AN APPRECIATION OF THE STATE OF PLAY
The artist’s problem, as always, is that the merchants, indispensable to our sustenance, and the parasites who batten on us have no idea what we are doing. Those self-pressed into service of The Industry are like the inspired automotive designers, fresh out of school, snapped up by Detroit automakers to sketch fuel door covers.
The American auto industry was changed by the Japanese and Germans, starting in 1945 from zero (thanks to Douglas Aircraft and Boeing), and by the hot-rodders in SoCal who remodeled Detroit’s guff into something cool.
Our obliteration of their manufactories gave our postwar new friends, the Germans and the Japanese, that which GM could never have: a clean sheet of paper. And the Pacific Coast car freaks had the artist’s only other requirement: inspiration bordering on mania, NEXT TO WHICH NOTHING AT ALL MATTERED. The hot-rodders wouldn’t have traded the life of sun, sex, and auto mechanics for the highest-paid position in Detroit; they would have pitied the stock-optioned Executives, had they ever thought of them.
Artists who don’t hold “producers” in contempt—absent the remote possibility of their having demonstrated a simple decent regard for a contract—are nuts. One must protect oneself from the effects of unashamed greed for money or acceptance. We all would appreciate help in taking our pigs to market, but a human desire for acceptance—in effect, a self-delusion—often blinds us to those pigs’ identity.
Orson Welles was immensely fortunate in having, as his producer, my friend John Houseman. He also had Franchot Tone, a very wealthy actor, who funded much of the Mercury Theatre.
I wrote a film for John Frankenheimer, who confessed himself not only pleased but grateful, and suggested we do many more together. But he died.
Here’s a story from the world of Aviation.
A friend of mine is an old Freight Dog pilot with more than twenty thousand hours. He flew in the military. He also flew charters, for a while, for the Great of Hollywood. There he was, schlepping a very famous Producer known for his War Films. As they were approaching their destination, the Producer wandered up to the cockpit and said to my friend, “Don’t you think you should put the flaps down?” My friend said, “Sir, I am flying the plane, and I need you to go back and sit down.”
They were getting off the plane, and the Producer said to my friend, “I don’t think I like your attitude.” My friend said, “Sir, have you ever flown a plane?” The Producer said, “No, but I have many hours in a simulator.”
My friend said, “Sitting in a simulator has as little relation to flying a plane as making a war movie has to actual combat.”
The Producer said, “I don’t know they’re that dissimilar.”
“Fuck you, you draft-dodging swine,” my friend replied.
If we look up Bob Evans on the internet we find umpteen entries for a sausage manufacturer. My Bob Evans, when head of production at Paramount, was, curiously, not turning out sausages but making some stunning movies, e.g., The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, Serpico, True Grit, and Chinatown. His autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, is a hoot.
In it we find, among other self-serving lies (what else would one expect in an autobiography), his admission that he snuck down to a screening room every evening and corrected Coppola’s errors in The Godfather. And wasn’t I myself addressed by some unknown gent, at the next urinal, after the first screening of The Verdict?
He: “Like the film?”
Me: “Yes.”
He: “I wrote it.”
Can anyone be as gormless as these producers? How might one understand them? Better to understand oneself: the Pig who can find a truffle; and the companion on his journey, the producer, irritated by his constant digging in the earth, who turns him into roast pork.
We read in Proverbs that he who increases wisdom increases sorrow. The equation is commutative; that is, it can be read in either direction with equal profit.
We not only become sad because we have gained wisdom; we gain wisdom because, and only because, we have been saddened.
The wisdom, then, is on offer, and we are free to accept it or not. Acceptance is anguishing, as it entails a rethinking of the nature of the world, and of our place in it.
The tragedy of loss, betrayal, and recognition of our shame, hurt, and folly challenges us to face this otherwise avoidable truth: that the test does not begin until we are assured that the test is over and we have failed. This is the mechanism of all dramatic tragedy. If the Hero is not bludgeoned into acceptance of defeat, there can be no third act.
The above will now be familiar to any who have hit bottom, and familiar later to all but the very few (fortunate or not, you say) exempted.
Of course, the most exhilarating thing is to lead men into combat, to command a ship, and, in the civilian world, to direct a film. It’s an incomparable privilege that I’ve enjoyed for forty years.
The joy consisted in the unrestricted opportunity to explore the relationship between cause and effect.
