One of the most popular actors on the American stage in the nineteenth century was Edwin Booth (his statue stands today in Gramercy Park, near his Manhattan mansion). Born into a prominent acting family, Edwin and his two brothers carried on the family tradition. One of those brothers was John Wilkes Booth (yes, that John Wilkes Booth). After the Lincoln assassination in 1865, a cloud of infamy settled over the entire Booth family, and Edwin was forced for a time to abandon the stage.
Edwin, a handsome man with dark piercing eyes, was often described as “the American Hamlet,” and many still consider him one of America’s greatest actors. Like so many actors of his era, he had an elegant air and a great facility with words, once saying:
An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.
In this observation, offered many decades before technological advances made it possible to preserve stage performances on film, Booth describes the world of the nineteenth-century actor. Unlike other artists, they worked in an ephemeral medium—their creations melting away as soon as they were created. In 1962, Shelley Winters updated the idea:
Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues.
Metaphorical observations about actors and acting are very common, and they often help us look at this ancient profession in a new way:
Acting is like prizefighting.
The downtown gyms are smelly,
but that’s where the champions are.
Acting is like making love.
It’s better if your partner is good.
Acting is like letting your pants down; you’re exposed.
Actors are the jockeys of literature.
Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.
Directors have also offered intriguing analogical observations about the theatrical life. The Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who won three Academy Awards and was nominated for six more, was often asked about how he approached the myriad of decisions he had to make as a director. While he usually said he favored intuition over intellect, he once offered a fascinating description of how both were at work in his decision-making process:
I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness.
That is intuition.
Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear.
That is intellect.
The relationship between director and actor has also been described in metaphorical ways. Billy Wilder, winner of six Academy Awards and the first person to win three Oscars in a single night (as director, producer, and cowriter of the screenplay for the 1960 film The Apartment), explained it this way:
A director must be a policeman, a midwife,
a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.
A few years later, the French film director Jean Renoir picked up on the midwife theme and took it to a completely new level. Writing in his 1974 autobiography My Life and My Films, he offered one of the film world’s most famous quotations:
A film director is not a creator, but a midwife.
His business is to deliver the actor of a child
that he did not know he had within him.
Kirk Douglas once said that movie making is a collaborative art, and the proof of his observation is evident whenever we see screen credits roll. In addition to actors, directors, and producers, hundreds of other professionals are involved in the making of a film—screenwriters, film editors, camera people, composers, musicians, sound technicians, wardrobe and set designers, and many others (including, of course, those mysterious grips and best boys). By contrast, writing is one of history’s most solitary activities. When novels get turned into films, these two very different worlds intersect, and sometimes collide.
In 2001, the forty-nine-year-old Douglas Adams died of a sudden heart attack while working out in a gym in Santa Barbara, California. He had recently moved to California to complete a movie deal for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams, initially excited over the prospect of seeing his work adapted to film, became increasingly frustrated over what seemed like pointless meetings with endless numbers of people. The inordinate delays finally got to him, causing him to write:
Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like
trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people
coming into the room and breathing on it.
Adams never lived to see his work brought to the big screen—which might not have been such a bad thing if you listen to the experience of some other writers. John Le Carré, author of such famous spy novels as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, once summarized his Hollywood experiences this way:
Having your book turned into a movie
is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
Not all writers have problems when their novels are turned into films, however, and the secret has something to do with the way the whole process is viewed. Rather than see the transaction as a precious transfer of artistic ownership, it might be better thought of as a simple property purchase. Rita Mae Brown recommended the latter approach:
You sell a screenplay like you sell a car.
If someone drives it off a cliff, that’s it.
No discussion of acting and screen life would be complete without some mention of television, which has become so central to the lives of people that the veteran newsman Daniel Schorr once described it as “a nightly national séance.” But perhaps the most famous observation on the small screen came in 1955, when the American critic John Mason Brown said in an interview that he had recently overheard a noteworthy remark from one of his son’s friends:
Television is chewing gum for the eyes.
A year later, in another interview, Brown said, “So much of television is chewing gum for the eyes,” this time without mentioning the original author. As the years passed, the remark has been repeated innumerable times, sometimes as “Television is chewing gum for the mind.” Variations have been attributed to many others, including Fred Allen, Aldous Huxley, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But no matter who the line is attributed to, I’ve always found it fascinating that the original author of the observation—in my view, the most memorable words ever offered on the subject—was not some celebrated writer or wordsmith, but a simple schoolboy who in a momentary muse happened to notice a connection between two of his favorite activities, watching television and chewing gum.
In the remainder of the chapter, I’ll present many more metaphorical musings for your enjoyment—all having to do with the world of stage and screen.
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood,
place it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have room enough
for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.
Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely.
Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes.
Comedy is rather like a dessert; a bit like meringue.
I feel like a father towards my old films.
You bring children into the world,
then they grow up and go off on their own.
From time to time you get together,
but it isn’t always a pleasure to see them again.
What Einstein was to physics, what Babe Ruth was to home runs,
what Emily Post was to table manners…
that’s what Edward G. Robinson was to dying like a dirty rat.
