Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s 9780520938885, 9780520245181

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
ROBERT BENTON THE NEW TRADITIONALIST
LARRY COHEN MANIC ENERGY
BLAKE EDWARDS JUMPING AROUND
WALTER HILL LAST MAN STANDING
RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA OUT OF INDIA
LAWRENCE KASDAN A HUMANIST IN HOLLYWOOD
ELMORE LEONARD THE HOT KID
PAUL MAZURSKY A MAP OF THE HEART
NANCY MEYERS LATE BLOOMER
JOHN MILIUS THE GOOD FIGHTS
FREDERIC RAPHAEL RENAISSANCE MAN
ALVIN SARGENT PURSUIT AND DESTINATION
DONALD E.WESTLAKE THE WORST HAPPENS
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
GENERAL INDEX
INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Citation preview

BACKSTORY 4

ALSO BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN AS AUTHOR

Cagney: The Actor as Auteur Robert Altman: Jumping off the Cliff George Cukor: A Double Life Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends Clint, the Life and Legend: A Biography of Clint Eastwood Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light AS EDITOR

Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s Six by Robert Riskin Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist (with Paul Buhle)

BACK

4

INTERVIEWS WITH SCREENWRITERS OF THE

1970S AND

1980S EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

PATRICK McGILLIGAN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California For acknowledgments of permissions, please see page ix. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Backstory 4 : interviews with screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s / edited and with an introduction by Patrick McGilligan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-21459-5 (cloth: alk. paper).—isbn 0-520-24518-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Screenwriters—California—Los Angeles—Interviews. I. Title: Backstory four. II. Title: Backstory 4. III. McGilligan, Patrick. pn1998.2.b345 2006 812
.5409—dc22 200501879 Manufactured in the United States of America 15 10

14 13 12 9 8 7 6

11 10 09 5 4 3 2

08 1

07

06

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

TO ALISON MORLEY, WILLIAM B.WINBURN, AND PETER "HOPPER" STONE, WHO, VOLUNTEERING THEIR TIME AND TALENT, HAVE ENHANCED THE BACKSTORY SERIES WITH THEIR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE WRITERS.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix 1

ROBERT BENTON THE NEW TRADITIONALIST

Interview by Christian Keathley

11

LARRY COHEN MANIC ENERGY

Interview by Patrick McGilligan

37

BLAKE EDWARDS JUMPING AROUND

Interview by Bill Krohn

83

WALTER HILL LAST MAN STANDING

Interview by Patrick McGilligan

102

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA OUT OF INDIA

Interview by Vincent LoBrutto

131

LAWRENCE KASDAN A HUMANIST IN HOLLYWOOD

Interview by Graham Fuller

160

ELMORE LEONARD THE HOT KID

Interview by Patrick McGilligan

195

PAUL MAZURSKY A MAP OF THE HEART

Interview by Nat Segaloff

222

NANCY MEYERS LATE BLOOMER

Interview by Fred Topel

262

JOHN MILIUS THE GOOD FIGHTS

Interview by Nat Segaloff

274

FREDERIC RAPHAEL RENAISSANCE MAN

Interview by John Baxter

317

ALVIN SARGENT PURSUIT AND DESTINATION

Interview by Patrick McGilligan

344

DONALD E.WESTLAKE THE WORST HAPPENS

Interview by Patrick McGilligan

367

Bibliographic Notes About the Contributors General Index Index of Films, Plays, and Books

389 397 399 415

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PERMISSIONS

The Robert Benton interview has been updated from its initial publication in Film Comment (January/February 1995). The Larry Cohen interview was published in Film International, no. 11 (2004). The Blake Edwards interview was originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma (March 2003) and is reprinted courtesy of editor in chief Jean-Michel Frodon. The Walter Hill interview was published in Film International, no. 12 (2004). The Lawrence Kasdan interview was first published in Projections #3: A Forum for Filmmakers (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) and is reprinted courtesy of Graham Fuller, Walter Donohoe, and Faber and Faber. The Elmore Leonard interview was initially published as “Get Dutch” in Film Comment (March/ April 1998). The Nancy Meyers interview was originally published in the October 2003 issue of Screenwriter’s Monthly and is reprinted courtesy of Fred Topel, editor in chief Chris Wehner, and the magazine. The Alvin Sargent interview was published in Film International, no. 5 (2003). An earlier version of the Donald E. Westlake interview was published in Sight & Sound (Autumn 1990). Thank you to Richard T. Jameson (Film Comment) and Michael Tapper (Film International) for occasionally publishing pieces and keeping me solvent.

IX

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PHOTOGRAPHS

William B. Winburn photographed Robert Benton, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Elmore Leonard, Frederic Raphael, Alvin Sargent, and Donald E. Westlake exclusively for Backstory 4. Peter “Hopper” Stone photographed Larry Cohen, Walter Hill, Lawrence Kasdan, and Paul Mazursky exclusively for Backstory 4. Use of stills from motion pictures produced by the following studios is gratefully acknowledged: Warner Bros. (Bonnie and Clyde, The Getaway, Private Benjamin); Tri-Star (Places in the Heart, Blind Date); 20th Century-Fox (An Unmarried Woman); Paramount (Darling Lili, Paper Moon, Ordinary People); United Artists (Apocalypse Now); Columbia/ Sony Pictures (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Howards End, Something’s Gotta Give); Universal (Conan the Barbarian); and Miramax (The Grifters, Jackie Brown). Other photographs courtesy of Larry Cohen, Walter Hill, Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, Larry Edmunds’ Bookshop, Photofest, and the author’s personal collection.

INTRODUCTION

here are now four Backstorys, and from the first volume they have offered a representative cross section of high achievers whose life stories—recounted in transcribed interviews that freewheel over craft and careers—constitute an informal history of screenwriting. The writer who got the earliest start, in Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of the Golden Age, was Lenore Coffee, who wrote her maiden picture when silence was golden: a twelve-page vehicle for Clara Kimball Young that was filmed shortly after World War I. But the vast majority of the writers in the first Backstory came to Hollywood with “talkies.” They were authors, playwrights, and newspaper reporters, women as well as men; a surprising percentage of women wrote scripts in every genre in the early sound era. Writing movies was initially a sideline for many of the writers, and they brought their disparate backgrounds and professional expertise to a medium that already knew how to tell stories with pictures but felt encumbered by words. Writing memorable stories and dialogue, grafting their ideas onto the groundwork of the silent generation, they, as much as the directors or producers, made a Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s. Only a small percentage bothered to try directing. The writer-director— sometimes called a “hyphenate” nowadays—was a rare creature before World War II and was still uncommon during the Vietnam War era.

T

1

2

INTRODUCTION

Though many writers traveled with regularity between New York and California, everyone in the first Backstory toiled under studio contract and under producers who supervised their progress. The imbalance of power between writers and producers—more urgent than that between writers and directors, which was a power struggle that emerged later—provoked the decade-long campaign to organize the Writers Guild. The Guild was officially recognized in 1941, but the fight over minimums, rights, and privileges has never really abated. Not counting remakes, Julius J. Epstein was the writer among the stellar group of Backstory 1 with the final screen credit, scoring an Oscar nomination for his last script, for Reuben, Reuben, in 1983. Only Richard Maibaum also lasted with credits into the 1980s. Coffee, Epstein, Maibaum, and the others—Charles Bennett, W. R. Burnett, Niven Busch, James M. Cain, Philip Dunne, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Norman Krasna, John Lee Mahin, Casey Robinson, Allan Scott, and Donald Ogden Stewart—have long since passed away. Epstein, among the youngest, outlived all the others; he was ninety-one when he died in the year 2000. Truly his death marked the passing of the Golden Age of screenwriting. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s boasted informative and provocative conversations with thirteen of the next generation of American screenwriters: that auspicious lineup included Leigh Brackett, Richard Brooks, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Garson Kanin, Dorothy Kingsley, Arthur Laurents, Ben Maddow, Daniel Mainwaring, Walter Reisch, Curt Siodmak, Stewart Stern, Daniel Taradash, and Philip Yordan. Even though two of the interview subjects launched themselves into film in the silent era, the Backstory 2 writers formed a more modern bunch. After World War II, Hollywood was especially open to newcomers and fresh ideas. Thanks to Billy Wilder and John Huston, there was a bigger crack in the door for writers who wished to direct their own scripts. Neorealism and European film styles cast a spell over the industry. Scripts began to explore psychology, racial barriers, and sexual tensions. Independent and autonomous production units blossomed. Studio careers became increasingly tenuous and fragile when, after World War II, the industry found itself under attack, from within and without, and weakened by antitrust decrees, the blacklist, television, the deaths of the top moguls, and a wave of corporate dissolutions and takeovers. Some scholars argue that the 1940s was a high point for American filmmaking, and others insist that the 1950s was equally bountiful and important. Dividing film into decades is a convenience for critics, and it has been

INTRODUCTION

3

a convenience for the Backstory series; the reasons some people are interviewed—and others not—are partly circumstantial, partly whimsical. Some are favorites of the editor or the contributors. Some have been approached and have refused all entreaties; some important screenwriters refuse any and all publicity. (For example, Barbara Turner, Carole Eastman, and Elaine May—who are known for writing the seminal films Petulia in 1968, Five Easy Pieces in 1970, and A New Leaf in 1971, respectively— among many other films in Elaine May’s case—would be on anyone’s list of intriguing candidates. All three are women, among the mere handful prominent in Hollywood at the beginning of the 1970s, yet there is no indepth interview on record with any of the three.) But back to Backstory 2, and the 1940s and 1950s; the subjects wrote some of the great films of that era. Comden and Green polished the musical to perfection. Leigh Brackett wrote fine Westerns (and later—launching the Star Wars series—one of the enduring science fantasy films). Along with Wilder and Huston, Richard Brooks helped set the standard for writerdirectors. By the dawn of the 1960s, however, the film business had become sorely fragmented—like society in general, one might say. The blacklist had destroyed careers and made social commentary risky. The studios were inclined toward bloated movies that cost too much to make and were viewed as old-fashioned. Audiences drifted away as more and more people stayed home to watch Bonanza for free on television. Hollywood seemed out of touch. There was indecision and disarray at the top of the executive ranks; at least two major studios were on life support. It was the worst and best of times for writers. True, the downsizing of the studios led to fewer big-budget opportunities and the elimination of the busy schedules and programs that had nurtured young writers. (“Live” and series television offered an alternative proving ground.) But there were all kinds of footholds and niches for clever newcomers. Charles B. Griffith was Roger Corman’s point man for the often outlandish science fiction, juvenile delinquent, and horror flicks, made on remarkably catchpenny budgets, for drive-in and teenage crowds. Richard Matheson also served time with Corman and graduated to Rod Serling and Steven Spielberg. Horton Foote wrote autobiographical chamber works—unheard of in the Golden Age— which evolved through workshops, Broadway productions, and television versions into a list of screen credits unlike any other. The old breed of contract writers smoked cigars and drank brandy. Some of the writers bursting onto the scene in the 1960s smoked marijuana while they drank their brandy. Younger writers were eager to be more explicit

4

INTRODUCTION

with sex, violence, and language, and increasingly they got away with it. Terry Southern breathed revolution into Hollywood by cowriting Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Easy Rider (1969), Candy (1968), and The Magic Christian (1969), the last two based on his own novels. Teaming up with Sam Peckinpah, Walon Green redefined epic Western style and substance in The Wild Bunch (1969), which was equal parts frontier history, myth, and political commentary. Ring Lardner Jr. astutely saw Korea as an allegory for Vietnam and had disillusioned members of the losing football squad passing a joint in M*A*S*H (1970). Lardner was actually a veteran who had weathered the blacklist; one of the Hollywood Ten, he had served time in “the joint.” Lardner became the only blacklisted writer to win Best Script Oscars before (for Woman of the Year in 1942) and after the blacklist (M*A*S*H). Yet if modernism was on the rise in films like Easy Rider and M*A*S*H, the classical approach was still valued, and there emerged classicists in comedy as well as drama. The top screenwriters of the 1960s managed to strike a balance between triedand-true script virtues and the changing times, and often they mingled comedy with their dramas. Jay Presson Allen, George Axelrod, Walter Bernstein (another returned blacklistee), John Michael Hayes, the Ravetches (Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.), Arnold Schulman, and Stirling Silliphant—along with Green, Griffith, Lardner, Matheson, and Southern—were the luminaries of Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s. The writers in Backstory 3 belong in the same pantheon as their Golden Age counterparts—except their careers were attenuated, if not by long forays into television, then by defeats or disillusionment. Some elected to live on the East Coast, or in Europe, for spells. Some chose lucrative script “doctoring” rather than suffer young, know-it-all producers. The desire among writers for more creative power led to credits on fewer films. It was typical for a Golden Age writer—Charles Bennett, W. R. Burnett, or John Lee Mahin—to amass upwards of forty credits, often shared with people they never had met. No one in Backstory 3 claimed more than thirty. The better films boasted better-than-ever scripts at the dawn of the 1970s, but even if Hollywood was fertile with opportunity, it was still, as ever, fraught with peril for writers.

The oldest writer in Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s was born in 1922; the youngest (two of them), in 1949.

INTRODUCTION

5

The oldest started writing scripts in the late 1940s, for B films and radio; another got started in “live” television; a third began with Westerns in the 1950s. A few found initial traction in the zeitgeist of the 1960s, with films like Darling (1965), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) that reflected their closer connection to young audiences. Two or three were still in college in the 1960s, taking film courses. One way or another, they all really got going in the 1970s. The ones in college in the 1960s—as well as the writers already seasoned with experience by 1970—brought to Hollywood a film sophistication about Hollywood. More than one of the writers interviewed in Backstory 4 speaks knowledgeably of Howard Hawks, John Ford, and other old-time auteurs. John Huston’s name recurs in anecdotes as a shining exemplar. When Hollywood regrouped in the 1970s, the names and faces changed in every branch of the industry. Up to this time the writer-director had been almost a novelty in Hollywood; partly because such a combination made life simpler for new-breed producers who were untutored in script development, the writer-director briefly became a rising force. Demanding to direct their own scripts proved the sophistication of post-1960s screenwriters. For the first time the majority of subjects in a Backstory book have directed as well as written the bulk of their films. The studios had transformed so dramatically by 1970 that the possibilities seemed wide open. Writers in this volume were able to function inside studio parameters with hitherto unheard-of independence. They also worked outside the studios, producing their own films, without penalty. They went to New York and Europe and kept careers rolling. They partnered with the hottest young directors of the era—Spielberg, Woody Allen, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Francis Coppola, and Robert Altman— while branching into directing on their own. They wrote Oscar winners. They wrote commercial hits. They wrote bracing personal films. In this informal grouping, they offer a snapshot of the profession in those fervent, exciting years. ROBERT BENTON was a leading exponent of the domestic New Wave. He moved, effortlessly it seemed, from the innovative Bonnie and Clyde and a number of scripts written with David Newman to directing his own classically styled, quintessentially American films. His writing-directing career, which started with the Western Bad Company (1972) but then found new momentum with the Altman-produced The Late Show in 1977, has included the much-praised Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979 and Places in the Heart in 1984; his work continues apace with, most recently in 2003, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. A Robert Benton film is reliably intelligent, humanistic, and rich with observed Americana.

6

INTRODUCTION

No less consistent is the work of the next writer, alphabetically. However, the films of LARRY COHEN are more likely to be offbeat to the point of outrageous, falling into and spilling over every conceivable genre. A nut about Hollywood since boyhood, Cohen specializes in turning formula expectations inside out. He goes back to salad days in “live” television; in the 1960s he was dreaming up television series and pitching film scripts to Alfred Hitchcock. He emerged, as a writer-director, first in “blaxploitation,” then, as truly one of a kind, the mastermind behind It’s Alive! (1974), God Told Me To (1977), The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (1977), Q (1982), The Stuff (1985), and other quirky—to put it mildly—films. He wrote the boxoffice success Phone Booth in 2002, capping a career going on fifty years. BLAKE EDWARDS has been sneaking up on us for almost sixty years. He was ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences until his honorary Oscar in 2004. He had to wait until 2002 for his Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Writers Guild. By now it should be clear that Edwards ranks with Wilder, Huston, and Brooks among the top writerdirectors of all time. He penned his first script in 1948 and had decent credits in the 1950s, when he also started to direct. But in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he produced substantial hits, as well as personal masterworks. From Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962) to the Pink Panther series and The Party (1968), from Wild Rovers (1971) to 10 (1979), S.O.B. (1981), Victor/Victoria (1982), and That’s Life! (1986), Edwards has had a stellar career. He has been too long underrated—except, perhaps, by the French, who have appreciated his genius since the 1960s. WALTER HILL started out, inconspicuously, as a second-unit director for Woody Allen; he became a writer as a means of self-expression and collaborated early on with Sam Peckinpah and John Huston. He made the leap into directing his own scripts with Hard Times in 1975. Nothing afforded moviegoers more pleasure, in the 1970s and 1980s, than the string of virile, elegiac films Hill made that followed: The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, and more. Hill talks about his remarkable body of work—including his two franchise hits, 48 HRS. and the Alien series—clearing the record about his life, career, and Hollywood. The equally impressive filmography of RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA has been achieved almost exclusively in close association with producer Ismael Merchant and director James Ivory. (There is a shorthand for their films: Merchant Ivory.) An accomplished novelist and short-story writer, Jhabvala wrote her first script for Merchant Ivory, based on her own book The Householder, in 1963. In the years since, while maintaining her fiction output, she has adapted Jane Austen, Jean Rhys, E. M. Forster, Evan S. Connell,

INTRODUCTION

7

and Kazuo Ishiguro, and three novels by Henry James, into Merchant Ivory films. Her constant output over the years, of witty, elegant, often period drama for mature audiences, has reached several climaxes. A Room with a View drew huge crowds in 1986, and Jhabvala garnered a Best Screenplay Oscar. This was followed by Howards End in 1991 (another Best Script Oscar) and Remains of the Day in 1993 (which garnered a Best Script nomination). If LAWRENCE KASDAN quit tomorrow, he would long be remembered for his contributions to three blockbusters: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) in the Star Wars series, and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first installment in the Indiana Jones saga. But he has also made thoughtful, personal films, achieving a rare degree of success with audiences and critics. Body Heat, his first as director in 1981, resurrected film noir. The Big Chill (1983) reflected on the sixties generation from a Yuppie point of view, while Grand Canyon (1991) tackled Los Angeles as a metaphor for the social disparities of the eighties. Silverado (1985) and Wyatt Earp (1994) were sprawling, appealing Westerns. The Accidental Tourist (1988) was a brave, faithful adaptation of Anne Tyler’s novel. Kasdan was part of the formidable, late-1970s bumper crop of writerdirectors, schooled in Hollywood and American history, and fascinated by social dysfunction—a group that also includes Barry Levinson, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone. ELMORE LEONARD wrote the book on social dysfunction—actually, more than forty of them, so far. The reigning grand master of crime fiction was an advertising man living in Detroit when, in the 1950s, he began churning out Western short stories. Some were published, bought, and filmed, leading him, a few years later, to try screenwriting himself. Leonard wrote original scripts for tough guys Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson and adapted one of his books for Burt Reynolds; but film work, truth to tell, was precarious and less satisfying than writing novels. And less lucrative, after Leonard’s novels really began to take off in sales and ritually get optioned by producers. Films of his books, like Get Shorty (1995), Out of Sight (1998), and Jackie Brown (1997), have markedly improved in recent years and established him as the elder statesman of hip in Hollywood—though he is an octogenarian who still lives in a suburb of Detroit. PAUL MAZURSKY started out as an actor in films like The Blackboard Jungle (1955), became a writer, initially for television (helping to create The Monkees series) and then crafting scripts for movies, finally blossoming as a director of his own scripts. Nowadays he has come full circle; you are likely to spot him playing character roles in television and films. Especially

8

INTRODUCTION

in the 1970s and 1980s, however, a new Paul Mazursky film was an event. Characteristically, they were “serious” movies that were also deeply funny; they took the pulse of Hollywood and America. Four times his scripts were nominated for Oscars, seven times for Writers Guild awards—winning only for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Perhaps, like Blake Edwards, Mazursky has been too much taken for granted. Along with Lawrence Kasdan the youngest screenwriter included in Backstory 4, NANCY MEYERS shares with Kasdan the fact that her first screen credit appeared in 1980: Private Benjamin, a Goldie Hawn vehicle. For almost two decades after their debut, Meyers and her husband, Charles Shyer, plied the romantic comedy tradition, often with Shyer directing their scripts, several times modernizing classic films of yesteryear. After divorce, Meyers struck out on her own as one of Hollywood’s still-rare female writer-directors. Like Nora Ephron, another late bloomer in that category, she has struck gold with critics and audiences, most recently with Something’s Gotta Give (2003), which brought Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson together in an irresistible over-fifty love story whose original script, especially in Keaton’s character, echoed Meyers’s own life. When, in 2003, Blockbuster Video in the United Kingdom surveyed more than six thousand customers, asking them to rank their favorite speeches in films, Robert Duvall’s soliloquy in 1979’s Apocalypse, Now (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning”) topped the poll, while Clint Eastwood’s intimidation of a bank robber in 1972’s Dirty Harry (“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’”) came in at number eight. Both speeches were written by JOHN MILIUS, who, when he is not working as a hired gun, also directs his own mythopoeic scripts, among them, so far, Dillinger (1973), The Wind and the Lion (1975), Big Wednesday (1978), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Red Dawn (1984), and Farewell to the King (1989). Although Milius is part of the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola circle, he relishes his image as an iconoclast and political dinosaur, even if that perception—as he says in his interview—hurts him in today’s Hollywood. FREDERIC RAPHAEL has proved that it is possible to have an admirable Hollywood career while living your entire life in England and Europe. From Two for the Road (1967) for Stanley Donen, and Darling and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) for John Schlesinger in the 1960s, to Daisy Miller (1974) for Peter Bogdanovich in the 1970s, and then, after much television work in between, Eyes Wide Shut for Stanley Kubrick in 1999, Raphael has been consistently literate and provocative as a writer of television and film scripts, while keeping up what interviewer John Baxter calls an “impressively full bibliography” of novels, plays, literary essays,

INTRODUCTION

9

Greek translations, original dramas, and miniseries for British television. Occasionally, he even directs. ALVIN SARGENT also went from acting to writing, from Variety to scripts first for television, then breaking into motion pictures with Gambit (1966). He has always been a class act, securing an Oscar nomination for his script for Paper Moon and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars for both Julia and Ordinary People—all in the 1970s. He has logged major credits in each of the last five decades, including the infrequent original script; but again and again Sargent has reaffirmed his reputation as one of Hollywood’s preeminent adaptors, often of plays or books, and most recently, in the case of Unfaithful (2002) or Spider-Man 2 (2004), remakes or sequels of earlier films. Elmore Leonard could argue with DONALD E. WESTLAKE over which of their best books have made the worst movies. But Westlake (and Richard Stark, one of his various noms de plume) has also had occasional good luck with screen adaptations of his novels, especially with Point Blank (1967), The Hot Rock (1972), and The Outfit (1974). Despite having more than eighty books under his belt, Westlake has dabbled in scriptwriting, sometimes disastrously, sometimes triumphantly—as in the case of The Stepfather (1987), which keeps spawning sequels, and The Grifters (1990), for which his script received an Oscar nomination. And, as with Leonard, producers keep buying Westlake’s books and trying to tailor them for the screen.

The economic boom that the 1990s ushered in dazzled all of America, including Hollywood. The times seemed especially flush for screenwriters. Writer-directors seemed to breed like rabbits. Joe Ezterhas set records at multimillion-dollar script auctions. Women suddenly returned in force, and black screenwriters, regrettably absent from one of America’s most segregated professions until the 1960s—and, even then, “blaxploitation” pictures were usually in the hands of white writer-directors like Larry Cohen—finally began to make modest inroads. The Writers Guild, flexing its muscles, even hoped that it might chip away at the director’s “possessory credit” (though the Guild is still fighting that fight). Plus ça change. By the year 2000, there emerged a new normal. The pictures being made by the major studios sadly seem all of a piece: recycled ideas, weak remakes, big-budget and high-concept yet homogenized entertainment. Writers’ stature and script prices have definitely dropped. Producers, obsessed with profits, have become more controlling; there are not

10

INTRODUCTION

the same possibilities for “skullduggery,” to borrow a word from Blake Edwards, that once there was. The niches for personal expression, as Walter Hill notes in his interview, have dwindled. Young writer-directors can find a sanctuary with smaller, independent films, but Hollywood writers, as always, have to trust in financing, an empathetic producer, fortitude, and chance. We are fortunate in Backstory 4 to have a baker’s dozen articulate survivors willing to ponder their profession and reminisce about the good old days—which are now the 1970s and 1980s.

INTERVIEW BY CHRISTIAN KEATHLEY

ROBERT BENTON THE NEW TRADITIONALIST

f the Cahiers criticism and New Wave films of the late fifties represent one of the cinema’s great avant-garde moments, then New York in the early sixties represents an equally important moment: the assimilation and popularization in America of French avantgardism in filmmaking and film criticism. Andrew Sarris’s ranking of American directors in Film Culture, Richard Roud’s organization of the first New York Film Festival, Peter Bogdanovich’s retrospectives of Hawks and Hitchcock at the Museum of Modern Art—assimilation of French cinematic sensibility was well under way in New York in the sixties, and Robert Benton was in the thick of it. During these years, Benton, along with David Newman, was responsible for a striking series of articles for Esquire magazine, many of them about movies, all of them partaking of movie culture. Particularly important to Benton was the reevaluation of much of Hollywood’s popular entertainment as being equivalent, or even superior, to what had been deemed cinematic high art. Indeed, Benton and Newman’s casual remark—in a caption—that Rio Bravo (1959) was “maybe one of the five best movies of all time” was a radical move. Like Lichtenstein’s comic strips or Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, it repositioned popular art as avant-garde art and upset the established boundaries between what counted and what did not. The transition from “about movies” to writing movies themselves is now the stuff of legend. Benton and Newman’s script for Bonnie and Clyde

I

11

12

ROBERT BENTON

ROBERT BENTON IN NEW YORK CITY, 2003. (PHOTO BY WILLIAM B. WINBURN.)

(1967) passed from François Truffaut to Jean-Luc Godard and finally to producer-star Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn, who made it into one of the handful of pivotal American films, thus completing the popularization of the nouvelle vague avant-garde by integrating its formal concerns into mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. In the early seventies, Benton made the leap to directing, and, in spite of the New Wave influence, his own filmmaking has become more classically American. His is a modest, self-effacing style—one that can easily be mistaken for no style at all by those without the eye for it. Kramer vs. Kramer could cop the 1979 Best Picture Oscar, and Benton the Best Director prize, but when it came to Editing and Cinematography, Benton’s style demanded a subtlety and precision that, when executed, was more (or rather less) than

ROBERT BENTON

13

many in Hollywood could see, blinded as they were by the smoke and mirrors of Apocalypse Now (1979) and All That Jazz (1979). Jerry Greenberg and Nestor Almendros delivered in these categories, but the Academy, unfortunately, did not. This modesty of approach serves Benton’s deepest commitment, which is not to visual stylishness or even plot but to character. Much of his richest work focuses on unexceptional people of the common class (often from his home state of Texas)—people past their prime, or people who never have reached their prime—who become exceptional in their efforts simply to maintain their lives and their connections to those around them. Benton is especially drawn to the drama and pathos of everyday life: not to the romance of falling in love but to the challenges of staying married (Nadine, 1987); not to winning the million-dollar lottery that sets you for life but to winning the thousand-dollar lottery that just gets you over the next hump (Nobody’s Fool, 1994). His work—including, most recently, Twilight (1998) and The Human Stain (2003)—is filled with situations that display his sensitivity to the most ordinary experiences of life, as well as with characters and relationships that confirm him as one of the warmest, most sympathetic and generous of contemporary filmmakers.

ROBERT BENTON (1932–)

1967 1970 1972

1977 1978 1979 1982 1984 1987 1988

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn). Co-script with David Newman. There Was a Crooked Man (Joseph L Mankiewicz). Co-script with David Newman. What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich). Co-script with David Newman and Buck Henry. Bad Company (Robert Benton). Director, co-script with David Newman. Oh! Calcutta! (Jacques Levy). Co-script. The Late Show (Robert Benton). Director, script. Superman (Richard Donner). Co-script with Mario Puzo, David Newman, and Leslie Newman. Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton). Director, script. Still of the Night (Robert Benton). Director, script. Places in the Heart (Robert Benton). Director, script. Nadine (Robert Benton). Director, script. The House on Carroll Street (Peter Yates). Executive producer.

14

ROBERT BENTON

1991 1994 1998 2003 2005

Billy Bathgate (Robert Benton). Director only. Nobody’s Fool (Robert Benton). Director, script. Twilight (Robert Benton). Director, co-script with Richard Russo. The Human Stain (Robert Benton). Director only. The Ice Harvest (Harold Ramis). Co-script with Richard Russo.

Published works include The In and Out Book (with Harvey Schmidt); Little Brother, No More (with Schmidt); The Worry Book (with Schmidt); Extremism: A Non-Book (with David Newman); and Don’t Ever Wish for a 7-Foot Bear (with his wife, Sally Rendigs). Plays include Oh, Calcutta! (contributions) and It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman! (with David Newman). Academy Award honors include the Best Adapted Screenplay for Kramer vs. Kramer and the Best Original Screenplay for Places in the Heart. Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay include Bonnie and Clyde, The Late Show, and Nobody’s Fool. Writers Guild honors include Best Written Drama and Best Written Screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde, Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen for What’s Up, Doc? and Best Adapted Drama for Kramer vs. Kramer. Best Script nominations have included Bad Company, The Late Show, Superman, and Places in the Heart. Benton also received the Ian McLellan Hunter Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1994.

Perhaps because I missed it, New York film culture in the early sixties is a time and place for which I feel a deep nostalgia. Tell me about it. Yes, that was a great time. I was talking to [Andrew] Sarris a couple of weeks ago and he was telling me about a friend of his, Eugene Archer, who had been a critic on a New York paper. Archer went off to Paris in the late fifties or early sixties, and he had a contract to do a book about six classic American directors: George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, John Huston . . . and I can’t remember the others. Well, according to Sarris, when Archer got to Paris and met the Cahiers people, he found out they didn’t like Huston; they loathed Zinnemann. All they were talking about were Hitchcock and Hawks. And Archer wrote Sarris in a panic, saying, “Who in the hell is Howard Hawks?” It was a time when the New Wave directors taught us to rethink American film. There was an absolute reversal of prevailing values. We found out

ROBERT BENTON

15

the directors we idolized—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol—were influenced by Hawks or Hitchcock or Don Siegel or Joseph H. Lewis. (When we were going to do Bonnie and Clyde with Truffaut, he had us watch Gun Crazy [1949] which we’d never seen, and Godard was in the audience.) It wasn’t just that there was a new way of looking at films—there was also a new way of talking about films. It wasn’t just about which ones you liked or disliked, but about the relationship of one film to the rest of the director’s—or actor’s, or cinematographer’s—work. It was the beginning of the auteur theory in America—and I’m not at all sure the effect of that has been benign. Anyway, people began to get the idea that there might be such a thing as film literacy. I remember one time Peter Bogdanovich saying to me that he had seen every American film worth seeing. And a huge amount of this we owe to Sarris, who was one of the few intelligent voices about film in those days. The other person who was important at the time was Dan Talbot, who had the New Yorker Theater, which was, except for the Museum of Modern Art, the only place that showed consistently interesting movies. And, if I remember rightly, he used to also have people lecturing on films. Do you remember Sarris’s ranking of American directors in Film Culture? Do I remember it?! I still have it. I can remember where I bought the copy. At Fifty-eighth and Madison there was a newsstand in an office building— the building no longer exists. I memorized a good deal of it. It was a turning point for us. For me, this reevaluation of American cinema was probably as important as the New Wave itself, because together they got rid of that traditional notion of what was high art in movies—largely meaning movies that had “important” subject matter. And now, because of Truffaut and Godard and Edgar Ulmer and Don Siegel, you could make a gangster movie that might be taken seriously. And the New York Film Festival started around this time. The New York Film Festival and Richard Roud, its first director, were a major part of what went on at that time. I remember you’d go to the festival and watch Feuillade or Buñuel or Bresson, or a movie like Ro.Go.Pa.G. [1963].1 You would watch every movie you could see because you might never see them again. Every year there would be a new Godard at the festival, and every year the critics—except for Vincent Canby—would hate it, and talk about how

16

ROBERT BENTON

great the last Godard was, and how sad it was that he’d lost his genius. Then the next year there would be another Godard and the critics would do the same thing—forgetting that the year before they had trashed the very picture they were now praising. Also around this time, and what must have surely been important for you, were the retrospectives of Hawks and Hitchcock at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Peter Bogdanovich. Yes. I had known Peter when I was art director at Esquire; Peter was doing various pieces about people in Hollywood. I’ll tell you a story. Because, at that time, Esquire was not that successful, and because none of us was paid very much, they gave us a lot of freedom, and we behaved like rowdy children trying to get attention. Any outrageous thing you could think of was considered. Well, every once in a while the lawyers would come back and say, “I’m sorry, that’s libelous. You can’t do that.” And it formed, I think, in both David [Newman] and in me, a kind of romantic notion connected to being bad children—and that’s irresistible. Movies don’t promote that. They can’t. They just cost too much money; too many people worry about too much. So to have worked at that time without that much risk was really great. Occasionally I have dreams that I’ve gone back to work at Esquire, and they’re not unpleasant dreams. Anyway, about this time, I was getting fired from my job as art director, but they very generously kept me on half salary for a couple of years, just doing ideas and being what was then called consulting editor. One of the best parts of working at Esquire was the collaborative nature of magazine work itself, and one of the best collaborations I had was with David, who was one of the editors—very bright and a wonderful writer. We were both addicted to movies, and we wasted many hours talking about movies when we should have been doing other work. In any case, we were reading a book by John Toland on John Dillinger [The Dillinger Days, New York: Random House, 1963], and there was a footnote about Bonnie and Clyde. And I had grown up with endless stories about them; my father had gone to their funeral . . . but that’s another story. By that point, we had seen The 400 Blows [1959], Shoot the Piano Player [1960], Breathless [1959]—and we decided to try and write an American New Wave movie about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. We didn’t know how to write a screenplay, so we were going to write an outline first, and then a treatment. And the day we were going to do the outline, Peter called up and said, “I’m doing the Hitchcock retrospective, and I’m screening Rope [1948] this afternoon.” So we worked from like ten

ROBERT BENTON

17

in the morning until two in the afternoon; at two we went to a private screening of Rope at the Museum of Modern Art; and then we went back and finished the outline that afternoon. I have a recollection that was in the late spring or early summer, and then we wrote the treatment through a good part of the summer. Eighty pages, full of camera directions. I’ve still got it somewhere. How many of those camera directions survived into the movie? I couldn’t answer that question. I think the spirit of what we wrote was there. In a sense, the descriptions of camera movement were less about the literal shot than the notion of the relationship of style to content. What about the opening shot—the close-up of Bonnie’s lips—which people often read as an homage to Citizen Kane [1941]? That we didn’t write. As we wrote it, in the first shot you saw this woman absolutely stark naked, standing in front of a mirror, putting on makeup— and then you never saw her nude again in the whole movie. But for one shot, like ten seconds, you saw this woman absolutely naked. The opening shot, as it is, the close-up of her lips, is Arthur [Penn]’s. I find it somewhat ironic, given your association with a certain kind of American cinema—the kind privileged by Sarris and auteurism—that if there was a review that “made” Bonnie and Clyde, it was Pauline Kael’s. Actually, Penelope Gilliat did the first positive review. Then Joe Morgenstern in Newsweek reversed his first review, which had been negative, and that was the real turning point for the picture. When was the last time you saw Bonnie and Clyde? Nineteen sixty-nine or ’70. Really? You’ve never stumbled across it on TV? If I have, I’ve turned it off. Not out of bitterness. I do that with any picture I’ve ever worked on. When they’re over, they’re done. I’m not interested in them any longer. Everyone likes to say, “What if Truffaut or Godard had directed Bonnie and Clyde?” But in fact it’s crucial that they didn’t.

18

ROBERT BENTON

AMERICAN NEW WAVE: FAYE DUNAWAY AND WARREN BEATTY (WITH MICHAEL J. POLLARD) IN BONNIE AND CLYDE , WRITTEN BY ROBERT BENTON AND DAVID NEWMAN.

Exactly right. Warren knew that. At the beginning we said, “What about Godard?” and Warren said that would have been a mistake. And he was right, it needed an American director. And I cannot imagine a better director than Arthur Penn to have done it. I watched Night Moves [1975], which Arthur directed, not long ago. It’s a brilliantly directed movie, in some ways maybe even more beautifully [directed] than Bonnie and Clyde. But the other thing I cannot overestimate is Warren; he was the guiding spirit of the film. After Bonnie and Clyde, you and David Newman were a hot property. Yet you had only one other original script produced—There Was a Crooked Man [1970]. What else did you do? We were put under contract to Warner Bros., and the first thing, which ended up being There Was a Crooked Man, was a prison picture we were writing for Don Siegel with the tentative title “Hell.” We decided to call it that so that when the picture opened, people could ask, “Where are you going tonight?” And you could answer, in all truthfulness, “I’m going to

ROBERT BENTON

19

Hell.” (Laughs.) Come to think of it, that probably says more about late adolescence on our part than movie writing. Why Don Siegel? He had made that great prison picture, Riot in Cell Block 11 [1954]. We loved Siegel’s movies. They’re simple and clear, and they never get fancy— just simple declarative sentences. I watched Charley Varrick [1973] again recently, and what’s extraordinary is that the film is utterly amoral at the level of content, but Siegel imposes a kind of morality through his style. You and Newman were often criticized for your films’ amorality. Yes, we were. But what we learned from people like Siegel is that the subject matter can be amoral, but the voice telling the story can be quite moral. Anyway, we wrote a very violent, very dark prison Western for Don Siegel, and the studio turned around and gave it to Joe Mankiewicz, one of the most literate and urbane directors in Hollywood. We had a wonderful year working with Joe—and he is the basis for the Big Joe character in Bad Company [1972]—but the picture ended up very different from the picture we started out to write. After that, we did a version of Choice Cuts, a book by [Pierre] Boileau and [Thomas] Narcejac, who wrote the books on which Vertigo and Diabolique were based. There was a string of writers on it before us, and an even longer string after us. The producer was Mel Ferrer. I remember he flew to New York and took us out to dinner, and he ordered a whole salmon. My mouth must have dropped open; I had never seen anybody order anything that cost more than fifteen dollars. And then when it came, he sent it back! (Laughs.) Anyway, we may have done it with some intelligence or not. It may have been a dreadful script. I don’t remember. I can’t remember anything except that damn salmon. Then we did “Hubba Hubba” for Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, a comedy set at a fictional Hollywood studio in 1941. And we had a great time. We wrote one draft, and they gave us a series of notes and asked us to cut ten pages. We then went away to the south of France—both families used to go to the south of France in the summer—and David and I would work in the morning and then go off and have lunch at the beach. It was a very wasteful and luxurious lifestyle. We were having such a good time that we ended up adding at least fifty pages to the script. That work was the most like Esquire that we’d had since leaving there. It was about anarchy. The climactic comedy scene took place in the studio executive’s office on Decem-

20

ROBERT BENTON

ber 7, 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor playing on the radio in the background. Now that’s sick! (Laughs.) I’ve always loved that script. And you did What’s Up, Doc? [1972] for Bogdanovich. Yes, and we worked very well with Peter, but we were pressed for time. I had to leave at a certain point and start work on Bad Company, so Buck Henry came in and did the final draft, and he pulled it together in a terrific way. From my point of view—and David might tell you different—an enormous amount of that movie is due to Buck Henry. •

•

•

How did the switch to directing come about? Doing There Was a Crooked Man, we were on the set all the time, which we weren’t on Bonnie and Clyde; and when we came back from the shoot, we both realized that we had a desire to direct. A friend of ours, Jean-Pierre Rassam, who is a producer in France, said to us, “Look, you guys should write two screenplays—because you’re valuable as a property together, not individually—and then make a deal to direct them.” So we wrote two screenplays together, one for David to direct, called “Floreanna,” about a German dentist with stainless-steel teeth living in the Galapagos Islands, and mine was Bad Company. Paramount called up and said, “We’re interested in Bad Company,” and I said, “Fine. I’m tied to it as director.” They said, “Let’s meet for a drink and talk about it.” And in the meeting, I sat there, waiting for the studio executive to say, “What makes you think you can direct?” (Laughs.) In which case I would’ve panicked and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” (Laughs.) I kept waiting for them to say no. Then they asked me to do a test, and so I called Bud Yorkin, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. They can’t tell anything from a test. I’ll tell you what to do. It’s a piece of cake. Just say yes.” On the way to the test, I kept thinking, this will teach me. Anyway, I got there, and after being on the set for an hour, I thought, “This is really what I want to do with my life.” And then, of course, I got scared they weren’t going to let me do it. But Stanley Jaffe—producer of Bad Company, and then later of Kramer vs. Kramer [1979]—did let me direct. I was earnest in those days, very, very earnest. At one point I insisted on screening My Darling Clementine [1946] for everyone, and then I dithered on for a good hour or so afterward. When I finally shut up, Howard Koch Jr., who was the assistant director,

ROBERT BENTON

21

said, “Why is it I’ve worked with three first-time directors and every one of them has shown me this movie?” (Laughs.) Bad Company has a very controlled style . . . Very controlled. Before I started the picture, someone said to me, “They always fire guys like you. The only way to protect yourself is to shoot the picture so minimally that no one can cut it except you.” So I did. I mean, not since Jean-Marie Straub has anyone shot in such a minimalist way. I didn’t find my voice as a director right away, not on Bad Company. On that film, I was a writer-director. There’s one scene in Bad Company where there was a director. That’s the scene where, after the young boy has been killed, and Barry Brown’s character has been wounded, two of the other boys, John Savage and Jerry Houser, are supposed to hold up a passing stagecoach and hitch a ride. And as it pulls away, Barry Brown and Jeff Bridges start throwing rocks at the stagecoach. I woke up that morning and decided to try it. I’d never done anything before that wasn’t on the page. And the actors responded to it instantly. It has a kind of life to it that I think nothing else in the picture has. The Late Show [1977] is much looser. That’s the influence of [Robert] Altman [who produced the film]. It’s also from seeing David [Newman]’s film The Crazy American Girl [1975].2 What he did there was much looser, and I thought, “David’s right. I should not have been so austere. I should have moved the camera. I shouldn’t have been so tight.” And Altman’s influence was enormous. Altman taught me to trust actors, taught me to just relax. And those actors—Art [Carney] and Lily [Tomlin]: I had the best actors in the world to trust. Still, to this day, my favorite line in the movie is Lily’s, when she gets out of the car with Bill Macy: “Not only is this car a toilet, but you are the attendant.” And it’s her line, not mine. I can remember falling down on my hands and knees and trying my best not to fuck up the take. And the doing of it was fun. I mean, we were tired, and no movie’s fun in that sense, but it was wonderful. It was also great to do a kind of sleazy genre movie. If I had to say what are my favorite movies, I guess I would say The Late Show and Places in the Heart [1984]. There was something about the sheer doing of them that was so satisfying. The first screening we had of The Late Show, the studio hated it, said it was unreleasable. One of the worst first screenings I’ve ever been to in my

22

ROBERT BENTON

life. And the guy who was head of the studio called me up, and we’re all sitting there ready to slit our wrists, and he says, “We all hate this movie. Every one of us. But there’s one young executive who likes it. Her name is Paula Weinstein. So we’ll turn it over to her and see if we can salvage it.” And Paula came in and worked and worked and worked, and she just wouldn’t give up on it. She was terrific. At first, the studio just gave it a perfunctory release in a few major cities, and it did so well that they had to rush it into broad release. Everybody in that movie is so good: Bill Macy, Eugene Roche, John Considine, Howard Duff . . . Howard Duff had been the original Sam Spade, on the radio. That’s why I picked him. It was to be—in my pipe dreams—the reverse of the beginning of The Maltese Falcon [1941]: Bogart gets killed and leaves Jerome Cowan to deal with the case. Altman got Howard Duff to do the role, and because he’d done that for me, I wanted him to do the lawyer in Kramer vs. Kramer. You’ve had wonderful insight in casting actors, many fairly early in their careers—Meryl Streep, John Malkovich, Ed Harris. I’ve had extraordinarily good luck. But there have been times when I’ve made dismal mistakes. When I was doing Bad Company, one of the leads was a fine young actor named Barry Brown [who played opposite Jeff Bridges]. We had conceived Bad Company in the spirit of those Anthony Mann Westerns with Jimmy Stewart and Arthur Kennedy; you know, where the men were friends when they were younger, probably on the wrong side of the law, but now one of them has gone straight and the other has remained a criminal. Well, I wanted to do a kind of prequel, a movie about those same men when they were young. So when I cast Barry, I was looking for a young Jimmy Stewart. However, when he showed up to talk about the picture, he started talking about Montgomery Clift. I kept saying “Jimmy Stewart.” He kept saying “Montgomery Clift.” So I went to David Newman and said, “Here’s the first important monologue the character has; write it so that if Daffy Duck did the part he would sound like Jimmy Stewart.” David did a wonderful job, and when I gave the pages to Barry, he read them and he said, “You’ve won.” Now, I used to think that was an amusing story, but the truth is, I never really gave him the proper chance. With hindsight, my guess is he was closer to being right than I was.

ROBERT BENTON

23

I really didn’t learn to trust actors until I worked with Altman. He once said, “The only real heroes in the movies are the actors. We sit safely behind the camera and make up lies, but they’re the ones who have to get up there and convince everyone that those lies are true. And if they spot a flaw in our logic, we’re foolish not to listen to them.” When we were preparing the courtroom scene in Kramer vs. Kramer, I asked Meryl to make some notes about her scene, play with it a little bit. She came in the next morning with three pages on a legal pad. I thought, “Uh-oh.” But I read it and it was wonderful. She played the scene brilliantly, and a lot of what’s there is hers. Those lines about, “I’m his mommy”—I could never have written that. Wasn’t there a time when you planned to do some work with Truffaut? I wouldn’t have the career I’ve had if it wasn’t for François Truffaut. First, it was his initial interest in Bonnie and Clyde that encouraged us to write the script; he spent several days going over the treatment with David and me, giving us the only lesson we ever got in screenwriting. Then, over the years, Truffaut and I talked about doing pictures together. At one point we considered doing a remake of Mildred Pierce [1945]; another time we did preliminary work on a film about Howard Hughes’s last days. And then, after The Late Show, Stanley Jaffe asked me to do Kramer, and I suggested that I write it for Truffaut to direct. Stanley was interested and so was Truffaut, but he was busy with something and Stanley didn’t want to wait, so he offered it to me. Kramer was the first film you made with Nestor Almendros, who was cinematographer on four of your films, and starting with Kramer, there’s a balance struck, stylistically, between the control of Bad Company and the looseness of The Late Show. I had been in Paris shortly before I started Bad Company, and I saw The Wild Child [1970], which is one of the films of his [Almendros’s] that I love most; I used the Vivaldi theme from it in Kramer. I called François afterward to tell him how much I loved the film and ended up spending most of the time talking about Nestor’s work. The relationship between a director and a cinematographer is critical. One of the many things Nestor taught me is the plan séquence, which is a moving medium shot that follows the scene in one shot. It’s not a conventional master—that is, it’s not a wide shot from a fixed position.

24

ROBERT BENTON

What is it that appeals to you about that strategy of shooting? Because so much of the pictures that I do is about performance, they, of necessity, deal with editing. And the thing about the plan séquence is that once in a while in the rhythm of a picture, you just let it go; you hold with just the sense of the shift in rhythm that is involved in the scene. Also, I like medium shots. It’s easy to make close-ups look pretty; same with long shots. Medium shots don’t usually look pretty, but they show a character and their environment. The characters aren’t isolated from it, they’re not overwhelmed by it: they’re in it. And what the medium shot does spatially, the plan séquence does rhythmically. I was reading Dudley Andrew’s biography of André Bazin [André Bazin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], and he connects Bazin’s aesthetic—which is related to the New Wave’s aesthetic, and to yours—to a Catholic philosophical tradition that privileges not imposing oneself, but instead adopts a posture of watching and listening. Precisely. You watch. You don’t impose yourself. Or you impose yourself only to the extent that you accept the fact that you’re selective in who you watch. You make the choice to watch this or that person, and not always at the significant moment. Most filmmakers today, it seems, think of style only in terms of imposing themselves. When I talk about stylistic content in movies, I don’t mean that kind of obvious visual stylization. There are some directors whose sense of style is that of an interior decorator. Style for someone like Don Siegel, on the other hand, is almost—and the emphasis is on almost—invisible, but it forms a kind of spine. That’s my idea of what I mean by style. I think movies should have the immediacy of handwriting, and the personal quality that handwriting has. And it should be direct in certain ways. You worked on the script of Superman [1978] before you did Kramer. Was it strange being a writer for hire again after having been a director? Actually, I worked on Superman—and I worked on only one draft—before I shot The Late Show. I was getting very little money to do The Late Show. And David and I got a call from [producers] Alexander and Ilya Salkind. They had a script that Mario Puzo had written, and they wanted a rewrite.

ROBERT BENTON

25

Ironically, they did not know that, in the sixties, David and I had written a musical called It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman! It opened in March of 1966 and closed a few months later. Anyway, the Salkinds wanted to do the same thing with Superman that they had done with the Musketeers movies, which was to shoot the picture and its sequel at the same time. So I worked on one draft, and then I went off to do The Late Show, and David and [his wife] Leslie did the rewrites and they wrote Superman II [1980]. When I finished The Late Show and was in Europe with my family on the press junket, I took my son, who was then about ten, to the studio in London where they were just then shooting the picture. And then I did Kramer, and Superman didn’t come out until after I finished that. After Kramer vs. Kramer, which had been a big critical and commercial success, you made Still of the Night [1982], and you went back to a story that you and David Newman had written years earlier. Why? I had made a commitment to United Artists to do that picture before I did Kramer, and I thought I had to honor that commitment. Also, part of almost every picture I’ve done has been a reaction to the film that immediately preceded it. I wanted to do something cold and analytic after Kramer. And Still of the Night was cold, it just wasn’t analytic. (Laughs.) There was just something at the writing level that I could never solve. Everyone focused on the references to Hitchcock, but in many ways it’s quite different from Hitchcock. For one thing, it’s a mystery, something Hitchcock never did. Yes. And it had a lot of Fritz Lang in it. Nestor and I watched Woman in the Window [1944] and Scarlet Street [1945]. And we watched some early Buñuel. And Chabrol. I love Claude Chabrol. But I think I just lost my footing on that picture. If you lose your footing in an early draft, it’s easy to stop and go back and find where you went off; but once you’re in the middle of shooting, it’s really difficult. The movie would’ve been a lot better if [the Meryl Streep character] had been the killer. I should’ve seen that you can make that kind of character deeply sympathetic. That’s what Chabrol does with Stéphane Audran. Just a static close-up of her lends a kind of moral weight to things, no matter who she’s playing. That ability to use an actor to anchor a film just by their presence is really something. I mean, what Bergman does with just a close-up of

26

ROBERT BENTON

Ingrid Thulin or Bibi Andersson in Wild Strawberries [1957] is extraordinary. And it has nothing to do with stardom; it has to do with knowing the power of certain faces. Your knowledge of film history is vast, and you’ve said that you often have models in mind when you work on a picture. For Bad Company it was the Mann-Stewart Westerns. For The Late Show it was Ride the High Country [1962] and The Big Sleep [1946]. For Still of the Night it was Hitchcock and Lang. What about for something like Places in the Heart? Places was unlike any other picture in that way. It started out to be a movie about my father and his two brothers and my grandfather—this family of bootleggers in this little town. Both my uncles were murdered, and one of them was accused of murder. And my father, on the other hand, was a kind of closet criminal. He worked for the phone company, but he came from this family where murder was a major topic of discussion. In counterbalance to all that, I had this subplot of this woman who was based on my great-grandmother, whose husband was killed. And whenever I started writing her, whatever she did was fine, and the other people were always contrived and clumsy. It was full of plot without plot being organic to character. After I’d done about three-quarters of the first draft, I got really disgusted with it, and went back and decided to take out everything without this woman in it. And suddenly the picture came to life. That had no model so far as I know. If there was any model, in some way because there were multiple plots, I suppose it was Nashville [1975]. I really loved Nashville. I loved those multiple plots, which I’m not very good at. The two plots in the movie—the main plot with Sally Field, and then the Ed Harris–Lindsay Crouse subplot—are hung together pretty loosely. I don’t feel that second plot is well connected. I originally had a third plot, and early on I was talking to Carol Littleton, the editor, and she said, “You know, these two plots replicate each other—why don’t you make them one character?” And I did, but I still don’t think I ever solved that second plot. I think I was really unwilling to let it be a simple story about this woman and the farm. It’s very arbitrary. I’ve always believed that structure is of vital importance. And I can see that the structure is one of the weakest parts of Places. Character is the strength there, and again, so much credit goes to the actors. Let me give you an example. During the rehearsals for Places in the

ROBERT BENTON

27

ROBERT BENTON WON AN OSCAR FOR HIS SCREENPLAY FOR PLACES IN THE HEART.

Heart, we were going over the scene in which the Sally Field character, Edna Spalding, is in her kitchen and she’s having a bath, and Mr. Will, the John Malkovich character, who is blind, comes in shouting at her about her children’s behavior. In the scene as written, he comes in, and at first she’s a bit embarrassed, even though she knows he can’t see her; then, when he starts criticizing her children, she lashes back in defense. When we were rehearsing, we had two chairs pushed together for Sally, as a mock bathtub. We ran through the scene several times and it looked good, but Malkovich asked, “Can we do it one more time?” Fine. So this time, at the end of the scene, John gestured wildly with his finger, so that his hand went down into the imaginary space of the water. Well, everybody got it at once. It added something marvelous to the scene, making it much richer than it was, because it added a further layer to John’s character and to these two characters’ relationship. And John’s performance of that moment, when Mr. Will realizes that Edna is naked, is just marvelous. As you have described the way you work, the emphasis on character over plot, your desire to work in a certain way with actors, suggests a very high degree of collaboration, especially with actors. Are some more naturally

28

ROBERT BENTON

collaborative than others? That is, do some have a lot of opinions while others just want to be told what to do? Oh, of course, but it depends on the actor’s style or temperament, and you can’t really draw conclusions about whether an actor’s any good or not based on their acting temperament. Nicole Kidman, for example, is very collaborative. She will say she’s not, that she just wants to be told what to do, but when you press her, if you push her, she will respond in a very good way. My early cut of the scene in The Human Stain when Faunia [Kidman] is with the ashes is far less good than the final cut, and that’s because I made Nicole come in and sit with me in front of the editing machine and talk about it. And she helped guide us through that scene and made it a lot better. When we were shooting Twilight, we had done several takes of one scene, and I wanted to make an adjustment on [Gene] Hackman’s side, and I went over to talk to him, and I can be a little long-winded, and finally Hackman stopped me and said, “You want me to do it better? Okay, I’ll do it better.” And he did! He did exactly what I wanted. •

•

•

How long have you been in New York? I came for the first time in 1951, and then I moved here in 1953. After fifty years, you must think of yourself as a New Yorker, yet you still have a strong link to Texas. With Nadine, you went back to Texas again. Well, I guess I have a feeling of displacement, of not being from one place or the other. It does an interesting thing to leave where you are and go someplace else. It’s interesting how that link to your original place gets broken, and then how it re-forms itself. And I guess I do that often through my films. David Mamet once told me that everything he’s written is drawn from something like a two-year period of his life. And I think I draw on Texas partly to find out something about that time that I didn’t really understand when I was growing up there. Nadine is a movie about family. There is something I find very moving—and I don’t mean that simply in a sentimental way—about family, particularly those artificial families that we all create. Not the families we’re born with, but the ones we choose. And more specifically, although it’s another genre picture, Nadine is about being married. The banalities of

ROBERT BENTON

29

married life are, for me, far more interesting and more poignant than the intensity of romance. There’s something I find deeply moving about ordinary life. For me, the most moving parts of Bonnie and Clyde are not when they shoot people, but their day-to-day lives: that they always had to get food from restaurants, or that they lived in their cars—the ordinary reality of their lives. The Rip Torn character in Nadine is in that wonderful tradition of comic, but very threatening villains, like Big Joe from Bad Company and Ronnie Birdwell from The Late Show. I really wanted him to be Altman. In fact, if I could’ve gotten Altman to play him, I would have really loved it. I’m not sure I could direct Altman. (Laughs.) But Rip Torn is terrific. Billy Bathgate [1991] was the first time you ever directed a picture you didn’t write. How did that come about? After Nadine, I spent two years trying to adapt a book called War in Val d’Orcia, which is set in Italy during World War II. Finally, I gave it up because I realized, some fifteen years after David and I tried to adapt Boileau and Narcejac, that I simply could not write European. I can only write from what I really know. I don’t know rich, I know poor. And I don’t know European, I know American. So Disney asked me if I wanted to direct something, and they offered Billy Bathgate. And I had loved [E. L.] Doctorow’s book. Tom Stoppard had adapted it already, and I’d admired his work for a long time, so I thought it would be a terrific opportunity because I wanted to get back to work. Were there any rewrites, once you were involved? There were some, and I was involved, but I was only “involved.” I wasn’t the writer. The ending changed from the novel. The last thirty or so pages of the book suddenly summarize a great span of years and bring us to the present. And Stoppard’s first draft included that, but all I could think of was actors turning up suddenly in wax and makeup. Also, Edgar’s book had great dialogue, but I should have had the brains never to do a movie with interior voice. You can’t do it. It created all kinds of point-of-view problems. Part of the problem with Billy Bathgate is that is a genre that’s owned by The Godfather [1972]. And nobody can do that kind of film without put-

30

ROBERT BENTON

ting yourself up against it, and that’s putting yourself up against one of the last great American masterpieces. I think of you primarily as a writer of original screenplays, but you’ve done several adaptations. Nobody’s Fool was another adaptation. Do you have a preference? Well, adapting a novel provides you with a narrative, and narrative is not my strong suit. An original screenplay offers great freedom, but then I struggle with narrative. It’s a real dilemma. How did you come to select Nobody’s Fool? Again, I had been working on another script, and I gave it to two friends whom I trust a good deal. Both said, “It’s never going to work.” And I knew they were right; I could spend the next year and make it okay, but never more than okay. So at that point, [producer] Arlene Donovan called to say that Scott Rudin had given her Richard Russo’s new book to read, and that he was interested in me directing. She had read it and loved it. I started reading it and I thought, “Uh-oh. . . . It’s set in a small town in upper New York state in the middle of winter . . .”And then it turns out a few pages later that it’s got two children, and then a few pages later, a dog. Each of these is bad enough, but you put them together and it promises to be a nightmare. I kept saying to myself, “No way . . . not a chance in hell. . . .” But I kept on reading. There was something about the characters, especially the main character, Sully, that I really loved. Finally, by the time I had finished, I knew that, in spite of the snow, and the children, and the dog, I was desperate to do the picture.I guess it’s kind of a variation on Kramer: it’s what if Ted had walked out instead of Joanna, and it’s twenty-five years later. I’ve read both the novel and your screenplay, and I’m curious how you went about the adaptation, the process of trimming the book down? The book is over five hundred pages long.Therefore, we know from the start that the movie could never approximate its complexity and richness. But a movie and a book are not the same and shouldn’t be expected to fill the same function. I’m aware that this isn’t a real answer to your question, and I don’t mean to avoid it, but to answer your question seriously I would have to presume a knowledge of both the book and the movie on the part of the readers, and then the patience on everybody’s part as I tried to explain why certain truly wonderful characters from the book never reached the screen.

ROBERT BENTON

31

That’s the long-form answer. The short form is this: I wrote and rewrote and rewrote. I’m a notorious rewriter, but I have never come close to rewriting a script as many times as I did this one. The second part of the answer is Richard Russo. Early on I asked for his help, and he was extraordinarily generous and helpful and smart. He understood that it was a movie and not a book, and that certain tough choices had to be made. Some of the best parts of the screenplay are Richard’s work; the movie would not have been half as good without his help. And in adapting this, I thought of it as a kind of Hawks movie. My model, in a way, was Only Angels Have Wings [1939], although this story was not about pilots, and it’s anything but a tropical country. But it’s about a community of men—and the one woman, the strong woman. So Hawks was my model, as he often is. I don’t have the sense of formal values to use Hitchcock as a model. I also think Hitchcock is a dangerous model to use. Whereas Hawks is like speaking Italian: he’s a forgiving model. But Hitchcock is like speaking French: you have to speak it so precisely. Truffaut, who understood him probably as well as or better than anybody, made some of his most grievous mistakes under the influence of Hitchcock. Hitchcock is like Picasso: he’s impossible to imitate. You can admire him and you can draw from him, but it’s dangerous. Do you storyboard? Yes, I do. Constantly. When I visited the set, your approach seemed to be to give [cinematographer] John Bailey an idea of what you wanted, and then he’d suggest several ways that it could be done. It seemed pretty loose. Right. The storyboards are not carved in stone. You have to adapt yourself to where you are, and we were shooting in someone’s home, not on a set, which would’ve been different. But basically, I storyboard everything in a crude way. You once said, earlier in your career, that because you started as a writer and your first instincts were perhaps as a writer, that you tended to solve problems by writing rather than directing. Is that still true? To some extent, yes. But it’s more complex now. I also start directing while I’m writing, and then during shooting I rewrite constantly, but that rewriting relates to directing. I rewrite as part of my way of working with the

32

ROBERT BENTON

actors, to make sure that the actors are comfortable with what we’re doing. This is also part of my style of working in general. I’m not someone who bludgeons actors into doing something a certain way. But I am good at trying to negotiate a solution that’s acceptable to me and to them, and I often negotiate through writing. Actors, I think, have to be able to walk into a scene comfortable enough that they can move around in the scene, and they are not caught in a kind of straitjacket. But even here, you aren’t always on the same page even when you think you are. When I showed Nobody’s Fool to Paul Newman, he looked at it and said, “I would have made a very different picture.” It was as though all the time we had been working, the picture he thought we were making, the one that was in his head, wasn’t the picture that I was shooting. And I thought, isn’t that interesting. Did he say how? No, he didn’t want to say how. But he was happy. Oh, he was very happy, and we’re very good friends. But other times when you think you’re absolutely of the same mind with an actor, it doesn’t work. There have been times—and I won’t name any—that it seemed the actor and I had great communication, yet what’s on the screen is lifeless, and I don’t know whose fault it is. It’s just like there are some great scripts that turn into lousy movies. When you wrote Twilight, you knew you were writing that for Paul Newman. Was that the first time you’ve written specifically for an actor in advance of filming? No, it wasn’t. I have often had a specific actor in mind. Of course, sometimes they ended up not doing the film for one reason or another. When I’m writing a script, I tack up photos of the actors I have in mind, and I always have to be able to look up and see those pictures. I don’t know how many of those people will end up in the film, but by looking at those pictures I hear the voice of the actor, I sense their presence. In the case of Nobody’s Fool, I said to [producers] Scott Rudin and Arlene Donovan, I want to do this project, but I want to do it only for Paul Newman. And they agreed to the point that we offered it to Paul before we told the studio. When I read the book, the first person I wanted to do it was

ROBERT BENTON

33

Paul. If Paul had said no, I would have been hard-pressed to do the picture. That’s who I saw so clearly. This approach says that you shape character to accommodate actor, not the other way around, which is the commonly perceived approach. Yes, and I simply don’t know how to do it the other way. I continue rewriting throughout filming in order to suit the actor, to accommodate the actor, and I mean that in the most creative sense. This is not a matter of acting ability, but of veracity. If you can use that stuff the actor has to make the character more believable, more whole—to bring the sense that they have a life and an existence beyond this specific film, this narrative—that’s also when the actor has the greatest sense of freedom to be able to be risk things. But what about when the actor you cast also brings this list of other characters that they have played and that the public already knows? When you did Twilight, the characters from Harper [1966] and Hud [1963] obviously inform Newman’s character, Harry Ross, in important ways. Yeah, absolutely. I looked at Harper a lot. I think Bill Goldman’s screenplay is wonderful. And The Drowning Pool [1976]. With Twilight, it was Harper as the past reference for Harry Ross, and for Nobody’s Fool, Hud was the past reference for Sully. These trailing personas can work for you, or against you. Here, though, Newman doesn’t just play on his own past in a superficial way, he brings it with him as a kind of weight. It brings depth to the character—again, in a way that suggests the fullness of a life beyond the movie you’re watching at the moment. Twilight was also the first time you had collaborated with someone since working with David Newman. Was it difficult to go back to working with someone? Well, Richard Russo wrote about four scenes for Nobody’s Fool, which are some of my favorite scenes. But Twilight was something we collaborated on from beginning to end. Everybody’s got a different voice. So a lot of it was Richard and me getting the voice down in sync, which we did by the end of it. It was a wonderful collaboration. Then we wrote a script called The Ice Harvest, which we adapted from a novel by Scott Phillips. But for complicated reasons, I decided I shouldn’t direct it. I decided to back away from it because I was aware that there was a kind of darkness in this material that I wasn’t able to do. I loved all the humor and I loved all the characters,

34

ROBERT BENTON

but I would have made a shift in it that I think probably wasn’t best for the material. This brings us back to the issue of adaptation. There are two basic ideas about adaptation, and they are summarized in Truffaut’s infamous essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” The first is that you borrow only the narrative, and the author’s voice is left behind.The idea here seems to be that what is specifically literary gets abandoned and is supposedly replaced by the specifically cinematic. This position was attacked by Truffaut. The second, which Truffaut espoused, is that you retain the author’s voice as much as you can, and it then intersects with and mingles with the director’s. If you think about it, it’s more like a theatrical notion of directing. Just as you go to see a specific director’s staging of a Shakespeare play, you go to see a specific director’s adaptation of a certain novelist. The two sensibilities intersect. How did this work with The Human Stain? Well, Nicholas Meyer wrote the adaptation of the novel, but beyond that step, of course, there is the voice that makes itself heard in directing. I tried as much as I could to keep the language, the voice—[Philip] Roth’s voice. Even throughout shooting, I kept going back to the book. But fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to think about it, there are always several voices in any film: the voices of the characters and their dialogue, the voices of the source material if any, the voice of the director, the voice of the narrative itself. Even if you are utterly faithful to a book, by virtue of where you erase— and you have to erase—then you are shifting the tone and altering the voice. My nature—and this might sound self-serving—is much sweeter than Roth’s. I am a religious Protestant, he is a secular Jew. Much as I admire him, these radically different sensibilities are bound to produce radically different senses of tonality, and I think that was where I changed the voice, and I guess I did something that I have sometimes condemned other people for doing: I substituted my voice for his. When you choose what to erase—and here I mean not just subplots or insignificant action, but perhaps leaving out bits of a scene that you have otherwise taken intact from the book—what guides you? Do you leave something out because you think it would come off as insincere or phony, because it’s not your sensibility, because you’re morally opposed to it? Take, for instance, the scene where Coleman Silk [Anthony Hopkins] picks up Faunia Farley [Nicole Kidman] and gives her a ride to the dairy the first

ROBERT BENTON

35

time. In the scene in the book, there’s a moment when she puts her leg up on the dashboard and lifts her skirt and she is exposed, and she catches him looking at her. Almost every line of dialogue from that scene, except for a few “ums” and “ahs,” is taken from the book. By erasing the moment where she flashes herself, I changed Roth. I did it because in a novel you can hold shifts like that. The area you can have where characters do not contradict themselves is broader in a novel than in a film, because a novel exists in your imagination and you can make shifts in tone more quickly. In the movie, I felt that if she puts her foot up on the dash and flashes, first of all I probably wouldn’t be able to show it, but more important, if I had been Coleman Silk, I would have stopped the car and made an excuse because I would have thought, “This woman is crazy.” I had room in the film to do only the love story; I didn’t have room for complications. Roth’s book is a very angry book, and mine is not an angry movie. I’m not opposed to anger, but I didn’t know how to make the anger work with the love story. Some other things gained by what we chose to erase. The films you’ve made are all very carefully structured, but they are structured in such a way as to foreground the characters, not the plot. We tend to think of rigid structure as favoring plot, not character. And we think of character-oriented films as being loosely structured. But yours are not this way. There are two models. In one, plot grows out of character. This is the Hawks model. In the other, character grows out of plot. This is the [Otto] Preminger model. When I do the architecture on a script of my own, I follow the Hawks approach. I do it so that character dictates narrative, and as the narrative goes along, the characters become more complex, and they don’t tell you where they’re going until they get there. I recently saw an interview in the New York Times with Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. They had been roommates when they were struggling actors in New York many years ago, and for the first time they were appearing in a film together, Runaway Jury [2003]. And the interviewer asked them, if you were starting out today, do you think you could have the kind of career that you’ve had. Hackman immediately said, “Absolutely not.” What about you? I agree. Definitely not. Movies have changed a great deal since I started, and they’ll continue to change. But I think we’re at the edge of a technological

36

ROBERT BENTON

revolution that will change the movies again. Digital filmmaking will change movies, making it so much less expensive, and what movies are about is going to change. It’s easy to see only the bad changes, but there are more changes to come, and I think many of those will be good.

NOTES 1

Ro.Go.Pa.G. is four short films combined into a feature by the directors whose names form the initials of its unusual title: Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti.

2

The Crazy American Girl was the first and only film directed by David Newman, written by him and his wife, Leslie. It was not released in the United States and is not listed in most reference books.

INTERVIEW BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN

LARRY COHEN MANIC ENERGY

Mr. Cohen has mined a career out of one simple question—what’s the worst that could happen?—which he answers with the stinging, compelling heat of the exploitation thriller. ELVIS MITCHELL, “LARRY COHEN’S ART OF PARANOIA,” NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 27, 2003

here’s no mistaking a Larry Cohen film. As writer and director he has accumulated a list of singularly offbeat credits for four decades, which includes Westerns, science fiction, “blaxploitation,” horror, suspense, and social satire. Often, he freely mixes one genre with another. His premises are eccentric bordering on bizarre. In God Told Me To (1976), a mysterious series of murders are connected to an alien from outer space who appears to people as God; in Q (1982), similarly ritual killings are linked to a giant flying serpent nesting on top of the Chrysler Building. Only in a Larry Cohen film would a new food product pushed by Madison Avenue drive consumers insane and literally devour their insides, as in The Stuff (1985). His stories are often simultaneously visceral horror and loopy comedy. He organizes the weirdest, most wonderful casts. The best (and worst) of his films are typically shot on cheap, fast schedules. “Manic energy” keeps the productions going and might also describe the man himself. Especially in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohen was working prolifically and with unusual autonomy, shrewdly trading off his scripts and bargain budgets for minimal interference. For his considerable cult following, in the United States and overseas (especially France), “un film de Larry Cohen” came to mean a genuinely unpredictable alternative to conventional studio fare.

T

37

38

LARRY COHEN

LARRY COHEN IN LOS ANGELES, 2003. (PHOTO BY PETER “HOPPER” STONE.)

Above all, his is a personal body of work, and Cohen has a fascinating life story, and a highly individual writing regimen, to go along with it. His long, amazing career started with “live” television in the late 1950s and reached a new peak, in 2003, with Phone Booth—directed from his script by Joel Schumacher—which scored a hit with both critics and audiences. LARRY COHEN (1938–)

1966

1969 1970 1972 1973 1974

Return of the Seven (Burt Kennedy). Script. I Deal in Danger (Walter Grauman). Script. Blade Rider, Revenge of the Indian Nations (edited compilation of Branded ). Co-script. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (Mark Robson). Co-script. Scream, Baby, Scream (Joseph Adler). Script, story. El Condor (John Guillermin). Co-script. Bone (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. Black Caesar (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. Hell up in Harlem (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. It’s Alive! (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script.

LARRY COHEN

1976 1977 1978 1979 1981 1982 1984

1985 1987

1988 1989 1990 1992 1993 1994 1996 1997

39

God Told Me To (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. It Lives Again (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. The American Success Company (William Richert). Co-script, story. Full Moon High (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. I, the Jury (Richard T. Heffron). Script. Q (Larry Cohen). Producer, director, script. Scandalous (Rob Cohen). Story. Special Effects (Larry Cohen). Director, script. Perfect Strangers (Larry Cohen). Director, script. The Stuff (Larry Cohen). Executive producer, director, script. Spies Like Us (John Landis). Actor. It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (Larry Cohen). Executive producer, director, script. Best Seller (John Flynn). Script. Deadly Illusion (Larry Cohen, William Tannen). Co-director, script. A Return to Salem’s Lot (Larry Cohen). Executive producer, director, co-script, story. Maniac Cop (William Lustig). Producer, script. The Wicked Stepmother (Larry Cohen). Executive producer, director, script. Maniac Cop 2 (William Lustig). Producer, script. The Ambulance (Larry Cohen). Director, script. Maniac Cop 3 (William Lustig, Joel Soisson). Producer, script. Guilty as Sin (Sidney Lumet). Script. Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara). Co-story. The Expert (William Lustig, Rick Avery). Co-script. Invasion of Privacy (Anthony Hickox). Script. Original Gangstas (Larry Cohen). Director only. Uncle Sam (William Lustig). Script. The Ex (Mark L. Lester). Co-script. Misbegotten (Mark L. Lester). Script.

40

LARRY COHEN

2003 2004

Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher). Script. Cellular (David R. Ellis). Story.

Television writing (and directing where noted) includes Kraft Playhouse (multiple “live” episodes in 1958–1960); Checkmate (“Nice Guys Finish Last” episode in 1960); Way Out (“False Face” episode of 1961–1962 season); U.S. Steel Hour (“The Golden Thirty” episode in 1961); The Defenders (multiple episodes for 1961–1962 season); The Nurses (multiple episodes for 1962–1963 season); The Fugitive (multiple episodes of 1963–1964 season); Espionage (multiple episodes of 1963–1964 season); Arrest and Travel (multiple episodes of 1963–1964 season); Never Too Young (creator of 1965 daytime soap opera); Branded (creator and producer of 1965 series); Blue Light (creator of 1966 series); The Invaders (creator of 1967 series); Coronet Blue (creator of 1967 series); Custer (creator of 1967 series); Cop Talk (creator of syndicated series); In Broad Daylight (script of 1971 telefilm); Cool Million (script of 1972 telefilm and creator of series of the same name); Griff (creator of 1973 series); Columbo: Any Old Port in a Storm (co-script of 1973 telefilm) and Columbo: Candidate for Crime (co-script of 1973 telefilm); Shootout in a One-Dog Town (story for 1974 telefilm); Columbo: An Exercise in Fatality (story for 1974 telefilm); Man on the Outside (script for 1975 telefilm); See China and Die (director and writer of 1980 telefilm); Women of San Quentin (co-story for 1983 telefilm); Desperado: Avalanche at Devil’s Ride (script of 1988 telefilm); As Good as Dead (director and writer of 1995 telefilm); The Invaders (1995 miniseries based on earlier series); Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct: Ice (script for 1996 telefilm); Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct: Heatwave (script for 1997 telefilm); and The Defenders: Choice of Evils (co-script and story of 1998 telefilm).

I’m assuming you grew up as a huge film fan. Oh, yes, indeed. I loved the movies. I had to see every movie that played. Did your family have any connection to show business? My grandfather had been a minstrel in traveling shows back at the turn of the century, and he’d actually been in blackface, and one of the end men. His brother was the other end man. Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo.1 Of course, I never saw any of these minstrel shows. His mother on her deathbed made him promise to give up show business. So the banjo went into the closet,

LARRY COHEN

41

and he never once again played it his whole life. I asked him a hundred times to play the banjo for me, but he wouldn’t take it out of the closet; it brought back too many painful memories, I think. But I heard about the minstrel shows and vaudeville from him and other members of the family. He played in vaudeville on a bill with Jimmy Durante, and toured the West and played in a saloon owned by Frank James, Jesse James’s brother. He had quite a few adventures in his early life but gave it all up by the time he was twenty-one and led a rather conventional life after that, running a gentleman’s furnishings store on 125th Street in what is today the heart of Harlem. In those days it was a fashionable white neighborhood. He liked to go to the track, he saw all the vaudeville shows and plays, but he never dabbled in show business again, and when my mother showed interest in being an actress, she was discouraged from doing so. Did you have any involvement with show business before you got into film? When I was young, still in my teens, I started performing a standup comedy act, and I performed in various venues. This was before comedy clubs existed. I used to play in the resorts in New Jersey and upstate New York in the summertime, and occasionally I did club dates in the city. I also sold jokes to comedians. I would frequent a Manhattan coffee shop, Hansen’s Drugstore, where all the comedians congregated. I used to hurry down there after high school and hang out on the corner with all the comics and sell them jokes. How much was the going rate? If I got ten dollars for a joke, I guess it was a lot. Sometimes they never paid you. One comedian and his manager, I recall, threatened to throw me out the eleventh-floor window if I asked for my money again. It was not financially rewarding, but it was great fun. What kind of standup did you do? Were you an angry comedian? Audiences at the resorts I played up north wanted typical comedy routines—traditional, old-fashioned jokes. In college I took my comedy from the news and did more sophisticated, satirical stuff. I performed all during the time I was in college. At CCNY—City College of New York—I was the resident emcee. Thursday afternoons between twelve and two there was a free period where people had clubs and groups that they went to, and I used

42

LARRY COHEN

to put on a show, almost every week, in Townsend Harris Auditorium. It was a full-hour variety revue with singers, a couple of comedy sketches, and an opening monologue. A brand-new program every week. Were you emceeing as well as producing? I emceed it and played the lead comic. My two sidekicks were Paul Kagan, who became the head of Paul Kagan Associates, which is probably the leading research company in media in America today; he was like Carl Reiner to my Sid Caesar. And there was another friend named Vic Ziegal, who became a famous sportswriter for the Daily News. He was my third banana. How did your film tastes influence what you were later inclined to write as stories? I don’t know what subconscious effect it had. I just know I really loved the movies and couldn’t wait until next week’s pictures came along. In those days we had double features, and there was a big Loew’s circuit in New York and an RKO circuit. The Loew’s theaters got all the MGM and Paramount movies, and the RKO circuit got the 20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros. movies. You knew where you had to go to see pictures from which studio, with which roster of stars. I particularly liked the Warner’s pictures, because they were the more hard-boiled, more aggressive movies. The actors all talked quickly, and they were the kind of actors I liked: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and Bette Davis. I suppose, when I look back, most of my favorite movies were directed by Michael Curtiz. No matter what the genre was, my God, it was directed by Curtiz. Whether it was a musical like Yankee Doodle Dandy [1942], or Casablanca [1942], or Captain Blood [1935], whether it was a crime melodrama or gangster movie, whatever I liked, there was Michael Curtiz’s name on the damn thing. How did writing figure into your ambitions? Or was it all writing, one way or another? From the time I was eight or nine years old, I was drawing my own comic books. I was a comic book aficionado, I suppose. I wish I still had my collection; my parents threw it out one year when I was away for the summer. I liked to draw my own comics, and they’d be as long as sixty-four pages, because in those days most comic books ran sixty-four pages in length. Mine were not silly comics; these were serious stories, sometimes anthological,

LARRY COHEN

43

crime-does-not-pay-type stories. Sometimes I’d create a superhero, but in general they were more realistic. They were like storyboards for movies. Was there a point at which you switched to short stories or plays? I did take a creative writing course at City College. I remember after I turned in my first assignment, the instructor called me in and said, “Where’d you copy this from?” I said, “I didn’t copy it. This is mine. I wrote it.” He said, “Don’t lie to me. I know you copied this from somewhere, and I’m going to allow you to drop the course without penalty, but I’m not going to allow you to steal stuff and bring it in here and pass it off as your own work.” I said, “Okay, if that’s the way you feel.” In truth, it was something that I alone had written, but it was just too damn good. He couldn’t believe that it came from someone in a freshman writing class. That’s the last writing class I took, ever. Was there a point at which you made a mental decision to switch to film writing—or to orient your career toward film? I guess I knew I wanted to do movies. Comic books were really movies. My thoughts were always involving movies. I knew every movie; I sometimes stayed and saw them twice. So I was studying how they were done. Of course, when I heard a movie was being filmed somewhere around New York City, I’d get over there and see if I could slip onto the set and watch them shoot. The first one I actually saw shooting, Martin Ritt was directing Edge of the City [1957], with Sidney Poitier. Then I heard Sidney Lumet was directing That Kind of Woman [1959], with Sophia Loren, and I went on that set. Later on, Hitchcock was doing North by Northwest [1959], and I followed him around New York to various locations and watched him in action. Were you mentally taking notes? I was letting it sink in. But most of my training came from sneaking into the NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza and watching them stage and block out live television programs. There wasn’t much in the way of security, and I was able to sneak into the RCA Building, when I was just out of high school. I usually walked past the page boy on duty in the lobby, with a script under my arm, like I was going someplace, and if he tried to stop me, I’d just say, “That’s okay,” and keep walking into the elevator. Nobody ever asked me what was “okay,” so I got away with it. After a while I went down there every week. I’d ride up to the ninth floor, then go down the fire stairs to the

44

LARRY COHEN

eighth floor to avoid any kind of security check, and then I’d find myself on the stage where they were rehearsing Robert Montgomery Presents or Philco Playhouse, and just spend the whole day hanging with the actors and the director and the floor manager. People saw me every week, so they thought I belonged there. I was there when they staged and shot Marty, with Rod Steiger, and The Middle of the Night, with E. G. Marshall and Eva Marie Saint, and I remember Robert Montgomery doing Appointment in Samarra. There were two programs that would rehearse every Sunday, and then on Wednesday if I could come back, I’d see them run through The Kraft Television Playhouse, or sometimes The Hallmark Hall of Fame, with assorted guest stars. One day, I remember, I spent watching Ginger Rogers doing three plays by Noël Coward, and I actually got very chummy with Trevor Howard, who was doing Brief Encounter opposite her.There was always only one guy who was very suspicious of me—he was the floor manager of the Robert Montgomery show—generally sizing me up in a very suspicious way, birddogging me around the studio, as if he was going to get me thrown out. He turned out to be Dominick Dunne, and when I run into him in New York nowadays, I always remind him,“You were the guy on Robert Montgomery who was always eyeing me suspiciously.”2 Were there any film studies courses at CCNY? I took the only courses they gave in film, which were documentary film courses. They didn’t have creative theatrical film courses, but you still learned how to edit and how to load a camera inside a black bag. I ended up majoring in documentary film. There were some good people teaching at the school, including a famous old surrealist filmmaker named Hans Richter.3 Most people think his films are kind of awful, but he was an émigré and some kind of celebrity, so they made him chairman of the department, though he had nothing to do with documentary films whatsoever. But they had an excellent teacher for editing, Gene Milford, who’d cut On the Waterfront [1954]. As far as the creative input, I didn’t really need much from them, because I already had no problem coming up with scripts or writing stories. Why was that? I could just do it, that’s all. It’s like someone who sits down at the piano and knows how to play, instinctively. I never thought twice about it. It was just something that came to me. Some kids were great playing baseball; other

LARRY COHEN

45

kids were great at playing the piano; some kids were terrific at math. Writing was just something that came naturally. •

•

•

How did you make the leap to writing professionally? I had to get a job to earn enough money to pay the rent, because I didn’t want to live at home anymore. So I took a job at NBC as a page boy, figuring maybe I’d make some contacts. At least I would be hanging around the same building that I used to sneak into. I just started writing sample scripts and going around to all the production companies in New York, trying to find out exactly what they were looking for. Then I went home and wrote scripts on spec and brought them back in. If they didn’t like them, I wouldn’t get upset about it; I’d just go write another one, and then another and come back again. Eventually I wore people down. They saw this poor kid working his ass off for free. I figured if I did it enough that somebody would feel guilty about it and give me a job. What was your first sale? Talent Associates asked me to write a half-hour sitcom for a series that was going to star Don Ameche and Tuesday Weld, but they never went on the air with the show. It was a $500 teleplay, never produced, but at least I had a sizable check that I could go home with and show my mother and father, and say, “Look, people are paying me to do this.” How did you teach yourself the television script format? Same as the comic books? Looking at samples and figuring out what was selling? I studied scripts—that’s all. It doesn’t take any real genius to master the form of writing a live television script. All that mattered was the content. Did you end up doing much live television? I did maybe a half dozen live shows before videotape was introduced, and that was the end of live television. Nobody wanted to risk doing anything live if they could do it on tape and perfect it. Live television was always peppered with errors. Actors made mistakes that went out over the air. You couldn’t do anything about it, because there was no going back for a second try.

46

LARRY COHEN

But there was a purity and excitement about live television, right? It was like a live performance on Broadway. The first thing I wrote that was actually aired was a Kraft Playhouse, which was odd, since I used to be a page boy on the Kraft program. We page boys used to look forward to Kraft, because we’d get to go into the studio and eat all the food that was used in the commercials after the show went off the air. In those days, every meal counted. I wrote this particular show, which was done in color from the Brooklyn Studio. It was actually an original, but based on the characters that Ed McBain had created in his books about the Eighty-seventh Precinct. He eventually wrote forty or more Eighty-seventh Precinct books, but at that time there was only one or two, and Kraft was interested in dramatizing one of them. They didn’t buy any existing book, they only bought the rights to use the characters, so I wrote a completely original teleplay about those characters, and NBC immediately put it on the air. I got $1,500 for that. This was my debut, and of course I quit the NBC page staff, and the local New York newspapers printed articles: “Page Boy Writes Teleplay,” and I got my picture in the papers. The second one I did was kind of a free adaptation of a book called Night Cry by William L. Stuart. This book had previously been adapted into an Otto Preminger movie called Where the Sidewalk Ends [1950], with Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, but apparently the producing company didn’t know that and wouldn’t believe me when I told them; it also had been done as a radio play on Suspense with Ray Milland. But my version was unlike any of the others. It starred Jack Klugman, and there was a small part in it, about a five-minute cameo role, that of a little blackmailing weasel who tries to shake a cop down—and the unknown actor who came in and played the role was so astonishing that everybody was taken with him. He was fabulous and stole the whole damn show. That was Peter Falk, making his television debut. After the telecast went off the air, we got phone calls from reporters and columnists who wanted to know who this actor was. Jack O’Brien in the Journal-American wrote a full column about Peter Falk. He was immediately signed to play a role in Murder, Inc. [1960], a movie in which he wore the same clothes and basically played the same character from my television show—and he got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. His career was off and running. That was my second show, so already I was making a little noise in the business. The live shows could always run long or short. The writer would have to be around for rehearsals, because there were always changes after the run-

LARRY COHEN

47

through—either to lengthen or shorten the script. You’d have to make adjustments, and that was good in a way, because it meant the writer had interplay with the actors and the director. I had a good time doing those shows. Was there anything you could do in live television, at this early stage of your career, that was personal or individual? I wrote more or less what I wanted to write. Did your move to the West Coast come after live television? After I did my first couple of shows, suddenly nothing was happening, and I was just not getting work. People asked me, “When is your next show coming on?” and I didn’t know what to tell them. I couldn’t go back to being a page boy again. It was embarrassing that I had had my shot and was now back on unemployment insurance. I decided to try California, thinking I’d be able to get into filmed television, which was already booming out there. I went out to Hollywood in late 1959 or early ’60, with a business card from this company called Talent Associates, for whom I’d done my Kraft Playhouse. I’d also gotten into developing specials for them. My job was to take old movies and transform them into live television remakes. We did things like remake Meet Me in St. Louis [1944], only with Jane Powell, Walter Pidgeon, Tab Hunter, Ed Wynn, and Patty Duke in the Margaret O’Brien role. It was a poor imitation of the Judy Garland movie that wasn’t onetenth as good, but they got it on the air, which was the whole idea. This was not what I wanted to do; I wanted to write my own stuff— another reason why I went out to the coast. When I got there, however, the agent who represented me at William Morris told me, “Oh, you’ve come at a very bad time. All the assignments are already gone.” I checked into the Montecito Hotel, in the heart of Hollywood, which housed all the actors, writers, and directors visiting from New York. It was a wonderful place to be, and the rent, believe it or not, was $150 a month, including maid service every day. Everybody there was from back East, and many of them were out in Hollywood for the first time. You’d meet them all at the pool. Brendan Behan, the famous Irish playwright, was there, and we became friends. Sydney Pollack was an assistant director working for John Frankenheimer. Martin Balsam was out there doing a movie called Psycho [1960], and he went ahead and told me the ending at the pool one day and ruined the picture for me. Paul Lukas, the famous Academy Award–winning actor from Watch on the Rhine [1943], was an old man, but he’d go out to the swim-

48

LARRY COHEN

ming pool, put on a bathing cap, and swim fifty laps, much to our amazement. Percy Kilbride from Ma and Pa Kettle was living in the hotel. Mel Brooks always seemed to be having a fight with someone at the front desk—perennially unhappy. Even Peter Falk turned up there, and of course there were a lot of beautiful girls around. Had you ever been to Hollywood before? No, and going to the studios was marvelous. The first Hollywood set I was ever on was a movie called The Sins of Rachel Cade [1961], starring Angie Dickinson and Peter Finch, at Warner Bros. Boy, was I thrilled when I walked out on that soundstage! Gordon Douglas was the director, and Peverell Marley was the director of photography [DP]. In my usual manner, as I had at NBC, I just wandered right into their midst, walked alongside the director, and butted my nose into all their business. Nobody knew who the hell I was, but they figured I must be associated with the studio. I remember Gordon Douglas walked over to the DP at one point, and they started discussing how they were going to block a scene. I edged in beside them, and when they were finished chatting, Gordon Douglas turned to me, and asked, “Is that okay with you?” He knew I was a gate-crasher, but he was kind. I had a good time at the studios, but I was in Hollywood for months, and no work materialized. After a while I moved into a place even cheaper than the Montecito Hotel, up the block—for $85 a month. I never did work. Finally, I left and flew back to New York and immediately got a call from the agency. Now that I was gone, Four Star wanted to buy a story of mine, but they didn’t want me to write the teleplay—I wasn’t experienced enough—they just wanted to buy the story for $350. So I took the $350, figuring it was better than nothing, and that was all I had to show for my first six or eight months in Hollywood. Returning to New York in abject defeat, I then was fortunate enough to sell a U.S. Steel Hour and a segment for a science fiction show called Way Out, which was hosted by Roald Dahl. My episode was called “False Face,” and Dick Smith did the makeup on it. It was a classic, which is remembered by a lot of people—particularly all the young makeup artists in the business today, who all started out buying Dick Smith Monster Makeup Kits, which featured the makeup he did on this “False Face” segment of mine. Teenagers bought the kit and practiced doing monster makeup at home. Everybody from Rick Baker on down started their career with that kit. I only did one episode, and the show rather quickly went off the air. But it was fun to have Roald Dahl appear and mention my name at the begin-

LARRY COHEN

49

ning. It was much like an Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Roald introduced each show. “Tonight’s show is by Larry Cohen . . .” he intoned in his British accent, and I was ecstatic. The Steel Hour was an autobiographical show about a boy who wants to be a comedian, and I was played in that one by no less than Keir Dullea— certainly not good casting, but he was a very nice guy. Henny Youngman played the comedian who steals my jokes. So I was working again, but as fate would have it, President Kennedy activated the reserves after the Berlin Wall was put up. I was in a reserve unit, so I was called to active duty and shipped down to Virginia, to a base near Williamsburg. Fortunately, I arrived around Christmastime, and they were preparing a Christmas pageant, so the chaplain got me to write the Christmas show and then kept me on to write his radio program. I ended up with an office in the chaplain’s section, and naturally I had a typewriter and free access to do whatever I wanted to do. Technically I was supposed to be a stevedore, but there was nothing for the recruits to do when they were called to service, so they just had them loading and unloading the very same ship every day. I figured, “That’s a bit monotonous,” and I’d rather be in the chaplain’s office writing a radio program. Eventually I started writing scripts for television programs. I sold one treatment to a series called The Defenders, which was the Emmy Award– winning, number one show with E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed, produced by Herbert Brodkin and supervised by Reginald Rose, who created the concept. The producers took a liking to me and allowed me to write, even though I was in the army, and they knew I could only get into New York on Fridays by going AWOL. I got on a plane early in the morning and flew into Manhattan from Virginia, had my meetings, spent the weekend in New York, and flew back to Virginia on Sunday night. And you didn’t get caught? I never did. So you wrote your first filmed television while in the army? Yes, and I kept doing it for the whole eight months. By the time I got out, I had a firm position as a writer on The Defenders. Wow!

50

LARRY COHEN

The same company, Herb Brodkin’s company, had The Nurses, and Espionage, and other programs which I could also write for, and all these shows were getting tremendous attention. So by the time I finally went back to Hollywood, I was a hot New York writer. •

•

•

When did you go back to Hollywood? Probably the following year—about ’63. By then I wanted to get a series of my own on the air. Which I soon did. Meanwhile, I wrote the first episode of Arrest and Trial—which was a ninety-minute series, forty-five minutes of the arrest and forty-five minutes of the trial—the prototype, really, for Law and Order. It was produced by Universal. My episode had James Whitmore as the guest star; Ben Gazzara played the lead in the show. Then I was asked by Walter Mirisch to come up with a way to make The Magnificent Seven [1960] into a weekly television series. I said, “Why don’t you just make another movie? It would be a terrific sequel, and a lot of people liked the picture.” Nobody remembered that the first one had been a flop. Nobody went to see the original Magnificent Seven. It actually never even got a downtown opening in New York; it opened in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Theater, then moved over to the Loew’s circuit and played for exactly four days, and then it was gone. It had gathered attention over the years, on television, because the actors who were in it eventually became stars. It was perceived as a hit movie, even though the critics had called it a second-rate imitation of the Kurosawa classic. Eventually I talked Walter Mirisch into calling Yul Brynner and seeing if he would do such a sequel. Yul Brynner said yes. Then Walter told me, “We can’t use the music because it’s been bought and used as the background for a Chevrolet commercial.” I said, “If you don’t use that music, Walter, then don’t make the picture, because there is no picture without the Magnificent Seven music.” Well, he again listened to me, and he got the music back, and oddly enough, Elmer Bernstein was nominated for an Academy Award for the sequel, not the original. Same exact music, though. Was that your first film sale? That was my first feature. How much control did you have over that script? Were you able to do what you wanted to do?

