Peter Bogdanovich
Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and stars from the golden age of Hollywood lived again as Peter Bogdanovich regaled the audience at the National Film Theatre with tales from his new book, Who the Hell's in It?. Here's a full transcript.
* Clive James
* guardian.co.uk,
* Tuesday November 30 2004
Clive James: Peter Bogdanovich, ladies and gentlemen. And I'm not... I'm Clive James, and fans of the Sopranos will know that I'm sitting in Peter's seat and he's sitting in Lorraine Bracco's. Because when they talk to each other in the Sopranos, that's the arrangement, isn't it?
Peter Bogdanovich: That's right, but I'm perfectly happy here.
CJ: Well, when Peter's last big book came out, the one before this one which is called Who the Hell's in It?, and it's tremendously available this evening. The previous book was called Who the Devil Made It?, which is equally tasty and I recommend them both hugely. When that book came out, I reviewed it for the New Yorker and I had the pleasure of saying about Peter Bogdanovich that he didn't really need a career because he has a destiny. And I wasn't trying to flatter him, although of course I was. I think he's a director of that stature - we think of him as something quite out of the ordinary in the American context. We think of him more like a European director. In fact he even sounds like one - Peter Bogdanovich is a European name, whereas, say, Spike Jonze isn't. But we won't go into that. But the important thing for me to say about him, speaking as a writer, is that if Peter had never made a film, he would still be one of the most important writers about film that we know of. I also think, of course, that one of the things that makes him an important writer about film is that he knows a lot about making movies - it actually does help. But he writes delightfully about the movies and he's doing it again with this new book. Who the Devil Made It? was about the directors, and Who the Hell's in It? is about the actors. At the risk of over-simplifying his main thesis, I would say that it's something like this - that in the old days, up to the end of the studio system, roughly in the 60s, the big stars played essentially themselves, whatever they did, and that since then, that has not been true. Is that a fair summary? So that the old conception of the star is gone?
PB: Yes, the whole thing has changed because in the old days, the idea was that there was a certain personality that the actor had, and that personality was consistent up to a point, and you could write for that. And so the studios basically were in the business of making the most of their stars. All the directors, writers and actors were under contract - so the whole idea was to make the most of the stars. The stars had a certain personality which the audience was attracted to, and that was maximised by the writing and the directing. So, the whole idea that they, so to speak, played themselves, is and isn't true. First of all, that tends to have a kind of pejorative quality, when people say, "Well, he's just playing himself". But the truth is, good acting is about finding the character in yourself, not about pretending to be somebody else. My old teacher Stella Adler, who also taught Brando, said, "Of course you play yourself, darling, who else can you play?" But you find the character in yourself. Now Brando is very much to the point here, because Brando kind of became a star in the last full decade of the golden age, and was one of the only stars who refused to be typed - he wanted to be different from picture to picture, and did. And actors have wanted to be like Brando ever since. So that happened at the same time that the studio system fell apart. So today, you have very, very good and versatile actors who don't want to be typed and who are different from picture to picture. And there's no star system, there's no studio to back up the stars, so it really doesn't exist anymore. Occasionally you get a star like Clint Eastwood or Hugh Grant, who essentially has a certain persona that the audience likes and plays that, but there's no system that backs it up.
CJ: You do say in the book that it took even Cary Grant a while to become Cary Grant - he had to find that persona.
PB: It was interesting. He made 28 pictures before he found a picture that clicked in for him, which was The Awful Truth. Prior to that he'd had a lot of directors who helped him a lot. Like Josef von Sternberg, who directed him in Blonde Venus, which was his fifth picture in the first year that he was acting. And I said to him - this is in the book - "Did Von Sternberg direct you much?" [does Cary Grant voice] "Not really, no." "So did he give you anything?" "Yes, he did." "What?" "Well, the first day I came on the set, he looked at me and said, 'Your hair is parted on the wrong side.'" [Audience laughs] "So what happened?" "Well, I parted it on the other side and kept it that way the rest of my career." [More laughter]
CJ: Yes, he made himself into this sort of ideal Englishman, and even in Australia we thought he was the ideal Americanised Englishman.
PB: And Americans thought he was some kind of eccentric American.
CJ: But you do realise that no Englishman ever talked like that.
PB: No, I know.
CJ: Especially not now. Most English actors today, especially on television, sound as if they spent the whole afternoon ramming their heads against the wall of a pub. They don't sound like Cary Grant. It's a very special sound.
PB: Cary sounded like nobody else. That was the other thing about the star system in the golden age, there was a particular sound to the way that people talked. Cagney had a certain way of talking - I asked him once about acting and he said, [does James Cagney voice] "Good acting means you look in the other actor's camera eye" - meaning the eye closest to the camera - "and tell the truth." Now who talks like that?
[Audience laughs]
And Jimmy Stewart - I can do Jimmy Stewart, you wanna hear it?
CJ: Yes, please. That was the one I thought I could do until I met you.
PB: Jimmy Stewart, you know, had [does the voice] this way of talking... "Who? Nobody." I called him up one time and said, "How you feeling, Jimmy?" and he said, "I tell ya Peter, after 70 it's all patch, patch, patch."
CJ: Now that I've got you on this streak, I've got to get your Brando. I think you were an actor yourself when you first saw Brando, weren't you?
PB: Yeah, I'd been acting for a long time. You mean when I first met Brando?
CJ: When you first saw him in action in New York, I mean, in the Tennessee Williams play.
