HAROLD BECKER: The Hollywood Interview

Director Harold Becker.


Digging up The Onion Field with Harold Becker
by Jon Zelazny

On January 27th, 2010, Gregory Ulus Powell went before a parole board at The Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, California. Powell has been serving a suspended death sentence for the 1963 kidnapping of LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, and the murder of Campbell.

The crime was the subject of L.A. cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh’s 1974 non-fiction bestseller, The Onion Field. Five years later the movie appeared, directed by Bronx native Harold Becker, who went on to popular hits like Taps (1981), Sea of Love (1989) and Malice (1993).

With Greg Powell back in the news, I met with Becker at his office in Beverly Hills.


HAROLD BECKER: The Onion Field was my big break. I had made one feature film in England, The Ragman’s Daughter (1972). It was well received over there, but didn’t really cut through here. I had never planned on a Hollywood career; I’d been a photographer, and made short films in New York, and then I went to England in the late sixties, and did a lot of commercials and photography there.

That was the era to be a photographer in London. Did you cross paths with David Bailey, or any of the other famous young hotshots?

I knew them all. I did a few commercials with stylist Mary Quant, and I was very much in demand as well. It was a great, great time.

I was surprised to see Alan Sillitoe (author of The Ragman's Daughter) has been steadily churning out novels ever since, but none of them have been filmed. Have you kept up with his work? Is he still good?

I have read some of them, and they are very good. But Alan’s style—so-called proletarian novels, or “kitchen sink” drama—was very much in vogue in the early sixties, and things have moved on. “The Ragman’s Daughter” was originally a forty or fifty page story, and I loved that one image of a girl on a horse coming down that working class street.

I only knew Victoria Tennant from Steve Martin’s L.A. Story (1991), but my god, she’s beautiful in Ragman. You can’t take your eyes off of her.

She came from a major theater family, and had a pretty extensive background on the stage. I still see her. We’ve remained friends all these years.

So a few years after that, I was out here, wondering how to get a film going, and I went with an agency called Adams, Ray & Rosenberg. Lee Rosenberg called one day and said Joseph Wambaugh was interested in having me direct The Onion Field. I knew very little about the story, or the author… even though Joe already had quite a reputation. His writing really informs that whole modern notion of a realistic cop story, and Hollywood had already made movies based on his books The New Centurions and The Choirboys.

James Woods as Gregory Powell in The Onion Field.

I know he wasn’t happy with the movie The Choirboys (1978).

What happened on The Choirboys led directly to how The Onion Field came to be made. The director was Bob Aldrich, and Joe had written the script, with the stipulation that it would not be changed… and if it was, Joe was to be consulted. Instead, Aldrich changed the script and then swore his actors—his whole cast of twenty-four young men—to secrecy. As you can imagine, twenty-four actors are never going to keep a secret; Joe found out about it, and was incensed. He either sued or threatened to sue Columbia, and they gave him back the rights to The Onion Field as part of a settlement.

So Joe came to see my agent about another director for The Onion Field—a man who turned out to be unavailable—and Lee showed him The Ragman’s Daughter… which has nothing to do with cops—it’s a love story about a petty thief in Nottingham—but Joe really liked the visual style of it.

I read the book The Onion Field, which was terrific, and then Joe’s script for it, which ran over two hundred pages.

Author Joseph Wambaugh.

Wambaugh was also on the LAPD when the crime took place. Did he know Campbell and Hettinger?

He didn’t know them at the time. He may have met Hettinger afterwards.

I read Joe’s script several times, and the day before I was going to meet him, I called my agent and said I wasn’t sure I should do it. “This script is really two movies. The first half is a crime melodrama, and the second half is a courtroom drama.” I’ll never forget what Lee said: “Harold, do you have something better to do?”

So I met Joe, and was very struck when he told me how he felt that if he was born to do one thing in his life, it was to write The Onion Field. I thought, now that’s passion… and I wanted to be part of it.

