In Which We Pray For The People Of Pakistan

Shopping List

by DICK CHENEY

HBO's disastrous programming of late reminds me of the Republican presidential field, I wrote. But no, there is nothing to watch on HBO anymore. Cancel all of your subscriptions. Did you know they are jumping into bed with J.J. Abrams? Do they ever want a woman to watch one of their shows again?

HBO had success by adapting the works of a fantasy writer whose literary efforts were deemed too complex to bring to film or television. They decided to follow this up by working on Michael Crichton's back catalogue. I am sorry but this looks like a complete mess.

Do you giggle like a schoolgirl every time someone says they have the munchies? You will probably enjoy The Brink.

The other day I watched The Brink, a thinly veiled excuse for Tim Robbins to complain about Israel every week. I have to give this humorless show credit in that it actually attempts to portray a non-Western country, in this case, Pakistan. However mostly of the comedy consists of Jack Black smoking pot and Robbins having sex with Asian prostitutes, which really grates after awhile.

The Brink is going for something like Dr. Strangelove but the weird thing is that it actually takes itself seriously. Straddling the line between parody and satire is working out decently well for Donald Trump at this point, but I've never heard of it being a success in television. It is astonishing how many people take Donald Trump at face value. What he said about John McCain was hilarious, and he has singlehandedly made Jon Stewart funny again. Does The Nation also think that Big Bird is destined to become our Secretary of Defense?

Cute lampshade. I think Farrell was in a sitting position the entire episode.

After Sunday night's disasterpiece, there is only one more episode left of True Detective, which I have to give some credit to — at least it didn't try to save its mess of a season by showing off Rachel McAdams' body in an extremely unlikely sex scene with Colin Farrell. They did have intercourse, but it was very restrained and loving, and prefacing by Farrell's Ray Velcoro explaing, "I am a bad man."

The president of HBO gave a rambling and completely insincere interview about how much he loves True Detective. "The finale will really deliver," he explained, as he mimed masturbating to the reporter. Well, it has better, since David Fincher's shows (Utopia? Synchronicity? Get the fuck out of here) are D.O.A., the last season of House of Cards was about as entertaining as a White House press conference and someone (probably Michael Lombardo) got high on molly and greenlit a Lewis and Clark miniseries. This is a real thing.

"I looked in the woods for your rapist for over an hour. I think that was sufficient."

But back to True Detective. The story so far: There isn't much of one. From the attorney general to the chief of police, everyone enjoys a hot bang now and then. The protagonists of True Detective are the people excluded from these lively sex parties. Since there were not invited, they decided to steal some important business paperwork from the event. Naturally, the owners of the paperwork want it back. Instead of just making a photocopy, Taylor Kitsch refuses and is murdered.

Are you getting excited! About the paperwork! But you know what might save HBO? A miniseries about affordable housing. What even is this.

He wrote down flash grenades on a piece of paper. What even is this.

A mark of evil is how easily we are influenced by our environment. "If you had just been honest, we couldn't have got you," the people blackmailing Taylor Kitsch explained. Instead he had to pretend to be a straight man, and it is what got him killed. I believe the same thing happened to Rock Hudson.

Vince Vaughn was busy, and a lot more. He showed his wife the guy he killed and she was nonplussed. I think she has probably seen it and a lot more before when she was Nucky Thompson's wife in a past life. I am running out of steam trying to describe how lame True Detective is, but not even Vaughn blowing up his own casino for some reason was sufficient to bring excitement to events.

I guess their production budget was pretty meager by this point.

Instead of describing Rachel McAdams' sex with Colin Farrell in excruciating detail (he touched her arm with his finger) or bashing HBO for their terrible choice of programming, I need to focus on a growing trend: older woman stealing the roles of younger women. I am absolutely devastated that the careers of Jonathan Demme and Meryl Streep have come to this:

Maybe cast one person of color in your movies, just to amuse me.

I didn't feel sympathetic towards Ellen Page when she was a pregnant white girl with a cute boyfriend, and I certainly don't care about some older white woman appropriating cultures she isn't a part of and trying to restore order to her family. Jonathan Demme was a respected and admired artist at one time. Now he's probably going to executive produce a miniseries about the Wright brothers or something while Halt and Catch Fire gets canceled. There is no justice.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

I'm sensing the mayor may be a thinly veiled commentary on HBO's president.

"Break the Chain" - Ultimate Painting (mp3)

In Which Pauline Kael Finds Something To Be Happy About

Her Triumph

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.

Reading the reviews of Pauline Kael is a pleasure not only because of how often she was right (except with Blade Runner), in retrospect, about what actually made a movie good. It is rewarding because of her descriptions of actresses and actors. Beyond taking them to task for their mere talent, she was able to describe the effect they had on people through their continuing cinematic presence. Kael properly deduced that a huge part of going to the movies consisted of how the audience responded to the people on the screen, rather than simply basing her critique on the competence of the writing or the technical aspects of the cinematography. Her sentences in her radio and print reviews about the onscreen talent of the twentieth century rise to the level of expert observation of humanity in all its manifold variety. Here are a few of my favorite descriptions. - A.C.

Marilyn Monroe

Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn't take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack — as if she died between wolf calls.

