Pauline Kael (29 page)

When it was a matter of mentoring and taking her career advice, many—though not all—of her younger admirers felt that agreeing with her was crucial. One who discovered the price of disagreement was the screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, who had first met Pauline in 1967. Schrader came from a strict Protestant background—his parents were staunch members of the Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan—and he had entered Calvin College, intending to pursue a career as a minister. But a fading movie theater in Grand Rapids had started showing art films, and Schrader had become enamored of Ingmar Bergman’s pictures. Growing up, he had been forbidden to go to the movies at all, and now, as a student, he immersed himself in the art form, running a student-organized film club off campus and reviewing movies for the student newspaper.

During the first night they met, at her West End Avenue apartment, Schrader and Pauline gently argued about movies—she was amused by his worship of Bergman—and drank a good deal, so much so that he wound up spending the night on her living room sofa. The following morning, after she had served him a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, Pauline informed him, “You don’t want to be a minister. You want to be a film critic. We are going to keep in touch.” Given his background, he was highly susceptible to the evangelical streak in Pauline’s personality, and once he was back at college, began sending her reviews he’d written, and she would call him and comment on them. Later she pulled strings with Colin Young to get Schrader into the UCLA film school and used her influence to help him land a reviewing job with the
LA Free Press
.

During Christmas 1971 Schrader flew from Los Angeles to New York and met with Pauline. By this time she was regularly approached by the arts editors of newspapers around the country who had openings for film critics; a good word from Pauline usually meant that her candidate got the job. She told Schrader about a position in Seattle, but by now he had begun thinking seriously of trying his hand at writing screenplays and told her that he was afraid leaving Los Angeles for Seattle would put an end to that possibility. Pauline coolly replied that she needed an immediate answer, and Schrader gave her one: no. What followed was a lengthy silence and “some cold chitchat.” Schrader flew back to Los Angeles and went to work on his script. It would be years before he and Pauline reconnected.

 

One of the frustrations Pauline felt at this time was that the screen’s new freedom in tackling both contemporary subjects and contemporary attitudes had given birth to a certain soft-headedness, both in the new audience and among some of the (mostly younger) critics who were writing about the movies. So often, when people rhapsodized about a new film, it was the film’s pose, its attitude, that enchanted them, rather than the actual content and substance. In an essay published in
The New Yorker
in January 1971 called “Notes on Heart and Mind,” Pauline made it clear that she didn’t want her concerns in this area to be misinterpreted as being reactionary. “I don’t trust critics who say they care only for the highest and the best,” she wrote. “It’s an inhuman position, and I don’t believe them. I think it’s simply their method of exalting themselves.” But she saw the dangers in new films that were so freewheeling and “free-spirited” that they lacked any real center or settled for being modish studies in alienation. She was afraid the new pop sensibility wasn’t balanced with enough of an artistic, musical, or literary background of genuine substance; she was wary of the new breed of arts-loving intellectuals who had sprung up on college campuses across the country, who rejected much of traditional literature and filled their shelves with “head” reading that combined a pose of depth and meaning with a jazzy, pop sensibility, books such as Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha
, Tolkien’s
Ring
books, and Richard Brau-tigan’s
Trout Fishing in America
. She felt that the children of the 1960s “have been so sold on Pop and so saturated with it that they appear to have lost their bearings in the arts.”

This led to a number of traps, both for the critic and those reading him. First, it led reviewers to praise rotten movies simply because they were considered in tune with the times. This worked to the critic’s advantage, of course: It made him seem an ally of the moviegoing public and also earned him greater name recognition, since his reviews were constantly being quoted in the movie’s ads. Much of this, Pauline was sure, smacked of collusion: “In most cases, the conglomerates that make the movies partly own the magazines and radio stations and TV channels, or if they don’t own them, advertise in them or have some interlocking connection with them. That accounts for a lot of the praise that is showered on movies.” Cover stories on big films always helped magazines boost their newsstand sales, and Pauline knew of many cases in which critics at major newsmagazines were pressured by their editors to write favorable notices of a new release so they could justify placing it on the cover. She found many of the television critics particularly insidious because “they understand that their job is dependent on keeping everybody happy.”

