The Steagle Saga, a/k/a "How it is done to you"

This is the myth-worthy saga of a low-budget movie you've never heard of, that few people have ever seen, that failed miserably both artistically and financially - and about which I have been unduly curious for half a century, because it was the first movie set I ever visited.

Stories of failure have always been fascinating to me. Partly because they don't get told nearly as often - George Lucas would much rather talk about Star Wars than Howard the Duck or Willow. But he started all those projects with a vision and a script, and nobody knew in advance which one would produce generations of progeny.

One of my biggest regrets as a journalist was that I never got to write up my Rolling Stone-sponsored visit to the set of Texasville, Larry McMurtry's sequel to The Last Picture Show, with struggling director Peter Bogdanovich returning to the scene of his 1971 triumph in 1990 - the same year Coppola was making Godfather III and screenwriter Robert Towne had written the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes.

When laboring on the originals, those filmmakers didn't have any foresight that they would become classics; indeed, if you listen to Coppola's commentary on the Godfather DVD, he was under constant worry that he was going to be fired. And when they tried to recapture the magic two decades later, they certainly didn't set out to make thin, soulless retreads. I never wrote up my Texasville reporting, because the Rolling Stone movie critic saw an early screening and - correctly - declared it bad, and the magazine (like most) was not geared to giving space to long features on duds.

But it would have been a much more interesting story than one of a success.

Which brings me to my earliest set visit, to The Steagle, a movie released 50 years ago this month.

In early May, 1970, the cast and crew were filming at the train station in Scarsdale, my hometown, for a scene of star Richard Benjamin getting off a commuter train. 

My mother, then 32 - only a year older than Benjamin! - having somehow learned about it, dragged me and my two younger brothers to the station to watch the dull, repetitive act of a train slowly arriving and a man getting off and being greeted by his wife (played by Cloris Leachman, unknown even to my fangirl mom - The Mary Tyler Moore Show wouldn't premiere until that fall, and although Leachman's performance in The Last Picture Show that would win her an Oscar had already been shot, it hadn't yet been released).


The under-10-year-old set visitors, Scarsdale RR station, May 1970

I had dutifully brought along my recently-obtained autograph book, which mostly contained New York Mets, and with my mother's nudging, obtained Benjamin's signature. As you can tell from the photo, I had no idea who he was - since his movies had all been for adults.

Me and Dick
My interest in The Steagle was recently rekindled by a Facebook post by a guy from my high school whose dad had done locations for the 1969 Benjamin movie Goodbye, Columbus, which reminded me that its tennis scenes had been shot at the Scarsdale High courts. I wondered - wait, what about that other movie Richard Benjamin shot in Scarsdale?

Even in the streaming era, The Steagle is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that Benjamin was in the peak of his career after the troika of Goodbye, Columbus, Catch-22 and Diary of a Mad Housewife.

I finally tracked down a crappy bootleg DVD. Though somewhat clumsy and disjointed, it has noble aspirations to be a kindred spirit of late 60's-early 70's anomie cinema such as Easy Rider, The Graduate, Catch-22, et al.

Based on an obscure novel by Irvin Faust of the same name, The Steagle tells a darkly comic tale of existential 60's Cold War dread and escapism set during the week of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Protagonist Harold Weiss, a buttoned-up suburban college professor (Benjamin), hears about the Crisis, fears the world is coming to an end, and briefly goes crazy - telling off colleagues, having an affair with a co-worker, then heading out across the country using a different pseudonym in each city: in Chicago, a liaison with an ex (who, in a creepy twist, looks just like she did when she was young - because it's that woman's daughter) and then to Vegas where he gambles and beds a stewardess, and then to Hollywood in a meta fantasy climax, where he meets a washed-up former movie star (played by a real one, Chill Wills) tending a bathroom and they end up staging actual explosive war scenes on a movie studio lot.

Then the Crisis ends, and Weiss returns home to suburbia, looking the same but newly untethered by the struggles and liberations of "the war" that his imagination had unleashed.

The obscure title refers to the brief wartime manpower shortage that led to the merging of the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers; Benjamin's character is supposed to represent this kind of freakish wartime fabrication.

The long trailer, that I found on YouTube, amazingly starts with an atom bomb explosion and the announcer saying, "Now that we have your attention," and then cuts to Benjamin speaking Pig Latin to his students - baffling out of context - and then quickly tries to appeal to a wider audience by jamming in all the sex and explosion scenes, likely only alienating the art-house fans who might have appreciated the story it was trying to tell.

