by Warren M. Sherk

As 1964 draws to a close, Dimitri Tiomkin secures an option from American novelist Will Henry for the motion picture rights to his Western novel, Mackenna’s Gold, published by Random House the year before.

With a penchant for writing under pen names from Clay Fisher to Will Henry, Henry Wilson Allen (1912–1991) would write more than fifty novels, several of which would be adapted to film, such as Young Billy Young.

Turning a novel into a film can often be a long and arduous process. As a first-time producer, it would take Tiomkin nearly five years to bring Mackenna’s Gold to movie theaters. The effort goes on so long that Tiomkin’s original intent to provide the music score becomes untenable due to his commitments to produce and score another film close to his heart, Tchaikovsky, based on the life story of the great Russian composer.

A 1963 reviewer of Will Henry’s book believes the novel “will be a wonderful candidate for the current crop of Hollywood Western endeavors.” “It has all the ingredients of a first-class wild west scenario—a love story between a tall, quiet-spoken young gold prospector and a defenseless white girl captive incorporated into a search for forbidden Apache gold by an ‘illiterate, profane and insensate’ half-breed and his motley crew of renegades.” “It’s all here in glorious technicolor with enough action, unsavory characters, murder, and mayhem to please the most demanding Western fan.”

Mackenna’s Gold would be filmed in Technicolor and Super Panavision using 70mm film stock in cameras outfitted with proprietary spherical camera lenses to create a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.2 to 1.

Tiomkin sends a copy of the book to producer-screenwriter Carl Foreman, his longtime friend and frequent collaborator. The last Western the two worked on, High Noon, will be hard to top. After they discuss Mackenna’s Gold by phone Tiomkin follows up with a letter addressing the novel’s strengths and weaknesses.

Admitting the book needs “a lot of work,” he goes on to write “…the thing that attracts me most in it and that will, I’m sure, appeal to you is that here is a real opportunity to say a few important things about basic human values in a situation in which the main characters are stripped of all veneer of civilization and conventional morality and stand bare in the grip of deadly greed and overwhelming passion.”

Tiomkin’s postscript reads, “I just talked to Will Henry (the author of the book) and he is absolutely thrilled by the idea that you might do the book and direct it.”

Letter from Dimitri Tiomkin to Carl Foreman on the property “Mackenna’s Gold,” for which Tiomkin recently optioned the film rights, February 2, 1954

The film is announced to the press by the Hollywood Reporter in March 1965, “Tiomkin Acquires Novel For Film Production.”

Clipping from “Variety,” April 21, 1965

Agreements take time

The film would be produced by Highroad Productions, an independent film company in New York, and distributed by Columbia Pictures. Foreman is an executive producer for Highroad and has a six-picture pact with the company run by president Sidney Elliott Cohn and vice-president Irving Rubine before the latter’s untimely death in an jet crash in 1962 after completing The Guns of Navarone. Martin Jurow became vice president and headed Highroad’s production unit in 1967. (Highroad is not to be confused with Carl Foreman’s production company, Open Road Films Limited, based in London and made up of Foreman, Emmet Dalton, Kenneth Green, and Sidney G. Barnsby.)

Agreements with Highroad Productions signed by Sidney E. Cohn follow in April 1965, including one to co-produce the film with Carl Foreman and another with Tiomkin Musical Enterprises arranging for the music score to be written by Tiomkin.

The project gets off to a rocky start. At a conference at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on May 8, Tiomkin’s attorney, Harry E. Sokolov (who also served as an executive assistant to Richard D. Zanuck at Twentieth Century-Fox), requests revisions to the contracts with Highroad signed in April. Sokolov contends that the co-producing contract is inequitable and unfair and that it was entered into in haste, under pressure, and without the benefit and advice of counsel. Sokolov will not allow his client to meet with Foreman until the “equitable revisions” contained in his letter to Cohn dated May 10 are accepted.

This precipitates a second meeting at the Beverly Wilshire on June 18, attended by Cohn, Foreman, and Sokolov. After that meeting, Cohn draws up a summary with twelve points discussed at the meeting.

