Blake Edwards Strikes Again

Blake Edwards Strikes Again

Dan Delgado: This is an ad for Barclays Bank from 1980 featuring the character Monty Casino.

Barclays Ad Audio: Hello, sports! Snap! Monty Casino's the name, intellectual enterprises. What? The academic sentiment. What are you reading? Oh, papers, books, periodicals, you name it.

Here, listen. What was you doing back there? I'm looking for rooms. Clean, comfortable, inexpensive rooms. Ha! He's uncanny. You read my mind. He's stage of you, you know.

Dan Delgado: But it's not just a commercial. Well, okay, it is, but it's also the last filmed performance of actor Peter Sellers. Sellers was paid one million pounds to do four commercials for Barclays in April of 1980.

But after filming the third one, which you just heard, Sellers wasn't feeling right. His pacemaker was racing. Turns out, it had a heart attack. The fourth commercial was never filmed. Now, this was not the heart attack that would kill Sellers. That came a few months later. In July of 1980. He died about two weeks before his final film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr.Fu Manchu, was released. And it's not very good.

But before he died, at the age of 54, Peter Sellers had three other movies lined up.

Two of those, Lovesick and Unfaithfully Yours, would eventually be made with Dudley Moore taking his part. The third, and what would have been the next movie he started, was going to be The Romance of the Pink Panther. This would have also been Seller's sixth film in the Pink Panther series. His role as the bumbling inspector Jacques Clouseau has become the role he'd been most associated with to this day, and this new movie was possibly intended as his last in the series.

John LeMay: The basic plot, again, is that Clouseau, he's after this master criminal known as the Frog. And, uh, he doesn't know that it's actually this beautiful woman named Anastasia.

Dan Delgado: This is John LeMay, author of Trailing the Pink Panther Films.

John LeMay: It's got some funny bits in it, just, you know, again, the whole story is just him trying to capture her.

And then when he, he does finally capture her and finds out that she's this beautiful woman, he falls in love with her. And, uh, what I really didn't like about the script is the ending. I mean, what I was just describing is what you'd call the epilogue or the end coda. But the ending, the climactic story resolution, really, really weak.

Because it had Clouseau and Anastasia trying to do a heist together. And that sounds funny, but it wasn't that elaborate. It's like they rob a jewelry store. Something that Clouseau is disguised as a woman that's supposed to be her aunt. And they get captured by the police, and Clouseau talks his way out of it somehow, so that they don't get arrested, even though Clouseau was clearly in on the crime and all that.

And it's really that simple, and then after that, Clouseau and Anastasia get married, and it's a happy ending, so. The ending resolution really needed, uh, reworking, but otherwise, the script as a whole, the flow is pretty good, and uh, It's got good bits for Cato and Dreyfuss and stuff like that, so it hits all the right

beats.

Dan Delgado: Sellers had made all his previous Pink Panther movies with writer and director Blake Edwards. Edwards had been a frequent collaborator and combatant for Sellers. They had made six films together, five of them Panthers. But for Romance of the Pink Panther, Peter Sellers had decided to go it alone. Well, not exactly alone.

Series regulars Herbert Lom and Burt Kwok would also return. Directing was originally going to be Sidney Poitier. But he dropped out and Clive Donner took over. And playing the master thief and love interest would have been Pamela Stevenson. But when Sellers died, so did Romance of the Pink Panther. And while Sellers was gone Blake Edwards was very much still alive and going strong.

For him, Seller's death wouldn't mean the end of a series. Instead, it kind of presented an opportunity to keep the series going and to not have to argue with Sellers every single day of production. But the movie he was going to make was definitely not Romance of the Pink Panther.

He had something else in mind. My name is Dan Delgado, and in this episode, we're taking a look at Blake Edwards and MGM's attempts to keep the Panther, well, in the pink. Welcome to the Industry.

Before we focus on the end of the Pink Panther series, Let's take a look at how it began, and how we got to this point. There are two things every cinephile will tell you about the Pink Panther from 1963. First, Peter Sellers is not the star of the film. Rather, he's third billed. The lead would be David Niven, playing a cat burglar known as the Phantom.

Though it's Sellers who completely steals the movie from him. The second thing they'll tell you is that Sellers was not the original choice for Inspector Clouseau. Originally, Peter Ustinov was cast, but dropped out weeks before the movie began. The movie was, as you might have guessed, a big hit. Movie fans wouldn't have to wait long for Inspector Clouseau to return.