She seemed to have become a camp siren out of confusion and ineptitude; her comedy was self-satire, and apologetic — conscious parody that had begun unconsciously. She was not the first sex goddess with a trace of somnabulism; Garbo was often a litte out-of-it, Dietrich was numb most of time, and Hedy Lamarr was fairly zonked. But they were exotic and had accents, so maybe audiences didn't wonder why they were in a daze; Monroe's slow reaction time made her seem daffy, and she tricked it up into a comedy style. The mystique of Monroe — which accounts for the book Marilyn — is that she became spiritual as she fell apart. But as an actress she had no way of expressing what was deeper in her except in moodiness and weakness. When she was "sensitive" she was drab.

Paul Newman

Somehow it all reminds one of the old apocryphal story conference — "It's a modern western, see, with this hell-raising, pleasure-loving man who doesn't respect any of the virtues, and, at the end, we'll fool them, he doesn't get the girl and he doesn't change!"

"But who'll want to see that?"

"Oh, that's all fixed — we've got Paul Newman for the part."

They could cast him as a mean man and know that the audience would never believe in his meanness. For there are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience does not believe in their villainy except to relish in it, as with Brando; and there are others, like Newman, who in addition to this rapport, project such a traditional heroic frankness and sweetness that the audience dotes on them, seeks to protect them from harm or pain. Casting Newman as a mean materialist is like writing a manifesto against the banking system while juggling your investments so you can break the bank.

Barbra Streisand

As Streisand's pictures multiply, it becomes apparent that she is not about to master an actress's craft but, rather, is discovering a craft of her own, out of the timing and emotionality that make her a phenomenon as a singer. You admire her not for her acting — or singing — but for herself, which is what you feel she gives you in both. She has the class to be herself, and the impudent music of her speaking voice is proof that she knows it. The audacity of her self-creation is something we've had time to adjust to; we already knew her mettle, and the dramatic urgency she can bring to roles.

In Up the Sandbox, she shows a much deeper and warmer presence and a freely yielding quality. And a skittering good humor — as if, at last, she had come to accept her triumph, to believe in it. That faint weasellike look of apprehensiveness is gone — and that was what made her seem a little frightening. She is a great undeveloped actress — undeveloped in the sense that you feel the natural richness in her but can see that she's idiocsyncratic and that she hasn't the training to play the classical roles that still define how an actress's greatness is expressed. But in movies new ways may be found.

Warren Beatty

There is a story told against Beatty in a recent Esquire — how during the shooting of Lilith he "delayed a scene for three days demanding the line 'I've read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov' be changed to 'I've read Crime and Punishment and half of The Brothers Karamazov.'" Considerations of professional conduct aside, what is odd is why his adversaries waited three days to give in, because, of course, he was right. That's what the character he played should say; the other way, the line has no point at all. But this kind of intuition isn't enough to make an actor, and in a number of roles Beatty, probably because he doesn't have the technique to make the most of his lines in the least possible time, has depended too much on intuitive non-acting — holding the screen far too long as he acted out self-preoccupied characters in a lifelike, boringly self-conscious way...

The role of Clyde Barrow seems to have released something in him. As Clyde, Beatty is good with his eyes and mouth and his hat, but his body is still inexpressive; he doesn't have a trained actor's use of his body, and, watching him move, one is never for a minute convinced he's impotent.

Cary Grant

Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he is — they want to be like him. And women imagine landing him. Like Robert Redford, he's sexiest in pictures in which the woman is the aggressor and all the film's erotic energy is concentrated on him, a sit was in Notorious: Ingrid Bergman practically ravished him while he was trying to conduct a phone conversation...

Many men must have wanted to be Clark Gable and look straight at a woman with a faint smirk and lifted, questioning eyebrows. What man doesn't — at some level — want to feel supremely confident and earthy and irresistible? But a few steps up the dreamy social ladder there's the more subtle fantasy of worldly grace — of being so gallant and gentlemanly and charming that every woman longs to be your date. And at that deluxe level men want to be Cary Grant. Men as far apart as John F. Kennedy and Lucky Luciano thought that he should star in their life story. Who but Cary Grant could be a fantasy self-image for a president and a gangster chief? Who else could demonstrate that sophistication didn't have to be a sign of weakness — that it could be the polished, fun-loving style of those who were basically tough? Cary Grant has said that even he wanted to be Cary Grant.

Katharine Hepburn

There were occasions in the past when Hepburn had poor roles and was tremulous and affected — almost a caricature of quivering sensitivity. But at her best — in the archetypal Hepburn role as the tomboy Linda in Holiday, in 1938 — her wit and nonconformity made ordinary heroines seem mushy, and her angular beauty made the round-faced ingénues look piggy and stupid. She was hard where they were soft — in both head and body. (As Spencer Tracy said, in the Brooklyn accent he used in Pat and Mike, "There's not much meat on her, but what's there is cherce." Other actresses could be weak and helpless, but Davis and Hepburn had too much vitality.

Unlike Davis, Hepburn was limited to mandarin roles, although some of her finest performances were as poor girls who were mandarins by nature, as in Little Women and Alice Adams, rather than by birth or wealth, as in Bringing Up Baby and in the movie that the public liked her best in, The Philadelphia Story (even if her dedicated admirers, including me, tended to be less wild about it). Hepburn has always been inconceivable as a coarse-minded character; her bones are too fine, her diction is too crisp, she wears clothes too elegantly. And she has always been too individualistic, too singular, for common emotions. Other actresses who played career girls, like Crawford, could cop out in their roles by getting pregnant, or just by turning emotional — all womanly and ghastly. Hepburn was too hard for that, and so one could go to see her knowing that she wouldn't deteriorate into a conventional heroine that didn't suit her style...

