MacLaine - Above the line: my Wild oats adventure

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ALSO BY SHIRLEY M AC LAINE

You Can Get There from Here

Dont Fall Off the Mountain

Dancing in the Light

Out on a Limb

Its All in the Playing

Going Within

Dance While You Can

My Lucky Stars

The Camino

Out on a Leash

Sage-ing While Age-ing

Im Over All That

What If...

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Copyright 2016 by Shirley MacLaine

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First Atria Books hardcover edition March 2016

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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

Jacket design by Janet Perr

Jacket Photographs Ann Clarke Images/Getty Images (Woman); Adam Hester/Getty Images (Ocean Waves); Yanugkelid/Shutterstock (Sandletters)

Author Photograph by David Weininger

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: MacLaine, Shirley, date, author.

Title: Above the line : my Wild oats adventure / Shirley MacLaine.

Description: New York : Atria Books, 2016.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015040061

Subjects: LCSH: MacLaine, Shirley, date. | Entertainers--United States--Biography. | Spiritualists--United States--Biography. | Wild oats (Motion picture)

Classification: LCC PN2287.M18 A3 2016 | DDC 791.4302/8092--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040061

ISBN 978-1-5011-3641-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-3643-6 (ebook)

To all the below-the-line, with love and appreciation

Some of the names and details in this account have been changed. As you read, you will understand why. The experience is my truth as I remember it.

To Whom It May Concern:

You people have been pitifully amateurish, bordering on corrupt. You have been unfair in continually changing your minds. People have spent their own personal money because they know there is a schedule to meet. Yet we dont know whether the money is even there to make this movie, Wild Oats . Your oats are being sown in ways that are wildly unfair.

Show me the money and Ill show you my signature.

On behalf of everyone who is having a difficult time with your inability to organize even a Good Humor Bar, Im waiting...

No money, no signee, no movie: only dirty laundry.

Have a nice day though.

THAT WAS the email I almost sent.

But Im glad I didnt. The day I wrote it was the opening round of a boxing match between me and independent filmmaking. Why were we in the ring? Thats what this book is about.

It isnt often that a person my age (eighty-one), with a past (this time around) of work pretty well done and a life exuberantly led, gets to experience a real-life movie while making a reel-movie movie on next to no money.

Making a movie is the most useful experience Ive found for getting to know more about myself. But you dont have to be an actor or work in show business to have that experience. Were all creating our lives every day. We are the actors and writers and directors and producers and financiers of our lives. So Id say that means that our life itself is an art, one weve chosen to take part in. Its like a movie weve chosen to make. Both need financing. Did anyone assure us when we were born that the money would be there? No. Did anyone assure me when I began Wild Oats that the money would be there? No. So why did I do it? Ambition? Adventure? Challenge? Fame? Because they asked me to? Im not sure the why even matters now.

Is any of what we call real actually real anyway?

I realize thats a big question, and one that came back to me many times during the events Ill be sharing with you in this book. Heres a part of the answer: youve got to sow your own wild oats to find out.

Wild Oats started about five years ago. I sat at dinner in New York in the Village with two women. I cant really remember many details about them except one was heavyset and one lived part-time in Paris. They had a script about two women who went off on an adventure... or was it a mother and daughter? Or was it a grandmother and granddaughter? There have been so many versions, Ive forgotten them all. It was kind of a comedybut not really that funny. I was polite but more interested in the dinner I was having. Delicious and French. Somebody knew what they were doing. There was a woman director involved. I dont remember if she was one of the women at dinner. Fast-forward a year...

I had a meeting with that director, who actually said to me, I dont know or care how much money the movie will cost. Thats not my job. Im going to shoot the script we wrote.

I dont know where the expression amateur night in Dixie comes from, even though I am from the South and I stopped being an amateur a long time ago, at least where films are concerned. When I asked the director what the budget was, or should be, she said, Im not interested. She said the same thing when I asked how long the shoot would be and how much Id be paid. When I came right out and asked, Do you have the money to make the film? she repeated, Im not interested. So by the end of the meeting, I said, Likewise, and left.

Fast-forward one or two more years...

I have an agent named Jack Gilardi who inherited me after Mort Viner, my previous agent, died on the tennis court. Jack professes to be around seventy-eight, but hes older than me. Hes from Chicago and basically trusts me, I think, because I once told Sam Giancana to f himself. I trust him because he trusts me. Ive not changed agencies since I came to Hollywood in 1954. I know its stylish to keep changing, but an artists career is in a constant state of change anyway. If its not, then youre not going for longevity. So when it came to my representation, I stayed with what I knew and trusted.

I love Jack, and vice versa, and am well aware that Im involved with putting his grandkids through college! I cant retire. I want them to be educated. So Jack was involved with the conversations about Wild Oats from the beginning, and he eventually worked out the deal for me to take the part. Neither of us had a clue what we were getting into.

The original script and story was to be shot in Las Vegas (a place where the women could sow their oats). But when other states and cities started offering tax rebates and so forth to film companies, studios and screenwriters shifted their focus to saving money instead of saving scripts.