Even as We Speak (26 page)

The book comprises interviews with veteran filmmakers – Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg,
Raoul Walsh and others less famous though sometimes even more ready with illuminating war stories of their craft. These were (and sometimes are: a few yet breathe) men rooted in history as much as
in Hollywood. Their collected memories make the past look fearfully rich beside a present that is poverty-stricken in everything except money. ‘Whoever invented spending millions of dollars
has absolutely ruined the picture business,’ Allan Dwan told Bogdanovich in the late sixties. It might have sounded like an old man’s bitterness then. Said today, it would simply sound
accurate – except, of course, for the amount of money. For ‘millions’ read ‘hundreds of millions’. A mere million buys you one pout from Val Kilmer in
The
Saint
and maybe two drops of sweat from Tom Cruise in
Mission: Impossible
as he hangs there reprising the heist scene from
Topkapi
at a hundred times the outlay for a tenth
of the impact. Today’s blockbusters, despite the technical bravura of their components, rarely strike us as being very well put together: the tornado twists, the mountain blows up, the
dinosaurs eat the scenery, and you are supposed to be lost in wonder, but instead you are left wondering why you are meant to care, because the characters risking death have never been alive and
there would be no story without the scenes that interrupt it. The special effects leave NASA looking underfunded, yet the general effect, despite oodles of expertise, is one of a hyperactive
ineptitude – of the point missed at full volume, as in the unstoppable monologue of a clever, spoiled child. Mountains of money in labour give birth to ridiculous mice. There’s a
reason, and this book’s radiant bullion of reminiscence illuminates what it is.

To put it bluntly, the old guys had to tell a story because they couldn’t blow up the world. There were limitations you couldn’t spend your way out of, and in overcoming them lay the
essence of the craft, its economy and brio. Don Siegel says it for all the others when he unveils the secret of shooting on the back lot: ‘For instance, if there’s an area which looks
weak, I decide that I’ll pan down to the feet of the guys walking and then come up where the area’s good . . . At the moment where it’s weak, I’m closest to the feet. This
is no hard and fast rule, just an example.’ When you remember that one of the main reasons that
Heaven’s Gate
nearly bankrupted United Artists was that Michael Cimino
couldn’t live with the idea of a background that looked weak for even a single square yard, you realize that there is a whole aesthetic, and hence a morality, embodied in Siegel’s
attitude. To accept and transcend limitation can be a source of creative vibrancy, whereas to eliminate it with money almost always leads to inertia. On his seventeenth, and last, day of shooting
Baby Face Nelson
, Siegel did fifty-five separate camera setups, and they’re all in the picture. (‘It cost $175,000 to make,’ Siegel told Bogdanovich, ‘and it took a
lot of bookkeeping to make it
up
to $175,000.’) Warren Beatty, given the choice, would have gone on editing
Reds
forever, but no amount of editing could lend tension to the
footage, in which only Jack Nicholson behaved as if he owned a watch.
Reds
, a pioneering effort in the annals of modern wastage, was made in order to indulge the creative whims of its
maker.
Baby Face Nelson
was a cynical, cost-conscious piece of exploitation. Which was the work of art? All right, which would you rather see again tonight?

Reality is a useful brake on megalomania. Besides this key point (continually and hearteningly endorsed by almost everyone in the book), there is plenty of other stuff that merits thoughtful
attention from the current generation of moviemakers, who so often not only can’t do anything small but don’t even want to, except as a career move on the way towards doing something
big. Leo McCarey took credit for very few of the hundred or so Laurel and Hardy films that he was effectively responsible for, but his vision shaped that of his actors. ‘At that time,’
he says, ‘comics had a tendency to do too much.’ (There has never been a time when they had any other tendency, but let that pass.) In
From Soup to Nuts,
Hardy as the
maître d’
came in to serve a cake. He tripped, fell, and buried his head in the cake. It was McCarey who shouted (in 1928 the audience couldn’t hear him),
‘Don’t move! Just don’t move! Stay like that!’ Seeing it now, all you get to look at is Hardy’s back, stock-still as you rock back and forth with the best kind of
laughter – the kind you bring to the joke, participating in it with your imagination.

The movies are a collaborative art, then – or, rather, they were a collaborative art
then,
back at a time when the audience didn’t feel left out. But this
is to talk like a curmudgeon. Actually, there are more good, solid, humane, well-plotted, and well-acted movies being made now than ever before. Compare a densely textured political thriller like
City Hall
with the average FBI gangbusting melo of the forties – one of those movies in which the agents sneak up on the spies while a yelping commentator on the soundtrack tells you
what they are doing (sneaking up on the spies). But there is no comparison. The movie business now is immeasurably more sophisticated than it used to be. Sophistication, however, is a two-edged
sword. It abrades the innocent delight necessary for the making of, say, a screwball comedy. (Bogdanovich’s triumphant latter-day contribution to the genre –
What’s Up,
Doc?
– is the surest testimony that we should put the best possible construction on everything that has happened to him since the death of Dorothy Stratten: only a man capable of deep
love could celebrate a wild girl’s pilgrim soul with so much joy.) And, above all, it erodes the concept of a modest sufficiency. It ought not to – in almost any other field, the
sophisticated rein themselves in – but in the movies it somehow does. People who have made small, intelligent movies dream of making big, dumb ones, persuading themselves that if all values
except production values are left out some kind of artistic purity will accrue.

