Hollywood is often an industry that thrives on perception. Despite how carefully executives, insiders, and the entertainers that work in the industry try to keep their images squeaky clean, scandals and Hollywood often go hand-in-hand. If anything, it's these sordid tales that often keeps the public so enthralled by Hollywood, adding a dimension that blurs the lines between fiction and reality, adding further intrigue and twists to plots that are already convoluted enough by themselves.
Occasionally, some tales of the utter depravity that occurs behind the scenes in Hollywood are more unbelievable than the films and stories the industry produces itself. The story behind the 1979 film Winter Kills is probably one of the most lurid of such tales to ever came out of Hollywood. In an industry known for using violence, drugs, gangsterism, and even murder to such good effect as fictional plot devices, this was a story where all of these things featured together — only they weren't a part of the movie, but plagued its production instead.
Winter Kills as a Concept
The movie was put into production by two men of ill repute. They were both famous (and infamous) for allegedly being large scale marijuana smugglers who had gotten pretty wealthy from this trade. The men, Robert Sterling and Leonard Goldberg, were also well known in the entertainment industry as the men behind the Emmanuelle softcore porn films.
However, for Winter Kills, they set their sights higher and sought to make a bigger budget film that featured A-listers. To their credit, the movie did feature Jeff Bridges as its lead, and by the time it was released, even had a cameo appearance in it by Elizabeth Taylor. The supporting cast was absolutely incredible, including Hollywood royalty John Huston (an iconic director and actor), the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune (of Akira Kurosawa fame), the wonderful Anthony Perkins (of Psycho fame), the famous Eli Wallach (of Westerns like The Magnificent Seven and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), and Sterling Hayden, a Hollywood golden boy notable for the masterpiece Johnny Guitar. The film's wild production, however, had much less Hollywood polish, and was filled with lasting controversy of a pretty disturbing nature.
The problems that beset this production were likely all traceable back to money. Goldberg had some pretty big plans for the film and employed some wishful, albeit creative, thinking to get the movie financed. Blogger John Fleming summed up the financing issues with Winter Kills by noting the following in a piece he wrote about the movie:
But they did not actually have the $6.5 million budget needed to make Winter Kills themselves. Leonard Goldberg believed that, if you borrowed a large enough amount of money, the debtors would have to let you finish the movie to ensure getting their money back. The problem was that the film went at least $4 million over budget and, at one point, the production manager had a sawn-off shotgun shoved under his chin until he paid for a generator.
The Mafia's Apparent Involvement
The production story of Winter Kills gets far more disturbing from there. The story goes that the financiers were actually the mafia and when costs began to soar, the movie was halted and even declared bankruptcy at one point. When the loans could not be repaid on time, all hell broke loose. In the middle of the production, Goldberg was found brutally murdered. His body was discovered handcuffed, and he had been shot in the head, apparently from a hit that the mob placed on him for failing to pay back the debt on time.
If that wasn't crazy enough, his partner Robert Sterling was later arrested and sentenced to forty years in prison for marijuana smuggling. Considering the fact that the movie had some pretty mainstream elements to it, was based on a famous book, and starred major actors, all of these side stories were obviously hugely controversial, and remain so to this day.
Of course, while much of the mafia's involvement in the production and the calamities that followed couldn't be conclusively proven, there are many documented cases of the mafia's involvement in Hollywood movies.
The Controversy Surrounding the Plot
Winter Kills was often hailed as a quirky or dark comedy, and a poignantly relevant conspiracy movie. It was based on a novel of the same named written by Richard Condon, a writer who gained fame by writing political books, many of which went on to become great movies, such as The Manchurian Candidate. Condon's style was generally known to be dryly satirical, but his books were often adapted into political thrillers.
Despite the comedic elements and outlandish nature of Winter Kills, the story was essentially a conspiratorial retelling of the assassination of President Kennedy. After all the delays and funding problems during production, the movie was halted indefinitely. This wasn't surprising since one of its chief producers was murdered, and the other was sent to prison.
It was eventually only released after its director, William Richert, and Jeff Bridges shot another movie in Germany just to make enough money to complete and release Winter Kills. However, its initial release was still nightmarish to say the least, and it was soon pulled from theaters by its distributor, Embassy Pictures.
It was later re-released but still faced controversy for its subject-matter, and there were apparent attempts to derail it from its inception. Richard Condon himself famously complained that the CIA and the Kennedy family were involved in trying to make sure the original book never got turned into a movie.
A Cult Following
Despite all the drama and controversy surrounding this one movie, Winter Kills often receives positive reviews in retrospect. However, many of these saw the movie as a hilarious take on a serious issue and most confined its plaudits to compliments for the comedic aspects of the film.
The movie was obviously a nightmare commercially, but has still built up quite a cult following for itself over the years. It will always be remembered for having one of the most disturbing and unbelievable backstories. After its re-release, the scenes with Elizabeth Taylor were added and the movie has since enjoyed a lot more success as a cult favorite.