Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (8 page)

Beatty was on his feet again by this time, looking out the window. He said he was only going to be in London for another day or two, and then back to Hollywood.

"A lot of people out there just kind of dismiss me as an irresponsible kid," he said. "All of Hollywood is old, old, old, for that matter. There are as many good young actors and directors in America as there are in Europe, but Hollywood shuts them out. Hollywood is afraid of young blood. It's a ghost town."

He pointed a finger and posed a question. "I'm twenty-eight years old," he said. "I'll give you five seconds to name me another Hollywood leading man under the age of thirty-five."

It was hard to do. Promising newcomers, yes, but no stars. And even later with plenty of time to think, only three names came to mind: Elvis Presley, Frankie Avalon, and George Hamilton. That's food for thought right there.

INTRODUCTION

rank Casey was the Warner Brothers publicist in Chicago when I became the Sun-Times film critic. He'd gotten his job when mayor Martin Kennelly suggested him to Jack Warner at a time when Kennelly was owed a favor. The mayor called in Frank and informed him that he was now working for Warner Brothers. Frank was not sure this was good news. He had a job at Coca-Cola.

"What can they give you that Warner Brothers can't?" asked the mayor.

"A uniform."

Shortly after I joined the paper as a feature writer, Casey announced a junket to the set of Camelot and the paper sent me. In those days we accepted studio junkets without a moment's thought. Casey liked my story about Camelot and told the editor of the paper I should be their new film critic. That had something to do with me getting the job, when it opened up. On the other hand, I was once on Casey's enemies list and did not get invited to a screening or an interview for two years. He never told me why. Then we were buddies again. It was said he had never sat through an entire movie. He once called me up and said, "Whoosis wants to know if you want to talk to Whatsis."

Casey engineered the interview with James Stewart, when I had been on the job less than a year. Firecreek was a Universal picture, but Stewart said he wouldn't do the junket unless Casey handled it. They had a history together. Warners loaned him out. Casey had a history with Ronald Reagan, too; as a favor to his friend Dr. Davis, he introduced the doctor's daughter Nancy to Ronnie.

At the wake at Gene and Georgetti's steak house after Casey's death, his bosses got up and told stories about his expense accounts. A waiter showed me an American Express machine. "This is the machine we used," he said, "when you had dinner here with Frank every night."

"I had dinner with Frank every night?" I said.

"Including Mondays, when we are closed."

e-reading this James Stewart interview, I am struck by the fact that I apparently asked him why he'd never played a bad guy, and he answered me, "I just really don't know if I could play a heavy." Perhaps he was being nice to me. Certainly he knew, as I obviously did not in 1968, that he had played bad guys. By the time I wrote the piece "Mitch and Jimmy: Some Thoughts," I knew that. You learn on the job.

1968

]E IL IPA50, TX-The morning after the world premiere of Firecreek, his seventieth motion picture, James Stewart pulled a maroon dressing gown on over his shirt and slacks to ward off the chill in his hotel suite.

This took a minute or so and then he returned to his chair and sat down, crossing his arms, rocking back and forth slowly, trying to frame the right words to answer the question his visitor had just posed.

"Oh, I guess I've been asked often enough when I'm going to get around to playing a bad guy," he said at last. "I never have. Seems like everyone else has taken the plunge. John Wayne. Henry Fonda."

He took another pause, and you could see the grin beginning around his eyes. It was a slow grin that took its time working around to the rest of his face. The Stewart grin.

"I don't know," he said at last. "I just really don't know if I could play a heavy. I've played heroes all my life, and now-well, it would be like playing Hamlet. It's not that you don't want to, but you just don't know if you could. I've never seriously considered it."

He sipped from a mug of black coffee. "It wouldn't be in character, would it?" he said.

James Stewart playing a bad guy? No, that wouldn't be in character. Not after Lindy, who flew the ocean, and Mr. Smith, who went to Washington, and Destry, who rode again.

"The Stewart character usually isn't aggressive enough to be a bad guy," Stewart mused. "It's all he can manage to be the good guy. He'd rather just plod along, getting through life without too much commotion, but somehow he stumbles into a dangerous situation and has to get out.

"That's the kind of character I play in Firecreek-a part-time sheriff who gets paid two bucks a month and doesn't want to shoot out nothing with nobody."

That was also the kind of character in Rear Window, wasn't it?

"Right," Stewart said. "The guy who has a broken leg, and discovers a crime by accident. He gets involved against his better judgment. For his troubles, he gets another broken leg. Some hero."

As Stewart spoke, his voice fell into the famous drawl. It is not an act. It is the way Stewart talks, and it is catching.

After five minutes with him you're likely to discover, to your embarrassment, that you're doing a jimmy Stewart imitation.

"Don't let it bother you," Stewart said, smiling. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing a jimmy Stewart imitation myself. All of this"-he waved vaguely at the suite-"wasn't planned. I'm a lazy person. By nature I would have planned a quieter life. I don't act. I react."

