The Sheila Variations

Movie quiz time!

Dennis Cozzalio presents: Dr. Smith’s Lost in the Space at the End of Summer Movie Quiz. I live for his seasonal quizzes!

I have answered (in my typical fashion) with images and Youtube clips rather than just words. It's been soooo fun finding the right image to go with my answer, etc. Kind of a challenge ... so ... unfurling below are my answers!

Make sure to go visit Dennis' most excellent site - because all of the answers in the comments-section to that particular post are awesome. Dennis has one of the best communities on the web - so go have a look!

My answers below.

1) Your favorite musical moment in a movie

In terms of ongoing emotional power (for me, I mean) this clip has to be my favorite.

His face, and its openness, in that final section - in between the 3 minute mark and the 3:30 mark ... got me through the roughest patch in my life in 2002. I went into it, kind of, here.

But then I have to go with this as well:

That's as hot as it gets. When she throws her whole body backwards, arching her back, head dropped down to the floor? GOOSEBUMPS.

Other musical moments I love:

-- the final rap battle in 8 Mile
-- Shipoopi in The Music Man
-- John C. Reilly and Mark Wahlberg in the studio recording their "song" in Boogie Nights
-- Liza Minelli singing "Maybe This Time" in Cabaret
-- the opening number in Oliver!, with all the little orphans tramping through the workhouse with their bowls - brilliant
-- the music that happens when you see John Travolta "strutting" down the street in Saturday Night Fever - perfection
-- the entire damn film of All That Jazz
-- the closing credit sequence of The Darjeeling Limited - with the train traveling along through India as the credits roll - with the wonderful Joe Dassin singing "Les Champs Elysees" - one of the most infectious, happy, and yet bittersweet songs I've ever heard (and I don't even understand the lyrics since it's in French. It doesn't matter. Perfect music choice.)

And also:

That clip reminds me of being about 11 or 12 years old, standing out in the backyard with my friends, pre-puberty, all of us draped in beach towels for capes, strutting around in the summer dusk, singing at the top of our lungs, "I'M JUST A SWEET TRANSVESTITE FROM TRANSSEXUAL TRANSYLVANIAAAAA HA HA". We didn't even know what any of that meant, we just knew that what we had seen was freakin' COOL and we wanted to act it out. I know it's bizarre. It's called being a child of the 1970s.

2) Ray Milland or Dana Andrews

3) Favorite Sidney Lumet movie

4) Biggest surprise of the just-past summer movie season

I haven't seen all that much (in the theatres, anyway). But I'm going with:

I was apprehensive going to see it ... just because. I loved every second of it. Well, wasn't wacky about Cate Blanchett ... but everything else? Including (most importantly) the spirit of the thing ... I loved it.

5) Gene Tierney or Rita Hayworth

6) What’s the last movie you saw on DVD? In theaters?

DVD:

Theatres:

7) Irwin Allen’s finest hour?

8) What were the films where you would rather see the movie promised by the poster than the one that was actually made?

I've written about that poster before. It stopped me in my tracks when I was coming out of another movie. It's arresting, it's terrifying - it just doesn't look like any other poster. The movie was a piece of SHIT.

9) Chow Yun-Fat or Tony Leung

I like his acting, I like his ambition for himself, I like how he talks about acting, and that he is willing to take risks. Not that Leung is not ... but there's something about Chow Yun-Fat I very much admire.

10) Most pretentious movie ever

Even just looking at that poster makes me mad.

11) Favorite Russ Meyer movie

This is the only one I've scene so I'll go with that.

12) Name the movie that you feel best reflects yourself, a movie you would recommend to an acquaintance that most accurately says, “This is me.”

God, I love this question. Well done, Professor.

For various reasons I won't go into, I would have to answer:

13) Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo

All the way.

14) Best movie snack? Most vile movie snack?

I like to sneak in snacks, not being a candy or, really, a popcorn fan. I do enjoy putting peanut M&Ms into my unbuttered popcorn (a trick taught to me by Allison. Good stuff. Salty AND sweet. Good stuff.)

Most vile movie snack? Those nachos with the rubbery cheese. No thanks.

15) Current movie star who would be most comfortable in the classic Hollywood studio system

I know Clooney is the typical answer, and I do agree with that as well - but I think Carrey even more so.

16) Fitzcarraldo—yes or no?

Sure, why not? I saw it on the big screen, and it is literally an insane movie. Like: literally. Boats over mountains, Peruvian peasants, Klaus Kinski ... but then, I'd watch Werner Herzog direct a McDonalds commercial, so take it with a grain of salt.

17) Your assignment is to book the ultimate triple bill to inaugurate your own revival theater. What three movies will we see on opening night?

18) What’s the name of your theater? (The all-time greatest answer to this question was once provided by Larry Aydlette, whose repertory cinema, the Demarest, is, I hope, still packing them in…)

Hippodrome Redux

19) Favorite Leo McCarey movie

No contest:

20) Most impressive debut performance by an actor/actress.

I fluctuate on this question between two choices:

and

Two extraordinary debuts. Their work is far more sophisticated than their experience would show. Fantastic performances, both of them.

21) Biggest disappointment of the just-past summer movie season

Probably The Dark Knight, although, like I said, I haven't seen everything.