LARRY COHEN

51

No control. It took them years to get it made. We had a lot of directors come and go, though Yul Brynner stayed committed. At one time Irvin Kershner was eager to do it. In our meetings he was very rabbinical in his manner and examined everything—every detail he could question, he did. One time, we were sitting in the office with Walter Mirisch, discussing the picture, and he was nitpicking everything. Finally he looked over at me and said, “Why do there have to be seven?” That was it. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Walter looked at me, and we knew we had the wrong director for this picture. So they got rid of him, and eventually Burt Kennedy directed it—but not well. I never had any control on any picture until I started directing them myself. That’s the reason I started directing the pictures. To be perfectly honest, if I could have retained control of the pictures without having to direct them, I think I would have just written them and let somebody else direct. Directing is like factory labor. If people would simply do what you tell them to do, you wouldn’t have to be there every minute yourself. When a crew constructs a building, they follow the architect’s plans; the builders don’t go ahead and suddenly change the plans to suit themselves. In movies, you plan for months, but once they take it out on the soundstage, actors and directors decide to make changes without any thought of the consequences, or what the overall theme of the picture might be. Maybe it’s just on a whim. Maybe it’s the star, who is having a bad moment. Actors often have bad moments. They’re usually testing you, to see how much they can get away with, and if you don’t let them have their way, they may walk off the set—but generally they’re back within a few hours, or even a few minutes, and they do the scene your way. One picture I wrote—called El Condor [1970]—was an odd job, because the studio had decided not to make a picture, and they had canceled the film, but the sets had already been built over in Almería, Spain. Some genius thought, “Maybe we can make another picture using those same sets,” so they hired me to go to Spain and look at the scenery that had been built to see if I could come up with a story that would be filmable on those sets. If I could, then everybody’s job would be saved. I had an entire crew standing around waiting for me to come up with something. I did concoct a good story, and I quickly wrote it; everybody was happy. They put the picture into production, hiring Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef. As soon as I got back to Los Angeles, the studio execs phoned me and said, “Lee Van Cleef won’t get on the plane.” I asked why. They said, “Because he doesn’t like the part.” Alberto Grimaldi, who was the producer of many of Van Cleef’s spaghetti Westerns in Italy, had read the script and

52

LARRY COHEN

told Lee this would ruin his career. “People will laugh at you,” he was warned. I said, “Could you arrange for me to meet Van Cleef?” They arranged for us to meet in a restaurant, and when I got there, Lee was very hostile. I calmed him down. We exchanged a few jokes. And then he said the part was ludicrous, and that he was going to be ridiculed for playing it. I said, “But, Lee, it was written that way. It’s supposed to be funny. It’s a comedy role.” He said, “You mean it’s supposed to be that way?” I said, “Sure. This is a role like Humphrey Bogart played in The African Queen [1951]— a beaten-up old drunk.” He said, “Well, I didn’t realize that.” I said, “You’re going to get big laughs with his part.” He replied, “That’s great. How about if I play it without my toupee?” I said, “A fabulous idea!” The next thing you know, he was raring to get on that airplane. I realized early on that if you don’t give in to these actors, and if you resist them—explaining what’s right and what’s wrong—very often they will understand and go along with you. If you capitulate every time a star finds fault, then you’re not doing them a service either. You’ve got to stand up for what you believe in, and reason with them. If you have strong enough convictions, you may be able to sway them and save the movie from being destroyed. I soon realized, “Hey, you can actually work with actors and convince actors to play things your way. You should be directing movies!” In that period of time, between The Return of the Seven [1966] and Bone [1972], the first picture you directed, a period of time that is only six or seven years, were you experiencing a lot of frustration with what happened to your scripts? Well, I did a picture with Mark Robson called Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting [1969], which I cowrote with my friend Lorenzo Semple Jr. Lorenzo has had some big credits—like Papillon [1973] and Three Days of the Condor [1975]. I had first told this story to Alfred Hitchcock, when Universal set up a meeting between us at the St. Regis in New York, and Hitchcock was very taken with it. He swore he wanted to do it, but when I got back to California, the story department and executives at Universal talked him out of it. Lorenzo said, “Let’s write it together. We can do it in a week, and then we can bring it back to Hitchcock.” It turned out great, but when we took it back to Hitchcock, he said, “It’s marvelous, but you haven’t left anything for me to do.” Which meant we had worked out the whole picture without him, and he liked to be involved closely in developing a story. Hitch’s longtime associate Joan Harrison called me about wanting to produce the picture. She loved the script, and she was a wonderful woman,

LARRY COHEN

53

but she just didn’t have any financing, and then Mark Robson emerged. He had just directed Valley of the Dolls [1967] and made millions. He had some fine credits: he directed Champion [1949] with Kirk Douglas, The Harder They Fall [1956] with Humphrey Bogart, The Bridges at Toko-Ri [1954] with William Holden and Grace Kelly, Von Ryan’s Express [1969] with Sinatra. I thought, “Wow. He’ll do a good job.” But that’s not how it was. Mark Robson was a major disappointment. He didn’t change the script, hardly at all, but the picture was simply tepid, because the direction was so flat and the actors were poorly cast. It needed stars, and some directors need stars. Let’s face it: even Hitchcock was much better when he utilized stars. If you look at his pictures that don’t have stars, they lack the same sparkle. Look at Frenzy [1972] and think how much better it would have been if he had Michael Caine or Sean Connery in that picture, instead of the dull guy who played the lead [Jon Finch]. After that, I said to myself, “I’ve got to direct my own movies, because it’s a shame to see a great script go to waste.” In the meantime, I’d sold some television series. I’d been fortunate enough to cook up ideas that the networks bought and put on the air— some of them without even shooting a pilot. I started to get a reputation around Hollywood as a guy who could create television series that the networks would buy, based on the script alone. The first one was Branded— everyone remembers its theme song. I’d cooked up this idea of a cavalry officer who’d been court-martialed for cowardice, who’s got to try and redeem himself. My agent rushed me over to Goodson-Todman, who were a television producing company with a relationship with Procter & Gamble, who owned the 8:30 p.m. time period on NBC. In those days the sponsor controlled time periods. Procter & Gamble wanted a half-hour show and promised if we could get Chuck Connors, they’d buy the show based on a six-page treatment I’d written. We were scheduled to go on the air in about three months. It knocked everybody for a loop in Hollywood, because this doesn’t happen very often. I got that show on, and then I got a show on with Brodkin in New York called Coronet Blue, about a guy with amnesia—pretty much like the story of The Bourne Identity, which came much later—and then I got another show on called The Invaders at ABC, starring Roy Thinnes as a fellow who’s seen aliens land on earth and begins hunting them. So I had three television shows on the air. I was rolling. On the basis of the television shows and your filmed scripts, you must have achieved some financial independence by this point in your career.

54

LARRY COHEN

At that time I bought a great big mansion up in Coldwater Canyon, that had been built in 1929 by the Hearst family and formerly was owned by director Sam Fuller. I’d gotten married and had a couple of kids, and one day, after the Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting disaster, my wife bought me a director’s finder [viewfinder] and said, “I think you should go do what you really want to do, which is make your own movies.” •

•

•

How did you talk someone into letting you direct? Fortunately, I used my writing ability. I had the script for Bone, and I went to various producers and said, “Look, if you let me make the movie, I only need $85,000 to get started. If you don’t want to put up the rest of the money, you don’t have to, and if you don’t get your $85,000 back, I’ll write you a free screenplay.” Based on that assurance I got some money from Nick Vanoff, who was a television mogul—he had The Hollywood Palace and Hee-Haw. Nick never got his $85,000 back, but he never asked me to write the free script either, God bless him. A shrewd ploy. I hoped someone would take me up on that. How was your first directing experience? I didn’t have anyone supervising me. I didn’t have anyone looking over my shoulder. I could do anything I wanted to do. I was fortunate, on my first effort as a director, that I didn’t have to answer to anyone. The lower the budget, the less likely they are to watch you closely. Of course. In this particular case, the guy gave me the $85,000 and went away, and that was it. The producer was making so much money from The Hollywood Palace and Hee-Haw that he didn’t care. Most of my pictures have been low-budgets. The fact is, if I could get more money, I suppose I would take it, but I always took what was offered. We needed more money when we finished shooting Bone to complete the picture. I probably spent about $225,000 on the picture by the time we finished, but I found a distributor to pick up the back-end costs—the lab bill and the sound bill and paying off the equipment house. All along I was taking that risk, that someone would eventually buy the picture.

LARRY COHEN

55

When you directed for the first time, what worried you? Did you discover weaknesses as well as strengths, anything you hadn’t anticipated? I was just so happy to have the opportunity to do what I wanted to do. I found out that I enjoyed the actors and got a kick out of working with them and coming up with new things to keep them interested. I got a veteran cameraman named George Folsey, who had thirteen Academy Award nominations in his career, for pictures like Meet Me in St. Louis, Green Dolphin Street [1947], and The White Cliffs of Dover [1944]. He had been one of the big cameramen at MGM, and he brought with him a lot of his old cronies— elderly gentlemen who were now retired but still wanted to work. His son George Folsey Jr. was the camera operator and editor of the picture, and he went on to be producer of most of John Landis’s movies over the years. I had top-quality Hollywood talent supporting me. How did you then get into—I don’t know if it’s considered a pejorative term outside of Hollywood, and I don’t mean it that way—the “blaxploitation” trend? There was a black actor in Bone, Yaphet Kotto, and one of the people I showed the picture to was Sam Arkoff over at American International, who didn’t want to buy the film but who admired the performances. He called me up one day and said, “We’re looking to make some black movies, and you really know how to direct those black actors.”I said,“Well,I directed one black actor, and he was just like everybody else . . . but if you say so, Sam.” I happened to have an idea for a movie with a black cast, because Sammy Davis Jr.’s manager had hired me to come up with a movie in which Sammy could star,where he wouldn’t be a mere flunky to Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. I thought Sammy could play a small-time gangster in Harlem who rises to the top of the underworld and then crashes, very much like in the classics Little Caesar [1930] or Public Enemy [1931]. I called it Black Caesar [1973]. When it came time to get paid the $10,000 I was promised, Sammy Davis never came up with the money. He was having trouble with the Internal Revenue Service and couldn’t pay me. That’s how I wound up with the material, so when Sam Arkoff asked me for a black exploitation movie, I had a treatment in the trunk of the car and could make the deal with him on the spot. How many treatments do you have in the trunk of your car? Plenty! That one happened to be the right one at the right time.

56

LARRY COHEN

Did you feel any tension in this era, of being a white man in a black man’s genre? As I told you, I went to CCNY, which is in the middle of Harlem. During breaks in college, I collected rents for my father in Harlem, because he owned and managed some buildings there. So I was familiar with Harlem, and after all, being the grandson of a minstrel, what could be more apropos than to suddenly find yourself doing black movies? But during this period there was so much black protest and general political tension in the United States—at least outside the film industry. And in Hollywood, a lot of the early blaxploitation stars rose up to take complete control—acting as the writers and directors and producers, as well as stars, of their pictures. Like Fred Williamson, you mean, who starred in Black Caesar? Later, Fred went on to produce and direct a lot of his own movies. He used to tell people he learned all his techniques from me, and I would ask him not to repeat that. He didn’t shoot at all the way I did. He used three cameras going at once, doing the close-ups, medium shots, and reverses all at the same time. I always set up each individual coverage and spent a lot of time lighting each setup and working closely with the performers. Yet Fred must have made a dozen movies. Jim Brown, who ended up producing but not directing some of his movies, was another big fan of mine. I only directed him in one picture, but Jim’s a good, natural actor, who took direction well. The only problem I ever had with him was in regard to his teeth. In between words he would click his teeth somehow. It would be picked up on the sound track, and so we ended up having to go in and cut all those little clicks out of the track in order to make it usable. Jim Brown told me It’s Alive [1974] was the scariest movie he ever saw, so I enjoy being the guy that scared Jim Brown. A lot of people who have worked for me have gone on to make their own movies. I suppose I make it look so easy that they think they can do it, too. I don’t mean to harp on this, but there wasn’t the slightest black-white tension on the set? Nobody ever said a word. Even years later, when Orion did a reunion movie of all the black exploitation actors, called Original Gangstas [1996], they asked me to direct it. I said, “Well, you’ve got plenty of black directors now.

LARRY COHEN

57

You should get yourself one. It’s more appropriate.” But they insisted they wanted me, so I did it. And, once again, nobody said a word about me being white. Nary a hint of criticism. Starting with Bone, and then continuing on through the 1970s and 1980s, once you’ve been liberated from television and contract scripts, your originality shines through in offbeat, edgy, black-comedy films that are different from what you had done before. Were you feeling liberated? Absolutely. I was doing what few people can do, and that is have total control over a movie. I could come up with a crazy idea, as offbeat as it might be, and then I was allowed to execute the pictures without having to answer to anybody. That’s the most liberating and enjoyable part of the business. If I came up with an idea for a new scene, or wanted to change dialogue or a location, I could just do it. I didn’t have to call a meeting and have a bunch of people walk in and second-guess me. And the actors knew I had that power, and they were in awe of me. Was this quirkiness bottled up inside of you? God Told Me To, for example, is light-years from anything else you had done—not only different from other films in your own career but different from the rest of the American cinema. Was there always this genie inside of you, waiting to jump out? Yeah, I think so. Even when I was writing comic books as a kid, I was writing very eccentric stories—not the usual comic book stuff. When I got a chance to make my own movies, I figured, if you’re going to do your own film, don’t just copy somebody else’s movie, or make something in a traditional form that you’ve seen everyone else do. Was it more of an evolution than a leap? Maybe. I don’t know. I credit my subconscious for most of my work. I don’t think too much about what I write. An idea comes to me, and then I feel like I should write it, so I sit down and just let it go. I don’t work it out in advance. I don’t make a step outline of what’s going to happen. I like to let it evolve. I’m always looking forward to the next day’s work, so I can find out what happens to the characters. Do you have any philosophical framework that you use to guide you along—like, if you’re writing something horrifying, you have to be sure to add in some comedy?

58

LARRY COHEN

Comedy automatically seems part of my nature. I always see the humorous side of even the most bizarre happenstance. It just comes out automatically without me thinking about it. As I say, I don’t plan anything, and when we’re shooting the picture, things change automatically. You get to a location, and you find something in the location you hadn’t expected to see, and you make use of it. As the writer and director, I have the freedom to alter whatever I choose. If I want to write a little connective scene to move things from point A to point B, I can do it. I don’t have to call a writer to figure out how to make it work. I grab a pencil and paper and scribble a whole new scene and give it to the actors. Actors love it when you give them a scene written by hand, which they’ve seen you write in front of their eyes. Once you write a new scene for an actor, while he’s watching you do it, you more or less own that actor afterward. Often I find out something about an actor, personally, in the first couple of days of shooting the movie, and I say, “Oh, we’ve got to put this into the picture. We’ve got to add this to the script, because it’s something that could give a whole new depth to the character.” Like the first day I worked with Michael Moriarty on Q, I found out that he was listening to a tape recording of his own songs on a break. I learned that he played scat piano and wrote scat music. I said, “Okay, let’s change the character and make him a guy who dreams of playing in piano bars, and we’ll get an empty club and shoot a scene where he auditions for a job, and you can play one of your songs.” We canceled the next day’s shoot, and I got a club with a piano, and we shot that new scene. It gave a whole different aspect to the character he was playing, and it gave him a chance to do something he loved. And then you owned him! (Laughs.) After that, he’d do anything I asked, yeah. Are there pictures of yours—of the ones you wrote and directed in the 1970s and 1980s, in particular—that are more unadulterated accomplishments from your point of view, more Larry Cohen–type pictures, as opposed to others that might have been compromised in various ways? The ones I did myself were pure Larry Cohen, and the ones I worked on for other people were compromises—like I, The Jury [1982], which I worked on but didn’t direct, or finish directing, for one reason or another. Those certainly were compromises. There were occasional scripts that I sold over the years, like Best Seller [1987] and Guilty as Sin [1993], that were made into pretty decent movies, but they could have been a lot better.

LARRY COHEN

59

Let me ask you about a few specific titles—where the ideas came from, or your reflections on the films, how you feel about them today. It’s Alive? That’s one of my biggest hits, so it has a warm spot in my heart. I don’t know why I wrote that particular piece. It just came to me. I just thought, “Hey, what would happen if . . . ?” It was really an intense, painful, human drama about the disintegration of a family, and I kept the monster out of the picture most of the time and dealt with the characters. It was a monster movie where the people were more important than the monster. Were you writing it totally on spec? Totally on spec. I usually write on spec. Spec writing is my best writing, there’s no question about that, because whenever you’re writing for a studio you have to tell them the story before you write it, so you know before you start what is going to happen. It’s never as good as when it all just occurs as part of the process, and you’re so immersed in it you don’t have to think about it. I don’t like telling the story beforehand. I don’t like following an outline. To me, it’s like painting a picture by numbers. Nowadays some people think they absolutely must work from an outline. Certain schools will tell you that you should always work out an outline. But as I said, I never went to writing school. I just let it ooze out of my subconscious. I enjoy the experience of letting it happen. It’s like going to the movies. Tell me about God Told Me To. Same thing. Suddenly I was writing the damn thing. I don’t know what gave me the idea in the first place, but I found myself writing it. Once I got started, I wanted to see what would happen next. Certain things that were in the picture were not in the original script—like the St. Patrick’s Day parade. I would never write that into a script, because I could not guarantee that I’d actually be able to capture a scene like that on film. I shot the parade first, before we actually started the picture, way ahead of getting the financing; I spent money of my own to shoot that sequence, because I knew the parade was happening then and wouldn’t be repeated for another year. If I was going to capture that parade, I had to do it immediately. I got Andy Kaufman, who played the psycho cop, and I shot the scene with four camera crews on the run. Afterward I went out and raised the money, and because I knew I already had the scene, I added it to the script.

60

LARRY COHEN

Wasn’t it hard to raise money for a picture like that? I finally got the money from a couple of television producers, who gave me a minimal amount of money. Generally, I’ve found the best way to get money is to allow people to take tremendous advantage of you. If they give you short money and can get a lot in return for it, they have a tendency to do the deal. You’re being screwed, but you get to make the movie. I saw God Told Me To in Paris, where it was being advertised in big letters on the marquees as “Un film de Larry Cohen,” and, even though the version I saw was dubbed in French, I was blown away. Judging by the crowds, it must have been a big hit overseas. But my understanding is that it didn’t do well in America, perhaps because of poor distribution. It was picked up by Roger Corman’s company, New World, and it played in most major markets. But they never came up with a good ad campaign or TV spots in order to sell it. They didn’t know how to market the picture. Over the years it acquired its own following. It has a tremendous number of fans, and I get more requests for that movie from film festivals than anything else. That’s the one they’re always asking for, all over the world. Do you work hard, especially on a grim, horrifying subject like that, to come up with a hopeful or meaningful thematic statement at the end? Most of my pictures do have that. There’s something more than the basic ABC’s of a story. There’s an overall resonance. But I start with the characters and the situation. I put the characters in a gripping situation and learn where the story is going through self-discovery of the characters. And I wasn’t sure where the leading character in God Told Me To was going to go, when I started writing, that he would discover who he was, and that he was not going to be entirely human. I don’t consciously provide a theme or moral at the end. If that happens, then it happens. I don’t go out of my way to set that up. I allow the story to tell itself. The subconscious takes over. It’s automatic writing. The characters start to say their own lines and start to do what they want to do. I just let them go. Even if they don’t want to do what you originally thought they might do, let them alone and see where they take you. It’s amazing how little rewriting I do, after it’s all done. Sure, I have to clean it up a little, but, generally, in terms of the major beats of the story, it’s done. Tell me about The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover [1977].

LARRY COHEN

61

That was an entirely different process, because I did do a lot of research for that. For some reason, I just wanted to do that movie, because I liked FBI movies when I was a kid—pictures like The House on 92nd Street [1945]. Although yours is the ultimate anti-FBI movie. Yeah, right—the FBI movie to end all FBI movies. The reason I made that picture, probably more than any other reason, is that everybody told me I couldn’t do it. Every place I went, people said, “Oh, you can never make that picture; the FBI will never let you. Nobody will release the picture, nobody will finance the picture, and if you make it you’ll be setting yourself up for trouble, because look what the FBI did to people in Hollywood during the period of the blacklist”—which hadn’t been over for that long when I started out to make this picture, in ’76. And Mr. Hoover died in ’74. His own people were still basically running and managing the bureau. So it was a foolhardy adventure. It must have worked like an aphrodisiac on you, telling you what you couldn’t do. I had to put in a year of research. I went down to Washington, D.C., hired a guy from the New York Times’s Washington bureau to be an adviser, to get me into places and introduce me to people and take me in to interview former FBI executives who ordinarily wouldn’t talk to anyone. I was surprised by how many people did open up. We went up to William Sullivan’s house in New Hampshire—he was like the number three man in the bureau—and spent the night there at his house, sleeping in his son’s room; his wife fed us dinner, and he spent all night and all day giving us info he’d never told anybody before. The New York Times guy managed to get a couple of front-page stories out of it as well. I felt like we were doing investigative reporting, coming up with new information, although the most interesting revelation of the picture was pretty well ignored by everybody. Which was that Deep Throat, who was the informant for [Bob] Woodward and [Carl] Bernstein on Watergate, was really a top FBI executive, probably Clyde Tolson. We stated that at the end of the movie, but nobody picked up on it, or nobody wanted to. Certainly the press and the Washington Post didn’t. How could they acknowledge that their wonderful Pulitzer Prize–winning authors Woodward and Bernstein were simply conduits for the FBI, dutifully leaking information to the public? They’d rather they be thought of as crusading journalists, rather than as conduits of information purposely intended to damage the

62

LARRY COHEN

tottering Nixon administration. Twenty years later, Dan Rather, on CBS, identified Deep Throat as L. Patrick Gray, who was the successor to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and nobody made any comment; there was no ripple. But it wasn’t L. Patrick Gray at all. It was Clyde Tolson.4 I think that’s why Woodward and Bernstein used the appellation Deep Throat; they were making an inside joke—an allusion to Tolson’s alleged homosexuality. So they called him Deep Throat, obviously, instead of Cocksucker. A pretty funny joke for no one ever to have got. Nobody came close to getting it. And you were also writing that script on spec? Sure. Financing your own researches? Sure, and paying the Times guy a salary. Without any idea whether you could sell it? I always had that constant belief that I was going to get this picture made, one way or the other. Eventually I gave the script to Frank Yablans, who’d formerly been head of Paramount Pictures. He told me he loved the material. A month later I read in the Hollywood Reporter that Frank Yablans was producing a movie called The Secret American, based on a forthcoming book by Ladislas Farago, who wrote Patton [1970], and that it was going to star Marlon Brando as J. Edgar Hoover. I found out the book hadn’t even been written—not page one. It was an idea submission that had been given to a publisher, but now Yablans was announcing a feature movie on the same subject my script covered. He had access to all the information that I had researched so thoroughly. I was determined, then, that I wasn’t going to let this guy make this picture before me. All the more reason I had to go forward. I started my picture immediately—and as it turned out, Ladislas Farago never wrote his book on Hoover. I actually started The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover without the money to make the picture. I took the actors—Broderick Crawford, Dan Dailey, and a few others—down to Washington, D.C., with only enough cash to shoot for a week, and it was all my own money. We got the cast down there and started shooting. I was on the phone constantly, trying to

LARRY COHEN

63

raise some money, and, fortunately, my old pal Sam Arkoff came up with a little. But he misunderstood, or I misled him into believing that Rod Steiger was playing J. Edgar Hoover. I’d told him that it was an Academy Award– winning actor—and he assumed it was Steiger. I was trying to get Steiger; he was going to do it, and then all of a sudden he changed his mind and opted to do the life of W. C. Fields for Universal [W. C. Fields and Me, 1976]. That left me without a star, so I got Broderick Crawford, who looked just like J. Edgar Hoover, and who had won his Oscar for playing a political demagogue before, in All the King’s Men [1949]—in which he played a prototype of Huey Long. Later, when I told Sam it was Broderick Crawford, he moaned, “Oh my God, is he still alive?” It was a pretty amazing cast of veteran actors. Yes, we dressed the film up with an all-star cast. They were all mainly older actors whose greater days had passed. José Ferrer is a wonderful actor, and also an Oscar winner, but he was for hire. I loved the idea of all these actors, from Lloyd Nolan to Celeste Holm to Howard Da Silva, whom I had loved in movies for years, being in my picture. I loved the fact that I had good enough roles to attract them. I assume they shared the same political attitude toward J. Edgar Hoover. Well, Rip Torn, for one, was obsessed; he thought the FBI had been following him for years, and that they had a file on him. All he wanted me to do was to get him his file. But it turned out they didn’t have much on him— he found that out years later through the Freedom of Information Act. I’m sure he was broken up by the fact that the FBI never had any real interest in him at all. In general, do you exist outside the major studios? No, I take my scripts to the studios, and sometimes the studios make them. Warner Bros. made a bunch of them—six or seven. American International made five or six. I made one for MGM. We got distributed by New World for one. Those are all what I would call regular studio pictures. I made a few pictures that were outside the regular studio system, but they were for Hemdale, and John Daley is a major supplier. I wasn’t really part of the independent film realm, where little companies that hardly existed distributed the pictures. Mine were mostly funneled by major distributors into the theaters.

64

LARRY COHEN

Tell me about Q. Where did that idea come from? I kept staring at the Chrysler Building and saying to myself, “Well, the Chrysler Building should have a movie about it. Why should King Kong and the Empire State Building get all the attention, when the Chrysler Building is so much better looking?” The Chrysler Building definitely needed its own movie. I saw all those birdlike gargoyles on the sides of the towers at the Chrysler Building, and I told myself, “If a giant bird flew over New York City looking for a nest, it would certainly head directly for that feathered pinnacle that shines so brightly over the city in the reflection of the sun. Wait, wow, great! A giant bird living on top of the Chrysler Building—that sounds like fun . . .” The next thing was to figure out who the lead character would be: the small-time crook who knows the location of the nest and blackmails the city. I decided to create somebody from the lowest depths of the city, who finds himself at its highest pinnacle, at the top of the Chrysler Building below the needle. It seems like that might have been your highest-budgeted picture. No, it wasn’t. It was maybe $1.1 million. Possibly the Original Gangstas was the highest, at $3.6 million. Doesn’t the budget greatly influence the amount of time you are allowed to rehearse and shoot, or reshoot? I was always shooting long hours, but I preferred to shoot late anyway. I suppose if I had more luxury time, I would have done twelve hours instead of eighteen to twenty, and I would have shot for a few more weeks’ time, but I found shooting the exhausting hours and creating that kind of hysteria makes for a better movie. Everybody is so hyped up and crazed that the manic energy comes through on the screen. I like to create a momentum. Once I got people on a roll, and we got some excitement going, I just didn’t like stopping. I hated to stop for meals, and I hated to wrap for the day and to have to pick up the next morning in the same location. I wanted to shoot the day’s location out and not have to come back there again. You seem incredibly prolific—you seem to write and produce films much faster than most screenwriters. One of the reasons is that when I’m writing, I don’t know what’s going to happen next in the script, so I’m anxious to find out; I can’t wait to get back to work and start writing again. I’m anxious to see the rest of the story

LARRY COHEN

65

unfold. I’m the stenographer, the court reporter, who’s taking down what all the actors and characters are saying, and I’m enjoying it. And you’re always anxious to be on to the next one. I suppose when I finish one, then I want to get on to the next one because it’s always such a pleasurable experience. The best part of the whole process is the writing. That’s the joy. I think The Stuff must be your most bizarre, hilarious premise. It came from my realization that if you hype any fast food on television often enough, people will come and pay for it and eat it, no matter how awful it may be. American consumers are just being barraged with junk food that is doing them damage, shortening their lives, and, in the case of cigarettes, killing them. So I thought, “Let’s make a movie and deal with a real situation in terms of a monster spoof.” I think the company that made the picture really wanted more of a pure horror movie. I gave them a satire, so they were never too happy with the film; they wanted a scary picture that would make the audience scream and run out of the theater. But I thought the basic idea of The Stuff was so absurd that it could never really be sold as a pure horror movie—that it had to be sold as a horror movie with a sense of humor. Wasn’t that becoming increasingly true of almost everything you wrote? Yes, it became that way as time progressed. My films became more satirical in the second phase of my career. I don’t think that was true of God Told Me To or It’s Alive—which were more serious films. But then I got to the point of doing Q, and I enjoyed Q so much because of Michael Moriarty— that we made three more movies together—and in every one of them we managed to maintain the humorous undertone. Even in the remake, It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive [1987], there was a humor in the picture that we hadn’t attempted in the first two It’s Alive pictures. Maybe I’d become a happier person, or maybe it was the combination of me working with that particular actor. Did your rapport with Moriarty on Q lead directly to his casting in The Stuff, A Return to Salem’s Lot [1987], and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive? Yes. After Q I knew I wanted him in The Stuff. I met with some resistance from New World, which was financing it, and which was looking for a more

66

LARRY COHEN

traditional, good-looking, leading man. I finally convinced them to go with Moriarty. I got him a hairpiece—which he hated having to wear—but in the three pictures we did after Q he wore a different hairpiece, or a toupee of some kind, in every one of them. He would never wear the same hairpiece twice and always made me spend the money to buy him another one to punish me for making him wear it. Why was he the perfect lead for you? We were kindred spirits. He was into improvising on the set. Nothing intimidated him. He was perfectly in control and knew every line in the script—even everybody else’s lines. He was able to improvise new material, because in order to really improvise you have to know the written material cold, and be able to go off on riffs and then segue back into the main line of the dialogue and not lose continuity. I could talk to Michael while we were actually shooting, yelling things to him on the set in the middle of a scene between his lines. He’d hear me and wouldn’t even flicker an eyelash; instead, he’d pick up on what I was saying and start weaving that into the dialogue. Then we’d just excise my words from the sound track. You don’t hear me, but I’m goading him on—constantly feeding him ideas. He is a jazz pianist and very much a jazz actor. With him, you can make every take different. Was it always a battle to get him as your lead? Producers always wanted a conventional lead, and I’d end up making a few offers around, but luckily would get turned down, and then I’d go back and say, “Moriarty is the best one I can get, and he’s the one I really wanted.” •

•

•

I’d love to hear about The Wicked Stepmother [1989]. Was that written expressly for Bette Davis? Absolutely. I’d seen Bette Davis on some talk shows, and I felt compassion for her because everybody was willing to give her testimonial dinners and honors, but few were willing to offer her a job. It seemed to me she was on all these interview shows, hoping that if she exposed herself enough on television, that someone would see her and know she was still alive and offer her a film. She was a great star in her day, probably the number one female star in the history of talking pictures, and I loved Bette Davis movies.

LARRY COHEN

67

LARRY COHEN WITH BETTE DAVIS ON THE SET OF THE WICKED STEPMOTHER .

So I said to myself, “Why doesn’t someone just write her a script?” Well, I was in Hawaii at the time; I’d gone back to Hawaii to run my movie Island of the Alive for the people on the island of Kauai, that cooperated and helped make the picture—I had promised to bring the film back there and screen it for them. I rented a theater and showed the film to all of our friends who’d been so cooperative. While I was there I had a week in Hawaii with nothing to do, really, me and my tape recorder. I started walking up and down the beach, dictating, and suddenly Bette Davis was talking, and so was the Wicked Stepmother. The conceit of the movie was what would you do if you came home one day and found out that your elderly father had married Bette Davis; she had moved into your house and insisted on being called “Mom.” It was like The Man Who Came to Dinner [1941], only with Bette Davis as a witch. It was a takeoff on all the parts Bette Davis had played in her career. By the time I came back from Hawaii, I had a script. I had it typed up and made some corrections and sent it out to Bette Davis. It was promptly rejected—of course she never got to see it—it was dismissed by some agent she had, who probably never read the script. As a matter of fact, Bette later told me that the second time she rejected the script she did so because she

68

LARRY COHEN

had been told it was a horror movie. She just didn’t want to do a horror movie, so she didn’t read it. We made a third attempt to get her, never giving up, because after all, if I didn’t have Bette Davis, who was going to play the part? We finally got to Robert Osborne, who is now the host of Turner Classic Movies and is a columnist. He lived in the same building as Bette Davis and was an intimate friend of hers. He gave her the script as a favor. This time she read it. My phone rang—this very phone in the kitchen of my house—and a voice crackled over the line: “Is this Mr. Cohen?” I knew right away who it was. “Well,” she said, “you certainly gave me some laughs last night. I suppose you wrote this especially for me.” “Yes,” I said. “You can certainly see that.” Anyway, she invited me over to her apartment on Havenhurst in Hollywood, to meet her, and it all began. When I went to see her, I realized she was in terrible physical condition. She looked awful and was still recovering from several strokes and cancer operations. There had been tremendous weight loss. She walked with a limp. My agent, who accompanied me to the meeting, took me outside and grabbed me and said, “Are you out of your mind, even thinking of making a movie with this woman?” I said, “I guess so. If I was crazy enough to make a movie about J. Edgar Hoover, I’m crazy enough to make a movie with Bette Davis—even in this sad shape she’s in.” It was apparent to me that there weren’t many movies left in this poor woman’s life. This would probably be it. I’d written the script, and she wanted to do it, and damned if I wasn’t going ahead. I took a full-page ad in Variety and got some artwork done and a poster that said, “Bette Is Bad Again!” with a picture of her puffing away on one of the many cigarettes she would smoke in the movie. This woman smoked ten packs a day—two hundred Vantage cigarettes a day, I’m not kidding. We’d break open ten packs in the morning and put them in cups, so she wouldn’t have to reach into a pack with her hands and struggle to get a cigarette out; she didn’t like fumbling for them. When one cigarette was extinguished, the next was immediately in her mouth being lit. I said to her one day, “Bette, you know how bad it is for you—why do you insist on smoking?” She said, “Larry, if I didn’t have a cigarette in my hand, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.” Smoking was just part of her being. Anyway, we took the ad and waited for some response. Finally Robert Littman—agent and sometime producer—was able to talk his friends over at MGM into letting us make the movie for $2.5 million. Bette was to get $250,000 for her performance—and then we cast a lot of people that Bette

LARRY COHEN

69

suggested: she recommended Lionel Stander, who I thought was a wonderful suggestion, and approved of Barbara Carrera. I never had any problems with her during preproduction. We got along very well. She was always up at my house, hanging out, and I have cigarette burns on the furniture to prove it. I never repaired anything, because I like to point out, “That little burn there was caused by Bette Davis.” She loved the script and thought it was very funny, and naturally so, as it was written for her and was in her cadences. I captured her rhythms. There wasn’t much revision to the script, though she would come up with wardrobe ideas and constantly call me up on the phone. She wouldn’t say, “Hello Larry,” or any salutation; I’d just pick up the phone, and she’d start talking. “I think I should have red hair in this movie”—and bang, that was it, she’d hang up. She wouldn’t even say good-bye. She would just state her views and hang the phone up. I let her pick the person to design her clothes, and eventually we had an elaborate fashion show at Western Costume. I went over to see the clothes she was wearing. She modeled all seven or eight outfits for me, parading around a runway, doing pirouettes and turns. She was getting a great kick out of showing off for me with the $25,000 worth of clothes I’d bought her. Unfortunately, everything was black and looked the same. When it was all over, she asked, “Well, what do you think?” I said, “I think it all looks exactly the same. One outfit looks just like another. It’s so drab. Can’t we put a colored handkerchief here, a belt there, or a sash to brighten things up?” “Well!” Her eyes flashed, and that was the first time I saw it, that look of Jezebel, or the Virgin Queen. “Then we’ll just scrap everything and start all over again!” I said, “Oh, no, we won’t. Bette, we’ve already got this stuff and paid for it, so we’re going to use it—we’ll put handkerchiefs with it, sashes, a belt here, a pocket design there . . .” Bette just stood there and glared at me. I said, “Bette, you invited me here because you wanted my opinion, didn’t you?” “Yes,” she said. “Well, I’ve just given it to you.” That was it; she never said another word, and that was the end of it. After that, we got along much better. I bought her a beautiful little charm bracelet at Ralph Lauren for her birthday, and she wore it on the set regularly, and every time she showed up wearing the bracelet, she’d raise her arm and jiggle it, making sure that I saw she had it on. And she’d never leave the set during the rehearsal or the production without giving me my kiss good night. Even if she had wrapped, she’d wait around fifteen or twenty minutes until I was finished with what I was doing, and they’d tell

70

LARRY COHEN

me, “Miss Davis is still here. She wants to say good night.” I’d find her, and she’d give me that kiss, and only then she’d go home. I went out of my way to choreograph the film to her advantage. I directed her very specifically, trying to move her around the set in such a way that she wouldn’t look so disabled. I tried to walk her from one position to the other and move the camera at the same time, so you wouldn’t see the limp, and so she would seem more mobile. I even wanted to use a double a couple of times, which I eventually did, to make it appear as if she was walking very briskly across the room. That wasn’t her—but then when she turned around, of course we’d cut in and that would be Bette. But unfortunately she only worked a week, because she got sick. As it turned out, her problem had begun well before we started production, and it wasn’t anything involving her previous illnesses. She had a bad bridge in her mouth, and the denture cracked about four or five days before the production began. She and her assistant tried to glue it together, but it wouldn’t stay in place, so her bridge kept dislodging. But she would never tell me what was the matter. She would always try to push the bridge back into place with her tongue. I noticed that her line readings were very odd, because she’d take pauses in strange places while she tried to readjust her teeth. After the first week she looked at the dailies and saw what she was doing; then she announced that she had to rush off to New York City to see her dentist— the only one she trusted. So I shot around her for a week, waiting for her to come back; then her lawyer told me,“Well, she can’t come back, because they have to pull out four more teeth, rebuild the entire bridge . . .” and now she’s lost eight or ten pounds and she’s down to seventy-two pounds . . . Anyway, I went to MGM, and they said, “We’re going to have to close the picture down, and the insurance company will pay everybody off”— the entire production costs—which means everybody would have been paid their salary, including me, but the picture would be scrapped. But I said, “It’s a shame to throw away fifteen to twenty minutes of Bette Davis. She probably will never work again. This could be the last picture”—as it actually was—“maybe we could salvage the fifteen to twenty minutes. I could rewrite the story, so that instead of Bette Davis, who plays a witch who turns her cat into Barbara Carrera, Bette Davis could turn herself into Barbara Carrera, and Miss Carrera can finish the picture.” I convinced MGM that the picture was not going to make money in theaters, but it would probably sell a couple of units to every video store in the country, because all the video stores had Bette Davis sections. They’d all take a couple of videos, and that alone would make the picture profitable for MGM.

LARRY COHEN

71

Whatever rights they sold to television or unto perpetuity would just be money in the bank. The completion bond company and the insurance company agreed to kick in some money, so that MGM didn’t have the full exposure anymore, rather than take the total loss of paying off on the closure. For a while we’d contemplated getting a replacement for Bette—like Lucille Ball, for example, but poor Lucy was in the hospital at the time and soon died. They also talked about Carol Burnett. But I thought the best gamble was to use the Bette Davis footage because the video value of it was strong, even if the theatrical value wasn’t. And so we finished the picture. Did you ever see her again? Not directly. I spoke to her on the phone but never saw her in person again. When she heard we were shooting again without her, naturally the Jezebel side of her came out again, and she had to go on the attack. She wouldn’t admit that she had left because of the dental work; now she was telling everybody that she quit because of a disagreement with the director, and that I was ruining her performance. When the picture got close to opening, she went on Entertainment Tonight and attacked me on ET, and in the New York Times and the Post. Oh, dear. But it was all right, because most of the reporters who looked into it uncovered the true facts; they printed her version of it, and then they also printed the real story. I never said any words in my own defense. I never counterattacked. I never criticized Bette Davis. I thought she was a wonderfully courageous person, and I still do. She was fighting for her career; she was afraid that if people thought she’d left a movie for medical reasons, that no one would ever employ her again. Here she was virtually unemployable anyway, but she was afraid that a bad mark on her insurance record would mean that no one would ever hire her, and working was her life’s blood. If it meant attacking Larry Cohen, who’d been a good friend, so what? She knew I could take it, and I did. You know, the fact that she looked terrible wasn’t such a detriment to the film, because she was supposed to be a terrible old witch. If she could only have said the lines, it would have been a fairly good picture. But even the fifteen minutes that she did is marred by her inability to get the dialogue out. I would have preferred to give her a better farewell movie. It was

72

LARRY COHEN

unfortunate, but what we have, at least, is a testament to Bette Davis’s last performance, in that she was in there trying. I think the picture actually fares better when she’s not in it, because the other actors played their parts very well, and there’s some amusing stuff in the movie. •

•

•

It seems that after The Wicked Stepmother you took a step back from directing all your projects—that you directed less and were more content to simply sell your scripts in the 1990s. Was that a conscious decision? I know I did The Ambulance [1990] after The Wicked Stepmother, and I did a cable movie for the USA Channel called As Good as Dead [1995]. And then I did Original Gangstas for Orion. That’s still a bit of a slowdown, isn’t it? You know what happened? I got remarried, and I spent of lot of time with my wife, traveling, and having a good time, and enjoying my new marriage. When you go into making movies, of course that means long separations and tremendous hours of working on the set. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood to change my lifestyle and go back to that crazy, twenty-hoursa-day madness that I’d loved before. You said before that if they directed your scripts right, you wouldn’t have to direct them yourself; were they being directed better? No, they still didn’t direct my scripts right. I had Sidney Lumet direct Guilty as Sin, and he was one of my great heroes. I thought, “Oh, wow! Sidney Lumet!” I’d been on the set watching him direct Long Day’s Journey into Night [1962] with Katharine Hepburn. I’d been a huge fan. I was just overjoyed that he was doing Guilty as Sin. I thought we’d get a terrific cast and make a superb movie. I think he got discouraged, too, because they got basically a second-level cast—Rebecca DeMornay and Don Johnson were perfectly okay, but they were like the B team. We tried to get Paul Newman, who liked the script but thought himself too old for the part. Disney even sent it to Sean Connery. But Lumet ended up with Rebecca DeMornay and Don Johnson—and he didn’t have much enthusiasm for the picture after that. It wasn’t one of his better directing jobs. Strangely

LARRY COHEN

73

enough, it’s Lumet’s most successful film theatrically in the last seventeen or eighteen years. It was a pretty decent thriller, and it did tremendous business in the video stores. Best Seller I finally got made after seven or eight years of selling it to one company after another and having it not made. Eventually it got produced by Orion with Brian Dennehy and James Woods, who were good in the picture, but once again I felt that I was getting the B team. If Gene Hackman had played the lead, we might have done much more at the box office. Brian’s a wonderful actor, but he was never a movie star. A picture like that needed movie stars. I wrote it originally for Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster—that kind of combination. Were you originally hoping to direct it? Not with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster—my chances of getting to direct those two guys were pretty slim. But that’s the kind of casting I originally wanted, and actually I wasn’t too heartbroken when somebody else directed it. I’d had it for so long that I was delighted to finally see the picture going in front of the cameras, and delighted that it was being made at all. Were you intentionally writing more scripts on spec, accepting that you wouldn’t be directing as much? I always had plenty of scripts circulating that I hoped might lead to a directorial assignment, but I wasn’t going out like I had before, with J. Edgar Hoover and Q and so many of the others, where I just started making the picture without having any financing, throwing myself into the middle of chaos. You weren’t putting yourself so much out on a limb? I was married again and starting a different life. I was enjoying the fruits of marriage and travel and companionship. To be perfectly honest, one of the great attractions of making movies during the middle period of my life was the accessibility of women when you are directing a picture. You met a lot of girls, and you were the director, and everybody was all over you, and you were hyped up and crazed and fearless, and nobody ever said no. Everybody always agreed to anything you wanted on the set, as far as directing goes, and it seemed to carry over in your relationships with

74

LARRY COHEN

women. They were always there for you, and it was that period in our lifetime where the relationship between the sexes was so amicable; everybody seemed to get along so well in the late seventies and early eighties. This was before AIDS came along. People were having great times with each other. It was before women became quite as adversarial. So I’m happy that I’m out of that now, but I certainly enjoyed that particular period of making movies and making love and having a great time of it. •

•

•

A few questions about your writing habits: How do you write? Longhand? Typewriter? I heard you say that you sometimes dictate into a tape recorder. I started out my career writing on a typewriter for years. I wrote all my Defenders and early television and early features on the typewriter. When I was doing my World War II spy series Blue Light at Fox, I hurt my hand; I had to have a skin graft, and so I couldn’t use the typewriter for a while. I began dictating to secretaries. I had one secretary in the morning and another secretary in the afternoon, and I’d rotate two more secretaries the next day and just dictate the scripts. I found I was turning out a tremendous number of pages and getting to act all the parts and having a good time. I liked having an audience to perform for, and I knew if I had somebody in my office, I’d have to come up with material—I couldn’t just stare at the secretary, poised there with a pen. I was going so fast in those days that they couldn’t keep up with the pace. Sometimes they’d break down and cry—and I’d feel terrible. Then I switched over to a tape recorder, and for years I dictated into a tape recorder, usually walking around Central Park in New York, or walking around my house out here in California, keeping on my feet and dictating while moving around. I get so internalized with the writing that I forget how much time I’m putting in. I’m just caught up in the characters and the moment of the story. The time rushes by. Sometimes I can turn out twenty to twenty-five pages a day, dictating like crazy. That’s a pretty unusual technique. I enjoy it, and I still got to act the parts. I never got into a computer. In the last couple of years, just prior to Phone Booth, I started writing in long-

LARRY COHEN

75

hand. I take a pad—usually one of those composition books like you had when you were in public school—and I fill up those books, writing very rapidly in longhand. I felt the work was changing a bit; there was much less description—almost everything was being told in dialogue form. When I first started writing on a typewriter, the scripts were much longer; there was a lot of scene description, and a lot of background. Now I tend to let everything tell itself through the dialogue, which is much better, since many people don’t read anything but the dialogue anyhow, when they’re rushing through a script. Did your output slow down a little at the notebook stage? No. You’re limited a little bit by the speed at which you can write. Fortunately, I have a secretary now who can read my gibberish—and can transform it. With the writing in longhand, I can also go out to a public place; I can write in a coffee shop or in a park—anywhere I can find a place to sit down or have a table to lean on. I know people who take computers to Starbucks, to do their work. I understand: people like to see human life out of the corner of their eye and escape from the isolation of working at home all by themselves all the time. I don’t care. I can work at home. I can work outside. All I have to do is get started, and after a couple of minutes I’m hooked up to what I’m doing, and everything around me blurs out. When do you write? Regular hours? I write in my spare time, really. I don’t have any delegated period. I try to make myself available to my wife and my family—whatever they’re doing—and I always seem to find a few hours every day when I can get off to myself and do the writing. Unless I have a terrible deadline or some schedule that I have to meet. Years ago, when I was first married and had a bunch of kids, I never wanted to be the kind of father who was chasing the kids out of the office— and I didn’t want my wife saying, “Can’t you see your dad’s working?” and all that nonsense. So I didn’t work at all when the kids were home. I tried to spend the time with them. Then I’d wait until everybody went to bed at night, and I’d slip out around midnight or one o’clock in the morning and come downstairs and write until four or five in the morning, when no one was around. It was just great. No phone calls; no distractions; nothing but fighting the urge to go to sleep.

76

LARRY COHEN

What percentage of the time do you write on spec nowadays? Three out of four scripts? Easily more than that, even. Occasionally I get a good idea and go into the studios and pitch it a couple of times. Chances are if nobody buys it, I’ll still do it on spec. I go in with great hopes that I’ll get somebody to jump right in on the deal, but a project like Phone Booth, for example, could never be sold on a pitch—no one would believe it would work. How can you tell someone you’re going to set a movie in a phone booth and sustain it for a full-length picture? You may as well give them the finished script. •

•

•

Let’s talk about Phone Booth. I gather this picture started, a long time ago, with Alfred Hitchcock, with whom I take it you have a lengthy personal and professional relationship. You are a fan of his films, you watched him direct, and you tried to sell scripts to him. The first time I met with him I only talked to him about Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, and the second time I had lunch with him at the bungalow that he had at the Universal lot out here in Studio City—Universal City, they call it now. We had a three-and-a-half-hour lunch. Of course any kind of meeting with him was always very lengthy. He liked to talk. He was very generous with his anecdotes, very expressive with those great big hands moving around, gesturing—he talked with his hands. I remember he had this very strong handshake, and these big thumbs—good hands for a strangler. If those hands wrapped around your throat, boy! But he’d also get up and move around the room as he got into telling a story; he was surprisingly graceful, once he started talking about an idea. Suddenly this big man would get up and start moving with the grace of a ballet dancer. He got lost in himself, telling his story. It was something wonderful to see. During the course of the lunch we talked about many ideas. He quizzed me on a couple of things, asking, for example, “How would you handle a scene where someone is in a store where they sell antique china, and he’s being followed by spies, and he wants to get the attention of the police? What would you do in the scene that would be entertaining?” My suggestion was that he begin blatantly shoplifting in front of the staff and other customers; I could just see Cary Grant stuffing things into his pockets, doing double takes at people and smiling at them—knowing that someone is going to call the police because he’s a shoplifter. I thought that would be a perfect Hitchcock scene. That wasn’t Hitch’s solution. His solution was

LARRY COHEN

77

that the would-be victim should just start dropping pieces of china on the floor and breaking them, accidentally on purpose, until finally the shopkeeper calls the police. He used a variation of that in Topaz [1969], but unfortunately, the way he staged it in Topaz, it lacked any humor whatsoever; neither did the film have any humor. It was a terrible picture, and he was miserable making both Torn Curtain [1966] and Topaz; Joan Harrison told me that. I was trying to get him to do a story called “Frenzy,” which was not the Frenzy eventually made into the movie we all saw but another “Frenzy,” which had an entirely different story, about a famous Broadway actress whose son is a psychopathic killer of young women. He had told me the whole story of it in New York City at the St. Regis, in great detail— including the chase on the mothball fleet, which was in upstate New York, where they had anchored a bunch of old ships that had been left over from the war. That’s where he had planned one of the climactic chase scenes: a girl who has been taken on board one of those ships and stripped naked in preparation for being murdered by the psychopathic son manages to escape. The psychopath pursues her across the ship and up the smokestack; a naked woman climbing the smokestack of this old ship—very phallic obviously. Anyway, he told me this whole scenario and acted it out for me at the St. Regis. I had the impression that he really hoped to get Ingrid Bergman to play the mother, because he had such a great relationship with her on films before—and he knew, probably subconsciously, that he desperately needed a star. I was trying to get him to resuscitate this “Frenzy” project, but he kept saying that the studio, Universal, didn’t want him to do it. He seemed very, very intimidated by Lew Wasserman and the Universal executives, who had more or less undermined his confidence in himself. While making him a very rich man, they’d also destroyed him as an artist. Hitch had severed his ties with [composer] Bernard Herrmann, for example, who had been a close friend and a great collaborator, and mainly it was the Universal executives who had poisoned his mind against Herrmann and convinced him he needed somebody like Henry Mancini to write songs and a hipper musical score. Which he never got, by the way. But I couldn’t get him to revive “Frenzy,” and so we went on to talk about other movie ideas. I said, “How about a film that all happens inside a phone booth?” He thought that was a marvelous idea, but how would we make it work? How could we keep a movie going for a feature-length time inside a telephone booth? I came up with some variations, but I never thought of a sniper, which I should have, because I’d already used one in

78

LARRY COHEN

God Told Me To. As a matter of fact, there’s a parallel relationship between God Told Me To and Phone Booth in that both have a figure who’s basically playing God, who’s totally dominating the existence of another human being—acting out a God complex—and using a sniper’s rifle to invoke fear. God Told Me To is clearly the antecedent of Phone Booth. I’d run into Hitch subsequent to our second meeting at premieres, including the opening of the actual Frenzy picture. They had a screening and party at the Century Plaza Hotel; he brought his wife, Alma, over and introduced her to me, and told her that I was the young man who wanted to make a movie in a telephone booth. I think I saw him one more time, after the opening of Family Plot [1976], and again he asked me, “How are you coming with our telephone booth picture?”—though I think he’d pretty well given up on me by that time. Had you written any of it? I was never able to work out who the guy was in the phone booth, and why he couldn’t leave the booth. When did it finally break for you? Many years later it somehow dawned on me: that the guy should be the victim of a sniper. As soon as I put those two elements together, then right away I had to decide who the guy was going to be. I said to myself, “Let’s take the character from Sweet Smell of Success [1957], and update him to 2000, and see what would have become of Sidney Falco in today’s world.” A publicist seemed like the perfect guy to put into the telephone booth, because, after all, he’s trying unsuccessfully to make his clients famous and get them on television, and here, in a few moments, he will find himself to be the most famous man in New York and on every television station, as the news remote broadcasts capture him as the man the police have trapped in a phone booth and accused of murder. It was an ironic progression, that a guy who desperately wants to make other people famous inadvertently becomes famous himself. And of course, with publicists the telephone is the tool of the trade. How long was the script around before it was sold? That was sold almost immediately, but it took over three years to get the picture made after 20th Century-Fox bought the script. They took it off the

LARRY COHEN

79

market and paid for it very handsomely, and then set out to try and get a star. We went from Mel Gibson to Jim Carrey to Will Smith. There were many, many actors who were interested in doing it. There were many actors who wanted to play in it who the studio was not interested in—like Nicholas Cage, Robin Williams, even Dustin Hoffman—they were considered “too old.” The studio wanted a young guy, and eventually they got Colin Farrell. Many stars, including Jim Carrey, announced they were going to do the picture and then backed out after they got scared, especially when the director, Joel Schumacher, decided he wanted to shoot the picture in about two weeks’ time, instead of a normal production schedule of eight weeks. That terrified most actors. Joel eventually shot a day or two in New York, and about ten days out here. Personally I’ve never shot a picture in less than eighteen days! Of course Schumacher was spending a great deal more money than I was ever able to afford. He had five camera crews going at once and was able to close down Fifth Street in downtown L.A. and redress it to be New York. Did the script have all those wonderful split-screen scenes? Some of it, but not as many as Schumacher put in. Split-screen rarely works for me, but it really worked for that film. In that one it did. Otherwise, was he faithful to the script? He followed the script, almost to the letter. We didn’t have Kiefer Sutherland in the picture when it was originally shot, you know. The part was played by Ron Eldard, a very good actor, who was perched up in a window across the street from the phone booth every minute of the time, doing all of Colin Farrell’s dialogue with him. But when I went to the set to see the picture shooting, I just was not happy with Ron’s voice. I was in fact very upset. I told my wife, “Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand it. I can’t be on the set anymore. I’m making faces, and I don’t want the director to see me, so let me get out of here. I have to recover from this, because this whole picture is going right down the drain.” Finally, I went to the Fox executives and told them that Eldard’s voice was wrong. They were afraid to do anything about it, because they thought Schumacher would become outraged if we challenged his decision on casting. I said, “Well, it has to be done,

80

LARRY COHEN

because otherwise the results will be disastrous in the long run, so I’ll take it upon myself to approach Schumacher.” I went to Joel and told him what I felt, and he simply said, “You really think so?” I said, “Absolutely.” The next day he went out and hired Kiefer Sutherland. They had finished shooting the picture by that time, but he brought Kiefer in, and they did all the voice of the sniper over again in a recording studio and then married it all to the dialogue Colin Farrell had already recorded opposite Ron Eldard. So, actually, Colin never got to work with Kiefer in any of those scenes in the phone booth; he lamented the fact that he never got to act opposite Kiefer, and Kiefer said it was the first time he’d ever acted in a movie where he got to see the entire movie before he came to work. They fixed it up, then they shot the one scene together at the end—where Kiefer actually appears on the screen—that was the extent of his performance. Kiefer worked two or three days and added immeasurably to the film. His voice made a tremendous difference. Was it a rare circumstance for you, selling one of your scripts and seeing it filmed right? I was happy with the job that they did. I would have done it differently if I directed. I would have actually shot it in New York City, and I would have put the phone booth on a street corner in a very, very busy intersection, and I probably would have shot a great portion of it with hidden cameras. My original intention was to shoot it with hidden cameras during the day and to make the movie appear to start around five o’clock in the afternoon—so that a portion would be shot in daylight, and then it would gradually segue into night as the picture progressed. When the police get there—pretty soon it would be night with spotlights and searchlights—we’d have an entirely different shadowed look for the whole street. We’d be able to close down the street and control it from midnight until five in the morning, when there’s no traffic, and then in the morning we could release the street back to the city. Then we could come back again the next night for more shooting and keep doing that, so we could get real locations and have a variety of looks to the movie. Still, the picture was a huge success. Close to $50 million domestically so far—and it will probably do much more than that in DVD. As I speak, it’s now the number one DVD rental in America.

LARRY COHEN

81

I would think your own phone in Hollywood would be ringing off the hook. The phone’s ringing—not necessarily off the hook, but it’s ringing. I’ve sold another script called Cellular, which is being done at New Line, and Kim Basinger’s going to be in it with William H. Macy. It’s a movie about a young guy who gets a phone call from a woman who’s a complete stranger. She’s been kidnapped and is calling him on his cell phone; but she doesn’t know where she’s being held, and he has to try and find her before she’s murdered and before they get disconnected. I had a rush of very good ideas around the same time I wrote Phone Booth. One after another, I turned out maybe six or seven spec scripts, and I’m only now beginning to release some of them into the marketplace. Six or seven? In what length of time? In a year or so; maybe fourteen months. I was writing a tremendous amount of material around the time I did Phone Booth. But I put them aside; I sold Cellular, and the rest I held back, waiting for Phone Booth to come out. Six or seven: that sounds incredibly fast and prolific from a standard screenwriter’s point of view. If you sit around and think about it for months, if you outline it, you don’t get anything done. With me, I don’t work it out, I just start in writing it. I allow myself to be completely immersed in the process of writing, and then it just kind of emerges from the fog.

NOTES 1

“End men” were white actors in blackface who bantered in Negro dialect between vaudeville acts. Mr. Bones (referring to dice) and Tambo were common nicknames.

2

Before he became a well-known novelist, essayist, and journalist, Dominick Dunne worked in television and film, notably producing Panic in Needle Park (1971), Play It as It Lays (1972), and Ash Wednesday (1973). The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Random House, 1999) is his memoir of that part of his life.

82

LARRY COHEN

3

Painter, theorist, and filmmaker Hans Richter was one of the fathers of the Dada movement who pioneered avant-garde, experimental, abstract, and surrealist filmmaking in Germany in the early 1920s, before Hitler rose to power and the Nazis declared Richter a degenerate artist. Emigrating to America, he accepted a post at City College.

4

After this interview was concluded, in 2005, the identity of “Deep Throat” was revealed to be former deputy director of the FBI Mark Felt.

INTERVIEW BY BILL KROHN

BLAKE EDWARDS JUMPING AROUND

lake Edwards’s first screenplay, cowritten with college chum John Champion, was Panhandle, in 1948, a modest Western they coproduced that starred Rod Cameron and was directed by Lesley Selander. Selander, an old hand with oaters, probably never had a more literate script. Cameron and the other characters are constantly trading barbed witticisms, which fly especially thick and fast in the exchanges between Cameron and Reed Hadley, playing the bad guy. In the midst of this sagebrush saga that seems to want to be a Restoration comedy, it is appropriate that Cameron should earn the undying enmity of a young gun played by Edwards himself, when he tells the gullible youngster a long shaggy-dog story about his run-in with Billy the Kid in a rainstorm, the punch line for which is “He killed me.” Near the end of the film, with a sense of structure rare in a programmer, Edwards, who has never gotten over the joke, shoots it out with Cameron and dies like a dog . . . in a rainstorm. Panhandle pretty much marked the end of Edwards’s acting career and the beginning of his early career as a writer, first for radio, and then for films. A series of films cowritten with Richard Quine and directed by Quine, mostly musicals, some of them quite charming, led to Edwards

B

This interview was written and compiled with the assistance of Jean-Marc Lalanne.

83

84

BLAKE EDWARDS

directing two himself, and finally to the film he considers his real directing debut, Mister Cory, a 1957 drama starring Tony Curtis as a tough street kid turned gambler. Critic and future filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was impressed with the title character, played by Curtis, whose highly personal moral code reminded him of Stendahl’s Lamiel. (He was probably referring to the character’s snarling denunciation of the weakness of a rival who has offered to “nobly” stand aside if it makes the woman happy: a stunning scene.) Godard’s lofty comparison only serves to underline the fact that Blake Edwards, in whatever genre he has essayed, has always been an author of brilliant dialogue, intriguing characters, and endlessly surprising stories, the qualities we look for in a writer-director who is a writer in the fullest sense of the word. Adapted from a story by Leo Rosten, Mister Cory was the first screenplay signed by Edwards alone. He has also worked frequently with collaborators—most notably the Waldmans (Frank and Tom), Maurice Richlin, William Peter Blatty, his children, and even, in The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and That’s Life! (1986), his own analyst. And he was also perfectly happy, after becoming a producer-director on Experiment in Terror (1962), which was written by Gordon and Mildred Gordon, to direct scripts by other writers. But it was as a writer-producer-director that he changed the face of television crime series with Peter Gunn, and even today Edwards maintains that his first big film hit, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), adapted by George Axelrod and Truman Capote from Capote’s novel, is not his film. This despite the fact that he contributed one of his best party scenes and a moral ending that Axelrod vehemently opposed—two signature scenes by which we recognize Edwards’s dual identity: the madcap master of the revels, and the unfashionably serious artist who walked a razor’s edge between manic and depressive in his pitch-black comedy about Hollywood, S.O.B. (1981). Edwards tells us in the interview how he created some of his most memorable moments on the set, improvising with talented collaborators like Peter Sellers and Jack Lemmon, but when we revisit some of the high points of his post–Pink Panther career, many of which he wrote solo, we are always in the hands of a great writer who happily is also a great director: The Party (1968), Wild Rovers (1971), Victor/Victoria (1982), 10 (1979), S.O.B., That’s Life!, Skin Deep (1989), and Switch (1991) are among the most personal works to ever come out of Hollywood, and they all began as dazzling scripts written by Blake Edwards. That’s Life!, which is obviously a personal testament, recounts one weekend in the life of a woman (Julie Andrews) waiting for her biopsy results, while her self-absorbed family, unaware that she has even been to the doctor, carry on with their own lives. Her husband, played by Jack Lem-

BLAKE EDWARDS

85

BLAKE EDWARDS, IN 1987, ON THE SET OF BLIND DATE .

mon, enters the film uttering a monologue that continues without a break for three scenes and at least ten minutes—a torrent of self-pity and charm, hypochondria and wit, that is paradoxically Edwards’s gift to his actresswife, who gets to play the gamut of unspoken emotions she is feeling while the man she dearly loves runs on at the mouth, oblivious to her pain. In this corner, a tour de force of pure cinema acting, worthy of Lillian Gish; in the other corner—making it possible—a textbook example of how a thousand words can sometimes be better than a picture, flawlessly performed by one of Hollywood’s most brilliantly talkative actors and informed from start to finish by a tour de force of writing that we scarcely notice, so effortlessly does it seem to have flowed from Edwards’s pen. Both arts were needed to express the genius of one of the rare film auteurs who has continually chal-

86

BLAKE EDWARDS

lenged himself with daring, imaginative scripts and continually topped himself by how he brought them to the screen. BLAKE EDWARDS (1922–)

1948 1949 1952 1953 1954 1955

1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962

1963 1964 1965 1966

Panhandle (Lesley Selander). Producer, co-script. Stampede (Lesley Selander). Producer, co-script. Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder (Richard Quine). Co-script. All Ashore (Richard Quine). Co-script. Cruisin’ Down the River (Richard Quine). Co-script. Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine). Co-script. The Atomic Kid (Leslie H. Martinson). Story. Bring Your Smile Along (Blake Edwards). Director, co-script. My Sister Eileen (Richard Quine). Co-script. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton). Uncredited contribution. He Laughed Last (Blake Edwards). Director, script, co-story. Mister Cory (Blake Edwards). Director, script. Operation Mad Ball (Richard Quine). Co-script. This Happy Feeling (Blake Edwards). Director, script. The Perfect Furlough (Blake Edwards). Director only. Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards). Director only. High Time (Blake Edwards). Director only. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards). Director only. The Couch (Owen Crump). Co-story. The Notorious Landlady (Richard Quine). Co-script. Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards). Producer, director. Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards). Director only. Walk on the Wild Side (Edward Dmytryk). Uncredited contribution. Soldier in the Rain (Ralph Nelson). Producer, co-script. The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards). Director, co-script. A Shot in the Dark (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script. The Great Race (Blake Edwards). Director, co-story. What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-story.

BLAKE EDWARDS

1967

Gunn (Blake Edwards). Director, co-script, story.

1968

The Party (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script, story.

87

Inspector Clouseau (Bud Yorkin). Based on his character. 1970

Darling Lili (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script.

1971

Wild Rovers (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, script.

1972

The Carey Treatment (Blake Edwards). Director, script.

1974

The Tamarind Seed (Blake Edwards). Director, script.

1975

The Return of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script.

1976

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script.

1978

Revenge of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script.

1979

10 (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, script.

1981

S.O.B. (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, script.

1982

Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, script. Trail of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, coscript.

1983

Curse of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, coscript. The Man Who Loved Women (Blake Edwards). Producer, director, co-script.

1984

City Heat (Richard Benjamin). Co-script and story as Sam O. Brown. Micki + Maude (Blake Edwards). Director only.

1986

A Fine Mess (Blake Edwards). Director, script. That’s Life! (Blake Edwards). Director, co-script.

1987

Blind Date (Blake Edwards). Director only.

1988

Sunset (Blake Edwards). Director, script.

1989

Skin Deep (Blake Edwards). Director, script.

1991

Switch (Blake Edwards). Director, script.

1993

Son of the Pink Panther (Blake Edwards). Director, co-script, story.

2005

The Pink Panther (Shawn Levy). Prequel to The Pink Panther, based on his characters.

88

BLAKE EDWARDS

Acting appearances in the following films (sometimes uncredited): Ten Gentlemen from West Point (1942), Lucky Legs (1942), A Guy Named Joe (1943), Ladies Courageous (1944), See Here, Private Hargrove (1944), The Eve of St. Mark (1944), Marshal of Reno (1944), Marine Raiders (1944), Wing and a Prayer (1944), In the Meantime, Darling (1944), My Buddy (1944), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), This Man’s Navy (1945), A Guy, a Gal and a Pal (1945), Gangs of the Waterfront (1945), They Were Expendable (1945), Strangler of the Swamp (1946), Tokyo Rose (1946), Till the End of Time (1946), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Beginning or the End (1947), Panhandle (1948), and Leather Gloves (1948). Television credits include Four Star Playhouse (writer-director for episodes of 1952 series); Richard Diamond, Private Detective (creator and writer of 1957 series); Peter Gunn (executive producer and writer-director of 1958 series); Mr. Lucky (producer and writer-director of 1959 series); The Dick Powell Show (writer-director of episodes of 1961 series); The Boston Terrier (director of 1962 telefilm); The Monk (story for 1969 telefilm); The Pink Panther Show (uncredited conceptual contribution to 1969 series); Julie and Dick at Covent Garden (director of 1974 special); Casino (executive consultant for 1980 telefilm); Justin Case (executive producer, director, and solo teleplay for 1988 telefilm); Peter Gunn (executive producer, director, and teleplay for 1989 telefilm); Julie (director of 1992 series starring Julie Andrews); The Pink Panther (1993 cartoon series based on his characters); and Victor/Victoria (codirector and script of filmed Broadway show, 1995). Plays include Victor/Victoria. Academy Award honors include a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Victor/Victoria. Edwards received an honorary Oscar in 2004. Writers Guild honors include Best Adapted Comedy awards for The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Victor/Victoria, and Best Comedy Script nominations for The Notorious Landlady, The Pink Panther, The Great Race, The Return of the Pink Panther, 10, and S.O.B. Edwards received the Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2002.

How did you break into writing? I went to see a Western with Gary Cooper, with a friend of mine. When we left we played a game of miniature golf and talked about it. And I kept saying, “I could do better.” Somehow we decided that we’d collaborate and write a Western. To raise money we painted his mother’s house, and to have

BLAKE EDWARDS

89

a kind of bible to go by we took one of my father’s scripts and practically copied it.1 If you took the Western we wrote, I’m sure it had the same scene numbers and everything practically the same. And we ended up producing it—it was called Panhandle. After that I was a producer out of work—the picture had done all right financially, but not that great. I was living with a charming lady at the time who looked like she was on her way to being [famous]. She did a radio show that introduced new talent, and she came home and said, “How did you like my show?” I said, “I didn’t.” We got into an argument, and she finally said, “Why don’t you write one?” So I did, and the script was produced, and the show introduced a man named Jack Webb. The producer [of the show], who was also an agent, took me to Dick Powell, who said to me, “I want to do another radio show, but I have a problem for you. I want to make this ‘The Singing Detective.’” So I did what I’ve done a number of times, which was lie through my teeth. I said, “I have something . . . it’ll only take an hour to change it.” I was living at the beach then—I’d been thrown out by my girl—so I said, “I’ll bring it to you in the morning.” Didn’t have one word. That became a show called Richard Diamond, Private Detective, and from there I just accelerated as a radio writer. You did some writing in film all along, sometimes uncredited. I have heard you worked on Night of the Hunter [1955]. Yes. There’s not much to tell. Charles Laughton had a partner, an agent named Paul Gregory. It was about that time that I was starting to get good notices for some of my radio shows, and Gregory wanted me to work on Night of the Hunter, which I did. I wrote a treatment that included some scenes written out. Was it anything like what they made? Oh yes. But in those days you didn’t have much of a contract. My contract said I’d get paid a certain amount of money, and that was it. But I certainly had many meetings with Laughton. If I’d done the work that I did then on a script today, I would have gotten credit. I liked the story, but I didn’t like the way it was developing. I didn’t like Laughton’s ideas about it. It should’ve been more like Something Wicked This Way Comes. Who were the people you considered your masters as a young filmmaker?

90

BLAKE EDWARDS

There was no one person who set me off. I liked Laurel and Hardy when I was in my teens. And as I got in the business and went from being an actor to being a writer and then a director, I began to be impressed by [Orson] Welles—Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons [1942]. But I don’t really remember saying to myself, “I want to do that kind of work.” I suppose somewhere along the line, when I was in midcareer, if I were asked, I could have named a bunch of directors, but I couldn’t say, for example,“I prefer [John] Huston,” although Huston was one of the directors who impressed me the most by his body of work. It’s up to someone else to say if I was influenced by someone. There were many directors who did wonderful comedy, and others who did dark, noir-style films. But I sort of jump around. Yes, you do! The hardest thing of all for me is to answer how I see myself with respect to others that I admire. There’s a certain something about Welles that I admire, and there’s a lot that Welles did that made me angry. I wanted to grab him by the throat and say, “How could you have such a talent and just fuck it up!” Weren’t you on the Universal lot when Welles was making Touch of Evil [1958]? I don’t recall if I was on the lot, but certainly I was around. I went on the set a number of times. Mostly I loved Ambersons; I saw an early cut, and a lot was taken out by the time they released it. I liked the way he related to actors. I knew some of the people he worked with on the radio; they were friends of mine. And I inherited his cameraman [Russell Metty] from Touch of Evil.2 But I can’t say Welles was one of my favorite directors—he directed one of my favorite films. You had one of your own best films drastically recut: Wild Rovers. A longer version was shown here recently. I didn’t see it [at the Los Angeles County Museum], so I couldn’t say if it was my cut. The studio literally took whole chunks of the film and hid them from me after they were removed. They were discovered more or less by accident in the MGM archives by my editor, Ralph Winters. Some of that may have been put back in the version you’re talking about, but I don’t know who did that. It has certainly never been the movie I made, to my knowledge. Sometimes I wish I’d gone to live in France.

BLAKE EDWARDS

91

Nonetheless, you were able to move from radio to the film industry, and then to the center of the industry, not by taking orders, but by doing your own films. Universal certainly wasn’t known for innovation, and neither was Columbia. And yet eventually you were able to impose your vision. What was it like starting out as a director? Did you start off starstruck, or did you walk in and take charge? I walked in and took charge. I had an attitude. I did it by being determined enough, by believing enough, by being irascible enough, by scaring a lot of people. A lot of it was my anger at the way they did business, the way they thought. From the beginning it amazed me that the people in control of the business were so inadequate. I think I took great exception to it almost from the beginning. I didn’t have time to learn the game, so I just charged in. I’m a very impatient fellow about many things, and if I get very enthusiastic about something I get all the more impatient to make it work, and more and more impatient with the people who don’t see it my way. A lot of my films that were successful—as far as I am concerned—it took years to make them happen. It took six years and a lot of skullduggery to get 10 made. With me, it usually takes quite a while, not necessarily because the project is controversial, but because the people in charge don’t understand me and don’t want to take on the tsuris. Fortunately a few people along the way have put up with my irascibility and my impatience, or at least were willing to give me the benefit of a doubt. Friendship is an important theme in your films. S.O.B. is a wonderful portrait of friendship. That was an amazing set. The camaraderie between the actors was remarkable. Wild Rovers is also about friendship. What the studio didn’t get about Wild Rovers is that I consciously began to write a Greek tragedy. That’s exactly what it is. Two guys rob a bank so they don’t have to work anymore, and so they can go to Mexico and live reasonably well. But then they say, “We can’t rob the ranch where we work; we have to give their money back to them—they’re our friends.” Then the very people they think of as their friends turn on them: Karl Malden sends his two sons out to get them. I thought, “That’s good stuff. That goes back

92

BLAKE EDWARDS

a long way.” Maybe I don’t write it as well as they used to, but it’s good stuff. Very few people got it. There were long family scenes with Malden and the wife that gave you the other side of the coin, and they were trimmed out. And it won’t play without those scenes. But Jim Aubrey was the head of the studio, and he was working behind my back, cutting without me knowing it, and hiding the film, if you can believe it! You also show friendships between men and women that aren’t sexual, or don’t start off to be: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Tamarind Seed [1974]. It seems that male friendship is one of the things you most value, maybe because it has been important to surviving and accomplishing your goals in a difficult business. I was watching Skin Deep with one of my granddaughters, and she said, “Gramps, I had no idea you’d done so many films that have to do with the gay aspect of men and women. But it’s so subtle.” And I started thinking, “You know, I really have!” George the bartender in 10, the relationship between the man who has become a woman and the woman he’s working for in Switch . . . That’s an area where you definitely innovated—Victor/Victoria being the most obvious example . . . Even with Robert Preston in Victor/Victoria, I worked hard to make him an enjoyable character, quite apart from being gay. I think I did a really good job of making him as much heterosexual as homosexual. But I don’t recall at any time feeling compelled to do it because I felt it was a necessary social thing. It’s certainly part of the Hollywood scene, where it’s taken for granted in the same way it is in your films. I was accused of being gay very early on. I never could figure out why. When I was interviewed by Playboy [in 1982] at the very end [of the interview] they said, “Now we’re coming to the inevitable question,” and that was it! When I started in therapy I said, “Before we go much further, I’d like to figure out why people think I’m gay.” I was very controversial for my relations with women, so maybe people thought, “Anything that blatant has to be a cover-up!” You show sexuality as a continuum, which includes friendship, and where the sexual component in friendship may even be acted out eventually.

BLAKE EDWARDS

93

Minnelli and Axelrod teased the audience with that idea in Goodbye, Charlie [1964], but in Switch it actually happens. Mmmm . . . Andrew Sarris wrote that you were a director who “walks on the slick surfaces of modernity with the squeaky shoes of morality.” That’s great! I was a hippie when you made 10, so I was less accepting of it than I had been of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but I watched Breakfast again last night, and it’s pretty much the same film. [Audrey] Hepburn’s a lot like the Bo Derek character—a free spirit, lives for fun, lives for the high life, and [George] Peppard says to her at the end,“You’re running from yourself.You don’t want to look at things.” The photography is soft-focus, but it’s a very tough film. Not many people know this, because my normal reaction when I’m asked about Breakfast at Tiffany’s is to say it’s not my film, since George Axelrod wrote the script; but the very thing you pointed out was not in the script. And I incurred the wrath of the writer because of it. That whole sequence where he tells her off, that’s me—I wrote all of that, because I thought it was imperative. I haven’t told anybody that [before]. Days of Wine and Roses [1962] is another example. You show the fun and then the horror. At the end, the “days of wine and roses” are over. Jack Lemmon either has to give up the woman he loves or go down the drain with her. We almost didn’t get to do that. Jack Warner wanted a happy ending. It’s curious that having a moral ending would get you in trouble! I take it you’ve run into that more than once. Absolutely. Because you’ve touched a nerve. Because movies aren’t supposed to be about serious matters? Because the people that make the decisions aren’t really about serious matters. They think it’s stepping outside the film. But the film is reflecting life, and when you start talking about that reflection, it touches something in them that they refuse to recognize and can’t articulate. With me there’s really a need for a moral-ethical canvas. I’m not religious, and yet I find I

94

BLAKE EDWARDS

very definitely need some form of my own religion. I admire a lot of different things about a lot of different religions, but invariably they all end up pretty much the same—talking about ethics, morality, “what goes around comes around,” stuff like that. And it inevitably creates a problem with the people who are in a position to say whether I get to make the movie. It’s very difficult. But then you also wrote John Ritter’s line in Skin Deep: “God is a gag writer.” That’s something that actually happened to me—the wave that washes over him.3 I was in the middle of a divorce. I decided I’d have a party at the beach and invite all my friends, who would make it easier on me. I’d have a good time and forget about the divorce. But I got really freaked out, I couldn’t bear all the fun, all the noise. I went down to the beach, put myself in the yoga position and looked out at the sea. There was a big full moon, like a movie set. It was bright yellow, and the sky was purple. No clouds. And as I was sitting there contemplating, I noticed that the moon had disappeared suddenly. I thought, “What the fuck is that?” And at that second I was hit by a tsunami wave—which had been predicted—and it rolled me under the house. When I finally came up out of all this seaweed and sand, I could hear the party going on up above. Nobody had any idea that I was under there with a mouth full of sand. And of course it struck me as funny. I crawled out from under the house and staggered into the house next door, where a writer, Johnny Bradford, lived. He had a courtyard with a gate, and you walked through the courtyard to get to the front door. So I opened the gate and walked through, laughing my ass off, went up to the porch and opened the door.And there Johnny Bradford was with his wife, sitting at this little candlelit dinner. And that’s when the big second tsunami hit. It came through that courtyard of his house like something coming out of the barrel of a gun, and hit me and blew me into their house and right into their table. We all ended up covered with water and screaming with laughter. I said, “One day I’m going to do this in a film.” A true, true moment. I went to bed and slept in all this sand. The next morning I got up, and went into the bathroom, opened the door—and there was my soon-to-beex-wife with a .38 cocked and pointed right between my eyes. And? I took the gun away from her. I’d been trained to do that for over thirty years.4 But I looked at her and thought, “Boy, you never know. You laugh

BLAKE EDWARDS

95

at what God has to say about tragedy and think it’s all been resolved, and the next thing you know you’re facing a loaded .38.” There’s drama waiting right around the corner, and a lot of humor, too: even the gun. Which brings up another important topic in your work: comedy. Comedy is an important topic in my life! If I didn’t have comedy, I wouldn’t have survived this far. Comedy is always the saving grace. If I can find the humor in a situation . . . Sometimes it looks like it isn’t going to happen. Sometimes I think, “Where are you? I need you to give me the insight that will save me.” And only one time has it gone far enough that I felt, “I don’t want any more of this. I can’t put up with this anymore.” One time I really contemplated suicide. And getting rid of that impulse turned out to be one of the funniest moments of my life. I was all prepared, and the things that happened as a result of the attempted suicide were hilarious. Another rule Sarris says you broke is that slapstick isn’t supposed to be funny if someone gets hurt, whereas you’ve built hilarious gags on things that would be too grisly for a horror movie. It seems from what you’re saying that, for you, slapstick doesn’t grow out of a desire to be funny, but out of tragedy or potential tragedy. It’s a way of dealing with serious matters. Therefore I consider that slapstick—literally slapstick—is not entirely what I do. Only some of it turns out to be slapstick. Slapstick comes from vaudeville—it comes from what they called “the slap stick” (slapping sound as he demonstrates), which made that sound. Of course I also understand how it’s used as a slang word. What’s funny about your great comedy character, Inspector Clouseau, is that he’s a man who really wants to dominate a situation through his personality, brains, and sophistication. He has a noble image of himself that is continually being frustrated. Clouseau operates on the premise that there are Eleven Commandments, the Eleventh Commandment being “Thou shalt not give up.” That’s how he functions. He would never think for a moment that he won’t succeed. And because he believes it so much, everyone around him believes it. So you don’t really have anybody in the final analysis to prevent it, except Fate. He’s a series of . . .

96

BLAKE EDWARDS

. . . of mis-happenings. Such things still happen to me. I claim that there is a Clouseau gene that exists in my family. We’ve always been that way— we’ve always been very accident-prone. To the extent that I nearly killed myself [once]; I was a quadriplegic for forty-eight hours. A lot of tragic things have happened to me, which you can take out of context and see where Clouseau exists in me. My daughter is very much the same way. We don’t dare get too close together in a room. She’ll drop something, or I’ll trip over her. We’re enormously accident-prone. How did you come up with the character the first time—when you were preparing The Pink Panther [1963]? I particularly love the mixture of sophisticated characters and very broad slapstick in that one. What about Bringing Up Baby [1938]? That was slapstick. But to see [Cary] Grant do it . . . He had great ability. A big man, broad shoulders— he was a movie star. No way you could get away from it. Was that intimidating to you when you directed him [in Operation Petticoat, 1959]? It was intimidating to me because I couldn’t believe his choices! He was very lucky throughout his life that he got certain directors who were strong enough to impose their will on him. Left alone, I don’t know what would have happened. That’s very interesting, because you always read about him contributing comedy ideas, bits of dialogue. They weren’t all good? Not with me. I nearly got into a fight with him. He would come up with things that were just . . . And there was one thing that I tried to get him to do—the writers and I got down on our knees and said, “Look Cary, do it anyway. You own the film; you can get rid of the scene if you don’t think it’s any good, but let us show you what we’re talking about!” No good. Missed one of the great comedy moments. To this day I’m sorry about it. It’s one of the few things I regret in my career. It was always supposed to be in the movie, but it was designated to be done by somebody else. And it suddenly dawned on me or the writers or all of us together that if he did it, it would just be wonderful. Couldn’t talk him into it. I’m tempted to ask what the joke was . . .

BLAKE EDWARDS

97

Well, I certainly will tell you. As it was in the film, Tony Curtis and Gavin MacLeod steal a pig, a huge pig, and they get stopped by the Shore Patrol. And to get past the Shore Patrol, they dress the pig up as a sailor. It suddenly dawned on us that, considering Cary Grant’s character—being a bythe-book officer, undoubtedly out of Annapolis and the antithesis of the officer played by Tony Curtis, a scoundrel who can get things done—that if Cary Grant saved the day, and was the one who had to get them through the guard, the one who dressed that pig up, it would have been hysterical. And it would have been the moment where you really loved him and admired him, and where he came down off that pedestal of Annapolis. I gave him every argument I could come up with. He said that people would not associate him with a pig. I don’t have the impression that you ran into that very often in your career. When I look at a movie like The Great Race [1965] or The Party, it looks like it evolved on the set between you and the actors. Quite right. On The Party there was no script. Each character had an outline, a couple of paragraphs, and we ad-libbed the whole film. Let me tell you what the Cahiers du Cinéma said about The Party: a critic wrote that it was about an actor who represents the third world, destroying a house that represents Hollywood—an allegory of the revolution that was coming to change cinema. Who said that? Pascal Bonitzer. It was at a time when the magazine was increasingly politicized . . . But The Party does seem to have been an attempt at a new way of making films, from what you just said. You and I can sit around and intellectualize it all over the place, and part of the intellectualizing would be right, but most of it would be . . . serendipity. When Sellers and I starting making films together it became perfectly obvious that the thing that made it work and made it so much fun was the ad-libbing—things discovered on the set. And we talked time and time again about, “We do so much ad-libbing on the Panthers, why don’t we adlib a whole film?” It was that simple. I said to the Mirisch Company, “I want to take this character, and I want to have a party,” and they said okay. It’s really an expansion of the party sequence in the middle of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I take it was somewhat ad-libbed.

98

BLAKE EDWARDS

It was all ad-libbed. When I spoke to William Peter Blatty about Exorcist III [1990], which he directed—where the scariest scene is elaborately choreographed in one long master shot—I said that even though it was a horror film, it reminded me of Jacques Tati. He said, “I very much admire Jacques Tati, but I also worked with Blake Edwards.”5 I very much admire Jacques Tati, too. Particularly his first film [ Jour de fête, 1949]. With Switch, it looked to me as if you decided that, having done everything you could do with Peter Sellers and his successors in the Panthers, you were seeking fresh inspiration in the idea of a female slapstick character, although Ellen Barkin isn’t exactly doing slapstick. It’s funny you’d bring that up. Last night was the first time that I’ve really entertained that thought. I had thought about it a long time ago—so long that I can’t remember how it came up. I just remember snippets of conversation about a potential female Clouseau. We do learn at the end of Son of the Pink Panther [1993] that he has a twin sister. That’s true, but that’s inherited—it’s not anything I’d care to view as a film or give any longevity to. Does a woman offer different character resources than an accident-prone man? Yes. There was a film made some time ago that appealed to me, which starred a very talented English actress. When you first see her getting off a bus, she falls off the bus in a kind of slapstick way. Then she does one slapstick thing after another. Very funny stuff. But you find out that the reason for it is that she’s terminally ill and has a strange balance problem. That juxtaposition was interesting. (Pause.) But it doesn’t really interest me that much at this point in time. (Laughs.) Have you seen Mike Myers’s films—the Austin Powers series? I should have started with that. You want to know about my comedy? I’ll talk about Austin Powers [Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,

BLAKE EDWARDS

99

BLAKE EDWARDS WITH WIFE-ACTRESS, JULIE ANDREWS, ON THE SET OF DARLING LILI.

1997]. I don’t care for Austin Powers. It doesn’t make me laugh. And I think it reflects what is happening more and more in comedy—which doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Things change. What makes people laugh at one point in time, at another point they won’t get it. It’s very hard to criticize something like Austin Powers’s comedy because so many people enjoy it. So for you even the more cartoonlike Clouseaus are serious? Oh yes, I think the whole premise of Clouseau is very serious. Remember that Clouseau did not start off as the man who leaned on the globe.6 The original character was a French farce character, an Inspector of the Sûreté, a leading criminologist, who is obsessed with a jewel thief that he has never caught. And he was completely unaware that the jewel thief was cuckolding him. That was the premise. It was very sophisticated, and Peter Ustinov

100

BLAKE EDWARDS

was supposed to do it. So even though Clouseau became something else, that premise from a serious sexual farce was still inherent. And also when I say to you that he operated by the Eleventh Commandment, to me that’s serious. I don’t think that Austin Powers is at all serious about anything in his films. There’s some good physical stuff, but it doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t make me laugh like Laurel and Hardy make me laugh. They always make me laugh. Beginning with, I think, 10, something that was always latent but very serious and important in your work became more the central focus. Your films were always sexy, but in the 1970s and 1980s all your films are about sexual politics—as if the breakdown of censorship in 1968 had given you a chance to explore something that had always been important to you, but which was previously just treated as a source of fun and seduction. If there’s a core to your movies beyond what we’ve been talking about— tragedy and comedy—it’s what Preston Sturges called “Topic A”: sex. Is that another topic you take seriously? I take it pretty seriously. I’m certainly influenced by things that seem commercial and timely. I don’t always do them, but I’m aware of them. But usually what I do, for better or for worse, is take a topic fairly seriously. And you make mistakes, but occasionally you don’t. Those are the ones that make a difference, that remind people of what you did in your work. During those years [the 1970s and 1980s] I was in group therapy, with a very interesting group of people, and then I spent several years in analysis. My analyst—he’s still alive, he’s ninety-four years old, a very funny man—then collaborated with me on The Man Who Loved Women.7 I made a joke earlier about living in France. I was generalizing from the fact of my acceptance there. Acceptance always makes you feel that way— being voted the best foreign film, the Legion of Honor, all those kinds of goodies. Although I keep reminding myself that Jerry Lewis has those things, too. I think the thing that convinced me I should go live in Paris was when Skin Deep opened there. I had landed in a small plane and took a car to drive into Paris. I was relaxed, and the way I was sitting the windshield was about on the same level as my eyes. The driver said, “We’re in Paris,” and I opened my eyes and saw the poster for Skin Deep: a giant condom with fish swimming around in it. I said, “This is my kind of town!” You’ve been quiet for a while. Do you have future writing or directing plans?

BLAKE EDWARDS

101

I’m writing a couple of things for theater now. Actually I have some film projects I’m involved in, too. I’m negotiating with Paramount to do “Peter Gunn” [updating the 1967 film]. I won’t direct it. We are trying to negotiate “10 Again,” doing it as a remake, set in England. Those are my commercial projects. But I have also written the book for a Pink Panther musical, and we’re committed to that. I’d think the success of The Producers on Broadway would make that tempting to a theatrical producer. Absolutely. And I’ve written my first serious play. It’s about the Devil, who goes to a clinic because he’s depressed. And his psychiatrist is a woman. It’s called “Scapegoat.” I wake up in the middle of the night and write on it. That’s not usually my “process.”

NOTES 1

Blake Edwards’s stepfather, John McEdward, was a veteran Hollywood production manager. His step-grandfather, J. Gordon Edwards, was an important director of the silent era.

2

Edwards “inherited” cameraman Russell Metty from Welles on Mister Cory. Touch of Evil was made earlier but underwent heavy postproduction and was released a year later, in 1958.

3

The tsunami scene is depicted in Skin Deep.

4

The gun incident is more or less the start of Skin Deep.

5

William Peter Blatty cowrote A Shot in the Dark (1964), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966), Gunn (1967), and Darling Lili (1970).

6

The first sight gag in The Pink Panther: we are introduced to Clouseau, making a charismatic, forceful speech, delivered while walking around the office. As if to emphasize his concluding point, he leans dramatically with one hand on a big standing globe of the world, which turns under his hand, almost dumping him on the floor. It generally gets a big laugh.

7

Milton Wexler cowrote The Man Who Loved Women and That’s Life!

INTERVIEW BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN

WALTER HILL LAST MAN STANDING

alter Hill’s first produced script was in 1972, but his films are a throwback to the Golden Age and to storytelling traditions that seem increasingly endangered in today’s Hollywood. He brings a modern swagger to oldfashioned genres. He relishes stories that center on male heroics, with cinematic action, but he is always reaching for intelligent themes. He prides himself on craft and literacy. He was lucky to have worked closely with Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, learning disparate lessons from the experiences. He is at once the consummate pro and a personal, at times poetic, filmmaker; it helps, as he explains in this interview, that he has taught himself to write in “one voice” (like Peckinpah) or “many voices” (like Huston). Hill swiftly turned director, emerging as one of the best of the new crop of writer-directors in the 1970s. But after the stellar run of Hard Times (1975), The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979), The Long Riders (1980), Southern Comfort (1981), and 48 HRS. (1982), the industry became increasingly homogenized, and Hill found his niche shrinking. He branched out into producing, and directing other people’s scripts. When I first contacted him about an interview, he said, half jokingly, he was touched that anyone thought of him as a writer anymore. Hill has mastered the Hollywood game. He maintains an incredible output; he can boast several fran-

W

102

WALTER HILL

103

WALTER HILL IN LOS ANGELES, 2003. (PHOTO BY PETER “HOPPER” STONE.)

chise hits (the Alien series, 48 HRS. and its sequels, the Tales from the Crypt series); and, though it is a constant struggle, he keeps making his personal films. Hill does not go in for extravagant publicity; he does not give many interviews. This one he approached conscientiously. Much of it was conducted by e-mail, with Hill polishing the final draft.

104

WALTER HILL

WALTER HILL (1942–)

1968

1969 1972 1973 1975

1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1984 1985 1986

1987 1988 1989 1990 1992 1993 1994 1995

The Thomas Crown Affair (Norman Jewison). Second assistant director. Bullitt (Peter Yates). Second assistant director. Take the Money and Run (Woody Allen). Second assistant director. Hickey & Boggs (Robert Culp). Script. The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah). Script. The Thief Who Came to Dinner (Bud Yorkin). Script. The Mackintosh Man (John Huston). Script. The Drowning Pool (Stuart Rosenberg). Co-script. Hard Times (Walter Hill). Director, co-script. Dead People (Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz). Actor. The Driver (Walter Hill). Director, script. The Warriors (Walter Hill). Director, co-script. Alien (Ridley Scott). Producer. The Long Riders (Walter Hill). Director only. Southern Comfort (Walter Hill). Director, co-script. 48 HRS. (Walter Hill). Director, co-script. Streets of Fire (Walter Hill). Director, co-script. Brewster’s Millions (Walter Hill). Director only. Rustler’s Rhapsody (Hugh Wilson). Producer. Blue City (Michelle Manning). Producer, co-script. Crossroads (Walter Hill). Director only. Aliens (James Cameron). Executive producer, co-story. Extreme Prejudice (Walter Hill). Director only. Red Heat (Walter Hill). Producer, director, co-script, story. Johnny Handsome (Walter Hill). Director only. Another 48 HRS. (Walter Hill). Director, sequel based on his characters. Alien3 (David Fincher). Producer, co-script. Trespass (Walter Hill). Director only. Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill). Producer, director. The Getaway (Roger Donaldson). Co-script, remake of 1972 film. Wild Bill (Walter Hill). Director, script.

WALTER HILL

1996

1997 2000 2001 2002

105

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (Gilbert Adler, Ernest Dickerson). Executive producer. Last Man Standing (Walter Hill). Producer, director, script. Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (Gilbert Adler). Executive producer. Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet). Producer. Supernova (Walter Hill under pseudonym Thomas Lee). Director only. Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual (Avi Nesher). Producer. The Prophecy (Walter Hill). Director only (straight to video). Undisputed (Walter Hill). Producer, director, co-script.

Television writing (and directing-producing where noted) includes Dog and Cat (creator of the 1977 series); Tales from the Crypt (direction and scripts for the “Cutting Cards,” “Deadline,” and “The Man Who Was Death” episodes, as well as executive producer of the 1989 anthology series); TwoFisted Tales (executive producer of the 1991 anthology series); Perversions of Silence (producer and director of episodes for the 1997 anthology series); W.E.I.R.D. World (executive producer of the 1995 series); and Deadwood (director of episodes of the 2004 series).

How does your film sensibility come out of your personal background and life story? I have no idea. There are the mysteries of the head and heart. I admit to a somewhat juvenile sensibility, with an emphasis on physical heroics. I was asthmatic as a kid, several years of school interrupted. This left me with a lot of time alone—daydreaming, reading, listening to radio serials; I was devoted to comic books. I never liked kid fiction much, read adult novels at a very early age, never much liked kid movies either. I’ve always been a good reader. My father and his father were my great heroes, smart, physical men who worked with their heads and their hands. Both had great mechanical ability, I had none. Being a sick child means that you are fantastically spoiled—which of course I loved—and was excellent preparation for Hollywood. My Ephraim Katz Film Encyclopedia (admittedly not always perfectly reliable) mentions your involvement with cartooning, journalism (your

106

WALTER HILL

degree in English), construction and oil drilling, and also educational documentaries. Which of these had the most useful application to your career as a writer? If the encyclopedia says I have a degree in English, it is mistaken. I was a history major. If it says I was a journalist, it’s also mistaken about that. For a few weeks of my life while young and unemployed I contemplated journalism—never did anything about it. I did work in the oil fields on Signal Hill1 during summers of the latter part of my high school years, and several more years while in college. My job description was a roustabout. I was never part of a drilling rig (they are skilled workers, I was not), though I have been around drilling units a great deal, but mostly around crews that pulled the rods and casings on individual wells. My grandfather (on my father’s side) was an oil man: a wildcat driller who became an owner and operator. As to construction, I ran an asbestos pipe–cutting machine for a summer; add to that factory work—I was a spray painter in the John Bean factory in Lansing, Michigan. Horrible job. I can still smell the fumes. All of this taught me one important thing that carried over to writing. If you are capable of making a living out of your talent and imagination, you are a privileged soul. As to the actual writing, you learn about writing by reading. And then you learn to make use of your own particular attitudes, gifts, and skills by—writing, writing, writing. You spent time, early on in the industry, as an assistant director. I suppose what that job teaches is obvious—but is it? Is what you learned on Bullitt [1968], for example, vastly different from the lessons learned on Take the Money and Run [1968]? As an assistant director, I saw how often the process of filmmaking was political as well as creative. Again, one shouldn’t generalize, but this was true on Bullitt, not true on Take the Money, which was the first time that I worked with (around) a writer-director. I didn’t do much but pass out the call sheets and fill out time cards. The fact that the director is a writer, and has written the script being made, changes all attitudes. Executives, actors, crew—to them, the director becomes the personification of the script, and it therefore immediately becomes much less vulnerable to attack. I think I’m a particularly good witness to this; and as a writer (before I was a director), I was generally treated in the classical Hollywood tradition.

