FILM In Which Wes Anderson Tries To Game Pauline Kael
Monday, August 18, 2008 at 5:32PM Now we republish Wes Anderson's essay about showing Rushmore to Pauline Kael that F&F published before the print edition of the Rushmore screenplay. Stay tuned after our feature presentation for a fierce debate between Wes and David Edelstein over his portrayal of Kael.
My Private Screening with Pauline Kael
by WES ANDERSON
I already had Pauline Kael's phone number because I'd found it when I was looking through somebody's Rolodex a couple of years ago. ''Hello. My name is Wes Anderson. I'm calling for Pauline Kael, please.'' I had immediately recognized her voice (from a tape I have of her on ''The Dick Cavett Show'') when she answered the telephone, but I wanted to give her a chance to introduce herself.
''Who are you?'' she said, suspicious and steely. I paused.
''I'm a filmmaker, and I've just finished a movie called Rushmore, and I was hoping maybe I could . . .''
''How long is it?''
''Ninety minutes.''
''Ninety?''
''Or slightly less. Ninety-ish,'' I said.
''That's a long Rushmore. ''
I hesitated. I thought she was making a joke, but I didn't get it. I said, ''Well, it's got a pretty quick pace.''
''What'd you do on it?''
''I directed it.''
''Who wrote it?''
''Me and my friend Owen Wilson.''
''Who's in it?''
''Bill Murray.'' This was my trump card. I knew from her reviews that Bill Murray was one of her favorite comedians.
''Which Bill Murray?''
There was a silence. ''The Bill Murray. You know Bill Murray. You love Bill Murray.''
''What was he in?''
My mind drew a blank. ''What was he in?'' I repeated the question. I could only think of one title. ''Meatballs, '' I said.
It didn't ring a bell. ''You'll know him when you see him.''
She laughed uncomfortably and said, ''O.K.'' She asked if Rushmore was my first film, and I told her no, that I'd directed a movie called Bottle Rocket.
There was another silence.
''Well, lets hope this one's not too thrown together.''
I thought about this. ''How do you mean thrown together?'' I said.
She didn't answer. I waited. She laughed quietly, and then she seemed to warm up all of a sudden: ''O.K., send me the tape,'' she said.
''Actually, to tell you the truth, I'd prefer to screen it for you. Is there a movie theater near you?''
She paused. ''There's the Triplex.''
''Let me show it to you at the Triplex.''
She sounded skeptical. ''How are we going to do that?''
''I'll get the studio to set it up.''
''That could be expensive,'' she said.
''Well. Let's stick it to them,'' I said.
She liked the sound of this. ''O.K., let's stick it to them,'' she said. She told me she didn't drive, and that someone would have to pick her up and take her to the theater.
I said: ''I'll do it myself. How do I get to your house?''
''I don't know,'' she said.
''O.K. I'll figure it out.''
A few weeks later I drove from Cambridge to Ms. Kael's house in Great Barrington, Mass. I brought some cookies with me which I thought I would offer her during the first reel.
Her house is stone and shingle and very large, and I saw a deer duck into the trees at the corner of the yard as I came up the driveway. I knocked on the screen door and she looked out. She was sitting in a wooden chair. ''My God, you're just a kid,'' she said.
She told me to open the door. I tried it. I told her it was locked. She told me the lock had been stiff for 20 years, and that I should just fiddle with it. She said she knew it was 20 years because she'd just finished paying off her mortgage.
I fiddled with the lock for a minute and got the door open. We shook hands and I said: ''It's very nice to meet you. How are you?''
''Old,'' she said.
She was a few inches under 5 feet tall, and she stood shakily with a metal cane that had four legs at the base. We both had on New Balance sneakers.
She has Parkinson's, which makes her shake a little bit and leaves her unsteady. She told me she had been in the hospital with meningitis during the week after we spoke on the telephone, which explained her forgetting who Bill Murray was. She told me I would have to hold her hand and help her get around, and I told her that would be just fine. On the way to the theater she told me she'd invited her friend Dorothy to join us. ''I would've gotten a group together, but I didn't want to have too many people, in case the movie isn't any good.'' I nodded and pulled into the driveway next to the theater. There was a small-town police station there, and I stopped in front of it.