22) Michelle Yeoh or Maggie Cheung

I must choose her because she gave what I consider to be one of the greatest performances ever given by an actress (no exaggeration) in 1992's Yuen Ling-yuk - a film I saw with Ted in Chicago - it's a biopic of silent film star Ruan Ling Yu - sort of the Greta Garbo of China ... and my GOD it's an amazing film. Ted and I were hugely depressed by it. I remember we went out for dinner afterwards and kind of couldn't shake the film. It stayed with us. Maggie Cheung is fucking unbelievable. The interesting thing about her is because she is so beautiful she is often underestimated, or just hired as "the pretty girl". There was a similar thing going on in Yuen Ling-yuk (American title is The Actress) - where Ruan Ling Yu had to convince people she was more than a pretty face. There are moments in that film (and I have not seen it since 1992) that have stayed with me, like indelible ink. It's difficult to find - I have it on VHS - but I seriously recommend you tracking it down, if possible.

23) 2008 inductee into the Academy of the Overrated

Please. Just go away.

24) 2008 inductee into the Academy of the Underrated

I know she's not wasting away in silly projects, she works all the time and is always good - but it's my belief she's a future Oscar winner. Maybe even multiple Oscar winner. She's terrific. I want to see her smash through into major box office clout.

25) Fritz the Cat—yes or no?

I don't care.

26) Trevor Howard or Richard Todd

I wonder if this is because of the Saint Joan/Pope Joan connection? Is there another one to be made?

I have to go with Trevor Howard.

27) Antonioni once said, “I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.” What filmmaker working today most fruitfully ignores the rules? What does ignoring the rules of cinema mean in 2008?

Frogs falling from the sky.
A sweet movie about the porn industry.
A 4 hour movie about an insane oil tycoon - where the first HOUR has maybe one line of dialogue.

I don't think he's always on target, and sometimes he misses the mark ... but I appreciate way more his risk-taking than others who play it safe, only doing what they think an audience of the lowest-common-denominator will want. Now, look, I loves me some typical Hollywood fare, if it works. But I love, too, that there are wild-card artists out there - Robert Altman (well, not anymore, but ...), and Almodovar, and Wes Anderson ... who have their own vision and are relatively uncompromising about bringing it to fruition.

To me, focusing on narrative and character rather than just plot is really rule-breaking in today's movie culture ... where scenes seem to all have a POINT, and everything needs to be explained or over-explained. I cherish those film-makers who are not so worried about explaining everything, who leave a vast landscape in their film up to MY interpretation.

28) Favorite William Castle movie

For me, there is only one answer:

Brilliant campy ridiculous film - with random boxes of Pepsi placed strategically (for no reason) through the set because of Crawford's connection with Pepsi. My favorite moment (maybe ever) is when Crawford, wearing Bettie Page bangs and a flowered dress, begins to act in a vaguely slutty and inappropriate way towards the psychiatrist and she lights her match off a turning record on the turnstile, shrieking the music to a halt. It is delightfully nuts. Love that movie. Alex, Eric, Mitchell and I laughed so loudly watching it that Chrisanne told us to keep it down. hahahahahaha

The clip can be seen here:

I honestly don't know what to say. The lighting-match moment comes at 3:17. I never get sick of it. And his following line, "Why don't you sit down?" in that context makes it even funnier. Unintentionally funny, yes, but it all adds up to a deliciously ridiculous and enjoyable film.

Here is Kim Morgan's essay on the film - not to be missed.

29) Favorite ethnographically oriented movie

I thought about this one quite a bit. I took social studies (unfortunately) in college. I am racking my brains. Do the Right Thing came to mind. So did Wall Street. But finally - I had to go with my "favorite" - it was my favorite movie of last year as well:

30) What’s the movie coming up in 2008 you’re most looking forward to? Why?

I have watched the previews for this film maybe 20 times now. They make me laugh. I love the campiness of what I have seen (Clooney sneaking around with a giant knife, Pitt getting punched in the face by Malkovich) ... and anything with Frances McDormand in a leading role is okay by me.

31) What deceased director would you want to resurrect in order that she/he might make one more film?

32) What director would you like to see, if not literally entombed, then at least go silent creatively?

Robert Zemeckis.

33) Your first movie star crush

Oh gosh, where do I start? Lance Kerwin was not, technically, a movie star, but I loved him with the burning intensity of a supernova. And I was in love with Ralph Macchio from before his Karate Kid career - I loved him from Eight is Enough (which I've written about here) ...

I think, though, if we stick with "movie stars", I'd have to go with:

It was more the part he played in those movies than HIM, to be honest ... but honestly. Yowza.

The Books: "It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here" (Charles Grodin)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, by Charles Grodin

I consider this to be required reading for young actors.

It's so good on so many levels, but particularly good for young unknown full-of-hope actors. It's not just an autobiography. It's not even a How-To book, because if anyone has had an unconventional and, at times, very difficult career, it is Charles Grodin. But it is a Must-Read. I think definitely for actors it's a must-read - but anyone interested in the business, and how it works (not how it appears to work, but how it actually works) - should also read it as well. The ups and downs, the callous decisions, the annoying co-stars (I love the chapter entitled "Breakthrough: I don't accept an apology from Anthony Quinn") - the craft itself - working on the SELF, as an actor must do ... at the same time that you are trying to survive in a pretty brutal business. The book addressees all of these issues like no other. I think it should be handed out to actors in scene classes, or put on "suggested reading" lists of freshman-level acting classes. I read it from the cloister of college, where I was highly successful, and the thought of taking that out into the real world was exciting ... but scary, too. Grodin's book, on some level, says back to young actors, "Yeah. You should be scared. Toughen up, toots. Harsh world out there." But it doesn't JUST have a cynical tone to it (which is a huge turn-off) - it also is an honest look at his own journey, finding his way, leaping at opportunity when it knocked - but also missing some key opportunities for such and such reasons. Grodin also is notorious for his temper, and obviously his sense of humor - which often got him into trouble, when someone didn't get the joke. But he wasn't afraid to be disliked ... that's one thing ... and yet at the same time, he NEEDED to be liked, in order to get his projects done. The classic dichotomy.