Yet, in the end, the tension between the true creative talents in the film industry and the sellouts was an enormous part of what revved Pauline up, made her eager to sit down at her drafting table each week and begin scribbling on her yellow legal pads. She might strongly disagree with John Simon that part of the function of a film critic was to raise the standard of what got made—she wasn’t comfortable with the notion of identifying what that standard might be—but believed, as Judith Crist did, that it was imperative to call attention to the best work being done. “I don’t have any doubts about movies’ being a great art form,” she wrote, “and what makes film criticism so peculiarly absorbing is observing—and becoming involved in—the ongoing battle of art and commerce. But movies alone are not enough: a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation. Most movies are shaped by calculation about what will sell: the question they’re asking about new projects in Hollywood is ‘In what way is it like
Love Story
?’”

The winter season ground on with a run of mostly indifferent films. Pauline admired Eric Rohmer’s
Claire’s Knee
, but despite her liking of its gently witty script and the “summery richness” of Nestor Almendros’s cinematography, it was ultimately too civilized—too tame—for her to embrace fully. She regretted that this story of sexual obsession had “no emotional head of steam when it gets to the subject of sensuality and compulsive attraction.” It wasn’t until the very end of her six-month reviewing stint that she found a movie she responded to with great enthusiasm: Bernardo Bertolucci’s
The Conformist
, which had been shown at the New York Film Festival in September 1970 and was now going into general release. Set in Mussolini’s Italy, it cast Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcello Clerici, a former liberal who has become a quintessentially faceless member of the Fascist machine. Bertolucci loved the look of’ 30s films, and with his cinematographer, the peerless Vittorio Storaro, he came up with a remarkable look for the movie. Like some of the other reviewers, Pauline was not entirely comfortable with the psychosexual explanation for Marcello’s conformity (an attempted seduction, when he was thirteen, by a chauffeur), nor was she at ease with the way Bertolucci equated lavish opulence with decadence, an old movie trope of which she was fast tiring. “Our desire for grace and seductive opulence is innocent, I think, except to prigs, so when it’s satisfied by movies about Fascism or decadence we get uncomfortable, because our own enjoyment is turned against us. One wants modern directors to be able to use the extravagant emotional possibilities of the screen without falling into the DeMille-Fellini moralistic bag.”

On March 27, in a ceremony held at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Pauline received the George Polk Memorial Award for Criticism, conferred by the Department of Journalism of Long Island University. She was in good company: Other honorees were Otto Friedrich (for his book
Decline and Fall
) and Walter Cronkite.

With her review of
The Conformist
, Pauline wrapped up her fourth season at
The New Yorker
. That winter also saw the appearance of “Raising Kane,” a major essay she had worked on for several years—a revisionist look at the creation of one of the landmark films of the old studio system,
Citizen Kane
. Part critical analysis, part polemic, part outward-spiraling cultural history, Pauline’s article would cement her reputation among her admirers and convince many of her detractors that she was what they had always accused her of being—an irresponsible bully.

W
hat was the impetus for Pauline to write “Raising Kane”? Bantam Books had wanted to bring out a paperback edition of the script, with an introductory essay by her. She passed on the offer initially—then, when another writer assigned to the project didn’t work out, she agreed to do it. In September 1968, Pauline received $375, half of the total advance from Bantam, and set to work. Her contract included the right to publish the essay separately in a magazine.

More than anything, “Raising Kane” was her call to arms to defend Hollywood’s perennial underdog—the screenwriter. As her own fame as a critic had grown and she had gotten to know more and more writers, she had become increasingly aware of how dismissively the writer was treated by the film business. For decades directors, producers, and stars had wrested writers’ scripts away from them and changed them wholesale. “You have no say at all,” Arthur Laurents complained to his interviewer Patrick McGilligan in the late ’80s. “Don’t you understand?
No writer has any say at all about a movie!
You can argue, but you can’t say. They have the say. That’s why they don’t like writers. Because they wish they [themselves] could write. That really is why. They think, now they’ll really fix you . . . now we’ll fix you . . . we’ll make it
ours
.”