''You can't park here, Wes.''
''Oh, I think we'll be O.K.''
rushmore script
She shook her head. She said that this was proof I was a movie director. No one else would think they could double-park in front of a police station.
We went into the lobby and she introduced me to Dorothy. ''This is Wes Anderson. He's responsible for whatever it is we're about to see.'' Then Ms. Kael told me I should change my name. ''Wes Anderson is a terrible name for a movie director.'' Dorothy agreed.
I ran out to move the car, and then found Ms. Kael and Dorothy sitting near the back of the theater. Ms. Kael explained, ''I like to see the whole screen.'' I offered them some cookies, and Ms. Kael immediately started eating one. ''These don't have butter in them, do they?''
''My guess is they probably do,'' I said.
''I'm not supposed to eat butter,'' she said, but she kept eating. Ms. Kael and Dorothy watched for an hour in total silence. Then Dorothy, who is a real estate agent, got paged and walked out, and that was the last I saw of her. Finally, the movie ended, and I took Ms. Kael's hand and walked with her out of the theater.
''I don't know what you've got here, Wes.''
I nodded.
''Did the people who gave you the money read the script?''
I frowned. ''Yeah. That's kind of their policy.''
We started slowly down the steps. ''Just asking,'' she said. It was a short walk to the car. ''At this point, I would usually tell you not to worry if you have to carry me, since I only weigh 85 pounds. But you look like you don't weigh much more than that, yourself.''
I was a little disappointed by Ms. Kael's reaction to the movie. I started reading her New Yorker reviews in my school library when I was in 10th grade, and her books were always my guide for finding the right movies to watch and learning about filmmakers. I'd gone to great lengths to arrive at this moment. ''I genuinely don't know what to make of this movie,'' she said, and I felt she meant it.
I drove us back to her house. We went inside, and Ms. Kael invited me to sit in her study and talk.
The house is full of books, and the rooms are large, with lots of windows. She took me to a closet in a room so crammed with tall stacks of boxes that you had to turn sideways to squeeze around them. The closet had extra copies of all her books. She told me I could have any of them I wanted. They were first editions, and I wanted to take a dozen of them, but eventually I just chose two.
I asked her to sign one of them for me, and she said this would take a few minutes. Her Parkinson's makes it difficult for her to write. That's why she quit The New Yorker. I asked her if she'd ever dictated a review, and she said, ''I think I wrote more with my hand than with my brain.'' She said she would never write again.
''Glad to hear it,'' I said, thinking of the review of Rushmore that she wasn't going to write. She looked up at me. She smiled faintly.
Then we sat for a while talking about movies, and she finished signing my book, and I told her I had to get back on the road. I was headed for New York, and it was already getting dark.
She walked me to the door, and we chatted a little longer. She told me to keep in touch, and we said goodbye. I didn't look at her inscription until I'd checked into my hotel room. It said:
''For Wes Anderson, With affection and a few queries. Pauline Kael.''
Wes Anderson is a filmmaker living in New York.
David Edelstein’s letter to the editor (and Anderson’s response):
New York Times
February 21, 1999
“A VISIT WITH KAEL
Making Sport”
To the Editor:
Boy, could I relate to Wes Anderson’s ”My Private Screening with Pauline Kael” [Jan. 31] about traveling to the Berkshires to show his film ”Rushmore” to the retired New Yorker critic. Here’s a young guy who adored Ms. Kael’s work all his life, learned how to watch movies from it and dreamed of screening for her his own film. Doubtless the response he’d hoped for was along the lines of: ”You’re a genius. You’ve revolutionized filmmaking. You’ve captured the adolescent experience as no one has before.”
What a bummer it must have been to find Ms. Kael somewhat hobbled by Parkinson’s disease. And then, when she gently implied that she didn’t think the picture added up to much, how devastating. Here’s the thing, though. A person with even an trace of decency would not have turned around and written up the encounter in a way designed to make sport of her infirmities. I hope that if Mr. Anderson is ever on the kind of mind-altering medications that advanced Parkinson’s and meningitis sufferers find it necessary to take simply to function, someone doesn’t visit his home and then surprise him with an account of what he said and did in a major newspaper.