James Woods and Franklyn Seales as Powell and Jimmy Lee Smith.

Did you come to it with an affinity for cops?

Not in a positive way. Growing up in the Bronx? Cops were people who came around when we were playing stickball, grabbed our sticks, and broke up our games!

But once I got to know Joe, and all the other cops I met and worked with, I came around 180 degrees in my understanding of their world. There’s a scene in Sea of Love where Al Pacino has this great speech Richard Price wrote about what it means to be a cop: that you can think what you want about them, but they do clean up after us. I think it’s a miracle they stay as sane as they do, given the beating most of them take. It’s still a profession with one of the highest suicide rates.

I never thought anything would come of The Onion Field—no studio in Hollywood was going to make that movie—but when Joe and I finally got his 200 page script down to 120 pages, he said, “So, you ready to go?” I said, “What are we gonna do for money?” He said, “I’m raising it. I’m very close.” He hadn’t told me he was already out there working on it; he’d mortgaged his house and five acres up in San Marino, and got all his wealthy friends to put up $100,000 or $200,000. His wife Dee was also very involved—she only had a high school education, but she made such an impression on the bank, they offered her a job as an executive! She and Joe ultimately put together $2 million, and that’s what we made the picture for. He said, “It may not be as much as we need for a picture like this, but you’ll never have as much creative freedom in Hollywood again.”

And he was absolutely right. Joe said in one interview, “I would no more look over Harold’s shoulder when he’s directing than I would have him look over mine while I’m writing.” Only in dealing with another artist are you going to find that kind of a rapport, because they understand what it takes to create something.

The script is also unusual in that the first half—the crime drama—takes place over three days, while the courtroom drama covers fifteen years. Were you guys worried about that structure?

No, we just wanted to make it as tight as possible, and to give it a real momentum. What I realized is that by the time the second half starts, the audience is totally vested in the fates of these people. They’re hooked.

Did you meet with the real Greg Powell, Jimmy Lee Smith, or Karl Hettinger?

I wanted to meet Powell—he was in San Quentin—but Joe didn’t think it was a good idea. “They’ll only con you,” he warned. I spoke to Powell on the phone a couple times—he had this great voice; a real actor’s voice—but I finally realized the story I was telling was “Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field.” That book was my bible, and I needed to see the characters and events through Joe’s eyes. If I started formulating my own opinions about these people, it could blunt the focus.

The person I got to know best was Pierce Brooks, the cop played by Ronny Cox. I also met most of the actual lawyers, because we hired them as technical consultants, so there’s an extremely high degree of accuracy in those scenes. As Joe said, “The five most important words in this script are “This is a true story.” I always tried to honor that.

We also made every effort to use the actual locations. Like the spot where Powell and Smith captured those guys… we shot that exactly where it actually happened; on Gower Street, by the highway ramp. The same houses are still there.

John Savage as officer Karl Hettinger.

You described your early career in photography and commercials. Did that give you experience working with actors? Did you direct plays?

I never did theater. You do work with actors on commercials, and I had done that one other film. My first day on The Ragman’s Daughter, I was working with the actors and I remember thinking, “This is where I belong.”

Then the fact that you got such great performances out of four relatively unknown actors on The Onion Field seven years later is even more amazing.

The only one you could describe as known then was John Savage, who had just starred in Hair (1979). I don’t think Franklyn Seales—who played Jimmy Lee—had ever done a movie before; just stage work. Ted Danson only had a couple minor TV credits. Jimmy Woods had been in movies, but always as a supporting character, never a lead role.

There was another actor who read for Greg Powell who was pretty damn good, and he looked exactly like Joe described Powell in the book: tall, blonde, Nordic-looking; icy-blue eyes, cold. We both thought this actor was perfect… and then Woods came in. He looked absolutely wrong for the part, but he had the essence of the character; he was Greg Powell. I finally decided that very few people knew the real Powell, so it wasn’t like casting somebody to play Teddy Roosevelt. And Woods just had the guy down. He’s done a lot of wonderful work since, but I don’t think he ever disappeared as deeply into a character as he did in The Onion Field.

