Among the challenges facing the film director John Huston when he was shooting his screen adaptation of James Joyce’s short story The Dead in 1987 was an inability to negotiate directly with the leading actress, even though she was his own daughter.
Anjelica Huston’s 1986 Oscar Academy award (for Best Supporting Actress in the film Prizzi’s Honor) elevated her to Hollywood A-list status, obliging her father to deal with her only through the New York-based William Morris Agency, except when he was directing her on the film set.
“The William Morris Agency has indicated from the very start that it wishes Anjel weren’t in it”, Anjelica’s brother Tony wrote in his diary. “Despite the fact that Dad made her into the star they now represent, they believe she should be working for top bucks elsewhere. The way they make their opposition felt is by insisting on a whole bunch of perks in her contract, such as hairdresser and make-up”, he added.
Anjelica was also the highest-paid cast member and she was the only actor to have a daily driver during filming. Her payment for the eight-week shoot was almost double that of the leading man, Dubliner Donal McCann. She earned $90,000 compared to his $48,528, excluding per diems, according to production notes in the Huston Archive in the University of Galway Library.
John Huston was also suffering from advanced emphysema which forced him to make the film in Valencia, 35 miles north of Los Angeles, California, instead of in Dublin, where the story is set. “Huston directed the movie, at eighty, from a wheelchair, jumping up to look through the camera, with oxygen tubes trailing from his nose to a portable generator; most of the time, he had to watch the actors on a video monitor outside the set and use a microphone to speak to the crew”, noted Pauline Kael in the New Yorker magazine.
Another problem was that Hollywood film distributors had “a complete aversion to the title ‘The Dead’”, according to the production notes. “Titles bearing the words ‘dead’ or ‘death’ are out”, they show. Early screenplay drafts were titled “Dubliners” and said they were based on a “novella” by James Joyce. “All studios, major, minor and independent, turned the film down, despite the low, $5.5million cost”, Kael wrote.
John Huston regarded James Joyce as “the most influential writer in my life” and he had read Ulysses first as a teenager and later while on honeymoon. His copy was smuggled into the US, where it was banned, by his mother in 1928. He gave “a very generous donation” towards the creation of the James Joyce Museum in the 19th-century Martello Tower at Sandycove, Dublin, where the first episode of Ulysses is set, according to the museum’s first curator, Vivien Igoe, and he had a home in Galway for nearly 20 years.
Huston was born in Nevada, Missouri, in August 1906, shortly before Joyce began to write The Dead in Rome. Huston bought his Galway home, St Cleran’s, near Craughwell, in 1952 and he became an Irish citizen in 1964. His children Anjelica and Tony spent most of their childhoods in Galway. “Ireland is my real home”, Huston said while filming The Dead. “I regret giving up my house. Every so often I experience a pang of real longing for that house, and for Ireland. I sometimes feel that I sold a little bit of myself when I let St Cleran’s go”.
John Huston had been thinking of making a film adaptation of The Dead since shortly after he moved to Ireland. He was proud of his honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Trinity College Dublin “but prouder that he was joint master of the Galway Blazers”, according to a friend. Huston said that the Blazers’ annual hunt ball was “the wildest entertainment I have ever witnessed”.
He may have been attracted to The Dead, which is set on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1904, some 120 years ago this January, by its Galway denouement. “When you reach the end and hear Gabriel’s words, you realise that what he says goes also for you; the revelation is not only self-discovery for him, but for yourself too”, he said.
Despite the obstacles, the film was a triumph. Tony Huston won an Oscar nomination for his screenplay and Vincent Canby of the New York Times said that John Huston’s production “was close to faultless”. He deemed the film a “magnificent adaptation” with “the mark of a master”.