Critics were - correctly - divided: the Los Angeles Times called it "a stunning writing and directing feature debut"; Variety criticized the "confusing and rambling storyline and frequently slow-paced and low-key direction."

But as to why that might be, there's actual historical documentation. My research also turned up the existence of a tell-all book by Steagle writer-director Paul Sylbert, published three years after the film, long out of print, called "Final Cut: the making and breaking of a film."

I find it surprising that Sylbert was able to sell his story, since nobody had heard of the movie or him, and much of it seems like personal therapy and/or revenge. And clearly the book had little cultural impact, since 15 years later, the title Final Cut was used for Steven Bach's best-selling expose about the making of the legendarily expensive, legendarily disastrous Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's follow up to The Deer Hunter.

Sylbert's Final Cut tells a similar tale of how Hollywood misoperates - albeit on a smaller budget with much smaller stakes - and turns out to be at least as interesting a historical document as the movie itself. 

Final Cut is by no means a great book - it's painstaking, painful, self-pitying, overwritten (Greek myth references, philosopher and poet name drops), and probably would have been better as a long magazine article. But it's fascinating, an all-too-rare kind of first-person showbiz bridge-burner of the process that Sylbert quotes Kubrick as having described as "an attempt to paint a picture in a factory," in which Sylbert names (most) names and blames blames, after he has realized (or decided) he would never direct again. And ultimately it enhanced my appreciation of both Sylbert and his decimated lone auteur attempt. 

As Sylbert writes midway through: "This is not in any sense a how-to-do-it book. It is more in the way of a how-it-is-done-to-you book." On the jacket, Gore Vidal blurbs it as "The best, and so the most gruesome account of the making of a movie today." 

But the story it tells is, in fact, not limited to what was "today" back in 1974. While specific to the era, it still rings true about the nutty randomness of being allowed to make expensive, collaborative entertainment, the uncontrollable factors involved with how it turns out, and how even though none of it is ever personal, everything is always personal.

Anthea, Richard (L), and Paul (R) Sylbert 

Sylbert had an amazing Hollywood career. After some work in opera and theater, he had directed some TV and commercials, but was mainly known as an art director. He had worked for Hitchcock on The Wrong Man, for Elia Kazan on A Face In the Crowd, and would eventually win the Oscar for his work on Heaven Can Wait. His post-Steagle art director credits also included Kramer Vs. Kramer and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 

The Steagle's costume director was his wife at the time, Anthea Sylbert, who had designed the costumes for 1968's Rosemary's Baby, and who would go on to win the Oscars for costuming Chinatown and Julia. The book is dedicated to her. (Astonishing side note: Paul's twin brother Richard was also an Academy Award-winning art director (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) - whose credits also included The Graduate, Chinatown, Shampoo, Reds, and the Manchurian Candidate. The brothers also served in the same unit in the Korean War.)

Several of Paul's observations in the book about show business are evocative, and timeless. 

In the Studio Power Game there are no real rivals. Personnel from the top echelons flow from one lot to the other like liquid houseguests. The idea being to keep everyone else out, they fill each other's vacancies in the industrial condominium with such untrammeled dispatch that they often appear to be in two places at once; a glowing manifestation at the site of the old mess, and a hovering uncertainty at the site of the new one.

He knew that the movie he wanted to make was not an easy sell. At one point he describes it as:

...not exactly a barrel of laughs, but still something of a comedy; not exactly a tragedy, but a pathetic account, which ends badly for our hero, who, like all his noble antecedents, works exceedingly hard at his own downfall.

And Sylbert has clarity about his chosen protagonist, whose name he lightly deracinated from Weissberg to Weiss, who he cheerfully calls

something of a schmuck...abandoning what he conceives to be the reality principle for what he conceives to be the pleasure principle.

In the book's telling, Sylbert himself, as filmmaker-protagonist-schmuck, ends up victim to something like the reverse of Weiss's fate: in pursuing the pleasure of making an indie, personal film, Sylbert came up against the reality principle of what dirty business it takes to get a movie made.

His own tragicomic tale has twists and turns and booby-traps - or as he later puts it, "the facts of laissez-faire in the world of merchants and money" - that even the best screenwriter couldn't have thought up. 

Joseph E. Levine

After writing several screenplays that didn't sell/get made, Sylbert optioned the novel himself and, thanks to a recommendation from director Mike Nichols, sold his adaptation to Avco-Embassy - a hybrid that came about when mostly-schlock exhibitor and producer Joseph E. Levine surprised even himself by making a mint off Nichols' The Graduate and sold his Embassy pictures to Avco for $40 million.  He had subsequently lost much of it trying to find the magic alchemy for another cultural phenomenon. 

