POODVECKER

My daughter Willa, who had a Czech nanny, first spoke English with a pronounced accent and many of the linguistic gaffes by which we’re charmed in those foreigners we condescend to like.

Her favorite bird was the poodvecker.

Tolstoy, a Commie, points out that we know when a marriage is failing when the partners communicate in concise, straightforward sentences. Those spouses are in the process of reconstituting themselves as strangers. Divorce lawyers say it starts in bed and ends in court.

The eros and exuberance of filmmaking is extinguished ’neath the wet blanket of Good Works and Legalism, and the Family Language is forgot. What of the ancient “Whom do you have to fuck to get off of this movie?” And reference to film firearms as “gubs”—from Woody’s bank robbery scene in Take the Money and Run. And so on. We see everywhere a terror of offending in those once functional relationships now all one breath away from “Get a lawyer.”

After filming a scene, the sound guy once called for one minute of silence, to record room tone; and a crew member might suggest we sing the Sound Guy Hymn, “Him, Him, Fuck Him.” But “fuck Him or Her” won’t stretch. Farewell the poodvecker, Beloved Bird, farewell.

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Directing actors is fairly simple. If it’s a comedy, the answer is usually “Throw it away quicker”; for a drama, “Knock it off.”

Acting schools load the actor with analyses that clarify nothing. They serve only to kill spontaneity, as the actor tries to remember which particular emotion or memory he is supposed to associate with which word. Actors understand the scenes when they first read them (just like you and me)—further analysis is pointless. The scene is either: a recognition, leave-taking, confrontation, ultimatum, apology, proposal, appeal, reconciliation—and there are a few more, whose names will occur to the reader. That’s all, folks.

Billy Wilder’s famous question, of a love scene: What keeps them apart? The separation is the writer’s job, that’s built onto the scene. The actor’s job is to overcome the difficulties not of his performance but OF THE SCENE.

Why would anyone (in “real life,” if such there is) burden himself, for instance, at a job interview, by remembering, “I must get this job because my mother is dying of cancer”?

The actor’s job, having taken the job, is to get on with it, accept the difficulties (the scene), stand still, and say the stupid fricking words. How Rare, O Daughters of Zion, are those who will act accordingly. Which is why we have directors.

The Greats—Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, De Sica, Kobayashi, Ozu, Mario Monicelli, Powell and Pressburger, Kubrick—directed their casts as a great conductor leads the orchestra. The journeymen and hacks, as the cartoon has it, just wave their baton till the music stops, then turn around and bow.

How might one “learn” movie directing? Film schools accept (that is, bilk) “directing” students. But one can no more learn film directing from a class than one can learn knife fighting from a video. The film school “student directors” are paying for the right to act in a charade, holding their place through the ability to please those who are, in effect, their employees.

How might one learn film directing? A more useful question, “How do I make a movie?” And more useful still, “How do I make this movie?”^I How might one make a film without the possession of a sheepskin? How does one make a Romanian omelet? “First, steal two eggs.” How does one make a film? First, get a camera.

Curiously, there is one in your pocket. Remove camera from pocket, make film. Doing so, one will learn immediately lessons that make no sense in a classroom. The light is too bright, too dim; the passersby are all looking at the camera; the traffic noise is drowning out the dialogue; the actor doesn’t like my direction; I’m running out of daylight. Don’t shoot the star’s close-up at the end of the day, as he will be tired; keep your temper. And so on.

The lessons become ever clearer when one tries to cut the thing together. We find the eyeline is wrong, the light does not match, a shot has been fudged, there is no cutaway, THE SCENE DOESN’T WORK, I don’t have an ending. And so on. Now you are actually learning. And you might recall the lessons when you set out to make the next film—because you’ve paid for them.

Actually, you will recall some of the lessons and learn to repeat, “Oh jeez, I’ve done it again…” All the while learning fascinating new things never to do again.

The boxing coach will teach you, “For chrissake, keep your guard up,” but no matter how extended his instructions, the real lesson will come from your sparring partner.

I was having a drink with two retired cops, and every reminiscence ended with raucous laughter, and two observations, “Oh God, we had fun” and “The poor kids today will never know what they missed.”

Well, that’s age for you.

The Wright brothers first exhibited the airplane in France in 1908; Blériot flew the Channel in 1909, and I’m sure Wilbur and Orville shook their heads at the poor slob who had missed the Good Old Days.

The Wrights learned to fly by watching birds; early filmmakers by watching people, and our contemporaries by watching films. But study of films will only inform the aspiring director how to make that film. And he won’t actually even learn that; for the shot, the cut, the effect he’s watching may be the product of accident or compromise, or that mélange we might call genius.

Back at the ranch, in the 1946 Razor’s Edge, Anne Baxter has fallen off the wagon in 1920s Paris; she’s a degenerate lush. Now Ty Power, who knew her back in Lake Forest, has returned from Tibet, where he studied yoga. He gets her clean. Then he decides to marry her. Gene Tierney, who has long loved Ty, decides to break it up.