And his off-camera relationship with Franklyn was exactly like the relationship between Powell and Jimmy Lee Smith: that hatred developed between them, and then they had to work together to fight the case through the court system… that same dynamic played out between the actors. All four of those guys went on a real ride there, so to speak. We all got completely caught up in it.

When we shot the scenes in the onion field, it was nighttime and it was cold, just like the night of the crime. Remember when they all get out of the car? Jimmy Woods shoots Danson, and Franklyn starts screaming?

It’s blood curdling. You almost think it’s some kind of sound effect at first.

That was real. And it wasn’t in the script. I was so glad I had the camera on Franklyn at that moment because there was no way he could have done it again with that degree of anguish. That’s how intense making that movie was.

Now much is made later in the story about who fired the next four shots into Campbell’s body. The second time the issue came up, I realized not only could I not remember which guy did it, I couldn’t even remember if there were four more shots. And the more they talk about it, the more it drove me crazy that I couldn’t remember. You want to stop the movie and go back to that scene.

Finally, I did. And here’s what you see: Hettinger is running toward us in the foreground, so that’s where our attention is. Meanwhile, deep in the background, Woods and Seales are standing side by side over Danson’s body. Four shots are fired, but even when you look right at those tiny figures, it’s hard to see who did it.

We always wanted that question hanging in the air. It’s a deliberate bit of misdirection.

Which makes it the most pivotal moment in the film, because so much of the aftermath focuses on it. When people were watching the film in the theaters back in 1979, I imagine some of them walked out when it was over, and got right back in line again just so they could watch that scene again.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that moment.

Given the facts, I think it’s safe to conclude it was Powell who fired those four shots… which was a big tactical error on his part. Campbell was down; had Powell immediately focused on killing Hettinger, I don’t think there was any way Hettinger could have escaped.

Now one aspect of the story that feels a bit glossed over is how quickly Powell transforms from a stupid hoodlum into this brilliant jailhouse lawyer.

Greg Powell was not stupid. He was a sociopath—

He seems stupid in the first hour. Telling Jimmy his car works better as a getaway car because it has a broken clutch, or saying he can elude detection by skipping across the street after a stick-up. He’s always talking some kind of bullshit.

Yeah, but see, he was a control freak… and I think when the full threat of the law finally came down on him it focused him. That’s how he was able to master the study of law.

By the end of the movie, you imagine if this guy had led a different life—and applied himself when he was young—he probably would have been very successful.
Maybe. But he was purely a street guy, highly intelligent, but psychopathic. That hop-skip he does is psychopathic behavior. He was trying to scare the shit out of people.

Okay, I see what you mean now. Powell didn’t actually believe all that stuff he said; one of his methods for manipulating people was to constantly snow them.

Exactly. He was weaving a web of control around Jimmy.

The story carries out as far as those people’s lives had moved until 1979, and then you wrap it up with one final scene for each main character.

I was a little uneasy about that final reprise. We honor Ian Campbell with the scene between his mother and the young bagpiper, which I thought was a bit sentimental. But I finally went with it because I thought, “Aw, shit. We put people through hell with this; give ‘em a dollop of sugar.” And it actually worked.


Ted Danson as Officer Ian Campbell and James Woods as Powell.

My only thought was it seems more like a literary idea than a cinematic one. But I agree; you can’t just pummel an audience with unrelenting bleakness.

I like Jimmy Lee Smith’s final scene in the prison yard. The guard asks if he thinks he’ll ever get out, and Jimmy says, “I was born for a prison yard.” Which turned out to be true: he was in and out for drugs the whole rest of his life, and finally died of a heart attack in prison a couple years ago. Had he never met Greg Powell, I don’t think he would have ever been implicated in a murder. He was a soft guy; a petty crook who never would have carried a gun. He wasn’t a killer.
And you see how Powell did all right for himself. He wasn’t living in some dungeon; that cell was pretty comfy. And it wasn’t in the general population; it was next to the Social Services office. Something you learn about prisons when you visit them is that the inmates really control what goes on in there. All the guards do is prevent them from getting out… and if you make it easy for them, they make it easy for you.

