I write this in a Paris hotel bedroom while waiting to see a producer whom I have never met, and never previously heard of, to discuss a project with a young director whose only film I have yet to see, with a view to writing a movie based on a book which, if I worked for Alfred A. Knopf, or had my own publishing firm, I would have nixed after half a dozen pages. Since I went on and finished it, and went through it again as you do through your empty pockets for the car key that has to be there somewhere, and still isn’t, I can assure you that I would’ve been right the first time. Why do they want to make terrible books into movies?
Most movies are, of course, terrible, dating back to the beginning, even many that were once said to be masterpieces. A recent biography, by Jeffrey Vance, promised that Douglas Fairbanks was not only the first superstar but also “a great artist.” Have you looked at any of his movies recently? I have; never again. The Thief of Baghdad? I wouldn’t steal it. Nostalgia gets worse: by chance, the other night, I tripped on a TCM screening of The Producers, not the recent inflated and joyless musical but the original Zero Mostel/Gene Wilder version. Pure gold, if I remembered aright. I remembered a-wrong: I came in on Mostel looking down at that white limo in the street and calling out, “That’s right, baby: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.” Okay. Then we came to the line about the cardboard belt. Ace. But then . . . who would ever want to see again the protracted scene, frantically hammed, in which Mel Brooks sets up the premise of the movie: that a Broadway flop could make more money than a hit? After a sad little while, you realize that the camera did nothing that gagman supreme Brooks couldn’t have done without it. The Producers is, in a word or three, a radio show.
Which leads me to another movie that crops up among sacred cows: the touchstone of taste, the farce you have to love, Some Like It Hot. I got it as a Christmas present; a very nice man saw it at the top of a list and gave me the deluxe edition, complete with script, notes, and hagiography, a volume so high and wide and heavy you don’t read it, you bench-press it. One is not supposed to say what I am about to say, but if I take the lead, and the responsibility, will you follow me and confess that Billy Wilder’s One For The Ages does not evoke one involuntary laugh or even a smile that is not politely forced? Take the scene in which high-heeled Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon—the least irresistible award winner in movie history—did their number with the rest of the girls in the band in the railroad coach and Lemmon (wasn’t it?) had to explain the bullet holes in his double-bass and came up with . . . “Termites”? Wasn’t that great? Was it? How about “Nobody’s perfect,” the supposedly perfect last line? That’s true.
Some Like It Hot is on lists, lists of the great films. Movie critics and fans are consumed with lists—the 10 best of the year, the 100 greatest comedies, the 50 greatest TV commercials, the 10 greatest musicals. Empaneled adjudication is a key office of the academico-curatorial-parasitico-criticocracy that gives The Arts its centurions. Lists and enumerations are always symptoms of declining achievement. Such tabulations began in the “museum” of Alexandria in the third century b.c.e., when the Distinguished Professors of the Ptolemies became the first cultural taxidermists, stuffing the past into categories and classes (the Seven Wonders among them). When 5th- century Hellas was producing great drama, sculpture, and architecture, one good work of art capped (or derided) another, but no self-important assessors put them in a definitive order.
The classification of movies and their reverential encasement as works of art is a category mistake. There’s no reason why people should not amuse themselves with ranking movies, or anything else (meals, golfers, bridge players, the rich), but if Ezra Pound’s definition of art as “news that stays news” has any kind of lasting bite, it leaves nasty teeth marks in almost every movie you ever saw and makes a bloody mess of, for examples, last year’s roster of Oscar nominees.
Am I lonely on my cloud when I think that Milk was curdled with conceit, not that of the excellent Sean Penn but of the whole idea that single-issue politics is the essence of democracy, when in fact it sponsors the creation of irreconcilable constituencies of the self-righteous? The villain just had to be a straight man, and a Catholic, who really wanted to be gay as a bird.
Which brings us to Doubt. Great performances—if you like photographed theatricals. But what about that serious script about serious matters, God and Sex and how they don’t get along? At least it’s about Big Issues, isn’t it? Stanley Kramer lives! But if Doubt was in fact a thinking person’s movie, why did the great Meryl Streep—see her sing and dance in Mamma Mia! and try not to clap and smile—overact in the last, big big scene, in which she confesses her Doubt. About what exactly? Whether He exists, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, whether the Church is wholly right about celibacy, abortion, and adjoining issues that turn rational (ha!) people hissy? Or just about whether Mother Meryl had been right that Father Philip Seymour Hoffman protested too much about whether he was a pedophile?
Like Heidegger’s idea of Science, movies don’t think. Which brings us to Slumdog Millionaire, a confection calculated—if nothing else, and nothing else—to raise a cheer from the ranks of Tuscany. Such a silly, happy, wish-fulfilling film, I loved it ever afterward for a full ten seconds. The quizmaster gives a fine, sly performance; he didn’t get the Oscar the way Penn did because he didn’t have the right single-issue PR man behind him. What was the movie about? It does for quiz shows what Billy Elliot did for ballet dancing. It was superbly organized, superbly energetic, superbly edited . . . comfort food.
