WHITE DOG
With Kristy McNichol, Paul Winfield, Burl Ives, Jameson Parker, Lynne Moody, and Marshall Thompson.
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When Jon Davison, the producer of Airplane!, was first assigned to the project, he reportedly didn’t want any part of it. Then he had the brilliant idea of assigning Fuller to the project. Fuller completely rewrote the script with Curtis Hanson, a friend of his who had already worked on one of the earliest drafts; apart from some of the characteristics of the dog Gary described and the white man who ran the animal training compound, all of the Gary book was jettisoned. Instead, the story focused on a white actress who finds the dog and a black animal trainer who tries to recondition him.
After the film was completed, it was briefly test-marketed, tampered with a bit but not significantly altered by the studio, released overseas, and then essentially shelved. Not long afterward Fuller moved to Europe, where he has lived and worked ever since. The move was understandable considering the studio treatment accorded his last two American pictures: four-hour and two-hour cuts of The Big Red One (1980), his magnum opus about his World War II experiences, were both discarded in favor of a drastically reworked version that wound up pleasing no one (although it is full of extraordinary and beautiful moments even in this form), while White Dog was never released domestically at all. Since Fuller’s move to Paris, apart from writing several novels and appearing in several films, he has written and directed three more features and one short film–a Patricia Highsmith adaptation for French TV that I haven’t seen–none of which has opened in the U.S. He is currently 79, and his chances of working again for an American studio are extremely slim, though he still harbors hopes that his original four-hour cut of The Big Red One might be restored, even if only for a French miniseries.
Another example of Fuller’s boldness occurs in an earlier sequence, when the dog breaks loose from his cage in the compound and, shortly afterward, chases a black man into the sanctuary of a church and kills him; the camera then cuts to a nearby stained-glass window of Saint Francis of Assisi. (What follows reveals some idiotic studio tampering in the version being shown here, involving redubbed lines as well as cuts in footage. Keys and Julie both turn up at the church; Keys incapacitates the dog with a knockout drug and then enters the sanctuary. In the original, shown on cable, Keys says to Julie when he emerges, “He killed a man–in a church! . . . I’m sure it’s not the first black man he’s killed.” In the release version, this line has been redubbed as “He attacked a black man. He’ll live. He’ll live.” Apparently the notion of a black man dying inside a church was deemed “too controversial” for the American public.)