Grodin doesn't just describe his own experiences - he then turns each one into a little "teaching moment" (sorry, don't really like the Oprah terminology but in this case it can't be helped) ... Moments in your life where you realize, through the mess and chaos, there are actually are lessons to be learned - but God, sometimes isn't it difficult to figure out what the hell lesson it is?? Grodin shows that there is a choice involved. You can choose a lesson that empowers you, or you can choose one that makes you bitter and self-righteous. Sometimes Grodin chooses one, sometimes the other - as we all do ... and he is unafraid to call a spade a spade. There are people who were unkind to him starting out. Not even big-wigs at the time - just your basic casting agents, agents in general ... saying horrible things right to your face with the utmost carelessness: "We're looking for someone sexier ..." Whatever, things that go right for the jugular. How do you keep your confidence up in the face of that?? It takes some serious mental maneuvering ... it really does. You have to decide to make sense of it, rather than be victimized by it.

Grodin doesn't come off like he has an ax to grind, or like "look how mean everyone was to me - yet I STILL made it!!" ... It's an honest look at the brutality of the business - and how people can say the most outrageous things and you have to somehow just survive it. Like the story he tells about the party celebrating the fact that the Broadway smash hit Same Time Next Year - which Grodin starred in with Ellen Burstyn - had been bought up by a producer and was going to be made into a movie - and Grodin asked the playwright's wife why the playwright wasn't there, and she replied blithely, "Oh, he's off meeting with Actor X who we are really hoping will play your part in the movie." !!! Unbelievable. Grodin reports this story, and it was years ago, but he obviously never forgot it ... He forgives the playwright's wife for her callousness (which he did not believe was malicious, just unthinking) ... but says he still, to this day, kind of "ducks" when he sees her, afraid of whatever zinger she might throw his way. Grodin reports these stories honestly, you can still feel the emotion behind it - he's not all Zen about these things and that's one of the refreshing (and most human) things about this book. He also behaves in an unexpected way - and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it backfires ... but there are great lessons in all of that for any young actor. Grodin admits that his humor sometimes doesn't go over well ... but then there are people like Mike Nichols who say of Grodin, "He's the funniest man I've ever met." (Grodin was actually cast as Benjamin in The Graduate, but it ended up not happening - Grodin blowing that opportunity for various reasons. Grodin, forever afterwards, was always nervous whenever he saw Dustin Hoffman, even if Hoffman was just walking on the beach. Grodin always believed that any sighting of Hoffman anywhere meant that Grodin was about to be fired.)

So. Who are you going to believe? Which interpretation do you go with? Or can you be okay with the fact that some people just won't "get" you? Grodin's entire career seems to have been about that. Some people will "get" you, others won't ... you have to keep working anyway.

The title of the book comes from an anecdote during the filming of the disastrous 11 Harrowhouse. Grodin's career had exploded (in a good way) with The Heartbreak Kid, directed by Elaine May.

I don't think Grodin got one bad review for that film. He says that people still come up to him on the street and talk to him about that movie. Anyone who asks him for an autograph, even now, still say, "I loved you in The Heartbreak Kid ..." So awesome, right? He hit the big time! Yay! But this is why this book is so important: the next movie he did was a movie called 11 Harrowhouse and it very nearly killed his career for good. You would have thought he would have the pick of the crop ... but no, things dried up immediately. To quote Heidi Klum, "One day you're in, the next day you're out." But anyway, the title of the book comes from an experience he had during filming 11 Harrowhouse. Just a year before, Grodin had become a big star, a hot new actor, desirable, wanted, praised.

Candy Bergen and I were filming the movie 11 Harrowhouse in a castle outside London. We were sitting in a room off the main hall where the cameras were being set up. After a few minutes an Englishwoman appeared. I don't know who she was, but she acted as though she had a duchess-or-something title. She said, "Did someone ask you to wait in here?" "No," we answered, a bit taken aback. She responded: "Well, it would be so nice if you weren't here."

A master of the anecdote, the ba-dum-ching of any given story ... Grodin turns these mainly unpleasant memories into "teaching moments", as well as a revealing memoir about his own development. We learn sometimes by watching others. There is no such thing as a done deal. Grodin thought he had it in the bag with The Heartbreak Kid and while that film will probably be what he is remembered for (that and Midnight Run) - that's not all there is. There were TV specials (including a highly controversial one with Simon & Garfunkel), late-show appearances (he was notorious), directing, plays ... Grodin figured out early on that he would not be happy just as an actor. The point was to stay in the business, by any means possible.

The book is quite funny, and there were times it made me laugh out loud. Any young actor, too, will recognize himself ... in the descriptions of the early days of Grodin's career in New York, taking classes with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen, and trying to get cast in something - the whole obsession with headshots ("Did you get your pictures?" "I'm getting my pictures...." "I like my pictures." "Can I see your pictures?") is just so dead on ... so universal ... and there are also moments where Grodin makes mistakes (many many moments) - like the time he disagreed with a bit of Roman Polanski's direction during the filming of Rosemary's Baby. Or the time he refused to accept Anthony Quinn's bullshit (in my opinion) apology. The time he almost got into a fistfight, defending Marlo Thomas' honor and reputation from a heckler who told her she should be "ashamed" of herself and that her father "would be ashamed".

I liked the VOICE of the book, too. It's cynical, sure, but there is a lot of warmth there, too.

