The director who hated working with Kirk Douglas: “Started badly, went on badly, ended badly”
In 1959, Kirk Douglas purchased the rights to turn Howard Rigsby’s Sundown at Crazy Horse into a feature. Over the next year, Rock Hudson signed on to co-star with Douglas in the film, and Douglas hired his Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to pen the screenplay. When he secured a director for the picture, though, he inadvertently set himself up for a very difficult shoot.
In fact, it was so stressful that the director later accused Douglas of going berserk at one point, and he utterly hated working with the legendary actor.
The problems for The Last Sunset began early in production as the novel had been retitled on its way to screen. Trumbo had been blacklisted by Hollywood in 1947 when he refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee during its investigation into supposed Communist activity in the film industry. The writer took a stand for his principles, but he could only continue working in the movie industry if he wrote under a pseudonym.
By the time 1960 rolled around, though, and he was on-set writing and working on the ever-changing script for The Last Sunset, things had started to shift in the industry. Spartacus hadn’t been released yet, and Universal was still hedging its bets over whether to give him screen credit for it and The Last Sunset. However, United Artists had already agreed to credit him on Otto Preminger’s Exodus, another movie he was working on. This led to a situation where Trumbo left The Last Sunset to work on Exodus – and by the time he came back, the production was in tatters.
In truth, director Robert Aldrich knew that The Last Sunset was doomed long before Trumbo’s disappearing act. He was hired by Douglas on the movie after two flops in a row and was “dead broke”. He, therefore, accepted the job purely as a paycheque gig, arguing, “In this business, you have to stay alive. You have to take subjects like this to make money to eat, to buy more properties and float another project”.
To Aldrich’s chagrin, he found himself working on a project with a troubled script that its star knew wasn’t up to standard. “Kirk was impossible,” Aldrich claimed. “He knew the screenplay wasn’t right. The whole thing started badly, went on badly, ended badly.”
Everything came to a head when Douglas found out that Aldrich had three writers sequestered away in his quarters near the New Mexico set. They weren’t working on The Last Sunset, though. Instead, they were writing other projects that Aldrich was trying to get off the ground after he finished work on the movie. He needed to have something else lined up, after all, as he wasn’t in the same financial position as his leading man.
Instead of understanding the position his director was in, though, Douglas was enraged. He felt Aldrich was demonstrating that he wasn’t fully committed to The Last Sunset, and as a result, “He went berserk. He just went crazy”.
Aldrich had to banish his writers to Mexico City and continue with the movie, but the damage was already done. “That was a toughie,” he admitted. “I found it extremely difficult personally to do the film.” By the time Trumbo came back to the production, Aldrich confessed, “It was too late to save it.”
The film wasn’t particularly well-liked, and it quickly became a footnote in the careers of Douglas, Aldrich (who later directed The Dirty Dozen), and Trumbo. In the end, the famed screenwriter didn’t even get his credit on the movie, but he was credited on Exodus and Spartacus, which signalled the beginning of the end for the Draconian blacklisting of Hollywood writers.