According to Sylbert's account, Levine brashly approved The Steagle not because of its script, with which he did not seem very familiar, but because of what happened during their meeting in Levine's office after Sylbert noticed a photograph of Levine with the painter Andrew Wyeth. 

Sylbert remembered that he'd been told that Levine avidly collected Wyeths - he had even, in 1968, purchased the Olson farmhouse made famous in Wyeth's most famous painting, "Christina's World" - and Sylbert happened to know the entire Wyeth family, thanks to a nephew who had invested in an earlier, unsold script Sylbert had written based on Bernard Malamud's The Assistant. 

The Olson House, owned then by Wyeth collector J.E. Levine 

So the meeting about The Steagle quickly became all about mutual Wyeth fandom, and Levine giddily sent Sylbert out the door with a green light - much to the annoyance of the money man in the room, who immedately fumed privately to Sylbert "the man's gone crazy! Absolutely crazy!" and declared "We get all controls, let me make that clear." Meaning, Sylbert says, "(a) budget, (b) script, (c) casting and (d) final cut." 

All four categories would weather severe storms for the rest of production. 

When the first line producer calculated that the miniscule granted budget of $1.5 million would not suffice for the movie's locations, sets, period costumes, etc. - he was fired. 

When the next one reaffirmed this assessment, cost-cutting in other departments ensued, some of which Sylbert discovered only as they arose - like when he asked to shoot a scene with the zoom lens he'd ordered and was told the $20/day rental had been denied -- thus costing an extra $4000 in additional shooting hours. Also cut: walkie talkies to communicate with others on the set, forcing a lot of running around, and $5 dimmers for lights. All of which, of course, lead to much more expensive overages. 

But the "Rosebud" of the movie and how it turned out is one of those things nobody can ever predict when they're trying to navigate all the shoals of moviemaking - and yet at the same time is the oldest story in the world. 

After getting that green light, Sylbert suddenly endured an escalating amount of pressure about the casting of the small but crucial role of Harold's college colleague Florence Maguire, who is with him when the news of the Cuban Missile Crisis breaks, and has a doomsday fling with him in his car. Her character also has to speak French.

Suddenly he was told the studio really wanted him to meet with an actress he calls "Sally Wyles" - the only pseudonym in the book.  

She is a pleasant enough woman, exactly like thousands of other pleasant, aging, unsuccessful actresses to be found in Hollywood. The other thing she has in common with this genus is that they are, with rare exceptions, singularly untalented.

While they were discussing her experience - a half-hour TV episode, a small part in a Raquel Welch movie, and a role in a Caesar's Palace production of The Odd Couple - he realized he happened to see the last, because he had been in Vegas shooting a commercial with the production's Felix Unger, Arnold Stang, and Sylbert remembers her as singularly awful. 

"Wyles" also didn't speak French, but promised to work with a coach if she got the part. 

As Sylbert quickly deduced, Sally turned out to be the very special lady friend of a very high-up person at Avco-Embassy - someone reports seeing the two canoodling at a screening - and he realized with growing dread it would be very hard to get out of this conundrum, which threatened to sour everything else he had precariously set up. 

The following sequence is almost comical in its cliche: to convince him of her talent, he's shown footage of her in the TV show, in which she is "without qualification, very bad." His producers then excused it away because the show itself was lousy, and told him to keep an open mind, and promised him a screening of her scene from the feature film.  

He writes, 

Girls who find themselves in Sally's position usually also find themselves in certain very set parts...the categories usually are: girl in a scene with some lines who conveniently dies in the first five minutes of the movie, usually by violence; and leading female role in a cheap sci-fi chiller where almost everything is done either by a lot of men or a lot of monsters, with the exception of the screaming, which is her department. You can always spot her. First she is much too glamorous for the part of a lady scientist, so they hide her behind a loose lab coat, a pair of glasses, and a chignon, or a French Twist...until she is needed. At which point, of course, the glasses come off, the hair comes down, and the lab coat is shredded right down to her underwear, revealing the body of a North Beach gogo dancer.

The next day he gets shown her scene with Raquel, poolside in a Vegas hotel, in which she is confronted by her crazy husband, brushes past him to Welch's table, only for him to pull out a gun and shoot her dead.