PB: No, I didn't see him in that. The first time I met Brando was on a street corner. I was 14. He was walking down the street and I saw him coming and I thought, "It's Marlon Brando". And he was wearing what turned out to be his outfit from On the Waterfront, because he was shooting. And I thought if I don't say hello to him, and get his autograph, nobody would believe that I just saw Marlon Brando. So I went over to him, it was about 6 o'clock on a winter's day and it was dark. And I'd just seen a matinee of a play with Jose Ferrer called The Shrike, which I thought was very effective. So I went over to Brando and I said, "Mr Brando, may I have your autograph?" [Does Brando voice] "Yeah." And he never stopped, he kept on walking. "You got a pencil?" And I'm looking for a pencil and a pad and I was very nervous, and I said, "I just saw Jose Ferrer in The Shrike. You seen it? I thought it was wonderful." "Yeah, I thought it stunk." [Audience laughs] That so floored me I couldn't say anything else. I found the pen and a piece of paper, and it was the only time I've ever seen anybody sign an autograph without stopping. He just signed, kept on walking, passed it to me, and that was it. And that was the first time I met Marlon Brando.
CJ: His acting, especially in The Wild One, heavily influenced my own acting. My own acting was done mainly in the foyer of the cinema as I was leaving, but no one was impressed. Mainly because I thought it was just a mumble, but in fact, it's more than that. The sinuses come into it, don't they?
PB: Oh yeah, he had a [does the voice] definite thing, a kind of Midwestern twang. And remember when they said to him in that, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" and he says, [pause] "Whaddyagot?" He changed everything, Marlon.
CJ: In my position as host, I realise that it's incumbent upon me sometimes to give you a punchline. First I want to do the set-up - it's in the book and it's about Cary Grant - and I want to get it just right for you. So, Cary Grant is, shall we say, of advanced years, and he comes to this gala benefit, and there's an old lady sitting at the desk, and he's got to persuade her that he's allowed in because he hasn't got his ticket.
PB: Oh, that was at the AFI's first lifetime achievement award ceremony, for John Ford. This was 1973, and there was this lady at the counter taking the tickets. And Cary - I was right behind him - comes up to her and says, [does Grant] "I'm terribly sorry, I've forgotten my ticket. May I get in please?" And the lady doesn't even look up, she just says, "Name?" And he says, "Cary Grant." Now she looks up, she looks at him and says, "You don't look like Cary Grant." And quick as a wink he says, "I know, nobody does." [Audience laughs]
CJ: I have a profound point to make here about The Philadelphia Story, one of my favourite movies. Principally because it was playing in the main cinema in Singapore the year that the city fell to the Japanese - a little known fact. And it occurred to me that Cary Grant could not play, because of the expectations created by these actors and the way they were cast in movie after movie and the personalities they established, Cary Grant could not really play the James Stewart role. Because James Stewart is socially aspiring but Cary Grant can't socially aspire because he's already there.
PB: Absolutely. Cary was very much there. You've reminded me of another story - may I tell another story about Cary? This is in the book, too. He said, "I was in my office one time and the phone rang, and my secretary came in and said that President Kennedy was on the line. So I picked up the phone and he said, 'Hello, this is President Kennedy.' I said, 'Hello, Mr President, how are you?' And he said, 'Fine. My brother, the attorney general, is on the other line, too.' So I said, 'Hello, Mr Attorney General, how are you?' 'Fine.' Everybody says fine, and then I said, 'Well, what can I do for you gentlemen?' President Kennedy said, 'Oh, nothing. We were just sitting here in the Oval Office, talking, and we decided that we wanted to hear Cary Grant's voice.'" [Audience laughs] How about that for the Kennedy White House?
CJ: Can I just raise one point about the established characters and the stars - what if the established character doesn't really check out with reality? In your book, you talk about John Wayne and our faith in his actual being. But what does he represent on screen, and how did that square with reality, in your view?
PB: John Wayne - I don't know, I guess people thought of John Wayne as the archetypal American. The man of the west.
CJ: Well, that's exactly what scares some of us to death.
PB: Well, yes, now, after the world's gotten a little scarier. But Wayne represented a kind of American legend, an American Hercules who could do anything, who was quick-tempered and angry, who had a kind of innocence and yet he was profane. In life, Duke was kind of like a gigantic 10-year-old - he had a kind of awkwardness which was interesting. Lauren Bacall says that in the book, that what she found most appealing about Duke was that he always seemed ill at ease in social situations. I watched him on two sets, acting, and he was extraordinarily into it - he was always watching, he never went to his trailer, he was always there, and usually playing with a six-shooter or a rifle or something. One time I went to interview him at his home in Newport Beach, and he was putting on his toupee and we were getting ready to shoot the interview, and they were lining up the shot out on his terrace. And I said, "I hear, Duke, that when you're not being directed by Ford, or Hawks, or Hathaway, that you pretty much tell the directors what to do." And he says, [does John Wayne] "Naw, that's not true. As you know there's only one director on a picture, only one captain on a ship." And I said, "Well, you know, for example when you're doing pictures with Andy McLaglen, I understand you pretty much tell Andy what to do." He says, "Naw, Christ, I've known Andy since he was so high, and I knew his dad Vic McLaglen for ever, but when Andy's directing a picture, he's the captain and what he says goes. That's the way it is." Then somebody comes in and says, "Peter, you wanna come check the shot?" and I go and do that, and I say, "Okay, bring Mr Wayne out." So Duke comes out... [does John Wayne] "All right, you better move that light over there, and that stone elephant there, move that over there and I'll sit on that." I'm sitting on the terrace and looking at him and I have a smile on my face, and he catches my eye, and he goes, "Oh, sorry, Andy." [Audience laughs]
CJ: One of the many enthralling aspects of the book for me was, I thought I invented the concept of Frank Sinatra as a revolutionary screen actor, but you're way ahead of me. I thought Sinatra was terrific, I watched everything he did when I was a kid. Movies like Suddenly and The Manchurian Candidate - the scene in that movie with him and Janet Leigh between the two cars on the train, great scene written by George Axelrod, and he's wonderful. I know he was a big star, but why didn't he just dominate Hollywood? Was he just too impatient?