A Shot in the Dark was released the very next year (1964). But it was not intended to be a Clouseau film. It just turned into one. It's based on a stage play about a French magistrate investigating a murder. Sellers was cast as the lead, but it wasn't Blake Edwards directing. Anatole Litvak was the intended director, but when Sellers didn't get along with him.

He was out and Edwards was in, and Edwards had the idea to change the lead character to Clouseau, an idea that Sellers loved since he already knew how to play him. A Shot in the Dark may be the second in the series, but in some ways it's the first. It establishes Clouseau as its lead. And it brings together the main supporting cast that would last the rest of the series.

Herbert Lom, Bert Kwok, Andre Maranne, all series regulars, first show up here. But it's also here where the Edwards-Sellers relationship starts to go bad. When a shot in the dark wraps, Edwards vows to never work with Sellers again.

If there's an anomaly in the series, it has to be 1968's Inspector Clouseau. A movie made without Blake Edwards and without Peter Sellers. Instead, Alan Arkin plays the lead in a movie that quickly flopped and has pretty much been all but forgotten. It should be noted that same year that Alan Arkin was playing Clouseau, Edwards and Sellers reunited to make The Party, a movie in which Sellers plays an Indian character in brownface who mistakenly gets invited to a Hollywood party.

And through his particular brand of chaos, seemingly destroys everything in sight. It's hailed as a comedy classic, despite its racial issues. But, it didn't light up the box office. And even worse, it strained the Sellers-Edwards relationship even further.

And if their relationship was that bad, you may wonder, How? How is it 11 years after A Shot in the Dark, how did this happen?

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It is my business to look at trouble. Peter Sellers, in The Return of the Pink Panther. Rated G. General Audiences.

Dan Delgado: So, how did we get Return of the Pink Panther in 1975? For Blake Edwards, it was sort of a necessary evil. He had movies he wanted to make, but he was on a prolonged losing streak. He needed a hit, so it was time to go back to what worked, which was Inspector Clouseau.

Peter Sellers wasn't doing much better, so getting him back on board was easier than it normally would have been. There's also a whole story about it being a 26 episode TV series instead of a movie, but we'll save that for another time. What counts here is that Return of the Pink Panther was a huge hit.

And if you have a huge hit, you have to follow it up, right? Edwards was really keen on the next film, The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Released a year and a half later, at the end of 1976, Edwards wanted Strikes Again to be an epic three hour long film. And his original cut was about 180 minutes long. But United Artists wasn't looking to take any unnecessary risks and had the movie cut down to 103 minutes.

In the end, Strikes Again was another huge hit and kept the Panther train rolling. 1978's Revenge of the Pink Panther is the last film in the series that Sellers filmed. Originally, Edwards wanted to use all of the cut footage from Strikes Again, which is about 46 minutes worth, and write a story around it.

However, Peter Sellers wasn't interested in doing that and insisted that Edwards come up with an entirely new story, which he did. Revenge was another box office success, although less of one than the previous two films. And it was the last time Edwards would direct Sellers.

Now, that's not 100 percent accurate. Peter Sellers did do a cameo in Blake Edwards 1979 mega hit comedy 10, which starred Dudley Moore, Bo Derek, and Edwards wife, Julie Andrews. But his cameo was cut out of the picture and now we're back to where we started.

Director Blake Edwards always had issues with Peter Sellers. And to be fair, a lot of people did. Here's one of the many things Edwards said about Sellers over the years.

Blake Edwards: Peter was a great talent and a very insecure individual who could behave irrationally and arrogantly. He was inevitably a joy to work with whenever his fortunes were at a low ebb, but When he was riding high with popular success, it was sheer hell to deal with him on set.

He made everyone, down to the crew, miserable.

Dan Delgado: That's not actually Blake Edwards, but those are his exact words. That's actor Patrick Oliver Jones, who'll be reading his quotes throughout this episode. And the Panther films got Edwards powers he didn't necessarily have otherwise.

Blake Edwards: The Panthers bought me my freedom.

I was desperate. I knew I couldn't go on as I had been, enduring the kind of thing that happened to me on Wild Rovers. I needed some way to gain creative autonomy in order to keep working. And then... Out of the blue, I got the idea for Panther. Suddenly, I had bargaining power. You let me make this film, and I'll give you another Panther.

