Scents of film reviewing: sex and money
One afternoon at the Cannes film festival, I went with a man named Tom McSorley, who was there to scout movies for other festivals, into the Canadian pavilion – a temporary booth on the edge of the beach where our country’s movies were promoted – just after closing time. We knew the guy who managed the booth that year, and getting into places that are closed, or forbidden, or that offer free stuff, is part of the glorious foundation of movie reviewing. I believe it’s actually in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms somewhere.
Anyway, we helped ourselves to a couple of beers from the fridge and walked out onto the beach. We took off our shoes and stood in the surf. The sun was low on the curve of shore that cradles the Croisette, the ritzy main boulevard in Cannes. The pastel pink and yellow hotels were lit by the glare off the water.
It was about 5:30 in the afternoon. Back in Ottawa, where I live, it was almost lunch time: civil servants would be putting on their jackets and heading out to a still chilly Sparks Street Mall, where they would sit on benches and eat sandwiches from paper bags. Here, the evening – dinner with the informal gang of journalists who met every year at the event, like kids returning to the same well-fed summer camp, maybe at that pizza joint that Roger Ebert liked so much – stretched before us.
“We’re being paid for this,” Tom observed, in a tone pitched somewhere between irony and Dorothy when she first saw Oz.
“Pretty good job,” I agreed.
I was driving a taxicab in Toronto just before I got my first newspaper job, and I covered police stories and service clubs and city councils before I was eventually appointed film critic for the Ottawa Citizen, and later for the national chain of Postmedia newspapers. The last 20 years of my career were spent in the sandbox of journalism, playing with toy trucks: I went to movies and wrote about them, and occasionally got to meet movie stars. I wasn’t exactly covered in glamour, but I got close enough to catch its fragrance and hear its voice. It smells like sex and it sounds like money.
This first dawned on me near the beginning. I was in the presence of Tom Hanks at a roundtable interview – that means sitting with five or six other reporters in a hotel meeting room with Hanks at one end, drinking coffee – and I asked him some question about That Thing You Do!, a 1996 movie about a young rock band, which he had directed and co-starred in. While he pondered an answer, I was thinking, “Look at me. I’m making Tom Hanks think. I’m wasting Tom Hanks’ time.” There’s a lot of reflected glory in this notion. The stories people tell about meeting stars are most often stories about themselves, and how the star reacted to them.
That was the same series of press interviews where I was fooled into thinking I had finally come into my own as an entertainment journalist; that is, a random ex-cabbie who worked for some newspaper somewhere who, by dint of having access to a large number of readers, was deemed important enough (by the publicists who decide these things) to be in the room with the celebrity. I covered the Toronto International Film Festival for a year or two before I got enough courage to speak at these roundtable interviews. The other reporters judged you on the questions you asked – mainly because you were taking valuable time away from the questions they wanted to ask – and it felt like making a short and exceptionally stupid speech in front of people just like you but better-informed, plus a movie star who didn’t want to be here.
One of the co-stars of That Thing You Do! was a young actor named Jonathon Schaech, and someone asked him why the characters he played were always so intense. (Parenthetically, this is exactly the sort of question that other reporters couldn’t wait to ask if only you would shut up.) Schaech remarked that people said that a lot, and he didn’t really understand it. “What does that mean anyway, intense?” he asked, and out of the blue I heard that strange croak that is my own voice interrupting him. “Dark hair,” I explained, and everyone at the table laughed – everyone, that is, but Jonathon Schaech, who was, to be fair, still in the middle of his answer.
Nevertheless, I then realized – or thought I did – that I could be myself in front of “the talent,” as they are always called. They were just people like you and me. Neither of those things turned out to be true.
In 2004, I flew to Boston to interview John Travolta for the firefighter film Ladder 49. Travolta walked into the hotel room and immediately asked if he could close the drapes because his blue eyes were sensitive to the light. “You must have the same problem,” he said to me.
“No,” I said. “My eyes are hazel.” Actually, in some light they’re a seductive shade of green, but I didn’t want to brag in front of the talent.
Travolta walked over and stood a few inches away from me. He stared intensely into my face.
“Your eyes are totally blue,” he said.
This wasn’t something I could debate. I was there to interview a big star and if he wanted to create a slightly alternate reality, I was in no position to argue. It’s like being an assistant to Donald Trump: you just go along with the boss because that’s one of the things about famous people. They’re always right.
