VOLUME 19 - NUMBER 02 MARCH-APRIL 1983

APRIL 1983/$2.00 COMMENT Sam Spiegel's 'Betrayal': page 51



•SI•SSUe published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center Volume 19, Number 2 March-April 1983 Ghost Writers in the Cinema ... 9 Laurence of Olivier ......... 24 Accepting a screenwriting award The most honored actor in for Tootsie , Larry Gelbart praised British history will receive his co-author, Murray Schisgal , for one more accolade on April being such a joy to work with. The 25. Laurence Olivier will be joke: Gelbart hadn't worked with feted by the Film Society of Schisgal on the script, and may Lincoln Center. David never have met him before that Thomson considers the night. They were two of at least stage and screen careers of eight Tootsie writers; and Tootsie is this most protean and daring just one of the successful new I-M---.I -d-s-e-c-tI.o-n-:-T- -h-e- I -o-fIp-er.f-o-rm-e-r-s.---3 : - : 1 - 1 movies that perpetuates the Old ta lans.... Hollywood traditions of rewriting and ghostwriting. Michael Sra- Some of the names may not be as fa- gow has the inside stories and miliar to filmgoers as those of Anto- some thoughts on the collaborative nioni, De Sica, or Fellini, but they are process In movies. forging a vital new Italian cinema. The Spiegel Catalogue ....... 51 Spotlighted in this Dan Yakir folio: Marco Bellocchio (Leap into the Void) , The African Queen, On the page 35; Marco Ferreri (Tales ofOrdi- Waterfront, Lawrence ofArabia: nary Madness), page 38; Ettore Scola totems of power and quality, (La nuit de varennes, page 41; the Ta- credits of producer Sam viani Brothers (The Night of the Shoot- Spiegel. Harlan Jacobson has ing Stars), page 44; star actors words of canny appraisal for Cardinale, Gassman , Loren, Mas- Spiegel, and warmer senti- troianni, Sandrelli, and Tognazzi , ments for our Betrayal cover girl, page 46; the zany new actor-directors , Patricia Hodge (page 51); page 48; and young Peter Del Monte, and Michael Bygrave page 49. On page 32, Stephen Har- interviews the star of Betrayal, vey offers a critical overview of the Jeremy Irons (page 53). Italians. Also in this issue: Nicolas Roeg's 'Eureka' ...... 20 TV: Wouk's Windy War ...... 74 With a provocative cast and dollops of So 140 million people watched The Journal .................... 2 hot violence and sex, Roeg's new film Winds of War. Stephen Harvey tells Susan Linfield reports from the has sparked debate within the walls of the other 90 million what you missed. Leipzig festival, where the revo- MGM/UA even before its release. lutionary flame still burns strong. The Oscar-Man Weekend..•... 6 Harlan Kennedy talks with this Orbits: Gene Moskowitz...... 77 That's when you and your friends try adventurous British director. Mosk., as he signed his reviews, put guessing who's going to win the Variety on the international map. A Academy Awards: Gandhi or E.T.? George Cukor, 1899-1983..... 58 tribute from his boss, Robert Landry. Newman or Kingsley? Spielberg or The curmudgeonly craftsman of The Attenborough? Our eight experts- Women and Little Women is recalled by Books: Eisenstein ........... 78 David Ansen, Lee Beaupre, Stuart his chronicler, Carlos Clarens. The Soviet director and theoretician Byron, Roger Ebert, Myron Meisel, still provokes controversy. Dennis Dale Pollock, Andrew Sarris, and Industry: Grosses Gloss ...... 62 Jakob's review demonstrates same. Richard Schickel-to help you Our eighth annual appraisal of choose. Hollywood's hits and flops. By Lee Bulletin Board.............. 80 Beaupre and Anne Thompson. Cover photo: 20th Century-Fox. Editor: Richard Corliss. Senior Editor: Harlan Jacobson. Business Manager: Sayre Maxfield . Advertising and Circulation Manager: Tony Impavido. Art Director & Cover Designer: Elliot Schulman. West Coast Editor: Anne Thompson . Research Consultant: Mary Corliss. Executive Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center: Joanne Koch . Second class postage paid at New York and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 1983 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights reserved. The opinibns expressed in FILM COMMENT do not represent Film Society of Lincoln Center policy. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international copy right. The publication of FILM COMMENT (ISSNOOIS-119X) is made possible in part by supOrt from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscription rates in the U.S. : $12 for six numbers , $22 for twelve numbers. Elsewhere: $18 for six numbers , $34 for twelve numbers , payable in U.S. funds only. New subscribers should include their occupations and zip codes. Editorial , subscription, and back-issue correspondence: FILM COMMENT, 140 West Sixty-fifth Street, New York, N.¥. 10023.

Letter From Leipzig Susan Linfield No stars in evening gowns on opening ence can take. A Gennan film srudent from Leipzig night but, under klieg lights from the sitting next to me sighed, \"I think it is TV cameras, the Capitol Theatre was very hard to make a documentary film First held in 1955, the Leipzig Inter- packed with filmmakers, diplomats, where people don't fall asleep.\" national Documentary Film Festival students, townspeople, and Central grew out of political, not aesthetic or Committee members of the country's For years , Leipzig has exhibited commercial, motives. As Festival Presi- ruling Socialist Unity Party. The crowd works from the developing countries, dent Annelie Thorndike bluntly put it, rose in a silent moment of tribute to the which often lack both a native film tradi- due to the Nazi atrocities \"Germany was four Dutch TV journalists killed in EI tion and the technological means to de- a horrible word\" to much of the world. Salvador last March. velop one. This year, Nicaragua's In particular, East Germany (the Ger- Ramiro Lacayo Deshan showed his man Democratic Republic) lacked dip- Leipzig's logo is a Picasso dove over From Eagle to Dragon, a Vietnam War lomatic recognition and was referred to the words \"Films of the World for the montage with a soundtrack ofJanis JoP- by the Western press as \"the so-called Peace of the World.\" Posters here aren't lin, Glenn Miller and Ray Bradbury plastered on walls, but are neatly dis- reading the poetry of Ho Chi Minh. played and mounted behind glass. Ev- More than simply antiwar, the film's 'GDR' .\" erywhere-in shop windows, the Capi- subtext was a fascination with simulta- That first year, Leipzig screened only tol Theatre, and especially the srudent neity: people live in places of unuttera- cafe at the university-were antiwar ble destruction while others carry on ba- 53 films; last November it presented posters. (One is of a baby exclaiming, nally and obliviously in peace. over 350 films from about 50 countries- \"Mr. Reagan, I want to live!\") mostly from the socialist bloc and Third While many of the films at Leipzig- World, but also from Western Europe, A Czech film called New York City, from both East and West-limped the U.S., UNESCO, the PLO, and the 12thlune 1982, opened the festival , fol- along, the Cuban films leaped. The hall- exiled Antifascist Committee of Chile. lowed by other anti-nuclear films from marks of the Cuban style-fast-paced It also honored eleven \"trailblazer\" doc- East and West Gennany, Bulgaria, Swe- editing, creative use of music, stills umentarians from ten countries-in- den, Japan, the U.S. , and Canada. De- montage, humor, and frequent use of cluding Emile de Antonio, Ivor Mon- spite the high prizes won, it takes an inter-titles-were evident in Santiago tagu and JooP Huisken-who helped exceptionally skilled filmmaker to make Alvarez's New Symphony, an affectionate legitimize Leipzig by lending it their a peace march look interesting. There but wry portrait of Mozambique'S new films, names, and presences. are just so many signs, chants, and c1ose- leader Samora Machel. It is constructed ups of babies and marching feet an audi- along the lines of a classical symphony. 2

Nissan/Datsun Presents the 7th Annual FOCUS Awards Enter your best work in the Seventh Annual FOCUS Film Competition. This is the chance of a lifetime to make your break, win your share of over $60,000 in scholarships and Datsun cars and gain recognition in the fi lm community. Enter your best work now* This may be a unique opportunity for you. 1. Filmmaking 6. Film Editing Finished 16mm film . $4,500 awarded in Finished 16mm film . $1,000 scholarship . scholarships. First place winner receives a 1983 SPONSOR TO BE ANNOUNCED . Nissan Sentra . SPONSOR TO BE ANNOUNCED. Board of Judges : William Gordean, Carl Board of Judges : Nina Foch, Taylor Hackford, Kress, Carol Littleton . Randal Kleiser, Steven Lisberger, Ivan Reitman . Institution Awards 2. Documentary The corresponding College or University of Finished 16mm film . $4,500 awarded in the First Place winners in the three Filmmaking scholarships . First place winner receives a categories will receive $500 in 16mm film 1983 Nissan Sentra . SPONSORED BY WARNER product from Eastman Kodak Company for COMMUNICATIONS INC. Board of Judges : their Film Department's use. Ellen Hovde, Charles Lippencott, Humberto Rivera, Amalie Rothschild, Ben Shedd. Premiere and Award Ceremony: 3. Animation/Experimental All winners will be flown, expenses paid, to Los Angeles for the FOCUS Premiere Finished 16mm film . $4,500 awarded in and Award Ceremony to be held at the scholarships . First place winner receives a Directors Guild Theatre. Accommodations 1983 Nissan Sentra . SPONSORED BY will be provided by the Westwood Marquis. COLUMBIA PICTURES . Board of Judges: Jules Bass, Ed Hansen, Faith Hubley, Chuck Competition Deadline: April 18, 1983 Jones, Arthur Rankin, Jr. Get a complete set of rules from your 4. Screenwriting English, Film or Communications Department. Or write to : FOCUS, Box M, 1140 Avenue of Original feature-length screenplays. $4,500 the Americas, New York, New York 10036 awarded in scholarships. First place winner receives a 1983 Nissan Sentra . SPONSORED BY EMBASSY PICTURES. Board of Judges: Marisa Berke, Martin Caan , Syd Field, Anne Kramer, Gail Parent. 5. Sound Achievement Nissa n/Datsu n Presents Finished 16mm film . $1 ,000 scholarship . SPONSORED BY DOLBY LABORATORIES INC. F~CUS Board of Judges: Jim Corbett, Robert Knudson, Frank Warner. Nissan Motor Corporation in U.s.A. \\ ·The entry you submit must have been done on a non-commercial basis by any student enrolled in a U. S. college, university. art institute or professional film school. Board of Governors : Lewi s Allen · John Avildsen • John Badham ~ Ingmar Bergman· Ton y Bill. Jules Dassin • Robert DeNiro • Stanley Donen • Federico Fellln i • Mil os Forman· Bob Fosse · John Frankenhelmer • Robert Getchell . Bruce Gilbert . Ward Kimball. Herbert Kline. Barbara Kopple • Jenn in gs Lang. No·rman .Lea r · Jack Lemmon· Sidney Lumet • Frank Perry. Burt Reynolds . Gene Roddenberry . Herbert Ross. John Schlesinger. George C. Scott · Stirling. Sdllphant • Joan Mlcklln Silver ~ Neil Simon · Steven Spielberg. Francois Truffaut • Saul Turell • Jerry Weintraub· Orson Welles · Bruce Williamson· Robert Wise · Frederick Wiseman · David Wolper. Peter Yates. Charlotte Zwerin



Filminuto is a six-minute cartoon featur- and impassioned indictment of the his- ing such characters as the militaristic torical forces in German society which American \"EI Superjohn\" and the Cu- led it to wage two bloody world wars. ban male \"EI Macho\"; Rolando Diaz' \"Twice German imperialism took the Controversia is a funny but critical por- offensive,\" the film's narrator says. trait of sexual conflict in today's Cuba. \"Wherever we went, blood and tears The Cuban films are generally free of followed.\" both obsequiousness and condescension You and Many a Friend also contains and walked off with the first and second surreptitiously shot footage of the War- prizes, respectively, for Orlando Rojas' saw Ghetto-the first ever seen inside portrait of Harry Belafonte, Sometimes I Germany-where, as the film bluntly Look at My Life, and Luis Bernaza's states, \"German fascist brutes starved study ofan illiterate Cuban dairy farmer, the Jews to death.\" The film has been Pedro Zero Percent. shown in theaters and schools and on Eastern European filmmakers seem television in the GDR, and is scheduled liveliest on the past fight against fascism for theatrical re-release this year, on the and on the Second World War. Veselin 50th anniversary of Hitler's rise to Nikolic compresses, but does not dimin- power. (It was also shown at the Pacific ish, the life, torture and death of a Re- Film Archives in Berkeley a few years sistance fighter into a six-minute mon- ago.) According to Thorndike, the film tage (Yugoslavia); One of a Million- opened up \"a traumatic guilt process\" in Walter BalLhaus is a portrait of an Germany. One West Berlin woman went underground photographer of the Nazis to see it twelve times to be certain that (GDR); and They Continue to Live is a the soldier on screen kicking Jewish present-day tale of the child survivors of children was her son, and then wrote to a Nazi massacre (Czechoslavakia). One Thomdike, \"My son's death is the only of the strongest films of this genre was justice.\" We're Not Giving Up, We Still Shout, a A six-part television series scheduled Soviet film about the children of various to air next year, Busch Sings (GDR) pre- political prisoners and revolutionaries miered at Leipzig and won a Special (including Mao Tse-tung's son) who Gold prize. Produced by a collective of found refuge at Russia's International German filmmakers under the director- School during the Stalin era. ship of the late Konrad Wolf, it is already Unfortunately, the passion, emotion the talk of Berlin and promises to be a and sense of history displayed in such major cultural event in East Germany. films often vanish when the scripts turn Busch (1900-80) was a singer and com- from past to present. Film after film de- poser known as \"the voice of German picted happy workers and noble road workers\" in the Berlin of the Twenties. construction projects. Few analyzed The great political upheavals of his time problems of current socialist societies, -the Spanish Civil War and the rise of except Why Are You Standing Here, a the Nazis-were the material from Hungarian comedy about workers' prob- which he fashioned his art. Busch Sings lems, and the Cuban films. Dejan Ko- is therefore not only a biography of a sanovic, a Yugoslav filmmaker, told me, famous cultural figure but, through him, \"In one way, it's very important to know a chronicle of eighty years of German the past, and the Americans' problem is artistic and political history that incorpo- that they close their eyes to it. But on rates the works of Busch's contempo- the other hand, some socialist countries raries Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eissler. escape into the past in order to avoid Among the episodes: 1935, or Pandora's treating contemporary problems. You Box, a portrait of Berlin's cultural milieu see here a hundred films about the war, in an \"ordinary\" year; In Spain, which but not one film on the Polish problem contains extensive interviews with or on contemporary youth life. The Rus- Spaniards who fought in the Spanish sians have a term for such films: 'the Civil War; and A Dead Man on Leave, polishers'. \" which covers the years of Busch's im- Nonetheless, the past proves over- prisonment and \"condemnation to si- powering for many filmmakers. You and lence\" by the Nazis. Many a Friend (GDR), a 1956 film by Konrad Wolf once said that \"political Annelie and Andrew Thorndike, shown art is not exclusively art with political in retrospective, makes use of extensive \\ content, but a way of dealing with reality Nazi film archives and explores the in every form.\" Busch Sings, his last question ofGerman guilt. An 85-minute investigation into 20th-century German work, is an eloquent illustration of that history, the film is both a sober analysis precept-one which WoWs contempo- raries the world over sometimes forget.~

Oh I'd Love to Be an Oscar Major Winner... \"Gandhi was a great man,\" read the endearingly scrawly In our last issue, eight Los Angeles industry-watchers ad in a January issue of Daily Variety, \"but E .T. is a great movie.\" How many of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts predicted which films and artists would win nominations in and Sciences' members will agree with that plaintive E.T. eight major categories. They did just fine, guessing the right • fan? Not enough, opines our panel of eight critical and finalists except for Charles Durning (up for Supporting industry savants, who scanned the list of Oscar nominations Actor in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) and some of the within a week of its announcement and have predicted the nominations for Tootsie (no surprise considering that few of winners for us. If our experts are right, the Academy, like our panelists had seen the film by then). Now three of the the New York Film Critics Circle last December, will L.A. pickers join five other veterans of the Oscar game to declare itself too noble to fall for the E.T. merchandising give us their best early shots. hype, only to fall for the Gandhi sanctimony hype . \"By ' voting for Gandhi,\" says industry analyst Lee Beaupre, \"an A majority of the panelists give Steven Spielberg the nod Academy member can feel noble. He can also figure he's for Best Director; also Meryl Streep for Actress, Louis helping to add the millions of dollars to the potential gross Gossett, J r., for Supporting Actor, Jessica Lange for that winning Best Film could mean for the picture. \" Supporting Actress, and the googolplex of Tootsie scribes for Original Screenplay. Now it's your turn. You have until April 11. Best Picture Best Original Screenplay Best Actor E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Universal John Briley, Gandhi Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie Ben Kingsley, Gandhi (DA, LB, DP, AS) (RE) Larry Gelbart, Don McGuire, Murray Jack Lemmon, Missing Gandhi, Columbia (DA, LB , SB, MM, DP, Schisgal, Tootsie (DA, LB , SB, MM, Paul Newman, The Verdict (SB, RE, MM, DP, AS) AS) RS) Missing , Universal Barry Levinson, Diner Peter O'Toole, My Favorite Year Tootsie, Columbia (RS) Melissa Matheson, E .T. The Best Actress The Verdict, 20th Century-Fox Extra-Terrestrial (RE, RS) Julie Andrews, VictorlVictoria Douglas Day Stewart, An Officer and a Jessica Lange, Frances Best Foreign Film Sissy Spacek, Missing Alsino and the Condor, Nicaragua (RS) Gentlel1Uln Meryl Streep, Sophie's Choice (ALL 8) Coup de Torchon, France (LB, RE , DP, Debra Winger, An Officer and a AS) Gentlel1Uln The Flight o/the Eagle, Sweden (SB) Best Supporting Actor Private Life, U.S.S. R. Charles Durning, The Best Little Volver a Empezar, Spain (DA, MM) Whorehouse in Texas Best Director Richard Attenborough, Gandhi Louis Gossett, J r., An Officer and a Sidney Lumet, The Verdict Gentlel1Uln (DA, SB, RE, DP, AS, RS) Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot Sydney Pollack, Tootsie (RS) John Lithgow, The World According to Steven Spielberg, E.T. The Garp Extra-Terrestrial (DA, LB , SB, RE , James Mason, The Verdict MM, DP, AS) Robert Preston, VictorlVictoria (LB, Best Cinematography Best Adapted Screenplay MM) Nestor Almendros, Sophie's Choice (RS) Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart, Allen Daviau, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Best Supporting Actress Missing (LB) Glenn Close, The World According to (DA, SB, MM, AS) Blake Edwards, VictorlVictoria Owen Roizman, Tootsie David Mamet, The Verdict (DA, SB, DP) Garp Jost Vacano, Das Boot Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot (AS) Teri Garr, Tootsie Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor, Alan J. Pakula, Sophie's Choice (MM, Jessica Lange, Tootsie (ALL 8) Kim Stanley, Frances Gandhi (LB, RE , DP) RE, RS) Lesley Ann Warren, VictorlVictoria DAVID ANSEN, Newsweek; LEE BEAUPRE, industry analyst; STUART BYRON, Rastar Productions; ROGER EBERT, Chicago Sun-Times; MYRON MEISEL, industry analyst; DALE POLLOCK, Los Angeles Times; ANDREW SARRIS, The Village Voice; RICHARD SCHICKEL, Time. .g., 6

First comprehensive picture-and-reference volume on this major studio RKO was hatched, so the legend goes, at a Manhattan oyster STORY bar in October 1928. The hatchers: tycoons Joe Kennedy and Richard B. David Sarnoff. And here's the giant volume that has the whole Jewell story: all 1,051 pictures from 1929 till the studio distributed its last film in 1960 - PLUS at least one photo from every picture! & It's all here, thanks to mm writer Richard Jewell and Vernon Vernon Harbin. Vernon who? Harbin started at RKO in 1931 , in Fan Harbin Mail. He worked up to executive rank, survived every upheaval, wound up running the Coast office of RKO General till he retired in 1976. \"Without his contributions, \" acknowledges Jewell, \"The RKO Story would be a lesser work indeed. \" Tbe awesome features: everything you expect in the definitive volume, and more • All 1,051 RKO films listed by year: plots, ma- SAVE jor casts and credits S30 • Over 1,100 photos and posters, at least one for every film • GIANT in size: 320 9 1/ 4 x 12 1/ 2 pages (on fine paper) • Studio history, decade by decade and year by year • RKO Oscars and nominations, by year • All RKO pictures produced and / or distributed in England, year by year: major casts, director, brief plot synopsis • Exhaustive title index of some 1,250 RKO films, American and English • Massive index of over 7 ,500 people: per- formers, directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, technicians, choreog- raphers, composers, designers, etc. • EXTRA - and unusual! Endpapers reproduce 26 autographs of key people (mostly actors) in the RKO saga ~,,~ How to get this massive $35 volume for ONLY $4.95 ~A~ .-----------------------------------------------------~ ONE OF THE SMALLER OF THE 1,051 ENTRIES Writer Dalton Trumbo and director John Far- 15 OAKLAND AVENUE' HARRISON , N.Y. 10528 row worked hard on the remake of A Bill Of Divorcement (1932) but to no avail. The I enclose $4 .95 . Please send me the $35 RKO Story, be offered a new Club Selection piU SAlternates every Clemence Dane play had somewhat yellowed postpaid and at no additional charge . AI the same 4 weeks (13 times a year) in the Club bulleti n, with age, and audiences evinced little interest in time please accept my membership in the Movie/ En· PREVI EWS. If I want the Selection , I will do noth ing its melodramatic rendering of Victorian taboos tertainment Book Cl ub. I agree to buy 4 books over and it will come automatica lly. If I want an Alternate about mental disease. Maureen O'Hara Oeft), the next 2 years at regular Club prices plus shipping or no book at all , I'll notify you by the deadline date playing the part that launched Katharine Hep- and handling. I may resign after buying and paying speci fied. If I shou ld ever receive a Selection without burn's career, and Adolphe Menjou (right) in for 4 books at reg ular Cl ub prices . I wi ll be offe red having had 10 days to decide if I wa nt it, I may return John Barrymore's role as the unbalanced some 200 books on movies and entertainme nt , the it at Club expense and receive fu ll credit. PREVIEWS father, were inevitably and unfavourably com- majority at 20·33 % discou nts plus shipping and han· also includes news about my fell ow mem bers and pared to their predecessors. Despite Trumbo's\\ dling. For every book I buy at the reg ular Club price , their hobbies . I am welcome to se nd in simi lar items lucid script, Farrow's delicate direction and an I receive one or more FREE Bonu s Book Certificates about myself and my interests . PREVIEWS will excellent support troupe that included Fay wh ich entitle me to buy many books at far below publish every such item it deems suitable, FREE . Bainter, Herbert Marshall, Dame May Whitty, regular Club price , usually at 60·80% discounts . I'll Patric Knowles, C. Aubrey Smith, Ernest FC-22 Cossart, Kathryn Collier and Lauri Beatty, the NAME Robert Sisk production flopped ($104,000 loss). ADDRES S C IT Y STATE ZIP ---------------------------~--------------------------

