The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (327 page)

Frank Pierson
, b. Chappaqua, New York, 1925
1970:
The Looking Glass War
. 1976:
A Star Is Born
. 1978:
King of the Gypsies
. 1990:
Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture
. 1992:
Citizen Cohn
(TV). 1995:
Truman
(TV). 2000:
Dirty Pictures
(TV);
Conspiracy
(TV). 2003:
A Soldier’s Girl
(TV).

Frank Pierson was raised (after Harvard and journalism) as a writer-producer in television, where he worked on the
Have Gun Will Travel
show, in which Richard Boone introduced the urbane, educated gunfighter Paladin. From that he went into screenwriting for movies and three nominations in a decade:
Cat Ballou
(65, Elliott Silverstein);
Cool Hand Luke
(67, Stuart Rosenberg); and
Dog Day Afternoon
(75, Sidney Lumet), for which he won an Oscar. He also did scripts for
The Happening
(67, Silverstein);
The Anderson Tapes
(71, Lumet);
In Country
(89, Norman Jewison); and
Presumed Innocent
(90, Alan J. Pakula).

As a director, he developed much more slowly:
The Looking Glass War
was le Carré, but it’s very stiff. He was clearly no match for his stars or their heady sense of show business in
A Star Is Born
, and rather shy of the full-blooded melodrama in
King of the Gypsies
. But, more recently, for television, he has shown much better results. His
Truman
, with Gary Sinise, was an exemplary biopic, his
Cohn
was riveting, and
Conspiracy
—written by Loring Mandel and based on the Wannsee Conference of 1943—proved to be a revelatory study of Nazi clerical in-fighting, and one of the best pictures of 2001.

He was president of the Academy from 2001 to 2005.

Harold Pinter
(1930–2008), b. Hackney, London
There are writers who would have had a large influence upon screenwriting even if they had never attempted a screenplay. I am thinking of Hemingway, Graham Greene, and Simenon (at least), novelists who seem formed by the ways films can tell stories. They may describe some elements of scenery and appearance, yet more than that their narratives provoke us into visualizing, or imagining. Landscapes, action, and “beautiful” people evidently benefit from this. Yet the most visually creative of novelists may be those who have a character deliver a line of dialogue so that we
see
the pause,
feel
the hesitation, and
guess
what has been left unsaid. And that is where Harold Pinter would deserve a place in this book, even if he had never met Joseph Losey, or looked at Marcel Proust.

Paul Schrader observed this when he directed Pinter’s script of Ian McEwan’s
The Comfort of Strangers
(90): “Pinter’s characters are always saying one thing and meaning something slightly different. There are layers of nuance and innuendo and seemingly inexplicable actions and events which are in fact very explicable in a non-prosaic fashion. I’m very attracted to the idea of a psychological life running just under the surface of normal life and motivating the normal life in subtle ways: it goes back to why does Travis [Bickle] take the girl to the porno movie? It seemingly doesn’t make sense, but of course it does make sense.”

Now, some might say—in praise or attack—that for years Pinter had been writing stage plays that were really movie scripts needing to be recited. In other words, he was not actually concerned about “the psychological life running just under the surface.” Indeed, he was enchanted by the surface, by the patter of talk, the rhythm of silences. Thus, his plays have usually translated to film or TV very fluently—even if the tension feels greater in theatres. His stage structures were cinematic and his TV plays were already gripping little movies—I think, especially, of the version for TV of
The Lover
, which paired the uncanny Alan Badel with Pinter’s then wife, Vivien Merchant.

Sooner or later, Pinter was going to become a target for the movies. His first script was actually a version of his own play,
The Caretaker
(64, Clive Donner). But that appeared after
The Servant
(63, Losey), an adaptation of the Robin Maugham novel that had been originally commissioned by Michael Anderson.

The matching of Losey and Pinter blessed both men. Losey was a real filmmaker, and an egoist determined that Pinter should serve him. Thus, the films were pitched more ambitiously. For Losey, Pinter was someone who knew English class hypocrisies like an eavesdropping butler (Pinter was definitely lower middle class, and Jewish). And Pinter wrote dialogue for nervy, minimalist actors, leaving the look of things available for Losey. As Losey saw it, he liked Pinter because of: “Observations of characters, a very acute awareness of class dynamics and contradictions. He does superbly evoke the visual for me, but I don’t think he has any visual sense at all.”

