A healthy ego and caustic wit fuel Richard Fleischer’s no-hold-barred “Just Tell Me When To Cry”, his highly spirited autobiography published in 1993. He retired five years earlier after a prolific career started in 1946 and an impressive 47 films to his name. None of them in animation, unlike his father Max, the legendary genius cartoonist, creator of Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor.

It does not take long for the reader to understand that he has no intention to sugarcoat anything as his rip-roaring memoirs begin with an attention-grabbing first sentence. “John Wayne hasn’t shit yet.” It was early 1945, and twenty-nine-year-old Fleischer, under contract with RKO, was touring the studio. Inside a soundstage, the crew of Edward Dmytryk’s Back to Bataan at a standstill was waiting for the Duke to exit his trailer. The reason for the delay? He could not work until he first had a satisfactory bowel movement! The tone is set, but wait, there is more to come in that vein from the self-described “close-up observer of some of Hollywood’s most delightfully despicable, lovely hateful, admirably deranged characters.”

Fleischer has no qualms about revealing firsthand testimony of their many and bizarre shenanigans. Cheekily warning that he “had not tried to be deliberately harsh about some of the personalities in this book, just truthful. They are a quirky lot, these movie folks, but that’s what makes them special. Let’s face it: Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.” And so, Fleischer embarks in a trip down a memory lane populated with colorful anecdotes.

In 1947, Child of Divorce was his first directing job. “I got as my star Sharyn Moffett”, he recalls. “It could have been worse. She was a ten-year-old actress the studio hoped to turn into a Shirley Temple or Margaret O’Brien, a metamorphosis devoutly to be wished.” It did not happen.

Then Howard Hughes bought RKO and the studio dynamics changed. “His meddling became intolerable,” he remembers. “He seemed to be obsessed with changing the ends of pictures.” Case in point with His Kind of Woman, directed by John Farrow, starring Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum for which Fleischer had to shoot a totally different ending. It was all done under such tight supervision and an increasingly “suffocating minutiae”, that it drove everyone involved on the verge of insanity while operating in “a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of dark secrecy and almost byzantine machinations.” One day, an out of control Mitchum went on a drunken rampage and destroyed the set.

Each star brought their own set of idiosyncrasies with which Fleischer tried his best to deal with, albeit not always successfully. In 1954, during the filming of the Walt Disney production of 20,000 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the giant squid’s repeat mechanical malfunctions were not the only problem. Kirk Douglas often went overboard with his constant suggestions about his part. “Sure, he was difficult to work with and yes his upstaging habits were annoying,” admits Fleischer, “ but he was, after all, a star. A real star. And real stars must be forgiven most things because they are enormously talented.”

Three years later, they were reunited on the epic adventure The Vikings. He had not changed, and Fleischer, while impressed by “his unbounded, boyish enthusiasm for moviemaking”, was often once again annoyed with “the unreasonableness of his temper flare-ups.” The film was a huge box-office success, but he can’t help settling an old score with the Disney mystique. “It was a common belief, even in Hollywood, that Walt was responsible for everything in the films he made, and he told me that the secret was to let somebody else do all the work and take all the credit for it.”

Fleischer was looking forward to working with Orson Welles on the 1959 courtroom drama Compulsion. Though initially a bit concerned, he was relieved that “not once, during the entire time I filmed with him, did he ever make a directorial suggestion. He was the actor and I was the director and we developed a wonderful working relationship based on mutual respect.”

After abruptly resigning from 20th Century Fox in 1956, Darryl F. Zanuck had set up a production company in Paris. In the early sixties Fleischer directed two films back to back for him, Crack in the Mirror and The Big Gamble, both starring the ex-mogul’s paramour and current obsession, French singer Juliette Greco. “Infatuation is too shallow and pale a word. This was a man possessed. He dedicated himself to pleasing her, making her happy, making her love him. It did not seem to be a mutual undertaking. But the slavish devotion, the expensive baubles never let up. What Juliette wanted, Juliette got, including the most expensive bauble of all: a movie.” Once she left him, Fleischer felt pity for Zanuck, “a colossus of the movie industry brought to his knees by a fatal flaw: an unreasoning obsession for an unresponsive, unappreciative girl”.  

Dino de Laurentiis was another prominent producer Fleischer worked for. “An impeccably tailored bundle of raw energy and volatile emotions, with a personality resembling his speech pattern: curt, abrupt, brusque. The impact of meeting him for the first time was something akin to sticking your finger in an electric socket.” In 1961 he hired him to direct Barabbas, a huge biblical epic with some scenes numbering a record 9,115 extras. Yul Brynner passed on the titular part that went to Anthony Quinn. Jeanne Moreau was tested to play his lover but replaced, at De Laurentiis’ suggestion, with his wife Silvana Mangano. “Dino was above all a consummate salesman, unsurpassed showman, and a manipulator.”

In 1965, Fleischer was surprised to get the plum offer from 20th Century Fox to direct his first musical, Doctor Dolittle with Rex Harrison. “In spite of his reputation for being a temperamental, ruthless perfectionist and impossibly difficult to handle, he was a talent I would give everything to work with, an opportunity not to be missed.” It would prove another challenging project. Nicknamed Tyrannosaurus Rex by the film’s composer-lyricist Leslie Bricusse, Harrison had to be extensively cajoled into accepting script changes and songs. His procrastination and demands often hampered the process. He was in and out of the picture at least five times. “And once cameras started turning in late June 1966, I was expecting the worse,” Fleischer confesses, “but there were no more complaints, no more demands, just pure, creative professionalism. All the problems came instead from co-stars Anthony Newley and Samantha Eggar, and from the hundreds of animals and from the weather.”

He writes about his first foray in science fiction (1966’s Fantastic Voyage) and gives a moving tribute to Edward G. Robinson who died a few days after completing his last role in Soylent Green. He expresses dismay at his co-director Akira Kurosawa’s despotic and borderline unhinged behavior during the preparation of the 1970 war drama Tora! Tora! Tora!. And he regretfully confesses how his longtime admiration for Laurence Olivier was tarnished when filming the 1980 musical The Jazz Singer. “How do you tell the world’s greatest actor, a legend in his own time, that he is overacting, that he’s got his words wrong and that you don’t like the accent he is using? Working with Larry required more than being knowledgeable, technically proficient, and creative. It required United Nations-class diplomacy.”

The book really gives a vivid and unfiltered account of the Hollywood machine madness from the Golden Age to the eighties, through several decades of changes, and the crazy ways some of his movies were put together and done. Charlton Heston praised it for providing “a dead-on survivor’s insight into the crap-shooting, comic-opera Mafia vendetta the movie business has always been.” Still, at the twilight of his life, Richard Fleischer can look back with bemused lucidity. Because, after all, what really mattered was what ended up on the screen.

As for the title, he explained it came from a comment made by Silvia Sydney after he had given the legendary actress a lengthy monologue explaining her character’s motivations in the bank-robbery thriller Violent Saturday. To which she replied to a puzzled Fleischer: “Whenever you need tears… just tell me when to cry.” Priceless. Strangely, there is no mention in the book of his last pictures. Nothing on what crazy things might have happened on Amityville 3-D, Conan the Destroyer, or Red Sonja. “The industry has been more than kind to me, and I’ve stretched a modicum of talent into an exceptionally long run,” he concludes with copacetic pride. “It’s been an exciting, glamorous lengthy career and a lucky one, with many more ups than downs. And much to my surprise, I’ve lasted longer than the majority of my peers.” And whatever price he had to pay for this longevity, in the end, it was all worth it.