“I let myself be pushed”: the movie Kirk Douglas called “a load of shit”
History is littered with figures who had a transformative impact on cinema, but Kirk Douglas doesn’t often get spoken of in the same breath as the rest of the industry’s most vaunted pioneers, although maybe he should.
After all, every actor who forms their own production company to help develop their own projects from the ground up and shape the trajectory of their career owes at least a small debt of gratitude to the ‘Golden Age’ star, who was among the first to break free of the restrictive studio system and take charge of his own destiny.
In the mid-1950s, Douglas established Bryna Productions, making him one of the first nameworthy stars to become an independent producer. Instead of being shoehorned into roles he wasn’t necessarily desperate to play, he could shop projects around to various studios around town and retain a degree of control and autonomy that on-camera performers rarely held at the time.
That’s without even mentioning his instrumental role in ending the communist blacklist, when he happily credited Dalton Trumbo as the screenwriter of Spartacus, helping to usher in the end of a grim period where even being tangentially associated with the movement was tantamount to a career death sentence.
He was still an actor first and foremost, though, so he didn’t focus exclusively on appearing in films where he also doubled up as a producer. Maybe he should have done, though, because he’d be the first to admit he was regularly steered in the wrong direction to notch more than a few misfires on his belt.
Douglas was happy to bet on himself, even if it didn’t always work out. Referring to his 1949 boxing drama, the star revealed to Roger Ebert that he was so convinced by the strength of the material he rejected the opportunity to round out the star-studded ensemble cast of The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
“Champion, for example. I had a chance to be in a picture with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner over at Metro. I said, ‘No, I want to make this picture Champion. The agents thought I was nuts,” he admitted. “On the other hand, I let myself be pushed into A Lovely Way to Die, and what a load of shit that was.”
The 1968 crime thriller starred Douglas as a grizzled detective who turned in his badge and became a private investigator. He became entangled in a mystery involving a slick defence lawyer and the woman about to stand trial for allegedly murdering her husband. All things considered, this was not a bad concept, but clearly, the leading man disagreed.
Not every movie gets to be a winner, but fortunately for Douglas, his secondary career as a producer ensured he wasn’t being strongarmed into shitty films any more than he needed to be.
