From the S&S archives:
The 'Fox' and the gapes

MOVIEMAKING is a pretty fascinating business; in any film company the range of characters is sure to include someone sexy, someone smart and someone sweet.

In the case of "After the Fox," — the sexy one was Maria Grazia Buccella, an Italian beauty in the well-packed "Bitter Rice" tradition.

The smart one was Broadway playwright Neil Simon, a slim, neat writer with three plays currently on Broadway: "Little Me," "Barefoot in the Park" and "The Odd Couple."

The bit of sugar — a bit browned by the sun, to be sure — as in the person of Britt Eklund.

As De Sica busily worked over a scene in the Sant' Angelo piazza, Simon, who did the "Fox" screenplay, relaxed in Tamiroff's personal chair and watched happily.

From the Bronx, Simon has been watching scenes in the works in show business since he was 16. A veteran of the TV "squirrel cage," Simon has penned scripts for Robert Q. Lewis, Tallulah Bankhead, Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and wrote his first play while under contract to Jerry Lewis.

"Originally I wanted to do a spoof on art films like `Hiroshima Mon Amour' or `Last Year at Marienbad' and the Antonioni movies, where people walk endlessly across the screen without seeming to have any purpose or direction. Soon the idea of a film-within-a-film developed, and before I knew it I had a suspense story, with a cops-and-robbers chase at the end."

Simon said he finds film technique a "bit different" from the stage mainly in that "you can only use about half the dialogue in a film you use in a play." He is already hard at work adapting "Barefoot in the Park" and "Little Me" to the screen and will remain in Italy until September working on them.

Simon, who sports a baseball cap with the monogram BSL for Broadway Show League, feels that last year's Broadway season was "very disastrous — only three shows hung on. It was just a lack of good plays, I think, and the fact that for a long time we've been depending on British imports and they didn't make it this time.

"Fiddling with the ticket prices won't be much help," Simon said. "Only good shows will help Broadway."

After 10 years work in television's rapidly changing world, Simon has little hope for any major improvement in TV fare. "It's bound to be more of the same old stuff ; you've got to turn TV shows out so quickly you don't have time to do a good job. For spot news and current events, TV can't be beat  — sorry, Mr. Newspaperman — but there isn't much room for quality stuff.

"Besides, any fantastic idea worthwhile quickly becomes fiction or a play — the rewards are so much greater than on TV.

"My next play? Don't want to talk about it. When I do I don't like what I hear myself saying. How to get into the theater writing business? Gosh, I don't know. There isn't any formula method. All I can say is if someone is good and ambitious, he'll make it."

AT THIS point De Sica shouted "Cut!" and a dark-haired beauty plopped down in the folding chair labeled "Sound."

"I just wish the tourists wouldn't stare so much when I walk on the street with Peter," said the brunette. "I can hear them whispering about his poor wife, that blonde Swedish girl, and Sellers already chasing someone else. I feel like pulling this wig off."

Britt Eklund (Mrs. Peter Sellers in real life, with a baby daughter to prove it) sprawled out in her chair, dodging behind the shade of an umbrella. "I just can't take this sun," she complained. "It hurts my eyes."

At a respectful distance a circle of tourists — mostly male — admired Miss Eklund's trim legs and neat face. She fluffed the realistic wig and said, "You know, just as soon as I put this thing on I feel Italian. I want to gesture and shout and try a bowl of pasta.

"1 feel so sorry at times for the poor German tourists — they're all so angry and displeased (male circle aforementioned not counting) about the way we've moved in and roughed up the buildings and taken over the beaches.

"And I feel terrible when I don't see the baby. I'm here on the set, except when we finish early which is never in the movie business, from dawn to sunset. And Peter and I only work together in fight scenes in the film — it's all so mixed up.

"I'll be glad to get out of here and get to Rome and then London so I can take off this wig and not get all those nasty looks from loyal housewives."

GETTING a few looks of her own was demure, willowy (except in the right places) Maria Grazia Buccella, former Miss Trento, Miss Venice, Miss Italy, Miss Europe, Miss Italy Cover Girl of 1965 and now "The Bikini Girl" in "After the Fox."

"She has a lot in common with Anita Ekberg and Jayne Mansfield," says director De Sica, adding hopefully, "and she can act, too." Sellers says, "She has a fine, er, sense of comedy — I think she has a fantastic, er, career in front of her."

The 23-year-old beauty got her start in films as many a sister-star ahead of her did — as a slave girl in "Rasputin." Her biggest film prior to "Fox" was "The Secret War," with Henry Fonda, Vittorio Gassman, Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan. At about the same time she made "War" she joined with Gassman and Virna Lisi in "A Virgin for the Prince."

Now, in "Fox," La Buccella becomes a plot pivot. The flackmen describe it this way:

"Her voluptuous figure is used as a foil by a gang of Egyptian gold thieves to distract truck drivers handling a gold bullion shipment worth $3 million. She appears on a highway clad in a scanty swimsuit. The drivers run off the road and the thieves make off with the gold. Later, when Sellers is hired to smuggle the bullion into Italy, `The Bikini Girl' again acts as a `front' and is so appealing he falls in love with her."

With her natural "attributes," Maria admits she has to take special precautions while walking in Rome. In charming, lightly accented English, she put it this way

"Ah, when I walk down the Via Veneto I must wear the dark glasses and a very straight — how do you say it, confusing? — dress. And I must put controls on my walk and step very straight and not do the movement. But the men they are so-charming? They make you feel so grand ...

"Could 1 really stop a truck in the bikini? In this bikini, well, it is extraordinary, you know? When we shoot that scene it will be what they say a covered — or do I mean closed? — set. Yes, I think I could at least pull on the brakes for a truck in this bikini."

The semicircle of admirers swayed slightly as she swept them with her blue eyes and took a deep breath.

"I'm so very happy to work with Mr. De Sica and Mr. Sellers; they are both so charming, and I do prefer comedy roles so much. Yes, I speak in English, but it is not so very good. I studied in school and with a private professor and by myself, but it is so difficult, the spelling and the pronouncing.

"I speak in English in this film, but my gestures are all Italian. I used to go to the movies to study my English, but I always went to sleep, which was not too safe," she said.

"Do I have a fiance? Ah, I don't know ..." And on that hopeful note she wandered off.