The Sheila Variations

1953 – 2003 HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, to ON THE WATERFRONT

Here is an entry from my old blog, which seems appropriate, today. I wrote it in honor of the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront. It became a long ramble about what inspired me as a kid, what those old films meant to me, who I looked up to, which giants had shoulders I tried to clamber onto:

So this year is the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront.

On the Waterfront, as everyone knows, (and if you don't, then you SHOULD, and if you haven't seen that film: then shame on you! Go and rent it NOW) was filmed entirely on location in Hoboken, NJ, where I now live. Hoboken was, obviously, quite a different town in 1953. It was a rough place. There were over 200 unsolved murders in one year, around that time. My friend who works at City Hall in Hoboken told me that. It was an anarchic place, a hard-bitten place, a place of poverty. Right across the river from New York City, but it might as well have been Detroit.

Hoboken is now completely over-crowded, with an average of 3 bars per block, it's over-built, buildings going up everywhere (but they haven't built more parking lots, so anyone who has a car in Hoboken is completely screwed, quite frankly.)

Hoboken is the kind of place where, on a Friday night, if you walk down Washington Street, you are bombarded with the mating rituals of early 20-somethings who are drunk. Girls who all look alike (like all the girls on "The Bachelor") strutting down the street in their regulation-black, all shrieking on their cell phones, saying things like, "Well, we waited for you at the Black Bear … where ARE you?" In grating voices, where everything, even statements of fact, come out as questions.

The real Hoboken-ites, the locals, the people who grew up there, have been pushed further and further to the periphery of this town. There is a lot of class resentment.

It's a big Italian town. (Obviously. Frank Sinatra grew up here.) You can still find little off-the-beaten-track Italian restaurants, (you have to venture off Washington Street) where the food is phenomenal, the waiters all clearly were born and raised in Italy proper, and the red wine comes in a basket, and you don't have wine glasses, you have little chunky clear-glass cups.

But the I-have-my-first-job-in-Manhattan-and-my-parents-bought-me-an-SUV-for-my-graduation-from-the-Fashion-Institute crowd has taken over. The parking spaces in Hoboken were designed for small cars. The SUVs take up two and a half spaces. Again, I look at the double-parking, sometimes triple-parking, and thank the good Lord I do not have a car in this town.

Anyway. Tangent over. What I really want to talk about is On the Waterfront. Let me set up the day for you all.

Yesterday, I went into Manhattan to have lunch with an old flame.

My relationship with this man only lasted six weeks, and it was a long time ago, but it had a huge impact on both of us. (He's the one who took the photo of me at the top of this new blog - the one where I'm running through the field.) He and I would hang out endlessly at diners, all hours of the day or night, drinking coffee, eating stacks of pancakes, and talking about John Cassavetes. Who we revered. And Marlon Brando. And Gena Rowlands. And Elia Kazan. He and I dressed exactly alike. Flannel shirts and corduroy pants. Mod-grunge. It was that kind of relationship.

So here he is. In Manhattan. We were trying to decide what we wanted to do, and he said, "Well, seeing as it is you and me, I think we should find a nice diner." So that's what we did. We went to the Moonlight Diner on 23rd and 9th, and ate a stack of pancakes, we drank bottomless cups of coffee, and talked about Cassavetes. Among other things. It was great. I love it when things don't change. I haven't seen this guy in years, although he did call me on September 12, 2001, to make sure I was okay. I heard from people on that day who I haven't heard from since the first George Bush was president.

It means the world to me that some things stay the same. I would be lost without continuity.

Then he and I took a meandering walk through Chelsea, my arm hooked through his arm, and talked about our careers, and what we're excited about, and what we're afraid of. He goes back to LA tomorrow. So we said goodbye. It wasn't all that bittersweet, although I had thought it might be.

I made my way back to Hoboken. The day was beautiful. Sunny, bright, but with a crisp wind. The streets of Chelsea were nuts … pedestrians clogging the crosswalks, bicycles zipping through traffic, everybody in their tanktops, and sunglasses.

I got out of the PATH train and started up Washington, when I ran into John, my friend from City Hall. I haven't seen him in a year or so. "Hi, John! How are you? What's up? Blah blah blah…"

He said immediately, "Have you heard of Budd Schulberg?"

Hmmm. Sounds incredibly familiar. I know that name. "Uh … writer, right? Wait a sec … I know that name…"

"He wrote On the Waterfront."

"Oh! Right! Of course!"

"He's in Hoboken right now. For the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront. They're doing a TV special about it, so he's doing a walking tour of all the locations of the movie."

"You're kidding me!"

"He's right around the corner. Want to go join the tour?"

Do I want to go meet Budd Schulberg???

Nah, I got a lot of stuff to do. I have laundry, and I have to go check my emails.