WALTER HILL

107

What were the date and circumstances of your first professional sale of writing (i.e., you got paid money)? Can you date your first script sale in Hollywood? Produced or not. Joe Wizan bought a script that I’d written, a Western, in 1969 (I think). He optioned it for a couple of years, picked up the option once—“Lloyd Williams and His Brother” was the title—later changed to “Drifters.” Never got made. Got close a couple of times. Sam Peckinpah was going to do it after The Getaway [1972], then he jumped over to MGM and Pat Garrett [Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 1973]. I used some material from “Lloyd Williams” when I did the script for Hard Times, so it probably worked out for the best. Except for Joe. I hate to join the long line of people who have asked you about Peckinpah, but he’s a hard subject to avoid. I love The Getaway; it seems the peak before the decline. What did Peckinpah bring to that collaboration as a writer? Or was he (my impression) partly frustrated and inarticulate as a writer? I had been hired by Peter Bogdanovich to write The Getaway (actually to cowrite it with him). He had read Hickey & Boggs [1972] and got the producers (Foster and Brower)2 to sign me up. I’m actually not sure that Peter ever read Hickey & Boggs, but Polly Platt did; they were separated, but she was still a very big player in his life.3 I didn’t know Polly then; later we got to be friends. Anyway, Peter and I began to write—I was in San Francisco with him while he was shooting What’s Up, Doc? The way we worked was pretty simple: I was staying in the Huntington working on pages and then bringing them to him on the set; he would then give me notes. We had maybe twenty-five pages when we went back to L.A., and Steve McQueen fired him. Nothing to do with the pages (we hadn’t turned anything in)— personality thing. So I started over. (Peter was trying to make a Hitchcocklike picture out of the material, which I wasn’t very comfortable with, but I was doing my job, man.) I wrote a first draft in about six weeks, and then they hired Sam. He came in from England, where he had been finishing up Straw Dogs [1971]. I assumed he would do any rewrites himself or bring in one of his cronies; but we talked, got on well, and he kept me around. While I was doing changes (mainly trims, dialogue polish, and probably most critically, going from period—1949—to contemporary), he gave me several of his old

108

WALTER HILL

scripts to read. He had a motive. He suggested I lift a few pages out of one of them and adapt them to the story at hand. Which I did. This was the first time I ran into the idea of directors reworking old scenes and making them fit anew. I’ve done it myself a number of times. As they say, most of us only know one story. One of the pleasant surprises of my life was how little Sam changed my Getaway script while they were shooting. And I thought it came out to be a pretty good film—certainly well directed, well shot, and for the most part well acted. In speaking about Sam, you need to be careful about which stage of his career you’re talking about. I think the dividing line is around Pat Garrett (a film I’m not wild about, but I know others are). Obviously I’m talking about alcohol and, let’s say, various other forms of intoxicants. I’m in no position to throw stones, but Sam’s habits were well documented and, in the end, very self-destructive. He was alcoholic, but functional and rational up to about this time—after that, he was in and out of coherence, especially artistic coherence. I’m trying to be dispassionate here—it’s difficult. I was very fond of Peckinpah. We weren’t terribly close, but he was a friend. He helped my career in many ways and many times encouraged me as a writer and a director. He could be a lot of fun—he had a wicked sense of humor— but he also had most of the traditional manifestations of an affluent alcoholic, and they aren’t pretty. For instance, excessive reliance on toadies and flunkies, talking badly about people he actually liked, and that liked him, and the constant paranoid search for disloyalty was absolutely Nixonian. Peckinpah was a good writer, but he only had one voice. He could just write his kind of thing: Westerns, hard guys, bitter-enders. But he wrote them quite well. He was good at structure and good at finding the ironic moment. On dialogue, it’s a little harder to be completely generous. He was good at finding short catchphrases for characters that described their inner workings, but I always thought he was way too explicit in having characters baldly state thematic ideas. The contrast with John Huston I think is interesting. Huston, like the more traditional screenwriters, could write in many voices. For instance, it’s impossible to imagine Sam writing Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet [1940], Jezebel [1938], or Wuthering Heights [1939].4 But one can certainly see him doing Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1948]. This sounds like a criticism of Peckinpah but isn’t meant to be. I actually think you are much better off writing in as narrow a voice as possible (produces higher-quality work and a more personal statement), but the other side of that coin (and Sam is illustrative of this), you probably burn out faster.

WALTER HILL

109

ALI MacGRAW AND STEVE McQUEEN IN THE GETAWAY , FROM WALTER HILL’S SCRIPT, WHICH CHANGED “VERY LITTLE” WHEN SAM PECKINPAH CAME ON AS DIRECTOR.

Do you feel you write with one voice or more? I’m old-fashioned. I can write in more than one voice, but I think all my best stuff is when I play to my strength. Unfortunately, in my case, those projects are much harder to get made. I know there is some trick to writing for Paul Newman, who can be fussy, but it seems like an elusive, enigmatic job from the outside. You got away with it twice in the early 1970s. How? Serendipity? I didn’t know Newman at all. Still don’t. I was around at the beginning of the shooting of The Mackintosh Man [1973]—“The Freedom Trap,” in those days. We did have a couple of meetings to go over rewrites—he was quite pleasant, struck me as the kind of guy that wanted to live to be a hundred, and have everybody love him. He may make it. That whole thing (Mackintosh) was a real fiasco. The novel wasn’t much, my script wasn’t much, Huston was doing it for the money, and

110

WALTER HILL

Newman was doing it because Huston was doing it. I got into Mackintosh because it got me out of being sued. A couple of years before, I had been signed to write an original Western for Warner’s (“The Big R.B.,” never got written) when a spirited fight broke out over their selling my script Hickey & Boggs to United Artists. I had been paid $15,000 (I think, hard to remember), and they sold it for a couple of hundred thousand. My agent Jeff Berg took the position that Warner’s was meant to be making movies, not brokering scripts, and certainly not without cutting the writer in on the windfall. You can see where this is all going; anyway, a year goes by, Warner’s is mad because they are not getting an original script by me as promised by signed contract, and they had paid me some start-up money (thirty years later, I can see they had a point). So Berg settles the whole mess by jacking up my price on the old “R.B.” deal and tells them I’ll adapt something for them. They (literally) send me a box of novels they owned— I pick one out and crank out a draft—remember, I’m still furious about the Hickey & Boggs transaction. The book was a half-assed spy story, a genre that’s never been one of my favorites.5 In truth, and pretty obviously, I should never have done the damn thing. I wrote (I think) a workmanlike script—this is the dangerous gift of being able to write in more than one voice—but it wasn’t anything more than workmanlike. Certainly nothing special. Anyway, vaguely embarrassed, I turned it in and left town. A couple of weeks later I called Berg from San Francisco, and he immediately says, “Where the shit have you been? Everybody’s looking for you—great news, blah, blah . . .” I’d been driving all over the gold rush country and stayed a while over in Reno; he told me to get my ass back to L.A. because Newman and John Huston were doing my script. And it was true. But . . . They flew me to London, then to Ireland to work with Huston. We didn’t get along very well with the work, but he was great at lunch and dinner. He kept wanting to stick to the book, and I kept suggesting we’d better change as much as possible. (I know all this sounds more than a bit self-serving and has the accuracy of hindsight, but trust me, it’s true.) Anyway, I felt a bit desperate, smelling disaster. And Huston refused to get too excited about it all. By then he’d survived many disasters, and he was a bit preoccupied; it was a bad time for him. He was getting sick (emphysema), having a lot of problems with his new wife (massive understatement), and had a lot of money trouble. I got fired in the end. Huston ended up writing a lot of the final script (later, he was reluctant to admit this, as well he should have been), as did a couple of other writers—Gerald Hanley and someone else, I forget who. As to the finished film, I wrote about 80 percent of the first half

WALTER HILL

111

(I’ll let somebody else do the math), nothing after that. Somehow I ended up with sole credit on the thing—just my luck. I had ambivalent feelings about Huston for years, and then we got tossed together again over Revenge. This was back in L.A. in the mideighties. He was lonely, broke, very sick, living in some crappy house up in Laurel Canyon. He had just written a script based on Jim Harrison’s story with his son, Tony—coincidentally, I had cowritten a script with David Giler several years before from the same material. And originally Harrison had written a draft, I think for Jack Nicholson. Ray Stark tried to engineer a blending of the Hill/Giler and Huston/Huston scripts, which I was to direct; Huston, who really should have directed it, was too enfeebled at that point. Oddly enough, he seemed to like our script better than his own, save for the ending—the last thirty pages actually—I think he was right. I can still hear him, “You have completely fucked up everything that the story is trying to be about, torn the petals off the rose.”6 He loved to argue. I remember once I happened to make a passing complimentary reference to Apocalypse Now [1979], and Huston did thirty minutes on what crap the film was—wouldn’t hear a word in favor of it. At this time he was getting ready to direct the Joyce story [The Dead, 1987] in some warehouse out in the Valley. He was playing the last card and knew it. They were brave last days. Anyway, we made our peace. The other Paul Newman project was yet one more mess. Larry Turman and David Foster (David had produced The Getaway) had a deal at Fox and asked me to do a script of Ross MacDonald’s The Drowning Pool. Richard Mulligan was to direct. I did a draft and tried to toughen up the material, and put a little more muscle in Lew Archer’s pants, which was probably a mistake. Certainly the studio and the producers ended up feeling that way; their main criticism was MacDonald’s fans don’t respond to physical action. They may have been right, but I thought going in the direction they wanted with the script was the highway to dullsville. So I more or less jumped ship to start writing Hard Times at Columbia for Larry Gordon. What followed on Drowning Pool was the usual Hollywood horseshit. Lorenzo Semple rewrote me. Tracy Keenan Wynn then rewrote him. And, finally, I think Eric Roth did some work on it. In the finished picture, there are a couple of scenes that I can say I more or less wrote—beyond that, not much. Mulligan left the project when I did; he and I got along fine. Newman wasn’t part of the deal at the time. I think he came in after Lorenzo’s draft. As you may infer from my remarks, I wasn’t too crazy about the movie. •

•

•

112

WALTER HILL

How did you teach yourself screenwriting? The usual story—read a lot of scripts, saw every possible movie. Wrote a lot at night. My big problem was finishing—I must’ve written twenty-five first acts—abandon and move on, abandon and move on. This went on about three years. Funny thing, once I was able to finish a script, I was able to make a living at it right away. I don’t mean the format so much, I mean the essence of it, as well as the kind of style you preferred. Were you influenced by specific scripts? Alex Jacobs’s script of Point Blank [1967] was a revelation. He was a friend (wonderful guy, looked like a pirate, funny and crazy). This revelation came about despite a character flaw of mine. I have always had difficulty being complimentary to people whose work I admire, when face-to-face with them. This is not the norm in Hollywood, where effusiveness is generally a given. Anyway, a mutual friend told Alex how much I admired Point Blank and John Boorman. Alex then very graciously gave me a copy of the script. This was about the time he was doing The Seven-Ups [1973]. Anyway, by now I’d been making a living as a screenwriter for maybe two or three years and had gotten to the point where I was dissatisfied with the standard form scripts were written in—they just all seemed to be a kind of subliterary blueprint for shooting a picture and generally had no personal voice. Mine were tighter and terser than the average, but I was still working within the industry template and not too happy about it. Alex’s script just knocked me out (not easy to do); it was both playable and literary. Written in a whole different way than standard format (laconic, elliptical, suggestive rather than explicit, bold in the implied editorial style), I thought Alex’s script was a perfect compliment to the material, hard, tough, and smart—my absolute ideals then. So much of the writing that was generally praised inside the business seemed to me soft and vastly overstated—vastly oversentimental. Then and now. I haven’t changed my opinions about that. But I have changed them about the presentational style. Anyway, I immediately resolved to try to go in that direction (that Alex had shown), and I worked out my own approach in the next few years. I tried to write in an extremely spare, almost haiku style, both stage directions and dialogue. Some of it was a bit pretentious—but at other times I thought it worked pretty well. I now realize a lot of this was being a young guy who wanted to throw rocks at windows. What scripts did you write in that particular style?

WALTER HILL

113

Hard Times was the first, and I think maybe the best. Alien [1979]—the first draft, then when David and I rewrote it, we left it in that style. The Driver, which I think was the purest script that I ever wrote, and The Warriors. The clean narrative drive of the material and the splash-panel approach to the characters perfectly fit the design I was trying to make work. Of course all this depends on the nature of the material; I don’t think the style would’ve worked at all had I been writing romantic comedies. You appear to have a knowledge and appreciation of certain screenwriters of the past. Are you conscious of the influence of particular old-time screenwriters? I did some homework. You owe it to the craft. Borden Chase, Lamar Trotti, Ben Hecht (probably the classic example of the multivoice screenwriter), Preston Sturges, [Robert] Riskin, and of course Hawks—who was a writerdirector, though he’s usually not billed that way. I don’t pretend to be a scholar about the history and evolution of screenwriting, and I think you have to approach it as a craft rather than an art. But it’s the old story; if the craft gets good enough, it is an art. In general, how much do you need a cowriter, either for balance, feedback, or just company? As they get older, writers tend to specialize, given their particular comfort zones, but I’m still trying to be flexible. I’m happy to sit down and write an original, an original on spec or after a pitch (one of the first rules I learned but have broken many times—never write for free, and never use your own money to buy a project), or adapt from a source. I like cowriters for all the reasons you’ve mentioned, but I’ve discovered there’re very few people I can work with. It’s just such a delicate thing; you have to be on the same wavelength, not that you won’t have some roaring discussions—you should really like each other, otherwise the process is so intimate that you will probably end up trying to choke your partner. Cowriting is great for two basic reasons: you’ve got an equal to test your ideas against, and vice versa; the other reason being you have someone you can have some laughs with. I can’t write with someone unless it’s fun; as you know, writing alone can be very grim. In the past, I’ve only written with (as opposed to worked with) three guys—David Giler, Larry Gross, Lukas Heller. With David, we usually ended up working in hotels with plenty of time for TV sports and long dinners where alcohol was served. Lately he and I have worked at his place up

114

WALTER HILL

in the hills—that’s where we did Undisputed [2002]. Lukas and I always worked out at my beach house. We also made arrangements for TV sports and dinner. Larry and I usually worked at whatever studio was paying us; then we’d each go off and write; then we’d hook up the next day. Obviously you work with people because they’re giving you something that you think is going to make it better. David’s the best dialogue writer I’ve ever known. And he’s got a marvelous capacity for coming up with the unexpected—a U-turn that’s novel but at the same time underlines what you’re trying to do with the material. A lot of the time he’ll present it as a joke, and it’ll turn out to be a great idea. Like in Alien, when the Ian Holm character was revealed to be a droid—that was David. Lukas was also a great friend—I miss him very much—he was just really good at everything about screenwriting. Construction. Story. Dialogue. Theme.A terrific adaptor, he had to have source material. Other than that, he had all the bases covered. Three to five pages a day, then pass the bottle. Larry is an unapologetic intellectual. Very rare in show business. Extremely well-read. Extremely knowledgeable about the history of film. He’s very good at keeping scenes on the thematic track. We’ll discuss something, and he’ll then cite a moment from Dostoyevsky, Borges, Yeats, or some such to illustrate it; then we sit there and try to figure out how to steal it. (Laughs.) People always say that writing is a lonely profession, but directing, although you are surrounded by people, is also a solo act. I can figure out what might be professionally required—but what is psychologically necessary for a writer to make the leap to being a director? Writing does not train you for the following essentials in directing—verbally transmitting your ideas to other people. Suffering fools. Practical problem solving of a physical nature. Leadership that falls somewhere between being the first of equals or a ruthless tyrant—depending on your character and the role you choose to play. Most of all, a sense of how to deal with the actors, to give them confidence they’re in good hands and are in an environment to do their best work. However, most of the real work of both directing and writing is interior, private, personal, noncollective, idiosyncratic. •

•

•

Hard Times: How much of a struggle was it to get your first directing job?

WALTER HILL

115

I met Larry Gordon in the spring of 1973—he was running American International Pictures then, and he told me he’d give me a shot at directing if I’d write a script for him. We had to find a subject, obviously—something that appealed to both of us—then he moved over to Columbia. Larry was going to have his own unit that specialized in low-budget action films. Larry is one of the great characters: from Mississippi, obstreperous, high-decibel, tough businessman, real smart, and can make you laugh for hours. The first thing he told me was that he didn’t figure he was taking much of a chance on me as a director: I couldn’t be any worse than the ones he’d been working with at AIP, and at least he’d have a shot at getting a good script. I was in that bullshit “hot-writer” phase coming off The Getaway, so we made a deal: write for scale, direct for scale, and they couldn’t make the picture without me. So it was a good bargain for everybody; they got me cheap, and I got a shot at directing. The truth is, I would’ve paid them for the chance. Larry had a project set in San Pedro about street fighting for money. He had developed a script from a newspaper article—it was contemporary and pretty rough stuff—very AIP. I thought maybe if you did it more like a Western with a kind of mythopoetic hero, it might take the edge off—give it a chance to come upmarket. Larry went with that, so we made it period— set it in New Orleans. Larry had spent a lot of time there; he went to law school at Tulane. He knew a lot about the city, and I thought I knew a lot about everything. (Laughs.) Anyway, I guess I took a deep breath—a subject matter I loved, a producer I respected, a deal that said I could direct—here was my chance, no excuses allowed. I wrote a draft, then rewrote it four or five times before I finally got it. But I did get it, and I knew it. I knew it was going to get an actor, and get made. How much of a struggle was it to hold on to the job and do it properly? I shot it in thirty-eight days. It seemed like about a year and a half. I got along pretty well with [Charles] Bronson, not so well with [James] Coburn, loved Strother Martin. I had written a rather exotic character; Strother asked me if he could just play it like Tennessee Williams. I said, great, and that took care of it. Strother could be very waspish, but he was a gentle soul. He gave me a special edition of Whitman when we finished. I was sorry we never got to work together again. The cameraman, Phil Lathrop, helped me enormously. How much of a switch was it, going from writer to writer-director?

116

WALTER HILL

Not a lot. Some people have a knack for it—I think I fit that category. What I think is deplorable is the notion that directing is an extension of a writing career, and that those who don’t make the jump are somehow the less for it. Is it possible to say which of your films was made with the greatest creative freedom? I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had a lot of producer interference. Larry and I used to have fights, but they were always couched in good humor and respect. And when he disagreed with me, he never went to the studio behind my back. To a lot of people, Larry’s a bit of a rough character, but I always found him to be more than honorable. I haven’t always done so well with the studios. Even in that period, in the 1970s? The first two films went okay—when I turned my cut over to Columbia on Hard Times, they had two little notes: I said no, and they said fine. I had some real fights with Michael Eisner on The Warriors, and a few years later on 48 HRS. But Larry always smoothed them out as best as possible. Do you like Eisner? I like him about as well as he likes me. Let’s let it go at that. You made two films for him; both made money and got good reviews. To be honest, I never liked his general approach; he was the prototype of the executive that led us to the high-concept, market-driven studio. I realize that makes me sound like a Luddite, but fuck it. I have to admit, had Eisner not taken the path, someone else would have. My clearest impression is that Eisner wanted movies to be a kind of pleasantly flavored chewing gum and was almost physically uncomfortable in dealing with anything about the dark side of the human heart. There’s no taking away he’s a hugely successful businessman, and he was obviously a great fit for Disney. I liked two things about Michael: he didn’t give a damn about what you thought about him, and he had an unshakable belief in his own opinions; both are rare qualities in film executives. Unfortunately, the unshakable belief had a downside; he had great popular instincts, but he lacked anything approaching artistic taste. And to be really good, you need both.

WALTER HILL

117

The whole executive/writer thing is obviously tricky. I’ve liked a lot of them, but Eisner, I just found all his notes, ideas, and enthusiasms to be so shallow. I liked being around Alan Ladd, Gareth Wigan, John Calley— smart guys that had very high standards. I certainly don’t believe that studio interference has ever made any project I’ve been around more commercial. Or better. The best defense is a good script. It all starts there. Was the script process on 48 HRS. acrimonious? 48 HRS. started out as an idea by Larry Gordon. In the original story, the governor of Louisiana’s daughter was kidnapped by a vicious criminal who strapped dynamite to her head and announced to the world there were forty-eight hours to pay the ransom or kaboom. Solving this dilemma was obviously a job for the meanest cop in New Orleans, who goes to the worst prison in Louisiana and gets out the most vicious criminal in the history of the state, a Cajun, for his special knowledge about the devious ways of the kidnapper, who, coincidentally, used to be his cell mate. The cop and the con don’t get along very well, but finally hard justice is done to the miscreant. Very hard justice. As you can see, in some ways things changed a bit. And in some ways they didn’t. I guess this is a good example of my juvenile sense of heroics, because even though I’m poking a little fun here, I loved the basic notion of the story. Right from the first. Roger Spottiswoode wrote one of the early drafts, while he was living at my house up off Mulholland—right after we had finished Hard Times. Roger was the editor on the film; he wanted to direct, and Larry and I encouraged him to write his way into the job. Bill Kerby wrote a draft, as did a couple of other guys—the project moved from Columbia to Paramount. Then Tracy Keenan Wynn wrote a draft. I guess then it was my turn; I wrote a quick draft that took it in another direction. This was meant to be for [Clint] Eastwood. Larry got him interested in the story, but Clint wanted to be the convict.As I was leaving to do The Long Riders, I suggested to the studio that we flip the roles, and I’d rewrite it with the idea that Eastwood be teamed up with Richard Pryor. But Eastwood didn’t want to play a cop—that would bump his Dirty Harry series over at Warner’s. He was right about that. Then he decided to do a prisoner role in Alcatraz with Don Siegel [Escape from Alcatraz, 1979], and that pretty much put paid to the idea that he would play our convict part. Alcatraz turned out to be a good film, but it didn’t help us any: the big fish had slipped through the net. Another couple of years went by, and nothing much seemed to happen; then, out of the blue, Larry called me and asked if I’d do the picture with [Nick] Nolte. Suddenly everything had broken right, and Larry put the

118

WALTER HILL

movie together; a good example of a persistent producer—Larry never quit on it. We shot the film seven years after Roger had written his draft. Up to this point, there wasn’t any acrimony that I knew about. But once we had a start date, and Larry Gross came in to help me tune the script up, then it got pretty rough and stayed that way until the movie came out in the first part of December. We started shooting in the middle of May, if I remember correctly, with about a seven-week prep. Larry Gordon was busy on a lot of his projects, so he had Joel Silver, who worked for him, produce the movie on a daily basis while he [Larry] oversaw what was going on. So Larry remained active on the project? Yeah. Very much so. I think 48 HRS. was our fourth movie together, and by now we were great friends. This was about the time Don Simpson was carrying water for Eisner; Don was President or Vice President in charge of the Western Universe, something like that—one of those phony titles they give each other. A few months later they fired Don and made him a producer—the way he lived made them nervous. Anyway, Don would get Eisner’s notes and transmit them to me. They were usually incoherent, more or less depending upon the amount of drugs Don had ingested. At some point the studio figured out this system wasn’t so hot. So Ricardo Mestres started doing the notes, and Don just signed them. It’s actually not correct to call the notes Eisner’s: Michael would have some general notion about the script, and he’d put it in the pipeline, then Those Who Also Serve would try to implement them with specific ideas. So the notes you were getting represented a committee trying to assuage their boss. Classic studio procedure. What did you do with the notes? I usually read them and tossed them; then, after a while, I didn’t read them and tossed them—finally, I just started sending them over to Joel [Silver], unread, and told him to tell me if there was anything any good in them. He had his secretary read them, and she’d tell Joel what she thought. I assume she wasn’t a trained story analyst. Shit no, she wasn’t. Anyway, Eisner was frantic that I wouldn’t let the movie get funny enough—which was bullshit. But you know the drill; they only think “funny” is what’s on the page. Jokes. Situational gags or sight gags are usually beyond them, unless you go up to their office and act it

WALTER HILL

119

out. I’ve never been much for that. So Larry Gross and I just kept writing, specifically to the personalities of Nick and Eddie [Murphy]—and we got it where we thought certain scenes would play to their strengths. The big problem in a sense was Eddie—I know I should have such problems on all my movies—and turning him into a real film personality, not letting him simply be a comedy sketch character out of Saturday Night Live. Larry Gross and I were rewriting Eddie to the very last day of shooting. The more we learned, the better he got. Of course, it’s obvious that he was a gold mine of talent. I guess we did something right—Eddie played basically the same character for the next ten years. How much of Eddie’s dialogue was improvised? Not a lot. Occasionally he came up with something really good, which I was smart enough to go with. I mean, he is a very funny guy when he wants to be. But let’s not get into the idea that William Powell and Myrna Loy really talked that way. They had writers. In the redneck bar scene, who wrote the line—“I’m your worst nightmare—a nigger with a badge”? I did. That scene was done out of sequence, pretty much at the end of shooting. Eddie started a few weeks after principal photography began (he was finishing up his commitment to Saturday Night Live), and I had arranged to do most of his heavy lifting as late as possible in the schedule, so we’d have more time to write to him and work with him. The atmosphere on the set was terrific. We had a lot of fun making the movie. But the atmosphere at the studio, as I’ve indicated, was lousy. When I did the gunfight scene in the hotel, where Nick faces off with Jimmy Remar—I think it was the first or second week after we got back to L.A., they (the executives) went to dailies and said I’d never work at Paramount again. Why? Too violent. They thought it would kill the humor. You did work at Paramount again. Yeah. But they were all gone. Did they really want to fire Eddie Murphy?

120

WALTER HILL

Yes. But that wasn’t Eisner. Several of the executives didn’t think Eddie was funny. Or, to be precise, they didn’t think he was like Richard Pryor, who was the definition of funny black man at that time. I showed Eisner some cut footage, and he thought Eddie was fine but that I was still not letting the movie be funny enough. He kept talking about “block comedy” scenes. That’s a TV expression. I’m not exactly sure what it means. I told Michael I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but not to worry, the story was coming along fine. And that Eddie was very funny. As usual, Larry Gordon smoothed it all out, and I kept shooting. The person that really understood that Eddie was doing great was Joel. Remember, this was Eddie’s first movie, and he was all over the place, but Joel understood we were only going to use the good stuff. And there was plenty of that. •

•

•

You were working in a special niche of your own in the late seventies and early eighties with Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, and Southern Comfort—lean, elegiac films that, I’m guessing, benefited from modest budgets and expectations, as well as low producer interference. Yes, that niche no longer exists. The middle ground has largely fallen out of the studio system. Is it possible to say, for you, which of them turned out the best? Or, in retrospect, your favorite? I couldn’t say. They’re social as well as aesthetic experiences. If you point a gun at me, I’d probably say Wild Bill [1995] is as good as anything I’ve done. But that was years later. Are the megahits like 48 HRS. a kind of mixed blessing? The positive factors are obvious and on the whole outweigh everything else. A big hit allows you to go forward, keep working. But the financial people constantly want you to not simply repeat yourself (I’m not against this in principle, remember we only know one or two stories), but they usually want you to go out and make exactly the same movie right down to the shoelaces. I am against that. If I may digress, this old saw that I’ve just used again about only knowing a couple of stories, is actually quite accurate if one substitutes the word “theme” for “stories.”

WALTER HILL

121

Speaking of megahits, can you clarify your contribution to the Alien series? I generally duck answering Alien questions in interviews—so much of it ended up acrimoniously, and when you give your side, it usually comes out sounding totally self-serving. Alien was the first time you functioned as a producer. Yes. This is complicated—mainly I’ll try to talk not as a producer but as a writer—however, in this case it’s difficult to separate . . . David and I had formed a production company [called Brandywine] with Gordon Carroll—this was about 1975. About six months after we started, I was given a script called Alien by a fellow I knew (Mark Haggard, interesting guy, a real John Ford expert) who was fronting the script for the two writers (Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett). I read it, didn’t think much of it, but it did have this one sensational scene—which later we always called “the chest burster.” I should probably also say that The Thing [1951] was one of my favorite films from when I was a kid; and this script reminded me of it, but in an extremely crude form. I gave it to David with one of those “I may be crazy, but a good version of this might work” speeches. The next night, I remember I was watching Jimmy Carter give his acceptance speech to the Democratic convention, and was quite happy to answer the phone when it rang. It was David—he told me I was crazy, but he had just got as far as the big scene (the chest burster), and it was really something. So basically, off the strength of that, we acquired the rights and kicked it around for a few weeks, trying to figure out what to do with it. Remember, neither of us was a real sci-fi writer or a horror writer, but we were arrogant enough to think we understood how the genres worked. First, we gave the original screenplay to the studio we had a deal with (Fox); they read it and passed (actually, it had been previously submitted to them, so technically they passed twice), but we just didn’t want to let it go. We believed that if you got rid of a lot of the junk— they had pyramids and hieroglyphics on the planetoid, a lot of [Erich] von Däniken crap, and a lot of bad dialogue—that what you would have left might be a very good, very primal space survival story.7 Finally, I said I’d give the fucker a run-through (it was now around Christmas holidays). David was going off to Hong Kong with his girlfriend, but before he left we thrashed it out pretty good. How did the rewrite differ from the original script?

122

WALTER HILL

For starters, in the original material, it was an all-man crew, and the creature was some kind of outer-space octopus—the main idea David and I had was to do a slicked-up, high-class B movie that as best we could avoided the usual cheeseball characters and dialogue. This doesn’t seem like much now, but the notion that you’d write up to a B movie idea—make it to be played with the same intentions and style as high drama—that was out of the box, then. And, pretty obviously, we were thinking like producers before we began to deal with it as screenwriters. One other thing—I resist science fiction that suggests the universe is something other than dark, cold, harsh, dangerous. I said before how much I liked Hawks’s The Thing, and one of the ideas in the finished script [of Alien] that I liked best was the way it dramatized and valorized instinctive wariness and practicality when dealing with the unknown, over the needs of science. Right from the first, I wanted very much to get a version of that into the script. And I think that quality is what made the movie so American, even though it was shot in England, had an English director, English technicians, and several English cast members. David had suggested making the captain (Dallas) a woman. I tried that, but I thought the money was on making the ultimate survivor a woman— I named her “Ripley” (after “Believe It or Not”); later, when she had to have a first name for ID cards, I added “Ellen” (my mother’s middle name). I called the ship Nostromo (from Conrad: no particular metaphoric idea, I just thought it sounded good). Some of the characters are named after athletes: Brett was for George Brett, Parker was Dave Parker of the Pirates, and Lambert was Jack Lambert of the Steelers. In a sense, what was different from the O’Bannon/Shusett script is difficult to answer. There were certainly a lot of finite things: the protagonist as a woman, mixed-gender crew, the Wayland-Yutani Company, the conspiracy theory undertones to the Wayland-Yutani Company, the possibility of using the Alien as a biological weapon, Ash as a droid, the idea of class lines based on job descriptions—what we called “truckers in space” (this became an instant cliché; you couldn’t make a sci-fi movie after this without baseball hats); but the most significant difference in the two scripts was setting the mood, the environment, and what became the stance of the film. That said, we then added a rough contemporary quality to the characters that broke it out of the usual genre mold—the “kiss my rosy red ass” and “kill the motherfucker” kind of dialogue that historically you didn’t find in science fiction movies. Remember, we were at the same studio that had made Star Wars [1977]. The on-lot joke at the time was that we were the Rolling Stones to their Beatles.

WALTER HILL

123

Did you like the joke? Shoot me as the Antichrist, but I never much liked the Beatles. The film is sometimes criticized for having weakly defined characters. That’s bullshit. You clearly know who each of them are, and what their attitudes reflect—and they have immediacy. And of course, our best character was the Alien. Can you elaborate? David and I joked about calling him/her “Nietzsche,” you know, “Beyond Good and Evil.” Seriously, that was one of the things in making the thing fly—we articulated that notion in a way that got to the audience. I love the Ash death speech, “A perfect organism. Its structural perfection matched only by its hostility. I admire its purity. An organism unclouded with remorse, conscience, or delusions of morality . . .” Ian Holm. Wonderful actor. I remember I met with Tommy Lee Jones in New York; we were interested in him playing Dallas—he told me he had read the script twice, and the only character that really grabbed him was the monster, and that he’d sign up tomorrow if he could play it. It sounds like you and David Giler had a good time writing the script. Too much probably. And to tell the truth, we were kind of left-handing the whole thing. I don’t mean we thought we were above the material; that’s the worst sin, and sends you straight to the inner circle of hell. But we were busy on a lot of other projects, and, again, neither of us felt sci-fi was our natural métier. Although I had been a big sci-fi reader when I was a kid, David not at all. Oddly enough, in the long run, I think that distance helped the script—the feeling we had of standing somewhere outside the genre helped get it off center and made it different in tone. And it gave us the courage to be irreverent. I mean, when it’s 2:00 a.m. and you’re writing about a monster with acid for blood, some irreverence is called for; we were always taking an implausible situation and trying to make it sound real, and most of the time we pulled it off, I think. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we may have left-handed the script, but we did work very hard; the Ash death speech we probably wrote twenty times before we got it right. Anyway, David went off to Hong Kong, and I sat down and did the spec rewrite of the O’Bannon/Shusett script. It took maybe a week.After the hol-

124

WALTER HILL

idays, David got back, and then he and I rewrote it several times. We gave it to the studio, and they got on board. Gareth Wigan was the executive on the piece; he’s one of the very few executives I’ve ever worked with who’s actually very good with script. David and I then did what seemed like an endless series of polishes. The last couple we did in New York in my room at the Navarro (now the Ritz Carlton), while I was prepping The Warriors. But, in the end, you two weren’t credited. Correct. The [Writers] Guild decided we didn’t deserve any writing credit for our efforts. It sounds like you’re still unhappy about this. It’s a long time ago, and there are a lot more important things in the world; however, I certainly believe it was an injustice in the sense that it doesn’t reflect the truth. Partially as a result of all that, after the first Alien, I have to admit I never felt as involved or committed to those that followed, though obviously I was quite happy at their success. Is it true you’ve sued Fox over the profits? Yes. Twice. Both times settled in our favor. Any backlash to this? I am told that David and I are currently blackballed at Fox. So be it. Why was Alien so successful? First, but not necessarily foremost, it was a good script—suggestive of deeper issues, deeper terrors, nightmares. It’s not quite a sci-fi movie, not quite an action movie, not quite a horror movie, but some kind of odd synthesis that came together via a good, solid, old-fashioned story move. The objective problem in the first half becomes subjective in the second half by getting into Ripley’s head and experiencing the terror through her. The final draft was very tight, only about eighty pages, lean and mean. But whatever the quality of the script, films have to be realized. And in this case, it just all worked. [Director] Ridley Scott did a wonderful job, the best film he’s done, I think. Sigourney Weaver was iconographically perfect and had the chops to pull it off. She was a very young woman then; inexperienced, but it made the movie so much better that she wasn’t a known

WALTER HILL

125

actress. Needless to say, that was a tough one for the studio to swallow. I mean, we were insisting on a female lead in a sci-fi action film; and then on top of that, insisting on an unknown female lead. With a director whose previous film had a worldwide gross of, I think, less than half a million dollars. That’s why maybe the ultimate good guy was Laddie [Alan Ladd Jr., then production head of 20th Century-Fox]—he said yes. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that warm films are commercial, and cold ones are not. As usual, the conventional wisdom isn’t true, and it isn’t true by the bagsful with Alien. It’s a very cold film. Hospital cold. I’m-here-to-die-in-this-sterile-room-and-nobody-gives-a-shit-cold. But at the same time, that’s only a half-truth; it’s also fun—a good example of the old show biz rouser. What about Aliens [1986]? This was a few years later. David and I sat down and had a discussion about what the sequel should be. We figured the next one should be a straight action thriller—the military takes over—a patrol movie. David wrote it down on a couple of pages. Jim Cameron wrote a treatment. David and I rewrote it a bit (this must be about fall of ’83); we gave it to the studio, and they said, “Go to script.” Jim went off and directed The Terminator [1984], then came back and wrote the first draft. It never changed much. Did you like the film? Obviously Jim has a great talent for connecting with big audiences. I thought he shot the shit out of it. Tremendous physicality. I wasn’t too crazy about the stuff with the kid. What about Alien3 [1992]? Another complete fucking mess. The studio wanted to crank another one out. There were a number of false starts. David and I were a bit sick of it and wanted to end the whole thing. But we wanted to do it with some class and thematic cohesion. We thought that killing Ripley—or, to be more precise, having her sacrifice herself while ridding the universe of the Alien—would be a bold move and round out the trilogy. That was our only stipulation; beyond that we tried to stay out of it as writers. As usual, David and I were busy on other films. There were a number of writers and directors, then David Fincher was hired. There was a start date, the script was announced to be a mess (it was)—it had been run through about five writers up to

126

WALTER HILL

then; sets were being built, actors being hired—the usual circus of expensive incompetence. The studio and Sigourney asked us to put on our firemen suits, so David and I went to London and started writing. Fifteen years later, and we’re still in hotel rooms rewriting Alien. We felt we were working in handcuffs—writing to sets that were already built, plot moves that had been committed to that we didn’t agree with. Then there were differences of opinion with Fincher, Sigourney, and the studio. We did our best and went home. On this one, you and David Giler got credit. Or the blame. I think a lot of the ideas in the third one are actually the most interesting in the series, but the whole thing didn’t quite come off. And certainly some of that is our fault. Speaking for myself, I don’t think our script was nearly as good as the one we did for the first Alien. What about the fourth, Alien: The Resurrection [1997]? We had nothing to do with that one—didn’t even think it was a good idea for starters—we thought we had ended the series. And our relationship with the studio had deteriorated even more, probably due to the lawsuits. People don’t usually love you when you sue them. Our only real function was telling the studio that the script they developed without our input wasn’t any good and wouldn’t work. We then suffered the traditional fate of the messenger . . . Personally, I think it’s a lousy movie. And they just wasted Winona Ryder. That’s inexcusable. •

•

•

Let’s return to your masculine/physical heroics for a moment. Are there ways in which this strength has also become a straitjacket? I’m thinking of violence and car chases, for example—which, dating back to Peckinpah and The Getaway, were an innovation in the American cinema, but nowadays, in other hands, these ideas too often become simplistic clichés. I can see producers coming to you expressly for that and urging more and more violence and smashups upon you, in terms of both script and filming. The stars, too, begin to fall into a mold and then demand such things. Yes, no? Yes. But since you’ve asked a complicated question, allow me to be a bit circular. I love comedies, musicals, and thrillers like everybody else, but I con-

WALTER HILL

127

fess to believing action pictures are what movies are most essentially all about. It’s the work they do best and uniquely best. I don’t mean action movies are better; in fact, most of them are actually a lot worse than the norm. But the few that really work are sublime. Films like Colorado Territory [1949], White Heat [1949], Ride the High Country, The Seven Samurai [1954], Scarface [1932], Heat [1995], Dirty Harry [1972], Attack! [1956], The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [1966], or a hundred others I can name . . . The real power of movies lies in their connection to our unconscious or semiconscious dream life, and action movies are about heroism and death. Will he live or will he die is the ultimate drama, isn’t it? Purity is important. Because it’s the essence of what the creative person is most trying to achieve—the ideal. This is where I think screenplays and movies cause terrible frustration; the dramatic form itself is so messy. So much of what we are trying to do is simply to put things in proper order.And this ordering of things is complicated; it’s absolutely not simple. Now, if you’re going to do action films, a certain amount of repetition, which certainly is a kind of straitjacket, is inevitable.You are going to have to deal with gunfights and chases.And usually there are certain other limitations that are a given. If you’re doing Dirty Harry, Eastwood is not going to be shot dead at the end, right? So it becomes a kind of game.The audience knows what the conclusion will be, but you still have to entertain them. So you are always walking on the edge of a precipice—trying to juggle the genre expectations, which can slip into clichés, and in many cases are clichés—and your personal need to dance with the idea of taking the familiar and getting a little offcenter, getting it to play—putting your fingerprints on it. We have our areas of skill, and we want to continue to explore them, because we feel there’s probably something left to say—the need to, maybe this time, get it right. Lukas Heller always told me that [Robert] Aldrich used to say that the manipulation of idiots [the studio] was part of the job. But you manipulate them to get the opportunity to chase a kind of limited perfection. The main thing is to use whatever means are at hand to tell stories that mean something to you on a personal level. And often, again especially in the action field, what is personally interesting to you may be invisible to others. In the end, of course, when reviewing the result, the person you have outsmarted is very often yourself. It seems to me that when you have directed “only” and especially produced “only,” that often you are doing so partly in order to step outside the mold, doing offbeat comedies or other stuff (horror, etc.) that otherwise might not come your way. Is that a fair generalization?

128

WALTER HILL

Yes. Absolutely. And with mixed results. You seem to have made a point of directing or producing, without writing the scripts, for quite a few films after the mid-1980s. Is that partly happenstance? Or is it a decided career choice? Neither. I think in every instance, for better or worse, I did a lot of work on the screenplays but decided to not put in for credit. In some cases I felt I didn’t deserve it; in others I thought I would hurt the chances of the writers I was working with in getting credit. As discussed before, I’m not a great admirer of the arbitration process. I’ve never directed a script I didn’t control, with the exceptions of the Supernova [2000] mess and the Deadwood pilot for HBO. If you’re willing to make films without really controlling the storytelling elements, then you can probably work a lot more. But unless you’re broke, why bother? •

•

•

How does your script format differ from when you started out? Do you write less dialogue, less description nowadays . . . or what? My scripts have always been a bit terse, both in stage directions and dialogue. I think I’ve loosened up in the dialogue department, but I still try to keep the descriptions fairly minimal, and in some cases purposefully minimalist. I still punctuate to effect, rather than to the proper rules of grammar. I occasionally use onomatopoeias now, a luxury I would certainly never have allowed myself when I was younger. My favorite description of the dilemma of screenwriting comes from David Giler, “Your work is only read by the people who will destroy it.” What is the actual writing process for you? When I’m working alone, the old hard way. Longhand. Fountain pen. Legal pads. Thesaurus at my side. This last item, I’m not ashamed to say, is quite helpful—when you write screenplays, you don’t have a lot of room, and the stage directions can become onerously repetitive if you don’t work at fresh descriptions. Try to show the reader a new way to see it. Unless, of course, you are using repetition as a rhythm device in creating mood—which I guess is a perfect illustration of one of the things I like best about screen-

WALTER HILL

129

writing: whatever is true, the opposite can also be true. Both at the technical level and at a much larger one—I think it’s best approached as an enigmatic way to make a living. When you look around the room at a Writers Guild function nowadays, how many people do you recognize, still working at the craft, from your own first days as a screenwriter? What has been the secret of longevity in the field? Luck? Tenacity? Talent? I’m under the impression that very few people that started writing about the time I did (late 1960s) are still at it, but I could be wrong. One loses contact—that’s the nature of the work. But it’s foolish to think there aren’t a lot of casualties along the way. As to what makes for career longevity—this is difficult; your categories of luck, talent, and tenacity are certainly factors—to last at a significant level, relatively without compromise, seems to me to be the hardest trick to pull off. All this begs for definitions, however, and my notions of who is compromised and who isn’t probably differ radically from others’. Obviously, sustaining a career is primarily due to being associated with either commercial success or widely held notions of having done quality work. But quite often the first is a matter of luck, and the second a mistake in judgment that gets repeated often enough to have a life of its own. Are the current producers, or studio executives, worse than ever, in terms of script standards? Let’s not kid ourselves; it’s always been a whorehouse. But I think it was a more elegant one in the past, and certainly there was a much greater attempt to tell adult stories. I have confessed my juvenile sensibility, but now what’s on demand isn’t juvenile, it’s more often childish. As you know, producers (studios) come in all shapes and sizes. In general I’d say that now they put much more emphasis on concept, and much less emphasis on, and have less confidence in, the craft of storytelling. I don’t want to fall into the trap of the old fucker who complains that everything was better in the past. I don’t believe that. But I do think something reasonably adult is more difficult to get through the studio system than before (not that it was ever easy). There are a lot of reasons for this, but the greatest of them go beyond Hollywood—essentially the changing nature of a mass audience, domestic and foreign. I should add I’m the kind

130

WALTER HILL

of person that believes if you had a system built on altruism and great goodwill, with the sole aim of making a positive contribution to popular culture—even then, 90 percent of what got made would be shit. A lot of attempts at good work get done in the independents, but they generally lack scale. And scale is one of the glories of film. Currently what’s most getting lost is the personality within films. We need Red River [1948]. Hawks and Borden Chase. A wonderful old screenwriter told me this recently, “It’s a paradoxical truth; Hollywood’s worse than ever, but it was always bad.” But I can’t quit on that note. It’s only half true, in my case; the other half being that, for nearly forty years now, it’s been a voyage where I’ve been lucky enough to work with an enormous amount of talented people. And got paid for it. No complaints.

NOTES 1

The fields atop Signal Hill, overlooking nearby Los Angeles, are dotted with oil derricks.

2

Producers David Foster and Mitchell Brower.

3

Best known early in her career as a costume and production designer, the multitalented Polly Platt closely collaborated with husband, Peter Bogdanovich, until their divorce. Nowadays Platt is as likely to turn up on film credits as a producer (Bottle Rocket, 1996) or screenwriter (A Map of the World, 1999).

4

John Huston made an uncredited contribution to Wuthering Heights.

5

The Mackintosh Man is based on Desmond Bagley’s novel The Freedom Trap, published in 1971.

6

Revenge was eventually produced in 1990, with Kevin Costner, Anthony Quinn, and Madeleine Stowe starring, Tony Scott directing, and the script credited to novelist Jim Harrison and Jeffrey Alan Fiskin.

7

Erich von Däniken is the controversial Swiss author of Chariot of the Gods? and many other “nonfiction” books, theorizing about extraterrestrial visits and their influence on human culture since prehistoric times.

INTERVIEW BY VINCENT LoBRUTTO

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA OUT OF INDIA

n paper, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (PRAH-ver JOB-va-la) is a woman of many words. As a novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter, she has produced a textured and abundant body of work. In her literary work she eloquently echoes her muses Henry James and E. M. Forster. Personally, Jhabvala is a quiet and private woman who rarely grants interviews. Meeting and interviewing her for the Backstory series was a rare privilege worth waiting for. The journey began in 1992 when Pat McGilligan suggested I interview Jhabvala for Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s. I contacted her through the good graces of the Merchant Ivory office and received a lovely letter written by hand, in fountain pen, expressing her interest, but concerned if she really fit in a volume about the sixties and not the seventies. McGilligan and I certainly thought so. Jhabvala’s first screenplay, The Householder, was produced in 1963, and she filled that decade with her fiction writing. Her reticent but friendly turndown left the opportunity open, with the hope she would participate in the project. Polite reminders and updates were exchanged. In 1997, I sent her my biography of Stanley Kubrick [Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, New York: Dutton, 1997]. She was intrigued with the mystery and myth surrounding Kubrick’s life and work and invited me to her New York apartment in a building near the United Nations, also home

O

131

132

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

to her partners Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, and where she lives with her husband, the architect C. S. H. Jhabvala. Cyrus, known to friends as “Jhab,” is now retired and a fine-arts painter whose work appears on the covers of Jhabvala’s literary works. It was the end of summer in New York, hot and uncomfortable for me but not for Ruth, who has spent a large portion of her life in India. She was cordial, gracious (we sipped delicious and refreshing ginger tea during the afternoon), and more forthcoming than legend has it. I had read the few interviews that existed and was a little concerned about her customarily very short answers. My goal was to engage her in a conversation in the oral history tradition, and the talk turned out to be spirited and insightful. At one point she respectfully asked to leave the room, and I quietly listened as she suffered a sustained coughing spasm. When she returned, Jhabvala explained that the years of breathing the polluted air of India had taken a toll on her vocal chords—one of the reasons she rarely speaks publicly or gives interviews. A shy woman with great inner strength who is totally dedicated to writing—anything else can be an intrusion on the sacred process—Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany. Her parents were Marcus Prawer, a Jewish solicitor who fled Poland during World War I to avoid the military, and Elenora Cohn of Berlin, whose ancestors fled both Poland and Russia. Ruth’s maternal grandfather was cantor of the largest synagogue in Cologne. She learned English early as a child, mastered her ABC’s, and began to write while in Germany. In April 1939, the Prawers escaped to England and were refugees at the dawn of World War II. In 1940, Ruth attended the Hendon Country School in England. As a teenager she wrote constantly, developing passion and learning the craft. A disciplined and voracious reader, Jhabvala studied her beloved Eliot, Hardy, Dickens, James, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Chekhov. She was educated at Queen Mary College, London University, where she received a master’s degree in English literature, completing her thesis, “The Short Story in England.” In 1948, while Ruth was at the university, her father, overwhelmed by the loss of more than forty relatives to the genocide inflicted by the Nazis, committed suicide. Months later Ruth met “Jhab,” also a London University student, whom she later married. The couple moved to Delhi, beginning Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s long fascination with the mysterious and intriguing land of India. She has a near-perfect balance of living a third of her life in Europe, a third in India, and a third in America, shaping the unique Euro/Eastern/

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

133

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA IN NEW YORK CITY, 2003. (PHOTO BY WILLIAM B. WINBURN.)

Western perspective in her work as a writer and screenwriter. Jhabvala rarely discusses her brush with the Holocaust or mentions the years 1933–1939—it is unlikely she will ever explore the subject in her work because it is too close and too painful. In 1961, Merchant and Ivory optioned Jhabvala’s fourth novel, The Householder, a film was made, and a partnership of more than forty years was launched. As a screenwriter and filmmaker, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has tackled Henry James, E. M. Forster, and England’s and India’s caste systems. She is a master at adapting literary works to the screen with integrity and a respect for tradition—and an independent filmmaker who represents the vanishing voice of civility in world cinema.

134

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA (1927–)

1963 1965 1969 1970 1975 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1983

1984 1986 1988 1990 1991 1993 1995 1996 1998 2000 2003

The Householder (James Ivory). Script, based on her novel. Shakespeare Wallah (James Ivory). Co-script, with James Ivory. The Guru (James Ivory). Co-script with Ivory. Bombay Talkie (James Ivory). Co-script with Ivory. Autobiography of a Princess (James Ivory). Script. Roseland (James Ivory). Script. Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (James Ivory). Script. The Europeans (James Ivory). Script. Jane Austen in Manhattan (James Ivory). Script. Quartet (James Ivory). Script. The Courtesans of Bombay (Ismail Merchant). Narration and contributions. Heat and Dust (James Ivory). Script, based on her novel. The Bostonians (James Ivory). Script. A Room with a View (James Ivory). Script. Madame Sousatzka (John Schlesinger). Co-script with John Schlesinger. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (James Ivory). Script. Howards End (James Ivory). Script. Remains of the Day (James Ivory). Script. Jefferson in Paris (James Ivory). Script. Surviving Picasso (James Ivory). Script. A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (James Ivory). Co-script with Ivory. The Golden Bowl (James Ivory). Script. Le Divorce (James Ivory). Script.

Published novels and short-story collections include Poet and Dancer, Three Continents, In Search of Love and Beauty, Heat and Dust, Travelers or A New Dominion, A Backward Place, Get Ready for Battle, The Householder, Esmond in India, The Nature of Passion, Amrita or To Who She Will, Shards of Memory, Out of India: Selected Stories, How I Became a Holy Mother, An Experience of India, A Stronger Climate, Like Birds, Like

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

135

Fishes, East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York and New Delhi, and My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past. Academy Award honors include a Best Script nomination for The Remains of the Day and Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay for both A Room with a View and Howards End. Writers Guild honors include nominations for Howards End and The Remains of the Day and winning Best Adapted Screenplay for A Room with a View. Jhabvala received the Ian McLellan Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1993 and the Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1994.

How did you make the transition from novelist to screenwriter? I was always a writer. As a child, I was always scribbling. I had lots of unfinished plays, novels, and stories. Then, when I went to India, I was just old enough to be at the stage where you begin to publish. My first book was published in 1955, and then I wrote a series of novels and stories. At the end of 1961, Merchant and Ivory bought my fourth novel, The Householder, and said, “We’d like you to do the screenplay.” I said, “I’ve never done a screenplay,” but they’d never made a feature film, so we all started out together. Were you a spontaneous writer? Did you have any training or mentors? No mentor, no training, but a lot of self-training—just trial and error. Who were some of the authors you read at the time you started writing? I was born in Germany. I didn’t change languages until I was twelve, then I changed languages immediately and forgot German completely. I was just a bit too old to get into children’s stories, so I missed out on all the English children’s stories. I may have read some preadolescent books like the William series,1 which my own grandchildren are reading now, and then I went straight on to Dickens. I remember I was reading David Copperfield when I was twelve. Gone with the Wind, which came out in 1940 when I was thirteen years old, I thought was wonderful. Then I went on to read every kind of middlebrow and best-selling novelist in almost the same breath and without discrimination. I was also reading great books. I was reading War and Peace, I was reading Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Proust, but everything was completely indiscriminate.

136

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

I used to read everything, through the 1950s. Then I must have stopped at the generation just before me, people like Anthony Powell in England, and the Jewish writers, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. I can’t really take in contemporary and younger writers, and frankly I don’t like to read books about the Holocaust, having just escaped it by the skin of my teeth. Of course I have never touched the subject in any of my own writing—I don’t know if I ever will. I left Germany in April 1939 just a few months before, and of course left many members of the family. So for me it’s not a subject that I really want to read about or deal with—it’s too close. Did you ever explore novels on a scholarly level? No, no, never, never, not until I went to college. There I studied English literature more on a scholarly level, and during that time I didn’t do any writing of my own at all. As soon as I left that off, I went back to writing. Do you think of the novel as being a character-driven genre of writing? Yes, my own novels are, and the screenplays also. Do the characters occur to you even before the situation? Yes, the characters come first. You get a sense of somebody, but characters are never in isolation, they always come with others attached to them, with a whole background attached to them, with a whole way of living attached to them—you can’t quite separate everything. Do you do a character study first before beginning to work on either a novel or a screenplay? No. Do you start to get an image of who they are and then explore them in the writing? Yes, you just push ahead, and they have to come alive on their own. You are a very disciplined writer. I understand you write seven days a week. Yes—well, not now anymore so much, but for most of my life. Whenever I have a project going, I do it consistently, usually in the mornings; after

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

137

that I am no good anymore. I used to be able to do it morning and afternoon, but not for many years now. Do you write in a linear fashion? I start at the beginning and see where that leads me. Do you revise continually as you work through the first draft? I write straight through in one draft, go back, do a second draft, go back. I always go back, but it always has to be on a full basis, not in bits. What is an average number of drafts you write on a film project? Six, seven, eight. If you were to look at them all lined up in a row, do they change dramatically, or do they evolve? No, they evolve. When I give over a first draft, it’s in fact usually a fourth or fifth, so nobody’s seen the first, and I don’t even keep them, nobody knows what’s in them. I’ve forgotten what came first. •

•

•

So much of your work as a screenwriter has been in literary adaptations. What is your philosophy toward adapting a novel for the screen? First, you must have reverence for the material you are doing. Then, you have to be quite irreverent about it in order to make something else out of it. You are making a novel into a film, so you can’t leave it in the same form. You really have to break it up, invent new characters. In the novel Remains of the Day, for example, the housekeeper has a husband who is just mentioned, but in the film we have whole scenes with him. I thought we needed another dimension. On a page you can just mention someone, but to be part of the story in a film you might have to show much more. When you do a literary adaptation, do you work with a copy of the book in any particular manner? Do you cut out the pages, for example, or highlight particular passages? No, nothing like that at all. I take a lot of notes, though I first read it and take no notes at all. Then I read it again, and I might start taking a few notes. I read it one more time and make long notes.

138

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

You have such a distinctive voice as a novelist. When you write a screenplay adaptation of a novel, do you try to write in the voice of the original writer? Oh, yes, not exactly in the voice of the novelist, but something like it. What was it like to adapt your own novel The Householder into your first screenplay? It was my fourth novel. At that time I just wrote one after the other, and they were all set in Delhi, where I was living. I didn’t give much thought to transforming it because I had never done a screenplay, and Ismail Merchant and James Ivory had never done a feature film. There was nobody to guide us. We made a lot of mistakes. So that was really our first learning process. What did you learn about the adaptation process? As we went along, we learned that in a film you only need a quarter of the dialogue from the book. We just had to cut it away. I liked so much to write dialogue, but it was useless. It took some years, then I began to reduce the dialogue so much that I reduced it too much in following films like The Guru [1969] and Bombay Talkie [1970], where I didn’t give the characters enough to say. What’s the difference between dialogue in a novel and cinematic dialogue? Cinematic dialogue has to be much simpler for people to actually speak, much more naturalistic. It might look equally naturalistic on the page of the book, but actually it’s not. Any true dialogue in a novel is always full of artifice. It’s the art of being natural, but it’s not natural. I’ve just been terribly lucky because James Ivory always chooses wonderful actors who make the text come alive. If you have a bad actor, you can give them what you think is the most superb dialogue in the world, and they’ll ruin it. The caste system in India impacts on the themes in The Householder and figures in many of the novels and screenplays you’ve written. How has this caste division—or, in the case of your English adaptations, the class system—influenced your writing? I don’t really think about it that way any more than you think about the structure of the society around you—it’s just there. Caste and class can be really quite close. Class in England is in a way like caste in India. The evil part of caste I can only compare with the feelings between black and white

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

139

people in America. It’s almost a physical thing between white and black, or used to be, especially in the South. It’s something inbred, based on instinct, not on reason. It’s like anti-Semitism also; people who are anti-Semitic have something that’s just completely inbred in them. It’s intuitive; there’s no thought behind it. There’s only instinct—a kind of animal instinct— that you have to fight against. Does that kind of conflict make for interesting dramatic writing? I never really use that as a concept. In India I was always in an urban environment with upper-middle-class, educated people, where it does not play such a conscious part. I do always know it’s there. In America, you always know it’s there between black and white people. You needn’t write about it or mention it; it’s just there, built into the individual as well as into society. What was the genesis of your second film, Shakespeare Wallah [1965]? Even before I met him, James Ivory wanted to make a film about actors traveling around, but he was thinking about a troupe of Indian actors. Then he met a troupe of English actors who were traveling around, and one of them had written an autobiography. I read that, and it struck me how much it was a kind of paradigm of the end of the British Empire, which came just about the time, in India in 1947, that this man was writing about. He was traveling in India while it was happening and just after, when India became independent. So it came about because of the desire to make a film about traveling actors and because I had wanted to say something about the breakup of the British Empire. Were you familiar with the work of Shakespeare at that point in your career? Did you do research for the project? No research. I mean, I grew up in England, my goodness! (Laughter.) I guess it was all around you. Yes, yes. Were the characterizations based on these real people? The older couple who ran the troupe were, and so was their daughter, who had been in the troupe all through the war in India. Everything else around them, the film star and the playboy, were put in.

140

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

While you were writing your first screenplays, did you refer to screenwriting books or to other screenplays to learn the form? I never saw a screenplay—never. I had no idea. I had no idea of its actual physical form. All my early screenplays are set out like plays—I didn’t even know how to arrange the dialogue on the page. I still do not know anything about camera angles—nothing in the least technical enters into it at all. How closely did James Ivory work with you? Did he physically work on the screenplays with you? No, he was in America, and I was in India. We used to exchange letters. We exchanged ideas a lot more in the beginning, when we were living apart, than in later years. Now that we live in the same city, we hardly talk about it. We don’t need much discussion. Many of the Merchant Ivory films deal with the film business, especially the industry in India, which is quite unique to world cinema. In Bombay Talkie, were you treating the theme in a satirical manner? It was only half satirical. We brought in an English romantic novelist character who had the same kind of overheated, overromanticized, trashy imagination as enters into Indian films. So it isn’t only the Indian film industry that is treated satirically. The whole way of looking at and conducting life was just on a shriller level than in any of our other films. One of the sets shown on the Indian soundstage in the film was an oversized typewriter used for a musical dance number in the spirit of Busby Berkeley. Was this your idea? No, it was James Ivory’s idea. It’s a marvelous image. How did it come about? He had already talked about wanting to have a studio set with this giant typewriter. He was set on that. They always do have very fantastic sets in Indian movies. In Bombay Talkie you examine the social and political cultures of India and England, and in so many other Merchant Ivory films there is also this

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

141

motif of a clash of different cultures. Why do you return to this theme so often? You don’t choose a theme; you choose a subject, or a story, or a character.The society in which this story is set evokes, or brings out, the theme. The theme has to arise out of particular circumstances—concrete characters set in concrete situations. In Shakespeare Wallah the circumstance of English actors in India, and meeting Indian film stars, in itself brings out a clash of cultures. But we don’t say,“Oh, we must show a clash of cultures”—it’s the other way around. It’s intuitive. You don’t say, “Oh, I must illustrate this theme.” No, you say,“I want to tell this story.”The ultimate meaning comes out later, but you don’t know what it is when you start—it has to evolve naturally. Are you constantly aware of the spirituality of India also, as you write? Yes, it was always very strongly there while I was actually living in India during the sixties. My novels and stories are full of that spirituality, much more than the films. Why do you think Americans are so fascinated by the country? It has always fascinated everybody. India has always been such an exotic place, so different from anywhere else, physically so beautiful and also so horrible at the same time. There is a real dichotomy in India between beauty and suffering. Also, filmmakers have always been captivated by the light there. Yes, the colors are so much more violent than anywhere else—well, everything is, including the food which everyone likes so much. •

•

•

I know Autobiography of a Princess [1975] is one of your favorite films. How did that project come about? That had a very strange genesis. Ismail Merchant went to India and shot footage of Indian palaces. In the cellars of the palace at Jodhpur they found old footage that was rotting away. Then he went out again and shot some footage of interviews with maharajahs, and he brought that back to London. I was in London at the time and saw all the footage. Then we went to the palace at Jodhpur, and met someone like the princess. We thought, “We’ve

142

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

got all this material; we really should do something about it. Why can’t we have the story of a princess and palaces and the interviews all boiled together?” Jim said, “Maybe you could bring in an Englishman as well. It’s not only the death of royalty but also the death of British supremacy in India.” Then, from London I went back to India, and I wrote the script. They went and shot the film in a week in an apartment in London. Did you indicate and describe the documentary footage in the script and structure where it would be inserted, or was that something that evolved during the postproduction process? No, that was all written. I understand you like to get involved in the editing process. Sometimes I see the rushes just to see how things are progressing. I like to see the rough cut, that’s the really interesting part for me. Some actors are better than others, and you might have to do some shifting. We do a lot of shuffling around. So I do spend time in the cutting room at that point, after they have a rough cut and before they start on the postproduction procedure. Then I no longer see the film until it’s completely ready. Do you think there is any correlation between the film editing and the writing process? Oh, yes. I feel that the writer belongs in the cutting room because only you know how the story is supposed to go; only you know where the emphasis is supposed to fall. By that time nobody can see the wood for the trees, but you still can because you remember the wood and what it was supposed to be, while nobody else does at that stage. So I really feel that writers should be allowed in the cutting room at that point. The film editor Carol Littleton, who cut E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial [1982], Swimming to Cambodia [1987], and The Accidental Tourist [1988], told me the editing process is the final rewriting of a film. Yes, that’s true. If the dialogue has come out badly, you can dub it. You can certainly improve performances. You find that even the best performances sometimes have a lot of repetition; actors have certain mannerisms, certain habits—especially older actors—and you can certainly always improve their performance by taking those things out.

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

143

Will you still be writing during postproduction, if dialogue has to be rewritten for dubbing, or if narration is added? Yes. If that’s necessary. •

•

•

Roseland [1977] is about the lives of the people who inhabit the legendary New York dance hall known for the Harvest Moon Ball competition. How did this film come about? Roseland was financially dictated. That was our first American film; we had no money whatsoever. Somebody from Oregon said they could give us a small amount of money, so we had to set it in one place. We just didn’t have the money to move around to locations. Somebody said, “Come have a look at this dance hall.” So we went to Roseland, where this person was working, and we thought, “Oh, yes, this would be a good location, and there would be so many stories inside.” We had no money to go anywhere else except inside Roseland. We sat in Roseland on several evenings and met people down there, and so those became the given set of characters. So you created characters based on people you met at Roseland? Not exactly based on, but we knew these were the kind of people that went there and the sort of things that might happen there. How did Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures [1978] come about? That was another strange one. You see, during those years we had no money at all, and we had to make films where we could, with whoever would commission us. In London, I had met Melvyn Bragg, who was just taking over an English television arts program. He said, “Ask James Ivory to make any film for me, only it has to have something to do with art.” James Ivory is a collector of Indian miniatures, so’s Ismail, so that seemed to be the natural subject. So we made up that story, and that was pretty successful on that program. Then, very foolishly I think, this British arts program bought sight unseen an early manuscript of Jane Austen, a little play that she had written, and they gave it to us and said, “Will you make a film of it?” and we said, “Sure.” When we read it, it was just nothing, it was like some child’s doodle. So we had to make up the whole story around it, Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, and all of that.2

144

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

Andrei Serban is credited with directing the avant-garde theater rehearsal scenes for the radical director who is vying for the right to produce the Austen play. What research did you have to do to understand experimental theater? I read quite a lot of books about it. Did you study Grotowski and other theorists? Yes, yes, I read all of that. We met André Gregory, and I went to some of his rehearsals. But the basis of the film was this stupid play they went and bought. They didn’t know what it was! They thought, “Oh, wonderful, a manuscript of Jane Austen!” There was nothing!3 How did you decide to make an adaptation of the Jean Rhys novel Quartet [1981]? I read Jean Rhys first. Actually, we chose another one of her books first. We wanted to do Good Morning Midnight, but Glenda Jackson had bought the rights, so we couldn’t get that book. I thought that Quartet was also a very good story with very good characters, so we took that one instead. How did you approach adapting your own novel Heat and Dust [1983] to the screen? I never meant it to be a film. Heat and Dust was published in 1975, but the film wasn’t made until 1983.We so very much wanted to make a film in India, so it was there and ready. First I had to read it again, then I went ahead with it as I do with all of my adaptations. You read the book and then put it aside. Did you find you were able to do what was necessary as free and easily as when you were working with another author’s novel? Yes, for by that time so many years had elapsed that it really was like somebody else’s book. It was eight years later. Are you ever on the sets when the film is being shot on location? No, I go on a courtesy visit, but if they need any changes or cuts, then they can call me. It’s very rare, actually. There’s not much you can do on the set, although I welcome changes. Sometimes an actor will spontaneously put in something of their own. That’s the most wonderful gift they can give to a

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

145

ANTHONY HOPKINS AND EMMA THOMPSON IN HOWARDS END, FOR WHICH RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA WON A BEST SCRIPT OSCAR.

film. I hate for the script to be considered just set in stone. Actors can contribute so much and loosen it up. I always say, “If they feel in the least uncomfortable with it, throw it out, don’t let them say it.” Is there a degree of acting improvisation in the films? Not really. I wish there were more. Some actors do give you more than others. Actors are a bit timid. I think they could do more, but our scripts are pretty tightly constructed, so I suppose that might be prohibitive or inhibiting. Sometimes I might deliberately leave it open. In Howards End [1991], when Vanessa Redgrave and Emma Thompson are walking along the platform, we left it open. They are just saying something about journeys here and there, and they came up with such nice lines themselves, just as they were walking along with their backs to the camera. If dialogue you hear offcamera doesn’t work out, you can always wipe it out, but if it does work out, it’s really a very nice thing to have.

146

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

Do you have a personal relationship with the actors? Do you get into discussions with them about their characters? No, not really. I meet them perhaps at some social occasions; mostly we don’t talk about work. •

•

•

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge [1990] was based on two novels, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell. Was it a particular challenge to adapt those novels into a screenplay? Mr. and Mrs. Bridge was based on two novels, which were a series of short pieces—vignettes. They were also written years apart. It’s my absolute favorite film. But it was really more difficult than anything else we’ve done because the characters are so elusive. There, I took a lot of notes. I really had to break the whole thing up and make notes on all of the characters, which I don’t always do, but on this one [I did it] more extensively than any of them. One novel is more or less about Evan Connell’s mother, and one is more or less about his father. I had to fuse the two novels together. Mr. Bridge, who is played by Paul Newman, is a beautifully complex character. Mr. Bridge is a wonderful character—a decent, upright man, really with quite highly developed sensibilities, which he never expresses openly. I actually had three Mr. Bridges right in front of me: one was Paul Newman himself, one was Evan Connell himself, and the third was James Ivory. So there were these three typical Americans, really three Mr. Bridges. So Evan Connell was on set during the shooting? Yes, he was more on set than I was. I met him once or twice before shooting, and he seemed to be a very Mr. Bridge sort of character. Paul Newman is an actor who has been known to be very personally involved in the projects he works on. Did he have any input into the script? No, he immediately took it, and he immediately interpreted it. There was no hands-on at all. Did you know you were writing for him? No, I never think of actors, never. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge was a project of

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

147

Joanne Woodward’s; she wanted to do it for many years and bought an option. That’s when we got involved. Was it Joanne Woodward’s intention for her husband, Paul Newman, to play Mr. Bridge? He said, “Oh, you’ll never be able to get Mr. Bridge right, but if you get it right, I’ll do it.” Then we did get it right, and he did it. •

•

•

The Courtesans of Bombay [1983] is unique among the films Merchant and Ivory have made. It’s a cross between a documentary and a docudrama. How did this project come about? Ismail Merchant had gone to Bombay to shoot in the courtesans’ quarter, and he came back with all of this footage, masses of it, which was fascinating, but it didn’t have any kind of structure at all. It was really his documentary; then we put a fictional framework around it. So your role was to structure the film? Yes, then he had to shoot some fictional material for the framework. Did you get involved in Merchant Ivory films like Maurice [1987] and Slaves of New York [1989], in which you didn’t write the screenplay? A bit, yes, but not much. I always read their scripts before filming, but I don’t really tamper around with someone else’s script. How did you come to select the Henry James novels The Europeans [1979] and The Bostonians [1984] for screen adaptation? Again, it was money. Both of them take place in America; it was easier and cheaper both to shoot here than to take a whole lot of people to England and shoot there. I smile every time you mention money considerations because when you talk to filmmakers you find out that economics dominates what they can do and can’t do, and film critics and theorists are often unaware of this. Yes, absolutely! I mean, if you decide to spend so many millions of dollars, they have to come from somewhere; you can’t just do anything you want.

148

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

Do you consider the budget a restriction from a writing standpoint? You can write a single line in a screenplay that could cost the production company millions of dollars in terms of location and scope of the scene. No, I’m never tempted to do that. My scripts, like the novels, are more inward-looking, more character-oriented, they’re not really dependent on glorious scenery or going to faraway places—except India. “Period” is another built-in expense. So many of the Merchant Ivory films have been period pieces. Do you think of them as period films, constantly, as you are writing them? No, not at all. We choose them because of the literary material, not because they happen to be set in a certain period. The characters in your period work seem to present the notion that people have not really changed over the centuries. No, they haven’t. How can they? We are all driven by the same thirst for power and lust and love. Yes, it can be a story from the tenth century. It’s the same common experiences, really, as the nineteenth. •

•

•

Why do you think A Room with a View [1986] proved so enormously popular? We couldn’t understand why, it happened so suddenly. I don’t know why that particular film. You can never tell. It’s a wonderfully romantic film. Do you think that was part of the attraction? Probably, but we’ve had romances in other films that haven’t been very successful. Several of the Merchant Ivory films have captions and cards that are part of the story construction. They give the films a lovely literary quality. At what point does this element enter the project? Are they in the original screenplay?

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

149

They were used in Room with a View because it was taken from the novel and the captions are there. I didn’t really want them, but then they looked so nice, we decided to leave them. James Ivory always wanted them. Were you against it because it was too literary a device? Yes, and I felt they were really unnecessary as far as the story was concerned, but they were so attractive in themselves. The last image of Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands sitting and looking out of the window, which was also used for the advertising poster, is an image central to the film. When you read a book that you are going to adapt to the screen, do you get images like that in your head? Yes, I do. I see the characters in a certain location, in a certain attitude, that expresses so much in the film. Would you ever consider doing an adaptation of a work by a postmodernist novelist like Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, or John Barth? No, they’re not the sort of novels that would be Merchant Ivory films. We’re into the sort of novelist like Henry James or E. M. Forster that say something to us, novelists that deal with the same kinds of situations and characters that interest us. What is it in particular about Henry James that attracts you? You just put your hand into his novels, and you pull out the most superb dramatic scenes and wonderful subtle characters. He really is the greatest. Have you read a lot about the lives of Henry James and E. M. Forster? Oh, yes. Does that help you to write the screenplays? No, not actually to write the screenplays, but you have to have background to know where they came from—where their material sprang from. In interviews, Stanley Kubrick liked to quote from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel as it applies to narrative cinematic storytelling. Have you read it?

150

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

Oh, yes. Do intellectual ideas about writing stimulate you? No, they don’t interest me in the least. I’d much rather practice the craft, or see somebody else practice it, than just read about the craft. I don’t want to hear what people have to say about how to do it. Of course, Henry James always wrote his prefaces. James and Forster knew what they were talking about, but what they say about writing usually only relates to their own work, really. •

•

•

You wrote the screenplay for Madame Sousatzka [1988], which was directed by John Schlesinger. Was this the only time where you worked with a director other than James Ivory? The only time, yes. Usually we are busy with work of our own. At that time we didn’t have any work. Was that experience different? Yes, I suppose it was. I wasn’t so involved as with the Ivory films. How did it come about? John Schlesinger came and asked whether I would like to work with him on this, and since we weren’t doing anything, I said yes. What about Madame Sousatzka interested you? That was a book [by Bernice Rubens] we really stood on its head. That was a book that completely changed. There was a music teacher in it and a boy, but in the film it wasn’t that music teacher, and it wasn’t that boy. It was just rewritten almost from scratch. Did the characters change right away, or did things develop over a period of time? No, immediately. I said, “Well, I don’t like the book,” and he said, “You can do anything you want.” So that’s what we did. I didn’t know him, so he

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

151

worked a lot with me on the script, much more than I would with Jim. I needed that. Working with him on the script was a nice experience. We did change it so radically. How did Merchant and Ivory come to make Remains of the Day [1993]? Remains of the Day is actually the one film that we did not originate. Columbia came to us and said, “Would you like to make this film?” Harold Pinter had bought it and got the project together with Columbia. He wrote a completely different screenplay, which stuck much closer to the novel, but it didn’t work out, so Columbia came to us and asked whether we’d do it. So you had the Pinter screenplay as a basis? No, I had the book as the basis. I went back to the book. You can’t use somebody else’s screenplay. Did you have to compress the story in your adaptation? In the book Lord Darlington has two conferences, one in 1929 and one in 1938. We compressed those into one. Then we took things said earlier and put them into the mouths of important characters to make it more explicit in the film. The formal way the characters speak takes on a real weight and tension in the film. Were you aware of this quality as you wrote the dialogue? What I do realize is that I mustn’t have a single word that’s not absolutely necessary, no “Oh, yes, I see,” nothing like that. You have to compress and compress and just give them the essence. Did you get to speak with the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro when you were working on the script? No, I didn’t meet him before. I only met him after the film was made. How do you feel about using narration as a cinematic storytelling device? We’ve used it only twice—in Jefferson in Paris [1995] and Surviving Picasso [1996]. In Jefferson in Paris, it was extremely necessary because there were so many different elements that had to be kept together. Sur-

152

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

viving Picasso was the particular viewpoint of one particular woman, so that’s why we used narration. I really don’t think of it as a device; in both cases it seemed like a necessity—it was useful. Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso were both films about historical figures. Did you do a lot of research on these two films? A lot on Jefferson in Paris, not research, just a lot of plain reading, and a lot of reading for Surviving Picasso. How much was known about Thomas Jefferson during that period? Oh, a lot. Everything’s always been known about Jefferson. You don’t have to do research, you just pick up any book and read it, and there’s so much. There’s one called Jefferson in Paris, one entire book just on Jefferson’s years in Paris, telling you what he did every day. There are his own letters. There’s so much in every history book. Everybody knows so much, but of course you have to make your own interpretation. There were so many elements involved that we just had to have narration. Jefferson had written all these letters anyway, so it was easy to use his voice. I know how much you admired Nick Nolte’s performance as Thomas Jefferson. Many critics and audiences were surprised by his casting. What is the connection between your vision of Thomas Jefferson and Nolte? Everybody thinks that Jefferson was this very refined aristocrat. Well, in all the reading we did, Jefferson really wasn’t an aristocrat, he was a gentleman farmer. Of course he was a very learned man and very intelligent, but finally, essentially, he was a middle-class farmer and quite a manly character, not effete. Everyone said, “Oh, go get some very refined English actor.” Not at all. Thomas Jefferson was an American; he was a farmer and a middle-class American. Audiences were probably not ready for that reality; they brought their own perceptions to the film. They expected a very aristocratic Englishman, but Thomas Jefferson wasn’t a bit like that. He was really middle-class and also a family man. He’d say things like, “Come and have family soup with us.” With all his grand taste, he was really like that. This is what he was and what he remained. To make

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

153

him real, it was necessary to show him as he really was, in his own time and place, not as later generations like to think he was. Jefferson was a complex man. He had a romance with a black woman in a time when that was not socially acceptable. He was an advocate for racial equality, yet he had black slaves working for him. Everyone around him had black mistresses—there was no secret. He was a widower, and she was his wife’s half sister—it was almost a natural situation. When Jefferson said he wanted to liberate black culture from slavery, was it motivated intellectually or politically, or did he truly believe in this? I think he believed it intellectually, but economically and personally it was extremely inconvenient. He couldn’t have run his houses and his farms if he didn’t have black labor. It’s a very honest film in that regard. Well, maybe too honest. No one seemed to like it, and we couldn’t understand why everybody was so upset. I like Jefferson in Paris very much. Nobody gave us credit for the French Revolution scenes; I thought they were visually just so stunning. What research was involved for you to write the screenplay for Surviving Picasso? I read all the books, I read masses of books on Picasso. Did you spend a lot of time studying the paintings also? No, not really, one had grown up with him. There was a first show in London in 1945 or 1946, so we all knew the paintings. I never want to see any of them again, and I never want to hear the name of Picasso ever again. He was a great painter but not a very nice fellow. Well, I didn’t mind him, but his family behaved very badly. Surviving Picasso was not a good experience for us. The family tried to stop us, and they wanted to sue. Art critics are all dependent on the Picasso family. They

154

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

were instructed by the Picasso family not to cooperate with us and to write everything they possibly could against us—which they did. We also had some art experts who had to withdraw because the Picasso family told them they would never be allowed to go anywhere near a Picasso again if they worked with us. We couldn’t have made this film without Warner Bros. behind us; the whole legal department had to help us because we couldn’t have the Picasso family sue everybody. The family did everything they could to stop us, but after the film was made, they kept quiet. That’s odd, because Picasso’s tempestuous relationships with women were not a secret. Absolutely not, the secrets are in his paintings. •

•

•

I’m sure you have heard stories from other screenwriters who have had studios interfere with their work, but you seem to have escaped this, working with Merchant Ivory. Yes, I’ve been very lucky. Yes, I’ve escaped that completely. I never had anybody rewrite my work, and lately we’ve dealt with big companies—Disney, Warner, Columbia. Touch wood, so far no one has in any way ever interfered with us. So far, the only people who have ever tried to make us change were Miramax—we’ve only worked with Miramax once, but that was enough. Which film was that? Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. That was a very unlikely project for Miramax. How did they try to interfere? Not at the screenplay level, but afterward, at the end, they wanted this, they wanted that. They had a terrible fight. Ismail Merchant got so mad he smashed up their office. (Laughs.) Mad at the Weinsteins? Yes, he got so furious, he threw something and broke a whole glass wall. The next time they went there, the walls were all done up in concrete.

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

155

Miramax were the first and only people to put us through a public preview where a whole lot of kids come to it and then write horrible rubbish about the film. Miramax got frightened and wanted changes, but other companies have always seen that we get more or less a Merchant Ivory audience for a preview. I might add that we did not make the changes Miramax wanted. James Ivory always has creative control and final cut. Are you looking ahead to any future Merchant Ivory productions? I’m working on another Henry James novel, The Golden Bowl, which is going to keep me busy a long time. I suppose it will be the film after next, maybe in 1999 or 2000. There’s another one that I’m only partly involved in. This, again, is a project of James Ivory’s; he chose it. He started to write the screenplay, and I finished it. It’s something that I really don’t know anything about. The writer James Jones has a daughter, Kaylie Jones, and she wrote a book, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. It’s a sort of novel/memoir about growing up with James Jones partly in Paris, partly on Long Island, from about the age of six to sixteen. I never really write about children, and this is a lot about children, so I really couldn’t handle that aspect. Also, it’s about teenagers, and I never write about teenagers, and I never write about school and colleges. James Ivory felt involved with the material because he grew up in America, and he was also an American in Paris. There really aren’t a lot of children in your work. Yes, because whenever we have tried to do children, it’s always been a failure so far. So James Ivory has had to work very hard on this film. He’s really attracted to it, and it’s a very nice story, but I know very little about the background. Who decides what Merchant Ivory is going to do next? 4 Well, it has changed over the years. I prefer it to come from the director because if I have an idea of my own I go and write a novel or a short story. So I prefer to have something that actually appeals to James Ivory—like, for instance, Jefferson in Paris. I wouldn’t have thought about that, but for years he carried the idea around that he wanted to do something about Jefferson in Paris. When he presents something like Shakespeare Wallah, then I might suggest another element to explore another aspect of it, and we’ll go off that way, but I do prefer the first germ to come from him. On

156

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

the other hand, I usually choose the literary adaptations. I read a lot more than they do. I’ll give them a book and say, “I think you will like this; this will suit you.” I always thought Forster suited James Ivory very well, and Henry James suits him very well. What is it that gave you that impression? Both Forster and Henry James deal with a certain, quite sophisticated society for one thing and have characters who might be passionate but are certainly restrained. They both are interested in cities and houses. In the cases of E. M. Forster and Henry James, did you first introduce the idea of adapting their work, or did you come up with a specific novel? No, I came up with a specific book.They knew Forster and James all right, but they may not have read those particular books, or not remembered them. I always wanted to start with Howards End, but a lot of what we’ve done has always been what we could do financially. A Room with a View was easier than Howards End to do. We have always had to have an eye on finance. None of your scripts are originals; all are adaptations from books or short stories. Do you ever come up with an original idea, where you say, “This is not a novel; this should be a film”? No, I never come up with those ideas. I let James Ivory come up with them. Can you sum up what you have learned about filmmaking, from working so steadily with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant? I’ve learned what works. I know the sort of things we can do between us. I know also what we can’t do. I know what things won’t work and that it’s a process of experimentation all the time. Merchant Ivory films are almost a genre unto themselves. How would you describe a characteristic Merchant Ivory film? It has to be a subject that suits the director, the producer, and myself—it takes all three of us to make it a Merchant Ivory film. We make the films that appeal to us. We make them in the way we like to make them, and we do what we know we can do. We know we’re no good on special effects or great action—that’s not our forte at all.

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

157

There are Indian, American, and European sensibilities at work in Merchant Ivory films. Do you feel all of those at play as you write a screenplay? Yes, the three of us have all three sensibilities in a way. I don’t think any particular strain dominates—it’s simply that one is an Indian, the other is an American, and I’m a European. So you still perceive yourself as European. Oh, yes, my roots, my education, my reading—everything—that’s all European. And yet you’ve spent a lot of time living in India. It’s almost equal now. I lived twenty-four years in Europe, twenty-four years in India, and twenty-four years in America. How is your work as a novelist and as a screenwriter accepted in India? As far as my novels are concerned, I’ve never had much of an audience in India; mostly [my audience is] in England. Our films are mostly well known in England and in America. Does your female perspective influence the work? Do you think of yourself as the one woman in the Merchant Ivory equation? No, not particularly. I’m just a third person, another person bringing another personality in there. I suppose it is a woman’s personality. Does being a woman give you a different kind of insight, when you’re writing male characters in a screenplay? I never thought about it because, after all, when I write novels, I have to create male characters. Often male writers are criticized for not capturing the feminine psyche and voice. Henry James, E. M. Forster, Dickens, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov—none of them ever had any difficulty with their female characters. The great novelists never had any trouble with it.

158

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

Are there screenwriters you admire? Films you consider as landmarks in screenwriting? I have sort of a blank because when I was a child growing up in Germany, Jews were not allowed in the cinemas. Then in England, after I was twelve, I saw the war films during the forties and some films just after the war— like films that David Lean made. Then in 1951 I went to India, and I stayed in India until 1976. I didn’t see any films there. I never saw the French New Wave films at all because they weren’t shown in India. I came to America in the seventies, and that is when I started seeing the big movements like the French New Wave, but all of that was finished; the films were already somewhat dated or weren’t current anymore when I did see them. So I can’t really talk of anything that particularly influenced me because there were long, long periods when I never saw a thing. Do you go to the movies often nowadays? It depends where I am. When I’m in India, I don’t go at all because they just don’t come there, but if I’m here in New York and something’s playing on the corner, certainly I’ll go—but I’ll only go to films I know that I’ll like. I don’t go to action films. Then I get all the tapes at the end of the year from the Academy, so I get a chance to see them. So you have been principally influenced by novels. Oh, absolutely, yes. I read far more than I see.

NOTES 1

The William series of children’s books were written by Richmal Crompton, with illustrations by Thomas Henry Fisher. They were published in England and made popular in the 1940s. Titles include Just William, More William, and William in Trouble. The series featured William, a lovable mischief who harassed his family with boyhood pranks.

2

Jhabvala is referring to a Samuel Richardson novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison. Jane Austen wrote a novel titled Sir Charles Grandison.

3

Andrei Serban is a stage director long associated with the Robert Brustein, Yale Repertory, and LaMama theater companies. His innovative reinterpretations of classic plays include The Merchant of Venice, The Cherry Orchard, and Ghost Sonata. André Gregory is a New York theater director best known for avant-

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

159

garde productions mounted by his theater company in the 1960s and early 1970s, and also as a film actor, most notably in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981). Jerzy Grotowski, the founder of the Polish Laboratory Theater, radicalized acting technique and stage directing in the 1960s with his concept of a “Poor Theatre,” which focused on the actor-audience relationship, not theatrical artifice or influences from film and television. 4

Producer Ismail Merchant’s sudden death in May 2005, long after this interview was concluded, has clouded the future of all planned Merchant Ivory projects.

INTERVIEW BY GRAHAM FULLER

LAWRENCE KASDAN A HUMANIST IN HOLLYWOOD

There’s so much rage going around, we’re damned lucky we have the movies to help us vent a little of it. DAVIS (STEVE MARTIN) IN GRAND CANYON

awrence Kasdan has engineered himself an unusual place in Hollywood machinery. As the writer or cowriter of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), and The Bodyguard (1992), Kasdan is, commercially speaking, one of the most successful scenarists of his time. This facility with hugely popular escapist material jars, however, with his vocation as the writer-director of such thoughtful, modernist, and literate films as Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1988), and Grand Canyon (1991). It is significant that the above quotation is spoken by Grand Canyon’s slipperiest character—a Hollywood producer of schlock films who claims to have seen the light—for it’s an epigram that Kasdan surely believes yet does not entirely trust. Unlike his collaborations with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, each of the films Kasdan has directed is, in its own way, a problem picture, the work of an A-list director who commands big stars and big budgets but who does not make movies that sit comfortably within that notion of “the movies.” Even when they occupy specific genres—film noir in Body Heat, the Western in Silverado (1985), marital comedy in I Love You to Death (1990)—they come across as earnest, philosophical meditations groping toward an understanding of the complexities of love and communality, the relationship between cause and effect, and in search of a system of values.

L

160

LAWRENCE KASDAN

161

Unsurprisingly, they are movies that often leave the viewer a little troubled, fraught as they are with ambiguities and ultimate irresolution. They beg questions: What will Body Heat’s Matty Walker contrive next? Can The Accidental Tourist’s Macon Leary and Muriel Pritchett possibly stay together? Kasdan’s endings aren’t necessarily happy—and in this sense his films are truly adult, patently at odds with the fake panaceas offered in most American pictures. Kasdan was born in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1949 and was raised in West Virginia, the son of thwarted writers. His mother, Sylvia, had been accepted into Sinclair Lewis’s writing program at the University of Wisconsin but gave up her studies; his father, Clarence, sold television antennas in his brother-in-law’s electronics store and died, an embittered man, when Kasdan was fourteen. A brilliant student, Kasdan majored in English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and thrice won the Avery Larwood literary prize. He then worked for seven years in advertising in Los Angeles (winning a CLIO for the first TV commercial he wrote) and tried to force his way into the film industry as a writer. He submitted The Bodyguard sixty-seven times before finally selling it in 1975. Continental Divide (1981), written, as the story goes, in two hours on the grass in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, started a studio bidding war and brought Kasdan to the attention of Spielberg and Lucas, as he explains below. Kasdan is a devotee of Howard Hawks, and his hiring on The Empire Strikes Back placed him immediately in Hawksian mode, since he replaced Leigh Brackett, a seminal Hawks writer, on her death in 1978. When we met at his family home in Los Angeles in March 1993, Kasdan had just delivered his screenplay for Wyatt Earp (1994) to Warner Bros. Released the following year, Kasdan’s second Western, starring Kevin Costner as the legendary U.S. marshal and Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday, proved an epic (195 minutes), as well as a meticulous, study of a mythic figure.

LAWRENCE KASDAN (1949–)

1980 1981

Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner). Co-script. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg). Script. Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan). Director, script. Continental Divide (Michael Apted). Script.

162

LAWRENCE KASDAN

LAWRENCE KASDAN IN LOS ANGELES, 2004. (PHOTO BY PETER “HOPPER” STONE.)

1983

1985 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991

Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand). Co-script. The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan). Executive producer, director, coscript. Silverado (Lawrence Kasdan). Producer, director, co-script. Cross My Heart (Armyan Bernstein). Producer. The Accidental Tourist (Lawrence Kasdan). Producer, director, coscript. Immediate Family (Jonathan Kaplan). Executive producer. I Love You to Death (Lawrence Kasdan). Director only. Grand Canyon (Lawrence Kasdan). Producer, director, co-script.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

1992 1994 1995 1998 1999 2003

163

The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson). Producer, script. Jumpin’ at the Boneyard (Jeff Stanzler). Executive producer. Wyatt Earp (Lawrence Kasdan). Producer, director, co-script. French Kiss (Lawrence Kasdan). Director only. Home Fries (Dean Parisot). Producer. Mumford (Lawrence Kasdan). Producer, director, script. Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan). Producer, director, co-script.

Academy Award honors include Best Original Script nominations for The Big Chill and Grand Canyon. Writers Guild honors include Best Comedy for The Big Chill, and Best Script nominations for The Empire Strikes Back, Body Heat, The Accidental Tourist, and Grand Canyon.

