Obituary here.
Bonnie and Clyde, a landmark in so many ways. I am right now tearing through Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America
My first scene began with Evan and me sitting in the back of her car, supposedly chasing the Barrow Gang. I waited for Arthur Penn to call “Action”. Arthur was sitting alongside the camera – out of frame, of course – but not more than five or six feet away from me. As soon as I heard him say, “Action,” I started to act. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it? But Arthur immediately called out to the camera operator, “Keep rolling,” and then he gave me my first revelation of what it means to be an “actor’s director”. While the camera was rolling, he said, “Gene, just because I say ‘Action’, doesn’t mean you have to start acting – it just means that we’re ready. I could see you had something cooking inside, but you weren’t ready to act yet. Film is cheap. Keep working on whatever you’re working on and start acting when you’re ready.”
The scene went very well.
When we took a break, the assistant director came up to me and said, “Don’t get used to what just happened – you’re not going to find many directors who work like Arthur.”
A moment taken out of a crazy shooting schedule, cast, crew, everyone standing around waiting – Mr. Arthur Penn took the time to gently steer a new actor in the right direction, let him off the hook (as in: You’ve already been cast, you’ve already proven yourself, you don’t need to do that here), and give him a tiny pointer on how to work, how to BE on a set. Generosity personified and certainly something Wilder never forgot.
Rest in peace, Mr. Penn.
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And he directed one of my favorite movies, The Miracle Worker, with a favorite performance, by Anne Bancroft, and my favorite scene from that performance, from IMDB –
The asylum? I grew up in such an asylum, the State Alms House. Rats? Why, my brother Jimmy and I used to play with the rats because we didn’t have toys. Maybe you’d like to know what Helen will find there, not on visiting days. One ward was full of the old women. Crippled, blind, dying, but even if what they had was catching, there was nowhere else to move them. That’s where they put us. There were younger ones across the hall, prostitutes mostly, with TB and epileptic fits. And some of the kind that keep after other girls, especially the young ones. And some were just insane. Some had the DTs. And there were girls in another ward with babies they didn’t want. They started at thirteen, fourteen. They left afterwards, but the babies stayed. We played with them, too. There were a lot of them, with sores all over from diseases you’re not supposed to talk about.
Damn good director. I especially loved Little Big Man and Night Moves.
Another who made Hollywood’s middle period bearable. He has been missed.
Patrick – Yes, I love that movie. Patricia Neal tells some wonderful stories about him too – she did the stage production of The Miracle Worker, playing Helen Keller’s mother. I included an excerpt from her autobiography in the tribute I wrote about her, and it deals with that production, and how Arthur Penn sensed her anger that she wasn’t cast as Annie. A sensitive guy, he handled it just right.
All my friends from the Actors Studio are leaving comments on my FB page to this link – since we knew him to some degree – and my friend Bill, a wonderful actor, remembered something Arthur said about the sort of prosaic and yet magic quality of what acting is, and how actors operate:
That pretty much sums it up. You can sit around and wait for the magic but that won’t get you too far. There’s nothing wrong if the magic doesn’t show up – that’s how magic WORKS. Don’t beat yourself up about it. “Let’s go eat.”
The point is to keep working. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s go eat.