Here, a house without a pool is like a neck with no diamond necklace;
a swimming pool is like jewelry for your house.
There is as much difference between the stage and the films
as between a piano and a violin.
Normally you can’t become a virtuoso in both.
For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus,
the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay,
the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does,
straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Being a screenwriter in Hollywood is like being a eunuch at an orgy.
Worse, actually; at least the eunuch is allowed to watch.
Brooks, never a great fan of Hollywood’s decision-makers, also observed: “Ten years ago, the studio heads thought the audiences were sheep. Now, they think they’re snails with Down’s Syndrome.”
A play is like a cigar.
If it is a failure no amount of puffing will make it draw.
If it is a success everyone wants a box.
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals
with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine,
and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.
Chandler created one of America’s best-known fictional characters, the hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. Many of his novels and short stories were made into films, including the film noir classic The Big Sleep. He also wrote screenplays for many films, including Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia. He once said, “If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and…if they had been any better, I should not have come.”
The movie actor, like the sacred king of primitive tribes, is a god in captivity.
The point is that members of the public worship actors but often feel as if they own them as well. The ancient gods of captivity—who were nothing special outside their little universe—were in some ways less important to the tribe than the tribe was to them. Today, many actors become like deities imprisoned in golden cells.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Hollywood grew to be the most
flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
Film music is like a small lamp
that you place below the screen to warm it.
This intriguing image of a film score warming the screen comes from one of America’s great composers. He also did the musical scores for dozens of Hollywood films, including Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Red Pony, and The Heiress, for which he won an Oscar. Two other composers added these thoughts:
“A film musician is like a mortician—he can’t bring the body back to life, but he’s expected to make it look better.” Adolph Deutsch
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano-playing in my living room has on the book I’m reading.” Igor Stravinsky
Some young Hollywood starlets remind me
of my grandmother’s old farmhouse—
all painted up nice on the front side,
a big swing on the backside, and nothing whatsoever in the attic.
The real actor—like any real artist—has a direct line to the collective heart.
When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that’s been watered.
The relationship between the make-up man and the film actor
is one of accomplices in crime.
Hollywood is the gold cap on a tooth
that should have been pulled out years ago.
Filmmaking has now reached the same stage as sex—it’s all technique and no feeling.
Modesty is the artifice of actors, similar to passion in call-girls.
Gleason’s point is that any demonstration of modesty from an actor is likely to be insincere. The notion has been advanced by others, but never so well.
The cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.
This may be history’s most famous description of cinema. The allusion is to the speed with which the individual frames on a roll of 35-millimeter film pass through a movie camera. In another memorable metaphorical observation on his craft, Godard said, “A film is the world in an hour and a half.”
That’s the way with these directors,
they’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.
Technically, this is a mixed metaphor; but when a metaphor is badly mixed—a Sam Goldwyn specialty—it is often called a mangled metaphor.
Movies are just another form of merchandising—
we have our factory, which is called a stage;
we make a product, we color it, we title it, and we ship it out in cans.
I felt like a raisin in a gigantic fruit salad.
Lana Turner is to an evening gown
what Frank Lloyd Wright is to a pile of lumber.
A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel.
However beautifully the job is done,
we are still on the ground and in a world of reality.
Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring.
Everything we cannot say with words or show with action
you have expressed for us.
This came in a 1961 letter Hepburn wrote to Mancini, composer of the score for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The movie, adapted from a Truman Capote novella, stars Hepburn as Holly Golightly, a glamorous New Yorker who is working as a high-priced escort. Her goal is to meet and marry a wealthy older man, but she becomes attracted to a handsome and struggling young writer (George Peppard), who moves into her apartment building (he, in turn, is being kept by a wealthy older woman). Of the seven Oscar nominations the film received, Mancini took home two, one for the sound track and one (with Johnny Mercer) for the song “Moon River.”
The stage is actors’ country.
You have to get your passport stamped every so often
or they take away your citizenship.
This was Heston’s way of saying that film stars needed to occasionally appear on the live theatrical stage, even though stage roles are far less lucrative.
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
For me the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
Also employing an executioner’s analogy, Eli Wallach famously observed: “Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck.” Tyne Daly changed the metaphor, but made the same point: “A critic is someone who never actually goes to battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.”
Academy awards are like orgasms—
only a few of us know the feeling of having had multiple ones.
Huston was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning two. He had his multiple orgasms in 1948, when he took home the Best Director and the Best Screenplay Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience
without danger all the excitement, passion, and desirousness
which must be suppressed in a humanitarian ordering of society.
Glamour is just sex that got civilized.
Producing is like pushing Jell-O up a hill on a hot day.
This is a variation on the metaphor nailing Jell-O to the wall, which describes a task that is virtually impossible. The expression originated in 1903 when Theodore Roosevelt was trying to finalize an agreement with the Columbian government to build a canal in (at the time) their province of Panama. Roosevelt was so frustrated with Columbian officials that he bellowed, “Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall.”
