Billy Wilder didn’t think much of his movie The Fortune Cookie. The tale of football and fraud is well liked — and features an Oscar-winning performance by Walter Matthau. It was the first in a series of screen collaborations between Matthau and Jack Lemmon, Still, Wilder once told writer-director Cameron Crowe that the Cookie “is not a memorable picture. … It was just sort of there.”
But there’s plenty of there there when it comes to local memories.
The movie, which was released in 1966, was shot partly in Cleveland in the fall of 1965. It featured the Browns, the old Cleveland stadium, St. Vincent Charity Hospital, Terminal Tower and supporting turns by the Kent State freshman football team and the St. Edward High School marching band.
In the film, Jack Lemmon plays Harry Hinkle, a cameraman for CBS who, during the telecast of a game, is run into by Browns player Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson (played by Ron Rich). Hinkle’s brother-in-law Willie Gingrich (Matthau) sees a big payoff in a lawsuit by inflating Hinkle’s injuries — even though that causes great concern for Jackson and a moral dilemma for Hinkle.
Making the film involved a good bit of movie magic. Some footage was shot during an actual Browns-Vikings game on Halloween 1965. While the movie refers to plays by Jim Brown and Lou Groza (with real-life broadcaster Keith Jackson as the TV announcer), a bigger moment in the real game was Leroy Kelly getting a long run-back on a punt, which would become part of Jackson’s run in the film.
According to the Saturday Evening Post, additional footage was shot the day after the game with Browns players serving as both their team and the Vikings. This time, Ernie Green was wearing the number 44 belonging to the real-life Kelly and the movie’s Jackson — because, the Post said, Kelly was “too small to pass for actor Ron Rich at close range.” A stuntman stood in for Green in the collision.
KSU players filmed
Still more shooting followed on the next day, this time with the Browns unavailable and 30 members of the Kent State freshman football team taking their place. (Each player was paid $20 for the work, the Daily Kent Stater said.)
The stadium audience consisted of between 5,000 and 10,000 spectators — far fewer than what a regular Browns game would draw. “The stands were packed as far as the camera’s eye could see, which is to say as far as one section on each side of one exit,” the Post reported. The fans who came had been enticed not only by the chance to see a movie being shot but by the promise of TV sets, transistor radios and drawings for a 1966 Ford Mustang and trip to Hollywood, says Wilder biographer Ed Sikov.
A “hefty, amazed ticketholder” was awarded the trip by Lemmon (and, according to the Post, greeted the news with a Cleveland-like “No ----?”). The car, notes Sikov, was won by Wilder’s wife.
Besides the Kent players, the 80-member St. Edward band was present, as it had been at the real game, serenading the audience and appearing briefly on camera in reaction to Hinkle’s accident.
Mike Katai, a 1966 St. Edward graduate now retired and living in Parma, was thrilled not only to be in the movie but to be directed by the Oscar-winning Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot).
“He did come up to me and, as best as I can remember, said, ‘Look, this man just got injured and it’s your job to take the people in the stands’ minds off the incident.’ ” He had to look at the accident in disbelief, then turn and strike up the band.
“It was all in one take,” Katai said proudly. But he was amused by the movie magic accompanying the scene. “I think it was a studio band that they dubbed in there [for the music]. We did have the music in front of us. … We played it, but that’s not what you heard in the movie.”
There was much more to the making of the movie, of course, and production was stalled for months after Matthau had a heart attack.
But it finally made it into theaters in 1966, including with a special screening in Cleveland’s Detroit Theater that Katai attended; he was happy to see he had survived the editing process when several local TV celebrities who had shot pieces were cut out.
As for wider reaction, reviews were favorable. But Sikov notes Wilder’s summation that The Fortune Cookie “didn’t impress the critics and didn’t make money and it disappeared in the big garbage pit along with a year of my life.”
Wilder is too negative, since the film has survived, including in several DVD packages. You can still see some of the locations in the movie; the hospital building still stands, said a representative of what’s now the St. Vincent Charity Medical Center.
Curse of Cleveland
However, you can also wonder if there’s a Fortune Cookie curse on the Browns.
The team, which had won the NFL championship in 1964, made it back to the championship game at the end of the 1965 season (there was no Super Bowl yet) but lost to the Green Bay Packers. They’ve not been back to the championship since. Before the 1966 season, Jim Brown retired. And there’s the now-ominous comment that Wilder made in Cleveland in 1965.
That Vikings game where the movie shot footage was a bad loss for the Browns, so bad that fans booed the quarterback, Frank Ryan. Wilder — who’d had a box-office flop with Kiss Me, Stupid, before making The Fortune Cookie — tried to console team owner Art Modell after the game.
“After my last picture, I know how Modell feels,” he said. “But he shouldn’t worry. There’ll be further disasters.”
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, Facebook, Twitter, Ohio.com and the HeldenFiles Online blog. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.