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by Michael Sragow Unraveling the Enigma ofMovie Authorship Among creative people in Los FI NAL DRAFT.. liJm Angeles there exists a long-term malady that's almost as common as smog infec- t t: COMMENT tion. Call it Screenwriters' Complaint- a condition of anguish and exhaustion \"GALLING DIANA DARLING\" brought on by not getting credit for work done, or getting credit for work not \"~',Ott Id I L, E te'10 (j ~ done, or getting credit for work altered beyond recognition. Most screenwriters ..:: prefer to suffer in silence, but hardly a season passes in Hollywood when skir- lywood way of life. In the Thirties, the anti-Communist blacklist (1949-60), mishes do not arise over the authorship Selznick kept young writers like Budd hundreds of writers worked pseudony- of the biggest movies. \"Did you hear Sch\\llberg and Ring Lardner, Jr. on mously or through \"fronts.\" Dalton who reaLLy wrote Tootsie?\" (Fill in any hand to do odd jobs like the endings of Trumbo, who wrote Gun Crazy uncredi- combination of Don McGuire, Larry Nothing Sacred (1937) and A Star is Born ted and later broke the blacklist when Gelbart, Murray Schisgal, Elaine May, (1937). After he became a writer-direc- Otto Preminger put his name on the Robert Kaufman, Barry Levinson & Va- tor, John Huston rarely put his name on Exodus script, won an Oscar for his script lerie Curtin, and Robert Garland.) \"I scripts he co-wrote when they were di- of The Brave One, under the pseudonym know the guy who wrote all of Eddie rected by others (Robert Siodmak's The \"Robert Rich.\" Murphy's gag-lines in 48 HRS. in one Killers and Orson Welles's The Stranger, weekend.\" (The rumored whiz-kid, both 1946); and one of Huston's most Today's screenwriters have a guild Stephen E. de Souza, scotched that popular films, The African Queen, co- that was formed partly as a watchdog for whopper.) written with his friend James Agee, was screen credits. Nunnally Johnson, polished without credit by John Collier screenwriter of The Grapes ofWrath and Confusion of authorship is rooted in and Peter Viertel. During the period of Roxie Hart, said once that the man who Hollywood history. Rarely ever did big catalyzed the Guild was a producer studio movies spring from a single pen, which is one reason Dream Factory scribblers became well-known only if they got headstarts elsewhere. From gangster dramas to Late Show weepies, movies got written and re-written, with multiple credits and many anonymous assists. Some random examples: Angels With Dirty Faces was written by John Wexley and Warren Duff from a story by Rowland Brown. CamiLLe was adapted by Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, and James Hilton from the Dumas play. Ca- sablanca had a screenplay history almost as complicated as Tootsie's: Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein took the first swipe at the Murray Burnett-Joan Alison play, Everybody Comes to Rick's; Howard Koch then brought it close to final form; and Casey Robinson and Lenore Coffee helped director Michael Curtiz slap it to life. On Gone With the Wind, producer David O. Selznick hired at least ten writers to work on the script, including Ben Hecht, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jo ' Swerling, Edwin Justus Mayer, John Balderston, and Oliver Garrett, though sole credit went to Sidney Howard. Ghostwriting has always been a Hol- 9

Credits controversies often transcend greed, ego, or moral outrage and pierce to the essential mystery ofmovie authorship. Writers-and directors-often have no idea how their specific contributions influence a finished movie. named Barney Glazer: \"Oddly enough, The Deerhunter. recurring trouble spots in arbitration: no matter what the picture was, Barney's §Too Many Crooks. When a movie name was on it as one of the writers. authorship. Writers-and directors-of- Well, this happened so often, not just ten have no idea how their specific con- like Tootsie passes from hand to hand with me, for God's sake, but a dozen tributions influence a finished movie. In over the course of several years, the arbi- others, that his victims met to see how an adaptation, just knowing what huge tration can turn into a chaotic free-for- they could stop him from taking credit, chunks should come out of a novel can all , worthy of fingerprint checks and lie- and the result was the Screen Writers be an enormous help; in an original detector tests. The credit for \"additional Guild. \" (The current screenwriters' script, one idea can anchor an entire pro- dialogue\" no longer exists-leaving guild is the Writers Guild of America.) duction. One of the many screenwriters many writers out in the cold. on The Deer Hunter, it's said, merely Because producers like Glazer as- suggested that the Viet Cong and the §Last In, First Out.When a movie signed contract writers to projects in suc- American soldiers play Russian Rou- like The Pursuit of D.B . Cooper goes cessive teams, and then often usurped lette. Yet those sequences so dominated through a convoluted production involv- their credits anyway, the Writers Guild the movie that they justify the writer's ing extensive re-cutting, re-shooting standardized the procedure for deter- sharing credit. and re-thinking, the people who saved mining writers' credits. Producers who the movie often can' t get credit because work with Guild writers must submit a • arbitrators may refuse to use actual \"notice of tentative credits\" to the Guild filmed material as evidence. They usu- and to all writers who toiled on the Because screenwriters have usually ally rely on scripts alone, and thus don't movie. Writers may then agree with the received such niggardly praise for their see the spontaneous work the writer producers, or decide among themselves work, sympathetic journalists often as- may contribute on the set. The rewriter how to split the credit, or telegram the sume that if a writer doesn't get credit may not have enough \"written material\" Guild and the producers within 24 hours it's because of a producer's enmity or a to back up his claim. to request a reading of the final script; studio's spite. But most credit mishaps they may further reserve the right to occur simply because of the basic collab- §Hyphenation. When a writer-direc- protest within five days. If they do, the orative confusion at the center of movie tor like Walter Hill co-writes a movie Guild sets up an arbitration committee: art. And the writers who usually get like 48 HRS. (1982), he must prove that, two screenwriters who've judged at least mentioned in the press, whether or not if working alone, he contributed over two previous cases, one other Guild they get screen credit-virtuosos like half of the final script, or, if working as member, and a \"credit consultant\" from Robert Towne, Bo Goldman , and part of a team (as he did here, with Larry the standing Credits Committee. Pro- Elaine May-often don't want credit for Gross), over sixty per cent! (The same testors have the power to blackball a rewrite work, preferring to put their rules apply to writer-producers.) Guild reasonable number of persons from the names only on scripts they've written rules make it easier to dilute writing arbitration committee to which the first to last. credits on \"hyphenates' \" movies. The writers submit all versions of the script Guild's credit manual states outright they worked on (kept anonymous on Most writers who criticize specific ar- that \"any other writer who works on the request), along with an explanatory bitrations admit that, for all its imperfec- script [of a hyphenate's movie] may be statement. In most cases, writers must tions, the system would be hard to im- granted credit for any substantial contri- prove only that their work constituted prove. But all agree that there are three bution without necessarily meeting the one-third of the finished script. usually required 33%.\" Though these rules protected writers in the days of Since the arbitration is speedy and rapacious production executives and a doesn't involve any legal fees or finan- few genuine hyphenates (like Preston cial penalties, the writer who appeals has Sturges or Billy Wilder), many writers little to lose in time or money and much today believe that these rules embody to gain in prestige. Salaries rise accord- an outmoded institutional bias. ing to credits on successful movies; there are also small fortunes to be made These instances don't just indicate in residual fees when these movies play the industry's own imprecision over who TV. Fully a fifth of all Hollywood theat- does what in movies; they also reflect rical movies wind up in a Writers Guild the torturous routes movies take to the arbitration . screen in the Eighties, and the enig- matic relationships that have always ex- But credits controversies often tran- isted among producers, directors, actors, scend greed, ego, or moral outrage and and writers. To understand the pierce to the essential mystery of movie screenwriting process, it's necessary to realize that it's less like commanding an 10

army than it is like enlisting in the Hun- May performed similarly crucial chores Mermaid, for Ray Stark, to star Beatty, but he isn' t sure whether he'll want his dred Years' War. on Tootsie, thinks he understands her name on it until he's confident his work will be carried through : \"We talked reasoning: \"Elaine knows that a lot of about thi s up-front: I told Ray he could buy my work, but he couldn' t buy my Ghostwriters and Poltergeists re-writing is about egos-changing name.\" After Greystoke, Towne's dream Tarzan movie, passed out of his hands commas and getting credit in the arbitra- under murky circumstances during the shooting ofPersonal Best, he decided he When British playwright Trevor Grif- tion. And that clouds your judgment. couldn't bear to leave his signature; the screenplay now carries the names \"P.H . fiths and producer-director-writer-star It's really rare, unless a person is your Vazak\" and Michael Austin. (Austin , a real person , most recently wrote Fred Warren Beatty discussed the writing friend , for someone to take a script when Zinnemann's disastrous Five Days One Summer. ) credit for the Oscar-nominated script of you need help and say, 'That's beauti- In the old studio days, authors' credits Beatty's Reds, \"it was finally agreed,\" ful, that shouldn't be changed.' Usually weren' t such a big deal, either artisti- cally or professionally. Hollywood Griffiths told Mick Eaton of Screen they say, 'It's very good, except. . . ' It screenwriters knew they were cogs in the dream factory. And they were a Magazine, \"after a lot of discussion, that goes by percentages-screenwriters tight-knit group: in Pauline Kael's words, they \"collaborated promiscu- we would share a screenplay credit. My have to contribute over 30 percent to get ously.\" Nearly everyone was a ghost- writer, or even, like the fabled Bob express desire was that everybody who credit. By not putting her name on her Hopkins, a poltergeist writer: one who drops little explosions and moves on. had written anything should receive a work, Elaine May removes all of that Hopkins is said to have inspired the movie San Francisco by proclaiming, credit. I thought it would be very bold pressure in one stroke. From that mo- \"Earthquake-San Francisco-Gable and MacDonald-can't you see it?- and innovative to demystify something ment on, whatever she does only has to Clark's on one side of the street, Jeanette's on the other-goddam street of text creation, to recognise what is the do with craft. 'Let's fix this script. I splits right between them-it's gotta be but terrific!\" case in every Hollywood movie. Well, won' t get credit if I write more, I won't Towne's fierce guarding of his and his that was elbowed out, presumably be- get less credit if I write less. ' She gets friends' personal projects testifies to the sense of individual film authorship that cause it would have made it look like the paid very wel\\. And she only does what has, with minor setbacks, been increas- ing for the last two decades. \"Whenever film had been created by a committee, she wants to do.\" I help out Warren,\" he says, \"whether it's on Reds or Heaven Can Wait , I only but all film scripts are produced by com- May has such a wild and identifiable feel I'm helping him get his own vision on the screen. I wouldn't think of taking mittee.\" comic style that she occasionally earns writing credit for friendly suggestions. Did Tiffany sign every lamp, or Faberge If a movie's writers agree on how the the ire of writers who do go for the every egg?\" screenplay credit should read, regardless credit. They feel that she gets more Writers of Towne's and May's stature have reason to be wary over where their of who contributed what, they can by- praise than anyone else because critics names appear: producers can use these writer's personal reputations to add pres- pass the close scrutiny of the Guild. Of- alerted to her presence assume that any- tige to their projects and satisfy their stars whether or not they choose to re- ten, in these cases, substantial work thing good in a script is hers. In fact, main faithful to the writers' work. Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's goes uncredited. The two writers usu- May is less of a conventional comedy- Nest, Melvin and Howard, Shoot the Moon) believes that most shared credits ally mentioned for uncredited work on writer than a comic poet. In her play aren't worth the psychological tension and anguish: \"The arbitrations can be Reds are Beatty's long-time friends and Adaptation, a mother explains race rela- very damaging to artists, very damaging in a personal sense. After all, what do associates, Robert Towne (who wrote tions to a child: \"Phil, do you know how you prove? It should be like music. If you write a song and it works, who Shampoo, 1975) and Elaine May (who when you see a flower sometimes there's knows who did what?\" shared credit with Buck Henry writing a white flower and sometimes there's a Beatty's Heaven Can Wait, 1978). Actu- dark flower and they both grow in the ally, Towne says he didn't have much to same garden and receive equal portions do with the film: \"I may have cleared up of sun and rain? And bees go to both of some structural problems, but I have them because bees like dark flowers as only one line in the entire movie. War- much as they like white? That's why, ren and I were discussing what John when we say the word Negro, we must Reed would say at the train station when think of it as something very, very beau- he saw Louise [Diane Keaton] for the tiful that God gave to white people to first time in many months-after he's enjoy.\" May contributed several of already endured all these soul-depleting these out-of-the-blue jokes to Tootsie, experien<;:es with the Soviet bureau- including one about an actor's struggle to cracy. I told Warren I would say, 'Don't preserve the integrity of his role as a leave me.' \" tomato that gets the biggest laugh in the That is a significant and affecting movie. But these inspirations wouldn't emotional climax, but Towne says that work unless they were surrounded by the lioness' share of the additional writ- other writers' very good jokes and set in ing belongs to Elaine May: \"She wrote a dazzling symmetrical structure built the scenes between Jack,Nicholson [as (according to Pollack) by Larry Gelbart. Eugene O'Neill] and Louise Bryant; I Robert Towne, the most famous of all honestly think she wrote most of that Hollywood ghostwriters, has often movie.\" The O'Neill character-pro- asked to have his name removed from viding conservative counter-balance to movies even when he's written consid- Reed's and Bryant's romantic liberal ad- erably more than one line. Best known venturism-and Nicholson's perform- early on for his work on Bonnie and Clyde ance were hailed as two of the film's \\ (1967) and for performing \"spot sur- finest achievements even by those who gery\" on The Godfather (1972), Towne is didn't like Reds. Why, then, would any as hard-headed about his script-doctor- writer not want credit for it? ing as he is passionately protective of his Director Sydney Pollack, for whom own original screenplays. He just wrote 11

Sometimes a writer is happyjust to take the money and run. \"In a one-shot deal, my agent will use my not getting any credit as a financial bargaining point. \" Gaining the right credits, though, can Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS. credit; I kidded Ted about how help a writer's reputation and career. bummed out 1was that I'd have to share David Giler (The Parallax View, Southern Says Kerby: \"Often you're asked to credit with so many people. The pro- Comfort) might have more of a following write a killer scene to interest a star or ducers put Scott Spencer, Kotcheff, and if, in the early Seventies, he had been sell a project to the studio. You know it's me up for screenwriting credit, but the credited on that amiable comic Western a one-shot dea!. Under those circum- arbitration board ruled against me and The Skin Game, to which he added some stances, my agent will use the fact that Kotcheff.\" The final credit reads: brilliant Lenny Bruce-like jokes, in- I'm not going to get any credit as a finan- Screenplay by Scott Spencer, Robert stead of on Myra Breckinridge, for which cial bargaining point. \" Kaufman and Robert Mark Kamen; he wrote a clever adaptation of the Gore story by Scott Spencer. Vidal novel (according to all who read it) When you're a young screenwriter only to have director Michael Same gut hungry for your first credit, the airy atti- Asked what he learned from this ex- and sack it. Giler's own favorite credit tude expressed by Kerby is an impossi- perience, Gross says, \"I came away from scam came on the tough-guy satire The ble luxury. Before winning credit for col- the movie more convinced of the auteur Black Bird, which he also directed. laborating with Walter Hill on the final theory than ever. A director is the true Dozens of writers before Giler had 48 HRS. rewrite, Larry Gross, now 28, author of a film. Split Image is a very striven to come up with a workable Mal- worked with director Ted Kotcheff on quirky, bizarre movie-I think it's more tese Falcon remake but it was Giler who Split Image, last year's movie about reli- successful the more phantasmagorical it thought of making the movie a comedy. gious cults, only to receive credit as a gets-and Ted always had faith in his Two other guys got story credit. \"production consultant.\" Gross became ability to pick and choose among the involved with the movie when Kotcheff elements and make the film he wanted If screenwriters sustain careers long optioned a script of his and then asked to make. Whenever you see a good or enough, credits tend to even out. Gar- him to work instead on Split Image (then even a fairly good film, I think you're ner Simmons' new biography of Sam called Captured). Gross ended up being really seeing two films . The actual film, Peckinpah reveals that William Roberts hired and fired three times. and a kind of a shadow film-the really (The Magnificent Seven) had recom- horrible, mechanical film that the direc- mended N.B. Stone, Jr. to write the \"Kotcheffwould want me,\" Gross re- tor is being pressured to make by all the script for Ride the High Country; when calls. ''Then Polygram Pictures would highly cultivated and educated busi- Stone's script proved unusable, Roberts make an issue ofgetting rid of me. Then nessmen surrounding him. I saw Ted atoned by rewriting it anonymously, but whoever they'd bring in wouldn't give expend all his intellectual and physical Stone got the only writer's credit. A dec- Kotcheff quite what he wanted, and energy fighting the tendency to make ade later, Roberts received sole credit he'd say, 'I want Gross back.' The last the simple movie that any 'pro' could for writing Lamont Johnson's The Last time I was hired was two weeks before fix, and instead hang on to this precar- American Hero, though it was widely- the end of shooting. I found that all the ious balancing act. Ted would have known that Bill Kerby had written some key scenes in the movie's last third, made this into a watchable movie any- crucial scenes. At the time, Kerby where the kid gets deprogrammed- how. I just helped with the spadework.\" groused, but now he's mellowed. \"I was crucial stumbling-blocks in the plot- young and paranoid then,\" he says; \"the hadn't been figured out. These, and Which brings us back to Tootsie, only credit I could have eamed was 'Ad- other scenes, 1totally rewrote or revised. which might have been composed un- ditional Dialogue.' \" 1 was convinced I'd get a screenwriting der the slogan, \"All hands to the shove!.\" Kerby is so grateful over winning credit for The Rose (in arbitration, he 'Tootsie' received first position credit on the script and sole story credit; co-writer Bo Although the easiest way to clear up Goldman stood up for him) that he's the credits controversy would be to list become a cheerleader for Writers Guild every writer who ever worked on a given arbitration. He's also become a screen- movie, the Guild tries to cut the number writer without illusions: \"I was one of down both to bolster the dignity of the the many writers on 48 HRS. , but when I writing credit and to enhance the final read the final script I saw there was noth- rewards of the writers who do the most ing of mine in it. Frankly, I was ap- work. How tricky can this procedure be? palled, but when you have Walter Hill Just look at the curious script-to-screen doing that stuff, well, that's about as history of one of 1983's first big hits, good as you'll get.\" Sometimes a writer Tootsie. At various times it boasted five is happy just to take the money and run. production executives and an all-star 12

team of screenwriters. America's Moviest deo Catalog It started back in 1975, when veteran Just Got Movier. screenwriter Don McGuire, who had worked on three early Jerry Lewis Brand new 1983 edition! movies and adapted the Fifties Western Bad Day at Black Rock, showed agent- • 1000's & 1000's of titles on VHS, BETA, VideoDisc-Nobody producer Martin Baum a 30-page treat- has more! ment titled \"Calling Diana Darling.\" Asked now what the treatment con- • Order with confidence from one of America's largest, most tained, the crusty McGuire simply reads dependable home video services. Tootsie's ad: \"In the next seventy-two hours this desperate, unemployed actor It's bursting at the seams with pure video entertainment. From early will secretly audition for the female lead silent films to the latest releases ... the classics (and not-so- of a soap opera. And become America's classics) ... concerts ... cartoons ... famous tv shows ... foreign hottest new actress.\" films ... sports ... hard-to-find titles ... the list goes on an~ on. You'll also find complete listings for video games, acceSSOries, blank Hoping to co-produce it with tapes and more! Imagine-154 pages jam-packed with a complete McGuire, Baum commissioned him to description of every title, trivia, delightful photos and write a first draft (138 pages) called illustrations ... and access to the entire exciting Would I Lie To You? They offered it to world of home video. So stop searching. \"Peter Sellers and Michael Caine, a lot And start finding. Order yours today! of guys,\" says McGuire, but \"couldn' t quite get it together.\" Cine-Artists In- (Enjoy Adult Video? Enclose an additional ternational, a group of theater owners $2 for our huge Adult Video Catalog!) turned movie producers, paid McGuire Writers Guild scale for the script plus a o Enclosed is $5 (cash. chock or money ardor). 6736 Castor Ave. • , PA 19149 \"gross position\" on the ownership. They wanted to star George Hamilton Sond me your now Video Catalog, plus periodic and Buddy Hackett, but \"Everything updates of new releases and sale items. went kaplooey.\" McGuire and Baum went on to other projects. o Enclosed is $2 additional. Please include your Over the next two years, McGuire AduH Video Catalog. I am over 18 years old. would get calls from \"a half dozen hus- tlers\" about the project, and he'd refer 215-722-8298 them to Cine-Artists' Henry Plitt. Then, in 1978, a lawyer for Charles Name ____--------__----------------__--~--------------~F~e Evans, brother to Robert Evans and head of Evan-Picone clothing, called Address _______________________________________~____~_ McGuire to set up a deal. Eighteen months later, McGuire was at his home City ____________________________~___ State _ _ Zip ___- - - - - in the Berkshires when a friend called to read him a notice in Variety: Dustin Hof- Phone ______________________ o © 1983 Movies Unlimited, Inc. fman would star in Tootsie with Dick Richards directing and Charles Evans producing. \"You never know when it's gonna happen,\" says McGuire. \"When an idea is a good idea it lives. I've got a roomful of shit that's still dead.\" McGuire's script was about an out-of- work actor \"living in the back seat of a Dodge Dart,\" and a \"shitty little agent\" whose acts included \"Mary Tyler Mor- gan-a stripper,\" and a seal that spoke Yiddish. The actor tells his agent that he's so hungry he's \"eating wood,\" and the agent responds by getting him a job in the drag line of San Francisco's fa- mous Finocchio's. The actor protests: \"I'm not a faggot!\" But the agent pre- vails: \"Go up there, make $110 a week, send me $11.\" One night he's Joan 1 Crawford, one night Ann Dvorak, one night Joan Blondell. When the agent finds out that ABC is looking for some- one to play \"a 40-year-old butch nurse\" 13