Are we done here? I think so. Now try and love E.T. all over again, if you ever managed it the first time.
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The movies get technically better and better, edited to the split of a split second, and who cares? The best of those I saw all year was the rough-hewn, starless Gomorrah, an Italian film about the true nature of the Neapolitan Mafia, for fear of which, its Italian author is still in hiding, which is where, I think, David Hare ought to be, after having scripted The Reader, about a cutie ex-concentration-camp guard giving the German equivalent of tea and sympathy to a fifteen-year-old drop-in. Stanley Kubrick once told me how he had asked Veidt Harlan (his wife’s uncle, I believe) why he had directed the paradigmatic Nazi film Jew Suss, Veidt said,“Because they asked me to.” That’s showbiz. I’ve done a few scripts for the same reason, but none was for Goebbels, which isa plus. The Reader, book and film, is an absolute test of whether you have moral or aesthetic sense. It’s significant that there is not a single laugh in the movie. A split-second of observed truth would have revealed the tendentious fakery of the whole thing. The Reader is Love Story for Germans of a certain age: it’s about never having to say you’re sorry.
Kate Winslet won an Oscar for the thing, in the same year that she appeared in Revolutionary Road, a good novel by Richard Yates about an American couple in the mid-1950s that was ground into shapeless, pointless, tasteless celluloid sausage. You have to be a really, really rated guy like its director, Sam Mendes, to start a movie with a fight between a married couple (they get out of the car and yell at each other in reel one) and then go on to have them do what? Have more quarrels, breakups, affairs, and then one of them dies from a botched abortion. (Guess who.) Makes you think, doesn’t it, about how terrible things were between men and women in the 1950s? Actually, it made me think how good some of the movies were then. Even in the 60’s there were executives who dared to green-light a project because they liked the script—all right, in my case, also because Audrey Hepburn had agreed to star, and Stanley Donen to direct, Two for the Road.
That was more than forty years ago, I fear. So why, apart from the rejuvenating prospect of hitting that elusive moment in which script and director and performer all come together blissfully, do I go on trying to write for the movies or thinking about doing it? I think of George C. Scott in a pretty good movie, Patton, walking among the dead Germans and GIs in a battle he has won, saying something like “But I do love it so.” The old war-horse lifts his head at the sound of the bugle; the gray screenwriter makes do with the bagel. I don’t like spending time in conference with other people, especially on a Monday morning, when I should be composing literature of Lasting Importance, but the game is the game.
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While waiting for my French producer on this Monday morning, I read the autobiography of Claude Lanz-mann, the man who made Shoah. And it occurred to me that Lanz-mann’s implacable, sometimes clumsy, often jumpy nine-hour film (no kind of a movie) makes nonsense of all that self-serving Cahiers list-making: it can’t be ranked, and yet there has never been a more thoroughly serious, purposeful, or greater film. Lanzmann is the only camera-stylo filmmakerwho transcends aesthetic categories. Shoah is, among other things, film criticism as it should be done: it put Schindler’s List in its place before Schindler’s List was ever made. Lanzmann’s brave, pain-charged, unblinking compilation is, as Pound said, news that stays news. Its only rival as an account of what happened during World War II is Vasily Grossman’s huge, great novel, Life and Fate.
The massive scope of Shoah reminds me that, for the most part, it is not a movie in its totality that makes us love it, but rather moments here and there—specifically, individual lines of dialogue. All that photography, all that location hunting, all that set-dressing, all that stripping for action, and all those computer-generated “production values” amount to a hill of has-beens compared with “Frankly, my dear. . .” or “I coulda been a contender” or “Don’t ask for the moon, we have the stars.” Even a movie as little noted for its dialogue as Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte passes the test. When Mastroianni asks the Monica Vitti character (in a black wig this time around) how old she is, Monica replies: “Diec’otto anni e molti, molti mesi.” Translation: Eighteen years and many, many months. The second “molti” makes screenwriting some kind of an art.
And that, even now, as I begin to approach my fiftieth year essaying it, is what, at best, there is to aspire to, and why I sit here in wait for that producer, who had the rights to this skimpy novel whose premiss (key word) is supposed to have something worth trekking to Paris to talk about. The horror and the charm are pretty well the same thing: the worse the material, the smarter the alchemist when leaden plot and lifeless characters are gilded into something that glows and gleams.
Screenwriting, for me, is a degenerate way of writing Greek iambics or Latin verses, things I had to learn to do during ten years of an English education of the kind nobody gets anymore. You fit the words as neatly as can be into an established form within which you have to be terse, witty, allusive, rhythmic, and (key element) varied. Federico Fellini said the same thing with less pretension: “A film should be like a circus; never follow a dog act with a dog act.”
Fellini’s great star, Marcello Mastroianni, put it all in perspective. I once asked him why he was so often willing to play cuckolds and cowards and cads and what- not all, whereas American and British stars always worry about looking virile and coming out on top. “Beh, Federico,” he said, “cinema non e gran cosa.”
Translation: Cinema is no big deal.