Looking back, what aspects of your early life led you to become a filmmaker? I had a normal childhood, playing sports and so on. I think there was writing in the air in the house. My father had written in college; my mother had also started writing fiction and stopped. I had this feeling that it was something I could do. Then, from an early age, going to the movies was simply the best thing, although at that time I was only seeing Hollywood movies. When did you become aware of different directorial personalities? Two of my favorite movies were The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape [1963]—the images of heroism and masculinity and camaraderie in those films were very powerful to me. It took my brother Mark to point out that one man, John Sturges, had made those movies, as well as The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral [1957]. Mark had gotten heavily into films at Harvard and started talking to me about it in a way that no one else had before. He was very enthusiastic about certain directors—a concept that was foreign to me—and came home with reports of Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Resnais, Truffaut. Those were just names to me while I lived in West Virginia, but as soon as I went to school at Ann Arbor in Michigan, I started seeing their films and recognizing the style of American directors like Ford and Hawks, too. Ann Arbor was a wonderful place to see films, and I saw

164

LAWRENCE KASDAN

everything that was coming out in the sixties and caught up on everything I’d missed. Leaping forward in time, when you and Mark wrote Silverado, was that an attempt to redo The Magnificent Seven as a kind of “Magnificent Four”? I wanted to capture something of that. Silverado is a bit of a compendium of different moments from Westerns—perhaps more than it should have been. It didn’t matter, because I was filled with energy and was able to make a big Western at a time when Westerns weren’t that popular. I’d just come off a success with The Big Chill, and that’s the only reason I was allowed to do it. Did you study film at Ann Arbor? I was interested in writing, and when I got to Ann Arbor I started writing theater and fiction and was able to see my plays get produced. I didn’t get into the film program for a while. I was never formally part of it—I was an English literature major—but I eventually started taking film courses. Very quickly I began writing feature-length screenplays. Then, in one of the film classes, I made a short. Technically, it was very crude. What was it about? It was a wry look at a professor I knew who was very interested in all the young female students—sort of a rough, humorous film about his fascination with one particular girl. It was shot on 16 mm. I cut it and did the sound, but I was never a technically proficient student filmmaker. You marched on Washington a couple of times when you were a student. Were you protesting the Vietnam War? Yes. Were you a student radical? No. In fact, the first script I wrote was about someone like me who was a passive witness to all that. It was a projection of all my feelings about that as an observer. Now, all my work as a filmmaker has in some way been about my experiences of things, not the generalities of a situation. Of course, that means you’re limited to a certain extent by your experience, and you only hope there is something universal about it.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

165

After college, you went into advertising. It was a way of making a living while I wrote screenplays—and I wrote screenplays as a way to get into production. I wrote six or seven before I sold one; that was The Bodyguard. I thought if I started selling these screenplays, I’d get a chance to direct. I thought that was the way in. How different was your original version of The Bodyguard from the one that was finally produced? It was very different, but the words are almost identical right back to the original screenplay. When I was making Silverado, Kevin Costner, who was then an unknown actor really, got ahold of The Bodyguard and became very excited about it. He never let go of the idea of starring in it. As Costner’s star rose, it became possible for him to get it done. There had been constant interest in it, and it had been rewritten a lot of times with variations on the female character and her profession and so on. About three years ago Costner asked me if it was all right with me if he could revive it. I considered directing it and decided to do Grand Canyon instead, so Kevin chose Mick Jackson, who’d just done L.A. Story [1991], but I was very involved in the production. Just before they started, they pretty much went back to the original draft, and the basic thing is as it was written when I was twenty-five, with some remnants of other versions. When I began to sell screenplays, and they were directed by other people, the resulting movies were never very satisfying to me, and sometimes it created bad feelings. The Bodyguard, coming at a more recent moment in my career, was a reminder of that. It’s not a question of blame. It’s just that they can never be what you want them to be if someone else directs them. They may be better; they may be worse. But it’s happened to me a few times, and it’s very painful. I didn’t think after all this time that I would see another one of my scripts done by someone else, though; in fact, when The Bodyguard was done, it meant everything I’ve ever sold had been produced. I just don’t want anyone else to do my stuff anymore. What things tend to change? It’s always in the direction. One of the things I knew, and yet had to learn again when I started making films, was the extent of the director’s responsibility. It was kind of liberating in a way. On Body Heat, my first film, I thought that I had to do everything, dictate every decision. I placed the camera very specifically for every shot. Every one of the ten thousand deci-

166

LAWRENCE KASDAN

sions I took upon myself—I didn’t know any better. And what I had underestimated, and what I learned very quickly on later films, was that the director’s power is so complete and comprehensive that there are many things he can delegate; nothing can change the fact that it’s your baby if you’re any good. There’s nothing at risk. The more you invite people into the process, the more chance there is something vital will come out of it. This is a long way around to explaining how The Bodyguard had ten thousand decisions made by Mick Jackson—ten thousand decisions that I would have made differently. Having said that, The Bodyguard is, in a way, a perfect film because the idea’s a strong one, and Costner’s portrayal is exactly right. His performance has been wildly underestimated because acting in America is largely misunderstood, yet it’s exactly the character I wrote. Beyond that, everything in The Bodyguard is different—and it’s painful. If you directed somebody else’s script, would you want to rewrite it first? No—I did direct someone else’s script, I Love You to Death, and it was a fascinating experience.1 I had the writer, John Kostmayer, there every day, which I had never experienced myself when I was a writer; I had never been included. Directing someone else’s script, I felt what it must feel like to be an actor, where every day you are struggling to find out what it is you are trying to achieve. When you write and direct a movie, that particular thing doesn’t obsess you. You believe that you know exactly what you want, though you have many moments of doubt. Hopefully, you’ll be able to answer the various questions that emerge without resorting to your own preconceptions. When you take someone else’s script, you try to project yourself into it like an actor has to. I’m often shocked when an actor has entered a project with a gung ho attitude, and you find in rehearsals that they misunderstand the script. That’s not a bad thing—it’s often useful to find out how someone’s ideas are different from yours. That’s how I felt directing I Love You to Death. Every day I was struggling, and it was a particularly difficult piece, too. Even the writer, I think, did not know exactly how it should be handled. It was a problem of how to get the tone right. I used to say, and I guess I still believe it, that the difference between what I’d written, and what other directors would make of it, is taste. Would you like a certain face or costume, would you cover a scene that way, would you cut those two images together? It’s hard to find anyone whose tastes coincide exactly with yours. I found it difficult as a young man to just let a script go. When I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was obsessed with things that had changed, much more than I appreciated what was great about it. And five years later I felt differently.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

167

So you look back on it— With affection and respect. I recently saw an interview with Mike Nichols. He said at one point he’d turned down a chance to direct The Exorcist [1973] and the chance to make a fortune. But someone told him if he’d directed it, it probably wouldn’t have made any money. Me, too—I’ve turned down so many pictures that have gone on to be big hits, but I’m sure they wouldn’t have made so much money if I’d directed them. It’s a mystery what makes something a big hit anyway, but I think that my taste is not necessarily accessible to a mass audience. Take a picture like Raiders. I’m certain that Steven [Spielberg] directed that film better than I would have, which is what I didn’t appreciate when I first saw it. But you do have a sensibility that has enabled you to write two or three of the biggest-grossing movies of all time. Yes, I seem to be able to do that, but that’s mysterious to me. Raiders is an unusual circumstance in that Steven and George [Lucas] were both in tune with some kind of popular feeling. Their own interests are very much in line with what makes something popular. With the Star Wars [1977] sequels, you were going to do well with them no matter what. I did a good job on them, but they were always going to be hits. Then The Bodyguard became a huge hit, and there was something mystifying about that. It’s going to be like the third-biggest American movie ever released overseas, and I haven’t a clue why. I could look at it in retrospect and say, maybe people respond to this or that, Kevin’s very popular, and the music took off, but that’s the way all movies are evaluated after the fact. That’s not what carried it to such astonishing success—there was something in the core idea that was very attractive to people, particularly women, despite universal critical denigration. It had no critical impact whatsoever—none. It was just a huge hit. I couldn’t tell you why now. I could give you a lot of hypotheses. And I think the Mike Nichols rule of thumb works—if I’d directed The Bodyguard, it probably wouldn’t have been such a huge hit, though Costner doesn’t agree. Is it possible to analyze what makes your style of direction less blatantly commercial? I don’t know, and I don’t mean to denigrate anyone else. I think that popular movies work on a very simple premise, and that I’ve been drawn to movies that work on a very complex level. But then maybe a lot of that is in my head. Sometimes when I go back and look at a Hawks film or a Ford

168

LAWRENCE KASDAN

film, or any film that I really love, I’m struck by the simplicity. What is confusing is that when I saw The Bodyguard for the first time, it evoked so many complicated feelings in me that I attributed them all to the film. But maybe really good art is simple in a way that evokes that set of responses in people and yet is simple in its own right. Hawks, in particular, is very simple and yet very effective. Sometimes the artist is not aware of what he’s doing. When you look at different parts of a Ford film, you can’t believe that they are made by the same man. Some of them are squirmingly sentimental—the humor is phony and silly—but there’ll be moments of contemplation about heroism, or the way lives run in unexpected ways, and you’re just knocked back by the subtlety and immensity of his vision. I don’t think that Ford would make that distinction between those two facets of himself; he was just making a picture, you know? I think that, with good art, we just don’t know. The struggle is to let go of thinking we know. I know that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had been fans of forties and fifties adventure serials, but how did Indiana Jones evolve as a character when you wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark? Steven had purchased my script Continental Divide, which was very different from the film which resulted. The script had a kind of Hawksian speed, momentum, hopefully wit about it. I don’t think the film turned out that way, which was one of those painful experiences I had early on. But Steven’s enthusiasm for it was what got me involved with him and George. I think that what they were looking for was someone who could write Raiders in the same way that Hawks would have someone write a movie for him—a strong woman character, a certain kind of hero. So that’s what got me the job. George had already had the idea of the way the guy dressed, and Phil Kaufman had provided the Macguffin of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, which his orthodontist had told him about when he was eleven years old. At one time Phil was going to direct it, but he had gone on to different things. George had told the idea to Steven, and Steven had said, “Oh, that excites me.” When I was brought in, it became a Lucas-SpielbergKasdan movie. We sat down and decided on the kind of hero Indiana Jones would be, his name, his whip, and talked about the Macguffin and serial films. After that, we created the film by jumping through favorite moments from those kinds of films—the sort of thing we would like to see.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

169

Raiders was produced on a scale, with a kind of modern technological ability, that went way beyond any of those serials, but the spirit of onrushing events and constant crises—that’s from the serial. I think what they brought me in for, and what I tried to do, was to give it a Hawksian spine. I’m interested in character, whereas a lot of people approach a script from plot or story or the production angle—you know, “What can we do here?” I think that what happened in that three-way conversation was that each of us was able to bring in something of our own. Was the warehouse scene in Raiders a quotation from Citizen Kane? I think so. That was the ending that George always had, although the fact that the matte shot ended up looking like that scene from Citizen Kane came from Steven. George was interested in the fact that all these secrets were hidden away in a big government warehouse somewhere—not just the Lost Ark but all the things we don’t know about. Do you see Raiders as a Grail quest? I don’t, because the search for the Grail has never been a powerful story to me. It’s hugely powerful to Steven, and he sees most of his movies that way. My background is in literature, and the things that excite me are details of character—the way someone picks up something or a mood across the room. I don’t look at The Seven Samurai in the large sense. I look at it moment to moment, at the essentials of life, the details, the direction of the story, the unexpected turns of character. I never approach a story and say, “Oh, this is typical of life in downtown Detroit.” John Patrick Shanley is a friend of mine, and he called me up after he’d seen The Bodyguard and said it was one of the best things that he’d seen recently. I was mystified by it, but I could see that as he talked about it, it went right to the heart of his own concerns, and that there was something so achingly sad for him about a man who is willing to give his life for this woman he is so much in love with but can never have. I think that’s a very romantic idea, but some of that I’m aware of, some not. I approached The Bodyguard from a point of view of two characters I was interested in. I don’t think I ever looked for a broad perspective in it, personally. I’m having a slightly different experience with Wyatt Earp, because I approached it from Earp’s character and his life. Yet it’s very clear to me that his story is the American story. So this is one of those rare occasions where it’s clear to me that I’m aware of larger resonances.

170

LAWRENCE KASDAN

When you came to write The Empire Strikes Back, had the decision already been made to make it darker than Star Wars, or was that your influence? I think I influenced that, and George was open to it and ready to have it happen. Over the three Star Wars films, he saw a trajectory. The Empire Strikes Back was the second act, and traditionally, the second act is when things start to go bad. George had made his biggest decision when he hired Irvin Kershner to direct, even though Kershner and I were acting as his tools. When it came to the third act, The Return of the Jedi, which functions as the relief, he chose a different kind of director, Richard Marquand, whose worldview was much sunnier than Kershner’s. Did you have an affinity for science fiction? My brother had been a science fiction aficionado, but it had never interested me.There was a wall of science fiction books across the hall, but I’d never read them. I only became involved with [the] Star Wars [series] because I’d written Raiders for George, and that was directly in line with all the things that excited me about movies. He then hired me immediately to do The Empire Strikes Back. I was just a writer he liked who was immediately available. Was it like writing a Western, or perhaps a morality play? Well, once involved in the saga I related to it strongly because it’s elemental stuff. But I sometimes kid around and say it’s about Hollywood. It’s about imposing your fantasies upon others. A Jedi knight has the ability to take a weaker mind and control it, and that’s what Hollywood’s about. If the studio says to you, “We’re not going to make this movie,” you, as a Jedi knight, say, “We are going to make it.” And then the studio agrees. That’s what the Star Wars saga is about—it’s about following those things which are strongest in you and imposing them on the world. Making a career in Hollywood is like that if you want to do your own work. If you want to do what they want you to do, it’s easy. You just say yes. But if you want to do what you want to do, you’re constantly manipulating the chaos of the system. Does that require immense force of will? It’s been very clear to me since the very beginning what is necessary for me. It seems like it’s my job to oppose what is going on and use it for my own purposes. I’ve seen very talented people who will not oppose it. Their work is fine, too. I don’t think they’re less forceful than me; I don’t think they even see a conflict. But I think there’s something natural in me that

LAWRENCE KASDAN

171

saw the studios and their apparatus as the enemy. I think that a lot of people share the same agenda as the studios. So does it require a large force of will? I think that you inherently have a feeling about it. There are filmmakers who are much more radical than me who would look at me and say, “Well, he’s part of a system, and he does Hollywood movies.” I don’t see it that way. I think that character is destiny, and you do the things you have to do. You’ve had quite an unusual career in that you operate within the parameters of Hollywood, but you function as a writer-director making personal films. You don’t do contract jobs, or go off to make a film for the sake of making one. No. Oftentimes I want to, but when it comes to signing on the dotted line, I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t think that reluctance comes from a pretentious place; I think that I’m not capable of doing it. I can’t bring myself to do even those movies that turn out to be hits. I can’t get my head around them. So my career and my work have evolved very naturally. I always do the things that are right for me—not necessarily feeling that everything else is wrong. This relates back to what I was saying about the director’s power and influence over a film being so complete that, no matter what other people try to make it, it becomes a personal film. You see it in a movie like The Untouchables [1987]. It was a questionable script in my mind, and when I read it I said I didn’t know what to do with it, but Brian De Palma knew how to turn it into a Brian De Palma film, to take the moments he related to and blow them up so that they became the most important things in the movie, while the other stuff was thrown away. In talking about your writing process, you’ve used the word “density”— how you pack a great deal into each scene. Anything I say about this now is influenced by the changes in my process over the years. Looking again at some of my favorite films, and seeing that they’re simpler than I thought they were, has influenced my approach to the writing and directing of films. My initial response to them was that they were infinitely complex, that one image from Lawrence of Arabia [1962], say, conveys so many ideas. So when I started writing, I was trying to pack all those ideas in, to convey them to other people, because I wasn’t going to direct those films at that time. I’ve been writing screenplays now for twenty-five years, and it’s taken me all this time to see even a glint of where I should be heading, which is to aim for a certain simplicity and stop

172

LAWRENCE KASDAN

trying to pack the screenplay with as much as I can. On the other hand, that early approach served me very well in that the people who read the screenplays were able to see the mood very specifically and didn’t have to imagine that much. Sometimes, though, I think I’ve been too specific in the writing, and now I’m trying to fight that urge and be more open to possibilities and experiences. Do you write fast? Very. I wrote Wyatt Earp in three months, and it’s a huge story—more than three hours. It seemed fast to me. I used to outline what I was going to do. I don’t do that so much anymore. It’s part of trying to loosen up the process and not know what’s happening. But I think I’m a linear person, and when I write I don’t write a quick draft and then go back. I don’t like to leave anything behind me, because I’m uncomfortable with it. I tend to write a scene many times over before going on. The last time I was really doing drafts was when I was working for George Lucas. Now, I will sometimes revise and make little changes, but the essentials don’t change. I take a lot of time and effort with the first draft, and I’d rather shoot that. On Wyatt Earp I’m doing a revision in response to certain ideas that people have come up with. That, to some people, might be a draft; to me, it’s details. The first draft is what we’re really shooting. That may not be a good thing necessarily, but I believe in it. I believe in initial responses to people and things. Do you write in three-act structure, with each scene triggering the next? I think I do. And now it’s become so completely ingrained in me that I don’t have to think about it, but when I go back and look at the work I can see that it’s there. Grand Canyon is as loose a film as I’ve ever written, and when I was done with it I saw that I was following exactly the same kind of structure I had been using since I’d learned it in college. I hadn’t thought about it once during the writing—which is what you’re hoping for. By the time you’d finished Return of the Jedi, did you feel the need to address more obviously adult themes? From the very beginning, that’s where my interests lay. All the time I spent with George over three pictures, there was a tension about what kind of movie we were making—between George’s concerns, which are archetypal, and mine, which are very specific and human. I see myself as a humanist.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

173

All my interests are humanist ones. Anyway, I actually made Body Heat before Jedi, but George asked me as a favor to come and do Jedi with him. He had been very helpful to me in getting Body Heat made, and I felt that I owed him. So after having had the experience of directing, and loving it, to go back and write for another director was a difficult thing for me to do. But we sort of turned it into a lark. George is good company, and we had fun, and I liked Richard Marquand—he was a lovely guy. We did the work very fast under enormous time pressures, but a lot of the production design, effects, and so on, had already been prepared, so it was real easy. With Body Heat, were you consciously setting out to reinhabit the world of film noir? Yes, very consciously, because I didn’t know if I’d get to direct again. This might be my only shot and I wanted to do something very extravagant. I was searching in myself, knowing that I needed a framework in which to do an extravagant thing—basically because I’m a shy person. Actually, The Accidental Tourist is really representative of a lot of my tastes and interests in that it’s about the tiniest things, whereas using film noir on Body Heat gave me the license to have very extravagant dialogue and camerawork. For me, it was always about projecting what interested me within that genre. In a way, Body Heat is just like The Big Chill. It’s about someone of my generation who just happens to find himself in the film noir world, but, like a lot of my characters, is really a sixties character. Did you look at other film noirs or think about them? I had seen a great many of them in college and was very struck by them. It was a world that I found very sensual and exciting, and I was drawn to that. For me, that dark side speaks to my own hidden obsessions. I think we all have a hidden life. What’s great about noir is the blending of the life we present to other people and our secret life. It’s all about desire. Did you read deeply in hard-boiled fiction? Chandler, Hammett, and Cain—not beyond that. I think I got on to Hammett through The Maltese Falcon movie, not the other way around. That movie electrified me and I still think it’s the best possible model for a first film ever made. Body Heat is a child of The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity [1944] and Out of the Past [1947], but used for my own purposes. When people did not want to embrace Body Heat, they’d say it was

174

LAWRENCE KASDAN

a pastiche. I don’t think that covers it, but when you make a film like that you know you’re going to hear that kind of criticism. I’ve heard you say that Body Heat and The Big Chill are films about what one wants and the price one has to pay to get it. I don’t think this was preconceived, but it’s something that’s so insistent in my work that I can barely recognize it. Very often my films are about the conflict between our ideas and our desires, and that’s where the drama is for me. We know how we’re supposed to act, but we’re constantly in rebellion against the things we’ve been taught, and our hearts and bodies are telling us other things. That’s true from Body Heat right through to Wyatt Earp— you have an idea of how you should live your life, but it’s very difficult to live up to that. That’s the material that interests me. Did you storyboard Body Heat? What little directing I’d seen had been by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and they were great storyboarders. So I started storyboarding Body Heat, and after a while I stopped because it made no sense to me. I was just struggling to get some artist to put on paper what was already in my head. I thought, “Well, I’ll just do it on the set.” When the picture was done, I went back and looked at the little bit of storyboarding I’d done, and I’d shot the film exactly that way without looking at the storyboards once, though obviously some things changed. I think this is why it’s so much easier for me to direct something I’ve written. I’m the authority now on Wyatt Earp—not the historical authority, but on this movie. No one will ever know more about this than I do, although they may see the faults. This way I feel total confidence. Do you think about style? I think about style in terms of the themes. I think it has to do with every painting, photograph, and film you’ve ever liked—every book. When I go to make a movie, I’m influenced by Joseph Conrad as much as I am by John Ford. Since I’ve accepted the fact that everything on a film will go through my filter anyway, then all I want is more and more information. When you look at a film by Ford or Kurosawa, you get so much useful information, but you couldn’t ever hope to achieve what they achieved, if you wanted to. You’ve seen people try, and it’s impossible. But the interest-

LAWRENCE KASDAN

175

ing director that you hope that you are will hopefully create something unique each time. The style of your films is clearly yours, but that’s something which is less easy to describe than, say, Spielberg’s or Scorsese’s. As I say, I think that my personality is shy, reticent, in some ways; I’m conservative—I don’t wear flashy clothes. I think that’s true of my style, too, not that I don’t like things that are startlingly innovative. If you look at The Grapes of Wrath [1940], you can’t believe this movie was made in 1939— it’s avant-garde for today. You never see a film like this today, and you say, how can I begin to move in that direction? It’s so daring. So I’ve nothing against innovation and extravagance; it’s just perfect. The Seven Samurai, too. For me, the idea is, is the camera where you want it to be, not are you showing it off? I look sometimes at films that are wildly received, and it seems their camera movements are clearly there for movement’s sake; they have no purpose in the film. What I admire about Kurosawa is the Zen perfection of his camera placement, the rightness of it. That’s the idea I’m striving for—but style is not something that drives my pictures. Your films have often been described as slick or glossy. What’s your reaction to that? This sounds unrelated, but I am left-handed as a writer—I do everything else right-handed. At the point at which I could have developed ambidextrously, my parents were told,“Oh no, leave him alone.” It meant that I have never been able to write in a classical style—I’ve always smudged what I’ve written and I hate my handwriting. In my mind, a beautiful hand always represented slickness to me. So when people started describing my films as slick, it didn’t bother me. There are slick things in Kurosawa that people would never call slick. I think I make a good-looking movie, and that’s what I want to do. I also try as much as possible to use a dissolve when a dissolve is right, and cut when I’m supposed to cut. You’re never right all the time. Sometimes you feel you’re completely out of tune with the critical mode. You look around and you see lots of people being praised, and then you don’t want to be praised. It becomes bothersome after a while if you think your work is being underrated because it doesn’t have a certain kind of flashiness, but that’s momentary compared to your conviction that your own work is better on a second or third viewing. We live in a first-viewing world, but I don’t make these movies for one viewing. I can look at Lawrence of Arabia,

176

LAWRENCE KASDAN

or High and Low [1962], or Ikiru [1952], and be thrilled every time. That’s the ideal I’m working toward. Film noir has also stood the test of time, partly because it’s a school of filmmaking rooted in an older school, namely, Expressionism, and partly because its shadows have never quite gone away. It continues to be influential. It also touches something deep about the way men and women relate to each other that is independent of the surface intrigues and mysteries of the stories. Sometimes they make manifest what is in us all the time. You don’t have to be involved in an insurance scam, as in Double Indemnity, to feel the suspicion and experience the fears we have about the opposite sex—you can be on a date with someone! That, I think, is what noir is about. When Mary-Ann Simpson [Kathleen Turner] is seen on the beach at the end of Body Heat, do you feel that she has regrets about the way she has manipulated Ned Racine [William Hurt]? Yes, but not that she would do anything differently if she was given another chance. Wyatt Earp is a little bit like that—and everything else in between. Again, it comes from your ideas about what you should do with your life, versus the reality of doing them. Mary-Ann was so singleminded about achieving her goal—an infantile goal—that anything that got in the way of that was irrelevant. That’s what all great tragedies are about for me—that in this adherence to a single idea, we sometimes sacrifice everything. Double Indemnity is about that, and there’s a real ambiguity when Barbara Stanwyck says, “I love you” to Fred MacMurray just before he shoots her. He doesn’t know whether to believe it—and maybe she doesn’t know. I love that, because I feel that every day in every way. Was The Big Chill based on actual people you knew, or are the characters amalgams? They’re amalgams. Paul Schrader once said, “There’s a little bit of yourself in every character.” That’s very true of The Big Chill. It was about my friends, my feelings about them, and about me projecting myself onto them. It was also filtered through the sensibility and humor of Barbara Benedek, who wrote it with me and has a different personality than me. I always thought of the film as a comedy of manners. A lot of people projected that it was an incomplete summing-up of a generation, but it was

LAWRENCE KASDAN

177

LAWRENCE KASDAN WITH ACTOR KEVIN KLINE ON THE SET OF THE BIG CHILL .

meant to be specific, not a summing-up at all. One of the difficulties you face when you write and direct films is how they are received—not by the public, which goes into the theater innocently every time, but by critics, who have this terrible job where they see one bad movie after another and have to make a judgment about them. They often forget that there’s a difference between a writer-director and the characters he creates. They think that you have a one-to-one relationship with your characters, but that’s not the way it is for me. As much as they are part of you, you always have a distance from them. You might think that they are foolish, which I do most of the time. Certainly the ones that interest me are foolish. Sometimes you laugh at your characters, but you laugh at them empathetically. You hope that you are sympathetic to people’s faults. Everybody in The Big Chill is self-absorbed, struggling to deal with the realities of life in the world as opposed to the cloistered, comfortable existence of college, which they remember inaccurately anyway. They’re struggling with this disjunction between what they thought the world would be

178

LAWRENCE KASDAN

and what it is like, and they’re finding that it’s a difficult terrain to navigate. It’s hard for them to keep their feet. One of the characters says, “No one thinks they’re an asshole.” Clearly people are assholes, but never to themselves. That’s the heart of the movie, because most of the characters act foolishly, selfishly, single-mindedly, and they don’t see that they’re acting like that—and that’s where the humor is. They weren’t what they thought they were before, and they’re not what they think they are now, and yet they see their present day as a clear difference from their past. I think that people don’t change like that. The struggle goes on. Was The Big Chill about the loss of idealism? It’s about the loss of the idea of idealism. Whether or not they were actually idealistic back then, I don’t know. Initially, I included a flashback to their college days, but I took it out because it didn’t work. But what it was trying to show was that they weren’t all that different from now; you could see the seeds of everything they’d become. There was never a pristine time; there was only a pristine image of themselves. The Big Chill has wonderful ensemble acting. Tell me how you worked with the actors on this piece. Did you rehearse them extensively? On The Big Chill we rehearsed for longer than I ever have since—four weeks, which is really unheard of in movies. I haven’t done it again, because I’m no longer convinced it’s the right thing to do. On that occasion, when these actors who were strangers were going to have to play friends and know each other well, I felt it was the perfect situation. We actually went on location for the last two weeks and lived in the house we shot in. I had written The Big Chill not just from my view of the issues in the film, but also in reaction to Body Heat, where I’d been cloistered with two actors in a terribly claustrophobic movie. I’d determined that my next film would have a lot of actors and that I wouldn’t be stuck in an airless world. I love actors and I’m always frustrated that there aren’t enough parts for them. On Wyatt Earp there are a hundred parts, but I’ll still have to say no to a lot of people I want to work with. So Barbara and I wrote a lot of parts for The Big Chill, and I loved being in rehearsal with all those people. I’m amazed by what actors can do that I can’t do. Rehearsals are an investigation enabling them to bring to a script what isn’t there and exploring what is there—and seeing how that interaction takes place and changes things. At the end of a rehearsal, all that I’ll hope for is that there’s some understanding of the basic intent of the film.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

179

When it comes to shooting, do you remind people what you want, or just let them go? I tend to let them go until I’m not getting what I want. Sometimes they’ll give me something new that I hadn’t thought of and that I love; sometimes they’ll go off what I think is right. Directing is exhausting to me, because all day long you’re sorting out the good ideas from the bad—plus the good ideas that are inappropriate and which can throw off the balance of the piece, which might be better stored for later on, or which will never be right. You have to sort all that and guard the actors’ contributions. You never want to shut that down or discourage them for the next day. You want them to come back with the same openness toward you. It requires a certain kind of handling. Do you manipulate the actors to get what you want? I probably do, though I never think of it as manipulation. I think about it as being very straight with them about what my needs are. Sometimes their resistance is great, and I find that a good actor is usually right if they resist strongly—and that the only mistake I’ve made is in the casting. If you cast correctly, it gives you enormous freedom because the actor is never going to go that far wrong. They may not even have any understanding of the part, but they are so intrinsically interesting that it blows away all your reservations. Are you economical with takes? I’m trying to be more so. I’ve never done an enormous number. A lot of it depends on the actors. You can actually impose a rhythm on most actors. It took me a long time to realize that, because I was initially indulgent of actors’ desires to do more takes; and since I had some idea in my head that I was trying to relinquish by getting the take right, I was always ready to do another one, too. I began to feel that doing too many was counterproductive to everything that I was doing. Momentum is enormously important. You have two hours, say, to do a scene you’ve been thinking about for years. The actors may have been thinking about it for six months; they’ve been aiming for this day and will invariably be dissatisfied because they’ve built up that moment in their heads. As a director, you know that every moment in a film can’t have such weight; sometimes you want much less than the actors aim to give you. The excitement is in your having just one chance to get it right. I’m not drawn

180

LAWRENCE KASDAN

to reshooting scenes, let alone whole movies, although I know some directors are. I think that’s cheating. I don’t see it as a perfectible form. I see it like athletics: How did you play the game that night in front of the crowd in that stadium? That’s all that counts. The way you describe it sounds close to theater. The difference being that in theater you get to try again the next night. Film has that cutting edge; it’s going to be preserved forever and that’s what’s terrifying to actors. Getting them to relax is the hardest thing, because if they’re dissatisfied with what they’ve done today, they’ll be confused about the next three days, so you try to make them feel confident that they’ve done well. If you do three takes, will you print just one? I’ll print all three. I try not to do more than five; after that, it tends to be a drag. A movie like Silverado or Wyatt Earp has so many other things going on—gunshots, horses—which also determine how many takes you do. But in a pure acting film like Grand Canyon, where your camera crew is topnotch, you’re basically getting what you want each time. Then I might go again just to see if the actors will surprise me. I’ll say, “Just do anything.” Do the actors then lobby you to use that extra one? All the time. I’ve always had open dailies; anyone who wants to come can come. Sometimes you’re depressed because it’s bad. It’s like a drug, really, but I’ve found that dailies don’t tell you much about the way a movie is going. Silverado is a genuinely postmodern Western in that you brought in lots of generic tropes and drew attention to them: the wagon train, Kevin Costner as a fringe-jacketed Range Rider character, Scott Glenn as the lean, laconic loner archetype, Jeff Goldblum as the card shark, the gunfight in the street at the end. The Kevin Kline character talks very consciously about the specific atmosphere of saloons. There’s also the full panoply of six-guns, holsters, spurs, saddles, and hats. It’s a Western suffused with Western movie imagery. No one has ever used that word “panoply” before, but I think that’s the right way to approach it. Silverado caused enormous confusion in people

LAWRENCE KASDAN

181

who wrote about it, because of that quality, which they took to be a confusion on our part about what kind of movie we had wanted to make. And there may be some truth to that. It is postmodern in the sense that it is aware of its images and it does have a sensibility that is informed. I think that was an organic expression of the enthusiasm that my brother and I had for the genre. Eight years later, I’m about to do another Western, Wyatt Earp, in the same kind of location, Santa Fe, and it’s fascinating. I’m going to be walking the same ground, using the same kinds of horses, holsters, guns, and hats, but doing a very different kind of story at a different time in my life; sometimes that’s what happens if you’re lucky enough to make movies. Wyatt Earp will be nothing like Silverado, I think—I may be wrong. This movie’s very much a character study, and the character represents a great many things. Silverado was not like that. Above all, it was about the spirit of The Magnificent Seven and all the movies that spawned. It was that idea, which is so powerful to young American audiences, of a group of strangers coming together and using their skills to achieve a cause. I’ve always thought that was a good metaphor for filmmaking, because when you make a film you hire people you don’t know, but who are enormously skilled at specific things. Cameramen, editors, actors . . . it always feels like assembling an all-star team. Filmmaking is that kind of journey. You meet people on the road, they become intensely intimate with you, you rely on them in desperate situations. That’s what Silverado is about— relishing all those elements in a jaunty, ebullient way. But it’s not a classical Western. Most Westerns have been spare in story and character; it’s a very austere form, and there’s a real strength in that, as in any good, simple story. Silverado, though, is a terribly complicated story with too many characters in it. But for me, there couldn’t be enough moments, enough characters, enough horses, enough ways of dressing the film. Why were there no Indians in it? There were Indians, but we cut ’em out because we couldn’t afford the sequence. The cavalry sequence was cut, too. The women characters are particularly interesting: Linda Hunt as the saloon boss, Rosanna Arquette as the frontierswoman in the wagon train. Was the Arquette character cut down? Yes. It was my biggest regret about the movie that it didn’t work out with Rosanna. Her scenes probably weren’t written that well. I cut three or four

182

LAWRENCE KASDAN

of them out and made it tighter. It was already a long movie and you go with what you like best—not even necessarily what’s right, but what you want to look at for the rest of your life. The romantic triangle involving her, Scott Glenn, and Kevin Kline was developing interestingly, I thought, and then it stops. Yeah. It’s not good. I’m not proud of it. Where did the Linda Hunt character come from? It came from seeing Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously [1983] and just wanting to work with her. I met her and fell in love with her, and we wrote the part for her. If she didn’t exist, there wouldn’t have been that character. She was fabulous. Was the climactic gunfight between Kline and Brian Dennehy an homage to the one in High Noon [1952]? It’s an homage to a lot of gunfights. I love the way these men end up walking down a deserted street like that. I mention it because Kline is dressed almost identically to Gary Cooper. Yes, and I like that look, too! Wyatt Earp will probably look something like that. Now that you are doing Wyatt Earp, does that mean you won’t do the mooted Silverado II? I actually had a script written for it by John Kostmayer, who wrote I Love You to Death, and he did a good job. But I was worried that there was no reason to do it. Silverado underperformed terribly, and it was botched by Columbia—and they knew it. The new regime there knew they should have made twice as much money from it as they did, because it was a huge hit on video and cable. Now everyone in it has become a star—Costner, of course, is huge—and I was attracted to the idea of getting together with these guys again because they’re all in my circle of friends. But I began to think that there’s nothing in this story that warrants making the film, although I could change my mind. There’s enormous pressure for me to do Bodyguard II, and you can imagine what ambivalent feelings I have about

LAWRENCE KASDAN

183

that! It was never intended to be a series, nor was Silverado, though we left the door open for that. It’s just that there are so many movies to make and so little time. Each one you do is a huge commitment. As much as anyone, I’m sure, I am affected by the popularity or acceptance of a film I make, but that’s minor compared to the actual process of making it. I wanted to direct movies because I thought it was the best work for me to do; being able to write and direct is beyond my dreams. I love being on the set; I love working with the actors; I love cutting and mixing. That’s 95 percent of my work life. The other 5 percent is the reaction—and it can cut you like a knife. But the first 95 percent is your job. That’s why, when I choose my crew—and I tend to work with the same people—and actors, I always choose who I want to be with. People say, “Well, so and so is an asshole, but he’s worth it.” I never approach it that way—nothing is worth it. I am interested in the quality of my life and there are too many good actors around to make you want to put up with an asshole; there are so many people who desperately want to be in your movie. Why would you want to put up with a horrible person who is going to make your life miserable every day? It’s hard work. When you go to the set at five thirty in the morning—which is the hardest part for me—you want to see a face that makes you happy. That was my feeling going into each of the films I’ve directed. Most of those days I was happy to be there. I’ve had terrible days, of course, but when I arrived I was usually feeling good about the people in the film. You miss a shot when you tense up. That’s why I try to create a feeling of relaxation for the actors and the crew. I don’t like screaming. I don’t like fights. Some people thrive on it; I don’t. I essentially want people to be comfortable. They don’t have to be having a good time—I gave up trying to keep everybody happy a long time ago—but they should know that their work is respected and understood. I never want them to feel that the sword is hanging over their head. Can you get tough with people? I think so. When I was searching for a way to make a living while I wrote movies, I went back to school and got a master’s degree in education. The lesson I learned from student teaching was that you can control an unruly class at almost any level, but the more you yell, the less effective yelling becomes. That has influenced my approach to directing; for me, being hard is giving someone a look where another director might scream at them.

184

LAWRENCE KASDAN

Let’s move on to The Accidental Tourist. What attracted you to Anne Tyler’s novel? I was going to do Man Trouble [1992], which had been around for ten years, with Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange, and I worked on it for a while before it fell apart. I didn’t want to read The Accidental Tourist while I was working on Man Trouble, because Man Trouble is about an upper-class woman who gets involved with a crazy lower-class dog trainer, whereas The Accidental Tourist is about an uptight, upper-class man who gets involved with an eccentric lower-class woman. Thematically, they are totally different. What appealed to me enormously about The Accidental Tourist was that it’s about control. What the accidental tourist tries to do is control his environment so that he always feels at home even in the most exotic places on earth. That idea spoke directly to me, because I, like a lot of people, am fearful of all the chaos in the world. I try, in my own way, to control it. Everybody works out a system of control: either they exercise, or they eat too much, or they do drugs or drink, or they work very hard. In The Accidental Tourist, you have a man, Macon Leary [William Hurt], whose world has been shattered by the unexpected tragedy of the death of his son before the movie starts. The world cannot be controlled, and he sinks deeper and deeper into this hole. His wife rejects him for his lack of responsiveness to the tragedy, and he takes refuge in the tightness of his world as a travel writer. Then he meets someone who accepts chaos in the world and saves his life. Control and fear—those are very strong themes. Anne Tyler is an unbelievable writer. What I have just described to you is the story—but she’s a consummate stylist. When I read the book I felt not only that it should be a movie but also that it should be a movie that doesn’t violate the book. A lot of people in Hollywood thought it was a crazy movie to make. There’s not a lot of action in it, hardly anything, in fact, that Hollywood looks for. And I’ve got to tell you that I thought that all along, though it was only on looking back at the movie later that I was surprised that I had done it. It’s not really what people go to the movies to see, and I’m surprised at the size of the audience we got. It’s very slow. It’s about tiny things. It’s grim. The hero has a stick up his ass: he’s a horribly difficult guy to get on with. When you wrote the script, was it difficult to bring a sympathetic quality to a protagonist who’s so self-pitying? No. In my mind, Anne Tyler didn’t see him that way. I have two sons of my own, and so the thought of Macon Leary’s loss was so enormous to me that

LAWRENCE KASDAN

185

I understood his behavior completely. To me, it’s not self-pity; it’s devastation, and he’s been incapacitated by it. Frankly, I don’t know that I would react as well as he did. Making the film, I knew he was a difficult hero. That’s why I love William Hurt’s performance, because he doesn’t pander for a second; he doesn’t ask you to like him, and he is a hard guy to like. The tension in the last part of the movie comes from the dilemma he faces: Will he accept this life force, the Geena Davis character, into his life, or is he going to relinquish it and be doomed? Every day we’re faced with those kinds of choices. You don’t have to experience enormous change to be faced with the choice between letting your life expand, or staying in your room where you know certain things can happen and you control some of them. It’s about fear. That’s what everything’s about. Was Anne Tyler involved in the film? When I went to Baltimore to scout locations, she drove me around, showed me the places she was thinking of. It was one of the high points of my life. I think she liked the movie, and I think she was taken aback a little by what she’d written, and seeing it embodied in that way. She may have been a little shocked by how grim it was. But in person’s she’s very funny—and there is a lot of humor in the movie. The look of the movie is very autumnal. Yes. Macon’s world is very closed in. It’s burnished, in a way. You know, he hasn’t “left the house,” and there’s something comforting about that, except there’s no air in it. Everything stays the same. I have an aunt whom I’ve been going to visit for thirty years, and nothing’s moved in her house. A magazine will be in the same place it was five years before. That’s her way of controlling her environment, and that was the mood I was trying to achieve. It’s a melancholy mood justified by the tragedy. But I don’t think I realized how melancholy it would be for people coming to the movie fresh. A lot of them said, “Why is it so depressing? Why is he so depressed?” But to me it was obvious. What saves you, when you make a movie, is that you become a true believer in it. That’s what gets you through it, not the thought that you’re

186

LAWRENCE KASDAN

going to make the greatest movie ever. The only chance that you’re going to do anything good is by being fanatical about the ideas as you see them. Sometimes other people will not see those ideas the way you do, and it doesn’t work for them. But a movie has a different relationship to everyone who sees it, and you hear enough people say to you, “Yes, I got it,” to make you feel glad that you’re doing this work, even though it may not be that popular. Sometimes you do work that is enormously popular, and you say, “I don’t know if I should be doing this.” Did you face resistance from Warner Bros. when you said you wanted to do The Accidental Tourist? It was an odd thing. They wanted to do it, and I don’t know why. It was probably the easiest job I had to get a movie green-lighted. When it was done and the studio started sneak-previewing it, they didn’t like it that much, but then we won the New York Film Critics’ prize and they liked it better. We did well at the box office, considering the kind of movie it is. I have sometimes been frustrated by the size of my audience, but not on that movie. I’m amazed we got as many people in to see it as we did. It was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had. I’m as proud of The Accidental Tourist as anything I’ve done. I Love You to Death came from a true 1984 case about a woman [played by Tracey Ullman in the film] who tried to murder her husband [Kevin Kline] for his philanderings. The film didn’t do very well. Do you regard it as a missed opportunity? I have more regrets about I Love You to Death than anything I’ve done, because Kostmayer had written an odd and interesting script. It was very funny to me, but there were things in it that were ugly. In postproduction we started sneaking it, and most of the sneak audiences hated the movie— despised it. They hated certain things, and I started taking those things out. We reshot the ending, added new scenes, and took out scenes that were difficult. I wanted to make the movie more popular, and that was weak, because it got worse and worse. As a result, I’ve never used those sneak preview cards since. It wasn’t as if the studio was making me change things. What do you think went wrong? I ruined the movie, I think. I don’t think it would have ever done better than it did, but it would have been a better movie had I not taken out those things

LAWRENCE KASDAN

187

that were ugly and odd and unexpected. Those were very real things that Kostmayer had conceived and he was all for taking them out, too. But he was a novice, and I had the responsibility. There are things in the film that are funny, that I’m proud of. Tracey Ullman did the opposite of what we expect from her; she held everything in. Other people did great work. But I think audiences didn’t like the film, because they want to go and see good-looking people achieving things. That’s what American movies are about. The scenes involving William Hurt and Keanu Reeves as the zonked-out assassins hired by Rosalie [Ullman] to kill Joey [Kline] push the movie toward surrealism. But it’s not funny to a general audience to see a couple of drug addicts as Laurel and Hardy. That’s what they were like—Mutt and Jeff. Were you attempting to address the archetype of the sleazy, macho Latin lover in the character of Joey? Yes. The film touches on a lot of archetypes in ways that are tasteless, which is another reason it’s difficult. For me, Joey is the absolute clearest embodiment of a man who wants to be a good husband, gets married, and then wants to fuck every girl he sees. That’s what leads to disaster. The film’s tacky-seedy flavor partly comes from its setting, Tacoma, an industrial town in a beautiful rural region of Washington. I love that town, despite the terrible smell from the pulp mills. The actual story took place in Scranton, Pennsylvania, another ugly town in a beautiful setting. That was familiar to me because I grew up in Wheeling and Morgantown, West Virginia, oppressively ugly towns with steel mills and coal mines in one of the most beautiful places in the country. Tacoma is part of the overall ugliness of the movie, which was intentional, but, again, I don’t think that’s what American audiences want to see. Some of your images of Americana—such as the coffeepot restaurant— are redolent of the way the country has been casually despoiled by commercialism. And describing this is painful. People want to succeed, they want to be good people—all of them—and they’re not making it. And there’s Joey blithely enjoying his life, which is about to go out of control . . .

188

LAWRENCE KASDAN

Grand Canyon, which you wrote with your wife, Meg, was an altogether more spiritual work. It depicts a cross section of people in Los Angeles, the haves and have-nots, some of whom come together during the course of the film. It was a prophetic picture in that it showed the social distress in Los Angeles, made all too apparent by the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict. It also struck me as a personal film with an element of wish fulfillment about it. I wondered if it was prompted by your feeling guilty, to some extent, about living and working in Hollywood, on the edge of one of the most depressed areas in the country? I think you can feel guilty anywhere in the country, any day, because the disparity among different social groups is so great. I know that some people said, “This is a Hollywood filmmaker feeling guilty,” but I think that if you were a lawyer in Cincinnati you’d feel the same way. It’s not about my guilt; it’s about the fact that the system doesn’t work. The ideas we have for the country are in conflict with what’s happened. People are not treated fairly. The world isn’t fair. That is accepted in most societies, but Americans are taught at an early age that everyone is equal, and everyone has an equal right to happiness and security, but society hasn’t delivered on that promise. To me, Los Angeles is a perfect example of that because of its physical layout. If you walk outside in Manhattan, you never have a fantasy that you can separate yourself from poverty, because when you cross the street you’ll find yourself in the middle of it. Los Angeles has always had a fantasy of separation because of the distances between communities, but it’s become clear that it is a fantasy—because if any of us are going down, we’ll all go down. Grand Canyon was about the fact that, even within this lovely setting, there is enormous despair. Did you set out, then, to make a social picture? Yes, but again it started with the characters. I think that everybody in the movie is struggling to make a life and to control their fears and to make some kind of connection. There is enormous loneliness in the movie. The Mary-Louise Parker character [the secretary who has slept with her married boss, Mack, played by Kevin Kline] embodies a lot of things that I see every day. She’s someone struggling to make an investment in a relationship, to be happy. It’s the same with the Sarah Trigger character, who bursts into tears in the limo because she believes that her boyfriend [Steve Martin], the Hollywood producer, won’t commit to her.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

189

She can see that the world does not work that well, that it’s a frightening place. Yet she’s ready to demonstrate her faith by having children, which is harder and harder to do with an optimistic attitude. She says, “It’s just that I want to have children . . . I don’t care how rotten the world is, I want to have them anyway. But I’m so far from being able to have them. I’m all involved with you, and you’re not going to have kids with me. We’re not even getting married.” Her frustration is huge, and it is for all the characters. Every one of them is trying to make a connection in a scary environment. You gave the scene where Mary McDonnell [who plays Mack’s wife] finds the abandoned baby a kind of mystical glow. It’s like a little fairy tale amid all this urban angst. It’s the baby-in-the-bulrushes idea. She’s achieved what we used to think was an ideal situation—freedom and comfort—but she’s not happy. She has invested so much in her husband and child, and now they don’t seem to need her anymore. Her kid has grown up and she no longer has anything to do. She sees the baby as her salvation, but she shouldn’t need the baby to give focus to her life. The scenes in South Central in Grand Canyon are not as harshly visualized as some directors have recently shown that neighborhood. I thought the film was shot realistically. It’s not a New York picture, where you go into a tenement and see people shooting up. When you go to South Central, you’re struck by what a neat neighborhood it is; it’s not the South Bronx. If you stand at a distance, it looks like everything is working, but it isn’t. L.A. is very deceptive that way. Simon [Danny Glover], the central black character in the film, is doing his job and succeeding to some extent. He’s surrounded by despair but not giving in to it—he’s very strong. I think some people objected to the ending of the film, as if it were an upbeat ending, though if people think it’s upbeat, then I’ve failed. To me, the ending is a question: “I can’t do anything to repair the rifts in society, I am mystified by it, I don’t know what our role is here, because it’s so short and so temporary. We’re just visiting this big rock, but what’s our relationship to the rock and what are our higher concerns in relation to the planet?” Each character in the film relates differently to different issues; the only one who gets to voice his relationship to the planet is Simon, who has found some kind of philosophical respite from the world—but not a solution, not relief. Maybe that’s why people think the ending is upbeat, but it’s not. You know Simon and Mack and their families won’t stay at the Grand

190

LAWRENCE KASDAN

Canyon; they’re going back to L.A. There is no running away from it. There is no safe place. The Grand Canyon is a metaphor for the gulf between rich and poor? That’s it. That’s what the Steve Martin character recognizes when he’s in the golf cart on the studio lot. I talked earlier about the distance between the writer-director and his characters—but it’s true that the characters do ask questions for the director. I do think there is a huge problem developing in this country and that a rage is emerging. The images we get on the local news every night are images of violence and murder. Society is rupturing and it creates agony. Do you think it’s going to reach a cataclysmic point? I am hopeful about the change of government [to Bill Clinton] in America. For twenty years we had leaders who said that things were all right and consequently nothing got done. Now we have leaders who say that things are terrible, but maybe they can improve them. Whether they succeed or not doesn’t matter—what’s most important is the quest. If Grand Canyon really did have an upbeat ending—which it doesn’t in my mind—why would that be so wildly inappropriate in these times? Why does every critic say, “Oh, it’s so Pollyanna-ish!” Does that mean that any kind of optimism about our ability to connect with other people is unjustified? I don’t believe that. The press is so cynical and history supports their cynicism, but it’s nonproductive. What was great about last year’s [1992] Democratic Convention was that people said with some passion that it still matters that we care about each other. If you don’t try, there’s no chance. I don’t consider myself Pollyanna-ish or cynical, though I’ve been accused of both. I’m just trying to take it all in. Is your film Wyatt Earp going to be a revisionist look at Earp’s career? It can be argued that Earp and his brothers were no more law-abiding than their rivals, the Clantons and the McLaurys. Their story has never been told on film with any degree of realism. No, it hasn’t—it’s always been idealized. When you know about the actual Earp story, Ford’s version, My Darling Clementine—which is one of my favorite stories—seems like a fairy story, but a very powerful one. If I could make a film half as good as My Darling Clementine is, I would feel my whole life had been justified. Even though there are problems with it, it has

LAWRENCE KASDAN

191

images in it that are so sublime that they mesmerize me. No matter how fantastical its treatment of the Earp story, those images embody what was important to Ford about the American character. When you think of Henry Fonda in that film, his performance was as close to ballet as it was to acting, and that, to me, was as powerful as any image about America and about manhood. If Ford had shown me something grittier or more real, it wouldn’t have been more true. The movie I’m doing is much more about what Earp was like, but it is sympathetic to him in the sense that—and this is my interest in him on this day when we’re doing this interview—he had certain ideas about the way life should be, and he stuck rigorously to his notions and it led to tragedy. This is a classic confrontation of legend and fact. There’s something to be said for Ford’s famous line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962]—“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”— because who knows where the truth lies? Do you believe that the recorders of our history, the journalists, are giving us an accurate picture of what’s going on now? I do not. So in the enormous amount of research I’ve done on Earp, reading many varying portraits of him, you wonder what the truth is. Who was Wyatt Earp? You will never know; you will only come up with a story. For me, he is not idealized—the way he was in Frontier Marshal [1939], My Darling Clementine, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—but neither is he some horrible guy because, in fact, he wasn’t. One reason I love this story is that Earp is a larger-than-life character who does extraordinary things, and yet he’s a very human guy with real conflicts between his desires and his ideals. Couldn’t you say, though, that the Earps were essentially a criminal element—the guys who ran the brothels and the gambling, killers when necessary—who used law enforcement to suit their own ends? They were like that whole class of lawmen who were willing to do a lot of different things, who wanted to be entrepreneurs and tried to make a go of it as saloon owners and gamblers. They did the basic American thing, which is to try to build up your fortune. But they were only good at one thing, which was being lawmen. A lot of attention has been focused on their involvement in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, which was a very ambiguous event, but the fact was they had been very successful lawmen in other towns. What parts of Earp’s life will the movie cover?

192

LAWRENCE KASDAN

A lot of it. It starts when he was young and focuses on the period between 1871 and 1881, when the gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place. I’ve never talked about a movie I’ve yet to make before, and it will be interesting to me to see how much I achieve between now, when I’m finishing the script, and when I’m done with the whole thing. I don’t know what it will wind up to be, because I’m hoping to breathe all that air into it that I was talking about earlier. It’s clear to me, at this point, that Wyatt Earp embodied a lot of American problems. No matter what the reality was, when you mention the name Wyatt Earp people think of a lawman cleaning up a town. That is the American idea: that you can go into Vietnam and clean up the situation, that you can go into Somalia with seventeen thousand marines and clean up the situation there. Time and time again, you see that it doesn’t work, because the situation cannot be cleaned up. Wyatt Earp found that out, too. He is like an exemplar of a certain aspect of American society. And was he compromised? Absolutely, as are most people. He was rigid and unforgiving, and loyal to his friends, and when you were an enemy he could not see you clearly. That’s the American way. What will the shape of the film be? It’s an epic, and that’s always dangerous. But I can’t think of a better canvas for an epic than the American West, with these men and their women struggling in a harsh but beautiful environment to make some sense out of their lives. There’s the opportunity for incredible images. This was a very brief period in our history—1865 to 1890—what we think of as the Wild West, and Earp walked right down the center of it. He went west on a wagon train, he worked as a teamster, hunted buffalo, became a lawman, tried to make it as a businessman, was a gambler, a miner, lived to be eighty. Anywhere where things were happening, there he was, but along the way he lost the thing that was most dear to him—his family. It was a miracle that he lived because he was in all these gunfights. He just survived. Never got hit. Does Doc Holliday function as a foil to Earp in your script? Yes, as he really did. Their actual relationship is practically incomprehensible to us now. Holliday, who was dying when they met, just latched onto Earp, and Earp obviously developed a real affection for him. But their friendship wasn’t helpful to Earp at all, because Holliday was an unpopular and infamous guy. They just connected in some way, right through this dramatic episode in Earp’s life.

LAWRENCE KASDAN

193

Presumably it won’t look too much like Silverado, despite your affection for the High Noon look. You’ll dress Wyatt and Doc and Bat Masterson in derbies and frock coats? Silverado is an imagined West. Hopefully, this will be much more authentic. It was a very beautiful place, though there was enormous squalor in those towns. They had no garbage disposal, no sewerage systems. I don’t know how much of that I’m going to show, because I’m walking the same line that Ford walked—legend versus fact—and the Earp legend is terribly important. But I don’t know if I can get hold of the fact, because I don’t really believe in it. I don’t know the true story of people living now. I’m not sure I know my own true story. What you’re saying is that the mythic resonances are what make the movie worth making. Earp looms larger than he deserves to. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the most famous gunfight in the history of the West, wasn’t even a good gunfight. It was a mess, just a street brawl; there was nothing classic or monumental about it. But it gave us this very powerful image of Earp and his two brothers walking down the street to face the enemy; and standing with them is his friend, this dissipated dentist, Doc Holliday, who’s a very dangerous guy. Right there, that’s a very attractive idea from American folklore. No one really bestrides that era as a giant: Wild Bill Hickok, the other legendary marshal, was a very compromised guy. What you’re dealing with is the intersection between what these guys were and what they came to represent. Wyatt Earp is your most ambitious project. Given the mythic elements we’ve talked about, the casting of Kevin Costner as Earp, and the strong revival of the Western, it has the potential, if successful, to give you substantial creative power. You’ve expressed, at different times, some disappointment about the general state of Hollywood filmmaking, but by pursuing personal, humanist, and often unfashionable subjects, you’ve carved a unique place for yourself in mainstream cinema. What, ultimately, has been the key to that—is it in your screenwriting, or simply in the desire to do it? It’s been said that a Buddha is what you do to it. Accordingly, Hollywood is whatever you want it to be—I believe that very strongly. You simply have to have the will. The studios are in chaos and fear, more than most businesses, although most businesses operate that way. If you can convince

194

LAWRENCE KASDAN

them that you can give them what they want, if you can repeatedly take care of their need to fill theaters, you can do anything you want. You can have enormous freedom. Filmmakers tend to underestimate their own power and overestimate the resistance of the studios to their ideas, and they often give in before the fight. Writing my own scripts has obviously given me enormous leverage because I don’t need the studios’ stories or scripts, but they’ve given me the support I need within the system and so I’ve made Hollywood movies. For me, a lot of the most powerful movies were made within that same system—I include Lawrence of Arabia and The Seven Samurai in that. And those are the kinds of movies I want to make.

NOTE 1

Since this interview Kasdan has again directed someone else’s script: French Kiss (1995), written by Adam Brooks.

INTERVIEW BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN

ELMORE LEONARD THE HOT KID

t the dawn of the millennium, one of the last links between Old and New Hollywood was a septuagenarian author who wrote all his best stuff from a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. Born in New Orleans, Elmore Leonard spent his childhood in Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Memphis between the impressionable ages five to ten, when Bonnie and Clyde and all those other Depression-era desperadoes were robbing banks. Crime stories were in the air. The Western yarns he started out writing in the 1950s and 1960s were made into big-budget studio productions starring the likes of Randolph Scott, Glenn Ford, and Paul Newman. Leonard saw the first movies that were made from his stories—3:10 to Yuma (1957), The Tall T (1957), and Hombre (1967)—in theaters in Michigan, which had become his home state, and except for a brief, post–high school trip to Hollywood in 1943, he didn’t even bother to visit America’s film capital until the late 1960s. Living in Michigan has always held hidden advantages for Leonard, giving his work a looseness and freedom, a detachment from market pressures and genre clichés. With the legendary H. N. Swanson as his Hollywood agent, Leonard briefly undertook screenwriting in the late 1960s and toiled intermittently into the mid-1980s, writing vehicles for tough-guy stars: Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds. The films he wrote did not turn out that

A

195

196

ELMORE LEONARD

ELMORE LEONARD IN BLOOMFIELD VILLAGE, MICHIGAN, 2003. (PHOTO BY WILLIAM B. WINBURN.)

great, and the work was rarely fun, especially when Leonard, adapting one of his own novels, was forced into compromises. When, in the early 1980s, his novels began to take off and make heaps of money, he was able to concentrate on fiction. More than ever, producers bought his books, turning them into films. Few made it faithfully to the screen. The very story elements that lured producers—Leonard’s tough, deadpan humor, streetsmart dialogue, unheroic characters, casual violence, and zigzag plotting— inevitably got watered down in the process. Until, that is, Get Shorty (1995), Touch (1997), Out of Sight (1998), and Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Rum Punch, which was retitled Jackie Brown (1997). By the year 2000, after several decades of foreplay, Leonard was suddenly plunged into a torrid love affair with film. After fifty years in

ELMORE LEONARD

197

the field, he was recognized as a modernist and, though still in Detroit, Hollywood’s hippest crime writer. ELMORE LEONARD (1925–)

1957 1967 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1984 1985 1986 1987 1989 1990 1995 1997 1998 2004 2005

The Tall T (Budd Boetticher). Based on his story. 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves). Based on his story. Hombre (Martin Ritt). Based on his novel. The Big Bounce (Alex March). Based on his novel. The Moonshine War (Richard Quine). Script, based on his novel. Valdez Is Coming (Edwin Sherin). Based on his novel. Joe Kidd (John Sturges). Script. The Valdez Horses, aka Chino (John Sturges). Uncredited contribution. Mr. Majestyk (Richard Fleischer). Script. The Ambassador (J. Lee Thompson). Based on his novel 52 PickUp. Stick (Burt Reynolds). Co-script, based on his novel. 52 Pick-Up (John Frankenheimer). Based on his novel. The Rosary Murders (Fred Walton). Script, based on his novel. Cat Chaser (Abel Ferrara). Script, based on his novel. Border Shootout (C. J. McIntyre). Based on his novel. Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld). Based on his novel. Touch (Paul Schrader). Based on his novel. Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino). Based on his novel Rum Punch. Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh). Based on his novel. The Big Bounce (George Armitage). Based on his novel. Be Cool (F. Gary Gray). Based on his novel.

Television includes High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane (teleplay for 1980 telefilm); Glitz (1988 telefilm based on his novel); Split Images (1992 telefilm based on his novel); Last Stand at Saber River (1997 telefilm based on his novel); Pronto (1997 telefilm based on his novel); Gold Coast (aka Elmore Leonard’s Gold Coast, 1997 telefilm based on his novel); Maximum Bob (1998 summer series based on his novel); and Karen Sisco (2003 ABC series based on his characters).

198

ELMORE LEONARD

Published works (novels and collections of stories) include The Bounty Hunters, The Law at Randado, Escape from Five Shadows, Last Stand at Saber River, Hombre, The Big Bounce, The Moonshine War, Valdez Is Coming, Forty Lashes Less One, Mr. Majestyk, 52 Pick-Up, Swag (aka Ryan’s Rules), Unknown Man #89, The Hunted, The Switch, Gunsights, Gold Coast, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, Split Images, Cat Chaser, Stick, La Brava, Glitz, Bandits, Touch, Freaky Deaky, Killshot, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob, Rum Punch, Pronto, Riding the Rap, Out of Sight, The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories, Cuba Libre, Be Cool, Pagan Babies, Tishomingo Blues, When the Women Come Out to Dance, and Other Stories, The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard, A Coyote’s in the House (children’s book), Mr. Paradise, and The Hot Kid.

To what extent do you think your writing was influenced by movies, even before you began selling stories to Hollywood? It was probably influenced more than I thought. When I started writing in the fifties, I wanted to make money right away, and I chose Westerns because of the market. You could aim for the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Esquire, Argosy, Adventure, and a number of pulp magazines, like Dime Western, that were still in business. And, because I liked Western movies and they were big in the fifties. So when you were writing a story, you were thinking of it, from the outset, as a possible movie? That was my hope. Was it just accidental that the stories you were writing, with so much dialogue, almost resembled scripts? It happened that my style did lend itself. The way I learned to write in scenes, with a lot of dialogue, made film possibilities easy to see. How much of that was your own individual style, and how much of it was something you had absorbed from movies? Well, I think initially I learned as much as I could from Hemingway, and then the style I developed seemed to apply itself to movies, scenes leading to scenes, character development, but always enough action, too.

ELMORE LEONARD

199

Starting out, did you know anything about the West, other than what you had seen in the movies? No. I wrote my first Western short story without having done any research at all, sent it directly to pulp magazines, and got it rejected. Then I decided, this was in early ’51, if I was going to have any success writing Westerns I should go about it in a professional way and do some research on the period, strive for authenticity. So I chose the Southwest—Arizona and New Mexico—rather than the High Plains and read a lot about what was going on in those territories a hundred years ago, in the 1880s. Books like On the Border with Crook, The Truth about Geronimo, and The Look of the West, which describes everything about cowboys—everything you always wanted to know about saddles and horses and guns, even the kind of coffee they drank. I still, every once in a while, look at The Look of the West. I also subscribed to Arizona Highways. I used that magazine primarily for my descriptions. When I needed a canyon or a desert, whatever the scene called for, I would find one in Arizona Highways and describe it from the caption, which told me what it was. That was ideal, because I could be out there looking at the cactus and brush and not know what it was. Also, Arizona Highways, in those early issues, throughout the fifties and even into the sixties, featured a lot of history too, accounts of what it was like to live there in those times. Did the authentic details and information you were picking up in your research contradict what you had seen on the screen? To some extent, especially the way people dressed. In movies, everybody in town wore a gun, and everybody wore that same kind of a porkpie hat that I think of as the “Dale Evans cowboy hat.” Nobody really wore that hat— well, maybe some—but you didn’t see it in the old photographs. Had you actually spent much time in the Southwest? No, not until ’58 or ’59. I was writing Chevrolet truck ads, and I went out to Arizona with an art director and a photographer to get some testimonial material for ads, where I would talk to the dealer who sold the truck to a particular guy who had been driving it for 160,000 miles, without having had the head removed from the engine—things like that. That is when I saw the Santa Catalina Mountains for the first time. This was while I was writing Hombre. The mountains didn’t look the way I was describing them, and it really surprised me because the Catalinas were in Arizona Highways

200

ELMORE LEONARD

all the time. But to actually see them gave me a different feeling. So when I came back, I rewrote the descriptions. Was the first story that you sold to the movies, 3:10 to Yuma? Yeah. How did that get sold? What was the process whereby you were “discovered”? The short story was in Dime Western, 4,500 words; I got ninety dollars for it. I had to rewrite one of the scenes and do two revisions on my description of the train. The editor insisted on it. This guy made me work. He said, “You can do it better. You’re not using all your senses. It’s not just a walk by the locomotive. What’s the train doing? How does it smell? Is there steam?” He made me work for my ninety bucks, which was good. It was in the magazine, and then within a year a producer saw it and bought it for Warner’s. Did you have any contact with the studio, or director Delmer Daves? None at all. My agent in New York, Marguerite Harper, used Swanie [H. N. Swanson] for her film negotiations. So they split the $400 agents’ fee. I was paid $4,000, but I also had to pay Popular Publications. Popular Publications was going through a difficult period, losing money, in the process of going out of business, so they took 25 percent of the film payment. That had been in all of their contracts from the beginning, but they had never used it until now that business was bad. Popular Publications took $1,000, Marguerite and Swanie took their cut, and I was left with $2,600. When was the first time you saw the movie? Here in Michigan, when it was released. It’s a pretty good movie. Just as it must be a strange experience to see for the first time the mountains you have been describing, purely from pictures in a magazine, it must have been strange to watch for the first time a motion picture that’s been produced from one of your stories—especially when you’ve had nothing to do with the adaptation. They had to add at least a half hour onto the front end because it was only a 4,500-word short story, which opens with the deputy sheriff character

ELMORE LEONARD

201

bringing the outlaw to the hotel where they are going to wait for the train to arrive that afternoon. He’s volunteered to put the outlaw on the train, knowing his gang will attempt to rescue him. In the movie, Van Heflin’s a rancher who’s broke, and that’s why he has volunteered. You see ahead of time that he has also witnessed the stage holdup; after the outlaw—Glenn Ford—is captured, he is taken to Van Heflin’s home and even has dinner with him. They added what was needed to make it a feature-length motion picture. How about The Tall T? How did that come about? That was a novella in Argosy, which sold to Hollywood fairly quickly. I found out later that Batjac, John Wayne’s company, had bought it originally, and then something happened, and he passed it on to Randolph Scott and [producer] Harry Joe Brown. They also added about twenty minutes on to the front end, which I thought gave it an awfully slow opening. Did you have anything to do with the people in Hollywood who made the movie? No. I saw that one in a screening room with Detroit newspaper critics in the midfifties. I remember the film coming to the part where Randolph Scott has Maureen O’Sullivan lure Skip Homeier into the cave. Randolph Scott comes in and faces Skip Homeier, who has a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. One or two of the critics said, “Here comes the obligatory fistfight . . .” But Randolph Scott grabs the shotgun, sticks it under Skip Homeier’s chin, pulls the trigger, and the screen goes red. They didn’t say anything after that. You might say that was a “defining Elmore Leonard moment.” You have become known for surprising, brutal violence in your stories. How did you come by that penchant? I wasn’t writing for Range Romance. I was writing action stories, six-guns going off, violence a natural part of it, the reason for reading a Western. But never, in thirty short stories and eight novels, did I stage a fast-draw shootout in the street, the way practically every Western movie ends. Later I developed ways of having the violence happen more unexpectedly and low-key. “And he shot him.” Did you get to meet Randolph Scott?

202

ELMORE LEONARD

Yes, he came to Detroit to promote the picture and we were interviewed together for radio. I remember at the end of the interview, he said to one of his aides, “Do you think I should wear my cowboy outfit to the theater premiere tonight?” I said, “No! God, no!” I didn’t want him looking like Roy Rogers or something. But he wasn’t asking me. Did he look askance at you? I think he did. Up until this point, with two movies made from your stories, had you ever even visited Hollywood? In 1943, I went out there with two of my friends. We graduated from high school in ’43 and got a ride out with a woman who had the necessary gas ration stamps. She dropped us off on Ventura Boulevard, and we walked across and up the street to the El Royale Motel and got a room for six bucks. We stayed there for three weeks, taking buses or hitchhiking to Hollywood and Vine, where we stood on the corner looking for movie stars. My Dad had a friend who was the drummer in the 20th Century-Fox band, and he took us through the studio. We attended one premiere and saw Tyrone Power—he was in his marine uniform—and his wife, Annabella; another night we saw character actor Richard Whorf. We used to have dinner at the Owl Drugstore—a Salisbury steak dinner for sixty cents—and one time there we saw Buddy Marino, who was a vocalist with Harry James. Later, we went to the Harry James radio show, and there was Buddy Marino again. That was about it for the stars we managed to see. •

•

•

What accounts for the ten-year span of time between your screen credits in 1957 and 1967, between The Tall T and Hombre? I’d think you would be in the pipeline now and selling more of your stories to Hollywood. The opposite seems to have happened. I wrote Hombre toward the end of ’59 and shopped it around until Ballantine finally bought it in January 1961. In March of that year I quit my job at the ad agency to write fiction full-time. But we bought another house, so my profit-sharing check—the $11,500 we were going to live on for at least six months while I wrote another book—went into the new house. So then I had to get busy doing a lot of freelance work.

ELMORE LEONARD

203

A friend of mine, Bill Deneen, an independent producer, had a contract with Encyclopedia Britannica Films to do geography and history movies, half-hour social studies, on about an eighth-grade level. I did about a dozen of those. Were those actually the first scripts you ever wrote? Yeah. Well, the very first was in ’59 when I was still at the agency, and I wrote a film to recruit brothers for the Franciscan order. They wanted a half-hour picture they could show at Catholic boys’ high schools. The picture I wrote was called The Man Who Has Everything. The producer—the same person who later produced the Britannica films—was in Brazil, getting footage for a film he was doing for an Italian missionary order. With the Franciscan movie coming up, he went to a Franciscan mission on the Amazon and found a priest—Father Juvenal—who was thirty but looked about seventeen. We arranged to have him come up to Michigan and star in The Man Who Has Everything. His character was a boy who played football well, had a hot rod and a girlfriend, he could do all these things, but decided he had a vocation to join the Franciscans and become a brother, not a priest. The same Father Juvenal is the guy that the character Juvenal in Touch is modeled after. He is such a giving, accepting, easygoing person, he’s made a lasting impression on me. Is there any hint of Elmore Leonard in The Man Who Has Everything? No, I don’t think so. (Laughs.) But I’m still in touch with Father Juvenal, and after I wrote Touch I sent the book to him—that was in ’77 or ’78—and just recently I sent the movie to him in Santarém, Brazil, where he lives. And he loved it. When you were doing the Encyclopedia Britannica films, were you doing them in a script form? It wasn’t the same format as a Hollywood script. It was side by side, the video and the audio. It was almost all voice-over. Where were these films shown? Encyclopedia Britannica Films would sell them to schools all over the country.

204

ELMORE LEONARD

What was their general quality? They weren’t bad for the budget we had. They put more money into them later, but were pretty skimpy when I worked on them. I got $1,000 per script, which was quite good, I thought, at the time. Were you able to do interesting subjects? We did The French and Indian War, using mostly stills, of course, although we also had some drawings made. We went to Ticonderoga and shot there with an expert standing in front of whatever we were showing and talking about what went on there. We did The Settlement of the Mississippi Valley and Frontier Boy. I wrote Danube, without ever having seen any part of the river. I wrote Puerto Rico, without having been to Puerto Rico. But I did go to Madrid to write Julius Caesar. Samuel Bronston had just completed his production of The Fall of the Roman Empire, some of it shot on a $1 million set of the Roman Forum he’d built just outside Madrid. Deneen and I visited him there and asked if we could use the set for an educational film. He said yes. But then we had to sit through a screening of The Fall of the Roman Empire [1964] and tell Bronston what we thought of it. “Wow, what a picture!” In other words, the answer to what happened between 1957 and 1967 is that your productivity as a novelist slacked off? From ’61 to ’66, I wasn’t writing any fiction. It took a long time to sell Hombre to Hollywood. I think maybe people didn’t like the fact that the Hombre character gets killed at the end. I would gladly have kept the guy alive to sell it to movies. Finally Hombre did sell—for only ten thousand bucks—but that got me writing fiction again, no more freelance of any kind. How did director Marty Ritt come into the project as director? The Ravetches [married screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr.] had read the book. They got Ritt, and then went to Fox. I think Ritt was suing the studio for some reason and directing the picture was part of the settlement he got. The details are in John Gregory Dunne’s book The Studio [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969]. Would Paul Newman have been your first or even third choice as Hombre? I doubt that I ever imagined him for the part, but when I saw the picture I thought he was believable in the role and did a great job. Ironically,

ELMORE LEONARD

205

[Richard] Boone was in The Tall T, so I had pictured him when I was writing the character [the leader of the outlaw gang] in Hombre that he eventually played. Although I had sent the book to his agent, I never heard back; it was Marty Ritt who cast him. An amazing coincidence, if you think about it. I think Hombre holds up as a terrific picture. I do too, but it didn’t get especially good reviews at the time. Did you have anything at all to do with the making of the movie? No. Did the Ravetches consult with you? No. They did write to me afterward and ask if I had anything else like Hombre, suggesting that “lightning might strike twice.” I thought, “If they want another story like Hombre, why don’t they write one?” •

•

•

What were the short-term disadvantages—and perhaps the long-term advantages—of writing movies, or at least books that you hoped might be made into movies, from the Midwest, without ever living in Hollywood? By the time I started doing screenplays, in the late sixties, you didn’t have to live in Hollywood and report to a studio. If it had been a requirement, I would never have gotten into screenwriting. I felt that if I lived in Hollywood, I would become immersed in the business of writing movies, producers calling with ideas they’d like me to develop. I saw this as writing to order, taking on assignments as an employee, and that was not my idea of writing. Adapting my own work to the screen was bad enough: doing alterations, making other people’s ideas fit, often having to incorporate what came off the tops of heads of individuals who had little or no sense of story. The advantage, though, was that selling options and rights and doing screenplays enabled me to write books, which weren’t making enough to live on until the eighties. How did you end up being represented by H. N. Swanson? Marguerite Harper was ill when I sent her The Big Bounce.1 She was getting ready to go into the hospital. So she sent it to Swanie. At that time it

206

ELMORE LEONARD

was called “Mother, This Is Jack Ryan.” Swanie read it and called me; this was the first time I had ever spoken to him on the phone. He said, “Kiddo, did you write this?” I said, “Yes, of course. It’s got my name on it.” He said, “Well kiddo, I’m going to make you rich.” Then he got eighty-four rejections, counting Hollywood, maybe a dozen or so in New York. The ones who rejected the book and said anything thought it was a “downer.” There was nobody in it to sympathize with. There weren’t any people they could really like. There was no hero. So I rewrote it, because I saw it needed a plot, but I left the characters alone and I’m glad I did. They’re the same kind of people I’m still working with. We sold it as a Fawcett Gold Medal book, and then Warner Bros. bought it. The producer’s son [Robert Dozier] ended up writing the script. It was an awful movie [The Big Bounce, 1969], and that’s all I can say about it. I finally met Ryan O’Neal at Trader Vic’s six or seven years ago.I was there with writer Abby Mann, and Abby went to the men’s room, and when he came back he said,“Ryan O’Neal’s over there with Farrah. He wants to meet you.” I said, “He wants to meet me? He was in The Big Bounce.” Abby said, “He knows that. He still wants to meet you.” So I went over and met him, and he didn’t blame me. He couldn’t, since I didn’t do the screenplay. When is the first time you actually went to Hollywood to work on a screenplay? That was in ’68 or ’69, with The Moonshine War [1970]. I had wanted to do the script for Valdez Is Coming [1971]. I thought that would be easy for a first script. But after that book sold, the film didn’t get into the works right away because they were waiting for Burt Lancaster to become available. And that took a couple of years. The producer, Ira Steiner, who had been an agent with Ashley-Steiner, got somebody else [Roland Kibbee and David Rayfiel] to write it. The Moonshine War was a nine-and-a-half-page outline called “The Broke-Leg War,” which Swanie sent to just about everybody. There was a guy at MGM named Buzz Blair who got the outline. He ran down the hall to [producer] Marty Ransohoff’s office and said, “Have you read this?” Marty said no. Buzz said, “It’s sitting right there on your desk. It’s only nine and a half pages. Read it, will you?” So he read it, and Metro made a deal with Ransohoff to produce the picture. They bought the screen rights to the book, which I hadn’t written yet, and then I wrote the book, which came out before the movie did. I had told Swanie I’d love to write the screenplay. He called Ransohoff, and Ransohoff

ELMORE LEONARD

207

said okay. So I wrote a draft from here in Michigan, and sent it to Ransohoff. Then I was called out there to do revisions. That was your first time in Hollywood since 1943. What was that experience like? Swanie took me around and introduced me to people and drove me past his house and said, “There’s my house right there, the only house on the block without a mortgage. Three and a half acres, and orange trees.” He drove me past the house again a couple of years later, and said the same thing. Then he invited me in, finally, in ’84. I said, “Do you realize you’ve represented me for thirty years, and this is the first time you’ve invited me into your house?” And he said, “Well, kiddo, you weren’t making any money to speak of, until recently.” I’d go out to Hollywood, stay all week and go home weekends. I spent at least three weeks out there before Ransohoff fired me from the picture. He said, “You’re too close to the forest to see the trees.” Was he right? No, not then. Now, when I think of adapting my own stuff, I think there is truth in that. Definitely. But it’s not so much that you’re too close to it. It’s just that all of your enthusiasm went into the original, so how do you get it back up to write the screenplay? To me, if the writing process isn’t enormously satisfying, it isn’t worth doing. I love writing books. I wrote movies for money. What did you do for those three weeks? Met with [director] Dick Quine. I’d go to his house every day and we would sit around and talk about what we were going to do; then Chris Mankiewicz would come over—he was the liaison between Ransohoff and us—and talk in broad general terms, never specific, about what should be in the picture. I thought we just wasted an awful lot of time, until finally I wrote the script, and then I was fired. They had another writer for maybe a week, and then I was hired back on. Quine liked me and got me back. Ransohoff also had a phonetically written script done by a professor at the University of Kentucky, I think, indicating what the dialogue would sound like with that kind of a rural southern accent. I kept thinking, “Why in the hell don’t they just get good actors who can fake it, or actors born in the South?”

208

ELMORE LEONARD

Did anybody ask your advice about casting? Then they ended up shooting the picture in California, not far from Stockton, in the only clump of trees in a rather barren area, a sweeping landscape of dun-colored hills. The picture was also miscast. Let’s face it, Dick Quine was not the guy to direct a picture about people who live in “hollers” and talk funny. He had done mainly comedies that were hip at that time, like How to Murder Your Wife [1965] and Paris—When It Sizzles [1964]. The Moonshine War didn’t stand a chance. They always ask the writer, but they don’t pay any attention to you. Richard Widmark I thought was all wrong for the part of the bootlegger. I had pictured someone like Burl Ives with a little sixteen-year-old girl sitting on his knee. I did visit the set for a couple of days. Patrick McGoohan had a scene with Joe Williams, who sang blues with Count Basie. After a number of takes, McGoohan came off the set, walked up to me, and said, “What’s it like to stand there and hear your lines all fucked up?” What did you say? He wasn’t as bad as most of them. (Laughs.) Do you feel that what went wrong there was not the script, but everything else—the casting, the locations, the director, et cetera? There were things about the story I had been obliged to change. In all of my screenplays, I’ve always gone against my better judgment in listening to the director or the producer, or doing what they want so I can get the money and go home and write a book. Or, thinking, “Well, they know what they’re doing,” even though something is telling me, “Nah, that’s not gonna work.” Around this time, you wrote Forty Lashes Less One, didn’t you? Although that eventually became another book, for a long time it has been kind of legendary as an unproduced script. A situation that may yet be remedied one of these days. Forty Lashes Less One was something I wrote for National General. That was also a case where they bought the book as a treatment, about twenty pages, before I wrote the book.Then I wrote a screenplay and gave it to them. Most of the story takes place in Yuma Prison.They decided that it would cost too much money to build a prison, because the actual prison was wearing

ELMORE LEONARD

209

away in the desert sun. Meanwhile, they got [writer-director] Richard Brooks on the project. I wrote another outline, so that rather than a prison it became a big work camp out in the desert where they’re building a railroad line. I had a couple of meetings with Richard Brooks at his home. Then National General dragged their feet, and Brooks went off to do $ [Dollars] (1971) with Warren Beatty. Before I knew it, National General was out of the production end of the business. They found out they couldn’t own theaters and also produce films. I was surprised they didn’t know that before. They gave the rights to Forty Lashes to one of their executives, and the rights became lost; nobody knew where it was, for years and years. Somebody was always asking Swanie, “Whatever happened to Forty Lashes Less One?” He didn’t know. I used to say to Swanie, “Let’s just sell it again, and then we’ll find out.” Well, the next thing I know, which is just this year, is that Quentin Tarantino has read it and wants to do it after Rum Punch, which he calls Jackie Brown, or after Killshot, which he tells me he wants to do next. He managed to locate this guy, who had the rights after all, and they agreed to a deal. What happened with Joe Kidd [1972]? It’s your script—a solo credit. But the story kind of falls apart. Swanie sold that story directly to Universal, then [studio executive] Jennings Lang got involved. I remember Clint [Eastwood] was there at the first meeting at Universal. How [producer Sidney] Beckerman got involved is a mystery to me. Clint’s man, Bob Daley, did the actual work as producer. I remember Beckerman was always rewriting my dialogue, and I was always putting mine back in before the secretary typed it up. We only had about a half dozen script meetings. The big problem was we changed a character’s motivation. Well, [director] John Sturges did. It was the John Saxon character. He, in my original story, was an egomaniac doing all this for his own glory more than anything else; he wasn’t that caring about the Mexican people. I based him on a character from the 1960s called [Reies] Tijerina, who wore a Chihuahua hat and was a big fan of Bobby Kennedy. Later, Tijerina was involved in an incident, a raid on a county courthouse in New Mexico, where he demanded land back for the MexicanAmerican people. The original title of the script, in fact, was “The Sinola Courthouse Raid.” Once you made the John Saxon character a good guy, another character had to be made the antagonist. Minor characters took on the role, became the bad guy, and from there on the plot fell apart.

210

ELMORE LEONARD

Sturges was using outtakes from The Magnificent Seven. I remember one scene: Clint is up in a bell tower, he hangs a pot from a line and swings it down lower and lower until it hits a sentry. Sturges would think of something like that and then look at us and say, “That’s movies!” He also thought of the ending, with the train crashing through the barroom. Most of what Sturges added was just exposition, but that included a couple of scenes I really hated. Everyone seemed in awe of him, even Eastwood and especially Beckerman. How much did Clint have to do with the script? Eastwood and Sturges would come into my office at the end of the day and read the scenes I had written. Eastwood is the easiest guy in the world to get along with. I don’t recall him changing that much. He would just agree and pass the pages on to Sturges. The only time I can recall him saying anything was for the scene where Joe Kidd is confronted by an armed faction, near the end of the second act. Eastwood said, “Shouldn’t I have my gun out when I say that?” I said, “No, I don’t think you need to have your gun out.” Eastwood said, “But my character has not been presented as a gunfighter.” He turned to Sturges, “Don’t you think I need my gun out?” Sturges said, “No, you don’t need your gun out.” Eastwood said, “Why not?” Sturges said, “Because the audience knows who you are. They’ve seen all your pictures.” But when the picture was made, Eastwood did have his gun out. What was wrong with Sturges at that point in his career? I don’t know. His intention was certainly to make a good movie. I think back on it now and wonder if he was a boozer. We were all waiting for him to display some kind of genius. Later on, Sturges invited me out to do a “fix” on a Charles Bronson Western [The Valdez Horses, aka Chino, 1973] he had directed in Spain with an international cast. I looked at a work print a couple of times on a Movieola and figured out where to put new scenes he wanted written: a fistfight, a gunfight, and a love scene. Sturges left town. I did the work and gave the new scenes to Dino De Laurentiis, the producer, and described them to him. He approved and then asked me what I was working on— which happened to be Unknown Man #89—and what it was about. As I told what I had of the story at the time, Dino’s aide, Fred Sidewater, translated, translating it into Italian. I remember thinking it sounded better in Italian than it did in English.

ELMORE LEONARD

211

Before Joe Kidd was even released, Eastwood called me and said, “Dirty Harry is making an awful lot of money worldwide. Do you have something like it, only different? A guy with a big gun—he doesn’t have to be in law enforcement. That kind of character.” He didn’t own much of Dirty Harry; the next one he wanted to own more of. I told him the rough idea of what became Mr. Majestyk [1974], and he told me to write it up. I did, about twenty to twenty-five pages. At that time the character was an artichoke farmer, because Castroville, which is near Carmel, is the artichoke capital of the world. I thought that would be handy for Eastwood—then he could go home for dinner. But I don’t think he wanted to go home. By the time I wrote up the outline he had acquired High Plains Drifter [1973], so he read it and passed. Was Joe Kidd the only script you ever worked on that was filmed, which wasn’t one of your novels? Right. Mr. Majestyk was the other one, but that became a novel after the movie. Nobody offered enough money for me to write the novel of Joe Kidd. Why not? Because Westerns were beginning to wane? Maybe that was it. They were gone from magazines and disappearing from all media, except TV. By the end of the fifties, there were more than thirty Westerns on prime time. That killed the book market. That’s why I got $1,250 for Hombre from Ballantine, when I’d gotten $4,000 each for the two books before, also twenty-five-cent paperbacks. I finally switched to crime, another commercial market. On Mr. Majestyk, Swanie said “You’re going to have to add a lot of description to bring it out to novel length.” I said, “No, you don’t add horizontally, you add vertically—a lot of dialogue.” That’s what I did. And I had part of another book I had written for a producer who was looking for a migrant worker story. I was into that, anxious to do one. I wrote part of a book, eighty or ninety pages, called “Picket Line”—a strike story. After I showed this producer the pages, he said, “Well, that’s not what I’m looking for.” He didn’t know what he was looking for. Anyway, Swanie showed it around to a few people and didn’t get any interest, so I hung it up for parts and used most of it in the novelization of Mr. Majestyk. Did you do any rethinking of the character for Charles Bronson. Or were Clint and Bronson interchangeable on the page? I wrote the characters and felt it was up to the actors to play them.

212

ELMORE LEONARD

Did Bronson have any script input or make any script demands? One time [producer] Walter Mirisch, [director] Dick Fleischer, and I met with [Charles] Bronson in Boston. He was coming from his farm in New England. The night before, at dinner with Walter and Dick, they said there was a problem. In one of the scenes Bronson’s character and the woman are trapped by the bad guys and have to make a run for it in a pickup truck. Bronson had told Walter he would never allow a woman to get in the truck with him under those circumstances, so he didn’t think his character should allow it either. But the way the scene works she has to be there. I said, “If he’s lying in the pickup bed with a shotgun, who’s driving the truck?” They said I would have to work it out. I said to Walter, “You’re the boss, why don’t you just tell him she has to be there?” They got a big kick out of that. Walter said, “Think of something.” The answer was simple enough: if the woman is in the truck before the shooting starts, it’s too late for her not to be there. Charlie said that would work for him. Do you have problems with the way that film turned out? I thought the casting could have been better. Bronson is Bronson, and I like him; but I don’t think much of the antagonists. Al Lettieri played the same ferocious character he did in The Getaway. He comes on with so much force. I like my characters to be a little more subtle, a little more laid-back. Isn’t that a problem in general, with you and Hollywood, that you’re always trying to write subtly, and producers and directors are always trying to make it more obvious? Definitely. Is it the script that you yourself wrote, which stayed most faithful to what you had written? I would say so. But in doing the “Picket Line” book, I had researched cantaloupe farming in the Rio Grande valley. When it came time to shoot Mr. Majestyk, all they could find in season were watermelons in eastern Colorado. So artichokes became cantaloupes, then watermelons. Some reviewers saw significance in the bad guys shooting up a pile of watermelons with all that red flesh. If we had used cantaloupes, what would they have said? •

•

•

ELMORE LEONARD

213

Why, between Mr. Majestyk and Stick [1985], does another ten years go by, in which you appear to have had very little to do with Hollywood? A number of the books I wrote were optioned. Like Swag, which I wrote in the midseventies. Swag’s been optioned every year since. [Brian] Dennehy has had it for the last four years now and he’s determined to get it made, directing it himself. I probably wrote more scripts in the seventies than during any other time, but none of them got filmed. Hollywood was buying my books, but there was always indecision and sometimes it seemed they didn’t really want to film the books. When I wrote Glitz for Lorimar, for example, I remember having a meeting with the guy in charge. He said, “All you did was adapt the book.” I said, “Yeah?” Then they got a couple of their young executives in to work on it with me, to make it different. So I did a couple of new versions. They got Sidney Lumet involved; I had a meeting with him, we discussed the story, and I went home and wrote a new treatment. At our next meeting, he put it up on his walls on three-by-five cards. Then he moved a couple of cards around and said, “Here, write that.” So I wrote another version in a couple of weeks, and sent it back to him. He said, “We’re 95 percent there.” But it turned out Lorimar decided that, with a name star, the picture would cost about $17 to $18 million to make, and they didn’t think it would gross enough to show a profit. When I heard they already had something else for Sidney Lumet to do, The Verdict [1982], my feeling was they had no intention ever of doing Glitz. We had to fight to receive payment for the rewrite I did for Lumet, although working with him was a pleasure. Someone else [Stephen Zito] eventually rewrote Glitz for television. It wasn’t bad, but characters were wasted; bad guys became simply bad guys. So, in general, you haven’t been too happy with what screenwriters have done with your work? When the screenwriter who was going to adapt Freaky Deaky came to see me, he said, “I want to know all about the main character, this Chris Mankowski, the guy on the bomb squad.” I said, “Well, you’ve read the book. That’s the guy. It’s all there in the first chapter.” In the opening sequence Chris and another bomb squad guy come across a drug dealer sitting on a chair with ten sticks of dynamite rigged underneath, so that when he gets up, it will blow. They talk to him and say, “Don’t try to leave the chair.” He is sitting right next to a Jacuzzi. “Don’t try and dive

214

ELMORE LEONARD

into the Jacuzzi. We know you’re fast, we know you used to be a Pony Down [street-dealing organization] runner”—a heroin seller—“when you were younger. But don’t think you’re fast enough to dive into that Jacuzzi. Stay right there. We have to go out and talk about what we’re gonna do.” They go out in back, light cigarettes, and begin talking about Chris Mankowski’s girlfriend and how outspoken she is about things. Then the room blows up, the French doors blow out, and that’s it. But Chris hasn’t finished the story he’s telling his partner, so he continues as they walk around the front of the house to tell the fire department it’s over. I said to the screenwriter, “That’s the guy.” He said, “I can’t write it like that. The main character has to be more sensitive.” I said, “The guy’s a cop, and I don’t know one who wouldn’t handle it the same way.” Fortunately, the option expired and wasn’t picked up. Most of the scripts I did were adaptations of my own books, but I did work on originals from time to time, like Joe Kidd and Mr. Majestyk. I did one five years ago with [director] Bill Friedkin that began as a police procedural and turned into the robbery of a televangelist, set in Florida. “Stingers”—that’s still sitting at Paramount. Beats me why nobody has filmed it. It needs a rewrite—I know that—it needs a big scene somewhere right in the middle. But that could be easily done. After a while, as I say, I just wasn’t having fun writing scripts. Was it that you were losing enthusiasm for rewriting yourself, or was it that they wouldn’t accept “Elmore Leonard” undiluted? I’ve said it before: I would have something like My Darling Clementine in mind—that way of doing a script—and what they wanted was something like John Sturges’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which is more of a Hollywood movie. I prefer [John] Ford’s. When you go to Hollywood, they want to make a Hollywood movie, and that’s the problem. You started out writing for movies with a lot of enthusiasm. How long did it take you to arrive at the point of view that you would just as soon not be involved? It took me a long time to get to the point where I could give it up, not have to rely on it to support the book writing, and by that time I had lost my enthusiasm. I did it for fifteen years or so, and along the way it just became work. Adapting my own stuff wasn’t fun at all.

ELMORE LEONARD

215

I gather Stick was a particularly dismal experience. I wrote the first version, which they showed to a preview audience at the studio, and Universal decided it needed a lot of work. It was my script, and my script was essentially the book, but the film was pretty bad. It just didn’t work the way it was shot. So they hired another writer, Joe Stinson, who had written City Heat [1984] and one of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies [Sudden Impact, 1983]. They gave [Burt] Reynolds a couple of million bucks to go back to Florida and add some action, and he did; he added machine guns and scorpions and a revenge motive. The book’s plot made it very clear that revenge had nothing to do with what was going on. It was about an ex-con playing a subservient role to some high rollers, investors; gunplay was kept to the subplot. The film was previewed again, but it wasn’t any better. I said to Joe Stinson, “Joe, you didn’t get any credit on the screen.” He said, “No, it’s your story, your book. I don’t really deserve a credit.” I said, “Joe, I’m going to insist you get your name on it.” The studio wanted to give Joe a credit anyway, so I didn’t have to insist. 52 Pick-Up [1986] is a small masterpiece by comparison. The bad guys are especially good—John Glover and Clarence Williams III. I thought Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret were great. The only thing I didn’t like about the film was the nudity—especially Vanity, the shots of her in bed, when Clarence Williams is pressuring her to reveal something. I don’t know why that scene bothered me, but it did. I didn’t care much for the subplot either: Ann-Margret, the aide of a political candidate running for office—the idea that her marital problem would jeopardize his chances of winning. The risk of the marriage being destroyed by his stupid indiscretion is enough; and her throwing his clothes out the window—in the book—clearly describes the wife’s attitude. The subplot of the Roy Scheider character faced with a slowdown at the plant is also omitted. It parallels his major problem: negotiating with his workers and dealing with the blackmailers. John Steppling wrote the screenplay, and then [director John] Frankenheimer sent me the script. He suggested a scene I might add. “We used so much dialogue out of the book,” Frankenheimer said, “that I think you deserve a screen credit. Make any changes you want.” Really all I did was add commas where proper names are used in the dialogue, and spell “all right” with two words.

216

ELMORE LEONARD

I haven’t seen The Rosary Murders [1987] or Cat Chasers [1989]. The Rosary Murders has a major problem in that there’s no way to show who the murderer might be, so you don’t see him until the last act. It’s not unlike that Eastwood movie Tightrope [1984], where they finally pull a ski mask off the killer and the audience thinks, yeah? So who’s that? The director rewrote my script anyway. A couple of other writers had been on Cat Chaser, and then Abel Ferrara, the director, sent me the script. He said, “Will you see if you can get this thing moving?” I said, “In the first eleven pages, you’ve got two guys sitting in one place, talking. That’s the main problem.” He said, “Well, Peter Weller has script approval, and he wants all the dialogue from the book.” I said, “You’ve got to move them around at least.” The eleven pages of dialogue were right out of the book, but you can do that in a book. I had a meeting at the Chateau Marmont with Abel and the two producers. They said, “We’ll pay you to rewrite the first twenty pages.” Instead, I rewrote the whole thing, quickly, and sent them a one-hundredpage script, which couldn’t have been tighter. They didn’t shoot it. They revised somewhat the script they had. You just wanted them to film your book? As it turned out, filming the book was the problem. There was reference to an involved backstory that had to be explained, a previous situation in which the man and woman were attracted to one another. It would have helped the film a lot if they met for the first time on the screen. I know too—Abel told me—that the producers took the film away from him and recut it. Cat Chaser was only released theatrically in England. What was the first book you wrote without caring whether it sold to Hollywood, or not? It became, by the eighties, not a question of caring whether or not my books sold—I continued to feel each one had a good chance. But since I no longer needed movie sales to support writing novels, my hopes weren’t as fervent. •

•

•

Was Get Shorty a totally positive experience? All the way. I must admit I was surprised to see the film had become a comedy. I told [director] Barry Sonnenfeld after I saw it, “I don’t write comedy.”

ELMORE LEONARD

217

He said, “No, but it’s a funny book.” Barry and [screenwriter] Scott Frank were conscientious about sticking to the plot and using as much of the dialogue as they could. The lines were delivered the way they were written, seriously, the way I heard the characters when I was writing their lines. Barry told me that Gene Hackman was delivering his lines one day in rehearsal, and Barry said, “Gene, that was really funny,” and Hackman said, “Well, I wasn’t trying to be.” Barry said, “That’s the whole idea.” I do think my books were getting a little funnier as I loosened up, toward the midseventies. I had become a little freer and easier in the way I was writing—not trying so hard to write—and funny things began to happen to the characters. Going back to The Big Bounce in ’68, however, I’ve been working pretty much with the same characters: ordinary people who seem a bit quirky, nonheroes, spending as much time with the bad guys—who usually aren’t too bright—as I do with the more sympathetic characters. I have an affection for all of them, so I treat them as human beings with much the same desires and hang-ups we all have. Plot is secondary, not that important to me. Once I know my characters I’m confident a plot will come out of them. I make it up as I go along, not knowing what’s going to happen, never ever knowing how the book will end. “Not knowing what is going to happen” is part of the comedy, it seems to me. Part of the Elmore Leonard experience. There are always amazing plot twists in your stories. What’s amazing to me, when I think about it, is that while Hollywood in general prefers plot-driven stories (they ask, “What’s it about?”), thirtythree of my thirty-five books, all character-driven and talky, have either been optioned or bought outright for film. I write a book not knowing what’s going to happen, so I won’t be bored, so I can entertain myself making it up as I go along, establishing characters in the first act I hope to be able to use later on, for a set piece or two, if not turns in the plot. If a plot twist is amazing, as you suggest, it must be at the same time believable. So I write each scene from a character’s point of view, with the character’s “sound” providing the rhythm of the prose and the believability of what’s taking place in the scene. The reader accepts it because the character is there. It might not be acceptable from my point of view, were I an omniscient author who thinks he knows everything. Their “sound” is much more entertaining than mine, so I try to keep my nose out of it. I don’t want the reader ever to be aware of me writing. And if the prose sounds like it was written, I rewrite it.

218

ELMORE LEONARD

Were you involved at all in the filmmaking of Get Shorty? I was on the set four days, and a couple of times Barry came over to me after the shot and asked me what I thought and if I had any suggestions. I couldn’t believe it. I figured this was the first time in the history of Hollywood this has ever happened—asking the book writer his opinion. By now—in the forty years that have elapsed between 3:10 to Yuma and Get Shorty—you must be finally getting paid well. And you have a cachet in Hollywood. Finally. It began with book sales. Gradually, in the early eighties, as I began to sell more books, the advances increased. About the same time I was getting more for screen rights. More recently, I have to thank Get Shorty for upping the price. It’s proven more impressive to buyers than forty-six years on the job. What did you think of Touch? Did you like the way it turned out? Yeah. Touch has the “sound” of the book. Get Shorty does too, but has the director’s look. Did you communicate much with Paul Schrader? Not much. We talked a little but he didn’t ask me anything about the story or the characters. There was no need to. He said in interviews he shot the book and I think he did, except for the ending. It’s much the same as the book’s, which isn’t really an ending at all. They’re driving off to California and the car simply disappears. In the book, they’re going to Luckenback, Texas, because of a Waylon Jennings song about the place, and then on to L.A. Next up is Quentin Tarantino and Rum Punch, with the title Jackie Brown. Have you read his script? Yeah, it’s pretty much the book, with a lot of Tarantino of course, a lot of additional dialogue. His shooting script is about 160 pages. Did you give Tarantino any input? I questioned a couple of things, asked why scenes we both liked were left out. But I only spoke to him twice on the phone. The first time was a cou-

ELMORE LEONARD

219

SAMUEL L. JACKSON AND PAM GRIER IN QUENTIN TARANTINO’S JACKIE BROWN , WHICH WAS PART OF THE ELMORE LEONARD FILM BOOM OF THE LATE 1990s.

ple of years ago, when he was just beginning, and he told me he was going to do Rum Punch instead of Killshot. That was all I heard from him for about a year and a half, until just before he started shooting, in early June, when he called again. He said, “I’ve been afraid to call you for the last year.” I said, “Why? Because you’ve changed the title and you’re starring a black woman in the lead?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Do what you want. You’re the filmmaker, you’re going to do what you want anyway.” I was on the set twice, and both times it looked like he was enjoying himself. I met Sam Jackson and Pam Grier, who looks terrific and I can see why Quentin wanted her. Bridget Fonda I’d met before, doing publicity for Touch, and was happy to see her in the picture. I trust Quentin and feel certain the film will work, though I suppose there will be a few smart-ass critics waiting to take a shot at him. There’s a whole slew of your books that are getting ready to be filmed now, right? Miramax got hold of Freaky Deaky, Bandits, Killshot, and Rum Punch, a few years ago, and recently acquired Forty Lashes Less One. I’m told Monte Hellman is writing and will direct Freaky Deaky. Quentin said he

220

ELMORE LEONARD

wants to write Killshot and appear in it opposite Robert De Niro, with someone else directing, and then do Forty Lashes after that. I don’t think anyone’s working on Bandits yet. After Get Shorty, people went back and optioned everything they could get their hands on. There were only a couple left. Unknown Man #89, which Universal bought years ago—at one point, Hitchcock was interested in making it—is now somewhere else being planned as a television production. Maximum Bob, I’m told, is going to be a full-blown TV series. Barry Sonnenfeld came off Men in Black to direct the pilot, the first hour of the series. Out of Sight is currently in production, Steven Soderbergh directing George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The script was written by my dear friend Scott Frank, who did Get Shorty, and he swears he didn’t wander too far from the book, unless he had to. I’ve got a new book coming out in January called Cuba Libre, the story set in Cuba a hundred years ago that begins three days after the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. Universal bought the rights and has hired the Coen brothers to write the script. (I can’t believe the way my luck is going.) It will be produced by Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. So, all of a sudden, you’re “hot.” It doesn’t seem that long ago I had hopes of being the hot kid, selling my first story in ’51 when I was twenty-five. I got on the cover of Newsweek in April 1985, and was seen as an overnight success after little more than thirty years. Now I’m seventy-two and still at it, presently writing a sequel to Get Shorty that puts Chili Palmer in the music business, where, with his mob-connected background, he should feel right at home. In doing the research, learning about the record industry, the success of Get Shorty has opened all the doors. (We’ve even had Aerosmith over to the house to drink nonalcoholic beer and play tennis.) MGM, Jersey Films, and John Travolta all seem optimistic that it will happen. I am too, but I have to finish writing the book before we’ll know if it’s any good. Or even what it’s about. Aren’t you about halfway done? Yes, and dying to find out what happens next.2

ELMORE LEONARD

221

NOTES 1

First produced as a film in 1969, The Big Bounce was remade in 2004.