She invites Anne to her apartment, where she is having afternoon champagne. She offers some to Anne, who is now sober. Anne refuses. Gene has to leave the room and asks Anne to wait. Anne waits, and eventually looks over, across the room, at the bottle of champagne. We all wait, watching. How will it unfold?

Each time I watch the film, not only do I wait for her to take the drink, but I can’t remember the sequence leading to it. So each time, I’m on the edge of my seat.

Master shot, Anne in the foreground, back to camera.

Champagne way over there, in a bucket near the window.

Pause pause pause.

Pause.

Then Anne starts to walk toward the bottle.

That’s it.

It gets me every time.

Had the director, Edmund Goulding, gone about it in the Studio Way, we would have seen:

Master shot, Anne in the room.

Her POV, the bottle of champagne.

Close-up, Anne looking at the bottle.

XCU bottle.

XCU Anne.

Master shot, Anne starts to walk to the bottle.

Insert: the bottle, Anne’s hand, picking it up. Etcetera.

But we can’t know if the sequence as shot was a mistake. Perhaps Edmund Goulding shot the CU of Anne, and the insert of the bottle, and the shot was ruined.

It doesn’t matter, for the sequence is genius and the credit goes to the director, whether he planned it or not, and whether or not he was there in the editing room. And if the film is a dud, he gets the blame. I love it.

The audience, watching the film for the first time, experiences a beautiful anticipation, paid off in an unforeseen but perfect conclusion. Seeing it for the second time, they not only recall the excitement of the anticipation but experience it again.

If the sequence were shot the brain-dead way, they would recall nothing—why would they? They’d experienced nothing. They saw a sequence of eight shots, and then she takes a drink. But they knew she was going to take a drink all the time. All they received from this sequence is unnecessary confirmation. So what?

To pay the audience off sequence by sequence is the wisdom of that great director Aristotle: if the end of the play must be both surprising and inevitable, how much more worthy to employ this knowledge of the audience’s consciousness in each scene, and then in every contributory sequence. The master of this, of course, was Buster Keaton.

How does one study an audience’s consciousness? The only way, on stage or screen, is to sit there with them while they watch your Baby dying.^II

If we study films to learn how to make them, all our efforts must be imitative. What can we learn from great films? To think longer and be bold—not in “expressing ourselves” (whatever that means) but in delighting the audience. In order to do so, we have to understand how they think. Easy to begin, as we watch films ourselves. Though we can’t effectively question our films’ viewers, we may observe them, and we may question ourselves about others’ films, asking not “How did they do that?” but “Why did I, the viewer, at such and such a point, sit up and take notice, drift away in thought, or open my mouth in surprise?”

Some folks are happy with a life making widgets or, indeed, packing them into boxes. Nothing wrong with that, I used to do it myself. One of the benefits of a repetitive job is that the mind is allowed to drift away and fantasize. These fantasies are, in effect, brilliant films; for don’t we structure them with expectations and disappointments, examples of heroism and treachery, and happy endings either in the marriage bed or in front of the firing squad?

What might drive our knowledge or dramatic expertise clean out of our head? You should have been here in the old days.

In those old days, making Spartan, I got to lie on the floor of Val Kilmer’s camper at wrap, at dawn, beyond fatigue, drinking Bloody Marys, half vodka, half V8, and half horseradish, while he explained the Commerce Clause. I got to spend a film full of nights in Jack Nicholson’s trailer on Postman, listening to the most idiosyncratic of raconteurs.

I wrote a script for Costa-Gavras, which he hated. He sent me a very thick envelope, stuffed, as I could feel, with many handwritten pages. I’d already received the message, as he hadn’t called for a month after getting my beautiful script. So I didn’t open the letter. I gave it to my agent, Howard Rosenstone, and called the next day.

“Did you read it?”

He said, “Yes.”

“What did it say?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

1. I. I’m sure there are classes in “Relationship Behavior.” A more practical consideration is: What is the best way to live with this person? The question is unanswerable without thought of the desire to do so. This desire immediately places the attention on the object rather than the subject.
2. II. An artistic failure, “in front of God and everybody,” is devastating. There is, however, and unfortunately, no education in a hit. A craft practiced in a bureaucracy has, for its audience, superior bureaucrats. Graduates of film school learn little or nothing of practical use, but the diploma is valuable, as it certifies them as compliant.

   I worked with Ricky Jay for forty years, and I got to direct his magic shows. But when there was actual magic discussed, I was dismissed from the conference. I begged him to teach me an effect. He finally gave in. He said that he would show me a simple card manipulation, and that when I could perform it better than it had ever been performed he would show me another. He also passed along the ancient vaudeville wisdom that you don’t know your act until everything that could go wrong with it has. But insulation from an actual, non-suborned audience can teach nothing. An invited dress rehearsal full of friends is useless as a gauge of the show—they’re there to show support. A showing of a film for a bureaucratic committee can serve only to reveal those superiors’ assessment of how the piece might affect their standing with their own superiors.

   “Industry Artists” whose work is rejected by the Suits may feel outrage, but they are spared the more human—and useful—shame.