Of course I want to go join Budd Schulberg's walking tour of Hoboken, on the 50th anniversary of On the Waterfront!

John and I turned onto 1st Street to go join the crowd.

There were news cameras, a tall guy holding a massive boom, and reporters clustered around the edges, scribbling into their notebooks. And in the center of it all was this little old man, the man who wrote the screenplay for the movie that changed everything. I cannot imagine my own life without On the Waterfront. It's like Citizen Kane. Or Star Wars. Or Easy Rider. Our world has been irrevocably changed because somebody made those movies.

Budd Schulberg is 89 years old now. He walks with a cane. He has a shock of white hair, and a warm smiley face. Not too many wrinkles. Just around the eyes. I took one look at his face and got very very moved. I'm moved right now just writing about it. He wrote that script. He was responsible for that script. He is a great man. A great great man.

I saw On the Waterfront in junior high school, when I first started getting serious about being an actress.

My passion was the Actors Studio. The characters of that place were as real to me as my contemporaries. Elia Kazan was real to me. James Dean. Shelley Winters. Harold Clurman. Marlon Brando. I read everything I could get my hands on.

I was 15 years old and read Harold Clurman's great book The Fervent Years, about the Group Theater in the 1930s. I read both of Shelley Winters' hilarious autobiographies, which are basically one long name-drop. I read Carroll Baker's autobiography (merely because she had been in one notorious Kazan film: Babydoll, and I wanted to hear her anecdotes about him).

I watched all of those old movies, wishing I could seep my way into the screen, and be on those sets, live in that time. I watched Rebel without a Cause countless times. I watched Streetcar Named Desire. I was obsessed with East of Eden. I rented Baby Doll. I watched Place in the Sun (one of the greatest movies of all time).

Mike Nichols says that when he is getting ready to shoot a new film, one of the ways he prepares, is to watch Place in the Sun. It is obvious why. You must remind yourself constantly of the greatness of others, and learn from their greatness. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

Place in the Sun is generally described as a "perfect film". Not too many films are. There might be a great movie, with one boring extraneous scene. Or some great performances with a so-so script. There might be a great story, with mostly great acting, but one actor who is not so good throws off the whole thing. Standards for perfection are set very high, as they should be. Mike Nichols wants to be in the company of those who did everything right. He wants to look at Place in the Sun and remind himself of what WORKS on film. A film where every note is in tune, where every element also contains the super-structure of the whole, where every smaller part works together with the larger part, where nothing goes wrong. The music is right, the script is right, the acting is right, the telling of the story is right, the production value is right (and not just right, but part of the theme of the piece), and … above all of that, is the "magic" factor. Which you can never plan for or manufacture. Everything may be in place, everything may look right and perfect, but there is no magic. Everything, while very well done and appropriate, somehow does not add up to a magical whole. This is the Holy Grail for film directors, Mike Nichols included. A Place in the Sun is not only filled with perfectly-tuned elements, but when all of it is added up, you get magic.

Anyone who wants to work in film (actors, directors, writers, cinematographers, costume designers) should study that movie. Obsessively. If you do not, then … I would say that you're not as serious about your work as you should be. Mike Nichols taught me that.

All of these anecdotes LIVED in my mind as a hungry ambitious adolescent actress. I didn't care as much about contemporary actors. My real gods were back in the 1940s and 1950s.

Then, when I was 13, I saw Dog Day Afternoon while I was babysitting. (I was probably way too young to have seen that movie! I didn't get a lot of it. The sex-change operation thing went completely over my head. But what I did get was the power of Al Pacino's performance.)

Now how can I talk about this … I don't need to fear hyperbole, because the impact Dog Day Afternoon had on me was so profound that I truly was a different person after seeing it. It was that big. That film changed my life forever. One indication of how the film affected me is: I actually considered writing a letter to the real character, the guy Al Pacino's character was based on, now in prison. I wanted to write to him. I don't know what I wanted to say, but I just knew I wanted to do something. That character LIVED.

The soul does not grow in a linear step-by-step way. There are events in life that quantum-leap you forward, skipping steps, skipping phases, your soul suddenly expands to three times its former size. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was one of those moments for me. A soul-growth moment. It actually hurt. I walked around for days, aching. Now I look back on it and see that that was a growing pain. My soul had done a quantum-leap, in one evening, and it hurt. I would press down on my chest with my hand, trying to comfort my own heart.

Al Pacino was new to me at that point. I, of course, had not seen The Godfather films. I would have been 10 years old. So I watched his performance in growing … horror. And identification. I could not believe my own eyes. I immediately went out and did a little research on the guy, and learned that he was also from the Actors Studio. I felt myself nod like a wise sage, when I got this information: "Of course that's where he's from. Of course." His background was the same mythical background as my other idols: Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, James Dean.