When an actress has been a star for a long time, we know too much about her; for years we have been hearing about her romances or heartbreaks, or whatever the case may be, and all this carries over into her presence on the screen. And if she uses this in a role, she's sunk. When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be — when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves — they may get praise and awards (and they generally do), but it's not really for their acting, it's for capitulating and giving the public what it really wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen.

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep just about always seems miscast. (She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.) In Postcards from the Edge, she's witty and resourceful, yet every expression is eerily off, not quite human. When she sings in a country-and-Western style, she's note-perfect, but it's like a diva singing jazz — you don't believe it. Streep has a genius for mimicry: she's imitating a country-and-Western singer singing. These were my musings to a friend, who put it more simply: "She's an android." Yes, and it's Streep's android quality that gives Postcards whatever interest i

This tale of sorrowful, wisecracking starlet whose brassy, boozing former-star mother (Shirley MacLaine) started her on sleeping pills when she was nine is without the zest of camp. It's camp played borderline straight — a druggy-Cinderella movie about an unformed girl who has to go past despair to find herself. The director, Mike Nichols, is a parodist who feigns sincerity, and his tone keeps slipping around. What's clear is that we're meant to adore the daughter, who is wounded by her mother's cheap competitiveness. Nichols wants us to be enthralled by the daughter's radiant face, her refinement, her honesty. He keeps the camera on Streep as if to prove that he can make her a popular big star — a new Crawford or Bette Davis. (She remains distant, emotionally atonal.)

Replying to Listeners

by PAULINE KAEL

I am resolved to start the New Year right; I don't want to carry over any unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, "Miss Kael, I assume you aren't married — one loses that nasty, sharp bite in one’s voice when one learns to care about others."

Isn’t it remarkable that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more "mature," they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs. John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial experience out of which she writes.

I wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument; they like to console themselves with the notions that the woman is semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs; now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis — which any man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the shadows.

Mrs. John Doe and her sisters who write to me seem to interpret Freud to mean that intelligence, like a penis, is a male attribute. The true woman is supposed to be sweet and passive — she shouldn’t argue or emphasize and opinion or get excited about a judgment. Sex — or at least regulated marital sex — is supposed to act as a tranquilizer. In other words, the Freudianized female accepts that whole complex of passivity that the feminists battled against.

Mrs. Doe, you know something, I don't mind sounding sharp — and I’ll take my stand with those pre-Freudian feminists; and you know something else, I think you’re probably so worried about competing with male egos and those brilliant masculine intellects that you probably bore men to death.

This lady who attacks me for being nasty and sharp goes on to write, "I was extremely disappointed to hear your costic speech on and about the radio station, KPFA. It is unfortunate you were unable to get a liberal education, because that would have enabled you to know that a great many people have many fields of interest, and would have saved you from displaying your ignorance on the matter." She, incidentally, displays her liberal education by spelling caustic c-o-s-t-i-c, and it is with some expense of spirit that I read this kind of communication. Should I try to counter my education — liberal and sexual—against hers, should I explain that Pauline Kael is the name I was given at birth, and that it does not reflect my marital vicissitudes which might over-complicate nomenclature?

It is not really that I prefer to call myself by my own name and hence Miss that bothers her or the other Mrs. Does, it is that I express ideas she doesn’t like. If I called myself by three names like those poetesses in the Saturday Review of Literature, Mrs. Doe would still hate my guts. But significantly she attacks me for being a Miss. Having become a Mrs., she has gained moral superiority: for the modern woman, officially losing her virginity is a victory comparable to the Victorian woman’s officially keeping hers. I’m happy for Mrs. Doe that she’s got a husband, but in her defense of KPFA she writes like a virgin mind. And is that really something to be happy about?

Mrs. Doe, the happily, emotionally-secure-mature-liberally-educated-womanly-woman has her opposite number in the mailbag. Here is a letter from a manly man. This is the letter in its entirety:

Dear Miss Kael,

Since you know so much about the art of the film, why don’t you spend your time making it? But first, you will need a pair of balls.

Mr. Dodo (I use the repetition in honor of your two attributes), movies are made and criticism is written by the use of intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination, and discrimination. I suggest it is time you and your cohorts stop thinking with your genital jewels. There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of if-you-know-so-much-about-the-art-of-the-film-why-don’t-you-make-movies. You don’t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good. If it makes you feel better, I have worked making movies, and I wasn’t hampered by any biological deficiencies.

Others may wonder why I take the time to answer letters of this sort: the reason is that these two examples, although cruder than most of the mail, simply carry to extremes the kind of thing so many of you write. There are, of course, some letter writers who take a more “constructive” approach. I’d you to read you part of a long letter I received yesterday:

I haven’t been listening to your programs for very long and haven’t heard all of them since I began listening … But I must say that while I have been listening, I have not heard one favorable statement made of any “name” movie made in the last several years…. I have heard no movie which received any kind of favorable mention which was not hard to find playing, either because of its lack of popularity or because of its age. In your remarks the other evening about De Sica’s earlier movies you praised them all without reservation until you mentioned his "most famous film — The Bicycle Thief, a great work, no doubt, though I personally find it too carefully and classically structured." You make me think that the charge that the favorability of your comments on any given movie varies inversely with its popularity, is indeed true even down to the last nuance.