Two months pass. In the interim, Cohn sends Sokolov an amendatory letter agreement. Sokolov examines the agreement, and both he and Tiomkin agree with all but one of the points. Meanwhile, the two lawyers continue to quibble about who is responsible for drawing up the contracts. Cohn ends up preparing three contracts, one for the rights to the novel that Tiomkin will assign to Highroad, one for Tiomkin to co-produce the film, and one for Tiomkin’s music services.

Foreman wants Tiomkin to meet him in London in late August and from there the two could travel to Madrid to search for locations and begin pre-production planning. Months earlier, when Tiomkin and Foreman first discuss the project, Tiomkin suggests filming in Spain.

“Somehow I cannot help feeling that the Spanish landscape will make a wonderfully dramatic backdrop for this kind of story. As you know, I have spent a considerable amount of time in that country during the last few years and I have developed there some extraordinarily valuable contacts.”

Before Tiomkin—who is staying at the George Cinq Hotel in Paris—is to meet with Foreman, Sokolov wants assurances that the contracts will be signed and initial payments made.

At the same time, Sokolov is still reacting to drafts of the various agreements from the law offices of Cohn and Glickstein attorney Max H. Rose and trying to protect his client’s rights if Highroad does not produce the film. (Tiomkin apparently has a conversation with Columbia Pictures executive vice president Leo Jaffe in July that if the studio produces the film without Highroad that Tiomkin would retain his status, rights, and position with any other co-producer.)

It’s late September by the time Sokolov sends Tiomkin, now at the Savoy Hotel in London, the contracts for signing. Tiomkin has established an “outpost” in London for his European enterprises and in addition to co-producing Mackenna’s Gold is negotiating with the Soviet Union to produce Tchaikovsky in that country. Sokolov closes his letter with the admonition, “…please, please, please be careful of any papers you sign until I see them.”

Meanwhile, Carl Foreman’s next film, on the early life of Winston Churchill, is placed on hold after hostilities break out between India and Pakistan near the intended filming locations. Mackenna’s Gold was to follow the Churchill film, now it moves to the front of the line.

The agreements are executed in October, and Sokolov thanks Cohn and Rose for their “cooperation in finalizing what at times seemed to be a rather trying negotiation.”

The “specific details” of the “usual” contract terms for Tiomkin’s composing services are of interest.

• No music by others shall be interpolated, with the exception of source music or music in the public domain
• Music written by Tiomkin will not be “auditioned”
• Tiomkin has the right to hire orchestrators and arrangers at his will and expense, with the expense to be reimbursed
• Tiomkin’s services shall be non-exclusive
• Tiomkin can be called on once after a preview to make reasonable changes
• Rights to music not used in the final cut for release shall revert to Tiomkin or Tiomkin Musical Enterprises

The fully executed copies of the agreements are completed by mid-November. This includes an agreement for Tiomkin to co-produce, an agreement of assignment (Tiomkin assigns his film rights to the novel to Highroad), a one-page supplemental letter, and a music agreement.

This paves to way to begin work on the film. Carl Foreman, after the birth of his son, Jonathan, in early December 1965, reports he has been held up working on the script lately but plans to travel to New York for a few days to then embark on completing the script in three or four weeks, perhaps in “Puerto Rico or Barbados.” He ends up in the Canary Islands, where, according to an assistant at his London company, Open Road Films, “the only telephone in the area is half a mile from where he is staying.”

Guy Endore’s take on the novel

American novelist Guy Endore supplies Tiomkin with his unique take on Henry’s book. Tiomkin and Endore both worked on Mad Love, for which Endore adapted Maurice Renard’s novel, “Les Mains D’Orlac.”

Letter from Guy Endore to Tiomkin, with his thoughts on the book, “Mackenna’s Gold,” February 25, 1965

“It seems to me that what has to be done with a book such as Mackenna’s Gold, is to turn it into an American Lower Depths, as Gorki might have written it, had he been a writer of Westerns instead of Cherry Orchards.”

Endore finds the characters in the novel lacking humanity. “Pelon, for example, whom one ought to admire because of his aboriginal drive for total power, and thus overlook his endless cold brutalities, ends by merely upsetting us. We don’t so much as hate him as we are sickened and revolted.”

On the hero, “As for MacKenna, we don’t quite believe him. In fact we don’t really understand him.” “…he really comes alive for us only in the final scenes of the book. In the big fight with Hatachi. That part is excellent.”

