A critic for Variety, Art Murphy, who called himself Murph, said of me in my second leading role in a movie in 1974, “It would be sad to think an acting career lay ahead.” The next year, I won a best actor award on Broadway in Same Time, Next Year, and the year after that I was in Heaven Can Wait. That critic is now deceased. When articles appeared about him after his passing, it was reported he was snappish around the office and enjoyed dressing in women’s clothes.
I honestly don’t look down on how anyone dresses, as long as they’re properly covered. Snappish around the office or anywhere is way over the line to me.
I’m more sympathetic to a local critic in Santa Monica who said of a movie I wrote, Movers & Shakers, “If you want to know what it feels like to die sitting upright in your theater seat, go see this movie.” The late ABC critic Joel Siegel said of the same movie, “You’ll laugh till you cry.”
While I don’t believe it was as good as Joel Siegel said, I obviously don’t agree with the Santa Monica critic. It probably never occurred to him that the movie was too hip or inside for him to get. I mean, I don’t get a lot of things, and I almost always believe it’s my shortcoming.
I mean, how bad could the movie be? The cast included Walter Matthau, Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Bill Macy, Penny Marshall, and Tyne Daley, among many others who’ve had a job or two, including me. Inside? Yes. Bad? No.
One of my closest friends was a critic, Richard Watts, Jr. From the early seventies until he died at the age of eighty-two in 1980, Dick was the theater critic for the New York Post and before that a movie critic and later a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He and I and a changing group of three or four others would meet every Friday night at Manhattan’s “21” Club for drinks and then have dinner there or go to other restaurants around the city. I loved Dick Watts. He was as kind a man as I’ve ever met and knowledgeable on so many subjects.
The late Clive Barnes, formerly the drama critic of the New York Times and later a critic for the New York Post, wrote about Dick after he passed. He said among other things that Dick’s opinions were informed by knowledge, love, and, very significantly, compassion. He said his writing was modest, and he had the honesty almost to protest his subjectivity.
Dick once gave a mixed review to something I had produced and directed on Broadway. He said that most likely part of his problem with the play came from some hearing loss he was suffering, as there were a number of lines spoken offstage. That Friday at “21,” I read into his ear a review from another major critic. He listened carefully, and when I finished turned to me with a big grin and said, “Why, Chuck, that’s a rave!”
There was only one Dick Watts. He knew he was subjective, as we all are, and he genuinely came to the theater wanting to like the production.
Maybe, in fairness, all critics want to like what they’re reviewing. Personally, I couldn’t handle going to see a play or a movie five nights a week or so. I mean, I’d come in in a bad mood, and that of course wouldn’t be fair to the people putting on the show.