Being a writer in Hollywood is like going into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
Mamet’s dim view of Hollywood was also reflected in his 1988 play Speed the Plow, where a character says, “Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it’s full of surprises and you’re constantly getting fucked.”
A trip through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat.
Mizner was one of Hollywood’s most colorful characters (Anita Loos called him “America’s most fascinating outlaw”). He and brother Addison were the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim’s 2003 musical, Bounce. Like David Mamet earlier, Mizner also had a dim view of his bosses: “Working for Warner Brothers is like fucking a porcupine; it’s a hundred pricks against one.”
Hollywood is high school with money.
If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know
that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.
This appeared in a tribute Odets wrote a month after Monroe’s August 1962 death by an overdose of sleeping pills (it was ruled a probable suicide). In predicting that a legend would spring up around the blonde sex symbol, Odets quoted a magnificent metaphorical line from the poet William Butler Yeats: “The tree has to die before it can be made into a cross.”
The difference between being a director and being an actor is
the difference between being
the carpenter banging the nails into the wood,
and being the piece of wood the nails are being banged into.
Working with Julie Andrews
is like getting hit over the head with a valentine.
Bond smoked like Peter Lorre, drank like Humphrey Bogart,
ate like Sydney Greenstreet, used up girls like Errol Flynn—then went to a steam bath and came out looking like Clark Gable.
It’s hard to act in the morning. The muse isn’t even awake.
Every playwright should try acting, just as every judge should
spend some weeks in jail to find out what he is handing out to others.
The camera is a little like the surgeon’s knife.
Being given good material is like being assigned to bake a cake
and having the batter made for you.
My native habitat is the theatre. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin.
I am a critic and commentator.
I am essential to the theatre—as ants to a picnic,
as the boll weevil to a cotton field.
This is a classic line in cinema history, delivered by Sanders in the role of critic Addison de Witt in the 1950 film All About Eve (screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The line captures how critics have been viewed by playwrights and actors (and writers as well, as you will see in the upcoming literary life chapter). The most colorful remark about critics from a stage performer, though, comes from George Burns, who said, “Critics are eunuchs at a gang-bang.”
Acting is like roller skating.
Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.
Making a film is like going down a mine—
once you’ve started, you bid a metaphorical goodbye
to the daylight and the outside world for the duration.
A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein
but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.
Another well-known attention span comparison was Robert Redford’s lighthearted jab at Paul Newman: “He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.”
Going to Hollywood to talk about menopause
was a little like going to Las Vegas to sell savings accounts.
This was Sheehy’s explanation for the lack of interest Hollywood producers showed when she pitched them on doing a film adaptation of The Silent Passage (1992).
The body of an actor is like a well in which
experiences are stored, then tapped when needed.
Careers, like rockets, don’t always take off on time.
The trick is to always keep the engine running.
This is great advice for anyone, but especially for people in an occupation with long periods of inactivity between gigs and even longer odds against success.
In the creative process there is the father,
the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part;
and the child, the role to be born.
Remember this practical piece of advice:
Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet.
Leave your dust and dirt outside.
Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties
with your outside clothing—all the things that ruin your life
and draw your attention away from your art—at the door.
Directing is like being a father on a set; comedy is like being a kid.
Steinberg was one of the best-known comics in the 1970s (he appeared on The Tonight Show 130 times and was the youngest person ever to guest-host the show). He went on to achieve great success behind the camera, directing such TV sitcoms as Seinfeld, Mad About You, and Designing Women. In 2005, he returned to the front of the camera with his TV Land talk show Sit Down Comedy.
It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla.
You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.
A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking—
it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.
By increasing the size of the keyhole,
today’s playwrights are in danger of doing away with the whole door.
The reference here is to the increased appearance of gratuitous sex in modern plays. Ustinov, a talented writer as well as a great actor, was suggesting that what used to be peeked at through keyholes was now in plain view.
Choice is to the cable monopoly what sunlight is to the vampire.
Valenti said this in 1987, as president of the Motion Picture Association of America. At the time, five companies controlled over 40 percent of cable-TV subscriptions and dictated what viewers would get to watch on television.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
In 1938, Welles achieved national notoriety and everlasting fame when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast created a panic on the East Coast. Two years later, the twenty-five-year-old Welles was lured to Hollywood by RKO studio executives. In 1941, he came out with Citizen Kane, often hailed as America’s greatest film. Welles once described the RKO lot as “The biggest electric train set any boy ever had.”
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts.
But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
This observation, made in 1956, nicely communicates the ambivalence so many people feel about television. More recently, Dennis Miller made a similar point: “Bad television is three things: a bullet train to a morally bankrupt youth, a slow spiral into an intellectual void, and of course, a complete blast to watch.”
Making movies is a little like walking into a dark room.
Some people stumble across furniture, others break their legs,
but some of us see better in the dark than others.
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank checks.
The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Wilder’s plays may have been blank checks, but the plays of many other playwrights are written for very precise amounts. Using two different similes, Vivien Leigh compared two famous playwrights this way: “Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one’s place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea—one swims where one wants.”
A movie without sex would be like a candy bar without nuts.