JUST ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER

Drama is not the lesson but the reminder that nothing in this life is on the level.

We laugh at the machinations of the cheating spouse, the lecher, the politician, the liar—not at the revelation that such exist but at our recognition that “we knew it all along.” Of course we did, for we are laughing at ourselves. And at our transparent efforts to keep our motives hidden, not only from others but from ourselves.

We stiffen our necks at the perfidies of the other side’s politicos and will hear nothing to the detriment of our own. But a little experience of the world reveals that they’re all just politicians, which is to say a bunch of thieves or fools. And we embrace the operations of the thief, fixer, lawyer, or stock manipulator who promises us—as we are wise—the short way to various benefits. We reason that, yes, he is a thug, but how lucky I am that he is my thug. Until comes the inevitable dawn.

I’ve spent fifty years as a dramatist. Not only did it seem the only thing worth doing, it was the only thing I was good at—providing not just joy but self-respect and, after some time, income.

The director and the writer in twentieth-century American theater enjoyed the respect of all—it was awarded not to the holder of office, for his rank, but to one who held the office because he could make it happen.

“It” was getting the asses into the seats, keeping them there for two hours, and sending them out to tell their friends. The Theater was a meritocracy, for the audience didn’t care where one went to school (let alone what race or sex one was), but only if one’s work fulfilled the promise of a Good Night Out.

I founded various theaters as a young fellow, and my ability to perform the above attracted co-workers who respected my ability. As I respected theirs.

The Commune (says this child of the sixties) only functions for a short time—till the charisma of its leader becomes tiresome, the vacuity of his vision becomes apparent, or Daddy’s loot runs out. Our sprung-from-the-earth theaters of Chicago in the ’70s lived through and ended with the success of their members.

For didn’t so-and-so go off to New York, or to TV, or to the Movies? Didn’t I?

Who doesn’t want a raise? The only folk intent on continuing poverty as a badge of election are those with parental or government support. So, any organism’s success means growth, and growth is the expenditure of strength, the inevitable end of which is decay and death, allowing new growth.

At no point does the healthy, growing organism, having wrested success from an uncaring universe, decide, “I’ll play these.” (See King Lear.) The universe will be the judge of that.

My particular road trip took me from Chicago to New York, to Off-Off, Off-, and Broadway, and then, surprise, to Hollywood.

The hegira unfolded in segments.

I’ve been a writer all my life, delighted every morning to sit down with my cup of tea and a typewriter, and (pick one or both) drive myself crazy or have a swell time.

But New York, may God forgive it, was not ready for two Broadway or Off-Broadway plays a year by the same guy. Yes, yes, Neil Simon, and so on, but, for whatever reason, not me.

And so I wrote for various rags, Esquire, New York mag, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, the Atlantic Monthly, and so on; and I started writing screenplays.

We know that, given the chance, the bad money will drive out the good, the tail will wag the dog; and the tail, in my case, was Hollywood. I began at what I considered the top, as in the foreword. Bob Rafelson had me ghosting him on the set of The Postman Always Rings Twice. “Why, hell,” I said to myself, of the position of Director, “I can do this.” As indeed I could, for I’d been doing it for years on the stage.

And I had a good theoretical start, as I’d been given a reading list at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

I spent a year there (1967–68), taught by, among others, Sanford Meisner. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I loved the school library and the reading list books by the early Soviet filmmakers and theoreticians, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Evreinov.

Their great contribution was the reduction of filmmaking to one simple truth: film is a succession of images the juxtaposition of which tells the story to the audience.

See here:

Shot of a man, sitting at a desk, staring off.

His POV: a mantelpiece, an envelope propped up on it.

The man gets up and walks toward the mantelpiece, passing a large window, closed.

Angle, the mantelpiece, the man takes the envelope.

He walks back, taking a letter from the envelope.

Shot of the desk, the man sits, he reads the short letter, he nods, leaves the letter on the desk, and walks out of the shot.

Shot of the window, now open, its drapery blowing in the wind.

Shot of the closed study door. It opens, a young woman enters.

Her POV, the open window.

Her close-up.

Her POV, the desk, papers fluttering in the wind. The letter we saw earlier, held down by a paperweight.

She walks toward the letter.

Shot of her hand, picking the letter up.

That’s how, as I learned from the Commies, one writes a film. The audience, like you, the reader, is led, THROUGH A SUCCESSION OF IMAGES JUXTAPOSED, to follow the action, not “understanding,” but “wondering” what happens next. So that the end of the sequence is, we very much want to know what was in the letter—which leads us to the next sequence, which is logically, what’s she going to do about it?

This is not a theoretical opinion, it’s how we perceive.

The film’s act builds on the sequence (as above), which is constructed from the most basic element: the shot.

“Yes, but,” you might say. What about The Characters?

Best Beloved, there are no characters, there are only actors, and actors are only people.^I

The Director is the one person on the set who doesn’t have to know anything. The department heads and the craftspeople are magnificently skilled, and have the answer to any question.

But the Director should (and, in the days before identity politics, had to) know something—else how to have achieved the position?

He might be good with a camera, or as a designer, or as a writer; and, in my case, my ability as a writer was linked to and derived from my work with actors onstage.

For I knew (and it was borne out in practice) that my words were sufficient—they didn’t need aid from the actors’ embellishments, they only required the actors’ courage. This meant stand still, let the words come out clearly, and do not be dismayed by unbidden emotions: they are not engendered by your insufficiency, but by the script. Letting them flow unhindered is what we see in that acting we call genius.

That’s what I brought to film directing: the knowledge that the actor didn’t need to help it, and that the audience would be grateful for the omission. We all know this, as we get up to leave the room when the television devolves to the Narrative Scene. And we of the Profession may learn it, when even prior to the influence of our paycheck, our self-respect depends on it.

When you’ve got the paying customers out front and they nod off during your beloved keystone scene, you carry that humiliation to the grave. And when your livelihood depends on it, you make sure you don’t do it no more. (Exceptions were, and are, the state-supported Theater, living on the subsidy of your tax dollars or the charity of subscribers willing to be bored spitless for a good cause.)

So I went, bit by bit, much like a Missionary among cannibals who had refrigeration. Bit by bit, to Hollywood.

And no one out there, in forty years, liked my scripts.

I exempt five directors,^II the actors, and the audience.

I came to Hollywood, as all news comes, from the East; I was a novelty, and a success; and most business arrangements started with, “I so respect your work, I love everything you’ve ever written,” and ended with, “except this.”

Time and again, and to this very day, I’ve been baffled by the inability of producers, studio executives, managers, and agents to read a script.

Or, better, to read a script written as direction to the director and cinematographer in order to complete a film that would, through the precision of its construction, enthrall, delight, amuse, or shock a paying audience.

Who were these fools? The wiser ones, the old moguls, and independent producers, were happy to be hustling for millions, rather than on the street corner, asking, “Wanna buy a watch?” I understood these guys, for was I not one of them? The difference between us was this: after the deluge, I figured I could probably get dinner by telling a tale at the Campfire; but Civilization would have to, once again, crawl its way back, before their like would emerge to say, “Kid, I think I can book you at a better campfire.”

Now, all things, in my senescence, have, of course, gotten worse. No one in Hollywood today matures in the experience of seeing something with his name on it fail in front of that audience which is paying the rent. But to return to the Neighborhood Playhouse, Stanislavski’s books were on the list. His An Actor Prepares and Building a Character were a bunch of drivel, leading not only to the self-absorption of James Dean but to the beatification of Brando. And to the sustenance of seventy years’ worth of so-called teachers of acting.

But Stanislavski’s autobiography, My Life in Art, is a thrilling read. The tale of his founding of the Moscow Art Theatre was not only an inspiration for me, and Billy Macy, Steven Schachter, and Patty Cox, in creating the St. Nicholas Theatre in Chicago (1973), but a storehouse of practical shop-floor hints.

He wrote that the director should learn shorthand, in order to keep notes at the pace of the actors in rehearsal; and he suggested the director learn to draw.

I never took to shorthand, and I never learned to draw. But I did learn to sketch.

This was of some help in the Theater. Not much, because the sets were worked out with designers who could draw; and the position of the actors could only be worked out in rehearsal.

Stage directors have, famously, been pictured moving cardboard figures around a scale model of the set. But a play’s actual blocking depends not on a picture but on the changing relationship between the actors and its correct communication to the audience.

There’s a palpable electricity between actors onstage. Left alone, they will usually arrange themselves, beat by beat, in order to achieve that position best calculated to achieve their ends. Just like prizefighters. And these positions will communicate this changing relationship to the audience.

Sketching was of little use to me as a stage director; but for the film director it is all in all.

For, as in the example at the head, the good film is a succession of shots; and each shot can be reduced to a simple sketch.

Most directors, in my days in Hollywood, and, it seems, all today in the Age of Dismemberment, consider moviemaking the capture of action. Generally, the record of: violence or sex—these incidents separated by narration. The audience doesn’t care about the narration (and neither do the filmmakers), but it is included as the final homage vice pays to virtue—separating the films by that thin membrane between moviemaking and outright pornography, or Grand Guignol.

But on my hill, filmmaking was a) the construction of a plot that could be recorded, shot by shot, and cut together to tell a story (as per the script); and b) the camera’s record of those shots made on a location or set.

The great director’s tool is the storyboard. This is a panel-by-panel cartoon of the script, made in conjunction with the storyboard artist. The cut film should be the direct rendition of the storyboard. (What else could it be?)

Most contemporary directors proceed from “an idea” to the shot list. This is the plan of operations, issued each day, to the crew, and lays out that day’s work.

Marge enters. Master, Marge and Sheila.
Medium shot, Marge and Sheila.
Close-up, Marge.
Close-up, Sheila… etc.

It can be observed that most films are today shot thusly. Which is why they are all the same. But I took real satisfaction from figuring out a sequence shot by shot. A day of planning in which I had one good idea was, for me, a great day. And when I’d reduced the film to the storyboard, and the shot list from it, I could walk on the set and shoot it.

I didn’t have to “feel” anything, neither did the actors. Neither they nor I had to “carry the film”; they had, as per the script, merely to “walk in the room” or “shoot the intruder,” as the case may be, saying the words thoughtfully supplied to them.

This mechanical method took the anxiety out of filmmaking, for no one was asked to do something either unclear or stupid. And so all my sets were happy. Why not? People scream on sets because they are frightened, and they are frightened because they don’t know what to do, the clock is ticking, and everyone is watching.

I was on the set of Things Change with my friend Shel Silverstein. He saw me sketching Don Ameche and said I should do cartoons. I told him I couldn’t draw, and he said, “Neither could Thurber.” And here we are.

I. Who were the “characters” in the above sequence? What did you know about them? Nothing. What did you miss?
II. Bob Rafelson, Sid Lumet, John Frankenheimer, and Danny DeVito. I never worked with the fifth, but he paid me the highest compliment. In 1992, Volker Schlöndorff made a documentary about Billy Wilder. He asked about the paucity of good scripts, and Billy replied, “Not everyone can be a Mamet.”