It's an act of generosity, this book ... and I am grateful I read it when I did in my life. It was a dash of cold water, in many respects - but at the same time, Grodin doesn't condescend, he doesn't roll his eyes at someone who wants to "do this" as a career - He's not a know-it-all. He makes fun of himself (his stories of working with Robert DeNiro are HYSTERICAL) - but he's also interested in passing on what he has learned.

I found this book to be invaluable at a time when I really really needed it.

A must-read.

The excerpt below has to do with Grodin's experience directing Lovers and Other Strangers on Broadway in 1968.

EXCERPT FROM It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, by Charles Grodin

As much as I feel for the actors' discomfort in auditioning, the people putting on the project have so much time and effort invested in it that these auditions become necessary to try to avoid making mistakes. The exception to this, of course, is if you're hiring someone to do something that everyone involved has seen him do before. I say "everyone" because in most plays everyone has cast approval - writer, director, producer, and, sometimes, the star. It's not that easy to get everyone to agree on anyone. I believe that casting is everything, and if you don't have the right actors, all the writing and directing in the world won't do it for a play. Fine comedy actors, in my opinion, must be as good at serious acting (reality) as they are at comedy. Because of those demands, this is a relatively small group of people.

Lily Tomlin (who has won a Best Actress award on Broadway) likes to tell the story of her audition for me. When she finished, I asked her if she'd ever acted before. She was crushed, she said, and ran to a phone booth to tell a friend how terrible she must have been. I always remind her that the reason I asked her that was because she had been recommended to me by the director of a musical review (Sandy Devlin, the musical stager from Hooray) she was in, and I thought she was a musical performer, even though I thought she gave a good acting audition. But, whatever my rationale, I inadvertently was as insensitive to Lily as others had been to me.

In any event, we ended up with a magnificent cast.

Eventually, the first day of rehearsal finally came for the play, which was called Lovers and Other Strangers. There were a lot of people gathered on the stage that day: ten members of the cast, many of whom had distinguished themselves in other Broadway shows; four or five understudies covering all the parts - also excellent people, any of whom could play the parts they understudied unusually well; of course, the writers, Renee and Joe; Renee's mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler; the producer, Stephanie Sills; top scenic costume and lighting designers; highly experienced stage managers; a number of assistants - a lot of people. I started to welcome everyone, and suddenly was acutely aware that all eyes were on me. I wanted to tell them how excited we were to have them all, and how I saw the play and all that, but I realized I was very, very nervous. I had learned how to deal with rejection but now I had to learn to deal with having authority - which also, unexpectedly, was nerve-racking. I had auditioned and approved every single member of the cast, but now, sitting there in front of all of them, I realized that many in the company were older and more experienced than I was. My directing experience consisted of one show that had run three weeks. (I couldn't go around telling that costumes-were-stolen story to everyone I met.) As soon as I realized my voice was shaking, I shifted gears and switched my speech to a short introduction of Renee's mother, Mrs. Frieda Wechsler, a short, extraordinarily warm woman with a lisp and a lot of guts, who always enjoyed making a statement. Mrs. Wechsler basically said how happy we were to have everyone there and how we all felt that, with hard work, we could have a success - pretty much what I would have said if I could have spoken.

Lovers and Other Strangers dealt with love, romance, and marriage. I don't know if it was life imitating art, or what, but as soon as this company got together, all kinds of romances broke out. I gave notes after each rehearsal. Sometimes one of the performers would be able to leave early because I had said all I had to say to him. His lover would sit there fidgeting, looking furiously at me to give her notes and let her get the hell out of there and into the arms of love. All the romances were topped by Renee and Joe calling me to a private meeting one day to tell me they were expecting.

We opened in the fifteen-hundred-seat Fisher Theater in Detroit to rave reviews and sellout business. It was a complete triumph. The papers were raving about Renee and Joe, and even me. Renee's mother told some of the movie people from Hollywood who had descended on us in Detroit that we wanted five hundred thousand dollars for the movie rights. When they looked faint, she whipped out a rave review from Variety and read the entire thing to them as they stood and nodded and looked increasingly nervous.

The road to Broadway was not entirely smooth. It was concluded at some point prior to the Broadway opening that one of the young women in the cast should be replaced. I was the only one against it, yet it was considered my job, as director, to tell the young woman. It seems unfair now; I should have said to the others: "You want to fire her? You tell her." I didn't want the job. But some kind of tradition was being followed, I guess. When I did walk over to the actress, it took me so long to get to the point that she thought we were just having an idle chat. As I got closer to saying what I had to say, I started to develop chest pains, which turned out to be tension. I had to lie down. She got me a glass of water, and as she was trying to calm me, I told her she was fired. It was doubly difficult for me because I couldn't tell her how much I disagreed with the decision and how good I thought she was. I thought that would be disloyal to the others. I know she felt like lying down herself, but she kept applying cold compresses. Two days later, the whole section that the young, talented actress had been in was cut from the show, and two additional actors had to be let go. But it was certainly easier to be dropped from the show because the scenes you were in were cut. Personally, I don't believe in firings unless it significantly affects the show. And I'd venture to say that more than the overwhelming majority of the time it doesn't. This time it didn't.

We finished our highly successful run in Detroit and prepared to move to Broadway. The stage of the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York was considerably smaller than the stage of the Fisher Theater in Detroit. When we moved the scenery to the Brooks Atkinson, it seemed that our four large sets would come rolling in and out on tracks that were awfully close together. I went to the head stagehand and said, "Are you sure there's no chance at all that these sets could sway a bit, and one coming in quickly could hit one going out quickly?" He stared at me as though that was the dumbest question he'd ever heard. When I persisted, saying, "Forgive me, it's my first Broadway show, and I just don't know about this," he said, "Kid, I've been in this business thirty-five years. Trust me." Always being an optimist, I did. When we started to preview, the sets regularly crashed into each other. Starting right there, until the present, I became kind of an optimistic skeptic.

