Pauline Kael

by Brian Kellow

  Some who were close to the two women felt that Gina had assumed the mother role at times: Whenever Pauline drove herself with deadlines, drank too much, and didn’t get enough sleep, Gina would urge her to maintain a better health regimen and take care of herself. Pauline had become friendly with a young movie-lover named Al Avant, who later angered her by gently encouraging Gina to go her own way. “He was always pushing her to get out and start her own life and pointing out to her that Pauline was dominating her life, which was true,” said Richard Albarino. Eventually, he recalled, Al Avant “was cast out in no uncertain terms. Pauline didn’t mind people being friendly, but she objected to him counseling Gina into active rebellion against her, because she totally depended on Gina.”

  In addition to her growing dissatisfaction with the run of new movies, Pauline was not particularly happy with her situation at The New Yorker. She continued to do battle with William Shawn over tone and language in her copy, and after more than ten years of the same arguments, she was suffering from battle fatigue. Shawn, for his part, was just as exasperated as he once had been about Pauline’s insistence on using sexual and scatological language that he deemed inappropriate for the magazine. Their arguments had lost none of their sting over the years; as always, Pauline seemed to enjoy pushing Shawn to the limits, trying to find a crack in his gentlemanly decorum. “I can remember a couple of times, at least, seeing him turn so red when they would start arguing,” remembered William Whitworth, who served as Pauline’s immediate editor for a time in the 1970s. “She would never let it go. Shawn had had a heart attack, and I thought a couple of times that he might fall over on the floor right there in the office. She was the only person in the process who didn’t treat him the way the world of journalism did, and the way the rest of us did, as a very special little person—which he was. She treated him like one of the guys and talked to him that way, with a lot of wisecracks.”

  One memorable confrontation with Shawn came in late 1978, when Pauline submitted her review of Goin’ South, a raucous Western comedy starring and directed by Jack Nicholson. “The problem Shawn had with her over and over had to do with her trying to sneak naughty words into the text and being really overtly, lip-smackingly appreciative of any sexual situations in the movie and wanting to make those as vivid as possible,” said Whitworth. In the opening sentence of her review of Goin’ South, Pauline rendered a vivid description of Nicholson, an actor she was still trying to come to terms with: “He bats his eyelids, wiggles his eyebrows, and gives us a rooster-that-fully-intends-to-jump-the-hen smile.” Shawn’s note in the galley margin read, “This piece pushes her earthiness at us, as if she wants to see how far she can push us, too. It’s the tone of the whole review.”

  Later in the same review she wrote of the actor, “He’s like a young kid pretending to be an old coot, chawing toothlessly and dancing with his bottom close to the earth.” Shawn wrote in the margin, “Her earthiness, her focus on body functions.” The description of Nicholson’s bottom being close to the earth was deleted, as was a later reference to Nicholson’s being “a commercial for cunnilingus.” Shawn circled the phrase and wrote, “This has to come out. We can’t or won’t print it.” Whitworth recalled that in all the years he worked at The New Yorker, he never saw Shawn make such an adamant decree; it was his customary style to try to get his way via gentle persuasion.

  Late in 1978 a film was released that Pauline thought had a good deal of the guts and vision that the decade’s greatest films had shown. Michael Cimino’s second feature, The Deer Hunter, concerned a group of Pennsylvania steel-mill workers whose lives are shattered by their experience serving in Vietnam. Robert De Niro starred as the distant, mysterious Michael, who saves his buddy Nick (Christopher Walken) when they are captured by the Vietcong and, in the movie’s most harrowing sequence, forced to play a deadly game of Russian roulette. As a director, Cimino was not afraid to be expansive: the Russian Orthodox wedding sequence, which became famous, went on for twenty-five minutes. (Rutanya Alda, who played the bride, Angela, recalled that the filming of it required sixteen- and eighteen-hour working days, with Cimino shooting all of the rehearsals to catch the most spontaneous moments.) Pauline thought the film’s “long takes and sweeping, panning movements are like visual equivalents of Bruckner and Mahler: majestic, yet muffled,” and that despite its structural flaws, it was “an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life—poetry of the commonplace.”

  Jane Fonda, while campaigning for her own Vietnam project, Coming Home, spoke out angrily against The Deer Hunter because of its depiction of the Vietcong, and despite her enthusiasm for the film Pauline was inclined to agree, finding it one of the few big Hollywood movies of the era to display a right-wing sensibility, in which Cimino betrayed “his xenophobic yellow-peril imagination. It’s part of the narrowness of the film’s vision that there is no suggestion that there ever was a sense of community among the Vietnamese which was disrupted.... The impression a viewer gets is that if we did some bad things over there we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic. The film seems to be saying that the Americans had no choice, but the V.C. enjoyed it.” She guessed that many would dismiss the movie because of its “traditional isolationist message: Asia should be left to the Asians, and we should stay where we belong, but if we have to go over there we’ll show how tough we are.” Yet despite her reservations, Pauline could see that The Deer Hunter showed evidence of tremendous artistry. Once more she had plenty of praise for Robert De Niro, who had developed into an actor capable of illuminating an opaque character. “We have come to expect a lot from De Niro: miracles,” she wrote. “And he delivers them—he brings a bronze statue almost to life.” (In later years, Pauline’s friend Daryl Chin would tease her about her early support of De Niro, saying, “Pardon me—he’s someone you babysat!”)