PB: I don't think he had the interest in making pictures - he liked singing, that was what he did and absolutely what he believed in. I think he was occasionally interested in movies but I think he lost interest at a certain point. I thought his best performance was actually in Some Came Running, in which he's superb, a very understated performance, and a lot of the scenes are done without a cut, which appealed to him. You know, he'd come into a recording studio and he'd rehearse, then sing it with the full orchestra once, maybe twice, and that'd be it. I asked him once why he didn't like to do more than one or two takes - he was notorious for not liking this and would get upset if he had to. So I asked him why, and he said, "It's kind of like singing the same song for the same audience twice." He was very conscious of that. He was most interested in singing.
CJ: I want to just slide into the area of your own career here, taking Sinatra as a reference. He was almost out of business when he did the Angelo Maggio role in From Here To Eternity, and he did it for $1,000 a week, which was nothing. And in your book, you've got this terrific phrase, "Such are the perils of American fame." You're talking from the heart there, right?
PB: Well, it's really easy to go up and down in the American fame department. Part of what America likes is that bring 'em up, tear 'em down, have a comeback thing.
CJ: They were probably gunning for you - you had one hit after another.
PB: They couldn't help it.
CJ: Well, you were a tempting target - a house with 19 servants...
PB: I was a very tempting target - when I was living with Cybill Shepherd, people were just killing us, we had very bad press. By the way, Cary Grant called me up one time and said, "Peter, will you stop telling people you're happy? And stop telling them you're in love." "Why Cary?" "Because they're not happy and they're not in love." "I thought all the world loves a lover." "No, don't you believe it. Let me tell you something, Peter, people do not like beautiful people." I didn't get that for a long time, that envy and jealousy can come cloaked in smiles.
CJ: I suppose one of the nice things about the studio system as was, melting into the past, was that it was harder to be collectively vindictive. I think Brando, after he made One-Eyed Jacks, either he condemned himself or was condemned to a kind of impotence, because he thought, or they thought, that he'd gone too far.
PB: I think Marlon gave up after that picture - he put a lot into it.
CJ: It's a marvellous movie.
PB: He's awfully good in it. I think it was the last time he really cared. It was the only film he directed, and they took it away from him, it was recut and he wasn't happy with it. His close friends, like Stella Adler, said that picture really kind of ended his passion for the movies.
CJ: Let's talk about Marilyn Monroe - you didn't actually get in the Actors Studio, did you, but she was and you were there?
PB: In 1955, when I was a child, I somehow managed to attend a Strasberg class once and Marilyn was sitting right behind me and she was wearing no makeup, her hair was a bit of mess, and she had on a bulky, thick-knit, black sweater. So she's right here, and I couldn't help peering - I allowed myself maybe four glances. But it was interesting because everytime I looked, she had the same expression. She was so extraordinarily wrapped up in every syllable that Lee Strasberg was uttering, not as a student but as a worshipper. She looked like her life depended on understanding everything he was saying. I've never seen such kind of desperation, actually. It was touching.
CJ: Wasn't Arthur Miller of the opinion that this was a dangerous thing?
PB: Well, Miller didn't like Strasberg at all. In fact he's written a new play and I'm told that Strasberg comes off rather badly in it. But Miller told me that he thought Strasberg hurt Marilyn very badly.
CJ: In other words, her inclination towards seriousness wasn't actually beneficial.
PB: She had a great instinct as a comedienne, but she was frightened of the responsibility. Howard Hawks told me she was just scared to come on the set.
CJ: I once said, very foolishly, that she had no comic talent compared with someone like, say, Paula Prentiss, who really could strut her stuff. But Monroe, on the other hand, was a comic star because you just felt, whenever you looked at her, that she was a flying star.
PB: Miller said an interesting thing about - he said she really believed in these characters that she played, which were not necessarily well written and were like paper characters, but she invested so much in them that she became convincing. She didn't do caricature, she was believing in what she was doing.
CJ: The rarest thing in the world is the beautiful comic actress, because that's the rarest combination, a beautiful actress who can actually be funny. And you're really talking about one in The Cat's Meow. I loved the film, I think it's a terrific idea, a bold idea. I want to talk to you in a minute about whether it's commercially viable to make a movie that depends on so much knowledge on the audience's part, when you yourself have said that the audience doesn't know anything. Most of your book is about how the younger generation is entirely forgetting who even Cary Grant was, so how are they going to remember who William Randolph Hearst was?
PB: Well, we tried to tell them within the body of the picture who everybody was, just enough - he's rich, he's powerful, she's a movie star...
CJ: My diagnosis would be, then make this the first episode of a giant and wonderful TV series, where you've got all the time in the world.
PB: That would be the better way to do it.