In the days before the Writers Guild established the \"one-third\" guideline, Tootsie's other writers might have gotten 3rd, 4th, and 5th billing on the screenplay, or at least an \"Additional Dialogue\" credit. 10 a TV soap opera called \"Mental Tootsie. That scene where the actor won't move Ward, \" he says, \"I've got him, er, her!\" to the center of the stage because his When the agent goes to tell him the with the project (\"I just loved the character, Tolstoy, is dying? That's the good news, the actor, dressed in Joan script\"), interested an important friend: way Dusty was. \" Crawford drag, is appalled: \"How dare Dustin Hoffman. you come to me with this offer? For this I Despite the contributions of Schisgal studied at the Royal Academy?\" But the Because Hoffman has had substantial (who would continue to work with Hoff- agent challenges the actor's professional control over his projects for the past dec- man up to and during shooting), the ego, and the actor becomes a hit in spite ade, the script went through another sea project remained at an impasse. Ri- of himself. Soon the agent is driving \"a change once he entered the picture. He chards left for an adaptation of Erich twelve-door Mercedes\" while his star brought in his best friend, playwright Segal's Man, Woman and Child (forth- sits beside him out of drag, unnoticed. Murray Schisgal (Luv) , to do a rewrite. coming this year). For a brief time Hal Sydney Pollack says the Schisgal rewrite Ashby was to be Tootsie's director, but Don McGuire is right: From \"Calling was too outrageous; others thought it too Ashby was still embroiled in editing two Diana Darling\" to the final version of serious. What everyone agrees on, in- other features. Then agent Michael Tootsie, the basic story hasn' t changed. cluding Schisgal, is that he fashioned his Ovitz and Columbia Pictures, for whom But between 1978 and 1982, this movie work around Hoffman's own personal Hoffman had done Kramer vs. Kramer, about an actor and an agent became and professional life. \"Dustin had just put him together with Sydney Pollack, a about as fully populated a comedy as any done Kramer vs. Kramer,\" he says, director who'd been one of the studio's since the time of Preston Sturges, and it \"which was partly about a man taking on most consistent moneymakers with The grew to have almost as many screen- the maternal aspects of a woman's life. Way We Were and The Electric Horseman. writers as major characters. In 1978, We were working on ideas that would Charles Evans hired Robert Kaufman take Dustin even further into under- Pollack wanted to work with Hof- (Getting Straight, Love at First Bite) to do standing the changes of consciousness fman, but only if they could straighten a rewrite, with George Hamilton as the that have occurred between men and out the script to everyone's satisfaction. prospective star. Soon after, Evans hired women. We even toyed with the idea of Pollack says that the structure of Tootsie director Dick Richards, who made the him playing a transsexual ~ennis player, was hammered out over a two-week trial cult comedy favorite Rafferty and the like Renee Richards. So when the Toot- work period by himself, Hoffman, and Gold Dust Twins. Richards and Kaufman sie script crossed our path, it meshed the new screenwriter, Larry Gelbart, worked on toning down the desperation with what we were trying to do. \" one of the industry's most reliable com- of McGuire's character and on deVelop- edy writers (Movie Movie, Broadway's A ing the romance between the actor and The setting soon changed from the Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the his female co-star on the soap opera. West Coast to the New York theater Forum, TV's M*A*S*H). Although Pol- (\"At one point,\" remembers Richards, scene, and the lead character became lack said he drew on material from the \"we even had them living together.\") extraordinarily close to Hoffman's own other scripts-\"there might be a line of Kaufman also worked to update the sex- persona as the driven, perfectionist actor Bob Kaufman's here, a line of Murray ual relationships in McGuire's 1975 perpetually clashing with his collabora- Schisgal's there\"-he summed up his script. Call Kaufman a Zeitgeist writer. tors. \"I've known Dusty for twenty view of the movie's authorship by say- years,\" says Schisgal, \"since he was an ing: \"There would be no Tootsie without Kaufman says that he dropped out actor Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway. Larry Gelbart and Elaine May.\" after completing his rewrite because he disagreed with Robert Evans-who'd Says Pollack: \"Larry, Dustin and I taken an interest in his brother Charles's literally wrote out the structure on one- project-on the direction that further line notes. It still wasn't the movie, but rewrites would take. \"Bobby kept say- it was the basic structure of the movie. ing what was important was the love Then Larry did two drafts. Then, over story, and he meant Love Story. It be- Christmas '81, while Larry was vacation- came some strange thing about two ing in Vail, he and I worked over the crazy kids from the Midwest falling in next draft. That was the script we bud- love and learning about life through geted and scheduled and started to pre- death, struggle, hospitals, the whole pare in earnest. Elaine fleshed that thing.\" Richards wouldn't comment on script out with one major, major differ- any meetings that might have taken ence: before she came on there was no place with Robert Evans. In any event, roommate\"-the flakey playwright Kaufman and Hamilton bowed out, and played by Bill Murray. soon afterward, Richards, who stuck \"Later,\" Pollack continues, \"there was a guy who didn't do a lot of writing 14

\"Ifyou couldn't get what you wantedfrom the first screenwriter you went to the second one, got a little bit more, incorporated what you wanted, left out what you didn't.\" It's this attitude that earns Pollack the appellation \"writer-fucker. \" but was an enormous help to me. That in so doing become a better man-that sounds good , but how do you dramatize was Bob Garland, author of The Electric that? Now sometimes we just put that stuff in: lines like 'Why are you all of a Horseman. He would sit in a room with sudden starting to care about other peo- ple?' Then I found a line that went: 'I me and help me make sense of all this found the character, I just have to learn to do it without the dress.' We kept the material. Some scenes just wouldn't sta- second part, but 'I found the character' led me to go to Dustin and say, 'Some- ple together, they needed glue, and where near the beginning we've got to hear you say, Don' t play a part that's not we'd do line-work, piecemeal. The in you! And then, near the end, if Julie's saying, 'I miss Dorothy, ' and you say Writers Guild would probably roll over 'Dorothy's right here,' then it will make unconscious sense to the non-actors in to hear this. It's not the best way to write the audience.\" a script. It's an emergency, bail-out way. If we judge Pollack as an auteur, how does this work of many collaborators fit This was three weeks before shooting, into his oeuvre? Surprisingly snugly. Starting with his second feature, This desperation time. Then Barry Levinson Property is Condemned in 1966, and con- tinuing with They Shoot Horses, Don't and Valerie Curtin came on one week They? and The Way We Were, Pollack's movies have often focused on off-center into shooting, to help smooth it out. friendships and romances featuring strong women. Says the director: They didn't do much writing. By that \"There's usually something hostile con- nected with eroticism, among all spe- time the film was already on a railroad cies. You see horses biting; you don't see best friendship a lot in romantic love. track. They did help remove a stum- Sydney Pollack. I'm always impressed when someone bling block in the plot: how Dustin says, 'My wife is my best friend.' So in Tootsie we have a man and a woman start would get into bed with Teri Garr. and for testing Hoffman's ideas on his out as best friends under the belief that they're of the same sex, and then find Levinson and Curtin had Teri emerge makeup and the script.) out they're a man and a woman.\" from her shower while Hoffman's un- In Tootsie, all scripts led to Pollack, Most of all, Pollack gave the film a unifying sensibility. \"People were al- dressing because he wants 'Dorothy' to who pieced together the characters, gag ways telling me, 'You don't want to make an outrageous comedy; you want try on Teri's clothes.\" lines, and bits. Pollack is philosophical to make a gentle love story.' And they were right. I wish I could say that was Throughout shooting, the actors con- about the difficulty of a director who coming out of some great artistic in- stinct. But in fact it was coming from tributed inventions that, if written be- doesn't write his own material gaining self-defense. I am not afarceur. I know better than to go into an arena where I forehand, would have been considered auteurship. He's quick to point out the don't know the rules. Some self-protec- tive instinct told me, 'Stay rooted in a integral parts of the script. Bill Murray number of choices any workmanlike di- literal reality.' So when it got too ex- treme, I would say, 'I don't believe rewrote most of his own lines. Many of rector must make. \"Every director who's that.' What I meant was, 'I don't have the equipment to direct that.' Blake the other actors used their improvisa- successful gets offered five hundred Edwards could do that. Billy Wilder tional backgrounds to beef up their roles scripts. So you make a choice. And you -none more so than Hoffman. keep making choices from the moment Given the smorgasbord of assembled you pick a project. Even when there are talent, the miracle is that the Writers ten names on a script, the reason is that Guild came up with a workable credit at you couldn't get what you wanted from all. Even so, Pollack, who thinks the the first screenwriter so you went to the arbitration was pretty fair (Elaine May, second one, got a little bit more, incor- remember, didn't want credit), figures porated what you wanted, left out what that Larry Gelbart got a co-story credit you didn' t.\" It's this attitude that earns with Don McGuire as compensation for Pollack, in William Goldman's Adven- having to share the screenplay credit tures in the Screen Trade, the appellation with Murray Schisgal. In the days before \"writer-fucker.\" the Writer's Guild established the \"one- If he had been handed a perfect third\" guideline for determining author- script, Pollack's major contributions to ship, Tootsie's other writers might have Tootsie would have been mood, tone, gotten third, fourth, and fifth billing on embellishment. Instead, he had also to the screenplay, or at least an \"additional assume the demanding task of manag- dialogue\" credit. These days, all that's ing editor. \"As a director, I use a lesson I left for them is to tell their stories to the took from teaching acting,\" he says. press. Kaufman, for instance, thinks he \"The question an actor keeps asking is: deserves a screenplay credit for being I 'What is the spine of the piece?' So a part of the squad that put Tootsie across director asks, 'How does each scene, the finish line. (Dick Richards won his each character, relate to the spine?' If co-producer credit essentially for put- you start with the premise in Tootsie, ting Hoffman and the script together, that a man is going to put on a dress, and 15

\"The Writers Guild arbiters made the myopic decision not to see the movie-penalizing the writer who is hired last, the one who normally works most closely with the actors and the director. could do that. But I've got to go another The Pursuit of O.B. Cooper. Duvall), on his tail, and flashbacks to the way. And I did.\" Vietnam survival training course where write.) Spottiswoode argued that the Gruen once commanded Meade-had 'The PursuitofD.B. Cooper' movie was doomed unless he could very little present-tense action. The first shoot sizeable new footage, written by half was about people opening doors and When a big holiday movie like Tootsie Shelton. It amounted, in the end, to 70 walking through corridors, the second incurs a credits controversy, the news percent of the completed film. The half about people making phone calls. makes the popular press. But writers Spottiswoode-Shelton team added new (\"Of course,\" jokes Spottiswoode. who labor uncredited on less well- characters-a rural rogue's gallery of \"That's how people solve problems in known movies don't even have notori- scam artists-and an end-of-the-hippie- Hollywood. \") The new version is a ety to console them. Take The Pursuit of era feeling. Even when editing the ex- movie-a nonstop pursuit on foot and D.B. Cooper-a case decided when the isting material, the new writer and direc- horseback, in car, canoe, and plane. Writers Guild arbiters made the myopic tor changed the film thematically, Meade's relationships with his adven- decision not to see the movie. dramatically, cinematically. turous wife (Kathryn Harrold) and his military-man father (Ed Flanders) were When this shaggy-dog chase movie The old movie, which I viewed for lightened up and humanized. Spottis- opened in November 1981 , it was pro- this article, was a banal, dour Vietnam woode and Shelton had managed the nounced dead on arrival. It was an en- vet docudrama: former Green Beret J. R. unlikely feat of simultaneously aerating gagingly low-down fantasy based on Meade (Treat Williams) concocts his a film and fleshing it out. J.D . Reed's novel about the real-life O .B. Cooper scheme partly to escape a skyjacker who had escaped with a para- postwar malaise, then g~ts depressed The producers submitted a tentative chute and $200,000 from an airborne when he wins the acclaim as a hijacker dual writing credit for Ron Shelton and plane in November (1971). The movie that eluded him as a veteran. The new Jeffrey Allan Fiskin, whose script had was slammed in the trade newspapers, movie is a Viet-vet comedy about a man actually been closer in content and spirit but overall, nationally, won positive re- who returns home and plans to get him- to the Spottiswoode-Shelton movie than views. The credited writer, Jeffrey Allan self the easy money that's part of the to the Kulik-W.O. Richter version. Fiskin, had recently written the cult fa- American dream for him and for all the Then someone called for an arbitration. vorite Cutter's Way; the credited direc- low-lifes he meets along the way (in- (Spottiswoode and Shelton think it was tor, Roger Spottiswoode, a former editor cluding a Nam comrade who returns to Fiskin; Fiskin says it wasn't.) And an of Peckinpah and Walter Hill films who haunt Meade like a comic Javert). unexpected thing happened: Fiskin re- wrote an early script of 48 HRS., had ceived sole credit. (Fiskin believes that directed only Terror Train (1980). Pre- The Kulik movie-despite relentless Shelton should have received some dictably, Fiskin won praise for the cross-cutting between Meade and the credit.) As compensation, the producers film's oddball touches and its loony-bin insurance investigator, Gruen (Robert made Shelton an \"associate producer.\" of supporting characters. Shelton conjectures that he might What most reviewers didn't know was have been screwed simply because, that Spottiswoode took over a version of while the other writers presented several the film that had been completed by drafts ofcomplete screenplays, he, in his Buzz Kulik and, working with screen- naivete, merely turned in the seventy writer Ron Shelton, gave it a total over- pages he wrote; after all, they did com- haul. Shelton's name is on the movie: prise the bulk of what turned up on- he's listed as an \"associate producer.\" screen. But Shelton and Spottiswoode (Spottiswoode and Shelton have since (who strongly supported his claim) collaborated on Under Fire, a journalists- couldn't persuade the arbitrators to see in-Nicaragua epic starring Nick Nolte, the two versions of the movie. Of Gene Hackman, Joanna Cassidy, and course, many of the contributions to a Jean-Louis Trintignant.) finished movie are made by actors and craftsmen and the director, even if The story behind the re-making of there's a writer on the set. But the arbi- The Pursuit ofD .B. Cooper is fairly sim- trators' refusal to screen footage effec- ple: the producers asked Spottiswoode tively penalizes the writer who is hired if he could shoot one big new stunt and last-the one who normally works most bring some cutting-room magic to the closely with the actors and the director. Kulik version. (John Frankenheimer had directed one sequence, and W.O. Rank-and-file Writers Guild mem- Richter contributed a substantial re- bers I've spoken with harhor two profes- 16

\"Don't get me wrong,\" says Hill, \"I'm by no means a bitter man . .. I just think it's obvious that writing credits no longer have much to do with how films are actually made. \" sional prejudices: for the first writer on a Giler couldn't get any screenwriting project, the \"pure\" writer, the one who credit on Alien (1979), though according sits alone in a room and types; and to director Ridley Scott they streamlined against the writer (usually the last) who the original script by Dan O' Bannon and does what everyone else in the movies Ronald Shusett, changing two of the business does-that is, collaborate. male characters to female and adding a major plot twist about a robot and a mi- Shelton also faced an aesthetic preju- nor one about a cat. (Later, science-fic- dice. To most screenwriters, what's of tion writer A.E. Van Vogt found remark- paramount importance in planning a able similarities between Alien and his movie is \"structure.\" The D.B. Cooper short story \"The Black Destroyer,\" credit fight suggests that the arbitrators which Hill and Giler never read. Jokes regard structure in the most diagram- Hill : \"I always thought what was re- matic sense. It's true that both movies markable about the original Alien start with Cooper's heist and end with screenplay was how similar it was to Meade and his wife facing down Gruen about 2000 other things. \" ) On Southern in a junkyard (though with wildly con- Comfort, their Lost Patrol movie, writer- flicting results). That is just about the director Hill and writer-producer David only similarity in two different movies Giler had to share screenplay credit with called The Pursuit ofD.B. Cooper. the first-positioned Michael Kane, from whom they'd commissioned an original '48HRS.' script and then totally rewritten it. 48 HRS., the second big hit of Walter Hill. There was a minor fracas over the Christmas '82 (after Tootsie), boasted all screenplay credit for 48 HRS., even the usual script problems and more. A side of the law. And because they were though Hill himself referred to the film legion of screenwriters worked on the played by Steve McQueen in The Get- during shooting as \"two guys in search of idea at different times. It was constantly away or Ryan O'Neal in The Thief Who a story.\" The idea of 48 HRS. -of a cop altered during shooting. And the pres- Came to Dinner, Hill appeared to be put- and con stuck together for 48 hours-is ence of a hyphenate, writer-director ting his heroes in Hollywood's tradi- really [producer] Larry Gordon's,\" says Walter Hill, made it a natural for a tional state of grace, granting special Hill. \"I think he may have had it as far Writers Guild debate. moral dispensations for the strong and back as 1971. A lot of wri ters worked on the handsome. But when I asked Hill the idea. In '75 or '76, Roger Spottis- Like Francis Coppola, Paul Ma- about a line from The Thief Who Came to woode asked if he could turn it into a zursky, Paul Schrader, and a few others, Dinner that seemed to spell out his affec- script; I came in on the deal, to co-write Hill was a hot screenwriter before he tion for romantic outsiders-the hero and advise and all, but Roger wrote most started directing. By his early 30s he was says that in a world of thieves, he wants of that script. Some time went by and known as the author of tough, terse ac- to be an honest thief-Hill said I was Tracy Keenan Wynn rewrote the script tion dramas with a fillip of black com- making the classic mistake of assuming Roger and I had worked on. Then it edy. Hickey and Boggs (1972), his first that because it says \"Screenplay by Wal- went from Columbia to Paramount and produced script, was an original comic ter Hill,\" Walter Hill wrote that line. He Paramount said, 'Let's write a draft for melodrama about the up-and-down didn't. Clint Eastwood.'They hiredme to re- friendship and partnership of a salt-and- write it with Eastwood as the criminal. pepper private eye team; amazingly, he \"I always felt I did the best job possi- So, I wrote that. But when I turned it in I received credit for it directly after the ble under the circumstances,\" Hill says of said that I didn't think it would work, title. After that, every credit got more his career as screenwriter-for-hire. \"If a that the best idea would be to make complicated. Hill swears that he had al- director has his basic story picked out Richard Pryor the criminal and have most nothing to do with The Drowning and his locations and his stars-and ifit's someone like Eastwood play the cop. Pool, though he shared the writing also based on a novel or even another Back in '78 or ' 79 no one seemed to credit with Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and draft of a screenplay-then you'd have think this was such a good idea Tracy Keenan Wynn, or even with John to go in knowing that your film would be Huston's muddled spy movie, The I like a whole lot of other films .\" As time went by, I forgot about the Mackintosh Man, though he received whole thing. But Joel Silver, the co-pro- sole writing credit on that one. When Hill became a writer-director, ducer, didn't forget. And Joel and Larry he worked on more distinctive movies got Paramount interested again. Para- Much of Hill's early work centered on but found credits harder to come by. He mount felt that the combination of Nick brawny, alienated types on rhe wrong and his writing-producing partner David 17

ATTENTION Nolte and a good black actor would be writers he might want to sign wouldn't commercial. What happened is very go to work for a \"hyphenate.\") SOUNDTRACK simple: Richard Pryor is now an enor- ALBUM mous movie star, and that's changed ev- When the tentative credits went out, erybody's mind about black lead with Spottiswoode (at Hill's insistence) COLLECTORS players. \" in the first position followed by Hill & AND Gross, Stephen E. de Souza lodged a From the start, Hill envisioned a protest, and wound up with the third- FILM MUSIC more improvisational film than he' d position credit. De Souza had worked on FANS ever before created. \"The story is tradi- the script for two or three weeks around tional urban thriller: two terrible guys the time that Murphy came on to the We are one of the largest are out there and have to be brought project. The producers recommended dealers in the world down. But even though I enjoy working de Souza to Hill because they thought in genres, the point is always to explode he'd be good at adding a light touch to specializing in the sale of them or give them a transfusion. So I the action. Hill didn't find de Souza fast soundtracks and original cast made a very conscious decision to go enough or his style of comic writing ap- albums. We stock thousands with the elements of personality of the propriate to the movie; he thought the two players, rather than be overly writer contributed gags instead of per- of titles including many genuflective to the narrative. Thrusting sonality touches (very few of which were rare out of print records and a white policeman and a black convict used), and he just didn't develop the together carries so much gravity that we rapport with de Souza that he'd later foreign imports. Some of didn' t have to beat the white-black have with Gross. Hill thought the work the soundtracks we stock thing to death. Ifit works, it's because of he did with de Souza was collaborative; include: Francis of Assisi , the actors' personalities.\" de Souza argued that, however closely Alexander the Great, The Girl he worked with Hill, the actual writing Hill thought that Roger Spottiswoode was his own. At any rate, because of the Most Likely, Cowboys, should get first-position credit for Guild's bias against writer-directors, de Island of Dr. Moreau , Sons of weaving the structure that provided the Souza wouldn't have had to write a third net for the improvisations. Hill's princi- of the film to eam his credit, though he Katie Elder, Halloween , pal co-writer was Larry Gross. Hill has says he did , he just had to contribute a Blow Out, Affair to Remember, been known throughout his career for \"substantial\" amount of construction or defining character through action rather dialogue or business. Durango, Circus of Horrors, than psychological badinage, but he Cinerama Holiday, Night of the knew that this movie would be more of a \" Don't get me wrong,\" says Hill, character piece than a plot picture, and \"I'm by no means a bitter man at this Hunter and Caine Mutiny. he wanted a writer who'd challenge his stage of my career. I just think it's ob- Write Today For own habits and assumptions. Through- vious that writing credits no longer have A Free Catalog! out filming, Hill joked that he waved much to do with how films actually get the flag called \"myth and archetype\"- made.\" Sound Track Album Retailers trying to play off the folkloric expecta- Department 701 tions an audience might have for a big • P.O. Box 7 blonde hero like Nick Nolte-while Larry Gross waved a flag called \"social Still, what's amazing is how much in- Quarryville, PA 17566 and psychological realism.\" The writers' fluence writers can have on movies even relationship became so symbiotic that when they don't earn credit. Says Dick Phone: (717) 284-2573 Gross often found Hill coming down on Richards: \"The writers who don't work Hours: 9AM-5PM Weekdays the side ofS&PR and and Gross defend- out can be very important; they can ing the perogatives of M&A. teach you where not to take a movie.\" A director like Sydney Pollack deserves all Though Gross was present during the praise he gets for keeping a compli- shooting, he admitted, \"At this stage a cated movie coherent, but he still needs writer is only useful to the director inas- screenwriters around to get scenes down much as he's thinking like the director. \" on paper before he puts them on film. But Gross and Hill continued to collabo- The union of writers and directors can rate as a team, incorporating and spar- be just as ecstatic and difficult as any tanizing Nolte's and Eddie Murphy's fruitful working marriage. improvisations. Nolte was especially good at physical grace notes, like the Screenwriters have always been the cheating love tap on Murphy's chin that most mysterious creators in the mov- caps their big fight. Murphy was espe- iemaking process. To judge from the cially good at making the talk more numbers of them used on a single proj- \"black.\" Most people on the movie felt ect, they're also the most disposable. that if anyone should have gotten credit But at their best they provide the ideas besides Spottiswoode, Hill, and Gross, and even the imagery that galvanize it was Nolte and Murphy. (Producer their collaborators. And as Bo Goldman Gordon didn't ask for his own story said, even when they write in relay credit, perhaps because he knows teams, sometimes they're able to mesh, to strike a common chord-and make beautiful music together. ® 18