That’s an intriguing notion—for Pinter did begin in, and has always played well on, radio. Moreover, if Pinter is a great screenwriter, as some say (particularly those besotted with his never-yet-filmed adaptation of
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
), then we have to wonder about the overall quality of his contribution to films.

I would guess that Pinter and Losey got so entangled in talk and a battle of wills that their films benefited:
The Servant
broke so much new ground—and was so reliant on its trashy novel for a basis; Nicholas Mosley’s
Accident
(67, Losey) is a better novel, but less of a film; L. P. Hartley’s
The GoBetween
(71, Losey) is close to a great novel—and the least worthy or striking as a movie.

Elsewhere, Pinter’s films have ranged from the plain to the pretentious, by way of the inept. However good the Proust screenplay may be, let us recall how abysmal
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan) turned out. Why? Was Pinter overpowered by Kazan and Sam Spiegel? Was he content to be paid? Was the film miscast? Is the novel tedious or incomplete as drama? There are times when a writer can make no impression.

The other Pinter scripts are:
The Pumpkin Eater
(64, Jack Clayton);
The Quiller Memorandum
(66, Anderson);
The Homecoming
(73, Peter Hall);
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(81, Karel Reisz)—which is a foolish idea for making the romance novelette “relevant”;
Betrayal
(83, David Jones), which is worse than foolish;
Turtle Diary
(85, John Irvin), which could have been written by Pinter’s second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser; and three pieces of thin-blooded and mean-spirited artiness
—The Handmaid’s Tale
(90, Volker Schlondorff);
The Comfort of Strangers
(91, Paul Schrader); and
Reunion
(91, Jerry Schatzberg).
Old Times
(90, Simon Curtis) felt like a claustrophobic parody of the Pinteresque, a ten-minute piece extruded to ninety minutes.
The Trial
(93, Jones) felt like something one had already seen.

Pinter has directed a few times for TV—Simon Gray’s
Butley
(74), content to let Alan Bates have a good time, and two of his own works:
The Hothouse
(82), and
Party Time
(92).

In later years, he concentrated more on the stage. He did only the occasional film script—
Bez Pogorova
(99, Slobodan Z. Jovanovic) and
Sleuth
(07, Kenneth Branagh), for that awful remake—but he indulged himself more as an actor:
Breaking the Code
(96, Herbert Wise);
Mojo
(97, Jez Butterworth);
Mansfield Park
(99, Patricia Rozema);
Catastrophe
(00, David Mamet);
Wit
(01, Mike Nichols);
The Tailor of Panama
(01, John Boorman).

Brad
(William Bradley)
Pitt
, b. Shawnee, Oklahoma, 1963
There have been enough moments when Brad Pitt seemed ready to pick up the smoldering torch of James Dean to remind ourselves that Dean died at the age of twenty-four—at which point in life, Pitt had shot not a foot of film. That’s not to dispute Pitt’s farmboy charm in certain movies, or what Michael Angeli called “a smile that could set feminism back twenty-five years.” For when he had his slinky, shiftless bit in
Thelma & Louise
(91, Ridley Scott)—replacing William Baldwin, who had elected to do
Backdraft
instead—he did more than give the Geena Davis character her first, revelatory orgasm. He left the public wanting more. He was lean, shy, and authentically cowboyish; he was also droll, wicked, and very sexy. That actor could have been Cal in
East of Eden
, or Huck Finn, or Gary Gilmore. But has Pitt yet really gone beyond his own early promise—when he was protected by being on screen for only fifteen or twenty minutes?

He was raised in Springfield, Missouri, and he nearly graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri. But he went out to Los Angeles and, having knocked around for a few years, began to get work:
Cutting Class
(89, Rospo Pallenberg);
Happy Together
(89, Mel Damski); on TV in
Glory Days
(90); and with Juliette Lewis in
Too Young to Die?
(90, Robert Markowitz).