2

Since this interview the Get Shorty sequel, Be Cool (New York: Bantam, 1999), has been published and filmed, with John Travolta reprising his role as Chili Palmer. Among the other mentioned works in progress, Jackie Brown and Out of Sight have been produced as films, and Maximum Bob for television. Tishomingo Blues is in development, to be directed by Don Cheadle.

INTERVIEW BY NAT SEGALOFF

PAUL MAZURSKY A MAP OF THE HEART

o filmmaker captured the sensibilities of American society of the 1970s and early 1980s with as much honesty, humor, and compassion as Paul Mazursky. Especially compassion. From the confusion of people searching for their place in the cosmos in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) to the anguish of onesided romance in Blume in Love (1973), from the uncertainty of aging in Harry and Tonto (1974) to the shock of losing a relationship in An Unmarried Woman (1978), a Paul Mazursky film—sometimes written by him alone, sometimes in collaboration—is a complex map of the human heart. And while he resists analyzing his writing process, it is safe to say that he has mastered it. Film critics have repeatedly praised Mazursky by noting that “he loves his characters,” but that’s being facile; all writers “love” their characters, or else how could they write them? What distinguishes Mazursky is that he loves his audiences and gives them fully realized characters who undergo meaningful personal journeys within a recognizable world. The journey began for Irwin Lawrence Mazursky on April 25, 1930, at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. Raised in the Brownsville section of New York’s

N

This interview is drawn from a series of interviews that took place between June 6 and October 3, 2001. The complete text with additional footnotes may be read at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Center for Advanced Film Study, to which grateful acknowledgment is made. Thanks also to Jeremy Ritzlin, Ph.D., Ken Kamins, Nico Jacobellis, Donovan Brandt, and Claire Brandt for their assistance, with special thanks to Mazursky's assistant, Kimberlyn Lucken.

222

PAUL MAZURSKY

223

most assertive borough, Mazursky attended P.S. 144, all the while dreaming about becoming an actor to escape his moody, domineering mother, Jean, and his passive father, Dave (in 1976 he would write and direct an autobiographical film about his early life, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, casting Shelley Winters as “Mom”). After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1951 with a degree in speech therapy, he moved to Manhattan, where he worked as a juicer at the pretrendy Salad Bowl vegetarian restaurant. In 1953 a writer friend, Howard Sackler, arranged an audition for Mazursky with tyro filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, to whom he had just sold a script; the result was a lead role in Fear and Desire (1953), the first film for both Kubrick and Mazursky. Two years later Mazursky was flown to Hollywood to appear in Richard Brooks’s trendsetting Blackboard Jungle (1955). Neither film led to stardom, however, and Mazursky returned to New York to study with Lee Strasberg while simultaneously working in improv comedy, notably as “Igor” of the comedy team “Igor & H” (the “H” being Herb Hartig). Engagements at the Village Vanguard, Bon Soir, the Purple Onion, One Fifth Avenue, the hungry i, and other clubs marked him as a rising comic writer-performer, but his aspirations remained in drama. As his career moved forward, he married Betsy Purdy in 1952. By the end of the decade the couple had relocated to Los Angeles, where Mazursky began writing scripts on spec, including one for The Rifleman, which got him into the Writers Guild. A 1960 call from former nightclub manager Larry Tucker drew both men into running the L.A. branch of Second City. Within two years they had joined the writing staff for The Danny Kaye Show on CBS, where they stayed until 1966. They developed the television series The Monkees and then wrote I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), which became a hit for Peter Sellers. When they put their script for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice on the market the following year, Mazursky announced he would not sell it unless he was attached as director. Producer Mike Frankovich and Columbia Pictures agreed, and everybody got rich. Ostensibly a satire on the touchy-feely movement that was then seducing America, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice presents, beneath its jokes, a story about how people waste their time searching for gurus rather than examining their own souls. Its gentle but acute perceptiveness and social satire set the pattern for nearly all of the writer-director’s subsequent work. He has written and directed sixteen films over the past four decades, most all of which involve a character taking a physical as well as an emotional journey. But Mazursky resists analyzing his work, even though it is rife with characters who go to shrinks to analyze themselves. A writer who insists

224

PAUL MAZURSKY

that he creates intuitively, he remains modest about the films he has made, while bottling his frustration at the resistance he encounters trying to make new ones. Optimism is also a Mazursky trademark. Even his darkest film, Enemies, A Love Story (1989), ends not with the death and uncertainty that Isaac Bashevis Singer tacked on to his novel but with the birth of a child. Similarly, The Pickle (1993), Mazursky’s last filmed screenplay to date, ends in a rebirth when its main character, a director, finds a reason to live after his film becomes a surprise hit. Mazursky, too, has enjoyed a guarded rebirth—as an actor. While he has always played roles in his own films, he has, over the last decade, appeared in such widely varied projects as 2 Days in the Valley (1996), Carlito’s Way (1993), Love Affair (1994), Antz (1998), and, most notably, The Sopranos and Curb Your Enthusiasm for television. Indeed, as these interviews began, he was freshly back from China, where he and Donald Sutherland were the only English-speaking performers in Xiaogang Feng’s Big Shot’s Funeral (2001), pairing them thirty years after the two first shared a scene in Alex in Wonderland (1970). Mazursky’s company, Tecolote Productions (Spanish for “owl”), fits in three rooms in Beverly Hills, and it’s where he comes every morning after coffee with friends at the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market. His inner office is decorated with a gallery of family photos, inscribed mementos from Fellini, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen, and such esoterica as a copy of Mad magazine’s spoof “Boob & Carnal & Tad & Alas.” The array is both personal and eclectic, much like Mazursky himself, whose sharp wit and characterdriven writing place him at odds with the youth-oriented films being packaged and produced elsewhere in the town he has lived in—and held a mirror to—for more than three decades. PAUL MAZURSKY (1930–)

1961 1966 1968 1969 1970 1973 1974

Last Year at Malibu (Paul Mazursky). Short subject. What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (Woody Allen). Uncredited contribution. I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (Hy Averback). Executive producer, co-script. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky). Director, co-script. Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky). Director, co-script, actor. Blume in Love (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, script, actor. Harry and Tonto (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, co-script, actor.

PAUL MAZURSKY

225

PAUL MAZURSKY IN LOS ANGELES, 2003. (PHOTO BY PETER “HOPPER” STONE.)

1976 1978 1980 1982 1984

Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, script. An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, script, actor. Willie and Phil (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, script. Tempest (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, co-script, actor. Moscow on the Hudson (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, coscript, actor.

226

1986 1988 1989 1990 1991 1993 1996

PAUL MAZURSKY

Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, co-script, actor. Moon over Parador (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, coscript, actor. Enemies, A Love Story (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, coscript, actor. Taking Care of Business (Arthur Hiller). Executive producer. Scenes from a Mall (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, co-script, actor. The Pickle (Paul Mazursky). Producer, director, script, actor. Faithful (Paul Mazursky). Director, actor.

Television writing and directing includes “The Tinhorn” (The Rifleman, 1963, story); “From Cara with Love” (The Cara Williams Show, 1964, coscript); “Dog Watch” (The Cara Williams Show, 1964, co-script); “Cara’s Private War against Poverty” (The Cara Williams Show, 1965, co-script); The Danny Kaye Show (1962–1966, writing staff); The Monkees (1966, pilot co-script and actor); Winchell (1998, directed only); and Coast to Coast (2004, directed only). Acting appearances include Fear and Desire (1953); Blackboard Jungle (1955); The Rifleman (“Hostages to Fortune,” TV, 1958); Twilight Zone (“He’s Alive,” TV, 1959); Twilight Zone (“The Gift,” TV, 1959); Twilight Zone (“The Purple Testament,” TV, 1959); World’s Greatest Robbery (TV, 1962); Love on a Rooftop (“Fifty Dollar Misunderstanding,” TV, 1966); Deathwatch (1967); The Other Side of the Wind (1972); A Star Is Born (1976); A Man, a Woman and a Bank (1979); History of the World: Part I (1981); Into the Night (1985); Punchline (1988); Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989); Man Trouble (1992); Carlito’s Way (1993); Love Affair (1994); Miami Rhapsody (1995); 2 Days in the Valley (1996); Touch (1997); Weapons of Mass Distraction (TV, 1997); Bulworth (1998); Why Do Fools Fall in Love (1998); Antz (voice, 1998); Crazy in Alabama (1999); A Slight Case of Murder (TV, 1999); Once and Again (TV series, multiple appearances, 1999); The Sopranos (TV, 1999); The Majestic (voice, 2001); Da Wan (2001); Do It for Uncle Manny (2002); Coast to Coast (2004); and Curb Your Enthusiasm (TV series, multiple appearances, 2004). Academy Award honors include Best Script nominations for Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto, An Unmarried Woman, and Enemies, A Love Story.

PAUL MAZURSKY

227

Writers Guild honors include television script nominations for Best Episode,Music Variety Show:The Danny Kaye Show, December 2,1962,and The Danny Kaye Show, February 3, 1965; and Best Script nominations for I Love You,Alice B.Toklas, Blume in Love, Harry and Tonto, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, An Unmarried Woman, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice won Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen. Autobiography: Show Me the Magic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

TEAMWORK

When did you first become aware that films were written? You’re obviously aware that they’re written, but I never much thought about it. I was always aware that there was a name on a film—Nunnally Johnson—famous ones. But I didn’t really know that much about the process. Most of what I knew would come from books by people as far apart as Eisenstein and Pudovkin, which I read when I was in my twenties more as intellectual exercises than that I was going to direct a movie. I read Karel Reisz’s wonderful book on editing. I read John Howard Lawson, who was a dramatist but also a dramaturge.1 When I started to write, I somehow got ahold of a couple of screenplays, looked at them, and immediately decided I wasn’t going to write screenplays with a lot of directions. All I like to put in is cut to or dissolve to, fade in or fade out, where the scene takes place, and, if it’s important, what time of day it is. And if it’s really important, is there something in the scene that happens, or something you see that the reader should know about, so that they can get a better picture? So it was only when I started to write that I truly became aware of the writer. How did you and Larry Tucker get together as a writing team? Larry ran a nightclub in New York called Down in the Depths. I auditioned for him with Herb Hartig, and we didn’t get the job. A couple of years later I moved out here. I get a call from him. He says, “Remember me?” I said, “Sure, you’re the guy that didn’t hire me.” He says, “Well, I’ve given all that up. I’m looking for an agent.” So we started talking, we were both funny guys, and he said, “You know, they’re looking for replacements at Second City.” So we both took over the Second City shows as coleaders [in Los Angeles] and began to do our own improvs. Along the line somebody

228

PAUL MAZURSKY

saw us, and we got the Danny Kaye gig. We did four years at Danny Kaye, during which we wrote “H-Bomb Beach Party,” which was optioned but never made, and then Toklas. The two of you created “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees . . .” as well as appearing in a “man on the street” sketch in the pilot. Were you going to be regulars? I was going to direct seven out of the first thirteen episodes. That was my deal. I’d never directed. So for me it was thrilling. We weren’t gonna be regulars, just gonna come in every now and again. And then we [Mazursky and BBS Productions]2 got into this terrible argument about who created the Monkees. The Writers Guild offered no protection; we ended up getting a credit saying “Developed by.” These days if you write a pilot, you created it. There’s no other source material. We were told to make “something like the Beatles,” [but] they didn’t want to admit to that. After Danny Kaye, The Monkees, and a few sales to episodics, did you have difficulty going from sketch comedy to full length? It’s a great word, “sketch.” What does it mean? Brief, quick, five to ten minutes at the most. You “sketch in” characters without trying to get into psychological depths. When you write a screenplay which will last an hour and a half, you’ve got to get in deeper. Are you stuck sometimes, if you need a laugh at a certain point, but you know it might destroy character or send the scene in another direction? That’s been Neil Simon’s so-called dilemma. I’m not here to criticize a brilliant talent, which Neil Simon is, but he has sometimes been criticized for succumbing to the need for a scene to be funny, so that too many characters speak in wisecracky tones. There are different kinds of humor. If you’re writing Some Like It Hot [1959] you can be much broader than if you were writing Sullivan’s Travels [1941], which is a brilliant, brilliant movie, and is extremely funny. But in Sullivan’s Travels the characters don’t speak in jokes. Is there such a thing as a cheap laugh? Yes. When Mel Brooks has six guys around a campfire farting, it’s a cheap laugh. But it’s funny.

PAUL MAZURSKY

229

Most of the characters in your films tend to have middle- or upper-middleclass ennui, where things may appear to be going great, but to them, something’s going on that makes them doubt the value of their existence— I’m sympathetic to those characters. I feel that the middle class is not treated in terms of tragedy. You have to be very rich or very poor to be thought of as a tragic figure. You started writing and directing at a time when people were just starting to “get in touch with their feelings” and “express themselves,” and that movement became part of your first films. The wonderful thing is that, early in one’s career, you’re not stopping and thinking about “Will this be a hit?” or “Do I have to live up to anything?” or “Will they like this?” or “Can I sell this?” I never would have made Next Stop, Greenwich Village or Harry and Tonto if I was worried about a big hit. But those days seem like centuries ago because they worry much more now about “Will the kids get it?” When I Love You, Alice B. Toklas became a hit, you and Larry refused to sell your script of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice unless you could direct it. [Producer] Mike Frankovich gave me my shot. When I went in to sell the script, I said, “Larry and I won’t sell this unless I get to direct it.” He said, “What have you directed?” I said, “Nothing, I made one short, Last Year at Malibu; I haven’t directed anything, but I’ve directed theater, and I’m gonna direct this script.” “Uh-huh. I’ll let you know tomorrow.” The next day he called me and said, “Okay, you’re on.” Just like that. Mike Frankovich suggested Natalie Wood. He came up with the idea of Bob Culp. He mentioned this Elliott Gould guy, and we had, by that time, read and met everybody in L.A. and were losing faith in the role. We thought that there was something wrong with the part; Larry and I had become convinced we’d written Ted like a schnook. Then Elliott walked in, and he talked for two or three minutes, and I looked at Larry and told Elliott, “You’ve got the part.” Bob & Carol satirizes the sensitivity movement while at the same time being sensitive to its characters. Bob & Carol was a satire about all the New Age stuff that was coming into American life with large numbers of people—ironically, the numbers are

230

PAUL MAZURSKY

just as large today—who would do anything to be saved. They’re like people drowning, grasping at anything—whether it’s Deepak Chopra, est, the Forum, the latest guru, the Mahareeshi, Scientology—America has tons of people who grab at those things. They want someone to explain to them, tell them for sure, that it’s not what Shakespeare said, it isn’t “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” They say about Paul Mazursky, “He loves his characters.” And he does. It’s one of the things that helps me. If you love your characters and feel affection for them as people, you won’t cheapen them too ridiculously. So that when Dyan Cannon is forced to say the word “teetee,” you believe it. You have compassion for her. She’s so uptight that it’s led her to go to a psychiatrist, who’s going to probe and find out what’s going on with this sexually repressed woman, who can’t call a vagina a vagina; she calls it a “teetee.” It comes out of a truth. There’s nothing sketchlike in the opening at the Institute—Esalen, supposedly. Bob [Robert Culp] wants to make a documentary about the place. His wife, Natalie Wood, goes because she’s his wife, and it ends up that they’re the only married couple there. They’re forced to make a real communication between each other, which reveals that she’s deathly afraid of him, he dominates her, won’t let her breathe, et cetera, and all the people in the room beat the shit out of him psychologically. That all happened to me when I went up to [the] Esalen [Institute] with Betsy, sort of. I then took it to the next step of having Bob and Carol tell the story of their incredible weekend to their best friends, Ted and Alice. And there was the movie. There’s a key scene in which, with contorted logic, Bob confesses his affair, and it pays off later when Carol has an affair and Bob must struggle to accept it. It’s brilliant comedy, if I say so myself. There are two lines in that movie which are among my favorites of anything I ever wrote. One is when Natalie says to Dyan Cannon, “I have great news: Bob had an affair.” And Dyan’s reaction is to go throw up, which preceded An Unmarried Woman. My other favorite line is where Elliott Gould is in bed with Dyan Cannon, and they’re ready to go to sleep and they’ve just gotten the news of Bob’s affair, and he wants to get laid, and she’s not in the mood. He says,“I think I’ll take a walk.” She says, “Don’t walk, stay with me.” And it all leads to her flinging up the covers and saying,“There! Do whatever you want! You want to do it just like that, with no feeling on my part?” And Elliott Gould says, “Yeah.” When that line came on at the only preview that counted, in Denver, you couldn’t hear for five minutes. Five minutes! And it was a huge the-

PAUL MAZURSKY

231

“HE LOVES HIS CHARACTERS”: ELLIOTT GOULD, NATALIE WOOD, ROBERT CULP, AND DYAN CANNON IN BED IN BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE , PAUL MAZURSKY’S DIRECTING DEBUT.

ater. I was sitting there with the heads of the studio, and they were flying off their chairs. When the movie was over, they took me by the arm and said something like, “Thirty-four domestic” [$34 million in rentals predicted], which was huge in those days. I didn’t know what they meant. I thought it was a wine. Then we had the same preview at the Crest Theatre in L.A. Very, very good, but not quite as good as Denver. You know why? The audiences in L.A. are one-third movie people, who are thinking, “Who are these guys? What is this movie? Are they gonna be hits? Is that funny?” That judgmental shit, which is why you never want to have your movie judged by those people. Take it to Denver. Let’s clear up a myth: Was Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice at all improvised? The whole script is written. Larry Tucker and I improvised to write it. We played opposite parts. He’d take a crack at Bob and I’d be Carol, I’d take a crack at Bob and he’d be Carol. Then I rehearsed every single scene between the two and the four. The closest I’ve come to improvisation is when I’ll tell an actor who’s having a lot of trouble, “Let’s rehearse once in your own

232

PAUL MAZURSKY

words. Forget my dialogue.” Once in a while it helps them free up a little bit, but usually we’ll get back to the script. Describe your method of collaborating with Tucker. Larry and I had an office on Sunset Boulevard, and we mapped out the story and would write. We would spend four or five hours a day there—talking, sleeping, walking. I would be at the typewriter. Somehow we’d come up with a couple of pages a day. See, the way to look at it is that if you can get two or three pages a day—if—at the end of fifty days, you’re gonna have a script. That’s only two months. It’s not terrible. It’s not a year. Then you take another month to rewrite, and at the end of three months you’ve got a real first draft. Something like that. My daughter, Jill, who’s a writer, spends two weeks on a script. They crank out eight pages a day. I’m not gonna criticize that process. Thirty pages a week; in a month they’ve got a script. After two hits in a row, you and Larry faced a traditional dilemma. We had nothing to write about. So we started writing about having nothing to write about. And the result was Alex in Wonderland [1970], which you first brought to Mike Frankovich at Columbia. Frankovich agreed to do it. When we got into early talks to cast it, I could tell that he was bothered by the fact that the opening scene in the movie is a man taking a bath with his four- or five-year-old daughter. It upset him. He thought it was dirty. So I told my agents to approach Mike and ask him if he wanted to get out of it, which he did, and we moved it over to MGM— —where you made the film. But just as you were finishing it, James Aubrey3 took over the studio. You had an atypical experience with him, didn’t you? The story, from the editors on the lot, was that James Aubrey hated every single movie brought to him that he inherited: Brewster McCloud [1970], Wild Rovers, et cetera. My editor was Stuart Pappé, who’s still one of my favorite editors, and we made an appointment to show it to Aubrey. And we prepared like the “jack story”:4 “He says one fuckin’ word, I’ll stand up and say, ‘fuck you!’ ” We then ran the movie for Jim Aubrey and Doug Netter [a distribution executive], the lights go on afterward, and Jim Aubrey says,

PAUL MAZURSKY

233

“I don’t think it’ll do any business, but it’s really well made. Congratulations.” That was it. And then they shoved it into theaters for Christmas. We weren’t ready. We needed another month. The sound was sometimes a little raw. But, in my opinion, what we really needed was a couple more previews for me to fiddle around with it. I like the picture, I’m extremely proud of it, but I think it can use some fixing and help. The failure of Alex crushed me, and I decided to try to see what it would be like to live in Europe. Europe was Art with a capital A and the Renaissance with a capital R, and I convinced my darling wife to move to Italy with me and the two kids. But that’s how badly I took the blow of Alex. That’s where I wrote the treatment for Harry and Tonto and got Josh Greenfeld started on it, and out of living there for the four, five, or six months, Blume in Love came out of me. So it was great. It’s interesting that in a film about a filmmaker as auteur, Alex doesn’t have any interest in writing. He wants someone to give him a script. I didn’t want to make him me. I didn’t want him to have the vaguest idea how to write. By the way, one of the funny things is that at least three different producers came up to me, convinced that I played them: Ray Stark, Jay Weston, and one other guy.5 I said, “Believe me, it’s all of you.” At least two of the producers I went to see over the years—Dino De Laurentiis and Jay Weston—I went to see about something I had in mind, and when I left their offices I had five scripts, so heavy I could hardly walk. They pitch you everything. And their attitude was, “You don’t like it? Fine! But look at this one, too. Maybe you’ll find something that you like . . .” It’s a very healthy attitude. Maybe healthy for them, but not healthy for the writer. That’s why they’re producers. Alex in Wonderland raises the issue of “personal film.” What’s your definition? I’ve always been slightly offended by that term. Every film you make is personal. A guy can say to you, “Yeah, I did it for a payday.”6 Well, they did, but they still did it. A lot of very smart guys have said to me, “This is a personal film.” I think what they really mean by it is they’re getting less money.

234

PAUL MAZURSKY

There are a number of writers who have done their best work with you, who will be remembered mostly because of their association with you. Tell me something about Larry Tucker. During the time we worked together he weighed between three and five [hundred pounds]. It was beyond obese. When he hit the five mark, around there, I asked him to go to a hospital, because he was falling asleep at the dailies. He could hardly walk, he could hardly breathe. We shared a year and a half performing in theater, we liked each other very much, we were not competitive, in a stupid way, ever—to Larry’s credit, and to mine. Then we had the four years on Danny Kaye. We had a lot of laughs. Then we wrote “H-Bomb,” Toklas, Bob & Carol, and after Bob & Carol we could do anything and didn’t know what to do. I basically came up with Alex in Wonderland. Larry helped, but it was mine. At the end of Alex in Wonderland I had to go away to Rome to shoot for a week, to shoot the Fellini sequence. When I got back, Larry, who had stayed here, said, “I had a weekend marathon with a therapist. I never had anything like it in my life, Paul. I made some big decisions. I’m leaving Marlene [his wife] and I’m leaving you.” I said, “You want to leave us both in one weekend, Larry? Are you sure?” “Well, I want to do my own stuff. I still love you and all that, but I want to be my own guy.” I said, “You know, you can be your own guy and still work with me.” He said, “No, I’ve got to break.” So we broke up. Still friendly. And then he had a very checkered career. He did some TV over the years with a partner named Larry Rosen, and maybe some other people. I kind of lost touch with him. He finally had the operation to tie up his intestines and lost an enormous amount of weight, got down to two hundred, but he also lost muscle tone. And the loss of muscle tone crippled him. Eventually he developed so much trouble with it that he had the operation redone and that didn’t help, and he ended up with multiple sclerosis. By the end—I went to see him a couple months before he died—he was flat on his back at home, but in a hospital bed with a tube in his neck, and he couldn’t talk. He’d have to whisper. It was horrible and very depressing. But Larry was a wonderful man.

STARTING OVER

How did you reenter Hollywood after your exile? When I came back from Italy nobody wanted to do Harry and Tonto. They said, “We don’t want to do a movie about an old man and a cat. You’re a

PAUL MAZURSKY

235

great talent, Bob & Carol was a huge hit . . .” Blah, blah, blah, blah. They were so negative, I didn’t know what to do. Someone came along and offered me a picture called “The Flasher,” and I was so desperate to go back to work—yet so ambivalent—that out of some crazy need I said okay. It was a black comedy about a cop who was a flasher. The night after I agreed to do it, I woke up in a cold sweat. I realized I didn’t want to do it. So I had to call Freddie Fields, my agent, and say, “Freddie, I don’t want it.” He said, “Well, you better call the studio and tell ’em yourself. I don’t want to call ’em because I already agreed.” I called them. I then got an office at what is now ICM [International Creative Management], and I went into the office and sat down in a room with no idea what to do. I just knew I wasn’t going to be doing “The Flasher.” I suddenly had this memory of me sitting in Italy, and I just started to type, I swear, and out of nowhere came this oneline idea about a guy in love with his ex-wife. Each day I wrote without knowing what was going to happen next. I had never done anything like that. Out came Blume in Love. With Unmarried Woman I mapped out the structure first. Next Stop, which I wrote myself, I also mapped out. But with Blume, all I knew was that I wanted to end with Tristan und Isolde, and them coming together. For whatever reasons, the script worked, and I gave it to my agent—Freddie, or Jeff Berg by then—and he showed it to John Calley at Warner Bros. That was on a Friday. On Saturday they called me and said, “When do you want to start?” But what I’m saying is that I didn’t think out the social meaning of what I was writing; I was just writing about feelings. The story never happened to me; Blume in Love is a fantasy. I’m still married to the same woman after forty-eight years. But you fantasize, and I got into the head of this guy, and I loved the idea—which I thought of around the end of the first week—that he’d end up raping his wife. Which was crazy. Blume in Love is romantic, but it’s also deeply disturbing. It’s a movie about a stalker; he only happens to be George Segal. All I knew was that I loved the irony of a man being desperately, desperately, desperately in love with his ex-wife. And the reminiscences of it taking place in the city of love, Venice, where lovers are all over the joint. The darkness of it came out of a pretty profound examination, if I say so myself, of how marriage is. In marriage people have to learn to accept the good and the bad. It’s easy to accept the good but harder to take the flaws and the problems—and this marriage was a pretty real marriage. Maybe Blume shouldn’t have done what he did, but Nina shouldn’t have done what she did. And the way it works out is the way it works out.

236

PAUL MAZURSKY

The moment after Blume [George Segal] has raped Nina [Susan Anspach], Elmo [Kris Kristofferson] comes in and Nina says, “He raped me.” Elmo’s reaction is to seek confirmation of it from Blume before he slugs him—not to believe what Nina just said. He cuts Blume some slack. Well, Elmo was an unusual guy. He’s based on a friend of mine, one of those real sixties dropouts with good cause for dropping out. Society had failed Elmo, and he no longer had confidence in it. So when he finds out that Nina was raped, instead of saying for sure that he believes her—because he knows how horny a guy can get—he wants to know from the guy, “Do you consider it an act of rape?” and Blume does. Yes. So he hits him. We know today that rape is an act of violence— —it is— —but in the film it’s portrayed as an act of desperate love. It’s also violent, though. I think it’s violent. He made up his mind at a certain point that he was gonna do it, and she didn’t want him to do it. You can get into different interpretations as to whether she really did want him to do it. But he definitely raped her. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Then it made it realer that she keeps the baby. When you’re writing a scene, are you conscious of the dialogue you need to move the story forward? Exposition is the bane of scripts. As a filmmaker, when I’m looking at a movie and I see, “Oh, they really want me to know X or Y,” that annoys me and takes me out of the movie. It sounds like the author talking, not the character. But you are aware that certain information is important. However, the more one goes on in this business, the more one realizes—me being one—that there’s a lot of information the audience can get without it being “on the head.” They can find out he’s a furrier late in the third scene, because someone comes in with a coat that needs to be retrimmed. During the first twenty minutes he never says he’s a furrier; he says, “I’ve got work to do,” and we don’t know what he does. I try not to write expositional dialogue, but you write it, you take it out, you disguise it, then you play games with it. Harry and Tonto was not an easy film to get made.

PAUL MAZURSKY

237

Josh started the script while I was in Italy. When I came back he’d already done fifty pages of wonderful stuff. Then I kept writing the rest, and we started combining. It was a very good marriage. The original script was too long—it was 150 pages, maybe more—but it was a great script. We were turned down, I think, twenty-one times. We set a record. Nobody wanted to do it. Alan Ladd Jr.—I gotta give him credit—had the guts to get me the “go” for Harry and Tonto. He had just gotten this job as an executive at Fox. He said Gordon Stulberg [president of the studio] will give you a million if you can get a name in it that will work on TV, in case it doesn’t work as a movie. So I got Art Carney. Art won the Oscar, which is like the world’s way of saying that miracles can happen. Whoever dreamt that he would beat out Dustin Hoffman that year?7 But when Alan saw Harry and Tonto, I could see, after the screening, damp [he places his finger beneath his eye and traces a tear], this one drop. That scene with Geraldine Fitzgerald wiped him out.8 It does a pretty good job on everybody else, too. It’s a wonderful scene. It’s based on my wife’s grandmother, whom I visited with my wife, and she thought I was her husband. So I had this experience of actually being called “Chester.” My wife had warned me it might happen, and I played along with it the best I could. I never forgot it. Those scenes were shot in a German old-age home in Chicago, one of the most extraordinary places I’d ever seen. It had a normal old-age setup, then outside the window was the cemetery—that’s where you ended up. Walking through that place nearly put me out of my fucking mind. Did Art Carney’s acting ability allow you to drop certain lines and convey them with just his gestures? I don’t remember, to be honest with you. All I know is that anything he had to say in the movie, he never sounded like he was acting. He may have eliminated a line here and there. For the most part it’s the utter simplicity with which he did stuff. There’s a scene where he’s driving with the cat in a car. We put the cat on the dashboard and, for some reason, the cat stayed there. The car was being towed, and Art’s there and the cat’s there and Art’s talking, “You know, Annie was a wonderful swimmer, and I remember once . . .” and every now and then the cat would [does a yawn] and Art never said it like, “I’m talking to a cat.” I never directed Art Carney; understand that. The only thing I would do was tell him where to stand, or some-

238

PAUL MAZURSKY

thing else very simple and basic. He would ask me sometimes, “Do I have to say this?” and we’d cut a line out. And if you watch the movie you’ll see him do [Mazursky expertly mimes Ed Norton preparing to pick up a drink, a series of well-known hand and shoulder movements for which there are no suitable English verbs]. I’m very proud of the Academy for recognizing him. And you know what pisses me off over the years? Here I’ve directed all these movies where the actors got nominated: Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, Art Carney, Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon. And I never get nominated as a director. Ever. I was nominated as a writer many times—but as a director, they must think I have nothing to do with it. Comparing the film to the script, the character of Ginger [Melanie Mayron] is significantly different. In the script she’s an unwed pregnant girl, where in the film she’s just a runaway. At what point did the change happen? I think the reason was that, as I started to make the picture, I realized that it’s loading things to make her that way. She didn’t need those reasons to run away. She just wanted to get away from a family that was probably not fun to be with. It happens every day. You know, I took one scene out of Harry and Tonto which, for the rest of my years, I’ll regret. When I went to the Grand Canyon to shoot, there was a big snowstorm, and I have fabulous footage of Art Carney and the cat, and he’s throwing snowballs and talking. When I screened the movie it seemed a little long, and I cut that scene out. It was a terrible mistake, because it was very rich and important. When you start writing a script with a stated premise like “a man wants a place to live,” as you did in Harry and Tonto, are you so formalistic that every scene must relate back to that central thesis? No. What I like is surprises. I like the idea that Harry talks to his best friend, Jacob Rivetowski [Herbert Berghof ], about the old days, and he says, “When’s the last time you had sex?” and his friend says, “Saturday night . . . March 1951 . . . yeah, about ten o’clock at night.” You get to like the guy, and the next thing you know Harry’s son is taking him in his car on a rainy day to look at Jacob in the morgue. I don’t tell you the guy’s dead, you only find it out when you get there. Okay? Now, I was in London with my wife and kids and got a call from a friend about my mother—that she had

PAUL MAZURSKY

239

died. I had to fly back to New York, go to the morgue, and identify the body. Same way: they bring it up on a little elevator. So I had had the experience of identifying a body in a morgue, the experience of the person standing next to me, the attendant, asking,“You want to be alone?”“Yeah.”And then being alone for a minute, two minutes, with my mother’s body. I take real things that happen in my life, and change them and put them in my films. I was dealing with real, personal stuff, which is what made my movies unique. They’re my view of life. They’re very personal. But it doesn’t mean shit, because John Ford is one of the great filmmakers, and I’m not sure how personal Stagecoach [1939] or The Searchers [1956] are. I’m not putting them down and saying I’m better ‘cause I’m personal. But most of the movies I see nowadays, the most personal they get is Blair Witch [The Blair Witch Project, 1999]. Next Stop, Greenwich Village is your most autobiographical film. With Next Stop, Greenwich Village, which I actually wrote after An Unmarried Woman, I showed Josh Greenfeld the first thirty pages or so and asked, “Am I crazy to be fooling around with this?” And Josh said, “Just keep going. There’s something good here.” And it helped me. You needed someone to tell you— —someone to tell me, “You’re not out of your mind doing a movie about yourself when you were twenty years old with your mother geshrying.”9 When you touch things that happen in your own life, you have no objectivity. I must say, as a writer, that objectivity is bullshit. I always hear, “You should be objective.” Why? Next Stop took me three months to write, and I was shocked when Fox said yes. Alan Ladd Jr. was not Jewish, and I mention that because the film is obviously about a Jewish guy in New York, his parents, Brownsville. And while I changed some stuff, it was kind of autobiographical in that the main character, Larry Lapinsky, winds up getting a job in Hollywood like I got Blackboard Jungle. The people are all based on people that I knew, but they’re also composited. Obviously the mother and father are my mother and father. The guy who owns the health food store, Lou Jacobi, is a vague version of George Haynes, for whom I was the juicer at the Salad Bowl at Broadway and Fifty-seventh, across the street from the Stage Delicatessen. Ellen Greene is based on my girlfriend, who did cheat on me. Chris Walken is Howard Sackler, who wrote The Great White Hope [1970]. Dorie Bren-

240

PAUL MAZURSKY

ner is a guy I knew very well. The gal who kills herself is based on another gal I knew very well. The black guy was a composite of a couple of people I knew, but the homosexual is [very close to a person] named Bill Hiller, who was funny and tragic. That was “our gang,” sort of. We often discussed, to great music in the café, everything that was going on: arts, literature, politics. We thought we were far out and wonderful. Shelley Winters played your mother. Do you direct Shelley Winters or just kind of aim her? You direct her. You get tough with her. Have I told you how she cries? No. She can only cry if you do the following: you have to get a tape or a disc of Madame Butterfly, one of the arias. You then put it right next to her chair. She hits the button that starts it. [Mazursky sings] “Oooooooooh, poor butterflyyyyyy . . .” She hears it and starts to cry, then she says, “It’s good, go ahead.” As soon as you’re ready to shoot, she pushes the stop button, but she’s crying. She can do that all day long. That’s a fact. I love her. I really do. The phrase “character-driven” is a shibboleth. They say they want it, but then they cut out the character and keep in the plane crash, only by then you don’t care about who was in the plane. Your scripts, however, are always character-driven. Scenes I’ve written are used in acting classes. I get calls from people who are using An Unmarried Woman, for example. I’ve also never been afraid of long scenes, whereas now the style is to be very brief and very fast with lots of cuts, and the dialogue, you know, you get a half a page of dialogue and you’re on to the next scene. You don’t have many discussions in movies any more like, “Should the Rosenbergs go to jail?” or about T. S. Elliott; if they’re making references to things like that, the studio won’t want it because the focus group won’t know who you’re talking about. Selfcensorship keeps you from writing good dialogue. If you’re too erudite, it gets pretentious, but if it’s about people, it won’t. The people in Next Stop, Greenwich Village are trying desperately to be avant-garde and with-it and political and all that. Right now, things are different; young people talk more about rave parties and Ecstasy and IPOs. I don’t know what young

PAUL MAZURSKY

241

people talk about now, which is why I’m probably not the kind of guy to write a script about today’s young people.

THE RIGHT TIME, THE RIGHT PLACE

Did you have any idea that An Unmarried Woman was going to fire the first feminist shot in American movies? No. I’ve never anticipated that anything I’ve done would be important. With An Unmarried Woman the only thing I knew was that I was getting a lot of resistance getting it financed because of a certain—and I’m not saying this just in retrospect—squareness about what was appropriate in a movie about a woman: that, in the end, Prince Charming had to come along and she’d go off with him. One executive at United Artists—it was a woman executive, by the way—even said to me, “How can she not go off with this guy?” And I said, “But that’s the whole point of the 110 pages you’ve read. If she goes off with him and does his bidding, she’s right back where almost every woman in this country is: in the end you do what the guy wants you to do.” The whole point of the movie is not to hate men, not to dislike men—you can love a man, but you love yourself too—and there comes a time in life when you’ve got to make difficult decisions where you have to do what is right for yourself at that time. No more complicated than that. I had this conversation with Jane Fonda, who was the first person I offered the part. Jane Fonda said to me, “I want to do something a lot more political than this.” I said, “Jane, if ever you did a political film, this is it!” The difficulties were so overwhelming, getting An Unmarried Woman made, that I never stopped and said to myself, “The reason I’m having difficulty is that I’m hipper than the crowd—this is a feminist thing—this is gonna shoot off the cannon.” I just thought, “The schmucks don’t get it.” At one point Josh Greenfeld called up and said, “Hey, are you aware that Fox is flush with money because The Omen [1976] opened big?” I said, “Really?” So I called Alan Ladd Jr. and said, “Laddie, is there any chance that we can renew our talk about An Unmarried Woman?” and he said, “C’mon down.” I met with Laddie and Gareth Wigan and Jay Kanter, and they said X, Y, and Z, and, “Can you do something to shore up the character of Martin, her husband?” and I said, “You’re absolutely right.” So I wrote about three lines that weren’t in the original, I tore out the first page, waited a week, put a new date on the cover, and sent it in as a total rewrite. They read it and said, “It’s a go.” You can print that.

242

PAUL MAZURSKY

The scene where Martin [Michael Murphy] confesses his affair to his wife, Erica [Jill Clayburgh], and she gets sick to her stomach, has come to be regarded as a classic—a very gutsy scene. It takes a gutsy actor, and it takes a gutsy director, because, remember, I’m a director who tends to rehearse a lot, and I chose never to rehearse that scene. They had come from a scene in a restaurant, and as they’re coming around the corner, I said to Michael Murphy, before he did the scene, “All I want you to do, Michael, is make sure you cry when you tell her about the affair. I’m not telling you how to cry or what to do, but physically you’ve got to stop at this point, so I can move around you with the camera.” And I told Jill, “When he tells you, you can’t step farther back than this because you’ll be out of the shot.” That’s all. And on the first take [snaps fingers] Michael got it. I did it about three times and covered them both. And that was it—off to the races. The last shot in the scene is with a handheld camera, without a Steadicam. We had put cereal in her mouth and I walked down the street with her in a kind of circular move, and she ends up at the street corner and throws up in one shot. My trick with one-shots, which I’ve always believed, is that by not cutting, you give a reality. Erica becomes very hard-edged. How far did you feel you could take her— being resentful and telling strangers to fuck off—before she lost the audience’s sympathy? I never worry about keeping sympathy. I just knew that if the actress who played her was truly likable, that you’d have a hard time hating or disliking the character. Jill Clayburgh was, if I may say so, the perfect choice. It was the perfect part for this lady who is, by the way, extremely bright, extremely together, extremely warm, a wonderful actress, attractive in a very realistic, non-Hollywood way. When she danced in her underpants and did the ballet—which I give myself credit for—she won the hearts of everybody.10 One of the bravest things in the picture is the first sexual encounter she has, when she goes down to SoHo and meets Cliff Gorman, who is brilliant in the scene. In the dark, she takes her clothes off, and her breasts are showing; Cliff took a nipple in each hand and pulled her toward him, and she went with it. That was courageous acting. It really did shock people that, even after she finds the perfect man, she chooses not to stay with him. I wasn’t sure how I was going to end the script; that made me nervous. I just knew that she’d meet a guy who was fabulous and turn him down. But then

PAUL MAZURSKY

243

“SHE WON THE HEARTS OF EVERYBODY”: JILL CLAYBURGH WITH MICHAEL MURPHY IN AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, WHICH GARNERED AN OSCAR NOMINATION FOR BEST SCREENPLAY.

I thought of this image—which, I must say, nobody believes that I thought of—that, at the end, he’d give her a big, huge painting, and she’d be walking down the street holding the painting, with the wind blowing, and instead of putting it down or asking for help, she’d hold onto it herself. She’s on her own. When Willie and Phil [1980] came out it was compared with Jules and Jim [1961], which sidetracked any reasonable discussion of it on its own merits. I got rapped—oh, gosh, I got rapped—for daring to remake Jules and Jim. I wasn’t trying to remake Jules and Jim. I’m not a moron! At the end of Jules and Jim she [Catherine, the Jeanne Moreau character] drives off a bridge! I was trying to say that in today’s times—which was in 1977—we’d reached the point where it’s not out of the question that two guys in love with the same gal can share her, take turns, and still be best friends. I was exploring that, and I thought it might be clever to have them be movie buffs, and to have them meet at a screening of Jules and Jim, which is one of my favorite movies. I knew going in that I was taking a risk in that, if I

244

PAUL MAZURSKY

had two guys meet at a screening in a theater in New York of Jules and Jim, people would say, “You’re trying to remake Jules and Jim.” Well, of course, it was inspired by Jules and Jim, but it had nothing to do with Jules and Jim except for one fact: it’s about two guys and a girl. There’s much more use of voice-overs in Willie and Phil, as a film, than is indicated in the script. Sometimes the narration provides transition between sequences, and other times they bridge a truncated sequence. We all steal from other movies. You’d be crazy not to. It’s the same as painters. One of the things that influenced me—now that I’ve finished telling you that I wasn’t trying to make Jules and Jim—was that Truffaut had this brilliant instinct for moving a film along cinematically without pretense in the matter of [snaps fingers] a second by saying, “They went to Paris.” Suddenly the screen flips, dissolves, wipes, and you’re in Paris. There’s no long establishing shots, he just moves the film along. Voiceovers are like a good drug. They can also make a film novelistic. They can work brilliantly, or they can tear you down. There are no rules. The voice in Willie and Phil is mine. It was an open call to the critics to say, “Boy, he must be nervous that we don’t get his movie,” or something like that. Truffaut used that third voice; it’s not the voice of any of his characters. Sometimes in Willie and Phil—and I also noticed this in some others, including Harry and Tonto—you cut away from a scene before it ends in the script. The blackout moment comes before the place where you wrote for it to come. When do you make those decisions? When I look at the full assembly. My theory is to let them act the full three pages, knowing that I might only need two. Not that you will make interior cuts to make the scene shorter, though I’ve done that too, but maybe the actors need six or eight lines to warm up: “Where you been?” “I’ve been out . . .” “You were supposed to come here at four o’clock,” “It’s only four thirty,” “Jesus Christ” and the next line is, “So what’s happening, is he gonna do it?” And I start the scene with that line. There’s a large chunk of script cut at the end of Willie and Phil where they’re discussing a Buñuel film. Willie [played by Michael Ontkean in the film] calls Jeannette [Margot Kidder] a sphinx, Phil [Ray Sharkey] talks about his salami nightmare, and then they all visit Phil’s therapist.

PAUL MAZURSKY

245

All cut out. I played the therapist. When I saw the movie I felt it began to drag toward the end, and the easiest thing for me to cut was myself. I was brutal. In retrospect, a couple years later I looked at the scene again, and I kinda liked it.

THREE OF A KIND

Now we come to three films that have a unity, and they are Tempest [1982], Moscow on the Hudson [1984], and Down and Out in Beverly Hills [1986]. All were written by you and Leon Capetanos, photographed by Don McAlpine, and designed by Pato Guzman. Tell me about your relationship with Leon Capetanos. My agent Jeff Berg said to me one day, “I’ve got a script by a guy named Leon Capetanos you ought to read. It’s called ‘White on White.’ ” It was set in post–World War I Paris, a clever, erudite relationship, not Jules and Jim, but there was something good about the writing. I really liked it, but I decided not to make it, though I did want to meet the guy who wrote it. I met with him and really liked him, and some time went by and I said, “I’ve been fooling around with an idea of trying to make a movie out of Tempest.” I don’t remember when Leon came aboard during all the time I had been thinking about it, because I first talked about making it into a musical, and I’d met with Mick Jagger to play Ariel. I was gonna do it about a group of actors who travel around the Mediterranean in their own little boat from island to island, rehearsing Tempest. Then a storm comes, and they go into the play itself. I didn’t know quite how to do it. I asked myself, “In what profession or art does one dream or fantasize enough to be as crazy as I think Prospero is?” I decided it was architecture. Then Leon and I spent a lot of time discussing this idea; Leon wrote a draft, and I worked on the draft, and we just kept on writing back and forth until finally it evolved. When I got John Cassavetes for the lead, I made everything Greek, because Cassavetes is Greek, and I set it on a Greek island. When you write with Leon, does one of you have a yellow pad, does one do the typing, do you use a “beat sheet,” or what? We just talk a lot, and then one way or the other I type out a lot of scenes and a step outline. Then Leon will take it over. We have worked a little differently on some scripts; some scripts we’ve worked on, he has done all the writing by himself, and then I take his pages and do the rewriting by

246

PAUL MAZURSKY

myself. Some more than others. In the case of Tempest he wrote a version, and then I took his draft and went to Palm Springs by myself and did a lot of work on it. In the case of Moscow on the Hudson he wrote his version, and I didn’t change much—the biggest change was changing the girl from American to Italian. When we did Moon over Parador [1988], I went on a [location] scouting trip with Pato Guzman, and took Leon with me so he could see what I was looking for while we were writing the script together. In those days, one was somehow able to get money for a scout and take an extra person. Sometimes your partner who’s doing the draft goes off into places you don’t really want to go, and you have to get the script back on track. Collaboration is a process. At what point do you articulate characters and start tracking them through the story? At the beginning. When you start, you talk about what kind of guy the main character is, what’s his relationship with his wife, what’s his relationship with his daughter. You talk about that as much as you can before you start writing. In some cases, you can have a vague idea and it doesn’t become three-dimensional until you start to write, and then it only becomes really three-dimensional if, when you’re writing, you realize that you’ve done something wrong and it’s only one-dimensional. And now you’ve got to figure out precisely, “What am I gonna do here?” So you add stuff onto the character’s life—his baggage, her baggage. You don’t necessarily even write about it, you just know about it. Sometimes it works very well, and sometimes you strike out. Shakespeare begins with a tempest. You end with one. When we wrote the script it became clear, as we were fooling around, that the storm ought to be the climax of his conflicts. It’s actually, on a very simple level, a man who has stopped paying attention to his wife, who goes off and has an affair. When he gets hold of the daughter, who can’t stand the fact that her mother has had this affair, they run off together. Ariel, in the play, is a sprite, almost magical—Susan [Sarandon] is anything but that, so we made her a zaftig, funny, funky, open gal. During the course of the story Cassavetes’s craziness drives him to build an amphitheater. The climax has his estranged wife, his former employer, and their entourage arriving by boat to his island. When he sees them in the water, there is a storm. Is the storm a real storm? Did he make the storm? Is it a magical storm? He

PAUL MAZURSKY

247

thinks he made it. In any case, it’s a way to resolve the conflict that’s been burning in his brain for a year. Let’s go to Moscow on the Hudson, which I guess you’ve heard called a “sturgeon-out-of-water” story. Never heard that. Ayn Rand said, in her testimony before HUAC, that “they never smile in Russia.” Moscow on the Hudson says the same thing. Things are bad there. I got the idea for Moscow on the Hudson because I had made Willie and Phil and I was lecturing at NYU for the graduate class, and one of the people in the audience asked me what I was doing next. I said I was going to do Tempest, and he asked for a job. He was a Russian, a guy named Vladimir Tukan. He told me about someone he knew who defected from an orchestra, defected in a department store, and I suddenly saw a movie in it. It’s funny how you get these ideas. In mine, a guy was gonna defect in Bloomingdale’s: that’s all I knew when I started. Eventually I made him a circus musician, and got hold of Leon and we started plotting and writing it. We did a lot of interviews with, say, ten or fifteen Russians who had come to America—they hadn’t defected, really, but had somehow gotten out. For me the great discovery was the device of making everybody in the story an immigrant. The lawyer [Alejandro Rey] was Latino, the girl [Maria Conchita Alonso] is Italian, Robin Williams is Russian. He meets Russians, Chinese, the Jamaican in the INS office, there’s an Iranian—that’s America. It’s about my grandparents when they came here—everybody was an immigrant. Did you rewrite any of the dialogue to accommodate Robin Williams’s speech patterns? Robin was great. My main thing in directing is to leave people alone when they’re doing it right. The only time I start interfering is when they’re not doing it right, or when I feel they could be doing it better. In Robin’s case, in the early rehearsal period, I thought he was doing a little more than he had to do—shtick—and I got him off it. Your script begins with twenty or twenty-five pages in Russian. The film, however, begins in English, in America.

248

PAUL MAZURSKY

Frank Price, who paid for this script (and for the movie) said, “We got a real problem. Your first twenty pages are subtitled and 83 percent of the audience can’t read.” So I said, “Let me try to come up with a solution.” And I finally came up with it. So you added the opening scene on a New York City bus, where Vlad [Robin Williams]) gives explicit directions to a more recent immigrant— —which is in English, and then the film becomes a flashback. We also made Anatoly the clown [Elya Baskin] someone who speaks in English when they’re in Russia, because he’s defecting, so he’s learned English. So now we have scenes in English. Anatoly has a great line in the hotel room when he sees Vlad stealing toilet paper. He says, “You should care less about your ass and more about your soul.” I still see Elya Baskin, who played the clown. He’s wonderful. And he still sees Robin. Elya was very disappointed because, in the sequel we wrote, he had a very good part. In the sequel, Robin’s character is now a Yuppie. He’s got all these people in the park selling toys for him, and he treats his workers like shit. He’s got a loft in SoHo, he’s got lots of women, he’s got a BMW that says “Vlad.” He’s doing great but he’s got one problem: he has no more soul. The Russian soul is gone. He gets a call in the middle of the night from Russia, and it’s his mother telling him that his sister is getting married, and he’s got to come to the wedding. He’s terribly afraid to come back, but he does go back to Russia. The clown, now a top black market guy, picks him up in a limo. In Russia, Robin’s character meets a woman doctor and falls in love. They have a great affair, but when it’s time for him to go back to America she won’t go with him. He asks, “How can you stay here?” She says, “This is my country.” So we reverse the other film’s defection. I won’t tell you the solution. The solution could maybe be a little better, but the script was very good, and the sequel should have been done. It only could be done if Robin did it. He didn’t want to do it. That was a blow. Down and Out in Beverly Hills is one of your most financially successful films. It’s also credited with reviving the careers of Richard Dreyfuss and Bette Midler, and kicking off a new company called Touchstone Pictures. Originally the script was going to be financed by Columbia, and at the last second they backed out, so we went to Frank Price at Universal, and they

PAUL MAZURSKY

249

paid us to write it. Frank liked it very much, but he wanted a different ending, and I refused. The ending that’s in the movie is the one that I had. He wanted something more like the Nick Nolte character going off with the girl [Elizabeth Peña]. I didn’t buy that. I like Frank very much, because Frank financed Tempest, Moscow on the Hudson, and The Pickle. I will be eternally grateful to Frank. But he just had this thing in his head. So my agents said, “Look, there’s a new company starting; it’s called Touchstone. Michael Eisner and Jeff Katzenberg are leaving Paramount [for Disney]. I think everyone in town’s going to want a bite of this project, but I think they will really back it and give you freedom and sell it.” So I went with them, and they were great. The film went into production with the title “Jerry Saved from Drowning.” “Jerry Saved from Drowning” is based on Boudu Saved from Drowning [the Jean Renoir film from 1932], which was itself based on the play Boudu sauvé des eaux, a boulevard comedy by René Fauchois. I had to go back to the play, because French authors are very protected; the Writers Guild of America is always looking for that kind of protection. I realized that calling it “Jerry Saved from Drowning” was going to get us in a lot of trouble, because nobody was going to go see a film with that title, so we came up with Down and Out in Beverly Hills. I’d seen Boudu when I was in my early twenties at the Museum of Modern Art. When I got the idea for Down and Out I was living on Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills. It has those alleys where I’d go to put the garbage out. One day I was putting the garbage out and I saw a bum—a hobo, a homeless guy, whatever you want to call him—pushing a supermarket cart with a little dog in it. I thought, “My God, what if that guy is like the vagabond in Boudu—a clochard, they called him—and instead of jumping in the Seine, he jumps in a pool?” That was the idea; I had it like that. (Snaps his fingers.) So I got hold of the Renoir movie, and I called Leon [Capetanos] and told him, and we looked at the movie and we said, “God, it’s gonna work.” For the rescuer in your film you wanted someone more mundane than the bookstore owner in Renoir’s film. Someone more bourgeois. We found a hanger factory for the character [Dave Whiteman, the Richard Dreyfuss character], who has more money than he knows what to do with. Nouveau riche. I wanted to satirize myself, I wanted to satirize Beverly Hills—my wife’s not like Bette’s character and

250

PAUL MAZURSKY

I’m not like Richard’s—but aspects of us. I had two kids, two girls; I gave the Whitemans a boy and a girl. In Boudu there are no children, there’s a maid; the maid I kept, and made her a revolutionary. All that is original, but the idea came from Boudu. Actor Michel Simon’s Boudu is far more of a reprobate than Jerry [Nick Nolte] is. But Jerry’s a liar. He tells people what they want to hear, and he also seduces the guy’s wife, the guy’s daughter, the maid. He’s “out there.” He’s not Mr. Nice. I wouldn’t trust him. Nevertheless, they do invite him back into their home at the end. They do, and for the last shot of the movie Richard Dreyfuss did a brilliant thing. [As they’re all going back in], Richard looks around at nobody in particular with an expression, “What have I done?” (Laughs.) Well, what has he done? Five years ago we wrote a sequel based on that question. I’d run into people who had lost their money. That simple. They weren’t outrageously wealthy, they had led very comfortable lives, and then they were forced to reexamine the way they lived. I started to think about doing it with humor, and taking Richard and Bette down that road. In the sequel they lose all their money and they have to move into an apartment. They have to have a garage sale; Little Richard’s character buys most of the stuff to help out. Dave gets a job—finally—at Burger King. It’s funny. I had Richard Dreyfuss and Bette lined up, and [Touchstone] passed on it. These morons passed. I was flabbergasted. Quote me.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Do you worry about the notes that studio executives give you to “improve” your scripts? I haven’t suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous notes. Don’t forget, I had a period of enormous power. For example, when I did Down and Out in Beverly Hills, I gave the script to [Jeffrey] Katzenberg and [Michael] Eisner, I went in, and we had one meeting where they had four notes. I never heard another note. And they were not written down. But I hear stories now! It’s unbelievable. Writers get twenty-five pages of notes now.

PAUL MAZURSKY

251

If they like the script enough to buy it, why don’t they shoot it? Why do they want to change it? You’re dealing with a combination of things that have to do with the studio executive being a meaningless person if he doesn’t contribute, and he contributes by giving notes. All those years I didn’t have that. They were afraid. They’d think, “I’m not gonna tell the guy that made Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice what to do.” If you don’t make a hit, they’re not afraid. Like Down and Out, Moon over Parador is also based on another film. Had you seen The Magnificent Fraud [1939]? Yes. Some guy called my office, and my secretary at that time said, “There’s a weird guy on the phone. He’s calling and saying he has the rights to bad movies.” That sounded funny, so I said, “Put him on. Yes?” “I have the rights to a lot of movies that were failures but I think have great ideas.” “Tell me one or two.” So he tells me one or two, and they’re ridiculous movies. I’m about to hang up when he says, “Then there’s one with Akim Tamiroff”—whom I happen to love—“about a dictator who dies and is impersonated by an actor.” I said, “Come over to my office.” My idea was basically very close to The Magnificent Fraud.11 Leon saw the movie with me, he loved it, we pitched it together, we went in and talked to, I think, Frank Price, and the next thing you know, we had a script. Raul Julia’s characterization as the autocratic “man behind the throne” is different in the film than is written in the script. He’s much crazier. At what point did you change it? Well, I’d always had that craziness in mind. To me, it’s there in the script. I told Raul to dye his hair blond, which he did—the only way we could justify the character: he’s a Nazi. And it worked. This was a man who was capable of killing. That’s all there is to it. You have to go along with the masquerade, or he’ll kill you. Raul was wonderful. My favorite line in the movie—and one of my favorites of any movie of mine—is his dying line, “I hate actors.” He was angry, crazy, and charming. And Fernando Rey . . .

252

PAUL MAZURSKY

Fernando is certainly one of the two or three greatest guys I ever worked with. I treated him, not just with kid gloves, but with divine adoration—I mean, he was in all those Luis Buñuel films. We had a few days of rehearsal, and one day he says to me [flawless Spanish accent], “Paul, I know that you have nothing but the greatest respect for me—” I said, “Well, I do, Fernando.” “Nevertheless, I would appreciate it if you would treat me like the dog, cur, actor that I am. Just shout out to me what to do.” The sex scene between Jack [Richard Dreyfuss] and Madonna [Sonia Braga] is a lot tamer on film than in the script. I don’t think I did that as well as I could’ve. I think it could have been hotter. It certainly wasn’t the fault of Sonia. It was a tricky scene. Doing a sex scene is hard, especially keeping the tone of the picture light. If I had it to do over, I would have, first of all, made the room darker. It should have been difficult to see faces. It was overlit. Secondly, it was too comical with his mustache going [off-kilter]. But once they got past that, it was a great scene. The film is about a deception on top of a deception. How far can you take that, because the audience surely knows the setup when they buy their tickets? It’s a farce, but I wanted it to be believable. When the studio saw this movie they were scared. If I remember, Tom Pollack, who was running [Universal Pictures] then, wanted me to take out all the New York [framing material] and have no flashbacks. Which I wouldn’t do, the point being that what the movie is about—and it has several levels of what it’s about—is that it’s really inspired by the fact that Ronald Reagan was our president. An actor becoming president of the United States of America! An actor is such a desperate human being that he’ll do anything to play a part. Anything. One of the great scenes is when Richard’s brought into the meat locker by Raul, and he’s trying to get out because this madman is crazy—and Raul starts reading him his reviews. That’s enough to keep any actor in the room: “By the way, they left out that I . . .” Richard did that magnificently. The movie’s about deception, role-playing, all of that stuff. To do it without New York was just a joke.

PAUL MAZURSKY

253

Moon over Parador was your first real foray into political satire per se. You had always been more at home in social satire. Yes. Down and Out had some critics who were very square, like the kind you get in the [Los Angeles] Free Press, saying, “He’s making fun of homeless people.” They just didn’t get the joke; they were so intent on being liberal that they didn’t understand that I was really showing you how disgusting it is to be homeless and broke and eating dog food in the alleys. I show all of it, but I don’t say, “Oh, these poor homeless people!” I put my politics in through the story. In Moon over Parador I had scenes in the socalled favelas where the junta is burning the homes, and somebody wrote one review—it’s the only one I remember—of me “making light” of the terrible problems in Latin America. You can’t win! Enemies, A Love Story is almost Jewish cinema. When does Jewish cinema become mainstream? Well, I don’t see it as Jewish cinema. I see Enemies, A Love Story as a great novel by a great writer who happens to be Jewish. And, of course, I identify with a lot of feelings in it, even though I am an atheist. I’m Jewish, and I feel very attached to things Jewish culturally, and very confused about certain other things, and I can tear up very easily when my granddaughter comes home from the school she goes to, and I say, “What did you learn today, Molly?” and she says, “Oh, today we learned some songs.” (Singing in ersatz Hebrew) “Shoyvel a hoim vella heem meeneyvoh . . .” Well, a big tear starts to roll down the right eye. Isaac Bashevis Singer is a great writer, and one of the big frustrations of my career has been not being able to make a film of Shosha, which is another great Singer book that I had the rights to and couldn’t find the money. But Enemies is a great novel, and that’s why I did it. I got interested in the book in 1970 but got no response. I forgot about it, and over the years I would make a movie, smell around a little bit [to see] if anyone was interested in Enemies, get nowhere, do another movie, till finally I did Down and Out in Beverly Hills for Disney, and they liked it so much, and they had underpaid me so much, that they felt guilty and they said, “Sure, Enemies, do it.” I don’t think they knew what it was. The way I pitched it was a comedy about a guy with three wives. When they read the script, they shit! It was like, “Jesus Christ, does it have to be this, does it have to be that?” I said, “Yes it does.” “Can’t you update it?” That’s what Michael Eisner said to me. I said, “It’s pretty hard to update the Holocaust, Michael, unless you want me to set it in Cambodia and have it in New York with Cambodians living here.”

254

PAUL MAZURSKY

How did you and Roger Simon realize the writing? Who did the breakdown? First we talked about it a lot. A lot of time talking. Then we had copies of the book which we put pencil marks around. I would say that I was more “in charge” of that, in that I would suggest deep cuts from the book—we can’t show this, we can’t show that—but our collaboration was wonderful. Roger really wrote the first draft. There’s no two ways about it. My biggest contribution was cutting. The dialogue is mostly right out of the book, and the changes we made in the dialogue were when we felt it was something very difficult to say. You and he flipped the ending so that the movie ends on an appropriate and more upbeat tone than the book. The book, to me, was so open-ended that I had no idea [what the ending meant]. I wasn’t really sure, and I must have read it ten times. I had originally written, with Roger, a scene in Miami where Herman [Ron Silver] is writing this letter to Yadwiga [Margaret Sophie Stein] in a motel around a pool, one of those Miami dumps, and a chick walks by who looks kind of cute in one of those period bathing suits. That was all. But I decided, finally, that the only way to give completion to the story—and it was a gamble— was to show the death of Masha [Lena Olin], which is certainly one of the great scenes, certainly, in anything I’ve ever done: her suicide scene. I can’t look at it. And then you see the cemetery. Very bare, very austere. Then the birth of the child—we’re feeling better now, at least Yadwiga had a baby, but we’re not sure where we’re going.We see the letter from Herman, and the twenty dollars—and we learn the baby’s named Masha.Then I go for the music and to the Coney Island Ferris wheel, and that’s the movie. Well, it worked. It’s probably the best-cast movie I ever made.There’s no mistakes. Lena and Ron Silver—I saw Ron in a play in New York written by David Mamet about show business and I loved him—Margaret Stein, whom I found through Agnieszka Holland—and Anjelica Huston; I saw her very early on, and we met twice, and that was it. It’s one of her great performances. They were the perfect cast, and [studio head] Joe Roth went with it. It’s also very sexy without being explicit. I didn’t do it to promote how brave the Jews were, but I did it hoping to understand that Jews were sexual, sensual, and all of the other stuff that

PAUL MAZURSKY

255

we’re used to seeing the goyim do: affairs, cheating, lying, everything. I have a sex scene between Lena Olin and Ron Silver. He and Lena come into a bedroom, they shut the door—the mother is in the other room—and it’s silent. You don’t hear one word. You hear the El train, and he starts to kiss and grope her, and he picks up her skirt and takes her onto the bed and gets her dress off and begins to pull her brassiere off and suck her breasts. The camera gets closer and closer—it was hot! In fact, just telling it to you, I’m getting moisture . . . Despite Disney okaying the writing of the script, they dropped the project, and it was picked up by James Robinson of Morgan Creek Productions, who took it over to 20th Century-Fox. How supportive were they? I’ll never forget the first time I showed it in a room with eight or nine people. Roger [Simon] had never seen it. He gasped. It was very moving. And the studio head, Joe Roth, said, “It’s a masterpiece. Don’t touch it.” Then we screened it for a test audience, and it got the lowest marks in the history of marks. Like “35”—beneath contempt. Where was that second screening? At 20th Century-Fox, for two hundred people. A focus group? A focus group. Aagh. Two hundred people, and it got a 35. So I said to Joe, “I’m giving up show business. The best thing for me to do is get out of the business. Joe, I’m not capable of changing this movie.” He said, “I don’t want you to. I don’t want any changes. What this means, Paul, is that 35 percent of the audiences out there want to see this movie. We don’t need any more than 35 percent of the millions of people who might see this movie. It’s a dark movie. I’m happy with 35 percent. Don’t change a frame. I’m happy with it. We need reviews—we’ll get ’em.” And that’s what happened. In later years, I’ve had other dealings with the same Joe Roth—who I still like, by the way, he’s a nice man—and he has turned me down on so many things, I can’t figure it out. But he and Jim Robinson [Roth’s partner] are very proud of that movie; that’s their claim to art.

256

PAUL MAZURSKY

MODERN PROBLEMS

Moving a world away, in Scenes from a Mall [1991], a longtime married couple—Woody Allen and Bette Midler—come clean with each other about their mutual affairs and wind up strangely closer for it. Roger Simon and I had a wonderful time writing that script. Roger is very fast. We had just done Enemies, A Love Story, and were exhausted from the Holocaust and a man with three wives. I think I came up with the notion— but Roger was there, too, I guarantee it—of two people in a mall, and everything taking place there, with two confessions. That was our idea, and we wrote it by pitching back and forth in a room, doing scenes; he would write it out, and we would pitch again and polish. As we wrote the script, I’m thinking of Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep. I get a call from [agent] Sam Cohn that [Michael] Eisner called him ’cause Eisner heard that Woody was looking for a movie because, Sam says, Woody is looking for a payday. I said, “I don’t know. Woody, he’s got to play this real guy, and he’s always Woody. Meryl and Woody? I don’t know . . .” Then I get a call from Eisner himself: reunite Bette and me, and then try to get Woody. I go through the whole thing in my head, and it’s an almost irresistible thing to work with those two people. So I send the script to Woody Allen, and in less than a day he says yes. Bette says yes. I’m off and running, but the tone of my picture has changed. [Originally] it was a more serious—funny, but slightly more serious—exploration. But I wanted it to be more funny. Woody brings a lot of baggage. I think his audience has trouble accepting him as anything but Woody. They want him to be That Guy, which he does [so well]. It became a very heavy idea: a double confession in the confessional of the twenty-first century, the mall. The mall is where we go now for everything. We go to the mall to find sex, to find food, to see human beings, to shop, to see movies. Seeing Woody Allen in a ponytail carrying a surfboard is the definition of culture clash. It’s already hilarious. He didn’t want to wear a ponytail, but he did everything else for me. The Pickle, which is the last of your scripts you’ve directed to date, is a companion piece to Alex in Wonderland. Have you ever felt as creatively compromised as Danny Aiello’s character does in the film? 12

PAUL MAZURSKY

257

In the movies that I have made, all of them, no studio ever forced me to compromise. Ever. The only trouble I ever had in postproduction was Faithful [1996], but the movie that came out was my movie. No, I didn’t feel compromised. I felt elated that I had a chance to make a movie about a guy who was making a movie about a flying cucumber. Arguably, Harry Stone [Aiello’s character] does, in fact, commit suicide at the end. He doesn’t, though. He’s saved. The way I see it, the utter irony is that he’s prepared to kill himself—and he really means it because he’s made a piece of shit to make money—but when he’s told that the piece of shit is gonna be a hit because the audience loves it, he not only runs out with a certain kind of joy, he’s on his way to pitching his next movie, and he’s back to work. Movie directors are like that. We constantly die and are reborn. The Pickle’s a very tricky movie but, again, it was sold like death. It was a small movie with Danny Aiello to begin with, not a big movie with John Travolta or kickboxing. It’s not gonna open strong anyway. You have to do what you always used to do in the past: you find a rabbi. That’s what they used to do with tough movies. Find a “rabbi”? You find a critic who will champion it. A rabbi. Faithful is the first movie you directed that you didn’t write.13 Well, Faithful was written by Chazz Palminteri. It had been a play, and Chazz had played the lead [of the hit man]. After The Pickle I was sitting around doing my usual: trying to get [Bernard Malamud’s novel] Pictures of Fidelman made, and one or two others. I got a call about Faithful, I read it, and I liked it. I always try to go by my first reaction to anything. I met with Bob De Niro [producer], Chazz Palminteri, and Frank Price; we cast Cher and took a big chance on Ryan O’Neal. Dark comedy; almost all of it set in one house. I played the psychiatrist, the part that they later made a whole movie [Analyze This, 1999] out of with Billy Crystal and Bob De Niro. We had a delightful shoot. Then I found out, after I had finished cutting it, that Cher and Bob saw it, and they didn’t like it. Chazz seemed to have liked it, but Bob’s his pal and then he didn’t like it, and they let Cher recut it. I can’t tell you the rest because it all worked out—it’s just not cricket of me. (Sighs.) It all worked out, and my cut is the one that you saw.

258

PAUL MAZURSKY

You had threatened to take your name off it, to do an Alan Smithee.14 I didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m very sorry it happened because once the word gets out that a film is going through something like that, it’s pretty much dead in this business. It was unfortunate, and it left a bad taste. Did you have input in the script? The script is all Chazz Palminteri’s. If I wanted to change a line or a word, Chazz was there. My big job in directing the picture, in a way, was that this guy had already played the part on stage, and I, at times, wanted certain other elements from it.

ON WRITING

How, physically, has your writing changed? Did you start with pencil and paper, typewriter— I used to work with a pad and a pencil and outline the story. Then I’d go to a typewriter. I type fifty-five words a minute. Outlines, a lot of pencil, yellow pad, throw it away, tap out a step outline. I used to type the script, make a couple of copies, go to the desert, and cut and paste using a scissors and Scotch tape. Then I’d rewrite, shape, throw out, all that stuff. Later the computer made all that obsolete. Do you have set hours and force yourself to do x pages a day? My tendency has been to write in the morning when I have the most energy. I would get to my office, I would say by nine thirty or ten, and write till about one. Straight through? Sometimes nothing—one word. Sometimes seven pages—very rarely. But I always like to leave knowing that, tomorrow when I come in, I can start with x. I manage to do that about half the time. I’ll have that next day’s idea in my head. Do you then reread everything you’ve written, before starting again the next day? I don’t plan to, but I often do. I find myself going back two pages, then saying, “Wait a second.” Then I try to get a run at it. One of the reasons for

PAUL MAZURSKY

259

doing that is that you have thirty minutes less to write; you’ll do anything to delay. You’ll sharpen a pencil for thirty minutes. “I want to sharpen all my pencils. I don’t want to sharpen one pencil. Not only that, the chair is so low somehow and I can’t find a screwdriver . . .” Finally it’s already noon, thank God. I’ve done a lot of that, I really have. They always say that you want to start at the last possible moment in a scene that the audience can still follow it. Who says that? The people who write all the books about screenwriting. They don’t know. They don’t know. I’ll get killed for this, but I’m against a lot of those books. There are no rules! Structure? For every movie you show me, I’ll show you one that defies every one of those rules and yet is a great movie. Do scripts have to hit a certain “reveal” on page 30, must there be something that happens on page 66— I only go by the movies I see. If the guy or woman who wrote the movie I saw did a great job, and they were helped or influenced by one of these people, fine. But most of the movies I see are not very good, so they couldn’t’ve gotten much help if they were going to these people. Do you say your lines out loud as you’re writing them? Sometimes I say the whole script out loud before I hand it in. By the time I reach a first draft, I’ve already gone through it, talking it. One advantage I have is that I’m an actor, but many of the roles I’ve played [for other people] over the years, you can’t say some of the words. It’s impossible to physically say them without getting your tongue caught in your mouth. Obviously whoever wrote those didn’t know you’ve got to say them out loud first. After all of this, do you still like writing? I sure like the idea of writing. It’s the most difficult thing for me. And I may be at that age when I get a lot of ideas but don’t finish them. I have notes on a variety of stories. I have a movie idea about a sculptor who is about sixty, and becomes obsessed with the fact that people he doesn’t think that much of are just starting to die and are getting these fantastic obituaries. He doesn’t

260

PAUL MAZURSKY

understand why, because they’re not really good artists. And he starts to obsess on his own obituary.Then he starts to reach the point where he wants to read his obituary. Does it exist? And he finds out, of course, the New York Times has his obituary already written, but he isn’t allowed to read it, so he gets even more obsessed. He develops this ploy, and he gets to read it. And, by God, it’s not nearly as good as some of the other obituaries . . . I won’t tell you the rest.

NOTES 1

Director Karel Reisz and Gavin Millar wrote The Technique of Film Editing (London: Focal Press, 1968). Playwright and screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, wrote several books about filmmaking, including Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (New York: Putnam’s, 1949) and Film: The Creative Process (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964).

2

The screen credit on The Monkees reads “Developed by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker.” BBS Productions was formed in 1965 by Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner. The success of The Monkees fueled BBS’s distinguished roster of films, including Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), Head (1968), and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972).

3

The late James Aubrey, dubbed “The Smiling Cobra,” ran MGM from 1969 until he was fired in 1973. During that time his draconian management style earned him a reputation as one of the most destructive studio heads in Hollywood history.

4

Attributed to Danny Thomas, the “jack story” involves a man who is going to a neighbor’s house to borrow a jack for his car. He works himself into such a frenzy over whether his neighbor will lend him the jack that the moment the neighbor opens the door, the man screams, “Oh, yeah? Well, you can keep your stinking jack!”

5

Mazursky plays an unctuous, oh-too-hip producer in Alex in Wonderland.

6

“Payday” is Hollywood parlance for wanting to do a film merely for the money.

7

Art Carney not only beat out Dustin Hoffman for Lenny (1974). He also beat out Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (1974), Al Pacino in The Godfather, Part II (1974), and Albert Finney for Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

8

Harry (Carney) visits an old flame (Fitzgerald), who, he discovers, is hospitalized with Alzheimer’s disease and thinks he is someone else whom she once loved— not Harry.

9

“Geshrying” is an Americanized Yiddish term for complaining or bemoaning in an overly demonstrative manner.

PAUL MAZURSKY

261

10

Happy with her married life just before it crumbles, Erica Benton (Clayburgh) imagines herself a ballerina and prances around her bedroom.

11

In The Magnificent Fraud, Akim Tamiroff plays an actor who poses as a South American dictator.

12

In The Pickle, Danny Aiello plays a once-respected personal filmmaker who feels he has “sold out” by directing a youth-market film.

13

Faithful is about a hit man (Chazz Palminteri) hired by husband Ryan O’Neal to kill his rich wife (Cher). The hit man becomes unexpectedly involved in their marital dispute.

14

Alan Smithee is the Directors Guild of America’s official pseudonym for a director who takes his name off his film.

INTERVIEW BY FRED TOPEL

NANCY MEYERS LATE BLOOMER

ancy Meyers was once part of the Meyers/Shyer writing team that produced hits like Private Benjamin (1980) and Father of the Bride (1991). Partnered with writer-director Charles Shyer until their divorce, she began a directing career with their last collaborative script, The Parent Trap (1998). She also directed the popular What Women Want (2000), based on her rewrite of the original script, and then soared to greater success with Something’s Gotta Give (2003), which paired Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson in a romantic comedy with a demographic not usually explored by Hollywood—those over fifty. Something’s Gotta Give began as “Untitled Nancy Meyers Project.” The script told the story of Harry Sanborn (Nicholson), a perennial bachelor who only dates women under the age of thirty. On what was to have been a romantic weekend with his latest infatuation, Marin (Amanda Peet), at her mother’s Hamptons beach house, Harry develops chest pains. Marin’s mother, Erica (Keaton), a successful, divorced playwright, reluctantly agrees to nurse him back to health. Once they are alone together, Harry is surprised to find himself drawn to Erica, and Erica is equally surprised to find herself rediscovering love. Romantic complications arise when Erica is pursued by Harry’s charming thirty-something doctor (Keanu Reeves).

N

262

NANCY MEYERS

263

Meyers gave this interview while still finishing the film. I reached her by cell phone on her way to drop off her daughter at school, then head to the editing room.The finished product was embraced by critics and crowds alike. It sold nearly $125 million in tickets in the United States alone, Diane Keaton’s performance was Oscar-nominated, and Meyers, a late bloomer as a “hyphenate,” emerged as one of the hottest writer-directors in Hollywood.

NANCY MEYERS (1949–)

1980 1984

1987 1991 1992 1994 1995 1996 1998 2000 2003

Private Benjamin (Howard Zieff). Co-producer, co-script (with Charles Shyer).1 Irreconcilable Differences (Charles Shyer). Co-script (with Shyer). Protocol (Herbert Ross). Co-script (with Shyer). Baby Boom (Charles Shyer). Co-producer, co-script (with Shyer). Father of the Bride (Charles Shyer). Co-producer, co-script (with Shyer).2 Once Upon a Crime (Eugene Levy). Co-script (with Shyer).3 I Love Trouble (Charles Shyer). Co-producer, co-script (with Shyer). Father of the Bride II (Charles Shyer). Co-producer, co-script (with Shyer). Ted Hawkins: Amazing Grace (documentary by Janice Engel). Associate producer. The Parent Trap (Nancy Meyers). Director, co-script (with Shyer).4 What Women Want (Nancy Meyers). Producer, director, uncredited script contribution. Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers). Producer, director, script.

Television includes Private Benjamin (1981 series based on her characters); Baby Boom (1988 series based on her characters); and A Place to Be Loved (associate producer of 1993 telefilm). Academy Award honors include a Best Script nomination for Private Benjamin (with Charles Shyer and Harvey Miller).

264

NANCY MEYERS

NANCY MEYERS (RIGHT) ON THE SET OF SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE WITH DIANE KEATON.

How did you decide on the title? Oh, because it was “Untitled”? I never did really. It got to the point where [Columbia/Sony Pictures executive] Jeff Blake came to me and said, “You’ve got to pick a title.” And I tried my hardest to get him to put a trailer out with no title because I don’t really think you remember the title on a trailer. I just think you say you want to see the Jack Nicholson/Diane Keaton movie. You don’t necessarily leave the theater remembering the title of those seven movies you just saw trailers of. So, pretty much I was told I had to lock in on something and that was sort of the title du jour. I’m not convinced it’s a great title for the movie. Where did it come from in the first place? It came from the teaser trailer. They used the song “Something’s Gotta Give” in the teaser trailer, which made us think of it as a title for the movie. Seriously, that was sort of the last one we’d all talked about. It happened sort of at the time when we said we have to pick a title. How does a romantic comedy present a unique view of relationships when there are so many out there?

NANCY MEYERS

265

Well, this is a movie about people falling in love late in life. I wouldn’t be comfortable writing it in any way other than as a romantic comedy. I think it’s how I write, so to me there was no choice in should it be a drama or should it be a romantic comedy. I think as a drama it’d probably have very few people going to see it. Does it take a woman to write a story about older couples? I don’t know. It took a woman, but I don’t know if it takes a woman. I mean, I haven’t seen any other scripts like this. I don’t know that a man couldn’t write a movie on the subject. I don’t think he would write one like this one because this movie is very much from Diane’s character’s point of view as well as from Jack’s, and I would imagine if a man were writing it the woman would be more of a secondary character who came into his life, and he actually comes into her life. When you get actors like Nicholson and Keaton, do they take over the characters? Take over? You mean, do they embody them? Did either of them do something drastically different than you imagined for the characters? Not at all. No, no, no. I wrote with them in mind, so they performed it as I had hoped and certainly beyond my dreams in terms of their ability to be so natural at it. At times, I watch the movie, and I think they’re making it up. They have incredible chemistry and they’re great actors. And they can say a written line like it’s not written. That’s really wonderful. I think they’re both not dissimilar. There are parts of them that are in these characters, so I think that was a really good thing for us all. Did you know you had them when you were writing? No, I didn’t. I knew that they were both interested, but not until they read it, I didn’t have them. Does knowing you’re going to direct change the way you write? No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’m pretty specific even with myself. So I follow the script very, very carefully. I rarely deviate from how I describe how the scene takes place. I don’t write it as a blueprint and then improvise on

266

NANCY MEYERS

that when I get there. I would. I’m not rigid about it. But I don’t just use it as a blueprint. I very carefully follow what I wrote because I’m the most sane about the script when I’m writing. Once you start directing, there are so many other things that come into your life every day in terms of just moviemaking, that when I look at the script and I see how I described she’s sitting in the chair and what her attitude is, it just locks me back into what the scene has to be. And I write those things in the script so I get them and they [the actors] do them. Everybody knows what’s happening in the scene. Were there any revisions on this film? Hardly. Word changes, or if I couldn’t get a location that’s exactly what I wrote, I’ll rewrite it to sound like a location I’m in. But there was no substantial rewriting at all. Is this the first script you’ve written solo? An original, yeah. I did a massive rewrite on What Women Want by myself, massive. But it’s the first original script I’ve written by myself, yes. How is the process different than a collaboration? Well, it’s much lonelier. And when I worked with Charles, we talked and talked and talked for months, just talking. I sort of don’t know another way to do it; so I ended up just writing, and writing all the conversations, because I needed to say those things and I didn’t want to actually, obviously, talk out loud. I would write my side of our conversation—what would have been a conversation with a collaborator. And by doing that, it was really very helpful, because I ended up with an eighty-eight-page outline that turned into the script. So, it’s interesting writing alone, because you can never get off the hook. You can never toss the ball to somebody else, or you can never say that is a bad idea, hoping they’ll make it into a good idea. It’s like playing tennis with a wall. It just keeps coming back to you, so you’re pushing yourself all the time. There’s never anybody else to ease the load, and I found it exhausting actually. But you also get to have your own ideas remain in a purer way. Did any of your conversations get long, or did they stay within reasonable scene length?

NANCY MEYERS

267

Long? Oh God, my first draft was exactly 250 pages. I didn’t have brads5 deep enough, long enough to get through the script. How did you cut that down? It took me about eight or nine drafts. Just keep going. I think from the first draft to the second, I cut about seventy pages. It’s just like making the movie. I’m now editing it, and I thought, “How am I going to get two hours and forty-five minutes down to two hours?” It was the same kind of thing again. How do you do it? You just start tearing away at it, and you can’t do it all at once. It’s impossible to see what it is at first. You just keep taking away and taking away, and it begins to shape up. Story, you know—you just keep following story. Is any of the story semiautobiographical? Yes. She’s a writer. She writes romantic comedies. She’s a playwright. She’s single. She’s divorced. She’s a mother. And she finds herself in a relationship late in life, and all those things have happened to me. I am a lot of the things she is. Our bios are not that different. But the situation that happened to her, and how it happened to her, never happened to me. What is your writing regimen? Usually I begin around ten, write till about seven. I put in a long day. I’ll take a walk, I eat at a certain time. This script was exhausting to me, because it is more personal, and I did fall asleep every day after lunch for about twenty minutes. And then I’d regenerate after that. I have a pretty rigid kind of schedule that I kept to. I did that for about ten months. Has that schedule changed over the years? Did it used to be lighter? No. My work with Charles . . . we put in long hours. We really did, always. What drives your writing—character, story, or theme? All of it, really. I don’t always know any of those things in the beginning. I don’t always know what the theme is. I have something I sort of want to say, but it evolves. It’s a process. It’s always interesting to see what it becomes, what it is I really do want to say. It isn’t always crystal clear in the

268

NANCY MEYERS

beginning. And the characters of course have to evolve and help tell that story, so they all work together. Did Something’s Gotta Give start out as something different than it ended up? Well, yeah. I don’t have it all in my head at first, so it does, because I remember when I pitched it to Jack, I really only had the idea up through the first act. And I knew that they would end up together, but I didn’t really know how I would get that to happen. And the character played by Keanu Reeves evolved when I felt the need for another character. He wasn’t crystal clear to me at first, who he was going to be. I did want a younger man. I wanted the Diane [Keaton] character to have a relationship with a younger man, but I didn’t know how to integrate him into the movie. He ended up becoming Jack’s doctor, because Jack has a heart attack. So it became a really nice way for them to always see each other, because Jack’s recuperating in her house. So it brought them together. But I didn’t have all that, at first. How important to you is format? Are you by the book? Is there any other way to do it? I totally stick to it. I’ve seen some that deviate. How much can a writer play with that? I don’t know why you’d have a desire to play with it. I think the format gives you your boundaries. You know what it’s supposed to look like and what it’s supposed to read like. It’s never crossed my mind to alter that. There’s no advantage to changing the format, I don’t think. Was it ever hard to let Charles direct your material? No, not at all. He’s been enormously collaborative. I suppose had he been one day my writing partner and the next day “the director,” that would have been difficult, but he never really ever made it feel like we weren’t continuing to work as a team. What did it take to get your first directing gig? I had wanted my children to be old enough where it would be okay for me to work those hours. I wasn’t really comfortable doing it until they reached a certain age. I don’t love producing. I don’t think it’s the great job on a

NANCY MEYERS

269

movie certainly, so at a certain point I got a little bored with it and wanted to step up to the plate. He [Charles] knew that, and he understood, and he felt I had been there as his partner all these years. It was time to switch hats. So between us, it was fine. And we had written a screenplay called “Love Crazy” that Disney gave the go-ahead to, and that was the one I was supposed to direct, but the casting fell through on it at the last minute. And I think maybe we had already written The Parent Trap, or we were going to do Parent Trap and someone else was going to direct it. I think that’s what the plan was. We had written it and were going to produce it and get someone else to direct it. When “Love Crazy” fell through, I really did want to direct, so I jumped into that. And I had a ten-year-old daughter at the time, and it was really a great thing for her that I was doing that [film], and that meant a lot to me. Have you learned about directing from being on film sets? I’ve only been on the sets of my films. I’ve never really had access to anybody else’s movies, and I learned everything that way. Should all screenwriters try to direct? I think if they feel a need to, they should try to, yes. If they’re comfortable having someone else direct their material, and they’re okay with that, writing is a great life. Directing is not a great life. So if they’re okay with that . . . I wouldn’t be okay with that. But if someone else can accept what will happen to their movie . . . even with great intentions, it [the script] will change. It will change, and if they’re okay with that, then I shouldn’t say everybody needs to, but I think it is the final draft—getting to direct the movie. What made movies like Father of the Bride a hit with audiences, and movies like I Love Trouble [1994] and Once Upon a Crime [1992] less successful? I think Father of the Bride really touched people, and I think it related to family, and I think Steve [Martin] was perfectly cast in it. It was pretty funny, and I think it confirmed the best in us. It was sort of an idealized family, and how we all would like to be in a world where dysfunctional families are always put on the screen. It was not a dysfunctional family, and I think there are a lot of families that are not dysfunctional, where there is that kind of love. And it was a movie about a father’s love for his daughter,

270

NANCY MEYERS

and I think that is a very real thing. I think fathers liked seeing it, it confirmed that men are great fathers, and I think that girls love being the object of that kind of love. I Love Trouble I think never had a chance. We had a very unfortunate relationship with the star [ Julia Roberts], and we were really unable to execute the script the way we saw it. So it was a very unusual situation for us. It was the only noncollaborative relationship we ever had with an actress, and as a result everybody got screwed. Nobody got to do their best work. And Once Upon a Crime is a movie we did a rewrite on. I never saw the movie. It was a quick rewrite job. I guess we did enough work to get credit, but it was not a film that I’m familiar with. How careful are you when you rewrite other people’s scripts? I don’t know what you mean by being careful with it. If I’m being asked to rewrite something, it’s because what’s there generally does not work and will not get made without the work that I do on it. For example, What Women Want was not a movie that was going to get made. That had a terrific idea, and I thought the execution wasn’t good enough, and the characters weren’t good enough; so I felt I had the liberty to change it. It’s what I was being asked to do. What was different about the original script? The only characters I kept were a male lead and a teenage daughter. I added the others: Helen [Hunt’s] character, the boss, the secretaries, the assistant, the friend, the suicide girl . . . I don’t think I kept any of the dialogue, not that I can remember.6 I kept the premise of a man who worked in advertising, who had an accident and could hear what women were thinking, but the story changed substantially. Who would he have hooked up with, if not the Helen Hunt character? In the original, he was dating a girl who was a struggling photographer, who worked in a coffee shop. She was a waitress, I think. How has comedy changed since the 1980s? I don’t know that it has. I mean, my first movie was 1980: Private Benjamin. And I don’t really feel that the movie I just finished writing is very different comedically from it at all. There’s a lot of great people writing

NANCY MEYERS

271

PRIVATE BENJAMIN , STARRING GOLDIE HAWN.THE FIRST SHYER/MEYERS

SCRIPT TO BE FILMED WAS OSCAR-NOMINATED IN 1980.

comedy now, but it’s different, I suppose. There are no restrictions on anything now, obviously. The There’s Something about Mary [1998] kind of comedy—which I thought was absolutely brilliant and hilarious—was not a movie that would have gotten made twenty years ago. I think it’s been very freeing, actually, to lose some of these restrictions. Is it the same as a Billy Wilder comedy? No, it’s different. It’s just different. There’s more jokes and less charm, I would say, in comedy over the years. It’s more jokeoriented, I suppose. Big ideas, big-premise ideas, big set pieces. But I think there’s always room for a different kind of comedy. Over the weekend, I was watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles [1987], and it was just so hilarious, so wonderful. There hasn’t been a movie like that in a long time—that kind of comedy. Splash [1984] was a great comedy from the eighties. Big [1988] was a great comedy. Broadcast News

272

NANCY MEYERS

[1987] was a great comedy in the eighties. Pretty classy movies, pretty elegantly written. But I find American Pie [1999]—I haven’t seen the other two, but the first one—hilarious, just absolutely hilarious. But it’s different, obviously quite different. Forgive the cliché, but did you face any challenges being a female writer? Well, for almost twenty years I was in a partnership with a man, so I don’t know what it would’ve been like as a woman with a solo career. And I don’t know if it would’ve been more difficult. I know in the beginning, back in the early eighties, I did feel protected by Charles, as a filmmaking team. But in terms of writing, I didn’t feel any prejudice. I think Hollywood likes a good script. I don’t think they’re going to care who writes it. I think if you begin to feel that prejudice, then you join the ranks of producing and directing. I never can really remember in any studio meetings where any executives would defer to Charles. I don’t remember that being true. Would you ever write with Charles again? No, that’s not going to happen. We’re not a writing team anymore. We haven’t written anything for five years and we’ve taken different paths actually. He’s just written a screenplay with Elaine Pope that’s a remake of Alfie. It’s terrific. He’s got Jude Law, and he’s directing that now. Any advice for up-and-coming screenwriters? I think it’s a mistake to write something you think people will like, or a combination idea, or this year’s version of last year’s movie. I don’t think you’ll ever get noticed doing that. I think you’re only going to get noticed by following your own instincts and doing original work, and writing the thing that only you can write.

NOTES 1

Harvey Miller cowrote Private Benjamin with Shyer and Meyers; Miller and Buck Henry cowrote Protocol with Shyer and Meyers.

2

Father of the Bride (and its sequel) was based on the Frances Goodrich–Albert Hackett script for the original 1950 MGM film.

NANCY MEYERS

273

3

Steve Kluger is also credited on the script for Once Upon a Crime, which was based on the 1960 Italian film Crimen with a script by Rodolfo Sonego, Giorgio Arlorio, Stefano Strucchi, and Luciano Vincenzoni.

4

The remake of The Parent Trap was based on David Swift’s script for the original 1961 Disney film.

5

“Brads” are the metal inserts that you stick in, bending the prongs back, in order to bind three-hole-punch paper together into a script.

6

The “suicide girl” in What Women Want is a file clerk in Mel Gibson’s office who he has always ignored; he goes to her apartment the day she is missing from work, to save her.

INTERVIEW BY NAT SEGALOFF

JOHN MILIUS THE GOOD FIGHTS

lot of the principles by which I live were dead before I was born,” John Milius sighs between puffs on the cigar he isn’t supposed to be smoking in his two-room Warner Bros. suite overlooking a parking lot full of BMWs, SUVs, and Porsches. The secluded bungalow also houses the offices of producer Mark Canton and actor-director Clint Eastwood, and compared with their palatial spreads, Milius’s digs are positively spartan. On his walls hang obligatory posters for his films, which include Conan the Barbarian (1982), Big Wednesday (1978), Red Dawn (1984), and The Wind and the Lion (1975). The rest of his office is filled with military artifacts, photos, plaques, and mementos, most of which might be more at home in the Pentagon than a movie studio. There are also shelves of books, ranging from literature to politics, that you just know have actually been read. In short, Milius’s headquarters are a cross between a tree fort and Elba, reflecting his demimonde status as a Hollywood insider who is treated like

A

“

These interviews took place between June 2000 and February 2001, although some material is drawn from earlier sessions. Grateful acknowledgment is extended to Valarie Schwan, Film Archives, USC School of Cinema-Television; Faye Thompson, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Walt von Hauffe; Anne Strick; Karl Fasick; and Bruce Bartoo. Particular thanks to Leonard Brady, John Milius's assistant since 1987, for access, efficiency, and encouragement. Note: The complete interviews are on deposit in the Special Collections of the AMPAS Library.