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by Harlan Kennedy for the tale of grizzled Jack McCann Cann bring on his own death?\" (Gene Hackman), who gets rich quick Back in the days when Man the Sci- \"Jack McCann is a dinosaur,\" says in a 1925 gold strike and lives happily Jewish gangster Joe Pesci ofGene Hack- never after. The uncaptured rapture of entist had \"simple\" dreams-turning man's aging millionaire in Eureka. \"And his great \"Eureka\" haunts him still metal into gold-there were but four everyone knows what happened to di- when we rejoin him two decades later- elements. Earth, air, fire and water. nosaurs.\" They were wiped out by the a giant leap for mankind, a·swift flash- Roeg's layer-on-Iayer movie rests its im- Ice Age-all except the few who went forward for filmgoers-on his private is- agistic base on these, and the dazzling to Hollywood and became production land sequestered from the din of World twenty-minute opening section set in chiefs. Nicolas Roeg has been battling War II. And the lost rapture stays to the Yukon is a song for four elemental with them ever since, whether trying to haunt him until his death, murdered in voices, with fire dominant. Fire plunges woo his first film, Performance, off the blood and fire in a bizarre from the sky, leaving a sizzling stone in Warner Bros. shelf back in the late Six- Walpurgisnacht in his mansion Eureka. the snow that McCann guards ever after ties or striving to make his good friend as a sacred talisman, his \"philosopher's DinoDeLaurentiis see Flash Gordon his Roeg thinks with his eyes: as befits a stone.\" Gunfire blows away the head of way in the mid-Seventies. cinematographer turned director. He a suicidal prospector. And fire frolics was director of photogrpahy on Far From tauntingly in the hearth of a croaky The shock of the new causes parox- The Madding Crowd, Fahrenheit 451 , Pe- hooker-cum-sorceress, Frieda (Helena ysms on Sunset Boulevard and points tulia. He then directed Performance, Kallianiotes), who laments the day Mc- East. Every Roeg movie, not just his Walkabout, Don' t Look Now, The Man Cann's passion for gold overwhelmed latest, is rampant with novelty and could Who Fell to Earth, and Bad Timing. and killed his passion for her. justify the title Eureka. It is thus no surprise that the latest moguls at Eureka is a treasure-trail ofoptic clues, If fire leaps forth as the primal spirit of MGM/UA have responded to its hard mythic psychedelia and eyeblink rags of energy in Eureka-life-giving or life-de- violence, sex, and complex narrative illusion and allusion, which leads into stroying-gold is its portable emblem. with perplexity, not immediately sure one of the richest movie labyrinths since When, in the Yukon prologue, Hack- whether to cut it or tough it out. Instead, Citizen Kane. It's a film about passion for man hacks out a river of gold from the they've dumped it on UA Classics. gold, sex, or for the elemental in oneself cavern under howling ice and snow (the and dying in the fulfillment. What can other elements all in chaining coalition), Up in the icy Yukon and down in the fuel life thereafter? It's a film about sor- Roeg intercuts repeated pickaxe bangs balmy Caribbean, Roeg and screen- cery-from alchemy to Tarot to telepa- with the gasps, both orgasmic and writer Paul Mayersberg (who scripted thy. And murder, mystery and motive. dying, of Frieda in her far-off bordello Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth) dig Not so much \"Who killed Jack Mc- lovenest. The music from Das Cann?\" as \"How and why did Jack Mc- Rheingold's prelude, simultaneously 20

swelling on the soundtrack, intimates Mightiest brain-twister of all is the that man holds the reins to his own des- mythic quest Wagner-style. And sacri- film's late and tenebrously cryptic court- tiny and had visible, communicable fice. For the consummation of Hack- room scene. After McCann's murder, gods of desire and conscience with man's love for gold has been bought, Claude is put on trial and led, by his own whom to battle over it. like Alberich's, at the cost of human sex- decision to conduct his defense, to a uallove. And the gold itself gushes forth confrontation with Tracy herself. Each Nights later, duly pricked to action, from the rock in a fiery-liquid river, an peels off layer after layer of protective Pesci's men converge on Hackman's elemental orgasm. half-truth as the lights dim around them mansion, Claude trailing ghost-like after save for a pale and eerie spot on each. in the shadows. And McCann, strewing When we leap forward into the For- blood-red flower petals over the stair-rail ties, the same mythic and elemental Roeg and Mayersberg, gear-shifting as if in invitation, is done to death. music is being played. The aging mage into the surreal, depart furthest of all McCann now presides over a household here from their true-life point of depar- • as knotted and intricate as the House of ture, the \"real case\" of Sir Harry Oakes. Atreus: wife Helen Oane Lapotaire), Oakes, prototype for the movie's Mc- Trying to summarize the theme and daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell), son- Cann, was murdered in Nassau in 1943. story of a Nicolas Roeg movie is like in-law Claude (Rutger Hauer), plus a His son-in-law, a French Count, was trying to distill and bottle Niagara Falls. bevy of servants and a dubious business tried for the killing and, like the film's Even the director, whom I met and manager (Ed Lauter). If McCann's trag- Claude, acquitted. But there the resem- talked with at London's Natural History edy is that he found ecstasy too soon in blances end, almost. Eureka's stylized Museum under the towering shadow of his life-and Alberich's curse lives with courtroom becomes an arena not for a long-dead dinosaur, tackled like with him in his sense of spiritual waste and weighing external facts but for peeling like. Roeg thinks and speaks as he films, in a high-volt helter-skelter of images and allusions, delivered in an intense passion spent-Roeg and Mayersberg through to internal truths: the truth that and husky British brogue that some- also now give him a tragic grandeur, a Claude is in Tracy's words, \"guilty of times sounds like Herbert Marshall at- patriarchal fallen wisdom that becomes tacked by oneiric delirium. It's impossi- the apex of the main character triangle. ble to transcribe his speech without Tracy is his soul-heir. Her psychic link plentiful italics, which mark the points to her father is invoked both in tele- where Roegjumps on a word like a trap- pathic cross-cuttings between the two per on a quarrelsome grizzly and wres- and in the gifts of spirit he has be- tles it to the ground. queathed her, from a driving quest for \"I wanted to make a film about ec- ecstasy to the arithmetic wizardry they stasy,\" he says, \"the many forms of ec- demonstrate one evening at dinner. stasy. Ecstasy in individual people, and Claude is the third corner of the trian- ecstasy as the mystic sense of life. How gle: the interloper-dilettante (or \"dab- our actions are connected to everything bler\" as Roeg calls him) who wants and everyone around us. It's not a mys- Tracy as much for her being the recepta- tery film, it's not a thriller. And I hope cle of her father's soul as for herself. you can' t put it into a slot. There isn't a Rutger Hauer makes Claude a vain, slot to put it in. To do so would make it a strutting, gold-quiffed, compelling de- thing it isn't.\" mon; a wanderer, a flying Dutchman Nonetheless, critics have been trying whose sole permanent possession is a Hackman in Eureka. to coax Roeg into slots for years now. yacht called Pandora. He's a \"movie mystic,\" he's a director of Much like Pandora's Box, Eureka be- innocence\", and that, far from having \"existential thrillers,\" he's a \"Borge- comes a movie that when thrown open the strength of mind and body to have sian. \" Eureka has already started send- explodes around one: outward from a taken the life of McCann, he scarcely ing cries of critical bafflement into the three-cornered thematic core of desire has the strength or self-knowledge to heavens. \"A-ha! \" cry hopeful scruti- (for gold, for love, for other men's souls keep his relationship with her alive. neers, Roeg has made a murder thriller. and secrets) and scattering sparks across Claude ends up, in this Strindbergian But then the film swirls and serpentines a huge terrain of myth and meaning. As ghost-trial, being arraigned not for a cap- on into a climactic trial scene that has in all his movies, Roeg hurls heady vis- ital crime of murder but for the spiritual nothing to do with criminal justice and a ual juxtapositions at us-in a bid to crime of an egoism that camouflages denouement that doesn't even tell us storm the syntactical frontiers between w.eakness, dilettantism, and moral myo- whodunit. shot and shot, scene and scene, meta- pia. \"Professional critics reflect the time phor and reality, parable and paranor- Nothing in Eureka is what it seems. they live in,\" says Roeg. \"And today it's mal. Even the movie's \"subplot\" is no sub- a very reactionary time, socially, politi- Is it real or emblematic cause-and-ef- plot, in the sense of an obediently subor- cally, and artistically. Especially in the fect when we cut from McCann's hand dinate layer of narrative. It's a major nav- movies. If the grammar of cinema is at being scorched by the talisman, which igating force in the action, as all changed or dented, it's resented far stands on a pedestal in the mansion's businessman Joe Pesci and his assistant more than in other mediums. Fellini hall, to Tracy crying in sexual pain or \\ Mickey Rourke bid to build a casino on once said, \"They call me self-indulgent ecstasy in her bedroom? Or when later in Luna Bay, a proposed development on now. They used to call it style.\" In liter- the same scene a golden chain (child- McCann's land. But McCann won't ature and poetry, fine: changes and parent link?) slips loudly from Tracy's play. \"I don't believe in chance,\" he changing attitudes to the form are quite dressing table? says, summing up his Homeric certainty acceptable. But the grammatic form of 21

It's a classic·lover's question, isn't it? 'What are you thinking, darling?' Pause. 'Oh, thinking about you, darling!' But you never know. cinema has very little root in literature, ing grass, etc. The first hippie really, lies-who are quite literally soul-clones and rwthing to do with the theater. And though I've nothing against hippies. I'm of their parent, their father or mother. In it's become full of rigid preconceptions. probably one myself-though a rather surface things they can be quite differ- old hippie! ent, but the essence is passed on. \"I remember an audience coming out of a screening of Marienbad, among \"But Claude hadn't 'gone the route' \"And that's what I wanted to illus- them some very eminent critics who like McCann, in a single quest for gold trate, as simply as possible, when the said, 'The man doesn't know anything -for his gold, for the gold's really a mathematics puzzle is solved by Tracy about form at all. Look at the ridiculous symbol of anyone's gold. Claude had shot of Sacha Pitoeff coming downstairs never thought any purpose through, and in her head at the dinner. She and Jack in a dinner jacket and then going up- he's not bright like McCann. He dab- share this gift. And how often can you stairs in a blazer, then downstairs in a bles, for instance, in the Cabala. At the know what is going on in someone else's dinner jacket ... The guy Resnais dinner early in the film , Claude is wear- head? It's a classic lover's question, isn't doesn't understand!' And yet today, ev- ing this shirt with cabalistic signs on it, it? 'What are you thinking, darling?' ery television commerical, the wife puts flaunting this rather c1everer-than-thou Pause. 'Oh, thinking about you, dar- a pie in the oven and the next shot is the image. And at one point, after they've ling!' But you never krww. Unless you family sitting down to feast on it. That talked about the five points ofwisdom in have a gift in common. And that scene has its direct root in the changes in the the Cabala, McCann says 'And the sixth was a simple, direct way of showing that grammar of film. Commercials like that is Bullshit. ' And he goes on, 'There's Jack and Tracy are linked.\" are the direct result ofAlain Robbe-Gril- only one Golden Rule. Do unto others let and Alain Resnais. as you would have them do unto you. Roeg and I get up and walk through The rest is conversation. ' the room, among the bustle of visitors \"The trial scene in Eureka,\" Roeg busy cricking their necks at the beast continues, \"is not-obviously it's not- \"Well, people have come up to me beetling above them, a giant jigsaw of a 'real' trial. The lights don't go down in and said 'Oh anti-Semitic!' and this, white bones. a real courtroom, as they do in ours; you that, and the other. Well, when Jack says don't have spotlights. It's a dramatic set- that he~s actually quoting straight from \"I wanted the characters in the movie ting for a confrontation between two the center of the Talmud: 'There's only to be big people,\" says Roeg. \"Not big characters. It's formalized. It's an arena. one Golden Rule' the Talmud says: 'Do 'symbolically,' because that's the death- And when you see Claude cross-exam- unto others,' and then it ends, 'The rest knell. But Grecian almost. The Father. ining Tracy, it's he who's being exposed. is commentary.' So the people who The Mother. 'I taught you everything you know,' he come up and say 'Anti-Jewish, anti-Yid' says. And he still doesn't understand that are only scratching surfaces. I believe- \"When you have this elemental feel he's talking to someone who has Mc- and it's part of what Jack McCann repre- to the people, there are links you can Cann's soul when he's talking to her, sents-that once you start scratching a make between the characters. For in- that they're the strong ones, she and Mc- surface you must go on until you reach as stance, all the women-Frieda, Helen, Cann, the ones who understand, the far as you dare go. Or maybe go right to Tracy-have dark hair, and they're ones with a capacity for life, knowledge, the bottom, whatever the dangers. given this kinship with the world of sor- not him. She saves Claude's neck, but in cery, of mysticism. And even the gang- doing so all things have to be said be- \"And this strength that Jack has,\" sters have this extra stature, they're tween them. And very few relationships Roeg continues, \"is what Claude en- small in a 'big' way. They're brutal, can survive that amount of truth.\" vies, what he covets. When the three of petty, mean, violent, uncaring men. them have their fight later in the film- Grand Guignol characters almost. They The character of Claude is the \"wild Tracy, Claude and McCann, when Jack don' t realize how much it takes to kill a card\" in the movie: an elusive, mercurial breaks into the couple's house-Mc- man like Jack McCann. He has to be presence flitting around the stronger Cann says to Claude: 'I see what you beaten down and consumed. flames of McCann and Tracy. \"He's a want. You want my soul. ' Claude wants dabbler,\" says Roeg. \"When we first it through Tracy. She, like McCann, has \"Which is why we made the murder started on the character of Claude, I re- this strength, this quest for ecstasy, and scene quite violent. People have come membered a man I once saw on Brigh- understands the danger of finding your up to me and said, 'Oh it's very grue- ton beach before the war, when I was a ecstasy too soon.\" some and brutaJ!' But I think it's impor- child. He was, supposedly, a French tant. In Performance only two shots were Count. The local people despised him Roeg sets a flame to another cigarette fired. Butwhen you shoot someone, you and used to call him the 'Count of no and looks up at the dinosaur's head, hol- reduce a physically healthy young man account.' And he had a beautiful girl low-eyed and bleach-boned. to probably terminal illness. It's an im- with him who wore one of the first bi- portant thing. kini-type bathing suits, shocking the lo- \"One reason the film isn't a murder cals. I thought of this man as a dabbler. thriller,\" he says, \"is that McCann \"I feel bad about violence when I The kind of man who came to fruition doesn't die. That's to say, what he is, think of films, good as they might be, later in occult things and dope and smok- what he represents is absolutely contin- like Friday the 13th, and people say 'Joily ued in Tracy. There are children-I've good film, lot of blood, and people are seen it in friends of mine and their fami- strangled and stabbed!' I believe in the sanctity of life and I've tried to show these gangsters as only foolish people 22

and criminal, not glorified at all. Sadistic through. You find echoes of what you ' re Gene Hackman. violence offered for gain, or to express trying to say in all kinds of places. machismo, is awful.\" \"When we were preparing the film Eureka is in a different dimension and we were talking about ecstasy, Paul from that catchpenny breed of fair- Mayersberg and I, we were saying that ground shocker: not only in its content the truly ecstatic moment should arrive but in its style and vision. Part of the at the point of ecstasy-is-death. And I movie's spell lies in Roeg's ability, as in came across this. \" all his films, to bend and transform im- ages in a way that takes us far beyond Roeg opens a book. \"According to naturalism. Even that old slam-bang fa- vorite, the zoom shot, is transfigured the Muslims, there are seven Heavens', here into a technique supple, respon- and they're listed and described , one by sive, and varied-from limpid, spectac- one. And when we come to the Sixth ular lunges forward across snowy land- Heaven , listen to this: The Sixth scapes or into the moon's face to tiny Heaven is composed of ruby and garnet darts of attention into an object or a hu- and is presided over by Moses. Here man face. dwells the guardian angel of Heaven and Earth, half snow and half fire .' And Jack \"I'm not comfortable just standing is the snow and the flame! That's the still,\" says Roeg. \"It's probably some Sixth. The Seventh Heaven is formed psychological thing! I like to be at differ- of divine light beyond the power of ent distances from things. They seem to tongue to describe and is ruled by Ab- expand more then. And the zoom cre- ram. Each inhabitant is bigger than the ates this effect. I can't bear, for instance, whole Earth and with 70,000 heads, those interview programs on TV where each head 70,000 miles, each mouth two faces just sit across from each other 70,000 tongues, and each tongue speaks and the camera doesn't move. I want to 70,000 languages, all forever employed get up and walk around myself. I'm in chanting to the glory of the most high. probably from the Peripatetic School of To be in the Seventh Heaven is to be philosophy!\" supremely happy, to be in paradise, to be in ecstasy.' \" Peripatetic conversation has now walked us all the way from the Natural Roeg chortles with delight, closes the History Museum to Nicolas Roeg's book, and throws a beaming look at house. I ask him how the title Eureka had finally been chosen for the film, me across the room. after the title had gone through several \"It's rather shattering, isn't it? That previous variants, including most re- cently Murder Mystery. really is the story ofJack McCann! Snow and fire. And the quest for the Seventh \"It was the cry of Archimedes, of course,\" says Roeg, \"when he stepped Heaven. Ecstasy. \" <$ into the bath and discovered the princi- ple of specific gravity. He was wearing Rutger Hauer and Theresa Russell. the golden crown of Herion, the ruler of Syracuse, who had asked him to find out how much base metal there was in it. So Archimedes put it on and stepped in, the water ran over the side, and he dashed off down the s~reet yelling 'Eu- reka!' Amusing chap. \"But actually the direct idea for our title came from Edgar Allan Poe's essay 'Eureka.' Which I think is marvelous, the best thing he ever wrote-it s specu- lation about the stars and the heavens, the cosmos. He said, 'After I've done \"Eureka\" I can do no more.' And that was the last he ever wrote. He went on a great binge and died two weeks later. \"Of course, what's fascinating about following leads in building a movie,\" continues Roeg, questing busily among his bookshelves, \"is that some things, some references/eel instantly right. And you don't have to follow the roots right 23



integrity, and soon the fear turns into Stoppard, Pinter, and Orton. That list suggests how often the trick By David Thomson real symptoms. Sometimes a spirit so set in pretending becomes delicate, hysteri- is comic or absurd. Olivier has been called a natural clown, but he smothers Once, after a more than normally cal, or hypochondriacal. All those vague his humor. In very few parts can Olivier himself feel dignity without loss or trag- electric performance of Othello, maladies are the fates conspiring against edy. That is one reason why he is a national institution. The English make Laurence Olivier stormed from the him, ensuring that everything he does is great actors, but Englishness expects them to be apologetic about the game. stage and into his dressing room, superhuman-just a little touch ofLarry Olivier has surmounted that sadness by asking us to think of acting (of what he is wrapped up in lonely anger. Why? asked in the night. • doing), rather than what is happening to his characters. his friends. You were great. \"I know,\" Olivier is ready to be the masquerader cried Olivier from behind the door, \"but Nowadays people often ask my wife, caught in the act. Who could imagine John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson writ- I don't know how or why. I don't know Joan, \"How do you know when Larry is ing that cunning let-out clause about ly- ing? But the superb aside is always there how to do it again.\" Those touched by acting and when he's not?\" and my wife in Olivier. He needs to feel an intimacy with the public, so that he could stop God know how busy He is. They are too will always reply, \"Larry? Oh, he's acting and whisper into the dark, \"Well, I do my best, Mrs., don' t I?\" John Osborne ardent and superstitious to take respon- all the time.\" In my heart of hearts I only gave him that line in The Entertainer; he was brought up on it, just as anyone sibility themselves, and so they become know that I am far from sure when I am under 50 in England has learned to equate acting with Olivier. And The En- neurotics of spontaneity. acting and when I am not or, should I more tertainer, written for him, is as fine a picture of the scoundrel actor at the end Somehow, all through the years , frankly put it, when I am lying and when I of his lying tether as Jean-Paul Sartre's Kean. (Good as Alan Badel was in that Laurence Olivier has wanted us to be- am not. For what is acting but lying, and role, it must have tempted Olivier.) lieve that what he is doing is impossible. what is good acting but convincing lying? The appointment of Olivier as direc- tor of the National Theatre was an ac- It is his brand of charm, the gracious But what eLevates this condition of Life to knowledgment that no one had so vigor- ously identified himselfwith theater and breathlessness that says, \"I didn't think the assumption of a vocation? I think we acting, or so laid the groundwork for being regarded as the man for Herculean I would make it in time-but here I may not get recognizabLy closer than one tasks. The National decision was taken only in 1962, but I'd guess that the am,\" so that we feel luckier to be seeing ofour youngest amusements-the game of events making it inevitable occurred be- tween 1944 and 1947. Those years of him. Then there is the thrill of long \"pretends. \" victory and rebuilding are crammed with Olivier's energy and his bold drive to odds, of taking momentous physical or -Laurence Olivier, Confessions of hold the eye; they constitute the mo- ment in which he volunteered the will creative risks that seem to defy mere an Actor: An Autobiography (/982) and the capacity to enter into the breach of a ravaged culture. mortal capacities. • It is also a perverse recklessness for an Olivier's new book is the confession Olivier admits that when he played actor-especially one with a matinee determined to own up. It has a vein of Henry V on stage, in 1937, Tyrone Guthrie had to nag him into giving the following, by no means unattractive, but lusting humility that allows this kind of big patriotic speeches more force and brio: \"You' re taking all the thrill out of yearning to be liked and given the offi- personality to beat itself for being un- the play, and for heaven's sake, that's all it's got.\" By 1944, Olivier had learned cial stamp of beauty (fame in movies)- worthy while holding center-stage. It is that he regularly twists, distorts, also a confession akin to the first Chorus amends, ages, uglifies, and engrosses speech in Henry V, begging for \"a muse his own face and his way of speaking. of fire\" to make a reality out of the Are those false noses being thumbed at \"brightest heaven of invention,\" then Garbo because she turned him down for recognizing (sadly but valiantly) that this Queen Christina? Or is disguise heartfelt? is only a wooden stage and so on, not In 1970, when Olivier played Shylock in France, but then surging ahead again London, his director, Jonathan Miller, into the exhilaration of pretending- had to tell him to go away and remove that it will be real if we, the audience, most of his heavy \"Jew\" look. Ah yes, I can only believe it and warm it with our can hear Olivier muttering to the mirror, irrational desires. now I know what it is to be persecuted. In Olivier there is a Vincent Crum- Such a man might be in a turmoil of mles and an Alexander Korda. He is like vanity and the guilt that comes from a 19th-century actor-manager, nour- being thought self-glorious; it could ished by ham and patriotism, and so in make a cold show-offof an actor, driving love with the process of pretending that him to more perilous heights of versatil- he can only have an actress for a wife, ity to prove to us it is not just self, not can only revel in the stage if it insists on just me. Danger is a deeper need still, confronting the impossibility of being the last conviction of those who live in I the reality it claims. That is a profound dread of their own boredom or empti- strain in English theater-of poetry sur- ness-and emptiness is the inward hor- passing drabness-and it is a theme ror of those so good at being other peo- common to Shakespeare, Congreve, ple. They may fear for their own . Wycherley, Sheridan, Wilde, Coward, 25