CJ: I wanted to raise that because you're in The Sopranos, and you above all must notice that there's an amount of creativity that's going on in things like The Sopranos and The West Wing, that are starting to leave the movies for dead, because you've got so much more room to paint with a big brush.
PB: I think that's one of the great things about The Sopranos, is that [creator] David Chase found a way to really make the television series an extraordinary medium, because of the length of it. I think it was Thomas Hardy who said, "Character is plot." It's a very important point, and that's really what The Sopranos is about - a bunch characters and that becomes the plot. In fact, I think one of the extraordinary things about that series is that you're so into the characters...
CJ: ... that you argue with them.
PB: Yeah.
CJ: I spend a lot of time arguing with Tony now. Tony should be more assertive - he should have wiped out his cousin straight away, hanging around was a big mistake. And Lorraine Bracco should listen to you. [Audience laughs] Tell me more about the Marion Davies character in The Cat's Meow. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about what happened on William Randolph Hearst's yacht when Thomas Ince got killed, probably by mistake, and Marion Davies, Hearst's mistress, is there, and wonderfully played by Kirsten Dunst. Until I saw this movie, you could not have convinced me that Kirsten Dunst could carry a role like that, but she not only carries it, she's wonderful.
PB: Isn't she? I thought she was wonderful. She was very young when we did the picture, only 18, and she turned 19 as we were finishing the picture, and she was playing 25. I thought she did a very, very good job.
CJ: She makes Marion Davies not only alive, but gifted and funny and clever and all the things that Marion Davies obviously was. Which raises the point, because that's not how we think of Marion Davies, and it's Orson Welles's fault. Because we, rightly, or you say, wrongly, identify the giftless creature in Citizen Kane with Marion Davies, because we identify Welles with Hearst.
PB: Yes, that was a huge mistake that Orson did his best to discourage and encourage. It was a complicated...
CJ: He encouraged it at first - he made an overwhelming myth. And then all the corrections you make later won't change the myth.
PB: Because really Welles wasn't playing Hearst. Hearst had a high voice and Marion Davies was talented. In fact, Kane was based on McCormick.
CJ: "Colonel" McCormick, who ran the Chicago Tribune.
PB: And he built the Chicago Opera House for his girlfriend who was a singer.
CJ: Who couldn't sing.
PB: But the myth is that it was about Hearst and Marion Davies - the libel was against Marion Davies because in fact she was a talented comedienne.
CJ: That's what I've thought ever since - what a terrible thing to happen to her, and of course people don't usually see a Marion Davies picture now, but you've only got to see one to realise that she had everything.
PB: She was a very gifted comedienne but Hearst liked to put her in costume dramas because he thought it was finer, he didn't like comedy.
CJ: What would have happened to Cat's Meow if Brando had played the lead?
PB: Marlon turned it down, he said, "I don't want to go up against Orson Welles." And it's funny because, of course, Orson wasn't playing Hearst. It's complicated, isn't it? What would have happened? I don't know - maybe we'd never have finished it. [Audience laughs] You know, Marlon used to like to put his lines everywhere - he didn't like to learn lines, so he would put them up there, down here, round there. He'd even put them on the other actors' faces. It's true. DeNiro did not like that. You know he'd be looking up here and say the line... [more laughs]
CJ: Here's a trick question. I think you're basically anti-blockbuster because you want to make smaller and serious movies - but what would have happened to your career if you had directed The Godfather?
PB: I don't know. I was offered The Godfather...
CJ: That's why it's a trick question.
PB: I was offered it. However, I was so flippant that I didn't even know it was The Godfather until 10 years later. The fella called me from Paramount and said that they'd just bought a novel by Mario Puzo, and that it was about the Mafia. And I quickly said that I wasn't interested in the Mafia, and that was the end of that. Dumb. [Audience laughs] But I wouldn't have cast Marlon, you see, I would have cast Edward G Robinson probably. It would have been a whole different picture.
CJ: I'm jumping backwards to your earlier big book now, Who the Devil Made It?, where you quote Allan Dwan, the veteran director, as saying, "Whoever thought of the idea of spending millions of dollars on a movie has ruined the picture business." Do you agree with that?
PB: I don't think it's helped, because you can't really buy quality. Orson used to say that limitation is the inspiration for art, and I think it is. When I asked Otto Preminger why he'd shot Anatomy of a Murder entirely on location, he said, [does Preminger] "Because if I want to move that wall, I can't. So I must be more inventive."
CJ: You also quote Don Siegel in Who the Devil Made It? about shooting on the backlot. He spent most of his life somewhere between the B- and A-list of directors. And he says, the secret of shooting on the backlot is, "I go with the actors and the camera goes down when the backlot starts looking weak and it comes up again when it becomes strong." There's an ethos in that, of an economy of means, isn't there?
PB: Yes, it's an economy of means. But also... in fact, of all the 16 directors in that book, and they're as disparate as Fritz Lang and Howard Hawks and Hitchcock and Don Siegel, and they all had one thing in common, and maybe the one thing only, but it was interesting - they all took pride in doing things inexpensively and making it look like it was expensive, or difficult or complicated.
CJ: Instead of the other way around. I saw Troy quite recently, in the cinema and then again in a plane by accident. The second time was agony because I kept noticing that millions of pounds were being spent to no real effect. Because a thousand computer-generated soldiers running towards you aren't as interesting as 10 extras crowded together. Explain that.
PB: Or that battle scene that Orson Welles did in Chimes at Midnight, where he had maybe 50 people, but he made it look like many. That was the only really anti-war battle scene I've ever seen.