Endore believes the story is too complicated instead of being “simple and gripping and stark.” “But when I finished the book I realized that in spite of everything the book had left an impression on me.”

Tiomkin previously told Endore he thought it could be another Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Endore agrees, “I think it could.”

Correspondence from Will Henry

Correspondence between the Will Henry and Dimitri Tiomkin begins in the first week of February 1965, almost immediately after the novelist receives a check from Tiomkin for the option to produce the film.

Henry Wilson Allen is living in tony Encino, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, on a hillside below the Encino Reservoir. He signs his letters to Tiomkin with his pseudonym, “Will Henry,” or more informally, “Will.”

Henry bemoans the “unfortunate timing” of the purchase of “Apache Gold” by Columbia Studio.

“I trust that the unfortunate timing of the Columbia purchase of ‘Apache Gold’ will not, in the long run, prove a serious obstacle…” “This damnable business of some studio beating a man to the draw on a particular idea, has been happening to me for 15 years now. I’ve had at least four big sales ruined by another producing outfit deciding to make the same ‘big western’ as that covered in my book, and just when [Gary] Cooper, [John] Wayne, or someone of that magnitude was about to sign for my book.”

Letter from Henry Wilson Allen, writing as Will Henry, to Tiomkin, February 8, 1965

Almost immediately, Henry sends Tiomkin his 1954 novel, The Fourth Horseman, touting it as “no better example of a fine western novel, my own or another’s.” Henry says Gary Cooper expressed interest before his untimely death. “I selected this particular story for your consideration because of what you have told me of your love for character and mood, as against, let us say, the routines of plot and action of which we are all so mortally weary in the usual western.”

When Henry’s wife happens to catch Tiomkin’s guest appearance on the Bob Crane Show on local Los Angeles radio station KNX, during which Tiomkin speaks glowingly of Henry, the writer fires off a thank-you letter.

“The last person remembered in Hollywood has always been the writer of the book. I think in this frame of reference, yourself being a creative writer in an even more delicate and elusive art, you have an advantage over the usual motion picture executive and/or producer in that you are emotionally on the side of the creator.”

By April news of the partnership between Tiomkin and Foreman reaches Henry through his literary agent, Lester Linsk, and Henry writes, “I remember that this was your first wish, and I am very happy that it has been implemented. Also you have the Columbia release. Wonderful. Let me tell you, sir, that my feelings are not gross in this regard, but most grateful. For once, a property of mine is in the hands of an artist—of two artists—and will be treated accordingly. I cannot tell you with what delights I look forward to your work with this picture and, believe me, I am already sharing Mackenna’s gold with him simply in the matter of my happiness in knowing that the story will be told, and scored, by masters of the medium.”

Letter from Will Henry to Tiomkin, April 23, 1965

Two days prior to Henry’s letter a headline in Variety noted, “Tiomkin-Foreman Partners for Col.” “Composer Dimitri Tiomkin is joining Carl Foreman’s High Road [sic] Productions as a producer and, with Foreman as coproducer, will put ‘MacKenna’s Gold,’ into work for Columbia as his first assignment. Film will be based on Will Henry’s adventure novel.” “The production will mark a resumption of a long association between Foreman and Tiomkin which started in 1941 when both worked for Frank Capra’s Army Signal Corps motion picture unit.”

Henry provides Tiomkin a promised bibliography of research materials on the Apache Indians of the American Southwest to authenticate the era, the area, and the atmosphere of the Apache and their times. The one-page, typed, list of books and articles is meant for ready reference; however, Henry stresses it also shows “how thin, really, is the reward of any one source.” “The value is achieved only in the digesting of the several-many sources…”

Henry’s own book draws on Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, the Frank Dobie account in 1939 of the legend of the Lost Adams Diggings (not to be confused with the Lost Dutchman’s Mine). One of Dobie’s sources was James McKenna, who told his version of the legend, Black Range Tales: Chronicling Sixty Years of Life and Adventure in the Southwest, three years earlier.

At one point, Henry imagines Robert Mitchum as Mackenna paired against Yul Brynner as Pelon Lopez.