enough about thrill to light up the whole cash before returning to England, and in wounded, but not in the big cannon. In show, not just the Crispian's Day speech. He saw himself as a modern, some measure to milk their notoriety, real life, the couple were married, and so robust Henry, a Battle of Britain king, not the careful replica of the medieval Olivier and Leigh played Romeo and Ju- they returned to England richer and re- icon in the National Portrait Gallery that had been his model before the war. Like liet on Broadway. Real love didn' t come deemed, with Olivier better educated in the king, Olivier had found his country too, and seen Shakespeare as the au- across. The show was so poorly received the public's need for martial sentiment. thentic poet of morale. that there were lines of people demand- Henry V is a victory film; V was a It helps explain Olivier that, more than many actors, he has himself been ing their money back; and on one dire British habit in those days. Not only moved by Shakespeare's scheme of trag- edy and heroism. Olivier may not be his evening, when Olivier did his famous, does its hero win, he survives and woos a age's finest Hamlet or Romeo (Kenneth Tynan was sure Gielgud had beaten dangerous leap up to Juliet's balcony, he princess of the enemy. As a movie to ride him); his first Lear, in 1946, may have been insufficient, leaving him the rich was so drained that he could only hang on liberated mood it compares with Chil- spoils of Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony. His defeats matter less than from the ledge by his fingertips until the dren ofParadise, and why not? They are the special way in which Olivier re- sponds to the notion of a flaw in great- curtain came to his mercy. There was a both films about patriotism as measured ness, marking it for destruction, and coming to infect the character's entire darker worry in Olivier's life. Rumblings in national theater. But the great origi- appearance. Henry V is neither a great play nor a tragedy, but if it ever had a had started in England, from Michael nality and verve of Henry V comes in high opportunity it was in 1944, as new armies invaded France. Religiously im- Balcon and J.B . Priestley, that certain Olivier's way of putting the Chorus on pulsive in his choices, Olivier was some- times dead-on. The flair of what is still English actors in America were tanta- the screen. Rather than have the figure his best film owes a lot to the way it permitted him an intimacy with the mount to deserters. An adulterer, living of Chorus introduce every act in person, whole nation and a way of saying actors are warriors too. in sin, deserving the feather, and a Ro- Olivier preferred to keep the voice on The war had not begun well for Oli- meo who couldn't get himself up-a the sound track. He would do the same vier. He was in and out of America, intensely but furtively involved with Vi- grisly set of handicaps. thing a few years later in some of the vien Leigh, not yet divorced from his first wife, Jill Esmond. He was trying Rescue took a form worthy of Crum- Hamlet soliloquies, showing the Prince, Hollywood again, but he was very un- happy on Wuthering Heights, and the ob- mles. Alexander Korda came to America but turning the speeches into interior ject of David O. Selznick's dismay on Rebecca: \"Larry's silent action and reac- to direct Larry and Vivien in That Hamil- monologues. tions become slower as his dialogue be- comes faster, each day. His pauses and ton Woman. The film was shot in six He was talking to Anthony Asquith, spacing on the scene with the girl in which she tells him about the ball are the weeks, with models of Trafalgar and the film director, about his approach to most ungodly slow and deliberate reac- tions I have ever seen.\" There was a Englishness wherever good Hungarian. Henry V: \"Suddenly I saw the solution. I testiness in Olivier's real feelings about both Merle Oberon and Joan Fontaine: art could conjure it, in Hollywood, at the have always seen my films from the last he reckoned that Leigh would have been better in both parts, and he is the General Service Studio. One for the soft shot backwards and was trying out on kind of actor who may need to think himself in love with an actress if the British heart. But it worked, and it Puffin [Asquith] the idea that the first audience is to be swept away by the fictional romance. The two longed to be would be Winston Churchill's favorite time we saw the Chorus, who up to now together, and yet.... Olivier was al- ready a little jealous of her triumph as movie. Olivier let his hair go lank and would have been merely an off-screen Scarlett O'Hara, just as in years to come she would be edged closer to breakdown flaxen; he drooped with impediment- commentator, would be for the last by having to read that she was simply beautiful while he was a great actor. minus an arm and an eye (if he could speech, when we would discover that In 1940, trying to put together some only establish whether left or right)- we'd been in the Globe Playhouse all and was like a luckier Jake Barnes: the time. I had no sooner said this to him than I saw immediately that the Globe Playhouse was to be the frame-with its actors employing a highly rhetorical method that would most felicitously set the central idea. \" The rising orotundity of that last phrase and the snap of \"suddenly\" and \"immediately\" are so characteristic of Olivier. His genius is sudden and bold; it has to be to convince him. He has said that he only \"got\" his Othello's way of walking, flat-footed and in a wide, lurch- ing stride, as he went from his dressing room to the stage at the final dress re- hearsal. (Made it, ladies and gentlemen, in the nick of time!) As for the archness of that fussy last line, it is Crummles again, a flourish in actors so steeped in Shakespeare, and yet so deaf to true meter, that they are confident in their own ability to run on for a few lines in pastiche bard when memory fails them. Never mind. The discovery of the Globe in 1944, minutes before an \"Eliz- abethan\" performance of Henry V, is the making of the movie. It is as interesting historically as it is dynamic on the screen: the camera cranes and tracks, To Agin Court in Henry V. and the bustle of another age is opened 26

up in a manner that makes most Forties Hamlet, the prince ofDenmark. tors in the movies-a featured eccentric costume films feel staid. Further, this in Khartoum, The Shoes ofthe Fisherman, opening allows the film an extraordinary first season: Richardson played Ibsen's The Battle of Britain, Nicholas and Alex- range of modes: the rolling green fields Peer Gynt (with Olivier coming on in the andra, Lady Caroline Lamb, The Seven- ofIreland for the battle, and a cardboard last act, shaggy with beard, as the But- Per-Cent Solution, Marathon Man , The Harfleur as exquisite as a plate from Les ton Moulder); Olivier did Richard III for Betsy, The BoysJromBrazil, Dracula, The Tres Riches Heures du due de Berry. The the first time, a landmark in his eager Jazz Singer, Inchon-so many dreadful movie was free and away; rhetoric was vilification of his own features to be- films , so many arresting bits and pieces, its breeze. We have only to think how come memorable. And they played to- at the same time out of directorial con- similarly the Royal Shakespeare Com- gether in Shaw's Arms and the Man, with trol yet honored and indulged because pany production of Nicholas Nickleby Olivier as Sergius and Richardson as this is a frail old lord banking money for worked to see that Olivier had harnessed Bluntschli. his little ones. a lively impetus in British theater. Olivier was convinced he came out of The struggle over Sergius armed Oli- Moreover, in his attitude to the stage, that contest badly; and make no mis- vier for the next Old Vic season. When Olivier loves the short burst of intensity take, he was a very competitive actor. the company did both parts of Henry IV, (the suspension of disbelief) no more He believed Sergius was a stooge, not so he took two roles as opposite as possible: than he enjoys alluding to the conditions much unattractive as foolish . Olivier, I Hotspur in Part I and Justice Shallow in of artifice. It is a way of saying, \"Believe think, is one of those actors who have Part II. That was like doing the waver- in me-but, look, I am a liar.\" His most great psychic difficulty in appearing ing chimes at midnight and the brave compelling moments of physicality, like other than clever on stage. That is why gonging of noon-except that Olivier the death fall in Coriolanus, make us his Richard III is so vivid, and his gave Hotspur a stammer. The speech shudder with apprehension and then George Hurstwood in William Wyler's defect was the actor's willful interpreta- look for the safety net. What is Crum- film Carrie so reticent. But slowly he tion of a bare hint in the text; it was not mles but the circus with words? The En- learned to like Sergius a little. In Con- part of the Hotspur tradition, though tertainer gives us the garish show and the fessions ofan Actor, he tells how Tyrone Olivier's example has since been copied shabby off-stage reality. It was Olivier by others, establishing a new line of ac- and Gielgud who played Ping-Pong in Guthrie urged him to love the character. tors zealous to discover compelling 1935 with the roles of Romeo and Mer- He calls it \"the richest pearl of advice in wounds in their parts. (The prolonged cutio, as if to say, \"See what a sport this my life,\" so that eventually \"I loved Ser- speech hesitation of David Threlfall's is. You must come two nights to see the gius for his faults, for his showing off, his Smike in Nicholas Nickleby-not in offsetting tendency to the story you are absurdity, his bland doltishness.\" Dickens-may be a distant inheritor of believing. Look at the actors, not the Olivier's ploy.) parts.\" And if we see the Chichester Perhaps the love came rather too Festival Theatre as being the first stage quickly and completely. It may have The proud assertiveness in breaking where the National played, and one been Olivier's way of fashioning a diffi- Hotspur's lines is an example of the bel- much influenced by Olivier, then it is I cult role into a \"character,\" a turn. Still, ligerence with wnich Olivier has often worth noticing that the new stage at Chi- the experience helped widen his reper- approached Shakespearean verse. Some chester was in the round, with lights toire, and thereby enabled him to be- critics found his truculence with the po- inescapable in the rafters. It was a come one of the oddest supporting ac- etry to be his greatest weakness, and the theater where entrances were made darkest proof of his vanity. Olivier may through the aisles, where action washed have known that he could not match the over the audience, where a \"highly rhe- rapturous musicality of Gielgud's torical method\" was always palpable. speech. But he defended himself on the score of naturalism. He took as his mas- • ters Charles Hawtrey and Gerald Du Maurier, actors who seemed easy and Henry V inaugurated a rush of daring idiomatic after the stately manners of fertility for Olivier. In 1944, after the Victorian acting. filming, Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and John Burrell were appointed co-direc- Olivier was also a Romantic-some- tors of the Old Vic Theatre. The strong- one who wanted to move himself as hold of the English classical stage, the much as he moved others-fascinated Vic had been bombed in .1941. The tri- by originality for its own sake and by umvirate was to raise a phoenix-at the Freudian character study. When he first New Theatre-in the name ofa revived played Hamlet, he consulted with Old Vic ideal. The season opened at the Ernest Jones, the student and biogra- . end of August 1944, with victory in Eu- pher of Freud. In one hilarious-sound- rope only a matter of time. ing production of Othello (1938), with Richardson playing the Moor, Olivier's The richness of the season was fos- own Iago startled Richardson one night tered by the feelings ofcomradeship and with a kiss on the lips, so sure was he rivalry between Olivier and Richardson. that Shakespeare had meant Iago to Kenneth Tynan once quoted Richard- have a secret homosexual passion for son as saying, \"I hate Larry. Until I see Othello. him. Then he has more magnetism than anyone I've ever met. Except Alexander In some Shakespearean roles, Olivier Korda. \" They had a star part each in the treated the verse to the violence of his 27

Ralph Richardson and Olivier in Richard III. complex material. Nevertheless, in the space of a few years he had gone from own sprung rhythm , an upheaval of Sheridan's The Critic, in which he the Archers-like artifice and color of one quirky naturalism and stealthy upstag- played a pert-nosed, white-faced popin- film to Shakespeare as film noir. His ing. The climax of this cat-and-mouse jay, Mr. Puff. \"Oedipuff,\" some called Hamlet is a lustrous piece of death-wish game with the language is Richard III, it. But customers slept in the streets to in a brooding, treacherous environment; and I fear that the film is becoming as get tickets, and there were stage-door its easy Freudianism and its stifling inte- comic as Peter Sellers' impersonation of chants of \"We want Larry.\" The Critic riors crowd in on the livid head of the Olivier's crook-speech always promised. had the added allure of a moment in prince. It is the work of a director ex- This was an Olivier who could only which Puff is hoisted high above the cited by the look and texture of film. speak faster or slower than anyone else, stage. One night, Olivier nearly fell, The collaboration of Olivier with de- sometimes in the same speech. The thereby making the rest of the run an signers Roger Furse and Carmen Dil- need to be versatile can threaten the ordeal for his jangled nerves. But the lion, and cameraman Desmond Dickin- fabric of a play. It is all the stranger in actor's ordeal and the crowd's suspense son, made for a rotting world in which that Olivier has subsequently acquired are in a lovely symbiotic tug-of-war for Hamlet's pained sensitivity is as appro- the habit of sounding like mock Shakes- Olivier. priate as the rueful smile with which peare at the drop of a hat. On solemn Robert Mitchum might scan the dark occasions, a beat and an organ peddle The 1945 season toured and came to and the past. begin to throb in his soft, hallowed New York; America was conquered too. voice. When he accepted the life's-work Then, late in 1946, by his own half- Still, in Confessions of an Actor, Oli- Oscar in 1979, he nearly took flight with timid, half-boasting confession, he vier is most struck in hindsight by a winged eloquence. And at the end of bagged the role of Lear, knowing it was daring 14-foot leap with which he had Confessions of an Actor, he reprints his the one that Ralph Richardson had al- the vengeful prince, sword in hand and maiden speech to the House of Lords, ways set his heart on. Olivier's Lear did Zorro in mind, descend on Claudius. as musical and archaic as a man with a tin not impress too many; PBS will soon air His own declaratory actions mean the ear can make it. his second shot at it, the Granada TV world to him; that may be why his sev- version made last year in competition eral recent illnesses have altered or sub- Of course, most of those who saw his with Michael Hordern's performance in dued his spirit, enabling him to find, at Hotspur were riveted: it was a great part the BBC Shakespeare series. The ri- last, tiredness. That great leap-in valry between Olivier and Richardson which, he admits now, he calmly calcu- for him, a man of the heath and the hills, probably meant more to Olivier. He was lated the chances of injuring himself or a firebrand, whose lunge at the crown knighted in 1947, a year after Richard- someone else-was a perfect self-im- will be thwarted, but who exults in his son-maybe because Sir Ralph was a age, and the logo for those years in own ambition. (If ever an actor was bom few years older, but more significantly which spectacular versatility made him a to understand Edmund's \"Then God because of Olivier's divorce. Scandal is national hero. stand up for bastards\" in Lear, it was much harder to stomach in the award of Olivier.) He had comered the rights to nobility, whereas it only glamorizes The actor John Laurie, who played a passion, energy, and danger on the Eng- those born as aristocrats. small part in Hamlet, has described the lish stage, and carried all before him in special combination of Vincent Crum- the other coup of the 1945 season. Olivier received the accolade in the mles and Charles Foster Kane: \"Olivier blond hair he had chosen for his film of was an autocrat, no doubt about that. • Hamlet. It was a shock at the time be- But in his position he had to be, because cause the picture was being made on a he was working from dawn, getting to To exceed different roles on succeed- closed set, and the public had no breath the studio first to see that everything was ing nights, he took on two drastically of it. But in those years, once he had ready as producer. Then, at half past different parts on one night. He played their allegiance, Olivier had the knack of eight, he assumed his role as director, Sophocles' Oedipus in the W.B. Yeats surprising them. He had boosted the provided that he was not required at the translation. In the last scene, his stark actor into being a man of the people. time as leading actor. We finished at face was blind and streaked with blood; And as a crowd-pleaser, he hardly put a about six o'clock, but Larry had to stay he was as ready to have his features torn foot wrong. Hamlet may be less success- on to get ready for the next day, or to as he was impatient to hack at Hotspur's ful than Henry V; it is a problem play, and rough-'cut what he'd shot the day before. verse. Against advice, some of which Olivier has never shown much taste for God knows when he got back to Chelsea seems to have been on the grounds of where he was living then. Really he had taste, he followed the Greek play with taken on the job of a superman. Two supermen. I don't know how he lived through it. In fact, I don't know how Larry has lived so long. His three Shakespeare films would have worn out anyone else I can think of. It made one forgive the autocracy, for one realized the weight the man was carrying when he would say, 'Don't argue! Do it as I want iel' \" • To act is to enjoy power. On the stage, and in front of the camera, people who 28

are inept and unheard in their real lives can command eloquence, space, time, and the faith of strangers. Olivier is one of those actors stimulated by the pros- pect of authority. His physical confi- dence has always been a sign of his plea- sure in just being on stage. Ordinary experience is a mode of life he seldom seeks to repeat on stage or screen; per- haps he has managed to avoid it in life, too. He is so much more in his element playing royalty, rulers, masters of their houses. And just as his Richard III seems to inhale enemies and reluctant ladies, consuming them and converting As Archie Rice in The Entertainer. them into the proud hump of ugliness on his back, so Olivier may get goose cannot fail to notice a brilliant performer bring to mind. bumps of fever on the stage, but goes attempting to be bad; nor do we miss the I can hear and see the guilty Ronald cold and clever in pictures. real slur on the spirit it would be for Colman look-alike in Rebecca; the un- Archie Rice is a case in point, the one Olivier to appear humble and undistin- bridled zis-et-zat Johnnie in 49th Paral- Olivier performance I have seen on guished. That is why the machinery of lel; the dried-out lemon of Carpathia in stage and film. Twenty-six years after its pretending grates on the screen (though The Prince and the Showgirl (elementally London production, I can recall the leer- it is just as legitimate to call it miscasting opposed to his blancmange partner), ing horror with which Olivier grinned at when an actor in a film has to bear wit- built around the clenched tics ofa mono- the audience in The Entertainer. For ness to hopes that are not his own). Simi- cle and an accent like a mouth-sore; a here was a most unusual opportunity. In larly, though his Othello was hailed uni- TV Big Daddy taking his accent on a playing a feeble stand-up comic, Olivier versally in the theater, on the screen he tour of every imagined South and gently said to an audience, yes, there is author- reminds us that his own first identifica- bullying Robert Wagner and Natalie ity in performance, and Archie fumbles tion in the play was with lago. For Wood into the status of tourists at a it. But that lack is so ghastly and arrest- surely, it is the lieutenant who usurps stately home called Acting; the sinister ing that the power can be regained the power in that story, who runs the Crassus in Spartacus, trying to embarrass through a process of voluntary humilia- show, and reduces his ostensible com- Tony Curtis with hissing talk of fine tion. It is as if Olivier drew upon the mander to the level of a dupe. By na- flesh; and Andrew Wyke in Sleuth, less a memory of seeing wrecks or drunks on ture, lago is quicker than the Moor, and solid being than a deck of disguises. the stage and knew that sometimes, as the camera is very discerning of a mind's That was too reserved a film-it needed we watch people \"dying\" there, outrage true speed. Vincente Minnelli or George Cukor- and pity are eclipsed by such terrible • but shrewd casting in that it drew upon uniqueness. As Archie, he somehow Olivier's greatest asset at the National the maze with an absent core, and the knew that by getting very bad, sleazy, Theatre may have been his decisive- master of the house who dreads his own and abject, he could reassert the primi- ness. But as an actor, it bars him from a exposure. tive force that the stage holds. He made whole range of parts. Ralph Richardson No contradiction in Olivier is as dense the audience want the agony to stop. has a great generosity in allowing a sub- as that between duty and personal glory. It was instinct, Olivier's strength, the lime slowness to show in himself: it F rom Fire Over England to Inchon he has hunch and the will that are the spring in must have been there in his Falstaff and played warriors for whom defense of the his great leaps. Instinct makes him put his Peer Gynt; on the screen, it is the state was a polite shield for self-promo- on broken noses and curdle his own ruined center of the Lumet Long Day's tion. (If only he could have filmed Cor- voice with accents. But instinct is so Journey Into Night, and the root of his iolanus for the fair but pitiless eye of much more vulnerable to film, where wronged but helpless common man in Preminger!) It is all the more ironic that the actor can no longer test himself The Fallen Idol. In Providence, John he got himself into a predicament with against the smell and the creaking si- Gielgud can show us authority, only to the British establishment over a play that attacked the myth of Churchill, lence of the audience. Moreover, power go a step further and rebuke it for the RolfHochhuth's Soldiers, brought to the on screen requires a trust in self-denial lying protection it offers; the author he National by Tynan and Olivier, but that many theatrical actors regard with plays must die and shriek in the very turned down by the Board. Olivier was trepidation. For it strikes them as un- pain he has tried to invent. himself as ambitious and as emotional about fame as Churchill. His leadership likely that authority affects the camera I'm not sure that Olivier could ever of the National Theatre is a little like according to how little hindrance or dis- betray his respect for authority, or be so Churchill's vindication in the Second guise the actor offers it. Shyness is mas- resigned to making a fool of himself. I World War. Both men recognized their tery there. Lack of confidence-so long am not even certain that I know what own splendor in the country's crisis, and as there is no resort to coyness, self-pity, the plain man looks like-the off-stage both earned the criticism of being less or begging-begins to enthrall an audi- I Archie in The Entertainer perhaps; the than the self-effacing team-men their ence. Film sees false noses as humbug, police inspector in Otto Preminger's position seemed to indicate. and it makes exotic accents sound like Bunny Lake Is Missing; or the put-upon lies. schoolteacher in Term ofTrial. But these Churchill's drama involved time in With the film of The Entertainer, we are images and performances so hard to 29

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His Mo- No auto-biography in The Betsy. riarty in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is an Our Forte exact study in persecution and worry; Anthony Quinn was Henry to his beyond doubt, the Seventies and all Becket, on Broadway in 1960, and he Exclusive Soundtrack Selections their physical onslaught uncovered a has described the fearsome way in which And Limited Editionsl Olivier is lord of the jungle: \"The terri- more vulnerable man in Olivier. Even fying thing about working with Larry Over 1,000,000 LP'S available: Marathon Man and The Boysfrom Brazil was hearing that clarion tone of his. It In-Print and Out-of-Print, an array of have moments: in the first, the scene becomes an obsession to you because on imports, highly-desired reissues, and where he is identified and pursued by an the stage he has such fantastic authority original casts (on and off Broadway). old woman crying his name on 47th that if you try in any way to match him Street, and in the latter the genuine vocally he can kill you. You find yourself We offer the finest service dread of evil's power that he gives the reaching for notes that aren't in your available - monthly auctions by mail Nazi-hunter. For almost the first time in repertoire. The first two weeks I had a (rare, unique titles), the only monthly a film, Olivier could measure authority terrible case of laryngitis trying to stay FlImusic Newsletter \"Music Gazette\" as a blight that makes for victims. up with him. I really went through hell and many times I wanted to give up. But For YOUR copy of our extensive The illnesses have been prodigious. then Larry has such an amazing way of catalog, a sample of \"Music Gazette\" They testify to his will to live just as they making you feel that he's depending on ($2 value), and monthly auction, explain his nervousness about taking on you, when actually he's not at all. He is Please Remit $1.00 TODAY TO: a large stage part: Lear again, or Pros- so disarming, in the sense that every- pero or Falstaff. But the illnesses have body drops their guard. 'You will carry RTS, Dept. 20B also changed our role as his observers. me tonight, old boy, won't you because He has let himself become a belea- I'm terribly nervous?' he would say. But, P.O. Box 687 guered monument. His gaunt, trembly of course, the minute you are on stage Costa Mesa, California 92627 MacArthur in Inchon and his invalid fa- you realize you've taken on a cage full of ther in Brideshead Revisited are alike in lions.\"@ (714) 544-0740 Tu-Th 12-4 pm being tributes to Tory idiosyncracy, and not much more. There has been a tacit special pleading in his work: that we excuse its vagaries. Yet the same years have revealed the old age of Richardson and Gielgud in Home and No Man's Land -sedentary roles for the most part, but touched with a strangeness of behavior and being that is apparent in very little of Olivier's work. He has always preferred clarity to mystery. Which seems to say he is not quite a , great actor, or a strikingly intelligent 30

ection A Film FoLio by Dan Yakir Bellocchio · Ferreri · ScoLa · The Tavianis · The New Buffoons DeLMonte CardinaLe · Gassman · Loren· Mastroianni · Sandrelli · Tognazzi Introd'1-ctory Essay by Stephen Harvey 31

