Hollywood: The Oral History (4*)

Age truly gives you perspective; as I devoured all 700+ pages of Hollywood: The Oral History, I realized that I've been around for most of Tinsel Town's much-fabled history. Oscars were awarded for only the 25th time the year I was born and in 2028 I hope to be around to celebrate their centenary.  Maybe by then I'll finally have gotten around to seeing 1953's big winners: The Greatest Show on Earth, Gary Cooper and Shirley Booth, whom I like to think of as my "star signs."

Silent movies fell outside my life span (and interest, if I'm being truthful) and by the time I reached adolescence, the studio system had pretty much collapsed, but the films released during my early youth are among those acclaimed as some of the finest ever shot in America, including Bonnie & Clyde, The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, Chinatown, Nashville and Taxi Driver, all of which I saw as soon as they were released. Ready access to first-run movies was New York City's primary appeal for a kid used to waiting for them to hit theaters on military bases or in El Paso, even if the tickets cost more and it meant lining up for two hours in sub-zero temperatures as I did for The Exorcist.

But after the blockbuster successes of Jaws and Star Wars, movies became more about hitting jackpots than making artistic statements, although there always have been exceptions.  Action, special effects and existing intellectual property took precedence over good writing, acting and directing, which became the province of independent films and eventually, streaming.  Tickets became more expensive, too, and despite an attempt by theater owners to make movie-going more comfortable with recliners and reserved seating (for a fee, of course), audience behavior--particularly after the advent of smartphones--became increasingly intolerable for this silver screen curmudgeon.  DVD.com became my primary go-to. I still mourn its loss.

Despite a doubling of the U.S. population since 1953, three times as many people caught at least one movie a week then than they do now; as a result, my favorite art form has lost much of its cultural currency in spite of welcome outliers like Barbie and Oppenheimer. That's probably why I enjoyed Hollywood:  The Oral History as much as I did.  Co-authors Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson listened to more than 3,000 interviews taped by the American Film Institute since 1969 with people sharing their expertise and memories about the movie industry when it still mattered to most people.  Some of what they had to say resonated so much that I wish I could have heard all 10,000 hours.

The authors divide the book into sections (e.g. "Beginnings," "Silent Directors" and "Sound"); it didn't really catch fire for me until "The Workforce" which includes many of the biggest names in the business, and whose work is familiar. I only wish a little more context had been provided about when the conversations were conducted, and who participated in what must have been various groups.  They seem to have cut and pasted thematically which occasionally can give the book a disjointed or repetitive quality.  And many truly iconic voices are missing, including Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor to name just a few.  All were still alive when AFI began the interviews.

Nevertheless, more than a few select passages inspired stream-of-consciousness commentary and memories--highlighted in this color--from yours truly!

                                🎥

THE WORKFORCE

Music

Through the 30s and 40s, there was a transition whereby you had a film with sound, dialogue, special effects, and everything else, but the filmmakers weren’t quite sure about the role of music. It seemed to work in silent films in a certain fashion, with wall-to-wall music, so they just continued to do it. They didn’t realize that diminishing returns set in, and if you had music from the frame alpha to frame omega, people wouldn’t listen to it after a while. It was like an enema in the Jewish family tradition. The idea was that it couldn’t hurt you.  Leonard Rosenman, composer

*  *  *  *  *

The music of any film is in a sense, the most abstract contribution to it. The composer often gets away with murder in the sense that often the director will come to the recording, and that’s it. He’s not able to listen to the score in advance, and what is there is what will have to be used.  Alex North, composer.

Directors

I adored working with Vincente Minnelli. Vincente never gives you one goddamn piece of direction. I cannot remember one full sentence of direction that Vincente gave me. He puckers his lips and he starts stuttering, and then you have to guess what he wants to say. Then he moves on. He watches the swans or the lilies or the horse in the background. You have to work with antenna to guess if he wants it stronger or more comical or satirical. You keep trying until something seems to please him. But, you know when you have it right. He never tells you, but you do sort of sense it. He usually tells you that the swans were great. I want talent in a director, and although Vincente didn’t say much, he has talent. He is inarticulate, but he has talent.  Leslie Caron, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

If you start to ask John Ford questions about your part, he will turn you off. If you get too insistent, he will just take the page and tear it out of your script and there is nothing you can do. I’ve seen him do it. Now, why, I don’t know. But it is so.  Henry Fonda, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

Most of my creative work is done before the camera begins to roll. Yes, all of it. I don’t understand why we have to experiment with film. Everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it. A composer puts a lot of dots down, and beautiful music comes out. There is a rectangle up there, and it has to be filled, but personally, I never look through the camera. What for? To find out whether the camera is lying? I only consider the screen up there, and the whole film, to me, should be on paper from beginning to end – shot by shot, cut by cut – and each cut should mean something . . . What is cinema? The assembly of pieces of film to create an idea . . . It’s the only new art of the 20th century, but it is essentially a visual art.

#  #  #  #  #

To be honest, I am not interested in content at all. I don’t give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material to create an emotion in the audience. I find too many people are interested in content. Who cares? I don’t care myself. But a lot of films, of course, live on content. I think one of the greatest problems we have in our business is the lack of people who can visualize.  Alfred Hitchcock, director.

Hitchcock, of all people, introduced me to Doris Day, my female role model, through "Que Sera, Sera," a song she sang in The Man Who Knew Too Much that I loved as a child.  The rotund director with an instantly recognizable silhouette became forbidden fruit when my mother forbade me to see Psycho but four years later, she took me to the very Freudian Marnie.  Go figure.  I've since watched nearly all of Hitch's films, some more than once, and deliberately chose The Lady Vanishes as my last DVD.com rental knowing I would be allowed to keep it as a bittersweet parting gift.

*  *  *  *  *

Now, the whole thing in art – and it’s an ugly word, but it’s a necessary word – is power, your own power . . . George Stevens had the only contract that ever has or ever will exist, giving the director complete control over every aspect of his films. He was once asked which aspect he would give up if he had to give only one of the basic four away. The four aspect aspects were (1) selecting the material and working on it; (2) casting, sets, and costumes; (3) shooting it (4) scoring, dubbing, and cutting. When asked which of these those aspects he would give up, he said, “Directing the picture.”  Elia Kazan, director.

*  *  *  *  *

The old stars were taught how to act on camera. It’s the toughest kind of acting. There is in the world, much more difficult than on the stage . . . But in film, you shoot for 20 seconds 30 seconds, maybe a minute, two minutes. You have no audience to respond. The crew are busy doing their jobs. You perform your story out of sequence, with no continuity, and you do it perfectly, impeccably, but the take is spoiled by some technical thing and you have to do it over, maybe 20 times, finding the right tone and emotion time after time. And the roles are often tailored for who the public has decided you are because the studio told them that’s who you were, and that’s not who you are. It’s a very hard kind of acting, and people are quick to dismiss it as not acting at all.  Richard Brooks, director.

*  *  *  *  *

I always wanted to be in vaudeville. I didn’t know it was dead. No one told me. And I arrived in New York City, and I was going to get into vaudeville because that’s all I had ever seen. I had seen some pictures, and I had seen some pearl white cereals – you know, where they lay out on railroad tracks. I had seen that. But it never dawned on me to be in pictures. I wouldn’t even dream of being in pictures. But to be in vaudeville, I could understand that.  I had gotten into everything I could in high school and church and Sunday school and the Elks convention or whatever came along, I was playing there, dancing, and singing, and doing all the things I could do in my hometown. Vaudeville, that’s what I wanted. So I kept looking for it, and no one told me it was dead, I didn’t even know the Palace was closed! But anyway, I never got a job – never gotten near anybody – and finally I got so hungry I went into modeling. But the great thing is, I kept my eye on showbiz, and I wasn’t just going to run off and marry the first guy that asked me.  Lucille Ball, actor.

Sometime after returning from Germany in 1957, my parents bought me a portable television set and I began watching I Love Lucy reruns.  When a dental appointment conflicted one morning, I threw the only temper tantrum I ever can recall.  Years later, when I referenced Lucy to Florian, he had no idea who I meant.  I was flabbergasted that he had been denied this fundamental pleasure.  Little did I know that madcap Lucy, just five years older than my mother, was a feminist with a mission from the very beginning. Her success came late, at the age of 40, in a different medium entirely.

*  *  *  *  *

[Clark] Gable, [John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, not one of those actors had a damn thing to say about the choice of stories. They did what they were told to do by very smart people. And they remade any portion of the picture that was bad. And they worked the star system so that if you went to see Gable, you knew that you were going to see a certain type of picture. You knew what he stood for. You knew if you were going to see [Joan] Crawford, what kind of story it would be. When the day came that the stars decided themselves what they were going to do – holy smoke, what a mess they made. You know, because nobody was watching them then. There have been some awfully good people who failed miserably because they chose bad things. They were better off when the studios chose, but many of them wanted more freedom, less glamour.  Howard Hawks, director.

*  *  *  *  *

They would threaten to suspend you or force you or threaten you into doing something you felt miserable about and also a film that you knew wasn’t going to be a success, because you learned very soon that there would be a film, say, that wasn’t very good, but nonetheless was the kind of thing that would be a success. Well, you would be forgiven if it was a financial success, even if it weren’t too good, because you would be identified with success. Then there would be a film that would be terribly good but maybe not too much of a success, but at least it would be terribly good, so that was all right. But if you were in a film, that wasn’t any good and wasn’t a success, you would be identified with failure, and there was a fear of failure. It was considered a contagious, disease, and you could get ostracized from being in a poor film that didn’t make any money, and literally, if you made three in a row, finished, out, absolutely out. That was it. They dropped you. They figured actors weren’t all that intelligent, and you had to fight that too.  Olivia de Havilland, actor.

Lady in a Cage wasn't Olivia de Havilland's finest hour.  But by the mid 60s, beggars, or older actresses at any rate, couldn't be choosers.  The grande dame's confinement in an elevator during a home invasion, at the mercy of hoodlums including a very young James Caan, was among the most titillating things this eleven-year-old ever had seen. 

*  *  *  *  *

I’m telling the story because during that summer when [my daughter] was in the apprentice group, they prepared one act of a restoration comedy… And Jane [Fonda] was not playing a principal part at all. She was playing a maid with a frilly little apron, I remember, and the act had been on for maybe 10 minutes before Jane made her first entrance. I remember it was on an empty stage – she came on like that. Now, nobody knew who she was except my sister and I. Nobody else knew who she was, but you could literally feel or hear the audience react to this person – who didn’t say anything, just came on stage. That’s charisma. That’s an electric something or other. There are all sorts of words for it: magnetism, you know. I just remember thinking you could hear the audience sort of straighten up or take a breath or something. There was a physical reaction that you were aware of– dear God, if she ever decides she wants to be an actress, she’s got it going for her. She’s got star quality. If you’ve got it, it’s not something you can learn. It’s not something you inherit. You’re born with it, but you don’t necessarily inherit it, because too many daughters and sons of charismatic actors are born without it, so I’m not taking credit. But Jane has got it. And if I’ve got it, thank you, it does help.  Henry Fonda, actor.

Here's an instance when it would have been interesting to know just when Fonda told this story, specifically was it before or after he shot On Golden Pond, his final role, the one that finally won him an Oscar?  In the press that Jane did for the 1981 film, she declared that bridging the gap with her emotionally distant father was one of the reasons she wanted to make it.  Here, he sounds as if he was, at least, always very, very proud of her.

*  *  *  *  *

It is a mysterious question, what makes them photogenic. I think it is very often the flesh quality. They’re made so the light can come into their eyes and the face moves well. It’s a very mysterious thing.  George Cukor, director.

I first became aware of Cukor with Rich and Famous, his final film.  I loved the dynamic between Candice Bergen and Jaqueline Bisset and couldn't understand why critics mostly dismissed it until I experienced the camp glories of The Women at a revival house as a cornerstone of my gay education.

*  *  *  *  *

The way I act with stars depends on what they will respond to, you know. I can become a masochist. I can become the Marquis de Sade.  I can become a midwife. I can become Otto Preminger. I don’t know what you do with an uncooperative actor. You kick him in the ass, I don’t know. Or you say let’s shoot the scene in two versions, yours and mine, and then you don’t develop his version. How’s that?  Billy Wilder, director & screenwriter.