Dan Delgado: Wild Rovers, the movie Edwards is referencing, is a 1971 western he made, which he financed himself, and yet the studio still managed to cut 40 minutes out of the film, which ended up being a flop. But with The Panthers, things had changed for the better for Blake Edwards. So how do you keep it going now that Sellers is gone?

Blake Edwards had this idea.

John LeMay: That it could be kind of like the James Bond series, where you just recast James Bond, that, you know, that was Edwards thinking.

Dan Delgado: Eventually, Edwards had a plan. It was a two picture plan that would be filmed back to back. The first was Trail of the Pink Panther. The idea here was to make a film that would serve both as a tribute to Sellers, which would feature plenty of Clouseau clips.

Based around a new story and lead into the second film, which would introduce the new main character, the successor to Inspector Clouseau. And I have to say, Trail of the Pink Panther is kind of a fascinating movie. And yes, I'm going to spoil it, so you've been warned. The beginning, which does feature Sellers as Clouseau, is made up from the cut footage from The Pink Panther Strikes Again.

In this part of the film, Clouseau is once again looking for the stolen Pink Panther Diamond. He gets into some typical problems, and eventually a plane he's on goes missing and Clouseau disappears. Then the movie shifts to a new character. No, not the character who will take over the series, mind you.

That won't happen until the next film. So for now, we get a reporter, played by Joanna Lumley. And the movie plays out in sort of a Citizen Kane style, with Lumley's reporter interviewing all of the regular Pink Panther characters. They even brought back original Panther cast members from 1963 who hadn't shown up since.

David Niven, Robert Wagner, and Capucine. And it's here where Edwards brings back clips from every other Panther film. In the end, there is no end. Lumley’s reporter doesn't find Clouseau, and simply hopes he's still out there. And amazingly enough, the finale does end with Clouseau, though not played by Sellers.

He's shot from behind, standing on a seaside cliff, looking out into the distance. A passing seagull then defecates on his coat, and you hear him declare... Swine seagull. Again, clearly not Sellers playing this part. Then you have the cartoon panther show up to show off some more clips of Sellers as a tribute.

It's all really... something. When Trail was released for the holiday 1982 season, it was a bust. Not only did audiences and critics not like it, neither did Lynn Frederick, Peter Seller's widow. She was so upset by Trail that she decided to sue MGMUA. When the case went to trial, Frederick claimed that Edwards had called her three days after Seller's death with the idea to use the cut footage from Strikes Again in a new movie.

Frederick had watched some of the clips of the cut footage and refused to give her blessing on the film. Knowing that Sellers himself had refused using it while he was alive. In 1985, the court sided with her. She was awarded $1,475,000 in damages. However, the other goal of her lawsuit, which was to have the film barred from any further circulation, was denied.

Frederick said, “It was an appalling film. Very bad indeed. Not a tribute to my husband, but an insult to his memory.”

And this brings us to Curse of the Pink Panther. The second of the Panther films that was intended to launch the series in a new direction with a new lead character. Again, the Panther regulars reassembled in what would end up being David Niven's final role.

Niven was clearly not well during the filming and it shows during the movie. His voice was so weak that in both Curse and Trail of the Pink Panther, it was dubbed by impressionist Rich Little. And Joanna Lumley, who played the reporter in Trail, is back, but in a completely different role for some reason.

Even Roger Moore shows up. In Curse, an American inspector. Clifton Sleigh, played by Ted Wass, is brought in to investigate Clouseau's disappearance. And what do you know? He's just as much of an accident prone idiot as Clouseau himself.

Curse of the Pink Panther Radio Ad: Just when you thought the world was free of Inspector Clouseau, another great detective has arrived.

Detective Sergeant Clifton Sleigh. He's carrying on a tradition of courage and brilliant undercover technique. Gotta like me boy. That's making him the next great inspector. I have a horrible feeling we are seeing history repeat itself. In Blake Edwards, Curse of the Pink Panther.

John LeMay: The character that he created, which was the inept young Clifton Sleigh in Curse of the Pink Panther, he's just really not that funny of a character, uh, to me because Inspector Clouseau, he's a, he's this aging, overconfident Frenchman, which is really funny.