Pauline knew better than most that there were few more ego-driven animals on the face of the earth than film directors—and Orson Welles, the young, blazing genius who had come to Hollywood in the early 1940s, commandeered a major studio, and called most of the shots on what became one of the industry’s groundbreaking films, was the embodiment of directorial ego. By the early 1970s Welles had directed only one commercially successful picture—1946’s
The Stranger
—but with the rapidly growing number of film studies programs and campus film societies, more and more young people were discovering his work, particularly his two early masterpieces
, Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
. Much had been written about the fate of both pictures—how, caught in a net of studio and national political chicanery, they had been deprived of the audience they deserved. Welles loved to tell these stories in interviews, especially in later years, when his image as the great misunderstood genius cut down in his prime loomed larger than ever. While Pauline had enormous respect for Welles’s talent, she couldn’t accept his often-repeated story that he was the one guiding creative force behind
Citizen Kane
. Over the years conversations and casual research had led her to believe that
Kane
’s screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, had been the picture’s driving creative force. She would use Mankiewicz’s years of neglect as a way into the piece, and give auteurism one more drubbing in the process.

In New York Pauline met with John Houseman, Welles’s former partner in the Mercury Theatre, who supported her in her belief that Mankiewicz was
Kane
’s true hero. She conducted extensive research on various film-history topics that she thought connected with
Kane
. Unfortunately, she didn’t do a great deal of research on the movie itself—partly because she learned that it had already been done.

At some point in mid-1969, Pauline discovered that Howard Suber, a tenure-track assistant professor in the motion picture department at UCLA, had spent years conducting intensive research of his own on
Kane
. Suber, in fact, started a graduate seminar devoted exclusively to the picture’s history and influence. The direction and screenplay were closely analyzed, and although Suber failed to entice Orson Welles to visit his classroom, he did succeed in arranging “guest lectures” with
Kane
’s film editor, Robert Wise; key grip, Ralph Hogg; Welles’s assistant at the Mercury Theatre, Richard Wilson; and the actress Dorothy Comingore, who played Kane’s second wife, the opera singer Susan Alexander. Suber had also gained access to seven drafts of the
Kane
screenplays, which had previously been under lock and key in the RKO studio files. Missing from the archive was “American,” the title of Mankiewicz’s original, unwieldy first draft, but eventually, Suber tracked that down as well. A pair of noted film scholars, John Kuiper and Richard Dyer MacCann, who were under contract to a small publisher to produce a book on
Kane
that would feature the shooting script, heard about the excellent work Suber was doing. They contacted him with a proposal to write an essay analyzing the development of the screenplay, which they would publish in their book; a three-way contract was signed, and Suber came up with a polished thirty-one-page essay.

For several years Pauline had been making regular appearances as a guest lecturer at UCLA, at the invitation of her old friend Colin Young, now the film school’s chairman. On one of these visits she met Suber, greeting him with the comment, “I hear you’re pretty good in seminars but boring as a lecturer.” Some months after he had signed his agreement with Kuiper and MacCann, Suber received a telephone call from Pauline. She told him about her contract for a book on
Kane
, pointing out that Little, Brown had also secured the publishing rights to the script. What was the point in having two books? she asked Suber. She suggested that the two of them each write an essay for Bantam’s book and split the money. She telephoned Kuiper and MacCann, who let Suber out of his contract. When Suber asked Pauline how his agreement with her publishers would work, she replied that she didn’t want to bother them at the moment, but she would contact them when the time was right. He agreed and, enthralled to be working on a project with America’s most celebrated movie critic, was afraid to ask for a contract between them.