When we opened on Broadway we got the biggest laughs I'd ever heard in the theater; they were like thunderclaps. In spite of that, the play received mixed notices. The New York Times loved it, which is supposed to be enough; but there was a certain amount of vitriol on the other side. The phrase "Neanderthal theater" sticks in my mind. The play was bold and maybe a little ahead of its time in the sexual-humor department. So, alongside the people screaming with laughter, there was a certain group heading up the aisles in the middle of the evening. The questionable sexual dialogue - and that's all it was: dialogue - represented far less than 1 percent of the play. The biggest laugh of the evening came when a woman turned to her husband in bed and asked demandingly: "Are you gonna make love to me or not?!" The man thinks a second and says, "I owe you one." It was the biggest laugh, and also a line that offended a lot of people. It neither made me laugh nor offended me. I was a much bigger fan of Renee and Joe's nonsexual humor, which was 99 percent of the play.

Business was in trouble from the start. We'd had the theater on what's called an interim booking, meaning another play was booked into the theater six weeks after us (my old friend Dustin Hoffman in a play called Jimmy Shine);and since we had the money to move it (it would have cost twenty-five thousand dollars), we felt we should. The movie rights had been sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Today, that would be equal to a million dollars. The writers got 60 percent of that, and the production 40 percent, which meant that the production had a hundred thousand dollars from the movie sale. Business increased from the first week to the sixth week by 150 percent. We had tried everything to keep going. The actors went around to the various ticket brokers and asked them to do what they could to steer people to the show since the brokers had liked it. I spoke to other producers who had loved the show in an effort to get them to take it over. Joe Bologna and I would stand in front of the theater where our Times review was blown up and comment, as though we were passersby: "I hear it's very good." A few people overheard us and bought tickets. Renee and Joe rounded up about fifty relatives and gave them money to buy tickets. They formed a line. We said to our general manager: "Look, we've got a line!" But Renee and Joe ran out of relatives before that plan could work. None of our plans worked. Heartbreakingly to all of us, the play was allowed to close when our six-week booking was up.

I felt very strongly that the producers should have spent the twenty-five thousand dollars and moved Lovers and Other Strangers to another theater. We had more than doubled our business from the first to the sixth week, we had a rave review from The New York Times, and, most significantly, the show, overall, was loved by the audience and had great word of mouth. A lot of people felt that if it had moved it could have run for two years. Its longevity possibilities, I believe, were proved in that it still is being performed regularly, some twenty years later, all over the country in amateur and stock companies.

Those people responsible for the money always feel they have total control and owe no explanation to anyone, even though in this case most of the money was raised, of course, by a series of backers' auditions performed by Renee, Joe and me. I've always resented this autocratic attitude of "money people". I think that when people work very hard for the better part of a year for little money, they are owed every chance and consideration. While, conceivably, by trying to go on running, money may be lost, work and effort going down the drain to me is worth more than money. The producers had actually wanted to close the play sooner, but I did some figuring, and got Renee and Joe to join with me (against the advice of their business manager) to indemnify the producers against any losses they might incur to finish out the six weeks. We would be responsible for any losses, and also share any profits. We ended up making eleven thousand dollars in profits for the remaining weeks. Recently, I was at a gathering, and one of the producers (a nonvisible one at the time of the play who had raised less than half the money and been influential in persuading Stephanie Sills to close the show) came up to me, introduced himself, and said: "I put up the money for Lovers and Other Strangers." I controlled myself for a moment, and the politest response I could come up with was, "Well, not all of it." He seemed taken aback. I wonder what he would have felt if I'd told him what I really thought of him.

I've always been proud of the successful movie that was made out of the play and of how the play continues to be done regularly all over the country to this day, and probably will for the rest of our lives.

Middlemarch again

Ted is reading Middlemarch and I have so been loving his thoughts on the book. It reminds me of what a spectacular (and exciting - that's one of the main responses I had to the book: it excited me) book it is (excerpt and thoughts here). And my thoughts on finishing the book here.

I also loved Ted's comment here:

But there is something I am finding satisfying about the contrast in the pacing of this book with the rest of my New York life. After a long day of school orientation and classes, I read just 20 pages before going to sleep last night, where I will usually read 60-80 in something from the pile by the bed.

I so know what he is talking about. It's kind of like my experience with War and Peace right now - a book I have almost no time to read ... but that's okay, because it's so big, I feel like I can take my time. I am still only halfway through (just came to the astonishing cross-dressing scene - where Rostov realizes he loves Sonya - pretty much because she has a mustache on ... it's quite blatant ... and I had actually gotten a kind of gay vibe from him earlier in the book - his hero worship of men which borders on sexual frenzy ... But look at how Tolstoy makes it overt here! Rostov can't take his eyes off Sonya, and the feel of kissing her lips with the fake mustache brushing against his own is intensely erotic to him. Brill!) But anyway, life lately has been crazy. I run from place to place, and I was telling my mother how forgetful I've been lately. I "forgot" to pay my electric bill. Sheila, losers forget to pay their utilities. So be it. I just CAN'T get organized right now. My mother reminded me of how up-in-the-air our lives are right now, and to never forget that. "There is no terra firma right now," she said ... "so be gentle with yourself, and remember to, you know, be careful when you're driving, and to check if the oven is on when you leave the house. Because our minds are so taken up with this other thing that we're going to be making mistakes." Excellent advice. Which I am trying to follow. I have Post-its around my house, reminding myself to do the things I need to do ... because from one moment to the next I forget my own name.