And against Sleigh, he's just, uh, I don't know what he is. He's just not funny. He wasn't really a good idea.

Dan Delgado: John LeMay has a point here. Part of what makes Clouseau so funny is his arrogance, despite his utter incompetence, while Clifton Sleigh is just a nice guy who happens to be clumsy. Ted Wass at the time was best known for the TV series Soap, and Edwards clearly had high hopes for the success of Curse of the Pink Panther, because he signed Wass not just for one film, but for six.

But it was not meant to be. Curse ended up being a bigger box office loser than Trail was, taking in just under four and a half million dollars.

John LeMay: MGM, when they saw Curse, saw what a bust it was, and in addition to the fact that Trail had not performed well, they moved Curse of the Pink Panther from like a prime summer spot, I think in May, and they booted it back to August, to basically to die.

And Edwards was really mad about that

Dan Delgado:. This change in schedule angered Edwards enough to file a $180 million lawsuit against MGM/UA for quote, “willfully sabotaging the film.” The suit was filed on behalf of two of Edward's production companies and cited MGM/UA for breach of contracts for alleged failure to spend at least 3.5 million for promotion prior to the August release of the movie.

MGMs response, well, they decided to countersuit their suit against Edwards was for $340 million. That suit named three pictures Edwards made trail curse and 1982’s Victor/Victoria, and said that Mr. Edwards and I quote, “caused lavish, extravagant. Unnecessary sums of money to be spent on production and overspent and squandered large sums on unnecessary or excessively expensive items.”

Now, mind you, these lawsuits were going on at the same time as Lynn Fredericks, Peter Sellers widow. So in one suit you had MGM/UA and Edwards on the same side. And then you had the others where they were suing each other and there would be more lawsuits filed and it would take a number of years to get it all settled, which it was.It was all settled out of court in 1988.

The next attempt to bring the series back was to bring it to television in a very different way. There would be no Clouseau, no Pink Panther Diamond, or anything else from the movies. Except for the Pink Panther himself, the cartoon character in the opening credits.

A pilot was made for a live action, animation hybrid series in which the cartoon panther teams up with a young reporter, played by Charlie Schlatter, and helps him get to the big scoop of the day, or something like that.

Seriously, only a pilot was made, and there's not a lot of information about it. And what I've told you is basically all you'll find.

But fortunately, I was able to speak to someone knowledgeable on the topic

Charlie Schlatter:  I loved it, and I remember I didn't even really want to do TV at the time, and my manager was saying, you know, we just got this script, it's called The Pink Panther, I really want you to read it, it's really funny, it's really good.

Dan Delgado: This is actor Charlie Schlatter.

Charlie Schlatter: And he explained the premise and I said, this sounds like The stupidest thing I've ever heard of. It was, it was, but in a way it was kind of genius too. Cause it was like the Purple Rose of Cairo. If you remember that movie where the hero basically jumps off the screen to save a life and it, and at that time… Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

So that was kind of hot. This whole inter mingling of. You know, animated life and real life. So it had a lot of, like, really good things going for it. And so finally I broke down, I read the script, I said, This thing is really, really good.

Dan Delgado: Okay, so what was the setup for this series?

Charlie Schlatter: There, I played this young guy, he was a reporter.

He's sent over to this old, tiny movie theater that's being torn down. For whatever, gentrification, who knows, and there just happens to be a Pink Panther film festival showing at that time. Well, a fire happens, my character Gary gets knocked on the head, falls down unconscious, and the Pink Panther literally jumps off the screen, drags my character to safety.

The hook to the story is that nobody, so now it's like Harvey because... Nobody can see or hear the Pink Panther, except for Gary.

Dan Delgado: So now the Panther is Gary's partner on reporting in the big city. Something like that. Oh and here the typically silent Pink Panther speaks.

Charlie Schlatter: And we had tons of guys. I think the guy who ended up doing it was Bobby Slayton.

And he was kind of like this, right? “Hey, Gar!” He was kind of this rough and tumble guy, but, uh, Maurice Lamarche from Pinky and the Brain. He was one of the guys up for the voice. So there was like, it was like a big thing.

Dan Delgado: So what happened to this pilot? Well, it's kind of a familiar story.

Charlie Schlatter: Teri Hatcher was in it, Tim Stack, I don't know if you know who he is.