Dog Day Afternoon marks, for me, the moment when I got serious about acting. As a life-choice. As a life's work. As an art-form. As a craft to devote my entire life to. This was not just having fun in the high school play, and loving applause. This was what I wanted for my future. I wanted, someday, to be able to act like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. And for that, I needed to get my ass to the Actors Studio. I want to do THAT kind of work. It seemed of a piece with Brando in On the Waterfront, James Dean in Rebel, Montgomery Clift in Place in the Sun. It was the same kind of acting. It looked like life. But not in a boring every-day-life kind of way. It looked like life lived large. It was unpredictable . It was never about the words being said. It was all about what was going on underneath. It was intensely theatrical. And so real it could clutch at your heart and make it difficult for you to breathe.

I wanted to be in the ranks of those people so badly that it ruined my appetite. I had never before experienced need like that, ambition, ruthless ambition.

Dog Day Afternoon lit the fire beneath me.

Over 15 years later, I got accepted into the master's program at the Actors Studio.

On our first day of orientation, we all sat in a large circular room, where eventually we would have workshops with teachers such as Ellen Burstyn, Marilyn Fried (sister of Marty Fried, a guy who was famous in my mind … a huge character in all of the autobiographies of Actors Studio people from the 1950s), luminaries of the Actors Studio. The adrenaline in that room was so intense that I thought I might have a heart attack. Our dean (James Lipton – or should I say: Will Farrell?) told us he wanted each of us to stand up and tell why we were here. What had led us to this point. What was our path.

When it was my turn, I stood up, and told about babysitting, and watching Dog Day Afternoon.

To me, it was an equation as simple as A to B.

So ANYWAY:

All of this was racing through my mind as I stared at Budd Schulberg. How much his work meant to me, how much that film meant to me, how formative it was, and how … much a part of me that kind of work is. And there he is: 89 years old, being honored and acknowledged, walking around the streets of Hoboken, telling stories about the shooting of that film. "Yes, and here is where we…"

Everyone clustered around him, leaning in to hear him, he was very soft-spoken.

We were standing on the very corner where they had filmed the famous taxi scene. (Maybe the most famous scene of all time! "I coulda' been a contender. I coulda been somebody." By the way: watch that scene again. People imitate that moment, but they imitate it incorrectly. Brando was a larger genius than can even be understood. When people imitate it, they put the emphasis on "been" in the second part of the line. "I coulda' been a contender. I coulda BEEN somebody." Fine. You could interpret it that way. But that's not what Brando does. Brando speaks the line with this emphasis: "I coulda been SOMEbody." Said with that emphasis, the line moves out of self-pity. And into tragedy. It's not about what might have BEEN, it is about the SOMEBODY he never got a chance to be.)

One woman asked Budd, "Did you have any idea when you were filming that scene how incredible it would be? How important it would be?"

Budd, with a warm smile, said immediately, "Absolutely not."

Everybody burst into laughter. The reporters scribbled manically.

Budd said, "You can't. You just can't work that way. You just have to work at getting the job done. We had to move on to the next location right away, after shooting that one, and we didn't have much time, so we just shot it, packed up, and hurried on to the next place."

Unbelievable.

A guy who was in the crowd, an old man, stepped forward and said, "I played the taxi driver in that scene."

The taxi driver has no lines, if you recall. You just see his face, his eyes, looking into the back seat at the family drama unfolding. The town of Hoboken had said to Elia Kazan and crew, "Sure, you can film all over Hoboken if you want, but you have to use locals as extras." And that's what they did.

Kazan was one of the first directors to shoot stuff entirely on location, rather than on a movie-lot, he also was one of the first directors to scope out locations beforehand, make friends with the people in the town, and hire up locals to play background. As opposed to hiring aspiring actors to be the background. That is one of the reasons why On the Waterfront still holds so much WEIGHT. All of those dock-workers at the end are real dock-workers. They are not actors. It makes all the difference in the world. The faces of those men … actors, in general, do not have faces that look like that.

So here steps forward this Hoboken local guy, who was not an actor, who Kazan had chosen to be the taxi driver. There he was!

Everyone stood back to beam at him, to smile up at this little old man, who once upon a time, had participated in the filming of that great movie. Budd Schulberg looked at him, and nodded vigorously, remembering.

"You only see the taxi driver's eyes in that scene," Schulberg said. "We wanted it that way. But yes, of course I remember you."

The taxi driver guy had an ear-to-ear smile. I felt like weeping. It was a very powerful moment.

Hoboken has changed so much that the guy who was leading the tour, a guy from City Hall, had to keep reminding us: "Here is where they shot that scene … of course, at that time, the waterfront was all docks … there was no park, or fountain…"

After the walking tour of Hoboken, with Budd Schulberg, I floated home. Mind racing. It was a beautiful gift. To see him, to be in his presence, and to be reminded of that film. I think it's about time I saw it once again.

Posted by sheila