But even as I write this, I can almost feel you begin to tighten up, to start thinking of something to say to show that I am wrong. I really wish you wouldn’t feel that way. I would much rather you leaned back in your chair, looked up at the ceiling and asked yourself, “Well, how about it? Is it true or not? Am I really biased against movies other people like, because they liked them? When I see a popular movie, do I see it as it is or do I really just try to pick it apart?” You see, I’m not like those other people that have been haranguing you. I may be presumptuous, but I am trying sincerely to be of help to you. I think you have a great deal of potential as a reviewer…. But I am convinced that great a potential as you have, you will never realize any more of that potential than you have now until you face those questions mentioned before, honestly, seriously, and courageously, no matter how painful it may be. I want you to think of these questions, I don’t want you to think of how to convince me of their answers. I don’t want you to look around to find some popular movie to which you can give a good review and thus “prove me wrong.” That would be evading the issue of whether the questions were really true or not. Furthermore, I am not “attacking” you and you have no need to defend yourself to me.

May I interrupt? Please, attack me instead — it’s this kind of “constructive criticism” that misses the point of everything I’m trying to say that drives me mad. It’s enough to make one howl with despair, this concern for my potential — as if I were a cow giving thin milk. But back to the letter—

In fact, I would prefer that you make no reply to me at all about the answers to these questions, since I have no need of the answers and because almost any answer given now, without long and thoughtful consideration, would almost surely be an attempt to justify yourself, and that’s just what you don’t have to do, and shouldn’t do. No one needs to know the answers to these questions except you, and you are the only person who must answer. In short, I would not for the world have you silence any voices in you … and most certainly not a concerned little voice saying, “Am I really being fair? Do I see the whole movie or just the part I like—or just the part I don’t like?"

And so on he goes for another few paragraphs. Halfway through, I thought this man was pulling my leg; as I got further and read "how you missed the child-like charm and innocence of The Parent Trap … is quite beyond me," I decided it’s mass culture that’s pulling both legs out from under us all. Dear man, the only real question you letter made me ask myself is, “What’s the use?” and I didn’t lean back in my chair and look up at the ceiling, I went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a good stiff drink.

How completely has mass culture subverted even the role of the critic when listeners suggest that because the movies a critic reviews favorably are unpopular and hard to find, that the critic must be playing some snobbish game with himself and the public? Why are you listening to a minority radio station like KPFA? Isn’t it because you want something you don’t get on commercial radio? I try to direct you to films that, if you search them out, will give you something you won’t get from The Parent Trap.

You consider it rather “suspect” that I don’t raise more “name” movies. Well, what makes a “name” movie is simply a saturation advertising campaign, the same kind of campaign that puts samples of liquid detergents at your door. The “name” pictures of Hollywood are made the same way they are sold: by pretesting the various ingredients, removing all possible elements that might affront the mass audience, adding all possible elements that will titillate the largest number of people. As the CBS television advertising slogan put it—“Titillate—and dominate.” South Pacific is seventh in Variety’s list of all-time top grossers. Do you know anybody who thought it was a good movie? Was it popular in any meaningful sense or do we just call it popular because it was sold? The tie-in campaign for Doris Day in Lover Come Back included a Doris Day album to be sold for a dollar with a purchase of Imperial margarine. With a schedule of 23 million direct mail pieces, newspaper, radio, TV and store ads, Lover Come Back became a “name” picture.

I try not to waste air time discussing obviously bad movies — popular though they may be; and I don’t discuss unpopular bad movies because you’re not going to see them anyway; and there wouldn’t be much point or sport in hitting people who are already down. I do think it’s important to take time on movies which are inflated by critical acclaim and which some of you might assume to be the films to see.

There were some extraordinarily unpleasant anonymous letters after the last broadcast on The New American Cinema. Some were obscene; the wittiest called me a snail eating the tender leaves off young artists. I recognize your assumptions: the critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty, envious of the creative fire of the artists, and if the critic is a woman, she is supposed to be cold and castrating. The artist is supposed to be delicate and sensitive and in need of tender care and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century romanticism is pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia.

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Some of you write me flattering letters and I’m grateful, but one last request: if you write me, please don’t say, "This is the first time I've ever written a fan letter." Don’t say it, even if it's true. You make me feel as if I were taking your virginity — and it’s just too sordid.

You can find more by Pauline Kael here.

"There Is No God" - Bonnie Prince Billy (mp3)

"God Is Love" - Bonnie Prince Billy (mp3)

"For Every Field There Is A Mole" - Bonnie Prince Billy (mp3)

In Which Fate Is The Fool's Word For Chance

Mountebanks and Misfits

From his difficult childhood under the tyrannical rule of an abusive stepfather to his young ascendancy to the heights of American theater, David Mamet is one of America's greatest talents. As he aged he began to produce essays about his dark past, novels about his relationship to his Judaism, and even poetry whose subject is too bizarre to describe. Mamet's ideas about how people talk to one another are evident in every corner of American television and cinema, where his rapid-paced style perfectly fit the limitations of a generation with a short attention span. In 1997 he sat down with the film critic Barbara Shulgasser in front of a San Francisco audience to discuss his ideas about Hollywood, acting, and why he writes. What follows is the first part of that interview.  - A.C.

with second wife rebecca pidgeon 

BARBARA SHULGASSER: You've said that, if you hadn't found the theater, you probably would have become a criminal.

DAVID MAMET: Yeah, I think that that's probably true. I knew a lot of criminals. I used to live with criminals.

BS: How do you mean? Literally in a house with criminals?

DM: No, no I used to spend all day playing poker with them. And then I sold nonexistent real estate for awhile with people who were basically criminals.

BS: Preparation for Glengarry?

DM: Yeah, well, that's what it turned into. And I was one of those kids who was always told that he probably possessed a great intelligence, but why must he act so stupidly? And so I never did very well at anything. So, I figured I was going to end up in prison somewhere.