Funny, there were just, it was just really super talented people. And we're all set to go, we do this pilot, this really great pilot, and we're like, on the schedule, and, uh, it was Kim LaMasters replaced Jeff Steganski, or vice versa. But there was a new change of guard at CBS. Okay, okay. And because of that, anything that was really slated to go, that wasn't, you know, actually it was Jeff Zaganski who came in, anything that wasn't his baby, you know, and no offense, I mean, you know, you can't begrudge him, he wants to run a network the way he wants to run it.

Dan Delgado: The old regime change at a network, or a studio, or wherever, has doomed many a project. I've heard this story over and over again.

Charlie Schlatter: And it was just me basically acting with like a piece of tape, blah blah blah blah blah, and then later on, they put it in, and so, and the special effects I have to say were like so, they were just primeval, but, they were so good, just like the shaking of something or the movement of the pan or whatever, to make it look like the pink panther is running around, and it was really really funny, I have to say, that's like one of the few things in my life that I look back at, god I, I wish that it was given a fair chance, you know, because it was such a, it was such a sweet show.

There was so much heart in it, too.

Dan Delgado: Blake Edwards had one more swing at bringing the Panther back to the big screen. The son of the Pink Panther would start the series anew with a new lead character. Again. This time it would be Clouseau's son. No, there hadn't been a son mentioned in any other movie, but that doesn't matter. Edwards wanted Kevin Kline for the part.

And personally. That would have been the choice that I would have made. And Kline was actually attached for a while, but dropped out after reading the script and being convinced it just wouldn't work. Though 13 years later, Kline would play Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the 2006 Pink Panther reboot with Steve Martin.

Rowan Atkinson, who Edwards did want for Curse of the Pink Panther 10 years prior, was the next person to say no thank you. Gerard Depardieu was also on the list, but ended up having to pass due to scheduling conflicts. Eventually, it was Italian comedian Roberto Benigni who took the role. And this was several years before his big success with Life is Beautiful.

At this time, Benigni was only well known in Italy. Edwards was given his biggest Panther budget, 28 million to make the film. He brought back Herbert Lom, Burt Kwok, Graham Stark, and even roped in Claudia Cardinale from the first Panther film, though here she's playing a different role. Production lasted for about four months in 1992, and the movie was out the following year.

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MGMUA gave Son of the Pink Panther an August release in 1993. Which isn't exactly a sign of confidence. It wound up grossing only 2. 4 million dollars in the U.S. and tanked basically everywhere else around the world. The script and Benigni’s thick accent were considered the main issues. He even picked up a Razzie Award nomination as Worst New Star. Although I should mention that in Italy, Benigni's home country, Son of the Pink Panther was a big hit.

Son of the Pink Panther ended up being the end of the road for the original series. It was also composer Henry Mancini's final film. Mancini, who created the iconic theme to The Pink Panther and worked on a number of Blake Edwards films over the years, Mancini, who created the iconic theme to The Pink Panther and worked on a number of Edwards films, died of colon cancer the next year.

It was, for Blake Edwards, his final film as a director. When the series was rebooted with Steve Martin in 2006, Edwards was there in name only. While the Panther films with Sellers gave Edwards a certain amount of power in the industry, why he kept going after it after all of the flops and lawsuits does seem a little maddening.

It's not as though he needed the money. Edwards was on a hot streak in the early 1980s. Hell, he even made money on Romance of the Pink Panther. That's the Peter Sellers penned film that died when he died. Edwards held the rights to the Pink Panther logo, so in order for United Artists to use it, they paid him 3 million.

Blake Edwards: And I got to keep all that money.

Dan Delgado: What it was really about for Edwards was something else. He wanted to prove he could.

Blake Edwards: Well, it was a commercial decision, and probably also, to be quite frank, to prove that I could succeed with a Panther film despite the absence of Sellers. I saw Curse of the Pink Panther the other night.

It turned out that I liked it. I didn't see everything, but I thought, Lord, it's a good film. And I thought, the bastards. The fact that I sued them in court and won means something, because they let the film fail.

Dan Delgado: And one more thing. In May of 2023, it was announced that a new Clouseau had been found. Eddie Murphy was in talks to play the Inspector in a new movie that would be a live action CGI hybrid that would pair him up with, yes, the animated Panther.

And if you're going to do that, MGM, I say, give Charlie Schlatter a call, too.