The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 478

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feove Pocino confers with director Sidney Lumet on the set of "Serpico." Right, Detective Frank Serp'cC oppeormg before the Knapp Commission in December, 1971. Movies Film-Making Is Payoff for Sidney Lumet Knapp Commission held its hearings on Serpico's. charges. A garment loft couldn't be used on days when deliveries were being made. Lumet wanted to preserve a "sense of changing seasons, which meant that trees had to be avoided in some sequences.

"And," Lumet says, "you never realize how many trees there are around in the city until you're out there, even in the ghettos." Despite the troubled beginnings and the physical problems, "Serpico" has become for Lumet one of' the one or two quadruple-threat winners in his career; "I like it, my friends like it, the critics seem to. like it and audiences like it." One of the reasons Lumet prefers to work a lot is his feeling that any director is a fugitive -from the. law of averages. "One in four is first-rate work. One in four is good and satisfying.

One in four is a try that missed. One in four is something you shouldn't have gone near in the first place. Maybe there's a fifth in there for other reasons, the one you did because you needed the dough. I did one never mind which just to learn how to use color. I was trying to negate color, to make a picture in color that was not colorful, and 1 had a chance to work with a genius in color.

I did it just to work with him. "I think the averages are true even for the greatest directors. Cukor has made classics I revere him but how many out of 80? And Ford, how many out of 170? Bergman had his early failures. Bad work and good work are both apt to be accidental. Wouldn't It Be Lovely? "One of the things that would be lovely if there were ever a revitalization of the majors would be a chance to work all the time.

I know how much it costs me to live and I'm not greedy. Give me a contract to make maybe three pictures every two years, and a stock company of perhaps 15 players, and let me go. Maybe some of the films wouldn't be worth releasing; cut 'em up for mandolin picks. But what you could do on the averages." But Lumet doesn't really look for that kind of revitalization. He was witness to one of the last rituals of the old-time major studio operations.

He had spent months preparing "Nat Turner" for Fox; a studio which was then again iii deepening financial troubles. "I went to a production meeting with 35 department heads 35! We were going to shoot in Virginia, and I was told of the plans to ship 400 horses from California to Virginia Virginia, one of the greatest horse-breeding states of them all with a commensurate number of wranglers. They were even going to send a trained dog, with handler, to snap at Nat's heels as he goes to the gallows. It was all marvelous, stupendous, and stupendously foolish. And I knew as well as I knew anything that it was never going to be.

The rumors were all over town. Sure enough, after that meeting Dick Zanuck called me into his office and said they were canceling the picture; there wasn't any money and they were shutting down the studio. As if it were the final measure of desperation, he said they were even shutting down the commissary. My meeting was at I was on a 5 o'clock to New York. I didn't even stop to pick up my bags." Continual from First Page: that, too.

For me Frank is all the more courageous because he knew what the odds were. He knew all ithe way; he's not starry-eyed. To go for idealism not knowing the truth is to be a fool. "Camus wrote about that bitch-goddess, hope, and that always made such sense to me. Hope suggests that there'll be some return, some reward, getting something back.

Not Frank. He's not the traditional idea of the noble man who becomes a saint. It may have been a waste; there's no reward, really. But he did what he had to do, and that's the true hope for us all. Lives don't matter as long as the system regenerates itself.

"That's one of the things 'Serpico' is about: the corruption which starts at the top in so many things, but the possibility of regeneration. "The ending is my ending 'Frank Serpico is now living in Switzerland' and it explains why I )ove Camus. No reassuring overstatement of what he accomplished, whatever the cost to himself. The whole business of looking for simple, easy answers is part of the corruptive process." 20 Improvisation Lumet estimates that the movie as seen is 40 the structure he and Wexlcr devised, keeping close to Peter Maas' original book, 40 "Waldo Salt's wonderful dialog" and perhaps 20 which was improvised during rehearsals and on the locations, much of the improvisation growing out of Pacino's close conversation with Serpico himself. One of Lumet's chief aims, he says, was to keep the heavies from looking like heavies.

"I tried to cast them as men with charm, who were all the more evil for being human and understandable. One of my favorite scenes in the fjlm is when the corrupt cop in the car is talking so proudly about his daughter who is with the San Francisco Opera Company, because that's so human. "I didn't want it to be anticop, because it's about corruption wherever it is, in politics, business, advertising. When Kehoe, one of the corrupt cops, says 'How can you trust a policeman who won't take it's one of the most evil lines in history." The production problems were mind-bending. The film was not shot in sequence, more like from last lo first, starting with Pacino shaggy-headed and full-bearded, then mustached, then the cleanshaven rookie.

Some locations Serpico's apartment was the only set were available only inter-jniltently, like the grand jury room in which the 3 The film "explains why I love Camus," soys IVVENTY-SIX.