He was the track star in
Across the Tracks
(91, Sandy Tung), and then he took on the stylish adventure of
Johnny Suede
(91, Tom DiCillo) and
Cool World
(92, Ralph Bakshi). He gave his best performance yet as the self-destructive, at-one-with-nature wild kid in
A River Runs Through It
(92, Robert Redford), a film that used his coltish air very kindly (as if Redford envied it). His “Early Grayce” in
Kalifornia
(93, Dominic Sena) was not just villainy, but elaborate Method grunge, and Juliette Lewis was his partner now both on screen and off. He also contributed a smart cameo to
True Romance
(93, Tony Scott).

He was itching to expand, but
Interview with the Vampire
(94, Neil Jordan) was far less convincing than
Legends of the Fall
(94, Edward Zwick), another shot at noble, prairie wildness. But he was effective and touching as the rebel cop in
Se7en
(95, David Fincher), understandably impressed and helped by Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow (his new love). But then his maniac in
12 Monkeys
(95, Terry Gilliam) only showed how easy it is for young, barely trained actors these days to show off—and be praised for it. It was a terrible performance, and it left one guessing that Pitt could only deal adequately with characters that were versions of his own idea, or ideal, of self. That worked once, for people like Gable and Cooper, but do audiences now tolerate that sort of acting? Meanwhile, Pitt approaches forty in a world crowded with moody young actors who can do the attitude of a lonesome puppy at the drop of a hat.

His later work seemed less exciting or excited, as if the labor of being a movie star and the vagaries of popular taste are beginning to depress him:
Sleepers
(96, Barry Levinson); the bizarre
Seven Years in Tibet
(97, Jean-Jacques Annaud);
The Devil’s Own
(97, Alan J. Pakula), which he said he despised, even if he had done much to unsettle it; the misguided
The Dark Side of the Sun
(97, Bozidar Nikolic), shot many years earlier; the huge failure of
Meet Joe Black
(98, Martin Brest); the buffed outlaw in
Fight Club
(99, Fincher), where the actor’s commitment deserved more directorial intelligence.

The rut deepened with
Snatch
(00, Guy Ritchie);
The Mexican
(01, Gore Verbinski);
Spy Game
(01, Tony Scott); and
Ocean’s 11
(01, Steven Soderbergh), where the suspicion dawned that he might be another Mickey Rourke. This was only supported by
Full Frontal
(02, Soderbergh); a voice-over for
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
(03, Patrick Gilmore and Tim Johnson); and then a very buffed, sulky, and Brando-ish Achilles in
Troy
(04, Wolfgang Petersen).

Well, something happened. The likeable country boy had been married to Jennifer Aniston (00–05), a suitable sweetheart, or so it seemed. But then his head was swayed by that force of nature and publicity, Angelina Jolie. After
Ocean’s Twelve
(04, Soderbergh), he appeared with Jolie in
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(05, Doug Liman). His life changed. In the new marriage he was adopting children. At work, he found himself producing pictures. And as an actor he began to entertain serious ambitions:
Babel
(06, Alejandro González Iñárritu), plus the fascinating
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
(07, Andrew Dominik), for which he won the Volpi Cup at Venice. Of course, there was an
Ocean’s Thirteen
(07, Soderbergh), to help defray babysitting costs. But there was a very welcome streak of broad comedy in
Burn After Reading
(08, the Coen Brothers). There was far less comedy and much masking pretension in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(08, Fincher—and the first film with Fincher that had no energy, no nastiness, and no love of Brad Pitt!).

He helped produce
The Departed
(08, Martin Scorsese),
A Mighty Heart
(07, Michael Winterbottom), a worthy picture and a heartfelt tribute to his wife. He was the lead (sort of) in
Inglourious Basterds
(09, Quentin Tarantino), though he did not seem to understand the mission;
The Tree of Life
(10, Terrence Malick) and
The Lost City of Z
(10, James Gray). Hardly anything he touches now is less than precious and awesome, and it can’t be long before he begins to look very tired.