By the middle of the 20th century, Hollywood was old enough to begin looking back on itself, a sub-genre that has since become a perennial favorite.  But IMHO, nobody has ever done it better than Wilder in Sunset Boulevard. The cover image of this book--Gloria Swanson as an aging, deluded silent film actress returning to director Cecil B. DeMille's set not knowing that he wants only to borrow her period car--acidly illustrates the vagary of stardom:  when you're hot, you're hot, when you're not, you're not.  Wilder upped the ante with cynical nostalgia when he also cast Buster Keaton as one of Norma's bridge playing has-beens and Erich von Stroheim as her protective chauffeur.  Von Stroheim actually directed Swanson in Queen Kelly, a notorious fiasco financed by Joseph P. Kennedy, then her lover.  

*  *  *  *  *

Judy Garland said, “Honestly, every day that I come to work, I know that I don’t have a voice. And I know that it is all pushed and faked and I know that they’re going to find it out, and the music department is going to come down and say, ‘Let’s stop this number because she can’t sing, let’s get somebody in to dub her number.’ I know what will happen. I can’t sing. I can’t act either." I was talking to her, and finally, we got her dressed and got her calmed down and she went onto the set. I was starting to leave the stage as she was starting to shoot, and I got over to the door, and she just stopped shooting, and said, “Hey, Walter wait a minute. Wait a minute, Walter. Are you the best goddamn costume designer in the world?” I said, “Well, hardly.”  She said, “That’s the way I feel, hardly. Don’t you try to tell me how to have confidence in yourself.” Then she got on with her number. Poor baby.  Walter Plunkett, costume designer.

*  *  *  *  *

Montgomery Clift watched Judy Garland do a scene one day on Judgment at Nuremberg, and when she did it, he was huddled in the corner like a puppy dog, to one side of the stage and he wept. The tears were rolling down his cheeks while she did the scene. And when it was over, he came up and whispered to me, “She didn’t do it right.”  Stanley Kramer, director & producer.

The public nature of the comments that comprise this book--even if the audience was mostly AFI film students--probably mean that many punches were pulled.  If both of these stars weren't already dead, would their director have spilled the tea?  Hollywood does, after all, run on relationships greased by insincerity.

*  *  *  *  *

But don’t elect a professional screen actor to be president of the United States, no matter how nice or bright or whatever they are, because they’ve spent their entire life being moved about like a piece of furniture. They’ve been used. That’s why all the men, almost without exception, become alcoholics, because it’s just not in the male nature to be totally passive. And all the women stars take up needle point. The women come out much better. My God, eventually everything in their house is just covered. A major movie star has miles of tapestry by the time her career is over and the man is drunk. It’s a tough life. Gore Vidal, screenwriter.

Vidal may have written for Hollywood but he was never "of" it, no doubt because of his open homosexuality.  I read Myra Breckinridge as a naive teenager still struggling with his sexual orientation and thought it was "dumb," mostly because I didn't understand that Vidal had written his truly transgressive, ahead-of-its-time novel as a provocation.  I did, however, salivate at the prospect of seeing the movie adaptation--not so much because of its campy cast--Raquel Welch, Mae West and a very dewy Rex Reed, among others--but because I had seen a still of Raquel "riding" the hunky actor playing Farrah Fawcett's bare-chested boyfriend in Playboy magazine's "Sex in the Cinema" series, my primary source of adolescent fantasy material. Vidal distanced himself as far as he could when Myra--one of the first "major motion pictures" to be rated X--was finally released and bombed in 1970.  

Coincidentally, in my junior year of high school, I wrote a paper for an enriched English class decrying the new MPAA ratings system--launched just two years earlier--because it prevented me from seeing Midnight Cowboy, the winner of the 1969 Academy Award for Best Picture, until after it was re-rated R--without changing a single frame of film--and came to El Paso's newest drive-in, the triple-screen Cinema Park.  With three parking lots to fill, management didn't care how old you were.

*  *  *  *  *

Then I got [James Dean] fixed in his room, and I took him to the lot to shoot some wardrobe tests. So we started to shoot these wardrobe tests, and the crew couldn’t believe it. They said, “Is that the stand in?” I said, “No, he’s going to play the part.” And they couldn’t believe it. But that was a good sign for me because he looked real. He looked like an actual person so then we started working, and he was good from the first day and fulfilling that part.  Elia Kazan, director.

*  *  *  *  *

In a way [Marilyn Monroe] really wouldn’t expose herself, although at that point in her life, she had every reason to act that way. I still can’t figure out her talent. I think she was absolutely brilliant, but I still don’t know whether she knew how to act. She had a self-barometer, some built-in mechanism that knew when a scene was right for her. She only knew one way to work. I’ve never seen anything like it. She would just stop. She would never wait for the director to say,“Cut.” She would just say, “Well . . . ” and walk off, and we’d have to start again. You’d get trapped if you were saving yourself for a last-minute spurt, because there wasn’t going to be any last-minute spurt. She just knew when it was going right for her. At times, she acted at you instead of with you. It was selfish, but it was the only way she knew how to do it, and the scenes worked, there’s no question of that.  Jack Lemmon, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

You want me to tell you about Marilyn Monroe? Everyone does. Whenever I do a motion picture event, usually it is my first question. The first question is always Marilyn Monroe, and I start with “No, she did not wear a brassiere.” That sort of content. It was a very complex thing working with her because she had tremendous problems with herself. She was on edge at all times, on edge of deep depression inside, whatever you want to call it. It was always a kind of question, you sweated it out: is she going to show up? Is she going to show up on time? Is she going to live through that scene? Is she going to finish that picture? That is a very, very nerve-racking thing if you’ve got like, $8 million in the enterprise so far. But when it’s all done, it was well worth it. It’s that old thing that I said, I don’t know, 400 years ago, that “Look, if I wanted somebody to be on time and to know the lines just perfectly, I’ve got an old aunt in Vienna. She’s going to be there at five in the morning, never miss a word. But who wants to see her?“

My God, I think there are more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II, and there’s a great similarity.  Billy Wilder, director & screenwriter.

In my mind, Monroe was tragic before she became a sex symbol.  Although I had yet to see her in a movie (Bus Stop, on TV, meh), she was my earliest experience with celebrity death, or at least the first one I can recall where I was when I learned about it.  My parents had taken me to play bingo at the officer's club in El Paso where we used to go for roast beef buffets. A loudspeaker announcement interrupted the game, eliciting gasps. My mother recalled that The Seven Year Itch was the funniest movie she had ever seen. Who directed it?  Billy Wilder, of course. They say never meet your heroes, but I would have taken my chances with Billy.

*  *  *  *  *

[Marilyn Monroe] could do, among other things, comedy. She had an absolute, unerring touch with comedy. She didn’t seem funny in real life, but she was very observing, she had an unerring touch. She acted as if she didn’t quite understand it. This was a perfectly natural function, and that was what made her very funny. She could also do low comedy, pratfalls and things like that.  George Cukor, director.

*  *  *  *  *

And I ended up directing Fred Astaire! And Gene Kelly! People always ask me sort of silly questions about the difference between them. One is extremely athletic, and one is extremely delicate in his movements. And that’s the big difference. The joy of seeing one is the joy of watching an acrobat and the other is like seeing a feather floating. And they both are incredible but quite different.  Stanley Donen, director & choreographer.

MGM musicals were never my thing; I always preferred adaptations of the Broadway musicals I'd heard in my mother's record collection or straight drama.  Audrey Hepburn already had made big impressions in Charade and My Fair Lady even though I thought it was unfair that she had been cast in the latter as Eliza Dolittle instead of Julie Andrews.  But in Two for the Road, Donen's final film, she more than made up for the injustice with her depiction of a woman falling in and out of love with her husband, played by Albert Finney.  Their marriage resonated because it reminded me of the difficulties my parents had faced in their own, particularly when we lived in France and Germany, and gave me real insight into the up-and-down nature of adult relationships.  

I will never forget the night that my mother vacated our apartment in Heidelberg after trying to pummel my father, who gripped her fists in defense, during a heated argument, the only time their frequent fights ever got physical.  A neighboring family took me to Forty Pounds of Trouble while Dad went to look for her.  I suddenly knew she was in the audience, too, when I heard her distinctive cough erupt from somewhere behind me. I definitely inherited Mom's preferred modes of escapism, novel-reading and movie-going, if not her addiction to prescription medicine.

*  *  *  *  *

I’ve watched Cary Grant on a set with the camera going. I’ve watched him looking at actors already performing with the camera running, and he looks at the last few pages of the script, puts it down, and walks on right in in the middle of a scene, and he’s Cary Grant. He worked that way; walk on, and be your persona. He worked very, very well that way. But I enjoy preparation and study and I come well prepared. Actors have different ways, and so do stars.  Gregory Peck, actor.

Look no further for idealized personifications of masculinity than Cary Grant (romantic) and Gregory Peck (paternal).  The sexual attraction between Grant and Hepburn when they pass an orange doing the mambo in Charade--a scene that now would probably require an "intimacy coordinator"--left me in a fit of Henry Mancini-scored giggles just as Peck's tenderness with Scout and Jem reminded me of something that I longed to experience with my own father, who never hugged me.  We shook hands after long absences.

*  *  *  *  *

Well, you know, there’s a great misunderstanding that anytime two women work together, there’s automatically going to be a terrific feud. The press did everything in the world to see that Joan Crawford and I had a big fight. Well, in the first place, we didn’t have any time. We made Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in three weeks, so we didn’t have any time for a feud. It was absolutely impossible. I have often said that if it was three months, I don’t know what would’ve happened, but anyway, in three weeks nothing happened, because we are both professionals. Actually, the men have bigger feuds than the women. It’s an old wives’ tale that women can’t get along, you know. It truthfully is. It’s just absurd.  Bette Davis, actor.  

*  *  *  *  *

I directed Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage which really made her a name. She was only a contract girl then, and her studio was only too delighted to loan her out . . . I’ll never forget the interview I had with her because of what Bette said. What she said was so indicative of her character then and throughout her career. She said that she liked the script, and then rather fearfully we asked if she’d like to play a bad woman like that, and she gave the answer “Yes. Under one condition.” And what was it? “No compromises.” It was so typical then to alter a character to make her more sympathetic or to change the conclusion of a story to a happy ending, but she wanted to play an evil woman with “no compromises." I never saw anybody go about her job with greater singleness of purpose. She realized this was the chance that she had been looking for, and she was determined to make the most of it.  John Cromwell, director.

*  *  *  *  *

People ask me about myself. I can only answer as an actress. Somebody asked Claude Rains once – one of my idolized actors, one of the greatest actors I worked with – and somebody asked him what his method was, and Claude Rains said, “I learn the lines and pray to God.” And I am basically in that category.  Bette Davis, actor.

Hollywood was especially cruel to Davis and Crawford in the 1960s, demoting them to B-movies but they scaled the Mt. Everest of camp when they co-starred--for the only time in their long, illustrious careers--as sisters in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, my introduction to them both. Even as a pre-pubescent child, I recognized just how over-the-top it was, particularly when Jane (Davis) serves Blanche (Crawford) her pet parakeet as a dinner entree.  It also includes my all-time favorite exchange of movie dialog:

Blanche:    "You wouldn't be able to do these awful things to me if I weren't still 

                   in this chair."

Jane:          "But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair!"

Two years later, director Robert Aldrich re-teamed the fading stars for Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, but replaced Crawford with Olivia de Havilland shortly before filming on the southern Gothic shocker began.   This one had a severed head bouncing down a staircase.

My love for both movies was a tell-tale symptom of my homosexuality.  

Aldrich went on to direct The Killing of Sister George in 1968, an early depiction of lesbianism at a moment when Hollywood began a tentative exploration of same-sex attraction.  The Fox, released the year before, was based on a D.H. Lawrence story about bisexuality, and starred the always quirky Sandy Dennis who reputedly swung both ways herself. The Sergeant and Reflections in a Golden Eye were about older, closeted men who were obsessed with young military recruits.  

I learned about all these R-rated films by reading reviews in Time magazine, but was able to see only Reflections because my mother was a fan of both Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. The car ride home that night must have been particularly awkward for Mom, or perhaps I kept my mouth shut after witnessing gay lust on screen for the first time, coupled with a degree of kinkiness permissible only because the Hays Code, Hollywood's self-imposed censorship system since the 30s, finally had begun to collapse.

*  *  *  *  *

[Katharine Hepburn] had all of the self-confidence in the world. Everything that she did was calculated for its effect. The minute she got out to Hollywood, instead of doing the type of things that a newcomer did, she bought an old, broken down, secondhand station wagon. She went around in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, practically all of the time, unless she went someplace for dinner, of course. All of this was calculated to be different. Anything she did was well thought out. Perhaps this enforced self-confidence was such that it would never allow her to think for a moment that she couldn’t do anything that she that was handed to her, no matter what it was.  

