| Ed Dykhuizen |
Joe plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 4th, through Tuesday, May 6th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
In 1967, American studio executives were adrift. Their main target demographic was the legion of young baby boomers who had the most time and money to burn on movies. The decision-makers in Hollywood were all old straight white men (of course), and they had no idea what young people wanted to see. Executives were stuck in their usual MO of greenlighting stories that they found appealing and/or mimicking what had worked before. Results had been bad for several years, but the box office numbers of 1967 really hit home that the old ways weren’t working anymore.
20th Century Fox pinned its hopes to Dr. Doolittle, an attempt to copy the massive success of The Sound of Music two years prior. Dr. Doolittle was a critical and commercial flop, but corrupt processes got it a bunch of Oscar nominations anyway. To everyone’s surprise, the number one box-office champion of 1967 proved to be the oddball comedy/drama The Graduate.
At number five in the year-end numbers was the groundbreakingly violent Bonnie and Clyde. Warner Bros. had had so little faith in Bonnie and Clyde that it had tried to dump it in a limited release. After producer/star Warren Beatty threatened to sue, Warner Bros. begrudgingly opened it across the country. Bonnie and Clyde was a huge hit among young people and earned $70 million on a $2.5 million budget. The New Hollywood movement officially began. In late 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) created the rating system, which cleared the way for New Hollywood hits like Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. The content of these movies would never have made it past the Production Code, in which the Motion Picture Association of America enforced censorship rules on behalf of the studios. New Hollywood films were characterized by gritty realism, tragic endings, and then-shocking levels of sex, violence, and profanity. They were the polar opposites of Dr. Doolittle. The old straight white studio executives who cashed in on the movement were the ones who gave unprecedented levels of creative control to young straight white filmmakers. (Women, LGBTQIA+ people, and people of color were almost completely ignored by Hollywood, though they made great advances elsewhere. Progress was slow.)
Norman Wexler’s Time to Shine
One young(-ish) straight white man who helped form the New Hollywood style was writer Norman Wexler. The son of Detroit factory workers, Wexler had made good with a Harvard education and a few off-Broadway plays. His script for Joe was turned into a movie with a $106,000 budget ($895,000 in 2025 dollars) and no stars: Peter Boyle had only a few small roles under his belt and it was Susan Sarandon’s first film. Joe earned between $9.5 and $19 million (reports vary) and Wexler was nominated for an Oscar.
Joe pointed the way for the gritty New York dramas of the New Hollywood movement. It opens with a scene showing nudity and intravenous drug use in graphic detail—both of which would have been unimaginable sights in a mainstream theater just two years prior. The movie examines the era’s politics mostly within a realistic depiction of working-class America. Unlike Easy Rider and other movies that foreground the perspective of hippies, Joe spends much of its run time getting to know the conservative wealthy businessman and racist factory worker who bond over their shared hatred of young baby boomers.
Wexler’s screenplay for Serpico made for another New Hollywood success. It was a collaboration between Wexler and Waldo Salt, but Wexler got much of the credit for the dialogue. In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that “Norman Wexler is responsible for most of the hip humor. He writes virulent low-life dialogue with a demented lift.”1
Dialogue is key to both a Norman Wexler screenplay and New Hollywood-style realism in general. To immerse an audience in an authentic working-class world, you can’t rely on the elevated, overly articulate language that your typical well-educated screenwriter will produce.
This sort of dialogue doesn’t sound clever, and thus doesn’t jump off the page. But when delivered by a skilled actor, they carry a blunt force that assaults the viewer. In the first bar scene of Joe, the titular character delivers a painfully long barrage of short, declarative sentences that explode with hate. When he says things like “Forty-two percent of all liberals are queer, that’s a fact. The Wallace people did a poll,” and “All you gotta do is act black, and the money rolls in,” anyone who has been cornered by a dumb, drunk, bitter loudmouth will shudder with recognition.
Wexler’s ability to make dialogue sound like that of the kind of people who usually aren’t represented in movies made him the go-to uncredited script doctor for New Hollywood productions. To do this he drew on his upbringing, as well as some bizarre incidents of his own devising.
Image courtesy of mubi.com
Before delving into some of these bizarre incidents, I should note that Norman Wexler suffered from bipolar disorder. It’s a condition that many creative people have, as its manic episodes can be wildly productive. They can also be full of paranoia and hostility.
During a flight from New York City to San Francisco in 1972, Wexler made a huge scene cursing at flight attendants and fellow passengers. He also threatened to shoot President Richard Nixon. When the plane landed in San Francisco, Wexler was arrested by the FBI. He insisted it was all a performance, saying “You’ve heard of street theater. Well, this is airplane theater. Why not theater in the air?”2
This was not as implausible an explanation as people thought at the time. Comedian Bob Zmuda related many similar stories about Wexler in his 1999 Andy Kaufman biography Andy Kaufman Revealed!
Granted, Bob Zmuda might not be the most reliable narrator. His 2014 book about Kaufman is full of outlandish claims that have been widely contested. But while his motivations for trying to milk publicity out of his friendship with Kaufman in 2014 are clear, Zmuda had no apparent reason to invent stories about Wexler in 1999. In fact, in Andy Kaufman Revealed! he refers to Wexler only as “Mr. X,” because, in his words, “more than 25 years later, I continue to be terrified of him. If I were to use his real name he might come after me. Why? Because he is—without exaggeration—completely fucking insane.”3
Zmuda says he was hired to be Wexler’s assistant for $2,000 a week (about $15,000 in 2025 dollars). For their first meeting at a comedy club, Wexler showed up with matted hair, barefoot, wearing filthy clothes and an expensive Rolex. After screaming curses at Zmuda, he asked for his nationality. When Zmuda answered “Polish,” Wexler said he believed the Nazi regime targeted the Poles because they were developing ESP. Zmuda and Wexler then rode away in the latter’s personal limousine.
