“Get the fuck out of my office”: Harrison Ford’s first movie put him on Hollywood’s “shit list”
Having been a household name and cinematic superstar for five decades, it sounds ludicrous to imagine Harrison Ford being exiled from Hollywood after his first-ever movie role. And yet, it almost happened.
He wasn’t even sure he wanted to be a full-time actor until he was cast as Han Solo in George Lucas’ Star Wars, despite having previously appeared in ‘Best Picture’ nominees American Graffiti and The Conversation. Everyone knows it was luck and coincidence that landed him the first of his two career-defining roles, but if one executive had gotten their way, he’d have never made it that far.
Apart from those two aforementioned critical darlings, the first decade of Ford’s filmography was hardly stellar. Prior to American Graffiti, he’d only appeared in six pictures, and he went uncredited in three of them, which convinced him to take up carpentry so he’d have a trade to fall back on if his acting pursuits went up in smoke.
The future Indiana Jones and Rick Deckard debuted, uncredited, of course, in the James Coburn-fronted crime thriller Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. He had one line to deliver, apparently enough for Jerry Tokofsky to decide he wasn’t cut out for the business. The story has become a key part of Ford’s mythology, but what often goes unmentioned is the immediate aftermath.
When he decided to fire back at the studio executive, he was promptly told to vacate the premises. Or as he remembers it, the vice-president of Columbia Pictures told him in no uncertain terms: “Get the fuck out of my office.” He’d pissed off one of the industry’s most powerful figures, and he only had one ally.
Walter Beakel was the head of the studio’s ‘New Talent Program’, which lent a helping hand to aspiring actors and filmmakers who wanted to break into cinema. He was the only person who had Ford’s back following his altercation with Tokofsky, even if he knew it would be an uphill battle to get back in the good books.
“He was on the shit list after that, I can tell you,” Beakel recalled. The top brass at Columbia thought the young upstart was too arrogant and confrontational to succeed, but his erstwhile mentor disagreed, to an extent. “He had his own mind. A person who doesn’t buy that stuff, who looks at you sceptically, questions and challenges you. But I liked that. It was rare to find it in an actor at that time.”
The vice president didn’t want anything to do with him, but as the person tasked with finding roles for the studio’s untested contract players, Beakel may well have been the most unsung and essential driving force in Ford’s early years. It was 13 months before he appeared in another picture, 1967’s A Time for Killing, and it was also the first time he’d been listed in the credits, albeit as Harrison J Ford, even though he doesn’t have a middle name.
That can’t have been Tokofsky’s call when he effectively told the actor to fuck off and find another line of work, even if it was almost another decade until Ford finally took off as a known commodity.