CJ: I can remember images from it now - I remember a sword going down a slit in a knight's helmet.
PB: It's a wonderful picture, but unfortunately very hard to see.
CJ: But I'm not going to remember Troy... You know I went to New Zealand last year, and it's been taken over by this Lord of the Rings thing. It's now populated by hobbits. You get out of the airport and there are all these short men with hair on their feet.
PB: I always thought that the goal in movies was to extinguish disbelief - it's that great line that George Stevens said about Jimmy Stewart: "He walks in a room and he extinguishes disbelief." I love that. I always thought that was sort of the point. But now that so much is computer-generated and there are so many tricks in movies, it's hard to convince anyone that anything's real. At the end of Paper Moon, there's a scene where they drive off and the road just went on forever, and I remember some critic at the time saying that clearly it was a fake road. Well, it was actually a real road in Kansas, and it was the only hill in the entire state of Kansas, and it was a great road and I loved it, and that's why I went and shot the ending there. But somebody said that the road looked too good, so it must have been fake. Now, it's hard to make people believe that anything really happened.
CJ: Could you see yourself committing to a long running TV show along the lines of The West Wing? I'll tell you when it hit me, when I realised that Band of Brothers was better than Saving Private Ryan. Saving Private Ryan spent a lot of money, great battle scene, but it didn't really give you the war. Band of Brothers did. The series has this spread. Do you see yourself committing to that?
PB: I've been trying to get one or two things done that way - I don't want to say what they are - but it's a great medium, particularly since the Sopranos.
CJ: And there's so much riding on a movie, it's such a one-shot, and it suffers from this problem which you outline brilliantly in your book, by implication, which is that the audience is getting younger and younger and more clueless all the time. If they can't remember who James Cagney was, then you're going to be in real trouble trying to give them a common frame of reference.
PB: Well, it's gone. Well, there we are. It's cheerful, isn't it? [Audience laughs]
CJ: Let's get cheerier, although some of the British audience might not think so because they have the French reaction to Jerry Lewis in mind. But one of the stars of your book is Jerry Lewis. And I'm bound to say that I agree with you and I don't think that the French are necessarily benighted in regarding Jerry Lewis as a formidable character.
PB: Yeah, it's one of the stupider jokes that the French love Jerry Lewis. Americans say it all the time, and it's so stupid because what they forget is that Jerry Lewis was an enormously popular star in America for about 25 years, and then he went down a bit, and then the French said he's great, and the Americans said, "Hah, the French like Jerry Lewis." But you know, so did you.
CJ: He and Martin never made a flop, did they? Every movie made money.
PB: Every one, yeah.
CJ: It occurred to me that my own career was influenced profoundly by Jerry Lewis when I was eight years old and the only comic record I listened to was a 78 shellac record - remember that routine of his, Sunday driving? Sunday driving, Sunday driving, Up the steepest hill I'm striving, I'm not quitting till I'm sitting, On the very top. There's more. A lady driver signals left, And then she makes a right, I hit her in the rumble seat, That isn't too polite. That was the first innuendo I ever understood. [Audience laughs] Do you remember it?
PB: I don't remember that. Maybe it is.
CJ: But that made me think, this man is a comic genius. And then when I saw the movies, I understood immediately how the system worked between him and Dean Martin, but I wondered how Martin took it because Jerry Lewis got all the praise, because it looked like Jerry was doing all the work.
PB: Well, the most interesting thing when you see Jerry and Dean on the live shows they did for television in the early 50s - I've known Jerry for many years now, 42 years - and about two years ago I was feeling rather gloomy, and he sent me all 28 of these Colgate Comedy Hours, and they were amazing, particularly the first 15 or so. And it was live on national television. And the greatest moments were when Jerry was trying to break Dean up, and he always did, so Dean would laugh and Jerry would go berserk, he was so happy, and that was hysterically funny. It was that chemistry between the two of them - you watch Dean watching Jerry like a hawk, to see where he's going to go and what he's going to do. They were extraordinary together, and the thing that made them extraordinary was this amazing affection they had for each other.
CJ: But it was true, wasn't it, that Jerry was the thinker?
PB: Yes, Jerry was the brains behind the whole thing. You see him in the shows, often telling Dean, he'd come out of character and sort of direct Dean. And when they broke up, Dean took what Jerry used to do over to the Rat Pack, because Dean became Jerry with Frank.
CJ: He used to break Frank up.
PB: Yeah, that was the thing. In a different way, of course.
CJ: Jerry knew a lot about making movies, didn't he?
PB: Jerry became a very good director. He's very, very smart, and very funny. He'd make you laugh anywhere.
CJ: Most directors now use the video camera with the main camera, to get the picture.
PB: He's the one who invented it - you know, the video assist, it's a closed circuit monitor that you could watch the scene on a television while it's being shot. Every director uses this now, and Jerry had invented it by 1959, when he directed his own first movie, because he wanted to be able to see himself while he was directing.
CJ: What was it about him and the boom mike? Did he invent it?
PB: No, he hated the boom mike, he wanted to get rid of it and succeeded in doing so on a couple of his pictures.
CJ: What's the problem with it?
PB: Well, you have to constantly light for it, because it's always getting in the way. There must be an easier way to do this. So you spend a lot of time lighting to not see the boom.
CJ: You can see actually see its shadow on some quite distinguished foreheads if you look very carefully. So he was planting little mikes all over the set?
PB: He did that on The Ladies' Man.