Ever the writer, after meeting Tiomkin in person, Henry gushes, “Since you have had me into your home, I can only add that the living flesh of the Tiomkin legend would seem as rare and delightful and full of grace as the music which wove the reputation in the beginning.”

“You will never know what your professional respect has meant to me at just this time in my life. I will value it above any payment of monies made for my work, either past, present, or future. God will not buy what you have given me. A payment upon my pride.”

In May 1965, Will Henry forwards a letter to Tiomkin from Bantam Books concerning their reprint rights and interest in tying in a paperback version to the film. The first Bantam paperback edition appears in 1966, more than two years before the film would reach theaters. Later editions feature cover art promoting the film.

Letter from Sunny Schnier, Bantam Books, to Tiomkin regarding the reprint rights to “Mackenna’s Gold,” May 13, 1965.

Time passes, Carl Foreman wraps up his executive producing role for Born Free, and in March 1966, Henry inquires if Foreman has completed a shooting script for Mackenna’s Gold [he hasn’t] and even offers to take a crack at a script as he convalesces from a bad bout of the Asian flu that includes broken ribs from coughing. Henry continues to bang out a shooting script and expresses his cynical view of screenwriters adapting material from novelists.

After that cynical comment on screenwriters, perhaps appropriately, the letters from Will Henry end. In an interview some years later, when asked if he liked Hollywood adaptations of his work, he said, “I would name The Tall Men, Yellowstone Kelly, Pillars of the Sky, Journey to Shiloh, Santa Fe Passage as truthful to the book and respectable Western films. Mackenna’s Gold is untrue to the book, miscast, wrongly conceived and executed. And consider this the writer of Mackenna’s Gold was the same gifted screen writer who scripted High Noon.”

Mackenna’s Gold in pre-production

Mackennas’s Gold hoped to repeat the boxoffice bonanza of the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, by reuniting Columbia Pictures; Highroad Productions; producer-screenwriter Carl Foreman; director J. Lee Thompson; composer, and this time around co-producer, Dimitri Tiomkin; and lead actor Gregory Peck.

Stars Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif, and co-star Telly Savalas, would lead an ensemble cast with Ted Cassidy, Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey, Burgess Meredith, Julie Newmar, Anthony Quayle, Edward G. Robinson, Carmilla Sparv, Eli Wallach, and Keenan Wynn.

As we learned, two years before the stellar cast would appear before the cameras, Dimitri Tiomkin makes the deal for the underlying story property that will make the filming possible. The Hollywood Reporter announces Tiomkin’s acquisition of Henry’s book at the end of March 1965, and Variety follows with the unveiling of the Tiomkin-Foreman partnership in April. By summer Tiomkin and Foreman are making plans to meet in Hollywood (Foreman is living in London).

Time flies. Pre-production meetings between Tiomkin and Foreman conclude in May 1966 in London, with the understanding the two will begin casting in Hollywood in June.

By the summer of 1966 Foreman is riding high, The Guns of Navarone is back in theaters and Born Free is doing well at the box office. This is the first time since 1949, with Champion and Home of the Brave, that Foreman has two films in release at the same time.

Between May and August of 1966, Foreman completes script drafts and work on the screenplay continues in January and February of 1967.

In February, the venerable Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times profiles Tiomkin, calling him the “Tovarich of Cinema,” a Russian reference to literally a comrade or friend of film itself. Of his previous three decades of collaborating with producers, directors, and writers as a film scorer Tiomkin says, “Enthusiasm was my contribution.” Now in the role of producer-composer, Tiomkin is intensely busy producing two films, buying and selling other story properties, such as Graham Greene’s “May I Borrow Your Husband,” that he plans to score, all the while maintaining his music career by scoring The Great Catherine and The War Wagon.

Casting for Mackenna’s Gold begins in March 1967 and Foreman writes Tiomkin after he closes a deal with Gregory Peck “on very good terms.” “Now, with Peck and Sharif playing the leads, we are off to a wonderful start.” Pre-production photography is planned to commence on May 15, followed by principal photography on June 24, and the film would wrap at the end of September.

Location, location, location

In the Fall of 1966, the production begins to scout locations for rivers and canyons in the United States.

The last film Foreman made in the U.S. was High Noon in 1951, relocating to Europe the following year to escape the blacklist. “… I left Hollywood under a cloud as [a] noncooperative witness” before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC).