John Wayne said something like that about Westerns once: that they were divided into action and reaction. In the action Western, the hero says, let's chase the varmints down. In the reaction western, the hero says, let's make a plan ...

"I make plans," Stewart said. "I think my strength on the screen is that I can react. When you think about Rear Window, you'll remember my role largely consisted of reacting. First Hitchcock would show what I was seeing through my binoculars. Then he'd show my face, and I'd reflect what I saw. I spent an astonishing amount of time looking into the camera and being amused, afraid, worried, curious, embarrassed, bored, the works."

Stewart recalled some of the other directors he had worked with: Frank Capra, John Ford, George Cukor, Ernest Lubitsch, Henry Hathaway, Anthony Mann. "A good director will keep the reins pulled tight," he said. "I've secretly wanted to direct a film myself, but it's a big chore and, like I say, I'm lazy. Directing is really the most creative and rewarding j ob in pictures. But I'm stuck in acting, I guess. I enjoy myself too much."

He divided a sweet roll into four parts, selected one, and washed it down with more coffee.

"You know what the real mystery is?" he said. "Over the years, I've learned the technique of movie acting, the craft, pretty well. I can go through the motions to my own satisfaction. But then, when it comes right down to it, none of the technique means a thing against those moments when you're in front of the camera and something takes place entirely in addition to the lines and the movements.

"John Ford always said-he's so disrespectful of everything and everybody-that most of the really good things in movies happen by accident. I think maybe he's right. You bring together competent people, and you solve the technical problems, and you try to find a solid piece of material to film. And if you have all that-THEN, maybe, something will happen. Or maybe not.

"Hitchcock and Ford both worked that way. They'd plan everything in advance, meticulously. Every detail. They'd foresee everything that could possibly be foreseen. And then, when they got us in front of the cameras, they'd sort of throw it all up for grabs, to see if anything exciting would happen. Within the technical framework, you sort of cross your fingers and wish for magic."

Stewart shook his head and allowed himself a wry smile. "I remember Ford used to have a speech. His theory of movie making. He'd say, don't talk about it. Don't analyze it. Don't rehearse it. Don't think about it. Come prepared and then get in front of the camera and do it and see how it comes out.

"Ford never rehearsed. I never like to rehearse anyway, for that matter. I learn my lines and think about them some, but if I'm doing a scene, I want to know the camera is operating. Unless the camera is moving, the scene isn't alive, and the rehearsal is technical stuff. By the time you get to the cameras, the scene is dead. Rehearsal should be limited to making sure nobody falls over any chairs.

"Directors who shoot a scene again and again aren't necessarily perfectionists. They're just waiting for that moment-that little moment, I can't put it into words-when everybody knows it was done right.

"Ford, on the other hand, always tried to shoot a scene only once, counting on spontaneity to carry the day. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. But it had nothing to do with improvisation in any case. The French directors like Godard who like to improvise everything are cheating themselves and their actors. They give nobody a chance to listen or react; everyone's thinking about what they're going to do next.

"But sometimes, all the same, a little moment will come when everything is right. You get involved. The sweat glands start to work. You tremble a little. And people will remember those scenes for years. They'll forget the whole movie, but remember the scene."

Stewart put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling. "I'll never forget once, we were on location in Canada, up in the ice fields," he said. "It was raining, and we had a fire; the company was trying to keep warm. An old man-he must have been seventy-came walking out of the rain and the wilderness. Out of nowhere.

"He said, Which one of you fellows is Stewart? I said I was. He said he'd seen me in a lot of picture shows. He said he remembered one scene real well. I was in a room, he said. There was a girl in the next room. There were fireflies around. I said a piece of poetry to her. The old man said he'd never forget that scene.

"Well, at the moment I couldn't remember it myself. But finally I did. That was from `Come Live with Me,' and the girl was Hedy Lamarr, and we made it in 1941." Stewart shook his head, remembering. "A moment like that will stay with you and the whole movie will fade away," he said.

"I've been in movies for thirty years or more, and I still don't understand what goes on in this art form, but I'm beginning to accept it. People will visit a Hollywood set and see dozens of people standing around doing nothing, and they'll say, what are all these people for?

"Well, they're there because it's the most inefficient business in the world. You'll spend a whole day, maybe, getting a few seconds or a minute or two of film. At the end of several weeks or months you have all these bits of film, and the idea is to paste them together into a movie. Ford calls it crocheting. It's a slow, sticky, frustrating business, but it's worth the time we spend."

Stewart swung his arms around as if he held a camera. "All this handheld camera business misses the point," he said. "I'm never happier than when the cameras are grinding and I'm trying something out in front of them. If it doesn't work, throw it away and try again. Maybe sometimes you'll get some film worth saving. And what the hell." The wry grin appeared again. "The film is the cheapest stuff in the whole business."