In the midst of this, is the slow majestic sweep of Tolstoy's masterpiece ... which I read a couple of pages a day ... and it's exactly what I need right now.

Ted and I went out the other night for Portugese tapas and wine at a great little joint on the Upper West Side (with the most awesome bartender known to man) ... and talked our heads off at each other for a couple of hours. We talked about books and movies and neuroscience and the wedding and religious fanaticism ... it was a necessary touching-base for me. A couple months ago, we said to each other that we want to see each other more - not just 2 or 3 times a year - and so far, we've been sticking to that promise. It's great. A friend like Ted you don't come by every day.

Read Ted's post.

The Books: "Cary Grant: A Biography" (Marc Eliot)

Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:

Cary Grant: A Biography, by Marc Eliot

First off, I love the cover design of this latest biography. It's stark, simple, eye-catching ... and Cary Grant was hugely tall so his posture here really stands out. I love that a playful image like that was chosen as the cover, and not just your typical glamour shot that makes up virtually every other book about Grant. I look at that image and I immediately want to read. So kudos to the design team at Harmony Books. Well done. Most hugely tall men are not able to sit cross-legged like that, but Grant, of course, was an amazingly agile acrobatic - even as an old man. The book highlights that aspect of his appeal, which lasted - well, forever. He was always spry, fresh, athletic, limber. Kind of amazing.

I found there to be a pretty good balance in Marc Eliot's book between the personal and the professional. It doesn't make the mistake of The Lonely Heart (excerpt here) and come up with a theory about Grant and then try to fit everything (even if it doesn't fit) into that theory. I hate it when biographies do that. I mean, theories are good, don't get me wrong ... but in my opinion the great biographies steer clear of such positional nonsense. I've read plenty of biographies that have a big CHIP on their shoulder and it's a huge turnoff. Kinda like reading political blogs this last week. Hmmmm. It all ends up sounding like "blah blah blah blah I AM RIGHT blah blah blah blah EVERYONE ELSE IS STUPID" and I cannot imagine anything more boring and less intellectually rigorous. But a book that is interested in going deep, in a true examination (especially of someone who might have gotten short shrift over the years) is a gem. Ron Chernow's book on Alexander Hamilton will be read for decades, perhaps a century to come (you never know with public figures) ... but certainly any book that is written on Hamilton will now have to reference Chernow's book. It cannot be ignored. It's magnificent. My hardcover copy weighs 45 pounds, I bet. It's gorgeously written, and it stays clear of Freudian analysis - although it certainly makes some interesting points, things that have been skipped over or missed by Hamilton scholars in the past. It's basically a deeper look at a complex personality. Every biography of Hamilton mentions his childhood in the West Indies, and his early job as a shipping clerk - and how much responsibility he was given as a youngster, and how amazingly facile he was with numbers and finance. This, of course, dovetails nicely with his later job as Secretary of the Treasury and his in-depth plan (not to mention his fanatical campaigning) for a national bank. A to B. But I haven't read a book that also looks at the culture of the West Indies - the slave ships coming in daily, the slave markets, the fact that the islands were so small that you could not help but be right on top of the horrors of the slave trade ... in a way that many in the colonies in America did not experience. There were the ports, of course, and the plantations, but nothing compared to growing up in a community so small that all of it was happening in the same place, at the same time. Hamilton watched all of that. And he, of all the Founding Fathers, was a straight-up abolitionist from day one. He did not own slaves. Many of the Fathers owned slaves, and were tortured by it ... but knew they were deeply ensconced in a system they could not extricate themselves from ... Many made plans to free their slaves after their deaths, many did what they could to keep families together ... but only Hamilton was committed to the outright abolition of slavery. This is a known fact. I have read many books about Hamilton, but Chernow's was the first to suggest that perhaps his brutal childhood in the West Indies, witnessing it at such close range, had a lot to do with his feelings about it. Certainly, Hamilton as an immigrant, basically, and a kid who grew up in a cloud of scandal and poverty (John Adams referred to him as "the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler") could (conceivably) have had much sympathy from other downtrodden people. That's a possible theory. And one that makes a lot of sense. But Chernow goes a tiny bit deeper. That's what a good biographer does.

To me, Richard Schickel's book (excerpt here) is the deepest of the books so far ... just in terms of Cary Grant's acting work and the creation of his persona (which kept changing, let's remember). But Marc Eliot's book is a wonderful addition to any Cary Grant library as well. It goes into Grant's bleak childhood, into his early days in New York (one of the best sections of the book, I thought), and I loved how much Eliot focused on Grant's head for business. He was playing the stock market, via phone? Telegraph?? - in his off moments filming Gunga Din. That was in 1939. He would go back to his room, and make some calls to New York, telling them to buy, sell, hold, whatever the hell ... Grant was a poor boy. He knew the value of money. He NEVER threw it around. He loved nice things - but only because nice things have a tendency to last longer than cheaply made things. He had his suits custom-made. He was immaculate. His houses were always elegant, with pools and tennis courts - because he had a passion for swimming and tennis. He planned well. Most actors do not plan well. Grant has a reputation as a bit of a tightwad - it comes up again and again ... and could drive his friends insane ... Billy Wilder tells a story about Grant coming over to his house for a dinner party and becoming obsessed with the studio speakers Wilder had. He asked him a million questions about them - how they worked, how the sound was, how much they cost (as though money was an object!!) - and Wilder found it all very amusing. Grant could have gone out and bought 20 stereo speakers if he wanted, and tried them all, throwing the rest out in the trash, or giving the rest to his housekeeper. But Grant pondered, thinking, analyzing, reading Consumer Reports, interviewing his friends ... before he ever made a purchase. This kind of caution is, obviously, hard to come by in Hollywood, where people are so overpaid. Grant used it well. He also was an independent spirit, which I think goes along with his financial smarts. He would not be owned by any one studio. He negotiated a deal, very early on, by himself, that he would be a free agent. Nobody was a free agent back then. To work outside the studio system ... well ... that was for desperate starlets who wanted to be loaned out to anyone who would bid on them. Not for Cary Grant, a huge movie star. But Grant was smarter than anybody in the room. He would not be owned. He got an unprecedented deal for himself, and ended up - through his life - being able to make choices based on what he wanted to do at that time, rather than having to do it because the studio owed another studio a favor. Bogart's career, by contrast, was full of him suffering through projects he had to do, even when he was a big star, because he was underpaid at Warners, and was a true "studio man". It was an emasculating situation for many stars, and Bogart really felt it. Grant remained unattached. Extraordinary.