  Her review of The Deer Hunter was one of the most vital pieces she had written in some time, demonstrating again her Agee-like talent for working out her feelings on the page. The future Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman was still a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor when Pauline’s review of The Deer Hunter appeared. “When I see something as huge, as rich, and as garbled as The Deer Hunter, regardless of how secure I am with my own feelings,” Gleiberman wrote to her, “I feel slightly off balance until I get a look at what you had to say. And what you’ve said has, I believe, made a difference in my life.”

  At year’s end Pauline saw the most purely enjoyable movie she’d seen in years—Philip Kaufman’s remake of the 1956 low-budget science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The original version, about a community being systematically supplanted by pods from outer space that hatch perfect, desensitized human replicas, had been a surprise hit when it was released and was still a favorite in campus revivals, as it had come to be read as a biting commentary on the McCarthyist paranoia of the ’50s. The remake swapped the original’s small-town California setting for San Francisco but retained the paranoid atmosphere.

  Pauline thought that for pure movie thrills, the new Invasion of the Body Snatchers was “the American movie of the year—a new classic.” She approved of the change of scene, because Kaufman and the screenwriter, W. D. (Rick) Richter, had beautifully captured the strays and eccentric artists that populated San Francisco. What better setting for a movie about the dangers of creeping conformity? She felt that eccentricity was “the San Francisco brand of humanity.... There’s something at stake in this movie: the right of freaks to be freaks—which is much more appealing than the right of ‘normal’ people to be normal.” She also had special praise for Veronica Cartwright, who played the film’s second female lead. Cartwright was an actress whose work Pauline had been following closely for some time. In her review of Cartwright’s 1975 film, Inserts, Pauline had compared her to Jeanne Eagels—“a grown-up, quicksilver talent.” Writing about Invasion, she obs
erved that Cartwright possessed “such instinct for the camera that even when she isn’t doing anything special, what she’s feeling registers. She doesn’t steal scenes—she gives them an extra comic intensity.”

  “Sweetie, you need a publicist—nobody knows you,” Pauline told Kaufman when they met at a Chinese restaurant shortly after the release of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Kaufman declined the idea of a publicity push, but he and Pauline maintained a pleasant friendship for years. “She recognized that Body Snatchers was in large part a comedy,” said Kaufman. “Pauline put her finger on it. It’s meant to be playful. We had such a great time making it, and everyone connected with it had a great sense of humor.”

  Not long after her review of Body Snatchers appeared, Pauline also had the opportunity to meet Cartwright in New York. They had a drink at the Plaza, and Pauline was full of questions and advice on what Cartwright might do next. James Toback joined them briefly, because Pauline wanted him to interview Cartwright for a possible role in an upcoming film. “She was obsessed with James Toback,” Cartwright remembered. “I mean obsessed. It was almost motherly. She wanted to make sure a meeting was set up between us, and it was almost like she was trying to guide him through something.”

  When Toback left for another appointment, Pauline and Cartwright remained behind to finish their cocktails. Evening was coming on, and Pauline invited Cartwright to attend a screening with her that night. Cartwright, who was having difficulties with her then-boyfriend, thanked her but begged off, mentioning her need to deal with her problems at home. Pauline could not hide her disappointment. “I had the weirdest feeling she was offended,” Cartwright observed. “I don’t know quite what happened, but she never reviewed me after that. She mentioned me, but she never picked me out in anything else. She was determined not to say anything.”

  Pauline’s growing sense of dissatisfaction with the films she was seeing took a particularly harsh turn in her treatment of Paul Schrader’s new film, Hardcore, starring George C. Scott as a strict Midwestern Calvinist whose daughter disappears on a church youth-group trip to Los Angeles; when a private detective he has hired determines that the girl is appearing in hardcore porn movies, Scott’s character goes out to L.A. to try to find her and bring her home.

  Years later, Paul Schrader admitted, “I was never happy with how that ended up. I don’t think the film works. I changed the whole ending—the ending never worked.” Schrader was also upset that the producer, Daniel Melnick, had pulled a casting switch on him. Initially, the part of the hooker who befriends Jake and helps in his quest to find his daughter was to be played by Diana Scarwid. “Danny Melnick didn’t want to fuck her,” Schrader recalled. “He said, ‘I’m not going to put a girl in there that I don’t want to fuck.’ So I put a lightweight actress [Season Hubley] in there against George, and that killed the whole section.”