BS: Uh-huh. What was your response when people asked you why you must act so stupidly?

DM: Well, it took me thirty years to find out that every rhetorical question is an attack.

BS: Yes. I won't ask any.

DM: Oh, good.

BS: Have you had to fight a lot of idiocy in your work in Hollywood?

DM: Only my own.

BS: Your own?

DM: Sure.

BS: Well, that's very modest of you, but I'm sure that's not true.

DM: Well, it says in the Bible, "What is he who conquers a city compared with him who overcomes his own nature?" So the thing about Hollywood is: there it is. I mean there's nothing hidden about Hollywood. It's what it is. And —

BS: Well, I think a lot of people go there with that attitude and hope that they can overcome but find it's just an avalanche of one form of moron telling you how much they love your work when they buy it and then how much it has to change in order to be made into a movie.

DM: Yeah, but to try to change Hollywood is like someone who goes out to work for the Ford Motor Company and says, 'You know, we should really invest in public transportation because it makes a lot more sense."

the verdict

BS: I see your point. Let's talk a little about your early screenplays. I love The Verdict. How did you get that job?

DM: I got the job for The Verdict...I was hired by Zanuck and Brown to write a movie based on a book by Barry Reed, a lawyer in Boston, Mass. And it's based on an actual case. They had me write the movie, and they didn't like it. They were very polite about it. They paid me. They said, "We just don't like it, and, if you'd like to write it again, we'd pay you again." They did. I said, "That's very flattering, but I couldn't write anything differently."

And so the project went on, and they hired several other well-known writers, and I became morose and sent a copy to Sidney Lumet, who I knew in passing, just to get someone else's opinion, hoping he would praise it. And the good fairy descended. The director, who was going to be, I believe, Robert Redford, dropped out of the project when they were committed to making the movie, and they sent the scripts they had commissioned — not mine — to Sidney Lumet. They never sent him my script. And coincidentally, that same week I'd sent him my script, and he called them back and said, "I'd love to do the movie. I'm just going to do Dave's screenplay." And, lo and behold, the day was saved.

BS: Wow.

DM: You know, one time in thirty years, what the hell?

BS: Well, the difference between movies and theater, as far as writers are concerned, is the difference between a medium that values the writer and one that kind of undervalues the writer. I'm wondering, since there has to be some kind of adjustment for a playwright who gets to write the way he wants to when he goes to Hollywood, how that changes the writing.

DM: Well, it's a completely different medium. One of the fascinating things about writing is that, when you write for radio, radio is different from stage, and stage is different from television, television is different from movies. They're all different. And it's like the poker player who says, "I sat down at this game, and they were playing deuces wild. And you had to trade in a one-eyed Jack on another card. I can't play that game." Well, if you can't play the game, you shouldn't play the game.

The point for the poker player is to understand the rules of the game, and for the writer to understand the essential nature of the medium — if he or she can — because each is very, very different. Writing movies and writing plays are extraordinarily different endeavors. Application and study would probably help anybody understand them a bit, but to say, "I don't know why they don't like my plays when I wrote movies well," is like saying, "I don't know why I'm not winning at indian poker when I can play five-card stud." You got to understand the rules of the game.

BS: I thought after I saw The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Verdict - I lived in Chicago and saw quite a lot of your work — that in your writing movies and having to fulfill dictates of a much more market-oriented medium, which Hollywood turns out, there would be more plot, there would be more structure, and that it might change your plays as well. And I thought it did. Did you?

DM: I think it absolutely did. Thank you. When you write a movie, when one writers a movie, that's all a movie is, is plot. All that you and I care about when we watch a movie is what happens next. And it's told with pictures. And the pictures go by at twenty-four frames a second. And we get the idea pretty damned quickly. There's nobody here who can't come into a movie or television show at any point and understand in a tenth of a second what's happening. And so what moves a movie along is plot. What happens next. "Oh yes," the audience says. "Oh my God, now he or she has gotten into an even worse scrape. Let me sit here a little longer and figure out what happens next." So, when I start writing movies, I had to really feverishly apply myself to understanding, to learning, how to write a plot. And I think it very much affected my plays for the better.

BS: Tell me. Was there an enlightening moment when you first realized that the theater had some power, had something that you wanted to be a part of?

DM: I think that moment was the moment when I first realized that it wasn't work and that people could go there and never work. I figured out that I had found the circus and I just wasn't going home. And I found it very young. My Uncle Henry, who lived out here for a while — and his wife, my Aunt Esther, still lives out here with that part of the family — was a producer of radio and television in Chicago for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. And he gave me jobs as a kid and my sister jobs as a kid, portraying Jewish children on television and radio. And through him I got into community theater in Chicago.

BS: It was a stretch —

DM: What?

BS: — portraying Jewish children.

DM: That's right.

American Buffalo 

BS: Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked if he believed in free will and he said, "Yes, I have no choice", which sounds like something from one of your movies. You seem to believe in fate. No matter what your characters do, they seem bound up in a fate that's decided already by their class and by what neighborhood they're from and their childhoods. I'm wondering if you think very much much in those terms when you're writing these characters.

DM: No, I never think about fate because, as we all know, "Fate is the fool's word for chance." Right? No?

BS: And why wouldn't that enter into your writing?

DM: Nobody saw that movie? Oh my God, where are you people from? Yeah, The Gay Divorcee. Eric Blore. Fred Astaire. "Fate is the fool's world for chance." Oh my God, where am I? No, Aristotle, used to say —

BS: You used to hear him say this?