In no uncertain terms, Sylbert writes, he tells the studio brass that "my open mind had grasped, in that fleeting instant of her appearance on the silver screen, that Sally Wyles stank, unequivocally." He is told that the scene is unfair to her, and he should audition her. 

When I re-read this passage, I started to wonder, how bad can she be? Was Sylbert just being a prima donna first-time director? 

I realized that even though in 1974 he had hidden even the name of the Welch movie, he described enough about it that in 2021 I could figure out not just what the movie was, but who Sally Wyles was. 

A quick IMDB search and Amazon rental later, I suffered through the same opening sequence he had, 50 years ago, of Flareup, and saw the actress who was being pressed upon him, whose real name is not very well disguised, it turns out: Sandra Giles, who had been born in Hooker, Oklahoma in 1932. (Side note: check out the Flareup trailer for some real pre-#MeToo violations.)        

They again told him he should "keep an open mind," and audition her in person. 

So he got his friend, actor Tony Franciosa, to read the Florence McGuire scenes with her. As Sylbert discussed the significance of the scene, he saw Giles both becoming both impressed - and more frightened. She could not produce tears for an emotional scene. After she left, Franciosa told Sylbert the actress had confided privately, "Jesus, I'm scared. I wish this was a dancing part, or something." 

By way of background, here are some facts about Giles from her IMDB biography: 

• Won several beauty contests in Texas including; Miss San Antonio, and Miss Corpus Christi. 
• In October 1957 her appearance on the "The Tom Duggan Television Show" was canceled because they claimed she was showing "more cleavage than clothing."
• In December 1957 was named "Miss 8-Ball" by the Los Angeles Press Club.

I found this picture of her from the 8-Ball event:

Sandra Giles, Miss 8-Ball 1957

In 1970, she was 13 years past the 8-Ball, and Sylbert told his producers he was not, under any circumstances, casting Sandy Giles. 

He was told bluntly if she were not used, "there would be no picture not to use her in."

Sylbert went into a tailspin. He consulted with his agent, who wishfully theorized that maybe this wasn't being demanded by the Man at the Top - just engineered by someone lower, trying to please. 

Sylbert decided to call their bluff - and discovered it was no bluff. The plug was pulled. 

Consulting with his wife, he decided there was no point in The Steagle becoming "the thirty-third movie I didn't make," and agreed to "at least try her." 

Magically the movie was back on, and Giles was immediately announced in the trades - as Benjamin's co-star (!). 

At the first rehearsals, Giles showed some signs of life, but then quickly froze up and was even unable to repeat things Sylbert found to praise. 

Then came the scene in French - well, written in French. Giles didn't attempt good French or even bad French - what she was speaking was a kind of gibberish. It turned out that her French teacher, discovering her limitations, had given her a little piece of paper listing all the words she couldn't say with suggested substitute words that sounded like French.

After Giles audition, Benjamin called Mike Nichols - who knew the importance of the part - who in turn called Sylbert. "If she appears on screen," Nichols told him, "I'm going to start a stockholder's suit....No matter what you do, you can't use her in the part." Sylbert assured him he would not. 

Sylbert devised a desperate, but inspired, two-pronged survival plan: shoot the Florence Maguire scenes at the very end of production, when Avco/Embassy would have spent too much money to shut him down - and secretly placing another actress on hold for the part. 

He began shooting in May 1970, and on day two - a Sunday, enabling them to park only 1962 vintage cars at the Scarsdale train station (p. 94 in the book) - a certain nine-year-old boy showed up with his aqua autograph book. 

The day turned out memorable for Sylbert too, because an incompetent assistant director got the train schedule wrong and they nearly missed shooting Benjamin getting off the train. 

Still, production proceeded largely as planned until July 2nd, when the agent for Jean Allison, a TV actress who was Giles' replacement in the wings, leaked news of her casting. 

As Sylbert writes, he had reason to fear: "Based on their previous behavior in foisting her on the film, they would probably be willing to kill to keep her on." Not to mention that on the strength of Sylbert having given her such a meaty role, Giles had already been cast in another of the studio's projects.

Sylbert explained to one of the producers that his entire reputation as a director moving forward was at stake: "Nobody ever looks at a lousy performance and asks themselves what could have possessed the director to make such a choice; and there was nothing in the credits to indicate that I had nearly lost the financing by reisisting her inclusion in it."

The next day one of the studio's henchman producers, Leonard Lighthouse, showed up to negotiate with Sylbert. Their exchange is astonishing, and key to how the movie turned out - and to why the book exists. 