  Pauline found Hardcore dreary. To her, Schrader did not exhibit anything close to the true moviemaking fervor of a Phil Kaufman or a Brian De Palma, despite his knack for coming up with “powerful raw ideas for movies.” Schrader had shot Hardcore on location in real L.A. porn shops and peep shows, but for Pauline the movie was short on ambience. “Schrader doesn’t enter the world of porno”; she wrote, “he stays on the outside, looking at it coldly, saying ‘These people have nothing to do with me.’” The character of Jake was not developed enough to suit her—there was no indication that he might be tempted or titillated by the world of porn—and the film’s approach to its subject was “cautious and maddeningly opaque.” It was her final paragraph, though, that verged on cruelty:

  The possibility also comes to mind that the porno world is Schrader’s metaphor for show business, and that, in some corner of his mind, he is the runaway who became a prostitute. He has sometimes said that he regards working in the movie business as prostitution, and Hardcore looks like a film made by somebody who finds no joy in moviemaking. (Paul Schrader may like the idea of prostituting himself more than he likes making movies.) Several veteran directors are fond of calling themselves whores, but, of course, what they mean is that they gave the bosses what they wanted. They’re boasting of their cynical proficiency. For Schrader to call himself a whore would be vanity: he doesn’t know how to turn a trick.

  It was so devastating a critique that it was almost impossible for Schrader not to take it personally. At the time he was already making his next film, American Gigolo, and he simply tried to shake off Pauline’s judgment. To others, however, who knew of her history with Schrader, as both friend and mentor, it was astonishing that she could write about him in such a manner.

  Her final review of the 1978–79 season was of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, which involved a meeting of all New York City’s street gangs to put aside rivalries and organize so they can outnumber the police force three to one and take over the city. Pauline ignored the fact that many of the actors playing the gang members looked like TV commercial actors; she found the film “like visual rock” and “mesmerizing in its intensity. It runs from night until dawn, and most of the action is in crisp, bright Day-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There’s a night-blooming psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.” Again, it was a review that suggested that the greatest gift a movie could deliver was a gut-level thrill; matters of construction and detail were of secondary importance.

  Pauline’s review of The Warriors was significant in that it seemed likely to be the last piece that she would write for The New Yorker. She had honestly believed that she would eventually be able to unseat Penelope Gilliatt and take over “The Current Cinema” on a full-time basis, but since Shawn remained stubbornly loyal to Gilliatt, that possibility seemed ever more remote. An even bigger concern was that she had reached the point where she questioned the degree of her own influence with readers. When she began writing regularly for the magazine eleven years earlier, she had wanted to shake up the way New Yorker readers thought, to reshape their ideas about which movies were worth seeing. She now believed that she had succeeded only in a partial and limited way. She was particularly piqued that she had not been able to have an effect on the tastes of most of the senior writers and editors at The New Yorker, who dutifully continued to attend art films by Fassbinder and Bresson that they thought were good for them, and looked askance at her praise for Carrie, The Fury, and The Warriors. She complained that the only ones at the magazine who listened to her about which movies to see were the young fact-checkers and messengers. There was also a significant sector of New York’s intelligentsia that had never forgiven her for not covering innovative and experimental works and some of the more obscure foreign films. She was beginning to fear that she was, in the words of Alan Jay Lerner, serenading the deaf and searching the eyes of the blind.

  At this rather confusing juncture, she was approached by Warren Beatty with an offer of work in Hollywood. Over the years Beatty had occasionally mentioned that he thought her ideas and level of taste could have even greater impact if she were to work in the film industry in some capacity. She had thanked him for his kindness and demurred, but the idea had stayed in the back of her mind. And, as the great eruption of’70s moviemaking had dwindled, she began to wonder if Beatty wasn’t right. Perhaps she might be able to make a difference where it mattered most—by improving the level of what was put into production.

  Pauline believed that she understood a lot of the reasons for the decline in film quality. The movie companies, as she told an interviewer, had succeeded in taking “the risk factor out of financing movies, by selling them in advance to TV, international TV, cable, Home Box Office, as well as selling them in advance to theaters.” It was simply easier for the studios to back projects that could be sold ready-made to television—and because of the need to appeal to the general tastes and safe standards of the TV audience, it was harder than ever to get financing for a project with real edge that would have to be substantially edited and partially redubbed
for network showings. To Pauline’s way of thinking, Hollywood at its best had succeeded by combining the two qualities that had distinguished The Godfather—commerce and art. But now, the businessmen seemed to have inherited the earth.

  Beatty presented her with a persuasive argument for heading west: Wouldn’t it be much better, instead of pointing out where movies had gone wrong after they had been made, if she could perform the same function by analyzing the scripts and advising on casting before production began? Pauline pondered the decision for a long time, and when she learned that the first project she would work on was a James Toback picture called Love and Money that Beatty’s company was set to make, she became much more interested. Love and Money was a noirish drama about a Los Angeles bank employee who becomes involved in financial and political intrigue in Central America. Pauline, believing Toback to be an artist who hadn’t yet been allowed the opportunity to hit his full creative stride, now saw an opportunity to help him. Negotiations between her lawyer, Kenneth Ziffren, and Beatty’s legal team began.