DM: That's right. Aristotle used to say, until someone would tell him to shut up, he used to say that character is fate. So tragedy is about character, which is about the capacity for the human being to make choices. And Don Marquis, who wrote Archy and Mehitabel, said — and I think Isaac Bashevis Singer may have been cribbing from him — that the ultimate reconciliation of the doctrine of free will and predestination is we're free to do whatever we want and whatever we choose is going to be wrong. And that's what tragedy is about.

BS: Well, religion seems to be another circumscribing factor for your characters. In The Old Religion, Leo Frank. And in Homicide, the movie that you wrote and directed Joe Mantegna plays a police offer who's kind of forced to face his Judaism, something he's apparently denied or ignored. You've recently returned, or stopped —

DM: Yeah, I think that's a fairly accurate description, sure.

BS: And how did that change things for you?

DM: Well, it made me happier.

BS: Really?

DM: Sure.

BS: How?

DM: Well, in very many ways. It's a great thing to be able to put down the intolerable burdens of, if one happens to be me, of arrogance, egoism, and self-absorption for a while.

BS: All that from Judaism?

DM: Sure. I have this great rabbi — his name is Larry Kushner — who has this magnificent congregation in Sudbury, Massachusetts. And on Yom Kippur he said, "The bad news is you're going to be here all day. The good news is you've got no place to go."

BS: So, he's a comedian. But how does this help you overcome arrogance and those other burdens?

DM: Well, there's two answers to that question. A-ha, right? And one of them is that the rabbis would say, "Whoever rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered." And other equally nonresponsive answer is that the rabbis would say, "put on teffilin, put on tallis, hold a prayerbook in your hand. Now, sin."

BS: It's better that way. So, that's what you've been doing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

BS: Well, good. Was it a surprise to your children?

DM: I don't think so. No. After growing up with me, I think very little surprises them.

BS: Oh, I see. In Homicide the Bobby Gold/Joe Mantegna character says, "There's so much anti-Semitism these last four thousand years. We must be doing something." Did you feel that way?

DM: No, certainly not. But I heard people say that one. I heard Jews make a similar comment. the book I wrote, The Old Religion, is about the Leo Frank case. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915. He was falsely accused of a crime that was fairly evident he didn't commit. The city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia and much of the South imploded in a one-man pogrom and identified Frank as this demon and decided he was a demon because he was a Jew.

And it was the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which had died out after the Reconstruction, and also the birth of the Anti-Defamation League. It was a show trial, and one of the many "Crimes of the Century.' It was called the "American Dreyfus" case. And I wrote a book about my imagined interior monologue in the persona of Leo Frank, a man who goes to work one day and comes home to find out he's a monster that the world wants to kill and the process he goes through trying to find out why that is true. It's a book about race hatred. And of the things that he experiments with in an attempt to explain to himself a world gone mad is that, perhaps, there is some rectitude in the libels of his accusers. I think that that's something many abused people — children, for example — adopt to deal with intolerable injustice. So, no, that's not something that I feel.

BS: I'm wondering how aware of your Judaism you were as a child growing up. Because it's another kind of outside, and you ended up becoming a writer.

DM: Well, I was pretty aware of it. As I said, my Uncle Henry worked for the Board of Rabbis. My grandparents all came from the Old Country, from Russian Poland. We were fairly Episcopal Reform as far as religious practice went. And the kids from the other side of the tracks used to come over once in a while and hit us on the head, call us all sorts of derogatory terms. But I didn't see a lot of upside in the proposition until I got older.

BS: I wanted to talk a little bit about your book about acting, True and False.

DM: Sure.

BS: The most staggering thing to me that you say in the book is this tip to the actor: If the audience enjoyed the play, you have done a good job. That just sounds like pandering to me. Does this mean that The Bridges of Madison County is a good book?

DM: That very well may be. I haven't read it.

BS: Trust me on this.

DM: If the audience enjoys the play, the actor has done their job, because the audience pays to come to enjoy the play. See actors, as another maligned subspecies of humanity love to flagellate themselves, because it takes free-floating anxiety and transforms it into a yummy little phobia: that it's not the world is bad, it's not that my teachers are worthless, that the critics are mannerless swine, it's not that the plays are no good, but, rather, that I am insufficiently prepared. And, if I just try harder, everything will come out well, and there will be no tears before bedtime.

BS: You don't know actors that use those other excuses, too?

DM: What other excuses?

BS: Those ones that you said it's not.

DM: I'm saying that most actors use those excuses. I've very seldom met an actor — and I've worked with the greatest actors in the world and am greatly privileged to do so — who didn't say, at one time or another, when you said, "Jeez, you were great," "Naw, I wasn't very good tonight." It's a terrible thing to say. It's an insult to the person paying the compliment, and more important, it's an insult to yourself. The audience comes to hear the play. If they had a good time, you did your job. If you know who to do something better, do it better tomorrow night.

BS: But isn't it possible for people to enjoy something that really isn't any good?

DM: Sure, I do. Don't you?

BS: Yes, but we're talking about what a good actor is.

DM: If the audience enjoyed the play, the actor did their job because the jobs of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience. The job of the actor is not to obtain some magical, mystical state of perfection in him — or herself. It's nothing but self-consciousness. It's heresy. And it's the heresy of people who've been exposed to just a little too much education and haven't had enough time trying to earn their living by it.

BS: Well, you talk about a formal education not only being useless to an actor but harmful. You say that it generally ruins a young actor.