“Now I’m returning as something of a conquering hero, bringing work to the Hollywood movie industry which has lost so many films to overseas productions.” Ironically, the once blacklisted Foreman is now a spokesperson in favor of reversing runaway production.

On the topic of where to shoot a film, he is initially quoted in the press as saying that cash in the form of foreign government subsidies affects decision-making more than authentic locales, but immediately walks back that statement. “The question of ‘authenticity versus cash’,” he says, “was raised in the third person and not as a personal question to me, and my reply was that it was the responsibility of every producer to bring in his film at the most sensible cost factors involved.”

Related to the topic of locations, the program that would later accompany the film’s release notes the role of the land itself as a major part of the production’s wide scope. “The script cried out for vast expanses of natural grandeur within which the human drama could most effectively unfold.” Two of Carl Foreman’s previous 1960s films, Born Free and The Guns of Navarone, took advantage of locations in Kenya and Greece, respectively.

Tiomkin and Foreman initially plan on filming the story in Spain on a budget of $2.2 million. A pre-production budget prepared by Columbia estimates the below-the-line cost to film in the U.S. at $3.2 million. Variety then reports that the budget is $5 million. The producers use the press to try to get concessions from the unions to film in the U.S. In spite of those efforts, the final cost has been reported as between $7 million to $14 million.

By mid-December 1966, the decision of where to shoot the film is yet to be made. Spain is still in the running and will win out if the production costs to film in the U.S. are more than ten percent higher.

Ultimately, Spain (and other options from Algeria to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to the South of France) is dropped from consideration and the filming of Mackenna’s Gold would take place on locations in the western United States, including Arizona, California, Oregon, and Utah.

The novel is set in Arizona—“So the only place to shoot it was in Arizona,” figures Foreman—and that state would provide many of the spectacular backgrounds and eventually serve as the site of the America premiere.

Four (famous) interns

A small blurb in the trade papers in June 1967 notes that four students, two from the University of Southern California (USC) and two from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) are selected as interns. The four students would go on to lengthy careers as prominent filmmakers. George Lucas, Chuck [Charles] Braverman, David MacDougall, and J. David Wyles, shot short films on location in the Arizona desert. (Lucas was not originally chosen to represent USC, he got the gig after the departure of Charley Lippincott, now best known for his film publicity skills and promotion for the original Star Wars trilogy.

George Lucas recalls, “I won a couple of scholarships…—one to watch Carl Foreman make McKenna’s Gold out in the desert and make a little behind-the-scenes movie…” Titled after the day on which it was filmed, 6–18–67, and also known as A Desert Poem, the impressionistic five-minute doc short largely ignores the actual filmmaking process the students were sent to witness.

The three other films are Portrait of a Filmmaker: Carl Foreman by Braverman, J. Lee Thompson: Director by MacDougall, and Mackenna’s Wranglers by Wyles.

The students were drawn from the classes of Arthur Knight at USC and Colin Young at UCLA. Graphic artist and short filmmaker Saul Bass, who does not appear to have any other connection to Mackenna’s Gold, was to serve as a special advisor. (Bass and Foreman previously collaborated on Champion, The Men, and Cyrano de Bergerac.)

The decision to offer student internships may have evolved from an earlier visit by Foreman to the USC campus. During film preparations in March, Foreman is the final guest for an eight-lecture series on the economics of the motion picture industry for USC students led by film producer Arthur Mayer.

A troubled production

There were reports, even during filming, that things were not always going well or on budget. The buzzards, a key to the film’s narrative and theme song lyrics, didn’t always show up or cooperate. “Problems have been nibbling Mackenna’s Gold to death. After three exhaustive months of location shooting, Carl Foreman does not have enough film printed.”

Immediately after the film wraps, in October 1967, Tiomkin leaves Los Angeles for London, a stopover on the way to Moscow where he is producing the motion picture then known as, “The Life of Tchaikowsky.” The implications for Tiomkin of producing two films simultaneously will soon become clear, as we will see in Part 2.

To be continued…

READ Part two: September 2021 Dimitri Tiomkin options Will Henry’s novel and co-produces Mackenna’s Gold, part two

(Sources appear at the end of Part 2.)