CJ: So why didn't that take on? Union pressure?
PB: I don't know. It's really hard to get movie people to change what they've done. It really is. Like sound in movies didn't change until records became so good that people realised they had to spend some money and get the sound as good as on records. Movie people don't like to spend money on technology, at least they didn't use to.
CJ: Can I just raise one question about the talented actor. I think some of the actors we remember from the past, with the characters they established, weren't necessarily broadly talented anyway. Whereas there are actors who are so talented that they can't become stars because they disappear into the characters, and this was true even at the time. My actor was Alan Arkin - I thought he was the most talented actor I'd ever seen and couldn't understand why he didn't become world's biggest star. But that was probably why. And that might be true of your guy, Ben Gazzara, because you write wonderfully about him and obviously love him, he's a terrific actor. But would he have been a bigger star if he was more conventionally handsome or something?
PB: I think he would have been a bigger star if he'd come into the business about 20 years earlier. When Ben came into the business, the star system had just about collapsed and there was nobody to create roles for him. John Cassavetes and I loved him, and so we geared the parts to him. But there was no system for that.
CJ: He's terrific in Saint Jack. And Saint Jack is a terrific movie. That was shot in Singapore, wasn't it? But for some reason I remember it as Vietnam - it's about the Vietnam war isn't it?
PB: Yeah, I like that one. It was set during the Vietnam war. I enjoyed that picture - I was in it, I played the heavy. It was how I was thought of at the time: "He's sort of a prick, let him be one."
CJ: You were first an actor, then a theatre director, then a movie director. But would you have been content to be just an actor? Is there such a thing, or is it a bigger thing than that?
PB: It's a bigger thing than that. Directing, for me, has always been tied up with acting because when I direct, much of the time, I show the actor what I want - it's easier than trying to explain it. I often will say, "Wait a minute, let me try it." I'll walk in and I'll see what the problem is. I have to get in the scene as an actor to see what has to be done about it.
CJ: There's one more question relating to that I want to ask before we throw it open to the audience to ask questions, as I'm sure they're eager to do.
PB: I haven't done my Jerry Lewis impression yet. "You can hold it but don't lick it!" [ Audience laughs] This was the tagline in America. He had an ice-cream cone and Dean was taking it and licking it. Sounds slightly obscene now.
CJ: I can't remember what I wanted to ask now.
PB: Whenever there's a lag on set and I want to break everybody up, I do Jerry Lewis. I figured out what was brilliant about Jerry Lewis when I entered the second half-century of my life, because I found myself resorting to Jerry Lewis moments at certain times when I thought the pressure was too much and you go "Yeeeaaagh." [Audience laughs] And I thought, so that's why he did it, because you just want to revert to being a nine-year-old.
CJ: This is unfair, I've got a very serious question.
PB: I know, that's why I did that.
CJ: You've got all these wonderful actors who either are stars or would have been stars, like Eddie Izzard, in The Cat's Meow. And you've got them sitting around a table, and it's shot in quite a confined space, mainly around this dining table in this quite small yacht. And there they are and they're relating to one another by, one will see another's face and that will tell you about how that relationship's developing. And it occurred to me that this is a grammar, and it's a grammar that you started to learn when you were a kid when you watched all those movies and made notes on them. Was it getting into you then, how pictures were put together?
PB: I think it was osmosis. In fact I didn't like it when people would say to me, "Oh this was done this way or that way." I'd rather not know consciously, but I must have known unconsciously how it was done.
CJ: I remember Jean Renoir was standing right where you're sitting now, 40 years ago, and someone in the audience asked him about one shot in The Crime of Monsieur Lange - a long, travelling shot outside the house, following the main actor. And Renoir interrupted him and said, "I don't remember that shot. When I saw the technical problem, I forgot it." He said it in French, but what he was really saying was "screw it".
PB: He was a great man, he was my favourite director. Beautiful man, the only man I ever met who really seemed like a saint. He said a great thing - I asked him once, "When you start a picture, Jean, do you know what the picture will look like?" This was an interesting question because I was concerned that I often didn't know what the picture would look like. And he said to me, [does Renoir] "Of course not. If I know what the picture will look like, I have no reason to make the picture." There was another great moment with him, when I talked to him about technical perfection. He made this film, Boudu Saved from Drowning, in about 1931. I didn't see it until some time in the 60s, and I went over to his house, and I said, "Jean, I just saw Boudu Saved from Drowning, what an extraordinary film." "Oh, thank you very much." "No, really it's really a great film. I just loved it." "You're very kind." "What do you think of it, Jean?" [shrugs, blows raspberry] "Well, you know it was made in the very early days of sound, so sound was not so good. And we had no money, so we could not buy all the film stock at the beginning, we had to buy it as we went along. So there is sometimes no consistency from one sequence to another. Sometimes the cutting is a little slow and sometimes it's a little faster. But I think maybe it is my best picture." [Audience laughs]
CJ: It was remade in Hollywood, wasn't it, but the remake didn't really work.
PB: No, it was Down and Out in Beverly Hills with Nick Nolte.
CJ: Nick Nolte's just not ugly enough, and the important thing about Boudu is that he looks like Renoir.
PB: Michel Simon, great actor.
CJ: Right, we're going to throw the session open to the audience now, and I know your questions are going to be better than mine.
PB: You know what Jerry Lewis said to me one time, he said, "I go to the refrigerator and I open the door, the light comes on and I do 10 minutes." [Audience laughs]
Q1: I lived in Singapore for a few years and there are many stories there of Saint Jack and how you told the Singapore government that you were doing one thing and did something else with the movie. Could you tell the truth about what happened with that, please?