Sadly, Karl Hettinger finally committed suicide about fifteen years ago. A lot of his problems came from the LAPD, because they laid all that guilt on him for giving up his gun. It was because of the Onion Field case that cops started wearing ankle holsters, so they would have a back-up weapon.

So I finished my rough cut of the film and showed it to Joe for the first time without any sound effects or anything in it. He loved it… and before I knew what he was doing, he made appointments to screen it for four of the major studios. I tried to stop him—the sound was completely raw; there was no music yet—but he went ahead and ran it for these four studio buyers—twice on Wednesday, twice on Thursday—and by Friday, we had four rejections!

The State of California denied Greg Powell’s eleventh bid for parole. He’s now 76.

They probably had never seen a cop movie like it. And my impression is that when studios don’t know what something is, they don’t know how to sell it.

Right. They don’t know what they’re looking at. Luckily, Bob Rehme was over at Embassy, a small distribution company, and he agreed to take on the film. Joe asked for one thing: that he put no more than $1 million into prints & advertising and $1 million into distribution. $2 million total… because Joe had seen people pour $5 or $10 million into promoting pictures, and he knew The Onion Field would never earn back that much.

John Savage and Ted Danson as Hettinger and Campbell.

Wambaugh had really done his homework on all this.

Oh, yeah. We finally opened in eight theaters, and there was only enough money for quarter-page ads in the local paper. I was in New York, so I went to the little independent theater on 34th Street in Murray Hill where it was playing… and there was a line of people around the block waiting to see it! With hardly any advertising, or word of mouth… ? How did they know? I won’t say we had a mega-opening, but for what we had, we did very well. It got good reviews, and it even made some money. Joe gave me a cut of the profits, and we all made something… not a lot, but something. And I mean all along, Joe had been prepared to lose his $2 million.

I never dreamed The Onion Field would have so much resonance. We just put one foot in front of the other to get it done, and we had a very dedicated group of people who worked on it; people who really felt like they were part of something special.

Your next film, The Black Marble (1980), was also based on a Joseph Wambaugh book.

Before we even finished The Onion Field, Joe came to me with the script for The Black Marble and said, “Here’s our next movie.” It was very different from The Onion Field, which was so dark that it left us reeling. This was more of a black comedy.

I was at a dinner party a few weeks ago with Quentin Tarantino, and he said to me, “You know what my favorite film of yours is? The Black Marble.” He said, “I own a 35mm print; when all this Oscar hoopla dies down, come up to my house and we’ll watch it!”

I can see his fascination with it. The characters, the milieu, the sensibilities… it’s has a vibe similar to Jackie Brown (1997). But I have to say I actually found the first hour or so of Black Marble rather offensive.

Really? Why?

Because it ridicules this cop who’s obviously burned out and close to cracking. Your actor, Robert Foxworth, plays it realistically—and you want us to laugh? Maybe I’m too sensitive here: my wife is an inner-city schoolteacher, so I hear about a lot of these kinds of public service midlife stress cases.

Then in the last forty minutes, you have three long scenes that redeemed it for me: Foxworth and Paula Prentiss at his apartment, the next one of them in bed, and that final fight between Foxworth and Harry Dean Stanton in the kennel, which is so unexpected and grisly and funny, all at the same time. But I guess the whole thing only clicked for me once the love story started.

It got great reviews. Something like a 96% favorable rating, so we thought we were in good shape… but it opened on a Friday, and by Monday it was gone. It was released by Embassy again, and they couldn’t even afford to keep it in the theaters for a week to see if attendance went up. But we had a good time making it, and I love the film.

And when you have one that doesn’t do so well at the box office, at least it’s forgotten. Nobody knows about it… except Quentin Tarantino!