon character, not the movie. The movie is fine but the animated figure designed for the main title has truly endured. It was all created in the DePatie-Freleng cartoon studio and years ago, I heard someone who acted like he was there at the time tell the following story…
It was a big deal for the studio. They were offered the opportunity to do this main title and they thought that if they could ace it, it would really put them on the map. What they had to do was design a pink panther that Blake Edwards would like. They got a bunch of artists and had them design pink panthers…hundreds of them. Fat pink panthers. Skinny pink panthers. Short pink panthers. Musclebound pink panthers. Dashing pink panthers. Stupid looking pink panthers…
Night and day, they churned out these drawings until they finally had…it must have been a thousand of them. They had this conference room with cork walls and they pinned drawings up on every inch of space. Friz Freleng said, "There's got to be one in here that Edwards will approve."
Then Mr. Edwards comes in. Everyone is very nervous because a lot is riding on this. They have hundreds of other drawings in folders in case he doesn't like any of the zillions they have on the walls.
Edwards walks in, glances around, points to one drawing on the far wall and says, "That one." And that was it.
Great story, right? Sadly, I don't think it's true. I later found out that the person who told me the story wasn't there at the time, wasn't as he led us to believe, a witness. He didn't go to work for the studio until years later when they were producing a steady diet of Pink Panther shorts. And I later heard Freleng tell how the design had been selected and it was a somewhat different tale.
What made the anecdote credible for me was, in part, the decisiveness of Blake Edwards' movies. Even if you didn't love a given film, it was obviously made by someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do and how to achieve it. Someone once said of another accomplished director, "Nothing gets into his pictures by accident." I felt that was true of the Clouseau films, of 10, of Victor/Victoria, of all the rest. I'm sorry there won't be any more of them because the guy really did know how to make movies.