#  #  #  #  #

She was instinctively a very good actress. She had never taken the trouble to learn more about the business. She had had only a short experience in the theater when she came to Hollywood. When she arrived here, she immediately became a star.  John Cromwell, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Marlene Dietrich always thought she knew more than anybody else, including [Josef] von Sternberg. She was intelligent and she understood, but she’s so strong. There’s some women that have got balls, and she’s one of ‘em. On the other hand, she’s a complete domestic. She was always bringing lunch on the set for somebody or having them over to dinner. 

Then she was the tough sex dame. It don’t match.  Henry Hathaway, director & producer.

Guess where I was on July 20, 1969?  Not in front of a television set, watching jerky, black and white footage of the moon landing.  I went to see True Grit, one of Hathaway's last movies, and the one for which John Wayne finally won his Oscar.  It took Ryan Gosling playing Neil Armstrong in First Man to get me interested four decades later by which time motion picture technology met my fussy standards. Damien Chazelle became the youngest guy ever to take home an Oscar for Best Director; Hathaway, who directed more than 60 movies, never won one but he did get to hang with Dietrich, no small compensation.

*  *  *  *  *

[Lana Turner] was interesting because she’s a perfectly charming girl to work with, very amenable, very good manners. She said something that’s so interesting: “Honey, if I can understand it, I can do it," which is very important. She was starlike in a rather innocent way. Although she was perfectly modest and good mannered, and she had been at the studio almost as a child, a very young girl, she was very, very polite. For instance, there was a script girl she liked who is no longer young, and Lana would never ask the woman to come to her. She would always go over to the woman.  George Cukor, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Monty Clift in his youth was the most beautiful looking actor on the New York stage. He was truly beautiful, and he was a matinee idol, a true matinee idol. He was the juvenile of all time. But he had a bad automobile accident, which scarred him, and it influenced him and affected him and he was drinking and he had big, big problems and always had a death wish of some kind or another. He became unreliable. And he needed someone to tell him he was wonderful or “I know that you’re having a little problem and you don’t remember the lines but what’s the difference? You’re wonderful.” But you can’t do that all day, every day.  Stanley Kramer, director & producer.

In other words, Kramer seems to be saying, Clift was behaving like a needy actress, probably his coded way of referring to Clift's homosexuality.

*  *  *  *  *

Marlon Brando was not self-indulgent the way the press said. When we were in Tahiti making Mutiny on the Bounty, the remake, Marlon Brando didn’t go around to the bars. Very occasionally he’d drop in, maybe at night, but usually he’d go out to his house, which was 17 km from where we were working. He was always extolling the virtues of Tahiti, and I said to him, “You sound like an Air France travel guide, for God’s sake, Marlon." He turns solemn. “Well,” he said, “look, I love it down here because I can be myself. I, not Marlon Brando, the star, I’m Marlon Brando, a man. I can go around barefoot, stripped to the waist, wear anything I want, and nobody pays any attention. You’re just as important down here as I am as far as the people are concerned. Here a human being is judged by local standards. That’s why I love it." Brando was another one of those guys from Omaha.  Ridgeway Callow, assistant director.

*  *  *  *  *

Clark Gable was magnificent. You know he would do a scene where he had to be something other than just a big, strong guy, where he had to have some emotions – and he’d be going pretty good, and he’d be almost through it, and he’d stop and say, “That stinks!” So we’d do it again, and he’d be a little better. And I’d say, “Look, would you like to try again?” And he’d say, “I know I’m stinking it up, but if you’re willing, I think I could beat that.” Now, he was never quite as bad as he thought he was. He downgraded himself terribly. He was always striving for something he could never quite hit. 

He had great modesty. He was not a great actor. He was a great personality. And he had a lot of wonderful qualities, generous, qualities, warm, human qualities and I think a lot of that shone through . It’s tough to fool a camera.  Tay Garnett, director.

                                🎥

THE PRODUCT

Everybody can quote half a dozen good lines from Casablanca, from Ninotchka, from The Maltese Falcon and any number of other pictures. Now, the two big laughs in Shampoo, as far as seeing it in the theater, were “I want to suck his cock" and “Do you want to fuck?”  I. A. L. Diamond, screenwriter

Now, having gotten that off our chests… I’m kind of surprised that you use such language.  Billy Wilder, director & screenwriter.

I’m just quoting.  I. A. L. Diamond

*  *  *  *  *

Sex, pornography, and obscenity have always sold better than anything else. Now you have to make it respectable and you make it a sort of an art form… I think A Clockwork Orange is phony. I think that Sunday Bloody Sunday is phony. I think they are just pathetic. I just go and laugh and throw up. Katharine Hepburn, actor.

Hepburn personified the older half of the generation gap when she trashed these brilliant, unforgettable films released during the early 70s.  I went to see both freshman year at Columbia with my new best friend Leslie, a Haitian pre-med student who had gone to Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn (if you know, you know). He took to calling me Stanley [Kubrick] because I wouldn't stop yammering about how much I enjoyed them. To this day, I believe Barry Lyndon is the most beautiful movie ever filmed.

Leslie looked a lot like Sidney Poitier who starred with Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a movie I'd seen with my mother while my father was in Viet Nam.  Afterward, she said with a grin, "He can put his shoes under my bed anytime."  

To my everlasting shame, I ghosted Leslie when I suspected he might be gay, not long after we saw Sunday Bloody Sunday which, while not homophobic, certainly depicted the future as a solitary one. It took me another three years to come out; Leslie had long since left campus.  To this day I wonder if he was the one who got away.

*  *  *  *  *

I remember when we did the opening scene [of The Sound of Music] with Maria singing on top of the mountain, which was photographed from a helicopter. We used to call the location “Maria’s Mountain." It was in Bavaria, over the border from Austria, and it was on top of a hill. The grass was beautiful– nice and long – and when the wind hit it, it waved beautifully. We had to change our schedule for various reasons, so we did not get around to the top of the mountain until late in the shooting. One day, our production manager went ‘round to check the location, and to his horror he found that the owner had cut all the grass! But fortunately we didn’t get to the sequence for another two or three weeks, so it had grown in the meantime. But when we did get the opening scene, it rained constantly, and there was quite a steep slope going to the top of the mountain. We practically had to crawl up there on our hands and knees – even the four-wheel drives couldn’t get up the mountain. They were slipping in the soft mud. So we found an old ox there, and I’ll never forget one day sending down for Julie [Andrews] to come up to the top of the mountain. We felt this rain was going to break, and she came up, sitting on the oxcart drawn by an old ox, with a mink coat on and a huge umbrella over her. It was one of the funniest sights I have ever seen. But Julie took it in great fun.  We huddled at the top of the hill, and when the sun broke out, which it did finally, we got the shot. I think it is a beautiful shot.  Ridgeway Callow, assistant director.

*  *  *  *  *

Everybody – readers, moviegoers, people in the business – all said, “Don’t make Gone with the Wind unless Clark Gable is going to play Rhett Butler." And nobody ever thought of making it without him. You just couldn’t. I believe somebody had suggested somebody else, and, I mean, the shriek went up. You could hear it. The Clark Gable thing was definite. You couldn’t, just couldn’t, not cast him as Rhett. There was no way from the minute you picked up Gone with the Wind. We were a generation that had watched Mr. Gable on the screen, and we were absolutely mad about him. He was the one man in the world as far as people were concerned – both men and women. Gable had charisma. There he was. And nobody has ever found any other man to come anywhere near him.  Adela Rogers St. Johns, screenwriter.

*  *  *  *  *

When George Cukor left, Vivien [Leigh] and I were absolutely desperate. We got the news, we were on the set of the bazaar sequence. We were both dressed in black, if you remember, because Scarlett has lost her husband, and I have lost my brother. When we got this news, we immediately went to visit David. We left the set, and we went to see David Selznick and we spent three hours in his office, beseeching him. We cried, we pulled out our handkerchiefs, and they had black borders– you should’ve seen the poor man. He went over to his window seat – he had a marvelous window seat – and he just sat there. The windows were open, and when those handkerchiefs came out, I thought he was going to go straight over the sill. But he was strong. I don’t think he had ever had a tougher test than he received that day in his office with these two women in black beseeching him to keep George Cukor. And he didn’t – he was very strong. That evening, encouragement came to me from a very strange source. I went out to dinner with Howard Hughes. We never thought back then that all of these extraordinary things were going to happen to Howard Hughes, though he was an extraordinary man. But that night he took me out to dinner, and I told him how anguished I was by this change. I was sure that I couldn’t relate, you know, that the characterization would escape me with anyone else on the set, in spite of the costumes and hair, and Vivien had the same terror, too, so Hughes helped me. It was the most extraordinary thing. You would never think that a man like that would have quite that degree of sensitivity and insight, but he did have it, and he gave me one of the nicest gifts that any human being has ever given me by the reassurance that he offered that night. He said, “With George and Victor" – Victor Fleming was the one coming on the film – “It’s the same talent, but Victor is strained through a coarser sieve." Those were his exact words. And I therefore was able to start work with Victor Fleming with a positive and receptive viewpoint. And of course that’s very necessary.  Olivia de Havilland, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

It’s just like The Wizard of Oz. I mean, no one believed it should’ve been made, and I mean no one at Metro, but I said, “I want to see it. I’ve wanted to see it since I was a kid."  

There’s only one thing that a filmmaker needs to realize: you don’t photograph the money, you photograph the story. There’s a lot of “geniuses“ around in our business today who think you photograph the money.  Mervyn Leroy, director & producer.

                                🎥

THE END OF THE SYSTEM

It was a whole different spirit, it was a whole different kind of competition. We all talked together about movies. We talked about “What are you doing? What’s the picture about? What’s the scene? What are you going to have in it?" Now they talk about “What kind of a deal did you get? What kind of a percentage? Is it on the gross? Is it in turnaround? Is it a set deal? Is it a negative pick up?” All of those things. We never heard of those things before. We just made movies.   Billy Wilder, director & screenwriter.

*  *  *  *  *

Our days were the early days of the greatest profession in this country, the greatest profession that this country has ever known. The one form of entertainment that most people could afford was the movies. And no matter what, the business went on. It’s a resilient business.  John Cromwell, director.

                                🎥

IDENTITY CRISIS

I had no interest in playing Hello, Dolly! I don’t know how it happened, even.  Some people‘s publicity runs away. Sometimes somebody will say, “Well, she’s going to play Hello, Dolly!” It was like a jolt to me. At that time, I really didn’t know why I did it. It was like somebody announced me for it, and all of a sudden – I forget why I did it. It was a mistake, though, because I remember my first meeting with Gene Kelly. I said, “Well, what is your concept? I mean, how are you going to do it? Are you going to shoot through lace, or is it going to be Victorian?” And he just looked at me. I don’t know. I hated that movie. Barbra Streisand, actor & director.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.  Mom took me to Hello, Dolly!, marketed as a "roadshow engagement" at the Northgate Theater which meant that reserved seats had to be purchased in advance.  The movie's release was an event. at least in El Paso where I once said "Time stopped in the 1950s.  Just look at the buses if you don't believe me." Streisand may hate the movie--probably because the project reeked of cultural irrelevance during the summer of Woodstock-- but who can forget how Pixar integrated "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" into the prescient Wall E, when the sweet robot uses a video clip from the musical to court EVE?  Nearly two decades after that WTF mash-up, director Andrew Stanton deserves major props.  He recognized how even a poorly adapted Broadway musical can teach important life lessons, and introduced composer Jerry Herman to a new generation of show-tune fanatics.

*  *  *  *  *

I ran into Pauline Kael through someone I had met in a bar. It’s that simple. And she became, you know, a patron, and she got me into UCLA, and that’s how I started going. Paul Schrader, director & screenwriter.

It's hard to overstate the gushing influence of Kael for movie lovers who came of age during her tenure at The New Yorker magazine when she and Penelope Gilliatt alternated reviewing. Her enthusiasms, particularly for Brian de Palma, became mine although I did maintain a soft spot for the much cooler Gilliatt, who penned the superb screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday.

*  *  *  *  *

Some reader at MGM suggested Elvis Presley would be good for Midnight Cowboy if it was turned into a musical. And someone at United artists, from whom I did the picture, seriously said, “Make Ratso Sammy Davis, Jr. and you have a hit."  John Schlesinger, director.