So the creators get carried away. And they want to carry us away with them, but without giving us anything to hold on to except a train being chased by a helicopter through a tunnel. To adapt
the famous words of Gertrude Stein, it is amazing how we are not interested. The hero
couldn’t
be doing that, even if it looks as if he were, so the only point of interest is how
they worked the trick. Whereas in the old days, even if he didn’t especially look as if he were doing that, he
could
have been doing that. So we were with him, and we didn’t
care how they worked the trick. We let them care. That was their job. They didn’t expect to have articles written about it, or to be interviewed – least of all in advance, before the
movie was even finished. They worked from pride, but the pride was private. Somewhere in there is the difference between then and now. Then we participated in the movie without participating in its
making. Now it’s the other way around, and now will pretty soon become intolerable if we don’t remember then. This book will help, like all of Bogdanovich’s other books.

It might even help us remember his movies, which were marked from the beginning by a rare compassion for those blasted by fate. The great scene in his first great success,
The Last Picture
Show
, was when Ben Johnson told the normal boys off for their ‘trashy behaviour’ in humiliating a halfwit. In one of his later movies,
Mask
, the director’s
challenge, met with subtlety and grace, is to transmit the awful self-consciousness of a superior mind as its grotesque containing skull closes in on it. Bogdanovich’s understanding of
fate’s unbiddably cruel workings is rare among filmmakers anywhere in the world and almost unheard-of in America. He seems to have been blessed with it from birth. But the blessing brought a
curse with it. Fate came for him, too. The killing of the Unicorn left him inconsolable. Since then, he has been living a story so sadly strange that not even he could plausibly make a movie of it.
One would like to believe that he doesn’t want to, since without a deep, literate conviction that the movies can’t do everything, he would have less of a gift for celebrating everything
they have done.

New Yorker
, 7 July, 1997

A hidden camera is far enough. Intercepted telephone calls were already far enough, but we were too fascinated with the results to be sufficiently disgusted by how they were
obtained. The results obtained by the hidden camera are nothing remarkable, if you discount the good looks of the subject, which we knew about anyway. The manner by which those good looks were on
this occasion recorded, however, was so repellent that even the tabloid editors – including, apparently, the editor of the
Sunday Mirror
, after his fellow editors rounded on him
– finally realized that a line had been crossed, although none of them seemed to grasp that they had all crossed the same line years before. Thugs who had been making a good living beating up
helpless victims suddenly discovered that one of their number had supplemented his bare hands with brass knuckles. ‘You fool,’ they cried, ‘don’t you realize it’s
supposed to be
fists
?’

One of the characteristics of the totalitarian mentality is to erect opportunism to the status of a principle. To describe the behaviour of a pack of not very bright journalists in totalitarian
terms might sound extreme. But it is another kind of wishful thinking, and a dangerously misleading one, to suppose that totalitarian impulses don’t exist in a democracy. They are repressed,
but they are there. One totalitarian impulse is to create a subhuman class which may be persecuted without compunction because it is beneath compassion. The moral squalor of French journalism under
Nazi occupation was no sudden putrefaction. The rot set in with the Dreyfus case. Anti-Semitism polluted French journalism – even the higher, literary journalism – in a long process
which had established the Jews as a special case well before the Nazis arrived to round them up.

Mass murder was only the sudden physical translation of a long spiritual contempt which had been propagated in French journals. Some of the journalists were not without talent. But they were
without pity, and what had given their callousness free play was the principle of free speech. It was a cruel paradox.

In Britain the same paradox now ensnares the famous. It takes a less cruel form, and is scarcely likely to have such a vile outcome; but while being careful not to diminish a great tragedy by
equating it with something inherently more trivial, one can still suggest that there is an instructive comparison to be drawn. In recent years there has been a steadily growing tendency to treat
the famous as if they were without the right to a private life – always an important step in depriving a group of human dignity, even if, as in this case, there is no further wish to deprive
it of life itself. (Quite the opposite: to ensure a supply equal to the demand, the press is ready to help almost anyone become famous, if only to provide fodder for the style-file supplements that
we all deplore even as we fight over the first look.)

It can be said that with politicians and other public officials the private life and the public role are intertwined, so that everything they want concealed, even if it breaks no laws, should be
open for inspection. (It
was
said, often, by Richard Ingrams of
Private Eve
, although when his turn came he was quick enough to decide that he had been a private citizen all
along.) But the thin argument grows thinner still when it comes to those public figures who are famous for their achievements. Some of them seek publicity for all they do, and so should be ready to
take the flak with the kudos; but clearly most do not, or, if they once did, learned better, holding, surely correctly, that the appreciation they attract is for their public performance, and that
their private lives are their own business. Since most journalists obviously feel the same way about themselves, they know they are wrong to contend otherwise, but increasingly they have done so
anyway, the contention growing more hysterical as its self-serving basis stands revealed. It has been years now since anyone prominent in any field could offer himself to be the subject of a
profile without taking his life in his hands. By the time open season was declared on the Prince and Princess of Wales, bad faith among journalists had already whipped itself up into a righteous
passion. It is often said in print, in the more august journals, that the royal family made a mistake in letting publicity into the Palace; but this is just a pious way of saying that they asked
for it. The idea that they brought it on themselves is basic to the cast of mind which invents a subhuman class as a preparation for giving it the treatment. From the Peloponnesian war onwards, for
the guards watching the prisoners starving in the rock quarry there has always been that consoling thought:
It’s all their fault for letting us do this to them
.

The more august journals have had good sport in recent days pointing out that the less august ones are steeped in confusion, what with the
Sun
high-hatting the
Mirror
over
tactics scarcely less questionable than its own. Posh editors ought to shed their delusions. To anyone on the receiving end of this stuff – which includes the public, who feel far closer to
the Princess than to any editor – the press looks like one thing, and that thing is a juggernaut: oppressive, relentless and overwhelmingly nasty, a sort of plain-clothes police state. The
cheap press stirs up the muck and the expensive press sifts through it, spreading it about so that everyone gets a whiff.