DM: That's right. That's absolutely right. For several reasons. The first is, show business smiles on early entry. That the things you can do when you're sixteen and seventeen and eighteen because you have a lot of time on your hands; you don't need a lot to live; you can't do when you're twenty-eight and twenty-nine and thirty. You should be out there getting your teeth kicked in and learning something and meeting some people and working hard.

Scott Zigler, a great, great director, directed my play The Old Neighborhood that Carole Hays produced, which just opened on Broadway last night, and he also teaches at Harvard. He's a great, great teacher. he says to the kids, "Get out there. And if you go to work for nothing in the movie business, if you do two movies for nothing" (he's talking about on the technical end), "you can be gainfully employed for the rest of your life." And it's true. The movie business particularly smiles on people who are reliable, dedicated and hard-working.

BS: But not necessarily good.

DM: But why should they be good? Why should anybody be  good when they're sixteen, seventeen and eighteen? You gotta get out there and be bad.

BS: Yeah, but sometimes they don't get better.

DM: Well.

BS: Isn't that possible?

DM: Yes. But they're not going to get better in school, and here's the reason why. Acting is something that's done for a paying public. It's not something that's done for school administrators and for teachers. the skills needed to please an acting teacher, a casting agent, a school administrator, are those that are completely opposite from the skills needed to please an audience. The audience — just like you and me- comes to the theater to be delighted, to be surprised, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt  because they want to have a good time. The teacher, the administrator, and the casting agent come to the session as if to greet a thief who's going to be underprepared and rob them of their time.

An audience isn't judgmental. That's why they come. That's why I come. That's why you come. There's nothing one is going to learn in school except to pander to authority. And the learning to pander to authority not only wastes the individual's time but ill equips the individual to deal with the authority of the greater world that is going to continue to exploit him or her. The casting agent, the fraudulent teachers, the people who take the headshots, the unskilled teachers of voice who are going to say, "Sit still and stay in class for the next million years, and I will tell you when you're any good." It's an absolute fraud.

BS: But that pandering to authority, isn't that to the detriment of anybody who wants to do anything, not necessarily be an actor?

DM: Not if they want to be a teacher.

BS: There's one.

DM: I've got some very good friends who are home schoolers, and they say the benefit of spending enough time in an institution is that eventually you get to be one of the guards.

BS: Another thing you say about actors, you tell them not to interpret. You say that to create the illusion the actor has to undergo nothing at all.

DM: That's right.

BS: What if you're a shy person trying to play a bore? Is there some kind of mock transformation that you have to go through in order to muster up whatever?

DM: No, you have to say words.

BS: And that's it?

DM: That's it.

BS: From this point of view, how can you tell a good actor from a bad actor?

DM: A good actor is one whose performance you enjoy. I mean, if you want to get more technical, I would say a good actor to me is one whose performance I enjoy because I find it truthful. Which is to say, I enjoy the performance.

BS: Well, that's not necessarily the most truthful performance. That's just the one you enjoyed.

DM: It's the most truthful performance to me. To whom else am I going to refer to it? If you're making love to someone, you say, "Jeez, I feel great." They say, "Yeah, I'm going to do better next time."

BS: Well, if you're playing to an audience of sadists and you really screw up in front of them, they'll enjoy that.

DM: The objections that you're raising, they're moot points. You can't argue them. But at the end of the the theater is a profession of mountebanks and misfits, much like myself, who've come in through the back door because no one else would have them and learned to find a place in society by getting up on a stage and doing plays that people need to hear and doing them well in an interesting, provocative, and unusual manner. Who haven't had the life bred out of them.

I've been teaching off and on since I was a kid, in many, many institutions, in the English departments and the drama departments, and all that I can tell you is — only I alone am escaped to tell thee — it's a big shock. You want to learn to act, go act. Go start a theater company. Go apprentice yourself. Go carry coffee. Go take voice lessons. And get up on the stage. You're going to be bad for the first x years anyway. You might as well be bad from sixteen to twenty rather than from twenty-eight to thirty-five.

BS: You also talk about how you're very much against interpretation of the text. In another book I was reading, you refer to a rabbi who points out that as one studies the Torah, the same portions at the same time of year, year after year, that one sees in them a change. But, as they do not change, it must be you who is changing. And that made me think that, isn't that another way of saying that the text has a depth that reveals itself through studying and interpretation?

DM: If one is studying the text. On the other hand, for an actor, the text reveals itself to the audience through the juxtaposition of the uninflected words, which the author wrote, and the moment-to-moment truthfulness of the actor. I don't want to hear some actor's good ideas. I and you and everyone here has the capacity to go to the library and understand what the author meant. What the actor can contribute, which is a great contribution, is the organic moment-to-moment, back and forth, the Ping-Pong game of the unforeseen.

What does it mean of somebody of whom we say they have a great technique? Of a chef of whom we say they have a great technique? It means you didn't enjoy that dinner.

BS: Why?

DM: Why? Whoever said that of a dinner they enjoyed? What we say of a dinner we enjoyed is "Yum." And what we say of a performance we enjoyed is, "Gol-ly!" We don't say, "What technique." We say "What technique' when we have been defrauded of anything more enjoyable. So we appreciate our own ability to appreciate.

BS: So, you would call a performance by Meryl Streep doing one of her accents or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main or De Niro doing Awakenings —

DM: First of all, I'm not going to name names because it's not my job, and my taste is not the point. Everyone has his or her taste, and they're entitled to it. That's what you're entitled to when you buy a ticket. You're there to see the show. You get to make up your own mind. Let me ask you a question. What is the line, "I never want to see you again." What does that line mean?