First Lighthouse commanded, "We want you to shoot her even if you don't use it." 

Sylbert argued that's no good, he HAD to use it - it's a pivotal role in the movie - just ask Mike Nichols. He decided to pick at the scab: "You're asking me to spend $80,000 [3 days shooting cost back then] on a lousy actress. Would you mind telling me why?"

"I can't,"  Lighthouse said. Then countered: "You can shoot both of them. How's that?" 

Sylbert says he retorted that not only doubled the cost of the scenes to $150,000, but the fact that he doesn't have final cut meant he couldn't be sure they wouldn't still use the Giles footage. 

"You have my word," Lighthouse tried. 

Sylbert shook his head.

So Lighthouse went even further: "If you shoot her, we'll let you burn the negative. But you've got to shoot her. How's that?'

Sylbert was rightly staggered by this - even "flattered," he writes, thinking he might have achieved a "record" - "the tantalizing finial of all the piles of crap ever erected to support a corrupt choice in the entire shabby history of show business." 

But he also knows it's bullshit. That if he shot one frame of Sandy Giles, it would end up in the movie. 

So Sylbert stood his ground, and Giles was out. But from then on, his grasp of the steering wheel was never as assured. 

I found interesing that while the name "Sally Wyles" appears in the book more than 30 times, Jean Allison is named but once, when her agent leaks her news - and Sylbert never circles back to describe what he thought of her performance in those scenes, after all it cost him. 

The rest of Final Cut takes us down a more familiar, and sad, filmmaking narrative. Sylbert fired an esteemed editor who had become a hack, assembled a first cut that was over two hours long, and then endured a series of test screenings that went increasingly poorly. 

Levine's response to the first screening in September 1970, was: "It's so...human!" But by the second one Levine was befuddled: "I never saw a film before I can't say anything about" - except that he didn't like the dark ending, which Sylbert is sure he had never gotten around to reading. The other execs followed Levine's lead, in a sadly familiar pattern: 

Most professional screenings suffer from funk. If they respond at all, they tend to choose the negative, putting the averages in their favor. Others simply play dead for fear of making a commitment in full view of their boss and their colleagues until they get the okay sign. They are what Dante has called the trimmers. He placed them outside of Hell altogether, deeming them unworthy of even the suffering of the damned, and described them as running in a swarm with their eyes perpetually fixed on a tall, flapping banner that changed direction with every whim of the wind.  

By the final screening, the three producers most on his side have left Avco/Embassy, whose struggles were continuing, and Sylbert calls it an "absolute bomb." He shortened the movie to 105 minutes. Levine's minion still tells him to lose the last five minutes altogether. Adding insult to injury, a film critic trying to sell Levine scripts sees a screening and gives Levine copious notes on how to fix it.

Sylbert knew he was in trouble when he saw the first mock-up of a print ad for the movie: 

The ad was so incredibly trashy I couldn't believe it, even of Levine: a paste-up of tit-bits including girls in bikinis, gotten from God knows where, splashed with the skill of any inept six-year-old over a shot of Dick lifted from a little photomat series I had made of him in uniform for the corner of a picture frame (for which he made the appropriately silly faces), supported by another head from the same series mounted on a naked body to pair with the naked teenbopper pasted over one eye of his blacked-out glasses and left over from Levine's last motorcycle flop; and all this was set against the rising sun of a roulette wheel.

Then, at an industry screening of another risky Levine project, Nichols' Carnal Knowledge, Sylbert finally glimpsed "Our Man At the Top," the one who'd been seen cavorting with Sandy Giles. And to Sylbert's shock, there she was again - brazenly by the married man's side in public.

 By this point Sylbert has nicknamed her "The Albatross."

Could an exemplary executive commit such a stark indiscretion? Obviously. It was the only time in my life I can every remember wanting to own an Instamatic camera. There is no doubt about it: power corrupts - it makes men careless. 

Levine, in his final, brusque meeting with Sylbert at a Beverly Hills deli, announced he was taking The Steagle away from him. He admitted being under a lot of pressure because of "other problem movies" and he, Levine, had to get the Steagle right, accusing Sylbert of being "too close" to it: "I hate the ending. You've had your chance,  and nobody bothered you." 

Finally, seeing his ship sinking, Sylbert blurted out his final poker card: "What about all that crap with [Sandy Giles]?" 

Instead of recoiling, Levine didn't even blink. "Oh, that's nothing. That happens." 

Sylbert realized the life lesson, he writes: It takes two to make a morality. 