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize … I mean thanks for pointing that … anyway, hi.”
Travolta’s back was hurting him, so he lay down on the couch of the darkened room and I sat in the chair with my notebook, like a psychiatrist in a New Yorker cartoon.
By then I knew something about fame. In 2002, the people at the Alliance distribution company invited me to join the press tour for Men With Brooms, a Canadian comedy about curling that was co-written, directed by, and starred Paul Gross, who also did the music. I would fly out to Vancouver to join the tour: the movie’s stars, producer Robert Lantos, two publicists and I would fly back east on a private jet, stopping to do publicity stunts – the cast would put on a curling demonstration in each city, then do interviews – and then go out at night to eat and carouse, keeping in mind that I like to be asleep by 11.
Travelling by private jet was an eye-opening experience: you get up when you want, go to the airport when you’re ready – or, in this case, when Paul Gross and Robert Lantos are ready – fly from here to there with no annoying security, and arrive at the next hotel to find your luggage has magically been transported from the previous city right into your room. When the tour was over and I had to fly commercial back home, I wanted to explain to everyone in line that I didn’t really belong there. I was a private jet guy who was momentarily displaced. I have a radio friend who encapsulates this attitude with, “Do you know who I think I am?”
The biggest names on the tour were Gross and Leslie Nielsen, the stalwart Canadian actor who had become a master of comic befuddlement in a series of Naked Gun and Airplane movies. Gross was the star of the event: big, handsome, talented, smart and faster than I was in solving the Saturday cryptic crossword in the Globe and Mail. However, at a boozy dinner at an Edmonton restaurant one night, I proved to be unbeatable at the cerebral art of balancing a spoon on my nose. Then I went back to my hotel just as the cast was heading out for the night.
But the best times were spent with Nielsen. We were two of the oldest guys, and we both got up early and sat in the hotel lobbies, waiting for everyone else to come downstairs. Nielsen said being early was a childhood habit: his family had missed a bus one day when he was a kid, so he was early for everything since.
I loved watching him. During one radio interview, the host asked him if he had ever curled before and he said, “No, but I once threw an entire basketball game.” However his main comedic tool was the fart machine, a portable plastic noisemaker he carried in his pocket and squeezed at exactly the right moment. His timing was brilliant: James Allodi, another actor in the film, called him “the Foster Brooks of the lower intestine.”
Nielsen would make the fart noise in front of fans who had rushed over to greet him – he was an immensely beloved figure – and then nobly ignore what was obviously the uncontrollable gastric distress of an older gentleman. He would sometimes hide a second, remote-controlled fart machine in the purse of a young female publicist and activate it just as she stood among a group of people watching Men With Brooms. Say what you will about farts, they are an evergreen source of humour.
Elevators were Nielsen’s natural playground. Civilians would get on and Nielsen’s colleagues would watch him. The anticipation was so exquisite that Nielsen didn’t have to do anything: people were crying with laughter at what might occur. It was Zen slapstick.
“At least you’re a laugher,” Nielsen said to me one day on a shuttle to the airport. He wasn’t that happy about having a reporter along, but he was willing to put up with an enthusiastic audience, and I was grateful to be one. I had a role. He knew who I was.
Because here’s another thing about famous people. Sometimes they’re very smart, and usually they’re very beautiful, but the main thing about them is that they’re famous, so if you meet them, you become sort of famous too, at least to friends who are always asking you what they are like. There’s no good answer to this because they are, after all, actors. What journalists recall is how the stars treated them: whether they remembered them when they met again, or talked to them about their families or other matters that had nothing to do with the movie being promoted.
Canadian actors are very good at this: Sarah Polley, everyone’s sweetheart, greets journalists with a hug, and I’ve been at parties where she would ignore the Hollywood big shots to hang out with the reporters.
However, some Americans are also engaged beyond their own fame. For a movie called A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), I was invited to a dinner with the cast and ended up sitting beside Kris Kristofferson.
“Do you mind if I call you Kris?” I asked, for some reason.
“Why?” he said. “What were you going to call me?”
“Mr. Kristofferson?” I said.
“Kris will be fine,” he said, and we got along great after that. It was an Italian restaurant and the waiter kept trying to explain that there was a special menu for our dinner and Kristofferson couldn’t order what he wanted from the regular menu. I eventually made the hilarious suggestion that we send out for pizza, but unfortunately, no one else at the table was as drunk as me.
