THE CENTIPEEP

The great Ira Levin wrote a real silly book called The Boys from Brazil. The gag was that escaped Nazis, fled to Brazil, planned to bring back the Third Reich.

Here’s how: they were going to breed a bunch of new Hitlers. These would be fashioned from mothers and fathers having some of the same characteristics of our Adolf’s folks. The kids would grow in environments similar to those that formed him and would undergo signal Life Events just like those of Der Führer’s childhood.

We hear that Barbra Streisand has cloned her favorite dog so she can have a close approximation of it around again after the original’s allotted span. My genetic notion is this: folks like leg of lamb. A sheep only has four legs; crossbreeding with a centipede would give us the CENTIPEEP.

These examples take no account of Environmental Variables. One cannot supply all the influences formative of Young Adolf—Mr. Levin’s hobbyists could only pick a few. And Ms. Streisand’s dog’s beloved personality was formed by its constant interaction, for good or ill, with her at a previous age. However much she loved Woofy II, or, God willing, III, a ninety-year-old owner isn’t going to play the same amount of fetch as a forty-year-old.

We have two poodles. My wife said she wanted the sort of dog that, “if you walk it, it dies.” But we got our two standards, who are, I am sure, as demanding as various unnamed Stars. And why not? They are retrievers. They were bred to hunt. If we go swimming with them, they treat us as they would a duck—that is, they want to bite us and carry us to shore. That’s what they’re bred for, and it’s tough to beat genetics.

Is Bad Behavior an inevitable concomitant of talent? The old stage adage has it: “In a Star it’s temperament, in a chorus girl it’s bad manners.”

I worked with several actors, though dissuaded beforehand by colleagues who’d experienced them.

I was told Val Kilmer was impossible. He was a pussycat.

Respected director friends cautioned me against Alec Baldwin. Filming with him was a delight. (He starred with Anthony Hopkins in The Edge, and I directed him in my State and Main.)

I did encounter several folks, before and behind the camera, who had an other than grand attitude, but I was warned against none of them.

What can it mean? Perhaps it has something to do with temperament, and it certainly has something to do with mutual confidence. Which of us wants to put himself in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, who is unprepared, untrustworthy, duplicitous, or false?

An actor, in this situation, is like one on a disastrous first date, gutting it out.

Most anyone with actual talent will, over a long career, be characterized as “difficult”; how could it be otherwise?

I myself have, since the beginning of my career as a playwright, fifty years back, been castigated by the Eastern Cultural Bloc, which treated my work with sporadic, grudging acknowledgment, maturing through antipathy into loathing. But a man may be known, and perhaps known best, by his enemies. Is it not so?^I

Many people, you may have noticed, are nuts. Many are lazy, or false, dreamy, unfeeling, manic, or some admixture of these—even as you and I. Some people, myself among them, are blessed to make a living employing the talents they were born with and improving on them to increase both enjoyment and gain.

Flying a helicopter is a learned skill. No one does it naturally, as it involves the sole menu of manipulations the human being wasn’t born to accomplish navigation in three dimensions. Filmmaking is the practice and amalgamation of skills we’ve possessed since we climbed down from the trees to eat the fermented mangoes: direction of group efforts in construction, painting, clothing, movement, and so on. It is a sort of uber-choreography.

Now we come to acting, which, over the years, has become, to me, more and more of a mystery. Some folks out here speak of “the acting gene.” This always seemed to me rather doltish, but I’ve come to believe that perhaps it’s more accurate than not.

The basic skills involved in acting are all prosaic. They are the ability to speak clearly, to enunciate, to move purposefully (and gracefully, if possible), to hold still-but-not-immobile. These can be learned. And must be learned. The result of their acquisition may be a competent actor, one suitable only for set dressing, or a star.

Some actors can entrance us reading the phone book, others can send us off to nap-land while sharing magnificent dialogue or salacious scandal. The camera finds some faces fascinating and some opaque. And everybody wants to be in the movies.

I directed Gene Hackman in Heist. Time after time I’d call “action” and then hear him, it seemed, continuing his informal chat with another actor, as if he hadn’t heard me. But he was, actually, playing the scene. There was no difference between his speech on-screen and off-, there was no added “help,” or embellishment, or hieratic delivery.

I had the same experience directing John Malkovich. What were these fellows doing? They were acting. Could one learn to act like them? No. Or direct like Kubrick?

Where would we be without talent?

I must define it as that which cannot be defined, which is beyond both explanation and analysis. If it’s not genetic, call me a moose. My god, it’s grand to’ve been next to it.

1. I. “It’s lonely at the top, but it ain’t crowded.” —Speed-the-Plow