He made some bad movies, but seriously - not a hell of a lot considering the length of his career. He had exquisite taste. He could be cautious to a fault - and Wilder begged him, over and over, to be in one of his movies. He wanted him for Sabrina, he wanted him for everything. But for whatever reason, Grant was reticent. They were good friends. And God, think of all the Wilder movies and how perfect Grant would have been in many of them. But Grant, as he got older, became more cautious - and would only trust his big-risk moments to Alfred Hitchcock. There's an amazing story about how Grant was first-choice for the role of the alcoholic suicidal actor in Star is Born, the role that James Mason ended up playing. What a perfect fit, right? James Mason is heartbreaking in the part ("I need a job!") but to imagine Grant ... it gives me goosebumps. Perhaps it cut too close to the bone, perhaps Grant did not want to reveal what that role would require him to reveal ... There's an amazing and eloquent anecdote described in Marc Eliot's book:

Cukor managed to convince Grant to keep an open mind long enough to at least read the screenplay. If he read it and still refused, Cukor said, he would never bring it up again. Under those terms,t he next night at Cukor's nearby desert home, Grant read aloud the part of Norman Maine, with Cukor doing all the others. It took several hours to get through, and when they were finished, Cukor smiled and said to Grant, "This is the part you were born to play!"

"Of course," Grant agreed. "That is why I won't."

I could think about that anecdote forever. It is very revealing but, typical for Grant, it doesn't reveal all. Wonderful. Cukor never forgave Grant for turning the part down. But Grant never did anything just because someone wanted him to do it. He had his reasons. We can guess at what they are, but again, we don't know. Marc Eliot takes a stab at explaining that decision but again, leaves the rest up to interpretation.

The excerpt I wanted to choose today has to do with Suspicion, the first film Grant did with Hitchcock.

First, let me go back to Richard Schickel and post what HE had to say about the film:

Alfred Hitchcock had also risen out of the English lower middle class, partly also by imagining a character for himself and then learning how to play it. He was as much a loner, and far more of an eccentric than Grant, and of course, saw in the actor precisely the qualities that reflected his own vision of life -- a romantic and humorous surface with dark undercurrents running beneath, always ready to burst forth. All of Hitchcock's anxiety -- and he was as much the poet of anxiety as he was the master of suspense -- was based on this unpleasant awareness that things were never what they seemed, that disorder always lurked below our treasured middle-class orderliness. All his movies were based on setting up a chain of circumstances that would bring his characters to an acknowledgement of that awareness.

There was not a single leading male figure in any Hitchcock movie that Cary Grant could not have played.

He began with him as early as 1941, with Suspicion, in which he played an obvious fortune hunter and a famous womanizer who takes an improbable interest in country mousey Joan Fontaine, keeps failing his promise to reform and take a job, and then appears to be planning to murder her for her money.

Grant is wonderful in the role; he is not quite smooth, so his comical high spirits make the threat he poses to the woman more than a mere menace. It brings the film close to the grotesque. His heightened playing underscores the film's basic question, keeps forcing us to wonder if we are seeing him objectively or are we seeing him through her increasing paranoid eyes?

The film's suspense derives entirely from that ambiguity...

What is significant about Suspicion is that, for the first time, one really feels the dangerousness of a charm as seductive as Grant's. It was perhaps hinted at in Sylvia Scarlett, but the world of that film was so remote, and his character so exotic, that it did not menace as it does here, where Fontaine (who is very good and vulnerable) makes us feel its sexy lure, its ability, helplessly, to enthrall.

Yes, yes, yes. Suspicion is not quite successful. Hitchcock was forced to change the ending. The growing menace of the entire film is suddenly resolved, improbably, in the last 2 lines. The couples drives off into the sunset and I, as the viewer, am left with ... But ... but ... what about all the rest of it?? Hitchcock was unhappy ... but, as Schickel mentions, he saw something unique in Cary Grant, that nobody else was seeing at that time, so he got to work on Notorious, the brilliant thriller starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains. And here, he hit it out of the park. They all did.

But Suspicion is VERY important because it was a true break in the type Grant had been playing up to that time. It must be seen in that context. Grant had been playing madcap guys, comedic farcical roles, dashing heroes ... so to accept Hitchcock's direction, to allow himself to be molded into the character of an unsavory slippery liar ... is a huge risk. And Grant did not like risks. He was careful. He held back. But he was in good hands with Hitchcock, and he knew it.