Most of the movIes thriving on the Twenty years ago, the Italians knew place. If Bellocchio's incest-infested subtitle circuit share one elusive but how to serve up just what we expected chamber dramas are the tragedies they necessary trait: they tend to be provoca- of them, but lately they seem to have seem, then how come they're so infer- tively alien in a soothingly predictable lost the knack. Their specialty used to nally funny? The Tavianis' The Night of way. They know where they stand in be spicy cynicism-It was always the Shooting Stars is neither a neo-neo- the cosmos, and neatly confirm what amusing to watch Alberto Sordi rise to realistic account of the Liberation that we already knew about the national the bottom of the post-war Economic was, nor a wistful folk tale exalting glo- characteristics of their countries of ori- Miracle, and Marcello Mastroianni or ries that never happened, but some- gin. Take (je vous en prie) the French Vittorio Gassman pant after a succes- thing poised elusively in between. film moyen starring Simone Signoret or sion of Sylvas and Stefanias, only to Three Brothers is most explicitly an alle- Annie Girardot or directed by one of have the bad luck to catch up with them gory of the limitations of idealism and the less renegade survivors of the New in the final reel. Modern life was a farci- the emptiness of ideology, but Rosi's Wave. All resolutely humanist stuff: a cal mess and womankind an alluring movie also contains some of the most few bemused tears, a bit of rueful menace, these movies said, but you passionately lyrical moments found in laughter, some photogenic meals, a might as well shrug your shoulders and any recent film. The one faith they all sundered romance, and the assurance keep speeding down the autostrada to- share is in the existence of an audience that, aufond, the human race is a pretty as wary of headlong sentiments and pat terrific species after all. People who wards a future that would most likely wouldn't condescend to take in a only be worse. equations as they are. Marsha Mason movie even on HBO All of them trust this public too much have been known to go ever so slightly In the Seventies, the Italian movies sodden over La Vie Continue or we saw kept purveying these staples to tyrannize it with the weight of their L'Adolescente-but then everyone while pretending to repudiate them. own intellectual idees fixes-some- knows the French are so much more Laura Antonelli was supposed to be thing which divides them more and refined than we are at conjuring the touching and vulnerable because she more from an apparent confrere like small-scale epiphanies of life. didn' t seem to enjoy undressing for suc- Bertolucci. 1900 seemed bent on prov- cess-she was forced to do it by those ing to us dummies lacking Bernardo The difference between French and decadent Mediterranean exploiters Bertolucci's snazzy education in Marx- German movies can be summed up by who shared the screen with her. Lina ist aesthetics that politics determined the Bruno Ganz Syndrome. In French Wertmuller's movies weren't the same everything. What this came down to movies, this actor gets to moon soul- old misogynistic commedie aU' italiana was that peasants like Gerard Depar- fully over Jeanne Moreau or Nathalie after all; they were really subversive dieu had bigger peekers than land- Baye. At home, he's sniped at by terror- political satire. If the old formulas were owners like Robert De Niro, because ists, possessed by vampires, and para- disintegrating from overuse and a they worked with their hands and hated lyzed by the demons inside his anomie- change in the atmosphere, fresh ones fascism. The Tavianis aren't nearly as ridden brain. German films teach us all clearly were needed. Abroad at least, confident of what they know as Berto- about pain, and they love it. Humor the demand was less for new movies of lucci is of late. In 1900, the second means having a dry snort at the expense real distinction than for confident con- world war ended because the just were of some fool thinking he has a future; a tinuing episodes in that madcap saga predestined to prevail, and the images happy ending is the spectacle of some devoted to Those Crazy, Lovable ital- chosen to illustrate this were just as Typhoid Lorelei getting her just Ians. fore-ordained-stalwart workers posed desserts. Inside the German bunker with spines braced against the horizon, within the Lincoln Plaza Triplex, only Which is probably why the boldest of oppressors hunched in the dark like the smug survive, while the mad and recent Italian films arrive here late (or rats, and no imperialist G.l.s anywhere the weak and the innocent get never) and attract relatively scant audi- in sight. ences when they do appear. Directors creamed. like Ettore Scola, Marco Bellocchio, Surveying the same period, The' the Taviani brothers, and Francesco Night of the Shooting Stars is too ab- Rosi have little in common, except that sorbed in taking all these historic con- all have been working at the peak of vulsions in to make such banal if right- their forces in the last few years, and all eous distinctions. During a climactic make movies whose distinctive trait is skirmish in a wheat field lit for a pasto- that they are profoundly disorienting. ral picnic, you can scarcely tell the par- These are agnostic films ,about mortally tisans from the Axis' stubborn last de- baffled people, as equivocal about the fenders . The camera freezes in genre rules which sustained Italian astonishment as someone skewers an movies for so long as their protagonists enemy, greets a re-emerging friend, are over the political and cultural as- drinks a dipper of water, and skips over sumptions which have guided post-war a spent body or two, all in an incon- Italian life till now. They willfully con- gruous jumble of seconds. A child found our expectations, not just from gapes in enchantment at a burst of one reel to the next but often within the bombardment fireworks which could same shot. have killed her. What matters in this movie is how things look in the now, Scola's movies have the structure and not the way hindsight teaches you what cast rosters of the old caustic comedies, everything really meant later on. Which and the aura of an elegy for a past that is why the Tavianis' Tuscan bedtime 'wasn' t really so wonderful in the first 32

· ... } ( Taking,refuge in the Taviani brothers' The Night of the Shooting Stars. 33

story has an exhilarating immediacy doesn't get lost somewhere in the cut- for so much of the film's two and a half that feels like truth. ting room. hours, while attending languid debates on the rights of the aristocracy, the jus- Rosi 's titular three brothers-a American audiences haven't yet got- tice of anarchy, and the beauties and Christian social worker, a leftist labor ten the chance to see Scola's La Ter- dangers of literature. Ideologues were organizer, and a magistrate engaged in razzo, which, like Three Brothers, is the doubtless unmoved by Scola's belief meting out justice to terrorists-muse distillation of its director's view of the that a shot of a radiant Hanna Schygulla at length over the anguish of the contemporary impasse in Italian life. I genuflecting before a dummy bearing present moment. Each has his own so- can understand why it hasn' t been im- the king's ceremonial robes proves be- lution which he privately knows to be ported here; Scola resembles no film- yond doubt that monarchy had its futile , while all persevere in hectoring maker so much as Joseph L. points, or that the sight of \"the people\" each other about the necessity of their Mankiewicz, and this is a three-hour bearing torches and determined grim- own missions. Rosi is sympathetic to all talkathon focusing on dire but parochial aces could be a mite dismaying to any- this-especially the need to have any crises in the Roman arts, letters, and one with sense. Scola's heroes, finally, belief at all to hold on to-but what he politics. (With a cast including Gass- are the bystanders who see their own really cares about is their dreams. I man, Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Jean- failings as clearly as they do the ex- don't think it's accidental that once Louis Trintignant, Serge Reggiani, and cesses of history: Mastroianni's elderly Three Brothers is over, the memory of Stefania Sandrelli, La Terrazza also can Casanova, dabbing another layer of the polemics fades like mist, but the boast ensemble acting of more force varnish on his face long past the time brothers' visions remain indelible. and subtlety than in any recent movie when it might have done some good, which comes to mind.) Scola tracks and Barrault's Restif de la Bretonne, a The judge has nightmares which each of these legislators, writers, and pornographer for the nonce who's stor- pinpoint his likely fate: being machine- media men through the sodden routine ing away his impressions of the revolu- gunned along with some random inno- of their professional days; their former tion for a more propitious moment. cents in the back of a Roman bus. The ambitions are now irrelevant or mislaid, youth worker's dreams summarize his which is precisely the fate in store for The acclaim which recently greeted hopes-sweeping away the urban mal- the newer order of achievers who ex- Leap into the Void has inspired distribu- adies that are corroding his charges- pend so much energy in despising their tors to exhume at least one of the Bel- using a literal dustbroom across an Ex- forebears . Scola himself belongs, locchios we've been missing: his 1976 pressionistic stage-set piazza. Their chronologically at least, to the same Victory March, an ironic title if there father has dreams gathered from what fading generation, but he refuses to ever was one for a movie about sexual he remembers: his wife waddling in the sentimentalize its plight-this is all rivalry, misogyny, and the misuse of sun down a dusty path to retrieve a merely the natural progression of power in a military garrison. In its sub- rabbit for their dinner, then turning things, and there's no reason why the liminal way, Leap into the Void is as with an impish smile and waving hello, class of '48 should be spared . Still, it's much about politics as Three Brothers; or farewell. I don't know why this scene ironic that a movie about cultural inertia inside their anachronistic enclave of makes me shiver, or just what it is that should in fact have turned out to be one gentility, Bellocchio's semi-wedded makes it so palpably sexy. I also can't of the most vital things Scola has ever and half-warped brother and sister have explain why I cry at the end of Ozu's done. barricaded themselves from the know- Late Spring when the widowed father ledge of their own superfluity in a rude pares a piece of fruit into a perfect spi- Scola's most recent film , the French egalitarian world, yet their isolation is ral, or halfway through How Green Was co-production La Nuit de Varennes, is a no less fatal an option. Throughout, My Valley, as a gust of wind lifts Mau- panorama of the French Revolution Bellocchio is much too alert to their reen O'Hara's veil into an arc just after filled in with the same tones of melan- human eccentricities to fossilize these her unsuitable marriage. Great direc- choly equanimity as La Terrazza. Gallic people into mere symbols of a Deserv- tors are the ones who manage to capture audiences apparently got a little saddle- edly Dying Class. It's the singularity of the ineffable, and then make sure it sore, trapped inside that bumpy coach pasty Michel Piccoli and his wan sister Anouk Aimee that makes this film so La Terrazza. arresting, not what they may represent -the ludicrous dignity with which he acts out the most childlike impulses, like sniffing his sister's sheets, or punc- turing the plaything bounced by some brat to disturb his solitude. In a recent interview, Bellocchio re- ported that the proxies of Marx and Freud no longer guide his work as they used to: all he trusts now is his own intuition. The gods seem to have toppled from every niche at RAI and Cinecittli these days, and this is proba- bly the best thing to have happened to Italian movies since neo-realism lost its luster. -STEPHEN HARVEY 34

Marco Bellocchio Marco Bellocchio \"doesn' t see be- yond his belly-button,\" wrote one Ital- ian critic. But such is Bellocchio's strength as a dramatist and a stylist that one can perceive through his anguish the torment of an entire generation of Italy's bourgeoisie. On his debut with I Pugni in Tasca (Fist in the Pocket, 1965), about a young epileptic who murders his psychotic family to liberate a \"normal\" brother, the director was hailed as a poet of cinematic madness. Like Bernardo Benolucci, he rebelled against the au- thority of the father; like Luis Bufluel, against the oppressive powers of the bourgeoisie, the educational and reli- gious systems, the military, and above all the family. This web of institutional authority so victimizes Bellocchio's he- roes that they often careen to the brink of madness-where the filmmaker's Marco Bellocchio oeuvre teeters in fascinated, and fasci- nating, equilibrium. brother's experiences, including an af- was Chekhov's text-and another cate- In his endless quest to decipher the fair with his ex-girlfriend (Angela Mo- gory, which includes political, issue-ori- mystery of madness, Bellocchio, 43, re- lina). Leap describes the sick, stifling ented films such as Fit to be Untied, La sisted easy political and formal answers. relationship of a man (Michel Piccoli) Macchina Cinema [1978], Sbatti il Mostro Though he found some solace in Marx- and his supposedly insane sister (Anouk in Prima Pagina [Slap the Monster on ist-Leninism and psychoanalysis, he Aimee). When she discovers the will to Page One, 1972] and Victory March. was ever ready to discard a dogmatic live, she gains her sanity and her brother You could say that Leap into the Void \"solution\" when it was no longer useful. loses his. was born out of the tragedy and despair This is why the tone of his early work, To chart Bellocchio's transforming of a certain kind of family life of the eincluding his second picture, La Cina maturity, one need only turn to the Italian bourgeoisie. It's a middle class VLCina (China is Near, 1967), consists of scene in The Eyes, the Mouth in which that's already disappearing. Therefore, scathing eruptions of anger, while more Castel and Molina watch the murder the kind of house, education, and atti- recent fare, such as SaLto nel Vuoto (Leap scene from Fist in the Pocket. Molina is tudes toward life that I've described are into the Void, 1979) and his latest, Gli about to cry in shock when Castel kisses a bit passe. But the images I've chosen Occhi, La Bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth, her. Instead of the despair of death, the do represent this despair, this \"ordinary 1982), offer labyrinthine chases after new Bellocchio offers sensuality. In- madness\" of everyday life, of small ges- the essential, where love and hate, free- stead of absolute separation among peo- tures and polite routines. dom and duty, pleasure and guilt coexist ple, he now foresees a certain closeness. You 've distinguished between autobio- so closely that their bearers find it excru- Bellocchio has survived many wars of graphical and politicaL films, but not be- ciating simply to exist. the intellect and the spirit. Now he car- tween your fiction fiLms and your docu- These days, Bellocchio is making a mentaries. ries on the struggle. - DAN YAKIR comeback. Leap into the Void has already No, because for me the difference is opened to favorable reviews in the U.S.; • in ideas and content rather than style. How did such different projects as Leap Marcia Trion/ale (Victory March, 1976) into the Void and Victory March come The Seagull is more representative of and The Eyes, the Mouth are scheduled about? What was it that enticed you to what I feel than Victory March. That film for release later this year. The previous pursue each ofthem? is a more calculated, reasoned effon, a Bellocchio film to receive theatrical re- Well, Leap into the Void started autobi- representation of my military experi- lease here was NeL Nome deL Padre (In the ographically, in the sense of referring to ence-that cruel, stupid, violent life Name of the Father) in 1972; Matti da childhood experiences in the provincial that the petit bourgeois hero [Michele SLegare (Fit to Be Untied, 1974), a col- town of Piacenza. Those experiences Placido] can't accept. He tries every- laborative documentary, was shown at determined the choice of subject in thing in order not to compromise, until the 1981 New York Film Festival. many of my films, from Fist in the Pocket he does just that. Leap into the Void is a more mature, through China is Near and In the Name of You have said that your tendency is to- the Father to Leap into the Void and The more darkly comic evocation of Fist in Eyes, the Mouth. ward the surreal rather than the reaL. the Pocket, to which The Eyes, the Mouth I I always start with a realistic situation. is a son of hallucinatory sequel. In Fist, There is in my work a very clear sepa- Lou Castel played the murderous hero; ration between the above category-in I look for stories with a logical sequence in Eyes he is an actor who tries to find the which I also include The Seagull [/l Gab- of things, with credible characters and a meaning of his life by reliving his dead biano, 1976] in spite of the fact that it real complexity. I have been formed by the realistic cinema: in America, I like 35

Kazan; in France, Renoir. But I often about the plight of the insane. We de- shoot Pirandello's Henry N just as I shot I seek to transform certain sequences of cided to make a film about the cinema, The Seagull. I retained Chekhov's entire the film and bring them to a non-realistic but we had no firm idea and the project text and shot the film in a villa, near a level. The problem is that I've often suffered a bit because of that. It has real lake. I'd do Henry N with a revised dealt with the subject of madness and characters but no systematic inquiry. text, with new images more befitting of therefore had characters that behaved the cinema. differently. So I have to create meta- For example, we have a ponrait of phors, to create something accessible. It Daniela Rocca, whose case reminds a bit How did you become a director? would be easy to depict their madness in of Frances Farmer's. She starred her act- I studied acting at the theater school a naturalistic way-show what you see ing career with a beauty contest and was in Milan. Since my voice wasn't strong in a psychiatric ward-but that would be soon picked up by a producer who spon- enough, I had to abandon theater acting. boring. I prefer to follow Shakespeare, sored her. But she had no defense mech- Naively, I thought I could play in films, who gave the Fool a different meaning. anism. She became known, especially as where my voice could be dubbed. I was Marcello Mastroiaimi's wife in Divorce, admitted to the Centro Sperimentale di Why your interest in madness? Italian Style, but later couldn't find the Cinematografica in Rome as an actor, Again, it goes back to my childhood. right vehicles. She tried to write and but switched to directing after one year. In my family, we had not only the kind direct. When her career starred declin- After my diploma, I went to London to of \"ordinary madness\" I mentioned, but ing, she became violent, insane. In the determine whether I had made the right real, clinical madness. It's an unforgetta- film, she talks about her career. It's a decision. I needed a different environ- ble memory. It's something I'm terrified classical porrrait. ment, a place to step back into. On that of and by dealing with it again and again solitary trip I wrote Fist in the Pocket. I I'm removing myselffrom it, anesthetiz- • shot it in my mother's house for 50 mil- ing myself to it. Ostensibly my life was lion lire, [$50,000]. I was lucky. normal, but it was really quite desper- Why do you makefilms? But I really became a director because ate. My family was very conservative, It's my way of questioning things. At I couldn't accept solitary creation. I highly moralistic, and strongly Catholic. first I tried to express myself through wanted to express myself not in collabo- I suffered from the absence of my painting, writing, acting, and I ended up ration with others so much as through father. He was a lawyer who spent all his directing. But I see the choice in terms them. Only film and theater make this time making a living for my mother and of my rapporr with the theater. There's a the eight children. In my films, the fa- ther figure is almost never there. I never theatrical side to all my films. r d like to really knew my father, so in my films I try to make him disappear. I always have Anouk Aimee and Michel Piccoli in Leap into the Void. authoritarian characters with whom the young protagonists get into violent con- flicts-of rage but also of dependence. Could you draw a parallel between your own experience at school and the army with their depiction in, respectively, In the Name of the Father and Victory March? The three years I spent at the French Catholic School at Lodi, which was the equivalent of college, were less trau- matic than my time spent at home, in spite of the intellectual degeneration I suffered there. My military service was much more violent, because I was sent there after going to the university and having made Fist in the Pocket. It was too much of a shock to become a caged ani- mal after having experienced an exalted existence. In order to be released, I fought to pass for insane. After one month of service, they sent me to a hos- pital and then I continued service practi- cally at home. I was 25 then. Your latestfilm is, among other things, a comment on your own work. Is La Mac- china Cinema, then, a reflection on the nature offilmmaking? After we made Fit to be Untied- Silvano Agosti, Stefano Rulli, Sandro Petraglia, and I-we were offered an- other project, since the picture had been well received and triggered discussions 36

such rigid characters, or is it simply be- cause you'd like to see them dead? [Laughs.] Nero's character is always close to suicide, so the fact that he pro- vokes the soldier to shoot him in the end is natural. For Placido, it's the fascina- tion with Nero's authority yet knowing that he's superior to him intellectually. This fascination with authority is typical of the petit bourgeois. It's the allure of fascism. The same goes for the character of Yves Beneyton in Name ofthe Father. Italian society was peace-loving but it chose fascism. That's where the story begins; and that fragility, that desire to obey, continues in the son. • The scene in Leap, where the children dance in the apartment after PLacido pisses on the Law books, evokes Viridiana . Was it conscious? Do you like BuflueL? I like him a lot, but there's no con- scious relationship. For me it was the idea that with the destruction of the house and the affirmation of the sister's departure, madness starts getting out of the window or through the door-and the ghosts of childhood could disappear too. The house starts breathing, becom- ing human. It's central to the style of the film and I used it to avoid the risk of the classical flashback. I preferred to remain in the present. The last scene in Leap, in which the camera rushes through doors and into rooms,foLiowing Piccoli, is impressive . It was a single take. I needed to dis- cover the house for the last time, prior to abandoning it-prior to his suicide- and especially to give the sense that he could no longer escape his responsibil- Emmanuelle Riva and Lou Castel in The Eyes , The Mouth. ity, his fate. He tries to hide, but can't. I also wanted to show a death that wasn't possible. It's a means to view life with a in my intuition. I like actors who give. too idealized or theatrical. He simply certain hope, even joy. Of course, that Miou-Miou, for example, is wonderful. jumps out the window. Naturally. doesn't mean you can't have a violent, She gives everything. The structure of Leap into the Void is even sadistic relationship with others in As to Franco Nero, his tragedy is his symmetrical, circular, and is based on the the cinema-especially toward actors. beauty. But he has a great willpower and logic ofa dream . But the life I love doesn't include in Victory March I felt there was a rapport In Leap, I created the style according violence or the submission of others. between him and his violent, rigid char- to the situation, in which there are often How do you work with actors? acter. His violence was reflected in the two characters, each in an adjacent I don't like to explain the characters or sex scenes with Miou-Miou. He slapped room. I wanted to show madness provide the logic behind things. When her for real; he became crazy. It's this through such a situation, because I al- actors have a direct, visceral rapport with identity between his character and him- ways remember that in my childhood their roles, they need no explanations. A self that makes it his best role. He's very the insane were speaking in the other general briefing will suffice. I look for professional and quite generous, but room. The voices of the mad became a actors with whom I can establish this when he depends too much on tech- violent kind of persecution, an obses- kind of relationship. With Michel Pic- nique you get standard results. In Fass- sion. My parents didn't understand how coli on Leap into the Void, I talked about binder's last film, Querelle, he had a serious it was for me and my brothers. the clothes and gestures of his character; I problem playing a homosexual. He was The other principle was the use of he added the rest himself. We worked embarrassed. real time for several instances of daily very well together. I like to know the The characters of Nero in Victory life: at the dinner table, or when Piccoli actors ahead of time, if possible. I need March and Piccoli in Leap into the Void is in the corridor listening to his delirious to trust them and for them to have faith have a death wish. Is it an integral part of sister, feeling a sudden urge to do her 37

harm. I work a lot on little gestures, on society, but one which accepts that soci- Marco Ferreri common, even banal motions; I try to ,ety and seeks to allow man to live ac- create a style through them. cording to its rules. Massimo Fagioli is a \"Art is doing something dangerous revolutionary, because he believes in with style,\" declares Charles Serking Why the dark colors of films such as the recovery of man: retrieving the qual- (Ben Gazzara) in Marco Ferreri's Tales of Leap, Name of the Father, even March? ity of life, of the imagination, and espe- Ordinary Madness (1981). Ferreri is fond cially a complete and complex sensual- ofSerking-a man, based on the Ameri- I've always been interested in having ity. He reminds me a bit of Wilhelm can author Charles Bukowski, who re- my characters come out of obscurity. Reich, who had a strong insight into cites poetry between boozing and forni- Some scenes in Leap were too somber, sexuality, but went mad. cating-but disagrees with his which may explain why it wasn't all that manifesto. \"That art,\" says the bearded, commercial. People need light. In Leap into the Void, I wanted to show 54-year-old director, \"is an outmoded a situation of stagnation and describe it concept from a defunct society. It's over. In 1969, you made Paola and Viva il through madness-':\"\"because the heroine Real art is the attempt to be in harmony Primo Maggio Rosso. How did the May can't control her private life-but also with one's self and with others.\" 1968 events influence you? show the possibility of recovery. Not to comfort and appease, but in a more vital Ferreri has made his career-19 films These two films were made when I sense. The tragedy of Piccoli is that in 25 years-out of the search for social belonged to an extreme left organization from the moment (AnoukAimee) leaves harmony in the morally bankrupt mod- in which we discussed not only my bour- the house, he loses his reason for living. em world. His first three films, shot in geois formation but also my identity as He was the center of the film. But in The Spain, combined the Neo-Realist influ- an artist. The latter was even more im- Eyes, I wanted to show what the woman portant, because everything was geared [Angela Molina] does. Marco Ferreri. toward serving the cause of the revolu- ence ofAlberto Lattuada, with whom he tion. The artistic quest was absolutely You think you understand women better had worked earlier, with the scathing subordinate to the political goal. Our now and thus are ready to talk about them? black humor of Rafael Azcona, the slogan was \"serving the people\" and I Spanish novelist who went on to write 14 made those two films as propaganda. Yes. And to talk about them now is of Ferreri's movies. EI Pisito (The Apart- also to change sides, to be less self-cen- ment, 1958) was about a young man who We used to say that in order to know a tered. What Fellini said is true: You can marries an old woman to inherit her certain reality, we had to experience it. only talk of what you know. Unless you apartment; EI Cochecito (The Wheel- It's true. And we only knew the bour- depict the impossibility of a man to ac- chair, 1960) depicted an old man poison- geois world. We thought that if we be- cept the change in the situation of ing his family for a wheelchair. came acquainted with the universe of women, as I did in Leap into the Void. the peasants and farmers, we'd discover \"With Azcona,\" Ferreri says, \"it was something completely different. We As a filmmaker, do you feel like an out- my youth. He was almost a brother. We tried to mingle among them, but discov- sider? A marginal? started together and shared an identical ered that theory and practice are two way of viewing things-the same black different things. We didn't really search. The marginality exists in the sense humor. We had a very good rapport It was blind obedience to Mao's Marx- that the cinema has a very limited im- throughout the revisionist period. After ism-Leninism. So, it was a complete ne- pact on Italian society. Today, television that, our ways no longer coincided, be- gation of the artistic quest, which must is increasingly important and all th,e cause the revisionist period ended for remain free. Art isn't meant to become filmmakers of my generation feel the me. I can no longer talk about 'society' propaganda, which is why these two pic- frustration of having to work for it. We or 'the couple' or use black humor.\" tures are mediocre. It was a kind of sui- have become poorer materially; we used cide on my part. Honorable, perhaps, to make more money years ago. So, film From his first Italian picture, L'Ape but suicide nevertheless. people are a bit more solitary, even more \"aristocratic\" than before. But the more You have often acknowledged the influ- romantic side, that of a filmmaker ence of psychoanalyst Massimo Fagioli, maudit, rejected by society, doesn't re- who is a controversialfigure. ally exist. Italian cinema is very hetero- genic, which reflects Italian society. His psychoanalytic theory is totally Most Italian films today are quite bad, original and has nothing to do with consisting of pure entertainment. But Freud or lung. For me, Leap into the there are still a few marginals who suffer Void, contrary to what some critics humiliation in order to keep creating. wrote, is not at all Freudian. It is much They suffer alone. There's no sense of closer to Fagioli, who's nothing short ofa an artistic community, which existed af- revolutionary. For several years, I've ter the War in the Neo-Realist move- been in collective therapy-not to be ment. confused with group therapy-by him in Rome and his spirit is expressed in the Do youfeel less pessimistic now? film. Also, with a mood of more severe Certainly. The problem with pessi- crisis and greater contradictions, the mism and optimism is that they don't same spirit permeates The Eyes, the pass through the will to be. The best result for me is not to say that I wish to Mouth. be different, personally and artistically, The Freudian school seeks to medi- but to manifest it by imagination and fantasy. That's when the wish becomes ate between the individual and society. a reality. It aims at controlling one's chaos and madness. It's a therapy of uprooting- not a therapy that discusses institutional 38