Every morning, Wexler and Zmuda would buy a cheap suitcase from the same luggage store. Then they would go to the bank, withdraw between $20,000 and $50,000 in cash, and put it all in the suitcase. Next it was off to an electronics store to buy three tape recorders, one to play music, one to record the day’s adventures, and one to replay the tape of the previous day’s events. Each night, Zmuda would secure the tapes and throw the tape recorders into the river because Wexler believed the CIA could plant bugs in them. The suitcase would be trashed as well, because, in Wexler’s single-word explanation, “fingerprints.”4
Most of each day was devoted to Wexler creating dangerous conflicts with strangers throughout New York City. Zmuda’s job was making sure it all got recorded and paying people thousands of dollars to not call the police. The tapes of the interactions would be transcribed and Wexler would incorporate their contents into his screenplays.
Zmuda relates that in the three weeks he worked for Wexler, people regularly threatened to kill him, and he had guns or knives pulled on him several times. Once, Wexler and Zmuda crashed a birthday party for a mafia don’s grandmother. Wexler pulled out an article with a headline “Mafia Assassinates JFK!” and shoved it in the old woman’s face, screaming, “Hey ma, look what your son has been doing!” The woman burst into tears. Several men hustled Wexler and Zmuda into a back room and forced them on their knees. Zmuda pleaded for forgiveness, saying that this was Wexler’s suicide attempt. The men shoved the pair outside. Zmuda was shaking with fear, but Wexler was not. Instead, Wexler yelled at Zmuda for ending the confrontation before they could get some good material.5
Wexler did have a fail-safe plan he could have used. He did so on another occasion, after he defecated onto the floor of a busy airport. When police rushed in and grabbed him, Wexler yelled “Zmuda! Catch-22!” This code word told Zmuda to play a tape of a very famous Hollywood figure (Zmuda doesn’t specify who in his book—my bet would be Al Pacino) saying “Officers, if you are listening to this tape, the man you are arresting is Norman Wexler, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and personal friend of mine.” The tape then told Zmuda to pull out a photo and news clipping proving the story. Zmuda handed out thousands of dollars to the officers and all was resolved.6
Inspiring Andy Kaufman
Bob Zmuda regaled the New York comedy scene with Norman Wexler stories. The one that proved most inspirational for Andy Kaufman was the “glazed donut story.” One day Wexler burst into a busy bakery, pushed to the front of the line, and demanded a glazed donut. The clerk told him to wait his turn, and Zmuda was shocked to watch Wexler walk calmly to the end of the line without complaint. When he was up, Wexler pointed to every item for sale, one by one, and bought them all. He then went to the back room and bought everything there too, including the butter, sugar, flour, and salt. Zmuda hired a delivery truck to cart away all the baked goods. Then he had to hire another. Wexler ordered Zmuda to just have it all dumped somewhere, but Zmuda told the drivers to bring it to a food shelf. Then Wexler started paying the bakery employees hundreds of dollars to take off their clothes. When he and Wexler finally left, Zmuda glanced into the window display and noticed that only one thing remained: a single glazed donut.7
In Zmuda’s telling, Andy Kaufman was so wowed by this story that it inspired him to create the character Tony Clifton. Kaufman would put on huge sunglasses, a fake nose and chin, a mustache and wig, and a suit with a big faux beer belly. Clifton was a terrible lounge singer who would abuse audience members and tell sexist jokes. The point was not to get laughs, but to make people hate him and boo him off the stage.
Right image courtesy of AndyKaufman.com, left image courtesy of grunge.com
The other point was to make people think Tony Clifton was a real person, not just another character of Andy Kaufman’s. Kaufman always denied that he was Clifton, and Cliton spoke derisively of Kaufman. When too many people started catching on to the ruse, Kaufman walked into a venue where Tony Clifton was performing. This time, Bob Zmuda was in the Clifton costume.
If anyone still believed Tony Clifton was a real person in 1999, Milos Forman’s Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon let them in on the true story. The movie does not include anything about Wexler, but Bob Zmuda’s biography of Kaufman came out the same year. If Wexler did hear about it, he was in no state to wreak revenge. An especially taxing manic episode from November 1998 to February 1999 left him incapacitated. He died of a heart attack on August 23, 1999.
Tony Clifton was a strange legacy for the very strange Norman Wexler. The more important legacy, of course, is the uniquely gritty dialogue of Joe, Serpico, Saturday Night Fever, and the many New Hollywood screenplays that Wexler doctored. Someday I hope to read a full biography of Norman Wexler, ideally one that could reveal some humanity underneath the bizarre anecdotes. Until then, I only have a glimpse into a uniquely creative and destructive person.
Footnotes
1 Quoted in Tom Vallance, “Obituary: Norman Wexler,” The Independent, August 26, 1999 https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-norman-wexler-1115537.html
2 Myra Oliver, “Obituary: Norman Wexler; Oscar-Nominated Writer,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 26, 1999, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-26-mn-4343-story.html
3 Bob Zmuda, Andy Kaufman Revealed, (Little, Brown and Company, 1999) p. 30
4 Zmuda, p. 34
5 Zmuda, p. 38-39
6 Zmuda, p. 40-42
7 Zmuda, p. 44-48
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon