In Hollywood there’s an A-list and a B-list for work, for parties, for just about everything. A producer might want Brad Pitt for a movie but know the chances of getting him are slim. So she or he will have an entire list of other possible actors.
It’s that way for writers, for directors, cameramen, everything.
Someone like John Alonzo, who worked on Chinatown and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is on everyone’s A-list of cameramen. A kid fresh out of the American Film Institute, New York University, or the University of Southern California, all fine programs, isn’t on any list.
It’s a hopped-up version of the tracking system in high school.
For television I had been on the A-list except at CBS. (For whatever reason I’ve never had much luck with CBS. Maybe it’s because it’s so hard to park there. The running joke used to be, “CBS, the network that dares you to do business with them.”) My work continued to stand me in good stead, although my contacts were dying in terrifying numbers.
Thanks to Sneaky, however, I could and did back away. I don’t know if that will be temporary or permanent. I can’t dissemble about my distress over the business right now. It’s so bad that in most sitcoms, with a few marvelous exceptions, when someone wants to speak a line that’s supposed to be funny, they shout it. That kills wit right there. Wit is always quiet and sly. These days every emotion is signified and underlined three times. I don’t know how the actors stand it, and film isn’t much better. The independent films are better, God bless them, but the studios are out of it.
I hope the 1997 Oscars woke them up. Talk about egg on your face. The independents walked away with everything.
Even if the studios are committed to profit and profit only, the question has to become, how much profit? Why can’t the studios go back to the old system and make the blockbuster as well as a few modestly budgeted movies that are about real people?
A studio executive has a responsibility to the shareholders. Actually, if I am hired to work on a picture, I feel I have a responsibility as well. People are risking their money on “my” project. I want a good return. Again, how much profit? If I can take a $15 million film and when all the costs are toted up deliver a $10 million net profit to the studio, I have done my job and so has everyone else on the project.
Budgets are so bloated, people are forgetting how to be creative. Often, having to find a less expensive way to accomplish a result brings out creativity. Just shoving more money at a director is lazy and is also financially irresponsible to those same shareholders.
As for the salaries of the heads of the studios, they’re bigger than the gross national product of Peru—or so it seems. If they can deliver, I suppose they’re worth it, but I wonder what kind of signal it sends throughout the business. There is a point when people, in and out of the business, recoil in disgust.
I’ve been fortunate, though, to work with some good, good people. I count Alvin Cooperman at the top of the list. He’s blue-chip. Norman Lear taught me a lot. We’d fight and make up and I think, on looking back, that the sparks made us both more creative. He knows story, he knows production and action, but above all, Norman knows network politics. Watching him schmooze with an executive ought to be part of a university course.
An actor who helped me as a writer was Jason Robards. He goes to the text. When we shot a new adaptation of The Long Hot Summer he’d sit down at a picnic table with me and he’d meticulously examine the text.
“I hate Faulkner,” he’d grumble. “Can’t understand a word of it.”
“This isn’t really Faulkner,” I’d parry.
“It’s based on his short stories.”
“This is to Faulkner as military music is to music.”
Then he’d laugh that rolling, Irish laugh of his and he’d set to work.
But then, Jason Robards is of the theater. He is classically trained. He’s also one of the greatest actors of his generation. What a body of work he has created.
The Long Hot Summer let me watch good actors and great actors develop their characters. Dennis Turner, who rewrote part two (no, I didn’t mind a bit—he did a good job), wasn’t called on the set. I was. We worked our asses off.
Don Johnson had to carry the show, even though he was thrown against Jason Robards, Ava Gardner and the extraordinary Judith Ivey. Everyone wrote off Cybill Shepherd, thinking she was there for beauty. She fooled them.
As it turned out, Don Johnson did carry the show. He had a lot more inside him than the network thought he did—and there was more than one executive waiting for him to fail, since he was a pain (in their estimation) on Miami Vice. If he was a pain, get him better scripts. If actors are really working and growing, they don’t have time to bitch and moan.
Stars bitch and moan. Actors act.
Cybill blossomed during this shoot. She was scared to death initially. I liked her immediately. She’s southern, after all. But as she opened up her character I grew to respect her.
Romances? No. I had a crush on the assistant director but he paid me no mind at all.
Mother gave me a harsh piece of advice when I was young. It’s crude but I pass it along because it’s the God’s honest truth: “Don’t shit where you eat.”
I have never and will never sleep with anyone I work with on any project. After the project, hey, fair and clear. I never did, though, because we’re all gypsies and we’re moving on to the next project.
This might be a steamier read if I could pretend I’ve had wild sex with stars or they’re my nearest and dearest friends. But it’s not true. I’m a farm girl. I take the money and put up fencing or buy more land. I hardly qualify as an interesting person by Hollywood standards. I’m not on the party A-list and wouldn’t be able to attend if I were.
The strangest episode I observed involved Roseanne and Tom Arnold, who were married at the time. They hired me to adapt Graced Land by Laura Kalpakian. It’s a well-written book, peeling away welfare fraud to reveal the fraudulent emotional life of the main character. In the wrong hands this would be plowing through mud. She wrote a light, funny novel and made it work.
Roseanne was perfect for the lead. A lot of my friends regaled me with horror stories from the set of her TV show. I did as I usually do: I listened and kept my own counsel.
I met Roseanne and Tom in their trailer on the back lot. We hit it off. She had a good grasp of her character and he understood his character, too.
Tom can’t sit still, so as Roseanne and I discussed the story he was like a kangaroo. He’d jump up. He’d sit down. He’d jump up. He’d go outside. A very masculine fellow. I understood why she was attracted to him.
The first thing I noticed about Roseanne is that she trusts no one. She trusted me to get her a good script but I doubt she would ever trust me as a person. Her experiences in this world have left her wary. She wants to trust people but something pulls her back.
I’m not sure she trusted Tom but she loved him. She’s a passionate woman who needs male attention. He doted on her when I was with them.
Each time we discussed the script, I was impressed with Roseanne’s understanding of the subtext of the story. The politics of the piece touched her. I was crazy about working with her. She made it easy. Her staff also was very good. And the network executive, Phillipe Perebinossoff, gave me the best set of notes I have ever gotten from a network executive. (Usually network notes are pretty poor. The execs may understand structure but not character. No one understands pace, I swear.)
The other great thing about Phillipe is that he wouldn’t give in to Roseanne. She needed a strong hand. She was acting in her first movie of the week, her husband wanted to codirect (the network nixed that), he was costarring opposite her and she was starring in the hottest show on television. It was too much and, while Phillipe was sensitive to her desire to control everything, he wasn’t going to let her overload.
Living in Virginia, I missed out on the daily politics of the show. Halfway through the second draft Phillipe was pulled off and a new executive put in charge. I never mets her. I can’t say anything about her, good or ill.
But I sure can tell you what happened to the show. ABC hired Bill Bixby to direct. He was a good director but he wasn’t right for this piece.
The opening scene sets the lead. The heroine’s husband left her five years ago for a younger woman. Joyce, the lead character, is obsessed with Elvis Presley. She’s a con artist and, to add to the irony, her ex-husband occasionally comes back and sleeps with her. He’s cheating with his wife, as it were. It’s too delicious.
Bill Bixby called me up. “What’s going on in this scene?”
I explained.
“Does he fuck her?” His exact words. Obviously, Bill wasn’t southern.
“Uh, yes, he does.”
“She can’t fuck him. The audience will lose sympathy for her right away.”
How wrong he was. That opening scene established what was good about Joyce, and what was delusional and deceitful. She still loved him and she made good on it in bed. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred, seeing that, will feel sympathy for Joyce and fear that he’ll hurt her all over again. The hundredth woman will write an irate letter to ABC declaring we’ve all gone to hell in a handbasket. The candyasses tend to listen to the hundredth all too often.
Why Roseanne allowed that to happen I don’t know. I wasn’t on the set. Either she was tired of fighting or they convinced her this was the better way. The opening scene was changed. Joyce didn’t sleep with her ex-husband.
Why would anyone involved with The Woman Who Loved Elvis (ABC changed the name) undermine its star that way? Did the network, sick of dealing with her, decide to get even? That would be colossally stupid. Was Tom so worried about his role that Roseanne put her energies into him and forgot to protect her own character?
When the show was aired it did quite well and Tom gave a good performance; it was his springboard. Roseanne gave a credible performance but not the one she intended to give. Her character’s teeth were pulled. No fangs. The supporting cast was quite good. I was beside myself when I watched the rush cut, however. No fool, I didn’t call Roseanne or the network. Done is done.
I will always believe she was betrayed. Roseanne has a peculiar acting range. Her stage work is that of a stand-up comedienne. That means she’s going to have problems with her timing in films because film requires a vastly different timing than a live audience. She won’t have a problem understanding character and she will flourish with good people around her. I don’t know if she wants a cinematic career or a long-form television career. Her series has been phenomenally successful. But if she wants to grow as an actor, she can. There’s a lot inside.
Actors, like horses, have different speeds, different abilities, different temperaments.
I love them. I love working with them. I’ve seen some of the best onstage. Helen Hayes, Maggie Smith, Janet Susman in London, Glenda Jackson in London, Colin Blakely (I miss him), Linda Lavin, Jason Robards, James Earl Jones, Vanessa Redgrave, Derek Jacobi and Timothy Piggott-Smith are the ones who spring immediately to mind.
I prefer watching actors on the stage. I get a much better sense of their abilities. In film a great director, a great editor can save an actor’s ass. On the stage they live or die alone.
The greatest piece of television acting I ever saw was Dame Peggy Ashcroft’s Barbie Batchelor in The Jewel in the Crown. Nothing prepares you for the scope of her performance. Get her old films on video and watch her give performance after performance of splendor.
A favorite piece of film acting that most of you might toss off as too light is Sir Alec Guinness in Captain’s Paradise. How funny, believable and subtle.
I could go on and on about actors. I feel for them because they’re badly treated until they get to the top and then they can still be badly treated because producers and directors prey on their insecurities.
Cherish them. They give all they can give and are dependent on others for the work. I can walk away and say, “The hell with you,” and write another novel. An actor has to wait for the script and the call. Therein lies their conundrum.
Oh, the bravest actor I ever saw was Richard Chamberlain. When he walked away from Dr. Kildare to learn his craft on the stage in London, he was much derided in the press. But he was right. The best place for an actor to learn is on the stage. When he came back he performed the title role in Richard II and he was good. Richard II can so easily be played as a tragic fool or a swishy queen. Chamberlain got him just right. Richard II never truly understood power. He was enchanted with the image.
As I was wrapping up with The Woman Who Loved Elvis a female walked into my life who was more bullying, uncooperative and self-absorbed than any star. Peggy Sue was a holy horror.