274

JOHN MILIUS

275

an outsider. “I have always been on the other side of the cultural war,” he says with relish. “I have always been an example from the beginning of that which was culturally incorrect.” Regardless of trends, he remains a traditionalist. He detests “hipness” and “cool,” belongs to the National Rifle Association, has a broad range of military contacts, and is a political conservative—a résumé that brands him as a maverick in an industry that prides itself on being liberal. Nevertheless, Milius is arguably the best writer of the so-called USC Mafia, a tight-knit group of filmmakers that resuscitated—though some say homogenized—American cinema in the 1970s. Perhaps it’s his politics that have kept him from being as prolific as his friends and collaborators, among them box-office champions Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Coppola, and Robert Zemeckis, but the fact is that his tastes are different. Raised on Ford, Hawks, Lean, and Kurosawa, shaped by filmmakers as disparate as Fellini and Delmer Daves, Milius favors history books over comic books, character over special effects, and heroes with roots in reality, not stardust. His feeling for history infuses his scripts with a keen sense of time, place, and customs. Milius’s stories reflect his own deeply held ethic, which embraces the values of tradition, adventure, spiritualism, honor, and an intense loyalty to friends. The burly, bearded Milius is a captivating raconteur. A conversation with him is like sitting around a campfire, and—unusual for Hollywood— his tales are rarely about himself. When he intones, “You know, it’s interesting . . . ,” it invariably is. He insists that he honed this ability as a surfer, yet the precision of his language exceeds the argot of those who hang ten. This is probably a good place to disclose that John and I have known each other for more than twenty-five years. Though I had first heard of him from George Hamilton, who touted him as the “truly talented young writer” of 1971’s Evel Knievel, we only met after he made his directorial debut with Dillinger (1973) two years later. I discovered him to be refreshingly honest and happily indifferent that his political conservatism placed him at odds with most of his peers. This, plus his fondness for macho themes, not surprisingly have made him a frequent critics’ target. John once told (baited?) me that I was the only liberal film critic he liked; whether this says more about him or me, we never decided. The subject came up over Red Dawn (1984). He had just come from a tour of the Pentagon conducted by General Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s onetime chief of staff. John excitedly described the experience: “They have separate floors for each branch of the services, they have these neat uniforms and grand oil paintings hanging everywhere, and you have to get around in a

276

JOHN MILIUS

golf cart . . .” Finally, pausing to light a cigar, he asked, “You ever been to the Pentagon, Nat?” “Well,” I offered nostalgically, “I demonstrated outside of it a couple of times.” John raised his eyebrow, puffed the cigar thoughtfully, and said, “We have more in common than you like to think, and it bugs the shit out of you.” Although he privately chafes at his public image as a gun-toting, liberalbaiting provocateur, he allows himself to be painted as such, at times even holding the brush. He plays the Hollywood game like a pro, yet sticks to his own rules; he is a romantic filmmaker who avoids love scenes; his movies contain violence, yet no death in them is without meaning. Most frustrating, his best-known writing has been in films that other people wound up directing, sometimes without giving him credit. No one is more aware of his paradoxes than Milius himself. For example, the day after Farewell to the King opened (disappointingly) in 1989, I dropped by his house, which overlooks one of Los Angeles’s most picturesque canyons. As we walked through the living room, we were trailed by an attentive terrier that was tap-dancing behind us on the tile floor. John waited for the tiny thing to catch up and then gazed down at it. “That’s Posie,” he grunted. “A guy like me, you’d figure I’d have a dog named Fang.” John Milius, the youngest of three children, was born on April 11, 1944, to Elizabeth Roe and William Styx Milius of St. Louis, Missouri. When John was seven, his father retired, sold the family shoe manufacturing business, and moved everybody to Southern California, joining the Golden State’s postwar population boom. By the age of fourteen, John had become both an avid surfer and a juvenile delinquent, two pursuits that went hand in hand “in the old days,” as he would later call them in his autobiographical Big Wednesday (1978). He acquired the nickname “Viking Man” for his flamboyance and practiced his storytelling on the beach when the tide was out. But such traditions were invisible to parents, and John’s shipped him to the Lowell Whiteman School in the mountains of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for eleventh and twelfth grade. “It was a new school at the time,” he recalls fondly. “We built it ourselves, and I mean that literally: if we wanted a place to live or have a class in, we had to get the wood and build it.” He returned to California, undecided whether to become an artist or a historian; he spent a summer in Hawaii, where, on a day too rainy to surf, he wandered into a Kurosawa

JOHN MILIUS

277

film festival. That did it. Returning home, he enrolled in the thenundergraduate Cinema School of the University of Southern California, at a time when the term “student filmmaker” didn’t exist and USC offered no automatic entrée to Hollywood. Indeed, the film industry was practically a closed shop when Milius and his generation sought access. What blew the doors open was a combination of fresh talent and the fact that the old-line studios didn’t have a clue what the burgeoning youth market wanted to see, and there was a plummeting box office to prove it. The “USC Mafia” found allies (and eager exploitation) in the likes of independent producers such as Roger Corman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Joe Solomon, and Larry Gordon. With the collusion of Francis Coppola, who was the first film school graduate to land a studio career, the movie brats changed the shape of film, both artistically and commercially. Milius is married to actress Elan Oberon, who is his third wife. They divide their time between their home in Los Angeles and a house in New England. “It would be nice to retire to someplace like that and teach,” he muses about the liberal East, “but those are all politically correct schools, and I don’t think that I would last a day at one of those places. I’m a victim of my times; I don’t fit in at all anymore. Years ago I would’ve had it made. Now I’ll probably be an outlaw till the day I die.” JOHN MILIUS (1944–)

1966 1967

1969 1971 1972 1973 1975

The Reversal of Richard Sun. Short subject. Marcello, I’m So Bored. Animated short, with John Strawbridge. Glut. Short subject. Viking Women Don’t Care. Short subject. The Emperor (George Lucas). Short documentary. The Devil’s 8 (Burt Topper). Co-script. Evel Knievel (Marvin Chomsky). Co-script. Dirty Harry (Donald Siegel). Uncredited contribution. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (John Huston). Script. Jeremiah Johnson (Sidney Pollack). Co-script. Dillinger (John Milius). Director, script. Magnum Force (Ted Post). Story, co-script. The Wind and the Lion (John Milius). Director, script. Jaws (Steven Spielberg). Uncredited contribution.

278

JOHN MILIUS

JOHN MILIUS, ON LOCATION IN 1982, DIRECTING CONAN THE BARBARIAN .

1978 1979

1980 1982 1983 1984 1987 1989 1990 1991 1993 1994 2001 2005

I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Robert Zemeckis). Executive producer. Big Wednesday (John Milius). Director, co-script. Apocalypse Now (Francis Coppola). Co-script. 1941 (Steven Spielberg). Co-story. Hardcore (Paul Schrader). Executive producer. Used Cars (Robert Zemeckis). Executive producer. Conan the Barbarian (John Milius). Director, co-script. Uncommon Valor (Ted Kotcheff). Producer. Lone Wolf McQuade (Steve Carver). “Spiritual adviser.” Red Dawn (John Milius). Director, co-script. Extreme Prejudice (Walter Hill). Co-story. Farewell to the King (John Milius). Director, script. The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan). Uncredited contribution. Flight of the Intruder (John Milius). Director, uncredited script contribution. Geronimo: An American Legend (Walter Hill). Story, co-script. Clear and Present Danger (Philip Noyce). Co-script. Texas Rangers (Steve Miner). Uncredited contribution.1 The Son Tay Raid (John Milius). Director, script.

JOHN MILIUS

279

Television writing and directing include the telefilm Melvin Purvis: G-Man (1974, story and co-script); Miami Vice (1984, episodes); The Twilight Zone (“Opening Day,” 1985, director and writer); The Motorcycle Gang (1994, director only); Rough Riders (1997, director and co-script); and Rome (2005, writer of episodes). Academy Award honors include Best Script nomination for Apocalypse Now. Writers Guild honors include Best Script nominations for The Wind and the Lion and Apocalypse Now.

GROWING UP AMERICAN

Before you, who was the storyteller in your family? My father would read me stories, or tell me stories. I remember he read James Fenimore Cooper to me. But I think that one of the very first stories that he ever read, that told me about him, was about the Rough Riders. They were his heroes. My father was a lot older; he didn’t sire me till he was fifty-six. So my father was, even though I was somewhat close to him, a distant figure, sort of a Churchillian, statesmanlike figure. He was Harvard, class of 1910, and then went into World War I. When he was younger, he would go up to Colorado from Missouri and work summers. He was a pretty good woodsman, so there was a tradition in our family to do that. Later, I was sent to various camps, and they were pretty rough, not like the usual summer camps that kids go to. The best of them was the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, which still exists, and my kids have gone there. That was in New Mexico, where you lived with the Zuni Indians and learned woodcraft. It was a kind of early Outward Bound school. You were born April 11, 1944, in St. Louis, Missouri. Your father was a shoe manufacturer who retired and moved the family to California. Why? He thought it would be nicer out here for the kids to grow up. And yet he sent you to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for secondary school. That’s because I was a bad kid, and by the time I was a teenager I was well into surfing and was a juvenile delinquent. You went to the Whiteman School in Colorado because you were a rebellious kid. What turned you around there?

280

JOHN MILIUS

The mountains. The wilds of Colorado were like throwing B’rer Rabbit in the briar patch. Plus life was simpler and different then. For example, we were allowed to check out our rifles from the closet in the school and get up in the morning and go hunting before we went in to school. You can’t imagine kids doing that today in school anywhere. We were encouraged to learn woodsmanship, how to survive in the wilds; we were encouraged to learn various sciences, bird watching, geology—we were encouraged to become naturalists. Wayne Kakela, who was one of my teachers, grew up a tough, burly character, wonderful guy, very intelligent, went to Dartmouth, wonderfully well-read, and was something of a beatnik. He was a great fan of Hemingway and Faulkner. He loved great literature, and he was a great naturalist, too. Were you writing then? All of a sudden, one day, I learned how to write. Until that day, English class consisted of diagramming sentences, and I failed that miserably. I have never been able to diagram sentences; I don’t know what the difference is between an adjective and an adverb, to this day. And I didn’t need to know, when it came down to writing; when I was maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, I could imitate any style there was. I could write a report in “Hemingway.” I could write a report in “Conrad.” I could write a report in “Technical Manual.” I could write a report in “Kerouac.” Do you remember the first time you felt truly pleased with something you wrote? When I was fifteen years old. I think it was about Indians and mountain men. Most teenagers hate writing. I didn’t like writing either. It was work. Were you a good oral storyteller at that point? I was learning. I think that came from being a surfer. Surfers in those days were more literate than the image of surfers today. You must remember that surfers had a great beatnik tradition. The first time that the great waves of Waimeia Bay were ridden, [surfing leader] Mickey Maños quoted the St. Crispen’s Day speech from Henry V to the other surfers.

JOHN MILIUS

281

You also had your own nickname, didn’t you? “Viking Man.” But my real name in the surfing community as I was growing up was “The Yeti.” I’ve always been The Yeti because I went away to school in Colorado, and when I came back I was the Abominable Snowman.

THE FILM MAFIA

It’s a cliché to say that you and your USC classmates changed film forever, but what was it like when you were actually there? There were only five undergraduate students when I went to USC: me, George Lucas, Basil Poledouris, Randal Kleiser, and Don Glut.2 Cinema school was situated between the school and the girls’ dorm, so all these beautiful girls would go by, and we had a little bench in front of the cinema school which we would sit on and attempt to make conversation and try to get to know the girls. And, of course, we were a dismal failure. Those girls wanted nothing to do with us. We were not even geeks, we were trolls— film trolls! Film wasn’t cool yet. No, it wasn’t cool at all. I got my share of girls at the beach, but I like to think about all those beautiful girls going by George Lucas. He’s probably never gotten over that. I remember when I was in high school, I thought that that was the ugliest part of life—the popularity and all the other crap that goes on. I was a flagrant outsider and not particularly socially well accepted. I couldn’t wait to get out of high school, when real life would begin. However, now I find myself, at age fifty-six, living in a world that has become very much like the world that I was in when I was sixteen and in high school. Our whole world, our whole culture, is like a giant high school dance. Particularly Hollywood. Your USC thesis film was an animation: Marcello, I’m So Bored [1967]. It has a kind of Chagall-esque quality.3 It just fit the times and the project. I wanted to do something that was very colorful. It was dealing with hipness and fashion and that kind of stuff. Why didn’t you stay in animation? I couldn’t see myself sitting there drawing cell after cell.

282

JOHN MILIUS

What was your first feature script? I suppose the first script I ever completed was a script called “Los Gringos.” I think I wrote some three-by-five cards and tried to do an outline. Your generation was known as the first to take a Beaulieu or an Éclair out in the field and just shoot. What led you into the discipline of writing? No one else wanted to be a writer. They were all just putting pieces of film together. If you look at a film like The Emperor [1967],4 it was clearly made from putting pieces together. Very well done, but clearly not a written film. I became a writer because I wanted to be a storyteller and had stories I wanted to tell. I used to joke that they all wanted to be artists, and when they asked, “What do you want to be?” I said, “I want to be a big mogul and ride around in the big car.” And, of course, they became the moguls. Having turned down a job offer in animation, how did you find yourself at American International Pictures working for producer Larry Gordon? This would have been around 1967. Somehow Willard Huyck [a USC friend]5 got a job working in the story department at AIP, and they needed another smart-ass young college kid. It was either another summer being a lifeguard or working in a gas station, so I took this job and went to work. Jim Nicholson [cofounder of AIP with Samuel Z. Arkoff ] had just separated from Sam Arkoff. We read scripts and talked to Larry and served as his whipping boys. We lasted two weeks until I was fired for insubordination and Willard was fired for surliness. But we were rehired the next Monday and told to go write a script called The Devil’s 8 [1969]. We were told we had two weeks, and we wrote it in ten days. This was AIP’s knockoff of The Dirty Dozen [1967]. Yes. We wrote it in a rented apartment below the Sunset Strip. I remember that our apartment—maybe someone had lent it to Willard—had a stuffed leopard in it, and I was allergic to leopard, as I was allergic to cats, having allergies and asthma, so I had to sit out on the balcony. There was a screen door, and I would have to yell in stuff to him and he would type it. Were you proud of the film? I don’t think we ever thought it was our best work. It was pretty good; it was funny. It’s about a moonshine ring—a lot of noise but not very good action.

JOHN MILIUS

283

Did you go to the set? Hell, no. Even at AIP the writer was barred? Sure, sure. And it didn’t take them very long to make it. It was called The Devil’s 8 because they didn’t have enough money for a full dozen. On the strength of that credit, did you get an agent? On the strength of that I probably wouldn’t have gotten anything. I had some ideas and treatments and sent them around to various agencies,and I remember keeping the letters of rejection for a long time.They said things like,“We only deal with sophisticated, well-dressed and well-washed people.” When you got something done at AIP, especially something like The Devil’s 8, that wasn’t necessarily a boon to your career. Plus you must remember that writers in those days—as opposed to today, where there are a lot of very successful writers who have no credits and there are a lot of writers with one or two credits—in those days, writers had twenty or thirty credits. I’m the last writer like that in the business. So who was the agent who finally agreed to represent you? I’d written another screenplay after “Los Gringos” called “Last Resort,” and Marcello won the National Student Film Festival,6 and then my friends George Lucas and Marty Scorsese and I were all featured in Time magazine—all the ugly, punk kids. Mike Medavoy, who was working in the mail room of CMA [Creative Management Associates], said he would represent us all. That was in 1968. Needless to say, he was a good agent and did pretty well.7 Next I did a script called “Truck Driver,” which was a pretty good story, though it never got made. And I followed that with Jeremiah Johnson [1972].

BREAKING INTO THE BIG TIME

Jeremiah Johnson has a complicated history. You wrote the script, then it was pulled away from you and given to Edward Anhalt, then you were brought back in. Twice. I got very little money to write it—$5,000—but by the time I was through I had made $80,000. That’s how many times they hired, fired, and rehired me.

284

JOHN MILIUS

The original story is about a guy who kills 247 Crow Indians.8 I don’t remember how many it really was, but he did kill a lot of Crow and he ate their livers. He lived till ninety-something, so they couldn’t have been that bad for him. When Warner Bros. bought my script, Sidney Pollack was not the director, nor was Robert Redford the star. The first considered star was going to be Clint Eastwood, and the director was to be Sam Peckinpah. I was really looking forward to doing it with Sam; he was one of my heroes. But he didn’t last very long; he went and had a meeting with Eastwood, and ten minutes after the meeting, he was gone. I was working on another Warner Bros. picture at the time, Dirty Harry, which was going to star Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra quit the movie, so they moved Clint Eastwood into Dirty Harry and took him off “Crow Killer,” which became Jeremiah Johnson. Edward Anhalt told William Froug [in The Screenwriter Looks at Screenwriting, New York: Macmillan, 1972] that “John Milius, the original writer, was committed to one kind of story and the producers weren’t. I thought his script was brilliant, but I don’t know how many people would have paid to see it.” Why did they buy the script if they didn’t want to make the movie? That’s the question that is constantly asked in Hollywood. There is no answer to that question. Who made the changes and why? Even though the scenes were reconstructed, I eventually had to do all the dialogue because no one else could do it. They brought in Edward Anhalt, they brought in David Rayfiel—who is on every Sidney Pollack film, and he’s a good writer—but nobody could write the mountain men dialogue. The point of being a mountain man is that he’s out there alone and he doesn’t see anybody or talk to anybody, and when he does see somebody, the guy more than likely wants to kill him. I got the idiom and some of the American spirit from Carl Sandburg. [For example,] Johnson comes up to a trapper named Del Gue, played by Stefan Gierash, who’s buried up to his neck in the sand. Johnson says, “How’re you doin’?” And because Johnson says, “How’re you doin’?” Del Gue says, “Oh, I’m doin’ fine, I got a fine horse buried under me.” Del Gue [also says things like], “Mother Gue never raised such a foolish child,” or “You have stolen these pelts and die you must.” That’s not normal lan-

JOHN MILIUS

285

guage. You know where I got a lot of that from? The book True Grit by Charles Portis, who wrote without contractions, so that people say, “I will do that” and not “I’ll do that.” johnson: Where is it that I could find bear, beaver, and other critters worth cash money when skinned? man: Ride due west as the sun sets. Turn left at the Rocky Mountains.

I think you can truthfully say, although other movies of mine had been made by then and Evel Knievel is full of good stuff too, that movie is certainly where I was getting up to speed. Next we come to Dirty Harry. You are not credited on the film, but you and Terry Malick wrote an early draft of the screenplay along with H. J. [Harry Julian] Fink. Irvin Kershner was set to direct, and Frank Sinatra was to star. Then Sinatra pulled out of the project.At what point did Don Siegel come in? He came in an hour after Irvin Kershner left. We went to Palm Springs for our second meeting with Frank Sinatra, where we were driven by circuitous route to his compound by one of his thugs. We had a lunch of finger sandwiches, where they cut off the crusts, very nicely done. The first time I went, he asked me about “the gat.” I said, “What?” and he said, “You know, the gun. Do you have one of those big guns?” I said, “Yeah, I’ll bring one next time.” Well, I don’t think he thought this kid was gonna bring a gun, a “gat.” So at this second meeting he asked me about “the gat,” and I opened my briefcase and whipped out my four-inch Model 29. And he said to his bodyguard, “Jilly, look! Lookit that gun! Lookit that gat! He comes in here with a gat that big and you don’t even know it!” Needless to say, I think Jilly got in a lot of trouble for that. When Frank picked up the gat and looked at it, he said the line that’s in the script, “Ooh, it’s a big one!” He actually said, “Too big!” and put the gun back in my briefcase. We went back to Los Angeles from Palm Springs, and by the time we got back he had decided he didn’t want to be in the movie business anymore. Your script starts quite differently from the finished film, which begins with Scorpio, the killer, on a rooftop shooting a girl in her swimming pool. Mine started with Harry ranting at the audience as if they were young cops being trained, and he was standing in front of pictures of dead cops, shooting melons and stuff with different weapons. But Clint Eastwood said—and he’s right—“I don’t do all those words. George Scott does those words. I’m

286

JOHN MILIUS

good at grunting and squinting and shooting people. I don’t do words, I do squinting.” The “I know what you’re thinkin’ . . .” speech is yours.9 Yes. What’s interesting is that the theme of vigilantism, which drew so much criticism in Dirty Harry, becomes the essence of its successor, Magnum Force [1973]. Magnum Force is the flip side of Dirty Harry. In other words, if you can go beyond the law, how far can you go? To me, one answers the moral question that the other brings up. It’s not just a sequel. Dirty Harry was criticized for being fascist. That’s just because Pauline Kael liked the sound of that word. She liked to call me a fascist and called me a fascist for years. She was a fascist! In Reeling [Boston: Little, Brown, 1976], referring to Jeremiah Johnson, Kael writes, “He had it written into his contract . . . that he would get to shoot the numerous animals that his script (later modified) required be slaughtered.” I just said that if you want somebody to shoot an elk, I’d like to shoot the elk because I’d like the meat. And that’s what she turned it into. Was part of your deal in the early days that your producer was contractually obligated to give you a new gun? Yes. Because paper wasn’t honorable. People were more honorable in those days. When did this stop being part of your contract? When the price of my screenplays went above $500,000, they said, “You can get your own goddamn gun.” BECOMING BLOODED

You intended to make your directorial debut with The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean [1972], didn’t you?—but then Paul Newman got involved.

JOHN MILIUS

287

The script was sent to Lee Marvin. Paul Newman and Lee Marvin were making Pocket Money [1972], and Lee Marvin got the script, and he was reading it and he really liked it; he got drunk and he left it on his chair and went off and passed out somewhere. Newman picked it up and started reading it and took it away, and he called his people in Los Angeles and said, “Buy this script, I want to do this.” They came to me and wanted to buy the script. I said, “Fine, I want to direct it.” They said, “No, no, that’s not possible.” So there were two prices: one that was very cheap with me directing it, and one that kept going up and up if they wanted it without me. They finally paid the price without me. The script was considerably mutilated by the time the film was made. [Director John] Huston changed all kinds of things or demanded that I change them. It wasn’t at all the same movie.10 And yet you later hired Huston to play Secretary of State John Hay in The Wind and the Lion. Well, I like Huston, even though he did completely ruin The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. But I don’t think he ruined it as much as the whole group of them did. Huston certainly wasn’t the right person to direct it, Newman certainly wasn’t the right person to act in it. And they’re all terrific people. Did I ever tell you about the time I almost killed John Huston? We went hunting quail around Elizabeth Lake [north of Los Angeles] with my great dog, Jaster, in an area where there were Joshua trees. We got into a covey of quail and we were watching Jaster and shooting, and Huston was saying, “This is great, this is marvelous, we’re going to have a marvelous day.” We were pretty far from the road, and it was really hot. He started coughing and turned all red, and he sat under a Joshua tree and he said, “I’m gonna cash it in, kid. This is it. I’m not gonna make it, I can tell!”11 I said, “What can I do? What can I do?” He said, “Go back and get some water.” It’s a long way to the car in the hot sun and, in those days, I was in pretty good shape, so I ran all the way back. I was thinking, “What am I gonna do? When I get back he’s gonna be dead. How am I going to explain this to the police? To Hollywood? That I took John Huston out and killed him hunting?” Of course, he killed Clark Gable the same way [on The Misfits, 1961]. But Huston was like a father to me, and I was just horrified. When I got back with the water, thinking, “God, I hope he’s alive,” he was propped up under the tree, still red and breathing horribly, but he had a cigar out by then, and he said, “You didn’t bring any beer?”

288

JOHN MILIUS

I said, “We don’t have any beer! What the—?” He said, “You shoulda known to bring some, you shoulda known.” Then he said, “I still don’t know if I can make it. You better sit down. I’m gonna tell you about my first recollection of my life, since you’ll probably be here for my last.” Then he told me a story about how, when he was a little kid, his father, Walter, who was a worthless actor with an actor’s personality, had some job in Globe, Arizona, or Douglas, Arizona—someplace like that. He was in charge of the volunteer fire department and, of course, since he didn’t want to work and was just a ne’er-do-well, he had sold, to various restaurants and other places, all the water that was kept in the town’s storage tanks. But he didn’t tell anybody, so when a fire broke out in the hotel or some bar, everybody ran out and the fire department came to put it out and there was no water. Well, the town burned, and then they figured out about the water. So, he said, his earliest recollection of life was the town burning to the ground in the night, and an angry crowd pursuing his father with torches, tar and feathers, and a noose, and bouncing in the back of a buckboard as his father hightailed it out of town with his mother. That was his first recollection of life, and I think it’s pretty damn good! Needless to say, he didn’t die. What did you learn about directing from Huston? More than I ever learned in cinema school. Just marvelous things. He would say, “I’m gonna connect these two shots with all this complicated camera movement. Basically, the reason I’m doing this is that it will take a long, long time to set up and I’ll have time to go to the trailer and look at some art or fool around with Cici [his then-wife].”12 He’d confide, “But that’s not the way you’d really want to do it; the way you’d really want to do it is this, this, and this . . .” He used to say, “Inevitably the shot that’s the worst, most pretentious shot in the movie”—like through a keyhole or something—“that’s the shot they’re always gonna think is so great. That’s the shot the critics will always like.” Why do directors get all the glory, not writers? Nobody likes to write because writing requires facing a blank page, which is not pleasant. Directors can tell people what to do, they can judge them, they can be cruel, they can do all the stuff that they couldn’t do in normal life. I mean, just look at the outfits they wear. To be a director, you have to wear a baseball hat. Basically, they’re all trying to look like Steven Spielberg.

JOHN MILIUS

289

Let’s get to George Hamilton and Evel Knievel. At that time Hamilton was chiefly known as a guy who worked on his tan and dated one of President Johnson’s daughters. Was your relationship a good one? A wonderful relationship to this day. He’s a wonderful guy, totally underrated. He’s a great con man, that’s what he really is. He always said, “I’ll be remembered as a third-rate actor when, in fact, I’m a first-rate con man.” You weren’t the first writer on the script. I was having a fight with my [then-]wife, and George said, “I will provide you with my home in Palm Springs and a motorcycle, and you can get away from your wife for the weekend, go quail hunting, and I’ll pay you $5,000—that’s all I’ve got—to write a couple of funny lines in this script.” Well, I get down there and I read this script, and it was terrible. So I threw the script in the pool and beat on it with an oar. And, of course, now the script was waterlogged, so I just wrote another one. He later told me he knew that if I got down there with that script, I’d write another one. How did your script justify Evel Knievel’s daredevil behavior? What makes him take all those risks? He saw himself as the new gladiator of the new Rome, something larger than a daredevil. He saw the whole spectacle of civilization and the absurdity of what it’s turned into, and he fit into that. A great showman. And he would do insane things. What’s the point of driving a motorcycle over a bunch of trucks, let alone the Caesar’s Palace fountain? It doesn’t make any sense. But somehow it’s wonderful because it’s not just jumping through hoops of fire or over pits of snakes, it’s a bunch of lined-up cars and trucks. It brings things to a blue-collar, proletarian elegance. What did Knievel himself think of the film? He loved it. He adopted the opening speech for his act. DIRECTING DILLINGER

You finally got to direct with Dillinger, which has the kind of opening that makes an audience pay attention: John Dillinger robs a bank and announces to the customers, “This could be the greatest moment in your life, don’t make it your last.” You drew him as a hero, but in fact he was not

290

JOHN MILIUS

a nice person and hurt people, such as when you show him killing a bank employee named O’Malley. Well, no. In reality there was one murder rap, and even that was unsure. That’s why I picked Dillinger as a subject. Of all the outlaws, he was the most marvelous. He said something once that was great: “You’d do what I do if you had the nerve.” But I assume that when you embark down that road, you’re gonna kill somebody. That’s why I had him kill O’Malley in the film. If you live that kind of life, you’re gonna have to take the consequences. He beat up on Baby Face Nelson [played by Richard Dreyfuss] pretty nicely. Baby Face Nelson was a killer. He deserved what he got. But Dillinger was an artist, a terrific character. His life was an example in the Depression— not that you can rob the banks and right the social ills, like in the movie Bonnie and Clyde, which is total balderdash. Bonnie and Clyde had no more intention of being Robin Hood than Dillinger or Baby Face Nelson. They were always griping because they’d rob stores and get fifteen dollars and still have to shoot people. Is that why you gave the line to Pretty Boy Floyd [Steve Kanaly] that “Things were all right till Bonnie and Clyde came through, and then everything went to hell”? Bonnie and Clyde were punks. Clyde was the Charlie Starkweather of his day. Your characters behave as if they know the audience is watching them, such as Harry Dean Stanton saying, just as G-men are about to gun him down, “Things have not been going well for me today.” I have a healthy sense of the absurd. Dillinger was single-mindedly pursued by Melvin Purvis of the FBI. Even though they were opposites, you portrayed each man as being concerned with his image in history. I didn’t think of it that way. Really. I just thought of them as these two bigger-than-life characters who were opposed to one another, like the Olympians. It’s like Hector and Achilles looking over the wall at each other.

JOHN MILIUS

291

How much input did the studio have in terms of the script? I remember [producer] Larry [Gordon] had some comments. He’d say, “I want him to be tougher here,” or “I wanna see some blue pages, big boy.”13 All I did was mark all the pages that he made comments on and have them printed on blue paper, and gave ’em back to him and he liked it fine. And this time they let you direct. Since I was a really hot writer in town at that moment, Larry said, “We’ll let you direct the movie if you write it cheap.” I would, of course, have paid them to direct a movie.

THE WIND AND THE LION

The original story, as you know, was about a man being kidnapped.14 When I read it in the August 1959 American Heritage magazine, I wanted to know more about the Raisuli, and the book I got was the [Rosita] Forbes book.15 Matter of fact, the idea of making Pedicaris a woman came from Forbes. And I realized that this is the way it should be; the relationship between the two of them could be quite sensual without them ever doing anything. Do you think Rosita Forbes had a relationship with the Raisuli? I’ve always thought so. I’m almost sure. He was a captivating character, she was attractive, and he would have wanted her. And he was the Raisuli! The Teddy Roosevelt character in the script definitely wants to provoke a shooting war; the film makes him seem almost playful about it. Imperialism wasn’t a bad word then. People in the movie think and act in a way that was correct for 1904—not correct for 1917, not correct, certainly, for 1920, and absolutely not correct for 1974, when the movie was made. You have an appearance by Charles Foster Kane in your script—not William Randolph Hearst, but Charles Foster Kane—which didn’t make it into the movie. Did you intend to shoot it? Yes, and, of course, I wanted to get Orson Welles to play the part.All of a sudden, one day, when I was shooting in the most oppressive heat in Seville [Spain,where The Wind and the Lion was filmed] and staying at the Alphonse

292

JOHN MILIUS

XIIIth Hotel—which they used as the Officers’ Club in Lawrence of Arabia— I came back covered in dust and sweat, and there was an impeccably dressed Italian assistant director waiting for me.He said,“Mr.Welles is here.He’d like to see you.” So I was ushered into this Moorish back room, and there was Welles. He was holding two huge fans; he was in a giant caftan and covered with sweat and huge, just sitting there enjoying the evening light. He said,“I should’ve brought a camera. I wanted to shoot you for my movie.16 I had to get an actor to play you!” He went on to tell me how he had come there to do a sherry commercial and he’s just had two ducks, two roast ducks! He recommended various restaurants and then he laughed and said,“I suffer from a disease—a medieval disease—it’s called o-BEES-i-ty.” Now, can you have a better meeting with Orson Welles than that? [Nevertheless], we had to cut that part out [of the script]. I think the Errors and Omissions people said we’d get sued by RKO! Nineteen seventy-five,when the film was released,was the year that saw the bifurcation of the American film industry. Steven Spielberg made Jaws [1975], and its box-office success drove everybody to chase blockbusters from then on. You made The Wind and the Lion, which was a more traditional film. A lot has been made about how your generation of filmmakers stuck together. Has that changed, even though you have diverged artistically? No. We all grew up together. We helped each other out. I remember that George and Marcia Lucas came down when I had a rough cut of The Wind and the Lion, and they made some suggestions in cutting, and then Marcia went and changed some things around. We all did this before we were rich—I mean, “rich,” to me, was $100,000; it wasn’t like the millions that people had later. Before anybody had any money, everybody worked on each other’s stuff; it was sort of fun. When Steven asked me to do the USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws, I never thought of asking him for money. It was just fun to do.

BIG WEDNESDAY

Big Wednesday17 is a film that people either love or hate. I’m one of the former, but the studio and the critics were among the latter, and they prevailed. It’s still sort of a numb spot in my life. It was a very personal film, and it really tore me up when it was attacked in such a way that few people got to

JOHN MILIUS

293

see it. I would like to have communicated the things in that film to more people, but, I guess, if you can communicate with a few, you’re successful. Big Wednesday is one of those great Hollywood stories where about 97 percent of my friends abandoned me afterward, and I couldn’t get any of them on the phone. Not the surfing friends, the Hollywood friends. It was like having the plague. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near you, because they were afraid they might catch it. How ironic that a film about friendship drove friends away. I remember one night seriously considering joining the French Foreign Legion, but I didn’t know whether I should fly to Marseilles in first class or coach. The film was heavily cut. For example, the speech is gone that explains what the actual Big Wednesday is. Did you take the material out, or did the studio? The studio did, but basically they didn’t change the movie much. Nobody said it should have a happier ending, or “Who are we rooting for here?” and that kind of shit. No “Can’t we have a guy who’s a bad Nazi surfer who grows up with them and has a duel in the end with Matt, and Matt finally wins and shows him up?” Was it difficult to configure modern-day characters as classic gladiators? No, because I saw Malibu that way when I was growing up. It was a microcosm of the historical and the real world. You’d see the rise and fall of great men, empires built and lost, and all of this was within the Pit [where the big-name surfers hung out]. The years from the time I was, say, twelve until I was, say, twenty-two or twenty-three—when I was forced to go inland—I saw an enormous amount of drama take place: the coming of hippies, the coming of drugs, the Vietnam War, the protests, the commercialization of surfing, the cheap heroes and the real heroes, the loss of morality, the pioneers being forgotten. With leadership comes responsibility, which is a frequent theme for you, and there’s a telling exchange that talks about that in Bear’s [Sam Melville] surfboard shop. Matt Johnson [Jan-Michael Vincent] says that he doesn’t want “a bunch of dorky kids” looking up to him, and Bear says,

294

JOHN MILIUS

“These kids look up to you whether you like it or not.” That’s the curse of anyone who’s a role model. And Matt really wasn’t ready for it till Big Wednesday. He was just a kid; he doesn’t get the power to be a man until Bear gives him the big wave board the night before Big Wednesday. The passing of youth is vivid in the film-within-a-film, Liquid Dreams, the Endless Summer–type surfing documentary which premieres for the surf community. Matt Johnson is crushed when the young audience has no idea who he is but cheers for the new kid, Gerry Lopez.18 And, of course, Gerry Lopez is a really good thing. He is the next generation; the torch has to be passed to him. At the end of the movie, Matt, Jack, and Leroy say, “He’s as good as they said he was.” At the end, Matt gives the sacred surfboard to some random kid instead of Lopez. Why? Because Lopez is already “there.” He doesn’t need a board. The other kid needs the board. Gerry is Roland of France; he’s swinging the sword Durendal. But the sword Excalibur must be passed on to another Englishman. If the kid doesn’t deserve it, if he isn’t worthy, he won’t be able to ride it. He won’t be able to pull it from the stone. How much does the film have to do with “No Pants Mance,” a short story written by Denny Aaberg, who cowrote Big Wednesday with you? Not much other than Denny was around and we both sort of idolized Lance Carson. Lance is the Jan-Michael Vincent character. Lance is a wonderful person and he’s still a very close friend. He’s a marvelous character because life did not follow art in his case. He was asked to participate in Big Wednesday and surf in it, but he was out of shape and an alcoholic. He made my boards for me and he made a few boards for other people, but his life was just a mess. Perhaps he saw, through these other surfers and the story of the script, that his own life was pretty bad. He went home one night and stopped drinking, without the need of AA or anything or anybody else, never took a drink again, and has lived a very, very productive life, has become a surfing legend, is in great health today and is still a great surfer. He hasn’t had a drink since then and did it all by himself. Whereas JanMichael did the opposite: he played this character and then sank into a more spiraling decline.19

JOHN MILIUS

295

The presence of some actors—Hank Worden [as “Shopping Cart”] in Big Wednesday, and Ben Johnson in Dillinger and Red Dawn—evokes John Ford. Did you ever meet Ford? I met him at USC when he was old; he died shortly after that. I did have a great earlier encounter with him, though, that winter I spent in Hawaii. I would surf there till dark and paddle back at night, half a mile from the reef, thinking of sharks the whole time, of course. There was a great boat moored in Ala Moana Yacht Harbor with lights on it; it was John Ford’s yacht [the Araner] and they were preparing to go off to do Donovan’s Reef [1963]. I told them, “I’d like to hire on. I’ll do anything I can.” They said, “Do you know how to sail a boat? Are you a decent sailor?” I said, “No, but I can dive with the best of ‘em, and I can swim really good, and I’m a great surfer and I really know the sea that way, but I’ve never sailed.” And then John Wayne turned around and said,“Well, come back when ya do know how to sail, kid.” John Ford and John Wayne were sitting there! John Ford says, “Sorry, kid, we don’t have any surfing in this movie.” I said, “Thank you very much, Mister Wayne and Mister Ford,” and I went on my way. I look back at it now as a scene out of a movie. That didn’t happen by accident now, did it?

WRITING OTHER PEOPLE’S MOVIES

There’s been more written about the making of Apocalypse Now than about Vietnam itself, and there were many similarities. I suppose you’ve already answered every question in the world about it. I answer ’em different each time. I usually lie. Your script opens on Kurtz, whereas both the book and the final film build up to Willard’s encounter with him. Why did you choose to begin with Kurtz and his men? I just thought you had to see these guys. I wasn’t really that concerned with staying at all in the tradition of Conrad. Matter of fact, I read Heart of Darkness when I was sixteen years old and never read it completely since. Conrad tells it as the story of a story. In all of Conrad’s work it’s the most difficult to read. Not an easy-flowing Nostromo. Even Lord Jim is much easier. When I read it, the effect on me was so indelible that I never wanted to read it again. It was like The Searchers where, after I didn’t see it for a while, I began to think I had

296

JOHN MILIUS

dreamed it, and the same thing was true with Heart of Darkness. I didn’t want to go back and find the direct details, but it was amazing how much I’d remembered. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz isn’t terribly concerned about the elephants he had to kill to get their ivory, but in Apocalypse Now Kurtz is very protective of the natives. Why the change from cavalier to compassion? As I remember, when you finally get to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness he’s delirious. They put him on the boat and leave, and he dies on the boat having said almost nothing. He never explains himself at all except to say, “The horror.” It’s all Marlow explaining about him. So we had to have a different ending. Of course, I wrote the script years before the movie was made,20 but when I was writing it I knew that we had to have Kurtz explain himself. And he does explain himself, perhaps more than he should. It becomes his obsession. As he leads Willard through his compound, he explains the meaning of patience and dedication in a very Eastern, mystical way. If you go through all the scripts,the Kurtz in the first version is very different from the Kurtz in the last version, but there is a similarity. There’s some wonderful stuff that was added, and wonderful stuff that was taken out. Francis [Coppola] put in Kurtz reading T. S. Elliot—“We are the hollow men . . .”—because he wanted to sound literate. In your script, Willard and his men stay in Kurtz’s compound at the end and continue his madness. In the film, they leave on the boat. There were many different endings. There was one that was quite good in which Willard kidnaps Kurtz and takes him back to the boat, and then he and the crew escape back down the river, very much like Heart of Darkness, and the Montagnards follow, singing “Light My Fire,” and they ambush him. And after they ambush him, Willard calls in the air strike on himself. What the hell is Brando talking about in his colloquy? He’s trying to explain to Willard what Truth is. He’s trying to make him look into the pit that he’s looked in, and see the Truth. He describes the VC [Viet Cong] and how they fight—that they are capable of this barbarity, but they fight with passion. They have concern for the children. He says, “If I

JOHN MILIUS

297

FUTURE CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER AND SANDAHL BERGMAN IN A SCENE FROM CONAN THE BARBARIAN, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MILIUS.

had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly.” They’re not fighting a lie.21 One of the terrible things about the Vietnam War was that it was a lie between the president and the grunts. Prior to that, people knew what they were fighting for. Fred Rexer22 said that this generation, that was capable of the kind of heroism that he experienced when he was there in ’65 and ’66, will “never be again purchased so cheaply.” In other words, you used up not just a generation but a nation’s ideals. And perhaps that’s at the root of a lot of our problems. Apocalypse Now became the magnet for everybody’s passion over Vietnam. You even took flack for things you had nothing to do with. You eventually figure that you’re not doing movies to please everybody. When I saw Apocalypse Now, all of a sudden the criticism didn’t bother me anymore. I simply realized that the whole thing was larger than criticism; that things which were dealt with in that movie were very important to me, and were very important to a lot of people, and that it didn’t matter whether someone liked it or not. Certain people came up to me and said, “You know, I was in the first Air Cav and, boy, I was really touched and

298

JOHN MILIUS

moved. I felt like I was right back there.” And other people came up and said, “I was there for two years and I never saw a helicopter attack that was quite like that.” And I’d say, “Well, I’m sorry we didn’t do your Vietnam, we did somebody else’s.” I read reviews which were just ridiculous, where critics had obviously read the college outline series on Joseph Conrad and were pretending to have read Heart of Darkness and had obviously not read Heart of Darkness. And I realized that none of it matters. You can’t sit there and worry about what some guy will say one day. You make your movie and it has a life of its own. It’s like somebody saying, “I don’t like your kids.” You sit there and you say, “Well, that’s too bad you don’t like my kids. You have to live with them. They’re in the world and you’re in the world, so tough crap.” Isn’t that the kind of character you’d like to be? I’m supposed to be the kind of character that says, “Piss on ’em,” but when somebody attacks you about your work, you get hurt, and gradually you get over it. Now I think I get over it a lot quicker. And now I don’t even think I get hurt any more, so (chuckles) I think I’m getting to be the kind of character who can say, “Piss on ’em.” How did it feel that something you wrote was filming halfway around the world and you couldn’t be there for it? Most of the time you don’t have somebody like Francis Coppola directing. He’s a genius on a par with Orson Welles. Francis is the shining light of our generation. He’s far and away the best filmmaker of our generation, and I think that’s largely been forgotten. The rest of us are very good filmmakers, but Francis cut new ground. Schindler’s List [1993] is a great film; Raging Bull [1980] is a great film. But Francis made Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. That’s all he ever has to make; those films are extraordinary masterpieces.You can look at his others and say,“Rumble Fish [1983] is a great film, but it’s not the size and power of those; Peggy Sue Got Married [1986] is a rather so-so film; Tucker [1988] is okay . . .”They fade to insignificance compared to The Godfather and Apocalypse. It just doesn’t matter. For all the notoriety of Apocalypse Now, you did some writing without credit that brought you equal attention: the Indianapolis speech from Jaws. Did you really write that with the phone off the hook, while Steven Spielberg waited on the other end on Martha’s Vineyard?

JOHN MILIUS

299

Yeah, but it was two phone calls. He called me several days before and said to be prepared to write something about why Quint [Robert Shaw] doesn’t like sharks. Steven and I have a long history of his exploitation of me. When you took it on, did you immediately think of the story of the Indianapolis? I thought of several ideas. I thought of the Indianapolis. There were two other incidents, both of them involving the area around the Solomons. In the Battle of Iron Bottom Sound there were a lot of people eaten by sharks. Then there was the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, in which Japanese transports were strafed by B-25s and P-38s, and the sea was filled with corpses and bodies, and people trying to swim to shore; the sharks had a feast, and the Americans flying over were sickened by it. Was Robert Shaw really as drunk as they say, shooting the scene? He was totally drunk. As Steven tells it, he’d been caught by his wife screwing the nanny, so in the middle of the speech he’d be talking about,“You ever seen a shark’s eyes? Cold and dead, and turns over just like when your wife tells you you’ve been screwing the nanny . . .” Steven would say, “No, Robert, you’re drifting.” Or, “So many people bobbin’ in the water. They was caught by their wives, too.” They shot it the day it was written. Sometimes things like that happen quickly and you don’t think much about it at the time, and for the rest of your life you’re being asked about it. Between the Indianapolis speech in Jaws, “I know what you’re thinkin’ . . .” from Dirty Harry, and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning . . .” from Apocalypse Now, you may be best remembered for things that aren’t in your own films. Well, if I can be remembered for a few good speeches, that’s all right. You and Spielberg executive-produced two films by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis—I Wanna Hold Your Hand [1978] and Used Cars [1980]. And then Spielberg directed their script, 1941 [1979], from your story. The latter may be his worst film. What happened?23 It’s just not the type of movie that Steven should have done. It should have been a small, contained movie that had its roots in real experience. If you overdo everything and make it the biggest this and the biggest that, you

300

JOHN MILIUS

lose the real experience. Everything in Used Cars comes out of a reality; nothing in 1941 came out of a reality, though the original script was very well rooted in reality. It was a real incident, and it was so twisted by the time it got on screen that it lost that feeling. So the problem really comes back to a regard for writing. I maintain that the fault of that movie can be blamed on the director’s interpretation of the script.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The script for Conan the Barbarian had a torturous development. Early drafts were written by Ed Summer and Roy Thomas, then Oliver Stone and L. Sprague van de Camp. What elements did you introduce when you came in? What was done up till then wasn’t usable. It was a fever dream, it wasn’t Conan. I took the things out of R. E. Howard that I wanted to use, and chose a primal story of revenge. I had the idea of doing a trilogy. The first one would be about strength—“that which does not kill you makes you stronger.” In the end, Thulsa Doom [James Earl Jones] tells Conan [Arnold Schwarzenegger], “I’m the reason you’re strong. I’m the reason you’re here. I’m the reason you’re Conan. What will your world be without me?” He kills Thulsa Doom—which he must do, or else Thulsa Doom will kill him—but then he doesn’t know what to do next. So he contemplates, “Where do I go? Now that I’m a strong, completed man—what do I do? Where do I go?” I love the ending we put back for the DVD, in which Conan returns the kidnapped princess to her kingdom. He’s free, but—and this is something that is echoed in a lot of my films—free do to what? Conan says little and remains stoic throughout the film. How did you make him an accessible character? All the basic emotions are accessible to audiences. All of the things that Conan does, we all feel ourselves. He just acts upon them with more intensity than we do. He is a character who relies on the animal, and I believe that the animal instincts in people are the better part of them, and that the civilizing instincts are often the worst part of them. When the going gets tough, the tough get feral. The film doesn’t rely much on dialogue. Matter of fact, we are over twenty minutes into the film before Conan even has his first line of dialogue, when he answers the question, “What is best in life . . . ?”

JOHN MILIUS

301

MARLON BRANDO TRYING TO EXPLAIN WHAT TRUTH IS TO MARTIN SHEEN IN APOCALYPSE NOW .

“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentation of their women!” Conan is the movie where I finally said, “Yeah, now I think I really have learned my trade.” How close do you feel the film was to Robert E. Howard’s Conan? Not really that close. I didn’t follow any stories—he had a lot more magic and was supernatural [in Howard’s version]—but in spirit, very close to Robert E. Howard. What was it like working with legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis? He fought me on everything. He never understood the film. So why did he want to produce it? Because it was a deal, and Dino loved to deal. He liked to deal more than he liked to film. One thing I can say about Dino, whatever he did, it doesn’t matter, because despite his interference, he was a superb producer. I always had enough. But it was really rough.

302

JOHN MILIUS

Did he leave you alone to make your movie? Oh, he certainly didn’t leave me alone! He visited the set, threatened to fire me and everybody else several times. He didn’t like me ’cause I opposed him. But anybody who went along with him and kissed his ass he just crushed. And if you opposed him he just tried to crush you, too. But I suppose, you know, all my troubles in the end will build character. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That’s what the movie’s all about. Conan had to spend time on the Wheel of Pain, and I had to spend time with Dino. As we conduct these interviews, you are preparing to write and direct King Conan, the official sequel.24 How did you reimmerse yourself in Conan’s universe after twenty years? I reread a lot of R. E. Howard and a lot of history, and I’ve read some other novels, and I’ve come to an understanding of what the essence of Conan should be. Obviously I can’t do the same story, but there’s something about Conan that I like, that resonates with me.

RED DAWN

In a lot of ways, Red Dawn—in which a group of teenagers defend America when Russian troops invade the country using conventional warfare—is an antinuclear film because it says that nuclear weapons are useless. It also says that World War III is unwinnable. It shows the desperate futility of war. At the end of the movie, in spite of all the heroism and valor, and the reasons and the revenges on both sides, all that’s left to remember these fighters is a lonely plaque on some desolate battlefield that nobody visits anymore. War is supposed to make heroes, but these kids don’t really become heroes. They become heroes, and then they become animals. They become used up. There was a scene that was taken out that was important, but the studio wanted gone, where they shoot into a house and a little girl is in there and they almost kill her, and they realize that they, too, are guilty of losing their humanity. They give her a little bit of food and one of them says, “It would be better if we’d killed her.”

JOHN MILIUS

303

Kevin Reynolds’s original script for what became Red Dawn was called “Ten Soldiers,” wasn’t it? It was a completed script. I changed it a lot; I wanted to make it more real, and Kevin Reynolds’s script was more of a meditation on the kids going bad, more like Lord of the Flies. I took a lot of stuff from French and Russian Resistance stories—in particular that they’re not going to make a big difference, but the fact that they fought and died makes a symbolic difference. It was pretty cheeky, making a war film without superheroes like Arnold or Bruce or Sly or Clint. I wanted to show this war on a very small [canvas]. Obviously there’s a lot more going on in the war, a lot of groups resisting or giving in. And I did think it was necessary, at different points in the story, to tell what was happening outside our group, which is why I had the air force pilot, played by Powers Boothe, enter and explain a few things about the bigger war. You come to realize that real war is like a great big machine that just grinds people up, and nobody looks back—they’re just shooting at each other across these great distances every day. The Cuban commander, who makes a gallant gesture at the end, knows this, and he lets Jed [Patrick Swayze] carry off his wounded brother [Emilio Estevez]. A man like that, a man of ideals when he started fighting—all of his wars were wars of national liberation where he was justified in freeing people from oppression. Yet he had become the oppressor.

FAREWELL TO THE KING

Farewell to the King25 is your David Lean film by way of Joseph Conrad. Nick Nolte said that when you shot it, you kept going deeper into the jungle, and it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about the film or you. I had a ball. I got to really like the Borneo jungle. I lost about twenty-five or thirty pounds while I was there—and gained it back later. It’s a great boy’s adventure to go into the jungle and make a movie. One gets the sense of the jungle being a character.

304

JOHN MILIUS

That’s what I wanted. I always try to do that in all my movies, have the place be a character, because I think that ultimately is important. There are touches of Conrad: a man not being able to escape his own past, always being drawn back. Oh, I’m always influenced by Conrad. Unlike other movie action heroes, yours have a sense of their place in history, and of the hero myth itself. Learoyd [Nolte] even gives himself up so his adoptive people can be free. I like Learoyd because he realizes that he’s served his function as a legend, and that he, himself, the man, doesn’t need anything. These people, as he says, will be strong because of the stories they’ll tell about him, not because of him. He speaks, as many of your characters do, in a classical style, even though the film is set in the 1940s, which is fairly contemporary. I wanted him to speak as though he was used to speaking in a classical language, because of the way the Dyacks speak. Their language is almost like Greek or Latin. If you translate their stories they are very Homeric. There is a certain formality in the way he speaks: “Solon the Terrible challenged me to fight, and it was my opportunity to become one of them. We fought and many blows were exchanged, and finally I prevailed.” I forget exactly what he says, but it’s a formal, stylized way of speaking. There’s a line that [novelist Pierre] Schoendoerffer uses: “These were the days of high adventure.” You even gave it to the Wizard [Mako] in Conan the Barbarian. I love that phrase. In the book, Learoyd sets up a monarchy and unifies the Dyack tribes, just as Lawrence of Arabia unified the Arab tribes. In the film this is unclear. In the movie it’s unclear because they took all that out. It was quite clear how he gets the women to have a sex strike and none of the men get laid until they come to the conference table. He goes to the women and he uses them. Then he uses pride—the pride that they must be strong among

JOHN MILIUS

305

themselves and unify, or the world will come in and get them. He’s a great king. When the film came out in 1989, it was heavily cut and barely released. It was thrown away. I, as usual, was attacked viciously, but in time I think it’s become regarded as one of my best. In a way—I don’t know why—I guess this film is more heartfelt than anything I’ve done since Big Wednesday. Orion Pictures demanded cuts and changes after your director’s previews, and the producers took their side. The producers Al Ruddy and André Morgan—who are friends of mine now—were lied to by the Orion executives. They did a very careful divideand-conquer and turned us against each other. They [Ruddy and Morgan] would love to recut it the way I wanted. Right now. We’d all love to recut that movie and rerelease it. Why would Orion have wanted to change your movie? Why do they ruin scripts? The executives decided they had a better idea. How did you deal with the compromises that were demanded of you? You deal with any kind of disagreement by fighting, by struggle. Ultimately you have to ask how much you are willing to put in. Are you willing to get fired over having it your way? As John Huston said, “There is a time when you have to take that long walk down the road.” There’s also a point where you say, “If I change this, it won’t really compromise what I intend to do, and it will get it made. I may be losing something I liked, but I’m willing to lose that because it’s more important for the thing to get made and it can still be what it is.” You know when it’s no longer what you wanted to write about, when it’s not the story you wanted to tell. Stanley Kubrick said that if you make only one compromise a day, by the end of your film you’ve made three hundred compromises. How far will you go before you take that long walk down the road? Kubrick had enough money and enough time to do it, and was treated better than anybody in the history of film. Kubrick fought his battles with

306

JOHN MILIUS

neatly dressed regiments, with the finest equipment, total logistical support, being able to pick the ground and the time and the place, and usually the enemy. I have fought all my battles as a guerrilla fighter—at night, with no or little ammunition, weapons that were stolen, and usually having to fall back after fighting against superior forces. I learned much more from reading Mao and Geronimo and Victorio or Che Guevara than I did from reading about how Stanley Kubrick made films.

FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER

You’re an uncredited writer on Flight of the Intruder [1991], which is about two hotshot navy pilots [Willem Dafoe and Brad Johnson] who make an unauthorized bombing run on Hanoi during the Vietnam War, doing, in effect, what their own government doesn’t have the guts to do. Robert Dillon and David Shaber get the screen credit. Because I was the director. That was one of my great fights with the Writers Guild; they struck my name from it. Was this because you weren’t established as cowriter from the beginning? No, it was that if you’re a director—and, particularly, if you’re me—they weren’t going to give credit. The film is about professionals who do their job, even when their superiors get in the way. They aren’t hampered by the politics surrounding their job. There’s a letter Kurtz writes to his son in Apocalypse Now that’s my answer to that: “In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action—what is often called ruthless, but may, in many circumstances, be only clarity—seeing clearly what there is to be done, and doing it: directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. There are moments in war for what could be called compassion. There are also moments for direct action, or what could be called clarity.”

ROUGH RIDERS

Theodore Roosevelt appears in several of your films. You sang his praises in The Life and Times of Roy Bean, Brian Keith played him in The Wind and the Lion, and you finally made a whole movie about him with Rough Riders [a 1997 telefilm]. What is it about him?

JOHN MILIUS

307

My father thought he was the greatest president we ever had. He could do everything. He was like Alexander the Great. He was a great writer, a great naturalist, a great outdoorsman, a great statesman, a great warrior, and a great thinker. And he was a Populist; he was very rich, but always stayed in touch with the common man. If you look at his policies today they seem almost communistic. He was not one of these arrogant, wealthy, distant, privileged princes. He was truly a man of the people. How do you get an actor—in this case, Tom Berenger—to embody T. R. for you? All I had to do was turn Tom—who is a historian and a stickler for detail as well as a matchless actor—loose and say, “Here’s material on Teddy Roosevelt”—which he already had a considerable amount of, by the way. He himself got tapes so he could hear how Teddy actually sounded; he got his eyeglasses from the same place that made Roosevelt’s eyeglasses (he had five or six pairs with him at all times, the way Teddy did, sewn into his hat and his pockets). In the movie he gets a pair shot off from behind—the bullet goes past his eye, shoots the glasses off—and he reaches around and gets another pair. Teddy Roosevelt was an extraordinary character. In both Rough Riders and The Wind and the Lion, he’s a bit of a kid, sort of blustery. He had “The Great Enthusiasm.” Everything that’s good about America is exemplified in Teddy Roosevelt. He is a perfect hero because he’s not always right. He’s wonderfully flawed, overzealous, truly a character bigger than life. Did you ever hear about the time he was shot while giving a speech, while running for president on the Bull Moose ticket? He had a book in his pocket which slowed the bullet, but it penetrated his chest anyway. Bleeding, he fell back, and his hand went up and he continued his speech while they grabbed the assassin and brought him to him. He said, “Let me look into his face.” And he looked into the face of this guy and said, “Pitiful! Take him away!” and continued his speech, bleeding through his coat. There are very few people of that magnitude. When you encounter characters like that in history, like Caesar, Caius Marius, Roosevelt,Alexander— many, many characters like that; they stick right out. All these characters must be flawed. If they’re too goody-goody they don’t work anymore. How much responsibility do you have to tell history accurately, because future generations will learn it from the movie?

308

JOHN MILIUS

You can change the truth as long as you have the spirit of the truth. History is just a lie that is accepted by everybody. Or Grant’s definition of history, which is, “One goddamned thing after another.” What I liked about that film was that it’s very evenhanded about the war. It shows that maybe we didn’t have the most noble motives for getting into it. After they’ve taken San Juan Hill, there’s a sense of ennui that suffuses the men, almost as if they know they’ll never have it this good again. That’s the whole movie. The characters in my movies don’t go off with pots of money and live happily ever after. They’re going to live the way the rest of us live. In a sense, nobody will even know what they’ve done. To me, one of the most realistic characters in Rough Riders is Bardshar [Eric Allan Kramer]. He goes back home a hero, but his wife is gone and their general store’s empty. So he sits down and lights a cigar.

BACK TO WRITING FOR HIRE

Let me ask you about your two Tom Clancy films, Clear and Present Danger [1994] and The Hunt for Red October [1990]. Didn’t you “doctor” Red October? Just to rewrite all the Russian scenes. I asked if I could do the American stuff and they said no. From a mechanical point of view, when you’re confronted with a fivehundred-plus-page novel, how do you start adapting it? Those two—Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger—were very easy to do because Tom Clancy loves to tell how much he knows about everything. There isn’t a lot to change. The stories are pretty simple, and all you have to do is follow the story and not go into details about the cavetation of the propellers on submarines, or how the FBI tracks a killer, or how this young guy shoots him with a .22. The main story of Clear and Present Danger is not the drug lords; it’s the opportunistic, career-oriented people within politics and the military, in our society. It is the lack of a bigger morality. On a book like that, do you go through with a Magic Marker and highlight the sections that you think will make it into the movie? Do you jot notes? I’m serious.

JOHN MILIUS

309

I stopped writing stuff down on pads a long time ago, although with that one, I think I did write down something, just to keep track of scenes. Usually the first time I read something, I just read it. I don’t really work till I have to work. See, I believe a lot in the writing process, in having confidence in yourself and confidence in your abilities and leaving things up in the air. In other words, if you plan it all out pretty well, it’s gonna be boring. I don’t want to really know where I’m going tomorrow. I just wanted to write it as a clear and concise screenplay. But I don’t really know where I’m gonna go from day to day. I sorta know the ending, I sorta know what’s gonna happen, but I don’t know how I’m gonna get there. Do you think in terms of what kinds of scenes are going to make people put money into the film, scenes that will play on the screen—the three good scenes that, they say, will “sell” a script? I just have to find the scenes interesting. I have no idea what somebody else is going to think. How do you establish character in a concise way? You have to make them do things that are memorable and real and have a certain impact. You try and make people quirky and interesting. If you have a hero and the hero is able to prevail all the time, he’s not very interesting. I like people who take risks, who think of themselves as in service of something bigger. What I dislike about actors in general is what George Bernard Shaw said: that an actress is something more than a woman, and an actor is something less than a man. The reason for that is that most actors think that they’re the center of the universe,and therefore they’re boring,because what kind of a universe is it if you’re the center of it? A true hero is never the center of the universe.The true hero is someone who realizes that there is something bigger than he, and achieves a certain dignity by giving himself to that. Your villains, too—with the possible exception of Thulsa Doom—are as complex as the heroes, and have flaws. They also have to be real. If you look at most villainous people, they always have their own story. Look at it from their side. Did the Nazis get up every day and say, “I’m going to be a good Nazi today, so I’ve got to get myself in a fiend mode? I’ve got to round up more Jews”? No, they think they’re right when they’re doing these things. You have to get into their minds and understand what it is that makes them justify themselves.

310

JOHN MILIUS

Steve Zaillian and Donald Stewart are also credited on Clear and Present Danger. Was this one of those cases where they brought the rewrites around to everybody? I wrote the first draft and later wrote the sequence where they ambush the Suburbans [SUVs], and Steve Zaillian added a sequence where they’re dueling back and forth with computers. Everybody added something to it. Steve Zaillian and I had a wonderful ending that they never used, which is too bad. The character of Cortez, the drug kingpin [Joachim de Almeida], was a good character, and we had this whole other ending with him going to Washington to kill off the national security adviser [Harris Yulin], who is the real villain, while he’s jogging in Washington. In fleeing afterward, Cortez runs through a bad neighborhood and is accosted by thugs who say, “You’ve got to give us your money, man, because we need our dope!” They shoot him, but he manages to kill the guy who wounds him fatally. Before he lumbers off to die, the dope addict says, “You don’t understand, man. I understand where you’re coming from, but I need my dope.” It’s one of his customers who’s done him in! And Cortez sits on a bench in the Mall looking at the Capitol all night, and as the sun is coming up, it’s dawn, and he takes out and lights up a Cuban cigar—because it’s illegal—and smokes it and laughs hysterically. And then, looking at the Capitol, he dies. But we couldn’t use that because Harrison Ford doesn’t have a scene that good. And it’s a terrible ending now where Harrison says, “I’m gonna go to the Senate and testify in closed session.” Well, we know the senators are just as rotten as the president! How is he gonna expose this before the Senate? They exposed everything about Waco, and it did a hell of a lot of good, didn’t it?

THE WRITING PROCESS

Why do so many of your films use voice-over narration? Nothing’s as good as somebody telling you a story. What I do goes back to the Homeric ethic of telling the tale of the Trojan wars again and again, until finally it’s written down by somebody. Nobody really knows who Homer was. In every one of my movies I have a scene—and I’ll often cut it out—where somebody tells a really powerful story, and it’s just them talking and telling the story. I can think of other movies where that’s effective: Patton’s speech [in Patton, 1970] is much more effective because he’s telling it to you: “We’re going to go through those lousy Hun bastards like crap through a goose.” Another great scene is in the Bergman film Persona

JOHN MILIUS

311

(1966). Two women on the beach tell a story of an erotic encounter, a sexual incident. I don’t even remember what the sexual incident was—I haven’t seen the movie since I was very young—but I remember it was incredibly arousing to hear them talk about it while they were lying there on the beach. There wasn’t anything you saw except them talking, but you used your imagination, and so it was incredibly powerful. Your scripts for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Dillinger, and The Wind and the Lion aren’t written in the standard screenplay form. They’re in the past tense, they use shortcuts, and they’re evocative rather than glib or functional. When I wrote Roy Bean, I wanted to write it better than it needed to be. I didn’t like the way screenplays were written. Matter of fact, I give myself full credit that the screenplay form today is my form. Eliminating cut to and a lot of stuff like that. Describing settings. The Wind and the Lion opens “A gull screams,” and then you go right into the story, you open on the image. Or “The Desert—Caravan to Fez.” You don’t cut to “close shot—Desert—Caravan to Fez.” It’s just what it is. With Rough Riders it’s “Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay.” That’s all you need to know; you don’t need to know what kind of shot it is. Do you say your dialogue lines out loud while you are working on a script? No. I just write them. Do you scroll back and forth, and rewrite as you go? Sometimes I’ll go back and fix something, or make a mental note to go back and fix it later when I’m done, but I like to get through to the end. Once you’re writing, it takes on a certain organic nature, and to interfere with that is very bad. When writing is good, you really don’t know what the people are gonna do each day. They surprise you because they’re alive. If you go back and fix things, you’re being much too manipulative. You don’t want to have that kind of control over it. You want to have the thing a little bit out of your control. How do you know what’s good and what isn’t good? When I’m excited by it and can’t stop writing, then it’s good. When I find it to be maudlin or predictable, I know it’s bad.

312

JOHN MILIUS

Do you have a work ritual? Nope. I used to dance with rattlesnakes. You don’t drink, you don’t do drugs, maybe a cigar— It’s been a hard life because I have not had the comfort of drugs or drink like other writers. Have you ever been blocked? Many times. I’m blocked right now, today. I hope something will happen tomorrow. Sometimes you just feel so guilty that you sit down and write. Once I get started, I’m usually okay. How much research and thinking do you do before you sit down and start writing? You do as much research as you can to make it real, and you gotta know sorta where you’re going. Then you don’t want to do too much planning, because if you do too much planning, it’ll become dull. I think that’s what most writers do, and why most screenplays are so dull. And then the same thing with executives who write down how they’re gonna fix it and they all put in their two bits. How can the thing have any life of its own?

HOLLYWOOD-AND-VENAL

Is film merely a storytelling medium, or does it hold a higher place in our culture? Historical tales tell the stories of valor and heroes and great enterprise that underline the better nature of men. And I think that’s a worthwhile thing to do. That’s what my purpose is. I’m here to build monuments to the Rough Riders and to the marines at Iwo Jima and the Son Tay raiders and, I hope, Curtis LeMay. Why is it so hard to get meaningful movies made? We’re in a time when people are specifically trying to do movies that are not about anything. It’s not like we’re trying to run away from problems like the Depression or something like that. It’s that we do live in a time of enormous permissiveness, flagging morality—of any kind, not morality as

JOHN MILIUS

313

sex, for example—morality as business ethics. These are times when no one’s sure of anything, so rather than deal with anything, it’s best to make films about nothing. How do you see yourself in the history of film and the commerce of this town? I just try and make a living. I don’t think I have a very big place—in fact, I have a very small place in the commerce of this town. I’m an anomaly. As far as the history goes, I’m always amazed that any of us has any place in film history. I don’t know how many more films I have in me. Three? Five? I’ve made twenty-three so far, maybe I’ll retire when I’ve made thirty. That’d be a pretty good record. But I don’t know how important any of this is really going to be in the light of history. They always tell writers, “Write about what you know.” What does this generation of writers and filmmakers know? All of life adds up into experience, and if people don’t live life but just look at movies, then they’re going to make movies about movies, and the experiences that they have borrowed from movies. That’s what happens a lot of the time now, my generation included. The whole thing is to be young, which is why so many movies nowadays are made about high school—because that’s the only life they had prior to making movies. It used to be that you were expected to be an artist breaking new ground. Now it’s completely the opposite: the more you can key it to a particular audience that you can manipulate, the better off you are. It’s like high school—high school culture has encompassed everything. Everybody goes and does things because it’s “hip” or “cool” or whatever. Advertisers and media people sell this idea. Well, if that’s all [young people] hear about while they are growing up, that’s going to become the virtues they have, not the virtues of steadiness of honor or loyalty or honesty. They’re not going to have the virtues of great skill or excellence; they’re going to have the virtues of being hip and changing with the times. I’m an anachronism. Many times in interviews I’ve been asked, “You don’t really do all this stuff that they say you do; you don’t go hunting and shooting, and hang out and smoke cigars with your friends, and do all this macho old man, redneck shit that you say you do, do you? Isn’t this just a way of irritating people and having a persona?” People actually say that to me, and I say, “No, I do all that stuff ‘cause that’s what I really like to do.”

314

JOHN MILIUS

I don’t really give much of a damn about a lot of other things, and what I care about really is not that popular, and I really don’t care about what other people do. I’m not very good at hiding anything. I come off as very strongly opinionated and very set in my ways, but I’m not arrogant. I am an anachronism. It’s pretty hard to be arrogant if you’re an anachronism.

NOTES 1

Milius removed his name from the credits of Texas Rangers.

2

Although Milius and Lucas are the best known of the five, Randal Kleiser later became a successful director of Grease (1978) and other films. Basil Poledouris, who composed the score for Milius’s student films, went on to compose many major sound tracks, including for several Milius features: Big Wednesday, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Farewell to the King, and Flight of the Intruder. Don Glut acted, occasionally wrote and directed, and performed miscellaneous behind-the-camera functions principally for exploitation films.

3

Marcello, I’m So Bored is a pastiche of captured conversations, with the recurring motif of a street sweeper. At the end (photographed in negative) a man and a woman drive up in a convertible. Milius plays the man.

4

George Lucas’s documentary The Emperor profiles flamboyant Los Angeles radio personality Bob “The Emperor” Hudson.

5

Huyck and his partner Gloria Katz later wrote several notable films, including the Oscar-nominated screenplay for George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973).

6

Marcello, I’m So Bored won the National Student Film Award in 1967.

7

A key player in the rise of the “New Hollywood,” Mike Medavoy became production chief of United Artists, left to cofound Orion Pictures, and later formed his own production company.

8

From a novel by Vardis Fisher, Jeremiah Johnson is about a cavalry officer prevailing on mountain man Jeremiah Johnson to lead him through a sacred Crow burial site. The Crow retaliate by killing Johnson’s adopted wife and son. Johnson then goes on a rampage, killing Crow Indians until he and the tribe reach a respectful standoff.

9

For the record, this is Harry’s (Clint Eastwood) memorable speech to the felled bank robber: “I know what you’re thinkin’: ‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?”

10

In The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Judge Roy Bean yearns his entire life

JOHN MILIUS

315

to meet Lily Langtry, legendary stage actress and international beauty, but before this can happen he is killed, defending his town against bad men. In Milius’s script, Langtry finally arrives by train the morning after Bean dies and is handed a letter left behind for her. The script says, “She sat in the window, framed like a beautiful portrait. Reflected in that window, one could also see the Judge’s coffin being loaded onto the train. She opened the letter and read . . . a tear rolled down her cheek—she sniffed but recomposed herself by stiffening the upper lip. She folded the letter—the train whistle blew—clouds of steam obscured her.The train left with the two of them. That is the story of how Judge Roy Bean lived and died and brought law and order to the wild land west of the Pecos River. Fade Out.” In the film, years pass between Bean’s death and Langtry’s arrival. 11

John Huston suffered from emphysema, which eventually killed him in 1987.

12

Celeste (Cici) Shane was Huston’s fifth wife.

13

In film scripts, revisions are usually printed on various-colored pages.

14

In real life, the Raisuli captured an Englishman named Ian Pedicaris. In the film of The Wind and the Lion, Mulay Hamid El Raisuli (Sean Connery) kidnaps an American woman, Eden Pedicaris (Candice Bergen), and her children not for money, which has no honor, but as a political ploy, forcing President Theodore Roosevelt to call out the Mediterranean fleet to rescue her.

15

Rosita Forbes wrote El Raisuni, the Sultan of the Mountains (London: Thornton-Butterworth, 1924). Forbes—whose real name was Lady McGrath—was a celebrated travel writer who also influenced young filmmaker Michael Powell (see Powell’s memoir A Life in the Movies).

16

Welles is referring to The Other Side of the Wind, his legendary, never-completed story of a great director’s last days. Numerous filmmakers (Mazursky, Bogdanovich, Jaglom, etc.) tell of receiving late-night calls from Welles to “come be in the movie.”

17

Big Wednesday is about the friendship of three “big-name” California surfers— Matt Johnson (Jan-Michael Vincent), Jack Barlow (William Katt), and LeRoy Smith (Gary Busey). Their friendship survives drinking, war, aging, and nature itself during America’s turbulent years, 1962–1974.

18

Surfer Gerry Lopez plays himself in the film.

19

At this writing, Jan-Michael Vincent was still struggling to reclaim a career repeatedly derailed by substance abuse and run-ins with the law.

20

Apocalypse Now was originally written in 1969 for George Lucas to direct. Milius transposed Joseph Conrad’s story of an ivory trader gone mad in the Congo into an allegory about the insanity of Vietnam.

21

The meaning of this scene was clarified when Apocalypse Now Redux was released in 2001, restoring a major plot point: Kurtz had warned, in a suppressed intelligence report to the Joint Chiefs, that “dilettantes” with one-year tours of duty were useless against a dedicated enemy.

316

JOHN MILIUS

22

Fred Rexer is a former Special Operations expert and frequent adviser on Milius’s films.

23

I Wanna Hold Your Hand exuberantly follows the adventures of a group of kids trying to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. Used Cars is about try-anything salesmen plying the used-car trade. The comedy 1941 is based on the fallacious sighting of a Japanese submarine off the shore of California shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

24

Although there have been two ersatz Conan sequels—Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985)—plans were begun in late 2000 for Milius to write and direct an official sequel in which Arnold Schwarzenegger would play the elder King Conan. Tentatively, King Conan, Crown of Iran would pit Conan— who has agreed to serve a foreign power in exchange for peace for his people— against his son, who comes to claim his spiritual inheritance. In the summer of 2001, the producers, the Wachowski brothers (Larry and Andy), rejected Milius’s script; then in 2003 Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California. The future of the project is unclear.

25

From the 1969 novel by Swiss journalist Pierre Schoendoerffer, Farewell to the King follows Learoyd (Nick Nolte), a deserter in World War II, who sets himself up as a king of a South Pacific island, by virtue of unifying its disparate Dyack tribes, and then must face the Japanese anyway when war catches up with him.

INTERVIEW BY JOHN BAXTER

FREDERIC RAPHAEL RENAISSANCE MAN

ith a more pervasive literary culture than the United States and, moreover, with not so much work to go round, the screenwriter in Europe is far less likely than his Stateside counterpart to specialize. For Frederic Raphael, as for his European contemporaries Harold Pinter, Jean-Claude Carrière, and John Mortimer, writing for films is just one element in an impressively full bibliography, which, in Raphael’s case, includes collections of literary essays, novels of manners, translations from classical Greek, original drama for radio and television, and some short films as director. While his writing for John Schlesinger on Darling (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), as well as his intricate screenplay for Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), attracted attention and awards, he was as surprised as anyone when Stanley Kubrick invited him to adapt Arthur Schnitzer’s Traumnovelle. Eyes Wide Shut (1999), though not to everyone’s taste, least of all Raphael’s, remains a characteristically eccentric conclusion to Kubrick’s brilliant but erratic career. Interviewed in the walled garden of his luxurious home in the Dordogne region of central France, Raphael applied a characteristically dry and sarcastic wit not only to Kubrick and the experience of Eyes Wide Shut but to the totality of a varied cinema career.

W

317

318

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

FREDERIC RAPHAEL VISITING GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, 2003. (PHOTO BY WILLIAM B. WINBURN.)

FREDERIC RAPHAEL (1930–)

1956 1956 1958 1961 1964 1965 1967 1970

Charley Moon (Guy Hamilton). Uncredited contribution. The Big Money. Uncredited contribution. Bachelor of Hearts (Wolf Rilla). Co-script. Don’t Bother to Knock, aka Why Bother to Knock (Cyril Frankel). Co-script. Nothing but the Best (Clive Donner). Lyricist, script. Darling (John Schlesinger). Script. Two for the Road (Stanley Donen). Script. Far from the Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger). Script. A Severed Head (Dick Clement). Script.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

1974 1981 1990 1999

319

Daisy Miller (Peter Bogdanovich). Script. Richard’s Things (Anthony Harvey). Script, based on his novel. La putain du roi (U.S.: The King’s Whore) (Axel Corti). Co-script. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick). Co-script.

Television includes Weissgibt auf (1966, based on his play, German TV); Rogue Male (script, 1976, U.K.); The Glittering Prizes (miniseries, script, based on his novel, 1976, U.K.); Premiere (wrote and directed “Something’s Wrong” episode of series, 1978, U.K.); Of Mycenae and Men (script, 1979, U.K.); School Play (script, 1979, U.K.); The Best of Friends (series, 1980, U.K.); Oxbridge Blues (miniseries based on his books, also director, 1984, U.K.); After the War (ten-part miniseries, 1990, U.K.); Women & Men: Stories of Seduction (director and writer of “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt” episode of HBO series, 1990, U.S.); Picture Windows (script for “Armed Response,” episode of Showtime miniseries, 1995, U.S.); and Coast to Coast (script based on his novel, 2004, U.S.). Plays include Lady at the Wheel (with Lucienne Hill), A Man on the Bridge, The Island (for children), An Early Life, and From the Greek. Published works (partial listing) include Obbligato, The Earlsdon Way, The Limits of Love, The S-Man: A Grammar of Success (with Tom Maschler, under joint pseudonym Mark Caine), A Wild Surmise, The Graduate Wife, The Trouble with England, Lindmann, A Novel, Darling, Orchestra and Beginners, Like Men Betrayed, Who Were You with Last Night?, April, June and November, Richard’s Things, California Time, The Glittering Prizes, W. Somerset Maugham and His World, Sleeps Six, Cracks in the Ice: Views and Reviews, For and Against, Oxbridge Blues and Other Stories, A List of Books: An Imaginary Library (with Kenneth McLeish), Byron, Heaven and Earth, Think of England, After the War, The Hidden I: A Myth Revised, Of Gods and Men (illustrated by Sarah Raphael), A Double Life, The Latin Lover, France: The Four Seasons (photographs by Michael Busselle), Old Scores, The Necessity of AntiSemitism, Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay (with Stanley Kubrick), Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick, Popper, The Great Philosophers from Socrates to Turing (with Ray Monk), All His Sons, Personal Terms: The 1950s and 1960s, The Benefit of Doubt, Personal Terms II, A Spoilt Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood, and Drawings (with Sarah Raphael). As translator: The Poems of Catullus (with Kenneth McLeish), The Serpent Son (with McLeish), The Oresteia of Aeschylus (with McLeish), The Complete Plays of Aeschylus (with McLeish), and Medea (with McLeish).

320

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

Academy Award honors include an Oscar for Best Original Story and Screenplay for Darling and a nomination for Two for the Road. Writers Guild honors include Best Original Screenplay nomination for Two for the Road.

You’ve written that your first involvement with screenwriting was as “an overworked, underpaid and ignorant hack.” This would have been in the late 1950s, after you graduated from Cambridge? The first film I worked on was Charley Moon [1956], directed by Guy Hamilton, who later became famous for the James Bond movies. It was a musical starring Max Bygraves, a comedian who was quite famous then and remained so for a long time. It was about a guy who . . . well, became Max Bygraves. I wrote it with Leslie Bricusse. He and I had written a revue at Cambridge for the Footlights called Out of the Blue, which came to London and was quite famous for a season in about 1954. Bricusse, an extremely adept operator who was involved with very smart people in London, because he’d worked with Beatrice Lillie, was commissioned to write this film, and I, because I had worked with him on various stage revues in Cambridge, was asked to work on it. He got paid £1,200 and I got £50—doubtless a fair partition. As a result we were offered a contract for one year by the Rank organization to write movies. Rank’s Pinewood was a sort of mini Hollywood studio in those days. We each got paid £112 a month, and, to our great pleasure, during the entire period of the contract, they never asked us to do anything. I used some of the money to travel, particularly to France, and I’d just got back from Paris when I had a call from a Rank producer named Joseph Janni. He was making a comedy with Ian Carmichael called The Big Money [1956], and we were asked to read it and rewrite it. Years later, Joe asked me, “Fred, do you remember the first thing you ever said to me?” I said, “I imagine it was something like, ‘Good afternoon, sir.’ ” He said, “No, no, it was not that at all. You came to my flat in Chelsea, having just read the script of The Big Money, and you said, ‘What do you want to do this piece of shit for?’ ” But, as Joe would say, “There’s shit, there’s high-class shit, and there’s shit with sugar.”

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

321

You scripted “the unfunniest comedy of an unfunny era, the squarewheeled vehicle on which the German actor was trundled to temporary oblivion.” I take this to be Bachelor of Hearts [1958]. Yes. After we rewrote The Big Money, quite successfully, Rank, now that our contract had lapsed, asked us to do a film about a German exchange student at Cambridge who becomes the target of a fringe student group called the Dodo Club. The star, Hardy Kruger, went on to make some quite respectable films, but this wasn’t his finest hour. By the time it was finished, I was so tired of collaboration, and of the movies, that my wife and I decided to move to Spain. Was that before or after you wrote Don’t Bother to Knock [1961]? Both—since I remember coming back from Spain to work on it. It was another rewrite job, but for another studio, ABPC. They had a rather cynical script editor named Fritz Gotfurth, who was the first person I ever met who had personal experience of Hitler’s Germany. We became rather friendly, and he let me rewrite this script, which was a farce about a travel agent, played by Richard Todd, who keeps giving keys to his flat to various women. Dickie [Todd], who was also executive producer, liked what I had written, and I was asked to do some more work for him, on a project called “Little Ladyship.” This was written by Fritz Gotfurth’s wife; Fritz was very adept at selling his own and his wife’s product. It was never made, but the money I was paid for four weeks’ work could pay the rent for ten weeks in Spain. Around then, you had your first approach from Hollywood. It must have been late 1958 or early 1959. There were two Hollywood characters who contacted me in London. One was [agent] Sam Jaffe. The other was Sam Marx, who had been script supervisor, or whatever it was called, at MGM. When Sam Marx retired, he was given, as a kiss-off gift, a production project, which was quite usual in those days, and remains so even now. I remember going to their suite at a big hotel on Park Lane. They each called the other “Sam,” and though their names were indeed Sam it was a bit strange. They wanted a film about Damon and Pythias, these two great friends—“But y’ know, Freddy, it’s not about a coupla fruits, or like that.” They had already had a draft done in America, and they’d rented a room in

322

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

the nearby Dorchester Hotel for me to read it. I said I’d rather take it home with me. As I left, they said, “Uh, Freddy, one thing. We had sorta second thoughts about that script. So where it says, ‘Damon,’ that’s Pythias—right? And where it says ‘Pythias,’ that’s Damon.” It was then I decided it would probably be best if I had nothing whatsoever to do with the movies from then onward.1 So you went back to Spain? I did. We could live there for about £10 a week while I wrote novels, finishing one on Friday and starting the next one on Monday. In 1960 we went back to England for the birth of our second child and first daughter. In those days you did not have children born in Spain if you could avoid it, because of the state of Spanish doctors’ hands and doubtless other [body] parts. While we were there, I had a call from Wolf Mankowitz, who was adapting a novel called Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man for Peter Sellers. It was about a man who fell hopelessly in love, and in a way paralleled Peter’s own experience with Sophia Loren years later. The job paid £1,000, so I went to see Mankowitz. He was a quite well-educated and rather bright man who’d written novels, had been to Cambridge, and at one point had been a Leavisite. I don’t know why he asked me to see him, unless it was out of an urge to turn down fellow Cambridge graduates, and fellow Jews for that matter. He showed me this huge box filled with five-pound notes, which were then a quite respectable medium of exchange, and told me,“I don’t want any of this Cambridge rubbish. I want a real show biz writer, and I don’t think you’re him, so piss off.” However, a few days later, a novel I’d written before I went to Spain, The Limits of Love, about Jews in London, was published to considerable acclaim. It had a whole-page review in the Daily Express. Wolf rang again, and said, “Fuck it, I suppose if you’re going to be a success, I’d better give you this job.” I then worked on the script, but by the time I’d almost finished Wolf and Peter had a row, and it went into abeyance. Meanwhile, I’d been to see Stella Richman, who was a TV producer at ATV. Stella was extremely good to a large number of writers, of whom I was one. She enabled us to write lots of things for television, got them put on almost immediately, paid us retainers, and so on. I lived through Stella and ATV for a period of about three years, all the while writing more novels, which paid very little. My wife and I, with our two children, were able to go back to Spain, and live in considerably more style.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

323

How did you come to write Nothing but the Best [1964]? One of the plays I wrote for ATV was The Best of Everything, from a short story by the American Stanley Ellin. Gary Raymond and Terence Alexander played the two men, and since it ran less than an hour, the story ended with the trunk being delivered to the house.2 I’d have been happy to keep on living in Spain, writing novels and the occasional TV script, but Selwyn Lloyd brought in what was called a “credit squeeze,” and suddenly one couldn’t get money out of England anymore.3 Overnight, we were almost broke. Fortunately, however, The Best of Everything was bought by Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, who traded as AngloAmalgamated. Their head of production, David Deutsch, hired me to write the screenplay. Our lease in Spain was up, and so almost overnight everything in our lives changed. I actually wrote Nothing but the Best in Rome, in a flat on the via Triumfale. I made it a somewhat larky version of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, though with a happy ending.4 I think the tone came out of my sense of insecurity about England. I’d arrived in England as a sevenyear-old American kid, and I very quickly realized—because England was a very dominant and assertive culture, and an intimidating one—that you either learned how to be like the English, or you weren’t going to get anywhere. And as most seven-year-olds can, and as Jews traditionally are supposedly able to do, I did manage to do it successfully, so successfully that I would find it hard today to detach the mask from the face. So the story of Jimmy Brewster was not as alien as one might imagine. My good fortune is that I’d been through many of the things in the film without being greatly threatened by them. I did actually go to a good school, I did go to Cambridge, and I was, I suppose, quite a clever person. Also, the English upper-class character—what one thinks of as the Etonian character, and a constant of English comedy—is the sort of person, with his total lack of shame, and insolence and assurance, that any social-climbing little Jew boy might wish to be. The fun of social comedy is always the same, in a way. I remember saying to Kubrick about Eyes Wide Shut, which is based on a story set in Vienna earlier this century, “You must remember that marriage, courtship, and the relations between the sexes have changed enormously since then,” and he said, “You think they’ve changed? I don’t think they’ve changed that much.” And they haven’t. Because bishops always move diagonally, and knights always two forward and one to the side. That’s the chess game

324

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

we’re in. And to a degree, people trying to make it in society are no different now than in the days of the Satyricon. Nothing but the Best has some of the smartest and wittiest dialogue of any film of the period. Only one blow is struck, and hardly a voice is raised. Everything’s achieved by wit. Critics were at pains to say that people in Nothing but the Best talked like no upper-class people ever did talk—to which the answer is: I didn’t know I’d made any contract with reality when I decided to write fiction. The trick is to create convincing alternative worlds which tell you something about the present one. To that degree, Nothing but the Best is nothing but a projection of England in the eyes of an amused and secure but never unalarmed outsider. Did you have any input into the casting? Yes. I think writers exaggerate but can also underrate their influence, particularly if they have a caustic tongue. We do have some ability to improve—or not improve—things, according to our enthusiasms. Alan Bates had just made A Kind of Loving [1962] with AngloAmalgamated and become a kind of star, so they were able to get him to do it. And since this was a metropolitan rather than a provincial film, he was quite keen. I can’t remember whose idea Denholm Elliott was. It wasn’t mine, though it was certainly a good idea. Denholm had previously played more or less charming juvenile leads in films like The Sound Barrier [1952], which was not really his métier at all. He was very glad to play a character part—one of his first. Millicent Martin was my idea. She had become a celebrity in the David Frost TV show That Was the Week That Was. She actually belonged very well to the world of Nothing but the Best in that, though she appeared to be very deb-y and Harrods-y, she was in fact a brave little Jewish hoofer and singer. I remember we had a read-through with the cast, and Harry Andrews said, “Is this your first screenplay?” I said yes, since it was the first one I’d written alone. And he said, “Well, it won’t be the last.” Was it a happy production? How did you get on with Clive Donner? Clive Donner was the idea of David Deutsch. They’d worked together at Elstree when Clive was an editor. He’d made a couple of unsuccessful films, and was doing commercials—some, I think, for Joe Janni’s company.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

325

David and Clive, in the nature of producers and directors, were not interested in gracing me with any more credit than was necessary, though David was more generous than Clive, who affected great enthusiasm for the script, but later suggested to David, apparently, that they should get another writer. But when things went wrong, of course, I was the person to whom they had recourse. When they showed the film to Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, they hated it. They didn’t understand it. So I said, “Let’s put a commentary on it. Ask them to list everything they didn’t understand, and I’ll explain it in the commentary.” That was quite fun, and of course all the reviewers, who credited everything good in the film to Clive, said this film could not have been constructed as it was unless the idea of a voice-over had been present from the beginning. I’d revamped the original story so much that David Deutsch wrote to Ellin asking if he’d mind if his name was removed from the credits. To which Ellin replied, “If you think I’m going to take my name off a movie as good as that, you’ve got to be crazy.” Which was nice, and perfectly fair. •

•

•

And you were then offered a plethora of other projects? I don’t know about a plethora. As you know, in every business there are fewer players than people outside it imagine. What happened was that Joe Janni, who’d been fired by Rank, and John Schlesinger, the team who made A Kind of Loving for the same company, did not want, having done that film and Billy Liar [1963], to make another film in Bradford. They were sick of the Great Northern Hotel and all that it stood for.5 In their ponderous way, stemming from the British documentary tradition (for which I have very little use at all), they had been seeking to do a film about “A Modern Woman,” based on an ex-Rank actress called Beth Rogan. She married a banker named Tony Samuel and was also the mistress of Joe Janni’s best friend, Charles Ricorno. And this became Darling [1965]? Yes. Godfrey Winn, then a famous journalist, had written a treatment called “A Woman on Her Way,” which was all about this woman who behaved badly, but whose heart was in the right place—even though other parts were not at its service all the time. They came to me with this terrible piece of paper (the number of terrible pieces of paper one has seen in one’s life beats any conceivable reckoning), and asked if I would write a screenplay based on it.

326

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

We then had various meetings with people involved in what they conceived to be the world of such a woman—as if Shakespeare, before being allowed to write King Lear, would have been required to meet with a certain number of dethroned monarchs of a certain age in order to discover what they had in common. We did meet some interesting people, however, including Beth Rogan, on whom the story was putatively based. There were many marvelous stories, including one about her and her demon lover going to Geneva. He was trying to advertise to her the joys of two women and one man in a bed, and they picked up a girl, but because it was Geneva on a Sunday evening, they couldn’t buy any drink. The only thing they could buy were liqueur chocolates, which this man proceeded to drain into a glass to get this innocent girl sufficiently pissed to get her into bed. In a sequence of your semiautobiographical TV series The Glittering Prizes, you describe a scene where the lovers—and owners, in a sense, of the model-actress played by Julie Christie—devour her effigy in ice cream. I did actually put such a scene in the original screenplay of Darling, but it was cut out. Darling took a long time to be made. Anglo-Amalgamated put up part of the money, but the Rank organization refused to back it, since they’d just made a film called The Wild and the Willing [1962] and thought this covered much the same ground.6 And then, suddenly, after a long period of not being made, during which I had become involved in my next film, Two for the Road [1966], and its eventual director, Stanley Donen, Darling suddenly was made, and quite well too. What did you think of Julie Christie? Julie’s performance has that rare quality in that it still seems to vary from viewing to viewing. Sometimes you watch the film and think, “She can’t say a line without fucking it up.” But she really is a magnetic person to watch. As Joe Janni used to say, “She has the eyes.” And if you have the eyes, nothing else matters much. I thought Dirk Bogarde as her writer lover whom she picks up and drops throughout the film was the weak link. Dirk said to me, “I can’t get over the feeling that the character’s very weak,” and I didn’t endear myself to him by saying, “Well, why the fuck do you think you’re playing it?”

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

327

And Laurence Harvey as the lover? I quite liked Larry. Larry was fun. He was an honest tart; quite shameless. Occasionally he had “Ideas,” which is usually a mistake in an actor. Like the notion of his cigar smoke blowing back into the room just before he enters it. But John let him put it in, and it worked well enough. After Darling, I was asked to adapt Iris Murdoch’s novel A Severed Head for Jimmy Woolf and John Woolf, who were then doing Romulus Films. They wanted a vehicle for Larry—though they didn’t tell me this at the time. John Schlesinger was to direct. It was the first time I was offered real money for a script. I was in Rome, and [my agent] Richard Gregson rang me and said, “They want to make A Severed Head and they’ll pay $75,000.” I put my hand over the receiver and said to my wife, “$75,000!!!!” and then took my hand away and asked, “Is that enough, Richard?” I wrote A Severed Head, but then the Woolfs revealed they wanted Larry and, failing him, Dirk Bogarde to star, and John, in the way of directors, decided he didn’t want casting foisted on him, so the project went into abeyance, only to be revived, disastrously, somewhat later. You ran across Joseph Losey at this point in the midsixties, I think. Yes. Losey, despite all his affectations of artistic purity and political correctness, was, like most people in the movies, adroit—and he was adroit, especially, at turning weaknesses, of which he had a number, into strengths, of which he had few—and at keeping a very wary eye on everybody else’s activities. And he also, like the keen adulterer I suspect he was, felt that the desirability of people was verified by the fact that other people desired them. I’d gone back to Rome in 1964, where I was writing Two for the Road, and I got a letter from Losey which, if it didn’t bring tears to my eyes, certainly brought a triumphant lump to my throat, because at that time Losey was the absolute darling of the Cahiers du Cinéma fancy movie set. He asked me to write some dialogue for a movie that he was planning. I can’t remember the title, but for some reason, probably funding, it was to be shot in Norway. I said I wasn’t very keen, and he said that, when I was next in London, would I go to see him about doing various things. I went to see him and didn’t like him very much. He wanted me to adapt a book called The Young Trout; a very poor book by Roger Vailland, which Losey later turned into a very poor film.7 I don’t know why he chose me. Perhaps Harold [Pinter] wasn’t available, and one has to pick one’s “second eleven” sometime.8

328

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

AUDREY HEPBURN AND ALBERT FINNEY IN TWO FOR THE ROAD , FOR WHICH FREDERIC RAPHAEL’S SCRIPT EARNED AN OSCAR NOMINATION.

What was the genesis of the film you did make next, Two for the Road? I don’t know whether my wife didn’t want to lose me, or I didn’t want to lose my wife, but we took the view that it would be prudent in the wicked sixties if I didn’t spend large amounts of time in London while she was in Rome, and vice versa. So we used always to just pack up and travel together. While we were driving down to the south of France from London on one of these trips, I said, “Imagine if we met ourselves as we were ten years ago,” and of course the idea revealed itself as a movie. I suggested this to John and Joe, and they were not very keen. Alan Bates, however, was. You had him in mind for the role of the architect, eventually played by Albert Finney? Not really, though I did mention it to him. Who would you have preferred? Rock Hudson.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

329

You’re kidding! I wanted someone who could say lines. I like lines being said correctly, and English actors are not all that good at film dialogue. They’re quite good at acting, but that isn’t the same thing. What brought you to the film’s eventual director, Stanley Donen? Darling was just about to go into production, and my then-agent, Richard Gregson, thought it would be a good idea if I had some experience of working with a big Hollywood director. I agreed, since I’d only been paid about £3,500 for two years’ work on Darling, and we had a new house and a new child. He arranged for me to write a movie for a director named Norman Panama. Panama had made a number of films with Melvin Frank, but they had parted, and Panama, thinking he was the talented one, had started to do movies on his own. In fact Melvin Frank went on to make a number of successful movies; I don’t know what happened to Panama. Norman was a perfectly nice guy, and it was arranged that I would write a movie with him called “What Makes Tommy Run.” It was going to star Kirk Douglas and was about a U.S. Air Force general who falls in love with another general’s wife. It took place in Rome, which was probably why I was deemed to be a suitable collaborator. Things began to go wrong from the first day I started work with Panama. He believed in the Hollywood idea of “kicking the idea around.” He had a typewriter on a wheeled trolley, so he could get a line on paper without any delay. We tried to work out the motivation for what made Tommy run, and I began to feel very ill. I can’t work with other people in the room and I never have been able to work out the motivation for anything. I soon had a splitting headache. After I’d been there two hours, I looked at my watch, and only fifteen minutes had passed. That night, I told my wife how I felt, and she said, “Dump him.” “But the house needs central heating . . .” “Don’t blame me. Dump him.” I rang Richard, and he said, “I’ve made the deal. You said you were available. If you want to get out, you’ll have to handle it.” American producers were widely known to be without morals, and ready to crush anyone who didn’t do what they were told. I was convinced of this when I went in the next day and told Panama,“Look, I don’t care what makes Tommy run, and I don’t want to write the film. I just can’t do it.” And Panama said, “You don’t want to do the movie?” I said, “I realize my career in the movies is over . . .”