What I mostly remember, though, was the next day, when I went to interview Kristofferson, he recalled that it was me who sat next to him the night before. You’d think this would happen a lot, but it doesn’t because, as I finally realized, you remember because you met a star, but the star forgets because he only met you.
In these ways, and others, I talked to a lot of movie stars and directors – and even a duchess, Sarah Ferguson, who helped produce the movie The Young Victoria (2009) and who struck me, since you ask, as a sad woman who was trying to hold onto something that was gone from her life. She told me she didn’t actually have a home, but travelled the world staying with friends, in the manner (I imagined) of other ex-royals – the Duke of Windsor comes to mind – who would cling to the tatters of ruined glory. Sarah was known as Fergie when she was married to Prince Andrew, but those of us who interviewed her were told that she was to be addressed as “Your Grace,” or perhaps it was “Your Highness.” I sidestepped the problem in the manner of a young man who doesn’t know if he should call his father-in-law “Dad,” “Mr. Fitzgibbons,” or “Sid,” and so doesn’t call him anything. You just wait until he looks at you, and then you start talking.
My celebrity encounters were memorable mainly because they were with celebrities. Few of them did anything that would make a story if you were just spending 15 minutes or half an hour with an anonymous person. They said things that were quotable just because they said them, and while I always tried to capture the essence of the person in my stories, after a while I became adept at what my old Postmedia colleague Bob Thompson called “the magic of journalism.”
So if Brad Pitt, say, walked into a room and said, “Boy, it’s hot outside,” that was all you needed: you could write 700 words on Pitt and his new movie, cobbling together old Internet factoids, fresh insights from the press kit, a description of what Pitt was wearing that day, and a blow-by-blow description of his new movie. These pieces – and thankfully there weren’t many of them – would inevitably begin, “Brad Pitt walks into the hotel room …” and would hinge on the transition from “Boy, it’s hot outside,” to, “But Pitt is getting used to the heat, with three big movies coming up this year.”
It was always a great moment when you realized you had the story, this kind of story anyway, no matter what else happened. I interviewed the postmodern filmmaker Charlie Kaufman for his 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York, in a room – at the Intercontinental on Bloor Street in Toronto, once the go-to spot for TIFF publicists – from which the bed had been removed to make it look more like an interview and less like an assignation. However, the padded headboard had been bolted to the wall so when Kaufman walked into the room (“Charlie Kaufman walks into the hotel room …”), he saw this strange artifact that looked like a piece of abstract sculpture.
“What’s that?” asked Kaufman. “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Coming from the writer of Being John Malkovich, a movie in which people enter an actor’s consciousness through a portal in his brain, that is an impressive endorsement. I could relax. I had my story.
All this made me wonder about the nature of celebrity, which I found more fascinating than the celebrities themselves. Sometimes we would talk about this. Most celebrities said that fame was a mixed blessing, although they hated to complain about it because they were smart enough to know how that sounded. When I visited the Toronto set of the Atom Egoyan movie Where The Truth Lies (2005), co-stars Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth did a two-man comedy routine about being given free stuff just because they were well-known, but also losing their anonymity when, for instance, they might want to buy a laxative at the drug store without having their name shouted down the aisle by a star-struck clerk.
On balance, it’s probably better to be recognized. One day in Cannes, I was entering the tiny lobby of the ancient building in a back alley where I rented a one-bedroom apartment. It was a great little place with a tiny balcony that looked out over the patio of a nearby café, the bocce court where old men in baggy pants rolled balls in the dirt, and, behind them, the yacht basin where big fancy motorboats were moored.
One year I was invited to a movie party aboard a yacht. I always wanted to attend one of these just to say I had done it, but it turned out that the yacht stayed moored at the marina and you boarded by going down to the dock and stepping across the gangplank. However, there were so many freeloaders already on board by the time I showed up that the captain said it was overcrowded and could sink, albeit one foot from shore. After waiting for an hour I gave up and went home. Thus the jet set lost another member. The good news is that I got to bed by 11.