PB: Well, what happened was... the book, Saint Jack by Paul Theroux, was banned in Singapore, because they did not want to cop to the fact that Singapore was a city where American soldiers came, during Vietnam, for R&R, which really meant getting girls and so on. And they didn't want to admit that that happened. So the book was banned. And when I decided to make the movie, we travelled around most of Asia looking for a place to shoot it besides Singapore, because we knew we couldn't shoot it there. But Manila, Hong Kong, wherever we went, it wasn't as good as Singapore, obviously, because that's where it took place. So we decided we would shoot it in Singapore after all, but we couldn't tell them that it was Saint Jack because they never would have let us. So we told them we were shooting a movie called Jack of Hearts. And one afternoon, I dictated to my Chinese secretary a totally different plot, about a guy who comes from Buffalo to Singapore to open a nightclub or something. Actually he wants to open a whorehouse. I talked it out and described all the scenes - it was complete fiction, it was kind of a cross between Pal Joey and Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing. Quite terrible. But this is what we handed out to everybody, and nobody knew we were shooting Saint Jack at all. I was there for six months. Got back to Los Angeles and - remember Roderick Mann? - he came over to do an interview with him, and like an idiot I told him the truth. And of course, he printed it, it was a good story, and well... Headlines in Singapore: "Bogdanovich tricks Singapore". Vicious editorials and the picture, of course, was banned in Singapore. Though I am told there are bootleg copies there. So that's what really happened. It was sort of fun to do it that way, though, I have to admit.
CJ: It's the best movie about Vietnam.
PB: Why, thank you. I liked what Renoir said which connects with this, because I was talking to him about making pictures, and this was early on in my life. And he said, [does Renoir] "When you make pictures, you should not gather around you associates, nor even collaborators, but conspirators." I love that.
CJ: There's a big speech at the end of the picture that Gazzara could have done but he just throws it away.
PB: What we did on that picture was, we decided to try to make a picture where all the obligatory scenes didn't exist. This was slightly based on something Howard Hawks had said to me once, "There are certain scenes that the audience expects. And when you don't give it to them, they're so happy." So Benny and I discussed it often: let's not do that scene, or let's avoid that scene. Anything that we thought was predictable or was a "movie" scene. He gets tattooed at one point, will there be a revenge scene? Let's not do a revenge scene, let him just tell them to go screw themselves. We kept doing that. So we came to this last scene, between my character - I'm an FBI/CIA kind of guy - and Benny, who's a pimp. And I had asked him to take incriminating pictures of an American senator, which he did but then he decided he couldn't do it, he couldn't sink that low. And there was a long, four- or five-page scene where we discuss this, and the morality of the picture comes out. And we rehearsed it the night before in the hotel, and Benny said afterward, "Isn't this one of those scenes we said we weren't going to do? I mean, what is this scene? It's a lot of bullshit here, a lot of talk. I mean, basically this guy just says 'Fuck it', right?" "So why don't you just say that?" "Right, that's what I'll say." And that was the whole scene. "Hey Eddie, fuck it." And he walks away.
Q2: I love Targets. I'd never heard of it until I came to the UK. I wanted to know if there was anything funny about its distribution in the States and I also want to know, whatever happened to the lead actors? They were so great, and it's such a spare film.
PB: Thank you very much for that. That movie exists because of Boris Karloff. Roger Corman called me up and said, "Boris Karloff owes me two days' work. Here's what I'm proposing: you shoot 20 minutes of Karloff in two days - you can shoot 20 minutes in two days, I've shot whole pictures in two days - and then take 20 minutes of Karloff footage I made with him called The Terror. That's 40 minutes of Karloff. Now work with a bunch of other actors for 10 days and shoot another 40 minutes and that'll be a new 80-minute Karloff picture. You interested?" [Audience laughs] I said sure. It took a while to figure out what to do, and actually it had a happy ending because we had him for more than two days - we ended up getting him for five days. Again, all these limitations really make you creative. If you haven't seen it, it's available on DVD. But the leading actor, Tim O'Kelly, who plays this kid who goes crazy and starts shooting everybody, I don't know what happened to him. He really dropped out - he did that picture and it was a great experience for him, then he did some other picture and he didn't like it, and then I don't know what happened to him. Boris Karloff, of course, was one of the greats. He was 79 when we made that picture, he died two years later. He had emphysema, he had braces on both his legs, couldn't walk and talk at the same time easily but did, worked long hours and never complained. What a professional, what a sweet, kind man he was. I was in that movie too, I played a movie director, and there was a scene where we both pass out drunk on a bed and then I wake up in the morning and I see him and, in the script it says, "He sees Karloff, jumps and then starts to laugh." I don't know if you know this, but it's rather hard to laugh on cue. In fact, it's very difficult. So we did two takes and it was lousy. I was going, "I'm sorry Boris" and he says, and I can't do Karloff, he says, "Peter, just because you wrote that he looks and he laughs, doesn't mean you have to do it." I said, "It's rather difficult." And he said, "Then by all means, don't do it." So I didn't, and we got the scene rather quickly. He was wonderful. We had a scene in the picture - he had a speech to give, a long anecdote which he told beautifully, about this merchant who sees Death in the marketplace, and is terrified when Death looks startled to see him. The merchant later escapes from Baghdad to Samara, and later on, when Death is asked, "Why did you make that gesture to the merchant?" he says, "I didn't, I was just surprised to see him in Baghdad when I had an appointment to see him tonight in Samara." I've just told that story badly but the point is, it was about two in the morning and Boris had been working since 9am, and I went over to him and said, "Boris, I was thinking of doing this without a cut." He said, "Fine, I have the lyrics." He called the lines either the lyrics or the jokes. "I have the jokes" meant he knew them. So I said, "You want me to have them written on cards?" "You mean idiot cards? No, no. I have the jokes." So we got back and we shot it in one take, just the first take. He was absolutely brilliant. And I had said to him, "When you finish the story, we'll be in a close-up and there'll be a big head at the end of it. So when it's over, think about your own death." He said, "All right." That was a rather extraordinary thing for me to say to him, and took a lot of moxy, but directors will do anything. So he did this wonderful moment in the end. I was in the scene, off to the side and by the time it was over, I was not in the shot. And I said, "Great! Cut! Print!" And we were in this little Santa Monica studio and there was a small crew, and there was a spontaneous burst of applause. I could tell Boris was very moved. I went over to his wife, she was watching and had been helping us. She had tears in her eyes. She said, "Do you know how long it's been since a crew applauded for Boris?" It was such a great moment. And when I see that picture, that's the scene that kills me.