330

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

And he said, “Don’t be so fucking stupid. Thank God you told me now. Who wants to spend seventeen weeks with a guy who doesn’t want to do something?”9 Then Panama said, “Listen, I was talking to Stanley Donen at a party last night, and he said, ‘You’ve got Freddy Raphael? How?’ I told him, ‘I just called him up,’ and Stanley said, ‘I never thought of that. Maybe you could get him to call me?’ So, you want to work with Stanley Donen?” I said, “Well, I’d like to meet him.” I went to Stanley’s office, and walked up the stairs past the posters for all his successes: Singin’ in the Rain [1952], On the Town [1949], and so on. He said, “I saw Nothing but the Best, and everybody told me it was Clive Donner, but I knew it was you.” I didn’t find this entirely disagreeable. We discussed a few projects, none of which I liked, but a while later I suggested Two for the Road. Stanley gave me a little money and I went away and wrote it, and sent him the script. One night he rang, and said, “It’s the most wonderful thing I ever read. In fact I would have called you halfway through but I felt silly. It’s going to be the best thing I ever did.” It’s one of Audrey Hepburn’s best performances. Did you write it with her in mind? Audrey had been our thought from the beginning. When we first approached her, she said she liked the idea but had just made Paris When It Sizzles [1964] and was worried the film would be like that. We sent her the script, then went to Switzerland, where she lived with her then-husband, Mel Ferrer, who went on and on boringly about his own projects. But she was absolutely adorable and, having read the script, she said yes. We then went back down to Zurich, Stanley and I, and he said, “C’mon, Freddy, let’s buy some watches.” We went into this big store, and Stanley said, “We’d like to see some watches.” The guy said fine, and spilled large numbers of watches onto a velvet tray, and Stanley said,“Freddy, which ones would you like?” I said, “Sorry?” I felt like one of those women who say, “What sort of girl do you take me for?” and it must have showed, because Stanley said, “Don’t be silly. We got Audrey Hepburn. Have some watches.” How satisfied were you with Two for the Road once it was done? I have a great affection for Stanley, who worked extremely hard, and who said at the end of it, “If you like it, that’s all I care about.” I think he did

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

331

make some mistakes typical of the time: overdressing, for instance. I think it could have been a truer film if it had been slightly more intimate and less showy, but in many ways it is a very beautiful film. I think it’s the greatest performance of Audrey’s career—all the more so for the fact that she was pregnant for much of it. On the page, the script reads as a quite sunny story of the durability of married love, the ability of two people to find new reasons for staying together, even in the face of wealth and success. But the film has a melancholy undertone. Is that down to you or Donen? I think Stanley felt the film would be taken more seriously if Albert were encouraged not to play it like Rock Hudson. Although Albert did have a love affair with Audrey both during and after the movie, for the purposes of the movie itself he never understood something of which I’ve always been deeply conscious, because of my own marriage: that you’re very lucky to be with a beautiful woman. Perhaps he’d been spoiled in that regard. So, except in one moment when they sit in a café before they go to bed together for the first time, and the predominant mood of which is desire, he never conveyed that he knew he was lucky. Audrey understood it, but Albert didn’t. And therefore the film was not as much about that marriage as it might have been. Part of the problem was the problem of English actors in America in general. English actors are defined by their origins. You never wonder where Harrison Ford came from; whether he is the son of a steelworker or a Wall Street banker. But English actors all come from somewhere. It’s the curse of England: everyone comes from somewhere, and they’re never allowed to forget it. And they never forget it themselves. So Albert never really became anything but a somewhat older guy from Salford. He never transcended his origins, except on stage occasionally. But that was acting, and being in the movies isn’t acting: it’s a kind of false being. And he couldn’t “be” falsely. He mistook being serious for the same thing as being more miserable. Recently in Hollywood they’ve been thinking of remaking Two for the Road. Carrie Fisher has done a script—since clearly I, having written it once, was completely unsuitable to write it again. Apparently she delivered each of the seven journeys in a separate envelope, and advised them to mix them up themselves. Whether it will ever be done, I don’t know. Meg Ryan wants to do it, but, as one producer told her, “Can you imagine a review that

332

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

begins, ‘Better even than Audrey Hepburn . . .’?” Audrey simply can’t be bettered in that film. Meanwhile, there was Far from the Madding Crowd, which took you back to John Schlesinger. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was at the apogee of my career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. I’d already signed to do Far from the Madding Crowd for MGM, and by the end of 1968, I’d done four feature films made in three or four years, and won an Academy Award for one of them. I thought, “I wonder when I’ll do something really good”—after which I never made another Hollywood movie. Adapting [Thomas] Hardy’s novel was apparently suggested to Joe Janni by Woodrow Wyatt, who’s a bit of an operator.10 And the idea of a gentle piste bleu11 down to a crock of gold wasn’t entirely offensive to me. Events proved otherwise, however. My agent had done a deal which separated the rights in Britain from those in America, on which MGM pinned its hopes. In the event, it did very well in Britain but poorly in America. Why do you think that was? It’s a film I admire, and I think John did a very good job, since God knows he’s hardly the stuff of sheep breeders, but it is a bit slow. I saw it in New York and didn’t like it as much as when I saw it in London. One knew it was losing the audience. And then the Dorset accents were a problem. Americans simply did not relate to these kinds of country people. At this point, I think, you were set to switch from writing to directing. Nineteen sixty-nine was the start of the American majors pulling out of British production as the dollar rose or fell—I can’t remember which. I’d written an original screenplay called “Guilt,” and Dick Zanuck and David Brown at Fox had agreed to let me direct it. It was about a woman who goes with her husband to Africa, where he’s killed. She returns to London, and becomes involved with her sister. I didn’t have a written contract, but Faye Dunaway was eager to do it, and the project was set. No problem at all about me directing. By the time I got to Hollywood the project was dead. There was no money, and nobody was doing anything at Fox. Dick and David hadn’t yet been sacked by Darryl, but that was all in the wings.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

333

I went to see the production manager at Fox about resources for “Guilt,” and he said, “Can you use any Zero Fighters in your movie? Because I got thirty Zero Fighters from Tora! Tora! Tora! [1970].12 I could let you have them for, like, nothing. In fact you would be doing me a service.” “It’s a bit of a problem,” I said, “since the film’s set in Africa.” He said, “Maybe they could fly over or something.” Fox had no money, and then Richard and David were fired, so “Guilt” was never made. But, despite everything you hear about duplicitous Hollywood lawyers and greedy producers, Fox honored every clause of our agreement. At this point in 1970, out of the past, your script of A Severed Head reappeared and was filmed. A couple of cowboys called Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais got hold of it. Clement was going to direct, and they got together the most illustrious but appalling cast of all time. Never has a film been so badly cast, or so badly directed. Ian Holm, a fine actor within his range, was not born to play Cary Grant.13 •

•

•

And then you adapted Henry James’s Daisy Miller [1974]. Daisy Miller! I’d almost forgotten. How did you get involved? There was a writers’ strike in California. Peter Bogdanovich wanted to make this film in Europe, and since I was technically a member of the British Writers’ Guild it was not blacklegging to write a screenplay in Europe, though it would have been to write one in California. Daisy Miller was really a glorified BBC 2 play; in fact I was recommended to Peter by Mark Shivas, the BBC head of production who had just commissioned me to do a series of six plays called The Glittering Prizes, on which I suspended writing to do Daisy Miller. I thought Peter wanted to do something bold and original, and I had some bold and original ideas on how to do Henry James, but he didn’t want that at all. Orson Welles had said to him that Cybill Shepherd was born to play Daisy Miller, and since Orson was Peter’s conception of what the Delphic sibyl looked like, naturally his prophecies were taken very seriously.

334

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

It’s the only film I know where you actually see the actress fluff on camera; apparently there was no cover for it. There aren’t many ways of covering Cybill Shepherd’s failings, I think. So you returned to The Glittering Prizes—six films about a group of Cambridge graduates and what happens to them as they launch themselves in seventies Britain, mostly in the arts. I wanted to do six films which would show what I was really capable of. And the BBC in those days was commissioning work from people irrespective of whether they were blue collar or white collar; not like now, when we know that education is a very bad thing and must on no account be shown in public. I thought I would write six pieces with continuing characters, but each one of which would be a kind of display; the sort of films Eric Rohmer had made in his contes moreaux.14 The Glittering Prizes was a great success, but it’s never been repeated, and when I suggested recently that the BBC do another series showing the same people twenty years on, they turned it down. Apparently the audience no longer wants films of posh people talking about middle age. But after Glittering Prizes, Mark Shivas suggested I do a thriller, an adaptation of a Geoffrey Household novel, Rogue Male, which had already been done in a totally overrated film called Man Hunt [1941]. For the first and last time in my career, I said I’d do it if I could name the director, and I suggested Clive Donner, who had gone into something of a decline following the success of What’s New Pussycat? [1965]. He did quite a good job too. Peter O’Toole was fine. Alistair Sim was lovely. A pretty nice little movie.15 Your credits during the eighties and nineties suggest only occasional flirtations with the movies while you concentrated on writing fiction, but from novels like California Time and some of your journalism, it’s evident you remained fairly deeply involved with the cinema, and indeed with Hollywood. Once the bottom fell out of British cinema in the midseventies, they continued developing projects, but usually without a director, and nothing came of them. But I had usually one job a year, which kept my operation turning over and allowed me to keep writing books, and I went to California almost every year on one thing or another. I did a script of Muriel Spark’s novel The Driver’s Seat, for instance, which was never made. I wrote a version of César et Rosalie, which Stan-

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

335

ley Donen wanted to do.16 I did a thing for Richard Dreyfuss called “FiftyFifty,” which I liked quite a lot. It was about a man who’s decided to leave his wife and who’s also decided not to leave his wife, and you follow both strands. It ends up with him on a skyscraper about to commit suicide, where he’s joined by the other version of himself who also wants to kill himself, but for entirely different reasons. His wife shouts up, “Don’t jump. We can do all the things we always wanted to do. We can go to Israel,” and he says, “Let’s jump.” This didn’t go down too well with Dreyfuss, who has a genius for choosing exactly the wrong projects, like the dreadful Mr. Holland’s Opus [1995], while refusing to do, for instance, When Harry Met Sally [1989]—one of the great wrong decisions of all time, I should think. One of your novels finally got adapted when they filmed Richard’s Things [1980]. Was this because the liberalism of cinema had finally caught up with the theme—a mistress having an affair with the widow of her lover? I suspect that it was because of the usual heterosexual fantasies about lesbian women. I fancied it as being much more erotic. Liv Ullmann, who was not my favorite lady, behaved very badly toward Amanda Redman as soon as she realized Mandy was younger and prettier than she was. Having agreed to play the part, she then said she wasn’t going to do any sex scenes. There’s no shortage of sex in The King’s Whore [1990]. How did that come about? My agent in London represented someone on the film, and a version had been written which was in French. They needed an English-language version, but the French are convinced that no Englishman can write French, or read it. I was an American citizen, however, and exempt from this embargo. I had a meeting with the two French producers, who liked my French, so I got the job of redoing it, which turned out to be a nightmare. I didn’t like the director, and I don’t think he liked me. The producer had no money, and there were enormous problems in assembling a cast. Isabelle Adjani was supposed to star. We had a meeting with her in Paris—a dinner party, in fact, in someone’s flat. She was very sweet but very nervy. After dinner, the producer, a man called Maurice Bernard, and the director, Daniel Vigne, said to Isabelle, “Do you mind if we smoke cigars?” She said she did mind, very much, but they lit cigars anyway, and she left the film. Also they cast Timothy Dalton, who was very bad. We were supposed to have John Malkovich,

336

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

and I rewrote it all for him, but he either decided he didn’t want to do it, or wasn’t being paid enough. I never saw the picture. You directed a few things around this time, including a thirty-minute “two-hander”17 for the BBC called Something’s Wrong. I was asked to write a half-hour film suitable for a new and inexperienced director, and I said, “Funnily enough, I’ve got one of those right here.” I also directed another small film for the cinema, The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt (television, 1990) for a series of trilogy films called Women & Men, produced by Home Box Office. •

•

•

Which brings us to Eyes Wide Shut and Stanley Kubrick. Had you met him before you began working on this project? The only time I met Stanley between my birth and the time I went out to see him at St. Albans around 1994 was at Stanley Donen’s house in Montpelier Square in about 1974. We had dinner with Lord [Arnold] Goodman and the Kubricks, and played a silly game, and that was it.18 I wrote to Kubrick after that and suggested doing a film about Electra, because he’d shown a great interest in the ancient world, but he never answered my letter, which is quite standard with him. Although he is quite likely to ring you in ten years and say, “About that letter you wrote . . .” Exactly. I think he has the Orthodox Jewish attitude to time, which is it doesn’t exist. Judaism, by virtue of its rigidities and its repetitions, doesn’t deal with progress. It deals with the arrest of progress. Nobody ever mentions that Stanley Kubrick is Jewish, which is frightfully nice of them, but means that they never get his character right. At one point during the writing of Eyes Wide Shut, he said to me, “Y’know, you got this scene where they’re walking down the street, these two guys? You just say, ‘They walk away down the street.’ What are they talking about?” I said, “Stanley, they’re just walking away down the street. We don’t hear what they’re saying.” “I’d just like to know what they’re talking about.”

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

337

“They’re a couple of surgeons. What do you want them to talk about? Nurses’ tits? Golf? The stock market? Skiing?” Stanley said, “They’re a coupla gentiles, right?” “Right.” “What do those people talk about? We’re a coupla Jews. What do we know?” “You’ve sat in restaurants, in airplanes,” I said.“You’ve listened to them.” And Stanley said, “Yeah, but they always know you’re there.” What brought you two together finally? After I’d finished with The King’s Whore, there was nothing much else on the horizon. But my London agent told me that Warner Bros. kept ringing him and asking, “Is Freddy Raphael available?” I asked, “What for?” but they never said. Eventually I was asked to do an American TV miniseries of The Count of Monte Cristo, which was for quite a lot of money—and I needed some. I agreed to go to Paris and talk to the producers, who turned out to be a Hungarian and a guy from Canada. After lunch, the producers’ sidekick insisted on going back with me to my hotel “so that we could begin the bonding process.” I rang my wife, who asked me how it went, and I said, “I may kill myself.” And she said, “There’s a message from London. Stanley Kubrick wants you to call him.” I rang Stanley, and he said, “Wouldya be free to work with me?” I said, “I’ve just made a deal with some other people. Do you want me to break it?” “Yeah. That’s okay,” he said. He’d taken six months, but once he’d decided, he’d decided. Did you know what the project was? He didn’t tell me anything at all about it. I thought it was Artificial Intelligence [2001], which was not my specialty.19 I was in Majorca, and he sent me a document [about Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, which was the story basis for Eyes Wide Shut]. I didn’t know that he’d been trying to make this project for fifteen years. I never saw any other scripts, though I’ve found out since that other scripts had been written. Once, he told me, “By the way, we changed the names of the

338

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

two characters to Frederic and Sylvia.” And I said, “Those are the names of myself and my wife.” He said, “Yeah. You look a bit like Arthur, you know. A bit like Schnitzler.” Why do you think he chose you? I frankly have no idea. He reads a lot, though he never talked about anything I’d written. He had seen The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, however. “That was a pretty good movie,” he said. “You’re a pretty good director.” I said,“I had Ernie Day as cameraman, but with only a week to shoot . . .”And he said, “No, c’mon, you’re a pretty good director. And that’s why you’re never gonna come on the set.” The affinities between The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt and Eyes Wide Shut seem remote. Except that it’s about two people and they do talk well together. What was it like working with Kubrick? I knew he was a difficult man; I didn’t know how difficult. It was a painful process, in terms of the amount of work I had to do, which was out of all proportion to the putative deal. He did drive me completely crazy from time to time. But we did get on very well. And I did respect him. I made exceptions for Stanley of an order I’ve never done with anybody else. I did a section of forty-five pages, rather quickly. He said, “I’d like to see what you’re doing.” I said, “I hate to do that, but I will do it for you.” Because to show pages is always a disaster. They want you to redo those pages, and it’s Penelope’s tapestry in spades. I sent him the pages, and he rang our house in London just before Christmas 1994. My wife passed him over, and he said, “Freddy? I’ve read the pages, and I’m absolutely thrilled.” I know why he was thrilled. Because after all this time, the people had come alive [on the page], and the spark was there, and the film was going to happen. After that, we had less happy conversations. Like: “I don’t like that scene, OK?” “What don’t you like about it?” “I dunno.” “What would you like done about it?” “I dunno. I wish I could help ya. I just dunno. I just don’t like it. Wouldya do it again?”

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

339

Once, when I protested at one of these demands, he said, “Ya know those first forty-five pages. They were great. I love those pages, okay? But y’know something? Maybe they were too good. Maybe we should scale them down. Because if we can’t make the end of the picture as good as the beginning of the picture, maybe we should scale the beginning down.” So I found myself saying, “Stanley, you can’t be serious. You can’t make the beginning of the picture worse on the grounds that you’re creating expectations you can’t fulfill. We’ve just got to fulfill the expectations.” And he said, “Yeah, you’re probably right. So will you do the scene again, okay?” It was like I wrote fifty movies for Kubrick, thousands of pages. To some of which he’d say, “Pretty good scene.” To others, he’d say, “That’s a great scene. A great scene for Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, okay? But I can’t get them. So wouldya do it again?” Or he’d say, “You know what she sounds like? She sounds like Barbra Streisand playing a New York hooker. And I don’t want Barbra Streisand in the movie.” Did Kubrick talk about his reasons for choosing Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman? We never discussed casting. Never discussed anything except how to set this story in New York now. Occasionally, we had conversations right off the subject. Once, he said to me, “Y’know Caesar’s Gallic Wars? Y’read it?” I said, “Stanley, I read it in Latin when I was nine.” “Yeah, okay. So whatcha think? Is it a movie?” I said, “Caesar’s Gallic Wars a movie?” “Remember the dialogue between Ariovistus and Caesar on the banks of Rhine; that scene—two guys—remember that?” “Yes . . .” “Well, that’s great dialogue. We don’t have to change that. We’ve got one great scene. All we gotta do is . . . we could do that tomorra.” We also talked a little about Artificial Intelligence. I said, “How do you think New York looking like Venice will affect the dialogue?” He said, “Whad’ya mean?” “Well, don’t you think there might be a different vocabulary for people who were born and lived in a world where the sea level was six meters higher? All kinds of things can’t happen. There’s no subway, for instance. Isn’t that interesting?” Stanley said, “Maybe it’s interesting. Maybe it isn’t. I dunno. Maybe you just ruined the whole film. It’s easy for you to say. But that’s ten years’ work gone, y’know?”

340

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

Although we parted with, as they say, expressions of mutual esteem, I had no idea whether I would ever speak to Stanley again. I could imagine, God help me, being lured back into it again. He sort of spoiled me for other people. Not because it was such fun writing for him, or so quick, but just because of that extraordinary obsessive hermetic concern with this particular story and . . . not how we are going to do it together, but how it’s going to be done with us. He didn’t want me to think of cinema for him. Any cinematic idea, he didn’t want that. I have found that this new film I’ve written was very much influenced by my work with Stanley.20 In what sense? The fact that it’s got to supply photo opportunities, in a way. Scripts are about what you’re going to film, not what you’re going to say. But I understood you to say that, with Kubrick, that was exactly what he didn’t want. He wanted opportunities; he didn’t want you to tell him what the shot is. For instance, he didn’t like jokes very much. A joke in a scene determines how a scene is shot—look at Billy Wilder. If that fountain is going to explode during the scene, the fountain has to be in shot in order to establish that there’s a fountain in the patio. Stanley didn’t want that, because it put limits on his ability to treat the scene cinematographically. He might come to it in the end, but he didn’t want you to dictate it. •

•

•

You consistently bad-mouth producers in much of what you write about the cinema. You say a producer is “a man who takes the only remaining bottle of water from a man dying of thirst in the desert and spits in it to improve the flavor.” But I sense a grudging admiration for some of them, and Joseph Janni in particular. Producers, in the sense of people who have a passion to make movies and to see a story through, are missing from the cinema today. Most producers today are deal makers. They leave the director and the writer, at least in the sense of his page-producing competence, to get on with it. Whereas people like Janni, who drove me completely crazy, did care about the story.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

341

He would ring you up and say, “You are the writer, but I feel that in this scene—something is missing.” I’d say, “Fine. What do you think it is?” And he’d say, “I don’t know.” But after a bit, you’d find he was right. It was the same with Stanley Kubrick. As a producer he had the same maddening habit of saying, “I think the scene just doesn’t work. Will you do something?” I’m not saying this makes for a quiet life, but it is an essential aspect of filmmaking which no modern studio executive ever mentions. All he says is, “The public would like” (or wouldn’t like) “to see this or that. Can you fix it?” That’s the way the movies are, but it’s not the way the movies should be. Somebody who is passionate for a project rather than for making a deal is a valuable adjunct, though God knows not a great creative source, in trying to make movies which are protected from the studio until they are able to go to school at least. And that is the great and indeed unique difference between Kubrick and any other producer I’ve worked with in modern times. Because Stanley was extraordinarily adroit in procuring for himself immunity from intrusion. All the time I worked with him, which was, off and on, for the best part of two years, no reference to any outside conceivable, let alone actual, supervisor or audience was ever mentioned. We just tried to make the story as good as it could be.

NOTES 1

Damon and Pythias (1962) was eventually filmed in Italy, directed by Curtis Bernhardt and Alberto Cardone under the title Il Tiranno di Siracussa (The Tyrant of Syracuse). Guy Williams and Don Burnett starred.

2

In Ellin’s story, an ambitious working-class man befriends a down-at-heel aristocrat, offering room and board in return for lessons on how to behave. He then murders his tutor, hiding the corpse in his trunk. He woos and marries a wealthy girl, only to learn that she is the sister of the murdered man. Her family decide that their disreputable son should be at the wedding and, though unable to find him, arrange for his possessions to be delivered to the house—including the trunk.

3

Selwyn Lloyd was an important Conservative of the Harold Macmillan years, at various times Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Privy Seal, Leader of the House, and Speaker of the Commons.

4

In the film Nothing but the Best, Jimmy Brewster (Alan Bates) is a clerk who lusts after the daughter (Millicent Martin) of his suave property developer boss

342

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

(Harry Andrews). With the help of the seedy aristocrat Charles Prince (Denholm Elliott), who gives Jimmy a Cambridge education by taking him on a oneday tour and teaching him all the right catchphrases, Brewster undermines Martin’s incompetent fiancé (James Villiers), sheds his own ex-girlfriend and his parents, and dispatches Prince when his usefulness is ended. In the film’s ending, the trunk is still delivered to the house but no longer contains the corpse; it has been discovered and buried by Jimmy’s ex-landlady, with whom he’s had an affair. Jimmy goes on enjoying the best of everything. 5

Bradford is an industrial city in West Yorkshire, an area where many “realist” films of the fifties and sixties were shot. The Great Northern Hotel was the place where most people from London stayed.

6

The Wild and the Willing (U.S. title, Young and Willing): “A troublesome student at a provincial university seduces the wife of a professor,” in the words of Leslie Halliwell.

7

La truite, or The Trout, in 1982. Leonard Maltin describes it as “elaborate but muddled.”

8

“Second eleven” is a cricket reference. There are eleven people on a cricket team, so the “first eleven” are the best players in a school or club—the “A” team. The “second eleven” are the next-best players—the “B” team.

9

“What Makes Tommy Run” became Not with My Wife, You Don’t! produced and directed by Panama in 1966 from a script by Panama, Larry Gelbart, and Peter Barnes, with Tony Curtis and George C. Scott. Judith Crist remarked that “it has all the verve, subtlety and sophistication of its title.”

10

Another Conservative politician, twice member of Parliament, Woodrow Wyatt was better known as a media man who wrote a column for both the Times and News of the World and launched a well-known television discussion program.

11

Piste bleu means “blue track” or “blue run” and comes from skiing. Ski runs are designated according to the degree of skill needed, and the piste bleu is the top run at any resort. Blue almost always connotes luxury in French: blue riband for the fastest liner across the Atlantic, cordon bleu the best cookery, and so forth.

12

“Zero Fighters” were the primary Japanese naval fighter planes in World War II, used in the Pearl Harbor attack and kamikaze attacks.

13

A Severed Head, characterized by Leslie Halliwell as “unwisely boisterous,” was the story of a philandering wine merchant whose wife starts her own extramarital romances. It starred Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, Ian Holm, and Claire Bloom.

14

Eric Rohmer’s six films in his series contes moreaux—stories with a moral—are La boulangère de Monceau (1962), La carriere de Suzanne (1963), and the features La collectionneuse (1967), Ma nuit chez Maud (1969), Le genou de Claire (1970), and L’amour l’après-midi (1972).

15

Rogue Male (1976) was actually a BBC television production, though it had limited release as a film.

FREDERIC RAPHAEL

343

16

César et Rosalie (1972), directed by Claude Sautet and written by Sautet and Jean-Loup Dabadie. Romy Schneider played the mistress of wealthy self-made businessman Yves Montand, who runs off with a young artist, played by Sami Frey. Unexpectedly, the two men become friends, and the three settle down in a ménage à trois.

17

A thirty-minute film with only two characters (a “two-hander”).

18

Another mover and shaker of the sixties and seventies in Britain, a lawyer, arts fund-raiser, and patron, Lord Goodman ended up chairman of the Arts Council.

19

Artificial Intelligence (also called A.I.) is based on Brian Aldiss’s story “SuperToys Last All Summer Long” but derived in part from Pinocchio. It takes place in a future where environmental disaster has flooded the East Coast of the United States. The main character is a robot boy. A number of writers, including Aldiss, worked on it on and off for a decade. It was eventually filmed by Steven Spielberg in 2001, after Kubrick’s death.

20

Raphael is referring to a script as yet unproduced.

INTERVIEW BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN

ALVIN SARGENT PURSUIT AND DESTINATION

M

y interview with Alvin Sargent evolved not unlike one of his scripts. Over several months we met here and there— his house, his office, this restaurant, that one—progressing by fits and starts. Sometimes he talked freely in a torrent, other times he torturously chose his words, or asked me to turn off the tape recorder because he wasn’t feeling articulate. He welcomed interruptions and distractions, and continually urged me to forget about him and interview someone else. One day, his friend the screenwriter David Rayfiel stopped by to use the shower, and Sargent almost shoved me in with him.1 “Interview him, not me!” Although he hates to admit it, and it’s a limiting description, “serious and sensitive” is the hallmark of his films. Fitting for a man whose films often explore neurosis and dysfunction, he expresses only doubt and anxiety about his work. Yet no screenwriter in present-day Hollywood has as long and admirable a track record of sensitive, serious achievement. He broke in as the cowriter of Gambit (1966), a Michael Caine heist film, and then wrote the thoughtful Western The Stalking Moon (1969) and the captivating The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) for Alan J. Pakula. He worked steadily on prestigious projects throughout the 1970s. Following an Academy Award nomination for the charming Depression-era comedy Paper Moon (1973), he won Oscars for two sobering dramas: Julia (1977), his

344

ALVIN SARGENT

345

adaptation of an extract from Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, and Ordinary People (1980), Robert Redford’s directorial debut. After a spell during which he wrote ambitious, unproduced original works, Sargent reemerged in the late 1980s with an impressive variety of credits—frequently in collaboration—adapting (his specialty) as well as occasionally originating screen stories. The Writers Guild gave him the Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. With his name on the edgy Anywhere but Here (1999), which was based on Mona Simpson’s novel, the engrossing remake of Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidèle, Unfaithful, in 2003, and the sequel to the blockbuster Spider-Man—the even more commercial and acclaimed Spider-Man 2 (2004)—Sargent neared forty years at the top of his game. Our sessions usually began with his standard refrain: “This is bound to be a boring interview. I’m so inarticulate . . .”

ALVIN SARGENT (1927–)

1966 1969 1970 1972

1973 1976 1977 1978 1980 1987 1988 1990 1991

Gambit (Ronald Neame). Co-script. The Stalking Moon (Robert Mulligan). Script. The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula). Script. I Walk the Line (John Frankenheimer). Script. Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (Alan J. Pakula). Script. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Newman). Script. Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovich). Script. All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula). Uncredited contribution. Julia (Fred Zinnemann). Script. Bobby Deerfield (Sydney Pollack). Script. Straight Time (Ulu Grosbard). Story. Ordinary People (Robert Redford). Script. Nuts (Martin Ritt). Co-script. Dominick and Eugene (Robert M. Young). Co-script. White Palace (Luis Mandoki). Co-script. What about Bob? (Frank Oz). Co-story. Other People’s Money (Norman Jewison). Script.

346

ALVIN SARGENT

ALVIN SARGENT IN LOS ANGELES, 1996. (PHOTO BY WILLIAM B. WINBURN.)

1992 1996 1999 2002 2004

Hero (Stephen Frears). Co-story. Bogus (Norman Jewison). Script. Anywhere but Here (Wayne Wang). Script. Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne). Co-script. Spider-Man 2 (Sam Raimi). Script.

Television includes episodes for Four Star Playhouse, Ben Casey, and The Nurses, and the telefilms The Impatient Heart (1971) and Footsteps (1972). Academy Award honors include a nomination for Paper Moon and the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars for Julia and Ordinary People.

ALVIN SARGENT

347

Writers Guild honors include Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium for Paper Moon, and Best Adapted Drama for Julia and Ordinary People. Sargent received the Laurel Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991.

You must be awful at pitch meetings. I am. I went to a pitch meeting recently with a guy from Europe who wanted to talk about a movie I’ve been working on for eight years now, with [Constantin] Costa-Gavras, who is a friend of mine. We went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, to the Polo Lounge, and had lunch. The pitch was so embarrassing that the man, whom you would know—he’s very well known—made a “sympathy call” to me the next day. He said, “Jeez, I’m really sorry about yesterday . . .” I don’t edit myself well when I am talking. Funny thing, I used to have cats and they gave me asthmatic attacks. I discovered that the day after one of these breathing attacks I would still have some leftover breathing problems. I’d be breathing deeply, and have to be extra careful when I was talking. So I’d be scheduled for a meeting, let’s say, and have to pitch an idea to somebody about something. I was usually much more—maybe even very— articulate and effective, because I didn’t worry as much about what I was going to say. I was worrying about the breathing, instead. I edited myself more carefully, because I didn’t have the breath to put a lot of deadwood into what I was talking about. Everything I said seemed more concise and clear, and I know that was because I was suffering the aftereffects of an asthmatic attack. You ought to induce an asthmatic attack every time you are scheduled for a pitch. Yes, as I’m talking to you I’m thinking I should have a pussycat in my lap. Come to think of it, I used to write better when I had cats! Giving a pitch, you feel trapped. It’s like being on camera with your fly down, what do you do? You’ve got to keep talking. Give me a pussycat! The way I mumble things out, ideas and unfinished sentences in a disconnected way, is very much the way I work. I don’t stay focused for any length of time. That’s why I take so long to write something. I usually take a year and a half, or longer, to write a screenplay. Paper Moon was the exception. I wrote Paper Moon in sixteen weeks; I knew the destination of

348

ALVIN SARGENT

RYAN O’NEAL AND TATUM O’NEAL IN PETER BOGDANOVICH’S FILM PAPER MOON .

the piece. You hear writers say, “It wrote itself,” or “That one wrote itself.” Well, I wrote it, but it helped me. I felt I knew the characters so well that I could imagine them in any situation. Usually, the process of writing something involves a constant reawakening of the idea I started with. The process for me is all about pursuit and destination. Pursuing that vague thing I was after in the first place. I keep losing the concept of what the piece really is about,and then I keep having to remind myself what the intention should be. If I can keep the concept alive, somehow I can keep moving toward the destination.The concept is the fuel for me. A lot of writers feel inarticulate speaking off the cuff. Well, I’m more inarticulate than most. Sometimes it’s amazing to me that I am a writer. I never intended to be a writer. I’m rather uneducated. I never went to college, I quit high school, and I don’t even read a great deal. Why did you quit high school? The war [World War II] was on, and I was afraid I was going to fail. At that time, if you went into the service before you left high school you were

ALVIN SARGENT

349

guaranteed to graduate. So I joined the navy. The war was almost over, but in the navy I needed to learn the Morse code. To learn the Morse code, I needed to learn to type. In a way, typing got me into writing. How? I loved it. I loved typing! Typing can be a warm-up for writing. Once you get going, whatever you’re thinking about subconsciously taps into your typing, and vice versa. For a long time I had a beloved typewriter, which had been passed down in the family—my brother had it, then me, now my daughter has it. After I learned to type, I loved to just sit and type away, because it was something I knew how to do. After a while I started to write little scenes. And I had grown up wanting to be an actor, so I also knew something about dialogue. You wanted to be an actor from an early age? In high school I wanted to be an actor. I liked being on the stage—high school plays, talent shows, stuff like that. Did you go to movies a lot, as a kid? Oh yeah, as a kid, I went four times a week—two times on Saturday, two times on Sunday, in the summers. As often as I possibly could. I think people who have been actors, or have studied acting, have a leg up on creating interesting characters. People always say that. I don’t know why that would be true. Maybe just seeing movies is enough. I think I got whatever I got from watching movies, not from being an actor. Absorbing the craft, learning about cuts, realizing what made me happy. I learned what I needed to feel about what was right, effective, dramatic, did the job, and told the story. I was in the navy about a year and a half. When I got out, I came out here to Los Angeles and went to UCLA as an actor in the theater department for a short time, about six months. Until, one day, I just didn’t show up for classes. I was a bad student, and had made up my mind that I would find work on my own as an actor. I was in “little theater” out here for a while. As a matter of fact, recently I went to a play—one that James Brooks directed at the Coronet Theatre— and I turned to [producer] Laura [Ziskind], whom I live with, and said, “I played this theater twice. I was directed by Charlie Chaplin.”

350

ALVIN SARGENT

His son Sydney used to run a little theater called the Circle Theatre in Hollywood, with a fellow named Jerry Epstein, who became a good friend of Chaplin’s and followed him to Switzerland and became a big part of his life over there. Charlie would come in at the end of rehearsal periods and take over, help direct some of Sydney’s plays. I had small parts in two of them. This was in the late 1940s, before Charlie went off to Europe. Oona would come too, and just sit, watching and knitting. Charlie was delightful and charming. He got up and performed all the roles for us. “No, no, no, we do it this way . . .” His characterizations were all kind of the same, so by the time the show opened everybody was acting like little Charlie Chaplins walking around the stage. But it was fun for Charlie, and it was fun for us. Then I went to New York and stayed there for a year. I did some stage pieces and four television shows—not much. Otherwise I worked as a waiter, or at the actors’ telephone exchange. I came back here, but still wasn’t getting any parts. I got married, and decided I’d better get a real job. I would have taken any job—a job as a shoe salesman; then I might have been a shoe salesman for the rest of my life. It wasn’t like, “One day, I’ll be a writer . . .” I got a job at Variety, selling advertising for about $65 a week. I had the job for about a month when I got a phone call from the casting director at Columbia Pictures. He said, “Listen, we’ve got a part for you in a movie called From Here to Eternity [1953], which is being shot now in Hawaii. I’d like you to go over there. [Producer] Buddy [Adler] wants you over there.” I said, “What do you mean you want me over there?” The guy said, “I’m telling you, we’ve got a part for you. It’ll just take four days.” Maybe they had my picture or résumé on file, I don’t know. Or else they thought I was Joe Sargent, who was also an actor.2 I said, “I can’t. I’m working at Variety. I just got married and I need this job. I’m getting $65 a week.” He said, “We’ll give you $400 for four days.” Still I said no. He kept insisting. Anyway, I finally called my boss at Variety and he said, “Okay, but only for four days, and then you’ve got to come back.” So I went. Here I was in From Here to Eternity. Was I a writer? No. Did I think I would ever be a writer? No. Did I know anything about writing? No. Then, was I an actor? No. I was finished with acting, I didn’t want to be an actor, but I did want four hundred bucks. Who was directing? Fred Zinnemann. If somebody had said, “Twentyfive years after this you’ll write a movie, and Fred Zinnemann’ll direct it, and you’ll win an Oscar—but he won’t—I’d say, ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.’ ” So . . . anything can happen.

ALVIN SARGENT

351

Of course I was in Hawaii—not four days—but two weeks. I thought I’d lose my job but I didn’t. I stayed at Variety for nine years, happy to pay the bills and support my family. That’s all I ever thought about. Very oldfashioned stuff. When did you actually start writing scripts for a living? What is the first thing you sold? While I worked at Variety, I kept a typewriter downstairs and I used to type up little scripts just for my own pleasure. I never thought anything would come of it; it was just for pleasure, like a painter. My agent—who was my agent for twenty-seven years, before he retired—saw some of my work through a friend, some of these scenes I used to type up. I started working for Variety in 1953. In 1956 I wrote a half-hour TV show while I was still selling advertising. I dropped it off at the story editor’s for Four Star Playhouse. He called me about a week or two later, and said, “I want to buy this script. I’ll give you $1,500.” They bought it, they produced it, and I continued to work for Variety for seven more years, which tells you something. I think the right thing to do would have been to say, “Wait a minute. This is what I want to do. I can do it! And look at the money you can make!” But I didn’t. I stayed at Variety. Did you write any more scripts while you were selling advertising? Maybe, not many. It wasn’t something I thought about, or did, very actively. And though I knew a number of writers, most of them were, at the time, blacklisted. I didn’t even appreciate the richness of some of these people. Who? How did you get to know them? Socially? My wife was an actress and also did some modeling with Rudi Gernreich and other agencies. We led a very simple life, but we got around, and we met and became friendly with some blacklisted people. I had known Hy Kraft’s daughter in college; I used to stop over at his house, and I became friends with his family. Dalton Trumbo used to come by that house, and I got to know him. I was a very quiet boy who liked to hang around with people and didn’t even know who I was hanging around with. I don’t remember much intellectualizing in this group. Certainly we didn’t talk much about the blacklist. I didn’t know much about the blacklist. But as a matter of fact, I guess I was a kind of “front”—or almost a front—for Al and Helen Levitt once. They were calling themselves Tom and Helen August in those days.3

352

ALVIN SARGENT

Tell me about that. While I was working at Variety, they wrote a script and asked me if I would take it to Keefe Braselle’s manager, and try to sell it under my name, and get them the money. I remember I did that. I don’t remember if it was bought or not; I think it might not have been. My boss at Variety, where I was still selling advertising, was a friend of Keefe Braselle’s manager. He called me in one day, and said, “I hear you’re selling scripts on the side now. How are you going to do your job around here?” I said, “I promise only to do it on the side.” Believe me, when I was selling advertising at Variety, I was hardly doing anything else on the side! •

•

•

I’m surprised to hear that someone like you even does pitches at this stage of your career. Usually I don’t, because usually I adapt things. I’ve noticed that about your credits. Why? Why does it always end up being plays or novels for you? Probably I don’t know how to develop a story line too well. When I die, on my gravestone they will write: “Finally, a Plot.” (Laughs.) Have you tried and failed? Well, I wrote a lot of original stuff for television in my time, and I’ve been working on a number of original scripts in the last few years. But mostly, it’s true, for film I have done adaptations. It’s ironic, because I have trouble reading. I read slow, I don’t read much, and sometimes I don’t even remember what I’ve read. I hardly ever finish books. You know, Paper Moon is adapted from a book, and I truly didn’t read the last part of it. I just couldn’t read that book anymore. I got bored. There was a book I had trouble with for another movie I made—Heaven Has No Favorites, an enormous, very slow book by Erich Maria Remarque. Bobby Deerfield [1977] was my title. I needed to come up with a title that sounded like a race car driver’s name. I never find characters’ names in a phone book, incidentally. They’re not my old friends’ names either. I find them on the map. If you look at a map, you’ll find lots of Deerfields—Deerfield, Connecticut, Deerfield, Illinois. Whenever I find a name on a map, it works for me.

ALVIN SARGENT

353

I know what you mean. I always get hung up on a character until I accept the name. Try maps. I like looking at maps. There’s something very freeing about maps. Anyway, I read some of the Erich Maria Remarque book, but could not get through it. I even had trouble reading Ordinary People, and that’s an easy book to read. Somehow I always lose track of what’s going on. I remember once, [Robert] Redford said to me, “Why don’t we do that scene with so-and-so, right from the book?” I said, “Oh, no, no, no . . .” I didn’t know what he was talking about! (Laughs.) Redford insisted, “That would be a good scene.” So I said, “Well, I’ll think about it.” I ran home and found the scene in the book, and it was a good scene, so I stuck it in. Later I told him, “You were right.” If you don’t read a book that you are adapting into a screenplay, how do you know how it is supposed to end? Of course I knew how Ordinary People ended, but I gave the film my own ending. Basically I followed the book, stayed as close to the written material as I could, but I gave it my own ending. It depends on what feels right. I also gave Paper Moon my own ending. In the book Addie Pray [the Tatum O’Neal character] goes off to live with her grandmother, and all kinds of things happened to her and her grandmother, as I remember. I decided no, I was just going to take her to St. Joe [St. Joseph, Missouri]. By that time they’re [the characters played by Ryan O’Neal and Madeline Kahn] in love with each other, though they won’t admit it, and that made for a simpler ending. Don’t you feel any obligation to the original work? When I appreciate the work. When I read a novel, if I really believe in what the novelist has done, and if it works for me, I feel an obligation, but my belief in the work doesn’t always extend to the whole work. With a play I adapted recently, Other People’s Money [1991], I was more bound to the text, perhaps—besides it being a play—because it was about something I couldn’t invent. It was about finance, economics, money, Wall Street. I don’t know that world the way [playwright] Jerry [Steiner] does, so I used a great deal of the play, and basically tried to open the scenes up. Most of the play is in the movie, and the general structure of the movie is basically the structure of the play. But to enhance the so-called love story,

354

ALVIN SARGENT

we tried to turn the woman into a romantic figure, and it didn’t work. In most ways I stayed too close to the play, I guess. I’m angry with myself over that script. I’m angry that I failed. I’m angry that I turned it in. I knew the reviews would not be good, but there’s always that little part of you that hopes maybe they will be. When you take on a play that everybody has gone to see—it’s a fun play and on its own level works quite well—when you try to adapt that play into a movie, and try to do all the things a movie requires, it’s going to be compared to the play. And I really didn’t do a good adaptation. I think it was a case of—I hate to blame it on this—I think I needed to do it fast, because they needed to start filming, for whatever reasons. So I did the script in, like, four months, where I usually take at least a year. There are differences in the things that happen in writing when you do a draft in four months, compared to sitting down by yourself without any time pressure. My script never takes off. It’s flat. That’s the word some reviewers used: “Flat.” Oh, I knew the script wasn’t wonderful, but you fool yourself. You hope the laughs will carry you through. You play a lot of mind games with yourself. Plus all the money they pay you to do these things. I feel responsible. I feel— Like you didn’t earn your salary? That, and that when they see the review they’ll retract the script I’m presently working on. You always worry that your career is over, and nobody will want you anymore. Ten years ago I would have been even more worried. But I guess I’ve survived plenty of bad reviews. Mostly I’m angry at myself for my work on the script. I’m not blaming actors or the director. I hope you’ve noticed that. If the script works, the movie can work, but the script is what makes a film work—along with everything else. •

•

•

What’s the maximum amount of time you put in daily? If I know what I’m doing? I can sit there for long, long hours. But my “max” for fighting and trying is less. I lose patience and confidence. I get scared. I might give up after ten minutes. (Laughs.) I’m not a very disciplined writer, and I don’t sit down and write every day because I love writing. I used to, and when I did I was a better writer for it. It’s like exercise, or working out: you just write. Usually if you write

ALVIN SARGENT

355

a few hours a day, some part of that is going to be a little nugget you can hold onto, and take off from, and write a story or a screenplay. While you are sitting waiting for inspiration, do you turn the phone off? No. I’m more likely to get an extra phone. Radio on? Music? No, I don’t believe in music. Coffee? Coffee’s good. Coffee’s really good. Is it all typewriter, or sometimes pencil? Either one, and either way your first enemy is the piece of paper. There’s a battle going on. You’ve got to make friends with that piece of paper, and then create communication with the paper, so that finally whatever happens in the mind is immediately pasted on that paper. •

•

•

You adapt novels more often than plays. Plays are more structured—or at least more compatible with film structure. With a play, you have a dramatic form that you can either stick to or digress from, whereas with novels there is a lot more to organize and to strip away. Absolutely. You have to find the essence of a novel. It’s much more of an original piece of work to adapt a novel. However, if I was the novelist who wrote Paper Moon and you dropped some of my favorite stuff, I might appreciate the movie for its own sake, but I think I would resent you—hypothetically—if I met you. I would have very mixed feelings about what you did to my novel. I’m sure you would. Not very long ago I became a rewriter for about six weeks of work on White Palace [1990] by Glenn Savan. The book is all right; there’s some nice stuff in it. And I admit there are problems with the film. Somebody wrote a piece in one of the [Los Angeles] newspapers recently, interviewing novelists about the movies of their novels, whose

356

ALVIN SARGENT

scripts they did not write. And Savan was one of those quoted as being very unhappy about White Palace. He didn’t like the movie as it turned out? I didn’t like the movie as it turned out! I came in late on the project. When I read this interview with Savan, however, I felt,“I’m sorry.That was dumb of me.”I never tried to contact Savan.I should have.I was foolish not to.I should have sat down and talked to him, because the writer has things [in his head] that only he knows and understands about his characters, things that he didn’t write down. It would have helped a lot to talk to him. It would have been better for the movie. I’m very, very sorry I didn’t do so, in that case. Do you ever make a point of meeting the authors and spending time with them? Sometimes. I spent a lot of time with Judith Guest [the author of Ordinary People], who I like very much and who was very helpful, but I still felt I could move away from her work and into mine, and then back into hers. Basically I was able to use the book, but still depart. I also had Redford as the director and producer, and he kept me close to the book. He knew what kind of movie he wanted. I originally opened the script, for example, with the house burning down on Christmas night. In my scene they were all standing around and watching the fire, and then the movie started with a flashback. I thought it was a great scene—the Christmas tree catching fire! Redford said, “Oh no, no, no . . . let’s just do the book.” But usually I don’t feel obligated to contact the author. For example, I didn’t talk to the author of Paper Moon [Joe David Brown], which as a novel also had another title—it was originally called Addie Pray. The characters in the film are from the book, the scams are all his, but most of the scenes in the movie are really original. How about Lillian Hellman and Julia? I ended up spending a lot of time with Lillian. And you read Pentimento? That was simple reading, like peanuts. And by the time I met Lillian, I already knew her voice. I knew that voice and that rhythm. A lot of writing is about rhythm. We have our own rhythms, and then we understand

ALVIN SARGENT

357

ROBERT REDFORD, IN 1980, DIRECTING MARY TYLER MOORE IN ORDINARY PEOPLE .

some rhythms which aren’t ours, but which we can play with. Lillian was wonderful, very colorful, and she talked just like she reads. At first, I must say, I didn’t want to do Julia. I was afraid to do Julia. I’m always afraid to do anything of that importance. I was very intimidated by the idea of meeting such a literary figure. But meeting her helped me to understand her and also to understand [Dashiell] Hammett. When Lillian and I got along okay, I felt a little better about doing the script. Julia had started with Jane Fonda and [director] Sydney Pollack, then Sydney decided he didn’t want to do it, so the producers gave the script to Fred Zinnemann. Sydney would have redone my whole script, because he didn’t like it very much. But Fred just came in and did my script. So I was fortunate. Did Lillian critique or make suggestions for the screenplay? Not as I wrote it. When I finished it, I sent it to her, and she was very kind about it. She was upset about one aspect—the searching for the baby—she claimed that never happened really. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t a Julia.

358

ALVIN SARGENT

If you’re so picky about what you read, what persuades you to read something? Aren’t you besieged with offers? People do send me things. People I’d like to work with can get me to read something. I’ve been working a lot recently with Norman Jewison, for example, first on Other People’s Money and then Bogus [1996]. I had never worked with Norman before, and at first I’m always uncomfortable with new people. But Norman makes you comfortable. He gets excited and enthusiastic about things. Norman’s lovely. I’m very fond of him. Was it Norman who sought you out for Other People’s Money? Actually, I think Warner Bros. said, “Why don’t we get Alvin Sargent to write this?” Norman didn’t know me; maybe he knew my work. Then I went to New York and saw the play, and I thought to myself, “I don’t want to do that.” I didn’t know how to do that. That’s typical of me, but then Norman’s excitement convinced me. Also, Other People’s Money was a comedy. The most comedic things I had ever written were Paper Moon and Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing [1972]—which was a long time ago. I like comedy, and I needed a break from the kind of material that usually gets sent to me. I know that I am perceived in a certain way. I’m seen as the guy who writes Ordinary People–type of stuff: “serious and sensitive.” What I’d really like to write is dangerous stuff. I used to write Naked Citys—tough stuff, New York streets.4 That was fun. The “serious and sensitive” reputation got started long before Ordinary People, though, didn’t it? What do you think got your reputation going in that direction? I guess it was my first big film job, which was through Alan Pakula, who was a friend of mine. I knew Alan dating back to the days of the Circle Theatre and Charlie Chaplin. He had produced some films and wanted to try directing. I had written some television, so he asked me to adapt a book called The Sterile Cuckoo. It had a real interesting girl character. That’s where “serious and sensitive” got started. Although some people didn’t think it was so serious and sensitive. Some people thought it was pretty sophomoric. (Laughs.) Then I did Paper Moon, which, although it was a comedy, was a “serious and sensitive” comedy. My doing Paper Moon was almost a fluke. Peter Bart was in charge of Paramount then, and I had just done The Sterile

ALVIN SARGENT

359

Cuckoo, so Peter asked me, “Would you be willing to do another adaptation?” There was no director. No producer. No star. Do you feel stuck in that category—“serious and sensitive”? I’d be better off not doing that sort of thing. My need, my drive, my frustration, is about letting go, and getting into tougher rhythms. Tougher music. Coltrane! Like Straight Time [1978], for example? I love Straight Time. My draft of that script, which got changed to some extent, was maybe the best thing I’ve ever written. That was really tough street stuff and I had a good time doing that script. I like those characters. I like that anger. Eddie [Bunker], who wrote the book [No Beast So Fierce, New York: Norton, 1972] is a good friend of mine; he’s out of jail and is a writer too now—a wonderful writer, and a real intellect.5 That film is unlike anything else I’ve done, and really gives me great satisfaction. I love to think about the characters and the energy and certain scenes, which have a resonance for me. Why don’t you insist on doing tougher stuff? I don’t know that. The answer to that question, which I don’t know, bothers me. I can’t imagine that you need to take jobs—to keep making a living. You’re wrong there. I am not a screenwriter who has earned an enormous amount of money. I started getting paid a higher fee, more money, only after Ordinary People. That’s when I could command more money. I can’t retire. I really have to keep working. And even when I make a large salary, it always takes me a long time to write the script. My impression is that a successful screenwriter such as yourself—after a certain amount of time and after such a body of work—that you could fundamentally live off what you receive from the Guild every year in residuals. You could, I couldn’t! (Laughs.) When you imagine that amount of bucks, what do you imagine?

360

ALVIN SARGENT

I imagine, from your body of work, between $200,000 and $300,000 a year. Nothing like that. From Ordinary People, last year, maybe I made $2,000 to $3,000. Paper Moon—maybe $900. I get residuals from old TV shows I did in the sixties—$3.00. From Nigeria, I got thirty-five cents once! From another place I got a penny! I have to write because I never saved any money. I didn’t accumulate any money or property. I have to work. That’s depressing. Did the pot of gold for screenwriters—when prices went sky-high for some scripts—kick in around here, long after Ordinary People? Oh yes, after Ordinary People. For writing Julia, which took a year and a half or more, I got paid $125,000. That was perhaps an enormous sum of money over ten years ago, but it also took over a year of work and you have to add in government taxes and your agent’s cut, so you don’t end up with a lot. For Ordinary People, I made a few hundred thousand dollars, but that was a long time ago too. So I haven’t made a lot of money compared with some of the people who came afterward. Maybe I’m too picky. I could be rewriting scripts faster, all the time, like lots of other Hollywood writers do. When a friend asks me to help, I sometimes rewrite. I worked a little bit on All the President’s Men [1976] because Alan Pakula is a friend. I don’t mind rewriting, but some people only rewrite. They will pay you $100,000 a week to do a rewrite. My agent called me the other day and said somebody at Paramount asked if I could just put in two weeks on a script. I asked, “What is the two weeks on?” It turns out they wanted a rewrite on Breakfast at Tiffany’s [1961]. I said, “Oh, they have a new script . . . ?” “No—the George Axelrod script. They want it brought up to date. Two weeks’ work at the most.” I thought about it, “Two weeks’ work . . .” I have trouble doing that sort of thing, partly because it always takes me such a long time to get down to work. Some of these guys are really fast; they just sit down and do a rewrite—and who cares if it stinks? The producers just turn around and have someone else do another one. The fulltime rewriters make a million dollars a year. Not me, unfortunately. Money creates pressure for speed, and I don’t like that kind of pressure. I like to be paid for going slow. If someone asked me, “Ideally, what would you like to happen?” Aside from peace in the world and happy lives for my

ALVIN SARGENT

361

children, I’d say, “To have enough money to really sit down and take the time to write the things I want to write!” Hey, that’s what I want! (Laughs.) That’s what every writer wants, right? My point is, I have projects of my own to do, I start them and I work on them, but lately I never seem to finish them. Why is that—is it that the money has to come from somewhere before you can really go to work—or is it something that is stopped up inside of you? Maybe we need a psychiatrist to answer that question. (Laughs.) I don’t know. That question bothers me. Maybe it’s me. •

•

•

Why does it appear, looking at your credits, that you took time off after Ordinary People? That’s wrong. I did a lot of work—some of my best, original scripts. After Julia, Richard Roth, who produced Julia, went to Lillian and said, “I’d like to get the rights to Pentimento, An Unfinished Woman, and Scoundrel Time, and use them to create a tale about you and Hammett.” She agreed to that. So I worked with Lillian, and got very close to her at that time. I made a lot of tapes of conversations with her, and formed this piece about her meeting Hammett, their writing, his drunkenness and infidelities, her going to Spain, him going to jail, et cetera, it all ending up with the blacklist. At the end the story became very political. I spent two years on the Hammett and Hellman script, fundamentally an original, after Ordinary People. I also wrote another original called “Madly in Love,” which is a script of mine that I like very much. It’s about a man so phobic he can’t even bear to come out of his house and cross the street. Until one night, in the middle of the night, a man comes into his house, ties him up, and robs him; this incident forces him to come out of his house and fight very hard to get a grip on his phobias. He decides to drive to Barstow, California, to see a girlfriend of his, who plays in a string quartet. On the way there, he goes into a bar and happens to see the robber. He overhears the robber, figures out that he lives in Amarillo, Texas. Now he has a mission, to get his stuff back; he makes a decision, which takes all night, to follow the man who robbed

362

ALVIN SARGENT

him. All kinds of things happen to him—all the worst things that could happen, which he has imagined, and has talked about in agoraphobic groups—the car breaks down, a man threatens him with a gun, a dog chases him, he gets lost, he falls apart, et cetera. Until in the end, he ends up having to run the last ten miles of the way into Amarillo, he finds the robber, and he gets his stuff back. He is a changed man. The script is about this change that takes place inside of him. It’s based a little on truth, because I was robbed in the middle of the night once when I lived alone. Were you traumatized? I was frightened, but I survived it. I was angry for a year and rather vulnerable. Anyway, I worked on “Madly in Love” for a long time—well, actually, I should say I have been working on “Madly in Love” for a long time—I don’t regard that script as finished. I continue to play around with it. How many times have you written it all the way through and then put it away? Two or three. Why do you keep going back to it? Because there’s still something wrong with it. What’s the reaction to it when it is shown around? Why has it taken so long to get produced? Directors, especially men, I think, are afraid of it. I want to say they are afraid to spend two years of their life with a phobic man. You must have taken some of that idea and recycled it into What about Bob? [1991]. That’s certainly about an ultraphobic man. You have written two original stories—Hero [1992] and What about Bob?—for producer Laura Ziskind? “Co-original” stories, I should say. Yes, I wrote them with Laura [Ziskind]. One day I was talking to someone who travels out here a lot, and who said she had a husband who was a psychiatrist. I asked, “Does your husband come out here sometimes, to spend time with you?” She said yes. I said, “What about his patients, when he makes these trips? Do they ever follow?” She mumbled something in

ALVIN SARGENT

363

reply. I was driving home and I thought of the idea: a simple, maybe not a very clever idea, but it could be funny. Some guy follows his doctor and his family on his vacation, because he needs a family—which proceeds to drive the doctor insane. And after invading his house and destroying it, he ends up marrying the doctor’s sister. The patient becomes his brother-in-law! (Laughs.) So we wrote the story and Laura produced the film. Writing for her is hard, not very satisfying. The film is not as good as it should have been, but it’s a very funny script. How did that happen, if Laura was the producer watching over it? Laura said a wonderful thing once: A producer is a person who hires someone who can fire her—a director or a star, who can have the real power. The amount of power a director can take, or a heavy star, is very hard to deal with sometimes, but I don’t want to dwell on these things. This is dirty laundry, and it isn’t about my writing. •

•

•

It seems to me that you made some kind of decision after Ordinary People, even if it was a subconscious one, to try and write more originals—scripts that were in some ways about yourself. It’s hard for me not to see the arc of your career as away from adaptation, and toward selfdiscovery. I never thought of it that way, though I guess it is true in some ways. In between work on these originals, however, I was always taking jobs. I did Nuts [1987]. I rewrote a few scripts: White Palace and Dominick and Eugene [1988] were rewrites. Dominick and Eugene was not a major piece of work, but I like what I did. But you’re right, I’m not known for originals. I haven’t broken through to get my originals produced, and as a matter of fact it’s been a long time since I’ve had something produced that I worked on from beginning to end. This turn in the conversation bothers me. I’m very frustrated about some of my recent work. I have less self-assurance about myself, my writing, my work, nowadays. I’m sitting here thinking, why interview me? Why do you think it’s been so long since you’ve felt self-assured? Mmm. Money—I think when I started making more money, I didn’t work as well. That may be bullshit, but it feels right.

364

ALVIN SARGENT

Have you been hampered by any unusual personal circumstances? Well, a marriage that was difficult. But it’s so easy to blame other people. It wasn’t as if somebody died or somebody beat me. Well, somebody did rob me, but after that I wrote Ordinary People, so it wasn’t that. A lot of what happens to someone’s career is also luck, fate, happenstance. How much of what has happened to you in the last ten years can be ascribed to unfortunate circumstance? Did professional bad luck also come into play? No, I don’t believe in professional bad luck. I believe that if what you write is any good, somebody will produce it. If they won’t produce it, at least you know it’s good. You probably expect more self-confidence from someone like me, because of the sort of success which I apparently have. I mean, does someone like Larry Gelbart walk down the street feeling inadequate? I have a feeling he walks down the street exuding confidence. Well, then, that probably helps his work. His work exudes confidence. It is brash. My work is always held back by something. I don’t know what it is. Is it because I have to earn dollars? Maybe I just haven’t found the right thing to do for a long time. Maybe I should just find some simple book to adapt. Maybe there’re too many things distracting me. Maybe I should spend more time alone. If you could put all of the things I’m saying into music, you would call it “Writer’s Torment.” It’s a classical torment, even though it is also very personal and individual. I’m sure. Could it be, also, that since 1980 there has been a sea change in Hollywood, in terms of what can be developed and sold? Not really. I believe you could do Ordinary People today. I have seen films I could imagine myself writing. Nobody thought for a minute that Ordinary People was going to be some award-winning movie. I know I never did, not even after it was finished. It never occurred to me. I couldn’t believe it when it was announced as Best Picture of the Year. (Laughs.)

ALVIN SARGENT

365

Apparently it touched a lot of people, and that is acceptable in Hollywood, partly because a lot of people will spend money to see it. No, you can still do films like that; you could do Ordinary People or Julia today. I don’t believe things are any different. It’s just that back then we didn’t have any special effects like they do now, and therefore Terminator 2 [1991] could not be made. But that takes a big percentage of the market away from you, if what they’re buying is special effects, and that’s not ever the kind of thing that you’re writing. I believe if you write a good script, they’ll pay for it, and if they can find somebody to star in it, or direct it, they’ll make it. A lot of writers will tell you this, however: my unproduced stuff is probably my best work. It has the most bite.They are scripts all in various stages. I keep nursing them along. I like to believe they will all be filmed some day. I have been working intermittently for eight years on this one script, with Costa-Gavras. It is about the Spanish civil war, and involves two young American girls who break away from their families in the 1930s. They escape to Paris. They wind up in Spain and become part of an entertainment group; they get caught in intrigues, strafed by airplanes, one of them is badly hurt. I take their lives and friendship up through the invasion of Paris. Every now and then, I go back to work on this script, or Costas will come to town and we’ll get down to some productive conversations. I love that script. It stimulates me. What I am stuck on a project and seeking inspiration I go back and look at the old stuff, not just scripts of mine which are familiar to you, but things like the Hellman and Hammett project, or “Madly in Love,” or this Spanish civil war story. I go over to the box it’s in, I grab a section of it, read it, and say to myself, “Hey, that’s good . . . that’s really good!” Then I pick up some energy. I pick up the energy from reading something that’s alive and works. I take that energy right to the typewriter and try to transpose it, putting it into whatever I’m working on. I do go slow. I tend to play around with things. I get stuck. I get bad reviews, and then I don’t want to go back to work. I take on a new project and I’m afraid to commit to the responsibility. I don’t even sign the contract, sometimes, until after I’ve worked on the script for a few months. I don’t like to let people down. I know I don’t write significant pieces that advance the art of cinema. I don’t do Easy Rider–breakthrough things. I don’t do that. I am a traditional,

366

ALVIN SARGENT

old-fashioned writer, whose desire to be intellectually effective is so grave, so unattainable, in my mind, that I rarely, maybe never, achieve what I am hoping for. But I keep trying. Here it is, twenty to thirty screenplays and fifty television hours later, and listen to me. I’m as afraid as I’ve ever been. I’ve been writing scripts for thirty years, I’ve won all these prizes, even the Laurel Award, and in some ways I’m still afraid to go to work. Do I sound like a Laurel Award winner?

NOTES 1

David Rayfiel is known for his uncredited script-doctoring and has contributed to many fine films, including a number directed by his friend Sydney Pollack. His official credits include Valdez Is Coming (1970), Three Days of the Condor (1975), ’Round Midnight (France, 1986), The Firm (1993), and Sabrina (1995).

2

Joseph Sargent turned from acting to directing in the 1960s for television shows and occasional films.

3

Principally a playwright, Hy Kraft worked intermittently in Hollywood before his blacklisting. Dalton Trumbo, Oscar-nominated before the blacklist for his script for Kitty Foyle (1940), was one of the Hollywood Ten. Blacklisted writers Al and Helen Levitt worked prolifically in television as Tom and Helen August. See the profile of their careers in Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

4

The television series Naked City ran from 1958 to 1963.

5

Edward (Eddie) Bunker died on July 19, 2005.

INTERVIEW BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN

DONALD E. WESTLAKE THE WORST HAPPENS

or more than twenty years Donald E. Westlake’s (and Richard Stark’s) novels have attracted Hollywood producers. There have been some extremely good films made from them—the sledgehammer noir of Point Blank (1967), the cool caper The Hot Rock (1972)—some indifferent ones, some god-awful. One oddity on the list is several films, in different languages, with unalike actors playing the same character (a continuing character in Westlake novels, the bumbling burglar Dortmunder and his gang). The French, in particular, are drawn to filming his books. Westlake himself is rarely involved in the screen adaptations; he is rarely consulted by the producers, so he protects himself in the worst cases by never watching the films. Growing up, Westlake loved movies, and his talk with me was sprinkled with quotes from Preston Sturges films. (“I view the entire proceedings with a sense of gloomy foreboding.”) His books are patently cinematic; along with quirky characters, hilarious dialogue, and intricate plotting, he specializes in scenes of “visual misdirection”: where you think someone is doing one thing, but a slight, subjective shift in the perspective (or camera angle) alters everything. In fact, Westlake got his start, most improbably, by writing an unauthorized biography of Elizabeth Taylor under the nom de plume of John B. Allan [Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America’s Most Talented Actress and the World’s Most Beautiful Woman, Derby, Conn.: Monarch

F

367

368

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Books, 1961]. “That was a true cut-and-paste,” he explained. “I was just starting out and my first agent was a big schlockmeister. Little assignments would come along. ‘Would you do this biography of Elizabeth Taylor?’ ‘Sure, why not? It just means going to the library and doing research.’ Then they asked me to do Gary Cooper. About two weeks later, I hadn’t quite started yet, Cooper died. I called my agent and said forget it. ‘But now that he’s dead,’ said my agent, ‘it’s even better!’ ‘Exactly. I’m not a vulture on a branch,’ I said. That was the end of it.” For many years in the 1960s and early 1970s, Westlake wrote mainly as Tucker Coe or Richard Stark. His reputation for hard-hitting crime thrillers was imperiled, however, when a Westlake book, The Fugitive Pigeon, came out funny and sold above the Stark books, even in Europe. Though repeatedly lured to work as a scriptwriter,Westlake has taken the usual number of body blows from deals gone awry, and scripts endlessly developed, then dumped or botched. But he has also struck gold on occasion and was nominated for an Academy Award for his bleak, powerful adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for director Stephen Frears, in 1990. Westlake (still doubling as Richard Stark) remains a novelist first and foremost. Over eighty books so far, counting all the pseudonyms, and he still averages at least one a year. DONALD E. WESTLAKE (1933–)

1963

1966 1967

1968 1972 1973 1974

Le commissaire mène l’enquete (Fabien Collin). Anthology film, with one segment based on Westlake’s short story “Lock the Door.” Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, France). Based on the Richard Stark novel The Jugger. Mise à sac (Alain Cavalier, France). Based on the Richard Stark novel The Score. The Busy Body (William Castle). Based on his novel. Point Blank (John Boorman). Based on the Richard Stark novel The Hunter. The Split (Gordon Fleyming). Based on the Richard Stark novel The Seventh. The Hot Rock (Peter Yates). Based on his novel. Cops and Robbers (Aram Avakian). Script and subsequent novel. The Bank Shot (Gower Champion). Based on his novel. The Outfit (John Flynn). Based on the Richard Stark novel.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

369

DONALD E. WESTLAKE IN NEW YORK CITY, 1990. (PHOTO BY WILLIAM B. WINBURN.)

1977 1979 1983

1984 1987 1989 1990

Cinque furbastri un furbacchione (Lucio De Caro). Italianmarket-only version of Jimmy the Kid. Hot Stuff (Dom DeLuise). Co-script. Slayground (Terry Bedford). Co-script, based on the Richard Stark novel. Jimmy the Kid (Gary Nelson). Based on his novel. Le jumeau (Yves Robert, France). Based on his novel Two Much. The Stepfather (Joseph Ruben). Co-story, script. The Stepfather II (Jeff Burr). Sequel, based on his characters. Why Me? (Gene Quintano). Co-script, based on his book. The Grifters (Stephen Frears). Script.

370

1991 1996 1997 1999

2001 2004

2005

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Dis-moi qui tu hais (Jean-Pierre Mocky, France). Short subject, based on his novel. Two Much (Fernando Trueba, Spain/United States). Based on his novel. La divine poursuite (Michel Deville, France). Based on his novel Dancing Aztecs. Payback (Brian Helgeland). Based on the Richard Stark novel The Hunter. Jimmy the Kid (Wolfgang Dickmann, Germany). Based on his novel. What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (Sam Weisman). Based on his novel. Je suis un assassin (Thomas Vincent). Based on his novel The Contract. Mr. Ripley’s Return (Roger Spottiswoode). Co-script. Ordo (Laurence Ferreira Barbosa). Based on his novella. Le couperet (Costa-Gavras). Based on his novel The Ax.

Published works (novels except where noted) include The Mercenaries (aka The Smashers), Killing Time (under the name Tim Smith), Brother and Sister (under the name Edwin West), Campus Doll (Edwin West), Young and Innocent (Edwin West), Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America’s Most Talented Actress and the World’s Most Beautiful Woman (nonfiction under the name John B. Allan), 361, The Hunter (aka Point Blank, under the name Richard Stark), Strange Affair (Edwin West), Killy, The Man with the Getaway Face (aka The Steel Hit, by Richard Stark), The Outfit (Richard Stark), The Mourner (Richard Stark), The Operator, Young and Innocent (under the name Edwin Wood), The Score (aka Killtown, by Richard Stark), Pity Him Afterwards, The Fugitive Pigeon, The Jugger (Richard Stark), The Busy Body, The Spy in the Ointment, Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (under the name Tucker Coe), The Seventh (aka The Split, by Richard Stark), The Handle (aka Run Lethal, by Richard Stark), Anarchaos (under the name Curt Clark), God Save the Mark, The Rare Coin Score (Richard Stark), The Damsel (Richard Stark), The Green Eagle Score (Richard Stark), Murder among Children (Tucker Coe), Philip ( juvenile), The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution (collection), Who Stole Sassi Manoon?, The Black Ice Score (Richard Stark), Somebody Owes Me Money, Up Your Banners, The Sour Lemon Score (Richard Stark), The Dame (Richard Stark), The Blackbird (Richard Stark), The Hot Rock,Adios Scheherezade,Wax Apple (Tucker Coe), A Jade in Aries (Tucker Coe), Ex Officio (aka Power Play, under the

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

371

name Timothy J. Culver), I Gave at the Office, Lemons Never Lie (Richard Stark), Slayground (Richard Stark), Deadly Edge (Richard Stark), Bank Shot, Plunder Squad (Richard Stark), Cops and Robbers, Don’t Lie to Me (Tucker Coe), Comfort Station, Under an English Heaven (nonfiction), Gangway! (with Brian Garfield), Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, Jimmy the Kid, Butcher’s Moon (Richard Stark), Brothers Keepers, Two Much!, Dancing Aztecs (aka New York Dance), Enough! (collection, aka A Travesty & Ordo), Nobody’s Perfect, Castle in the Air, Kahawa, Why Me?, Levine (collection, under the name Abe Levine), A Likely Story, High Adventure, Good Behavior, I Know a Trick or Two (under the name Samuel Holt), One of Us Is Wrong (Samuel Holt), High Jinx (with Abby Westlake), Transylvania Station (with Abby Westlake), What I Tell You Three Times Is False (Samuel Holt), Trust Me on This, Sacred Monster, The Fourth Dimension Is Death (Samuel Holt), Drowned Hopes, Horse Laugh and Other Stories (collection), The Perfect Murder (with Jack Hitt, Lawrence Block, Sarah Caudwell, Tony Hillerman, and Peter Lovesey), Humans, Don’t Ask, Baby, Would I Lie?, Smoke, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, The Ax, Comeback (Richard Stark), Backflash (Richard Stark), A Good Story and Other Stories (collection), Flashfire (Richard Stark), The Hook, Bad News, Firebreak (Richard Stark), Put a Lid on It, Money for Nothing, The Road to Ruin, Anarchaos, Watch Your Back!, and God Save the Mark. Television includes 87th Precinct (1961); Journey to the Unknown (1968 series); Supertrain (1979 story for pilot); Fatal Confession: A Father Dowling Mystery (story and teleplay for 1987 telefilm); The Father Dowling Mysteries (1989–1991 TV series creator); Stepfather III (1992 telefilm, based on his characters); Fallen Angels (1993 Showtime series, teleplay for “Fly Paper” episode); and A Slight Case of Murder (1999 TNT telefilm, based on his story “A Travesty”). Academy Award honors include an Oscar nomination for The Grifters in the category of Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. Writers Guild honors include a Best Adapted Script nomination for The Grifters.

MADE IN U.S.A.

A producer in Paris named Georges de Beauregard started to buy The Jugger, but stopped after three of eight $2,000 payments. The next year, he made a movie called La Religieuse [1966], which the French banned at home and wouldn’t give an export license. His friend [Jean-Luc] Godard asked him what else he had, wanting to help him somehow, and de Beauregard gave

372

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

him The Jugger, neglecting to say he didn’t own it. At that moment, Godard was making Two or Three Things I Know about Her [1967]. The big expense in a movie is renting the equipment, so he already had that. He cobbled together a quick screenplay, turned the male thief into a girl reporter played by Anna Karina, and shot Made in U.S.A. on twelve afternoons while doing two or three mornings. I think de Beauregard meant to pay up eventually, but when he saw how changed it was from the original, he decided, screw it. But he didn’t level with Godard, who told Sight & Sound he was doing a film based on a serie noir thriller by Richard Stark. My friend Marilyn Golden said, “Congratulations! I see Godard is making a movie of one of your books,” and I said, “No, he isn’t.” This led directly to my only—so far—international lawsuit. It ran on and ran on. Ambrose Bierce said the human brain not only can hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, it insists on it. In this case, the French didn’t take my lawsuit seriously because they figured (1) I was a writer, and too poor to fight, and (2) I was an American, and too rich to care. I fell right between those two stools. So I won. I didn’t sue for the original contract, I sued for copyright infringement. The remedy is the destruction of all infringing material. I went to them and said, “Do you wanna destroy everything, including the master, or do you want to deal?” They said, “We’ll give you the North American rights.” Done. In the thirty-five years since, those rights have been worth exactly nothing, partly because it’s such a rotten movie, but just now a distributor is planning a new release of a whole ton of Godard, and they want Made in U.S.A., and they’re going to pay me. I never met Godard. I don’t know what he thought of it all. I don’t much care. MISE À SAC

That was a straightforward sale [of the Richard Stark novel The Score]. I don’t believe I ever exchanged a word with any of the filmmakers. Mise à Sac got a pretty good review in Variety but never played in the States. I speak no French, but watched a tape of it at a friend’s apartment in Paris once. I figured I knew the story. It looked modest but good. POINT BLANK

Hollywood started buying my books around 1967, with Point Blank, which is a terrific film. I did nothing on the film. They bought the book and went

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

373

their own way. That’s usually been the case. The film is more stylized than the book, more mannerist, whereas the Richard Stark books are very flat. They are meant to be very lean and mean. The “Richard” was Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death [1947], and “Stark” was because that’s what I wanted the language to be. Stephen King has now used both ends of my pen name. Stephen told me that when he chose a pen name for the Richard Bachman books—his agent called him and said, “We have to have a name now . . .”— at that moment he was reading a Richard Stark novel and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive. So he said: “Richard Bachman.” A few years ago Stephen told me he was writing a book in which a writer’s pen name comes after him. He asked, “Do you mind if I use ‘Stark’ as long as I use a different first name?” And that’s George Stark in The Dark Half. Stark is more external, for me. It’s hard to speak of comic novels as being “the essential self,” but I guess the comic novels really are me. They’re closer to where my mind tends to go. When I was writing my first comic novel—The Fugitive Pigeon (I always preferred my title, “The Dead Nephew,” but my editor at Random House didn’t like the word “dead” in the title)—I told my agent, “This one is coming out funny.” He said, “Don’t do that. You won’t get any foreign sales, because American comedy doesn’t translate. You won’t get any paperback sales. You’ll cut your income in half, if the book is funny.” Well, The Fugitive Pigeon sold twice as many copies as the previous books, it did sell to paperback, and it did well in Europe too. And I found I was enjoying myself.

THE BUSY BODY

Poor Sid Caesar. He was going to make the transition to movies, and moved his family to L.A. and made two stinkers in a row: The Busy Body [based on a Westlake novel] and The Spirit Is Willing, both 1967. Not his fault. The Busy Body has a tediously slow script. I met William Castle a few times and Caesar once, but had nothing to do with the film. Castle was an interesting character. He brought me down for the premiere to New Orleans. Why New Orleans? Why not? The movie does have one great scene. Caesar has to hide in a casket, not realizing at first there’s already somebody in it. He can’t leave, and he can’t make noise. The scene runs five minutes, and is absolutely hysterical. Castle said afterward that The Busy Body was the movie that finally told him he should stop directing and just produce. His next project was Rosemary’s Baby [1968]. I got to him one movie too soon.

374

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

“A TERRIFIC FILM”: LEE MARVIN GETS KNOCKED AROUND IN THE CULT FILM POINT BLANK .

THE SPLIT

There’s very little to be said about The Split. Once again, they just bought the book [the Richard Stark novel The Seventh] and made the movie. The writer, Robert Sabaroff, came out of TV to make that, and then went right back in. The director [Gordon Fleyming] was a lox. It was a great cast, but the one day I visited the set I thought nobody was in charge and nobody was excited. They were building the movie around Jim Brown, which was maybe not that good an idea. Not much energy came off him, which is surprising, when you think about it. A friend of mine, referring to the sex scenes between Brown and Diahann Carroll, said, “Now we know the sound of two blocks of wood making love.”

THE HOT ROCK

Rarely has a screenwriter talked to me about adapting one of my books. The first time was William Goldman [scenarist of The Hot Rock], who holds the

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

375

whole field of screenwriting in contempt. Either in spite of that, or because of that, he is, I think, the best living screenwriter. Nobody on earth could have made a movie out of All the President’s Men [1976], and he did. When he took the job of doing The Hot Rock, he called me and said, “I want to take you to lunch and I want you to tell me everything you know about those characters that you didn’t put in the book.” I thought, “What a smart guy this is!” We spent time together. The director [Peter Yates] and producers [Hal Landers and Bobby Roberts] didn’t give a damn, but Bill would send me portions of the script and say, “What do you think?” He was very forthcoming. He took out the only thing I thought of as a movie scene in the whole book, a scene where they have stolen a locomotive from a circus because they have to break into an insane asylum. It’s a complicated scene, but that seemed to me like a movie scene. Bill explained why he couldn’t use it and he was right. Every once in a great while—I don’t think in terms of movies if I’m writing a book and I think anyone who does is crazy—I’ll look back at something I’ve written and say, “That’s a movie scene . . .” And if the movie rights are sold, that scene is never used.

COPS AND ROBBERS

Cops and Robbers was “the Peter Principle” at work. Aram Avakian was the finest film editor anybody has ever seen. I watched him and was impressed by just the speed and sureness of how he worked—and film editing is as private and solitary as writing. Being that good of a film editor meant that he almost inevitably became a director. As a director he was too reasonable a man. He couldn’t deal with a lot of egos and craziness. The picture came out pretty well, he did a few other movies, and they tended to come out pretty well too. But because he wasn’t a strong leader, he almost always had some trouble, some unhappiness on the set—because he wasn’t the “father.” I was on the set much of the time, but my task was to be Aram Avakian’s friend. When he went into his tent all bloodied, I was there to say, “It’s okay.” I wasn’t a real collaborator in the filming. The film was a surface treatment, and afterward I thought I’d like to get a little deeper into those characters. Other people have done that, where the screenplay became the outline, essentially, for a novel. On the Waterfront [1954] became Budd Schulberg’s novel Waterfront; Love Story [1970] became Erich Segal’s novel. So I wrote a novel called Cops and Robbers,

376

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

which was the same characters and story as the film, but we got to know more about the characters and their milieu.

THE OUTFIT

The Outfit is one movie made from a Stark book that got the feeling right. That movie is done flat, just like the books. John Flynn was the writer-director, and it was early in his career, and I thought he was going to be a world-beater. He put together an incredible cast, everybody from Robert Duvall and Karen Black and Robert Ryan, to Elisha Cook and Archie Moore and Anita O’Day. He wrote it “period,” but then de-emphasized that. He had everybody moving fast. It was efficient but it was also thoughtful. I didn’t meet him at the time, but have met him a couple times since and he did not have the career I expected. It takes more than talent. It takes luck, and a genius at making choices. The Outfit is about the only thing he’s done that shows what he can do.

THE BANK SHOT

I saw one scene from The Bank Shot once, and it looked pretty bad. It was [Gower] Champion’s only movie [as director]. A friend who saw it said it was a farce shot in extreme close-up, so whenever somebody stepped on a banana peel all you knew was that they’d left the frame.

SLAYGROUND AND JIMMY THE KID (U.S.A., 1983)

Quite honestly those are two pictures of mine that I’ve never seen.

JIMMY THE KID (GERMANY, 1999) AND LA DIVINE POURSUITE

These were both “that-language-only” films, that can only be shown in their original language. With Dancing Aztecs [the Westlake novel that forms the basis of La divine poursuite] it doesn’t burn the rights. If somebody wanted to make an American version of it, they could. But it means I never saw either film, nor did I have any relationship with the filmmakers, except I met Michel Deville [director of La divine poursuite] for a drink in Paris before he made it. French friends told me he’s a wonderful writerdirector, but not that time.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

377

HOT STUFF

The original story of Hot Stuff was about a sting operation in Washington, D.C., that had been written up in Time magazine. But the producers got hung up negotiating the rights with the cops, so we moved it to “Anytown, U.S.A.,” which never works. I finished up the script, and four years went by. All of a sudden the movie was being made, and when I got the proposed credits there were a total of six writers, including [Dom] DeLuise [who was starring as well as directing]. A maximum of two could get credit. I would get a production bonus if I got a credit, so I applied, and wrote a four-page letter describing my contributions. Dom DeLuise also applied, sending in a script where he underlined all the lines he claimed. Some of them I’d written, and some of them were old before DeLuise’s grandfather was born, like, “Do you know what burns my ass?” “What?” “A flame this high.” I became one of the two credited writers. DeLuise did not. I got my bonus. The movie has the same basic thread to it as my script . . . and there are some bits in it that are very, very funny. But it’s a funnyman’s movie, not a writer’s movie.

THE STEPFATHER, THE STEPFATHER II, AND THE STEPFATHER III

The credits on The Stepfather are rather weird. I’m the main writer, but the story is credited to Brian Garfield, Carol Lefcourt, and me. Carol Lefcourt was an editor at a publishing house in New York; Brian had published some books with that house. Carol Lefcourt gave Brian a clipping about this guy, John List in New Jersey, who killed his family and disappeared, saying to Brian, “A novel about his next family might be interesting . . .” Brian said, “Yeah, it might,” but didn’t do anything about it right away. A year or two went by before he told me about the idea, though he had lost the clipping. By then he thought he was a movie producer (it took him several years to realize he wasn’t). He said, “I’ll never write it as a novel, would you like to do it as a movie? My production company will hire you . . .” The story did connect with me in a very strange way. At one point during the Depression, my father lost his job and didn’t tell my mother that he had lost his job, and spent several weeks leaving the house every day as though going to work—but actually looking for work and not finding any. On Fridays he would take money out of his savings account and bring it home as though it were his salary. One day a woman friend of my mother’s

378

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

blew his cover. My mother and father always had trouble comprehending each other. As far as my mother was concerned, the marriage was a partnership and she had been frozen out. This guy in the clipping had done the same thing: either quit, or been fired from, his Wall Street job, and then, for the next several weeks, he did the same thing my father did, except in his case it led to murder. I found that a little spooky. I decided not to turn away from that idea, but to take a look at how people have different viewpoints of what their communal experiences are. Early on [director] Joe [Ruben] and I were talking, and he asked me if I had any images of what the movie should be like. I told him about a movie that Alexander Mackendrick directed called A Boy Ten Feet Tall [aka Sammy Goes South, 1963]. Twice in that movie Mackendrick did something that I love: in one scene planes fly over and bomb the kid’s house. The kid is playing, he hears the sound and he looks up, and then there is a quick cut to the sky as the plane is leaving. You don’t get a chance to think about it . . . There’s another scene where one of the native bearers is standing on one side of a large bush and on the other side is a lion. The guide is aware of the lion, but the lion isn’t aware of the guide; yet the guide is afraid to move, he just stands there and calls for the white hunter with the gun, who is played by Edward G. Robinson, to come quick. As the hunter’s still running, we cut back to the guide and the lion, and the lion is already in motion, halfway around the bush . . . I told Joe, “That’s what I want for The Stepfather—not a long setup for the violence. There shouldn’t be a lot of violence, but when violence happens it should happen faster than you could know it.” So from the very beginning it was written into the script that when the stepfather hit his wife it would be the second half of a gesture with the phone. It’s scary because he can’t be reasoned with, and it just happens very quickly. That’s not far from comedy, and hitting ’em with a punch line. Comedy is simply another way of hiding and jumping out—you hide and jump out with the punch line. The whole idea of The Stepfather is that the punch line would scare you instead of making you laugh. My deal was with Brian, and since we are both writers we made an absolute sweetheart contract that was quite distressing to Joe Ruben at one point, when he wanted to bring in a friend of his just to do a little polish. Part of the contract said I could not be replaced without my permission. So The Stepfather stayed mine, more so than usual, just like The Grifters stayed mine, more than usual.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

379

WHY ME?

I tried to take my name off Why Me?, but the Writers Guild wouldn’t let me. I wanted my name off it, because The Stepfather is very good and The Grifters is very good, and this thing in between is like a dead mouse. Why Me? is from one of my books, and I did the first three drafts of the script, or whatever. It was a French production company, and they were going to shoot it in New York, because it’s a very New York story. At the last minute they got an infusion of American money, and that led to its being transferred to Los Angeles, where any number of typists from the Valley took a whack at it. In resetting the story from New York to L.A., the script required a lot of writing and thinning out of characters. After seeing the resulting film, I’ve developed my theory that David Hockney is the only thing that’s ever been improved by being moved to Los Angeles. THE GRIFTERS

All of a sudden everything of Thompson’s that hadn’t been made was being put under option. His moment had come. It seems perfectly appropriate to him that his fifteen minutes of fame should have come so many years after his death. That’s a Jim Thompson irony. Thompson had been done in film before, but I don’t think he was done very well—except for Coup de Torchon [1981], the [Bertrand] Tavernier film, which is grand. I think we got Thompson’s soul on the screen for the first time. The closest anyone got to Thompson before was Coup de Torchon, but that soul was Gallic. There were three previous scripts that I know of, and there may have been a fourth in the pipeline, a little further back in time. I never read the previous scripts. At one point [Martin] Scorsese was going to direct The Grifters for Disney. Scorsese stayed involved as producer; we had conversations with him in New York before the filming, screenings with him at the end, and I believe the dialogues or rushes (I always forget what to call them) were sent to New York pretty constantly. Scorsese always wanted to see chunks of the film and he was always pleased by what was happening. How I got involved is that for over a year I had been working with Volker Schlöndorff on a film of Eric Ambler’s Passage of Arms, and having a very good experience, until the project fell apart. It fell apart because Orion, which was going to produce it, could never feel quite secure that we were going to make a good picture. They wanted to keep tinkering with it. Finally Volker was driven mad. He went off and did The Handmaid’s Tale [1990] instead.

380

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Stephen [Frears] had just become involved with The Grifters. Volker and Stephen were both at the Telluride Film Festival, and Stephen said, “I’m trying to find somebody to write this Jim Thompson story.” Volker said, “I’ve been working with Don Westlake and having an awful lot of fun.” Stephen said, “Well, I’d love to have fun!” (Laughs.) Stephen knew that I used to write these Richard Stark tough-guy novels, and at first he thought I probably wasn’t right for him because I didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. “He just does comedies, and this isn’t a comedy.” But before he came to talk with me he screened The Stepfather, and he thought, “Ah, Westlake didn’t write that. Stark did.” Stark hits hard, like Thompson. I have to tell you my favorite Richard Stark line. In one of the books the character Parker is being bedeviled by somebody. A message is brought to him. Parker gets annoyed. The guy who brought it to him says, “I’m only the messenger.” Parker shoots him and says, “Now you’re the message.” That’s in a Jim Thompson vein. During the filming, I remember Stephen turning to me one day and asking, “That line—is that you or Thompson?” I answered, “That’s me.” He said, “Okay, I’m beginning to figure out which of you is which . . .” At first I turned Stephen down, however. He asked why. I said, “The book’s too gloomy. These people are just too grim and depressing and I don’t want to spend all that time with them.” He said, “If you think about it from the young man’s point of view, then it isn’t gloomy and depressing. If you don’t think of the mother as the principal character, then—although it’s not a comedy—it’s a story of survival. It’s a story about someone who is going to survive, no matter what. And a story of survival is a little more upbeat.” It’s true: Thompson is hard to take because he isn’t upbeat and the best you can hope from him is “We can survive.” I had read most of his books, of course. The only book of his I ever had trouble with—which I didn’t like—is the one that everybody thinks is the greatest: The Killer inside Me. That one I’ve never warmed up to, but some of the others are good, and The Grifters is very good. There’s always quirkiness and surviving against odds and an off-kilter view of life in Thompson’s work. I think Thompson, because of the Depression, because of his personality, because of his drinking, because of his own family and other stuff, he was always writing too fast, slogging away. Still he managed to do, almost exclusively, stuff that came from “within.” He distorted it. In The Grifters he’s really telling a story about the tangled emotions between a mother and a son, but he puts the characters both in the mob. That’s for the market, but the story is for him. I think he thought of himself as a seriously intentioned and talented novelist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.The Depres-

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

381

sion robbed him of the college education he needed. He came out of Annabarca, Oklahoma, and was in the wrong place to have literary confreres. He was a lost figure out in Oklahoma, which is what his characters are. He always wrote from his guts—too fast, but from his guts. He was usually doing stuff for too little money in secondary markets. Every one of his books was published at least one draft too soon, so there’s lumpy, undigested stuff in them, because he wouldn’t have the time or impetus to go back and redo parts, smooth things out, and get it right. In that situation you’ve got to get it done, send it in, get your $2,000, and pay the rent. I did some of that in my early days of writing, so I know how it happens. You’re going along until you get to a point in the story where you say, “Oh, my gosh, this story isn’t going to work unless she was married before . . .” You can solve it two ways: you can go back and put the marriage in where you should have put it in the first place, or you can just stick it right in: “She was married before . . .” and keep going. That’s what Thompson does. So my first job with The Grifters was to untangle all the knots and lay the story out. The difference between a movie and a novel is that a movie is just the surface of things, and the meanings and emotions can only be implicit. Even if somebody stands on screen and says, “I’m in terrible pain at this moment,” you’re simply seeing someone who says, “I’m in terrible pain at this moment,” whereas a novel can convince you that you’re really in the presence of someone feeling terrible pain at this moment. It’s a different intensity, a novel. Even a shallow novel is “inside” somewhere. Since a movie is dealing on the surface of things, it’s easiest to start scripts in the instruction manual mode, as if you are doing an instruction manual from which somebody is making a film. Start with basics—like in painting, when you put the colors on a canvas to convince somebody to get an emotional response—that’s what a basic script is. You then put on top of that as much meaning and emotion and reality as you can, but what a script really is basically is a set of instructions. I would never do a novel in the same way. One thing Stephen and I agreed on right away was updating the book. A story shouldn’t be done “period” unless it is about the period. There’s no problem with updating Thompson because his people only live in a very narrow world, with each other. Their whole interest is the emotional struggle between them. To update it, all you have to do is take their hats off. Stephen never suggested a line of dialogue, but he was a very good editor with the script. There’s a phrase, when you’re trying to avoid being too obvious, clichéd, or banal: “Too much on the money.” As I wrote the first

382

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

draft, I realized that every line of dialogue had to be “too much on the money.” That’s what I was trying for; to hit things right absolutely on the center of the nail head. I wanted to do damage on every page. I had this real sense of being a club fighter. Normally, with dialogue, I would ask myself, “Isn’t there a more elegant way to do this?”—or a more indirect way—but not on this one. The producers first had talked to Stephen before Dangerous Liaisons [1988]. As a matter of fact the only reason he directed Dangerous Liaisons was because the Writers Guild went on strike. He and I were just starting to get together when the writers’ strike loomed. Dangerous Liaisons had been offered to Milos Forman, who turned it down, and now the producers were rather desperately looking for a director, so they could get moving. Stephen took the job of directing Dangerous Liaisons because he wanted to work. Christopher Hampton [scenarist of Dangerous Liaisons], being English, wasn’t affected by the Writers Guild strike. The Grifters was delayed a year between the corporate hugger-mugger and the writers’ strike. We kept meeting and gearing up, then folding our tents again, meeting and gearing up, then folding our tents again. Apparently Stephen became a hot property as a result of these delays. Partly because the producers wanted to prove their earnestness to him, they laid on a location scouting trip to Los Angeles, for Stephen and me. I had been there a lot but Stephen had not. If he did The Grifters, it was going to be his first American movie, and, for an Englishman, there’s nothing more quintessentially American than L.A. In fact, because I knew he would enjoy it, I went a little out of my way to show him something. Part of the film is set in La Jolla, so we took the train to Del Mar, then rented a car and drove down to La Jolla, then back up to Los Angeles. In driving from Del Mar down to La Jolla, I drove several blocks out of the way to show him Raymond Chandler’s house, because the English love Raymond Chandler. Stephen got out of the car, looked at it from every view. It was an enjoyable trip, and it cemented things a lot, including how we got along with each other. As we were driving back toward L.A., in fact, he said, “You know, I do like to have the writer on the set.” I said, “You mean, you want me out here while you’re filming?” He said yes. This is what members of the Writers Guild are screaming for all the time, but my reaction was “You want me on the set?!” There was a compromise reached, and I was there for the last week of rehearsal, the first three weeks of filming, and the last week and a half of filming. So I was there for about half of the filming.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

383

ANNETTE BENING, JOHN CUSACK, AND ANJELICA HUSTON—THE STARS OF THE GRIFTERS.

But I was fiddling with dialogue almost every day. People say to me, “Oh you write such realistic dialogue.” Well, it may look like realistic dialogue, but you have to hear somebody say it aloud, and sometimes you realize there are nine too many words in a sentence, or the sound of it is all wrong. There was one line of Anjelica [Huston]’s that was just too long, and it sounded stupid. She was struggling with it, trying to do her job, but having a helluva time. Almost always, if I was going to talk to one of the actors, I’d ask Stephen first, rather than blurting something out, because there has to be a line of authority. I said to Anjelica, “Sorry, this is my fault. I’ve given you a rotten line here. Let’s see what I can do.” I took something out, she did the new version, and it was better. We did that sort of thing all the way through the filming. One time, late in the filming, we were going to shoot three pages in the script that once had seemed perfectly sensible. Suddenly I realized that we’d already covered everything in that scene and much of the dialogue was just posturing. While they were setting up the lighting, I grabbed the script and cut a page and a half of dialogue. I called Stephen over, and my wife, and I read them the new version. My wife and someone else ran off

384

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

to a Xerox machine to do an immediate cut-and-paste and then brought the pages back and handed them out to the actors. We were doing that sort of thing too, all along the way. Writing under these conditions is a different kind of writing. But there’s a rhythmic flow to the film that you become aware of, and what you experience on the set, or see in the dailies, suggests a rhythm that requires changes in the script. I was never made to feel like a fifth wheel. Frequently during the filming Stephen would ask me, “What do you think? How does this scene look?” Actually there’s a flashback scene—now cut out of the film—about when Anjelica had her child, at age fourteen. We were in the maternity ward for the scene. The way Stephen staged it, I thought it was complicated and confusing. When he asked me what I thought of it, I told him I didn’t like it and suggested something else that I thought was cleaner and clearer. He said, “Okay, why don’t we try that?” Even after the filming was done there was more fiddling with the script. Assembling the film we’d discover a scene where the audience might not understand what a particular gimmick was, so then we put dialogue in to explain things, long after the filming was finished. I had a kind of astonishing relationship with Stephen and The Grifters, and it clearly has ruined me for the movie business for the rest of my life. Stephen behaved as though we were partners making a movie. He was the partner who stood out front, like in a store, and dealt with everybody, but when we went inside the office, we were partners. I’ve never had that.

LE JUMEAU (FRANCE, 1984) AND TWO MUCH (U.S.A.-SPAIN, 1996)

I have never seen either version [of these two films based on the Westlake novel Two Much], having been warned away by friends who cared about me. Both versions make the same simpleminded, totally destructive mistake. In both versions, the main character doesn’t kill anybody. So what’s it about? A guy screws twins? People shouldn’t be handed a camera until they reach the age of reason.