DAVID EDELSTEIN
Brooklyn
The writer is the film critic for Slate, the Internet magazine.
edelstein and eddie izzard
WES ANDERSON replies:
I sent a copy of my article to Pauline Kael before it was published because I didn’t want to refer to her Parkinson’s without her permission. I told her I wouldn’t publish the story if she didn’t want me to. She read the piece and thanked me for dedicating our script to her. (The article will appear as the introduction to the published screenplay of ”Rushmore.”) She also suggested some grammatical changes and asked me to correct a few details, which I did. The suggestion that I wanted ”to make sport” of Ms. Kael’s infirmities causes me great pain and embarrassment. I thought it was clear in my article that I not only deeply respect Ms. Kael but that I very much enjoyed meeting with her.
The Response of DAVID EDELSTEIN:
Anderson’s response had enough half-truths and distortions to warrant a reply in this column. Let’s look at his assertions line by line:
I sent a copy of my article to Pauline Kael before it was published because I didn’t want to refer to her Parkinson’s without her permission. I told her I wouldn’t publish the story if she didn’t want me to.
According to Kael, she said it was OK to publish the story as part of the introduction to the Rushmore script: Printed screenplays generally have runs of no more than a few thousand copies and are largely read by buffs and wannabe screenwriters. But she didn’t know that Anderson’s account would appear in the New York Times until the day the paper landed on her doorstep–and if she had known, she told me, she’d have screamed.
She read the piece and thanked me for dedicating our script to her.
According to Kael, she first learned she was the dedicatee of the Rushmore script when she read Anderson’s reply to my letter in last Sunday’s Times.
She also suggested some grammatical changes and asked me to correct a few details, which I did.
She asked that Anderson note that her recollection of the events in question was quite different–which he didn’t.
The suggestion that I wanted “to make sport” of Ms. Kael’s infirmities causes me great pain and embarrassment.
So much pain and embarrassment that a few nights ago he was telling the story all over again on national television to Tom Snyder. Anderson’s encounter with the retired New Yorker critic has now become comic fodder for his autobiography. How long before it turns up in a movie?
I thought it was clear in my article that I not only deeply respect Ms. Kael but that I very much enjoyed meeting with her.
I like Ken Tucker’s description of the piece in a recent appreciation of Kael in Salon: “putatively affectionate but peculiarly heartless.” Like the obnoxious hero of Rushmore, Max Fischer, Anderson has trouble seeing much beyond the bubble of his narcissism.
Molly's appreciation of Bottle Rocket
Danny on Hotel Chevalier
Molly on Hotel Chevalier
Wes Anderson iTunes playlist
from here:
O: Do you ever hear a song and think, “I have to have that in a movie?”
WA: Yeah, I do all the time.
O: What’s an example of that, a case where a song actually made it in?
WA: Every single song that’s in Rushmore.
THE RUSHMORE SOUNDTRACK IN ITS ENTIRETY
"Hardest Geometry Problem in the World" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"Making Time" – The Creation (mp3)
"Concrete and Clay" – Unit 4 + 2 (mp3)
"Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" – The Kinks (mp3)
"Sharp Little Guy" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"The Lad With the Silver Button" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"A Summer Song" – Chad & Jeremy (mp3)
"Edward Appleby (In Memoriam)" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"Here Comes My Baby" – Cat Stevens (mp3)
"A Quick One While He's Away" – The Who (mp3)
"Snowflake Music" (from Bottle Rocket) – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"Piranhas Are a Very Tricky Species" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"Friends Like You, Who Needs Friends" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"Rue St. Vincent" – Yves Montand (mp3)
"Kite Flying Society" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
"The Wind" – Cat Stevens (mp3)
"Oh Yoko!" – John Lennon (mp3)
""Ooh La La"" – Faces (mp3)
"Margaret Yang's Theme" – Mark Mothersbaugh (mp3)
Reader Comments (19)
wes anderson is intolerable
Amen David Edelstein. To quote the character from Boogie Nights who Burt Reynolds wanted to screw Roller Girl in the back of the limo: "Your movies suck now anyway"
[...] In Which Wes Anderson Tries To Game Pauline Kael [...]