*  *  *  *  *

The picture did nothing in Italy, a very famous art picture, 8 1/2, probably one of the most famous. I never understood it, to tell you the truth, but we promoted the hell out of that picture. You know what we did? We had over a hundred screenings for different egghead types, and it became a cocktail, what I call a cocktail picture. "Have you seen 8 1/2? You must see it." It became the thing to do and so we did a hell of a business [in the United States] with the picture. I remember months later, I owned a theater on 57th St., and [Federico] Fellini wanted to see 8 1/2. It was still running, it ran a year, and he wanted to see it, he wanted to look at an actor he had used. He was in New York, and we went to see it. We sat in the theater, and there was nobody in there, and we had come to about the middle of the picture, and I said, “Federico, I never knew – what the hell does that mean?" He said, “I don’t know.”  Joseph Levine, distributor & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

As young filmmakers we’re looking at, boom, every week something from Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Godard, Resnais, Satyajit Ray, the greatest filmmakers in the world, and the arguments we were having in coffee houses in the streets as filmmakers were you know, what’s going to win out? The formalism and the kind of dreamscape of Fellini or the improvisational quality of Godard?  The argument was between Fellini and Godard!  William Friedkin, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Film culture in New York in the 50s and 60s was a vibrant one, and there were a lot of opportunities to see rare films back then. People were starting to take film very seriously… I worked for Dan Talbot for a couple of years at the New Yorker Theatre on the Upper West Side which could hold something like a thousand people. Dan was the first person to show classic American films rather than foreign films, which the Thalia and most of the art houses were doing. He was following the Cahiers du Cinéma lead. For them, [Howard] Hawks was a greater director than Fred Zinneman and [Alfred] Hitchcock was greater than David Lean. The idea, as stated by various French New Wave critics, like Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rohmer, was that despite the impositions of the studio system, the personality of certain directors would show through no matter who wrote it, who shot it, or who was in it. Their points of view triumphed over the multiplicity of restrictions that might have existed.  Peter Bogdanovich, director.

Harriet, an older copy editor I met while working at Crown Publishing, sparked my passion for the mostly black-and-white movies of the 30s, 40s and 50s. The post-Stonewall gay scene had swallowed up her closest friend, another Brooklyn College graduate, and she took me under her wing to pass along what cultural historian Ethan Mordden calls "the knowledge." Harriet recommended All About Eve, The Women and The Philadelphia Story, her favorite, at a time when revival houses still existed and programmed their offerings by star and theme. Thanks to her I became a regular patron of the New Yorker Theater, not far from 47 Pianos, the Thalia and the Theater 80 St. Marks, and soon learned that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford deserved respect, not ridicule.  

  

*  *  *  *  *

I think the word should be author, I’m not sure, but if the French want to say auteur let’s not quarrel with them. They’re OK.  Mel Brooks, writer & director.

With Blazing Saddles, Brooks introduced hilarious vulgarity to the Sutton, a posh movie theater on Manhattan's snooty Upper East Side, with cowboys farting around a campfire and the incomparable Madeline Kahn doing her best Marlene Dietrich impression as Lili Von Shtupp, a lascivious size queen. It was one of the few times I disagreed with Pauline Kael.  Warner Brothers execs refused to allow Richard Pryor, who helped write the film--even then breathtaking in its political incorrectness--to star as the Black cowboy.

*  *  *  *  *

In 1943, two movies came out in America, Casablanca and Watch on the Rhine. Now, Casablanca was based on some ridiculous play. It was called something funny, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and it was Warners’ two very sharp, very clever script writers – the Epsteins worked on it. Michael Curtiz took over the direction, and it was rather an interesting, unusual bit of casting, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were co-starred and it was the kind of movie that they were making jokes at while it was going on. No one took it very seriously, it opened in New York at the end of 1942 and opened the rest of the country the beginning of 1943, and it was a smash hit. I mean, the public made it a hit. Critics, you know, gave it so-so reviews. The other funny thing, when the Academy Awards came along, it won the Academy award for best picture. The picture that won the New York Film Critics award was Watch on the Rhine. Now, Watch on the Rhine was a Lillian Hellman, very ideological play, a thesis play, very dull and stiff, Paul Lukas repeating his stage performance, Bette Davis, taking a minor role, so Paul Lukas could do the screen performance for Warners. Very ideological left-wing, you know, not romantic at all. Full of propaganda and rather stiffly directed. All of the New York intelligentsia felt that Watch on the Rhine was a serious movie and Casablanca was idiotic. It was typical of Hollywood to make a picture like that. Now, today, any serious critic, I don’t care whether auteur or not, looking at those two movies, will find Casablanca more interesting, more much more interesting – a much more important movie, a more significant movie, much more important artistically, mythically, by any level, as compared to Watch on the Rhine and the exact opposite was true in 1943.  Andrew Sarris, film critic.

I took a History of Film course at Columbia with Professor Sarris, who also reviewed films for the Village Voice and was married to Molly Haskell, another critic. I wish he'd screened movies like Casablanca, my mother's favorite, instead of The Earrings of Madame de and The Rules of the Game, both of which put me to sleep.

*  *  *  *  *

The laughter that went through this town when the French -  who are always wrong – remember that!  Whenever the French have a theory, you must begin by saying “It’s incorrect." It’s a nation devoted to the false hypothesis. On that they build marvelously logical structures, but the hypothesis is always wrong. They suddenly decided that all these hacks that we’d been laughing at for years were great creators.  Gore Vidal, screenwriter.

*  *  *  *  *

I believe that auteur crap is exactly that. I mean, it’s an ensemble.  Clint Eastwood, actor & director.

*  *  *  *  *

If you’re going to have an auteur what about the producer who gets the idea, finds the writer, puts the package together? He’s just as much the auteur.  Eleanor Perry, writer.

A family road trip to California in 1969 afforded me the opportunity to see a controversial movie about adolescence written by Perry and directed by her husband Frank.  Initially, Last Summer, which culminates in a rape, had been slapped with an X rating, the MPAA kiss of death, which meant it likely would never come to El Paso.

As soon as we arrived in San Francisco, where we had gone to check out Haight Ashbury, I looked for a newspaper ad and begged Mom to take me (after excising some nudity, the producers had resubmitted the film for an R rating).  We both had read the book by Evan Hunter, a Literary Guild selection that I shared with my closest friends in high school, two sisters, who were equally enthralled by the characters' loss of innocence.  Mom added it to our itinerary which caused a rift with Dad who, I more dimly recall, may have been miffed because we hadn't gone to see Grand Prix at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles a day or two earlier in Los Angeles.  I definitely recall driving past the distinctive sign, but it wasn't the kind of movie for which I or my mother would have expressed any enthusiasm; my lack of interest in anything automotive before I started driving had been hard for Dad who made pilgrimages to Formula One sites in Europe.

Things came to a head after Mom and I had seen Last Summer, when she refused to accompany Dad to the Condor, a topless club in North Beach where Carol Doda famously performed and which was then a popular tourist attraction for men and women, if not their precocious teenagers.

"You'll take that kid to a goddamn movie but you won't do something your husband wants you to do?" he yelled.  

Dad had no use for entertainment unrelated to cars. He cut the trip short and we drove back to El Paso. I remember stopping only for gas during a 17-hour trip.

Coincidentally, the Perrys shot Last Summer on Fire Island, where I would spend 34 consecutive summers.  It includes a brief scene of two young men in their bathing suits, concealed in the dunes, smooching on a blanket.  Two decades later, Bruce Davison one of movie's leads returned to Fire Island to shoot Longtime Companion, a tragic film about the impact of the AIDS crisis on a tight group of friends whose disparate lives overlap there. He earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Longtime Companion opens on July 3, 1981, the day the New York Times published the first article about what was then identified as "gay cancer," with shots of multiple characters discovering the news that would come to define a generation.  I know where I was that day, too, because I recorded it in my journal:  in line to see Mary Poppins flash her tits in S.O.B., a comedy directed by her husband, Blake Edwards, with two friends.  One of them, Chris Mason Johnson, then a student at the prestigious School of American Ballet, was my best movie buddy until he slept with David, my boyfriend.  Unbeknownst to me, Chris, who once observed that I was "task-not goal-oriented" (his mother was a psychologist), went on to become an independent filmmaker, something I discovered only after reading a review of Test, his excellent 2013 movie, in the New York Times. Guess what it's about.

Yes, one might say that movies are intricately woven into the fabric of my life in multiple ways.

*  *  *  *  *

[Roger] Corman was the first guy to let any of us in our generation have starring kinds of roles in B movies.  Bruce Dern, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

I was giving them an opportunity to make their first film, which, hopefully I would make a profit from, and hopefully their career would take off.  Roger Corman, producer.

Up until about 1968, when my older friends got their driver's licenses, my mother had been my primary movie-going companion.  And while recording these memories, I have begun to realize how I cling to them because they were such an integral part of our relationship, which ended in 1975, when non-Hodgkin's lymphoma took her at the age of 59, two months before I graduated from college.

Wild in the Streets, distributed by American International Pictures, may have been one of the first movies I saw with without her, probably a good thing. Mom would have been appalled, much as I have been by the cinematic proliferation of super heroes in the early 21st century,  but times keep on changing. 

A charismatic rock 'n roller (Christopher Jones, more than sexy enough to linger in my nighttime imagination) is elected president of the United States when 15-year-olds are given the vote.  People older than 35, the mandatory retirement age, get dosed with LSD before they are dispatched to compounds that looked very much like concentration camps. The youth quake didn't spare a screeching Shelley Winters, the president's mother, four years younger than my own.  I reveled in the sexy anarchy although as a 15-year-old myself, I didn't believe that "nothing can change the shape of things to come" for a second.  Sadly, I do now.

Little did I know then that critics as disparate as the feuding Pauline Kael and Renata Adler loved it, too. The latter called Wild in the Streets "the best film of the year so far" in the New York Times, and compared it to The Battle of Algiers, which has had a much longer shelf life.  If Kael were still alive, she might be less embarrassed about her enthusiasm for a mostly forgotten movie because she admired its youthful energy, a clear and accurate reflection of the moment.  Adler critiqued Kael for her subjectivity, the very thing that made me adore her.

*  *  *  *  *

I read for Cry Baby Killer . . . That’s where I met Roger [Corman].  I worked cheap enough for him, and so I started working with him as a result of this. The great thing about Roger’s movies is that you do play different things: costume stuff, which I do as badly as possibly can be done, gangster, pictures. In those days, there were a lot of insane murders being done, which I’ve always been partial to. That was great . . . Jack Nicholson, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

I did my first show, "Night Gallery," with Joan Crawford. It was frightening because I hadn’t met the crew before I came on the set, and [I was so young] they thought it was a joke. They really thought it was a publicity stunt, and I really couldn’t get anybody to take me seriously for two days. It was very embarrassing. 

She’s a very nice woman, Joan Crawford. I mean, Joan could have been the real crisis on the project. Instead, Joan was the only person on the crew who treated me like I had been working 50 years. I mean, Joan was just sensational. She understood that I shouldn’t have been there making that particular show, I should’ve been making something out of my imagination, and she was very compassionate, and we worked very closely together. Joan was a total refreshment.

The other icy refreshment was the prevailing temperature on the sound stage. Joan always works with the air conditioners blowing. This was inside in January.  Steven Spielberg, director & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

I would like to have worked [then]. It’s for all the groovy actors that I could have worked with in their prime and some of the cool actors from the 50s and 60s that were still around. I mean, I could still work with Bette Davis. That would’ve been fucking awesome. Quentin Tarantino, director.

To hear Davis speak dialog written by Tarantino is my idea of heaven. He directed three of my favorite films of the 21st century:  Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  The latter recalls Sunset Boulevard, if it had a fairy-tale ending.

OTH's storyline about Sharon Tate is one of the reasons I love it so much.  I have vivid memories of Valley of the Dolls, released two years before her brutal stabbing by the Manson family.  My girlfriends and I had passed around Jacqueline Susann's novel about women's addictions at the Fort Bliss swimming pool and were panting with hormonal anticipation to see the movie version even though we knew it couldn't possibly be as salacious.  

My mother, who told me Judy Garland, an inspiration for one of Susann's characters, had been fired from the R-rated film, agreed to take us to a matinee at the stand-alone Fox Theater in the Basset Mall.  She sat elsewhere with one of her friends, a very cool move in Pattie's and Susie's eyes.  We avidly discussed the characters and performances on the way home--particularly when Patty Duke and Susan Hayward mix it up in the older star's dressing room, surely one of the campiest scenes in movie history--but Mom and I resolutely avoided two obvious topics because we both had secrets.

Mary, whose various illnesses scarred her midlife and my childhood, hoarded her own dolls; I remember snooping in my parents' medicine cabinet and seeing bottle after bottle filled with small pink pills.  Her doctors had prescribed Darvon, a highly addictive synthetic opiod, for pain, but I'm certain its use also explained why I often found her lying on the couch in her bathrobe, listless, when I returned home from school in the late afternoon.