PAYBACK

Oh boy. Brian Helgeland, co–award winner for the script of L.A. Confidential [1997] was—of course—going to become a director. It’s the Peter Prin-

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

385

ciple again, people rising to the level of their incompetence. Helgeland and I corresponded [about remaking Point Blank], and talked on the phone, but did not actually meet face-to-face. It was going to be a small movie, maybe even black and white. His first script was airless, a total homage to film noir, pedantic and earnest. It was one of those rare times when the novelist says, “It’s too close to the book.” He opened it up in later drafts, got it a little looser. Then Mel Gibson came along. Helgeland had written one of his movies [Conspiracy Theory, 1997]. Gibson wanted to see what Helgeland was doing, and when he saw the script he said he’d produce and star. He wanted to play a bad guy, not just twinkle his life away. So it became a bigger movie, into which Helgeland tried to fit his homage. The first version [of the finished film] was actually a little better, though utterly without wit or humor. I have a tape of it, and everything’s dark and murky. Of course they test-screened it, and the audience kept saying, “Gee, why’s Mel being so nasty?” Finally, they took it away from Helgeland. Here’s where it gets tricky. A Directors Guild rule says that, if a director on a movie is replaced, his replacement can be anyone in the big wide world except a producer of that movie. Mel Gibson was the producer. He brought in the Australian writer he tends to bring in, and they twinkled Mel up, and did an entire new subplot. A character who had been Angie Dickinson on the phone for one minute, never seen, in the first version (Helgeland homaging again), became James Coburn with a kidnapped son in the second version. They shot an additional twenty or twenty-five minutes, directed by who knows who, not Helgeland. Laying cutesy on top of earnest, they came up with smarm.

WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN?

Larry Turman, the producer, tried to put this project together for a few years, with four different lead actors, and only with [Martin] Lawrence could he get the financing. A lovely script was written by Matthew Chapman. As soon as they started shooting, the animals took over the zoo. “Gee, Ma, I do standup, every word outa my mouth is a jewel.” Turman kept trying to get them to shoot the movie, but they were having too much fun being assholes. At the end of the experience Turman did something no producer ever does; he lowered his credit. He had been sole producer, but he brought three other names up from deeper in the credits to be coproducers because, as he told me, he didn’t want anybody to think it was a Lawrence Turman film. And no one will.

386

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

MR. RIPLEY’S RETURN

Mr. Ripley’s Return is one of the odder episodes. Let’s see if I can do it justice without meting out justice to the participants. In 1992, I was hired by an indie prod [independent production company]—one American L.A.-based, nice guy; one Frenchman, Paris-based, charming guy; one German, never met, I think he was the money guy—to do the second Ripley novel, Ripley Underground. I’ve always loved the deadpanness of [Patricia] Highsmith, and I thought it reached a peak in that book. The guy Ripley is tormenting, in his passive-aggressive way, suddenly turns around, smashes Ripley’s head with a shovel, and buries him in Ripley’s own garden. Ripley survives, comes up out of the grave later that night, takes a nice hot tub, patches his cut parts, and then what does he do? Call the cops? No. Shoot the guy? No. He haunts the guy for the next one hundred pages of the book, appearing and disappearing in windows, stuff like that. I was delighted to take a crack at the book, and didn’t mind Highsmith’s weirdnesses and repulsivenesses, because I wasn’t going to meet her or deal with her; that was the ground rule. I did my first draft, and that attracted Michael Tolkin to direct. He had some lovely ideas, details of menace and suspense for the second draft, which I wrote, and then never heard from them again. Another constant with the indie prod is, if the movie isn’t going to get made, they disappear, owing you money. It’s happened to me before, it could happen again. However, if the movie gets made after all, they have to pay before it’s released. Three times over the years, the American producer called my L.A. agent to say that it looked like a go and, “We know we owe Don the money.” My agent said,“Don knows you owe him the money, too.” This third time, magic time, the movie got made, I got paid. (Little problems, such as with health and retirement payments, nothing serious.) However, there was also a potential production bonus, if I had a solo or shared credit. I have no idea what happened to the script over the last eleven years, but there was no point not putting my hand out. I did, and lo and behold, a shared credit! Initially in first place, but the other guy got annoyed and said he’d done far more work on it than me, which must be true.1 Both shares get the same bonus. Do I want to argue the case and read twelve scripts on the same story, particularly when some of those scripts I am likely to look upon as less than felicitous? I’m happy to be Martha Washington. Michael Tolkin did not direct. I don’t know director [Roger Spottiswoode] or cast or anything. No one has contacted me directly. I am merely

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

387

that truck-stop waitress in Amarillo they fucked in 1992. That’s okay; I think highly of them, too. Someone working on the set of the movie—I think it was shot in France, but don’t know for sure—said it wasn’t coming out well, which could merely be schadenfreude. On a happier note, at this moment, in Paris, [Constantin] Costa-Gavras is shooting my book The Ax from a screenplay by him and his usual writing partner. I don’t have high hopes, I have high expectations.

NOTE 1

The other credited writer of Mr. Ripley’s Return is W. (William) Blake Herron, who also wrote The Bourne Identity (2002).

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

These selected recommendations for further reading are limited to major interviews and articles published in newspapers or magazines, as well as a small number of relevant books. In general, the screenwriters of earlier Backstory volumes attracted little serious attention outside of Hollywood, whereas in recent years—starting with the writer-director boom of the 1970s—the situation has changed. Important screenwriters are now integrated into the publicity stream, and publication of scripts is a modest growth industry. Partly because of DVDs, which often include commentary by the writer about the script, nowadays on the Internet there exists a constant turnover of brief interviews or articles on individual screenwriters and their screenplays. and David Newman were introduced as Hollywood’s new “Dynamic Duo” in Newsweek (November 6, 1969), and a good follow-up on their teamwork was Larry Gross’s “Robert Benton and David Newman: What Have They Been up to since Bonnie and Clyde?—A Lot!” in Millimeter (October 1976). Benton himself wrote about the experience of making Bad Company in Action, no. 8 (March/April 1973). Robert Levine reported on “Robert Benton and The Late Show: Marlowe in Nighttown” for Film Comment (January/February 1977), and Lisa Vincenzi interviewed Benton for Millimeter (August 1987). ROBERT BENTON

389

390

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

The screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde is featured in Best American Screenplays: First Series by Sam Thomas (New York: Crown, 1985) and is also included in The Bonnie and Clyde Book, compiled and edited by Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). Benton is among the people featured in Oscar-Winning Screenwriters on Screenwriting by Joel Engel (New York: Hyperion, 2002). Michael Adams’s overview of the Benton-Newman oeuvre is included in American Screenwriters: Second Series, edited by Randall Clark, vol. 44 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1986). Maitland McDonagh, who has written extensively about LARRY COHEN in different venues, interviewed the writer-director for “Larry Cohen: Thriving outside the Mainstream” in Film Journal (July 1985) and “Dispatches from the Cohen Zone” in Psychotronic (Fall 1991). Dennis Fischer profiled Cohen for “Directed, Written and Produced by Larry Cohen: From Monster Babies to Homicidal Messiahs” in Midnight Marquee (Fall 1985). Robin Wood and Richard Lippe interviewed Cohen for Movie, no. 31/32 (Winter 1986). Early on, Wood signaled Cohen’s importance—comparing his work to Brian de Palma’s and focusing on Hell Up in Harlem, Bone, It’s Alive, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, and It Lives Again—in “Gods and Monsters” in Film Comment, no. 14 (September/October 1978). Phone Booth spurred numerous articles. Dave Kehr wrote “Please Hold the Line (for 30 Years)” in the New York Times (March 30, 2003); and Elvis Mitchell reported on “Larry Cohen’s Art of Paranoia” in the New York Times (April 27, 2003). J. R. Taylor interviewed the “Chaotic Son” in New York Press (September 15, 2003). Amy Wallace profiled “The Survivor” in the New Yorker (February 2, 2004). Cohen himself wrote about the long genesis of the project in “Getting inside Phone Booth” in Script (November 2002) and “Phone Booth: A 30-Year Project Wouldn’t Hang Up” in the Los Angeles Times (March 30, 2003). Cohen figures in Darius James’s That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury) (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995) and is the focus of Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker by Tony Williams (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996). Williams also wrote “Cohen on Cohen” for Sight & Sound, no. 1 (1983/84). In the 1970s and 1980s BLAKE EDWARDS was interviewed by Peter Stamelman in Millimeter (January 1977); Herb A. Lightman in American Cinematographer (“Riding Hard on a Chinese Fire Drill: An Interview with

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

391

Writer/Producer/Director Blake Edwards,” July 1978); Harlan Kennedy in American Film (“Blake Edwards’s Life after 10,” July/August 1981); and Myron Meisel in Rolling Stone (“S.O.B.: Do They Mean the Movie or Blake Edwards?” August 6, 1981). Edwards and Julie Andrews were interviewed by Lawrence Lindeman in the December 1982 issue of Playboy; they are also jointly interviewed in Take 22: Moviemakers on Movie Making by Judith Crist (New York: Viking, 1984). Edwards and Peter Sellers were profiled by Jordan Young in “Inspector Clouseau Strikes Again—And Again and Again” in the New York Times (July 16, 1978). The writer-director is among the interview subjects of Hard Act to Follow by Michael Sellers and Gary Morecambe (London: Blake, 1997). Edwards’s published screenplays include Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther Strikes Again with Frank Waldman (New York: Ballantine, 1976) and Selections from Blake Edwards’s Victor/Victoria (New York: Warner Bros. Publications, 1982). Peter Lehman and William Luhr’s Blake Edwards (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981) and the companion second volume, Blake Edwards: Returning to the Scene (Ohio University Press, 1989), definitively chronicle and analyze his career. Lehman and Luhr’s several published interviews with Edwards include “Too Much to Do, Not Enough Time to Do It: An Interview with Blake Edwards” in Wide Angle, no. 3 (1980); and “There Is a God and He’s a Gag Writer” for Written By (March 2002). WALTER HILL has been interviewed, notably, by Bob Martin for Starlog (July 1979); by Alain J. Silver and Elizabeth Ward for Movie (“Scriptwriter and Director: Interview with Walter Hill,” Winter 1978/79); by David Chute for Film Comment (“Dead End Streets,” July/August 1984); by Larry Gross for Bomb (Winter 1993); and by Maitland McDonagh for Film Journal (“Hill Returns to the West with Wild Bill,” January 1996). Michael Goodwin reported on “The Hit Master” for Esquire (November 1981). “Hill on Hawks”—Howard Hawks, that is—appeared in Sight & Sound (February 1997). Randall Clark assesses Hill’s talent and themes in his essay included in American Screenwriters: Second Series, vol. 44 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1986).

Alone, or in company with Merchant Ivory, RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA has been the subject of other interviews and entire books. John Pym’s excellent “Where Could I Meet Other Screenwriters? A Conversation with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala” appeared in Sight & Sound (Winter 1978/79). Graham

392

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

Fuller spoke to the novelist-screenwriter for Interview (“Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” November 1990). Susan Bullington Katz conducted “A Conversation with . . . Ruth Prawer Jhabvala” for the Journal: Writers Guild of America, West (December/January 1995). Ruth Jhabvala, Ismail Merchant, and James Ivory were profiled by Mark Ginsburg for Interview (December 1983) and by Anthony Korner for Art Forum (“Three’s Company,” November 1987). The Contemporary Authors series of books is one of the best reference/biographical sources for writers, including screenwriters, and sometimes, as in the case of Jhabvala, Lawrence Kasdan, Elmore Leonard, John Milius, and Donald E. Westlake, from the Backstory 4 list, solid interviews are included. Jhabvala is interviewed in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, vol. 29 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1990). Jhabvala is among the individuals featured in Screenwriting by Declan McGrath and Felim MacDermott (Burlington, Mass.: Focal, 2003). Among Jhabvala’s published scripts are The Householder (New Delhi: Ramlochan Books, 1965); Autobiography of a Princess, as compiled by James Ivory (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); and Savages, Shakespeare Wallah by Jhabvala and Ivory (New York: Grove Press, 1973). The Merchant Ivory productions are the focus of The Films of Merchant Ivory by Robert Emmet Long (New York: Abrams, 1991); and The Wandering Company: Twenty-one Years of Merchant Ivory Films by John Pym (London and New York: BFI/MOMA, 1983). Jhabvala’s life and career are treated at length in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala by Ralph J. Crayne (Boston: Twayne, 1992); Ruth Prawer Jhabvala by Vasant A. Shahane (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1976); and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Fiction and Film by Jayanti Bailur (New Delhi: Arnold, 1992). See also James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies by Robert Emmet Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Since his high-profile emergence as a writer for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in 1980, followed by his strong directing debut with Body Heat, LAWRENCE KASDAN has been a recurring favorite of interviewers. Dan Yakir interviewed the writer-director for Film Comment (September/ October 1981). Kasdan was the subject of the “Dialogue on Film” in American Film (April 1982). Pat Broeske interviewed Kasdan for Films in Review (April 1984). Ted Elrick’s profile, “Not So Mum on Mumford: A Conversation with Lawrence Kasdan,” appeared in the Directors Guild of America

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

393

Magazine (September 1999). F. X. Feeney’s “Kasdan’s Gift” was published in Written By (August 2001). Kasdan is among the interview subjects in The Directors by Robert J. Emery (New York: Allworth Press, 2002). The Star Wars scripts come in many variants, including Return of the Jedi: Script Facsimile by Kasdan and Lucas (New York: Del Rey, 1998); The Empire Strikes Back Notebook, with contributions by Diane Attias, Lindsay Smith, Leigh Brackett, Kasdan, and Lucas (New York: Ballantine, 1980); Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: The Complete, Fully Illustrated Script by Brackett and Kasdan (London: Virgin Books, 1999); Star Wars: The Scripts by Lucas, Kasdan, et al. (London: PanMacmillan, 1995); and Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays by Laurent Bouzereau (New York: Ballantine, 1997). Kasdan’s other published scripts include The Big Chill with Barbara Benedek (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), and Wyatt Earp: The Film and the Filmmakers with Jake Kasdan (New York: Newmarket Press, 1994). Also of interest is Kasdan’s article “P.O.V.” in The Best American Movie Writing, 2001, edited by John Landis (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001). Kasdan is interviewed in Contemporary Authors, vol. 109 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1983). One of the first articles about ELMORE LEONARD and Hollywood was Bill Kelley’s “This Pen for Hire” in American Film (December 1984). The late 1990s brought several Hollywood adaptations of Leonard’s novels, along with a spate of articles and interviews timed to coincide with their release, including Graham Fuller’s “Sex, Lies and Cops” in Interview (July 1998); and Lawrence Grobel’s “Elmore Leonard in Hollywood” in Movieline (July 1998). Tod Lipp’s “Adapting Get Shorty” and “Elmore Leonard on Get Shorty” are both in Scenario, no. 1 (1996); Annie Nocentie’s “Adapting Out of Sight” is also in Scenario, no. 2 (1998). “The Road Not Taken,” Leslie Felperin’s interview with Scott Frank about adapting Leonard’s Out of Sight and Get Shorty for film (and Karen Sisco for television), is in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight & Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau (London: BFI, 2001). There are innumerable interviews with Leonard about writing fiction, which invariably touch on screen versions of his books.These include “Making a Killing: An Interview with Elmore Leonard” by Craig L. LaMay in The

394

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

Culture of Crime, edited by Craig L. LaMay and Everette E. Dennis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1995); and Creativity: Conversations with 28 Who Excel by Susan Charlotte with Tom Ferguson and Bruce Felton (Troy, Mich.: Momentum Books, 1993). Leonard is also interviewed in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, vol. 28 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1990). Leonard’s life and career are also surveyed in Elmore Leonard (Literature and Life) by David Geherin (London and New York: Continuum, 1989); Elmore Leonard by James E. Devlin (Boston: Twayne, 1999); and Get Dutch! A Biography of Elmore Leonard by Paul Challen (Toronto: ECW Press, 2001). has always been generous with interviews. Among the better and more extensive are the interview appearing in Dialogue on Film 4, no. 2 (November 1974); Bob Thomas’s profile in Action (“Paul Mazursky: Film as Autobiography,” March/April 1976); Ralph Appelbaum’s interview in Films and Filming (“Experience and Expression: Paul Mazursky,” August 1978); Terry Curtis Fox’s interview in Film Comment (“Paul Mazursky Interviewed,” March/April 1978); Christine Bunish’s interview in Millimeter (January 1987); and Mike Figgis’s interview for Projections 10 (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). Mazursky’s transcripted interview is part of Word into Image: Portraits of American Screenwriters (Santa Monica, Calif.: American Film Foundation, 1981). Among his published scripts are Tempest: A Screenplay with Leon Capetanos (New York: Performing Arts Publications, 1982); and Harry and Tonto with Josh Greenfield (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974). James Moore assessed Mazursky’s writing and filmmaking career for American Screenwriters: Second Series, edited by Randall Clark, vol. 44 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1981). Mazursky’s autobiography is Show Me the Magic: My Adventures in Life and Hollywood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

PAUL MAZURSKY

JOHN MILIUS has been outspoken in interviews from the outset of his career. “The Making of Dillinger” was chronicled by Andrew C. Bobrow in Filmmakers’ Newsletter (November 1973). Milius was profiled by Jon Landau in Rolling Stone (“Dillinger: Cops, Robbers and Superstardom,” August 30, 1976); interviewed by Greg MacGillivray for American Cinematographer (“John Milius ‘Hangs Ten’ on Film,” June 1978); by Richard Thompson for Film Comment (“Stoked: John Milius Interviewed,” July/August 1976); by

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

395

Larry Salvato and Dennis Schaefer for Millimeter (September 1975); by Paul M. Sammon for Cinefantastique (“Nine Days in Cimmeria: On Location with Conan,” no. 3, 1981); by John Gallagher in Films in Review (June/July 1982); more on Milius and Conan by Paul M. Sammon for Cinefantastique (“Milius the Director,” no. 2/3, 1982); by Adrian Turn for Sight & Sound (“Milius and Conan,” no. 3, 1982); by Adrian Rutner and J. Petley for Films and Filming (“John Milius: A Teller of Folk-Tales,” October 1982); by Peter Rainer in American Film (“Mixed Messages,” March 1986); by David Rensin in Playboy (“Twenty Questions,” June 1991); and by Eric Bauer in Creative Screenwriting, no. 2 (2000). Published screenplays include Apocalypse Now Redux: A Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Milius (New York: Miramax, 2001). Milius is credited with writing The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (New York: Bantam, 1973) and the novelizations of Big Wednesday, with Dennis Aaberg (New York: Bantam, 1978), and The Wind and the Lion (New York: Universal-Award House, 1988). Milius is among the subjects of Reel Conversations by George Hickenlooper (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1991). He looms importantly in several Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas biographies and also figures prominently in The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979) and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Milius is interviewed in Contemporary Authors, vol. 101 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1981). Richard Braverman contributed a valuable essay on his oeuvre to American Screenwriters: Second Series, edited by Randall Clark, vol. 44 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1981). FREDERIC RAPHAEL spoke with Clive Hodgson about “Writing for the Screen” in Film (March 1979). Among Raphael’s published motion picture scripts are Two for the Road (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967) and Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay by Raphael and Stanley Kubrick, including the Arthur Schnitzler novel that inspired the film (New York: Warner Books, 1999). Raphael’s memoir of working with Kubrick is Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Ballantine, 1999). ALVIN SARGENT is rarely interviewed, though he turns up fleetingly in Sell-

ing a Screenplay: The Screenwriter’s Guide to Hollywood by Syd Field (New York: Dell, 1989).

396

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

Sargent’s Oscar-winning script for Julia is part of Best American Screenplays: Second Series by Sam Thomas (New York: Crown, 1990). Interviews with DONALD E. WESTLAKE abound, though they usually focus on his prolific fiction. Charles L. P. Silet’s “What’s the Worst That Could Happen? An Interview with Donald Westlake” (originally from Armchair Detective, Winter 1996) is included in The Big Book of Noir by Lee Server, Martin H. Greenberg, and Ed Gorman (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1998). Westlake is also interviewed in Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series, vol. 16 (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1990).

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

JOHN BAXTER has published forty books, the majority dealing with cinema,

including biographies of Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, George Lucas, and Robert De Niro. His most recent books are a memoir, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, celebrating a lifelong fascination with collecting rare books, and its sequel volume, We’ll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light. He lives in Paris. For further details, see www.johnbaxter.net. GRAHAM FULLER is the editor of Potter on Potter, Loach on Loach, and Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, all published by Faber and Faber.

is an assistant professor in the Film and Media Culture Program at Middlebury College, Vermont. His writings have appeared in Art Papers, Film Comment, and Framework, as well as in the volumes Directed by Allen Smithee and The Last Great American Picture Show.

CHRISTIAN KEATHLEY

BILL KROHN has been the Los Angeles correspondent of the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma since 1978. He was the coproducer, codirector, and cowriter of the documentary It’s All True, based on an unfinished film by Orson Welles. More recently he wrote the award-winning Hitchcock at Work. He is currently writing books on Luis Buñuel for Taschen and The Serial Killer in the Cinema for Reaktion. He regularly reviews films for the Economist.

397

398

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

is the author of nine books, including Selected Takes: Film Editors on Editing; Stanley Kubrick: A Biography; The Encyclopedia of American Independent Filmmaking; and, most recently, Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures. He is an instructor of editing, production design, and cinema studies for the Department of Film, Video and Animation at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he is also a thesis adviser and member of the Thesis Committee. His work has appeared in American Cinematographer, Films in Review, and MovieMaker. LoBrutto is a special member of the American Cinema Editors and the associate editor of CinemaEditor.

VINCENT LoBRUTTO

has variously been a studio publicist, film teacher, movie critic, and documentary producer. His work has been seen on HBO, A & E, Learning Channel, USA Networks, and bookshelves. He is fascinated with investigating and portraying the creative process, especially of screenwriters who struggle to maintain a personal vision in a collaborative medium. He lives in Los Angeles, where, like everybody else, he is developing screenplays. He interviewed Walon Green and Stirling Silliphant in Backstory 3. NAT SEGALOFF

was born in 1962 and started his career as a photojournalist in Europe in 1988. He covered world events until moving to Los Angeles in 1997 from Mexico City. Since then, he has been shooting productions stills and portraits for movies and television. Find out more about him on www.stonefoto.com. PETER “HOPPER” STONE

FRED TOPEL has been an entertainment journalist since 1999. He graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in cinema and has written for the Hollywood Reporter, Cinefantastique, and Femme Fatales magazines. He currently writes for About.com, Chud.com, Madblast.com, Wave magazine, Videostore magazine, and Screenwriters Monthly. Visit him on the Web at http://actionadventure.about.com.

is an editorial and fine art photographer living in Maplewood, New Jersey, with his wife and daughter. His photos have also appeared in earlier Backstory editions.

WILLIAM B. WINBURN

GENERAL INDEX

Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Aaberg, Denny, 294 ABPC studios, 321 Adjani, Isabelle, 335 Adler, Buddy, 350 Adventure (magazine), 198 Aiello, Danny, 256, 257, 261n12 AIP (American International Pictures), 115, 282–83 Aldiss, Brian, 343n19 Aldrich, Robert, 127 Alexander, Terence, 323 Allen, Jay Presson, 4 Allen, Woody, 5, 6, 256 Almendros, Nestor, 13, 23, 25 Alonso, Maria Conchita, 247 Altman, Robert, 5, 21, 22, 23, 29 Ambler, Eric, 379 Ameche, Don, 45 American Heritage (magazine), 291 American International Pictures (AIP), 115, 282–83 Andersson, Bibi, 26 André Bazin (Andrew), 24

399

Andrew, Dudley, 24 Andrews, Dana, 46 Andrews, Harry, 324, 341–42n4 Andrews, Julie, 84, 99 Anglo-Amalgamated, 323, 324, 326 Anhalt, Edward, 283, 284 Annabella, 202 Ann-Margret, 215 Anspach, Susan, 236 Archer, Eugene, 14 Argosy (magazine), 198, 201 Arizona Highways (magazine), 199–200 Arkoff, Samuel Z., 55, 63, 277, 282 Arlorio, Giorgio, 273n3 Arquette, Rosanna, 181–82 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 149–50 Attenborough, Richard, 342n13 ATV, 322–23 Aubrey, James, 92, 232–33, 260n3 Audran, Stéphane, 25 Austen, Jane, 6–7, 143–44, 158n2

400

GENERAL INDEX

Avakian, Aram, 375 Axelrod, George, 4, 84, 93, 360 Bagley, Desmond, 130n5 Bailey, John, 31 Baker, Rick, 48 Ball, Lucille, 71 Balsam, Martin, 47 Barkin, Ellen, 98 Barnes, Peter, 324n9 Barrow, Clyde, 16, 290 Bart, Peter, 358–59 Barth, John, 149 Basinger, Kim, 81 Baskin, Elya, 248 Bates, Alan, 324, 328, 341–42n4 Batjac company, 201 Baxter, John, 8–9 Bazin, André, 24 BBC (television), 333, 334 BBS Productions, 228, 260n2 Bean, Judge Roy, 314–15n10 Beatty, Warren, 12, 18, 209 Beckerman, Sidney, 209, 210 Behan, Brendan, 47 Bellow, Saul, 136 Benedek, Barbara, 176 Bening, Annette, 383 Bennett, Charles, 2, 4 Benton, Robert, 5, 12; on actors as anchors, 25–26; avant-garde sensibility of, 11–12; on Bad Company, 21; on Billy Bathgate, 29–30; body of work by, 13–14; on Bonnie and Clyde, 17–18; on character orientation, 35; on family/marriage themes, 28–29; filmmaking style of, 12–13, 24; honored works by, 14; on “Hubba Hubba” script, 19–20; on The Human Stain, 34–35; on The Late Show, 21–22; on Nobody’s Fool, 30–33; on Places in the Heart, 26–27; on plan séquence, 23–24; on Don Siegel’s films, 18–19; on Superman script, 24–25; on switch to directing, 20–21; on François Truffaut, 23; on Twilight, 33–34; on

working with actors, 22–23, 27–28, 31–33; on writing adaptations, 30–31, 34–35 Berenger, Tom, 307 Berg, Jeff, 110, 235, 245 Bergen, Candice, 315n14 Berghof, Herbert, 238 Bergman, Ingmar, 25–26 Bergman, Ingrid, 77 Bergman, Sandahl, 297 Bernard, Maurice, 335 Bernhardt, Curtis, 341n1 Bernstein, Carl, 61–62 Bernstein, Elmer, 50 Bernstein, Walter, 4 Bierce, Ambrose, 372 Black, Karen, 376 blacklisting, 3, 4, 61, 351, 366n3 Blair, Buzz, 206 Blake, Jeff, 264 Blatty, William Peter, 84, 98, 101n5 “blaxploitation” movies, 55–57 Blockbuster Video survey (2003), 8 Bloom, Claire, 342n13 Bogarde, Dirk, 326, 327 Bogart, Humphrey, 42, 52, 53 Bogdanovich, Peter, 5, 8, 11, 15, 20, 130n3; and Daisy Miller, 333–34; and The Getaway script, 107; Hitchcock retrospective by, 16–17 Boileau, Pierre, 19 Bonitzer, Pascal, 97 Boone, Richard, 205 Boorman, John, 112 Boothe, Powers, 303 Brackett, Leigh, 2, 3, 161 Bradford, John (Johnny), 94 Braga, Sonia, 252 Bragg, Melvyn, 143 Brando, Marlon, 62, 301 Brandywine company, 121 Braselle, Keefe, 352 Bresson, Robert, 15 Brett, George, 122 Bricusse, Leslie, 320 Bridges, Jeff, 21, 22 Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, 220

GENERAL INDEX

Brodkin, Herbert, 49, 50, 53 Bronson, Charles, 7, 115, 195, 210, 212 Bronston, Samuel, 204 Brooks, Adam, 194n1 Brooks, James, 349 Brooks, Mel, 48, 228 Brooks, Richard, 2, 3, 6, 208, 223 Brown, Barry, 21, 22 Brown, David, 332, 333 Brown, Harry Joe, 201 Brown, Jim, 51, 56, 374 Brown, Joe David, 356 Brustein, Robert, 158–59n3 Brynner, Yul, 50, 51 Bunker, Eddie, 359 Buñuel, Luis, 15, 25 Burnett, Carol, 71 Burnett, Don, 341n1 Burnett, W. R., 2, 4 Busch, Niven, 2 Busey, Gary, 315n17 Bygraves, Max, 320 Caesar, Sid, 373 Cage, Nicholas, 79 Cagney, James, 42 Cahiers du Cinéma (magazine), 11, 97, 327 Cain, James M., 2 Caine, Michael, 53, 344 Calley, John, 117 Cameron, Jim, 125 Cameron, Rod, 83 Cannon, Dyan, 230, 231, 238 Canton, Mark, 274 Capetanos, Leon, 245–46, 249 Capote, Truman, 84 Cardone, Alberto, 341n1 Carmichael, Ian, 320 Carney, Art, 21, 237–38, 260nn7,8 Carrera, Barbara, 69, 70 Carrey, Jim, 79 Carrière, Jean-Claude, 317 Carroll, Diahann, 374 Carroll, Gordon, 121 Carson, Lance, 294 Carter, Helena Bonham, 149

401

Carter, Jimmy, 121 Cassavetes, John, 245, 246 Castle, William, 373 CCNY (City College of New York), 41–42, 44, 82n3 “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” (Truffaut), 34 Chabrol, Claude, 15, 25, 345 Champion, Gower, 376 Champion, John, 83 Chandler, Raymond, 382 Chaplin, Charles, 349–50, 358 Chaplin, Sydney, 350 Chapman, Matthew, 385 Chase, Borden, 113, 130 Chekhov, Anton, 135 Cher, 257, 261n13 Christie, Julie, 326 Chrysler Building, 64 City College of New York (CCNY), 41–42, 44, 82n3 Clancy, Tom, 308 Clayburgh, Jill, 242, 243, 261n10 Clement, Dick, 333 Clift, Montgomery, 22 Clooney, George, 220 Close, Glenn, 180 Clouseau, Inspector (character), 95–96, 98, 99–100, 101n6 Coburn, James, 115, 385 Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan Coen), 220 Coffee, Lenore, 1, 2 Cohen, Larry, 6, 9, 38, 67; on blaxploitation films, 55–57; body of work by, 37–40; on Cellular, 81; on Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, 52–53; on Bette Davis film, 66–72; on female relationships, 73–74; on filmic influences, 42–44, 82n3; on first directing experience, 54–55; on first Hollywood experience, 47–48; on God Told Me To, 57, 59–60; on Guilty as Sin, 72–73; on Alfred Hitchcock, 76–78; on Sidney Lumet, 72–73; on Magnificent Seven sequel, 50–51; on Michael Moriarty,

402

GENERAL INDEX

Cohen, Larry (continued) 65–66; on Phone Booth, 77–80; on The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, 60–63; on Q, 64; on screenwriting process, 59, 60, 64–65, 74–76, 81; on shooting schedules, 64; on show business background, 40–42, 81n1; on The Stuff, 65; on television work, 45–47, 48–50, 53; on writerdirector’s power, 51–52, 57–58 Cohen, Nat, 323, 325 Cohn, Elenora, 132 Cohn, Sam, 256 Collier’s (magazine), 198 Columbia Pictures, 115, 116, 117, 182, 223, 232, 350 Comden, Betty, 2, 3 Connell, Evan S., 6–7, 146 Connery, Sean, 53, 72, 315n14 Connors, Chuck, 53 Conrad, Joseph, 295–96, 298, 304 Cook, Elisha, 376 Cooper, Gary, 88, 368 Cooper, James Fenimore, 279 Coppola, Francis Ford, 5, 275, 277, 296, 298 Corman, Roger, 3, 60, 277 Costa-Gavras, Constantin, 347, 365, 387 Costner, Kevin, 130n6, 161, 165, 166, 167, 180, 193 Coward, Noël, 44 Crawford, Broderick, 62, 63 Crist, Judith, 324n9 Crompton, Richmal, 158n1 Cruise, Tom, 339 Crystal, Billy, 257 Culp, Robert, 229, 230, 231 Curtis, Tony, 84, 97, 324n9 Curtiz, Michael, 42 Cusack, John, 383 Dabadie, Jean-Loup, 343n16 Dafoe, Willem, 306 Dahl, Roald, 48–49 Dailey, Dan, 62 Daley, Bob, 209

Daley, John, 63 Dalton, Timothy, 335 Da Silva, Howard, 63 Daves, Delmer, 200, 275 Davis, Bette, 42, 66–72 Davis, Geena, 185 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 55 Day, Ernest (Ernie), 338 de Almeida, Joachim, 310 de Beauregard, Georges, 371–72 Deep Throat (Watergate source), 61–62 De Laurentiis, Dino, 210, 233, 301–2 Delillo, Don, 149 DeLuise, Dom, 377 DeMornay, Rebecca, 72 Deneen, Bill, 203, 204 De Niro, Robert, 184, 220, 257 Dennehy, Brian, 73, 182, 213 De Palma, Brian, 171 Derek, Bo, 93 Deutsch, David, 323, 324–25 Deville, Michel, 376 Dickinson, Angie, 48, 385 Dick Smith Monster Makeup Kits, 48 Dillinger, John, 16, 290 Dillon, Robert, 306 Dime Western (magazine), 198, 200 Doctorow, E. L., 29 Donen, Stanley, 8, 317, 326, 329, 330–31, 334–35, 336 Donner, Clive, 324–25, 330, 334 Donovan, Arlene, 30, 32 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 135 Douglas, Gordon, 48 Douglas, Kirk, 53, 73, 329 Dreiser, Theodore, 323 Dreyfuss, Richard, 249, 250, 252, 290, 335 Duff, Howard, 22 Duke, Patty, 47 Dullea, Keir, 49 Dunaway, Faye, 18, 332 Dunne, Dominick, 44, 81n2 Dunne, John Gregory, 204 Dunne, Philip, 2

GENERAL INDEX

Durante, Jimmy, 41 Duvall, Robert, 8, 376 Earp, Wyatt, 190–92, 193 Eastman, Carole, 3 Eastwood, Clint, 7, 8, 117, 195, 209, 216, 274, 284; in Dirty Harry, 127, 285–86, 314n9; Elmore Leonard on, 210, 211 Edwards, Blake, 6, 10, 85, 99; on adlibbing, 97–98; body of work by, 86–88; on current projects, 101; first screenplay by, 83, 88–89, 101n1; on France, 100; friendship/sexuality themes of, 91–93; on Cary Grant, 96–97; honored works by, 88; on Inspector Clouseau character, 95–96, 98, 99–100, 101n6; on moral-ethical imperative, 93–94; on Night of the Hunter, 89; on personal traits, 91; on radio script writing, 89; on Skin Deep, 94–95, 101nn3,4; on Orson Welles, 90; on Wild Rovers, 90, 91–92; writerdirector qualities of, 84–86 Edwards, J. Gordon, 101n1 Eisenstein, Sergei, 227 Eisner, Michael, 116–17, 118, 120, 249, 250, 253, 256 Eldard, Ron, 79, 80 Ellin, Stanley, 323, 325, 341n2 Elliot, T. S., 296 Elliott, Denholm, 324, 341–42n4 Encyclopedia Britannica Films, 203–4 Ephron, Nora, 8 Epstein, Jerry, 350 Epstein, Julius J., 2 Esalen Institute, 230 Esquire (magazine), 11, 16 Estevez, Emilio, 303 Ezterhas, Joe, 9 Falk, Peter, 46, 48 Farago, Ladislas, 62 Farrell, Colin, 79, 80 Fauchois, René, 249 Fawcett, Farrah, 206

403

FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 60–63 Fellini, Federico, 275 Feng, Xiaogang, 224 Ferrara, Abel, 216 Ferrer, José, 63 Ferrer, Mel, 19, 330 Feuillade, Louis, 15 Field, Sally, 27 Fields, Freddie, 235 Fields, W. C., 63 Film Culture (Sarris), 11, 15 Film Encyclopedia (Katz), 105–6 Finch, Jon, 53 Finch, Peter, 48 Fincher, David, 125, 126 Fink, H. J., 285 Finney, Albert, 260n7, 328, 331 Fisher, Carrie, 331 Fisher, Thomas Henry, 158n1 Fisher, Vardis, 314n8 Fiskin, Jeffrey Alan, 130n6 Fitzgerald, Geraldine, 237, 260n8 Fleischer, Richard (Dick), 212 Fleyming, Gordon, 374 Flynn, John, 376 Folsey, George, Jr., 55 Folsey, George, Sr., 55 Fonda, Bridget, 219 Fonda, Henry, 191 Fonda, Jane, 241, 357 Foote, Horton, 3 Forbes, Rosita (Lady McGrath), 291, 315n15 Ford, Glenn, 195, 201 Ford, Harrison, 310, 331 Ford, John, 5, 168, 174, 191, 214, 275, 295 Forman, Milos, 382 Forster, E. M., 6–7, 131, 133, 149–50, 156 Foster, David, 107, 111, 130n2 Frank, Harriet, Jr., 4, 204 Frank, Melvin, 329 Frank, Scott, 217, 220 Frankenheimer, John, 47, 215 Frankovich, Mike, 223, 229, 232

404

GENERAL INDEX

Frears, Stephen, 380, 381, 382, 384 Frey, Sami, 343n16 Friedkin, William, 214 Frost, David, 324 Froug, William, 284 Fuller, Sam, 54 Gable, Clark, 287 Gale, Bob, 299 Garfield, Brian, 377, 378 Gazzara, Ben, 50 Gelbart, Larry, 324n9, 364 Gernreich, Rudi, 351 Gibson, Mel, 79, 385 Gierash, Stefan, 284 Giler, David, 111, 113–14, 121, 123–24, 125–26, 128 Gilliat, Penelope, 17 Gish, Lillian, 85 Glenn, Scott, 182 Glover, Danny, 189 Glover, John, 215 Glut, Don, 281, 314n2 Godard, Jean-Luc, 12, 15–16, 84, 371–72 Goldblum, Jeff, 180 Golden, Marilyn, 372 Goldman, Bill, 33 Goldman, William, 374–75 Goodman, Lord Arnold, 336, 343n18 Goodrich, Frances, 2, 272n2 Goodson-Todman company, 53 Gordon, Gordon, 84 Gordon, Larry, 111, 115, 116, 117–18, 120, 277, 282 Gordon, Mildred, 84 Gorman, Cliff, 242 Gotfurth, Fritz, 321 Gould, Elliott, 229, 230, 231, 238 Grant, Cary, 76, 96–97 Gray, L. Patrick, 62 Great Northern Hotel (Bradford, West Yorkshire), 325, 342n5 Green, Adolph, 2, 3 Green, Walon, 4 Greenfeld, Josh, 233, 239, 241 Gregory, André, 144, 158–59n3 Gregory, Paul, 89

Gregson, Richard, 327, 329 Grier, Pam, 219 Griffith, Charles B., 3, 4 Grimaldi, Alberto, 51–52 Gross, Larry, 113, 114, 118, 119 Grotowski, Jerzy, 144, 158–59n3 Guest, Judith, 356 Guzman, Pato, 245 Hackett, Albert, 2, 272n2 Hackman, Gene, 28, 35, 73, 217 Hadley, Reed, 83 Haggard, Mark, 121 Haig, Alexander, 275 Halliwell, Leslie, 342nn6,13 Hamilton, George, 275, 289 Hamilton, Guy, 320 Hammett, Dashiell, 173, 357, 361 Hampton, Christopher, 382 Hanley, Gerald, 110 Hansen’s Drugstore (Harlem), 41 Hardy, Thomas, 332 Harper, Marguerite, 200, 205 Harrison, Jim, 111, 130n6 Harrison, Joan, 52–53, 77 Hartig, Herb, 223, 227 Harvey, Laurence, 327 Hawks, Howard, 5, 11, 14, 15, 31, 35, 113, 122, 130, 161, 275 Hawn, Goldie, 271 Hayes, John Michael, 4 Haynes, George, 239 Hecht, Ben, 113 Heflin, Van, 201 Helgeland, Brian, 384–85 Heller, Lukas, 113, 114, 127 Hellman, Lillian, 345, 356–57, 361 Hellman, Monte, 219 Hemingway, Ernest, 198 Henry, Buck, 20, 272n1 Hepburn, Audrey, 93, 328, 330, 331, 332 Hepburn, Katharine, 72 Herrmann, Bernard, 77 Herron, W. Blake, 387n1 Highsmith, Patricia, 386 Hill, Walter, 6, 10, 102–3, 103; on action movies, 126–27; on Alien,

GENERAL INDEX

121–25; on Alien sequels, 125–26; on background/education, 105–6, 130n1; body of work by, 104–5; on The Drowning Pool, 111; on Michael Eisner, 116–17, 118, 120; on first directing job, 114–16; on first script sale, 107; on 48 HRS. script, 117–19; on John Huston, 108, 110–11, 130n4; on The Mackintosh Man script, 109–11, 130n5; on Eddie Murphy, 119–20; on Sam Peckinpah, 107–8; on screenwriter’s voice, 108–9; on screenwriting process, 112–14, 128–29; on studio system, 116–17, 118, 129–30; on writer-director’s role, 106, 114, 128 Hiller, Bill, 240 Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 11, 14, 15, 25, 43, 220; Robert Benton on, 31; Larry Cohen on, 52, 53, 76–78; MoMA’s retrospective on, 16–17 Hitchcock, Alma, 78 Hockney, David, 379 Hoffman, Dustin, 35, 79, 237, 260n7 Holden, William, 53 Holliday, Doc, 192, 193 Hollywood Reporter (newspaper), 62 Holm, Celeste, 63 Holm, Ian, 114, 123, 333, 342n13 Homeier, Skip, 201 Hoover, J. Edgar, 61, 62, 63 Hopkins, Anthony, 34–35, 145 Household, Geoffrey, 334 Houser, Jerry, 21 Howard, Robert E., 300, 301 Howard, Trevor, 44 Hudson, Bob, 314n4 Hudson, Rock, 328, 331 Hughes, Howard, 23 Hunt, Helen, 270 Hunt, Linda, 181, 182 Hunter, Tab, 47 Hurt, William, 176, 184, 185, 187 Huston, Anjelica, 238, 254, 383 Huston, John, 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 102; Blake Edwards on, 90; Walter Hill on, 108, 110–11, 130n4; John Milius on, 287–88, 305, 315n11

405

Huston, Tony, 111 Huyck, Willard, 282, 314n5 International Creative Management (ICM), 235 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 7, 151 Ives, Burl, 208 Ivory, James, 6, 132, 138, 139, 140, 143, 146, 149, 155–56 Jackson, Glenda, 144 Jackson, Mick, 165 Jackson, Samuel L., 219 Jacob, Alex, 112 Jaffe, Sam, 321 Jaffe, Stanley, 20, 23 Jagger, Mick, 245 James, Frank, 41 James, Harry, 202 James, Henry, 7, 131, 133, 147, 155, 333; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on, 149, 150, 156 Janni, Joseph, 320, 324, 325, 326, 332, 340–41 Jefferson, Thomas, 152–53 Jersey Films, 220 Jewison, Norman, 358 Jhabvala, C. S. H., 132 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 6–7, 133; on adaptations, 137–38, 144, 146, 156; on Autobiography of a Princess, 141–42; background/education of, 132–33; body of work by, 133–35; on Bombay Talkie, 140; on caste and class, 138–39; on children as subjects, 155; on The Courtesans of Bombay, 147; on cultural/gender identities, 157; on film editing, 142–43; on films as influence, 158; on financial considerations, 147–48; on Holocaust, 136; honored works by, 135; on Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, 143–44; on improvisation by actors, 144–45; as interview subject, 131–32; on Thomas Jefferson, 152–53; literary interests of, 135–36, 149–50, 156; on Madame Sousatzka script,

406

GENERAL INDEX

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer (continued) 150–51; on Miramax project, 154–55; on Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 146–47, 154–55; on narration in film, 151–52; on Remains of the Day, 151; on A Room with a View, 148–49; on Roseland, 143; on screenwriting process, 136–37, 141; on Shakespeare Wallah, 139; on Surviving Picasso, 153–54 Johnson, Ben, 295 Johnson, Brad, 306 Johnson, Don, 72 Jones, James, 155 Jones, James Earl, 300 Jones, Kaylie, 155 Jones, Tommy Lee, 123 Journal American (newspaper), 46 Julia, Raul, 251 Juvenal, Father, 203 Kael, Pauline, 17, 286 Kagan, Paul, 42 Kahn, Madeline, 353 Kakela, Wayne, 280 Kanaly, Steve, 290 Kanin, Garson, 2 Kanter, Jay, 241 Karina, Anna, 372 Kasdan, Lawrence, 7, 162, 177; on The Accidental Tourist, 184–86; background/education of, 161, 163–64; on The Big Chill, 176–78; on The Bodyguard, 165, 166, 167, 169; on Body Heat, 173–74, 176; body of work by, 161–63; on character orientation, 169; on commercial hits, 167–68; on directing another writer’s script, 166, 171, 194n1; on director’s power, 165–66; on film noir, 173, 176; on Grand Canyon, 188–90; on historical accuracy, 191; honored works by, 163; on I Love You to Death, 186–87; on My Darling Clementine, 190–91; on Raiders of the Lost Ark, 168–69; on screenwriting process, 171–72; on Silver-

ado, 164, 180–82; on Silverado/ Bodyguard sequels, 182–83; on Star Wars films, 170; on studio system, 170–71, 193–94; on style of films, 174–75; thematic interests of, 160–61, 172–73, 188–90; on working with actors, 178–80, 183; on Wyatt Earp, 191–93 Kasdan, Mark, 163 Katt, William, 315n17 Katz, Ephraim, 105 Katz, Gloria, 314n5 Katzenberg, Jeff, 249, 250 Kaufman, Andy, 59 Kaufman, Phil, 168 Keaton, Diane, 8, 262, 263, 264, 265 Keith, Brian, 306 Kelly, Grace, 53 Kennedy, Arthur, 22 Kennedy, Burt, 51 Kennedy, John F., 49 Kerby, Bill, 117 Kershner, Irvin, 51, 170, 285 Kibbee, Roland, 206 Kidder, Margot, 244 Kidman, Nicole, 28, 34–35, 339 Kilbride, Percy, 48 King, Rodney, 188 King, Stephen, 373 Kingsley, Dorothy, 2 Kleiser, Randal, 281, 314n2 Kline, Kevin, 177, 180, 182, 186, 187, 188, 256 Klugman, Jack, 46 Koch, Howard, Jr., 20–21 Kostmayer, John, 166, 182, 186, 187 Kotto, Yaphet, 55 Kraft, Hy, 351, 366n3 Kramer, Eric Allan, 308 Krasna, Norman, 2 Kristofferson, Kris, 236 Kruger, Hardy, 321 Kruger, Steve, 273n3 Kubrick, Stanley, 8, 131, 149, 223, 317, 323; John Milius on, 305–6; Frederic Raphael on, 336–40, 341 Kurosawa, Akira, 174, 175, 275

GENERAL INDEX

Ladd, Alan, Jr., 117, 125, 237, 239, 241 La Frenais, Ian, 333 Lambert, Jack, 122 Lancaster, Burt, 73, 206 Landers, Hal, 375 Landis, John, 55 Lang, Fritz, 25 Lang, Jennings, 209 Lange, Jessica, 184 Langtry, Lily, 314–15n10 Lardner, Ring, Jr., 4 Lathrop, Phil, 115 Laughton, Charles, 89 Laurel and Hardy, 90, 100 Laurents, Arthur, 2 Law, Jude, 272 Lawrence, Martin, 385 Lawson, John Howard, 227, 260n1 Lean, David, 158, 275 Lear, Norman, 19 Lee, Spike, 7 Lefcourt, Carol, 377 Lemmon, Jack, 84–85, 93 Leonard, Elmore, 7, 196; on The Big Bounce, 205–6; body of work by, 195–98; on casting actors, 208; on Cat Chaser, 216; on character orientation, 217; on educational film scripts, 203–4; on 52 Pickup, 215; on first visit to Hollywood, 202; on Forty Lashes Less One, 208–9; on Get Shorty, 216–18, 220; on Glitz, 213; on Hollywood screenwriting experience, 205, 212–15; on Hombre adaptation, 204–5; on Joe Kidd, 209–10; on The Moonshine War, 206–8; on Mr. Majestyk, 211–12; on optioned books, 219–20; on Stick, 215; on Quentin Tarantino, 218–19; on Western story writing, 198–201, 211 Lettieri, Al, 212 Levinson, Barry, 7 Levitt, Al, 351–52, 366n3 Levitt, Helen, 351–52, 366n3 Levy, Stuart, 323, 325 Lewis, Joseph H., 15

407

Lillie, Beatrice, 320 Little Richard, 250 Littleton, Carol, 26, 142 Littman, Robert, 68 Lloyd, Selwyn, 323, 341n3 Loew’s theaters (New York), 42 London Daily Express (newspaper), 322 Lopez, Gerry, 294, 315n18 Lopez, Jennifer, 220 Loren, Sophia, 43, 322 Lorimar, 213 Los Angeles Free Press (newspaper), 253 Losey, Joseph, 327 Loy, Myrna, 119 Lucas, George, 5, 160, 161, 172, 275, 281, 283, 315n20; Lawrence Kasdan on, 172–73; John Milius on, 292; and Raiders of the Lost Ark, 167, 168, 169; and Star Wars films, 170 Lucas, Marcia, 292 Lukas, Paul, 47–48 Lumet, Sidney, 43, 72–73, 213 MacDonald, Ross, 111 MacGraw, Ali, 109 Mackendrick, Alexander, 378 MacLeod, Gavin, 97 Macy, Bill, 21 Macy, William H., 81 Maddow, Ben, 2 Mahin, John Lee, 2, 4 Maibaum, Richard, 2 Mainwaring, Daniel, 2 Malamud, Bernard, 136 Malden, Karl, 91–92 Malick, Terry, 285 Malkovich, John, 27, 335–36 Malle, Louis, 158–59n3 Maltin, Leonard, 342n7 Mamet, David, 28, 254 Mancini, Henry, 77 Mankiewicz, Chris, 207 Mankiewicz, Joe, 19 Mankowitz, Wolf, 322 Mann, Abby, 206

408

GENERAL INDEX

Mann, Anthony, 22 Maños, Mickey, 280 Marino, Buddy, 202 Marley, Peverell, 48 Marquand, Richard, 170, 173 Marshall, E. G., 44, 49 Martin, Millicent, 324, 341–42n4 Martin, Steve, 188, 190, 269 Martin, Strother, 115 Marvin, Lee, 287, 374 Marx, Sam, 321 Matheson, Richard, 3, 4 May, Elaine, 3 Mayron, Melanie, 238 Mazursky, Paul, 7–8, 225; on Alex in Wonderland, 232–33, 260nn4,5; background/career of, 222–24; on Blume in Love, 235–36; on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 229–31; body of work by, 224–26; on Leon Capetanos, 245–46; on Art Carney, 237–38, 260n7; on character orientation, 230, 246; on cuts from scripts, 244–45; on dialogue, 236, 240–41; on Down and Out in Beverly Hills, 248–50; on Enemies, A Love Story, 253–55; on Faithful, 257–58, 261nn13,14; on Harry and Tonto, 237–38, 260n8; honored works by, 226–27; on improvisation, 231–32; on The Monkees experience, 228, 260n2; on Moon over Parador, 251–53; on Moscow on the Hudson, 247–48; on narrative voice-overs, 244; on Next Stop, Greenwich Village, 239–40; on personal film, 233, 239; on The Pickle, 256–57; on Scenes from a Mall, 256; on screenwriting process, 227, 232, 238–39, 258–60; on studio system, 250–51; on Tempest, 246–47; on Larry Tucker, 227–28, 234; on An Unmarried Woman, 241–43, 261n10; on Willie and Phil, 243–45 McAlpine, Don, 245 McBain, Ed, 46 McDonnell, Mary, 189

McEdward, John, 101n1 McGilligan, Pat, 131 McGoohan, Patrick, 208 McQueen, Steve, 107, 109 Medavoy, Mike, 283, 314n7 Melville, Sam, 293–94 Merchant, Ismael, 6, 132, 138, 147, 154, 159n4 Merchant Ivory films, 6–7, 133, 140; captions used in, 148–49; financial considerations of, 147–48; as genre, 156–57; studios’ relations with, 154–55 Mestres, Ricardo, 118 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. See MGM Metty, Russell, 90, 101n2 Meyer, Nicholas, 34 Meyers, Nancy, 8, 264; body of work by, 263, 272nn1,2, 273nn3,4; career background of, 262; on comedy, since 1980s, 270–72; on directing, 268–69; on female writers’ status, 272; honored works by, 263; on screenwriting process, 265–66, 267–68; on Something’s Gotta Give, 264–65, 267, 268; on successful/ unsucessful movies, 269–70; on What Women Want rewrite, 270, 273n6 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 63, 70–71, 90, 206, 220, 232, 260n3, 332 Midler, Bette, 249–50, 256 Milford, Gene, 44 Milius, John, 8, 278; on Apocalypse Now, 295–98, 315nn20,21; background/education of, 276–77, 279– 81; on Big Wednesday, 292–94, 315nn17,18; body of work by, 277–79, 314n1; on Clear and Present Danger, 310; on Conan character, 300–301; on Conan sequels, 302, 316n24; on Francis Coppola, 298; on criticism of his films, 286, 297–98; on Dino De Laurentiis, 301–2; on Dirty Harry, 285–86, 314n9; on Evel Knievel, 289; on Farewell to the King, 303–5, 316n25; on first directing job,

GENERAL INDEX

289–91; on first feature scripts, 282–83; on John Ford, 295; on historical accuracy, 308; honored works by, 279; on John Huston, 287–88, 315n11; on Jaws speech, 298–99; on Jeremiah Johnson, 283–85, 286, 314n8; on The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 286–87, 314– 15n10; politics/values of, 274–76, 312–14; on Red Dawn, 302–3; on Theodore Roosevelt, 306–7; on screenwriting process, 310–12; on Frank Sinatra, 285; on Spielberg’s 1941, 299–300, 316n23; on studio system relationships, 305–6; on USC film classmates, 281, 292, 314n2; on Orson Welles, 291–92, 315n16; on The Wind and the Lion, 291–92, 315nn14,15; on writing adaptations, 308–9 Milius, William Styx, 276 Milland, Ray, 46 Millar, Gavin, 260n1 Miller, Harvey, 263, 272n1 Miramax, 154–55, 219 Mirisch, Walter, 50, 51, 212 Montand, Yves, 343n16 Montecito Hotel (Hollywood), 47–48 Montgomery, Robert, 44 Moore, Archie, 376 Moore, Mary Tyler, 357 Moreau, Jeanne, 243 Morgan, André, 305 Morgan Creek Productions, 255 Morgenstern, Joe, 17 Moriarty, Michael, 58, 65–66 Mortimer, John, 317 Mulligan, Richard, 111 Murdoch, Iris, 327 Murphy, Eddie, 119–20 Murphy, Michael, 242, 243 Museum of Modern Art (New York City), 16–17 Myers, Mike, 98–99 Narcejac, Thomas, 19 National General, 208, 209

409

NBC Studios (New York City), 43–44 Nelson, Baby Face, 290 Netter, Doug, 232 New Line, 81 Newman, David, 5, 11–12, 16, 19, 22; film directed by, 21, 36n2; and Superman script, 24–25 Newman, Leslie, 25 Newman, Paul, 72, 195; Robert Benton on, 32–33; Walter Hill on, 109–10; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on, 146–47; Elmore Leonard on, 204; in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 286–87 Newsweek (magazine), 17 New Wave, 11–12, 14–15, 24, 158 New World, 60, 63, 65–66 New Yorker Theater, 15 New York Film Festival, 11, 15–16 New York Times (newspaper), 61 Nichols, Mike, 167 Nicholson, Jack, 8, 111, 260n7, 262, 265 Nicholson, Jim, 282 Nolan, Lloyd, 63 Nolte, Nick, 117, 119, 152, 249, 303, 304, 316n25 O’Bannon, Dan, 121 Oberon, Elan, 277 O’Brien, Jack, 46 O’Brien, Margaret, 47 O’Day, Anita, 376 Olin, Lena, 238, 254, 255 O’Neal, Ryan, 206, 257, 261n13, 348, 353 O’Neal, Tatum, 348, 353 O’Neill, Oona, 350 Ontkean, Michael, 244 Orion Pictures, 56, 305, 379 Osborne, Robert, 68 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 201 O’Toole, Peter, 334 Pacino, Al, 260n7 Pakula, Alan J., 344, 358, 360 Palminteri, Chazz, 257, 258, 261n13 Panama, Norman, 324n9, 329–30

410

GENERAL INDEX

Pappé, Stuart, 232 Paramount, 101, 117, 119, 214, 358–59 Parker, Bonnie, 16, 290 Parker, Dave, 122 Parker, Mary-Louise, 188 Paul Kagan Associates, 42 Peckinpah, Sam, 4, 6, 102, 107–8, 284 Pedicaris, Ian, 291, 315n14 Peet, Amanda, 262 Peña, Elizabeth, 249 Penn, Arthur, 12, 17, 18 Peppard, George, 93 Phillips, Scott, 33 Picasso, Pablo, 153–54 Pidgeon, Walter, 47 Pinter, Harold, 151, 317, 327 Platt, Polly, 107, 130n3 Playboy (magazine), 92 Poitier, Sidney, 43 Poledouris, Basil, 281, 314n2 Pollack, Sidney, 47, 284, 357, 366n1 Pollack, Tom, 252 Pollard, Michael J., 18 Pope, Elaine, 272 Popular Publications, 200 Portis, Charles, 295 Powell, Dick, 89 Powell, Jane, 47 Powell, Michael, 315n15 Powell, William, 119 Power, Tyrone, 202 Prawer, Marcus, 132 Preminger, Otto, 35, 46 Preston, Robert, 92 Price, Frank, 248–49, 251, 257 Procter & Gamble, 53 Proust, Marcel, 135 Pryor, Richard, 117, 120 Pudovkin, V. I. (Vsevolod), 227 Purdy, Betsy, 223 Purvis, Melvin, 290 Puzo, Mario, 24 Pynchon, Thomas, 149 Quaid, Dennis, 161 Quine, Richard (Dick), 83, 207, 208 Quinn, Anthony, 130n6

Raisuli, Mulay Hamid, 291, 315n14 Rand, Ayn, 247 Rank studios, 320–21, 326 Ransohoff, Martin, 206–7 Raphael, Frederic, 8–9, 317, 318; on American versus English actors, 328–29, 331; on BBC film series, 334; body of work by, 318–19; on casting decisions, 324, 328–29; on Daisy Miller adaptation, 333–34; on Darling, 325–27; on directing jobs, 332–33, 336, 343n17; on Richard Dreyfuss, 335; on English cultural experience, 323–24; on Far from the Madding Crowd, 332; on Albert Finney, 331; on first screenwriting jobs, 320–22; on Audrey Hepburn, 330–31; honored works by, 320; on The King’s Whore, 335–36; on Stanley Kubrick, 336–40, 341; on Joseph Losey, 327; on Wolf Mankowitz, 322; on Nothing but the Best, 324–25; on Norman Panama, 329–30; on A Severed Head, 333, 342n13; on television script writing jobs, 322–23 Rassam, Jean-Pierre, 20 Rather, Dan, 62 Ravetch, Irving, 4, 204, 205 Rayfiel, David, 206, 284, 344, 366n1 Raymond, Gary, 323 Reagan, Ronald, 252 Redford, Robert, 284, 345, 353, 356, 357 Redgrave, Vanessa, 145 Redman, Amanda, 335 Reed, Robert, 49 Reeling (Kael), 286 Reeves, Keanu, 187, 262 Reisch, Walter, 2 Reisz, Karel, 227, 260n1 Remar, Jimmy, 119 Remarque, Erich Maria, 352, 353 Remick, Lee, 342n13 Rendigs, Sally, 14 Renoir, Jean, 249 Rexer, Fred, 297, 316n22

GENERAL INDEX

Rey, Alejandro, 247 Rey, Fernando, 251–52 Reynolds, Burt, 7, 195, 215 Reynolds, Kevin, 303 Rhys, Jean, 6–7, 144 Richardson, Samuel, 143, 158n2 Richlin, Maurice, 84 Richman, Stella, 322 Richter, Hans, 44, 82n3 Ricorno, Charles, 325 Riskin, Robert, 113 Ritt, Martin, 43, 204, 205 Ritter, John, 94 RKO theaters (New York City), 42 Roberts, Bobby, 375 Roberts, Julia, 270 Robinson, Casey, 2 Robinson, Edward G., 42, 378 Robinson, James, 255 Robson, Mark, 52, 53 Roe, Elizabeth, 276 Rogan, Beth, 325, 326 Rogers, Ginger, 44 Rohmer, Eric, 15, 334, 342n14 Romulus Films, 327 Roosevelt, Theodore, 306–7 Rose, Reginald, 49 Rosen, Larry, 234 Rosten, Leo, 84 Roth, Eric, 111 Roth, Joe, 254, 255 Roth, Philip, 5, 34, 35 Roth, Richard, 361 Roud, Richard, 11 Ruben, Joe, 378 Rubens, Bernice, 150 Ruddy, Al, 305 Rudin, Scott, 30, 32 Russo, Richard, 30, 31, 33 Ryan, Meg, 331–32 Ryan, Robert, 376 Ryder, Winona, 126 Sabaroff, Robert, 374 Sackler, Howard, 223, 239 Saint, Eva Marie, 44 Salkind, Alexander, 24–25

411

Salkind, Ilya, 24–25 Samuel, Tony, 325 Sandburg, Carl, 284 Sands, Julian, 149 Santa Catalina Mountains (Arizona), 199–200 Sarandon, Susan, 246 Sargent, Alvin, 9; on acting background, 349–50; on blacklisted friends, 351, 366n3; body of work by, 344–46; on Lillian Hellman, 356–57, 361; on Hollywood filmmaking today, 364–65; honored works by, 346–47; on income from screenwriting, 359–61; on Norman Jewison, 358; original scripts by, 361–63; on Other People’s Money, 353–54, 358; on personal insecurities, 347, 348–49, 363–64, 365–66; professional reputation of, 344, 358–59; on screenwriting process, 347–48, 354–55; on Variety job, 350–51, 352; on writing adaptations, 352–54, 355–56 Sargent, Joseph, 350, 366n2 Sarris, Andrew, 11, 14, 15, 93, 95 Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 198 Sautet, Claude, 343n16 Savage, John, 21 Savan, Glenn, 355–56 Saxon, John, 209 Scheider, Roy, 215 Schlesinger, John, 8, 150–51, 317, 325, 327, 332 Schlöndorff, Volker, 379, 380 Schmidt, Harvey, 14 Schneider, Romy, 343n16 Schnitzler, Arthur, 317, 337 Schoendoerffer, Pierre, 304, 316n25 Schrader, Paul, 176, 218 Schulberg, Budd, 375 Schulman, Arnold, 4 Schumacher, Joel, 38, 79–80 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 297, 300, 316n24 Scorsese, Martin, 283, 379

412

GENERAL INDEX

Scott, Allan, 2 Scott, George C., 324n9 Scott, Randolph, 195, 201–2 Scott, Ridley, 124 Scott, Tony, 130n6 Second City (Los Angeles), 223, 227–28 Segal, Erich, 375 Segal, George, 235, 236 Selander, Lesley, 83 Sellers, Peter, 84, 97, 98, 223, 322 Semple, Lorenzo, Jr., 52, 111 Serban, Andrei, 144, 158–59n3 Serling, Rod, 3 Shaber, David, 306 Shane, Celeste (Cici), 288, 315n12 Shanley, John Patrick, 169 Sharkey, Ray, 244 Shaw, George Bernard, 309 Shaw, Robert, 299 Sheen, Martin, 301 Shepherd, Cybill, 333–34 Shivas, Mark, 333, 334 Shusett, Ronald, 121 Shyer, Charles, 8, 262, 263, 266, 268, 272 Sidewater, Fred, 210 Siegel, Don, 15, 18–19, 24, 117, 285 Silliphant, Stirling, 4 Silver, Joel, 118, 120 Silver, Ron, 254, 255 Sim, Alistair, 334 Simon, Michel, 250 Simon, Neil, 228 Simon, Roger, 254, 255, 256 Simpson, Don, 118 Simpson, Mona, 345 Sinatra, Frank, 53, 284, 285 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 224, 253 Siodmak, Curt, 2 Smith, Dick, 48 Smith, Will, 79 Soderbergh, Steven, 220 Solomon, Joe, 277 Sonego, Rodolfo, 273n3 Sonnenfeld, Barry, 216–17, 218, 220 Southern, Terry, 4

Spark, Muriel, 334 Spielberg, Steven, 3, 5, 160, 161, 275, 288, 343n19; and John Milius, 292, 298–99; and 1941, 299–300, 316n23; and Raiders of the Lost Ark, 167, 168, 169 Spottiswoode, Roger, 117, 386 Stander, Lionel, 69 Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (LoBrutto), 131 Stanton, Harry Dean, 290 Stark, Ray, 111, 233 Stark, Richard. See Westlake, Donald E. Steiger, Rod, 44, 63 Stein, Margaret Sophie, 254 Steiner, Ira, 206 Steiner, Jerry, 353 Steppling, John, 215 Stern, Stewart, 2 Stevens, George, 14 Stewart, Donald Ogden, 2, 310 Stewart, James (Jimmy), 22 Stinson, Joe, 215 Stone, Oliver, 7, 300 Stoppard, Tom, 29 Stowe, Madeleine, 130n6 Strasberg, Lee, 223 Straub, Jean-Marie, 21 Streep, Meryl, 23, 25, 256 Strucchi, Stefano, 273n3 Stuart, William L., 46 Stulberg, Gordon, 237 Sturges, John, 163, 209, 210, 214 Sturges, Preston, 100, 113, 367 Sullivan, William, 61 Summer, Ed, 300 Sutherland, Donald, 224 Sutherland, Kiefer, 79, 80 Swanson, H. N., 195, 200, 205–6, 207, 209, 211 Swayze, Patrick, 303 Swift, David, 273n4 Talbot, Dan, 15 Talent Associates, 45, 47 Tamiroff, Akim, 251, 261n11

GENERAL INDEX

Taradash, Daniel, 2 Tarantino, Quentin, 195, 209, 218–20 Tati, Jacques, 98 Tavernier, Bertrand, 379 Taylor, Elizabeth, 367–68 Tecolote Productions, 224 Thinnes, Roy, 53 Thomas, Danny, 260n4 Thomas, Roy, 300 Thompson, Emma, 145 Thompson, Jim, 379, 380–81 Thulin, Ingrid, 26 Tierney, Gene, 46 Todd, Richard, 321 Toland, John, 16 Tolkin, Michael, 386 Tolson, Clyde, 61, 62 Tomlin, Lily, 21 Torn, Rip, 29, 63 Touchstone Pictures, 249, 250 Travolta, John, 220, 221n2 Trotti, Lamar, 113 Truffaut, François, 12, 15; on adaptation, 34; Robert Benton on, 23, 31; narrative voice-overs by, 244 Trumbo, Dalton, 351, 366n3 Tucker, Larry, 223, 227–28, 229, 231, 232, 234 Tukan, Vladimir, 247 Turman, Larry, 111, 130n2, 385 Turner, Barbara, 3 Turner, Kathleen, 176 20th Century-Fox, 42, 78–79, 121, 124, 237, 239, 241, 255, 332–33 Tyler, Anne, 7, 184, 185 Ullman, Tracey, 186, 187 Ullmann, Liv, 335 Ulmer, Edgar, 15 United Artists, 110, 241 Universal Pictures, 52, 77, 209, 215, 220, 248–49 USC Mafia, 275, 277, 281, 314n2 Ustinov, Peter, 99–100 Vailland, Roger, 327 Van Cleef, Lee, 51–52

413

van de Camp, L. Sprague, 300 Vanity (actress), 215 Vanoff, Nick, 54 Variety, 68, 350, 351, 372 Vigne, Daniel, 335 Villiers, James, 341–42n4 Vincent, Jan-Michael, 293–94, 315nn17,19 Vincenzoni, Luciano, 273n3 von Däniken, Erich, 121, 130n7 Wachowski brothers (Andy and Larry Wachowski), 316n24 Waldman, Frank, 84 Waldman, Tom, 84 Walken, Christopher, 239 Warner, Jack, 93 Warner Bros., 42, 48, 63, 110, 154, 186, 206, 284 Washington Post (newspaper), 61 Wasserman, Lew, 77 Wayne, John, 201, 295 Weaver, Sigourney, 124–25, 126 Webb, Jack, 89 Weld, Tuesday, 45 Weller, Peter, 216 Welles, Orson, 90, 101n2, 291–92, 298, 315n16, 333 Western Costume, 69 Westlake, Donald E. (pseud. Richard Stark), 9, 369; on Aram Avakian, 375; on The Bank Shot, 376; on The Busy Body, 373; on credits for Hot Stuff, 377; on credits for The Stepfather, 377–78; film adaptations of novels by, 367, 368–70; first writing assignment of, 367–68; on Stephen Frears, 382, 384; on William Goldman, 374–75; on The Grifters project, 379–80, 381–84; on Brian Helgeland, 384–85; honored works by, 371; on Made in U.S.A. lawsuit, 371–72; on Mr. Ripley’s Return, 386–87; on The Outfit, 376; on pen name, 373; published works by, 370– 71; on The Split, 374; on Jim Thompson’s work, 380–81; on

414

GENERAL INDEX

Westlake, Donald E. (continued) What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, 385; on Why Me? rewrites, 379 Weston, Jay, 233 Wexler, Milton, 101n7 Whitmore, James, 50 Whorf, Richard, 202 Widmark, Richard, 208, 373 Wigan, Gareth, 117, 124, 241 Wilder, Billy, 2, 3, 6, 271, 340 William Morris agency, 47 Williams, Clarence, III, 215 Williams, Guy, 341n1 Williams, Joe, 208 Williams, Robin, 79, 247, 248 William series of books, 135, 158n1 Williamson, Fred, 56 Winn, Godfrey, 325 Winters, Ralph, 90 Winters, Shelley, 223, 240 Wizan, Joe, 107 Wood, Natalie, 229, 230, 231 Woods, James, 73 Woodward, Bob, 61–62

Woodward, Joanne, 147 Woolf, James (Jimmy), 327 Woolf, John, 327 Worden, Hank, 295 Writers Guild, 2, 9, 382 Wyatt, Woodrow, 332, 342n10 Wynn, Ed, 47 Wynn, Tracy Keenan, 111, 117 Yablans, Frank, 62 Yates, Peter, 375 Yordan, Philip, 2 Yorkin, Bud, 19, 20 Young, Clara Kimball, 1 Youngman, Henny, 49 Yulin, Harris, 310 Zaillian, Steve, 310 Zanuck, Darryl, 332 Zanuck, Richard, 332, 333 Zemeckis, Robert, 275, 299 Ziegal, Vic, 42 Zinnemann, Fred, 14, 350, 357 Ziskind, Laura, 349, 362, 363 Zito, Stephen, 213

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. The Accidental Tourist, 7, 160, 161, 162, 173, 184–86 Addie Pray (novel), 356 The African Queen, 52 Alex in Wonderland, 224, 232–33, 234, 250n5, 256 Alfie, 272 Alien, 104, 113, 114, 121–25 Alien3, 104, 125–26 Alien: Resurrection, 105, 126 Aliens, 104, 125 All Ashore, 86 All That Jazz, 13 All the King’s Men, 63 All the President’s Men, 345, 360, 375 The Ambassador, 197 The Ambulance, 39, 72 American Graffiti, 314n5 American Pie, 272 The American Success Company, 39 Analyze This, 257 Another 48 HRS., 104 Antz, 224, 226

415

Anywhere but Here, 345, 346 Apocalypse Now, 8, 13, 111, 278, 279, 295–98, 301, 306, 315nn20,21 Apocalypse Now Redux, 315n21 Appointment in Samarra (television play), 44 Arrest and Trial (television series), 40, 50 Artificial Intelligence, 314n19, 337, 339 As Good as Dead (television play), 72 Ash Wednesday, 81n2 The Atomic Kid, 86 Attack!, 127 Austin Powers film series, 98–99, 100 Autobiography of a Princess, 134, 141–42 The Ax, 370, 371, 387 Baby Boom, 263 Bachelor of Hearts, 318, 321 Bad Company, 5, 13, 14, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 26

416

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Bandits (novel), 219, 220 The Bank Shot, 368, 376 Be Cool, 197, 221n2 The Best of Everything (television play), 323, 341n2 Best Seller, 39, 58, 73 Big, 271 The Big Bounce, 197, 205–6, 217, 221n1 The Big Chill, 7, 160, 162, 173, 174, 176–78, 177 The Big Money, 318, 320 Big Shot’s Funeral (aka Da Wan), 224, 226 The Big Sleep, 26 Big Wednesday, 8, 274, 276, 278, 292–95, 314n2, 315n17 Billy Bathgate, 14, 29–30 Billy Liar, 325 The Blackboard Jungle, 7, 223 Black Caesar, 38, 55–56 Blade Rider, Revenge of the Indian Nations, 38 The Blair Witch Project, 239 Blind Date, 85, 87 Blue City, 104 Blume in Love, 222, 224, 227, 233, 235–36 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 5, 8, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229–32, 231, 234 Bobby Deerfield, 345, 352 The Bodyguard, 160, 161, 163, 165–66, 167–68, 169 Body Heat, 7, 160, 161, 165–66, 173–74, 176, 178 Body Snatchers, 39 Bogus, 346, 358 Bombay Talkie, 134, 138, 140 Bone, 38, 55, 57 Bonnie and Clyde, 5, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 17–18, 18, 20, 23, 29 Border Shootout, 197 The Bostonians, 134, 147 Bouda Saved from Drowning, 249 Boudu sauvédes eaux (play), 249 A Boy Ten Feet Tall (aka Sammy Goes South), 378 Branded (television series), 40, 53

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 6, 84, 86, 92, 93, 97, 360 Breathless, 16 Brewster McCloud, 232 Brewster’s Millions, 104 The Bridges at Toko-Ri, 53 Brief Encounter, 44 Bringing Up Baby, 96 Bring Your Smile Along, 86 Broadcast News, 271–72 Bullitt, 104, 106 The Busy Body, 368, 373 Candy, 4 Captain Blood, 42 The Carey Treatment, 87 Carlito’s Way, 224 Casablanca, 42 Cat Chaser, 197, 216 Cellular, 40, 81 César et Rosalie, 334–35, 343n16 Champion, 53 Charley Moon, 318, 320 Charley Varrick, 19 Choice Cuts (novel), 19 Cinque furbastri un furbacchione, 369 Citizen Kane, 17, 90, 169 City Heat, 87, 215 Clear and Present Danger, 278, 308–10 Colorado Territory, 127 Le commissaire mène l’enquete, 368 Conan the Barbarian, 8, 247, 278, 278, 297, 300–302, 314n2 Conan the Destroyer, 316n24 El Condor, 38, 51–52 Conspiracy Theory, 385 Continental Divide, 161, 168 Cops and Robbers, 368, 375–76 Coronet Blue (television series), 40, 53 The Couch, 86 The Count of Monte Cristo (television miniseries), 337 Coup de Torchon, 379 Le couperet (aka The Ax), 370, 387 The Courtesans of Bombay, 134, 147 The Crazy American Girl, 21, 36n2 Crimen, 273n3

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Cross My Heart, 162 Crossroads, 104 Cruisin’ Down the River, 86 Cuba Libre (novel), 220 Curb Your Enthusiasm (television series), 224 Curse of the Pink Panther, 87 Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, 38, 52–53, 54, 76 Daisy Miller, 8, 319, 333–34 Dancing Aztecs (novel), 370, 371, 376 Dangerous Liaisons, 382 The Danny Kaye Show (television series), 223, 228, 234 Danube (educational film), 204 The Dark Half (novel), 373 Darling, 5, 8, 317, 318, 325–27, 329 Darling Lili, 87, 99 Days of Wine and Roses, 6, 86, 93 The Dead, 111 Deadly Illusion, 39 Dead People, 104 Deadwood (television series), 105, 128 The Defenders (television series), 40, 49 The Devil’s 8, 277, 282–83 Diabolique, 19 Dillinger, 275, 277, 289–91 The Dillinger Days (nonfiction book), 16 The Dirty Dozen, 282 Dirty Harry, 8, 127, 211, 277, 284, 285–86, 314n9 Dis-moi qui tu hais, 370 La divine poursuite, 370, 376 Le Divorce, 134 $ (Dollars), 209 Dominick and Eugene, 345, 363 Don’t Bother to Knock, 318, 321 Double Indemnity, 173, 176 Down and Out in Beverly Hills, 226, 227, 248–50, 253 Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet, 108 Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 4 Dreamcatcher, 163

417

“Drifters” (unproduced script), 107 Drive a Crooked Road, 86 The Driver, 6, 102, 104, 113 The Driver’s Seat (novel), 334 The Drowning Pool, 33, 104, 111 Easy Rider, 4 Edge of the City, 43 The Effect of Gamma Rays on Manin-the-Moon Marigolds, 345 The Emperor, 277, 282, 314n4 The Empire Strikes Back (aka Star Wars: Episode V), 7, 160, 161, 170 Enemies, A Love Story, 224, 226, 253–55, 256 Entertainment Tonight (television series), 71 Escape from Alcatraz, 117 Espionage (television series), 40, 50 The Europeans, 134, 147 Evel Knievel, 275, 277, 289 The Ex, 39 The Exorcist, 167 Exorcist III, 98 Experiment in Terror, 84, 86 The Expert, 39 Extreme Prejudice, 104, 278 Eyes Wide Shut, 8, 317, 319, 323, 336–39 Faithful, 226, 257–58, 261n13 The Fall of the Roman Empire, 204 Family Plot, 78 Farewell to the King, 8, 276, 278, 303–5, 314n2, 316n25 Far from the Madding Crowd, 8, 317, 318, 332 Father of the Bride, 262, 263, 269–70, 272n2 Father of the Bride II, 263 Fear and Desire, 223, 226 La femme infidèle, 345 “Fifty-Fifty” (unproduced script), 335 52 Pickup, 197, 215 A Fine Mess, 87 Five Easy Pieces, 3 Flight of the Intruder, 278, 306, 314n2 48 HRS., 6, 102, 104, 116, 117–20

418

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Forty Lashes Less One (novel), 208–9, 219–20 The 400 Blows, 16 Four Star Playhouse (television series), 351 Freaky Deaky (novel), 213–14, 219 The Freedom Trap (novel), 130n5 The French and Indian War (educational film), 204 French Kiss, 163, 194n1 “Frenzy” (unproduced script), 77 Frenzy, 53, 77, 78 From Here to Eternity, 350 Frontier Boy (educational film), 204 Frontier Marshal, 191 The Fugitive Pigeon (novel), 373 Full Moon High, 39 Gambit, 9, 344, 345 Geronimo: An American Legend, 104, 278 The Getaway, 104, 107–8, 109, 212 Get Shorty, 7, 196, 197, 216–17, 218, 220 The Glittering Prizes (television series), 326, 333, 334 Glitz (television film), 213 Glut, 277 The Godfather, 29–30, 298 God Told Me To, 6, 37, 39, 57, 59–60, 65, 78 The Golden Bowl, 134, 155 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 127 Goodbye, Charlie, 93 Good Morning Midnight (novel), 144 Grand Canyon, 7, 160, 162, 165, 172, 180, 188–90 The Grapes of Wrath, 175 Grease, 314n2 The Great Escape, 163 The Great Race, 86, 88, 97 Green Dolphin Street, 55 The Grifters, 9, 368, 369, 371, 379–84, 383 “Los Gringos” (unproduced script), 282 “Guilt” (unproduced script), 332–32 Guilty as Sin, 39, 58, 72–73

Gun Crazy, 15 The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 163, 191, 214 Gunn, 87, 101n5 The Guru, 134, 138 The Hallmark Hall of Fame (television series), 44 The Handmaid’s Tale, 379 Hardcore, 278 The Harder They Fall, 53 Hard Times, 6, 102, 104, 107, 111, 113, 114–15, 116 Harper, 33 Harry and Tonto, 222, 224, 226, 227, 229, 233, 234–35, 236–39, 260nn7,8 “H-Bomb Beach Party” (unproduced script), 228 Heart of Darkness (novel), 295–96, 298 Heat, 127 Heat and Dust, 134, 144 Heaven Has No Favorites (novel), 352 Hee-Haw (television series), 54 He Laughed Last, 86 Hell Up in Harlem, 38 Hero, 346, 362 Hickey & Boggs, 104, 107, 110 High and Low, 176 High Noon, 182 High Plains Drifter, 211 High Time, 86 The History of Sir Charles Grandison (novel), 143, 158n2 The Hollywood Palace (television series), 54 Hombre, 195, 197, 199–200, 202, 204–5, 211 Home Fries, 163 The Hot Rock, 9, 367, 368, 374–75 Hot Stuff, 369, 377 The Householder, 6, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138 The House on Carroll Street, 13 The House on 92nd Street, 61 Howards End, 7, 134, 135, 145, 145, 156

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

How to Murder Your Wife, 208 “Hubba Hubba” (unproduced script), 19–20 Hud, 33 Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures, 134, 143–44 The Human Stain, 5, 13, 14, 28, 34–35 The Hunt for Red October, 278, 308 I, the Jury, 39, 58 The Ice Harvest, 14, 33–34 I Deal in Danger, 38 Ikiru, 176 I Love Trouble, 263, 270 I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, 223, 224, 227, 234 I Love You to Death, 160, 162, 166, 182, 186–87 Immediate Family, 162 Inspector Clouseau, 87 The Invaders (television series), 53 Invasion of Privacy, 39 Irreconcilable Differences, 263 It Lives Again, 39 It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman! (play), 25 It’s Alive!, 6, 38, 56, 59, 65 It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive, 39, 65, 67 I Walk the Line, 345 I Wanna Hold Your Hand, 278, 299, 316n23 Jackie Brown, 7, 196, 197, 209, 218–19, 219, 221n2 Jane Austen in Manhattan, 134 Jaws, 277, 292, 298–99 Jefferson in Paris, 134, 151–53, 155 Jeremiah Johnson, 277, 283–85, 286, 314n8 Je suis un assassin, 370 Jezebel, 108 Jimmy the Kid, 369, 370, 376 Joe Kidd, 197, 209–11, 214 Johnny Handsome, 104 Jour de fête, 98 The Jugger (novel), 371–72 Jules and Jim, 243–44

419

Julia, 9, 344–45, 346, 347, 357, 360, 365 Julius Caesar (educational film), 204 Le jumeau, 369, 384 Jumpin’ at the Boneyard, 163 The Killer inside Me (novel), 380 Killshot (novel), 209, 219–20 A Kind of Loving, 324, 325 “King Conan, Crown of Iran” (unproduced script), 316n24 The King’s Whore, 335–36 Kiss of Death, 373 Kitty Foyle, 366n3 The Kraft Television Playhouse (television series), 44, 46, 47 Kramer vs. Kramer, 5, 12, 13, 14, 20, 23, 25 L.A. Story, 165 LA Confidential, 384 Last Man Standing, 105 “Last Resort” (unproduced script), 283 Last Year at Malibu, 224 The Late Show, 5, 13, 14, 21–22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Lawrence of Arabia, 171, 175–76, 194, 292 The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 277, 286–87, 311, 314–15n10 The Limits of Love (novel), 319, 322 Liquid Dreams (documentary), 294, 316n18 Little Caesar, 55 “Little Ladyship” (unproduced script), 321 Lone Wolf McQuade, 278 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 72 The Long Riders, 6, 102, 104, 117 Lord Jim (novel), 295 Lord of the Flies, 303 Love Affair, 224, 226 Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, 345, 358 Love Story, 375 The Mackintosh Man, 104, 109–11, 130n5

420

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Madame Sousatzka, 134, 150–51 Made in U.S.A., 368, 371–72 “Madly in Love” (unproduced script), 361–62 The Magic Christian, 4 The Magnificent Ambersons, 90 The Magnificent Fraud, 251, 261n11 The Magnificent Seven, 50–51, 163, 164, 181, 210 Magnum Force, 277 The Maltese Falcon, 22, 173 Man Hunt, 334 Maniac Cop, 39 Maniac Cop 2, 39 Maniac Cop 3, 39 The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt, 336, 338 Man Trouble, 184 The Man Who Came to Dinner, 67 The Man Who Has Everything, 203 The Man Who Loved Women, 84, 87, 100, 101n7 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 191 Marcello, I’m So Bored (animated short), 277, 281, 283, 314nn3,6 Marty (television film), 44 M*A*S*H, 4 Maurice, 147 Maximum Bob (novel), 220, 221n2 Meet Me in St. Louis, 47, 55 Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man (novel), 322 Men in Black, 220 Micki + Maude, 87 The Middle of the Night (television play), 44 Mildred Pierce, 23 Misbegotten, 39 Mise à Sac, 368, 372 Mister Cory, 83, 86, 101n2 The Monkees (television series), 7, 223, 228, 260n2 Moon over Parador, 226, 246, 251–53 The Moonshine War, 197, 206–8 Moscow on the Hudson, 225, 246, 247–48, 249

Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, 134, 146–47, 154–55 Mr. Bridge (novel), 146 Mr. Holland’s Opus, 335 Mr. Majestyk, 197, 211–12, 214 Mr. Ripley’s Return, 370, 386–87 Mrs. Bridge (novel), 146 Mumford, 163 Murder, Inc., 46 My Darling Clementine, 20, 190, 191, 214 My Sister Eileen, 86 Nadine, 13, 28–29 Naked City (television series), 358, 366n4 Nashville, 26 A New Leaf, 3 Next Stop, Greenwich Village, 223, 225, 229, 239–40 Night Cry (novel), 46 Night Moves, 18 The Night of the Hunter, 86, 89 No Beast So Fierce (novel), 359 Nobody’s Fool, 13, 14, 30–32, 33 “No Pants Mance” (short story), 294 North by Northwest, 43 Nothing but the Best, 318, 323, 324–25, 330, 341–42n4 The Notorious Landlady, 86, 88 Not with My Wife, You Don’t!, 342n9 The Nurses (television series), 40, 50 Nuts, 345, 363 Oh! Calcutta!, 13 The Omen, 241 Once upon a Crime, 263, 270, 273n3 Only Angels Have Wings, 31 On the Waterfront, 44, 375 Operation Mad Ball, 86 Operation Petticoat, 86, 96–97 Ordinary People, 9, 345, 346, 347, 353, 356, 357, 360, 364–65 Ordo, 370 Original Gangstas, 39, 56–57, 64, 72

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Other People’s Money, 345, 353–54, 358 The Other Side of the Wind (uncompleted film), 315n16 The Outfit, 9, 368, 376 Out of Sight, 7, 196, 197, 220, 221n2 Out of the Blue (stage revue), 320 Out of the Past, 173 Panhandle, 83, 86, 89 Panic in Needle Park, 81n2 Paper Moon, 9, 344, 345, 346, 347–48, 352, 353, 356, 358–59, 360 Papillon, 52 The Parent Trap, 263, 269, 273n4 Paris When It Sizzles, 208, 330 The Party, 6, 84, 87, 97–98 Passage of Arms (novel), 379 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, 107, 108 Patton, 310 Payback, 370, 384–85 Peggy Sue Got Married, 298 Pentimento (memoir), 345, 361 The Perfect Furlough, 86 Perfect Strangers, 39 Persona, 310 “Peter Gunn” (unproduced project), 101 Peter Gunn (television series), 84, 88 Petulia, 3 Philco Playhouse (television series), 44 Phone Booth, 6, 38, 40, 77–80, 81 The Pickle, 224, 226, 249, 256–57, 261n12 Pictures of Fidelman (novel), 257 The Pink Panther, 86, 88, 99–100, 101n6 The Pink Panther (prequel), 87 The Pink Panther Strikes Again, 87, 88 Places in the Heart, 5, 13, 14, 21, 26–27, 27 Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 271 Play It as It Lays, 81n2

421

Point Blank, 9, 112, 367, 368, 372–73, 374, 385 Private Benjamin, 8, 262, 263, 270, 271, 272n1 The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, 6, 39, 60–63 The Prophecy, 105 Protocol, 263, 272n1 Psycho, 47 Public Enemy, 55 Puerto Rico (educational film), 204 La putain du roi (aka The King’s Whore), 319 Q, 37, 39, 58, 64 Quartet, 134, 144 Raging Bull, 298 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 7, 160, 161, 166, 167, 168–69, 170 Rainbow {ham}Round My Shoulder, 86 El Raisuni, the Sultan of the Mountains (nonfiction book), 315n15 Red Dawn, 8, 274, 278, 302–3, 314n2 Red Heat, 104 Red River, 130 Red Sonja, 316n24 Le Religieuse, 371 Remains of the Day, 7, 134, 135, 137, 151 Return of the Jedi (aka Star Wars: Episode VI), 7, 160, 162, 170, 172–73 The Return of the Pink Panther, 87, 88 Return of the Seven, 38, 50–51 A Return to Salem’s Lot, 39 Reuben, Reuben, 2 Revenge, 111, 130n6 Revenge of the Pink Panther, 87 The Reversal of Richard Sun (short subject), 277 Richard Diamond, Private Detective (radio series), 89 Richard’s Things, 319, 335 Ride the High Country, 26, 127 The Rifleman (television series), 223

422

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Rio Bravo, 11 Riot in Cell Block 11, 19 Ripley Underground (novel), 386 Robert Montgomery Presents (television series), 44 Ro.Go.Pa.G., 15, 36n1 Rogue Male, 319, 334, 342n15 A Room with a View, 7, 134, 135, 148–49, 156 Rope, 16–17 The Rosary Murders, 197, 216 Roseland, 134, 143 Rosemary’s Baby, 373 Rough Riders (television film), 306–8 Rumble Fish, 298 Rum Punch (novel), 196, 209, 218, 219 Runaway Jury, 35 Rustler’s Rhapsody, 104 Saturday Night Live (television series), 119 Scandalous, 39 Scarface, 127 Scarlet Street, 25 Scenes from a Mall, 226, 256 Schindler’s List, 298 The Score (novel), 372 Scoundrel Time (memoir), 361 Scream, Baby, Scream, 38 The Searchers, 239, 295–96 “The Secret American” (unproduced project), 62 The Settlement of the Mississippi Valley (educational film), 204 The Seven Samurai, 127, 169, 175, 194 The Seventh (novel), 374 The Seven-Ups, 112 A Severed Head, 318, 327, 333, 342n13 Shakespeare Wallah, 134, 139, 141, 155 Shoot the Piano Player, 16 A Shot in the Dark, 86, 101n5 Silverado, 7, 160, 162, 164, 165, 180–82, 193 The Sins of Rachel Cade, 48

Skin Deep, 84, 87, 92, 94–95, 100, 101n4 Slaves of New York, 147 Slayground, 369, 376 S.O.B., 6, 84, 87, 88, 91 Soldier in the Rain, 86 A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, 134, 155 Some Like It Hot, 228 Something’s Gotta Give, 8, 262, 263, 264–67, 264, 268 Something’s Wrong (television film), 336 Son of the Pink Panther, 87, 98 The Son Tay Raid, 278 The Sopranos (television series), 224 The Sound Barrier (aka Breaking the Sound Barrier), 324 Southern Comfort, 6, 102, 104 Special Effects, 39 Spider-Man, 345 Spider-Man 2, 9, 345, 346 Spies Like Us, 39 The Spirit Is Willing, 373 Splash, 271 The Split, 368, 374 Stagecoach, 239 The Stalking Moon, 344, 345 Stampede, 86 Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back, 7, 160, 161, 170 Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi, 7, 160, 162, 170, 172–73 The Stepfather, 9, 369, 377–78, 380 The Stepfather II, 369 The Sterile Cuckoo, 344, 345, 358 Stick, 197, 215 Still of the Night, 13, 25 Straight Time, 345, 359 Straw Dogs, 107 Streets of Fire, 104 The Stuff, 6, 37, 39, 65–66 Sudden Impact, 215 Sullivan’s Travels, 228 Sunset, 87 Superman, 13, 14, 24–25 Superman II, 25

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Supernova, 105, 128 “Super Toys Last All Summer Long” (Aldiss), 343n19 Surviving Picasso, 134, 151–52, 153–54 Suspense (radio series), 46 Swag (novel), 213 Sweet Smell of Success, 78 Switch, 87, 92, 93, 98 Take the Money and Run, 104, 106 Taking Care of Business, 226 Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood, 105 Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, 105 Tales from the Crypt Presents Ritual, 105 The Tall T, 195, 197, 201–2, 205 The Tamarind Seed, 87, 92 Ted Hawkins: Amazing Grace (documentary), 263 Tempest, 225, 245–47, 249 10, 6, 84, 87, 92, 100 “Ten Soldiers” (script), 303 Terminator 2, 365 Texas Rangers, 278, 314n1 That Kind of Woman, 43 That’s Life!, 6, 84–85, 87, 101n7 That Was the Week That Was (television series), 324 There’s Something about Mary, 271 There Was a Crooked Man, 13, 18–19, 20 The Thief Who Came to Dinner, 104 The Thing, 121, 122 This Happy Feeling, 86 The Thomas Crown Affair, 104 The Three Days of the Condor, 52 3:10 to Yuma, 195, 200–201 Il Tiranno di Siracussa (aka The Tyrant of Syracuse), 341n1 Tishomingo Blues, 197 Topaz, 77 Torn Curtain, 77 Touch, 196, 197, 203, 218, 219 Touch of Evil, 90, 101n2

423

Trail of the Pink Panther, 87 Traumnovelle (novel), 317, 337 Treasure of Sierra Madre, 108 Trespass, 104 The Trout (aka La truite), 327, 342n7 “Truck Driver” (unproduced script), 283 True Grit (novel), 285 Tucker, 298 Twilight, 13, 14, 28, 32–33 2 Days in the Valley, 224, 226 Two for the Road, 8, 317, 318, 320, 327, 328, 330–32 Two Much, 370, 384 Two or Three Things I Know about Her, 372 The Tyrant of Syracuse (aka Il Tiranno di Siracussa), 341n1 Uncle Sam, 39 Uncommon Valor, 278 Undisputed, 105, 114 Unfaithful, 9, 345, 346 An Unfinished Woman (memoir), 361 Unknown Man #89 (novel), 210, 220 An Unmarried Woman, 222, 225, 226, 227, 230, 235, 240, 241–43, 243 The Untouchables, 171 U.S. Steel Hour (television series), 48, 49 Used Cars, 278, 299–300, 316n23 The Valdez Horses (aka Chino), 197, 210 Valdez Is Coming, 197, 206 Valley of the Dolls, 53 The Verdict, 213 Vertigo, 19 Victor/Victoria, 6, 84, 87, 88, 92 Viking Women Don’t Care (short subject), 277 Von Ryan’s Express, 53 W. C. Fields and Me, 63 Walk on the Wild Side, 86 War in Val d’Orcia (memoir), 29 The Warriors, 6, 102, 104, 113, 116

424

INDEX OF FILMS, PLAYS, AND BOOKS

Watch on the Rhine, 47 Waterfront (novel), 375 Way Out (television series), 48–49 What about Bob?, 345, 362–63 What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, 86 “What Makes Tommy Run” (script), 329–30, 342n9 What’s New Pussycat?, 334 What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, 370, 385 What’s Up, Doc?, 13, 14, 20, 107 What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, 224 What Women Want, 262, 263, 270 When Harry Met Sally, 335 Where the Sidewalk Ends, 46 The White Cliffs of Dover, 55 White Heat, 127 White Palace, 345, 355–56, 363 Why Me?, 369, 379

The Wicked Stepmother, 39, 66–72, 67 The Wild and the Willing, 326, 342n6 Wild Bill, 104, 120 The Wild Bunch, 4 The Wild Child, 23 Wild Rovers, 6, 84, 87, 91–92, 232 Wild Strawberries, 26 Willie and Phil, 225, 243–45, 247 The Wind and the Lion, 8, 274, 277, 279, 287, 291–92, 311, 315nn14,15 Woman in the Window, 25 Woman of the Year, 4 Wuthering Heights, 108, 130n4 Wyatt Earp, 7, 161, 163, 169, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180, 181, 190–93 Yankee Doodle Dandy, 42 The Year of Living Dangerously, 182 The Young Trout (novel), 327, 342n7

Text: Display:

10/13 Aldus Bell Gothic

Indexer:

Patricia Deminna

Designer:

Jessica Grunwald

Compositor, printer, and binder:

Sheridan Books, Inc.