Regina (The Conjugal Bed, 1963), in seek something different. \" was transfonned. I don't describe the which Marina Vlady is so detennined to It is a sign of the times that a man who future. America is the present, the cen- have a son that her husband (Ugo once made movies for cinephiles now ter of the Empire, where the structures Tognazzi) dies of sexual exhaustion, aims his movies at the mass European are still holding. Europe is the past, the Ferreri focused on the perpetual skir- audience. Ferreri declares that this is periphery. \" mish of the sexes amid collapsing mores, precisely what he intended. He can still Bye Bye Monkey, an allegory about traditions, and institutions. Since La de- make films \"for myself'-like Dillinger man's approaching extinction, pits La- mierefemme (The Last Woman, 1976), he e Morto (Dillinger Is Dead, 1969), where fayette (Gerard Depardieu), a man in has directed his lens at the individual: communication was smothered in stun- search of new relationships and a mean- man, woman, child. ning images, and Chiedo Asilo (My A.ry- ing to his life, against Flaxman Oames \"I used to make films to change soci- lum, 1979), about children in a kinder- Coco), the humanist who so fears the ety,\" he declares. \"But now I realize it garten-but mostly, he says, \"I make imminent regression of man that he lives has transfonned itself. We have entered films to unify, bring people together, by in a museum dedicated to Roman civili- a new Middle Ages and are searching for using images that are common to all of zation, as well as Luigi (Marcello Mas- a new society. La grande bouffe [The Europe's new generation. I seek an troianni), a man of political utopia who Grande Bouffe, 1973] was my last film oneiric vision of reality to get closer to can't fit in. Previously, the alienation of about the 'old' society. It closed an era. others. \" Gerard Depardieu in La derniere femme Mterward, we had the energy crisis and This quest has led him to America, or Michel Piccoli, who murders his wife other dramatic changes.\" In La grande where he shot Bye Bye Monkey (Ciao, without premeditation in Dillinger, or bouffe, where four gounnets stuff them- Maschio, 1978) and Tales of Ordinary Marcello Mastroianni in Break-Up had to selves and die surrounded by their own Madness. Monkey depicts a desolate do with their spiritual malaise. \"In those three films, I showed alienation as re- lated to work, the factory, because that's the way it was. Today, you can no longer talk about it. Now it's more like Bye Bye Monkey, where the heroes spend time in exteriors and their positions aren't clearly defined. It's like a fantastic voy- age into the core of our reality.\" More often than not, Ferreri's heroes end up committing suicide, murder, or self-mutilation. \"In the mind of the con- temporary European spectator,\" he says, \"these are tragic, even barbaric, ways to solve the problem. But the young accept these deaths very well. They don't consider them morbid. They understand that a hero may reach a moment in which he chooses suicide. \" \"We know a little bit about love, but absolutely nothing about sex,\" asserts Andrea Ferreol and Philippe Noiret in The Grande Bouffe. the director, whose characters often are unable to distinguish between the two. excrement and vomit, and L' Uomo dai New York, ruled by rats and inhabited \"I didn't know it before, but now I'm Cinque Palloni (Break-Up, 1965), in by desperate loners and dropouts, and convinced that nothing can really hap- which Marcello Mastroianni's obsession Ferreri's central image is that of the pen between men and women-and with discovering the maximum volume beach along the Hudson with the World that there's nothing anyone can do about of a balloon leads to his own suicide, Trade Center towering above it, partly it. There are no guilty ones, or else both Ferreri has established his cinematic obscured by the dead body of an enor- are to blame. The couple is an economic method: he starts from a realistic situa- mous chimpanzee, Macho Kong. Tales entity, not a natural one, and we can no tion, then pushes it all the way toward its takes place in Los Angeles, where sleazy longer talk about it. \" inevitable explosion. hotel rooms, dingy bars, and sun- Whether he shows the \"Queen Bee,\" \"The explosions, the exaggerations, drenched, dirt-filled streets swanning who devours the male in L'Ape Regina, with bums create the perfect environ- or the moustachioed and bearded Ape the black humor were meant to shock ment for artistic creation. Woman (Annie Girardot in La Donna avant-garde audiences. But the young Scimmia, 1964), a kind-hearted sort of generation that now sees my films has \"Early in my career,\" explains Fer- Elephant Woman exploited by her hus- already exploded. I love to break up reri, \"a project would start from an idea. band (Ugo Tognazzi), Ferreri traces the things, but at this time of transition I Now it's an image, the most essential root of all evil to social institutions. don't seek it. I try to be the camera of image possible. I made films in America \"Here, Tognazzi victimizes Girardot the the filmgoing public, to represent what's in order to find images that correspond way he was taught; he is a victim of his in their heads. It's not my generation; to the period in which we live. These work. As for woman, she may be a vic- we 'old folks' still talk of L'Ape Regina. images-these natural locations-have tim, too. But she has at her disposal a But the new generation, those who energy because America is new. It's a fantasy world untouched by man. Man know me only through my recent films, civilization that came from Europe and 39

Gerard Depardieu in The Last Woman. Gazzara in Tales of Ordinary Madness. is the fruit of society, and as society be- can help mediate. Chiedo Asilo is per- sleeping wife (Anita Pallenberg) and came weaker, so did man. But woman's haps the most important film for me, position is more vital because it is more because it's an exploration of man when takes a sailboat to Tahiti. Food =sex conscious and contested. As man is be- he's several months old. Man is closer to God when he is that young. =gun =death. coming weaker, woman is becoming stronger, growing up. \"Anyway, because women are closer If Dillinger is an extreme example of to the child, I decided to make my latest images replacing words, it is not the only \"In the past, I told stories about men film, Storia di Piera. I found a book film in which Ferreri has exposed the and women, but in The Last Woman I written by two women about the rela- inadequacy of spoken language. In Bye really tried to discover women. At the tionship of one [Isabelle Huppert] with Bye Monkey, Depardieu often grunts and time, I thought it was a bit too early to her mother [Hanna Schygulla]. The uses his whistle when he wants to ex- talk about children, so I felt that women mother, for me, is a very modern, actual press something more emotional, to cre- were closer to children than men, be- heroine-the way Serking is in Tales of ate \"poetry.\" This absurd, moving im- cause of their fantasy and imagination. Ordinary Madness-and will,be well-un- age evokes the work of the In Chiedo Asilo, I tried to tell the story of derstood by the public. It's a story of two French-Rumanian playwright Eugene a child, and it wasn't easy, so in Bye Bye people who eat in the street, seek a Ionesco. \"I love Ionesco, because he too Monkey I used a monkey baby instead of rapport with the sun, and have a non-tra- tries to break things and liberate the a real one.\" In Monkey, Lafayette (De- ditional attitude toward sex.\" people who use words and receive pardieu) legally adopts a baby monkey them.\" Ferreri pays great attention to he finds near the corpse of Macho Kong Until recently, one of Ferreri's trade- creating a \"harmony of color\" to en- and yields to the creature's dependence marks has been the creation ofcinematic hance the image, but dismisses music as on him. He plays the role of father with- triangles. To express the inability of his \"an old convention, not too important. \" out complaints. But when his girl be- couples to get together, he would add a Similarly, his camera is mostly static: comes pregnant, he cannot face the re- third element, an obstacle, to come be- \"When I find the image I consider es- sponsibility and abandons her. tween them: in Break-Up; the balloon; sential, I want to film it, and I move the in La Grande Bouffe, food; in The Last camera as little as possible so as not to \"In The Last Woman,\" says Ferreri, Woman, the knife and the baby; in Liza obstruct the image.\" \"the man is already trying to change. He (1972), a dog-Catherine Deneuve can seeks a dialogue with women, maybe in only get through to loner Mastroianni as Ferreri regards his actors as \"images,\" a more brutal way-by chopping off his a human dog once his real dog dies. too. While they can in themselves be cock-but he starts that dialogue. Perhaps the most complex set of visual inspirational (Omelia Muti was essential Barely. And whenever there's a dia- equations exists in Dillinger Is Dead: Mi- for him to visualize Tales), they always logue, it's bound to be tragic. I don't chel Piccoli divides his time between emerge as images within the image of think there has ever been a dialogue cooking and toying with his gun. He their surroundings. \"I like to work with between men and women, which is why gets in bed with the maid (Annie Girar- actors who abandon the notion of 'act- I returned to the child. Man can talk to dot), gun in hand, and licks honey off ing,' .\" he says, \"and become people man and women can have a dialogue her back. He then proceeds to shoot his who want to live our common daily ad- among themselves, and maybe children venture. I don't like to discuss with them, because the film has a reality 40

that's outside all of us. What counts is That was the year he turned to direct- putting the actors in a situation where they can become the characters. When Ettore Scola ing, and again the maturing process- Depardieu made The Last Woman and Bye Bye Monkey, he gave everything. So Few filmmakers have ventured to ex- from farce to social comedy-was evi- did Hanna Schygulla in Storia di Piera; plore human dignity-or its absence- she participated totally in the role. with more zeal than Ettore Scola. In dent. His first international success was films as different as Down and Dirty and \"That's the way I worked with Mas- his latest, La nuit de Varennes, he reveals Drama della Gelosia (The Pizza Triangle, a sensibility as refined as it is crude, as compassionate as it is cruel, as precise as 1970), a pre-Wertmuller comedy with it is loose. All these contradictions coex- ist peacefully and provocatively in a ca- Marcello Mastroianni , Monica Vitti, and reer that consists of the 15 features he has directed (plus some sketches in om- Giancarlo Giannini . With C' era-vamo nibus films) and the 50 scripts he wrote troianni and Tognazzi as well. In those for others over the past decades. At 51, tanto Amati (We All Loved Each Other So days, Tognazzi was a bit like Depardieu he is gradually becoming the most re- today, but with less contradictions. Mas- spected filmmaker in his country, which Much, 1975), his valentine to the early has done nothing to modify his vigor, a strength that survived consistent com- Italian cinema, Scola established his mercial success as well. troianni for me always stands for reason. reputation as a critical and festival favor- He represents the logical, the daily rou- Born in 1931, Scola entered the film tine. Piccoli was like that too at the time, industry in the early Fifties and began ite, winning prizes at Cannes for Brutti but I can't use him now. The women collaborating on dozens of comedies- most important to me were Annie Girar- first pure romantic slapstick, then the Sporchi e Cattivi (Down and Dirty, dot, Omelia Muti, and Hanna. Omelia stiletto of acute social observation. In represents what cannot be expressed. I this period Scola's scripts helped shape 1976) and Una Giornata Particolare like Isabelle Huppert too, but 1 pre- the personalities of Italy'S most popular ferred the mother's character in Storia di male stars. For Alberto Sordi he wrote (A Special Day, 1977). The balletic cam- Piera, which I gave to Hanna. My next Due Notti con Cleopatra (Two Nights with film will have Omelia and Hanna. \" Cleopatra, 1954) and Made in Italy era movements of his films, including a (1965); for Vittorio Gassman, Il Matta- One thing Ferreri doesn't do is cast tore (Love and Larceny, 1960), Il Sor- complicated six-minute tracking shot passo (The Easy Life, 1962), and Il Suc- cesso (1963); for Ugo Tognazzi, Alta that opens A Special Day, provide ironic Infedelta (High Infidelity) and Il Magnif- ico Cornuto (The Magnificent Cuckold), commentary to the bitter travails of his both 1964. characters. Scola can kick the spectator Ettore Scola. in the gut, spit in his face, drag him through the muck-and leave him actors he considers as alteregos. \"1 don't equipped with a new consciousness, an think we need an alterego,\" he states. \"We need to get into the belly of others, awareness that is social, political, and aesthetic. • -DAN YAKIR to explore others. You see, I've never You began as a screenwriter, with looked back, never looked in the mirror to decipher whether I was happy or not. dozens of screenplays for, among others. Now I'd like to find out how I managed to travel for 15 years without a moment Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, and Antonio of boredom. 1 used to be a 'hippie,' a free man, until I went to Spain and dis- Pietrangeli. How does an Italian screen- covered the book El Pisito by Azcona. writer collaborate with the director? It's always a give-and-take situation . From Pietrangeli, I learned to pay at- Then I started 'working.' I had discov- tention to women at a time when no- ered cinema as a child, but I was no film buff. It was a game of sorts. But if you body spoke of feminism or even of ask me if! was happy then, well, 1 don't women . Women in Italian cinema were always mothers, sisters, or whores, and know the meaning of happiness-what nobody ever tried to understand what it means to feel at ease with one's body. \" went on in a woman's mind. I wrote all Underneath the ferocious satire, the of his films-Io La Conoscevo Bene. outrageous situations, and the subver- Adua e le Compagne, La Parmigiana , sive spirit, isn' t there an unquenchable Nata Di Marzo-all with major female thirst for all things moderate, for \"nor- roles. mality\"? \"Of course,\" agrees the direc- From Risi , I learned to include very tor, \"but for the moment we're abnor- light moments-add a meaningful mal, not in harmony with others. In this touch without overstressing things . His time of transition, people will seek this camera appears to roam around casu- harmony-not a meaningless happi- ally, but it's reall y very observant. He's ness. Maybe man is tragic and his life is naturall y talented , which is why I get nothing but suffering, but this suffering upset when he makes a bad film. We is harmonious with his way of being. \" made eight films together, including In several of his films, Ferreri uses the The Easy Life [/l Sorpasso 1and I Mostri. beach as the final image. \"The sea,\" he What kind of a rapport do you have explains, \"is central to our lives. We're with people like Risi? born in salt water, in the womb. But I In Italy, unlike in France, the don't use the sea as a symbol of hope. I auteurs see each other ofte n. We get no longer have hope; I have the cer- together every week; we're friends. tainty of change. We keep changing, for We're not competitive the way they are the better. We are the protagonists ofour I in America. It doesn't matter who time and a protagonist doesn't need makes less. hope. We may be in the midst of a tragic How do you generate projects? moment, but it's active, productive, and I don' t know the exact moment strong.\" -DAN YAKIR when an idea is born, but ideas circulate 41

and you start studying them. My films herself completely and plunges into the among them, too. And not at all casu- are always preceded by long periods of ally. writing-sometimes up to a year. I start character, which is why I sometimes alone, then invite other collaborators • like Age-Scarpelli [the team of Agenore keep in a film the mistakes she's made Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli] or Rug- In La nuit de Varennes, you focus on gero Maccari, the screenwriters with -say, when she forgets a line-be- historical event, in which the protago- whom I work most often. nists are trapped. Why your interest in the cause she's already so much into her As to We All Loved Each Other So French RevoLution? Much, I wanted to make an epic film role that she makes up for it. The revolution began on French soil about Italy at the end of the War, when I was very young, which would spill In Gassman, there are many differ- two centuries ago and created new into our time-a film about the hope values that the world must still take into and despair regarding what we hoped ent actors-even some bad ones! He account today. That night in Varennes, for that didn't materialize. It took a year when Louis XVI and the Royal Family to write. can do almost anything. But there's also tried to escape from Paris, determined the question of the value of Man. The Italian cinema has almost always a private side to him-I've known him film is about a king who departs from been concerned with the national real- the scene and the people who love him ity-unlike the more \"personal\" very well, since I was 20 and he 30- but decide that they have to arrest him. French filmmakers. Maybe they're To me, this is evidence that History is greater artists than we are, but they and he has a timid, uncertain side, made of the histoty of the individual. In don't look around them. In Italy, on a A SpeciaL Day, I showed history looming few happy occasions, the cinema even which contradicts his physique and above the destiny of two humble peo- ple who hope to divorce themselves anticipated the mentality and customs looks. from their environment. There, history of the Italians. Divorce, for example, dictated particular destinies. In La nuit became legal partly due to some Italian Do you feeL like a marginaL, or is it de Varennes, it is the individual who films, which helped some people over- come the taboos of sex, family, and simpLy a usefuL position from which to helps trigger the forces of history. authority. So you see, my interests remain the examine your characters? Do you think that Italian cinema bene- same even when themes, periods, and fits artistically from its constant financiaL I used to feel that way, when I ar- formats change. People said that Pas- crisis? sione d' Amore was a departure for me. rived in Rome from Trevico in the But to me the ugly woman [Valeria It has always been in a crisis, as long D'Obici] in Passione, the homosexual as I can recall. Without a crisis, Italian south. I was four years old and felt quite [Marcello Mastroianni] in A SpeciaL cinema would seem strange, as if it Day, the slum dwellers in Down and were controlled by the Mafia. And the different from the other kids at school. Dirty, they're all apart from the rest of cinema is just about the only field in the world; they're marginal because of Italy where the Mafia isn't present. When I started making films, I also felt their nature. My approach is always the We're not protected by the government same. In fact, I often have the impres- and we're often disliked by it, because not too satisfied with what I was doing. sion of making the same picture over we're always critical, always poking and over again. fun. They prefer television, which is I started as gagman, a ghostwriter. Now completely servile to the powers-that- In La nuit de Varennes, as in La Ter- be. I feel that it wasn't such a bad way to razza and We Ail Loved Each Other So Much, you express disillusionment over You're considered an actor's director. break into filmmaking. It's a craft that I like actors a lot, because they're the Lost ideaLs. ones to transmit my ideas to the public. no longer exists. Yes, there are moments in history- So, before shooting, I try to make my ideas clear to them. They're my first When did you become interested in as in the French Revolution-when public. I respect them. I think that exalted man believes that everything even actors with great careers are used a fiLm? will change, but other forces prevail. In bit differently in my films. Not because terms of action, you have to be optimis- I force them to forget their personality, I've always been interested in im- tic. You have to do things, work, make but I think the character is more impor- films, become politically engaged. But tant than the actor. ages. I used to draw as a kid and it's hard not to be pessimistic about What was it you wanted to bring out in ideas, about man, because you can't Stefania SandreLli and Vittorio Gassman published my drawing in satiric journals ignore everything that happened in the in We All Loved Each Other So Much past and is happening now. or La Terrazza? like Marc Aurelio. Then I started writ- I wanted to use Stefania's instinct What's your notion ofa politicalfilm? and intelligence. She has a natural out- ing for them and then for radio-re- A political film doesn't necessarily look, almost like an animal. I know I have to deal with a specific political can confide a character to her and she'll views, sketches, gags. Through that, I situation. Politics means man and his instinctively flesh it out. She forgets mentality. The fascist mentality of man met filmmakers like Age-Scarpelli and is a political factor. Therefore Passione d'Amore is a political film about the way Monicelli, and I began collaborating people look at beauty and ugliness. But I don't talk about \"messages.\" I'm not with them, first anonymously, then with a byline. I like writing. I consider myself first and foremost a screenwriter, and only then a director. I still don't mind writ- ing for Risi or Monicelli. It's not really painful for me. I must harbor inside me a desire not to finish things, which is why a script takes me a year, while the scenario is ready after three or four months. But I rewrite again and again, so as not to finish. How then do you see the function ofthe camera? ( There's a double thing here. I like the mise en scene, moving the camera, but I refuse to pre-plan it. I use no storyboards. When you work with the actors it just happens. Then the camera movement becomes as important as the writing; it is, in fact, a parallel writing. In Italy, scripts are divided into left and right columns. On the left you write what's to be shown and acted. I pay a lot of attention to it when I write-choos- ing the right adjectives and adverbs- because the camera will have to choose 42

the Pope. I talk about things that inter- edy. So, the real Italian comedy resem- What influences on your work do you est or amuse me, ordinary things like bles life by being more human. acknowledge? Vittorio De Sica? Roberto love and work. If there's a message Rossellini? somewhere within, it's not willed. Is this Italian comedy naturalistic? It's the offspring of neo-realism. It's Yes, these two and Cesare Zavattini. Alongside Dino Risi and Mario Moni- also based on the realization that you And Sergio Amidei, with whom I wrote ceili, you're considered a pillar ofItalian can't follow a man's daily routine with- La nuit de Varennes . The film is dedi- comedy. What is it that makes your brand out exploring his fantasies , his imagina- cated to him. I think my films can be ofcomedy so successful? tion. The screenwriter Cesare Zavattini called neo-realistic, but with a little ex- said that film should follow man's every tra magic-because, although it's im- In life, the dimension of play and step-eating, working, gestures , ac- bedded in reality, there's always an ele- laughter is present no less forcefully tions, and feelings-just the way a po- ment that's more ambiguous, more than that of tragedy. In Shakespeare liceman tracks a thief. The best Italian imagined than real. It's Magical Neo- there's a lot of laughter, and these in- comedy did that too. Realism. stances of laughter underline the trag- Hanna Schygulla , Marcello Mastroianni, and lean-Louis Barrault in La nuit de Varennes. 43