Although the actors scream "fag" more than once, the movie failed to depict a character's homosexuality explicitly. But even this inquisitive 14-year-old knew enough not to ask why Neely catches Ted Casablancas, her gay husband, cheating on her with a woman in their pool. The Hays code was still in force when production on the troubled film began.

Be careful what you wish for.  Three years later, 20th Century Fox released a sequel called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a Hail Mary pass of the flailing Hollywood studio system. Russ Meyer, who became a low-budget auteur by casting bigger mammaries than stars in his "nudie" pictures, was hired to direct a screenplay written by "thumbs up or thumbs down"critic-in-training Roger Ebert, then just 27.  

What was he smoking? An integrated, all-girl rock band called "The Carrie Nations" seeks fame and fortune in Hollywood and ends up at a bloody massacre perpetrated by Z-Man, a transsexual producer.  Too soon after the Sharon Tate murders?  Absolutely, but nobody at 20th Century Fox, desperate for a hit after a series of expensive flops, seemed to mind.

That said, BVD (released just a week after Myra Breckinridge, another X-rated movie distributed by Fox with a transsexual lead character) did fulfill my lustful expectations, primed by a "Sex in the Cinema" spread in Playboy featuring Michael Blodgett as Lance Rocke in a leopard-skin bikini.  Edy Williams educated me about female orgasm, too, when she moans "there's nothing, nothing like a Rolls not even a Bentley" as she climaxes in the back seat of the former while getting fucked by the cute, sexy boyfriend of the band's lead singer.  Bummed out by his infidelity, he later fails to commit suicide.

Until recently, I thought this 60s-gone-bonkers nightmare fell into the guilty pleasure category. Imagine my surprised delight when I discovered that it has been added to the prestigious Criterion Collection. But what I can't figure out, is how I got to see BVD in the first place.  The theater in El Paso must not have checked IDs.

*  *  *  *  *

Bette Davis was very dubious about my directing [her in the TV movie Skyward but she really liked the project and wanted to go ahead with it. She kept calling me “Mr. Howard” on the phone, and I said, “Well, Miss Davis, please call me Ron.” And she said, “No, I’ll call you, Mr. Howard until I decide whether I like you or not.” And so I was a little concerned about that. I went to work the first day, and she was very cordial, if somewhat distant. And, well, it was 106°. And I had a sport coat on, because I was trying to, you know, look like an adult or something. And I went up to her in the cockpit of this plane, this little mock-up, we’re working with out in Texas, and as I was approaching her, she kind of was like, “Oh, oh, my God." And then, for the whole benefit of the crew, who, fortunately, I had worked with once before, she said, “Oh, my God, I saw this child walking up to me. And I had no idea who this child could possibly be,” and then laughed and got a big laugh from the crew. And I laughed, and so then I leaned in, and I gave her the direction. And she did it.

And when the day’s shooting was over, I said, “Well, Miss Davis, you’re through, you go on back to the hotel now, I’ll see you in the morning.” And she said,“Okay, Ron, see you in the morning,” and kind of patted me on the ass and went back to the hotel.  Ron Howard, actor & director.

*  *  *  *  *

I did the last "Alfred Hitchcock Hour" ever made. My contact with Hitchcock consisted of him coming on the set on my first day of shooting to film his introduction. I was really terrified, because he was this great director. He came up to me and stared. He said, “Mr. Friedkin, you’re not wearing a tie. Usually our directors wear ties." I thought he was putting me on, but he was absolutely straight. That’s all he ever said to me.  William Friedkin, director.

Friedkin, who took home an Oscar for The French Connection before directing The Exorcist, still one of Hollywood's biggest box office smashes to date, had a career almost as checkered as his love life, which included engagement to the daughter of director Howard Hawks and marriages to French actress Jeanne Moreau and Sherry Lansing, a Hollywood studio executive.  But I remember him more for The Boys in the Band and Cruising, released a decade apart beginning in 1970.  Their sensationalist subject matter likely appealed to Friedkin.

Both films were controversial in the wake of Stonewall.  Pre-liberation stereotypes populated Boys, based on a ground-breaking play by Mart Crowley, recently remade by Netflix; in Cruising, a detective, who may be sexually conflicted, searches for a gay serial killer in the Ramble and West Village leather bars.  It drew protests from the LGBTQ+ community for sending the wrong message about our "lifestyle." 

My love for Boys (which included using the movie as the theme for my 50th birthday party) is based on its depiction of gay friendship--particularly the camaraderie that can develop on Fire Island in a shared house--and its bitchy humor ("there's one thing to be said about masturbation: you certainly don't have to look your best").  In 1981, I was truly mystified when I watched a panel discussion of Boys on local television before a dinner party at a Park Avenue apartment hosted by a couple who owned a place on Fire Island.  Like much of the panel, the guests dismissed the characters as "self-hating fags."  "They really don't seem all that different than you guys," I said, which fortunately didn't prevent David and I from securing an invitation to help them close their house for the season several weeks later.  We'd never been before.

Cruising hit even closer to home.  I actually watched it being filmed in the Ramble one night which of course prevented me from doing exactly that!  The movie didn't particularly impress me, but again I was confused by the reaction: although leather bars intimidated me, who could deny that they were an entrenched part of the downtown scene, as were the trucks and the piers, where men searched for anonymous sex and which soon became killing fields as a result of the HIV epidemic?      

.

*  *  *  *  *

It never occurred to me to ask a director to be consulted on style or content. I remember halfway through my career, I’d been an actress for 12 years, and I made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It was the first time that a director, other than my husband had asked me what I thought, and discussed the script with me, the story, changes that needed to be made. I couldn’t believe it. It was Sydney Pollack.  Jane Fonda, actor & activist.

*  *  *  *  *

So much of who I was had to do with activism. I was organizing, I was not in Hollywood. I was on military bases, I was in VA hospitals. I was in Detroit going to union organizing meetings. I was talking to people near toxic dumps. I was organizing. And I was very conscious of the fact that my celebrity separated me from people. And my career was not what came first. And I considered leaving the business. And when I was in Detroit, I met a guy, his name was Ken Cockrel, he was a a Black lawyer. He eventually became mayor of Detroit. And he said to me, “Jane, organizers are a dime a dozen. The movement doesn’t have movie stars. Your career is really important.” That completely transformed the way I thought about acting and about my career. Suddenly, it was important for me to have a career, and I had to be intentional about it, which meant I also had to start paying attention to what I was making movies about. And I started to want to make my own movies.  Jane Fonda, actor & activist.

Her highly commendable activism aside, I first became smitten by Fonda in Barbarella, particularly during the riveting striptease she performs in a space suit during the opening credits of then-husband Roger Vadim's adaptation of a French comic book.  After years of perusing my father's Playboy magazine centerfolds in the back seat of the car when he brought them home from the Post Exchange, I had become a connoisseur of women's breasts.  Although Fonda's were as perky as any I'd ever seen, that didn't stop me from me ogling the pectorals of Pygar, a blind angel played by John Philip Law, the same gorgeous blond actor who had rung Rod Steiger's chimes in The Sergeant.

But Barbarella was so much more, as any Duran Duran fan will tell you.  The band is named after the inventor of the orgasmatron that the ingenuous Fonda short circuits, and Anita Pallenberg, the Rolling Stones muse, plays the Black Queen of Sogo, a villainess whose blade-like fingers must have inspired Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands more than 20 years later.  I immediately bought the soundtrack--my first--by the Bob Crewe Generation and still stream it if I'm in the mood for some classic 60s grooves.  And when I took a class at the Fashion Institute of Technology in the 90s, I used a Life magazine cover to screen print on a t-shirt overlapping images in pink, black and chartreuse of Fonda in her spacesuit holding a ray gun.

Recalling that I saw the Barbarella unsupervised with friends in downtown El Paso also reminds me that my father warned us not to sit in the balcony of the Plaza Theater, because that's where queers (his preferred slur) might try to molest teenage boys. Needless to say, that didn't happen, but the place--with its Wurlitzer organ and twinkling stars on the ceiling--mesmerized me nevertheless.  I never wanted to see another movie in the nondescript theaters on Fort Bliss where we typically paid 35 cents for a seat although sitting aside young soldiers, some of whom, when high, purchased ice cream cones from me at Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors, had its pluses.

And now, in my early 70s, I wonder if my obsession with Barbarella was a symptom of something else:  did I want to be Jane Fonda?  No actress ever has fascinated me more. Coincidentally, I'm wearing a t-shirt of her 1970 mug shot, purchased several years ago from her website, as I write this.

*  *  *  *  *

So finally, [Peter Fonda] calls me from Canada . . . And he calls me and wakes me up in the middle of the night and he says, “Look, man, Hoppy,” he says, “They’re going to give us the money to make a movie. And they’re going to let you direct and they’re going to let us both act in the picture, and I’m going to produce it. The only one drawback is, it is a motorcycle picture. But like you know, I got this great idea. See, we smuggle all these drugs, and then, like, we get on these gleaming bikes. We sell the drugs, and we get on these big bikes, and we go to Mardi Gras. And then, like, a couple of duck hunters shoot us in Florida." He said, “What do you think about that as an idea?" And I said, “Peter, are you sure you have the money?" And he said, “Yeah, I got the money.” I said, “It sounds like a hell of an idea to me.” So that was the beginning of Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper, actor & director.

*  *  *  *  *

We played the whole movie [Easy Rider], and it ended, it was quiet, everyone was waiting for Leo Jaffe, and there was a pause – it seemed like a year. Jaffe, who at that time was in his late 60s, stood up, turned around, and he looked . . . at me, and he said – this is a quote – he said, “I don’t know what the fuck this picture means, but I know we’re going to make a fuck of a lot of money." And we’re all elated.  

#  #  #  #  #

On Friday afternoon, we would run the picture at Columbia just amongst ourselves. The grass would come out and everybody would get high, and then we’d go on and have a long conversation in Bert Schneider‘s office. Bob Rafelson, Jack, myself, Dennis, Peter, and those would go on for hours. And the next morning, I couldn’t remember what the hell had gone on.  

#  #  #  #  #

That’s another interesting note, and I must make note of it. In those days, the late 60s, there was a lot of innocence surrounding dope. Not like it has developed into. And as a result of that, there was a lot of dope in our editing room.  Donn Cambern, film editor.

*  *  *  *  *

There was a time when if I heard “Do our thing” or “Do my thing,” one more time, I would have regurgitated in front of them.  Sam Arkoff,  producer.

                                🎥

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

When I made Bonnie and Clyde pretty boys didn’t really produce pictures so much or maybe certainly not at that age. Kirk Douglas had produced very well, Burt Lancaster was involved in producing, and of course, Orson [Welles], but he passed through the pretty boy stage early. Anyway, I was a little bit derided. “You’re not going to call yourself a producer, are you?"  Warren Beatty, actor, director & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

When we finished Bonnie and Clyde, the film was characterized, rather elegantly by one of the leading Warner executives as “a piece of shit." It went downhill from there.”  Arthur Penn, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Pauline Kael told them in The New Yorker. Andrew Sarris told them in the Village Voice. In the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin told them, and in the New York Times, it was Vincent Canby. As never before, these and others had what no critics ever had in Hollywood: power. Swaying the public, they could sway the box office.  Sam Wasson, co-author.

*  *  *  *  *

And then my brother sent me a record of these young guys. And I would play it in the morning when I got up to go shoot The Graduate. At a certain point, I thought, schmuck! This is your score. And it took me quite a long time of hearing it every morning to realize that it was this thing that I think is very important to movies, the “happy accident,“ the found thing. And once they start to come, they come like, like meteorites. They keep coming at you, these coincidental things. So we’d already shot a lot of of the montage, and [editor Sam] Osteen, and I just dropped in Simon & Garfunkel. And that was quite amazing. What happened. They were, in some ways, the voice of Benjamin.  Mike Nichols, director.

*  *  *  *  *

After Mike Nichols had done The Graduate, I said, “If Mike Nichols could’ve gone to Joe Levine and said, “I want to do The Green Awning.” “The what?“ “The Green Awning," “What is it?" “It’s a movie about a green awning.“ “Does any famous star walk under the green awning?" “No, all unknowns.“ “Are there any naked women near the green awning?" “No, no naked women." “Are people talking and eating sandwiches and scrambled eggs in outdoor tables under the green awning?"  “No, it’s just a green awning. Panavision. Just a green awning. It doesn’t move." “How long would it be?" ”Two hours. Two hours, nothing but a green awning on-screen. No talking, no dialogue, nothing." “All right what the hell, we’ll do it."  Mel Brooks, writer & director.