CJ: I have to bust in once more - and it's to recall a scene in the new book, and it's a real tale from Hollywood. I just want to suggest to you that Tales from Hollywood is a fabulous idea for a long-running series. Because here we have two young, aspiring Hollywood people - there's you, the young director and Ryan O'Neal, the young star. And you get on a plane, and Marlene Dietrich is in the seat in front of you.
PB: What happened was, we were waiting in LAX to fly to Denver, to change planes to fly to Kansas to shoot Paper Moon. The assistant director comes over and says, "I hope you don't mind but Marlene Dietrich's taken your seat. She likes to sit in the first two on the left, so we've moved you to the second two." I said, "Marlene Dietrich's on the plane and she's going to Denver?" "Yes." And it turned out she was going to Denver to do a concert. She was all in white, white suit, white hat and everything. So Ryan says, "Let's go over and say hello." So we go over and Ryan says, "Hello, I'm Ryan O'Neal, Love Story?" [Audience laughs] And she says, "Yes, I won't see it, I like the book too much." [More laughs] And Ryan says, "This is Peter Bogdanovich, he directed The Last Picture Show." It was still in cinemas at the time. "Have you seen that?" And she says, "Yes. I thought if one more person stripped slowly I would go crazy." [More laughs]
CJ: One more question and we've got to end it.
PB: Then she got quite nice and after we took off, she turned around, and was on her knees in her seat and talked to us the whole flight. "Why do you know so much about my pictures?" I said, "Because I think you're wonderful, and you worked with some great directors." "Oh, no, I only worked with two great directors. Billy Wilder and Josef von Sternberg." I said, "What about Orson Welles?" "Oh, yes, of course, Orson." Anyway.
CJ: We have to wrap it up after this one, but I'm sure Peter'll be around to sign his books, if you have them with you. I've never met any author who's not ready to sign a book if you have it with you. Actually Ronald Reagan didn't - he used to hand it to a secret service man.
PB: That's funny. Louis Armstrong had a stamp. [Audience laughs]
Q3: As a film-lover, are there any universally acclaimed movies that you've gone along with and said you really liked it when actually you think it's bloody awful? I mean, personally, mine's Blue Velvet, which everybody says is fantastic, but I just can't see it.
PB: I never liked Blue Velvet, either, I have to say.
CJ: A lot depends on how you feel about seeing Dennis Hopper in an oxygen mask, doesn't it?
PB: I don't know, that's one of those questions. Well, I haven't seen ET - I just had a feeling I wouldn't like it.
CJ: Lovable creatures bicycling through the sky?
PB: I didn't like the way ET looked. That's a terrible thing to say - you can't judge a movie without even seeing it. But I just didn't want to see it.
CJ: I feel that way about Close Encounters.
PB: I'm not a big science-fiction man. I don't like horror, and so you can see that I'm out on left-field at the moment because everybody loves that right now.
CJ: Haven't seen Troy?
PB: Haven't seen it.
CJ: You can actually be looking at Troy, and you still haven't seen it. [Audience laughs] They searched the world to find a non-charismatic Helen of Troy. The whole bloody war is about her... Anyway, we'll have to end this here...
PB: Can I tell one quick story? It's not a funny story, but it's a nice story to end with. It has to do with why we all sit around talking about movies so much. What is it we like about the movies? I was sitting with Jimmy Stewart one time and we got on to the subject of movies and the effect they have on people. And Jimmy told me this story: "We were shooting a picture in Colorado. We broke for lunch, and it was the usual terrible box lunch. And this guy, an older fella, who'd been watching us, he comes over to me and says, 'You Stewart?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'You said a poem once in a picture. That was good.' And I said, 'Thank you very much.' That was all he said and he walked away. And I knew just what scene he meant - it was a scene in a picture made 20 years before, and it was just about a minute, and he'd remembered it all these years. And I thought, that's the wonderful thing about movies. Because if you're good, and God helps you, and you're lucky enough to have a personality that comes across, then what you're doing is, you're giving people little... tiny... pieces of time... that they never forget." Isn't that a great description of movies?
CJ: It's a fitting moment on which to end. Peter Bogdanovich. Watch his movies, read his books and just cherish him.
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