New Balance sneakers = stuff white people like
You have to love Wes Anderson. There's something so fragile and human about his cinema that touches something in me that very few auteurs come close to.
The Kael meeting was just wonderful. Brilliantly written, this has made my Sunday.
[...] Wes and Pauline. [...]
what's with all the hot editors at this place/?jealousssssssssss.
To summarize Will Oldham I also agree that, Wes Anderson is a cancer of music.
Edelstein never brings up the fact that Kael's mind altering drugs could also be effecting his interactions with her as well and that her memory is shaky--so events could have followed the way Wes said and then she could have forgotten them by the time Edelstein commented to her about them. I think it'd also fair to assume that Edelstein would have been aware of this; however, it also appears that he never gave Wes nor the recording of the interaction a chance to begin with.
Why would Edelstein need to debate that article by Anderson? What is the point? He pinpoints errors and mischaracterizations of Kael by Anderson to what purpose? Dwelling on his description of her disease. If someone has Parkinson's, they have Parkinson's. If they like butter cookies, they like butter cookies. It was a just a description. What is the big deal? To me Anderson's story was a pretty honest account and worth reading. Why do we have to debate people's actions, can't we just focus on their work?
Wes Anderson is wonderful.
I agree with Anthony. Anderson didn't make fun of Parkinson's at all—he was merely describing what happened. Edelstein ends up sounding like an unhappy, sour-tempered man. It also seems like reactions to this depend on whether someone likes Anderson or not, i.e. "I don't like Anderson, therefore I think this one event proves he is self-centered. And a jerk. And white."
David Edelstein can suck a dick. The guy can't write a decent review without giving away 80 percent of the film.
Dave Edelstein...
u mad?
I thought Anderson's account was touching and well-written. And full of respect and affection for Ms. Kael.
David Edelstein, you come across as one sour and unhappy guy.
I can't for the life of me figure out what part of Anderson's story was supposed to have been "making light" of Kael's infirmities. If anything, Kael makes light of them, herself, when telling Anderson that this is the point at which she tells people they might have to carry her. This of course assumes she really did say that (there's no indication she didn't). Other than that, he seemed to merely describe what happened and the details of the meeting that made an impression upon him, which include her condition. For the most part, the article is very self-deprecating and if anything quite worshipful of Ms. Kael.
As a poster already noted above, I'm not sure you can imply that someone on "mind-altering" drugs should on the one hand not be held accountable for what she says while simultaneously basing one's construction of the events in question on her words, ex-post-facto. If Mr. Edelstein's churlish, sycophantic need to "defend" someone who is to my mind the only smart, witty voice in the piece, one must perhaps question his motives in at least equal measure to Anderson's.
But the rebuttal, retraction, and pedant-dicksize competition is the least interesting thing about the article. Kael's comments are funnier than anything Anderson has had a hand in since Bottle Rocket, and her confusion (which I do NOT chalk up to Parkinsonian brain bruise) about what exactly it is we're supposed to enjoy about Rushmore proves she's still (um... ex-post-facto) more on the ball than any review I've ever read of his films. Speaking for that minority of us that are equally confused by what is supposed to be funny, interesting, or enjoyable about Rushmore and every one of his films since, I both salute the Pauline Kael depicted in this article and balk at the idea that she requires anyone's defense.
what's the big deal? i thought the article was about the disappointment of meeting ones heroes combined with the fact that lots of old people are cranky and difficult to deal with. you want them to give you their approval but instead they take your butter cookies. maybe mr. edelstein would enjoy mr. andersons movies more if he took the stick out of his @$$
"Every single song that’s in Rushmore."
I can remember when Wes Anderson didn't have such a big ego that he refused to credit the music supervisor who, in Wes's own words, played "Ooh La La" for him when he had never heard it and then insisted that it be the song over the end credits. When 'Rushmore' was touring college campuses, he brought that guy on stage with him and Murray and Schwartzmann and spent a lot of time talking about how great and important he was. It was about six months to a year after that he dropped all references to the guy from his patter.
On the other hand, Wes wanted all Kinks songs. Which is fine, I love the Kinks. But his reason was because they perfectly represented rebellion or something stupid and esoteric like that.