My mother used to reminisce about going to double features as a young woman.  We finally shared the experience in 1967 when my father left for a year in Viet Nam, just as the "new" Hollywood was emerging.  We saw Bonnie & Clyde first, at the Plaza, and then walked a short distance to another theater for The Graduate which we both enjoyed a lot more. Afterward, I learned that the double features she'd seen had been shown in the same theater, so our afternoon, perhaps my favorite childhood memory of her, was even more special. I had to wait until I moved to New York to see one that had been programmed for creative or pack-the-house reasons.  Pre-covid retirement brought another variation that required careful study of various movie start times at the AMC Lincoln Square which has 13 different screens, including IMAX.  Someone had told me you could spend an afternoon walking from one auditorium to the next with a single admission which definitely sounded like a retirement plan.  Cheap cinephile that I am, I always made sure that I never missed a second of one of my choices, although I can't remember any sneak double bills off the top of my head.

*  *  *  *  *

Mr. Hitchcock told us that he would no more improvise during shooting than the conductor of the New York Philharmonic would improvise while conducting. He believes the time to improvise is when you’re working with paper – not film.  David Brown, producer.

*  *  *  *  *

It’s the director’s job to be in control. It’s the actor’s job to be out of control – and, but somehow, as a professional, to be in control slightly of being out of control. And if you’re a good director, you don’t want to be in total control. Everything will be boring, it’ll be planned, and there will be no spontaneity, so as a good director, you want to be slightly out of control of being in control. So you’re a guy at the same time being out of control of being in control and being in control of being out of control. And in this way, lies certain institutions that you could be sent to.  Warren Beatty, actor, director & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

When I cast a film, most of my creative work is done. I have to be there to turn the switch on and give them encouragement as a father figure, but they do all the work. If an actor comes to me and asks, “What exactly should I do when I come in in that door?" I’ll say, “Have you thought about wearing cowboy boots instead of those slippers?" I’ll say anything except answer their question directly, because the minute I’ve narrowed the 360° possibility down, they’re not creating things themselves, and I’m doing the work. I want to see them do the work.  Robert Altman, director.

Mash, released in 1970 and Altman's commercial breakthrough, marked milestones both in Hollywood censorship history and the Hon family.  "Fuck" was uttered on screen for the first time; we heard it distinctly through the tinny speakers at the Del Norte Drive-In Theater. Although both my parents swore casually, neither ever used it. Nor had my father ever joined my mother and me for a movie, but the ferocious, anti-war satire must have lured him out of the garage for a night: as a World War II veteran recently returned from Viet Nam, he was completely disillusioned with the American military.

Drive-ins were so much a part of my moviegoing experience in El Paso, and cars weren't always necessary.  When we moved into a new suburban development after returning from Heidelberg in 1965, we could see the screen of  the Cactus Drive-In from our dining room table, through the patio window, for several weeks until other houses were completed to the east.  Although it had been my fantasy to be babysat by Ann-Margret since seeing her in Bye Bye Birdie, my first musical, while we were in Germany, I kept my sexually confused eye on Michael Parks in Bus Riley's Back In Town, night after night while eating my mother's stuffed peppers (ugh) or enchilada casserole (yum).

Believe it or not, the Trail, another drive-in across town, showed porn in an undeveloped area not far from the Rio Grande River.  "Truckers used to crash all the time when they drove past on I-10 craning their necks while trying to get a look at the on-screen action," I exaggerated to my dorm mates upon arrival at Columbia.  Playing up my dusty roots in a place Mom derisively called the "cultural crotch of America" was definitely key to fashioning my new identity.  But it also included extolling the incredible murals that decorated the stucco facades behind drive-in screens built in the late 50s and early 60s, when their popularity peaked.  They typically depicted Tex/Mex scenes. with names like the Bronco, the Fiesta and the Del Norte.

*  *  *  *  *

I don’t like to go and sit and bullshit with [studio executives], because they’ve got nothing to say. So it’s your natural instinct to stay away from it, because they’re a negative force. They’re negative. They put negative energy, whatever the hell you wanna call it, into what you’re doing. Every goddamn time. I’ve never sat around with any of them that gave me an idea that was worth a goddamn.  Hal Ashby, director.

*  *  *  *  *

I thought Universal was the prime rib of movie studios. I kept remembering Orson Welles’s famous line that a movie studio was the best toy a boy could ever have, and I began to function at Universal as if it were a giant sandbox.   Steven Spielberg, director & producer.

Barnet, my first gay friend (and five years older) taught me almost as much about old movies as Harriet. For example, did you know that Doris Day turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate? Wouldn't that have been something?  It might have given her a shot at a Best Actress Oscar after losing to Simone Signoret in 1960, when she had been nominated for Pillow Talk opposite Rock Hudson.  Anne Bancroft lost to Katherine Hepburn for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a great example of how often Oscars are awarded as often on the basis of sentiment as merit. But Bancroft's bemusement and fury remain indelibly etched in my consciousness nearly 50 years later.

Although Barnet and I could talk for hours about these contingencies on the phone, we occasionally differed in our reactions to contemporary movies that we saw together.  My put-down of E.T. the Extraterrestrial infuriated him so much that he called me a snob and left me standing on a corner.  I wasn't really criticizing Spielberg, I just don't usually care for movies about unrealistic subjects, particularly when children are featured although there are exceptions to every rule.  A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's underrated masterpiece from 2001 (!) includes another chilling line of dialog, just before Monica abandons David, a humanoid robot replacement for her son, that continues to resonate: I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world.  Just think--25 years ago humans were apologizing to AI instead of fearing it!

In any case, I learned a lesson from my experience with Barnet.  Instead of criticizing or refusing to see a film my friends have enjoyed I simply say "It's just not my kind of movie." If only some of them would do the same.  Solitary viewing also solves the problem of diverging tastes.

*  *  *  *  *

Midnight Cowboy was a case in point. John Voight’s photograph failed to elicit one bit of enthusiasm for the producer, Jerome Hellman, and me to even meet him, and it was only due to the forceful personality of the casting director that we met him and read him in one scene. Then we were bowled over.  John Schlesinger, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Juliet Taylor was the casting director for Woody Allen‘s movies, and she’s a fixture in New York – great, great, imaginative, casting director. She would go to all the shows, and she saw me in a production of an Arthur Miller one-act on the same bill with a Tennessee Williams, one-act, and I had gotten some good reviews for that. So she asked me if I would like to fly to London and meet Fred Zinneman, who was casting Julia. And I was really stunned, because it was to audition for the part of Julia. At that time, they weren’t sure if it was going to be a star or they wanted to get an unknown opposite Jane Fonda. So I flew and met Fred Zinneman, and he said, as I walked in, “Well, I’ve already cast decided to cast Vanessa Redgrave.” I said, “Well, you know what, that’s fine. That’s fine. I mean, I completely understand." “He said, “Would you take a smaller role?” And so that that’s how I got my first job.  Meryl Streep, actress.

*  *  *  *  *

On What’s Up Doc? I never saw a budget. I never knew what the budget was until it was over. The only thing I’ve ever heard on Doc was John Calley called me up. We were shooting up in San Francisco. He called me up, he says, “You know, Peter, the chase is very expensive.” I said, “It is?" He said,“It’s going to cost $1 million.” I said, “Well, that’s an expensive chase." He said, “Is there anything you can do to make it cheaper? I don’t know how you know? When cars go down the street, they got to go into the glass and the Chinese dragon. I don’t know what to do. They’re all good jokes. I don’t know what to cut out.” He says, “You haven’t got any ideas?" I say, “No. I think it’s important to have the chase, don’t you?"“Yep – well, I just thought I’d ask." That was the whole conversation.  Peter Bogdanovich, director.

Until my sixties, I didn't re-watch movies all that often no matter how much I liked them, so when I sat down one night with a Pines housemate and slipped What's Up Doc into the DVD player, I fully expected to enjoy the screwball comedy as much as I had the first time, when co-stars Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal were at their most luscious.  Instead, I found it silly and tedious, particularly the expensive chase scene, which seems to go on forever.  The movie's only redeeming qualities are Madeline Kahn, in her first film role, and the palpable chemistry of the stars, which includes them singing "You're the Top" over the credits.  People may not change, but their tastes sometime do.

And while The Last Picture Show did hold up, perhaps because it nails the cultural desert of West Texas, the absence of production designer Polly Platt (and Bogdanovich's first wife) from this book is a real shortcoming. To hear Hollywood historian Karina Longworth tell it on her terrific podcast "You Must Remember This," Platt was integral to the success of Bogdanovich's early films, including What's Up Doc and Paper Moon, even after he dumped her for Cybill Shepherd.

*  *  *  *  *

Now, let’s take Shampoo for instance. It is about a very specific place [late-1960s Beverly Hills] at a very specific time historically . . . Men did, in fact, open their shirts, down to here and hang 7000 things around their neck, started to become the peacocks, started in a funny way to become the sex object. I mean, Warren Beatty in that movie is, in fact, the sex object. None of the women are. So now you say to yourself, “what do I do about that? That is both real and works dramatically?" So you say, “OK, if I’m going to put him in a leather jacket, I want it to be the softest leather jacket that ever happened. When you touch it, it should almost be a sexual experience. I don’t want a heavy leather jacket anymore." So I have eliminated a whole category of things that are not possible, and it is the process of elimination, which, I think, has to happen in all areas, whether it be our direction, costume designing, cinematography . . . Anthea Sylbert, costume designer.

                                🎥

THE CREEP UP

I called directors “Sir“ even though I’m now at a point where at least half of them are younger than I am and make a hell of a lot less money.  Charlton Heston, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

I think all you guys realize that the director is more important than the writer by this time. Does anybody think different? Francis [Ford Coppola] rewrote me and I rewrote him. That’s why it worked. Same thing on The Godfather II: I did first draft, then he did second draft, then we’d get together and I’d do the third draft. I think it worked fairly well.  Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather.

*  *  *  *  *

I’ve always said that the great thing that happened in The Godfather was that every guy that was making that movie, literally every guy, needed a winner. I certainly had not never done anything like that. Francis [Ford Coppola] needed a monster. [Marlon] Brando was in trouble. Al Pacino, you know, Jimmy Caan and Bobby Duvall, they were nobody.  Al Ruddy, producer.

*  *  *  *  *

I was overwhelmed by Godfather. I just really did feel like the outsider.  Diane Keaton, actress.

*  *  *  *  *

My first meeting with Marlon [Brando], I remember meeting with him in Harlem – an Italian restaurant in Harlem, I think it was Patsy‘s. And Francis Coppola got us all together, sitting around this table: Jimmy Caan, Duvall, myself, the late John Cazale. And we sat around the table with Marlon having Italian dinner. And the odd thing was, each one of us became the character we’re going to be in the movie. We sort of went to that – at least, I went to it because of my shyness and my inability to articulate. But at the same time, Marlon, too, had an image. And he projected this larger-than-life thing that he also used in his own way. And he was a prankster, too, so he would lay it on sometimes. But I got close with him for a while there on the picture.  Al Pacino, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

The old idea was to take a class film and open it first in New York, probably at an East Side house, and then in Westwood, and then let the media percolate to the peasants of the world. The word that it’s a great hit. The Godfather broke that pattern because of the urgency to see it. When Paramount released The Godfather, it released it simultaneously in many houses that previously had never played anything but single, exclusive engagements.   David Brown, producer.

*  *  *  *  *

Nobody would think that a cigarette company wouldn’t launch a cigarette and spend $5 million to advertise it and not have it available in every drug and grocery store in the country. That was the thing we used to miss in the picture business.  Joseph E. Levine, producer.

*  *  *  *  *

In Japan, if a man cracks up, he closes the window and kills himself. In America, if a man cracks up, he opens the window to kill somebody else. And that’s what’s happening in Taxi Driver.  Paul Schrader, director & screenwriter.

*  *  *  *  *

Steven Spielberg has this ability to bring about an idea and then really open it up for discussion. It doesn’t matter who’s involved in the process. If they have a good idea, he’s going to listen to it and he’s going to add on it. When people are in an environment, a creative environment like that, and they realize that that isn’t closed off to them, then I think people begin to get very creative and they begin to get very alive in terms of ideas. And he’s very good at creating an atmosphere like that, and I think, consequently, it shows in his films.  Kathleen Kennedy, producer & studio executive.