Levine delegated the final cut to producer Frank Rosenberg, who slashed away at the movie to make it more "Disney," excising the dark ending, trying in vain to get a family-friendly rating. Rosenberg told Benjamin he was trying to make Harold Weiss "a nicer guy" and might add a new scene in which Harold writes a note to his wife before he disappears on his escapade. 

Hearing this, Sylbert started writing what would become Final Cut - despite knowing that, as he put it, "it is suicide." (He also tried to file an injunction against Levine, but lost.) 

The studio cut another 14 minutes out of the movie - down to a mere 91 minutes. Benjamin attended a screening of it and called Sylbert trying to make him feel better, but everything he said made it worse. "It's not so bad. I mean, they couldn't kill it. There are a lot of good things left...." 

Among the cuts: much of the lusty scenes set in Chicago with newcomer Susie Tyrell playing Weiss's ex's daughter - scenes that, uncut, according to Sylbert, had gotten John Huston to cast Tyrell in Fat City, which would earn her an Oscar nomination. 

Two of the other cuts Sylbert has some theories about. One was a fistfight in a men's room between two buffoonish Hollywood producers. He thought Levine found it too close to the bone. 

Even more telling to him were the excision of flashbacks Harold has on a plane while lying about who he is and pretending to be Andy Hardy - an iconic, Gentile movie character concocted by Jewish immigrant film mogul Louis B Mayer. The flashbacks were the only time in the movie Weiss's Jewishness is even referred to, and Sylbert is convinced that Levine was continuing a long history of Hollywood moguls burying their discomfort with their roots. 

Predictably, The Steagle opened to middling and often befuddled reviews, in two theaters on September 15, 1971, according to Sylbert, lasting in one a few weeks, the other a matter of days: "What would have resulted from the film being released as it was made will never be known; but there is no doubt whatever about the results in the case of Levine's version." 

He also bemoans the blockbuster mentality which was already taking hold when he wrote the book, thanks to movies like Love Story and The Godfather, that he could tell were going to make it even harder to find screens for the more idiosyncratic, artful movies that the new Hollywood had been coming up with in the years after The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde. 

Sylbert knows his story of abuse at the hands of Hollywood was not special: as he admits, "the system is relentless as it is routine," and that until all directors have final cut, they are "more to be pitied than blamed. So, for that matter, are the critics." 

Before he ends the book, he mentions that when the studio re-released the movie a few months later paired with a B-movie trying to get some more box office out of it, the Disney approach had been completely reversed to make it seem much tawdrier than Levine had allowed the final cut to be: 

"Half husband...half playboy!"

POST SCRIPT: Few of the principals involved in this story are still alive. And those who are, probably don't have much to add. I did try to reach Richard Benjamin (83), Jean Allison and Anthea Sylbert (both 81), but didn't hear back.

Chill Wills died in 1978. 

Anthea and Paul divorced circa 1984. She eventually formed a successful production company with Goldie Hawn, before retiring from the business and moving to Greece with her husband since 1985, Richard Romanus (who played Dr. Melfi's husband on the Sopranos). 

Joseph Levine died in 1987,  having been involved in nearly 500 films. After trying to donate the Wyeth-famous Olson House to Maine in 1974 and taking it back because they couldn't afford to run it, he sold it to Apple CEO John Sculley, who eventually did donate it. It's now part of the Farnsworth Art Museum. 

Richard Sylbert died of cancer at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital at 73, in 2002. 

Susan Tyrell, who lived with actor Herve Villechaize for a few years in the 70s, suffered from thrombocytosis, had both legs amputated at the knee in 2000, and died in 2012. 

Mike Nichols died in 2014. Cloris Leachman just this past January (2021). 

Paul Sylbert, 1928-2016

Paul Sylbert never directed another movie. He died November 19, 2016, at the age of 88.  In his New York Times obituary, I learned:

• he and Richard had both attended the same high school as my set-visitor mom, Erasmus Hall in Brooklyn, though years earlier (and you better believe if she'd known she'd have approached him).
• 
  
• Paul had been blacklisted from TV in the 50s as a Communist sympathizer, telling one friend, "In those days, I was redder than a lobster." 

Sandra Giles, 1932-2016

Five weeks after Paul's death, on Christmas Day, 2016, Sandy Giles, who just wanted a dancing scene, passed away. 

(Update: Anthea Sylbert died in Greece, June 18, 2024, age 84)

Happy 50th anniversary, Steaglites.