The Tavianis situation and come to discover the inevi- the couple. In his despair, he gives up on tability of political commitment. The life. His dream of becoming a filmmaker With their first fiction film, Un Uomo utopia that they propose is a concrete also remains unrealized because he is da Bruciare (A Man/or Burning, 1962) , possibility rather than a fantasy. In their afraid to go it alone. For the Tavianis, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani became a cru- recent films, the Tavianis have become this is not really a manifestaion of cow- cial part ofItaly's political cinema. In the the most optimistic of filmmakers, more ardice, but a need for a communal expe- early Sixties, films such as Gillo Ponte- humanistic and more politically subtle. rience. Fraternity is essential for both corvo's Kapo, Carlo Lizzani's II Gobbo, Padre Padrone (1977), their most accom- life and art-as these two filmmaking and Roberto Rossellini's II Generale plished film , brought them international brothers have shown for twenty years della Rovere exposed the evils offascism acclaim, which, after the more esoteric II and more. as they reaffirmed human dignity and Prato (The Meadow, 1979), has been re- solidarity, often advocating self-sacrifice peated with La Notte di San Lorenzo (The The Night o/the Shooting Stars depicts as the price of liberation. In the late Night o/the Shooting Stars , 1981). the struggle of a community to survive a Sixties and into the Seventies, directors massacre by the Germans in 1944. Al- like Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi fo- • though the story is told by an adult hero- cused on the machinations of the system ine (who remains invisible until the very These three pictures manifest the end), she is simply one of many charac- (Petri's Investigation 0/ a Citizen Above conviction of the filmmakers that ters who embark on an impossible odys- change can come as a result of an indi- sey, in the course of which lives come Suspicion, Rosi's Cadaveri Eccellenti). vidual act, but the act's ultimate signifi- into focus or are shuttered forever. The This approach lent itself to the thriller cance depends on its collective context. unexpressed love of Galvano (Omero format, with character development sac- In Padre Padrone, young Gavino Ledda Antonutti) and Concetta (Margarita Lo- rificed for clarity of \"message.\" (Save rio Marconi) strives to break his zano) is consummated on the eve of Lib- isolation and ignorance to become a eration after 40 years. The story's narra- With the passing of the turbulent Six- member of the community. Gavino's fa- Paolo and Vittorio Taviani shooting The Meadow. ties, and their replacement by a more ther(Omero Antonutti) had condemned tor, then a six-year-old girl, learns complex and ambiguous sense of politi- him to a shepherd's solitude, in an ex- through experience that war is more cal realities, filmmakers modified their ploitative system whose success de- than just a dangerous game. The friend- approach. The Tavianis' change was pends on the separation of the victims ship between a villager (Mario Spallino) most radical. A Man/or Burning had de- from each other. When Gavino shares a and a guerrilla partisan (Massimo picted the assassination of a trade union brief moment of camaraderie with an- Bonetti) survives through mutual sup- leader (Gian Maria Volonte); The Subver- other boy, both are severely punished- port-and, as with Gavino in Padre Pa- sives (I Sovversivi, 1967) described the not only because they neglect their duty, drone, communication finds its ultimate death of a Communist leader and its but because any gathering is potentially expression in comradely emotion. impact on his disciples. But starting with rebellious. Indeed, the only occasion San Michele Aveva Un Gallo (Saint Mi- that later brings several young shep- The denial of emotion between chael Had A Rooster, 1971), the Tavianis herds together (a religious procession) Gavino and his father is as much the showed themselves less interested in gives birth to a collective sense of indig- outcome of dehumanizing poverty as it the condemnation of evil than in the nation: the young men determine to is a tool to sustain repression. In The evolution of the \"decent core\" of soci- emigrate en masse to Germany. Meadow, Giovanni's father (Giulio ety. Allonsan/an (1974), set in the Brogi) can only confess his love for him French Revolution and starring Marcello In The Meadow, a young magistrate, on the son's death bed. The film opens Mastroianni, Lea Massari, and Mimsy Giovanni (again Saverio Marconi), seeks with him asking for Giovanni's help in Farmer, continued the trend and began to belong to a community that includes arranging a business deal, but ends with to emphasize the na·ive-surreal elements Enzo (Michele Placido), an activist, and the son inspiring the father to renounce that would characterize their later, bet- Eugenia (Isabella Rossellini), his girl. In his complacency and \"rebel.\" In Shoot- ter-known films. the delicate menage that ensues, ing Stars, there are no aloof fathers, but Giovanni is essentially a third wheel. the village families are bound by loyalty San Michele and Allonsan/an deal with His love for Eugenia and friendship for and love, the fascist families by domina- characters who refuse to accept a given Enzo don't alter the fact that they make tion and dependence. When a 1S-year- 44

old boy, whose squealing joy in killing The Tavianis' films could almost be The film-long flashback is both fairy tale non-fascists amounts to a kind of sexual called surrealist musicals , so essential is and nightmare, history and fantasy. hysteria, is shot by the villagers, his fas- music not just as emphasis under the cist father tries desperately to dig him- narrative but often as the emotional The Tavianis tend to alternate self into the earth, then abruptly com- theme. It's through music that the hero closeups and long shots, not simply for mits suicide. Through these and other of Allonsanfan (Mastroianni) accepts his visual contrast but in order to juxtapose vignettes, the Tavianis make clear roots and his destiny, and , as in Shooting the subjective and the objective. In which \"side\" they are on, but never Stars, some of the most lyrical moments Shooting Stars, a closeup of the people's deny the \"other side\" its moments of are set to familiar classical and folk airs. hands as they break the bread to make compelling humanity. In Padre Padrone Gavino first becomes Host is followed by a long shot of the aware of his spiritual needs when he German soldiers congregating outside Into this diversity of experience, the hears the sound of an accordion. Music the church, preparing to blow it up. Sim- directors inject their dreams, fantasies, is the means of expression for the inartic- ilarly, in The Meadow , an extreme hallucinations, memories. They use the ulate: the young shepherds tell each closeup of Giovanni's eyes is followed soundtrack almost expressionistically, other about their lives and malaise by a long-shot of Eugenia's exquisite and transform the image from one of through the eloquence of their musical solitude in the park. poetic realism to something bordering instruments. It is not accidental that on the fantastic. Thus the deceptively their rebellious decision to emigrate is In Padre Padrone, the camera is simple narrative and the authenticity in- conveyed over the soundtrack: during mostly static and often doesn't follow herent in the Tavianis' neo-realist legacy the procession, the padrones' religious Gavino: he is allowed to slide in and out (in The Meadow they pay tribute to Isa- chant clashes with the German song of of the frame , a wandering bit player in bella Rossellini's father with a clip from the shepherds. When Gavino's father the remorseless Sardinian hills. Simi- Germany, Year Zero) become nothing tries to break his son's spirit, he readily larly, a closeup of a couple about to make less than oneiric. love is followed by a pan to the village, in long shot, or a closeup of Gavino's The Night of the Shooting Stars. Saverio Marconi in Padre Padrone. In Padre Padrone, when a relative identifies music as the \"enemy\" and excited face as he plays the accordion is dies, bequeathing Gavino's family an ol- breaks his radio. But Gavino whistles succeeded by a similar pan to the hills ive grove, we see the silent family mem- the tune played on the radio. The mel- around him. Again, the filmmakers dis- bers and relatives and hear their ody of spiritual revolution will not be tance the audience from the hero, to thoughts which unite into a cacophony silenced. prevent us from becoming too easily ab- of repressed desires. Elsewhere in the sorbed by his anguish. They never let us film, the lonely villagers speak to their Even as they try to enhance the audi- miss the bigger picture-it is there on animals and imagine their response, ence's identification through the minu- the screen. conveyed by off-screen voices. Gavino's test detail and an awesome emotional classmates pray for a lot different from intensity, the Tavianis distance the • his; the family members of a murdered spectator with the cunning of cinematic man pray for wealth and happiness. artifice. Padre· Padrone opens with a The circular narrative structure of narration about Gavino, followed by the both Padre Padrone and The Night ofthe Dreams are hard to fulfill in this bleak introduction of the real Gavino who ap- Shooting Stars implies a kind of Viconian milieu, which is why these fantasies are proaches his cinematic father, giving him symmetry. Gavino's triumph is but one never visualized. But in the warmth that a stick to carry. This three-fold distanc- step in a long and winding road; the fills The Night ofthe Shooting Stars , they ing announces that we are watching a baby to whom the Shooting Stars story is often are: a little girl imagines the parti- film about reality, not reality itself. The told may somehow be blessed by the sans to be Romans bayonetting a Fas- first frames of The Night of the Shooting experiences of his ancestors. In revolu- cist; when partisans choose code names, ,Stars mix Brecht with Disney: a child's tion is continuity; in continuity, commu- we get to see why one prefers \"Re- bedroom window opens on to an in- nity; in community, the fulfillment of quiem\" (we see him singing in church); tensely blue night sky where a shooting individual aspirations. By evoking this a young woman expresses a secret joy at star crosses the horizon and a mother's comradely dream, the Tavianis have cre- the destruction ofher elegant home, and v:oice informs us that we are about to ated unique experiences-and earned we see it explode. hear of a similar night 37 years earlier. the respect of their own film commu- nity. -DANYAKIR 45

Acting, Italian Style Visconti was very tough on the set, but SOPHIA we loved each other. But I was mad at LOREN: I love Foryears, the most visible asset of the Fellini because we had no script and I my work. Being Italian film industry-and its most ex- didn't know what to do. The films I'd an actress IS portable commodity-was its stunning save: The Leopard, 81b, Once Upon A something I've gallery of actors. With their earthiness, TIme in The West, The Professionals. always wanted. their passion, their very human foibles , And now that I've they became more than idols for their f VITTORIO 'succeeded, I feel public; they became participants in the GASSMAN: Act- much more con- collective inner life. In the following ing is a game of scious of the monologues, six star actors and actresses chance. I like its problems an ac- discuss what makes them tick, how they vitality. Transfor- tress has to face, work on a role, which directors they like mation is a nor- because the better known you are, the most, and what image they have con- mal state for an more they want from you. I'd like to give jured for their public. actor, which is even more, but you have to find the wh y an actor right ideas, the right story, the right di- able to act, you shouldn't have a rector and actors. You can't just do what have to have suf- soul: he should you want. You always have to depend on fered in life- be able to assume others. Our work should be done within otherwise you a group-we should exchange ideas and ~;;;;:: can' t express it. different identities and having perma- do the best we can, honestly. But on the set I nent ideas and feelings may preclude You can' t work against the role you're always prefer a that. My favorite kind of actor is John playing, but with it-with what the au- --_....: harmonious at- Barrymore-larger than life and smell- thor means and wants to demonstrate. mosphere. I'm ing like Lucifer. I don't like actors who When I first read a script, I don't really very introverted smell too healthy. Nor am I a method understand it. I already get nervous and and I respond to any sign of tension, actor; I have no psychological approach. can't concentrate. So I read it several subtle gestures, strange vibes. It's hard It's simply a question of intuition. more times, then discuss with the direc- for me to work with someone I don't tor and agree on changes, then study it like; I've turned down roles when I Directing is the most creative part in a for a long time and then forget about it. couldn't imagine working with another film, while in the theater it's the actor When we start shooting, I go over every actor. If your partner doesn't give you who counts. Actors are a passive ele- scene and perform. I add little notes much, you can' t give either. My most ment in a picture, and the challenge is to here and there, about what I may want memorable partners? Ugo Tognazzi, become totally passive without becom- to do in a certain scene. Not technical Nino Manfredi, Marcello Mastroianni, ing stupid. If you can rely on the direc- notes. I work with my emotions. Burt Lancaster, Jean-Paul Belmondo, tor, th.en it's satisfying. Otherwise, it's a For comedy, a director must have a Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan. I remain real torture and you feel impotent. My sense of humor and good timing. For very good friends, for years, with actors I favorite director is Dino Risi; we've drama, he has to be intelligent and emo- work with. It's very exciting to live many made 15 films together. We work very tional, like Vittorio De Sica was. Two lives-I've had more than 60-but you smoothly together, with lots of joking Women was the biggest step in my career need to be very sure of yourself, very and improvising. We don't feel we're -it changed me completely. In one strong and not take things too seriously. actually working. Over the years, we scene, I could see De Sica from the It's important not to have a fixed im- have developed on screen a kind of por- corner of my eye. He was crying behind age and I'm glad different directors saw trait, with vices, weaknesses, and vir- the camera. He was always with the ac- me in different ways. Fellini thought of tueS. I think the role I did in The Easy tor, because he was an actor; he under- me as a sweet creature , the ideal Life was something new, in blending stood what it meant to do a very emo- woman; Visconti said I reminded him of comedy with tragedy. I like them to be tional scene. He loved me and I loved a tigress. How I work depends on the mixed. I'm looking for more complex him. What a pity! Today, I like Fellini director. With Visconti, it was like stage characters, because things are more am- very much; I like certain Antonioni work: we first read it around a table, biguous now. films; and I like Scola. A Special Day is a then did it in motion. With Fellini, it very important film for me. I see Scola as was the opposite-you had the feeling The other directors I prefer are Ettore continuing the tradition of De Sica and of constant improvisation. I feel equally Scola and Mario Monicelli. I was in Rossellini , but in a more modern way. comfortable with both. I don't like to Scola's first four pictures as a director. Scola is sensitive, intelligent, and has a rehearse too much, because I fear losing He's more meticulous than Risi and gets lot of patience with actors. He has a spontaneity. I lik~ to discuss with the deeper into the psychology of the char- great eye for detail. I shot the film with- director, except when you don't need it. acters, does less improvisation. I like We out makeup because I trusted him. All Loved Each Other So Much and La My experience in America has been a Terrazza . And I'm indebted to Moni- very positive one, if you remember how celli, because I'd made a lot of bad they talked about me and the experi- movies early on and he was the first to ences I had working with all these beau- offer me a comic role in Big Deal on tiful people. I especially remember Madonna Street. He changed my whole George Cukor and Sidney Lumet. In career. La Grande Guerra and the two England, Carol Reed. I think Spencer Brancaleone pictures I did with him are among my best. And I have to mention Risi's Scent ofa Woman, which I love. It's my biggest success in recent years. 46

Tracy was a great actor-I always felt he STEFANIA of an ironic situation. I like to cry and was talking to me alone. The same for SANDRELLI: laugh at the same time.lt's the best way Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, AI I've always been to touch the audience. Pacino, and Robert De Niro. But per- passionate about UGO TOG- sonally I work best with Marcello Mas- the cinema, first NAZZI: There's troianni. We have chemistry. It's a as a spectator and much greater sat- magic. I can't explain in words. then as an actress. .isfaction in direct- In Two Women, Yesterday Today and I live the cinema ing-I've di- Tomorrow and Marriage, ItaLian Style, I as I do my life, rected four played submissive women. I like to play with the same pictures-than in such roles, because I think I can help principles: I'm al- acting, because I some women to wake up. But what I ways ready to , can make some- represent for the public, I don't know. change. Up to now, I've played three or thing different j and worthwhile. I'm just a member of the family: the four times the virgin and decided \"never . the wife the lover. again.\" In Italy, women's roles are a bit But in Italy actors MARCELLO limited. are a commodity- that exists only for MASTROI- I don't seek to choose between com- making money. So when I want to ex- ANN I: Act 0 r s edy or drama. I like to recreate what the press certain ideas, I have to work with- havea kind ofvoid others imagine me as. I try to live each out pay, find actors willing to do the inside them- part with the director. It's not at aLI a same, and even produce my films. As an why else would psychological preparation, De Niro style actor, I tend to be cast in realistic roles, they need to live -it would bore me to do research. I while in directing I veer toward the fan- the lives of started with Pietro Germi on Divorce, tastic. I try to find reality in the meta- others? I think ac- Italian Style. He made me suffer: I was physical or the surreaL I also try to play tors find their 15 and embarrassed and he presed an all my roles in an atmosphere that would own personality enormous camera at me, literally against allow both the dramatic and the comic to weak, their own the wall, insisting on long takes and ex- come forth-otherwise it's incomplete. color gray and flat, and they need to treme c1oseups. I almost suffocated. He I like my characters to go to the limit and disguise all that by appearing more limited me, but also helped me. Germi's I like changing. I don't make academic charming, more intelligent, more mys- L'lmmorale [The CLimax] was a good preparations for a role. I didn't study terious. It all points to a lack of maturity. film. homosexuals for La cage aux foLIes. I Fellini sees me as sensitive, intelli- I create a relationship with a director, enter the psychology of my characters gent, somewhat confused and with a by which I mean true complicity, a real easily, both physically and instinctively. childish side. When he needs a person friendship. The very fact that a direc- The three directors that formed my who doesn't reach maturity or becomes tor's vision is different from my own character as an actor are Marco Ferreri, \"serious,\" he calls me-that's essen- point-of-view makes it interesting. Oth- Dino Risi, and Mario Monicelli. With tially the role I played in La Dolce Vita, erwise, I'd get bored. Bertolucci is flexi- Ferreri, I started with L'Ape Regina. He 8112, and City of Women. I like Fellini's ble and keeps evolving and I respond to leaves you completely free during the world and understand him well, which his crazy passion for the cinema. I feel shooting, even though he has a precise saves time. He doesn't have to explain, free with him; I can do anything; there idea of what he wants. He trusts you. In except by some small gesture. But we're are no barriers. I did Partner-what a the sketch that Monicelli directed me in also friends and one works better with horrible film!-without pay, and later ALta Infidelta, I played a character that friends. We resemble each other a bit, The Conformist and 1900. The role in later became a staple for me: a peasant although we're not at all alike. As an 1900 frightened me a bit, because I'm with big feet and a small brain. Moni- actor, I don't have to do much with him. not very keen on politics. I find politics celli, he's the argumentative type. But I follow his suggestions. on the screen vulgar. It's enough to say Risi leaves you in peace. He's the best The director is the real creator of a something authentic and deeply-felt. director of quality comedies in Italy. But film. The actor is an instrument. The But with Bernardo it was fine and the I've been as interested in the intellec- director is the chef; he cooks the meal. role turned out to be easy. With Germi, tual cinema of Pasolini [Pigpen], Germi The director understands you better who was tender and humorous, but of [L'lmmoraLe], and even Fellini-even than you do yourself and can make you another style, I didn't feel so free. though we never did shoot The Return of get out of yourself. And Fellini is a psy- I also like Scola. He's a good director Mastorna. chologist who sees well into people. and a tender man who understands My popularity is both an asset and a In Italy, people feel sympathy, even women better than anybody. You have liability: the public always demands to esteem, for the characters I play. I seek to love him to work with him, because it see me in comic roles. I'd have preferred not to disturb, but to remain on the side. isn't easy. On La Terrazza, where the to be French rather than Italian, because I'm a bit passive and reactive-unlike entire Italian cinema was represented, the French have an absolutely unbreak- Gassman, who's aggressive-and that's he made us repeat 30 times for tiny de- able marriage with their actors, with the why I have such a good chemistry with tails! And then there's Luigi Comencini. actor serving as husband. In Italy, the Sophia Loren. We complement each He resembles me a lot in his tenderness public is the husband-a Latin husband other, like Laurel and Hardy. I love mixed with irony. He's passionate and -and the actor is the wife. But I try to Sophia. She's intelligent, beautiful, and demanding. I love Delitto d'Amore, be a modern wife, a bit feminist, who'd has a sense of humor. When we're to- w~ich we did together. I find it wonder- say, \"No, you can't force me all the time gether, she acts-I react. ful that he manages to create drama out to do only what you want!\" -D .Y. 47

tion of funnymen has conquered the dialect is Neapolitan. His popularity re- Italian box-office. Most are TV comics The New Buffoons who specialize in dialect jokes and local sembles that of Roberto Benigni, an humor-which explains their invisibil- With a world-weary slouch and sad ity outside their home base. actor specializing in low-life comedy of eyes that have seen and understood ev- ery human folly, the middle-aged Italian Actor-director Carlo Verdone, a misery (/I Minestrone) and whose Vati- male as played by Mastroianni, Gass- balding, overweight, baby-faced, clean- man, and Tognazzi has held center- cut impersonator of \"dumb\" Italian ar- can satire, /I Pap'Occhio. was a smash. screen in international cinema for a quar- chetypes, has created loose sketches ter century. But there is another son of spiced with Roman dialect that made Un His specialty: Tuscan dialect. Italian male-the kindly buffoon, slack Sacco Bello, Red White and Verdone , and of jaw and dim of wit-who has enter- Borotalco into smash hits. Recently, he The burly, bushy-eyebrowed, musta- tained huge local audiences for almost as played Alberto Sordi's idiot son in the hit long. English-speaking moviegoers still film Viaggio con Papa . Unlike Verdone, chioed, and Afro-haired Diego Abatan- haven't caught up with such longtime actor-director Massimo Troisi is slim, low-brow comics as Enrico Montesano, has dark curls and fiery eyes, but like tuono has made a superstar career out of Lando Buzzanca, Renato Pozzetto, and him he creates simple situations and AIdo Maccione. And now a new genera- ethnic characters that help explain the a single comic routine: he's the ambi- success of his Ricomincio da Tre. His tious Southerner who goes to Milan in search of fame and fortune-a paisano Harold Lloyd. His films, 1 Fichissimi and Eccezziunale. .. Veramente were both directed by Carlo Vanzina and proved him a major box-office draw. Similarly successful was his /I Tango della Gelosia, co-starring Monica Vitti and helmed by Steno, the veteran writer-director who's also Vanzina's fa- ther. And yes, it broke all records. The not-so-New Wave Adriano Ce- lentano, a pop-music idol for two dec- ades (and star, 15 years ago, of Pietro Germi's Serafino), is now a pop-movie idol. With his irrepressible energy and his choice of vehicles that are little more than rehashed fairy tales (rich girl, poor boy, etc·, often directed by the success- ful team of Castellano & Pipolo, Celen- tano has amassed a very long list of hits: Innamorato Pazzo, Mani di Velluto. Qua la Mano , Yuppi Du. /I Bisbetico Domato. and Asso. Like the spaghetri-westerners turned comics Terence Hill (b. Mario Girotri) and Bud Spencer (b. Carlo Pe- Maurizio Nichetti Massimo Troisi dersoli), Celentano has an appeal that spans genres and generations. The smanies are fewer and in-be- tween. Actor-director Nanni Moretti staned his career with the Super 8 10 Sono Un Autarchico and was hailed as a genius after the release of his 16mm Ecce Bombo. An irreverent iconoclast, he lIses sardonic humor and bitrer par- ody to comment on the plight of con- temporary youth. His Sogni d'Oro, about the travails of a young filmmaker, has already been compared to 81/2. Less ambitious is actor-director Maurizio Nichetti, whose debut Ratataplan, a hi- lariously nonsensical comedy made of slapstick, surrealism, macabre humor, and silent film routines, made a bundle and played the international festival cir- cuit. His third effon, Domani Si Balla, evoked the following judgment from Va- riety: \"Offshore chances look slim for this type of comedy.\" All of which proves that laughter may not be so uni- versal as philosophers suggest and pro- ducers hope. Wonder how Richard Pryor's concen films would play in Pis- Eleonora Giorgi and Adriano Celentano in Mani di velluto toia.... -DANYAKlR 48