*  *  *  *  *

I met Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios when he was a very young man. I think he was about, maybe, 23 years old, 24 years old . . . I was five minutes or so late to the restaurant. And I went over to the table, and here was this kid, he looked like he was 17 years old. He stood up, and he said, “I’m Steven Spielberg.”And I felt like an elder, more or less immediately. “Oh!”And he was dressed like a very young person might. And the wine list came over. He looked at it, and I could see – I don’t think he’d ever held a wine list in his hand before. And we had lunch and spoke about [Jaws]. I had no idea what he had done before, some television, I think. But I discovered five minutes into the conversation that this young gentleman knew as much or more than I did about film music. He started singing the themes of films that I’ve written, subthemes, you know, that I’d forgotten about, and everything of Max Steiner or anyone else you want to pick. He was really quite a scholar, and erudite, almost, in this area. Much more than I. And I loved that about him, of course instantly. And we could sit and dish about film music, ones that I’ve played for, the ones I liked, didn’t like: “Well, why didn’t you like it?" "Why do you like this?" An insatiable capacity to learn. A glistening intellect, obviously, in the first meeting with this kid.  John Williams, composer.

*  *  *  *  *

I have absolute trust and faith that John [Williams] is right when he sees my movie for the first time.   Steven Spielberg, director & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

All this money is spent making a picture. Then they take two weeks to come up with an ad concept, they book it into a couple of theaters, and they send it out there. It’s as if you sent your four-year-old off to nursery school for first day and didn’t kiss him goodbye and didn’t give him breakfast. It’s crazy.  Julia Phillips, producer.

*  *  *  *  *

We are in a commercial business. Film is predicated on an audience of millions of people. And if you are not comfortable with that fact, you should get out of it. There are a lot of ways to express yourself in this world, and only a few of them cost this much. If you want to be a rocket scientist, you have to accept the fact that you have to work for the United States or Russia – you know, you’re not going to be a rocket scientist for Warner Brothers. Paul Schrader, director & screenwriter.

*  *  *  *  *

Marty Scorsese called me. I was over at Universal, and he was scoring Taxi Driver at Warners. Marty said, “You got to get over here. The score is brilliant. You got to just drive over here!" So I got in my car, and I drove over to Warners and went into the recording session and went into the booth and sat with Marty for an hour listening to Taxi Driver. Benny Herrmann was sitting on the floor, smoking a big cigar. He was covered in ash – his stomach went out to here. And Marty said during a break, “OK, you got to come meet Bernard Herrmann." So he brings me out by the hand, and he parks me in front of Benny Herrmann. And he said, “Benny, this is my friend, Steven Spielberg." And I said, “Oh, Mr. Herrmann, I’m such an admirer of your work. You’re such an amazing genius." He looked at me, said, “So why do you always hire John Williams?” And he actually passed away that evening. That was the last day of his life. I got to meet him on the last day of his life. He unexpectedly died asleep that night, at the hotel.   Steven Spielberg, director & producer.

I've been firmly in Herrmann's corner since 1996 when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa Pekka Salonen, released a compilation of his most famous film scores, including Psycho, Vertigo, Fahrenheit 451 and Taxi Driver.  And thanks to Charlton Heston (whose fascinating oral history is one of this book's biggest surprises in contrast to his right-wing statements as president of the National Rifle Association) I now know that Orson Welles brought him to Hollywood to score Citizen Kane after they worked together in radio's Mercury Theater.  Herrmann conducted the orchestra that played during the infamous "War of the Worlds" broadcast in 1938, when many Americans believed a Martian invasion was actually taking place.

Wouldn't it be cool if Radio City Music Hall or another equally prestigious concert venue programmed a night of Herrmann's film music one Halloween night?

                                🎥

THE DEAL

No one is forcing the studios to pay these prices. No one. I have seen things where it’s absolutely reprehensible, the competitiveness between the studios, where they’re absolutely convinced that if they don’t pay a certain star that price that someone else will, and that only compounds the problem.  I’m delighted to say to my clients, “Hey, they just won’t pay it." But I’m not going to say it if they’re going to pay it to a rival's client. I just won’t. And as long as they’re dumb enough to pay these prices – I mean, Gene Hackman did not want to do Lucky Lady.  I mean, he did not want to do it, and they kept offering him more and more and more money. Well, everyone has their price I mean, it wasn’t as though he was being asked to exterminate people, he was being asked to play in a movie, and finally these people came up with the kind of money that it was almost obscene for him not to do the film.  Sue Mengers, agent.

*  *  *  *  *

I mean, there’s no windfall like a movie. It’s the biggest crap game in the world! You put down 2 million, and you take back $100 million. You put down $10 million, and you take back $200 million. It’s incredible! The numbers are staggering. Nobody’s going to walk away from that. You’d have to get me to Las Vegas first, because it’s a great gambler’s business, which is why we’re all here. We’re all loonies.  Frank Yablans, studio executive & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

Possibly one of the most misleading terms ever applied to the phenomenon of films and their exhibition is the word industry. It implies a repetitive industrial pattern. It implies criteria which the Wharton School of Business reviews: quality control and cost control. Well, you can get everybody in the world to agree on what constitutes quality in a ball bearing. You can’t get two people to agree on what constitutes quality in a film.   David Chasman, studio executive.

*  *  *  *  *

Part of my problem is that over the years. I’ve dreamt up things that couldn’t be put on screen, unless I move the state of the art and technology forward. Science fiction is great on paper, but it’s much harder when it comes to cinema, because for at least a brief moment, you have to make it appear to be real. It’s really determined by available technology, and for many years those hurdles were impossible to overcome. The connection here is actually that all art is technology, whether it’s picking up a charred stick and drawing pictures on a wall or creating the Death Star. When we finally finished Star Wars, I don’t think anybody, you know, understood that it would go anywhere. George Lucas, director.

*  *  *  *  *

They showed a 20th Century Fox film early, you know a month early, and before all the publicity or anything could come out. And as we drove over from our house to MGM, where they were showing this, actually, my husband said, “What’s this about?" And I said, “Well the director, George Lucas said he made it for 12-year-olds.“ And Dick said, “Well, let’s go home." And I said,“No, we should go because we liked American Graffiti so much.” So that was the first public screening of Star Wars. Nobody who walked into that theater, knew what to expect. And when it was over, I saw something that I had never seen before, and have never seen since, which is an audience of about 400 jaded Hollywood people and members of the press standing and screaming and applauding. Once the movie got out into the theaters and was over praised, the people who went to see it two months later, said,“What’s all this fuss about?" But when we walked out of the theater that night, I said, jokingly, “We should buy 20th Century Fox stock," which, of course I couldn’t do because I was on the staff of the New York Times and I could not own any movie stuff. And so I would not have, but it turned out that at least half a dozen people who were in the theater that night did exactly that and made a considerable amount of money.  Aljean Harmetz, co-author.

*  *  *  *  *

The three kids in Star Wars, nobody ever heard of, including their parents, and the movie opened the same day in 23 places around this country, including Grand Rapids, Iowa, and it opened a hit in Grand Rapids, Iowa, and it opened a hit in New York and LA. And that’s what it always comes down to. There was something about that movie that made it work before it ever opened. It is something with people, with an audience. It has nothing to do with Time magazine or Pauline Kael saying it’s a masterpiece. It really doesn’t.  Ned Tanen, studio executive & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

There is a wide open door to Hollywood today, and that’s the original screenplay. That is the only really wide-open chance, because if that script knocked somebody out in Hollywood, just one person, you’re the director, you’re the producer, or you’re the writer, whatever you want to be, all you have to do is be involved with that.  Michael Phillips, producer.

                                    🎥

PACKAGING

There is going to become a point, and it won’t be too far in the future, when pay television, instead of having to drink at the trough of post theatrical release, is going to have enough money to go out and finance features on its own, and when it does, it’s going to raise hell at the major studios, in terms of traditional forms of distribution and the opportunity of motion picture theaters to attract income.  Gordon Stulberg, studio executive & lawyer.

Just call Stulberg Cassandra.  The future arrived in 2007 when Netflix began streaming.

*  *  *  *  *

You know, if you took “faster” and “clearer” out of the patois of everybody who isn’t a director or an actor in Hollywood, they would have nothing to say at the meeting. Nothing to say, period. There’s no other real grasp. And “likable.” Those three things. In fact, you could just turn that on, and you’ll be right up to speed at any meeting they have lately. Jack Nicholson, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

There’s something very American about Robert Redford. He has a much darker inside than what one sees on the outside. He’s prototypically American in that sense. America has his glamorous exterior and a rather troubled, dark interior. Redford has that.  Sydney Pollack, director & actor.

*  *  *  *  *

Well, I mean, there’s [Robert Redford] climbing on top of you, you know? You don’t have to act, you know?  Barbra Streisand, actor & director.

*  *  *  *  *

I could tell you stories, but they’re too dirty to tell, about Barbra [Streisand].  Peter Bogdanovich, director.

Was it appropriate for a mother to take her 16-year-old son to see The Owl and the Pussy Cat? Probably not but I giggled so hard that I nearly peed my pants long before I fell in love with her voice.  I still found it hilarious after a re-watch despite Streisand's initial characterization of neighbor George Segal as a "fag." The slur must be more problematic for her son. 

*  *  *  *  *

Our first scene together [in Julia] was in Sardi’s after the triumphant opening of The Little Foxes. And Lillian Hellman walks across the floor of Sardi’s and everyone’s applauding. And Anne-Marie played in black wig by Meryl Streep, is following her. And the camera’s taking both of us. And then I walk off camera and Meryl walks into camera and the camera stays on her. And I remember the next day I went to see rushes, I was by myself. And I saw this actress do something with her hands and her mouth . . . that told a whole story in one gesture, and my hair stood on end.  Jane Fonda, actor & activist.

*  *  *  *  *

You just don’t know what the other actor is going to do. You can have all these ideas about what you’re going to do with your little character, and then the guy can just reach out and touch you in a moment when you didn’t expect anybody to touch you and your whole thing falls apart, so it’s not, for me, valuable to make too many decisions or to analyze.  Meryl Streep, actress.

*  *  *  *  *

Now we get into the restaurant in [Kramer vs Kramer], the scene doesn’t work. The scene does not work. It was very simple. Meryl [Streep] had a big speech. Eight sentences into that speech, she told me she wanted the kid back. And I’m sitting and I’m sitting and I’m sitting and I’ve been playing a character now for four or five weeks. So I have a sense of him, you know, and I’m sitting, I’m saying “Why am I sitting here? Why am I sitting? Why don’t I leave? What am I talking to her for?" And the director says, “What’s the matter?" And I said, “I don’t know what I’m sitting here for." And Meryl is getting upset, she thinks I’m not interacting with her. I said, “I’m not not interacting with you! Why am I here?" And she starts telling me why I should [interact with her]. I said, “Don’t tell me why I should!" You know, we’re working, we’re raw, you know, we’re separated people and getting a divorce. So we’re using our ourselves, you know we’re not on speaking terms half the time, you know – we are and we aren’t, you know? So we walked out. We weren’t speaking to each other. I wasn’t able to match her. I wanted to match her. I wanted to get back at her emotionally, and it wasn’t in the writing. So somehow we did a take. And after the take, I didn’t even plan it, but I didn’t want to leave. You know it’s like an actor that doesn’t want to get off. And I was so upset that she had more stuff to work with. I just took a glass and I just boom, and it went up against the wall in shards. [director Robert Benton] loved it, and they wanted to reset the cameras. It’s in the movie. Meryl wanted my heart. She had glass shards in her hair.  She said, “What are you doing? You could’ve blinded me!" I mean, she was furious. She hated me.  Dustin Hoffman, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

I never really could figure out how you got your satisfaction, how you got your rocks off in the movies. I understood how to do that on stage for this big effort that’s completely consummated at the end of the night and then you go out and drink. In films you have just this long dragged out – every day, there’s a new problem, there’s a new thing. And then you just leave it and go away. And a year later, somebody shows you what it is that they’ve made. And that’s a long time to wait for satisfaction. And I couldn’t really understand it, how to enjoy it.  Meryl Streep, actress.

In the mid-90s, I discovered that I loved something more than movies, or at least movie stars.  While working at the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence on a prevention video for parents, a board member for the organization offered to contact Streep and ask if the then two-time Oscar winner (for Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie's Choice) and mother of children ages 4, 9, 12 & 16 would be interested in introducing it.  She said yes.

I had become aware of Streep relatively early, in 1978, thanks to David, just after she'd made her film debut in Julia and not long before she was nominated for her first Academy Award in The Deer Hunter.  David had been working as an assistant prop master at the Public Theater where Streep had appeared as the title character in "Alice in Concert," (later called "Alice at the Palace" when televised on PBS), a musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll's children's classics by Elizabeth Swados.  I couldn't wait to tell her we'd seen it and gush about her performance in The French Lieutenant's Woman, a not entirely successful adaptation of one of my favorite novels.