(Hitchcock had wanted the potentially poisoned glass of milk to seem ominous and to dominate the eerie climbing of the stairs scene - so he placed a small lightbulb in the liquid - so that the glass appears to glow.)

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Cary Grant: A Biography, by Marc Eliot

Suspicion was based on the 1932 British novel Before the Fact by Anthony Berkeley Cox (written under the pseudonym Francis Iles), which RKO had purchased in 1935. After several unsuccessful attempts to make a movie out of it, they shelved the project until Hitchcock and Wanger found the book gathering dust on the studio's shelves. The novel tells the story of Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth (Joan Fontaine), a passive but wealthy woman overly attached to her husband, Johnnie (Grant), who she discovers is in fact an embezzler, has murdered his best friend, and is about to murder her. Debilitated by her love for him, she cannot do anything to stop him, and, in the climactic scene, she calmly accepts a glass of milk from him that she knows is poisoned and dies.

This was fertile turf for Hitchcock, who loved the idea of making a movie about a woman so masochistically attached to her husband she would actually allow him to kill her. If, in fact, that was what he intended to do. Hitchcock's brilliant twist was to keep the audience guessing until the very end whether Aysgarth was really a murderer, or if the whole thing was only a figment of the wife's paranoid imagination.

If Hitchcock clearly envisioned the film in his mind, his studio-assigned producer, Harry Edington, did not. And when Hitchcock, who had vacillated over the ending of the film, decided Grant should turn out to be a killer, Edington said that was impossible because audiences would never accept Grant in that type of role. This impasse came two months into production and lasted until Hitchcock finally and reluctantly altered the script to make the woman the victim only of her own paranoid delusions.*

Filming then resumed, and for the next three months Fontaine became so unnerved by the director's relentless harping on her to "act crazy" that she developed an upset stomach that once again halted shooting. This delay stretched into a week and caused the entire project to once again come up for review at RKO, where, because of the vagueness of the shooting script, in which it still remained unclear as to whether Johnnie was a killer, the studio's board members considered canceling the whole project. One alternative solution was to cut from the completed footage all negative references to Johnnie's character and see what that would leave; the studio then produced an incomprehensible fifty-five-minute "happy" version of the film that horrified Hitchcock, who then assured the studio that he would finish the film the way they wanted. As a result, Suspicion ends with a wild car ride down the side of a winding road, in which Johnnie at first seems to be trying to kill Lina but in reality is only trying to save her from falling out of her side to certain death.

Despite all the plot confusion, for the first time in his career, due in large part to Hitchcock's direction, Grant gave a performance almost entirely defined by his character's internal emotional life rather than his exterior features. Grant's Johnnie Aysgarth embodied Hitchcock's darkest projections of himself, as the director audaciously took one of the most popular actors in Hollywood and used his smooth veneer as a mask to drive the audience mad trying to figure out what was underneath it. As had every other of the major directors who'd helped mold Grant's onscreen persona as an extension of their own, Hitchcock, through his skilled and idiosyncratic use of the tools of his trade - close-ups, angularity, the rhythm of the montage against the composition of the mise-en-scene - was able to create rather than elicit a performance from Grant without what he considered the unnecessary intrusion of "acting". In Sternberg's hands, Grant had become the epitome of the sleazy ladies' man; McCarey's vision was someone with charm, wit, and the boundless energy of love-infused youth; to Hawks, Grant was the romantic, athletic adventurer; to Cukor, he was the adventuresome interior romantic. It was Hitchcock who finally took Grant deeper, who used his insecurity as an actor (a reflection of his own very real repression) to create a personality whose criminal darkness was the perfect cover to protect the emotional defects of the charismatic performer, the complex but amiable surface of the character he played, and the masterful director who managed to at once put them all on dazzling display. As John Mosher correctly put it in his review for The New Yorker, "Cary Grant finds a new field for himself, the field of crime, the smiling villain, without heart or conscience. Crime lends color to his amiability."

For both star and director, their inspired collaboration on Suspicion became a virtuosic display of not only what they could do on film but what film can do best, the visual, or surface, display of one's soul by the behavioral display of one's private (secret, repressed, forbidden) thoughts and desires. The great Hitchcockian touch is what makes Suspicion so compelling. By allowing Grant to act out the subtext of his character - a man so enraged at his wife that he wants to kill her - he becomes, in Hitchcock's morally rigid world, an actual killer. And even more shocking, his wife becomes his coconspirator for her "role" in triggering such murderous thoughts.

Even with its denatured script and studio-imposed happy ending, Suspicion proved an unqualified box office success and joined the two previous films he made that year - The Philadelphia Story and Penny Serenade - on the list of top-five grossing films of 1941.** The film's record-breaking Thanksgiving weekend opening took place at Radio City Music Hall (officially kicking off the 1941 holiday moviegoing season), and this time everyone in the business believed there was no way the Academy could deny Grant a long-overdue Academy Award.

*According to Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, while Hitchcock insisted later on that he never intended to alter the plot of the original novel, his memos to RKO in its archives suggest that from the start the director "wanted to make a film about a woman's fantasy life." It is likely that the purpose of those memos was to tell the studio what it wanted to hear, in order to get the film into production. A previous attempt by the studio to film Suspicion, as a star vehicle for Laurence Olivier, had been abandoned for the very same reason: the studio refused to have him play a killer.

** Of the sixteen movies Grant made in his first five years as a freelancer, Suspicion came in at number three, grossing more than $400,000 in its initial theatrical release. RKO's highest-grossing movie of 1941, The Philadelphia Story opened in December 1940 and played in theaters well into 1941. Grant made a third film in 1941, Arsenic and Old Lace, which was not released until 1944.

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