This day, however, I stepped into the lobby to wait for the creaky French elevator – essentially a motorized vertical coffin – when three large men came in behind me, through the slowly closing front door. They stood in the tiny lobby and took out cigarettes. “You’re not going to smoke in my lobby, are you?” I asked, ignoring the facts that a) they were large men, b) it was not my lobby, and c) who cares anyway? However, they looked kind of ashamed and started to leave the building when I looked over and noticed one of them was the actor Nick Nolte.
Now I was embarrassed. “It’s hard to find a place to smoke anywhere,” I said, a transparently last-ditch stab at camaraderie. Nolte grunted and left the building, his entourage at his back.
I had evicted Nick Nolte. This was even more exciting than making Tom Hanks think. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone and it has become a legend in my little circle. Various versions (that I kicked Nolte off an elevator for smoking; that Nick Nolte and I were roommates at Cannes) are recalled whenever my name is mentioned, I think.
Nolte is always good for a story. One year at Cannes, I visited the set in Nice where he was shooting the film The Good Thief – the 2002 remake of the French classic Bob le Flambeur – and he showed up for the roundtable interviews in a shirt that looked like he might have slept in it, with the chest pocket ripped and hanging half off. Sleeping in his shirt wasn’t much of a stretch either: one year the Toronto festival he did interviews in bed, wearing his pyjama bottoms. It was hard to get him to stay on topic but it didn’t matter that much for the piece (as we call it): “You walk into the hotel room and there is Nick Nolte, lying in bed in his pyjama bottoms.” The second sentence is pretty well gravy.
The other story I’m world-famous for is The Western. One year at the Toronto film festival I interviewed Kevin Spacey – back when such a thing was politically permissible – for a terrible film he had directed entitled Albino Alligator (1996). It’s never easy to interview someone associated with a fiasco, but you learn to talk around the film and change topics. I asked Spacey if he ever wanted to make a Western.
“Yes,” he replied. “And I know what gun I would use. I’d use John Wayne’s gun.”
He then told me that when John Wayne died, the gun he used in many of his films was obtained by Sammy Davis Jr., who did a fast-draw routine as part of his Las Vegas nightclub act. And when Davis Jr. died, he left the gun to a friend of Kevin Spacey. “It’s hanging on a wall,” Spacey said. “I’d like to take it down and use it. Duke’s gun.”
Wow, I thought. What a great little anecdote. “Did you ever want to make a Western?” would be a good question to tuck into my back pocket in an emergency, although it must be asked with care. You wouldn’t use it on, say, Clint Eastwood.
A year or two later I was interviewing the Canadian actress Carrie-Anne Moss, best known for the Matrix series, and, running short of things to wonder about, I asked her if she would ever like to make a Western. “Who told you to ask that?” she said. I assured her no one did: it was purely my own (apparently inspired) idea. At the end of the roundtable session, she looked at me again and asked, seriously, who told me to ask her that Western question. The other reporters looked over at me as if I held some deep Hollywood secret. Who was this man from Ottawa, with his insight into the conspiracy to have Carrie-Anne Moss make a Western? It was almost as good as “dark hair.”
Five or six years later, back home, the Ottawa Citizen sponsored a series of talks by accomplished women. One of them was Marlee Matlin, the hearing-impaired actress best known for her Oscar-winning turn in Children of a Lesser God. She would speak in front of 2,000 or so people at the National Arts Centre and answer questions later and I, as the paper’s film critic, would go up on stage to interview her and act as moderator for the 20-minute Q and A.
I started by interviewing Matlin by phone – through a translator – and writing a long story on her life and career. Then I introduced her on the stage and she spoke for an hour (using the same translator) about her life and career. Then she and I went up on stage and dealt with five or six questions sent up by the audience about her life and career. This took maybe seven minutes. I now had 13 minutes to kill in front of 2,000 people, talking to a woman who had covered every conceivable aspect of her life and career and had elucidated some of these responses for her Ottawa fans. There was nothing left to know.
“Did you ever want to make a Western?” I asked, wishing there someone out there in the audience who knew that I had now officially reached the bottom of the barrel.
“A Western?” said Matlin in the tone of wonderment that would quite properly greet such a notion. “Sure.” And she stood up, took two invisible .45s from her imaginary gun belt and pretended to shoot in my direction. “Bang bang,” she said. Got me.
JAY STONE was film critic for The Ottawa Citizen, Canwest News Service and Postmedia for 20 years. He is now retired in Ottawa, but still writes the occasional review for the website ExPress.com. He will reminisce for food.