Suddenly, I had to face my own "Sophie's choice," if one far less traumatic, having already made plans to spend the week of the August full moon at the Muller Cottage.  It turned out to be the only time when Streep was available to film "What Should I Tell My Child about Drinking?"  If I wanted to hang out in an Upper East Side living room with the greatest actress of my generation, I would have to re-schedule my vacation, not so easy in a shared house.

I chose the Pines and Streep did her usual great job without having to deal with a fanboy.

*  *  *  *  *

What I’ve learned about Tom Cruise is that whatever you’ve seen him do in a movie is clearly exactly what the director has asked him to do, because he’s that kind of actor. It’s just like, “Can you do it standing on your head and backwards?" “Yeah, sure." Paul Thomas Anderson, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Tom Cruise does control his image. He controls his image in ads and in trailers, so he definitely sees all that stuff. A lot of it was sent off to England, where he was doing his movie with Stanley Kubrick. I mean he was fully involved in each one of these trailers that they put together for Jerry Maguire. I wondered how he was able to produce Mission: Impossible while he was making Jerry Maguire. I guess he just finds the time to do it, because he went over little cuts on some of the trailers and improved them quite a bit. What he would say is the thing you long to hear as a director. He said, “You know, guys" – and believe me, he’ll call every one of the people involved at the studio on the making of these trailers, all of them, and say – “You know, guys, this is better quality movie than you’re giving it credit for. This is a Kmart movie, the way you’re selling it. This should be dealt with with more class." And in fact, he upgraded the whole presentation of Jerry Maguire in a way that he could only do because he had the control.  Cameron Crowe, writer & director.

*  *  *  *  *

I considered myself – and do consider myself – the greatest improvisational actor working in films. I say that because I write well on my feet within these strictures.  Jack Nicholson, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

Jack [Nicholson] is such a force for the positive. And I understood from watching him what lifted him, because he was connected to every single person on the set, the wardrobe ladies in the third row of vehicles in the wardrobe trailers — to them, to everybody beyond, to the greens man. He had a relationship with everyone. And so when he started a scene, everybody’s love just lifted him. I’ve never seen anybody quite so gifted at using whatever was around to do what he needed. And he was hilarious when he had to be naked. He’d say, “All right, everybody, Steve is coming out, don’t be too depressed,” and he would just turn it into a terrific number. And he had the crew in stitches.  Mike Nichols, director.

*  *  *  *  *

But also remember that actors are very vulnerable, right? Because the goods they’re selling is themselves. I’ve been in love scenes with a director, like, “Cut, no." And you’re like, “No, that’s my, that’s my go-to. That’s my, that’s my thing, man. No, what the fuck, I’m two times the sexiest man alive! Fuck you!"  George Clooney, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

Hollywood always was a global business, but when I started, foreign [box office] was 10% of the gross. Getting to the 90s, it was was 40%. So increasingly, when you make something you’re making it for a worldwide audience.  Mike Ovitz, agent.

*  *  *  *  *

Since Star Wars came out, that kind of film or a variation of it is what commercial cinema is all about, not just America, but everywhere in the world.  William Friedkin, director.

                                    🎥

EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS

I don’t know what a man feels like in the job. So I’m just supposing that. But I don’t feel the pressures of being a woman or being young. Do you know? I don’t feel that. I feel the pressures of trying to find 15 movies that I want to make, that I feel committed to, that I feel a passionate about. That’s the pressure.  Sherry Lansing, studio, executive, & producer.

*  *  *  *  *

I don’t think filmmaking is gender specific.  Kathryn Bigelow, director.

*  *  *  *  *

I don’t consider just doing films about females or with a female point of view. I’ve been through a lot of my life, and I really think of myself as a humanist, not just a feminist, although I think women should be feminist. The topics I’m attracted to are buried and, in a lot of cases, quite political. And the sensibility that I bring to it is a female sensibility, because I am female. But if it’s a woman’s story that I really want to have told, then there has to be a reason for it beyond the fact that it’s a woman’s story.  Lee Grant, actress & director.

*  *  *  *  *

I have never met a producer who was not interested in my particular concept of the “Blackness” of a script.  I sought to present as forceful an image as I could in order to counter the prevalent one. The prevalent image in those days was that Negroes were lazy and shiftless. So in my pictures, I was cool and hardworking. If you look at the films, you’ll see that I tried to present that which was most lacking: a guy with a job other than the usual menial ones. I played doctors and lawyers. I played a psychiatrist for Stanley Kramer. Of course, some of those films are heavily dated today, but I believe in the historical evolution of things. You and I are in this room partly because of that history.

#  #  #  #  #

The fact is that most of the scripts I did were written by Whites, which is to say that to require you to write only for Whites makes no sense. To require me or this gentleman to write only for Blacks also makes no sense. A writer has a point of view on something and with his script speaks to that point of view.  Sidney Poitier, actor.

In this Hollywood at least, homosexuality remained the love that dare not speak its name, not even among gay directors (George Cukor and John Schlesinger, to cite two) let alone the dozens of movie stars who spoke to AFI about their careers.  This lack of acknowledgment in "Everybody's Business" reminds me of the pervasive discomfort with LGBTQ+ representation in studio films until well into the 21st century and the extreme disappointment that I experienced when the unmemorable Crash beat the groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture at the 2006 Academy Awards (just watch Jack Nicholson's eyebrows).  Sure, it won Oscars for directing, writing and score but it couldn't bring home the top prize.  Ironically, however, two straight guys playing gay were nominated that same year for Best Actor including Heath Ledger and winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (not that there's anything wrong with that so long as LGBTQ+ characters and issues do appear on the silver screen, and not just as sidekicks or subplots). If AFI is still organizing seminars for budding filmmakers, gay representation is a topic long overdue for discussion.  Get on it, guys, with a double bill of Brokeback and Gods & Monsters, written and directed by Bill Condon, probably my favorite movie of all time, to show how well our stories can be done! 

*  *  *  *  *

Ben Baronholtz for Libra Films distributed Eraserhead and he started midnight films with El Topo. And so he thought Eraserhead was the perfect midnight film, and he was willing to go with it. They don’t put any money into the film, they just put it into a theater, and if word-of-mouth is good, everything‘s fine. It’s survives. It’ll go up and down, but in the big picture it’ll always be growing. But if word-of-mouth is bad, that’s the end of it. David Lynch, director.

El Topo was released the year before I joined the freshman class at Columbia and smoked weed, something I'd always been too scared to do in El Paso.  Tom and I got high before going to see El Topo, our first midnight movie, in Chelsea at the Elgin Theater, now the Joyce.  The evening felt like a rite of passage. Afterward, he tutored me in Alejandro Jodorowsky's Catholic imagery as we scarfed down slices of cheap pie at the aptly named Four ‘n 20.  It still made no sense. 

Although I didn't catch Eraserhead until many years later, on video, and avoided The Rocky Horror Picture Show because I'd already seen the Broadway show and dislike audience participation, one midnight movie does occupy unique territory in my memory landscape.  After seeing The Harder They Come in January 1975 (the theater reeked!), I met Stuart, the first man I ever shared a bed with, coming home on the train with my straight buddies, thanks to his clever discretion.

Stuart, more a Barbra than Jimmy kind of guy,  took me to see the bloated Funny Lady in Philadelphia not long after Mom died.  He was more forgiving than I.

 

*  *  *  *  *

We had a Canadian guy who was going to give us a half million dollars to make [Reservoir Dogs], which was, for us, an amazing amount of money, if we would consider making Mr. Blonde a woman, which was his girlfriend, and this is a true story, this is not a made made-up story. You hear about this stuff all the time, but when it really happens to you, it takes you by surprise. It was so out of left field that we went home and thought about it for an hour. And we had another person who’s gonna give us a million and a half and he saw the movie as a comedy and we saw the movie as a comedy. We didn’t realize he thought about it more like a comedy like the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona, which is a very different kind of comedy than we saw. And it’s very hard to sit in that office when someone finally, finally, is offering you money and they want to completely change your vision. And what do you do? It’s a difficult decision to make. What gave us the power in our own minds to turn down those offers was, in our mind, we knew we were making the movie. In the end, if everyone came out and said, “We’re not going to give you the money,” we were still going to make the movie with our own money. So we had our own basis of power, where we were coming from, even in that position where we looked like we had no power. Lawrence Bender, producer.

*  *  *  *  *

I did audition for Reservoir Dogs. I would’ve done a better job if I’d known Quentin [Tarantino] was going to be such a talented director.  George Clooney, actor.

                                🎥

MONSTERS

When Michael Crichton pitched me Jurassic Park after two years of not writing anything, my first response to him is my son Chris loves dinosaurs. He was 10. I love dinosaurs, and my dad, may he rest in peace, loved dinosaurs. Everyone loves dinosaurs. And then there is only one human being on the planet that can make this movie, only one. So I said, “Michael, it’s binary. We can we either get [Stephen] Spielberg to make it or there’s no movie. I don’t have a second choice."  Mike Ovitz, agent.

*  *  *  *  *

One of the other dangers of cutting digitally is the loss of what we call “thinking time." An editor needs time to think. Certain things strike you only after a period of time. There is often no way you can think of certain things under pressure. An editor often needs that space. Of course, now with things digital, the studios think you can do it all very quickly. I have never learned to be absolutely magical with my fingers, because I want to have the time to think that I used to have when I was hanging up film and rewinding on a flatbed editing machine.  Anne V. Coates, editor.

*  *  *  *  *

I find that the most difficult thing in this town is how everybody wants to do what somebody else already did.  Kathleen Kennedy, producer & studio executive.

*  *  *  *  *

Anybody who had a pancake at the international House of pancakes on Sunset when it first opened and then goes there today understands why conglomeration deteriorates the quality of the product.  Jack Nicholson, actor.

*  *  *  *  *

People are going to films today, not to be turned on by the ideas. They’re going to films because they want to turn off.  William Friedkin, director.

*  *  *  *  *

Who in hell wants to aim a film down the middle? Is that what the fuck they make a film for? For the middle of the road? I mean, what the hell is that? You don’t make your films for that. You know, you make your films for a reason.  Hal Ashby, director.

*  *  *  *  *

But my philosophy has always been, there are four kinds of pictures: there are good movies that make a lot of money. There are good movies that make no money. There are shitty movies that make a lot of money. And there are shitty movies that make no money. So my feeling is, make only good movies or what you think are good movies. Some will make money, some won’t make money, and you’ll wind up doing OK because the worst thing you can do is make something you don’t think is too good and then it doesn’t make money. You feel like an idiot. You feel like a real idiot.  Rob Reiner, director & actor.

*  *  *  *  *

I sat on the phone this morning with two young development executives, and they were very sweet, but they couldn’t tell you who Frank Capra was. It’s a whole different world. Try talking to Steven Spielberg or Stanley Kubrick without any film knowledge. You can kiss your ass goodbye. And they’re so poorly trained now. . . 

What happened?  Tech. Guys up north started creating Netflix. So the movie business did what they always do. They see tech blow up, and they ignore it.  When the dot-com bubble burst, the entertainment business did not take advantage of the moment to go in and fix what was digitally wrong with the business. And once you saw what was going on with iPods and mobile phones, you couldn’t help but say to yourself, “this is the future."

Small movies have always been an alternative to the big system, but then when streaming started, there was absolutely no differentiation. Next thing you know, there is no movie business in Hollywood.  Mike Ovitz, agent.

*  *  *  *  *

There are three cardinal rules of filmmaking, according to Curtis Harrington. I want you all to remember these. One is: never make a film with animals. Number two is: never make a film with children. And number three is: never make a film with Shelley Winters.  Curtis Harrington, director. 

*  *  *  *  *

Blazing Saddles, a picture where an Indian tells Jewish jokes. Who could ever think that that’s going to be a success in Kansas City? I must tell you, I was one of the first 30 people who saw that picture. I saw it with Mel Brooks, and Mel Brooks was sick because no one in the audience laughed.  Eric Weissman, lawyer.

*  *  *  *  *

All our notions of manly behavior, of womanly behavior, of social behavior, of societal interdependence, or societal antipathy, derive, for good or ill, from movies, which is why I think they are important.  David Chasman, studio executive.

*  *  *  *  *

Everything, every piece of film I’ve ever exposed, is both an adventure and an education. And it’s the greatest way of life imaginable. And it’s such a great medium. You know, there’s so much possible in it.  William Friedkin, director.