Paul Mazursky talks Cary Grant’s acid, Natalie Wood’s pasties

I saw “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” at the Traverse City Film Festival yesterday. It’s the 40th anniversary of the Oscar-nominated film, released in 1969, and director Paul Mazursky was on hand to answer a few questions after the screening.

What strikes me about the film is that most movies in the 1960s focused on the younger generation – the Woodstock generation. But this film concentrated on two wealthy, upper middle-class couples living in L.A. I was coveting their homes and cars and swimming pools, but of course, under the facade are  bunch of issues – sexual issues, in this case.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it follows two couples, played by Natalie Wood and Robert Culp, and Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon, all contemplating what it means to be married and whether you can fool around outside the marriage and have it all be ok. They start out believing it IS ok, but by the end of the movie, when it comes down to whether they can swap spouses and be ok with it, that’s another story.

A few notes from Paul Mazursky:

A colleague said the film would be considered “dirty,” but Mazursky told him, “If I get Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, then it wouldn’t be dirty.” So it was a matter of casting the right actors.

He was “a little uptight” about auditioning three women who needed to sit naked in a room in the  movie, and joked that he did the auditions with his wife, Betsy, in the room. At least, I think he was joking. Maybe he was serious.

During the scene at the nightclub, when the foursome is entering the room, Robert Culp bumped into an extra played by Bill Cosby, his co-star in “I Spy” at the time.

On making movies about the upper middle class, Mazursky said “I treat them with affection, but my tendency is to have some satire in it … not that I was one of them. I was broke at the time I made this movie,” driving a brown and white Studebaker rather than the Jaguars and Cadillacs most Hollywood players owned. 

Mazursky and his wife Betsy went to the Esalen Institute, the center depicted in the opening scenes of the movie; he said they were “a version of of Bob and Carol.”

On getting the actors to strip down to their undies, even though they were covered by blankets and other things, “in those days, actresses like [Wood and Cannon] didn’t show their breasts,” Mazursky said. “Natalie had pasties on, which you didn’t see.” He added that “those were the greatest undies I’ve ever seen.” It’s true – the women’s undergarments in that movie are absolutely gorgeous!

“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” actually changed the course of history in the movies, because “up until this picture, they were reluctant to do a movie like this,” he said.

On the pot-smoking scene, Mazursky said, “I’m sure that Culp had smoked, but Natalie, I don’t really know.  Cary Grant introduced Dyan to acid.” (She was recently divorced from Grant when this movie was made.)

On the scene with Dyan and the psychiatrist, Mazursky said, “She was brilliant. No scene that I’ve ever done has been better than that scene with Dyan and the psychiatrist.” As a side note, that was Mazursky’s real-life psychiatrist, whom “later flipped, cracked up,” he said. “Because of me, I think.”

Mazursky said of the cast: “It was a very good cast. It’s hard to think of anyone else in this film. Elliott Gould is a very funny guy, and Natalie Wood was at a crossroads at this point. Her career had slowed down, and she was cautious about what to do next. But she read the script and loved it, and that was it.”

Robert Culp’s entire wardrobe in the movie came from his own closet, except for one thing. “I gave him the beads,” said Mazursky.

He said Quincy Jones was the first one to see the film, and he encouraged Mazursky to keep the “Hallelujah Chorus” at the beginning of the film, “and he added a few riffs here and there.”

As for whether the movie has a moral, Mazursky says, “If you have a message, let Western Union send it. That’s one thing I don’t like to do in my movies.”  

On using “What the World Needs Now” for the ending song, Mazursky said when he first heard it, “I got goosebumps.”

The cast kept asking for eight weeks how the movie would end, and whether the two couples would swap partners in bed. Mazursky said, “It was in the script, but it was unclear how it would go. I said, ‘I don’t know. Let’s wait and see.”

Any differences in the audiences then and now? Not really, he said. “I screened it for about 1000 people in the Czech Republic two years ago, and they went nuts over it. So it still seems to work.” It absolutely does.

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