BS: It depends.

DM: Exactly. That's exactly correct.

BS: Thank you.

DM: It depends on what's happening in the moment. It can mean any number of a million things. And just so, when the line is spoken on stage, it can mean any number of a million things. As I say in the book, for any actor to prepare what he or she thinks the "character is going through" and then bring that onto the stage is an error of the same magnitude for the basketball team to say, "We're going to go out, and we're going to perform these plays irrespective of what the other team is doing."

BS: Well, what about Horowitz interpreting Chopin? is that any different from an actor interpreting Mamet?

DM: Well, it depends. It's a very good example. There are some pianists whose technique is so good they just bore you to death. One would rather hear a twelve-year-old who wanted to play the music. And I would, too, of the actors. I would rather hear somebody who wanted to get on stage and mix it up a little bit than someone who's going to share with me his or her good ideas about the text.

It's not the actor's job to be interesting. It's the actor's job to be extraordinary brave and forthright. And, when I was a kid growing up, we used to say the best thing you could say about an actor was that he or she was dangerous. That's what people want in the theater. You know, we look at early performances of Brando. You look at something Joey Mantegna did. You look at Patti LuPone in this play on Broadway. You say, "Gee, where they hell did they come from? Man, I never could have thought of that." Exactly. you know, you see Whoopi Goldberg when she was doing her comedy on stage —

BS: I never could have thought of what?

DM: Whatever the actor —

BS: The way they were doing it.

DM: Yeah. And neither could they.

BS: Well, isn't that their interpretation?

DM: No, it's their performance.

BS: Could you elaborate on that?

DM: Yes. Stanislavski said there are three kinds of actors. There's the actor who's gonna be the hack actor and give you his or her version of what they think an actor would do in this role. They're gonna interpret other actors. And then there's the mechanical actor, who gives you their version of what they think their character would be like. They're gonna think it up. They're gonna practice in front of the mirror, and they're gonna bring it in. And then there's the organic actor, who's simply going to determine what is needed in the scene and then go on and do whatever they can to get that from the other person.

Now, a good example of this organic behavior is a child who doesn't want to go to bed. A lover who wants a second chance. A man or woman who wants a job. Somebody who wants to get laid. There's nothing that these people won't do. And that's called having an objective. Having an objective is just a fancy word for wanting something real, real bad. And when all of us — or any of us — are in these situations, there's nothing we won't do. All of our attention's on the other person. And we'll change horses in the middle of the stream to do anything to get them to give us what we want. Now, when you see that in an actor on stage it's awfully damned compelling. Because what the great actor's doing on stage is changing his or her tactics to get what they need from the other person on stage, rather than performing what they dreamed up at home.

William H. Macy in Oleanna

BS: Isn't that technique, though?

DM: No.

BS: It seems to me that it is for this reason: if you're trained, part of your training is to be constantly aware of your opportunities on stage, and one of them means, "I must change tactics when called for." Rather than going out there every time without any understanding of what may happen, you have the understanding already, and you're ready for it and can do it.

DM: One doesn't have to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities on stage any more than one has to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities in trying to talk a cop of a traffic ticket. We're born with this capacity.

BS: Some people are better at it than others, though.

DM: Exactly so. And some people are better actors than others. But it's an innate capacity to be imaginative. And what's needed in the actor is not these dull whips of authority with which we flagellate ourselves of concentration and discipline and technique. Who cares? What's needed is bravery and intelligence and imagination. And all of us have all of that we need.

BS: But, as you say, the addition of emotion and all that kind of stuff is not something you want to see in your actors.

DM: It's false. It's lying. There's nothing anyone can do to control his or her emotions. If there were, we wouldn't need psychiatrists.

BS: I wonder. I don't really agree with that. If —

DM: Did anyone ever tell you, "Cheer up"?

BS: Yes.

DM: What was your reaction?

BS: Let me ask you this. What if you, right now, were suicidally sad, but you decided for the hour and a half it would take you to promote your book on this tour that you could set that aside. And then, when you knew it was going to be over, you go back to your room and cry and shoot yourself or whatever. I think that —

DM: That's not manipulating emotions. That's having an objective. The two things are very, very, very different.

BS: Well, that's semantics.

DM: What?

BS: Certainly it's manipulating your emotions. I think that the theory that one can control one's emotions and urges for short periods of time is the basis of the philosophy of teaching children good manners.

DM: No, what they child controls is not what he or she feels. What they control, if they can—

BS: Is behavior. That can look like emotions.

DM: Well, it might look like emotions to you, but there's nothing a human being can do to control their emotions. Cults function by suggesting to a human being that this control is possible and then shaming them when they find that it's not. That's how a cult functions. And when psychiatry becomes a cult, as it can, or a religion, as it can, that's how it functions. Or an acting class or any kind of class.

To say to the individual, "I've asked you to do something. Now why can't you do it?" The individual gets the idea that he or she is bad, and the only cure for the inherent badness is to work harder, to, in fact, enslave themselves to, and in the case of acting schools, to the teacher. And I've seen it for thirty years, and it's a vast imposition on the acting student. And, it's a fraud. There's nothing that the human being can do, to control their feelings, to control their emotions. and it may be practiced unwittingly, and it may be practiced for the best of all possible reasons, but it, nonetheless, is a fraud perpetrated on the student.

"From the Mouth of Gabriel" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"Heirloom" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"Arnika" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)